mirage

I don't see why that would be puzzling. We don't have the early oral accounts. Mark writes his story, and hey presto.

There isn't a progression of myths about Mohammed from non-messenger of god to messenger of god either. You get one tradition canonised and the others are suppressed or just never written down.

If you don't have ink and paper contemporaneous to the nascent myth, why would you expect evidence of its early stages?

gurugeorge

The puzzle is, there is written material that dates from the time where one could happily put the placeholder "early stages" (e.g. 40-50 AD), but it's this mythical stuff that doesn't look at all like any kind of elaborated stories about someone who lived recently, but looks instead like abstract, mystical, speculative, visionary stuff no different from other, similar stuff of the time (other Jewish mystical/visionary thing, other Greek things).

rob117

But remember- the Jesus of Paul's letters was, in all probability, almost completely Paul's own creation. The Q1 gospel, which probably dates from around the same time as Paul, consists of Jesus' sayings and teachings. There is no connotation of god-man in Q1. The Jesus of Q1 is portrayed as a non-divine prophet of the end-times.

mirage

Oh I see that you mean "puzzling" in the sense that it doesn't fit so well with a "standard" myth about a man. As in a myth about something abstract and spiritual than was perhaps later projected onto a real or fictional man?

I wouldn't consider 40-50 years very early. Myths can get going in a few hours, but I see that we were talking at cross purposes to some extent. The earlinesss also depends as much on how many tellers it passed through as the period of time, of course.

gurugeorge

Hmm, the problem with this, as Robert Price points out, is that since the Q1 sayings is comparable with Cynic and Stoic teachings from various Cynic and Stoic authors from various times, the collection looks more like a similarly general collection of nuggets of wisdom rather than the teachings of a living person.

gurugeorge

Yeah. If you look at Doherty's online "Jesus Puzzle" website, read the articles and trace the quotes and citations, and really seriously look at the early Christian stuff without automatically reading a historical figure into it (as is natural for all of us, but especially Christians, of course!), the effect is quite weird: it actually does look like what they are talking about is more of a mystico-philisophico-visionary entity than a person recently deceased who taught in Palestine. The mystico-philosophical-visionary-recently historical entity only starts to appear, become fleshed out, in writings from roundabout 90-120 AD (incl. of course Mark - even though neither Mark nor Luke seem to have been meant as literal historical records!).

At least, that's what comes across to me - YMMV of course!