From patheos. com /community/exploringourmatrix/2011/07/19/review-of-earl-dohertys-jesus-neither-god-nor-man-chapter-9/
jeffreyspm
"The contrast with Jesus is stunning, lots of near contemporaneous records, claims in terms of style to historical biographies of a recognisable type, coherence with social, cultural and historical data of the period. And, yes, the detail in the Gospels themselves presents itself as with an eye witness quality. Not to say that the stories have not been told and retold many times before committing to writing. This is why historians find the attitudes of mythicists as frankly ludicrous. "
Robert Tulip
Well, no. There is no definitive evidence of the existence of the Gospels in the first century, putting them far too late to be more than hearsay for a historizing fictional agenda. Philo, who should have heard of Jesus had he existed, does not mention him. The mentions by Josephus are late frauds. The mythicist argument is the only scientific explanation of the rise of Christianity, explaining all the evidence, and its exclusion is simply a matter of group think by academics.
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
This is why it is so important to highlight the similarities between mythicism and creationism. The last comment by Robert Tulip would sound appealing to someone who didn't know anything about the field - the desire to be scientific is a good thing. But what you miss if you don't investigate further is that Philo lived in Alexandria in Egypt, and so there is no particular reason for him to have heard of Jesus, unless Christians came there talking about him, which still would not be first-hand information. One mention by Josephus clearly has been tampered with, but probably is not a whole cloth addition, and the second mention could still be authentic even if the Testimonium Flavianum is not. And the lack of "definitive evidence" for the existence of the Gospels in the first century does not mean that it is plausible to posit that they were first composed in the second century, and fails to mention that our copies of the Gospels are much closer in time to when they are believed to have been composed than most other texts that historians work with from the ancient world.
Lots of people present their view as offering a "scientific approach" and so it is crucial to look at a person's method and not simply the marketing claims for their view. In this case, what could sound scholarly to someone without a background in the field is clearly exposed as bunk with just a little investigation. Just like creationism.
Robert Tulip
Creationism is abundantly refuted by science. The hypothesis that Jesus Christ is a myth is scientific. This is a basic difference.
The hypothesis that Jesus Christ did not exist as a historical individual is the most plausible explanation for the production of the Gospels. Daniel's prophecy of the anointed one (9.26) led to the Essene claim that this prediction would be fulfilled in 27 AD, as the long awaited messiah. So the starting point for Christian ideation was the idea of Christ. The historical Jesus appears to have been invented much later through a process of 'Chinese Whispers'.
Just as King Josiah filled in the details of David and Solomon to justify his temporal ambitions (cf Kings, Deuteronomy), the Gospel authors took the spiritual Christ described in Paul and other writings and filled in the details to produce a believable literal history, suitable to mobilize a mass movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... explains that Philo was a prominent leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria at the alleged time of Christ, and evidently visited Jerusalem. He is also a prime source of the Logos theology in the Gospel of John, describing the Logos as God's blueprint for the world. It simply beggars belief that Philo never mentions Jesus Christ, given his abundant writings on topics at the center of Christian theology, unless there is something fraudulent in the Christian texts. If Christ was a public figure as described in the Gospels, the complete absence of mention of him by reputable independent sources for a century after his supposed life is incredible. It is as if some one today wrote an account of a person allegedly living during the second world war based only on hearsay and expected people to believe it as history, with no corroborating evidence.
The real link to creationists here is among the apologists, who cannot bear the psychological trauma of seeing their beloved dogma exposed as the biggest lie in history.
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
@Robert Tulip, if the approach you advocate is scientific, then surely you will not mind me asking for some evidence.
First, where did the Essenes predict that Daniel's prophecy would be fulfilled in 27 AD?
Next, why do you claim that Paul's Jesus was purely spiritual when Paul mentions his having been born, of Davidic descent, having a brother, bleeding, and dying by crucifixion?
Third, what makes it seem plausible that within not more than a hundred years someone would take a purely spiritual savior, concoct stories about that person appearing in history, and persuade people of their religion to believe this so effectively that no one who knew of the original purely spiritual savior version seems to have been around?
Fourth, if being a public figure merited mention by Philo, then why is Philo silent about teachers and other public figures of that sort from this period whose existence is often considered plausible or even probable based on other sources?
Finally, why do you seem unwilling to consider the mainstream historian's approach and conclusions, namely that there are indeed things that are fabricated in the Gospels, but that not everything is fabricated? If you think history works like the natural sciences, you are badly mistaken. But even in terms of what historical study can offer, you seem completely uninterested in it, preferring to discuss the matter in the apologist's all-or-nothing manner. If your approach is scientific, then why is that?
Robert Tulip
Thank you James. The Docetic Gnostics were a prominent early Christian group who held that that Jesus' physical body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The triumph of orthodoxy over the Docetic view was primarily a matter of numbers, that a simplified historical salvation myth was accessible for the general public, whereas a complex spiritual vision involved use of allegory that required a high level of education to understand. Therefore, Church Fathers whose main objective was church expansion were those who aligned their views to the literal story with its potential for political influence. They were easily able to isolate and suppress the views of their opponents. The attack at 2 John 1.7 on 'deceivers' illustrates that such doubts about the historical Christ were widespread, and also provides a foretaste of the methods the church later used to suppress unbelievers.
On Paul, Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University argued in her 1975 book The Gnostic Paul that the authentic epistles operate at two levels, a spiritual level for initiates and a simplified level for the general public. So I would not say Paul's Jesus is "purely" spiritual, rather that it is primarily spiritual, with the few material references intended as allegory. Against the few mentions of a bodily Jesus, we find that none of the tales in the Gospels except the Last Supper and the cross are mentioned, with no detail, leaving open the strong probability that Paul knew nothing of Jesus of Nazareth, but primarily wrote for a spiritual audience, adding the occasional physical references to generate broader interest by claiming he was talking about real events. The absence of detail in these physical references suggest they may have been hearsay, or a misunderstanding on Paul's part of an original spiritual or cosmic message. They are seized on by the church to justify the gospel message, but are so scanty, and lacking in any corroboration, that it makes more sense to read Paul as a waystation between an originally spiritual messianism and the eventual literal story of the gospels. It is worth noting that Paul's suggestion of Davidic descent in Romans 1 directly contradicts the virgin birth myth.
My source on the Essenes' use of Daniel is The Jews Against Rome by Susan Sorek of Lampeter University. I mentioned it primarily to illustrate that the messianic yearning of the times was a decisive factor in the construction of the Christ myth. The theory that Daniel predicted the time of Christ using the day-year principle was propounded by Isaac Newton, but I do not know of ancient references other than Sorek's claim.
On Philo, it is not just that Christ as a public figure should have been mentioned by anyone outside the charmed circle of Christian propaganda if he existed. Philo wrote extensively on the theme of the word or Logos, and is arguably the real source of this idea in John. Philo was a main advocate for the Jews to Rome, and died in 50 AD, some twenty years after the claimed date of the death of Christ. If a Christian community was really active as described in Acts, it really is extremely surprising that this messianic advocacy went unnoticed by Philo, given his keen interest in related topics, and the extensive communication between Alexandria's big Jewish community and Israel, unless of course these claimed historical events did not occur and were invented later.
I question mainstream Christian history simply because it is far more plausible that the causality of Christian origins went from Christ to Jesus, not from Jesus to Christ, in view of the abundant continuities between Christian doctrine and earlier mythology. The Christian record of censorship, especially the wholesale destruction of Pagan documents, raises the question of what they had to hide.
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
Thank you, Robert. The Docetists we know of from actual ancient texts took the beliefs that other Christians had, about a Jesus who appeared in history, and denied that that Jesus was a fully flesh-and-blood human. It is not evidence that anyone everr thought of Jesus Christ as a purely celestial figure. You seem to have been listening to mythicists who ignore such important evidence as the fact that the expectation of the kind of anointed one (Christ/Messiah) that Christians claimed Jesus was, that of the line of David, was expected to be a human figure, because the whole concept was the restoration of the kingship to the line of David. Nor do we have evidence of Jews naming purely celestial saviors with mundane Jewish names like Jesus (which is simply an English way of rendering the form of the name Joshua used in the Gospels).
I assume that since you do not have any evidence for it and will accept that Isaac Newton is not prior to the composition of the Gospels, the claim about what pre-Christian Essenes believed is being dropped.
You talk about what is more plausible, but for an approach to be in any sense "scientific," surely it must taken the relevant evidence into account, don't you think? Once one has a preconceived theory, and is determined to adhere to it, there is rarely any evidence that cannot be made to fit somehow. And so I would encourage you to work inductively from the source material about early Christianity and its context as the appropriate way to answer historical questions.
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
@Robert, I meant to mention in my previous comment that you are absolutely right that Paul's statement about Jesus being of Davidic descent is indeed incompatible with the later development of the idea that Jesus was conceived without a human father. But what needs to be added is that it moves away from later dogma in the direction of Jeaus being an ordinary human being, not in the direction of his being an exalted, miraculous, celestial entity.
beallen0417
Just to be clear, under this argument, is it put forward that Paul does not describe an exalted celestial entity?
Robert Tulip
On the Essenes, my source for their views on the date of the messiah was a scholarly history of the Jewish War as mentioned. I will contact the author Susan Sorek to find her source for ancient existence of the 26 AD prediction from Daniel as her text is not footnoted.
If Jesus was not flesh and blood, then he was celestial. This is the direct implication of the attack in 2 John - "many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world." If Jesus Christ has come as not flesh, but as spirit, it suggests a celestial mythological identity. This primary celestial exalted vision accords with the visions of Jesus Christ as 'the same yesterday, today and forever', 'before Abraham was, I am', 'I and the Father are one', 'I am the alpha and omega'. Similarly the cosmic hymns in Colossians 1 and Philippians 2.
The scientific question then becomes how the ancients formulated this celestial messianic vision. My opinion is that Christianity was originally primarily astrotheological, using the Hermetic principle "as above so below", reformulated as "thy will be done on earth as in heaven," to produce a mythology of earthly events reflecting the slow cycle of the stars. The main candidate for this astronomical basis is precession of the equinox, seeing Christ as the mythic avatar of the Age of Pisces. This vision was too complex for a mass movement and was condemned and suppressed as heretical (Docetist), leaving only concealed traces such as the miracle of the loaves and fishes. This miracle appears six times in the Gospels, more than any other. It makes complete sense as allegory for the shifting position of the sun and moon against the stars at Easter, as the equinoxes precessed into Pisces (fish) and Virgo (loaves), as a symbol of miraculous creative abundance.
Theological scholarship on astrotheology remains in its infancy, other than in works by Carl Jung such as Aion and Answer to Job. The orthodox view that this interpretation is heretical remains a major obstacle to rigorous research. However, the cosmic theology accords far better with the evidence than the literal historical story of tradition.
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
What you think makes complete sense doesn't fit well with the evidence. The earliest sources clearly have a human figure in view, to which increasingly exalted heavenly roles eventually get attributed. As one traces that trajectory, the divination of Jesus eventually results in denial of Jesus' real humanity, because of the difficulty of having suffering and deity coincide. That is exactly what 2 John 1:7, from late in the NT period, has in view: not people who deny that Jesus Christ ever appeared in human history, but people who deny that he came in flesh.
Your view fits poorly with the evidence. The fact that you couch it in the language of New Age mumbo jumbo does not make it seem more scholarly, to say nothing of scientific.
Robert Tulip
JM: “The earliest sources clearly have a human figure in view, to which increasingly exalted heavenly roles eventually get attributed.”In fact the process was the reverse. The New Testament gives a naïve reader the impression the Gospels preceded the Epistles, whereas the genuine Pauline letters are the earliest texts. The human Jesus of the gospels, with the miracles, parables, family story, etc, is basically absent from Paul, for whom Christ performs a primarily mythic and symbolic role as mediator and redeemer.JM: “As one traces that trajectory, the divination of Jesus eventually results in denial of Jesus' real humanity, because of the difficulty of having suffering and deity coincide. That is exactly what 2 John 1:7, from late in the NT period, has in view: not people who deny that Jesus Christ ever appeared in human history, but people who deny that he came in flesh.” It is far more plausible, as Doherty argues, that Docetic thinkers understood Christ as a myth from the start. The concept of a historical but non-fleshly messiah is contradictory, and simply shows that orthodox detractors of the Docetists distorted their views and failed to understand them. The only way Christ could have "come into the world" without being flesh and blood was as the symbolic basis of a universal cosmic vision specifically pointing to the actual time of Christ. This is precisely what we see with precession of the equinox at the time of Christ, with the shift of the spring equinox point, the alpha and omega of the Jewish calendar, from the constellation of Aries into the constellation of Pisces. JM: “The fact that you couch it in the language of New Age mumbo jumbo does not make it seem more scholarly, to say nothing of scientific.”In fact, precession was known well in ancient times, and is a purely scientific observation. Sir Norman Lockyer, founder of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, argued that alignments of Egyptian temples indicate a clear knowledge of precession well before the time of Christ. There is no need to introduce any “mumbo jumbo” to defend the hypothesis that observation of the slow sweep of the stars due to precession was an organizing principle for ancient mythology, including Christianity. We do not need any astrological speculation to see that this is a simple matter of long term observation. I discuss this in more detail, including showing how the years around 20 AD mark a clear moment of observed shift, at
http://www.bautforum.com/showt...
James F. McGrath, Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
Robert, Doherty's views are not persuasive, and what you are talking about may be something that you can read into New Testament texts, the way Christian believers often read their dogmas into them, but they are not what one actually finds in them. In calling your views "scientific" I think you may be confusing astrology with astronomy.
Robert Tulip
A problem with the mythicist debate is that conventional theology has many deep-seated assumptions, such as the assumption that any effort to see stellar allegory in the Bible, e.g. between the twelve apostles and the twelve signs of the zodiac, or between Jesus and the sun, is the first step on a slippery slope to irrational astrological fatalism.
In fact, precession of the equinox is purely astronomical, and requires no astrological assumptions to understand. It is an entirely legitimate scientific and historical hypothesis that the authors of the New Testament developed a symbolic mythology from observation of the slow shift of the stars, with Christ as the Alpha and Omega reflecting on earth the observed shift from one Age to the next in the zodiac.
Perhaps Roman Emperor Hadrian was telling the truth when he said after a visit to Alexandria that “there is no Christian leader who is not an astrologer, a soothsayer, or a master of wrestlers.” (Letter to Servianus, 134 AD)
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