GakuseiDon

Yep. Celsus said that he was well acquainted with the opinions and doctrines of Christianity, though Origen disagreed with that assessment. Still, Celsus seems to have known Christianity pretty well. Meanwhile around the same time, according to Doherty, Christian mythicists were writing letters to the Roman Emperor of the day on behalf of all Christians...

Doug Shaver

How do we know what he's using? Have you got a quotation where he identifies his source of information about Christian beliefs?

Doug Shaver

What Earl said.

What does he say that implies he was speaking for "most of Romans and Jews"? Quotation, please. His words, not Origen's.

Doug Shaver

Why would Origen, and all the other early heresiologists as well, have ignored those Christians who believed that Jesus was killed in a "spiritual realm"?[/QUOTE]
I don't have any idea how many other early heresiologists there were, and neither do you. The only documents we have are the ones that orthodox Christians decided were worth preserving. And they had about a thousand years during which to apply their filters to the Western historical record.

Giving the managers of the Medieval scriptoria plenty of benefit of doubt, I would suppose that documents written by, or referring to, early Christians who denied Jesus' historicity would have been judged to be of no value and therefore not worth the scribes' time to copy.

As for Origen in particular, I agree with Earl that we can't simply assume that he would have known of any mythicist sects. And if he did know about them, it is not prima facie improbable that he would have considered them not worth his time to rebut. It would have depended among other things on how much clout they still had by the time Origen came along.

Doug Shaver

How do you justify your apparent assumption that the answer would be knowable with enough certainty to justify a "simple yes/no answer"?

aa5874

A similar question can be asked, what convinced the christian Marcion and his followers, around 144 CE ,that Jesus never existed as a real person? And this belief of Marcion was held for hundreds of years.

I am not sure Celsus is convinced that Jesus existed, Celsus may be just reported the opinions of some. Even Irenaeus, in Against Heresies, demonstrated that as early as the 2nd century the historicity of Jesus was not clearly known and there was much confusion among Christians.

Some Christians believed Jesus real and not crucified, other Christians believed he was not real and was never on a cross. And there were other Christians whose Jesus did not even come close to the Jesus of the NT.

It appears to me that Christians, on a whole, had no idea whatsoever who Jesus actually was, from at least the 2nd century.

For over almost two hundred years, at least, from the 2nd century, Christians themselves argued over the historicity of Jesus, and it is not certain if this matter has ever been resolved by them amicably.

EarlDoherty

So, about the year 170, Celsus was familiar with Jewish ‘spinning’ of the Gospel story to discredit and ridicule it. What does this prove? We know from rabbinic writings set down beginning in the following century that these kinds of calumnies were circulating among the Jews in response to the Gospels, and 170 is certainly the very period when such things would have arisen, within a decade or two of our first witness to any widespread knowledge of the Gospels even among Christians. On the pagan side, Lucian around the same time was ridiculing Christians in his Peregrinus.

Now, there is a telling thing to be noticed in connection with this. Prior to the time Lucian and Celsus were writing, we seem to have no surviving ‘spin’ of this sort by the Jews against any historical Jesus traditions. Why would such things only arise at this late date? Shouldn’t calumnies against such traditions have arisen much earlier? The epistle of Barnabas finds fault with the Jews misreading of their scriptures, but he hasn’t anything to say about Jewish adulterating of the Gospel story. Most telling is Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho. Now, to some extent, I’m going out on a limb here, because I made only a quick skim of the text (it’s been several years since I read it carefully from start to finish), and I also tried my search function on key terms and came up with nothing. But this is a long and detailed (if fictional) dialogue with a Jew who objects to all sorts of things in Christian thought which Justin feels need countering. Yet there seems to be nothing put into Trypho’s mouth of the sort which Celsus raises (through the same device: creating a symbolic Jewish opponent). If anyone can point out something of this nature in Trypho which I have overlooked, I would appreciate it. This is a strong indicator that the Jewish ‘spin’ which Celsus offers is of very recent vintage and therefore does not speak to “supplemented information not found in the Gospels.” Rather, it was Jewish defamatory invention in response to the Gospels. Celsus is using this newly circulating response to aid in his own defamation of Christianity, which he has derived in great part from having encountered the Gospels himself. (And let it be stated yet again that there is no reason to expect that either Celsus or the Jews of the latter 2nd century would have been in a position to know and declare that the Gospels were not basically history.)

The same situation is found in Minucius Felix (written North Africa?) in the 150s. All sorts of calumnies are placed in the pagan’s mouth, but nothing of the sort which are to be found in Celsus. Felix rejects the very thought of his faith being based on the life and death of a crucified criminal. If Don were right, and Felix is really defending such a doctrine (no matter how obscure and misleading his technique in doing so), and if Jewish calumnies against the integrity of the Christian portrayal were circulating, surely he would address these as well.

(This, by the way, is my response to Ben, who asked: “Earl, who (if anyone) is on your list of mythicists (whether of the Pauline, the logos, or whatever type) who had encountered the emerging historicist juggernaut (your term) and rejected it?” Not only Felix, but those unnamed deniers of an historical Jesus born of Mary, crucified by Pilate, etc. in Ignatius, and probably in 1 John 4. We could even include Tatian, who dismisses the Gospels as “we too tell stories” which he says are in line with the Greek myths. And no, Don, I’m not going to be sucked again into that one either.)

As for Celsus’ knowledge of figures like Marcion, this would hardly be anomalous. Marcion began as part of the Roman church which toward the middle of the century had entered the historicist camp, based on the Gospels, and his subsequent career was in Rome. If Celsus moved in Roman historicist circles he would have come in contact with Marcionites. During the 170 period, there could well have been no surviving mythicist groups in such circles. Athenagoras and Theophilus, on the other hand, come from areas outside Italy. (And anyway, they are not mythicists, strictly speaking, as I regularly point out. No worries about sublunar realms here.)

In my picture of the rise and fall of the mythic phase in early Christianity, as I said earlier, I regard the Pauline type of mythicism as eventually morphing into historicity, dependent chiefly on a misinterpretation of the Gospels as history. I have also pointed out elsewhere how scholars have come to acknowledge that Paul had very little influence on 2nd century Christianity, until much later in the century when Paul was brought back into the “orthodox” fold by the Roman church, by reclaiming his epistles from the Gnostics and by inventing the Acts of the Apostles. (I pointed out, for example, in my Mysteries series how the key Pauline doctrine of “baptism into Christ’s death” cannot be found anywhere in Christian writing of the 2nd century.) Nor is anything strictly Pauline, or even mythicist in the sense of the Son undergoing an atoning death, to be found in those major apologists outside Justin. Our actual 2nd century witness gives us the historical Jesus circle, the Logos-religion circle, and Gnosticism, but virtually nothing relating to classic Pauline mythicism.

Detractors here are also ignoring the clear evidence we have of that evolution, that transformation of the Pauline Christ into the Gospel Christ, the atrophying of classic mythicism per se—before the time of Celsus. It is most evident in the epistle of Barnabas, which is probably to be dated sometime in the first 2 or 3 decades of the 2nd century. In the interests of making that clear, I will quote an extended passage from my Article No. 12, On the Threshold of History: Jesus in the Apostolic Fathers at the Turn of the Second Century.

And before anyone objects on the basis of a supposed Gospel quote in Barnabas or his reference to the apostles, or the bare statement that he taught and performed miracles, I would suggest they actually read the whole section on Barnabas in that article, before placing too much reliance on them.

The same crossing of the threshold can be perceived in Ignatius, as described in the succeeding part of that same article. He too has a foot in both camps, the traditional mythicist and the new historicist, as I show in the sections “The Nature of Jesus in Ignatius” and “In the Deep Silence of God” in the latter part of the article.

I might also briefly quote The Jesus Puzzle (p. 279) on the Epistle to Diognetus which, written around the same time as Barnabas, shows a situation very much like the latter:

I would suggest that the actual picture created by the first century of Christian writings is sufficient to suggest not only the diversity of the “Christian” movement (which should not even be given a single all-encompassing name, since this is misleading) but how it evolved from diversity into singularity, passing through different, incompatible and uncoordinated phases and circles with no central directing force. This picture is sufficient to answer all the objections being raised by those who have done their best to resist it. I would place this concrete, positive picture of the evidence against all the plaintive negative appeals emanating from the other side: But we can’t find this, and we can’t understand that.

Earl Doherty

Roger Pearse

Has any scholar ever dated Minucius Felix so early, I wonder, and if so who?

It has never been clear whether Minucius Felix wrote before Tertullian or afterwards, for lack of data. But as far as I can tell there is general consensus among scholars today that he wrote around 230 AD. The philological analysis carried out by Carl Becker in the 1950's appears to have resolved the situation, at least according to the Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea. Only Quispel holds out.

Once we recognise that we are dealing with a contemporary of Cyprian, what becomes of the argument above? (I think that I have made this point before, although apparently without effect).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Clivedurdle

How many other accounts also seem to be based on scripture? Might there have been a pre -xian Judaic tradition of doing this, probably including plays, of which Mark may be understood as a further evolution?

As Moses, Adam, Eve, Noah and Abraham and many others are invented figures who were later believed to be real, why assume this venerable production line did not also manufacture a Jesus?

spamandham

I don't know what mythicist you are referring to, but I'm not sure it's important. Why would you expect Celsus to know about a long forgotten early church history?