Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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DCHindley
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by DCHindley »

I think the major difference between the Bruno Bauer influenced Monist and Marxist positions is that one thought that the salvation scheme was formed among the proletariat in 2nd century Rome in the fictional context of 1st century Jerusalem, while the other (I forget which) said that it actually came together in Jerusalem, but I am shooting from the hip here.

Perhaps if I posted the TOC's of the two books and the key paragraph from the essay:
"On the History of Early Christianity," by Frederick Engels (1894-95)

[Re:] Bruno Bauer. His greatest service consists not merely in having given a pitiless criticism of the Gospels and the Epistles of the apostles, but in having for the first time seriously undertaken an inquiry into not only the Jewish and Greco-Alexandrian elements but the purely Greek and Greco-Roman elements that first opened for Christianity the career of a universal religion. The legend that Christianity arose ready and complete out of Judaism and, starting from Palestine, conquered the world with its dogma already defined in the main and its morals, has been untenable since Bruno Bauer; it can continue to vegetate only in the theological faculties and with people who wish "to keep religion alive for the people" even at the expense of science. The enormous influence which the Philonic school of Alexandria and Greco-Roman vulgar philosophy — Platonic and mainly Stoic — had on Christianity, which became the state religion under Constantine, is far from having been defined in detail, but its existence has been proved and that is primarily the achievement of Bruno Bauer: he laid the foundation of the proof that Christianity was not imported from outside — from Judea — into the Romano-Greek world and imposed on it, but that, at least in its world-religion form, it is that world's own product. Bauer, of course, like all those who are fighting against deep-rooted prejudices, overreached his aim in this work. In order to define through literary sources, too, Philo's and particularly Seneca's influence on emerging Christianity and to show up the authors of the New Testament formally as downright plagiarists of those philosophers he had to place the appearance of the new religion about half a century later, to reject the opposing accounts of Roman historians and take extensive liberties with historiography in general. According to him Christianity as such appears only under the Flavians, the literature of the New Testament only under Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius. As a result the New Testament accounts of Jesus and his disciples are deprived for Bauer of any historical background: they are diluted in legends in which the phases of interior development and the moral struggles of the ' first communities are transferred to more or less fictitious persons. Not Galilee and Jerusalem, but Alexandria and Rome, according to Bauer, are the birthplaces of the new religion.
The Rise of Christianity, by Albert Kalthoff (1904)

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Was There A Historical Jesus? (1)

Chapter 2: The Preparation For Christianity In The Roman Empire (33)

Chapter 3: The Preparation For Christianity In Greek Philosophy (59)

Chapter 4: The Preparation For Christianity In Judaism (73)

Chapter 5: The Communistic Clubs (101)

Chapter 6: The Organisation Of The Christian Community (117)

Chapter 7: The Christian Church (154)

Chapter 8: The Future Of Christianity (184)
Foundations of Christianity, by Karl Kautsky (1908)

CONTENTS

Book One: The Person Of Jesus

I. The Pagan Sources
II. The Christian Sources
III. The Dispute Over the Concept of Jesus

Book Two: Society in the Roman Empire

I. The Slave Economy
Landed Property
Domestic Slavery
Slavery in Commodity Production
The Technological Inferiority of the Slave Economy
The Economic Decline

II. The State
State and Commerce
Patricians and Plebeians
The Roman State
Usury
Absolutism

III. Thought and Sentiment in the Age of the Roman Empire
Insecurity
Credulity
Untruthfulness
Humaneness
Internationalism
Piety
Monotheism

Book Three: The Jews

I. Israel
Migrations of the Semitic Peoples
Palestine
The Conception of God in Ancient Israel
Trade and Philosophy
Trade and Nationality
Canaan, Road of the Nations
Class Struggles in Israel
The Decline of Israel
The First Destruction of Jerusalem

II. The Jews After the Exile
The Exile
The Jewish Diaspora
The Jewish Propaganda
Anti-Semitism
Jerusalem
The Sadducees
The Pharisees
The Zealots
The Essenes

Book Four: The Beginnings of Christianity

I. The Primitive Christian Community
The Proletarian Character of the Community
Class Hatred
Communism
Objections to the Existence of Communism
Contempt for Labor
Destruction of the Family

II. The Christian Idea of the Messiah
The Coming of the Kingdom of God
The Lineage of Jesus
Jesus as a Rebel
The Resurrection of the Crucified
The International Savior

III. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians
Agitation among the Pagans
The Opposition between Jews and Christians

IV. The History of Christ’s Passion

V. The Development of the Christian Community
Proletarians and Slaves
The Decline of Communism
Apostles, Prophets and Teachers
Bishop
Monasticism
There is nothing here to suggest that they were slapping together a fanciful hypothesis grasped from thin air in order to counter something they feared. I do get that impression from reading modern Jesus Mythers. They instead engaged in a serious examination of the economic, philosophical and cultural conditions that preceded the development of Christian theology and its concept of its own history.

DCH
Solo wrote:
DCHindley wrote:mh,If one were to ask me, the Marxists Engels and Kautsky, and the Monist Kalthoff, have made the best attempts at actually explaining, with plausible antecedents, how the Christian salvation-myth could have formed in the 1st century Roman empire without a human Jesus actually existing.
FYI, Kautsky actually contradicted Engels on Jesus existence. He believed there were authentic scraps of history in which Jesus was one of many Jewish rebels/zealots in his time. For the leading German socialist, the ultimate historical proof of Jesus was the 'primitive Christian communist society' in Jerusalem. He wrote a Marxist theory on the Origins of Christianity for which he received the nickname the Pope of Marxism. I have never been convinced by the argument but nonetheless it is an interesting and absorbing reading. I have discovered that despite his being lamented as an infamous "renegade" by Lenin and the bolsheviks (he was committed to parliamentary democracy), in the latter Soviet Union, his theory was readily embraced and the "mythical Jesus" of Bauer, Engels, Lenin and Drews (which I was taught at university in Prague in 1960's) all but discarded in the 1980's by the Soviet Academia. Many Russian Orthodox churches were built under Gorbachev and many historical ones, destroyed by the early bolshevik activists, rebuilt. Most famous among them is the cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (yes, yes the one in which Pussy Riot screamed obscenities).

Best,
Jiri
Last edited by DCHindley on Mon Sep 01, 2014 11:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
ghost
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by ghost »

Marcion rejected the OT. That's because before the Flavians you didn't need the OT to interpret the gospel. The gospel must have had less references to the OT, or even none at all. So it doesn't follow that the gospel's setting was Jerusalem instead of Rome, or that the river was the Jordan instead of the Rubicon, and so forth.
Ulan
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by Ulan »

ghost wrote:The gospel must have had less references to the OT, or even none at all.
What is left of the gospels if you remove the OT references? And I'm not talking about Matthew's ham-fisted attempts at bending some ill-suited OT passages to his purpose, but all the alluded references that make up the bulk of the text of Mark's gospel?
ghost
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by ghost »

Ulan wrote:
ghost wrote:The gospel must have had less references to the OT, or even none at all.
What is left of the gospels if you remove the OT references? And I'm not talking about Matthew's ham-fisted attempts at bending some ill-suited OT passages to his purpose, but all the alluded references that make up the bulk of the text of Mark's gospel?
Good question. I think the problem is also what the OT references replace, because they might have been inserted to replace somethng else, so as to give the appearance that the setting is Jewish like the OT. I think you'd be left with a bio of Caesar's last 5 years or so, but the order of the anecdotes in the middle of the gospel could be shuffled. For example, one anecdote is that of the Gerasene/Gadarene/Gergesene demoniac (the name shifts) that could be Ceraunian instead. Sayings by or about Jesus could also be rewritings of sayings by or about Caesar. For example, "we have no king but Caesar" could be a rewriting of "I'm not king, but Caesar", "esan gar aleeis" of "alea iacta est".
ghost
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by ghost »

I see here's a reconstructed gospel with less OT references. It's still set in Galilee, and you might argue the reconstruction is wrong, but at least the idea of a gospel with less OT references is not just for nutjobs and conspiracists.

http://www.Marcionite-Scripture.info/Gospel1.html
Adam
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by Adam »

Charles Wilson wrote:
Clive wrote:Is this the christian answer to the question where is the temple? You are?
This is A Christian answer, but one that was grafted onto the Construction. Consider:

John 2: 18 - 22 (RSV):

[18] The Jews then said to him, "What sign have you to show us for doing this?"
[19] Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
[20] The Jews then said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?"
[21] But he spoke of the temple of his body.
[22] When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.

Our Poster Adam may need to step in here and give Teeple's listings of Redactors and Editors here
None of John 2:17-25 is from a source, but is all from the E Editor except for a verse from the R Redactor bridging 22 ot 23, starting at "and they believed the scripture". However, my Thesis holds that the Editor himself was one of the seven eyewitnesses, namely John the Apostle himself.
Charles Wilson
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by Charles Wilson »

Adam wrote:
Charles Wilson wrote:
Clive wrote:Is this the christian answer to the question where is the temple? You are?
This is A Christian answer, but one that was grafted onto the Construction. Consider:

John 2: 18 - 22 (RSV):

[18] The Jews then said to him, "What sign have you to show us for doing this?"
[19] Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."
[20] The Jews then said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?"
[21] But he spoke of the temple of his body.
[22] When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.

Our Poster Adam may need to step in here and give Teeple's listings of Redactors and Editors here
None of John 2:17-25 is from a source, but is all from the E Editor except for a verse from the R Redactor bridging 22 ot 23, starting at "and they believed the scripture". However, my Thesis holds that the Editor himself was one of the seven eyewitnesses, namely John the Apostle himself.
1. Adam: Teeple's ...Gospel of John is on the way! I thank you very much for bringing Teeple's book to my attention.

2. I am prepared to make a major assertion based on your analysis of this section being "E". You word it as E being one of the 7 eyewitnesses. I word it differently but it may be a distinction without a difference.

3. Verses 19 and 20 are most certainly references to the Mishmarot Priesthood and most probably to the Mishmarot Group "Immer". On the assumption that the descriptions of Josephus in Antiquities..., Book17, Section 9 and Wars..., Book 2, Sections 1+ are references to the Temple Slaughter of 4 BCE, [edit: and the verses 19 and 20 are] looking back from 8/9 CE, the Editor is either A: aware by knowledge of Jewish language and customs of that which he is writing about or B: looking at the first translation by written work or by what he is being told. Raskin (See Post from last night on the linkage between Mark and John) argues that the document that Mark may have literally cut up for his work makes this a written work and I agree.

Verse 19 is a continuing source of study for me right now. I have the math showing the overlap between the Mishmarot Group "Bilgah" and "Immer" for Passover Week. It may give an understanding to the statement, "Destroy the Temple and in three days I will raise it up." If the Passover of 4 BCE is on Wednesday-ish and is covered by Bilgah (With other Groups in support positions), the Coup will have thrown out the Quisling Herodians and the Romans. When "Immer", the Group masterminding the Coup, rotates in three days later, the Temple will Consecrated and Re-Dedicated as God stated in Leviticus. Priests, of greater "Piety and Purity", will Stand in the Temple, not the appointed Mongrel High Priests of Herod. God WILL stand by the Ordained Priesthood.

Verse 20 is, as stated earlier a Time Marker from 8/9 CE. It points back to the ascension of Herod and the death of Antigonus. Antigonus is not the only Hasmonean who matters to Herod. He tried killing ALL of the Lineal Rulers of the House of Eleazar, which included the Hasmonean Dynasty.

The reason why 8/9 CE is important is that the Passover of 9 CE is covered by Immer. The math of the Mishmarot rotation finds Immer on duty during this Passover as well. It appears that the Priests (who survived...) could not imagine any other reason for God NOT standing with them in 4 BCE. Was God preparing them for another time when they could return and finish the Job against Rome? The two verses, 19 and 20, are very directly referencing these times. Did the viscerally anti-Semitic final version of John come from this "E"?

4. Note to steve43: You do not agree that there was a "Temple Slaughter" in 4 BCE and I have taken your statements in for an accounting. There is something in the Math that is "Odd" (and I don't mean "even"...) one way or the other, but I do not believe that there was a Saint Josephus. He finessed other written points in his works. Yet, the readings of Antiquities and Wars at this point are consistent and appear to support the thesis that Herod died AND THEN Archelaus almost immediately ordered the massacre of at least 3000. The Mishmarot rotations support it - provided that "Johoiarib" was on duty when the Temple was destroyed by Titus. REAL or LITERARY?

5. Back to Adam: If E wrote verses 21 and 22, either he did not know what he was writing or he was THAT CYNICAL. It is a stupid blunder to try to "fix" the statement with the small bandage of "He was talking of his body...".

"...But when he was raised from the dead..." is AT LEAST as Cynical as anything else in the NT Gospels and there is a lot to consider in the Cynicism Department.

The reason is easy to see. John and Mark had a document in front of them about a Story of incredibly Black Humor, detailing a member of the Group Immer and the friendship between this Priest and a Priest of Bilgah. The Priest of Bilgah is given to us as "John" and also "Eleazar", as in the "House of Eleazar". This other name is given to us in another form: "Lazarus".

6. Adam, I cannot agree with your wording as to "Witness of the Apostle John". I am prepared to give tentative approval to the idea that this "E" MUST have had direct access to the original Story that Mark also had. He writes with knowledge and purpose. If Mark and John are close together in Time and Place, they are writing under orders to Transvalue an incredibly sad literary work. Mark is the better writer. John writes the better Story from what he had. It is less cleverly disguised but is just as lethal.

CW
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DCHindley
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Re: "Brain Damage"

Post by DCHindley »

Pink Floyd (PBUT) wrote:The lunatic is on the grass
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forbodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon
The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'till I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon

"I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvellous! HaHaHa!"


Amen!
Stephan Huller
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by Stephan Huller »

Yes David, the crazies are getting WAY out of hand. It's like they make four or five assumptions and then think they've 'proved' that Jesus is something other than what's been recorded in the ancient texts. I don't understand how we can have four or five lunatics at the forum, each taking similar leaps into fantasyland talking over one another. How can Charles, maryhelena, ghost, Pete all 'agree to disagree' with each other but then turn around to basically declare war on reality? How can Jesus = Caesar coexist with Jesus = Antigonus? It's almost as if they've conspired to allow encourage one another to make up shit in order to forget that the gospel is about a crucifixion of Jesus in a particular year of the reign of Tiberius while Pilate was in Judea. These conversations are getting more and more ridiculous. There isn't even an attempt to address the original posts in a thread. The threads simply become opportunities to air the stupidest opinions ever conceived about Jesus and the early Church.

Can't we have a rule that if an opinion isn't witnessed in ancient literature or cannot be demonstrated to have any basis in reality that we just place these discussions in a subforum or a specific thread devoted to stupid theories?

It was the same problem at the other forum. Real conversation gets drowned out by the basest inanities.
Charles Wilson
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Re: Richard Carrier on gMark parallel with Jesus ben Ananias

Post by Charles Wilson »

Yeah, like that Kook that wrote that book on young Marcus Agrippa. He was so sure that he had cracked the thing wide open.
Then, he started calling it his "...silly, little book...".

Yeah. Like that guy.
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