Against the Argument for 'Influences' in Early Christianity

[Ben C. Smith]

None of that resonates with early Christianity.

Maybe not for you because you were brought up in a forty third rate form of Christianity (evangelical American whatever Christianity).

And why is this kind of pop psychology so popular on this forum anyway? It accomplishes nothing. The texts are what count, and the valid arguments to be made from those texts.

[Ben C. Smith]

When I joked about you "projecting" your interest in sex and sexuality, it was just that: a joke. I do not intend it to be taken seriously. I could not care less whence your ideas come from; only their validity is of even the slightest interest to me.

[Secret Alias]

I am not joking or being rude. ANY evangelical THINKS they are being 'objective' being trying to find exegetical threads in the New Testament ... unaware that that is what their religious ancestors have been doing since Luther. It's not an insult. It's not a joke. Biblical criticism exists in tucked away corner in the overall culture of humanity and that culture is dominated by the pursuit of sex (although in the post-Covid world I am not as sure). I can remember hanging out with Benny and he'd laugh because he'd say you (meaning me) are totally unlike any Biblical scholar he'd ever encountered. He's just a fucking Samaritan. Came out of the womb that way. And all these eggheads would ask him about this or that but he's just a regular guy. So I enjoyed that.

But my point in this thread is to say - this egghead thing about studying 'element A' from the Bible as an influence on 'element B' that's the way Protestants have always worked. They have their Bible studies classes (even the Catholics have these now too). But it's complete bullshit. This is the way you manufacture sermons. There's no end game here. It's just spinning round and round in the same circles. Then you die and your student keeps it going and so on and so on. There's no resolution to any of it. It's just what Protestants do. The same thing with 'the study of the historical Jesus.' We're just following in the path laid out by the Church Fathers.

The Empire didn't like two powers in heaven. The Emperor was the cosmocrator. That was the yardstick. The fact that the Torah had one god walking around on the earth as the prototypical man impregnating the wives of the Patriarchs making the Israelites/Jews as a special 'astral race' while another God was in the clouds - that wasn't cool. It wasn't cool because Jesus was that anthropomorphic divinity and was actively creating a race of supermen in the second century.

So whatever Christianity was from the late first century to the late second century this other thing emerged from Irenaeus onward. Irenaeus probably following Justin to some degree had this list of 'bad Christians' and all of what they believed and promulgated was to be avoided. So other elements were layered on top of the gospel used by Marcion, Tatian, Apelles and the rest of the older tradition. This understanding of the godman made the man who was God born from a Virgin and walk and talk like us. Fine. But we never get any direct evidence of this older tradition. Everything we get is only as old as Irenaeus. Even Justin's material was edited by someone like Irenaeus at the end of the second century.

So we can only get so far by traditional Biblical exegesis. We basically fill out of lives with a distraction from the world that is crumbling around us. But the real prize is getting to know the Christianity beyond Irenaeus. I don't know how we do that. I try in my own way. I try to read Philo and Clement and look for a continuous tradition. I try to see parallels between the description of the two powers tradition as described in the (altered) writings of r Ishmael and the (altered) writings of Justin. But its hard. I admit its hard.

[Ben C. Smith]

But my point in this thread is to say - this egghead thing about studying 'element A' from the Bible as an influence on 'element B' that's the way Protestants have always worked.

That is the way real life works: elements of thought (ideas) influence authors, who spin them into new and different elements of thought, which then in turn influence other authors, and so on. So yes, many times element A will have influenced element B, mediated by a human being who read or heard element A and then wrote or spoke element B. That is just how ideas develop. It is not Protestant; it is human.

ETA: I have to assume that you really mean something else other than what you are saying, that you are just not expressing yourself clearly: because to suggest that ideas do not influence people to form related but different ideas, that there exist no elements in texts which inspired related but different elements in other texts, makes no sense whatsoever.

[Secret Alias]

I have to assume that you really mean something else other than what you are saying

No. I am saying the idea that Joshua was the one like Moses - the core understanding of the gospel - was not developed as pure exegesis or 'influence' from some other tradition. It is implicit/explicit understanding of the Pentateuch. It can't get any more hit over the head. Like figuring out that Batman is Bruce Wayne. The Marcionites are said to have gone out of their way to deny the 'son of David' paradigm. They read the Bar Timaeus narrative that way. The only reason it is 'exegesis' now IMHO is because Irenaeus wrote the explicit = Bar Timaeus was blind but then when he stripped his clothes and Jesus spoke he could literally see who Jesus was = Joshua.

The gospel was originally written as if the original understanding of the Samaritans and Sadducees played out as literal truth in 20 - 21 CE. Joshua was resurrected in the Joshua portion of the sixfold division of the narrative (i.e. from when he crosses the Jordan to Jerusalem). The only wrinkle is that the narrative is inverted. Instead of Joshua crucifying the kings and sealing them in a cave, Joshua is crucified and sealed in a cave. Mary is just Rahab redivivus. It's not 'influence' - it's just a parallel universe - as if Moses received an imperfect but related understanding to the actual mystery established before the Creation. Like the Pentateuch written in a funhouse mirror.

[Secret Alias]

Remember Irenaeus and someone else (I forget) accepted that Ezra wrote the Torah in a visionary state. How did that wrinkle get allowed in the dogma? Because there was this core idea that the mystery of the gospel = the true mystery of the Old Testament imperfectly preserved by Ezra. The smokescreen that Marcion hated Moses was likely misinformation. If the orthodox knew Ezra, if the pagans knew Ezra, so too the heretics.

[Secret Alias]

If the physical Ten Commandments in the temple (or the synagogue of Alexandria) had the short-form commandments that would have been taken as another inaccuracy of Ezra.

[Ben C. Smith]

I have to assume that you really mean something else other than what you are saying

No. I am saying the idea that Joshua was the one like Moses - the core understanding of the gospel - was not developed as pure exegesis or 'influence' from some other tradition. It is implicit/explicit understanding of the Pentateuch.

Are you talking about the difference between (A) "merely" being influenced by a text and (B) being part of a living tradition?

[Secret Alias]

The use of American standards in romantic comedies is what I am thinking of. When Harry Met Sally's use of It Had to Be You for instance. Reiner chose a song to convey the mood of Billy Crystal dealing with his feelings for Meg Ryan. The song didn't 'influence' When Harry Met Sally. The script was written with the conscious choice of standard American music. This was because Ephron and Reiner wanted to create a modern romance where 'romance' was already recognized to be an archaic concept. Romance was something from 40s and 50s films where the standards form the template for various moods and feelings.

Ephron supplied the structure of the film with much of the dialogue based on the real-life friendship between Reiner and Crystal. The soundtrack consists of standards performed by Harry Connick Jr., with a big band and orchestra arranged by Marc Shaiman. For his work on the soundtrack, Connick won his first Grammy Award for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance.

The Torah is love story between God and the Israelite people. God literally impregnates all the women in the narrative. When the Israelites learn that God is their Father (gasp! that's Christian) they also learn that they are a race set apart from the rest of humanity who only have material ancestors.

In the same way as the standards came from musicals which told the story of boy meet girl and these songs were taken in When Harry Met Sally to tell a different kind of love story, the gospel assumed that Ezra wrote an imperfect love song. As such the melody as it were was retained recontextualized. The god who impregnated women now closes the womb of women. Why? Time is short. But what about the promise of Abraham? It was no longer an allegorical story. It was fulfilled in the mystery religion of Christianity. That's why I say that it isn't about influences any more. The core understanding of Christianity is that the text is misleading. That's why Irenaeus says:

When, however, they are confuted from the Scriptures, they turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority, and [assert] that they are ambiguous, and that the truth cannot be extracted from them by those who are ignorant of tradition. For [they allege] that the truth was not delivered by means of written documents, but viva voce: wherefore also Paul declared, "But we speak wisdom among those that are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world." And this wisdom each one of them alleges to be the fiction of his own inventing, forsooth; so that, according to their idea, the truth properly resides at one time in Valentinus, at another in Marcion, at another in Cerinthus, then afterwards in Basilides, or has even been indifferently in any other opponent, who could speak nothing pertaining to salvation. For every one of these men, being altogether of a perverse disposition, depraving the system of truth, is not ashamed to preach himself.

I've struggled with this for a long time. If the Marcionites and Tatian and so and so and so and so all had different gospels how didn't Christianity just devolve into various groups arguing with each other over the different textual traditions? My solution is that what is present in Roman Catholics to this day is a survival of the solution in antiquity - only the mysteries matter.

The catechumen had their 'elementary studies' and prepared for baptism. But once they completed their studies the written word didn't matter any more. It wasn't that Marcionites 'hated' the Old Testament. Christianity was essentially beyond written texts. That's why Paul speaks about writing on the heart (from Deuteronomy admittedly). But there is this sense that the Law was a prison. That writings were a prison. The Law promised what Abraham was promised but never delivered. Protestants continue this textual obsession but not the Catholics not the Orthodox. On a certain level there is an understanding that mere words only go so far. The mysteries render the word irrelevant.

[Secret Alias]

It is an interesting phenomenon the way post-modern films reuse standards. The films from the earlier era didn't recycle and recontextualize music in this way. 'Romance' is the thing that 'the old movies' and the 'old songs' were about. The music evokes romance but now in an age where all the tensions of the past have been removed. The gospel's use of the Torah is like that only with the added assumption that Ezra only received an imperfect understanding of the mystery that was to come (which of course was fulfilled by Christianity). Sort of what Islam does with Muhammad as the 'seal of the prophets' assuming that Christianity cared about a linear succession of prophets as a central concern. I think Manichaeanism did. But the whole reframing of the Judeo-Christian tradition seems odd to us. More like the list of precursors to Mani in the Manichaean psalm book than anything Christian.