Robert Tulip

How then, Roger, do you explain 2 John 1:7? "many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world."

Only a contorted rationalization can make "Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh" mean something different from "Jesus of Nazareth existed."

Who are these "many" whom the writer of John's epistle feels compelled to attack as Satanists?

Nazareth itself did not exist at the time of Pilate. The concept "Jesus of Nazareth" is code for "Jesus the Nazarene", a veiled reference to the proscribed Nazirite secret society and its imaginary hero.

Explaining the construction of the Christ myth is the most fascinating psychological and political forensic problem in all human history, not least because honest research is systematically blindsided by the faithful.

Roger Pearse

The majority of this post doesn't seem to be addressing the same argument, so needs no reply from me. But one sentence seems worth querying:

I wonder whether we know this? Isn't this view sufficiently unusual to be associated with a specific figure, namely Euhemerus? (I have not researched it, so don't know).

And I think perhaps the claim made here is that the Greeks just accepted their own myths? Because this is not always so either. The Greeks also had rationalistic tendencies towards their myths; see, for instance, Palaephatus, Peri Apiston. (I have only seen a few pages from the Google Books preview, here).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

This would seem to be a reference to docetism, the idea that Jesus had a phantasmal body. You will find Ignatius writing against it, so it is plainly a very early heresy. The reason that it appealed, as I indicated above, is that it gave the heretic an excuse to sidestep the pagan jeer that Jesus was crucified.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Iskander

Thank you, it is a pleasure

Docetism was an interpretation of the living man who was preaching, eating and so forth. Docetism was defining the humanity of Jesus as something not really belonging to this world.

Jesus was for the orthodox both fully man and fully god.

Others took the view that 'What you see is what you get', that is Jesus was only a man adopted by god

Robert Tulip

Docetism, another word for early Gnosticism, "appealed" for far deeper reasons than some jinking sidestep. Jesus as "phantasmal" coheres with a range of mythic tales, such as the virgin birth, the resurrection, miracles, eternal pre-existence, Jesse's Branch and cosmic status as alpha and omega, all of which are plainly invented and unhistorical. The cross is spiritual, conveying the message that the divine is revealed in the things reviled by the world. Far more plausible than any historicist construction is that all these spiritual visions came first, and they were then popularised and simplified through the Gospel story of Nazareth etc.

Far from a 'heresy', the mythicist idea of Jesus Christ as pure spirit is the coherent origin of the historical fiction that became the universal church dogma. The obliteration of this original Gnostic story was comprehensive. Hiding texts promoting Gnostic faith was a capital crime under the Christian emperors.

The spiritual (ie mythical) Jesus is far and away the primary focus of Paul, who neglects to mention miracles, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee or Jerusalem as having any connection with the supposed earthly Jesus, or to use the normal reference to the work of a founder by saying 'as Jesus taught'. The Paul-Jesus relation is less Stalin-Lenin and more Tolkein-Frodo.

The Historical Jesus is a Big Lie. Its cultural persistence in a scientific age, after we have refuted its associated flat earth and creationist dogmas, illustrates the emotional resonance of the myth of a personal saviour.

Roger Pearse

The sidestep is documented in Tertullian De Carne Christi 5. Can you document from ancient sources any of your claims about docetism?

I always understood that gnostics were docetic, but not all docetists were gnostics. The chronology is wrong for it to be otherwise.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Chili

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Robert Tulip

Thank you Roger for drawing attention to Tertullian, the father of Latin theology, but you do exaggerate in asserting he “documents” any sidestep regarding the Historical Jesus. Tertullian rather provides more just another embarrassing example of the ridiculous ‘criterion of embarrassment.’ This text you have mentioned from “On The Flesh of Christ” includes his most famous statement, although generally seen as a misquote. At 5.4 Tertullian writes “the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.” This produced the renowned mistranslation “I believe because it is absurd.” Hence Voltaire's prescient line 'believing absurdity permits atrocity.'

I do not like Tertullian, and have disliked him since reading feminist critiques of his patriarchal misogynist view that woman is the devil’s gateway - http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0402.htm

Looking at this chapter you have cited, http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/...#P9316_2557561 we find gross failures of logic, simply assuming what it seeks to prove, that Jesus was an actual person. It is far from your claim of any ‘documented sidestep’. Like Origen, Tertullian was one of those fervent useful idiots who served curial propaganda by living long enough after the purported time of Jesus to be sucked in to the false belief that the Gospels were history rather than fiction. His honesty and piety in gross delusion served the church admirably.

To get a sense of how impossible it is to engage with Tertullian rationally, he says at 5.8 “if His flesh with its sufferings was fictitious, for the same reason was the Spirit false with all its powers.” As with many statements of early dogmatists, this one does not improve on repeated reading, but looks even weirder and more illogical. The Spirit is not like the flesh as Tertullian asserts. Rather, the spirit is a product of cultural imagination, ritual and myth. The flesh is material while the spirit is ideal. If the flesh of Christ was fictitious (as any modern fiction is fiction) it in no way implies that “the Spirit is false with all its powers”. This is just over the top argument by assertion.

Shakespeare invented his characters, but they remain spiritually powerful. Their spirit is not false. Virgil did not really show Dante the way to hell, but this imaginary character is spiritually powerful. Dmitri Karamazov, Milton’s Satan, Wednesday in Gaiman’s American Gods, all are fictional but spiritually powerful. Tertullian is just talking rubbish with his purported logic of a refutation of Docetic Gnosticism. But really, such imaginative leaps are typical of Christians.I recommend you read Jesus Neither God Nor Man by Earl Doherty to explore the Docetic interpretation of Paul as interpreting Christ as Spirit not flesh. Also, The Jesus Mysteries by Freke and Gandy explores this problem. It is a hard problem, because the destruction of non-orthodox literature was so thorough. Recall we only have some meagre quantity of late Gnostic literature because it was buried in the desert by monks at the far southern fringe of empire while Roman legions advanced on a mission to find and destroy. The rest of Gnostic literature was all burnt by imperial edict and none has been found.

We have no early Gnostic literature except what the Gnostics were able to surreptitiously smuggle into the Bible. Luckily there is a lot of that, especially in the apocalypse. As Elaine Pagels has argued in The Gnostic Paul, Paul’s epistles speak at two levels, an overt level for the hylic fools and a covert level for the pneumatic wise.

In the Gospels, we find the key Gnostic trope expressed in Luke 8:10 “, "To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the rest in parables; that 'seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.'” This statement, repeated in various forms in all four gospels, indicates the original Gnostic focus of Christianity in salvation by knowledge, contrary to the orthodox mass appeal doctrine of salvation by belief alone which later overcame the true faith of knowledge.

The Nazirite Watchers formed a secret Gnostic society with Buddhist links. Their inner circle was Gnostic (knowing the mysteries of God, as Luke puts it). The public texts were all parables, including presumably the allegorical parable of the very existence of Jesus. This core doctrine was not suitable for a mass movement, and was therefore revised in John’s epistles, as I quoted earlier. Similarly, the original 'Jesus the Nazirite' had to be hastily revised to escape persecution and suppression, through the handy device of the invention of the Potemkin village of Nazareth. I don’t believe that we have clear information on the chronology. The Gnostics included secret societies with very ancient roots linking them to international networks of spiritual wisdom, for example through the Buddhist Theraputta missionaries in Alexandria. The Pythagoreans and others emphasised oral transmission of teachings.

And the term Docetist is highly ambiguous, having been poisoned by dogmatic liars and fools. At core, docetic means that Jesus Christ only seemed to live on earth as a flesh and blood human being. This idea could either mean that Jesus actually lived but his physical existence was that of a ghost, or that Jesus did not actually live, and the claim that he did is based on people taking the false appearance of the Gospels for historical reality. The latter accords with Gnostic theology, while the former is a hylic corruption. This distinction between the way of seeming and the way of being goes back to Plato and Parmenides, as referenced in the Gospel mention of Bar Timaeus the blind man, allegorically suggesting that Greek Philosophy (Timaeus) needs to have faith in Christ in order to gain sight.

Roger Pearse

No doubt. The point, of course, was to give an ancient source for what I said. You objected to my statement; so I asked...

From which I can only infer that you have no idea whether any ancient source supports the claims you made, and made with utter certainty.

No doubt you do.

Iskander

Implicit question: “none of early church fathers spent any time arguing against the notion that Jesus was not a real, historical person.”
Explanation: “Nobody in antiquity denied that Jesus of Nazareth existed,”
*******

The term Docetism is not ambiguous .Docetism, like any other Christological theory, tries to explain the man Jesus and his relation to God; the starting point for all such explanations is the existence of the man Jesus living among us.


The Adoptian Christology is about the man who has become God .The Pneumatic Christology regards Jesus as a heavenly spiritual being (the highest after God) who took flesh, and again returned to heaven after the completion of his work on earth.

The Adoptian Christology is well expressed in the Shepherd of Hermas and the Pneumatic Christology which may be traced back to the Pauline, but which can hardly have its point of departure in Paul alone, is found also in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

The formula that Jesus was a mere man (ψίλὸς ἄνθρωπος), was undoubtedly always and from the first regarded as offensive. But the converse formula, which identified the person of Jesus in its essence with the Godhead itself, do not seem to have been rejected with the same decision.
The above is based on Harnack’s, History of Dogma - Volume I