graymouser

We know that early Christianity was probably a very diverse movement existing in a Roman Empire full to the brim of strange religious movements. The idea that orthodox Christianity as we know it goes back, with few roadbumps, to 33 CE or thereabouts is pretty well debunked.

There seem, to me, to be four primary strains talking about Jesus in the core of the NT - the Gospel of Mark, the Q material, the Gospel of John, and the letters of Paul. The fact that not all of this material is completely harmonious is of great interest to Biblical scholars; there are a plethora of historicist and mythicist accounts of how the material got to be written about this Jesus fellow.

What I have to wonder is: why did these all have to be about the same Jesus? I think this is a valid question for both mythicist and historicist accounts alike. Just because Matthew and Luke combined Q wisdom material with the Markan narrative doesn't mean that they were correct in doing so; it strikes me as entirely possible that these writers were co-opting a separate wisdom tradition (or, if you buy into the idea of layers of Q, maybe several separate traditions) into a narrative framework.

As for Paul, we know that he said almost nothing about the life of his own Christ. Why do we decide that Paul's Christ and Mark's Christ (and Q's Christ) were the same Christ? I understand that the Christian tradition - which comes much later and with considerable ability to redact or alter documents if necessary - links them, but why do we accept this? Paul's Christ only seems to be joined to Mark's by crucifixion, and I'm not even sure if we know that about Q's Christ.

Christianity is a highly syncretic religion, clearly blending different elements and mixtures of Hellenism and Judaism into a whole that developed in a very diverse state. So why do we continue to go along with the idea that these Jesuses all reflect the same person (or even the same myth)? I think that a multiple-Jesus hypothesis, whether historical or mythic, has at least as much explanatory potential as a single-Jesus hypothesis. Has anybody written seriously along the lines that I'm presenting here? I'd be interested in reading any exploration of the idea that they aren't all talking about the same person.

Julio

What about this other christ [or Jesus] of the first century: Apollonius of Tyana? Is he not reflected in the apocryphal Gospels and/or Acts of the second century?
http://www.livius.org/ap-ark/apollon...llonius01.html

show_no_mercy

I always wondered how, if there really was a singular leader of Christianity, that different "Jesuses" sprouted up almost immediately. If we take Paul's letters to have been written around the 50s, then there were already different "Jesuses" being preached immediately after this "Jesus" was executed.

Either there were multiple people named Jesus who were executed, or they were all going by personal revelation and not any human founder.

Clivedurdle

Jesi clones?

(There is a horror movie in there!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neu...Neumann_probes

graymouser

Personally, I'm not sure why it couldn't have been both - if we allow for the possibility of conflation, it's not clear why Paul's Jesus had to be Mark's Jesus or either had to be the person who uttered the Q sayings. One or more could be mythical, one or more could be historical.

Here's one way to look at it. Are Paul's soteriology and theology really sufficiently similar to Mark's such that, if Christianity had failed and Mark / the Pauline epistles were only available as separate documents rather than being linked through the Christian Bible, would there be compelling evidence that their "Christ" was the same person? If so, I'd be interested to see a case made for it. If not, why are we taking the compilers of the Bible at face value when they say they're the same Christ?

Sheshbazzar

With no authentic or actual "Jesus" it would be easy for each Christianity to invent a "Jesus" that was suited to their own views.
Multiple views and stories about "Jesus" or "Joshua the messiah" would then have prevailed until the "orthodox" opinion of church leaders either incorporated, or rejected various aspects of these multiple "Jesus's" to make one standardised "Jesus" figure out of what was originally many such urban-myth type characters.
Marcion's version of "Jesus" was offensive to most of the other church fathers, as was that of the the Nazarene's, the Arianist, the Sabellianist.....and on and on.
Multiple Jesus's, of multiple Christianities, brewed down and stewed down into one pot of orthodox tripe.

Doug Shaver

The question may be valid, but there are only two sensible answers. Either there was one and only one historical Jesus, or there was none at all. I believe there was none because I think all the one-Jesus historicist theories have parsimony problems, and they only get multiplied if you hypothesize more than one of them.

Clivedurdle

But isn't a possible response to this like the story of the group of blind people feeling an elephant?

graymouser

I don't see why there are only two answers. I know that you shouldn't multiply entities et al, but I think entertaining a multiple-source hypothesis for Mark, Q and Paul may prove to have better explanatory power (there were distinct sects with different and conflicting theologies) than a single-source hypothesis regardless of whether the sources refer to a historical or mythical Jesus.

Within a multiple-source framework, I think the possibility that there was "some" historical person whose movement was co-opted into proto-orthodox Christianity. For instance, we know that Q was added to Mark; it could be that there was a sage, teacher or cult leader who said the Q sayings, was not crucified, and was later conflated with the Christ of Mark and the sayings were incorporated into Matthew and Luke. Paul and Mark would be separate and totally mythical. This is a quasi-historicist position that bears little relationship to the "standard" historical Jesus idea. Not saying that's the definitive answer, I just want to go into why we don't look harder at the implied connection between the NT material.

Doug Shaver

I didn't say there were only two. I said there were only two that are sensible.

You seem to be conflating the sources of documents with their subject matter. Just because the gospels are all about a man named Jesus does not mean Jesus was any kind of source for those documents. If he existed, then he could possibly have been one source, but the authors could have used any number of other sources as well. But that still does not imply, or make it even likely, that there was more than one Jesus.