The "spirit possession" explanation for Christian origins

[Leucius Charinus]

ECW: Historical Jesus Theories: Stevan Davies
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/j ... avies.html

• Doing away with the unproductive model of the historical Jesus as a teacher, Stevan Davies proposes that spirit possession played a crucial role in earliest Christianity. The texts themselves - Acts, John, Paul - tell us as much. Davies uses current anthropological research on spirit possession in order to shed new light on the history of early Christianity. Davies speculates that Jesus developed an alternate personality as "the spirit of God," by which he expelled demons in his healings. In this way, it is possible that much of the sayings material in John and sayings like Q's "No one knows the Father but the Son" reflect a tradition of the sayings of Jesus as possessed by the spirit of God. Davies explains the origins of Christianity in theorizing that took place concerning the disassociative experiences. For the idea that Jesus was divine, it took only a simple equation of identifying Jesus with his alter-ego as the spirit of God. In this way, Davies's theory fulfills a criterion that is overlooked in many reconstructions, that of explaining the development of Christian theology from the life of the historical Jesus.

I'd guess this is a summary of earlier work, but not substantially different from the new work.

I have the same problem with this as I have with outhouse's "Anthropological Jesus". The historical method does not permit anthropology to be a substitute for archaeology in the absence of archaeological evidence. Anthropology may be an extremely instructive tool to assist the historical method when there exists a sufficient abundance of archaeological data. Or literary texts with known and secure authorship dates.

Literary texts, especially those for which the author and date of authorship is unknown, may be of any genre under the sun. The author is presuming a historicity from the texts of the NT and attaching anthropological commentary to the presumed chronology. This is a house of cards without archaeology. It is really just an extension of Albert Schweitzer's observation that people will continue to find an absolutely huge diversity of "Historical Jesus's" in accordance to their starting position.

The Historical Jesus lives in some sort of quantum world. When he is observed, the observer cannot be precise in both location and time. Jesus is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle. His observers, observing Him, perturb and influence their own observation. Their reports are subjective. They are not using the historical method. It can be no other way IMO, unless some further evidence - preferably archaeological, or if literary, manuscript discoveries OUTSIDE the church like the NHC - is forthcoming.

Does Davies mention Apollonius of Tyana? (Another supposed healer, resurrecter and "Spirit Identifier" of the 1st century)



LC

[DCHindley]

... [H]aving recently read Morton Smith's Jesus the Magician (everybody should read that at least once), there is a lot about necromantic uses of spirits. That is, there were practices which involved the perceived summoning and use of the spirits of dead people to achieve magical acts, healing, exorcisms of demons, etc. The practice was sometimes referred to (according to Smith) as "raising" that person from the dead.

One particular feature of this practice was that murder victims were seen as more powerful than regular people. There was an association of greater power with greater innocence.

So I think your question can be filled in if a group of disciples or whatever fixated on a crucifixion victim perceived as completely innocent and blameless and "raised" him (or decided that God had raised him) as a kind of perfect sacrificial victim whose spirit they could access - in other words, if the Pentecostal event (figuratively speaking) was *necromantic* in nature, and felt as a possession by Jesus himself.

You mean, like:

Page 17:
For instance, some of his disciples thought he [i.e., Jesus] rose from the dead. Without that belief Christianity would be inexplicable. But how shall we explain the belief? Certainly not from rabbinic Judaism; no such belief is known to have been held about any rabbi of his time.

Page 169 Note to page 17:
NO RABBIS RESURRECTED: The passages commonly translated as Statements that John the Baptist "has risen from the dead" (Mk. 6.14p., 16), probably mean he "has been raised," by necromancy. See below pp. 33ff. In any case, the Baptist was not a rabbi. [This seems a bit convoluted. He must be alluding to critics who cited Mark 6:14-16 as proof that a rabbi had been thought to have been resurrected.]

Page 34:
... the study of ancient magic led Kraeling [C. Kraeling, "Was Jesus accused of Necromancy?" JBL 59 (1940) 147ff.] to the right track: Jesus was called "John" because it was believed that he "had," that is possessed, and was possessed by, the spirit of the Baptist. ... If a magician could call up and get control of, or identify himself with such a spirit, he could then control inferior spirits or powers. (In third-century Smyma, Christians were believed to do their miracles by using just such necromantic control of the spirit of Jesus, because he had been crucified.) More frequent are spells by which spirits of the dead are themselves given assignments. Particularly interesting in relation to Mk. 6.14 is a prayer to Helios-Iao-Horus to assign to the magician, as perpetual "assistant and defender," the soul of a man wrongfully killed. This would establish
approximately the sort of relation Jesus was believed to have with the soul of John. In the light of these beliefs it seems that Mk. 6.14 should be understood as follows: "John the Baptist has been raised from the dead (by Jesus' necromancy; Jesus now has him). And therefore (since Jesus-John can control them) the (inferior) powers work (their wonders) by him (that is, by his Orders)." A little later, after Jesus had been executed, the Samaritan magician, Simon, was similarly thought to "be" Jesus. The Christians, of course, maintained that the spirit by which Simon did his miracles was not Jesus, but merely a murdered boy.

Page 175 Note to Page 34:
KRAELING; "Jesus," I47ff. The account given in the text tacitly corrects some difficulties in Kraeling's position.
CHRISTIANS IN SMYRNA: The Martyrdom of Pionius 13 (Knopf, Märtyrerakten). For the use of spirits of the dead to compel demons, see PGM no. IV, lines 1911ff.; no. LVII, line 6. On the role in necromancy of persons untimely dead, see Bidez-Cumont, Mages, vol. I, pp. 180—186, who trace the practice to the fifth Century B.C.

Page 53:
If we take the letter as it is usually taken, at face value, we can discern the questions Pliny asked and the answers he received:
What's this I hear of nocturnal meetings?
We're working people, so we have to meet before dawn. Like all working people, we've got to be at work by sunrise.
What are the spells you sing?
They aren't magical spells, they're hymns.
Do you evoke, as a demon, that crucified criminal?
No, we worship him as a god.
...
[This is, of course, Smith's imagined reconstruction of such an interrogation, probably based on details in accounts of Christian martyrs from 2nd-3rd centuries CE, some of which appear to have used actual transcripts of the interrogations that were either publically posted after the sentence was carried out or obtained from officials by means of bribes. Offhand I do not recall where I heard these assertions about trial details being obtained somehow, but I swear - like Paul - that I am not lying.]

Page 180 Notes to PAGE 53:
EVOKING A CRIMINAL: On the supposed power, and the importance in magic, of the spirits of condemned criminals, see above, p. 34. Most gods were thought to belong to the heavenly and good world, demons to the underworld and the powers of evil. Men might become either gods or demons, but most became demons. For Christians accused of having raised Jesus, a condemned criminal, by necromancy, see The Martyrdom of Pionius 13.

DCH

[Clive]

Lewis Hyde Trickster

This ambitious and captivating book brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in ancient myth and modern practice.

The classical trickster figures are most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town. They are the consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable heroes of culture. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to catch salmon, sing, and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu introduced the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself.

Trickster Makes this World revisits these old stories then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass and others.

The old myths say that the trickster made the world as we actually find it. Other gods set out to create a world more perfect and ideal, but this world––with its complexity and ambiguity, its beauty and its dirt––was trickster's creation, and the work is not yet finished.

This book argues monotheism basically misunderstand the mess life is. For example missionaries used words of Africans for a trickster as the word for the devil, when the trickster is the go between

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Davies says that the belief that Jesus rose from the dead was a consequence of their spirit possession. The resurrection was how they rationalized the spirit experience. Is your theory able to be re-shaped to accord with this hypothesis? If not, how might one account for a belief that Jesus had risen from the dead prior to the ASC experience? Were there not others in Jewish history (e.g. Maccabean rebels) who were believed to have suffered death despite their innocence, so much so that their blood was considered to be of atoning value for the sins of the nation -- but they were never believed to have been resurrected.

These are the questions. I don't know, but it may just be that no one ever thought of it before or maybe it was a continuation of a previous movement. It may possibly have also been tied to a belief in a parallel to Elijah and his successor, Elisha, receiving "twice his spirit" after Elijah's ascension. I don't have the answers, but the Elijah-Elisha parallels run all through Mark.

The other question:

Accounts of magic (outside the gospels) seem to consistently describe various rituals, chants, some sort of strange actions or setups, etc. Yet the accounts of Jesus I think are completely void of these. His miracles seem to be more like an imitation of those of a god -- the word alone performs them without fuss. What would you (or Davies) say in response to this?

The accounts of Jesus healing and exorcisms are not as devoid of magical trappings as you might think. Smith spends a lot of time pointing this out. I'd have to dig up the book to find more details, but he does cite things like incantation formulas and the use of mud and saliva as examples of common practices used by other magicians.

[neilgodfrey]

The accounts of Jesus healing and exorcisms are not as devoid of magical trappings as you might think. Smith spends a lot of time pointing this out. I'd have to dig up the book to find more details, but he does cite things like incantation formulas and the use of mud and saliva as examples of common practices used by other magicians.

Yes, the only instances I can think of are the "talitha koum" and the saliva treatment on the blind man in Mark. I think it's Davies who himself points out that Smith's examples are not really found in the gospels -- though I know many treat the above examples as indicators of magic ritual.

[Clive]

This accessible study of witches, from their western origins in Greece and Rome, to their persecution in the 16th century and 20th-century paganism, aims to challenge some commonly held misconceptions about witches and witchcraft. Many witches, for example, were male and witches went unharmed and unpersecuted for much of history. Maxwell-Stuart discusses the connection between magic and heresy, sterotypical images of witches through the centuries and methods used to identify suspects. Chapters also consider famous trials and witches and the social and religious context for the witches who `plagued' North America and Protestant England in the 17th century. The study is now available in a small paperback format.

Dr PG Maxwell-Stuart is an Honorary Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. His many publications include Witchcraft - A History (Tempus 2000)and The Occult in Medieval Europe (Palgrave 2005).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eKY ... UQ6AEwBDgK

[Clive]

Just wondering -which is the worse heresy - that Jesus is a myth or there was a Jesus and he was a witch....

[Clive]

The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite....Aristotle wrote that Homer first 'taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way". Homer makes lies so real that they enter the world and walk among us

Trickster p 17.

Mark 14:22 KJV
King James Version
And as they did eat , Jesus took bread, and blessed , and brake it, and gave to them, and said , Take , eat : this is my body.

I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people

http://biblehub.com/leviticus/26-12.htm

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,

http://biblehub.com/john/1-14.htm

Then Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. 40 So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. 41 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. 42 They all ate and were satisfied, 43 and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish. 44 The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?s ... %206:30-44

[Clive]

And Hermes, in an old story, invented lying when he was a hungry child with a hankering for meat

[Clive]

Trick is Dolos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish.