Men as Gods

yeah, i read a book on the subject. its called "jesus and the lost goddess" by freke and gandy. its claim is that jesus was never real and that he was made up by philosophers who were fusing pagan and jewish ideals. these ppl were called Gnostic Christians.

to summerize the book: the jesus tale appears to be a fusion of the moses story (with the escape to egypt, parting of the red sea vs walking on water, deliverance out of physical/spiritual slavery etc) and the mystery religions of mythras and isis (the "lost goddess" was supposed to be both mary madalene and the virgin at once- both being a metaphor for a soul on its way to redemption). the authors say that this jesus religion existed before 1 AD, but after a while people started believing it was real because a part of the religion's initiation requires telling the neophyte that the stories are true and then later denying this once he gets to a higher level in the church. these believers then rewrote or created scriptures and post-dated them to further their agenda. ultimately the "literalist" christians (those who said jesus was real) outnumbered the gnostic ones. Constantine became a christian and made it the official roman religion for politicial reasons (which is surely true) and then the church killed the gnostics.

some of their texts still exist! find the Nag Hammadi library!

of course, ive read counter-arguments by secular historians saying that the gnostics were a product of 400 AD (the time of constantine) and that they were indeed the ones who altered ancient texts. and ive read other people say that the gnostics actually believed in their religion (which is fundamentally different from modern christianity), and it was not metaphorical.

Amaleq13

Paul's letters appear to meet those conditions.

What conditions are required for "explicitly mythical"?

GakuseiDon

Any examples of writings you would regard as expressing a "mythic" perspective, from any of the literature around or before the time of Christ? Homer ties the Trojan war with kings who actually lived (Agememnon), though I don't think he actually dates it.

andrewcriddle

Paul appears to be speaking of events (the death resurrection and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus) which have happened recently in the lifetime of people still alive at the time of writing.

It may or may not be be possible to interpret Paul otherwise, but that is at least the prima facie obvious way of reading what he says.

More generally Paul's writings were interpreted from soon after they were written by at least most readers as being historical not mythical.

This may not prove that Paul was not mythical but it at least shows he was not 'explicitly mythical' if he was that easy to understand as historical.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

One of my concerns is that I doubt whether there is much material that is genuinely mythical in Doherty's special sense (ie claims about recent events alleged to have occurred in a spiritual realm)

In a somewhat wider sense of mythical (Things genuinely believed to have occurred but not in the sense that ordinary everyday events have occurred) Hesiod would be (probably mostly) mythical so would Pindar so would the 'Homeric Hymns' a lot of the material recorded by Pausanias would be mythical to the people who informed Pausanias, although the question as to how Pausanias privately regarded this material is another matter. Much of the material recorded by Apollodorus would have originally been regarded as mythical but Apollodorus may regard it as basically fiction.


Andrew Criddle

Amaleq13

On the contrary, only the resurrection appearances are described as taking place recently. The death and resurrection are not located in either time or space.

Ah, I was not sufficiently clear. I wasn't suggesting that Paul, himself, qualifed. I was suggesting that Paul's beliefs about a Sacrificed Christ would appear to meet your criteria for "mythical".

But I'm also still curious about what criteria you have in mind with regard to "explicitly mythical".

andrewcriddle

I think there are two sorts of problems with this

a/ detailed textual issues eg Paul's claim that Christ's appearance to him, a few years later than to the other apostles is an 'untimely birth' (literally an abortion) probably implies that the gap between the resurrection of Christ and the appearance to Paul is much larger than the gap for the other appearances,large enough to be a problem for Paul's status as an apostle. (Even if this is pushing the menaing of the word too far if the resurrection has no clearly defined time it is unclear why there should be a tight time range for appearances witnessing to said resurrection. )

b/ Paul's thought in general. For Paul the death and resurrection of Christ is centrally an event in a series of events stretching through time. The death and resurrection ends the period of law as instituted by Moses and sets up a new basis for humanity to relate to God. It may be formally possible that Paul held that God had changed the basis of man's relation to him by sending Christ to die 'when the time had fully come' at some time in the past a few centuries ago and had only very recently got round to revealing to humanity that the rules had been changed some time ago. But it is hardly probable.



I may have expressed myself badly. I meant that Paul cannot have been an unambiguous proponent of a mythical Jesus or he would not have been so frequently understood by his early readers to believe in a historical Jesus.

I thought that my criteria were straightforward. There are various writers some early like Ignatius for whom it would be difficult to doubt their belief in a historical Jesus, I was asking which writers groups etc make their belief in a mythical Jesus difficult to duobt in the same way.

Andrew Criddle

Rick Sumner

I can't speak for andrewcriddle, I however, would delight to see somewhere that states something akin to "this took place in the spiritual realm." Paul was certainly capable of saying such a thing, see 2Cr.12.2-4. Why doesn't he? Why, for that matter, doesn't anyone else? Greek had perfectly good terminology for it, and Paul was clearly familiar with that terminology. Why didn't he use it?

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Toto

2 Cor. 12:2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know--God knows. 3 And I know that this man--whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows-- 4 was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.

This shows Paul speaking only indirectly about what happened in the third heaven, with references to "things that man is not permitted to tell." It is hardly an advertisement for Paul's willingness to speak about a spiritual realm in plain language!

Rick Sumner

The third heaven isn't a spiritual realm?

You are kidding, right?

"Willingness" has nothing to do with what was said, and there's in truth no defense to make in either direction on it. What I said was "capable."

Regards,
Rick Sumner