Robert Tulip

What people subsequently came to believe does not really help us in the effort to reconstruct the motives and intentions and identities of the authors of the Gospels. We should not accept Christian dogma on face value that the Gospel authors were Jesus Literalists, or that they thought miracles actually occurred. The Gospels themselves contain strong hints that this conventional reading is just wrong.

The massive upheaval between the alleged time of Christ and the production of the Gospels included the Roman invasion and destruction of Jerusalem. The traumatic context meant it suited believers in the second century to promulgate a miraculous popular faith. The question here is how these false beliefs plausibly arose in terms of historical evolution.

The miraculous ideas in the Gospels originated among mystery cults (and I am not using cult in a pejorative sense). They told stories to convey theological messages. The stories that became popular are the ones that were catchy, as we see with the mass emotional appeal of popular music today. The politicians of the church then used the criterion of popularity to swing the guns of mass opinion against the isolated Gnostics and purge them and their ideas. So mystical ideas such as cross and resurrection became bastardised and corrupted into popular simple historical miracle stories.

It is all rather tragically similar to the historical evolution of the Russian Revolution. Stalin constructed the myth of Lenin and used it to purge the old Bolsheviks, so that the Communist Party of the 1940s bore little resemblance to the Bolshevik movement of 1917. But the 'airbrushing' conducted by early Christians of their Gnostic origins was far more successful than Stalin's efforts to rewrite history, since the big lies of Christianity are still widely believed today.

The best heuristic for this analysis is Orwell's dictum in 1984 - "who controls the present controls the past." The orthodox efforts to find and destroy all Gnostic material were highly successful, such that our efforts today to understand how the Gospels really came into existence require a forensic study of the remaining cryptic clues in the extant texts. The original voices are mainly heard through the distorting lens of canonical censorship. It seems the authors were smarter than their critics, and left enough clues for their real meaning to be rediscovered.

Iskander

There was a religious Jewish man known to us as Jesus who lived in the land of Israel some 2000 years ago

He become in some way or another an important public figure preaching repentance to bring forth the expected messiah

Jesus was executed by the Romans as a political enemy

The Jesus movement was one of several Jewish sects

Around 90 AD the Jewish-Jesus sect was made unwelcome in Judaism

The expelled Jewish Christians developed away from Judaism.

Is there a place in this outline for your OP?

Chili

All is allegory unless otherwise noted as in John 6:56 where "my body is real food and my blood is real drink."

The words "real" here mean that food and drink is the body and blood of Christ (except the alcohol added maybe).

Robert Tulip

Thank you Iskander, I appreciate your interest. The outline you have presented probably represents in large part the most widely accepted consensus view among rational students of these matters. But it has several terminal stumbling blocks.

The Historical Jesus story has no rational place for the miraculous, so must find some other explanation for the miracle stories which are presented as central to the Gospels. Apart from the resurrection the miracles of Christ are entirely absent from Paul’s epistles, justifying an immediate hermeneutic of suspicion regarding their provenance. If Jesus actually lived, the miracle stories would be an overlay on actual memory.

It is more plausible against the evidence to think of the relation between story and miracles the other way round: the miraculous Jesus Christ as eternal logos and divine pre-existent spirit was a mystery idea with wide but secret currency at the turn of the common era, reflecting the idea of divine king of the world as anointed saviour, in Greek Christ Jesus. The process of word becoming flesh described by John most plausibly meant the myth was historized, not that the history was mythologised.

The emergence of the Christ story occurred in the context of a shared history post destruction of the temple in 70 AD. This history was primarily one of trauma, in which the Romans had crucified many. The healing process required a psychological displacement of the extreme cruelty experienced by the Jews in the Roman War, in which Josephus says the Romans crucified Jews until they ran out of wood. The mystical Christ therefore served as one for all (1 Peter 3:18, 2 Corinthians 5:14, , a symbolic sacrificial king who was able to represent the sins of the world in place of the actual horrific memory of mass slaughter.

The Jesus story brought together common experience into an archetype, becoming more real as recovered memory in religious imagination as the actual memories faded. The absence of any evidence that such a man as Jesus actually lived, either in Josephus or Philo or any other extra-Biblical sources, suggests the story of Christ originated as an imaginative fable, not as embroidery of any actual personal memory.

This mythic basis of the Christ story is further supported by the claimed existence of Christian groups around the Roman Empire in the first century, as attested by Paul. Accepting the conventional timing of Paul’s Epistles for argument’s sake, it is bizarre that a carpenter from Nazareth would have become the actual object of such widespread cultic ritual and debate about his identity.

The primary object of worship was the eternal Christ, not the man of Nazareth (a place which is not mentioned by Paul partly because the town did not then exist). One of the functions of the miracle stories was to explain the rapid implausible spread of the ‘man from Galilee’ dogma, with the suggestion that the explosive geographical growth arose from word of mouth about the feeding of the multitude, walking on water and rising from the dead. Of course this is all impossible, unless you apply the Deus ex machina that to God all things are possible by miracle.

My view is that the miracles came first, as heroic myth, and were steadily popularised into the Nazareth story, which itself is just a fig leaf for the real identity of Christ as representing the Gnostic Nazarene sect, wich in turn could not be mentioned because it was proscribed by Rome for its Gnostic rebel views.

The death and resurrection miracle is a very ancient fertility cult, with the annual turn of the seasons from winter to spring celebrated with the ritual death and return of the king. This annual myth feeds into a much bigger story of time, with the Christ alpha omega myth matching directly to the ancient observation of precession of the equinoxes, a story encoded in the loaves and fishes miracle.

Basically, convention has the causality backwards with its logic of man becoming god as Jesus was deified as Christ. The more logical explanation is that god became man as the ideal Christ was historized as Jesus. Jesus Christ started off as a myth, who was then enfleshed in story. Christ did not exist so the early church had to invent him.

The Gospels were a weapon of war against Rome, developed at a time when physical warfare was not possible in the context of catastrophic and humiliating military defeat. Spiritual warfare required the subtle removal of Rome’s moral legitimacy, through the popular replacement of Caesar by Christ as Lord and Saviour, within an expedient tactical assertion of imperial loyalty. Miracle stories formed an important part of this strategic Christian struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Empire.

Chili

You are so right in everything you write, but let me tell you first that it does not take long to run out of wood in the desert, and that is why I believe they would feed so-called Christian to the stork high up on a pole that they used over and over again. This so created the "storks bring babies" legend that still is very popular where I come from today.

Yes, and I think Paul was the walking and talking evidence of the miracles-in-motion among men of good will.

There is nothing cruel about it if you see it as comedy, and if you read it without prejudice you will find that those who were crucified (or fed to the stork) were all volunteers who stood convicted by the Jews under Jewish law only.

And yes, it is all imaginative by intent, wherein all that exists in the imagination must exist in reality as well, or we, as humans, can not have an image of that as prior to nature conceived in the soul from where it shimmers to attract the suffering servent with noble ideas of his own. These would be the so called Christians, I suppose, who were willing to sacrifice their body to this ideal instead of just their human condition that was enslaved to this idol much like opium addicts are today.

The real problem is that Jesus was not a carpenter, but only was said to be the carpenters son, to point at Joseph's sinfullness in that carpenters are known to make many things, and since all that is made is made in sin because the primary of all our actions are prior to us from the divine it is called 'in sin' created as co-creator with God without giving credit where credit is due (and here is that prior to nature thing in us again as final event).

The fact that he had 12 shepherds-on-the-go is evidence that he was not a carpenter as they represent 12 telec visions shining on him that Plato called Forms and Aristotle called Ousia's that bring the Final Form also known as Parousia about, wherein while searching for destiny he goes from glow-to-glow hoping to find yet another shine he actually finds himself at the bottom of this demiurge event to there get the glow now on himself in answer to the meaning of life as it is.

This image is real in the gospels where they were 'taking turns' herding sheep in the middle of a midwinter night, to say that something is seriously wrong wherein so now ousia's as strongholds of Joseph-the-Jew are on-the-run.

Simple reading should tell you that with no mystery about it all all, except in the minds of gawkers maybe who are just begging for squawkers to lead them astray and who eventually will be fed to the storks by the Romans who would end their suffering as a favor to them (cf the exlamations made from the cross wherein "it is finished!" is opposite to "where did you go?"

So it is a courage thing, really, wherein shepherds are shought, or ranchers maybe, who understand that the herd mentality is greater than that of the cowboy himself.