bacht

Yes, if the canonical Acts appeared ca 180 then we should say proto-Catholics or developing orthodoxy.

As you say the gnostic texts gave us lots of "secret" teachings of Jesus and his disciples. Is it the Preaching of Peter that actually uses this literary setting of post-resurrction/pre-ascension discourse?

The official teaching if I understand correctly would cite apostolic succession as a kind of oral tradition, passed on from Jesus to apostles to bishops.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Juststeve,

Good response. I like your point, "It is clear that there came a time in Christianity when the belief in the resurrection became far more important than the ethical teachings of Jesus."

I think there is a big contradiction between the mystical dogmas about the crucifixion and resurrection and the ethical teachings of Jesus. It seems that in the New Testament, outside of the gospels, none of the writers have access to these ethical teachings. Ethical teachings are put forward without any reference to anything Jesus said or did in the gospels. It is not that the ethical teachings are different than what we find Jesus teaching in the gospels, it is generally similar, it is just that the writers never point to Jesus as a source.

This seems especially inexplicable in Acts, where presumably, the apostles, in their real lives and the author, after writing the Gospel of Luke, has been exposed to these ethical teachings.

If we see Jesus Christ as a crucified and resurrected God/son of God developed from the Hebrew Scriptures, then the inability to access Jesus' teachings become understandable. In other words. All the non-gospel materials in the New Testament are developed before the gospel accounts of the Earthly Jesus are written. In this view, chapter 1 of Acts is meant to be a bridge between the material in the rest of Acts and the gospel material. In this view, we see the non-Gospel material written first and the gospel material developed out of it. This to me is the best explanation for why the non-gospel material does not have access to the ethical teachings and actions of Jesus. The gospels and Jesus' specific ethical teachings and actions of Jesus were written afterwards and grew out of them.

We can postulate five stages

1. Ethical teaching of essenic or essene-like group
2. Concept of Jesus Christ as word or logos, crucified and resurrected as Holy spirit or Son of God developed from Hebrew Scriptures.
3. Non-Gospel New Testament material combining 1 and 2.
4. Human Jesus source material reflecting ideas in 1,2, and 3 and some other historical and/or fictional source material.
5. Gospel stories of Human/half-human Jesus combining 1,2,3 and 4.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

John Kesler

Acts 1:3 allows Luke to change the focus of the "kingdom of God" from the rulership of God (Luke 9:27; 22:29-30) to the church and teaching about Jesus (Acts 8:12; 28:23, 31).

Juststeve

Jay:

There's no reason to postulate an "essenic or essene-like group" as the source of the ethical teachings attributed to Jesus, unless somehow you know they didn't come from a guy named Jesus. You don't know this, it seems to be an underlying assumption. As I said above there is nothing remarkable about the ethical teaching. They are what we would expect a first century Rabbi to be saying. Think of the real Jesus as a poor man's Hillel and there is no need to imagine some other mysterious source. There is advantage to what I am proposing. The Gospels say the teaching came from Jesus. Follow your approach and we might as well say that the ethical sayings came space aliens when they weren't busy with the pyramids. Why not, at least it isn't Jesus.

Steve

PhilosopherJay

Hi Juststeve,

The problem with the Hillel parallel is that I can't imagine people making him into a God and then ignoring everything he said.

Jesus' ethical teachings come in three flavors 1) a series of parables, most of which are cynical or aimed against the Mosaic laws or Jewish leadership, 2) short "I Got You" dialogues generally between Jesus and his disciples or representatives of the Jewish upper classes, and 3) long rhetorical political speeches like the Sermon on the Mount and the farewell speech in John. All of these seem based on pithy sayings. Even here, we may postulate a source material collections of text reflecting many different texts, rather than one human being.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Doug Shaver

I do not claim to know there was no Jesus. All I claim is that there are some problems trying to explain Christianity's origins on the assumption that there was one. One of those problems is: If his teachings were so unremarkable, then what possessed a few of his disciples to imagine that he was God incarnate?

Juststeve

Doug:

I suppose my response to your question is I don't know that a few of his disciples imagined that he was God incarnate? All I know is that years after Jesus was dead some authors, not the disciples, wrote stories that implied that some of the disciples regarded Jesus to be God incarnate. I assume the authors so regarded him but that says noting about the disciples.

When I am debating with believers they often argued that the disciples belief in the resurrection is evidence that the resurrection occurred. I remind them as well that we really don't have any first hand testimony from a disciple about what they saw. The same is true about what they imagined about his God Status.

I think the best we can say is that over time some Christians began to equate Jesus with God. That there were always dissenters, and still are, but that the issue was resolved for most Christians in the 4th century. How over that time so many came to believe Jesus was God is something I can't explain. Neither can I explain how so many religious people of so many religions came to believe things which to me are unbelievable. I don't however think you can conclude much from the lack of an explanation other than that we lack an explanation.

Steve

aa5874

That is EXACTLY what you DON'T know. You ASSUME you own history and have NO regard for the actual evidence.

You DO NOT know if Jesus actually lived.

So, if you are claiming that there is NO first hand testimony from a disciple when debating BELIEVERS why are asserting that you KNOW after Jesus died authors wrote stories.

There is SIMPLE no evidence or eyewitness account that Jesus of the NT LIVED. Jesus of the NT was NOT a man based on the writings of antiquity.

Actually that is the WORSE thing to say. You are ACCUSING Christians of Antiquity of DECEPTION. Why would so-called Christians just begin to LIE about a known man who could not be a God in the first place?


Why would Saul/Paul knowingly DECEIVE himself and claim Jesus was the END of the LAW when Jews knew it was total madness and stupidity?

How could a mere man scarcely known and one of the thousands of Jews crucified be the Creator of heaven and earth and to whom EVERY knee should bow?

What you suggest does not make much sense.

Exactly. You don't really know what you are talking about. You DON'T know if Jesus did actually live and when the FIRST Jesus story was written and the ACTUAL contents.

ALL we know is that the Jesus story and the Pauline writings CONTAIN fiction and that Jesus was described as Some kind of Ghost.

Is it NOT true? That is all we know.

And we ALSO know that in Acts of the Apostles Jesus told the disciples to wait for some kind of Ghost to get POWER and then he ASCENDED through some clouds.

Is it NOT true? That is ALL we know.

I know a Ghost story when I see one. Do you?

Acts of the Apostles is one of them Ghost stories of Antiquity like Marcion's PHANTOM story.

There are NO teachings of Jesus in ACTS except the post-resurrection teachings about the Gifts and the POWER of the holy Ghost.

This is Jesus the resurrected in Acts.
Acts 1. But, there is NO such thing as a Holy GHOST in the first place.

All we KNOW is that the ACTS of the Apostles contains fiction.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Avi,

This is an interesting hypothesis. The Jesus character was exulted with the nomina sacra and therefore nothing more could be said about his earthly existence.

I think the opposite is more likely. The nomina sacras ΙΣ and ΧΣ were used for the Lord (Kyrios) nomina sacra ΚΣ as a code. In all groups there are codes that are acknowledged and known by the group. This distinguishes outsiders from the group members.

The gospel or earthly Jesus stories just fit right in with the nomina sacra code that was already in existence. This is why the "name of the Lord" is emphasized as the determining belief for being a Christian as opposed to any doctrine of Jesus. You don't have to believe any belief of Jesus, you just have to believe that the name of the lord is Jesus and/or the anointed one (Christ).

That is why the epistles use Jesus, Christ and Lord almost interchangeably.

If this was not the case, we should expect to find at least some early material spelling out the name Jesus instead of using the nomina sacra. As far as I know, we do not find a switch point.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

avi

Howdy Jay!

Thanks for your reply. Very thoughtful, as always.

I enjoy this thread, and I appreciate your introduction of it. I have learned something, and that is not just because I have such a huge gap to overcome, that I would learn a great deal from reading anything at all!!!

Ok, you may be right on target here. However, I had a very different idea, from yours, not so much the idea that nothing was mentioned about JC's teachings due to exultation of his brilliance, as more the notion, no matter how far fetched, that if this guy is the son of Yahweh, then, like Yahweh, we must be silent--we dare not utter his name in public, nor write it down--instead we must employ a code, not to distinguish our group from some other, but to demonstrate our subservience, and our compliance with HIS diKtates.

Well, in another culture, another linguistic group, another race of people, the Chinese executed those who dared to reference the top leader directly. Those Chinese authors were OBLIGED to AVOID writing his proper name, lest the author be seen as contemplating some sort of egalitarian frame of mind. We humans are certainly NOT the equal of those great masters of the universe, those godlike creatures who lead us, and accordingly, we must show deference, or die. Qin shi huang, by way of illustration, a couple of hundred years before JC appeared on the scene, buried alive 400 scholars, for having the audacity to challenge the supreme leader's notion on some topic of interest at the time. Death is a remarkable deterrent to writing about something as provocative as "the revolutionary instruction of JC, as told to Peter, Judas, and John".

I threw it out there to stimulate some contemplation as to WHY, as you pointed out in your OP, the bible contains so few of JC's teachings to the apostles? Jay your OP is profound.....

I cannot compare the four gospels to comparable Greek writings from two thousand years ago, but, I imagine, (I suppose, without evidence,) that ancient writers would have had no difficulty emulating Plato, with his wonderful accounts of Socrates' instruction of students. In my mind, the question arises, why haven't the authors of the four gospels inserted some kind of text corresponding to the supposed teachings of JC to his disciples? At least, in my opinion, there is no excuse such as: the model for incorporating instructional approaches into a theological document did not exist a couple thousand years ago....

avi