The Jesus myth Part I

[Physics Guy]

I sort of get the impression that maybe the Jerusalem leaders didn't care much about gentile converts, and pretty much just said, "Yeah, sure, Paul, you go and do that now. Write if you get donations."

[Manetho]

Another factor to consider when inquiring into why it took so long to write down Jesus’ story is the impact of literate culture, or lack thereof, on his movement. The Jesus movement was not a movement of elites. Elites were the writers. Philo, Josephus . . . we tend to see elites producing the texts that last. That or people with scribal training, and such people are usually attached to an elite. In comparison with the Dead Sea Community, to offer another vector of literacy and book production, the Jesus movement apparently did not produce many texts for the first couple of decades, and even then the volume and variety of texts was quite limited.

As far as we can tell, Paul was the first Jesus cult adherent to write about Jesus at all, and he conforms to the profile of a wealthy, educated elite (not upper crust, but still relatively elite as the scion of a major manufacturer and as a Roman citizen).

Moreover, the focus on Jesus sayings both in the New Testament gospels and Thomas suggests a strongly oral orientation in this movement.

All of these factors tend to militate against the early production of written accounts of Jesus’ life.

They also tend to militate against the idea that Jesus started as a cosmic god who was later clothed in human flesh and historical circumstances.

Think about it: Philo writes about the Logos as a wealthy Alexandrian Jew who had the time and money to study Platonism. We have no reason to think that the early followers of Jesus were into cosmic speculations. Paul was trained in higher, more learned religious thought. HE is the kind of person who would cosmicize Jesus, not Cephas.

Note that Kishkumen is able to point out how the earliest Christians, such as Paul and Cephas, fit into their general cultural context. We may have limited evidence of what they actually did and believed, but the mainstream scholarly understanding of that evidence fits with their respective backgrounds and the culture of their times. They make for a reasonably coherent explanation for how Christianity as we know it came to be. Paul comes up with a cosmic understanding of Jesus because he has the intellectual background to do so, which Jesus's original followers did not. Paul emphasizes visions of Jesus because he is trying to set himself up as an authority on Jesus, and visions are the only way Paul could ever have interacted with him. And after Paul transmits his understanding of Jesus to his Gentile converts, Jesus ends up being deified because people from a polytheistic background are less averse to deifying a human being than Jews are.

I don't see mythicists really grappling with the cultural context to this extent. I have not read Carrier's books, but despite asking for it more than once, I've never seen his advocates say whether he has an explanation of how and why the hypothetical original cosmic Jesus came to be placed in the specific circumstances described by Mark. What reason would people in this culture have to do such a thing? How would it have worked in this culture? If he does have an explanation, I'd be interested in hearing it.

[huckelberry]

I sort of get the impression that maybe the Jerusalem leaders didn't care much about gentile converts, and pretty much just said, "Yeah, sure, Paul, you go and do that now. Write if you get donations."

I could not help but chuckle . There might be some truth to this .(not supposed to be according to a few verses but even so...)

[Analytics]

My point isn’t that there weren’t other believers. Of course there were. Paul was persecuting them. My point is that the movement doesn’t seem to have anything to do with any of these people following around Jesus for 3 years and then continuing the movement he started. Rather, it is about them having visions and getting their messages and authority from the visions. There were many who had visions, and they often contradicted each other. But as far as I can tell, they never appealed to what Jesus in the flesh had said to resolve them.

From Galatians 2...

If Peter had spent 3 years walking around with Jesus, that would seem to be qualitatively different than what happened to Paul, and Paul’s argument here would be very weak.

Yes, but you asked the question of what we would do with the two written traditions. You are not addressing the question of the basis on which you dismiss Mark after claiming you are embracing him. If Mark is one of those written traditions you claim we should look at, on what basis do you dismiss his account of Jesus the living human being interacting with Peter for roughly three years before Jesus’ execution?

It appears you are conflating my thoughts on the matter with those of mythicists. I, personally, think Mark needs to be understood and dealt with. I believe textual criticism gives us a decent picture of what the original autograph of Mark said and when it was written. And I now concede that you, Huckleberry, Physics Guy, Symmachus, et.al. have probably been right all along about what this implies about historicity.

In addition to the arguments about this that I read on this forum, a source that really helped me see the light was reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. That book is about the textual criticism of the New Testament, which a lot of emphasis on the gospel of Mark.

In Chapter 10 of his book, Richard Carrier argues pretty extensively that Mark was originally intended to be read allegorically. I'm left unconvinced by his argument here--would an allegory really be in a detailed and recent historical context that was full of biographies of real people (Peter, James, etc.)? Maybe they read it like we would read "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer," but my guess is that it was not.

And, honestly, why do you think Paul is making a convincing or strong argument? All we have is his own claim, which is made self-servingly, that he was somehow on par with the Brethren in Jerusalem....

Your specific question, remember, was what mythicists think about Peter, not what I think about him.

The truth is that he was probably a marginal figure from the perspective of the Jerusalem leadership. What would the Jews who walked with Jesus worry about this character who was teaching Jesus to the Gentiles? Other than making sure he was not a threat, I doubt that they were all that focused on the Gentiles, beyond, say, eating with them on occasion, as we saw in the strife with James....

This is getting back to my point, and it would seem our perspectives might not be quite as far apart as you think. How different were the religions of Peter and Paul?

My interest in this goes back to the Fall of 1984. I was a Sophomore in high school and Sister Fronk was my seminary teacher at Hillcrest High School in Midvale. We were studying the New Testament that year. I decided to read the New Testament, beginning to end. I had very few preconceptions of what it would say. What really shocked my young mind was how different Paul's religion seemed to be from Jesus' religion. It was the same kind of shock I had four years later when I went through the temple--the Mormon religion outside of the temple seemed very different than the Mormon religion inside the temple.

The appeal of mythicism to me has always been the way that it recognizes the existence of this "two-religion" problem of mine, and dealt with it in an interesting, novel way.

At this point, I think Mark really was telling a dramatized story of an actual apocalyptic preacher from Nazareth. But I'm still struck that Paul's religion doesn't trace back to that. Rather, Paul's religion traces back to his vision. If we grant that there were at least some people in the ancient world that believed sky demons crucified Jesus in a spiritual realm, It's a valid question to ask whether Paul was one of them. When Paul says it was "the rulers of this age" that crucified Christ because they didn't understand the hidden mysteries (1 Cor. 2:7-8), it sounds an awful lot like the sky-demon "rulers of this world" in Ascent of Isaiah.

[Kishkumen]

Thanks, Analytics. I tried to point out that I was using “you” to represent the mythicist perspective as I understood you to be doing, but I did throw in your actual self, I suppose, in the comments about those two traditions, not being certain how you meant them to be taken.

I am not sure about Paul and the rulers of the age. They could indeed be archons or “demons” in some cosmic/fatal/astrological role. Of course, they can also be the Romans, or the archons in league with the human rulers of the age. I would have to look into it. I have long accepted this aspect of Paul (principalities and powers), and I think it is fascinating.

It is probably different from the “religion” of Jesus’ followers, and I can see its appeal to Gentiles, just as Mithraism appealed to others for similar reasons. Paul was a Jew, but he was also pretty Hellenized and he knew some Greek literature. It should be conceded that we tend to Gentilize him through our Christian traditions of misreading him. There is a lot more there to be grappled with for sure.

I share your curiosity on this point.

[honorentheos]

When? Where? Among whom?

I suppose everything is possible to some degree, but I don’t know what that has to do with the historicity of Jesus.

Repeating what I said above, I think the “historicity of Jesus” question needs to be clarified. Rather than asking “did Jesus exist historically,” I’m more interested in looking at the different Christian groups and trying to better understand their provenances and relationships to each other.

There are two groups I’m most interested in. Paul’s group and Mark’s group.

For what it's worth, I think this is a question about how the romanized religion of Paul that eventually became the religion of the empire differed as an outgrowth from a religion of rebellion and strict belief in the eventual overthrow of that same empire.

There are fringe debates around the dead sea scrolls arguing that the Essene groups who contributed to them may have been reflective of the community of zealot Jewish adherents whose narratives regarding a betrayer refer to Paul. It's tenuous. But it gets some purchase by revealing a little considered fact about the role of Paul as the popularizer who made a dangerous and parochial legalistic system appealing to a diverse population of Roman-influenced peoples.

In some ways, Christianity was to Roman as Islam is to the modern Western empire...

Anyway, if you are interested in that theory I'd recommend reading this:
James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls https://www.amazon.com/dp/014025773X/re ... BRSBW19856

[Physics Guy]

How much reason is there to believe that rebellion against Rome was ever part of what became Christianity? I mean, it makes a cool story, and there were rebel groups around. Everything that made it into the New Testament, though, is pretty pietistic and accommodating of Roman rule: Render unto Caesar, My kingdom is not of this world, Fear God and honour the king.

Sure, that could just be because all the early rebellious stuff got purged out. But given the Maccabean tradition of rebellion on the one hand, and the overwhelming power of Rome on the other, there would seem to have been an obvious niche for a Jewish movement that offered people an out, by saying No, you don't need to throw your life away trying to fight the legions, the Kingdom of God can be a spiritual thing, or anyway a thing that God will do without you having to fight.

And of course that is the line that Christianity eventually took. If there was a rebellious beginning, then I think the way it morphed into something that could become the Roman religion is obvious in the New Testament: it went pietistic and accommodating. I just don't see any clear reason to think there was any morphing to do, though. It could just as well have started out like that. "You don't have to die on a Roman sword" is a pretty good selling point.

[honorentheos]

My understanding of the Gospel of Mark is the Jesus portrayed in it preached the Son of Man as an imminent restorer of God's chosen people to their inheritance. His execution, minus the Markan Appendix, is a story of shocking reversal and revelation.

Jesus was executed by the Romans for treason or religious agitation as evidenced by the method of execution used. By itself that stands as meaningful evidence that to the Romans his teachings were political and dangerous. If he was going around telling people to not engage in violent rebellion, why would the Romans have executed him? Because the leadership of the religious locals found him to be a threat? Really?

I would argue that's weighty evidence of a different class than romanticized narrative descriptions. Should we be surprised that the narratives that became the religion of Roman are less anti-Roman? Or that they become progressively more anti-Semitic chronologically speaking? If to the author of Mark Jesus was preaching against viewing the kingdom as a literal overthrow of Roman, Luke as companion of Paul the Roman citizen speaks of Jesus asking forgiveness of the Romans as they knew not what they did, and by the time the author of John comes around the Jews have become the enemy of Jesus.

[Physics Guy]

I guess that depends how much correlation you expect between Roman execution and threat to Rome. There are plenty of regimes today where dying in police custody does not strongly imply deliberate sedition. Maybe I haven't done enough reading about the early Roman Empire but what I've done makes me think of it as a gangster state. It has never occurred to me that Jesus's crucifixion was any evidence that he really preached rebellion against Rome.

If he had, then it would be weird for his movement to have survived him. If he had had revolutionary followers then they could have tried to carry on in the aftermath by whitewashing all his politics into spiritual stuff, but what kind of political revolutionary has any interest in doing that? Wouldn't that be like Che Guevara's followers all suddenly turning into pacifists after his death, and pretending Che himself was always a pacifist, just so they can go on being Che fans? And what kind of spiritual seeker wants to pin their hopes on a failed revolutionary, when they can just pick a more naturally congenial guru?

On the other hand the idea that Jesus was never about rebelling against Rome makes his popularity easier to understand. Rebellion against Rome would surely have had a pretty limited audience.

[Physics Guy]

When we're contrasting Mark and Paul, where does John fit? The Gospel of John stands out starkly from the synoptics, but it doesn't sound very Pauline to me either. However it really got written, it seems to me to do a pretty good job of seeming plausible as the gospel that is different because it's the insider's gospel going behind the scenes. John's gospel works as what it became, a supplement to the synoptics.

If there was an early Christian community that relied on John's gospel alone, though, then it would seem to have been fairly different from any communities that might have known either only Mark or only Paul. Maybe it would have been different by being somewhere in the middle. John represents Jesus talking to people and doing things around Palestine, but it's also heavily theological about him.