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LegionOnomaMoi vs AmbiguousGuy: The (non)Historical Jesus

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
Three or four years ago my attention was drawn to the question of the historicity of Jesus. I'd overheard some debates and I began to join in and ask questions. All my life I'd thoughtlessly followed the cultural assumption that Jesus actually existed around 30CE, so I was pretty surprised when I saw that the most powerful evidence seemed to be against Jesus. It slowly dawned on me that he was most probably a fiction. Since that time, I've floated my opinion around, wondering if anyone could batter it into a different shape, but so far I've heard little evidence or argument for the historical Jesus (HJ). Certainly none that has shifted my position.

Of course, it's just my opinion. What else could it be? But, curiously, I began to see that my opinion angered some people. Which perplexed me at first. I'd thought that we were mostly beyond being angered by Jesus opinions one way or the other. But apparently there are real things at risk here. Jobs, ministries, entire academic fields, career reputations... maybe even souls?

But that's all digression. I'm sure we'll see no such anger here in this thread.

The reason we are here, now, is that my friend LegionOnomaMoi has agreed to a one-on-one debate with me regarding the (non)historical Jesus. Pretty exciting. I tried to rent the Goodyear blimp to do some promotional advertising, but it was tied up. Tell all your friends to come and watch. If it goes well, we might do T-shirts.

I'm happy to be called 'Ambig' or 'AG' and I hope the LegionOnomaMoi is OK with 'Legion.'

So. Here are a couple of issues which I find to be powerful arguments against the HJ -- by which, again, I mean a Jesus of 30 CE Judea.

1) The Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. I write a little fiction, so I know what a pile of revisions looks like. For every story I've written, there is a box or an efile full of versions which look quite a bit like the finished story. Each one contains blocks of text which track, verbatim, blocks of text in the other versions. Just as we find with the synoptic gospels.

I'm crafting my story, improving it, dramatizing it, finding new details which make it work better. No, I don't like the stone already rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Let's have an angel come and roll it away, right in front of the women! Etc....

I've seen such revisions with non-fiction work, though not nearly so much, but I have never seen two different writers making revisions of a third writer's work. In today's world, of course, gMatthew and gLuke could not be published. They'd be quickly sued by Mark for plagiarism.

So I conclude that Matthew and Luke are not any sort of arm's-length storytelling. Instead, they are revisions of Mark's original and probably-fictional story. Would you revise a guy's diary entry? Would you revise a news article? Probably not. You'd just write your own version of events.

But you might revise an exciting new theological/fictional work, especially if you lived 2,000 years ago and gospel-writing were all the rage.

I consider all other gospels, including John, to be hopelessly distant in time from the supposed HJ. I take John no more historically than I take the Book of Mormon, so far as evidence of the HJ. (I also think Mark is suspiciously distant in time. I can see no reason to wait 40 years to write about a messiah, not if he were actually historical.)

2) Paul's silence. By all accounts, Paul was a fanatic. He loved the Christ during every millisecond of his waking life. He was downright infatuated.

And everyone seems to agree that Paul was in Jerusalem, meeting with members of Jesus' entourage, shortly after 30 CE. So we know for a certainty that Paul would have sucked them dry for every last detail of Jesus' earthly ministry. He would have known everything about Jesus life and probably four or five versions of every major incident.

And yet. And yet Paul does not speak of Jesus' life.

Have you ever preached a sermon? I haven't, but I've listened to a bunch, sometimes listening to their rehearsals from distant rooms in the house. And I can tell you that preachers are always taking incidents from real life as the kernels of their sermons. If the dog bit the mailman, well, there's a way to use that in the Sunday morning sermon.

So why doesn't Paul go on and on talking of the historical Jesus? As he speaks about the storm threatening his ship, why doesn't he say, "As the angry and chaotic mobs came for Jesus, so did the thunder and wind come for me."

Why does he seem unaware that a physical man was being claimed to have lived during his own lifetime? Well, because he wrote his letters before Mark came up with his story about a real man who lived just a few years earlier. That seems the most reasonable explanation.

I could go on and on. By now my view of the HJ is turning into an actual theory. There are still lots of holes in it, of course, but that's the main reason I continue to debate it. Maybe I'm missing something.

If so, I'm sure Legion is just the guy to set me straight. Let's see.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
But apparently there are real things at risk here. Jobs, ministries, entire academic fields, career reputations... maybe even souls?


I hope the LegionOnomaMoi is OK with 'Legion.'

Legion, LOM, anything you want as long as it is recognizable so I know you are referring to me.
Also, although I might slip and say e.g., "author of Mark", for convenience I will simply act as if the titles were the names of the authors. If at any point this causes confusion, I can clear it up or we can agree to something else.

1) The Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. I write a little fiction, so I know what a pile of revisions looks like.

What basis do you have for thinking that your experience of observations on genre, the writing process, literacy, etc., is applicable? Fiction is quite broad, so perhaps it would be helpful if you could demarcate (to the extent possible) the genres that existed in and around Jesus' day such that we have somewhere to start for comparison?


For every story I've written, there is a box or an efile full of versions which look quite a bit like the finished story.

Thankfully, we have some pretty straightforward issues with using the above to compare to the gospels. I don't mean efiles or anything like that, as what you write above could hold true of pen and paper.

The problem is that there were no pens and was no paper. There was papyrus and parchment. Thanks mainly to Pliny the Elder, we know how papyrus the plant as made into papyrus the "paper". It took labor to harvest it and a complicated process of cutting strips of a particular length (they had stock sizes you could buy then as now). The two separate layers of strips, one laid out horizontally and the other vertically, were then repeatedly pressed until the fibers had sufficiently smoothed. Finally, the end product was delicately smoothed until it was flat enough to write on.

Parchment required killing animals for their skins. The NT collection (including Paul's letters and other irrelevant material) would have required 50-60 goats. I can't tell you what just the synoptics would require, as I would need to know how many folios, but just by comparing how much of the NT is taken up by the these 3 works, it would probably be around 20-25.

A writer had to pay for each page. The ink too had to be handmade. I don't know if you've ever used a fountain pen (my brother loved the idea and bought one that I used once and it was a mess), but bad ink and bad writing material that costs money when there was no middle class at a time of not only economic turmoil but flat out war doesn't seem to have much in common with your editing process.



Each one contains blocks of text which track, verbatim, blocks of text in the other versions. Just as we find with the synoptic gospels.

I'll have to get back to the problems with the textual analysis in a bit, because it turns out we still have another serious problem with your analogy. Let's imagine that Mark goes out and buys the necessary materials. He then distributes his draft. Virtually all texts are missing or are preserved in quotations in manuscripts from the middle ages. The physical fragments of Mark's gospel in the 2nd century is surpassed in how close our earliest textual evidence is to the original only by John's gospel. 500 years or more before the average manuscripts of classical authors we do have manuscripts for, we already have more whole and partial copies of Mark than we do of any text outside of the NT.

So we have 2 problems. First, even scribes hated writing. They actually said this in the margins or at the end of a copy they were paid to make. Given how fast even treasured manuscripts disappeared (mostly lost or ruined), and given that Mark's gospel was distributed by a persecuted minority, the only plausible explanation for the textual evidence we have is that there were a lot of manuscripts. And we not only have the actual physical manuscript witnesses that survived, but also the quotes from the 2nd century onward of Mark by Christian authors.

What did this cost?
"it is worth emphasizing that the complete Bible text, or even complete Old Testament and New Testament text, is a rarity, partly because of the great cost and labour of producing such a thing" p. 631 of Elliot's New Testament Textual Criticism: The Application of Thoroughgoing Principles

"In fact, a manuscript of the New Testament represented a small fortune because the preparation of the parchment was only the first step" p. 77 of Aland & Aland's The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism.

So here's Mark, writing his drafts, but not on the material that was made for such a purpose at the time (early chalkboards and there predecessors had been around for many centuries). Instead, he decides that it's worth the cost not only to write one whole draft, either pay for it to be copied or do so manually to save a little, and then repeat this twice.


I'm crafting my story, improving it, dramatizing it, finding new details which make it work better. No, I don't like the stone already rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Let's have an angel come and roll it away, right in front of the women! Etc....

So let's assume for the sake of argument that Mark is incredibly wealthy to be able to do this. We quickly run into several other issues. You are equating an editing process that doesn't describe the differences among the synoptics, or at least can't account for them. Basically, you are describing narrative edits- changes to the story. Those aren't he main changes. I'll list a few.

The first isn't the most persuasive but I put it first because it is striking and irritating. Mark has been described as a "string of pearls" in that he appears to have a bunch of oral material that he writes down usually with no regard to narrative or style. The clearest indicator is the way almost every pericope in Mark begins: either kai euthos/"and immediately"or just "and". ~80% of Mark's "paragraphs" begin with "and", about half of which are "and immediately/then suddenly".

If we just count euthos alone, we find it used 8x more than in Matthew and over 14x more in Luke.

Basically, Mark reads like a child reciting stories of what happened in school: "and the teacher said...and the John said that...and suddenly during recess" etc.

But even if we surmise that Mark is not only rich but displays a remarkable ability to increase his literary skill, there is another peculiarity of Mark that can't be so easily dealt with: his use of the present tense. In Greek this usage is called the "historic present". Mark uses it 151 times (I didn't count so I'm relying on J. C. Hawkins here). Luke once. Mathew about 2 dozen.

This stylistic choice is also lexical, as about half of those 151 uses is the word "to say".

Mark's use of periphrastic tenses, however, is not stylistic but Semitic. Same with his odd use of plurals and the way he coordinates clauses. Instead of following more idiomatic Greek, which has a number of ways to subordinate clauses that Aramaic and Hebrew lack, Mark uses parataxis. Matthew and Luke do not.

I can go on if you wish, but for now let's take stock and see what we have. Mark somehow manages to afford an unheard of editing process in the ancient world (everybody else, even the rich who dictated to scribes, would use erasable templates). Assuming he wrote Matthew and Luke, his editing is not "how can I improve this story?" but using a verb tense 151 times more than Luke, Semitisms, and other things completely unrelated to the story.


but I have never seen two different writers making revisions of a third writer's work
How about Tatians diatesseron, which did this with all four gospels?


Instead, they are revisions of Mark's original and probably-fictional story.
"Limited facility with syntax, grammar and vocabulary makes clear that Mark is not a work of ‘high literature’ and was capable of being read by those of moderate education." p. 8 of Painter's Mark's Gospel.

Note that it is not style, which would or could go hand-in-hand with editing to make a better story, but grammar and vocabulary.


Probably not. You'd just write your own version of events.

Unless I lived 2,000 years ago, in which not only did people do this, they wrote works claiming to be written by famous people.

But you might revise an exciting new theological/fictional work
As you know already, there were godmen before and godmen after, both historical and mythical. We know that the earliest pagan references to the Christians and Jesus are negative and dismissive, from Pliny to Celsus. They remained negative long after Celsus, but we can't really say "earliest" when we get to the 4th century.




especially if you lived 2,000 years ago and gospel-writing were all the rage.

It wasn't. There were 4. We've called other texts gospels, but they are completely different from the four (the "gospel" of Thomas has no story, and the so-called "gnostic gospels" are of an entirely different nature). It is our designation that ties a collection of sayings with a bizarre cosmology and calls them both gospels, but this is like calling Democritus a nuclear physicist.

I consider all other gospels, including John, to be hopelessly distant in time from the supposed HJ.

Why?
 
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LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
2) Paul's silence. By all accounts, Paul was a fanatic. He loved the Christ during every millisecond of his waking life. He was downright infatuated.

By all accounts, Paul started out by beating up Jesus' followers and by persecuting them.

And everyone seems to agree that Paul was in Jerusalem, meeting with members of Jesus' entourage, shortly after 30 CE.

From Galatians 2:17-19
οὐδὲ ἀνῆλθον εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα πρὸς τοὺς πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἀποστόλους, ἀλλὰ ἀπῆλθον εἰς Ἀραβίαν, καὶ πάλιν ὑπέστρεψα εἰς Δαμασκόν
18 Ἔπειτα μετὰ τρία ἔτη ἀνῆλθον εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα ἱστορῆσαι Κηφᾶν, καὶ ἐπέμεινα πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡμέρας δεκαπέντε· 19 ἕτερον δὲ τῶν ἀποστόλων οὐκ εἶδον, εἰ μὴ Ἰάκωβον τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου

["neither did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but up into Arabia, and back again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to inquire into/learn from/get information from Peter and remained with him for 15 days. But none other of the apostles did I see, except James the brother of the Lord]
Ignoring brother for now, you have confused the trips he took. You aren't the first:

The first is his assertion in The Jesus Puzzle that there was not “much opportunity in evidence for him [Paul] to have acquired details about Jesus’ life”. Doherty then references Paul’s visit to Jerusalem. However, there are problems with Doherty’s description here. First, he states that “Paul went to Jerusalem exactly once”. However, it is unclear what his basis is for this claim. In the very letter Doherty references (Galatians), Paul mentions (Gal. 2.1) a second trip"

So we know for a certainty that Paul would have sucked them dry for every last detail of Jesus' earthly ministry.

As there was no "them", he couldn't possibly do that. It would appear, however, that he went straight to the top to do this:



Then there is Doherty’s description of Paul’s 15 day stay with Peter. He states that “[a]ll he did at that time, so he says (1:18) was ‘get to know Peter’ and see James.” This is at the very least somewhat misleading. First, there is the length of the stay: 15 days. As C. H. Dodd put it so long ago, we can safely assume that “they did not spend all the time talking about the weather.” The only clue (other than the length of the visit) for what took place is the infinitive Paul uses to describe his action during the visit: historesai. This word, whence comes our English “history”, was forever changed by the work of Herodotus...and in Greek the verb historiagraphein means “to write history”. There are several Greek words Paul could have used here, which are less formal and far more common (e.g., gignoskein), but he used one found nowhere else in the N.T. and rarely in Greek literature at all. It is commonly found within the works of historians, from Herodotus to Diogenes Laertius (Plutarch uses it frequently), but is almost completely absent from drama or non-technical texts. In other words, for Paul to use this word, there is probably something special about his visit, at least more than a simple “get to know” Peter...And that would better explain the length of the stay.


And yet Paul does not speak of Jesus' life.

He does.
How, I wonder, does Paul’s statement that a particular direction comes from him, not the Lord, indicate some “heavenly source” unless one assumes already that there was no earthly Jesus? There is nothing within Paul’s language to indicate a heavenly source, and in fact if one looks at 1 Cor. 7 in full such an interpretation is problematic. Earlier, in 1 Cor 7:10, Paul explicitly seperates his instruction from that of the Lord: tois de gegamekkosin paragello, ouk ego alla ho kurios…/”to the unmarried I command, or rather not I, but the Lord…” Paul’s assertion that this prohibition of divorce is from Jesus is also echoed in Q and Mark. Almost immediately following this, however, Paul states (1 Cor. 7:12), tois de loipois lego ego ouch ho kurios…/”to the rest I say, not the Lord,…” He goes out of his way to indicate that the first part is a teaching from Jesus Christ, as he does in the line quoted by Doherty (where he states he has no command from the Lord). On the assumption that there was no earthly Jesus, these lines by necessity are from some “divine revelation”. Of course, if Paul received “divine revelations” one wonders why he would ever need to indicate that an instruction or command was his own, not the Lord’s. After all, if he receives divine instructions, and it is understood by his audience that he does, why would they give credence to his own thoughts on some matter when he makes it clear he didn’t receive any divine instruction? Why didn’t he? It’s rather odd that Paul has a divine decree concerning divorce, one that is rather general, but when it comes to how followers of Christ should deal with unbelieving spouses, divine inspiration dries up. This makes perfect sense if Paul is actually passing on the same teaching recorded in the gospels and coming from an earthly Jesus, who did not have to deal with issues which occurred in the early church, but is harder to explain if all teachings of Jesus are divine inspirations.


Paul also states Jesus ate with his disciples, that he was descended from David kata sarka, that he knew his brother, and even if we look at the passages that could suggest Jesus was a heavenly source, we find the opposite. Paul says Christ rose from the dead. But he also says it in a very particular way. I'll spare the full Greek because a translation you can look up will suffice for all but a bit

1 Cor 11: 23ff

Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου, ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν, ὅτι ὁ κύριος Ἰησοῦς ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ᾗ παρεδίδετο ἔλαβεν ἄρτον
["for I received from the Lord that which I pass on to you: that Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread..."]

1 Cor 15:3ff
παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον, ὅτι Χριστὸς ἀπέθανεν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν κατὰ τὰς γραφάς, καὶ ὅτι ἐτάφη
[for I pass on to you that of primary importance which was passed on to me: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with scripture, and that he was buried]

In quote 1, we find Jesus was betrayed on a particular night. We don't know what night, but the language defines the night as particular, something very much at odds with prayers or formulaic language common among for cultic rites and rituals long before and long after. Rather than just say Jesus was betrayed, or even betrayed at night, something happened on that night during which he was betrayed. One thing was grabbing or taking hold of bread. So Paul's Christ myth or heavenly Christ is suddenly taking food on a particular night; namely, that night he was betrayed. How does a heavenly Christ get betrayed on a night during which he takes and passes around food and drink?

Things get even more strange for any Heavenly Christ. Because despite the inaccurate descriptions of dying and resurrecting gods that plague the internet, Paul doesn't just say Jesus died and rose. He says Jesus was buried. How do you bury a heavenly figure? If you are another god and this is some epic set to meter describing some legendary past, then another god might scatter Jesus' parts all around or tie him to a rock, but it isn't. It's a letter.

The next issue is the formulaic language that indicates, especially in particular contexts, the reception and/or the transmission of oral/aural material. paradidomi and paralambano are used outside of the NT to refer to this giving and receiving of teachings or an "official" kind of transmission of information. Not only do we find the words, but the entire Greek is a memorized, formulaic account of this event.

We find the earliest version of the passion story before the story author. That is, if Mark hit upon this idea to write a story, he already had the ending. And it wasn't the ending of the Hellenistic Mithras savior god, nor the dying and rising Attis (both of which post-date the gospels), but Jesus the Messiah who was betrayed on a night where he took and passed around food and drink before his death. And he did not die and rise, but he died, was buried, and rose.
 
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LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Finally, perhaps most curious of all is what Paul says this was for. Or rather, it isn't that he says that it was for their sins, but that this was in the scripture. Only it isn't. There is no dying messiah who sacrifices his life for sins in scripture, both what is now the OT and non-canonical literature such as eschatological texts recovered from Qumran. There was a human anointed of God, like those in scriptures, who restored Israel by ridding the land of those who had stolen it and making it the land of YHWH's people once more.

Jesus didn't do this. He was executed. So even before Mark, we have attempts to try to understand why the Christ didn't do anything he was supposed to . Instead, he failed and afterwards the Romans came and destroyed the temple, YHWH's home. The Jews anointed their kings and great human leaders, not people who were shamefully executed. And by the time Mark writes, it's even worse. Not only did the Christ not restore Israel to its people, but because he failed Israel was attacked and the single most important social, cultural, and political icon/structure, the temple, was destroyed.


So why doesn't Paul go on and on talking of the historical Jesus?
He tells us one reason. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, this whole thing is pointless. Another is easily deduced from the use of Christ, references to scripture and scriptural characters, etc. Paul was writing letters, not gospels. He was writing to people that, as he tells us, he had already passed on the Jesus tradition too.

Finally, under the assumption that Paul isn't getting bad reception on the god wire when it comes to one aspect of divorce, that he isn't messing up how one talks about sky gods and heavenly entities who never were on earth, but was talking about a historical Jesus, then we can explain another problem. James and Peter both wanted any gentiles to keep the laws of Moses and if male that meant circumcision. Paul wanted to convert everything he could see, and this insistence on keeping with the laws that were no longer really applicable because Jesus had restored Israel by...well...he's sort of nebulous here but the thrust is that its out with the old laws and in with the new. Only Peter, thanks to James, is in his way. However, when he realizes this (so he tells us) he first just leaves Jerusalem, the home base. He doesn't say why, but next thing we know Peter has travelled to Antioch and now all of a sudden Paul can rebuke him.


But there's no earthly Jesus. There's no 12 disciples of Jesus, and no head disciple Peter. They're all just worshipping this godman Christ, just like Paul. So why doesn't Paul "receive" a message that Peter is wrong? What is wrong with this signal reception between the godman and revelations? I mean, this godman can't even finish talking about the divorce rules before we get "hello? you there? hello? friggin' Verizon. I can hear you now my ***!"

We've got a godman who is a failed messiah, who never existed on earth but was buried In it after being betrayed, who needs to fix angel radio because Paul has to slink of to wait for Peter at Antioch instead of receiving a revelation then and there, and finally we have Mark, the story-teller. Only before his story Paul has already said the one most important thing was that Jesus rose from the dead. Mark writes a story that doesn't make sense because the by that time the failure of the Christ had caused the temple to be destroyed and the Romans had won. And just to top it all off, Mark is copied by those who apparently thought it was great that this new idea of a historical messiah, which is what the Jewish notion always was, so this tradition of writing stories that people are killed for believing in continues.

Like Paul, the gospels reference the scriptures all the time, and the main "character" in the various editions of Mark is a Jewish figure. So why, when Nero is blaming Christians before Mark was written, and Pliny writing letters about these new weirdoes, does a story about a failed messiah who used to be a godman, become so successful once the messiah part get's reinterpreted (and at least by Paul's time) and the godman becomes human? It's sacrilege to the Jewish belief, the historical godman part is old news for the gentiles and the Jewish part (that is pervasive in Mark's and his 2 imitators) has to be explained to them, but it catches on because...?

Of course, if there was a Jesus, then we don't have to worry about all the problems thinking that Matthew and Luke were written by the same person (none of which I've gotten into yet), we don't have to wonder what's wrong with Angel Radio, we don't have to wonder why, before Mark, this Christ godman is already not a Jewish nor a pagan concept, we don't have to worry about why Paul speaks of him doing physical things, but most important of all, we don't have to wonder how this movement started.

Instead of the millionaire author making an already persecuted group of non-Jewish AND non-Gentile followers of godman Christ, we have a charismatic figure who did start a movement and did gain a following but then was executed. That means that either he wasn't the messiah, or the messiah role had to be reinterpreted. And that began before Mark. It also means we don't have various copy-cats of a story motivating people to follow a figure from a just defeated Jewish minority to join an already persecuted group. Instead, we have people like Paul who go around proclaiming the "good news" and a Jesus who was popular enough in his day to keep the movement alive after his death.

I don't know about you, but I've read some pretty decent stories. I practically worship Tolkien and he has a ready made mythology (I actually knew of someone who was an ex-wiccan turned pagan/neopagan who wanted to know if as her pantheon she could use Tolkein's stories), but as much as I like the stories, I'm not going to start believing in them and especially not when a bunch of people have already died, including the main character, for following this nonsensical jumble of Jewish scripture and Jewish blasphemy.


As he speaks about the storm threatening his ship, why doesn't he say, "As the angry and chaotic mobs came for Jesus, so did the thunder and wind come for me."

Because he didn't write Acts, which begins:

"In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen."

You're also going to have to explain what is commonly called Luke-Acts because the same author wrote both.

Well, because he wrote his letters

...he had already established churches. If we didn't have even the evidence that Paul did know Jesus had existed and does make this clear, that would just make the assumption that Paul never believed in an earthly Jesus as equally likely as he did. Because under the assumption Jesus did live, Paul is writing letters to people who already know the story. Paul says he passed it on to them.
 
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AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
What basis do you have for thinking that your experience of observations on genre, the writing process, literacy, etc., is applicable?
My experience with life and with writing fiction.

Fiction is quite broad, so perhaps it would be helpful if you could demarcate (to the extent possible) the genres that existed in and around Jesus' day such that we have somewhere to start for comparison?
I hardly believe in genre -- considering it a misleading construct in the same way as the term 'language' is misleading, for example, or 'species.' Once people start believing in genres, well... they start believing in genres. I've heard writers argue endlessly about the proper genre of a certain modern work. People with Lit degrees from expensive universities, and they battle furiously over the proper categorization of a piece of work. It's almost as bad as RFers arguing over whether a guy is an atheist or agnostic. Or maybe a gnostic atheist or agnostic theist. I find such labeling to be not only a silly waste of time but detrimental to clear thought if taken too seriously.

So I don't really believe in genres as a useful concept. If moderns can't agree on modern genres, I don't see it as useful to think that we can get much of a grip on ancient genres.

Also I am a lover and a champion of the lone wolf, the creator, the genius who writes because he's moved to write -- never giving the first thought to genre. He brings something new to the world. He breaks all and every rule and stands in uniqueness for the ages to admire.

Thankfully, we have some pretty straightforward issues with using the above to compare to the gospels. I don't mean efiles or anything like that, as what you write above could hold true of pen and paper.

The problem is that there were no pens and was no paper. There was papyrus and parchment. Thanks mainly to Pliny the Elder, we know how papyrus the plant as made into papyrus the "paper". It took labor to harvest it and a complicated process of cutting strips of a particular length (they had stock sizes you could by then as now). The two separate layers of strips, one laid out horizontally and the other vertically, were then repeatedly pressed until the fibers had sufficiently smoothed. Finally, the end product was delicately smoothed until it was flat enough to write on.

Parchment required killing animals for their skins. The NT collection (including Paul's letters and other irrelevant material) would have required 50-60 goats. I can't tell you what just the synoptics would require, as I would need to know how many folios, but just by comparing how much of the NT is taken up by the these 3 works, it would probably be around 20-25.

A writer had to pay for each page. The ink too had to be handmade. I don't know if you've ever used a fountain pen (my brother loved the idea and bought one that I used once and it was a mess), but bad ink and bad writing material that costs money when there was no middle class at a time of not only economic turmoil but flat out war doesn't seem to have much in common with your editing process.

I've read this block of text three times now, but I really can't understand how it relates to what I've said. You're holding that ancient writers didn't have the luxury of as many rewrites as I have had? Certainly that seems true. I've enjoyed increasing rewrites in my own lifetime. I'm a technical nitwit but I learned the wordprocessor as soon as I could get my hands on an Apple II. Not nearly so many boxes of revisions in the backs of my closets anymore.

So I obviously agree that rewrites were more precious back then.

So here's Mark, writing his drafts, but not on the material that was made for such a purpose at the time (early chalkboards and there predecessors had been around for many centuries). Instead, he decides that it's worth the cost not only to write one whole draft, either pay for it to be copied or do so manually to save a little, and then repeat this twice.
Ah. You think I'm arguing that the author of Mark rewrote his own work?

If so, no. My assumption is that two different authors rewrote Mark, creating gMatt & gLuke, as I tried to explain in my opening remarks.

So let's assume for the sake of argument that Mark is incredibly wealthy to be able to do this. We quickly run into several other issues. You are equating an editing process that doesn't describe the differences among the synoptics, or at least can't account for them. Basically, you are describing narrative edits- changes to the story. Those aren't he main changes. I'll list a few.

The first isn't the most persuasive but I put it first because it is striking and irritating. Mark has been described as a "string of pearls" in that he appears to have a bunch of oral material that he writes down usually with no regard to narrative or style. The clearest indicator is the way almost every periscope in Mark begins: either kai euthos/"and immediately"or just "and". ~80% of Mark's "paragraphs" begin with and, and about half of these are "and immediately/then suddenly".

If we just count euthos alone, we find it used 8x more than in Matthew and over 14x more in Luke.
Yes, we've definitely derailed our train of thought, it seems. This and more of your response material seems based on a mistaken belief
about my position.

I believe that gMark was revised by others, not by Mark. It's why I commented that Mark might have sued them for plagiarism in our modern world.

I can go on if you wish, but for now let's take stock and see what we have. Mark somehow manages to afford an unheard of editing process in the ancient world (everybody else, even the rich who dictated to scribes, would use erasable templates).

Assuming he wrote the Matthew and Luke, his editing is not "how can I improve this story?" but using a verb tense 151 times more than Luke, Semitisms, and other things completely unrelated to the story.
As I say, you've somehow misunderstood my opening message. Which is OK. It may take time to adjust ourselves. But you're arguing against something which I don't believe and haven't proposed.

How about Tatians diatesseron, which did this with all four gospels?
I'm not familiar with it, but you're welcome to explain if you'd like.

As you know already, there were godmen before and godmen after, both historical and mythical. We know that the earliest pagan references to the Christians and Jesus are negative and dismissive, from Pliny to Celsus. They remained negative long after Celsus, but we can't really say "earliest" when we get to the 4th century.
OK. But again, I'm not sure what relevance that has to my position. You might want to imagine that I'm a child, a kindergartener. When you work to counter my points, maybe you could be more direct about it? In other words, tell me why you believe that the material above counters my position. You won't offend me. Plus, our readers would probably appreciate it.

Why does the existence of BeforeJC & AfterJC godmen somehow counter my argument about a new theological/fictional work (gMark)?

What relevance are the negative references to the Christians and Jesus by pagans?

It wasn't. There were 4. We've called other texts gospels, but they are completely different from the four (the "gospel" of Thomas has no story, and the so-called "gnostic gospels" are of an entirely different nature). It is our designation that ties a collection of sayings with a bizarre cosmology and calls them both gospels, but this is like calling Democritus a nuclear physicist.
I agree about the sayings' gospels. I don't like calling them gospels. But there do appear to be hundreds of gospels written since Mark, some as recently as the past couple of decades. To me it seems that gospel-writing was almost a cottage industry back in the day, like making religious relics for the tourists.

Why do I discount gJohn as historical? Well, first because it seems so over-the-top theologically. It announces that in its first line. And second because I consider a hundred years to be too long. Imagine how hard it would be right now for us to write a biography of General Pershing and his part in WWI. We could hardly provide our readers with much new information about him. We might get lucky and uncover some forgotten artifact, but -- reading us 2000 years hence -- I wouldn't trust us to be very accurate about any new information. And Pershing was a famous international figure in a time with newspapers, magazines, cameras, birth certificates.

How about you? Where do you draw the line between reliable history and unreliable? If you consider the Book of Mormon to be unhelpful so far as giving us information about the historical Jesus, whyso? Why might you reject the BOM but accept gJohn?

[Note: I didn't realize that you planned to post more messages, and I'm not really happy with a multi-parter dialogue. So I may condense things. If I do that and miss a point which you'd like me to address, just point it out.]
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
[Note: I didn't realize that you planned to post more messages, and I'm not really happy with a multi-parter dialogue. So I may condense things. If I do that and miss a point which you'd like me to address, just point it out.]

I apologize. I've lost too many posts so I write in Word, and then it turns out to be too long for one post even when I take half out.

Ah. You think I'm arguing that the author of Mark rewrote his own work?

Yes. I was. Thank you for clarifying.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
People with Lit degrees from expensive universities, and they battle furiously over the proper categorization of a piece of work.
This isn't literary theory. Here genre is a key tool used by classical historians, classical philologists, medieval historians, linguists, anthropologists, and many others.


Also I am a lover and a champion of the lone wolf, the creator, the genius who writes because he's moved to write -- never giving the first thought to genre.
And were I a publisher I would be ecstatic. But here we are interested in history and an artistic approach is counter-productive. You are approaching an oral society as a writer of fiction. To a hammer, everything is a nail.


You're holding that ancient writers didn't have the luxury of as many rewrites as I have had?
This is what I mean. So I’ll try to describe what went into writing a bit more clearly.

You think about joy of writing because you are used to things like computers, pens, cheap and easy to write on paper, punctuation, erasers, lowercase letters, spaces between words, light, and a culture that has been flooded with texts of all kinds for hundreds of years.

YOUVENEVERHADTOWRITELIKETHIS and hope you don’t make a mistake because you are probably either taking dictation or making a copy, not composing. Galen tells us about the effect of polishing the “paper” in order to make it smooth enough to write on. You could now write on it, but you couldn’t easily see it. The polishing made it shiny. During the day when there was plenty of light, it could be blinding. When it became dark, the light of torches would cause glares while shadows covered the rest. And of course there’s the filthy ink that isn't easy to use but is still costly. As chances are that you didn’t pay for ink or “paper” (because you aren’t an author but a scribe), making mistakes that have to be edited means that whoever hired you has to spend more money. Or you are a slave, in which case instead of being paid for the final product, you might be beaten half to death if you spilled ink on many pages, or made too many errors.


These gospels weren’t just written, but had to be copied. So even if the original authors did not dictate but wrote, copies were produced by scribes or amateurs and neither enjoyed it at all.


And that’s just the labor part. Historians and other authors tell us that they distrusted written texts. They would go to great lengths over and over again to demonstrate to the reader that if they were not eyewitnesses the talked to those who were and made sure to get accounts from people who were there. Government officials that were the equivalent of or close to clerks, stenographers, lawyers, and more frequently memorized rather than kept written records, or did both.



To clarify (that is, please rephrase or alter what I say so that it is accurate)- in your theory, we’re basically dealing with people who liked the story of Mark but thought it needed or could benefit from some alterations?

This is a problem I’m having. On the one hand, you seem to approach Mark as a brilliant idea of a story: a godman who was historical. And two other authors thought so too, but felt some changes could benefit the work. On the other hand, before Mark was written Christians had already been persecuted by Paul and blamed by Nero. Even if Mark was written before the Romans destroyed the temple, Matthew and Luke were not.

What exactly was this group that Paul persecuted and why? And after he joined, and wrote elements of what we find in Mark saying that they had been transmitted to him as he had to the churches, what were these churches? What why did they worship a Jewish notion that referred to a human? This was blasphemy for Jews and idiocy or nonsense for gentiles. You are approaching an oral culture as a writer, and one of only two groups in the entire ancient world with sacred texts from the point of view of an author of fiction. I get that you think this was a big allure, but when was the last time you felt like being tortured to death for a good story?


I'm not familiar with it, but you're welcome to explain if you'd like.

Tatian harmonized the gospels into one. And it was popular among many for a while (one text is easier to copy, it erased the inconsistencies, it was easier to understand, etc.). Then the Bishop Theodoret (among others) burned every copy he could find.

Why does the existence of BeforeJC & AfterJC godmen somehow counter my argument about a new theological/fictional work (gMark)?

What argument? You just said it was fiction and when asked why you said it was because you were experienced with fiction. You claim it was exciting and then ask:

What relevance are the negative references to the Christians and Jesus by pagans?

We’re trying to settle an issue of Christian origins. You are caught up on a view of Mark as a story and think that this is enough to ignore all context. That's not history, it's the projection of your views as a person living in a literate society 2,000 years later applying your experience with writing to an oral culture.

The Jewish messiah was not a godman. The idea of a godman was blasphemy and they fought and died over the placement of idols in their temple or the presence of Roman troops in the land bequeathed to them by YHWH. But in your version the godman was there before Mark, in complete contradiction to the idea of the messiah. And after Mark, as a human messiah, he was a failure. So who was worshipping this paradox before Mark, and who found Mark exciting enough and why? You claim it was the idea of a historical godman, but when I have told you that this was nothing new you can’t tell me why Mark’s version was superior to the others. Nor can you explain to whom Mark as a story would be popular to.

Pliny the younger wrote to Trajan about he his procedure for Christians: they got the opportunity to deny that they were Christian or to making offerings to the image of Trajan, and if they didn’t he had them killed.

And as for a historical godman, Pliny tells us the Christians "recited a hymn antiphonally to Christus as if to a god [Christo quasi deo"

Not to a god, but as if he were a god.

Tacitus refers to Christians, as a “deadly superstition" which "erupted again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but also in the Rome”. He describes the reception they got: “first those who admitted to it were arrested, then on their information a very large multitude was convicted, not so much for the crime of arson as for hatred of the human race. Derision was added to their end: they were covered with the skins of wild animals and torn to death by dogs; or they were crucified and when the day ended they were burned as torches.”

Celsus called Jesus the illigimate child of a soldier named Panthera, and goes off on Mary too: “Was the mother of Jesus beautiful? Did God have screw her because she was beautiful, although by his nature he cannot love a mortal body? It is unlikely that God would have fallen in love with her, since she was neither wealthy nor of royal birth. Indeed, she was not known even to her neighbors.”

Lucian scorns those who come to the bring a jailed Christian, Peregrinus, food, because not only do the Christians deny the gods, they worship a “crucified sophist”.

Even if we look at Christian writings, we find lots of quotes from the NT (many actually have to be explained away), but nobody from antiquity ever thinks about the story at all.

But there do appear to be hundreds of gospels written since Mark
, Define "gospel".
 
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AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
(As I say, I'm going to try to condense our dialogue down to the essence of the arguments. If you think I've skipped over an important issue or question, let me know and I'll address it.)

....you have confused the trips he took. You aren't the first:
No, I haven't confused the trips; I'm ignorant of them. The details of all of this really don't interest me much. I'm only curious about the larger elements. Over time, I've asked many of those who seem familiar with the details whether or not Paul spoke directly to Jesus' followers, and they've all seemed to concede it. But I take your point that he only spoke to a couple of the leading ones and I'll use that assumption unless someone argues against it.

Paul also states Jesus ate with his disciples, that he was descended from David kata sarka, that he knew his brother, and even if we look at the passages that could suggest Jesus was a heavenly source, we find the opposite. Paul says Christ rose from the dead. But he also says it in a very particular way.
What can I say except that it's not enough. It's not nearly enough. In my view, we should not have to pick through Paul's writings to find examples of Paul considering Jesus to have been physical. Rather, we should tire of hearing about Jesus' life from Paul. We should wish that he would finally shut up about every little detail of his Lord's earthly life.

Then there's the fact that his letters are theological works of disputed authorship which had to be hand-copied by Christians over the centuries. (Educate me if these are wrong assumptions on my part.) With all of that in mind, the few apparent actual Jesus references lose their value as convincing evidence for me.

So for now, I'm going to stick with my conclusion that Paul probably didn't think of Jesus as a physical man.

Things get even more strange for any Heavenly Christ. Because despite the inaccurate descriptions of dying and resurrecting gods that plague the internet, Paul doesn't just say Jesus died and rose. He says Jesus was buried. How do you bury a heavenly figure?
Hey, it's theology. Gods can do anything.

We find the earliest version of the passion story before the story author. That is, if Mark hit upon this idea to write a story, he already had the ending. And it wasn't the ending of the Hellenistic Mithras savior god, nor the dying and rising Attis (both of which post-date the gospels), but Jesus the Messiah who was betrayed on a night where he took and passed around food and drink before his death. And he did not die and rise, but he died, was buried, and rose.
Ah. That actually seems to plug a hole in my theory. You're saying that such a passion story existed before Mark? But in a verbal form? (How do you know that?) If so, it explains why there were Christian churches before Jesus. Someone else mentioned a 'Yeshu' referenced in the Talmud, who died in 93 BCE. Maybe an oral passion story began to form about him, with infusions of godman concepts into the messiah idea. Churches began to organize themselves around the Mediterranean. Paul began to proselytize for this new religion. And finally Mark came up with the idea of claiming an actual 30CE Jesus, expanding the oral passion story into a simple narrative.

What do you think?

Finally, perhaps most curious of all is what Paul says this was for. Or rather, it isn't that he says that it was for their sins, but that this was in the scripture. Only it isn't. There is no dying messiah who sacrifices his life for sins in scripture, both what is now the OT and non-canonical literature such as eschatological texts recovered from Qumran. There was a human anointed of God, like those in scriptures, who restored Israel by ridding the land of those who had stolen it and making it the land of YHWH's people once more.
So wouldn't this point to a copyist adding that bit into one of Paul's letters?

Jesus didn't do this. He was executed. So even before Mark, we have attempts to try to understand why the Christ didn't do anything he was supposed to.
Unless Paul didn't actually write that bit. Wouldn't that make better sense?

Paul was writing letters, not gospels. He was writing to people that, as he tells us, he had already passed on the Jesus tradition too.
OK, but I find that argument completely unconvincing. I don't think anyone could have stopped Paul from endlessly mentioning the details of Jesus' life, no matter what he was writing.

But there's no earthly Jesus. There's no 12 disciples of Jesus, and no head disciple Peter. They're all just worshipping this godman Christ, just like Paul. So why doesn't Paul "receive" a message that Peter is wrong? What is wrong with this signal reception between the godman and revelations? I mean, this godman can't even finish talking about the divorce rules before we get "hello? you there? hello? friggin' Verizon. I can hear you now my ***!"
Not following you. Why do you assume that Paul would have telecommunicated with Jesus-the-godman?

We've got a godman who is a failed messiah, who never existed on earth but was buried In it after being betrayed, who needs to fix angel radio because Paul has to slink of to wait for Peter at Antioch instead of receiving a revelation then and there, and finally we have Mark, the story-teller. Only before his story Paul has already said the one most important thing was that Jesus rose from the dead. Mark, this millionaire author who decides to spend god knows how much (but not Jesus; reception issues) because he doesn't like to write drafts the way everyone else does. So he spends a fortune mass producing 3 versions of a story that doesn't make sense because the by that time the failure of the Christ had caused the temple to be destroyed and the Romans had won.
If I make a small complaint: What about allowing me to describe how I see Jesus -- rather than poopooing a Jesus which has nothing to do with me. It would save us a lot of time and wordage.

So why, when Nero is blaming Christians before Mark was written, and Pliny writing letters about these new weirdoes, does a story about a failed messiah who used to be a godman, become so successful once the messiah part get's reinterpreted (and at least by Paul's time) and the godman becomes human? It's sacrilege to the Jewish belief, the historical godman part is old news for the gentiles and....
You keep saying that, so let me ask you quite directly: Please tell me of another godman story in which a fictional godman is claimed to have historically existed just a few years earlier.

If there is such a story, I would like to examine it. If there is no such story, why do you keep insisting that such a story is old news?

...they have to get the Jewish part that is pervasive in Mark's "editions" explained to them, but it catches on because...?
Because no one had previously thought to make the godman historical, as Mark did. Do you really not feel the excitement of such an idea?

I'm telling you. A godman walked the streets of Chicago in 1973! He actually lived! Yeah, and he healed the sick and multiplied the fishes for his followers. But he began to gather followers and Mayor Daley's administration felt threatened. Yeah. So the jealous powerbrokers had the Chicago PD go after the godman. There was even a mock trial, and then they took the godman out and shot him in the back of the head and dumped him in the landfill. Yep. I'm not kidding. It all happened just like that. And if you believe in the Chicago godman, with all your heart and soul, you will live for eternity in heaven, unlike the disbelievers who will be damned to eternal torment.

You really don't think such a story could catch hold in the hearts of those who heard it, Legion -- especially back in those days? If not, we just understand humans in radically different ways.
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
This isn't literary theory. Here genre is a key tool used by classical historians, classical philologists, medieval historians, linguists, anthropologists, and many others.
Sure. But I'm suggesting that such folks can sometimes be seduced into believing in 'genre' in unseemly ways. They can forget that such categorization is artificial, vague, unreliable. They can come to believe that genres actually exist as real things.

Think about my example of theological labels. There are people here in this forum who believe that humans can be sorted out according to whether they are 'atheists' or whether 'theists'. A lot of people believe that. But I see those people as suffering some confusion about language and about people. Sometimes I'll confront one of them. I'll say, "You are welcome to question me about my god views for as long as you like. At the end of the Q&A, you will then tell me whether I'm an atheist or a theist. OK?" But of course I never have any takers for that proposal. I think it's because my simple challenge makes them (uneasily) realize that 'atheist' and 'theist' are just words -- arbitrary categories created by each human mind as it goes along rather than real, existing-in-the-cosmos buckets into which a flesh-and-blood person can be dropped.

So when I hear a classical historian insist that a written work is THIS particular genre rather than THAT other genre, I pretty much just discount him as a person who's been seduced by words. But if he's vague and humble about which genre -- or admits that the work may span genre boundaries or even meld various genres -- then I tend to take him more seriously and listen more attentively.

And were I a publisher I would be ecstatic. But here we are interested in history and an artistic approach is counter-productive. You are approaching an oral society as a writer of fiction.
I think you may have missed my point. I wasn't talking about me, but about Mark. Even if his 'gospel' doesn't seem to fit a proper genre, so what? Maybe he was that one unique long-wolf creator -- though I would think of him more as a religious genius/fraud than as a writing genius.

These gospels weren’t just written, but had to be copied. So even if the original authors did not dictate but wrote, copies were produced by scribes or amateurs and neither enjoyed it at all.
OK. That seems evident. I just don't see its relevance.

To clarify (that is, please rephrase or alter what I say so that it is accurate)- in your theory, we’re basically dealing with people who liked the story of Mark but thought it needed or could benefit from some alterations?
Yes. I think they wanted in on the theological argument, so they rewrote Mark's story. They may have also been motivated by the same thing which motivates many writers. They read a story and they think, "Heck, I could have written that myself. In fact, I could write it better than that. In fact, I think I will!"

This is a problem I’m having. On the one hand, you seem to approach Mark as a brilliant idea of a story: a godman who was historical. And two other authors thought so too, but felt some changes could benefit the work. On the other hand, before Mark was written Christians had already been persecuted by Paul and blamed by Nero.
I like where your thought is headed. I think you've latched on to a possible weakness in my theory and are properly probing it.

What exactly was this group that Paul persecuted and why?
I don't know except that they were clearly 'Christians.' I'm guessing that it was a group which had combined elements of the godman myths with elements of the messiah myth, but with the physical messiah being a fairly vague notion. Maybe just some guy who was purported to have lived a hundred or so years earlier.

The big problem here, of course, is that heretical (by which is often meant 'old' or 'antiquated') theology usually gets destroyed by the current reality bosses. So we may never know much about those early churches and I personally can't trust much of what we do think we know.

Why did they worship a Jewish notion that referred to a human? This was blasphemy for Jews and idiocy or nonsense for gentiles.
So all Christians are following something which they see as idiocy? But why would they do that?

You are approaching an oral culture as a writer, and one of only two groups in the entire ancient world with sacred texts from the point of view of an author of fiction. I get that you think this was a big allure, but when was the last time you felt like being tortured to death for a good story?
Me? Never. I'm the ambiguousguy. I have no fierce belief in either an historical godman nor a fictional one.

But your question confuses me, mostly because you seem to ask it in honesty -- as if you disagree that people throughout history have been tortured and died for their beliefs, whether true or false.

You don't think that people held on during the Inquisition? Everyone gave in at the first sign of danger?

We’re trying to settle an issue of Christian origins. You are caught up on a view of Mark as a story and think that this is enough to ignore all context. That's not history, it's the projection of your views as a person living in a literate society 2,000 years later applying your experience with writing to an oral culture.
Well, no. That's what you are doing -- projecting your modern personal biases onto ancient times and ignoring all context. I am soaking my entire soul and mind into that ancient culture and coming up with the obvious truth of it. (Just messing with you. A bit of tit for your tat.)

The Jewish messiah was not a godman. The idea of a godman was blasphemy and they fought and died over the placement of idols in their temple or the presence of Roman troops in the land bequeathed to them by YHWH.
So why would the Jews fight and die for their beliefs, while the Christians would cave in at the first sign of opposition? How do you explain such a difference between the two groups?

But in your version the godman was there before Mark, in complete contradiction to the idea of the messiah.
It's why Jesus worked better among the gentiles than among the Jews, yes? Or am I misunderstanding that?

Even today, Christians swear that Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies, while Jews vehemently deny it.

And after Mark, as a human messiah, he was a failure.
Sure. Mark couldn't make him a physical success. The news was already in. So he had to make him a spiritual success. It's the way that all inconvenient truth is circumvented, even today. Every time a doomsdayer fails, he just asserts that the world has ended spiritually rather than physically.

You yourself did that with the verse from 2nd John, didn't you? The Jesus-deniers weren't denying a fleshly Flesh Jesus, but rather denying a spiritually Flesh Jesus. Something like that is how it seemed to me, anyway.

You claim it was the idea of a historical godman, but when I have told you that this was nothing new you can’t tell me why Mark’s version was superior to the others. Nor can you explain to whom Mark as a story would be popular to.
You have yet to tell me of another story parallel to Mark's. If one exists, I'll be glad to study and address it.

Pliny the younger wrote to Trajan about he his procedure for Christians: they got the opportunity to deny that they were Christian or to making offerings to the image of Trajan, and if they didn’t he had them killed.
Yeah, and the Illinoisans killed the Mormons, since they wouldn't recant their heresy. And so it goes.

Tacitus refers to Christians, as a “deadly superstition" which "erupted again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but also in the Rome”. He describes the reception they got: “first those who admitted to it were arrested, then on their information a very large multitude was convicted, not so much for the crime of arson as for hatred of the human race. Derision was added to their end: they were covered with the skins of wild animals and torn to death by dogs; or they were crucified and when the day ended they were burned as torches.”
If you get a minute sometime, read about what happened to the early Mormons and those of various other breakaway faiths. Even in 19th century America, people died for what they believed... true or false.

Define "gospel".
I'd say it's a story which purports to tell things about Christ. Urantia and the BOM, for a couple of more recent examples.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I would appreciate it if you read this post, but it is not necessary to respond to it if you do not find something that you feel merits it. It is designed to help ground the discussion, not really to be a part of it. For this reason, I have tried to include more flavor than just a dull exposition on historical methods or epistemology or something like that, so if you're wondering what relevance some quote might have, it's probably just for literary beauty.

just messing with you. A bit of tit for your tat.

That is not tit for tat. It is not an insult or a criticism to suggest that you are doing what historical Jesus scholars all did for the entire 19th century and many have done since. It is advice I would give "big name scholars" like Crossan, Mack, Craig, and others. Too many unconsciously seek the Christian Jesus when they believe they are seeking the historical Jesus, and "find" what they started out with. On the other side (both anti-Christian and more generally those to him this Jewish eschatological prophet is too alien), do the same: they "find" a palatable anti-establishment egalitarian guy from the 1960s or some similar figure because they started out with one.

It is advice that historical Jesus scholars, whether they are biblical scholars or not, need to constantly tell themselves. Most now do most of the time. It is also why the historian and non-biblical scholar Michael Grant, in his 1977 book on the historical Jesus, said that "historical" Jesus research was finally beginning. The reason I put scare quotes around historical is because historians had been using historical-critical methods for over 200 years, but methods mean nothing if the mindset or framework is skewed or otherwise faulty. To insult my own field, (cognitive) neuroscience, it is littered with bad research. The methods were fine. They were simply used inadequately. Sometimes for the same reason that HJ researchers need to be wary of: mindset/framework. Other times for reasons that are irrelevant here.

You may have heard of Ernest Renan (he wrote Vie de Jésus). Of all the so-called "liberal lives" (an approach in the 19th century to the HJ), his was an unmatched piece of work: "noble in reason, in form and moving how express and admirable!...the beauty of" his period, and yet this "paragon" of liberal lives, unmatched in literary style, was just as flawed as all the rest. Even Schweitzer, the guy who wrote the book whence comes the phrase "quest for the historical Jesus", and who demolished the liberal lives approach, got carried away. I include him not because this is particularly relevant but as an admirer and I'm sure talented producer of literature I thought you might enjoy it:

"The Baptist appears and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him.
Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign."

"and crushed them all to blood". It is another Stephen Crane poem, though, that reminds me of the problems that plagued historical Jesus research, from Christian and anti-Christian bias to the fact that all the tools Biblical scholars developed (used so well in other fields) came from the forge only after a thousand failures.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
'Round and 'round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
You can never — "
"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

That was historical Jesus studies until Schweitzer showed that all this running (the methods used before him to find this HJ), were all doomed from the start. His devastating critique, even though it put a temporary halt to HJ scholarship, was necessary. It meant that when scholars started up again, they were aware of how little came out of over a century of studies and 60,000+ works on the subject in the 19th century alone.

As a result, biblical scholars started to borrow methods from other disciplines and invite contributions from them. I'm not saying the problems just up and disappeared, or that scholars suddenly stopped producing works which were projections of themselves onto the past (or plagued by too many assumptions), just that the number of these started to decrease while the tools available and used correctly started to increase.

We ignore this at our peril. When I warn against projecting yourself or your world into the past, it is something I warn myself against constantly. Not a criticism.
 
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LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I'll use that assumption

My point was not that the trip you mentioned didn't happen, just that the date was wrong. The meeting described in Acts happened, even if the description of it is totally inaccurate. It just happened after Paul had already spent 15 days alone with Peter.

What can I say except that it's not enough.

You have not offered any evidence that Paul viewed Jesus as a godman and Paul never says so. Quite the contrary:

"there may be so-called gods [legomenoi theoi] in heaven or on earth — as in fact there are many gods [theoi] and many lords [kyrioi] — 6 yet for us there is one God [heis theos] the Father, from whom are all things and to whom we are [ἐξ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς αὐτόν], and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we for whom are [διʼ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς διʼ αὐτοῦ]." 1 Cor 8:5-6

Ancient Greek has no "a" or an indefinite article (it has an article which is more or less the definite article), so there are many ways of saying something like "a god". Paul uses none of them. He uses the word for 1. Also, God the father is the one "out of whom/ex hou" everything is and "we are going to him" or "toward whom we are" (eis auton/toward whom). Jesus is not the one from which/out of whom all things came to be. He is not the source, but is pre-existent in some sense, which is not a Jewish notion of Messiah/Christ. As they are coordinated clauses the same verb of being left out is left out in both clauses. Thus "through whom we" carries the sense "this is the means for or through which we live".


If you think Paul believed that Jesus a heavenly Christ/Christ godman, then what follows from that belief? Most importantly perhaps is the Jewish notion of Messiah/Christ. The Greek translation of the Hebrew was around at least as long as the LXX, and thus long before Jesus. It means anointed, but in non-Jewish Greek context this had to do with bathing and ointments. In Jewish texts written or translated into Greek, it had to do with one chosen by god to lead his people (as e.g., a Davidic king, a would-be king, a prophet, etc.). But the anointed one, all the way back to 1 Samuel (Kings), was a person.

The Mishnah was written down c. 200 and the Talmud c. 700 CE. Yet still we find references to would-be messiahs who failed and they are all people, not "godmen", just like all the messiahs we know of before Jesus. So how is it that this Jewish notion of the Christ came to be the godman Paul referred to?

In my view, we should not have to pick through Paul's writings to find examples of Paul considering Jesus to have been physical.

That's not your view. In your view there's nothing odd about Paul believing in a non-earthly Christ, and thus nothing odd with him writing about one. What I'm saying is that given what we know about Paul and Judaism as well as the wider context, if there were no references to anything bodily in Paul, we would still have a very hard time trying to show where on earth a conception of a messiah as having never been on earth came from when we have hundreds and hundreds of years before, during, and after Jesus concerning messiahs, but not one instance of any godman but of people.


Rather, we should tire of hearing about Jesus' life from Paul
Paul isn't writing for our sake, nor is he writing about Jesus, but writing to those who are already Christians addressing Christian concerns. What basis is there to assume he should say anything about Jesus' life?


Then there's the fact that his letters are theological works of disputed authorship which had to be hand-copied by Christians over the centuries.
They had to be hand copied by Christians or non-Christians (hired scribes). But these are letters dealing with specific concerns of specific communities. They aren't histories and they weren't written to talk about Jesus.
Gods can do anything.

The can't in Judaism, because there are no gods. There is only one God.

After the gospels, the biggest problem was Jesus' nature. There were those who claimed he wasn't divine (like the Ebionites), those who thought Jesus and God the father were both gods, and those that thought Jesus only appeared to be human. The closest thing we ever find to your Jesus Godman is what we find after all the gospels were written.

You're saying that such a passion story existed before Mark?
A story isn't formulaic, isn't a recitation of received information or a declaration of faith. That's what we find in Paul. Not a story.

But in a verbal form? (How do you know that?)
There are points in Paul's letters where his language changes completely. It's like reading a letter from someone who includes the a prayer or poem.

Someone else mentioned a 'Yeshu' referenced in the Talmud
700 years later. If you think John is too late, then forget the Talmud.

infusions of godman concepts into the messiah idea.
1) What godman concepts? Specifically?
2) If we assume that Jesus never existed, then the messiah idea is completely absent from a group of people who followed/believed in this Jewish Christ so much the term could be used to define them.

A non-human (and therefore non-Jewish) godman Christ comes out of nowhere.

What do you think?

That you've erased any Judaism from a Jewish notion without giving any explanation for this and postulated how ideas of a godman you don't specify were introduced into a movement that was defined both in opposition to Judaism and completely incomprehensible without it.

And that this is a lot easier to explain if we don't have to make up a reason why a new conception of the messiah was needed. With a historical Jesus, we don't have to.

So wouldn't this point to a copyist adding that bit into one of Paul's letters?

Such references are in all the gospels. A central factor in most "heretical" versions of early Christianity form at least the beginning of the 2nd century was the rejection of Judaism (or worse, that whatever was true of it was evil). Matthew, Mark, Paul, Luke, Acts, etc., all referenced scripture. To have a messiah who didn't do anything that the messiah was supposed to required reinterpretation of scripture. If Paul didn't say that Christ was consistent with Jewish scriptures (not just those of the OT either), then we'd be wondering.
Jewish references are littered all throughout Paul's letters, which are incomprehensible without a Jewish framework.

Unless Paul didn't actually write that bit. Wouldn't that make better sense?
Paul repeats it over and over again. It's his central belief. Without it, he can't make sense of the messiah, because Israel is not restored. With it, Israel is restored through death and God's kingdom opened by resurrection.


Why do you assume that Paul would have telecommunicated with Jesus-the-godman?

I'll go over this again:
in 1 Cor 7:10, Paul explicitly separates his instruction from that of the Lord: tois de gegamekkosin paragello, ouk ego alla ho kurios…/”to the unmarried I command, or rather not I, but the Lord…” Paul’s assertion that this prohibition of divorce is from Jesus is also echoed in Q and Mark. Almost immediately following this, however, Paul states (1 Cor. 7:12), tois de loipois lego ego ouch ho kurios…/”to the rest I say, not the Lord,…”

Paul tells us things that Jesus Christ commanded/taught. Not many, but in the above example he is dealing (as he does in his letters) with a problem in a Christian community: "Now concerning the matters about which you wrote". The issue is marriage/divorce. He goes on at length about it, and these lines (as well as e.g., 7:25 "Now concerning the unmarried I have no command of the Lord") are integral.

If Jesus were a Divine Christ for Paul, what we'd expect is that for every dispute he must address, we'd hear what Christ tells him. That would be the only way for him to get any "command" from the Lord Christ.
These commands make perfect sense if Jesus existed, but not if he didn't.


rather than poopooing a Jesus which has nothing to do with me
I was trying to demonstrate what follows from your theory. I'll try to be more explicit from now on.


Please tell me of another godman story in which a fictional godman is claimed to have historically existed just a few years earlier.

I'm saying that we have historical people who were believed to be gods. This idea of a godman is a modern one, because from the 3rd century until at least the 19th, there was only one god-man: Jesus.

For example, we have a coin minted while Augustus still lived calling him the son of god. Suetonius, in his biographies of both Augustus and Julius Caesar says they were gods. In fact, for Julius Caesar it was an official cult and but Suetonius tells us not just law but via "popular account/common belief" as he "counted among the gods". Of Augustus, he tells us that in an account by Asclepius Augustus' mother was sleeping at night when Apollo in the form of a snake impregnated her. See Div. Jul & Div. Aug


If there is such a story, I would like to examine it.
There are stories of possibly historical people who were called gods. There are historical people from Plato and Lysander to the Caesars who were either descended from gods or were gods. How can Lysander be descended from Herakles, or Julius Caesar be counted among the other gods, if they didn't all exist in the minds of those of the day? I would read the lives of Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Plutarch to start for such stories.
 
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LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Important points about my last post:
1) You have yet to demonstrate that Paul or Mark or anybody until much later thought Christ was a godman.
2) Paul specifically refers to commands of this Lord Christ Jesus of his and when he can't he says he has no commands from that Lord.
3) You have yet to explain what a "godman" is, and how a Messiah that was defined as human and was a Jewish concept became a Jewish godman when this is completely contradictory to the Judaism of the day and before. It had been a long time since YHWH was just the biggest god on the block. Full monotheism was in effect.

To make up for the fact that my posts are long, I'm going to use this one for one thing only: the issue of gods and godmen.

Because no one had previously thought to make the godman historical, as Mark did.

The word in Greek is either θέανδρος or θεάνθρωπος. The problem is that it isn't in Paul. It isn't in Mark. In fact, it isn't even in the BDAG ("the" lexicon in English for NT and early Christian Greek). I had to go to the TLG to find it, and it's first used some 300 years after Mark (a Latin translation of Origen, some centuries after him has what might be the Latin equivalent, but in our Greek texts of Origen he never uses the term), and even then only barely. Most of the uses are after 500 CE, which the TLG doesn't cover so I had to look through Byzantine Greek Lexicons. It entered the English language as "God-Man" in the 16th century and was used exclusively to refer to Jesus. Before Jung, it's hard to find where the use of godman (german Gottmensch, French Homme-Dieu) referred to anyone other than Jesus.


For the Greeks, gods, daimôn, hemitheos, and other deities or demi-gods were very real and from Isocrates incredibly superior account delivered to the successor of Evagoras, in which he described how the ex-king was superior to the demi-gods of Zeus (or at least equal) to the lives of Suetonius of the Caesars, the people of antiquity had living gods alongside demigods and the descendants of both: Lysander, Plato, etc. They had rituals where ecstatic states were induced through chanting, prayer, and placebo-like effects greatly enhanced by the mechanisms of group psychology where Dionysus would appear (or some other god). As gods often appeared as strangers clothed in particular garb (a traditional mythic description ubiquitous in antiquity thanks to the Homeric epics), the visits from actual gods were plentiful. The relationship and physical proximity to gods that the pagans had is probably found most detailed in Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians.

Which is why the "heretical" Christianities were more like the pagan cults: as the grew from Marcion to the numerous versions in the late 3rd and 4th centuries, they eschewed the Jewish basis and tradition and re-wrote the gospels to get rid not only of these, but of a human Jesus. Actually, some versions kept the human Jesus as a host-body, but Docetism (in which Jesus was a divine entity upon earth like those the pagans had) was more prominent by far.

The pagans/gentiles has living gods like the Caesars, descendants of gods and demigods like Plato and Lysander, miracle-works including the contemporary of Jesus that Philostratus' Life tells us of (Apollonius of Tyana), and even Jewish didn't want a Messiah peasant (why do you think Matthew and Luke have Jesus of Nazareth born in Bethlehem?).



I'm telling you. A godman walked the streets of Chicago in 1973!
Actually it was a bit earlier and in Ethiopia:
"This very brief overview of Selassie's life demonstrates a very human ruler, someone who was clearly a fallible character, a man who fell prey to human weaknesses such as decadence, delusions of grandeur, and the desire to subjugate those over whom he had authority. None of this is particularly shocking or unexpected, given the context. For the followers of the Rastafari religion, however, Selassie is a figure of devotion whose hagiography bears almost no relation to the historical figure, and even within his own lifetime Selassie was hailed by thousands as living incarnation of God. Indeed, for Rastafarians, Selassie was 'the Almighty on earth in the flesh of Man', 'the head of creation', 'the God of all ages', 'immortal', 'omnipotent', and 'the world's greatest political leader of the twentieth century' whose 'works for the unification of humankind, equal rights and justice are unparalleled'"

And so again we find not a nobody but an emperor whom the common people worship:
"Brother George Huggins of Accompong, explained the enthusiastic welcome, 'it is hard to put in words what seeing this man, this great man, the Lord of lords, in Jamaica meant to us in the Rastafarian community. We had heard so much about him for so long.' On the tarmac, some waved palm leaves, some red, green and gold Ethiopian flags, and some blew the Maroon cowhorn known as the abeng in welcome. Everyone kept their eyes on the sky wondering when the plane carrying His Imperial Majesty from Trinidad and Tobago would arrive. Rain began to fall and the crowd continued to wait, hoping even for just a glimpse of the plane through the thick clouds that had formed.
When the insignia of a roaring lion and stripes of red, green and gold finally came into view, the rain stopped. People shouted, 'See how God stop de rain'. The sound from the crowd was deafening as masses of people rushed to get closer to the island's distinguished visitor. The crowd simply broke down any barriers that stood in their way in their eagerness to position themselves as close as possible to the 'King of Kings'."

Standing, E. (2010). Against Mythicism: A case for the plausibility of a historical Jesus. THINK, 9(24), 13-27

You really don't think such a story could catch hold in the hearts of those who heard it, Legion -- especially back in those days?

I linked you to one story ~300 years before Jesus about what "those people" found exciting, and you need only read Suetonius' Lives to realize the power that an Emperor as a living god among gods had over "those people". This is history, not psychoanalysis. If you think such a story would catch hold, then surely you can produce some evidence that this story was more exciting than the crowds that cheered and whooped when divine Augustus appeared before them, just as an Ethiopian emperor would 2,000 years later?

If not, we just understand humans in radically different ways.

Perhaps. But so far you have produced an analogy with you writing process which turned out to be completely inadequate, and you have yet to support your ideas about what was exciting for people at this time. You haven't even stated what a godman was or why you assert Paul thought Jesus was one. Also, I have not only a 20th century account that better matches my version of what people in antiquity found exciting, but references to what people said in antiquity. If I understand humans so poorly that I am wrong about the historical Jesus, where is your evidence? If it exists solely in the way that Christians are...well...Christians, and therefore believe that Christianity is great and awesome, that's not evidence of anything other than that Christians are Christians. If there is evidence that the idea of a god becoming historical was exciting, where is it? Not in early Christianity, where the first "re-write" of Mark covered up his origins to make him more palatable by having him be born in the right place and where when we finally find unambiguous claims that Jesus was divine it is accompanied by views which strip away the "man" part of your "godman".
 
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AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
We ignore this at our peril. When I warn against projecting yourself or your world into the past, it is something I warn myself against constantly. Not a criticism.

A good message and I appreciate your effort to explain all that.

So let's step aside and discuss tact for a moment. Forgive me if I suggest that you may not have mastered the art of diplomatic language quite yet. Here's what you said to me:

You are caught up on a view of Mark as a story and think that this is enough to ignore all context. That's not history, it's the projection of your views as a person living in a literate society 2,000 years later applying your experience with writing to an oral culture. [Legion]

But I don't interpret that as a generalized warning against projecting our modern, personal views into historical issues. I interpret it as an accusation that I am behaving thusly at a specific point in my argumentation. In other words, you are accusing me of bias in order to refute my point. That's how it feels to me anyway.

But of course, I deny. I am surely not ignoring context. I am not projecting my modern views back into history. I am coldly and objectively divesting myself of all personal bias and merely observing the reality of that ancient time and place.

See? They're just claims and counterclaims.

Let me demonstrate how a diplomat might have worded your quote above:

AmbigGuy, I think we need to be wary of being caught up on a view of Mark as a story. Such an assumption might cause us to miss some important context and might even be a projection of our views as people living in a literate society 2,000 years later, applying our experiences with writing to an oral culture.

We aren't diplomats here; we're debaters. So I'm not upset that you accuse me of bias. It's just that my only possible counterargument is, "Not I'm not. You are."

Just my take on things, of course.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
They can forget that such categorization is artificial, vague, unreliable.

Which is why studies on the gospels in comparison with other literature was so important. Over the past several decades, when this began to be questioned, it turned out that the gospels have a great deal in common with biographies by ancient historians.
To refute the mainstream view that they are a kind of ancient history, you would need to show that they are fiction. Which means comparing them with other literature of the time.


Think about my example of theological labels. There are people here in this forum who believe that humans can be sorted out according to whether they are 'atheists' or whether 'theists'.
Concepts are categories. They are fuzzy, they are nebulous, they are ever-changing, but without them we don't have thought.

At the end of the Q&A, you will then tell me whether I'm an atheist or a theist. OK?" But of course I never have any takers for that proposal.
Do you know where the word agnostic comes from? Someone who was asked to label his theological view much like you state: Thomas Huxley. He coined the term because he wasn't a theist, but he wasn't an atheist, he just didn't have the knowledge of god like the gnostics (as they were understood then) did. So he called himself agnostic: without the gnostic knowledge of god.

arbitrary categories created
...the fundamental process of all thought.

Until you understand that without language there is no thought, then you can treat language derisively all you want but all you have done is made the mechanisms that allow you to understand, interpret, and make meaningful any and all perceptual experiences.

So when I hear a classical historian
Which classical historians have you heard or read?

I think they wanted in on the theological argument

What theological argument? Paul said (I quoted this 2 posts back) that there was only one god.

They may have also been motivated by the same thing which motivates many writers.

Most writer's do not take texts of religious movements and then risk death to re-write them for the sake of literary satisfaction. And your writing process analogy already doesn't hold up. This was an oral culture. Even for Christians and even after the gospels: a face-to-face account was better than any text, and stories were told, not written. The reason we have so few historians and biographies is in part for the same reason that parts of the Talmud date back before Jesus (although they are unusable for historical purposes because the far more formalized oral transmission occurred to late): no matter what the content of some information was (news, philosophical teaching, history, biography, epic, drama, etc.) it was to be transmitted orally. Most of the texts that we have were transmitted orally (including the gospels) but were written first to have a "script" of sorts. Quite literally a script if we are dealing with drama, but not if we are talking about e.g., court cases.

Antiphon, Andokides, Isocrates, and other orators were orators. Yet we have written works by them. Why? Because like Herodotus, the gospels, officially appointed people whose job it was to take testimony, and lawyers all dealt with oral information and oral transmission. Clearly, many wrote down what they would say, or wrote down guides or instructions for this or that so that a teacher could say them, but the fact remains that literacy was mostly a way to help oral transmission.

I don't know except that they were clearly 'Christians.' I'm guessing that it was a group which had combined elements of the godman myths with elements of the messiah myth,
There was no "messiah myth". The kings of Israel were messiahs. So were priests. So were prophets. Nor were there any "godman" myths. That's a modern invention. There were living gods, gods that dwelt elsewhere that came to earth, descendants of gods, etc. But this "godman" idea is mostly Jungian.

but with the physical messiah being a fairly vague notion.
It was neither vague nor singular.


The big problem here, of course, is that heretical (by which is often meant 'old' or 'antiquated') theology usually gets destroyed by the current reality bosses.

We have no copies (other than a piece discovered in 1933) of Tatian's Diatesseron. But we know of it. Same with most heresies. That's because the "reality bosses" didn't destroy them but preserved them. They didn't intend to, but in order to become the "reality bosses" they needed to refute them, which meant quoting them at length. Also, heretical doesn't mean old. It means new. Paul and the first Christians were heretical Jews. Then various heresies were either hashed out in councils, arguments which we have evidence of, etc.


I personally can't trust much of what we do think we know.
Which is?

So all Christians are following something which they see as idiocy? But why would they do that?

They didn't. Because Jesus was a messianic figure and therefore wasn't some contradiction-in-terms like you Christ Godman. But he failed. And as so often happens, whether it is Jesus' followers or neo-Marxists, when the prophesied doesn't come to pass, it becomes reinterpreted to make it both inline with what actually happened and to be "consistent" with what supposed to.

The only way we get a bunch of lunatics following idiocy is if we imagine a group of Christians utterly defined by a Jewish notion of a human restorer of YHWH's people who don't believe that human was earthly but a Godman.


So why would the Jews fight and die for their beliefs, while the Christians would cave in at the first sign of opposition?

1) The Jews had a land to fight for. After it was lost, no more fighting
2) Both caved at times.
3) Plenty of Christians refused to renounce their religion and died for it, whether because they were cut down in the streets or executed for refusing to denounce Christianity. If you call that caving, then dying rather than doing what you believe to be wrong is cowardice.

How do you explain such a difference between the two groups?

One began as a heretical movement from the other.

It's why Jesus worked better among the gentiles than among the Jews, yes? Or am I misunderstanding that?

The Christians were a Jewish minority until they had become sufficiently distinct that the Romans took notice. But the Jews were themselves a minority, and by the time the Christians really diverged from Judaism, the romans had destroyed the temple and killed who knows how many Jews. After that, the Jews were far more concerned with their only problems rather than dealing with the Jews that were still Jews and followed a human Jesus or these new Christians who couldn't decide what the hell Jesus was. It was the Roman empire who systematically persecuted them, because they lacked the claims to ancient traditions that the Jews had (which is one reason that so many cultures who ruled over Israel still respected the religion and why gentiles attended synagogues). Jesus worked "better" in the sense that certain ties between the gentiles and Jews, such as gentiles who were polytheists but would attend Jewish gatherings to worship YHWH, enabled the Jewish framework of Christianity to make sense for the minority of gentiles familiar with it. For the majority, it was worse than Judaism.

Even today, Christians swear that Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecies
That's because several hundred years of debate on this resulted in an orthodoxy in which it was decided that the Jewish god and Jewish scriptures stayed, so long as they were reinterpreted (a process that began before Paul wrote).

Mark couldn't make him a physical success. The news was already in. So he had to make him a spiritual success.
He was already a spiritual success. Hence "Christ". The only way he could be a Christ would be to be physical and to restore Israel. He didn't restore Israel, so his restoration became spiritual. As the Christ Jesus, he was already physical.


The Jesus-deniers weren't denying a fleshly Flesh Jesus, but rather denying a spiritually Flesh Jesus
They were denying that the Jesus who walked the earth was human rather than a divine figure who only appeared to be human. They absolutely denied he was "fleshy".

Something like that is how it seemed to me, anyway.
My mistake. I obviously wasn't clear.

You have yet to tell me of another story parallel to Mark's
That's because you are telling me what Mark is, when Mark is nothing of the sort. And if I'm wrong, you haven't done anything to show this other than say that your experience as a writer of fiction explains stories and that a godman notion which didn't exist was incorporated with a messiah notion that didn't exist.


in 19th century America, people died for what they believed... true or false.

The issue is whether someone showed them a really great book and they decided to turn it into a religion to die for- literally.

I'd say it's a story which purports to tell things about Christ.
Like 1 Kings. Which does this.
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
Could you maybe write FIN or something when you are done posting? I'd rather not fragment things but instead exchange whole replies.

Thanks.
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
You have not offered any evidence that Paul viewed Jesus as a godman and Paul never says so.
You seem to have some technical definition in mind for 'godman' which I don't share with you. In this instance, I'm simply saying that Paul seems to have thought of Jesus as mystical or incorporeal rather than as a physical man -- and certainly not as a physical man who lived in his own lifetime, with whom he could have hung out if only he'd made it to Jerusalem earlier.

But I'm not interested in defending my opinion in detail, nor am I competent to do it. As I've said, I'm a generalist, a theologian, a theorist. I don't have time to bore down into every area which interests me. Instead, I listen to experts, especially when they're arguing with one another; I ask them hard questions if I'm lucky enough to have that opportunity. And most importantly, I listen with extreme attentiveness to the integrity of their minds, judging the degree and direction of their bias. From all of that, I draw my most likely conclusions about what is true. Then I take those moderate-sized truth elements and build my worldview, with tentativeness and with attention to new and contrary information. (At least I hope I do that last bit.)

I first heard of Paul's ignorance of the HJ from Isaac Asimov, years ago. I remember how it startled me. Asimov has a good reputation with me. He seemed to have very little bias in his discussion of biblical matters and of course he had a capital processor fed by a craving for all knowledge. Since that time I've listened and read and wondered about Paul, and my Asimov-provided opinion hasn't changed much. No one has given me evidence which compels me to see Paul as having known of an earthly Jesus. Not yet.

But I'll admit something else: I'm biased. I see life as non-magical, even mundane. I don't much believe in heroes, especially majestic ones. Occam's Razor usually works for me. If there's a simple answer or opinion, I usually go for that.

So here's what I see: If 1) Paul was a Christ fanatic, and 2) Paul knew every detail of Jesus' earthly life, yet 3) Paul did not constantly rant about HJ's earthly life, and 4) Paul's writing have been copied and recopied over the years by extremely-biased theological types yet we still have to strain to find evidence that Paul considered Jesus to be historical... then the simple answer seems that Paul didn't think of Jesus as historical.

That's about all I can say about that, though you're welcome to continue to attempt my conversion to your own view.

The Mishnah was written down c. 200 and the Talmud c. 700 CE. Yet still we find references to would-be messiahs who failed and they are all people, not "godmen", just like all the messiahs we know of before Jesus. So how is it that this Jewish notion of the Christ came to be the godman Paul referred to?
I'm confused by your question, but you're welcome to ask it again in a different form. I will say that all things are possible with theology. One man alone, like Paul, is perfectly capable of deciding that the Jewish messiah is actually part God and part man. Or all god. He has no obligation to follow standard theology. In fact, if he had followed the standard thought, we would not know of him today. He'd have been just another preacher of the old rather than a prophet of the new.

In your view there's nothing odd about Paul believing in a non-earthly Christ, and thus nothing odd with him writing about one. What I'm saying is that given what we know about Paul and Judaism as well as the wider context, if there were no references to anything bodily in Paul, we would still have a very hard time trying to show where on earth a conception of a messiah as having never been on earth came from when we have hundreds and hundreds of years before, during, and after Jesus concerning messiahs, but not one instance of any godman but of people.
Ditto above. Where does a new god concept come from? Well, it comes from a single human mind. Give me 60 seconds and I'll concoct a new one here on the spot. Really, your outlook here doesn't make sense to me. You see everyone as being locked into a particular theological camp, at all times, and never able to get out? Theological lockstep? That certainly isn't my experience with godthinkers.

Paul isn't writing for our sake, nor is he writing about Jesus, but writing to those who are already Christians addressing Christian concerns. What basis is there to assume he should say anything about Jesus' life?
Human nature. We always talk about what is important to us, especially us fanatics. And a guy who is fanatical about a hero figure? They are usually the very worst bores.

They had to be hand copied by Christians or non-Christians (hired scribes). But these are letters dealing with specific concerns of specific communities. They aren't histories and they weren't written to talk about Jesus.
OK. It's a fine opinion. I disagree with it, but there's not much else to say. I believe that the wolf will always go for the meat. You seem to believe that the wolf will not go for the meat unless his specific intent at the moment is to go for the meat.

A story isn't formulaic, isn't a recitation of received information or a declaration of faith. That's what we find in Paul. Not a story.
Umm... I think you're being way too subtle for me. Are you claiming that Paul's letters contain a passion story?

There are points in Paul's letters where his language changes completely. It's like reading a letter from someone who includes the a prayer or poem.
So I'm right? You see a passion story embedded in Paul's letters somehow? Have you ever extracted it and presented it as a whole to the world? I'd love to see it.

700 years later. If you think John is too late, then forget the Talmud.
Thanks. I didn't know that. So will the Jews argue that the stories pre-existed orally (aka: 'oral tradition') and were just written down in 700 CE? Or will they admit that it was written de novo in 700 CE?

1) What godman concepts? Specifically?
Who can know that? This all happened 2000 years ago and there were thousands of individuals, each of whom could have his own godman concept which changed daily. It's theology. It was a constant battle to see (invisible) reality in my way rather than your way. Just like the RF. Look around this forum. Tell me which godman concepts are held by the membership. You can't do that. Heck, the ones who hold them usually can't explain them -- much less could you explain 'the RF godman concept'. Not if your life depended on it.

And that this is a lot easier to explain if we don't have to make up a reason why a new conception of the messiah was needed. With a historical Jesus, we don't have to.
But I think you have it backwards. An historical Jesus would have gone the way of extinction just like each and every other Jewish messiah has done. Only a fictional messiah, pretended to be historical, could succeed. Real humans have remembered warts, but mythical humans can be perfect. The trick is to succeed in convincing everyone that he was real.

Paul tells us things that Jesus Christ commanded/taught. Not many, but...
Since it is not many, wouldn't the most likely explanation be that later copyists added that material?

If Jesus were a Divine Christ for Paul, what we'd expect is that for every dispute he must address, we'd hear what Christ tells him. That would be the only way for him to get any "command" from the Lord Christ.
Why? Why couldn't he just be relaying Christ's teachings which he'd learned from other Christians? When he had none, he held silent. When he had some, he conveyed them.

I'm saying that we have historical people who were believed to be god
Of course. And that's the main reason we don't worship them today. They were historical. Not enough people could believe that they rose from the dead, for example. Or that they did miracles in public. For that, we need a fake historical person. (Sorry to put it that way, Lurking Christians, but it's how it seems to me.)

There are stories of possibly historical people who were called gods. There are historical people from Plato and Lysander to the Caesars who were either descended from gods or were gods. How can Lysander be descended from Herakles, or Julius
Caesar be counted among the other gods, if they didn't all exist in the minds of those of the day?
I think they did exist in the people's minds. That's why they ultimately failed as gods.
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
1) You have yet to demonstrate that Paul or Mark or anybody until much later thought Christ was a godman.
In my conception, only godmen can rise from the dead or do miracles or promise us a place in heaven. Regular guys, non-godmen, can't do that stuff.

2) Paul specifically refers to commands of this Lord Christ Jesus of his and when he can't he says he has no commands from that Lord.
Right. He's passing on church teachings. It was his job.

3) You have yet to explain what a "godman" is, and...
As with all words, it depends on the particular usage and context, but a godman generally looks like a regular fleshman but has a special connection to 'God.' He can often perform miracles and usually goes around teaching God's Own Truth to the masses. Often he even rises from the dead. A godman is A Serious Hero, worthy of our worship. Non-godmen aren't.

...how a Messiah that was defined as human and was a Jewish concept became a Jewish godman when this is completely contradictory to the Judaism of the day and before. It had been a long time since YHWH was just the biggest god on the block.
Full monotheism was in effect.
So you don't believe in evolving theology? You should talk to a Baha'i sometime.

The word in Greek is either ??a?d??? or ?e?????p??. The problem is that it isn't in Paul. It isn't in Mark. In fact, it isn't even in the BDAG ("the" lexicon in English for NT and early Christian Greek). I had to go to the TLG to find it, and it's first used some
300 years after Mark (a Latin translation of Origen, some centuries after him has what might be the Latin equivalent, but in our Greek texts of Origen he never uses the term), and even then only barely. Most of the uses are after 500 CE, which the TLG
doesn't cover so I had to look through Byzantine Greek Lexicons. It entered the English language as "God-Man" in the 16th century and was used exclusively to refer to Jesus. Before Jung, it's hard to find where the use of godman (german Gottmensch, French homme-Dieu) referred to anyone other than Jesus.
As is often the case, I have no idea why you are writing such stuff. It's almost as if you consider 'godman' to be a proper noun. Is that how you see it? It's so odd to me, the way you seem to believe that you can follow a word around through different languages and times. But I guess someone who studies ancient language might come to think of things like that -- as if the words can mean things in and of themselves.

But as someone who hardly believes in standalone words, that they can contain some particular meaning all by themselves, I assure you that your historical hounddogging is wasted on me. In my conception, words don't mean things. Only people can mean things.

Actually it was a bit earlier and in Ethiopia:
No, Selassie was an actual guy, I'm pretty sure. I've seen photos, and I have no reason to believe that people have joined together in a worldwide conspiracy to make me believe that he was physical when he actually wasn't. So Selassie fails the test. Unlike the fictional Jesus, people can go back and find info on Selassie. Remember: In order to succeed, the messiah must be purported to be real but he must not have actually existed. I doubt that Rastafarians will inherit the earth, despite all their killer weed.

If you think such a story would catch hold, then surely you can produce some evidence that this story was more exciting than the crowds that cheered and whooped when divine Augustus appeared before them, just as an Ethiopian emperor would 2,000 years later?
If I understand what you're asking, the evidence is right in front of you. Christians = billions. Augustinians = close to zero.

Actual historical figures have no chance against fictional messiahs claimed to have been historical.

Perhaps. But so far you have produced an analogy with you writing process which turned out to be completely inadequate....
That is really so curious to me... your intensity to proclaim victory.

Even in the face of your confused and irrelevant response to my overwhelmingly-powerful writing analogy, still you cling to the paltry and ineffectual little 'evidence' which you scraped together to cast against it. Kinda amazing. But alas. I'm afraid my analogy rules, and the synoptics are proven to be fiction. Sorry.

(Faux victory dance. Fake arrogance and certainty. Do you recognize it yet, or do you still confuse it with my serious responses? Either way, you just got served!:))

...and you have yet to support your ideas about what was exciting for people at this time.
That's true. I also can't provide evidence that teenaged boys tend to masturbate or that wolves feel an intense craving for meat. Some things we just have to infer from what we have observed of life.

You haven't even stated what a godman was or why you assert Paul thought Jesus was one.
Paul thought that Christ rose from the dead. Do you think non-godmen can do that?

If I understand humans so poorly that I am wrong about the historical Jesus, where is your evidence?
That's a really strange question. I'd have no idea how to answer it.

If there is evidence that the idea of a god becoming historical was exciting, where is it?
Billions of Christians, even today.
 

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
But I don't interpret that as a generalized warning against projecting our modern, personal views into historical issues.


The warning is general, but the way it applies to any person is partly general and partly personal.


Let me demonstrate how a diplomat might have worded your quote above:

Thank you. I'll try to follow your example in the future.

Also, I have written more than enough for now, so per your request I am stating that I am done replying/posting until you respond. Also, if you write a post but would like me to hold off because you have more to say, I'll do so. Just let me know.
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
Which is why studies on the gospels in comparison with other literature was so important. Over the past several decades, when this began to be questioned, it turned out that the gospels have a great deal in common with biographies by ancient historians.
Well I would sure hope so. If Mark looked more like fiction, then my theory might fall apart. Mark's point was for people to see it as biography, not fiction.

To refute the mainstream view that they are a kind of ancient history, you would need to show that they are fiction. Which means comparing them with other literature of the time.
You seem confused about that. If I could show that gMark looks more like ancient fiction than like ancient history, then my theory would fall apart. Why would Mark make his work look like a piece of fiction rather than pretend biography?

Concepts are categories. They are fuzzy, they are nebulous, they are ever-changing, but without them we don't have thought.
Yes, obviously.

Do you know where the word agnostic comes from? Someone who was asked to label his theological view much like you state: Thomas Huxley. He coined the term because he wasn't a theist, but he wasn't an atheist, he just didn't have the knowledge of god like the gnostics (as they were understood then) did. So he called himself agnostic: without the gnostic knowledge of god.
Yes, I know all that. But, as so often, I have no good idea why you have mentioned it here in our dialogue.

Until you understand that without language there is no thought, then you can treat language derisively all you want but all you have done is made the mechanisms that allow you to understand, interpret, and make meaningful any and all perceptual experiences.
Ah, I see. So all of your work above was to shoehorn me into a black outfit so that you could ride out onto the field in your resplendent whites and proclaim the True Truth? Yikes. I find myself still trying to adjust myself to you. It's hard for me to understand why you so fiercely crave to win, at whatever the cost.

Anyway: If you feel in need of a short lecture on the proper understanding of language and how it works, you only have to ask. It has been my life's work, and I am happy to share my deep linguistic wisdom with those who have not been able to work their way through some of the rudimentary aspects of it. Just ask.

Now onward.

What theological argument? Paul said (I quoted this 2 posts back) that there was only one god.
That's all theology is to you? Settling the issue of how many gods there are? I certainly don't see it that way.

Most writer's do not take texts of religious movements and then risk death to re-write them for the sake of literary satisfaction.
You don't know if Matthew and Luke risked death. Aren't you aware that people often write political and religious works anonymously? I think Hamilton even did some of the Federalist Papers that way(?)

The reason we have so few historians and biographies is in part for the same reason that parts of the Talmud date back before Jesus
You just told me that the Talmud is from 700CE, in order to refute the Yeshu thing. What's up?

There was no "messiah myth". The kings of Israel were messiahs. So were priests. So were prophets.
So nobody considered Jesus to be the messiah?

Nor were there any "godman" myths. That's a modern invention. There were living gods, gods that dwelt elsewhere that came to earth, descendants of gods, etc. But this "godman" idea is mostly Jungian.
That's a fine opinion. Lots of scholars disagree with you, from what I've read here and there.

Also, heretical doesn't mean old. It means new. Paul and the first Christians were heretical Jews. Then various heresies were either hashed out in councils, arguments which we have evidence of, etc.
So you're arguing that bigamy isn't really heretical to the Mormon Church? Only new ideas are heretical? I have to say that I find your claims to be quite strange at times.

Plenty of Christians refused to renounce their religion and died for it, whether because they were cut down in the streets or executed for refusing to denounce Christianity.
Then why on earth do you keep arguing that the early adherents of the Jesus Story would not have died for their beliefs? I'm utterly confused as to what your actual position might be.

They were denying that the Jesus who walked the earth was human rather than a divine figure who only appeared to be human. They absolutely denied he was "fleshy".
OK, it's a fine opinion. Me, I'm going to stick with the simpler explanation -- that John was cursing those who denied that Jesus had actually lived in Jerusalem in 30CE. The simple and obvious answer is usually the right answer, in my experience, though not always.

That's because you are telling me what Mark is, when Mark is nothing of the sort.
How could I possibly tell you what gMark is? And how could you possibly know that gMark is nothing of the sort? Really, Legion, all we smart apes have are our individual personal opinions... I'm pretty sure about that.

I'm not telling you what gMark is. I'm presenting my opinion that gMark is probably a concocted story which makes up an historical figure, places him in the recent past, claims he was a messiah/godman/prophet/healer/magician, and goes about trying to convince people to believe that he was actually historical.

I'm asking you if you know of any other instances of such a thing. If not, how can you claim that history is replete with such stories? All you've mentioned so far are actual historical figures whom some claimed to be gods, etc.

And if I'm wrong, you haven't done anything to show this other than say that your experience as a writer of fiction explains stories and that a godman notion which didn't exist was incorporated with a messiah notion that didn't exist.
Yeah. But that doesn't bother me. It's because I've long since given up the belief that we can know the truth, while I'm not so sure that you have yet accepted that.

If you're wrong? How could you be wrong? That implies that you could be right. But I'm perfectly content accepting that I can't prove anything to you or even to myself. All I can do is make my best guesses, listen to others as they make theirs, fight about it a bit, and then continue accepting that we can't know the truth.

It's a mushy world out there, man. In my opinion there's a whole bunch of relaxation in accepting that view of it.

[FIN]
 

AmbiguousGuy

Well-Known Member
[Also, I have written more than enough for now, so per your request I am stating that I am done replying/posting until you respond. Also, if you write a post but would like me to hold off because you have more to say, I'll do so. Just let me know.

Thank you for the courtesy. This is pretty exhausting and time-consuming, but I feel like we're having a productive dialogue -- and with somewhat fewer sharp edges than usual.:)
 
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