aa5874

Matthew 27 Matthew 27Natthew 28.

The disappearance of Romulus and ascending to heaven do appear to show many similar elements with the disappearance of Jesus and his ascension to heaven.

1. There was darkness over the land.

2, The exact date of his disappearance is not known.

3. His body and clothing have not been found.

4. He was worshiped as a God and not a king.

The NT Jesus appears to be as mythical as Romulus, and perhaps the inventor of Jesus was aware of Plutarch's description of Romulus.

spin

Point is, if you work from modern "common sense" you are not commenting about the past, but creating your own version of it. If you are deciding ad hoc what can and what can't have happened in the past, this has nothing to do with history. And knowing that writers from ancient times may not have distinguished what you consider to be real from the not real -- seeing both to be real -- you're hardly in a better position to judge.

So unless you've got some evidence for your myth claim, you're as good as those religionists you are dealing with, for they just take the same position, judging the past using the common sense they have to work with.


spin

spin

Oh, shit, gurugeorge, anyone can shave off a difference from an analogy and miss the analogy itself.

You are looking at two "end products" and guessing about them. We don't know how the error of Ebion came about. For all you know someone may have had a vision about him.

Yes, we are still inventing differences with Ebion, but naturally it isn't relevant. One figure we have good reason to believe didn't exist, ie Ebion, is used to show that non-existent figures can enter tradition, as a means to show that Jesus need not have been real to enter into tradition.

I know all about the vision status of Paul's gospel origin. I've argued it here at length, but it doesn't help you get to Paul's vision of Jesus being mythical. In fact, when I asked the rhetorical question,

If Paul is simply mistaken in his belief that Jesus was real, how is that any different from the case of Ebion?

you totally missed the drift. It was about Paul's belief that Jesus was real. This is the obvious parallel in the analogy with Ebion, just as Tertullian and others believed that Ebion was real.

Mythicism claims that Paul believed that Jesus was a mythicial entity who operated in a different sphere from the reality of Paul, which simply renders Paul's notion of the sacrifice of Jesus in no sense capable of working as a proxy for all people in this world. Unless the death of Jesus was in this world and subject to the powers of this world, Paul's theology would have been rendered useless.

See my previous paragraph.

You haven't shown that your projection is correct.

You know nothing of the sort. You don't know what the precursors were to the visionary stuff (and obviously there are numerous elements that existed prior to the vision, unless of course you'd like to argue that the vision came to Paul pristinely -- does that fit any reality you know?).

And what has your notion of myth got to do with the claim that Paul got his knowledge of Jesus from a vision?? The source of the information has no necessary bearing on whether it is myth or not.

We only have the little that Paul tells us, however representative of reality that is. He doesn't supply you with enough information to make definitive judgments.

You're in no position to make such a claim... unless of course you've had such an experience (that is documented) and thought that it wasn't real (etc.).

I agree that a vision could be the start of christianity as we know it, as I have argued frequently in this forum.

Because it has been argued and as a scenario fits as a possibility -- which can't be dismissed out of hand, as is your wont:

Nothing is solved. You are simply stating your contentment with your scenario. Evidence you have none, so there need be no contrary evidence. You have taken a possibility that I have argued and for no apparent scholarly reason turned it into a necessity.


spin

aa5874

The mythical position on Jesus was NOT taken from thin air, it was taken DIRECTLY from information found in sources of antiquity.

There are hundreds of sources of antiquity that described Jesus as a God.

Gods are mythical entities.

Jesus is no different.

And there is no historical information except forgeries where Jesus was described as one who rose from dead.

It is just plain absurd to say there is no evidence or information of Jesus as a Divine entity, a myth, when that is what the NT and Church writings propagated from conception to ascension for hundreds of years.

Clivedurdle

Arguably Cyclops is real.

They have definitely been recognised as a misinterpretation of mammoth skulls.

What category does a misunderstanding of a real thing fit in?

Conversely I understand at least the following.

A Christ who is best understood as a heavenly based god who gets down to an unclear point in the heavens. (added - that may include Earth, like Hercules having adventures)

"oriental cults"

A Jesus who is probably a character in a play.

a god Jesus.

A worldview with a God and his son and the expectation of a new heaven and earth - now we see as in a glass darkly, with loads of greek ideas - logos, equality, priesthood of all believers.

Loads of references to water, fish, Holy air, death and life - crosses - geometric centre points - Blake and the Geometer god.

I put this lot down in a mythological pot, but maybe it needs a word of its own - Christianity?

Steven Carr

Huh? Where did that come from......?

Not even early Christians would have bought that.

Hebrews definitely has the blood being used in heaven.

Hebrews 9
When Christ came as high priest of the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not man-made, that is to say, not a part of this creation.

maryhelena

Yes, a word of its own - because its not just a 'mythological pot' - the pot is wide and its deep - along with the mythology it accommodates prophetic interpretations from the OT along with that very specific date stamp.

Not, of course, that the specific date stamp is any confirmation of the historical reality of the gospel storyline - as such a date stamp has no ability to confirm historicity on any modern day piece of fiction. However, the date stamp by the gospel writers - Herod the Great to Tiberius - does seem to indicate that it was necessary, somehow, for their prophetic interpretations. After all, what relevance does prophetic interpretation have if there is no historical backup as to its assumed fulfillment?

What the early Christians 'saw' as being prophetic fulfillment is the big question?? Perhaps if one is not working from the idea that first came Paul and his spiritual Christ and secondly came a figurative/mythological Jesus created out of OT prophecy - one might find more scope for understanding the beginnings of early Christianity. Instead of, first came the mythology of Christ in a spiritual realm - maybe first came an interpretation of OT prophecy - which then led to both the gospel's origin storyline and to Paul's taking that prophetic interpretation into the purely spiritual realm?

Sometimes I think the whole historical Jesus verse a mythological/figurative/symbolic Jesus is a bit like that optical illusion of the vase and two faces. The mythological camp see those two faces - they see a Jesus of Nazareth that is not historical, a literary creation that is reflecting elements from more than one source. The historical camp only sees the vase - they 'see' a historical man as being relevant to the beginnings of early Christianity. However, the historical man they claim to see, Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be historically verified. But the claim that there was a specific historical individual relevant to how early Christians understood their new religion, understood it from within a prophetic tradition, is a claim that I think cannot be easily dismissed.

spin

When was Hebrews written? (Hmm, didn't think so.)


spin

Clivedurdle

How was the crossing of the Rubicon and the move from the Republic to the Empire understood then?

Were there huge end of the age emotions? Wasn't there a star sign change as well? Would Judaic apocalypse mongers have jumped on a bandwagon, especially with the fall of Jerusalem?

Is there something about Pilate and Herod that made them a good time to put the story?

Might all this tale be a Judaic spin on it all?

gurugeorge

Whoa! We are talking about reasons we have (as historical investigators) for thinking that people in the past believed that something was real. You can't turn the tables with "for all we know" at this point!

Plus also, those reasons can't just be restricted to the texts alone - they must perforce be grounded in prior assumptions about how the world works. Historical investigation has to be grounded in science, and science tells us that non-insanity-based visionary experiences do exist, and we even have the beginnings of understanding of the mechanism (cf. Blakemore, Metzinger)

Of course, that's a given. You can have a "belief in a real x" and that belief can come about in any number of ways.

People believed Ebion was real; people believed that Jesus was real. People believed Ebion was real (we now think) because of a linguistic misunderstanding. People believed Jesus was real because ... well, do we have any positive reason to believe that it's because of a linguistic misunderstanding in this case, or do we have any positive reason to believe it's because a literary farce came to believed to be true (as might perhaps be the case with the later Mark, for example); or that it was a pure conjob, or that... etc., etc., et multae ceterae?

Maybe. But those alternatives are all pretty thin compared with the fact that in Paul, we have positive evidence of a specific way that
Paul could have come to believe Jesus was real (without him actually being real). So why do we need to even look at the other "maybe"s (except for the fun of it)?

Correction: one kind of mythicism.

Rendering the proposed mythical Jesus non-fleshly is unnecessary for mythicism.

Here's how it goes: entity X talks to Paul (and I would say, based on 1Corinthians 15, Cephas and a few before him, although of course philosophically speaking we have to say that strictly speaking it was a numerically different subjective hallucination that, because of similar conceptual features, Cephas and Paul believed to be the same entity) in visionary experience, and says "I am the Messiah, know that I sojourned on the Earth a wee while ago in obscurity, in human form, clothed in flesh, and did such-and-such. Those who look for the Messiah to come are chumps, I've already been, it's done and dusted, the victory has been won on a spiritual level - look, you can see it foretold in Scripture if you look carefully enough." (We get this because Paul tells us he got his gospel from the horse's mouth; and this is the content of that gospel, which we can glean from his writings.)

(Side issue: of course it's likely that the leftfield Scriptural reading came first in the case of the Jerusalem people ("according to Scripture"), but because of the "ophthe" list we can reasonably assume they also had visions of him.)

This type of scenario is entirely consistent with the textual evidence we have, and what we know about visionary experiences. There is no need (yet) to go looking elsewhere for an explanation.

Visionary entities often give people stories about themselves - there is no rational reason (no reason based on the evidence we have, which includes not just the texts but what we know about visionary experiences) why the content of the story in the case of Paul (or before him, the Jerusalem people) should have been restricted to non-fleshly realms.

So we have this result: the Jesus entity was not real, it had supernatural elements that make it mythological, but it was believed to be real, and believed to have been on earth in the flesh. That's what you can get from accepting the positive evidence of visionary experience in Paul.