Clivedurdle

An odd line, "as I said to you about Jesus", or something to illustrate an argument would close the matter, but the complete absense of odd comments must mean the orthodox explanation is wrong!

Exactly! Try reading the New Testament assuming a Christ in heaven or in the distant past. It makes far more sense than the forced interpretation of a bloke in Galilee!

Because it is not a direct relationship between equally human parties! One of these names is Yahweh Saviour Messiah - is it a name to start with? Brothers of Yahweh sounds very biological! At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow! OK, very human!

Again, why no references to real biography at all? We are discussing god becoming man - I would expect something! The eucharist bit does not count as Paul says it was related to him directly in a vision!

michael wellenberg

Well ... Lord is a title, Paul equates the bearer with Christ, a title, too, meaning Messiah, and he equates the bearer with Jesus, a name - would you agree ? And this Jesus / Lord / Christ had brothers - anything non-sensible or not real in here ?

If an issue, in this case Jesus´biography, is a well-known and not disputed knowledge in a group of people, in this case one of Paul´s communities, which was not taken into question, then Paul was not challenged to address or defend this issue as he did in so many other cases. What would you expect ? Paul telling stories of Jesus´life in order that we might believe he knew of them ? For his communities he need not do this.

Michael

Didymus

I didn't say anything about the date. It doesn't appear in the gospels either. A range - e.g., "during the prefecture of Pontius Pilate" - would have at least suggested historicity. As Paul left it, Jesus could have been crucified by Alexander Janneaus along with 799 other rebels in 100 BCE.

It should be obvious why Paul should have at some point noted that the crucifixion took place in Jerusalem, unless we can suppose that the location of Jesus' death at the heart of Judaism is insignificant. Christians today hold that the course of Jesus' life and death bear witness to God's mercy and love and serve as exemplars for all mankind. And they believe that his teachings offer mankind the correct path to eternal salvation. Apparently Paul thought otherwise, since he never quoted Jesus by name and never mentioned his life and wondrous deeds. Or even that he worked in Galilee!

Perhaps that's because all Paul knew about Jesus came from Scripture, from other ancient texts, and from his own imaginings regarding his heavenly Savior.

I was unaware that Paul limited his discourse to contentious issues.

Which "debate" is that? Argument from silence, indeed.

Paul used the tem "Lord" to refer to Jesus, to the Father, and to an unspecified deity.

Who do I think Jesus was for Paul? An obscure savior, sent "in accordance with scripture" to atone for man's sins, rejected by mankind (like Wisdom) and crucified under obscure circumstances by unknown parties at an unknown time and place, all "in accordance with Scripture."

There is not a "huge misunderstanding" about that. Christian apologetical literature is rife with desperate attempts to explain away the Pauline silences with wild conjecture about Paul's motives. Most of those flights of fancy impute to Paul an utterly implausible "lack of concern" for (inconsequential?) matters like Jesus' miracles, his teachings, and his trial and crucifixion.

Do you really think that Paul's congregations in Ephesus, Corinth and Rome were intimately familiar with the Jesus' teachings and the events in Jesus' life? And with the exegetics that would help them comprehend those lessons and apply them to their lives? If "there was no more need to do so," then why was the production of the four gospels - biographies of Jesus - necessary? In fact, there is not a shred of evidence that Paul's congregations knew anything about Jesus' ministry in Galilee or about his last days in Jerusalem.

Sorry, but the "lack of concern" theory is belied by the entire history of post-Pauline Christianity, from the gospels onward through the Fathers and the church councils and to the present day.

So Jesus said nothing worth repeating to distant congregations (with many new converts) about "belief, daily life and so on"? This will come as a great surprise to most Christians!

As I said before, if you have any interest in these matters whatsoever, "The Jesus Puzzle" is essential reading.

Didymus

michael wellenberg

It is difficult to imagine in this case why Paul would have said that most of Jesus´contemporaries/witnesses were still alive unless you assume that Paul include this without thinking.

I do not see why this should be obvious. Paul´s creed was that Jesus died and was resurrected (and, yes, he refers to him also by his name as Christ Jesus).

This may or may not be the attitude of Paul towards Jerusalem which actually seems ambiguous.

To infer from Paul´s silence about bare facts of Jesus´ life that he only used scripture and his own imaginings is not an historically appropriate picture considering traditions about Jesus´life and death having arisen shortly afterwards and were already spread in the pre-Pauline oeriod.

We should not speculate about what Paul should or should not have done.
The "problem" of Paul´s silence is a construction since it is based on the presupposition that Paul´s silence indicates a lack of knowledge of the historic ministry and because Paul should have shown such knowledge in his letters he refers to an unreal figure

I did not say that it was not worth repeating or was of no importance. Certainly it was. I said there was no need for repeating.

Michael

Geetarmoore

Why not?


There is an easier explanation for why Paul wrote as he did.....

The Bishop

I've reached my turning point. I read Jesus by A.N. Wilson. It's full of holes, and like most books has one or too eccentricities of its own. For example, tekton meant "scholar", (possibly derived from Geza Vermes) and not only did Paul actually meet Jesus, but he was the "Temple Servant" whose ear got cut off. I hasten to add that he does signal quite clearly that this is pure speculation on his part. He makes passing reference to the "totally fictional" concept of Jesus and describes it as "eccentric".

I continue to have problems with MJ because of arguments like the following:Well, duh!

Seriously, why is that so unlikely?

Apparently so, why not?Erm, another 30 years had gone by, at minimum. There would naturally come a time when oral tradition was no longer considered enough. There is the example of the Mishnah to confirm this need. The evidence, surely, is Paul's lack of mention of those details? :P

Doug Shaver, I skimmed over your response to Muller on behalf of Doherty. I'm concerned at one point you state the lack of any particular reason to follow the consensus of scholarship regarding the dating of the Gospels. You immediately follow this by accepting the scholarly consensus for the dating of Paul's epistles. This strikes me as inconsistent.

I'm puzzled by this matter of late-dating the Gospels. As far as I've been able to ascertain, the MJ advocates like Doherty don't go further than to say that there "is no good reason that the Gospels could not have been written as late as the mid-second century". The reason for this is obvious. If Ignatius is not, after all, the first Christian Father to mention Pilate and Mary, because they were already mentioned in pre-existent Gospels like Mark and Matthew, then the whole "Argument from Silence" falls to the ground, or at least it has been propped up on inadequate foundations. Conversely, however, if the Argument from Silence - about Pilate, about Mary, about other Gospel details - is correct, then surely it stands as substantial proof that the Gospels were indeed later than the normally accounted dates? But I've not read this anywhere in MJ arguments. In fact the consensus dates of 70-80 for Mark have been cited by MJ-ers in other arguments about Gospel reliability (mainly in disputes with Christians of the "inerrant" variety).

I'm just after some clarification here.

michael wellenberg

Your questions/criticisms seem to be similar to my own :
I think it is better and more honest just to say we do not know the reason for Paul´s silence about Jesus´life events than to attempt explaining Paul´s silence by saying this is because he did not know anything about them.
The next step, the connection with the writing of the gospels, makes it all still more dubious, independently of their dating.

Michael

James Brown

Well, at least one group was labeled as the anti-christ:

I John 4:
It seems way back then people were suggesting that Jesus had not come in the flesh.

Toto

I don't understand the objection here. Doherty dates Mark to about 80 CE, and does not rely on an especially late dating of the gospels. The silences he talks about are in Paul and other early material.

Doherty is relatively conservative here. The Dutch Radicals and their modern followers date Paul and the gospels to the second century, and think that Ignatius' letters are later forgeries.

No Robots

Docetism is the best known of these "no fleshly Jesus" creeds, although I am not claiming the 1 John 4 is specifically anti-docetic. But, according to Judith Lieu, it cannot be considered anti-mythicist:

The immediate response to the `antichrists' is the centrality of the confession of Jesus as the Christ or Son of God (2: 18-23; see above). In chapter 4 that affirmation is expanded in a specifically polemical setting. The only valid confession, here ascribed to the spirit which is of God, is of Jesus Christ [as] the one who has come in flesh' (4:2). It is not an affirmation that he came in the flesh as against some other form of his coming, for this would require a different grammatical construction in the Greek. It is an acknowledgement of the one who can be so entitled; its reverse (4:3) is simply to fail to confess Jesus. (It would require either a 'that' (Greek hoti) clause or an accusative and infinitive, a construction which is read by Codex Vaticanus (B) here in an obvious attempt to clarify the issue.)

The Theology of the Johannine Epistles (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Judith M. Lieu, p. 75