Malachi151

I've read most of the Jesus Puzzle, and seen the arguments along those same lines many times, and I agree that there are many passages in the Pauline letters that seem to indicate that Paul doesn't view Jesus as a person who had recently been on earth, but then there are other passages that I have quite a bit of difficulty with, such as the ones dealing with the Last Supper and Crucifixion. For example, from 1 Corinthians 11:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...1;&version=31;

We compare that to Mark, and Mark says:

Mark and Paul are pretty consistent here, and I can't really see a way to interpret Paul's in any way other than Paul believing that Jesus had been on earth and been betrayed and had had a real last supper with real people.

Ideas on this?

Gooch's dad

That's damned impressive of you, Malachi. You're about the only JM'er I've seen on this board who has admitted that Paul does seem to recognize a historical Jesus.

Of course you know what my idea on this is.

spin

What from his post makes you think Malachi151 is a "JM'er"?

What makes you (and perhaps Malachi151) think that Paul "seems to recognize a historical Jesus"? Is this any different from Paul believing that there was a real Jesus who acted in this world? Is it any different from Tertullian's belief that Ebion, the non-existent eponymous founder of the Ebionite movement, acted in this world?


spin

aa5874

Who is the real Mark?

Gooch's dad

spin:

I had the impression from his previous posts that Malachi was a JM'er. If I was wrong about that, then I apologize, Malachi.

as for "what makes me think that Paul recognizes a historical Jesus", that passage from 1 Corinthians, taken at face value, shows that Paul is talking about a historical person. On first reading, any person would say that Paul is talking about a real person who dined with other real people.

That passage is just one among many where Paul is clearly writing about a historical Jesus. When he wrote about Jesus born "of the flesh", he is obviously writing about a real person. Doherty has tried to defend his unorthodox re-interpretation of this passage here on IIDB, but he went down in flames--accusing those he disagreed with of being "apologists" in the meantime.

There are many Pauline passages where Paul is clearly talking about a historical Jesus. I find that JM'ers have to bend over backwards, begging the question the entire time, to explain these passages.

spin

Thanks for the response...
...but that question was only part of a series of three questions, for which I hope you see the relationship of thought:

1. What makes you [..] think that Paul "seems to recognize a historical Jesus"?
2. Is this any different from Paul believing that there was a real Jesus who acted in this world?
3. Is it any different from Tertullian's belief that Ebion, the non-existent eponymous founder of the Ebionite movement, [was a real person who] acted in this world?

I'm not a JMer, nor a HJer, but I do believe that we are dealing with traditions whose origins may simply be too obscure for history to unveil, ie no-one has a way of knowing the historicity or lack thereof of the sources of these traditions.


spin

Gooch's dad

spin,

I don't know enough about mystery religions to answer that series of questions. Except to point out that Paul has dozens of mentions of Jesus being a real person, "according to the flesh", and that, as Muller has pointed out, he also uses "according to the flesh" to describe his (Paul's) own relationship to the other Jews.

So yes, I guess that is a very different situation than Tertullian and Ebion.

I was on vacation last summer when this thread on HJ scholarship was active, but it really reveals a lot to me about the discussion. It seemed to end up with Chris Weimer being accused by Biff, of being a closet Christian.

I'll ask again--WHY isn't Doherty, or someone else, getting the JM hypothesis published in some journal of historical inquiry? I think I know the answer--it is because Doherty simply ignores data that doesn't agree with his predetermined conclusion. No scholarly journal will bother with such question-begging.

Malachi151

There are different issues here, but I specifically said my problem is with "Pauline mythicism", by which I mean the idea that Paul himself did not believe in an earthly Jesus. Perhaps this should indicate historical Jesus, but that's not what I was thinking.

Doherty claims that Paul did not believe that Jesus had ever been on earth, i.e. that Jesus existed in the regions between earth and the farthest heavens, or some other business. I understand what he is saying, but I don't see that Paul believes that.

My reading of the Pauline letters, admittedly in English translations (which already poses a problem), is that Paul did believe in an earthly flesh and blood human Jesus.

That is question #1 IMO. Did Paul believe in an earthly Jesus.

Question #2 is whether or not Paul put Jesus into a historical context, which I think any reading of his letters says no. One can still ask, though, if Paul viewed Jesus historically in his own mind, and that's a harder question to answer for obvious reasons, #1 being that we can't read Paul's mind, and #2 being that "historical" was not so well defined back then as it is now, these things played back and fourth more back then.

Paul, though, doesn't give us any historical context for Jesus. If all we had was Paul's letter then Jesus could have been put into any time frame for thousands of years preceded Paul, there is nothing to indicate "when" Jesus existed.

Lastly, we have the issue that in some ways it really doesn't matter what Paul believed, because Paul can still be wrong. Even if he believed in a historical Jesus,that doesn't make Jesus historical, but it is certainly relevant to the question because if the key person in the early Jesus movement DIDN'T think that Jesus was a historical figure, then that's a big deal.

My other concern, though, is the similarity between Paul's description of the rites of Jesus and Mark's description.

Why the similarity?

First we should note that Paul begins by saying "For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you".

What does this mean? Had he said this to the Galatians then to me this would be a big indicator for JM, because the Galatians should have known this before Paul, but I'm not sure who 1 Corinthians is to.

Why is this phrase in there, and what does it mean? Paul said that he didn't get his info about Jesus from any man, but we can probably take this as hyperbole, so did Paul get this Jesus rite from the community? Did he make it up himself? Did he for argument's sake "get this information from one of the apostles"? Was this written into the letter by Eusebius ?

Secondly, why does "Mark" say almost the same thing as Paul? Did "Mark" get his info from the Pauline letters? Was this a standard part of oral tradition that Mark got his info from, and if so, how does that impact our view of the gospel of Mark in relation to oral tradition? etc.

So, to me there are two things to be explained with this passage:

#1) Does Paul view Jesus was "heavenly", "earthly", and/or "historical"?

#2) How do we explain the similarity between Paul and Mark on the description of this rite?

spin

You might know as much as I do...

I'll explain about Ebion. There was a christian sect called the Ebionites. Its name derives from the Hebrew word "ebion" meaning "poor". However, someone probably before the time of Tertullian jumped the tracks and got the idea that the Ebionites must have got their name from some person called Ebion, just as the Marcionites got their name from Marcion. Easy enough error to make. By the time of Epiphanius this non-existent founder of Ebionites even had a town of birth.

The moral to this story is that traditions develop with or without a historical kernel to them. Fortunately with Ebion it's relatively transparent to see how he entered the world of the living.

When you can't get back to the beginning of a tradition how do you choose whether the source is real -- behind the Nero tradition about fiddling while Rome burnt there is some garbled reality mixed with a strong dose of distortion and polemic --, or not -- as in the case of Ebion?

Can you see the problem I am posing? We have no initial source materials to the Jesus traditions, but we can see it developing by itself after the tradition had developed. We can see for example small things such as one gospeler putting Jesus on two animals (Mt 21) for the triumphal entry because he thinks it matches his understanding of the source prophecy, or bigger tradition elements, such as the nativity stories for one at least is not fundamentally based on real events. Traditions develop regardless of what is behind them. I've tried to find out what lies behind Constantine's dream, but I find two christian and one pagan source, all of which conflict. Traditions develop.

I'm sorry, but I truly don't care about Doherty. He has his ideas about how christianity came into existence. But then so do others.

Toto

There is a question you need to answer before you can even get to #1.

Do the letters we have from Paul represent what Paul wrote? How much is interpolation by later orthodox Christians?

As for #2, there are a number of possibilites. Mark probably read Paul, but the passage in Paul might have been added by a later editor, perhaps the same one who wrote the passage in Mark. Certainly later Christian scribes who copied the documents had many opportunities to standardize the passages.