maryhelena wrote:
If, as Bermejo-Rubio suggests, the gospel Jesus was seditious - how then does that position impact upon Richard Carrier's version of mythicism? Why would a celestial Pauline Christ figure be euhemerized as a seditious figure? Why involve theology with politics? Particularly so if the intent was to have the Jesus figure unjustly crucified by Rome. A blasphemy charge by the Jewish leaders and a Pilate willing to do their bidding would be sufficient for the Jewish leaders to get a crucifixion verdict. As it is Pilate, in the gospel story, finds no fault with Jesus.
Thus: 1) the gospel writers could not deny a seditious Jesus so had to add this feature to their story. 2) this could indicate a historical gospel Jesus (of some variant) 3) this could indicate that the gospel writers were reflecting, 'remembering', earlier than 30/33 c.e. history in their seditious Jesus account i.e. the historical event of 37 b.c.e. when a King of the Jews was executed by Rome. (70 years earlier).
There's a number of good points here, yet also a number of things to unpack and consider.
It is universally accepted that the canonical gospels were written after the start of the Roman-Jewish Wars.
After the start of the Roman-Jewish Wars - especially after the routing of Jerusalem - one can understand that a Jewish community (or various communities) anywhere may have been wanting to narrate a Jewish seditious hero (or two, three, four, etc) eg. a pre-66
AD/CE hero. They could have borrowed various figures to help develop such a hero-character (or characters). They may have borrowed contemporary figures; contemporary narratives; and they may have considered key texts available in this period - 66
AD/CE onwards - which would have included, among others, the Jewish texts (the Septuagint/LXX, etc; Philo's texts; Aristides texts; and then newly available Josephus's
War &
Antiquities with their accounts of various people. --
(there may have been other texts used thus - analogous to or similar to the Dead Sea Scroll texts, the Nag Hammadi texts. etc; texts since lost, texts we today have never known about).
Surely a 'seditious Jesus' would be more likely
after the start of Jewish-Roman antagonism.
Some gospel narratives or characters may have developed concurrent to the Josephus narratives eg. John the Baptist; some gospel characters & narratives may have developed later.
It's possible - probable, even - that the Pauline corpus was written mostly or fully separate to the 'gospel set' (as Stephan has put it on another thread).
When these two sets of texts were eventually selected to be put together, out of a milieu of variants and other texts, they would have been redacted to align
(as the Dutch Radical AD Loman has proposed/argued) - a human Jesus could have been somewhat inserted in the Pauline texts to align with the human-Jesus narratives in the gospels (ie. the gospel Jesus was inserted in the Pauline texts
as both sets were evolving and gaining popularity, rather than the human Jesus being mostly developed later).