What counts as a historical Jesus?

[Craig B]

But isn't that all from Acts? Paul says he stayed "At the house of Judas"(Iscarriot? Oh My!) on "The straight way". The idea is, that later in life Paul let his followers think that his earlier refences to Damascus referred to the Syrian city.

That sounds very contrived, to the point of absurdity.

There are many Judases already. Jesus has a brother of that name. There is the evil disciple. But there is also a good disciple St Jude. Although in the lists of disciples' names there is only ever one Judas. And we have the epistle of Jude whose author claims to be a brother of James. Jesus also had a brother called James. So a Damascene Judas should occasion no surprise.

 

[JaysonR]

Thank you for your patience in explaining things in this thread!

I still can't see where I went wrong... I'm guessing two or more thoughts collided. I'll go back a ways and re-read.

No problem.
If you need any help or clarification, just let me know and I'll do my best to help.

 

[IanS]

Why would it be something new? There have been loads of claims about all sorts of named gods doing all sorts of supernatural things, since long before Jesus, and long after right up to the present day. But nobody (except the faithful) believes any of those stories were true. Why is Jesus the exception?

It would be new because there isn't a recorded instance of either of the following:
1) Hellenistic fictional literature category that involved using Hebrew culture for the literary setting and figures
2) Hebrew precedent for writing about a figure completely fictional and reporting that they lived immediately within the timeline of those reading the material

If the Hellenistic culture started everything, then that would be really interesting and fascinating.
If such were the case, that should really be taken note of and examined as to how that occurred in much greater detail, as it would be the only such instance.

If the Hebrew culture created Jesus as fiction entirely, then this would stand as the only known case where a complete non-existence messianic or prophet claimed individual of the rough period of first century CE was entirely made up, rather than the individual existing and the claims about them heavily exaggerated and politically biased.

OK, well the first thing to note is - for you to say that there was no Hebrew precedent for writing about belief in purely fictional gods, and thereby concluding that Jesus was unlikely to be a mythical invention, is really just an argument from incredulity. And that’s not a very good reason for trusting that 1st century Hebrews would not say untrue things about imaginary gods … on the contrary, afaik, they constantly claimed to witness all sorts of imaginary gods, demons, angels etc on a daily basis.

The second general point is that Paul’s Letters and the Gospels are in any case quite clearly describing a fictional Jesus. People did not realise that in the 1st century AD, because everyone was absolutely certain that miracles were true and they were sure that miracles and visions of gods and angels etc. happened every day. But now, in the 21st century, we know those stories are complete fiction.

If you say that we can discard all the miracles from the bible, and ignore all the heavenly visions and voices from God etc., and thereby be left with a Jesus figure who appears to be an ordinary man, then you are quite literally inventing a different Jesus who was never actually the Jesus described by authors like Paul, Mark, Mathew, Luke and John who wrote the bible.

However, apart from all that - in the case of religious beliefs at the time of Paul and the gospels, we are probably no longer talking about a purely traditional Hebrew view of the prophesised messiah. Because from several centuries before Paul, the region had become heavily influenced by the culture, religions, and philosophies of Greece. And then much later, from around 80 years before Paul was writing, also influenced by rule and religions from Rome.

That sort of change is also apparently quite clear in the Dead Sea Scrolls from 100-200 years before Paul was writing. By that time, long before Paul, preachers in that region were already talking about a messiah who would be a supernatural apocalyptic Son of God, and it was already widely believed that dreams, visions and imaginings should be interpreted as factual messages from God.

That is quite obviously a similar message to the one that Paul was apparently teaching.

But it is a belief based on an amalgam of Jewish OT teaching, Greek Mystery Religions, Belief in dreams as reality, and belief that the messiah would be apocalyptic and in some sense not merely a mortal man.

So we should not be looking for any examples of mythical gods just in ancient Hebrew OT traditions, but also in Jewish traditions becoming mixed with Greek mystery religions, mystery philosophers, dying and rising gods, and similar Roman gods and beliefs …. all becoming mixed up together.

 

[IanS]

Ians;

History does indeed function differently than empirical sciences.
If you don't like history's methods; I'm not faulting you for it. Allot of folks don't - Napoleon was one such famous individual, for example.

The one-way and two-way discussion doesn't mean that other models fail to exist in empirical sciences; not at all.
It is instead that, say, to accept Higgs, we don't have to prove String Theory is errant.

However, in History; that's the kind of thing that regularly happens.
And that's because there is so little material evidence to aid in building new models.
The only thing that can often be done is a reinterpretation of the same physical material (until an archaeologist somewhere finds a new piece of material to add to the list).

As such, by two-way, what I am referring to is that to offer a new model, the constituent proposition has to address the leading model head on and show how it fails to satisfy as many portions as the new model; using essentially the same exact material evidence.

Empirical sciences have an additional support line of being able to propose a position and then physically test the possibility in many cases (i.e. Higgs).

There's no such possibility for History.
It's all a giant debate class.

OK, I don’t want to spend a lot more time on this sort of thing, because apart from anything else we are now descending into all sorts of vague and subjective side issues. However …

… what you are saying above just boils down to the fact that extensive reliable evidence often just does not exist for the lives of many figures in ancient history.

But that’s hardly a convincing reason as to why anyone should put much faith in what certain historians say about certain ancient individuals.

However, in the case of Jesus, and the sort of “academic scholars” who study Jesus, we are not talking about mainstream academic historians in general. We are talking about a very specific niche area of academic interest which is heavily bound up with religious academic institutes, theologians and theists, and ancient religious beliefs … this is not by any means just another branch of academic history such as (say) the history of Roman conquests, or the historical investigation of the Egyptian empire.

Moreover, what is being described here as the “historical evidence”, appears to come entirely and completely from the devotional biblical writing itself. And that writing is completely discredited by it’s constant claim of impossible miracles, visions and imaginary beliefs etc. Not to mention that none of it is remotely original, eye-witness, contemporary, or from any known named author whose sources can be checked. That is an utterly hopeless position as “evidence” … it may be, as you say, all that “historians” have to work with, but in that case what they have to work with is very far short of what is required by any objective standards at all.

Regarding your consideration regarding the academics' studying Jesus.
Firstly, I have no patience for theologians and dismiss, immediately, anything any such individual offers to history.
Why they exist tampering with history is beyond me; they are not belonging in the field hardly more than astrologists belong in the astronomy department.


As to the rest, where you are bothered by people devoting their career to studying Jesus; that's normal in history....).

What? You say it’s normal for academic historians to quote “ devote their career to studying Jesus “ ???

It most certainly is not normal lol.

In my 20 years in science at London University I bumped into academics from all sorts of departments, inc. the history dept, but I don’t recall any of them having any professional interest in the study of Jesus … let alone devoting their lives to it!

Some people devout to Maya, some to a specific region of Africa, I myself am interested in Near East Asia in general, but this is normal.

History is compiled by obsessive people; people that don't just do some average job and just happen to look at a Maya case, or a Jesus case that comes across their desk.
That is more the rare instance, and more something of a Museum Historian than just a typical Historian.

A typical historian is a specialist in one topic of history; be that a region (Europe, Near East Asia, Asia, etc...), a culture (Ancient Hebrews, Maya, Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, etc...), a period (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc... ), event (WWI, WWII historians), or person (President Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, King George, Shakespeare, etc... historians).

There's really not a ton of general historians sitting around universities just parsing through material that is passed out among the academic community email for the daily work load.
Again, that's more a museum historian.


I won't be able to agree with you on the specialist tangent.
That isn't odd at all for history, and rather par for the course.

In fact, I'd rather this than the idea of generalized historians being the majority as we'd know far less and have a much less filled in picture as there is just so much material that humans leave behind that it's really difficult to be aware of all of the pieces unless you do spend a ton of time specializing in one specific avenue.


The majority aren't actually focused just on Jesus; that's those books that a person can read on shelves that come off that way.
Its more that people that specialize in the anthropology of early Christianity and late BCE Hebraic culture, and Roman culture that get involved in the mix with some folks who specialize in Jesus (and some of these latter folks write books, and because Jesus is ever so popular, everyone reads them; etc...).

I think we must be seriously misunderstanding each other re. the above, because I have not said or implied anything contrary to the above at all.

What I have said is that the academic study of Jesus, appears to be very much a niche area, which is actually not so much about history per se, but instead a subject of very specific concern to the origins of Christian religious belief, and a field heavily populated by people other than typical university academic historians … ie mainly filled with theologians, theists and others who are very, very interested in Jesus and Christian religious belief.

And as I pointed out above - the evidential written material that these “scholars” appear to be relying upon, seems to derive entirely from just the devotional religious writing of the biblical authors themselves. And that writing is filled from end to end with what is now known to be physically impossible claims of an entirely mythical and fictional nature. As objective reliable evidence, that is a complete non starter.

 

[eight bits]

Jayson

It was a mandated religion by Rome, which owned most of the Western world.

Yes. How does this story having yet another unique distinction foster an expectation that it is typical of the stories arising from its time and place?

We don't see a huge movement before this;

Obviously, censusing an underground movement a millennium and a half after the fact presents methodological difficulties. I think you'll easily find respectable scholarly estimates of there being millions of adherents, geographically well dispersed, at all times during the Fourth Century, whether under persecution, tolerance or establishment conditions.

Which is regrettable for my actual argument, because if Constantine's successors had invested the enormous political capital needed to impose by force a story that had few adherents, it would be an even more remarkable indicator that this story was atypical of its time and place of origin. As it is, I must settle for the story being uniquely favored among its birth cohort.

The Western Empire survived the Christian establishment by only two generations or so. The religion nevertheless survived in the West, in large part because of re-establishment by the former barbarians. In other words, the story persuaded new converts in high places, converts who had no cultural commitment to the First Century Levant.

At the very least, this re-establishment in exotic circumstances shows that the story had protean qualities. That, in turn, suggests a loose coupling at best to what is peculiar to its time and place of origin. It also suggests that any account of Christian success which fails to take into account its species-wide psychological dimensions is an incomplete account.

In other words, Piggy's demonization of Joseph Campbell, combined with a distortion of Campbell's teaching, is a material pillar of his "argument."

Maybe so; but if that's the case, then we need to identify what that was anthropologically.

The anthropology is that human beings transcend their local circumsatnces. It may be exceptional when they manage it, but it is possible and it actually happens. When it happens, it may be "good anthropology" to carry on as if nothing exceptional had happened, but it is not sound scholarship to adjust the blinders when the light hurts your eyes.

If anything, people find the texts to be modeled after other forms of literary styles; not introducing a new form.

Quite so. Plainly, it is the content, not the form, that distinguishes this story. Nobody claims that Paul invented the letter as a form of communication. Nobody claims that "Mark" invented the "life" as a literary genre.

but a social anthropologist might nit pick that "propaganda" as a form and style wasn't invented yet;

Then I would recommend Caesar's Gallic Wars. or Cicero's speeches against Cataline as a rapid remedy for this hypothetical social anthropologist's nit problem.

The question is whether or not it was entirely made up or partially made up.

Agreed. We are trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the orignal composition. However, with every year that the story survives, the practical difference between a true story and a false but believed story diminishes.

The immediate aftermath of the compostion, when the difference would be most able to make itself felt, is hidden from us. Our first glimpse of the story is written decades later by a man who cannot say of his own knowledge whether the story is fact or fiction, in letters addressed to people whose sources of factual information are even more tenuous than his own.

Regardless of the truth of the underlying story, those letters recount only their author's fantasy of Jesus. The letters we take as genuine come to us through a channel which evidently faked almost as much Paul as it transmitted. The character of Paul is also hidden from us. He exhibits signs suspicious of mental illness. He exhibits signs suspicious of mercenary motive and dishonesty.

Warts and all, what of Paul made it through the channel is the closest thing to a witness we have. This is a four-star lady dog of an inference problem we have set ourselves.

 

[Bad vibe]

I made the mistake of reading "The incredible shrinking son of man" by Robert M Price, now everything I thought I knew has pretty much gone out the window. I'm seeing propaganda, symbolism, politics, and less and less HJ, maybe there was a Jewish preacher as in this consensus but after that it would seem all bets are off as to who, when, what he said or did.

The more I look the harder it is to stay objective and not see exactly what you want to see or expect to see. The only thing I'm sure of is the religious icon, cultural Jesus I was familiar with is pure myth.

 

[tkmikkelsen]

I made the mistake of reading "The incredible shrinking son of man" by Robert M Price, now everything I thought I knew has pretty much gone out the window. I'm seeing propaganda, symbolism, politics, and less and less HJ, maybe there was a Jewish preacher as in this consensus but after that it would seem all bets are off as to who, when, what he said or did.

The more I look the harder it is to stay objective and not see exactly what you want to see or expect to see. The only thing I'm sure of is the religious icon, cultural Jesus I was familiar with is pure myth.

I wouldn't call that a mistake, more of an openness to alternative explanations. I have also read quiet a few of Robert Price's books and I think that all of them have some very good argument.

If you are interested in another view on Jesus, myth or man, try and see if you can find Tommy Thompson's "The Mesiah Myth". It is a good read.

Even though I think that Price, Thompson & Carrier makes some interesting claims. Personally I still think that there is a 1st century rabbi that has been lost legend and myth by now. Basically it is by now impossible to know what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to Jesus.

 

[Darat]

...snip... Basically it is by now impossible to know what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to Jesus.

Slightly disagree as lots of what is said about Jesus is obvious fiction - for example "zombie Jesus".

 

[Greediguts]

I wouldn't call that a mistake, more of an openness to alternative explanations. I have also read quiet a few of Robert Price's books and I think that all of them have some very good argument.

If you are interested in another view on Jesus, myth or man, try and see if you can find Tommy Thompson's "The Mesiah Myth". It is a good read.

Even though I think that Price, Thompson & Carrier makes some interesting claims. Personally I still think that there is a 1st century rabbi that has been lost legend and myth by now. Basically it is by now impossible to know what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to Jesus.

Robert Price has also become more open to alternative explanations as well. Are you familiar with Acharya S? Robert Price now endorses her work.

 

[Bad vibe]

I wouldn't call that a mistake, more of an openness to alternative explanations. I have also read quiet a few of Robert Price's books and I think that all of them have some very good argument.

If you are interested in another view on Jesus, myth or man, try and see if you can find Tommy Thompson's "The Mesiah Myth". It is a good read.

Even though I think that Price, Thompson & Carrier makes some interesting claims. Personally I still think that there is a 1st century rabbi that has been lost legend and myth by now. Basically it is by now impossible to know what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to Jesus.

Sorry misunderstanding I meant "mistake" as wry humour, I realise now just how complex the propaganda and pure fiction dominate the bit of evidence we have. How anyone can state with any confidence this bit is or isn't true I have no idea.

 

[tsig]

Sorry misunderstanding I meant "mistake" as wry humour, I realise now just how complex the propaganda and pure fiction dominate the bit of evidence we have. How anyone can state with any confidence this bit is or isn't true I have no idea.

Piggys' stance seems to be that while none of the stories are true when you look at them as a whole you can discern the Truth.

 

[The Norseman]

Sorry misunderstanding I meant "mistake" as wry humour, I realise now just how complex the propaganda and pure fiction dominate the bit of evidence we have. How anyone can state with any confidence this bit is or isn't true I have no idea.

Well, once Piggy gets done with his admittedly thorough exposition on the life and times of the first century (minute by minute detail it seems) he might go on to actually explain how all that fits in to the worldview which compels him to post tidbits like

The notion that a historical Jesus is controversial is as valid as the notion that there are genuine controversies over whether evolution is real. Nobody who is familiar with the actual scholarship believes there's any controversy at all.

 

[Brainache]

First, we don't know where Paul was converted. He doesn't say.

Second, Jesus had nothing to do with the Qumranis and they had nothing to do with him. Both the Qumranis and the Jesus school were apocalyptic, but they're different social classes, different structures, different locations, different theologies. They have no direct influence on one another.

I know that is the mainstream view and that Eisenman is out on his own with this, I just like bringing it up as a possibility. Eisenman is unorthodox, but at least he's qualified. He does point out a lot of striking similarities between the DSS and early Christian writings.

So please don't hate me for mentioning Eisenman, he might be a Kook, but at least he's not a "Myther"...

That sounds very contrived, to the point of absurdity.

There are many Judases already. Jesus has a brother of that name. There is the evil disciple. But there is also a good disciple St Jude. Although in the lists of disciples' names there is only ever one Judas. And we have the epistle of Jude whose author claims to be a brother of James. Jesus also had a brother called James. So a Damascene Judas should occasion no surprise.

There was also Judas of Galilee, quite famous at the time for founding the "fourth sect" of Judaism, you know, Zealots. I bet his "house" was on a very "straight way"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_of_Galilee

...
In Antiquities of the Jews[2] Josephus states that Judas, along with Zadok the Pharisee founded the "fourth sect", of 1st century Judaism (the first three are the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes). Josephus blames this sect, usually identified with the later Zealots, a group of theocratical-nationalists who preached that God alone was the ruler of Israel and later urged that no taxes should be paid to Rome, for the Great Jewish Revolt and for the destruction of Herod's Temple...

 

[Piggy]

I know that is the mainstream view and that Eisenman is out on his own with this, I just like bringing it up as a possibility. Eisenman is unorthodox, but at least he's qualified. He does point out a lot of striking similarities between the DSS and early Christian writings.

So please don't hate me for mentioning Eisenman, he might be a Kook, but at least he's not a "Myther"...

Oh, I don't hate you, man. Just my little caveat, that's all.

 

[JaysonR]

OK, well the first thing to note is - for you to say that there was no Hebrew precedent for writing about belief in purely fictional gods, and thereby concluding that Jesus was unlikely to be a mythical invention, is really just an argument from incredulity. And that’s not a very good reason for trusting that 1st century Hebrews would not say untrue things about imaginary gods … on the contrary, afaik, they constantly claimed to witness all sorts of imaginary gods, demons, angels etc on a daily basis.

I apologize for the confusion, but that isn't what I was attempting to convey.

What I was saying is that we have a gap in social anthropology accounting for a new form of literature during this period whereby fictional characters were written about as existing physically alongside the community during the lifetime of the readers.

The absolutely wrote fictional accounts of religious natures, but so far, I haven't seen any anthropologist examine the condition of a new literary style of the time whereby writings were made of individuals perported to live along side the community who would then read the material within the same lifetime span as the claimed existence of the individual being addressed.

The best that I can do as a comparison is that we write fiction this way today all the time.
A show like Fringe pretends characters exist in our world during our lifetime and we understand them to be fictional characters.

There's, so far as I know, no such anthropological account of such behavior of either culture regarding this sort of style of writing within this period.

If such did occur, man...I would be thrilled!
I personally don't care one bit whether Jesus did or didn't exist, and in fact, it would be far more exciting for me if he didn't as then there would be a new literary trend to examine culturally that is so far unaccounted for.


As to Paul, I don't know whether or not Paul believed or didn't believe that Jesus did or did not exist when he wrote.

 

[JaysonR]

… what you are saying above just boils down to the fact that extensive reliable evidence often just does not exist for the lives of many figures in ancient history.

But that’s hardly a convincing reason as to why anyone should put much faith in what certain historians say about certain ancient individuals.

I do not intend to convey the idea that it is convincing reason.
I only brought that up as an aid for expectation; that the request for hard evidence is a bit of a aimless request considering that we have such terrible material for many ancient events and figures.

Essentially, I'm saying to not hold breath for that.

However, in the case of Jesus, and the sort of “academic scholars” who study Jesus, we are not talking about mainstream academic historians in general. We are talking about a very specific niche area of academic interest which is heavily bound up with religious academic institutes, theologians and theists, and ancient religious beliefs … this is not by any means just another branch of academic history such as (say) the history of Roman conquests, or the historical investigation of the Egyptian empire.

I won't deny that a bunch of folks that are invested, especially theologians (who, in my opinion, should be discounted on site), for personal motives.

I don't think that summarizes the entirety of the historicity of Jesus, however; that seems rather sweeping to claim and doesn't fit entirely with what I'm familiar with.
There's a bunch of folks in the mix, and yes; there are a bunch of passionate advocates for Jesus - my suggestion regarding those is to look elsewhere rather; like anthropologists - they are generally a pretty good group, though they tend to not pick one individual, so getting good material from this group is less frequent than the Historian group in general.

Moreover, what is being described here as the “historical evidence”, appears to come entirely and completely from the devotional biblical writing itself. And that writing is completely discredited by it’s constant claim of impossible miracles, visions and imaginary beliefs etc. Not to mention that none of it is remotely original, eye-witness, contemporary, or from any known named author whose sources can be checked. That is an utterly hopeless position as “evidence” … it may be, as you say, all that “historians” have to work with, but in that case what they have to work with is very far short of what is required by any objective standards at all.

You won't find me to disagree here; I don't think there's really any satisfactory end for the historicity of Jesus that is purely conclusive.

What? You say it’s normal for academic historians to quote “ devote their career to studying Jesus “ ???

It most certainly is not normal lol.

In my 20 years in science at London University I bumped into academics from all sorts of departments, inc. the history dept, but I don’t recall any of them having any professional interest in the study of Jesus … let alone devoting their lives to it!

What I was referring to was that it's not odd for historians to specialize, and that as such; it would not be odd to consider someone specializing on any given figure - if that's Jesus; okie dokie, then their thing is Jesus.

That said, I noted in a different thread that the impact of Jesus' historicity upon history is incredibly tiny, practically none; so I don't think there's a huge amount of historians that flock to the matter as it's historically not that interesting by comparison to allot of other possible tasty bits in history that have allot more exciting tangents and possible results; for instance, there's allot more thrilling work in regard to establishing if anyone (and who) came to the Americas during ancient times or not.

I think we must be seriously misunderstanding each other re. the above, because I have not said or implied anything contrary to the above at all.

Hopefully we're getting closer to an understanding?
If I'm not grasping something, I hope to learn what I'm missing, and I'll definitely keep trying to be better at articulating my meanings.

 

[JaysonR]

Yes. How does this story having yet another unique distinction foster an expectation that it is typical of the stories arising from its time and place?

I don't see an anthropological correlation between the literary culture which produced the texts and Roman state mandate of adherence later on.

The motives involved by the Roman government regarding the forced adherence of the religion didn't really have much to do with the literary culture from which the texts were produced.

Obviously, censusing an underground movement a millennium and a half after the fact presents methodological difficulties. I think you'll easily find respectable scholarly estimates of there being millions of adherents, geographically well dispersed, at all times during the Fourth Century, whether under persecution, tolerance or establishment conditions.

These two sentences are dissimilar topics to me.

The second doesn't indicate anything about the former inherently.
I'm very open to any investigation to a new literary trend of writing, essentially, what we now understand as contemporary fiction (writing of a physical character to live in your time even though the individual is not actually living in your time at all).

The anthropology is that human beings transcend their local circumsatnces. It may be exceptional when they manage it, but it is possible and it actually happens. When it happens, it may be "good anthropology" to carry on as if nothing exceptional had happened, but it is not sound scholarship to adjust the blinders when the light hurts your eyes.

I don't fully understand this paragraph.
Of course people can trancend their circumstances; we see that regularly.
So far, I've seen nothing anywhere written by anyone that details how such was the case here anthropologically.

Events of such occurring don't fail to produce a trail culturally in contemporary works.
We should see non-Christian bodies of work following suit; a literary cultural change.

Agreed. We are trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the orignal composition. However, with every year that the story survives, the practical difference between a true story and a false but believed story diminishes.

The immediate aftermath of the compostion, when the difference would be most able to make itself felt, is hidden from us. Our first glimpse of the story is written decades later by a man who cannot say of his own knowledge whether the story is fact or fiction, in letters addressed to people whose sources of factual information are even more tenuous than his own.

Regardless of the truth of the underlying story, those letters recount only their author's fantasy of Jesus. The letters we take as genuine come to us through a channel which evidently faked almost as much Paul as it transmitted. The character of Paul is also hidden from us. He exhibits signs suspicious of mental illness. He exhibits signs suspicious of mercenary motive and dishonesty.

Warts and all, what of Paul made it through the channel is the closest thing to a witness we have. This is a four-star lady dog of an inference problem we have set ourselves.

I'm not denying the extreme difficulty, nor do I intend to rest on the literary culture tangent as evidence.

Instead, it is simply an area that I see gaping in inquiry and would like to see filled in better.
So far, while I see supporting material back and forth about Jesus; I really only see supporting material anthropologically for the literature being par for the course of these culture's way of writing about actual peoples when they were fanatically admired.

There's this huge hole where material should be supporting the idea of a new literary trend in culture anthropologically.
I would like to see that filled in at least with even just one proposition and theory; I'll take even just one...that would be excellent.

In this regard I'm a starving dog, I'll take any scraps for this missing exploration.
So far, I can't find any anthropological work discussing it; very frustrating.

 

[Piggy]

1 Corinthians, continued

OK, time to move forward in Paul's first letter to the assembly at Corinth.

This letter is particularly rich because, unlike the assemblies in Galatia and Thessalonia, the assemblies in Corinth were fraught with interpersonal and doctrinal conflicts owing principally to the highly urban and cosmopolitan atmosphere, which gave rise to clashes due to the mixing of classes within the assemblies, the wide variety of backgrounds among adherents, and a greater number of Christian missionaries espousing a broader spectrum of interpretations of the new religion.

So let's pick up where we left off….

Paul is addressing a problem made known to him by "Chloe's people", perhaps slaves sent by Chloe to inform Paul of the problem, that the assembly is dividing into factions, some claiming to follow Paul, others claiming to follow the Egyptian evangelist Apollos (who seems to be currently residing with the Corinthian assembly), still others claiming to follow Simon the Rock (who would have had the most clout of any of the visiting apostles), and still others rejecting allegiance to any apostle and claiming allegiance to Jesus.

Paul comes down on the side of the latter group, although in his mind this amounts to pretty much the same thing as agreeing with Paul, despite his protestations that no one should claim to follow him rather than Jesus.

Paul insists that he conveys the "knowledge" of the resurrection of Jesus the Anointed, but that he does so without "wisdom and eloquence", a direct barb aimed at Apollos, who is preaching a particularly Egyptian flavor of diaspora Judaism, which emphasizes the importance of "wisdom" in achieving salvation.

Paul continues….

[T]he message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Judeans demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Judeans and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

There's a limit to how deeply I can go into Paul's references to scripture, which thread in and out of his writing, but one passage is key here to understanding his use of the terms "wisdom" and "mystery" in this section and the passages following, and not surprisingly it's from the book of Daniel, which as we've seen is critical to the apocalyptic expectations of the first Christians.

Here, Daniel is speaking to the king, who has asked him to interpret a dream:

No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or diviners can show to the king the mystery that the king is asking, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has disclosed to King Nebuchadrezzar what will happen at the end of days.

Only God reveals the "mystery" of the "end of days". And God communicates with those whom God chooses to communicate with -- in Paul's view, meaning Paul himself, of course, as well as the members of the assembly during their conversion experience in which the Holy Spirit granted them the spiritual gifts to which he referred earlier.

Anyone claiming to be a "wise man" interpreting the scripture through his own superior knowledge and eloquence was not to be trusted.

The direct citation of scripture which Paul makes here is from Isaiah, and is typical of the "low shall be made high, and the high made low" theology of both Jesus and his followers. Here's how the original translates in my edition:

I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.

So you see, Paul's references to the revelation of hidden mysteries have nothing at all to do with any influence by shady "mystery cults", but are in fact based -- like all of his thought -- squarely on Jewish scripture, particularly the apocalyptic traditions.

This should demonstrate the dangers of making spurious connections with other times and cultures, without first looking to the sources most close to hand.

Paul makes reference here to those who are "perishing" and those who will be "saved". Keep in mind that although these terms would later be spiritualized -- so that salvation refers to some spiritual life in an etherial heaven and perishing refers to being doomed to hell -- Paul meant these terms quite literally. In his mind, God's army was going to kill the wicked when it descended to earth, and only the righteous who had faith in Jesus's bodily resurrection (more on that later) would be saved from the destruction.

Note, too, that Paul disdains both the Jewish Law and Greek philosophy as a means of saving oneself from the imminent wrath of God.

He also refers to the rejection of the views of the Jesus movement by most Jews, who are apparently -- and quite naturally -- pointing out that Jesus did not fit the "signs" which everyone expected of a messiah.

Paul's answer is that God has "called" only a few Jews and gentiles who "believe" in what appears to be "foolishness" and "weakness" to other people, to be saved precisely because of their faith in what God has done in resurrecting Jesus.

Now here's an important point:

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth.

This is telling, and we'll see the repercussions as Paul's letter continues.

Not many were wise or influential or noble. But some were.

In Corinth, Paul has managed to convert not just slaves and the lower classes, but also a few -- perhaps like Chloe -- who could read and write, who were heads of households, and who had enough means to own slaves.

As we've seen evidenced by Paul's own paternalistic attitude toward his congregations, Hellenistic society was stratified, and the mixing of the classes wasn't a smooth process by any means.

And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

Once again we see what Paul's method was -- he didn't convert people by argument, but by some sort of charismatic ceremony, we don't know exactly what, in which the power of the Holy Spirit was demonstrated to the convert. It must have been something like a tent revival, in which participants are whipped into an ecstatic state, which can be quite a compelling experience.

And as always, the message is the sacrifice and bodily resurrection of Jesus as a sign that the end has arrived.

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:

“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.

This is a long letter, and very dense, so I'm afraid I can't cover it as closely as the others, but it's worth examining the early passages rather narrowly.

No surprise that he says the rulers of this age -- who, if you recall, have been given "power for a time" per the apocalyptic scripture -- are doomed to perish.

But now we see shades of Enoch, and the idea that all things have been "destined [since] before time began". Had the rulers of this age -- soon to end -- been given the wisdom of God, they would not have crucified Jesus because that act sealed their fate.

But by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, God revealed the mystery of the end times to those whom He chose.

The citation here is not directly from scripture which would have been deemed canonical by the Priests and Sadducees, but appears to have been taken from some rabbinical commentary accepted by Pharisees, who also accepted the Wisdom of the Fathers, which lends credence to Paul's self-identification as a Pharisee.

It appears to be based on this passage from, not surprisingly, Isaiah:

From ages past no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who works for those who wait for Him.

All right, we're not even done with chapter 2 here, so as you can tell, I'm going to have to pick up the pace. I hate to do that, but "world enough and time," as they say.

I really do appreciate the patience of those who are following along, and I hope it's worth your time, too.

I said this might take weeks, but to me it's just so fascinating, I want to dwell on it probably longer than I should. For all I know, it might be well into summer by the time we get through the gospels.

More later, as I manage to get time.

Thanks again for listening.

 

[Stone]

Two articles by an atheist on HJ versus MJ --

http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...ld-cocked-scholars/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

http://www.rjosephhoffmann.com/2013/01/05/the-historically-inconvenient-jesus/

Stone

 

[maximara]

I made the mistake of reading "The incredible shrinking son of man" by Robert M Price, now everything I thought I knew has pretty much gone out the window. I'm seeing propaganda, symbolism, politics, and less and less HJ, maybe there was a Jewish preacher as in this consensus but after that it would seem all bets are off as to who, when, what he said or did.

The more I look the harder it is to stay objective and not see exactly what you want to see or expect to see. The only thing I'm sure of is the religious icon, cultural Jesus I was familiar with is pure myth.

This is what the "classic" Christ Mythers of c1900 (Drews, Remsburg, Robertson) were arguing--even if there was a 1st century Jesus the Gospels account tells us nothing reliable about him.

IMHO part of the problem is you have the traditional Jesus getting mixed in with the Gospel and some points being argued (like the whole December 25 birth date) are not really relevant to the issue at hand.