‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Jesus was originally a human being of the 1st century about whom a later mythology grew up. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.
The first post in this book review is here. All subsequent posts will be linked at the end of that post as they go up.
Chapter 7: Non-canonical accounts of Jesus
This chapter looks at whether there’s any support for Jesus’s historicity in what are known as the non-canonical gospels (the various early-ish stories of Jesus that, for various reasons, weren’t considered bona fide and didn’t make it into the official NT).
In this chapter, I don’t actually have much on which to disagree with Price. The non-canonical gospels, like the canonical gospels, were written by unknown authors many years after events, and thus aren’t very helpful in terms of figuring out what did or didn’t happen. They do, of course, add at least somewhat to the general problem that I raised in the last chapter; if gMark really was just a fictional work, how on earth did it lead to so many people being so convinced it was real that they were writing detailed embroidered versions of the story? Price has yet to address that problem. However, as far as specific points are concerned, there’s only one detail on which I wanted to comment.
It isn’t actually about the apocryphal gospels directly but about one of the passages Price quotes from the standard gospels. Near the end of the chapter, Price is talking about passages that gThomas appears to have copied from gMark, and brings up the Parable of the Tenants. I agree with the point he’s making – yes, I think the author of gThomas copied this from gMark – but I wanted to comment on the passage itself, because it raises yet another problem for Price’s theory.
What is important about this particular scene and literary allusion is the fact that it clearly makes the most sense in the context of the First Jewish-Roman War and the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In concluding the parable, Jesus says “What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.
The “vineyard” is Israel, the “owner” of the vineyard is God, the Jews are the “tenants,” and the “others” are the Romans. This is all a very clear and common interpretation, but of course this interpretation only makes sense in the light of the First Jewish-Roman War. This parable is written by the author of Mark as a way of spelling out the meaning of his entire story; it basically explains the meaning of the Gospel of Mark.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that the idea that Mark was alluding to the first Jewish-Roman war is, while a perfectly probable and very widely accepted one, not quite the certainty that Price seems to think. Mark portrays Jesus as describing various scenes of dreadful but rather nonspecific disaster that would befall the Jews. While this might well indeed have been a retrospective interpretation of the war, it’s also vague enough that it might just be either Jesus’s or Mark’s beliefs in a coming apocalypse in which sinners would be destroyed. These sorts of beliefs seem to have been fairly common amongst Jews of the time (as they are amongst fundamentalist Christians today), and thus it’s hardly outside the bounds of coincidence for someone to have come out with such a ‘prophecy’ shortly before an actual disaster occurred. I think gMark could have been written either before or after the war.
However, all that is by-the-by; there is a more important problem for Price’s theory in this whole parable. In the parable, what have the tenants/the Jews actually done that’s led the owner/God to decide to ‘destroy the tenants and give the vineyards to others’? According to verses 3 – 8 of the chapter, the answer is that they’ve repeatedly beaten and/or killed the slaves sent to them by the owner to collect his due, eventually killing the owner’s own son. In the analogy, of course, the slaves are analogous to previous prophets and the son is analogous to Jesus, thought of by Christians as God’s son. In other words, the wrong for which Mark is blaming the Jews in this analogy is… killing Jesus. Or, at least, killing or attacking a series of prophets, culminating in killing Jesus in the same way that they supposedly killed other prophets.
Which, of course, fits perfectly well if Jesus was a historical man who actually was killed; under that theory, Mark is blaming the Jews for this and blaming disaster (whether the actual disaster of the war or an imagined imminent disaster) on them for this action. But, according to Price’s theory, gMark is meant to be an entirely fictional allegory blaming the Jews for something else (Price seems a little fuzzy on what, but clearly in Price’s theory it can’t be for killing Jesus). So how does Price’s theory fit with this parable?
I did raise this point in a previous post. Price replied:
[Mark’s] creating that narrative in his story. Clearly the Jews kill Jesus in his story. The parable relates to the narrative.
OK. Why is Mark creating that narrative in his story? Price believes that Mark wrote this gospel as an allegory in order to convey a message about why he thinks the Jews had brought/would bring disaster on themselves. He’s clearly stated, above, that this parable is Mark’s way of ‘spelling out the meaning of his entire story’. Why would Mark be spelling out that the meaning of his entire story is ‘the Jews are at fault for killing Jesus’ if he was not trying to convey that the Jews were at fault for killing Jesus?
Price is welcome to come up with an explanation, if he’s got one. But it’s yet one more to add to the list of details that make much better sense if the figure on whom our Jesus stories was based was actually a real person.
A martyr is a martyr is a martyr – I dunno how many people claimed (or got labeled by others to have) “son of god” status, but I suspect the “son of the owner” box has fewer occupants than the “executed for their heretical beliefs or actions” box.
The number of people in the “ran around denouncing Israel for its lapses” box, even before the massacres of year 70 CE, probably exceeded those in the other two boxes put together (though doubtless those boxes have considerable overlap).
Does it give you pause that with so many people writing whimsical bullshit you have reason to doubt literally everything?
What many scholars trying to reconstruct the “historical Jesus” (“HJ”) have done is assume that the parsimonious explanation is that there has to be some historical core to these stories and then guess which bits are historical and which bits are the “detailed embroidery” (to use your language). Sure, they make educated guesses (farm more than mine would be) based on their knowledge of the languages and customs and events of the times, but the various different HJs conflict with each other on so many points it’s impossible to even get a sense of HJ’s actual personality. Was he a nice guy? A flaming asshole who trolled the Romans for sport? An optimist? A pessimist? An alcoholic?
With any given detail contestable, the reasoned assessment that there must be a historical core becomes rather less than helpful since we don’t know which bits are that historical core.
I don’t argue that the people making that reasoned assessment are wrong. I just think that it’s not helpful to say that there’s an HJ but we don’t know anything about the HJ that wouldn’t be true of any of the many apocalyptic preachers of his age. In other words, we don’t know anything **individual to that HJ**, nothing unique to that one person.
Saying that there was an historical tradition of Jewish apocalyptic and messianic preaching that was flavored with a soupçon of Helenic mysticism is useful because we can study that and characterize it.
Saying that there was one person who gave rise to Christianity simply isn’t useful unless we can say something about that person that was unique to that person. Given the wildly different and deeply conflicting HJs constructed by different scholars, anything that we think we “know” about HJ is historically indistinguishable from the mythology and speculation that others mistake for “knowledge”.
While Price’s theories may be a crock of something worthless and foul, for me the real point of Jesus mythicism is this: Whatever knowledge about the specific founder of Christianity that might be both unique to that founder and recorded in documents that survive to this day is indistinguishable from the many myths and assumptions about that founder, and that’s assuming that there was a single founder and that Christianity didn’t emerge out of the union of several small movements with different founders under the pressure of Roman aggression (or some similar exigency).
So long as there is no reliable test for which facts about HJ are both true and able to distinguish him (her?) from other apocalyptic/millenial preachers of his (her?) time, the HJ is lost and only the MJ remains.
“Saying that there was one person who gave rise to Christianity simply isn’t useful unless we can say something about that person that was unique to that person.”
.
Resurrection.
“With any given detail contestable, the reasoned assessment that there must be a historical core becomes rather less than helpful since we don’t know which bits are that historical core.”
And whose historical core, among many possible people? Perhaps there were 3 to 4 jesui, after all why would we expect Roman records? and Josephus attests multiple messiahs.
• amalgamist-mythicist process
Christianity began after a sequence of events: 1. various prominent leader deaths; 2. subsequently having a number of competing narratives spun by Jewish Pharisee and Sadducee interests, and then 3. by an amalgamist-mythicist process that resulted in the cross-fertilization of these myths about various persons.
@txpiper:
That’s not unique to the founder of Christianity. Many people have come back from the dead.
“Many people have come back from the dead.”
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I don’t know who you have in mind. But people in the Bible who were raised from the dead subsequently died, again.
With any given detail contestable, the reasoned assessment that there must be a historical core becomes rather less than helpful since we don’t know which bits are that historical core.
This is a very important point. The most we can really claim to “know” about Jesus — or rather, plausibly suspect about Jesus — is that someone in Roman-occupied Judea started preaching a relatively radical and progressive form of Judaism, acquired enough of a following to cause a stir, maybe got crucified for it, and later had his whole story embellished and inflated into the “Biblical Jesus” we “know” today. So an honest Christian wouldn’t have much to base their beliefs on except for the teachings recorded in the New Testament — which should be able to stand on their own merits, without all the surrounding mythology and endlessly-fawning-personality-cult rubbish.
@Crip Dyke, #2:
Hi there! Good to see you.
A lot of people assume that’s so, but I don’t think it’s the case. I think that we can still learn something from looking at the likely background to this sort of whimsical bullshit developing.
For an analogy: Let’s say you walk into someone’s house, and see one wall has coats and bags hung on it, piled high enough that you can’t see the coathooks under them at all. This means you can’t see anything about the colour or design of the coathooks; you can’t really tell anything beyond the fact that they exist and are in some way able to support a lot of stuff. But it would be fairly silly to jump from that to ‘Hey, how do we even know there are coathooks under there at all? I bet there really aren’t’. We know that something is holding all those coats up. We can hypothesise that maybe the house owners glued all those coats to the wall as an art installation, or that they invented an antigravity machine that they’ve chosen not to share with the world but instead just use to keep their coats on the wall. But both of those possible explanations are unlikely enough that, in practice, it is a fair assumption that somewhere underneath all those obscuring coats some actual coathooks exist.
But your actual question seems to be why I want to spend my time on debates about Assumed Coathook Jesus, and the answer to that is, simply, because it’s something I enjoy doing. I’m not trying to reconstruct Jesus or figure out what he really said as opposed to what was attributed to him later or attribute his words with particular importance; I’m deconstructing a claim of R.G. Price’s that’s based on shoddy reasoning. I dislike shoddy reasoning and get immense satisfaction from picking it apart, and I find it very relaxing to spend some time doing so in a low-stakes debate that isn’t just a thin veneer over ‘actually, we just want an excuse to hate people in Category X’. Of course it’s not useful; it’s a hobby, and, as such, it’s not meant to be useful. It’s meant to be enjoyable. Since I enjoy it, I keep doing it.
Dr Sarah @#8 said: “[W]hy I want to spend my time on debates about Assumed Coathook Jesus, and the answer to that is, simply, because it’s something I enjoy doing.”
I expect you will have future opportunity with new scholarship on Paul’s Jesus.
“In reality, these opponents of Paul knew nothing about a crucified savior having lived on Earth….Since the apostles James, Cephas, and John were not aware of an earthly Jesus who was crucified by the Romans in about 36 CE, they could not have been the disciples of an earthly Jesus.”
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Yes, this definitely qualifies as “new scholarship”.
And some more “new scholarship” per:
Allen scholar.google.co.za @ https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?hl=en&user=u3KFRyAAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Allen curriculum vitae @ http://nwu.academia.edu/NicholasPeterLeghAllen/CurriculumVitae
The Jesus Fallacy: The Greatest Lie Ever by Nicholas Peter Legh Allen.
ASIN : B0B8ZKHJ1C
Publication date : August 7, 2022
Crip Dyke… @#2 said: “Assuming that there was a single founder and that Christianity didn’t emerge out of the union of several small movements with different founders under the pressure of Roman aggression (or some similar exigency). ”
In a forthcoming book Price explores the possibility that:
Paul
Apollos
Cephas
were originally figureheads of rival sects who became amalgamated together.
PRICE, ROBERT M. (2023). GOSPELS BEHIND THE GOSPELS. PITCHSTONE. ISBN 978-1634312387.
N.B.:
Samaritanism’s primary religious text is the Samaritan Pentateuch (or Samaritan Torah).
The religion also has an apocalyptic element, with a belief in a messiah (the Taheb) who may be Moses or a similar prophet who will return for the “the day of vengeance” and resurrection of the dead.
@2 [Crip Dyke…] said: “So long as there is no reliable test for which facts about HJ are both true and able to distinguish him (her?) from other apocalyptic/millenial preachers of his (her?) time, the HJ is lost and only the MJ remains.”
In keeping with Lataster’s of proposal of grouping HJ-skeptics (i.e. MJers) and agnostics (i.e not persuaded by the arguments either way) together. I think using HJ and AJ—are good labels for the 2 sides of the debate.
The HJ position also has a schism between two viewpoints (i.e. Biblicists & HJers):
OP: “[If] gMark really was just a fictional work, how on earth did it lead to so many people being so convinced it was real that they were writing detailed embroidered versions of the story?”
It can not be assumed that we have the autograph Markan text. Perhaps our extant Markan text has been through a major redaction(s) in response to Marcion of Sinope, who may of authored the original featuring the Good (chrestos ) Redeemer (iourgós | ιουργός | ΙΟΥΡΓΌΣ). N.B. There is no extant MS with Greek δημιουργός or dēmiurgós being shortened to just iourgós. It is an unevidenced hypothetical.
[MOOD-MUSIC] “In The Beginning”. YouTube. Hans Zimmer.
Lord IS revealed himself to his first devotee and said many wise thing to him. Said devotee gave Lord IS the cognomem XS, and started a cult called XSians.
In short: Paul believed in the divine Lord IS XS from the very beginning!
It seems the more we actually learn about the gospels and their main protagonist the more we must accept the conclusion that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is a historicized fable. A religious story meant originally to teach, compete and elevate eventually became taken as literal fact.
Here is a current debate with PhD Candidate Jack Bull.
Bull, despite being a self-described practicing Catholic, seems to be a sane and (apparently) independent-thinking scholar of Christian origins — one who is able to collegiality engage with Richard Carrier. I know of no others like him. Bull holds that Marcion’s version of Mark was the first version of Mark !
• “Did Jesus Exist? Dr. Richard Carrier Vs. PhD Candidate Jack Bull”. YouTube. History Valley. 1 July 2022.
Nomina sacra: A nomen sacrum consists of two or more letters from the original word spanned by an overline, viz. we do not “know” what the nomina sacra represent, hypothecially Jesus Christ or perhaps not! All known early MSS use only nomina sacra!
Some nomina sacra commentary by Stephan Huller at: “The Jewish Myth Of Jesus – Stephan Huller”. YouTube.
@2 [Crip Dyke…] said: “I just think that it’s not helpful to say that there’s an HJ but we don’t know anything about the HJ that wouldn’t be true of any of the many apocalyptic preachers of his age. In other words, we don’t know anything **individual to that HJ**, nothing unique to that one person.”
which echoes
@2 [Crip Dyke…] said: “[T]he HJ is lost and only the MJ remains.”
which echoes
“…Price attempts to reassemble the puzzle pieces, disclosing several earlier gospels of communities…”
.
What were these earlier gospels?
What were these earlier gospels?
Elaine H. Pagels. “The Story Of The Storytellers – Q – The Hypothetical Gospel | From Jesus To Christ | FRONTLINE | PBS”. pbs.org.
Many biblical scholars also embrace the hypothesis that narrative material that is unique to the Gospel of Matthew and unique to the Gospel of Luke must be derived from other sources named M and L. And it is further assumed that these hypothetical sources were independent of each other. And that they derived from oral traditions that went back to the historical Jesus himself.
Price does not trace these hypothetical sources back to a historical Jesus, but argues that they did exist and answer many questions.
An interesting bit of trivia per: “Jesus: The Evidence” (1984). BFI. Film details: United Kingdom Television.
• “[YouTube_playlist] Jesus: The Evidence”
In response to this “London Weekend Television” series broadcast, James D. G. Dunn was able to persuade Wells to modify his viewpoint. Dunn wrote: “The alternative thesis… that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him.”
Per Wells,
@db, #4: As far as amalgamist theories go: I have no problem with believing that many of the sayings/actions attributed to Jesus were actually things said or done by other rabbis of the time. I think that once there was a story of Jesus, it would have accreted smaller stories from other people. However, the claim here seems to be that this same accretion process could have accounted for the Jesus story in the first place in the absence of any actual person walking the earth. That I don’t buy.
Could fictional embellishment of ‘competing narratives’ account for some kind of story of a rabbi who was martyred? Quite possibly. Could it account for multiple people being convinced that a particular Yeshua of Nazareth had walked the earth at a fairly specific time point just a few decades back, to the point of writing and passing on multiple written accounts of same, including some rather awkward attempts to retcon/gloss over points in the story? Highly unlikely. The hypothesis that these things originated with an actual charismatic rabbi who acquired a following remains vastly more plausible.
@Raging Bee, #7: Actually, it’s debatable whether Jesus’s ideas would have been particularly radical or progressive within Judaism. His teachings on the Sabbath are similar to teachings in the Talmud, and his teaching on divorce is actually way over on the stricter end of the scale. But, yes, agree in the main with what you say.
@db, #9, quoting David Oliver Smith:
OK, db. Can you explain to me why Smith believes this is the case? And I don’t mean ‘quote a wall of text giving more unsupported opinions about what happened’, or ‘list some obscure journal references that supposedly prove a point’. I’m asking you to summarise Smith’s actual arguments for believing these claims. Thank you.
@db, #11: All this chap’s qualifications seem to be in fine art, which isn’t that promising. (Although his artwork is brilliant. I was very impressed by the examples.)
Anyway, I’m quite happy to consider any of his arguments that you post here on their own merits or lack thereof, but same request as above applies: if you want me to engage with them, you’re going to have to post the actual arguments. Not just lengthy quotes telling us that this person believes such-and-such, but the actual reasons why they believe it. And if you can’t then you can’t, but in that case there really isn’t much point just C&Ping unsupported claims, much less back-cover blurbs.
@db, #13:
Not really useful here, since I’m discussing the arguments of someone who’s convinced that Jesus didn’t exist and can therefore hardly be described as ‘agnostic’ on the subject.
And I don’t think it is that useful to lump different beliefs together here. There’s ‘I have studied the evidence and believe Jesus never existed’, there’s ‘I’m assuming Jesus never existed because I don’t believe anything else Christians have to say’, and there’s ‘I really don’t care either way’. Lumping them all together is a useful tactic for JMs who want to claim their position has more support than it actually does, but doesn’t exactly clarify the debate.
@db, #14:
Quite possibly not, but I can’t see how that helps. Whatever the original text was, how exactly do we get from ‘Mark wrote a deliberate work of fiction’ to ‘multiple people were so convinced this was real that they were writing detailed embroidered versions’? See https://freethoughtblogs.com/geekyhumanist/2022/02/12/deciphering-the-gospels-proves-jesus-never-existed-review-chapter-six-part-2/ for more detail on my thoughts on the problems here.
@db, #20:
YES, THIS. I mean, I’d strongly support ‘less’ rather than ‘more’ in that last subclause, as you can guess. But the idea that the movement originated with a Rabbi Yeshua of Nazareth and that all the myth, hype and embroidery then built onto the memories of this particular person is far simpler than the various hypotheses which we end up needing to explain how the available evidence could have shown up in the form it did without an actual Yeshua of Nazareth.
Depends what he means by ‘not to be identified with’. I do of course think it fair to say that the original Jesus did not actually rise from the dead and wasn’t actually the quasi-divine saviour that Paul pictured. However, Paul certainly seems to have identified the figure he describes with someone who had lived some kind of earthly life and had brothers who were involved in the church, suggesting that his Jesus was based on an initial human leader of the original movement rather than having been wholly imagined.
@25 [Dr Sarah] said: “Lumping them all together is a useful tactic for JMs who want to claim their position has more support than it actually does, but doesn’t exactly clarify the debate.”
Per “JMs who want to claim their position has more support than it actually does”, to date, they should claim no more than:
1. Thomas Brodie
2. Richard Carrier
3. Raphael Lataster
4. Robert M. Price
5. Thomas Thompson
6. Philip Davies
7. Hector Avalos
8. Arthur Droge
9. Carl Ruck
10. David Madison
11. J. Harold Ellens
as those historians with actual and relevant PhDs, who either doubt the historicity of Jesus or have admitted to being agnostic about it (as in, they are unsure whether he existed or not). Cf. Carrier (25 August 2022). “List of Historians Who Take Mythicism Seriously”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
@27 [Dr Sarah] said: “Paul certainly seems to have identified the figure he describes with someone who had lived some kind of earthly life and had brothers who were involved in the church, suggesting that his Jesus was based on an initial human leader of the original movement rather than having been wholly imagined.”
Per Paul attesting that Jesus “had brothers who were involved in the church”:
‣‣‣[How typical would it have been to identify someone as a brother of the Lord?]
1. According to the Gospels Jesus did have a brother named James.
2. Now if in Galatians we read that “James [was] the brother of Jesus” then, of course, we would all agree that such a phrase points to a sibling relationship.
3. But we do have many instances where “brother” is used of Christians and in Hebrews Jesus speaks of having many brethren.
4. “Lord” is a religious title, not a personal name, so there is some small room for “brother of the Lord” being used in a spiritual or non-familial sense.
5. We know of no other instances of people in this context being called the “brother of a spiritual Lord” (or God) so this reduces the chances that Paul was saying James was the brother of the spiritual Lord.
6. But we also have another tradition that Jesus had no siblings at all. So how can that little detail be explained if it were known that James had been the brother of Jesus?
7. We also have information that James was reputed to have been a renowned leader of the Jerusalem church, and his relationship with God was so close that he was known as old ‘camel-knees’, a repetitive strain injury/side-effect from overmuch praying. Our interest is in the likelihood of such a phrase in this context being an indicator that James and Jesus were siblings. So if James were such an unusually holy man then maybe there is some plausibility in the idea that he was known as a special “brother of the (spiritual) Lord”.
8. Another circumstance we do know was common enough in ancient times was the tendency for copyists to edit works, usually by adding the odd word or phrase or more. Sometimes this was entered as a gloss in the margin by way of commentary, with a subsequent copyist incorporating that gloss into the main body of the text. That’s a possibility, too, given what we know of both Christian and “pagan” texts.
9. Given what we know about the evolution of texts, the alterations to manuscripts and so on, it is by no means sure how secure any wording, especially a slight one, in a New Testament text should be considered which is far removed from the original letter of Paul. How can a decision be made about key questions based on this inherent degree of uncertainty, an uncertainty justified by the general instability of the textual record visible in the manuscripts we do have? And yet arguments are formulated on such slender reeds all the time.
10. On the other side of the ledger we have the likelihood that if Jesus were known as a Son of David then it is reasonable to imagine that his royal heir would be his next-in-line brother, probably James. So “brother of the Lord” may not be such an unusual way to describe him in the letter.
‣‣‣[How likely or expected is the evidence we have if James really were the brother of the Lord?]
11. If James were known as the brother of the Lord in the early Church we would reasonably expect someone who met that James to tell others that the James he met was “the brother of the Lord”. (And certainly Jesus is called “Lord” very often elsewhere. So is God, but Jesus is too.) So to that extent the Galatians 1:19 statement about James is just what we would expect.
But see Tim Widowfield’s discussion. He throws cold water on what I thought was such a simple point to make in The Function of “Brother of the Lord” in Galatians 1:19
12. Against this, however, is the problem that if our hypothesis were true — that James, a leader of the church, really were a sibling of Jesus — we would expect to find supporting claims to this effect in the contemporary or near contemporary literature.
13. But in the Book of Acts we have what is surely a strange silence about James being related to Jesus despite his prominence in the Jerusalem church. Additionally, we have the unexpected failure to explain how this James acquired this position of pre-eminence. The beginning of the book indicates only twelve apostles and a total of 120 brethren were the original Christian club. James is not singled out. Yet we inexplicably find James leading the Jerusalem conference in Acts 15. It should further be kept in mind that we have no reason to assume that the designation “brother of the Lord” in Galatians was a reference to a “head” of the church as James appears to be in Acts.
14. The letter attributed to James in the New Testament gives no hint that its author knew that the name and person of James was a blood relation of Jesus. One would have expected some such indication in a letter sent to brethren far and wide (to “the twelve tribes”) to alert readers to the presumed author’s authority. This would be especially so if James were a reasonably common name. Given the often contentious nature of early Christian correspondence, it is difficult to explain why any information to enhance the author’s authoritative status would not be made explicit.
15. The letter attributed to Jude in the New Testament is just as unexpected in the way it identifies its author as the brother of James and not Jesus — if indeed our hypothesis were correct.
16. The Gospels indicate that James, though a brother of Jesus, was hostile to Jesus. There are no indications anywhere in the Gospels that this hostility was ever resolved. So on the strength of what we know from the Gospels we must suspect that the James Paul met in Jerusalem was not the same as the brother in the Gospels. If he were the same we would expect some hint somewhere that he came to have a change of heart.
17. Another factor in the Gospel account is the unusual combination of the names assigned to the brothers of Jesus. Any discussion on whether or not Jesus had literal siblings necessarily embraces Mark’s naming four brothers:
Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James (=Jacob), Joseph, Judas (=Judah) and Simon (=Simeon)? (Mark 6:3)
Although the names may have been common, to find these particular names all bracketed together is still striking. Jacob, Joseph and Judah are three of the most prominent of Israelite patriarchs, and Simeon, too, is strongly associated in this status with Judah.
It’s a little like naming a string of Olsons Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin: the names themselves convey a close identification with the nation’s foundational past. (Fredriksen, Paula. 1999. Jesus of Nazareth, p.240)
18. Paul in Galatians expresses no interest in learning about Jesus things that only a brother could know. He even scoffs at the idea that James might have anything to teach him. He is evidently not interested in knowing anything about Jesus in this worldly context.
19. The context in which the brothers of Jesus appear in the first Gospel (Mark) is the theological message that prophets are not accepted by their own kith and kin. The scene is presented to illustrate this message. It sets Jesus in the tradition of other men of God: Abel, Joseph, Jephthah, Moses, David . . . So the purpose is not to convey historical information but to illustrate a theological message and claim about Jesus. Given the absence of any other evidence clearly supporting historicity, this is a point against the historicity of the relationship between the two persons.
20. There is no external witness to Galatians 1:19 till the time of Origen (3rd century) despite its apparent potential usefulness in arguments against Marcionites by “orthodox” representatives such as Tertullian (second century).
21. There is a critical case of some slight cogency against the authenticity of Gal. i, 18, 19, which was absent from Marcion’s Apostolicon; the word “again” in Gal. ii, 1, which presupposes the earlier passage, seems to have been interpolated as it is absent from Irenaeus’s full and accurate citation of this section of the Epistle to the Galatians in his treatise against Heretics. (p. 76 of Jesus Not A Myth by A. D. Howell Smith.)
Cf. Godfrey, Neil (December 5, 2017). “Thinking through the “James, the brother of the Lord” passage in Galatians 1:19″. Vridar. “Given the considerations listed above, I would say that the evidence is just what we would expect if James were not a literal sibling of Jesus.”
db @ # 28 mentions Thomas Thompson as one skeptic of the Historical Jesus hypothesis, which prompts me to discuss his The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, which I read recently in hopes of contributing to this argument.
Thompson seems very familiar with the literature of the period, including much exo-biblical material (which I wish he’d spent more pages on), but he approaches it all more as a literateur than a historian. His thesis, so far as I can grasp it, boils down to a claim that the whole “suffering servant” motif pops up so often in the middle-East writings of several centuries that it forces us to see the Jesus stories as just another iteration of the same theme, a sort of hero’s journey marked by abuse from an arbitrary God/master as multiple parables to the (perceived) history of the Jews.
He delivers this thesis through an avalanche of examples, mostly biblical, but lays it on so thick I started to wonder whether he overstates his case by cherry-picking (a question I’d have to re-read the OT to answer – no thanks!). And he approaches the Bible as a thematically consistent work, never (sfaict) citing the “Documentary Hypothesis” at all or finding contradictions in purpose from one section to another, which reminded me again and again of writings by believers rather than analysts (phooey!).
I took some notes, including the following just as an example of how Thompson likes to equate everything biblical with everything else biblical:
So, while I did pick up some interesting etymology and other food for thought from Thompson, I have to question whether this book (haven’t read any of his other stuff) contributes much of use to the historical/mythical Jesus debate – even while it claims to hold that question at its epicenter.
Neil Godfrey writes,
db @ # 31 – I think that repeated theme has a lot to do with how the Jews have persisted throughout the centuries while so many other traditions turned to dust – and I feel glad never to have experienced such indoctrination myself.
@30 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Thompson likes to equate everything biblical with everything else biblical”
And R. G. Price likes to equate most everything in Evangélion katá Márkon (Greek: Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Μᾶρκον) to “Second Temple Scriptures” with good reason!
An excellent essay on “Markan intertextuality” is at Vorster, Willem S. “The production of the Gospel of Mark: An essay on intertextuality”. Wikisource.
“ECR Interview: Dr. Nathanael Vette”. PhD Students to Follow. 6 September 2021.
See: “Intertextual production of the Gospel of Mark”. Wikipedia.
@30 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Thompson seems very familiar with the literature of the period, including much exo-biblical material (which I wish he’d spent more pages on), but he approaches it all more as a literateur than a historian.”
Thomas L. Thompson writes,
Robert M. Price has argued that he would prefer the MJ (aAJ 🙂 ) position to be called ‘New Testament Minimalism’, stressing, as he sees it, the continuity with an approach found in the Hebrew Bible scholarship of Thomas L. Thompson, Philip R. Davies and others.
db @ # 33 – thanks for those links!
Both of them shed a little light on the potential sources for gMark, yet both seem (to me) to have serious omissions. For one example, neither mentions at all the Greek influences some scholars find (particularly the story of Telemachus in the Odyssey); for another, neither cites any of the chronological clues by which we place Mark first among the gospels yet after the year 70 rebellion. In that, they both resemble and support Thompson’s case for a fictitious Jesus.
For a third, the Wikipedia piece glosses over what it describes as “… the final text represents a rather lengthy history of growth…” by supporting the contention that Mark wrote “… at a desk in a scholar’s study lined with texts …” The Wikipedia summary makes it clear that the text we have is dense with allusions to earlier material, but leaves open whether that comes from one scholar/folklorist or a committee (almost perfectly reflecting our larger question as to whether the Jesus figure was an individual or a composite).
Both pieces (the 2nd Wiki cites W. Vorster so much I suspect him of having had a hand in it) explicitly assume a historical Jesus, yet dodge the issue, not unreasonably, by positing a gMark written long enough after the events that no living potential eyewitnesses had any involvement. To me they raise more questions, specifically as to the quantity and influence of first-century midrashim (we can safely assume that most such did not last to modern times, so I think those questions will go forever unanswered), and to whether any midrash centered on known actual (near-)contemporary persons or whether the whole genre stayed clearly in the legends lane.
db @ # 34: Thomas L. Thompson writes, The proper question is rather a largely literary question than an historical one.
– which on one level makes sense, but on another lets him off the hook for a lot of homework. In The Messiah Myth, for example, he treats everything in the Tanakh as if from a unified source, while I think sorting the pieces out (by JEPD, chronologically, or otherwise) might yield a few clues. He routinely refers to Yahweh, and (to my recollection, and the index) never to El – if he got that right, that in itself might tell us something about who influenced whom, and why some (parts of) texts got left out (and if he got that wrong, that’s just plain sloppy).
• One way gMark is noticeably unique
Alfred Suhl in 1956 concluded that in Mark—scriptures were not used as part of an attempt to demonstrate that the life of Jesus was a fulfilment of OT prophecies. Later evangelists (Matthew and Luke) wrote that way, but not Mark.
Vorster, following Suhl, also argued that Matthew and Luke use the Old Testament within a promise-fulfilment scheme, and that Mark’s use of the Old Testament is totally different, see Vorster, Willem S. (1999) [1981]. “The function of the use of the Old Testament in Mark”. In Botha, J. Eugene (ed.). Speaking of Jesus: Essays on Biblical Language, Gospel Narrative, and the Historical Jesus. BRILL. p. 153. ISBN 90-04-10779-7.
@35 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “…neither [article] mentions at all the Greek influences some scholars find (particularly the story of Telemachus in the Odyssey)…
Even though Dennis R. MacDonald and his Phd student(s) have solid scholarship on this, it would be scrubbed from WP as fringe on most articles—where it would be most cogent. Vorster died of a sudden stroke in 1993 and likely would of been a strong supporter of MacDonald had he lived.
Soon forthcoming is MacDonald’s life work magnum opus, that will merge in a reference-accessible form all his Hellenic and Jewish mimetic work, with summaries and bibliography for each item.
• “Interview with Dr. Dennis R. MacDonald & Edouard Tahmizian”. YouTube. Freethinker Podcast. 3 June 2022.
@35 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “[It is] clear that the text we have is dense with allusions to earlier material” and there is a “larger question as to whether the Jesus figure was an individual or a composite”.
Per Wells, “I propose here that the disparity between the early [New Testament] documents and the [later] gospels is explicable if the Jesus of the former is not the same person as the Jesus of the latter. ” N.B. This earliest literature per Wells includes, additionally to the genuine Paulines, three post-Paulines ascribed to Paul (2 Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians) and also the letter to the Hebrews, the epistle of James, the first epistle of Peter, the three epistles of John and the book of Revelation. —i.e. these are the “early” Christian documents attesting Paul’s unique Jesus separate from Q and the Gospels.
db @ #s 37-39 – Thanks again for the eludications: you clearly know this stuff in depth far beyond mine.
db @ # 37: … Vorster, Willem S. (1999) … but @ # 38: Vorster died of a sudden stroke in 1993 …
I guess this further supports Crip Dyke…’s point @ # 5. 😉
(# 37) … Mark—scriptures were not used as part of an attempt to demonstrate that the life of Jesus was a fulfilment of OT prophecies.
Fascinating, especially if we concede (& I know of no reason not to) that Mark had such an abundance of OT allusions. Distinguishing the two would, I suspect, require splitting of a lot of hairs. Didn’t the idea of Jesus-as-messiah get established well before gMark, leaving the author(s) of same little option but either endorsing or rebutting?
(Huh – a quick search of the whole King James text finds only two uses of the word “messiah”, both in Daniel.)
(# 38) … solid scholarship … would be scrubbed from WP …
[sigh] An article on intertextuality in Mark would (I think, though I’ve read even less about Wikipedia-politics) justify at minimum a link to a separate entry on Greek influences (& Persian, Egyptian, etc).
A quick look-up of Dennis R. MacDonald shows he attended Bob Jones U and now teaches at Claremont – neither of which I would expect to support his heresies. Here’s hoping his “most important work ever written on the gospels” rattles them both.
… the gospel of John arguing that the earliest version is an imitation of The Bacchae.
Uh, with Jesus playing the role of Dionysus? I’ll have to remember to raise a toast to that, next time I open up some wine.
(# 39): Per Wells, “I propose here that the disparity between the early [New Testament] documents and the [later] gospels is explicable if the Jesus of the former is not the same person as the Jesus of the latter.”
Ooh, what a lovely can of worms that opens! Wiggle wiggle wiggle!
This earliest literature per Wells includes, additionally to the genuine Paulines, … the book of Revelation. —i.e. these are the “early” Christian documents attesting Paul’s unique Jesus separate from Q and the Gospels.
I had thought Rev post-dated everything except maybe gJohn & a couple of pseudo-Paulines in the NT, but this puts more weight on the Nero-contemporary side of the scale. Don’t quite see how one squares Paul’s Jesus with John the Revelator’s Jesus, but maybe a few summers on Patmos without a hat or umbrella would make that clearer.
Somewhere in the epistles, I recall that Paul said something to the effect that “their Jesus is not my Jesus” (can’t find it in a quick search). I’ve long taken that as evidence that multiple Jesus-stories competed for mind-space in the first half-century CE, and most were suppressed (or neglected to death) by the factions which prevailed then and later. Does Wells propose two HJs, or one HJ and one – in the gospels!?! – MJ?
Oops, apologies for the html fail in my # 40: please read that “can of worms” line as unitalicized.
@db (quoting Neil Godfrey from Vridar), #29, reply part 1:
Since we have no other examples in early Christian writing that don’t appear to be referring to actual brothers of Jesus, clearly not that typical.
Oh, come off it. You’d still find a bunch of reasons to argue that it didn’t mean that, or had been interpolated, or whatever. 😊
…in the sense of being brothers and sisters of each other, yes. We don’t, however, have other instances of Christians being referred to as ‘brother of the Lord’.
I’m fairly sure Hebrews never claims to be quoting Jesus, and I can’t find anything in Hebrews about brethren/brothers. I think Neil made a mistake in a reference here.
I’m not quite sure what Neil means by ‘spiritual sense’ here.
Citation, please?
Precious little. ‘Brother’ has a connotation not just of a special relationship, but of a relationship on equal footing. As such, it’s an unlikely word for a religious group to use about the relationship that any of their members – however holy and respected – have with their leader or their demigod. There’s also the question of how this would explain ‘brothers of the Lord’ in 1 Corinthians 9:5
It is, but only moves the problem one step back. If someone wrote ‘brother of the Lord’ in the margin next to James’ name, that means someone had some reason to think that this particular James referred to a James who was known as Jesus’s brother. Even if the person who thought this wasn’t Paul, we’re still left with the question of why someone would think this if Jesus was actually believed to be a spiritual figure only.
What we know about alterations to manuscripts, as far as I can see, is that they’re typically either a) natural mistakes that are easy to make in copying (a word gets omitted or misspelled, words are transposed, a word might be substituted for one that either looks or means something very similar) or b) changes based on what the copyist believed should be there. I can’t really see how ‘ton adelphon tou kuriou’ would be likely to make it in there for either reason (barring the point above about it being added by a copyist who himself had reason to think that this James actually was the brother of Jesus, which doesn’t help the Jesus mythicist case). I mean, if you’ve got such a theory as to how both this and the similar phrase in 1 Corinthians 9:15 could plausibly have been added, by all means explain it, but it seems highly unlikely.
@db, #29, reply part 2 of 2:
We’ve also got the question of how Jesus would have become known as a Son of David if his followers all believed he was a celestial quasi-divine figure.
…such as, say, a casual reference in Paul’s letters to James being the brother of the Lord, or a reference to this in a historian of the Jews such as Josephus?
That doesn’t seem like ‘additionally’ so much as a wider version of the problem stated in the first sentence; Acts doesn’t explain how James became a leading figure in the church. The traditional explanation that he was Jesus’s brother is neither confirmed nor refuted by anything in the text. It’s not ‘it’s odd that Luke never mentioned he was Jesus’s brother’, but ‘it’s odd that Luke never tells us why this particular apostle became a leader of the movement’. Either Luke left that detail out, or possibly a line got omitted at an early stage of manuscript copying. Either way, I can’t see how this would somehow be more odd if the explanation was ‘he was Jesus’s brother’ as opposed to a different explanation.
I thought we didn’t know whether he was or not? There were plenty of Jameses around, so it’s perfectly plausible that that James wasn’t the one referred to as Jesus’s brother.
Although this is a widely-made claim, I haven’t been able to find anything in the gospels to indicate that James, specifically, held any particular hostility against Jesus. We’ve got one statement in Mark that his family said he was ‘out of his mind’ and went to ‘take charge of him’, but it doesn’t specify which family members this referred to, and we’ve got one claim by John that ‘not even his brothers believed in him’. That’s all rather vague and general. If Neil thinks it reasonable to dismiss the ‘brother of the Lord’ phrase as being too uncertain and insecure to take seriously, I don’t think it’s terribly consistent to treat these lines as solid textual support for the claim that James was hostile to Jesus.
In what way is it unusual for five siblings all to have very common names? Or for a devout family to give all its children Biblical names?
Paul expresses no interest in learning anything about Jesus’s life on earth, full stop. He wasn’t interested in Jesus the person, but in Jesus the magical sin-erasing mechanism. So, no, he probably wasn’t interested in hearing Jesus’s brother’s childhood anecdotes of what it was like growing up with him.
So are we not meant to be concluding that James was hostile to Jesus? If not, why was Neil talking as though such a conclusion were a given just three points back in this same post?
From a quick search, it seems that Marcion’s position was that the god of the Jewish scriptures couldn’t possibly be the one who sent Jesus as he was far too horrible. I can’t understand how a statement that James was the brother of Jesus would have helped refute this.
So are we now not meant to be suspicious of the validity of slight variations in texts?
The question of whether James was a literal sibling of Jesus is rather missing the point I was making, which is that Paul’s ‘brother(s) of the Lord’ statements are hard to explain if Jesus was not originally a human being walking the earth. It’s entirely possible that James could have been a metaphorical sibling of an actual human Jesus; in fact, interestingly enough, Origen says (‘Against Celsus’, 1:47) that this is exactly what Paul thought. I’m not debating about whether we can prove that James and Jesus shared genetic material. I’m questioning how we would have got from ‘Jesus was a celestial being’ to Paul’s reference to Jesus’s brothers. People can have friends or associates who are so close we refer to them as ‘brothers’ even without them literally being brothers. Celestial beings, however, usually don’t.
I had thought Rev post-dated everything except maybe gJohn & a couple of pseudo-Paulines in the NT…
• Godfrey, Neil (15 September 2022). “List of Vridar Posts on the Book of Revelation”. Vridar.
Neil Godfrey writes,
@40 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Does Wells propose two HJs, or one HJ and one – in the gospels!?! – MJ?”
Per Wells, Paul asserts a unique Jesus on earth sometime B.C.E. And per Wells, the historicity of this B.C.E. Jesus is unknowable, but Paul thought this Jesus was a historical personage and a god.
N.B. Carrier also holds that Paul thought his Jesus was a historical personage and a god—who never came to Earth—but did die as a human personage off Earth.
Per Wells, Q and the Gospels are evidence of a C.E. historical personage perhaps named Jesus and conflated with Paul’s B.C.E. Jesus.
@40 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “I recall that Paul said something to the effect that “their Jesus is not my Jesus” (can’t find it in a quick search). I’ve long taken that as evidence that multiple Jesus-stories competed for mind-space in the first half-century CE, and most were suppressed (or neglected to death) by the factions which prevailed then and later.”
The working theory is that when Paul wrote Lord IS XS he meant Lord Jesus Christ. However we have no attestation that IS XS meant Jesus Christ to Paul and there are no early MSS that spell out Jesus Christ. Paul perhaps was worshiping the Lord iourgós chrestos which is also IS XS in Greek and perhaps a new savior god, or Philo’s Logos who was a redeemer second-god.
db @ # 44 quoting Godfrey: … good reason to think that the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark was a careful personification or metaphor for the people of Israel, especially their demise in 70 and even perhaps 135 CE.
Dunno of anybody else who dates gMark to 135 or later, unless Godfrey (or Vridar) wants to ascribe that to actual prophecy.
… we have no clear cut evidence that anyone had heard of a gospel narrative until the middle of the second century…
That puts all the synoptics at least two generations past the generally accepted dates, doesn’t it?
… once one was known, a cottage industry of producing lots more was begun.
Which, circumstantially, boosts the MJ position: Jesus-story authors felt no obligations to factuality.
db @ # 45: Per Wells, Paul asserts a unique Jesus on earth sometime B.C.E.
Not just born, but in active ministry before Paul’s lifetime? Or does Wells move Paul back in time too?
… Paul thought this Jesus was a historical personage and a god.
Kind of odd that Paul would have “known” of such a historical personage when hardly anybody else did. Or does this tie into the Freke & Gandy thesis of a Jesus-god worshiped by Essenes & others BC (Before Caesar)?
… Carrier also holds that Paul thought his Jesus was a historical personage and a god—who never came to Earth—…
Which makes me wonder what definition of “historical personage” Carrier has in mind – I can’t think of one which doesn’t depend on some modern-science-fiction contrivance.
Per Wells, Q and the Gospels are evidence of a C.E. historical personage perhaps named Jesus and conflated with Paul’s B.C.E. Jesus.
More huh? (a) Q itself remains hypothetical; (b) how could the gospels get the biography right but not the name?; (c) at least in the early-Christian communities in which presumably the gospel-writers had roots, Paul and his claims would have enough prominence that they would have dropped some sort of clue if describing a Jesus II. (I know: not fair to ask you to reiterate what I should look up in Carrier & Wells for myself, except I don’t have any of either of their books to hand…)
@47 Pierce R. Butler said:
PhD Candidate Jack Bull dates gMark to 135 or later. Bull and Carrier (who contra Bull, goes along with mainstream dating) agree that dating the gospels is hopeless in Biblical Academia. see: “Did Jesus Exist? Dr. Richard Carrier Vs. PhD Candidate Jack Bull”. YouTube. History Valley. 1 July 2022.
Also
Chris Palmero. “Assume nothing. Ask why”. Born in the Second Century.
@47 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Q itself remains hypothetical”
Did you read: Ehrman, Bart D (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne. ISBN 978006220644
Ehrman is less then candid that Q, M, L, etc.. remain hypothetical. 😮
Godfrey, Neil (23 March 2010). “G. A. Wells on mythical and historical Jesus’s”. Vridar.
[q]
Wells goes to pains to stress that the Jesus of Paul and most early Christians was not the same as the Jesus of Q. The name Jesus means Saviour and is a natural one to apply to any figure seen to be performing this role. Paul warned vociferously against others teaching another Jesus. So there was more than one floating around.
Wells also suggests that the author of the Gospel of Mark fused the two in an attempt to bring the minority Galilean community over to the majority Christian view of Jesus. Unlike the Q Jesus, Paul’s Jesus was a pre-existent being who descended to earth to die a salvific death. He was modelled on Jewish Wisdom figures and influenced by pagan mysteries.
The Jesus of the religion of Christianity, the one who was crucified for our sins and resurrected, is the Jesus of Paul and, according to Wells, mythical. Mark attempted to fuse this Jesus with an itinerant Jesus of Galilee who left teachings in Q. Matthew and Luke incorporated those teachings in their gospels. But Christianity was widespread quite independently of any Q teacher, and the Q followers always remained a minority sect until their extinction.
The details of Jesus’ career in the gospels are so redolent of Elijah and Elisha and other OT figures, though, that I can’t see any room for a real person behind them at all. Otherwise, why not refer also to that person somewhere in there to which one is applying all those OT types? And if Q falls, then so does this small glimmer of a historical Jesus who seems to have accidentally intruded into a historical movement, a bit like Brian did in the Monty Python film of the Life of Brian.
[/q]
@47 [Pierce R. Butler] said:
Wells concurs with mainstream dating of Paul, but holds it could be earlier.
Wells holds 90+ for gMark and plumps for 120 C.E.
“G A Wells Earliest”. Internet Infidels. 1999.
Palmero. “Born in the Second Century | 4. The Gospel of Mark a Work of Brutish Lateness”. Buzzsprout.
Hermann Detering writes:
Zindler, Frank R. (2022). “A New Paradigm for the Study of Christian Origins: Replacing the Dendritic Model”. Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (SHERM). 4 (1): 114–152. doi:10.33929/Sherm.2022.vol4.no1.08.
LOL, I get it now: the Life of Brian title as homage to Strauss, David (1983) [1835 in German]. “Life of Jesus | PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION”. In Stepelevich, Lawrence S. (in en). The Young Hegelians: An Anthology. CUP Archive.
AND all the others…
Jennifer Stevens writes,
@db (quoting Neil Godfrey), #44:
Then why all the specific details? Compare the story to the Servant Songs in Isaiah, where the Servant is actually named as ‘Israel’ or just referred to as ‘he’, where there are no details of family or place of origin, no specific anecdotes about the things the servant has said or done, no-one named as implicated in the execution. And why was the Jesus in gMark referred to as the Messiah?
Yes, and JM-ers seem to ignore the significance of this. As far as I know, we have no other examples of fictional tales of the time being taken up and embroidered in this way. These competing narratives of Jesus’s life seem much more the kind of thing we’d expect if a real person had inspired a cult that then went off in various directions.
@db, #45:
What are Wells’ reasons for dating it BCE?
From what I’ve seen, even Carrier actually seems to have walked the ‘never came to Earth’ claim back a bit; he now allows for the possibility that Paul believed the celestial Jesus had briefly descended as far as the earthly realm.
@Pierce R. Butler, #47:
No, I’m with you on this one. If db likes the arguments enough to keep referring to them, he can go to the trouble of explaining them. Or not, if he chooses, but if he can’t be bothered to make the arguments for himself (instead of just alluding to all the people who believe them), then I don’t see any good reason why we should go and look them up for him.
@db, #50:
This is like arguing over whether the Santa Claus that children believe travels in a flying sleigh and climbs down chimneys is the same as the 4th-century Bishop of Myra. If you mean ‘does the mythical figure still have anything whatsoever in common with the St Nicholas on whom he was originally based?’ then no. If you mean ‘did the Santa Claus myth originate from this one particular identifiable individual?’ then, yes, it did; historians can trace it back. So, if Wells means that Paul had a very different understanding of who Jesus was than his original followers who passed on stories about things he’d done, then, yes, with that I agree. If he means that Paul came up with the story completely independently and the two separate stories were only fused later, then that claim needs justifying.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, surely you’ve done enough reading to know that that’s an incorrect fundie translation? It actually means ‘God is salvation’, or ‘God is deliverance’, or ‘God saves’.
Sounds more as though he meant it metaphorically, in terms of different conceptions of Jesus. (The quote is 2 Cor 11:4, BTW, if you or Pierce still wants it.)
Why would it have mattered so much to him to bring a totally unrelated cult over to that view? Especially since Wells seems to be trying to argue that Paul’s Jesus only existed in heaven, and gMark explicitly goes against that view?
Back to the coathook metaphor from above; why were all these multiple OT references being made about one figure, if not because one figure triggered this mythology?
Say what now? There are numerous descriptions in the gospels of specific things Jesus supposedly said or did, plus a few background details. I mean, I get that you think all of this was made up wholesale, but I’m a bit puzzled that you seem to be saying it isn’t there at all.
@56 [Dr Sarah] said: “Carrier actually seems to have walked the ‘never came to Earth’ claim back a bit; he now allows for the possibility that Paul believed the celestial Jesus had briefly descended as far as the earthly realm.”
Carrier allows for that possibility, but concludes the evidence makes Celestial-only Jesus more probable.
If Paul did hold that position, not much would change since Paul was informed by only revelations and scripture.
Carrier (25 February 2021). “The Original Scriptural Concept of ‘The Lord’ Jesus”. Richard Carrier Blogs.
Yikes, I get distracted by purported real-life and come back to more comments than I can respond to coherently.
db @ # 48 seems to accept the Palmero/Bull re-dating of “Jesus” to 135 or so, which causes me a few problems:
• tossing out centuries of scholarship (an arguably inconsistent position for a semi-advocate of Jesus-mythicism, I know, but I do have respect for the grinds who analyze every change of spelling and other chronolinguistic clues);
• the placement of the Jesus story in the time of Pilate, when the later rebellions would serve even better for a tale of martyrdom;
• the confusions that this puts on the Paul chronology;
• the numerous stories of, e.g., Nero scapegoating christians for his own failures.
Positing a historic Jesus after the rise of a Jesus cult puts us in Hugh Schonfield territory, with a young man (opportunistic or deluded) deliberately attempting to fulfill the prophecies of a messiah he heard growing up, which strikes me as altogether too glib. And I’ll almost always pass on history-via-youtube: this sort of material demands the seriousness of books or journal articles.
And didn’t Wells later abjure (much of) his own work in The Jesus Myth?
db @ # 49 – No, I haven’t read Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?, in some part because of reviews and online comments to the effect that he relied so heavily on the brother-James argument plus an unsupported acceptance of the Q hypothesis, and didn’t bring much else to the table. I hope to catch up to it one day, but for the last few years have concentrated my history reading on the USA, and that title in particular (generally I greatly respect Ehrman) just doesn’t have enough pull to draw me away.
db @ # 50 – Wells’s idea of a Jesus-figure “… modelled on Jewish Wisdom figures and influenced by pagan mysteries…” struck me decades ago as the most plausible mythicism argument yet, but I haven’t had the time to track down his full argument for same, since he spread it over 6 or 7 books. Or maybe I was overly influenced by having read Philip K. Dick’s Valis around the same time.
@58 [Dr Sarah] said:
The name Jesus means Saviour
…that’s an incorrect fundie translation? It actually means ‘God is salvation’, or ‘God is deliverance’, or ‘God saves’.
Carrier, Richard (2020). Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ. Pitchstone Publishing. ISBN 9781634312080.
Dr Sarah @ # 58: The quote is 2 Cor 11:4…
Which also refers to “another gospel”, which puzzles me greatly. Was there a whole genre of “gospels” before the canonical & apocryphal set we squabble about today – a literature also at odds with Paul & his churches?
This reminds me a bit of another (nominal) Christ figure, one Christopher “Kit” Carson, a known actual living person who (unintentionally) inspired a wave of novels (which he didn’t like, insofar as a functional illiterate who probably had bits and pieces of them read aloud to him could have an opinion on same). But those works grew out of a profit motive: the authors of “gospels” could only gain some admiration from their fellow cultists for having fortified their beliefs and for perhaps drawing in new “sheep” (mostly in other cities).
Maybe something more cogent will occur to me later; in my little slice of the space-time continuum, it’s time for dinner. Thanks for the food for thought, but I hear a bowl of pasta calling to me now.
@60 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “I haven’t read Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?”
Your better off reading his How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperOne, 2014. ISBN 978-0-06-177818-6.
And
Lataster, Raphael (2016). “Review Essay: Bart Ehrman and the Elusive Historical Jesus”. Literature & Aesthetics 26 (1): 181–192. ISSN 2200-0437. (Online PDF)
@60 [Pierce R. Butler] said:
Since gMark likely incorporates Jesus ben Ananias; why not 1 or 2 more Jesui? If Jesus prime flew under the radar as HJers claim, then why not Jesus” double prime or Jesus”’. They all may of been amalgamated together in gMark.
No, his The Jesus Myth? position remained constant.
Q has been described as Juggernaut in Biblical Academia. It certainly buffaloed Wells and misled Doherty.
Carrier write,
Ehrman commits the fallacy of hasty generalization again. In order to assert absolute certainty that the “Q” source existed (since he leans a lot of his case on it), he dismisses the work of Mark Goodacre (who extensively presents The Case against Q in print and on the web) and other leading scholars who agree with Goodacre (including Michael Goulder, E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davies), without giving, or citing, any rebuttal to it whatever. He just says it “has failed to convince most of the scholars working in the field”.
But I doubt Ehrman has widely polled scholars on this (so as to know “most” reject it), much less all and only those scholars who have read and examined the case made by Goulder and Goodacre (since the opinion of scholars who haven’t even examined their argument obviously doesn’t count for anything). He is therefore arguing from his own ignorance, and making hasty generalizations about “the scholarly community” as sufficient reason to dismiss Goodacre’s case. That is a fallacy. Goodacre’s case case has to be addressed. It can’t be dismissed by armchair polls conducted in Ehrman’s head.
@56 [Dr Sarah] said: “What are Wells’ reasons for dating it BCE?”
Wells 2004, p. 34: “My view is that Paul knew next to nothing of the earthly life of Jesus, and did not have in mind any definite historical moment for his crucifixion. As we saw, holy Jews had been crucified alive in the first and second centuries B.C., but traditions about these events, and about the persecuted Teacher of Righteousness, could well have reached Paul without reference to times and places…”
@db, #59:
…which would mean that Paul not only believed that a human could be conceived of the seed of David and born of a woman under the law, all completely in the celestial realm, but saw no need at any point to clarify for his readers that he believed these things to have happened in a celestial realm.
…and from having a minimal amount of contact with the original church which was at least enough for him to be aware of a specific group known as brothers of the Lord who were not the same as the apostles and who had privileges not available to all church members, which, again, brings us back to the difficulty of explaining this fact satisfactorily under a mythicist theory. (See my comments #42 and #43 in this thread.)
@db quoting Carrier, #61:
I know very little Hebrew, but here are the reasons why I disagree with Carrier’s interpretation here:
1. I have never heard the name translated as ‘God’s Saviour’. Names beginning with forms of the ‘Ye’ prefix are normally translated as statements about who God is, rather than about what God possesses. Therefore, Yeshua/Joshua/Yehoshua is translated as ‘God is salvation’ or ‘God is deliverance’ (the second meaning is closer to how it would have been understood).
2. From everything that I can find from searching on the matter, biblical Hebrew did not have a genitive form for nouns; like French, it used the form of adding an ‘of’ phrase after the noun referring to the thing possessed. In other words, if someone had wanted to say ‘God’s Saviour’, in Hebrew this would have been phrased in a way equivalent to ‘Saviour of Yahweh’, with the word for Yahweh after the word for Saviour, rather than before it.
3. It’s an odd phrase to use anyway because it’s weirdly ambiguous; it suggests that the person in question saved God rather than being a saviour sent by God.
4. Every piece of literature we still have uses the name Jesus when they use a name. Would a group of people who’d known someone by a particular name really change over that completely, with no trace of the previous name, even with a title appended to it? What is the probability of that and how does it compare to the probability that the reason people referred to him by this very common name was because he did, in fact, have this very common name?
I don’t think it particularly meant ‘chosen one’. It was a term used to refer to kings because they were anointed at their coronation ceremonies (and at some stage started also referring to priests who were likewise anointed), and it also, of course, became used in the much more specific sense of referring to the king descended from David who would supposedly end up ruling over a much-better-off Israel in a glorious future.
@Pierce R. Butler, #62:
That one I can explain. The word ‘gospel’ literally just means ‘good news’. Although it has since become irrevocably associated with particular written stories of Jesus, that wasn’t the case at the time that Paul et al used the term. Therefore, Paul would have been referring to people bringing different forms of ‘good news’; his particular good news was that Jesus’s sacrificial death saved them/meant that the Law was no longer necessary, whereas other groups had different claims about what the good news of Jesus’s death was (probably that his resurrection meant he was still going to come back as the more expected form of Messiah).
@db, #65:
That’s an argument for us not knowing when Paul wrote, but I can’t see how he’s dating it to BCE in particular.
That’s an argument for us not knowing when Paul wrote, but I can’t see how he’s dating it to BCE in particular.
Wells holds a pseudo-Euhemerism view that Paul’s second-god may actually of been a remote non-divine historical personage that the Lord’s cult (nascent Christians) had deified. So he puts this in the remote past as did Euhemerus for Hercules, etc.
@db, #71:
OK. Why?
OK. Why?
In fact, Wells never said B.C.E. .. I am following R.M.Price’s commentary on Ellegård and Wells when I attribute B.C.E. to the Jesus` prime of Wells.
Wells only says “in an unspecified past” eg.”In the gospels, the two Jesus figures — the human preacher of Q and the supernatural personage of the early epistles who sojourned briefly on Earth as a man, and then, rejected, returned to heaven — have been fused into one. The Galilean preacher of Q has been given a salvivic death and resurrection, and these have been set not in an unspecified past (as in the Pauline and other early letters), but in a historical context consonant with the date of the Galilean preaching.”
Wells writes,
See Online PDF p. 24 “Theologians as historians“. Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning (59): 193. for a summary of ‘s viewpoint.
Wells concurs with mainstream dating of the Pauline text.
Wells holds 90+ for gMark and plumps for 120 C.E.
@68 [Dr Sarah] said: “[Paul’s] particular good news was that Jesus’s sacrificial death saved them/meant that the Law was no longer necessary…”
Rather, Paul was deprecating the Temple Cult and declaring a new covenant for Christ followers.
Per Paul, the poured Human blood of Lord IS XS made all the blood poured on the Temple Cult altar redundant. And the “All Father” was now affecting the covenant where Christ followers (already dead or otherwise still living) would get new bodies on Earth 2.0.
I see a Religious syncretism of Middle Platonism, Mystery religions, and Hellenistic Judaism in Paul.
Middle Platonism is a stumbling block for many people, due to it not actually being Platonism per se!
IMO, a sophisticated first_CE Platonist (i.e. middle platonic) would understand evil in the same way that something being “cold”—can be understood as merely the absence of heat. All (Loddy, Doddy, and Everybody) have the potential to be good in the same way that every atom (understood as a ball on the Newtonian billiard table universe) has the potential to have heat. Thus a person is evil if they are not living their full human potential. As the bible says; since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, “men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men … They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice.” because they are ‘COLD’ (i.e. not fulfilling their potential to be good), thus have “a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.” Cf. Romans 1:28
db @ # 63 – Thanks for the tips. I already have the Ehrman on my shelf – will, I hope, follow up on the Lataster tonight.
db @ # 64 – Ehrman could quite well (and quite easily, and in quite good faith) have reached a conclusion about other scholars rejecting Goodacre et alia simply by following the literature. (Or maybe not – I claim no familiarity with such readings myself.)
db @ # 65: … traditions about these events, and about the persecuted Teacher of Righteousness, could well have reached Paul without reference to times and places…”
That seems rather unlikely if we take Paul at his word about having persecuted the Jerusalem (& elsewhere?) Judeo-Xian community in his earlier life.
Dr Sarah @ # 68: The word ‘gospel’ literally just means ‘good news’. … Paul would have been referring to people bringing different forms of ‘good news’; his particular good news was that Jesus’s sacrificial death saved them… different claims about what the good news of Jesus’s death was …
All of which seems to assume that “gospel” meant “Jesus-redeems (somehow) story” – can we really take it for granted that the term did not include aJesus-ical narratives too?
@60 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “I’ll almost always pass on history-via-youtube: this sort of material demands the seriousness of books or journal articles.”
You may be throwing out the champagne with the cork! (or if you are in AA—the baby).
Holmes covers material i.e (Middle-Platonism) not in the students textbook because he thought it very important! I am certain his students appreciated it 🙂
• Wheaton College IL. Video lecture #18 Middle and Neo-Platonism by Arthur F. Holmes (2015) per “A History of Philosophy”. YouTube. @ https://youtu.be/Sic5OdUIkgk
This is a must see lecture on the eclecticism of Middle-Platonism drawing from other philosophies. In short Middle-Platonism is a synthesis s of several schools of thougt.
@76 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “All of which seems to assume that “gospel” meant “Jesus-redeems (somehow) story”
Danila Oder holds that gMark originated as a play. I suggested the name of the play may of been “Evangélion Apocalypse” = Good News Revealed.
• Oder, Danila (18 December 2019). “What was the title of Mark’s play?”. The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text.
db @ # 78: Danila Oder holds that gMark originated as a play.
Which to my mind raises all sorts of questions about what constituted a “play” 20 centuries ago in Palestine. No doubt the Greek influence still weighed heavily, especially among the educated classes, but surely a community which identified as Jewish would bring their own twists to that.
I read the Lataster review you linked to @ # 63 last night, and was most struck by the taunting and personal swats at Ehrman. As an Australian, Lataster may have been exposed to too much Murdoch media for his own good; his editors should also take a long vacation from such antischolarly influences.
“Jesus’s sacrificial death saved them”
.
Technically no, on two counts.
First, “It is finished…” indicated that what was accomplished happened before His death. Second, this achievement was atonement, which enables salvation, but does not make it happen. Being “born again” triggers that process.
The account of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 reveals that paradise (Abraham’s bosom) and heaven are not the same thing. The former is beneath (Matthew 12:40 comp w/ Luke 23:43). It is where Old Testament saints were sequestered until the atonement was settled, and access to heaven was possible, signified by the veil in the Temple being torn in two.
All thing in order.
This is part of a broad and detailed study that involves the first three Levitical feasts, and a second liberation and Exodus from the captivity of the grave.
@79 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “[Lataster’s] editors should also take a long vacation from such antischolarly influences.”
Lataster updates his criticism in the peer reviewed 2019 Questioning the Historicity of Jesus: Why a Philosophical Analysis Elucidates the Historical Discourse. Brill-Rodopi. ISBN 978-9004397934.
Someday you may be able to compare it with is 2016 work. Lataster has been given the epithet “Wrecking Ball” by others.
@80 [txpiper] said: “…access to heaven was possible, signified by the veil in the Temple being torn in two.”
I see this as deprecating the Temple Cult. Proclaiming that first-god has left and is not coming back. There is no longer any need to pour out blood at the temple—first-god is not there anymore—the temple cult will be withered as was a certain fig tree.
If by “Being “born again”” you mean becoming a Christ follower who will get a new body on Earth 2.0 after Earth 1.0 is destroyed per the new covenant with first-god—brokered by second-god (aka. the redeemer) then I concur.
@79 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Which to my mind raises all sorts of questions about what constituted a “play” 20 centuries ago in Palestine.”
• An update on Hellenistic Judaism in Palestine:
Alexander took Palestine in 332 BCE and Jews were quickly exposed en masse to Greek culture. In some cases, Palestinian Jews began accepting the influence of this culture. For example, Greek names began appearing within Jewish families as early as the late third century BCE.
• Jews outside of Palestine, namely in Egypt, exhibited greater signs of Hellenization.
Given the fact that Hellenistic Judaism combined Jewish religious tradition with elements of Greek culture. And that during the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE) a Male Jew, would be OK with changing his normative sexuality and his body image as Jew.
db @ # 81: Lataster has been given the epithet “Wrecking Ball” by others.
Which reminds me of R. Reagan’s budget director David Stockman, whom somebody described as “doing with a hatchet what should have been done with a scalpel”.
db @ # 83 – poking around on Danila Oder’s website shows that she postulates “Mark” as a Christian-convert (or Christian-curious) from aristocratic roots, sponsored by an elite Roman family, educated in Alexandria but producing a private play for said Roman family at their Roman home. All of which she fits together very tidily, though mostly circumstantially (seems to me this demands a scan of the gMark text for Alexandrian/Roman vocabulary, etc): an intriguing and not-impossible scenario but not (yet) a compelling one.
…seems to me this demands a scan of the gMark text for Alexandrian/Roman vocabulary
Carrier and other scholars opine that the erudite Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain affected a vulgar patois in his writing on purpose. Likewise did the author(s) of the Markan text which displays a erudite mind penning vulgar Greek.
“What The Heck Is The Apostle Paul Up To? | Robyn Faith Walsh PhD”. YouTube. MythVision Podcast. 3 June 2022. @TIME:00:10:12 “…Paul knows Plato really well . . . his native tongue is Greek…”
Walsh also comments that the original Greek: ἐκκλησία ekklēsia were just groups of tradesmen banding together for mutual social welfare of the families in the ekklēsia.
db @ # 86: … the Markan text which displays a erudite mind penning vulgar Greek.
Dante Alighieri might serve as a closer example in time and style. We should also consider the possibility of a shrewd redactor working over some amateur’s text, or maybe vice-versa: everyone seems agreed that more than one hand left fingerprints on the document.
The very vague verses of Paul recounting his disastrous debate debacle in Athens always suggested to me his Greek and eloquence therein lacked more than a little.
… the original Greek: ἐκκλησία ekklēsia were just groups of tradesmen banding together for mutual social welfare of the families in the ekklēsia.
Seems to me most of the early Christians came from the underclass: slaves, porters, sailors, etc: neither the aristos nor what passed for a bourgeoisie would’ve gone gaga for all this “the last shall be first” apocalyptic agitprop. Post-70, practically all of the Jews not Roman-identified would have fit into the underclass by refugee-necessity.
Dante Alighieri might serve as a closer example in time and style.
Michael Masiello writes, “In the Convivio, Dante is learned, exuberant, and encyclopedic. Dante is happiest in Italian; and his “Italian” is closer to the pure Florentine dialect here than in the Commedia, whose “Italian” has taken on the dialectal hues of many of the regions Dante traveled in his exile. It is this heteroglot, lower-c catholic intermixture of Italic vernaculars that makes Dante the “inventor”’of modern Italian (in some sense).”
Ezra, Daniel Stökl Ben (2003). The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century. Mohr Siebeck.
@26 [Dr Sarah] said: “Whatever the original text was, how exactly do we get from ‘Mark wrote a deliberate work of fiction’ to ‘multiple people were so convinced this was real that they were writing detailed embroidered versions’? ”
Danila Oder writes,
“For example, Jesus is not the Davidic messiah in GMark…”
.
“And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ“. Mark 8:29
“And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?” Mark 12:35
**Christ references in Mark**
• You are the Christ” (Peter in 8:29).
Peter’s Confession (8:29) — Mark begins the Gospel calling Jesus “the Christ” or “the Anointed One” or “the Messiah” but it would take Peter eight whole chapters to figure this out himself (8:29).
• “‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’And Jesus said, ‘I am…’” (14:61)
High Priest & Jesus (14:61) — asks Jesus at his trial whether he is the Christ. Jesus says “I am” and then proceeds to tell about his second coming.
• “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down from the cross that we may see and believe” (15:32)
Mockers (15:32) — at the crucifixion scene, several bystanders who will mock Jesus use his Christological Titles but don’t really mean it.
**Pre-Christian Greek Christ references**
Samuel MusgraveWikipedia (1732–1780) was an English classical scholar and physician. His 1778 edition of Euripides was considered an advance on the 1694 work of Joshua Barnes. Musgrave’s edition was the most methodical and accomplished complete edition of Euripides (and fragments) yet published anywhere. Cf. Euripides, Quae extant omnia, Oxford, 1778, 4 volumes.
Musgrave gives a variant spelling of 501 μυρόχριστος (myróchristos) in the sense of “anointed”. Other editors give μυρόχριστον (myróchriston).
@91 [txpiper] said: “‘…How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?’ Mark 12:35”
An interesting aside N.B.: As a study on the “Intertextual production of the Gospel of Mark” we would say that the Markan text is alluding to:
LOL, given:
IMO, scribe would be better translated as “Corporate Lawyer” advising the executive officers of the temple 🙂
@91 [txpiper] said: “Mark 12:35″
• “FAQ”. The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text.
db @ # 37: … in Mark—scriptures were not used as part of an attempt to demonstrate that the life of Jesus was a fulfilment of OT prophecies.
db @ # 93: … we would say that the Markan text is alluding to: Isaiah 11:1-9 … Jeremiah 23:5f; 33:14-18 … Ezekiel 34:23f; 37:24 … Psalm 89:20ff … Isaiah 9:7 … Psalm 2:2, 6 …
Please reconcile.
Please reconcile.
Excellent point Pierce R. Butler! Are you perhaps an attorney/scribe on Earth 🙂
Carrier appears to trump Vorster and Suhl—per Paul and gMark on the human flesh suit of second-god being fulfillment of Davidic prophecy.
What did Yesus teach?
• The end is nigh, REPENT!
Per the historical personage Jesus b. Joseph/Pantera, whom I have given the moniker Yesus. Bart Ehrman holds the viewpoint that Yesus was a Jewish preacher and teacher crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate. Ehrman indicates that he believes that Yesus was born into poverty and was either a carpenter or a carpenter’s son. He began his public ministry while trapped in a poverty-stricken lower-class life. He was an “The end is nigh! Repent!” type of preacher. He was baptized by John the Baptist. He “raised the ire of Pharisees,” causing a ruckus in the Temple but not at the scale depicted by the Gospels. Pilate personally ordered his crucifixion after a brief trial at the beginning of Pesach, the holiest holiday of them all. Roman soldiers flogged Yesus on his way to the Cross, and he was dead within six hours.
What did second-god teach?
• I will be to you a redeemer God
Cf. Godfrey, Neil (2 December 2010). “The Second God among Ancient Jewish Philosophers and Commoners”. Vridar.
db @ # 97: Are you perhaps an attorney/scribe on Earth…
Neither, unless “scribe” encompasses intermittent data-entry peon.
db @ # 98 (quoting R. Carrier): Jesus in Mark never behaves like a human…
db @ # 99: Bart Ehrman holds the viewpoint that Yesus was a Jewish preacher and teacher crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate.
So the one scholar considers historical the depiction that the other apparently holds most unrealistic. I have to remain agnostic.
So the one scholar considers historical the depiction that the other apparently holds most unrealistic.
“Brodie and Ehrman are both competent scholars, both are assessing the same body of literature acting as historical evidence, and yet they reach diametrically opposite conclusions. (p. 6)” [Dykstra, Tom (2015). “Ehrman and Brodie on Whether Jesus Existed: A Cautionary Tale about the State of Biblical Scholarship“. The Journal of the Orthodox Center for the Advancement of Biblical Studies (JOCABS) 8 (1): 1–32. Full Text: PDF available]
db @ # 101: Thanks for the Dykstra link – very readable, if clearly tilted towards Brodie & mythicism.
Though I despair of citing it as exemplary, given this flagrant error:
Anyhow, clearly not what one would expect from a source calling itself The Journal of the Orthodox Center for the Advancement of Biblical Studies, though I don’t think I’ve encountered JOCABS before and perhaps they’re all Biblical buccaneers sailing under false flags. The final pages consist of attempted appeasements aimed at believers and ecumenicism generally, so perhaps the Orthodox Center as a whole cruises closer to the mainstream and simply allowed this yawing as a gesture of liberality.
Though Dykstra allows himself to range beyond the two books he nominally reviews, he doesn’t mention either of the Robert Prices, nor the Jesus Seminar, nor some of the other writers those who follow the HJ/MJ debate would expect. I wonder why…
LOL, I wonder how many times what Brodie has argued—has been seen interdependently by others and then bang! Down come the blinders.
• Adrian Russell (27 May 2014). “If John was Elijah is Jesus Elisha?”. GoThereFor.
Kelly Wellington writes,
@96 [Pierce R. Butler] said: “Please reconcile” the viewpoint that in Mark—scriptures were not used as part of an attempt to demonstrate that the life of Jesus was a fulfillment of OT prophecies. AND Mark 12:35 “…How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?”
This appears to be a “Poker Tell”—in that the Markan author(s) was a gentile (perhaps no even a Christian!)—making the assumption that the Greek speaking reader had a Greek LXX Old Testament, used by the early second-god hellenistic cult, to look this up in.
Another “Poker Tell”:
• Oder, Danila (23 July 2021). “What is the meaning of “Boanerges”?”. The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text. “In Mk 3:17 Jesus gives two disciples the nickname “Boanerges”; the text explains that the meaning of “Boanerges” is “Sons of Thunder.” The problem is that “Boanerges” is not good Aramaic.”
Cf. “Why I think Mark was an Alexandrian”. The Two Gospels of Mark: Performance and Text. 6 August 2021.
@db quoting Danila Oder, #90:
So, if ‘their purposes’ were to present Jesus as a character who’d lived on Earth… why on earth would they have been members of a group that taught he’d only ever lived in Heaven? Going with the ‘Davidic descent’ example that Oder brought up: Yes, Matthew and Luke did indeed find it important to present Jesus as fulfilling the prophecies about being descended from David, and also the one about being born in Bethlehem. Since these things were important to them, why would they have been members of a group that taught that the Messiah had already lived and died completely in heaven? If that was really what the original cult taught, Matthew and Luke wouldn’t have been members in the first place. They’d have continued to wait for a human Messiah whom they could at least reasonably believe to have been descended from David and born in Bethlehem.
How, exactly, does Oder think illiterate people were finding out about these stories in gMark? They obviously weren’t reading the book for themselves. I note from previous comments that Oder is hypothesising it was a play, but also that it was supposedly written for a private performance for one family, which in the nature of things would not have become very widely known.
If the teaching of the group was that Jesus was a heavenly being, surely the whole group would know this? Why is Oder talking as though this would have been something that only the elders would know? If some of the congregation members did get hold of the Markan stories and start asking questions, why wouldn’t other people just point out straight away that the stories were obviously fiction?
If Oder thinks the aim of the stories was to answer questions by illiterate people, why on earth would the stories have been written down at all?
I’m going to be charitable and assume that Oder meant ‘composed by’ and is not actually trying to claim that these lengthy and complex works were written by people who were barely literate. Although even that does still leave me rather confused as to how she thinks barely-literate people were composing all these fictional stories when she was claiming above that illiterate people ‘always think concretely’. If she believes that illiterate people are unable to grasp the very concept of fiction, how does she reconcile that with this apparent idea that having a few rudiments of literacy enables them to invent fiction in detail?
Anyway. What Oder seems, somewhat clumsily, to be trying to say, is that large numbers of people who couldn’t properly read somehow heard Mark’s supposedly fictional story of Jesus, somehow didn’t have it repudiated by the church elders, and were so interested they invented lots of stories about it. Which… then got written down by people who were literate. Not in a ‘behold the amusing legends of these country peasants’ kind of way, but in a way that got taken so seriously it completely took over the nascent group as the overall belief form, even though it completely contradicted what all the people in charge were actually teaching. How is any of this supposed to make sense as a plausible version of events, and why should we believe this rather than the much simpler explanation that these congregations actually believed from the start that Jesus had walked the earth, and thus were telling stories about that?
@txpiper, #91:
[querying Oder’s statement that Jesus wasn’t the ‘Davidic Messiah’ in Mark]
I think Oder was focusing on ‘Davidic’ rather than ‘Messiah’ in that phrase. Mark certainly presents Jesus as the Messiah, but not as a descendant of David, as Luke and Matthew both do.
[I]lliterates always think concretely
This claim often cites: @ https://web.archive.org/web/20160711163416/http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/RAVSessays/essays/pdfs/XP_Atheism_Rising.pdf
• Cheyne, J.A., 2009. “Atheism rising: The connection between intelligence, science, and the decline of belief”. Skeptic 15(2), pp.33-38.
@db, #107: Interesting, but ‘We don’t talk about what we haven’t seen’ doesn’t exactly support Oder’s claim that illiterate peasants would have responded to hearing a story from gMark by asking more questions about it and inventing detailed further stories about it.
Dr. Sarah,
“Mark certainly presents Jesus as the Messiah, but not as a descendant of David, as Luke and Matthew both do.”
.
Mark does write about a blind man in Jericho who thought that He was. It must have been a common perception in that town.
Mark 10:47-48
And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.
And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, Thou son of David, have mercy on me.
db @ # 104: … making the assumption that the Greek speaking reader had a Greek LXX Old Testament…
Which brings us back to the motives and methods of “Mark”, and how he/they saw his/their prospective readers.
I’ve usually visualized “Mark” as part of some Christian enclave in some city, writing mostly to put some order into their ambient oral lore, probably with hopes that copies would circulate and do the same for other groups elsewhere; just how the scribes & manuscripts would get around seems pretty vague, but apparently the literati of the period had exchange networks and enough of a paying clientele to keep things moving. The market for such works would consist of those willing to pay scribes to make copies: that would mean mostly wealthier intellectuals, maybe a few libraries, possibly traders looking for lightweight goods, perhaps one or two other Christian groups.
Only in something like Oder’s scenario would “Mark” have had financial incentives, in the form of aristocratic patrons with a taste for Septuagint allusions; in any case, historicity as we understand it would take a secondary position at most. Obviously the demand for Jesus stories already existed, and we have to look at all the Gospels as intended to meet that market. Some years ago, a researcher found the name “Robin Hood” in some ancient Nottinghamshire documents, which aroused a fair amount of chatter but made trivial difference in anyone’s understanding of medieval English history; uncovering an actual Jesus might create a lot more jabber but probably turn out equally inconsequential for practical purposes.
[U]ncovering an actual Jesus might create a lot more jabber but probably turn out equally inconsequential for practical purposes.
Which echoes:
Also, Carl A. P. Ruck, professor in the Classical Studies department at Boston University and a well credential classicist/philologist has said he is a Mythicist, with a fresh approach. His argument is simple: Christianity is a Hellenistic religion, not a Jewish one. It has borrowed from Judaism for exotic ethnicity.
“Harvard Philologist Says “No Historical Jesus””. YouTube. Aug 3, 2022.
I don’t see any compelling reason to think that Mark is not the person mentioned in Acts 12:12 & 25, 15:37-39 and 2 Timothy 4:11.
Kok, M. J. (2012). THE FLAWED EVANGELIST (JOHN) MARK: A NEGLECTED CLUE TO THE RECEPTION OF MARK’S GOSPEL IN LUKE-ACTS? Neotestamentica, 46(2), 244–259.
Kok (2015). “Why Did the Gospel of Mark Survive?”. bibleinterp.arizona.edu.
Kok wonders “Why Did the Gospel of Mark Survive” ?
Walsh wonders if it’s possible that Christians actually didn’t write the gospels?
• “Did The Greco-Roman Elite Class Write The Gospels?! – Professor Robyn Faith Walsh”. YouTube. History Valley. 24 May 2022.
[quote] Neil Godfrey, “Vette : Writing With Scripture”. Vridar. | part 9
**Something different about Mark**
This brings me back to an important difference between Mark’s use of Scripture and how the other evangelists deployed it.
As Nathanael Vette writes, Mark does not
Other aspects (e.g. motivation of actions and words, explanatory background) of Mark’s narrative also appear undeveloped and the best reason I have found to explain such characteristics in Mark is given by Nicole Duran in Power of Disorder: Ritual Elements in Mark’s Passion Narrative. Mark is writing not only a “scripturalized narrative” but, unlike the other evangelists, he is also writing a “ritualized narrative”.
The features of the Gospel of Mark that have led some readers to imagine it was written to be performed, or even acted as a play, are the same features that Duran identifies as those of ritual. (Theatre is a secular counterpart of ritual.)
[/quote]
Cf. Vette, Nathanel (2022). Writing with scripture: scripturalized narrative in the Gospel of Mark. London ; New York. ISBN 978-0-5677-0466-5.
@Pierce R. Butler, #100:
…which I would have thought it does, in 1st-century terms; weren’t scribes the people whose job it was to record things for other people? 🙂
@txpiper, #109:
‘Son of David’ seems to have been a synonym for ‘Messiah’; after all, the prophecies are of a descendant of either David or his father Jesse, so the assumption would have been that that was where the Messiah would descend from. Anyway, good point, and I wasn’t trying to say that Mark didn’t think he was a descendant of David; I meant that he doesn’t make this an explicit claim in the way Matthew and Luke do, and I would assume this is what Oder meant when she said Mark didn’t present Jesus as the Davidic Messiah.
@db, #114:
Not sure why this would be an either-or? I would have thought the obvious explanation is that by this point there were at least some members of the more elite class in the group of Jesus-followers, and that some of those wrote the gospels.
R. G. Price writes,
I’d thought this thread had concluded, but checked back on a hunch and see the dialog continued.
db @ # 118 – I did a search for the opening lines (“Judaism as we know it …”) of your quotation from RG Price, but the only find came from … your # 118 here. Can you cite a source, or at least give us the title, etc, of Price’s new book (& possibly whether anyone else supports his revisionism)?
Can you cite a source, or at least give us the title, etc, of Price’s new book…
R. G. Price writes,
whether anyone else supports his revisionism…
None given .. but perhaps supportive? .. The Jesus Fallacy: The Greatest Lie Ever by Nicholas Peter Legh Allen.
db @ # 120 – thanks. A lot of Price’s chapters apparently would, if given serious scholarly treatment, merit whole books on their own.
This mostly tells me I’ll need to read up on Marcion and the Gnostics (or maybe just listen to their albums [alba?]).
A revolution in historical understanding such as Price proposes will take a lot more work than a single book with a plethora of very short chapters.
The Amazon write-up of Allen’s book (out for less than a month) does not look very promising, spending more wordage on buttering up prospective readers than describing its contents, and not even addressing the claims made in its title. (Also: >$35 for a paperback?)
So far, this only sets off my crank alarm.
Some words of wisdom by mlinssen,
Easy: the Church wanted Mary to have been a “perpetual virgin”.
Paul regarded his “vision” of Jesus as the source of his authority. James (and Peter), deriving their claims to authority from knowing Jesus when he was alive, were rivals, so naturally Paul didn’t want to admit this gave them any superiority. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he referred to James as “the brother of the Lord”. Why would he do so unless James was actually Jesus’s brother?
Question-begging.