Tim O’Neill is at it again, on Twitter this time, making false claims about my work, and about the Epistles of Paul. The item of contention again is my proposal that when Paul said Jesus was “made from the sperm of David” (which is literally what Paul says in the original Greek), he meant that literally: God used the actual semen of David to form a body for Jesus to occupy in order to accomplish his atonement sacrifice as spelled out in Philippians 2. Here is a corrective.
What I Actually Said
Since O’Neill is a liar and tends to not tell you what I actually said, I’ll start by making very clear what I actually wrote in my peer reviewed monograph on the subject, On the Historicity of Jesus (pp. 575-77). I have of course already thoroughly covered this in The Cosmic Seed of David if you want to read a full exposition (I’ve also discussed it in “Seed of David, How?” in response to Simon Gathercole). But here I’m keeping it simple, breaking it down to simple paragraphs and bullet points of the things O’Neill never admits or often won’t even mention.
First:
- In Romans 1:3, Paul literally writes “concerning His Son, who came to be from the sperm of David according to the flesh.”
- Most modern translations do not render these words literally but “interpret” the words to say something else according to each team of translators’ theological assumptions, adding words not in the Greek, or translating words contrary to Paul’s usual idiom.
- We cannot answer the question with the data available whether Paul meant “sperm” (i.e. seed) allegorically (as he does mean elsewhere when he speaks of seeds and births, such as of Gentiles becoming the seed of Abraham by God’s declaration), or literally (God manufacturing a body for Jesus from the actual sperm of David), or figuratively (as a claim of biological descent—-even though Paul’s vocabulary does not match such an assertion, but that of direct manufacture). At best it’s equal odds. We can’t tell.
- Two (not just one) of those possibilities are compatible with Jesus never having been on earth, and since all three readings are equally likely on present evidence, that is why Romans 1:3 doesn’t help us determine if Paul believed Jesus was ever on earth.
- Nevertheless I count this verse as evidence for historicity, ruling on the upper bound of my margins of error that it’s twice as likely Paul would write this if Jesus was a historical person than if he was not. And that’s quite generous, because…
Second:
- It is an indisputable fact that when Paul says this, he uses a word he only uses of manufactured, not birthed bodies (ginomai, referring to Adam’s body: 1 Corinthians 15:45, in the very context of describing Adam’s body; and our future resurrection bodies: 1 Corinthians 15:37, which, as for Adam, God will manufacture for us).
- It is an indisputable fact that Paul uses a different word every time he refers to birthed bodies (gennaô, e.g. Romans 9:11, Galatians 4:23 and 4:29).
- It is an indisputable fact that subsequent Christian scribes were so bothered by the above two facts that they tried to doctor the manuscripts of Paul to change his word for “made” into his word for “born” (and did this in both places where Paul alludes to Jesus’s origin: Romans 1:3 and Galatians 4:4).
- It is an indisputable fact that Paul depicts Jesus’s body being manufactured for him in Philippians 2:7. No mention of birth, childhood or parents. And all this matters because…
Third:
- It is an indisputable fact that Nathan’s prophecy of the messiah literally declared that God said to David that, upon his death, “I shall raise your sperm after you, who will come out of your belly” (2 Samuel 7:12) and that seed will sit upon an eternal throne (7:13).
- It is an indisputable fact that Nathan’s prophecy was proved false: the throne of David’s progeny was not eternal; when Christianity began, Davidic kings had not ruled Judea for centuries.
- It is an indisputable fact that when faced with a falsified prophecy, Jews almost always reinterpreted that prophecy in a way that rescued it from being false.
- It is an indisputable fact that the easiest way to rescue Nathan’s prophecy from being false is to read Nathan’s prophecy literally and not figuratively as originally intended: as the messiah being made directly from David’s seed and then ruling forever, thus establishing direct continuity and thus, one could then say, an eternal throne did come directly from David.
Put all this together and there is no reason to believe Paul meant Romans 1:3 any other way than the only way that rescues Nathan’s messianic prophecy from being false. And that prophecy would be false if it were taken to mean the seed of a continuous line of sitting kings. So Paul cannot have believed it meant that. And Paul’s choice of vocabulary in linking this prophecy to Jesus, based on what we can show was Paul’s own peculiar idiom everywhere else regarding the difference between manufactured and birthed bodies, and his statement in Philippians which confirms he believed Jesus had a body made for him that Jesus then merely occupied, confirms this. No evidence in Paul confirms any other reading.
It’s also a fact that:
- The Gospels of Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as not descended from the seed of David but directly manufactured by God (this time in the womb of Mary). Though they both give a Davidic genealogy for Joseph, they both explicitly say Jesus was not born of the seed of Joseph.
- Therefore even the authors of the Gospels believed either that Jesus’s body was manufactured by God directly out of the seed of David or the “seed of David” prophecy was only meant allegorically. They cannot have understood it figuratively (as meaning biological descent), because they explicitly exclude that in their chosen description of Jesus’s origins.
Therefore, it cannot be implausible that Paul would mean Romans 1:3 in either of those two senses, since later Christians, the very authors of the canonical Gospels, clearly did as well. In fact we have no early Christian text that claims Jesus was biologically descended from David. And indeed, the author of Revelation even says Jesus was born in outer space, in some cosmic allegory involving celestial women and dragons and battles. And as I cite in OHJ, Irenaeus would later chafe at Christian sects taking that location literally, proving that indeed many Christians indeed did.
So “that’s implausible” simply doesn’t cut it as an argument. Nor does “that’s weird.” Because most ancient Christian beliefs were weird. “It’s weird” in fact was so normal as to be everywhere, in both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought. A far cry from improbable. And while allegorical readings of words and phrases were also demonstrably routine, in Jewish and Christian and even specifically Pauline thought, the cosmic seed hypothesis is even more likely to have been intended because it’s even more parsimonious: it’s the one interpretation that renders the Nathan prophecy true with no ad hoc assumptions. It relies solely on a literal, plain reading of his prophecy, and nothing but then-known supernatural options for gods to effect their plans.
It’s also a fact that every other time Paul uses his vocabulary of God manufacturing bodies, he refers to an act of manufacture by God that took place in outer space (meaning in the expanse or heavens above the earth). He explicitly says our resurrection bodies have already been manufactured by God in outer space and await us there (2 Corinthians 5:1-4); and he says the garden of Eden, “Paradise,” where we know Adam was manufactured, is located in outer space (2 Corinthians 12:1-5), in accord with Jewish lore relayed in the Life of Adam and Eve.
That’s what I actually argue in Historicity. The conclusion is not really escapable by any device.
If Jesus didn’t (really) exist, then the first Christians were posed with two beliefs they needed to maintain: that the messiah received a body of flesh (to die in and thus atone for all sins) by divine manufacture (if mythicism is true then we can be 100% certain of this); and that God promised, by scriptural prophecy, that the messiah would come from the seed of David. We can then validly predict from these two facts, that such Christians will believe God did that directly (manufactured the cosmic messiah’s body directly out of the seed of David) or they must have reinterpreted Nathan’s prophecy allegorically (if mythicism is true then we can be 100% certain of this).
Since this outcome is logically entailed by mythicism, the wording of Romans 1:3 can never be evidence against mythicism. It is already 100% expected on mythicism given our background knowledge about Jewish prophecy and Paul’s choices of wording. Therefore it cannot be more probable on historicity, as there is no probability more than 100%. Crucially, this would not be the case if that Nathan prophecy didn’t exist, or if Paul used the opposite vocabulary (e.g. saying “born” rather than “made” or said “descended from” rather than “came out of” and so on) or mentioned an actual birth in Philippians 2, and so on.
And yet I still counted Romans 1:3 as evidence for historicity!
In that and every other respect, O’Neill never has any argument against any of these things I actually said, nor against any of the actual arguments I actually made, which I just outlined above.
Misrepresenting the Nature of the Translations
The King James translation of course most accurately reads, “Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Its translators probably wanted Paul’s words to match the Gospels, which depict Jesus being made by God, not descended from David (Joseph never impregnates Mary in either Nativity, and contrary to Christian apologetics, neither genealogy is of Mary but only of Joseph), which is indeed closer to what Paul surely meant (he just wouldn’t likely have heard of those particular mythical narratives yet, as they’d only get written half a century later).
O’Neill makes the false claim that modern Bibles don’t translate this verse the way the King James did and therefore we should trust modern translations. But that’s directly false: every literal modern translation agrees with me on the literal meaning of the verse; and it’s indirectly false: modern translations are not more accurate to the original Greek but merely reflect changes in the dogmatic faith-assumptions of the translators.
Thus modern Bibles usually vacillate between the highly nonliteral and the closer-to-literal but still contentious reading. For the highly nonliteral, we get misleading nonsense like, “Regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David” (the NIV translation, where many of these words, like “earthly” and “life” and “descendant,” are not in the Greek) or the even less accurate “concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh” (the NASB, where now we have a whole phrase, “born of a descendant,” that isn’t in the Greek). For the closer-to-literal we get things like, “Concerning his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (the ASV, which ironically accomplishes what those meddling Medieval scribes had attempted but failed to do: switch out Paul’s word for “made, came to be” with Paul’s word for “born, begotten,” probably for exactly the same faith-based reason).
But modern literal translations don’t do this. The Young’s Literal edition (or YLT), completed near the end of the 19th century, reads, “Concerning His Son, who is come of the seed of David according to the flesh.” The Berean Bible (or BLB) is even more modern than that, attempting again to avoid dogmatic assumptions in its translation, and it reads, “Concerning His Son, having come of the seed of David according to flesh.” And indeed the reason the interlinear Greek-English version of the Bible uses the BLB is that the only way to correctly render English next to the Greek is with a literal, and thus not ideologically contentious, translation. You can see why if you try to get any of the other translations to fit the Greek.
None of the most literal translations of the Bible, from the Protestant King James edition (whether original or updated), or even the old Catholic Douay–Rheims edition, to the even more modern Darby, YLT, and BLB, render Paul’s word as “born.” They always say “made” or “came.” Because that’s what the Greek says. In fact, “came” is less literal a translation than “made,” as a more literal translation would be “came to be,” and Paul’s usage with respect to other bodies (the first of all bodies, Adam’s, and our future resurrection bodies) always employs it in the sense of “made, manufactured.” And Paul should be translated in light of how Paul himself speaks and uses words.
O’Neill likewise ignores the standard principle of translating Paul in terms of Paul’s own usages of words (the way every writer should be translated), and instead tries to “reinterpret” Paul’s use of the word “made” in the context of the old Septuagint translation of Genesis. But that doesn’t affect any of the facts above. When in 1 Corinthians Paul says Adam “was made” by his soul being breathed into a body God manufactured from clay (which Paul believed was celestial clay, believing the Garden from which it was taken was in the third heaven above), he is indeed referencing Genesis, but he is describing exactly the same thing he describes in Philippians 2: the soul of Jesus entering into a body of flesh God manufactured for him, a body “like” a human one, that people “found” as such. This is exactly what we are saying. And it’s exactly what Paul says of Adam and thus quite clearly appears to say of Jesus. There is no basis for concluding otherwise.
Conclusion
Once we survey these facts, we have to ask, what are the most likely inferences from these facts? Not “what are traditional inferences,” not “what are the latest sectarian inferences,” not “what are the possible inferences,” but the most likely inferences. And when we ask that question, our only answer is: “Paul meant his words in Romans 1:3 to indicate either an allegorical or literal reading of the Nathan prophecy it is adapted from.” And that leaves us with no evidence for historicity in Romans 1:3. Because whether read allegorically or literally, it is no less likely on either mythicism or historicity. It is equally compatible with both.
Only if the Nathan prophecy didn’t exist, or it wasn’t true that messianic Jews would not dare reject or contradict a Biblical prophecy in any system of beliefs they constructed, would Romans 1:3 be unexpected on mythicism. Therefore only then would the allegorical or cosmic seed hypothesis be improbable.
Unlike a gerrymander, where we make something up ad hoc to explain away some evidence, our background knowledge (b) conjoined with the hypothesis (h), in this case mythicism, entails the observation. On that conjunction of evidence and hypothesis, the content of Romans 1:3 has a near 100% chance of being observed. Indeed you could have reliably predicted it ahead of time with the same information. Because (b) includes those two indisputable facts: that prophecy said this; and messianic Jews made their systems of beliefs conform to prophecy. Those are not conjectures. They aren’t things we are just making up. Those are established facts.
Of all options the earliest Christians had, “reinterpreting the prophecy” is vastly more likely than “rejecting the prophecy.” And “reading the prophecy literally” is the most parsimonious means of “reinterpreting the prophecy,” and thus again the most likely. But even the next most likely option would have been reinterpreting it, and thus intending it, allegorically. Which also renders Romans 1:3 100% compatible with the mythicist thesis. Either way, we get no evidence against mythicism, here.
“It’s weird, therefore improbable” is not a scholarly but in fact an anachronistic and thus amateurish response to this. Even the Zoroastrians had similarly imagined their messiahs to be born from the ancient stored semen of their religion’s founder; and as I note in OHJ, Jewish lore about the powers of demons implied something akin had even already been done to David, in order to sire sons by him through foreign mothers to fight him on the battlefield. God’s powers as described throughout Jewish and Christian lore were clearly capable of even weirder things than this. So no one would have deemed it odd or implausible that he could do this too. We only think it’s weird because we live in a different culture that finds everything Christians believed their God could or did do was weird (like storing empty resurrection bodies for us in outer space, or placing the Garden of Eden in outer space—two things Paul expressly believed and took for granted no one would question). But they didn’t think those things were weird. So they wouldn’t think this thing was either.
The only way to escape this conclusion is to argue it’s more likely that someone who came to believe in a celestial Christ narrative would abandon that belief as soon as they were confronted with Nathan’s Davidic seed prophecy, than that such a person would simply reinterpret that Davidic seed prophecy to match their celestial Christ narrative. And there is simply no plausible way to argue that. Even the authors of Matthew and Luke didn’t see it that way: both adopted either the cosmic seed or allegorical reading of Nathan’s prophecy, and expressly depicted Jesus’s origin that way.
Hence it does not matter how “weird” their reinterpretation is. Christianity and Judaism are full of weird reinterpretations of prophecy when confronted with prophecies they can’t otherwise make fit the facts or their most cherished beliefs. In fact, that’s just about the only way they ever dealt with refuted or contradictory prophecies. As even Gospels’ nativity narratives exemplify: they don’t even try to depict biological Davidic descent; they instead choose the far weirder solution of direct divine manufacture of the body of Jesus. Which nevertheless is therefore still declared to be Davidic. If that’s not weird, then neither is a cosmic version of the very same thing, nor any allegorical understanding they also could have imagined.
Another thing to point out is that cosmic sperm was indeed commonplace in ancient Greek thought as well.
The Orphic theogonies are filled with references to sperm and genitals, and this formed a major component of Orphic theology.
See for example: http://www.hellenicgods.org/orphic-rhapsodies——24
Orphic theogony basically held that Zeus cut off his fathers genitals then swallowed them, consuming his semen, and thus being able to give birth to a new universe.
We read of this also in the Derveni Papyrus, and Plato makes reference to it as well.
Did u count Romans 15.8
(KJV) for histurisiti too?
Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers?
Ehrman – jesus befor the gospls p104 dus so.
The word “minister” is not in the Greek there. This is yet another example of translators lying to us, by replacing what the text actually says, with what they dogmatically wished it had said. See the scripture index of OHJ, which will lead you to my discussion of this verse. But in short, a “deacon” is a doorman, a servant, who does his lord’s will. This can include delivering messages, but Paul repeatedly says Jesus did that by celestial revelation, and mentions no other mechanism.
Thank you Richard for a brilliant and compelling exposition of the falsity of this core apologetic rationalization. I appreciate how you can bring together so many elements so clearly.
Looking at what you call the ‘misleading nonsense’ of the NIV fraudulent mistranslation which writes that Jesus “as to his earthly life was a descendant of David”, we can readily see how such ideologically motivated language has brainwashed readers to the dogmatic conclusion.
My preferred translation in Mythicist terms would be to say that Jesus Christ was invented among the Jews, with ‘invented’ a reasonable translation of ‘made’, and ‘among the Jews’ a reasonable translation of sperm of David. That accords with the historically reasonable suggestion that the Hellenistic Greeks co-invented Serapism, Mithraism and Christianity in cooperation respectively with the religions of Egypt, Babylon and Israel.
On another point in your post, I disagree with your use of the term “outer space”. This is a concept first used in the nineteenth century, but in your mocking application to Jesus it wrongly implies a physical bodily in the heavens, where it seems the cosmic language of the Bible is entirely symbolic in its intent.
When the Greeks told stories about the constellations of Hercules and Perseus I don’t think any adult imagined these mythical heroes were physically present in the stars that bear their names. Language about such legendary figures being placed into the heavens by the Gods is purely poetic, serving as cultural reminder for the myth.
Similarly with Jesus Christ, my view is that he was imagined by his original inventors as represented by the equinox point of the sun as it moved from Aries into Pisces, and this became the hidden basis of Paul’s cosmology.
This is a highly complex astronomical and astrological piece of cosmic thinking that is entirely possible and highly explanatory for the Biblical language about Christ in heaven. It makes the heavenly location of Christ two dimensional – imagined as visible on the surface of the starry sphere – not as an invisible physical three dimensional entity.
I doubt Paul meant “invented.” He didn’t think Adam’s body was invented; nor our future resurrection bodies. He clearly meant “made.”
And the Greeks can’t have invented Christianity. Paul himself attests it originated in Judea and was based in Jerusalem before he even converted to it; and had it merely been a Gentile religion, he would not, as a Pharisee, have been persecuting it as he says he did; and indeed, allowing Gentiles into it without becoming Jews was Paul’s later invention, not the original feature of the church. So your interpretations cannot make any sense of Paul’s letters.
There is also zero evidence for astrological meanings in earliest Christianity. They are entirely constructing it out of scriptural, not astrological, numerology, and from prophecy, not astronomy, following the Jewish model of interpretation called pesher. See my book for evidence and scholarship.
Thank you Richard for publishing my comment and for your reply.
A key issue here is that if Jesus Christ was a myth, the authors of the Gospels knew that to be the case. The question of how and why they invented this fictional hero, with the main myth that the story was historically true, remains to be answered.
You say “I doubt Paul meant “invented.” He didn’t think Adam’s body was invented; nor our future resurrection bodies. He clearly meant “made.”
• My thinking on Paul draws from Elaine Pagels’ book The Gnostic Paul. She argues for much more extensive Gnostic allegory than is conventionally seen. For example Jew and Greek were used by Gnostics as allegory for beginners and wise (psychic and pneumatic), a method that could have been intentional in the Epistles. My interest is to pursue the hypothesis of detailed concealed philosophical allegory in Paul and the rest of the New Testament, hiding a sophisticated Platonic vision of mystery wisdom beneath a supernatural veneer of Greco-Jewish syncretism. This whole mystery line of original Gnostic construction of Christ as Philosopher King was crushed by the Empire for promoting a rival power base, and was derided as heresy with the mocking distortion of Docetism. So Paul’s use of ‘made’ could coherently serve as a way to conceal the original philosophical knowledge that Jesus Christ was totally invented as a myth, as was Adam. After all, if Jesus really was invented, the authors of the New Testament must have known that was the case, and systematically concealed that knowledge by use of euphemistic language.
You say “And the Greeks can’t have invented Christianity. Paul himself attests it originated in Judea and was based in Jerusalem before he even converted to it; and had it merely been a Gentile religion, he would not, as a Pharisee, have been persecuting it as he says he did; and indeed, allowing Gentiles into it without becoming Jews was Paul’s later invention, not the original feature of the church. So your interpretations cannot make any sense of Paul’s letters.”
• You misunderstand what I meant. I never suggested Christianity was ‘merely’ a Gentile religion. Rather, my view is that it emerged by syncretism between Judaism and Greek philosophy, together with other Gnostic elements from Egypt, Babylon, Syria and even India. That model seems to accord with the likely process of invention of Serapis and Mithras, as methods for the Greeks to construct a modus vivendi with each partner culture, through a new religion that would be viable in the emerging ‘common era’ context of cultural synthesis.
You said “There is also zero evidence for astrological meanings in earliest Christianity. They are entirely constructing it out of scriptural, not astrological, numerology, and from prophecy, not astronomy, following the Jewish model of interpretation called pesher. See my book for evidence and scholarship.”
• I disagree on your ‘zero evidence’ claim although it is admittedly scanty. Visual cosmology was central to ancient religions, and has a plausible coherent place in Christian origins, with strong explanatory power. The trouble here is that the astrology in earliest Christianity was systematically concealed, apparently due to political suppression. We see zodiac symbols appear overtly later, on floor mosaics and in gothic cathedrals, but the early evidence has only survived in fugitive traces. For whatever reason, the theory of God in popular early Christian orthodoxy totally excluded astrology as heresy, perhaps due to its perceived pagan associations. But this exclusion seems to conceal a political struggle between Gnostic astrologers and orthodox bishops. If astrology was central to the construction of the Christ Myth, its exclusion meant kicking away the ladder after climbing it. When we now look we can’t easily see any ladder, but we can put together the evidence for astrology in the Bible from concealed traces, as a coherent hypothesis.
• The most vivid of these traces to my reading include that the tree of life and the river of life match directly to the stars of the zodiac and the Milky Way, that the alpha and omega symbolise Jesus Christ as avatar of the Age of Pisces, that the four living creatures are the Royal Stars of Persia, and that the Chi Rho cross matches precisely to the movement of the equinox into Pisces as symbol for a new astrological age. For some reason the prominent place of astrology in Jewish culture – eg the references to the ephod high priest breastplate as astrological by Philo and Josephus – was systematically expunged from Christianity and repressed as heresy, allowing the destruction of all overt traces of this key building block of the ‘cosmic Christ’. My view is that Christ was invented as a visible two-dimensional moving stellar image on the face of the firmament, seen in the slow precession of the equinoxes, as predicted for centuries before the movement of the equinoxes into Pisces and Virgo. Jesus was never a three-dimensional being imagined in outer space.
Not necessarily. They could have sincerely believed he was a historical person and at the same time not cared what was historically true and made up whatever was convenient about him. Because this is how all myths and legends arose of real historical people. So we can’t actually infer reliably what the Gospel authors believed about the mere historicity of Jesus.
Also, that they knew they were making stuff up, is not evidence they were making up astrological stuff. That’s a non sequitur. There is no evidence they were doing that. And plenty of evidence they weren’t doing that. They are making stuff up to match a pesher derived from ancient scriptures to communicate a new social philosophy. That explains all their content. Nothing else is left over to explain.
Meanwhile, you are relying on obsolete scholarship. It is now the conclusion that Gnosticism didn’t exist. And any of what you are talking about is hopelessly speculative. Speculations are not evidence. They are mere possibilities, which are not therefore probabilities. We can’t do anything with that.
We often can get at allegorical meanings, when we have relevant contextual evidence. But when we do, we never find astrology underneath it. Only standard ancient metaphysics, politics, and cosmology derived from scripture, not astrological notions. Likewise, indeed, Christianity is, even from its start, likely a syncretism of Jewish and Hellenistic ideas. That still doesn’t get us to any of your thesis. And there s nothing in early Christianity that justifies your claims about the tree of life matching the zodiac and such. There is neither zodiac nor tree of life anywhere in its literature or art until so late it’s clearly a later import that can explain nothing about the origins of Christianity. Meanwhile, everything as to the latter is perfectly well explained without it.
So there is no need of that hypothesis, and no evidence for that hypothesis. We should therefore abandon it.
Did Gnosticism exist? The analysis you cite from the Westar Institute refutes the conventional notion of Gnosticism as a heretical movement within Christianity, but is premised on the historical existence of Jesus, saying nothing about how the Christ Myth may have come into existence if it was entirely fictional.
My view is that the Westar critique reflects a widespread error of scholarly method, the systematic privileging of the extant over the lost. That is understandable, given that speculating about lost material is so uncertain, but the situation with early Christianity is that the monkish sieve of orthodoxy created a gross distortion in the surviving material, allowing historicist material to survive while actively destroying heretical material.
Gaining a balanced reading requires active focus on the fugitive traces of lost ideas. An analogy is that an open field gives no visible evidence of the rich forest that previously grew there, but we can study the hidden traces. With early Christianity, there is good evidence that a much more intellectually rich and complex ancient tradition, usefully termed Gnostic, was systematically eradicated by the barren totalitarian oppression of the Christian orthodoxy, rather like how Orwell says in 1984 that control of the past enables control of the future.
If the hypothesis is that Jesus was invented, then the problems of why and how this occurred can usefully employ Gnosticism as a category, but in a wider way, premised on continuity with much more ancient oral wisdom traditions. Considering the secrecy of oral traditions such as the Mysteries, and the near complete loss of information about cults such as Serapis and Mithras, Westar are on shaky ground in assuming that extant literature is a good representation of actual history.
The specific example of use of astrological symbolism in the myth of the tree of life may be the best illustration of this problem of historical method. A key text is Revelation 22:1-2 “the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.”
This mysterious text is actually far easier to solve than a cryptic crossword. It is an exact match for the twelve signs of the zodiac appearing on both sides of the Milky Way, given away by the basic clue that no real tree grows on both sides of a river. This explanation supports the idea that the visible heavens were seen as manifesting the orderly glory of God, and also helps to show the suppressive mentality that surrounded the use of astrology in the Bible, indicating that more explicit reference would simply have been deleted by censors.
This is just one example of how allegorical astrology is concealed in the Bible in a way that is obvious to readers who are not biased against such a reading. This same allegorical method applies to Paul’s ‘seed of David’ line, which simply reflects that the imaginative fiction of Jesus as Messiah used the Jewish tradition of the Hebrew scriptures as its source.
You have method exactly backwards: we cannot build hypotheses on lost data; and must attend to the actual data we have. The Westar analysis shows Gnosticism was invented by modern scholars based on no actual ancient data. They conflated sources and misinterpreted them and constructed a sect no evidence exists for. Westar is right. There was no such thing as Gnosticism. There is no evidence at all for that modern construct. There were just a bunch of sects all of which had some of the attributes modern scholars credited as Gnostic and none of which had all the attributes modern scholars credited as Gnostic.
Any correct interpretation of the historical record must now take this into account. All past scholarship on Christian sectarianism must be rewritten without the idea of “Gnosticism.” There was no such thing. There were the ideas credited to Gnosticism, but they are scattered, nowhere found all together, and everywhere found in part.
And none of this has anything to do with presuming historicity. That is nowhere in the Westar analysis and has no effect at all on it.
I was not suggesting to build a hypothesis on lost data; rather my point is that we have anomalies in the existing data which imply the existence of lost data that has been systematically suppressed, notably around the role of astronomy and precession in early Christian thinking, such as in the tree of life example I gave. These anomalies suggest paths to reconstruct the most plausible Christian origin hypothesis, requiring a paradigm shift to explain why and how the story of Christ was invented as a way to reflect the observation of precession in an anthropomorphic mythology.
Further examples of precession in the Bible include the correlation between the chi rho cross, the alpha-omega symbolism and the movement of the equinox from Aries into Pisces; the old tradition that the twelve foundations of the Holy City in Rev 21 are the zodiac signs in reverse, as per precession; and the correlation between the loaves and fishes as symbols of abundance and the new celestial axis of Pisces and Virgo. This is all existing evidence which is best explained by a lost coordinating cosmic theology grounded in observation of precession of the equinox.
There are enough of these clues of a lost astronomical framework for Christianity to support the hypothesis that the whole movement started as grounded in hermetic astronomy, as above so below, imagining Jesus Christ as avatar of the New Age of Pisces.
The Jesus Seminar run by the Westar Institute supports historicity of Christ. My criticism of their work is based on the view that historicity is a basic all-pervading error in Christian theology, and so we need a completely new framework to explain how Christianity evolved in the absence of Jesus of Nazareth as its historical founder. Precessional cosmology serves as that new framework.
However, having climbed that ladder to invent Jesus, the church found the astronomical blueprint uncongenial for institutional growth. They not only kicked the ladder away, but worked assiduously to remove every direct trace of the ladder of visual cosmology from records, rejecting it as heresy. But the visual cosmology was so intimately entwined with the origins of Christian faith that it was not possible to eradicate all the evidence, and numerous veiled clues survived.
This theme of the centrality of astronomy reflects the Egyptian and Babylonian influences on Israel, and is what I mean by claiming there is a hidden Gnostic movement behind Christianity, quite different from the conventional theory of Gnosticism as a heretical Christian sect. There are strong traces of visual cosmology in Gnostic literature such as the Peratae. That does not at all imply that Gnosticism was a unified sect. Rather, it points to hidden and lost knowledge that can be studied as having contributed to the invention of the Cosmic Christ, but which was subsequently suppressed, ignored, forgotten and denied.
There are no anomalies that establish Gnosticism existed. That’s precisely what Westar found. It’s a modern made-up construct that in fact the actual evidence contradicts or doesn’t support.
And there are no “clues” to Christianity having any astronomical content in its earliest century. We have the writings of Paul, Clement, Hebrews, the Gospels, the earliest Apocrypha, Ignatius, and so on. No astronomy. To the contrary, it’s all scriptural numerology. The only evidence of astronomical ideas entering Christianity are in very late texts that radically differ from all the earliest literature. That’s why it can’t have had any likely role in the origin of the religion.
ROBERTTULIP: I was very intrigued by your explanation of Revelation 22’s zodiacal connection. I’ll confess I am poorly education on some of that and the problem for me is that there are so many cranks running around preaching knowledge of astrotheology. Still, I approach the subject with an open mind. Would you point me to a good resource to find these explanations like you have provided for Rev. 22? Thanks!
Pesher from the Hebrew Scriptures explains the method of the Gospels – how they were constructed – but not the motive – the reason why the story was constructed. To answer why the Gospels have their form it seems to me we must turn to astronomy and comparative myth.
The role of Jesus as anthropomorphisation of the sun appears with lines such as the description of him as the light of the world at John 8:12. Similarly the direct correlation between the 1:12 ratio of the orbits of the sun and moon and the relation of Jesus and the disciples suggests a natural origin for the myth.
The central role of astronomy in ancient religion is explained in scholarship such as Lockyer’s analysis of star worship in Egypt, and Taylor’s analysis of sun worship in Israel. I also think there is high plausibility in Massey’s comparison between Jesus and Horus but recognise this is more controversial.
This cosmic material tends to be ignored, but an underlying naturalistic cosmogony provides a highly consistent explanation of why the Gospels were written, to imagine the orderly divine grace seen in the heavens as appearing on earth. The moral framework of Christianity saw the orderly perfection of God as appearing in the stable movement of the heavens, a theology that was widespread in ancient myth.
Taking this basis further, the hypothesis can be advanced that the Deuteronomistic tradition of God as totally transcending nature objected to any such overt naturalism, and therefore suppressed it from the Christian texts. However, this naturalism had been central to the construction process and so the suppression was only partial, from the Gospels and also from the epistles and especially the Apocalypse.
Yes, it does explain the reason: the scriptures predicted a specific form of messianic apocalypse and even stated a timetable for it. Thus motivating literally the entire pesher genre to figure out what date that timetable meant and how the events would proceed. Resulting in Christianity. No astrology, no astronomy, involved. Nor is there any evidence Christians ever referenced any in the origination of the religion or even the later Gospels in the canon.
(1) Your proposed translation does not work in the Greek language or literary context.
(2) By contrast my use of “outer space” is actually more accurate in the Greek and context than the word “heaven” (see my other comment on this point).
(3) The Bible never speaks of Jesus in the terms of a constellation. Nor does any other Christian text.
(4) There is exactly zero evidence for your theory and abundant evidence against it. All the evidence proves the first Christians found Jesus in a pesher of scripture and Jewish numerology therefrom, not in constellations or astronomy. Full stop.
“Because most ancient Christian beliefs were weird.”
Most? No, all ancient Christian beliefs are weird. For that matter, all modern Christian beliefs are weird too. Which ones aren’t? Among the world’s religions, Christianity is the most preposterous because it demands that we accept the largest number of ridiculous, childish beliefs.
Well, no. Come on. They believed some non-weird things. Like that being nice to people is good for society or that social systems depend on taxation, or that the sun is more distant than the moon and both are in outer space, and so on.
But you are right to say most distinctively Christian beliefs were weird. John Loftus has a whole chapter enumerating hundreds of examples in The End of Christianity (“Christianity Is Wildly Improabble”).
Obviously I’m referring to distinctively Christian beliefs, such as what’s found in the Athanasian creed or The Fundamentals. Which ones make sense to you? Because all of it comes across as just plain weird.
The Fundamentals is a 20th century sectarian document. It has no relevance to ancient Christianity. The Athanasian Creed is ancient but still late (c. 300 A.D.), so still of little relevance to original Christianity or even Christianity of the first two hundred years. Compare it to the Ignatian creed, where you see a lot that’s not weird (that Jesus would be born of Mary, ate with disciples, crucified by Pilate, is not at all weird, even despite Christian apologists wanting to claim it all was). Even the Athanasian creed contains several mundane beliefs among the weird things. And in no way does the Athanasian creed contain all Christian beliefs; it doesn’t say anything about morals or baptism or the deeds or sayings of Jesus, for example.
Well, all of these Christian beliefs are weird since they’re all infused with beliefs about Jesus’s divine nature and the reality of the supernatural. “Jesus was born of Mary” when completely isolated from the Christian belief-system is a mundane statement, but when placed in its proper Christian context it becomes ridiculous. When Christians say things like “Jesus was born of Mary” or “Jesus ate with his disciples,” they’re obviously not meant to be taken in just an everyday, mundane sense.
Sometimes they are. Many Christians mean and meant them mundanely. And even when they didn’t, in those cases only the infused beliefs are weird. The beliefs infused with them are not weird. That’s my point. Not every belief Christians have or had is weird. Especially when we include all their moral teachings, all their mundane teachings about human nature, and so on. False is not the same as weird.
Tim’s literally claiming you “deliberately” misspelled his name. https://twitter.com/TimONeill007/status/1199823309199695872
Lunacy. Since I spelled it correctly (with two l’s) everywhere else in the same article, obviously the first dropped l was a typo. Which was easily fixed.
Is O’Neill even an atheist? He’s always writing obsessive posts about how Christianity is so wonderful and about what amazing things its done for us. I don’t think he’s ever written about anything else, not even on philosophical topics.
He comes across as a Christian apologist who calls himself an atheist because he thinks it’ll make him sound more credible. I bet he couldn’t mount a convincing defense of atheism if his life depended on it. That’s how Christian this guy sounds.
I’d be careful of that logic. It sounds no true scotsman to me
They’re admittedly my own impressionistic observations, but it’s odd a self-professed atheist would go out of his way to obsessively defend a religion that causes problems wherever its found.
Imagine a world without Christianity.
Now compare it to this one.
Wouldn’t the world be a much better place without Christianity? To say otherwise is to ignore the vast amounts of evidence to the contrary.
I’m pretty sure he’s really an atheist. He defends Catholicism not because he is a crypto-Catholic, but because he’s a dick.
This is different from what I do when I defend Christianity, for example, such as I often do in correcting false atheist narratives about Christians or Christian history (many examples have appeared on my blog). I correct the atheist errors and then acknowledge in what ways they remain correct in their critique of Christianity. O’Neill just likes trashing mistaken atheists without doing the careful research to actually land on the correct conclusion they should adopt instead.
This is ironically due to a black-and-white bias he often complains about in other atheists, but is hopelessly enslaved to himself. He cannot see a middle position anywhere, where the atheist narrative is half right and half wrong. To him it can only be “atheists are totally right in their criticism, or Christians are totally exonerated.” The result is what you observe.
No. He’s an atheist. See my other comment.
Tim O’Neil is a joke. He doesn’t even understand “one of the companions of Moses” in Philo is a metaphor.
Yes, that’s an idiom for all the authors of the Bible, not a literal claim that someone who knew Moses wrote any book of the Bible (which book could that have possibly been?). For those who want more detail on that, jump to this comment on 2019/04/21.
“ginomai, referring to Adam’s body: 1 Corinthians 15:45, in the very context of describing Adam’s body”
I think the references ar mis-linkt.
Good catch. Only the “1 Corinthians 15:45” was misdirected. Fixed. The other is correct.
So Paul’s belief, according to you, is that Jesus was a spirit being whose death and resurrection occurred in outer space. But if this could happen to a spirit being, what is the difference between a physical and a spiritual existence? If there’s no difference, why even bother having a spiritual existence to begin with? Your belief doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. How can spirit beings die if they are incorporeal? Angels are immortal in 2nd Temple Judaism.
Another problem is 1 Corinthians 15: 20-1:
20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.
First, it says Christ is the “firstfruits” of the dead, which means that he is the beginning of the eschatological raising of the dead on earth (since there is only one resurrection and it only occurs on earth). Wouldn’t this mean that his resurrection would be no different from the physical resurrection of the human dead because it is the first of many to follow?
Second, the Greek word used here is ἄνθρωπος, which means man, not spirit being. Note the “Semitic parallelism” that equates Adam’s humanity with Jesus’s humanity. Adam was a human in the same way Jesus was a human, which is why death and resurrection “came through” mankind. This clearly means that Paul saw Jesus as an actual historical figure.
Paul was a Pharisee and Pharisees believed in a literal bodily resurrection, not a spiritual one. This is confirmed by Josephus, who says Pharisees believed the souls of good men would inhabit other bodies at death. Presumably these bodies would be similar to the ones they had while alive. We have no reason to think otherwise.
The word σώμα always means body, as in material substance, in ancient Greek. It never designates anything immaterial. You can see this for yourself in Liddell.
History and ancient Greek refute your Jesus mythicism.
(1) I have never said anything about immaterial bodies. So I don’t know what you are responding to.
(2) Paul was not a Pharisee at any time anything we have from him was written. He previously was, but rejected it as a false sect and condemned it. So what he would have thought “as a Pharisee” cannot inform what he would have thought as a convert to a different sect, the Christians.
(3) Josephus actually says the Pharisees believed people enter new bodies, not their old ones. I show many more examples of this belief among them in The Empty Tomb. Thus confirming what I have been saying for over a decade now: Paul believed the body of flesh is left behind and rots away, and people rise to new life in new supernatural (“spiritual”) bodies (1 Cor. 15:37-54) already waiting for them in heaven (2 Cor. 5). There is abundant evidence many Jews, including Pharisees, did not think these new bodies would be identical to those we had in the flesh. I survey all the evidence in The Empty Tomb (this was even back then often debated among Rabbis, and we can’t tell what Paul thought about it, except that he says there is among the saved “neither male nor female” etc. which suggests he might have advocated a significant change in form). So if you want to get informed on that, you need that book.
I don’t know why you think a celestial being is bodiless. I never said that. Angels have bodies. The same supernatural ones we will have when resurrected as Paul describes in 1 Cor. 15:37-54 and 2 Cor. 5. And angels can assume a mortal body (wear it like a coat) to die in. That’s literally what Paul says in Philippians 2. They then rise from the dead in their angelic body again.
You don’t seem to know anything about what I’ve actually argued. Get up to speed. For detail on Pauline and Jewish resurrection belief see my chapter on it in The Empty Tomb. On why the evidence in Paul does not indicate he knew of an earth visit by Jesus, read Ch. 11 of OHJ. On the “anthropos” question see my whole article on that.
Please actually read my writings before attempting to criticize them. You are wasting everyone’s time here by saying things already refuted elsewhere, which you should already have read and be responding to, not ignoring.
Just out of curiosity, where does the Bible say angels have bodies? They can assume bodies, but that doesn’t mean they have bodies. There’s that reference to “heavenly bodies” in 1 Cor. 15:40, however Paul’s not talking about angels, but observable natural phenomena. That’s why he mentions the sun and star as examples, but not spiritual entities.
For what it’s worth, Philo says angels are “souls hovering in the air.” That would be the understanding the Jews had at the time.
On angels and bodies, I discuss this and cover the sources and evidence in The Empty Tomb. If you want to know, go read it. Including what Philo says (which in context actually explains angels are made of stuff and thus have bodies; they only lack bodies of flesh unless they choose to wear one).
And yes, Paul is saying in 1 Cor. 15:40 that all heavenly bodies and thus all heavenly beings are made of pneuma. Anything that can be called alive (and thus existent) must have a body, he says. Including supernatural beings, who have bodies that are immortal and indestructible and so on (as Paul elaborately explains throughout 1 Cor. 15). They are not bodies of flesh.
This was standard Jewish metaphysics. I cover it all in TET.
Remember the part where they banged mortals and had kids with them? Or the parts where they wielded flaming swords? Or where they had four heads?
But only Jesus comes in the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3). No heavenly being is ever described as having the “likeness of flesh” or even bodies made of flesh and blood in Jewish religious literature. This means that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection could not have occurred in “outer space,” as you claim it does.
To the contrary, both the Jewish Philo and the pagan Plutarch explain that supernatural beings often assume mortal bodies below the orbit of the moon. That’s precisely what distinguishes that section of outer space from above it.
Please read OHJ. You keep revealing you haven’t read it with remarkes like this.
re: “It is an indisputable fact that Paul depicts Jesus’s body being manufactured for him in Philippians 2:7…”
It’s also indisputable that the next verse says that Jesus… “having been found as a man…”
So — where do you suppose this “made man” was found? Floating in the Cosmos?
Continuing my backlog:
You surely have read OHJ, yes, where I explicitly discuss this verse and explicitly answer your question?
Homework assignment: find that, and quote it here.
(Hint: the people who found him are the same ones who killed him.)