tat tvam asi wrote:They believed that a celestial being was real. They believed a celestial being came down and then went back up.
I want to focus on this concept of “a being”. When we say that something is “a being” we implicitly or explicitly assume it is a distinct entity. Whether that is the case for the original celestial Christ, or even for God, is something I doubt.
There is a startling cognitive dissonance here, saying that Jesus and God could have been imagined by the ancients as real but not as beings.
We would not say that gravity or beauty is “a being”, even though they are real. The nature of these realities is quite different from distinct entities, let alone entities which have conscious intentions. And yet both gravity and beauty are real, even if their nature is a pattern rather than a being.
My point here is that the Gnostic concepts of the identity and nature of Jesus Christ as cosmic mediator were highly Platonic, grounded in the philosophical view that ideas and patterns are real. When Plato said that beauty is real, like other eternal ideas, he was not saying that beauty is a celestial being, or a finite entity, but rather that conceptual existence is meaningful but is different in kind from material existence. Plato, and the Gnostics who drew from his well, did not in any sense have a spatial concept of heaven, but rather viewed the divine as suffusing the material, although in a way that is generally not seen or understood.
My concern about this basic conceptual framework emerges strongly in regard to Carrier’s introduction of the concept of “outer space” as a way of explaining this alleged celestial being, who allegedly moved spatially from heaven to earth. I think Carrier is introducing some crude modern materialist spatial concepts here that are very different from what the ancients thought.
The theme of motion in texts such as the Ascension of Isaiah here is allegory for a conceptual myth regarding how Jesus Christ was imagined as the mediating point of connection between time and eternity. That is a highly complex idea, but one that needs to be explored to get a handle on how different ancient philosophy was from the modern assumptions that derive from our abundant empirical material knowledge. 'Outer space' reads the ancient concept of heaven through a distorting modern lens that fails to engage with the ancient meaning.
When Jesus Christ is conceptualized as eternal reason, as the pre-existing logos, he is imagined in purely linguistic or spiritual terms as a timeless pattern that persists through time, not as a material entity. So when the NT authors speak of the incarnation, they are not suggestion a material motion from heaven to earth, but rather an idea that at a specific time the universe was in tune with itself. This is an idea strongly reflected in the core idea of Jesus Christ as alpha and omega, understood in fairly simple cosmic terms.
This priority of the concept is a big theme in Plato, for example in his comment in the dialogue
The Sophist that there is a basic clash of world view between materialists who cannot imagine that anything non material is real, and idealists who see concepts as what persists through time, and therefore hold that understanding what persists is more real than what does not persist.