Why did they separate Jesus from Christ? Two hypothesis

[Giuseppe]

THE FACT: it seems that Mark's Christology is separationist: the spiritual Christ possessed the man Jesus from the his baptism until to his fugue (from agony on the Cross, or from the Cross, via replacement with Simon of Cryene, or from the hands of Pilate, in the form of Bar-abbas). There evidence that some early users of Mark were separationists.

THE QUESTION: why did they separate Jesus from Christ?

hypothesis 1: it was a necessary step of the process of incarnation of a Jesus Christ originally pure spirit, even if descendend on the earth (for example, the priority of the Gospel of Marcion over all the other Gospels). Since a spirit was considered ''naked'' in the Antiquity when he appears without a body, a material body had to be given to the angelic Jesus as his mere recipient, and hence the separation between Jesus and Christ.

The problem with this view: to prove that Mcn preceded Mark is surely difficult. I am interested to the relation between the two Gospels, but I am a bit skeptical about a solution.

hypothesis 2: a ''character confusion'' happened between the god Jesus and the man Jesus, after the 70 CE (or in the 2 CE). The god Jesus was confused, especially in the eyes of Pagans, with a man Jesus crucified by sediction or sourcery.
The evidence of this is in the Barabbas episode, Celsus, Tacitus (if authentic in his reference to Christ and Chrestiani), and in particular Minucius Felix.
This is partially a view shared by Ben in his important A mythicohistorical (hybrid) approach to Christian origins. Maybe the only difference is that he sees a particular man Jesus reflected in the Gospels and confused (deliberately) with Jesus Christ, while I see more particular men named Jesus confused (maybe not even deliberately) with Jesus Christ. The difference is also about who started the confusion:

1) if they were Christians, then they were believing that the news about Bar-Kokhba (or other military messianists) were the news of the Parousia of the victorious Christ. (there is clear evidence that the same author of the Revelation of Peter assumed that Bar-Kokhba was the Christian Christ).

2) if they were Pagans, then that ''character confusion'' is described very well by Kurt L. Noll:

I suggest that the Jerusalem pillars preached a Jesus who claimed to be a son of David and expected to wage holy war on behalf of the Jewish god in the near eschatological future (in other words, a Davidic messiah similar to those in ps. 2, the Qumran texts or Psalms of Solomon). The proclamation of the cross fits very nicely with this hypothetical 'Gospel according to the Jerusalem Pillars', for any Roman governor would have viewed this type of Jesus as a foolish but potentially dangerous criminal, and the pillars would have used the story of the resurrection to affirm how wrong that Roman governor had been (1 Cor 1:20-25).

(K. L. Noll, Investigating Earliest Christianity without Jesus, in 'Is This Not the Carpenter?', edited by Thompson, Verenna, 2012, p. 252, note 62, my bold).

As reaction to this unwanted and unexpected ''character confusion'' (was Jesus Christ only a crucified criminal?) by Pagans, some Christians opted for an apology more moderate and apparently more ''rational'' than the simple fanatic exaltation of the divine wisdom against the fallacious ''wisdom of the world''.
This apology was clearly embarrassed by the mention of the name 'Jesus', too much allusive to the concept of Holy War given his diffusion among Jewish messianists (see Jesus son of Saphat in Josephus).

For example, Minucius Felix never mentions 'Jesus', but only 'Christ':

For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God. Miserable indeed is that man whose whole hope is dependent on mortal man, for all his help is put an end to with the extinction of the man.

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0410.htm

But other Christians were more radical than Minucius Felix: Jesus was a mere man, therefore the accusations and the defamations (that continued against him even in their time) were part and parcel of his real passion on the cross, while the true Christ ''remained impassible''. The divine wisdow is still superior to the ''wisdow of this world'', but at that point it was became gnosis.

The problem with this view: This view is assuming simply that the first euhemerizers of the god Jesus were, despite them, the same Pagans by their defamatory and denigrating rumors about the presumed ''true'' belief of the Christians. But Richard Carrier doesn't credit this theory of any confidence.

[Ben C. Smith]

This is partially a view shared by Ben in his important A mythicohistorical (hybrid) approach to Christian origins. Maybe the only difference is that he sees a particular man Jesus reflected in the Gospels and confused (deliberately) with Jesus Christ, while I see more particular men named Jesus confused (maybe not even deliberately) with Jesus Christ.

Just to clarify, I actually agree that the confusion may not have been deliberate. I am open on that point.

Also, I do suspect a confusion (whether deliberate or not) between more than one historical Jesus. Jesus of Ananus, for example. When I identify a particular Jesus (not the son of Ananus, but somebody else) as shouldering the brunt of the confusion, it is because of those few transmitted details (from Papias, for example) that I find credible; that is the Jesus I am specifying, whichever man it was whom Philip may have talked about with his daughters (for example). But that by no means rules out other men named Jesus (or even other men not named Jesus) whose biographical details may have been merged into a single stream.

And yes, I am aware of how tenuous the evidence is here.

I am quite sympathetic to the idea that Bar Kokhba rebellion contributed significantly to the gospel traditions (among other Christian traditions); but I think those traditions started earlier than Bar Kokhba. I doubt he was the initial catalyst for it all.

Your link is broken above, by the way. Here it is: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3125.

[Giuseppe]

I am quite sympathetic to the idea that Bar Kokhba rebellion contributed significantly to the gospel traditions (among other Christian traditions); but I think those traditions started earlier than Bar Kokhba. I doubt he was the initial catalyst for it all.

Surely we have evidence by Origen that various Zealot figures were identified with Jesus Christ.

For this reason, they loved him [John the Baptist] quite justly, but they did not keep their love within bounds; for they kept wondering ''whether perhaps he was the Christ''. The apostle Paul warns against inordinate and irrational love when he says of himself, ''I fear that someone might have an opinion of me above what he sees or hears from me, and that the greatness of the revelations might exalt me'', and so on. Paul feared that even he might fall into this error. So he was unwilling to state everything about himself that he knew. He wanted no one to think more of him than he saw or, going beyond the limits of honor, to say what had been said about John, that ''he was the Christ''. Some people said this even about Dosithesus, the heresiarch of the Samaritans; others said it also about Judas the Galilean. Finally, some people burst forth into such great audacity of love that they invented new and unheard of exaggerations about Paul.
For, some say this, that the passage in Scripture that speaks of ''sitting at the Savior's right and left'' applies to Paul and Marcion: Paul sits at his right hand and Marcion at his left.

(Origen, Hom. in Luc., 25)

But maybe a central point of difference between my view and your view is that while I agree with Noll that the character confusion was started by Pagans already at the time of Paul (and resisted by Christians as Paul), I think that the same Christians did contribute to this character confusion only later, after the 70 and maybe even more later, in full 2 CE, as effect of what Dujardin called a ''Christianization'' of the early Christianity, i.e. the trend to judaize ''a second time'', ie. in an artificial way, (the first time was the banal fact of the his Jewish origins) the Christian sects, against what Paul had made and triggered (i.e. the Gnostic phenomenon). In other terms, the Ebionites were a later sect, not one in continuity with the original Pillars. In general, the threat of the Judaizers to the Pauline communities was more strong after Paul and not during Paul, in my view (per Rylands and Celsus's argument). Jesus was called Christ meaning for ''Christ'' a real historical figure and not more the title of an angel (as in Paul and among the early Christians).

For example, so Ory (I quote him relatively to the ''character confusion'''s argument, here, not about the Marcionite Priority):

It does seem that responsibility for this failure of comprehension goes back to Marcion, who was the first to have conceived of the earthly epiphany of Jesus. In him, we glimpse the “turning point” of the metamorphosis from a god to a historical individual. His disciples did indeed assume that the period of time separating Marcion from this epiphany was a hundred years. The famous expression “in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius” — i.e. the year 28–29 — suggests that one hundred years was derived from the year 128–129, which would then be highlighted as that of the revelation to Marcion of the coming of a divine being to earth. The date of the arrival of a god who was not historical could not have been furnished by Marcion, but his disciples calculated it when the needed to fix the date of the manifestation of a prophet in whom God was incarnate. Finally, the date was seized upon by the disciples of John the Baptist as that of the manifestation of their master, and it serves that purpose in Saint Luke’s Gospel.

(Analysis of Christian Origins, p. 38, my bold)