Layman

Well, much of my criticism is based on Carrier's comments. Doherty did respond to Carrier's review, but still failed to provide any examples beyond Dionysis.

I thought my cite to G.A. Wells tackled this. Those people who cared about Jewish orcales cared about them because they thought they were predicting future events on earth. Thus, the more founded something is in the OT the more we should recognize that the quoter/alluder was claiming something that really happened.

I could add my Josephus and Essene examples I recently emailed to you.

To Paul, either Jesus is God's agent or Jesus is God. Either way God is responsible. I don't see this as a strong point.

Perhaps it would, but nothing about that fact suggests that no birth happens. Even Doherty's discussion in The Jesus Puzzle concedes that the verses are still implying a birth here. Nothing about it suggests that it's just a myth.

My take on it is that the term used was more appropriate for describing THE eschatological event of an enternal being being born of a woman. It's not a beginning, but a becoming. In other words, it's the best term available to describe the incarnation.

See No. 1. Perhaps it is, but all Jews knew that you had to be born a Jew to be born under the law.

Because Paul was using a well-known idiom to reinforce the idea that Jesus was a human being. When I say "this is a cool book" why I am I commenting on its temparature? I'm not, it's an idiom.

I'll try and get to the other points as time permits.

Sure. Do you want the revised version? Might take a while longer. I have some other projects I'm working on. Or, you could post it now and post a revised version later.

Up to you.

Layman

We know that Marcion mutiliated Paul's letters and mutilated Luke. Moreover, we know that one of Marcion's most important targets was anything suggesting Jesus was a human being or was born. This is why he removed the first two chapters of Luke. It's also why he removed Galatians 4.4. No such references could be allowed.

On the other hand, it is undisputed that the idea of Jesus being born was already established well prior to Marcion. Though Mark does not have a birth narrative, he does refer to Jesus' mother. So too with the Gospel of John. And Matthew's birth narrative was widely circulated prior to Marcion.

I explain Marcion's mutiliating tendencies more fully here:

http://didjesusexist.com/marcion.html

I'll have to examine the argument more closely, but it's doubtful. We know that Marcion mutilated his texts. There is no such certainty about the church's response to Marcion.

gregor

While not responsive necessarily to the question of other messiahs, doesn't John posit an earthly mother and father, rather than a divine son.

John 7 states:

"40 Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, said, Of a truth this is the Prophet. 41 Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee? 42 Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was? 43 So there was a division among the people because of him. "

Couple this with the comment that people were confused because how could the son of Joseph and Mary be the Messiah, and it surely supports natural parents, no kingly dna, and non-divinity before baptism.

Toto

Layman:

You have made a good argument that "born of a woman" is a common term for a normal human being. But Doherty's argument is based on the best explanation of the evidence taken as a whole; when one finds a few phrases in Paul's letters that support a historicist case, versus many that support a mythicist case, the best explanation may be that those phrases have some esoteric meaning, that they are part of fulfilling Scripture, or that they are interpolations. For Paul to intone "born of a woman, born under the law" certainly does not say that Jesus was born of a particular woman in a particular year at a particular place, the sort of details one expects when historical facts are recounted.

You chopped off the quote that you took from Carrier, who goes on to say (from here: {emphasis added}

Doherty's comment on this is here:

Layman said:

Actually, Paul does not seem to know Mary, and has no Maryology. His "Son" was born of an anonymous woman, who might well have been metaphorical.

In the passage cited, Doherty is not asking why Mary was not used as a salvation figure, but why she was not mentioned as analogous to Sarah, who bore Isaac, and why other aspects of a human Jesus were not used in Paul's extensive analogies. From the language of Galatians 3 and 4, one could assume that the important elements of Christianity are to be found solely in creative interpretations of passages from the Old Testament and some vaguely described faith in Jesus Christ.

Finally, do you think that Dionysus actually lived on earth or that 1st century Greeks thought that he did? It is not clear to me why you think that analogies between Jesus and either Dionysus or Hercules support your case.

Final nitpick: When you publish an essay such as this, would it not be better to link to Carrier's essay and Doherty's comments? You don't want to get the moniker "no-link".

Layman

Actually, when we find scriptures that clearly identify Jesus as a human being and others that refer to him being a spiritual being, we should recognize that this fits in perfectly with established Christian theology: Jesus was a spiritual and eternal being who was incarnated on earth for a time to accomplish God's eschatological plan. I have yet to see any verse offered by Doherty or his disciples that clearly attest that Jesus never came to earth. But, here is the perfect spot, Toto. Give me all these verses in Paul that clearly affirm that Paul believed that Jesus never came to earth.

Paul says Jesus was "born of a woman." There are no examples of any mythical saviour god comparable to Doherty's version of Jesus that were described in this matter. The plain meaning of the phrase and its overwhelming attestation of usage requires an undersanding that Paul mean that Jesus was a human being. (Toto Responds: "But Doherty's argument is based on the best explanation of the evidence taken as a whole").

Here I show that Paul's "descended from David" refers to a human Jesus and lacks--despite Doherty's claim to the contrary--any mythical parrallel: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...hlight=Doherty (Toto Responds: "I went back and read that part in the Jesus Puzzle and note 44, and it is a throw away line.").

Here I show that Hebrew's "second coming of Christ" very clearly means that Jesus has already been to earth once before: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=45180 (Toto Responds: "Is this your only disagreement with Doherty's chapter on Hebrews")

Here I show that Hebrew's reference to Jesus being executed "outside the gate" refers to an earthly event: http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=47767 (Toto Responds: "Doherty bases his theory on an accumulation of evidence, no one point of which is decisive").

Eventually you need to pony up and quit relying on the "look at the whole picture" excuse.

No, the fact that Paul says Jesus was "born of a woman" means that Jesus, like the rest of us human beings, had a mother. That Paul did not recount who that mother does not change the meaning of the term or its established usage.

CJD dealt with the Mary issue above. G.A. Wells dealt with the "creative interpretations" issue above as well ("It is of course true that the source of statements such as ‘descended from David’ is scripture, not historical tradition. But this does not mean, as Doherty supposes, that the life and the death were not believed to have occurred on Earth.").

I've got a forthcoming piece that deals with it even further.

Furthermore, Doherty's theory is not really based on passages that require a mythical Christ, they are based on passages he thinks that those early Christian writers should have used instead of the one's they did.

You showed this same inability to understand in a previous discussion. Carrier sees it clearly enough when he rejects Dionysis as a valid example: "[C]iting cases where Dionysus had a mother because he was euhemerized as a real person, or had a goddess for a mother, are not relevant, since Paul can be doing neither here. "

It does not matter what I believe about Dionysis or Hercules. What matters is what the stories about those figures said. Doherty does not claim that the early Christians believed that Jesus walked the earth and was born of an actual woman, but were wrong. He claims the early Christians believed that Jesus acted only in the spiritual realm and never came to earth. If Jesus was like Dionysis, he could have been born of a specific mother like Dionysis, born in a specific place like Dionysis, and perform specific acts like Dionysis. In other words, if Jesus is like Dionysis he's a divine being in something of a human form performing certain functions on earth. None of which supports Doherty's theory.

Carrier sees this very clearly, why don't you?

I apologize for not giving the Carrier link. I thought I had done so but see now I only gave the link to Wells.

I took Doherty's comments from his book. It is impossible to link to the text of that book. I should have given a pin point cite.

Toto

This is about what we expect, since the church wrote or selected those scriptures. But the church fathers did not do a perfect job, and there are clues as to what might have actually happened in the contradictions and difficulties.

Any such passages would have been edited out by the mid-second century.

Well, no, eventually you have to answer the argument.

I don't see that CJD dealt with the entire issue. He said

CJD appears to be asking why Paul should have mentioned the later Catholic take on Mary as theotokos. Doherty is asking why Mary was not mentioned as a mother, since Paul has been weaving analogies involving mothers.

Wells asserts that historicizing scripture does not mean that it didn't actually happen. I don't see how this deals with the "creative interpretations" issue. Wells does say

from which I gather that he thinks Paul thought that Jesus existed at some point, although not during the reign of Pontius Pilate.

Euhemerism: \Eu*hem"er*ism\n. [L. Euhemerus, Gr. ? a philosopher, about 300 ?.]
The theory, held by Euhemerus, that the gods of mythology were but deified mortals, and their deeds only the amplification in imagination of human acts.

I don't think that most of the legends that talk about Semele or other possible mothers of Dionysus are ascribed to euhemerism, so I am not sure what Carrier is talking about. But I could be wrong.

I can see what you are trying to argue, but I don't see any support for it. The educated pagans of Jesus time would not have thought of Dionysus as a person who existed in history, but as an allegory or a myth. If they saw Jesus as a similar figure, they would not have assumed that he was born of a particular mother in a particular place and did things on earth - they would have assumed that he was a fictional being with a message. That is my point - can you understand that?

Vorkosigan

You know, you make a good post and then you throw it away with churlish nonsense like this. It saddens me.

First, Toto did not respond with only "That's a throwaway line." That was a five page thread with numerous replies in which several us attempted to explain why your demand for a parallel was an incorrect and forced reading of the passage you cited. Your basic premise is flawed. Toto wrote several replies, showing how you had erred from several angles. It is one thing to say you thought the replies were erroneous, it is quite another to dismiss them with the totally churlish comment above.

BTW, there is an example in the OT of someone being given a lineage that they didn't have in order to occupy a certain position (see history of Zadok the priest). It's not a vast leap from there to giving the Messiah the lineage he needed.

Vorkosigan

Peter Kirby

I can understand this response--it is even more necessary when dealing with 1 Cor 11:23-25--but it is a departure from the "exclusively heavenly" idea that there were absolutely no stories talking of a human Jesus in the time of Paul. The Greeks actually did have stories about Dionysus being born to a particular mother in a particular place and doing particular things, but some of the more sophisticated of philosophical bent deemed these stories to be allegory, with a moral or metaphysical meaning if any (some went to the extreme that all the members of the pantheon were metaphorical extensions of the monotheistic Deity, similar to the Hindu idea--but this by no means applied to all Greeks). Unlike Philo's Logos, the Greek's Dionysus has a human mother Semele and was imprisoned by the king Pentheus in the very earthly city of Thebes in the play of Euripides. If the "born of a woman" Dionysus is an analogue to Paul's Jesus, then Paul knew a story about some Jesus who had a Jewish mother, ministered to the circumcision, was handed over after instituting the Eucharist, and was crucified on earth. Paul may have held the Jesus story to be allegorical, but this is not the same as saying that Paul's Jesus was an abstract heavenly being who had yet to attract any particular mythology of activities among men. So, if "born of a woman, born under the law" is not in fact a reference to a literal Jesus but rather a reference to an allegorical story like that of Dionysus, this line of thought could at the least call for a retooling of mythicist theory.

best,
Peter Kirby

GakuseiDon

So then, if Paul had mentioned Mary, would that have added to Doherty's view or subtracted? To my mind, it wouldn't be proof one way or the idea.

Interesting that Celsus, a pagan philosopher writing around 170 CE and knowledgeable of the mystery religions, repeats rumours that he heard regarding Jesus being the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier (in Origen's Contra Celsus). It shows that Jesus (at least by the middle of the second century CE) was sufficiently different to the Mystery Gods in that respect.

Also, remember that Paul DID teach a spiritual Christ! The options are:
(1) Paul taught a spiritual Christ who he regarded as only ever existing on a spiritual plane.
(2) Paul taught a spiritual Christ who pre-existed on a spiritual plane, was born on Earth, was crucified, and then went back to a spiritual plane.

Just pulling out where Paul taught a spiritual Christ doesn't necessarily disprove either of these points!

Layman

I dealt with everyone of your and Toto's "arguments." Toto provided no examples. Neither did you. In fact, no one did.