From Fiction to "True Story"

[FallentoReason]

I couldn't resist waiting until tomorrow to respond. It's rather late here.. but what the hell.

Some of the early forms of Christianity, according to what I've read from Ehrman, preached that the higher spiritual realm was good, closer to God, and the physical material realm was corrupted. Something had gone horribly wrong in the material world. In fact, one of the early brands of Christianity, Doceticism, rejected the idea of a physical flesh-and-blood Jesus because they couldn't imagine a holy god having anything to do with an unholy world. Echoes of the struggle of proto-orthodox Christianity against Doceticism are found in the Bible itself in 1John 4:1-3 and 2John 1:7 where the reader is admonished to reject Doceticism on the basis of faith (not on recent history???).

Yeah, Doceticism was one of the 6 schools of thought on Jesus. I'm compelled to think that these different schools of thought ranging from spiritual Messiah to physical and divine Messiah got their 'inspiration' from other cults. I remember reading something about Plutarch which said he documented the existence of Mithraism in some parts of Greece during his travels. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure Lucius Plutarch gets a mention in Acts which means these cults were definitely polluting the minds of people who would later possibly be involved in writing the scriptures left behind. This is the only explanation that I can see for why there were 6 very different views on who/what Jesus was which sometimes have strong parallels with Mithraism.

Judea stands at the cross-roads of three continents. It was occupied by various pagans for centuries prior to the birth of Christianity. Many of the core beliefs of Christianity are foreign or even blasphemous to ancient Jewish beliefs found in the OT (the intercessor like Jesus, the concept of an afterlife, Heaven and Hell, etc.). While I'm skeptical of any claim that the early Christians copied a specific alternate religion like Mithraism, I have no doubt that these other faiths did influence early Christians, or else where did these non-Jewish ideas come from?

I think the non-Jewish ideas must have come from Greek philosophical minds. Jesus' parables seem oddly philosophical to me.

And so we have a compelling scenario where a sect of Judaism, influenced heavily by pagan ideas, gave up on this world seeing both their promised kingdom and messiah existing in a higher place. Jesus might have gotten his start as a vision of prophets like Paul and was later "brought down to earth" in what might have been intended as parables, parables later taken to be "true stories" and elaborated upon, from Mark to Matt to John.

I'm not convinced that Mark was always intended to turn folklore into 'true story' though. So much of Mark mirrors the OT and even Josephus' works that I think it's more likely that Mark was intended to reflect the history, not of a crucified Messiah, but of the suffering and destruction the Jews had to go through.


That's my two cents anyways. I wish I remembered my initial reaction to reading your post. I had so much more to reply to but I've forgotten some of it... maybe it's time for bed!