aa5874

But, you appear to have amnesia.

You must have forgotten that your posts have been recorded.

This is an excerpt from post #92

You just seem to be playing a game.

Petergdi

Kurios for God is meant as the greek equivalent of Adonai.

The primary sense of kurios applied to Jesus is the inverse of doulos.

A "servant of Christ Jesus" is someone for whom "Jesus is lord". It is easy for a modern English reader to miss this, but for the original readership the kurios/doulos relationship was a basic fact of life.

Paul does believe that the same honour is due to the risen and exalted Christ as to God, and he sometimes uses parts of the OT in which kurios represents YHWH to talk about Christ, but I think if you read Paul with the kurios/doulos relationship in mind you will see it all over the Pauline epistles.

Peter.

avi

And, for those few folks unfamiliar with Hebrew, 'adonai' is translated as 'lord'.
And, for those few members of the forum, like me, not yet up to speed with Greek, 'doulos' means 'slave' in English. So, the inverse of slave, is obviously 'master', or slave owner, both quite repugnant thoughts to me. Slavery was very common in Ancient Greece, presumably including the second century CE, i.e. at the time of the creation of the 'gospels', and 'Paul's' letters.
Perhaps, but doulos does not mean 'servant', but rather, 'slave'.

avi

Petergdi

It's a metaphor. The original audience understood what slavery was like better than any of us can today. A large proportion of the first readers of the NT were slaves. In Paul's metaphor everyone is a slave, you can be a slave of sin, or a slave of righteousness. See Paul's discussion in Romans 6 12-23.

Paul's letters are first century, and most or all of the gospels are too. Trying to date everything late is more than a little silly.

Peter.

aa5874

But, Philo, a supposed contemporary of Jesus, Peter and Paul, made no reference to a man or an entity called Jesus who was elevated to the same level as "Yahweh".

Philo, a Jew from Alexander, a supposed contemporary of Jesus, Peter and Paul made no mention AT ALL is his writings that there were JEWS, Peter, Paul and eleven others who asked the people of Judea to elevate a Jewish man called Jesus to the same status as Yahweh.

To elevate a man to the same status as Yahweh by Jews in the 1st century, before the Fall of the Temple or 70 CE, would have been a most significant departure from Jewish tradition as described by Philo and Josephus where Jews from Judea and Alexandria would have preferred to have their necks chopped off than worship a man as a God and give him the name and status of Yahweh.

The Pauline writings about Jesus are implausible and are consistent with LYING not madness.

This is found in Philippians 2.5-6 Now the Pauline writer did refer to Jesus as existing in the form of THEOS.

No Jewish source of antiquity external of the Church writings can demonstrate that there was a Jewish man who existed in the form of THEOS with the same status as Yahweh with the power to forgive the sins of Jews and the power to abolish circumcision before the Fall of the Temple.

rizdek

It is interesting that Paul apparently said he used all means (1 Cor. 9:20) to reach people. ALL means could include lying, because of a "the end justifies the means" approach. This would then suggest he might be a pathological liar which I guess is a form of mental illness...at least a mental disorder for some. But he might have merely felt justified to "stretch" the truth so he could save people from eternal damnation.

This reminds me of an amusing/sad anecdote between my father (may he RIP) and me. I had de-converted and told my folks (this was 30+ years ago). Naturally my folks were distressed and hoped I'd reconvert. One day, in a conversation with my dad I said something relating to Paul saying that he would "by all means save some." My dad expressed relief thinking I had repositioned my beliefs. He was quite elderly and I never had the heart to tell him it was a backhanded compliment (aka asteism) aimed at Paul and other apologists who would use deceit to get people to convert. Sorry for the tangent.

avi

Peter, I am sure you mean well, in submitting your thoughts to the forum, and I do not wish to disparage your thoughts. However, can you not appreciate how "silly" it is to write that significant quantity of slaves were literate in Greek?
Do you imagine that somehow the kids go to school in the Greek world, by then administered by the Romans, even in Greece itself, and then, having been well educated, become the property of slave owners? Or, alternatively, do you imagine some Roman General, with thousands of slaves and their children, sending the kiddos off to school to learn how to read Aristotle?

Peter, absent evidence to the contrary, I must argue that it is not only silly, but wrong, to write that a significant proportion, i.e. a measurable quantity, in excess of 100 persons, let's say, of slaves, could read or even comprehend, the gospels. I will go further and say, that in my opinion, offered with as much evidence as you have provided for your sentiments, i.e. zero, virtually none of the slaves or former slaves could read or write Koine Greek. I am doubtful that a significant proportion of those participating in the earliest Christian churches could even understand spoken Greek, since Turkish (Hittites), Coptic, Aramaic, and Syriac, are not even in the same Indo-European family of languages, and Persian, which is in the same family of languages as Greek, is about as similar to Greek as it is to German, i.e. not very similar. The linguistic barrier would have been formidable.

Paul was mentally deranged, Peter. Would you recommend that I read other mentally deranged persons' writings to learn about the meaning and proper interpretation of the Gospels?

How would you respond to me, if I urged you to read about the Mormons, to learn the truth about Jesus' visit to North America?
I am sure that you can offer some evidence in support of your fervent belief. I am keen to learn of that evidence. Absent some reliable data, I will stick with my opinion that the Gospels were created in the aftermath of the third Jewish Roman War, and "Paul's" letters written subsequently, mid second century. I am easily impressed by data, I am absolutely unimpressed by fervent convictions, or lofty credentials. Roger Pearse is correct on that point, in my opinion!

avi

Solo

I don't think it's a question of phonetics but a cultural attitude to God. The one dominating Jewish thought down to the Hellenistic era was the fear of the power of God, and the need to placate God by obeisance and ritual. The old Jewish God was impenetrable: 'I AM that I AM....tell them I AM sends you'. He tells Abraham to kill Isaac and then changes his mind. The fear of this kind of GOD extended as far as deciding when God's sacred name could be used. Since in mere reciting the texts there was no direct petition to God, the sacred tetragram was substituted.

The Greeks had no such fear of the supernatural. In the popular tales the figures of the Pantheon were oversized humanoids with human defects and weaknesses, angry, infidel and spiteful. The God of the philosophers was knowable because it was abstract, impersonal and logical. Wisdom, not raw power, was the aspect of God that conferred dignity and appealed to intelligent humans. To a rational culture, the idea that anything of God was untouchable, or unreacheable, would seem silly, a product of primitive mind easily spooked.

Jiri

Petergdi

It isn't silly at all. Being silly would mean something like using your imagination to do ancient history without bothering to take a minute to look it up.


He seems to me to be saner than than the average person. While there are occasional oddities in his arguments, reading BC&H and seeing the extreme oddities here should keep those in perspective.


Familiarity with the rest of the NT is essential. While Pauline metaphors and Synoptic metaphors are not always the same, they have more in common with each other than they do with mid-2nd century and later Christian writings.


Silly analogy. If you asked me to read Brigham Young to understand Joseph Smith, it would be more apt and I would think it reasonable. (I'm not saying that the parallel is a good one, I know only a little of LDS history, and someone who hadn't met JS in person but was of the same gneration would be more analogous.)

Peter,

DCHindley

In the affluent households would be more literate slaves, especially household slaves, than you may be assuming. Also, are you aware that in antiquity most folks were familiar with literature that was read aloud to them, not directly read by each individual? The upper crust employed literate slaves to manage their correspondence as well as any collections of literature they posessed. They may also have read them aloud to their master as well as to any guests he may have had in attendance. What is to prevent them from doing the same for the other household slaves, only with literature directed to them?

I believe Harry Gamble discusses this in Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (or via: amazon.co.uk).

DCH