GakuseiDon

deleted

ApostateAbe

OK, cool. Before we go one, can you please tell me what your tentative explanation is for the account of the baptism of Jesus?

ApostateAbe

Not the issue? For me, the issue is which explanation is the best explanation to cover the baptism of Jesus in Mark. Is the issue different for you, or am I not covering the stated issue well enough? What is the issue for you?

You say the story by Mark does not require much in the way of explanation beyond Mark's exaltation of Jesus. OK, we can and should expand the explanation to cover all of the gospel accounts, not just Mark. In Matthew, JtB said, "I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?" Since Matthew's JtB seems reluctant to baptize Jesus because Jesus is superior, my explanation for Mark also covers the account in Matthew. Again, my explanation is that Jesus was actually baptized by JtB, and Christians wanted to spin the history away from the belief that the baptizer is religiously superior to the baptizee.

"If there is some actual history here, why are the references to John in the gospels so disjointed and contradictory?"

That seems to be a non sequitur that follows only from the all-or-nothing historical paradigms of mythicists and normalskeptics. The accounts are contradictory in the details, especially with respect to the details that would be expected from myth littered with wishful thinking and religious interest. If we can explain much of it with the patterns of invention typically found in myth, then we also need to explain the elements that do not seem to follow those patterns of invention. And, we can do that by proposing a certain historical core to the story, as I already described. If you think that is not the best explanation, then you need to propose an alternative explanation that is even better. If it was all made up, then find an explanation that cover the details of the evidence better than the predominant explanation of the critical the scholarship. Hell, find an explanation that is half as good.

show_no_mercy

It was etiological. Christians at the time of Mark had been baptising for quite some time because the Jewish sect that they evolved from had been doing baptisms. That's why you have people like Paul still baptising. And by the time Mark wrote they didn't know why they were doing it. Mark comes along and says "It's because Jesus was baptised". But of course, Jesus is the most awesome, so he can't be subordinate to John.

JtB lived a generation (40 years) before the destruction of the 2nd temple, and was a good herald in the reimaged Elijah/Elisha herald-to-the-messiah cycle.

Of course, caveat time. None of this preculdes a historical Jesus from being baptised. All it means is that wherever baptism comes from, it doesn't start with Jesus, and the "embarrassment" (which would only be embarrassing to proto-orthodox Christians anyway) in no way necessitates baptism.

Toto

I thought you were trying to explain why John is so deferential to Jesus. How is the historical explanation better than the literary one?

Once Mark wrote his narrative, later editors (Matt, Luke, and John) put a different spin on it. But these later versions are not evidence that Mark was spinning a historical story. If anything, they would argue against the idea that the story was established history.

That's my point.

But the power of invention can easily explain anything.

Pure invention, or story telling, is an established part of human nature. Keeping accurate historical records, on the contrary, is not. Story telling can explain anything, including embarrassing details, local color, historical figures added as background, an evil villain who dies at the end, a hero who has to overcome adversity but prevails at the end.

What elements of the gospels do you think cannot be explained by human invention?

ApostateAbe

Yeah, you are right in the sense that story telling can explain anything. So can miracles. So can elaborate conspiracies. So can powerful outerspace aliens. I know that I say this time and again and it is probably very annoying by now, but what matters most is which explanation is the best. Story telling can explain anything in the gospels. That means it has considerable explanatory scope. You are at least on par with the Christians. Does it have greater explanatory power, greater plausibility, less ad hocness, and greater consistency? Explanatory power is an important one. The baptism stories show signs of the baptism being an embarrassment, yet the baptism is still included as though it is a known undeniable fact. My explanation has explanatory power for the extreme humility of JtB in Mark and the reluctance of JtB in Matthew. That answers your initial question, by the way.

Toto

Rubbish. There is lots of evidence of storytelling all around you. The evidence for miracles and outerspace aliens is lacking, and the evidence for powerful conspiracies is never there (because the conspiracy removed it and also covered its tracks too well.)

Yes, especially when you trace all of the elements of the gospel to reworking the Hebrew Scriptures.

But that's just it - Mark is not embarrassed. Extreme humility is a plot device, much more likely to have been made up than observed. Matthew reflects a different theological stance in which the baptism for removal of sin might be embarrassing, but this doesn't show a historical antecedent, just that he was working from Mark's story (as we know from the large amount of copying that he did.)

ApostateAbe

Cool, thanks. When you find problems in someone else's model, those problems are not so relevant if you can't supply your own better explanation. But, you have supplied an alternative explanation, and I appreciate it.

If I were to find a major problem with your model, I think it would be the matter of plausibility. You say that these people didn't know why they were doing baptisms, which is certainly not an intuitive thing to suspect. Would we not expect that a bizarre ritual would maintain some sort of justification in the process of passing the tradition along? Did they not have sermons or incantations to accompany such a tradition, to underlie its purpose? Or, did they really baptize themselves for no conscious reason at all? Can you find any analogues within history or the present day where nobody has an idea why a tradition exists, enough to necessitate an elaborate origins story? If you can, then that takes care of the problem of plausibility--there are plenty of rituals that I can not relate to.

You previously said that JtB was apparently insanely popular. Would it be expected, then, that proto-Christians would claim that Jesus was baptized by JtB? He didn't need to be baptized by JtB. To fulfill your model, he could have been baptized by anyone, not a serious rival. This would be a problem of explanatory power. In the gospel of Luke, that is what happens--Jesus is baptized by an anonymous person, not John (he was in jail at the time). In the gospel of John, there is mention of John the Baptist and his deference to Jesus, but no mention of the baptism at all! Do you think some sects of Christians changed their story after they realized that the baptism of Jesus was embarrassing? That would solve the problem, but is it expected that Christians would invent a story that was initially embarrassing? Isn't it more expected that Christians would incorporate it into their accounts if it is already a well-known fact?
Jesus, that analogy is hard to follow. If you tell me it is important, then I will put more time into it and try to parse it out.
We all agree that baptisms preceded Christianity. In my model, the original Christian motive for baptisms would become extraneous only after the doctrine of sacrificial atonement, which developed after the death of Jesus. You say the very first Christians should have ditched it, but the very first Christians were Jesus and his entourage of disciples. To figure out why Christians didn't abandon the practice, you might try to figure out why baptism is still being practiced. If you were to ask Christians, they would likely claim that it is a symbol for the cleansing of sin with the death and resurrection of Christ, an ad hoc doctrine to be sure, not so far from your own model. I could have just made that up, but it actually roughly approximates the justifications inferred in Romans 6:4, Collosians 2:12 and 1 Peter 3:21.
John the baptist fulfills the prophecy (any sort of predecessor can), and the gospels most certainly did portray JtB as the "messenger" of prophecy. The baptism itself doesn't seem to have much to do with the prophecy. The prophecy would be "fulfilled" regardless.

mountainman

And to highlight the case for the removal of evidence we only need look at the 4th century. The Emperor or Pontifex Maximus in the first place had recourse to the political tool known as "Memoriae damnatio" and it is a fact that Constantine used it at least 4 times.

We have the orders for the immediate destruction of the books authored by certain specific people (Porphyry and the "Porphyrian" Arius), orders that anyone found preserving said evidence was to be immediately executed by beheading, and orders for the soldiers to operate search and destroy missions for these books.

At the end of the 4th century the destruction of the literary evidence of antiquity in the library of Alexandria, which if preserved would reveal an embarrassing silence on Constantine's Jesus. This was not to the liking of the christian orthodoxy, and their man in Alexandria, the militant thug and murdering bishop Cyril undertood the deed.

Cyril also undertood the task of refuting the books of Emperor Julian who had written "Against the Christains". Other assignments for Cyril included heaping anathemas and refutations upon Nestorius, the ex-Archbishop of the City of Constantine, for being too liberal and objective in the scope of his reporting on all the different christian sects operative among the "heretics".

The christian victors twisted their history.
They rubbed the resistance out.
They painted Arius as another "christian".


Yes, its just a straightforward fabrication from the LXX.

It occurs to me that it would be interesting to discuss the relationship between the position of the mythicists and the position of the gnostics to see what common ground exists. In what sense might it be correct to see the earliest mythicists as the gnostics?

Secondly, what is the relationship between the history of the gnostics who authored the "Gnostic Gospels and Acts, etc" and the history of the Mythicism, as much as it may be related to the Greek New Testament.

aa5874

That is not true at all. It does NOT say that an anoymous person baptized Jesus.

The author of gLuke simply mentioned the arrest of John the Baptist before he mentioned the baptism of Jesus in his story.

In gJohn's story, both John the Baptist and the disciples of Jesus were baptizing people.
John 3.22-23