jakejonesiv

No traces or clues? They are all over the place! There is scant Historical Jesus in the Pauline epistles, a Jesus exclusively in heaven in Revelation, Hebrews in which the OT Joshua's are to the fore, factions within the Johaniane community that insisted that Jesus had not come in the flesh, a Jesus for which crucifixion is not important in GThomas and Q (if it existed!), a whole array Gnostic Redeemers varying from the Christian to the completely non Christian, the Marcionite version of Jesus as a docetic phantom, etc.

Not to mention the Enochian literature that is so filled with what would become Christian symbolisms it makes the head spin.

You are relying on the proto-orthodox constuction as if it were the only one, when just the opposite is true. And these guys, the Roman Church, had a vested interest in promoting a historical Jesus (hey you can't have Apostolic Succession from "Pope Peter" without starting wit an HJ). In contrast the heretics held a more spiritual and mystical view of Jesus. Oh, and they did caterwall and complain, but to hell with them, they were just heretics. The proto-orthodox won the doctrinal wars, and today we are just buying their spin.

Jake Jones

rlogan

TedM

What you are doing is begging the question: Assuming a historical Jesus along with most of the clearly wrong orthodox religious positions on Christian history, and then using that assumption to "prove" any other position is wrong.

Moreover, it seems each and every point that might conflict with that orthodoxy can't be investigated because there is not enough time for you, or quite frankly - you just don't want to consider it.

Spin offered you proof by contradiction that the assumption you make regarding the existence of a historically notable anti-mythical Jesus movement (or whatever you want to call it) in the first century is a necessary condition for myth.

I have given you an example where in the 20th century with all the modern communications of telephone, television, radio, news media, universal education and literacy, space exploration and satellites - the most important "bishop", if you will, for the Nation of Islam had to actually make a physical pilgrimage to Mecca before he realized what a con man Elijah Muhammed was.

You can't just brush these aside when they negate completely what appears to be so central to your argument.

Although on the one hand you are addressing all the posts directed your way, you are doing so under a pretense that you are actually not holding the positions you emphatically embrace. That is, you do not really hold the positions you hold and therefore do not need to defend them when using them to argue those very positions.

Now come on, TedM. You seem somewhat reasonable here so let's just be honest. You can't have it both ways.

Are you willing to concede that at least two examples have been given that contradict your insistence on "countermovement" being necessary to a mythical scenario?

TedM

I mean traces or clues of a reaction to an original mythical Jesus by those that believed otherwise, or of a reaction to a historical Jesus by those who believed otherwise. Surely you don't think that in the very early days of the movement there coexisted two camps--the historical and the non-historical, right? Do you believe that prior to Mark there was a historical movement? I am assuming that the mythers do not believe that was the case. Therefore I am looking for a reaction/response/opposition to the new paradigm--not examples of a heavenly Jesus. A heavenly Jesus isn't helpful because that is compatible with a historical one also. So is Thomas. So is Gnostic. So is Paul's writings. Only the 1 John example can be construed to be a reaction, from what I can tell..


Yet, since Paul would have been a heretic, I would expect his writings to be banned, not canonized! Do you think they just said "Well it's close enough to a historical Jesus, and he says a few things that were historical, and he sounds so insightful, let's just let him slip in, and pass him off as one of us? Ridiculous, don't you think? The only other possibility I see is that they didn't realize Paul wasn't talking about a HJ, but that seems absurd given the early influence he had--his message would not have been lost to all of his followers so quickly.

ted

TedM

Well, that's a fair criticism. I know nothing about the Ebionites or their leader, and I know nothing about the Malcom X thing, which sounds very questionable. If in each case, you and spin want to present a parrallel to Christianity along these lines, then I'll pay more attention:

1. Strong original belief that the person was not a human being, but had human-like qualities and lived in another sphere doing things that sound like they would have been done on earth

2. Strong opposition to the worship/veneration of this non-person by the culture in which the movement arrived

3. Biographical type story written within 100 years presenting the being as a historical person who actually did things on earth, and not another sphere.

4. Immediate acceptance of the historization of the being, and rejection of the prior conception of the being, without any evidence of such rejection by the non-historical group.

5. Lack of any evidence of refutation by those in the culture than knew the historical presentation was complete fiction, and among whom were many who were strongly opposed to the non-fictional movement too.

6. Strong promotion by the historical group of the writings of the leader of the non-historical group, as opposed to rejection of the movement as an early heresy.

If your examples meet this criteria, then you'll have something worth devoting some time to.

ted

spin

No, sorry, TedM, you are pulling the barbarian on us. You are saying you are ignorant and want to stay that way. I gave you a brief backgrounder for Ebion and it contained references, but you assiduously avoided dealing with the information. You don't want to pay attention. You just keep coming with this silly plausibility line of argument that makes it so you can't separate your position from any work of fiction.

You now want parallels along the lines you dictate. Well, TedM, you can take a hike because you are not entering into a dialogue. You are not checking the information provided. You are not li stening to what people are saying to you.

You are not thinking a bout how information passed around in ancient times, so what you are asking for may not reflect your understanding of your benchmark.

The reason why I mentioned Ebion in the first place was because he was clearly not a real person, but neither was he invented as your imaginary fictional process has you think it. In the case of Ebion, someone made a mistake, considering that the Ebionites must have had an eponymous leader called Ebion. Easy mistake, as most sects were named after their leaders. You know, Jesusites, Valentinians, Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Sabellianists, Arians, Manicheans, etc. (Other names were more descriptive, such as Docetists, or Monophysites.)

However, once we had the spontaneous birth of Ebion, there was an inexorable development behind the scenes which gave him bones and flesh and even a birth place.

This is not a matter of fiction. This is the ugly reality of living tradition. The Didache talks of itinerant preachers wandering around getting food and support from telling their stories. Probably the better the story it is the better the hospitality. Then there are infant gospels, collected acts of Freddie or Wayne.

Still working under your mind-reading abilities for people of two thousand years ago. You don't know the situation behind the development of the texts. You don't know what the people thought or what motivated them in regard to their beliefs and understandings.

Let's face it: the first account we have of Jesus is certainly not biographical. Would you call Paul's work biographical? I wouldn't even call Mark much of a biography. Jesus is initiated. Jesus is tested by Satan. He gets disciples. Magic, miracles, and mumbo-jumbo, ending in the passion story. Some biography.

Then when did Jesus live? There are Rabbinical references to a Jesus 100 years earlier than the common datings for Jesus, which puts Paul's having spoken to people who were witnesses seem like urban legend. Besides, we can't date Paul in a trustworthy manner. Have we not built a house of cards each step unsafe and dependent on earlier steps?

Your assumptions about chronology are questionable at best. So are your understandings of what you consider must have been what happened in your make believe pre-christianity theology.

What you seem to be doing in these steps of yours is throwing hurdles in front of yourself so as to block your progress in an investigation. YOU are not arguing with me.

Black and white dichotomies are of no help in understanding tradition development. "Not real" doesn't need to mean "fictional". Would you call Ebion fictional? Did someone sit down and construct him? (Do make the effort to understand the implications of Ebion, the non-existent founder of the Ebionites.) Did Tertullian write about Ebion, believing that he was fictional?? Surely Tertullian, or someone before him, heard about the Ebionites and assumed they had a leader called Ebion.

How did we end up with the birth narratives in the gospels? How did we get the post-resurrection material?? You can simply believe that they really happened and we would having nothing more to discuss, or you can conclude that these are developments from the tradition. Traditions develop. We can't hope to be definite about a lot of that development because it happens outside the material evidence we have. Now, it might be based on real events or not. We have, and they had, no way to tell. They simply accepted what their people said -- until they stopped being their people, in the case of heresies.

Hopefully, by now, you have the idea that I think your prerequisites don't reflect reality. You support the invented idea of a "historical group" (and a "non-historical group"). I don't. We find traditions, often competing, that we can't get behind. We can see them developing in places, but not enough to get a full picture. Clearly there was no "historical group" versus a "non-historical group". There could have been a figure of the model of Ebion, who would lead his people to the promised land, a new Joshua, or more likely at the time, Jeshua. Once there is momentum for the figure, he will grow like Frankenstein's monster, having parts collected from various phases of the tradition development.

You won't get examples to meet those criteria, TedM, because your criteria don't seem to reflect much of anything that I know about the past. You also require someone to make the unique developments in christianity not unique. That's done through setting up straw men.


spin

rlogan

Come now, TedM. This is hilarious.

It took you longer to compose this than it would have to google up some basic information on the Nation of Islam and it's ridiculous garbage about the Evil scientist who created white people out of black people on whatever island it supposedly was...

You cannot fabricate an entire list of precise conditions that reality must meet in order to even start looking at it in preference to your admitted complete speculation.

And to say it "sounds very questionable"? My, what a skeptic we are!

I will admit being annoyed by the coy pretense that the church did not destroy a good deal of the early literature that was inconsistent with what became canon.

What we have - gospel of Thomas and so forth - only exists through very fortunate finds of documents the church suppressed.

As it stands, the Pauline Christ vs the gospel Christ is a prima facie case for the discrepancy in spiritual vs historical versions. Only that much which is not outright contradiction can be cobbled together as canon. And so we do indeed have this difference, but one glossed over, in the canon itself. Remnants of the differences in thought and historical evolution in "Christ".

Your condition is essentially to demand that the canon itself have outright contradictory claims and argue against itself on the most basic of points.

As far as the extrabiblical record there is virtually no mention of Christians at all, let alone details about what any particular strain of them believed. So what you want out of the first century simply does not exist - and you know it.

What exists in the second you dismiss because, well - it disagrees with you.

So in short, you seem to devote an awful lot of hours constructing speculations and devising the most highly stylized "proofs" history must give you before actually reading any history.

TedM

It didn't take long to compose my list..

Why should I look at something that apparantly isn't even comparable since you didn't try to show the parallels?

This is a joke. You imply that the church destroyed the heretical documents, even though the church documents reference them at length, but that they not only didn't destroy the Pauline heresy, but actually adopted it into their canon! Do you realize how ridiculous a theory that is?

No, it is to demand the canon not embrace a heretical philosophy as though there was no heresy. Such an embracing seems very unreasonable to me given their treatment and the record that still exists within church documents of other early heresies. If not, I'd like a comparable example.


I don't know what you are talking about. If you have examples of early writings--1st or 2nd century that basically say the Pauline movement is what Doherty claims, or that allude to the inevitable clash between the Pauline followers and the historical teacher/healer movement feel free to share..

The point is that there is no good comparison in history because the theory doesn't make any sense. I gave 6 conditions, and as far as I can tell you couldn't meet even a couple of them.

ted

TedM

It is fiction. And the process of tradition.

Look. I can accept the idea of a preacher/healer type that Paul interpreted one way and as time passed traditions grew until many were solidified and added to in GMark. However, that's not the scenario I am arguing against here. I am arguing against the following:

1. Paul's Christianity was the first, dealing with a non-human spirit who 'lived' in another sphere. He didn't live on earth recently, he had no disciples, he wasn't a healer, he wasn't a teacher. All he did was 'live' without sin, die and rise again--all revealed to Paul and others through the scriptures and perhaps Hellenistic influences.

2. Paul's Christianity was the main form until Mark came along and introduced a Jesus who lived on earth at a fairly recent point in time, had disciples, was a healer and a teacher, and physically died on earth.

It appears to me that we have scant evidence of an evolution from Paul's Jesus to Mark's Jesus: Q, the Didache, GThomas, etc.. are all very questionable in terms of dating. It may be that these preceded Mark and had some following.. but that isn't the point. The point is that Doherty argues for a non-historical Jesus in the beginning of the Christian movement and the 'myth' camp likes to argue that GMark 'created' a real live teacher healer Jesus--a creation that replaced--without a peep--the Pauline Jesus. That is the dichotomy I am arguing against. IF you don't accept the premise, then there is no point to responding further.


Paul's writings are a lot more credible than the Rabbinical ones, written several centuries AD..It doesn't matter if Paul's Jesus lived in another sphere 100BC...What matters is that his was the first type of Jesus (according to Doherty), replaced later by a very different Jesus--that's the premise. It appears you don't accept the premises above. IF so, we are done.

Yes, it is 'possible' that a Jesus with two different origins--one on earth and another in another earthlike spere--co existed and developed together, but then it seems odd that none of the literature of the two camps seems to reference the other. I don't buy it. It seems much more likely that one either 1. one philosophy of origins existed in the beginning and was overtaken by another later on (which leaves the same problem of lack of evidence for a clash) or 2. there was no significant debate about the place Jesus carried out his activities or what those activities primarily were because there never was a Doherty-like Jesus.


It seems to me that the Doherty model requires that there would have been at some point. "Jesus lived on earth and was teacher/healer/well known" vs "Jesus didn't live on earth and had no following" is just too basic a difference for a Messiah figure to assume a smooth evolution of tradition.

ted

spin

Fiction deals with the notion of authorial intent, a concept which you ignore totally.

Fiction is when an author sets out to write something which he presents as plausible narrative though he knows it is not based on any direct events or people that the world has known, though some of the background events and people may have existed.

Paul claims that his was just one gospel amongst many. How many of these different concepts could have been absorbed into the fabric of a generalising tradition which encapsulated many if not all in a fledgling heterodox collection of theologies?

Does anyone whose position you oppose think that Paul was writing in a vacuum?

That's right. The chronology is not transparent and you can't make the relationships between the works clearly so you can't generalise what christianity should or should not have been or done. Somehow though you do.

Let's put this another way. You questioned a datum that I put forward with regard to when John the Baptist died. You were clearly at that stage interested in historical research of some sort. It seems now that you have withdrawn from history and are intent not to deal with what we were talking about from the beginning, but move the conversation into safer ground for you and deal with blacks and whites.

Don't waste your time with such subjectivity.

We were done, I guess, TedM, when you started shifting ground away from where the conversation started.

Because you invent two camps, rather than see how Paul may have been part of a tradition which allowed heterodoxy. Just think of today where many christians don't accept the empty tomb, where many don't accept the divinity of Jesus, where many don't accept the resurrection as being of the body, etc. Now think back then at a time when there were no control organisations which told people what the theology was.

I wouldn't buy your straw man either. But it is only a creation of your mind. Paul's concept of Jesus need not have been clear to his followers who were not theologians. They didn't have a notion of historicity, as you want them to have. They believed what they heard.

You don't show any methodology to get to this conclusion. You show that your tools are too blunt to discern what is historical from what is merely plausible.

The people who led the religions may have known what their territory was and Paul gives you a small window on that, but his flock could be led astray without difficulty because they didn't have the discernment you want them to have had.

What Paul would have understood would have been much more in focus than what his followers would have believed. What happens when Paul's ideas get into the hands of the Greek historico-philosophical schools of thought?

In Paul's time what was necessary was to believe in Jesus. That was sufficient. The what, the why and the how wasn't necessary, because the end was near, wasn't it? You desire for nice packaged concepts in the minds of early believers I don't think matches the state of flux at the time. You have seen so many kooks and closed minds holding various shades of christianity today. The world was much more accommodating then, as the vast range of Jewish thought indicates (and as Paul hints at), and there were no theological police to excommunicate you.


spin

spin

We can reconstruct some through the various refutations, but we don't have the texts themselves. All of Porphyry's were to have been burnt. Very few have come down to us. There are references to early (non-mainstream) gospels which haven't survived. Where's your beef?


spin