Magdlyn

Well, it wasn't looking good for Judea/Jews round about that time, was it? End of an era for self-rule, or even hope for it, and a search for some other kind of autonomy. Could it be that simple?

GG, thanks for your well-thought-out thesis. Makes sense to me!

I agree on the Simon (Magus)-Paul-Saul progression.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Says nothing about the earliest Christian martyrs, their chronology or motivation...

What about it, gurugeorge?

Regards,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, Roger!

Oh, I've been around... but not as busy on the Net as I used to be. Had to deal with some other matters.

Now it's summer, in any case, and there are lots of distractions around.

All the best,

Yuri.

gurugeorge

Hi Andrew. For a fact, it's an area that I don't feel terribly sure-footed in, however I don't think it's as definitive of MJ Christianity, or as much of a central issue for MJ theories, as most HJ theories seem to need it to be, in order to make sense of an HJ.

To me apocalypticism is more like a thread that runs through both Judaism and Christianity, is definitive of neither, and is more to do with politics than religion (i.e. it's what you get when revolutionaries get involved with religion). So my excuse is that my discussion was at a high enough level of generality that I could leave these kind of side-issues out (same applies to martyrs)!

When I take Paul as a whole, the eschatology that's there is, to my mind, consistent with him using a common rhetorical trope to get "beginners" to behave nicely (especially in the context of Thessalonians). If apocalyptic expectation and eschatology in the usual sense were part of his main creed, it would surely have found its way into 1 Corinthians, but what I find there is simply new definition of "The Anointed One" ("that the [true] Anointed One [contrary to what you may have heard that the Jews believe, dear listeners, is an entity who] died, buried and rose again [as opposed to him being a great military leader to come]"). OTOH, the discussion of "resurrection" there describes it as clearly a spiritual affair that (to me at least) seems to be a veil for non-dual enlightenment. (If you look at the much later Gnostic "Epistle to Rheginos" the terms of discussion are almost identical, with the talk of the world as "apparition" making the link to non-dual enlightenment even clearer, as befits a more specialised exposition of the matter.) The term "paraousia" also clearly has a possible mystical meaning consistent with "Christ in you".

At any rate, although I admit it's a gap in my presentation, I don't think it would alter the outline much (as I'm following Ehrman's outline of how Jewish proto-Gnosticism might have arisen out of disappointed Jewish apocalypticism, so this is consistent with the idea that Paul might be using an older, and to him outdated type of discourse symbolically). That many later (post 70 CE) Christians took Paul literally is beyond doubt, but if you ask me whether Paul thought he was being literal, or whether the earliest Christians took it all that literally, I wouldn't be so sure of that.

I've thought of a good analogy for this actually. In Mahayana Buddhism there's a thing called the "Bodhisattva vow": one vows to make every effort to attain enlighenmen, not for one's own sake, but for the sake of being in a powerful enough position to help enlighten all beings (that means all beings). Obviously a big task, and if one believes in it, that belief will have the functional effect of making one's efforts less ego-involved, and therefore more likely to be successful. I think the apocalypticism in Paul serves a similar function: it's a psychological trick to smooth peoples' psyches out, to get them into a groove of behaving in a moral way that's good preparation for the more advanced kinds of exercises that will bring on their "resurrection" and the "paraousia" of "Christ".

IOW, if you think you might die at any moment, then given the right philosophical background (i.e. one that doesn't predispose to a libertine reaction, which would always be a potential danger with the use of this trick), one will do one's best to "live well" and behave nicely right now. That in itself (by smoothing out the fluctuations in one's psyche) will help bring on one's "death" and "resurrection", in which one's body is seen as already dead, a tomb, a mere apparition. (Or alternatively, in which one's spirit - one's little chip of God - is understood as having been "crucified" in flesh, and is now released into to its true condition.)

gurugeorge

Hi Yuri! Again, as with Andrew's question, I admit it's a wooly area in my thought about all this. The only thing I'd say is that martyrdom is more obviously a proto-orthodox/orthodox thing, so in my view it wasn't a feature of the earliest Church at all, but of the post-70 CE proto-orthodoxy.

Remember, I don't take Acts seriously as history; to me the first identifiable martyr is Ignatius, himself also one of the first readily identifiable proto-orthodox Christians. Indeed the presence of tales of martyrdom in Acts is, to me, a sure sign of its being a proto-orthodox fantasy. The (later) Gnostics seem to have thought it was quite silly to die for a belief, and this is consistent with their form of Christianity being basically mystical (as I believe early Christianity was); but if the belief in question is a proto-orthodox belief in a lineage connection back to the one-shot Avatar of the divine, martyrdom makes more sense for the proto-orthodox - all they've got is a belief, and to die for a belief is the ultimate showing of commitment to it.

One thing about martyrdom is that it's pretty clearly connected with sado-masochism. Orthodoxy is saturated with sado-masochistic imagery, from the Christ image itself, through tales of martyrdom (think of Saint Agatha or whoever it was who had her breasts ripped, or that deliciously gay image of St Stephen shot with arrows). This in itself should be a clue that it's pretty far from the kind of religion that might be at the inception of a genuine religious movement. It's all about torturing the human creature by strapping it into a set of ideas, and delighting in the discomfiture of the human creature thus tortured. And the basic premise of my story is that early Christianity was a genuine religious movement (i.e. an instance of people having direct visionary and mystical experience of the divine), not an emotive, hysterical, political or ideological movement.

Anyway, regardless, as with Andrew's question, I don't think it would alter the main outlines of my story much to take martyrdom into account: to me, it seems like a side-issue.

andrewcriddle

In 1 Corinthians 15:51 we have this reads as if Paul is expecting the imminent coming of Christ just as he was in Thessalonians.

Andrew Criddle

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, gurugeorge,

So you think Ignatius was the first Christian martyr? What about his motivation? Do you think his letters were forged?

Regards,

Yuri.

gurugeorge

As I say, I'm not really sure about this area (what I mean is, I haven't read as much scholarly stuff about it as I have about what I wrote about in my outline), but as I said, if Ehrman (and those he cites, can't remember the names) is right that Jewish proto-Gnosticism might have arisen out of a disappointed apocalyptic milieu, and if it's right to spot some kind of proto-Gnosticism in Paul (as scholars of all sorts of persuasions have occasionally done), then it's feasible that he could have been using the language of apocalypticism in a sublimated or spiritualised - proto-Gnostic - manner.

The most feasible scenario would be that there's a bit of that kind of language in Paul (used in the spiritualised way I'm suggesting) but that it was tweaked a bit and made more ordinary-looking by later (post 70 CE) editors (perhaps from the same stable as those who Christianised whatever Jewish apocalypse was used to make "John"'s?); but this is pure speculation to save my theory!

gurugeorge

I'm afraid my only knowledge of Ignatius comes from a triangulation of the Catholic Encyclopedia and the discussion of him on Earl Doherty's website! But given that, I think he probably was a martyr, who died for his strong beliefs. I think the short rescension of his letters are probably genuine, or are forgeries that genuinely describe the beliefs of a certain sect of Christians at the time (shortly after 100 CE - either way, the opinions are what I would call "proto-orthodox"), and I think they are the first really solid evidence we have of belief in a strongly historical Jesus in something like the orthodox form.

What's interesting from my point of view is that this early evidence of belief in a strongly historical Jesus shows it (as W Bauer pointed out) as being in a position of struggle against already established Jewish and proto-Gnostic (not "docetic" - that's an anachronism imho) Christianities.

(Just to clarify: by "strongly historical" I mean orthodox-like belief in a god-man known personally to the Jerusalem apostles, living circa 0-30 CE in Palestine - this being the only kind of belief that could possibly lead an investigator now to the plausibility of a historical Jesus in the modern, rationalist sense of a mere human being known to the Jerusalem apostles at that time. I think that some Jewish Christians may have had a similar belief by circa 100 CE - indeed the proto-orthodoxy may have initially gotten their belief from the some post-diaspora Jewish Christians - but that the majority of Christians descended from Paul were at that time proto-Gnostic and probably had a variety of interpretations of the historicity of their mythical entity, all the way from Doherty-sublunar, through to "historical" like Hercules. The virtue of the mythicist position IMHO is that it explains without strain the variety of beliefs. That's just what you'd expect - in the context of a new religion starting at that time, with the majority of adherents, descending from Paul, being of a proto-Gnostic cast - when something that started off as a vague "once upon a time" idea gradually got concretised by one side in the course of a many-sided sectarian polemic, while the other sides still held to a variety of beliefs.)

youngalexander

In short;
1. Why are the early Christian epistles silent about a historical jesus?

2. Why is early Christian art late? > 200 C.E.

3. Why is early Christian art overwhelmingly 4:1 OT:NT - & NT does not imply Gospel HJ?

4. Why is imagery of the nativity, arrest, trial, carrying cross, empty tomb very late >250 C.E.

5. Why is imagery of the suffering Christ extremely late > 325 C.E.

There are a multitude of HJ explanations to cover each of these questions. MJ may provide a single overarching explanation.

That late and literary rather than early and oral provides the most parsimonious explanation of both the EC epistles and the lateness of the EC art and its contents.