Diogenes the Cynic

The similarity is that his followers thought he was going to be the Messiah when he was alive, then refused to accept that they were wrong after his death and began to aver that he would come back again. The manner of death is less traumatic, but the comparison is no less illustrative for that, since the crucifixion would have been presumably more traumatic, not less, and with people far more prone to supernatural beliefs and interpretations of the world.

It is also not uncommon at all for people grieving deaths to have hallucinations of them after their deaths. People see and hear dead relatives all the time, especially when still in the grieving process. One of my grandmothers (a very devout Southern Baptist), told me she had seen and had an entire conversation with a recently deceased sister once. She thought she had really talked to her sister's spirit.

If, in the traumatic aftermath of the crucifixion somebody (let's say Simon the Rock) is out fishing, totally bummed and then he looks up and thinks he sees somebody walking out on the lake. Actually walking on the water. Then he sees that it's Jesus. Maybe he even talks to Jesus. Jesus tells him that it's all good. He's going to come back down from the sky like Daniel's Bar'nash and tear shit up. Peter tells everybody else, and some of them start saying they saw Jesus too.

Now you have something similar to Schneerson - a small group of Jewish believers who think their rabbi is going to come back to life. That's all you need for a naturalistic first layer to the Jesus story. The rest is added by Gentiles in succeeding generations. He did not go from peasant to God in one step, and was never seen as God by his original followers. They probably didn't even believe in a physical resurrection.

Steven Carr

How did Jesus's followers think he was going to be the Messiah? Has Ehrman forgotten that he has labelled Jesus as an 'apocalyptic prophet'?

An apocalyptic prophet does not fit your description of a Messiah.

So unless Jesus followers were just following anybody at all on the off-chance they might one day turn out to be a Messiah (like the crowds in Life of Brian would follow anybody and hail them as a Messiah), they could not have had any reason to follow Jesus.

aa5874

You just INVENTED your story.

You have demonstrated perfectly how people can INVENT their own stories and then BELIEVE them..

Solo

Paul makes such representation (no doubt revealed by the Lord) in 1 Thess 4:16-17

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

This aligns closely in the imagery of Mk 13:26-27

And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

ETA: the "class of bodies" is a reference to 1 Cr 15:51-52

Best,
Jiri

Diogenes the Cynic

Ehrman doesn't say they thought he was the Messiah while he was alive. His hypothesis is that Jesus preached the coming of the Messiah and that his followers decided after the crucifixion, that he would return as the Son of Man. That was an idiosyncratic, micro-sectarian belief (just like the Schneerson cult), which became the mustard seed for the Christ mythos in the diaspora. Christianity is a Gentile religion, not a Jewish one. Jews never bought it.

Steven Carr

So how did they decide Jesus was the Messiah, when we are told that a crucified Messiah was not a concept that could occur to a 1st century Jew?

On page 285, Ehrman contrasts the role of 'Messiah' and 'Son of Man', so how did Jesus become both? Your job description of the Messiah is very different from that of 'Son of Man'.

And Ehrman calls this 'Son of Man' a 'cosmic figure', although he denies that Jesus was thought of as a god.

This is just playing with words.


Clearly, Ehrman is teaching that early Christians thought of Jesus as having god-like powers, but he cannot use the word 'god' because he has committed himself to saying that early Christians did not think of Jesus as a god.

And he cannot explain how this happened.

It is like a miracle must have happened.

One minute Jesus was a crucified failure, the next his followers were proclaiming him 'the Son of Man' and 'Messiah', although Ehrman has trashed the whole scenario of any 1st century Jew thinking of a crucified Messiah.

Ehrman's historicist scenario makes no sense. He can't explain how a crucified person became the Messiah.

GakuseiDon

Wouldn't the claims of resurrection and ascending to heaven do that? If you look at the Gospels and the hints in Paul and the early epistles, Jesus' life on earth was not a success. But it was the Resurrection event that confirmed his elevated status.

In the Gospels, the picture is of people -- previously welcoming -- abandoning him and the apostles in disarray; then Jesus reappears and things kick off again. Acts continues the story with the apostles spreading the word.

Once people got the idea that Jesus was in heaven and able to personally intercede with God, then you start to get the elevated Jesus. Taken to the pagan world, Jesus becomes a god himself.

aa5874

Please be careful. You are tying up yourself in KNOTS. Your imagination appears to be out of control.

You NEED a credible source of antiquity to support your claim that the supposed followers of Jesus did NOT think he was a Messiah.

You are now arguing from your "history book" filled with BLANK pages.

In the EARLIEST Jesus story, gMark, it was a supposed disciple, Peter, of Jesus who FIRST Identified Jesus as the Messiah.

Mark 8 Diogenes the Cynic your rational is on shaky ground. You are making errors after errors.

Toto

But these claims of a resurrection were not exactly credible. Pagans would look at Christians and not see any evidence that god had actually intervened.

This looks like you are just accepting the story line from the gospels, and figuring out a way that it could have happened naturalistically. But that doesn't make the story probable.

GakuseiDon

Keep in mind that you had Paul and the early apostles out there, with their miracles and prophecies. If they were proclaiming healing miracles and prophecies in Christ's name, then this showed that Jesus could now intercede on behalf of those who accepted him. Pretty good thing to have in a demon-haunted world. Then there was early Christianity's emphasis on the widows and the poor, which would have appealed to, well, widows and the poor.

I'm not sure what "the story" you refer to here is supposed to be. I think the outline provided in the Gospels, Acts and Paul show a small movement, basically destroyed by Jesus' arrest and crucifixion, but really ramping up in the years ahead based on the missionary zeal of the early apostles convinced by visions of the Risen Jesus and a ready-made audience of God-fearers. Once Christianity breached the barrier between Jewish and pagan beliefs, with the conversion of Greek-philosophically trained pagans in the Second Century, it started to spread much faster.