spin

Apparently you at least don't.

I cannot help your problem understanding the first task you must deal with, ie what the text actually says.

I'm not interested in what your story is. I'd rather deal with the text. You have difficulties with that.

:constern02:

That's why you've assiduously avoided dealing with it when I post textual references.

I never claimed that he "argues for the bare fact of a dead Jesus nor a crucified Jesus". I said that he contrasts faith in Jesus and his death with torah observance. As to your claim that he doesn't "even hints that such claims were ever challenged", the contrast of Jesus with torah observance is such a hint.

Paul would talk underwater about his theology and hear nothing against it. Your conclusion however, is baseless conjecture, which is the basis of your entire response to the issue. It seems it doesn't matter how often Paul places faith in Jesus in contrast with what his opponents advocated, ie torah observance, you'll still try to project it onto them.

What continues to be idiotic to you is apparently of little relevance. The issue first and foremost to any Jew is the practice of Judaism, torah observance and that is what Paul is dealing with, contrasting faith in Jesus with. If Paul will not advocate torah observance amongst his converts, there is no second base. You haven't touched first base.

"[A]bhorrent"?? Illogical. But irrelevant if you can't get to first base.

You aren't listening to yourself. You claim is tantamount to gospel as audience. You might package it a bit more obscurely, but that's the upshot.

So you can provide links.

Great comeback.

You've shown no incoherence. You've shown a lack of support for your conjecture.

That was long ago in case you hadn't noticed. You've been crapping on about it for a very long time and getting as far as your data lets you: nowhere.

What evidence? That is always the problem. I can't really explain this phenomenon of a person such as you, who claims to value evidence, totally turning his back on it. Perhaps it was a revelation, a conversion, a powerful short-circuiting of the logic system, that brought you to make outlandish claims about Paul's revelation.


spin

Amaleq13

Why would anyone persecute an "orthodox" group of messianists?

I agree that you are of no help whatsoever in trying to understand what Paul's letters tell us about his beliefs.

Yes, you have made your desire to avoid the subject quite clear. That this enables you to continue to avoid the problem with your position is probably not a coincidence.

I'd rather you dealt with the texts rather than arbitrarily and myopically focusing on just one.

Yes, I have difficulties with what I consider to be an arbitrarily selective approach to understanding Paul's beliefs because I consider it foolish. I also have difficulties with the incoherent story that is derived from your conclusion because it is a clear indication that there is a problem with your analysis.

No, you've just suggested that these facts were denied despite the complete absence of any evidence to support it and the strong argument from silence against it.

And this continues to be false. He contrasts faith in his interpretation of the death with faith in torah observance. That is what the text states.

Only in your imagination. Even assuming this false claim to be true, to suggest that he would only hint at such a major objection is just more absurdity for your position. His Galatians would be satisfied with only a "hint" that Paul might be able to defend his central belief? Your story just gets more incoherent.

It is first and foremost here because the contrast of his interpretation of the death of Jesus with their faith in torah observance is the only source of conflict. If something as fundamental to Paul's beliefs as the bare facts of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was also contested, we would expect to find Paul defending those facts right along with defending his interpretation of the implications of that death. That we find no such efforts at defense on Paul's part is strong evidence that no such opposition to those facts was offered.

Your effort to fabricate a chronology of opposing claims is as incredible as the story your conclusion produces.

Paul's belief in a crucified/resurrected messiah is first base. His opponents didn't have a problem with it and that can only be because they shared his faith in those facts. They had a problem with the conclusion Paul derived from his belief in those facts and that is why we only find Paul defending that conclusion.

No, that is you continuing to refuse to listen.

That's because you willfully ignore the story one's conclusions must tell about the data. It was my recognition that the story resulting from the conclusion made no sense that caused me to rethink my analysis of the data.

Some day, you might get to that point as well but I'm not going to hold my breath. You've clearly got too much personal stake in your conclusion. :wave:

spin

Being messianist? But you'd need to ask a zealous conservative.

Attempted witticism won't help "your problem understanding the first task you must deal with, ie what the text actually says."

Your confusing your story with the subject. They have little to do with each other. You also fail to define any problem with my position. Your empty rhetoric only shows your empty content.

Until you can show an understanding of the text of our dispute all your dealings are useless. This is a simple idea, which you cannot meaningfully avoid. You get what meaning from the source before you run the risk -- through interference through introducing contamination from elsewhere -- of not getting any meaning from it. Once you've got what you can, then you can compare it with other texts and deal with the comparison.

You've certainly displayed difficulties in understanding your task. You're not supposed to hamper your understanding of the text in the way you are refusing to extract meaning from it before your try to put meaning into it from elsewhere.

You've shown no incoherence. In fact you've shown little desire either to contemplate what Paul says of what happened or of what was necessary for being a Jew of the time.

The text of Galatians, by contrast of faith in Jesus with torah observance, provides indirect evidence for those insisting on torah observance not sharing Paul's faith in the efficacy of the death of Jesus.

Where is your evidence from Galatians that they even believed that their messiah died? We know they believed in torah observance and they put it before anything else. They didn't need anything from Paul other than his rejection of it to put them in opposition.

As you flail about, you can't grasp that the conflict Paul has with his opponents is rooted in the first problem, ie what is involved in being Jewish.

This is just more of the same "I don't care about the being Jewish issue". Judaism was fairly heterodox at the time regarding theology. What made them Jewish was torah observance and what is at the heart of Galatians is a rejection of torah observance. You can't side-step the issue and go onto point B if the text shows no sign that they were interested in anything other than point A, ie torah observance.

Not chronology, silly. Relevance. Your incredulity is based on your refusal to see the conflict between them.

Obviously for Paul. that's why he contrasts it with what is of interest to his opponents, ie torah observance.

Umm, it is fairly simple: if you don't observe the torah then you are not fulfilling your Jewish responsibilities. Everything else is superfluous until that issue is resolved.

There is a clear disjunction between the message you transmit and the one you imagine you are sending.

You and your stories. The extraction of evidence from the data is more important than any story.

This recognition was arrived at without consultation of the text in question. Once you noticed you couldn't get what you wanted from it, you went elsewhere.

Holding your breath would help you lose consciousness and perhaps clear the brain of this silliness not based on the text.

Stop being ridiculous. I'm not the one selling a position in this.

You have to arbitrarily decide that when Paul talks of his revealed gospel and not getting it from people, he's only talking of that bit of the gospel which you believe is aimed at the gentiles, even though Paul clearly states that his gospel is universal.

Normally when someone persists in ending all their ravings with a wave, Toto gets pissed off.


spin

Ben C Smith

Ironically, if the only text we are allowed to use is Galatians, we would have to conclude that the principal content of the gospel is: The gentiles will be blessed through [Abraham] (3.8), since that is the only verse that really fills out by name any gospel content to speak of in the whole of Galatians. The mentions of the cross in the letter are not in the same places as the mentions of the gospel or preaching the gospel.

Ben.

gurugeorge

Well, they were obviously some variety of Messianists, and if we are to believe Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, they were Messianists with a unique view of the Messiah, namely that he'd been and died and risen again, and had already won his victory.

This is in contradistinction to normal Messianists, of course, who looked to the future and thought of the Messiah as one to come, and yet to win his victory.

Hence the aptness of the term gospel = "good news of a victory won".

Now (if 1C15 is to be trusted) obviously this core belief was shared by Paul, he was an apostle of that belief, and a bringer of that good news.

But from what we can gather, he had a disagreement with the older apostles over its scope. There isn't the slightest shred of evidence that I can see that the disagreement was over any fundamental element of doctrine, particularly not the distinctive, strange and stumbling-blocky idea of a Messiah who appeared to be a failure in precisely the way everybody else had expected him to be a victor; just of the somewhat ancillary point about whether you had to cut your winkie and observe certain rituals or not, to partake of the benefits of what He had wrought.

So when he says "his" gospel, there's no implication that it was vastly different from what the other apostles taught, at least not in terms of the core elements of dying/rising personal-relationship Soter deity, because that's what he avows he shares with them in 1C15. So when he says "his" gospel, there's no need to read into it that he's saying his unique-in-every-possible-way gospel. The shared doctrine pointed to in 1 Corinthians 15 precludes that, and there's no reason from anywhere else to take that as the meaning.

gurugeorge

How? I don't see any necessity for a great divide here. Why can't he have first gotten wind of the belief and the idea from people, and then had a personal visionary experience in which the entity mentioned in the idea spoke to him and told him to universalise the message?

In Corinthians, he's putting himself in a tradition; in Galatians he's pulling away from the tradition somewhat, but why can't this just be evidence of a development, or even vacillation, rather than a contradiction pointing to jiggery-pokery?

I don't think we need to import the connotations of the "Road to Damascus" bollocks from Acts. From the letters only, we have simply: a religious conversion experience mentioned in the same breath as religious conversion experiences had by others earlier; which is elsewhere emphasised in more personal, unique terms.

It's not really a creed, it's the closest thing we have to a creed from those times, so I think Christians are accustomed to interpreting it that way, but we needn't take their cue. It's in a teaching text, and it's just a brief reminder to the flock of "what we believe", in the context of a discussion clarifying some questions naturally arising from "what we believe".

spamandham

If 1 Cor. 15 is authentic, it tells us nothing about the beliefs of the Jerusalem group. It is a letter (supposedly) from Paul to his group of gentile Christians reiterating what they (Paul and the church at Corinth) believed.

Paul tells us explicitly in 2 Cor 11:4 that the "super apostles" were teaching a different Jesus , a different gospel and a different spirit. He doesn't clarify who the "super apostles" are, but the only others he refers to as apostles are members of his own family/church, and those from Jerusalem.

Ben C Smith

Yet Paul says in Galatians that he ended up preaching as gospel (ευαγγελιζεται) the same faith as the one that he had persecuted.

There is no way to indict any given reconstruction simply on the grounds that it claims similarity between the Pauline gospel and the Jerusalem gospel: Paul himself claims similarity between his gospel and the Jerusalem gospel. Everybody in this debate, not just gurugeorge, is listing both similarities and differences between these gospels. You and spin seem to list only one basic similarity, messianism (of some kind), amidst a host of differences, while Amaleq13 and gurugeorge seem to list only one basic difference, Jewish requirements, amidst a host of similarities. So simply to give a verse that talks about difference does nothing to either side; both sides agree that there is at least one difference; both sides agree that there is at least one similarity. The debate is on how many of each.

As for the different Jesus bit, does this different Jesus automatically have to be an uncrucified and unresurrected Jesus, just because that would indeed be different? If so, does it also have to be a female Jesus to the male Pauline one? For that, too, would be different.

We ought to be able to recognize rhetoric when we see it.

Consider this rhetoric (emphasis added):

In addition to preaching a Christ who was materially wealthy, many of the faith teachers, such as Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, proclaim a Jesus who descended into hell and had to be tortured by Satan in order to complete the atonement for the sins of mankind. That's not the Jesus I know and love.

Did Hagin and does Copeland preach an uncrucified and unresurrected Jesus just because some other Christian says that they are not preaching the Jesus he himself knows? Of course not. This is rhetoric. And so is 2 Corinthians 11.4.

Ben.

spamandham

*sigh*

No, he says he persecuted the church of God until God's Son was revealed *IN* him. He does not say anywhere in Galatians or elsewhere what the Jerusalem sect taught or believed, other than we know they were devoted to Jesus Christ, and whatever they taught was significantly different from Paul's gospel.

Paul never explains why he was persecuting the church, but we know it had something to do with Jewish tradition else his comments about Jewish zeal would have no context. Based on Peter's lackadaisical attitude toward Jewish tradition, I infer Paul was persecuting them because they were ignoring the Sabbath and its associated power structure - the very same offense that eventually leads to Jesus' crucifixion in the gospel stories.

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

If the Jerusalem sect were teaching "crucifixion/resurrection+circumcision", and Paul's innovation is to subtract the circumcision part, then why is Paul bringing up the crucifixion aspect? That's the part they have in common, right?

Ben C Smith

Galatians 1.23:

...but only, they kept hearing: He who once persecuted us is now preaching as gospel [ευαγγελιζεται] the faith which he once tried to destroy.

Ben.

ETA:

Because Paul disagrees with them on the implications of the cross. He thinks that cross equals no circumcision. Galatians 6.12 makes this connection very clear.