(June 20, 2017 at 6:04 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:(June 17, 2017 at 12:09 pm)Secular Elf Wrote: It was the proto-Orthodox Pauline Christianity that eventually won as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, and Marcion's work Antithesis which started the development of the Christian canon that developed into the Bible.
Well how it seems to me is that Paul and people around him invented Jesus à la L. Ron Hubbard. And why do I think that? Because Paul said it himself repeatedly. He constantly claimed that he has received his knowledge directly from Jesus. Meaning no apostles and no actual Jesus, no oral tradition, that it all came down from heaven direct to his ear, either via another vision of his Christ or the Lord God himself; like
Galatians 1:11-12 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
Galatians 1:15-16 But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being.
Even more Hubbardian is in 1 Corinthians 9:14 Paul says "the Lord" commands that preachers like him should be supported financially - let's face it it's business for him.
Or 1 Peter where writer identifies himself as an "apostle" and not a "disciple" of Jesus Christ, meaning those who made careful search and inquiry into the Hebrew scriptures in order to get the answers from the "Spirit of Christ within them". So not witnesses or somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Jesus:
1 Peter, 1:10-12 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry, inquiring about the person or time that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated, when it testified in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the subsequent glory. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in regard to the things that have now been announced to you through those who brought you good news by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven - things into which angels long to look!
Considering that Paul's writings date before the gospels, writer of Mark reverse-engineered a cosmic savior deity from Paul into a flesh-and-blood man on earth doing a sloppy job. Because he made numerous geographical mistakes among other mistakes of Roman law, Hebrew law etc.
Then the other writers of Gospels simply plagiarize Mark with some re-writes so that Mark's story becomes increasingly improved in Matthew and Luke; and by the time John's story is written, Jesus has become a cosmic deity from the very creation of the universe who strides around Judea fearlessly declaring to all that he is God almighty made flesh.
That seems to me a credible explanation of how a Jesus figure may have been inserted into Early Christianity. I think that if Jesus existed, he may have been just a rabbi that tried to reform Second Temple Judaism and was not intending on starting a new religion. As I said before, it would be as equally credible that Jesus may be made up, as the mythicists posit.
By the way, I consulted my essay, and there are a few corrections I need to make to my earlier comments. That third group of Jewish Christians that I could not remember before was the Elkasites. The three main groups of them were Ebionites, Nazarenes, and Elkasites.
Their Christologies: the Ebionites were Adoptionists: They viewed Jesus as being adopted by God after his baptism, their belief was that Jesus was not divine. The Nazarenes viewed Jesus as the Messiah that all Jews had been looking for and that he was divine. And the Elkasites viewed Jesus as metaphysical (my memory again!).
It was the Nazarenes in Antioch who gave the religion its name by also being called Christians.
The date of the actual split of Christianity from Judaism is 135 CE.
As far as actual literature the Christians had a bunch of them, many of them gnostic in theology. The earliest grouping of Christian literature was by Marcion, who rejected the Torah and for the first time grouped books together which would become the New Testament, in his Gospel of Marcion, or as the Marcionites called it, the Gospel of
the Lord. Tatian the Assyrian put together the Diatessaron, which was formed sometime between 160 and 175 CE, which combined the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) into a single narrative of Jesus' life. The Diatessaron was written in Syriac and it was sacred to the Syrian Church.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."--Thomas Jefferson