Chris Hansen wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 6:29 pm
1. Perhaps I will include those, since we may impart mythicism on a post-facto basis.
Yes, that's a good way of framing it ie. they "may impart mythicism on a post-facto basis."
Not that many people are likely to read them, or, if they do, as imparting mythicism (it would be interesting if others proposing a core- or proto- Luke as a pre-Marcion text or even as a 'first gospel'
Chris Hansen wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 6:29 pm
2. Jörg Rüpke is not a mythicist. In that book he implicitly indicates he holds to historicity in the book:
"In about AD 30 there emerged among actors in Palestine a man called Jesus, of a prophetic and apocalyptic stamp, who was eventually executed." see page 351.
Nothing in the book indicates that he rejected the historicity of Jesus
Rüpke uses 'actor' or 'actors' over 200 times in a variety of different ways in
Pantheon.
There are aspects of Rüpke's full commentary that could be said to counter your assertion that "Nothing in the book indicates that he rejected the historicity of Jesus." Perhaps the best compact example is on p. 355 where he notes, in relation to the production of Marcion's Gospel in the 2nd century, -
"...the stunning absence of earlier biographical narratives of Jesus’s life is ... the consequence of such earlier narratives being nonexistent..."
The full prior immediate text to that is -
...The god of Jesus Christ, as described in the available texts by Paul, was the positive antagonist of [the evil] ancient figure [of the creator god of the Pentateuch]. The most influential aspect of Marcionism, however, was neither the institutions it created nor any accompanying rituals, but its historiographical groundwork. In outlining a simple biographical schema, replete with current anecdotes and quotations—here I am following the increasingly mooted, even if still radical position of a second-century date for the canonical gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—Marcion’s portrayal of the life of an apocalyptic visionary and peripatetic preacher, from his first emergence to his rather unusual execution, could be seen as the model of a life turning away from Judaism. He thus orchestrated a rupture that he relocated a century into the past, carefully keeping his narrative free of contemporary references. (p. 355)
And Rüpke had previously noted, pp.334-5, -
.
The letters collected under the name of Paul pose their argument against a background of Stoic and Platonic philosophy, while assuming an intensive knowledge of biblical writings, even on the part of noncircumcised recipients. This was another bricolage by intellectuals intent on their own legitimation ...
... The extant [Pauline] corpus, on the other hand, has the character of a pseudepigraphical continuation of writings by Paul, to some extent going so far as to reflect the personal link in theological terms.
37 The writers’ motivations were various, ranging from an interest in continuing Paul’s work and providing contentious interpretations of it, to reverence for Paul and instrumentalization of his name (a process taken considerably further outside the corpus of letters, beginning in Luke’s history of the apostles). In this manner, editors engaged in professional exegesis and in the formation of philosophical schools. But it was only with Acts, written deep into the first half of the second century, with its collective biography of the Acts of the Apostles, that we see the beginning of institutional history.
38 Here, Paul became the central link in a genealogy of groups that, from the mid-century onward, increasingly wished to see themselves primarily as Christiani.
39
37 See Henderson, I. (2012) “ ‘… Hidden with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3): Modes of Personhood in Deutero-Pauline Tradition.” In J. Rüpke and W. Spickermann, eds., Reflections on Religious Individuality: Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Texts and Practices. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 62. Berlin. 43–67.
38 Thus Cancik (2011) “Hairesis, Diatribe, Ekklesia: Griechische Schulgeschichte und das Lukanische Geschichtswerk.” Early Christianity 2 (3): 312–34.
39 See Arnal 2011, and below. On their designation by others, & then also by themselves, as “Christians,” see Trebilco 2012; 272–311.
- Arnal, W. 2011. “The Collection and Synthesis of “Tradition” and the Second-Century Invention of Christianity.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23 (3–4): 193–215.
- Trebilco, P. (2012) Self-Designations and Group Identity in the New Testament. Cambridge; pp. 272–311.
Rüpke goes on to propose -
.
Marcion invented something new. In the literary environment of the Roman Empire as described, nothing was more natural than to write a Greek-language “biography” as a founding document for a new religious network. Marcion’s opponents reacted immediately with a weighty intellectual exchange of the sort that a metropolis like Rome made possible; and, as was usual in historiography, they reacted with competing versions ... Marcion’s competitors were in fact also active in Rome, and, moreover, adopted substantial parts of his model. The author of the text that most plagiarized Marcion was identified a little later, by Marcion himself, as Luke, in an edition that featured the gospel along with some of Paul’s letters. It concentrated on correcting Marcion’s fundamental break with Judaism. With their narratives of Jesus’s childhood, both Luke and Matthew demonstrate how familiar the biographical character of the template was, and also how scant the source background was as soon as one wanted to move beyond that template. Marcion, for his part, criticized their compositions (and that of Mark) as lying close to his own text.
Writings competing with Marcion’s edition of the 140s AD, which was prefaced by his “Antitheses,” could now only continue to accumulate. AD 160 saw a counter-edition that established the core of the future New Testament. The late addition of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles rescued the philosophical core represented by Paul and took a direction that, while no longer avoiding the gray zones of Jewishness, also provided this orientation with a patron. Within the same movement, however, spokesmen such as Luke (in Acts of the Apostles) and Justin (in his Apology)—and perhaps earlier the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas—persisted with the genealogy of exclusion, insisting that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 was a consequence of the crucifixion of the “anointed one.”
Rüpke, Jörg (2018) Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (pp. 356-357). Princeton University Press; p. 356.