Julian

What's special about it is that the deceivers do not necessarily deny Jesus but deny him as coming 'in the flesh.' That makes the statement look like an anti-docetic polemic. It could also just be that the deceivers deny Jesus, flesh or otherwise.

Here it is in Greek:

οτι πολλοι πλανοι εξηλθον εις τον κοσμον οι μη ομολογουντες ιησουν χριστον ερχομενον εν σαρκι ουτος εστιν ο πλανος και ο αντιχριστος

I am no expert but the ερχομενον εν σαρκι (coming in [the] flesh) seems unnecessary if the point was simply to say that they deny Jesus. It is reasonable to assume that the flesh is the issue here which shows how early Docetism really was, and how much of a real problem.

Julian

Didymus

Whether the earthly Jesus was made of flesh, or of spirit alone, was a hot topic. Ignatius of Antioch (95) makes the distinction often, and in a very direct way. From his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans:

Let no man deceive himself. Unless he believes that Christ Jesus has lived in the flesh, and shall confess His cross and passion, and the blood which He shed for the salvation of the world, he shall not obtain eternal life, whether he be a king, or a priest, or a ruler, or a private person, a master or a servant, a man or a woman.

If Doherty's right, woe be unto Paul!!!

And not only that. It's truly remarkable that there is no assertion in any ancient church writing - or any heretical writing, for that matter - that anyone thought Jesus existed in an "intermediary sphere." Nonetheless, the docetics had in common with Doherty's Paul the notion that Jesus was not a man. And those - like Paul? - who insisted that Jesus did not live as an earthly man came in for a lot of disparagement in the second and third century. The sphere in which he lived had nothing to do with it; the problem was that a spirit being could not, it was believed, have suffered as a man.

Seems like the church fathers profoundly misunderstood Paul. Or gave him a pass, for some unknown reason. Otherwise, would they have canonized writings that were premised on the belief that Jesus didn't live on earth as a man? Would they have revered a man - Paul - whose cohorts-in-denial, gnostics and docetics, they reviled as "beasts in the shape of men"?

Seems more than a little unlikely to me, but MJ theory seems to have great appeal nonetheless.

(Of course, the whole question can be sidestepped by insisting that Ignatius' epistles were late forgeries, or, for that matter, that everything scholars date before Nicea was actually forged after Nicea. Such assertions are proof that Andy Kaufmann is alive and well and studying Christian origins.)

Didymus

GakuseiDon

Why? Didn't Doherty's Paul believe in all that? According to Doherty, Jesus didn't die as a spirit in a spirit realm, but as someone "in the flesh" in a spirit realm.

Didymus

I dunno; was the spirit realm populated by human beings?

I can't seem to find enough in either Paul or other writings to tell one way or the other. If MJ was the core concept of early Christian belief, it's amazing how it was never openly discussed. Nothing was written to explain how it worked, and there was nothing written, pro or con, even to suggest that it was prevalent in early Christian circles. It was a fundamental understanding of the nature of Christ; it was the christology of the first Christian theologian and missionary, yet, in a world obsessed with christologies, it was never attributed to him nor was it ever argued.

Instead, it sank without a trace. Odd. Very odd indeed. (Musta been a mighty efficient conspiracy!)

Maybe I've got Doherty wrong. Doesn't he have Paul regarding Jesus as consisting of a substance similar to matter, but not actually flesh? In other words, a spirit being, just like the gnostic Jesus?

The early orthodox church writers make a big deal about how Jesus suffered the way human beings suffer. Taking a common sense view, they insisted, contra the docetics, that only a human being could partake of human suffering.

If Paul and his congregations believed that beings in the spirit world, e.g., a sublunar Jesus, suffered in the same manner as humans, it seems like he would argued the point, especially since, as we can see elsewhere, there were strong winds against that view. But he never said a peep.

Didymus

GakuseiDon

I don't think that Earl has committed either way on that, though he has hinted at it: he noted that "born of a woman" was said of Dionysus, who was born of a mortal woman. So there may well have been humans up there as well.

Earl would argue that such beliefs existed till the end of the 2nd C CE, e.g. Tatian, Minucius Felix. But I agree it is odd in that case that there is no evidence that the anti-heresy writers drew attention to such beliefs, ESPECIALLY since those "Jesus myth" apologists were writing to the Emperors of the day on behalf of Christians.

No -- Paul believed that Jesus came "in the flesh". I think Earl has the AoI saying that Jesus was a spirit though, like the gnostics.

Didn't Paul talk about "those who preach another Jesus"? (IMHO the whole point is moot anyway, since there is no evidence that people thought the way that Earl is claiming in the first place)

ynquirer

The critical point as regard both 1 John and 2 John is one of emphasis.

You may say that Odysseus was wounded, that is, he was damaged in his flesh, and on those grounds you may further say that a mythical person does have flesh. But such a person does not have flesh of the same kind, so to speak, as an earthly person does. Odysseus does need flesh in order for the story about him to be meaningful. If in listening to the story someone asks, “Did Odysseus have flesh?” the story teller would answer, “Of course, how could he possibly be wounded otherwise?”

Yet if one insisted, “You must with all your hearts believe that Odysseus had flesh” - the interlocutors would say, “Please don’t be such a boring commentator of the Odyssey.”

And if one said, "You are committed to believe that Dionysus, who was born of a woman, had flesh" - another one would say, "Why are you interested in such an uninteresting quality of Dionysus as his flesh?"

This is the reason why both Dr. Lieu’s translation of the text according to which the writer is not asking for a profession of faith in the fleshly condition of Jesus but just for a profession of faith in Jesus, and Jakes Jones IV’s interpretation that the flesh is Paul’s (or even other followers’) are more interesting views – though erroneous, in IMO – that simply begging the question by saying that the flesh might have been in an spiritual sphere.

If Jesus' flesh was so interesting for the writter of the two epistles of John, it is not because of flesh being a taken-for-granted quality of a mythical man, but a token of his life on earth.

GakuseiDon

Yes, IMHO the issue was how can the Logos, perfect and unchangeable, be contained in impermanent and corruptible flesh? I like the suggestion that someone on the board put forward: that the "anti-Christs who denied that Christ came in the flesh" in the John epistles weren't the gnostics but the adoptionists, who believed that the Christ spirit descended into Jesus at baptism, birth or crucifixion. I'm not sure whether such a case could be proved along that line, but it makes sense to me. IMO the early Jewish church was adoptionist, including Paul, but as the church began to absorb pagan content, the notion of a Christ who came in perfected flesh due to a divine birth became popular. But the gnostics rejected the concept of a fleshy Christ altogether.

Didymus

And births, crucifixions, suppers, burials? (Goodness. How did they manage without radar and air traffic controllers?)

Tatian's Diatessaron had Jesus being born of a virgin.

Minucius Felix weakly defended Christianity against charges of worshipping a mortal criminal by asserting Jesus' innocence and immortality. Only an MJ apologist would view Tatian's lame and poorly framed defense as support for a mythical Jesus.

The fact remains that the only argument for 2nd century MJism is an argument from silence: "There isn't much mention of the gospels or Jesus' life in the 2nd century. That's a glaring omission. Therefore there must have widespread belief in a non-earthly Jesus."

But is it really a glaring omission? Was the absence of historical narratives surprising in a time when religion was in the realm of philosophy, not history or journalism, when the great issues of the day were epistomological and cosmological?

Clearly, the gospels and their historical/journalistic perspectives on Jesus were in ascendency during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. But missing were the conservatives: Where can we find a single early church document in support of the earlier MJ view of Jesus?

(Please let me know if I'm reading you wrong, but it seems like you're using "'Jesus myth" apologists'" in the largest sense of the term, rather than the narrower MJ sense used by Doherty. By that larger definition - and mine too - anyone who believed that Jesus was the messiah would qualify as a "Jesus myth apologist.")

The orthodox Christian fathers unequivocally rejected docetic and gnostic christologies precisely because those heresies didn't recognize a fully human Jesus capable of suffering. If, as you suggest, an MJ matched the "fleshly" specification, albeit in a different "sphere," the fathers would have been compelled to address the inevitable confusion between an MJ and a docetic Jesus. They would have been faced with the same question as mine: "Is the spirit realm populated with real human beings?" Real births? Real geneologies? Real crucifixions? Real suppers?

Most importantly, Do inhabitants of the sublunar dimension suffer physical pain?

And how could Jesus have known what it was to be human, if he only existed in the spirit world?

Surely those questions would have arisen, and, just as surely, the patristic writers would have responded to them. But they did not.

As is clearly evident from the vehemence of the fathers' polemics, the nature of Jesus was no small matter in an early church that seemed obsessed with christologies. If Doherty is right, there would have been a profound shift in the christology of the church - sometime in the 2nd century, when the Jesus of the gospels began to dominate church literature. I would ask Earl: Where is the evidence for that shift?

Where is the Great Debate between MJ and HJ proponents?

Where do we see Paul condemned for his quasi-docetism? Who among the church fathers argued for an earthly incarnation, in opposition to those who advocated a sublunar one? Or vice versa?

No such writings exist, of course. There was no need for them. The cosmological locus of Jesus' incarnation was simply not an issue in the early church, because, starting with Paul, they believed in an HJ. Sure, some thought him to be an apparition, but that apparition appeared on earth in the form of a man.

"No"? To what? I'm not clear on your position here. Are you saying that you think Paul believed that Jesus came "in the flesh"? Or that Doherty says that?

(AoI? Hoodat?)

Galatians 1.9? "If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed." But there's just no way to connect that caveat to Paul's christology, or anyone else's. For all we know, he could have meant something as mundane as "Don't give your money to those other guys. Give it to me."

Didymus

gnosis92

that's my problem with jesus-mythicism. ive not read doherty's "refutation of the refuters of the mj" does he address these objections?

EarlDoherty

As I’ve said on occasion before, when I’m not engaged in an active discussion here, I like to check in every now and then to see how people are representing (or misrepresenting) me and my views and whether they need to be set straight. I’m going to do that briefly and then go on to an ulterior motive for dropping in.

Didymus remarks that he finds it odd that nowhere in Paul is there a “peep” about how the spiritual-realm death thing works, or a discussion of its details. Like where the heck they found an available cross in the upper atmosphere, I suppose. (Although it might have been in the same warehouse Attis got his gelding knife, it’s hard to say how well organized those spiritual “human beings” in the heavens really were.) But what I find “odd” is that Didymus gets troubled over this lack of detail, but the lack of any time, place, setting and detail over Jesus as a recent human being who had done any of the stuff on earth the Gospels credit him with seems to slide by like water over the proverbial duck’s back. The latter raises far greater difficulties and perplexities, especially when they’re excluded (not just unvoiced) by so much of what the early epistle writers say.

There seems to be confusion over how I regard “docetic” philosophies, and whether a docetic Jesus is non-historical. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t have to be. The docetic Jesus (supposedly) walked on the earth, was seen and experienced by his contemporaries in a specific time and place, so he’s not even a ‘cousin’ to the mythical Jesus. (He’s nonsensical, of course, and hardly ‘historical,’ just like a half-man, half-god entity, as Jake points out.) In my view, docetism is a by-product of historicization. It arose almost immediately in response to the latter, as a way of putting a spin on the newly-developed HJ to make him acceptable as an historical phenomenon but without the unacceptable (to docetists) concept that he had truly entered and suffered in human flesh. We have to note that Paul and the early writers show no concern or knowledge whatever over the issue of docetism, and I have suggested that this is because there was no human flesh involved to be concerned about for the first 3/4 of a century of the movement.

The references in the epistles to that idea of “likeness” (eg., Phil. 2:6-11, Hebrews 2:14) is regularly interpreted as somehow related to docetism, but I would argue against this, if only because there is no openly docetic or anti-docetic discussion in epistles like these. If that was the purpose in using such terminology, this would indicate that the issue was current, and it would have been discussed in more detail and in unmistakeable terms. Instead, the “likeness” element fits better as part of my “homologic” picture, the idea that a descending god took on the likeness, form, nature of lower and material entities in order to suffer a similar fate to those entities, something he couldn’t do in the higher heavens, and this was in the context of the spiritual-material dichotomy on which the salvation theory of the period was based. As such, it was not a contentious issue, no one was arguing on two sides of the matter, and thus no detailed or argumentative discussion was needed.

Ignatius is usually interpreted solely along docetic/anti-docetic lines. As is 1 John 4 and 2 John 7. (The latter is not 2 John 1:7, by the way, as there is only a single chapter in 2 John, making the “1” unnecessary and not used.) I have to disagree with Dr. Judith Lieu, whose grammatical claims are a bit strained. Both those passages, as well as certain elements and passages in Ignatius, can equally be interpreted as reflecting a response to a denial that Jesus had come into the realm of human flesh, namely to earth itself. Thus, while there is certainly a degree of ambiguity involved in reading them, they can indicate the earliest rejection of the idea that Jesus had been incarnated as a human being. The Johannine epistles have no discussion of docetism (beyond the dubious assumptions brought to those two passages) and may predate the actual development of docetism. Didymus (I think it was) also raised the old saw about there being no record of antagonism or anti-heresy polemic against Jesus mythicism, and I have answered this many times before. The process of evolution was slow and extended enough, taking place through periods of upheaval and dislocation, across more than one cultural line, so that there was no overnight conflict, the Gospels being later reinterpreted. And the one threshold we can witness, represented in the Johannine epistles and Ignatius as the 2nd century arrived, may well give us an indication of that very thing.

I see that GDon has come back, as he regularly does, repeating the same old objections to my views of the spiritual world and Middle Platonism, as though I’ve never answered him in any significant way. One may remember that several months ago he was swearing on the authoritative figure of Ocellus as the prime example of how Middle Platonists thought, and how such an authority ruled out my interpretations. Then we found out that Ocellus was really a shadowy figure of Pythagorean times (5th cent. BCE) in whose name an equally ghostly and anonymous writer of the 1st century BCE, surviving in a couple of short quotes from the 6th cent. CE, made some very superficial comments about the heavenly realms, and on all this was his definitive claim made. I don’t know who his authority is now. He equally ignored my discussions of the Ascension of Isaiah 7 and 9 (the former especially) which clearly indicated that ancient religious thinkers could indeed envision things going on in the lower heavens and upper sublunar realm in distinction to earth itself, involving demon spirits and such (maybe even crosses and gelding knives, who knows?). Neither Carrier nor myself (and a few others here, apparently) find his protestations over Plutarch and other philosophers so cut and dried as he would like to think, and I have no intention of going into all this again at this time.

I still find that dissenters bring up the same objection that “flesh” has to mean earthly flesh, even though I keep pointing out that lexiconal definitions do not agree with that exclusivity. They also tend to keep insisting that phrases like “kata sarka” and “en sarki” always have to refer specifically to a ‘state of being in flesh’ rather than to something like ‘in relation to the flesh or to the sphere of flesh’ which gives a broader leeway to seeing a thought expressed by Paul as having a mythicist interpretation, and so on. This, too, I have no interest in presently rehashing when these kinds of things are simply ignored or fail to be comprehended.

Again, as others besides myself have pointed out (and it seems impossible to cure them of it), such dissenters are hamstrung by their overly literalist mindsets, demanding to understand how the ancients could have understood their mythological theories in literal ways. Where did the knife come from, are there crosses in the air below the moon, what does “flesh and blood” in the heavens constitute, where is the dividing line between earth and firmament and when do we cross it? If we had a telescope could we see the demons cavorting and contending (and crucifying) just this side of the moon? Here, too, they ignore the significant evolution from primordially-based mythology to Platonic reorientations. In any case, if you are going to insist on interpreting ancient thinking and its whole mythology phenomenon along such post-Enlightenment and modern scientific lines, then you’ll never “get it”. One simply has to read Paul and how he speaks of Christ (along with writings like the Odes of Solomon, the Shepherd, or of Philo or Julian for that matter) and you can come to the realization that they simply don’t think like we do. If you can’t, then nothing I can say (and have said) will enlighten you, and I am simply unwilling to waste my time.

Just a couple by the Did:

Sheer nonsense. You apparently missed the very long discussion thread a few months ago on Felix. As a good summary of my arguments, see my website: DebatesFelix. And:

It’s that kind of cavalier interpretation that saturates commentaries on the epistles which blithely dismiss passages that don’t agree with orthodoxy, such as Revelation 12 which has the infant Messiah (born in a mythological setting) immediately transported to heaven to await the End-time: this of course “symbolizes” in the writer’s mind his whole life and death on earth. Anyone putting forward apologetic analyses like these cannot be debated with.

And the latest from the “G”:

Well, the best solution to this, G, is to actually read the thing, don’t you think, before you lock yourself into the anti-MJ position? (Or is it simply a priori?) I’m still awaiting a comprehensive (or indeed any) response to that article, which refutes the common claim (much touted here) that NT scholarship has long since demolished Jesus Mythicism. I think it was Ben who pouted several weeks ago that I needed to give you all more time. Is anyone at least working on it? [Refutations]

But now to my “ulterior” motive. Someone has proposed to fund the publication of a “Jesus Puzzle Supplement” which would be a good-sized book ‘on the cheap’ reprinting selections from my website, probably a few hundred pages. It would also be priced on the cheap, simply to cover production and mailing/handling costs, probably no more than $10. I see it as including the summary article I wrote for the Journal of Higher Criticism, a few Supplementary articles like the one on Apollos, the Odes of Solomon and “Christ as ‘Man’,” my Sounds of Silence “Top 20”, a couple of book reviews, maybe my recent Refutations Article (or selections from it), a selection of Reader Feedback (on the more important topics), and even a few selections from my Comments and Reprints on the Age of Reason website. I may also include a bit of new material that was slated for the second edition of TJP, such as on “kata sarka” and the second century apologists. I say “was”—though it may still be—because the second edition is in something of a limbo at the present time, due to this ongoing eye problem I’ve mentioned recently, which continues to interfere with extended work at the computer, and I have no idea how long it will persist or whether it will even be more or less a permanent impediment. (It’s not a vision thing, but a comfort thing.) It’s been a life-long chronic disorder, and maybe with age I’m less able to keep it under control. In this imperfect world, we have to put up with setbacks and limitations, it seems. (Who says the demon spirits don’t exist—after all, Jesus believed in them and even dealt with them, didn’t he? Maybe I just need a good exorcist!)

Anyway, my point is, I’m asking for opinions from any who would like to volunteer one, whether they think such a publication would be of interest (probably for purchase through my website only, though Amazon might be willing to carry it even if it doesn’t have a cover in color), and whether it would be worth doing. (Someone else would be doing the set-up work, and as I say it would have outside funding.) Suggestions as to content would also be welcome.

All the best,
Earl Doherty