spin

This is a text analytical necessity. You must deal with the text for what it says before contaminating it with ideas from elsewhere. People running off to 1 Corinthians haven't done so. If the content in 1 Corinthians is in conflict with that in Galatians, how do you resolve the problem? Not by arbitrarily deciding 1 Corinthians better knows than what one reads in Galatians, causing one to work around the implications of Galatians. What sort of procedure would that be?


spin

spamandham

The creed in 1 Cor 15 has been argued by several well qualified scholars to be an interpolation.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter,[b] and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Paul received a creed from someone that included Paul being the last apostle? It seems kind of odd don't you think?

gurugeorge

It could be like a lineage recital in Tibetan Buddhism - it's like a surety for the listener. "Look, I'm at the tail end of a line of transmission".

The context is a discussion of (a rather spiritual kind of) resurrection isn't it? So there's a place here for a recital of a belief, and up to the second "according to Scripture" it looks pretty solid. After that, yes, you could argue some kind of interpolation - but it could also just be Paul rambling on.

But that main bit is all that's needed to show that he "received" the dying/rising mytheme, and that the Christ "appeared" to him in the same way that He appeared to the others named, and not in any fleshly way (i.e. there is no necessary implication that any of the people mentioned knew this Joshua Messiah fellow in person).

gurugeorge

Yeah, but aren't you just doing that in reverse?

gurugeorge

But my point is that isn't the only option. You can still accept a connection to earlier followers/originators of the idea without requiring the truth of the historical Jesus hypothesis. There is no implication in the creed at 1 Corinthians 15 that any of the people mentioned, including Paul, knew this Jesus as a person, and Paul's "seeing" of him is on a footing with theirs (i.e. it's a "grokking" not an eyeballing).

So far, the whole thing is just: variant Messianists in Jerusalem who purport to see evidence in Scripture that the Messiah has already been; dude comes along, take the idea on board but universalises it. That's all you've got there; no implication of historicity that hasn't been read into it.

(Of course, there's some implication of historicity in the myth - after all they believe this entity really did walk the earth and do the things they think he did - but that's not what we're talking about when we talk about "historical Jesus" now.)

Ben C Smith

Exactly so.

Ancient texts had no quotation marks, so the only ways to tell where the recitation of tradition ends and Paul himself begins to speak again are context and common sense. (Notice how nobody thinks Paul is still reciting tradition in, say, verse 10.) The recitation could end before the appearance list, or it could end before the appearance to Paul.

Personally, I think the tradition goes right up to and includes the appearance to all the apostles. Why? Simply because Paul himself (repeatedly) insists that he is an apostle, so it appears that the all the apostles line preceded the part about Paul, who is therefore adding his own appearance to a list that was already formed.

Ben.

aa5874

Paul's writings represent the God/man Jesus who was born of a virgin, crucified, resurrected, and ascended. It is fundamentally for that reason why the letters of the so-called Paul are canonised.

Paul in the NT did not have the same view as Marcion, where Jesus was unborn and did not resurrect or as Cerinthus, where Jesus was not a God at all.

Paul's claim is that he received his gospel from Jesus who was on earth and who later resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Those disciples who were with Jesus, while He was on earth, according to Paul, were preaching a gospel of circumcision, now it was his revelations from Jesus that produced a gospel for the Gentiles and also Jews, the gospel of uncircumcision.

But there is a problem, there are no other accounts except from Paul, that the disciples, like Peter, were preaching a gospel of circumcision. No other writer have written about any gospel of circumcision, not even in Acts of the Apostles.

Paul's conversion as stated in Acts of the Apostles alone contradicts his own claim about the gospel of circumcision.

There was no such gospel being preached, where a person must be circumcised to be saved, the disciples had received the Holy Ghost, as stated in Acts, and were , under the control of the HOLY SPIRIT, that is, they could only have said what the Holy Spirit wanted them to say.

And after the ascension of Jesus, the Apostles and seventy disciples went abroad and there are no written records even from apologatic sources that any of the Apostles or seventy disciples preached any other gospel other than belief in Jesus and baptism as the requirements for salvation. There are no accounts of massive increase in circumcision of converts any where, just baptism.

Paul's gospel of circumcision is bogus and cannot be accounted for.

Peter, under the power of the Holy Ghost was already preaching that whoever believe in Jesus and was baptised would be saved, even before the so-called Paul was converted by a bright light that left him blind to reality.

Amaleq13

And I thought you actually knew what "eisegesis" meant.

It is simply foolish to base one's conclusions about an author's views on only some of the available evidence. Again, the fact that your conclusion is based on such a foolish approach does help explain the resulting incoherence. You're staring at a single branch on a single tree and making claims about the guy who planted the forest. :banghead:

I'm not sure you actually understand "my" story enough to say but it is the incoherence of your story that is the problem.

Stop making foolish comments, if you are so concerned about my smilies' eyes.

You have made that claim but, as has already been pointed out repeatedly, it doesn't actually correspond to the text. Paul contrasts his interpretation of the implications of the death of Jesus for gentiles with the claims of his opponents. He never argues for the bare fact of a dead Jesus nor a crucified Jesus nor even hints that such claims were ever challenged. The crucifixion is unapologetically mentioned as though it was an uncontested and, therefore, shared belief with his opponents. A shared belief because it continues to be idiotic to suggest that these Judaizers, lacking an existing belief in a crucified messiah, would not have offered strong opposition and that Paul would have been forced to address such criticisms. As you well know, criticizing such a notion from the standpoint of a devout Jew would not be a terribly difficult task nor would it be a notion that a devout Jew would let slide. I would argue that such an abhorrent claim would be the focus of any criticism but, at the very least, it would be a part of any challenge to Paul's preaching from such clearly devout supporters of the Law and, therefore, a part of any defense.

There has never been such a moment. I have consistently tried to disabuse you of this misapprehension of my position but you perversely resist correction. :huh:

Why do you persist in asking questions to which you have already, repeatedly and by multiple individuals, been given the answers?

It is because my eyes are open that I find your conclusion wanting.

It is logical and coherent, yes. Quite unlike your own. The only real question is why the incoherence of the story your conclusion entails doesn't trouble you.

Oops, looks like you forgot that I changed my position from one closer to yours after rereading Paul subsequent to discussions here. IOW, and as I've already informed you, I became convinced by the evidence and contrary to the conclusion I held at the time. Wow, how weak does one's position have to be to fall back on the old "You don't accept my argument because you're biased" bullshit.

spamandham

That's possible, but there are other reasons to suspect interpolation as well. The exact words translated as "I received" strongly suggest a rabbinical tradition. But this is at odds with Paul's other claims that his gospel was revealed and not taught to him. Further, a creed is anachronistic for such an early point in church history.

Since we already know many writings were attributed to Paul after the fact, there is not much a priori bias toward an assumption of authenticity. A couple of oddities is enough to shift the balance to "most likely interpolated", and 3 is enough to declare it very likely.

If we exclude 1 Cor. 15 as an interpolation, I think the entire picture of how Paul views Jesus is changed. There are only a few other blurbs in Paul's writings where he says anything that would tie Jesus down as a human of the recent past, and we would need to examine those for likelihood of authenticity as well.

spin

"[A]ccept" is the wrong word. Try "support the conjecture of", or somesuch.

You're crossing from justifying conjecture to its irrelevance to my thoughts. You're right, but that doesn't justify the conjecture.

What makes you think the Jerusalem group were "variant Messianists"? Isn't this just more conjecture of the "skeptic's rehash" of common apologetics kind?


spin