As I've said, many times, if somebody can offer me a better explanation for Christian origins than "A guy called Jesus lived a couple of thousand years ago and some people thought he was pretty cool" I would be happy to listen to it.Paul Regnier commenting at Exploring Our Matrix.
I think that Cool Jesus is a very reasonable explanation for Christian origins, and I can't claim to have a better one. Moreover, I like Cool Jesus. I like the guy who hung out with the peasants, the prostitutes and the tax-gatherers and said to them "You guys are every bit as important in God's eyes as any rich prick sitting in the front pew at the temple." I even like that Cool Jesus may have been just deluded enough to think that he had some special role in God's plan to bring about a just and righteous world. What I really like is that Cool Jesus inspired his followers to form communities in which they treated each other well enough that outsiders sat up and took notice.
I'm just not so sure that the evidence is strong enough to say that Cool Jesus wasn't invented. When I look at the earliest sources, I don't see much evidence that Paul knew anything about Cool Jesus. In the earliest sources, I only find Mystic Christ who appears to certain select individuals and reveals deep spiritual truths. Mystic Christ is the heavenly being through whom God Almighty is going to bring about His grand scheme of reconciling the world to Himself. Mystic Christ inspires admirable behavior in his followers, too, but he doesn't do it by the personal example he sets because he doesn't have much personality. It's kind of hard to relate to Mystic Christ. So maybe it's almost inevitable that someone would invent Cool Jesus just to make Mystic Christ more accessible.
The ferocity of the debate over Did Jesus Exist? seems to have surprised a lot of atheists and agnostics who didn't realize that anyone cared about the question so much. One of the most frequent comments I have seen is "Who cares? The important thing is that we all know that Magic Jesus didn't exist." However, it does seem like a lot of people care about whether Cool Jesus existed while others think that debunking Cool Jesus is just as important as debunking Magic Jesus.
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I am very surprised you don't see evidence for the Jesus you revere in the writings of Paul (presumably, the earliest Christian writings).
ReplyDeletePaul never spoke of a "mystic" Jesus, but he did speak incessantly about a "resurrected" one - which in and of itself speaks of a Jesus who lived and died before that resurrection.
I can see how someone could read the letters of Paul and wonder why there wasn't more of the "gospel" material in them. It's a reasonable question. However, I do not see how someone reads the letters of Paul and concludes that he was writing about a celestial Christ who had never lived.
I didn't say I revered Cool Jesus. I said I liked him. Moreover, I am quite aware that Paul never spoke of a "Mystic Christ" just as I am aware that the gospels never spoke of a "Cool Jesus." Those are the phrases I chose to distinguish the supernatural heavenly being we find in the epistles from the flesh and blood man we (sometimes) find in the gospels.
DeleteIn any case, the fact that Paul may have thought that Jesus had once been a man who walked the earth rather than a purely spiritual being doesn't change the fact that for Paul the human Jesus is little more than a cipher or a placeholder.
On what basis do you call it a "fact" that Paul regarded the human Jesus as "little more than a cipher or placeholder"?
ReplyDeleteMike,
ReplyDeleteI would make things much easier if you would make some effort to interpret my comments in light of the points to which they respond. In this case it was your statement that you don't "see how someone reads the letters of Paul and concludes that he was writing about a celestial Christ who had never lived."
I appreciate that it seems to be theologically important to Paul that Jesus was an actual human being and that this undermines what I understand to be the mythicist theory that Jesus was thought only to have ever existed on some celestial plane. I am interested in reading what Carrier says about the issue when his book comes out, but it is not directly relevant to any of my doubts about Jesus' historicity.
When I refer to the human Jesus as being "a cipher or a placeholder" for Paul it is because I don't see anything that the man Jesus said or did during his earthly ministry as being particularly relevant to any point Paul addresses in his letter. It is only the mere fact that he once was a man that has theological significance. If Ehrman is right about the earliest understanding being that Jesus only became the messiah and the Son of God upon his resurrection, it would make sense that Paul would be indifferent to the man Jesus had been prior to the crucifixion.
Vinny, I'm puzzled at your reading of Paul as indifferent to the man Jesus had been prior to the crucifixion.
ReplyDeleteEhrman's statement may be subject to semantic differences. To be more specific, with regard to Jesus being messiah, the NT docs describe him as messiah before the resurrection but he was not publicly proclaimed as such until after the resurrection. Similarly, these docs describe him as the Son of God during his earthly life, but the resurrection constituted a defining event which gave the term new meaning.
As for Paul's showing interest in more than just that Jesus had lived consider that 1) Jesus had to have been a descendant of Abraham in order to be the messiah, 2) Jesus also had to be the descendant of King David as resurrecting someone without this lineage would have been disqualifying in Paul's mind, 3) Paul was concerned that Jesus had suffered and 4) done so without sinning for just having died was not enough to have fulfilled the Scriptures, 5) Paul saw crucifixion as the prophesied manner of death and so that was important, too. There's more I could say from Paul's letters, but this should be enough for you to recognize the inappropriateness of thinking Paul had no concern about the terrestrial phase of his celestial savior.
In short, without an earthly life that conformed to the profile written in the Hebrew Scriptures Paul would not have a resurrected Jesus he could look to as Messiah.
My question is this Mike: What actual evidence would Paul have needed that the life of the man had conformed to the profile? I can't think of any that he needed besides supernatural revelation and scripture.
DeleteAfter Paul encountered the risen Christ (whatever that experience entailed), did he set about to gather from knowledgeable observers the information he needed about the man that the risen Christ had once been? Not as far as we can tell. He says he didn't bother to go see the men who were supposedly personally acquainted with Jesus until three years after his conversion. One possible reason is that he already knew by revelation that the risen Christ had been a man and everything he needed to know about that man he could find in scripture. In other words, Paul could have known without ever talking to anyone who knew an actual person that the man the risen Christ had been was a descendant of Abraham and David, that he had lived whatever type of life was necessary, and that he had suffered and died in the prescribed manner.
Vinny,
ReplyDeleteYou're overlooking a lot. To start with, you're overlooking the several-year period prior to his conversion when Paul was persecuting the followers of Jesus. He was not just giving them a hard time where he was, he was pursuing them to various cities and hauling them back to the Jewish authorities. Do you think he was sticking cotton in his ears so he couldn't hear them say anything about the Galilean carpenter they were now extolling?
You are acting as if Paul knew nothing about the earthly Jesus before he started persecuting these followers of Jesus, and that he learned nothing more about the earthly Jesus in his persecution of these followers. That doesn't seem reasonable.
And that's just to start with.
Mike,
DeleteDoes Paul tell us anywhere that he had been persecuting the followers of Jesus for several years? I don't recall running across that detail before.
You are correct that it wouldn't be reasonable that Paul learned nothing about the earthly Jesus after several years of persecuting his followers if those followers had known Cool Jesus. However, if those followers had only encountered Mystic Christ who made himself known through appearances and revelation, as Paul had, then Paul need not have heard much of anything about the earthly Jesus.
The question I am raising here is what we can infer about the historicity of an earthly Jesus from our earliest source. If we want our answer to have any meaning, we are not allowed to assume historicity before we start. We need some evidence in Paul's letters that his victims were extolling a Galilean carpenter.
I would also note that the perpetrators of religious persecution are not generally known to have a particularly accurate picture of their victims beliefs. Early Christians were thought to practice incest and cannibalism. Jews have at various times been thought to practice infanticide. The use of tools like informants and torture might tend to confirm rather than correct the erroneous beliefs that inspired a persecution in the first place. As a result, I doubt that too much weight can be placed on what Paul learned about Jesus when persecuting Christians prior to his conversion.
Your last paragraph makes answering your first paragraph a waste of time - at least until your change your mind on your last paragraph. On that last paragraph, I don't find your logic compelling at all. Yes, some Romans had a false view of Christians, but how you expect citizens of the Big Apple of its day to keep up with details about an obscure sect of an obscure people called Jews? By contrast, the Jew Paul was persecuting fellow Jews over points of Jewish law. Read any modern-day Christian version of Saul of Tarsus (that is, one who is zealous to identify heresies such as the late Walter Martin or the current James White) and you will see that they do significant research about those they identify as heretics, for obvious reasons.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons that mythicism gets a free ride from a lot of skeptics is that it is a new kid on the block and there is therefore not a wealth of scholarly literature that interacts with it directly. Nonetheless, you can read authors like Larry Hurtado, A. M. Hunter, Martin Hengel, and others to learn that this idea of a non-corporal "Mystic" Christ is inconsistent with extant first-century Christian literature. If you don't have access to those authors, you can read the New Testament yourself and see that it only "supports" mythicism when mythicists selectively quote it out of context.
Your fundamental error, however, is your stubborn skepticism which causes you to set up artificial barriers to acceptance of obvious facts. Paul's letters were not written for skeptics of the 21st Century. They were certainly were written for mythicists. Nor were they written to skeptics of any kind. On the contrary, they were written to those who shared Paul's faith and for reasons peculiar to their time.
There is plenty of evidence in Paul's letters which undermines mythicism. But you won't recognize it if you act as if those letters ought to explicitly refute mythicism and demand categorical statements from them to that effect.
Mike,
DeleteI'm always open to changing my mind, but you are going to have to come up with some better reason for doing so than an analogy between James White and Saul of Tarsus. I think White's a bit of a jerk, but his activities and the societal constraints under which he operates are so completely dissimilar to Saul's that I just cannot see a basis for any useful comparisons.
Where I do see useful analogies is in other occurrences of religious persecution. As I think you noted correctly elsewhere, they are always about power, position, and privilege. They occur because someone who either possesses or is seeking those quantities finds it politically expedient to make the persecuted minority the scapegoat for some real or imagined societal ill. Nero blamed the Christians for the fire in order to maintain his power. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's problems in order to obtain power. The Russian nobles incited pogroms because it was politically expedient to do so.
In order to whip up the necessary anger, some dastardly allegations much be made against the group that is to be victimized, however, I think that it is rarely the case either that those allegations are factually true or that those allegations are the true reason for the persecution. The individuals who carry out the persecutions may truly believe the allegations though.
It is true that as a Jew persecuting other Jews, the potential for Saul to have understood the beliefs of the early followers of Jesus may have been greater than that of the pagans who persecuted the Christians in Rome. However, the same might be said of the Catholics and Protestants who have persecuted various Christian sects they viewed a heretical from time to time. I think it is still nonetheless usually the case that some sort of distortion of the victimized groups beliefs is required in order to whip up the necessary fear and hatred.
Vinny, I think you're considering all persecution of one kind only, and not properly allowing for various strains of it.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the persecutions undertaken by Nero against Christians and of Hitler against Jews probably do show similarities to each other: single leader trying to distract attention from problems and create scapegoats. Saul's persecution, however, was of a different strain - more like a religious partisan seeking to keep the approved faith pure. I do think James White bears certain similarities to Saul of Tarsus in this regard. No, James is not murderous, nor is he trying to take people into custody. But like Saul, James seeks to serve God's purposes as he currently understands them, he defines the pure faith, and he defines deviations from it, and then calls out those who deviate from the true faith to repent of their error and to stop misleading others. A key aspect of this type of persecution is to know the heretic and catalog his errors. This is necessary first of all so that the persecutor doesn't feel like a persecutor but rather like a defender of the faith. It's also necessary because it communicates to others what not to believe. Lastly, such catalogs help justify whatever punishments are meted out so that observing crowds know to condemn the persecuted and not the persecutor.
Nero, Hitler, Saul, and James all want to show how the persecuted are not victims but rather troublemakers. However, Nero and Hitler don't have to do near as much work to distinguish the troublemakers. Religious persecutors have to be very specific in order to wage their pogroms, especially since they, at least in these two cases, lack the vast government authority wielded by a despot. In other situations, religious authorities might have access to emperor/fuhrer-like power. Not here.
Even so, is some level of distortion involved? Sure. But minor relative to the Nero-Hitler situations. Some of the distortion is willful and some of it not. And the willful distortion, do note, is based on accurate knowledge. In no case, therefore, should we imagine Saul harassing believers from house to house with only the vaguest of notions about why he was doing it.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteI am certainly open to the idea that there are various strains of religious persecution, but all the examples that come to my mind are much more like what I have described than what you have described. The fact that you have to go as far afield as James White to find a useful analogy suggests that there aren't any good precedents for what you think was going on with Saul. It's not implausible or impossible, but I cannot see how it can be assessed as more likely than a kind of persecution for which we have so many more examples.
There's got to be some sort of category distortion going on in your mind for you to see the persecution undertaken by Saul of Tarsus as more akin to Nero's and Hitler's than it is to religious countercult apologists like Walter Martin and James White.
ReplyDeleteYes. It's the violent persecution and repression that I think most defines the category.
ReplyDeleteAs I've said before (although I know you disagree), Paul doesn't talk about his reasons for persecuting Christian prior to his conversion. You see it as an outgrowth of countercult apologetics of the sort we observe with White and Martin. I don't see any precedent for this. On the other hand, I see plenty of precedent for a persecution of political expediency based on false allegations against a convenient scapegoat. That causes me to assess the latter as more likely than the former. Is that really so confusing?
Actually, when I consider your refusal to recognize that Paul does talk about his reasons for persecuting Christians prior to his conversion, it does explain why you wouldn't catch the category distinction.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm left to ponder is how you can be impervious to textual evidence.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteAnd yet I am no longer surprised by your insistence that you can divine Paul's state of mind and the reasons why he did what he did or said what he said.
I understand why it seems this way to you.
ReplyDeleteFunny you can understand that while everything else I say seems to baffle you.
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