ABuddhist wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 3:58 pm
Such an attitude seems to assume that the obsession with relics in unique to Christianity after a certain time. Is Fredriksen aware of the cults surrounding relics in Islam and Buddhism?
I'm going to copy and paste the pertinent part of the discussion from the link above. The parts take from Earl Doherty's initial article are in italics, Paula Fredriksen's comments on the article are marked with her initials (P.F.) and Earl Doherty's comments on her comments are marked with his (E.D.).
In all the Christian writers of the first century, in all the devotion they display about Christ and the new faith, not one of them expresses the slightest desire to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth his home town, the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he held his Last Supper, the tomb: where he was buried and rose from the dead. These places are never mentioned. Most of all, there is not a hint of pilgrimage to Calvary itself, where humanity's salvation was consummated. How could such a place not have been turned into a shrine?
P.F.: Pilgrimage is a late third-fourth century phenomenon. This just is not odd.
Is it conceivable that Paul would not have wanted to run to the hill of Calvary, to prostrate himself on the sacred ground that bore the blood of his slain Lord?
P.F.: Yes: he was not a fourth-century, relic-conscious Christian.
E.D.: The reader will perhaps sympathize with me for being taken aback by these responses. The absence of the phenomenon in the first and second century is not odd because it's a phenomenon of the third and fourth century. The absence of relic-conscious Christians in the first century is not odd because the relic-conscious Christians come from the fourth century. Do the latter preclude the former? Does their presence in the fourth century explain, much less dictate, their absence in the first? At best, her statements would have to imply that significant conditions were different in the later centuries from those in the earlier. But this is not demonstrated, and there would be difficulty doing so. If Christians of Constantine's time felt a desire to know of the sites of Jesus' career, to visit the places of salvation, to collect relics of Jesus life, why would Christians of Paul's time not have felt the same desire? Those places and relics would be far better known and accessible in the earlier time than the later. The immediacy of their happening would be far stronger. If it were argued that there may have been some danger in visiting the holy sites, there would be no danger in showing an interest in them, a knowledge of them, in working them as motifs into their christology and soteriology. Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. His preaching of God and a new ethic in Galilee. The power of Jesus and the intervention of God shown by the empty tomb just outside Jerusalem. There would surely have been apostles and Christians who would have felt drawn to such places so rich in importance and sacred power. They would surely have disregarded any danger in visiting them, or found ways to circumvent it. Paul himself hardly avoided dangerous activity. Instead, we have a disembodied salvation myth in writers like Paul, an 'event' unattached to historical time and place. We encounter a void on all the great figures of the Gospel story: Pilate, the Jewish authorities, Barabbas, Simon of Cyrene, Joseph of Arimathea, the two crucified thieves, the women at the tomb, not to mention details about the passion such as Gethsemane, the scourging or the crown of thorns. We have a focus on the realm of the evil spirits and Christ's actions within that realm rather than on earth.
The only difference in conditions that could exist between the first and fourth centuries and make any sense is that the historical Jesus and a career on earth did not exist in people's minds in the first century, but had established itself in Christian consciousness by the third and fourth centuries.
Is there indeed, in this wide land so recently filled with the presence of the Son of God, any holy place at all, any spot of ground where that presence still lingers, hallowed by the step, touch or word of Jesus of Nazareth? Neither Paul nor any other first century letter writer breathes a whisper of any such thing.
P.F.: I'll bite: so what?
Nor do they breathe a word about relics associated with Jesus. Where are his clothes, the things he used in everyday life, the things he touched? Can we believe that items associated with him in his life on earth would not have been preserved, valued, clamored for among believers, just as things like this were produced and prized all through the Middle Ages? Why is it only in the fourth century that pieces of the "true cross" begin to surface?
P.F.: It has a lot to do with the Constantinian church. This isn't a huge mystery: it's been treated in many studies.
To generalize: Doherty is questioning why first century Christians showed no interest in visiting and worshipping at sites associated with Jesus, such as most notably the place of his birth and the place of his death.
Fredriksen notes that we don't have records of Christians venerating holy places associated with Jesus until the end of the third/early fourth century (i.e., the era of Constantine, his mother Helena, and Eusebius). Why should we suppose Paul and other first century Christians ought to have behaved like fourth century Christians? Veneration of holy places didn't become a thing in Christianity until the end of the third/beginning of the fourth century.
Doherty responds by asking why first century Christians *didn't* behave like fourth century Christians. Wouldn't the places where Jesus was born and died have been just as important to them? He thinks it's because Jesus was a myth and the reason that such places were not continuously venerated from Jesus' time (or perhaps I should say Peter's?) to Constantine's was that there was no actual starting point in Jesus' time. The sites where these things were supposed to have happened were invented later and retrojected into the past.
Best,
Ken
