I agree with all of this.Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2017 7:56 amI have a few longstanding thoughts on this whole matter which are probably best summarized as a list:Giuseppe wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2017 6:27 amTrue. I - or better, ''the mythicist who is in me'' - am both happy and disappointed by that answer by Hurtado. Since it is really (in my view) the only answer still legitimate by a historicist.Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Mon Dec 04, 2017 12:04 pm It certainly sounds like they tried to do exactly that.
Afterall, why do I like the marcionites? Not surely for their being historicists, but uniquely for a sense of pure opposition to the proto-Catholic tradition (of which I consider the academic HJ gild the last residue in the post-modern age).
- The (proto-)Catholics were (and still are) more inclusive than exclusive. They were able to absorb almost any idea about what Jesus was: the Messiah/Christ, the prophet like Moses, a new Elijah/Elisha figure, the son of God, the heir of David, second member of the Trinity, and so on. They were capable of great syncretism, as well: if your personal bent was more polytheistic than monotheistic, you could treat the saints like godlings; if you were ascetic, you could join a convent; if you liked the idea of a goddess, you could worship Mary.
- Many of the so-called heretical groups, on the other hand, were more exclusive than inclusive. Marcionites, for example, could not tolerate Jesus being the Jewish Messiah. Certain Jewish-Christian groups could not tolerate Jesus being divine. None of these groups could get along with Catholicism, so long as they remained exclusive; nor, however, could any of them get along with each other, so there was no way to "gang up" on the Catholics. I suspect that, in the end, Catholicism's cultural victory was at least partly due to their inclusive umbrella.
- Since Catholicism was so inclusive, the only way to mark oneself off as something other than Catholic was to vehemently disagree with one of its (mostly inclusive) tenets. Just to affirm something (Jesus is god, Jesus is man, Jesus is in heaven, and I am an ascetic) would not be enough; you would have to deny something (Jesus is not god, Jesus was not a man, Jesus is not in heaven, though Christ is, and nobody who is not ascetic is okay with God).
- Therefore, once the idea that Jesus Christ had been a man who lived and died took hold (for whatever reason, whether historical or ahistorical), the only way to mark oneself off as a true mythicist would be to deny that Jesus had ever been a man. To affirm that he was a divinity would not be enough; Catholicism was fine with that.
- The heresiologists scoured the religious landscape for any and all heresies they could scare up and criticize. There is even evidence that they practically invented a few heresies, based on hopeful misunderstandings, just to knock them down. I remember reading an article about the prospect of discovering new bird species around the world, and the author said that it was virtually impossible that there are new species of birds waiting to be discovered in North America and Western Europe, simply because there are so many eager bird watchers in those areas, and have been for decades. Well, the heresiologists strike me as having done for heresies what bird watchers do for birds, if you will; there were enough of them on the hunt over the course of decades and even centuries that it seems very doubtful that a heretical group was denying that Jesus ever walked the earth any time after the gospel story was being taken seriously. If people were denying it, they kept it a secret and took it to their grave. This is why I find Doherty's assertions about the Logos apologists to be very hard to credit: I find it incredible that a whole raft of influential mythicist authors were writing those apologies right under the noses of the heresiologists without being noticed.
- These observations, however, leave open the possibility that there were mythicists before the gospel story either took place or took hold, since before then there would be nothing to deny. This is one of the driving factors behind my hybrid approach to Christian origins. In that reconstruction, a kind of mythicism morphed into historicism. Any purely mythicist group which embraced the identification of its cosmic savior or revealer with the historical man Jesus would be Christian (and now historicist, even if only docetic or whatnot). Any purely mythicist group which rejected this identification would not even be considered Christian; it would be one of the Jewish sects or whatnot. The best way for mythicists to slip under the historicist radar, in other words, is to predate the invention of that radar.
- To my mind, none of this proves that there was an historical Jesus, at least not without a lot of further argumentation. The possibility remains that there was only one mythicist, or a scant handful at most, who wrote the first gospel story as a symbolic narrative for the religion, which was then immediately and thoroughly misunderstood by later tradents as historical. I think that, if this gospel author (or set of gospel authors) belonged to a community which insisted on a mythical Jesus for more than a few years after the story was being taken seriously, that community would have been detected by the heresiologists. (For the record, I am not all that fond of this possibility, but I admit that it is one.)
- All of these observations are mitigated, of course, if there are heresies of a mythicist bent described by the heresiologists. Giuseppe, did you not find some passages which may possibly be interpreted in that way? I think I remember remaining unimpressed with one or some of your examples but curious about one or two others.
What might be the best candidate for a remnant of a "mythicist" position in antiquity is this:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3119
An ancient mythicist accusation in Recognitions 8:62
In that thread, Guiseppe decided to deny it as soon as I tried to authenticate it.
