The Jesus myth Part I

[honorentheos]

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. 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.

That's basically the argument around Paul having betrayed the original teachings. To Eisenmann the evidence is for Paul being a deliberate vehicle for Rome to defang a dangerous rebellious belief system. Its been a while since I've read him but my take away was that conclusion was tenuous. The evidence leading to it that the religion of Paul was being composed by someone with a sympathetic Roman view and willingness to be all things to all people was much more compelling. The results being essentially that Paul took what was being taught among the Jerusalem disciples and fabricated a universally appealing message around Christ that was only possible by removing the Jewish teachings and leaving the benign.

[honorentheos]

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.

The author of John barely needs a historical Jesus as he ignores the birth narratives, explodes his one year ministry in Galilee into three years and renders him into the logos. The author of John almost certainly wrote in a time after the first Jewish-Roman war and in a time where the Bar Kokhbah revolt was festering to turn the Jews into the villains of the story about Jesus. I don't think it makes sense to talk of the Gospel of John in the manner above because it almost certainly didn't exist in the formative period we are discussing.

[Physics Guy]

Paul certainly made a Christianity for the Roman masses. He's explicitly polemic about divorcing Christianity from Judaism in order to do just that. What I find harder to swallow is that Paul also excised revolution. I don't see any sign of political revolution anywhere in the New Testament, and so although you can say that it was all purged before the New Testament got written, that still leaves revolutionary early Christianity as pure speculation.

And it would seem to be a weird choice for Paul to launch his mass-market Gentile religion by hijacking a failed Jewish revolutionary movement. That only seems plausible, I think, if you use historical hindsight to take for granted that Jesus was going to be a major religious figure and so Paul of course grabbed him. If you forget how it all actually turned out, though, then I have a hard time seeing why anyone who was going to do the sort of thing that Paul did would have had any interest in a failed Jewish revolutionary. If Jesus was instead a promisingly non-revolutionary neo-judaic teacher, on the other hand, his brand could indeed have been a natural choice for Paul to adapt and expand.

[Physics Guy]

The author of John barely needs a historical Jesus.

Maybe the apparent theological motivations of the author of John barely need a historical Jesus, but apart from a handful of early sentences the whole book is written as an account of the words and deeds of a historical Jesus. If the historical Jesus is an irrelevant detail for John, John let the tail wag the dog in his book.

And as with most of the New Testament texts, it's not clear to me that the date of final written composition is decisive for provenance of the tradition. Today a hit book series can spawn a whole subculture of fans, but I don't think that worked so well before the internet. I tend to figure that in ancient times communities produced documents, rather than the other way round. So I figure that at some point a Johannine movement of some sort developed, which eventually generated the Johannine texts. When and where did this community start, and how did it relate to the communities that were focused on the synoptics and the Pauline epistles?

[Kishkumen]

Maybe the apparent theological motivations of the author of John barely need a historical Jesus, but apart from a handful of early sentences the whole book is written as an account of the words and deeds of a historical Jesus. If the historical Jesus is an irrelevant detail for John, John let the tail wag the dog in his book.

And as with most of the New Testament texts, it's not clear to me that the date of final written composition is decisive for provenance of the tradition. Today a hit book series can spawn a whole subculture of fans, but I don't think that worked so well before the internet. I tend to figure that in ancient times communities produced documents, rather than the other way round. So I figure that at some point a Johannine movement of some sort developed, which eventually generated the Johannine texts. When and where did this community start, and how did it relate to the communities that were focused on the synoptics and the Pauline epistles?

Yes! The usual way these texts are generated is by adding a different twist to a well-known story. "John" takes the life of Jesus and rewrites it to make his own points. It is not that he was free to do just anything. He was still tethered to the basic idea that there was this fellow named Jesus who had a certain kind of life and interacted with a certain other people. Within the known, broad outlines, he took liberties to come up with his own version of the man.

[honorentheos]

Paul certainly made a Christianity for the Roman masses. He's explicitly polemic about divorcing Christianity from Judaism in order to do just that. What I find harder to swallow is that Paul also excised revolution. I don't see any sign of political revolution anywhere in the New Testament, and so although you can say that it was all purged before the New Testament got written, that still leaves revolutionary early Christianity as pure speculation.

And it would seem to be a weird choice for Paul to launch his mass-market Gentile religion by hijacking a failed Jewish revolutionary movement. That only seems plausible, I think, if you use historical hindsight to take for granted that Jesus was going to be a major religious figure and so Paul of course grabbed him. If you forget how it all actually turned out, though, then I have a hard time seeing why anyone who was going to do the sort of thing that Paul did would have had any interest in a failed Jewish revolutionary. If Jesus was instead a promisingly non-revolutionary neo-judaic teacher, on the other hand, his brand could indeed have been a natural choice for Paul to adapt and expand.

The strongest evidence is that crucifixion was typically used for particular crimes against Rome. It can be similar to accepting the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but instead by different authors over centuries as well. Certain verses that seem ill-fitting and uncharacteristic of Jesus such as the cursing of the fruitless fig tree or the violent cleansing of the temple make more sense. Multiple hands become apparent, multiple traditions captured in the text regarding what happened.

As to the failed rebellion, I think it's better understood as reframed than failed. Paul didn't invent the belief in Jesus' resurrection, and his writing is saturated in a belief in an imminent arrival of sweeping divine change. The ideas in Paul regarding grace, rebirth in Christ, adoption into the divine are likely his most noticable and appealing evolutions from the original beliefs of remaining true to the covenants in a corrupted society where the Herodians were seen as having led the priests astray.

[honorentheos]

Maybe the apparent theological motivations of the author of John barely need a historical Jesus, but apart from a handful of early sentences the whole book is written as an account of the words and deeds of a historical Jesus. If the historical Jesus is an irrelevant detail for John, John let the tail wag the dog in his book.

And as with most of the New Testament texts, it's not clear to me that the date of final written composition is decisive for provenance of the tradition. Today a hit book series can spawn a whole subculture of fans, but I don't think that worked so well before the internet. I tend to figure that in ancient times communities produced documents, rather than the other way round. So I figure that at some point a Johannine movement of some sort developed, which eventually generated the Johannine texts. When and where did this community start, and how did it relate to the communities that were focused on the synoptics and the Pauline epistles?

Yes! The usual way these texts are generated is by adding a different twist to a well-known story. "John" takes the life of Jesus and rewrites it to make his own points. It is not that he was free to do just anything. He was still tethered to the basic idea that there was this fellow named Jesus who had a certain kind of life and interacted with a certain other people. Within the known, broad outlines, he took liberties to come up with his own version of the man.

Well put. I don't think we three disagree on the historicity question nor the principle that the author of John was beholden to remain within certain boundaries consisting of the existing traditions around Jesus when it was composed. My one point out of this I'd make is that John probably isn't a new paradigm that people accepted and formed a community around so much as it reflects where certain communities of Christians were at in their beliefs at the time of it's composition. I think this is true of the synoptics, too. But not the writings of Paul. Paul was authoring not just writings but the ideas behind them in many ways.

[Physics Guy]

John probably isn't a new paradigm that people accepted and formed a community around so much as it reflects where certain communities of Christians were at in their beliefs at the time of it's composition. I think this is true of the synoptics, too.

My knowledge on these subjects is too shallow for me to have firm opinions. I have a combination of a little bit of reading and some impressions from talks by experts heard over years. That's enough to make me suspicious of some conclusions while others strike me as plausible. I'll argue against opposing arguments, but I try not to bring an argument to a fact fight.

So for what it's worth, yeah, it's one of my plausible things that the ancient texts we have probably reflect the collective ideas of groups of some kind, which had probably evolved over some time before they took the form we read now.

That doesn't mean that things got written by committee. The specific formulations in the texts, whether clumsy or catchy, are no doubt due to a few forgotten individuals. But the most likely reason why those formulations caught on and were preserved is that they captured what some substantial community wanted to express.

But not the writings of Paul. Paul was authoring not just writings but the ideas behind them in many ways.

I'd be willing to buy this. I think it's rare in history for one person's words to prove more lasting than bronze, but it's only rare on a per-capita basis. It happens for somebody every so many years. So for example it seems much more likely to me that Jesus's sayings were mostly invented by one person than that some later collective concocted them piecemeal over decades. Paul may well be another example. Genius happens. Committee work does not look like it.

Paul's ideas seem original to me in large part because he writes them so badly. He often rambles and rants. He needed an editor desperately, and if he'd had one all of his writings would probably have fit on one page. But that to me is the hallmark of someone who is articulating something original. Succinctness and clarity only come later, when the dust has settled and everyone knows what things can be simplified safely and what details aren't really just details.

Paul's letters read to me like first drafts. The comparatively lapidary gospels read more like things that have gelled out after many oral revisions. Even their glitches seem like sharks that people had come to accept as unfixable, rather than as hasty mistakes.

So if the chicken-or-egg puzzle is whether ideas or communities come first, I guess my theory is that individual geniuses tend to create a few rough gems, and then communities polish and set them. I don't think communities come up with original ideas collectively, either big concepts or little flashes of catchy phrasing, but I don't think the original form of the idea is likely to be clear and coherent. I think that takes a fair amount of collective curating.

[honorentheos]

John probably isn't a new paradigm that people accepted and formed a community around so much as it reflects where certain communities of Christians were at in their beliefs at the time of it's composition. I think this is true of the synoptics, too.

My knowledge on these subjects is too shallow for me to have firm opinions. I have a combination of a little bit of reading and some impressions from talks by experts heard over years. That's enough to make me suspicious of some conclusions while others strike me as plausible. I'll argue against opposing arguments, but I try not to bring an argument to a fact fight.

So for what it's worth, yeah, it's one of my plausible things that the ancient texts we have probably reflect the collective ideas of groups of some kind, which had probably evolved over some time before they took the form we read now.

That doesn't mean that things got written by committee. The specific formulations in the texts, whether clumsy or catchy, are no doubt due to a few forgotten individuals. But the most likely reason why those formulations caught on and were preserved is that they captured what some substantial community wanted to express.

I think all of that is fair. If we look at the gospels besides that attributed to John, we have the author of Luke tell us explicitly in the first few verses that he was compiling accounts and stories. Given what we know about how culture works, it's logical to view this process as a sorting of those accounts to align with his perspective of who Jesus was and why his life and ministry was significant. Matthew was composed with clear use of Mark as well as a bent to assert a scriptural Hebrew-focused apologetic for Jesus being the Christ. Luke and Matthew were clearly writing for different audiences with different perspectives of what made Jesus significant, while also sharing sources as is clear from the shared copying of Mark. Is that the work of a committee? Obviously not. It strikes me as typical memic evolution and cultural progression. Successful, attractive ideas and stories stick, unappealing or difficult to relate to concepts fail to gain purchase and "reproduce" in the culture, and what one sees over time is a product that is inherently appealing to enough people to be able to out compete those that lack appeal.

So if we look at what was present in the narratives at different points along the way we can gain insight into the selective pressures operating on the cultural development of what became Christianity as we conceive of it.

One thing that causes me to dismiss the mythicist position is it always seems to be engaged with Sunday School Jesus and not a human being living under Jewish law and Roman rule in ancient Judea. It seems ignorant of the conflicts among the Jewish people over how to deal with Roman rule with discontent over a priestly class who was seen by some as corrupted and giving over to Caeser rather than remaining faithful to God and th covenant. Mythisicm seems ignorant of the Herodians and Essenes. It isn't concerned with the foundation of Hebrew scripture being a product of subjection to Babylonian rule, Zoroastrianism and Hellenism, and politics of the time. The Abrahamic religions are founded by groups attempting to explain their captivity to worldly powers. It is infused in the DNA of western religion in ways that may surprise westerns to learn isn't inherent in all religions. I suspect that is part of it's appeal, though.

Anyway, those more interested in belief in the Sunday School Jesus aren't so different. Neither is engaging with a historic Jesus beyond the concept being seen as a binary way to dismiss thinking about the subject of who Jesus was just as modern Mormons aren't inclined to grapple with the reality of their founding prophets. If the cultural artifact that is religion is fulfilling a need, why risk damaging it.

[huckelberry]

Paul certainly made a Christianity for the Roman masses. He's explicitly polemic about divorcing Christianity from Judaism in order to do just that. What I find harder to swallow is that Paul also excised revolution. I don't see any sign of political revolution anywhere in the New Testament, and so although you can say that it was all purged before the New Testament got written, that still leaves revolutionary early Christianity as pure speculation.

And it would seem to be a weird choice for Paul to launch his mass-market Gentile religion by hijacking a failed Jewish revolutionary movement. That only seems plausible, I think, if you use historical hindsight to take for granted that Jesus was going to be a major religious figure and so Paul of course grabbed him. If you forget how it all actually turned out, though, then I have a hard time seeing why anyone who was going to do the sort of thing that Paul did would have had any interest in a failed Jewish revolutionary. If Jesus was instead a promisingly non-revolutionary neo-judaic teacher, on the other hand, his brand could indeed have been a natural choice for Paul to adapt and expand.

The strongest evidence is that crucifixion was typically used for particular crimes against Rome. It can be similar to accepting the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but instead by different authors over centuries as well. Certain verses that seem ill-fitting and uncharacteristic of Jesus such as the cursing of the fruitless fig tree or the violent cleansing of the temple make more sense. Multiple hands become apparent, multiple traditions captured in the text regarding what happened.

As to the failed rebellion, I think it's better understood as reframed than failed. Paul didn't invent the belief in Jesus' resurrection, and his writing is saturated in a belief in an imminent arrival of sweeping divine change. The ideas in Paul regarding grace, rebirth in Christ, adoption into the divine are likely his most noticable and appealing evolutions from the original beliefs of remaining true to the covenants in a corrupted society where the Herodians were seen as having led the priests astray.

Honerentheos, your point about assembled pieces which may not all fit seems appropriate even though your comparison to Moses is comparing a five hundred year period to a forty year period. What I find a bit striking is that your choice of what does not fit, temple cleansing and curse fig tree are what I would see as fitting most centrally and are what puts Marks story together. But Mark is not picturing a revolutionary Jewish legal purist he is picturing a prophet who is renewing Israel by making the start of the kingdom of God and establishing a new covenent to make that start into an ongoing process, a new beginning.

I am inclined to see in Mark the beginning of a shift away from Pauls time is short no need to marry view to a view that believers must ready to be in for the long haul.That in itself could be seen as reason to think Mark almost all fiction, that is if Jesus was a purist revolutionary.