DB, you well know that the fact that stories are in the Bible is not evidence that anyone actually believed those stories in the community where they were written. It appears that literal belief is a later corruption of an original symbolic intent. Stories of the risen Christ are all parables.
So you’re saying that the letters of Paul were made up the same way the gospels were? I assume you have proof of that.
Bible stories are created for a pedagogical purpose, not as accurate record of events. So stories of hallucination do not mean the writers or their subject believed they saw visions, but rather that such stories are helpful parables in teaching the community.
What I need to get from you is whether or not you believe that there was someone who authored Paul’s letters as yet another ruse or whether there was an individual who wrote those letters in earnest. Now, we know the pastorals weren’t written by Paul or not entirely but other letters as Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Romans, etc. appear to have been written by someone we call Paul, a man who claimed to have seen the risen Christ and therefore had the right to call himself an apostle and, as a result, ran afoul others who did not accept his accounts or authority and accused him of getting his information from the Three Pillars of Jerusalem—Peter, John and James. He countered by saying what he learned was via scripture clarified by revelations from the risen Christ—quite a common claim at that time by people trying to become big wheels in the Christian church—and that he did not even go to Jerusalem until about the 14th year after his conversion and met the three briefly and was only there a short while and so could not have gotten his knowledge from them. So, you’re saying this story I have just relayed is a fiction invented by somebody for purposes of teaching others. In essence, there was no Paul. He is as fictional as Jesus. Am I getting this right?
There is no sense talking about telling the women at the tomb of Christ that they were hallucinating if in fact those women are entirely fictional, mutants from Egyptian myth.
We’re not talking about those women or about the gospels. I already made that clear. We’re talking about the communities of Christians that formed in the wake of the death of this Jesus personage—the first several decades going into the 2nd century. I am not clear on whether you are saying that Paul himself is a myth invented by some unknown person as a literary device. This doesn’t make much sense. His claims of seeing the risen Christ would serve no pedagogical purpose. And to tell him that what he saw was a misunderstood parable makes no sense either. He either had a vision or he lied about having a vision—that’s the only options we have, unless you are saying Paul’s letters are themselves a fictional story written by someone else. In that case, I would like to see your proof.
Acts is pure fiction, as Carrier well documents. Dreaming dreams and seeing visions, per the prophet Joel, is big business in religion, and as Mencken sagely put it, if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. Visions are either mental illness, fakery, drug-induced or moral fables.
Yes, Acts is a fiction but Carrier does assign it some practical value in that gives us a window into how the church operated at that time. The book is a fiction but the information it gives about the church structure and the milieu in which it sprang appear to be completely truthful. So the account of Stephen seeing the risen Christ doesn’t have to be historically true. The account gives us a glimpse into what kind of things went on in the early church and how it operated. The conclusion is that people took these visions seriously and without a vision of Christ, you could not be an apostle. It was a big deal to say you saw the risen Christ because, by doing so, you were claiming apostolic authority and that was sure to rub more powerful members the wrong way and they would do everything in their power to bring you down. To make the claim, you had to be fairly certain of winning. Paul had to have some powerful people standing behind him and that’s why there was talk that it was Peter, John and James in Jerusalem.
But we have no evidence that any apostles actually saw anything, especially in texts such as 1 Cor 15 where Paul explicitly says his source for his claim is prophecy from scripture, not testimony of witnesses.
Paul explicitly stated his saw a vision of Christ in the third heaven. He also claimed to have seen him at the Last Supper and Christ gave him instruction. These appear to be two separate visions. The scripture he refers to was the basis of the entire Jesus movement and consisted of the Wisdom of Solomon, Isaiah chapter 52 and perhaps some stuff from Psalms. Carrier also mentions Daniel and Zecharia. In these scriptures, can be found the entire story of Christian belief. But the scriptures were not what elevated one’s standing in the church, it was the visions. Without having visions of the risen Christ spoken of in those scriptures, you could not move up, you could not claim authority, you could not earn the coveted title of apostle.
A few things here. The nasty reception that Allegro got for his mushroom speculation indicates the social wrath that will descend on anyone who explores mystical substances in western tradition, as Timothy Leary also discovered.
Remember this was a mystery school. Everything that went on was private and secret and could not be revealed to outsiders. There was no societal condemnation because they didn’t know much about what went on. Any condemnation came from the secrecy itself just as Freemasons were often resented even though they used no psychotropic substances. But then they were not vision-oriented and the early Christians were and if some early Christian potential leader with good charismatic qualities couldn’t seem to have the visions necessary on his own and didn’t want to have to lie about having them…
I don’t share your deprecating views on Revelation, which I consider to be very old in some of its core ideas, with strong poetic concealment used to protect the message over the long centuries during which it has not been understood. We should never think that any of the images in Revelation are what people actually saw, but rather should investigate them as allegory.
I’m just saying Revelation is written as a vision but it was not a vision. It is too carefully constructed. Within this supposed vision, we have Jesus dictating entire letters to various churches. Not likely. It was a carefully constructed allegory disguised as a vision because visions were taken seriously back then. It was written the way people expected it to be if it was to be considered authoritative. IOW, it was a direct revelation from the divine, untainted by human minds. Now it could have been based on previous visions but whoever put it together wasn’t high or “visioning” when he did it. He was quite deliberate in his aims which was a condemnation of the church for creating and foisting off an earthly Jesus on the populace.
Perhaps supply and demand curves can model the factors behind visions proliferating, to illustrate the evolutionary drivers of the market of ideas? In economics, as in the sociology of religion, market equilibrium occurs where supply and demand curves intersect. We can think of crucifixion or messianism as the X axis, and popularity as the Y axis. Where getting crucified for your ideas is unlikely, supply will be high and demand low. As the martyrdom element increases along the X axis, as long as the ideas are authentically messianic and not crazy, supply will fall and demand will increase. People admire saints but don’t wish to emulate them, and are highly suspicious of extreme theories of martyrdom like those of Islamic State. Where the two curves cross at the equilibrium of supply and demand indicates the social tolerance for messianism. This equilibrium point was different in the ancient world than it is today.
That may be one reason that apostles weren’t crucifying themselves in Jesus’s name—his passion and death were supposed to have fixed everything now and for all time. It would be unnecessary to duplicate it.
Perhaps the messianic fantasy need has been displaced into movies? There is a lot of analysis of characters such as Luke Skywalker, Neo from The Matrix and Frodo Baggins as messianic, saving their people from seemingly inevitable doom. There is still the demand for such transformative ideas, but maybe the supply is low because providing a simple and compelling story is too hard, given the challenge of reconciling faith and reason.
It’s something of the past. It no longer holds the power if once did. We can’t go back. Undoubtedly, some movies are made to fill this void left in our psyches but it will never be the way it was.
