mountainman

The term may have also been used to cover over the belief that Jesus merely seemed human but was actually no part human and no part God.
That is the term may have been used to diguise that possibly rather large percentage of the population who did not believe in an historical jesus.


But surely you dont think for one moment that the belief that Jesus was God
or in fact the belief that Jesus was historical, was held by everyone?
The history of the christian victors is notoriously nieve and one-sided.

This is false. Gods such as Hermes wandered around disguised in the form of men.
Such was part of the fabric of pagan mythologies.
It is possible that this "appeared in the flesh" business may simply mean "historical".
Thus the author of John implies that there were people who did not believe in the HJ.
Most of the pagans had probably never heard of him.
Why should we think for one moment they would automatically
believe that the greek new testament was an historical account?
Eusebius tells us that they ridiculed the sacred scriptures.
This is evidence of unbelief in any HJ.





The docetic belief may also be stated in such a way to suggest that Jesus seemed historical, whereas he was fabricated.
For example, some of the things that Emperor Julian set forth to mankind about the fabrication of the christians.
These sorts of records were purposefully destroyed because they were causing alot of Public Relation and Authenticity Issues
to arise for the late 4th century christian state church, and they needed to refuted.




How do you presume to know that? We cannot be certain that the passage was not referring to people who would simply refuse to believe or to be convinced that Jesus was historical, and that he had never appeared in the flesh at all. The silence of the testimony to an open hostility to the historical jesus may have been purposefully imposed by censorship. We are dealing with a small percentage of literate population, and the control and censorship of all extant literature by the imperial state christian revolution of the 4th century, which culminated in the burning of the library of Alexandria.

mountainman

Docetism

How is the belief that Jesus was non historical differentiated from the docetic belief?


But surely within an historical context, and not a non historical context.


So is the denial of the historicity (ie: the historical existence of) Jesus been regarded as a heresy? And how has this been differentiated from docetism?

stephan huller

Answer - the docetic belief is that God came to earth. The event was historical but it involved a supernatural agent. Mythicism (as I understand it) is that nothing happened in real space and time. The idea of God coming down to earth at the end of times is found in the Qumran writings. The idea would follow from various passages in the Torah which mention God interacting with the Patriarchs especially Moses.

Toto

I think the distinction is this:

Historicists think that docetists believed that a videotape of events in the first century would show a figure that appeared to be human, but that this human was in fact a spirit.

Mythicists think that this videotape would not catch sight of anyone resembling Jesus.

And mythicists like Freke and Gandy think that docetists would not expect that videotape to reveal what appeared to be a historical Jesus figure.

mountainman

This is the answer of the authority of the heresiologists who so presented the heretics, one class of whom was refered to as the docetae. Do the heresiologists address that class who believed Jesus was non historical?

But what of the class of people, and we must call them heretics, who did not believe that the event was historical, but was literary fiction?

Gandalf the Grey.


Hermes wanders around disguised as a human. The healing god Asclepius was associated with the most ancient and highly revered temples to Asclepius c.324 CE, in which year they were utterly destroyed by the Historical Jesus Publisher.

Do any news crews on the ground have any coverage of anyone claiming that Jesus was in fact a non historical (ie: fictitious) figure? Was there never any great controversy over this issue anywhere in the antiquity of christian origins?

mountainman

Nice analogy. While historicists may believe that the heresiologists believed that the docetistic heretics believed in spirits, I am not so persuaded. This "coming in the flesh" business from John is nothing but a statement of historical existence if I have ever seen one. The statement is a claim that Jesus was in fact historical, and had "appeared in the flesh" at such a latitude and longitude and timeframe as stated in the rule of Augustus.

Right alongside the claim that Jesus appeared in history, is a disclaimer - one might even call it a curse - that there were those who did not believe that this actually happened. We can only presume that the author was priming his readers for the unhappy state of affairs that NOT EVERYONE thought Jesus had made an historical appearance in the Terran GPS of antiquity.


My position is that the videotape would show nothing, but that the videotape of those who have been called "Docetists" by the orthodox 4th and 5th century christian heresiologists, would also include a massive class of people who were firmly convinced that Jesus was a non historical Greek literary fiction.

Toto

There is no record of the idea that Jesus might have been fictional in the early church.

mountainman

Records can and have been destroyed, and ESPECIALLY by the early church.

We may presume everyone thought Jesus was historical, or we may presume otherwise and that the heresiologists were careful not to preserve the record that explicit belief (See Nestorius who preserved such record of beliefs in fiction - and thus was shafted by Cyril), but rather ameliorated its description into something less offensive for the future glorious authenticity of the church.

Is it not quite reasonable to suspect that there was at one time a great controversy over the historical existence of Jesus who "appeared in the flesh"? This controversy we have in this century is not new. When did it start? What does the evidence say?

stephan huller

The question comes down to how the Jews approached the stories in the Torah about God being present on earth. Did they think they were historical? Yes. How do we know that? Because they ritually re-enact the Passover. That's the bottom line. If you go to a church they ritually reenact the Passion with the stations of the cross (unless you visit some modern American heresy). The bottom line is that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and Easter and Passover, rules out the idea that it was fiction. Even Origen the greatest allegorist known to us accepts the Passion as historical. How do we know this? Because he says that the passover is a type not of the passion of Christ, but of Christ's passage (and that of Christians) to the Father. In other words, one might expect Origen to say first there was the Passover and it served as the typos of the Passover. But he goes to great lengths in Peri Pascha to argue that this is not the case. The Passion is a substantial historical event.

mountainman

I dont know how people can trot out the church fathers as evidence of anything at all. There is no historical record of Jesus or the NT or the Christians in the first century despite the explicit history prepared in later centuries, and despite the hypothetical conjectures of many "academics and scholars". The question that if Jesus was not historical and yet from some point later - until recently - considered by many to be historical deserves some explanation and exploration. What does the evidence say in regard to the question as to who was the first person to initimate that Jesus was non historical, and in which century? In which century was John authored?