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I find this an especially bizarre position to take because, quite apart from the question of whether or not Jesus is actually the messiah, the Son of God, on which everything turns... this doesn't seem particularly true to Jesus' own self-presentation?
If we trust the gospels, Jesus does not present himself as overturning or revolutionising all prior moral thought. On the contrary, when Jesus is challenged on moral questions, he typically returns to what has been written before him, and enjoins loyalty to already-revealed principles. Jesus criticises other people for their inconsistency with past morality (e.g. Mt 15:1-9), and demands others be consistent with it (e.g. Mt 19:16-22, Mt 22:34-40). Jesus consistently presents his moral teaching as a return to the origins (e.g. Mt:19:3-9). (I've only cited Matthew here for convenience, but this passages are attested in the other synoptics as well.)
It seems strange to praise a man for being revolutionary when in his own words he is constantly urging people to return to what is taught in the law and in the tradition. Is Jesus a radical prophet, or a conventional teacher? You can easily find both narratives around him.
It rather reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
Likewise I often read about Jesus as being this wild moral revolutionary, or Jesus as just a simple re-presenter of what came before (this is particularly common from the de-mythologisers, who Jesus as merely one more eschatological prophet or messiah claimant in the ferment of first century Judea), and it seems strange to me that the same man be both a radical up-ender of tradition, and a staid product of tradition; or that he be both moral visionary issuing teachings that no one had heard before, and also simply reminding people of what they already knew.
Or perhaps the conclusion to draw is that he's actually the loyal one. He's the one in the balance point, at the centre, a slave of neither past nor future.
So did Zoroaster and Confucius. So did Mohammed and Joseph Smith. This is the standard play book of monotheistic cults. They claim they are just reclaiming the truth that the one true god proclaimed thousands of years ago.
I'm not sure about Zoroaster, actually, but certainly Kongzi presented himself as merely a humble servant of the ancient ways. Muhammad is a bit more complicated - Muhammad does not present himself as merely reiterating an old law, but rather as the product of a new revelation, given to him in the very moment that he proclaimed it. Joseph Smith is someone I'd put in another category entirely; he was a revivalist or restorationist, proclaiming not a return to living tradition, but rather the need for a radical break with that tradition in favour of conforming to the way of a (mostly imagined) ancient ideal.
Jesus, Kongzi, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith all talk about the past to an extent, but I don't think I'd say they all share an identical playbook. They do all posit some sort of corruption over the years which needs to be corrected, but the ways they conceptualise the past and the corruption in question are not all that similar.
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I'm no scholar but the answer may be two authors/traditions. The Q source of Jesus' teachings along with the book of James representing the Jewish Jesus' traditional arguments, and the rest coming out of Paul's more radical anti-law, platonic tradition that survived into modern Christianity while the James school died out.
But I agree that from what I've read, Jesus as super moral innovator seems a bit overboard, I have to imagine he cribbed a good amount from John the Baptist and there was a kind of apocalyptic Jewish movement he was joining and learning from.
As an atheist I just feel like when the Christians try to make any kind of historical argument I find it unconvincing because they gloss over the details. Obviously there's no perfect person, Jesus had flaws, and the fact he is so worshipped today is as much an accident as history as how much Mohammed is worshipped. The issue with Christians is they really want Jesus to be the messiah. If they dropped that then they could actually understand something about themselves, and then I would feel comfortable worshipping with them.
That's the whole point of Christianity. If Jesus is just some preacher, and not the son of God, the whole enterprise is worthless. What you ask of Christians is just as incoherent as asking chefs to "just drop all that cooking stuff".
Not worthless, and you could come up with a coherent subset of teachings; the result just tautologically wouldn't be Christian. "Christ" wasn't a surname; it's Greek for "anointed one", like Hebrew "Messiah".
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Gee wiz, The fastest way to become an atheist is to learn the history of the early jewish/christian faith and the shenanigans the people who wrote, and over-wrote the bible got into.
An ostensibly pagan polytheistic faith, rewritten to drop all the other gods and focus purely on the god of war. Later reclaimed and used as a cudgel by the romans to consolidate a fraying empire.
Pagan wasn’t even a term coined yet by the time of Christ…
Doesn't really matter, does it? They had a bog standard polytheistic mish-mash of various gods / "elohim". With serious cribbing from other religions in the region. Half the shit in the old testament is Egyptian/Babylonian with the names filed off.
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I really disagree with this, I think the analogy would be that if all the cooks in Italy believed their work was done in the name of the flying spaghetti monster, it wouldn't make all of their work worthless.
I think it's really important that Christianity imported Jewish morality to pagan Europe along with some Platonic philosophy, and that its followers stemmed the tide of Islam. Islam or something like it may be contingent on Christianity, you start getting into a rabbit hole of alt-history, but I think a pagan Europe would have been much weaker regardless and that would have been bad. Europe as it existed with Christianity basically created modern society, vastly increased the wealth of the world, and vastly decreased its overall suffering. If Jesus died for anything, you can at least say it was for that, even if he wasn't really God. And he did get a good millenium of unquestioning worship too, it's just that it's over with now.
Either way, Merry Christmas!
Not really. Christianity is still the world’s biggest religion, and atheism a fringe thing in most places.
Given birth rates it’s questionable atheism will even be around in a few centuries
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But we know that James and Paul were, at least after some time, not leaders of conflicting factions, if you think Acts 15 is at all historical.
I'm curious what you have in mind here.
Well, he was claiming that, and fit some prophecies.
What does worship even mean here?
I don't think they were in total conflict, I just think like I said they were different schools. I also think Acts was written by the Paul school so it's going to paper over what might have been more difficult disagreements to make it look like everyone important was okay with what Paul was doing.
Worshipping with no Jesus messiah would just be worshipping God, the sacredness of each human's existence, the mystery of consciousness, the light of love and morality in a vast dark universe, channeled through the best moral teachers we have including Jesus, yada yada. Yeah it's kind of just new-age humanism, and all the mechanisms keeping the church together would probably fall apart, but I do think if everyone could let go of the superstitions and utopian ideas while still keeping the machinery running there'd still be plenty worth worshipping in neo-Christianity.
But you said you were an atheist?
Where do you think Paul got his teachings?
I think there a few seemingly fundamental mysteries of existence that make the universe a bit more than the dark void that atheists typically characterize it as, but I would bet against those mysteries pointing to some kind of 1 identity "god" type, I don't really know what the other options are, but it's a difficult question. But if I was in a worshipping group, and some people saw it in the "god" style, and I left things more open for myself, it wouldn't be a problem for me. It becomes a problem for me when it's worshipping a human being, or some subset of humanity, as God, because that seems very unlikely to me to be true.
I think there was a lot of intellectual Jewish and Greek thought at the time that an educated Jew like Paul was drawing from, in addition to certainly being inspired by Jesus. I think he clearly responded to Jesus' death differently than original apostles, not having been part of the original group and having visionary experiences afterwards, and I think intellectually he brought in platonic ideas to make sense of them and spread them through his followers. I don't think these ideas were incorporated in the Jewish Jesus groups and I think it was probably a point of tension.
And I just think his attitude in not following Jewish law went beyond Jesus' teachings and was his own innovation. Any of the original 12 could have taken Paul's role as the gentile baptizer, you could imagine half of them or more taking that role considering how many gentiles there are compared to Jews. But it's the outsider who does it and appears to mostly do it on his own. For me that strongly points to Paul having a lot of his own ideas and following them on his own accord, rather than being a outreach plan devised by the original Jewish movement.
What do you make of Peter and unclean foods in Acts? What sorts of things do you think were peculiar to Paul? What do you make of him checking notes with the apostles in Galatians 2?
Interestingly, that bit actually has surprisingly little to do with foods. It tells you what it's on about:
Sure, they're related, but it also has to do with foods. See the application of that in Acts 15.
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I think Galatians 2 emphasizes the kind of separateness Paul has with the Jewish sect, you have some calling Paul's authority or teachings into question, probably because of not following the law and the other ideas of Paul, so he goes to get the blessing of the James etc. (who he says added nothing to his message), and they decide to accept what he's doing, but then that's it and he goes back off on his own. I don't think the groups were enemies or cut off from each other, just that they were different groups with differences of belief and that there was probably some tension there.
Specifically I think Paul's peculiar beliefs were in the holy spirit which I think he invented, how rapture/apocalypse works and ideas around afterlife which I think draw from Greek philosophy and Platonism, and not needing to follow Jewish law.
I don't have a ready explanation for the unclean foods thing, but I tend to think that the more visions are involved the less I'm inclined to believe it. It's one thing if Paul has his visions and I think that probably happened, since he seemed very intently motivated by whatever he experienced. I don't think all the other apostles were also getting visions from god, nor do I think they were actually healing people in miraculous ways etc. after Jesus' death. This story is also very convenient for Paul if you have Peter have a vision that confirms that you don't need to follow the law if God says so. Compare that to James 2:8.
Sure, Paul's careful to emphasize his own authority in Galatians—you see it a lot more there than in most of the other letters.
The Holy Spirit features prominently throughout Acts, including in the time before the conversion of Paul, and you see it in all the gospels (e.g. Mark 1:8). I just checked a reconstruction of Q, and it's in there as well. I don't see it in James, so perhaps that means it doesn't count, if that's the only thing you consider not Pauline, but I think it's quite clearly there otherwise. I'm not sure precisely what you mean by how the rapture/apocalypse happens. What do you think draws from Greek philosophy and Platonism? I'll grant that Paul was probably the one of the apostles most advocating for not needing to follow the ceremonial law, and that the others followed him in that. That's what Acts 15 seems to witness to.
How is James 2:8 in conflict there? Look at the passage? He is affirming that the law there is good, and that we will not adequately fulfill it—that matches Paul. (See, e.g. Galatians 3:10ff.)
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Was Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Sulaymān al-Tamīmī a radical theologian or a conventional one? Was Jehan Cauvin?
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