For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

Let me get back to being serious, though. What about the Didache? It is generally considered a primitive work - one of the earliest - c 100 AD which puts it within 10 years of Pliny and at most 20 of Tacitus/Suetonius.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/te...tfoot.html

Yet, with all its bullshit, it never mentions "jesus" ( or mary, joseph, pilate, yada, yada, yada....)

It was so primitive that they left it out of the bible!

I went to the commentary section which quotes various opinions.

A. D. Howell-Smith writes about the Didache (Jesus Not a Myth, p. 120):

The simple Christology of Acts confronts us again in the so-called Teaching of the Apostles, a composite work, of which the first six chapters seem to be a Christian redaction of a Jewish document entitled The Two Ways, while the rest is the work of several Christian writers, the earliest belonging to the first century and the latest perhaps to the fourth.

I found further information in the Jewish Encyclopedia - it's from 1906 but what it says about the Jewish origins of the first six chapters will probably be good enough.

A manual of instruction for proselytes, adopted from the Synagogue by early Christianity, and transformed by alteration and amplification into a Church manual.

As a matter of course, this Jewish manual could not be used in its entirety by the Church from the moment when she deviated from Jewish practises and views. Just as the Shema' Yisrael in the saying of Jesus (Mark xii. 29) was dropped by the other Gospel writers, so was the whole first part of the "Didache," dealing with monotheism, tampered with by the Christian editor. The whole book has fallen into disorder, and much of it is misunderstood and misinterpreted by Christian scholars, who judge it only from the point of view of the Church. The fundamental ideas of the "Didache" are indisputably Jewish. The teaching of the "Two Ways," the one of life and the other of death, runs as a leading thought throughout Jewish literature.

As the Didache is an instruction manual for a community there would be no need for any kind of biographical details to be included. Later Christian writers mentioned Jesus in 9:3, 9:6, 9:9 and 10:2 and "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" turns up in 7:2. The writers didn't think it necessary to add the name, Jesus, anywhere in the first six chapters, though. Back to the Jewish Encyclopedia.

the words "through the Twelve Apostles," which assume that the word "Lord" refers to Jesus, are a Christian interpolation.

I think this could explain it because the word, Lord, is used a lot from Chapter 8 and it's obviously referring to Jesus in the later writings.

Paul also used the word, Lord, so I decided to go back to him and the question of authenticity where his epistles are concerned. I thought this was particularly important because First Corinthians has many references to Jesus and crucifixion.

The name "undisputed" epistles represents the traditional scholarly consensus asserting that Paul authored each letter. However, even the least disputed of letters, such as Galatians, have found critics.[11] Moreover, the unity of the letters is questioned by some scholars. First and Second Corinthians have garnered particular suspicion, with some scholars, among them Edgar Goodspeed and Norman Perrin, supposing one or both texts as we have them today are actually amalgamations of multiple individual letters. There remains considerable discussion as to the presence of possible significant interpolations. However, such textual corruption is difficult to detect and even more so to verify, leaving little agreement as to the extent of the epistles' integrity. See also Radical Criticism, which maintains that the external evidence for attributing any of the letters to Paul is so weak, that it should be considered that all the letters appearing in the Marcion canon were written in Paul's name by members of the Marcionite Church and were afterwards edited and adopted by the Catholic Church.

So, if Jesus and crucifixion were later additions, what was the very first version of Christianity about? There are umpteen ideas about the origins of Christianity but which one is right?