Doherty's Mythicism

[_Philo Sofee]

"Son of man" here is ben-'adam, which can be interpreted as humanity or perhaps as a particular human being, perhaps Israel's king. In any case, it does not refer to a special celestial being.

Daniel's Son of Man coming with the clouds from the heavens Dan 7:3 says otherwise though. That certainly appears like a heavenly being. True many interpretations are possible, but celestial being is not obviously ruled out it appears to me.

[_Kishkumen]

Daniel's Son of Man coming with the clouds from the heavens Dan 7:3 says otherwise though. That certainly appears like a heavenly being. True many interpretations are possible, but celestial being is not obviously ruled out it appears to me.

Hey, Philo:

Analytics asked me about a particular passage. I was responding to that. Now, Daniel is another matter. Yes, there the Son of Man figure seems to be something quite different from the earthy king of Israel. Or, maybe not. I could be interpreting this through my LDS background. I know that some people interpret Daniel's "son of man" as a particular eschatological figure, but even here it may be that the figure stands for something like Israel.

[_Philo Sofee]

That's true I realize that and I appreciate that. I'm simply pointing out that there's multitudinous possible interpretations and translations of concepts in the very many different sects of early Christianity and early Judaism. And they could have combined certain interpretations of scriptures in different manners than what we do including the very passage you were commenting on. Because as we know by now there is no single one possible true likely interpretation of scripture, or the only one way of contexting scriptures. The ancients had hundreds of different ways of doing so as the Dead Sea scrolls pesharim demonstrate, not to mention the Book of Enoch.

[_Kishkumen]

That's true I realize that and I appreciate that. I'm simply pointing out that there's multitudinous possible interpretations and translations of concepts in the very many different sects of early Christianity and early Judaism. And they could have combined certain interpretations of scriptures in different manners than what we do including the very passage you were commenting on. Because as we know by now there is no single one possible true likely interpretation of scripture, or the only one way of contexting scriptures. The ancients had hundreds of different ways of doing so as the Dead Sea scrolls pesharim demonstrate, not to mention the Book of Enoch.

One of the problems you have to grapple with when you discuss the "son of man" is that the non-NT texts that use this as the name of an eschatological figure (Similitudes of Enoch, 4 Ezra) date so close to the Gospels, and perhaps after Mark, that it is difficult to say that the eschatological son of man was a figure who contributed to the earliest conception of Jesus.

[_Philo Sofee]

That's correct so far as I understand. The son of man concept is one of the most difficult ideas in all of biblical studies and there have been literally thousands of various studies done on it. Another problem we possess as we know there are at least thirty different kinds of Jewish groups and Christian groups in Jesus's day that we don't know anything about, hardly what they thought, what they felt, how they interpreted the scriptures, etc. Our sources are extremely limited. And the ones we have if they are based on oral tradition are seemingly difficult to come to grips with because we don't know if that's what was actually said by Jesus, or done by Jesus, or said by Paul, or done by Paul, or said by any of the early Christian writers, or done by any of the others. All we have is writings written decades later, Paul being the earliest Christian source. And he can be interpreted in myriads of different ways as Christianitie's demonstrate. So I agree with you this is all up in the air so we can't come to any hard fast conclusions about much of anything. The gnostics are incredibly diverse, some argue they came from Christianity some argue they became part of Christianity who knows? There's a whole slew of studies on that. And then their relationship with the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha is extremely dicey. Not to mention the dating of all this stuff which is not solid at all either. It is a terrific conundrum to be sure.

[_Analytics]

23 For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed took bread;

24 and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, This is my body, which is for you: this do in remembrance of me.

25 In like manner also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood: this do, as often as ye drink [it], in remembrance of me.

Again, whatever historical problems may be involved in supposing that there was a Last Supper in which Jesus said these things, it seems pretty clear to me that Paul assumed that Jesus was dining on earth and breaking bread with other people. I do not see here a mystical banquet in the sky where a mythological drama involving Jesus being betrayed in the midst of this celestial banquet (at night, no less) unfolds.

What's interesting about this verse is that it is a revelation. Paul didn't say, "As Peter and the other disciples told us, on the night Jesus was betrayed he told them..." Rather, he says, "I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed..."

So this clearly isn't evidence of historicity--Paul isn't telling us about the historical record of the last supper--he's telling us about his own revelations. So maybe he had a vision the last supper the way we have been conditioned to envision it--Jesus breaking bread at a long table, and instructing the disciples on the sacrament.

Alternatively, it's possible that Jesus wasn't speaking to his dinner guests, but rather was speaking directly to Paul in the vision, and giving him instructions on how the saints should eat.

That second alternative sounds more plausible to me. The previous chapters of 1 Corinthians were about how the Saints should eat--for example, if you are walking by a pagan temple that is serving meat that was offered as a sacrifice to a pagan God, go ahead and eat as long as nobody is watching (1 Cor. 8:8). But if you go to a neighbor's house for a barbeque and he tells you that the meat was offered as a sacrifice to idols, don't eat it (1 Cor. 10:28).

It's in this context that Paul tells us about the vision where Christ told him that the bread and wine was Christ's body.

You-know-who does say that there is a clear relationship between this verse in 1 Cor. and the Last Supper story in the gospels. So which is more likely?

1- Paul had a vision of the Last Supper which happened to align with the story of the Last Supper that he hadn't heard about from the disciples, but did make it into the written account Mark a few decades later?

Or 2- Paul had a vision where Jesus told him these words, so he wrote them down in a letter to the Corinthians. When a few decades later Mark was making up the gospel story, he decided to put these words into his account.

Of course it's possible that Paul thought he had a vision of historic events that the saints could just as easily heard about from the disciples that were actually there. But it also seems possible that this was just a vision of Paul that is compatible with mysticism.

[_Kishkumen]

23 For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed took bread;

24 and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, This is my body, which is for you: this do in remembrance of me.

25 In like manner also the cup, after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood: this do, as often as ye drink [it], in remembrance of me.

Again, whatever historical problems may be involved in supposing that there was a Last Supper in which Jesus said these things, it seems pretty clear to me that Paul assumed that Jesus was dining on earth and breaking bread with other people. I do not see here a mystical banquet in the sky where a mythological drama involving Jesus being betrayed in the midst of this celestial banquet (at night, no less) unfolds.

What's interesting about this verse is that it is a revelation. Paul didn't say, "As Peter and the other disciples told us, on the night Jesus was betrayed he told them..." Rather, he says, "I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed..."

So this clearly isn't evidence of historicity--Paul isn't telling us about the historical record of the last supper--he's telling us about his own revelations. So maybe he had a vision the last supper the way we have been conditioned to envision it--Jesus breaking bread at a long table, and instructing the disciples on the sacrament.

Yes, I would say that this entirely possible: like many a person today, who claims to have had a vision of the life of Jesus, Paul was adding his own witness of something he believed to have taken place in the life of Jesus.

But, in my mind, this is the important thing: He talks about the night Jesus was betrayed. So, this suggests to me that Paul, whether he could personally attest to the events of the Last Supper or not, assumed that the Last Supper actually happened, and most likely roughly according to the account that we have in the Gospels.

In this case, however, I think there may be other interesting possibilities, and I would have to look at the Greek to check them out. Unfortunately, I do not have my Greek New Testament with me, or my New Testament lexicon, or any commentaries. But I wonder whether that which he received and transmitted to others is not the story of the Last Supper, but the ritual contextualized in the Last Supper.

Alternatively, it's possible that Jesus wasn't speaking to his dinner guests, but rather was speaking directly to Paul in the vision, and giving him instructions on how the saints should eat.

Well, that would be interesting, but then he probably would not have set the scene by referring to the night Jesus was betrayed. Unless, of course, you are saying that Paul is imagining the Last Supper and imagining himself at the Last Supper, among the disciples, with Jesus suddenly turning to address him personally. Still, I don't think that possibility would help forward the position that Paul did not view that meal as an actual historical event.

1- Paul had a vision of the Last Supper which happened to align with the story of the Last Supper that he hadn't heard about from the disciples, but did make it into the written account Mark a few decades later?

Or 2- Paul had a vision where Jesus told him these words, so he wrote them down in a letter to the Corinthians. When a few decades later Mark was making up the gospel story, he decided to put these words into his account.

Of course it's possible that Paul thought he had a vision of historic events that the saints could just as easily heard about from the disciples that were actually there. But it also seems possible that this was just a vision of Paul that is compatible with mysticism.

Well, as I said, regardless of Carrier's views, some variation of #1 in which he has heard it from someone else is probably more likely since Paul refers to details that are transmitted at greater length in the Gospels. Since we cannot conclude definitively that the fact of him saying he received something from the Lord precludes or even militates against the possibility that the events he alludes to, which we also know of from other sources, took place, or that, at the very least, Paul is referring to a story he heard about the life of the mortal Jesus, then I would have to say that #2 is definitely the less likely, or, rather, highly improbable, alternative.

I mean, think of the mechanics of an allusion. Paul tells us that Jesus did and said these things on the night he was betrayed. Is this the first time he has mentioned this stuff to the Corinthians? No. He clearly transmitted this material to them earlier, and in that earlier transmission he must have said things that made some sense out of the allusion. So, unless Paul is referring to the Last Supper in something like the accounts we see in the later gospels, we have to fabricate a whole new myth for him to have told in detail elsewhere and then alluded to here.

And why would we have to do that? Because we have to account for those details somehow. Or we can throw up our hands in the air and say, "Well, even though we have these later accounts of a Last Supper and Judas' subsequent betrayal of Jesus, we can't really know what Paul meant when he mentioned the night Jesus was betrayed. All we can say is that Jesus appeared to Paul in this vision, broke bread for him, and then spoke these words to him. Then the Gospel writers, knowing no better what Paul was saying than we do, fabricated the Last Supper to satisfy our desire to know what he meant about a night of betrayal."

Or I guess we can make up another, earlier passage in an non-extant letter of Paul to the Corinthians in which he discussed at length the story of the mystical Jesus being betrayed by a demon in a superlunary sphere.

It seems to me that once we have gone that far, we might as well, as Symmachus points out, join Gee and friends in arguing the pre-Mormon existence of LDS temple cult in ancient Egypt.

[_Kishkumen]

1- Paul had a vision of the Last Supper which happened to align with the story of the Last Supper that he hadn't heard about from the disciples, but did make it into the written account Mark a few decades later?

I just want to reiterate that I don't see how the text precludes the possibility he heard about the Last Supper from someone else.

[_Philo Sofee]

Another interesting point about the deification of Jesus is that fragmentary, pre-Pauline "creeds" in the New Testament indicate that a number of earlier Christians (i.e., before Paul) believed that Jesus was both deified and became the son of God through his resurrection. This is quite the opposite of what the mythicist position supposes was the case.

If John's myth of the Logos were the earliest theology, then the mythicists would be golden. It is a lot more difficult to accept that Jesus started as a mystical entity that was transformed into a man, however, when these little creeds portray him as a human who was adopted as God's son at the baptism or his resurrection. Or became divine through possession by the Holy Spirit or at the resurrection. Such stories reflect the reworking of the story of a man who later came to be seen as a god, not vice versa.

Well too though we understand that there wasn't just one theology floating around that time. And we don't have access to all the various vagaries of theological speculation that we're going on then either. There was no singular interpretation of Jesus or of any other group. The Essenes had their savior Redeemer Messiah type in Melchizedek not Jesus. The gnostics had something completely different. The Ebionites had a completely different View. And several different Jewish groups had theirs; even Paul recognized people were following following Apollos view and said so. So just because we can't find all of them doesn't mean that's a count against the Mythicist view. Some Gnostic views are very close to the Mythicist view. Others aren't. There was no singular Gnostic theology either so we have to be careful with this. We have no reason to believe the Mythicist views survived the ravages of Christian destruction of all of their opponents. We know as a historic background Christianity was so paranoid that it wiped everybody else out that it could. We didn't really actually have the Gnostic views until 1945. All we had was the polemics of their enemies, who were the church fathers.

[_Kishkumen]

Well too though we understand that there wasn't just one theology floating around that time. And we don't have access to all the various vagaries of theological speculation that we're going on then either. There was no singular interpretation of Jesus or of any other group. The Essenes had their savior Redeemer Messiah type in Melchizedek not Jesus. The gnostics had something completely different. The Ebionites had a completely different View. And several different Jewish groups had theirs; even Paul recognized people were following following Apollos view and said so. So just because we can't find all of them doesn't mean that's a count against the Mythicist view. Some Gnostic views are very close to the Mythicist view. Others aren't. There was no singular Gnostic theology either so we have to be careful with this. We have no reason to believe the Mythicist views survived the ravages of Christian destruction of all of their opponents. We know as a historic background Christianity was so paranoid that it wiped everybody else out that it could. We didn't really actually have the Gnostic views until 1945. All we had was the polemics of their enemies, who were the church fathers.

If one is to make a sound historical judgment, then one has to go with the evidence one has. You do the best with what you've got. I grant you, Philo, that there are a lot of things we do not know, and that many things are possible. When I find evidence of these other things, I will happily incorporate them into my historical narrative. Until that time, I will stick with the evidence, every time. If I am not going to stick with the evidence, then I might as well go back to believing, against the evidence, that Joseph Smith understood the real deal with those papyri, while all those darned non-LDS Egyptologists are simply wrong.

I trust that you will do this. Go with the evidence. It is what you have done, and you will be consistent in applying this to mythicists' claims as well as those of LDS apologists.