It's a conundrum.Sinouhe wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 7:18 am Conclusion :
As we have just seen, during the first century before common era, we had a jewish sect awaiting their Messiah :
- a celestial
- and atoner
- suffering servant
- who will raises the dead
- and heal the crippled, the lame and the blind.
And suddenly, few decades later pop up in Judea :
- A Messiah
- Suffering servant
- atoner
- celestial
- who raises the dead
- heal the crippled, the lame and the blind.
His name was Jesus.
And unfortunately, the first sect disappear from the map and a new sect pop up in the same time.
What a remarkable chain of coincidences isn’t it ?
We have the intertestamental and Qumran literature to document these interpretations within the Jewish networks.
Does not the next datable attestation to such ideas comes with the "Church Fathers" -- thinking of Aristides and Justin. Had the discussion about these figures been restricted to Jewish and proselyte circles until the Bar Kochba events obliged gentiles who had been close to the Jewish schools of thought felt obliged to distance themselves from their erstwhile Jewish dialogue partners? Marcion fits in here, too, of course.
The problem I have with the writings of Aristides, Justin, Paul (whose writings also remain undocumented until the second century) is that their Jesus is so unlike the Jesus of our canonical gospels. The Jesus of the Gospel of Mark does carry the doctrinal ideas of Paul's and Justin's Jesus, but the figure is crafted as a personification of the Jewish people, with a special bias on their suffering, death, and hoped for revival as a "new body". The events of 70 were bad enough, but I understand they were not so condign that they dashed all hopes for a rebuilding of the Temple; the priesthood was still intact. But 135 ended all of that and smashed diaspora links with Jerusalem entirely.
And if that Jewish-gospel of Mark was a direct rebuttal to Marcion, as Vinzent argues, one can trace a trajectory of this "Son of Man/Enochian/Jesus type figure" from
1. Pre-70 Jewish ideas
2. Post-70 shaping of the figure involving more direct inputs from the proselytes, and a greater openness among those Jewish exegetes to toy with new ideas of relationships with the gentiles
3. The total end of Jewish hopes and first signs of gentiles actively dissociating themselves from Jewish roots, some more than others;
4. Marcion takes that dissociation too far -- unmooring the new religion from its rationale in the ancient Scriptures -- and the reaction begins with the gospel of Mark.
Caveat: the above is an expression of entirely transient thoughts that I am in no position to seriously defend. What's the expression? Flying a kite?