Clivedurdle

Last year I visited Brading Roman Villa on the Isle of Wight. There is a mosaic there, that at the unrelated Shanklin Chine is said to be xian because it shows the four cardinal points and these are thought to relate to the four gospels.

But how can any Chi Ro or ox lion man eagle be assumed to be xian when they might be about Chronos?

Clivedurdle

http://www.ecauldron.com/rethinking.php

gurugeorge

Because many scholars feel comfortable with a certain circumscribed world of discourse and are uncomfortable when elements are brought in from all over the place. Same syndrome as with medicine - although there are all sorts of things that could be discovered with sufficiently bold research, medical science is more comfortable looking for the lost keys where the lamplight is, rather than fumbling around in the vast darkness.

This sort of thing is regrettable, but understandable. At the end of the day, this subject is too big for any one mind to really get a handle on all the possibilities and escry something that might be true out of it. So people limit their area of research - this means, what they come up with is unlikely to be true, but it's going to be coherent enough to discuss.

As I've said before, the matters being discussed on this board will never be fully resolved until there's a massive cross-disciplinary effort by not just historians and philologists, but also archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists, cognitive scientists and even neuroscientists (remember, we are talking about religious phenomena here, which include "visions" and mystical revelations and the like, and these aren't just peripheral matters but absolutely central to religion). Until then, all that's going to happen is that tiny random pieces of jigsaw get polished - they can't yet be put together.

stonewall1012

gurugeorge: "Because many scholars feel comfortable with a certain circumscribed world of discourse and are uncomfortable when elements are brought in from all over the place."
I would agree that different views make people uncomfortable. However, "groping about in the dark" also gets ones hand bitten by snakes.

I am fine with people trying to tie Christ with Chronos if you wish to make that connection, however, you'd better have more proof than numerology (4 gospels 4 beasts) and Chi and RHO.

The numerious accounts give us a pretty interesting/diverse account as to why people refered to Jesus as Christ. It doesn't mean it's true... it doesn't mean he's God's Son... It doesn't even mean God exists. It means they believed he was connected to God in someway. The context is specific (Judiasm), the time is pretty specific (1st half of 1 century). If you wish to completely disregard all these ancient documents that's fine but your still left with a glaring question... who created the myth,when and why?

gurugeorge

I'm not particularly hot on the Christ/Kronos connection. It's an interesting possibility, and the astrotheological angle is quite plausible, it seems to me (for the later development and mythologisation of of the christian religion as it spread amongst the gentiles, certainly, if not for the early stages). What I'd like everyone to be clear on is that it's just these sorts of (what seem to us) hokey connection that people were fond of in those days. (Can't remember the Church father who said there have to be 4 gospels for some silly numerological reason, that's probably the most relevant one to bring in at this point.)

That is to say, because a connection may seem absurd, tenuous or cheesy to us, doesn't mean those people didn't "see" it and think it was cool. That's how the ancient mind seems to have worked in a lot of instances - analogical, magical thinking.

As to the "numerous accounts", well if you're talking about the gospels, really according to scholarship as I understand it there's only one "account" (GMark, or perhaps a proto-GLuke) plus a bit of oral tradition mixed in, then spun out into four (somewhat theologically varied) "accounts" with the addition of some gnostic stuff to one of them. And for the original "account" we can't really tell whether it's a purely literary product, a joke, a con-job, a bitter diatribe, or an eyewitness account of something that happened.

As to my own idea, from my own amateur noodlings, I've touted it a few times around here: Christianity was originally a variant, proto-Gnostic form of Messianism, a Joshua cult developed by a Samaritan community in Jerusalem, which held their Joshua Messiah to be someone who had already been and done his stuff "sub rosa", thereby doing an end run around the Archons (so to speak). This Joshua Messiah concept reversed the traditional messianic tropes (not a great king but an unknown, not a military victory but a spiritual one, etc., etc.). This was the "good news of a victory won" (gospel) that was at first understood as a visionary revelation and then spread to the gentiles by one "Paul", who was not actually part of the original Jerusalem community, and was actually the Samaritan Simon Magus of Acts (albeit heavily disguised, and split into two). The basic idea was that there was no point waiting for the saviour to come, because he's already been and we are already saved (albeit in a spiritual sense) - the kingdom of god is already on this earth, if you can but open your eyes and ears. (Fundamentally this is a mystical trope, little different from non-dual mysticisms of the Eastern - Advaita, ch'an, etc., type.)

The sundry proto-Gnostic communities sired by "Paul" eventually became the various forms of "heresy" encountered by proto-Orthodoxy, which grew out of the Roman church started by "Paul", but eventually became a new form of "Catholic" Christianity that tried to unite the disparate strands of the growing but fragmented religion together. To this end, it "hardened" the historicity of the Joshua Messiah cult figure. The original Jerusalem crowd invented a Joshua Messiah cult figure who was kind of vaguely in the past. The early documents speak of him in vague, spiritual terms, in a recent-ish past, and indeed perhaps something like a "Dreamtime" as Doherty says. But of course as time goes on and you get a situation like Chinese Whispers, eventually eager aspirants start to wonder about the details. So the "gap" is filled in, with perhaps little stories circulating buliding around the basic skeleton of death/resurrection after 3 days, and concretising the time to some relatively convenient time in the recent-ish past (pre-Diaspora). Or perhaps some Roman Jew wrote a satire on the Joshua Messiah story that got taken up and believed to be true (somewhat in the manner of Carlos Castaneda or something like that) and became the basis for further accounts.

Anyway, the point of the "Catholic" church's "hardening" of the historicity of the Joshua Messiah cult figure is because the diaspora Jews involved thought they could trace a stronger lineage connection to the actual cult figure himself than "Paul's" merely spiritual connection. As I've said before, this necessity to invent a strong, more historical lineage connection to the cult figure in order to trump "Paul's" merely spiritual connection is the tail that wags the dog of the "historical Jesus". All done with the best of intentions of course (Roman desire for order, and organisational ability); it only went sour when the spiritual, visionary Christianities that existed before proto-Orthodoxy (and were by this time turning into full-fledged Gnosticism) gradually got squeezed out of the picture as Orthodoxy came to require belief in the strongly historicized, strongly textualised "Jesus Christ" as the primary mark of Christian religion.

Amusingly though, in order to keep the Gnostics on board who were prepared to toe the party line, Orthodoxy had to perform a delicate balancing act between the spiritual Christ (which they shared in their roots - being originally founded by Paul as a Roman proto-Gnostic church themselves) and their historical human concoction. This delicate balancing act was one of the main theological marks of Orthodoxy all through its development.

See? All perfectly logical and rational, not at all odd or bizarre. A genuine spiritual movement compromised by dogma created for political gain. Happens all the time.

stonewall1012

gurugeorge: "See? All perfectly logical and rational, not at all odd or bizarre. A genuine spiritual movement compromised by dogma created for political gain. Happens all the time."
Ok, I would like to see how your theory flushes out with the evidence... so this proto gnostic Paul and this prot Joshua Samaritian community in Jerusalem found each other and "merged" so to speak...

Ok... how long did this take? When did this start?
I suppose I have to ask who you would consider the first majorly un"interpolated" author? Meaning who is the first christian espousing what we now call "orthodoxy"?

gurugeorge

I think we're talking about "Paul's" ministry being as early as roundabout 30CE, although the roots of the movement (the Jerusalem crowd) might even be earlier, actually prior to the date of the "birth of Christ".

Justin Martyr, Ignatius, I think they're the first examples we have of the rising proto-Orthodoxy based in Rome, but even at this point it's not fully-formed. (Not until the invention of Acts I think.)

So the timeline is roughly:

20-30CE - beginnings of movement in Jerusalem. Some people, forming a possibly mystical and visionary Samaritan (possibly mixed Jewish/Smaritan) community, get the "big idea" of a revised-and-reversed-values Messiah-in-the-past. Good news! The victory has already been won!

30-50CE - "Paul" takes up the cudgel and spreads a gentile-frendly revision of this revised Messiah to various towns in the empire, at this stage still only a few hundred people. It "takes" amongst some gentiles because at this stage Jewish-based things are considered ancient and pretty cool, especially by rebellious types. (It's a bit like the popularity of Tibetan Buddhism amongst a minority of the young today - it's a cool foreign thing with a hint of anti-establishment about it.)

50-70CE - the various proto-Gnostic churches seeded by Paul start to diverge into sundry forms of Gnosticism proper (i.e. by syncretistically taking on colouration from both neo-Platonism and local mystery cults, etc.). But some of them develop in other directions - e.g. in some places it's a more purely philosophical development, in other places, maybe especially Rome, they develop a variation that takes a more humanised, historicized view of Joshua Messiah, placing him in a more definite past, and with a more definite history, than the vague recent-ish past of the original cultists. This would be a perfectly natural reaction of hard-headed folk like the Romans - they want details, they want facts.

70-150CE - the beginnings of proto-orthodoxy - Justin Martyr and other missionaries from Rome like him coming across flourishing (well, relatively speaking, we're still only talking about a few thousands now) "heresies" in the boondocks. In this period also the burgeoning development of various gospels, acts, etc., - all inventions meant to justify and represent a particular brand of Christianity. And at this point there are quite a few varieties, ranging from the remnants of the original Jerusalem Christians, through variations on proto-Orthodoxy, through philosphical versions in which Christ represents the Logos, through to some of the wild and woolier forms of Gnosticism.

Towards the end of this period, the further development and sophistication of proto-Orthodoxy's doctrine, culminating in the fabrication of Acts and GLuke, and the heavy interpolation of "Paul"'s letters, as a reaction to the popularity of Marcion's Apostolicon. Also, at this stage, Roman orthodoxy is spreading and converting some of the formerly proto-Gnostic communities, partly through being rich enough to do a lot of charitable work for people, partly through impressing them with its fabricated lineage connection back to the Man Himself. i.e., to be clear, a Roman Catholic bishop could claim a lineage of personal contact right back to Joshua Messiah himself; whereas some poor schmuck-bishop-incumbent who had inherited the merely Pauline lineage, could only claim a spiritual connection to the cult figure, through Paul's inspiration. This is why the historical Jesus was invoked and hardened up, in order to have this power of persuasion. (Not saying this was done in a conspiratorial "smoke filled room" sense, it could have been just a series of coincidences. e.g. first you have some natural variation of a more detailed, more historicized Joshua Messiah story, and then its value as a persuasive tool is discovered, and then the meme is enhanced to make it more persuasive.)

150-300CE - battle to the death between the disorganised bunch of now-fullly-efflorescing Gnosticisms and the growingly centralised and powerful Roman Orthodoxy.

300-400CE - "mopping up" period for Orthodoxy - it has won the battle, partly because it had some of the sharpest minds on its side, and by this stage most formerly Gnostic communities kowtow to the Roman Church. The surly remnants of Gnosticism "within the fold" are called docetics, while without the embrace of Mother Church, the remnants of Gnosticism dwindle to a few pockets of resistance. Huge leap in numbers as Christianity starts to get favoured by the Emperors. (Possible rationale: Christianity is such a syncretic hodge-podge by this stage that there's something for everyone in it - Judaism, Astrotheology, mysticism, visionary experience, mystery religion tropes, philosophy, etc. - therefore it makes a good potential state religion that might help keep a dissolving empire glued together.)

judge

Is that a little early for Justin?

gurugeorge

Yeah I realised later he was in the wrong time slot and revised the above

the_cave

Both--the Greeks and Jews (apparently) did; therefore some of them did That's all.