Ben,
It looks like R.J. has been reading "The Real Messiah," by Stephan Huller, an author whose work, unfortunately, seems to be of a genre somewhere between The Bible Code and The Da Vinci Code. As far as I can tell, Huller's Big Idea is that Agrippa was the real Messiah. And, as far as I can tell, he seems to think that Jesus saw Messiahship as a sort of dynastic position and wanted Mark to be the next Messiah-office-holder. Robert Price sums up Huller's ideas at
http://frommessiahtopariah.blogspot.com/2007/04/robert-price.html
(Over at the textualcriticism group, Huller seems to be experimenting with a defense of the idea that the Gospel of John is very late -- late enough to reflect the author's awareness of the Marcionites. To do that, he has to say that P52 is something other that what it is; i.e., instead of being a part of the Gospel of Mark, that it is part of a some sort of Super-Gospel text resembling the Diatessaron in its scope.)
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
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Dispraxis writes:
ReplyDeleteMr. Stephen Huller, author of The Real Messiah, posted the comment below which I assumed was an error as it seems addressed to James Snapp, Jr., who would probably not get the message from here, I assume. However, Mr. Huller insists he meant it for my blog, so I have had to reconstruct it. Sorry, Stephan.
Mr. Huller commented:
Hi James,
We know each other from the Textual Criticism group. I just wanted you to know that I said nice things about you at my actual site:
http://www.stephanhuller.blogspot.com
There are 600 posts which detail some of the proofs for my assertions. But if I was to sum up what I BELIEVE here is a brief summary:
1) the Alexandrian claim to have been founded by Mark is true
2) the gospel was written at Alexandria to reinforce the 'chair of Mark' and later the Alexandrian office of Papa a title appropriated by the Roman Church in the 5th century from Alexandria
3) the reason Origen knows of traditions (Jewish and otherwise) that Agrippa was the messiah was because Agrippa was St. Mark
4) Origen's two advent system was an attempt at justifying the traditional Alexandrian understanding that Jesus emptied himself into little Mark at the crucifixion and it was little Mark who showed the stigmata on his hands and feet to prove this
5) Judaism, Samaritanism and Christianity in the period before the Antonine Emperors likely all believed a version of the 'Agrippa as Christ' idea.
6) the general idea rooted in a single, long gospel was maintained into the sixth or seventh century by Marcionitism (i.e. 'those of Mark') which remained especially influential around Edessa
7) the argument was ultimately developed by Mohammed as proof for his own status in early Islam (again based on a single long, gospel).
Hope that helps clear up what it is that I BELIEVE. I do work on scholarly projects which doesn't reference some or all of these theories no differently than you or anyone else that maintains a religious faith.
Thanks