I think you're wrong about the "dominant assumption," Robert. Historians have no trouble with the existence of Christian gnosticism from an early date. Christian gnosticism follows in the broader tradition of gnosticism, which was quite an old one going back to ancient Greece as well as other cultures. Further, there was no "original literal orthodoxy" from which the Gnostics could even be said to mutate. Orthodoxy refers to something quite different, a condition of doctrinal standardization that wouldn't arrive for a few centuries. There was no orthodoxy based on Jesus having existed, set against an assertion that he did not. This is a present-day belief slapped onto the ancient past. Whereas no doubt the Gnostics didn't make biography a matter of importance, I haven't seen anything that indicates that all these stories and sayings of Jesus, of which their books consist, equate to what we know as fiction. Our own concern with literalism simply wasn't a hallmark of those times. Please remember that all I've cared to argue is that Jesus was put forward as having been a man. I haven't argued that he was indeed real, although I think the probability does point to a man as having started the ball rolling.Robert Tulip wrote: DWill, the dominant assumption is that Gnosticism arose as a mutation from an original literal orthodoxy. This assumption is behind your comment here, but is precisely what is contested by the mythicist reading. Instead, the presence of Gnostic ideas in the Bible itself leads to the interpretation that in fact Gnosticism was a far older and more central theme in Christian origins, conceptualising religion against the hermetic principle that events on earth can be understood as part of the natural whole seen in the ordered movement of the cosmos. This central Gnostic idea is incompatible with supernatural dogma, and as a result the church developed its claim that the later Gnostics simply had wrong speculative interpretations of the historic Gospel events.
It may be strictly true that Gnostics didn't have supernatural dogma, in the sense of required belief. But to imply that they had no supernatural theology is counterfactual. You don't dip into the Gnostic books to seek refuge from supernatural woo-woo. Again you're recasting the Gnostics in an image more to your liking.
What the Romans had heard so much about was this religion that claimed as its leader a slain man who was actually the son of a god. This was the "new revelation," from their point of view. I'm going to defer to Flann on the arguments that Jesus could not have been an invention of the Gnostics. As he says, you need to have not just one invention, but a whole skein of them going forward, and that should arouse extreme skepticism of the Gnostic origin idea.I haven’t heard of Wilken before, so thank you for mentioning him. But your quoted text contains what for me is an alarm bell, in the phrase ‘the new revelation’. Orthodox theologians assume that Jesus Christ was the historic founder of Christianity, and brought this new teaching. But if in fact Jesus was a Gnostic invention, then the structure of Wilken’s argument is thrown into doubt.
Wilken doesn't posit anything about the origin of particular ideas of Jesus Christ. He only examines the Roman view of the Christians, which can be an instructive perspective. To the Romans, Gnostic vs "orthodox" would not have made any difference. What made a difference was the separatism of the people who called themselves ChristianThe actual debates which formed the New Testament are lost, so reconstructing their probable content requires careful analysis, including about how Gnostic ideas found their way into texts such as Romans 8. My view is that the melting pot at Alexandria where Mark wrote his Gospel produced a syncretism between not only Judaism and Hellenic thought, but also other less well known traditions from Egypt, Babylon and India. So the Gnostic concept of Jesus Christ as alpha and omega did not emerge from dialogue between a Palestinian Gospel and the oikoumene as Wilken posits, but rather was embedded from the start.