Toto

This is trivially easy. People make stories up all the time. Why do you think that a story has to be true? Do you think early Christians were too stupid or unimaginative to make stuff up???

What exactly do you find wanting here?

Toto

The existence of Christians is not proof of the existence of Jesus.

There is an argument that this passage is a medieval forgery.

spamandham

It seems to me that Lucian is directly telling us it was going on and was widespread or he would not have felt the need for his satire nor the prologue which goes way way absurdly out of the way to make perfectly clear that the story is not true - as a jab at the widespread hucksterism and overall gullibility of his age. So what then is the basis for thinking it unlikely when we have a skeptical writer of the time telling us it was commonplace?

GakuseiDon

Well, the OP refers to euhemerism, which was the denial of the gods as gods. I think from Lucian (whom I quote above) we can see that people had an idea that some stories were too fantastic to be credible. Plutarch also gives various views of the gods and their myths, from human beings deified, to allegorical stories based on natural forces.

Whatever the Gospels were, they must have had some inherent credibility about them, for them to be accepted as history. Especially if the first Christians did not accept them as literal history.

GakuseiDon

But exactly what was commonplace? Ancient biographies about people whom were known not to exist? Isn't that what you think the Gospels are?

Juststeve

Toto:

You're right. The exitence of Christians in Rome doesn't prove the existence of Jesus. It just proves the existence of Christians which is what I understood Kapyong to be doubting.

Steve

spamandham

...the intentional penning of fantastic stories that are then taken seriously. There is no basis for saying it's unlikely that this is what happened in the case of the gospels, regardless of what genre we assign them.

aa5874

But, the pre-suppostion that there was a Christian Community does not help at all in the determination of the existence of an actual Messiah called Jesus.

And further the earlier the dating of the Gospels the more it is likely that there was NO real character called Jesus.

The Jesus story in gMark would NOT be regarded as Good News but a Pack of LIES by those Skeptics in Galilee who KNEW Jesus for 30 years and were his neighbors, friends, and playmates as a child.

It is far more plausible that Jesus was an invented character fabricated by an anonymous apocalyptic writer decades after the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius and well away from Judea after the Temple was destroyed.

It would seem that an apocalyptic writer believed that the end of the world was soon to be AFTER the Fall of the Temple and believed that the book of Joel and other books of the prophets contained accurate predictions about the end of heaven and earth.


Mt 24:35 - Mr 13:31 - Lu 21:33 - Joel 2.32 Even the illiterate can understand the Synoptic story. Repent or perish. God has destroyed his own TEMPLE and the WORLD will be NEXT.

gurugeorge

It's easy - if the myth were initially of a divine entity with a few earthly aspects to his biography (kind of a standard myth), then over time earthly details might be confabulated.

Think of the infancy gospels and that sort of thing; or the forged letter of Jesus to the King of Edessa. Those were a step too far in the filling-in of historical detail, right?

But why can't the stuff we take for granted be of the same ilk?

But this is where it gets really interesting you see, because we sort of do have a bit of a smoking gun here. There's a particular reason why the myth might have been concretised, a plausible motive for what one might call the heavy historicization of the myth.

(I believe all the following fits with the evidence:-) Suppose (as is supported by the work of Walter Bauer) the early Church was a fairly diverse, woo-woo sort of thing (much as in Paul - seances, visionary experience, etc.), vaguely analogous to the New Age today, various loosely-related takes on an idea that was "in the air" at the time (divine intermediary/logos/personal saviour). Not a big movement, maybe only a few thousand people all told at that time - just a minor cult, but with some representation in the major centres of civilisation at the time. There are Jewish takes on the idea, but there are also other takes on the idea, some more philosophical, some more stemming from an exotericization of the Mysteries.

Now suppose one branch of this "New Age" movement, a rather more hard-headed, rationalistic branch that had some links to the Jewish version, based in Rome, decides it's time to stop all the nonsense and get the movement sorted out and organised. Stop the production of new "gospels", stop prophecy (basically ditch the "works of the spirit" stuff that Paul was into), stick to a basic text that there's no argument about. Centralise and organise, and get the dogma straight - not to mention, ensure a proper flow of monies.

Now at this stage, none of the early (possibly 1st century) apostles of the movement (e.g. Paul, or any of the people he speaks about in his letters - take note of this, there's nothing in the epistles like Paul saying "Cephas told me that Jesus had told him ...." or anything like that) apparently knew, or claimed to know the cult figure personally. If they did, there's no evidence of it in Paul. Suppose at this stage, Paul and all the rest of them are all on much of a similar footing as proponents of a "gospel" that's purely a spiritual revelation, based on a purely mythological entity whom nobody ever knew personally (but of course whom they believed had spent some time in earthly form, or appeared to have).

But obviously, to have eyeballed the cult entity and gotten teachings from him in person, while he was on earth, would be a firmer link to that entity than merely having had visions of him, or being inspired to prophecy or teachings by meditation on him.

So here's the motive: the heavy historicization of the Jesus myth is the result of this offshoot of the movement (which later becomes orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism) falsely claiming to have a lineage of bishops that goes right back to the cult figure while he was on earth.

IOW, it's the desire for a fabricated, and advantageous "apostolic succession" that's the tail wagging the dog of the heavily historicized Jesus. The desire to show off that some of "our bishops" descend from people who got teachings from the cult figure in person (as opposed to the vast majority of churches who got their revelations from no man - but from visions, scripture, philosophical musings, etc.)

But of course it takes a while for this idea to catch on. However, by the end of the 2nd century this offshoot begins to take the movement over, and by the time of Constantine, it's in a position to represent the movement as a whole.

So there you go: one pretty plausible and simple reason for the historicization, that fits the evidence, sticking to standard biblical scholarship as much as possible (note: the validity of Bauer's results in Orthodoxy and Heresy is really important to this theory, if evidence were found that proto-orthodoxy really was the earliest form of the movement just like the party line tells us, then I'd have to go back to the drawing board).

(There are other very different ways of looking at the matter in an MJ way, but a lot of them depend on late datings, etc., and while I'm happy some people are staking that territory out, I prefer to stick with orthodox scholarship's results as much as I can.)

EarlDoherty

I gave you one in my new book: The Hymn of the Pearl in the Thomas literature, probably from the 2nd century. Plutarch’s analysis of the Osiris myth as allegory also indicates that this sort of literature was commonly treated, even if not by everyone, as allegory. Philo interprets the entire Jewish scriptures as allegory, and the practice was not unknown in regard to Homer. It is hardly a stretch to see some works as the deliberate creation of allegory.

A few weeks ago I saw a film called “The Peaceful Warrior”. It was based on a book about a true story of a young gymnast who suffered a shattered leg in a motorcycle accident, and worked against all odds to overcome the handicap and went on to win a gold medal in the Olympics. In the story, he was befriended by a somewhat mysterious man who was manager of a highway gas station, who encouraged him in various ways, including with philosophical advice which the young gymnast used to overcome his accident. There was even the suggestion of extraordinary, even ‘miraculous’ actions on the part of this gas station manager. When his trials were over and he had qualified again for the Olympics, the gymnast went back once more but could not find this mysterious man; the gas jockeys he found there had never heard of him.

Rather than this film advocating or suggesting some sort of supernatural nonsense (the mysterious manager was an angel come to earth, for example), the story struck me quite simply as containing an allegory. Rather than write a book and produce a film which tried to portray the internal struggles of the young gymnast’s spirit, his private philosophizing and self-examination which led him to overcome his accident and near defeat (which would not have made a very interesting story from a theatrical point of view), the mysterious manager who served to spur all these things in him was an allegorical figure representing that internal process. In other words, the storyteller extrapolated internal and broader forces (some of the ‘philosophy’ reminded me of certain aspects of Buddhism) onto a representative figure who was not intended to be real.

I see the same process at work in the Gospels, at least in its purest form in Mark. Jesus is not a real figure. He is an allegory for various Markan purposes, which things are made more interesting and accessible by the Jesus figure being presented as though he were an historical reality. Since that figure was not historical, there were no oral traditions (missing in any case in all the non-Gospel literature) available to the author, and so he constructed his story out of scriptural elements, the latter being in any event pertinent to the spiritual understanding of his community. There are Old Testament scholars who point to whole books of the bible as allegory (in the sense of midrash on earlier writing and Jewish themes), such as the Book of Ruth, or parts of the David cycle. (See my discussion of Spong's view in "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man" page 407f.)

In this light, the Gospels are not biography. They are inspirational creations to convey lessons, insight, larger-than-life renditions of the community’s own nature, practices,. teachings and self-understanding. They may be theater, but they are not biography.

And to answer a later question of yours, I see no problem in audiences in Mark’s day recognizing the allegorical nature of this new work. On two grounds: they would have been entirely unfamiliar with such a story in their own sectarian background and would be led to conclude that this was allegory (and there being enough allegory ‘in the air’ of the religious world they moved in). It would be easy enough to understand in those terms. They should certainly have been able to recognize the scriptural basis of its elements. And, because the writer/public reader could very well have announced that it was allegory!

If we regard these compositions as originally the product of a specific community for its own enlightenment, one need not postulate a situation in which the audience for which it was intended could have mistaken it for the wrong thing. Of course, this is precisely the sort of thing which happened when the Gospels started to travel, and to reach others outside and later than that original audience. It may even have begun to some extent with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (I happen to think that John was under no illusion that he was offering any sort of biography.)

Earl Doherty