Clivedurdle

Will this one do? (top left of site)

http://www.saintsconstantineandelena.org/services.htm

Clivedurdle

Actually, on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, has anyone collected together images of Jesus? I just posted a constantinian word of god version, but there are myriads of others, fishy types, emperor god types, through to Dali St John of the Cross and Mel Gibson.

Images might be very valuable in looking for a historical core. Are there any images of an ordinary bloke before quite recently?

mountainman

The following text is from a review of the book.
(I do not have the URL handy - but its out there somewhere)

The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. (or via: amazon.co.uk)
- book reviews Art Bulletin, The,
Sept, 1995 by Peter Brown
THOMAS F. MATHEWS Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993. 208 pp.;
16 color ills., 122 b/w. $49.50

You may not like this, but its all Constantine ...

In 336, Donatus, bishop of Carthage (the founder of the schismatic "Donatist" church in Roman Africa), rebuked the imperial authorities: "Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?" he wrote, "What has the emperor to do with the Church?"' Though uttered in pique (the emperor had given to his rivals funds for the care of the poor which Donatus himself had hoped to administer), these were fighting words. Thomas Mathews's The Clash of Gods is the work of an art-historical Donatist. He wants to exclude the emperor--the art and ceremonial associated with the emperor's person along with their absolutist overtones--from the artistic and, by implication, from the imaginative world of post-Constantinian Christianity, much as Donatus had wished to exclude him from the affairs of the Donatist church.

The Clash of Gods is written to free Early Christian art of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries from what Mathews calls "the incubus of imperial interpretation" (p. 179). A previous tradition of art history, in his opinion, had imposed on the interpretation of this art "The Mistake of the Emperor Mystique": that is, it was claimed that much of the Christian art of the period was consciously derived from prototypes in imperial art. And with the art came the ideology attached to such an art. By borrowing from imperial models in this manner, late Roman Christians were assumed to have swathed the figure of Christ in a thick wrapping of "latent memories" that charged his figure with the absolutist power of a Roman emperor. Mathews will have none of this. He rightly insists that Christians of that period thought of Christ as a god, not as an emperor. He further insists that they were perfectly capable of creating an art of their own to convey their message. Indeed, it was their ability to do this that was part of the secret of the Church's victory over paganism. In "a relentless war of images" (p. 21), the Christian art of the post-Constantinian period carried the greater "punch" (p. 14). This, so Mathews insists, was precisely because Christians looked away from the heavy-handed obsequiousness of the imperial court to a wider range of images--to images of the gods and to images associated with less elevated but imaginatively more appealing areas of late Roman society: to the suave and resolutely antimilitarist philosopher and even (Mathews suggests at length with impish delight) to raffish figures of the religious demimonde, to the magician and to persons of indeterminate gender. For Christ, Mathews assures us, won out because he was the right sort of god. He was "A god of the `little man,' a genuine `grass-roots' god ... a caring god, concerned" (p. 92). Thus, Early Christian art derived its appeal not from echoing the stuffy solemnity that still reigned in imperial circles, but from its ability to present to the grass roots the image of a new, accessible divinity, many of whose representations positively subverted the official art of the Establishment. It is of this streak in Early Christian art that Mathews writes with undisguised fervor.


The tendency to reduce so much of post-Constantinian art to imperial models also assumed a claustrophobically centralized world, where all pomp and ceremony centered on the emperor alone. The later Roman empire was not like that. As Michael McCormick has shown, "It is essential to grasp that the complex of symbolic gestures defining the emperor's public life ... was only the apex of a great upward. It did not always trickel downward from the court. This is a point which Mathews had already made in a previous study of the Christian liturgy of Constantinople.(4)

(Altogether, the study of Early Christian art in this century has always been punctuated by moments of regret that Christian art seemed to owe so much to the conversion of the emperor Constantine and to the establishment of an imperial church. Scholars were tempted to think that some alternative source of artistic creativity must have existed for Early Christian and early medieval art, waiting to be discovered, somewhere on the fertile peripheries of the classical world, at a safe distance from the seemingly ever-present, crippling fact of empire. Not all such wishful thinking would strike a modern reader as salubrious. In 1923, Josef Strzygowski regretted "the oppressive influence of Semitic monarchism," in which "the divine figure is furnished with all the attributes of the despot." "In India," he pointed out, "Buddha is never depicted with the ruler's attributes." Late Roman Christian art, by contrast, was "the art of a spiritual and temporal autocracy of the old Semitic sense."(5)

Mathews avoids the erratic and, to a modern reader, highly unpleasant, tone of a Strzygowski. Strzygowski had looked to a distant, as yet undiscovered Kulturland for the nonimperial origins of Christian art. Mathews, by contrast, assures us that the imperial tradition was less present than we had thought. It existed only in the eye of a small but vastly influential group of modern beholders. Ernst Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar (followed by a host of lesser scholars) imposed an imperial source on Early Christian art by claiming to see "imperial" symbolism in scenes which, in the opinion of Mathews, need not bear any such interpretation. They did so, consistently and tenaciously, because they themselves still yearned (so Mathews suggests) for the vanished empires of their youth--for the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for the Russia of the Tsars: "The need to interpret Christ as an Emperor," Mathews concludes, "tells us more about the historians involved than it does about Early Christian art" (p. 16).


The few pages (pp. 16-19) that Mathews devotes to explaining why it was that Kantorowicz, Asfoldi, and Grabar came to place such emphasis on the imperial origins of so much of Early Christian art are an unnecessarily unattractive, because ungenerous, interlude in a book written, otherwise, con amore. They are bad intellectual history. Many decades ago, Arnaldo Momigliano warned of the dangers involved in treating the history of scholarship as an easy option, as a mere "Sunday pastime." He did so in a review that exposed the collusion with Fascism of which many of his near-contemporaries had been guilty. It is sad to see the wheel come full circle. Smug snap judgments on the cultural and political background of European academics are now used, as in this book, to delegitimize the contribution of a major scholarly tradition, by hinting that those who contributed to it were right-wing, monarchist, even sympathetic to Fascism.

Pete Brown

rlogan

It is a premise, as I see it being used:

The presumption that there is a person who not only initiated "Christianity", but who became the central focus of the religion.

The methodology is not to "find" anything at all. Instead it is to specifically construct what cannot be found, because the whole point is assuming what you want to conclude, but still explaining away the problems with the premise.

Since there is no person who anyone has been able to point to as this historical jesus, the effort is directed at inventing one that would have evaded detection or creating an illusion of "detection" via indirect means.


The wording is somewhat clever. It imbues a mere assumption with legitimacy without having to earn it.

For example, I might discuss the "historical core" of alien abductors or ghosts to artificially distinguish myself from those foolish enough to believe in them.

spin

I'm not committed either. It doesn't look particularly attractive, but then I'm looking at Luke being some time after Marcion's gospel, which later church fathers saw was related to Luke's.

I think I have flattened the attempts to breathe life into the basket case from the wall of Damascus. Caesar's household at the end of Philippians doesn't help other than that part of the text and it seems to be a composite letter, is after the republic. Have I missed out on anything?

I would reject the hopeful dating of Mark out of hand. We still have to wait for Justin till we get any essential recognition of gospel material.

The dating issue is extremely difficult generally because of the nature of the situation in which texts are transmitted because they are core religious documents, ancillary documents, less so historically useful documents, less so ones whose use hasn't been quite justified, while heretical or pagan material wasn't worth maintaining. Anti-christian stuff was actively destroyed and we only have traces of it as target practice for apologists to respond to. Had there been more information in the past about Ebion, what would be the major reason for preserving it? It has no intrinsic value for the christian reader.

My previous comment is relevant here. There is a fundamental difference between the Jesus material and the little Ebion material: there was a good reason to preserve Jesus traditions.

As it is for all of us.

Whether he was or was not contemporary doesn't seem to important though does it, when Paul never met the person?

It will be interesting to know first what you will expect for "pure legend" and how your progress goes.


spin

Ben C Smith

I do not think so. Carlson and Criddle showed in your thread why that Aretas cannot be III. That leaves IV by my count.

Paul is the primary source here, Josephus secondary (if the two conflict at all).

On the other end, 2 Thessalonians 2.4 really makes sense only if the temple was still standing when it was written. Either Paul wrote this epistle, and thus wrote before 70, or an imitator wrote it before 70, thus pushing Paul back even further.

There is a cumulative effect to consider over other details. For example, Paul claims to be contemporaneous with James of Jerusalem, whom Hegesippus, the infancy gospel of James, the first apocalypse of James, and others date to before the temple fell.

Evidence from a contemporary who never met someone is not evidence that the someone existed? I know Condi Rice exists, but I never met her. I know Ted Haggard exists, and until recently had never even seen his photograph.

There is always a way to dispute each element of dating. I am looking at the overall picture and asking what seems most likely.

Ben.

ynquirer

I don’t see why. Alexander might very well be a fictitious character.

1) He is said to have been taught by Aristotle the Philosopher. Despite of his having left a number of extant works on many different issues, and notably one book on politics that could have mentioned Alexander as he mentions many other Greek statesmen, the Philosopher never mentions Alexander. (I realize that this is argument from silence, but one that compares to Paul’s silence on Jesus’ life.)

2) Though many books on Alexander’s life are supposed to have been written immediately after his death, no one remains extant. Our sources are several books well into the CE, that is, four to five centuries after Alexander, which disagree among each other no less than the gospels do on Jesus’ life. (Some of them, like Plutarch, made such self-dismissing claims as to pretend that Alexander was a descendant of Heracles.)

3) No carbon-14 has determined that any coin or statute or painting of Alexander was ever made during his life. All of them could possibly be late representations of the Hellenistic myth, much as like representations of Zeus or whatever other ancient Greek myth.

4) His purported adventure from Macedonia to India might have been a collective work of Macedonians generals (Ptolemy, Seleucus, et cetera), possibly during more than a generation, who established Hellenistic kingdoms wherever they crossed over.

5) There is no proof that Sykander, Ishkander or Eskander, whose recollections have been found in Central Asia, was Alexander himself but one of those Macedonian generals.

6) The name Alexander is most suspect. It in Greek means “a man who protects,” a “protector.” Such a name as “Protector,” in different languages, has been frequently used by Indo-European conquerors. Alexandria would so be nothing other than “Protectorstown,” a common name for the capitals of such local kingdoms as established by the Macedonian generals.

The theory that the collective work of many Alexanders was done by one, mythical man, was contrived by a novelist, Timages, who fancied fictitious accounts by Ptolemy, Aristobulus, Nearchus, and Onesicritus (all of them, Macedonian generals). Upon Timagenes’ work much more fantasy was displayed later on.

Two thousand years afterward, the theory has an untestable historical core.

neilgodfrey

Does this mean that the "historical core" of Jesus is 'established' by a triple method of:

1. assuming that literature about such a character within a certain time frame is a priori grounds for assuming such a person existed; and

2. assuming that the type of character that existed is established by removing from that literature whatever is said about him that is implausible or impossible; and

3. assuming that if there is no other evidence that disproves that the character left over from steps 1 and 2 existed, then we can take that character as "the historical core"?


Is that a fair summary?


Neil Godfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com

Ben C Smith

That might be one way, if done correctly (and if the literature in step one can lay claim to being contemporaneous or nearly so; is that what you meant by within a certain time frame?). I think there are other ways too.

Ben.

krosero

This is an argument from contempt and is not worth discussing.

But what would you say to this? Over at this thread Earl Doherty and others among us are discussing the layers of Q. You know the deal: what was the first layer, or one might say "the core", of Q.

Stephen Carlson uses the word "nucleus":

What would you say to that process as a way of discovering what was first set down in writing?

What would you say to that process as a way of discovering what the earliest traditions were?

What would you say to that process as a way of discovering what the earliest Christians were saying (i.e., what any POSSIBLE witnesses to Christ were saying)?

What would you say to trying to discern the earliest and latest traditions in the Gospels, even the New Testament, as a whole?

Certainly Doherty does it, no less than other Biblical scholars: he tells us what was the earliest layer (a heavenly Christ in Paul's original compositions, and in the first layer of Q), and what was in the later layers represented by the Q2, Q3, the Gospels, interpolations into Paul (the earthly Christ).

The Testimonium problem is like that, too. We all agree that there must have been an interpolation, but people disagree on the extent on the earliest layer, ie, the layer written by Josephus.

What about it, are these legitimate methods? Or do they deserve contempt too?

Kevin Rosero