Hilariously sophomoric! It doesn’t matter a dead fly’s leg what he was more interested in, you’re saying he wasn’t interested in God’s life on earth at all! Such laughable special pleading!
You haven’t even presented a single credible comment, let alone an argument! You’re just mindlessly preaching pretend historical pseudo-agnosticism with the obvious quasi-hidden agenda of defending historicity without actually defending historicity in any legitimate way. I see nothing but empty verbiage calories; all bluff, no credible argument.
It’s sad what you’ve done to this debate, which could have been quite interesting. Maybe someone else will participate in a credible manner, but there’s no point on continuing this with you that I can see.
But this doesn’t seem surprising. There are plenty of contemporaneously recorded myths throughout history. I don’t believe Parson Weems’ account of a young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, but that doesn’t make me doubt Washington’s existence. I don’t believe that Mary, Mother of Jesus made her divinity apparent via a slice of French Toast, but I don’t doubt that it was actually sold on eBay some years ago. I have doubts about Sylvia Browne’s psychic powers, though I assure you she exists.
Just for clarification though: you stated, “My study leads me to the preponderance of evidence that the origin of the mythical Jesus probably lies in the Righteous Teacher of the Qumran community.”
I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying that there was Rabbi/faith healer wandering around Nazarath who visited the big city during passover, got in over his head, and was executed? But that he never actually walked on water, etc.? If that’s the case, then we have no disagreement. (Ok, I trust that you’re not saying that, but I honesty am not sure what you mean by Righteous Teacher.)
Cite that Paul denies physical resurrections are possible? That sounds like an important clue. TIA. (I see that this has been a matter of debate on the internet, unsurprisingly).
I’m running low on insight, but…
Ok, this is news to me: I had understood that 70CE Christianity was primarily Gentile but with nontrivial Jewish representation. I had understood that Mark was in part a story for those who had survived the trauma of the fall of the Temple. That suggests that part of his intended audience were Jews. From there, I had assumed that some of them had some familiarity with the Jesus cult ahead of time, but that may be a leap.
The other part is that Mark makes Peter out to be a moron. Doesn’t that suggest some sort of intra-religious skirmishing? Ok not necessarily, but I’m wondering whether the preponderance of evidence favors Dio’s presentation. Not that I’ve done any reading on this.
35But someone may ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. 40There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. 41The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
42So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”[e]; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. 48As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. 49And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we[f] bear the likeness of the man from heaven.
Not a very defensible position from the text, since Mark not only shows a great deal of ignorance of Jewish law and theology, but also blames the Jews for the crucifixion.
Probably, yes. Most likely it reflects a conflict between the Pauline and Petrine movements near the end of the first century. Mark makes Peter a dunce who doesn’t understand Jesus, who denies him and runs away, and who is denied a witness of the resurrection. The message is that Peter is not to be trusted as an authority, and that the Petrine community is not the true heir to the ministry of Jesus.
Yes, this passage is the main reason that Mark is dated as post 70 CE.
I had interpreted Corinthians 15 to be addressed narrowly on human resurrections, as opposed to Godly ones. But I admit other interpretations (and I may be demonstrably wrong.)
But… isn’t the Petrine community mostly Jewish? Or at least doesn’t it have a markedly Jewish contingent?
Religious vilification is popularly thought to be a result of scapegoating in the face of natural disasters such as hurricanes or famine. But I understand that it’s more often associated with frictions between related religious sects. So the anti-Jewish stuff could be taken as evidence for Pauline attacks on the Petrine community. And if that’s the case, then it would be surprising that there is no attempt in the gospels to explain away why some consider Jesus to be purely a man of the spirit, as opposed to a faith healer wandering around Nazarath in 20CE, if in fact the mythicist hypothesis holds.
But now we’re weighing evidence as opposed to ruling out interpretations. It’s been a interesting conversation (thanks to all!) but as I said, my insight is running low.
Re: the OP. I actually like Paul, which is something different than agreeing with him on everything. He typically landed on side of cutting the well-meaning some slack: even his attacks on homosexuality were more along the lines of an ad hominem argument as applied to a separate issue than an obsession or jihad.
At any rate, I can read Paul’s letters and believe that I have a fighting chance of understanding his point of view. I can’t say the same of Jesus of Nazarath, whose direct followers left behind no contemporaneous writings: for Him, I find it difficult to pierce the veil.
What’s relevant is not the myth-making itself, but the fact that no time need elapse at all before myths about even a real person start being circulated. So the fact that myths about a mythical figure can come so soon should not surprise anyone. That was my point with identifying those figures.
Okay, I’ll try to explain in more depth. Part of the problem is that I studied all this at great length and in great detail long enough ago to now be hazy regarding of some of the details. The title I should have been using is not “Righteous Teacher” but “Teacher of Righteousness”. That’s a significant difference and I apologize for my error – I shouldn’t have tried working from memory. The same problem caused a poor response to Latro earlier.
One thing I must emphasize immediately: When I speak of this Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus, I am not in any way following Alvar Ellegård’s highly questionable hypothesis in which he argues the two are one in the same. I don’t accept that view at all.
What I believe is that the Teacher of Righteousness and possibly other high priests of that particular Qumranian sect (which from my past research I tended to doubt were actually Essenes, but I don’t recall why it might have mattered) was one – just one, but probably the earliest – historical source of some of the sayings and teachings that began to be accreted around a more mythical “Teacher of Righteousness”-like figure who at some point later was to become the mythical Jesus, and that this process was underway perhaps 200 years before Paul’s first epistle around 57 CE (according to that article’s source).
That particular sect at Qumran was written of in some Dead Sea Scrolls, the origin of that sect and the nature of the Teacher of Righteousness being described (as per the Wikipedia piece) as follows:
Now, one thing we see all over the place in the Gospels is the direct recasting of famous parts of the Hebrew Scripture – often the words and deeds of the prophets – into more recent settings associated with Jesus. The similarities are far too close and compelling to be actual historical reportage (an important element in the mythicist position), and we also see in the Gospels the mythical Jesus revealing what can well be described as "things in which Israel had gone astray”. It is those and other similarities between the mythical Jesus and the Teacher of Righteousness that leads to my view.
Summary: The Teacher of Righteousness was likely the earliest historical source for the beginnings of the mythical accretions surrounding the mythical Jesus, and that started at least a century before the date that became associated with the birth of Jesus. This left all kinds of time for still more accretions and myth-making (not a deliberate, conscious activity but an ordinary product of human psychology such as we saw in the case of Sabbatai Sevi and others).
Those are perfectly fair questions, and again, I apologize for misconstruing your words.
However, this is a rather abstract, dense, and difficult set of concepts and they aren’t really suitable for a message board due to the length of the explanation I’d have to provide to make it persuasive. These ideas cannot be explained properly here without it looking like dubious nonsense because of the drastic changes over the course of two millennia in cosmogonies/cosmologies and popular understanding of the nature of the universe and reality.
But if you’ll agree to not mock what I say for it’s oddity, I’ll offer a brief explication of what Paul and Paul’s intellectual peers would have believed about the structure of earth and heaven. Keep in mind this is not my own work, of course, but I have been completely persuaded of this by Earl Doherty’s work, particularly his recently expanded and revised magnum opus, Jesus: Neither God nor Man.
One key point here involves the obvious lack of at least ordinary historical biographical references to Jesus in Paul’s writings such as where he was born, where he lived, who his relatives were and his basic life story. Had Paul’s Jesus been just another Gnostic mystery god, who were alleged to have been born, lived, and died (later to be resurrected) on earth in the distant past (the “sacred past”), there would be all sorts of biographical information relating to Jesus in Paul’s work (though we see precisely that years later with the Gospels). Not as genuine historical references, of course, but as mythical elements which serve to foreshadow and tentatively reveal some of the mysteries’ hidden meanings of those god stories. The fact that nothing of that sort exist in Paul (I’m not yet referring to the death and resurrection elements in Paul’s writings), as well as other logical problems, means that G. A. Wells’ and Freke & Gandy’s and several others’ mythical views of Jesus, in which such a lack of mythical pseudo-biographical information is inexplicable, just aren’t very plausible in the end.
Instead, one must remember what an abstract and elevated thinker Paul was and how well educated he was in philosophy and theologies and the like. With that in mind, the explanation for that lack of routine biographical data comes clear: Paul was a Platonist (though that is far from the only indication of Paul’s rather evident Platonism, as re-viewed by Paul’s extremely important intellectual and philosophical source, Philo of Alexandria). In Platonic realism/idealism (both terms paradoxically apply), entities such as people and objects and their attributes and motivations and actions and so forth exist as perfect Universal Forms (or patterns) in a kind of Heavenly Sphere (or heavenly layer of abstraction), while crude copies of them that exist on earth are inevitably flawed “Particulars” or instantiations. Therefore, a perfect “man” such as Jesus could only exist as a heavenly abstraction in a heavenly realm, where people and events transpire not in history but in a kind of archetypal/allegorical version of pseudo-narrative history.
Now I’ll turn to quoting Doherty directly:
So Paul’s writings, particularly in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s spiritual Jesus/Christ’s life and death takes place in the heavenly, essentially Platonic (as interpreted by the Hellenistic Jew Philo of Alexandria) realm of “the firmament” (as Doherty speaks of it above), which is the lowest level of Paul’s concept of heaven. Christ’s “resurrection” is therefore from the lowest level of heaven to the highest, God’s realm itself, where everything is totally incorruptible.
For more details, you really need to turn to Doherty’s book.
ETA:
I shouldn’t have posted to ambushed since I have little time to engage in commentary.
I will say this, however: I have lurked in as many of these threads as I have posted, and I am struck by some commonalities:
The source—the bible----is rarely quoted in favor of commentary on the bible.
I recently read a paper written by a doctor (forget his name) and he talked about belief systems and the question of authority. I (and the rest of us) are biased to accept as an ‘authority’ people/sources that will confirm my predispositions.
As a result…:
I routinely see these cites from authors that are highly speculative, sometimes egregiously so. Yet if their worldview fits with mine I blissfully ignore the speculative nature of their thoughts like its bible truth. (pun intended)
Now in fairness I haven’t read every post in this thread, But I have read a bit on this topic and in my reading it seems clear to me that Paul lived in a time where Platonic philosophy was extremely pervasive, yet he never addresses it directly once. Not once. Yet to the extent he does address the common popular philosophy of the day he exhibits something close to contempt.
Actually I did address this subject in post 190 although I didn’t refer to this specific passage.
We see lots of passages differentiating the wisdom of man from God’s wisdom.
Jesus spoke of this in Mat 15 and then promised the apostles the comforter aka the Holy Spirit, will come. The teaching was and is that real spiritual knowledge and insight comes only from communion with the Holy Spirit. That’s what Paul stresses in his writings.
I’m saying that there’s an explanation that fits a historical Jesus and is just as plausible as that of the mythicists. Namely; the thrust of Paul’s teaching was to accept the gift of the Holy Spirit and through that spirit gain real spiritual knowledge and personal transformation. The Spirit was his primary focus and he saw it as the still living real and active representation of God and Christ. That being the case, there’s no need to idealize or focus on the physical life of Christ.
If you believe you have access to all spiritual knowledge through direct revelation from the HS there’s hardly a need to seek guidance from other mortal men who got theirs from the same spirit is there?
That’s quite a request considering how eagerly you mocked almost every post I made. Still, I come to the boards to exchange ideas and learn new things so I’ll refrain from giving you what you gave me. It didn’t serve any useful purpose for you or add anything valuable to your argument. It wouldn’t for mine either.
I took some time yesterday morning to read some of your links “The Sound of Silence” in particular. It was interesting and I appreciate your efforts to explain. I’ll comment tomorrow when I have more free time.
Since Paul traveled in the Hellenistic world, Greek philosophy was extremely prevalent in his geographical travles, but it may not have been that well known to the demographics of a lot of his audience, who were of the underclasses, and not well educated.
The author of John was definitely familiar with Philo.
ambushed showed that he had a temper (though he has since calmed down some).
However, besides that he has made arguments. Ignoring those to pretend that his temper is his argument is not a refutation of his arguments - it’s just an abdication from debate on your part.
What is it you think you’re accomplishing by answering snide ridicule with snide ridicule of your own without dealing with a single argument? Is it witnessing?
I’m no fan of the unnecessary mocking contained in the posts you quoted or the unearned superiority they tend to imply, but pointing it out without offering any content of your own isn’t helping.
The diaspora intellectual world Paul moved in was highly cosmopolitan, and while Hellenistic Judaism was the predominant philo-theological element in Paul’s worldview, it was far from the only one.
But to answer your question directly: Extremely prevalent.
Oh, grow up. You can’t make even a single rational comment, let alone an argument, for your extremely shallow position and so you huff and puff and blame all your troubles on me.
Make a credible rational argument or admit you can’t.
That’s because even the most religious genuine biblical scholar (which leaves out all fundamentalists and literalists) acknowledge that the Bible is very far from historical reportage, with a great many fictional and mythical elements even among those who believe in both the historical existence of Jesus and that he was the Son of God. Also, those who cannot read the original text in the original language/historical context can’t rely on the popular translations being accurate.
So one has to often turn to commentaries (I personally favor “The Interpreter’s Bible” but my set is now lost somewhere) to try to come closer to what was actually being said in the Bible.
I know what you are referring to. They are the various extremely common psychological biases in our thinking that we must always be on guard for. One of the most common is called “confirmation bias”, where we are far more likely to accept views which match our own and far more reluctant to accept views which don’t.
To guard against these factors, one must become skilled in the arts of critical thinking, a cautious mode of thinking and analysis where one challenges oneself vigorously to examine one’s views on a particular topic to see if one has fallen into one or more of those psychological traps.
I put my nose to the grindstone to learn and practice critical thinking about 35 years ago when I became fascinated with skepticism and CSICOP (who taught it), and I’ve long had the habit. The book on the topic I like the best is How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. I heartily recommend it to all.
Now, one common misconception is that the rejection of the historical Jesus is just one or another form of atheism. This is very far from the truth, at least in my case. Atheism doesn’t require or benefit from the lack of a historical Jesus, since all that is necessary to fit with that worldview is that Jesus was not a God or other supernatural being. So this is independent from atheism. It is strictly about whether or not a given figure is historical or not, and we know that there are no small number of figures who were entirely mythical.
The argument for this historical Jesus simply fails. No credible historical evidence for Jesus exists.
Now, if we left it at that, the mythicist argument wins anyway since it fallacious in the extreme to believe in the existence of something or someone – like Santa Claus and monsters on Venus – without legitimate evidence.
But in the case of Jesus, we can go one step further: If someone as notable as Jesus had lived (not necessarily notable for his miracles, but certainly notable as a rebel who overturned the most famous Temple in the world and was ordered killed by Herod and all those other ostensibly historical events associated with him), there must be credible legitimate historical evidence of his existence. Since there is no evidence where evidence must exist, the only available logical alternative is to conclude he did not exist as a historical person. Q.E.D.
What reasoning do you employ to assert so emphatically that Paul NEVER addresses his foundational worldview of Hellenistic Judaism? Never? Did you expect to see the words: “I am a Platonist” somewhere?
I hold to several schools of philosophical thought. Can you see them all reflected in my words?