Category: Early Christianities

Where should the possibility of pre-Christian Jewish gnosticism fit? Where should we place the dividing line between events inferred from Acts/gospels/epistles on the one hand and accounts derived from Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius on the other? Should they all be included in Biblical Studies? If so, at what point do we break off that area and begin second century sources, then those of late antiquity? Marcion is second century but has an influence on biblical works. But how can we justify all of early Christianity into late antiquity and beyond being part of Biblical Studies? Ebionites are assigned to near apostolic times but are only found in late antiquity documents. Do we need a dividing line? Where do we put documents like Odes of Solomon that are seen by some to be pre-Christian but related to what emerged as more recognizable Christianity?

2011-10-19

Reading Galatians afresh: a Gnostic Paul, James, Peter and John?

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Gnosticism, New Testament
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Ron Goetz posted a comment elsewhere that reminded me of the works of Walter Schmithals on Paul’s letters. The one I have read most of, Paul & the Gnostics, is not the easiest of reads but is packed densely with detailed argument and detailed references to the scholarship of his day. But it does force one to re-think what is commonly written or assumed in other studies on Galatians.

Schmithals argues that Paul’s critics or opponents among the Galatian churches are not “orthodox” judaizers from the Jerusalem leadership of James. I won’t repeat those arguments here but will go through the way of reading the first two chapters of Galatians his arguments opened up to me. What follows is a mixture of Schmithals and my own interpretation, but I conclude with a quotation from Schmithals.

Paul’s Galatian church is being persuaded to embrace a different gospel (a perverted form the gospel) from the one he presented to them.

I marvel that ye are so soon removed from Him, that called you into the grace of Christ, for another gospel. For this is not another; but there are some who trouble you and would pervert the Gospel of Christ. (Gal. 1:6-7)

But then there is something unexpected for anyone who is reading within the perspective of disciples who have gone out from Jerusalem after believing they had seen the resurrected Christ. The gospel is something that can conceivably be preached by an angel from heaven. Continue reading “Reading Galatians afresh: a Gnostic Paul, James, Peter and John?”

2011-10-04

Carrier’s Real Origins of Christianity Course

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities, New Testament
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Tim alerted me to an interesting course advertised on Richard Carrier’s blog:

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2011/09/december-course.html

Course description: This course examines the historical origins of the Christian religion from a secular and skeptical perspective. . . . .

2011-09-13

How did early Christians [not] convince others Jesus was the Messiah?

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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I’ve been going through Geza Vermes’ The Changing Faces of Jesus and here I’ll focus on just one more detail: the way the scholar learns how the early “Jewish church tried to prove that Jesus was the Messiah”.

Vermes points us toward the journey he is to lead for his readers:

The best way to grasp the primitive Christians’ picture of Jesus is by reconstructing the content and style of their preaching. How did they present their gospel, and how did they endeavour to convince their first listeners . . . . The approach they adopted seems to have been substantially the same, whether the message was delivered in Jerusalem or in the very different setting of the Gentile mission of Paul . . . . (p. 121)

The one exception Vermes singles out was Paul’s address to the Athenians from the Areopagus in Acts 17:16-32. I will discuss this in a future post but not from Vermes’ viewpoint. Rather, I will look at the possible inspiration for this scene in a classical Greek tragedy by Aeschylus.

But this post is a case-study in how New Testament scholars mistakenly think they are doing genuine history.

Geza Vermes’ approach in his own mind is genuinely “historical”:

This view . . . . is that of a scholar, of a detached historian, in search of information embedded in the surviving sources. (p. 7)

So, according to the surviving sources, how did the early Jewish Christians try to convince others that Jesus was the Messiah? Continue reading “How did early Christians [not] convince others Jesus was the Messiah?”

2011-07-31

The origin and meaning of Nazarene/Natsarene and its relationship to “hidden gnosis”

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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Noah, the first Natsarene?

René Salm has shared his findings on the historical roots of the term we know as Nazarene. The pdf file, The Natsarene and hidden gnosis, is available on the mythicist resources webpage.

This is from the forward of the 20-page article:

This lengthy Addendum follows the third installment (Chapters 3–4) of my translation from the German of Ditlef Nielsen’s book, The Old Arabian Moon Religion and the Mosaic Tradition (1904). . . . [That book] explores a number of still novel themes which are foundational to my thought, such as: the influence of North Arabian religion on early Israelite origins, and in turn on Christianity; the gnostic nature of the religion of Midian, where Moses allegedly sojourned and learned from Jethro; and the gnostic character of the most ancient Israelite religion.

. . . . In the Addendum, I show that these terms [Nazarene and Nazoraean] reflect the Semitic n-ts-r (nun-tsade-resh), a root with specifically gnostic connotations going back to the Bronze Age. The dictionary tells us that Hebrew natsar means “watch, preserve, guard.” Its cognates in related Semitic languages also signify “secret knowledge” and “hidden things.” . . . .

. . . . . For perhaps the first time, we can now see that Natsarene (or a close cognate, with Semitic tsade) was widely used in early Middle Eastern religions to designate the person of advanced spirituality, a spirituality linked to hidden gnosis. Hence the title of the Addendum, “The Natsarene and hidden gnosis.” . . . . 

The table of contents: Continue reading “The origin and meaning of Nazarene/Natsarene and its relationship to “hidden gnosis””

2011-05-31

Mythicist Papers: Background to Christian Myths – a 3 day Death, Nazarenes, the John the Baptist Sect. . . .

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Early Christianities
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René Salm has translated the first two chapters of a fascinating study by Ditlef Nielsen, The Old Arabian Moon Religion And The Mosaic Tradition (1904) and made them available online at his Mythicist Papers resource page.

He has other resources there, too. Anyone interested in the origins of the “Nazarene” epithet [n-ts-r] applied to Jesus and early Christians, in the roots of the three-day death and resurrection concept in myth, of the (very early) background to what the later emergence of the Mandean or John the Baptist sect, the astrological basis for the Jewish sabbath and “magical” numbers, will find these resources indispensable. I have just completed the second chapter of Nielsen’s book and found it absolutely fascinating.

2011-05-11

Earliest Nazarenes: Evidence of Epiphanius

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by Neil Godfrey

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This is a continuation of my earlier post on the Nazarenes. As with that earlier post, this is primarily preparation to for adding articles to my vridar.info site. Maybe I was just unlucky, but it was not easy for me to find an online translation of the relevant passage by Epiphanius, Panarion 29. So hopefully this can be a useful reference for others interested in this topic.

Here is the complete text of “Panarion 29” by Epiphanius as it appears in the translation published by Brill, copied from the nazarenespace.com page, with my own corrections and editing. Continue reading “Earliest Nazarenes: Evidence of Epiphanius”

2011-05-08

Earliest (pre-Christian) Nazarenes: Pliny the Elder’s evidence

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities, History and Biography
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Ray A. Pritz discusses in some depth the evidence extant for Nazarene Jewish Christianity (the title of his book, subtitled: “From the end of the New Testament Period Until Its Disappearances in the Fourth Century”). It was published 1988 so no doubt the scholarly discussion summarized by Pritz at that time has since moved on.

I post here the first of his discussions of a “pre-Christian” sect related to a name like “Nazarenes”. We know from Acts that early Christians were known (at least by outsiders) as Nazarenes — Acts 24:5.

I skip here the reasons (covered many times elsewhere) this term cannot refer (contrary to Matthew 2:23) to a person from the village of Nazareth. Maybe will do so in a future post. I only present Ray Pritz’s discussions, and the evidence he cites, for a pre-Christian group known as “Nazarenes” or something similar. Continue reading “Earliest (pre-Christian) Nazarenes: Pliny the Elder’s evidence”

2011-03-21

Christianity and the “let’s turn the world upside down” bandwagon

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Ancient Religious Cultures, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities, Martyrs and martyrdom
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While one sometimes hears it said that the gospel message when first heard in the early Roman empire was “shocking” and “turned the world upside down”, it is in fact more correct to say that the gospel message was a product of its age.

In the century or so leading up to the common era and beyond, the idea of winning by losing, of conquering and gaining life through death, and the virtues of patient endurance and self-denial when faced with tyrannical powers and losses in this world, were emerging as a “new morality”. The Christian message of finding one’s life by losing it was the product of its age.

The Christian saviour who is a king who conquers by dying was the kind of hero that resonated with the popular figures of both serious and light literature of the day.

If in another time heroic figures were great conquerors of cities and slayers of giants — Agamemnon bringing down Troy, Dionysus and Alexander conquering Asia, Odysseus outwitting and slaying Cyclops, David felling and decapitating Goliath — there was another value emerging in those generations preceding the time of Christ that came to stand as an alternative virtue for the powerless.

Here is what a non-Christian Jewish text from around the same era as Christ wrote of heroic figures. The conquering king is the loser; the victor is the one who yields up his body to be a public spectacle as it is tortured to death. The blood of the martyrs is even said to be the salvation of the nation. Continue reading “Christianity and the “let’s turn the world upside down” bandwagon”

2011-03-05

Vision Mysticism among first and second century Jews and Christians

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Religious Cultures, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities
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April DeConick in Voices of the Mystics seeks to expand her readers’ knowledge of vision mysticism in early first-century Christianity, in particular arguing that the Gospel of John was written to oppose the practice as it appears to be endorsed in the Gospel of Thomas. In a recent post I discussed its apparent place in Paul’s experience. DeConick comments on the distinguishing feature of this experience among Jews:

Although the notion that the vision of a god makes one divine was Greek in origin, early Jewish mystics seemed to have welded this idea into their traditions about celestial journeys. Thus, in the Second Temple period, they taught that when one ascended into heaven and gazed on God or his enthroned bodily manifestation, the kabod or ‘Glory’, one was transformed. (p. 49)

Exceptionally righteous individuals like Moses, Ezekiel and Enoch had been transformed or glorified by their visions of God, and in the world to come all righteous were expected to be so transformed. Continue reading “Vision Mysticism among first and second century Jews and Christians”

2010-12-05

How not to name a new religion

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Early Christianities, New Testament
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In my previous post I carelessly used that pernicious passive voice and in retrospect I see that I conveyed a meaning I did not intend. I have since marked a correction to it in that post and fully intend to have a quiet but sharp word with my proof reader.

But has anyone ever heard of a religious group ever naming itself after the hometown of its founder? What would be the point? Is the religion acting as a tourist promoter to the home of its founder?

No, religious groups generally prefer to name themselves in a way that identifies something of their beliefs or practices.

We have indications that some early Christians called themselves something like “Nazoreans”, and the name has been linked etymologically to something meaning “keeper” or “observer”.

Those who try to say that the name originated as a reference to the town of Jesus’ boyhood are presenting an argument that ignores the etymological argument and makes no sense as the sort of thing people do.

Outsiders name other religions anything under the sun. But that’s quite a different matter.

 

2010-02-07

Map of second century Christianities

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by Neil Godfrey

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The following comparative overview of the extents of the “orthodox” and “nonorthodox” forms of Christianity from the time of the fall of Jerusalem through the second century is taken from chapter 8 of Walter Bauer‘s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. His information is inferred from the surviving literature from this period, and later references to literature no longer surviving.

No doubt there are studies since Bauer that would alter the overview and map below.

It is easy to imagine that the Christian religion we know grew steadily from Palestine and expanded gradually outwards, firstly through Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, until it gradually blanketed the whole Mediterranean world and Middle East.

But if that was the way it happened then how can the following extent of “nonorthodox” forms of Christianity be explained?

(click on map to enlarge it)

Blue = “non-orthodox” (e.g. Marcionites, Valentinians, and other such “gnostic” types)
Red = Roman-orthodox strongholds
Purple = contested areas; where “orthodoxy” was struggling, often in some form of “rear-guard” action, against the “non-orthodox”
Red stars = minority presence of “orthodoxy” (Edessa is a special case: the “orthodox” were also described as “gnostics”)

“Orthodox” strongholds and outposts

At the turn of the century, around 100 c.e., there were evidently only two major bastions of what we might call the foundations of the orthodox Christianity that we would recognize today: Continue reading “Map of second century Christianities”

2008-10-26

John the Baptist according to his followers today (the Mandaeans)

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Gnosticism
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Another recent gem on Australia’s Radio National program, Encounter, 5 October 2008, were interviews with Mandaeans (followers of John the Baptist) describing their lives and challenges since the invasion of Iraq. Mandaean scholars also discussed some of the Mandaean beliefs about their own origins and practices.

The transcript of the program is available
here.

According to the Encounter transcript, Mandaean belief is that John the Baptist:

  • was not Jewish, but originated among Medean (think Medes, near Iran/Persia) immigrants in Palestine
  • was whisked back to Medea at his birth by angels in order to be enlightened
  • returned to baptize at the Jordan
  • baptized by day and preached by night for 42 years
  • not in the transcript, but from the wikipedia, Mandaean literature has John dying at the moment he touched an angel

This is according to the Haran Gawaita, a Mandaean text dating at least from the 6th century, and possibly from the 3rd century.

Of course this historical view leads to interesting questions:

  1. some have given reasons to think that the John the Baptist references in Josephus were no more original than the Jesus references (e.g. Zindler);
  2. if there was a John the Baptist who was executed around the period of Jesus, and he had been at work 42 years, then we may have an(other) explanation for some of the earliest Christian art depicting John the Baptist as an old man when he baptized a very young Jesus;
  3. or if there was a John the Baptist who had been at work 42 years, much of that time post-Jesus, then we have another reason to date the gospels very late, well beyond living memory of such;
  4. we have an analog to Matthew’s story of enlightened individuals coming from the East to welcome the Christ;
  5. or best of all, maybe we begin to find an answer to Joseph Campbell’s question about the coincidence of finding at Jordan an individual who bore the name of the Mesopotamian god (Ea of Water, Oannes) associated with the ritual he taught.

Some late Christian literature (the Pseudo-Clementine — also from 3rd century) is also consistent with the Mandaean belief that John the Baptist was a gnostic teacher.

2007-04-20

The two-edged sword of Christian allegorizing

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Biblical Studies, Gnosticism
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What if a second century attempt to allegorize the Christian holy books had succeeded in the way early Christians allegorized the Jewish scriptures? Continue reading “The two-edged sword of Christian allegorizing”

2007-04-14

A gnostic mind game with Paul and Mark

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Gnosticism, New Testament
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Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Paul cites the many gnostic interpretations of Paul’s letters. The point is well made that our interpretation of Paul is inherited from the founders of the orthodox church today. Yet this interpretation was not so universal in the second century. Irenaeus took issue with the gnostics for claiming to have secret traditions that they claimed had been handed down from Paul in order to explain the spiritual (“pneumatic”) understanding of his letters. Continue reading “A gnostic mind game with Paul and Mark”