(continued)
ElijahW said:
What do you mean by the "dying Jesus legend"? Where does that come from?
Isaiah 53. Early Christian writers commonly quoted it as proof of a dying savior.
So when the temple was destroyed they wrote the Gospel/s, not like the Jews, being concerned that the stuff in the Talmud would be lost; or because the nation was no longer in a condition to support an actual king/messiah. They just wanted one so bad they wrote fan fiction about what he could have been like?
Santa's mailbox at the post office was full of requests for food and clothes this year. I heard several of them read on the evening news. It was amazing--and heartbreaking--to hear these letters of people pleading with Santa for new shoes, for instance, since they didn't have any.
People do not stop writing stories of hope, just because times are rough.
Where were Paul and Peter during this time of writing Mark? Were they martyred?
One tradition says Paul was released and went to Spain. Another tradition says he was martyred in Rome. Which one is right?
We don't know. Traditions about what happened to the apostles are so contrradictory and poorly supported, we simply don't know what happened to them.
What did the size of their two groups look like when Mark decided to make up a history for the spiritual figure they were worshiping?
Would you also like to know Mark's shoe size?
Are these serious questions, or an attempt to waste my time?
My answer: I don't know, probably somewhere between 100 and 1,000,000.
And Mark did not necesarily mean his book to apply to a particular man of the past.
Why was it natural to expect stories of a risen Christ?
For the same reason that, once some people came to believe that Elvis was still alive, storys of Elvis sightings became popular.
If Jesus was thought to be alive, everybody who believed it would have wanted to talk about what happened next.
Did they both write a virgin birth story independently of one another?
Do you not agree that the storys of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke contradict?
What type of communities did these texts come from and what was the response to the Markian community about them adding virgin birth and resurrected Christ stories?
Apparently a number of people liked the books of Matthew and Luke. For they were copied many times, and survived 2000 years.
And is this not about a person personifying reason/logos but that the logos existing anthropomorphically someplace that tells/reveals information to people?
Something like the wisdom figure in Proverbs, yes.
What did John change about the story from Luke and Mark with the addition of the signs gospel?
Have you not noticed that John 1-17 is very different from the synoptics? The signs gospel is thought to be the core of John 1-17.
Was the signs gospel about another messiah claimant offering salvation and talking faith, who sacrifices himself… or what was the point if not of the original signs gospel?
The signs gospel is all about Jesus as a revealer. (It never really tells us what Jesus actually revealed.) Probably this was not speaking about a specific person from recent history.
So John, Luke and Mark are all coming from faith based movements that are trying to exalt him as the messiah.
The gospels try to exalt their Jesus as the messiah. We don't know how much the movement existed before the books were written. We don't know if the writers thought the Jesus they wrote of was historical, or if they thought they were writing a novel.
In addition we have Gnostic groups represented by texts like the Gospel of Thomas. That wanted to present Jesus as a teacher and had no understanding of what was going on with the sacrifice or him being the messiah and rejected the notion of building a kingdom here based around him.
The Gospel of Thomas presents a Jesus that is little more than a phrase--"Jesus said..."--at the start of each verse. This book's Jesus could have been no more real then the Wisdom figure who spoke in proverbs.
What sources do you think the Gnostics used to base their conclusion that Jesus was trying to teach something and that was the importance and not the messiahship?
Gnostism had many varieties. Some probably saw their revealing Jesus as the messiah.
Do you think they had actual writings from a Gnostic who sacrificed his life or are just composting what was popular back then into GThomas?
Probably just "composting" their gnostic wisdom into a book.
We have people who thought Jesus lived but was a teacher… Gnostics.
The gnostics were varied, and interpreted many texts with spiritual meanings. It is difficult to know what they taught.
We have people who thought he was a historical messiah who sacrificed themselves… Orthodox.
The Orthodox sacrificed themselves?
Both of whom would see him as personifying the logos but differentiating on philosophy regarding matter and what the point of his message was.
And whether Jesus was a historical person.
What I don’t know about is the Pauline savior god and what the thinking was there.
Then perhaps you should read Paul.
What text do you think from that time best reflects the kind of salvation from these savior gods so I can try and get an idea of what you think Paul is talking about?
Romans and Galations, for instance.
It’s an anthropomorphic understanding of a spirit that dies in heaven and does something right? No interpretation, just take it literal and it’s supposed to mean something?
Huh?
If exclusiveness wasn’t the case then why assume that Paul or anyone else didn’t believe in both and that’s why you have mentions of a earthly figure dying and a spiritual figure enlightening?
Paul stresses that his gospel of Jesus comes from scripture. He never says anything about it coming from a man on earth.
If the thinking can overlap, what are the key phrases you look for that mean they thought he never existed.
Doherty summarizes at
http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp12One.htm
Thus, in the absence of a ministry of preaching, miracles, apocalyptic prophecy or the events of the Passion story, nothing in the New Testament epistles can be reliably linked to the Gospel picture. When this pervasive silence is set alongside the positive statements the epistle writers do make, that Christ is a newly revealed "secret/mystery" of God hitherto hidden for a long period of time, and that knowledge about him comes from scripture and revelation (e.g., Romans 16:25-26, Colossians 1:26 and 2:2, Ephesians 3:5), that the critical events and God’s actions in the present age are solely this process of revelation through the Spirit (e.g., 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5), when it is God who is spoken of as providing the gospel and appointing apostles (e.g., Romans 1:1, 1 Corinthians 12:28), when it is God who is said to have instituted the love command and other ethical teachings (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 4:9, 2 John 6 and several times in 1 John), when Paul says that it is he, not Jesus, who has been given the task of establishing the new covenant (2 Corinthians 3:5), when all the epistle writers speak of Christ being "revealed" and "manifested" in these final days (e.g, 1 Peter 1:20, Hebrews 9:26), or of their expectation of Christ’s future appearance on earth, giving no suggestion that he had already appeared here in the recent past (e.g., Hebrews 10:37, 1 Peter 1:7)—then we have a clear picture of a faith movement that was not started by any figure in living memory, but one based on revelation and a new interpretation of scripture, all of it governed by the dominant philosophical and religious ideas of the age.
Why does Paul support their hierarchy?
Paul doesn't support a church hierarchy. That's why the proto-orthodox wrote I Tim., 2 Tim., and Titus to make it look like he did.
Aren’t you saying that they used basically (as is) the texts of someone who didn’t believe in an earthly Jesus or was an actual apostle to support their line of apostles from an earthly messiah who sacrificed himself?
When combined with the gospels and Acts, Paul's books could be interpreted as talking about an earthly Jesus. But when taken at face value, Paul seems to be saying something else.
Why not grab some texts from one of the groups that actually believed in what they were preaching?
Which texts could they have used besides the ones they picked? Do you have something in mind?
What did Paul say that was so important and unique for them to try and attach it to themselves?
Paul stresses salvation through the blood to a much greater degree than the gospels do. If you are going to stress the blood atonement, then you need Paul and the writer of Hebrews.
Doesn’t a spiritual savior of Paul and an earthly messiah who died from the gospels, contradict each other unless one was produced by the other?
Not at all. Two groups can develop widely different views from the same starting point of Jewish scripure, messianic hope, and the Diaspora culture mix.
Faith in the Logos which was a source of enlightenment for all men including Jesus.
Justin's conversion experience seems to be based on that Logos, not on the crucifixion of a man in history.
So you’re saying that people who believed in an entity that existed only spiritually, heard of a story of the spirit coming to earth as a person and not that a guy was said to personify that spirit? What would make them think that was the case or even possible?
If one already believes that personified wisdom exists as a heavenly being, then it is a simple step further to believe that personified wisdom entered a physical man in the past, or that this personified wisdom made an appearance on earth in the form of a man. That appears to be the origin of docetism.
How do you think docetism originated?
I don’t know if either of those can be looked at as remnants of the mythical Jesus. Gnosticism is just saying what he was teaching was where the salvation was at and docetism is about the nature of his body, or when personification of the Logos begins, not about him never existing or teaching.
Gnosticism covered a wide range of belief. Many gnostics believed in a docetic Jesus.
What do you think they rewrote and when?
Huh? I just told you what they rewrote. They "rewrote history". That's an expression meaning they wrote history to conform with the way they wanted it to be written.
Eusebius in the fourth century is a good example.
When do you think the martyrdom started and how did it spread… if it isn’t something the church later made up. I’m trying to figure out if Jesus didn’t start it, who did?
The church father, Origin, writes around 250 AD that martyrdom had been rare. See http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/4front97.html .
Roman Martyrdom reached its peak at the end of the third century when Orthodox Christians refused to participate in worship of other gods. This angered the Romans, who thought these rituals were necessary to promote the common good.