• In total there are 39 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 39 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Commentary on Romans 8

Engage in conversations about worldwide religions, cults, philosophy, atheism, freethought, critical thinking, and skepticism in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Much as DWill may hope that the inexhaustible riches of Romans 8 have been adequately mined in this thread, I am still only up to Flann’s comment on page 3 in my methodical responses, so will leave the interlude on indigeneity to press on with the points I have not yet addressed.
Flann 5 wrote: You apply another conspiracy theory to try explain this rejection of paganism throughout the old testament.
You talk as though analysis of conspiracies is automatically invalid. But the Bible is based on conspiracies. It is fallacious to attempt to discredit analysis through guilt by association, the idea that because some conspiracies don't exist none do.

The Bible itself explains its conspiracies quite transparently. For example Moses explains that the first of the real ten commandments at Exodus 34:13 is “Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles.” This illustrates that these pagan practices were prevalent in Israel at the time, and that God was allegedly instructing the Jews to carefully conspire with each other by excluding their enemies from their confidence, saying “be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you.”
Flann 5 wrote: Egyptian religion was polytheistic and the oldest Jewish writings like Job and Genesis are clearly monotheistic and again distinguish sharply between the creator and the creation.
The relation between monotheism and polytheism is hard to reconstruct by taking the Bible as a primary reference. Jewish polytheism was rampant, given how the prophets so rudely compare polytheism with prostitution:
The Bible wrote:Judges 2:17 Yet they would not listen to their judges but went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them
Exodus 34:16 sons commit adultery against me by worshiping other gods.
Judges 8:33 the Israelites again ... chased after other gods - the Baals
Hosea 4:12 My people consult a wooden idol, and a diviner's rod ...... Longing after idols has made them foolish. ... They commit adultery by giving themselves to other gods. ... caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring
Hosea 1:2 prostitute by turning against the LORD and worshiping other gods.
There is a famous episode in Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell where Winston Smith helps to rewrite documents to prove that Oceania always has been at war with Eastasia. This is a parable, applying the Big Brother principle that "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Totalitarian regimes have always sought to control history, and the Bible is no different. Just because the surviving version of the Bible are rigidly monotheistic, that tells us nothing about how this meme evolved. In fact, Genesis is not among the “oldest Jewish writings”, but was put together after the Babylonian exile, as indicated by the Documentary Hypothesis.
Flann 5 wrote: You constantly talk about a conspiracy between throne and altar. What does that mean?
The purpose of religion in a context where there is no separation between church and state is to provide political support for the belief in the divine right of kings, to ensure stability of law and order by upholding the sense of moral purpose for the whole political community. The king or emperor or pharaoh was a religious figure, as in the example of the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar who was also Pope of Rome for twenty years (Pontifex Maximus).

The interesting thing in Christian origins is that the Western invasions of the East made continuity of previous beliefs regarding the political role of religion rather difficult, for example with the Greeks requiring the Egyptians to humanise their animal Gods in the form of Serapis, an important precursor to Jesus Christ. Starting off with the Blessed Virgin Mary calling for the bringing down of the mighty in her famous hymn the Magnificat at Luke 1:51-2, Christianity imagined an inversion of the social order, following the Psalmist vision that the ‘stone the builder refused is become head of the corner’.

This early Christian sundering of the traditional supportive role of the loyal established cult did not last long except in a thoroughly neutered form. As Christianity grew, it found that accepting the power of the king was essential to enable it to operate without persecution. Hence Christendom established what David Strauss in his 1835 radical book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined called the union of throne and altar as its core principle, with conventional dominant conservative ideas such as ‘God is in heaven and all is right with the world’.

Despite my interest in these radical analyses of the Bible, I personally regard political stability as a key ethical value, so I am presenting these critiques as a way to understand how the original authors such as Paul actually thought. One interesting source on this union of throne and altar question is from the Gifford Lecture at Aberdeen in 1970 – [url=
http://www.giffordlectures.org/books/cr ... t-divinity]Critique of Heaven[/url]
by Arend.
Flann 5 wrote: The "mystery now revealed" in 1 Corinthians is plainly stated to be the gospel, and not esoteric Gnosticism. Your theory simply refuses to allow the obvious statements to be just that, and therefore nothing contained in them can falsify this as you simply claim that it's part of the "concealing" process.
This ‘mystery’ quote is 1 Cor 2:7:
“we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.”
It is absolutely untrue that this mystery “is plainly stated to be the gospel.” The Gospels had not been written when Paul penned his letters, so to anachronistically assume Paul is talking about a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a title he never uses, requires the invalid church convention of reading the Epistles through the prism of the Gospels.

The predestination concept in Paul’s theory of divine mystery actually accords perfectly with the ancient Gnostic interest in precession of the equinox, which provides the ‘as above’ model’ of the slow motion of the sun that was imagined as being reflected in the ‘so below’ story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, which in Paul’s letters is described as a pure spiritual allegory rather than a historical event. The historizing through the Nazareth Gospel story only came later, as people sought to explain this complex Gnostic mystery in a form that could catch the popular imagination.
Flann 5 wrote:
You want to say that politically minded redactors weeded out all the pagan stuff and yet that this zodiacal stuff is still there in Genesis for example. [/quote]Yes. The problem was that the observation of the sky was fundamental to ancient religion, but Bible politics required that the public religion of Judaism interpret the sky as made by a single God outside the universe. So when the ancient seers saw the universe as providing the structure of time, this observation had to be carefully encoded and concealed. That is why the seven days of creation came to be understood as allegory for the 7000 years of history, in a way that makes perfect scientific sense from the ancient perspective on the slow movement of the stars caused by precession. This movement was definitely known and measured by the Greeks two centuries before Paul, and was probably well known in Babylon well before Genesis was put together.
Flann 5 wrote: Where is this zodiacal interpretation found in the gnostic "gospels?" Don't tell me. It's concealed there too. Where is this interpretation found historically?
As I mentioned earlier, the early Church Father Clement of Alexandria discussed how the Gnostics interpreted Christ and the twelve apostles as allegory for the sun and the twelve months of the zodiac. The Jewish focus on the zodiac was central, using it as the basis of the breast plate of the high priest in the holy of holies.
Flann 5 wrote: You just assert that the true meaning was suppressed and forgotten by the sorcerers apprentices but now the astro-theologists today have deciphered this.
My mention of the sorceror’s apprentices was not a reference to the orthodox, but rather to the Gnostics themselves. The point is that the original Gnostics had both a secret esoteric cosmic teaching and a public exoteric political teaching about Jesus Christ. They imagined they could control the public teaching to serve their secret doctrine which was reserved for initiates, rather like Scientologists snaring naïve newcomers.

But as in Disney’s Fantasia, the mop (ie the public story) took on a life of its own, and the apprentices (ie the Gnostics) could no longer control it. Against this allegory the return of the sorcerer to undo the spell equates to the second coming of Jesus Christ to explain the errors of the church.
User avatar
Flann 5
Nutty for Books
Posts: 1580
Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 8:53 pm
10
Location: Dublin
Has thanked: 831 times
Been thanked: 705 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
The "mystery now revealed" in 1 Corinthians is plainly stated to be the gospel, and not esoteric Gnosticism. Your theory simply refuses to allow the obvious statements to be just that, and therefore nothing contained in them can falsify this as you simply claim that it's part of the "concealing" process.


This ‘mystery’ quote is 1 Cor 2:7:


Quote:
“we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.”


It is absolutely untrue that this mystery “is plainly stated to be the gospel.” The Gospels had not been written when Paul penned his letters, so to anachronistically assume Paul is talking about a historical Jesus of Nazareth, a title he never uses, requires the invalid church convention of reading the Epistles through the prism of the Gospels.
Hi Robert. The gospel message was obviously known before the writing down of the narratives later called the gospels.Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. http://www.biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/15.htm
And in chapter one of 1 Corinthians which is context for the reference to God's wisdom as mystery now revealed, he is plainly referring to the crucifixion of Christ as the hidden message now revealed.Or rather it's significance as saving act of God.
http://www.biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/1.htm

It is the crucifixion,death, burial and resurrection of Christ as a real historical person that you are at pains to deny,which is precisely what Paul is preaching.
You want to say he has some hidden message of Gnostic allegory such as Christ as the sun, yet he is saying it is the historic realities which are the message.
Robert Tulip wrote: There is a famous episode in Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell where Winston Smith helps to rewrite documents to prove that Oceania always has been at war with Eastasia. This is a parable, applying the Big Brother principle that "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Totalitarian regimes have always sought to control history, and the Bible is no different. Just because the surviving version of the Bible are rigidly monotheistic, that tells us nothing about how this meme evolved. In fact, Genesis is not among the “oldest Jewish writings”, but was put together after the Babylonian exile, as indicated by the Documentary Hypothesis.
You cite Frank R Zindler contra Ehrman on the historicity of Christ. Zindler trots out many discredited ideas which you support, on questions of how the canons of the new and old testaments were recognised and formed, along with other mythicist notions of conspiracies to tamper with the literature and history.
Here J.P.Holding examines Zindler's assertions in detail. http://www.tektonics.org/uz/zindler02.php
It's worth remarking that it was blatant excising and tampering with the literature by such as Marcion that was rejected and for very good reasons.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Mon Jun 08, 2015 5:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Hi Flann
Flann 5 wrote:The gospel message was obviously known before the writing down of the narratives later called the gospels. Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 http://www.biblehub.com/niv/1_corinthians/15.htm It is the crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection of Christ as a real historical person that you are at pains to deny, which is precisely what Paul is preaching. You want to say he has some hidden message of Gnostic allegory such as Christ as the sun, yet he is saying it is the historic realities which are the message.
This chapter with the alleged historical Gospel is where Paul asks at verse 12 “if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?”
Umm, how what?? That is not really a very good argument, except as allegory. Just because people preach something does not make it true. People don’t actually ever come back from the dead, even Jesus. But the sun does, every morning and every Christmas and every Easter.

For a more extended mythicist commentary on 1 Cor 15, here is my summary of an article by the leading mythicist scholar Earl Doherty refuting the idea that 1 Cor 15 provides evidence of a Historical Jesus.
Earl Doherty wrote:Supplementary Articles - No. 6: The Source of Paul's Gospel http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp06.htm

• Paul moves amid diverse circles of apostles who preach the Christ, none of whom show any sign of tracing their authority or knowledge about such a divine figure back to a ministry on earth.

• The New Testament epistles give no evidence that anyone had known Jesus personally.

• Paul never addresses the issue in this way: “Yes, I know others were appointed by Jesus in his earthly ministry, but the way in which I was called is just as worthy.”

• Had there been such a thing as appointment by Jesus, can we believe that this, or a link to those who had been so appointed, would not be the benchmark by which all apostles were measured? Could Paul possibly have ignored such a standard throughout the debates in which he engages concerning apostolic legitimacy?

• Paul’s argument is that his "seeing" of the Lord legitimizes his apostleship. This "seeing" was entirely visionary, so the legitimacy of the Jerusalem apostles, is based on the same measure, namely visionary revelation.

• Paul tells his readers in Galatians 1:15-16 that God revealed his Son to him, not Jesus who revealed himself.

• In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul states his basic gospel, following it with a list of “appearances” of the risen Christ to various people in Jerusalem, culminating in Paul’s own, similar experience. Where did Paul get all of this information?

• Paul habitually uses the term “gospel” as something received from God

• About the list of appearances, there is nothing to suggest that, in Paul’s mind, they were not all of the same nature. And since neither Paul himself, nor anyone on his behalf down to the present day, has ever claimed that his “seeing” of the Christ was anything but a vision of a spiritual figure, this has to imply that Paul regards the other appearances as being in the same category; none were thought of as encounters with a bodily-risen Jesus of Nazareth.

• Paul in 15:5-8 is describing experiences in which people felt a conviction of faith in the spiritual Christ, experiences which may well have grown in the telling.

• The death and resurrection can be entirely mythological, revealed through the sacred writings; Paul’s repeated phrase “according to the scriptures” could be so interpreted.

• Verse 3 “For I delivered to you what also I received” is about receiving and passing on of tradition along a human chain of transmitted heritage. Yet if Paul is speaking of things he learned from others, this would hardly encompass his own experience of the Christ.

• But in Galatians 1:11-12 Paul says “the gospel preached by me is through a revelation, not from any man.” Given this declaration, why would Paul say to the Corinthians that he got his gospel from men? The declaration in Galatians must be allowed to govern the meaning in 1 Corinthians 15:3, in keeping with the complete absence of a chain going back to Jesus himself. The compelling picture is of an apostolic movement operating solely on divine inspiration. Anything he preaches about the Christ would fall within the spirit of Galatians 1:11-12, Paul’s firm declaration that he has received his message from “no man.”

• When we allow Paul to speak for himself, rather than impose upon him the narrative world of the evangelists, we find a consistent picture throughout the letters. The governing force in his life’s work, as it is with all the competing apostles who roam the byways of the empire preaching the divine Christ, is the power of God’s Spirit, manifested through revelation and a study of scripture. No historical man who had recently begun the movement hovers in the background of Paul’s thought. His gospel comes from God, and its subject matter is the Christ, the intermediary Son who is the hallmark of the religious philosophy of the age. Everything Paul has to say about his Christ Jesus comes from scripture.
User avatar
Flann 5
Nutty for Books
Posts: 1580
Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 8:53 pm
10
Location: Dublin
Has thanked: 831 times
Been thanked: 705 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:This chapter with the alleged historical Gospel is where Paul asks at verse 12 “if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?”
Umm, how what?? That is not really a very good argument, except as allegory. Just because people preach something does not make it true.
Paul is saying quite clearly that he had received the tradition of Christ being executed,buried and rising from the dead. He met Peter and James, and also speaks of post death appearances of Christ to various people at various times.
All this is repetition of familiar arguments, and I don't imagine either Tacitus or Josephus were preaching concerning his trial and execution by Pilate.
I'm now persuaded there may be some truth in Dawkin's meme theory, and the mythicist one seems a particularly resistant meme, so I may as well give up on attempting to debunk it.
Robert Tulip wrote: In fact, Genesis is not among the “oldest Jewish writings”, but was put together after the Babylonian exile, as indicated by the Documentary Hypothesis.
The Documentary source hypothesis is yet another meme alive and well despite serious problems with it. Even many liberal scholars question it in many cases.
Julius Wellhausen thought that writing did not exist at the biblical time of Moses and had other similar ideas which influenced his theories. We now have more knowledge of these times and these scholars were ideologically opposed to any notion of the supernatural in history, as you are Robert.
The ridiculously late dating of Genesis is founded on Wellhausen's conjectures based on source criticism of the time.
It's odd that mythicism is so founded on outdated ideas and scholarship from another era and is resistant to up to date information and discoveries.
Here's a brief article by contemporary archaeologist and Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen. Kitchen is a believing Christian but his academic credentials are impeccable and his arguments need at least to be considered.
http://www.theologynetwork.org/the-bibl ... tament.htm
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

DWill 28 April http://www.booktalk.org/post141254.html#p141254
DWill wrote:
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.
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.
The dominant assumption, as I see it, is that Jesus Christ actually existed as an historical individual, and that Christian Gnosticism mixed together Gospel ideas with older heterodox traditions. The challenge to this assumption that I am positing is that in fact Jesus Christ was invented as a fictional character within a Gnostic milieu, which included Paul’s Epistles, but this origin was concealed and then forgotten under the weight of literalist power. The dominant historical view is that Gnosticism emerged as a new movement in the second century, and that the first century church was entirely literalist. That needs to be turned on its head, with a lost Gnostic mystery school in the first century AD and earlier producing the Christ Myth as a mystical cosmic dream, which was subsequently popularised and historized with the strong appeal of Mark’s Nazareth story. The Christ of Faith came first, and was only later elaborated into the Jesus of History.
DWill wrote:Further, there was no "original literal orthodoxy" from which the Gnostics could even be said to mutate.
But my point is that this claim is what Christianity rests upon, with its assertion that Jesus Christ actually lived. In explaining Gnosticism away, the church has simply assumed Jesus was real, and that all the spiritualising stories are deluded. It seems the facts are the reverse of this broadly accepted traditional claim.
DWill wrote:Orthodoxy refers to something quite different, a condition of doctrinal standardization that wouldn't arrive for a few centuries.
No, the details of the Nicene and other creeds are elaborations upon a core claim of literal historicism, which arose within a century of the alleged life of Christ, and is only present in an ambiguous dreamy way in Paul’s letters.
DWill wrote: 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.
Explaining away the plain evidence of the letters of John which I quoted here at some length requires quite elaborate mental gymnastics. These letters plainly instruct Christians to have nothing to do with anyone who questions the literal historical existence of Jesus Christ. This ‘shunning’ method is an oldie but a goodie as far as defining the parameters of belonging to the tribe. Christians always read the Epistles through the prism of the Gospels. This means that extraordinary Pauline texts about Christ being infinite and eternal somehow have to be shoehorned into the Nazareth myth. The fact that Nazareth was established to provide a home town for the fictional Jesus just illustrates the scale of deception that was involved.
DWill wrote: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.
The Gospels obviously contain vast gobs of fiction, ranging from the ability of the authors to know what Jesus was thinking at Gethsemane to the whole panoply of miracles.
DWill wrote:Our own concern with literalism simply wasn't a hallmark of those times.
What an extraordinary comment! Are you saying that people in the ancient world did not care if stories were true or false? Of course they did. But we have to recognise that the ability of the church to control the historical record meant that we only have a totally biased selection of views, since possession of anything else was a capital crime for a thousand years. The Gospels (John 20:31) say “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus was the Christ”. Belief was the dominant motive, overriding accuracy. But the fact that the driver within the church was propaganda does not mean we can generalise to say people in the ancient world were indifferent to literal truth.
DWill wrote:
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 I am doing is trying to reverse engineer the epistles and gospels to identify a plausible motive and method for their construction. It is like deconstructing an engine to see how it works and how it was designed. All the evidence I can see points to the existence of a secret mystery school who initially imagined Jesus Christ as a fictional cosmic messiah, an idea which proved so emotionally seductive and powerful that it was elaborated with historical romance which overcame the original mystery vision. But the mystery ideas are still there in concealed form. In speaking of Gnosticism I am not endorsing the Christian theory that the Gnostics were only the late Valentinian school, but rather asserting that there was a large Platonic philosophical community (the Therapeuts) whose ideas were essentially Gnostic.
DWill wrote: 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 Christian.
The essential difference between the Gnostics and the orthodox as far as the politics of empire was concerned is that the orthodox accepted their subordination beneath the power of the state while the Gnostics did not. That is the core reason why orthodoxy was successful and Gnosticism was suppressed. As Pagels and Freke and Gandy explain, the core idea of Gnosticism was that the Gnostics formed an elite elect of the inner church, the enlightened leaders who could teach and guide the ignorant masses into knowledge of the secret mysteries of Christ. Such a cabal is intrinsically subversive in a totalitarian context like Rome. By contrast, orthodoxy, with its priority of belief over knowledge, allied with the state to suppress all talk of secret mysteries, except in the vague content-free language of miracles, in order to make the church acceptable as a force for imperial stability. The Roman magistrates naturally preferred religions who knew their supine place in the established order, so the suppression of Gnosticism with its rational ethics in favour of orthodoxy with its obscurantist literalism was something that was instigated by the empire.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:The dominant assumption, as I see it, is that Jesus Christ actually existed as an historical individual, and that Christian Gnosticism mixed together Gospel ideas with older heterodox traditions. The challenge to this assumption that I am positing is that in fact Jesus Christ was invented as a fictional character within a Gnostic milieu, which included Paul’s Epistles, but this origin was concealed and then forgotten under the weight of literalist power. The dominant historical view is that Gnosticism emerged as a new movement in the second century, and that the first century church was entirely literalist. That needs to be turned on its head, with a lost Gnostic mystery school in the first century AD and earlier producing the Christ Myth as a mystical cosmic dream, which was subsequently popularised and historized with the strong appeal of Mark’s Nazareth story. The Christ of Faith came first, and was only later elaborated into the Jesus of History.
Like everyone else here, I'm not a scholar and will never have the essential learning from which any authority derives. That's why I start with the easy, basic observation that a fictional Jesus (a better word than "mythical") was an idea never voiced until the 19th Century. Talk about the letters of John all you want, Robert, they don't say what you claim they do. Don't you wonder why this supposed existence of widespread disbelief in the personhood of Jesus isn't even a fleeting thought for other commentators? Look again at the "pagan" critics of Christianity, who spare no venom for the religion. Why does not one of them refute the faith by claiming it rests on a person who never existed? The existence of Jesus was granted. That gives an idea of the boulder mythicists have to push when they try to justify their revisioning.
But my point is that this claim is what Christianity rests upon, with its assertion that Jesus Christ actually lived. In explaining Gnosticism away, the church has simply assumed Jesus was real, and that all the spiritualising stories are deluded. It seems the facts are the reverse of this broadly accepted traditional claim.
Of course Christianity "rests upon" the existence of Jesus, but this is not what "orthodoxy" refers to. Say the words "Christian orthodoxy" to anyone able to comment (I guess besides a mythicist), and you won't hear, "the belief that Jesus was a real person." Orthodoxy means, and has always meant, "straight-thinking" about who Jesus was, what he did, and what he brought to the world. So it is deceptive and propagandizing to try to paint anyone who thinks Jesus existed as being stuck in an orthodox mindset upheld by dogma. It's absurd to put Pat Robertson and Elaine Pagels (who isn't a mythicist--why not?) in the same boat.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: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.
The Gospels obviously contain vast gobs of fiction, ranging from the ability of the authors to know what Jesus was thinking at Gethsemane to the whole panoply of miracles.
I spoke above about the Gnostic writings, not the Gospels.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:Our own concern with literalism simply wasn't a hallmark of those times.
What an extraordinary comment! Are you saying that people in the ancient world did not care if stories were true or false? Of course they did. But we have to recognise that the ability of the church to control the historical record meant that we only have a totally biased selection of views, since possession of anything else was a capital crime for a thousand years. The Gospels (John 20:31) say “these things are written that you may believe that Jesus was the Christ”. Belief was the dominant motive, overriding accuracy. But the fact that the driver within the church was propaganda does not mean we can generalise to say people in the ancient world were indifferent to literal truth.
I think you misunderstood. Literalism today describes a cultural struggle pitting one group against another based on two particular ways of interpreting scriptures. I don't see evidence of "literalist!" being an accusation thrown around in those distant days.
What I am doing is trying to reverse engineer the epistles and gospels to identify a plausible motive and method for their construction. It is like deconstructing an engine to see how it works and how it was designed. All the evidence I can see points to the existence of a secret mystery school who initially imagined Jesus Christ as a fictional cosmic messiah, an idea which proved so emotionally seductive and powerful that it was elaborated with historical romance which overcame the original mystery vision. But the mystery ideas are still there in concealed form. In speaking of Gnosticism I am not endorsing the Christian theory that the Gnostics were only the late Valentinian school, but rather asserting that there was a large Platonic philosophical community (the Therapeuts) whose ideas were essentially Gnostic.
You should go through the Gnostic Gospels that survive and pick out the sections that support your view of this cosmic vision. This could be problematic, since the Nag Hamadi materials are thought to have been written after the Gospels, but it's also thought they may contain passages that originated quite early. Then perhaps your claims could be evaluated. But if you're saying the products of this mystery school don't exist due to their secrecy, that's a dead end. You've probably cited your evidence of this "secret" knowledge that nevertheless got into the Gospels, but being interpretations, they're not strong as evidence.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: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 Christian.
The essential difference between the Gnostics and the orthodox as far as the politics of empire was concerned is that the orthodox accepted their subordination beneath the power of the state while the Gnostics did not. That is the core reason why orthodoxy was successful and Gnosticism was suppressed. As Pagels and Freke and Gandy explain, the core idea of Gnosticism was that the Gnostics formed an elite elect of the inner church, the enlightened leaders who could teach and guide the ignorant masses into knowledge of the secret mysteries of Christ. Such a cabal is intrinsically subversive in a totalitarian context like Rome. By contrast, orthodoxy, with its priority of belief over knowledge, allied with the state to suppress all talk of secret mysteries, except in the vague content-free language of miracles, in order to make the church acceptable as a force for imperial stability. The Roman magistrates naturally preferred religions who knew their supine place in the established order, so the suppression of Gnosticism with its rational ethics in favour of orthodoxy with its obscurantist literalism was something that was instigated by the empire.
That's a questionable interpretation, and where is your evidence of 1) a distinction made by the Romans between orthodox and gnostic (say in the 100s to 200s); 2) these supposedly orthodox being less subject to Roman suppression; and 3) that gnostic groups, formed as secret, elitist societies, had any role in reaching out to the "ignorant masses"?

When the Romans persecuted or suppressed, whom did they target within Christian communities? Maybe the ones that wore their Christianity more on their sleeves, like the ones you label as orthodox?
Last edited by DWill on Sun Jun 21, 2015 10:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6499
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2719 times
Been thanked: 2662 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

http://www.booktalk.org/post141287.html#p141287 29 April
DWill wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote: “What makes most sense of what is known is decisive”. This is precisely the scientific method. But theory of Christian origins has to start with some assumptions. Traditionally, orthodoxy assumes the New Testament has the status of “Gospel Truth” regarding the existence of Christ and the intervention of God. Modern materialism assumes that the physical universe is consistent and that miracles have a natural explanation, probably involving human error in the description. My view is that the Christ Myth Hypothesis makes most sense of what is known.
Why start with assumptions? History tries to ferret out assumptions. Maybe you feel that little knowledge of this period is available, putting mythicism and the accepted materialist view on equal footing, but they aren't comparable at all. We know more than enough from history and from biblical context to see that the balance is way in favor of the view that Jesus was always regarded as having been real, even if his historicity wasn't what was chosen for emphasis, as with the Gnostics.
Mythicism is materialism. They are entirely comparable because they are the same. By radically excluding unscientific assertions from our analysis of Christian origins, the remainder we are left with is the material observation that the Christ Myth evolved to suit the political and cultural context.

All theory starts with assumptions, as TS Kuhn explains in his paradigm theory. My assumptions here are just the basic assumption of modern philosophy that scientific method is sound, that the universe is orderly and material, and that the miracle stories in the Bible are not evidence of God breaking the laws of physics but rather allegorical tales with a deeper different meaning.
DWill wrote:
God is a bit like string theory or the multiverse, a hypothesis that lacks evidence but helps to explain the phenomena. Positing God means imagining a being outside the physical universe, for whom there is no evidence except fervent belief. There are no attested examples of miracles that bring into question the consistent operation of the laws of physics in the universe. So as David Hume argued two and a half centuries ago, it is easy to make sense of the supernatural content as being psychological and political delusion.
Just to clarify that this has no bearing on the argument of how Christianity arose.
The status of the supernatural is the central question regarding how Christianity arose, so it does have bearing. My view agrees with the James Randi sceptical line that all supernatural claims are false. Reading of ancient philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle and others, indicates that the smart people back then also agreed with this argument against supernatural intervention. Socrates was executed for impiety, for using logic to subvert popular belief in the Greek Myths. This clash between logic and myth is the central main idea of philosophy. Given that Gnosticism was essentially the marriage of Platonic philosophy with Hebrew mysticism, the status of the supernatural does have bearing on how Christianity arose.
DWill wrote:
The Tacitus reference is isolated, and like many of these supposed early references, would have been used by early apologists if it were genuine. The absence of the Tacitus and Josephus mentions of Christ from several centuries of Christian discussion of their work, against interest, indicate that these references are clearly fraudulent.
What does "isolated" mean? How does it disqualify this quotation as evidence in belief that Jesus existed?
Tacitus wrote in the early second century, by which time Christians had broadly established the Christ Myth, the belief in Jesus, and in any case none of the early Christian writers cite his Nero fire story. This fictional process based on hearsay provides no grounds for asserting that this belief was based in a factual history.

“Isolated” means that if Jesus was anything like the Gospel description, many other early writers, especially Philo and Josephus, would have mentioned him, but they don’t. As well, there is the massive problem that subsequent Christian apologists sought to justify their belief in the existence of Jesus, and displayed excellent knowledge of main historical sources, but this Tacitus quote was not cited in any extant source for more than a thousand years!

As usual, one of the most succinct summaries of this shocking apology is provided by DM Murdock, who says at http://www.truthbeknown.com/pliny.htm that the Tacitus passage on Christians and the fire of Rome
is not quoted by any of the Christian fathers, including Tertullian, who read and quoted Tacitus extensively. Nor did Clement of Alexandria notice this passage in any of Tacitus's works, even though one of this Church father's main missions was to scour the works of Pagan writers in order to find validity for Christianity. The Church historian Eusebius, who likely forged the Testimonium Flavianum, does not relate this Tacitus passage in his abundant writings. Indeed, no mention is made of this passage in any known text prior to the 15th century.

http://www.skeptically.org/newtestament/id6.html states
This passage which could have served Christian writers better than any other writing of Tacitus, is not quoted by any of the Christian Fathers. It is not quoted by Tertullian, though he often quoted the works of Tacitus. Tertullian's arguments called for the use of this passage with so loud a voice that his omission of it, if it had really existed, amounted to a violent improbability. Eusebius in the 4th century cited all the evidence of Christianity obtained from Jewish and pagan sources but makes no mention of Tacitus. This passage is not quoted by Clement of Alexandria who at the beginning of the 3rd century set himself entirely to the work of adducing and bringing together all the admissions and recognitions which pagan authors had made of the existence of Christ Jesus or Christians before his time. Origen in his controversy with Celsus would undoubtedly have used it had it existed. There is no vestige or trace of this passage anywhere in the world before the 15th century. Its use as part of the evidences of the Christian religion is absolutely modern. Although no reference whatever is made to it by any writer or historian, monkish or otherwise, before the 15th century (1468 A.D.), after that time it is quoted or referred to in an endless list of works. The fidelity of the passage rests entirely upon the fidelity of one individual (first published in a copy of the annals of Tacitus in the year 1468 by Johannes de Spire of Venice who took his imprint of it from a single manuscript) who would have every opportunity and inducement to insert such an interpolation. In all the Roman records there was to be found no evidence that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate. If genuine, such a sentence would be the most important evidence in pagan literature. How could it have been overlooked for 1360 years?

This information appears at a google search but not at the cited Wikipedia page Tacitus on Christ, as a typical illustration of how Christians censor such information.
DWill wrote:
The absence of these references to Jesus by others is easily explained if there in fact was never any controversy about the existence of Jesus. I ask you again to look at the discussions of Jesus by the "pagan" critics, who of course were opponents of Christianity. These are not direct evidence that Jesus existed, but they are indisputable evidence of the general belief that he belonged to history, which is all that is needed to disprove mythicism. None of these non-Christian writers tell us that Jesus was a myth.
That is just like saying that because the Swiss believe in William Tell or the English believe in King Arthur or Christians believe in God therefore they also existed. It is not a sound argument. This form of argument illustrates the psychological syndrome of believing what you want to believe regardless of evidence and logic. The belief that Christ existed does not disprove mythicism in the slightest. The only thing that would begin to do that would be real evidence, of the sort that exists for real people.

A typical gap is the absence of the years 29 to 31 from Tacitus' Annals, which would very conveniently be discarded by Christians who were offended by the failure to discuss Christ.
DWill wrote:
it's remarkably unlikely that Paul is springing on his audience the "news" that, behold, it's all about the ancient sun symbolism after all! That is probably the most conservative message anyone could have delivered, and why it would have seemed to be needed at this time is a puzzle.
Paul and the Gospel authors imagined the traditional real role of the sun as bringer of light and life in a humanised form. The radicality of Christianity is the idea that the infinite and eternal God, who was traditionally imagined as represented by the power and stability of the sun, became uniquely incarnate in a person who stands in solidarity with the least of the world.

Far from being conservative, this message involves a complete inversion of the values of the world. But the world was not ready for this inversion, so the messianic idea of transformation was steadily subverted by watering down the conflict between the Christian vision and the hierarchical stability of state power.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert, to start with, it indeed makes no difference in the HJ debate that Christianity is based on supernatural events. When we refer to the HJ school, that automatically signals an effort to exclude the claims of the miraculous from the parts of a story that might be historical. Historians can't deal with claims of miracles, and clearly they don't. What you and others seem to assume is that since we do have a large amount of non-credible material in the Jesus of the Bible, then of course no one on whom such beliefs were based could have existed. But that just isn't true, as we can judge by the rather common phenomenon of adding stupendous feats to the resumes of humans known to have been real. Jesus, whoever he was, was subsumed by some traditional narratives and beliefs. But to say there wasn't "someone" still flies in the face of what a comprehensive knowledge of the texts (in the original languages,) the times, and the cultures tells us.
Socrates was executed for impiety, for using logic to subvert popular belief in the Greek Myths. This clash between logic and myth is the central main idea of philosophy. Given that Gnosticism was essentially the marriage of Platonic philosophy with Hebrew mysticism, the status of the supernatural does have bearing on how Christianity arose.
Well, the impiety of introducing new gods, if you want to call that a use of logic. Socrates opposing democratic rule in Athens also go him into trouble.
The Tacitus reference is isolated, and like many of these supposed early references, would have been used by early apologists if it were genuine. The absence of the Tacitus and Josephus mentions of Christ from several centuries of Christian discussion of their work, against interest, indicate that these references are clearly fraudulent.
No, you're again assuming that there would have been some need on the part of apologists to defend the existence of Jesus, and there simply was not. It was battle they didn't need to wage.
“Isolated” means that if Jesus was anything like the Gospel description, many other early writers, especially Philo and Josephus, would have mentioned him, but they don’t. As well, there is the massive problem that subsequent Christian apologists sought to justify their belief in the existence of Jesus, and displayed excellent knowledge of main historical sources, but this Tacitus quote was not cited in any extant source for more than a thousand years!
I'm not claiming that Jesus was much like the man in the Gospel descriptions. The amount of attestation to the man who could have existed pretty well under the radar is sufficient and in keeping with what we hear about other historical figures. Josephus has not been shown to be fraudulent, especially his second reference to Jesus. Again, irrelevant about the Tacitus quote not being mentioned. No one saw a need to assert that Jesus had lived. This use of the argument from silence isn't valid. What is a valid use of that argument is that of all the criticisms of Christians by the pagan critics, and of all the descriptions of heresies compiled by the Church, there is no mention of a denial of the existence of Jesus.
That is just like saying that because the Swiss believe in William Tell or the English believe in King Arthur or Christians believe in God therefore they also existed. It is not a sound argument. This form of argument illustrates the psychological syndrome of believing what you want to believe regardless of evidence and logic. The belief that Christ existed does not disprove mythicism in the slightest. The only thing that would begin to do that would be real evidence, of the sort that exists for real people.
As I've said many times, the most important part for me is the belief that Jesus existed, not any particulars about his actual life and doings. You say, seeming to concede the belief that he existed, that this doesn't matter to mythicism, but it certainly does as regards the origin of the belief. If the belief existed because of history--that is, a person around whom the beliefs were created--we can rule out other ideas of the origin of the belief in the person, such as that it was"specially created" for purposes that mythicists like to talk about. I prefer the organic, evolutionary model to the "creationist."
Paul and the Gospel authors imagined the traditional real role of the sun as bringer of light and life in a humanised form. The radicality of Christianity is the idea that the infinite and eternal God, who was traditionally imagined as represented by the power and stability of the sun, became uniquely incarnate in a person who stands in solidarity with the least of the world.

Far from being conservative, this message involves a complete inversion of the values of the world. But the world was not ready for this inversion, so the messianic idea of transformation was steadily subverted by watering down the conflict between the Christian vision and the hierarchical stability of state power.
Does your view of Paul, or that of other mythicists, have any grounding in the best picture we have of who Paul was in terms of cultural background: a former Pharisaic Jew, educated but not a philosopher, claiming descent from those who produced the scriptures? It may be easy to assume some influence or other on Paul, as if culture was a grab-bag much as it seems to be to us today. But I believe that those with a true feel, based on knowledge of the language, history and culture, know better than this.
Post Reply

Return to “Religion & Philosophy”