A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

Two reasons to think so:
  • After the 70 CE, without more messianists in action (they are all dead), the followers of the various messianist traditions had to invent one, unless they could only join the last rebels in Masada or the last pharisees in Yabne.
  • The Gospels are surely full of déja vu effects, i.e. a false sense of familiarity about what other figures (not Jesus) did in the past: in primis or inter alia, the mere mention of Pilate would have moved probably the original readers to think about a historical figure who was killed by Pilate, i.e. the Samaritan false prophet, identified by some with Dositheus.
So, if a Jesus existed under Pilate and was not Dositheus, then he couldn't be THE historical Jesus, not more than a different messianist could be THE historical Jesus of his own right, insofar some actions or sayings also of the latter were artificially reported in the Gospel tradition.

Therefore: a historical Jesus never existed, since the concept itself of an only fondative figure was totally absent in the mind of the authors of that original collection that was the Earliest Gospel.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

The Earliest Gospel was not Mark, not proto-Mark, not Q, not even Mcn or proto-Lukas or proto-John.

The Earliest Gospel was a mere collection of the various acta et dicta remembered about various pre-70 messianist figures who posed as Joshua/Jesus (i.e. "a Prophet like Moses") or as the Messiah-King (Christos) or both.

The second step was to derive from this collection, through obviously the midrash from previous Jewish scriptures, the ideal figure of a "Joshua" and a "Christos". And here you are free to give your own solution to the synoptical problem.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

I confess that I am indebted to prof Christophe Batsch (a Jesus Agnostic, if not a Mythicist):

C’est probablement là, dans le bouillonnement intellectuel de la ville érudite, et dans l’urgence de trouver une explication à la catastrophe en cours, que furent hâtivement rassemblés, compilés et recopiés toutes les paroles, plus ou moins fidèlement conservées, les unes en araméen, les autres en hébreu, les dernières en grec de tout ce que la Judée avait connu de messies au cours du dernier siècle. Ces recueils de dicta hétérogènes (parmi lesquels rien n’interdit d’imaginer que figuraient ceux d’un charismatique galiléen) furent la matière première à partir de laquelle on élabora bientôt des évangiles, plus tard canoniques ou apocryphes, marqués aux sceaux divers des théologies différentes qui les inspiraient. Tous ces recueils possédaient néanmoins en commun ceci qu’ils rapportaient les actes et les paroles d’un «sauveur», Yeshua, qui était aussi le «messie», Chrestos.
Ce fut là le berceau du judéo-christianisme qui, sous ses formes multiples, déborda les frontières du judaïsme, d’abord à Alexandrie (d’où tout semble provenir en matière de Nouveau Testament), puis dans l’Orient de l’Empire, jusque dans sa capitale enfin. Les plus anciennes attestations écrites mentionnant les chrétiens dans des sources «païennes» (en l’occurrence latines) sont toutes datées du début du IIe siècle de l’ère commune. Il y a là une convergence remarquable qui donne à penser que le «phénomène chrétien» est alors tout à coup découvert et pris en considération par le monde romain, ses dirigeants et ses penseurs. Ce sont un passage des Annales de Tacite qui manifeste une connaissance au moins indirecte des récits évangéliques de la Passion du Christ (vers 110) ; la lettre de Pline à Trajan sur les chrétiens de Bithynie (vers 111-112); enfin la définition par Suétone des chrétiens comme «une catégorie de gens avec des superstitions nouvelles et maléfiques» (entre 119 et 12.)


My translation via Deepl of the first part:

It was probably there, in the intellectual ferment of the scholarly city, and in the urgency of finding an explanation for the catastrophe in progress, that all the words, more or less faithfully preserved, were hastily gathered, compiled and recopied, some in Aramaic, others in Hebrew, and the last ones in Greek, of all the messiahs that Judea had known in the course of the last century. These collections of heterogeneous dicta (among which there is nothing to prevent us from imagining that they included those of a Galilean charismatic) were the raw material from which gospels were soon elaborated, later canonical or apocryphal, marked with the various seals of the different theologies that inspired them. What all these collections had in common, however, was that they reported the acts and words of a "saviour", Yeshua, who was also the "messiah", Chrestos.

Hence the goal was to idealize the figure of the 'saviour' and 'messiah'. The facts of the 70 CE confirmed the existence of a topos: the Christ is crucified, the crucified one is the Christ.

Ainsi l’association entre les deux puissantes images idéologisées du roi messianique des Juifs et de la crucifixion n’avait-elle rien pour surprendre dans la Judée du Ier siècle; on pourrait même dire qu’elle en était venue à y constituer un topos.

Hence I wonder if Paul was originally one of the original post-70 collectionists who collected the various dicta et acta of pre-70 failed messianists.

A little clue in such sense is Acts 18, where it is said that Paul added informations to Apollos, and probably vice versa. Wasn't the exchange of informations a typical action of collectionists ?

ADDENDA: the Batsch's view satisfies really the Occam's Razor and plausibility. Only I would like to see where does Paul fit in this reconstruction.
User avatar
mlinssen
Posts: 3431
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:01 am
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by mlinssen »

Giuseppe wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:44 am I confess that I am indebted to prof Christophe Batsch (a Jesus Agnostic, if not a Mythicist):

C’est probablement là, dans le bouillonnement intellectuel de la ville érudite, et dans l’urgence de trouver une explication à la catastrophe en cours, que furent hâtivement rassemblés, compilés et recopiés toutes les paroles, plus ou moins fidèlement conservées, les unes en araméen, les autres en hébreu, les dernières en grec de tout ce que la Judée avait connu de messies au cours du dernier siècle. Ces recueils de dicta hétérogènes (parmi lesquels rien n’interdit d’imaginer que figuraient ceux d’un charismatique galiléen) furent la matière première à partir de laquelle on élabora bientôt des évangiles, plus tard canoniques ou apocryphes, marqués aux sceaux divers des théologies différentes qui les inspiraient. Tous ces recueils possédaient néanmoins en commun ceci qu’ils rapportaient les actes et les paroles d’un «sauveur», Yeshua, qui était aussi le «messie», Chrestos.
Ce fut là le berceau du judéo-christianisme qui, sous ses formes multiples, déborda les frontières du judaïsme, d’abord à Alexandrie (d’où tout semble provenir en matière de Nouveau Testament), puis dans l’Orient de l’Empire, jusque dans sa capitale enfin. Les plus anciennes attestations écrites mentionnant les chrétiens dans des sources «païennes» (en l’occurrence latines) sont toutes datées du début du IIe siècle de l’ère commune. Il y a là une convergence remarquable qui donne à penser que le «phénomène chrétien» est alors tout à coup découvert et pris en considération par le monde romain, ses dirigeants et ses penseurs. Ce sont un passage des Annales de Tacite qui manifeste une connaissance au moins indirecte des récits évangéliques de la Passion du Christ (vers 110) ; la lettre de Pline à Trajan sur les chrétiens de Bithynie (vers 111-112); enfin la définition par Suétone des chrétiens comme «une catégorie de gens avec des superstitions nouvelles et maléfiques» (entre 119 et 12.)


My translation via Deepl of the first part:

It was probably there, in the intellectual ferment of the scholarly city, and in the urgency of finding an explanation for the catastrophe in progress, that all the words, more or less faithfully preserved, were hastily gathered, compiled and recopied, some in Aramaic, others in Hebrew, and the last ones in Greek, of all the messiahs that Judea had known in the course of the last century. These collections of heterogeneous dicta (among which there is nothing to prevent us from imagining that they included those of a Galilean charismatic) were the raw material from which gospels were soon elaborated, later canonical or apocryphal, marked with the various seals of the different theologies that inspired them. What all these collections had in common, however, was that they reported the acts and words of a "saviour", Yeshua, who was also the "messiah", Chrestos.

Hence the goal was to idealize the figure of the 'saviour' and 'messiah'. The facts of the 70 CE confirmed the existence of a topos: the Christ is crucified, the crucified one is the Christ.

Ainsi l’association entre les deux puissantes images idéologisées du roi messianique des Juifs et de la crucifixion n’avait-elle rien pour surprendre dans la Judée du Ier siècle; on pourrait même dire qu’elle en était venue à y constituer un topos.

Hence I wonder if Paul was originally one of the original post-70 collectionists who collected the various dicta et acta of pre-70 failed messianists.

A little clue in such sense is Acts 18, where it is said that Paul added informations to Apollos, and probably vice versa. Wasn't the exchange of informations a typical action of collectionists ?

ADDENDA: the Batsch's view satisfies really the Occam's Razor and plausibility. Only I would like to see where does Paul fit in this reconstruction.
A few showstoppers there, and quite obvious ones really:

1. collections of heterogeneous dicta - don't exist in the NT, there are two types only: Thomasine logia and parables, and those not in Thomas. And the latter are completely different in type, style, setup, format, length, and so on

https://www.academia.edu/40951733/Two_t ... ht_and_day

Looking at the parables of Thomas and those of the canonicals from a strictly literal point of view we find two very different styles, almost completely opposite to one another.
The mundane, simple, longwinded human dialogues of the canonical parables pale in every aspect to the concise, well-wrought, cryptic parables of Thomas, full of allegory and active (in)animate objects that drive part of the story, and which have only one single protagonist at all times whereas the canonicals usually have two or more.

We also witness a gradual evolution in the gospels from the typical Thomas parable to the canonical parable, with the first own creations of Mark and Luke actually being quite laudable with regards to mimicking Thomas.
Yet that path gets quickly abandoned and we find the canonicals settling for their so very long (on average twice and a half times as long) moralising stories that almost always get explained even when the ever-present explicit moral message about good getting rewarded and bad getting punished is painstakingly clear, each and every time.
Thomas selectively handpicking his own favourite parable type out of this set of so very different styles is unfeasible, let alone that he converts them into his beautifully consistent metamorphosis model, and manages to turn Matthew's simplistic and uneventful parable of the net into his own core parable consisting of a triple metamorphosis.

From a literary point of view, comparing the two completely different parable styles makes abundantly clear that the canonicals made up their own parables from scratch, with Luke and Matthew desperately trying to outnumber the parables of Thomas by increasing their own versions by 1,400% while merely doubling the amount of logia and parables that Mark copied

2. some in Aramaic, others in Hebrew, and the last ones in Greek - we have less than nothing in the first two languages and we can be more than certain that the church would have preserved even the tiniest fragment of anything that would ever have existed

3. What all these collections had in common, however, was that they reported the acts and words of a "saviour", Yeshua, who was also the "messiah", Chrestos - impossible. The IS of the NT doesn't engage in any messianic activities whatsoever. He doesn't save anyone, he doesn't rescue anyone, he just does some random resuscitation left and right that is verbatim identical to that what Elijah did. His words come from Thomas, his actions derive from the Septuagint, and he is as Messianic as a turd. He does nothing but make empty promises, and very vague ones at that

4. Paul excels at NOT talking about IS, his words, his deeds. Paul hijacks the XS in him and goes off on a tangent. If you erase all the texts in the NT and keep only Paul (and Acts can be excluded or included, it won't matter), absolutely NOTHING would be known about IS

Anyone who starts off with Judaic roots will end up nowhere: those weren't there, never were there, and never will be there

Just ask around, consult a Judaic or two, three: "Could you give me a score, expressed in a rough percentage, of the fit by Jesus to the Messianic expectations as described in the Tanakh of around 0 - 200 CE?"

Go on, do it. How about doing some sensible research instead of reading opinions on opinions by opinionated outsiders who don't have a clue about Judaism?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism ... w_of_Jesus

Just a primer, very low level. A small excerpt:

The rejection of Jesus as Messiah has never been a theological issue for Judaism because Jewish eschatology holds that the coming of the Jewish Messiah will be associated with events that had not occurred at the time of Jesus, such as the rebuilding of The Temple, a Messianic Age of peace, and the ingathering of Jews to their homeland.[3][4]

Historically, some Jewish writers and scholars have considered Jesus as the most damaging "false prophet"

Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

mlinssen wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:18 am A few showstoppers there, and quite obvious ones really:

1. collections of heterogeneous dicta - don't exist in the NT, there are two types only:
I think that Batsch means the kind of evidence listed by Detering here:
http://renesalm.com/mp/Detering_PDFs/GE ... lilean.pdf

More acta than dicta, really, but the implication would be the same: isn't it?
User avatar
mlinssen
Posts: 3431
Joined: Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:01 am
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by mlinssen »

Giuseppe wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 2:18 am
mlinssen wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 1:18 am A few showstoppers there, and quite obvious ones really:

1. collections of heterogeneous dicta - don't exist in the NT, there are two types only:
I think that Batsch means the kind of evidence listed by Detering here:
http://renesalm.com/mp/Detering_PDFs/GE ... lilean.pdf

More acta than dicta, really, but the implication would be the same: isn't it?

Nach Augsteins Ansicht könnte Markus die historische Figur Me-nachem vor Augen gehabt haben, als er daranging, seine Passionsge-schichte zu verfassen. Aber auch andere Personen, wie z.B. der „We-he, wehe Jerusalem“-Jesus, Sohn des Ananias, aus dem Jahre 62 (Bell 6:304f. – vgl. Mk 13 par) oder die Spottgestalt des „Carabas“ (Philo Flacc 36f.) könnten mit ihrem Schicksal auf das Jesusbild des Markus abgefärbt haben. Jesus sei „eine aus mehreren Figuren und Strömun-gen synthetisch in eins geflossene Erscheinung.“11

I'm used to mediocre really, and sometimes come across pathetic in my work even - but biblical academic is mediocre at best with two or three handfuls of exceptions.
Detering has exclusively been talking about Menachem here, and before that has merely touched on Judas the Galilean the rebel. And now he just names two others and draws the conclusion that he draws?
Where are the parallels, the agreements, the similarities? Strömung?! Really?!?!?!?!? Nothing has been discussed about that so far, not a IOTA

Heute ist die Gressmann-Augstein-These ganz vergessen.

Ah, thank gawdness. Augstein got thrown in front of the lions and quickly digested

Wo man soweit nicht gehen will, weil man sich denn doch noch einen Rest gesunden Menschenverstands bewahrt hat, hilft man sich, wie der Berliner Neutestamentler Jens Schröter, mit verschwurbelten Ka-tegorien wie der „Fiktion des Faktischen“ oder „historischer Imagina-tion“.12 Leider vergisst Schröter, uns mitzuteilen, was für „Fakten“ beispielsweise den Fiktionen von Seewandel, Sturmstillung oder Himmelfahrt zugrunde gelegen haben und zu ihrer Erklärung herange-zogen werden könnten.

Gawds, Schröter - the worst of the worst. And Detering kills him off quickly

Selbst ein Theologe des 19. Jahrhunderts wie Gustav Volkmar erkannte deutlich, dass sich die literarische Kreativität des Evangelis-ten keineswegs nur auf die Deutung, sondern eben auch auf die Erfin-dung von Tatsachen bezog. Mit anderen Worten, dass die Evangelien alles in allem Produkte eines literarischen Prozesses waren, bei dem historische Daten lediglich als Staffage für theologische Aussagen (Volkmar: „Lehrpoesie“, Bultmann/Schmithals: „Kerygma“) dienten.
Mir scheint, dass die alten Herren richtiger lagen als viele ihre heuti-gen Nachfolger. Kritischeren Biss besaßen sie allemal.

And there's the catch, and full disclosure: The old farts damn well knew how to bite, their successors suck even at barking (a gross exaggeration of what Detering says, but in the same direction). Historical facts were mere stage props for the pure fiction that the gospel writers put in the spotlight

Detering makes an existential mistake, and that is that he assumes Josephus to be relating the facts - even though he admits at the very start that Josephus is all that we all have to go on, and IMO it is not even clear what the direction of dependence is between him and the various texts.
So Detering cannot accuse the texts of fusing the various messianic figures, because their existence is just as reliable as that of Jesus.
That Robert Price has decomposed it all in his 2000 book is all fun, but in essence he has done nothing but to look at the gospels and Josephus - hey, big deal

I am underwhelmed with Price's final words

“The gospels’ Jesuses are each complex syntheses of various other, earlier, Jesus characters. Some of these may have been reflections of various messianic proph-ets and revolutionaries, others the fictive counterparts of itinerant charismatics, and still others historicizations of mythical Corn Kings and Gnostic Aions. I think it is an open question whether a historical Jesus had anything to do with any of these Jesuses, much less the Jesuses of the gospels. Each is the figure-head, the totem, of a particular kind of Jesus community or Christ cult, and we will never know whether and to what extent each community reflects a remem-bered Jesus opposed to a Jesus or Christ who is a concretization of its own be-liefs and values.”15

Well what a surprise.
The last page is even more disastrous

Die historische Dekonstruktion des Jesusbildes der Evangelien för-derte bisher vor allem jene Komponenten zu Tage, die alle irgendwie mit einem Propheten und messianischen Erlöser zu tun hatten und überwiegend eine historische Grundlage besaßen

Wait w00t?!
I'm used to extremely bad apologists that they will write just any story, good or bad, and have their conclusion ready and waiting ages before - and this is the exact same
Ulan
Posts: 1505
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2014 3:58 am

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Ulan »

Despite that harsh criticism, I'm kind of sympathetic towards that idea in a more general way. If Josephus is derivative, you have to ask the question for which purpose the books were written, other than just Josephus prettying up his role in the whole war. It's a bit much effort to just cover for the Testimonium and its sibling, and other than that, it makes little sense as a "catholic" work, as it doesn't give much credence to the whole Jesus movement.

If you consider the Jesus of gMark as a nobody who was completely interchangeable as a vessel to transport (the messenger of) God/The Holy Spirit, to whom this Jesus immediately loses the initiative, this Jesus loses all personality. Jesus appears in verse 9 and loses control of the story in verse 12, and the rest is a story about announcing the end day.

I had this discussion with Lena Einhorn, who in her work targets the point that the actions of Jesus show similarities to how Josephus presents the "Egyptian", including the role of Paul in this (Acts identifies Paul with the "Egyptian", though just in a rumor). Unfortunately, Lena dismissed all the parallels to other figures, like Jesus ben Ananias. Or I mentioned this here with regard to Simon bar Giora (insert lazy quote):
Not quite as clear, but Simon bar Giora springs to mind in other stories (he's from "Gerasa" and was leader of a band of peasants, one possible solution for the Gerasene swine; the priests sent people to arrest him; he had a triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the people hailing him as savior, but failed; he disappeared below Jerusalem in an attempt to tunnel out, while the temple was destroyed; he came out again after he had run out of food; he emerged from the ground at the temple site, with his white, royal garb startling the Roman troops at first; he was killed as king of the Jews; his death even resembles the sin offering during Jom Kippur, with the Barabbas story being the Jom Kippur parallel, and the released "goat" (Barabbas) is usually the one that is tossed from the temple mount, which happened to bar Giora, though from a different temple mount).
Not all parallels are good, mind, but if it was that clear, (nearly) everyone would have already agreed on a solution. gMark as a war story that recollects all the alleged warnings that supposedly had been given is at least not the worst idea.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

I have sent a mail to prof Batsch to know where he places Paul in this reconstruction.
Very curious about his answer!
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by Giuseppe »

In whiletime, the Carrier's comment.
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3412
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: A collection of episodes about various failed Messianists of the past was the Earliest Gospel

Post by DCHindley »

g,

I hesitated to respond at first, as you know we are often at loggerheads, 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 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."

Regardless of the reason for this change in POV, the gentile wing(s) of Jesus's flavor of messianism had for sure reinvented him as a redeemer in a redemption story where, ironically, they and not the Judeans were the real "children" of the Judean God.

Did I get you wrong. Where would you differ from me?

DCH
Post Reply