The Origins of Christianity

[eedipus]

... the origin of Christianity was probably a result of the destruction of the 2nd. Temple ... by the Romans in the year 70AD.

True, but do you think the "crisis point in their identity with their monotheistic God ... facing the end of their Jewish faith in their God" came then of after the put down of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the then absolute sacking of Jerusalem with no chance of rebuilding the Temple.

Where was the promised Messiah?

The answer to the problem was the opposite to what they had previously thought. The Messiah was not yet to come, He had already been but he had not been recognized for who he was.

It was probably a Hellenic Jew who fashioned the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He intuitively understood the real meaning of the Greek mystery cults, the Elusinian Mysteries, and wrote the story of Jesus as an allegory for how we should view life and death but, tragically, it was altered and interpreted literally. It is not that the Jesus story is untrue, but it was really intended to point to a greater truth.

An interesting proposition.

The Roman-Jewish Wars between 66 and136AD were a catastrophe for the Jewish people,
and in terms of religious significance I see the sack of Jerusalem and in particular the destruction
of the Temple in 70AD as the watershed between the beginning of Christianity and Rabbinic
Judaism.
The possibility of a large exodus of Jews from Palestine would have galvanized the Jewish intellectual elite to produce an answer that evolved through the centuries to what we have today.
The Bar Kokhba revolt from 132 to 135AD was certainly another crisis point but in making a choice
I would choose the destruction of the Temple in 70AD that produced the crisis in their faith and initiated the origins of Christianity.

Dennis Sutherland.

[eedipus]

... the origin of Christianity was probably a result of the destruction of the 2nd. Temple ... by the Romans in the year 70AD.

True, but do you think the "crisis point in their identity with their monotheistic God ... facing the end of their Jewish faith in their God" came then of after the put down of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the then absolute sacking of Jerusalem with no chance of rebuilding the Temple.

Where was the promised Messiah?

The answer to the problem was the opposite to what they had previously thought. The Messiah was not yet to come, He had already been but he had not been recognized for who he was.

It was probably a Hellenic Jew who fashioned the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He intuitively understood the real meaning of the Greek mystery cults, the Elusinian Mysteries, and wrote the story of Jesus as an allegory for how we should view life and death but, tragically, it was altered and interpreted literally. It is not that the Jesus story is untrue, but it was really intended to point to a greater truth.

An interesting proposition.

The Roman-Jewish Wars between 66 and136AD were a catastrophe for the Jewish people,
and in terms of religious significance I see the sack of Jerusalem and in particular the destruction
of the Temple in 70AD as the watershed between the beginning of Christianity and Rabbinic
Judaism.
The possibility of a large exodus of Jews from Palestine would have galvanized the Jewish intellectual elite to produce an answer that evolved through the centuries to what we have today.
The Bar Kokhba revolt from 132 to 135AD was certainly another crisis point but in making a choice
I would choose the destruction of the Temple in 70AD that produced the crisis in their faith and initiated the origins of Christianity.

Dennis Sutherland.

[eedipus]

.. the origin of Christianity was probably a result of the destruction of the 2nd. Temple ... by the Romans in the year 70AD.

True, but do you think the "crisis point in their identity with their monotheistic God ... facing the end of their Jewish faith in their God" came then of after the put down of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the then absolute sacking of Jerusalem with no chance of rebuilding the Temple.

The Roman-Jewish Wars between 66 and136AD were a catastrophe for the Jewish people,
and in terms of religious significance I see the sack of Jerusalem and in particular the destruction
of the Temple in 70AD as the watershed between the beginning of Christianity and Rabbinic
Judaism.
The possibility of a large exodus of Jews from Palestine would have galvanized the Jewish intellectual elite to produce an answer that evolved through the centuries to what we have today.
The Bar Kokhba revolt from 132 to 135AD was certainly another crisis point but in making a choice
I would choose the destruction of the Temple in 70AD that produced the crisis in their faith and initiated the origins of Christianity.

Dennis Sutherland.

Where was the promised Messiah?

The answer to the problem was the opposite to what they had previously thought. The Messiah was not yet to come, He had already been but he had not been recognized for who he was.

It was probably a Hellenic Jew who fashioned the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He intuitively understood the real meaning of the Greek mystery cults, the Elusinian Mysteries, and wrote the story of Jesus as an allegory for how we should view life and death but, tragically, it was altered and interpreted literally. It is not that the Jesus story is untrue, but it was really intended to point to a greater truth.[/quote]
An interesting proposition.[/quote]

[MrMacSon]

It was probably a Hellenic Jew who fashioned the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He intuitively understood the real meaning of the Greek mystery cultsa, the Elusinian Mysteriesb, and wrote the story of Jesus as an allegory for how we should view life and death but tragically it was altered and interpreted literally. It is not that the Jesus story is untrue but it was really intended to point to a greater truth. It would be set in the past and it would include a number of people known to have lived at that time; their presence would greatly enhance the story’s seemingly historical authenticity.

• a and probably the Egyptian mystery cults

b But what does the Eleusinian Mystery have to do with Christianity?

"In my hypothesis [An Alternative Explanation To Christianity’s Origins], Marcion had multiple tiers in his theology, similar to the Valentinians. The Gospel was an earlier tier, and the Paul letters and Revelation came later (alternatively, Paul was also introduced early). Given the penchant mystery religions had for this dual-tier system (the 'Lesser Mystery' vs. the 'Greater Mystery'), this multi-tiered system is quite plausible, given my earlier assumptions that Marcion was a student of Cerinthus, who wrote Revelation; Marcion makes reference to Cerinthus in 2 Corinthians 12. I also propose that Cerinthus brought Christianity to Northern and Western Turkey, and might have even brought it to those Northern Turks that Pliny the Younger noticed in 112.

"Beyond that, this hypothesis also fits the general template: The Lesser mystery depicts suffering in dramatic form, while the Greater Mystery is more abstract, and gives broader insight into the theology’s underpinnings, and ultimately tie in the high-minded principles. The Gospel of Mark, which I think had heavy contribution from Marcion, reads like a play or dramatic depiction, rather than a biography – Ken Humphreys has a Youtube video about that detail. Could it be that the Gospel of Mark was the outline for a dramatic performance that was to be performed in Christianity’s own mystery gatherings? A copycat of the Eleusinian mysteries?

"Another aspect of plausibility of this connection lies in geography and timing. The Eleusinian mysteries continued to be popular at precisely the time that Christianity was ramping up, the mid-2nd century. The Eleusinian temple to Demeter was destroyed in 170, and promptly rebuilt by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was emperor between 161 and 180. Incidentally, that was the same time frame as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus were beginning to emerge as the orthodox victors. By this point, Christianity had already spread to Rome, and (I suspect) was engaged in heavy lobbying campaigns (eg Justin Martyr’s 1st apology, chapter 26).

"Consider a line in Galatians 3: 1, one of the most obviously Marcionite of all the Pauline epistles:

• 'O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.'

“ 'Clearly Portrayed', says the author. The Greek word is Prographo (προγράφω). “Paul” used this same term in Romans 15:4 and Ephesians 3:3 (this amplifies my suspicion that most of Ephesians is indeed “authentic”, save for a few passages1).

"The term Prographo gives a clue that Paul is not saying Jesus was crucified. It is saying that Jesus was portrayed as being crucified. This contributes to the plausibility that what we’re looking at in many of the early New Testament texts is a snapshot of an emerging mystery cult that had all sorts of influences from other mystery cults, including the Eleusinians, along with cultural, philosophical, and mythological inputs of the day.

https://timsteppingout.wordpress.com/20 ... mysteries/

1 Deconstructing Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

[Michael BG]

Paul often writes of rival people preaching a different message to his, (esp. in Corinth), which was why I didn’t try to specify what the something was that Paul (and those he accepted in Jerusalem) had in common.

I think it is hard to provide a strong case that there wasn’t a community in Jerusalem that Paul didn’t see as having something in common with his communities.

I find double-negatives hard to discern, let alone triple negatives like that ('I find it hard ... wasn't ... didn't ...').

I thought I had made the positive case as well as using negatives three times.

There was a community in Jerusalem that Paul recognised as sharing some beliefs with him and the communities he established. I think it would be very difficult to present a strong case this is not true. But please try if you wish.

If a second century editor was adding the references to Peter, James and John I would expect there to be less conflict than there is in Paul’s letter (a bit like Acts).

I also wonder if Paul talking about interacting with Jesus apostles in Jerusalem is a later confabulation.

Can you present a case that these sections were not written by Paul?

I have the impression you dislike Cassey but I don’t know how you feel about Paula Fredriksen who writes,

In the Qumran library … alongside the more familiar image of the royal Davidic messiah, the future warrior …we also find other messianic figures. … he might be the eschatological prophet, who will teach righteousness … at the End of Days. … This diversity of messianic figures … should not obscure the prime importance of the Davidic messiah. …The Messiah son of David is the best and most widely attested figure, cutting across sectarian as well as temporal lines: …

Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews p 123-24

These are widely held views of New Testament scholars.

Widely held views do not equal widely held specialist views. I don't know why you bring in any suggestion of personal dislikes to this discussion. Casey is the one who has slandered me and that had nothing to do with his arguments in his scholarly topics -- which I have addressed several times. I have indeed demonstrated the flaws in his arguments but Casey chose to personally attack many others who did the same thing. His work on the Son of Man does deserve attention, though its tendentiousness does lessen its long-term value.

You need to address the specialists in apocalyptic literature. Just read for yourself the passages I have cited and even from those one can scarcely deny that questions deserve to be asked about common NT scholarly and popular interpretations. Did God really come down to David on a dark cloud to rescue him? Did the stars really fall from the sky when Babylon fell? Besides, it is not hard to find the original sense of what are translated as "age" and "forever".

I don't have the time to check up the references right now so will probably do so in a future post. I'm happy till then to agree to disagree.

When quoting scholars I look for passages where they establish their views with hard evidence and not simply express an opinion or assumption. As for your quote by Fredriksen, for example, notice the way she cites a DSS text and then makes a sweeping statement asking us to accept that the viewpoint is of "prime importance" more generally etc etc -- without any supporting evidence. Yet when one reads Novenson, Boyarin and other Jewish scholars (and Christian scholars of Jewish texts) one gets a very different picture.

Please accept my apologies I did not mean that you disliked Cassey on a personal level I only meant that you disagreed with him and therefore didn’t like the positions he espoused. (I had the impression from your blog that you had never communicated.)

In defence of Fredriksen, the book I quoted from is for the general public and therefore does not produce all the evidence she might have. (I do not have a large library of books I can quote from.) Also my intension was to present the general consensus and not a detailed rebuttal of your general statement.

Hopefully I will be active here when you present the “wealth of scholarly material establishing the meaning of Mark's terminology within the understanding of the same terms in the OT” and this will include both sides of the argument.

Cassey continues,

it was bound to mean that the Romans would be driven out of Israel. … A notable Jewish prayer for deliverance is the Qaddish. …

“… May he (God) let his kingdom (…) rule in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, speedily and in the near time. Amen.”

This is an unambiguous prayer for the final establishment of God’s kingdom.
…
Jews at the time of Jesus believed that God … will set up his kingdom on earth, (and it) is to be hoped for in the near future.

p 215, 218

Notice Casey draws upon late rabbinic text and declares it must predate the gospels because of some similarities in Aramaic phrasing. (No details provided.) Casey was a brilliant Aramaic scholar but his weakness was that he assumed anything he could somehow suggest had an Aramaic source by definition went back to authentic Jesus or first century Jewish sayings. Few critical scholars, I believe, were persuaded.

Besides, a prayer for a kingdom to come is not in dispute. What we are looking for is the meaning of certain images in Second Temple era apocalyptic literature.

I agree with you that “his weakness was that he assumed anything he could somehow suggest had an Aramaic source by definition went back to authentic Jesus or first century Jewish sayings.” I think that a weakness of the Aramaic method is that the texts in Aramaic that are being compared are often later than the first century. However this does not mean that the comparison is not useful.

If there was a prayer that God’s heavenly kingdom should come in the near future this is evidence that there were Jews who wanted this and it is evidence that it is possible that Jesus’ call for such a thing was not unusual and it was within Jewish thought of the time.

So Paul was not a Roman citizen then?

Paul does not state he is in his letters and therefore the only evidence we have for it is Acts and Acts is not always a reliable source of historical facts. The Acts Seminar think Luke created the story.

"Consider a line in Galatians 3: 1, one of the most obviously Marcionite of all the Pauline epistles:

• 'O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.'

“ 'Clearly Portrayed', says the author. The Greek word is Prographo (προγράφω). “Paul” used this same term in Romans 15:4 and Ephesians 3:3 (this amplifies my suspicion that most of Ephesians is indeed “authentic”, save for a few passages1).

"The term Prographo gives a clue that Paul is not saying Jesus was crucified. It is saying that Jesus was portrayed as being crucified. This contributes to the plausibility that what we’re looking at in many of the early New Testament texts is a snapshot of an emerging mystery cult that had all sorts of influences from other mystery cults, including the Eleusinians, along with cultural, philosophical, and mythological inputs of the day.

https://timsteppingout.wordpress.com/20 ... mysteries/

According to Perseus Prographo (προεγραφη) means “write before” as in “previously written” which could mean “ordained” so it could be read – “Before your eyes Jesus Christ was crucified as it was written.” The RVS translate it in Eph 3:3 as “as I have written” and in Rom 15:4 “was written in former days”.

[neilgodfrey]

If there was a prayer that God’s heavenly kingdom should come in the near future this is evidence that there were Jews who wanted this and it is evidence that it is possible that Jesus’ call for such a thing was not unusual and it was within Jewish thought of the time.

Prayers for God's kingdom are one thing, but we are discussing the question of messiah and a particular way God is to "come" to the world (not necessarily establish his kingdom). They are by no means the same thing.

We have evidence that some Christians post 70/135 viewed the fate of the Jews as God's judgment upon them and a sign that they had been replaced as God's people by "the church". This actually coincides with the view of Daniel that the defeat of the Seleucids and independence of the Jews was the coming of the Son of Man to judgment and the establishment "forever" of the kingdom of the saints. There are many similar parallels to this sort of apocalyptic use of metaphors to describe historical events that to the outsider seem entirely earthly. The "wise" know that it all means and what is really happening.

[neilgodfrey]

In defence of Fredriksen, the book I quoted from is for the general public and therefore does not produce all the evidence she might have. (I do not have a large library of books I can quote from.) Also my intension was to present the general consensus and not a detailed rebuttal of your general statement.

There are no other references for her to turn to. There is no support for her assertion anywhere in existence. All that is available is evidence for other (later) periods that she must assume also applies to earlier periods. Biblical scholars too often betray their general reading public this way. They are merely repeating the prevailing ideological views on the assumption that they are so well accepted that they will never be questioned. I am sure Paula herself firmly believes what she asserts.

But the fact remains she makes no appeal to evidence beyond the DSS and no evidence for her assertion exists beyond the DSS.

Novenson, Hengel, Boyarin, Green, Thompson and others do cite evidence to argue their case that the standard popular conventional view that we find repeated by Fredriksen is false. But appeas to evidence to argue against a mainstream, long-held wisdom is often ignored by the mainstream for various reasons.

[neilgodfrey]

Hopefully I will be active here when you present the “wealth of scholarly material establishing the meaning of Mark's terminology within the understanding of the same terms in the OT” and this will include both sides of the argument.

I am currently in the process of (re)organizing all of my resources through zotero for easier ready reference. I'll be in a position to do justice to the topic then, in a few weeks, maybe another 2 months. Meanwhle, one passage I did come across that appears at the end of an article on the state of apocalyptic studies a few years ago:

Because of the nature of the dreams and visions they narrate and the extraordinary character of their narratives, most scholars would now agree that an apocalypse is an imaginative response to a specific historical and social situation. Yet there is a significant minority in this country, whose presence is attested by the wide circulation of the "Left Behind" novels, for whom the canonical apocalypses are historical fact,

So we students of apocalypses still have our work cut out for us.

That's by Adela Yarbro Collins, "Apocalypse Now: The State of Apocalyptic Studies Near the End of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century" in the Harvard Theological Review, 104, 4, Oct 2011, pp. 447-457. Curiously many N.T. scholars when commenting upon the Synoptic Apocalypse slip right back in to their (long-accustomed?) habit of reading it as literally as Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

[andrewcriddle]

2 Cor 11 is describing punishments by the Jewish persecutors. Without turning to Acts or the Pastorals I don't know what reason we have to think Paul was accosted by Roman powers. He also said some of his sufferings were even a god-send to keep him humble.

Beaten with rods ἐραβδίσθην is us ually taken as a Roman punishment (as distinct from the Jewish 39 lashes) The verb is only used in the NT here and in Acts 16:22 where it is clearly a Roman punishment.

Andrew Criddle

So Paul was not a Roman citizen then?

In the Acts passage Paul was illegally beaten.
In itself this is entirely plausible (see the various trials of Roman officials for alleged misconduct for example) however for it to happen on three separate occasions may seem improbable.

Andrew Criddle

[John2]

Re: "This diversity of messianic figures" in the Dead Sea Scrolls (in Michael BG's citation of Fredriksen), the references to the Messiah in the Damascus Document are singular, as Wacholder notes on pg. 214 in "The New Damascus Document."

Conventional scholarship emends CD's reading ... [of a singular messiah in] (6:1) to a plural ... and understands that it is alluding to two messiahs ... A distinction should be drawn between these clauses containing the word [messiah] in the plural [in other Scrolls] and that of ... (the Messiah from Aaron and Israel) which occurs four times in MTA (CD 12:23-24; 14:19; 19:10-11; 20:1), wherein the term "messiah" is in the singular.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ZZ58U ... nt&f=false