Toto

I went around and around with GDon on this issue. Don is not accusing Earl of selective reading. He claims that the second century apologists don't speak much of a historial Jesus, but that they must have believed in a historical Jesus because they had the gospels, therefore the absense of evidence of a historical Jesus in first century writings is not evidence of absense.

I pointed out to Don that the second century and later Christians believed that Jesus was "historical" for theological reasons. They based their opinion on reading the Hebrew Scriptures, not on any evidence that Jesus walked the earth. This is not the stance that one would assume a first century writer would take, if Jesus were a near contemporary. I don't think that Don had any answer for that.

Papias is not so clear, but he is the best that Eusebius can find in the historical chain of evidence.

This has been discussed on this forum. The idea that Jesus might never have walked on earth sounds like a major issue from our modern point of view, but was not such an issue at that time. A god who operated in a spiritual realm was still a god.

Later enemies of Christianity, such as Julian or the later Jewish writers, attacked Christians for deifying a mere man who was born of a prostitute and crucified as a criminal - but they got these "facts" from their reading of Christian writings, not any independent source.

Sheshbazzar

There is a well documented reason for this apparent lack. The Christian Church essentially spent the first thousand years of its existence in actively seeking out, burning and destroying all such 'heretical' texts and anyone found in possession of them.
Which hardly leaves us with any balanced or accurate record as to what these missing texts contained, or as to what a possible majority of Christians actually thought or believed during the first and second centuries.

The Mafia of the Orthodox Church sent all unorthodox 'heretical' competing documents and their supporters to that place where Jimmy Hoffa resides.

All we have are such self-serving 'well cooked' books as the Church Mafia decided to allow to survive.
By the mid-3rd CE any document that bluntly said "what are you talking about?--Jesus never was on earth" or even clearly implied any such 'blasphemy', would have been confiscated, burned, and its possessor immediately executed without trial.

ApostateAbe

Very problematic explanation. It would be correct to say that we do not have heretical texts of the second century in the present day (or at least they are scarce), because they were either destroyed by the orthodoxy or just not preserved. However, we have abundant evidence of the existence of heretical texts and what was contained in them, because early Christian apologists from the second century and onward quoted them abundantly and wrote against them, and those records are preserved. We have evidence for a number of different heresies that existed in the second century. The heresy that Jesus was merely myth or merely spiritual is not found among them, though there was a heresy that Jesus was God and merely seemed human. That is a huge problem if Christianity started out believing in an explicitly mythical Jesus and there was a shift toward a historical Jesus. The early Christian records should be chock full of such debate for or against that shift.

GakuseiDon

Thanks, TedM.

Yes, pretty much, though my argument is that Earl hasn't taken into consideration the wider literature when evaluating whether it is reasonable to assume that the early writers would write as we would expect them to write. That analysis simply hasn't been done.

That's correct. Earl's point is that, for example, Tertullian writes about a historical Jesus in his Apology, so it isn't that significant that he didn't write about a HJ -- not even mentioning the names "Jesus" or "Christ" -- in Ad nationes. But such reasoning is dependent on whether we have all the literature available to us.

Exactly. Maybe the wider literature can be explained away, but unless Earl investigates it, how would we know? If people take anything away from my review, I hope it is that questions need to be asked. But most people who read Earl's work will come away not knowing that.

To me, the next step would be Earl giving his reasons for why those "missing examples" didn't include historical details about Jesus, and then applying this to his 2nd C "ahistoricists" to see if the same situations applied. That would be the logical progression.

No, there are none.

Yes, on page 498 (if there are other pages I hope Earl could let us know):

As a final note, we might ask: where the the writers (for we might expect there to be some) who openly and in unmistakable words reject the figure of Jesus, with no possibility of ambiguity?--until we realize that no such document would ever have reach us through 2000 years of Christian censorship. Possibly for the same reason, we possess no pagan writing which discusses a case for rejection of the historical Jesus. Even Celsus (who does not do this) survives only piecemeal in Origen's great refutation of him. On the other hand, it is likely that even leading pagan thinkers like Celsus would have no way to verify or disprove the circulating Christian story and narrative accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, nor would they have possessed the exegetical tools and abilities to disprove Christan claims through a study of the documents themselves. In any case, all of these documents, give the poor state of communication and availability of materials in the ancient world, would hardly have been accessible to someone who might have thought of undertaking such a task.

More specifically, Earl sees M. Felix, the author of Octavian, writing against the idea of a historical Jesus.

Sheshbazzar

You got what The Church Mafia chose to allow you to have. Nothing more, nothing less.
If they did not choose to allow any particular text, argument, or view to survive, they made damn sure that it didn't.

Where are these texts? Where are Jimmy Hoffa's remains? You can't produce Jimmy Hoffa's remains?
Why do you need these similarly 'missing' texts to know that a crime was committed?

TedM

It sounds to me like that is part of his objection, but maybe he can further clarify. Edit: I see that he has and says he IS accusing Earl of selective reading.

I think in both centuries one with knowledge or a belief in a historical Jesus would be expected to discuss him in at least two contexts:

1. showing that he did this or that
2. drawing on what he did or said for a discussion of theological issues

The writers of the 2nd century did have 'evidence' to them: the gospels and the traditions that had developed. So, we would still expect them to discuss him, using the evidence they were aware of. I don't think it would matter so much what the source of the evidence is.


Sure, the idea of a god not having walked the earth was probably no big deal. However, I think new information about their God as having been a Jewish man with a family and a life -- the information in the gospels, surely would have spurred great interest if one had previously not 'known' of this information, theological beliefs from the scriptures notwithstanding.

The very 'personal' God being claimed to have been a human being on earth would surely have deserved a comment at the least. The docetic belief shows that there was great interest in the question of whether Jesus' body was physical or not--because he was a divine being. How much more interest there would have been as more details came out from the gospels. Yet, no one said "this is pure bs. Our god lived only in the spiritual realm."

And yet, it was still discussed. It seems to me that this example along with the docetic writings are examples of why we perhaps SHOULD expect that an apologist who didn't believe in a historical Jesus who walked the earth would discuss an opposing view when they become aware of it. Yet, they didn't discuss it.

At the least this seems a significant enough issue to have been covered in Earl's book. Maybe he'll fill us in on whether he did or not. Edit: I see a quote above..I'll take a look

ApostateAbe

If there was no evidence of the existence of any apologetic writings against any heresies in early Christianity, then such an explanation may fly. But, as it stands, you must somehow explain how the apologetic writings against several heresies of the second century were preserved against the censorship of the church, but not the proposed heresy about a mythical/spiritual Jesus that was supposedly predominant in the beginning, believed by Paul, and lasted through to the second century and believed by more early Christian authors. Was the church especially fearful of that particular heresy, that they censored all mention of it, even the writings against it?

Do you at least understand why such a claim can be seen as difficult?

GakuseiDon

Er... actually I AM accusing Earl of selective reading.

I do a little more than that, though part of the analysis is looking at allusions to gospels and Pauline letters, which I do by referencing the article by Richard Carrier on the formation of the NT canon in my earlier articles on Doherty's use of Second Century writings.

That's why the analysis needs to go deeper than what Doherty gives in his book. What does it mean that allusions are made to gospels and the NT in Doherty's 'ahistoricist' writings? Did the 'ahistoricists' have oral traditions similar to content to that of the gospels? Doherty just takes it to a certain point; it needs to go further. It needs knowledgeable people looking at the implications.

And let me emphasize again how utterly fantastic is Doherty's conclusion of Tatian's "Address to the Greeks". That's something I would love to see him debate, perhaps with Richard Carrier, who writes (from the link above):

Curiously, the first "orthodox" Christian move toward canonization begins outside the Roman Empire, in the Syrian church. Moreover, this canon was ultimately not in Greek, but was a Syrian translation (M 114-7). The single man responsible is Tatian, who was converted to Christianity by Justin Martyr on a visit to Rome around 150 A.D. and, after much instruction, returned to Syria in 172 to reform the church there, banning the use of wine, the eating of meat, and marriage (M 115)...

The only complete work of Tatian's that survives is his "Oration to the Greeks" which is a scathing attack on Greek culture. We know he wrote books prolifically on a number of other topics. He was probably the first Christian to do so, apart from Justin.

Really? Maybe you mean I had no answer that you particularly liked.

It is all about setting expectations. If there is a large unexplainable -- and unexpected -- silence in Second Century literature that mirrors the First Century (which Doherty himself points out, as I write in my review) AND we can determine that most of the Second Century silence was by 'historicist' writers, then how would that set our expectations about what we would find in the First Century?

Toto, you write "This is not the stance that one would assume a first century writer would take, if Jesus were a near contemporary." THAT's the analysis that is missing. Can you give me the reasoning for that assumption please, and a cut-off date for when that assumption would no longer apply?

TedM

We are in agreement--we might expect there to be some.

A worthy point. Abe addressed this:
Is Abe right?

But if the belief in a historical Jesus was evolutionary, I would have expected that there would have been plenty of discussion of this evolution (ie see prior post referencing doceticm). So, the kind of evidence Earl mentions wasn't needed by pagan thinkers in order to raise the issue. All they needed was an awareness of the CONTROVERSY in order to pounce on the opportunity to use it to their advantage! While there were gaps in communication and there was censorship as time went on, I find it a real stretch to believe that there was this large Christian movement -- thousands of believers, with a number of coveted documents that support the belief in a spiritual-realm only Jesus, which was displaced with a historical Gospel Jesus at the core, requiring the 'conversion' of Paul to a historicist position, and we don't have ANY trace of this taking place while we DO have long records of heritics (Marcion, Tatian) and docetics who believed (in Tatian's case at one time at least) in a historical Jesus but rejected certain ideas pertaining to his fleshly humanness.

There was no need for someone to undertake a massive task like an 800 page book. Just a reference.. just one..

GakuseiDon

TedM, I think Toto would say that the early historicists wouldn't care about the ahistoricists, since (to quote Toto): "the second century and later Christians believed that Jesus was "historical" for theological reasons". And who knows? Maybe Toto is right! But the analysis still needs to be done. Is it correct? Does it fit into what we know from the literature available? I don't think so. The idea that Jesus didn't have flesh was considered a grave heresy. I can't see how the idea that Jesus never came to earth was anything that would be ignored. But then I haven't done that analysis either, so who can say? That's why we need knowledgeable people, looking at the implications, trying to work out how all the pieces fit together.

I think we can go further than that. According to Earl (from page 4 of my review):

For the average pagan and Jew, the bulk of the workings of the universe went on in the vast unseen spiritual realm (the "genuine" part of the universe) which began at the lowest level of the "air" and extended ever upward through the various layers of heaven. Here a savior god like Mithras could slay a bull, Attis could be castrated, and Christ could be hung on a tree by "the god of that world," meaning Satan (see the Ascension of Isaiah 9:14)

Thus, according to Doherty, that evolution occurred against the direction of beliefs of the time. Is this significant? I think so personally, but again, it is just another building block in making an evaluation of his theories, another part that feeds into the analysis that needs to be made. Just as, on the "Vision of Isaiah" thread, "dwelling among men" and "in your form" in the L/S versions of Ascension of Isaiah needs to be added into the analysis to examine the various options, and see how everything holds together.