Posted: Jul 23, 2013 7:40 am
spin wrote:Hell, Neil, I've been tardy here. I've been engaged in trying to pin McGrath down in the comments section of the Vridar post on his blog. I'm a b-a-a-a-d boy.neilgodfrey wrote:
That doesn't make sense to me. How can an integral part of a tradition not “support the tradition”?
What makes it an integral part? In what sense is John the Baptist an integral part of christianity? The best you've offered is a vague notion of John being a foil. Baptism doesn't fit into christianity. It has no meaning within the theology. Some duffer had to come up with this baptism with fire nonsense to trump the Johannine variety. Still people got baptized.
We'll have to agree to disagree. Baptism is as “integral” to Christianity as is a ritual eating the flesh of Christ and the confession that Christ is Lord. In Paul we can see it preceded any references to John the Baptist. There are clues throughout Mark that baptism is a symbolic motif apart from JB, as has been established I think at least since Scrogg's and Groff's 1973 JBL article, “Baptism in Mark: Dying and Rising with Christ”. Fire was part and parcel of Mark's Scriptural source for the entire scene: the new Exodus as the founding event for a new people of God is set in the wilderness, heralded by a lone prophetic voice, announcing the way, being led safely through water and fire of judgment (Isa. 40:3). . . .
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:This idea that there was some sort of competition between John the Baptist and Jesus is a product of later Christianity. It was introduced by later Christianity and the apologetic purposes are transparent. It was not there in the epistles or other pre-gospel traditions (unless one accepts modern constructs of Q as historical evidence).
If christianity started with Paul, ie his epistles, then you are getting the beginnings of christianity and he says all he is giving is christ crucified. He was apparently still working out the basics.
If you like. But again we'll have to agree to disagree. We have in Paul's letters quotations and references to traditions and hymns and christologies that preceded him. We have to accept Paul as he is. He gets pretty stroppy in some of his epistles about anyone wanting to change anything he teaches – not indicative of one still groping his way to thrash out a new religion. What was worked out later became either “heresy” or “orthodoxy”.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
You're overworking the "apologetic" and "theological faith" rhetoric and I think not noticing the fact that John doesn't sit well in christianity. John is the one who receive the Elijah references leaving Jesus to play second fiddle as an Elisha figure. John talks about the eschaton, the end time, the need for repentence. Jesus gets to repeat this stuff, but it's John's message. That's upstaging, don't you think?
Apologetic and faith are not overworked. I simply introduced them as the simplest explanations for the JB passages in the gospels. Can you point to a single JB reference in the gospels that does not link directly to some OT passage? Without going into the details here, we can see that everything said about JB in the gospels is derived from Malachi, 1 and 2 Kings, Isaiah, . . . It is all “midrashic” creation if you will tolerate that word. If not, I'll use another. Whatever it's called it all amounts to the same thing. The only conceivable “secular” historical reference we have to John (Josephus) situates him at a time that excludes him from any possible role in relation to Jesus.
This doesn't amount to apologetic and faith. It's a claim that there is a hb source for every single John reference in the gospels. OK, I'll ask about the elephant in the room: what's the source for baptism?
When an evangelist crafts a baptism scene from Jewish Scriptures to introduce the new Saviour that sounds like the sort of activity that one could call a “faith” or apologetic activity. The same symbolic meanings are at work as were there for Paul when he spoke of baptism. The new Israel emerging from the waters to be filled with the Holy Spirit as God's son – just as the New Exodus of Isaiah foretold is just the starter. The wilderness setting and the Elijah figure – the whole body and soul of the scene is theological symbolism through and through. There is nothing but superfluous razors for Occam's beard if we try to find room for anything historical on top of all of this.
If you don't see this as an “apologetic” of any kind then again we'll just have to disagree.
There are any number of likely candidates for the source of the baptism. I thought that's pretty obvious. What's the source for the other ritual, the meal?
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
It's not evidence, but argument from silence. The notion of thew messiah is delineated briefly in the Psalms of Solomon and to a greater extent in the DSS. The securely dated DSS by C14 are before the turn of the era and the Psalms are the same, so there is already a literary tradition to support the notion before the reputed time of Jesus.
Now you're getting my point. We have no evidence of a popular imminent messianic expectation prior to the Jewish War(s).
But you're not getting mine. You know: argument from silence.
We're talking past each other. Your argument is there despite the silence – or absence of evidence. I am simply saying lack of evidence means lack of evidence and no foundation for any argument. We can't build a case despite the lack of evidence.
My argument is based on the way the term “messiah” is used in the evidence we do have. It never applies to a contemporary figure until the Jewish War/s at end of first and early second centuries.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:The notion of the messiah is found in many Jewish texts. The question remains, though, whether these notions were part of the wider popular consciousness. We have no evidence that they were. The texts speak of a messiah at the “end of days” – suggesting a distant future time. There is no evidence that such an idea was translated into having any immediate relevance to the society of the day among the general population.
We have no wider evidence of very much about Judea in the first century, let alone views of what the general population found relevant. The literature that you are trying to separate from the general population is most of what we have about the period. The literature talks of messianism. Messianism was a strongly political notion involving the overthrow of foreign rulers and we have traces of several political moves, taken to be vaguely independence oriented, that the Romans crushed in Palestine.
We can't validly squeeze the evidence we have for one subset to fit into gaps left by the absence of evidence in other areas without serious justification. We have no reason to assume that the literary evidence we have was in the consciousness of the general populace, let alone that it was interpreted to apply to imminent political events. The Gospel of Matthew nativity scene even assumes the contrary – that the general populace were not filled with any such anticipation: special inquiry had to be directed to the court wizards.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
Josephus has apologetic reasons not to deal with any messianism. In fact he eschews the term in all places except the TF and the reference to James. No-one but Jesus is a messiah. You can understand my straight face here. (The two passages about Jesus are the only two that mention a messiah, so you should be able to glean my lack of belief.) Josephus had reasons not to deal with this problematic notion of Judaism, since armed rebellion is entailed in the messiah's activities. His work is usually, and I think fairly, classified as an apologetic history. Besides, a dead messiah is a false messiah and Christians are not going to label anyone else a messiah. The messianic silence is not significant.
So goes the conventional wisdom. But is any of this really the final word? Josephus has apologetic reasons to eschew references to messianism, we are told, but then we are told he doesn't eschew the term for other reasons – e.g. when he talks about the brother of Jesus or whatever, or when he talks about Vespasian. This sounds like some sort of ad hoc rationalization rather than a real argument.
I may not have made myself clear, so let me try again. Both references to the messiah concerning Jesus are bogus. (The TF for obvious reasons and "the brother of Jesus called christ" from the James passage on syntactic grounds.) They just happen to be the only references to "christos" in Josephus despite the term being used about 40 times in the LXX.
So Josephus nowhere discusses messianic expectations prior to the Jewish War. Your argument appears to rely upon data that makes no reference to messianic expectations nor even messiahs of any kind, and must in turn find an explanation for that silence in the evidence to justify its use to support a claim that Josephus is talking about messianic movements! That sounds like the sort of apologetic one expects from the most erudite of theologians.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:I can reply that there is a simpler explanation: there was no popular messianic expectation until the time Josephus says there was.
Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. We have almost no sources for Palestine beside Josephus, so once again this is an appeal to silence. And he avoids using the term messiah, though he does indicate knowledge of messianic prophecy, when he applies it to Vespasian, so his lack of discussion concerning messianism when he deals with Jewish political activists killed by the Romans. We later find a specific political activist, Simeon bar-Koseba, who no-one can deny was called messiah. It's not hard to look back at the zealot movement and see the same aims as Simeon.
I'm not appealing to silence. I'm appealing to the evidence we do have for the way “messiah” was understood (as not applying to a contemporary figure or being the subject of popular anticipation) prior to the Jewish War/s. The silence in the evidence leaves my argument untouched.
It is a complex argument to say that Josephus did not mention something about events that he wrote about because of various motivations and sensibilities on the part of himself and others; why not simply say X is not mentioned, full stop? Leave it at that. Maybe they really were the average royal pretenders without any “messianic” associations at all.
Why is there even a question about why he did not address something? Why do we have to assume there must have been more (our belief systems demand there was more!) and then find arguments to explain the silence. This does not sound like best-practice methodology to me.
Now if we do have good reasons that's fine. But question-begging is not allowed.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
Who was around to leave a body of literature that would call anyone else a messiah? The silence is insignificant.
Messianism, if embodied, implied rebellion against the Roman overlordship. It meant removal of foreign power from the land of the Jews. Advocating messianism was sedition.
It was not sedition to scorn those who pretended to be messiahs and accuse them of lying and thereby being responsible for the downfall of Jerusalem. Josephus could not scorn anti-establishment rebels enough. Adding the fact that they were deluded messianists would not have hurt his propaganda interests in any way. Why, even the scholarly establishment can quite accept Josephus telling the Romans that some Jews thought Jesus was the messiah.
The passage is one of those apparently non-cristian testimonials that religious scholarship has held on to tenaciously for lack of anything more substantive in its efforts to sustain a Jesus in history.
The fact that you rightly point out regarding Josephus's views of the political "rebels" only helps to understand why he wouldn't address them as messianic.
This is begging the question.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
You still really haven't said what benefit including John would have been. The best you've mentioned is something about him being a foil, which seems to have entailed saddling christianity with baptism.
Well a literary foil suggests a benefit. We have the typical literary prophetic announcement of a great figure to come, the representative of the Old against the New. This is another topic entirely. I have posted about it often enough on Vridar. It deserves another series of posts here.
You're making my case. There needs to be an old order for the new one to supercede. If it weren't real then it would have no effect on the audience of the immediately subsequent period.
Stories don't have to be “true” or “real” to be powerful mind-changers.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
I gave the Acts reference purely for the fact that the baptist religion is shown to have survived and was proselytizing, showing that it was a separate existence from christianity. The later it is, the more significant that separation is.
That various writers didn't know him, especially someone at the beginning (Paul), suggests that the evolving tradition hadn't as yet dragged John in.
All the Acts reference does is tell us what the author of Acts wanted to convey to his audience. Now what is the best explanation for that? That is another question entirely. (We can't just blithely assume historicity. We need first to address the nature and context of the literature we are dealing with.)
You'll note that I didn't assume historicity for the passage. I used it to show that this writer of Acts is still dealing with the effect of John's religion long afterwards.
The assumption that there was an effect from John's religion long afterwards is an assumption of historicity.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:And if Paul writing twenty plus years after Jesus had no need to address the JB question – when and why does this JB become someone that Christianity “can't ignore”?
Paul was just starting the religion. Why should he have dealt with John, when he was still working out what his beliefs were? This line of argument makes you ask why Paul didn't acknowledge anything much at all that was later found in the gospel. It either wasn't significant or it was added later. I don't think there was much of anything at the time of Paul because he seems the best bet as the founder of the religion.
This is returning us to stuff addressed above.
spin wrote:neilgodfrey wrote:spin wrote:
I don't think one can make these sorts of calls without having a close familiarity with the language and cultures. The Greek seems pretty straightforward to me, but what it seems to me would probably not be of any significance because I lack that close familiarity.
I am open to reading the scholarly arguments. I have read several that DO address this “in Christ” phrase (Novenson, Engberg-Pedersen) and it is of their arguments that I am thinking here.
If anyone with the skills has argued a case that “in Christ” can refer to any believer in a messiah, per se, then I will love to read it. Till then I have no alternative but to go along with the arguments of those who do have the specialist skills – such as the likes of the two scholars I mentioned.
“In Christ” does not speak of a believer in a Messiah, per se. Bar-Kochba supporters were never described as being “in Christ”, I am sure.
Again we come to the wall of silence. I'm sure there is no problem in accepting the term "christ" is what Jews used in Greek for "messiah". I doubt that you'd want to argue that Paul--amongst everything else--is coining a new christian idiom which included "in christ", but is using the resources of the language already existent. This should point to the likelihood of "in christ" existing before Paul and any hypothetically earlier Jesus believers.
I addressed the silence above. My argument is not from silence; the silence has no effect upon my argument that is based on the evidence we do have. I don't have to rationalize the silence away.
“In Christ” has been studied and explored often enough for us to have a pretty good idea of what it means.
Anyway, when Paul speaks of “assemblies in Christ” I think we are entitled to be guided by the evidence we do have vis a vis the understanding of messiah, its relationship to contemporary persons, it's theological core, and the concept of “in” within this context, to guide our conclusion as to what Paul meant by the phrase.
There is no reason to think that there were identifiable "assemblies" that could be characterized by their belief in a messiah! We can generally say that Judaism per se, for all its different flavours, believed in a messiah or two.