DCHindley

Loomis,

Oops! Too early and too little coffee.

I said

IHSOUS is indeed declinable. Yes, I, even I, make errors.

I was thrown off by the form "Iesoun" you keep posting. IHSOUN is the accusative form of the word, used when the name is the object of a sentence. It is the custom among one and all to refer to Greek nouns in the nominitave case, in this case IHSOUS (Iesous), unless you are quoting something in the original Greek.

DCH

DCHindley

Loomis,

You say

The oracles are written in a kind of verse with predictable meter involving vowels and syllables. I guess the editor of that translation of S.O. felt that verse 257 seemed to ruin the meter of the segment 256-259.

Verses 256, 258 & 259 all clearly refer to Joshua son of Nun. Vs 257 seems to draw on Numbers 11:7-9, where Moses stretches out his arms and the Israelites win in battle. Thank you for noticing that Sirach has Joshua stretch out his arms holding his sword "against the cities (that resisted the Israelites)." I have not seen that used in commentaries so far. Yet vs 257 also adds that part about the "fruitful wood." The manuscripts of S.O. that have survived were all preserved by Christians. I think a Christian copyist saw this passage (256, 258-9), which was based on Joshua as a military leader, which may have even included a line which drew from Sirach, and thought "this HAS to refer to Jesus Christ," adding that bit about the fruitful wood. Christians loved to redact Jewish literature, especially apocalypses and esoteric literature, to add Christ dogma.

I can direct you to a really good example of this kind of Christian "adoption and adaptation" of Jewish works. In books 7 & 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions (ca. 150-300 CE) are sixteen prayers that appear to have been remnants of Jewish synagogal prayers, very similar to prayers in the present day Jewish Prayer Book, and may derive from the Jewish liturgy as practiced in Alexandria. These prayers are full of interpolations that introduce Christian catch-phrases and passages of Christ doctrine. See the translation and commentary by D R Darnell in J H Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, volume 2, pages 671-697.

But why should Jesus Christ receiving greater glory than Moses mean he is the successor of Moses. You know Moses' face was said to have shone with light after God allowed him to see him face to face, and so Jesus, who is in heaven with God as HP, should glow even more brightly in the opinion of the author of Hebrews.

I might have overstated things when I said he is a kind of Joshua redivivus. The author of S.O. V.256-259 may have simply borrowed the imagery to emphasize that the coming messiah would be a conqueror like Joshua was believed to have been. It seems to be a Christian who thought it should refer to Jesus Christ, which Christian see as a different kind of messiah.

DCH

spamandham

Yes, but you are ignoring 98% of the Pauline corpus to focus on a couple of phrases, when we *know* (to the extent we know anything about history) that the writings we have are not pristine copies of the originals, but have been edited many times over. That's not a reasonable approach.

We can't simply pretend that what we have are unmolested copies of the originals.

The ideas are not my original ideas of course. I probably could google to relocate references on general cult psychology, but so could you.

aa5874

I challenge the notion that "Paul" was a 1st century writer . There is no corroborative source for" Paul" outside of the Church.

The PAULINE writings must be proven to be from the 1st century before this character whose conversion found in Acts is fictitious can be used as some sort of contemporary.

It is very critical that PAUL'S history be confirmed or that an historical source external of the Church be located to date Paul.

What PAUL thought or wrote about Jesus may be of no historical significance if he was nowhere in the 1st century.

Why did the Church canonise Acts of the Apostles with a most fictitious conversion of Saul/Paul?

People who knew the Pauline writer and were his converts would have known that his conversion was fiction as found in Acts, not once but three times.

Why did the author of Acts refuse to write about the death of Paul once he was martyred?

Why was Acts of the Apostles written in a manner so that it would appear that it was written before the death of Paul?

Paul is a most questionable character.

I refuse to accept Paul as a contemporary of Jesus until some one can show he did exist in the 1st century using credible external non-apologetic sources.

How did PAUL manage to meet people who are most likely to have been fictitious characters

How did the Church not know that more than one person was using the name Paul to write Epistles?

Jesus cannot be historicised by fictitious characters.

It must be demanded that Paul's history be ascertained before he can be used as a contemporary.

angelo

It's available through Lulu publishing.

ApostateAbe

I am not pretending that we have unmolested copies of the originals. The point is to go with the most plausible explanation given the evidence. Many times, interpolations have evidence to indicate that they are interpolations--they are out of place, they don't fit the confirmed views of the author, they fit the likely views of an interpolator, we have known interpolations that are closely comparable to them, or we have a clear intent on the part of the interpolator. You can always speculate about interpolation, and it means that you can make any theory consistent. There is one scholar who thinks that Jesus was a Pharisee--you can do that, you can make that possible, as long as you attribute the anti-Pharisee sayings of Jesus to the misquotes of later Christians. It seems to me that a better theory requires the least number of interpolations that lack evidence.

And, the human nature of Jesus is not something obscure in the writings of Paul, not if you take what seems to me the most plausible interpretations. Paul repeatedly makes a point about the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as the cross of Jesus. That was a well-known method of Roman execution at the time, and it was earthly, physical and human. There is no evidence to suggest that it was spiritual, as mythicists otherwise may claim. They don't seem to claim that they are mere interpolations, as they would for the even more direct statements of Paul, but, if you combine the unlikely interpolations with the unlikely interpretation of a "crucifixion," then you only compound the relative implausibility of the entire theory. You "solve" the problem in only the most trivial amateurish sense. You can make any theory consistent like that.
This is not a general point. This would be an obscure point, not easily found with a Google search. But, if you don't know where to look, that's fine, I won't hold it against you.

ApostateAbe

I already knew someone was publishing it, but thanks. I can find even some of the most obscure scholarly books on the interlibrary loan catalog, since it integrates dozens or academic libraries in its network. If it isn't there, then pretty much the only choice is to buy it from an online bookseller. Amazon.com, of course, has almost every book. The advantage of the interlibrary loan is that it is free for students. Or, at least, my scholarship donors are paying for it.

aa5874

But there is evidence that the Pauline Jesus was non-historical. This cannot be denied.

In the Pauline writings it can be found where the writer claimed he was not the Apostle of a man but of Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead.

There is further evidence where it can be found where the writer claimed he was not taught by man but by the revelation from Jesus Christ, the same who was raised from the dead.

In Colossians, a Pauline writer described Jesus as the Creator of heaven and earth.

Colossians 1.12-16 It is extremely clear that the Pauline Jesus was described as a God not just a man. The Pauline Jesus was a GOD/MAN just as in the Gospels and the Canon.

angelo

Not forgetting of course the brain explosion he experienced on the road to Damascus.

Don McIntosh

I hear this sort of thing all the time, especially in this forum, and I must confess that I don't quite understand the reasoning. I realize I'm a bit late to this dance, and worse yet, I am a fundamentalist without an advanced degree in Biblical Studies, Historiography, or Ancient Languages. So I decided to review Paul's letters, starting with Romans (generally accepted as authentic), his first in the canon, and got no further than this:

"Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:1-4).

Evidently the emphasized portion has been described as cryptic, or perhaps ambiguous, by some, but it is commonly used by Paul in reference to physical realities (except when speaking of the flesh as the "sinful nature," which clearly Paul would not say of Christ, let alone in the context of his birth and resurrection by the "Spirit of holiness"). It seems to me, then, to indicate a theological point on the part of Paul, that Jesus, though Lord and Messiah, was born into the world as a flesh-and-blood man. That is, he was both Son of David and Son of God. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles (Greeks), and his decidedly theological message centered on Jesus' fundamental identity, so he had little need to rehash the various historical circumstances of the life of Jesus (other than his becoming a man for the purpose of salvation). Besides, it may well be that his audience was already immersed in the writings and oral traditions that made up the Gospels.

At the same time, Paul was keenly aware of proto-Gnostic movements afoot at the time, as his apologetic addresses to the Corinthians and Colossians indicate. As direct witness to the overwhelming power of Christ he was nonetheless reminding the Romans of Jesus' genuine humanity (historicity) in the introduction to his theological magnum opus. For this reason and others, I don't buy Bultmann's miracle = myth assumption, which leads to the history-or-myth dichotomy that dominates discussions of Jesus like this one. To me it makes more sense to say that an ongoing, seemingly unresolvable disupute over Historical Jesus vs. Mythical Jesus offers indirect evidence of an original, Traditional Jesus. In other words: The church councils were right all along.

The apostolic writers as a group (and especially John), along with the early church fathers, took great exception to docetism, which could be roughly defined as the belief that the physical-historical element of the Incarnation story was a myth, or at least illusory. So… why would anyone think that strident anti-mythicists were really mythicists at some deeper level? If they were not mythicists, is it reasonable to suggest that they should have gone out of their way to anticipate 21st century historical criticism and formulate a preemptive "response"? To me, trying to demonstrate that Jesus wasn't a myth is like trying to prove that we aren't all currently living in The Matrix:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix2.html