DWill wrote: appearance of the now-canonical Gospels would not have coincided with any authoritarian crackdown on alternative thinking.
Thanks for picking up on this paragraph DWill. I was not suggesting the Gospels were originally authoritarian. There are several levels of comparison here with
1984. The first is that the Gospel authors wished their stories to be plausible, so setting them several generations in the past helped enable that. Orwell similarly explains in Chapter 8 how the descriptions of capitalists had become stylised and polemical due to the loss and suppression of memory of earlier times, coupled with aggressive assertion of the victor's claims.
Of course you are correct that the authoritarian use of the Jesus story by the Roman church was a later development, although its seeds are present in the canonical Epistles of John, especially 2 John 1:7 “many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.” John is offering a critique of the Docetic heresy which held that Jesus was imaginary, indicating that mythicism was widespread.
DWill wrote: It would be a few centuries before such authority existed, and in the meantime it appeared that a great many gospels about Jesus, but not in the mode of the synoptic Gospels, circulated until they did become heresy to be rooted out.
It appears that all Docetic literature was successfully rooted out, in a highly successful cultural genocide, since we have no examples of early Christ Mythicism extant today, except the fugitive traces in later Gnostic writing and the refutations such as from John. Orwell presents the same syndrome in his statement that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
DWill wrote:I don't believe that the non-existence of Jesus was ever asserted in the forbidden books.
Even though non-existence of Jesus is a reasonable interpretation from 2 John 1:7? My view is that Jesus started as cosmic myth, and was only later enfleshed in the gospel fables, but like a ladder that is removed after someone has climbed it, the evidence of the construction method has not survived.
DWill wrote: In an age in which a great many miraculous things were not disputed, it would be likely that the assumption that a person named Jesus had lived would not be, either.
The non-dispute of the historical Jesus is quite a heroic assumption, since the question of whether Jesus actually existed could have been a highly political point of conflict, between Gnostic mystics who invented the cosmic Christ and orthodox believers who found the literal story effective for church growth.
DWill wrote:It seems that the historical reality of Jesus was very important to some but not important to others, which isn't surprising.
Literal faith was essential to the orthodox church, in their use of the Orwellian method of controlling the past to control the present and the future. The myth of the actual existence of Jesus is central to Christian identity.
DWill wrote:I'm not arguing that Jesus must therefore have really existed.
And yet to question the assumption of Jesus being a real person is deeply shocking for most people still today, as shocking as the thoughtcrimes of individual autonomy that Orwell discusses in 1984.
DWill wrote:The similarity between Oceania and First-Century Palestine would appear to be slight.
True. The comparison I am drawing is with how first century Palestine was later interpreted by the autocratic church of Christendom, not with the early church. The broad idea is that the military security framework from the Age of Constantine was supported by universal agreement on religious dogma, with a complete ban on any divergence from the party line. Such unanimity had not emerged in early Palestine, but it became a central factor under Christendom.
The broad causal comparison here rests upon the evolutionary model, where a changed situation enables initial extreme diversity, and within that diversity, a single highly adaptive genome or meme emerges to conquer. That is the syndrome seen in the emergence of chordates from the Cambrian explosion, the emergence of Christian orthodoxy out of the heterodoxy of the early church, and the rise of Stalin in Russia and Orwell’s imaginative satire of Big Brother in the UK out of the chaos of communist revolution.