A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Giuseppe
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:25 am
Giuseppe wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:52 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:31 am One thing I am having trouble understanding about your views on this topic is what embarrassment (whether the raw human emotion or the criterion built upon that emotion) has to do with any of it.
but how? Satan has just killed the Son in full knowledge of him, and he is still ruling this world totally undisturbed?!??

Remove from him at least the feeling and the pleasure of winning (for a so long time from the crucifixion) by making him ignorant about the his victim!
So the embarrassment of which you speak is Satan's embarrassment, not any human author's embarrassment?
I don't understand. Satan doesn't exist, so how can he feel embarrassment? The my point is that, when for example Ignatius says in Ephesians 9:

Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord

...Ignatius is embarrassed by the possibility that Satan knew the death of the Lord and, despite of that knowledge, he is visibly still firm in the his power without any appearance of decline (given the delay of Parusia).
(I am ignoring the other possible interpretation of the passage, here: that Ignatius was embarrassed by early anti-Christian mythicists, calling them all as "Satan" insofar, like him, they ignored if Jesus existed really).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Giuseppe wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 11:00 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:25 am
Giuseppe wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:52 am
Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:31 am One thing I am having trouble understanding about your views on this topic is what embarrassment (whether the raw human emotion or the criterion built upon that emotion) has to do with any of it.
but how? Satan has just killed the Son in full knowledge of him, and he is still ruling this world totally undisturbed?!??

Remove from him at least the feeling and the pleasure of winning (for a so long time from the crucifixion) by making him ignorant about the his victim!
So the embarrassment of which you speak is Satan's embarrassment, not any human author's embarrassment?
I don't understand. Satan doesn't exist, so how can he feel embarrassment?
That is my question to you. You are the one who had just written two sentences about Satan's emotional state.
The my point is that, when for example Ignatius says in Ephesians 9:

Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord

...Ignatius is embarrassed by the possibility that Satan knew the death of the Lord and, despite of that knowledge, he is visibly still firm in the his power without any appearance of decline (given the delay of Parousia).
I can definitely see Ignatius claiming that Satan did not know about the death of the Lord. What I am not seeing here is some indication that he would be embarrassed if it were otherwise.
Last edited by Ben C. Smith on Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 4:30 am If knowledge of God's overall plan, including a messianic death, is known from a natural reading of scripture, then of course the demons can know it, as well.
Yet in the Second Temple era apocalyptic world (even in the canonical Daniel and Revelation, as well as certain canonical epistles) we know that humans can be exalted even above angels and be made privy to secrets not even angels know, and how mysteries of prophecies and scriptures are revealed only to the righteous while hidden from the wicked.

Further, I keep wondering about our non-textual sources, the earliest Christian art: Jesus crucified is not a significant theme at all there. It is predominantly Jesus the young boy or Jesus the good shepherd. Even in the Epistle of James it is the prophets who are pointed to as exemplars of enduring unjust suffering, and Jesus is not a crucified figure in Revelation, and Paul appears to have been challenged by prophets or apostles who did not accept his idea of the crucified Christ.

So I guess we have two questions here:

1. is it right to think of scriptures containing a natural of a messianic death reading that can be understood by anyone? (The author of Daniel appears to have had to re-work in significant ways the words of Isaiah to make them conform to the experiences of the Maccabean martyrs.)

2. was the Christ crucified idea so central to all early Christianities? -- though obviously it did eventually become the central one to all that we now think of as Christianity.
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Giuseppe
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:15 pm Further, I keep wondering about our non-textual sources, the earliest Christian art: Jesus crucified is not a significant theme at all there.
apart the fact that (proto-)Revelation, Didache and James are not Christians at all (in the specific case of Didache, the 12 apostles were originally the 12 servants of the High Priest carrying missives in the Diaspora, the precise thing Saul did in Acts: hence the irony is that he was already an apostle: only, of the earthly high priest and not of Christ).

I think that the absence of crucifixion of which you talk is merely the absence of the crucifixion as scandalous death. In Galatians, Paul is particularly angry against the primitive people in need of earthly images of the crucifixion. While Paul was reluctant to represent a crucifixion in outer space by earthly images. Even the crucifixion meant as a servile supplicium was for Paul a wrong way to represent the crucificion in outer space. Even the reference to the curse of the cross in Deut. These earthly images were useful only to "explain" the crucifixion to the stupid hoi polloi (of Galatia, especially), not to make true pauline "perfects".

ADDENDA: In 1 Corinthians 1:17-19 Paul is explicit about the crucifixion as being a cosmic event in outer space showing the power and the glory of God and not a scandalous thing.
The scandal of the cross was for Paul to represent the crucifixion via earthly images (as a curse from Deut., as a image for fools Galatians, as a servile supplicium) to be understood by the outsiders.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Giuseppe wrote: Tue Oct 15, 2019 2:07 am
I think that the absence of crucifixion of which you talk is merely the absence of the crucifixion as scandalous death.
I'm thinking of the earllest sarcophagi (from around the time of Tertullian/200 CE) and the catacomb art -- there is no depiction of Jesus' death at all. Jesus is always very much alive and dispensing benefits (not the blood kind) to his followers.
Last edited by neilgodfrey on Tue Oct 15, 2019 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Giuseppe
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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neilgodfrey wrote: Tue Oct 15, 2019 6:49 am
Giuseppe wrote: Tue Oct 15, 2019 2:07 am
I think that the absence of crucifixion of which you talk is merely the absence of the crucifixion as scandalous death.
I'm thinking of the earllest sarcophagi (from around the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian) and the catacomb art -- there is no depiction of Jesus' death at all. Jesus is always very much alive and dispensing benefits (not the blood kind) to his followers.
What you are saying is not in contradiction with what I have said in the quote above. Basically, the crucifixion was not meant as a servile supplicium, but as a cosmic event that provoked a lot of benefits since it meant the conquest by Jesus of the fate of the men (until that moment, a possession of the rulers).
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Taking a stab at Neil's two questions:
1. is it right to think of scriptures containing a natural of a messianic death reading that can be understood by anyone? (The author of Daniel appears to have had to re-work in significant ways the words of Isaiah to make them conform to the experiences of the Maccabean martyrs.)
We know from Herodotus that ancients knew that prophetic discourse could be understood differently before the events in question compared with how the same words might be understood after pertinent events happened. The phenomenon is general and robust. Even modern material created with known non-predictive intent (e.g. warnings intended to avoid possible undesirable outcomes or depictions of normal situations "opposite" but therefore meaningfully related to catastrophic events that later came to pass) can be retrospectiely "read naturally" by some people as prophetic. For example, two routine-then-but-startling-now pre-911 advertisements:

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... s-of-9-11/

Whether a reader (human or demonic) could recognize Jesus as the One (R) in advance from what would eventually be canonized prophecy is plausibly independent of whether after the fact (or after the circulation of the first Earth-Jesus fiction) a suitably disposed reader might naturally find Jesus being described there. There is no contradiction in simultaneously asserting "No reader could have known that such-and-such specifically would happen" and "This author foretold that a specific such-and-such would happen," despite the juxtaposition being ironic or arguably paradoxical.
2. was the Christ crucified idea so central to all early Christianities? -- though obviously it did eventually become the central one to all that we now think of as Christianity.
An interesting question, but what methodology would allow us moderns to distinguish between:

- different personal perspectives on Christ crucified within some hypothetical ancient Christianity (singular, perhaps referring to a dominant or typical form of the system) whose membership included both literate well-off citizens and many lower-class and oppressed people like slaves and free women (as may well have been the case of early Christianity or -ies), versus

- plural contending primitive Christianities flourishing side-by-side, differing about the significance of crcufixion?

For the well-off citizen types, crucifixion was a horror which neither they nor anybody close to them was likely to endure. For the literate, an intellectual puzzle like how could "a curse on the land" also be a blessing for all who believed in him might be an occasion for unpleasant cognitive dissonance and so the subject for discussions with like-minded peers familiar with scriptural arcana. Meanwhile, the slaves, for whom crucifixion was a genuine possibility, might have felt solidarity with a godman who could have avoided any and all unpleasantness, but freely chose to suffer horribly for their sakes instead. If that choice was mysterious in some way, so what? A dash of mystery can be a feature in a religion, not necessarily a bug.

For both groups, there are far more pleasant scenes available for decorative use. Hunky young Jesus, with or without livestock, justifies itself as a choice for decoration in a wide variety of contexts, regardless of how "important" the scene depicted might be to one's religion. Context-salient scenes (Jesus raising Lazarus for a mortuary; Jesus feeding people or hosting a last supper in the dining room) do not necessarily betoken greater importance for those scenes in other contexts, or in the the overall religious stance.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 amFor example, two routine-then-but-startling-now pre-911 advertisements:

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... s-of-9-11/
An episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off of The X-Files, featured an attempt to hijack an airliner remotely and crash it into the World Trade Center; just like AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175, the airliner was taking off from Boston. The episode aired on March 4, 2001, some six months before 9/11.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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Paul the Uncertain wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 am Taking a stab at Neil's two questions:
Thanks for the responses.
Paul the Uncertain wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 am
1. is it right to think of scriptures containing a natural of a messianic death reading that can be understood by anyone? (The author of Daniel appears to have had to re-work in significant ways the words of Isaiah to make them conform to the experiences of the Maccabean martyrs.)
We know from Herodotus that ancients knew that prophetic discourse could be understood differently before the events in question compared with how the same words might be understood after pertinent events happened. The phenomenon is general and robust. Even modern material created with known non-predictive intent (e.g. warnings intended to avoid possible undesirable outcomes or depictions of normal situations "opposite" but therefore meaningfully related to catastrophic events that later came to pass) can be retrospectiely "read naturally" by some people as prophetic. For example, two routine-then-but-startling-now pre-911 advertisements:

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/201 ... s-of-9-11/
On the other hand I think we have to acknowledge that what are said to be taken as "OT prophecies" of Jesus are on the whole not written like the sorts of Delphic oracle ambiguous prophecies at all. The Delphic oracle was clearly prophetic and deliberately opaque or ambiguous.

That's not how the NT or other Second Temple Jewish authors found prophecies in the "OT". They used a kind or word play to create entirely new meanings that bore little obvious relation to the original texts.

Example, the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah are not prophecies but histories. They are metaphors for the suffering of Israel past and hope for future redemption. Yet "Daniel" reinterpreted some of these passages to create an entirely different heavenly figure, the Son of Man, as a metaphor for the Maccabees. Then "Enoch" took Daniel's Son of Man metaphor and created a real person out of it. By then we lost all connection with the Isaiah 53 passage.

The tale of Jonah was not a "sign" or prophecy, either. In another narrative an author could conceivably made the image of Jonah under the gourd the central "prophecy" instead of his 3 days in the great fish.

With what we call prophecies from the OT we are more often looking at something aking to a "midrashic" play on words and narratives and a highly imaginative way of creating prophecies where none existed. That's the sort of "revelation" Paul sometime speaks about.

Paul the Uncertain wrote: Wed Oct 16, 2019 2:17 am
2. was the Christ crucified idea so central to all early Christianities? -- though obviously it did eventually become the central one to all that we now think of as Christianity.
An interesting question, but what methodology would allow us moderns to distinguish between:

- different personal perspectives on Christ crucified within some hypothetical ancient Christianity (singular, perhaps referring to a dominant or typical form of the system) whose membership included both literate well-off citizens and many lower-class and oppressed people like slaves and free women (as may well have been the case of early Christianity or -ies), versus

- plural contending primitive Christianities flourishing side-by-side, differing about the significance of crcufixion?

For the well-off citizen types, crucifixion was a horror which neither they nor anybody close to them was likely to endure. For the literate, an intellectual puzzle like how could "a curse on the land" also be a blessing for all who believed in him might be an occasion for unpleasant cognitive dissonance and so the subject for discussions with like-minded peers familiar with scriptural arcana. Meanwhile, the slaves, for whom crucifixion was a genuine possibility, might have felt solidarity with a godman who could have avoided any and all unpleasantness, but freely chose to suffer horribly for their sakes instead. If that choice was mysterious in some way, so what? A dash of mystery can be a feature in a religion, not necessarily a bug.

For both groups, there are far more pleasant scenes available for decorative use. Hunky young Jesus, with or without livestock, justifies itself as a choice for decoration in a wide variety of contexts, regardless of how "important" the scene depicted might be to one's religion. Context-salient scenes (Jesus raising Lazarus for a mortuary; Jesus feeding people or hosting a last supper in the dining room) do not necessarily betoken greater importance for those scenes in other contexts, or in the the overall religious stance.
Yes, we can come up with rationalizations to reconcile the contradiction in the two types of evidence but I think they run afoul of what we know of the actual evidence itself when we think them through some more.

For example, from Paul we know that the idea of a crucified Christ was central to the faith of the high and the low classes, ditto for the subsequent philosophical and more educated Christians of the second century. The philosopher Justin had no difficulty with a crucified Christ as central to his faith. Other philsophers like Plato and Seneca would also construct images of gruesome torture and deaths to illustrate meaningfully certain plights of "the wise man".

Example, the very idea of "being crucified with Christ" was itself an abstract and philosophical (educated) concept akin to the Stoic idea of giving up one's own "mind" to the "Logos" or "Reason" -- as spelled out in some detail by Troels Engberg-Pedersen in Paul and the Stoics..

Was not the crucifixion and then resurrection the very hope of the dead -- so why does this central hope appear to be missing from the earliest Christian funerary art?

You are right about the evidence for different Christianities existing side by side from the early days. I find it difficult to imagine them having much time for each other, though.
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Re: A thought on the mystery of the passion of the Christ.

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(Note to Ben: It really is startling how much material there is which can now be read as referring to 9-11, even when we know that the creators of the material had other purposes and no inkling of the real events. The two examples in the blog post were chosen for their possible parallels to Mark 13:1-2, but the body of pre-911 artistic, literary and dramatic references to the destruction of the landmark towers is much larger. Fascinating how the mind seizes on coincidences and what the resulting affect is.)

Howdy, Neil

Kudos on your extended review of Lataster's book, still in progress. On some points you make here:
That's not how the NT or other Second Temple Jewish authors found prophecies in the "OT". They used a kind or word play to create entirely new meanings that bore little obvious relation to the original texts.
As it happens, the possibly most famous-notorious of the Delphic prophecies (one of the incidents that Herodotus discusses, the one predicting that the outcome of a proposed war will be decisive, without specifying who would win) is not at all ambiguous. As prophecies go, it is unusually falsifiable: one of the combatants will be destroyed. That is not the only seriously possible outcome of a military adventure, or even typical. Many wars are stalemates or settled on liveable terms, this one won't be.

Herodotus shows awareness that the fault lay not with the oracle but with the decisionmaker who read what he wanted to read in a text that plainly said no such thing.
Example, the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah are not prophecies but histories.
I think we are in some basic agreement here. However, the author's intentions may be irrelevant to what the later reader may find "prophetic." This was illustrated in the difference between our contemporary spontaneous reaction to depictions of a lone airplane in the vicinity of the North Tower in contrast to how those same images were understood by both their authors and their original viewers.
The tale of Jonah was not a "sign" or prophecy, either. In another narrative an author could conceivably made the image of Jonah under the gourd the central "prophecy" instead of his 3 days in the great fish.
Yes. Luke (11:29-30, 32) amplified the "sign of Jonah" to refer to the overall situation in Jonah, without a word about three days in a fish. However, Luke continued to emphasize the prophetic character of Jesus' reference to Jonah.
For example, from Paul we know that the idea of a crucified Christ was central to the faith of the high and the low classes,
Agreed, and so it was in my hypothetical. What differed by class there was what fostered the importance of the crucfixion aspect of the idea. I proposed recognition of contexts in which, despite the idea's central importance, other aspects of the faith lore might be expressed instead.

What may have been a bug for the intelligensia (or only ironically satisfying as a puzzle to be worked out with study and learned discourse) might have been an unalloyed feature for other adherents. That remains a possibility despite a different way in which the available evidence could be interpreted.
Example, the very idea of "being crucified with Christ" was itself an abstract and philosophical (educated) concept akin to the Stoic idea of giving up one's own "mind" to the "Logos" or "Reason"
I'm not at all sure that it was abstract. Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford, for instance, has done a lot of psychological and anthropological work on the churchly use of "imagined dialog" and similar exercises. Contemporary Christians exist who consciously practice these exercises, and interpret the resulting subjective experiences as divine or angelic communication.

I don't have a strong conclusion to offer here and now about the applicability of Luhrmann's work (and others') as "experimental archeology" bearing on Christian origins, but there is ample foundation there for further study, IMO.
Was not the crucifixion and then resurrection the very hope of the dead -- so why does this central hope appear to be missing from the earliest Christian funerary art?
I don't know of course, but I live near a cemetery. I notice that funerary art (mostly in stone there) is often personal. For example, some of the older military-issued headstones have no reference at all to religion (contemporary American ones do), but much reference to the deceased's military service. There are several Masonic headstones, but statistically, many of those buried in those graves must have been Christians or Jews.

Yup, there are plenty of crosses. I get what you're saying. But plenty of "missing" crosses, too.

I don't get how Jesus raising Lazarus wouldn't be a strong candidate for selection, despite Jesus not being the one raised. If you see the basis of my puzzlement, then where is the line? How is Jesus rescuing an errant lamb not an icon of hope for a good outcome in the judgment that attends the anticipated resurrection? Or, why would anybody feel inhibited about using the well-worn figure of referring to a part in order to represent a whole (an incident in Jesus' career to stand for the entire career, of which the "central hope" is an integral part, as is shepherd imagery)?
You are right about the evidence for different Christianities existing side by side from the early days. I find it difficult to imagine them having much time for each other, though.
Again, I don't have a strong conclusion to offer at this time, but so what if they didn't have "much time for each other;" did Group A need Group B's permission to adore Jesus? (Eventually, yes, Group B would roast Group A on sticks otherwise, but at the beginning, when neither group had much power or influence?)
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