The distinguishing characteristic of a Christian sect would be the archangel Jesus having died. There is no evidence Paul knew of any
Christian sect preaching “another kind of death.”
[…]
Paul is never clear on what sort of death is meant. The words he uses also referred to standard Jewish executions (as for example by stoning). I cite scholarship and evidence of that in
OHJ (pp. 61-62). So, for example, the sect outside the Roman Empire that preached Christ was stoned and
then crucified, by the Jews (
OHJ, Ch. 8.1; which Paul could be referring to, as he is sufficiently vague) could be more original than the souped up version invented possibly by Mark that has the Romans do it in collusion with the Jews.
Other than that, there probably were
pre-Christian sects (one of which probably became Christian, by novel revelation) that did revere the archangel Jesus and probably even taught he would be the coming messiah, but had not yet come to the conclusion that he’d died to effect his plans, thus had already initiated the end times timetable. There are hints in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the sect(s) represented there did have some such view (and may even have written up pesher prophecies of that angel’s future planned death). But we don’t know that for sure, we don’t know if the only such sect simply became Christianity, we don’t know if any members of that sect protested the revelation and stuck to the original timetable and thus broke away, we don’t know if there were other sects never impacted by the revelation who continued preaching their own thing. Paul does say there were sects preaching “another Jesus” whom the Christians should shun. So those could have been any of the above, for example.
Another way to look at it is: the manner of death was too trivial to have a schism over at that point, especially as Paul is so vague about it—and you don’t go vague on a point that’s creating schisms; that’s what creeds are for: to demarcate what’s valid and what’s anathema. So clearly there were no anathemas regarding means of the killing; vagueness would at best mean an intent to “big tent” the movement and unite schisms. Notice that by the time we get to Ignatius,
now the manner of death is a schism point built into the creed, indicating that
by then there certainly were sects disagreeing (though exactly what they were disagreeing on or why we can only speculate). But that’s almost a hundred years later. But there could well have been sects still revering or expecting the Jesus angel as not having died, and who (like possibly Philo) thought it absurd that he would ever do so, and/or who (like possibly the Qumran sect) thought it was not time yet for it to happen, who were competing with Christian sects. They could be the “other Jesus’s” Paul talks about. But we sadly just don’t know.
Comment by Richard Carrier—23 May 2018—per "Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus".
Richard Carrier Blogs. 26 April 2018.
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