about the rapid fabulation about Jesus: embarrassment of the reality or of a phantom?

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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about the rapid fabulation about Jesus: embarrassment of the reality or of a phantom?

Post by Giuseppe »

I like a lot the reading from this [ur=https://celsus.blog/2018/06/16/readers- ... han-jesus/]blog[/url].

In particular, the author writes:

If you wanted to spread stories about Jesus being the Messiah, what kind of Messiah would he make if he was nothing but an obscure, itinerant peasant, who made little impact on the known world during his lifetime?

Hence the need, very soon, of an exaggerated fabulation about the earhtly Jesus. Dr Ferguson thinks, basically (I would like to be excused in advance if I misunderstand here his view), that the Earliest Evangelists were so embarrassed by the insignificance of the historical Jesus (insignificance next dangerously to not-existence!) that they were moved to increase the fabulation about Jesus as mere reaction to neutralize in advance that embarassment.


My problem with this view is that perhaps - perhaps! - this explanation ignores deliberately the role of marcionism in the myth-making about Jesus. Afterall, without disturb Marcion, already the Messianic Secret in Mark seems per se a deliberate attempt to create that paradox (an unknown Jesus versus the extraordinary impact of the Christ), so not really something of which Mark was really ''embarrassed''.

In other terms, ''Mark'' wanted that his Jesus was unknown, ''quasi an obscure, itinerant peasant, who made little impact on the known world during his lifetime''. And where there is a will, there is no embarrassment.

So, to the cost of the my usual semplification of the things (the reader will understand me), the contrast ''obscure Jesus versus famous Christ'' was not an apology against embarrassment about a real obscure Jesus, but it was, from the beginning (hence, from the Earliest Gospel), a polemic about Jesus behind not the Christ.

Think about it:
1)
the Christ has to do a great impact on the World's History, by definition of Christ
2) Jesus didn't that great impact
3) therefore: Jesus is not the Christ.

Only then, assuming this fact before, I may concede that later, as a real embarrassment provoked by this fact, who wanted that Jesus was really the Christ had to eclipse also his being totally unknown (by adding, for example, the titulum crucis to avoid possible misunderstanding about his true identity).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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