Freethought & Rationalism Archive

EarlDoherty · 08-13-2007, 02:59 PM

In the course of our late lamented “A Realistic Reading of Paul” debate, I referred to my posting of

“a lengthy piece here analyzing the uses of ‘sarx’ in the Paulines in which I studied those “instances of the terms and phrases involved”, the various ways in which the writers speak of the “flesh” of Christ, and put forward the conclusion that we could not assume one standard meaning, let alone that Paul had to be regarding Jesus as a human being.”

Ben asked me to point him to this posting, and I found I was unable to. I was thinking of an essay I had written immediately after our memorable “Dancing with Katie Sarka Under the Moon” thread in 2005, but I had thought I had posted parts of it in a subsequent thread on the same subject. Either I did not (my memory once again failing me), or I just can’t find such postings.

Ben accused me, in his last major posting on the “Paul” thread, of not addressing the alternate passages in Paul from which he derives his contentions about Romans 1:3’s “kata sarka”, but that (apparently) non-existent posting I had referred was supposed to do just that. I feel that now I need to make up the deficiency, not the least because Ben bowed out just at the point when I was starting to introduce problematic passages (for his view) about “flesh” and “spirit”—namely, 1 Peter 3:18 in which Christ is put to death “in flesh” but quickened to new life “in spirit”. And this epistle writer is not the only one. If the thought world of the early Christ cult envisions Jesus’ rising as a heavenly/spiritual event, it becomes a valid question to ask, are we misinterpreting the death “in flesh” if we simply base it on the Gospels and standard meanings?

In any case, the core of Ben’s argument was the position that “kata sarka” in other passages has a clear meaning of human flesh, or human descent, thus pointing to a similar likely or necessary meaning for Romans 1:3. But when one surveys “sarx” in the Paulines, this is simply not the case, and that’s what my essay was designed to show. Moreover, it also shows that in fact many Pauline (and others') usages in this context are clearly not talking about ordinary human flesh in relation to Christ, but have highly mystical meanings. Consequently, to take Ben’s argument and use it myself, they could be said to point to a similar likely meaning (i.e., mystical) for Romans 1:3, especially considering the scriptural context I have been at pains to point out through the previous thread.

Ben may or may not choose to get involved in this one, but the reason I started a new thread is that we need to focus specifically on that pesky phrase (for both sides) and try to clarify the range of meaning and usage Paul and those who followed him gave it. Too many here simply make the declaration that Paul always uses it in the human sense (and can only do so), with a more or less consistent meaning, in the face of too much evidence to the contrary.

I will reproduce most of that essay here. I will omit my introduction as not necessary, and make a few cuts throughout as non-essential material for our purposes (though I have left in my impressive peroration at the end). Note that apart from a few passing references, this is not an essay which takes apart Romans 1:3, or 1 Peter 3:18 or the Christological hymns. It is concerned with the broader picture of how the Paulines (and other epistles like Hebrews) present Christ’s “body/flesh”:

Quote:

… Whether Paul’s Christ danced with Katie Sarka under the moon, or at some other prom, we just can’t say. The bottom line is that it was beyond earth, in some “other place.”

What we can say is that in all these systems, the ultimate God could not Himself suffer or descend into corruptibility. He was too perfect and transcendent. This is why the mystery cult savior gods were drawn from subordinate ranks, from the lesser deities of the Near Eastern religions. For the Hellenized Jews (or was it Judaized Greeks?) who invented Christianity—I prefer the term “Christ belief” for that initial phase—probably around the turn of the era, their new Savior was a “Son” of God, an emanation of the Deity, syncretized with a divinized Messiah, God’s Anointed who pre-existed with him in heaven. This “intermediary Son” was a subordinate descending god who, in doing so, took on a lower, corruptible form to undergo death. That much is clear from the pre-Pauline hymn in Philippians 2:6-11, the oldest window we can gain onto that early landscape. From his base sojourn to die, he reascended to the highest spiritual realm, there to gain the honor due to him, including the name “Jesus”. Death in the lower, fleshly realm, resurrection and exaltation into the spiritual realm. That, said the author of 1 Timothy (3:16), was “the mystery of our religion,” quoting another Christological hymn in the Pauline community, in which the pattern is the same:

He was manifested in (the) flesh,
Justified in (the) spirit…

In 1 Peter 3:18, this basic dichotomy is stated yet again (it may or may not be a loosely quoted hymn):

He was put to death in (the) flesh,
But made alive in (the) spirit
In which he went and preached to the imprisoned spirits…[i.e., the dead in the underworld]

It is worth noting that in none of these passages is there a hint of activity on earth. There is not the slightest allusion to any Gospel data. Indeed, it is conspicuous by its absence—which, when spread across so many writers and documents, must be taken to indicate that there was no Gospel dimension in the consciousness of the communities which produced these writings. All we have is the dichotomy itself: “flesh” involving descent and material-like forms and death, and resurrection/re-ascent to “spirit.” It would be inconceivable, in all this language and liturgy produced by a widespread faith movement, that if this descent to flesh involved incarnation into an actual human man on earth, with a career anything like that of the Gospels, not a whisper of it would find its way into the formulas such a movement created to present its faith. Or informally as well, of course, since the epistles from beginning to end say nothing of a recent historical man.

So what language did these hymnists and epistle writers adopt to describe the descent of their savior god into the realm of corruptibility and death? The two Platonic realms were matter or flesh, and spirit. Using “flesh” for the former would have made more sense, since the concepts of corruptibility and suffering were more directly associated with human flesh, although matter was also “changeable.” In moral thinking, as Paul’s obsessions show, it was flesh that was weak and degenerate, it was flesh that was susceptible to lusts. So where religion was concerned, spirit and flesh would naturally comprise the polar opposites. Spirit would save flesh, flesh would be exalted to spirit. Sometimes it was “body” that was used in the contrast; in some discussions, Paul freely interchanges body (sōma) with flesh (sarx). As well, since the counterpart relationship between man and god involved the latter assuming the form of the former so as to undergo similar experiences (suffering and death), this brought him into the realm and shape of flesh. The sacrificed divinity then reversed the process by rising and being exalted (justified, vindicated) into spirit, which the human devotees were then guaranteed to follow in parallel, as Paul tells us in Romans 6:5 (cf. Ephesians 2:6).

The phrases commonly used throughout the early Christian literature to refer to the lower realm into which the deity descended, or the state which he assumed, or the sphere associated or affected by his activities, centered on the word “sarx,” flesh: “kata sarka,” literally, according to the flesh; “en sarki,” or just “sarki” by itself, in flesh. It is frequently claimed that usage of the word sarx in itself can only refer to human flesh, flesh on earth, or the realm of earth itself which flesh inhabits. But this is erroneous. Let’s start by looking at some of the pertinent uses of sarx in the epistles, focusing for now on the Pauline corpus, and leaving aside for now the contentious ones. The word has a broad range of meaning, both literal and figurative. [You’ll have to forgive me for no longer italicizing the Greek words, it’s too laborious inserting all the tags.]

A – Some usages are literal, referring to the human body or human life, such as:
- 2 Cor 12:7 : I was given a thorn in my flesh (tē sarki)
- 1 Cor 7:28 : Those who marry will face many troubles in this life (tē sarki)

B – Often it refers to humanity, or a race of men:
- Gal 1:16 : I did not consult with any man (sarki)
- 1 Cor 10:18 : Consider the Jewish people [lit., Israel according to the flesh] (kata sarka)
- Rom 3:20 : Not by works of the Law will flesh (sarx) be justified in God’s sight

C – Frequently it refers to standards or values of the world:
- 1 Cor 1:26 : Not many of you were wise, by any human/worldly standard (kata sarka)
- Rom 8:4 : in those who walk [i.e., conduct themselves] not according to the flesh (kata sarka), but according to the spirit (kata pneuma)
- 2 Cor 5:16 : we know no man according to worldly standards (kata sarka); even though we once regarded Christ kata sarka, we do so no longer [that is, we no longer apply worldly standards to Christ; this does not have to be a reference to any “flesh” of Christ].

D – Often it refers disparagingly to human nature in its perceived baser interests:
- Rom 7:18 : I know that nothing good lives in me, in my flesh (en tē sarki mou)
- Col 2:18 : being puffed up by the conceit of his worldly mind (noos tē sarkos)
- Rom 8:13 : if you live according to the flesh (kata sarka), you will die

The last example shows that being in flesh was also a state of mind, relating to one’s spiritual condition. It was something one could leave, even though one was obviously still in one’s physical body.

The Pauline usage of sarx could be literal and figurative, opening the door to a non-literal understanding of Christ being kata sarka and en sarki. Let’s list the ten key appearances of sarx as a descriptive of Christ (some outside the Pauline corpus), so we get a sense of what we’re dealing with. The translations will be somewhat literal. (Note that sarx, “flesh,” is the basic form, in the nominative case; en sarki is “in flesh,” with the preposition putting the noun into the dative case, though sometimes sarki appears without the preposition. Kata sarka is the phrase most troublesome, in that its standard literal translation “according to the flesh” is woolly and covers a number of possible meanings; the noun here is in the accusative case. Some of the quotes below have the noun in the genitive case, sarkos….

1. Romans 1:3 : …the gospel of God…concerning his Son, who was come of the seed of David according to the flesh (kata sarka)…

2. Romans 8:3 : God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (sarkos hamartias)

3. Romans 9:5 : …from whom [the Israelites] (is) the Christ according to the flesh (kata sarka). [This is usually translated (the Greek ‘fleshed out’—pun intended) by saying “from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ” (NIV) or “from them in natural descent sprang the Messiah” (NEB).]

4. Ephesians 2:14-15 : He has made the two [Jews and gentiles] one by abolishing in his flesh (en tē sarki autou) the Law with its rules and regulations. [5:30-31 will be added when discussing this passage.]

5. Colossians 1:22 : He [God] has reconciled you through (Christ’s) death in his body of flesh (en tō sōmati tēs sarkos autou). [1:24 will be added when discussing this passage]

6. 1 Timothy 3:16 : he who was manifested/revealed in flesh (en sarki)…

7. Hebrews 2:14 : Since the children have partaken of [NEB: of a family share] blood and flesh (sarkos), he [Jesus] also in like manner (paraplēsiōs) shared the same things, in order to destroy the power of death…

8. Hebrews 5:7 : In the days of his flesh (en tēs hēmerais tēs sarkos autou), he offered up prayers and petitions…

9. Hebrews 10:20 : we enter the Holy Place [sanctuary] by a new and living way he has opened for us through the curtain of his flesh (tēs sarkos autou)

10. 1 Peter 4:1 : Since Christ suffered in the flesh (sarki)… […because he who has suffered in his flesh is finished with sin. This is a good example of paradigmatic parallel between deity and devotee, a sharing of experiences having results in the believer.]

When one thinks about it (and too few have), this is certainly a curious situation. In fact, it’s more than that; it’s bizarre. All this reference to flesh, yet not one reference to earth itself. All these references to the figure of Christ, yet not a single one to Jesus of Nazareth and his Gospel life. All this raising in the spirit, yet not a murmur of tradition about returning to flesh and spending time with followers on earth. “In the days of his flesh” (Heb 5:7) what did he do? Something from scripture, the source of virtually everything we find in the epistle to the Hebrews and so many other documents, as though scripture is the window onto this ‘life’ of Christ. In Romans 1:3, his being “of David’s seed” is derived from scripture as well, so Paul tells us in the preceding verse, as part of the gospel of God told in the prophets.

Another curiosity is found in another stereotypical form of expression. Why the fixation on describing Christ as taking on only a “likeness” to humans, as in Romans 8:3 and Hebrews 2:14, as well as the Philippians hymn (where the idea is repeated three times)? The idea also appears in the crucifixion passage (chapter 9) of the Ascension of Isaiah, as well as in the Apocalypse of Elijah in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, where the author says (1:6) that God

“sent his son to the world so that he might save us from captivity. He did not inform an angel or an archangel or any principality when he was about to come to us, but he changed himself to be like a man when he was about to come to us so that he might save us from flesh” (vol.1, p.736).

Note the similarities here with the Ascension of Isaiah and even the Philippians hymn. Not only is Christ like a man, all the participants are heavenly, angels and spirit forces, and there are no Gospel details anywhere in the document….

But perhaps the most bizarre feature of our list of passages above is this. Many of these references are highly mystical in their treatment of Christ’s “flesh” and “body.” Together with other aspects of the epistolary Jesus, such as his pre-existence, his role as creator and sustainer of the universe, his mission as conqueror of the evil spirits, the unifier of a sundered cosmos: all these create a mythological picture of a transcendent deity. His assumption of “flesh” and his relationship to humanity is entirely in terms of his role as Savior, and those terms are highly obscure. We get nothing about a teaching or miracle-working career on earth. That such a lofty transformation should have been made by anyone of a crucified Galilean preacher is almost incomprehensible, especially to the exclusion of all other aspects of his identity and life on earth. And this supposedly within a handful of years of that life and its ignominious ending.

Yet another curiosity. The usage of the “sarx” language is found across a wide spectrum of Christian literature over a considerable period of time. (Kata sarka is used in relation to Jesus in 1 Clement and the letters of Ignatius in similar fashion.) It was thus an established convention from very early on, and not limited to the peculiarities of one writer, such as Paul or even the ‘school’ which followed him and wrote in his name. If this is peculiar language to refer to a life on earth, employing nothing that clearly indicates the latter, how would it have arisen?... [Here I cut Richard Carrier’s discussion of the meanings of “kata sarka” from his review of The Jesus Puzzle]

If this language did arise to describe a human life on earth, how was such a strange convention established and how did it become so pervasive? From Paul to pseudo-Paul to Hebrews to 1 Peter to the Johannine epistles to the Pastorals, they all use the same terms. One might understand a single writer adopting such words out of his own idiosyncrasy to refer to Jesus' life or human descent, but how would it get passed on and retained by so many? Would it not have run up against resistance or simple lack of reception in the minds of those who would have preferred to be more direct, who would have had their own natural inclination to refer to Jesus' life in more clear and standard ways? Moreover, it is doubtful that the author of Hebrews enjoyed any influence from Pauline circles, and even the community of 1 Peter shows no direct dependence on Pauline thought. The Johannine writings betray their own isolation. What, then, were the channels of the spread of this dubious language? In the context of a movement based on an historical person, can we envision how the situation we find in these documents could have arisen? I suggest we cannot. What does make sense is that the movement developed in the context of belief in a mythological Christ according to the principles of Middle Platonism. A verbal convention would be needed, and could develop and spread throughout a diverse, amorphous movement, to refer to that dual activity, the two aspects of the relationship of the descending-ascending god to his environment. No adverse tendencies would mitigate against adopting such expressions.

If a god is required by religious thought to suffer and die, then within the Platonic context he must descend to a region of the universe where that can take place, namely the ‘fleshly’ world of corruptibility. The latter, however, is not restricted to the surface of the earth; it is encompassed by the entire region below the moon. That region is inhabited by spiritual beings as well, namely Satan and his evil demons. They exist in spiritual form, even if imperfect and corrupted ones; in their spirit form they engage in activities such as warring among themselves. (And in crucifying Jesus, as the Ascension of Isaiah 9, and Paul’s probable identification of the demon spirits (“the rulers of this age”) in 1 Cor. 2:8 as the agents of Jesus’ crucifixion.) As we have seen, the demonic powers were regarded as belonging to the realm of flesh and as possessing heavenly (i.e., spiritual) versions of earthly bodies. Angels, too, in the Old Testament had a ‘corporeality’ different from men (the “strange flesh” of Jude 7). This is acknowledged in the latest edition of Bauer’s Lexicon, in its definitions of sarx:

b. of transcendent entities…Of flesh other than human…i.e. of divine messengers who take on sarx when they appear to humans…

Thus, if early Christian thinkers were pressed for a term that would identify the realm and nature of the region into which the Christ would descend, the state he would assume upon entering it, and the relationship he bore to those he had come to save, “flesh” would have been a natural choice, even if he did not assume actual human flesh and walk the earth. There was, we can say, such a thing as ‘spiritual flesh.’ Paul speaks of Christ possessing a “spiritual body” (sōma pneumatikon) which the resurrected bodies of Christians will be modeled on (1 Cor. 15:44), with no suggestion that he had ever had a material body (it is conspicuous by its absence, given the particulars of his argument here); and in the Apocalypse of Elijah the flesh of the body is set aside and spiritual flesh (sarkes pneumatos) is put on (4:16, 5:32. See the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol.1, p.748 and 752).

(Whether for Paul, that ‘fleshly’ region in which Christ was crucified was specifically envisioned as below the moon we cannot be sure. We don’t know enough about his cosmology, his knowledge of or adherence to—or concern for—strict Platonic principles and related mythology to say.)

We should note that even among pagans, the gods had “bodies” and “flesh”. Cicero, in “On the Nature of the Gods” Book I, 49 (Penguin, trans. H. MacGregor) says: “…then it must follow that the gods themselves have human shape. This shape is not a body, but analogous to a body. It has no blood, but something analogous to blood.” This is equivalent to Christ cult conceptions of “likeness” to human form, etc., as in the hymn of Phil. 2; it is equivalent to referring to the “blood” and “flesh” of Christ when Paul, as we shall see, treats this in non-human, mystical ways. And Cicero a few verses earlier argues why we should see the gods in “fleshly” forms and characteristics: “through the prompting of nature and our reason.” The early Christians could do no other than interpret the spiritual Christ, when he operated in the realm of corruptibility, in human terms, especially when scripture, as they saw it, presented him in such terms (as in Hebrews 10:5).

Our jumping-off point to understanding how Paul and other early Christians could have perceived Jesus’ presence and activity in the realm of “flesh” is his usage of sarx to refer to the earthly sphere, to things or standards that are ‘in relation to’ the world in which men and women move. I called attention to C. K. Barrett’s translation of kata sarka in Romans 1:3 as “in the sphere of the flesh” (even if Barrett did not specify this as including the entire sublunar region, or did not himself regard Christ’s activities as taking place in an above-earth area of that sphere). In the quote above from Richard Carrier’s review, he noted that “kata” can mean “at” or “in the region of,” and the latter meaning is also noted in classical Greek by Liddell & Scott. While we have seen that sarx can refer to a spiritual form of flesh, the connotation in some of the Pauline passages might be further illuminated by broadening the understanding of kata sarka and en sarki to encompass this idea of the sphere of the flesh, the region itself. Christ in his spiritual ‘fleshly’ form while within the ‘fleshly’ sphere, possesses a nature relating to that sphere and has a relationship with those who inhabit it….

But we can probe deeper into the thought and expression of Paul and find further support for the position that Christ kata sarka is not a reference to a Jesus on earth, in human flesh. Everyone acknowledges that Paul and other early epistle writers were highly mystical in their presentation of Christ, almost beyond anything we can absorb today with our scientifically oriented minds. We read the words and grasp the symbolism, but to get inside it in a real way is like the proverbial attempt to nail jelly to the wall. I keep referring to G. A. Wells’ remark that much of Paul is “unintelligible” to moderns, and I daresay even to theologians who, putting their best faces on the matter, still fail to convince us that these ideas can bear any relation even to religious reality. Let’s take a closer look at some of those 10 key epistle passages I laid out earlier:

Ephesians 2:14-16 : “For (Christ) himself is our peace, he who made the two [Jew and gentile] one, destroying the wall between them, by abolishing in his flesh (en tē sarki autou) the Law…in order that he might create in himself a new man out of the two, and in this one body (sōmati) reconcile both to God through the cross…”

Here, Paul’s reference to Christ’s flesh and body are hardly literal. They are a mystical representation of the effects of his sacrifice and the combining of two peoples into one entity. The “body” referred to is hardly a human one, making the “new man” something other than a literal human individual. This is a refinement of the idea stated earlier in 1:10 that in the person of Christ, in the act of his sacrifice (the words flesh and body do not appear here), “all in heaven and earth are brought into a unity” (NEB). Here we have a cosmic being on a grand supernatural scale, conforming to so much else in the Pauline imagery used to describe the metaphysical Christ (consider 1 Corinthians 8:6, or 2 Corinthians 4:4-6, or Colossians 1:15-20, along with Hebrews 1:1-3)—and there is no sign that any of it is based on a recent itinerant preacher. But let’s add a later passage in the epistle (5:29-31) to this mix as well:

“No man ever hated his own flesh [sarka], but nourishes and cares for it, just as Christ does the church, we being the members of his body [sōmatos]…and the two [a man and his wife] shall become one flesh [sarka]. This hidden mystery I interpret as referring to Christ and the church.

Here, Christ’s “body” is the church, also equated with the “flesh” of the Genesis verse. Paul himself frequently defines the “body” of Christ as the church, or describes the latter as an entity of which he forms the head and the believers the limbs (e.g., Col. 1:18). In 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, Paul describes Christ as a body made up of many parts, its individual members being the congregation of believers. How such congregations could ever have accepted and responded to such an extravagant rendering of a simple human man, if that’s what it was, is almost unfathomable.

Colossians 1:22 combines “body” and “flesh” in virtually interchangeable and mutually supporting fashion:

“He [God] has reconciled you [to himself] through Christ’s death in his body of flesh [en tē sōmati tēs sarkos autou].

Like the idea of unification of two peoples in Christ’s “body” in Ephesians 2:16, here Christ’s “flesh” is the vehicle of reconciliation. The writer has gone far beyond the scale of referring to some broken human being hanging on a hill of execution outside Jersualem. In verse 24, he represents Paul as envisioning his own personal suffering (from some unspecified physical affliction) as “filling up” in his own flesh what was missing in Christ’s sufferings. He submits to this willingly “for the sake of Christ’s body (sōmatos), which is the church.” Again, Christ in regard to ideas of “body” and “flesh” is consistently cast in terms that are thoroughly mystical, far beyond the individual human scale.

Perhaps the ultimate in mystical identification is found in Hebrews 10:20:

“…we now have confidence to enter the Holy Place [sanctuary] by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way he opened for us through the curtain, that is, his flesh [tēs sarkos autou].”

The “curtain” is a reference to the veil of the Temple, blocking off the inner holiest sanctuary. For this writer, Jesus’ own flesh constitutes the veil through which the believer can now pass to enter a new sanctuary, one cleansed and transformed by the entry of the heavenly High Priest bearing the sacrificial offering of his own blood. There is no reason to dismiss all this language as simply poetic metaphor, an overblown imagery everyone throughout an entire faith movement decided to attach to a human man whom they then never mentioned. The terms “flesh” and “body” along with much other human language have been used throughout the literature as ways of describing spiritual entities and processes in a supernatural dimension which overlaps and affects the material. The denizens of the latter are the congregations of believers, forming a mystical union between human communities and spirit deities who guarantee salvation through this counterpart relationship spanning earth and heaven, the physical and the spiritual. This was one of the grand concepts of Hellenistic religion, a multi-faceted yet integrated universe designed for personal salvation from flesh to spirit. Attaching terms like “flesh” and “body” to Christ was these writers’ way of representing the working elements on the divine side of the equation. They are located in the spiritual realm. Christ’s “flesh” is not of earth.

The true “mystery” of the Christian faith would be how someone like Paul, an intelligent, innovative, sophisticated thinker, and so many others like him, could possibly have constructed this mad, magnificent, mystical cosmos upon the corpse of a crucified criminal, a man they had never met, one who left no identifiable mark in the contemporary witness of the time, whose life as prophet, preacher and wonder-worker ceased to be of any apparent interest to his own proclaimers and faith communities. Those who insist on distorting the esoteric, metaphysical world of the early epistles, along with that of the Odes of Solomon, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Shepherd of Hermas, forcing it into the mundane historical mold of the Gospel story, are sandblasting away all its intricate and fantastic features, leaving us with a record that makes little sense and contains so much seeming contradiction. If, on the other hand, the world of Paul and Hebrews, of the Odes and the Ascension, is seen as a creative flowering, centering on Jewish culture and tradition, of all the mystical currents of the time surrounding mythical savior gods and divine emanations, a riotous universe of many elements, a complex salvation process linking heaven and earth, so much of it coming alive from the pages of scripture, we then have a world that historians of religion can open up and reveal to us our wondrous, if misguided, past.

It makes for a dizzying waltz around the dance floor with the marvelous Miss Katie Sarka.

What more can I say? (But no doubt there will be more…)

Earl Doherty

Ted Hoffman · 08-15-2007, 02:40 AM

This is a great OP Earl. Please make it as comprehensive as possible so that it eliminated the need to repeat the arguments in future.

Ben C Smith · 08-15-2007, 07:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

Ben accused me, in his last major posting on the “Paul” thread, of not addressing the alternate passages in Paul from which he derives his contentions about Romans 1:3’s “kata sarka”, but that (apparently) non-existent posting I had referred was supposed to do just that. I feel that now I need to make up the deficiency....

To review, the passages that I listed as being of use in deriving meaning from Romans 1.3 (which entails more than just κατα σαρκα, BTW) are the following: Romans 9.3, 7; 11.1; 1 Corinthians 10.18.

I have asked you to address these passages once or
twice, and I even specified the exact context that I felt justified my turning to these particular parallels:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ben

All of these instances have in common the description of a person or group of persons by their physical descent.

Descent (or kinship) is the contextual glue that binds Romans 1.3 to the passages that I listed.

And here you are promising to make up the deficiency... yet in your entire posting (or article) I do not find even one single mention of Romans 9.3, 7; 11.1; or 1 Corinthians 10.18. I find several uses of the term flesh in a metaphorical way (to refer to a pattern of human behavior, for example), but nothing that addresses the context, descent and kinship, that I specifically named.

I do not dispute that these words, indeed any words, can be used figuratively, metaphorically, or with a transferred meaning of some kind. That is the nature of human language. I insist that these metaphors be identified from context. You yourself seem to be a fan of using context to derive meaning:

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty, emphasis mine

Once again, context is everything....

It may very well do so if you persist in ignoring contexts, either immediate or overall....

What I am trying to do is bring in other considerations of context to, shall we say, ‘soften’ that assumption....

You are still refusing to grapple with the context....

You helpfully identify an immediate and an overall sort of context. Let me use those categories.

Immediate context: Paul is discussing Davidic descent and kinship (seed of David). What does the term according to the flesh mean in such a context?

Overall context: Paul elsewhere uses the term according to the flesh to refer to his own kinship with ethnic Israel (Romans 9.3) and ethnic Israel in general (1 Corinthians 10.18). (These instances put this question from your article in a little different light, BTW: If this is peculiar language to refer to a life on earth, employing nothing that clearly indicates the latter, how would it have arisen? I would ask you: If such language is meant to refer to some non-human realm, why does Paul use it of himself?)

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

What more can I say?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ted Hoffman

Please make it as comprehensive as possible....

I echo this sentiment. Please make it comprehensive enough to at least mention the verses I gave you so many posts ago. It is time, I suggest, to really make up the deficiency and really deal with Romans 9.3, 7; 11.1; 1 Corinthians 10.18. If you wish to read Romans 1.3 in light of, say, Ephesians 2.14-15 (from your article), please let me know what contextual clue(s) you are using to trump the obvious (to me, at any rate) context of descent and kinship.

Thanks.

Ben.

EarlDoherty · 08-15-2007, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ben

Descent (or kinship) is the contextual glue that binds Romans 1.3 to the passages that I listed.

And here you are promising to make up the deficiency... yet in your entire posting (or article) I do not find even one single mention of Romans 9.3, 7; 11.1; or 1 Corinthians 10.18. I find several uses of the term flesh in a metaphorical way (to refer to a pattern of human behavior, for example), but nothing that addresses the context, descent and kinship, that I specifically named.

Actually, my essay did include a discussion of Romans 9:3, but I cut it because the verse had arisen in the previous thread and was knocked around there a bit (that the reference was part of a list of things that 'belonged' to the Jews, with no clear statement of it being specifically "descent" that was being described). The other two were not directly related to Christ. But I acknowledge your point.

Yes, Paul does use this phrase in human contexts and that can compromise one of my points to some extent—about it being strange or woolly language. It still is strange and woolly, but at least Paul is being consistent. And yet, the very fact of that consistency and oddness of language can also work in my favor. When Paul uses "kata sarka" in the context of human descent (Romans 11:1 and 1 Cor. 10:18) we may ask why he chooses this phrase and does not put it more ‘naturally’. Would you yourself say, “I am an American according to the flesh”? Odd, to say the least. In what context might you choose, or fall into, such a way of expressing yourself? I would suggest it would be a context—one within which you are, let’s say, regularly writing and speaking—of living in a perceived multi-layered universe comprised of the realm of flesh and the realm of spirit, “kata sarka” and “kata pneuma”. Your theology operates within that world and you regularly express yourself within that way of thinking about your environment. Thus when you come to speak of your relationship to Americans, to human beings, especially in a letter where you make other reference to the two realms and relationships between them, you say “kata sarka”.

When you come to refer to the deity you are proclaiming, and he—as perceived through some holy writing—has a relationship to Americans (even if you don’t quite understand it), you represent that relationship by using “kata sarka”.

So far so good. But what should lead someone to decide that (kata Earl) you are in fact speaking of a deity in using similar language to your usage with humans (having been influenced by scripture), as opposed to (kata Ben) you speaking of a human being, since that is the way you speak of your own relationship to other human beings? The answer is: the context, as laid out in my essay and elsewhere. You too appeal to context, but I maintain my context can whup your context. You merely point to other usages of that particular, and odd/woolly, phrase. I point, not only to other ways that phrase could be taken, I offer all sorts of other indicators pointing to no inclusion of, no room for, even outright exclusion of, an historical figure (not to mention the simple utter silence on any such figure), including many indicators in which the writer refers to the “sarx” or the “body” of that deity in terms which are clearly not human but are mystical on a grand scale.

About as grand, let’s say, as saying that a deity in heaven can be “of the seed of David.” About as mystical and unfathomable as saying that Christ and the believers can form a single body, that the universe is united in Christ’s flesh, that we now enter into the new sanctuary through Christ’s flesh/curtain. These, by the way, can hardly be styled as referring to “a pattern of human behavior.” You have dismissed all these examples and more in my essay in this way:

Quote:

I find several uses of the term flesh in a metaphorical way (to refer to a pattern of human behavior, for example), but nothing that addresses the context, descent and kinship, that I specifically named.

So now all these things are simply “metaphorical”? But when the suggestion was made that Romans 1:3 was a metaphor, you pooh-poohed that. Why can all those passages I point to be metaphor (Paul does not define them as metaphorical) but not Romans 1:3? I’m not saying they are, but I can’t see a clear enough distinction between the two to relegate them to two different categories. Don’t forget: an allegory/metaphor is the presentation of something that in itself doesn’t exist, in order to illustrate something that does. Is Paul going to talk about a composite “body” made up of Christ and believers, if he doesn’t think such a thing exists? He’s not talking about a material body, this being the ‘metaphor’. He is talking about a mystical body. But if that mystical body is only a metaphor, what beyond that is it a metaphor for? If you eliminate the mystical body, you’ve eliminated the whole thing. Consequently, this and other passages like it cannot be “metaphors”.

Compare that with the one passage in which Paul declares an allegory is involved: Galatians 4:21f. We have two distinct sides to the equation. The account in scripture is the metaphor (leaving aside whether Paul believed it described an actual historical situation—Philo’s type of allegorical interpretation of the scriptures, I believe, would not). What it is ‘metaphorical’ for is Paul’s interpretation, which he sees as a true, mystical reality, namely the two covenants, as he describes them in 4:24f. We don’t have that in any of the passages I point out, and which you (erroneously) would like to label mere “metaphors”.

Paul is talking about things, about aspects to his Christ (my essay examples), which he believes are real, a belief that can only exist in his mind if there also exists in that mind the cosmological duality of human and spiritual dimensions which interact with one another and in which beings in each respective one can have a ‘real’ relationship with beings in the other. Ergo, just as he has a real relationship with the believers—indeed he is even joined to them in manners which involve concepts of “body” and “flesh”—Paul’s spiritual Christ in the heavens can have a ‘real’ relationship with a human being on earth involving body and flesh, namely David, even if Paul doesn’t understand such a thing and has derived it from scripture. After all, what is the real difference between David’s “flesh” and the “flesh” of Paul’s fellow Christians? Christ is joined to the latter, why not to the former? That joining in the latter case is not the joining when Christ is/was on earth. It is Christ as he is now to Paul, a spiritual Christ in heaven (regardless of whether he had been on earth before or not). It would not require Christ ever to have been human.

So in that kind of thinking, we are hardly entitled to rule out an idea in Paul’s mind that a spiritual Christ in heaven can have a joining with David. And if we use the Christ/believers ‘common body’ as a model, which Paul hardly presents as an actual material body but rather some mystical equivalent, then why not see that he regards the relationship between Christ and David as not an actual material one (David’s seed somehow ending up in Jesus of Nazareth’s veins) but as representing some mystical equivalent (not a metaphor) between David and his heavenly Christ, one pointed to in scripture but which Paul might not have understood. In fact, can we even say that Paul “understands” his mystical idea of the common body between Christ and believers, or how the universe has been reunited in Christ’s body? I certainly don’t. On the other hand, mystics have their own ways of “understanding” (I think we have an example right on this board) which most of the rest of us just stare at blankly. Perhaps Paul did think he understood it.

It may well be that none of it makes any sense to us, but when we survey Paul’s mindset through his writings, and the mindset of the whole era through its philosophical writings, we are hardly justified in making such a distinction simply because of how we feel about it.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith · 08-15-2007, 01:27 PM

Woo hoo! F...i...n...a...l...l...y, you are addressing the verses I put forward to you.

I shall return to this in due time.

Thanks.

Ben.

Johnny Skeptic · 08-15-2007, 04:54 PM

http://www.backyardprofessor.com/the..._hagiosun.html

"Elaine Pagels has shown how the Gnostic Christians read Paul far different than the Jewish-Christians. Again, there was in antiquity no singular way to read and understand scripture, anymore than there is for us today."

gstafleu · 08-16-2007, 06:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

In fact, can we even say that Paul “understands” his mystical idea of the common body between Christ and believers, or how the universe has been reunited in Christ’s body?

An interesting question, and though I don't have an explicit answer for it, it does bring up something I have been wondering about. Something that may also throw some light on the woolliness of the concept of kata sarka.

As you have amply shown, historical detail about Christ is completely lacking in the epistolary record, the best we can do is perhaps this one fuzzy remark about David's seed. This is a rather unusual situation when looking at mythology in general. For example, when the Sumerian goddess Inana was said to have walked on the earth, some historical detail was provided to give substance to the event: e.g. Inana walked in Eridu. Similarly when Dionysus is said to be born from a woman, the woman is specified: Semele. But in the epistles we find nothing of the kind.

That, I would suggest, is a mythologically unstable situation: most human beings are not mystics and require some earthly grounding in there sacred stories. So the absence of any historical detail in the epistles not only indicates that the Christ of the time was not seen as a human being, it also sets the mythology presented in the epistles apart from the way in which mythology is usually presented, to wit with an earthly/historical component to help the non-visionaries among us.

This would suggest that the time of the epistles was one of mythological transience. The new Christ belief had just been discovered, from scriptures, visions, whatever, but had not yet gelled into something sustainable. We know what that sustainable version would turn out to be, the gospel version, but in the epistles we aren't there yet.

This situation of transience may explain the woolliness of the kata sarka and kata pneuma concepts as presented in the epistles. These two concepts were a part of the belief and hence also in transition. Under those circumstances we can hardly expect consistency. Certainly not consistency between authors, and quite likely not even consistency within one author.

So yes, Paul (and others) may not have quite "thought through" the whole idea. Or rather, they were part of a whole thinking-through process, and we can see the fluidity of that process in their writings. Our current day point of view is of course used to the now-known more or less stable version that developed later, and it may not always be easy to escape imposing that stability on the instability of the epistles.

Gerard Stafleu

Solo · 08-16-2007, 07:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

......
After all, what is the real difference between David’s “flesh” and the “flesh” of Paul’s fellow Christians? Christ is joined to the latter, why not to the former? That joining in the latter case is not the joining when Christ is/was on earth. It is Christ as he is now to Paul, a spiritual Christ in heaven (regardless of whether he had been on earth before or not). It would not require Christ ever to have been human.

I am intrigued by the suggestion that in Paul's mind Christ "is joined" to the "flesh" of Christians. It would be nice to see some reference to that.

As for the requirement of Christ to have been human: I do not understand the crucial passage of 1 Cr 15:42-58 without such assumption. Especially, in verse 43 the speiretai en astheneia (sown in weakness) seems to be completely without meaning if it is not related to estaurwthe eks astheneias (crucified in weakness) of 2 Cr 13:4. I cannot imagine Paul thinking of Jesus as other than human, i.e. a sinner in the eye of the law.

Quote:

On the other hand, mystics have their own ways of “understanding” (I think we have an example right on this board) which most of the rest of us just stare at blankly. Perhaps Paul did think he understood it.

Earl Doherty

I am confident that you will grasp eventually that the stigmata tou kuriou Iesou (Gal 6:17) Paul thought he carried in his body was not speculation suggested by a study of scripture.

Jiri

gstafleu · 08-16-2007, 08:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

As for the requirement of Christ to have been human: I do not understand the crucial passage of 1 Cr 15:42-58 without such assumption.

I don't understand it with such an assumption

. In 15:50 Paul clearly says "that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." So the believers who will inherit that kingdom will not do so in a flesh-and-blood form, rather in their "raised" spiritual form. If that "raised" form were flesh and blood it would be pretty useless, as Peter wouldn't let them through the gate (OK, a bit anachronistic, that).

And it is not just that one line, Paul keeps hammering in the idea: "the perishable inherit the imperishable," "we will all be changed" (given that we are already flesh and blood, what do you think we will be changed into?), "For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality." So again and again the idea is that we leave our mortal, fleshly form behind and go into the kingdom of heaven in a pure, spirit-like form.

In the whole passage Paul equates Adam with unbelievers, or at least with the situation before his (Paul's) snappy revelation. After the flesh-and-blood Adam came Jesus, in spiritual form (15:45): "The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit." Believers will now become of the second type: not a living being, fleshly, like Adam, but like Jesus, which is spirit like. So after they are raised they will have a spiritual form which allows them to go into the kingdom of heaven, emulating the "advances" made by Jesus relative to Adam.

If Jesus was seen as a flesh-and-blood type, what use was it to emulate him, since you then still would not pass Peter's gate? In that case, forget the following (15:48-49): "As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we[f] bear the likeness of the man from heaven." Well, fine, we bear the likeness of this fleshly man from heaven, so Peter tells us to bugger off.

The whole passage makes it necessary that Jesus was not a flesh-and-blood creature.

Gerard Stafleu

Chris Weimer · 08-16-2007, 08:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gstafleu

If Jesus was seen as a flesh-and-blood type, what use was it to emulate him, since you then still would not pass Peter's gate? In that case, forget the following (15:48-49): "As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we[f] bear the likeness of the man from heaven." Well, fine, we bear the likeness of this fleshly man from heaven, so Peter tells us to bugger off.

The whole passage makes it necessary that Jesus was not a flesh-and-blood creature.

Except the whole point of Jesus' death and resurrection was that he was born of the flesh, died, and was resurrected in the spirit conquering death. If we are to emulate Jesus (according to Paul) , we need Jesus to first be living, then die, then be resurrected as a spirit. Voila, we have our model that fits Paul's words perfectly.

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08-15-2007, 02:40 AM	#2
Ted Hoffman Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: "" Posts: 3,863	This is a great OP Earl. Please make it as comprehensive as possible so that it eliminated the need to repeat the arguments in future.

08-15-2007, 01:27 PM	#5
Ben C Smith Veteran Member Join Date: May 2005 Location: Midwest Posts: 4,787	Woo hoo! F...i...n...a...l...l...y, you are addressing the verses I put forward to you. I shall return to this in due time. Thanks. Ben.

08-15-2007, 04:54 PM	#6
Johnny Skeptic Banned Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Florida Posts: 19,796	http://www.backyardprofessor.com/the..._hagiosun.html "Elaine Pagels has shown how the Gnostic Christians read Paul far different than the Jewish-Christians. Again, there was in antiquity no singular way to read and understand scripture, anymore than there is for us today."

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