Toto

To repeat what has been said here before, the second century proto-orthodox Christians felt the need to bolster and solidify their authority by tracing it back to the disciples who heard Jesus' actual words, and those who heard the teaching from disciples who heard Jesus' word - thus the attempt to trace an apostolic succession. This is not really a "mythicist" argument - it was developed by historicists.

In the struggle between the proto-orthodox and the gnostics, who felt that truth came from within and each person needed to seek his own truth, the more disciplined church structure of the proto-orthodox won out.

TedM

Jay, thanks for your reconstruction. It is interesting. As for the manuscript evidence, it may be that two groups are represented in the NT..however it isn't clear to me since neither group seems to acknowledge the other, both groups believe in the angelic Jesus who will come in the future, and both appear to have references to a human being who recently lived. It really is the gospels that stick out though from all the others, since those are full of very clear claims that Jesus walked the earth.


I see that the Paul and Thecla was popular. I'm unaware of there being popular stories in writing about a human Jesus that preceded the gospels, though. Do you think the stories started with some rudimentary version of Mark or other gospels?


Can you fill me in on Barnabus reference?


Interesting idea.


Disaster can result in some unusual things. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on this.

ted

TedM

At the least, a Messiah who would walk the earth and lead their nation as king into a wonderful era.

GakuseiDon

I'm not sure how that explains what Doug was referring to, as he wrote here:

Soon after that, a few Christians got the notion that those writings were about the founder of their religion. Those historicist Christians tried to convert non-Christians to their religion. For various reasons that are not particularly mysterious, the historicists were more successful at winning converts than the Paulinists.

Why were historicists more successful at winning non-Christian converts than the Doherty Christians? According to Doherty, Paul was dealing with concepts common in the day ("dying and rising gods in the non-earthly realm"). Wouldn't that have been an advantage over the historicists? What reasons would have made the historicists more successful in gaining non-Christian converts?

Toto

The proto-orthodox, or the historicists, had the advantage of a structure with some top-down control. If they accepted that Jesus told his disciples X, and X was passed down through the generations to the current church leadership, they would be more likely to do what they were told for the common good of the group. The gnostics (whether or not they were mythicists are you define that) would have been like a herd of cats, hard to organize, hard to get anyone to sacrifice for the common good, because each person took his authority from the Christ within him.

Doug Shaver

Yes. James Campbell; Gwyn A Williams; J. N. L. Myres; Michael Wood; David Dumville; W. A. Cummins.

Doug Shaver

I don't recall ever saying that it was "quite common," and if I have ever said anything to that effect, I'm retracting it now, if "quite common" is supposed to imply that it was a majority view or something close thereto.

Not that its relative popularity is especially relevant to my point. During the times we're talking about, Christianity itself, regardless of what its adherents believed about Jesus, was still just a fringe movement.

In the competition for converts, the historicists would have had an advantage for the simple reason that people can more easily relate to, and understand, flesh-and-blood people than purely spiritual entities, no matter how real they think the latter happen to be. Assuming that you are receptive to begin with to the notion that a son of God died for your sins and then was resurrected, and that you can gain eternal life by believing that he did, you're likely to find it more congenial to think that an otherwise-ordinary man was that son of God than some disembodied who-knows-what.

Besides, a historical Jesus was the only option for those prospective converts who did not believe in kind of spirit world described by Doherty. Nobody is claiming that everybody in the ancient Near East believed any of that, but everybody did believe, as everybody still believes, that charismatic preachers sometimes suffer martyrdom.

Doug Shaver

From the time the Roman Empire collapsed until the printing press was invented, who else but orthodox Christians would have been responsible? By every account I've ever read, during that period the church had the only people who knew how to write anything.

They had a choice. They could record the condemnations, or they could pretend that people who denied Jesus' historicity had never even existed.

From all the threads this forum has had on Jesus' historicity, it could hardly be more obvious that Paul's epistles are not clearly contradictory to Jesus' historicity. That ought to be all the evidence anyone needs that there was never a need, from the orthodox viewpoint, to stamp out his writings. Practically everything Paul said about his Christ -- no matter what kind of being Paul himself thought Jesus was -- could have been said about a historical man. It was trivially easy for any early historicist Christian to suppose that Paul's Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth.

The survival of the Pauline corpus would have had nothing to do with what Paul's original readership would have thought he was talking about. Only Paul's actual words would have mattered, so long as they could be interpreted as references to Jesus of Nazareth.

Only so long as anyone knew about them and what they believed. That is why, if any of them wrote anything more explicity ahistoricist than Paul's own work, those writings would not have been preserved.

From an apologetic standpoint, if you're claiming that a man was the son of God and rose from the dead, and that anyone who thinks otherwise deserves to burn in hell forever, your job is a lot easier if your adversaries don't dispute the man's existence to begin with.

Of course there was a tradition. The tradition was the Paul (a) was talking about Jesus of Nazareth and (b) learned everything he knew about him from Cephas and various other of Jesus' disciples.

I have long wanted, but have not yet had time, to find out what first-century Jewish sources had to say about the traditional Jews' messianic expectations. I have never seen any such sources cited, aside from Josephus. With that exception, to date I have never seen any reference to any authority for any claim about what Jews of that time, traditional or otherwise, thought about the messiah.

But considering human nature in general, and especially human religious nature, and considering the patent vagueness and ambiguity of all the alleged messianic prophecies in Jewish scripture, we surely have zero reason to suppose that there was anything like unanimity on the matter, and good reason to doubt there was even a clear consensus.

I mean, just look at all of the Christian sects nowadays who claim to believe everything the Bible teaches and nothing but what the Bible teaches. What do they agree on? Practically nothing. Why should it have been any different among the Jews 2,000 years ago?

TedM

It's not just pretending they didn't exist. It is accepting their writings as supportive of their own very different views.

It is one thing to not stamp out writings. It is another to accept them as representive of one's own views. Either they really knew that Paul's views were different and did very little to "adopt" Paul as one of their own by putting in more blatantly gospel-like references, or they didn't know Paul had different views. The latter seems unlikely to me--especially given Doherty's premise that the reason Paul never talked about Jesus as having really lived in a sphere other than earth was because his audience was "ingrained" with the concept.


That tradition would have come either after some dispute with original Pauline Christians who knew what the real tradition was, or after they simply died out. In either case, your answer relies in great part on doctoring of the real truth by the orthodox--a conspiracy theory answer. I think there most likely would have been some clearer clues as to the major shift in Jesus' origins.


The Messiac passages are clear: A king was to come to earth and rule Israel to be victorious over its neighbors. Did this view change by the 1st century? Possibly, but we don't have any evidence for it (other than Christianity) and we do have evidence that it remained prevalent--both in Josephus' writings and in the NT.

thanks,
ted

karlmarx

The earliest "flesh-and-blood" advocates I find are Iraneaus and Justin Martyr, both 2nd century, and they both advocated their position on theological grounds. I don't know of anyone advocating a flesh-and-blood Jesus in the 1st century.

But maybe Luke could be considered a "flesh-and-blood" advocate, in a pinch.