lpetrich

As to Lord Raglan's Mythic-Hero scale, it's true that Augustus Caesar is one of the highest-scoring well-documented people, but he scores only around 10. And he scores very high by the standards of well-documented heroes.

However, Jesus Christ scores around 19, way up there alongside Oedipus, Hercules, Perseus, Romulus, Zeus, Moses, Krishna, the Buddha, etc. And he even fits my proposed addition: prophecy fulfillment, though Augustus and Alexander the Great also allegedly fulfilled prophecies.

So if there was a historical Jesus Christ, the Gospels' accounts of him are so encrusted with mythology that they are close to useless for telling what he was like.

Zeichman

Sure, "19" if you conflate all the canonical gospels and Paul. This is neither a helpful nor an interesting approach to the question, since it assumes an unrealistic degree of homogeneity among early Christians. What do you get when you take Q, Thomas, Mark, or Paul on their own? These are among the earliest surviving sources and are (presumably) independent of each other with the exception of aspects of Thomas. Regardless, I would seriously question the usefulness of the Raglan scale.

gurugeorge

Actually I agree. What the Raglan scale does is show the mythical nature of the settled Jesus of the NT Canon taken as a whole, but (non-fundie type) scholars generally don't doubt that that Jesus is a heavily mythologised entity.

The problem is to see whether behind that Catholic myth is just an earlier, simpler kind of myth (or perhaps several of them), or a man (or perhaps several).

dog-on

Though one can "possess the spirit" through and as a result of studying the scriptures...

Clivedurdle

Please google Derren Brown.

gurugeorge

I don't know, can one? I guess we'd have to be scholars and know the languages, common usages, diachronic and synchronic usage in spiritual contexts at different times and places, etc., to dig deeper.

But I hope I've shown it's not just an assumption that Paul was talking about visionary experience. Given the wealth of pretty woo-woo sounding things he says at fairly crucial points, it's a viable way of looking at what he's talking about. (Particularly in view of the quote I commented on, where he's justifying his Apostleship by first, talking about his Jewishness, then talking about his hardships in spreading the gospel, then talking about his visionary experiences.)

It's also backed up by the Kerygmata Petrou, which has Peter arguing with Simon Magus who (according to standard scholarship, so far as I can tell) stands for Paul (but, according to scholarship, only in this instance, as a theological foil) and Simon Magus justifying his apostleship on grounds of visionary experience.

(I'm following a "standard" view of Paul here, but for myself I like Detering's argument that the above puzzling identification, and some other bits and pieces of evidence, show that "Paul" was "Simon Magus", in reality a certain Samaritan called Simon, nicknamed Atomos ("Shorty" - the Greek equivalent of "Paulus") mentioned briefly by Josephus, and that the equation of Saul=Paul was a Judaizing of Simon in order to accomodate the man who had actually originally done a lot to spread something called "Christianity", and had been for various reasons demonized by the Jewish branch of it, back into the "fold" of orthodoxy. A man who was Marcion's teacher, as well as grand-teacher of Valentinus, and glimmerings of whose essentially proto-Gnostic Christianity we still see flashing here and there in the "Epistles". The orthodoxy couldn't wipe him out of history because he had been tremendously important in starting it off, and some of his writings were popular and in circulation. What they did instead was "harmonize" him into the story of Acts, and have what had been a blazing row between him and the Jewish Christians, evidence of the intensity of which remains in the Kerygmata and pseudo-Clementines, sanitized as a reconciliation between Peter and Paul in Acts. And Simon's visionary experience is sanitized as the "conversion on the road to Damascus".)

dog-on

I'm with you re: Detering

Just see no need for hocus pocus when I'm told, day in and day out that, basically, one finds Jesus through the scriptures. I see no reason to give anymore credence to claims of actual "visionary" experiences then I will give to tele-vangelists claims about what "the Lord" supposedly said last night...

gurugeorge

That's because as soon as the "hocus pocus" was wiped out of Christianity, all it had to rely on was the "memetic" aspects, with a closely-guarded corner allowed for mysticism (which is something different again from "hocus pocus"), so long as mystics toed the line doctrinally.

Many of the other religions on the world have always unproblematically retained their "hocus pocus" aspect (which is one of the things that has attracted Westerners to them from the 60s onwards). I recently got a lift from Sufi taxi driver in London whose family has done spiritual healing in the name of Allah for generations; most Daoism in China involves ritual magic, talismanic magic, etc.; Hinduism is full of it; Tibetan Buddhism (which copies classical Indian Buddhism at its height) involves ritual magic and communication with enlightened "gods"; and even in the most austere form of Buddhism, Theravada, in Thailand, specialist monks will do trance divinations for local villlagers, etc. Most other religions have had long standing traditions where the "knacks" of getting into mystical states or doing guided lucid dreaming or "astral travel" or divination or oracle-type stuff have been passed on through the generations. Not so with Christianity - hence the "gap" for that is filled with con artistry and hogwash nowadays.

The only Christians today who are probably anything like those original ones are the some of the black church types who do speaking in tongues, ecstatic trances, "laying on of hands" type healing, etc. Also the hardcore Christians mystics in some of the religious orders, on the mystical side (by mysticism I mean experiences of union with, or rather non-difference from, the Universe, or whatever you think of as the Absolute).

The true carrier for the "hocus pocus" side of Christianity (as also the pagan versions of these things - Greek magic, neo-Platonic Theurgy, Hermetica, etc.) was the stream of thought and practice nowadays called "Western Esotericism" (which is beginning to get some serious academic attention), but because it was initially heavily suppressed and persecuted with the triumph of orthodoxy, it was too fragmented to keep up sustained traditions where people could hand on the "knacks" of these things, hence it degenerated into either mere philosophical speculation or a game for rich dilettantes.

Clivedurdle

The charismatics are all over the place - catholicism, elim, assemblies of god, alpha, teen challenge....

I can still speak in tongues - learned trick - many very senior clergy do now, as much fun as ouija and ideomatic effects!

In anthropology it is normal to look at allegedly primitive peoples and use that to work out what probably happened in the past - the charismatics are the equivalent of ceolocanths!

And when we are in the world of myth, of woo woo, of the gnostic, is it not a good idea to use the techniques designed to study that world?


What was that about virgin births and godmen and saviours and rising from the dead and bread into bodies and wine into blood again?

gurugeorge

I think you mean "ideomotor". Yes, people (especially bookworms and academics) don't realise how easy it is to do some of these things with a bit of practice, or somebody to pass on the "knack". Even serious mystical experience isn't that hard to get (I'd say a solid 3 month retreat would probably sort anybody out).

I take a Dennettian view of it. In the same way as Dennett says the route to understanding the mind is "heterophenomenology" (i.e. take seriously peoples' reports of how it really seems to them, and design experiments round that to find out how it really is), I think the route to understanding religion is to take seriously peoples' reports of their religious experience. Yes, of course, from a rationalist, materialistic standpoint, it's all brain tricks and body tricks, but taking the seemings seriously makes the religious "thing" much more understandable, and you run less risk of making the mistake of calling 70% of people idiots just because they believe something you think can't be experienced because you don't believe it exists. It may not be experienced, but it may very strongly seem to be experienced, and understandably that's good enough for most people to convince them. To convince them otherwise, you have to do the same thing illusion experiments do re. consciousness - show them the wizard behind the curtain, show them what's really going on.

i.e., it's no good giving somebody who's seen and spoken to God just as clearly as they see and speak to you philosophical reasons why God doesn't exist, and then mocking them for being so dumb as to believe God exists; you have to show them how a seeming experience of talking to God can arise.