Doherty, who for all his flaws is the most thoughtful and convincing mythicist ive ever read, attempts to go beyond "the crucifixion was made up" and provide some sort of positive conception of the event, as he sees it, within the early Church. The key, he thinks, is Middle Platonist cosmology.
At its most basic, Middle Platonism divides the universe up into various "spheres" which can themselves be partitioned into two major categories, sublunar (below the moon) and supralunar (above the moon). These latter spheres are the spheres of heaven; involved in the movement of planetary bodies and the home of angels and God himself, heavenly spheres are unchangeable and incorruptible. Below the moon lies the realm of change and corruptibility. Like the heavenly spheres which were no doubt thought to number many, Doherty believes Middle Platonists subdivided the sublunlar realm. The earth and ordinary sorts of historical events occur in the lowest of these, he says, but above in what I understand him to be saying is the firmament, kinds of spiritual, un-earthly ones. These sublunar spiritual events are in some sense parallel to earthly, fleshy ones, but are not strictly earthly or fleshy as we normally encounter them. The heavenly Jerusalem in John's apocalypse, which Doherty offers in support of his thesis, is like the earthly Jerusalem in that it contains thrones and garments and presumably other kinds of ordinary stuff, but clearly not in an ontologically equivalent sense. Heavenly buildings are not actually made of stone or heavenly garments of cloth.
It is here in the sublunar Twilight Zone of the firmament that Doherty places the crucifixion. Paul, he says, conceived of Jesus as having coming down from the supralunar spheres of heaven into the firmament above the earth where he was crucified by the malevolent demons who make it their home. A nice little package to be sure, but just how consistent with known Middle Platonist belief is Doherty's thesis? The long and short of it is, not in the least.
So far as we are aware, the sublunar realm was a continuous expanse. The earth and normal goings-on were, as in Doherty, located at the bottom. Above this though was not a pseudo-fleshy realm of buildings and crucifixes where a man could be put to death, but air. Actual, ordinary air that we breath. Yes, demons inhabited this space (firmament) between the earth and moon, but this is because they too were made of air (or fire). Yet, aside from demons and two or three other things the ancients considered spiritual (water, fire), we find nothing but birds acting here, which is very explicable. Birds, but not people, buildings or big wooden crosses, are known to traverse our regular every-day sky.
So how does Doherty turn the same regular ol' sky we see when we look up into a parallel world where something like a crucifixion could occur? Primarily in two ways; confusing and conflating happenings in different spheres and drawing undocumented analogies, usually in the form of a rhetorical question.
The Ascension of Isaiah, so key to his argument, is a perfect example of the former. Doherty freely quotes 7.9:
"And we went up into the firmament...for the likeness of that which is in the firmament is here on the earth."
His clear implication is that the author of AoI conceives of the firmament not only as being above the earth, but as mirroring it. The context, however, makes nonsense of this:
Quite simply, the likeness is not general, as Doherty supposes. It does not refer to buildings or clothes or crosses or human-like beings at all, but to fighting and envying. Demons in the sky, like people on the earth proper, fight and envy. Thats the extent of similarity.7.9. And we ascended to the firmament, I and he, and there I saw Sammael and his hosts, and there was great fighting therein and the angels of Satan were envying one another.
10. And as above so on the earth also; for the likeness of that which is in the firmament is here on the earth.
11. And I said unto the angel (who was with me): "(What is this war and) what is this envying?"
12. And he said unto me: "So has it been since this world was made until now, and this war (will continue) till He, whom thou shalt see will come and destroy him.
Heavenly Jerusalem doesnt work either. How pseudo-earthly things in the spheres of heaven support the hypothesis that Jesus was crucified below the spheres of heaven but above the earth (that is, in the sky), im not entirely sure.
I'll continue later.
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