Balthasar schreef: ↑12 aug 2023, 11:13
Deel 5.
In het derde hoofdstuk legt Carrier zijn 'hypothesis of myth' uit. Dit idee bestaat uit vijf stappen (pagina 53).
1. In de vroege dagen van het christendom geloofde men dat Jezus Christus een god was zoals alle andere.
2. Men dacht dat Jezus met hen communiceerde via dromen en vergelijkbare ervaringen.
3. Er was geloof in het idee dat Jezus op bovennatuurlijke wijze was geïncarneerd, gedood, begraven en opgestaan.
4. Een allegorisch verhaal plaatste Jezus op aarde.
5. Uiteindelijk begon men te geloven dat dit allegorische verhaal letterlijk historisch waar was.
Volgens de auteur is dit een 'minimale theorie', maar het komt dan wel erg goed uit dat dit precies overeenkomt met wat Carrier zelf betoogt.
Een minimale hypothese is m.i. dat je een historische verklaring voor het ontstaan van het christendom biedt waarin Jezus geen historisch persoon is geweest.
Alweer. Had je mijn linkje vergeten?
Hij geeft die verklaring toch, naar eigen zeggen in..see Element 22 in Ch. 4, with Chs. 8.12 and 12.3).
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13425.
All the sects that kept teaching the original version (that Jesus was only seen in inner visions, not touched and handled and eaten with on hills and in homes) were overrun and driven extinct, and all their literature destroyed
.... some hints survive of there having been Christians who preached the earthly Jesus was mythical: Chs. 3.1 and 8.12.
Between the 30s and 70s some Christian congregations gradually mythicize the story of their celestial Jesus Lord, just as other mystery cults had done for their gods, eventually representing him rhetorically and symbolically in overtly historical narratives, during which time much of the more esoteric truth of the matter is reserved in secret for upper levels of initiation (Elements 11-14, 44-48). Right in the middle of this process the Jewish War of 66–70 destroyed the original church in Jerusalem, leaving us with no evidence that any of the original apostles lived beyond it. Before that, persecutions from Jewish authorities and famines throughout the empire (and, if it really happened, the Neronian persecution of 64, which would have devastated the church in Rome) further exacerbated the effect, which was to leave a thirty-year dark age in the history of the church (from the 60s to the 90s), a whole generation in which we have no idea what happened or who was in charge (Element 22). In fact this ecclesial dark age probably spans fifty years (from the 60s to 110s), if 1 Clement was written in the 60s and not the 90s (see Chapter 8, §5), as then we have no record of anything going on until either Ignatius or Papias, both of whom could have written well later than the 110s (Chapter 8, §§6 and 7).
It’s during this dark age that the canonical Gospels most likely came to be written, by persons unknown (Chapter 7, §4),
and at least one Christian sect started to believe the myths they contain were real, and thus began to believe (or for convenience claim) that Jesus was a real person, and then preached and embellished this view. Because having a historical founder represented in controlled documents was a significant advantage (Chapter 8, §12; and Chapter 1, §4), this ‘historicizing’ sect gradually gained political and social superiority, declared itself ‘orthodox’ while condemning all others as ‘heretics’ (Chapter 4, §3), and preserved only texts that agreed with its view, and forged and altered countless texts in support. As a result, almost all evidence of the original Christian sects and what they believed has been lost or doctored out of the record; even evidence of what happened during the latter half of the first century to transition from Paul’s Christianity to second-century ‘orthodoxy’ is completely lost and now almost wholly inaccessible to us (Elements 21-22 and 44).
No element of the theory I just outlined is ad hoc.
The letters of Paul corroborate the hypothesis that Christianity began with visions (real or claimed) and novel interpretations of scripture, and this is not a fringe proposal but is actually a view shared by many experts. The idea of a ‘celestial savior’ is corroborated by documents such as the Ascension of Isaiah and has precedents in theologies like the continual death-and-resurrection of Osiris, and is found even in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Euhemerization of god-men by placing them in historical contexts was commonplace in antiquity. That ancient texts could have symbolic and allegorical content is well established in classics and religious studies, has ample support in the sociology of religion and was common practice in ancient mystery cults and Judaism. Christianity did possess the central features of ancient mystery cults. And the fact that such ‘mysteries’ were kept secret and revealed only to initiates, who were then sworn to secrecy, is a well-known fact of ancient religion. Everything else is an undeniable fact: the Epistles do reveal the constant vexation of novel dogmas; the devastating events of the 60s did occur; the history of the church is completely silent from then until the mid-90s or later; a historicist sect did later gain supreme power and did decide which texts to preserve, and it did doctor and meddle with numerous manuscripts and even produced wholesale forgeries to that same end—and not as a result of any organized conspiracy, but simply from independent scribes and authors widely sharing similar assumptions and motives.
Knip...
Now. Find what in all that is implausible. Implausible in context. Good luck. Because none of it is.
We could stop there. That’s my summary in just a few paragraphs. Honestly, nothing more need be said. But if you want more detail, read on.