About those "loggerheads", I should give the following explanation for the readers:
I think that if Paul lived in the 50 CE and wrote integrally the epistles attributed to him, then end of the discussion: Richard Carrier is right. Period.
Abandoning that assumption, I continue to read what DCHindley argues:
Indeed Batsch thinks that the early Christians were the last post-70 followers of the various failed pre-70 Messianists (Theudas, the "Egyptian", possibly a rebel Galilean, the Samaritan false prophet, and many many others etc). I think that this view is corroborated by the fact that there are indeed in the Gospel tradition, docet Detering (following Augstein, here), a long list of items resembling this or that failed pre-70 messianist. By the 70, the embryonic topos existed already, that the "king of the Jews", "Messiah" or "Christos", was connected with the crucifixion as form of death, since the crucifixion was what expected fatally all the failed messianists. After the 70, this topos had only to be explicited by a story, based on the the various dicta et acta collected by the post-70 followers of the various pre-70 failed messianists.DCHindley wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 12:20 pm but I started to look at the issue.
IIUC, you are proposing that the earliest Christian good-news began with an account detailing several failed attempts to establish a Judean 'Kingdom of God' on earth, followed by the early Christian's solution: that Jesus was indeed a messiah (anointed leader) but one of a supernatural nature that opens salvation to everyone, not just Judeans.
I see here a first great difference between Batsch's view and DCHindley's view: the latter thinks that the principal hero of the post-70 story, i.e. "Jesus", is not an amalgam of various pre-70 failed messianists, but precisely the memory of a specific historical figure: the rebel Galilean crucified by Pilate, and only him.
At contrary, I think that this rebel Galilean crucified by Pilate, if he existed, could still (!) have contributed to zero for the post-70 story, since the name of Pilate could have been derived from the memory of Dositheus (identified by a lot of people in Internet with the false Samaritan prophet killed by Pilate), while the Galilean origin of the hero of the story could have been derived from the memory of Jesus b. Sapphat (docet Greg Doudna).
the portrait of Jesus as a sort of vagabond preacher of wisdom sayings and justice may be a marcionite contribution (Marcion not coincidentially coming from Sinope), but at any case I see the gospels more as one against the other, rather than all allied against "the common Roman government opinion that Jesus had been justly executed as an unapproved royal claimant".DCHindley wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 12:20 pmI have argued in the past that I felt that the three synoptic Gospels were completed as attempts to "correct" the common Roman government opinion that Jesus had been justly executed as an unapproved royal claimant, and thus a threat to peaceful society. They present Jesus as a sort of vagabond preacher of wisdom sayings and justice (not that uncommon at that time and region according to Kloppenborg 's The Formation of Q, 1987), who was framed by the evil Jews to serve their pursuit of unjust power by force. I have long proposed that proto-orthodox Christians had re-invented Jesus into a divine redeemer in response to the disappointments of the war's results, and an extreme form of social stratification that developed between "Greeks" and Judeans. in Judea, Galilee, Batanea and southern Syria generally. There were atrocities, war crimes, and extreme animosity between "sides."
I agree completely with this view. Here I may see in action the Simonians, the Marcionites, the Cainites, followed by the proto-Catholics. Here I may see even the fabrication of Paul in the gentile field: after the Earliest Gospel (=the collection of acta et dicta) and before Mark. Paul himself may have acta et dicta found in the collection, insofar Paul himself (!) could be the expanded memory of the Herodian Saul, persecutor of the Zealots. The Herodian Saul was historically an active propagandist on behalf of the "king of the Jews" (Agrippa), but when the image of "king of the Jews" was connected with the image of the 'crucified Messiah' (docet Batsch), then the memory of Saul was distorted as the legend of the Christian apostle Paul/Saul and adopted easily by radical gentilizers (=anti-demiurgists).
surely I differ from you insofar you distance yourself from the Batsch's theory of Jesus as post-70 amalgam of various failed pre-70 messianists. In other terms, your fault is that you are historicist: you really think that a Galilean victim of Pilate was remembered in the final product as and better (sic) than any other failed pre-70 messianist: this your view is historicism, isn't it?