From much time I was very curious about how Couchoud thought the angel Jesus was euhemerized on the Earth.
He writes:
(p.133)Marcion therefore needed to show that the apparition of Jesus was recent, and had nothing to do with what had been predicted or revealed in the old scriptures of the Jews, but was a new thing. The manifestation of Jesus was a terrestrial fact; therefore the crucifixion must also be a terrestrial event.
NOTA BENE: Couchoud isn't saying still that Marcion invented the earthly Jesus, as possibly Neil reads Couchoud, in my view, wrongly:
Precisely: Marcion inherited the concept of a Pilate's Christ from the Pagans, but he made it easier for pagans the task of euhemerizing Jesus by displaying the belief in a Christ appeared on Earth the first time only to Paul.Couchoud will say Marcion began to compose his life of Jesus on earth in the late 120’s. If the Tacitus reference is authentic — I doubt it, actually — then it points to Marcion inheriting the idea of an earthly Christ rather than originating the concept
Until there, the French scholar has said only that Marcion had shown a theological interest in a recent apparition of Jesus on the Earth.
Thus he writes:
(p. 133)This idea was to have far-reaching consequences, though the didascalus of Hebrews might repulse it with disdain. The populace straightway took it to heart. Novices of little instruction must have heard of it, Greeks of artistic bent, who took the theological data as a dramatized story. Thus there might come to the ears of some Roman magistrate obscure whisperings as to the mystery of Christ Crucified.
Therefore the Pagan Romans were the true euhemerizers of the angel Jesus.
The pattern of cause-effect is the following:
1) Marcion: the angel Jesus appeared the first time to Paul, and only to him, on the Earth (still no gospel was written).
2) how a Roman magistrate interpreted prima facie these obscure words:
2) how a Roman magistrate interpreted secunda facie these same obscure words: Christ was crucified at the time of Paul the apostle, i.e., when Pilate was procurator in Judaea. Tacitus identified the seditious Chrestiani killed under Nero with the Christiani followers of Marcion, by him met in Asia and from which he realized that their Christ was a recent apparition. And so we have the so-called Testimonium Taciteum.In 111 Pliny the Younger, after cross-examining the Christians of Bithynia and Pontus, had no notion that their Christ was a real character. According to them, he reported to Trajan, on a certain day (surely Sunday) they assembled before dawn and chanted a hymn to the god Christ, those on the one part answering those on the other. (Stato die ante lucem convenire carmenque Christo quasi Deo dicere secum invicem.) Here it is a question of Christ, a heavenly being, awaited as the dawn on the first day of the week.
Couchoud writes also in the footnote 212 of p. 133 :A few years later, in 114, a friend of Pliny, a former consul too, Tacitus, was proconsul in Asia, where it was not unlikely he had to consider cases against the Christians. Still a little later, in 117, Tacitus wrote the Annals, where he said of the burning of Rome that Nero thought the incendiaries to have been Christians, so called after Chrestus, who had been put to death under Tiberius by the proconsul Pontius Pilate. (Nero subdidit reos . . . quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus Chrestus211 Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem. Pontium Pilatum siplicio adfectus erat.)
It is not likely that Tacitus obtained such information at Rome, for the Roman Christians, if they can be judged by Hermas, were far from thinking of Jesus as a historical person. The comment was derived from the interrogation of Asiatic Christians, followers of Paul, if not Marcionites, for the latter joined the words Christos and chrestos (good). The idea Tacitus had of Chrestus from what he knew of Christians is analogous to that he had of Moses from what he knew of Jews: “Moses instituted new rites, different from those of other men, in order to form for himself a new people in the future.” Josephus’s silence in respect of Jesus is enough to prove that Tacitus here wrote as a polemic and not as a historian.
Pontius Pilate was the procurator who governed judæa for ten years in the time of John the Baptist. In the Antiquities of Josephus he is said to have been very harsh (XVIII. iii. 2; repression of a revolt in Jerusalem: iv. I; massacre of Samaritans), and the Antiquities appeared in 93. He it was became responsible for the putting to death of the Son of God.
Tacitus identified wrongly the seditious impulsore Chresto (the ''Egyptian Prophet'' ?) of Suetonius with the recent figura of the marcionite Christ by him known in Asia. That was the true act of birth of the earthly Jesus on the Earth.Annales, xv. 44. Tacitus imagined some sort of seditious superstition which was put down under Tiberius and reappeared under Nero.
3) The reaction of Marcion when he knew what the Pagans were saying (that Christ was a Jew crucified by Pilate):
(p. 133-134)Marcion accepted enthusiastically this popular, pagan idea of Christ’s death; its simplicity appealed to him. It was looked upon as an accomplished event, and was not hampered with a baggage of visions, interpretations, gnoses, and what not. It was eminently readable and, read aloud in the churches, would arouse more fervid faith than the most ebullient prophecy. The manifestation of God, extraneous to the world, could be told in the form of a brief tale of Jesus on earth, concluding with the death on the cross, the sacrifice for the salvation of mankind, which St. Paul considered the essential and lasting act of Christ.
Once the Cross of Jesus had been erected on earth, once the name of Pontius Pilate had been discovered, the details of Jesus’s life soon developed. Each church brought its scrap of good news; here all recalled a prophecy, there a parable, formerly inspired by the Spirit of Jesus, and now ascribed to Jesus himself.
In short, if you are the Pagan Tacitus and you listen about “Christ” only:
1) that he appeared the first time on the earth to an apostle lived recently under Pilate
2) that he was crucified
then your pragmatic and rapid conclusion is that :
3) Pilate crucified “Christ”.
And you would do even more so if you know independently that both Claudius and Nero persecuted riotous followers of a Jew named Chrestus.
The weakness of the theory is that it assumes an omniscient Marcion (who gives the input to the Pagans and after receives and uses their output), but I think that the strongest point of the his argument is to observe correctly that something happened between 114 and 117 CE in the Roman elite if Pliny is witness of a Mythicist Christ and only some year later Tacitus is witness of a historicist Christ.
The only possible explanation is that Jesus was euhemerized on the Earth between 114 and 117 CE.
