Ted Hoffman

Mack writes that “according to the Christ myth, Jesus became the Christ by virtue of his obedience unto death. Here in the Christ hymn, Jesus is the incarnation of a divine figure who possessed “equality with God” already at the very beginning of the drama and had every opportunity to be lord simply by “taking” possession of his Kingdom. His glory however, is that he did not “grasp” that opportunity...but took the form of a slave. Because of this, God exalted him to an even higher lordship.” p.92 [emphasis mine]

Now, by definition divine figures are not historical figures. Historical figures dont incarnate and historical figures dont take the form of humans as the Philippians passage says because by definition, they are humans: they dont have a choice over what form to take. This is mythology. He [Mack] does not need to take a position on historicity for us to determine the implications of what he is saying as far as the historicity of Jesus is concerned. It is also very possible that a writer can unwittingly make statements that support a MJ but be unaware of it because he does not have an MJ in his sights, or fail to appreciate the implications of his statements because he espouses a different interpretive framework.

Greek mythology tells us that the god Zeus assumed the form a swan and seduced Leda and even impregnated her and he also appeared as a bull to Europa. One would have to be pretty obtuse to argue that a source that is explaining this kind of mythology needs to be categorical about the historicity of Zeus.
Tell me Zeichman, what other historical figures transmogrify (to borrow a Kafkaean phrase - or is it metamorphosize?) into other forms?

Yes, Mack does not name the Christology manifest in Philippians 2:8. Brown does. Brown writes that “incarnational thought is indicative of pre-existence Christology (“emptied himself taking on the form of a servant; the word became flesh”)” Brown, The Death of the Messiah. Volume 1 & 2 (1994), p.141.

Adoptionist Christology is what is consistent with a HJ.

I will be interested in the quote supporting the claim that "Mack argues the Philippians hymn presupposes a Jesus who was primarily known for teaching."

Solitary Man

This is clearly wrong on multiple levels. First, later Christians had no problem assuming their divine figure was also historical. Second, the practice wasn't rare in the empire, as even Julius Caesar was thought to be a God, especially in the east, and there was no problem ever believing that Pharaoh is God.

Then please explain the appearance of Athena to Odysseus.

They do if they were also divine.

Your abusing the word here.

You're trying to trap Zeichmann with your crap. The actual historian doesn't argue that Jesus actually "transmogrify", but that he was believed to. Likewise, Pharaoh was believed to be divine in human form. Heck, the Japanese up until very recently thought that the emperor was god. And the Romans for a long time worshiped their emperors as gods.

Ted Hoffman

SM, you are right that a character can be historical then made divine. This is called apotheosization and by definition, it involves elevating an ordinary person to a level of a God. You correctly point out that it was done to Caesar. It was also done to Alexander the Great. These are historical figures and their historicity is recorded in historical sources. Historians know Caesar was a historical figure, even if devotees may believe otherwise. We here, are interested in positions historians would take.
If one is divine first as per the earliest sources, then incarnates (as the Phillipians passage indicates), then we can agree that since the figure's nature is divine, they remain divine irrespective of what form they take. Do you agree with this reasoning?
Like someone joked, sticking feathers in your butt does not make you a chicken.
That is the sense in which I made the statement, by definition divine figures are not historical figures. Caesar is not a divine figure even though he was divinized by faithfuls.

We are not discussing Christian thought here: we are discussing history. Christians are free to assume that loaves of bread can talk and walk.
Again, that is what the Egyptians believed. Pharaohs were blood and flesh men. They had children and died and were buried. Do you have historical evidence to the contrary?
Even Persians worshipped some of their Kings. It doesnt mean they were divine beings.
How would that help the discussion?

Solitary Man

No, since you include a false implication. If you were to clarify that by earliest sources you do not mean earliest extent sources, then yes, I'd agree with you. If someone was first conceptualized as a deity and then humanized, it negates their historicity. But earliest sources and earliest extent sources are two different things. Paul may be the earliest extent source, but he's hardly the earliest source, nor does he likely represent the earliest form either. The first is factual - Paul speaks of Christians whom he persecuted, and of a group already in existence. They both predate Paul. The latter is hypothesized. It seems through critical inquiry that Paul represents a different brand of Christianity than his predecessors. I'd opt for the Ebionite-esque Christians as being representative of the earliest sources, i.e. Jesus was a man, albeit a prophet, perhaps even a messiah, but not God.

What a weird analogy.

If he was deified, then by definition he was divine. He's Caesar divus - Caesar the divine.

What historical Christians thought is part of history.

I never said I didn't. But Gods also had children and died. Horus is the son of Osiris and Isis, and Seth killed Osiris.

Yes they were to the Persians.

youngalexander

TH & SM, you seem to be talking past one another.
True, yet 'What historical Christians thought is [not necessarily] part of history', and in this case is not!

Jesus is the son of Dad & Mary, but it aint history.

Sigh, perhaps those histerical Persians were mistaken?

Ted Hoffman

SM, I think I have made my point and I get your point loud and clear. To be sure, divine beings are deities and largely heavenly beings as opposed to flesh and blood men and because of that, they belong to the realm of myth.

Humans can be elevated by others to worship status but that divination is an expression of what the devotees think or believe, and not a statement of fact concerning the historicity of such humans. But apotheosized people are exceptions rather than the norm.

You are using divine in the technical sense (apotheosization) and disingenuously pretending to be rebutting my arguments. This is really cheap of you. I have emphasized throughout here that I am interested in discussing historical issues not people's beliefs.

gurugeorge

It's this "hypothesized" aspect that seems problematic - where does "critical enquiry" get that idea that Paul's predecessors knew personally a man named Joshua who they thought was the Messiah?

The only difference I can see between Paul and his predecessors is that he had a more universalized (not restricted to observant Jews) version of what they had, there doesn't seem to be any distinction in terms of the "mythological quality" (so to speak) of the Christ they believed in. He's "seen" in scripture (and possibly visionary experience in their case, certainly in Paul's case), there's not an iota of a hint that he was ever eyeballed by any of them as a living human being.

GakuseiDon

Getting back to the OP, I see that Doherty has used "circling the wagons" in his review of Acharya S's "Christ Conspiracy" (my emphasis):
http://home.ca.inter.net/~oblio/BkrvTCC.htm

"There are those who have expressed some uncertainty about the scholarship which originally presented some of the subject matter dealt with in this book, since much of it comes from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But there is a prominent reason why today's researcher is inevitably thrown back on this early period of investigation. The so-called History of Religions School was a feature of that period, represented by such luminaries as Reitzenstein, Bousset and Cumont, and other, less famous scholars. Its conclusions about the relation of Christianity to the thought and religious expression of the time, especially in regard to the mystery cults and even solar mythology, proved unpalatable to mainstream New Testament study. This was also the period of intense examination of the idea that no Jesus had existed at all (J. M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, the Dutch Radical School, etc.). The result was a backlash and a circling of the wagons, creating a fortress mentality against such scholarship for the latter three-quarters of the 20th century. As a result, there has been little recent investigation of that History of Religions material, especially sympathetic investigation. Acharya S may draw to a fair degree on that older scholarship, but while certain aspects of it are necessarily somewhat dated, one of the things which struck me in her quotations from it (and more and more of it is now being reprinted) is how perceptive and compelling much of it continues to be."

Doherty also seems convinced by the evidence she brings forth in her book. As he says here (my emphasis):

"Commemorative ceremonies of gods like Dionysos, Attis, Osiris, and even the Phoenician god Baal as recorded on a 4,000 year old tablet now in the British Museum, move in virtual lockstep with the Passion story of Jesus in the Gospels. Gospel characters and their features mirror astrological symbols and divine pantheons of contemporary cultures; the workings of the heavens (astro-theology) and especially solar myths have uncanny parallels in elements of the Christ story. And so on."

About 8 months ago, I emailed the British Museum about that 4,000 year old tablet, and got this response:
I mentioned this to my long-time combatant Freethinkaluva (Acharya's chief sycophant), and he also emailed the British Museum, apparently getting the same response, with the addition that "Marduk's Ordeal" comes from Assyria and should date to the 7th century BC. So it seems that Doherty has uncritically accepted Acharya's claims about the tablet, and is unaware of the more cautious approach of modern scholars (though perhaps he would regard this as part of the "circling of wagons" and "fortress mentality").

gurugeorge

Not to let that cheeky little aside go without comment, I think Doherty is talking more in the context of biblical scholarship than Assyriology

But anyway, these kinds of mistakes are made all the time in academic writing are they not? It's just a warning to be more cautious - and indeed, Price says in the interview cited above that Acharya has been more careful in her recent books.

At any rate, things like these don't disqualify work from being interesting - or even true in its conclusions. Don't forget, all the scholarly folkways aren't things that actually lead to the discovery truth - they're just there to prevent time-wasting discussions with idiots in a time-pressured world. There is in fact no guarantee that following scholarly procedure will result in the discovery of truth. Truth is discovered by making intuitive leaps about the "big picture", in the context of which the logic of how things connect together becomes clearer, more coherent, and fits better with reality tests. (Popper/Kuhn)

The real problem is maybe just that broad picture stuff isn't so popular in academia as it was in the time Doherty's talking about - that kind of "grand synthesis" that was so popular in German scholarship following Hegel (I think) fell into disrepute only when Hegel fell into disrepute philosophically at the turn of the century. Everyone is into fiddly details nowadays.

(Actually, I surmise that part of this push towards fiddly details (which in turn makes people who are into fiddly details attracted to academia) may itself have been part of the "circling of the wagons". If the big picture seems to show no living Joshua Messiah, let's just ignore it and get stuck in to detailed work.)

But really I should think it would be obvious that both big picture stuff and fiddly detailed stuff are necessary in scholarly work, because as I said above it's the big picture that partly shapes what count as details. (Same as Popper's point - it's actually one's metaphysics that first of all shapes one's science, even though that metaphysical view may not be decidable at the time. Take for example Democritus - there were loads of rival metaphysical positions at the time, but what do you know? It turns out that one of them - Democritus - was right. But nobody could have decided for or against Democritus at that at the time because there was no mechanism, no means, to test his ideas.)

So the sort of grand synthesis stuff that Acharya is doing is valuable, and the fact that she uses the work of older generations of scholars that also had grand synthesese is valuable too.

I mean it's not as if an astrotheological influence is an inherently implausible, lunatic notion like "Little men from Mars wrote the Bible" or something like that. It's already inherently very plausible, so even if some of the details in her particular version of the idea are wrong, that doesn't mean one shouldn't try it on for size and see how the details of Christianity look in that different frame.

Also, Acharya's other interesting idea about priesthoods of different cults sharing some ideas and even wandering about amongst themselves isn't implausible either - AFAIK Greek philosophers visited Egypt and Egyptian priests visited Greece and Rome, and I'd bet my life that the evidence we do have of such sharing and melding of ideas is just the tip of the iceberg (another glimpse can be seen in some of eclecticism of the the "practical" Hermetic and Magical Papyrii). Certainly if you look at the parallel case of Eastern stuff, there was a lot of sharing of ideas going on between Daoism and Buddhism, between Buddhisim and indigenous shamanisms, etc., etc.

Solitary Man

You said the exact same thing I did, agreed with me, and then negated it. You have a contradiction to resolve.

I think there's plenty of evidence that Jesus existed, he had a father (obviously), and that his mother was Mary.

Hysterical or historical? Perhaps they were mistaken about what? That the Gods actually existed or that they believed that there kings were Gods? I think it's pretty hard to confuse the latter.