aa5874

No such thing can be found in the Synoptic Gospels.

Do you even understand what "GOSPEL" means?

In the synoptic GOSPELS, Jesus, the Child of the Holy Ghost and a Virgin, was a GOOD NEWS preacher.

Look at the evidence in the synoptic GOSPELS.

Matt 4:23 -
Mark 1:14 - Luke 4:18 - In the synoptic GOSPELS Jesus, the Child of the Ghost, was a GOOD NEWS preacher.


You have NO credible evidence of antiquity for what you IMAGINE. Again, in the NT Jesus had NO reputation as a doomsday cult leader.

Jesus, the Child of some kind of Ghost of God, was REPUTEDLY a GOOD NEWS preacher based on the PUBLISHED findings of gLuke.

Examine the evidence in gLuke about the REPUTATION of the Child of the Ghost.

Lu 7:22 - In the synoptic GOSPELS, Jesus had NO reputation as a doomsday cult leader, but a GOOD NEWS preacher to the poor, a healer and one who could RAISE the dead.


Your assertion is COMPLETELY illogical. You simply cannot IMAGINE evidence into existence. You need actual credible historical evidence for your Jesus.

The synoptics GOSPELS are about the Child of the Ghost of God who preached GOOD NEWS to the JEWS.

Look at the evidence for Jesus in the synoptics GOSPELS.


Mt 1:18 - ApostateAbe, please read the GOOD NEWS that Jesus preached and then go find a history book for your doomsday cult leader.

The synoptics GOSPELS do NOT contain the HERESY that Jesus was just a man.

A CANON of the Church that claim Jesus was GOD INCARNATE does NOT support the HERESY that Jesus was just a man.

You seem to have NO IDEA what a CANON of the Church signifies.

The NT CANON MUST BE COMPATIBLE WITH THE TEACHINGS OF THE CHURCH that Jesus was GOD INCARNATE.

gurugeorge

There are many god-men in mythology - i.e. fantastic superhero-like entities that have human-looking elements to their stories. Krishna made out with a bunch of cow-herding girls

Sometimes you get these stories in an euhemeristic fashion - some guy whose story gets blown up over time. But sometimes it looks like the entities in these stories are entities seen by the inventors of them, in visionary experiences, dream visions and the like ("Paul" seems to be such a case).

To decide between these two plausible origin scenarios, the clincher for the first hypothesis is to independently find your man, your real human being. In the absence of such a person, it's perfectly legitimate to look at the second hypothesis and see what shakes out.

As it turns out, quite a lot shakes out, because if you look at the later history, we can see a motive for the historicization of the second type of mythical being (i.e. in the political handiness of the concept of Apostolic Succession, given the Diaspora situation, and what must have been disarray and likely one or more breaks in the continuity of transmission of tradition).

That's not really what you need. The apocalyptic stuff is part of the Christ myth, but it seems to be interwoven clumsily; the bigger part of the message, certainly for "Paul", is about some kind of spiritual salvation of the individual. As spin points out, some of the apocalyptic stuff can be traced to earlier texts. Just like some of the other elements of the Messiah Myth are traceable all through the cultures of those times and places.

(Side note: I quite like what I read in Ehrman's Lost Christianities, about the hypothesis that proto-Gnosticism - which is what the original Christianity would have been, under my overall hypothesis - developed from "disappointed apocalypticism", in which case you'd get traces of the language of apocalypticism in the newer religion; but it's used metaphorically in the newer religion. Another option is Margaret Barker's idea of the continuity of an older, esoteric Temple cult - which would tie in with the idea that the Jesus Christ figure hearkens back to an older concept of the Messiah than the one current at around 0 BCE - i.e. a Messiah with more of a divine god-man element, not merely some political-military leader with a divine mandate.)

Anyway, all these elements could have accrued to a real person, sure; but what person in history can we point to, who's attested outside the cult texts under investigation? That's what's really required as part of a true "historical Jesus" (i.e. ordinary human being) hypothesis (that plus something internal to the texts would be nice - e.g. "Paul" mentioning that "Cephas" had said something to Jesus, that kind of thing).

As I pointed out, the real comparison is to how religions in general get started. And the type of start-up I outlined is by far the most common, it seems to me. Person has visionary/mystical experiences, brings back a "message". That's overwhelmingly the general template of religion. The only exceptions I can think of offhand are early Buddhism and some elements of early Daoism (though not all, it turns out the "religious" Daoism elements were right there from the beginning). But really you could call Buddhism more of a philosophy in the ancient Greek sense, than a religion proper - it's only thought of as a religion now because so many religious-proper elements crept back into it over the years in Buddhism's migration across the East.

Plain as the nose on your face, that type of visionary start-up is what we have with "Paul" (and it looks like it could be what we have with "Paul"'s predecessors too, if we take seriously the absence of any avowed personal acquaintance between his predecessors and the Christ figure, in terms of any of them knowing the supposed Christ figure as a human being - which, curiously enough, is what the later, made-up idea of Apostolic Succession requires).

Toto

spin's comments were detailed and based on evidence. This is entirely uncalled for.

avi

Thanks Jay,

I do not share your opinion that Jesus was not regarded as a prophet.

a. Original documents may have been distorted to reflect post-Nicean changes to the religion;
b. Muslims consider JC as prophet, based upon?
c. Constantine evidently regarded both John and JC as equally significant, hence assignment of birthdates to summer and winter solstice's respectively.

avi

Juststeve

Toto:

Spin's post to Abe was snide and sarcastic. Your role as protector of the mythers prevents you from appreciating that. Mustn't draw parallels myther's don't like, and mustn't call them out when they act badly. It's Abe who has cause to be offended but from you not a word.

Steve

Toto

spin is not a mythicist. Just ask him. However sarcastic, his post contained arguments that speak to the issue. But I notice that when mythicists come up with actual arguments, you prefer to just insult them with comparisons to fringe scholarship.

Abe produced a post based on a logical error - that since he only knows about modern doomsday cults founded by actual people, and the version of Christianity in the gospels looks like a doomsday cult, that Jesus must therefore have been an actual person. What can one say about this twisted syllogism? I've gotten tired of trying to straighten Abe out.

Juststeve

Toto:

Your guilty of oversimplifying Abe's argument but never the less its good of you to try to straighten him out. How lucky we all are to have someone like you to straighten us out.

Steve

Toto

In what way have I oversimplified this argument?
Now I suspect that Abe might have misstated his own argument - he probably really meant to talk about the most probable explanation of the evidence. But that's not what he said.

You can search the archives if you care to, and see Abe's history here. Time after time, he posts some far fetched claim, and has to back down when he is challenged.

In the meantime, Steve has failed to back up his claims that spin was rude or arrogant or holds fringe views on Jewish apocalyptic thought in the first century, but there is only so much I can do.

ApostateAbe

spin, my objections to your criticisms are listed. If you would like to focus on only a few and leave out the rest, that would be better, in my opinion. It is always a big useless mess when debates exponentially expand into many different topics and balloons into countless one-liner points in every post.

• "Really? I mean because all your observed cases are X, then all cases are X? You still want to present that as an argument?"
  
  Yes. It is not as though it is impossible that Christianity had a beginning that had almost nothing in common with any sociological event that we have ever seen, but you can either go the explanation that is perfectly normal or the explanation that is spectacularly extraordinary. We go with the explanations that are expected given the laws and patterns. That is simply a very basic principle of all empirical inquiry. There are some people who apply the philosophy of postmodernism to history, and I knew that Toto was one of them, and I am beginning to realize that you are also one of them, at least when it comes to textual evidence. If so, then please let me know, because it would mean a very fundamental difference in the way the two of us reason, and I don't think we can possibly come to any agreement.
  
• "Not one of your doomsday prophets comes from a period close to the one you are trying to analyze. Your argument is based not on context, but modern themes projected into the past."
  
  My argument is about both. You need to make the best sense of the passages by looking at the context (immediate context is far better than distant context), and you need to test that the explanation is plausible given historical/sociological patterns. Why don't we believe the accounts of miracles? Well, it is in large part because we don't ever see miracles happen in the modern day. If you think that the sociological pattern of doomsday cults that exist in all cultures of the present day is not a pattern that should be extended to time and place of the beginning of Christianity, then maybe you should explain why.
  
• "Perhaps you lost track of what you were supposed to be talking about."
  
  No, I think you started off track of what I was supposed to be talking about, and you stayed off track. The other posters in the thread knew what I was talking about. You seemingly made a hasty perception of my argument based on the topic given in the first sentence.
• "You don't get to dictate how things go here. This is a dialectic."
  
  Well, it is generally good manners to focus on the topic of the original post of the thread. You introduced your own theory, which is related--at least you explain the same verses that I brought up. But, I got a little miffed when you completely ignored my argument except by saying I didn't have one. I think you should be explaining how your own theory is better than mine. This forum is filled with people who parade their pet theories, and it helps when they make the case of how their own theories compete.
  
• "Saying that the reference to 'birth pangs' has no explanatory power is empty rhetoric, as you misunderstand my comment. The birth pangs and related material help to show that the work in Mk 13 is of origin text not speech, which removes it from the mouth of Jesus and in the case of 1QH text which originates prior to the epoch of Jesus."
  
  I did not misunderstand your point, and my criticisms have equal applicability in light of your rephrasing. You go to a very different context to make sense of "birth pangs," when you can make perfect sense of it by examining the immediate context.
• "I'm demonstrating that you are starting with your hands tied. You make assumptions about the text which you have no reason to make. Somehow you extract a real Jesus from a figure in a text, a text which in the case of Mk 13 evinces redactional effort rather than an oral source."
  
  Sorry, what assumptions? I don't think my argument is significantly affected if Mark was very much redacted. Myth is myth.
  
• "Your making perfect sense equates to a form of naive literalism, ie you are bound for no clearly stated reason to try to make the text reflect some reality, when the text doesn't allow you to do so... That's your assertion. Naive literalism in any form doesn't make much of a theory."
  
  "Naive literalism" is something that we may associate with ideological or personal trust in all of the claims an author makes on the face. I do encourage interpreting written text literally most of the time (when there is no good reason to interpret it metaphorically, etc.), but I don't necessarily encourage believing it literally. Anyone can find bizarre interpretations for anything, but some interpretations are better than others. I generally think that the best explanation for any given textual evidence, because of its plausibility and explanatory power, involves interpreting the meaning based on what is most apparently on the face of it. Literalism, in that sense, is not naive. It is straighforwardly obvious and rational. So, if you disagree with what I said, "If we had no other way to make good sense of it, then that is what we would need to do. But, we can make perfect sense of it by looking at the immediate context--same document, same myth, same religion, same time," I think you are going to need to make in light of that point a better case for accepting explanations for evidence that are far removed from the document, time and religion of the evidence.
  
• "You're moving into new material. The central content of the OP was based on Mark 13. Why not try to deal with that first?"
  
  Jesus speaks of the "kingdom of God" all throughout the gospel of Mark, there are two passages in Mark where Jesus directly implies that the "kingdom of God" is new, Jesus closely associate the "kingdom of God" with the apocalypse, and Mark 13 is all about the apocalypse.
• "If you want to call centuries of tradition rough similarities rather than see that much of Mk 13 fits into a well recognized genre, then you aren't dealing with the context of the literature."
  
  Rough similarities are not all that is needed to conclude literary borrowing, nor is a shared genre, whatever that genre may be. Does your genre of fictional literature ever involve a character anything much like a doomsday cult leader? If so, that would really help.
• "Still shooting at the wrong thing. You haven't made it out of text. You are just assuming that you can get out. The problem that you have before you is an epistemological one. You don't seem to be able to show how you can turn text into history... There is nothing new in the material that you have offered as a means of showing that someone specific, who you claim must be Jesus, was responsible. You are trapped in text, pretending that you can get reality out of it... You can keep making crackpot theories until the cows come home that assume your conclusions, for you do assume that you can get history out of the literature. That is a conclusion that you need to demonstrate, but you don't seem to have the tools to help you, so you assume it."
  
  To find an example of how I turn text into history, see the summary of my argument that I wrote for you before. We find history in the text by finding the best explanations for the evidence of the text (not by placing blind trust in the claims of the text). I prefer Argument to the Best Explanation. I hope you are not implying that all text is useless for history. If you think we can get history from text, then please let me know of your methodology. If you do not think we can get history from text, then you can have the last word so I don't waste any more of my time. Thanks.

ApostateAbe

Yes. I think the members here have read enough of what I write that I very often discourage absolute certainty or absolute logic in matters of history. I kept it simple for spin, and I think he knows my meaning, too. The argument lends a lot of weight to a conclusion that follows the typical and common patterns, but of course there is still the possibility that Christianity somehow started out like nothing else we have ever seen.