Solo

I believe the analysis of the miracles of the Gadarene swine and the Lazarus story will show that Jesus likely performed ritual acts interpreted as magic. As to the "moral lessons", these have been understood more or less since Schweitzer to have been a "community property".

I believe that is wrong. The psychic phenomena that came to be associated with Jesus, were always apprehended by all known varieties of Jesus-professing communities, as contact with the supernatural.

With some qualifications I would agree to that. I am not sure what "devout" means in the context.

He called for repentance and, if Mark 12:25 proceeds from HJ directly, he believed that sex drive is suppressed naturally in the new "psychic" reality of the kingdom. There is no ground on which to claim that Jesus preached avoidance of sex. His preaching asceticism is disclaimed by the arguments his disciples had with the followers of John the Baptist.

Not many scholars today believe that Jesus was "sending missionaries". It's an oblique justification of the proselytic function of the later church.

The "prophetic" elements of self-destruction and the cognitive "hitch" by which such destruction implies the destruction of "the whole world" (hyperbolically), is very familiar to psychiatrists and psychologists. The common diagnostic term for the notions of Armageddon, or the collapse of heavens, with the passing of the individual self is "psychotic annihilation". It is a very common phenomenon. The re-enactments of these irrational compulsive scenarios vary with time and culture: I am writing two days after the events at Dawson College in Montreal.

I agree.

The 'death-like coma' on the cross would have been caused by asphyxiation. Even if he had been resusciated within minutes of its manifesting, the loss of oxygen would have caused irreversible brain damage.

what does the gradual nature of that realization relate to, I wonder

....would have been premature. He was alive, the tale asserts.

What 'error' was that ? He honorably fulfilled his contract with God, agreeing to sacrifice himself for Israel. He suffered on the cross. What was there to expiate ?

I like Kazantzakis better. He does not have to blush because he writes excellent, and moving fiction.

Jiri

J-D

Jiri, thanks for your response.

The general impression I get from your post is that different opinions from those of Graves and Podro are possible on a number of points. This is true, of course. What I would be interested to hear are any grounds for thinking that their position on any point is untenable or dubious or that some other position is superior. I don’t suppose that anything they say must be right just because they say it, but on the other hand I don’t suppose that anything they say must be wrong just because somebody else says something different.

You refer to ‘analysis of the miracle of the Gadarene swine’, so I will try to summarise Graves and Podro’s analysis. They describe it as the oddest story in the Gospels, and offer an explanation of its oddness which depends on a complex misreading. Graves and Podro hypothesise that the original version told only of Jesus expelling the evil spirits from a possessed man (something which can be explained naturalistically as calming a mentally disturbed person) and denying a request from the evil spirits (more mad ravings?) to pass from the man into the swineherds (not the swine). For further explanation, they refer to a passage in Josephus’s Wars (Book 4, Chapter 7, paragraph 5) which describes fighting between people from Gadara and Roman soldiers, in which the Gadarenes were defeated and many of them were driven down a slope into water. They further hypothesise that somebody familiar with the event described by Josephus wrote in the margin of an early version of the Gospel an account of it, saying that the evil spirits must not have gone away after all and blaming them for the impulse that affected the Gadarenes at the same place so that they attacked the Romans at the same place ‘where these swine were herded in the time of Jesus, but afterwards flying away, were driven down to the waterside where a prodigious number were drowned’. Later, their hypothesis continues, somebody incorporated a misreading of this marginal note into the body of the text to produce the version later canonised. Now I know that there is no way of knowing that precisely this happened, and I don’t think Graves and Podro are suggesting that there is. I think they are suggesting that something like this could have happened, and that something like this is more plausible than supposing either that the miracle actually happened as recorded or that some writer fabricated it in its recorded form out of nothing at all.

You also refer to the Lazarus story. The key features of Graves and Podro’s approach to this are easily summarised. They suggest that the original story was an account of how Jesus failed to raise Eliezer (Lazarus), and that the conversion to a miracle story was facilitated by the transposition of some details of an account of how Jesus himself came alive from the tomb.

I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to the moral lessons having been understood as ‘community property’ since Schweitzer. If you mean that Jesus’s moral teachings were not original with him, then Graves and Podro would agree.

I don’t understand your reasons for your position on the supernatural elements, and in particular I don’t understand what you mean by ‘psychic phenomena that came to be associated with Jesus’.

In answer to your question about what Graves and Podro mean by ‘devout’ when they suggest that Jesus preached the Kingdom of Heaven only for devout Jews, the intended meaning of ‘devout’ in this context is ‘scrupulous in the observance of the Jewish Law, both its letter and its spirit’.

For Graves and Podro’s views on Jesus and sex, and Jesus and asceticism, refer to post #10 above.

The reference to ‘missionaries’ means the Twelve Apostles. Graves and Podro’s view is that Jesus saw it as his duty to make sure that his message of repentance was available to all the Jews in the country. The appointment of the Twelve was to assist him in this task. The word ‘missionaries’ does not mean that they were supposed to proselytise, in the sense of seeking converts to their religion (meaning Judaism) among those who were not already followers of it, but only that they were supposed to bring a religious message. I don’t see why this should be an implausible explanation to give for the appointment of the Twelve, and I’m not sure what more plausible explanation there is.

Can you cite medical opinion to support your claim that if Jesus lapsed into a death-like coma he must necessarily have suffered irreversible brain damage? If this is true, it would explode Graves and Podro’s theory on this point, but they seem to have obtained medical opinions as a basis for their theory, in addition to Graves’s own experience in the First World War.

You roll your eyes at the use of the word ‘gradual’ in relation to Jesus’s realisation that the Kingdom of Heaven was not at hand. I’m not quite sure what you’re querying here. What Graves and Podro suggest is that Jesus may have believed, immediately after surviving the crucifixion, that all prophecies had been fulfilled and that God would bring on the Last Days and the Kingdom of Heaven at any moment. The realisation that this was not going to happen any time soon would then have been borne in on him ‘gradually’ with the accumulating passage of time.

You ask what ‘error’ Jesus would have thought he had to expiate, on Graves and Podro’s theory. The error was the supposition that the Last Days and the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand. The failure to come to pass of the prophesied eschatological events would have demonstrated that the time was not ripe for the fulfilment of prophecy and that Jesus erred in attempting to ‘force the hour’. Moreover, this error was the occasion of sin in others, namely Judas’s despair and suicide, and also the actions of those deceived by the false doctrine deliberately preached by Jesus as a provocation (according to the theory which I have attempted to summarise in an earlier post)—Graves and Podro suggest that the two men crucified with Jesus could have been two such, whose violence he would therefore also have had on his conscience.

I haven’t read Kazantzakis, I’m afraid. He may be a better writer than Graves and Podro, and he’s surely a better writer than I am. But the excellence and power to move of his prose are not evidence against the plausibility of other people’s theories.

Diogenes the Cynic

The main problems with the thesis are that some of its key claims lack any evientiary support. What is the evidence that Jesus was descended from David? How could anyone hhave posibly known? Their were no documented genealogies dating back to david at the time. David himself may not have even existed.

Why pollute the hypothesis with a "virgin" apologetic. There is no evidence that any virgin birth tradition existed before Matthew and no reason to "explain" it. There was no prophesy of a Messianic sacrifice and no need to fulfill one. The whole idea that anyone could survive a crucifixion in a "death-like trance" is ridiculous, shows no understanding of how crucifixion kills (hint: anyone who is unconscious suffocates immediately) and that whole scenario is found on a completely unnecessary desire to provide a naturalistic explanation for an event (a perceived "resurrection" by Jesus' direct followers) for which there is reason to believe ever happened.

I know some of this stuff served as the basis for Robert Graves' novel, King Jesus, but it involves a lot of specious (and outdated) scholarship.

J-D

Diogenes, thank you for your response.

The canonical text says that Jesus was descended from David. Either some author made this up out of whole cloth, or some author based this on something. There’s no direct evidence of basis for the story, but there’s also no direct evidence for its fabrication.

Your point that David may not have existed is well-taken, but on reflection I don’t think it alters the essence of the case. The existence of the kingdom of Judah and of its later kings is independently confirmed, and we know that in later times they were believed to have been descended from David. The traditional genealogy of the Japanese Imperial family is believed by modern scholars to be fictitious in its earlier parts, but historical in its later parts. If we reinterpret ‘Davidic descent’ to mean not ‘descent from David’ but ‘descent from one of those families traditionally accepted as descended from David’, I don’t see that anything material is changed. It is meaningful to refer to people of Jesus’s time (and since) as ‘Levites’ without necessarily assuming that there ever was such a person as Levi.

There must be an explanation for the virgin birth tradition. Even if you suppose that ‘Matthew’ made the story up out of whole cloth, that’s an explanation! And I don’t yet see any reason why that explanation should be considered more plausible than another.

If it’s true that anybody who passed out while on the cross would have suffocated, then I would concede that Graves and Podro’s resurrection scenario is impossible. Is is true? Can you direct me to confirmation? That’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for when I began this thread.

The Nazarene Gospel Restored isn’t a basis for King Jesus: it was written later. King Jesus also uses the death-like trance scenario, but differs in other major respects and admits a supernatural component. In a footnote, Graves says: ‘In 1946, I published a historical novel, King Jesus, written from the standpoint of Agabus, an Alexandrian scholar, in the year 98 A.D … his view does not correspond with ours on many points …’

It’s hardly fair to blame Graves and Podro if their scholarship has been outdated since they wrote. As for me, whether or not their scholarship has been outdated is what I’m trying to find out. And, as I say, if the findings of later studies of crucifixion have been as you indicate, then I’ve got an answer to my question.

Alf

I think it is a simple matter of authority.

If you went to someone and said "Jesus said .... " they would say "Jesus who?". However, if you claimed that Jesus was descended from David that gave him both authority as well as credibility to aspire to some form of kingship - the king of the jews.

Of course, the jews themselves didn't care much about this as such but the christian sub-cult within the jews probably considered this important and then when non-jews were taken into the faith they exported these ideas to them. On the surface these claims meant little to the gentiles but it did give them some aura of signficance and importance. A regular uneducated gentile may have no idea who David was but if the christian then said that this Jesus descended from this David who was the legendary king of the jews, they got some authority. People listened to them.

The virgin birth is a plain and simple import of pagan virgin birth stories and again, a pagan may not care to listen about some Jesus guy but if this guy was born by a virgin then he was special and worth listening to and so the person telling him about this Jesus was also by extension worth listening to.

In short, it doesn't matter that it isn't true and we don't really have to make up stories about rumors of him being descended from David or virgin born etc. Those rumors may at some point appear but it was christians who most likely started them!

The genealogy in Gluke and GMatthew was perhaps not invented by those gospel authors but they were made to "prove" that he was a descendent of David but they do not really prove anything. They start with David in one end and follow historical names that they believed follows the true historical people down and then at the other end you have this Joseph which the story say is the (supposed) father and then a bunch of names in the middle - they couldn't even agree on the father of Joseph! If the gospel authors didn't just make the names up they probably did some "research" in where they asked some fellow christians if they knew who the father of Joseph was etc and then tried to follow the line back to some historical name which they could dig up in official records to prove that he was descendent from a king. As soon as they found a name that happened to match a "known" historical name they considered the problem solved and wrote down the genealogy. No checking or verification involved at all. If they did some checking they would probably have found problems with the supposed father of Joseph as they differ in who that father is. Of course, matthew probably did some adjusting of the line since he made a point of there being exactly 42 and that is divided in 14+14+14 so he probably removed some names here and there to make it exaclty 14 in each section and if necessary added in some names to ensure this. For mystical and numerological reasons.

Mysticism and numerology has been with christianity since the early days as GMatthew is evidence of. Irenaus' argument of why there should be 4 gospels is also of the same kind.
This is despite the fact that christians in general looked down upon magic and generally had the attitude that only Jesus could do miracles for real - all others was fake! For that strange reason Christians was often on the same side as the sceptics in claiming that a miracle worker was fake. However, their reasoning was completely different. The sceptics thought he was fake because they had natural explaanations to what he did and he did not allow any inspection of what he did by anyone who wasn't faithful believer. The christians thought he was fake because only Jesus could really do miracles and so anyone else had to be fake.

Alf

Amaleq13

IIUC, suffocation is how crucifixion kills the victim and why breaking the legs hastens death. I would think unconsciousness would result in the same loss of support for the rib cage.

Diogenes the Cynic

Crucifixion worked by asphyxiating the victim. The suspension from the arms expanded the abdominal muscles in such a way that it was difficult to exhale. The victim had to repeatedly push himself up with his legs in order to exhale and draw breath. That's why breaking the legs of the victim was considered to be an act of mercy. When he could no longer keep lifting himself up to breathe, he would asphyxiate in minutes or seconds. Obviously an unconscious victim would not be able to actively raise himself up to breath and would suffocate quickly. To lose consciousness on the cross was to die on the cross.

J-D

Well, as I said, that settles it.

Should this information have been available to Graves and Podro? Was it known in 1953?

Amaleq13

Perhaps not. According to this article, recent studies suggest death was not due to asphyxiation but hypovolemic shock if the arms were extended out in the standard representation. Only fixing the arms above the head results in the already-described asphyxiation.

According to the article and assuming they did any research, yes. The author cites studies from 1925, 1936, 1937, and 1949 as supporting the asphyxiation theory.

J-D

But, if the article you cite is correct, these studies cannot have been conclusive. Graves and Podro do not use the term 'hypovolemic shock', but they do refer to shock and to slowing of circulation, which as far as I can see comes to the same thing. So if the recent studies referred to in the link are right, does this reopen the question? Is it then possible that somebody could survive after losing consciousness on the cross? Graves and Podro do cite ancient sources to the effect that death was normally caused by exhaustion and pain, that victims some times lingered for days, and that leg-breaking was not a standard part of the procedure but an additional punishment, and if these things are true they do seem to count against the asphyxiation theory as far as I understand it. But even if death resulted from causes other than asphyxiation, it's still possible that loss of consciousness on the cross could not be survived. Now I don't know what to think. I notice that the linked article refers to the same case recorded by Josephus and cited by Graves and Podro of somebody surviving after being taken down from the cross, but I don't know that that case involved the victim losing consciousness.