Doug Shaver

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver Name me one 20th-century cult leader whose followers claimed that he was raised from the dead and whose name was never mentioned by even one 20th-century historian.

Specifics, please, and your sources.

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Originally Posted by hjalti And even if you dispute that, even if we just assume that few students were running around the country claiming that Applewhite had reached "the level above human", would you really expect books like "The history of the USA in the 20th century" to mention him?

Maybe. Maybe not. In either case, I would not say it was analogous to what Jesus' followers allegedly said about him.

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Originally Posted by hjalti Do you for example know who Michael Travassier is?

Specifics, please, and your sources.

hjalti

Re Heaven's gate: His name is Rio di Angelo, he has a book on amazon preaching the "good news".

Re Michael: The documentary The End of the World Cult, the part where the teenage girls talk about that being naked in bed with him is being naked with god is memorable.

How similar does it have to be? And funny enough, the Heaven's Gate seem to say very similar things about Do/Applewhite that Richard Carrier argues for in the book The Empty Tomb regarding the theology of Paul. And if you watch teaching videos on YT from Heaven's Gate (here is a great channel, probably done by Rio diAngelo (=River of Angels)), you will notice that Do very often quotes the epistles of Paul (e.g. the stuff in 2 Cor 5).

The point is that if Jesus existed, he was the leader of some small, insignificant cult who got himself killed by the Romans. We just don't have sources that are that detailed to think that it's particularly improbable that we don't hear about him. After all, how many cult leaders do you think there were active in 1st centuru Palestine? And how many of them do you think we have mentioned in Josephus? :huh:

Sheshbazzar

The major problem with anything that 'Paul' allegedly 'said' or 'wrote', is that we don't know that a original Paul ever really said or wrote it.
We also don't know how many 'Paul's' contributed to these texts, or where or when these 'Paul's' made their interpolations and additions.

That a 'Paul' claims that he persecuted the Church, or that he was a personal acquaintance of, or recieved any 'fellowship' from the Apostles, cannot be taken as evidence that the first or an original Paul ever did, or ever wrote of any such thing.

Acts and the 'Pauline' epistles are a totally untrustworthy source for establishing any historically accurate timeline.
'Paul', IF such a individual ever even existed, became nothing more than a handy name, a 'tool' used to create a new religion.

The orthodoxy 'preserved' only their fabricated, theologically doctored, and spuriously interpolated mss, even supplementing them with entirely fake invented 'Pauline' texts.
Acts in particular is primarily 2nd-3rd century church invented propaganda fabrication of a totally imaginary church 'history'.

Its like researching 'Peter Pan' to find the 'authentic history' of Anicetus.





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aa5874

You are MERELY repeating what HJers BELIEVE. It is ALREADY KNOWN that people BELIEVE there was an "historical Jesus" WITHOUT any actual credible evidence from antiquity.

The ASSUMED HJ has been around for sometime now but we are AT EVIDENCE stage right now.

HJers have VENTED their BELIEFS and it is time to get to the NITTY-GRITTY.

It is time for the PRESENTATION of Credible sources of antiquity not sources WE CAN'T TRUST.

If you have NO credible external evidence from antiquity for what you believe about Jesus then you wont have any arguments at all.

The history of Jesus as a man cannot be assembled from SILENCE.

gurugeorge

Well, we've been through this before aa, there's an easy way to understand what "Paul" is saying without it having to be lie. It's just visionary experience, a kind of hallucination, often the result of extreme conditions like sleep deprivation or psychological trauma, but not necessarily always pathological, it can also result from breathing practices, repetition of phrases, obsessive poring over holy writings, the use of drugs, etc., and can be experienced deliberately, either as a departure from lucid dreaming, or from a waking state. Modern cognitive science is beginning to understand the mechanism of it, it's sort of an artefact of the way the brain models the world and itself in it. It's not all that unusual, and it especially wasn't unusual in the past.

It's really the root of religion, in the sense of a sociological phenomenon where you get people claiming sincerely to have spoken to spirits, etc., and bringing back the "message" of what they said. "Paul" is quite of a type, a standard type, of visionary and mystic, common all throughout history and throughout the human race, from the East to the West.

If there were no such phenomenon, then of course what you are claiming would be the most logical explanation, what "Paul" is saying could only be a lie. But since there are such phenomena, there's a logical way of understanding what he's saying as the truth - as it seemed to him.

But the NT Canon does, oddly enough

You know we love you aa Over the course of our little exchanges I have come to respect your thought, and your persistent insistence on the mythical character of the material we've got, even though the way you present it is strange and puts people off (it put me off initially) but I think now I understand better where you're coming from.

I still think you're wrong on this, though.

And yet, this nobody was included in a prominent position in the Canon of the New Testament. None of the other 12 "apostles", these supposed paragons who got the teaching from the man himself, seemingly said much that was worth preserving. They had to make up some obviously made-up stuff to fill in the gaps, while preserving screeds of this nobody's writings.

Yeah, sure.

Not good enough aa. It's all tarred with the same brush. JM is just an early orthodox writer writing at a time when orthodoxy hadn't gotten their story straight.

Now what is the mark of orthodoxy? The mark of orthodoxy is the very insistence on "apostolic succession", on the 12 "apostles" spreading the word, and on anything not coming from the 12 being bogus. That's JM's schtick too, just as it's the later Irenaeus', and all the rest of them.

But Paul was not one of the 12 - so why is he included?

And as I've said, he does mention "Paul" - he mentions "Paul" in his proper name, "Simon Magus", a magician, an occultist, you know, the type of person who has visionary experiences of talking to "gods", "spirits", etc.

As I said, the whole thing about the orthodox Church is to have a settled canon, and a settled lineage. The "apostolic succession", a fabricated lineage from a non-existent being, is the Big Lie we're hovering around. It is, I believe, the tail that wags the dog of the historicized (eyeballed-as-a-human-by-apostles) Jesus.

So why is this "Paul", who on no possible reading can be counted as one of the 12, included in the Canon of a church that's built around the idea of "apostolic succession"? Why is this troublesome proto-Gnostic writing included?

BECAUSE IT HAD TO BE. Because not to have included it would have caused them more problems than including it. Because the "heretic" churches knew their founder was the author of the those writings, and to get them on board, the orthodoxy had to somehow co-opt him.

Sheshbazzar

'Paul' was the orthodox mouth-piece used to convey and implement orthodox theology and claims to 'authority'.

"Paul' wrote....." or "Paul' said....." is the most powerful -tool- that Orthodox Christianity has ever came up with.
Even more powerful than anything "Jesus said....." because 'Paul' could interpret, or even effectively nullify anything that "Jesus said....." at the theological will and pleasure of the Orthodox Church.

"Paul' wrote...." still unquestionably rules, and totally dominates all forms of Christianity.
Even though most, if not all, of what "Paul' wrote...." is much latter church fabricated pure horse-shit.





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gurugeorge

Well, this is an area I'm still working on, but I take my departure 1) from the consideration that the events of the Diaspora would have been the cause of confusion. Some of the people involved originally may have been killed, and some of the original lineages of teaching may have been broken. That seems to be a general likelihood.

The other consideration 2) is something that has often been mentioned on this board. The place names in GMark, and the examples of customs, etc., are not correct. "Mark" is obviously reconstructing a past, based on limited and sometimes wrong information. He's an intelligent writer, but he gets some things wrong that someone who had been from the pre-70CE time would have known about.

This last is pretty well known to biblical scholars, AFAIK, and is one of the reasons for liberal scholars dating GMark after 70CE. That, and the fact that "Jesus" seems to be "predicting" something that happened (the fall of the Temple).

I am just going a wee step further, and conjecturing that "Mark" is also wrong about the actual origins of the movement: he's garbling some sort of tradition, perhaps gotten through a Pauline lineage (but not necessarily), about the early "apostles", and compressing time.

See, as many MJ-ers have pointed out, in the earliest writings (the "Paul" writings, Hebrews, etc.) the time and place of the Christ figure are somewhat vague, it seems to be "yea time", or some kind of "dreamtime" as per Doherty. It's not really clear.

I think "Mark" is the first person to specify, to draw into focus, the "recent-ish past" of what I think was the original myth (as in "Paul" and Hebrews), he's sort of collapsing the time sequence, and bringing it into a very specific recent past, a recent past that's just before the time of the "apostles" (which would be vaguely known to his tradition, ie. that it was some time in the region 30 CE to 50 CE, the time of the origins of the movement, which I actually date to just after the Caligula events, to a short period of optimism after Caligula's threatened razing of the Temple didn't occur, which may have seemed like a victory to the Jews at the time, and a sign that God was on their side).

So he's drawing the "yea time" of the original myth to a specific time, just before the "apostles" who actually initially had the revisionist Messiah concept, and making those "apostles" be actual students of the cult deity while he sojourned on Earth sub rosa (which sojourn I think was part of the original myth).

As above, I think there would have been some sense of the Jerusalem "apostles", but since the tradition "Mark" would have been in would have been something that was seeded by "Paul" (in reality Simon Magus), he had a dim view of those "apostles".

The only addition, the big difference, is that he makes it out to be that the reason they were stupid is that they were personal disciples of the cult deity, but didn't understand it at the time.

Again, look at the "Paul" writings - the sense of it is that the whole Christ event was something that happened in obscurity. That was the whole point of it - instead of coming as a great military victor, with trump and fanfare, he fooled the Archons (who had been waiting for just such a big brouhaha) by coming secretly, in obscurity, sub rosa, and defeating death by the resurrection. That, to me, is the sense of the earliest myth as you get it from the "Paul" writings.

GMark is like an expansion of that - even the "apostles" don't really understand who this "Jesus" really is.

I was strengthened in this recently by reading April De Conick's "Thirteenth Apostle" (or via: amazon.co.uk). It's clear from her reading of that text that the Sethian Gnostics had the same dim view of the "apostles", and the whole Judas text seems to be a polemic against the idea of "apostolic succession". But this is a slightly later development, later than GMark, when the myth of personal discipleship of the apostles had settled in. (IOW the Sethians are writing at a time when GMark's meme of personal-discipleship-of-the-apostles had been accepted by the community, and they were arguing against the orthodox version of it.)

Hope that makes some kind of sense!

gurugeorge

They would have done better to fabricate "Peter wrote", wouldn't they?

As I said, orthodoxy is marked not so much by theology (it actually shares some theology with gnosticism, i.e. Catholicism is itself pretty mystical), but by the concrete idea of the "apostolic succession".

i.e. orthodoxy is not so much a theological move, as a political move, an attempt to settle the writings (cease and desist new prophecies, new gospels) and to settle the lineage (bishops descended from the Twelve), to unite a disparate movement and get the dues flowing.

If that's the case, and yet there was no "Paul", then having the "Paul" writings as a mouthpiece would be stupid (because "Paul" is not one of the Twelve, and betrays proto-Gnostic tendencies). Better to just fabricate more bullshit from the mouths of the Twelve, surely?

But they couldn't do that, because "Paul" was known (the "apostle of the heretics", remember?) and had to be included, and had to be co-opted.

In a sense, Acts is an olive branch to the "heretics", it's giving them a way to toe the orthodox line (to accept the "apostolic succession" of the Roman-Alexandrinian bishops) without having to ditch too much of their own religion - and the "Paul" figure (probably the nickname of Simon Magus, affectionately known as "Shorty" ) gave them a way to come into the fold and retain some of their own tradition and dignity.

aa5874

Why can't "Paul" be LYING when he ADMITTED he LIED for the Glory of God?

Ro 3:7 - I do not make STUFF up.

Why don't you want to accept that "PAUL" admitted he LIED?

"Paul" is a part of the LIE.

Once you start believing a LIAR and the Hallucinated you will just get conned.

Justin Martyr did NOT claim he LIED for the Glory of God.

Not at all. No way. Read about Justin Martyr's conversion and you will see NO HOCUS-POCUS like the "LIES" about the bright blinding light in Acts.

Read about the conversion of Caecilius in Minucius Felix "Octavius" and you won't see the HOCUS-POCUS as is found in the Pauline writings and Acts of the Apostles.

Why do you IGNORE the confession of "Paul" that he LIED for the Glory of God? See Romans 3.7.

There is evidence that suggests the "Pauline writings" are NOT historically accurate even Scholars have deduced that more than one person used the name "Paul" to write Epistles.

The Pauline conversion is FICTION in Acts 9.

In Galatians 1.18-19 "Paul" claimed he met the apostles Peter and James who may have been FICTITIOUS characters.

Why do you IGNORE the RED FLAGS?


So, explain why the PASTORALS were included in the Canon when it has been deduced that "Paul" did NOT WRITE them?

You seem not to understand that there is NO credible evidence that Jesus did exist or did what is written in the NT. If Jesus Christ and ALL TWELVE disciples can be invented or their history, why cannot "Paul" or his history be invented?


Justin Martyr's writing is COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE with the theory that Jesus was NOT a figure of history because Justin Martyr cannot ACCOUNT for the acts of any specific APOSTLE or "PAUL" after the supposed Ascension of Jesus.

Justin Martyr did NOT account for the Day of Pentecost the most significant post-ascension day for the start of the Jesus movement.

Apostolic succession" is NOT just merely claiming that 12 ILLITERATE men spread the gospel all over the world. Justin Martyr did NOT name any Bishop of Rome or even the NAME of HIS OWN BISHOP.

Justin Martyr did NOT WRITE about a Single bishop of anywhere.

Is this some kind of Joke?

Do you even understand what you are saying? If "PAUL" was Simon Magus then you are CONFIRMING that the Pauline writer is a BIG LIAR.

You appear to be TOTALLY confused.

Justin Martyr did NOT write about any NT Canon or any "apostolic succession" . He was NOT part of the BIG LIE.

Because it was part of the BIG LIE. If some one did NOT FABRICATE ACTS of the Apostles and the Pauline writings there would have been NO "history" for Church after the supposed Ascension of Jesus.

Justin Martyr has NO history for the Church after the supposed ascension of Jesus. Justin Martyr history of the Church is JUST about one SENTENCE.

Examine the TOTAL post ascension history from Justin Martyr.

"First Apology" XXXIX In the writings of Justin Martyr there is a BIG BLACK HOLE for over 100 years for the history of the Church.


Justin Martyr WROTE about Heretics and STILL did NOT mention "Paul".

Justin Martyr mentioned Simon Magus, Menander, Saturnilus, Basilides, Valentinus, the Marcians and others WITHOUT mentioning "PAUL"

Justin Martyr was NOT PART of the BIG LIE.

There is a 100 year BLACK HOLE of history of the Church in the writings of Justin Martyr.

No other Christian writer has SUCH A MASSIVE 100 year BLACK HOLE. From about 33 CE to the middle of 2nd century there is Nothing for the history of the Church in the writings of Justin Martyr.

Irenaeus did FILL that 100 year BLACK HOLE with BOGUS information of FOUR Gospels, the Pauline writings, Acts of the Apostles, letters from Clement of Rome, Polycarp and other questionable writers.

Irenaeus was PART of the Big lie and all those who use the Bogus information in "Against Heresies".

Sheshbazzar

Not necessarily, there could be a lot of reasons for "not putting all of their eggs in one basket". Better to keep 'Paul' and tough theological debates, questions, and teachings separated from the 'Peter' figure and the attendant claims of Apostolic succession and ecclesiastical Authority.
That way, in the contest for converts, the one would still stand where the details of other might prove to be a temporary hinderance.
Still works. 'Join The True Apostolic Church......and we'll work out the details together'.
No, I don't think so. The Twelve are never portrayed as being very theologically savvy, and making any one of them into the theological spokesman for a huge load like the Pauline corpus would have overshadowed the remaining eleven and utterly upset the Gospel portrayal of The Twelve as being relative equals.
'Peter' of course would be the natural and expected choice, yet the NT Church documents keep him in relative silence and focus instead on setting him up as quite exclusively as a figurehead for the doctrine of Apostolic succession.
Provides a way for 'Peter' (and the question of Apostolic succession) to keep his hands clean and stand aloof from any of the other many messy theological disagreements.
To this day every Christian Church concedes to St Peter as being the foremost of The Twelve. If the orthodox had attempted to use 'Peter' for speaking much more, it would have drawn him into other internal theological conflicts, with an attendant loss of stature.
By keeping him out of it, he could be permanently used as figurehead rallying point for the Church as a whole, which perfectly suited the needs and ends of the orthodox.
This much I pretty much agree on, only I'd put it this way. There once was an original Paul, whose Christological teachings and writings were quite well known and influential, and thus could not be totally ignored.
The orthodox 'solution' to this problem was to co-opt and extensively 'edit' Paul's writings while systematically exterminating and destroying the writings of any 'Heretical' faction that had been personally acquainted with Paul or employed his original (now 'heretical') writings.
These heretics were 'offered' an either or choice, submit to the orthodox and the texts and teachings supplied by the orthodox or die.
So yes, in this way the orthodox production of 'Acts';
Yet all branches of Christianity ever since are entirely beholding to a NT text that is virtually a total fabrication of The Orthodox ne Catholic Church.
albeit one drawn and fashioned from a large variety of older sources.