TedM

The problem is that MF never renders a judgement as to whether the man in question really was a criminal, really was ever crucified, or really ever even existed. Had he believed ANY of those were NOT true we might expect him to have said so. In his silence we can't conclude anything. As far as the specific question--Did MF believe a HJ had lived, the fact that he didn't object to the man as having existed could argue that he did believe he had lived on earth. However, his silence about whether he was really a criminal could argue that he believed he had indeed been a criminal.

The link he makes later between the cross with a good man is very odd indeed if he personally thought the man had existed but had deserved death as a criminal.

In addition, in my rebuttal to Earl's NUMBER 1 yesterday, I concluded that a MF rejection of orthodox Christian views (such as would be the case if he believed he had lived but has been a criminal) is in NO way supported by the "product" of Felix theory in his pagan description, and if the theory (of an opposing Christian group) IS still correct that poses problems of inconsistency between types of arguments--which hurts the strength of his NUMBER 2 argument of parallelism.

HIS ACTUAL REPPONSE:
His response to the pagan instead focused on Christian beliefs, and implies that NO a criminal isn't worshiped and NO a mortal man isn't worshiped either. NEITHER of those conflict with orthodox Christianity.


All that being said, the silences about that man in particular, as well as his statement elsewhere that gods aren't born and don't die like humans do persuade me to question if he really did have orthodox views, as he sounds almost agnostic about the man and is silent about the resurrected Christ. At the same time, however, I think it is very easy to overstate the significance of silences.

ted

andrewcriddle

The problem is that, as Doherty IIUC agrees, there is very little trace of a Logos doctrine in the Octavius Or of similar ideas of divine intermediates between God himself and humanity.

There is IMO less reason to attribute some form of Logos Christianity to Minucius Felix than to hold that he venerated a crucified God.

Andrew Criddle

krosero

Yes, I was trying to make a simple argument about what people hear when articles such as "a" or "the" are used; as I said, Doherty used an argument about articles to insist on his meaning. But I'm surprised that you focused so hard on this, Ted. In my last response I was trying to clarify what I was doing and making a stab at an argument via linguistics. I have always said that only a better knowledge of Latin could help us move from our impressions of the English translations to something more authoritative, but you seem to feel I was asking for people to step in to confirm my arguments. Of course not. Where it comes to Latin, if I'm corrected, I will be corrected. No one has yet stepped in, unfortunately, because I would like to know how Felix would say "this man."

You ask me to be decent and drop the Latin, but I already have, Ted: I said in my last response, let's go with the English translations. I also said that we were not going to get far with such little distinctions even in the English, because both sides seemed to have similar arguments. So I already dropped it. As far as I'm concerned, Felix might be talking about a set, and still indict the single man in question as not worth worshipping. He also might be talking about just that man, and acquit him of being a guilty criminal and a mortal not worthy of worship. The argument about articles just doesn't tell us much.

So this whole line of argument will become confusing, frustrating and tedious, and I will drop the whole thing. And I won't return to it unless I can find a way to make my linguistic arguments better understood (and unless linguistic arguments provide us with much). There are far more productive issues right now.

krosero

It's true that Felix starts by talking about "a criminal and his cross." The reason the cross is in there is to identify the story quickly and in its major elements: so he doesn't just say, "Now about that story of the criminal..." That might be vague, so he lists the whole story: the criminal and his cross. But when he proceeds to list which elements are objectionable, or far from the neighborhood of truth, he returns to the criminal element, and the "mortal man" element implicit in the former. He does not return to the cross element. Not here, anyway. He returns to it after he's finished a whole discussion of the character and nature of, first, the criminal, then "mortal man" generally, and finally the Egyptians pharaohs. That discussion reaches its end when he starts talking about crosses and idolatry. "Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for" (but the pagans, he notes, might worship some wooden idols "as parts of your gods").

It's been said many times that we shouldn't read the comment about the good man as referring back to the crucified man, and that we shouldn't take Felix's sometimes poetic comments on the sign of the cross in nature to reflect back on the smoking gun passage, as if to say: See, we do have a cross in our worship. I certainly agree about the first, and may agree with the second. Doherty's reading, that Felix is just saying how common the sign of the cross is, therefore we wouldn't worship it, sounds pretty reasonable to me. Like Doherty, though, I see Felix as being unclear here, and I'm not sure.

In the same manner, I don't see it as legitimate to take Felix's blanket rejection of cross-worship and read it back into the smoking gun statements, as if to say: See, we don't worship a crucified victim. All that can be said is that Felix doesn't worship the cross -- and the talk of idolatry really specifies that he's talking about the pagan charge that Christians worship wooden shapes in the way pagans might.

As for Felix not wishing for crosses at all, I remember a documentary, "From Jesus to Christ," where it was argued, that the representation of the physical cross became the popular Christian symbol upon the abolition of crucifixion and the acceptance of Christianity, and had previously been seen as representing Roman power (and deadly torture). Of course, Paul talks about Christ being represented as crucified before the eyes of the Corinthians. I'm not sure, however, what can be concluded, if some pre-Constantine Christians (who may not have suffered persecution, in the Corinthian case) had a cross or crosses before their eyes when they worshipped. All it might mean is that Felix is the type of historicist Christian who felt his religion should rise above the need to have visible symbols. Certainly any Christian today would say that we don't worship crosses; and in Protestant more than in Catholic circles, it's common to say that crucifixes or crosses are not wanted, either; this sort of objection has been with Christianity from the beginning, because of its Jewish roots. At any rate, Felix does not deny Caecilius' charge that Christians have no visible objects of worship. And all Felix is saying is that Christians don't worship crosses, and don't desire them. It doesn't mean he rejects the worship of Christ crucified.

I'm not sure what you mean. When Felix says that worshipping a wicked man is far from his beliefs, that makes perfect sense in any Christian sect that we know -- except in Doherty's postulated case of a group of Christians who rejected Christ as a wicked mortal. Worshipping a wicked man is VERY FAR from orthodoxy.

This is not my position. I don't recall every saying that a basis of fact behind the calumny is in the text. I said in my response to Doherty's challenge what I thought was in the text: a rejection of worshipping mortals, and particularly wicked ones; we may also add here the rejection of worshipping crosses. IMHO, anyone on either side of the debate saying that more is explicitly there, has not recognized that they're inferring the meaning, or reading an implied meaning. Other than the explicit things I mentioned, that's what both sides are left to work with: infererred and implied meanings. Felix is vague, and explicit about very little; for that reason, we can have such basic questions about him.

I think it may be 50/50 whether the smoking gun passage ("For in that ... could be believed God") means a Christian who accepts Christ or one who rejects Christ. That's taking the passage by itself.

But we couldn't leave it there, because there are other things to consider. Doherty wants to use the passage to create a new category of Christian, who rejected Christ-worship. When the passage is used to describe Felix as someone who accepted Christ, I see no real problems, other than the secondary questions of where exactly Felix fit into historicist Christianity. I've already gone into the problems I see with a new category -- and more importantly, it's a category that changes Felix's religion, on an important matter, without an explicit reason.

I find it frustrating that Doherty's side of the debate can admit that the passage is perfectly acceptable to the later orthodox Church, and still call it a smoking gun for a theology that rejected Christ-worship. It's an ambiguous statement, however you look at it. Do you not agree?

It is your assumption that he saw crucified victims as wicked. I think this has been dealt with before, but all I'll say is that in any society of millions, some people will find any given execution, or executions, to be unjust, and some will find the opposite. Why is it stated with such confidence that Felix thought the crucified victim deserved what he got? He even speaks a little bit about torturing Christians in his pagan days, and says that he never sought (or got) confessions of real crimes from them, other than the crime of being Christian. The present Felix believes that there is something about Roman justice which does not match the offense.

I've been under the impression that the argument was that Felix held the criminal worshippers to be somewhere between wrong and wicked, and held the same about their practice. It's been my impression that Felix is being made out to criticize orthodox Christians implicitly when he rejects their worship as part of his own faith. If you have a way in which Felix can be reconciled to orthodox Christianity, great. But aren't you saying, too, that Felix believed the man and the worshippers to be wrong? Felix can be reconciled to orthodox Christianity if he drops those sentiments. But then he becomes an orthodox Christian.

What you mean is "no significant distinction," and that is an opinion. By the way, the calumny about the criminal and his cross is not just as much a mistake as the others, according to Doherty's theory. The calumny is correct, for Felix, at least on the charge that the worshippers are wrong, and possibly on the charge that the man at the center of the worship was wicked. I think TedM has been pointing out that Doherty's "pattern principle" (what I call the use of the criterion of coherence) fails for this reason: one of the calumnies is not false, per Doherty's model. If a repeating pattern is what we want, we break it when we say that one of the calumnies was largely vindicated while the others were completely refuted.

If he rejects that depiction, and it covers all crucifixions, then he has rejected for himself the worship of Christ. He rejects Christ. He regards the worship of him as wrong. That is Doherty's argument, from everything I have read of these debates.

Amaleq13

On the contrary, Felix's response clearly implies an assumption that the man described by his opponents was mortal, crucified, and guilty. In fact, his entire argument against them assumes that what they are saying is true of the individual described and then proceeds to deny any connection to his beliefs.

He asserts that NEITHER of them are true of his beliefs though. His beliefs involve neither a crucified criminal nor a mortal man. Crucifixion is not separated out as something true of his beliefs but misunderstood by opponents and that seems to me problematic for any argument that he held "orthodox" beliefs.

The man described is clearly rejected as not being part of Felix's beliefs so why would he bother to consider whether he actually existed? The question is irrelevant to Felix's purpose.

andrewcriddle

It seems to me entirely possible that Minucius Felix did not regard the death of Christ on the cross as a salvific sacrifice.

Eg he may have regarded it merely as an example of martyrdom which Christ's followers are called upon to emulate if necessary.

This is a separate question from whether or not he believed that Christ died on a cross.

Andrew Criddle

TedM

It implies that OPPONENTS believe those things. Pagan opponents. It doesn't imply that HE agrees because all he does is deny that Christians worship a criminal and a man.


He denies that Christians WORSHIP a criminal and a man. IF Felix didn't even believe such a being existed I would expect him to indicate such because if such a man never existed, saying so would cover both points automatically--ie, clearly a Christian can't worship a criminal OR a man if such a man never even existed.. He wouldn't need to explain that a man isn't a god or that a criminal wouldn't deserve worship.

ted

Amaleq13

You keep separating the fact the man is a criminal from the fact the man is crucified but they are clearly interconnected facts. The man is assumed to be a criminal and assumed to be wicked because he was crucified. That is clear from Felix's response. Every time you write "criminal", it should read "crucified criminal" because that is the accusation. There is a secondary accusation that the cross, itself, is also worshipped but this does not change the fact that we should be consistently talking about Felix's response to the accusation of worshipping a crucified criminal rather than just worshipping a criminal.

It wouldn't just be a "cross element" but a crucifixion element and that, IMO, is problematic for any argument that Felix worshipped an innocent crucifixion victim. From an orthodox viewpoint, what is wrong with the accusation is a) Christ was innocent and b) Christ was not a mere mortal. From that same standpoint, Felix completely fails to address the former and appears to partially address the latter. From Doherty's standpoint (IIUC), Felix has no need to address the guilt of the crucified man and has no need to explain the distinction of a semi-mortal entity because he does not worship an innocent, crucified godman.

It seems to me that Felix is offering alternate explanations for the inclusion of the cross symbol in his belief system. That these are offered as an apparent alternate to crucifixion as the source seems to me problematic for understanding him as having orthodox views.

I agree. Felix simply denies worshipping a crucified criminal. That he offers no disclaimer that an innocent crucifixion victim might be worthy is, again, problematic for any argument of orthodox beliefs since that distinction is crucial to those beliefs and the nature of the error in the accusation.

I think his other references to sources for cross symbology argues against this.

Felix says that worshipping a crucified criminal is far from his beliefs but that is not far from orthodox beliefs as I've already argued. It is a misunderstanding of actual beliefs rather than a totally false claim.

Worshipping crucified criminals in particular, criminals in general, mortals in general, and crosses in general are denied by Felix. What is missing, though seemingly necessary for a defense of orthodox beliefs, is an assertion of innocence despite crucifixion and an assertion of divinity despite the appearance of mortality. The worship of crucified criminals or mortals is rejected without apology even though both represent, from an orthodox position, misunderstandings of actual beliefs. Felix treats them all as though they are far from the truth.

I'm not sure I buy that but I'll have to reread his argument.

I certainly agree that Felix could have been much more clear in describing his actual beliefs but what he does say, IMO, fails to reflect a position of orthodoxy. The claim of worshipping a crucified criminal is not far from the truth. It is a misunderstanding of actual beliefs. An orthodox Christian would consider Felix's response as including nothing heretical but it certainly wouldn't be considered adequate. The fact that Christians ever since have been reading an orthodox assertion into Felix is sufficient to establish that as a fact.

It is my assumption, based on what Felix says, that he considered the crucified criminal described by his opponents as wicked. I withdrew a blanket assumption about all crucifixion victims at the end of my post.

I'm not sure I buy into actual "criminal worshippers" being involved. Felix is asserting that the depiction is far from the truth of his own beliefs.

That Felix offers an argument that, with certain specific additions, could be used by orthodox Christianity does not make him orthodox.

Amaleq13

I suggest you read Felix again. He is clearly basing his response on the assumption of the crucified man's guilt. He doesn't just imply the man's guilt, he uses the assumption of his guilt as the basis of his argument.

Felix does assert that no crucified criminal exists in his religion.

I think you are, despite repeated attempts to disabuse you of the notion, continuing to think of mythicists as actively denying the existence of a historical figure. You cannot equate the absence with such a figure with an assertion that such a figure never existed. I am now officially giving up on trying to explain it to you.

Amaleq13

I agree this is "possible" but wouldn't we still have to assume Felix considered Christ to have been innocent?