A mythicohistorical (hybrid) approach to Christian origins.

[MrMacSon]

Yes, thanks, I do know that. It is one of the reasons I am open to different time frames. I am not certain, however, how far to press what is essentially an argument from silence. Are we to suppose that, because crucifixions are not mentioned by our extant historians, they did not happen for 30+ years? That is exactly the sort of stance that would simply be begging for the chance discovery of some fragment, say, from Justus of Tiberias.

One thing that would support that silence is that single, simple line 'Under Tiberius all was quiet' and the fact that things were supposedly also quiet under Agrippa I.

[Ben C. Smith]

Yes, thanks, I do know that. It is one of the reasons I am open to different time frames. I am not certain, however, how far to press what is essentially an argument from silence. Are we to suppose that, because crucifixions are not mentioned by our extant historians, they did not happen for 30+ years? That is exactly the sort of stance that would simply be begging for the chance discovery of some fragment, say, from Justus of Tiberias.

One thing that would support that silence is that single, simple line 'Under Tiberius all was quiet' and the fact that things were supposedly also quiet under Agrippa I.

That is true, as I once mentioned in the form of a question to Ms. Einhorn here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2536&p=57224#p57224.

ETA: Incidentally, MrMacSon, I do not know whether you recall me once opining in a PM to you that perhaps not every Jesus/Christ figure mentioned in early Christian literature is the same Jesus/Christ figure or not, but the OP is the result of that line of inquiry we were discussing at the time.

[Bernard Muller]

to Ben,

I do not think that Philippians 2.5 is part of the hymn. I have a few metric analyses of the hymn saved, and I consult them from time to time, and Philippians 2.5 would seem to be Paul's introduction to it, not a part of it.

OK, but Paul made sure that the one who comes as a humble "servant" is already named Jesus.

That is such a fine line. Again, it is not that I think this is impossible, but rather that another option seems more likely to me.

Even after the gospels (despite the disturbance and the rebel perception), Christian "fathers" considered Jesus sinless.

The comma really does not help much. To rearrange the phrases like the translations do is an indicator that the way the Greek phrases are arranged might lead one to the "wrong" conclusion. What I wonder is whether it might not actually be the "right" conclusion.

In Revelation we have also (5:5-7a)
"and one of the elders saith to me, 'Weep not; lo, overcome did the Lion, who is of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, to open the scroll, and to loose the seven seals of it;
and I saw, and lo, in the midst of the throne, and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb hath stood as it had been slain, ...
and he came and took the scroll ..."

It would still be evidence of a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

There is no precedent in the Jewish scriptures for such a notion.

Three of those four texts are from the Pauline epistles. And the fourth is probably no later than Josephus, certainly no later than Tacitus.

I was referring to your case for an historical Jesus, not the one against it.

Cordially, Bernard

[maryhelena]

The quote from George Wells I mentioned in an earlier post.

Quote:

Can We Trust the New Testament? George Albert Wells (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Can we trust the New Testament?: thoughts on the reliability of Early Christian Testimony. (2003)

By George Albert Wells

Page 50

The summary of the argument of The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1999a) given in this section of the present work makes it clear that I no longer maintain this position (although the change is perhaps not as evident from the titles of those two books as it might be). The weakness of my earlier position was pressed upon me buy J.D.G. Dunn, who objected that we really cannot plausibly assume that such a complex of traditions as we have in the gospels and their source could have developed within such a short time from the early epistles without a historical basis (Dunn 1985,p.29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q, or at any rate parts of it, may well be as early as ca. A.D. 50); and – if I am right, against Doherty and Price – it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that the Q material, whether or not it suffices as evidence of Jesus’s historicity, refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles.

my bolding

George Wells:

“Perhaps Doherty's strongest point is Paul's assertion (1 Cor.2:8) that Jesus was crucified by supernatural forces (the archontes). I take this to mean that they prompted the action of human agents: but I must admit that the text ascribes the deed to the archontes themselves.”

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode.../earliest.html

Two Jesus figures. The Pauline Jesus and the Gospel Jesus. Two NT crucifixion stories. One crucifixion story based on terra-firma and the other crucifixion story based in a 'spiritual' context i.e. based in an intellectual/philosophical/theological context. The Jerusalem above and the Jerusalem below.

George Wells does not have his Galilean preacher figure crucified. Wells gets his terra-firma crucifixion from BCE, (Alexander Jannaeus) Hasmonean Jewish history.

Thus, elements from Doherty plus elements from Wells and research into early christian history might finally move along......

[Giuseppe]

@Ben

In my reconstruction, this Jesus figure does not emulate anyone with the possible exception of the Hebrew hero Joshua.

It has occurred to me that Jesus of Ananus is possibly the Jesus of which I speak; but I have no proof of this equation. What would be required is evidence that the chains of transmission I have identified actually pointed back to this Jesus; and I do not think this can be shown.

My objection (that is the Doherty's) would work in both the cases. For sake of discussion, I concede freely the existence of a historical Jew named Joshua who was crucified by Pilate during the his deliberate imitation of the biblical Joshua. I concede even that ''Mark'' (author) was inspired from this earthly Joshua to derive his Gospel story about the life-on-the-earth of the Christ Jesus of Paul.
Stantibus rebus, The difference between the my view and the your view is that I would call what Mark did as ''mere inspiration by an artist derived from real facts'' while you call it as ''chains of transmission'' (a term remembering ''oral tradition''). The difference is that, in my view, Mark would have realized what he did (to euhemerize the pauline Christ) EVEN if there was not a Joshua crucified by Pilate but only a Jesus ben Ananias. While in your view, if that hypothetical Joshua didn't exist, then Mark would have NOT written the first Gospel, as result.


I think that one of the great merits of Richard Carrier's opus magnum is a precise definition of what is to be meant as HISTORICAL JESUS:

1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.

2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.

3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).

The point 3 is denied clearly by the Ben's reconstruction, in my view. De facto, his hypothetical historical Jesus is NOT the same Jesus ''some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god'', since in his view Paul didn't identify that Jesus with the his celestial Jesus. Carrier's definition of minimal historicity requires that, everywhere there appears the name of ''Jesus Christ'' (in Paul as in the Gospels), always and only the same earthly guy is meant. This not being the case where only the name ''Christ'' (see Odes of Solomon) or only the name ''Joshua'' (see ''Joshua ben Ananias'') appears.

The Ben's error seems in my eyes the same error of this critic of OHJ:

http://postflaviana.org/historicity-jesus-yes/


@Peter

I have no problem with Doherty defining his own terms, but it becomes zealous and overreaching when telling others that *they* cannot call a certain type of idea a "HJ" idea.

In this regard, someone had shown to Carrier an academic article about the real origins of the John Frum cult.

I have lost the link of the comment of Carrier in answer to that guy. The article is the following:

http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl ... /22920.pdf

The conclusion of Carrier is that there would be more evidence of a historical John Frum (very similar to Ben's hypothetical earthly Joshua-emulator) than a historical Jesus.

What happened with John Frum (I go to memory):

A mythical vulcano deity was named “Karaperamun” and (later) ''John Frum''.

A guy named Manehevi claimed the his identity with the deity John Frum as he was ''possessed'' by John Frum.

Even after that it was revealed that he was not the real John Frum, the people believed that John Frum existed, even if Manehevi was not John Frum.

Therefore in this case, we have a John Frum myth who precedes, even if shortly, the first earhtly John-Frum emulator. And the legacy of this Manehevi did contribute to give more ''personality'' to the general portrait of John Frum.

It is clear where is the difference between Jesus and John Frum:

The only earthly Jesus-emulator to our knowledge was Paul (''I was crucified with Jesus'' etc), or Simon Magus (maybe the same identical figure?): in any case, Carrier argued, when the cult was already started (via the Pillars, whoose no evidence exists that they were Joshua-emulators).

While the first earthly John-Frum emulator, this Manehevi, was active (in his claim of being John Frum) just during the same years when the name ''John Frum'' became known to authorities, hence raising the serious possibility that Manehevi was the true historical John Frum.

With this precise difference between John Frum and Jesus, personally I think that Carrier has confuted very well the Price's thesis:

I am not trying to say that there was
a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I
am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed
together with other Jesus images, some one of which may actually have been based on a
historical Jesus the Nazorean. The old Christ-Myth theorists took for granted a single-root
origin theory, just as orthodoxy did; it just chose a different candidate for the root.

(Deconstructing Jesus, p. 163-164)

The old Christ-Myth theorists were simply right: no evidence of Joshua-emulators identified with the Jesus Christ of Paul in the Gospels, apart banal inspirational midrash from Josephus.

[Giuseppe]

The answer by Richard Carrier that, in my view, resolves definitely the question posed by Ben's thesis (please read my post above), is the following:

Thanks for that article. I do cite abundant scholarship on the Cargo Cults in OHJ (Element 29), but this would have been a nice addition to that list.

The alternative you suggest at the end doesn’t work as an explanation of the origins of Christianity, however. Certainly other people’s stories were cannibalized to create later myths about Jesus (e.g. the historical end of Jesus ben Ananias in the 60s AD was used by Mark to structure his crucifixion narrative for Jesus Christ, even though the latter was claimed to have died thirty years earlier). But Christianity was already around for decades by then.

Paul attests that Christianity began with the belief that the archangel became incarnate and died, which was learned by revelation from his resurrected self (and confirmed in secret messages in scripture), and that this event had occurred in very recent history (with some math, we can show it was most likely in the 30s, and within just a few years of Paul joining the sect). That leaves not enough time for earthly emulators to precede (no one had even thought of the death scheme before that, and in any event even if someone had, and tried to play the part, they would obviously not be the same person the Christians were talking about, since there can only be one of them, and that’s the one Cephas, and later Paul, saw in a vision) and none who followed could have any connection to Christianity (since the death already happened, no one trying to play the part later would be acknowledged as the real one, nor could even have been imagined to be, by Christians).

(my bold, cursive original, source: http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives ... ment-14104 )

This is the problem for Ben's view: his Joshua-emulator is only a mere actor cannibalized by ''Mark'' to euhemerize the Pauline Christ. If that particular actor was missing (as I think he was, whereas for John Frum we have evidence of well three natives posing as his emulators in action during the same formative years of the cult), Mark would have no problem to find other actors (from Josephus or from his memory) to give ''flesh and blood'' to his invention.

[Blood]

Yahweh was, I submit, worshipped as a descending and ascending (dying and rising) deity after the pattern of Ba'al (or Hadad); both Ba'al and Yahweh were cloudriding storm gods; both were at least sometimes regarded as sons of the high god El; and Ba'al actually meant "lord", which is interesting insofar as Yahweh was often rendered as "lord" in various texts, including the Septuagint. Psalm 18.46 (18.47 Masoretic; 17.47 LXX) reads: "Yahweh lives, and blessed be my rock; and exalted be the God of my salvation." This line echoes lines 18-21 of column 3 of the Ugaritic account of Ba'al and Môt, in which Ba'al has succumbed to death in the nether realm: "Even I may sit down and be at ease, and (my) soul within me may take its ease; for mightiest Baal is alive, for the prince lord of earth exists." This descent and ascent of Yahweh perhaps mirrored, in some retellings, that of Inana (or Ishtar), in which the goddess is said to have descended through seven layers or portals to reach the nether realm, where she was slain but rose up again after three days and three nights. Yahweh is, in this story cycle, essentially a savior; he is also the son of El (or El Elyon); that is, he is the son of God. He may, then, have earned the name Yehoshua. Yehoshua (= "Yahweh saves") is to Yahweh as Zeus Soter (= "Zeus the savior") is to Zeus.

Constructions like "dying and rising gods" are basically junk DNA that keep discussions like these bogged down in obsolete 19th century thinking. Frazer, who was an atheist, wrote with a not-so-subtle anti-Christian agenda. He wanted to demonstrate that there was nothing special about Christianity without explicitly stating that, which is dishonest. His three examples of "dying and rising gods" (Osiris, Adonis, Attis) have some similarities; but they also have huge differences, which Frazer downplayed. All the deities of the ancient world were "dead" (i.e., not present in physical form) but mystically "alive" (to hear prayers and receive supplications).

"Lord" is a late middle ages Germanic/English word; it has no relevance whatsoever to ancient religion, it only confuses matters.

[Ben C. Smith]

to Ben,

I do not think that Philippians 2.5 is part of the hymn. I have a few metric analyses of the hymn saved, and I consult them from time to time, and Philippians 2.5 would seem to be Paul's introduction to it, not a part of it.

OK, but Paul made sure that the one who comes as a humble "servant" is already named Jesus.

Paul may have, but his spiritual forebears may not have.

The comma really does not help much. To rearrange the phrases like the translations do is an indicator that the way the Greek phrases are arranged might lead one to the "wrong" conclusion. What I wonder is whether it might not actually be the "right" conclusion.

In Revelation we have also (5:5-7a)
"and one of the elders saith to me, 'Weep not; lo, overcome did the Lion, who is of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, to open the scroll, and to loose the seven seals of it;
and I saw, and lo, in the midst of the throne, and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb hath stood as it had been slain, ...
and he came and took the scroll ..."

Yes, and in chapter 12 a child is born. I am not sure that any of it means that the plain meaning of Revelation 13.8 ought to be discarded.

It would still be evidence of a Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

There is no precedent in the Jewish scriptures for such a notion.

The Jewish scriptures are not the only book on my shelf. I am also interested in the ancient correspondence between Ba'al and Yahweh, and what the mythic defeat of chaos or death might mean for some of our texts. How much precedent is there for a crucifixion to be cast in sacrificial terms as we find in the epistle to the Hebrews? What I am saying is that the Lamb having been slain may well be a similar sacrificial interpretation of Yahweh's temporary succumbing to chaos or death.

Three of those four texts are from the Pauline epistles. And the fourth is probably no later than Josephus, certainly no later than Tacitus.

I was referring to your case for an historical Jesus, not the one against it.

Ah, I see. Well, the gospel of Mark is hard for me to use as outright evidence, without leveraging it somehow, because we do not know for certain who wrote it or when. (I know you know who wrote it and when, but I for one am not as certain as you are.) Unprovenanced texts ought to be used with great caution. What I am really seeking is a chain of transmission that we can actually (albeit hypothetically) trace. Mark gives us exactly one example of that, and I use it. Papias gives us another, as does the Johannine appendix. If earlier texts gave us such chains of transmission, I would use them. The epistles of Paul might do so with James, but yeesh, there is so much going on there, and I am not certain the relevant passages are original to the epistles of Paul (owing in great part, of course, to me tending to give Marcion a bit more credit than you do). I wish I could decide for certain whether they are or not, but I cannot as yet, and they feel rather suspicious to me. I did make allowances for that contingency, however, in the OP: if Paul knew the brother of Jesus, then obviously the stage he belongs to would change (he would move from the "mythical Jesus Christ" box to the "mythicohistorical Jesus Christ" box).

As for Josephus, I am not at all convinced that he said anything about either Jesus or James. Tacitus I have my doubts about, as well, though in his case it might not matter either way, since he may simply have picked up on Christian tradition and not cared either way about its original veracity, being content to point out that the founder had suffered a shameful death, so much the worse for the poor deluded saps who still follow him.

I have to say, Bernard, that I have found your website very useful on these issues (believe it or not), and I have leaned in your historicist direction many, many times. (You may recall those times when I have PMed you to ask where to find something on your site.) One thing that holds me back is that short list of passages that I feel I have to twist to align with that approach; and I do not like having to twist them. On the other side, I have often found myself leaning in a more mythicist direction, but again, what holds me back is the feeling that I am either twisting or just plain ignoring some of those little chains of transmission and other indicators. This thread is my attempt to have it both ways, without feeling I am twisting any particular datum out of sorts. I suppose I may easily be accused of privileging some data over others (perhaps the Marcionite version of Paul over the canonical version), but at least there is some evidence there, and one can easily imagine how the one set of data might give rise to the other. It is harder for me to imagine, say, an author wording Revelation 13.8 as he did if he had no notion of the Lamb having been sacrificed from the beginning; there is no easy fallback for me on those kinds of issues: the text is what it is, and I can either read it in its most natural sense or feel crumby for having twisted its meaning to conform to other data points.

[Ben C. Smith]

Constructions like "dying and rising gods" are basically junk DNA that keep discussions like these bogged down in obsolete 19th century thinking.

In the Ugaritic texts, Ba'al apparently goes down into the underworld, is temporarily overwhelmed by death, but then defeats death and goes back up again. In other texts, Ishtar or Inana descends gate by gate into the lower world, gets hung upon a hook, but then is revived and ascends again to the upper world. Are you happy with "descending and ascending" and simply making a point about my parenthetical "dying and rising" terminology? Or does the terminology of descent and ascent also prick your ears?

Frazer, who was an atheist, wrote with a not-so-subtle anti-Christian agenda.

That may well be true. I also do not care. I have accepted many fine points both from people who attack and from people who defend Christianity. It is my job to separate the motives (including my own) from the evidence.

"Lord" is a late middle ages Germanic/English word; it has no relevance whatsoever to ancient religion, it only confuses matters.

Yes, yes, "warden of the loaf" and all that. Are you seriously pretending that I was not simply using the standard English translation of the ancient Greek kurios? I think obtuseness like that is what confuses matters. The same pedantry can be applied to using the term "church" for ecclesia and such. While it might not be a bad idea to use the original language terms for every key concept, avoiding later Germanic terms, it would lead to sentences like this: Paul wrote to the ἐκκλησία in Rome about the δικαιοσύνη and ἀγαθωσύνη of θεός. Such a thing ought to be totally unnecessary on a forum such as this one.

[Ben C. Smith]

Can you add the information about different names, such as 'Simon' (Gospels) vs 'Cephas' (Paul)? Maybe the chief disciple of Jesus got retconned as the Cephas in Paul.

Okay, here is my take on this issue so far. Please bear in mind that all of this is in flux and far from certain.

I have already sort of tipped my hand on this with my discussion of those shadowy apostolic doubles that we find all over the early record, a phenomenon that seems to strike at the so-called Pillars (Galatians 2.9) with special force. Is Peter the same as Cephas? Is either of those the same as Simon? Is John of Zebedee the same as John the Revelator or John the Elder? Is James/Jacob the Just the same as James of Zebedee? Is either of those the same as James the son of Mary and brother of Joses?

Other apostolic and related names show some flexibility, as well, despite not being Pillars: Matthew and Matthias (and throw in Levi for good measure), Philip the Evangelist and Philip the Apostle, various women named Mary, a couple of men named Jude/Judas, and so on.

I suspect that, in a lot of these cases, what we have are two or more different individuals who share either the same name or close enough to the same name to make the connection. Most of the names in question (with notable exceptions, such as Peter) are quite common (John, Judas, James/Jacob, Mary), so imagining two or more people with the same name is not a hindrance. Some of these names may have belonged to actual followers of the seditious Jesus (Simon?), while others may have belonged to various groups of mystics (such as the Twelve, with or without the man named Peter?) as described in 1 Corinthians 15.5-8 (whether genuinely Pauline or not), Hebrews 2.1-4, and 1 John 1.1-3. Perhaps the after-the-fact messianic insights of the historical Jesus' followers and the visionary experiences of the mystics were eventually seen as pretty much the same thing, with the effect that the two groups were seen as one and the same. If there was one John among the mystics and another John (of Zebedee?) among the followers, it would be natural for confusion to arise. If Peter was a luminary amongst the mystics, famous for a very personal vision of the mythical Jesus Christ, there might be great pressure early on, once this Jesus Christ was somewhat firmly identified in some circles with a Jesus who was crucified in Jerusalem, to make him one of the latter's personal followers; he may have been artificially lumped with Symeon/Simon, who really had been a premier follower. Perhaps this Peter was even slow at first to acknowledge that the historical Jesus had anything to do with the visions, and this slowness was transmitted as him having denied Jesus for a time before coming around. (I know... speculation run amok.)

I definitely suspect on other grounds that the selection and order of the Catholic epistles (James, Peter, John, Jude) reflects the names and order of the Pillars as Paul lists them (James, Cephas, John). But, if Peter, the Pillars, and the Twelve were important enough to build these kinds of structures upon, then they would have been important enough to turn into representatives of both sides (the mythicist cultists and the former seditionist followers). So I also suspect that all emphasis on an inner circle of three disciples (Peter, James, and John) during Jesus' ministry is a backcasting of the influence of the three Pillars named in Galatians 2.9 (James, Cephas, John). The three men are probably not the same at all, but their names were either identical to or close (enough) to the names of actual followers of Jesus (on this hypothesis, the common names of John and James were easy to find amongst the followers, but the uncommon name of Peter was not — so, after being artificially equated with Cephas/Caiaphas, it was added as a surname to Simon in order to equate those men).

It seems possible to me that the Transfiguration is a remembrance of Peter's visionary experience; at any rate, this event is associated with Peter in particular in 2 Peter 1.16-18 (along with an anonymous "we"), in the Apocalypse of Peter (along with the Twelve), and of course in the synoptic gospels (along with James and John). And the Transfiguration is sometimes suspected as a resurrection appearance backdated to the career of Jesus in the gospels. The Transfiguration story, along with the desire to turn the visionary Twelve into companions of the historical Jesus, may have been a visionary Peter's gateway into Jesus' life as Simon's alter ego. I think it may be one of a veritable flood of events which originally either postdated the resurrection or had nothing to do with either it or Jesus' life (the walking on water, calming the sea, the miraculous catch of fish, the adoption of Jesus as son of God) which have been pushed back into the ministry so as to fill it out with stories that are not about a band of misfits who tried and failed to instigate some kind of revolutionary Passover mischief. In the version in 2 Peter, the visionaries are called ἐπόπται, which was used in two principal ways, I think. First, it was an epithet for a deity as an overseer; second, however, it was a term for an initiate into various mysteries, as we find, for example, in Plutarch:

Plutarch, Life of Alexander 7.5: 5 It would appear, moreover, that Alexander not only received from his master his ethical and political doctrines, but also participated in those secret and more profound teachings which philosophers designate by the special terms "acroamatic" and "epoptic" ( ἀκροατικὰς καὶ ἐποπτικὰς), and do not impart to many.

Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 22.3: 3 His impeachment is on record, and runs as follows: "Thessalus, son of Cimon, of the deme Laciadae, impeaches Alcibiades, son of Cleinias, of the deme Scambonidae, for committing crime against the goddesses of Eleusis, Demeter and Cora, by mimicking the mysteries and showing them forth to his companions in his own house, wearing a robe such as the High Priest wears when he shows forth the sacred secrets to the initiates, and calling himself High Priest, Pulytion Torch-bearer, and Theodorus, of the deme Phegaea, Herald, and hailing the rest of his companions as Mystae [μύστας] and Epoptae [ἐπόπτας], contrary to the laws and institutions of the Eumolpidae, Heralds, and Priests of Eleusis."

Now, maybe 2 Peter is taking a page from the gospels and mystifying it, deliberately removing or at least obscuring the notion of eyewitness testimony, which is better conveyed by αὐτόπτης, as we find in Luke and in Herodotus...:

Luke 1.1-4: 1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses [αὐτόπται] and servants of the word, 3 it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; 4 so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.

Herodotus, Histories 2.29.1: I was unable to learn anything from anyone else, but this much further I did learn by the most extensive investigation that I could make, going as far as the city of Elephantine as eyewitness [αὐτόπτης], and beyond that by question and hearsay.

...than by ἐπόπτης, and replacing it with mystic sight. Or maybe, just maybe, 2 Peter reflects the starting point for this line of tradition, the visionary imaginings of a mystery cult; and the mystic ἐπόπται were turned into literal αὐτόπται sometime after an historical Jesus came into the picture:

2 Peter 1.16-18: 16 For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses [ἐπόπται] of His majesty. 17 For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased”— 18 and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.

The mountain may be literal or it may be figurative. The quote from heaven is from Psalm 2.7. It is not my contention that 2 Peter predates the merging of the cultists with the former seditionists; rather, if I am right, it merely preserves something more original than either the synoptic version or the apocalyptic version of the tale.

Philip may have followed the opposite trajectory as Peter: Philip was, ex hypothesi, one of the followers of the historical Jesus, and his daughters provided some information to Papias (whereas Peter and the others simply appear as a possible ultimate sources in Papias' list, and we do not have any indications of direct chains back to the individual names as we do in the case of Philip). But not all of the names of the Twelve visionaries were known in later generations, so his name was added to their ranks, once the Twelve had been retrojected into Jesus' ministry, in the intermingling of the two sides that I mentioned earlier; the flow could go both ways.

At any rate, overall, my tentative perspective is that, when the mythic Jesus Christ cultists and the historic Jesus followers merged (on the basis of the core coincidence I have sketched out), various names on both sides of the aisle had to be coordinated. Some names (James, John) were very common and found exact matches on the other side, and were thus merged on the same basis that the two figures named Jesus had been merged. Other names (Peter) were not so common, and some fiddling took place to make sure that such important people were amply represented. Visions (probably more important to the cultists than to the seditionists) became the key factor for leadership, so everyone important had to have one, even if only in retrospect, regardless of whether that vision had been a true mystic experience (Peter on the holy mountain and Paul in the third heaven?) or simply an insight into the messianic nature of the Jesus who had been crucified in Jerusalem (James at his eucharistic table?). Maybe the Apocalypse of John was taken as John the Pillar's moment.

Again, all is tentative.

Ben.