Jesus mythicism and first-century Jewish cosmology

Longfellow

Longfellow

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Some time ago, maybe a year or more, I read that Richard Carrier had proven mathematically that the probability that Jesus existed is in the range of 0 to 1/3. I had to know all about that, to see how well it stood up. From there, I fell into a rabbit hole looking-glass world of Bayesian storytelling, but that's another story for another time.

As I remember it, Carrier has a theory that Christianity began with some Jews worshiping a god similar to some some Greek and Roman gods, but who was crucified and raised in a celestial realm, not on earth. Later, they retrofitted that onto their scriptures. Over time, that story started being told as if it were about a real person. I wanted to see if there could be any grain of truth in that, if I could find any trace of some Jews believing in a purely celestial figure who could have evolved into the Jesus of Christianity. I found not only one, but an entire family of celestial figures in first-century Judaism who not only could have evolved but actually did evolve into the Jesus of Christianity.
 
More specifically for example, these heavenly figures from first-century Judaism were identified with Jesus by his disciples:
  • Wisdom traditions (Sophia/Hokhmah)
  • Logos theology → Philo of Alexandria, later echoed in John.
  • Exalted patriarchs (e.g. Enoch, Elijah and Moses)
  • Angelic hierarchies → 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Dead Sea Scrolls.
  • Heavenly intermediaries → angels, archangels, exalted patriarchs (like Enoch/Metatron).
  • Personified attributes → Wisdom, Word/Logos, Name, Glory, Spirit.
  • Cosmic mediators → figures who bridge heaven and earth, conveying divine presence or authority.
  • Melchizedek → heavenly deliverer, priest, bridging heaven and earth
I disagree with Carrier in three ways: 1. I think that there was not only one first century Jewish heavenly figure that evolved into the Jesus of Christianity. There was a whole family of them. 2. I don’t think those heavenly figures themselves were borrowed from Roman and Greek cosmology and retrofitted to the scriptures. I do think that Roman and Greek cosmology might have influenced some people’s interpretation of those scriptures, or at least how they described it 3. I don’t think that the character of Jesus was invented for that purpose. I think that there was already a real person whose disciples associated the same OT passages with him that Jewish cosmology associated with those heavenly figures.
 
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Longfellow said:
some Jews worshiping a god similar to some some Greek and Roman gods, but who was crucified and raised in a celestial realm,
Click to expand...
A couple of questions spring to mind. Was he a god prior to the crucifixion and who crucified him and why?
 
rocala said:
A couple of questions spring to mind. Was he a god prior to the crucifixion and who crucified him and why?
Click to expand...
That's a rough outline of Carrier's theory as I remember it. I don't remember all the details. I only mentioned his theory because that's what put me on a trail that led to first century Jewish heavenly figures like the ones that I listed above, which I think are part of the history of Christianity.
 
I’ve been arguing against what I thought was a popular view among scholars, that Paul was the first to say some things that he said about Jesus, but maybe they aren’t saying that anymore if they ever did.
 
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