Was Julius Caesar the real Jesus Christ?

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Right at the moment I'm reading Steve Mason's "Josephus and the New Testament". This is right after reading MacDonald's "The Gospels and Homer: Imitations of Greek Epic in Mark and Luke-Acts". This stuff added on top of what I've found in Josephus, Tacitus, and Dio Cassius that shows up in all kinds of crazy ways, tells me that something very, very, VERY fishy was going on back then.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

My out-there hypothesis of the day:

Josephus was written AFTER they say it was written (no contemporary sources mentioning the works, no early manuscript evidence, first quote something like a century after it was claimed to have been written, only Christians were interested in his books)

-to provide a justification for Judaism

-which could then be used as a justification for Jewish Christianity (the whole second covenant nonsense), the authors of which used Josephus to edit Marcion's gospel and create their own fake history (Luke/Acts)

Question, was Josephus written with the idea already in mind of justifying Christianity?

So, a relative chronology:

Paul > Marcion > Josephus > Luke/Acts, Matthew

 

[John G]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Josephus was written AFTER they say it was written...
Paul > Marcion > Josephus > Luke/Acts, Matthew

So would that mean even Josephus' autobiography is a forgery/highly insertion-laden? It does have a shipwreck that looks a lot like Act's shipwreck for Paul and both do seem Homeric.

 

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity


Well, read Mason's comparison of Josephus with Luke/Acts first. I think that a lot had to do with one's audience in those days. But until I get the stuff in tabular format, I won't be able to say much. Josephus COULD have been written after Acts, but it looks like Luke/Acts - at least in the form we know it, was dependent on Josephus.

 

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

I should add: the problem of lack of citation of Josephus except among Christians bothered me for a bit but now I think it can be understood that the Roman/Greek historians knew what Josephus was doing and didn't consider him credible. He ended up playing only to a niche market.

I also have a niggling suspicion that Luke/Acts was written/re-written as a polemic response to Josephus for the same niche market.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Yeah, I suspect Luke/Acts was composed/remixed based on Josephus. This one looks interesting:

_http://www.amazon.com/dp/1570036500/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2OZSBJUIKYW07&coliid=I2KYTTSA5XH83M

Building on recent scholarship that argues for a second-century date for the book of Acts, Marcion and Luke-Acts explores the probable context for the authorship not only of Acts but also of the canonical Gospel of Luke. Noted New Testament scholar Joseph B. Tyson proposes that both Acts and the final version of the Gospel of Luke were published at the time when Marcion of Pontus was beginning to proclaim his version of the Christian gospel, in the years 120-125 c.e. He suggests that although the author was subject to various influences, a prominent motivation was the need to provide the church with writings that would serve in its fight against Marcionite Christianity. Tyson positions the controversy with Marcion as a defining struggle over the very meaning of the Christian message and the author of Luke-Acts as a major participant in that contest. Suggesting that the primary emphases in Acts are best understood as responses to the Marcionite challenge, Tyson looks particularly at the portrait of Paul as a devoted Pharisaic Jew. He contends that this portrayal appears to have been formed by the author to counter the Marcionite understanding of Paul as rejecting both the Torah and the God of Israel. Tyson also points to stories that involve Peter and the Jerusalem apostles in Acts as arguments against the Marcionite claim that Paul was the only true apostle. Tyson concludes that the author of Acts made use of an earlier version of the Gospel of Luke and produced canonical Luke by adding, among other things, birth accounts and postresurrection narratives of Jesus.

That "earlier version of the Gospel of Luke" would have been Marcion's gospel. So not only did Luke/Acts probably use Josephus, they used it as a response to Marcion and Paul. And some of the people who try to reconstruct Marcion's Paul letters suspect that the parts where Paul refers to himself as an ex-Pharisee are interpolations, as are those that give some credibility to the "Jerusalem group".

 

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity


Sounds good. It's going on the stack.

I finished Mason... he is very "politically correct" in his evaluation of his findings but the findings themselves are furiously interesting.

So, I immediately picked up Philo. I thought I would do the whole shebang but god! I just CAN'T slog through all that philosophical nonsense he writes. I've scanned through a bunch and I don't think I'll miss anything.

However, I read his historical bit, "Flaccus", with considerable care since it it is about a period of history where Tacitus writings are lost (the reign of Gaius - Caligula) and Dio spends his effort on the "Weekly World News" version of that reign.

Anyway, the pogrom instituted against the Jews of Alexandria in 37/38 may be the solution to the curious remark of Paul to the Galatians suggesting that the Jews were suffering some kind of retribution at that time since it was certainly before the destruction of 70 AD. I don't have the reference immediately to hand but Mason discusses it toward the end of his book. I'll dig through tomorrow and see if I can find it.

Anyway, there is certainly enough motivation for students of Philo to start diddling with gospels... or doing other things after that mess happened. And one can see quite a bit of the philosophy/theology of Paul in Philo, too.

 

[ka]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Hi all:
Some reading I did recently made me want to know what happened in Alexandria in 38 AD, so I did an internet search, which yielded almost nothing but this:
http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

It’s not what I was hoping to find, but it’s interesting, and it relates to the matter of Early Christian connections with Philo.

There’s some archaeological evidence suggesting that a St. Mark’s Church in Alexandria was actually a re-consecration of a Jewish Temple that was an exact replica of the one in Jerusalem.

There’s also discussion of some “man-god” mysteries that allegedly link pagan mystery traditions to early Christianity.

My immediate reaction is that it’s all pretty far-fetched, but that I do not have the background knowledge to judge it. Maybe someone else here could make something of it.

 

[ka]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Hi again:

After the previous post, I went back into the Stephan Huller blog to try to get oriented in it. It is not set up to be easy to navigate.

In that process I discovered that he has most recently been studying exactly the questions this thread is about: the gospels used by Marcion and how they are different from the 4 canonical gospels.

I am not familiar with this stuff at all, but he has a LOT of material. He says Marcion used a “diatessaron” or a harmonized gospel that includes all the material—and more—included in the canonical four.

He seems to have gotten a lot of his material out of accusations against Marcion written by Ireneus, Tertullian, and their followers.

It’s beyond me to judge this, but I can contribute by giving you the place where this discussion starts:

[urlhttp://www.stephanhuller.blogspot.com/search?q=11/15/2014][/url]

 

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Problem is that the Talmud and all that stuff came later and could be just as deceptive as the Christian texts.

Last night I read through Josephus' account of Agrippa vis a vis Jews at the time of Gaius and it was so different that even Whiston had to put in some corrective footnotes excusing Josephus. He's got all the action in Judea and barely a mention of Alexandrian issues. He's got Flaccus as the governor of Syria who causes problems for Agrippa instead of Flaccus as the governor of the Egyptian province as Philo says. Something really fishy is going on there.


Wikipedia:

Aulus Avilius Flaccus was the Egyptian prefect appointed by Tiberius in 32 CE.[1] His rule coincided with the Jewish massacre in Alexandria in 38 CE.[2] According to some accounts, he may have encouraged the outbreak of violence. According to the Jewish philosopher Philo, Flaccus was later arrested and eventually executed for his part in this event.

 

[l apprenti de forgeron]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

My out-there hypothesis of the day:

Josephus was written AFTER they say it was written (no contemporary sources mentioning the works, no early manuscript evidence, first quote something like a century after it was claimed to have been written, only Christians were interested in his books)

-to provide a justification for Judaism

-which could then be used as a justification for Jewish Christianity (the whole second covenant nonsense), the authors of which used Josephus to edit Marcion's gospel and create their own fake history (Luke/Acts)

Question, was Josephus written with the idea already in mind of justifying Christianity?

So, a relative chronology:

Paul > Marcion > Josephus > Luke/Acts, Matthew

Very interesting, AI !
All these questions can drag immense fields of information that are not yet visible. I really wonder if Nietzsche was right to suggest that the biggest struggle is between the Greek moral vs Jewish morality (or more accurately, the Epicurean and Stoic moral vs monotheistic moral). Christian morality is the Jewish morals, of the Jewish priests. The only difference seems be have added to the mix the Piety of Julius Caesar and God like a father and stuff of the cult. Following "The Ancient City", the religion of the Romans, I think that we can imagine how Caesar could have been become the father of the whole empire after his murder.
Perhaps there has been a great effort by the elite of those times to transform Caesar in the Jewish messiah, as it allowed them to generate a state of greater dependence in authorities. Also misery and almost total slavery in the spirits by the introduction of the monotheism in Europe. The imperial monotheism. The true Christian morality is not truly known by Christians. Or it is very murky.

 

[l apprenti de forgeron]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

I hope the following does not sound too stupid, but sometimes I think that the real "ark of the covenant" is the monotheism itself, which was introduced in Europe and then around the world.
Another interesting question is to know whether the zealots were the original marxists, and that communism-egalitarianism was their strategy against the Romans and its imperialist financing (also against the Jewish elite associated with them). It is quite embarrassing that historians do not tell the truth openly about that the church-state has been marxist for centuries, which abolished private property and commerce...Well, I must read the book of Daniel T. Unterbrink, knowing that are false his assertions about Paul.
So, Judas or "the "patsy" utilized to supplant Caesar" is the same Jesinavarah mentioned by the C's, right?.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

Just finished reading the "scholars version" of The Authentic Letters of Paul. A couple impressions: first, Paul strikes me as a real force to be reckoned with! He comes across as intelligent, compassionate, indefatigable, tireless, funny. He gives quite a few 'smacks' to his people in his letters, too, probably well deserved. He'd make a good forum moderator or SOTT commenter! In terms of doctrine, it's interesting to see the not-so-subtle change in some core ideas between the earlier letters and Romans, where he goes super-Jewish and totally contradicts stuff he said previously. Also weird are the mentions of him getting money from the churches for "the poor" in Jerusalem (nb? the Ebionites, a Jewish-Christian group, got their name from a word meaning 'poor').

So with that in mind, I also just received BeDuhn's reconstruction of Marcion's Gospel (The First New Testament). Haven't started it yet (only browsed through and checked up a few references). But consider this: In the SV, Paul's letters take up about 110 pages of text. In contrast, the attested parts of the letters from Marcion's versions of the letters (only the 7 deemed authentic - Marcion also included Colossions, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians) take up only 24 pages. Of course, this is only the text directly attested. Commentators on Marcion didn't quote everything in the letters, so it's likely that large portions were included that weren't directly attested. However, the commentators also mention specific sections that were missing (accusing Marcion of deleting them).

What are some of the portions missing? ALL references to giving money to the Jerusalem group 'poor'. E.g., all of 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 (considered to be two separate letters from Paul worked into some others), where he appeals to Corinth and Achaia for money for the Jerusalem group. Also, pretty much all of Romans 10, 11, 15, 16.

Romans was the most problematic letter for me, but that could be due to the fact that it was written to and for a Jewish group. It looks like he was trying to speak to them in language and concepts they could understand, but that a lot got added by the catholics. I'll make a closer study of it to see what I can find. In the meantime, one of my favorite lines from Paul to the Romans: "I am speaking in common, ordinary terms to accommodate your limited powers of comprehension." LOL!

 

[Laura]

Re: Marcion, Paul, and early Christianity

You might want to read Danielou's "Philo" next.

Added. It's kind of horrifying to read a theology created by interpreting the Pentateuch with Greek philosophical ideas as the tools, based on the conviction that the whole nonsense was actually written by a guy named Moses, and that this guy was the "greatest prophet" that ever lived, and therefore, there must be many symbolic meanings behind every word.

Shades of Foucault's Pendulum!

But it gets worse when you realize that this nonsense is what influenced the theology of Christianity.

Danielou doesn't think that Paul was influenced by Philo, but rather that they were both influenced by Palestianian theological developments which Philo took and developed one way, and Paul another. However, I'm not so sure. He does point out a certain level of polemic in the reversing of some ideas.

 

[Palinurus]

While researching a name mentioned without further details in Flavius Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews (Book XX, Chap. IX, § 7; Loeb 20, 223) i.e. Mattathias ben Theophilus, I ran into an interesting book with yet another theory about the possible familial affiliations and ancestry of the alleged historical Jesus, as well as about the possible father of Flavius Josephus himself.

Mattathias ben Theophilus (c. 60 CE) was the Jewish High Priest (Kohen Gadol) [1] at the start of the Jewish Revolution, and was overthrown by Revolutionary forces.

A minority of scholars believe him to be the same as the Theophilus mentioned in the New Testament books of Luke (1:3) and Acts (1:1). One author argues that Mattathias ben Theophilus was the father of Josephus.[2]

References
[1] Daniel R. Schwartz. Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity. J. C. B. Mohr. July 1992. ISBN 978-3-16-145798-2; pp 160-163.
[2] Herodian Messiah by Joseph Raymond (Tower Grove Publishing 2010) at pages 214-17.

I searched the forum for Joseph Raymond and for Herodian Messiah but drew a blank on both occasions. Incidentally, the full title of the book is Herodian Messiah: Case For Jesus As Grandson of Herod.
This hypothesis seems somewhat in line with the gist of the researches of Charles N. Pope previously mentioned, although that author champions other Herodians or Hasmoneans as possible candidates, if I understood his remarks correctly.

Anyway, this is what amazon has to report on the author and his work:

About the Author
Joseph Raymond was raised in a devout Roman Catholic family in St. Louis, MO USA and educated in Catholic schools. He received degrees from two Jesuit universities graduating law school in 1986. Thereafter, he served as a Department of Justice lawyer in Washington, DC but later left the practice of law to found an internet company. In 1988, he began a spiritual journey of study and reflection largely focused upon the origins of Christianity. Once started, the journey is never complete. In January of 2012, Joseph Raymond gave an on-camera interview in Los Angeles with Karga Seven Pictures regarding theories contained in Herodian Messiah for a documentary on the Discovery Channel called "Jesus Conspiracies". I[t] appeared in episodes 1 and 3 of the series.

Book Description
Publication Date: February 14, 2010
This work details the author's painstakingly collected evidence supporting a shocking theory, that Jesus was the grandson of both Herod the Great and the last Hasmonean king (Antigonus). The analysis begins with one loose thread in the official biography of Jesus Christ, the claim by the Sanhedrin that it lacked authority to execute him. Why didn't the Sanhedrin execute Jesus after convicting him of blasphemy? The same legal body executed Stephen and James the brother of Jesus for the same crime. During Roman times, the Sanhedrin lacked authority to execute only one class of Jew--Roman citizens. All descendants of Herod were Roman citizens. Two elements of proof for the theory are the ancestor list found in Luke, Ch. 3 (it appears to contain the names of Hasmonean kings) and Jesus' denial that he is a son of David. See Matthew 22:41-45, Mark 12:35-37 and Luke 20:41-44.

Index of Chapter Titles

Chapter 1 Summary Argument
Chapter 2 Jesus, Messiah of Levi
Chapter 3 Luke's Genealogy
Chapter 4 Mary the Mother of Jesus (Mariamne bat Antigonus)
Chapter 5 Mary Magdalene (Mariamne bat Aristobulus)
Chapter 6 Crucifixion of Jesus
Chapter 7 Paul of Tarsus (Phasaelus ben Timius)
Chapter 8 The Jesus Movement, Origins and Theology
Chapter 9 Antipater ben Herod (Father of Jesus)
Chapter 10 Josephus, Jewish Traitor
Chapter 11 Paul, Speculative Theories

As I've not read this book, it might very well turn out to be just another red herring in this never ending and totally convoluted topic. Nevertheless, I thought it certainly deserved a mention in this thread -- if only for reasons of completeness and for archiving purposes. Apologies in advance when this would prove to be just noise.