Sorry, I meant my question in a slightly different sense: Why would inventing a trial before the Romans and a crucifixion make people believe that Jesus was the Messiah?The two things have to be separated. The Roman trial was the "technical" translation of the celestial event (the earthly archontes, i.e. the Romans, replacing the celestial original archontes of this age). Hence a technical expedient, not the "goal".I don’t even know where to start with this. How would inventing a trial and sentence that didn’t happen have anything to do with proving that Jesus was the Messiah or the son of YHWH?
The goal, i.e. the main reason for the invention of an earthly life of Jesus on the earth, is revealed by John 20:31:But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Evidently, testimonia had to be invented to prove that Jesus was the Christ (these testimonia being the Gospels). Why?
Jews didn’t want to believe in a Messiah who’d died a humiliating death, and crucifixion wouldn’t have fitted well with their existing concepts and images of sacrifice. Romans, and other Hellenised members of the ancient world, had very strong beliefs in the importance of law and order, and would be predisposed to reject someone who’d been executed as a criminal. While the early Jesus-followers clearly did in the end manage to argue enough people round to accepting the crucifixion that Christianity survived and eventually flourished, it was very much an ‘in spite of’ rather than ‘because of’.
And so it’s very hard to see why someone starting from a perspective of deliberately trying to think up ways to make this new religion palatable to others would make up a story of a trial before Roman authorities culminating in a crucifixion. That would be the exact opposite of palatable.
This is one of many things that is explained much more easily if it did come from a true story. If the starting point for the stories was an actual Yeshua who was actually crucified by the Romans, then that neatly explains why later followers passed on that he’d been crucified by the Romans. If you want to hypothesise that this was a deliberate invention, then that hypothesis requires a good and plausible motive as to why someone would invent a very off-putting story. (Not why they'd invent a story, but why they'd invent one that was so off-putting.)
Jesus isn’t a celestial aeon in Paul. See https://freethoughtblogs.com/geekyhuman ... -9-part-3/.I can only think that the reason was polemical: Christians had to be reassured definitely and decisively about the fact that Jesus was the Christ, against deniers who claimed the total estrangement of Jesus from the world of the creator god, and against Jews who denied the Jewishness of Jesus.
If Jesus had continued to be a celestial aeon (as he is in Paul),
Giuseppe, I’m trying to figure out what you think the earliest members of this new organisation actually believed. From what I can make out, you think they believed that Jesus was some kind of heavenly being, but despite this was still Jewish and still the Messiah. You also think they believed they had to invent stories about Jesus living an earthly life because they thought they wouldn’t gain followers otherwise. Have I got that straight so far? Can you please explain what led you to those conclusions? Your explanations don’t really make a lot of sense, so I want to check whether I’m at least interpreting your premises accurately.then the direction of the Christianity would have been towards the "Gnostic" anti-demiurgist (anti-YHWH) sects and not towards the Jewish roots. By historicizing Jesus, the first evangelist could point out that YHWH was the supreme god. A Jesus-aeon was a potential threat for the celestial supremacy of YHWH (and the historicist Marcion is evidence that even an earthly but docetic Jesus could still continue to threat the YHWH's supremacy).
Statistics: Posted by DrSarah — Sun Apr 21, 2024 12:34 am