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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.
Many many treatises could and have been written about what Acts 15 does and does not do. But yeah, there's very little that is particularly on point for what Peter's vision was about. I mean, Peter was a main character there; you'd think he'd have brought up his vision and been like, "Yo dawgs, god told me in a vision that we can eat dawgs, so we can definitely throw that bit out."
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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.)
No I consider Q Jesus' teachings, but it was placed into the bible from the Pauline school, and I don't think the way the holy spirit is referenced in Q has the kind of theological qualities that it does in the more explicitly Paul writings, it's more just used as a kind of addendum or exclamation mark, there's not much meaning in how it's used there and could be removed without changing the meaning of things.
Corinthians 15:35 (and a bit preceding it) goes over what I think are his unique ideas that I don't think the Jewish followers of Jesus really had in mind, and have that platonic quality. When he's talking about "glories" of things that is basically Platonic "ideal" versions of things.
I think that contrasts with James' "whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." I'm not totally familiar with all the evidence on what Jewish Jesus followers believed, I think there would be knowledge of Greek ideas and the traditional Jewish views of it not being much, but I don't see anything like passage of Paul in the above passage along with his certainty. I only find one passage in Q that seems anything like an afterlife heaven and that may have been phrased differently in Jesus' original words, referring to what I think most scholars understand that he believed in an earthly heaven that he would rule.
And sorry I meant James 2:10 which I think Paul very much disagrees with.
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