Amaleq13

Yep, full circle.

Sure but that isn't Paul's audience, is it? The Jews Paul had a problem with wanted the audience to be modified to fit Judaism but Paul was modifying Judaism to fit his audience.

Sure, and they might have included information about the preaching of a living Jesus in their preaching but Paul clearly doesn't and we have no indication that he was criticized for its absence. What does that tell us? I would think it suggests that the preaching of a living Jesus was not necessary to the gospel. OTOH, Paul also tells us that the Pillars were interested in making sure that his efforts obtained a regular cashflow so a jaded individual might wonder if that wasn't the only thing that mattered to them as far as the gentiles were concerned. IOW, "Yeah, you go teach the gentiles but make sure you get the address right when you send back the cash, Paul."

Yes and that's exactly what we don't have in Paul. We don't really have much in the way of biographical details in Mark, either, but we do have Jesus depicted in a clearly historical context and that, I think, provides ample motivation for interest in biographical details. And what do we find included in subsequent versions of the story? Nativity stories and the appearance of a historical account. The obvious question that I've skipped is: What motivated Mark to write his story? And the answer to that question, I think, might be found in another thread: Mark's view of the disciples. From that discussion, it seems possible to me that Mark was motivated by what he considered to be false teachings that either originated with the Disciples/First Apostles or was attributed to them.

The fun just never stops.

GakuseiDon

Can you name one other saviour god who performed "fleshy" actions in the Lower Heavens?

OK. This may sound like an impertinent question, but if I asked you: Without referring back to Earl's writings, do you think that you would be able to give a satisfactory answer to a Biblical specialist on why 'born of woman' is not a problem for the mythicist side?

I'm not asking you to do this here, but I just wonder at how confident people who accept what Earl is writing really are in their understanding, and especially in the support for those ideas. As I wrote in another thread, a lot of people who've read Earl's book has come away with the idea that people's in Paul's time had beliefs that we would have found difficult to understand, so that any beliefs we attribute to them must be valid.

Same as above. If asked, do you think that you would be able to explain how Earl's reading has a reasonable probability of being correct?

Sorry to probe you on these things! I know I sound like a smart-arse. You've said that you aren't entirely convinced of Earl's Mythical theory, so in my eyes you are more likely to be objective in your answers.

LGM

Michael Jordan.

Ok. This may sound like an impertinent question, but if I asked you: Without referring back to the bible, do you think you would be able to give a satisfactory answer to a human physiologist specialist on why "a dead guy coming back to life and flying up into the clouds" is not a problem for whatever side you're on Don?



I guess it all makes perfect sense if you're a "biblical specialist" on the right side...

GakuseiDon

:notworthy:

No, I definitely wouldn't be able to.

LGM

Okay...so far so good...

So which is more likely...that some guy named Saul invented a messainic savior god based on his exegesis of some Hebrew prophecy...

...or that a real guy named Jesus, born of a real virgin woman named Mary, was crucified by the Romans, and then 2 days later, gets up, walks out of his tomb, says hi to some of his homies, and then flys off up into the clouds?

Put aside your fear of this vengeful god for a moment and put on your skeptic hat, (you know...the one you use to evaluate the claims of Joseph Smith, Sun Myung Moon, and Marshall Applewhite)...and tell us...which is more likely?

The "mythicist" position is that the earthly man Jesus introduced in "Mark's" hagiography is simply a "myth"...an allegorical archetype...a new and improved piece of Jewish midrash. The mythicist position is supported by the broad evidence that Paul, the other first century disciples, and historians, tell us NOTHING of CONSEQUENCE about ANY of the biographical details of the mythical guy we suddenly find in Mark's stories.

Being "born of a woman"...isn't even close to being "born of the virgin Mary in Bethlehem and was attended by angels and three Eastern kings..."

No amount of knowledge of ancient Greek, or desperate rationalizing of the silence, is going to change that...and its getting a little late in the day for having copyists and forgers fix the problem...

So please...stop the patronizing pretense that it all makes sense if you're a "biblical specialist", or that the correct translation of Katie Sarka defests the basic mythicist position.

Earl hasn't discovered anything new...he's just putting these pieces of the Jesus puzzle in chronological order on the table and is simply saying..."look". Ane the people who have so much invested in some, or all of the myth, being historical...

...are screaming "heretic"!

rlogan

With all due respect, I don't think so. Otherwise you would not have posed the questions you did.

What do you mean by "people"? Some "people" view marketing statements more critically than others. But the evidence is incontrovertible. There are mutually exclusive assertions in the Bible. The great mass of Christians simply don't care. Q.E.D. They are operating at a marketing level of images and not concrete analytics.


Again, you do not seem to grasp the elemental point. Who cares what varying images are operating in the minds of consumers. It has to appear on the label, and it does not even have to mean the same thing to everyone.



You are confusing the great mass of consumers with the academic types who spend whole lifetimes anguishing over minutiae. Are any of the three geneaologies of Jesus ever read in church?

What sorts of things actually occupy most people's minds in church? Is the mortgage payment late? What am I having for lunch? What color panties is she wearing? Is God going to grant me the Smith account? My shoes are prettier than her shoes. Etc.

zzzzz...Seed of David...mph...zzzz...prophets foretold...snort...everlasting life...zzzz...Did I put bleach in the washer...

EarlDoherty

I didn’t say that the heavenly Jerusalem was in the sublunar realm. My point was that material things on earth had their counterparts in the heavens, demonstrating that there were spiritual equivalents to earthly things (whether cities, or trees or “struggling� among evil angels). Some of these things could be located in the sublunar realm, as is shown by the Ascension, where the angel accompanying Isaiah speaks of counterpart activities between the demons in the upper aer or firmament, and similar activities on earth. Clearly, the “sublunar realm� can include things both spiritual and material, since this is the region defined by “corruptibility� and death. This is precisely why the fallen angels were banished there, and why gods to undergo suffering and death must descend below the moon (as Julian has Attis doing).

(Someone quoted Bernard Muller on “Zion� being earthly. I never said it wasn’t. I was speaking of the heavenly Jerusalem, which by definition is not earthly. As usual, Muller takes something out of context, misreads it, and builds up an irrelevant case based on his misconception.)

You ask for evidence of other savior gods undergoing sublunary experiences, and point to myths of gods like Osiris having traditions seemingly placed on earth. The latter is so because that’s where they were originally located, in sacred time or primordial history. Gods like Osiris and Dionysos had ancient traditions and myths established long before Platonism, and this mode of expression was preserved. Mithras slaying the bull, however, in its Hellenistic version, did not, and no one would point to the Greek Mithras as an historical figure or place his activities on earth in history. Christianity arose at a time when Platonic cosmology had taken over myth, which is why the earliest Christian mythology (as in Paul) contains no earthly historical elements. Its source is scripture, as I continually point out, and will continue to do so. As for the Ascension, it presents a clear picture of a descending god, and even if you regard the crucifixion by “the god of that world� as not clearly located in the firmament (although I think it is), the descent itself is not allegorical. If the Son can descend through the layers of heaven, especially interacting with the denizens of the various levels, including the upper aer, then he can undergo things in that region below the moon and above the earth. That’s really all we need. But for a fuller presentation of the case that Platonic views of mythology were current, see Appendix 6 in The Jesus Puzzle. (I was going to reproduce it here, but I find that I don’t have an electronic copy of my JP text at hand. The only surviving one is at the printer, and my original perished in my 2003 computer crash, and I can't seem to locate backup copies.)

I think Don and I have long since presented our differing viewpoints on myth and the sublunar realm, and I see little to be gained by going over the same ground repeatedly. The exclusive focus by the early epistles on scripture more than adequately suggests that history and oral tradition was not the source of their information about Christ, and since there is nothing equivalent to ‘primordial history’ in early Christian mythology, parallels with ancient tales of Osiris are not that relevant. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why myths, supposedly on earth, concerning a god like Osiris can survive in that ‘quasi-historical’ form for millennia, but the entire early record of Christianity outside the Gospels, supposedly composed within years and decades of Jesus’ own life, has nothing of the sort. Instead, Christ is “revealed� out of scripture, Christ “speaks� out of scripture, everything he “does� (as in Hebrews 5:7) is derived from scripture. Even the one supposedly clear historical datum everyone likes to appeal to, Romans 1:3’s “of David’s seed� is stated outright by Paul as scripture based, nothing else, and to demonstrate this, tomorrow I will post my 2001 reply to Jeffrey Gibson on the JesusMysteries board on that very point, when he, like so many others, tried to ‘detach’ 1:3 from the “gospel of God in the prophets� in the preceding verse. If this feature of Christ “kata sarka� is dependent on scripture and not historical tradition, it amply demonstrates that “kata sarka,� however Paul thought of it, has here a mythological significance and derivation. For early Christians like Paul, scripture was the embodiment of the Christ myth, a situation whose development would be inconceivable if Jesus of Nazareth had recently walked the earth and inspired men and women to go out and preach him, heavy with the memory of his historical activities. That they would abandon and ignore those memories and that life in favor of an obscure and esoteric method of presenting their object of worship to the world makes no sense at all.

One thing I would like to point out is that this method we find in the epistles is a consistent one. Those explanations I have been supplying from my website to the dozen or so passages TedM (and others) regularly appeal to fit into a coherent whole. A mythical Christ with features common to other savior god mythology (interpreted in a largely Jewish setting), a source in revelation and scripture, with a grounding in the philosophy and cosmology of the time. There is nothing ad hoc about any of it.

Continuing with those explanations in response to Ted’s claims, let me throw in these today:

From my Sound of Silence feature on 1 Peter:

And,

Again from the Sound of Silence on 1 John:

Best wishes,
Earl Doherty

GakuseiDon

No, I didn't say you did. I asked for objects in the sublunary realm above the earth. Yet the only ones you give me are the ones ABOVE the firmament. This has happened a few times. I don't see why you bring up the heavenly Jerusalem that exists in the perfect sphere above the firmament when I ask you about objects in the non-perfect world below the firmament.

Earl, this kind of comment makes me suspect that you don't understand what you are saying. The counterparts in the heavens are between what is ABOVE the firmament and what is BELOW. There are no counterparts between the air and the earth that I've found, since both exist in the sublunary realm. I would even make a stronger claim: the concept is incoherent in terms of Middle Platonism.

The angel just says that there is jealousy amongst the demons of the sky, just as there is jealousy amongst people on earth. And that is fair enough, in terms of the beliefs of the day. If you want to try to read more into it than that, I'd like to know how far you want to take it. What activities? Please name them (I've asked for this a few times). Fighting with swords? Hanging people on trees? Please give a source to check.

No, Julian doesn't do that. He places Attis on earth, or as an allegory for natural forces, just as Plutarch does. We have ruled out that Paul thought of Christ in allegorical terms, so this example doesn't help you I'm afraid.

From here: http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...e_2_mother.htm

Since, therefore, a certain Cause is allowed to have preceded material forms, being itself entirely immaterial, under the "Third Creator" (who 10 is to us father and lord, not of these objects only, but also of the Visible and Fifth Body), so we separate from the former [the Third Creator] Attis as the Cause that descends as far as the region of Matter, and we regard this Attis as the generative Power and the Gallos at one and the same time----him who, as Fable tells, was exposed by the side of the streams of the river Gallos, and there grew up, and afterwards, when he had got tall and handsome, became the favourite of the Mother of the Gods, and she committed to his care all other things, and placed upon his head the star-bespangled cap. Now if the head of Attis be covered by this visible heaven,11 ought we not perchance to interpret the river Gallos as signifying the span of the Milky Way, for at that point, it is said, that the body which is susceptible of passion mixes with the impassive circular orbit of the Fifth Body? As far as this limit truly hath the Mother of the Gods allowed this minion of her's to leap about and dance----namely, he that resembles the sunbeams,12 this intelligible Power, Attis. And when the same is |263 arrived at the extremity of his limits, he is said in the fable to have descended into the Cave,13 and conversed with the nymph, symbolizing the duplicity of Matter, and it is not Matter itself that is here meant, but the ultimate Cause of things incorporeal, which also existed before Matter. Moreover, it is asserted by Heraclitus: "Death unto souls is but a change to liquid."14 This Attis, therefore, the intelligible Power, the holder together of things material below the Moon, having intercourse with the pre-ordained Cause of Matter, holds intercourse therewith, not as a male with a female, but as though flowing into it, since he is the same with it.

Fine. Then where did they place his activities. From what I've found with other gods, it is either on earth or it is allegory (in which case it didn't happen anywhere at all).

I mean, unless you are claiming that people placed Mithras's activities in a fleshy sublunar realm, what is the point of even raising this? Vork did the same thing for Zeus. You did the same thing for Osiris. Yet Plutarch clearly has the man-in-the-street as placing the activities on earth while Plutarch himself regarded them as allegorical. Remember, we both think that Paul did NOT regard Jesus's crucifixion as allegorical.

A simple question: which saviour gods' activities were placed in a sublunary realm above the earth? Mithras? Osiris? Dionysus? Inanna? Attis? Any? If there are none, then why even raise the question?

Appealing to a manuscript in which the final redacted form has Christ crucified on earth doesn't seem to be a strong case to me. AoI also talks about others who were killed under the instructions of demons. Justin Martyr refers to Socrates being framed by demons, as well as the Christians of his day being slurred through the machinations of demons. AoI is consistent with those ideas.

For what it is worth, I feel I have rebutted your ideas on this subject as you are currently presenting them (and I stress that I agree that it shouldn't be worth very much, since I am very much an amateur in this field -- but that is how I feel). I'm not really trying to declare victory here, just that we are locked into our respective positions, so I can't see any further advance via debate being possible.

At the least, I hope I have put some focus on the subject on the sublunary realm. It would be nice if someone sympathetic to your ideas actually started to look into the whole question of the sublunary realm, since I fear that people reading your book are coming away with an incorrect idea on the topic. But I've been promising myself to move onto other projects (including completing a review of "The God who wasn't there" movie by Brian Flemming), so I will be bowing out of any further discussion on this, at least for the immediate future (though I recall stating something similar not so long ago!)

Earl, I've really appreciated your responses, and have enjoyed these debates immensely. Thanks very much for your time.

EarlDoherty

The following is what I wrote on May 17, 2001 on the JesusMysteries list during an extended discussion of Romans 1:1-4. I have not changed a word of it. At that time, Gibson did not reply to this post. If he makes a reply today, I will be ignoring it, as I indicated in my last posting on the “Doherty, Gibson…� thread concerning his behavior in regard to Richard Carrier. However, I invite anyone else to comment on the content below.

Clivedurdle

I assume Greeks et al had boiled water and seen a change from one element to another, and also seen rain come from clouds so had seen air change to water - a transformation of elements.

The above is another transformation - life - (souls, breath, air, rauch) to liquid - water.

Zip forward to the alchemists - continually attempting to find the philosophers stone, to transform base metal to gold - but I understand alchemy is a very ancient game.

The central ceremony of the xian church - the eucharist - has wine transforming to blood and bread to flesh.

It's all alchemy and magic! There is another alchemy - the dead to life! (known as the resurrection!)

What is this pretence that the neo platonists and writers of the new testament were rational and had ordered everything logically into separate spheres and elements?

There is some logic in it, but there are serious problems - like believing because water can transform into air by adding fire, (by boiling water) death can transform into life by the power of the Holy Spirit!