Have to Put Something Up
Hey gang,
I love being able to share here, but with school rolling I haven't put much up lately. I did write a long comment, long enough to be a blog post, at edgeoffaith, and I thought, hey, I might as well stick it here. It's not great, but it's something. Still waiting to hear back from my brother's professor friend on NT scholarship issues.
Love,
t
I haven't been back in the blog since my last post until last night. I write a response to EddieF then realized I hadn't read the Doherty links, went to those, read for a while, ended up in I Thess., then began reading Christian responses to Doherty, then began reading about gospel dates…anyway, the fact is Doherty's revisionist thesis is quite radical, that the gospel pericopae were fictional, snippets written after Paul's life and that they bear no connection at all to the historical person of Christ or any of his remembered sayings or acts. My initial reaction is that there are many problems with this thesis, but since D's ideas, which I hadn't seen before, require reflection and not offhand reaction, I'll let him sit for now. Of course, for this to work, Acts would have to be a complete fake (which is odd alongside Luke which incorporates sources others found viable, Mark and Q); then we have Paul's own statement that he was an enemy of the Way before his own conversion experience. That places Christianity (in some form heretical to Judaism) in or around Jerusalem only a few years after the crucifixion. Also, I thought Doherty's assertion that the passage in I Thess is forced very stretched. Even as an open-minded (I hope) person, his ideas are wild, but I haven't read far enough to say any more than I have!
On the list of pagan mythological precedents here: I have to say that such a comparison is truly not fair. Sure some of the roman Caesars were deified after their death and joined the roman pantheon in a local, state-supported way; since many of the Caesars behaved in life about the same way the Roman/Greek deities did I suppose there was no ethical issue! But when Octavian, Augustus, calls himself filius dei, the son of the God, he is referring of course to Julius Caesar. Julius was his uncle, I believe, and left Octavian his heir in his will; Octavian was only 18 at the time of Ceasar's (untimely) death. Octavian spent years jockeying for the top spot in Rome. When Caesar was deified (and I forget what role, if any, Octavian played) Octavian, in his bid to seize political power declared himself the son of the god, depicted Julius as a martyr for the glory of Rome, and used this title along with lots of other things to castrate the Roman senate and set himself up as dictator of the empire, essentially.
Now, does Octavian's use of the title 'son of the god,' in a polytheistic society which revered/deified its dead emperors, often as part of political power struggle (it is a fair question if the average Roman truly revered the dead emperors or expressed any piety towards them), is Octavian's adoption of this epithet the same as John's use of the term in his gospel? (And I don't know who wrote John, though I genuinely feel at this time that there are many clues for a very early, even eyewitness tradition; the gospel, while anonymous, declares it has this eyewitness foundation). Honestly, I don't think the two have anything in common. The Jews were monotheists with a transcendent creator/lawgiver/judge; claiming this God produced a son is not the same thing as what the Romans and Octavian were doing. Octavian's self-proclaimed filius dei has, in my view, nothing to do with John's claim.
On the rest of the list: these are examples taken from history, psuedo-history, and mythological pre-history. Read the myths of Dionysus, entire narratives about him and not just snippets (and I'm not saying you didn't read entire narratives, I'm speaking to the whole blog). He did lots of things related to grapes/vines/wine; it was his thing. And to me those stories are as clearly mythological as Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. I'm not being silly; I am speaking as a reader of literature. The gospels present themselves as records of actual historical events which occurred during a specific time in history and in specific Palestinian locations. Does that mean one has to believe them? No. But to say that the myth parallels between Dionysus, or Osiris, or Horus (a god with more than one name, more than one myth cycle, and as a sun god a natural for 'death' and 'resurrection' as he rose and set)…the pieces of literature we have which give us these stories are not the same as the gospels. I am convinced of their difference apart from my religious beliefs.
This list is long and I can't address any other particulars now, but I will say a couple other things: one, the roots of the gospels are clearly Jewish; the internal evidence for this is overwhelming. If one wants to argue that the miracles of Jesus are echoes of OT events (even, say, OT mythological events!) that's another debate. But to say that the gospel authors were intentionally incorporating pagan elements, or that the gospels are the same literary genre as the pagan myths, or for that matter, the Genesis patriarchal stories, is not supported in my view. And two, it is possible, and here I get on odd ground, that, like the Bene Gesserit in Dune, God planted what C.S. Lewis (who had read more myth and material from the ancient world than I ever will) called 'good dreams.'
This is Lewis' own idiosyncratic vision, admittedly, but the fact that we have pre-historical mythological precedents for what the gospels present as history is, for Lewis, a case in Christianity's favor. Many societies had religious sacrifice. I actually don't know, and want to know, how many of them used this sacrifice for atonement of sin as opposed to trying to sway the god into granting crops or favorable winds or providing some other service. The Jews did use it for atonement. I think Lewis should have separated the two kinds of sacrifice more, meaning that a vegetable deity who dies and is reborn like the crops, like the seasonal cycle, like the sun's rising and setting, is not the same as a god who dies and is reborn for sin, for reconciliation, for justification, but still…Lewis called the pagan stories which echo (in my view, in a very different way) the Jesus story 'good dreams.' He actually wrote about this at length in Surprised by Joy, in Pilgrim's Regress, other places. I'm not saying all Christians have to view the pagan stories as Lewis did, but his idea is intriguing. If you can, read the final chapter or two of SBJ; in the meantime, Here is one quote I managed to find online: I'll close with it. But before I do:
I appreciate the humane way I'm treated here, and it's why I come back when I can. I do sense anger on this blog at times, though not directed at me, but then as I'm a pretty angry guy too (ask anyone who knows me well), I understand the feeling of having real questions and being given no answers. I also know something about religious hurt.
in Christ who lives,
t
"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to
Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a
difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can't believe a
thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the
whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of
Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world...
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I
met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all:
again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I
liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the
idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly
moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason
was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as
profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could
not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply
a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but
with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must
be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's
myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God
expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He
found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what
we call "real things". Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of
being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in
the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our
faculties. The "doctrines" we get out of the true myth are of course
less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that
which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the
actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."
I love being able to share here, but with school rolling I haven't put much up lately. I did write a long comment, long enough to be a blog post, at edgeoffaith, and I thought, hey, I might as well stick it here. It's not great, but it's something. Still waiting to hear back from my brother's professor friend on NT scholarship issues.
Love,
t
I haven't been back in the blog since my last post until last night. I write a response to EddieF then realized I hadn't read the Doherty links, went to those, read for a while, ended up in I Thess., then began reading Christian responses to Doherty, then began reading about gospel dates…anyway, the fact is Doherty's revisionist thesis is quite radical, that the gospel pericopae were fictional, snippets written after Paul's life and that they bear no connection at all to the historical person of Christ or any of his remembered sayings or acts. My initial reaction is that there are many problems with this thesis, but since D's ideas, which I hadn't seen before, require reflection and not offhand reaction, I'll let him sit for now. Of course, for this to work, Acts would have to be a complete fake (which is odd alongside Luke which incorporates sources others found viable, Mark and Q); then we have Paul's own statement that he was an enemy of the Way before his own conversion experience. That places Christianity (in some form heretical to Judaism) in or around Jerusalem only a few years after the crucifixion. Also, I thought Doherty's assertion that the passage in I Thess is forced very stretched. Even as an open-minded (I hope) person, his ideas are wild, but I haven't read far enough to say any more than I have!
On the list of pagan mythological precedents here: I have to say that such a comparison is truly not fair. Sure some of the roman Caesars were deified after their death and joined the roman pantheon in a local, state-supported way; since many of the Caesars behaved in life about the same way the Roman/Greek deities did I suppose there was no ethical issue! But when Octavian, Augustus, calls himself filius dei, the son of the God, he is referring of course to Julius Caesar. Julius was his uncle, I believe, and left Octavian his heir in his will; Octavian was only 18 at the time of Ceasar's (untimely) death. Octavian spent years jockeying for the top spot in Rome. When Caesar was deified (and I forget what role, if any, Octavian played) Octavian, in his bid to seize political power declared himself the son of the god, depicted Julius as a martyr for the glory of Rome, and used this title along with lots of other things to castrate the Roman senate and set himself up as dictator of the empire, essentially.
Now, does Octavian's use of the title 'son of the god,' in a polytheistic society which revered/deified its dead emperors, often as part of political power struggle (it is a fair question if the average Roman truly revered the dead emperors or expressed any piety towards them), is Octavian's adoption of this epithet the same as John's use of the term in his gospel? (And I don't know who wrote John, though I genuinely feel at this time that there are many clues for a very early, even eyewitness tradition; the gospel, while anonymous, declares it has this eyewitness foundation). Honestly, I don't think the two have anything in common. The Jews were monotheists with a transcendent creator/lawgiver/judge; claiming this God produced a son is not the same thing as what the Romans and Octavian were doing. Octavian's self-proclaimed filius dei has, in my view, nothing to do with John's claim.
On the rest of the list: these are examples taken from history, psuedo-history, and mythological pre-history. Read the myths of Dionysus, entire narratives about him and not just snippets (and I'm not saying you didn't read entire narratives, I'm speaking to the whole blog). He did lots of things related to grapes/vines/wine; it was his thing. And to me those stories are as clearly mythological as Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. I'm not being silly; I am speaking as a reader of literature. The gospels present themselves as records of actual historical events which occurred during a specific time in history and in specific Palestinian locations. Does that mean one has to believe them? No. But to say that the myth parallels between Dionysus, or Osiris, or Horus (a god with more than one name, more than one myth cycle, and as a sun god a natural for 'death' and 'resurrection' as he rose and set)…the pieces of literature we have which give us these stories are not the same as the gospels. I am convinced of their difference apart from my religious beliefs.
This list is long and I can't address any other particulars now, but I will say a couple other things: one, the roots of the gospels are clearly Jewish; the internal evidence for this is overwhelming. If one wants to argue that the miracles of Jesus are echoes of OT events (even, say, OT mythological events!) that's another debate. But to say that the gospel authors were intentionally incorporating pagan elements, or that the gospels are the same literary genre as the pagan myths, or for that matter, the Genesis patriarchal stories, is not supported in my view. And two, it is possible, and here I get on odd ground, that, like the Bene Gesserit in Dune, God planted what C.S. Lewis (who had read more myth and material from the ancient world than I ever will) called 'good dreams.'
This is Lewis' own idiosyncratic vision, admittedly, but the fact that we have pre-historical mythological precedents for what the gospels present as history is, for Lewis, a case in Christianity's favor. Many societies had religious sacrifice. I actually don't know, and want to know, how many of them used this sacrifice for atonement of sin as opposed to trying to sway the god into granting crops or favorable winds or providing some other service. The Jews did use it for atonement. I think Lewis should have separated the two kinds of sacrifice more, meaning that a vegetable deity who dies and is reborn like the crops, like the seasonal cycle, like the sun's rising and setting, is not the same as a god who dies and is reborn for sin, for reconciliation, for justification, but still…Lewis called the pagan stories which echo (in my view, in a very different way) the Jesus story 'good dreams.' He actually wrote about this at length in Surprised by Joy, in Pilgrim's Regress, other places. I'm not saying all Christians have to view the pagan stories as Lewis did, but his idea is intriguing. If you can, read the final chapter or two of SBJ; in the meantime, Here is one quote I managed to find online: I'll close with it. But before I do:
I appreciate the humane way I'm treated here, and it's why I come back when I can. I do sense anger on this blog at times, though not directed at me, but then as I'm a pretty angry guy too (ask anyone who knows me well), I understand the feeling of having real questions and being given no answers. I also know something about religious hurt.
in Christ who lives,
t
"What had been holding me back [from a conversion to
Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a
difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can't believe a
thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the
whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of
Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world...
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I
met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all:
again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I
liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the
idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly
moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason
was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as
profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could
not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply
a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but
with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must
be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's
myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God
expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He
found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what
we call "real things". Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of
being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in
the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our
faculties. The "doctrines" we get out of the true myth are of course
less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that
which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the
actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."
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