GakuseiDon

I'm not sure what you mean by "visionary allegories". Can you explain?

Toto wrote that "Perhaps he [Justin] knows that those gospels are just allegorical, with no basis in eyewitness testimony?" But it is clear from Justin's use of "memoirs of the apostles and those who followed them" that he is believes he is referring to eye-witness accounts. However, he never uses those eye-witness accounts as the reason for conversion. As Steven Carr suggested, this is strange. My point is it is part of a pattern that needs to be considered when deciding on what [i]we[/] would expect when evaluating early Christian literature. That pattern includes: it wasn't eye-witness accounts of Jesus' miracles or Jesus' wise-sayings that convinced people to convert, it was the ancient prophecies that Jesus fulfilled that convinced.

Justin is defending his faith against inventing a Christ, but not against inventing a Jesus. As his Trypho character says, "But Christ —if He has indeed been born, and exists anywhere—is unknown, and does not even know Himself, and has no power until Elias come to anoint Him, and make Him manifest to all." In other words, even if the Messiah had been born, he couldn't be known as "Christ" until he is anointed by Elias.

Trypho goes on and says:

And Trypho said, "Those who affirm him to have been a man, and to have been anointed by election, and then to have become Christ, appear to me to speak more plausibly than you who hold those opinions which you express. For we all expect that Christ will be a man [born] of men, and that Elijah when he comes will anoint him. But if this man appear to be Christ, he must certainly be known as man [born] of men; but from the circumstance that Elijah has not yet come, I infer that this man is not He [the Christ]."

Not surprisingly, Justin responds that "the Spirit of God who was in Elijah preceded as herald in [the person of] John, a prophet among your nation".

Justin details the arguments over interpretations of Hebrew Scriptures. I think nowadays many think the selling point of early Christianity was that of a Jesus Christ, who was some outstanding guy who, through miracles and wisdom, started a new religion. But for the first few hundred years, that wasn't the selling point of Christianity. It was "prophecy fulfilled".

Imagine the Jesus in the short clip below appearing back then, or appearing now, for that matter. Would Christians see him as Jesus Christ, based on these miracles?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkIS3...feature=relmfu

That's right. But why was that person believed to be the Christ, according to Justin? Was it because the words were so wise, or because of miracles? Or because he fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures?

aa5874

Your post is just nonsense.

If Jesus did exist he could have only been an ordinary man.

Please state a single prophecy that the supposed Jesus as an ordinary man fulfilled up to the day he allegedly died?

1. Jesus taught his disciples he would be raised from the dead on the third day.

Did that happen?

How could an ordinary man be raised from the dead on the third day?

An ordinary man would be a false prophet within 72 hours of his death.

Now, look at 1 Cor 15.17 supposedly written after Jesus was dead.

1 Cor 15 Jesus as an ordinary man did NOT resurrect on the third day.

If Jesus was just an ordinary man then he was a false prophet and could not have fulfilled any prophecy when the so-called prophecies were NOT really prophecies in the first place.

Virtually all the so-called prophecies about Jesus in the NT were taken out of context.

Now, Trypho the Jew will tell Justin Martyr that his Jesus is foolishness. Jesus cannot be both Myth and Man.

Jesus was a foolish paradox that fulfilled NOTHING but Myth.

The Gospels are merely four samples of myth fables that were believed in antiquity by various Christians cults. The Gospels are NOT history of an ordinary man who fulfilled prophecies.

Solo

What do I mean by "visionary allegories" ? When Matthew writes in 5:1: Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him he does not take down a report reads it from Q, he composes it. He composes a sermon on a Judaic holy mount which was taboo to anyone but prophets until - the end times. Matthew is in a trance-like state; he envisions the grandiose sermon and puts it down on paper. He does not hallucinate Jesus on the mountain. He receives the inner sight of him - hard to explain but I can show it on an example of Teresa of Avila who describes it rather well: she was asked by her confessor to explain her visions. She said she sees nothing during her mystical union with Christ. 'Since you see nothing', asked her confessor incredulously, 'how do you know it is our Lord' ? She replied that she saw no face, that she knew it was Our Lord and it was not an illusion....'one sees nothing, within or without...but while seeing nothing the soul understands what it is and where it is more clearly than if you saw him....The soul hears no word, either within or without, but understands quite clearly who it is and where he is and sometimes even what he means to tell. How and by what means [the soul] understands, it does not know, but so it is; and while this is happening it cannot fail to know it'.
Matthew I believe was similarly transfixed, when he was creating the sermon on the allegorical Mount.

The conversion issue is rather difficult subject. I believe the first groups proto-Christian groups were small, built around ecstatics. They would have had their support net around and people who were hangers-on, groupies and people who wanted to be on the mysteries. Things changed once the groups started to consolidate around new scriptures - which would become something of a standard, interpreted by intellectuals who if they were not in physical contact with the groups had no clue what half of this stuff was about. Take Eusebius take on Montanus in the Chronicles. He considers tongue speaking and the elation in his congregation the sign of the devil even though the scene around the heretic and his prophetesses basically describes the Pentecost. The church was radically changed after the first few decades. Justin is an intellectual, an apologist. He himself does not possess the spirit nor understands it. He relies on the verities in the apostolic memoirs but has no way to verify them. He believes the oracular sources are the fulfilment of the Hebrew scriptures.

Well, that's fine. I don't see the issue here was the existence of a Jesus character. It was more of whether he had the Right Stuff for the claim of Messiah to pan out.

More or less; the ironic thing about the way Justin argues is that he uses Paul's reading Christ into the tanakh, without giving hm any credit.


That would be the most widespread and popular grasp of the Christ wish-fulfilment utility. What can I get out of him ? There is a difference between how this would have been played out in 2nd century Rome compared to 15th century Rome, but then again that difference would not be far off from being a Marxist in Leipzig in 1870's and being a Marxist in Leipzig in 1960's.


Loaded question !

Best,
Jiri

Toto

But what prophecy was fulfilled and how would you know?

Most scholars seem to assume that the gospels contain "prophecy historicized" not prophecy fulfilled. They assume that there was a charismatic, memorable historical Jesus, but his memory was filled in with details from the Hebrew Scriptures.

You are saying that there was no charismatic historical man. What is left? What did the historical Jesus do to fulfill prophecy?

Vorkosigan

Interesting, in light of the baptism in Mark....

Steven Carr

Allegedly, 'Mark' was 'embarrassed' by this baptism, and yet we find Christians being taunted with allegations that their Messiah had not been anointed.

How can somebody be embarrassed by enemies because something happening and also being taunted by the same people with claims of it not happening?

So much for the criterion of embarrassment.

Vorkosigan

Indeed, Justin was so embarrassed that he affirms it happened, indignantly.

ALthough in all seriousness, Trypho's position is very close to the adoptionism of the writer of Mark, as is Justin's.

GakuseiDon

The more relevant question is what prophecy and how did Justin know? My point is that Justin isn't saying that Jesus is the Christ because he convinced people that he performed miracles and gave wise sayings, but because he fulfilled prophecy.

GakuseiDon

I think I see what you mean. By "allegories", I thought you had in mind allegories like those used by Plutarch and other Middle Platonists, i.e. myths were descriptions of timeless forces.

That's right. I speculate that the worldview of pagans and others changed in the First Century CE when Platonism and Neo-Pythagorean concepts became popular and the old ancestor worship and interest in the state religion started waning. Paul probably straddled the two periods. Paul seems to have been a travelling preacher, performing miracles and healings as he went as signs that the Spirit of God had been entrusted to him. But the main convincing element, then as in the time of Justin, was "prophecy fulfilled" IMO.

Haha! Well, maybe. Still, there was an overriding interest in the Hebrew Scriptures as validating Christianity and Jesus as Christ rather than the life of Jesus himself, at least until we come to Marcion. But Marcion rejected the Old Testament.

aa5874

Please state the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled.

Did Jesus fulfill the very first so-called prophecy of Isaiah 7.14 when it is written that he was born of a virgin and the Holy Ghost?

The answer is NO.

Jesus originated from a FALSE prophecy or a Non-prophecy. This is extremely significant.

Jesus, as an ordinary man, renders the so-called prophecies about him as pure fiction or fabrications.

Listen to Justin and Trypho in "Dialogue with Trypho" LXVI-LXVII It is clear that the very ORIGIN of Jesus was NOT fulfilled prophecy but a MIS-INTERPRETATION of Scripture yet remarkably Jesus fulfilled the MIS-INTERPRETATION.

Jesus fulfilled mis-interpreted scripture throughout all the Gospel stories.

Jesus is a Nothing but MIS-INTERPRETATION.