Meta => Are you trying to argue that Paul was a pagan? That would be absurd. The guys in china are so far removed form the milieu of the mediteranian that those examples have no relivance.

The view Dhortey experesses is absurd. The prhaseology Paul uses is extremely Jewish. Moreover, Doherty never docuements these mysterious Platonic Christians or jews. He's thinking of hellenized Jews, but there is no little connection to Plato. I wont say none,b ecause the Mar kaba mysticism did have influences from Platonism, but that in no way means that they thought of Christ as not a flesh and blood person. Kata means according to and when used wiht sarx it means according to the felsh and this is exactly how any Jew would say that he was born of a woman in Greek.

What also can't document is any Platonic notions of using these terms in the first century to mean Plantoic forms or demi gods who appeared human but were not. These are Gnsotic and neo-platonic views that don't emerge until Platinas in the third or fourth century and he can't document anything ealier.

Meta => So what? That's just argument from sign. Like saying "Jesus lived in the first century, The essenes lived in the frist century, therefore, Jesus was an essene. There is nothing to connect the early chruche's undertanding of Jesus to these other figures. Mithrism hadn't hit Palestine until AD 70, and when Roman soliders interestedin Mithras were stationed in Palestine from their permentant base in Ostia they were influenced by Christainity and took Christain symbols into their own faith, not vice versa. This is the finding of Franz Cumont and has been updated since then.

The plainest interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews 9:11-14 is that Christ's sacrifice took place in a non-earthly setting and a spiritual time;

Meta => No that is not true to any degree. the planest is cealry that Jesus made sacrafice in the heavenlies after he died on the cross,and that as it says in Heberews "during his life on earth" and spekas of his fleshly sufferings. It makes the point that this is why he is able to be a high preist becasue he was tempted as we are, which would not work if he were not a flesh and blood person.


8:4 virtually tells us that he had never been on earth.


Meta => That's quie absrud how do you rationlize the statement "during his life on earth?"


Meta => What in that passage links Christ to Adam Kadmon? There's nothing there to influence that reading except wishful thinking. Anthropos in no way has any sort of speicial references to ideal types or to non-fleshly sorts of Manhood.


For minds like Paul's, such higher world prototypes had as real an existence as the flesh and blood human beings around them on earth.

Meta => How do you think that? What is there in Paul's writing that would tell us that? Why does he say that Jesus had an ancestry according to the felsh?


Meta => ahahahaahahahah! Why can't it just be that he's saying exactly what you don't want him to say? If you just read it plainly that is exactly what he says, that Jesus was a felsh and boold person. To transform him into an etherial being you have to just dogmatically with no reason whatsoever change the words 'David's Stock' and born under the law, very Jewish concepts and not pagan, and rooted in the expectation of a flesh and blood Messiah, to say something they do not say! The term STock even though it's Greek here corrosponds to the Hebrew term usually translated as "seed" which is almost always, not always but almost always used of flesh and blood. I think that term is zera?



Meta => But all you are doing here is just dobmatially equivocating on ever term that contradicts your thesis. There is nothing to link Jesus to an etherial existence, it says plainly he is flesh and blood. Moreover, that's what the Jews expected, why would Paul see it any differently? Not even Rudolph Bautlmann, the cheif gnosticizer saw Paul's statements that way.



Meta => Again, "this says the opposite of my thesis so it must mean I'm I'm right." It's aslo an argument from silence. he doesnt' give Mary's name so he must not have believed in a real flesh and blood mary, that doesnt' follow. This is also contradicted by the thing about "the child bearing" in Phil. Mary Redeems woman for her work in the child bearing, which would have no meaning if there was no child bearing.


Meta => Of course because he was a demi god. No one ever said that Dionysius was not a real felsh and blood person, within the confines of the myth. The myth never says "he only looked like a person but was really etherial." It assumes he had a fleshly existence, even though by Paul's day probably no one believed he really lived. He was not a etherial being, neither was Hercules or many other demigods of mythology.

Meta => NO that is wrong. Just as wrong as it can be. It is easy to see you have never taken Greek. en sarx means in the felsh, he was a felsh and blood person, there ant no way you can't change that to say what it doesn't say. It celary and unequivocally means "in the felsh." Meaning, he was flesh and blood.


In his divine form and habitat a god could not suffer, and so he had to take on some semblance to humanity (eg, Philippians 2:8, Romans 8:3),


Meta => Right to the more clearly it states that he was a flesh and blood person the more you rationalize to try and make it say the oppossite. It makes no sense, however, that a Jew would not think of the Messiah as flesh and blood, and it makes even less sense that needing him to suffer he doesnt' make him flesh and blood.


Meta => But it doesn't say that! It says that after the death when he was dead and in heaven he entered into the prefect temple in the heavenlies, it doesn't say that he didn't have a felshly death on the cross. actaully it says he did. It clearly and palinly says it and you just dogmatically change it to fit a stroy that is concocked to fit an ideology which is skeptical and designed to remove Christ form the center of Christian faith. It's also turning history upsdie down in order to foist this farse upon an unsuspecting internet.


Meta => Yea Pilate! Rome, the powers.


Meta => No schoalrship is devided on that, and there are those who argue that it was Rome. I'm inclined to agree that Paul did believe in a spiritual realm which controled the earthly realm, but why should htat mean that Christ wasn't flesh and blood? All that does is extend the power of the supernatural into the natural it doesnt' remove the site of the cricifiction to an etheiral realm, nor does it render Jesus an etheiral being.

And again, the basic metaphysical scheme for this view doens't come together until Neo-Platonism. We dont' know enough about the mystery cults of the first century in order to construct this sort of grand cosmology.


It was in such spiritual, mythological dimensions that Paul's Christ Jesus had been "incarnated" and performed his act of redemption.

Meta => Which makes no sense and serves no purpose because if he was an etherial being he wouldn't need incarnating in an etheial realm anyway, and it also flys in the face of all Jewish belief.


Such was the timeless secret which God had hidden for long ages and only recently revealed to visionaries like Paul. And it was all to be discovered in scripture, or at least in the new way of reading it.


Meta => Except that when Paul makes statements like that which approach that sort of "I have a secret" idea, it is always about soteriology not about the incornation.

It is very difficult for us to get our minds around all this kind of thinking, because in our scientific and literal age we simply have no equivalent. This is one of the major stumbling blocks to an understanding and acceptance of the Jesus-as-myth theory.


Meta => No actually its not. This view was blown away by the great Pauline scholar D.E.H. Whitely in his calssic Theology of St. Paul circa 1964 in which he says "St. Paul is not indebted to the mystery religions."


He also maticulously analyzes the use of sarx and says quite clearly that Romans 3:1 means flesh and blood birth.

Toto

Did you even bother to read the excerpt from Doherty I pasted in above? Doherty discusses the precise language you did (house of David, born of woman, etc.) and ascribes Platonic meaning to it.

Doherty is a trained classical scholar, the sort of person you usually hold up as an expert. I am not absolutely sure that he is correct, but he does seem to have the credentials that you and I lack to read Greek texts from 2000 years ago and interpret them.

Metacrock - I cannot follow your argument. There are too many words I cannot figure out.

Bede

PhysicsGuy,

Thanks for your reply.

On the question of Paul's references to the Historical Jesus, kindly put forward by Layman, the platonic explanation does not wash. In order to assert this (against the face value of the text) you must be able to demonstrate that this is how the text was understood and give us examples of an undoubted case for comparison. To recharacterise all of Paul's thought as neo Platonistic seems far fetched as neo platonism was founder by Plotinus in the third century AD.

Unless we have good reason we must take the text at face value. We cannot reinterpret it in the light of our theory and then claim the reinterpretation is evidence of our theory being true.

On Acts - a late Acts would refer and be chronologically consistant with Paul's letters which we know from both 2 Peter and 1 Clement were common currency by the end of the first century. Given the number of sources in Luke/Acts, it is inconceiveable that the author (happy to cannibalise Q and Mark for his gospel) wouldn't use them. Acts does not use them and isn't fully consistant. Ergo, Acts is early.

To claim that Christians would be able to make an amendment to widely read non Christian literature by 250AD seems to me desperate. Doherty claims that Origen seems to have a different version of the passage to us but I disagree - Origin just read too much into it.

Q does refer to the human Jesus and to John the Baptist. There are a few bits in it apart from sayings. That Paul (on a face value reading), Mark, Q and John all developed the myth idea independently seems
absurd.

And you have so little time! Paul died in about 65AD and was writing letters nearly up to the end. He has all his converts all over the Med who, according to Doherty, make no effort at all to defend the mystic teachings of their master (dispite praising him to high heaven in later letters) but within thirty years have all bought into the historical Jesus, except the Gnostics of Egypt where Paul never went! This is frankly incredible.

For info, my previous contact with Doherty was on a private board from which I was banned becuase they didn't like my name. In other words, they censored anyone who seriously challenged him.

Yours

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

But Mike, Paul uses his Jewish eschatological speech in the same manner as other Jews, with the exception that Jesus is the center of it.

Your idea is absured. Somehow BECAUSE Paul was using Jewish speech, observed Jewish customs, and celebrated Jewish festivals, THAT is the evidence that he is not Jewish? On what basis is this assumption made? The only reason anyone has given so far is that it fits into Doherty's theory. You have offered no reason to believe it is true.

This is why Jesus-mythers are ignored by New Testament scholars, whether liberals or Christians. They are so obviously a theory in search of evidence. And all of their arguments are about how the evidence doesn't mean what it clearly means.

Even if your matches were true Mike, all you have established is that something unusual happened. Most times when someone claims to be x, then talk like x, act like x, and are admitted to be x by his enemies, the reasonable conclusion is that he is x. Only agendized credulous arguments rejected by New Testament scholars across the board keep it chugging. Oh, and a willing audience of hardcore skeptics who are so intent on diminishing Christianity that any argument will do.

I find your appeal to authority extremely disengenous since you ignore the fact that the overwhelming number of historians find the Jesus-myth idea to be the absurdity it is.

And Doherty did the same thing you did. He simply asserted that the clear references to Jesus' humanity must be understood in a way no one else thinks they should be understood. He did not explain WHY they should be understood by other than their clear meaning? Does he offer evidence of other people in Paul's time using this phraseology in the way he interprets it?

Does he explain why someone who was so obviously immersed in Jewish customs and knowledge would use Jewish eschatological language in a way that no one else did? Or why he would use Jewish eschatological language to try and convince Gentile god-fearers and hellenistic Jews in a purely spiritual Christ? When that language implies Godly intervention into the earthly realm?

And you only addressed some of what I mentioned. I also brought up many other things Paul wrote about the human Jesus. His brother for example? Why does Paul refer to James, the brother of Jesus? He uses the term for blood relative, not a spiritual brotherhood. And given the fact that most skeptics believe there was some tension between James and Paul, why would Paul invent such a flowery description of James, if in fact it were not true? Or, in fact, was only meant to be a spiritual relationship?

Try again.

Ah. deLayman finds Toto's appeal to authority disingenuous.

But then in the second half of the very same sentence, he proceeds to make an (unsubstantiated) claim, which itself is --you guessed it--an appeal to authority.

It's a wonder that deLayman doesn't choke on his own irony.

[This message has been edited by Omnedon1 (edited April 19, 2001).]

Sigh.

Unfortunately, all Toto does is appeal to authority. He doesn't engage in substantive debate or discussion regarding the authorities ideas. Maybe he doesn't have time.

The reason Toto was disingenuous is because he was relying solely on an appeal to authority, while at the same time ignoring the overwhelming consensus of authorities against him.

As for my assertion being unsupported, there are some things so generally recognized that only someone either 1) being exceptionally difficult in order to harass, or 2) someone extremely ignorant about New Testament studies, would claim that there is anything less than a solid consensus of New Testament scholars who believe in Jesus' existence.

Hello Omnedon

Are you offering any supports for any of Toto's or Doherty's claims? I have not seen them. But if you are, please feel free to do so. We are going through each of the 12 pieces of Doherty's puzzle right now, so feel free to offer your evidence here or on that thread.

Thanks,

Nomad