Toto

This was the topic of discussion some time ago here. Realize that McDonald is a practicing Christian, not a mythicist, and probably does not support the uses that others make of his work.

I listened to a few sentences of the youtube video before I had to turn it off. Can you summarize?

Diogenes the Cynic

I think a better case can be made for the Gospels as being a hybrid of midrash and classic hero-story motifs than for being modeled on any single or particular piece of literature.

I was just reading a piece by Robert Price yesterday reiterating the commonalities between the Gospels and 22 common points of hero stories. I think the analogy of incorporating the story tropes of "westerns" into something like a space opera isn't bad, but it can't be confined to one work of literature. It's more just general characteristics and common story structures.

For instance, it's a very common theme of hero epics for the hero (who is almost always a son of a king or a son of a god) to have an infancy narrative in which some attempt is made on his life (usually by a king who fears him as a threat), and for the infant to be spirited away, quite often in a boat or other floating vessel. It was already a cliche even when they wrote it in for Moses.

Those are the kinds of things that Christian myth adopted - not so much plagiarizing or adapting specific other stories, but just taking from the common formulas.

Shake it up with midrashic techniques and (probably) a common sayings tradition and you've got yourself a Gospel. A fusion of Jewish and Pagan literary formulae. Pagan chocolate in Jewish peanut butter - or maybe it's the other way around.

stephan huller

I've heard that argument before and I know that it has a lot of fans around here. My difficulty is why you need to manufacture Jesus from pagan myths when the Jews already had hero myths of their own. Moses was already compared with Orpheus and the like. I'm just not convinced that anyone who makes the argument that the gospel was principally derived from pagan myths has enough knowledge about the Pentateuch and the ancient traditions associated with it to decide which was the more likely scenario.

Indeed, let's start with the idea that Jesus was a god (which is presumably the opinion of mythicists). Why then would the author of the gospel have borrowed from mythical stories about human beings? The Jewish tradition sharply distinguishes between man and God. Men like Moses can surely become God but they start out as men. If the mythicists believe that Jesus was a god they should look for myths about pagan divinities. I don't understand the confusion over whether Jesus was a man or god on the part of the first gospel writer.

Indeed I have said this before but there seems to be a tendency to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. This is fine if we are just sitting around a camp fire shooting the shit. But if we are trying to have this stuff taken seriously we can't argue on the one hand that the gospel was 'certainly' about a god or a supernatural Jesus and then put forward that the same author was drawing from myths that were clearly about human beings.

This would presumably be counter productive to what must have been his original purpose to having people who had never heard of Jesus take him in the way he was intended to be taken. It's like dressing your daughter up for the prom in lingerie and then being surprised she came home pregnant.

Diogenes the Cynic

I wasn't presenting it personally as a mythicist argument. I'm not a mythicist. I would posit that first midrashic explanations of the crucifixion and then pagan dying/rising god motifs were overlaid onto a historical event (i.e. a real crucifixion of a real person).

So they would turn to human hero myths (under my hypothesis) because they were starting with a real person.

DCHindley

History explains facts. The process you are describing is called emplotment, where the story gets cast into traditional molds.

To me, the gospel stories essentially cast the story of Jesus' life as a tragedy (a hero is defeated by relying too much on his own intuition about the good in other men - the betrayal by Judas to the schemes of those jealous Jewish authorities), yet with the exception of Mark they end with a comic twist (from the chaos of events, something good comes of it - the resurrection and all it implies about God's overall plan for the world).

DCH

mountainman

It cites Dennis Ronald MacDonald's observation on the parallel between a scene from Homer and a scene from Mark in the NT. In Homer a unknown woman (Eurycleia) washes and then anoints with oil the feet of Odysseus. In Mark an unknown woman anoints with oil the feet of Bilbo Jesus Baggins.

Did Mark recall the Homeric episode when he penned his own annointing scene? Parallels are:

1) Woman meets a "stranger".
2) The stranger is recognised.
3) Some liquid is spilled.
4) The woman annoints the hero.
5) The talk/scene immediately shifts to the hero's enemies.


Further parallel ....

The name of the the anonymous woman in Homer, "Eurycleia", means "FAR-FLUNG GLORY".


Mark was therefore most likley fabricating his narrative from Homer.





Also see Acts of Andrew

steve_bnk

Who kis the Gandalf character in Lord Of The Rings.

Does battle with evil and falls to a great depth. Libgers for a period in an intermediate state. Gets resuretd as Gandalf The White symbolized by his hair turning white. When he first meets those he klnew before, he has to take on his old rerference points.It is a born again Christisan experience. Tolkien was Christian.

It is also a love story of a group of men, as was JC and the apostles. Point being there are only a handful of human literary themes that get repackaged over and over again.

The question is what were the gospel writers presenting, what was the message for the converts portrayed by the myth? The JC character varies from one to the other. The acerbic gadfly in the face of the Jewish establishment to the serene sermon on the mount. The gospels are not varying degrese of authenticity, they represent different writers.

LegionOnomaMoi

This doesn't in any way seem to you to be a contradiction in terms? An "anonymous" women whose "name" is Eurycleia, and whom Odysseus not only knew, but knew from childhood?

stephan huller

The question people haven't asked is how common was it to have women wash your feet? if it was as common as texting on your phone is today a reference to having some wash your feet wouldnt be noteworthy

stephan huller

And then it turns out that such activity was quite common for slave women as we see from the narrative of Joseph and Aseneth:

Aseneth states: 'And you, Lord, commit me to him for a maidservant and slave. And I will make his bed and wash his feet and wait on him and be a slave for him and serve him forever (and) ever.

Aseneth's prayer equates the washing of another's feet with a sign of service. In a story transmitted in the Yerushalmi very similar words are put into the mouth of a female relative of R. Eleazar. When he encouraged her to get married, she allegedly said to him: 'Behold, I am your maidservant to wash the feet of the slaves of my master' (y. Yeb. 13: 2, 13c).

The misguided people who claim that there is some significance between the two women washing men's feet begin with the idea of a woman washing a man's feet as something unusual. Once we see it was common, the argument breaks down.