andrewcriddle

The basic issues are that
a/ the link to John the Baptist is not IIUC a central element in early Mandaean belief.
b/ The elaborate Gnostic myths of the Mandaeans are unlikely to go back to John the Baptist or IMO to anyone else active before 70 CE.
Thank you.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Yeah, but how do you know what those people who died in 64 thought about Jesus? Nobody knows. Tacitus is writing in ~115, about things that had happened 50 years before. He knows what the Christians of his day think, but no evidence is given for the Christians of Nero's day, if there were any.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Marxist, you might enjoy this argument from Laupot that the Romans destroyed the Temple to get at Christianity.

http://anzwers.org/free/elaupot/index.html

rlogan

Insomuch as we have no contemporaneous text evidence from the Mandeans, I concede that the question is unanswerable conclusively. That followers of John continued on is in evidence with the Bible itself.

Occam's suggests continuation rather than multiplicity of origin.

It would be true of all religions that there is evolution and adaptation from elsewhere. As I have alluded to, there are some aspects of the Mandeans that are much more ancient.

So i should not want to propose the mandeans as strictly John in origin and strictly pure linear descendants.

Johann_Kaspar

Because belief is the most powerful weapon. Especially when it is based on a myth. People will die with joy because or when they think that they will win an eternal afterlife. For instance this belief could be based on the story of the resurrection. Now we can debate if there was an historical or a mythical Joshua, but would you deny that the resurrection story is a myth? I am sure not. So the witnesses died - if they died - for a myth.

Also the mythical Messiah was harmful to the Roman empire because it gave power to the Jews who wanted an independant Eretz Israel, it gave them the ideology to fight "until the end". And the Roman empire paid the price.
Please!
As long as xianity remained within Judaism, it was not called xianity.
But do we know when xianity began?
888 auc.

Jobar

Yuri, I don't consider myself at all a scholar in these matters; a well-educated layman perhaps, if 'layman' is a suitable term for an atheist. But I *do* consider myself a mythicist, as I said here; and my position on it has nothing whatsoever to do with the number or indeed the existence of any Christian martyrs. As others have said very well, human beings will martyr themselves for the strangest reasons.

I've read Wells' Did Jesus Exist?; also numerous works on mythology in general. When I read Wells' work I was barely aware of the mythicist position, but ever since I read the Bible at fourteen I'd been aware that something about Jesus-the-person just wasn't right. Reading Wells was like a great light dawning, and his hypothesis still seems to me the best we have at present to explain the origins of Christianity.

I hold mythicism as a hypothesis, not as a faith; I've got no money bet either way. I'm not averse to seeing any evidence that there was indeed a real live human being who was the 'seed' that grew into Jesus the Christ; however so far it seems more likely that, like Hercules, William Tell, Paul Bunyan, and Clark Kent, Jesus is made up from whole cloth.

Yuri, I've read this thread with interest; truly I'm open to any new evidence, or any new hypotheses, which would attempt to demonstrate the existence of some HJ. However, I am vastly unimpressed with any argument of the form 'prove that X does not exist!'; I used to mod the EoG forum, and I've seen way, way too many theists trying to pull that trick. And I've seen creationists claiming that just because we don't have every single transitional fossil showing the evolution of creature A into creature B, evolution is impossible; I modded E/C for a short time, too. Some of your arguments look entirely too much like those creationists' claims.

IOW, all your efforts on this thread have been interesting, but unconvincing, to this interested non-specialist.

dragbody

Yuri,

Forgive me for jumping in this conversation so late. This is my first post on these forums. It seems that many responses have been given to your initial question about how the chronology of early Christian martyrdom can be reconciled within a mythic Christ perspective. While many of these answers have been sound and fair, you seem to be unhappy with them. I think the reason for this is because your question is really just the pretext for a conclusion that you have not explicitly stated.

As Elaine Pagels has shown in her book, "The Gnostic Gospels," belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as stated in the Apostle's Creed was probably formed in response to those early Gnostic Christians who denied that Jesus had literally risen bodily. This belief needed to be defended in order to justify those Christians who were allowing themselves to be martyred in emulation of Jesus's death. So, it seems your conclusion, if stated explicitly, may sound something like this: "Early Christian martyrdom, as it was fueled by a desire to imitate the literal, bodily death of Jesus, is proof that the early Christians believed that Jesus had been on earth in physical form in the recent past."

I am aware that these are not your words, but this conclusion is the only argument I can see your questions working towards.

The first problem of this conclusion, however, as it has been stated by others here, is that we do not know for sure when the first Christians were actually martyred.

Second, we do not know the specific reason the first Christians were killed. There were many reasons that early Christians may have been killed. To assume that the earliest Christians died for the same reasons that the second or third century Christians died is unfounded. For example, it has been suggested that Paul was martyred under the persecution of Nero's reign. Even if this were true, which we have no reason to believe, we also have no reason to believe Paul was killed for a belief in an historic Jesus. The point is that the earliest Christians to be killed were more probably killed as scapegoats--the content of their beliefs was irrelevant to why they were killed, and therefore their deaths do not support the thesis I think you are suggesting.

Ultimately, the first Christians we know that died for their Christian faith and belief in Jesus were not killed until after a belief in the historic Jesus could have evolved in a picture of early Christianity consistent with the MJ theory.

Rick Sumner

I believe you're misunderstanding Pagels, whose position is rather that doctrine, which is not synonymous with belief, of Jesus' bodily resurrection was formed in response to Gnosticism. Belief in it, as Pagels readily admits, is attested quite early, and follows quite naturally from emphasis placed on Jesus not being a ghost. The question she is addressing is why the "orthodox" made it doctrine--a confession necessary to orthodoxy, not why it was believed in. She inquires as to why the insistance that their interpretation was the only interpretation, in light of other accounts, such as Emmaus Road, which would seem to lend themselves well to a spiritual resurrection. (The Gnostic Gospels, p.4-7)

Pagels sees rather a political advantage to the doctrine. If it was a bodily resurrection, and that body has now ascended, then authority is restricted to those who experienced that resurrection. It is Pagels' contention that it became doctrine as an effort to legitimize the supposed Petrine succession, and to deny the validity of those who claim to achieve authority through later experiences and secret revelations, which of course includes the Gnostics.(The Gnostic Gospels, 7-27)

Regards,
Rick Sumner

dragbody

Rick,

Sorry, I apparently was not very clear about my intention for referencing Pagels. The only reason I did so was to connect the idea of Christian martyrdom with the historic death of Jesus--the point I thought Yuri was trying to make. When I said "belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus as stated in the Apostle's Creed," I was referring to the proclamation of their beliefs, i.e. doctrine, not the actual beliefs themselves.

Also, as I remember it, it was the belief in bodily resurrection and the post-resurrection appearance to people like Peter that was alledged to validate Petrine succession. It was the bodily death of Jesus that Christians imagined themselves to be emulating.

Thanks for your reply and pointing out where I should be more clear.

Yuri Kuchinsky

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, my dear friend.

I'm inviting the mythicists, so far unsuccessfully, to put their best case forward.

Yes, there _are_ quite a few mythicist theories out there, but so what? Since you have so many theories at your disposal, then why is it so difficult to select one for presentation?

Just give me your best case... How does it fit in with the traditional chronology of early martyrs?

Yuri.