Jesus--Fact or Fiction??

[Mike Cl]

Element 6:
The suffering-and-dying servant of Isaiah 52-53 and the messiah of Daniel 9 have numerous logical connections with a man in Zechariah 3 and 6 named 'Jesus Rising' who is confronted by Satan in God's abode in heaven and there crowned king, given all of God's authority, holds the office of high priest, and will build up 'God's house (which is how Christians described their church).

In the Septuagint test, Zechariah is commanded in a vision to place the crown of kingship upon 'Jesus and to say immediately upon doing so that 'Jehovah declares' that this Jesus is 'the man named 'Rising' and he shall rise up from his place below and he shall build the House of the Lord. 

If this 'Jesus Rising' were connected to the dying servant who atones for all sins in Isaiah (and perhaps also with Daniel or 11Q13), it would be easy to read out of this almost the entire core Christian gospel.

The significance of this is that if such a connection had been made, the connector would have before him, in a simple pesher of Jewish scripture, a celestial being named Jesus Christ Rising, a high priest of God, in opposition to Satan, who is wrongly executed even though innocent, and dies to atone for all sins, is buried and subsequently 'rised', exalted to the highest station in heaven, appointed king with supreme heavenly power by God, and who will then build God's house (the church).  That sounds exactly like Christianity.

[Baruch]

Yes ... early Christianity was Jewish ... but that "Jewish" wasn't rabbinic, the Pharisees were just one faction, the Taliban faction.  The rabbinical faction after 200 CE, is that part of the surviving Pharisee faction (with a few Sadducees thrown in) who were willing to kiss Roman ass, in order to survive at all.

In other words, the core of the gospel narrative, as a story, is an extended parable, it is as fictional as The Prodigal Son.  Jesus' parables are parables within a larger parable.  Johannine and Pauline Christianity, are much closer to the original Gnostic inspiration.  And Gnosticism is heterodox and hetero-praxis ... just as Sufism is within Islam.  It comes from Babylon, Persia and India.

[Mike Cl]

Yes ... early Christianity was Jewish ... but that "Jewish" wasn't rabbinic, the Pharisees were just one faction, the Taliban faction.  The rabbinical faction after 200 CE, is that part of the surviving Pharisee faction (with a few Sadducees thrown in) who were willing to kiss Roman ass, in order to survive at all.

In other words, the core of the gospel narrative, as a story, is an extended parable, it is as fictional as The Prodigal Son.  Jesus' parables are parables within a larger parable.  Johannine and Pauline Christianity, are much closer to the original Gnostic inspiration.  And Gnosticism is heterodox and hetero-praxis ... just as Sufism is within Islam.  It comes from Babylon, Persia and India.

In this section of Carrier's elements, he is making it clear that Christianity did not just spring up out of nowhere.  The Christians did not invent themselves or start at a ground zero.  The typical Christian seems to think that Jesus was born a Christian and that only through him did the religion start or was spread.  They also seem to think the bible appeared the same way; that a short time after Jesus was born, the Bible was prepared in heaven and then plopped down on Earth totally complete.  I know that many of my christian friends would search the NT for follow up when Paul mentions 'scripture' in one of his passages.  They have no idea that that Paul's scripture was the OT (because that's all there was); and they have no idea that there was more than one version of the OT.  He is establishing that all of the Christian concepts are/were Jewish concepts; that what was to be called Christian is simply a Jewish sect.

[Baruch]

The rabbis have their own lies.  They were just one faction, and they only surviving orthopraxis faction.  They are not orthodox however ... their views veer from the Tanakh/OT.  In fact, they say that the Targums (Jewish translations of the Tanakh into Aramaic) were more authoritative than the original Hebrew version.  Everyone starts from somewhere, innovates, and then denies both.

Of course while Sunday School taught American adults to read ... that doesn't mean they understood what they read, either in 1817 or in 2017.

[Mike Cl]

The rabbis have their own lies.  They were just one faction, and they only surviving orthopraxis faction.  They are not orthodox however ... their views veer from the Tanakh/OT.  In fact, they say that the Targums (Jewish translations of the Tanakh into Aramaic) were more authoritative than the original Hebrew version.  Everyone starts from somewhere, innovates, and then denies both.

Of course while Sunday School taught American adults to read ... that doesn't mean they understood what they read, either in 1817 or in 2017.

Yeah, Carrier mentions in a footnote, the Jonathan ben Uzziel targum that deals with 'the suffering servant'.

[Mike Cl]

Element 7:
a) The pre-Christian book of Daniel was a key messianic text, laying out what would happen and when, partly inspiring much of the very messianic fervor of the age, which by the most obvious interpretation predicted the messiah's arrival in the early first century, even the very year of 30 ce.  b) This text was popularly known and widely influential, and was known and regarded as scripture by the early Christians.

If Daniel was behind much or all of the first-century craze for messiahs, it could have inspired Christianity as well (with or without a historical Jesus), Christianity being just another messianic cult like all the others.  and we can verify this at least as far as the Gospels.  Mark quotes a passage from the Danielic timetable (MK 13.13), and Matthew provides the attribution (Mt. 24.15).  Thus the earliest texts that place Jesus's death in Palestine around 30 ce were clearly aware of the very prophetic text placing a messiah's appearance and death around 30 ce.  And that's a fact, whatever we decide to make of it. 

The irony in all of this is that Daniel 9 was an attempt to fix a failed prophecy in Jeremiah, yet this 'fix' also failed, prompting later Jews to try and salvage this double failure by 'reinterpreting' Daniel this time and thus doing to Daniel what Daniel had unsuccessfully attempted to do to Jeremiah.  Christianity was the most successful result.  Of course, then the Christians had to spoil it by creating their own prophesy that the end of the world would come within the lifetimes of those hearing the good new.  Which prophesy also failed.

................................'Yes, the world didn't end today as we thought, but at least we're still saved'.  That's the mantra Christians have sustained the faith with for two thousand years.

[Baruch]

Daniel was created circa 140 BCE ... it was part of Maccabee propaganda, piety and written in the ever more important Aramaic.  By the time of Paul, it was about 200 years old ... old enough that common people would have forgotten where it came from.

[Cavebear]

If Alexander had lived longer, and had adopted Buddhism as had King Menander of Punjab (Indo-Greek) a bit later ... we would never have heard of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

And if Mithraism had taken hold, we would have an entirely different world.  So what?

[Baruch]

And if Mithraism had taken hold, we would have an entirely different world.  So what?

You love alternative history, as long as you are positing it ... hypocrite much?  Mithraism (Roman kind) was only popular with Roman officers/centurions.  Would have never gotten farther than say, Freemasonry (which is kind of based on Roman Mithraism).  Mithra as a Persian god, was subordinate to Ahura Mazda, and would have only caught on if the Persians had managed to conquer the Romans.

[Cavebear]

You love alternative history, as long as you are positing it ... hypocrite much?  Mithraism (Roman kind) was only popular with Roman officers/centurions.  Would have never gotten farther than say, Freemasonry (which is kind of based on Roman Mithraism).  Mithra as a Persian god, was subordinate to Ahura Mazda, and would have only caught on if the Persians had managed to conquer the Romans.

Mithraism appealed to Roman soldiers in the East.  But it pre-dated christianity with some common elements. 

[Mike Cl]

Element 8:
a) Many messianic sects among the Jews were searching the scriptures for secret messages from god about the coming messiah, both the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint.  The Christians were thus not engaging in novel activity when they did the same.  b) Since countless Jews were already doing this, and had been for a century or more, we must conclude the Jews who would become the first Christians had already been doing it long before they became Christians.

Indeed this was a fad of the time, evident throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmuds and Jewish literature elsewhere.  The whole pesher genre is devoted to this activity.

.......................And it is because of this that countless different sects and interpretations of God's plan arose, with Christianity among them.   

[Baruch]

Element 8:
a) Many messianic sects among the Jews were searching the scriptures for secret messages from god about the coming messiah, both the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint.  The Christians were thus not engaging in novel activity when they did the same.  b) Since countless Jews were already doing this, and had been for a century or more, we must conclude the Jews who would become the first Christians had already been doing it long before they became Christians.

Indeed this was a fad of the time, evident throughout the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmuds and Jewish literature elsewhere.  The whole pesher genre is devoted to this activity.

.......................And it is because of this that countless different sects and interpretations of God's plan arose, with Christianity among them.

Correct ... an certain Kabbalists are still doing this, down to the present day.  See Rabbi Menachem Schneerson.  Christianity only became majority Gentile after 135 CE ... but from that time, Gentile Christians became obsessed with divining the End Times.  See Millerites.  All of them, including Paul, were wrong.  And were basing it on a mythical Christ to begin with.  Of course there are historical precedents even for fantasy ... but that doesn't mean that the Teacher of Truth 200 years before Paul, was the historical Jesus.

[Mike Cl]

Element 9:
What in the early first century were considered the inspired scriptures of God consisted of a larger network of texts than are now collected in the OT, including texts outside the canon and texts that no longer exist and also variants of texts that do exist but which often said different things then than extant versions now do.  In other words anyone trying to construct their picture of the messiah from hidden messages in the 'Bible would have been using tests and variants not in any current Bible today, and Christianity can be understood only
in light of this fact.

The earliest Christians clearly held in their sacred collection books no longer inthe Bible, including the Wisdom of Solomon and the Book of Enoch, and others.  Codex Sinaiticus, for example, one of the earliest surviving Christian Bibles, includes in its OT 'canon' 2 Essdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach (Book of the All-Virtuous Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira).  These and other texts influenced everything the earliest Christians said or believed about Jesus.

Another important scripture of the period was the apocryphal Psalms of Solomon, which established many of the standard beliefs about the messiah, including his roles as king, judge and shepherd. Though Psalms describe this messiah in the manner of a military conqueror, it is still somewhat circumspect, saying 'he shall destroy the godless nations iwth the word of his mouth' and that he will use no weapons or armies.  It also says God will 'raise him up for the house of Israel to educate him' which could easily inspire proto-Christian thinking: for 'raise him up' is identical in wording to 'resurrect him', and can even be read as saying God will resurrect this messiah to educate Israel.  I am not arguing here that Christians got this idea of a spiritual dying-and -rising messiah from this scripture at the time, and Jews everywhere were searching their scriptures for hidden meanings just like this.

There were also evidently several scriptures early Christians were using that we don't have and don't even know the titles of.  Clement of Rome, for example, quotes as scripture texts we know nothing about, and yet which clearly influenced earliest Christianity. 

[Baruch]

"Sirach (Book of the All-Virtuous Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira)" ... the writings of Philo ... the book of Joshua ... the book of Zechariah ... the Dead Sea Scrolls ... the Nag Hammadi library ... there is a lot of it ... and the various Gentile sects picked what they liked, and edited as necessary.  An official canon and church history only comes from the Council of Nicaea, 300 years after Paul.  You have to study Kabbalah, to see what it was originally like before 135 CE.  Esoteric and occult.  Apologists simply stick to what was decided in the 4th century CE by Roman bureaucrats (aka Orthodox priests).  Good works done prior to the Council of Nicaea were banned (works of Origen, the first Gentile Bible scholar).

[Mike Cl]

Element 10:
Christianity began as a Jewish messianic cult preaching a spiritually victorious messiah.  This means that (a) sometime in the early first century at least one of the many diverse sects of Jews came to believe and preach that (b) a certain Jesus was an eschatological Christ, (c) despite his having been crucified and buried by the powers that be (whether temporal or supernatural), (d) because he had afterward appeared to certain favored people and convinced them he was this Christ and (e) had to die in atonement for all sins but (F) had risen from the dead to sit at the right hand of God in order to being the work (through the sect he was thus founding) of preparing for God's kingdom until (g) the time when this Christ would descend from heaven to complete his mission of destroying God's enemies, resurrecting the dead, and establishing an eternal paradise .  (h) At this time Jesus was already believed  to be a preexistent being but (i) was not believed to be identical to God, but to be his appointed emissary and subordinate, not God himself but given God's authority, being God's 'son' in the same sense as angels and kings traditionally were.

None of this should be controversial.  Some scholars might challenge the notion that the earliest Jesus cult regarded the death of Jesus to be an atonement sacrifice, but the fact of the matter is ur earliest Christian documents widely attest this was a standard, fundamental, and pervasive Christian belief, and affords no evidence of any prior version of Christianity.