jjramsey

Evidence?

Arnobius made a similar argument, in Against the Gentiles 1.40-41. The fact that he felt he had to do so points to the pagans of the day not seeing crucifixion as just another kind of ugly death.

Mithras did not experience death; he made a bull experience it. Osiris' death made him become god of the dead. I suppose that the initiates felt they benefitted from this, but it is not a good parallel to Christian soteriology. Offhand, I don't know what benefit the worshippers of Attis saw in his castration and bleeding to death, or what the worshippers of Dionysos saw in him being torn apart by the Titans as a baby. :huh:

To call an obstacle "invented" when there is documentary evidence indicating otherwise is disingenuous.

Didymus

"He was stapped in. Someone throws a switch and his body is jolted."

Context is everything. Like the Psalm 22 verse, that could be construed as vague if you lived in, say, the Falkland Islands in the 19th century. In 20th century America the prompt would have been more than sufficient to bring to mind the electric chair.

There's no question that the humiliating nature of the crucifixion was used by its enemies to disparage Christianity. But that doesn't take the whole picture into account.

The NT authors had their disappointments; on the other hand, they knew they were striking plenty of responsive chords, especially in the Diaspora. That raises some fundamental problems with the arguments from embarrassment: they assume an overarching cultural consensus, usually on the basis of only a few bits of text. But in fact, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: In the case of the crucifixion story, we know that whatever resistance there may have been in some quarters was offset by acceptance in others. So the argument tends to be self-cancelling.

The arguments from embarrassment - "Surely it must be historical because no one would try to peddle such a self-defeating scenario if it were not" - seem to be based on another false assumption, that the authors, if they indeed had been writing fiction, would have been retailing stories they knew to be false. But historical truth and theological truth are two very different things; the NT authors were NOT making things up, they believed every word they wrote to be true in some sense of the word. I think that the author of Mark, for example, believed he had discovered a perfect "fit" between the messianic prophesies and the Wisdom stories, the legendary Jesus of tradition, Paul's crucified savior (surely based on the coupling of Psalm 22 with crucifixions of Jewish Zealots by the Romans), the fall of Jerusalem, and most particularly the destruction of the Temple. Based on those connections, the Messiah MUST have been crucified under Pilate! To Mark, that discovery was a divine revelation that had to be shared with the world. He didn't need historical evidence to write what he did; he thought he had discovered ultimate truth and the key to the salvation of mankind.

Now THAT is a nagging prod, to say the least.

D

jakejonesiv

Paulinics

If Tertullian's memory is to be credited, "Mithra there, (in the kingdom of Satan, ) sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown." Prescription, chapter XL.

You have conceded the examples of Osiris, Attis, and Dionysis.

Like I said before, what was an obstacle to converting some was a boon to converting others. The Christian message was Christ died for you (Romans 5:8), and the more grusome, the more unjust, the more shameful the death the better the results; more emotional impact. Or have you never been to a revival? People be shoutin' carrying on, praising Jesus. JJ, what you are saying is directly contradicted every day.

What you are saying is contradicted historically. The church grew despite the alleged crucifixtion of its founder. In fact, it grew because of it.

Jake Jones IV

jakejonesiv

Well stated. The hitting streak continues!

Jake

jjramsey

Yes, context is everything. Say someone wrote this:

Now someone mining the passage for a reference to the electric chair could pull the highlighted passage out of context, but someone coming to the text cold would not likely think of that. Psalm 22 is a similar situation. Someone reading the text cold would see the narrator as in a much more dire situation as that of Lt. Jon Doeh, but the context doesn't fit crucifixion. It would take someone looking for a crucifixion to see one.

Not really. The fact that a small minority did accept it does not mean the message wasn't embarassing. You are dodging the real problem here. It is one thing to continue to preach an embarassing message after it has shown some results. It is another thing to begin to preach that message to start with, when the risk of rejection is clear and the reward uncertain. One needs to account for the motivation to begin kicking against the cultural goads.

One critical problem I see with this scenario. Paul's crucified savior is not a solution to the Zealots' problem. If anything, Paul's theology makes the Zealots irrelevant. If Paul was inspired by the Zealots, then his mission to the Gentiles makes no sense, since for the Zealots, they were the enemy. Another problem is what the source for your "legendary Jesus of tradition" would be to start with.

Ben C Smith

Just to clarify even more completely, the scenarios I ran through are relevant only if we see a direct connection between Jesus ben Ananias and the trial of Jesus, and I am not (yet) persuaded of a direct connection. But nor have I really put a lot of study into it yet.

Ben.

jjramsey

Expand please.

This is not evidence that Mithras himself was thought to have been resurrected. There is also the real problem of whether Tertullian's memory does serve him, and how much is him seeing through Christian lenses. Remember that Justin Martyr was trying to establish that there was "diabolical mimicry," and stretched the pagan stories to fit. If Tertullian had a similar mindset, he could easily be seeing hints of Christianity where they aren't. The passage is too vague to establish what you want it to, and your interpretation is not confirmed by the iconography in the mithraea.

With Osiris, I pointed out that the benefit that his initiates would have gained from his death didn't parallel Christian soteriology. One can indeed say that he "had experienced death in some way to the benifit of the initiate," but so what? To put it bluntly, "in some way" and "benefit" are used as weasel words to make the sentence cover a broad range of soteriologies.

With Attis and Dionysos, I professed ignorance as to how their deaths were salvific. That is not a concession. If you have actual information on the matter, please share it.

The problem with that statement is that it was obviously not true in the first few centuries of Christianity, as pointed out above.

This is grossly fallacious, confusing the attitudes toward crucifixion after sentiment against it had been overcome with the attitudes toward crucifixion that pertained in first few centuries A.D.

jakejonesiv

JJ Ramsey,

Show me from NT documents that Christians were embarrased by Jesus' alleged crucifixtion.
Just the opposite is true. Christians gloried in the cross.
"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ..." Gal. 6:14

"For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God." 1 Cor. 6:18.

Here we have it in a nutshell. Some people will say preaching a crucified savior is foolishness. For this they are condemned to perish by Christian doctrine. (So much for them!)
But Christians weren't embarrased. It was the gospel.
jjramsey, are you saying that Christians were embarrased by what they understood as the power of God?

Let's take a look at Philippians 2:7-9.
The mythical Jesus is said to be exalted because he died on the cross.

Death by crucifixtion was a shameful death, but Christians weren't embarassed by that. They scorned its shame. Hebrews 12:2. "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

SO JJramsey, if your point is to have any credibility, you are going to have to prove that Christians in the NT writings are portrayed as ever being embarrased by the cross.

Jake Jones IV

jjramsey

You keep misunderstanding the point, which is how the first Christians got to the point where they would embrace something that they would have otherwise been embarassed by. So far, what I've seen has been something along the lines of "They embraced it because they saw it in the scriptures," but the case for them deriving their belief from the scriptures--as opposed to using it as post hoc justification--is weak. I can think of an easily plausible reason for what pushed the original Christians over the edge: They were too emotionally invested in Jesus to give him up, so they found a way to salvage their belief in him as Messiah despite his crucifixion. You, of course, do not accept this as a reasonable possibility.

BTW, I PM'd Ben C. Smith on Zindler's justifications for calling the JtB passage in Josephus an interpolation. He warned me that he is not an expert on the historical background, so make of this what you will, but the gist is that in Antiquities 18.109ff, the passage "Macherus, which was subject to her father" may indicate that Macherus had been controlled by Aretas, but this is the odd man out. The fortress was rebuilt by Herod the Great, and Herod Antipas would have been the natural inheritor of it, and it was described by Pliny as the second strongest fortress in Judea. The likelihood that Antipas did have control of it long enough for him to imprison JtB isn't unreasonable.

Didymus

Unlike now, the first century did not offer a myriad of possibilities to choose from. And unlike the contemporary reader, the first-century reader could not Google a few keywords to find obscure contexts.

It is not at the least bit far-fetched to think that, when reading the words "they have pierced my hands and my feet," the first thing that would come to the mind of a first century Jew - especially one seeking to unlock hidden prophesies in a sacred text - would be crucifixion.

In fact, it is almost impossible to think otherwise if one considers the oppressive situation in second century Palestine. Josephus made many references to crucifixion; it was the Romans' intimidation method of choice. This fact was not lost on Jews in the Disapora.

Dodging the problem? Seems like I dealt with these questions in my last post. I didn't deny that some found the crucifixion embarrassing, or that enemies of Christianity used the crucifixion to disparage Christianity. That's well documented.

But to recap and expand a bit:

• The NT authors knew what would fly in the second century and what wouldn't. Time has proven the accuracy of their estimates.
  
• More importantly, they saw themselves as truthtellers, not as charlatans or fabulists, so there was no consciousness of inventing or promulgating falsehoods.
  
• There was no lack of motivation; the NT authors were men on a mission to save mankind!

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I was suggesting that the idea of a crucified savior of mankind could have been (partially) grounded in the crucifixion of Zealots, radical Jews who believed themselves to be saviors of the Jewish people. See the connection?

The Sayings Tradition regarding a man Jesus, a wandering preacher/teacher of a Kingdom of God. The Gospel of Thomas embodies some of it, and it's widely accepted by scholars that the sayings of a "Jesus" were transcribed into a hypothetical collection called "Q," later to be used by Matthew and Luke.

D