Did Rev 11:8 euhemerize Jesus for the first time?

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Giuseppe
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Did Rev 11:8 euhemerize Jesus for the first time?

Post by Giuseppe »

I have noted that many Mythicists of the past have described what I would call, in absence of better terms, a post-70 “re-judaization” of the Christianity (to distinguish it from the mere fact of the Jewish Origins of Christianity).

For example, so Georges Ory:

In light of this evidence, it is assumed that confusion took place — far removed from these events in time and space — between the god named Jesus and various men in Galilee who had the same name, and who raised rebel armies to throw off the Roman yoke. Following their defeat and flight, this sect or these groups of assassins or zealots must have come across people among their Jewish co-religionists and among the pagans who revered a certain Jesus who was god. It was doubtlessly easy for them to believe that this god was their messiah who had ascended to heaven. There were certainly bitter disputes between these new Christians, these Jewish Christians, and the Gnostic Christians
...
These early Christian works were Judaized through numerous interpolations that turned a divine being into a man of flesh who played a role in Jerusalem.
...
It is not out of the question (as the Epistle to the Hebrews may seem to indicate) that the Christian community had to welcome the remnants of Jewish sects who had left Judaea at the end of the first century or after 135 with no hope of return, offering them a new priesthood and a tabernacle “outside the camp”.

(Analysis of Christian Origins, p. 50-51, 66, my bold)

And so Eduard Dujardin:

The proper name Christos is thus evidence of the first Hellenization of Jesus. The word Messiah in the modern sense of Liberator is the witness of the Judaization of Jesus. It dates from around the year 70.
...
The Jewish notion of Messianism attributed to the name of Christ was the main cause of the Judaization of Christianity, when , in order to take the place left vacant by Judaism, which appeared to have perished with Jerusalem in the year 70, it sought to make Christianity the heir of “the new Israel”.
....
After the destruction of Jerusalem in the year A.D. 70, in the hope of recovering the heritage of Judaism, the Church attempted to reconcile the Christian promise of salvation and the Messianic promise. The Christian hope was substituted as the incarnation of the Jewish hope, thus uniting in the ancient god Jesus the contradictory features of the Jewish Messiah and a slain and resurrected mystery god.
(p. 51-51, 135-136, Ancient History of God Jesus, my bold)


And so G. A. Wells:
Te next letter in the canonical collection is the first epistle general of Peter, which purports to come from 'Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ'.
...
All the prophets expected the final reckoning to come in the last times, that is, their own. Peter, however, places not only Jesus' second, but also his first coming in the last times. He says that Christ who redeemed us with his precious blood 'was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world, but was manifested at the end of the times for your sake, who through him are believers in God, which raised him from the dead and gave him glory' (1:20). This suggestion that his sufferings on earth belong to the relatively recent past is not present in the Pauline letters. So far we have met it only in the non-Pauline I Tim.
(The Jesus of the early Christians, p. 153, my bold)

From the words of Peter, “indeed..., but...” it seems that Peter was moving the death of Jesus from ''before the foundation of world'' to ''the end of times''.


But the best among all the Mythicists was beyond any doubt in my view Luis Gordon Rylands. He was an authentic vulcano of acute ideas about all the principal topics of Christian Origins. No surprise that some of these ideas may be inconsistent among them, but this doesn't decrease their value.

So Rylands :
If it were possible for historical students to investigate the early stages of Christian development entirely free from prepossessions, they would, I am sure, perceive that the Christianity of Asia Minor owed nothing at all directly to Jerusalem during the first three quarters of the first century. It grew up in the Jewish diaspora quite free from Ebionitish or Judaic elements ; it was, indeed, a revolt from formal Judaism, fostered by the free spirit of Greek philosophy. The name "Christ Jesus" was, of course, of Jewish origin, Christos = Messiah, Jesus = Joshua; but the Gnostic "Christ Jesus" was entirely different in his nature and functions from the Jewish national or apocalyptic Messiah. All the writings contained in the three earlier Epistles, up to the year 75 at least, are Gnostic, and exhibit not the least trace of Judaic influence. They are absolutely silent as to any conflict between the new ideas and the old, and indeed exclude it by their freedom from hostility to Judaism. The spiritual blindness of the Jews is deplored. Regret is apparent, but no bitterness. No doubt conflict had occurred in Jerusalem between the adherents of the new Judaism and the old, and Jews had opposed the propaganda elsewhere. But the tone of the documents negatives the idea that a Judaizing party in the Church had made attacks upon the young Pauline communities in the region in which the documents were composed. Between 70 and 80 A.D., modification becomes evident. But that modification cannot be traced to influences emanating from Jerusalem. It was produced almost, if not quite, entirely by the interaction of Gnostic parties holding various views within the churches. It has been proved that at a very early date there was a Jewish Gnostic party which held that Christ had come in the flesh, or that the purely human Jesus had been inspired by the pneumatic Christ.
....
There is, however, no reason to suppose that Jewish Messianic ideas came in the first instance into the Pauline communities directly from Palestine. It is much more likely that they were derived from some of the Apocalypses. Some of these were Judaic, but others have distinct Gnostic affinities ; the Book of Enoch particularly.
All the evidence goes to show that the Pauline communities were beginning to be permeated by Messianic ideas at a fairly early date, perhaps about 80 A.D., and that these ideas came, not from Jerusalem, but from one or other of the Apocalypses.
A little later a party of Cephas representing Ebionitish and Jewish national Messianic ideas made its appearance. That party was for some time not aggressive. The absence of hostility or bitterness from all the references to the party of Cephas in First Corinthians proves that in the main its doctrines were not irreconcilable with those of the majority ; and no doubt they gradually permeated the churches.
....
By the end of the first century probably a Gospel was in existence localizing the sacrifice of the Saviour God, or the Messiah, Jesus, in Jerusalem. The result of that would be that the party of Cephas would very rapidly grow in authority. "Traditions" professing to come from men who had known the divine man in the flesh began to emanate from Jerusalem. The church in Jerusalem, now in a position to claim that its leaders were the successors of the Apostles, and that it was the repository of the "traditions," could speak with authority to the other communities, in which the ground had been prepared by the party of Cephas. And it ventured to push its authority so far as to require Gentile Christians to conform to the Mosaic law. Now at length, late in the first or early in the second century, the situation exhibited in the Epistle to the Galatians becomes not merely possible but just what one would naturally expect. This sketch of Christian development during the first century is not only reconcilable with, but even supported by, the documentary evidence, as the traditional hypothesis certainly is not ; it is, moreover, perfectly reasonable and probable in itself. There is sufficient evidence that there was no conflict over the Mosaic law until late in the first century.
(A Critical Analysis of the Four Chief Pauline Epistles, p. 278-282, my bold)

Therefore the mention of the intrusion of ''some came from Jerusalem'' in an Epistle to Galatians fabricated in 100 CE reveals, for Rylands, the existence of a claim by Judaizers that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem. But who was the first to place the crucifixion in Jerusalem and why?

Rylands notes rightly that the “Jewish Messianic ideas ... were derived from some of the Apocalypses” and I would add: from the Revelation of Saint John, in particular by 11:8:
and their body shall be on the street of the great city, which is called spiritually Sodom and Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified.
It is not an interpolation. The link 'Jerusalem/death of Jesus' was absolutely necessary for the first post-70 Judaizers. If Jesus was crucified at Jerusalem, then his shed blood purified firstly the Jews of Jerusalem who believed in him. Therefore they were more true Christians then all the Christians of the Diaspora, for a sort of IUS PRIMAE SANGUINIS. There is something, in this primitive logic, that remembers me the medieval IUS PRIMAE NOCTIS : only because a woman is married in the land of the feudal lord, the latter has right to have sexual relations with her. So, for the author of Revelation, only because “the Lord” was crucified in Jerusalem, the Christians of Jerusalem were the first ones to be purified by the his blood and therefore they possessed exclusively Christ.

Therefore the idea that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem was the first step towards his coming euhemerization.

A crucifixion in Jerusalem implies eo ipso a Roman crucifixion (one despised as such by the same Romans?). And who wrote the Earliest Gospel (after Bar Kochba) did the rest.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Did Rev 11:8 euhemerize Jesus for the first time?

Post by MrMacSon »

Giuseppe wrote: Mon Sep 11, 2017 11:34 pm I have noted that many Mythicists of the past have described what I would call, in absence of better terms, a post-70 “re-judaization” of the Christianity (to distinguish it from the mere fact of the Jewish Origins of Christianity).
I think reference to 70 [ad] (as in post-70 ad) is unnecessary. I don't think there is any evidence of Christianity before the 2nd century (I don't believe Paul's letters or the synoptics had been written before the early-mid 2nd century AD).


So Georges Ory:
... this sect or these groups of assassins or zealots must have come across people among their Jewish co-religionists and among the pagans who revered a certain Jesus who was god. It was doubtlessly easy for them to believe that this god was their messiah who had ascended to heaven. There were certainly bitter disputes between these new Christians, these Jewish Christians, and the Gnostic Christians ...

...Christian works were [likely] Judaized through numerous interpolations that turned a divine being into a man of flesh who [is said to have] played a role in Jerusalem.
...
It is not out of the question (as the Epistle to the Hebrews may seem to indicate) that the Christian community had to welcome the remnants of Jewish sects who had left Judaea at the end of the first century or after 135 with no hope of return, offering them a new priesthood and a tabernacle “outside the camp”.
(Analysis of Christian Origins, p. 50-51, 66)

And so Eduard Dujardin:
The proper name Christos is thus evidence of the first Hellenization of Jesus. The word Messiah in the modern sense of Liberator is the witness of the Judaization of Jesus. It dates from around the year 70.
(p. 51-51, 135-136, Ancient History of God Jesus,
I would say Christos was a notion before Jesus. It may have been tied to notions of a Yeshua or a Joshua, before Jesus was a concept.


Eduard Dujardin: -
The Jewish notion of Messianism attributed to the name of Christ was the main cause of the Judaization of Christianity, when , in order to take the place left vacant by Judaism, which appeared to have perished with Jerusalem in the year 70, it sought to make Christianity the heir of “the new Israel”.
(p. 51-51, 135-136, Ancient History of God Jesus,
I doubt Judaism "perished in with Jerusalem in the year 70".

If Christianity was Judaised, that Judaization would likely to have been done in the late 2nd century.


"...the Church [may have] attempted to reconcile the Christian promise of salvation and the Messianic promise [in the hope of recovering the heritage of Judaism]"

and "The Christian hope [may have become conflated with] the incarnation of the Jewish hope, thus uniting in the ancient god Jesus the contradictory features of [a] Jewish Messiah and a slain and resurrected mystery god" (p. 51-51, 135-136, Ancient History of God Jesus),

but that would likely have been done later than Eduard Dujardin proposed.

.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Did Rev 11:8 euhemerize Jesus for the first time?

Post by MrMacSon »

Giuseppe wrote: Mon Sep 11, 2017 11:34 pm ... the idea that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem was the first step towards his coming euhemerization.

A crucifixion in Jerusalem implies eo ipso a Roman crucifixion (one despised as such by the same Romans?). And who wrote the Earliest Gospel (after Bar Kochba) did the rest.
Crucifixion in Jerusalem ~ 30 AD allowed the blame to be attributed to the Jews, while also having some Roman authority in the process.

It also allowed the narrative to be set in a place and time where it could not be contradicted.

And it allowed the euhemerisation to take place when it was decided to cement Jesus as a man(to reify him).
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