freigeister

On the contrary, most people have a propensity for dragging everything down to their own level, and inevitably seek to destroy those individuals who manifestly stand above them.

This is the real war: the war between those who assert the reality of genius, and those who deny it. I side with Thomas Jefferson:

And, as Jefferson would concur, of these natural aristocrats, the greatest is Christ. I call on you now publicly as I have previously by email to read Constantin Brunner's Our Christ. You can start with his critique of mythicism.

You guys are always whining about how no critics review you. Well, Brunner reviewed you a hundred years before you even started. You should at least read what he has to say. Or in the end do you act like priests and ignore, suppress and mock any serious challenge to your sophistic fantasies?

andrewcriddle

The supposed eye-witness testimony about Apollonius of Tyana (who died c 100 CE) is things like the 'Memoirs' of Damis supposedly a disciple of Apollonius.

Our only evidence for the 'Memoirs' is the claim by Philostratus writing in the early 200's to have used Damis' work as a basis for his 'Life of Apollonius'.

Many scholars think that Philostratus simply invented most of his supposed sources.

Andrew Criddle

Kosh

And Mozart wrote his first symphony at 5.

Best not to judge by the average, it's a bell curve ya know....

luvluv

Holy Schnikies! The man himself!

Well, I was going to let this conversation lay, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, so...

But first to young Ted Hoffman:

The biographical information available in Q? Well first of all that there was a guy named Jesus who walked the earth and did things. This would seem to be problematic to the mythicist position. But then we have that Jesus healed a man in Q-37 (is that the "Beelzebub you were referring to?), that he corresponded with John the Baptist (Q-24), that he met a centurian who had great faith, and healed his daughter (Q-23), that he was baptized by John the Baptist and was tempted by the devil (Q5-8), among other things. Plus others (see the quotes to Doherty below)

Point being, I guess, large portions of Q are clearly about a guy who lived amongst people and talked to them and interacted with them.

Earl "The Pearl" Doherty:

Couple questions:

1) What is the independent evidence that there even are layers of Q, or that the document evolved from sayings to biography, rather than something like the reverse? I'll just come out and say it: I think the motivation behind insisting that Q is layered is the desire to get to some naturalistic, itenerant Jesus they are sure existed. IOW, it has always struck me as ideology in search of evidence.

2) Do folks think Q emerged not from one author but from several? If so, then how is it that all the sources began attributing these sayings to Jesus and none of them to the dozen or so other savior gods around?

3) Wouldn't it be just as legitimate for me to say that you reading a mythicist assumption into the compendium of Q as to say that I am reading historicist assumptions into it, since it clearly includes biographical information about Jesus?

4) Where would you date Q?

I went to the trouble to list them specifically:

Can you tell me where I can look to find similar ethical teachings in other mystery religions of the region?

Jesus's unique ethical genius was about a lot more than the golden rule. I'm particularly interested in any other mystery religions that emphasized God as an intimate "Daddy" figure and which taught primarily in parables.

Couple more questions:

1) How do scholars establish what is the earliest layer of Q?

2) What about 1 Thess. 4:9 suggests that Paul didn't know Jesus distinctive ethical teachings?

3) If the Messiah never appears in Q, how do you explain:

Q-47- 48:

Q- 38:

Q-32:

And most of all, Q-25,25:

Thanks for your time. I'm not the biggest Bible scholar in the world and I've only heard about your book. I'm anxious to hear your responses.

(All the Q quotations are from the book Q: The Lost Gospel by Marcus Borg.

luvluv

Oh, and one more thing:

What did you think of the movie (The God Who Wasn't There)? Why don't you get together with the director, gather up a bunch of folks on both sides of the issue, including the big names who disagree with you, and do a really informative documentary on this issue? There's gotta be enough money and interest out there to do it?

(Actually scratch that... don't get that director get somebody slightly less biased.)

Toto

luvluv - Earl Doherty appears in an interview distributed as part of the DVD of the God Who Wasn't There.

Doherty has been trying to get some of these "big names" who disagree with him to take him seriously enough to debate him for some time, so I bet he would go along with that idea.

diana

I understand how you feel, and I agree when it comes to people's observations of human nature and how much they think they understand people. It isn't fair to draw the same conclusions, though, when it comes to scholarly work. Either they have done the research and are being fair in their interpretations or they aren't; age doesn't have much bearing on it, if any.

Consider Peter Kirby. Or WinAce.

d

EarlDoherty

I want to spend most of my available time here this weekend on the Ascension of Isaiah, so I apologize if I don’t answer “luvluv� (I really do dislike having to address someone by a pen name, especially of this sort, it’s one of my pet peeves) as fully as I could. This is a very broad subject he is broaching, meriting a lot of detail and referencing, but I’m only going to scatter a few scraps, I’m afraid. I’ll comment on some of the things he has raised, not always in order:

Neither the word, nor the concept, of “Messiah� appears in any of these passages. You are confusing the Messiah with the Son of Man (as well as the Son/Wisdom idea). Granted, they are similar creatures, but the Son of Man is a specific End-time figure distinct from general Jewish expectation of the Messiah. It was derived from a reading of Daniel 7:13, and was much less widespread an idea than the Messiah. In fact, we can detect it only in the Kingdom preaching movement (represented by Q and which Mark was a part of), from which it entered the Gospels. (It is nowhere found in the epistles.) It can also be found in some Jewish writings of the time (i.e., the mid to late first century), 4 Ezra and the Similitudes of Enoch, and in Revelation. When John the Baptist (in Q) asks “are you the one who is to come� he is speaking of the Son of Man, though these are ideas being put into his mouth by the Kingdom community who looked back to him as their mentor, and are very unlikely to represent the Baptist’s actual preaching. If you look at the opening Q periscope, the Baptist prophesying one who will follow him to separate the wheat from the chaff, you will see that he is not speaking of a fellow-preacher already on earth, but a future apocalyptic figure who will be judge and executioner. When an historical founder was added to the Q traditions, he became identified with this Son of Man, but those sayings in ‘Jesus’ mouth still sound like he is speaking of someone else.

I am not sure what you mean by “independent evidence.� This is, of course, a question of interpretation, which many scholars (though not all) have derived from their study of Q. Prior to, or along with, the work of the Jesus Seminar, Kloppenborg (The Formation of Q, 1987) and Mack (The Lost Gospel, 1993), Edwards (A Theology of Q, 1976), are some of those who recognized different categories of sayings in a reconstructed Q, and that those categories seem to have been developed sequentially, presenting a picture of an evolving Q, with new material regularly added, probably accompanied by a certain amount of revision and rearrangement of sayings.

The ‘biographical’ type of material betrays late characteristics, in that the Jesus figure is evolving toward features of divinity that are not there in the “wisdom� material, for example. Other sayings, such as the Son knowing the Father, are seen as reworked wisdom sayings in the direction of identifying them with the Jesus figure. The Baptist in the earlier ‘layers’, as I said above, does not identify his Son of Man with a contemporary, whereas in the anecdote about sending his apostles, he is ostensibly linking the two, and so on. Literary criticism allows one to identify patterns of development like this.

You are still seeing things from the old perspective. It is not that all these sayings began to be attached to Jesus, but that a "Jesus" (if that was the name originally given to him) was attached to the sayings. Q evolved a body of sayings from various sources, the community preaching the Kingdom formed it as its adopted ethic and lifestyle guide, then (as often happens in sectarian behavior), this body of material came to be seen as the product of a single man who had begun the movement. That such a man was not there in reality can be seen from an analysis of the document itself, and I have devoted several chapters in The Jesus Puzzle to laying out the arguments for this.

It might be, if my claim that there was no founder Jesus at the root of Q were based on nothing in the document itself. But this is not the case. And the historicist point of view has to ask itself some uncomfortable questions: Why is there not the slightest hint of a death and resurrection for ‘Jesus’ in Q? Why is no soteriological role given to Jesus? (He is not stated as providing salvation.) Why is there no Jewish character in the earliest layer of Q (the so-called “wisdom� sayings which the Seminar regard as authentic)? Of course, some scholars reacting to this have identified the “genuine� Jesus as a Cynic-style sage, but this is simply fudging the admission that the great ethical teachings of Q, which wound up in the Gospels, look like nothing so much as a compendium of Cynic ethics. As does the lifestyle/apostleship material of Q resemble that of the wandering Cynic philosophers.

No, I didn’t say that similar ethical teachings were found in the mystery religions. They are not. Those cults were not primarily interested in ethics, at least not up front, and not in any of the meager writings we have from them. The parallels exist in other ethical teachers, such as Epictetus, or the Cynics generally. As I say in the Jesus Puzzle (p.159):

Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher who adopted Cynic traditions and preached to the poor and humble masses, was recorded to have said: “All men have always and everywhere a Father who cares for them.� Dio of Prusa urged people to trust in providence, for “Consider the beasts yonder, and the birds, how much freer from trouble they live than man…� (See, for example, F. G. Downing: “Cynics and Christians� in New Testament Studies 1984. Robert Price’s “Deconstructing Jesus� lists a great number of Cynic parallels to the reputed teachings of Jesus.)

As for teaching in parables, Robert Funk has declared that Jesus did not borrow this from anyone, but I think that includes a high degree of wishful thinking. That such a practice, and highly skilled one, would have sprung spontaneously into being from a single mind is almost inconceivable. In any case, basic forms of parable are found in the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard (5:1f). As the refined product of a group, it becomes more feasible. If Q contains indicators that a single founder did not exist at the beginning, then the parables become the product of the movement, honed over a certain amount of time. Incidentally, we have one document in particular which contains no historical Jesus figure, and no sign of any derivation from such, which nevertheless has a number of parables, even if of inferior quality to those of the Gospels, namely The Shepherd of Hermas, predominantly Jewish in character and probably to be dated to the late first century.

What does in “We are taught BY GOD to love one another�?

Your list of “distinctive ethical teachings� makes as much sense, if not more, as the product of a movement rather than a single man, especially when so much else is incompatible with the preferred picture of that single man.

Eckz

Denial of the facts? Sigh

What do you mean by mysticism?

freigeister: I'm not sure I understand how him being a mystic can clear up the problems with the timeline that's presented in TGWWT.

freigeister

You mean there were thirty years between the time Christ started preaching and the time somebody wrote something about him? In a place where there was over 90% illiteracy? Where his followers were the lowest of the low? Where the deeds and sayings of the establishment figures weren't written down until 200 years later? Ya don't say!