Jesus Myth Theory

[ska invita]

This all just reminds me of some daft post a while ago that butchersapron ripped into, by some daftie who said they never visit churches or cathedrals because they don't like Christianity.

Many people have very real emotional reasons never to want to set foot in a church. A visceral dislike (detestation) of certain organised religion is more common than you might imagine, especially outside of England - Its harder to relate to that in C of E land, where most peoples experience of churches tends to be benign and dislike of religion theoretical. Peoples feelings about this cant be theorised as right or wrong from an objective distance.

Extreme example, see how many indigenous canadians want to look around churches.

Personally there are some churches/mosques I might go in for a peak, but many others I won't, or I have had to walk out sharpish from weddings etc. <and ended up in a surprisingly large group of other people who couldn't handle being in there (not in the UK). Nothing daft about that.

I've no idea what the original post was you referred to and cant be arsed to talk about it more or justify my feelings, though I think you should try on the emotion of just how deeply people can dislike churches, enough not to want to go in them.

 

[Serge Forward]

Churches, though they often have nice architecture, are a bit cold, draughty and miserable, and are meant to intimidate rather than be cosy. Compare that with the usually plusher synagogues... oh, and the Jain temple near me is amazing.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Clergies were part of the power structure in days of yore in England. Can anyone recommend any reading on that and how the power declined as we became more secular?

 

[Pickman's model]

Clergies were part of the power structure in days of yore in England. Can anyone recommend any reading on that and how the power declined as we became more secular?

that's a very good question and nothing comes to mind. perhaps butchersapron can suggest something

 

[Magnus McGinty]

that's a very good question and nothing comes to mind. perhaps butchersapron can suggest something

He seems to have gone quiet. Hope he’s well. He’s an oracle with reading material so I expect he’d know something, maybe.

 

[Carl Steele]

Was Jesus Christ a Socialist Revolutionary? - a seasonal short video by Aaron Bastani.

I don't have a view on the issue but maybe he's right.

 

[AmateurAgitator]

Was Jesus Christ a Socialist Revolutionary? - a seasonal short video by Aaron Bastani.

I don't have a view on the issue but maybe he's right.

Personally I don't think he was. I think this is perhaps best explained by this extract by Oscar Wilde from the Soul of Man Under Socialism :

And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence of His own. He had, as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society.

 

[danny la rouge]

 

[Carl Steele]

It's a great song, really good lyrics, enjoyed the story-telling, Judas was revolutionary and Jesus was a sell-out, similar to the question Dylan asked, "did Judas Iscariot have God on his side."

 

[AmateurAgitator]

And ofcourse, I'm not sure if it has been mentioned on this thread already, but I remember reading about a Gospel of Judas years ago.

 

[Carl Steele]

And ofcourse, I'm not sure if it has been mentioned on this thread already, but I remember reading about a Gospel of Judas years ago.

This is one of the Gnostic Gospels: Gospel of Judas

The Gnostics are interesting, their gospels are "non-canonical" (not in the Bible or anywhere near it), I think they saw Jesus as a mystic rather than the Son of God (it's a long time since I read about this) and their Gospels are a series of wisdom teachings rather than stories. Also the creator of our universe is a flawed somewhat unsavoury "Demiurge" - which kind of resolves the problem of evil discussion - so it's not hard to see why their stuff didn't make it into the Bible.

 

[vanya]

This is very persuasive. I have no doubt that he is at least as real as Robin Hood.

Does an imaginary hero-figure accrete to fantastic stories, or do fantastic stories accrete to an originally quite mundane hero-figure? The latter model seems more believable – and more parsimonious – to me, which is why I would never refer to Robin Hood (say) as “fictional”. Misremembered, over-written, fabulised and all in all the subject of tales that have grown a thousandfold in the telling, but I would bet on there being a real person at the back of it all somewhere. (And ditto Jesus.)

 

[Carl Steele]

The Gnostic Gospels are a version of Christianity without the resurrection or the virgin birth, and which tell the story of the garden of Eden from the pov of the serpent. They are a heresy which was literally buried - and dug up in bizarre circumstances in 1945. The Story of the Storytellers

The New Testament is the official account but seemingly only one piece of a much larger story,

 

[Humberto]

I think that most of the thinking was that the most substantial and reliable accounts agreed with eachother. Hence Matthew Mark.... and t'other s

 

[tim]

The canonical gospels, with the possible exception of Thomas, were written earlier "gnostic" ones. Thomas is a collection of sayings, lacking the narrative structure of the synoptics and John.

There are lots of Apocryphal gospels and other texts and nobody seems to agree about which could be classed as gnostic or indeed what exactly gnostic means

The correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca probably wouldn't count as gnostic but I like the idea that someone in the fourth century decided that they should have corresponded and so created the correspondence. I also like the fact that Christmas ghost story writer and Cambridge academic M. R. James was the person who translated the letters into English.

The Apocryphal New Testament (1924)/Epistles/The correspondence of Paul and Seneca - Wikisource, the free online library

en.m.wikisource.org

 

[8ball]

Does an imaginary hero-figure accrete to fantastic stories, or do fantastic stories accrete to an originally quite mundane hero-figure? The latter model seems more believable – and more parsimonious – to me, which is why I would never refer to Robin Hood (say) as “fictional”. Misremembered, over-written, fabulised and all in all the subject of tales that have grown a thousandfold in the telling, but I would bet on there being a real person at the back of it all somewhere. (And ditto Jesus.)

I don't agree about your interpretation of what is more parsimonious. Also, as the saying goes, "God does not always shave with Occam's Razors".
I'm not invested in the idea that Jesus (this particular one) was not a historical person, but I do feel that the casual assumption that these stories must have been based on a single person is likely overly simplistic.

That is not to diss Jesus.

Jesus was way cool

He walked on water and swam on the land.

He turned water into wine, and if he had wanted to, he could have turned wheat in marijuana, and vitamin pills into amphetamines.

That's so cool.


Also, Jesus is a guy in Argentina who works on my company's IT helpdesk.
He is very cool. His superpowers mostly involve Microsoft systems.

 

[Carl Steele]

The relatively recent discoveries of the gnostic gospels beg the question of how much else we don't know about early Christianity - the New Testament represents a particular faction, the one which won out. The gnostic version of the Jesus story is pretty much diametrically opposed to the one we learned in school (or maybe at home).

This is Bart Ehrman on Gnosticism and The Lost Gospel of Judas.

 

[BigMoaner]

JC was a dude, i like reading/hearing about him. No interest in absoloutly dismissing his existence out of hand, or saying for certain he existed. There's value in his being/not being. Part of the rich tapestry, etc. There's nothing wrong with seeking comfort/truth/meaning/direction from teh "spiritual", try turning those impulses off in man and it's impossible, no matter what someone like dawkins et al say, it's when it's used to oppress, kill etc others which is not cool.

 

[Serge Forward]

Has anyone mentioned the gospel according to Biff yet?

 

[Knotted]

I had a bit of a fascination with the Jesus myth theory about a year ago. I think the Jesus in the gospels refers to a real man now, but I think there's an outside chance that they don't, I think a lot hinges on references to Jesus's "brother" James in Paul's epistles and how you interpret "brother". The myth theory is a stretch tbh. But it's also an interesting version of christianity where Jesus is doesn't exist and you're not supposed to think he exists and it's all a big parable. I ended up reading Mark (generally thought to be the first gospel to be written) in that light. I don't think a mythicist reading works but some of Mark I think is definitely mythical and supposed to be mythical. Eg. the part about Jesus trashing a fig tree is surely pure symbolism and meant to be read as pure symbolism.

I'm now a big fan of Mark's gospel. Some of it's quite comedic. Jesus isn't particularly likeable, he's crotchety and deliberately cryptic. At one point he heals somebody and is really pissed off about it. Nobody understands Jesus and his whole existence is a bit of a non event. Even his disciples are genuine idiots who get everything wrong. And it all ends with an empty tomb discovered by a couple of women who flee in fear and don't tell anybody (so how does the author of Mark know what happened?). The message is that something big went down and nobody knew it and even the author of Mark doesn't know what the upshot is. Or at least that's my reading.

 

[Carl Steele]

JC was a dude, i like reading/hearing about him. No interest in absoloutly dismissing his existence out of hand, or saying for certain he existed. There's value in his being/not being. Part of the rich tapestry, etc. There's nothing wrong with seeking comfort/truth/meaning/direction from teh "spiritual", try turning those impulses off in man and it's impossible, no matter what someone like dawkins et al say, it's when it's used to oppress, kill etc others which is not cool.

It seems to me that the Christian churches with their priests and endemic immorality, and the eastern religions with their oppressive hierarchies (tall tales of superior beings) have done much more than Richard Dawkins (who is, in many ways, a fool) to turn off the "spiritual impulses" of men and women, because they have set themselves up as the gatekeepers. It's little wonder how so many take solace in the idea that when they die they disappear.

 

[BigMoaner]

i've often thought of joining a zen temple, but somethign in me just recoils. the idea of all those soft whispered tones and dewy eyes. the tilted head in faux compassion. To me it's a fast track on becoming a Buddhist Subject. i've known buddhist who haven't read outside of buddhism for decades. shudder. i think people just value their own freedom of thought too much for all that shit these days. that's not to say it is valueless though.

 

[8ball]

JC was a dude

Totally.

See post #316

 

[Magnus McGinty]

i've often thought of joining a zen temple, but somethign in me just recoils. the idea of all those soft whispered tones and dewy eyes. the tilted head in faux compassion. To me it's a fast track on becoming a Buddhist Subject. i've known buddhist who haven't read outside of buddhism for decades. shudder. i think people just value their own freedom of thought too much for all that shit these days. that's not to say it is valueless though.

They can be just as cuntish as any other ideology though. Just look at their persecution of Muslims in Myanmar for evidence.

 

[Sue]

They can be just as cuntish as any other ideology though. Just look at their persecution of Muslims in Myanmar for evidence.

Or look af Sri Lanka.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Or look af Sri Lanka.

There's also something running in the background with a close friend of mine involving Buddhists which I can't detail here. All I can say is behind the peaceful façade lies some unscrupulous people. Although I guess that can be true of anywhere.

 

[Carl Steele]

i've often thought of joining a zen temple, but somethign in me just recoils. the idea of all those soft whispered tones and dewy eyes. the tilted head in faux compassion. To me it's a fast track on becoming a Buddhist Subject. i've known buddhist who haven't read outside of buddhism for decades. shudder. i think people just value their own freedom of thought too much for all that shit these days. that's not to say it is valueless though.

As a personal practise some of it is useful to some people. But I'm not sure how grovelling before a graven image of the Buddha (who of course is not a god, though he may as well be) helps anyone. The notion that a superior human being must be obeyed in every aspect, without question, is hardly a path to personal development. Instead of reading the texts I spent some time talking to Buddhists (including one or two of the reborn) and saw no difference between them as people and someone I might chat to in the pub. Had I seen a difference I would have looked further.

 

[BigMoaner]

As a personal practise some of it is useful to some people. But I'm not sure how grovelling before a graven image of the Buddha (who of course is not a god, though he may as well be) helps anyone. The notion that a superior human being must be obeyed in every aspect, without question, is hardly a path to personal development. Instead of reading the texts I spent some time talking to Buddhists (including one or two of the reborn) and saw no difference between them as people and someone I might chat to in the pub. Had I seen a difference I would have looked further.

it could be said that that's the point. there's no fundemental difference between ordinary every day awareness and the buddha nature or the thathata or whatever. the practice becomes just a recognition of that.

quite why people would need to endlessly "carry the raft" - i.e. retreats and practices and endless rituals is beyond me. zen is supposed to help with that. "kill the buddha if you see him", "use your buddha statue as firewood" etc. it's easy to get stuck in the paradox though: if i practice all the time i am doomed, if i don't practice all the time i will forget and be also doomed. if spiritual practice is anythign for me it's a balance between the two. forgetting, remembering, but not trying really to "do" anything. allowing it come and go as and when it does.

 

[Carl Steele]

it could be said that that's the point. there's no fundemental difference between ordinary every day awareness and the buddha nature or the thathata or whatever. the practice becomes just a recognition of that.

quite why people would need to endlessly "carry the raft" - i.e. retreats and practices and endless rituals is beyond me. zen is supposed to help with that. "kill the buddha if you see him", "use your buddha statue as firewood" etc. it's easy to get stuck in the paradox though: if i practice all the time i am doomed, if i don't practice all the time i will forget and be also doomed. if spiritual practice is anythign for me it's a balance between the two. forgetting, remembering, but not trying really to "do" anything. allowing it come and go as and when it does.

I don't know if you've seen this - Sean Carroll and Alan Wallace

Wallace is a Buddhist scholar and Carroll is a physicist, it's more a discussion than a debate. Wallace makes some good points, in particular he talks about how a practise of contemplation and meditation can take you to a point where you can get beneath our apparent reality and see aspects of past lives (interestingly he wants to test this empirically). Intriguing as this is, and it is definitely worth investigating, I'm not sure what it reveals about the nature of reality and our role in it, apart from the fact that Dawkins-style materialism is probably wrong, and a lot of people have thought this for a very long time.

This is another issue with the eastern traditions. For all the tantalising insights they appear to offer, they all seem to lead to the same dead end.

 

[BigMoaner]

I don't know if you've seen this - Sean Carroll and Alan Wallace

Wallace is a Buddhist scholar and Carroll is a physicist, it's more a discussion than a debate. Wallace makes some good points, in particular he talks about how a practise of contemplation and meditation can take you to a point where you can get beneath our apparent reality and see aspects of past lives (interestingly he wants to test this empirically). Intriguing as this is, and it is definitely worth investigating, I'm not sure what it reveals about the nature of reality and our role in it, apart from the fact that Dawkins-style materialism is probably wrong, and a lot of people have thought this for a very long time.

This is another issue with the eastern traditions. For all the tantalising insights they appear to offer, they all seem to lead to the same dead end.

haven't seen it.

all i can say from my own experience is that meditation has allowed me to see that there is a context for everything. so if i am sitting quietly, meditation has made me more aware, or in "contact" with the context. before, i would just see a world of objects. interacting with other objects. the world, the table, me, the car, the road, etc. but these happen in a context. what is that context? i have no idea, and i have no idea if it has some underlying substrate or not. but to seperate myself from it and say "I am here" and that "is over there" no longer cuts it. and what ever it is, or i am, or what both are together, is that they happen by themselves. i am not sure if this is an insight to anything. but it's a switch that cannot be turned off. all sorts of structures of subjectivity can dissolve or vanish (but allways to reformulate, over and over). but to me this insight is no closer or further away than anything on a fundemental level. it's just a dawning or a judegement that subjectivity is not as simple as what i once thought it was, that there is a mysterious context to it all, to every thought i think, to every time i make a step. i've used it here before and i keep goign back to it, but heigdegger absoloutly nails something so fundemental to all of this: "we don't come to thought, thought comes to us." in other words subjectivity, being, seems to me an arrival, a happening, rather than "a load of dead matter coming together to produce life" - and even if that is the case, in what context does that process happen?