tat tvam asi wrote:Very keen observation Robert. It's true that the mythology takes a mythical deity and then brings it down into the flesh, what has been called the orthodox Christian "carnalizers." When viewed against what was going on with the Philo and the Therapeutan collegia around the Roman Empire during the early first century, it is clear that the idea of the Son of God was not carnalized yet at that point.
'Carnalizing' sounds like turning ideas into meat. How I see it is that from the start, Christianity promoted a vision of worldly transformation, a shift of ages. It is a fairly reasonable question to ask how you can have a transformation if you don't have an agent who is responsible for the transformation. So the pressure was on to pick up on the hints in Paul that point towards Christ as material agent. Recognising that this carnal reading struck a popular nerve, the original indefinite idea of Christ as myth was shunted to the margins and suppressed in the popular vision, even though it remains central to the Christological question of how to unite the two natures of Jesus Christ in a single person, the hypostatic question of the anointed savior, how the Christ of faith is the Jesus of history. If we now ignore the apparent errors about the Jesus of history, how much is really left of the Christ of faith? Is it possible to rebase the eternal vision in astronomy?
And it's clear that the allegorical works of the Therapeuts mentioned by Philo were considered as early proto-gospels by later generations of church fathers. A scientific analysis shows a more abstract mythology gradually getting itself more organized and narrowed down with time. Finally, the more detailed historical Jesus begins to appear into the historical record over a century after the supposed life time. It seems clear enough to me that I'm looking at various writers trying to bring an historical setting to the myth and coming up with different ideas as to how that historical setting should go. And these various attempts were thrown together and attempts at harmonization have occured every since.
It is so interesting to compare this evolution of Christian faith with evolution in nature or technology. We see that a crude starting point always encounters various practical difficulties, and only those versions that adapt to respond to these difficulties survive into the future. The difficulty faced by the proto-Gospel was that the religion of Christ, as an overturning of old thought, was well suited as the basis of a mass movement, which required simplicity. Against 'only believe and be saved' any complex eschatological astronomical vision would always be marginal. The origin of orthodoxy is in its ancient popularity, and until now the philosophical basis of this popularity has never really been understood and analyzed.
The writers show geographical mistakes as well, as if they were not writing in and around the very region described in the myth. They look to the Greek Septuagint instead of the Hebrew scriptures when trying to tie OT quotes into their Son of God fulfillment of prophecy attempts, which, are easily seen for what they are. What orthodox Jews living in Israel, knowing the geography and the Hebrew scriptures would do such a thing and make so many mistakes in the process? It sounds more like Graeco-Jewish allegorizing to me, an effort that likely spanned the collegia brotherhood network spread around the empire outside of ancient Israel in large part. Trying to rationalize the NT by asking questions about the politics in Israel at the time of the early, concerning orthodox Jews, doesn't make very much sense to me because it's more than obvious that this mythology wasn't created in Israel just after those times in all actuality.
Yes, for any forensic detective there are holes in the story that you could drive a truck through. Evangelical apologists still manage to ignore these holes, such as the apparent origin in the Greek speaking diaspora.
It seems to be more about ancient Israel from an outsider perspective, and indeed from a perspective of the future looking back at earlier times gone by and trying to impose mythical thoughts and ideas on those earlier times - much the same as we find in OT with the fictional Egyptian Captivity, Exodus, and Conquest of Canaan via "Joshua", or "Yeshua" the heroic Jewish general. Did an historical Jesus, named after the general Yeshua of this previous myth, predict the destruction of the Temple, or did a writer have the second named character of Jesus/Yeshua, in a newer updated mythology, predicting the destruction of the Temple to try and make it look like this new hero character was all-knowing and could tell the future? The Orthodox Jewish authorities are blamed for the destruction 'about to come'. They are the "bad guys" of this myth in very obvious ways. Who would see them in this light? Graeco-Jewish hellenizers operating outside of the orthodox Jewish community in the diaspora perhaps? Blaming them for what happened in Israel after the fact?
Like the way King Josiah inserted a prophecy of his glorious rule in the supposedly earlier book of Kings. The aim of the Gospels was to be believable, but they were written at a time when hardly anyone could refute their errors, and those few could easily be isolated and ignored. Putting the prophecy of the destruction of the temple into the story was easy, and showed remarkable restraint, as though the writers thought carefully about how far the credulity of their audience would stretch, and deliberately remained within that limit, while also stretching it with the miracles, all aimed at showing that Jesus was special.
And with a myth like this in circulation how long would it take for a certain anti-semitism to emerge? The orthodox Jews rejected this hellenized Graeco-Jewish myth as a heresy against Judaism. And the fact that they would not submit to these ill-conceived attempts at historicizing a hellenized Graeco-Jewish myth made the Jews all the more hated by those seeking to promote this historical fallacy. There's been some talk of anti-semitism as a reason for leaning towards an historical Jesus, but there's really no reason to assume that the anti-semitism had to originate from an historical act of the Jews killing one of their prophets as a blaspemer IMO. There's no record of this in the first place. Nothing from the Jews or Romans about any of this happening in the early first century. Herod owed a great deal of money to Philo's brother in Alexandria and there were mixed emotions going around about Rome putting him in power. The anti-Herodianism that starts off the gospel accounts is perfectly understandable from the perspective of the Graeco-Jewish communities feelings over in Alexandria.
Christianity was targeted at the broad masses of the Roman Empire who had to accept each other and so could not accept an exclusivist myth, such as the older doctrines of any of the previously isolated communities, whether from Israel, Rome or Egypt. Christ proved remarkably accommodating towards other beliefs, turning their gods into disciples, angels, demons, etc. Jewish exclusivism was an affront to this new syncretic model.
The character is made to flee to Egypt and then return. And upon returning strikes at the very heart of the orthodox Jew's power and authority. And how long would it take for a myth like this to influence a certain anti-semitism when the orthodox Jews were being painted as evil and corrupt? The Romans, simply doing their duty, are painted as being forced around into doing things that they didn't feel like doing just to appease the evil and corrupt orthodox Jewish authorities. The whole thing is very fishy to say the least...
But the context of the critique of Judaism was the effort to construct a new mythology that would delegitimise the pagan Greco-Roman imperial gods. This is why Jesus expresses respect for Moses, and why Paul calls Jesus the second Adam. It is about adapting Judaism to the new historical dispensation of empire. We see this adaptation hidden in injunctions such as 'walk the extra mile' which I have heard refers to a Roman rule that imperial soldiers could force locals to carry the soldier's pack for one mile, but not for two, so refusing to give the pack back to the occupying controller was an act of sedition, aimed at shaming Rome into seeing that its dominance was immoral. This targeting of Rome as the main source of evil was extended in the common identification between the Antichrist and empire. It was mainly when the empire took over the church that this angle was downplayed by targeting the Jews.
