TedM

Clearly you don't understand what I'm saying. I know what I'm saying so don't dispute me. You just don't get it, and I'm not going to try and explain it anymore to you here.

aa5874

You have already explained your mis-guided acceptance of irrational explanations of the past.

Your posts are recorded.

EarlDoherty

And thank you, Ted, for furthering mythicism's point (along with Athenagoras and Minucius Felix). The sacrifice of the epistles' Christ Jesus was acceptable precisely because their Jesus was NOT a human being, in any way, but an entirely heavenly figure who did not possess human flesh and blood (but only a spiritual "likeness" of such, so that he could undergo a death). Your explanation that an historical Jesus was only seen as partly divine, doesn't work, because what were they to do with the part that was supposedly very much human? Simply overlook it? All that human blood shed on the Calvary cross? This didn't cause the slightest offence? This is precisely the thing that the epistle to the Hebrews shows no concern for, no knowledge of, gives no attention to.

As for second century apologists like Athenagoras and Minucius Felix, they don't have a Son and Logos who underwent a sacrifice. Theirs is simply a Logos religion, salvation by knowledge of God through the channel of the heavenly Logos. (It is nonsense to think that those apologists, other than Justin, had any belief in an historical Son on earth as the basis of their faith.) There is not the slightest hint of an atonement doctrine in them. They are simply railing against the practice of blood sacrifice of animals on the part of pagan traditional religion (maybe of the Jewish one as well).

I have to agree with others here that the doctrine of the blood sacrifice of God's Son on earth by human agencies is offensive and repugnant. Christians have always praised Jesus for his willing sacrifice, "he gave up his life for us," but at whose direction, whose requirement? Who established the system that God could be appeased and sin forgiven but God himself? It was hardly written in the stars independent of God's personal makeup and direction. What does that say for God's own sense of morality and fair play, not to mention his personal enlightenment? What does the idea of Hell say for the same things? Infinite punishment for finite transgressions? Even Jesus' suffering and death was temporary, he was resurrected to exaltation three days later. (Some sacrifice! The Christian religion, in its bloody swath across the world and its own community, has produced over the centuries far more human pain, death and misery than that.) Why should our punishment for, as Christian theologians liked to put it in my younger days, spurning the Son's sacrifice be eternal? No third day ascent from our "descent into hell." The whole orthodox Christian concept is ugly and preposterous.

There has been some discussion here about Mark 10:45. To what extent is it a full-blown atonement doctrine as we find in Paul? There is no "for forgiveness of sin" in Mark. Rather, it may be something more akin to the Maccabean concept (in the Maccabean pseudepigrapha), that God will accept the martyrdom of the Jewish faithful and apply it to the forgiveness of Jewish transgression. This is what leads me to think that Mark's very limited dealing with the meaning of Jesus' death is as much allegory to give meaning to the believers' own persecution and death in their lives as members of the sect. After all, the fully developed Christian soteriology, extending into our own day, is that God purposely sent his Son to undergo death as an atonement required by God. The Maccabean concept did not involve God deliberately engineering the deaths of the Jewish martyrs to provide an atonement to himself. He was just expected to grant some larger worth to those deaths 'post factum'. (I admit that Mark has Jesus saying that scripture prophesied the death and rising of himself, which suggests divine engineering, but note that this is the death and rising of the Son of Man, not the Son of God, although Mark is equating the two. It's a murky area, and short of reading Mark's mind over the space of two millennia, can probably not be resolved.)

I'd take Athenagoras' Logos religion any day. It was probably the most enlightened religion produced in the ancient world. (It also had a basis in the Jewish prophets and the better features of the Jewish God. The basis it did lack was an historical figure. Justin, unfortunately, bridged and eliminated that gap.)

Earl Doherty

stephan huller

Yes the Marcosians (= those of Mark) actually developed a ritual called the 'redemption' from their interest in Mark 10:45 - 50. (Irenaeus 1.21) Epiphanius strangely and inexplicably attributes the same rite to another group. The rite also shows up in the Anonymous Treatise on Baptism related to Irenaeus's original text.

aa5874

Your claim is absolutely erroneous. The Jesus of the Epistles MUST be God who manifested himself in the Flesh.

The spirit or soul is immortal and cannot die or suffer death in Jewish religion..

It is the Flesh that Must be Sacrificied. It is the Flesh that must die and then resurrect.


Hebrews 5 How in the world could the very cult that fabricated the doctrine of Remission of Sins by the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus be offended by their own teachings???

In the NT, the Sacrifice of the Son of God was considered the Greatest Love of ALL.

John 3:16 KJV Virtually all the apologetic writers of antiquity that mentioned the life of Jesus claimed he was baptized by John that he was crucified in the reign of Tiberius or when Pilate was governor or after a trial with the Sanhedrin and was raised from the dead and visited his disciples and commissioned them to preach the gospel.

All the supposed Christians of the Jesus cult--- Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Aristides, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Melito, Origen argued that Jesus was on earth and was the son of God born of a Virgin.

By the way, Athenagoras mentioned NOTHING whatsoever about Jesus.

TedM

You're welcome. I agree that it does help support the mythicist case.

Yes. Look past it to its theological meaning., which is exactly what Paul's writings do. It perhaps could explain why Gospels came a bit later -- a reluctance to dramatize the gory crucifixion. (Although expectation of a second coming seem to me to better explain the lack of an earlier biography)


But, it DID cause offense, and Paul says it clearly -- calling it a curse, and a stumbling block to the Jews (1 Cor 23). This is consistent with an earthly crucifixion -- perhaps more than a heavenly one.


I"m ok with that and don't necessarily disagree with it. But, it is not relevant to my concern here, and although Mary seems unable to understand how I can say that with honesty, perhaps you can. What matters is whether enough Jews of the time could 'overlook' the offense of the cross, as Paul did, to create Christianity from an original human-god-Messiah founder. I think they could.


I don't know for sure, and would need to study Mark much more closely to say, but I do think 10:45 packs a wallop, and the foretelling of his death and resurrection, and the death on Passover, and the clear Messianic references combed from the OT all suggest to me an atonement theology (and you did seem to admit that inclination regarding the foretelling). If Mark was early, and not interpolated in those various passages then we arguably have a similarity between Mark and Paul in theology that lessons the gulf that some see between the two.

EarlDoherty

You must be some cook, aa! You can't tell one ingredient from another. The recipe calls for salt? Let's throw in some sugar. It's all the same white stuff!

You don't seem to be able to differentiate anything. And you are quite right. Athenagoras mentioned NOTHING about Jesus, the human man and Gospel character. Nor did Theophilus, nor Minucius Felix, nor did Tatian in his Address to the Greeks. Nor did Clement of Rome (as I have demonstrated), and quite probably not Aristides either, since the single paragraph reflecting the Gospels looks very much like an insertion, since it appears in different places in the two manuscript lines and is not compatible with the way the Logos figure is discussed in the rest of the document (see my Appendix 11 in JNGNM). But according to you, it's all white stuff. And you commit one hell of a fallacy of begging the question: "all the apologetic writers of antiquity that mentioned the life of Jesus..." Well of course, those who mentioned the life of Jesus recount the Gospel features. And the vast majority of those come from Ireneaeus onward, when the Gospel story was widely accepted as history. This is your idea of logical argument?

Again, the cult that taught that a human Jesus was offered as a blood sacrifice, was not the group that was offended by it. The earliest expressions of what we call Christianity were diverse and uncoordinated, with many different versions of teaching and soteriological philosophy. Minucius Felix was offended by historicists based on regarding the Gospels as history. Ignatius calls "mad dogs" those who teach that Christ had not been born of Mary, baptized by John and crucified by Pilate, so there were apparently quite a few of those around. (I have also demonstrated that there is more to Ignatius' opponents than simply docetists.) Paul refers to those outside the Christ cult he was a part of who were offended by the idea of a messiah who had been crucified. NOT that a human man had been crucified and turned into a part of God, which Paul never offers.

But, it's all the same white stuff, right?

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

But Paul doesn’t give us anything regarding what he is allegedly looking past. Does he ever discuss the crucifixion, or even refer to it, in a manner which relates to a presumed occasion on earth, a gory event in history? No, he doesn’t. He can’t even tell us that the Lord of glory was crucified by Pilate, but rather by “the rulers of this age” which even ancient commentators took as a reference to the demon spirits. (Please don’t come back with 1 Timothy 6:13; for one thing, that’s a second century writing. And 1 Thess. 2:15-16 is a widely recognized interpolation.)

As for a reluctance to dramatize the gory crucifixion, I don’t see evidence that Christian writers were reluctant to discuss anything. Once again, you are setting up the Gospel story in the background and interpreting the text from there. Besides, Galatians 3:1 sounds like Paul has been anything but reluctant to dramatize the event. Trouble is, he doesn’t say where that event took place. And did every single epistle writer across numerous communities feel that reluctance? Why was it left to a single writer, Mark, decades later to open the floodgates when all such reluctance was apparently washed away?

The “offense” we are discussing here is the offense of God requiring human sacrifice to appease himself, which would have been operable if Jesus had suffered and died in human flesh. But that is something which Paul NEVER “says clearly” at all. In fact it is notably missing in that passage in 1 Corinthians 1. It is not the stumbling block of sacrificing human blood, it is not the folly of turning a man into God. It is the bare fact of preaching a Messiah “having been crucified”. That folly would apply to a sacrificed heavenly Messiah.

And yet, Ted, this shows that this very point would have been a primary issue. Because it would have been something that very much had to be “overlooked” it would require defense, it would require explanation, it would require discussion. There is never the slightest hint in the epistles that this is an issue. The whole thing is simply not present. (Nor is it present in regard to some unknown incarnated sacrificed messiah in an uncertain past, as G. A. Wells and some others would have it.) Just as, for all Paul says about faith, he never once says that the sect requires faith that the man Jesus was really the Son of God and Messiah. As I say in both books, “Paul believes in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God.”

Again I point out in both books that scholars (Moffatt, Attridge, Wilson, Barrett, etc., etc.) are constantly recognizing (according to their viewpoint) that epistle writers faced various "problems" in reconciling what they are saying with the Gospel story, "problems" which the writers themselves never show any sign of being aware of, let alone actually address.

If something does not walk like a duck, does not look like a duck, does not sound like a duck, why would you think it was a duck? Of course, we all know the answer to that question.

Earl Doherty

TedM

If Paul was writing to defend the cross against those who saw it as a stumbling block I would agree. But he wasn't. He was writing to believers that were NOT offended--at least not enough to lose faith. If you argue that he should still have addressed the cause of the stumbling, the actual offense of human sacrifice if that's what it was, how is that any different than saying he should still have addressed the cause of the stumbling, the actual offense of a heavenly sacrifice--since he DOES say that it was a stumbling block? Every argument you give against the human factor usually can be applied to the mythical factor, although maybe not to the same extent, I admit.

aa5874

Please, enough rhetoric. You KNOW that white stuff is not all salt or sugar.

You seem not to have read or not to understand the writings of the authors you mentioned.

1. Tatian, Athenagoras and Theophilus wrote absolutely nothing about any character called Jesus whether as human or heavenly--Nothing--ZERO.

2. Aristides and Justin claimed Jesus was KILLED or Pierced by the Jews on earth. See "Apology" by Aristides and "First Apology" by Justin.


Again, Apologetic writers, Aristides and Justin, mentioned the crucifixion of Jesus and claimed he was PIERCED by the Jews on EARTH.

Justin's Dialogue with Trypho XXXII Aristides' Apology