Malachi151

Well, that's a challenge to Doherty's version, but not in general.

If, for example, Doceitism had become the dominate view and hardly anyone today had heard of the idea that Jesus was flesh and blood, surely we wouldn't be having this argument.

Was there anyone arguing that The Book of Enoch was false? Was there anyone arguing about the nature of Isaiah?

Johnny Appleseed was a mythical figure, but he was also a human figure.

Molly Pitcher was always assumed to be a real human being, but nevertheless her she is a myth, at least as best as can be determined.

The problem is compounded by the destruction of Israel, which has so many profound impacts and created a break in the social fabric and ideas and knowledge of the region.

Lot's of people have gone to Wyoming or Montana (I forget) looking for "Brokeback Mountian" since the movie came out, yet no such mountain exists, it's fictional.

Moses is probably mythical, as are most of the early Jewish figures, and certainly Adam, Abraham, Enoch, etc. yet the Jews in the 1st century regarded them as absolutely real people.

People talk about how those myths formed over time, but again, the destruction of Israel would have had the effect of making the recent past much foggier much more quickly at this time, so it's really not much different.

Chris Weimer

So...Julius Caesar, or Antinous were both mythical?

Ted Hoffman

I think we know the difference between apotheosized figures and mythical figures.

Malachi151

True, but that doesn't address what the OP was saying. The OP was saying that there would have been some difficulty getting people to believe in a religious figure if that figure wasn't a real person that people knew about.

Obviously, this is total malarkey, as there were literally tens of thousands of worshiped deities that had been crafted from nothing more than imagination, who had come into the sphere of worship in the same way that MJ hypotheses postulate for Jesus.

So far as I know, the only people called gods that were indeed real people were rulers, which is quite a different scenario.

The main point is that invention of deities was something that took place in this culture at an alarming rate, and was on-going.

The idea that there would have been something that made the organic synthesis of a deity difficult to occur at this time a place is simply nonsense, it happened all the time, especially when we consider that Paul was "preaching to the Gentiles".

I think that perhaps one thing that could be done to strengthen the MJ argument is to show how other deities originated and how their cults got started.

There is also the fact that among the Jews there were tons of stories about various figures, such as Enoch, Isaiah, and arguably Moses, which are false but were firmly believed and about figures which never existed whom the Jews believed firmly were real people.

Chris Weimer

Oh really? What makes Jesus different?

PS - Malachi151 - can you please cite your sources for your last post?

Solo

If you had said, that Nicodemus was meant to be believed literally because the church locked away the non-literal truth as sacramental mystery, I would have said, AMEN.

Well, the "whatever reason" seems rather obvious. The church wanted a monopoly on Jesus and to that end converted the mystical experience (and interpretations) of him into authorized church relics and standard liturgical process.

The new-agers may be upset about this but I think the hiding away of the mysteries overall improved communal mental health. Based on high-level observations I made in early 1990's I'd predict the mental health overall of today's typical Catholics overall would show greater stability than Jehovah Witnesses' (or Pentecostalists, e.g. as seen in Borat) who believe the end is near. The chances to recover from mental health lapses would be greater for Catholics again (I think) because the priestly structures protect from and deflect the raw assaults of the supernatural. Some people can hack it, most can't (1 Cr 10:4-5)

Jiri

gstafleu

Not quite. I was saying that a religious concept gets accepted more easily (by the broad public) if it has a realistic (as in: really physically existing) component. E.g. there is a real physical entity "Zeus" who can come down and screw you. Similarly it is easier to believe in a saviour who walked the earth (as an avatar of a deity, an incarnated god, a "son of god" in human flesh, a real human possessed by some spirit from above...) then something completely outside the physical world. I would suggest we still see that phenomenon every day.

Also note that this point is secondary to my argument. We know that Jesus was historisized by Mark et al, I just provided a possible reason for that happening. Feel free to reject my reason for the historification, my main argument (Paul could have started with an MJ, Mark's HJ can still have had a historical core) doesn't suffer.

Gerard Stafleu

Malachi151

Okay, so apply that to Hercules, Dionysus, Mithras, Poseidon, Apollo, Helios, Medusa, Cupid, Pan, etc., multiplied by 1,000....

Likewise, the Jewish God was never presumed to be physical, at least not in any significant way, yet the Jews believed in him.

What of all the figures in Enoch? The Ancient of Days, the son of Man, Enoch for that matter, etc. What of the man in the linen cloth in Daniel? What of Belair, Satan, all the angles, Michael, Gabriel, etc.

Why is all this exempt from this purview?

andrewcriddle

What about Antinous ?

He was worshipped as a God.
He was a real person.
He was not a ruler.

Andrew Criddle

gstafleu

All these were also seen as having a real part in addition to an imaginary part: you could run into Poseidon (not that that ever happened, of course).

He wasn't? He manifested as some sort of fire, quite visible, in a bush. He had other physical manifestations as well, otherwise why say that you would die if you really saw him? If there was nothing to see there was nothing to die of.

Just to stick with the angels, Maria had a fairly realistic encounter with one. Paul (in Acts) was sprung from jail by one. Pretty down-to-earth I'd say.

I suspect the confusion here may come from the fact that most religious stories have (at least) three layers. Let's take Jesus' chat with Nicodemus in John 3 as an example.

First the most physical layer: there is a real ("historic" as we say in this forum) Jesus talking to a real Nicodemus.

Second the more mythical layer: Jesus is talking about some real, but supernatural, god. Jesus is some sort of avatar of this god (John 3:16), which connects the two layers. Perhaps we should call this the supernatural layer.

Third we have the layer which is usually called mystical or esoteric. It does away with any physically real, external ("somewhere up there in the sky") gods. In this layer the whole passage is "analogy." There doesn't have to be a physical Jesus (although there could be in a guru sense, but probably not cf Mullah Nashrudin or the ever present "master" in the Zen Koans). He is not talking about some external sky daddy but about something within yourself.

The farther you move from layer 1 to layer 3, the more difficult it can be to understand, simply because you move away from "I'll believe it when I see it." Hence the inclination of religions to throw in a healthy dose of layer 1. Usually people don't get much further than layer 2, which they reach on the crutches of layer 1. What we are calling the mythical realm here is probably mostly layer 2. But the three layers are not disjunct, you can move from one to the other in a fairly smooth manner. Which can of course cause all kinds of confusion as to where you are.

I hope I didn't sound to Jiri-like here .

Gerard Stafleu