The relationship Paul identifies in Galatians 3:13 between Christ’s crucifixion and Deuteronomy 21:22-23 is interesting because it is the one place in the typology argument where a mythicist might argue the New Testament crucifixion act itself is typology. That doesn’t help answering whether Paul started with memory of the historical Jesus being crucified and then shaped it according to Deuteronomy 21:22-23 in Galatians 3:13, or if Paul is indicating in Galatians 3:13 that he discovered that the celestial Jesus was crucified by an allegorical reading of Deuteronomy 21:22-23?
Strauss said: “when we find details in the life of Jesus evidently sketched after the pattern of these prophecies and prototypes, we cannot but suspect that they are rather mythical than historical. (Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, p. 89)”
Likely the clearest Prophecy about Jesus is the entire 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah 53:3-7 is especially unmistakable: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
The only thing is, Isaiah wasn’t making a prophesy aboout Jesus. Mark was doing a haggadic midrash on Isaiah. So, Mark depicts Jesus as one who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. He then describes Jesus as wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The Servant in Isaiah, like Jesus in Mark, is silent before his accusers. In Isaiah it says of the servant with his stripes we are healed, which Mark turned into the story of the scourging of Jesus. This is, in part, is where atonement theology comes from, but it would be silly to say II Isaiah was talking about atonement. The servant is numbered among the transgressors in Isaiah, so Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The Isaiah servant would make his grave with the rich, So Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a person of means.
Then, as Dr. Robert Price says
The substructure for the crucifixion in chapter 15 is, as all recognize, Psalm 22, from which derive all the major details, including the implicit piercing of hands and feet (Mark 24//Psalm 22:16b), the dividing of his garments and casting lots for them (Mark 15:24//Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (Mark 15:20//Psalm 22:7), and of course the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34//Psalm 22:1). Matthew adds another quote, “He trusts
in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him” (Matthew 7:43//Psalm 22:8), as well as a strong allusion (“for he said, ‘I am the son of God’” 27:43b) to Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which underlies the whole story anyway (Miller, p. 362), “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life: for if the righteous man is God’s son he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
As for other details, Crossan (p. 198) points out that the darkness at noon comes from Amos 8:9, while the vinegar and gall come from Psalm 69:21. It is remarkable that Mark does anything but call attention to the scriptural basis for the crucifixion account. There is nothing said of scripture being fulfilled here. It is all simply presented as the events of Jesus’ execution. It is we who must ferret out the real sources of the story. This is quite different, e.g., in John, where explicit scripture citations are given, e.g., for Jesus’ legs not being broken to hasten his death (John 19:36), either Exodus 12:10, Numbers 9:12, or Psalm 34:19-20 (Crossan, p. 168). Whence did Mark derive the tearing asunder of the Temple veil, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38)? Perhaps from the death of Hector in the Iliad (MacDonald, pp. 144-145). Hector dies forsaken by Zeus. The women of Troy watched from afar off (as the Galilean women do in Mark 15:40), and the whole of Troy mourned as if their city had already been destroyed “from top to bottom,” just as the ripping of the veil seems to be a portent of Jerusalem’s eventual doom.
Of course if you are determined to believe that it is all made up you can do this kind of exercise but it all rests on an enormous fallacy, that whoever made it up decided to create a story that would practically guarantee the failure of the movement. Nobody before Paul thought Deuteronomy applied to the Messiah. Nobody before the early Christians thought Isaiah 53 applied to the Messiah. Nobody before Mark applied Psalm 22 to the Messiah.
So what’s more likely, that whoever created Christianity (who was that exactly?) decided to mine the Hebrew scriptures to create a new religion that would deliberately misinterpret these scriptures to create a belief system guaranteed to alienate the vast majority of its potential audience, or, that they believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah and after the disaster of his crucifixion went back to their scriptures and looked for explanations of how this could have happened? The latter makes much more sense to me. And it best explains the sources and traditions we have.
Mythicism sounds provocative at first blush but the deeper you penetrate it the more incoherent it becomes.
Stephen said
Of course if you are determined to believe that it is all made up you can do this kind of exercise but it all rests on an enormous fallacy, that whoever made it up decided to create a story that would practically guarantee the failure of the movement. Nobody before Paul thought Deuteronomy applied to the Messiah. Nobody before the early Christians thought Isaiah 53 applied to the Messiah. Nobody before Mark applied Psalm 22 to the Messiah.So what’s more likely, that whoever created Christianity (who was that exactly?) decided to mine the Hebrew scriptures to create a new religion that would deliberately misinterpret these scriptures to create a belief system guaranteed to alienate the vast majority of its potential audience, or, that they believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah and after the disaster of his crucifixion went back to their scriptures and looked for explanations of how this could have happened? The latter makes much more sense to me. And it best explains the sources and traditions we have.
Mythicism sounds provocative at first blush but the deeper you penetrate it the more incoherent it becomes.
Maybe one has to modify the argument a bit. Since Christianity with its idea of a dying Messiah ultimately became a big success among gentiles, one has to say that no Jewish sectarian community would have invented the dying Messiah idea. To maintain the mythicist argument, one would have to claim that proto-christianity was invented by gentiles portraying a fictional Jewish origin, including the existence of Paul.
To maintain the mythicist argument, one would have to claim that proto-christianity was invented by gentiles portraying a fictional Jewish origin, including the existence of Paul.
Sure, and there are people who have suggested just this explanation. But once again where is your evidence? And how far are you willing to go into this kind of speculation just to hold onto a mythicist construct? The principle of parsimony suggests that all things being equal the simplest explanation tends to be the right one. And the explanation of a failed apocalyptic prophet whose followers created stories about him after his death seems to be that simplest explanation.
Steefen said
Had a challenging day today: I have independent attestation that Jesus was not crucified alive by Rome.
That has been something that would be big news if I got a second source to back up the first source.
JESUS WAS NOT CRUCIFIED ALIVE BY ROME.
The Second Attestation That Jesus Was Not Crucified Alive
Gospel of John
And Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross
Jesus of Nazareth, The King of the Jews
Gospel of Matthew
And set up over his head
This is Jesus King of the Jews
Gospels of Luke and Mark
written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew
King of the Jews
Mark, then Luke: King of the Jews <then Matthew adds Jesus> Jesus King of the Jews
<then John adds of Nazareth> Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
Basileus did not always mean king, in Greek, it could frequently indicate the Latin imperator as basileia could indicate imperium
The crucifix help up at Julius Caesar’s funeral was a tropaeum.
That is the Gospel of Mark leaving in the original reference to Julius Caesar.
= = =
Gospel of Mark
They crucified him
parted his garments
and cast lots
QUESTION: What garments, plural
The biblical Jesus only had “The Robe” singular
Julius Caesar had garments, plural, put on his funeral pyre before it was set on fire.
That is the Gospel of Mark leaving in the original reference to Julius Caesar.
“If we look at the verb stauro, stauro does not mean crucify but to put up posts or slats or a palisade: fence in.
Christians turned stauro into a torture post to get cross and crucifixion.
Christians also mistranslated kleros to be “cast lots”.
To first century Greek speaking people, kleros originally meant heirloom.
The Christian meaning of stauro and kleros reads:
And when they crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon the garments.
But a Greek of the first century would not have understood the Greek of that English sentence in the Bible.
The original Greek understood by Greeks of the first century would have understood the original reference to Julius Caesar:
and when they were putting up posts or stakes to fence off [Caesar’s body and the stuff under his body].
Three historians attest:
Appianus:
There they collected together pieces of wood and benches and anything they could find for a funeral pyre, throwing upon it adornments of the procession [heirlooms; allotment], some of which were very costly. Some cast their own wreaths upon it and many military awards.
So casting lots for Jesus garment is the Gospel of Mark leaving in the original reference to Julius Caesar. It is not Roman soldiers betting for Jesus’ robe because it has supernatural powers.
Plutarchus:
and they hauled benches, barriers, and tables from the place and helped them around the corpse
[an already dead Julius Caesar, an already dead Jesus Christ]
Suetonius:
and immediately the throng of bystanders heaped on it dry branches and the judges’ chairs and the court benches and whatever else came to hand and could serve as an offering. Then the flute players and actors pulled off their robes … and flung them into the [stauro] fenced off area which was burning.
Likewise, the veterans of Julius Caesar’s legions through valuable arms into the fenced in area where Caesar’s body was burning.
Matrons offered up jewels and their children’s purple fringed tunics.
It is easy to detect that the passage from Mark is an abridgment of Caesar’s funeral.
Jesus was not crucified alive, we are reading the cremation of an already dead Julius Caesar.
Appianus:
Before Caesar was cremated, the people bore him to the Capitol
The Roman derived Capitolium from caput.
An Etruscan king, Olus (Aulus Vulcentanus) was killed and buried there and that the Capitoline temple and hill received its name after his skull was later found there.
Gospel of Mark
They bore Jesus to Golgotha, the place of a skull.
= = =
In both the Caesar and the Jesus accounts, the Greek word phero (pherousin) is used which means to bear or to carry.
Both Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ are born/carried to a place of the skull.
I’m trying to put together the big picture for the idea that Jesus’ crucifixion was a myth (noble lie):
1) Love seems to be a central theme of early Christianity.
Paul wrote
– 8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not give false testimony, You shall not covet,” and if there are any other commandments, are summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love works no evil to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:8-10)
Mark seems to echo the commandment of love as we find it in Paul:
– The Great Commandment: 28 One of the scribes came and heard them reasoning together. Perceiving that Jesus had answered them well, he asked Him, “Which is the first commandment of all?” 29 Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. 30 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31)
(2) The problem of trying to create a benevolent, just society was that the Christians believed the central feature of that society, the Temple, was corrupt. Mark has Jesus say: “17Then He began to teach them and declare, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” (Mark 11:17). Jesus and his atoning death that effectively rendered useless the temple cult “coincidentally” emerged at just the time in history when a big problem for the Jews was, as Lataster says, the “inaccessibility caused by the temple being controlled by the Roman-loving Temple cult. One noteworthy example would be the more ‘progressive’ Pharisees, what with their synagogues and Old Torah, who had less need for the Temple; likewise the Essenes who thought the Temple leadership so corrupt that they developed and performed their own religious rituals elsewhere. (Lataster, Jesus Did Not Exist, 223-224).”
(3) To rectify this problem, the first Christians invented a story of an atoning Christ, keeping the philosophy of love paramount, but substituting the temple cult with, to use Paul’s words, a simple and pure (2 Cor 11:3-5) faith in Christ.
Carrier agrees on this point. He writes:
‘A better question is “Why did they invent the idea that the messiah got crucified?” Because they needed one, is the mythicist answer. It accomplished what they needed: the elimination of dependence on the Jewish temple cult and its Jewish leadership. It also created a plausible Jewish variant of a massively popular fashion among salvation cults at the time.’ ** you do not have permission to see this link **
I don’t think you can attribute any monolithic intent to “the Christians” at this point. Paul mentions crucifixion often and in passing, as if it could be taken for granted: it seems to have been a pre-Pauline conception. The gentile Christians he was preaching to would not have been overly concerned with issues of the temple. Writings like Mark and Matthew present the outlook of different communities which would have had different perspectives, and what is presented is done so with the destruction of the temple in view.
Bart Ehrman often presents the best argument I’ve heard here, and I guess you’ve heard it, but it’s worth mentioning. If you were going to create a messiah or a god, you wouldn’t likely create one who had been tortured to death by an oppressive military and legal structure. It seems more likely to be an uncomfortable fact which had to be worked around in that respect. It’s interesting that it became such a focus of devotion. Looking at it from the mythicist view, I don’t see why the fact of crucifixion would be any more necessary than any other form of death. The best I might say is that it turned out to be a useful embellishment. It almost certainly wouldn’t have been early on though. As Paul says in 1 Cor. 1:23 “but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles”.
The crucifixion of Jesus is really where Mythicists have to scramble to make an account. A Jewish movement that invented a doctrine that was practically guaranteed to alienate 99% of its intended audience? If you eliminated the New Testament and had only the Hebrew scriptures where would you find any basis for a crucified Messiah? Certainly the early Christians went back and reinterpreted the Hebrew scriptures to reflect the fate of Jesus. But why would they have had to do that if the weren’t forced to by the fact that they believed Jesus was the Messiah but everyone knew he had been crucified? Before the early Christians nobody interpreted Isaiah 53 or Psalms 22 to be about the Messiah but now the mythicists are forced to say they were, thus claiming to know more about the ancient Jewish traditions than the actual Jews of the time did? I don’t think so.
Doesn’t the apostle Paul seem to suggest mythicism when he says, in large part, what makes him an apostle is that he has “seen” Christ (“Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? – 1 Corinthians 9:1), perhaps suggesting it was a rare thing to have seen Christ (because Jesus was not a popular faith healer who had an earthly ministry, but rather was a mythical being)?
Lataster picks up on this too when he writes: “Paul outright says this, effectively claiming that Christians only know about Jesus because of chosen ones like himself (Lataster, JDNE, 245).” Lataster cites in support of that contention the following passage from Paul:
14How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? 15How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, “HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THE FEET OF THOSE WHO BRING GOOD NEWS OF GOOD THINGS!” (Romans 10:14-15).
‘Doesn’t the apostle Paul seem to suggest mythicism when he says, in large part, what makes him an apostle is that he has “seen” Christ’? Um, no. I have never seen Elvis (except on a TV screen) but I don’t think he is a myth. Lots of people “saw” Elvis after he was dead, that does not mean he was a myth? Why do mythicists hang onto that belief? Would it be easier to create a mythical Elvis than for there to actually have been an Elvis? Not by a long shot.
That’s an interesting point though. Loads of people would have seen Jesus, so why mention it? I think he meant the risen Jesus. Those he was writing to would have understood what he presumably meant. Obviously, they hadn’t seen Jesus at all. Paul specifically claimed to see Jesus after he had been resurrected, as he says in Chapter 15 of the same letter. In verse 3 he makes it clear that he had told them about this previously “For what I received I passed on to you“. Chapter 15 makes it clear that a resurrection of a dead person is being talked about. Paul never claimed to see Jesus in the flesh. His statement doesn’t suggest to me that Jesus didn’t live.
john76 said
(…)(3) To rectify this problem, the first Christians invented a story of an atoning Christ, keeping the philosophy of love paramount, but substituting the temple cult with, to use Paul’s words, a simple and pure (2 Cor 11:3-5) faith in Christ.
Carrier agrees on this point. He writes:
‘A better question is “Why did they invent the idea that the messiah got crucified?” Because they needed one, is the mythicist answer. It accomplished what they needed: the elimination of dependence on the Jewish temple cult and its Jewish leadership. It also created a plausible Jewish variant of a massively popular fashion among salvation cults at the time.’ ** you do not have permission to see this link **
This is the failure of Jesus Mythicism in a nutshell.
First it is claimed that the early sect was invented within Judaism, an event that requires either that Paul’s letters are fabrications/part-fabrications or that he and many other contemporary actors were duped by a small group of conspirators in the beginning of the thirties. These possibilities are inferences of a very, very low probability. There is no evidence for it. On the contrary, the Jewish post-crucifixion movement seems to have continued some level of temple worship. Even today, many Christians continue to believe that Jesus will return and restore the temple.
The second point is that one didn’t have to invent an executed Messiah to to create independence of the temple cult. The Essenes made that, and so could any other Jewish sect.
Plutarch has given us a description of the very impressive triumph of Romulus.
After the rape of the Sabine women, Romulus won a first victory against the King Acro of Caenina. Romulus smote Acro in duel combat and had to fulfill a vow that if he won, he would himself carry the armor and weapons of his enemy to Jupiter and dedicate them to him.
“Romulus thought about how to best fulfill the oath to Jupiter and at the same time offer the citizens a pleasing drama.
He had a mighty oak tree felled and formed into a cross that would become the tropaeum. The whole suit of armor of King Acro was mounted on the cross. Romulus put a wreath on his head. Under the wreath, his long hair flowed.
He heaved the tropaeum onto his right shoulder and sang a song of victory. His soldiers followed him and joined in the singing. Then the citizens welcomed them with joy and wonder. This procession was the model for later triumphs. The cross was dedicated to Jupiter.
It was an act of strength to carry the cross.
The Cross of Victory, Victory in Jesus, Victory in Romulus
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The third attestation that the gospels are not just telling us an accurate account of the crucifixion of Jesus:
Part I
Appianus:
Before Caesar was cremated, the people bore him to the Capitol
The Roman derived Capitolium from caput.
An Etruscan king, Olus (Aulus Vulcentanus) was killed and buried there and that the Capitoline temple and hill received its name after his skull was later found there.
Gospel of Mark
They bore Jesus to Golgotha, the place of a skull.
Part II
Jesus Shouldering His Cross Is Romulus Shouldering His Tropaeum.
Plutarch has given us a description of the very impressive triumph of Romulus.
After the rape of the Sabine women, Romulus won a first victory against the King Acro of Caenina. Romulus smote Acro in duel combat and had to fulfill a vow that if he won, he would himself carry the armor and weapons of his enemy to Jupiter and dedicate them to him.
“Romulus thought about how to best fulfill the oath to Jupiter and at the same time offer the citizens a pleasing drama.
He had a mighty oak tree felled and formed into a cross that would become the tropaeum. The whole suit of armor of King Acro was mounted on the cross. Romulus put a wreath on his head. Under the wreath, his long hair flowed.
He heaved the tropaeum onto his right shoulder and sang a song of victory. His soldiers followed him and joined in the singing. Then the citizens welcomed them with joy and wonder. This procession was the model for later triumphs. The cross was dedicated to Jupiter.
It was an act of strength to carry the cross.
The Cross of Victory, Victory in Jesus, Victory in Romulus
Stephen said
Of course if you are determined to believe that it is all made up you can do this kind of exercise but it all rests on an enormous fallacy, that whoever made it up decided to create a story that would practically guarantee the failure of the movement. Nobody before Paul thought Deuteronomy applied to the Messiah. Nobody before the early Christians thought Isaiah 53 applied to the Messiah. Nobody before Mark applied Psalm 22 to the Messiah.So what’s more likely, that whoever created Christianity (who was that exactly?) decided to mine the Hebrew scriptures to create a new religion that would deliberately misinterpret these scriptures to create a belief system guaranteed to alienate the vast majority of its potential audience, or, that they believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah and after the disaster of his crucifixion went back to their scriptures and looked for explanations of how this could have happened? The latter makes much more sense to me. And it best explains the sources and traditions we have.
Mythicism sounds provocative at first blush but the deeper you penetrate it the more incoherent it becomes.
While I disagree with the mythicist position on Christ as a historical person the resurrection story is definitely and myth and legend. The conundrum for me is that I still maintain a very progressive new thought type of theology when it comes to this part of Jesus. As Dr. Ehrman suggest on another post “I believe the story of the historical Jesus was a tragedy that ultimately did nothing for anyone”. However, a lot of his teachings or even the teachings attributed to him are interesting indeed. Consider the theology of people like the late Johnnie Coleman, and also the things ** you do not have permission to see this link **teaches. You do not even have to accept any literal meaning of anything in scripture to follow New Thought Christian theology.
Of course I am not 100% into New Thought. I lean more towards some of Marcion’s views on Christ, and I also follow a version of Womanist Theology I am most comfortable with. Yet I have no idea if any of what I believe is true. In that sense I am an agnostic theist and may always be one.
Whenever I read discussions regarding the crucifixion which then leads into discussions regarding the belief in the resurrection is based on visions, it always make me pause and reflect that in the Old Testament, visions are typically “dreams”. Ancient people looked upon dreams very differently than we do. Today, it would have been just a dream.
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