In turning once more to the views of G. A. Wells, Ehrman demonstrates that mythicism is not monolithic, for Wells’ views on what earliest Christians like Paul believed in shows that the opinions of mythicists can be almost as varied as those of New Testament scholars who have sought to uncover the ‘genuine’ historical Jesus. (Of course, only the former are condemned for that diversity.)
Wells and two originating strands of Christianity:
Wells, like myself, sees a Christian movement which originated in two essentially separate expressions that only came together in the Gospel of Mark. Since I did not consciously take this from Wells, this illustrates the principle of different individuals or groups coming up with similar ideas based on available evidence or ‘in the air’ concepts but not dependent one on another. (Unless Wells took it from me! 😉 )
Strand one: Q, Galilee and a founding figure:
Wells accepts the existence of Q as representing one of those expressions: a sectarian movement in Galilee preaching the coming of the kingdom of God; but he came to believe (sometime around 1990) that an historical sage, à la the Jesus Seminar, lies at its root, whereas I see the evidence in Q pointing to a later development for such a founding figure during the evolution of the sect, and that no such founder existed.
Strand two: Paul, Wisdom and the reign of Alexander Janneus:
On the other hand, Wells sees Paul as deriving a non-existent Son/Christ figure from philosophical and scriptural sources, influenced especially by the “personified Wisdom” tradition of the Hebrew bible. But rather than locating him and his acts in a supernatural time and place, Wells interprets Paul as concluding that Christ had been born, lived and died on earth at an unknown time in the past, though he opts for Paul locating this during the reign of Alexander Janneus (103-76 BCE), known to have crucified hundreds of his rabbinic opponents.
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Problems with Wells’ theory
There are several problems with Wells’ theory.
First of all, Paul never actually tells us that his Christ had been on earth, let alone living and dying during the reign of Janneus.
He and the other epistle writers never make room for a presence of Jesus on earth, even in obscurity, between the ancient promises of God and his first action on those promises through recent revelation and the preaching of the gospel by apostles like Paul.
No attempt is ever made by any epistle writer to speculate on the time, place and circumstances of such a life on earth.
I also believe that Wells has not taken into account that the occasional human-sounding language on which he seems to base his conviction that the epistle writers regarded Christ as having been on earth fits very well into the context of a heavenly Christ and the principle of paradigmatic parallelism, in which a heavenly figure undertakes to share in certain characteristics of the human world, but only in the “likeness” sense, for the purpose of undergoing sacrifice. For this, he does not need to come to earth or be incarnated.
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Personified Wisdom in Jewish tradition
Be that as it may, my intent here is not to take on Wells, but to examine Ehrman’s interpretation of him. He notes that Wells appeals to the “personified Wisdom” tradition in Jewish thought. I, too, believe that this tradition influenced the development of the early Christ cult, but in conjunction with the Greek Logos concept in the Hellenistic tradition of the period. Indeed, even Jewish personified Wisdom by Paul’s time had been influenced by the Greek Logos, as we can see in the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and an Alexandrian document about to be examined.
Ehrman first quotes Proverbs 8, but he can hardly think that this early expression of Wisdom in the Jewish texts somehow survived in a pristine state to reach Paul, unaffected by intervening Greek thought:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth….
[several verses describing aspects of God’s creation]
Then I was beside him, like a master worker;
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.
In fact, Ehrman immediately quotes from another ‘Jewish’ work, the Wisdom of Solomon in the Jewish apocrypha, which is usually dated some time early in the first century, during the lifetime of both Philo and Paul:
Wisdom of Solomon
She is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty….
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness….
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well….
For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,
and an associate in his works. (Wisdom of Solomon 7 – 8)
This goes beyond the light-hearted and relatively innocuous picture of Wisdom keeping God supplied with iced tea during his labors at creation. Here we have a dramatic presentation of an intermediary entity standing proud beside God in heaven, a dangerously close compromise to strict monotheism. It is cut from the same cloth as Philo’s picture of the Logos. And it bears an undeniable resemblance to similar presentations of the Son throughout the New Testament epistles. (In the last instalment I quoted 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-20 and Hebrews 1:2-3.)
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Comparing the Wisdom of Solomon with the New Testament epistles
Indeed, it is astonishing that Ehrman and other historicist scholars can look at this passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, acknowledge that it is not speaking of any human being but of a heavenly entity, and then turn to virtually identical descriptions of the Son in the epistles—which equally do not make any association of what they are describing with a man on earth—and yet insist that such descriptions are talking about an incarnated human being. The ability to compartmentalize powers of judgment according to one’s personal interests is clearly an asset in the discipline known as New Testament scholarship.
In fact, Ehrman now examines Wells’ comparison between the above passage in the Wisdom of Solomon and the very similar passage in Colossians 1:15-20. Wells is maintaining that the Colossians hymn looks to be dependent on the concept of personified Wisdom we see in the Wisdom of Solomon (though we don’t know if the latter document and passage was known to Paul).
I might make the point here that Wells fails to note that the Colossians hymn shows no advance over the Wisdom of Solomon passage in a respect which, if Wells were correct, should have been crucial to Paul. If Paul and his circles believed that the Son talked of in Colossians had actually been incarnated to earth, even if at an unknown time, this dramatic addition to the myth of Wisdom should surely have been included in the Colossians hymn. The latter saw fit to add the element of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, but no reference to an incarnation to earth.
Ehrman finds fault with Wells’ contention that more than one aspect of the Wisdom of Solomon could have influenced Paul’s thinking about his Christ. The document also contains (2:10-20, 4:7-5:5) an account of the “just man” who is wrongfully accused and condemned to a “shameful death.” (This is not supposed to represent a specific historical individual, but the stereotyped righteous person who suffers at the hands of evil men.) I pointed out earlier that this particular ‘tale’ was one example of the recurring genre in Jewish writing according to which the Passion account in Mark was created: the Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One.
Wells’ view is that Paul, or someone before him, could have reflected on this tale in the Wisdom of Solomon, took a cue from the “shameful death” reference and decided it referred to the crucifixion of an obscure earthly Jesus. Considering that the epistles constantly refer to the revelation of Christ in scripture, and that such scriptural sources would likely have been certain verses in the Suffering Servant Song of Isaiah 53, along with passages in Psalm 22 and Zechariah 12, an added influence from the Wisdom of Solomon would not be infeasible, although as far as we know this document was never regarded as “scripture.”
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The Wisdom of God
I have to agree with Ehrman that Wells has read more into the reference to “the wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:23-24 and 2:6-8 than is merited. Rather than a formal reference to personified Wisdom, Paul seems to be speaking of God’s “wisdom” in reference to the system of salvation he has established through the sacrifice of his Son. Even Paul’s statement that Christ “is the power of God and the wisdom of God” is not calling on personified Wisdom, but stating the principle that the Son is a reflection or the embodiment of certain of God’s qualities and activities, pure Logos-style thought.
Paul has other similar characterizations, such as “the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” in 2 Corinthians 4:6. This is hardly a reference to the past human face of the Gospel Jesus, but reflects the idea that through knowledge of the spiritual Son, whose ‘face’ has been revealed, we are able to know something about God’s nature.
Wells, then, suggests that for Paul, “Wisdom had become incarnate in Christ,” even if that incarnate life had been lived in obscurity. Ehrman pronounces this idea “riddled with problems,” even though there is a common exegesis of Matthew which sees the evangelist as implying this very thing—although for Matthew it is clearly for the earthly Jesus of his Gospel, whereas Paul presents us with no such earth-oriented scenario. But what are these “problems”?
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Ehrman’s objections
Rather weak:
Ehrman first makes the rather weak objection that ‘Jesus as Wisdom’ is only one among many characterizations Paul would have been giving his Christ, and by no means the commonest one. True enough, but that in itself hardly makes a minority association invalid. Scholars can still maintain that Paul was ‘called by Jesus’ (based on the road to Damascus legend or whatever Paul’s vision of Jesus entailed), even though in the vast number of cases Paul states he had been “called by God,” there being only a couple of occasions on which Paul throws in a calling from Christ along with God, as in Galatians 1:1.
A bit more reasonable:
Ehrman is a bit more reasonable in objecting that it would be quite odd for Paul to regard his Christ as Wisdom incarnate but to then make her/him the messiah—and crucified to boot. No Wisdom tradition anywhere even suggests such a fate. Not even the Logos was to be, or had been, killed, which may be why Paul’s message was “folly” even to Greeks. However, being nevertheless led to accord to a Wisdom-inspired Son and Messiah a sacrificial death based on a reading of scriptural passages would not be infeasible either.
Goes too far:
But Ehrman goes too far in his objection that we cannot judge Paul’s view by a passage in Colossians, which is regarded as not by Paul but written a little later in his name. He scoffs at the idea that this hymn (Col. 1:15-20) derives from a pre-Pauline tradition (like the other christological hymns in the Pauline corpus), since “Colossians is post-Pauline.”
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Pre-Pauline Christological hymns .
Ehrman himself argues for that elsewhere, so on what basis is he rejecting the Colossians hymn as “problematic” because it was written after Paul?
But whether written by Paul or not, scholarship judges that all of these similar hymns in the Pauline corpus represent the same type of thinking and expression (all, by the way, lacking an historical Jesus), and thus could all pre-date Paul, if only because those in the letters judged authentic to Paul (notably Philippians 2:6-11) also look to be quotations by him of earlier hymnic material. Ehrman himself argues for that elsewhere, so on what basis is he rejecting the Colossians hymn as “problematic” because it was written after Paul?
Besides, is Ehrman going to claim that the pseudo-Paulines (Colossians and Ephesians especially) are completely divorced from Paul’s thought and constitute new and unprecedented ideas? There can be little doubt that these later epistles represent a ‘school’ of Pauline thought, in communities he founded or proselytized, largely based on the apostle’s own views, though the hymns themselves seem to have preceded Paul. (Ehrman has previously tried to maintain that just because Colossians and Ephesians show a preoccupation with heavenly forces of evil, this does not mean that Paul held anything like the same views!)
the texts themselves . . . do not bear out this type of scenario, except through Ehrman’s dubious methodology of creating oral traditions to conveniently precede the epistles.
Ehrman reverts to his old ‘begging the question’ approach. He declares that Christians started out, not postulating an incarnation of Wisdom or any other divinity based on scripture, but facing the historical fact of a human Jesus being crucified, and thus constituting a “crucified messiah.” This automatically rules out any influence from scripture except as supplying prooftexts supporting what they already believed about their earthly Master. Thinking of Jesus as “God’s Wisdom” only came later. Well, we’ve been through the texts themselves in sufficient detail to show that they do not bear out this type of scenario, except through Ehrman’s dubious methodology of creating oral traditions to conveniently precede the epistles.
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2. Was Jesus an Unknown Jew Who Lived in Obscurity More Than a Century Before Paul?
Did Paul’s Jesus live obscurely a century and more earlier?
The excution of the Pharisees by Alexander Jannaeus, by Willem Swidde, 17th century. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Ehrman now focuses more closely on Wells’ contention that Paul viewed his Jesus as having lived an obscure life on earth and been crucified over a century before his own time. Wells, incidentally, does not interpret “the rulers of this age” to mean the demon spirits, for he sees the obscure Jesus as crucified on earth at some point in the past. Seemingly, as noted earlier, he has in mind Alexander Janneus. But this, too, entails a problem for Wells. Why one Jewish king over a century in the past would be referred to as “the rulers of this age” or why Paul would feel justified in claiming on this basis that past rulers were on their way to destruction is not at all clear.
Ehrman takes the tack that, while Wells claims correctly that Paul never gives any indication that Jesus had lived in the recent past, it would seem odd that such a time lapse would be seen to have taken place between the obscure Jesus’ death under Janneus and his recent appearances to certain people (including Paul himself) which inaugurated the new revelation and preaching movement.
Ehrman has a point, though it could be neutralized in one way. If Paul and others had really learned about Jesus entirely from scripture and concluded that he had lived on earth, with the period of Alexander Janneus offering itself as the best candidate for time, place and circumstances, then that is what they would have believed. It would be no more invalid for them to accept the longish period before Christ became known than for modern Christians to think it is invalid to accept that the Second Coming is imminent even though two millennia have elapsed after the initial promise of such a return. In either case, it is a matter of people wanting to think that prophecy and its fulfillment is about to land on them, and if that seems to entail an unreasonable elapsing of time, this just gets ignored.
Still, Ehrman is justified in querying Wells’ picture, with its century-and-a-half lapse not seeming to be reflected in how Paul presents things. But there is an easy way out, for both of them. There exists no sign of a lapse because Paul’s “death, burial and rising” are not located at any point in the earthly past, whether known, unknown or postulated. Paul fails to ever suggest a time and place for his Christ’s death and resurrection because he does not locate them on earth. They are ‘events’ which have taken place in a supernatural dimension, and there is no time lapse problem involved because they cannot be pinpointed in relation to an earthly chronology. (The best we could say is that they took place some time after Adam or Abraham or the giving of the Law under Moses, but this may simply be the effect of inserting Christ into God’s process of ‘salvation history’ and may not necessitate even that degree of relative chronology for what was a timeless heavenly act. See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, chapter 17: “The When of Christ’s Sacrifice.”)
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The sequence of events in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8
The first ‘point in time’ which can be located in the Pauline system is the time of revelation, the ‘appearances’ of Christ to certain people on earth. (For the community of 1 John it is the revelatory experience of 1:1-4, and for Hebrews it is its own revelatory experience in 2:1-4. In neither case is this experience identified with the life of Jesus on earth, despite scholarly attempts to read such a thing into the respective passages.)
On the other hand, it is likely that these appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 were largely ‘confirming’ visions (perhaps with the exception of that of Paul, who desperately wanted to join the club instead of persecuting it). They served to support ideas that had arisen through the study of scripture which, perhaps not long before, had produced the conviction that the Son existed and had acted as God’s agent of salvation—again helped along by contemporary philosophy and existing salvation theory of the time, including the pagan mysteries. Certainly, the impression Paul creates is that the Jerusalem sect had formed prior to those visionary experiences, although we don’t know on the basis of what beliefs, or whether a Son was specifically involved. “Brothers of the Lord,” as noted before, could conceivably have referred to God.
Ehrman’s reading here is simply his own wishful thinking
Thus there need be no perceivable problem in regard to a gap between 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 and 15:5-8, just as Scientology recognizes no problem between L. Ron Hubbard’s ‘revelation’ (in the late 60s, I believe it was) that we are all descended from aliens arriving on earth eons ago and that actual alien visitation, since the latter lay in an unperceived limbo until Hubbard received the revelation of its occurrence. Thus, Ehrman’s reading here is simply his own wishful thinking:
No, Paul is expressing a straight chronological sequence of events: Jesus died; he was buried; three days later he was raised; and he then appeared to the apostles. (DJE? p. 249)
Ehrman’s “he then appeared” adopts a language which implies the type of ‘shortly afterward’ sequence he wants to see in the passage. In fact, the Greek text can be seen as presenting not a sequence of events, but a listing of what Paul has previously told (“delivered” to) the Corinthians. He is reminding them (15:1) of that information: his gospel about the heavenly Christ derived “kata tas graphas” and the supporting visions. If the former were not intended to represent events on earth, there need be no temporal relationship implied between verses 3/4 and the rest of the passage, between Christ’s acts and the visions—which may not even have been as strong as visions but simply ‘convictions of his presence among them.’ (See Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.78, and p.76 on the latter point.)
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Ehrman’s straws .
This is clearly Ehrman grasping at straws.
Straw 1:
Ehrman again voices his objection to Wells using Colossians to understand Paul’s views, since Paul did not write this epistle. But that would be claiming that no movement’s founding ideas ever survive the death of the founder, or that the second generation of a sectarian group never reflects the ideas of the first generation. There is enough in common between Colossians and Ephesians and the genuine letters of Paul to reject such a stance. This is clearly Ehrman grasping at straws.
Straw 2:
Another straw effort is in trying to block Wells’ opinion (shared by many others, as we have seen, including mainstream scholars) that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 with its reference to “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” is an interpolation. Ehrman reminds the reader that he has addressed—and dismissed—that view earlier. And so he has, and has been dismissed in turn in earlier postings here for adopting such a conservative stance and failing to give any weight to the fact that it is the view of many of his scholarly peers, past and present.
It is ironic that mythicists can be roundly criticized for suggesting an alternate reading or an interpolation, accused of maintaining such things simply because they are “convenient,” yet here is Ehrman going against the clear grain of his fellow critical scholars and dismissing interpolation in 1 Thessalonians for reasons which can only be seen as “convenient” for his stance against mythicism.
Straw 3:
Then there is the straw that “everyone knew”:
The fact that Paul does not mention that Jesus died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is not in the least odd. What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew? (DJE? p. 248)
What occasion? How about the scores of times when Paul refers to Jesus’ death, but never, by chance because it is simply present in his mind or because he felt like it, happens to mention the time, place or agent? (Did he take a vow never to let such a reference pass his lips?) What about in 1 Corinthians 2:8, when he refers to the agents of Jesus’ death not as Pilate or the Jewish authorities but by a phrase that ancient Christian commentators themselves took to be referring to the demon spirits? What about him having in mind a crucifixion by the ruler Pilate which ought to have prevented him from making the statement in Romans 13 that the innocent have nothing to fear from earthly rulers, who are God’s appointees to punish evildoers?
What about him and other epistle writers having in mind the historical event of two decades before, which ought to have led them to insert it between God’s age-old promises and his gospel of the Son in scripture, and the first action by God on those promises and the first revelation of that gospel in the time of Paul? How about according some role for that historical life when Paul sets his own ministry against that of Moses, or proudly accords to himself God’s ministry of reconciliation and the inauguration of the new covenant? If everyone already knew about the historical Jesus, the messiah and Son of God who had lived, taught, died and risen within Paul’s own lifetime, it is hard to believe that at least some would not have wondered why he never showed up in any apostle’s presentation.
Straw 4:
Not only does Ehrman have to ignore this void in the alleged “common knowledge” on the part of Paul’s readers, and apparently of Paul himself, he must substitute for it, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat, those Gospel “sources” which “spoke of the historical Jesus already by the early 30s, within at least a year of the traditional date of his death, before Paul was even converted.” (DJE? p. 248)
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Paul’s “firstfruits” have sprouted in scripture .
Remember, too, that for Paul the starting point is always the “time of faith” (as in Galatians 3:23-5). For all the epistle writers the starting point is the time of Christ “being revealed” (all those revelation verbs), the “time of reformation” as in Hebrews 9:10.
. It is not the time of Christ’s life and actual acts of dying and rising.
Ehrman again brings up the Pauline reference to Jesus’ resurrection as the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection of the dead. But I have made the point before that it is the revelation of Jesus’ resurrection, coming from God in the present time, which has served as the firstfruits; it need not be the act itself. If it were, we should expect from Paul a somewhat more detailed presentation of that recent historical event, instead of numerous bare references to it with no historical setting whatsoever, and with the implication on many occasions that it is not to be located in the recent past or that he doesn’t have any idea when it did occur.
If one historical event determines the imminent occurrence of another, we would have every reason to expect the former to be presented in an unmistakeable fashion. After all, two decades have passed. Wouldn’t some among Paul’s readership—even if they already had the “common knowledge” of Jesus’ crucifixion under Pilate—have wondered just how long it was going to be? Or on what grounds Paul could justify a passage of even two decades, or be so sure there was hardly any further time to go?
Ehrman offers this analogy:
After the farmer gathers the firstfruits on the first day of harvest, when does he gather the rest? Does he wait a hundred years [referring to Wells’ theory]? No, he goes out the next day. (DJE? p. 251)
And so he does. The next day. What farmer waits two decades? If I were among the audience of Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, I might wonder just how long Jesus was going to wait after dying and ascending before returning to earth with his angels and trumpets, and whether I might actually live to see the day. In all the discussion throughout the epistles about the question of when Christ would arrive from heaven (and remember it is never a “return”), no one ever calls attention to how long it has been since he was here and how long believers have been waiting.
Remember, too, that for Paul the starting point is always the “time of faith” (as in Galatians 3:23-5). For all the epistle writers the starting point is the time of Christ “being revealed” (all those revelation verbs), the “time of reformation” as in Hebrews 9:10. It is not the time of Christ’s life and actual acts of dying and rising. It is not a time ‘past’ in relation to their apostolic work, but a present period which has begun with their apostolic work in response to revelation. There is no sense of any given time lapse or period between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and rising, and the present time of the apostles. As far as they are concerned, this is “the next day” after the revelation of Christ as the “firstfruits.” They are out working for as big a yield as possible before the imminent harvest by God.
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Summarizing his case against Wells
That Ehrman persists in distorting and misrepresenting the early record can only elicit a groan. Here is his summation to Wells:
I should stress that this is the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all. It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all of the Gospel sources—Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, L—and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate). These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so after the traditional date of Jesus’s death. (DJE? p. 251)
That Paul should differ from every other Christian is understandably “hard to believe” by those locked into forcing him into the Gospel mold.
Nor are the rest of the epistle writers who seem to express themselves just like Paul apparently included in “every other Christian of the day.”
“All four of our canonical Gospels” agree? Not surprisingly, since they are all based on the first one written, whose ‘event’ of Jesus crucified by Pilate can be found nowhere prior to Mark in the extant record.
Jesus is associated with John the Baptist?
Not by a single one of the epistle writers, who never once mention the Baptist.
Not even in Q can John be seen as aware that Jesus was alive at the time he was prophesying the coming of the Son of Man (Lk/Q 3:16-17), let alone that he had baptized him.
As for the Dialogue between Jesus and John (7:18-35), this extended anecdote has been shown by John Kloppenborg and other Q scholars to be an artificial construction later in Q’s development.
And of course, any view of Jesus’ death—whether on earth or in heaven, whether by Pilate or by demons—is completely missing in Q.
Born during the reign of Augustus and Herod? Matthew and Luke are a decade apart in the actual year, both inventing ‘biographical’ details which are as phoney as Washington’s cherry tree, while Mark has not a word to say on a time of birth.
Luke as a reliable historian? Perhaps to those naïve enough to accept the Prologue as Gospel truth, even though the rest of Luke fails to live up to its claims.
Josephus and Tacitus? We know how reliable they are, and how long it was before their alleged references to Jesus showed up in the consciousness of Christian writers.
And we have seen on just how firm a ground Ehrman’s fantasy sources are based—“independent” all of them—going back to Palestinian traditions datable to the year 31 or 32.
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(Next instalment: Ehrman takes on an infamous mythicist.)
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18 thoughts on “28. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Part 28 (G. A. Wells)”
I saw someone else post this question on another blog entry here, but I think it got lost in the shuffle. It seems appropriate to ask again here though, so…
Is it possible that the “woman” Paul refers to in Galatians 4 as having generated/made/birthed Jesus is meant to be understood as Sophia?
Seeing Paul’s description of Jesus “born of a woman” as a reference to Sophia, might explain much of Jesus. And it would explain much of Jesus – specifically as seen as an extension of, “born of,” his mother, Mary.
That is? In one increasingly plausible reading, Mary would be a version of Sophia, the female figure personifying wisdom. The Magnificat – where Mary is said to not just bear but also “magnify” or perhaps illuminate Jesus – can be read as finding Mary in a very Sophia-like position.
And if Mary is basically Sophia, or Wisdom? Jesus would then be seen as son of “Mary”/Sophia. Or son of Wisdom. Thus fitting Philo’s description of a “word” or Logos that is the “son of” wisdom.
No doubt worshipers at the Hagia Sophia would rejoice… at this re-discovery of the importance of Philo and the worship of Sophia or wisdom. As yet another part of the origin of the Jesus legend. Linking the origins of Christianity once again, to the worship of “wisdom.”
And then specifically to the kind of wisdom we might call Hellenistic Jewish Platonism. See especially I note, where Paul and other epistolic writers specifically, use the basic vocabulary and idea of Plato’s famous Theory of Forms. The epistolic writers like Paul following Plato slavishly, in suggesting that we here on “earth” in the “flesh” are just im “perfect” “perish”able “copies” or “shadows,” of the “eternal” ideal forms or “models” or Paradigms, in “heaven.”
I think the magnificat is based on Hannah’s song about her son Samuel (perhaps originally as the mother of the saviour Saul). Wisdom as the emanation of God is indeed often felt to be female (provebs, Job, Psalms) and in at the creation (though seeming in Genesis to play a male part – as Milton expressed it : brooding on the abyss and madest it pregnant). Equated later with the torah, and the logos, I think wisdom’s role is inherited more by the second and third persons of the trinity, than by the mother of the lord, whose role is to be – mother.
ARTHUR DREWS’S CONDENSED EXEGESIS ON THE MEDIATOR/SAVIOR
It is interesting to come back to a time when these ideas were expressed in a fresh, simple, and direct form.
When Arthur Drews comes to The Proofs of the Historicity of Jesus in Paul, which is the first section of Part III Witness of Paul (in his epoch-making The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus) (1912). Drews first analyzed the concept of Jesus as Mediator and Savior, and shows the strong influence of Philo and the Gnostics of the 2d century (formatting within quotations added by me):
Any man who reflects impartially on this theory will find it difficult to believe that there is question here of an external historical process, an historical individual. The idea comes closest, perhaps, to that of the Gnostics, and especially close to that of the Alexandrian religious philosopher Philo, an older contemporary of Paul, and his principle of the Logos, which we afterwards find blended with the Christian belief in the gospel of John. Christ seems to be in Paul another name for the idea of humanity, a comprehensive expression of the ideal unity of all men, set forth as a personal being. Just in the same way Philo conceives the fullness of the divine ideas personified in the shape of the Logos, the “mediator,” “son of God,” and “light of the world,” and blends the Logos with the ideal man, the idea of man. And just as Christ is made flesh and assumes human form, so Philo’s Logos descends from his heavenly sphere and enters the world of sense, to give strength to the good, and save men from sin, and lead them to their true home, the kingdom of heaven, and their heavenly father.
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It is precisely the essential point of my theory that, in the early Christian and Pauline view, the real coming of the Messiah is preceded by his appearance in human shape. According to Isaiah, it is not due to the powerlessness of God, but to the sins of the people, that the fulfilment of the promise of a Messiah is delayed (Is. lviii; lxx, 1). In the fifty-third chapter the prophet had spoken of the “servant of God” who takes on himself the sins of men, and thus “justifies” them. If this figure of the servant of God and just man is associated with that of the Messiah, and the idea is inspired that the servant of God is to be understood, not in the sense of the people of Israel generally, but as a single individual who offers himself for men, in the same way as in heathenism originally one individual has to sacrifice himself annually for all, it would naturally follow that the individual who thus sacrificed himself would not merely have human features, but would have to be a real man, otherwise he could not expiate the sins of men. None but a man could, according to the general feeling of antiquity, take on himself the guilt of other men. Only as man was “the just” in Solomon’s Wisdom conceived, and he calls himself “servant of God” (ii, 13) and represents God as his “father” (xvi, 18). Indeed, even the suffering servant of God in Isaiah was so unmistakably described as man that the most resolute elevation of his figure to the supernatural and metaphysical world, such as we find in Paul, could not obliterate his human features. The question is, whether these features are those of a real, that is to say historical, man: whether the heavenly being which must appear as a man according to Paul came upon the earth at a definite moment in history…
But Paul represents Christ as “of the seed of David” and born “of a woman” (Rom. i, 3). Is not that a plain reference to an historical individual? Unfortunately, descent from David is merely one of the traditional features of the Messiah, and consequently of his human appearance; and, if the Pauline Christ was to be a man at all, from whom could he have been born if not from “a woman”? If Paul seems to lay stress on this trivial and necessary circumstance, he may have been induced to do so by Gnostic tendencies, which aimed at dissociating the figure of the saviour from all earthly limitations, and turning it into a purely metaphysical conception; and he therefore did not merely make use of a familiar Jewish expression—“born of a woman”—which occurs more than once in the Bible.[10] We may add that at least liberal theologians are, to a great extent, convinced that the “historical” Jesus did not descend from David, and that the genealogies in the gospels, which purport to prove such descent, are later fabrications made with a view to establishing the Messianic character of the Christian saviour. Thus Paul would have departed from the truth if he had sought to represent Christ to the communities as a descendant of David!
In the 3d section, The Question of the Genuineness of Paul (i.e. of the authenticity of the epistles and the historicity of Paul himself) Drews comments,
In one case the connection between Gnosticism and Paul is so evident that it may be cited as a proof that Paul knew nothing of an historical Jesus; it is the passage in 1 Cor. ii, 6, where the apostle speaks of the “princes of this world,” who knew not what they did when they “crucified the Lord of glory.” It was long ago recognised by van Manen and others that by these “princes” we must understand, not the Jewish or Roman authorities, nor any terrestrial powers whatever, but the “enemies of this world,” the demons higher powers, which do indeed rule the earth for a time, but will “pass away” before the coming triumph of the saviour-God.[13] That is precisely the Gnostic idea of the death of the Redeemer, and it is here put forward by Paul; from that we may infer that he did not conceive the life of Jesus as an historical event, but a general metaphysical drama, in which heaven and earth struggle for the mastery…
Did Paul know Hebrew at all? The question seems to be absurd if the author of the Epistles really was the pupil of Gamaliel and had been a zealot for the Mosaic law. Yet the Epistles give no trace of an acquaintance with Hebrew. In spite of the assurance of the writer that he was born a Jew, he seems to be Greek in everything. He thinks as a Greek, speaks as a Greek, uses Greek books; and whatever there is in him that can only be explained—we are told—by Judaism is much closer, as van Manen says, to the Alexandrian or Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and Wisdom, which he often uses, than to the ideas of the Old Testament, and need by no means have been taken from the Hebrew Bible.
Drews here is following Willem C. Van Manen (1842-1905) of the Dutch Radical School in his Römerbrief (German translation of the Epistle to the Romans), with an excellent presentation in an English article in the Encyclopaedia Biblica:
The Savior has to appear to be a real man. The law did not make men righteous, and so Jesus Christ was despatched to free men from the law, redeem them and deliver them from sin and death by his own sacrificial death. By his union with Christ, man becomes dead to the law and gains eternal life. Philo’s Logos is a similar divine Savior and Mediator.
Blended with the Liberator Messiah (who has to descend from David), the fusion results in a Suffering, Dying & Rising God. But this Mediator/Savior has to appear as a real man before his sacrifice — born of a woman, including under the law (Gal. 4:4) (a Jewish expression).
The idea of a son of God sent as mediator to benefit mankind and confer redemption is abundant in Ancient Greek mythical stories (Herakles, Dionysos), and Ancient Near East mysteries (Attis, Adonis, Osiris). Same idea in the Son of Man of the prophet Daniel. The God figure is linked to the cycle of nature and sun periodicity. Paul enlarged and deepened the idea. Gal. 4:1. The mention of the twelve in 1 Cor. 15:5 is a gloss.
In one succinct formula, summarizing Drews:
Jesus = Ancient Hebrew figure of the Righteous Suffering Servant/Victim of Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Wisdom, Proverbs, Job + Flying features of mysteries’ Dying-and-Rising God + Liberator Messiah.
It’s the blending of all those disparate ideas which provides the dynamic but also the confusion of the writings of early Christianity, as the fit was never guaranteed nor clearly explained, with each writer following his own feelings, imagination, and rhetorical skills. And gave a living to the succeeding generations of professional scholars, with each renewing the debate and rehashing the same fundamental points. The first one being Paul: “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” in 1 Corinthians 9:11-14 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%209:11-14&version=ESV
Lots of really great work on Greco-Roman influence on Christianity was done in the 18th and especially 19th centuries; especially in Germany. And it was only a later, reactionary c. 1960’s outbreak of selfprotective provinciality or ethnocentrism in Religious study, that insisted as seeing Jesus as being almost wholly from the Jewish traditions only.
Too many mistakes were made, in trying to see the legend of Jesus as coming just from Jewish sources only. So that today it is time to get back to the better, broader, cross-cultural perspective, of the classics of the previous centuries; and to begin to expand on them again. I and many others now agree that many different cross-cultural traditions were feeding into the creation of the Jesus legend; including many Jewish, but also many Greco-Roman/Platonistic, Egyptian and other Middle Eastern influences. Which are now referred to collectively by scholars as “ANE” or Ancient Near East culture.
Earl Doherty is helping lead this effort; rightly calling attention again to Philo, and Neo Platonism proper. In addition, I see going back to Plato himself; to his Theory of Forms. Which may be even more useful than referring to “Neo Platonism”; which was an influence too, but a slightly different one. Neo-Platonism and Plato himself being relatied, but slightly different. As historians of Philosophy have long asserted. I see both “Neo-Platonistic” influences on Paul especially; but also more simple and direct influences from Plato’s Theory of Forms.
In any case, more and more scholars, Mythicists, are not groundless, but are actually agreeing with, borrowing from, the best in classic scholarship; arguing that we should see Jesus in effect, not as coming from a single Jewish tradition, but from many.
Or as I like to say more specifically, many might see “Jesus” or “Christ” as being a sort of “composite” as I like to say, of many different “lords.” (And Messiahs; and christened kings and Christs, etc.) The fact that a term like “lord” especially was widely used to refer to dozens, hundreds, thousands of different individuals, I suggest, made the term “Lord” in particular, into a variable; a moment of variable confusion. But one that allowed many various , different traditions concerning “lord”s – different lords – to be collected and assembled, conflated. As if they were about the same person, the same Lord god.
So my own thesis relating to all that, is this: when Luke or other redactors of oral legend, went around collecting stories about “the lord,” in effect it is likely his sources confusedly narrated may different tales, of many different individual lords, I hypothesize. So that when the collection of sayings of “the” Lord appeared; they by a natural popular confusion seemed to be about a single individual, but actually conflated and assembled, dozens of different figures, into one.
In any case? Thank you Earl for your work! And to the other significant contributers here.
Keep up the good fight! As ironically, Paul said.
No doubt, dozens of different cultures, traditions, created the legend of Jesus. Here we should probably not try to foreground only one; or to even firmly reject many. But acknowledge that many strange and apparently minor influences, played a part in the larger whole.
The most obvious problem with Paul and the Christ is that Jesus never was the Christ of Paul, the Christ of Paul was James the Just. Somewhere in the late first century to the early second century James was merged with the samaritan prophet Joshua/Jesus and the misunderstanding that Jesus was the Christ of Paul arose. Paul did attack James on the top of the temple stairs in the mid twenties of the first century. James was carried through the streets of Jerusalem, seemingly dead. His awakening from the coma induced by the attack of Paul then gave birth to the rumour of the resurrection of James aka the Christ. Some thought that the archangel Michael had awoken a pious jew like James from the dead and some went even further and thought that Michael had taken over James´s body.
There is an attack by Paul (or “Saul,” according to a marginal gloss) on James in Book 1 of the Recognitions of Clement, in which James falls down and breaks his legs, which may arguably stem from a second century Jewish Christian source, but I’ve never heard of the rest of what Kent mentions in his comment before.
JESUS IN THE CHRIST MYTH, AS PRESENTED BY ARTHUR DREWS
Since G.A. Wells has been influenced by the Christ Myth of Arthur Drews (published in two parts, 1909-1912), it is worth outlining how Drews presented the formation of the character of Jesus.
When Drews comes to examining the question of the authenticity of the Epistles, and the Historicity of Paul in the section 3 of The Witness of Paul, entitled The Question of Genuineness, he starts with a reminder:
“The Pauline Christ is a metaphysical principle, and his incarnation only one in idea, an imaginary element of his rehgious system. The man Jesus is in Paul the idealised suffering servant of God of Isaiah and the just man of Wisdom, an intermediate stage of metaphysical evolution, not an historical personality“
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Drews then continues by establishing that for Paul, Jesus was a purely ideal figure that lived in the upper levels of the earth’s atmosphere as imagined by the Ancient Greeks.
Paulinism is very close to the Gnosticism of the 2d century rather than the first century. Willem C. van Manen, the leader of the Dutch Radical School had already recognized in his Römerbrief (Epistle to the Romans) that Jesus had been put to death by the princes of this world“who knew not what they did” when they “crucified the Lord of glory”, in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 (ESV):
“Wisdom from the Spirit – 6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
Van Manen, in his Römerbrief had already explained that
“those princes were the demons’ higher powers, “which do indeed rule the earth for a time, but will pass away before the coming triumph of the saviour-God. That is precisely the Gnostic idea of the death of the Redeemer, and it is here put forward by Paul; from that we may infer that he did not conceive the life of Jesus as an historical event, but a general metaphysical drama, in which heaven and earth struggle for the mastery.”
Paul does use a lot of Gnostic language, which was understandable in the 2d century, but not around 50-60 AD, given as the spurious dating of the Epistles. Not enough time had passed to elaborate and deepen the new thoughts. The Damascus vision is not enough to explain in Paul such a quick turn-around conversion from zealot Jew to fanatic Christian.
Paul’s Judaism is highly questionable. Consulted rabbis cannot recognize a student of Judaism in Paul. Paul is constantly referring only to the Septuagint, and there’s no clue that he knew any Hebrew. He thinks Greek, speaks Greek, eats Greek, uses Greek in everything. Paulinism is much closer to the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and Wisdom. Paul never shows any respect for the sacred texts, distorting or changing their meaning, as in Gal. 4:21. His mindset is unique, similar only to other 2d-century writers, like Hebrews, Barnabas, Justin.
The Epistles and the Acts present two radically different stories. The Dutch Radical School (Rudolf Steck, Willem C. van Manen) has mostly denied the authenticity of the Epistles. The Epistles’ goal was to separate Christianity from Judaism. Many intriguing scenarios are possible about the character of Paul, a Jew who turned against the law and Judaism, to give freedom to the new cult.
The scholars of the Dutch Radical School have also expressed serious doubts about the historicity of Pau. They are the major Paul deniers, but impossible to read in their Dutch language. Not a single trace of Paul has been found in the writings of Philo and Josephus. The Clement epistle is not reliable. There’s no proof of the existence of the Pauline epistles before Justin. Papias was also silent about them. Many scenarios are possible to explain the production of the epistles under the name of Paul: one writer, or many? But, for the Christ Myth theory, the historicity of Paul is secondary.
Drews then delves deeper in the construction of the character of Jesus in the following Part IV of his book, The Witness of the Gospels, to show exactly how this ideal Christ, this actor in a major metaphysical drama derives from pre-existing beliefs:
1. The Suffering Servant of God in Isaiah 53
The book emphasizes the role played in the formation of the figure of Jesus by the Old Testament character of The Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, Jeremiah, Job, Zechariah, Ezechiel, etc… especially as presented in the Greek version of the Septuagint. In ch. 7, The Mythic-Symbolic Interpretation of the Gospels, Drews writes:
“The mythic-symbolic interpretation of the gospels sees in Isaiah 53 the germ-cell of the story of Jesus, the starting-point of all that is related of him, the solid nucleus round which all the rest has crystallized. The prophet deals with the Servant of Jahveh, who voluntarily submits to suffering in order to expiate the sin and guilt of the people.”
2. The Suffering Victim of Psalm 22
Isaiah 53 is seconded by the Suffering Victim in crucial Psalm 22, especially its lines: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34); They hurl insults, shaking their heads. (Psalm 22:7; Mark 15:29); They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. (Psalm 22:18; Mark 15:24). Other psalms present passages supporting the figure of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh (Psalm 1, 8, 15, 23, 24, 34, 37, 43, 69, 103, 109, 110, 116, 118, 121, 128, etc..)
3. The Righteous as Personification of Wisdom, his Persecution and Death
Drews also underlines the contribution of the character of the Just or the Righteous in Wisdom in the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach. (See Sirach 51) In Wisdom 7:15-29, she is “a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.” (See the whole Wisdom 7) In Wisdom 2:10-19 the wicked plot “Let us oppress the righteous poor man”, and in Wisdom 2:20 they decide “Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” (See the whole of Wisdom 2)
Drews adds:
“According to Deuteronomy (21:23), there was no more shameful death than to hang on a tree (in Greek xylon and stauros, in Latin crux); so that this naturally occurred as the true manner of the just one’s death. Then the particular motive of the death was furnished by the passage in Wisdom and the idea of Plato. He died as a victim of the unjust, the godless.“
In Ch. 8, Historians and the Gospels, Drews concludes:
“No one will question that the figure of Jesus in the gospels has a certain nucleus, about which all the rest has gradually crystallised. But that this nucleus is an historical personality, and not Isaiah’sServant of God, the Just of Wisdom, and the Sufferer of the 22d Psalm, is merely to beg the question; and this is the less justified since all the really important features of the gospel life of Jesus owe their origin partly to the myth, partly to the expansion and application of certain passages in the prophets.”
4. Flying Features of Dying-and-Rising God Added to the Syncretic Mix
In Ch. 13, Drews thickens the syncretic mortar with a key ingredient:
“Isaiah’s suffering servant of God, offering himself for the sins of men, the Just of Wisdom in combination with the mythic ideas of a suffering, dying, and rising god-saviour of the nearer Asiatic religions — it was about these alone, as about a solid nucleus, that the contents of the new religion crystallised. The ideal Christ, not the historical Jesus of modern liberal theology, was the founder of the Christian movement… It is more probable that Jesus and Isaiah are one and the same person than that the Jesus of liberal theology brought Christianity into existence…”
In summary, according to Drews and Van Manen, Jesus is an ideal character, who lived exclusively in the upper atmosphere of the Ancient imaginary world, never came down to earth, and suffered the ideal death of a Gnostic Redeemer, executed by the “rulers of the age”, who are the demons battling for supremacy, but who are bound to be defeated in a metaphysical drama, where Jesus if the final Savior.”
This is the drama that the author of the Mark Gospel brought down to earth to give historicity to Jesus, and place his earthly existence during the governorship of Pontius Pilate.
Today’s post of Doherty, thanks to Neil’s generous hospitality, is vastly important, because it presents the views on the question of the historicity of Jesus Christ from key exponents:
* Bart Ehrman
* Earl Doherty
* G.A. Wells
* and finally Arthur Drews (and also Willem C. van Manen)
My own two comments above:
2. ARTHUR DREWS’S CONDENSED EXEGESIS ON THE MEDIATOR/SAVIOR
4. JESUS IN THE CHRIST MYTH, AS PRESENTED BY ARTHUR DREWS
have a definite ambition: To demonstrate that, without a doubt, Drews was the originator of the figure of Christ as a purely ideal figure, very close to the Gnosticism concept of the 2d century, who acts in a metaphysical drama taking place in the upper regions of the earth atmosphere of the Ancients’ imagination, crucified by the “princes of the world,” “the rulers of the age”, the “demons’ highest powers”, and reborn in that same aetherial region to introduce the Kingdom of God.
Those are the very ideas that Earl Doherty has expanded in his Jesus Puzzle, and he’s done a great job in presenting an unknown argumentation to the modern generation of young people. In a market sense, Doherty is certainly the indisputable modern propagandizer of this theory. And he’s done a good job in convincing people willing, able, and ready to read his famously long exposes.
However, from a historical viewpoint, for scholars who know the history of this famous controversy, historicists versus Jesus deniers, also popularized as Jesus: Myth or History? it is also incontestable that Drews was the first one to put this idea on the Western World’s map a hundred years ago (1909-1912).
It is a sad fact, and Neil Godfrey’s posts have eloquently demonstrated it, that most NT scholars of our generation, don’t know this history. This is the case of his star protagonists, such as James McGrath, Bart Ehrman, and even R. Joseph Hoffmann: they know nothing of the real details of the history of the controversy.
Bart Ehrman even claims that he’d never heard of it until alerted by his blog followers. And his book “Did Jesus Exist?” shows that he’s never devoted the time necessary to make a truthful in-depth examination of the many aspects of the controversy which has lasted more than 150 years. For all those who were expectantly waiting for a knock-out punch, it proved an immense disappointment. Erhman bit more than he could chew.
I suspect that Hoffmann, obliged to acquire some real historical information thanks to the two elite universities he’s attended, knows a little more than the others, but is not eager to acknowledge it. His glib disparaging of Drews was a tell-tale sign.
I hope that, in a spirit of fairness and true historical scholarship, this site will maintain my two comments in honor of Arthur Drews, whose time to be rehabilitated and pulled out of his undeserved obscurity has come (thanks to both G.A. Wells and Doherty, by the way.)
Thanks, Roo. Your postings on Drews are extremely illuminating. I have to say that , altough I have a copy of Drews’ “Witnesses” and read it many years ago, I should have drawn on it more in laying out my own case. (But then I might have had a 900-page book instead of an 800-page one!)
Earl, this series is great. The absence of explicit reference to a historical Jesus by Paul is psychologically and logically decisive for the direction of causality between (A) the idea of the eternal Christ and (B) the story of the historical Jesus. Convention says B caused A, but all real evidence says A caused B. This indicates the convention is wrong.
Paul says the Christ was long predicted by Jewish prophets, even known at the time of the Exodus as their ‘spiritual rock’ (1Cor10:4). The language around this prophecy may not have been sufficiently explicit in the Epistles, so was made more direct in the language attributed to Paul at Acts 26:22-3 “the Prophets and Moses said the Christ was to suffer, and be the first to proclaim light both to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.” Already here in Acts we find a subtle extension of the early ethereal vision of Paul.
But the lack of a clear statement to the effect “it was predicted and really happened – here is the evidence” is damning for the claim that Paul’s reference was to a single man, rather than an idea. The mystery is how you crucify an idea. This paradox was the seedbed for the Gospel story. What it means, in my view, is that the Jewish people were part of an eastern vision of salvation and social harmony that was smashed by Rome, so the hope for the presence of Christ as a point of connection between earth and heaven had been shifted from the political to the mythic domain.
The key here is psychological plausibility for the writer. If Paul had been discussing events rather than ideas, he would have said so. No one saves the best wine for last, just as no good persuader omits their best arguments. All the evidence indicates this ‘best wine’ was seen later as implicit in Paul, because it is absent from his text.
You have to take Galatians 2 and Acts 15 together. In Gal 2: 1-10 (also discussed in Acts 15), Paul tells us of a council in Jerusalem regarding the new Gentile converts in Antioch–there, the issue is (putatively) settled. Yet when Peter comes to Antioch (Gal 2:11ff), he is “afraid of those who belong to the circumcision group,” ceases to eat with the Gentiles, after the men come from James. Now, in Acts, the only men sent from James are Judas and Silas. Jason, the truth of the matter is that Paul and James were not resolved: indeed, I am persuaded that Paul’s last trip to Jerusalem was an attempt at reconciliation … and I am at least partially persuaded that this reconciliation also failed. James was a Christian, but he was also a Jew, and zealous for the Mosaic Law, as the New Testament, Josephus, and the Early Church Fathers tell us. His non-reaction to Paul’s rejection of the Law as depicted in Acts 15 does not reconcile with the testimony of his character. First, it’s Peter that’s rejecting the Law (15:10). James is the one who formulated the council’s decision. Second, JPH argues here (http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/actspaul.html#151) that these are not the same event; the episode in Gal. 2 is paralleled in Acts 11, not 15. Third, I ran out of points…. On another point you raised (your struggle with Matthew 24), I recommend you take a look at Dee Dee Warren’s new commentary here http://web.archive.org/web/20050407051449/http://www.preteristlist.com:80/docs/warrenend.html. She argues from the perspective of OT prophecy that the apocalyptic language here was never meant to be taken literally (including the “no stone left on top of another” phrase that gives you doubt), and that Jesus’ coming was upward to reign in heaven, not down to visit earth.
I saw someone else post this question on another blog entry here, but I think it got lost in the shuffle. It seems appropriate to ask again here though, so…
Is it possible that the “woman” Paul refers to in Galatians 4 as having generated/made/birthed Jesus is meant to be understood as Sophia?
Well, Philo does say that Wisdom was mother to the Logos (De Fuga, 109)
Good ideas!
Seeing Paul’s description of Jesus “born of a woman” as a reference to Sophia, might explain much of Jesus. And it would explain much of Jesus – specifically as seen as an extension of, “born of,” his mother, Mary.
That is? In one increasingly plausible reading, Mary would be a version of Sophia, the female figure personifying wisdom. The Magnificat – where Mary is said to not just bear but also “magnify” or perhaps illuminate Jesus – can be read as finding Mary in a very Sophia-like position.
And if Mary is basically Sophia, or Wisdom? Jesus would then be seen as son of “Mary”/Sophia. Or son of Wisdom. Thus fitting Philo’s description of a “word” or Logos that is the “son of” wisdom.
No doubt worshipers at the Hagia Sophia would rejoice… at this re-discovery of the importance of Philo and the worship of Sophia or wisdom. As yet another part of the origin of the Jesus legend. Linking the origins of Christianity once again, to the worship of “wisdom.”
And then specifically to the kind of wisdom we might call Hellenistic Jewish Platonism. See especially I note, where Paul and other epistolic writers specifically, use the basic vocabulary and idea of Plato’s famous Theory of Forms. The epistolic writers like Paul following Plato slavishly, in suggesting that we here on “earth” in the “flesh” are just im “perfect” “perish”able “copies” or “shadows,” of the “eternal” ideal forms or “models” or Paradigms, in “heaven.”
I think the magnificat is based on Hannah’s song about her son Samuel (perhaps originally as the mother of the saviour Saul). Wisdom as the emanation of God is indeed often felt to be female (provebs, Job, Psalms) and in at the creation (though seeming in Genesis to play a male part – as Milton expressed it : brooding on the abyss and madest it pregnant). Equated later with the torah, and the logos, I think wisdom’s role is inherited more by the second and third persons of the trinity, than by the mother of the lord, whose role is to be – mother.
ARTHUR DREWS’S CONDENSED EXEGESIS ON THE MEDIATOR/SAVIOR
It is interesting to come back to a time when these ideas were expressed in a fresh, simple, and direct form.
When Arthur Drews comes to The Proofs of the Historicity of Jesus in Paul, which is the first section of Part III Witness of Paul (in his epoch-making The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus) (1912). Drews first analyzed the concept of Jesus as Mediator and Savior, and shows the strong influence of Philo and the Gnostics of the 2d century (formatting within quotations added by me):
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Witnesses_to_the_Historicity_of_Jesus/Part_3/Section_1
In the 3d section, The Question of the Genuineness of Paul (i.e. of the authenticity of the epistles and the historicity of Paul himself) Drews comments,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Witnesses_to_the_Historicity_of_Jesus/Part_3/Section_3
Drews here is following Willem C. Van Manen (1842-1905) of the Dutch Radical School in his Römerbrief (German translation of the Epistle to the Romans), with an excellent presentation in an English article in the Encyclopaedia Biblica:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_Biblica/River_of_the_Wilderness-Rome_(Church)#ROMANS_.28EPISTLE.29
So, in paraphrase of Drews’s presentation:
The Savior has to appear to be a real man. The law did not make men righteous, and so Jesus Christ was despatched to free men from the law, redeem them and deliver them from sin and death by his own sacrificial death. By his union with Christ, man becomes dead to the law and gains eternal life. Philo’s Logos is a similar divine Savior and Mediator.
Blended with the Liberator Messiah (who has to descend from David), the fusion results in a Suffering, Dying & Rising God. But this Mediator/Savior has to appear as a real man before his sacrifice — born of a woman, including under the law (Gal. 4:4) (a Jewish expression).
The idea of a son of God sent as mediator to benefit mankind and confer redemption is abundant in Ancient Greek mythical stories (Herakles, Dionysos), and Ancient Near East mysteries (Attis, Adonis, Osiris). Same idea in the Son of Man of the prophet Daniel. The God figure is linked to the cycle of nature and sun periodicity. Paul enlarged and deepened the idea. Gal. 4:1. The mention of the twelve in 1 Cor. 15:5 is a gloss.
In one succinct formula, summarizing Drews:
Jesus = Ancient Hebrew figure of the Righteous Suffering Servant/Victim of Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Wisdom, Proverbs, Job + Flying features of mysteries’ Dying-and-Rising God + Liberator Messiah.
It’s the blending of all those disparate ideas which provides the dynamic but also the confusion of the writings of early Christianity, as the fit was never guaranteed nor clearly explained, with each writer following his own feelings, imagination, and rhetorical skills. And gave a living to the succeeding generations of professional scholars, with each renewing the debate and rehashing the same fundamental points. The first one being Paul: “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” in 1 Corinthians 9:11-14
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%209:11-14&version=ESV
Lots of really great work on Greco-Roman influence on Christianity was done in the 18th and especially 19th centuries; especially in Germany. And it was only a later, reactionary c. 1960’s outbreak of selfprotective provinciality or ethnocentrism in Religious study, that insisted as seeing Jesus as being almost wholly from the Jewish traditions only.
Too many mistakes were made, in trying to see the legend of Jesus as coming just from Jewish sources only. So that today it is time to get back to the better, broader, cross-cultural perspective, of the classics of the previous centuries; and to begin to expand on them again. I and many others now agree that many different cross-cultural traditions were feeding into the creation of the Jesus legend; including many Jewish, but also many Greco-Roman/Platonistic, Egyptian and other Middle Eastern influences. Which are now referred to collectively by scholars as “ANE” or Ancient Near East culture.
Earl Doherty is helping lead this effort; rightly calling attention again to Philo, and Neo Platonism proper. In addition, I see going back to Plato himself; to his Theory of Forms. Which may be even more useful than referring to “Neo Platonism”; which was an influence too, but a slightly different one. Neo-Platonism and Plato himself being relatied, but slightly different. As historians of Philosophy have long asserted. I see both “Neo-Platonistic” influences on Paul especially; but also more simple and direct influences from Plato’s Theory of Forms.
In any case, more and more scholars, Mythicists, are not groundless, but are actually agreeing with, borrowing from, the best in classic scholarship; arguing that we should see Jesus in effect, not as coming from a single Jewish tradition, but from many.
Or as I like to say more specifically, many might see “Jesus” or “Christ” as being a sort of “composite” as I like to say, of many different “lords.” (And Messiahs; and christened kings and Christs, etc.) The fact that a term like “lord” especially was widely used to refer to dozens, hundreds, thousands of different individuals, I suggest, made the term “Lord” in particular, into a variable; a moment of variable confusion. But one that allowed many various , different traditions concerning “lord”s – different lords – to be collected and assembled, conflated. As if they were about the same person, the same Lord god.
So my own thesis relating to all that, is this: when Luke or other redactors of oral legend, went around collecting stories about “the lord,” in effect it is likely his sources confusedly narrated may different tales, of many different individual lords, I hypothesize. So that when the collection of sayings of “the” Lord appeared; they by a natural popular confusion seemed to be about a single individual, but actually conflated and assembled, dozens of different figures, into one.
In any case? Thank you Earl for your work! And to the other significant contributers here.
Keep up the good fight! As ironically, Paul said.
No doubt, dozens of different cultures, traditions, created the legend of Jesus. Here we should probably not try to foreground only one; or to even firmly reject many. But acknowledge that many strange and apparently minor influences, played a part in the larger whole.
The most obvious problem with Paul and the Christ is that Jesus never was the Christ of Paul, the Christ of Paul was James the Just. Somewhere in the late first century to the early second century James was merged with the samaritan prophet Joshua/Jesus and the misunderstanding that Jesus was the Christ of Paul arose. Paul did attack James on the top of the temple stairs in the mid twenties of the first century. James was carried through the streets of Jerusalem, seemingly dead. His awakening from the coma induced by the attack of Paul then gave birth to the rumour of the resurrection of James aka the Christ. Some thought that the archangel Michael had awoken a pious jew like James from the dead and some went even further and thought that Michael had taken over James´s body.
On what specific evidence is this scenario based?
Where does this story come from?
There is an attack by Paul (or “Saul,” according to a marginal gloss) on James in Book 1 of the Recognitions of Clement, in which James falls down and breaks his legs, which may arguably stem from a second century Jewish Christian source, but I’ve never heard of the rest of what Kent mentions in his comment before.
JESUS IN THE CHRIST MYTH, AS PRESENTED BY ARTHUR DREWS
Since G.A. Wells has been influenced by the Christ Myth of Arthur Drews (published in two parts, 1909-1912), it is worth outlining how Drews presented the formation of the character of Jesus.
When Drews comes to examining the question of the authenticity of the Epistles, and the Historicity of Paul in the section 3 of The Witness of Paul, entitled The Question of Genuineness, he starts with a reminder:
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Drews then continues by establishing that for Paul, Jesus was a purely ideal figure that lived in the upper levels of the earth’s atmosphere as imagined by the Ancient Greeks.
Paulinism is very close to the Gnosticism of the 2d century rather than the first century.
Willem C. van Manen, the leader of the Dutch Radical School had already recognized in his Römerbrief (Epistle to the Romans) that Jesus had been put to death by the princes of this world “who knew not what they did” when they “crucified the Lord of glory”, in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8 (ESV):
Van Manen, in his Römerbrief had already explained that
Paul does use a lot of Gnostic language, which was understandable in the 2d century, but not around 50-60 AD, given as the spurious dating of the Epistles. Not enough time had passed to elaborate and deepen the new thoughts. The Damascus vision is not enough to explain in Paul such a quick turn-around conversion from zealot Jew to fanatic Christian.
Paul’s Judaism is highly questionable. Consulted rabbis cannot recognize a student of Judaism in Paul. Paul is constantly referring only to the Septuagint, and there’s no clue that he knew any Hebrew. He thinks Greek, speaks Greek, eats Greek, uses Greek in everything. Paulinism is much closer to the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo and Wisdom. Paul never shows any respect for the sacred texts, distorting or changing their meaning, as in Gal. 4:21. His mindset is unique, similar only to other 2d-century writers, like Hebrews, Barnabas, Justin.
The Epistles and the Acts present two radically different stories. The Dutch Radical School (Rudolf Steck, Willem C. van Manen) has mostly denied the authenticity of the Epistles. The Epistles’ goal was to separate Christianity from Judaism. Many intriguing scenarios are possible about the character of Paul, a Jew who turned against the law and Judaism, to give freedom to the new cult.
The scholars of the Dutch Radical School have also expressed serious doubts about the historicity of Pau. They are the major Paul deniers, but impossible to read in their Dutch language. Not a single trace of Paul has been found in the writings of Philo and Josephus. The Clement epistle is not reliable. There’s no proof of the existence of the Pauline epistles before Justin. Papias was also silent about them. Many scenarios are possible to explain the production of the epistles under the name of Paul: one writer, or many? But, for the Christ Myth theory, the historicity of Paul is secondary.
Drews then delves deeper in the construction of the character of Jesus in the following Part IV of his book, The Witness of the Gospels, to show exactly how this ideal Christ, this actor in a major metaphysical drama derives from pre-existing beliefs:
1. The Suffering Servant of God in Isaiah 53
The book emphasizes the role played in the formation of the figure of Jesus by the Old Testament character of The Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, Jeremiah, Job, Zechariah, Ezechiel, etc… especially as presented in the Greek version of the Septuagint. In ch. 7, The Mythic-Symbolic Interpretation of the Gospels, Drews writes:
2. The Suffering Victim of Psalm 22
Isaiah 53 is seconded by the Suffering Victim in crucial Psalm 22, especially its lines: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34); They hurl insults, shaking their heads. (Psalm 22:7; Mark 15:29); They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. (Psalm 22:18; Mark 15:24). Other psalms present passages supporting the figure of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh (Psalm 1, 8, 15, 23, 24, 34, 37, 43, 69, 103, 109, 110, 116, 118, 121, 128, etc..)
3. The Righteous as Personification of Wisdom, his Persecution and Death
Drews also underlines the contribution of the character of the Just or the Righteous in Wisdom in the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach. (See Sirach 51) In Wisdom 7:15-29, she is “a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.” (See the whole Wisdom 7) In Wisdom 2:10-19 the wicked plot “Let us oppress the righteous poor man”, and in Wisdom 2:20 they decide “Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.” (See the whole of Wisdom 2)
Drews adds:
In Ch. 8, Historians and the Gospels, Drews concludes:
4. Flying Features of Dying-and-Rising God Added to the Syncretic Mix
In Ch. 13, Drews thickens the syncretic mortar with a key ingredient:
In summary, according to Drews and Van Manen, Jesus is an ideal character, who lived exclusively in the upper atmosphere of the Ancient imaginary world, never came down to earth, and suffered the ideal death of a Gnostic Redeemer, executed by the “rulers of the age”, who are the demons battling for supremacy, but who are bound to be defeated in a metaphysical drama, where Jesus if the final Savior.”
This is the drama that the author of the Mark Gospel brought down to earth to give historicity to Jesus, and place his earthly existence during the governorship of Pontius Pilate.
Today’s post of Doherty, thanks to Neil’s generous hospitality, is vastly important, because it presents the views on the question of the historicity of Jesus Christ from key exponents:
* Bart Ehrman
* Earl Doherty
* G.A. Wells
* and finally Arthur Drews (and also Willem C. van Manen)
My own two comments above:
2. ARTHUR DREWS’S CONDENSED EXEGESIS ON THE MEDIATOR/SAVIOR
4. JESUS IN THE CHRIST MYTH, AS PRESENTED BY ARTHUR DREWS
have a definite ambition: To demonstrate that, without a doubt, Drews was the originator of the figure of Christ as a purely ideal figure, very close to the Gnosticism concept of the 2d century, who acts in a metaphysical drama taking place in the upper regions of the earth atmosphere of the Ancients’ imagination, crucified by the “princes of the world,” “the rulers of the age”, the “demons’ highest powers”, and reborn in that same aetherial region to introduce the Kingdom of God.
Those are the very ideas that Earl Doherty has expanded in his Jesus Puzzle, and he’s done a great job in presenting an unknown argumentation to the modern generation of young people. In a market sense, Doherty is certainly the indisputable modern propagandizer of this theory. And he’s done a good job in convincing people willing, able, and ready to read his famously long exposes.
However, from a historical viewpoint, for scholars who know the history of this famous controversy, historicists versus Jesus deniers, also popularized as Jesus: Myth or History? it is also incontestable that Drews was the first one to put this idea on the Western World’s map a hundred years ago (1909-1912).
It is a sad fact, and Neil Godfrey’s posts have eloquently demonstrated it, that most NT scholars of our generation, don’t know this history. This is the case of his star protagonists, such as James McGrath, Bart Ehrman, and even R. Joseph Hoffmann: they know nothing of the real details of the history of the controversy.
Bart Ehrman even claims that he’d never heard of it until alerted by his blog followers. And his book “Did Jesus Exist?” shows that he’s never devoted the time necessary to make a truthful in-depth examination of the many aspects of the controversy which has lasted more than 150 years. For all those who were expectantly waiting for a knock-out punch, it proved an immense disappointment. Erhman bit more than he could chew.
I suspect that Hoffmann, obliged to acquire some real historical information thanks to the two elite universities he’s attended, knows a little more than the others, but is not eager to acknowledge it. His glib disparaging of Drews was a tell-tale sign.
I hope that, in a spirit of fairness and true historical scholarship, this site will maintain my two comments in honor of Arthur Drews, whose time to be rehabilitated and pulled out of his undeserved obscurity has come (thanks to both G.A. Wells and Doherty, by the way.)
Thanks, Roo. Your postings on Drews are extremely illuminating. I have to say that , altough I have a copy of Drews’ “Witnesses” and read it many years ago, I should have drawn on it more in laying out my own case. (But then I might have had a 900-page book instead of an 800-page one!)
Earl, this series is great. The absence of explicit reference to a historical Jesus by Paul is psychologically and logically decisive for the direction of causality between (A) the idea of the eternal Christ and (B) the story of the historical Jesus. Convention says B caused A, but all real evidence says A caused B. This indicates the convention is wrong.
Paul says the Christ was long predicted by Jewish prophets, even known at the time of the Exodus as their ‘spiritual rock’ (1Cor10:4). The language around this prophecy may not have been sufficiently explicit in the Epistles, so was made more direct in the language attributed to Paul at Acts 26:22-3 “the Prophets and Moses said the Christ was to suffer, and be the first to proclaim light both to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles.” Already here in Acts we find a subtle extension of the early ethereal vision of Paul.
But the lack of a clear statement to the effect “it was predicted and really happened – here is the evidence” is damning for the claim that Paul’s reference was to a single man, rather than an idea. The mystery is how you crucify an idea. This paradox was the seedbed for the Gospel story. What it means, in my view, is that the Jewish people were part of an eastern vision of salvation and social harmony that was smashed by Rome, so the hope for the presence of Christ as a point of connection between earth and heaven had been shifted from the political to the mythic domain.
The key here is psychological plausibility for the writer. If Paul had been discussing events rather than ideas, he would have said so. No one saves the best wine for last, just as no good persuader omits their best arguments. All the evidence indicates this ‘best wine’ was seen later as implicit in Paul, because it is absent from his text.
You have to take Galatians 2 and Acts 15 together. In Gal 2: 1-10 (also discussed in Acts 15), Paul tells us of a council in Jerusalem regarding the new Gentile converts in Antioch–there, the issue is (putatively) settled. Yet when Peter comes to Antioch (Gal 2:11ff), he is “afraid of those who belong to the circumcision group,” ceases to eat with the Gentiles, after the men come from James. Now, in Acts, the only men sent from James are Judas and Silas. Jason, the truth of the matter is that Paul and James were not resolved: indeed, I am persuaded that Paul’s last trip to Jerusalem was an attempt at reconciliation … and I am at least partially persuaded that this reconciliation also failed. James was a Christian, but he was also a Jew, and zealous for the Mosaic Law, as the New Testament, Josephus, and the Early Church Fathers tell us. His non-reaction to Paul’s rejection of the Law as depicted in Acts 15 does not reconcile with the testimony of his character. First, it’s Peter that’s rejecting the Law (15:10). James is the one who formulated the council’s decision. Second, JPH argues here (http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/actspaul.html#151) that these are not the same event; the episode in Gal. 2 is paralleled in Acts 11, not 15. Third, I ran out of points…. On another point you raised (your struggle with Matthew 24), I recommend you take a look at Dee Dee Warren’s new commentary here http://web.archive.org/web/20050407051449/http://www.preteristlist.com:80/docs/warrenend.html. She argues from the perspective of OT prophecy that the apocalyptic language here was never meant to be taken literally (including the “no stone left on top of another” phrase that gives you doubt), and that Jesus’ coming was upward to reign in heaven, not down to visit earth.
No, they do not have to be taken together.