Tammuz

If there was no historical Jesus that could spark Christianity, how did it get into existence? What would a mythicist timeline for early Christianity look like?

chrisrkline

I am interested too. There might, in fact will be, a problem with the assumption that there had to be a "spark." The orthodox view is that there was a moment when a real man was crucified and then very shortly after that a group of followers began preaching the Christian message. The spark was the crucifiction (or the resurrection/assumption.) With a MJ this is not necessary. The cult could have developed slowly over some time before they even settled on a name "Jesus" as their savior.

aa5874

I consider that the god-man Jesus concept was developed sometime after the writings of Flavius Josephus.

Josephus' writings contain the foundational characters and knowledge of the geographical setting for the Jesus story.
He wrote about the Hebrew Bible, John the Baptist, the Pharisees, Saducees, Pilate, Herod, the taxation of Cyrenius, crucifixion of his three acquaitances, numerous characters called Jesus, the geographical layout of Galilee, and the surrounding region. And Josephus wrote all this without mentioning a word about a Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary.

So the timeline for me would be probably early 2nd century, and not forgetting mountainman, the 4th century for the Eusebian version of Christ. Let's not forget that the Joseph Smith's version of Christ was developed in the 19th century.

Clivedurdle

I would probably put Daniel as the starting point for Messianic fervour, unless other prophets a bit earlier? The hunting for the christ then marinaded slowly for a few centuries, with bursts of heat.

We are possibly looking at several "messianities" - definitely a Pauline one, a Roman Markan one, a Hebrews one, a fish one?

Doug Shaver

Barring the discovery of pre-Pauline Christian documents, we can only speculate. Without a real Jesus of Nazareth, there is no telling even how long the movement existed before Paul entered the picture.

Clivedurdle

One of the more interesting points by Ellegard is that there seems to be a quite sophisticated church structure in Paul's time.

Yuri Kuchinsky

I think Tammuz is asking quite an interesting question. In fact, I've already asked something rather similar here a couple of years ago, but there didn't seem to be many takers to clarify some of these important issues... Seems like a hard question for the Mythicists!

The Challenge for the Mythicists: the Earliest Martyrs (May 14, 2005)
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=125169

Cheers,

Yuri.

Roger Pearse

Good to see you again Yuri; where have you been?

gurugeorge

I'd agree that you have to look well before Christianity and think of there being several version of the Messiah Myth. It was a myth that developed and grew and branched over time, as these things do.

A coherent picture has been growing in my mind over the past couple of years, from hanging around here at IIDB, reading Doherty's an other mythicists' writings, and looking at a bit of both orthodox and radical scholarship too (Erhman, Koester, the Tubingen and Dutch Radical schools, Detering, a few others). I'll divide it into a few phases:

Phase I (circa 30-70 CE)

It's often thought that Christianity must have started with some remarkable person, a "spark". I think it originally started with a small community (or several small related communities) of religious enthusiasts, and then was indeed "sparked" and given a big push by a remarkable person: "Paul". I think the Epistles we have contain a good deal of what this "Paul" wrote, but extra stuff has been added (although I don't think much), and probably a few things snipped. However, the main outlines of what the Epistles showis probably about right. (I think "Paul" may have been one "Simon Atomos", a Samaritan mentioned by Josephus, "Atomos" being the Greek equivalent of "Paulus",sort of a nickname, like calling someone "Shorty". There are a few other reasons for possibly making this attribution, too complicated to go into now, but it's not important to the broad outline of my theory whether this attribution is correct or not.)

What that very earliest Christian community (led by the Cephas, James, etc. of "Paul"'s epistles) believed in, what "Paul" believed in, and what communities such as those exemplified by the authors of the Epistles to Hebrews and Barnabas believed in, wasn't the existence of a man in their recent past who was a historical claimant to the title of Messiah in the traditional sense (a claimant who some of them had known personally); what they believed in and propagated was a new version of the Messiah Myth itself.

IOW, the "gospel" (the "good news") that was spread by the early Jewish Apostles and "Paul" was in its very first origins the special Big Idea of a small religious community (Cephas, James, the "Pillars") - a "revaluation of values" of the Messiah Myth itself, rather than the following of a human being who some of them (though not Paul) had known personally as a human being, and who they supposed to be the Anointed One in the traditional Jewish sense.

Out of a milieu of disappointed apocalyptic hopes in Hellenized Jewish and Samaritan communities, there developed in this community two complementary strands of thought: a kind of proto-Gnosticism (salvation as a relation between the individual and the divine, a home-grown Jewish version of the Graeco-Roman Mysteries idea of a "personal religion") and the idea of a new kind of Messiah, the Joshua Messiah, who instead of being a Messiah to come was a Messiah who had been; a Messiah who in worldly terms, far from being a glorious, renowned, victorious military leader, was an utter obscure failure who died the most ignominious, shameful death possible at the time; a Messiah whose victory wasn't a great worldly victory for the community, but a spiritual victory for every individual in their own hearts. (The original, Jerusalem community probably conceived it as an idea in a purely Jewish context; "Paul" universalised the idea to be for any and all human beings.) There was an echo of the "dying/rising" mytheme in this concept, but at this stage it wasn't something specially imported from the Hellenistic side, but probably just an unconscious inspiration from the general dying/rising (vegetation) idea indigenous to the area (Canaan itself being the home of one of the earliest known dying/rising archetypes, Baal.)

I'd say this all probably happened around 30-50 CE.

The key point is, these people were saying in their new value-revalued version of the Anointed One idea (myth), that their Joshua Messiah had done a sort of "end run" around the "Archons" (the spiritual entities or angels in charge of the earthly plane, in this early form of Jewish proto-Gnosticism). By living and dying obscurely and in great shame, Joshua Messiah had sort of slipped under the radar of the Archons who had been lying in wait for a famous, military, kingly victor. It was a spiritual/magical act of legerdemain that produced a victory that had already been won (rather than a victory to come). This is the very first original Christian "good news": the Messiah's victory has already been won, and it's a spiritual redemption for (at first Jews, then, with "Paul") all of us. The Kingdom (a spiritual Utopia) is here, present, and all around us, for whoever accepts this new version of the Messiah, for whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear. (Note that at this point it's actually a key part of the concept that he didn't make a big fuss like Messiah claimants normally would: obscurity, hush-hush, had been part of his game plan.)

(I think this was the exoteric meaning of the myth, but I believe, based on Paul's evident mysticism, that this exoteric meaning probably concealed a non-dual mystical esoteric meaning, encapsulated in the allegory of "resurrection", which I think is cognate with the more general ancient-world term for non-dual mystical experience: "immortality".)

At this stage the numbers aren't very great. It's a small movement, maybe a few thousand or so pretty hardcore enthusiasts at most, scattered around the Graeco-Roman world. It's not even a blip on the radar on the contemporary scene. The people involved would have been involved by reason of deeply held religious conviction and (for the most enthusiastic) by direct mystical experience. (This, as opposed to memetic "sociological"/"social glue" reasons for being in a religion that came into Christianity later.)

Phase II (circa 70-150 CE)

Now the thing is, this time reversal of the concept of the Messiah into the past, while it was a "cool" idea, invited (on the exoteric side) a natural human curiosity about where and when this Joshua Messiah had been and performed this spiritual act of redemption. I'd say that prior to circa 70 CE (the First Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Second Temple) the idea was necessarily pretty vague, a sort of "once upon a time" type of idea. But after 70 CE whatever sketchy biography or biographies had been floating around before then started to take on some flesh, and a particular storyline developed (probably by diaspora Jews under the influence of reading Josephus' history of the times back in the homeland) which put Joshua Messiah in a more specific time in the fairly recent past and somewhat bitterly blamed the Jews for ignoring their Big Idea at the time. (i.e. to be clear, while the mythic idea before 70 CE had been "once upon a time", after 70 CE it became, for Jewish Christians in particular, "recent enough in the past to be a sufficient show of the kind of foolishness that led the Jews to their destruction".)

So between 70 CE and 130 CE some kind of "Mark" (probably used by the scattered remnants of the original Jewish Christians) and a kind of "ur-Luke" (a simpler version of Luke probably used mostly by the proto-Gnostic Christians who had continued to thrive in Asia Minor right from the time of "Paul"'s preaching) developed. At the same time, other gospels such as the "gospel of the Hebrews" and the "gospel of the Egyptians" also developed. Probably also around this time, in parallel, the "sayings" traditions developed (such as perhaps Thomas and the hypothesised Q) and were borrowed from in the construction of the various gospels. (The sayings were developed from various sources - cynic and stoic wisdom, and the visionary experience and mystical understanding of the various Jewish and proto-Gnostic Christian communities themselves.)

So at this stage, for the Jewish side the historicity of the character starts to solidify somewhat, but it's still probably fair to say that to the majority of proto-Gnostic Christians, historicity wasn't a matter of great import: it was mythical "history", no different from any other myth. The spiritual Christ was still the most important thing to the majority of Christians then (as it is now!), and the story was nothing more than an exemplary, redemptive, emotionally engaging, morally uplifting tale to introduce the religion to prospective converts, with theological and mystical sub-meanings (no different from the Greek myths or the stories of any other mythological deity), and with an interesting fairly-recent-past scenario.

However, one of the tropes that creeps in to the proto-gospels at this stage (now a good 30 to 40 years after "Paul"'s ministry, and with the intervening catastrophe of the Jewish Revolt and the diaspora) is a misreading of "Paul"'s reference to the Jerusalem crowd as having known personally the cultic figure of the Messiah. An innocent enough misreading at first (people usually read the passage in the Corinthians the same way nowadays!). Actually there's no necessary implication of personal acquaintance of Joshua Messiah and Cephas, James, etc., in Paul at all. It's just a possible way of reading an ambiguous text.

Now the plot thickens.

Between 70-130 CE the branch of proto-Gnostic Christianity which had been seeded by "Paul" in Rome in the 50s, and latterly perhaps increased in numbers by Jewish Christians from the diaspora who found themselves in Rome, started to develop a very Roman interest in getting the movement as a whole into some kind of order.

At this stage you have to picture the Christian communities of the Graeco-Roman world being, as I said above, either Jewish (relative minority) or proto-Gnostic (relative majority, in Asia Minor and Egypt particularly), with the relative majority proto-Gnostic branches starting to develop into what would eventually become the full-blown Gnosticisms of various kinds of the post-200 CE period, with varying interpretations of the Joshua Messiah myth, and with the Jewishness receding to the background somewhat, and increasingly with various sympathetic Hellenistic and Asian ideas creeping in (e.g. the incorporation of Mysteries ideas, Hellenistic philosophy generally, but particularly Middle Platonic and Stoic "Logos" ideas, etc.).

At some point in an attempt (led by the Roman church) to gain political and psychological ascendancy over their fellow Christians, a new idea is developed by some combination of Roman Jewish Christians and Roman "Pauline" Christians, of a kind of "apostolic succession" that would trump any apostolic succession deriving only from "Paul" (which is what most of the non-Jewish, proto-Gnostic, turning into Gnostic, Christian Churches would have had).

The idea was that if the proto-orthodox bishops could show an "apostolic succession" that went back not just to "Paul" but also to the cultic figure himself, to the very Joshua Messiah of religious belief, the very Joshua Messiah of the stories, this would be a far more concrete, more impressive kind of lineage than a lineage only going back to the mere visionary/mystic "Paul". It would be a direct historical link between the person of the god-man and contemporary bishops.

Now, probably roundabout 130 CE, the result of this attempt to fabricate an "apostolic succession" back to the cultic figure himself is the reworking of "ur-Luke" and the fabrication of the "Acts of the Apostles". The key point of Acts is to have the proto-Gnostic visionary/mystic "Paul" who founded the Roman church shake hands with the Jewish Christian "Peter", in order to present Rome's lineage as a double "apostolic succession", not just from the visionary "Paul" (which was its true lineage) but also back to someone who had known Jesus personally (the false lineage). At the same time, the true apostolic succession of the majority of proto-Gnostic churches (the authentic lineage back to "Paul" of all the other non-Jewish Churches) was criticised as being from "Simon Magus", who represents (from the proto-orthodox point of view) the "dark side" of Paul - a mere visionary, who started all the "bad" Christian churches who won't accept the party line. A more thoroughly Jewish descent for "Paul" is invented by giving his original name as "Saul", while his real name (Simon) was reserved for his "dark" side.

This is the "tail that wags the dog" of the strongly historicised Jesus. It was necessary to have a strongly historical Jesus in order to have a better kind of "apostolic succession" than the only really authentic apostolic succession (going back to Paul, and indeed also at the root of proto-orthodoxy) of the large, unruly mob of proto-Gnostic (turning into Gnostic), Christian churches.

Phase III (circa 150-300 CE)

This phase is marked by reaction to proto-orthodoxy (from Marcion and early Gnostics strictly so-called) and the proto-orthodoxy gaining ground (and sometimes losing it) against, on the one hand, the Gnostics and those wayward proto-orthodox (who hadn't quite "gotten" the programme) who stubbornly stuck to their "Pauline" lineage and kept on developing their religion in visionary ways, and on the other hand Jewish Christians who, in a parallel movement going the other way, start to drop the mythical god-man aspect altogether, and make of Joshua Messiah a mere past claimant to the ordinary Jewish Messiah title - a kind of regression, but based on the proto-orthodox idea of "apostolic succession" that had by this time was starting to gain ground. This is the period where the interplay between orthodoxy and "heresy" really starts to get underway. This is the period where orthodoxy starts to develop its fine balancing act between, on the one hand, the spiritual Anointed One of its proto-Gnostic roots from "Paul" (which it shares with the Gnostics), and on the other hand, the strongly historicised human being Anointed One that it needs in order to sustain its falsified concept of "apostolic succession". Nobody can be allowed to deny either half. To deny the spiritual side would be to follow the Ebionites, and to have nothing numinous or mysterious or mystical about the religion; to deny the material side would be to deny the bishops the political and psychological advantage they needed in order to organise and unify Christianity into a single movement. It is this organisation that starts to bulk up the numbers of the Church, to turn it from a minority taste into a growing, public religion.

Because the orthodox Churches, led by Rome, were better organised and materially richer than other churches, able to help out in material ways (e.g. charitable works), and possessed of a larger number of highly educated partisans, by about 300 CE they were able to impress, buy off, and generally bring into the fold the previously recalcitrant Gnostic churches, who, swallowing the orthodox "apostolic succession", become what the proto-orthodox call "docetic". "Docetism", the highly spiritualised view of the Christ, is the remnant of Gnosticism in the Churches who have accepted the orthodox "party line".

Phase IV (circa 300 - 400 CE)

With Constantine's adoption of Christianity as the state religion, and his granting of special favours to Christians, the numbers really start to shoot up. By this time everybody and his mother wants to become a Christian because it's a good route for smart people to gain social advancement and a sinecure.

Also, with state power comes the ability to materially destroy any and all opponent religious points of view - both Christian "heresies" and "pagan" religion and philosophy. The beauty of it is, although Christianity could destroy pagan religious forms and shrines and texts, because of its history as a sort of hodge-podge of various ideas, it actually did offer something for everyone in return.

Now an interesting bit of irony starts to become apparent at this point. The original form of Christianity actually wasn't all that unique. Visionary, mystical religions are ten a penny in the world. But the settled theology that's created out of the combination of original Christianity, misreadings of cultic texts and proto-orthodox maneouverings and self-definition in the course of wranglings against "heretics", is a genuinely new idea: that God came to Earth once and once only in human form, sacrificed Himself for our sins, redeemed us, resurrected, and ascended to Heaven. In the general run of religions this is a truly unique and bizarre idea, and its uniqueness undoubtedly contributed to Christianity's growth. It's this kind of intriguingly different and "absolute" Christianity (that requires commitment to a unique, supposedly historical fact) that attracted great minds such as Augustine's.

By the end of this period the Canon and creed are solidified, and by the time the Nag Hammadi texts are buried, Christianity has more or less the form it had till the Reformation.

andrewcriddle

One problem with this if I'm understanding you correctly, is that it doesn't seem to account for the eschatological urgency of early Christinity found for example in Paul's letters. The belief that as a consequence of the death and resurrection of Christ the current world order/present age is shortly going to end.

Andrew Criddle