Didymus

I think so. I'm inclined to accept the scholarly consensus on dating unless there's a good reason not to do so.

That's a very interesting question. It's likely that Mark wrote his gospel in response, not to word of the crucifixion per se, but to perceived needs on the part of Pauline Christians. I think it quite likely that there was a strong desire in the Diaspora for more information about the Messiah, and that Paul wrote his gospel in response to that need. Gnosticism was a continuing threat; the gospel served to firmly "ground" Jesus as a man who lived, not just on earth, but in Galilee, ate, drank, slept, etc. And, of course, there had been a terrible war, the Temple had been destroyed, and the effort to convert Jews had largely failed.

So the conditions that had prevailed in Paul's time had changed dramatically by, say, 75. While the need for a more clearly delineated Jesus might have been present to some degree during Pauline period, it grew more acute over the years.

As Rodney Stark has pointed out, Christianity didn't really "take off" until the 2nd century. I think the publication of the gospels may have been a major impetus. At long last, missionaries could present a fully illuminated picture of Jesus - and even quote him! - to prospective converts.

In rudimentary form in some circles, perhaps. But there must have been many variations at that stage. Perhaps Paul was reluctant to present one variation to a congregation that assumed another to be true. Seems like he thought that his five or so basic facts about Jesus were an adequate underpinning for his theology.

(Because the term "historical" is usually taken to mean that the gospels are to some degree accurate about Jesus' life, I don't use it to refer to a virtual mythical Jesus.)

I think the only conclusion we can draw from Paul's silences is that he knew nothing about the life of a human Jesus.

In any case, Paul didn't bother to refute the stories about a human Jesus that surely must have been in circulation during the 50s. That in itself tells us something about his priorities.

Interesting and provocative points. Thanks.

Didymus

Doug Shaver

Let me see here . . . Paul was not talking about a historical Jesus, and the gospel stories were not about any real man, but there was a real Jesus?

If I correctly understand your argument, it is that the death by crucifixion by some innocent man is needed to explain how it all got started. What I haven't figured out yet is why, if everything else in the New Testament can be explained on the basis of ideology and imagination, why not "Christ was crucified"?

Didymus

Yes. But your characterization is not quite what I have in mind.

1. Paul was talking about a real crucified man whom he and others believed was the messiah.

2. The gospel stories were ficticious tales inspired by the crucifixion of that real man and written in response to the need of Christians for a more "fleshed out" Jesus who was unequivocally not docetic.

3. There was a real Jesus, about whose life on earth we only know what Paul, the earliest (and perhaps best!) source we have on the subject, told us. A few other things can be surmised, but nothing like what appears in the gospels.

It certainly helps. But it is not exactly "required"; other theories do explain what happened. But this one squares well with a widely accepted set of facts, and at the same time seems more plausible, parsimonious and coherent than the others.

Everything else cannot be explained on those grounds. As others have pointed out, there is a good deal of historical material in the NT. Pilate was really a Roman prefect, Caiaphas was really a high priest, John the Baptist really conducted mass baptisms, Herod was really a client king, and crucifixions really took place in first century Palestine. And there is much more.

Regardless of that, Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection are the only pivotal events that appear in both the writings of Paul and in all the gospels. Both events have great theological significance. But of these two common elements, only the crucifixion could have been an actual historical event. So you are right. It occupies a premier position in the NT writings. It is, so to speak, the "crux" of both the history and the theology.

Why do I think that the Jesus sect began with such a crucifixion? For one thing, the sect having begun with a notorious crucifixion of a saintly but obscure man named Jesus - unlike either the "historical Jesus" of the gospels or the mythical Jesus adduced by Earl Doherty and others - is completely consistent with both the Pauline epistles and the later development of the gospels. To wit:

-- Paul said the man's name was Jesus. "Jesus" was a common name and means "Yahweh saves." Even though the coincidence of a crucified man with that name is high on the probability scale, it may well have been taken as a suggestion of scriptural fulfillment. It would certainly have tended to confirm hunches generated by other circumstances.

-- Paul said that Jesus was "the Seed of David." That would make him a Jew. Barring ethnic divisions in the sublunar sphere, that would make him a human being.

-- Paul said Jesus was "born of a woman" and had him present at a supper. Whether or not Paul believed that that particular event had really taken place, it seems quite unlikely that Paul would have put a mythical, non-earthly Jesus in such a setting. Even the use of bread and wine as symbolic elements would have been in opposition to the notion of a purely spiritual Jesus. As we can see from the writings of anti-docetist church fathers, things like food, drink, pain, birth, and death were put forth as evidence against docetist non-materiality and in favor of a human Jesus.

-- Paul said that James was "brother of the Lord." Clearly he meant Jesus. I'm not going to go into all the arguments; I hope it will suffice to say that, IMO, that reference puts Paul squarely in the "human Jesus" camp. In fact, I'm starting to think that the crucified Jesus was quite possibly a relative of James the Just, a man who was by all accounts, including Josephus', revered by Jews both in Palestine and the Diaspora. The crucifixion of any relative of James in itself would have caused a great stir. Just as James' execution by Ananus (Is that one word or two?) was considered to be a terrible injustice, so would the crucifixion of his brother. (I don't don't think VMJ lives or dies on this, however.)

This scenario certainly obviates the need for an existing band of disciples to carry on. Martyrs don't need disciples to promote their memory. They usually become known only in the aftermath, and often their lives are "spun" so as to give their deaths greater significance. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

If followers were indeed an important factor in transmitting the teachings of Jesus (I don't recall if you said they were, but somebody did), what role did they actually play? There are no writings from anyone who claims to have known anyone who knew Jesus, let alone from anyone who claims to have actually sat at the feet of the master during his earthly ministry. Jesus may not have been an entirely mythical figure, but the apostles seem to have been just that. The only acts that Paul attributes to the apostles have everything to do with the risen Christ, and nothing to do with Jesus' earthly ministry. So, by not positing any Galilean ministry, VMJ also accounts for the Paul's omission of any mention of Jesus' disciples during his time on earth.

And, as we seem to agree, the gospels have only a shaky foundation in historical fact. Unlike contemporaneous histories with a small amount of magical/miraculous content, a great percentage of the gospel material consists of miracles. So much so, in fact, that we have no basis to conclude that the basic narrative should be given credence.

Enough for now. Please keep in mind that this is a hypothesis "under construction." Hopefully, if the idea withstands critical scrutiny, it will become more fully formed over time. In any case, I hope I've addressed at least some of your concerns.

Didymus

Doug Shaver

OK. And I agree to a great extent. Your theory is perhaps the best one I've seen yet among historicist theories. I think your concept of a "virtual myth" is a nice touch.

If you're going to write a novel set in a certain time and place where the protagonist runs afoul of the political and religious establishments, you might as well try your best to get the names of all the head honchos right.

A few years back, William F. Buckley Jr. took to writing a series of spy novels, and I've read most of them. His first had a fictional queen of England, but otherwise every one in the series was chock full of real heads of state (Eisenhower, Stalin, Kruschev, Castro, Kennedy, Johnson, etc.) and real subordinates to those heads of state (the Dulles brothers, McNamara, Guevara, etc.) The novels' protagonist was a CIA spy named Blackford Oakes, and he was heavily involved in Cold War events that really happened (Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin, etc.) I found Buckley's sense of realism to be quite impressive, actually. But I never suspected for a moment that Buckley wanted me to think there was ever a real CIA spy named Blackford Oakes, or by any other name who did what Oakes was described as doing.

I don't see it being any more crucial than the resurrection. As far back as anyone can trace it, the Christian message has been that Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead.

Obviously, I would agree that of all the gospel stories that could possibly be true, the resurrection is not one. I also agree that if anything in the gospels really did happen, then the crucifixion is it. If there were no arguments at all against Jesus' historicity, then I would have little problem supposing that some parts of the gospels had some basis in fact. But there are arguments against it, and I think they are strong arguments. The question then moves on to whether there is any undisputed fact that is difficult to account for without assuming a historical Jesus. And I don't see any.

That begs the question. Paul talked about a Christ Jesus who died and was resurrected. He never said he was man.

Nothing that "may well have" happened can be evidence of what did happen.
[quote=Didymus]Paul said that Jesus was "the Seed of David." That would make him a Jew. Barring ethnic divisions in the sublunar sphere, that would make him a human being.[quote=Didymus]

I have tried to find some good sources about Hellenistic thinking on the sublunar realm, and they're damnably hard to come across, at least for us peons stuck with online sources. I can only say that I have discovered nothing yet to suggest that the sublunar realm was thought of as a place where ethnic divisions were either nonexistent or irrelevant. On the contrary, if it was supposed to mirror this world (or this world was supposed to mirror it), it would have been more remarkable if no such divisions had been envisioned.

Diff'rent strokes. I'll grant that it was hardly certain, but it does not strike me as the least bit unlikely.

It's my understanding that that was why he had to descend into the sublunar realm. To effect his salvific mission, he had to do a few things that purely spiritual entities could not do. Like suffer death.

I think it risky to base any theory on the supposition that extant writings give us anything like a complete picture of the first-century Near Eastern intellectual landscape. Just because a few propagandists insisted that "If he wasn't a man, he could not have done X" doesn't mean that had to have been the prevailing opinion among the intellectuals of that time. Any thinking about Christian origins has to take into consideration that for a thousand years, orthodox Christians were almost the only people responsible for maintaining the historical record. With rare exceptions, if Christian scribes didn't copy a document, it didn't get copied, and if it didn't get copied, it vanished.

Imagine Western civilization collapsing into another Dark Age, and that for a millennium, practically no one but a bare handful of evangelical Christians ever learns to read or write. Nothing in writing gets preserved unless they think it worth preserving. After the next Renaissance, what will historians in the year 4000 think Americans in the 21st century were capable of believing?

It is not clear to me. I have seen no non-question-begging argument that makes it clear why those words can have no sensible interpretation besides "male sibling of Jesus."

There you stand. If you can not otherwise, so be it.

No, but gods do, and so do men who people think are gods. Those who attract no attention during their own lifetimes don't get deified.
It's a nice try, no sarcasm or condescension intended.

It think almost would work if we had good reason to think Paul was the actual founder of Christianity. But he clearly wasn't. He was converted to a movement that already existed, and we don't know for how long, before he arrived on the scene. There is room for an awful lot of uncertainty about the particulars of Paul's beliefs about Jesus, and even more uncertainty about the particulars of what his contemporaries believed. But one general notion seems about as certain as anything ever gets in this area. That is, the first Christians that we know about were some Jews who believed in a Christ Jesus who was, if not a god, then something very like a god. That they would have so reacted to a man who had done nothing more extraordinary than get himself killed for no good reason is to me almost as incredible as an actual resurrection.

Didymus

Thanks!

Nor do I, theologically speaking. But it's a whole lot more likely to be historical.

Both are equally important to the Christian message, if not to historians. The belief that Christ rose from the dead ought to be significant to historians, though, because without it Christianity would have no salific message, and most likely would have failed. So it's necessary to ascertain how the belief began. If we don't think it was the result of actual occurances, i.e., the empty tomb and actual post-resurrection appearances, then we have find a naturalistic hypothesis to explain it. One such explanation is that (a) the emotional trauma of a particularly unjust and cruel crucifixion, coupled with (b)pre-existing beliefs about repudiated prophets and specifically about Wisdom, a repudiated savior of mankind, could have resulted in dreams and visions, hence the "appearances" that Paul refers to.

Against his historicity? Or against his "human-ness"? Historicity is often taken to mean the historicity of the gospels. I agree that arguments against that brand of historicity are strong. But the arguments against his human-ness - primarily those set forth by Earl Doherty in "The Jesus Puzzle" and elsewhere - are weaker. It seems that the notion of Paul's regarding Jesus as a mythical figure was formulated mainly to explain the Silences. It was a novel, thoughtful and very imaginative approach to a conundrum that had been troubling Christians and non-Christians alike for centuries. And I agree: It's a great improvement over the pitifully weak "Paul had other concerns" and "Paul's congregations already knew that stuff." But it has problems of its own, i.e., the tortuous path that must be followed to support a theory that, in the end, amounts to little more than "It can't be ruled in with certainty, but it can't be ruled out either, and best of all it solves the puzzle!" Well, so does VMJ, without all the excursions into the conjectural.

I think it is difficult - not impossible, but difficult - to account for the (almost undisputed) spread of pre-gospel Christianity without a precipitating event. I just don't think the preaching of Paul's abstract theology alone would have captured the imagination of Diaspora Jews in Asia Minor and Rome. The first Christians were not all philosophers; the death of a god in the sublunar sphere would have been altogether too commonplace and too easy to disregard. And thin gruel indeed, especially for diaspora Jews whose homeland was in subjection and whose leadership was in turmoil.

There aren't many undisputed facts in the study of Christian origins. But that's an interesting way of posing the question. What did you have in mind?

What about 1 Corinthians 15.21? Speaking of Adam and Christ, Paul wrote: "For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man."

And Romans 5.15? "For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!"

I won't repeat Bart Ehrman's list of Jesus' human chacteristics and actions, as per Paul. But Christian intransigence is not the only reason that Doherty's MJ thesis has not been widely accepted. It requires a great accommodative effort to read Paul's words about Jesus as words about a figure who never touched terra firma. (Crucified on some unearthly plane? What would that have been like? That's not, BTW, an argument from incredulity. It's just a parenthetical comment, not an argument at all.)

A good general principle, but most scholars find significance in that name, and fundamentalists to this day think it was a fulfillment of scripture. So it's not the least farfetched to think that people of the time would have viewed it in the same light, despite the common-ness of variations on Joshua.

After all, if there's one thing that everybody agrees on, it's that the crucified savior was called "Jesus."

We have no evidence that Paul was any more familiar with such matters than we are. But, absent an unequivocal assertion by Paul himself to the effect that Jesus existed only on a spiritual plane, I think we need such evidence if we are to accept the hypothesis that he was injecting such Hellenistic notions into his teachings.

For example, do we have philosophical writings by Paul or his teachers or his disciples that deal with intermediary spiritual planes beneath the heavens? Or writings by his enemies that attack him for such ideas?

According to whom? (rhetorical question)

I cannot find anywhere in Paul's epistles where he suggests that a sublunar counterpart of King David was the ancestor of a sublunar Jesus Christ. That's what I mean; this sort of conjecture goes way beyond the evidence. Alas, MJ seems to rest on such speculative assumptions and excursions.

Sounds like a rewording of standard Christian doctrine, actually. Jesus' incarnation was necessary in order to make possible his substitutionary atonement. He had to become a man in order to suffer like a man. (Of course, an omniscient deity could emulate any circumstance he wishes, but that's for another forum.)

When you come right down to it, there's nothing except the Silences that militates against Paul having regarded Jesus as coming all the way down to earth.

But I wasn't talking about the range of the 1st century intellectual landscape; I was talking about Christian refutations of docetism.

The corruption of scripture / patristic writings is not an issue here; there's abundant evidence that early Christian orthodoxy countered docetism by emphasizing the very things that I listed. They insisted on the resurrection of the body, and repeatedly asserted that Jesus would not have eaten food and drunk wine, or had a mother, etc., if he were merely a spirit in the form of a man. Their anti-docetism remains a cornerstone of Christian doctrine today.

I don't know what evidence you might have to support the notion that Paul saw things differently. If you've got anything, please share it with us.

As we have seen, there are a number of "sensible interpretations." But merely possible interpretations are a dime a dozen. It's Paul's interpretation that we must be concerned with, and the burden of historical proof is on those who claim that Paul meant something other than "brother" when he used the word "brother." The only "evidence" I've seen is that a literal interpretation doesn't fit someone's RC doctrine or MJ hypothesis. Well, that doesn't constitute very good evidence, does it?

I have stood elsewhere. But I realized that I was on shaky ground with a slippery footing.

There's a fine line between martyrization and deification. Of course, MJ'ers think Jesus was deified without having lived on earth at all! So how much attention did their Jesus attract before being deified?

I do appreciate that.

I agree that his death and/or the circumstances surrounding it had to be extraordinary.

We don't think we know, or will never know, the particulars of that crucifixion. But if Jesus' death was extraordinary in some way that suggested to the people of Jerusalem - and eventually the Diaspora - that he was the Messiah, then that crucifixion would account for the origin of Christianity. That's really the basis of the Virtual Mythical Jesus idea.

Didymus

Doug Shaver

Following the historical paper trail, the closest we can get to Christianity's origins is Paul's writings. In those writings, I think it fair to say that by definition, Christianity was the belief that the Christ had been crucified and raised from the dead. The historicity issue is whether Paul and other Christians at that time, when they talked about the Christ, were referring to a man who had recently lived in Palestine or to some other entity. Had the crucifixion and resurrection, in their minds, occurred in Jerusalem or somewhere else?

Well, (b) is pretty much a given. The issue is whether any facts about Christianity's origins are particular hard to explain without assuming (a).

If he was not human, he was not historical.

I have never seen it so used, at least not directly. It is certainly not the case that all people who believe in a historical Jesus think the gospels are historical documents.

Of course, in ordinary usage, Jesus' historicity logically implies some historicity of the gospels, simply because there is no historical Jesus outside the gospels. Aside from the gospels -- and you can include the noncanonical ones if you want -- there is zero documentation for the man, if there was such a man. Paul does not put his Christ in any historical context and does not provide any biographical information. His Christ died, was buried, rose from the dead, and "was seen" by many people, and that is all he did. Other Christian writings give us nothing that is not obviously derived from the gospels, and the handful of non-Christian references to him are worthless as evidence of anything but the existence of Christians.

Your hypothesis is idiosyncratic in its attempt to separate the historical Jesus from the gospel stories about him. That doesn't make it wrong, but it is going to create an occasional communication problem like this. The ordinary historicist presumes that the gospels are at least tenuously connected to a real itinerant preacher known as Jesus of Nazareth. Even if mostly untrue, the books are presumed to contain some vestige of historical fact. Deny that presumption, and there is no historical Jesus left to talk about. If there was a historical Jesus, then the gospel Jesus was in some way, however indirectly, based on him. By definition, more or less. That is what most people ordinarily mean when they refer to Jesus' historicity.

That is not how I read Doherty's reasoning, and it is definitely not my reasoning.

The silences are explained by saying that Paul never heard about any historical Jesus, and that he never heard about one because there never was one for anybody to hear about. But in positing that answer to the question, "Why didn't Paul say anything about the historical Jesus?" we are confronted with another question: "Then who or what was Paul talking about when he talked about Jesus Christ being crucified and buried and rising again?" "A mythical figure" is the answer to that question, not to the question of Paul's silences.

Doherty's explanation may strike you as torturous, but all I see is an appearance of complexity arising more from unfamiliarity than actual complexity. He is invoking a set of concepts that, while totally foreign to the average 21st-century intellectual, would have been almost common knowledge to any literate person of the first century. Most of these ideas were certainly new to me when I first read his Web site a few years ago. Since then I've done some studying of my own. I'm still way out of his league, but everything I have picked up so far supports him. So far as I can tell, he is not making any of this up.

How many of those people do you think there were? And more to the point, how long do you think these ideas had been around and why do you think so? We know the sect already existed before Paul was converted to it, but we don't know when it got started. We also don't know how many similar sects were flourishing in Paul's time -- but we do know there were some -- nor how long any of them had existed, either.

We don't know anything at all about the first Christians. We don't know where they were or when they were. We know where some Christians were as of the middle of the first century, but they were probably not the first Christians. They were just the first ones we know about.

And apparently it was disregarded, by and large, until a few Christians started claiming instead that their god had spent a few years living on earth.
Not a lot, really. Mainly, I'm thinking of the facts that certain documents exist, that the oldest extant copies are of a certain age, and that some of them were written by certain identifiable individuals (e.g. Irenaeus, Origen, Justin, etc.)

I am also thinking that notwithstanding a few dissenters, it is almost undisputed that the originals of certain letters attributed to Paul were in fact written by a Christian missionary of that name sometime around the middle of the first century. From that, I and practically everybody else infers the factual existence of a Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem during the same time, among the leaders of which were two men named Cephas and James.

I got careless. Touche.

Good, because having a few human characteristics and performing a few human actions does not make an entity a human being. It is pointless to attempt to analyze what Paul said about Jesus from the 21st-century European-American perspective. The analysis must be done from a first-century Eastern Mediterranean perspective.

Obviously not, considering how many atheists reject it, too. But there is such a thing as intellectual inertia, and it is quite unaffected by religious disbelief.

Yes, it does. You have to ignore everything humanity has learned in the last 2,000 years about how the universe is put together. You have to know how people living in that place at the time thought it was put together.

If you're going to invent a savior out of your imagination, and you're a Jew, it's not exactly improbable that you would give him a name that means "Yahweh saves."

Oh, come now. Do we need to see his diploma? Paul was not living in the modern world. He was obviously well educated, and you didn't have a hundred majors to choose from when you went to school in those days. If he did not learn the dominant philosophy of his own culture, what do you suppose he would have learned instead?

If Doherty is right, intermediary spiritual planes beneath the heavens is precisely what Paul's writings are about. And they are philosophical, as philosophy was understood at that time in history. The notion that you can talk intelligently without talking philosophically seems to be a modern one.

We don't have any writings by anyone who knew Paul, but it is my understanding that we do have writings confirming that the relevant concepts were in the intellectual air at that time, or at least that it is reasonable to suppose that they were. If he looks like a duck and waddles like a duck, then just because we cannot hear him quack doesn't mean he must be a goose.

If his enemies wrote anything against him, those documents have not survived.

And I can think of no reason to expect him to have spelled things out to that level of detail. It would have been like reviewing basic algebra in a trigonometry class.

In the first place, they're enough. At least some of them, cumulatively, are simply inexplicable on the assumption that Paul was talking about a man he had heard about and who had lived during his own lifetime. In the second place, Paul is not the only first-century Christian who is so silent about everything Jesus might have said or done prior to his death. Aside from the gospel authors, they all are, and none of the gospels can be known with certainty to have been written during the first century.

And up to that point we had been talking about what Paul could have been thinking. The anti-docetist polemics came long after his time, and we have no good reason to assume that their writers' thinking was anything like Paul's thinking. Just because a few second-century Christians were arguing that only real men can eat food doesn't mean all Christians everywhere and at all times would have agreed with them.

I have what he wrote and the ability to read it without presupposing that he must have meant whatever anybody writing the same thing nowdays would have meant. I have a minimal acquaintance with some of the philosophical concepts that could have been available to any educated person living at that time and in that place. I have the corroborating opinions of at least two scholars whose familiarity with those concepts greatly exceeds mine.
As I said, I'm still waiting for an argument that doesn't beg the question.

Of course Paul meant "brother" when he wrote "brother." That would have been true even if in Paul's mind "brother" meant "pink unicorn." The question is whether in this particular context we are compelled to assume that he must have meant "biological male sibling." It cannot be argued that Paul never used the word in any other sense, because he most certainly did.

Any interpretation has to fit the totality of evidence. Let us consider an alternate reality. Everything else is exactly the same, except that instead of "brother of the lord" it was "brother of Jesus of Nazareth, our lord and savior." Considering all the other evidence for and against Jesus' historicity, I would believe it was an interpolation.

But I don't need to go that far. Paul did not always mean "sibling" when he used the word "brother," and that is an uncontestable fact. For historicists to insist, as vehemently as they tend to, that on this particular occasion he could not have meant anything else is strong evidence of how feeble the case for historicity really is.

Good for you. Same here.

Fine or not, it's awfully hard to cross. Martyrs are a dime a dozen in the history of religion.

I was referring to what a man had to do for other men to get it into their heads that he was a god. It does not follow that all gods must once have been men who did such things.

Agreed. I just think the "if" is too big to fit the evidence.

Didymus

Wow. Long response. Thanks. I'll try to do it justice.

I think in Jerusalem. But that's only because the seat of Judaism is the proper place for such an event. It's an open question, though, since Paul does not tell us that it happened there.

True. Human and historical are really the same thing; I just wanted to be absolutely clear about it. As I have seen the term "mythical" used to mean "spiritual" rather than "fictitious" or "legendary," I have seen the term "historical" used to mean "similar to the gospels." When many people say that Jesus existed, they mean the human Jesus of the gospels, more or less. But when I make that assertion, I mean the human Jesus of the Pauline epistles, more or less.

(Somebody called VMJ a "mimimalized" Jesus, or somesuch. I'm not sure what a naturalistic version of the gospels would entail; there seems to be no consensus on that. But [tautology alert!] if it goes much beyond the crucifixion, I'd consider it "maximized," puffed up beyond any realistic notion of historicity.)

There's more. He was also a man, born of a woman. In contrast to his divine aspect, his fleshly human aspect was descended from David. He attended a supper prior to his crucifixion. He ate and drank. He didn't just die, but was crucified. Not much, I'll grant, but we shouldn't understate the case either.

In the VMJ scenario, as compared to the traditional Christian scenario, Paul's only glaring omissions are the time and place of the crucifixion. And voila! - the tired old apologetic that "Paul's congregations knew all that stuff" gets a new lease on life. (Of course, there's a lot less "stuff" for them to know. The "historical gospels" folks - Christians, for the most part, like J.P. Holding - insist that Paul's congregations were familiar with the entirety of the gospel narratives. That's just stupid.) If those two basic facts are all that's missing from Paul's epistles, the Jesus puzzle has been solved without resorting to speculative suppositions about hidden meanings in Paul's epistles.

(Although Matthew and Luke mention Caiaphas, Mark, like Paul, doesn't mention him. That's a problem in writing fake history from long ago and far away - you don't know who all the actors would have been.)

Yes, that is the presumption of the HJ contingent, but I have yet to see a rewrite that sets forth just those vestiges without all the geographical and historical errors and without the underlying LXX/OT references and story lines. Maybe Michael Turton will take on such a project when he decides to resurrect his participation in IIDB. Considering Michael's exhaustive knowledge of the subject and the dearth of historicity in the narratives, that should take him about 20 minutes. Or no minutes.

Of course it is. I took a shortcut.

I meant "tortuous," actually, "highly involved, complex." The concept of an intermediary sphere may be cosmological rubbish, but it doesn't seem particularly tortuous. OTOH, proving that Paul embraced it is a complicated, speculative process that involves rejecting literality and fastening vague, tendentious, "MJ-correct" interpretations to some very ambiguous passages.

Well, his words may be interpreted by some as alluding to such concepts, but he certainly doesn't invoke them, that is, "cite as authority, resort to, appeal to." If he had done so, Christianity would be a much different animal. I don't mean to pick nits here, but the difference is crucial.

Of course he isn't. I believe Earl Doherty to be a man of utmost integrity. But that doesn't make him infallible. MJ is still a mighty long walk for a very short beer. Our paths - yours and mine - have been similar, by the way.

Those concepts may indeed have been in the air during the first century, but it's not at all clear that Paul himself embraced them. He doesn't teach them; he doesn't refer to others as teachers of them, and he doesn't invoke the concepts themselves. Talk about silences! These are basic precepts about the universe, supposedly the underpinnings of his theology, yet he never mentions them directly.

A single unexplained reference to his own journey to the "third heaven" is woefully insufficient to support the contention that Paul believed that Jesus existed in such a sphere. Or that he didn't exist in this one. While there are other, ambiguous passages that an MJ exegete could interpret as reflecting such beliefs, there is still no clear, unequivocal statement to that effect. On the other hand, Paul states in at least two places that he regarded Jesus as a man. Are we to reject such crystalline clarity in favor of metaphor, ambiguity and supposition? Should we allow our knowledge that such beliefs were "in the air" to override the words of Paul himself?

If Paul really believed that Jesus existed in such a realm, why didn't he tell his congregations that? Or did they "know all that stuff anyway"? Has that familiar AfS ring, doesn't it?

Okay, I'll revise my statement. We have no reason to believe that Paul's congregations consisted of philosophers steeped in neo-Platonism, who, when presented with a multiplicity of ambiguous usages/meanings of the phrase "kata sarka," would know implicitly that none should be taken to suggest that Jesus was a human being, despite his explicit use of terminology - "man," "born of a woman," "seed of David," and yes, "kata sarka" - that virtually shouts his belief that Jesus was a man. It seems to me that MJ ultimately depends on the certainty of such implausibly favorable interpretations by Paul's congregations.

I've made that point myself a few times, but now I think they claimed that all along. "I once was lost and but now I'm found," as the song goes.

Of course, it is true that Christianity didn't start really rolling until Christians had an full-blown narrative of Jesus' life. Theology wonks get excited about Paul's epistles; the rest of us, not so much. (I've tried to interest a few CalTech friends in the Jesus puzzle, and boy, the silence is deafening. They'd rather dissect the Peloponnesian Wars.) Mark's narrative, OTOH, was a wonderful teaching tool, chock full of harrowing tales, wit, wisdom, heroism and betrayal, and, in the end, noble sacrifice for the good of mankind.

Really? Please identify just one non-human individual born of a woman and/or descended from a king. (Sorry, Rosemary's Baby doesn't count.) :devil3:

More than that. You have to believe. You must have faith.

True. But it works the other way too: If other messianic factors were in play, a man with such a name would certainly be a leading candidate for the savior job, wouldn't he?

Re Paul:

I don't think anyone has shown it to be dominant. Present, yes, but not dominant.

And the answer is... Judaism. Not instead of, but certainly in addition to. And I would certainly be hesitant to characterize Hellenism as the "dominant philosophy" of Pharisaic Jews who actually hired agents like Paul to assist in stamping out a heretical sect.

Middle-Platonism certainly existed, and, as Richard Carrier points out, there were plenty of ancient examples of the belief that "earthly" events sometimes took place in an unearthly realm. So I'll stipulate to the existence of such ideas at that time. But I have yet to see proof that that was the dominant philosophy of Paul's Hellenistic/Judiac/Damascene culture, and certainly no one, not even the astute Earl Doherty, has shown conclusively that it was the philosophy embraced by Paul himself. After all, we do have abundant writings by the man. His middle-Platonist cosmology should be leaking out all over the place. But it isn't.

Rejecting Mosaic Law is one thing; rejecting the entire cosmology of Judaism is another. I just don't think the evidence for such a turnabout can be found in Paul's epistles.

Yes, they were not unheard of.

Of course, the fact that quacks are heard from the vicinity of a pond does not mean that every creature in the pond is a duck.:wave:

Do you have evidence that Paul's congregations believed all earthly entities had sublunar counterparts?

I was speaking tongue in cheek, of course. Nonetheless, it is a point. If you place Paul's Jesus somewhere in the sublunar sphere, it is necessary to imagine that his birth, his crucifixion, his burial and his resurrection also took place there. I suppose one has to have lived 2000 years ago to imagine the role of births and burials in the sublunar sphere!

Do we have anything specific from Paul's contemporaries about such events taking place in that realm?

The Silences may be "enough" to support MJ against traditional historicism, but not against VMJ.

They are inexplicable if we assume, as Christians do, that Paul actually knew a lot about Jesus. But they are easily explained if we put aside the Jesus of the gospels and accept the proposition that Paul merely heard about a crucifixion that seemed to him and his cohorts to fulfill OT prophesies and messianic expectations. With the exception of Pilate and Jerusalem, VMJ fully accounts for the Silences.

The legend started "small" and grew with the telling, and continued to do so even after Mark's gospel was published, i.e., the remaining canonicals and a multiplicity of apocryphals, mostly gnostic. But by the turn of the century, Ignatius of Antioch (I'm a fan, of sorts, of Ignatius' passionate, disputatious epistles) seems to have either read Matthew's gospel or heard gospel-style stories of Jesus' fictitious earthly ministry. Not just Ignatius and the Pastorals, but turn of the century writers Clement of Rome and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas explicitly acknowledge the "humanity" of Jesus. Here's a little excerpt from Barnabas:

Barnabas 5:6
Understand ye. The prophets, receiving grace from Him, prophesied
concerning Him. But He Himself endured that He might destroy death
and show forth the resurrection of the dead, for that He must needs
be manifested in the flesh;

Barnabas 5:7
that at the same time He might redeem the promise made to the
fathers, and by preparing the new people for Himself might show,
while He was on earth, that having brought about the resurrection He
will Himself exercise judgment.

Barnabas 5:8
Yea and further, He preached teaching Israel and performing so many
wonders and miracles, and He loved him exceedingly.

Barnabas 5:9
And when He chose His own apostles who were to proclaim His Gospel,
who that He might show that He came not to call the righteous but
sinners were sinners above every sin, then He manifested Himself
to be the Son of God.

Barnabas 5:10
For if He had not come in the flesh neither would men have looked
upon Him and been saved, forasmuch as when they look upon the sun
that shall cease to be, which is the work of His own hands, they
cannot face its rays.

Barnabas 5:11
Therefore the Son of God came in the flesh to this end, that He might
sum up the complete tale of their sins against those who persecuted
and slew His prophets.

And Clement of Rome:

1Clem 49:6
in love the Master took us unto Himself; for the love which He had toward us, Jesus Christ our Lord hath given His blood for us by the will of God, and His flesh for our flesh and His life for our lives.

As Doherty points out, these guys may not have known the gospels. But they certainly thought Jesus was a human being who lived on earth. Of course, you can quarrel with the dates if you like. As I've mentioned, I generally accept the consensus datings unless there's a good reason to reject them.

As my GPS says, "Make a legal U-turn." I don't think there's much dispute regarding the issues raised by orthodox Christians against docetism. I strongly recommend Ignatius of Antioch's "Epistle to the Trallians." That and his other turn of the century letters are very enlightening about how orthodoxy was battling docetism. It took some time, but the non-docetists won the war, and seemingly silly arguments about only real men eating food had amazing force. You just have discard your 21st century preconceptions and think like someone who lived in the 2nd century!

I have seen nothing that shows that Paul's time was a whole lot different from Ignatius' in that regard. Bread and wine, body and blood; these things represented the material world of the flesh. The message of the Lord's Supper was the resurrection of the earthly body, as opposed to a non-material counterpart of the body in an intermediary spiritual realm. True then, true now.

I assume you're talking about acceptance of MJ. Argument from estimable authority noted. I think they're way outnumbered, though. (I'm shocked at Carrier's conversion. Perhaps he'll recant when he reads this post!

Say what?

It was common to refer to believers as "brethren," "brothers in Christ," not "brothers of Christ." They were each other's brothers, e.g., "all men are brothers." If Paul was referring to James not as Jesus' sib, but as something else: What was the intent of the reference? If it went beyond common usage, why was it not explained, given that that was the only such example? And if it just meant "pious," why did he use "brother of the Lord" only in reference to James, and not to anyone else?

So would I, but only because of "Nazareth," a word that didn't emerge as an ersatz place name until at least 30 years later.

I think, by the way, that the famous and almost-certainly historical James the Just (see Josephus) could have had an obscure, reclusive or wandering brother named Jesus who was crucified, and that that circumstance is evidenced by 1 Cor.1. 19. Such a literal explanation has got to be the default, but I wouldn't give it 100%, though. There may be a less obvious explanation for 1 Cor. 1.19.

How does "vehemence" constitute evidence of a weak case?

Are you insisting vehemently that he could not possibly have meant literal "brother of Jesus"? If so, on what basis do you make that assumption? And does your insistence constitute evidence of a feeble case for a mythical Jesus?

Do you think it's even possible that he meant the physical brother of Jesus? Or, to apply an argumentum ad adsurdum that's actually not that absurd, must we take as metaphorical everything in Paul's epistles that doesn't conform to MJ if taken literally?

Looking forward to your next post. Sorry this one took so long. (For some reason, I couldn't connect with IIDB all weekend.)

Didymus

jakejonesiv

I will agree with the first assertion, if Jesus was not human, then he was not historical. Miraculous beings cannot be demostrated today, much less than from nearly 1800 year old manuscripts of questionable origin.

But the converse is not true. This is a common fallacy of HJ proponents. (hey, Jesus had a brother, case closed! :huh: )
Even if Jesus was believed to be human, that does not make him necessarily historical.
It is merely a necessary prerequisite. Sherlock Holmes was clearly depicted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as human being. He was placed in a realistic historical setting similar to Victorian London. Mr. Holmes has a vivid personality, and is seemingly superior intellectually to his creator (who believed in faries!). He even had a brother, the equally talented Mycroft.

But the estimatable Mr. Holmes is not historical, he is a fictional character, despite the best efforts of cultists to prove otherwise.

Jake Jones IV

Llyricist

To be fair, the historicists are usually arguing against Doherty's thesis in particular when making this claim vis a vis Paul, and in Doherty's thesis, what Paul believed is important.

Didymus

What, Jake, is the converse of "If Jesus was not human, then he was not historical"?

And by all means tell us why such a statement would be fallacious.

Really? But I thought...

No, it is not a "necessary prerequisite." Earl Doherty and all the world's MJ'ers don't think Jesus was a human being. Does that mean that Jesus could not have possibly been a human being?

No kidding! Who knew?

Thanks for bringing us up to date on "faries" and the "estimatable" Mr. Holmes. But what does this have to do with my statement, which most assuredly was NOT "If Jesus was believed to be human, then he was necessarily historical."

I stand by my statement: Human and historical are really the same thing. Note the absence of the phrase "believed to be", a strawman that you gratuitously inserted into the discussion. If you're going to imply that my statements are fallacious, please try to read them carefully and characterize them accurately before spouting. Thanks.

Didymus