krosero

Earl Doherty proposes that the original Christians proclaimed a Jesus crucified in the heavens, never seen on earth by human eyes. This essay will examine his contention that these original sects gave way entirely to Christians who proclaimed Jesus to have been witnessed on earth. I will also be examining Doherty’s claim that another group of Christians worshipped only God in heaven and did not worship Jesus Christ in any form.

I have found so many problems with Doherty’s theory that I’m going to ask you all to forgive the length of this post. It turns out that even when you grant most of Doherty’s premises, his alternative history of Christian origins is full of contradictions and grave problems from start to finish. Chief among the problems is that orthodox Christians who were deeply concerned with heretical beliefs about Christ appear to know nothing about Doherty’s proposed beliefs.

The problem appears at any point in this essay. I only emphasize that it is worth starting at the beginning if you want to get the fullest perspective on Doherty’s claim that these two Christianities existed.

Also, I’ve tried to explain everything as clearly as possible, in the hopes of avoiding basic confusion about my arguments and the terms I’m using. If for no other reason, please read the essay from the beginning before asking for clarification. You have my thanks in advance.

Now on with the program.

Last year I began wondering in earnest why we don’t see clear signs of conflict, in the historical record, between the Christian communities proposed by Doherty and the communities that believed in Jesus’ appearance on earth. It’s a question that I first saw GakuseiDon pursuing to great effect in his formal debate with Doherty two years ago. It’s a perplexing question, because competition and conflict were such prominent features of early Christianity, the great examples being the conflicts with Marcion and with Gnostic groups.

See for example what Bart Ehrman has to say about how early Christian diversity resulted in inter-Christian conflict, with arguments and condemnations issued from all sides.

So why don’t we see clear signs that orthodox Christians were even aware of Doherty’s proposed sects and their beliefs? Why do they speak, as I have found, in ways that preclude there ever having been Christians who worshipped a celestial Christ? Why is this the case even for those two authors whom Doherty proposes as engaged in conflict with his sects?

Doherty’s narrative of Christian evolution has his proposed groups essentially disappearing quickly, so that this silence I am describing is supposed to have an appearance of plausibility. It is not plausible, as we will see. Moreover, one of my ultimate questions about Doherty’s theory is why his proposed Christianities should have gone extinct, or even diminished. I cannot answer that question, and I have found nothing in Doherty’s work that really offers an explanation.

Below I've written up a narrative of Doherty’s proposed evolution, starting with extended analysis of the two examples of conflict that he offers. I’ve followed Doherty’s own dates, mostly taken from a page on his website and the opening chapter of The Jesus Puzzle.

The groups mentioned in my narrative that are accepted in mainstream models, and also accepted in Doherty’s model as groups distinct from the two Christianities in question, are the orthodox, the docetists, separationists, Marcionites, Gnostics, and Encratites.

The groups proposed by Doherty don’t have proper names. I don’t know what to call the worshippers of the heavenly/celestial Christ, so I will call them “Doherty’s original Christians” or “MJ Christians”, to be distinguished from “HJ Christians” (or historicists) who believed that Christ appeared on earth.

Doherty’s second group is comprised entirely of apologists who, the argument goes, did not worship Jesus Christ in any form. Doherty sometimes refers to them simply as “the apologists”, though this can be confused with other apologists whom Doherty acknowledges as worshipping Jesus Christ. Doherty associates his apologists with a religion of the Logos and has referred to them as “Logos-followers”. Even this can be confused with certain apologists who accepted both the Logos and Jesus Christ, but I have found no better term. “Logos-followers” is the term I will use.

Let me start by reproducing Doherty’s own synopsis of his proposed evolution. Note his brief description of the political motivations behind it, in this piece from his “Jesus Puzzle” website:

A CONFLICT IN FIRST JOHN

Doherty holds that PAUL, in the middle of the first century, preached a celestial Jesus Christ, crucified by demons in the heavens. After Paul, but still before the First Jewish Revolt, Doherty has the epistles of JAMES and HEBREWS also preaching a celestial Christ, though he acknowledges that these epistles were not produced by Paul’s congregations and need not have shared their exact beliefs. After the war, Doherty has the rest of the New Testament epistles (and the Book of REVELATION) preaching a celestial Christ, though he makes an important exception for certain epistles.

He argues that certain New Testament communities, writing most likely in the 90s, first conceived of the celestial Christ having come down to earth when they learned – in visions alone – that Christ had “come in the flesh.” This distinction goes to the Johannine epistles: 1, 2 and 3 JOHN.

Doherty sees these epistles as containing the first signs of conflict in the evolution toward historicism. In both 1 John 4.2-3 and 2 John 7, “anti-Christ” is the description for those who fail to acknowledge Jesus Christ “come in the flesh.” The first of these two references is the more famous and important one:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already.

Doherty suggests that here we have a disagreement about whether Christ had incarnated on earth.

See his explanation on a past thread here:

But this interpretation of the conflict in 1 John is far from necessary, and it actually introduces a basic contradiction into the heart of Doherty’s mythicist model.

Epistles that supposedly proclaim a celestial Christ also speak of his flesh and say that he has come into the world.

See for example a contemporary of the Johannine author, 1 PETER, who says that Christ was “put to death in the flesh” (3.18) and “suffered in the flesh” (4.1). We find in both these verses the word used by 1 John for “flesh” (σαρκι). Yet Doherty does not count 1 Peter as historicist. He counts it as one of the early writers that believed in a divine “Son in heaven” (The Jesus Puzzle, 16). Though Doherty has never said so, the community behind 1 Peter would have been condemned as “anti-Christ” by the community behind 1 John. But anti-Christ worshippers, per 1 John, can be recognized if they do not confess Jesus Christ “come in the flesh.” The community of 1 Peter is speaking of Jesus Christ put to death in the flesh and suffering in the flesh. Did they not believe that Christ came in the flesh, if he suffered and died in the flesh?

The answer seems to be yes. 1 TIMOTHY, a supposedly MJ epistle (ibid, 301-302), says, “Christ Jesus came into the world” (1.15). The verb used there (ερχομαι) is the one that the Johannine epistles use to say that Christ came in the flesh. And the word for “world” (κοσμοϕ) is the one used in a nearly identical statement from 1 John 4.9, “God sent his only Son into the world.”

This problem is wider than a few verses. The NT epistles as a whole speak of Christ’s flesh, not to mention his body, blood, suffering, crucifixion, death, and resurrection from the dead. On these matters, the Johannine epistles do not exhibit a vocabulary different from supposedly MJ epistles; yet Doherty presents the Johannine epistles as unique. And he proposes that they have chosen as their mark of orthodoxy – their method of keeping heretics out – the same language used by those heretics whom they are purportedly condemning.

In Doherty’s view of the ancient world, gods could readily be described as having suffered and died in the flesh, and as having come into the world, even when they did not incarnate into a body on the earth but merely descended as low as the air or heaven where Christ supposedly was sacrificed. If the ancients did think this way, then an epistle like 1 John might use “flesh” to mean an earthly savior, while others like 1 Peter might simply refer to “flesh” crucified in the heavens. An epistle like 1 John might mean the earth when saying that Christ was sent into the world, while 1 Timothy might mean only the heavens when saying that Christ came into the world.

But then why does the community behind 1 John believe that adherents of the heavenly crucifixion “will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7)? Why does 1 John, when fashioning a test for recognizing those who worship the celestial Christ, expect them to be unable to use words that we actually see them using in the NT epistles?

Why does 1 John require the word “flesh,” which the heretics freely use about their savior, and make the test easier for them to pass? The argument seems to be that 1 John is using “flesh” as a way to emphasize or confirm that the appearance was on earth. But that cannot be in Doherty’s model, in which the ancients used “flesh” regularly to describe non-earthly saviors. So what is going on? Why is the test about coming in the “flesh” and not about coming to “earth”?

These problems disappear if we turn to known ancient theologies to explain what 1 John’s opponents might have believed. Granted, their exact beliefs are unknown and probably always will be, since the author of 1 John gives us no positive description of what they believed. Moreover, there are no real descriptions of non-orthodox (or heterodox) beliefs until the second century, so at best we’re trying to shed light on 1 John by looking at Christian beliefs as they had developed decades after our epistle was written. But there are signs in 1 John that the opponents held earlier forms of these heterodox beliefs.

The two heterodox ideas that have most often been associated with 1 John’s opponents are docetism and separationism. There are several verses in the epistle that seem to oppose these beliefs while doing little or nothing to oppose the idea of the celestial Christ, so it will be worth our while to explain how this is so.

Docetists disputed that Christ came in the flesh, not by having him live and die in the heavens (they located him on earth, as Doherty acknowledges), but by claiming that he was a purely spiritual being who only appeared to possess human flesh and merely seemed to suffer. Doherty argues that the conflict in 1 John is not about docetism, but the test in chapter 4 seems to be in some way about flesh – the signature issue in conflicts with docetism. Moreover, the prologue of the epistle (1.1-3) emphasizes that the “word of life” could be seen and touched. And in 5.6 the author insists that the savior came in blood – a typical Christian reference to Christ’s suffering.

Separationism was the idea that the Christ was a spiritual entity distinct from Jesus—a belief that the Christ only temporarily inhabited Jesus and abandoned him before the crucifixion. This view is sometimes called docetic, even when it did not involve a denial that Jesus himself was made of real flesh; sometimes, though, it did involve this precise denial (e.g., among the Valentinians); plainly, we’re dealing with overlapping ideas, not exclusive of one another. In any case, separationism of some kind could help explain why the author of 1 John believes that his opponents will not “confess Jesus” (4.3). And it helps us in 2.22, where we find the author asking, “Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.” Moreover, the test in 4.2 speaks of a unified being, Jesus Christ, being incarnated; we could see here an attempt to preclude any separation of Jesus and the Christ. And Ehrman tells us that second-century orthodox Christians precluded such a separation by using the unified name “Jesus Christ” instead of referring to “Jesus” alone or to “Jesus called Christ” (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, pp. 137, 153-63).

Doherty, of course, has never presented the MJ Christians as separating Jesus from Christ or denying that Jesus was the Christ; his proposal involves a unified celestial being. Nor has he presented the MJ Christians as docetic; they refer to the savior as coming into the world, in the flesh, shedding blood.

It does not seem important, then, for the purposes of discussing mythicism, to try to align the opponents with any specific heterodoxy. It is also probably wrong to do so. The key test in chapter 4 speaks about “every spirit” and may not be aimed exclusively at one idea or group. The author speaks of “many antichrists” (2.18) and “many false prophets” (4.1). All this raises the possibility that the community behind 1 John was facing a wide variety of ideas. The preeminent Johannine scholar, Raymond Brown, conducted a systematic analysis of 1 John’s polemic and found that the views of the opponents have points of contact with many heterodox beliefs as described in the second century (The Epistles of John, p. 67).

For what it’s worth, Brown regarded the opponents in 1 John as proto-docetists who acknowledged the incarnation into flesh but did not confess its significance for salvation (e.g., The Community of the Beloved Disciple, p. 113). Ehrman disagrees and aligns the opponents more closely with second-century docetists who denied the reality of Jesus’ flesh (e.g., The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, pp. 132-33). The introduction to the Johannine epistles in the Harper Collins Bible Commentary says simply, “we may assume that the opponents held to the divinity of the Christ, but either denied or diminished the significance of his humanity” (R. Alan Culpeper).

But none of this can apply very well to MJ Christians as we find them in the NT. The worshippers of the celestial Christ did not fail to confess Christ’s flesh as important for salvation. They speak about Christ in the same way that the author of 1 John does, both generally and specifically, as we saw with 1 Peter’s emphasis on Christ’s suffering and dying “in the flesh.”

And 1 John’s key verse, stating that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh”, while perhaps a good affirmation of basic belief in the face of separationism and docetism, is not a particularly good way to affirm belief in the face of the celestial Christ. The phrase refers to Jesus Christ as a unified being who incarnated; and it affirms that Christ came in the flesh; but it does not say that Christ came down to earth to participate in flesh down here; it does not exclude the idea of the celestial Christ. Neither separationists nor docetists could make the exact confession in chapter 4; but worshippers of the celestial Christ could.

When fashioning a test for detecting heretics, the author does not avoid the language that we find MJ Christians using in the NT; he uses their language, and fails to use any vocabulary that would have made the test hard for MJ Christians to pass. All this implies that he was not concerned at all with the celestial Christ, if he even knew about it. This seems impossible in Doherty’s model, given that the author’s community was the first to dissent from the celestial Christ. It follows that the celestial Christ may simply be a mistaken construction, and that no such theology existed.

If Doherty retained this theology, he could still make 1 John consistent with the other epistles by reading it as proclaiming a celestial Jesus, whose flesh was crucified in the heavens. Then 1 John is saying that Jesus Christ, in the heavens, was truly in the flesh, against the opinion of another group of MJ Christians who were saying that the celestial Jesus Christ was not truly in the flesh. 1 John would be saying that Christ was sent into the world – meaning the heavens – against the opinion of others who believed that the savior did not truly enter our world. It would be left to Doherty to find supporting evidence for a conflict involving these beliefs, and to recast 1-3 John as MJ.

However, this solution still eliminates the Johannine epistles as a witness to an MJ/HJ conflict. It makes all the epistles MJ, but the evolution proposed by Doherty loses its first witness.

There appears to be no way to make 1 John work plausibly as a sign of conflict between an earthly Christ and the celestial Christ purportedly proclaimed in the NT.


MARK AND IGNATIUS

Let us move on, then, to MARK. Doherty has spoken often of Mark as the crucial element that changed everything. In Doherty’s model, Mark introduced a detailed historicist tradition that would eventually carry the day. Doherty holds that Mark presented his earthly Jesus as allegorical, around the years 85-90, the same time that 1 John was independently bringing the celestial Jesus Christ down to earth.

The question is, when does the belief in Mark’s Jesus, who died specifically under Pontius Pilate, change from an allegorical to a literal belief? Doherty does not see a literal belief yet making an appearance with JOSEPHUS in the year 93, since he regards the Testimonium and the James passage as later interpolations. He claims that MATTHEW and LUKE were written and understood, for a time, as allegories (The Jesus Puzzle, 193); and he dates these gospels a little late, to the years 100-120. I presume that Doherty regards the GOSPEL OF PETER as expressing a literal belief but that he would date it well into the second century. (Peter Kirby, at Early Christian Writings, dates it to 70-160). He regards 1 Timothy 6.13, with its allusion to Jesus standing before Pilate, as another interpolation, to be dated sometime after the appearance of the epistle itself circa 110.

Nor does Doherty see a literal belief in the Gospel Jesus yet appearing in the ASCENSION OF ISAIAH. That complex document contains two sections about Jesus, his birth by Mary, his career and death (though Pilate is not named), and the trials of the early Church. The first of these sections, 3.13 – 4.22, was probably composed in the late first century (see the Ascension of Isaiah at Kirby’s site). Presumably Doherty opts for a later date. He agrees with the common opinion that the second section about Jesus, chapters 6-11, also appeared in the late first century (ibid, 106). But he holds uniquely that when it was originally composed, this section must have spoken about a slaying of a “Son” in the heavens; he has even suggested that this section was originally an independent Jewish document that did not yet contain the names “Jesus” and “Christ”.

Doherty does describe one witness, CERINTHUS, as talking about an earthly Jesus around the year 100 (ibid, 305, 307). He was marked by the later church as one of 1 John’s opponents, and described as a separationist who held that Jesus himself was made of real flesh. Doherty calls him a docetist. But rightly he makes little of this witness since what we know about him is uncertain.

The first author whom Doherty freely acknowledges to be expressing literal beliefs about Mark’s Jesus is IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH. In his writings, Ignatius associates Jesus Christ with Mary, the Baptist and Pilate. Doherty argues that Ignatius heard about these figures in “echoes” of the allegorical stories that Mark and Matthew were telling; this seems to mean that stories were making their way around, and that Ignatius embraced what he heard as historical (ibid, 196). Ignatius preached these beliefs as a bishop and died for them, but per Doherty, neither Ignatius nor his church at large discovered the sources of their new beliefs, namely the Gospels.

Ignatius wrote 7 letters to various churches on his way to martyrdom in the arena in Rome, an event that Doherty dates conventionally to about 107. These letters are important because they attest to conflict. Doherty believes that among the nameless heretics condemned by Ignatius are the worshippers of the celestial Christ. Once again, though, we have a difficult time finding Doherty’s proposed beliefs in the texts. Ignatius’ opponents are generally thought to be Judaizing Christians and docetists. Doherty ascribes docetism to opponents mentioned in such passages as Smyrnaeans 2-3, 4.2, 5.2 and Trallians 10, but he thinks that the celestial Christ was one of the heretical doctrines opposed in Smyrnaeans 1, Magnesians 11 and Trallians 9.1 (The Jesus Puzzle, pp. 305-308; see also this page).

Yet there is a more serious problem here for Doherty’s mythicist model.

Ignatius knows Doherty’s original Christians, and he is not in conflict with them. Moreover, he speaks as if HJ belief went back all the way to Christ, and as if no one had ever held MJ beliefs.

Ignatius calls Peter and Paul “apostles” in his letter to the Romans, and he admits to his readers that he does not have the authority to command them as these apostles did. He praises the Ephesians for having “always agreed” with the apostles and calls his readers “fellow initiates” of Paul; he adds that Paul himself thought highly of the Ephesians and mentioned them in his own letters.

I am not enjoining you as Peter and Paul did. They were apostles, I am condemned; they were free, until now I have been a slave. But if I suffer, I will become a freed person who belongs to Jesus Christ, and I will rise up, free, in him. In the meantime I am learning to desire nothing while in chains. (Rom. 4.3).

In him I am bearing my chains, which are spiritual pearls; in them I hope to rise again, through your prayer. May I always have a share of it! Then I will be found to share the lot of the Ephesian Christians, who have always agreed with the apostles by the power of Jesus Christ. I know who I am and to whom I am writing; I am condemned, you have been shown mercy; I am in danger, you are secure. You are a passageway for those slain for God; you are fellow initiates with Paul, the holy one who received a testimony and proved worthy of all fortune. When I attain God, may I be found in his footsteps, this one who mentions you in every epistle in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 11.2 – 12.2).

The “echoes” that Doherty believes Ignatius and his churches have heard and adopted as orthodoxy are even specific enough to include a tradition about Peter and other apostles touching the risen Lord.

For I know and believe that he was in the flesh even after the resurrection. And when he came to those who were with Peter, he said to them, ‘Reach out, touch me and see that I am not a bodiless daimon.’ And immediately they touched him and believed, having been intermixed with his flesh and spirit. For this reason they also despised death, for they were found to be beyond death. And after his resurrection he ate and drank with them as a fleshly being, even though he was spiritually united with the Father. (Sm. 3).

[Translations by Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. 1].

Ignatius seems to think that the HJ belief he and his churches have adopted from recent “echoes” floating in the culture actually was preached decades earlier by certain apostles, who had witnessed actual events. He speaks to his readers as if Peter and Paul had once preached to them. It’s as if the history of the transition to the HJ did not exist.

Ignatius sees his readers and Paul as intimately connected. He praises them for having always agreed with Paul. He thinks that Paul mentions the Ephesians in his letters; the verb Ignatius uses is μνημονευω (call to mind, remember, think of). It looks as if Ignatius knows a church in Ephesus that claims to go back, as an HJ church, to Paul’s time. This claim would have surely involved a denial of their own history, because in Doherty’s model they cannot have known about the HJ back in Paul’s time and cannot have associated with Paul in any way, except as MJ followers.

There would have been many congregants who remembered how only ten or twenty years before Ignatius’ letter arrived, the congregation had buzzed with the HJ ideas they were hearing for the first time; those years must have been filled with conflict and conversions. Yet they seem to claim that their congregation heard of the HJ long before that time; they seem to claim that they had always been HJ.

In a slight variation, they may not have been a community of any kind when they first heard the Gospel ideas at the turn of the century; they may have been established for the first time as a church, upon the new HJ doctrine, a decade or two before Ignatius’ letter. This would involve them in a further lie, to the effect that their very existence as a congregation or church – not just their belief in the HJ – was more ancient than it actually was, and that everyone was mistaken to remember the foundation of their community as a recent event.

And the problems are just getting started.

Why does Ignatius seem to have forgotten or denied Paul’s reputation as the one who had taken the celestial Christ to the Gentiles and preached that gospel so widely? Did this reputation disappear before Ignatius heard about Christianity? And why do the congregations that claim to go back to Paul appear to be forgetting or denying the same thing?

Doherty argues that four epistles preaching a celestial Christ appeared in Ignatius’ time or shortly thereafter. One is written in Peter’s name and praises Paul – see 2 PETER 1.1, 3.15. The others are known as the Pastorals and are written in Paul’s name: 1 Timothy, 2 TIMOTHY and TITUS. As I discuss more fully in the next section, the communities attested in the Pastorals appear to be growing. For Doherty’s model this would mean that growing bodies of Christians still regarded Peter and Paul as preachers of the celestial Christ.

Scholars have speculated that the Pastorals may have been written by a church in Ephesus, or more generally within a province west of Antioch, known as Asia; all of the churches known to have received Ignatius, or to have received letters from him, were located in that province. This would make HJ and MJ Christians next-door neighbors who were likely in conscious, open disagreement about what Paul had actually preached. Granted, the location of the Pastorals is a speculation; but it would be equal speculation to locate their communities in a place where Ignatius could not have heard about them.

It is, quite simply, hard to believe that Ignatius was ignorant of the continuing reputation of Peter and Paul as the apostles who had preached the heresy he was condemning. Most probably he knew that Peter and Paul were regarded by at least some Christians as having very different careers and beliefs than the ones that he and his readers ascribe to them. It must have been an open disagreement – yet there is nothing in Ignatius to suggest a disagreement about the apostles. Ignatius tells us only about disagreements concerning Christ – to whom we now turn.

Ignatius must have believed that Christ had begun the Christian movement, some seven decades earlier. Now, in Doherty’s model Ignatius belonged to churches that had preached the earthly Jesus for two decades at most. These churches probably thought that Christ’s surviving companions and Paul had once preached the HJ to some congregations but that the truth about Christ had since been denied by MJ Christians; Ignatius’ churches probably regarded themselves as defending a truth that had once been accepted universally, before the time of heretics.

But it’s nearly certain that the MJ Christians would have bitterly contested all the claims leveled against them: the claim that Christ was seen on earth and that they had staked their lives on a false Christ; the claim that their apostles did and preached things that a new and hostile sect was claiming they did; and the accusation that their churches had denied the basic truth for decades.

And under Doherty’s model, the MJ Christians would have been right. They had accurate memories of the apostles preaching a celestial Christ, while the new HJ Christians had nothing to back up their false claims. What was the authority of the latter group for making Paul into a preacher of an earthly Messiah, and Peter into one who walked with such a figure? How could they claim that Peter and Paul had been their apostles, and not apostles to other communities? What did the HJ camp have to counter any of the arguments of the opposite camp? With what could they persuade Christians, Jews and pagans that their churches were right about Christ and his apostles? With what could they persuade anyone that they were right to call the MJ churches – Christianity’s first churches – reactionary heretics who had long been denying the truth?

The authority could not have come from the Gospels, for Doherty insists that Ignatius’ letters show no sign that the Gospels were yet known. And in Doherty’s model, the Gospels had been written only a few years earlier as allegories, which hardly leaves time for the communities that produced them to start thinking of them and passing them around as historical documents. The first generation that possessed the Gospels would not have passed them around as such because, per Doherty, they understood the “midrashic nature” of their Gospels.

If we assume not merely that individuals wrote the Gospels, but that active, flesh-and-blood communities possessed these texts, it is reasonable to suppose that they enjoyed discussing midrash and would have disagreed with interpreters who tried to take the midrash too literally – especially if the literal interpretation was being used to prop up a hostile authority.

In fact I find it extremely easy to suppose that in the small cities of the ancient world, with Christianity in internal conflict, its various sects would have known about each other through disputes, converts, business dealings, intermarriages, and basic conversation or gossip. They soon would have discovered that the narratives and characters proclaimed by the new HJ Christians matched up with those invented by Mark and/or Matthew and their respective communities. I find Doherty’s supposition that the Gospels essentially invented the HJ but remained outside of history throughout these decades, practically hidden or obscure, remarkably difficult to believe.

So let’s look at the whole picture. Ignatius writes to churches that support him in six cities, from as far away as Rome; he refers expressly to five of them as headed by bishops (Eph. 1.3; Mag. 2.1; Tr. 1.1; Phd. 1.1, 7.1-2; Sm. 12.2); he refers to “the brothers” in yet another city, Troas (Phd. 11.2; Sm. 12.1); his letters attest to the existence of his own church in Antioch, of course, and to Christians from nearby regions who helped him (Sm. 11.1; Phd. 10-11; Rom. 2.2; Pol. 7-8). A large HJ network preaching Mark’s Jesus, but without knowledge of Mark’s gospel or any community that used or copied it, has sprung up suddenly in the historical record, its ecclesial offices defending the new history, placing all Christian hopes for this life and the next upon it, successfully persuading many to accept it, and condemning all who will not accept it, even when objections are based on accurate memories of the apostles and upon the testimony of the people who invented the Gospel stories – all this, on the basis of nothing but “echoes” (rumors) that the new churches have heard.

Doherty acknowledges that the new HJ religion would have felt a need for an authoritative source when trying to persuade people, though he acknowledges the problem for his model unwittingly, asserting only a problem for the mainstream model by claiming that the Gospels were late compositions that had not yet reached Ignatius.

From his online essay about Ignatius:

From a recent post on this board:

Frankly these last few claims have surprised me. If Ignatius thought that Christ had lived on earth, of course he thought that Christ’s story had been passed along, starting with apostles. Ignatius regularly affirms the authority of “apostles” (e.g., Tr. 3, Phd. 5.1, Sm. 8.1, Mag. 13.2). He mentions their names and what they did: Doherty seems to forget or ignore the story of Peter touching the risen Lord, which certainly suggests a sense of apostolic tradition. We could also count Ignatius’ exhortation to “be established in the doctrines of the Lord and the apostles” (Mag. 13.1, a verse which indicates at the same time that Ignatius was aware of teachings from Jesus; see also how teachings are mentioned in Eph. 9:2 and the salutation to Rom.)

Doherty seems to be concluding that Ignatius and his community have no sources other than what is expressly spelled out in the letters that Ignatius himself wrote. This is consistent with his general methodology. It is a staple of Doherty’s reading of ancient documents that if something is not mentioned, or is not mentioned in the ways that Doherty expects to see, then the author did not know about it – and no one in his community knew about it either, because communities are based on shared information and beliefs. Doherty tends to explain silence with ignorance; other explanations are routinely dismissed.

Doherty’s arguments from silence, it should be said, are not invalid in themselves. Their ultimate validity rests on a wide set of factors. We have to judge how he reads the historical record and whether his expectations of what to find in it are reasonable. For now, suffice it to say that arguments from silence often cut two ways.

Ignatius mentions nothing, for example, about people who are denying the role of the apostles. He mentions people who are claiming heretical things about Christ (e.g., Tr. 10.1, Sm. 4.2), but there is no sign that heretics were using Peter, Paul or other apostles. He acknowledges that Christ can draw controversy, but he brings “apostles” into the conversation as mere points of admiration, or as figures whose acknowledged authority play a role in internal debates about the authority of bishops and presbyters. Why is it that the one time apostles are invoked as part of an external controversy, it is not to demonstrate that apostles saw Christ on earth, but specifically to affirm that Christ possessed flesh, which Peter touched? The likeliest reason is that Ignatius was involved in a dispute with docetists about Christ’s flesh, but not in a dispute about whether the apostles saw Jesus on earth or preached such a Jesus later.

In the HJ model, no one was saying anything new when they claimed that Jesus appeared on earth, that Peter saw him, and that Paul preached him. There was a chain of authority beginning with eyewitnesses and continuing with those who inherited their authority. This was enough for Ignatius to preach a Jesus associated with Mary, the Baptist and Pilate. The intervening seven decades were sufficient time for the church to spread to various cities and for its authorities to develop into the office of bishop. Mark was just one recorder of stories that had been established apart from him, on other authority, so Ignatius need not have known about him or felt the need to quote him.

At this point we should briefly address the possibility that the Ignatian letters are not authentic, at least to see if Doherty’s scenario can improve. Granted, Doherty does not seem to regard the letters as forged. In his book he seems to share the widely held view that they are authentic (The Jesus Puzzle, 55, 202, 260, 298); and as you can see above, he called them “genuine” in his recent post on this board. In his old website essay about Ignatius, Doherty said that he leaned toward judging the letters as inauthentic. Even then he argued that they could not have been written long after Ignatius’ death since they show no sign of Gospel knowledge. And his recent post describes Ignatius’ thought as belonging to the earliest stages of the evolution toward the HJ. At most, then, we’re looking at a forgery no later than about 120.

The problem with an early forgery, however, is that the forger cannot get away with making up too many things. Everything we’ve discussed so far can still be verified a decade or two later: the existence of Ignatius, the nature of his beliefs, his communication with certain churches; the existence of those churches, their organization, their histories; etc. Unless we speculate that the letters were not sent to people who knew about these things, the evolution described remains essentially the same.

And the forgery option brings in new problems. Another decade or so has passed; but under Doherty’s method of reading documents, the author still has not heard of the foundation documents for the beliefs that figure in the forgery as the ones for which Ignatius died. The forger does not appeal to documents that would have, not merely aided, but actually constituted his case that Ignatius died for the distinctive beliefs of the new religion; that Jesus was seen walking on the earth; that the struggle against the celestial Christ should continue.

We would be left, in short, with a strangely muted witness to the celestial Christ.

Some scholars have mounted a case for the letters as a late forgery, as late as 160. But this would put the letters past the time of the celestial Christ. Doherty dates the last of the writings that proclaimed the celestial Christ to about 120 (more on that below). The struggle with that theology could not have continued far beyond that time. Making the Ignatian letters into a late forgery would remove the author as a participant to the conflict with the celestial Christ.

The struggle we expect to find in the evolution to the HJ – a struggle that never appears as more than a possible whisper in the historical record – would lose its remaining contemporary witness.


THE PASSING OF THE CELESTIAL CHRIST

Doherty’s next witness to literal belief in Gospel traditions is TACITUS, the Roman historian whose history, The Annals, is dated to 115. In it we find a report that Pontius Pilate had executed Christ. Doherty actually holds a very mainstream opinion here, to the effect that Tacitus was merely repeating what Christians were saying about their origins.

Doherty speculates uniquely, though, that if Tacitus heard in Rome that Christians were speaking about an execution under Pilate, it could have been Ignatius who had recently brought the idea about this execution to the Christians in that city (The Jesus Puzzle, 202). Of course, Doherty is not asserting that the Roman Christians were MJ at the time of Ignatius’ arrival; Ignatius’ letter to the Romans is no different in that respect from any of his other letters; it is particularly full of praise, and it anticipates support from the readers. Rather, Doherty must be saying that the churches in Rome were HJ perhaps in the same way that 1 John had been, with a belief in a historical Christ of some kind, though not yet a Christ executed by Pilate. When Ignatius arrived in the city, Doherty speculates, the Christians in Rome took the new idea and embraced it – even though Ignatius had no authoritative sources to back up the information.

At this point, but possibly at an earlier date, Doherty brings in the EPISTLE OF BARNABAS, and claims that the author got his idea of an earthly crucified savior only from the Old Testament (ibid, 263-64).

Doherty has the community behind 1 John producing the GOSPEL OF JOHN by the year 125. His idea is that the Johannine community, already having constructed an earthly savior through their own visions, came across the allegorical Synoptics and adopted these narratives about Christ’s ministry and passion under Pilate, proclaiming them as real history in the Fourth Gospel. Presumably, whatever narratives about Jesus that they had formerly constructed from visionary experiences were replaced or adapted to fit the new story now found in the Fourth Gospel.

Shortly afterward we come across PAPIAS, whom Doherty acknowledges as a witness to historicism. Doherty makes little of this witness, though, since his works are not extant.

In the 120s or 130s we run into POLYCARP, bishop of Smyrna and Ignatius’ friend. In Polycarp’s only extant work, a letter to the Philippians, he links his readers with Paul just as Ignatius had done, and speaks of the time when Paul was working among the congregants in Philippi (Pol. Phil. 3.2, 9.1, 11.2-3). Under Doherty’s model, this church has been HJ for forty years at most. This is still a short enough time for congregants to have personal memories of the church either being founded or converted when the HJ beliefs arrived on their scene; to know, therefore, that the church had not received its HJ beliefs from Paul and may not even have worked with him at all; that it had first encountered the HJ within living memory.

Polycarp also quotes the anti-Christ, come-in-the-flesh formula we saw in 1 John (Pol. Phil. 7.1). Doherty has not, to my knowledge, claimed Polycarp as a witness to the proposed HJ/MJ conflict. Polycarp certainly speaks as if his readers have never heard of the celestial Christ, the MJ religion, or its apostles. He seems quite certain that his readers believe themselves to have been one of Paul’s actual (HJ) flocks, even though under Doherty’s model they had not a shred of evidence for this, while the MJ Christians possessed every bit of evidence to the contrary.

If Polycarp is a witness to the HJ/MJ conflict, he is the last one. The MJ Christians have already ceased to be represented in the historical record. Doherty has all the NT books that purportedly proclaim a heavenly crucifixion appearing by the year 120. As noted in the section above, the last MJ epistles were the Pastorals and 2 Peter, appearing shortly after Ignatius’ death.

But this can hardly be taken to mean that Doherty’s original Christians disappeared instantly around the year 120. Their epistles had still been appearing regularly. If I may use a famous quote: Nothing vanishes without a trace.

As I mentioned above, the Pastorals present a picture of an organized religion that is maturing and growing in numbers. These letters do not speak about the end of the world as much as Paul’s earlier letters had done, and they have settled into such mundane tasks as appointing bishops, deacons and elders; setting specific qualifications for appointees; and prescribing the ideal conduct of persons according to gender, age, and status. Even in Titus, which is written to a Christian community on the island of Crete, elders are being appointed “in every town” (Tit. 1.5). And 1 Timothy 5.3-16 gives a very specific impression of growing numbers, enjoining its congregation to enroll only women over the age of 60 as Church-supported widows and encouraging women under that age to marry.

Why does 1 Timothy hand down instructions applicable to congregations that are growing in size and apparently looking forward to a future (on earth), if we never see any more documents from its religion?

Then there are the MJ Christians whom Doherty says are living at this time in Bithynia-Pontus, the province governed by PLINY THE YOUNGER. In his latest essay, “Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism”, Doherty asserts that the Christians interrogated by Pliny knew nothing of an earthly savior. Pliny tells us about these interrogations in a letter to the emperor, written in 111 or 112 – around the time that Doherty assigns to the Pastorals. Pliny serves as testimony that MJ Christians were numerous enough, at least in his province of Bithynia-Pontus, to be perceived as a problem requiring an inquiry to the Emperor.

For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms (Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan).

Yet there seems to be no trace of the congregations of the celestial Christ after about 120. Why do they disappear and leave us no more documents?

The best solution here is that Doherty has misread Pliny’s letter and the Pastorals. These Christians do not worship the celestial Christ at all; they are descendants of a historicist religion that began in the first century.

And the problem remains for Doherty’s mythicist model even if the Pastorals and Pliny could somehow be removed from the puzzle: we still have the epistles of the celestial Christ ending without a plausible explanation, and Paul’s religion leaving no trace of awareness in Ignatius or in the later, growing churches that all speak of an earthly Jesus.

In the 140s we have a prominent witness, MARCION, who located Jesus’ ministry on earth but held docetic beliefs about his flesh. Marcion’s original works are not extant; he and his church, which continued for a long time, were in deep conflict with the orthodox, who related all that we know about Marcion’s church and its offshoots.

Marcion’s canon included ten of Paul’s letters, despite their purported proclamation of a celestial Christ. Marcion accepted Paul into his canon only about 25 years after the composition of the Pastorals, which attest to the existence of growing MJ communities that still revered Paul. And Marcion was from Bithynia-Pontus, Pliny’s province. Possibly the son of a bishop, he was born in Pontus around the start of the second century, a few years before the time when Pliny purportedly found only MJ Christians. All this makes it incredible that Marcion did not know about the celestial Christ or about Paul’s reputation as an apostle of the celestial Christ.

Another witness at this time – only because Doherty dates it to about 150 – is the ACTS OF THE APOSTLES. Doherty holds that Acts was written to counter Marcion and to appropriate Paul for the orthodox.

Then we come across another pagan, LUCIAN, who associated Christianity with an earthly founder. Doherty mentions him in some statements about what Christianity had evolved into by this time.


In The Jesus Puzzle (pp. 200-01, emphasis mine):


In his debate with GakuseiDon:


In "Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism":


The first of these statements suggests a world in which the celestial Christ had all but disappeared by around 160. The other statements have the Gospel forms of Christianity – as represented in the orthodox, Marcion and others – still just making inroads in mid-century.

Whatever may be Doherty’s precise view on when the religion of the celestial Christ passed from the scene – and I acknowledge that precision is hardly to be expected in a matter like this – the religion in question has no witnesses among the church fathers and apologists of the time, who were starting to catalogue heresies.

The first of the heresiologists, JUSTIN MARTYR, wrote in the 150s. Justin’s anti-heresy work does not survive, but his extant works do attest to the existence of certain heresies, including that of Marcion.

Other heresiologists soon followed, including IRENAEUS, who wrote the five-volume Against Heresies between 175 and 185; TERTULLIAN, who wrote extensively about heresies between 197 and 220; and HIPPOLYTUS OF ROME, who wrote the 10-volume Refutation of All Heresies in the early third century.

None of the heresiologists mention a belief that Jesus was crucified in the heavens and never seen on earth. Doherty has always maintained that the orthodox Christians of the second century simply misunderstood the writings that had expressed this belief. The argument is that the religion of the celestial Christ had virtually disappeared by the latter half of the second century. The unspoken implication is that Christians deeply concerned with heresies did not remark upon the celestial Christ because that religion had become a trivial threat or was already dead, having passed from the scene some time before heresies were systematically attacked. It seems, in fact, that enough time had passed by for the orthodox, who did not have our hindsight, to know that the religion of the celestial Christ had indeed passed away and was not a present or future threat. We do not even get a recollection of how this heresy had either fortunately passed away or had been triumphantly defeated. There is nothing.

There is no hint that anyone remembered the role of 1 John or Ignatius in opposing the celestial Christ. Such a memory would not have been hard to preserve. Polycarp was Ignatius’ friend, and he lived until about 155. Irenaeus claims to have met Polycarp. And if I may state the obvious, Irenaeus could not have been the only person of his time who did meet Polycarp.

It’s an open question whether in Doherty’s model the orthodox were not worried about or were entirely unaware of the existence of a theology in which Jesus never came to earth. I have searched through Doherty’s work without finding a positive statement on this matter. And as I indicated in my introduction, nothing in Doherty’s writings that I know of attempts to explain how the theology of the celestial Christ could have died so quickly, especially when it had appeared to be growing only a few decades earlier. Nor have I found a reason proposed for why it should have died at all.

We are prompted to ask again why no one knew what Paul had proclaimed. Marcion and the orthodox were arguing over Paul, each side claiming that Paul supported its views on the nature of Christ’s sojourn on earth. Each side surely tried to find out whatever they could use against the other, to the effect that the other was misrepresenting the truth. Was there some tacit agreement between the two sides that neither of them would mention the celestial Christ?

And why did no one who worshipped or remembered the celestial Christ bother to tell them that they were both wrong?

The orthodox fought with Marcion about Paul’s letters – yet there is no record that they ever fought over Paul’s letters with Paul’s actual congregations.

The orthodox looked back to the beginning of Christianity and attempted to say with whom the heresies, as a whole and individually, originated. The communities branded as heretical claimed to go back to apostles like Paul, and the orthodox naturally denied the link. But the latter do not identify an individual or group that looked back to Paul and proclaimed a crucifixion in the heavens. They portray apostles like John condemning arch-heretics or their doctrines, but they tell of no one who confronted the celestial Christ. Not even John or Ignatius are pressed into this role, even though it would have taken nothing more than to read their purported condemnations of the celestial Christ.

This is where Doherty’s theory borders on the unbelievable.

All the known heresies were remembered after they passed away. Marcionism was remembered, as were the various forms of Gnosticism. Why were Doherty’s proposed beliefs forgotten?

Is there any example of a major heresy that was misunderstood as orthodox, with the truth coming out only now?

Moreover, if the writings belonging to the religion of the celestial Christ were so easy to misunderstand as something completely different, then we have a tacit admission, from Doherty’s own model, that his key entity has nothing like strong evidence behind it. The religion in question, if it produced the NT epistles more or less as they currently stand, produced only writings that never proclaimed its defining beliefs in an unambiguous manner. If the religion once produced unambiguous literature, which the orthodox amended or destroyed in the second century, then the latter should definitely have remained aware of the theology they were opposing – unless they deliberately chose, across the Christian world, to remain silent about it.

Then, at last, we’ve entered the world of the conspiracy theory.



THE APOLOGISTS

The orthodox Christians that took it upon themselves to refute heresies were indisputably contemporaries with Doherty’s second proposed population of Christians, who did not worship Jesus Christ in any form, whether celestial, orthodox, docetic, gnostic, Marcionite, etc. This second group faces the same problems we’ve seen for the communities of the celestial Christ. But in some ways the problems are more severe; and they shed light on what’s been going on with the first group.

While Doherty is not the first to propose that Paul worshipped a purely celestial savior – the idea was championed by M. Couchoud in the 1920s – he is the first, as far as I know, to argue that a group of Christians did not worship Jesus Christ in any form. Doherty’s argument from silence has led him, with perfect internal logic and consistency, to produce this new entity, but it has led him into absurdities at least equal to those we’ve already seen.

Time spent on this group will be worth the while. I am going to do something here that I did not do with the first group, which is to challenge the internal evidence in the documents that Doherty identifies as belonging to his group. That is partly necessary because Doherty’s second group is defined largely negatively, by what it did not worship, rather than being defined by its positive beliefs; so we are forced to describe it in careful detail if we’re going to ask how the heresiologists would have seen it. I am also taking this approach as a way of highlighting Doherty’s methodology and its results; it would be a waste simply to treat this group by repeating what was said about the first.

Doherty notes correctly that five Christian apologists of the second and possibly the third centuries, while calling themselves Christians, do not mention the words “Jesus” or “Christ” in their surviving original works; he notes that they offer weak allusions, at best, to the incarnation of a nameless Son. These apologists are TATIAN, THEOPHILUS OF ANTIOCH, ATHENAGORAS OF ATHENS, the anonymous EPISTLE TO DIOGNETUS, and MINUCIUS FELIX.

Doherty dates their works more or less conventionally, but somewhat early, placing them approximately in the period from 130 to 180.

You may have noticed already one strange thing about this group: it is populated entirely by apologists. (The Epistle to Diognetus has been mis-classified in the past, and is now typically classified as an apologetic work, which is how Doherty sees it). This should tell us that something is going on with Doherty’s reading of the apologetic genre.

And it recalls how Doherty populated his first group. The celestial Christ is found exclusively in what Doherty has called “the early Christian correspondence” (The Jesus Puzzle, p. 15; and see this page), that is to say, in epistles. That religion’s original compositions – apart from adopted texts like the OT books – are nearly all epistles. The one exception is a piece of apocalyptic literature, the Book of Revelation.

Both of Doherty’s proposed groups, then, are represented entirely by texts from non-narrative genres. The original Christian works of the narrative genre that we do have, Doherty tends to attribute to other communities; and he divides even those according to genre. He identifies literal HJ narratives on the one hand (John, Acts) and the allegorical Synoptics on the other; he has the latter being created by communities fond of a genre that Doherty names “midrash” – communities that belonged neither within the tradition of the celestial Christ whose exemplar was Paul, nor within the HJ traditions exemplified by Ignatius.

Something reckless seems to be going on here, when the method of dividing the ancient Christian population into separate communities and sects seems to have so much to do with genre.

As everyone knows, the NT epistles provide allusions to an incarnated figure that are less descriptive than what we find in the narrative genre of the Gospels, or in epistles which are more familiar with Gospel traditions and perhaps with the Gospels themselves (e.g., the Ignatiana). We find a very similar situation in Doherty’s Logos-followers: not a complete dearth of allusions to an earthly figure, but allusions that are weak in comparison with the Gospels or with other apologists like Justin whose surviving works are more firmly bound, for whatever reason, to Gospel traditions.

But let’s look at how Doherty describes his second group.

He notes that the “silent” apologists generally express a fondness for the Logos (translated typically as the “Word”), a widespread concept that appeared prominently in PHILO as the rationality in the mind of God. Justin and other HJ writers identified the Logos with Jesus Christ. Doherty notes that his five apologists, no less than those he acknowledges as worshipping Jesus Christ, often quote from the scriptures now classified as the Old Testament, just as Philo did. Doherty’s solution is to propose a religion of the Logos that arose separately from Paul or the Gospels – a religion whose non-Christian roots can be traced to Philo’s Alexandria. Doherty calls it a religion but is careful to note that it was not a unified or organized sect; he proposes rather that it was a trend of belief, like Judaism.

Now, certain adherents within the proposed religion, presumably at some point in the early second century, began calling themselves Christians but did not worship Jesus Christ in any form. Doherty’s “silent” apologists belong to this group of Logos-worshipping Christians; and so does Justin, in a fashion. Doherty proposes that Justin’s famous conversion, before he wrote his surviving works, was a conversion into this form of Christianity, one without Jesus Christ. Eventually, the argument goes, Justin accepted the Gospels, in what would have been a second conversion, this time into orthodox Christianity and an embrace of Jesus Christ.

The “silent” apologists, sharing the Jewish scriptures and the Logos with Philo, who was of course a Jew, sound in Doherty’s model as if they were Jewish themselves; this could help explain why they did not worship Jesus Christ. But Doherty has never called these apologists Jewish, because in their writings they reject Judaism just like orthodox apologists do. It cannot be emphasized enough: they called themselves Christians.

From Doherty’s website:

Already a series of questions beg to be asked. The name “Christ” does mean “anointed one.” But why did these Christians take on a name associated with a savior they did not worship – a savior worshipped by another religion? Did they not have a name for themselves? Did not others outside their faith give them a name that would readily identify their beliefs? Why not something to do with the Logos?

Why did these Christians choose to take on a dangerous name? They say that they are persecuted because they are called “Christian” (see esp. the first two chapters of Athenagoras’ A Plea for the Christians). Doherty believes that they were persecuted for the same reasons that all Christians and Jews were persecuted: for refusing to worship Caesar and the pagan gods. But we never see any of Doherty’s apologists attempting to secure protection for their own sects by offering to curse the name of Christ – this even though Doherty believes that Felix detested Jesus Christ.

Theophilus comments on why he actively embraced the name, but what about the other Logos-followers? Doherty says that the Logos religion was not unified, so Theophilus cannot be speaking for the others. For instance, what reason would a man like Felix have for calling himself Christian, since his surviving text mentions no Logos or intermediaries between God and man, rejects Judaism, fails to quote (as I’ve learned) from any part of the Bible and, per Doherty, also rejects Jesus Christ?

Let’s look at the reasons given by Theophilus.

And about your laughing at me and calling me "Christian," you know not what you are saying. First, because that which is anointed is sweet and serviceable, and far from contemptible. For what ship can be serviceable and seaworthy, unless it be first caulked [anointed]? Or what castle or house is beautiful and serviceable when it has not been anointed? And what man, when he enters into this life or into the gymnasium, is not anointed with oil? And what work has either ornament or beauty unless it be anointed and burnished? Then the air and all that is under heaven is in a certain sort anointed by light and spirit; and are you unwilling to be anointed with the oil of God? Wherefore we are called Christians on this account, because we are anointed with the oil of God.

There is nothing here shedding light on why these people might have called themselves Christian. Under both MJ and HJ models, Theophilus is trying to deflect scorn by drawing upon the linguistic definition of the word “Christian.” And there is no reason he shouldn’t. Theophilus is simply reminding his opponent that if he chooses to call Theophilus a name with a root meaning “anointed one”, he shouldn’t laugh, because he is calling Theophilus something as serviceable and beautiful and worthy as anything that is routinely anointed.

If the Logos-followers did not have Jesus Christ, why do they not call themselves Jews? What separated them from Judaism? Certainly it could not have been a mere anointing ritual or the Logos.

Nor were either of the latter two things incompatible with Jesus-worshipping forms of Christianity. We can even go further: the emphasis on anointing can be found in texts that proclaimed Jesus Christ.

A century before Theophilus, the author of 1 John had written:

But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know. (2.20)

...but the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in him.” (2.27)

That comes from an HJ document. We also see it in a worshipper of the celestial Christ:

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” (James 5.14-15).

Even a quick reading of the works of Doherty’s Logos-followers suggests further reasons that they called themselves, not Jews, but Christians: they do seem to be talking about texts and doctrines associated with a worship of Jesus Christ. They quote no Christian documents of their own (their religion seems to have nothing but the works pinpointed by Doherty), and they quote only known documents that proclaim Jesus Christ.

Theophilus seems to quote directly from the prologue of the Fourth Gospel; he names the author as John.

And hence the holy writings teach us, and all the spirit-bearing men, one of whom, John, says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God," showing that at first God was alone, and the Word in Him. Then he says, "The Word was God; all things came into existence through Him; and apart from Him not one thing came into existence." (Book 2, ch. 22, quoting John 1.1, 1.3).

Obviously this is a problem because the Fourth Gospel worships Jesus Christ. Doherty proposes here that the name “John” is an interpolation. His idea is that the name was added as a marginal gloss, and that Theophilus was merely quoting commonplace thoughts about the Logos, which came also to be quoted in the Fourth Gospel’s prologue about the Word. But much more than the name of John is involved here. We don’t have a mere thematic resemblance to the prologue of the Fourth Gospel; Theophilus seems to be quoting it. And the insertion of a name in the margin does not explain who or what Theophilus is talking about when he refers to “holy writings” from spirit-bearing men. No ancient text except the Fourth Gospel contains its lines about the Word. If the holy writings referred to are not in the Bible or another surviving work, what were they? Are they some theoretical collection of non-apologetic writings once produced by the Logos-religion and now lost? And who are the spirit-bearing authors? Did the Logos-religion once have a set of names that adherents regarded as inspired authors – names that strangely do not appear at all in the surviving works of the Logos-religion?

Doherty needs much more than the interpolation of a name here. And quite apart from this particular passage, he finds himself proposing a religion whose unique prophets – ie, prophets not shared with others, for Doherty does of course acknowledge that the Logos-followers accepted the OT prophets – have no names or known texts.

Theophilus’ affiliation with Christian documents that proclaimed Jesus Christ goes well beyond John. He speaks of “Gospels” or “the voice of the Gospel” (Book III, 13-14), quoting Jesus’ words as we find them in Matthew. He is silent about the name of Jesus, a curious fact. But it is no stranger than the fact that Felix, a Christian and supposed Logos-follower, fails to mention the Logos or to quote from any part of the Bible, including the OT.

And there are other examples of the affiliation of the Logos-followers with known forms of Christianity – examples that, to my knowledge, Doherty has not addressed.

The Epistle to Diognetus calls Paul “the apostle” and quotes a signature phrase from 1 Corinthians.

When the apostle considered this marvel he criticized knowledge that is exercised apart from the true command that leads to life, saying ‘Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up’.” (Diog. 12.5, quoting 1 Cor 8.1).

This verse is found in the last two chapters of the Epistle, which are widely held to have been written by a different author than the first ten chapters. In his book, Doherty simply noted that these chapters “contain a reference to apostles”, and that they were probably not written by the main author (The Jesus Puzzle, 280). But in his debate with GDon, he asserted that even these chapters do not have a historical figure in sight. So in a sense we may have a sixth Logos-follower here. Certainly, it is only these last two chapters – not the first ten – that show any knowledge of the Logos doctrine. Yet if the author of the last chapters is one of Doherty’s Logos-followers, it is a surprise to see him referring with praise to Paul and to a document that proclaimed Jesus Christ.

Worse, one of the original five Logos-followers, Athenagoras, also calls Paul “the apostle” and quotes him.

…the result of all this is very plain to every one,--namely, that, in the language of the apostle, ‘this corruptible (and dissoluble) must put on incorruption’… (On the Resurrection, ch. 18, quoting 1 Cor 15.54).

This citation of Paul is most intriguing, because it is taken out of a long section where Paul is dealing with doubts that the Corinthians harbored about the Judeo-Christian claim that all would be resurrected upon the world’s end. Athenagoras is writing a treatise intended to address pagan doubts about the same matter. We have a nice suggestion here that when Athenagoras set about tackling this problem, he consulted Paul’s own efforts.

And of course, both Paul and 1 Corinthians proclaim Jesus Christ left and right. So what is this citation doing in the work of an author who was supposed to have nothing to do with this savior? Why does Athenagoras refer to Paul, a champion of Jesus Christ, as orthodox Christians do? Can the phrase about incorruption be a mere commonplace of the time, which might have come from a source other than Paul – another unknown author, this one called “the apostle”, just as Paul was?

From Doherty’s debate with GDon:

Doherty mentions criticism, which makes it clear that he is not merely proposing ignorance on the part of the Logos-followers. Both Tatian and Felix, per Doherty, can be heard criticizing the known forms of Christianity (those associated with Jesus Christ) to one degree or another. In Felix, Doherty sees simple criticism, nothing more. His argument about Tatian is more subtle, but still among his least credible.

When Tatian mentions “our narratives” (Oration to the Greeks, 21), Doherty acknowledges that this refers to some sort of Gospel. Incredibly, he suggests that Tatian believes his own narratives to be on the same mythical level as the pagan stories he lambastes so aggressively as nonsense.

Doherty sees Tatian as nowhere pointing out that his own stories are “factually true” (The Jesus Puzzle, 283). Doherty is suggesting that in some way, Tatian sees his own narratives as factually untrue, on par with Greek myths in that sense, but still worth holding onto for some reason; we all agree that Tatian does not regard his own narratives as total nonsense. Of all the apologists, he has the most aggressive disdain for pagan culture, and he obviously sees a vast difference between it and Christianity. But Doherty is not clear on what that difference might be.

Late in his debate with GDon, Doherty did say that he would consider a suggestion, from a friendly reader, to the effect that Tatian regarded his own narratives in an allegorical fashion. I don’t know that there is any other choice. If Tatian did not regard his narratives to be factually true, the only option remaining is that he valued myth, allegory, fiction, or something similar. This would put him in line with Mark’s type of Christians, who viewed their Gospels as fictional “midrash.”

It is interesting to note, in this case, the half-century that has passed between the last extant documents proclaiming Christ as a mere allegory (Matthew, Luke) and Tatian. If Tatian belongs to this breed, he is an unexpected last gasp from them. Far worse, though, is the fact that if he had held the Gospels, at this late date, to be mere fiction or myth comparable to paganism, he would have been chewed alive.

Or so we should believe. Doherty’s model, though, has the orthodox completely silent about the Logos-following apostasy. For the second of his two Christianities, Doherty has not offered a possible condemnation from someone like the author of 1 John or Ignatius. In his debate with GDon, Doherty opted instead to argue that there was no particular reason for the orthodox to remark upon the apologists in question, since they did not bring up Jesus Christ himself.

But this is strange, because Doherty holds that Felix did say something scornful about Christ; that Felix was representative of other Christians of that time in this respect. Moreover, Doherty claims that Tatian’s Christians were calling the Gospels factually untrue. And Theophilus mentions “heresies” (Book II, ch. 14); he was either attacking the orthodox themselves or certain enemies of the orthodox; but it is reasonable to suppose in either case that the orthodox would have had reason to notice.

So why does Doherty propose that Christ-worshipping Christians, who made every effort to condemn heretical groups that called themselves Christian, fail to remark upon people living in their own time who do not even worship Jesus Christ but call themselves Christians anyway? These people represented themselves as the true form of the Christian faith; held the orthodox in contempt, per Doherty; used the same scriptures, or at the very least the same scriptural phrases now found in the OT and NT, that the orthodox were using; shared with the orthodox the concept of the Logos, which the orthodox did comment upon when it appeared in heresies; and belonged, every one of them, to the same learned class of men that was everywhere producing apologetic works in defense of a religion called Christianity. Why did their ideas never provoke the orthodox in the slightest, either by way of their own writings or through the populations that they belonged to?

We find that Tatian’s contemporaries, though they know him, say nothing about his religion’s supposed rejection/allegorizing of the Gospel.

Tatian is mentioned by Irenaeus (Adversus Heraeses, Book 1, ch. 28) as the founder of a heretical sect called the Encratites, who worshipped Christ but played down the value of flesh. Tatian appears to have been Justin’s pupil, and Irenaeus believes that Tatian defected from orthodox Christianity sometime after Justin’s death around 165. Before his defection, per mainstream models, Tatian produced his Oration to the Greeks, which Doherty refers to above as Tatian’s “Apology”. After the defection he produced the Diatesseron, a harmony of the four canonical gospels.

Doherty’s model has Tatian first converting to the Logos-religion under Justin; writing the Oration during this period; undergoing what would have been a second conversion, this time to the Encratite sect and its form of Christ-worship; and finally composing the Diatesseron. As with Justin’s biography, Doherty has complicated the picture by trying to fit a new entity into it.

But a greater problem here is that Irenaeus apparently knows nothing of Tatian’s rejection of Christ. And I don’t simply mean that Irenaeus fails to mention it when discussing Tatian. What I mean is that Irenaeus, despite knowing about Justin and Tatian, who both supposedly belonged once to Doherty’s Logos-religion, says nothing about this particular heresy anywhere in his works.

Irenaeus spends time refuting Tatian’s claim, from his Encratite period, that Adam would not be saved (Adversus Heraeses, Book 3, ch. 23); but he has no time for the idea that the Logos was everything while Jesus was a mere tale.

Yet there were certainly people who shared information with Irenaeus; people who knew something about Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Felix. Doherty even acknowledges an example of how his Logos-followers and their works were not isolated, when he argues that Tertullian used (and misunderstood) Felix’s work.

Tatian himself mentions a certain RHODON, who in his own writings relates that he was a pupil of Tatian. Rhodon preaches “the Crucified One”.

Can Doherty produce an example comparable to Irenaeus and Tatian – an instance where someone mistook a contemporary opponent for one of his own allies?

Can Doherty produce a comparable case of a religion appearing and disappearing without leaving a trace in the writings of contemporaries who attempted to address everything like it?

The religion of the Logos-followers produced works, says Doherty, that were ambiguous enough for the orthodox to adopt them. Well, at some point the religion must have written literature that more clearly described what its members believed, perhaps even addressing how their Christians stood in relation to the other world of Christians. What happened to these works? If the orthodox church neglected, suppressed or modified these works, then they knew about the group in question. But again, as we saw with the first group, they seem to have chosen to remain, across the Christian world, deliberately silent about it.

The Logos-followers could have been, theoretically, a small and negligible group within Christianity, but surviving works from five authors in the space of a half-decade do not normally make up a small group.

Felix, whom Doherty dates to about 155 (The Jesus Puzzle, 280), speaks of Christians having become a multitude (Octavius, ch. 33); his antagonist describes them as spreading throughout “the whole world” (ibid, ch. 9).

But again, we have no explanation for how or why the Logos-followers disappeared. It is even stranger here than with Doherty’s first group, because the apologists plainly attempted to earn respect for their religion as a philosophical, rational worldview. They wrote to pagan audiences, including figures in authority, and appealed for an end to accusations and persecution. Though they were not Jews, they openly located their roots in Judaism, which as an ancient religion was accorded official tolerance. They should have had success in aligning their religion with Judaism, given that they worshipped the Jewish God and rejected Jesus Christ. There is no reason their religion should not have survived or had a longer life.

Doherty puts it better than I do:

Yet their religion seems to have vanished instantly, at the height of its powers.


EXTINCTION AND EVOLUTION

The documents supposedly proclaiming a celestial Christ span about 70 years if we use Doherty’s dates (app. 50-120). Those of the Logos-followers span about 50 years (app. 130-180), and fewer than that if we move up Doherty’s very early dating of the first of the Logos-followers’ texts, the Epistle of Diognetus.

To put things in perspective: docetic and gnostic beliefs about Christ lasted for centuries. So did conflicts with these beliefs: in the year 400, AUGUSTINE was still refuting docetic and gnostic views about Christ, held by MANICHAEANS. Marcionism lasted at least into the fifth century, when both THEODORET and EZNIK DE KOLB witnessed it.

Now, if such views about Christ lasted so long – and have survived in some modern forms – why didn’t the view that Christ had been crucified in the heavens, or the exclusive worship of the Logos among some Christians, last for even one century? Why were their key ideas forgotten until now?

Why did these theologies die at all? Did orthodox Christianity overcome them? Then there should be an ample record of a struggle, and an equally ample record that the orthodox were at least aware of their competitors.

Doherty has tried to address these problems on this board.

Whatever Doherty intended to say here, his words specifically imply that we should have ample evidence of slow and extended conflicts, with heated disputes about the reinterpretation of canonized texts; that we should not find an overnight conflict like the one that we have to accept if 1 John and Ignatius are its only witnesses; that the “threshold” is exactly that, just a slice of the evidence and not the whole.

I put the following questions, then, to anyone who holds or supports Doherty’s model of Christian origins. Apart from 1 John and Ignatius, is there a silence in the historical record concerning Doherty’s two proposed Christianities? If so, what is the explanation? If not, where else are these Christianities mentioned?

Kevin Rosero

Gregg

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm finding problems with your analysis right from the start, namely this:

Doherty doesn't propose two separate, distinct belief systems, with some Christians worshipping a celestial Christ, others worshipping an earthly Jesus. He proposes everyone worshipping a celestial Christ, with the gradual incorporation by some of an Earthly incarnation of this Christ ... extending the descent to the firmament and the taking on the "likeness" of flesh, to an actual birth in actual flesh. This incorporation and shift began with the gospels; before the gospels there is no trace of an Earthly Jesus.

You seem to ignore the possibility that the spread of belief in an Earthly Jesus could have been so gradual and low key that there was no real "clash" of opposing views. In fact, the views were not really "opposed" to each other. The historicist "camp" also believed most of the celestial stuff about Jesus. the "celestial Christ" camp may have initially regarded the spreading stories about an Earthly Jesus as myths and allegories of the celestial Christ (which they actually were), consistent with their beliefs, and not paid much attention to those who took the stories literally (although didn't Ignatius emphasize to his readers that Jesus "really" lived in history? Would he have had to do that if there weren't those who disagreed?)

Perhaps by the time the literal historicist camp got large enough to really have an impact, the "celestial Christ" camp had drifted further away from its Jewish and Hellenistic roots and gravitated toward a literal gospel view itself, so there were never really two "separate but equal" camps with sharply distinct views primed to collide and clash with each other.

In other words:

1. Through the first century all Christians worship a purely celestial Christ.
2. Post-Temple, Mark writes the first gospel, an allegorical tale about the Christ set in an identifiable time and place on Earth.
3. Other celestial Christ worshipers like Mark's approach and copy it.
4. A generation or two passes. Some celestial Christ worshipers begin taking the gospels literally. Palestine has been depopulated and few people who actually lived at the time Jesus is believed to have lived are still around, so nobody can really disprove this view. For the Romans, the Christians are just another sect, and the "gospel-believing" Christians are an even smaller segment of this sect, so their claims are not much noticed.
5. Other celestial Christ worshipers don't take the gospels literally, but still find them meaningful as allegories, as of course they were meant to be.
6. Belief in a historical Christ spreads slowly but steadily, and over several generations more celestial Christ worshipers start taking the gospels literally rather than allegorically and incorporate a historical Christ into their belief systems.
7. A remnant of celestial Christ worship survives another century or two as Gnosticism.
8. With the elevation of Christianity to the official religion of the Empire, Christian beliefs are codified, heresies are stamped out and their papers burned, and existing literature is carefully chosen and if necessary redacted to ensure that it more or less conforms to orthodoxy. Keep in mind that the celestial Christ is still very much a part of this formalized belief system, just as it always has been. By this time belief in a historical Jesus is not much younger relatively speaking, but it still came after belief in the celestial Christ.

This is just a quick, off the top of my head response (and it's also late and I'm sleepy). I will definitely read your entire analysis and comment on it again later.

Roland

Isn't it Ignatius' whole point in bringing up the topic that some people are indeed DENYING that Jesus was born of Mary and crucified under Pilate?

"To the Trallians he said: "Close your ears then if anyone preaches to you without speaking of Jesus Christ. Christ was of David's line. He was the son of Mary; he was really born, ate and drank, was really persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was really crucified....He was also truly raised from the dead."

http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/partone.htm

Doesn't that alone suggest that there were people disputing each of these claims?

Ignatius's comments seem to be actually supporting Doherty's case, not refuting it.

Spanky

If some of you guys would spend half of the energy you put into debunking/defacing Doherty into critically analyzing what you actually believe, we might (you might) get somewhere.
Just half!





www.deveryharpermusic.com

Doug Shaver

I can do that. What I can't do, now or in the near future, is take the time to read it all with enough attention to formulate an intelligible critique.

krosero

Hi Gregg. Some quick comments.

I'm having trouble seeing where this differs from what I wrote. In my essay we have all the original Christians worshipping a celestial Christ, as you say; some incorporating an earthly incarnation, without Gospel details, in 1 John and Barnabas; the Romans having an earthly Christ and then adding Pilate; the Johannine community adding the Synoptic storyline. Certainly I'm working with Doherty's conception of a gradual evolution, not the "overnight" conflict that he critiqued in the quote I gave at the end of my post.

Actually I wondered if someone might emphasize that it was low key. Early on in my project I saw signs in Doherty's work that there was tension between the idea of conflict and that of a low-key spread of the HJ. But I think, and Doherty himself can correct me here if I've misread him, that his description of the evolution leans toward conflict. He has picked 1 John and Ignatius as his witnesses, and these men, as you can see, wanted nothing to do with their opponents. They called them anti-Christs, said that true believers should stop their ears, refrain from taking opponents into their homes, sometimes even to refrain from ordinary greetings. This was par for the course in early Christianity.

In a nutshell, when we look at ANY phenomenon in early Christianity, like gnosticism or Christianity, we're talking about evolution, not instant transformation. You are correct in saying so yourself. But those other entities, though they, too, gradually evolved, were known to the proto-orthodox, and the conflicts were great. A quick transformation does not, in my mind, cause greater conflict than gradual evolution.

But these are just general comments, in reply to yours. Generalities can't take us very far, which is why I tried to work so closely in the details of the evolution. Doherty, I think, is on the right track when he tries to find specific candidates for conflict, which is why I spent time trying to deduce what the conflict would have looked like in the late first century (and after). I look forward to your specific critiques.

And I will try to get to them when I can. It seems I've come down with a fever and may not get to replies as much as I would like.

Kevin

GakuseiDon

I can understand, since I'm very time-poor myself at the moment, but it would be a shame to let this become yet another one of the threads that challenges Doherty's thesis directly that just die. Kevin has gone into detail to test the robustness of Doherty's ideas about the development of early Christianity, and it would be good to get responses from mythicists on this.

GakuseiDon

I think perhaps you should re-examine what Kevin is saying here. Who exactly is Ignatius warning people against, and what did they believe? If you expand that section that Doherty quoted from (my emphasis):
http://www.earlychristianwritings.co...s-roberts.html

"Stop your ears, therefore, when any one speaks to you at variance with Jesus Christ, who was descended from David, and was also of Mary; who was truly born, and did eat and drink. He was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; He was truly crucified, and [truly] died, in the sight of beings in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth. He was also truly raised from the dead, His Father quickening Him, even as after the same manner His Father will so raise up us who believe in Him by Christ Jesus, apart from whom we do not possess the true life.

But if, as some that are without God, that is, the unbelieving, say, that He only seemed to suffer (they themselves only seeming to exist), then why am I in bonds?"

Who is Ignatius talking about? Does Doherty propose that there were mythicists who believed that Christ only appeared to have suffered and only appeared to have been crucified in a sublunar realm "in the sight of beings in heaven"? It seems to rule out Doherty's version of Paul, which is interesting as Ignatius knows about Paul and quotes from him elsewhere.

We know that there were docetists whom fit Ignatius's list perfectly -- they believed that Christ didn't suffer, wasn't crucified, etc. But is there evidence for the existence of a group that Doherty is proposing that Ignatius is railing against? No, AFAIK. And this is what it comes down to, time and again: evidence on one side, speculation on the other. If Doherty's case is cumulative, then the cumulation of evidence against him needs to be taken into account. In this case, it would be good for mythicists to try to explain the development of mythicism -- and its different forms -- against the contents and dating of the early epistles. I think Kevin shows up the problems well in his excellent post.

Zeichman

Can you give any significant examples, instead of just making insulting assertions? If you think this could apply to my own article, http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=200051, then please show me how uncritical I have been. While I think it would be beyond reason for anyone to claim that they have gone beyond confirmatory bias, this does not mean that one's results do not stand nonetheless.
Additionally, I won't argue that much of the criticism argued against Doherty has been either misrepresenting his claims, unempathetic to his views, or at least as agenda-driven as Doherty's own work, this probably comes from the fact that Doherty's work is directed towards the non-specialized lay-person and not the academic community. If that were his intended and actual audience, much more serious (in both gravity and quality) critiques would doubtless be the result. The only professional who has argued against his work at length, as far as I know, is Paula Fredriksen. One can clearly tell that her commentary is fairly rushed and not thought through at length, as her responses are not generally longer than a sentence or two. The only NT scholars who have spoken pleasantly of it are those who were predisposed to the ahistoricist position, like Robert M. Price and Darrell Doughty. While one might try to reverse this to those who accept an historical Jesus having all rejected Doherty's work because of their predisposition to the opposite, a curious counterexample can be found in William Arnal who admits he has a great sympathy for radical criticism, but agrees that Doherty's work is lacking.

Sorry for deviating from the topic, but the article is a bit long for me to read at the moment, though I intend to do so within the next few days.

Layman

Each comment in this passage (Trallians 9:1) can be explained in light of Ignatius' known and admitted docetist opponents, as well as perhaps the separationists to which Kevin also alludes.

It actually makes more sense in light of such opposition. The emphasis was not on Jesus coming into this world -- which docetists accepted. The emphasis is on Jesus' actual humanity -- which docetists denied. They believed Jesus appeared on earth in the "form" of a man. No ancestry. No momma. No being born. No need to eat and drink. And especially no actual suffering and death at the hands of humans, such as Pilate.

This also explains Ignatius' earlier comment about having "faith in the flesh" of Jesus. As Kevin points out, Jesus' non-existent hypothetical original Christians would have had no trouble talking about the "flesh" of Christ. But to docetists such comments were theological kryptonite.

This also explains the immediately following verse of 10:1, where Ignatius writes, "But if it were as certain persons who are godless, that is unbelievers, say, that He suffered only in semblance, being themselves mere semblance, why am I in bonds? " See? Ignatius' focus is not on Jesus' geographical location, but on the actuality of his suffering under Pilate. This is classic anti-docetist rhetoric.

10:1 forms a part of a rhetorical argument inclusive of 9:1. As described by Mike Isacson,
Isacson, To Each Their Own Letter, pages 117-18.

This emphasis is similar to expanded statements elsewhere that Christ was "truly nailed in the flesh" under Pilate in Smyr. 1.2. There, as here, the emphasis is on Jesus actual suffering as a human, not his existence on this particular plane.

Virginia Corwin helpfully describes Ignatius' docetist opposition as follows:

Corwin, St. Ignatius and Christianity in Antioch, pages 54-55.