Three different kinds of Mythicism

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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Three different kinds of Mythicism

Post by Giuseppe »

By reading Ory, Rylands, Smith, etc, I may classify the Mythicists of the past and of the present according the following way.

To begin, given the following intersection of two sets:

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B is the set of the Jews of Israel.
A is the set of the people lived outside Israel.
A intersection B is the set of the hellenized Jews or Gentile Judaizers.

1) Joshua and Christ are one and the same mythical being worshipped by the same sect.


This is the position of mythicists like Carrier, Doherty, Couchoud, Dujardin. The early Christian sect started to propagate from the set B to the conquest of the other two sets.

Their main feature of this mythicism is the total indifference about the Gnosticism. Emblematic in this sense is Richard Carrier, who shows no interest at all about Marcion, the Gnostics, etc. He seems to have no sympathy about even the ''heretical'' Christians.


2) Joshua and Christ are two different mythical beings worshipped by two different sects.


This is the position of mythicists like Smith, Rylands, Ory, Drews, Price, and in general of all the Mythicists who are interested about the role of the Gnostics in the birth of Christianity.

The best analytical proponents of this view are especially Rylands and Ory.

In short, there was a pre-christian cult of a mythical dying-and-rising Christ (not Joshua) only in the intersection of A and B (among the Jews of the Diaspora) while at the same time in Israel (set B), particularly in Galilee, there was a different pre-christian cult of a mythical dying-and-rising Joshua. Christianity was born when Jesus and Christ were fused in one single figure.

The so-called Gnostics descended from the pre-christian cult of Christ (not Joshua).

Evidence of this pre-christian Christ (not Joshua) would be :

1) the fact that Philo named ''Christ'' the Logos.
2) the Odes of Salomon (IF it was a pre-christian text) where only a dying Christ is named
3) and some Gnostic Jewish sects who surprised the Fathers since they adored a dying Christ while ignoring entirely the name of Joshua (or even despising it as alien to their cult).


3) Joshua and Christ are two different mythical beings worshipped by the same sect.


This is the position of Secret Alias. Ask him for more details.

A particular feature of this view is that the early Christian sect started in the set B, just as the point 1.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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