DrSarah wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 12:34 am
Sorry, I meant my question in a slightly different sense: Why would inventing a trial before the Romans and a crucifixion make people believe that Jesus was the Messiah?
Jews didn’t want to believe in a Messiah who’d died a humiliating death, and crucifixion wouldn’t have fitted well with their existing concepts and images of sacrifice. Romans, and other Hellenised members of the ancient world, had very strong beliefs in the importance of law and order, and would be predisposed to reject someone who’d been executed as a criminal. While the early Jesus-followers clearly did in the end manage to argue enough people round to accepting the crucifixion that Christianity survived and eventually flourished, it was very much an ‘in spite of’ rather than ‘because of’.
your argument is the famous argument that the death by crucifixion is so embarrassing that it has to be historical. An easy rebuttal here would be the mention of a long list of scholars arguing for the existence of the
pre-Christian belief of a Messiah suffering.
What you say becomes virtually true
after the 70 CE, when the view of the victorious Messiah becomes really
the mainstream view. Hence
only after the 70 the Christians found bluntly themselves,
ex abrupto, in strong need of justifying their belief in a suffering Messiah.
In this sense it becomes true that an apology was necessary: how Jesus could be the victorious Messiah
despite of the his suffering. Only
after the 70.
DrSarah wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2024 12:34 am
Giuseppe, I’m trying to figure out what you think the earliest members of this new organisation actually believed. From what I can make out, you think they believed that Jesus was some kind of heavenly being, but despite this was still Jewish and still the Messiah. You also think they believed they had to invent stories about Jesus living an earthly life because they thought they wouldn’t gain followers otherwise. Have I got that straight so far? Can you please explain what led you to those conclusions? Your explanations don’t really make a lot of sense, so I want to check whether I’m at least interpreting your premises accurately.
before the 70, Jesus was a Jewish deity considered crucified in heaven. The best Pauline evidence of the heavenly location of the crucifixion is the following:
Perhaps Doherty's strongest point is Paul's assertion (1 Cor. 2:8) that Jesus was crucified by supernatural forces (the archontes). I take this to mean that they prompted the action of human agents: but I must admit that the text ascribes the deed to the archontes themselves.
(my bold)
https://infidels.org/library/modern/g_a ... liest.html
In order to overcome
that Mythicist evidence, the historicists need really to give better evidence of the contrary but they have not given it,
ceteris paribus.
After the 70, two threats:
- The anti-demiurgist trend of gentile origins, a trend that wanted to de-ethnicize radically Jesus from the his Jewish soil. (evidence: Marcion of Sinope was a gentile, not a Jew);
- The mainstream view in growing rabbinical Judaism about the Messiah being only victorious and never suffering. Evidence: Bar-Kokhba is immediately deprived of the title of Messiah, after the defeat.
The only way to resist against these two threats was the insistence that Jesus was
really a Jew (
pace Marcion) and
really the Messiah (
pace the only-now-mainstream view about the Messiah).
The earliest
canonical gospel, Mark, is precisely devoted to insist on these two frontlines.
