rlogan

This is exactly what I am talking about: when you try to impose modern scientific analysis upon nonexistent concepts that people believe to be real, you are going to have an infinity of dog-chases-tail pedantry over what they "really" mean.


If there really is a mirror, show me the interface, the boundary, between the two. Since your concept requires this mirror, and since no ancient scholar actually brings any such thing to our attention, you cannot be allowed to use it as allegory. It can be simultaneously attacked for not being specific enough, and being too specific.

Trying to put religious concepts into concrete terms that satisfy the requirements of science is impossible. Their concepts are incompatible with science. Even just using the term "myth" sets you up for specious attacks by people who are going to say the ancients believed them to be true so they cannot be myths.

Mythologies by nature have hazy, handwaving, mysterious, allegorical, inconsistent features about them and that is why any writer trying to describe them falls prey to others demanding he be ever more specific, or alternatively that they really aren't all that coherently worked out.

The Pliny-Trajan correspondence in 112 CE is decisive for me in that there is no earthly person Jesus as big-bang founder of Christianity. There is no literature uncovered by Pliny's investigation of Christianity. When Mark arrives, it is clearly drawing upon Isaiah and other sources to weave a story that now has more time-specific "historicity". Christianity has been operating for many decades prior without that. Later gospels add even more "historical" embellishments.

This Christ concept arrives first. It is superstitious gibberish that is lying on top of other superstitious gibberish. Namely, that people are obligated to their religious overlords to make real monetary sacrifices to appease the Gods. The Christian innovation is a Christ concept that defeats that obligation forever. We no longer have to turn our first fruits over to the temple, or change our coins into temple coinage, or buy doves or whatever it is - we can eat all that food ourselves in a communal meal and thank Christ for that.

This removal of obligation to our wealthy overlords is wildly popular not because it has a tight analytical structure to it, but because it feeds from the well of human liberty. It is only later that all this detail is being added to give more legitimacy to the movement.

So sure, absolutely what is important is the meaning behind it, like namely being allowed to eat your own food instead of giving it to that rich A$$hole. The more detailed we try to be about the exact mechanics of how myths and reality intermix, the more we completley miss the point of Christianity. Especially at its inception.

aa5874

The Pliny-Trajan letters mention nothing about the crucifixion of Christ which suggest that the Pauline letters are late.

Pliny the younger is a witness against any character called Jesus Christ as found in the Pauline LITERATURE.

Pliny the younger uncovered NO Pauline Literature with the crucifixion and resurrection of a character called Jesus.

In the Pauline Literature the character Jesus is mentioned over 180 times.

Again, the presumptiom that the Pauline letters represent early Christianity is not corroborated by Pliny/Trajan correspondence.

Pliny Letter to Trajan On Christians

EarlDoherty

There is a huge difference between Achilles as found in the Homeric tradition and the Jesus as found in the Pauline tradition (and that of the rest of the epistles). The former began on earth and remained on earth. The Pauline Jesus shows no clear placement on earth and a lot of indication that he existed as an entirely spiritual and heavenly entity. Given that predecessor, the Gospels become a kind of reverse euhemerism, not a myth originating in a actual individual, although they also descend in part from an earthly teaching tradition (surviving in Q) which is entirely separate from the Pauline Savior.

And if the Gospels rather early began to be seen as 'originating with people' that doesn't make them so. The still-surviving myth of Adam and Eve was regarded as based on historical people, but no one here believes that.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

The mistake here is in regarding "early Christianity" as monolithic. An authentic first-century Paul would not have to represent the entire swath of early Christ belief. Paul himself presents evidence of other "ministers of the Christ" who preach "another Jesus" he virtually equates with the work of Satan. In fact, even in our extant early literature (including a range of Jewish sectarian writings in the intertestamental period) we see variety and lack of coordination and common doctrine between various expressions. Compare Paul with the epistle to the Hebrews, or the Pauline gospel of Christ dying for sin to a Jewish Christ/Messiah (as in the Ascension of Isaiah or the Similitudes of Enoch) which sometimes has no sacrificial or atonement dimension.

There is no necessity to make any correlation between Paul and the Bithynian Christ-believers investigated by Pliny. Until the middle of the 2nd century, we see nothing but "a riotous diversity."

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

I am not berating you, I am calling you to task for not doing your own homework.

Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

Why do you and Don persist on pointing readers to the 10-year-old The Jesus Puzzle when a much fuller and up-to-date treatment of the subject is presented in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, which latter book actually deals with the objections raised by such as Don during that 10-year interim? This has been my constant complaint against Don for harping on things stated in The Jesus Puzzle that have been clarified in the more recent book, and even earlier in DB debates he took part in.

And I thank Don for his series of quotes from me presented earlier in this thread (and then he repeated them later). It's nice when a dissenter presents his objection and then follows it with my own rebuttal to it. Saves me a lot of time!

Earl Doherty

ApostateAbe

Potayto potahto.

ApostateAbe

GakuseiDon did indeed quote from Jesus Neither God Nor Man in this thread, so I suggest you do your homework. The Jesus Puzzle is more relevant for me since it is more popular and you are still selling it.

EarlDoherty

Don, like a broken record, constantly bleats that I have presented "no evidence for a world of myth." I respond (and have done so many times over the years) that while we have no direct, unmistakeable statements in the literature (though Plutarch comes very close) which place the myths of the Hellenistic savior gods as interpreted in the cults in the heavenly world (not the least because writing about such things was forbidden), there are a host of indicators that such a relocation to the heavenly realm was, or could have been, made around the turn of the era under Platonic influence. (This was done even in The Jesus Puzzle.) Don himself has kindly reproduced that objection-answer twice in this thread.

In both books, but certainly in spades in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, I present literary evidence to support this contention. In other words, I am presenting a theory based in the evidence. (When one is presenting a new theory, it is hardly relevant to point out that such a theory is not on established academia's radar.) The proper scholarly counter to this is not to simply continue to parrot one's original objection, which Don persists in doing, but to deal with the case as presented in my theory, to answer and counter my use of those "indicators" in the evidence.

The only real attempt Don made in this direction was in his review of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man of a couple of years ago, in which he tried to dispute my interpretation of how Plutarch presented the myth(s) of Isis and Osiris and how that pointed to a relocation of the myth (and not just on Plutarch's part) into a heavenly dimension. In turn, in my extensive website rebuttal to that review, I showed how his objection to my reading of Plutarch, and his own interpretation of such passages, was all wet. As far as I know, he made no attempt to respond to that rebuttal.

Don's constant braying of "There is no evidence, there is no evidence!" is simply his own statement that he refuses to even examine, let alone accept, the evidence I present in offering my argued corroboration in the cultic myths for the heavenly sacrifice of Paul's Christ.

Earl Doherty

ApostateAbe

Earl Doherty, when I find that I have to make the same set of points many times over in this forum, I have a trick: I write the set of points once, catalogue it, and copy and paste it when I need it again. I figure GakuseiDon does the same thing. I suggest you do that for any time one of us asks for evidence that a belief in a "World of Myth" was commonly shared by the ancients. That way, there is no need to waste all that time either writing it again or composing a series of belittlements. When I have arguments, I give them away freely. I am not in this forum to market them.