Jesus of Ramathaim

[Brown]

He worshipped his father as an Authority Figure and blamed his mum for the divorce. He was still attracted to women like her (although not in the biblical sense), even hung out with one of the same name. ...

Actually, there are at least four Marys in Jesus's life: There was his mother; there was Mary Magdalene; there was Mary, who was sister to Martha and Lazarus (John 11); and there was a mysterious "other Mary" (Matthew 28:1, presumably the "Mary mother of James" mentioned in Mark 16:1-2).

 

[Craig B]

You might want to take the biblical version of Pontius Pilate with a grain of salt. He is depicted in the gospels as somewhat sympathetic to Jesus and fearful of a mob.

Josephus paints a far different picture of him.

So does the philosopher Philo, an exact contemporary of Jesus in whose many surviving works no mention of him is to be found. In "Embassy to Gaius" he mentions Pilate's

corruption. and his acts of insolence, and his rapine, and his habit of insulting people, and his cruelty and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.

 

[Dinwar]

You might want to take the biblical version of Pontius Pilate with a grain of salt.

I thought that went without saying. I was under the impression that in this thread we were assuming the Biblical version was more or less true--otherwise, the whole premise falls apart. I'm aware of the more reliable histories of Pilot, I just didn't think them applicable.

The RCC, when I was in a Catholic school, actually agreed that Pilot wasn't a nice fellow. They used his murder of an innocent man, just to satisfy the blood-lust of a powerful group, as an example of his brutality. The view presented to me was that he wasn't particularly enthusiastic about it, one way or another--which was the problem. He honestly didn't care if people lived or died.

As I recall, the Romans eventually removed Pilate from office for excessive brutality.

Not just that, if I recall correctly. They didn't like how he handled the Jews, either. You'd need to go pretty far to get Rome to object to your brutality in a region with a history of violent uprising. I'm not saying you're wrong; just that I have vague memories of there being other reasons as well, and they seem to make sense.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Hans: Considering that Armageddon is derived from, IIRC har Megiddo, "hill of Megiddo," could it be har Ramathaim, instead of ha Ramathaim? Ramathaim sounds like a masculine plural. Do you have any idea what it means?

Well, the full town name is Ramathaim-Zophim.

I'm not sure it mattered what it meant, though, or not for Mark who mangles the name anyway.

I think that if there is some symbolic meaning in choosing that particular town, it would be more like that it's the birthplace of Samuel AND the place where Samuel was buried. It's also mentioned a couple of times in stuff about David. So we could be looking at a bit of symbolic stuff, I guess.

 

[Craig B]

I thought that went without saying. I was under the impression that in this thread we were assuming the Biblical version was more or less true--otherwise, the whole premise falls apart. I'm aware of the more reliable histories of Pilot, I just didn't think them applicable.

The RCC, when I was in a Catholic school, actually agreed that Pilot wasn't a nice fellow.

Another Christian controversy! Pilate is a saint in the Ethiopian Church. Mind you, I think the Ethiopians are on their own as far as that is concerned

 

[TimCallahan]

Well, the full town name is Ramathaim-Zophim.

I'm not sure it mattered what it meant, though, or not for Mark who mangles the name anyway.

I think that if there is some symbolic meaning in choosing that particular town, it would be more like that it's the birthplace of Samuel AND the place where Samuel was buried. It's also mentioned a couple of times in stuff about David. So we could be looking at a bit of symbolic stuff, I guess.

Thanks for the link. According to my copy of Strong's Concordance, Ramah means "height," and Ramthaim-Zophim means "double height of watchers."

One interesting fact is that, in much earlier times, people of property, or at least their bones, may have been buried under the floors of their houses. Jars containing infant skeletons were found buried under the floors of many of these houses. We also have this passage from 1 Samuel (1 Sam. 25:1a, emphasis added):

Now Samuel died; and all Israel assembled and mourned for him, and they buried him in his house at Ramah.

This somewhat resonates with joseph of Arimathea (or Ramah) burying Jesus in his own family tomb.

 

[Craig B]

Thanks for the link. According to my copy of Strong's Concordance, Ramah means "height," and Ramthaim-Zophim means "double height of watchers."

One interesting fact is that, in much earlier times, people of property, or at least their bones, may have been buried under the floors of their houses. Jars containing infant skeletons were found buried under the floors of many of these houses. This somewhat resonates with joseph of Arimathea (or Ramah) burying Jesus in his own family tomb.

If Jesus spent "three days" in the tomb in the form of the bones of an infant buried in a jar under the floor, then his resurrection from that condition is all the more remarkable, and the Shroud of Turin is even more mysterious than we thought.

 

[JaysonR]

Thanks for the link. According to my copy of Strong's Concordance, Ramah means "height," and Ramthaim-Zophim means "double height of watchers."

One interesting fact is that, in much earlier times, people of property, or at least their bones, may have been buried under the floors of their houses. Jars containing infant skeletons were found buried under the floors of many of these houses. We also have this passage from 1 Samuel (1 Sam. 25:1a, emphasis added):

Now Samuel died; and all Israel assembled and mourned for him, and they buried him in his house at Ramah.

This somewhat resonates with joseph of Arimathea (or Ramah) burying Jesus in his own family tomb.

The dead were not buried under houses.
It was seen as very dirty to live among those in Sheol.
Actually; it's a violation of burial laws.

That passage that you are looking at is the common manner in which they referred to their family "tombs", or more properly thought of as familial entrances to Sheol.

That "house" is the Sheol house of the family where one goes to lay with their Father and their Father's Father, etc...

There are countless burial cave infrastructures exterior to the village or city boundaries of the same time periods.

To be more to the point, looking at this with practical biological thought: it would be really disgusting to keep the body in your house, anywhere, because the rotting corpse in the non-air-conditioned, yet extremely hot climate would be extremely foul and be really unsanitary.

The infant bones under houses in jars practice is very likely a taboo practice (at the time, but not earlier and earlier was done on large mounds and not hidden under houses) by remnant followers of a fertility Goddess of 'Ashtart.

See: The Biblical World, Volume 36. The Cult of the Mother Goddess, round about page 33/34 area.
I found a copy on Google Books so you don't have to buy it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qY7NAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[Manopolus]

I had always heard that the general consensus was that he was some sort of an unconventional rabbi. I've got nothing that refutes any of your guesses though.

 

[TimCallahan]

The dead were not buried under houses.
It was seen as very dirty to live among those in Sheol.
Actually; it's a violation of burial laws.

That passage that you are looking at is the common manner in which they referred to their family "tombs", or more properly thought of as familial entrances to Sheol.

That "house" is the Sheol house of the family where one goes to lay with their Father and their Father's Father, etc...

There are countless burial cave infrastructures exterior to the village or city boundaries of the same time periods.

To be more to the point, looking at this with practical biological thought: it would be really disgusting to keep the body in your house, anywhere, because the rotting corpse in the non-air-conditioned, yet extremely hot climate would be extremely foul and be really unsanitary.

The infant bones under houses in jars practice is very likely a taboo practice (at the time, but not earlier and earlier was done on large mounds and not hidden under houses) by remnant followers of a fertility Goddess of 'Ashtart.

See: The Biblical World, Volume 36. The Cult of the Mother Goddess, round about page 33/34 area.
I found a copy on Google Books so you don't have to buy it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qY7NAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Thank you for all of that. Yes, the only way you would bury an adult under the floor of the house would have to have been in the form of the bones after allowing the body to decay away elsewhere. The idea that "his house" would be the family tomb is certainly reasonable.

As to the jar burials of infants under stone floors in houses, there seems to have been a parallel worship of a goddess consort of Yahweh, who falls in and out of favor, along with the state religion of Yahweh himself.

All this, however is a bit off topic, and I don't wish to derail Hans' thread. IfJesus was originally from Ramah, then we would need to figure out how he ends up coming from Galilee.

 

[JaysonR]

A: It's entirely possible for someone's Father to be from somewhere other than where they themselves are from.
B: It's entirely possible for his Father to have moved, as if we take but little else out of the tales of this family, it is that they appear to move quite a bit.
C: It's also entirely possible that the title was an add-on to try to unify the Davidic line if a group believed this was where the greats were from.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Or D: they actually went out of the way to make a connection to Galilee, for some reason. Because it's not just the move to Nazareth that appears in Matthew, but they have him at the Sea Of Galilee a lot, as well as have him tell the disciples to meet him there.

Now why would anyone do that, if it weren't true? Or so the argument goes.

Well, you need to look at what happened at the start of our era, namely 6 CE. The province Iudaea was formed by merging Judea, Samaria and Idumea into one province. The Galilee was left separate. And unlike other territories that were ruled by Herod The Great as a Roman client, this was a core territory.

They were briefly ruled by the same king IIRC between 41 and 44 CE, but then it was separate again. And in any case, at the supposed time of Jesus they'd be separated. And so would they at the time Mark and more importantly Matthew write their stories.

So now I'm thinking... if you wanted to make up a Messiah (regardless of whether it's from whole cloth, or just adding the missing bits to some random pretender) who was sent to ALL the Jews and represented God's promise to ALL the Jews... wouldn't you want to connect him a bit with Galilee too? I mean, otherwise God kinda forgot about a bunch of his people.

Mind you, I'm not saying that I know that's what happened. Nobody can really know. But they could make that part up, and there were good reasons to.

Alternately, one can notice that Mark never actually says that Jesus ever lived in Galilee. At best he says that he was coming from Nazareth as a waypoint on his journey there, and at worst even that may be a later interpolation. (Remember, the first copy of Mark we have is mid 3rd century.)

Jesus could just be there on business, or going to the Sea Of Galilee to find a few more disgruntled members of the late John The Baptist's gang, or whatever.

 

[davefoc]

I quite enjoyed your bit of speculation HM, Thank you.

What I just asked for in the other thread was a plausible scenario to connect the Jewish human HJ to the formation of Christianity in the Gentile Greek community.

Now that you have essentially proved the existence of the HJ and are on a roll perhaps you could move on and take a shot at that?

Are Peter and James real associates of the HJ? Do they go on to form a viable religious sect within the Palestinian area? Do they fan out from their Palestinian base to found a religious sect that forms the inspiration for the rise of Gentile Christianity? Does the idea of a supernatural Jesus begin in a Jewish community or is that the pure invention of the early gentile Christianity? Were the Ebionites associated with group in the area of the Dead Sea scrolls?

Please feel free to let your intuition channel the answers to these questions. I'm not looking for much of that evidence stuff.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I don't think I proved anything, since the above speculation is just that: speculation. It not only lacks any external corroboration, but, just like any such reconstruction, there are some reasons to make up the Ramatha connection, too, if they were inclined to make it up. (Though the strike against that is that Mark mangles the name, so such a connection would be unrecognizable by most people at the time.)

But essentially one could do the same kind of speculation about anything else. See how someone indentified Snow White with Maria Sophia Margaretha Catherina von Erthal, which, although her life has some similarities, there are quite significant differences. If one is willing to go, basically, "this part is made up, and that part is distorted beyond belief, and that other part only bears a superficial resemblance to what really happened, and I'm gonna do my own interpolation for the missing pieces... but the result is absolutely true", there's no limit to what historical counterparts of story characters you can find.

And essentially that's what I did above.

The more significant part I tried to achieve isn't that I too can confabulate a HJ, but that I can do it in a way that turns most of the usual assumptions on their head.

E.g., most secular scholars, Ehrman included, think that Jesus wouldn't actually have done the clever pun in Greek that John has him do, because, hey, a poor worker's son from a tiny village from rural Galilee wouldn't have had that kind of education. Well, my Jesus is the other way around. I only need to use the burial oddity to get a Jesus that's not poor or uneducated. Quite the contrary. My well-off Jesus would be educated and fluent enough in Greek to do exactly such clever puns.

The point is more like that if even such a nega-Jesus is just as supportable, then, really, WTH do we actually know about who the real guy was or said?

But, then again, it's not just taking the piss, but an honest reconstruction too. I do believe it COULD have happened that way too. I don't take it seriously for lack of evidence, but it's possible.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

That said, about Peter and James, I truly don't know. Paul really doesn't give us all that much about them, even for such a confabulation.

It's, of course, possible that they were just like in the Gospels. I.e., that Peter actually was Jesus's best buddy -- in my rich Jesus reconstruction, even his caravan guard, to explain that pesky sword -- and that Jesus did have a biological brother called James.

The fly in the ointment I find with that, is that Paul assures us that

A) he preached Christianity long before ever meeting Peter or James, based on no more than his revelations (whether they be dreams, hallucinations, or just finding references to Jesus in the OT, take your pick), yet

B) when he does meet Peter and James, so accurate is his story from revelations, that Peter or James have nothing to add to it.

Which is odd if Jesus was a real person that Peter and James knew. But it would be actually very normal if they too found Jesus in just some references from the OT. In fact, it's even possible that Paul had been busier finding cryptic references to Jesus and actually had a more complete story than Peter or James ever had.

Be it as it may, my guess is that they didn't fan out and do anything noteworthy, as there seems to be a distinct lack of Jewish-flavour Christianity even mentioned by anyone until much later. When the Ebionites get mentioned later, they're mentioned as following a redacted copy of Matthew, and generally doesn't resemble what you'd expect from a group that followed the original teachings of Peter and James. And especially not one that grew from the Jerusalem group described in Acts. In fact, it looks like Paulinity with a Jewish twist retrofitted to it.

Also, as I keep repeating, it's odd that the church in Rome, who claims to be founded by Peter, actually very soon doesn't know that Peter and Cephas were the same person. Which is odd for a group that claims to have been founded, taught and led by him for many years. You'd think his name would have come up once or twice.

So my best guess -- but again, don't take it as more than speculation -- is that if a Jerusalem group that included Peter and James actually existed (and it might have,) they just imploded after the destruction of the temple, and made no real difference. The legacy that remained is really that of Paul.

 

[davefoc]

I don't think I proved anything, since the above speculation is just that: speculation. ...

I guess I should have added a smiley after I said you had proved the existence of the HJ.

 

[davefoc]

That said, about Peter and James, I truly don't know. Paul really doesn't give us all that much about them, even for such a confabulation.

...

I've begun to wonder just how plausible what I think of as the standard secular narrative about the emergence of Christianity is. I think the standard idea is that there was a Jesus sect that survived the HJ that included Peter and James. These guys successfully promoted a Jesus sect that in some way served as an inspiration for the creation of the Gentile Greek Christianity that we know. Paul is supposed to have interacted with this group and their principal point of disagreement seems to be about the issue of whether Gentiles needed to be circumcised and follow other Jewish religious laws or not.

But is this plausible? Paul is promoting a super natural Jesus and presumably that would have been the big bone of contention with a real Jesus sect that would have known the completely human HJ. It seems like we are missing some part of the story here that is completely unrecoverable at this point in time.

The dispute between Paul and the Jesus associates which Paul discusses seems to provide a kind of plausibility to the Paul's letters. Would he have included something like that if there wasn't some truth to it? But maybe the stories are made up to mirror real disputes that were going on between religious sects based on Judaism that continued to practice circumcision and follow dietary laws and religious sects based on Judaism that were less strict about following the religious laws.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Actually, I've mentioned this before, but, yes, people routinely make up weak-sauce opponents. A strawman sockpuppet is a fairly common type of sockpuppet on the internet, for example. There are whole boards where people argue bitterly with their own sockpuppets.

And Peter works exactly like one in Galatians. Instead of addressing whatever problem his congregation in Galatia might have had with him, he builds up Peter as a hypocrite (standard technique to make sure people don't side with him) and then Paul triumphantly trounces him with the argument he's actually delivering for the Galatians.

Plus, let's not forget Christianity even came up with Satan as someone who tempts people astray. Having something to be on guard against helps focus people's attention outwards.

That said, for me it's relatively unimportant whether Peter existed, so I might as well take him provisionally as a real person. Ditto for James.

The more important question IMHO is: what DID they believe? What WAS their beef with Paul? If they preached something to Paul's congregation, what did they preach?

As I was saying, without retrofitting stuff from the gospels, actually it's not very clear at all whether those believed in a human Jesus. Maybe they did, but it's not clear.

It may seem like, oh, Paul seems to say Peter traveled to his congregation and people followed him, but the thing is, Paul isn't there. He's missing from those cities for years in a row at times. That's the whole reason he writes letters.

In fact, in at least one place he even says point blank that he'll come to deliver their donations personally only if it's a sum worth his time.

So, you know, it's not like he drops by every weekend.

And sure enough, at times it's very clear that he's taking guesses about what might have led his congregation astray.

Since we don't have the answers from those congregations, we'll never know if Paul guessed right or those answered, "wait, who the fork is Peter? We never saw anyone by that name."

And the there's the fact that Paul is either schizophrenic or a liar. Really, either he actually believes that people from the OT were speaking secret messages about him and his congregation, or he's lying about it. There is not third option. And the former is delusions of reference, while the latter is plain old being dishonest.

Unfortunately neither makes him an ideal source of information about Peter and James, even if they were real people. If Paul is a liar, he could be distorting exactly what he told them and what they agreed on. (And Acts does seem to depict him as at least bending the truth when it suits him.) And if he's schizophrenic with delusions of reference, he could just understand that they're telling him stuff they weren't actually saying. The whole point of the delusion of reference is understanding messages to one, in what nobody else would interpret that way. E.g., like Charles Manson understood messages to him about an imminent racial insurrection, in some Beatles songs that had nothing to do with that.

 

[JaysonR]

Hey Hans...

Would you mind if I tossed in some ideas that address Davefoc's inquiry for a 'how it moved from Hebrew to Hellenistic culture'?

They are a bit at length, so it would chew up some thread space, but it would sympathize with your Jesus of Magrathea...I mean, Ramathaim.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Go ahead.