From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
davidbrainerd
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by davidbrainerd »

Giuseppe wrote:
I only see 8 explicit references to the Messiah in the odes, and only one is even interesting, in Ode 24, about a dove flying on the Messiah's head. Which means either the odes are written after the synoptics
The Davies's answer:
As for the dove, we hear in Ode 24:1-2 (Lattke): ''The dove flew onto the had of our Lord Messiah, because he was her Head. And she cooed on/over him, and her voice was heard...'' This might, at a stretch, appear to have something to do with the account in Mark 1:10 but as the passage continues on we quickly enter wholly alien territory (3-4), ''and the inhabitants were afraid, and the sojourners were disturbed. The birds gave up their wing [beat], and all the creeping things died in their hole'', that soon becomes cosmic mythos, (5-6), ''and the primal deeps were opened and covered. And they sought the Lord like those who are about to give birth, and/but he was not given to them for food, because he was not their own'', One does not have to raise the question of what kind of Christian theology identifies the Messiah as the head of the Spirit (assuming that the Odes'dove is symbolic of the Spirit, which is very far from obvious) to realize that the conjunction of the words ''dove'' and ''Messiah'' here have nothing whatsoever to do with Mark's scene of the baptism of Jesus by John.
The other birds and animals and "inhabitants" (could that one be any more obvious?) are representing demons who are afraid because the Messiah received the holy spirt (i.e. the dove) and now he's coming to cast them out. There's no food for them, he's cutting off their ability to feed on people, vanquishing them, etc. etc.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidbrainerd wrote:Bolding in the quotes is mine.
Giuseppe wrote:So Davies:
As discussed above, there is no mention of Jesus in the Odes anywhere, no mention of the crucifixion anywhere, not one saying of Jesus or miracle story about him found in any gospel is referenced in any of the Odes.
Ode 24, dove on his head. From the baptism by John.
Is Psalm 22.18 (LXX 21.19) an obvious reference to the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, then?

Granting that there is a lot of metaphor in the Odes, how do you know that the metaphor must postdate the gospel records and allude to them? How do you know that the gospel record (the crucifixion, the baptism) did not draw upon and reuse the metaphor (the division of garments, the dove over the head)?

(Serious question here; I have not made up my mind about the Odes yet. But I am very much interested in the methodology that we use.)
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Giuseppe
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Giuseppe »

I think that the mere occurrence ONLY of the name "Christ", without no clear reference to Gospel episodes (beyond the mythical actions of dying and rising) makes the Odes a pre-christian text (a fact recognized also by Earl Doherty). Surely a more pre-christian and mythicist text than the post-Gospel book of Revelation.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
davidbrainerd
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by davidbrainerd »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Is Psalm 22.18 (LXX 21.19) an obvious reference to the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, then?

Granting that there is a lot of metaphor in the Odes, how do you know that the metaphor must postdate the gospel records and allude to them? How do you know that the gospel record (the crucifixion, the baptism) did not draw upon and reuse the metaphor (the division of garments, the dove over the head)?

(Serious question here; I have not made up my mind about the Odes yet. But I am very much interested in the methodology that we use.)
The gospel writers themselves admit the Psalms came first by telling us this event is fulfilling a Psalm. Do you have anything like that for the Odes? Its not like they were ashamed to point to earlier texts and claim them as prophecies.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidbrainerd wrote:
Ben C. Smith wrote: Is Psalm 22.18 (LXX 21.19) an obvious reference to the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, then?

Granting that there is a lot of metaphor in the Odes, how do you know that the metaphor must postdate the gospel records and allude to them? How do you know that the gospel record (the crucifixion, the baptism) did not draw upon and reuse the metaphor (the division of garments, the dove over the head)?

(Serious question here; I have not made up my mind about the Odes yet. But I am very much interested in the methodology that we use.)
The gospel writers themselves admit the Psalms came first by telling us this event is fulfilling a Psalm. Do you have anything like that for the Odes? Its not like they were ashamed to point to earlier texts and claim them as prophecies.
Gospel writers, no. The plural is incorrect. Only John tells us that this verse fulfills a Psalm. Matthew, Mark, and Luke simply recount the event with no such referencing. And it happens a lot more often without an explicit reference than with one in the gospels.

So, if we notice no shame to point to earlier texts, but we find in the Odes no back referencing with respect to the dove over the head or the breaking iron bars and such, are you saying that the Odes therefore came before the gospels? (This seems to contradict your point, but I am not sure what function a lack of back referencing to the gospels in the Odes would serve your point.)
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Ben C. Smith »

davidbrainerd wrote:The gospel writers themselves admit the Psalms came first by telling us this event is fulfilling a Psalm. Do you have anything like that for the Odes? Its not like they were ashamed to point to earlier texts and claim them as prophecies.
Or perhaps the pronoun I have highlighted above was meant to refer back to the gospels....
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andrewcriddle
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by andrewcriddle »

I have real problems in dating Ode 19 before the Gospel writers. (It may imply knowledge of the protoevangelium or the sources on which the protoevangelium was based)
A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.
The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.
The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth.
So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.
And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.
And she did not require a midwife, because He caused her to give life.
She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the Great Power.
And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur.
Hallelujah.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Ben C. Smith »

andrewcriddle wrote:I have real problems in dating Ode 19 before the Gospel writers. (It may imply knowledge of the protoevangelium or the sources on which the protoevangelium was based)
A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.
The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;
Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.
The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.
The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth.
So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.
And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.
And she did not require a midwife, because He caused her to give life.
She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the Great Power.
And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur.
Hallelujah.
To reiterate a question I asked earlier, what prevents the Protevangelium from having borrowed this concept from the Odes or something like them? What tips the arrow in that direction of borrowing? (I have no fully formed opinion on the date of the Odes as yet.)
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Giuseppe
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Giuseppe »

I have real problems in dating Ode 19 before the Gospel writers. (It may imply knowledge of the protoevangelium or the sources on which the protoevangelium was based)
So Davies about Ode 19 and 33:
Some might argue that there are specific references to Christian themes in Ode 19, which discusses a virgin birth, and in Ode 24 where a dove flutters above the Messiah. Buth in both cases the imagery in the Odes is utterly unlike any that has ever been associated with the Christian idea of Mary or of the Spirit-dove in the story of Jesus' baptism. In Ode 19 we hear that the Father's breasts are full and that He is milked by the Spirit so that his milk runs into the cup which is the Son. The milk from the Father's breasts is the metaphorical semen that ''the womb of the Virgin caught, and she conceived and gave birth''. This is hardly an expansion of the Matthean or Lukan account! It is something wholly different. While in later centuries some Christians occasionally spoke of the milk of Christ, this is the not the metaphor used here where the Son is the cup receiving the milk of the Father.
The only other reference to a Virgin comes in Ode 33, which is a reference to God's Wisdom; the passage reads ''The Perfect Virgin stood up proclaiming and crying out and saying ''Sons of men, turn back, and their daughters, come, and leave the ways of this Corruption and draw near to me...'' (5-7. This is not a reference to Mary but to the female Wisdom who speaks in passages such as this one from Proverbs 8:1-5: ''Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice? At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand; beside the gate leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries around: 'To you, O people, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence; you who are foolish, set your hearts on it'.''.
Ode 19 also contains a trinity of the rterms ''Father'', and ''Son,'' and ''Spirit'', that became, of course, crucial to alter Christian theology, but the terms are hardly unique to Christianity. The use of the concept ''Father'' for God, and the discussion of God's Spirit are common in Judaism, only the ''Son'' is unusual in that theological context. This trinity of terms is unusual in earliest Christianity, occurring only once as such in the New Testament (Matthew 28:19), but it is not a set of concepts that is unique to Matthew. The Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of the Father are conceived synonymously by Paul, who also refers to the Spirit of the Son (Romans 8:19-16, Galatians 4:6). It is entirely possible, however, that the Odes community preceded and strongly influenced branches of earliest Christianity and so the fact that both communities occasionally utilize seemingly Trinitarian vocabulary indicates ideological connection, but it does not give us evidence of chronological priority. Indeed, when the Trinitarian terms are listed in Ode 23, they may be a later interpolation, for while ilne 21 refers to a letter entirely written by the finger of God, line 22 lists its authors as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
(p. 250-251)
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: From a dying Christ to Jesus Christ

Post by Giuseppe »

So Prof Stevan Davies:
Only if we assume from the outset, by hypothesis, that the Odes are Christian do we have any reason to think that the Odes derive from members of the religion focused on the life, death, resurrection of Jesus. No, in fact the Odes of Solomon are not Christian at all unless we oddly define their Christianity to be a cult unrelated to the religion focused on Jesus of Nazareth. But this might indeed be a way of understanding the, , for it might not be absurd to say that they derive from a form of ''Christianity'' for which Jesus of Nazareth was entirely irrelevant.
(p. 248, my bold)

I try to define my personal reconstruction of the Origins following partially Gordon Rylands and Stevan Davies on that matter:



1) A mythological Christ who dies and rises in the lower heavens.


Image

So Davies descives this phase:
Paul quotes the churches in Judea as having heard from other churches in the network that ''the man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy'', and Paul regard this as a statement of faith (Gal 1:23). This is Paul reporting on Paul's own life and experience and so is a uniquely strong piece of evidence that Paul joined a network of churches that taught a Pauline Christianity. If so, then the view commonly held during the past century that Christianity was founded on Jesus' moralistic and apocalyptic teachings only to become a complex soteriological religion through the inventiveness of Paul is quite mistaken. Paul did not join a network of hypothetical Q-sayings oriented communities concerned about the apocalyptic kingdom to come, as Bart Ehrman, Dominic Crossan and others argue arose in Galilee and Judea (if anything did) in response to the teachings of Jesus. The discontinuity between the historical Jesus as he has been constructed by scholars throughout the past century is so overpowering that some conclude that there was no historical Jesus at all. Some others believe that Paul invented the Christianity, he preached ab novo or, as he would say, from divine revelation, but Paul reports to us that he has joined with a group of communities that were preaching the religion that he himself began to preach, and since the religion Paul preaches is one focused largely on the experience of the transformational Spirit of God/Christ/Son it is not difficult to argue that the churches he first persecuted and then joined were also focused largely on the experience of the transformational Spirit of God/Christ/Son, as was the Jewish religion of the Odes of Solomon.
(p. 374-275)


2)

Image

The spiritual dying Christ of the Odes is named Joshua for the first time. About the provenance of the name ''Joshua'' So Rylands:
There was undoubtedly an early expectation among Jews that Joshua would reappear.
(Beginning of Gnostic Christianity, p. 152)

So Ben's words describe what the Pillars did for the first time and before Paul:
Philippians 2.5-11: 5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant [μορφὴν δούλου], and being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross [θανάτου δὲ σταυροῦ]. 9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Confer Isaiah 45.23: 23 “I have sworn by Myself; the word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness, and will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.” [It seems like the only actual name in the piece, and the only word actually called a name, is Jesus; but, if this figure received that name only upon his exaltation, what happens to the historical Jesus?]
3)

Image

The communities where Paul preached believed already in a dying Christ. Paul wanted to persuade them that their dying Christ is the same Joshua redivivus the Jews was hoping in. But what resulted from the Paul's mission was a radicalization of opposing positions: while some (among the original Odists) welcomed Paul, others would be horrified by the idea that a (biblical) ''man'', Joshua, is the spiritual Christ, fearing to open the door to the excessive submission to Torah (or even worse, to exasperated anti-Roman apocalypticism), while the Pillars feared, vice versa, that the pauline ''Jesus Christ'' was reduced to a symbol of the freedom from Torah.

EVIDENCE:
Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Joshua is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son.
(1 John 2:22)


4)

''Mark'' (author) sought to remedy to this division by writing a gospel that could be interpreted in two different ways: or as if Christ is an entity separate from Joshua (and possessing spiritually him as he possessed the early odists), or as if Christ is the same as Joshua.

Image

Clearly we can know easily which interpretation of Mark the proto-catholics would have choosen (that is the reason because Mark is survived).


If this reconstruction seems for you plausible, then I think that the greatest mythicist of all the times is Louis Gordon Rylands.

It is a very disgrace that his other works are not available online.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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