rob117

The name of Faust, at least in English-speaking cultures (I'm not sure how widespread it is), has the connotation of a person who has sold his soul to the Devil. Johann Georg Faust was a German alchemist who lived from about 1480-1540. Even during his own lifetime, rumors circulated about him having made a deal with Satan. It was claimed that his dog was really Satan in disguise. After he was executed in 1540, rumors and legends continued to circulate about him, until a book was anonymously published about him in German, called Historia von D. Iohan Fausten, in 1587, less than 50 years after his death. In this book, we have the familiar tale of Faust selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for money and power. The story by this time had become very elaborate, with lots of magic tricks and other supernatural mumbo-jumbo. This book was translated into English in 1592, as The Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor Iohn Faustus. In 1604, Christopher Marlowe turned the Faust story into a play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, in which Faust sells his soul to the Devil for 24 years of wealth and power.

This rapid spread of rumors during Faust's life, legends after his death, into a full-fledged myth less than 50 years later is a great, relatively recent analog to what may have been the case with Jesus. An even more recent analog could be Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormon Church; an even more recent analog could be popular conspiracy theories about how Hitler was supposedly using black magic and the help of aliens in his technology. The whole Roswell myth is also a great example- I have grandparents who are still alive now, and were in their 20s when the 1947 plane crash that sparked the whole elaborate Roswell mythology occured. There is now an entire elaborate, organized belief system, with a significant number of followers, that sprung from a plane crash that happened less than 60 years ago.

Does anyone else think there should be a study of the speed with which a myth can take form, that compares more recent examples like Faust and Roswell with the formation and early growth of Christianity?

andrewcriddle

The problem here is that the version of Faust found in Marlowe seems (according to your account) quite similar to the (probably bogus) stories about Faust during his life.

It soesn't seem a good example of the drastic rewriting of an account after the death of the person involved.

Andrew Criddle

SaintCog

I, for one, think that would be a fascinating study. In a somewhat related issue, Carl Sagan in his last book "Billions and Billions" does a small survey of sayings that are falsely attributed to people while they are still alive. Sagan himself points out that he never used the phrase "billions and billions," although that's the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they think of him.

Cheers,
SC

Zeichman

You may want to look into the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menacham M. Schneerson.

rob117

Similar, but much more elaborate.

gurugeorge

Hmm, but as I understand it, the "Mythicist" case is based on the (seeming) fact that the earliest written stuff (from round the 40-50 years mark) has its "Jesus" as a fully-fledged divine Redeemer, with hardly any whiff of earthly ministry at all. So in a sense it's less elaborate when it comes to "flowery details" (one might say). It's after that point (say 70-100) when you start seeing the details of an earthly ministry being fleshed out.

If there had been an "ordinary" (e.g. preacher-style) Jesus, one might well expect a flowering and elaboration on a basic story of earthly ministry with divine aspects (or a divine sting in the tail to the story). The puzzle comes in because that's what one doesn't find: one finds, at the beginning a seemingly totally spiritual being whose fleshly aspect is no more detailed than it is for any other God-man figure of the day, and then as time goes on you get this sudden detail and elaboration about earthly ministry which is then very quickly fixed, held canonical.

mirage

I had an excellent example of rapid myth formation that I can't find again.

It was a missionary who visited a place twice. The second time there was an elaborate myth around him, that he had performed magical actions. It was complete with entirely bogus first hand eyewitness testimony and all and everything.

Ring any bells with anyone?

gurugeorge

Again, I feel I should point out that this isn't quite what we've got in the Christian record. We might well expect an elaboration and a whole bunch of "Chinese whispers" about what "Jesus" did and said, if what happened was a case of somebody actually existing then legends and stories building round them. But what we find, 50 years or so after the supposed death of this "Jesus", is a fairly simple, abstract Divinity concept, with hardly any elaboration in terms of "he did this, he said that, and he performed this miracle here and that one there". The elaborated detail about "Jesus"' life then comes after that early layer of Redeemer/Logos/Godman, and then this burst of elaborated detail is fixed (in orthodox Christianity - although it seems to carry on in Gnosticism).

What's there in the earliest writings seems to be a "basket" of Christs, a bundle of slightly varying concepts, from different "communities", of a Son/Redeemer/Logos, an intermediary between a highly abstract, unreachable God, and man. There's some sense in which this Entity has come, or will come, "in the flesh", but it's hardly clear that this refers to some very recent historical past in Palestine - it could just as easily be a similar degree of "fleshliness" to other deities known for being embodied in forms people could see and touch.

It just makes more sense (to me) to see the beginnings of Christianity as a bundle of movements at the interface between Greek, Roman and Jewish culture, that developed the idea of a Redeemer/Son/Logos, which then became unified when a particular concretisation and visualisation of the "fleshliness" at first captured the imagination of a few of them, and later became imposed on the whole movement (by subsect(s) that believed very strongly in the historicity of that "story", becoming acknowledged as representative of the movement as a whole, as the Roman State religion).

There's just no escaping the dilemma: if "Jesus" had been more or less as portrayed in the Gospels, he'd have made much more of a "splash" in contemporary (non-Christian) accounts; if he was just a common or garden preacher or mystic who started a small movement, then it's difficult to account for the fact that he appears as a fully-fledged Redeemer/Son/Logos in the first known writings about him.

What we have is zero (or at best, a microscopically tiny amount of highly debatable) non-Christian contemporary references, and a fully-fledged Divinity at the start of what Christian texts we have. The Mythicist idea is (to me) the best explanation of these facts.

mirage

I take your point, though I may have mislead you with the bell-ringing remark, since I was merely wondering if anyone could enlighten me on what I was talking about.

I don't know much about Christianity, but isn't there some elaboration in the Gospels after Mark? And in the apocrypha?

The way I see it is that myths can be very fluid just as they are forming, but then often set reasonably quickly. Oral tradition can transmit stories surprisingly accurately, or so I read. I would have thought that whoever wrote Mark could have synthesised his own account from whatever selection of oral myth and invention he liked, but afterwards the scope for elaboration would be reduced in traditions accepting Mark.

gurugeorge

Sure, as I said, there's plenty elaboration in Gnosticism and other texts, of just the kind you'd expect from a sociological understanding of myth-making. It's the (apparently) very earliest layer that's seen as puzzling by Mythicists like Doherty.

IOW, you don't get this progression from a few stories about a remarkable guy to a full-fledged mythology about a Man-god. You get a progression from a full-fledged but very simple Man-god to a basic, somewhat fleshed-out story that then get fixed (in orthodoxy) or elaborated (in Gnosticism, etc.)