The Bishop

I find this plausible too. I also find it plausible that people would deify a dead hero. What I do not find plausible is the concept that someone would create a dead hero for deification out of whole cloth, and that this would be enthusiastically taken up by hordes of converts.

Not to be too denigratory of the Christian worldview, but I have no quibble with the concept that all the early converts to Christianity were entirely as delusional as the Heaven's Gate cult. But you're elevating "no evidence" to the level of unless you have a piece of paper with Jesus's signature on it, then there is "no evidence" he existed. I'm sorry, we do have documents, and there are things they say and things they don't say. This constitutes evidence. Even the Heaven's Gate cultists were delusional for a reason.


You seem to be creating a different argument. Didymus was making the argument that Paul's knowledge of the gospel account of Jesus's life was full and correct in every particular, and yet he never makes reference to it. I was simply pointing out that nothing about Paul's faith, his conversion, his theology or his message was necessarily dependent on having a "full and correct" knowledge of the details of Jesus's life. He himself appeared to be converted to Christianity by some kind of hallucination during an epileptic fit. Christianity exists today because that hallucination happened to someone of high intelligence and a great deal of energy, with no little charisma of his own. The Christian story predated Paul (because otherwise how was he persecuting Christians?) but his own conversion owes nothing to the story itself, but to his own physiology. Therefore he could easily have had only a sketchy knowledge of Jesus's life, and still been a committed Christian. Whether Jesus was a miracle worker or a teacher seems to be irrelevant, since as far as Paul was concerned, he had experienced Christ as a divine spirit. Clearly, that was all the proof he needed!

I'm not quite sure what it is you're expecting me to do. I simply pointed out that most Christians have a story in their head that actually doesn't have anything to do with the story in the book. But obviously the story in the book has something to do with the stories in the heads of the people who wrote it! I don't rely on a modern day Christian's memory for scholarship, I rely on what the documents say. Also, oral tradition was actually a lot more reliable than you might think. That thing that happens in the end of Fahrenheit 451 where in order to keep the books alive, everybody has to memorise and recite one, and pass it on to a new storyteller before they die, pretty much was how a lot of stuff was preserved in the days when only a few could read and write.


So, uh, Jesus? Son of a carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee. Born during the last years of Augustus. Preached in Galilee and then came to Jerusalem with his followers, where he caused a disturbance, and was possibly the figurehead of a revolutionary movement. Made the Jewish authorities nervous, they denounced him to the Romans, who then crucified him as an insurgent. It might also be noted that this Jesus bloke did not, in fact, do anything at all that would be expected of a Jewish Messiah. He was never actually a king. He never led any real revolt, and he was nailed up by the very Roman rulers a Messiah was supposed to supercede. In point of fact, the evangelists have to do a considerable amount of shoehorning to make the details of Jesus's life really fit scripture. This is not something I would have thought would be necessary of a fictional character.

Perhaps you would like to find for me anywhere in contemporary mythology or Jewish scripture any of those specific and pretty much pan-Gospel details. Jesus. Galilee. Temple disturbance. Priestly authorities. Romans. Crucified. I would like to see some other mythology that was written as nearly contemporaneously as the Jesus story is, too.

This is exactly what I mean. The fact that Paul doesn't say anything about Jesus's life apart from the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection implies that they do all know the Jesus story, not that they don't. He's not converting them. He's correcting theological error.


I was talking about the minimalist story that is being put about. The Gospel account is put in doubt on the grounds that non-Gospellers don't talk about the life details of Jesus - so the early Christian movement is assumed to have arisen solely from the non-biographic theology of the non-Gospellers! In my view it is the lack of biographic account in the epistles which indicate the presence of a known biographical story, otherwise people are being called to a new religion on no basis whatsoever. And what I meant by "This is irrelevant to Jesus's existence" is that the Gospels are not necessarily proof of Jesus's existence, and the epistle non-mention of life details is not proof of his non-existence.


But they do, after all, claim to have met people who are supposed to have known Jesus personally. Paul talks about meeting Cephas and James, "the brother of the Lord". He calls James "the brother of the Lord" in order to distinguish him from James the brother of Peter (or Cephas). Again, there is a telling silence here - apart from "the brother of the Lord" and the fact that they are the leaders of the church, Paul doesn't explain who Cephas and James are in the Gospel accounts. It's the fact that he doesn't which indicates that obviously everybody (Christian) knew who Cephas and James were, and their relationship to and personal acquaintanship with Jesus.

Clivedurdle

I don't think it was like that!

I think someone invented a heavenly Christ and an earthly Eucharist as the ritual - sympathetic magic, early alchemy, to cause the bringing together of heaven and earth.

This heavenly Christ then had earthly bits added on to fill up and balance the story! The radically new bit is the heavenly sacrifice to placate god and wash away our sins and the eucharist. Try reading Hebrews assuming the gospels and Paul do not exist!

Zeichman

Whether or not I am a Christian is irrelevant to the discussion, so please avoid fallacious ad hominems. I only asked a question, and was it certainly was not central to any point I was making. I regret not taking a couple minutes to Biblegateway it up.

And while I'll concede that point, you've still yet to respond to the one which I repeatedly claim is the most significant and likely to be wrong.

Does "YHVH Savior Messiah" even make sense in Aramaic or Greek, even if it WOULD have been understood as such?

And can you explain what you meant about Matthew 10:5, as I'm still quite unclear about that as well?

I eagerly await your response.

Didymus

Christians today consider them to have been Christians. Whether they considered themselves "Christians" we don't know. The word doesn't appear in Paul's writings, and we have no epigraphic or literary indication of it from that early date. Paul doesn't even use the term.

Why, you should ask, would people of that age have believed in Mithras? Or the Mysteries, Isis, Dionysis? Why was Marcionism such a big hit in the 2nd century? Who could possibly believe all the complicated hokum that makes up gnosticism? For someone in the 21st century, it's very hard to say, but it's a mighty stretch indeed to presume that Paul's diasporites would settle for nothing less than a recently historic crucified and ascended savior.

Well, the notion of a historical Jesus has been the heart of the Christian message SINCE the adoption of the gospels. Before that, Paul seems to have been quite content to preach a crucified and risen Christ, with no regard for the preacher/miracle worker of the gospels.

Say what? They were Christians so they must have believed in the gospels? You know virtually nothing about the people you're calling "Christians." Everything we know about the "Christian" beliefs of Paul's congregations comes from Paul himself. We have no other contemporary source.

Have you ever read Paul? He was fanatical about theological correctness. If he had believed the gospel story, he would have expected his church leaders to preach it to perfection. He would have taken stern measures to excise any error and replace it with the truth of Jesus' teachings. Yet we see only the most general admonitions in that regard, and certainly no hermeneutics regarding the meaning of Jesus' sayings or the pericopes or even the events of the trial and crucifixion. He doesn't even hint that he knew the gospel stories himself!

There is not an iota of evidence to support that claim. You need to do some reading regarding the mythicist position and the history of early Christianity. With all your huffing and puffing about my making your case for you, you seem to think you understand these matters, but you clearly don't.

That is a straw man. Paul gave his congregations a great deal more theology than that. But keep in mind that Paul's efforts were not very successful. As I pointed out previously, Christianity did not really explode until the 2nd and 3rd centuries, after the introduction of the notion of a historical Jesus.

You cannot blithely ignore the context and beliefs of the time. Jews in Paul's congregations were steeped in the Torah; gentiles were either God Fearers or they believed in Jupiter or local deities and/or one of the Mystery cults or in Mithraism. So they all had a foundation of belief in a god or gods of the spirit world or who came to earth long ago and far away. So they would have been very familiar the idea of deities of that kind.

And - this is important - NONE of those faiths based their beliefs on a claim that a deity lived on earth in recent times. There's simply no basis for thinking such a construct would have been essential to belief.

Nonsense.

Didymus

Vorkosigan

What's your position? That the pericope is not an interpolation? That Brunner could not have known?

Yeah, you got it.

<shrug> Individuals interested in Brunner's view of Jesus can check out the post NoRobots linked to. Extracts of Brunner's view of Jesus are available at:

http://www.constantinbrunner.info/pages/ourchrist.htm

I don't think anyone will disagree with my views on Brunner.

Vorkosigan

post tenebras lux

If people have the time - and willpower to keep reading - they can also check the full appendix on 'Criticism' from Brunner's Our Christ here. To quote the website's blurb: Here Brunner attacks the belief that Christ never existed as a real man, or that knowledge of the real man is utterly irrecoverable from the mythology that surrounds him.

Here's a quote, but - like I said - you'll need willpower:

No Robots

The pericope is not an interpolation. It is a part of the gospel writings that was excised from many manuscripts because it showed a moral permissiveness on the part of Christ that many clerics were uncomfortable with. This is the unanimous testimony of Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome.

Citations please. Or will this be another one of your silences following a challenge to your unsupported claims?

That a German Jew warns of the Holocaust in 1921 makes you shrug?

post tenebras lux

Hi No Robots, can you quote where Brunner predicted the Holocaust? All I can find as a 'fateful'. Is that what you're refering to, or were you thinking of something else he wrote/said?

Didymus

Who claimed that Paul or anyone else created Jesus Christ from "whole cloth"? Paul was working from OT prophecy and was undoubtedly influenced by gnosticism and the mystery cults. From what we know about the sociology and religious fervor of the early Roman empire, it's reasonable to think that many in his congregations would have also been deeply familiar with those ideas.

Who said that Paul had "hordes of converts"? It is a very bad practice in argumentation to put words in the mouths of others, implicitly or explicitly. In point of fact, there is no evidence of large scale conversions as a direct result of Paul's missionary work. Even Luke/Acts casts him as a long suffering servant of the Lord, often frustrated by rejection, struggling from one town to the next to deliver his gospel.

Did you check your reading skills at the door? I made no such statement about Paul's knowledge. Of course, if he knew about a historical Jesus, wouldn't he have wanted his congregations to <get>it right? How hard is that for you to understand?

But he seems to have taken no interest in the subject.

And what would it mean if he HAD told them the Jesus story? That they knew it, right? So you get result you want EITHER WAY! Great.

More circularity in an essentially tautological argument.

Didymus

No Robots

But wickedness needs to combine with the right kind of nonsense, otherwise it will not achieve the right result: the God, the God who was different - there was a thing! And today it is the race, the race that is different; there's a thing that will prove fateful again for the Jews - and this is one case when we really can hear the grass of history growing.

That's not clear enough for ya? Keep reading that same passage and you'll come to this:

Ultimately, past all shame, its loud-mouthed bellowings of victory resounding far and wide, criticism marches across the last frontier and enters the land of brazen fraud, solemnly swearing that Christ has Aryan blood as well, that he has only Aryan blood, and that to say Christ is a Jew is a lie on the part of the Jews - for only Aryans can produce geniuses, only the Germanic peoples, only the anti-Semites: Christ is of Germanic race, Christ is a Westphalian, Christ is a Saxon anti-Semite!

Scholarly criticism has come to this: it can now be enjoyed by the masses in the form of ultimate buffoonery, malice and spicy sleight-of -hand. Not only can it be enjoyed, not only has it reached its acme, where at last it can be pursued really energetically, now that the masses are rushing to get involved, it can be carried on with appropriate energy not only theoretically but, according to the ultimate goal of all science, the fruits of the theory can be harvested immediately. Immediate practical action can be taken: now, straight away, as a result of scientific knowledge, human beings can be subjected to violence and massacred.