Cege

So then you do recognize that men did perform resurrections according to the bible, although now you distinguish other resurrections than Jesus' as being resuscitations. Does the Greek make such a distinction regarding those described in the NT?

For example, in the case of Lazarus, who was reportedly dead for 4 days and decomposing, it seems radical to consider his dramatic resurrection as mere resuscitation.

I understand the assumption that Lazarus and the others lived to die a 2nd time, but FWIW the NT doesn't actually spell that out.

I agree that a resurrection that included supernatural body form and functions would be different from a resuscitation only.

ynquirer

'Resuscitation' is perhaps not a best choice to depict Lazarus' case, but that's what I meant, really.

Chili

Paul had just been through a divine comedy himself and knew exactly what he was doing. The faith of Peter was the efficient cause and Paul was the manifestation of this cause in the material world in the new Church that Jesus had promised to built. It is therefore that they became known as the first Pope. IOW, Paul launched the Church and left all so called Christians 'biting his dust' and so the gates of hell will never prevail against him.

There is nothing metaphoric about myth except to the outsider. Paul just gives us the right ingredients for the recipe that Jesus had in mind which must unfold on its own if God has anything to do with it. Yes, he was a mythopoet and therefore denied the historical worth of Jesus. Better yet, he move the who shebang to Rome in obedience to his call as the first chosen one. Good move I'd say.

But the preacher must speak fervently and with a high degree of urgency because the transformation does take place in the mind of he believer where the vail must be rent from top to bottom as if it was a hymen to severed.

Ben C Smith

For this thread, it is enough that the purported career of Jesus line up with either Dionysus or Augustus, mythical or not. The common thread is that both of them were imagined to have existed upon the earth, then ascended into heaven. That is the point of this thread. Not mythicity, not historicity.

I know you keep saying that, but it is still backwards.

This thread is about clearing the table of an hypothesis that I regard as nearly untenable. That hypothesis is the one that Doherty propounds, that Paul did not even think of Jesus as a being who had ever walked the earth. I am repeating myself here, but this thread is not about proving Jesus ever did walk the earth; it is about what Paul was thinking when he wrote what he wrote.

That may (or may not) be, but you write as if clearing the table of a flawed hypothesis is just not a task worthy of our efforts.

I, on the other hand, think even a committed mythicist ought to be able to examine the hypothesis in question and say: That makes no sense. (This is exactly what G. A. Wells did, for example, when confronted with the Doherty hypothesis.)

Ben.

EarlDoherty

Are you suggesting that you have even come close to "proving" what Paul thought, and that this could not have been an entirely mythical figure? I have seen no such 'proof' on this thread. It rather seems to boil down to an argument from incredulity: "I cannot believe that Paul could have meant anything other than a human, earthly incarnation when he wrote 'born of woman' " [if indeed he wrote it], or "I cannot believe that Paul could have meant anything other than an earthly descendant of David when he wrote (or quoted) 'of the seed of David kata sarka', even though he says he got this from scripture.'

Clearing the table will take a lot more work than that, Ben.

And where did Wells do that? What he did was stick to his previous interpretation of Paul's Jesus being thought of as a man who had lived obscurely centuries earlier, even when 'confronted' with my alternate interpretation of those passages which had led him to his conclusion. He may not have been won over to changing his mind, but I am not aware that he ever said anything like "That makes no sense."

As for his famous (or infamous) pullback to an admission that a human sage may have lain behind elements of Q, this 'conversion' preceded my book, and did not involve saying that my alternate analysis of Q to arrive at no founder figure behind it "made no sense".

Earl Doherty

Chris Weimer

He stated quite confidently that you were wrong, that the only thing you had going for you was archontes.

Ben C Smith

I am saying that I want evidence for Paul having thought what you say he thought.

You write as if understanding Pauline thought is just beyond our grasp. Yet that is what you try to do, is it not?

I also compare Paul's Christ with the savior deities of the current Graeco-Roman mystery cults, and although it is no longer fashionable to maintain that much of what is distinctively Christian was directly derived from the mysteries, both these religious expressions share elements of the same thought-world and are in part branches of the same tree. Seeing Christianity in this light goes a long way toward understanding some of Paul's thought.

You also presume to know what Pauline arguments mean and go so far as to derive Pauline (and indeed universal) standards from what Paul wrote:

In fact, Paul’s arguments reject the very idea that there could be any deficiency of qualification on his part. And the implication of 1 Corinthians 9:1 is that, since his "seeing" of the Lord is to be regarded as legitimizing his apostleship and this "seeing" was entirely visionary, the legitimacy of the others he is comparing himself to, which includes the Jerusalem apostles, is based on the same measure, namely visionary revelation.

That this is the universal standard is clear from 2 Corinthians 10:18. Paul declares: “It is not the man who recommends himself, but the man whom the Lord recommends.”

All of these arguments require you to get at what Paul was thinking through what Paul wrote.

So, when you write something like the following...:

...you are simply advising despair for others where you yourself retain hope of figuring out what Paul meant. If you are correct, then all reading comprehension turns out to be an argument from incredulity. Your own reading of 1 Corinthians 9.1 and 2 Corinthians 10.18 comes out like this:

It rather seems to boil down to an argument from incredulity: I cannot believe that Paul could have meant anything other than that divine revelation was the standard for apostolic legitimacy.

Surely you understand that it begs no questions to read Paul saying that Jesus was of the seed of David and come to the conclusion that Paul thought Jesus was a human descendant of David.

Now you are trying to turn the tables. The proposition (namely that Paul was not thinking of an earthly being) is yours to defend. I have attacked it in the only ways available to me: I have asked for your evidence (principally analogies, just as Carrier asked for), and I have provided counteranalogies of my own.

That makes no sense was my own wording, of course. Wells argued that using a Platonic concept of counterparts does nothing to help you, and he clearly did not even have any context in which to understand your reassessment of seed of David and the rest. And that is not his fault; that is the entire point of this thread. You have provided no context in which to understand your reinterpretation. You speculate; that is all.

The basic problem is that your alternate interpretation has no evidence going for it. Or at least none that you have supplied. And it has plenty of evidence against it (that is, plenty of analogies for what Paul wrote that definitely involve belief in an earthly being).

This is beside the point, since for the purposes of this thread Wells may as well have been correct before he looked to a Q founder as an historical core for Jesus.

Let me ask you: Was Carrier just flat wrong to even ask you for analogies to what you are claiming about Paul? Am I wrong to do so? Is it just so obvious that Paul does not imply humanity when he calls Jesus the seed of David that it is audacious for us even to ask for your evidence?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I almost missed this little phrase:

I really think this is the sticking point. You somehow have it in your head that if the source for the datum was scripture then the person described by that datum was probably not even imagined to have been earthly. I do not know whence you get this idea. Can you explain it?

In post 28 of this thread I gave an analogy. There are Christians who think that Jesus was physically not very attractive as a person. Their source, their only source, for this datum is scripture, namely Isaiah 53.2. Yet it is beyond doubt that they think Isaiah 53.2 is describing a human being who walked on earth.

In post 103 I asked if you had read this analogy; I received no reply to my inquiry.

Just in case you did not believe me that some modern Christians really think this way, here are some examples of this very thing.

User Majik_Imaje on a discussion board:

Well in the bible it says that HIS (Jesus) features were not pleasing to look at and behold. Isaiah 53!

What does God look like?

We have almost no physical description of Jesus as a human being. The only thing we have to go on is that he was not especially good-looking: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." (Isaiah 53:2)

From Christian Answers:

If being good-looking is important to God, then Jesus Christ would have been a real hunk, right? But he wasn’t. In Isaiah 53:2, Jesus was described this way:

In our eyes there was no attractiveness at all, nothing to make us want him (TLB).

You see, Erin, Jesus wasn’t good looking, yet He rocked the world because he walked with God.

User donnA on another discussion board:

To me, these verses [Isaiah 53.2-3] say he was probably not a physically attractive man, nothing about his face would draw anyone to Him.

Is there any doubt that these people are applying a datum derived solely from scripture to what they consider to be an earthly being?

If your best evidence for Paul thinking that Jesus was a purely spiritual being is that Paul derives his stuff about Jesus from scripture, then you are arguing from a fallacy, pure and simple.

Wells makes a similar point:

It is of course true that the source of statements such as 'descended from David' is scripture, not historical tradition. But this does not mean, as Doherty supposes, that the life and the death were not believed to have occurred on Earth. The evangelists inferred much of what they took for Jesus life-history from scripture, but nevertheless set this life in a quite specific historical situation.

I go into these details because you have brought up the scriptural source for these data several times, to the point that it appears you may mistakenly think they carry some of your argument for you.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

It may very well do so if you persist in ignoring contexts, either immediate or overall. If the context in Romans 1:3 is a gospel derived from scripture, and elsewhere scripture is spoken of as the exclusive means of revelation about the mystery that is Christ, hidden for long ages, and if arguments have been made (not only by me) that Paul in 1:3 may be speaking metaphorically, or with a mystical understanding of scriptural pronouncement, then on what are you basing your reading of 1:3? Simply your understanding of what you conceive to be the 'natural' meaning of a phrase like "of the seed of David"? Even though the entire Pauline context suggests that he regards his Christ as something far beyond a human entity, that he has placed his Christ in no historical setting on earth? That he speaks of Christ's body as "spiritual" (1 Cor. 15:44f) with no suggestion he ever had a material body? That he speaks, right before Gal. 4:4, of what has 'arrived' in the present as being "faith" about Christ, not Christ himself? That he excludes an historical Jesus at so many turns in discussing the onset and history of the movement, and his own personal role in it? And on and on?

I would say that, in light of this context, your insistence on a human interpretation of 1:3 or even Gal. 4:4, is indeed begging the question. On the other hand, when I take what Paul says and interpret it in light of everything that he says, and in light of the philosophy of the time and other external evidence, yes, I do suggest that I can identify what Paul is thinking and what he means. In other words, I am "getting at what Paul thought through what he wrote" by non-subjective (as much as possible) evidentiary standards and indicators. You, on the other hand, when you claim that Paul can only mean such-and-such by what he wrote, are appealing to your own subjective standards of meaning, not by the meanings we are allowed to derive from the evidence.

Thus, you cannot claim that we are on an equal footing. You cannot say of me that

My 'incredulity', if you want to use that term, is based on the evidence, on my (non-a priori) reading of the documents and the philosophy of the time. You, OTOH have not analyzed Paul's texts and other contemporary evidence to demonstrate that by "born of woman" or "of the seed of David," it is likely that he means what you want him to mean. Instead, the standard argument around here in that direction amounts to no more than: We all know what "born of woman" and "being of some historical figure's seed" means, it can't mean anything else but the standard, modern, logical understanding of such a phrase, therefore that's what Paul meant. Then you try to take the unjustified step of adopting the position: You have taken this illogical meaning from Paul, so it's up to you to supply proof, not us. Of course, no amount of argument or analysis of the evidence on my part is allowed to sway you from that "logical" understanding.

Earl Doherty

spamandham

There's always what appears to me to be the foundation of Christianity to draw upon.

Isaiah 53:3+
"He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
..."

A prima facia reading of this would lead one to believe the author is referring to a particular person being despised, stricken, etc. Isaiah draws upon parallels to Uzziah for his poetic description, and we would probably conclude that's who he was talking about if not for Isaiah 49.