The Origins of Christianity

[neilgodfrey]

I should add that I am not suggesting literary criticism is "superior" in any way to form criticism and should be a default position. That I have never argued. What I have expressed is the idea that the two are incompatible because they are based on quite different assumptions about the text. It may be that a literary critic is deluding himself with patterns that are not really there and that the form critic will have the last laugh. Hence my stress on the value of evidence-based hypotheses and even those, of course, are always tentative.

[Clive]

On sources, is it not accepted that rituals are also sources?

Gore Vidal in Julian describes what he thinks might have gone on in a mithraic ritual, where the conclusion of loads of stuff going on all night in a cave is bursting out at dawn to face the rising sun.

All these various rituals are forms of god bothering, with a good dose of altered states of consciousness.

This particular variety of god bothering wrote some of its rituals down, and because writers were involved, some were skilled at theatrics, drama, story telling, they were pretty good at it, editing tweaking, amending "improving" its truthiness!

So we have various stuff happening, apocalyptic stuff, son of god stuff, christing, various rituals of various groups, some attempts to write thoughts down, later attempts to merge the various strands of belief and practices.

I think the coevolution of theologies and rituals is actually reasonably clear, and the various tweaks to the base software codes can be seen.

The classic example of this is the still carried out ritual in eastern orthodoxy of playing with phosphorous. Another is the belief that the eucharist is the body and blood of christ, not just a representation, or in memory of. Was the passover connection an attempt to give a classic magical eating the god ritual some patina and authority be splicing it to an ancient religion?

[Clive]

Mark is solving a whole series of problems:

"this is my beloved son"
bringing judaic and greek beliefs together
giving hope (or is s/he?)
passion narrative
writing a story about why they believe what they do

[Peter Kirby]

It is interesting to find the name of J. D. Crossan on a list of scholars whose work has undermined the notion of a pre-Marcan passion narrative

It's a list of authors in The Passion in Mark.

but it most definitely qualifies as a pre-Marcan passion narrative.

Crossan is mentioned on the same page for his opinion on where a pre-Markan passion narrative ended.

[Ben C. Smith]

It is interesting to find the name of J. D. Crossan on a list of scholars whose work has undermined the notion of a pre-Marcan passion narrative

It's a list of authors in The Passion in Mark.

(Well, yes, that was already clear. Thanks.)

[neilgodfrey]

On sources, is it not accepted that rituals are also sources?

Gore Vidal in Julian describes what he thinks might have gone on in a mithraic ritual, where the conclusion of loads of stuff going on all night in a cave is bursting out at dawn to face the rising sun.

All these various rituals are forms of god bothering, with a good dose of altered states of consciousness.

This particular variety of god bothering wrote some of its rituals down, and because writers were involved, some were skilled at theatrics, drama, story telling, they were pretty good at it, editing tweaking, amending "improving" its truthiness!

So we have various stuff happening, apocalyptic stuff, son of god stuff, christing, various rituals of various groups, some attempts to write thoughts down, later attempts to merge the various strands of belief and practices.

I think the coevolution of theologies and rituals is actually reasonably clear, and the various tweaks to the base software codes can be seen.

The classic example of this is the still carried out ritual in eastern orthodoxy of playing with phosphorous. Another is the belief that the eucharist is the body and blood of christ, not just a representation, or in memory of. Was the passover connection an attempt to give a classic magical eating the god ritual some patina and authority be splicing it to an ancient religion?

From the little I have read I understand that myths can be created to explain or reinterpret rituals, not the other way around. If so, certain rituals may have been an inspiration for a myth-maker's creativity.

[Clive]

First, any given social order is produced and maintained through stereotyped, familiar and reassuring acts of discourse and practice that re-presents the constituent categories of society and their hierarchic order as if these were something natural, necessary, traditional, normal, and/or divinely ordained. Second, the same instruments with which the social order is continually reproduced can be used to disrupt and reconstruct it, even radically so. This involves an alchemy of sorts, the social world being conjured into existence by mythic and ritual invocations that speak and enact its structures with such conviction and cumulative force that these achieve reality, first in the consciousness and - perhaps more importantly - in the socially productive sentiments (affinity and estrangement) of those who listen, watch and participate; second in their actions, perceptions and dispositions; third, in the world they inhabit and reproduce. To understand how such magic is accomplished was the purpose of this book

https://global.oup.com/academic/product ... gb&lang=en&

(sorry quote above via google scholar)

[Clive]

Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
Part I: Myth
1. Myth, Sentiment, and the Construction of Social Forms
2. The Politics of Myth
3. Competing Uses of the Future in the Present
Part II: Ritual
4. Ritual, Rebellion, Resistance: Rethinking the Swazi Ncwala
5. Banquets and Brawls: Aspects of Ceremonial Meals
6. Festivals and Massacres: Reflections on St. Bartholomew's Day
7. Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain
Part III: Classification
8. The Tyranny of Taxonomy
9. The Dialectics of Symbolic Inversion
10. The Uses of Anomaly
Part IV: Affinity, Estrangement, Alterity [new]
11. The Mythic Sisterhood of Europe and Asia [new]
12. ''We are all related'': The Limits of Inclusion at a Lakota Sun Dance
13. Food, Filth, and Religious Community

Contents very interesting, for example banquets and brawls, and food, filth and religious communities.

Fascinating that a certain death starts with a meal .....

[Clive]

The case of imperial expansion.. is an instructive one. Although new territories may be added by conquest, successful integration of the populations within those territories depends on - better yet, amounts to - the transformation of these peoples's consciousness so that they come to consider themselves members of an imperial society rather than the vanquished subjects of a foreign nation. Such a radical recasting of collective identity, which amounts to the deconstruction of a previously significant sociopolitical border and the corollary construction of a new, encompassing sociopolitical aggregate, can hardly be accomplished through force alone.

Discourse and the construction of society

[iskander]

On sources, is it not accepted that rituals are also sources?

Gore Vidal in Julian describes what he thinks might have gone on in a mithraic ritual, where the conclusion of loads of stuff going on all night in a cave is bursting out at dawn to face the rising sun.

All these various rituals are forms of god bothering, with a good dose of altered states of consciousness.

This particular variety of god bothering wrote some of its rituals down, and because writers were involved, some were skilled at theatrics, drama, story telling, they were pretty good at it, editing tweaking, amending "improving" its truthiness!

So we have various stuff happening, apocalyptic stuff, son of god stuff, christing, various rituals of various groups, some attempts to write thoughts down, later attempts to merge the various strands of belief and practices.

I think the coevolution of theologies and rituals is actually reasonably clear, and the various tweaks to the base software codes can be seen.

The classic example of this is the still carried out ritual in eastern orthodoxy of playing with phosphorous. Another is the belief that the eucharist is the body and blood of christ, not just a representation, or in memory of. Was the passover connection an attempt to give a classic magical eating the god ritual some patina and authority be splicing it to an ancient religion?

IN THOSE DEAR OLD GOLDEN DAYS

The elusive sources for the gospel of Mark are to be found in men with the ability to remember what they had heard .Finding those men is now an impossible thing to do.


Hear...for I have given you good teaching, do not forsake my teaching. ( proverbs 4. 1-2 ) and Deut. 4:36, which reads: It was from the heavens that [YHWH] caused you to hear His voice, to discipline you; while it was upon the earth that He caused you to see His great fire, hearing His words from within the fire.


Chorus: Life was different in those golden days
Very different in those olden days
http://monologues.co.uk/musichall/Songs ... n-Days.htm