Ben C Smith

Maybe not for all mankind; that one may be new to Christianity, though I am not sure about that. But martyrdom is sometimes described in terms of payment for the sins of, say, an entire nation. 4 Maccabees 17.20-22:

These, then, who have been consecrated for the sake of God are honored, not only with this honor, but also by the fact that because of them our enemies did not rule over our nation, the tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified; they became, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And, through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an expiation, divine providence preserved Israel that previously had been afflicted.

4 Maccabees probably postdates the beginnings of Christianity, but it seems to be a Jewish development of the Jewish work 2 Maccabees, which certainly predates Christianity. 2 Maccabees 7.37-38 (here the youngest of seven sons is speaking as he is about to be martyred):

I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.

Loren Rosson points to Tacitus, Annals 16.35, as a pagan example of suffering death as a sort of sacrifice to the gods:

When [Thrasea] heard the decision of the Senate, he led Helvidius and Demetrius into a chamber, and having laid bare the arteries of each arm he let the blood flow freely, and, as he sprinkled it on the ground, he called the quaestor to his side and said: We pour out a libation to Jupiter the deliverer. Behold, young man, and may the gods avert the omen, but you have been born into times in which it is well to fortify the spirit with examples of courage.

But I daresay Christianity took this concept to a whole new level.

Ben.

jgibson000

One of the problems with this question is that it shows no awareness that the particular view of the atonement you mention is not a NT idea and does not appear in Christian theology until the 12th century -- in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo? (on this, see the older study by Hastings Rashdal, The Idea of the Atonement in Christian Theology (London. 1925) and John Howard Yoder's critique of Anselmian atonement theory in his Preface to Theology, but now Stephan Finlan's Problems with Atonement (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Michael Glazier, 2005).

There is, however, plenty of pre-Chistian evidence for the belief that a person's death could be salvific for a city, an EQNE, or a nation. See not only the Maccabean literature (1 Macc. 1.50; 6:44; 2 Macc. 7:37; 8:21; 4 Macc 6:22, 27, 30; 9:5; 11:14; 13:9) and the explication of this in Sam William's Jesus Death as Saving Event (or via: amazon.co.uk)) but also my Paul's "Dying Formula": Prolegomena to an Understanding of Its Import and Significance" in Celebrating Romans: Template for Pauline Theology. Essays in Honor of Robert Jewett (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Eerdmans, 2004) pp. 20-41.

There I note that the declaration and explication of the idea that X died for Y with salvific effect appears numerous times in secular works written long before Paul -- works, such as the Iliad of Homer, the elegies of Callinus and Tyrtaeus, the speeches of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Euripedes -- and then again with some frequency up though Paul's time in a variety of compositions that stem from a gamut of writers which includes statesmen and orators, moralists and biographers, historians, mythographers, rhetoriticians, playwrights, satirists, and ethnographers. Indeed, in the Pauline era alone secular examples of the use of, or the appeal to, versions of the "dying formula" are to be found well over thirty five times within the works of such writers as Philo, Plutarch, Josephus, Epictetus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cassius Dio, Polyaenus, and Pseudo-Apollodorus, not to mention that of the Scholiasts and the anonymous commentators on (especially Aristotelian) philosophical or works of Roman writers like Horace, Seneca, Caesar, Tacitus, and especially Cicero for whom the question "Homestum sit propatria mori?" was a rhetorical exercise

Jeffrey Gibson

Doug Shaver

I am not a professional scholar. I've had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but never in academia. I'm currently employed as a private security guard, aka rent-a-cop.

The point being, I don't have the time or means to find and study many primary sources for what people were thinking in the ancient Middle East. But I do know a thing or two about using secondary sources, and as an interested layman, I am largely limited to them.

My personal studies in this area began after I first encountered Doherty's Web site almost seven years ago. I have found no apparently reputable source that contradicts any substantial factual claim he makes about the intellectual milieu of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world. Not even evangelical or fundamentalist apologists, so far as I can determine, have managed to challenge the facts on which he bases his arguments, and if they had some facts they could use against him, they surely would be posting them. I have looked high and low on their Web sites for such facts, and they have none.

Among the apparently uncontested facts is that all Jews in that time and place were Hellenized, probably more so in the Diaspora but at least to some extent even in Judea and Jerusalem itself. It seems not to have been the case that there was a division between Hellenized and un-Hellenized Jews. To a first approximation, by the first century there were none of the latter. We don't know where Luke got the idea that Paul was from Tarsus, but if he was right about that, it counts for something.

Tarsus was on a major trade route and, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was "the home of famous Stoic philosophers." If there were famous Stoics hanging out there, then there surely would have been some not-so-famous proponents of other Hellenistic philosophical schools as well. Paul had an active intellect, whatever we may say about the quality of his intellectual activity. If the ideas were in the air, we may reasonably assume that he was aware of them.

The notion of a fundamental divide between the sublunar and supralunary spheres goes back to Plato. The idea that the material world is just a poor reflection of something happening at a higher level of reality was a core of Plato's thinking. Plotinus's theories were just an evolved and elaborated version of Plato's Forms, which is why, one supposes, it is called Neoplatonism. If Doherty's take on Paul's thinking is correct, then Paul's christology would just have been a kind of transitional theory adapted to a particular religious environment.

Middle Platonism was not a philosophy. It was many philosophies related by more or less (and sometimes tenuous) common descent from Plato and sharing certain ideas that are retrospectively perceived as characteristic of Plato's own philosophy. Philo represented only one lineage. Your objection is like saying that if primates are the quintessential mammals, then whales can't be mammals because they're not only legless but hairless as well. The taxonomy of ideas, is not as neat or unambiguous as the taxonomy of biological species, but there are useful analogies.

The difference is this. The HJ and VMJ argument is: Nobody can say X about anyone who was not a man; Paul said X about Jesus; therefore, Paul was necessarily thinking of Jesus as a man. The MJ argument: In Middle Platonist philosophy, one could say X about a spiritual entity; it is reasonable to suppose that Paul was a Middle Platonist; therefore, it is reasonable to doubt that when Paul said X about Jesus, he was necessarily thinking of Jesus as a man.

I do not. Other MJers can speak in their own defense, but I strongly deny that my own argument is so circular.

Given two facts (or sets of facts) that seem to imply contradictory conclusions, a circular argument would pick one conclusion and declare ad hoc that all the facts implied it. What I am doing is noting additional facts, not initially included in the logical analysis, and demonstrating how theose additional facts resolve the issue in favor of one of the conclusions over the other one. What the conventional arguments for historicity do is simply ignore the additional facts and instead pile on a bunch of ad hoc assumptions about Paul being ignorant of Jesus' life story or else having no interest in it.

I see the handful of apparently human references ("born of a woman" etc.), and I do not deny that to a modern mind, they seem to refer unambiguously to a human being. But then, I look at everything else Paul wrote about Jesus, and everything else written by other Christians about Jesus during the first century or so after his alleged death, and I notice all the stuff that did not get written about him, by anyone at all during that same period, and I see strong evidence that whatever this Christ Jesus was whom early Christians were talking about, he could not have been a man who had recently lived in this world. But, there are those few references, and they do need to be explained. So I propose an alternative explanation. The next question -- and the only relevant question at this point -- is: Is it a plausible alternative? If I can defend its plausibility without any reference to evidence for MJ itself, then I avoid circularity.

Schematically, we can look at it like this. We have 10 facts, let's say F1 through F10, having some logical relevance to whether we should believe X. Of the 10, nine imply X, but one, F10, say, implies not-X. If I argue that F1 through F9 imply X, therefore F10 is consistent with X notwithstanding that it seems to imply not-X, then I'm begging the question. But now I discover another fact, F11, and I observe that the conjunction of F10 and F11 is consistent with X. That resolves the contradiction and I've broken the circle.

You can give everything its 21st-century meaning. We need to be looking for 1st-century meanings.

I can understand why Everyman would have a problem grasping the notion that people 2,000 years ago inhabited a different mental universe than ours. But in a forum as intellectually high-powered as this one, I'm little puzzled by why so many people find that notion so baffling.

As evidence for anything, your hunches are worth about as much as mine or anyone else's.

Doherty and Carrier say there is plenty of evidence, and they're supposed to be in a position to know. Until I can look at that evidence with my own eyes to see whether it really supports their inferences, I can't see any good reason not to take their word for it.

One reason for my questioning them would be if I saw a strong counterargument by someone whose relevant competence was similar to theirs. As I noted earlier, though, I have not yet seen any such counterargument, and I think I have good reason to suppose that I would have seen one by now if there were one that any historicist could make.

So far as I can determine, no educated person in those days believed that any god had ever lived among men in this world.

We are talking about Christianity as it existed ca. 50 CE -- and at that, we're talking about only one sect that we happen to know about. We can make no assumptions about how much it had in common with the sect of Christianity that a century later declared the gospels to be historical documents recording the religion's foundation.

That might depend on how strictly you define "rules out," and in any case I don't want to engage in a proof-texting duel with anyone. Even you have conceded that on the evidence of his writings, even supposing that Paul was talking about a real man, he knew zilch about him beyond that bare fact that he had died by crucifixion.

There are times when "He didn't need to tell his readers what they already knew" is a good argument.

I understood Doherty's primary point there to be that there is no earlier mention of anything about Jesus except his death and resurrection (and implications thereof).

Doherty is responding to conventional historicists. I have acknowledged that your VMJ hypothesis does address most of the problems with conventional historicity, which among other things assumes at least a core of factual material in the gospels. That strength of that assumption, though, depends mainly on when we can reasonably believe the gospels were written. The traditional dates are hard to reconcile with the utter lack of any clear attestation to their existence before the middle of the second century. But then if they were written so late, that in turn is hard to reconcile with the assumption that Jesus did anything spectacular enough to have made the kind of impression he had to have made to have inspired the stories in the first place.

I doubt it. Even I would call that a reach. I think that what we see in Ignatius is the earliest known attested belief in a historical Jesus.

I don't know if I could or not, but I see no good reason to even try to.

If you mean a chronological cutoff, the answer is no. Among the very first Christians, none thought Jesus was ever a man living in this world. A few centuries later, no Christian thought he never was. Between those times, there was a transition when some Christians thought one way and other Christians though the other way. There was much fighting, and when it was over the winners wrote the history of it all.

My turn. What is your source for this reading of the "lights of the time"? What writer of that time made it clear that there could be no eating or drinking anywhere but in this material world?

Corporeal existence, I suppose; other than that, I frankly have no idea. I'm just taking my cues from people who seem to have done the legwork that I cannot do myself, plus noting that I have not yet seen any authoritative source contradict them.

Deification assumes a point prior to which the entity in question (human or whatever) was not a god. MJ denies that Jesus was ever not a god, and so no deification had to happen.

Isaiah 53 is one datum that fits your hypothesis. There are a few others that don't.

Josephus didn't call him "James the Just." Christians have just assumed that that was who he was referring to. Who else could it have been? The depends on whether "brother of Jesus called Christ" was in the original. Without that, he was just "one called James."

Josephus did obviously think the killing was unjust, but he does not describe it as an execution. It was more like a lynching.

That is not in any extant copy of Josephus. Origen and Eusebius claimed that Josephus blamed the city's destruction on James's death, but they don't say where in his works they read it, and wherever it was, it's not there any more. It has come to be called the "lost reference." Doherty discusses it at length in Josephus Unbound.

According to the extant Josephus, the denoument of the killing of James Whoever was not the sacking of Jerusalem. Instead it was an immediate demand by the people of Jerusalem for the high priest to be sacked and replaced, and the Roman governor's immediate acquiescence to that demand. Hardly the sort of thing to provoke God into a destructive fury. (In Moses' time, of course, God might have destroyed the whole city because they let the high priest live instead of killing him, too. But that was then.)

I hesitate to nitpick, but I'll do it anyway. He spells his name Strobel, and the allusion was to Josh McDowell.

Amaleq13

Thanks, Ben. I should probably have been more specific in asking if there was evidence that anyone made this a messianic expectation prior to the apparent Christian retrojection.

One of the problems with this response is that it shows no awareness that the particular view was introduced by someone else and the question was addressed to them as a result.

jgibson000

Why does it need to be a "messianic" expectation, what ever that means?

But you might want to look at Ps. Sol 17 to see that the view that the Messiah would deal with the sinfulness of Israel/the nation is something that existed in pre-Christan Judaism.




Speaking of awarenesses, please note the lack of it in who it was who gave you the quote for which you are expressing thanks!

Jeffrey

Amaleq13

While I find it difficult to believe you are unfamiliar with the concept or, assuming such a baffling lack of familiarity, that you are incapable of figuring it out, the relevance to what Didymus has been writing should be obvious to anyone who has been following the discussion from the beginning.

Thanks for this substantive and relevant information.

I'm well aware that I started my post with an offering of thanks to Ben and then addressed the rest to you. I guess addressing more than one person in a single post can be confusing to some if they aren't paying attention.

jakejonesiv

Hi Jeffrey,

That is an interesting methodology. One or more key Greek words are searched for in ancient extant Greek texts. Is the presumption that a consensus from the search results can be imported back into the context of the original passages, thereby illuminating them?

I would like to see a discussion of the caveats to this approach. A couple of
possibilites occur to me. Is there an implied assumption that these words (even though the matches span centuries and different types of literature) have a common meaning and useage across the sources? How do you control these variables?

But enough on the overview, let's examine the specific instance we have before us, the so-called "dying formula".

I don’t have your book, but I found Paul's "Dying Formula": Prolegomena to an Understanding of its Import and Significance at
http://rhetjournal.net/Gibson.pdf
So Jeffrey, if you have significantly revised your paper, please so advise.

I would suggest that the Pauline formula under discussion is not an antithesis of the Greco Roman hero dying valiantly against enemies of his polis or patride. We are off on the wrong foot when the explanation of a central concept is conceived in negative terms.

If you will give any credit to the writer of 1 Cor. 15:3, it is stated “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;”

Should you not look first to Isaiah 53:5-12 rather than search through Thesaurus Linguae Graecae “D” disk to find unrelated occurrences (all in gk, so there is another procedural assumption, where is the Hebrew and Latin?), the results of which are a poor match for the Pauline concept of Jesus? (Actually, there is more than one Pauline concept of Jesus, but I will leave that for another thread).

"He was cut off out of the land of the living (that means died Jeffrey, but would your search find it?), for the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due? Isaiah 53:8.

Hmmm, The servant of Isaiah died for the transgression of my people. Sounds like the “dying formula” of 1 Cor. 15:3. “Christ died for our sins.” And we didn’t have to invoke an antithesis.

Jake Jones IV

GakuseiDon

The best source for "Middle Platonist" views is John Dillon's "The Middle Platonists" http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...hesecularweb09

Dillon looks at the available writings on the subject, which extends from a few centuries before and after Paul. It's a dense work, but very well laid out. He looks at their writings and breaks them down into ethics, cosmology, etc.

It is the most comprehensive work on then subject that I've found, and there isn't anything in there to support Doherty's interpretation on the nature of the sublunar realm, I'm afraid.

A good link giving interesting information about the sublunar realm is here:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/midplato.htm

IMHO, Earl is invoking modern beliefs about "alternate dimensions" that he is retrojecting on 1st C thinking.

Most people who read Earl come away with the belief that the people of that time thought that the gods acted in a "fleshy sublunar realm" or "world of myth". But there is NOTHING like that in the writings of the time. I've certainly haven't found anything among the writings of Middle Platonists or pagan writings of the time. They thought that the gods either acted on earth, or that the myths were metaphors and thus didn't occur at all.

Keep in mind that the sublunar realm stretches from the earth to the moon. We are literally in the sublunar realm at the moment -- though generally when Earl and I argued about it, it was with the area under the moon or around the firmament.

He isn't deliberately making any of this up, I agree. But once you start looking for evidence for his view, you'll find very little to support him.

I suggest starting with the weblink I gave above, and concentrate on finding what kind of activities were carried out in the sublunar realm among early writers. I think Earl will agree that there is little to support him, which is why he needs to appeal to "imagination" and "thinking outside the box".

But you need to be careful not to apply your modern thinking a la "dimensions" on 1st C thinking.

There is no evidence of "intermediary spiritual planes beneath the heavens" that I've found. Richard Carrier (according to Ted Hoffman ) agrees with this. There is only one plane, stretching from earth to moon. I believe Earl himself agrees with this (though I don't want to put words into his mouth) -- his opinion is that "spiritual activities" were carried out in the air above, so Christ was crucified somehow up in the air.

Well, I'm not the scholar that Earl or Carrier are, so I don't expect you to take my word for it. But IMVHO Christ being crucified in "a sublunar realm" doesn't have evidence to support it. (Carrier believes there is in Plutarch, but I'm pretty sure he is wrong on this, and I will start a thread on what he wrote on this shortly).

Doug, a final thought: I think Earl's views about 1st C cosmology are akin to people's views about "a crucified Mithras" or "the Council of Nicea defined the NT". It appears to be something that a lot of people know, but few can cite evidence for that position. Earl himself relies on a handful of references from Paul/Pauline writings and the Ascension of Isaiah to support this.

Can you cite the evidence that the people of the 1st C could have believed that someone could be crucified in a "sublunar dimension" outside Paul or the AoI? I think you will find that there is little to none. If we can't find that belief at that time, then Earl's (strained IMO) interpretation of passages in Paul and AoI need to be reviewed.

Finally, what is the sublunar realm, in your opinion?

Doug Shaver

That's what I gather, having done some checking after I noticed Doherty cited it a few times. My book budget is temporarily strapped, so I'm going to see about getting it on an interlibrary loan.

I read it quite a while ago and downloaded it to my personal research directory along with several other Web articles on the same subject. I just happened to re-read it a few days ago. I don't see anything in it that contradicts Doherty.

When I hear modern talk of "alternate dimensions," I hear nothing in common with what Earl is talking about.

We shall see.

Obviously, neither Paul nor anyone else ever wrote in so many words, "Christ was crucified in the sublunar realm." But how much similarity is required to establish a plausible connection? There are Christian apologists who argue that the gospel virgin birth story could not have evolved from virgin birth stories in earlier religions because the previous stories were too dissimilar to the gospel stories.

I know what he relies on. I've not only read his Web site, I've also bought his book and am reading it for the second time now.

Not yet. Doherty says the evidence is there, and Carrier agrees. I'm doing my amateurish best to find out for myself whether they know what they're talking about.

As I understand it, the ancients saw the universe as a set of internested spherical regions centered on the (spherical) earth. The number of regions seems to have varied over time and among the various philosphical schools. The moon's orbit defined the outer boundary of the lowest region, which was called the sublunar.

GakuseiDon

I'd be interested to hear what you find out. One of my complaints about people who promote Earl's idea is that they never really look into it, and don't understand the ramifications of proposing "crucifixion in a sublunar realm". I believe that the lack of evidence for this view is pretty much a death-blow to Earl's idea of a "world of myth", certainly as a widespread belief among people of the time.

Yes, that's right. So, to refer to an earlier statement of yours (my emphasis):

If Doherty is right, intermediary spiritual planes beneath the heavens is precisely what Paul's writings are about.

I think you'll agree that, if the moon marks the outer boundary of the lowest region, there can't be intermediary spiritual planes between the moon and earth. And if there are no intermediary planes, then Christ (according to Earl's theory) would have to have been crucified in the air, somewhere between the earth and the moon?