Originally Posted by Chili

Yes but Mark, regardless of how 'first' he is claimed to be, is a tragedy instead of a comedy in that God had 'forsaken' Jesus as the [Galilean] suffering servant and that is what caused him to go back to Galilee for more suffering until he died [after 40 some years] nonetheless.

Originally Posted by ChristMyth

Jesus was different. He was raised as a spiritual body, never to see death again...

Originally Posted by Solo

You are right if you are trying to convey that Mark's gospel is cyclical. The young man in the empty tomb is a Pauline baptist attempting to initiate the Nazarene Jesus following into his death (as per Rom 6:3-6).

Ok, let's see if I can make sense of this. First, some people are so frightened by medical labels that they will be prevented by them from processing information about their bearers any further. You are not one of them - good. The bipolar disorder strikes people who live with intensity; we are extreme-mood junkies. We go through the glories of heaven and experience grandeur which eludes other people. The problem is that we are expelled from the feeling of the paradisiac magnificence by the chemistry of our brain. It is not a sustainable MO, so to speak. Worse, we look like total idiots when we are expelled from paradise. God places at the garden the cherubim and a flaming sword which turns every which way to guard the way to the tree of life. Meaning: what lives in heaven must come down back to earth, and to ensure the balance is kept one comes back through hell (or 'psychotic annihilation' as the psychiatrists call it). If you ever met someone who goes through that phase, you know instantly hat I mean by 'total idiots'. The story of Fall has been known since Babylonia, because the attempted 'fusion' with God(s), has been with a segment of the human population ever since the dawn of civilization. Mark just re-writes the story as the earthly fate of the sublime Spirit, which has to die in order that we (the manics) may live - a life. Some manics learn this lesson and calm down - i.e. resist the sirens in their right brain when they call to get high; some don't and they stay in the Samsara of heavenly vistas crash-landing in mess and chaos. Is this in any way understandable ? Best, Jiri

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi Mountainman,

Besides the five, six or seven unrecognized gospel appearances and the one in Acts of Peter, we should add the probable incognito appearance of Jesus found in Justin Martyr's Trypho:

Neil Godfrey has a nice discussion of the Emmaus appearance on his Vridar Blog.

My thinking on this goes along the lines of what you suggested in your posts about there being a limited literary selection of motifs to choose from.

We should keep in mind that incognito divinities was pretty much the standard device, beside dreams, in which the ancient Gods related to mortals.

For example, in book 22 of the Iliad, Athena tricks Hector into fighting Achilles by disguising herself as Hector's brother, Deiphobus:



Zeus, in fathering Hercules, disguised himself as Alcmena's husband, Amphitryon, according to Apollodorus', Library (book 2.4.8)


Probably the most well known example is Dionysius in Euripides' Bacchae:



Later the guards of King Pentheus capture him and bring him to Pentheus:


Again in the story of Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian Pirates as told by Hyginus in his Fabulae, he appears in disguise.



We find two incognito Gods in the story of Baucis and Philemon in Book eight of Ovid's Metamorphoss:


The Egyptian Goddess Isis also appears in disguise when she comes to Biblos to rescue Osiris.



Apparently, the gospel writings were following the standard "Incognito God" ancient literary formula for God-Mortal interaction.

There are two important things to note: the contradiction between the form (Incognito God) and plot (Resurrection) and the multitude of Incognito God variations used.

First, while incognito gods generally makes sense in mythological literature, it does not really make sense in the gospels. The God Jesus is not appearing to trick anybody into doing anything, he is there simply to teach. Thus, there appears to be no point to the disguise. The disguise is just there because it is part of the standard formula of Gods interacting with people on Earth.

We can find another, similar plot-form contradiction in literary history. Samuel Richardson, in 1740, wrote a novel called "Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded." While the novel was the hit literary event of the year, it divided England into " Pro Pamela" and "anti-Pamela" camps. Henry Fielding came out with the satire "Shamela" the following year, making fun of the novel.

One of the major problems with the book is that it uses an "epistolary" form. Richardson had apparently copied the form James Howell's "Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae written in the previous century. Richardson tells his story through a set of letters written by the main character, a young servant named Pamela, to her parents. She is writing to her parents about how her master/employer, "Mr. B." is trying to seduce her. She uses extreme detail in describing every thing that is happening to her and her feelings about them. This is fine and reasonable, but Pamela soon gets kidnapped and imprisoned by her employer. At this point, Pamela continues to write her letters home, but obviously she cannot send them. A more perceptive author would have abandoned the epistolary form, realizing the that any real prisoner under such circumstances could not send letters and wouldn't even be given any paper or pen to write them. Undaunted by the problem, Richardson sticks to his chosen epistolary form, and obsessively has Pamela write how she has managed to hide her letters and get paper and pen to write them. The letters to her parents suddenly change into a "journal" that she is keeping. This really doesn't solve the fundamental contradiction that her employer can not stop her from writing over 150 pages describing how he has kidnapped her, holding her prisoner and is planning on taking away her "virtue".

Richardson had apparently decided to adopt the pattern of the epistolary novel and did not abandon it, even when it made no sense because of his plot. This plot-form contradiction makes something that the author intended as serious seem quite ridiculous. In this way he is in the same situation, I believe, as the gospel writers who chose the God incognito form to prove Jesus had become a God after death. The plot of the Jesus story makes his being in disguise when he is trying to prove that he is really the guy who got killed a few days ago, appear quite ridiculous.

The writers, prisoners of their time, like Richardson, could not see the contradiction and could not solve the problem by changing the accepted form that they had to work with.

I should note that Richardson did understand that something was amiss by all the criticism he received. He published some 15 editions of "Pamela" over the next 12 years, making significant changes to every single one. Kathleen Hudgins notes, "For example, in response to the anonymously written Pamela Censured, Richardson made “nearly a thousand changes…to the text in the fifth edition” (Keymer and Sabor 37)"

Besides the awkwardness of the contradiction between plot (Jesus proving himself returned from the dead) and form (Incognito God), there is a second important point. The post resurrection incognito forms are all quite different:



While all these scenes suggest the motif of an "Incognito God," they are all quite different in their use of different variations of that motif. This reminds me of the style of Fred Astaire's dancing. He blended together many different well known styles of his day to create his own. In the movie "Swing Time" (Stevens, 1936), there is an hilarious explicit reference to the way he mixed up the dances.

Astaire, after meeting and annoying Ginger Rogers, has followed her to the dance school where she works as an instructor. He signs up for a free lesson and the dancing school owner assigns Ginger to him. She is upset when the school owner brings him over, because she knows that he signed up for the lesson just to meet her.



In the same way, the gospel writers take a little of each of the Incognito God stories and adapt them to Jesus.

Originally Posted by Transient

and the transfiguration was him hopping into his tardis.

Originally Posted by mountainman

Hi Philosopher Jay.

Brilliant! That the gospel writers take a little of each of the Incognito God stories and adapt them to Jesus appears to "fit the bill" as they say rather well.

I also like the way you always manage to fit in parallel examples of more contemporary genre to encourage lateral thinking. The idea of a dénouement involving the Incognito God is an excellent improvement to my first reply to your original question. Many writers brought the unknown god, or the Incognito God into their works or --- "at the end of their works (?) ". Do many still do this?

Thanks also for the many links (which I am now about to explore) and I will leave you with one last question provisionally based on the notion that the concept of the resurrected jesus (on walkabout around the imperial planet) has been cloned (somehow) from the Incognito God. Does the following citation assist this argument?

Best wishes,


Fred Flintstone


PS: Also, there may be some allusions to the Unknown God all through "The Shepherd of Hermas" (although Its been quite a while since i read it)

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

I think the claim about the "unknown God" just shows that the early Christians were eager to make their God acceptable to Greeks and Romans however they could. They weren't so hung up on the ideological purity of their product, but just in selling the product. We can also see the adaptation of the Incognito God story elements into the Jesus story as another way to make the religion more familiar to the Greco-Roman population and therefore easier to accept.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi Mountainman,

Thanks for the kind comment.

I think the claim about the "unknown God" just shows that the early Christians were eager to make their God acceptable to Greeks and Romans however they could. They weren't so hung up on the ideological purity of their product, but just in selling the product. We can also see the adaptation of the Incognito God story elements into the Jesus story as another way to make the religion more familiar to the Greco-Roman population and therefore easier to accept.