GakuseiDon

Strange! I've given the texts that Carrier references below, and I can't see anything to do with a "celestial Jesus" or "Jesus the Logos". This is like Carrier's use of Osiris, or his "Dying Messiah" that Thom Stark has blasted Carrier on.

Here is Philo's "On the Confusion of Tongues" 62-63:
http://earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book15.html

(62) I have also heard of one of the companions of Moses having uttered such a speech as this: "Behold, a man whose name is the East!"{18}{#zec 6:12.} A very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul; but if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who in no respect differs from the divine image, you will then agree that the name of the east has been given to him with great felicity. (63) For the Father of the universe has caused him to spring up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn; and he who is thus born, imitating the ways of his father, has formed such and such species, looking to his archetypal patterns.

Here is Philo's "On the Confusion of Tongues" 146:

(146) And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God's image, and he who sees Israel.

Here is Philo's "On Dreams" 1.215:
http://earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book21.html

(1.215) For there are, as it seems, two temples belonging to God; one being this world, in which the high priest is the divine word, his own firstborn son. The other is the rational soul, the priest of which is the real true man, the copy of whom, perceptible to the senses, is he who performs his paternal vows and sacrifices, to whom it is enjoined to put on the aforesaid tunic, the representation of the universal heaven, in order that the world may join with the man in offering sacrifice, and that the man may likewise co-operate with the universe.

No "celestial Jesus", no "Jesus the Logos".

dog-on

Don, did you actually read the Zechariah passage?

gurugeorge

Wiki: "Euhemerus apparently systematized a method of interpreting the popular myths, which was consistent with the attempts of Hellenistic culture to explain traditional religious beliefs in terms of a rational naturalism. "

Euhermerization is a rationalistic method of interpreting a myth.

What's given, what comes first, is a found celestial-type myth, and the Euhemerizer comes along and says "well, this must have been some ordinary dude at time x".

And that's what's being proposed by Carrier as having happened to a pre-existing Angel/High Priest/Son of God celestial being myth.

The idea is: GMark comes along and inteprets that myth in a more or less specific and recent-ish historical context. For him it's probably allegory (and probably proto-gnostic at that), but some people (proto-orthodoxy) start to believe - and sell it, and embellish it - it as having actually happened in that way.

aa5874

So, the evidence shows that there was no such thing as a Cosmic Jesus in the 1st century.

It makes no sense to develop a theory WITHOUT the necessary data.

Philo was supposed to be an ACTUAL contemporary of Jesus if he did exist but NEVER did refer to Jesus of Nazareth or claimed Jesus of Nazareth was the the Logos and son of God.

Philo did imply that he knew of NO-ONE who was wothy to be called the Son of God.

Philo's "On the Confusion of Tongues" 146 Philo's writings are EVIDENCE against a Cosmic and Historical Jesus.

Philo's writings are Compatible with the DATED NT manuscripts.

The Cosmic and historical Jesus are OUTSIDE of Philo.

andrewcriddle

There is a real doubt whether Philo would interpret this as meaning that Joshua is called "the branch". It seems to be talking about a king not a priest. (This is maybe a little clearer in the Septuagint than in the Hebrew.)

Some have regarded Zerubbabel as "the branch" some have interpreted it as referring to the Davidic Messiah.

Andrew Criddle

GakuseiDon

... "in terms of a rational naturalism". I.e no virgin birth, no resurrection from the dead.

Yes, an "ordinary dude". Though Euhemerus treated them as heroes, worthy of veneration, they were simply men. Their deeds, while exaggerated and made into legends, were real and occurred at some actual time and place.

I'm not aware of any of these myths as being "celestial-type". Which celestial-type myths did Euhemerus work with?

If it is allegory, then it isn't Euhemerism. "Euhemerism" would be that Jesus was just a man around whom legends grew.

Here is an allegorical reading of the Attis myth by Sallustius:

Sallustius gives the myth as follows:

... they say that the Mother of the Gods seeing Attis lying by the river Gallus fell in love with him, took him, crowned him with her cap of stars, and thereafter kept him with her. He fell in love with a nymph and left the Mother to live with her. For this the Mother of the Gods made Attis go mad and cut off his genital organs and leave them with the nymph, and then return and dwell with her.

Sallustius then provides the interpretation:

Now the Mother of the Gods is the principle that generates life; that is why she is called Mother. Attis is the creator of all things which are born and die; that is why he is said to have been found by the river Gallus. For Gallus signifies the Galaxy, or Milky Way, the point at which body subject to passion begins. Now as the primary gods make perfect the secondary, the Mother loves Attis and gives him celestial powers. That is what the cap means. Attis loves a nymph: the nymphs preside over generation, since all that is generated is fluid. But since the process of generation must be stopped somewhere, and not allowed to generate something worse than the worst, the creator who makes these things casts away his generative powers into the creation and is joined to the Gods again. Now these things never happened, but always are.

If GMark is allegory, how do you interpret it? What is it allegory for?

GakuseiDon

Yes, I looked at this passage earlier in this thread, around page 2.

Zech 6:12 is spoken by the Lord Almighty to Joshua son of Jozadak. Philo attributes the same phrase to "one of the companions of Moses", whom apparently was referring to Adam/Balaam as the good man/bad man from the East. Moses lived a long time before Joshua son of J, so Philo can't be referring to Joshua son of J in "On Confusion of tongues".

gurugeorge

According to Carrier he doesn't. He translates ἀνατολή (the same word in both the LXX and Philo) as "Rises" in his translation of the Philo passage relevant to the Zechariah passage:-

“Behold, the man named Rises!” is a very novel appellation indeed, if you consider it as spoken of a man who is compounded of body and soul. But if you look upon it as applied to that incorporeal being who in no respect differs from the divine image, you will then agree that the name of ‘Rises’ has been given to him with great felicity. For the Father of the Universe has caused him to rise up as the eldest son, whom, in another passage, he calls the firstborn. And he who is thus born, imitates the ways of his father.

It does seem to be the case that Philo is talking about some extant belief ("that incorporeal being"), or at least an entity his readers would have no trouble parsing - i.e. it seems that the entity he's talking about is at least known aboput by his readership (Alexandrinian Jews? it's basically Philo's Logos isn't it?), and it's a type of being that could be the type of pre-existing celestial being JM-ers are hypothesizing.

The thing that's not so clear is whether this known-to-Philo-and-his-readers celestial being is called Jesus.

The dude Zechariah is talking about is definitely called Jesus. He's a plain dude, a "dude son of dude".

But Philo seems to be interpreting the passage in a mystical way, in terms of which the "dude son of dude" called Jesus falls away as just a surface meaning in some way, and the deeper meaning of the Zechariah passage is about this (known) celestial being.

But the referent does seem to be the same. In other words, another way of putting what Philo is saying is:- "By virtue of the epithet or sub-name given him, the Jesus referred to in Zechariah cannot be a man - plain old "dude son of dude" - but must be that celestial being (of which we know)."

The fact that this passage is in the context of something about naming things correctly, seems to strengthen this.

(Incidentally, I think we can hardly ignore the "solar" idea here either - Anatolia meant "east/place of sunrise", right?)

gurugeorge

Sorry that was a bit confusing: my response was partly to the other person as well (in response to both your puzzlements about how Carrier could use the term "euhemerization" to cover what he means), so more general.

But in response to you directly: if Carrier's idea is that GMark is the first (at least known) euhemerization, then there's no virgin birth there, and no ascent (and perhaps in the original form no resurrection either!) at that point. The GMark Jesus is a miracle-working man who has some sort of connection to divinity, but he does seem to be on the whole rather earthly and semi-historicized, at least.

I think Carrier pictures the GMark Jesus as a sort of intermediate step. The GMark text seems to be a fleshing out of the idea that the advent of Jesus was a secret in some way.

I mean, he's pictured as famous, but he's also pictured as being someone whom not even his closest disciples realize who he really is or what his mission really is. So I think the "allegory" is proto-Gnostic, or something along those lines. IOW, it's partly a teaching tool (distinguishing hylic/pneumatic interpretations), partly a dig at the Jews, and for those purposes it suits the author to euhemerize - i.e. interpret the pre-existing Joshua cult deity, seen previously only in visions and scripture - into some recent-ish time and place.

Then this euhemerizing allegory is taken more and more seriously as representing the whole of the Jesus story by those who become proto-orthodoxy.

At least I think Carrier would mean something like this. We'll have to wait for his book to see. I think I go along with it to some degree. As you probably remember, I've always felt that the concept of euhemerization is extremely important in all this.

I mean, look at how well-nigh impossible it is for rational people nowadays to conceive anything other than a "historical Jesus"! The tendency in those days must have been just as strong for some people - and it seems to me that orthodoxy were, as one might say, the least woo-woo of an extremely woo-woo bunch. Intellectually smarter, more rationalistic, down-to-earth. Willing to believe in divinity, but wanting their divinity to have some concrete manifestation (especially if that conveniently also allowed their bishops to claim some sort of direct lineage! ).

Why virgin birth and crucifixion/resurrection are included in the later-than-GMark texts that have a more thoroughlly historicized aspect? Well, we don't need to claim that all aspects of supernatural have to disappear. The GMark Jesus is supernatural in some respects - the point is, he's historicized and has a strong earthly component, that's the euhemerization aspect - not necessarily as conceived by Euhemerus or other more purely rational thinkers, but just as a trend.

Incidentally, just to add, I think some of the confusion here comes because modern people are so naturally - euhemeristic - in the way they interpret myths that they just naturally think of the heroic dudes or whatever as lying at the beginnings of myths. But Euhemerus was positing, hypothesizing, claiming that the naturalistic interepretation of the myths was the correct one. i.e. the woo-woo comes first, then it's rationalized into something palatable to the down-to-earth mind.

I'm solidly with Jiri on these things (although I don't take as solidly pathological a view of what's going on as he does). Religion starts in weird experiences. We forget this at our peril (if we're trying to figure out what really happened). But religious experience is precisely what the rationalist mind doesn't "get" - hence euhemerization.

GakuseiDon

Gurugeorge, all might be as you say above. My point is how you and others are using "euhemerized", which seems to be more as a buzz word rather than providing information. The Gospels are the mythical accounts; Ehrman's failed apocalyptic prophet is the euhemerized account.