pakeha wrote:
Thanks for the clarification. I'm finding trying to place the data pertinent to the Jesus narrative difficult to sort into any sort of a rational/plausible scenario, but then,I'm new at this and am fortunate to be able to ask questions in forums like this one.
The expectations , mood and tradition of a particular culture is what should explain the birth of a new religion.
Momigliano writes:
On Pagans, Jews and Christians
Chapter 7 What Josephus did not see
“It is our task to elucidate more precisely the meaning of Josephus’s twofold blindness about the synagogue and the widespread Jewish and Christian apocalyptic trends of his time...
The mere existence of a minimum of weekly reading and interpretation of the Bible in public seems to me a new departure in the religious life of the classical world...The mere fact that one had to study in order to be pious is a strange notion which made Judaism increasingly intellectual- not what cults were known for in the Greco-roman world.
It favoured separation of the learned from the ignorant and it caused (and allowed) basic doctrinal disagreements; in the end it introduced schism and excommunication....As it happened, one of the sects which developed in the atmosphere of Jerusalem was to replace the old religion of Rome and Athens”
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Arnaldo Momigliano
On Pagans, Jews and Christians
Chapter 5 Religion in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem in the first century BC
The Psalms of Solomon indicated both an orientation and a mood which are different from anything we may surmise in Rome and Athens. Defeat is faced: it is directly related to God. No political interpretation is offered. What the writer hopes for, however, is a new politeia in the Davidic tradition: institutional concern is the consequence of religious scruples....
We may say that the Psalms of Solomon point toward the equivalence of perfect trust in god with salvation as formulated in the grand finale of the tract Beshallah of the Mekhiltah de Rabbi Ishmael, the date of which I do not know(4)
Note 4 it will be enough to refer to the bibliography of S. Holm-Nielsen...
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The Messiah Texts
Raphael Patai
Wayne State University Press, Detroit. 1979
ISBN 9780814318508
Chapters 2 and 3
Certain themes in Judaism have been treated by Jewish authors and sages as pre-existent in the sense that they were created in the sixth day of Genesis. Among them they mentioned the Torah, Repentance, the Garden of Eden and Gehenna, God’s Throne of Glory, the Fathers, Israel, the Temple and the Messiah.
The Messiah first appears as pre-existent in the First Book of Enoch which was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic about 150 B.C.E From that period on, the concept of the Messiah who was created in the six days of creation, or even prior to them or who was born at variously stated subsequent dates and was then hidden to await his time, became a standard feature of Jewish messianic eschatology.
The concept of the pre-existence of the Messiah accords with the general Talmudic view which holds that “The Holy One, blessed be He, prepares the remedy before the wound” ( B.Meg. 13b) .
The names by which the Messiah is called are revealing. In the first book of Enoch he is called, first of all, “Head of Days”, an epithet alluding to his pre-existence. In the same source he is also called “Son of Man, an old biblical appellation heavy with theosophical symbolism...
In any case this multiplicity of names indicates one thing very clearly: The image of the Messiah was very much in the forefront of rabbinical- and undoubtedly also popular- thought from the second century BCE on.
The earliest Biblical figure who in later literature was endowed with a superman Messianic character is Enoch, about whom it is said in Genesis (5:24) “that he walked with God, and he was no more, for God took him.” This brief enigmatic statement sufficed to turn Enoch into a superhuman figure: after his translation he became Metatron, the chief of all angels, and according to the book of Enoch (which was preserved in Ethiopic), he became the Messiah.
