Ben C Smith

Thanks for that exposition, Earl. Perhaps you could briefly address the question I posed somewhere: Why do the heresiologists, who to all appearances seem aim at being somewhat exhaustive, not identify your logos Christians as a heresy? Or do they, and I just have not noticed?

Thanks.

Ben.

Ted Hoffman

Because the logos allegedly evolved into flesh. In the face of intolerance, nothing beats adaptation. Morph when you see heresiologists. If you cannot morph, stay ambiguous. Thats what the logos did memetically.

Ben C Smith

So somebody like Minucius Felix personally rejected an HJ (and found a crucified Christ abhorrent), but when interviewed by the likes of Irenaeus pretended he accepted him?

Ben.

andrewcriddle

FWIW Tatian mentions Justin explicitly and admiringly in his Address to the Greeks http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/A...m#P1114_299739
Andrew Criddle

krosero

Okay, let's look at what Irenaeus wrote:

So anyone who held private sentiments different (or at least different in the eyes of the orthodox) from their public words did not prevent the orthodox both from noticing the ideas and, indeed, complaining about the disparity (that they saw) between public and private confessions.

Earl, I will have a response for you, and I will try to avoid my usual weakness, which is to respond to everything and to write entire essays. I will try not to cover old ground.

But there will still be a lot.

Kevin Rosero

Ted Hoffman

I am not aware that Irenaeus interviewed MF and that MF accepted a HJ in that interview. What are you talking about?

Ben C Smith

It was a mental image. I did not understand your contention. You seem to be saying that the logos Christians pretended to be something they were not.

You spoke of adapting. If they adapted before the heresiologists came on the scene, fine; they may have escaped detection. This is what I am told happened to the original Christians from the days of Paul. But this is impossible in the case of the logos crowd, since at least some of them were contemporaries of Irenaeus. So I presume you meant something different by adaptation.

I am left thinking you mean that they adapted only in the presence of proto-orthodox Christians like Irenaeus, that they wrote texts against an HJ (like Felix did, so the model goes) on one side but escaped detection by the heresiologists on the other side through adaptation, which must in this context mean pretense.

Ben.

Ted Hoffman

I am saying it evolved. We see it becoming the flesh in John and in Justin. It was a fluid concept so every one could have his own brand of the logos.
You also seem to be assuminng that even at the inception of Christianity, people were very clear on what everything meant and on what everything was. The documentary record shows us that that is not the case.

I think you are incorrectly assuming that Christianity always had a unique identity that it wanted to retain (through the exclusionary attitude of the heresiologists). Remember that at one time paganism was quite popular and before the orthodoxy emerged within Christianity, Christianity wanted to attract pagans and was a melting pot of Greek Philosophical ideas and Jewish religious ideas (like Sophia). So as pagans converted, they incorporated Greek philosophical ideas like the logos in their versions of Christianity. What we mythicists note is that we encounter in works like Epistle to Diognetus and Athenagoras’ A Plea for the Christians Christianities devoid of any allusions to a historical personage as a central savior figure.
In Athenagoras’ A Plea for the Christians, we find the logos and “a son” (just like Shepherd of Hermas)but they are both treated as abstract forces coalesced together in God. Athenagoras for example, represents a transition period. He is sufficiently ambiguous to sit on the fence and elude the radar of the heresiologists. And in Apology 5 Justin writes that the logos “took shape, became man, and was called Jesus Christ”. Of course, history has it that the HJ strand gathered momentum and force and became intolerant of other brands of Christianity and ultimately became orthodox Christianity.

Another thing to note is that the heresiologists had enough in their hands with other contentious issues than the logos, which was ambiguous as we see above - and which they probably couldnt tell from a cup of tea. Marcionites, Valentinians and Basilidians believed that God was incapable of becoming corruptible flesh and held that Jesus never existed on earth as a flesh-and-blood man. And they took issue with it. And heresiologists stood on the other side and did war with them.

Ben C Smith

Mythicists like you note this. Why did the contemporary heresiologists not note it? The following seems to be your answer:

Yet you yourself add:

The logos believers also believed that Jesus never existed on earth as a flesh-and-blood man, right? So why did the orthodox not take issue with them?

Ben.

krosero

Actually it’s a very valid approach to find exceptions to a general rule that’s being proposed. That’s one way to test the rule. You propose that there exists an essentially unbroken silence – which you are convinced is broken by no more than a few contra-indications, just a few “straws” – throughout certain documents and that this silence justifies taking these authors and putting them into whole new categories, despite the problems that this would create. The rule you’re proposing seems to be that if a certain idea is not reported in the ways that you expect (and the “you” is critical here, because your expectations must be questioned like anyone else’s), then the author did not know it and can safely be placed in a new entity that you’ve created for him. That’s a large claim, so of course the argument from silence that’s being used should be tested to see if it applies across similar situations – because if we do find a similar author who looks “silent” in the ways you describe but clearly belongs to the HJ tradition, something is wrong with the argument from silence as you’re proposing it. Without such a test, anyone could be allowed to create the entities he would like and place them in the historical record. Anyone could then engineer anything in the past, based upon his own expectations. Testing that could not be more rational or essential (and Ben has just done so in a separate thread), so I would be careful about disparaging the test.

Now, we have to ask what is wrong with the particular argument from silence. That is what I’d like to do here, though I think we need some perspective first. It seems to me that you’re not aware of why creating new entities is that much of a problem. You’re uncautious (aggressive) with your argument from silence, and I’m not sure you know what happens when you create new entities for Paul and the apologists.

We now have two new religions, two new entities. In a post above you acknowledged that your theory does ask us to accept two new entities, so I’m glad we’re in agreement about that. Let’s call the two entities Pauline mythicism and the Logos-religion.

So what happened to these entities?

Well, per your theory, they were largely misunderstood as orthodox, and they ultimately died out (at least partly through conversion). Their texts were all ambiguous enough for the orthodox to think that they referred to a historical Jesus, so the orthodox just absorbed the texts. And that’s the last we know of these two Christianities, until the 20th century.

So the first thing I’m requesting of you is another example of this happening. You say that the Logos-followers, for example, were not attacked because they were simply accepted as orthodox at some point. What other known group did the orthodox misperceive so badly that they took the group to be orthodox and even absorbed its authors' writings?

This is not a rhetorical question. Nothing could be more useful than an analogous example with which to compare.

And it’s important because your theory is thoroughly dependent on the claim that one author after another was misunderstood. This happens so often in your theory that I cannot help but be reminded of the phrase that you use to characterize the arguments of your challengers: “Your honor, my client was framed.” Your theory is a more or less constant refrain of, “Your honor, my client was misunderstood” – and I think this characterization of your theory is fair because it really is what you claim, almost word for word. Your clients are Paul and the apologists (and Mark, too); you’re standing up for them and claiming that, well, they were misunderstood.

You may have an analogous example, but the interesting part will be the comparison with your clients. So what do you have?

Now, some questions that have to be asked about your two new entities.

Why did Pauline mythicism die out? It’s not enough to point to a feature of HJ Christianity and say that this feature helped the orthodox win the day. We can do that for any other cult, too: just pick a feature of the cult that you think made it less competitive, or a feature of orthodoxy that you think made it more attractive than the particular cult. The difference is that Pauline mythicism was not mentioned. So what makes its case special?

There is no reason I know of that Pauline mythicism should not have lasted a long time. Its form of Christianity was the first. It had the “cache”, so to speak, the authoritativeness, of being first on the scene; it was the most “ancient” in a time that was suspicious of new movements. Yet it dies out fast and is not even remembered. The brief conflict that you propose it did have, while alive, with the proto-orthodox is forgotten.

It’s not enough, either, to say that Pauline mythicism evolved into historicism. That must be true for the other cults, as well – they must have lost converts to orthodoxy. But they lasted long enough to be remembered. At least some of their members, quite naturally, must have rejected or resisted orthodox forms of Christianity. So why didn’t Pauline mythicists resist orthodoxy for very long? Why are we supposed to buy the explanation that they just became the orthodox? Earl, you have argued that docetism was a reaction to orthodoxy, which tells us that not everyone in the ancient world was happy with the form of Christianity that became orthodox. On that point I actually agree with you. And after all, even according to your model, why should they have been happy with historicism? You have gone out of your way several times – in your attempt to show that Paul believed something typical of the times – to say that historicism was very much a narrow, minority viewpoint among Christians and in the ancient world generally; everyone else located their saviors in the heavens. Naturally, then, everyone can be expected to resist the supposedly narrow thinking of the orthodox. But we’re asked at the same time to believe that Pauline mythicism just evolved quickly into historicism.

The fact is, this is special pleading. There is no coherent theory of what happened to Pauline mythicism – just pleading on its behalf.

The same is true for the apologists.

At least some apologists, you admit, were aware of the orthodox. But the orthodox, we are to believe, were not aware of them. Now, this is not impossible, and I hope you don’t fall back merely on the proposition that it’s possible. But it is strange, because the orthodox were actively looking for heresies. And you have never told us that the “Logos religion” of the apologists was a small, negligible movement that might have been overlooked. I get the sense from everything you’ve written (especially about Felix) that the opposite was true.

And now you’ve argued here that some of these apologists may have to be dated earlier, perhaps to the first half of the second century. This puts them in a time when non-HJ Christianity was normative and HJ Christianity was still, per your theory, getting off the ground. If anyone should go unnoticed then, it’s the smaller group – the HJ form of Christianity. But you have precisely the opposite – you have the surviving documents of the “Logos religion” showing awareness of the HJ movement, even despising it, while the HJ documents show no awareness of a Christian Logos-religion in which they were despised or rejected.

As your theory allows, the apologists shared with the orthodox basically the same texts. They shared the OT, as everyone agrees. And in your posts here you do not object to the proposition that some may have known about Paul and his epistles; you allow on top of this that some may have known a Gospel or proto-Gospel, interpreted allegorically. So the apologists and the orthodox stood to a large degree upon the same texts. (You did not answer my question about whether the “Logos religion” also had texts unique to itself, texts now lost). And did the orthodox notice those people who were using the same texts and interpreting them differently? Of course they did. The orthodox at this time are complaining of heretics who interpret passages in the NT in an allegorical or less than straightforward manner (e.g., Against Heresies, Book II, chapters 24-27). The orthodox are aware of these Christians. But we are asked to accept that they are not aware of apologists who call themselves Christians, use familiar Biblical texts, and send apologetic works to emperors and other authorities or to the general public. (These were public documents, not secret writings concerning the mysteries). The orthodox are not aware, you say, of apologists who are taking allegory to the furthest extent possible by interpreting the central character as a fiction, or of others like Felix whose rejection of Jesus Christ was supposedly total.

What is special about the “Logos religion” of the apologists that allowed them to escape reprobation in the surviving record?

When you speak of “an excision” or of cutting out “a huge amount” of Tertullian, you’re speaking as if Felix was basically copying the full texts of Tertullian and restricting himself to excisions, additions and modifications, rather than writing an apology in his own style and borrowing what he wanted from Tertullian.

I have started floating an idea onto this board about what might be the peculiar challenges faced by rationalists/atheists in study ancient Christian texts. We all have peculiar challenges, and this board is not short on what the peculiar challenges are for present-day Christians in studying ancient Christianity. Nor is your work short on proposals about how theists misread texts.

I’ve proposed that modern rationalists are going to have a harder time than modern believers in understanding ancient Christians. You, as rationalists, are less like them; you have a greater distance to cover in understanding what they wrote or their motives for doing so. And to the extent that all modern exegetes project themselves into their objects of study, when rationalists do so they will be projecting something farther off the mark than would be the case with a modern-day Christian.

With discipline and education, none of this needs to be a problem. Let no one forget that when responding to me. I have no beef with atheists/rationalists studying ancient Christianity in general. To the contrary, their voices are needed. So just to be clear: I am just trying to suggest what the peculiar risks are for non-theists and non-Christians.

Yes, this is part of my answer to your argument from silence: I am trying to do what you will not do, namely to question the way you arrived at it.

So we have this ancient apologist, Felix. And we have a good point made about Felix from a modern apologist, J.P. Holding:

This was in response to your unfavorable comparison of Felix with later apologists who had no qualms about the cross, and to your incredulity at the idea that Felix could “deny” the cross in the way that you see him doing.

What you do not allow, Earl, is that there would have been different kinds of apologists back then just as today. You speak as if all Christians had to be the same; that Felix had to be like Tertullian; that the apologists had to make their apologies in the way that the HJ apologists did, or else they’re not HJ. And you have a rationalist view of human nature that’s very simplistic at times, in which, for instance, a person rationally decides that they can be more open with their faith when there is less persecution, and less open with it when there is more persecution. What Holding seems to understand is that there are different kinds of people, some of whom might react directly (and “irrationally”) to persecution with boldness.

And there are more ordinary considerations, too. The Christian tradition in which I was raised is not big on proselytizing, which makes me deeply uncomfortable, when I receive it (I never engage in it myself). It is not big on proclaiming Jesus’ love for me or his love for the world; it is quieter. I write publicly about Christianity in an intellectual or philosophical way, partly because of my upbringing but more due to my own temperament. All these factors surely should be weighed when looking at individual apologists, too.

Another example. You’ve often asked why the apologists, though they seem to quote Jesus’ words as found in the Gospels, do not attribute the teachings to Jesus himself, and thereby raise the stock of the founder in the eyes of the audience. Well, that might would you would do; Holding might do the same; it might even be the most “rational” thing to do. But people certainly do not have to behave rationally. They often don’t do what for someone else might be the best course of action.

A brief sports analogy. In tennis it’s best to step forward when returning serve and not to fall back, not to play defensive tennis. It’s best and most “rational” to move forward, as the coach tells you. But it’s completely natural, for some people, because of temperament or lack of training or whatever reason, to fall back.

And who knows, maybe for that particular apologist, in his peculiar circumstances, which are unknown to us, he did choose the most rational thing to do. Or at least it appeared to him like the right thing to do. Have you ever noticed that Felix does not even quote from the OT? According to the way that you use the argument from silence, we should therefore say that he shows “no knowledge” of the OT. I’ve asked myself why he should not have quoted from it. Then I realized that of all your 5 apologists, Felix is facing the ugliest and most ignorant set of calumnies. Of all of the audiences of your 5 apologists, Felix's opponent seems the least friendly (to Jews and Christians). In that situation, I might have also found it futile to quote Scripture.

Felix does not attack, first of all, the idea of a god begetting a son. He attacks the idea of gods procreating, which is different. He is clearly talking about pagan polytheism. Encompassed within the idea of procreating, theoretically, you might be able to include the idea of the Christian Son of God. You said as much, and more honestly, in your book: “He then goes on to ridicule the whole idea of gods procreating themselves, which would include the idea of a god begetting a son” (p. 287). At least, any rationalist today would say that the two ideas are similar. Maybe Felix’s audience might have hit him with that counter-argument, too. But from Felix’s point of view, he is ably criticizing the idea of the polytheistic gods procreating like a population, not the idea of the one true God having an eternal Son who does not procreate; in short, he ridicules polytheistic procreation, not a one-time incarnation.

The same goes for statements like “because a god cannot die”. Do you think that Felix would have agreed that the Christian God could die?

Now perhaps I have not described his theology exactly as it was; and much about Felix is unknown. But in general I think we can say with certainty that Christians throughout history have viewed their theology as quite different from pagan theology, often to the point of making arguments that could be turned back on them.

Every apologist makes arguments that are susceptible to rebuttal. Some apologists make stronger arguments than others. In Felix we may have a case of a set of arguments that could be turned back on him. And you know what? There is such a case in Irenaeus, too.

Does anyone else see what is blindingly obvious to me? Irenaeus is making an argument that can be turned back on the orthodox Christian God, too. The orthodox Christian God can also be faulted for allowing error, sin and suffering to come into the world. In fact you hear it today quite a bit: that if the Christian God allowed suffering, then he was either powerless to prevent it, in which case he is not all-powerful; or he did not care to prevent it, in which case he is not all-benevolent. Everyone here knows the drill.

So here is a case where a monotheist clearly sees his own tradition as unique. Had anyone tried to turn his argument back on him, he would no doubt give many reasons why his argument does not apply to his own tradition.

Here on this board we all make arguments that are turned back on us. Sometimes we don’t see it coming; sometimes we have a feeling that it will be turned back on us, so we try carefully to use words that we think will apply only to the opponent’s argument and not to ours – although the opponent, because he does not work with the same distinctions, will often not see it that way at all. And sometimes we just don’t see that coming, either. We just make that error.

It is certainly something that has happened to me several times – I pick my words carefully but my arguments are turned back on me anyway as if my distinctions just didn’t apply.

Felix does pick his words carefully. Too carefully, I think. I mean his arguments can get convoluted because they depend, not on bold and clear words, but on subtle distinctions that might well have been lost on much of his audience (I think that is what is going on in his “smoking gun” statement in 29:2).

You did say in your debate with Don, “It’s not just Paul and his type of faith they [the apologists] show no awareness of.” Maybe this was just a generalized conclusion, and that might be fine – if and only if you’ve dealt with the exceptions somewhere. I have yet to find anywhere that you brought up these two exceptions – Athenagoras and the author of “Diognetus”.

I explained this same thing about Diognetus, which makes me suspect that you do not read everything I write. You still have not clarified what is going on. The author of the first ten chapters shows no familiarity with the Logos doctrine. So is your “Logos-follower” the author of the last two chapters? He does mention the Logos. And you’ve argued that this author has no historical figure, either. So is he your Logos-follower? Maybe? Well, he is the one who admires Paul.

So let’s get to the significance of that.

AFAIK you have never tied Paul in with an allegorical interpretation of Jesus. For you, as for us, Paul really believes that something happened – it’s just that you think he placed it in the heavens. But Jesus as an allegory, a mere elevating fiction? Is that what we see in Paul? Hardly.

So here we have two apologists who know Paul, call him “the apostle”, and quote from his first letter to the Corinthians. They see him, in his letter(s), worshipping and praising Jesus Christ. He calls himself an apostle for an event of some kind that really happened. The apologists both acknowledge Paul as “the apostle” and surely see him as having the true gospel. But the apostle’s gospel is not allegory. It’s Jesus Christ, crucified.

And where would these two apologists have thought that this Jesus Christ was crucified? Were they Pauline mythicists, surviving up to this time? If so, then the religion of Paul is now, without question, contemporaneous with the heresiologists – and they don’t know anything about it.

Moreover, if they’re Pauline mythicists, that would be surprising under your standards, because like all of your Logos-followers they don’t actually mention “Jesus” or “Christ”. So if they’re Pauline mythicists, then what force is there to your observation that your Logos-followers don’t mention “Jesus” or “Christ”? If someone can fail to mention those names but still worship Jesus Christ (in a sublunar realm), then what can you draw from the silence concerning his name?

The other option is that Jesus Christ, for the two apologists that mention Paul, was crucified on earth.

Game, set, match.

It may be that Paul used a free-floating sermon; I do not know one way or another. But what is the simplest explanation for how this passage got to Theophilus, at least a century after Paul?

As you say, Theophilus’ words look close to Paul’s. Here they are for comparison:

What is the most parsimonious explanation here? That a sermon, which Paul may well have used, continued to be passed around orally for a hundred years, and that Theophilus received it that way? Or is it that the free-floating sermon was an actual document, now lost, which survived for a hundred years after Paul and was adopted, from his mythicist circles, into very different sects of Christianity – so we are told – that did not have JC, and that Theophilus got it this way?

Or is it simply that he had access to Paul’s letters, and quoted from them, because he worshipped the same savior?

For a proto-orthodox Christian, Paul was not the divine word; Paul would have, rather, received the divine word. Theophilus wants to tell us what God said, not what any man said. It would rob his language of this significance to start speaking like a historian and telling us what “Paul, a man who lived and worked around the Mediterrenean a hundred years ago,” had written down. That is why he is often mentioned as “the Apostle”, and why I think that both Athenagoras and the author of “Diognetus” were content to speak of him that way.

This is where I think that a rationalist like yourself is expecting, too often, for ancient Christians to speak as if they wished to impart historical data (the way you would speak; the way you would best understand) rather than speaking in the way that they wished to do.

I actually don’t remember arguing that Theophilus knew gospels in the plural, and if I did then I’ve been unclear about my argument.

You call this a denial, but Theophilus is talking about a Word that always exists, a Word that is also a Son. Christians have believed that Jesus was the incarnation of something eternal. Where do you see the incarnation ruled out? Is it because Theophilus says that the Word has always resided in the heart of God? How is it that such a Word cannot incarnate?

And to the extent that Theophilus talks about any particular time and place, he restricts his comments to the time when Adam heard the Word in Paradise. How does a comment about the Word existing at that time, in the heart of God, rule out, as you say, the incarnation by Jesus?

Here, I’m afraid, your objection makes no sense.

The actual quote is, "Show me even one who has been raised from the dead, that seeing I may believe." It seems to be a request for a current, living person (I don’t know if Don has made that point somewhere, too). Theophilus then goes on to discuss the issue of whether it would really help Autolycus to see with his own eyes.

True, he does not get into the Gospel, or Jesus, for whatever reason. But this is not the glaring omission that you seem to think it is.

I think I have covered, here and in other posts, the rest of the points you raised. And some of your post is old ground, which I said I wouldn’t cover. The debate you had with Don is here, and the debate Don and I had with you about Felix is here.

It’s appropriate that you would bring this up, because it characterizes your mythicist theory to a tee. Your internal evidence in the proposed MJ authors is ambiguous. (And this is not even a concession on your part, Earl, but a bedrock of your theory's design: the MJ writings had to be ambiguous; that's why they were misunderstood). Meanwhile the external evidence for the various MJ faiths simply isn’t there. Even your candidates for external evidence (1 John and Ignatius) are ambiguous. Nowhere is there a clear statement that Christ was crucified in a sublunar realm, that he did not come to earth, or that he was a total allegory. Everybody is silent.

One last thing. You will say that I am dismissing your argument from silence merely because it comes from a rationalist perspective. But that is not true. When I said above that rationalists and atheists should be studying ancient Christianity, I was not blowing smoke. Their perspective is needed: but like anyone else’s it’s limited. I think that from a rationalist perspective, some of the silences in the historical record are genuinely perplexing, and perhaps more so than they are to theists. I am trying to suggest to you here that maybe, just maybe, some of your perplexity is due to the natural limitations of your own perspective and your almost ritual way of rejecting alternative perspectives and answers from non-rationalists.

And more than anything, my argument with you is not that you don’t have good questions, but that you think that there are no other solutions, no remedies, except to create new entities.

Kevin Rosero