Clivedurdle

Site May Be 3rd-Century Place of Christian Worship: Discovery Made At Israeli Prison

Umm, Xianity looks decidedly mythicist about 250 - 300!

GakuseiDon

Where is the magic wand? And why "oopsie"?

gurugeorge

I think representations are less likely from mythicists in the very early days. I think you'd be more likely to get abstract symbols. Proto-orthodox representations involving "Christ" or elements from the storyline wouldn't even start to get underway till post 130 CE. I'd be very surprised if a "Jesus" image from before then was ever found.

If the percentage of Christian representations is roughly representative of belief in a statistical way (I don't know what the technical term for that would be, but you know what I mean - one would expect a certain percentage of stuff to survive from whatever sect, all things being equal), then judging by youngalexander's points, it looks like most Christians were "heretics" roundabout 200 and the proportion of orthodox belief only becomes the majority roundabout 300-ish!

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, gurugeorge,

Although you admit you don't know much about Ignatius, still, now that you've proposed him for the exalted role of the first Christian martyr, perhaps you might clarify some of your thought process... Such as,

Did Ignatius believe in the HJ?

If not, what was his motivation for sacrificing his life?

Do you accept the conventional date for Mk?

All the best,

Yuri.

Clivedurdle

From the archaeology would it not be reasonable to posit Xianity did not exist before the two hundreds?

gurugeorge

Hmm, I thought I'd made that clear? Yes, I think he's one of the first unequivocally recognisable believers in a historical Jesus in the orthodox sense, although even then probably not hugely aware of the gospel stories (probably aware of bits of them, or sketchy prior versions of them).

I wasn't aware there was a conventional date, I thought there was a small spread of conventional dates? I think post-70 to early 100s for something that was recognisably "GMark".

But I actually think parts of Luke may be older still (i.e. Marcion wasn't kidding, and it's gospels more like Luke which were being used by the proto-Gnostic Christian majority. Roughly, "Luke" and "Mark" are contemporary, with something like "Mark" being used mostly by some of the (relative minority) Jewish Christians (with its - as I believe - Jew-on-Jew critique of the dumb old Jews ignoring the importance of the cultic figure) and something like "Luke" being used mostly by some of the (relative majority) proto-Gnostic Christians descended from Paul (but later reworked, along with the fabrication of Acts, into its current proto-orthodox form); and then a bit later Matthew being concocted based on Mark, and used by most of the nascent but growing proto-orthodox sub-sect.

I think there were probably much earlier (50-70), sketchier stories/sayings floating around - but in a purely mythic form (i.e. as "historical" as Hercules). (The "sayings" come from bits of Cynic and Stoic wisdom, mixed in with the fruits of the kinds of "prophesying" and "knowledge" in Christian worship that Paul speaks of in Corinthians.)

IOW, as I may have said in my sketch, I think that before 70 CE the stories were more like "once upon a time" stories, and it's after 70 CE, maybe even 90-odd CE and Josephus' writing about times in the homeland, that somewhat embittered diaspora Jewish Christians place the cultic figure in a more specific past, partly out of a kind of romantic nostalgia, partly out of a desire to show that the reason the Jews screwed up is because they ignored the Christians' Big Idea. But even at this stage it's still mythic (i.e. "historical" in the mythical sense). It doesn't really become strongly historical in the orthodox sense until the Roman church looks for an "apostolic succession" better than the Pauline (mythic/proto-Gnostic) apostolic succession - it's that requirement, that proto-orthodox bishops have a lineage connection back to the apostles who supposedly knew the cultic figure in the flesh (a lineage connection better than the merely Pauline, which they themselves actually have) that pins the myth down to a highly specific historical context. To this end, they use part of the diaspora Jewish Christian idea of placing of the cultic figure in a more recent past - i.e. they try and combine the Jewish and (their own) Pauline (initially proto-Gnostic) lineages and create proto-orthodoxy (this blend being reflected in the fabrication of Acts). Proto-orthodoxy may even be the result of collusion between some Jewish (ex-mythic) Christians and some Pauline (ex-mythic/proto-Gnostic) Christians.

The Jesus story is, I believe as Doherty says, a story that gradually coalesces - partly out of a desire to "fill in" a gap left by having a new Messiah idea that makes the Messiah an entity who has been rather than an entity who is to come; partly out of error and misreading (e.g a misreading of Paul as referring to apostles who had personally known a Jesus), partly out of nostalgia, cultural critique, ideology and "political" maneouvering (as above).

gurugeorge

From the archaeology alone, it might be reasonable, but I think we can trust a good deal of the work that has been done on the texts. Apart from HJ biblical scholarship's reliance on Acts, I doubt there's much wrong with the general timeline of ordinary biblical scholarship (I mean the rational kind, not the religiously motivated kind). There are lots of clever and sincere people in that line of work, and I doubt they can be wholly wrong (especially on the philological side). They're just misinterpreting the significance of what's in front of their eyes because the idea that the whole thing is a kind of error or fabrication is just too weird to conceive - until you start looking at the stuff without HJ spectacles and trying the MJ idea on for size, as it were.

Doug Shaver

You're assuming that there is no such representation in the NT epistles.

But let's stipulate that those representations are ambiguous. You may ask: Why are there no unambiguous representations of the mythical Jesus from near the start?

Next question: Who might we reasonably expect would have ensured the preservation of the documents containing those unambiguous representations?

Yuri Kuchinsky

Really, gurugeorge?

Have you actually read Ignatius' letters? This is what he says,

http://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/...delphians.html

"I flee to the Gospel as to the flesh of Jesus, and to the apostles as to the presbytery of the Church."

Sure seems like he highly esteems the Gospels!

Also, check out this,

http://www.ntcanon.org/Ignatius.shtml

Of course Loisy argued that none of Ignatius' letters are really authentic, but belong to the latter part of 2c.

Regards,

Yuri.

gurugeorge

No, only glanced through them and done a few word searches.

Yeah but even from an HJ point of view it's not clear that he means the gospels as we know them. He uses "gospel" singular, seemingly still using it more in the more general sense we see in Paul. One might say that could mean he was familiar with one of the gospels, but then that would go against the idea that he seems to say things that have echoes from several of them. So even from an HJ point of view it would make more sense to think that he's referring to an oral tradition of bits of gospel rather than something like the fully worked-out gospels.

From an MJ point of view, Ignatius' only interest is that he seems to be one of the first genuine martyrs, and one of the first recognisably proto-orthodox Christians, who believes in Jesus' human birth from Mary, baptism by John and crucifixion by Pilate. That much of the "gospels" I'm quite happy to grant him. Also, his emphasis on church heirarchy is quintessentially proto-orthodox, and from the MJ point of view (e.g. of a theory like mine) it's interesting to see its beginnings here (and in 1 Clement).

Some definite straw-clutching going on there! Some of those "cites" are just single words and short phrases that could just as easily be common wisdom sayings popular amongst Christians that were also included in the gospels; the more reasonably identifiable fragments are, again, consistent with perhaps some bits of gospel traditions floating around, but not really to the point if you're wanting to show that the gospels, more or less as we know them, were formed by that time and well known. In the context of Ignatius' polemic, as Doherty says, "...[m]any episodes in the Gospel story could have demonstrated the ‘humanity’ of Jesus. If Ignatius wants his readers “to be convinced” of this or that aspect of his human Christ, he should have been quoting Matthew on these occasions, and clearly identifying his source at least some of the time."