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Earl Doherty 10 Years After

Page history last edited by John F. Felix 13 years ago

Earl Doherty 10 Years After

 

Brief Introduction

 

My copy of The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty is copyrighted 1999, 2005. I thought it would be of interest to do a textual comparison, solely for the sake of information, between that version of "The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle," and the version I just received in Jesus Neither God nor Man: the Case for a Mythical Christ, 2009. I am using the older version as the base text, showing the revision using formatting. If you want to read the prior version, read the black text and the red crossed out elements. If you want to read the 2009 version, read the black and the blue elements only. What can be seen consists mostly of expansions or examples of rewording for clarification, etc. My apologies to those who must use special features of their respective operating systems to analyze these changes non-visually.

 

"The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle"

 

[1] Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel story cannot be found in Christian writings earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was composed only in toward the late end of the first century CE.

 

[2] There is no non-Christian record of reference to Jesus before earlier than the second century. The two References references in Flavius Josephus (end of first century) are unreliable and can be dismissed in their entirety as later Christian insertions.

 

[3] The early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus (Messiah Savior) as a spiritual, heavenly being being, one revealed by God through scripture, and do not equate him with a recent historical man. Paul is part of a new "salvation" salvation movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.

 

[4] Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ in the supernatural/mythical world, world based on Platonic and Semitic cosmology, and derive their information about these events, as well as other features of their heavenly Christ, from scripture.

 

[5] The ancients viewed the universe as finite and multi-layered: matter below, spirit above. The higher world of the heavens was regarded as the superior, genuine reality, containing where spiritual processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly things were located. Paul's Christ operates within this system.

 

[6] The pagan "mystery cults" of the period worshiped savior deities who had performed salvific acts acts. Under the influence of Platonism, these acts came to be interpreted by the cults as taking which took place in the supernatural/mythical world, not on earth or in history. Paul's The Pauline Christ was similarly regarded as undergoing death and resurrection in the heavenly realm. This new Christ belief also shares shared many features with these deities other mythological concepts current in the ancient world.

 

[7] The most prominent philosophical-religious concept of the age this period was the intermediary Son, a spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and humanity. Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish personified Wisdom were models for Paul's heavenly Christ and Son, who took on an additional, sacrificial role under the inspiration of scripture.

 

[8] All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark, the first one composed. Subsequent evangelists reworked Mark in their own interests and added new material. None of the evangelists show any concern for creating genuine history. The Acts of the Apostles, Apostles as an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement, movement is historically unreliable, a second century piece of myth-making legend-making.

 

[9] The Gospels are were not written as historical accounts, but present a symbolic representation of a Galilean kingdom-preaching sect, combined with a fictional passion story set on earth, probably meant to allegorize the heavenly Christ's death and resurrection in the supernatural realm. They are constructed through a the process of "midrash," a Jewish method of reworking old biblical passages and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion is a pastiche of verses from scripture. scripture, and has nothing to do with "history remembered."

 

[10] "Q", "Q" is a lost sayings collection extracted from Matthew and Luke, and made no reference to a death and resurrection resurrection, or soteriological role for its Jesus. and It can be shown to have had no Jesus figure at its roots: some of which roots which were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q community preached the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and the arrival of the heavenly Son of Man, and its traditions were eventually assigned to an invented founder who was linked to the heavenly combined with the spiritual Christ Jesus of Paul the Pauline type in the Gospel of Mark. The case for the existence of Q is much superior to any alternative explanation for the common material in Matthew and Luke.

 

[11] The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a spiritual heavenly Christ and Son of God, some with a revealer role, others with a sacrificial one, shows that the this broad movement began in many different places, as a multiplicity of largely independent and spontaneous developments based on the Jewish scriptures and other religious trends and philosophy expressions of the time, not as a response to a single individual or point of origin.

 

[12] Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject the notion of a past human man as an element of their faith. The type of Christ belief which became later orthodoxy developed only through the course of the second century, to eventually gain dominance toward its end. Only gradually did the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels come to be accepted as historical and his 'life story' real.

 

Copyright (c) 1999, 2005, 2009 by Earl Doherty.

Formatted version copyright (c) 2010 by John F. Felix. All rights reserved.

 

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