jakejonesiv

NOW we are getting somewhere! You are saying that there was a ready made template in place before Jesus, right? Now if you broaden the template a bit to incorporate the other mythological influences that you admit ..., you are moving toward the JM position.

Jake Jones IV

Ben C Smith

I think he was obscure, but not to his followers.

My best reconstruction right now is that his tomb was really found empty (fill in the storyline of your choice) and that his followers really had visions of some kind. They put two and two together.

If you reject the Pauline epistles (even the Hauptbrief!) as second century forgeries, and the gospels as too late to matter, and both notices in Josephus as forgeries, and Tacitus as either interpolated or misguided, and both 1 Clement and the Ignatiana as forgeries, and the generational prophecies contained within the gospels as pointing to a generation other than the one contemporaneous with the figure who uttered them, then of course you can fill the void in with practically anything. Mystery sects, salvation cults, mushroom clubs... whatever you want.

But accepting the Pauline epistles and dating at least one of the gospels (or at least some of the gospel materials) to about 70 forces the issue somewhat.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

This statement points up what, IMVHO, is a serious flaw in a lot of JM reasoning. Here you seem to be saying that a mythical template applied to a figure makes it more likely than before that the figure was mythical to begin with (moving toward the JM position).

But this is a non sequitur. It presents the historicist and the mythicist positions as poles (either/or choices) on a spectrum or sliding scale that they in reality do not share. The choice between Jesus as historical figure and Jesus as nonhistorical character is not either/or, any more than the same choice for Alexander or Augustus is either/or. (There is an historical Alexander, as evidenced in epigraphy and later, often legend-encrusted history, and there is a mythical or legendary Alexander, as evidenced in the romances.)

Mythicism is, at root, an exclusive (either/or) position. It holds that Jesus more than likely did not exist (or at least that the stories and statements about him have better explanations than his existence). Critical historicism (I will not deal with the hyperconservative positions, such as biblical inerrancy) is, at root, an inclusive (both/and) position; it freely admits that mythical elements, templates, models, or designs have been added to the story of Jesus, even sometimes to the point of greatly outnumbering the historical elements.

The perception is out there that you could draw up two columns, one for historicity and the other for mythicity, and that every checkmark in one column speaks against the opposite view. But this is true only of the exclusive position; every checkmark in the historicity column threatens to find a so-called historical core behind the stories, and, the more checks there are, the fuller the story gets. But does a checkmark in the mythicity column in any way threaten critical historicity? Not at all. It is an inclusive position, and as such it admits that legends and mythical elements may indeed have gathered around an historical figure. The only way to disprove historicity is to make sure that the historicist column is empty, or at least very nearly so, and adding mythicist elements does nothing to empty the historicist column.

Even the leanest historicist reconstructions are still historicist. There are some historicists who, of all the available stories, seem to accept only that a fellow named Jesus was crucified on a charge of sedition and that his fellow seditionists thought he rose from the dead. That is pretty minimal, but it is historicist (on this board Diogenes the Cynic seems to adhere to some hypothesis of this nature), since it affirms that the legends grew from historical data, not from mystery cult speculation or the reworking of stories about Zeus.

So, to cut to the chase here, I do not for a moment believe that to accept a mythical template is to move toward the mythicist position. The only way to embrace an exclusive position is to eschew anything and everything in the opposite column. If you wish to talk of exchanging one historical element for a corresponding mythical element (for example, taking a parable away from historicity to assign it to literary creation instead), then in a crude sense one could speak of moving toward the JM position; but in a more accurate sense haggling over any number of checkmarks in the historicity column beyond zero is really an internal historicist debate.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

Hi Ben,

Thanks for this post.
You are right, it is not an "opposite poles" choice. Most historists agree that many mythical elements accreted to a story that started with one historical individual.

Mythicists, on the other hand, do not deny that elements of the Gospel story were accreted from many historical individuals, but the myth came first.And after the myth got started, further elements from both myth and history were added.

That is why I find Gakusei Don's theory of a pre-existing template based on Philo's Moses interesting. I have pointed out to GDon previously here that Philo's Logos anticipates Jesus as divine mediator.
Philo thought that Moses was pre-existent and partook of the divine nature upon the Holy Mount, which alegorically was interpreted as heaven. But Moses did not ascend the mount alone. He was accopanied by young Joshua (Iesous LXX). That could explain why the NT guy's name was Jesus.

Jake

Amaleq13

I do not intend to create a tangential discussion on this point but I'm curious how the absence of an empty tomb tradition in Paul figures into your reconstruction.

"My" reconstruction would have, instead of that tradition, an unknown fate with regard to the disposition of the body combined with subsequent visions.

Ben C Smith

He did not need to mention it. Everybody knew it.

Just kidding!

I would rather not go into Paul and the empty tomb right now. I think it would take more time and energy than I have at the moment. Sorry.

That is possible, too, and is on my platter as a live option.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

But Ben, that is merely one historist reconstruction. Others see Jesus as a wandering sage who spouted cynic like sayings (Q), and for whom crucifixtion was either unknown or not important.

I have no doubt that the alleged historical Jesus can be minimalized to the point that it "must" be true. How far do you want to lower the bar?

No, the historist column does not have to be "empty". Otherwise any guy named Jesus would prove your case.

If (for sake of argument) there was a HJ, he didn't amount to anything special, and had to be incorporated into a pre-existing mythical structure.

And that is what I see as the crucial dividing line in this debate. Not whether there was some failed preacher that manged to get himself killed (or not), but whether there were pre-existing myths or legends that incorporated this guy.

IMHO, the debate is really about whether Christianity began as a unique religion sparked off by the deeds of a single historical man, or whether it evolved out of the myths, legends, and religions of the time, no matter if a historical man (or several) were incorporated along the way.

But in either case, the figure of Jesus as represented in the Gospels is a composite, a character that never existed. Now, if you take the opposite side of that argument, the debate would be quite intereseting.

Jake Jones IV

Ben C Smith

One can always keep taking away from something till nothing is left, but where exactly it crossed the line, so to speak, between being one thing and being another is a philosophical question, not an historical one.

(One example I have used is that of a car. Is it still a car if you remove all four wheels and mount it on blocks somewhere in redneck country? Sure. Is it still a car if you take out the carburator and the transmission for an overhaul? Sure. But somewhere between removing a few pieces and breaking the entire structure down into individual parts to resell the thing has ceased to be a car. I do not know where that line is, nor does the question much interest me.)

It would prove a bare-bones historicist case if that guy named Jesus was in fact the core for the later set of beliefs we now know as Christianity. Even if the only thing he really had to compare with the later legends was his name.

The question is: How did the belief start?

It is conceivable, of course, that one guy was named Jesus, another guy got crucified, and yet another guy (who died of a heart attack) was believed to have been raised from the dead; then all three fellows got fused somehow. This is still an historicist position, though minimalistic to an extreme. In each case the cause for the later belief comes back to an historical figure.

It is likewise conceivable that no historical figure at all stands at the fount of Christianity; rather, stories were invented (based at most on broad types of people, like prophets and healers, not modified from any single person) and grew into a legend with no core. This is a mythicist position.

It is also conceivable that the whole thing started with a mystery savior on a mystical cross in a magical land of myth. This, too, is a mythicist position.

There are positions in between these positions I have sketched out. Whether they are mythicist or historicist I would have to decide case by case. But that does not affect the fact that for GDon to see a heavy layer of myth over an historical figure does not bring him ever closer to mythicism.

I do not understand. Many historicists readily agree that there were certain pre-existing myths (such as the coming of the messiah and the coming of the son of man) that were incorporated into the story of Jesus; he himself may have even had a hand in it!

What matters to me is not whether the existence of the myth preceded the figure or the figure preceded the myth, but whether the figure existed before the myth (however old) got attached to him.

I think the figure of Jesus from the gospels is a kind of composite, in the same way that Augustus is a kind of composite. That is, I think the gospels claim Jesus did certain things that he did not in fact do, just as the biographies claim Augustus did certain things that he did not in fact do.

Nevertheless, I think the evangelists knew of an historical figure and embellished him; I do not think they knew only a mythical figment and gave him real flesh, a real career in Galilee, and a real death on a real cross just outside Jerusalem.

In case you were wondering (and I have no desire to debate this list right now), here is my own bare-bones list of Jesus features that I feel capable right now of defending historically and in some detail:

1. He was born (that is, he existed), probably in Nazareth.
2. He was baptized by John the baptist.
3. He went off on his own career in Galilee at some point.
4. He uttered sayings against Herod Antipas and Herodias.
5. He made messianic claims during his career.
6. He was executed in Jerusalem at the behest of Jewish leadership but at the hands of the Romans.
7. He was buried (not left on the cross for the birds).
8. His tomb was later found empty.
9. His comrades saw visions of him and thought he had risen from the dead.

I think we can agree that this list (and even a fraction of it) boldly crosses whatever line we wish to draw between mythicism and historicism. Even if I cut this list by two-thirds and then attributed every single one of the other recorded features of Jesus to myth, I would still be an historicist.

Ben.

mens_sana

The original Greek was all in uppercase, so I wonder if Mark might have meant "son of God". All Jews were "sons of God". If there was an adoptionist theology involved, Jesus would still have been a "son of God" because adoption did not mean divine origin.

gstafleu

The answer will for now have to be a fairly general one. Let me start with a quote from the beginning of George Frazer's The Golden Bough, Chapter 1. He has established that a certain ritual performed in Roman times could not be derived from classical antiquity. I paragraph 4 he then says:
(My bold)
We have a similar problem with the passion and the Eucharist, and a similar possible solution. The first thing that has to be done is remove Christianity from its splendid isolation where the only other mythology that is deemed relevant is the Old Testament, and position it properly within the general realm of mythology. To that purpose other mythologies should be studied, as Frazer did in The Golden Bough and as Campbell did in The Masks of God. From this we can then derive the general themes, methods and properties of the genre Mythology, something for which a good start has already been made.

That done, we can then see how the OT and NT fit in this general framework, and specifically if Christianity contains elements, either from the general framework or sui generis, that do not appear in the OT. My suspicion is that the divine sacrifice and the Eucharist may be such elements. In any case, the study of general mythology should enable us better to recognize such elements.

Additionally it may or may not be possible to find a more or less exact provenance of the non-OT elements. On the one hand this was a literate age, on the other we know that devout believers at times were inclined to destroy evidence that went against their beliefs. So it is not a given this can be done, but it is worth a try. But even if we only demonstrate that certain non-OT NT elements are instances of universal mythological themes we still have accomplished something worthwhile.

Places to look for such non-OT influences would be the mythologies with which we know the Roman empire of the time was in contact, mainly the Levant, the Celts and the Germans. India, though less likely, should not be ruled out, I'm fairly sure there were Roman trading posts there.

As I said, a general answer to your "next steps" question, but given that this field has apparently been neglected, no doubt for the obvious reasons, there is at this time not enough detailed knowledge (I think, but who knows what may be out there) to be more specific.

Gerard Stafleu