EarlDoherty

Nope. Guess I just wasn't sensationalist enough. And no sex in The Jesus Puzzle. (Maybe that's what got Jon all worked up, talk about being cheated!) For that, you'll have to go to my "Jesus Puzzle" novel, which is in its entirety on my website--for free. Never get rich that way.

And thanks for all the psycho-babble. Some of it might even make sense.

Earl Doherty

Steven Carr

Even when they were dead?

Remember, Ehrman has trashed the idea that any Jew could have thought of a crucified person as a Messiah.

The logic seems to be - The Saviour of the Nation was expected to bring in a 1000-year Reich. He was not expected to shoot himself in a bunker. That was a humiliating, shameful death - not one the Saviour of the Nation was supposed to have.

So after Hitler shot himself in a bunker, some people started to think Hitler really must have been the Saviour of the Nation.

After all, he had shot himself in a bunker. So they reexamined their beliefs and 'found' that the Saviour of the Nation was supposed to shoot himself in a bunker.

This is all rubbish, but we are supposed to believe exactly the same happened with Jesus.

That his death was reinterpreted as a success.

mountainman

AMEN.


Evolution of the inner psychological environment of man lags well behind the technological advances of the external world.

mountainman

There is explicit sex in "The Greater Questions of Mary". Maybe another thesis work might be contemplated on the heretical books rather than the canonical books.

MrMacSon

A few authors* have addressed this in the past and said something like the failure to produce the messiah (who wasn't supposed to die) encouraged the resurrection story, and also encouraged a second-coming story.

They managed to turn a failure into a success.

* Paula Fredricksen(?) & others

Steven Carr

A bit like claiming the Saviour of the Nation was supposed to die in a bunker?

MrMacSon

Yes; as you proposed ... "think" and increasingly embellish to portray that; added the Christ suffix, increase the siginficance of that; add a 2nd coming (before or after the resurrection story ...)

Combine Paul's messiah-dude with the Gospel messiah-dude, give them the same name; add some "brothers", etc

dog-on

Doesn't such an interpretation of the evidence depend upon the order in which you place the data points?

e.g

Jewish Messiah -> Heavenly Redeemer

vs.

Heavenly Redeemer -> Jewish Messiah

MrMacSon

Perhaps. Depends on how the stories started and evolved; across several generations and in several locations, anything is possible.

Some have said there were many stories doing the rounds before the advent of christianity & its early spin-offs, and the most popular initial stories were the ones that fulfilled the olde testament

dog-on

That is the question. Ehrman's arguments seem to rely, at their core, on the existance of oral traditions that an be traced back to mid first century Palestine. This proposition is then used to place the core of the gospel tradition prior to the emergence of the epistolic corpus which, in turn, argues for the Jewish Messiah to the Heavenly Redeemer trajectory and giving us the "no one would have invented a crucified messiah" argument.

However, if the case can be made that the originating idea was instead that of a heavenly redeemer whose blood sacrifice removed the yoke of the curse of the law from humanity, then a crucified savior, or redeemer, might have simply followed from the pre-existing concept of temple sacrifice.

So, I suppose, that is the question.