TedM

Before his descension, and after his death. I thought it was clear I was referring to his life in the flesh.


Romans 5:15,17,18,19

I don't know. The verse is too vague to conclude that those opponents claimed Paul's Jesus was a figment of people's imagination.



The lack of a knowledge of an actual historical Jesus during Paul's day doesn't imply that there was no opposition to the idea of a Messiah-not-on-earth. Do you really think there wouldn't have been Jews in opposition to the idea of a Messiah who didn't fulfill their conception of scriptural prophecies of a Messiah-king in the line of David?


Then why does ACTS make such a big deal about how the early Christians searched the scriptures to prove that the man who was crucified had been the Messiah? Why were docetists considered heretics? It sounds to me like historicity was a real issue to people of that time. Historicity clearly isn't a "modern issue" only.

ted

Toto

You misinterpret most mythicist theories by saying that the mythical Jesus was a figment of people's imaginations. The MJ was a real, important force in their religion.

Because no man who was actually crucified was involved. You are inserting a crucified man into what the NT actually says. Early Christians searched the Jewish scriptures to discover the savior. If there had actually been a crucified teacher in recent memory, why look for him in a book?

Perhaps it would help if you quoted the exact words from Acts.

Because they had the incorrect answer to the question of the real substance of the savior.

Jesus clearly didn't fulfil the prophecies, except for the peculiar way that Christians read the scriptures (Luke 24:45). Why don't we have a record of their opposition from the first century?

TedM

I'm going to bed and will respond tomorrow.

spin

Perhaps a clearer question might have been:

"Where does Paul portray Jesus as human?"

Splitting hairs? What about the man/men/angel/angels who were at the tomb to announce the resurrection? Were they human? What about the man who wrestled with Jacob in Gen 32:24? The LXX calls him a man.


spin

spin

A more relevant question should be

"when were docetists considered heretics?"

I asked a while back how there could be such "heresies" when there was an established orthodoxy, given that the heretics were true believers in their "heresies". The Arian heresy was a heresy only because the issue had no significance prior to when the conflict broke out. The resolution of the conflict determined the orthodox position in the matter which was heterodox before, if even seriously considered.

Could the docetists have formed their theology after the imposition of orthodoxy regarding the humanity of Jesus? I don't think so.


spin

Clivedurdle

When - if ever - has xianity been historical? Fully god fully man?

TedM

The question of relevance is "Which people?". I claim we would expect Paul to have opponents that would have accused Paul of simply making a cosmic Jesus up out of his imagination. This could be those who believed Jesus had actually walked the earth, or those who didn't know of a historical Jesus but believed the Messiah would walk the earth, or those who simply thought Paul was a nut case and didn't like him and what his gospel was attempting to do.


The "pre-Paul" part of Acts is steeped in belief in historicity, frequently referring to Jesus as the man they had known, who was crucified. Peter is portrayed a number of times as using the scriptures to prove/support his faith in Jesus as the Christ position. One example is 2:22-36 Note how important the history of Jesus was to Peter:

It's the same theme in another early occasion, 3:17-21:

And again in 4:10-11, he uses scripture to support his historical Jesus as Messiah. Again in 4:25-26. Again in 7:52.

Even in the Pauline section the scriptures were used to prove a historical Jesus as Christ (20:35 quotes Jesus' words)

Acts 18:28
for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.[/quote]

Given this portrayal of such a strong need to support an alleged historical crucified Jesus as Messiah with scriptural ARGUMENTS, how can you imply that the issue would not have been important to anyone who isn't "modern" with your claim?:



Why would that matter if they only believed in what he said or did?



Just answer the question:
Do you really think there wouldn't have been Jews in opposition to the idea of a Messiah who didn't fulfill their conception of scriptural prophecies of a Messiah? If there were Paul's and his followers going around saying that the Messiah had come in a parallel universe, been crucified, and rose, and is now appearing to people, would there have been opposition, and would it have been directed to Paul?

In Acts the opposition is so strong against Jesus as a human Messiah. I would expect even MORE opposition against Jesus as a cosmic Messiah.



Sure, that is a possibility spin. However, since Paul doesn't say he wasn't really a man, it is legitimate to call this a silence on his part which one might not expect. In the LXX and other examples you gave, it was clear where those events took place.



I don't know why not. IF a man had lived and believed to have been part God himself, I see no logical reason to conclude that a branch of belief couldn't have sprouted which said that that man really only "appeared" to be a man.

It seems to me that part of the labeling of docetics as heretics is in defence of the gospels as historically accurate and not just spiritually accurate--ie he REALLY WAS born of Mary, he really did suffer on the cross, as portrayed..

ted

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera and Toto,

I think we have to talk about genres. Narrative genres generally have set rules which are clear to people knowledgeable about the genres, but not so clear to others. At the edges, genres, over time, can blend to form new genres.

If I may use movies as an example, there is a genre known as film noir.


Now, almost every movie theoretician has a different definition of what the basic elements of film noire are and therefore categorize it differently.Here is a general description from wikipedia:


Under this definition films like Renoir's "La Bete Humane" Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly" would probably be included as examples of flim noir. Yet one could suggest that "La Bete Humane" is more correctly classed as psychological thriller, "Rebecca" as modern gothic romance and "Kiss me Deadly" as anti-hero, hard-boiled detective-mystery fiction. On the other hand, films like "Detour," "D.O.A." and "Double Indemnity" seem like more straight forward examples of film noir. If one wishes to use a strict definition, there were probably only about one hundred films made between 1945-1955 that clearly should be labeled film noir, with a somewhat looser definition, one could probably find a thousand and even Brian DePalma's "Black Dahlia" which was released last year would qualify.

Genres also change over time. March of Time newsreels in the 1930's were considered documentary films, yet they were often carefully scripted before shot and used a great deal of staged or restaged footage. For example, a script would be written and Shirley Temple would be told by a director how to act, what to do and what to say for a specific newsreel. How does this differ from a scripted fictional story that she acted in. In a certain sense it does in that she was playing Shirley Temple, Hollywood child star in the newsreels, which did in some sense resemble her true life situation; while in the fictional narratives she was given different names and positions in society. Yet both the documentaries and fiction films both served to give false impressions of reality and in some sense worked together to reinforce them.

The novel "Zorba" is certainly fiction, but it is filtered through a zen-communist sensibility and the journalistic realism of the 19th century French novels of Flaubert and Balzac combined with the psychology-minded erotic playfulness of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. The film "Zorba" uses documentary techniques like handheld camera (especially the early boat scenes) and zooming. These were influenced by French New Wave cinema, which was influenced by the documentary techniques of newscameramen and home movies.

We can trace the development of the Jesus character through a number of genres:

In the Pauline epistles and Revelation, Jesus Christ appears to be more or less another name for Yahweh. In the sayings gospels, we are getting a collection of wiseman sayings, like the collection of sayings of Chinese philosopher Confucius. In Mark and John, for the most part, we are getting Jesus as a prophet possessed by the Holy Spirit, as in the later Hebrew Scriptures. Luke seems to be a real attempt to historicize the Jesus character using material mainly from Josephus. It seems quite similar to the historical biography of Appolonius of Tyana which may have been his model, and allows us to date the work to the reign of Septimius Severus. Acts of the Apostles seems to be a rewrite of a prior work detailing the adventures of the prophets Peter and John. The Jesus character is added briefly to the beginning of the work and the John character transforms suddenly in the middle into Paul, but as a whole it seems close to the historical fiction of Titus Petronius' "Satyricon".
So, at this stage, Jesus has appeared to go from a purely fictional character to a character that is part fiction, part historical. It is not until the Fourth century and Eusebius that we find him being made into a fully historical character. Although, Eusebius' History of the Church has to be considered a special genre of history in itself.

Thus the transformation is not directly from fiction to historical. What we see is that the Jesus character goes through a slow, nearly 300 year process of movement from simply a name into more and more realistic mixed genres until he becomes a historical character.

I believe that this is the same process that all mythological characters who were believed to be historical went through. This may be considered an anti-Euhemerist notion. Kings were not turned into Gods over time, but Gods were turned into Kings over time or met with kings by insertion into more and more realistic literary genres.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Solo

ad 1] Which certain events happened, Ted ? When did the Christian community accept them as factual and what does that mean in the understanding of the early believer communities ?

ad 2] It has been repeated several times here that the idea of historicity of Jesus as a recognized approach to the subject originates in the Enlightment. The thinkers in antiquity simply did not have the cognitive analytical tools to operate with such a term.

ad 3] I have just run a post to show that one can make a case, based on a psychological model, that Jesus was in fact invented. Within that scenario, the tipping of the hat would be rather obvious. Jesus, the God's one and only Son, was seen as insane by the contemporaries to whom God did not reveal (privately) the truth about his suffering. (Mk 3:21, 3:28-30, Mt 10:24, 24:26, Lk 4:23, Jn 7:19-20, 8:48, 10:20, 1 Cr 1:18-31). The way this would be read by most competent psychotherapists today, is that in the early communities used Jesus as a figure of speech to express hope that their own perceived insanity was in fact a deeper knowledge of the universe and revelation of God's plan for humanity.


What would these unspoken reasons be ? I wonder. Schweitzer was a very blunt and straightforward man.

I think it's more likely that you do not understand the psychiatric issue, that he understood very well (BTW, the book cited was his medical doctoral dissertation).

The ego eimi (I am) phrases in John are without a doubt ideas of reference, which presence defines paranoid mentation. In the diagnostic etiology available to Schweitzer such ideas most frequently point to dementia praecox (schizophrenia) or manic-depression (bi-polar disorder).

So right here, you have the most compelling reason for inventing Jesus. The messianic self-consciousness, even in antiquity was perceived as abnormal. No historical individual could sustain it without being dismissed as a fool (or a tyrant, if the self-glorification occured in a ruler).

Jiri

TedM

Which events? I suspect Jesus preached, had followers, maybe was seen as a miracle-worker, was crucified, and later believed to have been resurrected. I think those were all immediately accepted as factual. The gospels were likely also mostly accepted soon after they were written, accept for the differences the other gospels attempted to correct. Fast acceptance makes sense: The gospels simply "fleshed out" the basics--adding more teachings, more miracles, more details. And, fast acceptance is attested to by the evidence. The gospels were all written within a generation of each other. The fast acceptance is strong evidence for a historical core.

How arrogant that sounds! Thinkers in antiquity were not any less smart than us. Do you not recall the early verses of Luke?

Sounds to me like the author is expressing a desire to reflect accurate, actual history.


Sure, anything's possible. It just doesn't do much to explain the historical core evidence, how it was presented, and how it was widely and quickly corroberated.


I meant "unstated" by you. There may have been other reasons to reject John than the use of the first person.



Or, an eyewitness is relating what he experienced.. duh.

Who would dismiss them as a fool? Perhaps someone who was actually concerned with historicity, accuracy, and truth? But, don't you say that such people didn't exist back then? Doesn't your theory require internal inconsistency?

Yes, these people were desparate. The Jewish were obsessed with the coming of the Messiah. It wasn't an abnormal thing at all. In fact, it very well could explain how "normal" people came fairly easily to believe in a historical Jesus as the Messiah. Isn't it easier to believe that an interesting--perhaps imbalanced--man took on a Messiac-type role that others latched onto, than the idea that people invented a Messiah out of thin air and then believed their own invention?

ted