ApostateAbe

This thread is about the evidence that first convinced me of the historical mortal Jesus--it was the set of his failed prophecies of the imminent doomsday. Such a thing seems to be much more expected of a historical human Jesus as a cult leader than a merely-mythical Jesus.

Our only relevant sources for this stuff are the canonical Christian gospels, which of course are religious and mythical, and we cannot trust them at face value. However, as they exist as literature strongly reflecting ancient Christian belief, then they are historical evidence of ancient belief, and our goal should be to try to find the best explanations of that belief. When we interpret (not believe) the synoptic gospels on the face, then we have a model of Jesus who is, among a few other things, a human doomsday cult leader. The early Christians would not use such disparaging language, but that is nevertheless what they directly believed.

The three earliest gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) each contain roughly the same set of apocalyptic prophecies, each with a certain deadline. The deadline was the death of the last of Jesus' immediate listeners. Since the synoptic gospels were likely written shortly before this deadline, the gospel authors may have extended it a little, and Jesus may have actually told his disciples that the end of the world was just around the next corner, not necessarily a few decades in the future. Either way, it is a strong reflection of the belief of who Jesus was in the minds of the early Christians. The apocalyptic deadlines are contained in Mark as follows:

• And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’ (Mark 9:1)
• Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. (Mark 13:30)

These deadlines are in the context of Jesus predicting the details of the apocalypse.

In Mark 8, the prophecies are as follows:

• If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it
• Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels

And the deadline for these two prophecies is given as, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power."

Mark 13 contains much fuller detail. In Mark 13, the prophecies are as follows:

• Many will come in my name and say, "I am he!" and they will lead many astray.
• When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.
• For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom
• there will be earthquakes in various places
• there will be famines
• they will hand you over to councils
• you will be beaten in synagogues
• you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them
• bring you to trial and hand you over
• Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child
• children will rise against parents and have them put to death
• you will be hated by all because of my name
• the one who endures to the end will be saved
• the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be
• those in Judea must flee to the mountains
• Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days
• in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be
• for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he has cut short those days
• False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.
  sun and moon will be darkened
• the stars will be falling from heaven
• the powers in the heavens will be shaken
• Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory
• Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

And the deadline for all of these prophecies is given as, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place."

This means, at the very least, the Christian author of the gospel of Mark believed that Jesus taught the apocalypse is right around the corner. So, what is the best explanation for this belief? There is a known personality profile of those who lead religious movements and tell others that the end of the world is directly at hand: doomsday cult leaders. History and the modern day are littered with those people, and they very much tend to be actual people, not mere myths. If you take the gospel accounts at face value, even regardless of whether or not you accept the theology or miracle stories, that is the character profile that you find in Jesus. In addition to the doomsday prophecies,

• He strongly encouraged complete devotion to his self (Matthew 16:16-17).
• He encouraged hatred of one's family (Luke 14:26) and complete separation from one's family (Matthew 19:29).
• He made enemies of the religious authorities (Matthew 21:23-27).

Shortly after I found about the apparently failed doomsday prophecies of Jesus, I concluded that Jesus really was a doomsday cult leader, not just because that is what early Christians believed, but because it is the profile of human beings that we actually see often in history, not in mere myth. I then wondered why this wasn't a big rhetorical point against Christianity. There were apparently a lot of atheists on the Internet who, rightly or wrongly, believed that Jesus never actually existed, primarily because they believed that the gospels can not be used for historical evidence. However, the gospels do contain direct evidence of what many of the earliest Christians believed, so maybe we can make very good conclusions from what they apparently believed. It seems to be much more plausible that their beliefs spring from an actual single traveling cult leader named Jesus than from a mere myth of such a man.

Can you explain this stuff with a merely mythical Jesus? Sure. You can explain almost any conceivable evidence with a mythical Jesus. But, the point is that it seems to be much more plausibly explained with a Jesus who was actually a human being. All of the religious myths of human doomsday cult leaders that we know about originated from actual human doomsday cult leaders of the same rough profile as the myths. Therefore, it is likely that the same pattern is followed by the historical Jesus. Examples of such doomsday cult leaders are:

• Joseph Smith (LDS church)
• Haile Selassie (Rastafarianism)
• Lyndon LaRouche (LaRouche movement)
• Charles Taze Russell (Jehovah's Witnesses)
• Shukri Mustafa (Takfir wal-Hijra)
• Jim Jones (Jonestown)
• David Koresh (Branch Davidians)
• Shoko Asahara (Aum Shinrikyo)
• Claude Vorilhon (Raëlism)
• Li Hongzhi (Falun Gong)
• Dada Lekhraj (Brahma Kumaris)

Strong cults do not always predict the doomsday, but doomsday prophecies are almost exclusively the mark of a cult--they motivate adherents to go to extremes to evangelize, work for the cult and recruit, because they believe that the fate of the whole world is at stake in what they do. Many such cult leaders develop into myths, including myths with miracles. A particularly close comparison to this model of the historical Jesus is Haile Selassie of Rastafarianism. Recently, an article was written that explored the analogous myths of Haile Selassie. It was published in 2009 in the journal Think of The Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Against Mythicism: A Case for the Plausibility of a Historical Jesus by Edmund Standing

If a merely-mythical-Jesus model has competitive plausibility, then it likewise needs to fit what we know about the patterns of history and sociology. For example, do we have any examples of a merely-mythical human doomsday cult leader?

It is unlikely on the face. The very earliest evidence of earliest Christian belief strongly indicates that Christianity was a doomsday cult. Paul wrote:

1 Thes 4:13-17

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.

Doomsday cults are seemingly always founded by a human cult leader. The MJ explanation that would most follow most parsimoniously, but would seem highly unlikely regardless, is that there was some human cult leader that made up another human cult leader. But, there are plenty of other explanations. If the character of Jesus were somehow borrowed from other myths, or if he gradually evolved, or if he started as entertaining fiction, or if he is a combination of many men, then, whatever the explanation, it needs a historical pattern, or even just a single close comparison. If no good comparison exists, then we seem to have a choice between explaining the origin of Christianity as something historically normal or explaining the origin of Christianity as something especially extraordinary.

If a competitive explanation for the accounts of Jesus as a human doomsday cult leader is lacking in the merely-mythical-Jesus models, then how do any of the merely-mythical-Jesus models compete? Do any of the MJ models more powerfully explain any of the other historical evidence?

GakuseiDon

Mark's time limit that "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place", if part of a symbolic Jesus within a midrashic tale, needs to start from the point of Mark's writing, around 90 CE. So when Jesus says "this generation", Mark meant the generation reading his Gospel, not from the time of Pilate.

Not sure I understand the reasoning myself, but that's what Doherty says.

GakuseiDon

Looking through "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man", Doherty writes:

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 is an apocalyptic oracle about what will happen to living and dead Christians at the time of the Lord's coming, expected soon. It has no specific parallel in the Gospels" (page 30)

Doherty's concern here though is whether "words of the Lord" applied to Jesus or not, rather than on the timing of the coming End Times.

hjalti

Well, early Christianity was clearly apocalyptic. If we assume that Jesus was originally some kind of a god, who was later historicised, I can't see why we wouldn't expect apocalyptic sayings that were uttered by early doomsday Christians to be attributed to him.

One thing could possibly support this, the sayings where the gospel Jesus seems to talk about the son of man as someone other than him, when we see in Paul that they expected the return of Jesus. It makes sense if those sayings were originally sayings about the return of Jesus, put into the mouth of Jesus (the other explanation is that the gospels have retained Jesus' original teaching, that the son of man actually wasn't Jesus).

But sure, Jesus as a doomsday cult leader is a very plausible scenario.

ApostateAbe

Yeah, it seems to me to be kind of a slam dunk. If there were a better merely-mythical-Jesus model that could plausibly explain the evidence more fittingly, or even half as well, then I would have much more doubt. MJ-advocates or HJ-skeptics are smart people, generally, and I can't explain exactly why they tend to treat hand-waving ad hoc explanations as significant reasons to dismiss a very fitting model for this stuff (except of course for an explanation that would be insulting to them). They really need a model of the origins of Christianity that has good historical comparisons, in my opinion. Without that, then they need to either explain what makes Christianity so damned unique, or they lose the debate and they shouldn't be wondering why the critical scholars don't take their ideas so seriously.

hjalti

Ok, I don't think that mythicists can't come up with a plausible scenario. Something like this: There were a lot of doomsday-prophets in early Christianity (e.g. Paul), and when the god Jesus was "brought down to Earth" people attributed to him sayings going around among Christians, including those regarding the imminent return of the god Jesus.

I think I agree that doomsday-cult Jesus probably makes better sense of this specific portion of the data, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a slam dunk.


Can you elaborate?

PhilosopherJay

Hi ApostateAbe,

We should not ignore the very next line of Jesus at Mark 13:32, which contradicts and negates the prediction date of 13:31

This indicates that a speech most likely given in an earlier prophetic text was rewritten and included in a later edition of the text.

In the Iron Man original comic book, the author, Stan Lee, had Tony Stark building weapons for the United States to be used in the Vietnam War and fighting against the Vietnamese. it was later changed in the 1990's to the First Gulf War and to the war in Afghanistan in the 2000's. (The character was based on Howard Hughes who built weapons for the United States in World War II.)

Obviously Stan Lee was predicting/expecting a U.S. victory in the war in Vietnam. Otherwise why would he associate his superhero with a losing war? Does this failed prediction/expectation prove the real existence of Iron Man?

One may argue that Tony Stark was real because later writers would have buried the earlier wrong books with the wrong original story. If it was in their power, they probably would have done so. They couldn't recall the earlier comic books, so they did the next best thing, just rewrite the story and not worry about the earlier readers.

In the same way the Jesus predictions (probably original John predictions since John was a prophet, not Jesus) circulated earlier. The later writers could not recall them, so they just negated them by saying that nobody knows when these predicted events will take place.

It is quite dishonest to ignore this evidence of an obvious rewrite to make a case for an historical Jesus. It is very much like ignoring the 1990's and 2000's reboot of Iron Man to make a case for an historical Tony Stark who lived in the 1960's during the Vietnam War.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Toto

No, he can't, without violating the rules of this board or otherwise getting himself into trouble.

You cam PM me if you want more details.

hjalti

You might add Wayne Bent/Michael Travesser to that list. A documentary about him and his cult has the most hilarious example of a failed end of the world prediction I've ever seen: Then End of the World Cult (part 1). Although the stuff about touching teenage girls isn't funny at all. Just

ApostateAbe

Philosopher Jay, thank you for your attention and criticism. I don't see Mark 13:32 as negating Mark 13:30. Mark 13:32 sets an upper limit, and Mark 13:30 states the uncertainty within the bounds of the upper limit. You don't know what the dice roll will be, but you know it will be an integer between one and six. To be clear, I don't find it so likely that either quote closely reflects what Jesus actually said--the words of Jesus were reshaped to fit the perspective of Mark. Mark was written around 70 CE, about 40 years after the death of Jesus, and time was quickly running out before the apocalyptic prophecies look not nearly as imminent as Jesus (a doomsday cult leader) originally predicted. So, Mark 13:30 would, in my opinion at least, be a rewriting of the deadline to make the apocalypse imminent from the perspective of Mark, because there were conceivably some listeners of Jesus who were still alive, and Mark 13:32 is a way to apologetically justify 40 years of now-embarrassing delay in the doomsday--Mark's version of Jesus says that nobody really knows exactly when it would happen (at least within the upper bound).