What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

Tim, I'm sure you find this far more compelling than I.

As I’ve noted several times now, the Q material is right there in the text. It’s not some kind of “hypothesis”, it’s there for all to see. What is a hypothesis is the idea that it comes from one, single, lost source. I happen to think it comes from more than one, for some fairly complex textual reasons. But it’s not some figment of the imaginations of scholars (let alone “Bible thumpers”) because it is there in the text for anyone to see. And it is clearly based on a source or sources, now lost, because the verbatim correspondences between the Q material in gMatt and the Q material in gLuke are too many and too close for any other explanation to make sense.
I’ve asked you how you can just dismiss all this. I notice you haven’t responded.

We have two obvious traditions. One, and for the sake of convention let's call it "pauline" which has a supernatural hero in the sky just like every other mystery cult god popular at the time.

No, Paul does not just talk about a supernatural hero in the sky. He talks about a man, who was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians 4:4), who had a "human nature", was a human descendant of King David (Romans 1:3) and who had a human brother, who Paul himself had met (Galatians1:19). Paul seems to have believed that this man had come from heaven and returned there. And that he was coming again very soon. But he was not just a supernatural hero in the sky – he was one who had recently been a man on earth. Doherty’s theory is wrong.

We do not have the original documents. We do not even have whatever it was that Marcion put out in his canon c 140. What we have is what emerged from the dispute. The notion that the proto-orthodox would have taken anything from Marcion in toto is absurd. Just as they fixed up the gluke to suit their needs we must assume that "paul" was equally massaged. The bad news is that it would take an archaeological find on the order of the Dead Sea Scrolls or at least Nag Hamadi to get the originals and it is just not likely to happen or at least no one should plan on it happening.

I’m afraid I don’t understand this paragraph at all. You think they got the Pauline letters from Marcion? Pardon?

Richard Carrier refers to this as "euhemerization." The attempted meshing of the two is hardly seamless.

Richard Carrier blithely skips over the idea that the Jesus figure is not a product of euhemerization but is actually the result of apotheosis. And, unfortunately for Carrier, the evidence fits apotheosis far better. This is one reason Carrier’s recent clunker of a book has sunk without trace.

Now, were there other groups wandering around with equally screwy beliefs? Doubtless. Pliny the Younger reports interrogating Xtians in Bythinia-Pontus in the early second century and there is nothing reported which bears any resemblance to what you would have us believe was standard xtian doctrine at the time.

You expect Pliny to have given Trajan a crash course in Christian doctrine in that letter? Why? Though he does tell us that these Christians “meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god”. So why does he use the expression “as to a god” if he didn’t understand that this Christ was a man?

In fact, Pliny probably wrote Chrestians not Christians and was helped out by a well-meaning scribe who thought he correcting the spelling.

“Probably”? Evidence?

Could those groups have influenced later xtian groups? Maybe. What is missing is actual evidence.

What, you mean like the reference to this same Christian cult who worshiped a guy crucified by Pilate during the reign of Tiberius by Tacitus?

I'm not the only one who points out that Q exists in the wind. The primary argument against it is that something so important should have been preserved.... or at least mentioned.

That’s the primary argument against it? No wonder most scholars accept that it exists. Firstly, as I keep pointing out to you, the Q material is right there in the text. You need to account for it some other way if it is not there because it is based on a common source or sources. Secondly, why should it have been preserved? In the very early decades of the Jesus sect it consisted of a few thousand people who produced a number of texts. Most of those very early texts would have consisted of only a few copies. It would have been very easy for all of those copies to be lost – the survival rate of ancient books was not good. And it seems it was preserved – by being incorporated into gMatt and gLuke.

Xtianity emerges into the cold light of day in the mid 2d century. Far too much of anything before that is wishful-thinking.

Sorry, but that is ridiculous.