Stephen, dug that stick out of your butt yet?

What’s your problem, incidentally, with the notion of competing Messianic claims?

One might almost get the notion you were offended at my suggesting Jesus wasn’t the first dead person to get that honor?

Well, maybe that’s why it’s a good thing I won’t be here much longer.

But I think it matched the general tone of the discussion pretty well.  The discussion forum has never been terribly polite, and that was true long before I showed up. 

There are many serious scholars who believe John the Baptist was viewed as a potential messiah.  His cult’s survival after his death is assumed–Stephen assumes it, believes the Mandeans were influenced by members of that cult who were still around in the second century. Hard to see how the cult could have survived that long if John wasn’t seen as more than just a good man who got his head chopped off. 

Since there are no surviving writings from his followers, and the gospel accounts of him are all somewhat self-serving (and Josephus extremely brief and probably not that well-informed), it’s all guesswork.  Which Stephen has no problem with, long as it’s him guessing (what no scholar believes to be true).

I have no professional reputation to uphold here.

Neither does anyone else.

Ehrman does, but does he even read any of this?

For his sake, hopefully not.

😉

Given your notion of manners, I’m not at all surprised. 

You liked it because you were still able to pose as a real scholar then.  “Princeton.”  ::sigh::

You’ve never made a specific claim of any kind regarding your occupation.  

Care to change that? 

Then I will respect your privacy.  And draw my own conclusions.  Like everyone else.

Why would anyone get so territorial and possessive about a forum like this?  It ought to just be a place for interested laypersons to spitball, exchange info and ideas, discuss topics from the main blog in greater depth–but you turned it into your personal tutorial, your private classroom.  Or you tried.  And who would do that?  Not anyone who had a real classroom–at least not a class devoted to the subject we’re supposed to be discussing here (which isn’t Greek). 

This is the source of our tension.  And it will end when I leave.  And I will largely forget about you.  Because the only lessons you really had to teach were about human vanity, and there’s no shortage of teachers in that subject.  😉

Don’t guests leave, eventually?

I’m not sure you fully grasp the connotation of ‘guest’.

Everything not Greek is Greek to you. 

Yeah, I don’t think anybody was ever questioning those? 

The context, of course, is Jesus being asked what is the greatest commandment in the Jewish Law, and he responds by naming two commandments (that every Jew would have known from childhood) and linking them to each other; in essence, that loving God and loving your neighbor are the same thing, can’t do one without the other.  That is his personal reading, that of course others could have and probably did make before him.  For the record, I doubt nobody had ever said “Love God” or “Love your neighbor” before the time period Exodus is set in. 

So nobody is claiming Jesus wrote the 10 Commandments (or do I assume too much?), but what Essene scrolls say that the two commandments are so linked as to be the same commandment?  Curious.

Yeah, what Jesus is quoted as saying flows a lot better–Jesus had a certain cogency that comes across in the gospels, even though we may not have his precise wording–but of course, part of a saying being remembered has to do with how well it flows off the tongue.  Probably most of what Socrates is quoted as saying was derived from earlier philosophers, but at least as we have it from Plato, he said it better.  Originality of expression is, in fact, a thing.  Even when what’s being expressed has been expressed many times before, and what sayeth Ecclesiastes to that?  You know the quote. 😉

The primary evidence is that a cult of John persisted, and Christians kept modifying the story of Jesus and John to counter claims made about John, and to explain away the baptism (since they came to believe Jesus had been sinless, and baptism implies the superiority of the baptizer, at least up until that moment). 

But in fairness, the Mandeans don’t seem to have the Messianic tradition at all.  They just consider John the greatest of all prophets (and reject most of the Jewish prophets entirely). 

It’s debatable. 

Could be that once Jesus’ followers started claiming he was the risen Messiah, some of the John cultists felt they had to up the ante.