Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Nasruddin
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Nasruddin »

Chronolgy please.

1. Paul was writing in the 50-60s AD with no knowledge of John the Baptist.
2. Visions & revelations. Birth of Anti-YHWH sects.
3. John the Baptist is invented by some Jews.
... Josephus includes John the Baptist in his Antiquities, completed in 94 AD. His audience would have known whether John the Baptist was real or not.
4. John is made precursor of Jesus, appearing as such in the Gospels from the latter end of the 1st Century AD.

Paul, of course, never had a reason to mention John the Baptist. When did any of his letters (epistles written to address specific circumstances) need to mention John the Baptist? Paul never mentioned Herod, either. Nor the word 'chariot'. I guess those were later inventions too.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Giuseppe »

Nasruddin wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 12:52 pm When did any of his letters (epistles written to address specific circumstances) need to mention John the Baptist?
not only and not just when he talked about the baptism. The Gospels give evidence of ambivalence between Christians and John. In other threads I have shown that evidence. I have inferred that the earliest Christian approach with John was one of open hostility. Well: Paul should mention his adversary John, because if Paul had known John, then the rivalry Paul versus John had to be strongly expected and it had to show itself in the epistles... ...but there is no trace of a polemic anti-John in Paul, ergo Paul didn't polemize against John, ergo Paul didn't know John.

John was known by Christians only AFTER the death of Paul.

Other evidence of a rivalry between John and Christians : the incipit of Revelation was written by (the judaized version of) "John the Baptist" against the Christian paulines. But about this I will talk in future.

Again, a discussion between a mythicist and a historicist is not useful in this thread.

ADDENDA: in proto-John John the Baptist doesn't baptize Jesus.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Giuseppe »

Note that John was adversary of ANY Christian, not only of pauline Christians.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Giuseppe »

PREMISE: Clewis, PLEASE DON'T WRITE IN THIS THREAD TO POPULARIZE YOUR STUPID BOOK.


John the Baptist, in the his Judaizing version, was the original author of Revelation 12, of which I will give the original exegesis:

12 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
12
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”
13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.


As early as 1907, Wellhausen saw in this dragon the Roman army which, from 67 to 70, led against the Jews an implacable war, the Celestial Woman is the community of the pious faithful who fled outside Jerusalem, awaiting their salvation of the coming coming of the Messiah, the "rest of her offspring" are the Zealots, who, relying only on themselves, organized the last resistance against Rome.

The point of the original text of Revelation is that the Messiah will come in the future, but he is not entirely in the future: the Messiah is already born.

The author said that the Messiah child was ascended immediately to heaven just at his Birth to justify the fact that he is not still revealed in the his power.

Proto-John is the first gospel.

Because three reasons:
  • 1) there is no trial before sinedrites, but only before Pilate
  • 2) the episode Barabbas is a Judaizing parody just against the Son of Father of Proto-John (therefore proving that Mark comes after proto-John).

  • 3) Proto-John is very closely related to the Johannine Apocalypse and particularly to its old part (Revelation 12) because it attributes to the public life of Jesus the duration of three and a half years, it speaks with insistence of the his presumed mother and who also represents for him the community of the faithful to God and of the Messiah, finally proto-John also presents Jesus under the figure of the sheperd.

But proto-John only takes up the apocalyptic tradition of Revelation in order to contrast it.
For proto-John, the advent of Christ belongs to the past, the resurrection is currently taking place in every believer, the judgment is realized the same against unbelievers and the kingdom of God is instituted inside souls. All the technical terms of the Required are required, but with a new and entirely spiritual meaning. The shepherd in Revelation beats the nations with a rod of iron: he becomes in proto-John the good shepherd who dies for his sheep. The first will appear in a war triumph, on a white horse, the second also makes a triumphal, but peaceful, entry in Jerusalem on a donkey. One is given as "word" of God, but it is because "from his mouth comes out a sword to strike the nations", that is to say the divine sentence which will exterminate the wicked, the other is identified with the Philonian Logos, that is, the supreme wisdom that enlightens souls.

The Apocalypse exposed a thesis,

proto-John is the antithesis. The Synoptics are presented as a synthesis.

They materialize the evangelical tradition, which first presented itself as a Gnostic novel of a spiritual character, and they give it as a true and well attested story. They make, for example, the mother of Christ, who represents the Judeo-Christian community, the wife of the Northern Israel: Joseph. Carpenter is a misunderstanding of nazarene.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Nasruddin
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Nasruddin »

Giuseppe wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 10:15 pm
Nasruddin wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 12:52 pm When did any of his letters (epistles written to address specific circumstances) need to mention John the Baptist?
not only and not just when he talked about the baptism. The Gospels give evidence of ambivalence between Christians and John. In other threads I have shown that evidence. I have inferred that the earliest Christian approach with John was one of open hostility. Well: Paul should mention his adversary John, because if Paul had known John, then the rivalry Paul versus John had to be strongly expected and it had to show itself in the epistles... ...but there is no trace of a polemic anti-John in Paul, ergo Paul didn't polemize against John, ergo Paul didn't know John.

John was known by Christians only AFTER the death of Paul.

Other evidence of a rivalry between John and Christians : the incipit of Revelation was written by (the judaized version of) "John the Baptist" against the Christian paulines. But about this I will talk in future.

Again, a discussion between a mythicist and a historicist is not useful in this thread.

ADDENDA: in proto-John John the Baptist doesn't baptize Jesus.
I agree with you that antagonism between John and Jesus is readable in the Gospel account, and I pointed out to you that the Gospel of John does not even show that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

But Paul had no reason or context to talk about the baptism of John. Where does Paull ever discuss baptism in any great detail? He mentions it, but not as the main point under discussion, or in a context that would need to bring in John the Baptist, who had been baptizing as a Jewish ritual, had been dead for over 20 years, and whose purpose and significance had been quickly eclipsed by Jesus. To expect Paul to engage in an anti-polemic directed at John, who was nolonger significant and wasn't relevant to Paul's letters, is a strawman. This would be true regardless of whether you are a mythicist or a historicist.
klewis
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by klewis »

Giuseppe wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 8:59 am So the steps are the following:

1) Paul and the Pillars: Christ crucified in outer space. Worship of YHWH. Zero knowledge of a John the Baptist.

Now the problem is to detect evidence of the real origin of "John the Baptist", between (2) and (3).

For what I see, the foundation of your argument is that Paul, and others, did not write about something . If Paul did not write about the Lord's Supper in 1 Cor 11:17-34 then you would say that he did not know about the Lord's supper. There is a difference between not knowing and not writing about something.

This is like watching 10,000 hours of TV and concluding that no one goes to the bathroom because you have not seen one clip of someone going to the bathroom.
Giuseppe
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Giuseppe »

Nasruddin wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 12:31 pmTo expect Paul to engage in an anti-polemic directed at John, who was nolonger significant and wasn't relevant to Paul's letters, is a strawman.
just this is the point. How can John the Baptist be relevant to the pauline "Mark" and be not revelant to Paul's letters? If the problem existed for the disciple of Paul named "Mark" (and you agree with this), then the same problem had to exist even more greatly for the Paul himself, the teacher of Mark.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
davidmartin
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by davidmartin »

not going to find the answers in Paul Guiseppe i think
Paul adopts a method of never naming his opponents or reveal any historical details that might help
This is actually quite 'Gnostic' of him. Since when do Gnostic texts do this either?!

With such a common name as 'John' and multiple John's on the scene ...

If you ask me, there was a precursor to Jesus possibly named John, who taught the same kind of thing as Jesus
The key inconsistency for me is how John is portrayed in Acts of not knowing what the Holy Spirit is - but clearly he does in John!
One obvious reason for this, is to stop John being a baptiser in the Holy Spirit like Jesus... and yet when Jesus is baptised by him he does in fact receive the Holy Spirit, thus John does baptise in the spirit and know of it

The key takeaway from this is the whoever this John was, he was a spiritual baptiser like Jesus
Whether or not he is 'John the baptist' is a second question. Maybe he was Theudas. Maybe Theudas is John the Baptist.
But when did Theudas die, wasn't it the 40's?

One possibility is the church simply connected Jesus with John the Baptist after reading Josephus, when really it was Theudas he was connected to
But this is splitting hairs. The debate may as well be about whether it is water baptism for sins VS spiritual baptism (ie spiritual rebirth) that the John of Jesus was about. I say it's the latter and the church just wanted to create a 'pious' history for Jesus. Way better to choose John the Baptist over a guy who was more similar to Jesus and that some said was Jesus!
Giuseppe
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by Giuseppe »

davidmartin wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:34 am not going to find the answers in Paul Guiseppe i think
Paul adopts a method of never naming his opponents
I disagree. Paul mentions by name the his enemies when he has really enemies. He is open and frank in Antiochia: just this his openness is his persuasive way to win the Galatians. Peter was really a false person when he feared the followers of James.

I insist: there is really EVIDENCE that:
  • (1) John the Baptist was a problem for Mark, since Mark wants to resolve/neutralize it,
  • (2) while John the Baptist was not a problem for Paul
  • (3) "Mark" is pauline;
The simplest explanation of (1), (2) and (3) is that Paul didn't know John the Baptist.

ADDENDA: That is equivalent to say that "John the Baptist" became a problem for Paulines only AFTER the death of Paul. That is equivalent to say that "John the Baptist" was known by the Christians only AFTER the death of Paul.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
perseusomega9
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Re: Was the birth story in Luke/Matthew originally referred to John the Baptist

Post by perseusomega9 »

Nasruddin wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 12:52 pm His [Josephus'] audience would have known whether John the Baptist was real or not.


His Roman audience?
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
-Giuseppe
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