the_cave

I said I understood--I didn't say I agreed! But I think our difference here might just be a matter of degree.

But they trust that their preachers at least understand. If they thought even their preachers couldn't make any sense out of it, I think there might be more trouble.

Yes, but it does have to mean something, however vague.

I'll grant that there are many, many believers who don't take the time to sort these things out. There are also many who at least try. I confess I have no idea what the percentages are.

Sure. (Though I would guess if questions ever arise, they arise outside of church services.)

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

Good summary here!

krosero

This is a reply to both Don and Earl. I'm kindly asking both of them to read through the whole post. (Don, I know you're attending to other things, but don't worry, I have no specific questions for you; I’ve had no trouble understanding your position).

Don, I am finding more and more of Earl's statements to be confusing, and I'm going to ask him for clarification, but it might be worth quoting Piece #5 of the “Puzzle� for which Earl’s book is named:

Matter below, spirit above. Then on p. 120 of The Jesus Puzzle, there is this statement:

A dimension outside matter – this fits in with Piece #5, where the division is between matter below and spirit above. So Christ's appearance (and work) is a spirit-ual thing outside the world of matter. So far this is consistent.

A little later on p. 120, Earl says of Hebrews:

This fits the previous statements. Earl seems to be using the word “heaven� here not in its technical sense of everything above the moon, but in the loose Christian sense of God’s home – the place where Christians hope to be someday. And a sacrifice in that uppermost heaven is certainly not in the world of matter, and can safely be described as being in a spiritual realm.

The problem is that Earl has placed the crucifixion itself in the sublunary air – which is the only place it could be, given that demons were thought to live only in the realm under the moon. And this sublunary air does not seem like it can be described as “outside matter and beyond time,� or as Earl often says, outside the realm of history. I say this because the sublunary air was still in "the realm of change and decay", as TedH says in this quote that Don offered (my emphasis added):

“Change� is what makes history, and “decay� points to mortality, death, flesh – things that are less than perfect, less than the spiritual and perfect things in the heavenly Jerusalem, for instance.

Certainly, a bird is a fleshly being, one that changes and dies. The air that a human being breathes is thought to be right at the level of history and change – though the ancients probably did think of air itself as being something of a “spiritual� substance. Clouds “change� into water and back again into clouds, while clouds change their position and shape constantly (most dramatically, with storms, which were certainly regarded as part of human history) – though again, water could have been regarded as a more subtle substance than human flesh or earthly rock.

Here I’m getting into distinctions I have little familiarity with which to comment upon, so I will only say that it appears to me like the ancients conceived of a kind of continuum between the lowest flesh and the highest heaven – a continuum between the crudest matter and the most perfect spirit, but one in which the chief division was between the eternal, permanent things above the moon and the doomed things below (with the added caveat that certain sublunar beings, saved by God, are not ultimately doomed). Any correction here will be most welcome.

But Earl’s theory remains confusing, because in it, the crucifixion is sometimes described as being in the highest heaven, and sometimes in the lowest air; as one of the spiritual counterparts to the fleshly things of our world, and as one of the low, corruptible things that God’s Son had to take on in order to redeem the lowest flesh; as a thing outside of history and matter, and as a thing that Paul thought to have occurred in the sublunary air at a specific point in time (in the “fullness of time�) and presumably only a few years or decades before his own preaching and that of the Jerusalem apostles.

Earl has clearly described the Ascension as placing the crucifixion in the sublunary air (that is, in the firmament, below the first heaven). That seems to be clear enough. But he has Paul placing the death of Christ entirely outside the world of time, history, and matter ("a dimension outside matter and beyond time"). That just contradicts the ideas -- all of them Earl’s own contentions -- that Christ came into the realm of change and decay; descended in some literal sense away from God’s throne and into what Earl has called "the human realm of flesh"; suffered and died in the airy part of this imperfect realm (since pain and death cannot exist in the realms of perfection above the moon, even if trees and streets can); made a single sacrifice within time (within history), for all time; etc.

So Earl, where was the crucifixion? Did different writers place it in different places? And there’s one very specific thing I need clarification on, concerning Hebrews. Did that author conceive of an offering separate from the actual death of Christ (akin to orthodox Christianity’s own distinction between the offering of the Eucharist and the actual death it commemorates), and did he conceive of the actual death taking place below the moon or above it?

I don’t want to misunderstand what you’re proposing. Thanks in advance for your answers.

Vorkosigan

I think Earl has made a tactical error here. This perception is correct: Paul's view of where Jesus died was incoherent, like all theist thinking. The truth must defended with a bodyguard of lies, but nonsense is defended by incoherence. Paul obviously envisaged Jesus' death taking place in THAT OTHER PLACE. The whole problem arises when you attempt to give that place a name, because it is impossible to determine what the heck theists are thinking when they trying to ascribe location to the events of their religion (EX: Ask 8 Christians "where is heaven located?" and you'll get 8 different answers. Ditto for hell). Religious belief is to a great extent idiosyncratic. Trying to get a handle on how Paul thought about the behavior of the archons in the place where they killed Jesus is basically hopeless. Probably he himself did not know, and extemporized when he preached.

It's best to simply go with the evidence that Paul gives us: the archons executed Jesus in some place where they had the power to do so. It is certainly interesting to look at Hellenistic philosophy and speculate about what Paul was seeing in his visions, but nothing concrete will emerge.

Vorkosigan

krosero

Vork, I'm not sure that Don is in this thread anymore, given what he said above, but let me point out that Don has already clarified with Earl what he means when he says that Earl's theory is incoherent in terms of Middle Platonism. He has said that he's looking at what ancient people thought and comparing this against what Earl says that the ancients thought. That's the incoherence he means -- so your reply here that Paul's thinking was indeed incoherent, to modern thinking, misses the point, just as Earl's defenses in the same vein as yours have missed the point. Earl has said a few times that Don is asking about the scientific coherence of ancient beliefs, when all Don is asking is whether people thought what Earl says they thought. Earl says they thought of Christ's death as being in the sublunar realm. Earl says that they believed certain things about the sublunar realm, including the possibility that crucifixion could occur in it. Don says that the beliefs about the sublunar realm were not so. That is where the debate stands, as far as I can understand it -- and my apologies to either Earl or Don if I have misunderstood it.

In another post you state that historicists basically make a non-argument when they say about the Gospel stories that Paul's audience already knew them. "They already knew," is your shorthand for the argument. I personally don't think that "they already knew" is an argument; it's merely a possibility (and one that should be taken seriously, IMO). I do think that "they already knew" is a way to stop inquiry and arguments rather than promoting them. But I feel the same way about "they didn't make sense," which is my shorthand for the defense I keep hearing whenever the beliefs about the sublunar realm are discussed. And to be honest, I regard it as much the worse of the conversation-stoppers, because at least "they already knew" is still on the topic of what the ancients knew and believed -- but "they didn't make sense" is just a first-person statement about whether ancient beliefs make sense to us. It takes us away from the ancient beliefs in a very unfortunate way.

Earl has given it a name: the sublunar realm. The debate then becomes a matter of what the ancients believed about that realm.

I can't stress enough how much this sounds to non-atheists like a personal statement rather than an argument. You said that "they already knew" is a statement of faith rather than an argument. But "they didn't make sense" just sounds to me like an atheist statement of belief about the nature of theism: "it doesn't make sense."

That's a modern parallel. Today, belief in heaven has to adapt to the scientific fact that the place that the ancients called heaven doesn't exist in the sky. That scientific fact was not known to the ancients, who, from what I understand in these debates, all pointed skyward when referring to deities and the homes or thrones of the deities.

That's a real argument, in the sense that it is a falsifiable statement. The debate has centered on where archons lived: there seems to be a consensus here that the archons were regarded as restricted to the sublunar realm, including Sheol and the earth. Beyond that, as you know, we haven't had any consensus.

I have read your work, and I find it far from anti-intellectual, but I regard some of what you say here as anti-intellectual in the sense of discouraging dialogue effectively (which I don't believe is your intention).

And on that point, if there's one thing we should be discussing about the sublunar realm theory, it is the sublunar realm. What makes the sublunar crucifixion theory is, after all, the sublunar crucifixion. That's what makes Earl's theory distinctive. He has graciously allowed in his OP that he did not necessarily invent it, and I'm not talking about who invented it: I'm saying that to discuss Earl's sublunar realm theory, you have to discuss ancient beliefs about the sublunar realm. Test it against what we know about those beliefs, and debate what those beliefs were.

Vorkosigan

Thanks, Krosero. I think the issues are very simple, and Don's attempt to "clarify" them is actually an attempt to make the mythicist case disappear by defining it out of existence, a clever bit of rhetoric.

]The issue is quite simple: Clearly the ancients believe that there existed a place where the archons could take action on their own behalf, for in many schemes they were held to have screwed up Wisdom's attempt to create the world, and similar. Clearly the ancients were hazy on where that place was. They may have thought of heaven as a place you had to ascend to, but they are no clearer than moderns on where it might be or how to get there.

Proving "what the ancients" thought is actually irrelevant as we do not know what Paul thought, which is the point at issue. For example, if anyone looked at the surviving records of the Heaven's Gate cult 2,000 years hence, and compared them to the society at large, they would find no indication anywhere that anyone ever thought you could get to heaven by committing suicide and then riding up to a UFO behind an asteroid. They may find a UFO cult here or there, or the alien cults like Scientology. But exact parallels to heaven's gate will elude them. Anyone would be justified in arguing that the cult did not believe what they very plainly believed, on that basis. What Don is doing is attempting to construct an account of the ancient world's beliefs and then claim that ED's reading of Paul's beliefs won't cohere. That's right, perhaps it doesn't -- and that doesn't mean a damn thing. As ED has pointed out repeatedly, Paul himself is pretty clear on what happened to Jesus -- somewhere in THAT OTHER PLACE where the archons held sway, Jesus was executed, leaving his enemies trailing behind him, etc.

This brings me to the really annoying part of this type of attack, which is to demand of Earl a coherent account of theism, which is by its very nature incoherent. It's using the silliness of theistic belief as a weapon against Earl, and then demanding that he give up his position because it does not cohere with what we know of Middle Platonism (even though no apologist that I know has ever given up religion because it didn't cohere with reality. Coherence as an intellectual demand only runs in one direction here). ED's reading of Middle Platonism may be completely wrong. But his reading of Paul is correct.

Vorkosigan

TedM

I would rephrase that to "Paul himself is clear on what happened to Jesus but not where or when--somewhere, sometime, Jesus was executed by archons who didn't know who he was, and it represented a victory over the angels of darkness, where one man abounded for many" Whether that place was "THAT OTHER PLACE" or not or in some TIME unknown to Paul is IMO not at all clear. Whether that man was not really a man is never stated either. The implication both from the scriptures he uses and the way he references Jesus is that it happened on earth, but the fact that he uses scripture to present such a picture may indicate that it only happened in Paul's (and other Christian's) minds in SOME place at SOME time after the law of Moses and during the "present age".

It seems to me that all that is being asked is clarification as to the when and where Earl thinks early Christians were saying Jesus was crucified. If the evidence isn't clear, maybe the best answer should be changed to "the when and where simply isn't clear, and it could have even been thought to have happened on earth"? Thinking it happened on earth doesn't make it so. I"m really not sure why "earth" isn't included in one of the possibilities for where the alleged mythical Jesus resided since it seems the evidence is strong for earth and weak for the various alternatives...

ted

krosero

This is a very interesting parallel. I have a few points of disagreement. You refer to what the cult "very plainly believed," and indeed their prophecy was very clear about the asteroid and the foretold events; but I just don't think we have a very plain indication from Paul of an unearthly crucifixion, or anything like it; we have very plain indications, IMO, that Paul likes to speak in his mystical fashion of earth and spirit (of many spheres); and pretty plain indications, IMO, of an earthly Jesus. It's just where we disagree.

Also, the Heaven's Gate cult did not have any beliefs counter to general beliefs in our society. Our society believes in both UFO's and asteroids, and locates them both in the sky; knowing that, a future historian would have no problem judging the Heaven's Gate prophecy as a unique mixture of common beliefs. It was a unique prophecy -- in detail but not in kind. There are even, I believe, other instances of people believing that UFO's will bring about salvation (or destruction) of some kind.

Earl sometimes speaks of descents by deities to unearthly regions as if the record were replete with such beliefs, like UFO's today -- but I have never seen anything like today's plentiful and outright statements of UFO belief. I've seen a lot of inference, and no clear instance of any birth, supper, death, or burial in the firmament.

Today it's a universal belief that above the atmosphere, there is outer space, and there are asteroids. The beliefs of Heaven's Gate just don't break the mold: the beliefs speak of things widely attested in the modern record. Paul's supposed belief that the crucifixion took place in a "dimension outside of matter and time", but in the sublunar realm, runs against the universal belief that the sublunar realm was the realm of change, decay, matter and time, quite distinct and separate from the invisible and barred world above the dome which was in fact a dimension of timelessness and spirit -- from what I can glean in the evidence presented here.

I am interested in what Earl's reply would be, since he has based his reading of Paul upon his reading of Middle Platonism. And Don has said more than once that Earl can base his argument on things other than Middle Platonism, but that if the argument is based on Middle Platonism, then a comparison of Earl's contentions against what we know of Middle Platonism is in order, and perfectly legitimate.

"Paul's beliefs were unique" will be my shorthand for this argument you've presented. It is valid up to a point, in that everything under the sun and the moon is unique. But people before Copernicus did not believe in a heliocentric model (unless perhaps a few ancient scientists did so), and I suggest that a parallel exists: no one can be expected in the ancient world to believe that the world underneath the moon was a dimension (or even contained a dimension) separate from matter, change, time, and decay.

Vorkosigan

No, the one thing isn't. I think ED and DG have both misunderstood the problem, and are now debating a giant red herring. ED's error I think can be traced back to his emergence out of the old comparative religions school, which emphasized Jesus as a Hellenistic religious figure. But that is wrong; Jesus is a syncretic cult figure, like the White Buffalo of the Paiute messiah, Wovoka. You won't find a white buffalo in contemporary Christian belief, and you won't find a savior cult in the Amerind religions of the plains. Instead Wovoka turned out something completely new by combining elements of the two belief worlds to produce the savior cult of the plains indians. Similarly, in the 1850s Zulu followers of the prophet Umhlakaza and his daughter/niece Nongqauze, slaughtered all their cattle and emptied their grain-bins, because they believed that if they did so, the old chiefs would return and they would be rich and powerful. Who, looking at the Zulu reverence for cattle, would ever imagine that they would slaughter their herds? Syncretic savior cults are a dime a dozen, and they often appear inexplicable against their contemporary belief backgrounds.

Mythicism cannot be refuted by defining Middle Platonism so that it makes Paul's beliefs impossible, nor can it be refuted by referring to Judaism. Jesus is a figure created out of several streams of religious belief, taking elements from them all.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Oh, I don't think it is plain either. And I'll give DonG this: he's the first person to comment meaningfully on mythicism here who understands that it is a different interpretive framework and that the framework itself has to come under attack, and not merely assert that historicism is right and mythicists are nuts.

Sure. But which of our social beliefs posits that you had to commit suicide to get to heaven? I submit that none do.

I can offhand recall many myths in which divine beings descend into the underworld, in symbol and in narrative. In Greek myth alone you have Persephone, Orpheus, and many others.

Right. But suicide? Riding a UFO to heaven? The HG cult did what such cults usually do -- they rearranged the beliefs of their own time and place and tossed in some unique ideas of their own.

Big deal. All the elements of Paul's beliefs are found elsewhere -- heaven, demons, archons, savior figures, ascent-descent motifs, resurrection. There's nothing really new there, if you look at both Hellenism AND Judaism (to focus on Middle Platonism is to downplay the Jewish origins, I think).

ED's insight into what Paul is thinking will remain, even if his reading of Middle Platonism is destroyed.

A perfect paralle for Christianity indeed! Copernicus is a good example of syncretism in action -- people before him certainly did teach a heliocentric model, though the majority of Europeans did not. The syncretic origin? Copernicus was not only aware of ancient Greek efforts in that regard, but had on his shelf an Arabic text that taught it. He retained the perfect circles of his predecessors (it would take Kepler to realize those were wrong). In other words, his system was a mish-mash, just like Christianity, but of Arab and European and Greek elements.

Just as Paul's was a mishmash of Hellenistic mystery religions, Judaism, and probably other stuff as well.

Vorkosigan