On the silence of 2century apologists

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
archibald
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by archibald »

MrMacSon wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 3:19 pm
archibald wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 3:04 pm
MrMacSon wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:55 pm No, I'm thinking Christian church fathers would be part of Christian communities, and would have written about their communities.
Clement (apparently) wrote to another community. Point is, that would appear to be evidence for that other community, which is what you were seeking.
No, evidence for an other community was not what I was seeking. I was seeking information about a record about 'Clement's own community', or about other church fathers' own communities
No, your original question was:
MrMacSon wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:12 pm Is there any indication where that Pauline/Hellenistic Christianity thrived?
Then after I gave you some indications, you changed your request.

Come on man, come out of the closet! What are you getting at with all this 'possibly not Judean origins', 'possibly didn't spread the way is thought' carry on. :)
John2
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by John2 »

archibald (who I was already thinking seemed interesting) wrote:
At the moment I'm reading Robert Eisenman's 600+ page 'James, the Brother of Jesus' (I'm only on page 60 I must admit) but his thesis is one place you might look.
As the resident "Eisenman guy" here, I couldn't resist commenting on this.

I first read (and heard of) Eisenman about twenty years ago, when I read a review of JBJ. I didn't know anything about James at the time (or much about Jesus and that he had brothers), so it was a bit of an eye opener for me in that respect. At that time I had no one to talk to about Eisenman because no one I knew had read him (I talked my rabbi at the time into getting JBJ but I don't think they ever read it). And I had previously given up trying to determine who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls and was content to let them sit on my shelf and gather dust, since everything else I had read about them (starting with Gastor) didn't do much for me. But Eisenman seemed (and still seems) to have a very good grip on the ethos and type of people in the DSS, even if they aren't (or can't be because of carbon dating) Jewish Christians. To me (and I gather for Eisenman), it's just as interesting to think of them as being proto-Jewish Christians or just similar to Jewish Christians.

Here is how Eisenman puts it in JBJ:
... such an argument [that the Dead Sea scrolls are pre-first century CE] changes little regarding the position being developed in this book. All the doctrines, ideas, and orientations, all the exegeses that would then have been current among 'opposition' groups of the first century BC, can then be shown to have flowed full-blown and almost without alteration into the main 'opposition' orientation of the first century CE. Thus the argument of this book remains unaffected. Only the direct textual link to James or some other first century 'Righteous One' or 'Zaddik' would be broken ...
So I don't understand all the fuss about carbon dating. However you date the DSS, I agree that the "doctrines, ideas, and orientations" in the DSS are at least similar to what we know about Jewish Christianity. This isn't all that different from what you hear other scholars say. For example, Lim notes that:
... the [Dead Sea Scrolls] sectarians and early church were the only ones to have used the concept of “the new covenant” from the prophecy of Jeremiah. Other Jews did not comment on “the new covenant” nor did they use it in their writings.

http://www.christianorigins.div.ed.ac.u ... t-seventy/


And Bauckham notes that:
Although the Qumran community and the early Christians were certainly not the only Jews to focus their hopes on the Isaianic picture of the way ... they are the only two groups we know to have applied the image of this way to their own way of life.

https://books.google.com/books?id=U7-Qe ... re&f=false
All Eisenman does is note considerably more similarities. I started a thread about them here (which was also the first thread I ever started on the internet) intending to outline them all, but it got shut down over the carbon dating issue. I don't care if the DSS sect (yes, I see them as a sect) were Jewish Christians or not, but in any event they seem very similar to me.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=652

And spin offered such great commentary there that I started another thread to investigate his ideas more.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=679
Last edited by John2 on Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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archibald
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by archibald »

Hi. :)

I think I said that I'm only on page 60.....so I'm not sure how much I can offer just yet.

So far, it is at least a very interesting and good read.

Because so much about this topic (with which I confess I can become easily fascinated) is, I feel sure, never going to be conclusive, I tend to read almost everything (on the topic) while withholding judgement, or being a bit sceptical. This is true for both mainstream scholars and fringe 'eccentrics'.

It is a bit annoying that (I think) the DSS don't actually mention James, because I think this makes the connections less strong.

And here's a curve ball. What if the texts which Eisenmann links to the early Christian Community were written before the 1st C?

Jesus mythicists (of which I am not one but don't rule it out entirely) might like that. :)
archibald
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by archibald »

Thank you for the links to previous discussions. I will enjoy reading those.
John2
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by John2 »

archibald wrote:
It is a bit annoying that (I think) the DSS don't actually mention James, because I think this makes the connections less strong.
Well, they don't mention anyone's name as the Teacher of Righteousness (or the Wicked Priest, or the Liar, who I see as being distinct from the Wicked Priest but some don't). However you date the DSS and whoever these figures were, I see them as being in a situation where it was not prudent to name names given their opposition to the "the establishment."
And here's a curve ball. What if the texts which Eisenmann links to the early Christian Community were written before the 1st C?
I think that would be very interesting. As Eisenman put it in my citation above, "All the doctrines, ideas, and orientations, all the exegeses that would then have been current among 'opposition' groups of the first century BC, can then be shown to have flowed full-blown and almost without alteration into the main 'opposition' orientation of the first century CE."
You know in spite of all you gained, you still have to stand out in the pouring rain.
archibald
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by archibald »

John2 wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:42 pm However you date the DSS and whoever these figures were, I see them as being in a situation where it was not prudent to name names given their opposition to the "the establishment."
Interesting.

But......James was openly preaching near the temple (Eisenmann thinks)?

Also, 'Paul' would not have been 'establishment'?
John2 wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:42 pm
And here's a curve ball. What if the texts which Eisenmann links to the early Christian Community were written before the 1st C?
I think that would be very interesting. As Eisenman put it in my citation above, "All the doctrines, ideas, and orientations, all the exegeses that would then have been current among 'opposition' groups of the first century BC, can then be shown to have flowed full-blown and almost without alteration into the main 'opposition' orientation of the first century CE."
Yes, but is there another way of looking at it, that the 'fully formed template' did not require there to actually be a Jesus?

As I said, I do not subscribe to this, for a whole variety of reasons. But I think one should always try to have an open mind.

We are probably getting off-topic. :)
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MrMacSon
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by MrMacSon »

John2 wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:04 pm
.. Eisenman seemed (and still seems) to have a very good grip on the ethos and type of people in the DSS, even if they aren't (or can't be because of carbon dating) Jewish Christians. To me (and I gather for Eisenman), it's just as interesting to think of them as being proto-Jewish Christians or just similar to Jewish Christians.

Here is how Eisenman puts it in JBJ:
... such an argument [that the Dead Sea scrolls are pre-first century CE] changes little regarding the position being developed in this book. All the doctrines, ideas, and orientations, all the exegeses that would then have been current among 'opposition' groups of the first century BC, can then be shown to have flowed full-blown and almost without alteration into the main 'opposition' orientation of the first century CE. Thus the argument of this book remains unaffected. Only the direct textual link to James or some other first century 'Righteous One' or 'Zaddik' would be broken ...
... the "doctrines, ideas, and orientations" in the DSS are at least similar to what we know about Jewish Christianity. This isn't all that different from what you hear other scholars say. For example, Lim notes that:
... the [Dead Sea Scrolls] sectarians and early church were the only ones to have used the concept of “the new covenant” from the prophecy of Jeremiah. Other Jews did not comment on “the new covenant” nor did they use it in their writings.

http://www.christianorigins.div.ed.ac.u ... t-seventy/
And Bauckham notes that:
Although the Qumran community and the early Christians were certainly not the only Jews to focus their hopes on the Isaianic picture of the way ... they are the only two groups we know to have applied the image of this way to their own way of life.

https://books.google.com/books?id=U7-Qe ... re&f=false
archibald wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:28 pm
And here's a curve ball. What if the texts which Eisenmann links to the early Christian Community were written before the 1st C?
.
There's likely to be a lot more going on in Second Temple Judaism and in the early-mid post Second Temple period than we have been and still are commonly led to believe.

See


Segal, Alan (2002) Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism, Brill.
  • Segal explores some relationships between rabbinic Judaism, Merkabah mysticism, and early Christianity. "Two Powers in Heaven" was a very early category of heresy. It was one of the basic categories by which the rabbis perceived the new phenomenon of Christianity and one of the central issues over which Judaism and Christianity separated. Segal reconstructs the development of the heresy through prudent dating of the stages of the rabbinic traditions. The basic heresy involved interpreting scripture to say that a principal angelic or hypostatic manifestation in heaven was equivalent to God. The earliest heretics believed in two complementary powers in heaven, while later heretics believed in two opposing powers in heaven.


Schäfer, Peter (2012) The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other, Princeton University Press.
  • In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually re-appropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity ... https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9724.html
If one doesn't read the book (which I haven't, yet), this review by Chris Albert Wells on Amazon.com, May 27, 2015, is well worth reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-revi ... 0691160953

Barker, Margaret. The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1992.
  • Margaret Barker (a mainstream British biblical scholar; a former president of the Society for Old Testament Study) has argued that Gnosticism arose out of the Judaism First Temple period (c. 950-586 BC) ...

    Barker says there may have originally been no distinction between Yahweh and the Angel of Yahweh. She points out many texts in the Old Testament equate the two, for example Judges 2:1: Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, "I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you into the land that I had promised to your ancestors. I said, 'I will never break my covenant with you'."

    In Genesis 22, with its story of the sacrifice of Isaac, it is 'the angel of Yahweh' that calls to Abraham out of heaven (Gen. 22:11), but in the end Abraham names the place where this happened 'Yahweh-Yireh'; 'Yahweh is seen' (Gen. 22:14). In Genesis 48:15-16 Jacob says, "God, before whom my ancestors Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long to this day, the Angel which has redeemed me from all evil, may he bless these boys."

    In short, 'the bulk of the evidence suggests that the Angel of Yahweh and Yahweh had been identical'.

    Sometimes Yahweh was described as being incarnated in the Davidic king, as we learn in Chronicles' account of Solomon's coronation: "And all the assembly blessed the Lord God of their fathers, and bowed their heads and worshipped the Lord and the king" (1 Chron. 29:23). If this was the case, and the tradition had survived among the people of Israel if not in the official cult of the Second Temple (539 bc - ad 70), it would explain why the Gospels stress that Jesus was a descendant of David: as the messiah, he would be the embodiment of Yahweh as the old kings of Judah had been.

    According to Barker's view of Judaism in the Second Temple, the radical monotheists who wrote Deuteronomy and Second Isaiah won the day, and their marginalized opponents preserved a kind of anti-tradition that is represented in works such as the pseudepigraphical 1 Enoch and in Gnosticism. The Gnostics, repudiating Judaism, would also have repudiated Yahweh, who in their eyes had usurped the position of the true, supernal God, much as Blavatsky claims; hence the stupid, arrogant Ialdabaoth.

    Most scholars agree that the concept of a deuteros theos was widespread in Judaism of the first century ad. Barker differs in arguing that it had always existed in Judaism. Philo's innovation, she says, was simply to connect this 'second god' with the logos of Greek thought. The innovation of Christianity was to argue that this logos was embodied in Jesus, as Yahweh may have been in the kings of the old Davidic dynasty. Hence the emphasis on Jesus as the 'son of David'.

    Barker's portrait of this Temple theology, as she calls it, could clarify a great deal about the history of Christianity. It explains why Jesus could have attained quasi-divine status ... (cf. Phil. 2:6-11): he would have been the anointed one, the embodiment of Yahweh. It also explains why the Gnostics would have had an ambivalent attitude toward Yahweh. https://www.theosophical.org/publicatio ... azine/2196

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arnoldo
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

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Jax wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 1:10 pm Celcus is late 2nd century is he not?
Celsus is late 2nd but his work is cited by Origen in the 3rd century. In reference to a non-hellenistic hypothesis for the origin of christianity see: THE FORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY IN ANTIOCH A social-scientific approach to the separation between Judaism and Christianity by Magnus Zetterholm.
antioch.PNG
antioch.PNG (26.37 KiB) Viewed 7985 times
http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5231I.pdf
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Jax
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:11 pm MrMacSon and Jax, is the proposition on the table simply that Christianity started as a Greek/Hellenistic sect, with little to no Jewish/Semitic influence at all, and only later spread to Jewish/Semitic people groups?
Hi Ben, in my case, I note that all of the places that we normally associate with the origins of early Christianity appear to be in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece and later Rome, Syria and Alexandria by Egypt. Further, a large proportion of those sites are Roman military veteran colonies of Julius and Augustus Caesar of the late 1st century BCE (Corinth, Philippi, Troyas, Sinope) or major Roman cities (Thessalonika, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome) with the earliest sites for Christianity being Corinth, Thessalonika, Philippi, and Rome.

No sign of Christianity outside of much later tradition seems evident in the Levant until after the Bar Kokhba revolt when the area was heavily resettled by Roman emigrants. Also the spread of Christianity doesn't seem to radiate out from Jerusalem as would seem normal if that area was the source of this new cult. Rather, it seems to radiate out from Greece and Asia Minor.

Add to this the fact that the language of early Christianity is Koine Greek and not Jewish or Aramaic as one would expect from a cult originating from the Levant and one could make a case for Christianity not originating there. Also the vast majority of names in the NT and other early Christian literature are Greek and Roman not Jewish.

While it is obvious that the early Christians data mined the Jewish works, it is the Greek translations of that literature that are being used not the Jewish and Aramaic originals, and Greek and Roman literature and philosophy are clearly and abundantly evident in early Christian thought and literature. Not to mention that Jesus being the son of God is clearly a pagan concept that is foreign to Judaism. Couple this with the overwhelming rejection of Christianity by the Jewish people and I feel that a Jewish origin for Christianity to be unlikely.

The anti-Jewish nature of Christianity would seem odd for a religion that originated from Judaism.

I don't want to give the impression that some sort of conspiracy was in play here, rather, that a new cult began by using Judaism as a base and organically evolved from there. The Romans and Greeks are well known for adopting foreign cults and adapting them to suit their needs, the cult of Serapis is a good example of this.

My II quadrans.

Lane
archibald
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Re: On the silence of 2century apologists

Post by archibald »

Jax wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 5:53 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Fri Jan 05, 2018 2:11 pm MrMacSon and Jax, is the proposition on the table simply that Christianity started as a Greek/Hellenistic sect, with little to no Jewish/Semitic influence at all, and only later spread to Jewish/Semitic people groups?
Hi Ben, in my case, I note that all of the places that we normally associate with the origins of early Christianity appear to be in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece and later Rome, Syria and Alexandria by Egypt. Further, a large proportion of those sites are Roman military veteran colonies of Julius and Augustus Caesar of the late 1st century BCE (Corinth, Philippi, Troyas, Sinope) or major Roman cities (Thessalonika, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome) with the earliest sites for Christianity being Corinth, Thessalonika, Philippi, and Rome.

No sign of Christianity outside of much later tradition seems evident in the Levant until after the Bar Kokhba revolt when the area was heavily resettled by Roman emigrants. Also the spread of Christianity doesn't seem to radiate out from Jerusalem as would seem normal if that area was the source of this new cult. Rather, it seems to radiate out from Greece and Asia Minor.

Add to this the fact that the language of early Christianity is Koine Greek and not Jewish or Aramaic as one would expect from a cult originating from the Levant and one could make a case for Christianity not originating there. Also the vast majority of names in the NT and other early Christian literature are Greek and Roman not Jewish.

While it is obvious that the early Christians data mined the Jewish works, it is the Greek translations of that literature that are being used not the Jewish and Aramaic originals, and Greek and Roman literature and philosophy are clearly and abundantly evident in early Christian thought and literature. Not to mention that Jesus being the son of God is clearly a pagan concept that is foreign to Judaism. Couple this with the overwhelming rejection of Christianity by the Jewish people and I feel that a Jewish origin for Christianity to be unlikely.

The anti-Jewish nature of Christianity would seem odd for a religion that originated from Judaism.

I don't want to give the impression that some sort of conspiracy was in play here, rather, that a new cult began by using Judaism as a base and organically evolved from there. The Romans and Greeks are well known for adopting foreign cults and adapting them to suit their needs, the cult of Serapis is a good example of this.

My II quadrans.

Lane
I can see where some of your ideas are coming from, and I'm not averse to considering them.....

But, regarding non-conspiracy, wouldn't the (apparently 1st C) epistles (apparently) referring to a prior Jerusalem group start to involve potential deception on the part of a writer? And that's just for starters. I'm also wondering which 'cult' you think it (Rome) was adopting, and whether you have the new Roman cult alleging that it (Rome) was initially hostile to the new religion it was adopting.

I say that without assuming anything. I am open to alternatives. I may not eventually subscribe to them.

Consider me sceptical, but listening. :)
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