Vridar

2011/12/19

The Gnostic Gospel (Apocryphon) of John – 2

Filed under: Apocryphon of John,Gnosticism — Neil Godfrey @ 12:30 am
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This post follows on from my earlier post on The Secret Book of John, possibly a Jewish pre-Christian work, as translated and annotated by Stevan Davies.

Stevan Davies’ translation of the Secret Book/Apocryphon of John is available online at The Gnostic Society Library.

The Prologue is said to be a Christian addition to an earlier non-Christian book. But what sort of Christianity interested the scribe who added this? The disciple John is said to see Jesus appearing variably as a child, an old man and a young man. I am reminded of Irenaeus’s belief that Jesus had to have been past his 50th birthday when he was crucified so he could experience all the life stages of humanity and thus be the saviour of all. One is also reminded of the letter of 1 John that addresses the “children, fathers and young men” in the church. Of related interest to me are some of the earliest Christian art forms that depict Jesus as a little child – in particular when he faces an elderly John the Baptist to be baptized. Christ crucified does not appear.

See http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/Sarcophagus-Santa-Maria-Antiqua.html for related pagan images

The same prologue has Jesus say “I am the Father, the Mother, the Son. I am the incorruptible Purity.” The Holy Spirit in the eastern churches was grammatically feminine and so the Holy Spirit itself came to be regarded as feminine.

The Christianity that is appropriating this originally non-Christian gnostic text was one that viewed Christ as not only a discrete personality who had been crucified and risen as a saviour, but one that also accommodated gnostic-like ideas of Christ being identified in the different forms of humanity. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the range of humanity is a representation of the divine.

But enough of my ramblings and speculative asides. Back to the gnostic myth. (more…)

2011/12/18

How not to get oneself crucified by Pilate

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 9:53 am
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The third Christiansborg Palace

Christiansborg Palace. Image via Wikipedia

Another “guest post”, one might say:

It is no more imaginable that the British vice-regent of India should sentence a Hindu to death for expressing heterodox opinions about the teachings of Buddha, than it is that a Roman procurator should interfere on account of an accusation like the one made against Jesus, according to Mark 14:58 . . . and that he should do so in the face of admittedly conflicting evidence. He is reported to have said:

“I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.”

The Gospel according to St. John takes this statement in a symbolic sense. Taken literally as it is in Mark, it does not seem to imply anything socially dangerous.

Let us suppose that a man of our own day should be accused of having said: “I will destroy Christiansborg [i.e. one of the principal royal palaces at Copenhagen, . . . occupied by the Rigsdag, the Supreme Court, and various government departments], but within three days I will build another palace of much greater spiritual beauty.”

The court would then first make sure that he had really said such a thing. Then it would inquire whether the defendant actually had taken any steps toward the material destruction of the palace. This not being the case, the matter would undoubtedly be dropped. Any inquiry whether steps had been taken toward the building of a heavenly Christiansborg may be regarded as quite out of the question. (more…)

2011/12/17

The Hellenistic-Hebrew division in the Jerusalem church – 3

Filed under: Luke-Acts,Schmithals: Paul and James — Neil Godfrey @ 4:54 pm

The previous post in this series raised the question over the nature of the apparently very sharp divisions between the Hellenists and Hebrews in the early Jerusalem church. This division was sharp enough to bring about not only a division within the church itself but was a cause for the Hellenists (led by Stephen and such) being persecuted and driven out of Jerusalem while the Hebrew faction, under the leadership of the twelve apostles, remained in Jerusalem untouched.

More precisely, it follows from the persecution of the Hellenists ‘that their “gospel” necessarily contained something which the Jews could not bear and which was lacking in the preaching of the “Hebrews”.’ What was this special feature in the Hellenists’ preaching? (p. 20, Schmithals, Paul and James)

Walter Schmithals finds a tell-tale clue to answer this question in what he argues is the “pre-Lucan tradition” that lay behind Luke’s account of Stephen’s martyrdom and the ensuing persecution.

This “tradition” or the “real story” that Luke attempted to whitewash, says Schmithals, was that Stephen and the Hellenists preached blasphemous things against the Temple, Moses and the Law. They declared that Jesus was going to destroy the Temple and change the Mosaic customs. Luke says that this charge against Stephen was brought by “false witnesses” (Acts 6:11ff). He has Stephen point out in his speech in response that it was “not the Christians but the Jews themselves who rejected Moses and the Law (Acts 7:35, 37, 39-43, 48-53).” According to what else we read in Acts it is clear that the apostles and first converts themselves had only respect for the Temple and Law since they met in the Temple to worship and preach. But not so the Hellenists, apparently. (more…)

2011/12/16

The Gnostic Gospel of John (1)

Filed under: Gnosticism,God and other deities,Gospel origins — Neil Godfrey @ 10:37 pm
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Recently I began a series on the pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism but have recently read a book that I think may throw more direct light on that question — The Secret Book of John: The Gnostic Gospel – Annotated and Explained by Stevan Davies. Several things about this Gnostic gospel particularly attracted my attention:

  1. The Apocryphon of John did not originate as a Christian Gnostic document; apart from a few annotations scattered in the main body itself the main Christian elements (those bits that present the work as a revelation by Jesus to his disciple John) were tagged on to the opening and closing of a much older text.
  2. A clarification explaining that there are two types of religious metaphors: those that compare the divine to social and political models on earth (God as king or father, etc) and those that compare the divine to mental or psychological processes (e.g. Buddhism, Gnosticism).
  3. A partial coherence with Walter Schmithals’ claim that Jewish Gnosticism is not strictly dualist — the material world is not a reality opposed to the higher world but in fact is not a reality at all.
  4. More complete coherence with Walter Schmithals’ that among the saving powers are Christ, Son of Man and Daveithi, a word that “possibly means ‘of David’”
  5. Coherence with Walter Schmithals with respect to the absence of an individual descending redeemer figure. Thus though there are descents they are not on the part of figures truly distinct from the one being saved.
  6. Adam was created in a “heavenly realm” before appearing in a physical and worldly Eden.
  7. Repeated emphasis that in mythology the modern mind should not expect consistent logical coherence.

Though I suspect Stevan Davies would re”coil at the suggestion there is much here that overlaps with Earl Doherty’s arguments for the Christian Christ originating as a heavenly mythical figure. Schmithals himself argues that the false apostles and gospels Paul opposed were probably teaching something like this Gnostic Gospel. Nonetheless this text does help us understand another facet of the thought-world through which Christianity as we know it eventually emerged.

Oh, one more thing. I was not really aware before reading this book that the Apocryphon of John “is the most significant and influential text of the ancient Gnostic religion”. (But then I’m way behind many others in my knowledge of Gnosticism.) So for that reason alone it is worth close attention. (more…)

2011/12/15

Earl Doherty’s forerunner? Paul-Louis Couchoud and the birth of Christ

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 9:36 pm
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In his review of Maurice Goguel‘s attack on Jesus mythicism Earl Doherty writes (with my emphasis):

It was at the opening of the 20th century that the first serious presentations of the Jesus Myth theory appeared. The earliest efforts by such as Robertson, Drews, Jensen and Smith were, from a modern point of view, less than perfect, lacking a comprehensive explanation for all aspects of the issue. Pre-Christian cults, astral religions, obscure parallels with foreign cultures, even the epic of Gilgamesh, went into a somewhat hodge-podge mix; many of them didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Paul. It wasn’t until the 1920s that Paul-Louis Couchoud in France offered a more coherent scenario, identifying Christ in the eyes of Paul as a spiritual being. (While not relying upon him, I would trace my type of thinking back to Couchoud, rather than the more recent G. A. Wells who, in my opinion, misread Paul’s understanding of Christ.)

More recently on this blog Earl Doherty stated in relation to this 1920′s French mythicist (again my emphasis):

Prior to Wells, the mythicist whose views were closest to my own was Paul-Louis Couchoud who wrote in the 1920s, though I took my own fresh run at the question and drew very little from Couchoud himself.

I have recently acquired a two volume English translation of Couchoud’s work titled The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity, translated by C. Bradlaugh Bonner and published 1939.

Today I did a very rough and dirty bodgie job of scanning the introductory chapters of this book and making them word-searchable. But if you are not a fuss-pot for perfection and are curious about how Couchoud opens his argument I share here the opening pages of this two volume work.  (more…)

2011/12/12

Stephen — The Hellenistic-Hebrew division in the Jerusalem church – 2

Filed under: Luke-Acts,Schmithals: Paul and James — Neil Godfrey @ 10:26 pm
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Stephen disputing with Jews of the synagogue of the Freedmen and others in Jerusalem - by Vittore Carpaccio

Following from The Hellenistic-Hebrew division in Acts – 1 . . . .

Stephen makes a most awkward fit into the narrative that follows the Acts 6:1-7 when we try to make sense of the account as history. There are two options that I see:

  1. Either the author of Acts is attempting to weave a narrative about Stephen that he has inherited from a tradition that is incompatible with his propaganda narrative about the growth of the church
  2. Or the same author or redactor who made a botch of trying to reverse the traditional order known to Mark and Matthew of Jesus appearing first in the Capernaum synagogue and later facing opposition in his hometown — an attempt that led to a number of anomalies and loose ends in his narrative — finds himself in Acts in something of a similar pickle with the way he attempts to explain a persecution event that is quite implausible historically with incompatible fictions.
  3. Or I am sure there are any number of other alternatives but I’m only counting to two for purposes of this post.

In this post I explain the argument for the first option as it appears in Paul and James by Walter Schmithals and conclude with a few thoughts from the alternative argument.

For Schmithals there is “no doubt for his account of Stephen’s martyrdom . . . Luke is making use of an existing tradition.” The reasons?

  1. The mention of the Hellenistic Jews who dispute with Stephen (Acts 6:9) is not accounted for by anything that has preceded (Stephen himself is not introduced as a Hellenist Jew).
  2. The description of Stephen as a powerful preacher is inconsistent with his introduction in 6:1-7 where it is the apostles whose job is to preach leaving the task of almsgiving to Stephen and his fellows. (more…)

2011/12/11

The Hellenistic-Hebrew division in the Jerusalem church – 1

Filed under: Schmithals: Paul and James — Neil Godfrey @ 9:09 pm
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The Scripture for today is Acts 6:1-7

1. In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. 2 So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. 3 Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them 4 and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.”

5 This proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. 6 They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.

7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.

This marks a change in the scenario the author has painted in the previous five chapters. Till now the church has been portrayed as harmoniously united. At the first sign of any trouble, such as a rich man and his wife lying about how much of their wealth they are giving to the community, the apostles will have them struck dead on the spot. Miracles like these created so much excitement that multitudes more rushed to join up with such an idyllic group.

Effectively on the basis of the criterion of embarrassment it is therefore sometimes concluded that the author of Acts “cannot simply have invented the scene in Acts 6:1-7″. The scene is said to “conflict with his special purpose.” (Schmithals, Paul and James, p. 16)  Not so. Luke’s purpose is to write an origin tale to show how certain things came to be the way they were in his own day and how the “true faith” — even/especially that said to be taught by Paul — was founded on the “perfect” foundation of Jesus and the original Jerusalem church led by the apostles. Some such episode had to be found as surely as the author of Genesis had to introduce the tempting serpent and “fall” of Adam and Eve to get the story rolling.

But let’s accept an author of Acts who is working with material, tradition, whatever, that obliges him to write Acts 6:1-7. What might this passage mean? (more…)

A thinking cap that really works – & why the most educated can often be the most closed minded

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 7:25 pm
English: Communications Director Jay Walsh, wi...

Image via Wikipedia

It’s not what you don’t know that’s the problem — it’s what you do know! And the more you know the bigger the problem! Here’s the hypothesis that was tested — with a genuine “thinking cap” –  and reported back in February this year:

The more we know, the more close-minded we are; in other words, the better informed we become, the less intuitive it is to “think outside the box”.

Check this science news archive, or if you’d rather just listen to talk then advance the sound recording here to about the 4th minute of the “Listen Now” or “Download” and start listening.

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2011/12/10

Ed Jones Dialogue

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 10:13 pm

The following letter is from Ed Jones and is presented as “a reconstruction of the HJ in the form of a letter to R. Joseph Hoffmann about the Jesus Project. [Ed Jones] believe it can shown to be as historical as present accessible sources permit,  connecting the crucial dots to form a credible basis for developing a  truly whole reconstruction.  It is based largely on extracts from the works of Schubert Ogden, James M. Robinson and Hans Dieter Betz.”

Since related communications with Ed have criss-crossed more than one thread I have posted it here and set up this post as a central point to make further discussion with Ed Jones easier to follow.

I have also taken the relevant comments from the other threads and re-posted them here. (more…)

2011/12/09

What I don’t like about “liberal” Christianity

Filed under: Fundamentalism — Neil Godfrey @ 7:56 pm
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First the caveats. I do not like a lot about both of the mainstream political parties in Australia. I believe both parties have enacted some legislation that has caused  bitter damage to some peoples’ lives. But I do like a lot of people who strongly support or are even members of those political parties. The point is that one can dislike, even detest, certain viewpoints yet not be a jerk when it comes to human relationships. That includes religious viewpoints. I think I know how to distinguish between ideological (including humanitarian) argument and personal intolerance as well as one who has vehemently and publicly protested recent wars while maintaining a bond with an army-son voluntarily participating in one of those wars.

If you hate reading here is the synopsis of what is to follow: “Conservative” (US) of “fundamentalist (Aus) Christianity may believe a lot of weird stuff but so what? So does “liberal” Christianity, although those who call themselves “liberal” Christians may relabel some of their beliefs as “mysteries” or “unknowns” in place of “miracles”. But as may be distilled from the above paragraph, what really counts is the nature of a person. I have known good and bad people who are Christians, Jews or Muslims — “conservative/fundamentalist” or “liberal”. But though goodness or badness comes down to the nature of the person, it is also clear that there are certain belief systems that tempt, lead astray, deceive individuals into thinking and behaving badly towards their fellow creatures. (more…)

Maybe I’m wrong but maybe I’m right

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 5:00 pm
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A recent comment offered a serious response to my argument about the need for independent corroboration in order to have some degree of probability given in favour of the Gospel narratives reflecting some genuine historical events.

The point of mine being addressed was this: Whether the central character itself originated as a fabrication can only be determined through an assessment of evidence external to the narrative itself. In the absence of that “control” we have no way of knowing if there is a historical basis or not.

The critical response was this:

One problem with this field of inquiry is that by and large the evidence external to the narrative is asserted nevertheless to be part of the narrative. We have evidence outside the narrative (i.e.Mark) from John’s Gospel and from Paul. But if the “narrative” is defined as the myth of a particular movement, then anything that purports to be external to the narrative will be brought back into the narrative and thereby dismissed. Josephus, for example, insofar as anything he wrote about Jesus is original to him, presumably got his information from Christians and so he is not really an independent source. He is just repeating what some people got from the narrative. So, just as it is almost impossible for me to imagine any story whatsoever about Jesus that cannot be dismissed as mythical on the grounds that it would have some sort of application to the Christian cult and its beliefs, I also suspect that anything outside of Mark that used to validate Mark will be assumed to be a fabrication as well.

And I do think it is incumbent upon those who will say that all the supposed evidence is really the ancient constructing of mythic narratives about Jesus to say why this is happening. Why are they making up stories about some obscure Galilean who never actually lived? To say “we can imagine ways to show that every bit of the supposed evidence for Jesus is just made-up” seems to me to require an explanation of why they are making it up.

My response: (more…)

2011/12/08

Why Gospel Contradictions Really Do Matter

Filed under: Guignebert: Jesus — Neil Godfrey @ 11:04 pm

Once more from “my author of the week” secular rationalist historical Jesus scholar Charles Guignebert (1933), this time addressing the logic of those who tolerate the contradictions among the Gospels in their empty tomb and resurrection accounts by claiming they are irrelevant to the question of historicity – - -

First, a recap of some of the contradictions:

  • In Mark the women discover a young man sitting in the tomb;
  • In Matthew as the women arrive at the tomb an earthquake hits and an angel descends, rolls away the stone then sits on it, and Jesus appears to them as they leave;
  • In Luke the women find the tomb empty but while they are trying to make sense of this two angels appear to them;
  • In John Mary arrives before sunrise, sees the open tomb, runs to Peter, Peter and John run to the tomb and see clothes lying there, Mary sees two angels in the tomb then sees Jesus behind her.

And Matthew’s bribing of the guard story (to have them spread the rumour that the disciples stole the body) is clearly added to address a later allegation that this is exactly what Jews were saying had happened.

And of the resurrection contradictions G writes: (more…)

2011/12/06

Reasonably doubting that John baptized Jesus — Or how HJ scholars worked before they had Tools

Filed under: Criteria: Embarrassment,Guignebert: Jesus — Neil Godfrey @ 10:37 pm
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Does it really advance historiography to rename weak arguments "tools"?

There’s something very reassuring knowing you have a tool at hand if you are an archaeologist and hope to dig through layers of earth to find new historical evidence. And if you are a scholar of the historical Jesus you can always feel more secure in what you find digging beneath the texts if you can boast that you are deploying the latest tools in your efforts. Saying you are using a historians’ tools almost sounds as if you are on a level with a doctor using blood tests and blood pressure monitors in order to reach some level of objective assurance in a diagnosis.

One of these tools historical Jesus scholars use is embarrassment. That may sound like a flakey concept for a tool to the uninformed, but it historical Jesus scholars are widely known for explaining the tools they use to reach certain conclusions, and one of their tools is the criterion of embarrassment.

By using this tool these scholars, most of them anyway, can say with quite some confidence that it is a historical fact that John the Baptist baptized Jesus. The reasoning is that early Christians would have been embarrassed by their master Jesus being baptized by John as if a common penitent or inferior to the prophet, so it is not a story they would have invented. So the fact that they told the story shows they must not have been able to conceal the fact and were forced to live with, or explain away, their embarrassment. The baptism must thus be an historical event according to the criterion of embarrassment.

But of course the argument about embarrassment existed before historical Jesus scholars agreed not so very long ago to think about certain of their standard arguments as “tools”.

A secular rationalist argument in the pre-tool era

Contrast how this same matter of embarrassment could be handled in an argument before the days it was elevated to its modern technological status. (more…)

2011/12/05

Critically evaluating Paul’s claims about Jesus

Filed under: Guignebert: Jesus,Jesus,Paul and his letters — Neil Godfrey @ 9:04 am
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From the moment his followers believed that Jesus was the Messiah foretold by the Prophets, the transformation of his life into myth began, and proceeded apace. (p. 108 of Jesus by Charles Guignebert, trans by S.H. Hooke)

It is refreshing to read some sound logical sense by a historical Jesus scholar in the swelling tide of apologetic publications. I like the way Guignebert (through his translator) worded the following:

The belief in this illustrious descent [of Jesus] is unquestionably very old, since Paul already knew and accepted it (Rom. i. 3, “of the seed of David according to the flesh”), but that is no reason for believing, without further investigation, that it was correct. There are still critics, even open-minded ones, who accept the possibility of its being so, but we cannot share their opinion. (p. 111, my emphasis)

No doubt more recent scholars have expressed the same critical nous, but there are many other historical Jesus scholars who since have attacked the very values of the Enlightenment, sneered at what they label a “hermeneutic of suspicion” (some even arguing that “charity” is a Christian duty owed to certain subsets of texts) (Bauckham et beaucoup al), and glided on the wind of postmodernism to substitute “even fabricated material . . . however inauthentic it may be as far as the specific details are concerned” for genuine historical evidence (Allison).

So how does Guignebert investigate the correctness of this claim by Paul that Jesus was “of the seed of David”? (more…)

2011/12/04

Pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism 5 — The Christ Title (2)

Filed under: Schmithals: Gnosticism in Corinth — Neil Godfrey @ 3:07 pm
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Continuing the series that is archived here.

Here is my understanding of Walter Schmithals’ argument so far. (Others who have read ‘Gnosticism in Corinth‘ — Roger? — please do chime in with corrections. I have not found reading S easy and am quite open to being shown that I have forgotten or overlooked some significant aspect of his argument.)

Schmithals guiding principle appears to be that nature (or human culture) would produce a singular trajectory or evolutionary progression from a “system” which begins without a clear individualised redeemer myth (i.e. one in which a personalised redeemer descends from heaven to rescue mankind enabling them to follow him back into heaven and their true home). At the beginning the potentially saving power lies dormant in all humankind and is activated by saving knowledge (gnosis) of its origin and ultimate home. This power was part of the great power or creative force that produced all things.

Jewish influence or Jewish gnostics are said to have led to the adoption of the title of “Christ” as one of the names of this power. This adoption took only the title or term Christ and not the full conceptual embodiment of what that figure supposedly meant to Jewish thought. In this primitive gnostic thought the title Christ was thus amenable to being attached to the Primal Man or Adamus (heavenly Adam) concept.

None of the above is said to have shown any hint of Christian influence. (more…)

2011/12/03

The Breivik diagnosis: ideology wrapped in a straitjacket

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 10:43 am

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3709600.html

I suppose it’s trite to remark that this reminds us of the political function of psychiatrists in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Presumably it would mean Hitler must be exonerated, too. And Baruch Goldstein. Mohamed Atta. Tip the scales of power and ditto for Bush, Obama, Blair, Howard.

2011/12/02

Pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism 4 — The Christ Title (1)

Filed under: Schmithals: Gnosticism in Corinth — Neil Godfrey @ 9:58 pm
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This continues the series on an introductory chapter from Walter Schmithals’ Gnosticism in Corinth. The full series is archived here.

Now it is no longer a very long step to the identification of this system as “pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism.” When Simon identifies himself as the “Great Power,” he therewith makes the claim, not to be a definite divine emanation, but an emanated part of the one original God himself. We have seen that the Apophasis developed just this Simonian claim and how it developed it. It is immediately understandable that all the divine predicates can be claimed by Simon or can be attributed to him. Thus, following Irenaeus, Hippolytus rightly says that Simon tolerated “being called by any name with which people wished to name him.” Hence he is called not only Great Power or The Standing One, but also God, Son of God, Father, Holy Spirit, Kyrios, Savior, and so on. (p. 45)

The pre-Christian system of Simonianism did not use the Judaistic term Christ in the sense of being a unique redeemer but as a title only. So when Hippolytus says that

Simon had appeared as a man although he was not a man, and had apparently suffered in Judea, had appeared to the Jews as Son, and to the other peoples as Pneuma Hagion [Holy Spirit], it is still clear in this late report that Simon is the Christ not as the one Christ who has appeared in Jesus but as the Pneuma who has appeared in all, and only thus also in Jesus. (p. 46)

Dositheus who was reputed to have been Simon’s teacher presented himself as Christ, according to Origen (Celsus, 1, LVII).

But of course none of the above proves the existence of a pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism.

For Schmithals what is important first of all is to be clear about the nature of what he calls “the structure” of the pre-Christian Gnostic system: (more…)

2011/12/01

Jesus with Isaac in Gethsemane: And How Historical Inquiry Trumps Christian Exegesis

Filed under: Gospel of Matthew,Hays-Alkier-Huizenga: Reading the Bible Intertextually,Huizenga: Matthean Jesus and Isaac — Neil Godfrey @ 4:39 pm
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Other uses for clubs and knives: Flickr photo by Meyer Potashman

Edited with explanatory note on Jesus not struggling with his sacrificial vocation — Dec 2, 2011, 08:10 am

This post concludes the series outlining Huizenga‘s thesis that Matthew created his Jesus as an antitype of Isaac. The earlier posts are:

  1. Isaac Bound: template for Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew — this examines the Jewish beliefs about the Isaac offering narrative before the Christian era;
  2. Isaac Bound & Jesus: first century evidence — this surveys Jewish and some Christian beliefs about Abraham’s offering of Isaac in the early Christian era;
  3. Matthew’s Jesus crafted from the story of Isaac — a synopsis of the Isaac allusions to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew up to the Gethsemane scene.

This post concludes my presentation of Huizenga’s chapter The Matthean Jesus and Isaac  in Reading the Bible Intertextually. It first addresses verbal allusions and thematic correspondences between Genesis 22 and the Gethsemane and arrest scenes in the Gospel of Matthew; it concludes with a consideration of the reasons the Gospel author may have used Isaac in this way and the significance of his having done so. I also draw attention to Huizenga’s argument that while we have historical evidence for the likelihood of Isaac being used as a recognizable model for Jesus we have only later Christian exegesis to support the more widely held current view that Isaiah’s Suffering Servant was used as Matthew’s template.

What follows assumes some knowledge of the posts that have preceded. (more…)

2011/11/30

Noam Chomsky Interview with Phillip Adams (and others)

Filed under: POLITICS & SOCIETY — Neil Godfrey @ 4:19 pm
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Thank God for Podcasts. They mean I don’t have to miss out on a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting interview with “the most important intellectual alive,” Noam Chomsky of course.

What was especially interesting this time — and different from other interviews — was the extent to which he opens up about his personal life from childhood on and how he came to be where he is today.

I copy here a few of the comments from the Late Night Live webpage with the audio links, and some other videocasts:

Chomsky’s speech on receiving the Sydney Peace Prize and other (more political) interviews at the Sydney Opera House are also linked.

(more…)

2011/11/29

Matthew’s Jesus crafted from the story of Isaac

Filed under: Gospel of Matthew,Hays-Alkier-Huizenga: Reading the Bible Intertextually,Huizenga: Matthean Jesus and Isaac — Neil Godfrey @ 11:18 pm
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I forgot to conclude a series I began some weeks ago so let’s at least start to bring this one to a close. I was discussing Leroy Huizenga’s thesis that the Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew has been crafted from the Jewish stories of Isaac. Two reasons this has not been noticed before are suggested. Matthean scholarship has been

  1. “fixated on the formula quotations to the exclusion of other forms of Matthean intertextuality”;
  2. “redactional-critical, not narrative-critical”

. . . thus, scholars miss the cumulative narrative force of the many allusions to Isaac. (p. 70, The Matthean Jesus and Isaac in Reading the Bible Intertextually)

The previous two posts in this series covered various Jewish views of the sacrifice of Isaac in the pre-Christian and early Christian eras. Isaac came to be understood as going willingly and obediently to his sacrificial death, offered up primarily by God himself, with his sacrifice having a saving or atoning power. All this happened at Passover and on the Temple M0unt. Some of the following post will make more sense if those two previous posts are fresh in mind.

(In what follows I single out some of the more striking features of the argument and am not attempting to reproduce all of the facets and nuances Huizenga addresses. Much will be assertions of examples of intertextuality with only a little of the argument for them. This post is an outline of a chapter that is a synopsis of a thesis.) (more…)

2011/11/26

Pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism: 3 — the pre-christian date

Filed under: Schmithals: Gnosticism in Corinth — Neil Godfrey @ 11:30 pm
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How old is the Gnosticism described in the first two posts?

Schmithals holds that the Apophasis (c.f. Apophasis) attributed to Simon and from which (or from a summary or paraphrase of which) Hippolytus apparently drew his information was not itself written by Simon — at least according to what we can understand from the way Hippolytus speaks of it. Three points are singled out:

  1. New Testament quotations are included in the Apophasis [VI.9.10 = 137.11ff; VI.14.6 = 140.3.4; VI.16.6 = 142.23 ff.]
  2. The second century Galienus is perhaps used [VI.14.8 = 140.15 ff.]
  3. The Apophasis appears not to have been a unitary work in all respects.

I don’t have access to a copy of Hippolytus with either of these numbering systems so am unable to pull out the quotations. The NT ones in particular could be significant — are they from Paul’s epistles or elsewhere?

But the question is not the age of the Apophasis but the age of the system of Gnosticism described in it. And that is the theme of this post.

Schmithals begins with another account of Simon’s teachings that they share the terminology we find in Hippolytus’ account but that differ significantly in other respects. (more…)

A rational foundation for investigating the mythicist (and Christian origins) question

Filed under: Exchanges with McGrath,HISTORIOGRAPHY — Neil Godfrey @ 4:36 pm

I have been attempting to engage a biblical scholar in a discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of how historians can know if an event or person in ancient times were truly historical or a mere fiction.

Here was my initial proposition:

The theoretical underpinning of the historicity or factness of the contents of any report, document or narrative is that those contents can at some level be independently corroborated. This is a truism we learned as children: don’t believe everything you hear. This theoretical principle operates in our legal systems, in our media reporting culture, in our research investigations, in our everyday lives.

Let’s take a birth certificate as a case study. This contains information about the parents and birth time and place of a person, but also official seals or stamps and logos and names of the issuing authority in order to establish its authenticity. People who invented birth certificates recognized the need for independent corroboration of the contents contained in it, so they decided to add all this sort of information to it to make it more than just a blank piece of paper (that anyone could have written) saying so and so was born to x and y at this place here, etc.

Now let’s take the Romance of Alexander as another example. (more…)

2011/11/23

Luke’s Prologue — historical or historical illusion?

Filed under: Luke-Acts — Neil Godfrey @ 9:54 pm
Tags: , , ,

I was reminded of Luke’s prologue (again) when I recently read (again) the prologue of Roman historian Livy. Stream of consciousness takes me immediately to Loveday Alexander’s argument that Luke’s prologue is very “unlike” the prologues of ancient historians and to my own pet notion (anathema to most interested classicists, I am sure) that Luke’s second volume, Acts, is structured around the founding myth of Rome: both narrate the voyage of a hero from the east, via Troy, to establish a new (imperial/spiritual) headquarters in Rome. But I do take some courage in that at least one scholar, Marianne Palmer Bonz, has written an exploratory book, The Past As Legacy: Luke-Acts As Ancient Epic, expressing the same theme. (I call it “exploratory” because I am still seeking more specific details to support the argument.)

So I collate the different possible explanations of Luke’s Prolog in this post. (more…)

2011/11/22

Pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism: 2

Filed under: Schmithals: Gnosticism in Corinth — Neil Godfrey @ 6:38 pm
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Continued from post 1.

To sum up the significant themes I will sometimes paraphrase and sometimes repeat the words of Walter Schmithals on pages 39 to 40 of Gnosticism in Corinth.

The Gnostic system described in the previous post is attributed to Simon (i.e. the Simon Magus of Acts 8:9ff).

Hippolytus tells us that all of this was written out in a work attributed to Simon, the “Apophasis Megale” or Great Revelation.

In this Revelation Simon speaks with divine authority: “To you then I speak what I speak and write what I write. The writing is this.”

“His authority is of the great power in general, which he himself is as well.”

Now we know from Acts and other early sources that Simon is infamous for having claimed to be the great power. (more…)

2011/11/21

Pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism: 1

Filed under: Schmithals: Gnosticism in Corinth — Neil Godfrey @ 11:20 pm
Tags: ,

Last week my copy of Gnosticism in Corinth by Walter Schmithals arrived in the mail and the first thing that hit my attention about it was a discussion in the “Introduction A” chapter of pre-Christian Christ Gnosticism. This looks interesting for the obvious reason that it just might throw some light on one particular interpretation of the New Testament epistles — that they know only a spiritual Christ who bears no relation to the Jesus of the Gospels.

Schmithals’ is always a densely packed read so I know I need to step out of character and be patient and read this slowly. And since I know I’m not the only one interested in this I have decided to take the time to type up blog notes as I go through this section. (I sometimes freely copy phrases of the translated Schmithals in what follows.) This topic is new to me and understanding gnostic thought is not easy. I welcome feedback about any mistakes or misunderstandings in what follows.

One interesting remark by Schmithals reminded me of the question of Paul’s knowledge of details of a Christ myth. He writes:

In general one may say that an excess of mythological speculation is always a sign of diminishing existential tension — and conversely . . .  (pp. 29-30)

Food for thought here, I think, about the question of the emerging mythological details that accrued around the Christ Jesus as the years progressed.

Schmithals describes what he sees as a pr-Christian system of Jewish Gnosticism.

He begins with a discussion of the thought system of Simon (Simon Magus in Acts) as described by Hippolytus. This surprised me since other scholars (e.g. Birger Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism) dismiss the account of Hippolytus as a description of a much later — very post-Christian — development of Simon’s thought. But Schmithals does present a number of reasons to think that what Hippolytus is depicting is, rather, very early — pre-Christian — Jewish Gnosticism. (I am sure Pearson has read Schmithal’s works so I would like to read his responses. If anyone can point to his or other reviews I’d be grateful.)

Schmithals then describes similar Jewish Gnostic systems that he sees as related to the thought-world of the Simonians and shows how they embraced a Christ idea that is quite unlike the concept of Christ in the later (very Christian) Gnostic thought. Schmithals shows the way the Jewish Christ was reinterpreted to identify the Primal Man, or the Great Power that generated all.

It is difficult not to see overlaps here with passages in the Pauline letters. (But Schmithals clearly distinguishes Paul’s thought from that of this early Gnosticism.)

I don’t know if I will finish all of Schmithal’s discussion in a few blog posts but I can at least start with good intentions. (more…)

2011/11/20

Why and how I came to question the historicity of Jesus

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 11:15 am

This is a continuation from my previous “little bio” post.

An earlier version was accidentally published about half an hour before I had completed it. This is the completed version.

It never occurred to me that the historical existence of Jesus could be questioned until I came across Earl Doherty’s website. Till then I had been a happy atheist for quite some years, still fascinated by the Bible and its place in our society, so much so that I continued to study it from a range of perspective — literary and historical — in order to understand and share what I learned about its original nature and origins. I was particularly interested in sharing information about cults, the damage they can do and the tricks tactics they use to win members. Personal experience was a cruel but effective teacher. The thought of questioning the historical existence of Jesus never crossed my mind — until I stumbled across Earl Doherty’s Jesus Puzzle site.  (It had a different domain name then. Oblio something.) (more…)

2011/11/19

It is good to question biblical scholars: a little bio, 1

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 9:58 am

It is good to question any scholar, biblical or otherwise, but my focus here is on those who specialize in biblical studies.

Every authority, political,  professional, intellectual, should be held to account and made to justify itself. Most recognized intellectual authorities have little trouble doing this but there have been instances of fraud nonetheless.

But I am addressing biblical scholars in particular because they can be seen as important contributors to our knowledge and understanding of the Bible and Christianity, and it is the Bible and Christianity that enjoy central places in Western culture. And the Bible and Christianity have most definitely played vital roles in my own life, both for good and ill, which is probably true for most of us. (more…)

2011/11/17

The Best Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus (as good as an argument for the lost civilization of Atlantis)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 9:58 pm
Tags: , , ,
A map showing the supposed extent of the Atlan...

Atlantean empire: Image via Wikipedia

As a contributor to The Resurrection of Jesus William Lane Craig attempts to tidy up some looseness in the arguments for the resurrection of Jesus made by N. T. Wright in his voluminous opus, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

I quote here Craig’s recasting of Wright’s argument in a “more perspicuous” structure. He precedes his recasting with this:

[A]ttempts to explain the empty tomb and postmortem appearances apart from the resurrection of Jesus are hopeless. That is precisely why skeptics like Crossan have to row against the current of scholarship in denying facts like the burial and empty tomb. Once these are admitted, no plausible naturalistic explanation of the facts can be given.

He then presents the freshly polished argument: (more…)

John the Baptist became (or came from) a god?

Filed under: John the Baptist — Neil Godfrey @ 7:51 pm
Oannes

Image by Krista76 via Flickr

In my recent post I referred to an old view that John the Baptist may possibly in some way have originated from the Babylonian water god, Ea. Another scholar who also saw a link with this god was Robert Eisler, but he took the contrary view: that a historical John the Baptist was in some way eventually identified with Ea. He suggests the possibility in his 1920 book, Orpheus — The Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. Eisler’s views have always been controversial and I find many of them imaginative discussion-starters rather than convincing conclusions. So it is in that context that I share here what he says about the possibility of John the Baptist’s link with the pagan god.

Eisler is dogmatic in his insistence that John the Baptist was a historical person and flatly denounces the contrary claim by two early Christ Myth proponents, Dupuis and Drews:

It is more than a century since Charles Francois Dupuis, the famous Parisian lawyer and professor of rhetoric , first declared that John the Baptist was a purely mythical personage and his name the equivalent of that of the Babylonian fish-clad divinity Iannes or Oannes. Quite recently the same theory has been repeated in Prof. Arthur Drews’ much-discussed book on the so-called ‘Christ-myth,’ . . . . (more…)

2011/11/14

Sifting fact from fiction in Josephus: John the Baptist as a case study

Filed under: HISTORIOGRAPHY,John the Baptist,JOSEPHUS — Neil Godfrey @ 7:54 pm
Palace of Machaerus

Machaerus: According to Josephus it was controlled by Herod's enemy but the same Josephus? says Herod still used it as his own! Image by thiery49 via Flickr

The Jewish historian Josephus writes about both genuine historical persons and events and mythical characters and events as if they are all equally historical. Adam and Vespasian, the siege of Jerusalem and the last stand at Masada, are all documented in a single work of ancient historiography.

Is there some method or rule that can be applied to help us decide when Josephus is telling us something that is “a true historical memory” and when he is passing on complete fiction?

Is Genre the answer?

We cannot use genre as an absolute rule. Genre can offer us some sort of guide to the intentions of the author. But Josephus is no better than Herodotus or the historical books of the Jewish Bible when it comes to freely mixing mythical accounts and historical memory within the same ostensibly historiographical scrolls. Genre can deceive the unwary. The myth of Masada has long been accepted as “historical fact” largely because it forms a literary and ideologically aesthetic conclusion to the demonstrably historical report of the siege and fall of Jerusalem. Some information used by Josephus is known without any doubt to be historical because it is independently witnessed by both archaeological remains and external — “controlling” — literary witnesses. But archaeology has also given us reason to believe that the numbers of sieges and conquests of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century was doubled for literary-theological reasons. (more…)

2011/11/13

Are Atheists Wrong?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 9:07 am

An online debate is hosted at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2011/3361417.htm Anglican archbishop Peter Jensen, Tracey Rowland and Scott Stephens argue the affirmative and Dr Tamas Pataki, Jane Caro and Russell Blackford the negative.

The archbishop even claims that refusal to consider Jesus as the answer for your life is akin to being a flat-earther. I could single out some others, too, so unfortunately the quality of the debate is not uniformly high. But some may be interested in such a debate nonetheless.

2011/11/12

Monkeys, Typewriters and Evolution

Filed under: Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker,EVOLUTION, SCIENCE — Neil Godfrey @ 4:53 pm
The Blind Watchmaker

Probably most people curious enough to read a blog like this will know well enough already Richard Dawkins’ answer to the creationists’ analogy of the probability of monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare being used to debunk the idea of evolution.

But for the benefit of the random reader (as remotely likely and also possible as 2 monkeys with two typewriters typing two 2 character words — don’t forget punctuation keys, spaces, capitalization, numbers, etc) who has not encountered what is probably the simplest rebuttal of all of this “works-of-Shakespeare-typed-by-a-million-monkeys-at-typewriters” analogy, here is evolutionist Richard Dawkins’ rebuttal. He kind of substitutes weasels for monkeys as the main focus of attention, and then switches their roles from actants to objects, but no matter. The point is to demonstrate something real by means of a real (i.e. legitimate) analogy, and monkeys can still be kept in there as the behind-the-scenes typists.

So if we postulate that the primary mechanism of evolution is natural selection, then we will understand that natural selection favours certain genetic configurations over others. Those particular configurations that it favours for survival will be more likely to survive than the others. This is the classical model of the theory of evolution.

So with a nod to rationalwiki here is Dawkin’s monkey (sorry, WEASEL) analogy:

So much for single-step selection of random variation. What about cumulative selection; how much more effective should this be? Very very much more effective, perhaps more so than we at first realize, although it is almost obvious when we reflect further. We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before:

WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

It now ‘breeds from’ this random phrase. It duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – ‘mutation’ – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the ‘progeny’ of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. In this instance the winning phrase of the next ‘generation’ happened to be:

WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P

Not an obvious improvement! But the procedure is repeated, again mutant ‘progeny’ are ‘bred from’ the phrase, and a new ‘winner’ is chosen. This goes on, generation after generation. After 10 generations, the phrase chosen for ‘breeding’ was:

MDLDMNLS ITpSWHRZREZ MECS P

After 20 generations it was:

MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL

By now, the eye of faith fancies that it can see a resemblance to the target phrase. By 30 generations there can be no doubt:

METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL

Generation 40 takes us to within one letter of the target:

METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL

And the target was finally reached in generation 43. A second run of the computer began with the phrase:

Y YVMQKZPFfXWVHGLAWFVCHQXYOPY,

passed through (again reporting only every tenth generation):

Y YVMQKSPFTXWSHLIKEFV HQYSPY

YETHINKSPITXISHLIKEFA WQYSEY

METHINKS IT ISSLIKE A WEFSEY

METHINKS IT ISBLIKE A WEASES

METHINKS IT ISJLIKE A WEASEO

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEP

and reached the target phrase in generation 64. m a third run the computer started with:

GEWRGZRPBCTPGQMCKHFDBGW ZCCF

and reached METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL in 41 generations of selective ‘breeding’.

There is a little macro or whatever at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dawkins_weasel#cite_ref-1 where you can see this evolutionary process in action for yourself. One time I tried it I almost thought I saw only 7 iterations (i.e. generations) to complete the process. But obviously that is the sort of “luck” that defies anything we might expect in the real world. So try it again and see how many times it takes more than 70 iterations to achieve the goal!

I think this scientific response to the creationist analogy has more persuasive power than any efforts by befuddled theologians (e.g. James McGrath on Exploring Our Matrix) who are offended enough to modify the analogy to have monkeys use mere 4 key typewriters!

The Dawkins’ explanation is from his book The Blind Watchmaker

.

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2011/11/08

Why Jesus healed the leper in anger — another explanation?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 5:45 pm

The second healing miracle in the Gospel of Mark was that of the leper.

And there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down to him, and saying unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And Jesus, moved with anger (orgistheis), put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean. (Mark 1:40-41)

Most Bible translations follow manuscripts that read splanchistheis, meaning compassion, in place of orgistheis (anger) for obvious reasons. But the authors of Matthew and Luke who copied Mark here omit this word, strongly suggesting that what they found in the original also sounded offensive to them.

And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.  And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. (Matthew 8:2-3)

I don’t think the Gospel of Mark was written in some sort of relationship with Marcionism.  But a comment about the motives for Jesus healing people that I came across in Sebastian Moll’s The Arch-Heretic Marcion cannot avoid opening up the question of what might have been behind Mark’s original text.

Moll writes that Jesus healed not so much to help mankind but in order to thumb his nose at the Creator God. (Marcion taught that Jesus came from an Alien God who was all good, a higher God than the Creator God.) He came to defy the creator God who owned mankind and to purchase humans from that god in order to belong to the Good God.

Many parts of Tertullian’s discussion of Marcion’s Gospel demonstrate this. When we consider Christ’s attitude towards the Sabbath for example (Lk. 6:1-11), Marcion believed that Christ attacked the Sabbath “out of hatred” (odio). We can detect a similar notion in the story of the healing of the leper (Lk. 5:12-14). Not with one word does Tertullian mention Christ’s healing of the leper as an act of love or goodness in Marcion’s view. The reason [Marcion] treated this matter “with special attention” (attentius) was rather his wish to emphasise that Christ performed this healing as someone who is “hostile to the Law” (aemulus legis). The term aemulus is particularly interesting in this context, for it is exactly the emotion of aeumulatio (jealousy/resentment) which the Marcionites attribute . . . to the Creator. (pp. 67-8)

As I said, I cannot find any reason to attribute Mark’s gospel to any sort of dialogue with Marcion, but the coincidence of Mark here attributing the attitude of Jesus toward healing as was taught by Marcion is interesting.

 

 

 

2011/11/07

Metalogger taking over this week

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 4:55 pm

Vridar is my escape for some light entertainment past-time blog. But this week my after-hours are going to be mostly consumed by work since I am attending a week long conference in Melbourne and sharing tidbits of the day with my work colleagues, starting from today: http://metalogger.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/eresearch-australasia-2011-conference/

So, till I return to normal routines again I will be posting short snippets on and off here on Vridar.

But after recent experiences here in biblical studies I am not at all missing efforts to address what ultimately I realized was the anti-intellectualism of several anti-mythicists. It is incredibly refreshing — rejuvenating and even a little exciting — to be joining in discussions where some of the brightest minds in their fields can say something and be completely open to another person standing up and offering a diametrically opposed — but equally supported — argument.

I guess if the likes of Butler theological associate professors (who resort to trolling even on their own site!) and the arrogant and very often outright offensively rude wits they attract on their blog were ever as open to discussion of genuine methodology and evidence — and not for ego sakes resorting to subjective and vacuous “not persuasive” or “overly sceptical” retorts — this world would be too perfect and we’d never appreciate the difference between good and evil. (Okay, I’m typing this after the end of a long and intellectually stimulating day with an also quite stimulating — and proprietary sponsored — alcoholic beverage. )

Marcion’s date

Filed under: Marcion — Neil Godfrey @ 5:54 am
Tags:

For all the shortcomings of R. Joseph Hoffmann’s work on Marcion, Marcion, On the Restitution of Christianity, the one point he stressed and that was central to persuading me of the strong possibility that Marcion should be dated much earlier than is traditionally done, even as early as the opening decades of the second century, was a comment in the writings of Justin Martyr. Justin, writing in the middle of the second century, expressed some dismay that Marcion was “even now still” active and influential in the world. The clear implication is that it was surprising to see Marcion still preaching even at that late date.

Sebastion Moll in his 2010 book The Arch-Heretic Marcion knocks out that argument for an early date.

Finally, there is one passage in the work of Justin which has made some scholars believe that Marcion must already have been active before 144/145. In his Apology (ca. 153 – 154), Justin states that Marcion “has made many people in the whole world speak blasphemies” [Adv. haer. I.13,3] and that he is “even now still teaching”. . . .

Justin’s statement that Marcion is “even now still” teaching becomes understandable if we take a look at the preceding sections of the Apology. According to Justin, all heretics were put forward by the demons after Christ’s ascension to heaven. He then mentions Simon, Menander and Marcion, of whom the first two are of course long dead already. The reason for Justins’ surprise that Marcion is still teaching  is not his impressively long heretical career, but the fact that he is still active so long after the demons had put forward the other heretics. (p. 39)

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2011/11/06

Socrates, Jesus and the broken reed of Josephus

Filed under: JOSEPHUS,Testimonium Flavianum,the James passage — Neil Godfrey @ 12:47 am
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Socrates in Nuremberg Chronicle LXXIIvPoor Josephus. He is made to bear such a burden of evidence for the sake of Jesus. Socrates’ burden on the other hand is very light. People who knew Socrates wrote about him and we can read their accounts today. Some of these people tell us they were his students and devoted followers. Another was a playwright who irreverently mocked Socrates as someone whose head was always “in the clouds”. None of this leaves us with absolutely ironclad certainty that such a figure was historical but it does give us reasonable confidence. Without the writings of followers of Socrates we would never be sure if Socrates was a fictional character. Without the mockery of Aristophanes we would have more reason to wonder if there was a real person behind the name Plato selected as a literary master-voice through whom to express his own thoughts. Even so, a few have voiced the possibility that Socrates was not historical. But most of us have been satisfied to think of him as a real figure who instigated controversy in Athenian society and won a devoted following of students.

Jesus, though, is known only from one source of tradition, Christianity itself, until we reach at the earliest the latter years of the first century (and even within that tradition itself there is not a single one who claims to have been an eyewitness of the Galilean healing-teacher. It is not insignificant that this same tradition, in all of its many variations, seeks to spread belief in this person. The very idea of the twelve disciples of Jesus is problematic for several reasons. (The links are to earlier discussions of the evidence for them.)

So it is very important for some people to hang on tightly to the passages in Josephus that mention Jesus. Josephus, even though he wrote near the end of the century, a good 60 years after Jesus was supposed to have died, is the only first century account independent of the Christian tradition and so the only non-Christian witness to the historicity of Jesus within a long generation of his death. One scholar has even gone on record as saying that because of Josephus the evidence for the existence for Jesus is comparable to that for Socrates! Now that is a desperate claim. Nothing about Josephus comes close to matching multiple eye-witness sources. (more…)

2011/11/04

Bart Ehrman’s failed attempt to address mythicism

Filed under: Ehrman: Jesus Interrupted — Neil Godfrey @ 8:51 pm
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Uppsala, Sweden -- from my visit in 2008

In Jesus Interrupted Bart Ehrman describes his first encounter with people who believed Jesus never existed. Some people from Sweden had emailed him to ask if it were true that he thought Jesus was a myth. Ehrman describes his reaction:

I thought this was an odd question. (p. 140)

Bart Ehrman then comes very close to opening the door on something of utmost significance:

This view may seem strange to an American audience, where the majority of people think not only that Jesus existed but that he was, and is, the Son of God. But in parts of Scandinavia the majority of people thinks that Jesus is a completely fabricated figure, that he never actually existed but was invented by a group of people intent on starting a new religion. (p. 140)

But he does not go through with what, I would have thought, a question that cries out for an explanation: the cultural matrix of belief in Jesus and Jesus scholarship. Sometimes the best way to recognize one’s own assumptions and biases is to view one’s position from the perspective of another culture entirely. I don’t think there is anything “universal” (in the sense of being independent of cultures) about the study of Jesus.

So having begun with the question of historicity I was looking forward to Ehrman’s discussion of that very point. But he didn’t. There is a conceptual disconnect between the theme he introduces in his opening two paragraphs and the rest of the chapter. (more…)

2011/11/03

What mythicists need

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 7:11 pm

What mythicists need is a competent, knowledgeable and intelligent historicist to challenge them. One who doesn’t resort to ad hominem or outright insult. One who doesn’t see “mythicism” in every nook and cranny — whether in creationism or the Piltdown man or even Shakespeare! — wherever he or she even half way suspects he/she just might possibly find it.

Recently I responded to one scholar who has picked up the anti-mythicist cause when he wrote:

There is no more circularity (and no less) in investigating a historical Jesus than a historical Socrates or John the Baptist or Shakespeare.

I disagreed. I had referred to statements by historical Jesus scholars who have had the intellectual honesty to concede the circularity of their enterprise. (I have posted on these several times now — quotations by Albert Schweitzer, Stevan Davies and Dale C. Allison.)

I had pointed out that the evidence for the historicity of Socrates is not circular and referred to my earlier posts demonstrating this simple fact. We have multiple independent contemporary sources for the existence of Socrates — at least one from a devoted pupil and another from a scoffing playwright, one from a friend and one from a(n apparent) foe — and so the probability for the historical existence of Socrates is at least positive. Schweitzer lamented the fact that we have no comparable evidence for the historicity of Jesus since all the sources for Jesus are traced back to

the one source of tradition, early Christianity itself, and there are no data available in Jewish or Gentile secular history which could be used as controls. Thus the degree of certainty cannot even be raised so high as positive probability. (p. 402, 2001 edition of Quest) (more…)

2011/10/31

Would a “mythicist Paul” need a lot of mythical story detail?

Filed under: Paul and his letters — Neil Godfrey @ 8:29 pm

This is a reasonable question that was unfortunately asked by one who is searching for the one question that mythicism cannot answer. (Earl Doherty responded in detail but this was simply ignored by the questioner who found another question to set up in its place in a game of cat and mouse. Or maybe Earl Doherty has conspired with James McGrath for James to pretend he hasn’t read or understood Doherty’s book and to keep dropping the Dorothy Dixers so that he can use his blog as a platform for a clear and unopposed exposition of mythicism. ;-)

I have had my own thoughts on the question, however.

For Paul there is one central focus of his faith and that is Christ crucified. There is not a complex detailed mythological narrative attached to this as far as we can tell. And this stands to reason. For one thing complex mythical tales of gods are traditionally the result of centuries of cultural mixing and matching and evolution responding to changing social and cultural interests. What we appear to have in the case of Pauline “Christianity” is something of a theological-philosophical development with emphasis on the theological. It is a faith that is founded not in a rich literary tradition of mythical tales but in revelation and vision-mysticism. Revelation is spiritual and its matrix appears to be the Jewish sacred writings. And this was an era of flourishing religious and philosophical mutations.

But the research of scholars like Engberg-Pedersen and Niko Huttunen open up the indebtedness of Paul’s theology to Stoic philosophy. I am not referring to Stoic ethics but to the philosophical framework itself. (I’ve posted on some aspects of Engberg-Pedersen before and will be doing more posts on Huttunem soonish.) Paul’s Christ crucified is a theological version of Seneca’s (and Stoic’s) Reason or Logos. It converts and saves the individual — transforms the individual into a new person — by virtue of being grasped, apprehended. (more…)

More responses from Earl Doherty

Filed under: Uncategorized — Neil Godfrey @ 7:01 am

I see Earl Doherty is back into engaging with certain critics of mythicism:

  1. On the Freethought and Rationalist Discussion Board: http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?p=6967160#post6967160
  2. On Exploding Our Cakemix (© by T.W.): http://www.patheos.com/community/exploringourmatrix/2011/10/14/doherty-mythicism/#comment-350717525
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