lpetrich

I have, and it seems like she's making Jesus Christ in her likeness. Xenophanes would get a chuckle out of that; it was he who first pointed out that people created deities in their likeness.

She claims that a common misconception about the Bible is
What a load of history-rewrite hooey. The idea of God seems more like the idea of a cosmic autocrat to me.

This is all that we have on the Queen of the South:
Calling that feminism is grasping at straws. Why didn't he have a mixed-sex ensemble of apostles?

Elijah

That should be enough to make an interpretation. IMO It looks like he was predicting a female authority to rise up in judgment after hearing his message. It was presented to illustrate that he saw women as equal even in position of authority and expected their help when they heard his message. Seems more likely/straight forward than she represents the church and a symbolic marriage.

As far as him not having women apostles, he was trying to implant the serving/self-sacrificing meme into the men, not the ladies. If he expected his apostles to suffer the same fate as him then he had good reason to spare the women that role. He’s giving an example for the men to follow that will give the women the opportunity to take back control. Beyond that there are the possibilities that women may not have made usable witnesses or he may have had female apostles that the early church edited out.

No Robots

According to Stark, "Jesus seems to have been the leader of a sect movement within Judaism" (The rise of Christianity, p. 44). Stark makes it clear that it was not Christ and the disciples who had wealth, but rather it was later converts. Marta Sordi's book The Christians and the Roman Empire is very good at showing the early penetration of Christianity into the highest reaches of the empire's social structure. But, of course, all that was still after Christ's execution.

maryhelena

The carpenter's son.......why not the butcher, the baker or the candlestick maker.........

Perhaps mythicists should put aside the idea of cherry picking elements of the gospel story - as though there is some residue of a historical man left over after the mythological elements are removed - and rather look for symbolism within the gospel story line.

What could be symbolized by 'the carpenter's son'. Building comes to the fore. In both the building of David's palace and the building of Solomon’s temple, carpenters were involved. The King of Tyre sending Cedar logs and carpenters, along with the stonemasons, for work on the palace. Carpenters again coming from Tyre, with Cedar logs from Lebanon, for the re-building of the Temple - as authorized by Cyrus.

Like the literal, man-made, earthly temple, the new spiritual temple, likewise, required ‘carpenters’.........the chief cornerstone, the masonry, being the risen Christ.......

The gospel carpenter from Nazareth - viewed through a mythicist lens - is not a carpenter with the kitchen table on his mind......

(Mark has Jesus as ‘the carpenter’, Matthew as ‘the carpenter’s son’.)

Solo

How clever, aa... but then again it comes from someone who thinks that a look-alike a passage of gLuke in a copy of a copy of a copy of a Paul's letter is proof positive that Paul used gLuke.

Jiri

spamandham

For reasons I can't imagine, Stark assumes that Christianity transformed from sect to cult on the third day after Jesus crucifixion. This is just plain silliness. There is no reason to presume such a transformation, which leaves it as a cult from the get-go. Here's where Stark has stepped outside his domain of expertise and fallen into the same trap almost everyone does - assuming that the Gospels are basically history reports.

No Robots

I dunno. He seems to see that times were tough for the earliest believers:

When Paul, Peter, and other members of the founding generation looked around in the sixties, they could have counted only something less than three thousand Christians. Not only had Jesus not returned, three decades of missionizing had yielded only these slim results.--p. 185

Solo

Let's be rational, shall we ? The argument was whether a sociological theory of cults eliminates (or almost does) the possibility that there was a historical figure of a wandering preacher and a carpenter (or a son of one). I don't think there is one, and spamandham is not producing anything that would change my impression that he is talking through his hat. This is the fundy kind of argument: he basically asserts that it is true because it is written by Authority.

But you are not saying like s&h that this is science which all but eliminates objectively the possibility of a historical figure, whom tradition identified as a carpenter by profession.

Are you ?

Jiri

Toto

The word tekton can refer to a carpenter, or to a master builder, or someone who constructs clever arguments. There is no real indication in the gospels that Jesus was a carpenter - he never builds anything or handles tools. There's no real basis for turning him into a proletarian hero, or assuming that he came from a background of poverty.

spamandham

What reason do you have to even suspect this nonsense in the first place? You don't have any, yet you insist it's reasonable nonetheless.

Pu' lleeze ...