It is interesting how little things have changed, then. There are still roughly the same mythicist groups, if not more, and the idea of a celestial crucifixion is still a sticking point for the "other" mythicist groups.Giuseppe wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 12:56 pmwhen Couchoud advanced firstly the idea of a celestial crucifixion, he founded particular resistance by :Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 12:22 pm Why do you think that so many Jesus mythicists or Jesus agnostics out there fail to find the heavenly crucifixion theory viable? What is holding them back? (This is not a rhetorical question; it is sincere.)
- Mythicists who believed that the crucifixion was an earthly rite practiced any year from the remote past.
- Mythicists who believed that the Jesus of Paul was earthly but was some shadowy figure lived under Janneus and someway remembered in the Talmud.
While I can neither confirm nor deny such motives on the part of others, I can observe that these reasons all very much fly well above the texts themselves. I, for one, am interested in interpreting the texts; figuring out how to do that in ways which are the most likely to yield accurate results is the point of the endeavor for me. And I rejected Earl Doherty's celestial crucifixion because his interpretation of the texts was often horrible. How he treated the phrase "born of a woman," for example, would be criminal in a world in which civic morality was equal to scholarly endeavor. At one point in a debate I had with him on that matter he finally suggested that "born of a woman" might be an interpolation into Galatians, and I encouraged him to move along those lines, since on my reading the Marcionite version lacked that phrase; therefore, there was a case to be made. But I could not then, nor can I now, abide such terrible arguments, and the celestial crucifixion stance has been brimming with them for years now. Peter Kirby once mentioned that, in the case of Doherty himself, a new theory is bound not to be all put together yet, with all dots and crosses in place, and that is true; and I have given a celestial crucifixion some serious consideration while trying to abandon some of the more egregious examples of misinterpretation: call "born of a woman" an interpolation, make "brother of the Lord" mean something other than biology, and so on, and hey, maybe there is something to it; yet, in the end, I could not make it work without compromising good interpretive principles. Peter made the suggestion that, instead of a crucifixion in the heavens, it was instead originally a crucifixion in the abyss, and immediately that option made scads more sense than the celestial crucifixion theory does or did. I am not sure what psychological inducement you imagine I might have for preferring the abyss as a venue to the lower heavens, but for me it is a matter of interpreting the text in reasonable ways.The first case is an example of people having already their "reason" to be mythicist hence being reluctant a priori to abandon that reason.
The second case, that I can extend easily on the modern likes of G.A.Wells (afterall, he was open to the possibility of the Ellegard's Teacher of Justice as the real Jesus of Paul), is an example of people who are closed a priori about the possibility of a celestial death because the only idea seems to be too much "Gnostic" for them and as such "not really Jewish" hence not really useful to explain the belief of the Origins. Hence they create a false dicothomy: who denies an earthly crucifixion can be only a gentile (Christian or not), not a Jew (Christian or not). Because the Jews - as the prejudice goes - have a Messiah who is davidic or ephraimite therefore he has an earthly lineage therefore he has to be earthly. .... Something as: a genuine 1° CE Jew can't despise the earth to a such measure that he places the death of the his messiah not on this earth. The implicit assumption is that only the gentiles could place fatidic events "in the air". The Jews have to place their idols on the earth. The Jews have to be "materialistic" in any their conception. If they see a ghost, the ghost has to be material, too. Materialism is synonymous of Jewishness, it would seem (I am talking about the prejudice in action behind anti-Doherty mythicists here).
I am glad you put this here, because it exemplifies part of what I was talking about above.Even when he is compared to Melkizedek, "without father or mother", he has to be earthly "as Melkizedek was also".
Taking "without father or mother" is a terrible argument for a heavenly venue. I tried to tell you this before, but apparently the point did not make it through. "Without father or mother" is something one may posit of an orphan, for example, both in English and in Greek. In Greek there is the additional interpretive possibility of unknown heritage: one is "fatherless and motherless" if one does not know who one's parents are; bastard children can be called "fatherless." With respect to Melchizedek, the most important qualification is that he is "without beginning of days." That he lacks mother, father, and genealogy is simply a fact of the extant text of Genesis: we know none of those things about him, and that is all it takes to merit those terms.
As I mentioned in that other thread, I have softened considerably on your idea that the tribe of Judah is an addition to Hebrews; it is something to be considered, I will readily grant you, and I am glad that you made the argument (and thus indirectly pointed out a hole in my thought process). However, to suggest that the Greek terms for "without father" and "without mother" can, by themselves, suggest literally having no biological parents is just plain wrong. You seize upon them as if they prove something, but they do not. In conjunction with having "no beginning of days," yes, there is a case to be made, especially given the status granted to Melchizedek at Qumran. But, even so, this entire concentration of themes has nothing whatsoever to do with Melchizedek being earthly or heavenly during his time of ministry; he can be godlike and still operate on earth. You take a valid point and press it too far, and that can be very frustrating sometimes.
