The Jesus myth Part I

[Kishkumen]

I skimmed some of a you tube presentation by Carrier which seemed to cover the same points being discussed here. As this thread is not the first go round of the points I skimmed and gave up. I did note a mention of a view I have heard on a few other occasions. It was proposed that average lifespan at the time was 35 to40 years so there would not be people living who remembered Jesus or Jesus time when Mark was written.

Remembering the basics of arithmatic I thought that sincc a lot of people died young to get an average of 35 you have to have old people to balance the average. I found a little link with some back up proposing that in fact there were people who grew old in those day just not as many as nowadays.

I do not think there is any reason to think that in any time in the first century no Christians were still alive to remember the beginning beliefs and events started Christianity .(perhaps question the last decade)

https://revealedrome.com/2012/06/ancien ... women-age/

Yes. Of course there were people who lived longer than 35-40 years. Lots of them. Someone alive at the time of Jesus and old enough to remember him could have lived until the time Mark was written.

[Physics Guy]

Even secondhand memory is worth something. Well after the last of Jesus's actual contemporaries had all died, there would have been lots of people who could remember older people telling stories about Jesus.

Even today it's often that second generation which is the first to write down the old stories. Grandma and grandpa probably never did. I think the reason why grandparents don't write down their stories is simple. They don't get people to listen to their stories so that the stories will be retold. They retell their stories so that people will listen to them. So writing the stories down would defeat the purpose of the stories.

Besides having that perennial desire for an audience, the first generation of Jesus's followers were evidently also illiterate. They could no doubt still have gathered enough money, though, to pay a few scribes to set down the stories in writing. Over the years, they could have made many copies. So I don't think illiteracy can have been the main reason that stories of Jesus stayed oral for a generation or two. I think that being the only source of a story that lots of people wanted to hear was just too much social capital for anyone to relinquish until death took it out of their hands.

And in the struggle to control the direction and meaning of a new religion that was looking as though it might really have legs, being the living source of authentic tradition was a crucial advantage. Mormon prophets have shown us how awkward it can be for a living apostle to have to cope with a canonised Scripture as a rival authority. A visionary leader eager to take everything to the next level would embrace a new medium enthusiastically. Maybe Paul was just that, and did that, writing so many letters. I don't think Jesus's original followers were like that. Like all the business executives that don't make it into the good-to-great case studies, they just wanted to keep what they had.

So I bet the transition to writing only happened once the first-hand sources were dead.

[Kishkumen]

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.

If we imagine that the Jesus story was written to cover up early sophistication that is otherwise apparently absent, then we are getting into the realm of conspiracy theories. The Great Jesus Coverup.

[Kishkumen]

Biography, of which the gospels form a sub-genre, is generally speaking an elite genre, and one that is poorly represented in the surviving literature in comparison with other genres. Despite the fact that the genre was an outgrowth of Greek philosophical literature (biographies of philosophers), which had been around for centuries, the first real collection of biographies that survives to the present is Cornelius Nepos’ Latin biographies of statesmen and generals, written in the second half of the first century BC.

At the end of the first century AD, Plutarch starts writing biographies of Roman emperors, followed by his more famous Parallel Lives. Suetonius follows in the second decade of the second century AD with his biographies of Caesars.

In this company, the gospels are real outliers. The amazing thing is that they exist at all, and then further that they survived. It may be that the biographies of Jesus look as they do partly to satisfy those who had read Greek and Roman biographies of philosophers and rulers.

In any case, what I see in this is not the kind of data that points to early biographical writing about Jesus or early belief in Jesus as a cosmic god. The evidence broadly speaking affirms the view that a lowbrow religious movement somehow caught on and then, decades after the fact, started generating a literature that was desired and sought by wealthier urban converts who could read simple Greek.

[Analytics]

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.

1- Who was Paul referring to when he talked about Jesus the Christ? Was he imagining something closer to the mystic Christ described in Ascent of Isaiah? Or was he referring specifically to a crucified preacher from Nazareth?

2- What is the original inspiration for the Gospel of Mark? Was it a real person? Or is Carrier right and it fiction that places the mystic Jesus in a historical setting?

Mark’s Jesus was in all likelihood historical. Paul’s Jesus? That question is open for me.

I’m not trying to play the Evangelical anti-Mormon game of saying somebody of the wrong sect believes in a different Jesus. Rather, I’m sincerely asking if Paul and Mark crossed paths, would they recognize each other as belonging to the same religion? Paul worshiped Jesus. Did Mark? Maybe not.

Sincere question here: if Paul is such an outlier according to this mythicist model, what was it that Cephas and others believed and why did their opinion differ so much from Paul's?

My understanding is that Peter was illiterate and didn’t write down what he believed. I focus on the beliefs of Paul and Mark because we actually have their writings.

I would guess a mythicist would believe Peter was the first apostle. According to 1 Corinthians 15, after Jesus was resurrected he appeared to Peter, then to the 12 (does this imply Peter was not one of the 12? And what about Judas?). Then he appeared to Paul, which made him an apostle, too.

A mythicist might say that Christianity began by Peter when he had this vision, and that the apostles are the people like Paul who had subsequent visions.

[Kishkumen]

My understanding is that Peter was illiterate and didn’t write down what he believed. I focus on the beliefs of Paul and Mark because we actually have their writings.

I would guess a mythicist would believe Peter was the first apostle. According to 1 Corinthians 15, after Jesus was resurrected he appeared to Peter, then to the 12 (does this imply Peter was not one of the 12? And what about Judas?). Then he appeared to Paul, which made him an apostle, too.

A mythicist might say that Christianity began by Peter when he had this vision, and that the apostles are the people like Paul who had subsequent visions.

OK, but Paul and Mark do not come from a vacuum, and both of them acknowledge the existence of other believers. You (representing the mythicist perspective) seem to be using Paul as a kind of sieve to reduce the evidence to as meager a collection as possible. In other words, you will focus on Peter because Paul mentions him, and then reduce Peter's experience to a vision of a non-corporeal Jesus because that is what Paul mentions. If you take the existence of Mark as a separate tradition seriously, then you need to factor in what Mark says about Peter too, not use Paul to whittle Peter down to a mythicist size. The only way this exercise makes any sense is if you adhere to a kind of conspiracy theory in which Paul has made up Christianity on a very narrow basis of visions, and then everyone else does the inconceivable by making up human Jesus details to add to those visions.

Paul refers to Jerusalem and the Jerusalem leaders as a distinct group that predates him and with whom he does not necessarily always agree and get along. This suggests there is a lot going on that Paul simply cannot tell us about because he is not privy to it. What is all of this stuff? Can we really privilege Paul to the extent that mythicism tends to encourage when it appears he represents just one of a number of early Jesus teachers? I think what we can safely say is that Paul does have a distinctive Jesus teaching that he pushes. It focuses primarily on Jesus' death and resurrection, and what that means to those who believe in Jesus. This teaching does not focus on the life of Jesus, or tell us much about the life of Jesus, but it does not utterly exclude the notion that Jesus was at one time a living person.

I would like to know, for example, what Apollos taught. Paul does not appear to agree with whatever it was. Yet we have no reason to believe that Paul was in fact more authoritative to Christians at his time than Apollos, and the fact that Paul mentions Apollos instead may suggest that he thought Apollos was a threat to him because Apollos was apparently pretty successful.

First Corinthians

12 What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.”

[Kishkumen]

If Peter was so dominant as the one who had a vision, why was James able to send people out to Peter to discourage him from eating with Gentile Christians?

Galatians 2

12 for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.

[Analytics]

If Peter was so dominant as the one who had a vision, why was James able to send people out to Peter to discourage him from eating with Gentile Christians?

Galatians 2

12 for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.

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:

6 As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised.8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostleto the Gentiles.

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.

[Kishkumen]

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:

6 As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised.8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostleto the Gentiles.

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?

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. 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. Peter is easily corralled back into not eating with Gentiles because they hardly matter. It is Paul who really seems to care about them, probably because they are the asset he can bring to the movement that benefits his own interests the most.

Paul has an outsized role in our consideration of early Christianities because he later became a big deal. Gentile missions ended up being where the growth was. Gentile interpretations of Christianity were more portable and appealing. Moreover, Pauline literature became important in no small part because of the success of Marcion and the fact that he put together the first real collection of Christian literature, or the first “canon.” That doubtless elevated the status of Paul among Christians in general, even after Marcion was marginalized and his movement petered out.

So we come to the question of what the earliest Christianity was like with a very skewed perspective handed to us by the zealous convert who had a vision of Jesus and presciently started the mission to the Gentiles that changed the game. For the early years, though, he is not a central figure in Christianity. He is like the Cicero of Christianity. Cicero made much of himself, and he did play an important role, but his self-serving rhetoric coupled with the sheer volume of his surviving corpus skews our reading of Late Republican Rome. Was Catiline a terrible threat to the Republic? If we believe Cicero, then yes. But Cicero had every reason to exploit and misrepresent Catiline to make his consulship memorable. Similarly, Paul has every reason to promote his own idiosyncratic views. The later significance of those views should not distort our sense of their importance in Paul’s own time.

[huckelberry]

From Galatians 2:

6 As for those who were held in high esteem—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—they added nothing to my message. 7 On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised.8 For God, who was at work in Peter as an apostle to the circumcised, was also at work in me as an apostleto the Gentiles.

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.

Analytics, I half think you have a point here. It seems Paul is a pretty aggressive sort of guy. I suspect there never was an argument he was not game to engage. Yet there is another consideration. Perhaps Jesus never said a thing about how to engage in a mission to the gentiles.That would leave Paul figuring out some details.