Extracts from David Armstrong:
Roland, Rebirth, and Resurrection: A Comparative Eschatology of Paramahansa Yogananda and Origen of Alexandria
(Post of first part)
On the one hand, scholars of Early Judaism now take it for granted that all Judaism after the time of Alexander the Great was thoroughly Hellenized. The question in analyzing Jewish individuals, documents, and archaeology after 323 BCE is not whether they were Hellenized, but how much, in what ways, and with how much comfortable permeability of the boundaries of social institutions and cultural participation ... All varieties of Early Judaism are thus forms of Greco-Roman religion: Hellenistic and Imperial species of ethnically specific behavior dealing with ancestral customs and cultural norms for interactions with divinity and the worshiping community.
On the other hand, scholars of Early Christianity now universally recognize that the nascent Jesus Movement of the first century was fully within the cultic, social, and institutional boundaries of what we would identify as “Judaism,” and did not constitute an explicitly separate, wholly distinct religious phenomenon—“Christianity”—for some time afterwards.
The only conclusion that can follow from these premises is thus that to talk about the earliest “Christianity” as a species of Early Judaism and to talk about it from within the framework of Hellenic religion, philosophy, myth, and literary culture are not and cannot be mutually exclusive.
... scholars like M. David Litwa, whose excellent work demonstrates the sheer Hellenism of the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus in the terms of what ancient Greeks and Romans expected from their gods, including their human gods (“demigods” or “heroes”)... Luke’s account of Jesus’ pneumatic conception, for example, while certainly drawing on what he deemed tradition concerning Jesus’ conception and birth and making use of explicitly Jewish imagery, language, and themes (particularly surrounding haaron habrit, the ark of the covenant), no less engages in a theory of the genesis of divine humans that was also advocated by his pagan contemporary Plutarch (Moralia 7173-718b).
Likewise, as Litwa later points out, contra N.T. Wright and pro the growing consensus of scholars who work on ancient theories of resurrection (or what Litwa calls “corporeal immortalization”), Jesus’ restoration to physical life (the Gospels do not leave a corpse in the tomb) is the same preliminary to divine glorification or bodily deification that heroes like Asklepios, Herakles, and Romulus had received.
Again, the point is not anything so crude as to say that the Gospel writers simply “borrowed” something from the pagan imaginary and slapped it onto Jesus; but it is rather to point out that for Early Christian language about Jesus, as a species of Early Jewish ethnoreligious language, itself just part of the broader Greco-Roman cultural web, to have any kind of positive content for the people to whom that language was addressed, then what happened to Jesus had to have had some kind of parallel point of reference in wider religious discourse. Jesus can, and does, for the Gospel writers, surpass all other possible rivals, but figures like St. Justin Martyr had no problem, as Litwa points out, simply admitting that what Christians claim to have happened in, through, to, and for Jesus is “nothing at all new” or out of the ordinary beyond what was ordinarily predicated of the demigods in Greek religion (Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 21.1-3).
The basic principle here is that the mystery of Christ is unintelligible if it is wholly dissimilar to everything else culturally. If Christ has no parallel in world mythology, philosophy, and religion, then one has only succeeded in making Jesus perfectly inaccessible to all human conceptualization.
Roland, Rebirth, and Resurrection: A Comparative Eschatology of Paramahansa Yogananda and Origen of Alexandria
(Post of first part)
On the one hand, scholars of Early Judaism now take it for granted that all Judaism after the time of Alexander the Great was thoroughly Hellenized. The question in analyzing Jewish individuals, documents, and archaeology after 323 BCE is not whether they were Hellenized, but how much, in what ways, and with how much comfortable permeability of the boundaries of social institutions and cultural participation ... All varieties of Early Judaism are thus forms of Greco-Roman religion: Hellenistic and Imperial species of ethnically specific behavior dealing with ancestral customs and cultural norms for interactions with divinity and the worshiping community.
On the other hand, scholars of Early Christianity now universally recognize that the nascent Jesus Movement of the first century was fully within the cultic, social, and institutional boundaries of what we would identify as “Judaism,” and did not constitute an explicitly separate, wholly distinct religious phenomenon—“Christianity”—for some time afterwards.
The only conclusion that can follow from these premises is thus that to talk about the earliest “Christianity” as a species of Early Judaism and to talk about it from within the framework of Hellenic religion, philosophy, myth, and literary culture are not and cannot be mutually exclusive.
... scholars like M. David Litwa, whose excellent work demonstrates the sheer Hellenism of the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus in the terms of what ancient Greeks and Romans expected from their gods, including their human gods (“demigods” or “heroes”)... Luke’s account of Jesus’ pneumatic conception, for example, while certainly drawing on what he deemed tradition concerning Jesus’ conception and birth and making use of explicitly Jewish imagery, language, and themes (particularly surrounding haaron habrit, the ark of the covenant), no less engages in a theory of the genesis of divine humans that was also advocated by his pagan contemporary Plutarch (Moralia 7173-718b).
Likewise, as Litwa later points out, contra N.T. Wright and pro the growing consensus of scholars who work on ancient theories of resurrection (or what Litwa calls “corporeal immortalization”), Jesus’ restoration to physical life (the Gospels do not leave a corpse in the tomb) is the same preliminary to divine glorification or bodily deification that heroes like Asklepios, Herakles, and Romulus had received.
Again, the point is not anything so crude as to say that the Gospel writers simply “borrowed” something from the pagan imaginary and slapped it onto Jesus; but it is rather to point out that for Early Christian language about Jesus, as a species of Early Jewish ethnoreligious language, itself just part of the broader Greco-Roman cultural web, to have any kind of positive content for the people to whom that language was addressed, then what happened to Jesus had to have had some kind of parallel point of reference in wider religious discourse. Jesus can, and does, for the Gospel writers, surpass all other possible rivals, but figures like St. Justin Martyr had no problem, as Litwa points out, simply admitting that what Christians claim to have happened in, through, to, and for Jesus is “nothing at all new” or out of the ordinary beyond what was ordinarily predicated of the demigods in Greek religion (Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. 21.1-3).
The basic principle here is that the mystery of Christ is unintelligible if it is wholly dissimilar to everything else culturally. If Christ has no parallel in world mythology, philosophy, and religion, then one has only succeeded in making Jesus perfectly inaccessible to all human conceptualization.
