Steven Carr

Just as there really is a person living in the East End of London , who corresponds to Benjamin Creme's Maitreya?

The point of mythicism is to find out more about what early Christians believed. The process is what is important , not the results.

Rejecting mythicism means rejecting a serious examination of why early Christians like the authors of James and Jude wrote the way they did.

Which goes some way to explaining why HJ studies are hopelessly mired.

spin

I don't know how you can say that.

OK.

If one were pleading on such grounds. But we are agreed I hope that it is special pleading to say that Paul's "true" letters are unadorned with accretions, when we have several full letters that are seen as not his bearing his name.

There is almost no historical Jesus material in Paul and you would like to hang on to the little there is, but that is not necessarily for scholarly reasons.

My reading of the issue is that there are various reasons, not just one major reason.

Yes, lots of discourse issues...

"[D]ue caution" should not reflect apologetics.

I will argue that the last supper is inappropriately placed and irrelevant to its context. Though obviously it was relevant to the people who put it there, it doesn't reflect Paul's discourse. I have often argued against the veracity of the Petrine verses in Gal 2 and am happy to do so again. Will you honestly argue in favor of the appearance to the 500? It does point to a remanaged passage. One has to deal with such material on a case by case approach and you are merely muddying the waters with your cry of special pleading.


spin

show_no_mercy

I think this is a good question. Do we see this in the manuscript record? Are there any manuscripts cited (beyond 1 Cor) by any other Christians prior to Marcion? Marcion had a hugely popular church so we don't know if the proto-orthodoxy simply plucked the Paul of the Marcionites and edited them or presented the "original" Paul.

I think the reason that Marcion's canon didn't have the Pastoral Epistles is because they didn't exist in Marcion's day.

aa5874

This is just highly illogical. A reference to Jesus the God/man living on earth does not in anyway make a character human.

The Jesus of the NT was fully God and man, a mythical creature.

The Pauline writer is claiming that he got his revelations from a God/man called Jesus who was in heaven. Any mention of this God/man on earth does not in anyway alter his status as a mythical creature.

The mention of Achilles, the offspring of a sea-goddess, in a war on earth, by Homer or any other writer does not make Achilles a person of history or make his mythical status disappear.

Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, and Achilles, the offspring of a sea-goddess are locked as mythical creatures. The Pauline writings were placed in the NT to bolster the God/man myth.



Once the Church has denied that their Jesus was only human, then the Pauline Jesus represents the God/man mythical Jesus unless there can be found sources external of the Pauline writings and the Church that can corroborate a human only Jesus.

All of the claims about Jesus the God/man on earth as found in the Pauline writings are unsubstantiated.

And further, it is hopelessy absurd to use the Pauline letters as a corroborative source for the very manipulated letters with multiple authors and suspected mutilation.

gurugeorge

The problem here is quite tricky to conceptualise. Let me see if I can marshal some salient points on this:-

Mythical entities sometimes had "historical" details in their biographies - I mean, often, they were conceived of as having lived at specific times and places, such as certain famous cities; or as having had truck with human personages of the past, such as kings, etc. Some mythical entities appear to be of that type; other mythical entities appear to be wholly etherial, of non-material "substance". Doherty posits a mythical entity of the latter type, but it's not necessary to go as far as Doherty in that direction. It's perfectly plausible to posit a mythical Jesus that had "historical" details (i.e. pseudo-historical pseudo-details) of the more usual mythical type.

Paul may have believed in a mythical entity like this, with some "historical" details in his biography, just like other people in the ancient world believed in mythical entities with some "historical" details in their biographies. The problem of silence is really in that what paucity of historical detail you can glean from Paul doesn't look like what you'd expect if the Jesus entity Paul believed in had been historical in the fairly specific and detailed sense we glean from the gospels.

The gospels do purport to be eyewitness accounts, fairly detailed biographies of an entity that is at least a man (bracketing any divine element for the moment). Paul looks like he believes in an entity that was at least a man too. If the entity he believed in were the same entity as that spoken of in the gospels, we would expect Paul to mention some historical aspects. But it doesn't look like Paul believed in an entity that had the detailed historical biography we find in the gospels; nor does he seem to be familiar with that entity's sayings. The gospel story is compelling, and it's full of teachings. Normally, one would expect a fan of some great being to be aware of, and refer to, the details, and to spout the teachings. That's normally how disciples of a "great man" work: they cherish the details and the teachings. (Now of course there are counter-arguments to that, but we are already assuming some common-sense things - to take those counter-arguments seriously, we'd have to assume some more things that are not so common-sensical, such as fidelity of oral traditions, etc.)

So yeah, Paul may have believed in a "historical" Jesus, but the problem is, it's not clear that the historical Jesus he believed in was identical with the "historical" (and perhaps more plausibly historical) Jesus portrayed in the gospels. The degree of historicity in Paul is also compatible with a mythical Jesus (of the with-pseudo-historical-details type), whose initial biography was a bit vague and sketchy and who later accreted a more detailed biography.

show_no_mercy

Exactly. The Jesus that Paul believed in might have been crucified/executed any time in the past, not necessarily under the prefecture of Pilate (that part was argued in the Pastorals). He could have been the Yeisu ha Notzri of the Talmud tradition executed 100 years prior to the Jesus of the narrative gospels - the "Jesus" that actually was hanged [on a tree].

Doug Shaver

I'll stipulate that.

Well, it would be bad news, all right . . . but . . . .

My stipulation assumed irrefutable evidence that Paul did in fact believe in a historical Jesus, and I don't think we're going to get that.

Let's suppose there existed one clear reference to a unambiguously historical Jesus somewhere in the epistles generally regarded as authentically Pauline. Taking into consideration everything else we know about Christianity's paper trail, there remains the question of how certain we can be that Paul himself actually wrote that reference. If all of the other evidence about Christianity's origins were the same as it is now, I would argue just on grounds of parsimony that it would be reasonable to suppose that the reference was an interpolation.

Doug Shaver

I seem to have missed that thread somehow. I've got a bit of catching up to do.

jakejonesiv

We are attempting to force our 21^st century conceptions into ancient documents. I think it might be helpful if we framed the discussion in different terms.

There was no debate about Historical verses Mythical Jesus in the early Christian centuries CE. This is the modern debate. Nobody ever wrote five volumes against Jesus being crucified in the sky. With all due respect to Earl Doherty, it just wasn't an issue in the second century, and the whole argument is from importing the context from elsewhere. What we should note is that there is a lack of reference to Gospel material in the Pauline epistles, and Earl documents that very well.

The real debate in early Christianity was about Christology. We are all familiar with the various Christologies; Adoptionist, Docetic, Incarnation. Early skeptics, both pagan and Jewish, would relegate Jesus to mere man.

The earliest recension of the Pauline epistles give evidence of a Docetic Christology (Phil. 2:7, Romans 8:3). At least that is the interpretation of the Uberpaulinists of the early second century, the Marcionites (Tertullian, AM 1:15; cf PH 24). For example, Romans 1:3 was not in Marcion’s recension (Origen, Commentary on John 10.4; see Harnak, Marcion 102, also the complete absence in Tertullian). The PE were later redacted by catholic editors who inserted "pro-flesh" statements to support the proto-orthodox incarnational doctrine. It is noteworthy that almost all of the texts used to bedevil Earl Doherty (Romans 1:3, 9:4-5; Gal 4:4 etc) were not in Marcion’s recension.

Bart Ehrman has clearly demonstrated in Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, pages 238-239 even after we enter the period of extant manuscripts, the orthodox scribes continued to modify these same texts for theological and dogmatic reasons.

Think about it. What is the point in insisting that Jesus was "born of a woman" or had "flesh" when this does not distinguish him from 100% of humanity? It doesn't make sense unless someone else was arguing just the opposite. These are the very passages that Earl Doherty spends so much time battling (by supposing sublunary realms!), but receive a much simpler explanation as orthodox corruptions against Docetism.

Best,
Jake

Toto

As Robert Price points out in The Evolution of the Pauline Canon, we have no indication that these letters circulated as letters (as opposed to being written as part of a collection.) If Marcion and his orthodox opponents had made separate collections of circulating letters, one might expect to find some variation in the letters or the order, but we have nothing like that - only editing and counter editing for the usual theological purposes.