capnkirk

I think that perhaps the place to start is in defining what each considered the "original belief". Mack sets the background by establishing that the social upheavals and dislocations of the machinations of the great empires of the preceding several centuries had disconnected an inordinate number of people from their ethnic and national roots (the Diaspora Jews being just one example) resulting in extravagant social experimentation and imaginative intellectual projections to establish ethical ways to live in this very changed world. The reason for the outpouring of intellectual energy and for the struggle to find a new group was that the cultural traditions flowing into this mixing bowl were no longer supported by the social institutions that had produced them. People were on their own to manage as best they could. Three model societies were in everyone's mind during the Greco-Roman age: the Eastern temple-state, the Greek city-state, and the Roman Republic. Each had very different social organizations, and now the peoples of all three had been thoroughly redistributed throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. This is the social melange that Mack's Jesus grew up in. Let me now offer a rather long quotation from Mack describing Jesus and his "original beliefs":
Mack then traces this effervescent process forward. He characterizes these Jesus movements as similar to the Greek model of a school or discipline in that it was the norm for students to attribute their own expansions and clarifications of the founder's work to the founder, even decades later, long after the founder has passed on. The layers from Q2 forward should be understood in that context. These additions include the miracle stories, Jesus the prophet, Jesus the Messiah, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the deification. I have let this run a little long because I felt it necessary to provide enough information to give a reasonably clear picture of Mack's starting point, and the "original beliefs" that could be attributed to the historical Jesus.

I hope the preceding allows you to properly place these observations in Mack's overall vision. Clearly he sees all these as mythic overlays added by the Jesus movements as they evolved. A fuller discussion of this process deserves a thread of its own, so I will not continue to elaborate in this post, but suffice it to say that the impact of the "original" beliefs began to rip apart households and their nonconformance to the strict Jewish code of behavior had caused the Jesus groups to be ostracized. Loyalty was now the issue, and the Q2 layer was added, giving (for example) grounds to defend against the hostility from the Pharisees. As the movement encountered still different growth problems, more layering was added to address them, and so the process went, with each new layer naturally attributed to the "founder".

With respect to everything after Q1, you are essentially correct. Mack also holds that these were theological and philosophical creations by well-meaning followers who in the Greek tradition attributed their own work to the founder.

While Mack's is certainly not a historical Jesus in the Maccobian sense, he still points to a real "founder".

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Llyricist

But he gives no reason to actually do so (at least not in what you quoted). That quote starts with the supposition that there WAS an actual founder.

Stratifying Q seems to me to be one of the biggest exercises in affirming the consquent I have ever seen.... Let's start with this hypothetical document, and lets see if we can't strip the layers of this hypothetical document down to the original founder we KNOW is there.... sheeeesh

For all we know Q may have been a story about someone else entirely from which the gospel writers borrowed the sayings and parables (which would explain the lack of transmission of that document).

capnkirk

Llyricist,

You are expecting a three paragraph quote from a 300 page book to answer a lot of questions. With all due respect, I was responding to amaleq13's stated question, not your unstated one. You need to look at it again...as a response to demonstrate Mack's position relative to Doherty's.

For me, the evidence that points most strongly to the existence of a founder is that all these early Jesus groups claim the same founder and their documents point back to Q-roots. That is still highly circumstantial, but it doesn't reflect the bias that your statement imputes.

I make no apologies for the shortcomings of Q. I also harbor some of your misgivings about scholars' ability to exegetically separate layers within a "derived" document (though a good book about Q will probably be one of my next reads). OTOH, if you toss out Q, then you are left with a vacuum and even more layers of speculation. With the dearth of surviving documentation from that era, NOBODY can do more than make an educated guess, so I am willing to stipulate to that. Are you? I fully realize that we are comparing opinions of learned scholars, and that's the closest any of us is ever likely to get, and accept the lack of satisfaction attendant to such an incomplete closure.

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Paradox

I will - thanks for the insights there. Seems like I've got plenty to get my teeth into anyway. The book which Capnkirk recommended is on its way and I've bought "The Jesus Puzzle" to be getting on with as well as checking out the other threads. Awesome! Don't you just love this place?

Amaleq13

capnkirk,


The historical Jesus you describe is very similar to the one I had assumed prior to reading Doherty. His work forced me to confront how much I was reading into Paul's letters and left me doubting the necessity of an historical founder.

What I'm still left with is confusion about why the "Q Jesus" would have inspired Paul's novel theological reinterpretation yet allowed him to completely ignore what apparently made Jesus popular enough to spawn cults (ie his teachings).

Elsewhere, Vinnie has offered an argument where, if I'm reading him correctly, Paul is deliberately avoiding the teachings of Jesus because he feels others have incorrectly made that their focus. This seems consistent with my impression that, assuming an HJ, Paul has to be understood as deliberately avoiding making reference to the ministry or disciples. The latter I can understand as an authority issue but ignoring the former still seems problematic.

capnkirk

First, let me offer one clarification; I am not arguing for the necessity of a HJ, only for the probability of one, and the belief of the earliest followers that there was one.

I accept that there were Jesus groups that existed prior to Paul. To do so requires that I also accept that these groups evolved. That there was at least one Jesus group that had evolved into a Christ cult before Paul is necessary to explain Paul's references to having once persecuted such groups before being converted to their beliefs. While it says nothing about who Paul was before that time, it does account for Paul's appropriation of his kerygma. Somewhere along the way something happened to cause the Jesus groups to shift their focus from Jesus as teacher to the significance of his death. One gets the sense that the event that caused this shift was in fact Jesus' death, perhaps in a way that would evoke images of martyrdom (now don't read too much of the still later mythmaking as to the nature of his martyrdom a la GMark into this).

I believe that there was another issue at work here too. As the Jesus groups spread through Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, the validity of these groups' claim to the Kingdom of God (KoG) came under increasing fire from diaspora Jews. The very problems that Paul would later address vis a vis the gentile participation in the KoG arising from Jesus' Judaic origins. How could the Jesus movements have as great a claim to Israel as the Jews? The death of Jesus would somehow have to justify that claim. The answer was to create the necessary significance by mythologizing Jesus' death. The mythology drew obvious cues from the Greek tradition of the noble death and of hero and divine man, and from the Jewish wisdom tale about the vindication of a falsely accused righteous man along with Near Eastern myths of the King as God's son. While this would seem a gross overreaction to the threat, it was perhaps not so in view of the incredible ideal of human community it sought to justify, and offers some idea of the huge investment that people were willing to make to belong to this new social arrangement.

Without a HJ, the trail turns cold when one tries to see back before Paul. Still, we are discussing nuances here; we are trying to trace the path of a process of mythologization, and that is a very speculative endeavor no matter how one turns it.

In the light of the arguments I just presented, one could reasonably make that claim. It would be consistent with a change of focus within the Jesus groups from Jesus as teacher to attaching sufficient significance to his death to support their claim to the KoG.

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Amaleq13

Right. He calls them the Church of God IIRC. I was still thinking of Paul as the creator of Christianity from reading Maccoby. Was the Jerusalem Group part of the Church of God, then? Or are they actual former disciples who continue to focus on teachings?

I think Crossan reads Q as considering the implied death of Jesus as no different from what any of the Kingdom prophets could expect.

capnkirk

Well, Mack's view of Paul is only one step removed from Maccoby's on that point. Paul was certainly the first one to actually put the concepts of it in writing.

As for the Pillars of Jerusalem (and I am going to disregard any of the description in Acts as too far removed in time to be useful), Paul isn't very clear just who they are beyond their seeming insistence that Jews who followed Jesus must remain Jews. About whether they also insisted that Gentiles must also become Jews, he was less clear, but the implication was there that it applied to them too. It does still leave questions about whether this was their main concern with Paul's ministry, because it still seems like a leap for Jerusalem Jews to accept the divinity of Jesus and remain Jews. Freedom from the food laws is one thing, claiming to follow a deity who was not YHWH was quite another. It makes Luke's portrayal of them in Acts even more problematical. Josephus' mention of James also tends to further cloud the matter.

I also recall Crossan portraying Jesus as a Cynic and as a social bandit in one of his "trajectories" that ends in messiah. Then he pointed out that execution was the fate of captured social bandits and that betrayal was usually the means of capture. It seemed to me that he leads the reader right up to the lip of the cup and even peers over the edge, but stops short of taking a drink. To his credit, he didn't try to claim that the Passion happened, but he did leave the door open to the idea of a martyr's death.

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Amaleq13

If Paul's persecution of the Church of God is genuine, doesn't that require that we assume they asserted beliefs that were, in some way, contrary to Jewish law? If that is the case, the Pillars' apparent devotion to the Law suggests they were not associated with the persecuted CofG, doesn't it?

Without the alleged reference to Jesus, there is no reason to assume Josephus is talking about James the Just.

I think there is good reason to assume that James the Just had obtained a reputation for piety among his fellow Jews prior to converting to whatever Jesus-related belief he later held. Whatever the nature of that belief, it doesn't seem likely that it could have involved any denial or undermining of the Law.

It is very confusing. We apparently have a guy who apparently had little to recommend him as a leader or inspiration yet, despite that, he ends up having a variety of beliefs spring up soon after his death that radically changed people's lives. Some folks seem to have considered him God's Wisdom incarnate but failed to attribute any significance to his death while others completely ignore the wisdom of his teachings while focusing exclusively on the theological significance of his death.

capnkirk

I would say that you are correct on both counts, and supports my assertion that it is very unclear what the core beliefs of the Pillars were, except that they considered themselves Jewish and that they probably belonged to one of the earlier (pre-Christ cult) Jesus movements.

I would say that further clouds the issue; I just didn't choose to elaborate.

I think that your conclusion is correct irrespective of which came first, but agree that such a reputation would have been easier to come by before conversion than after.

While I won't argue with your assertion of him as a leader, I would disagree about what might recommend him as an inspiration. I can see the work of a charismatic visionary in his solution to the plight of the cultural refugees of the Greco-Roman age, but not necessarily the leadership qualities to turn it into a movement, and maybe not even full awareness of the social power of his solution.
Isn't such a wide range of interpretations just what you would expect from a local visionary whose personal interest in his solution was also essentially local? One who had no interest in creating an international movement, and spent little time trying to codify his personal philosophy into a (pardon the pun) crusade? The price of leaving that to others would tend to create a wide variety of (sometimes conflicting) interpretations. I think that these are all evidences that Mack's HJ had no intention of creating a macro-level movement, much less a new religion. The first 40 years or so reflect the undisciplined and uneven growth of a movement without a solid doctrine and without organized leadership. The diversity thus produced took three more centuries of vicious, polemic conflict to bring to a state of orthodoxy. That there were increasingly divergent interpretations was becoming apparent as early as Paul's time. If I understand Doherty correctly, he sees this diversity as evidence that there was no HJ, while Mack attributes the diversity to HJ's lack of interest in crystalizing his vision and exporting it as a global solution.

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