LGM

And I suppose if we wait another 30-40 years, some anonymous person we'll call "MarK", who was a friend of Marshall Applewhite, can write a story about all the details of how Marshall was the son of an alien, born at Roswell, and how the magical holy spaceship came to earth hiding behind the comet, and how the aliens aboard it caused all kinds of mircaulous things to happen, and how all who believeth in the story, and committed suicide, are now safely on their way to heaven...Amen...

Now please turn to page 354 in your hymnal as we pass the collection plate.

Vork,

I always forget...Why is Paul more credible than Marshall Applewhite?

And why does Paul have more authority to speak for any god than Marshall Applewhite does?

EarlDoherty

When I first approached the question of the “spiritual/mythical� realm, I did so in a more general ‘Platonic’ way, in which the duality was between spiritual and material, between the perfect and imperfect, the timeless and the changing. Especially in regard to Hebrews, Christ’s “sacrifice�, as it was defined in that epistle, took place in “higher order of absolute reality,� “offered in the realm of the spirit in the eternal order of things� as Moffat puts it in his commentary on Hebrews. Hebrews is admittedly unique, in that the “sacrifice� seemingly takes place in the highest heaven, but the death on the “cross� is not located, and there is no role given to demon spirits in any of it.

Paul, on the other hand, (and those later writing in his name) talk of the demons but do not specify where in the heavenly system they reside and do their work. In fact, the sublunar realm in any ‘Christ’ context appears (I can recall no other) only in the Ascension of Isaiah. I was faced with the problem of not knowing exactly what Paul’s thought was in regard to the death of Christ in the spiritual/mythical realm. I couldn’t speak of him placing it “under the moon� nor assume that there was consistent theory to be found throughout early Christianity about the layers of heaven and their various definitions. Then I had views of Sallustius and Julian who regarded the myths as allegories of “timeless processes,� while Plutarch suggested ‘recurring’ processes.

Strictly speaking, Krosero is right, there is a contradiction. A timeless realm is not the same as the corruptible, subject-to-change sublunary realm. But we have to make a distinction between modern agreed-upon views of the universe based on scientific and rationally-based investigation, and ancient philosophically-based theory based on nothing of the sort. This is where Don has gone off on his largely irrelevant tangent of trying to “define� such outlooks as though they were universal, soundly-based, and no one could or did venture outside fixed parameters or offer views which would be inconsistent. And if the ancients themselves could be inconsistent and confused, I think I can be forgiven for finding the whole thing confused myself, and offering a scenario which was unable to surmount that confusion and bestow complete clarity on it.

That said, when or if I get at a second edition of The Jesus Puzzle, I am going to have to make a different attempt at it, at least to lay out the fact of the confusion.

I think Vork’s postings above have hit the nail right on the head. All we can say of Paul is that he regarded Christ’s death as taking place somewhere outside the earthly realm, with Christ in some kind of spiritual form that had similarities/parallels with material ones. If the Philippians hymn is pre-Pauline, that was the previous view, too, though here too the exact picture of the movements of one who shared God’s nature yet descended to take on the “likeness� of men is not clarified. I suspect that all this lack of clarification indicates that things were vague for such sects. I am not even sure that the Ascension, in its original form for chapters 6-11, was strictly “Christ-ian� but perhaps belonged to some ‘Jewish’ sect having a sacrificial descending Son who went down to rescue the righteous in Sheol, and it became integrated into related sects like those of Paul, acquiring grafts of the names Jesus and Christ. We simply can’t tell.

We also have to keep in mind that all this mythical view of savior gods and mystery cults evolved over many centuries, and their contexts evolved with them, leading to adaptation and papering over of inconsistencies. As I tried to point out to Don, if a faith movement is in existence and new developments come along, contradictions do not lead to the abandonment of that faith, but things simply get ‘jerry-rigged’ and not always that rationally. There may well have been a whole range of adaptations for the idea of descending and redeeming gods during the period of Christianity’s inception, not always agreeing with one another.

If all this is unsatisfying, I sympathize. It’s frustrating to me as well. But Vork is also right on another point. My analysis of the spiritual death of Christ, and its related concept of “kata sarka,� is only one element of the total picture. The other pillars are not just the silences, but the reliance on scripture as the source of a “revealed� Christ, Christ seeming to reside in and speak out of scripture (something expressed by a number of writers), mystical views of a “Son� who is anything but historical as in the Odes of Solomon and the Shepherd of Hermas (the latter has mystical views even of the Torah as some kind of entity in itself), the duality of the ages in which a recent incarnation of Christ does not figure at all, Paul and the early apostles being the first reflection of the new faith and its preaching/understanding/fulfillment of God’s promises, etc., and so on. Within this total picture, and given the (admittedly confused) philosophy of the era which had no central authoritative dogma, the picture of Christ crucified somewhere in the heavens makes the best sense and is at least supported in principle by that philosophical and sectarian background.

Incidentally, Romans 9:5 does not say that Christ was “of Israel’s race�, at least not so graphically as my detractors would like to think. I quote from my Rebuttal article to Bernard Muller:

While I’m here, there were a couple of points made on the other thread before I posted my reaction to Jeffrey Gibson, which I will make a short comment on now:

Yes, but the key word here is “behind�. I said the following earlier:

I noted that Richard Carrier pointed out on the other thread that I did not say that “kata� in “kata sarka� involved motion.

I didn’t use “sphere� (borrowed from Barrett) in the sense of “some strata of sky above the earth.� I used it as encompassing the entire region of matter and corruptibility, which could be said to extend up to the moon. As for Barrett using “sphere� in a “more abstract sense,� this is not obvious from the passage in his Romans commentary, at least to any extent of ruling out my ‘expanded’ (over his) meaning:

That will have to do for now.

Best wishes,
Earl Doherty

Vorkosigan

Yes, it supports what I was arguing earlier, that Paul does not know that Jesus was the Davidic messiah, but instead, by saying of the seed of David, he means that Jesus was Jewish. But note how he uses children of the flesh in Romans and Galatians

ROM 9 "This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants."

GAL 4: "But just as then the child of the flesh persecuted the child of the spirit, it is the same now."

That's the key to understanding this, as I pointed out in the discussion about Muller. "Flesh" doesn't mean literal descent, it refer to the position one has relative to the promises God has made. It is entirely metaphorical. Consider Gal 4

22
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the freeborn woman.
23
The son of the slave woman was born naturally, the son of the freeborn through a promise.
24
Now this is an allegory. These women represent two covenants. One was from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; this is Hagar.

There are two women and each has a child in the normal way -- yet Paul describes one as being of flesh, and the other as being of spirit. See the problem? Paul cannot mean flesh as literal descent, because both women have "fleshly" children in that way. Whatever "flesh" refers to in this passage and in Romans where this language is echoed, it cannot be literal! Paul is using language figuratively and symbolically.

hus when Paul says Jesus was born under the law, he means that this had to be, ritually, because Jesus had to be under the law to free people from it, as he says. When Paul says that Jesus was born according to the flesh, he means that Jesus was born prior to the fulfillment of the promise -- because there were no children of the spirit, those did not appear until the Christians had come. Thus Jesus had to be born "according to the flesh" -- under the aegis of the demon spirits, whom Paul rhetorically asks his audience about in Galatians 4.

Thanks, Ted.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

MODS: Is there any way we can merge the two Kata Sarka threads???

Vorkosigan

jakejonesiv

Hi Earl,

This is the response of a true scholar and seeker of truth.
I look forward to reading further from you as you refine your approach.

Jake Jones IV

Amaleq13

Not without creating a monstrous and convoluted SuperThread that falls into the More Trouble Than It Is Worth category.


ETA: I think Ben is doing it in what might be the most efficient way (ie copying specific portions from one to the other and responding). And by "efficient" I mean somebody else does the heavy lifting.

Clivedurdle

So Jesus being of flesh might mean he is gentile?

TedM

Re Rom 9:4-5 Vork, I've responded on Ben's thread..

ted