Re: The Jesus Myth: An unrelenting case for history
Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2023 9:46 pm
The fact that Jesus's crucifixion was a horrible surprise for his disciples is no revisionist reading. It's clear in Christian tradition. Some gospel verses represent Jesus as telling his inner group about it in advance, at least vaguely, but even these texts show the disciples resisting the idea. The gospels criticise the disciples for not understanding where Jesus's mission was really going, in spite of Jesus's own words and the supposedly clear and abundant prophecies, but this still says first of all that, whether or not the disciples should have expected or even welcomed the crucifixion, they definitely didn't. The tradition of the anguish in Gethsemane even implies that Jesus himself wasn't sure what would happen to him until the last moment.
There are even awkward details preserved in the gospels that still hint at confusion among the disciples in the aftermath. Most of the accounts of post-resurrection appearances have people struggling to recognize Jesus, for example.
Up to a point you could say that this was all a myth, and the disciples are in the myth as a dimwitted chorus to emphasise the cosmic atonement dramatically by failing to understand it until the resurrection makes it clear even to them. If that was the plan of the gospels, though, it wasn't well executed. The story drags on for too long with preaching-and-miracles stuff that doesn't build up the cosmic significance of the passion, but even distracts from it. The non-atonement part of the Jesus story doesn't work well as mere scaffolding for the cosmic atonement. It all really reads more as though the non-atonement material was just there, and well enough known to the target audience that it could be spun, to try to make sense of the crucifixion, but not simply suppressed.
There are even awkward details preserved in the gospels that still hint at confusion among the disciples in the aftermath. Most of the accounts of post-resurrection appearances have people struggling to recognize Jesus, for example.
Up to a point you could say that this was all a myth, and the disciples are in the myth as a dimwitted chorus to emphasise the cosmic atonement dramatically by failing to understand it until the resurrection makes it clear even to them. If that was the plan of the gospels, though, it wasn't well executed. The story drags on for too long with preaching-and-miracles stuff that doesn't build up the cosmic significance of the passion, but even distracts from it. The non-atonement part of the Jesus story doesn't work well as mere scaffolding for the cosmic atonement. It all really reads more as though the non-atonement material was just there, and well enough known to the target audience that it could be spun, to try to make sense of the crucifixion, but not simply suppressed.