I don’t think I’ve ever seen “brother” used in that sense. And Paul himself uses the word, but doesn’t use it in that sense elsewhere in the epistles. And why would Josephus adopt it?
Paul isn’t particularly interested in the historical Jesus because he’s in competition with the Church in Jerusalem, whose members actually knew Jesus, and so he can’t really gainsay their personal knowledge. Hence his stressing of his independent line to Jesus. But he says Jesus was made in the form of a man, was buried, was of the line of David, was born of a woman and that he rose from the dead. You need a lot of special pleading to make that fit some sort of extended metaphor or myth.
Plus, if there was an early tradition that Jesus wasn’t human, then what happened to it? While we may not have a huge amount of information on the historical Jesus, we do have a lot of writing on even extremely minor schisms and controversies in the early Church. It seems inconceivable that a new teaching started that Jesus was a historical person, and that the old teaching immediately disappeared without any record of the dispute.
One might want to read the aforementioned Robert Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus” about the accuracy of the manuscripts that became the NT. Later copies are much different than earlier copies.
I’m probably dating modern textual criticism from the late 19th century, but be that as it may. I did a search on Inanna and crucifixion and found zip. Do you have anything authoritative to support that claim?
As for Isaiah 53, according to wikipedia, that passage refers to Israel itself as the ‘suffering servant’ and was only later co-opted by xtians to refer to Jesus.
Why are you focusing specifically on the word brother? What we do know plenty of examples of is a word used to refer to many members of a community also being used, in a formal and possibly slightly modified form, to refer to a leader of the community.
Holy Father. First Citizen (i.e. “Princeps”). The term “chair” originates this way.
Josephus may well have believed James was the brother of a man named Jesus. I haven’t said otherwise.
This “brother of Jesus/Brother of the Lord” thing is definitely, as I’ve said several times, one of the stickier points for ahistoricism. It’s surely nothing on which to hang an entire hypothesis, though.
That’s just it: “in the form of a man” seems like a specific signal that Paul is talking about someone who isn’t an earthly human being. And non-earthly beings were conceived of very easily as being capable of dying, being born, and having lines of descent. It’s not special pleading, it’s simply pointing to what’s known to be a widespread phenomenon, and pointing at what Paul actually says. It’s just pleading. Nothing special about it. (Again, the only real sticking point here is the line of descent from a known earthly figure. That’s the one thing I really don’t feel like I have an explanation for. But again–there’s that locution “according to the flesh” that gets attached to this claim, and that isn’t the way you’d say (apparently, from what I read, but again this is the thing I’m least confident about) that we’re talking about what Jesus was like in Earthly Flesh.
I’ll have to dig it up but there’s a reference here. (This isn’t the reference but it occurs to me that Ignatius seems to be trying to convince people that Jesus really existed on Earth–he says things like “Jesus really was crucified, really was tried by Pilate” or words to that effect. So maybe he was trying to counteract the very view I’m referring to. Also, some things early Christians said seemingly against Docetism could be read plausibly as being against a “heavenly Christ” doctrine. This is off the top of my head though and I don’t have cites ready to hand, nor at the moment the reference mentioned above.)
Recall my point–that in the earliest records we have of Christianity, we have a clear record of jews (or jew-like people) using such passages to argue that the messiah would be humiliated and killed. We also have such passages in Daniel btw. This renders more dubious the claim that jews “wouldn’t have” thought such a thing. They clearly did.
As for Innanna and crucifixion, that was not quite right. She was humiliated and killed, then hung up on a hook.
…Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room.
Ereshkigal rose from her throne.
Inanna started toward the throne.
The Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surrounded her.
They passed judgment against her.
Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall…
(“Descent of Inanna” translated in Inanna by Wolkstein/Kramer [1983], page 60
That’s simply not true. Even the Essenes believed that the Messiah would come to lead them to victory over the Romans. That’s what the Romans hated so much about the Jews - they were religious fanatics. They didn’t believe in a suffering savior, they believed in warrior-king savior. If you’re going to rely on the OT when OT tradition is clearly against you in this, I’m going require a bit more than some hand waving.
Aside from the fact that there is only a passing similarity here and the fact that no one questions pervasiveness of resurrection myths, I’m pretty sure no one was worhipping any Sumerian gods at the time or even had even the remotest recollection of any of the myths. But even if they did, there is no hint there that Inanna was god become man sacrificed for sins of the world - unless I missed something.
And even if we want to grant that, it’s irrelevant to the message that pervades the new testament - god is love. Personally I think Paul does a truly awful job of trying to give form to that message, but I think on some level he does at least recognize it.
OK, but “brother” isn’t one of those words, and it is the word Paul and Josephus use for James. If you have some other example of a contemporary of Paul using “brother” in the sense of “first amongst equals” (or even Paul himself using it in that sense), you might have something, but otherwise your just arguing that Paul was making up his own language just to shoehorn his meaning into your thesis.
Obviously Paul thinks Jesus is more then human, in the sense that he’s the son of God. But presumably in the “form of a man” means something, and if doesn’t have the meaning that’s come down to us, then Paul must have had some separate meaning that’s been lost. When you multiply that by all the other terms you’re trying to explain away (“died on a cross, buried, line of David, born of a mother, etc”) your basically hypothesizing that Paul, the most influential figure in early Christianity, had a whole theological system that disappeared without a trace, only to be replaced wholesale with an entirely different theology a few decades later.
There’s no way to prove that didn’t happen, but it seems wildly implausible.
The OT tradition is against me? I am really surprised to read that. Daniel 9 says specifically that the messiah (heck it’s even “Christ” in the Septuagint) will be killed. Isaiah 52-53 also say this, as mentioned above. Wisdom 2 doesn’t refer explicitly to a messiah, but does describe the way that a pure man of God will be humiliated and killed. We don’t have any records contemporary with Jesus of jews saying that the messiah will be humiliated and killed, but we also don’t have much in the way of records of what various Jewish sects were saying about the messiah at all. (In other words, we know of the existence numerous jewish sects at the time, and know that we do not know what many of them said about the Messiah). So the lack of a record of such a teaching contemporary with Jesus is far from conclusive of the claim that “Jews at that time wouldn’t think the messiah would suffer and die.” Moreover, we have numerous OT passages which either say outright, or clearly imply, that the messiah or a salvific figure or a godly man whom God will glorify will, first, be humiliated and killed. Some of these writings (Daniel and Wisdom) are not that far away from the first century. So to say jews wouldn’t teach this seems unsupported.
Innanna was being prayed to a few centuries after Christ. I apologize for my lack of cite though.
Recall my claim. It’s not that the entire Jesus mythos is lifted from some specific mythos. Indeed, I haven’t claimed that any of it is lifted from any mythos. This was a topic you wanted to discuss. To that end, I point out that the central elements of the Jesus mythos each can be matched to elements of other mythoi–and syncretism (combining elements from mythoi) was a common practice at the time.
The reason I brought up Innanna specifically is because the Jesus mythos I’m saying might explain what I find in Paul is one that involves Jesus as a spiritual being who descends to a lower heaven and is killed there. (This seems to be portrayed in Phillippians at least.) And so if you want to talk about parallels in other religions, that particular element is paralleled in the Innanna story.
None of what I said in the OP rests on any of this, but you said you want to discuss it.
After a bunch of googling, I think I’m mixed up here, so I retract the above comment.* You may be right that the specific story of Inanna wasn’t known to most people at that time. But again: I haven’t said anything that rests on this. You said you wanted to discuss parallels with other religions, so I said a little bit about that. I’m not sure still what relevance you think there is. You seemed to be saying there are no parallels with the Jesus mythos and that this somehow constitutes an objection to what I was saying. So you seem to be saying, then, that if what I say were true, we should see such parallels. But why do you think that?
*I could swear I read a story about a magic charm from 300AD or so being dug up that had a prayer or incantation addressing several gods from different religions, one of them either Inanna or Ishtar, for victory in a lawsuit. But I can’t find this anywhere to be sure that Inanna (or Ishtar) was actually mentioned, so I may well be misremembering.
You’re obviously reaching. First of all, Daniel is widely regarded as not being prophesy in the sense that the events that it actually foretells that are accurate turn out to have happened before the relevant parts were actually written.
So if that’s the best you can do, I stand by what I said above.
In addition, I point to the numerous Jewish rebellions against the Romans which were lead by numerous “Messiahs” who were NOT first crucified. These are just the last of the series but IIRC there were many other revolts going back even to pre-Roman occupation (Maccabees?)
Do you mean it wasn’t interpreted as prophecy? Of course none of the OT actually is prophecy, but much of it purports to be and was interpreted as such. Are you saying Daniel wasn’t written as prophecy or that it wasn’t interpreted as such? Or neither of those?
I actually am not sure why you are quoting a medieval jewish interpretation of Daniel here. I do not know what the relevance of this is supposed to be. Apologies for being dense.
So of course, I haven’t claimed that all or even most or even many jews thought the Messiah would be humiliated and killed. Rather, I have argued that your claim that no Jew would think that is unsupported.
I’m sure that you can read any number of prophetic texts pretty much any way you want. Hell, xtians have been doing for millenia. That’s not the point. The point is that if you talk to virtually any Jew they will tell you that the traditional interpretation of the Messiah is not and has never been what you propose.
Is it possible that some tiny minority of Jews may have believed otherwise? Sure. They’re called Christians.
I think you’re mistaken on that one. In a world with next to no communications other than people traveling from one place to another, and most people spending their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born, I’d guess you could easily make people up.
Idaho borders my state, but if you told me that Charles Murphy (a name I just made up) was the governor of Idaho TODAY, I’d have to take your word for it, because I have no idea who the gov of Idaho is. If I cared, I could look it up on the internet, but if I only had access to first century technology, I can’t imagine any conceivable circumstance that would make me care enough to walk to Boise and find out.
And if you were selling something that depended on on Murphy, and I happened to know somebody from Idaho, even then, how could I dispute you? My friend from Idaho may not have been there for several months; maybe Murphy was just elected. Even if I knew for a fact that the gov wasn’t Murphy, all I’d do about it is ignore your pitch. I’m not going to devote any time to following you around and telling people you’re wrong.
Jesus allegedly said that a prophet is without honor in his own country, but he’s the only example of that I can think of. Almost every other religion’s center of power is the country of its prophet. It seems pretty suspicious to me that there are so many miracles performed by (or associated with, e.g. the choirs of angels at his birth, and the zombie invasion of Jerusalem at this death) Jesus, seen by or reported by eyewitnesses to large audiences, and yet he only had 11 followers when he died, and his cult never really caught on in Israel. It only found fertile ground in places like Greece and Asia Minor and Rome, where there was absolutely no way to verify any details of his life or deeds, and where the people knew zero about the Jewish scriptures that allegedly pointed to him.
The only thing that makes me think that the gospels are very loosely based on an actual person is the trouble that Matthew and Luke went to in making up obviously fictional (and contradictory) birth narratives for Jesus, in an attempt to explain why he was called Jesus of Nazareth, rather than Jesus of Bethlehem.
There was the minor inconvenience of Jerusalem being virtually leveled in 70AD in the first Jewish-Roman War. And then there were a few tussles after that which didn’t really make it ideal for proselytizing. Just sayin’.
(Again, the only real sticking point here is the line of descent from a known earthly figure. That’s the one thing I really don’t feel like I have an explanation for. But again–there’s that locution “according to the flesh” that gets attached to this claim, and that isn’t the way you’d say (apparently, from what I read, but again this is the thing I’m least confident about) that we’re talking about what Jesus was like in Earthly Flesh.