Robert M. Price explains why the Gnostic Redeemer myth is behind 1 Cor 2:6-8

[Giuseppe]

One reason I believe Gnosticism predates Christianity is that, as Walter Schmithals suggests, several of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic tracts credit their revelatory content to Seth, Shem, Adam, or Melchizedek. Why not Jesus, Peter, Paul, and James? Of course, these latter worthies are fiven credit for other Gnostic texts, but why not all? If ther're all Christian in origin? Second, one must ask after the logical direction of influence: from Christianity to Gnosticism? Or from Gnosticism to Christianity? For my part, Harnack's schema seems more natural: he somewhere says that early Christianity combined three modules occurring with integrity in separate movements. The sacraments of initiation look like those of the ancient Mysteries. The depiction of Jesus as a miracle-working divine man matches the hero cults. And the notion of Jesus as the visible manifestation of a pre-existent heavenly being makes sense as a simplification of the Gnostic Redeemer myth. I recall how, once at the Jesus Seminar, Bruce Chilton made a striking analogy that applies well here. He told about a weekend visit to a friend's home. Going into the guest bathroom, he was amused to note that the several towels each bore the signature trademark of a different hotel chain: Omni, Marriot, Hilton, etc. What are the chances that representatives of these hotels had visited this bathroom and that each one borrowed a different logo for use in his own chain's towels? No, it is of course overwhelmingly more probable that his host had swiped each one of the towels from a different hotel he had visited. In the same way, we must ask whether it is not more natural to infer that Christianity derived these theological “towels” severally from Gnosticism, Apocalyptic and the Divine Man genre than that these three “parted Christianity's garments among them”.

(The Gospels Behind the Gospels, p. 122-123, my bold)

This point is very decisive for mythicism.
For the Roman crucifixion of Jesus is part and parcel of that “simplification of the Gnostic Redeemer myth”.

Not coincidentially, 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, the only passage in the Pauline corpus where the killers of Jesus are mentioned, is a Valentinian fragment, according to Arthur Droge. While it would be a Simonian fragment based on the Ascension of Isaiah, according to Roger Parvus.

At contrary, the Ascension of Isaiah would be a commentary of 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, according to Robert Price.

The strong clue to think that Droge is right contra Parvus is that 1 Cor 2:6-8 talks about 'perfects' and the term is explicitly Valentinian, even if also the Simonians assumed a division between insiders and outsiders. The second strong clue to support Droge contra Parvus is that we have evidence of a celestial crucifixion of the “superior Christ” among Valentinians, and obviously it would be impossible to think that the Archontes are not demons.

If 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 was without the Gnostic tenor, then this quote of the Bob Price's words would be a marginal secondary note, useful only to describe a specific detail of the Gospels: the pre-existence of Jesus.

But the Gnostic tenor is clearly visible behind 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, hence it has to dictate the extreme logical conclusion: the Roman crucifixion of Jesus is part and parcel of that “simplification of the Gnostic Redeemer myth”.

[rgprice]

Makes sense.

[MrMacSon]

I wondered what "the Gnostic Redeemer Myth" is, so I internet searched it.

In a series of blog posts on the Westar Institute's webpage in 2014, discussing Karen King's book, What is Gnosticism?, Cassandra J. Farrin raised it.

Firstly here:

Richard Reitzenstein is credited (for better or for worse) by King with the invention of the "gnostic redeemer myth."
...< . . paragraph omitted here . . >
I found this quote especially illustrative:

Possibly the greatest mischief was done by the invention of the Gnostic redeemer myth, that staple of two-page summaries of Gnosticism. This stirring narrative … was constructed by taking bits and pieces from particular motifs from a variety of historical and literary contexts, and combining them into a single, coherent narrative. … In reality there is no single existing ancient literary source that gives ‘the Gnostic redeemer myth’ as scholars have ‘reconstructed’ (ie. invented) it. (109, italics in original)

https://www.westarinstitute.org/blog/ch ... olonialism

Farrin discussed it further in a subsequent post:

The most damaging idea introduced by this generation of scholars was the gnostic redeemer myth.

... More or less invented by philologist Richard Reitzenstein by combining elements from many different texts, the gnostic redeemer myth is summarized as follows by twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Bultmann:

A heavenly being is sent down from the world of light to the earth, which has fallen under the sway of the demonic powers, in order to liberate the sparks of light, which have their origin in the world of light, but owing to a fall in primeval times, have been compelled to inhabit human bodies. This emissary takes a human form, and carries out the works entrusted to him by the Father; as a result he is not cut off from the Father. He reveals himself in his utterances (‘I am the shepherd’, etc.) and so brings about the separation of the seeing from the blind to whom he appears as a stranger. His own harken to him, and he awakes in them the memory of their home of light, teaches them to recognise their own true nature, and teaches them also the way of return to their home, to which he, as a redeemed Redeemer, rises again. (Bultmann, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart).

Bultmann, like other scholars of his generation, believed the gnostic redeemer myth to be a pre-Christian myth appropriated and transformed by Christian evangelists like the writer of the Gospel of John (Hammann, Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography: 319). Most of you will be familiar with the Christian version, as can be read in the second paragraph of the Nicene Creed:

I believe … in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

The gnostic and Christian myths mostly differed “in what each conceived to be the root cause of the problem . For Gnosticism, it was fate; for Christianity, sin” (King, 105). Often viewed as a direct competitor with the Christian redeemer myth, the gnostic myth was deemed “an alien parasite whose infestation produced the heresies of Christian Gnosticism” (109). Scholars were able to assume this in part because they assumed a master narrative in which Jesus delivered an original, “pure” doctrine to his disciples that was later corrupted (111).

In chapter 5 of What Is Gnosticism?, Karen King introduces three scholars who became increasingly critical of earlier claims about gnosticism, especially the redeemer myth: Walter Bauer challenged the notion that “heresy was a secondary development in the history of Christianity” (110). Christianity "did not look the same everywhere" (112). Whatever form Christianity took in a given city or region, that was Christianity to those communities. There was no model or protocol for how Christianity ought to be until several generations later. Hans Jonas challenged the history of religions school’s obsession with tracing the origin of gnostic ideas as though a movement could be defined merely by the sum of its parts. “Myth demands interpretation,” he believed (128). We can engage myth on a psychological and philosophical level rather than merely dissecting it. Carsten Colpe dissected faulty assumptions in past studies of gnostic texts, such as the fact that no single text tells a complete version of the myth, and that the Jewish “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel cannot easily be tied to redeemer figures in Manichaean and Mandaean traditions.

While the work of this later generation of scholars carried forward some of the prejudices of the past, such as the assumption that gnosticism was immoral and inferior, their “enduring work” has been “to emphasize the multiformity of early Christian phenomena, as well as to demonstrate irrefutably that Christianity and Judaism are integrally entwined in a wider historical and cultural matrix” (148). This laid a crucial foundation for the further upset of assumptions about gnosticism that was to come with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

https://www.westarinstitute.org/blog/wh ... eemer-myth

[MrMacSon]

Apparently,

"Petra was a common word for “rock” in Greek ...* Petros is an ancient Greek term that was not commonly used in Koine Greek at all. In fact, it was never otherwise used in the New Testament except when Jesus changed Peter’s name from Simon to Peter."

Omitted here, ie. after "Petra was a common word for “rock” in Greek," is, "It is used fifteen times to mean “rock,” “rocks,” or “rocky” in the New Testament."

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print ... -this-rock