EarlDoherty

I don't understand your objection (or even if it is an objection). What is your point?

Earl Doherty

sschlichter

you appeared to be lecturing on the importance of context while yourself ignoring the context.

2 Cor 11:4 For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus different from the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit than the one you received, or a different gospel than the one you accepted, you put up with it well enough!

Can't we tell who the someone is from the immediate context?

It appears the someones are Jewish, does it not.

It appears they are also followers of Christ.

Isn't adherence to the law a logical starting point for another gospel coming from Jewish followers of Christ in Corinth since it is the issue dealt with by the same author in other contexts. i.e. what other gospel do you see coming from Jewish followers of Christ?

~Steve

mountainman

The context is not historical.

The context of the Paul and Senecca Letter exchange is forgery.
Literature is not necessarily history, it is an assemblage by an author.


What appears on the surface to be a literary assertion has often turned out to be the product of the author's imagination.


Does the historical truth of this statement follow from the criterion of embarrassment?


The context is myth. The logical starting point is myth. The books of the New Testament are not historical accounts. The history of their transmission from antiquity to the present day should not be approached without questioning their integrity.

sschlichter

regardless, I would think that you would perform some exegesis first to understand what the author is stating, and then figure out why. this is being neglected in this case. The author is referring to Jews who became Christians. Corinth is not a mythical city, the Jews in that city were not mythical, the book you are reading exists in history, and you are surrounded by non-mythical Christians. I am sorry history has not been doled up in a more orderly fashion but making up your own will not help.

It is logical to say I do not believe the author or I do not believe the author is making sense or I do not know what the author is talking about but shoving your own bs into the text only serves to waste time.

mountainman

But why is such a performance necessary when this process had been conducted ad nauseum for centuries by generations of international "experts" who were firmly convinced that Jesus was either God or an historical man?


The case that Jesus was neither God not man does not required adherance to the myopia of past generations, rather it appears to break new ground in exploring a non historical jesus.

Do we know if "Paul" was historical? What if "Paul" is just a fabricated source like those we find abundantly forged in the "Historia Augusta"? Who forged the correspoondence between "Paul" and Seneca? These seem like valid questions.

The non-mythical Christians are partying on a low lying island and the tide of evidence is quickly rising against them. The book we are reading certainly exists in history, but its actual and specific entry point into the vast and panoramic scene of ancient history is sadly contraversial, and in terms of the 1st century of the common era completely without evidence of any kind, shape or form with the exception of truck loads of common pious forgeries.



History and belief are not the same thing.


Who really knows? Rutherford succeeded with that experimental approach in the development of the modern atomic theory. Firing questions into an historical text is one matter, but firing questions into a non historical text is another matter. Ancient history is about both questions. Earl Doherty is doing the field of ancient history a great service by the questions he asks of the texts.

For example, did Marcion or Heggessipus or Valentinus or Eusebius or Leucius Charinus or Rufinius or Jerome or Cyril think that shoving your own bs into the text only serves to waste time? Of course not - it was obviously some sort of "art form". I think Erhman calls it forgery.

EarlDoherty

Could be, but certainly not necessarily. Do you think other Jewish apostles were going about only concerned with whether gentiles followed the Jewish Law? They would also have been preaching some brand of the Christ, a figure Paul says they got (like himself) through revelation from the Spirit. And their own revealed Christ could well have been significantly different from Paul's, since they both relied on interpretation from scripture.

And again, I ask the question I asked before, if that was the issue, why would Paul refer to it as 'preaching another Jesus'? There was far plainer language he could have used if he was merely objecting to them offering a different gospel that simply entailed advocating adherence to the Law.

That sort of thing is 'paying attention to context'. Not trying to read something into it which the text will not readily accommodate.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

You believe the story is history but you cannot provide a CORROBORATIVE credible historical source for the Pauline writings.

Even Scholars are claiming that the identities of ALL the Pauline writers are NOT really certain and time when they ALL wrote cannot be verified.

Please say EXACTLY how you can tell or show who wrote any Epistle with the name "PAUL"?

EarlDoherty

Part 4 of his review of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man is GakuseiDon at his most frustrating. But it is a frustration I have been very familiar with over the years. Whenever Don would come up with a rebuttal argument in his opposition to my mythicist theories, he could sometimes be very loath to let it go, to compromise it or deal with counter-arguments from me. He has preferred to keep repeating himself as though I have had very little if anything to say along the way in response to his criticisms. The business of Tertullian vs. the second century apologists earlier in this review is a good example.

But it has been especially true in regard to certain statements about the location of the myths of the savior gods in The Jesus Puzzle (and on my website) which he very early seized upon. I have admitted since the book was published that such statements were too blunt, too definitively stated, and needed better qualification (though a certain amount of qualification was given, such as on page 122). Subsequent to giving it that more in-depth qualification several years ago, he has nevertheless seen fit to continue to quote them in their original versions, and he has done so again in the present review of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man: (Note once again that all Quotes unless otherwise indicated are from Don’s review.)

The last sentence here presents that unqualified, unnuanced version of things. Now, in discussions on this board over the preceding months, I have complained to Don that, since he was commenting on my new book, he ought to deal with how I present things in that new book, how I have approached the above-quoted contention in the years since The Jesus Puzzle’s publication, and not continue to simply quote from it as though I have never had anything further to say on the matter or to address his objections. So what does he do here? He does not quote the above from The Jesus Puzzle. Instead, he goes to my website, to an article written even earlier than The Jesus Puzzle (and I have admittedly been somewhat lax about bringing certain website passages up to date to reflect newer developments in my theory and its presentation), and quotes an identical statement from there!! I guess this is supposed to be a concession to my complaint about him casting the statement in The Jesus Puzzle in stone, but he just can’t let it go, or acknowledge any further development on it, and so he quotes it instead from the website. In a review of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, this creates a misleading impression and completely skews his comments in this part of his review. It certainly implies that I am still making the same general and unqualified statements even in the new book. I regard that as basically dishonest.

For the first quarter of Part Four of his review, Don gives us his picture of the cosmology of the ancients at the turn of the era. Most of it is irrelevant to his criticism, or simply misses the point, especially in regard to my much fuller analysis of the question in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. While his description could benefit from a little better clarity of presentation, he locates the “firmament” at the orbit of the Moon. Above lie the layers of the eternal and unchanging heavens (the number and nature of which he admits were not uniform across the philosophies and cultures of the time), while below lie the lower heavens and the earth, subject to change and corruption, the realm of flesh. No problem there, but note that he allows the “realm of flesh” to encompass those “lower heavens” below the moon, not just earth itself. At least, that’s how he states it; maybe it just slipped out of him.

Quoting from ancient writers like Plutarch and Apuleius, Don gives us a breakdown of the four elements which ancient philosophers regarded the world as constituting, plus “four species of rational beings,” which included daemons or demons. In the time of early Christianity, these “demons” were often regarded as evil. Good or evil, they were ‘intermediary’ beings, serving as channels between the gods and humanity. They lived in the “air” below the moon (sometimes called the “firmament” in the sense of an area with depth, though Don seems to deny the latter term that meaning, preferring to keep it as simply a demarcation point or barrier between the upper and lower heavens). He quotes Apuleius as giving the demons “bodies” of spiritual matter—though the word “flesh” does not appear. They are, however, very closely related to humans, something which Don apparently endorses:

(Considering that we today do not regard demons as real entities, it is astonishing how the ancients were capable of not only inventing beings which show no sign of existing, but of knowing so much about them. Of course, moderns still do much the same today in regard to gods and angels. But I digress.)

It is not clear why Don has provided all this detail, but he immediately follows it, in non-sequitur fashion, with a consideration of where the ancients located the myths of their gods. Note that this is “gods” in general, not specifically the savior gods of the mystery cults; and note that he quotes general authors like Tacitus who were not writing from the point of view of the mystery cult devotee. This is a key distinction, and is an important qualification I have made to clarify my earlier statements about where the salvation myths were thought of in the period of early Christianity. Not even in The Jesus Puzzle did I claim that the general myths of the gods, Greek and Roman, were transplanted to an upper heavenly realm. Moreover, I made it quite clear that ancient myths were originally located in a primordial or prehistory time on earth, and that such a traditional way of seeing things continued to have an influence even when Platonic cosmology about the heavens brought about a degree of venue change, into the upper world, for certain of these myths. Even in The Jesus Puzzle such a change of venue was restricted to the savior gods, and did not involve the Olympian pantheon in general.

By not taking into account those qualifications, since emphasized not only in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man but in many discussions which have taken place over the years on this board, Don continues to create a misleading impression about my views and to tilt at straw windmills. In fact, Don ends his section on the location of myths having made no point at all, let alone one that addresses my contention about how the cults themselves seem to have shifted their interpretations of the savior god myths from a primordial time on earth to a mythical realm in the heavens. He has largely failed to deal with the indicators we possess (outlined in The Jesus Puzzle, especially in a special Appendix on that subject) that they took traditional myths which had long been based in pre-historical settings on earth, and reinterpreted them into a heavenly setting under the influence of Platonism.

Don and other dissenters of the myth theory have long demanded concrete evidence of how the cults viewed the traditional myths, how savior gods could be regarded as undergoing suffering and death and the events of their mythical stories elsewhere than on earth. I have long tried to explain to them that the discussion of such stories by writers like Herodotus, or Tacitus, or Pausanias, are not done in the context of the cults and their interpretation of their myths and rituals. Thus, this type of literature is largely irrelevant. Such writers discuss things entirely within the traditional context of Greek mythology. Moreover, the subject matter is usually the gods in general, not gods specific to the cults. Where the latter is the case, such as the Egyptian Osiris, the myths being discussed predate the use of them by the later Hellenistic salvation cult. Moreover, I have repeatedly made the point that the only literature in which we could expect to find cultic interpretations of the myths spelled out would be that produced within the cults themselves, but such literature does not exist, because it was forbidden to reveal or record what went on during the secret rites or how those rites were interpreted.

Actually, my ‘too blunt’ statement in The Jesus Puzzle could have been solved by a couple of fairly simple qualifying phrases: “From the evidence we do have, we may conclude that the cults, by and large, reinterpreted their savior-god myths as events that took place in a heavenly dimension, and not on earth.” This, with much supporting discussion, is precisely what I have done in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. But you’d hardly know it from Don’s review.

Don has long gotten himself into trouble on two fronts. First, he cannot conceive of how the events of those mythical stories could be conceived of as “taking place” in a heavenly dimension. He gets stuck on the literality of it all. This is a good example of the point I made in the previous instalment of my response to his review: namely, that we should not bring our expectations, based on our knowledge of the universe and our advances in enlightenment, to the thinking of the ancients, that what we would not accept or believe should not determine what they would accept or believe. Don finds it incredible that anyone should believe that crucifixion, for example, could take place in the heavens. Where is the wood for the cross, where the nails? There are no trees in the firmament! he counters. Where did Attis get the knife to castrate himself in the heavens? He is applying his incredulity to the ancients. Well, I gave him an entire chapter in JNGNM addressing this very type of question (“Conceiving the World of Myth”). He counters none of it. Maybe he skipped it, considering that he doesn’t believe in the very existence of ‘a world of myth.’

Indeed, he has often made (and repeats it in his review) the bald statement that there is no evidence that the world of myth I have presented was believed in by anybody. Now, part of this is a semantic mistake, and he really needs to rephrase himself. I have long talked about a “world of myth,” and I thought it was quite plain that by this I mean a general view that many activities of gods and other heavenly entities were seen as taking place in the spiritual world, in those layers of the heavens which Don himself has spoken of in giving an account of Platonic cosmology, spheres both above and below the moon. There are several pages of quotations in JNGNM from writers of the time, from philosophers to Jewish sectarians to gnostics, about heavenly activities, about very human-sounding and literalistic happenings in the various layers of the heavens. For example (p.150):

This sort of thing is the “world of myth” and it can hardly be denied to have existed in the minds of the ancients in the face of primary sources like these. Don seems to be trying to define it on his own grounds, that is, he is using the phrase in one application only, that the mythical stories of the savior gods (as defined by the cults, though he doesn’t make that qualification himself) were not seen as taking place in such a world as I have revealed by sources like the above. In other words, as garbled as he is putting it, he is not denying the existence of a belief in such a world, he is denying that one class of divine activities, namely the deaths of the cultic savior gods, did not take place in that world, because, he says:

What concept didn’t exist? A heavenly world of higher reality? The concept that divine entities could suffer and die in that heavenly world? The primary sources I appealed to prove otherwise. The concept that only the Hellenistic savior gods could not? Don makes no attempt to justify separating out that one class of divine entity as being included, or able to be included, in the general ‘world of myth’ picture—other than, of course, saying that we don’t have direct statements from the cults to that effect. In view of the general picture of the era, I think the burden of proof ought to lie at a much less superficial level than that.

As I said earlier, I have always acknowledged that we have no direct, irrefutable evidence (such as the above), but I have explained why we don’t have any such clearly stated evidence: because it was forbidden. What I have done is to demonstrate, through laying out primary sources like the above, and much more, that divine activities were placed in the heavens, including death and suffering and other assorted mayhem (along with trees and earth-type artefacts—dare we include nails?). So on what grounds does Don claim that the deaths of the savior gods could not have been similarly envisioned in the heavens? Such was the nature of my argument: that the entire picture of the world of Middle Platonism and Platonic cosmology created a setting in which the cultic myths could be made right at home. When the writings of the philosophers, like Plutarch and Julian, are added, with their focus on the heavens and the activities of savior gods like Attis operating in the vicinity of the realm of corruptibility, we have a strong case for postulating a heavenly setting within the cultic interpretations of their myths. Moreover, in Appendix 6 of The Jesus Puzzle, and further discussed throughout Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, I survey actual hints and allusions from the literature of the time about the cults which point in that direction.

When we look at the early Christ cult as in Paul, what do we find? Despite the vast amount of non-Gospel documentary evidence from the first century (unlike the mystery cults), there isn’t a single clear placement of Jesus’ death and rising on earth. (1 Thess. 2:15-16 is, of course, widely regarded as an interpolation.) Now, Christianity had no long history like the savior god myths; it had developed no traditional type of story rooted in a primordial time and place on earth. The new religion arose squarely in the era of Platonic cosmology and its focus on the heavens. Consequently, there was no feeding of an earthly dimension into the salvation ‘event’ undergone by Paul’s Christ. Instead, reflecting that contemporary Platonism, the event was entirely spiritual, as in 1 Cor. 2:8’s crucifixion by the demons spirits (“rulers of this age”), as in Hebrews’ focus entirely on a heavenly scene of sacrificed blood in the heavenly sanctuary, as in 1 Cor. 15:35-49’s presentation of Christ as an entity with an entirely spiritual nature and no physical one, as in all those references to Christ being revealed through scripture rather than leaving behind traditions of a life the early writers could appeal to, as in the Ascension of Isaiah’s hanging on a tree in the firmament by the “god of that world,” and on and on. The new religion was in part a product of a Hellenistic-Jewish absorption of Platonic cosmology and its focus on the heavens, which is why the interpretation of a sacrifice in the heavenly world for Christ Jesus fits so well. The cumulative case as a whole is what determines that conclusion. Don has made hardly a dent in that cumulative case.

Of course, another related influence on the new religion was the mystery cults. But I have tried to stress to Don (not too successfully, I guess) that while there is a commonality between the postulated Platonic interpretation of the myths within first-century mystery cults and the interpretation of the Christ myth as a heavenly event, one is not used to ‘justify’ the other, in either direction, let alone in circular fashion. But they do provide corroboration to each other, in that the evidence in support of each one arrives at the same conclusion. There is nothing invalid in that.

(continued below)

Earl Doherty

sschlichter

I agree, not necessarily. We are dealing in probability.

I do not have a way to gauge how strange the phrase actually is. A different gospel seems plain enough to me and has a precedent.

surely, you agree that justification by the law is what is referred to in Galatians.

1st century:
another gospel in Galatia = Jewish Christians justified by the law

another gospel in Corinth = Jewish Christians justified by ______

dealing in probabilities, please fill in the blank.

~Steve

sschlichter

you are not engaging in analysis of the question at hand at all. If you do not see the point, then simply stop. why would the matter of Paul's historicity keep you from reading the text? what does it matter?

Your Seneca question, I am sure is very interesting but the relevance escapes me.

I do not recall stating any beliefs in the thread. I do not recall EarlDoherty stating any beliefs. You are the only stating beliefs and the only one assigning value to them.