aa5874

Once HJ scholarsip is known to be a sham why do some still say "HJ scholarship agree" as if their agreement is not the result of a sham or poor methodology?

mountainman

Hi aa5874,

In a very real historical sense much about the perpetuation
of "HJ Scholarship" involves an unspoken "Christian" hegemony.

Again I can only cite Momigliano ....

"Principles of Historical research need not be different
from criteria of common sense. And common sense teaches
us that outsiders must not tell insiders what they should
do. I shall therefore not discuss directly what biblical
scholars are doing. They are the insiders.

Russellonius

A literary approach would suggest looking for internal evidence for who, when and why. A useful thing to know would be, who funded the texts?

Please google and view this Titian: Pesaro Madonna.

Who funded this document? We don't need no stinkin' external evidence to be certain it was somebody in the Pesaro family who paid the artist because we know that producers of media control its content. That's always true, within limits. Newspaper editors, political functionaries and college professors get fired over ideological clashes with their employers, but then the cat is already out of the bag.

The Titian painting would be closer to the high end of the scale of 'producer control' than the case of the daily press or an instructor talking to students in a classroom. Jacobi Pesaro paid Titian to paint it. The document in question, the NT, would be further along the scale toward 'highly controlled by its producers' also. We would expect the providers of capital involved in the creation of the NT to have a pretty tight leash on its content. Those texts were produced by commissioning scribes.

Paul provided his own funding. So who provided funding for the gospel stories and Acts? We find in the text that Mary Magdalene, Joanna wife of Chuza, chief steward of Herod Antipas, and Susanna provided funding to Jesus' covenant renewal movement 'out of their means'. Not much other funding besides a widow's mite. Seems that Jesus' followers who were not of the Herodian social class were poor.

The story is that these women detached themselves socially from the circle of Herodias and her daughter, whose reputations were besmirched by the very same covenant renewal movement, to travel with Jesus and help oppose the rich who were exploiting the weak and generally failing to keep the covenant. Imagine their surprise when Jesus taught everyone to drink his blood in violation of the covenant. It seems violating the covenant wasn't so bad after all. Herodias and her daughter could say then to Mary Mag and those guys, 'I told you so'.

It was Mary Magdalene also who discovered the empty tomb and that Jesus was risen. Reports are that the disciples of Jesus, those incompetent bunglers, did not believe the reports of women from within the social circle of Herod Antipas that Jesus was risen (and that as a consequence it was no longer necessary to obey the Law, which they continued to disbelieve when they issued the Jerusalem decree which prohibits the drinking of blood! Weren't they there at the Last Supper?! (Signori Pesaro could have gotten the Turk and the Moor in the Titain painting to say and do anything he wanted if he had commissioned a text also.)).

It might be easier to believe that the provenance of the NT texts was the social circle of Herod the Great's descendants when we consider that the providers of capital who produced the story would not have done so if they did not see benefit in its creation. The problem at the beginning of the story was that traditionalists criticized the marriage of Herodias to Herod Antipas and then that problem had been resolved by the time Drusilla wanted to marry Felix. Is Paul's appearance before Drusilla, in which salvation is offered her and nothing is remarked regarding the legality of her marriage to a successor to Pontius Pilate as Roman procurator of Judea, the climax of the book of Acts? I do not find much of substance occurring after that scene.

The texts provide a good outcome regarding the reputation of the Herodian women. Not so good for those whose goal was to renew the covenant. Maybe that's because the texts were produced by people associated with Herodians and not by people associated with the movement lead by John the Baptist, Jesus, James the Just, then cousin Cleopas. Fits the evidence better that violators of the covenant would have produced the Christ myth
storyline, and that way we don't have to invoke any supernatural occurrences to get it to work out in our heads why it is now OK to violate the covenant. Mary Magdalene, the provider of funding, exonerates her Herodian women friends when she appears at the foot of the cross and at the tomb.

A woman named Salome appears at the foot of the cross - at the moment that the covenant is dissolved - also. The daughter of Herodias, who was unnamed in the story of John the Baptist's head on a platter, is Salome. We learn this from Josephus. If members of the Pesaro family could kneel before the appearance of the Madonna in the 16th century for having funded a document, the same could have happened in the first century when a woman named Salome, possibly the daughter of Herodias for all we know, knelt at the foot of the cross of Jesus. Her sins being washed away as a result.

The literary point of view of the story of 'the dance of the seven veils' is within the court of Herod Antipas. It was other people elsewhere who disposed of John's body. Does 'point of view' suggest provenance? Not in Bizzaro world. Everything is backwards there.

Paul also provided funding. We hear of his collection, but we do not have confirmation that it was delivered. Instead we have a report that Paul paid for a vow for four men. It was a Nazirite vow. Those who undertake a Nazirite vow abstain from wine and touching corpses - the very elements of Paul's Eucharistic formula! The text of Acts indicates that Paul was buying what they were selling in Jerusalem, but they did not buy what Paul was selling. They prohibited him from selling it. (Acts 15 & 21)

Paul's paying for that vow would have been the perfect opportunity for Peter to call Paul a hypocrite to his face. Why didn't Paul practice what he preached as he was depicted in his appearance in Jerusalem in Acts?

Funding could mean something else in this case. The donor/donee relationship suggests affinity. A politician or university could not accept funding from the Ku Klux Klan or NAMBLA without an inference being made that the recipient endorsed the position of the donor. By soliciting the money for the fee, the author is suggesting that James felt an affinity toward Paul, and therefore sought funding from him. The text claims that the purpose was to prove that Paul was not teaching against the customs of Moses, but this is faulty logic. The evidence is overwhelming that teaching the drinking of blood violates both covenants. Either James the Just lacked an elementary understanding of the principles of justice, or the claim of Paul's providing funding serves a polemic purpose - to suggest an affinity in the textual environment between James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul. But there is no report of the collection being accepted.

Funding considerations seem to point to the Herodian circle being the provenance of the NT texts. And we don't need to wonder much about 'when' - although the story may have developed over a long period, we know in which period it became manifest: post-Hasmonean.

Why was the text created? Same reason some aristocratic 'Jews' approached Antiochus IV Epiphanes with the idea of altering Jerusalem Temple practices in the pre-Hasmonean era. Something to do with the forces of modernization and the need to fend off a traditionalist critique thereof, along with its accompanying social agitation.

Religion is something that people do. It has something to do with stuff that people allege is happening up in the sky, but that is only for marketing purposes. A literary analysis reveals Herodians as prime suspects for originators of the Jesus Myth. They stood to benefit from the creation of the story. The funding trail seems to lead to them.

bacht

Interesting approach. Is this idea of covenant renewal based on a re-dedication to the Mosaic Torah, or something else? For instance Matthew has Jesus say "I came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it"

Should we consider Jesus, James et al to be apocalypticists thwarted by Herodian realpolitik?

Russellonius

John Dominic Crossan and Richard Horsley, among others, assert that Jesus led a covenant renewal movement. That would make them conservatives opposed to changes in the tradition. Matthew does have Jesus say something that sounds Pauline as you noted - Paul did not envision the law passing away either, but rather being 'fulfilled' in the resurrection. Also in Matthew Jesus says. "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

We can take our pick. I think the Q materials were in existence before Paul wrote, but did not become a part of the marketing materials of Christians until after the destruction of the Temple when market demographics changed, and that they were reworked to some extent, the purpose being to make the post-nomian vision of Paul more palatable to those who valued the tradition more highly but could no longer observe the covenant in the traditional Temple-based way.

That's exactly my claim. Analyzing the "flow", we have a covenant renewal movement whose efforts resulted in covenant replacement. If we exclude supernatural causes, how did that happen? It could not have been the goal of the renewal movement. So whose goal was it? Their opponents would seem the likely culprit. Paul opposed the Way. The Way opposed the Herodians. We find several points of connection between Paul and Herodians.

The resurrection mythology arose as a way of explaining how God can be good if the righteous are killed off by the unrighteous. God is just, therefore justice must be served in an afterlife, they speculated. Anthropologists find correlation between apocalyptic movements and groups whose way of life is changed forever due to foreign encroachment. The Jesus group fits the description much better than Paul's group. The Jesus group saw rapid Hellenization/Romanization of the homeland in their lifetimes. The author of Acts claims that Paul was a Roman citizen making him an agent of that change.

So it seems, if anthropologists are correct about who dreams up "last days" schemes, eschatological ideas - including the resurrection - would have originated among the traditionalists and not among progressives like Paul.

The timeline seems to show Paul promoting a spiritual Christ and later writers adding in details about the historical Jesus. Again, this shift in marketing emphasis reflects the change in market demographics after the Temple no longer operated and traditionalist consumers would be searching for a new religious provider.

Re-dedication of the Mosaic Torah seems to have been the goal of John the Baptist, Jesus and James. Claiming an alternative way to salvation would have been desirable to those considered 'outcasts and sinners' as perceived by that Mosaic system. Herodians were sinners as viewed by Mosaic traditionalists. Jesus' resurrection solved that problem, according to Paul.

aa5874

Your claim is utterly erroneous.

The timeline in the NT show that the Jesus story was fully developed by the time of the Pauline writer.

Jesus was ALREADY DEAD when "Paul" received "data" from the resurrected one.

The Pauline writer claimed he PERSECUTED the Church in Christ and that Jesus was made of a woman, was betrayed in the NIGHT after he had EATEN, was crucified and died, BURIED and was RAISED from the dead on the third day.

The Pauline writers' Jesus was FAR ADVANCED of the Synoptic Jesus since the Synoptic Jesus did NOT teach his disciples that he would be RAISED on the third day for the Salvation of Mankind and even ALL JEWS while the Temple was still standing.

It was the LATER gJohn's Jesus and the Pauline Jesus that was regarded as EQUAL to God and the Creator of heaven and earth.

mountainman

Christians were most successful marketing themselves amidst the changing demographics after the destruction of the Graeco-Roman temples of Asclepius (The old Graeco-Roman HEALING GOD) c.324/325 CE (and the cultural prohibitions which then ensued, enforced by a "Christian Army"). "Paul" is just a name to stand alongside "Pseudo Paul" in a mass of codices which were published at that time.

Historical methodology requires basic facts and evidence.
Biblical Historical methodology starts with the "inspired word".
The latter represents a subset of the former,
the former a superset of the latter.

Sacred history poses no problems
which are not those of profane history.

It was Mother Helena who rediscovered this.

Russellonius

Agreed. The challenge is to untangle supernatural assumptions from the profane interpretation of sacred history.

Thanks for going with the flow!

After the Roman imperial administration made Christianity their official religion the market for Christian products opened wider. There are no reports of Christian proselytizing to pagans before that. They seem to have been hunkered down trying to avoid local persecution and having debates mostly with "Jews". I should say "fellow Jews" because the differentiation between Christians and Jews at the time was only in their attitude toward the Law, Jesus' resurrection being the excuse given for not adhering to it among the one group. Christians texts contain lots of Mosaic religious capital in their detail and not much that's pagan other than some symbolism held in common.

The reports of pagan conversions prior to the fourth century were miraculous claims of large crowds converting all at once due to witnessing supernatural events. We do not believe miraculous claims. Did the pagans change their social attachments due these episodes? That's what we normally mean by religious conversion from a sociological viewpoint. Religion is a social behavior.

The market for Christian products in the first three centuries was said to have been among Gentiles. In the first century the word meant
It would help in untangling our supernatural assumptions from the profane interpretation of sacred history to always challenge the claim that there would have been much market demand among pagans for Mosaic religious products. Gentile meant "of the same family or clan", but the NT was written in Greek, the Greek word having roughly same meaning in the first century:
There would have been demand for a Law-free "Jewish" religious product not only among Judean aristocrats whose behavior was criticized by traditionalists, but also among the approximately two-thirds of "Jews" who lived in the Diaspora at the time. Those ethnic communities must have been at some stage of assimilation into the host culture considering that the dispersion began in 722BC when the ten tribes were "lost", and refreshed again in 586 with the Babylonian conquest.

Of course we could just define "Jew" as "those who obeyed the Law" and ignore normal social dynamics in favor of a theological interpretation of history. That would save us from having to examine all of the details of the sloppy business of social life (and support the Christian doctrine of suppersessionism). But then we would have to ignore the fact that doctrinal appeal to the demographic outside of "people of one's own kind" can account for only about 3% of growth according to sociologists who study these things (e.g. Rodney Stark) and modern proselytizing groups who keep records.

It would be hard to reconcile stranger conversion as a growth driver for Christianity with normal observed social phenomenon. Marriage on the other hand can account for a large share of growth. Conversion rates among mixed-faith marriages approach 50%. The partner with the stronger religious attachment usually prevails in this type of conversion. I would bet on the monotheist.

And within a few centuries of the advent of the state-sponsored Roman Catholic Church the Christians completely forgot about Greek and Roman philosophy and gods, only to have them restored later by the Arabs, who had preserved them. This group does not seem to have been all that Greco-Roman!

aa5874

Again, your post is misleading and erroneous. Have you read Minucius Felix "Octavius"? Caecilius was reported to have converted long before Constantine, perhaps more than a hundred years earlier.

And there are Justin Martyr's "Discourse to the Greeks" and "Hortatory Address to the Greeks" and also Tatian's "Address to the Greeks".


This is also not really true. Justin Marty wrote about his own conversion and it did not involve any miraculous hocus-pocus blinding light conversion like Saul/Paul in Acts.

mountainman

Hi neilgodfrey,

I have taken the liberty of attempting to extend your aims ...

It also means attempting to register and list and examine and review all the texts which are capable of being attributed to the appropriate historical epoch in which the texts of the church and the NT could have possibly been authored. This includes centuries one through early four.

Such texts will include the "Historia Augusta" and also all the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts". At the end of the day we seek to find some form of best fit referential integrity for an explanation as to the authorship of all these texts in relation to one another at that specific historical epoch.

To exclusively focus on the books of the NT canon is to be pathologically narrow minded about the diversity of the textual evidence, but this has been the dominant characteristic of "Biblical History" in an historical sense, as it moved away from the church into academia (and beyond).



We need a level playing field.
We need all the texts on the table at once.
And we need to look at them all equally.

I think you are moving in the direction of future objectivity.
Well done.