How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

while the Mishnah takes a somewhat broader position, as this link mentions.
Who cares. The position was developed in reaction to the minim. It also doesn't make logical sense and (this Torah = the ten commandments) is the position of the Samaritans who almost always preserve the origin old priestly position. But let's start with logic. How could this Torah have meant the Pentateuch referring to this Torah? It's a logical matryoshka doll where the Pentateuch continues three more chapters but is somehow already complete. The Torah can only mean the ten commandments. It's not even worth discussing. God only gave the ten commandments and Ezra gave the Pentateuch which is the narrative about the giving of the ten commandments (plus more)
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

Among the Samaritans the whole Pentateuch is read on Yom Kippur; no reading on the eight day.
Last edited by Secret Alias on Sat Oct 10, 2015 9:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

Oppenheimer's essay is quite instructive on this subject - https://books.google.com/books?id=xayoA ... en&f=false
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

So to return to the original question - a question which various people at the forum don't want to discuss because they have entrenched views as to how the question of the historicity of Jesus should be approached - is the debate over the Pentateuch (a) a verbatim account of actual debate(s) that took place throughout the ministry of Jesus (b) loose 'remembrances' or encapsulations of things said during the actual ministry of Jesus or (c) an invention of Paul the original gospel writer as preserved in a heretical tradition originally and further modified by various later figures (including Irenaeus).

I think (c) is the most likely and in fact the only viable option.

First of all it has to finally be acknowledged that there was this existing dynamic of ten commandments vs Pentateuch between the 'learned' and the idiotai in Israel. This is the key thing to remember. When for instance we read in the Pseudo-Clementines (and put in the mouth of Peter) that God wasn't happy with the sacrifices of Moses what the author is really saying is that Pentateuch was being rejected. Of course white people don't view it this way because they have learned to accept the 'Old Testament minus the sacrifices' as part of their own inherited world view (you know, that God was teaching everyone to be 'nice to one another' as a substitute). But this would not have been tenable in the age immediately following generations of sacrifices being carried out as prescribed by the Pentateuch.

Of course it must be said that Jews too have learned to accept 'the Law' as 'being valid' without carrying out the sacrifices. But they have done so in my mind like the person in a bad marriage. I am stuck with so and so. I want to be in a good marriage. I want to be fulfilled. But this is all I/we are capable of as long as I am stuck in this arrangement (this is a comical but ultimately accurate IMO characterization of the position of Maimonides).

The Christian approach is very different. According to their understanding God wanted to end sacrifices. But the Pentateuch is all about sacrifices. God didn't want people to be circumcised necessarily. But the Pentateuch explicitly says this is necessary. Whether or not contemporary Christians want to recognize it or not the original fault line in the debate between what are now called 'Christians' and Jews was the traditional fault line between the people of the land and the learned namely the ten commandments and the Pentateuch.

It doesn't take much of an imagination to see that the people of the land maintained a much earlier form of religion which had nothing whatsoever to do with the commandments associated with Pentateuch. The ten commandments were likely practiced in the land during the Captivity. When the Israelites returned Ezra established a narrative account of how Israel originally received the ten commandments (= the Pentateuch) in which new commandments (hundreds of new commandments) were introduced. The people of the land coexisted with the learned (i.e. those who were from chosen families who benefited from Persian rule and became the priests of the new society). The people of the land probably treated the weekly readings as 'the story' of how 'they' received the holy word of God but the narrative has little holiness in itself.

The paradigm that we still see in the Roman period - namely the active conversion of proselytes by Jewish authorities - only follows things that we see in Hasmonaean period, namely that the priestly class set about converting the ignorant to a specific covenant of 'Pentateuch veneration' by means of circumcision. But we must imagine that if we bridge the period between the Hasmonaeans and the introduction of the Pentateuch at the time of Ezra that the 'people of the Land' were the intended target of these conversion efforts.

Who actively engaged in these conversion activities? It is difficult to say but clearly IMO the Pharisees were the beneficiaries of the effort. In the beginning we can imagine (at least ideally) that the priestly class carried out the sacrifices on behalf of the nation as a whole but secured by Persian military back up, cared little about the 'people in the Land.' I would even go so far as to say that a significant portion of returning Exiles may have been rapidly converted at a very early period to this veneration of the Pentateuch. Indeed this would account for the Kuthim narrative that runs through Jewish propaganda.

In other words, in Galilee and even Samaria there were holdouts against the veneration of the Pentateuch as a holy text at the same level as the ten commandments which were literally 'God-given' (as the Samaritans say inscribed in stone by the finger of God with fire). The Pentateuch on the other hand was written by Ezra, a story which even the rabbinic tradition tacitly supports. If the 'Dositheans' derives from the Greek 'given by God' the tradition may well represent a preservation of the ten commandments as 'God-given' (otherwise it derives from the Persian term meaning 'friends' of God).

It has long been noted that specific portions of the New Testament witness what we might identify as Samaritan traits. Stephen's speech in Acts belies a Dosithean rejection of permanent buildings with roofs as places of worship. But it goes beyond this and approaches the entire rejection of sacrifice which necessarily embodied the theological purpose of the Pentateuch. Similarly Hebrews has Samaritan traits and a rejection of sacrifice. Of course in its present form, as Clement notes, it was corrupted ('translated') by 'Luke' (the editor of our canon). But in its original form it likely also made manifest this same northern 'people of the Land' POV which may well have corresponded with Dositheanism.

In any event it is important to note that Jerome specifically says that the Samaritan woman at the beginning of the gospel of John was a Dosithean. The appearance of Jesus near Gerizim was necessarily part of an early lost theological tradition where Jesus spoke directly to the people of the Land. My friend Rory Boid of Monash University has developed a systematic reading of the material related to Bethel in Genesis and determined that the Dositheans had a cultic center facing the mountain rather than on the mountain. If Jesus came to this place we can at last perhaps gain insight into the cultural background for early Christianity. There existed an extremely old tradition perhaps as old as the reception of the Pentateuch which preserved the distinction between ten commandments as 'heavenly Torah' and Pentateuch as man-made earthly Torah.

This is not to say that the author of the gospel explicitly identified Christianity with Dositheanism. But it is important to note that in a number of early heretical catalogs the Dositheans are identified as the first heresy. Simon breaks from Dositheanism in the Pseudo-Clementines. At the very least I think we should consider the likelihood that an extremely ancient form of Israelite faith was key to understand the context of Jesus's debate with the Pharisees.

The Sadducees likely did not care about the people in the land. They were happy to enjoy their privileged position in society, to carry out sacrifices and go on enjoying life. The Pharisees attained their strength by actively converting 'people in the land' to a form of Pentateuch veneration or at least identifying the Pentateuch with the heavenly Torah. The difficulty for the Pharisees was that in the traditional liturgy of Israel, the ten commandments and not the Pentateuch was clearly the focus of religious veneration. It was these words rather than the five books of Moses which were 'given by God' and so in their debates with the minim the fact that it was the ten commandments which were venerated and not the Penateuch they lost the debates with these folks.

The fact that it was the 'minim' who were identified as the agitators is significant. This is the usual terminology to describe followers of Jesus. Of course it is possible that the terminology was used before the advent of Christianity to describe heretics but we have no evidence for that. Indeed one would expect the terminology Kuthim to have been used if Samaritans were meant.

Moreover the Dosithean tradition had priests as the chronicle of Abu'l Fath shows. They were headed by someone of high priestly lineage and so of the best families in Israel. Of course the story can be taken as a rejection of sacrifices (Levi is slaughtered in the place of traditional animal sacrifices) https://books.google.com/books?id=_iMnz ... vi&f=false Indeed what function did 'priests' have if not to slaughter animals? So we can't be sure that they continued to maintain a priesthood by the evidence.

Needless to say there is a great deal of uncertainty here. With that we return to the original question - was Jesus an actual 'person of the land' who debated the Pharisees about the value of the Law from the perspective of one who only held to the sanctity of the ten commandments? No. We can be certain again that the gospel presumes that Jesus was the angel, the second god who gave the Law to Moses owing to other legal debates especially those that originally framed the so-called antitheses. In fact as I will show, the original context of the 'antitheses' lays bear that Jesus is going beyond merely saying 'we worship only the ten commandments' but developing a theology based only on the ten commandments which presumes that the Pentateuch was 'destroyed' with the destruction of the temple.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

And of course for the idiotai at this forum, my position presumes that our gospels were not the original texts. They were artificial creations, modifications of earlier traditions before Irenaeus. If anyone is going to work from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John they end up nowhere - not 'hooking up' with any ancient tradition, living in an artificial and unreal understanding of how Christianity developed - which as the very point of the original modification or alteration effort at the turn of the third century. If people want to insist that we use Acts and the four gospels as primary sources we effectively exclude all traditions outside the surviving one and more importantly end up with no real explanation for how Christianity developed. We are left with two principal and ultimately unrealistic options for the explanation of Christian origins - (a) the radical 'demystified' historicist POV (i.e. that all you have to do is strip the gospel of all allegory and symbolism in order to discover the historical truth - all of which is entirely subjective and has no precedence in antiquity) and (b) the radical mythicist POV which says that the gospel was all made up and either has no point of contact or that it is unnecessary to uncover a point of origin for the myth because it is wholly illusory .

My tentative reconstruction recognizes that the gospel did indeed derive its origin from 'real' currents of thought in Israel at the end of the second commonwealth period but unfortunately the information which is preserved for us (= the texts themselves) were deliberately corrupted from obscuring the ten commandments vs Pentateuch dynamic. I happen to think that is the most reasonable position for anyone to take but of course I am biased.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

Finally when the Church Fathers say that Marcion and the heretics 'hated the Law' or some such nonsense they are obscuring the original ten commandments vs Pentateuch dynamic which the heretics derive their origin. My guess (and it is little more than a guess) is that the commandment to love one another (in some form that I can't determine the exact words for) may have been meant to replace the original tenth commandment which recognized the sanctity of Gerizim (which was no longer holy according to the Dosithean point of view). That Jews originally acknowledged the sanctity of Gerizim is attested by the Qumran texts. Again I am not sure how any of this came about but if - as I suspect - the purpose of Christian rituals was to establish humanity made after the form of Jesus into its truly divine image or form then 'loving one another' was a recognition that each Christian who underwent full ritual 're-engineering' to resemble the ultimate divine template was in fact a living god in the image of God. To this end, we get the beginnings of the Christian veneration of the priest as 'Father' (= a living representation of Jesus).

Various of the saying from the lost gospel(s) witness this situation such as:
Have you seen your brother? You have seen your God. (Clement Strom 1.19)

Never be glad except when ye have seen your brother in love
Loving one's brother is the act of recognizing that both you and he are living gods, transformed beings after the image of perfection above.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
outhouse
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by outhouse »

Secret Alias wrote: First of all it has to finally be acknowledged that there was this existing dynamic of ten commandments vs Pentateuch between the 'learned' and the idiotai in Israel



.
Unsubstantiated when we know pauls community was following Hellenistic Judaism and had quite the knowledge of the Pentateuch text NOT just the ten commandments .


Same goes for the unknown gospel authors who had extensive knowledge of the text beyond basic laws


You have no evidence at all outside imagination
outhouse
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by outhouse »

Secret Alias wrote: - (a) the radical 'demystified' historicist POV (i.e. that all you have to do is strip the gospel of all allegory and symbolism in order to discover the historical truth


.

Such an ignorant view.

No credible scholar does this, as we do not consider apologetic rhetoric to be valid history.

Its obvious first century context of the movement has eluded you, and your unsubstantiated opinions leave way more questions then any credible answers.


Until you can address Pilate, Caiaphas, John the Baptist, Paul, Josephus in context your lost.
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DCHindley
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by DCHindley »

Secret Alias wrote:Oppenheimer's essay is quite instructive on this subject - https://books.google.com/books?id=xayoA ... en&f=false
At last! This link provides the instructions for constructing the atom bomb! It should be read by all anarchists and holy warriors, regardless of stripe! All Hail!!

DCH (tongue in cheek)
Secret Alias
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Re: How Much of the Gospel is Actual History

Post by Secret Alias »

For you DCH it is a joke. For John outhouse (who never read the material at the link) it must be real. He must really think it is attached to an atomic bomb.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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