Amaleq13

Glad to hear it and thanks.

aa5874

You probably have not checked the meaning of the word "fiction".

A false statement believed to be true does not make the statement non-fiction.

Homer's Achilles is fiction whether or not the author thought he wrote non-fiction.

Some people believe in myths or believe false statements are true and worship implausible characters and call these fictitious characters Gods and worship them hoping when they die they would be rewarded with eternal life.

spamandham

From webster...

Main Entry:
fic·tion Listen to the pronunciation of fiction
Pronunciation:
\ˈfik-shən\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English ficcioun, from Middle French fiction, from Latin fiction-, fictio act of fashioning, fiction, from fingere to shape, fashion, feign — more at dough
Date:
14th century

1 a: something invented by the imagination or feigned ; specifically : an invented story b: fictitious literature (as novels or short stories) c: a work of fiction ; especially : novel2 a: an assumption of a possibility as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth <a legal fiction> b: a useful illusion or pretense3: the action of feigning or of creating with the imagination


Satisfied?

JoeWallack

JW:
We have uncertainty here all the time regarding what constitutes "evidence". After looking at Webster online http://unabridged.merriam-webster.co...bin/unabridged I see at least 3 different categories of definition for "evidence":

1) Common usage. The broadest definition. The assertion and potential make it evidence. This is the definition I use.

2) Legal. Value must have a minimum to reach the level of "evidence".

3) Science. Strictest definition. Everything starts out as data and it is the relationship between data and methodology that creates evidence. I think this is what Spin uses.

JW:
So you've moved from MJ to so far from MJ that it has no evidential value for doubting that Jesus was crucified. As Richard Jeni would say when playing rural Georgia and someone in the back would stand up and say, "Ya'll probably just think we're all a bunch of dumb redneck hicks, doncha?", how do you answer? That's what you get for listening to Rick.

JW:
Ahh, progress. So now you agree that there is logic to this point. You are the objective one. It's possible that Jesus was not promoted where he was crucified. See how easy that was? As we concede this type of uncertainty though, where was Jesus promoted, which position that does that support? A position of doubt or a position of knowledge?

JW:
Well here's where you are right. But as the bully said in the classic Three O'Clock High when ordered by the Principal to leave the fight scene, "I'm afraid I just can't do that sir." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FavpMWFRAkQ

JW:
Quit wasting time telling me to quit wasting time. I have Faith that this will have the same effect on you that your command had on me. Yes, where was the Jerusalem Church located. This can be another one of those funny Christian questions like "Who is buried in The Empty Tomb?" or "What year was -0- CE?".

JW:
So you have no second-hand witness that Jesus was crucified. That might not be a problem except you have no first-hand witness either. You seem to be conceding one point at a time. Maybe this is the one for your next post. Than you can deal with the possibility that the cause of death was something in between natural causes and official Roman crucifixion (like hanging) which Paul took as a Type of crucifixion.

JW:
I know that you read Spin's posts. Evidence is like Real Estate, there are 3 important factors, Source, Source and Source. Regarding Jesus being crucified:

1) A 2,000 years ago event. Enough to create doubt by itself.

2) Religious context. Enough to create doubt by itself.

3) No first-hand witness source.

4) An original crucifixion narrative ("Mark") that is not believable. Pilate decides that Jesus is innocent so he finds him guilty and releases another Bar Abbas to prevent a riot who was guilty of starting a riot. Sounds contrived.

5) No second-hand witness source.

6) The main source (Paul) who claims Revelation as a Source in general.

That being said I accept that Paul is evidence that Jesus was crucified. Maybe Jesus was crucified. I just have doubt that he was.

Regarding "To suggest that they would have not opposed his teaching of a crucified messiah is simply absurd.", well there ya go again. Nothing in between is possible?

JW:
Galatians is just one issue of following the Law. The means of Jesus' death does not effect that. You are trying too hard.

JW:
Surely you concede that an important factor regarding what the Church chose to preserve is what a writing said. Let's say Eusebius saw a writing which said that Peter denied that Jesus was crucified. What do you think Eusebius might have done with it? Is it possible he would just consider it fiction and not even bother to mention it?

JW:
When I say the Jerusalem Church I mean Peter, James El-all. Do you think Peter and James were the Jerusalem Church and do you think Paul was in competition with Peter and James?

JW:
The better the MJ position the greater the doubt that Jesus was crucified. It's not an all or nothing thing. Don't they teach statistics in Alaska? (course that would explain a lot lately).

JW:
Another amazing assertion on your part considering we have nothing from Paul's opponents and you don't even know exactly who they were. Obviously Christianity preferred what Paul said to what Paul's opponents said. This means they said different things. Was one of those things "crucifixion"? Maybe.



Joseph

Amaleq13

No, you apparently have uncertainty about what constitutes evidence or proof for the claim you are making. You offered neither proof nor evidence that Paul's opponents denied that Jesus was crucified. You have only offered proof or evidence that leads you to doubt it.

Incoherent non sequitur.

Even assuming an MJ, the evidence suggests he was believed to have been crucified and none suggests this was contradicted by Paul's opponents.

The progress is, apparently, you paying attention because I did nothing but repeat my position from the start. :huh:

Why do you continue to pretend that your doubt is in any way relevant to the claim you are supposed to be supporting? You need evidence that Paul's opponents doubted.

Your doubt is not evidence of their doubt.

They were "pillars" of the movement and based in Jerusalem. Paul apparently felt he was in competition with them (or at least their representatives) with regard to his gentile converts and their acceptance of his good news that they didn't have to get their dicks cut.

One wonders, given this, why you would assert any knowledge about them, then?

No wonder you've wasted so much time defending a completely different claim. Too bad I'm not interested in discussing your doubts about the crucifixion. :wave:

spin

You've gotta be joking. You are the one who claims that they supported the notion of Jesus having been crucified, yet you are as always totally empty-handed. You have shown no evidence for what they believed. All one has to show in contrast is that Paul claimed not to have gotten his gospel from Paul's opponents. This leads you to redefine gospel message as gospel audience.

Time to change tune.

What movement exactly?? What did it believe in and what's the basis for this?


spin

Amaleq13

I don't think Joe needs your help to shift the burden but, given this false and confused statement above, I think you need to actually read the thread before trying to help. I have made no such claim. I have only been denying a claim for which Joe has yet to provide any support.

You can continue to pretend this isn't how Paul defines his gospel but that doesn't actually change the text.

If only you would take your own advice. The song you keep singing continues to be incoherent.

The one Paul persecuted prior to joining.

A crucified and resurrected messiah.

Either revelation or direct interaction with the above.

Any more questions to which you already know the answers and to which you have already demonstrated you have no better response?

No, you don't. :wave:

spin

Your response to Joe was a hook to bring you back to your responsibilities. Let me cite you for the benefit of clarifying them to you:

[Y]ou apparently have uncertainty about what constitutes evidence or proof for the claim you are making.

Your confusion would be admirable, if you didn't know the difference between message and audience.

Only in your perverse thinking. You're the sorry soul living in the fantasy that Paul confuses message with audience. This is just a projection of your silliness.

Did you see that duck and weave? What movement theologically. Hmm? Tell us what you know... my let's save you the effort: you don't know anything.

I've been trying to get you to cough up evidence for this for many months. Could you drag something appropriate out of your crystal ball?

Where in Galatians does Paul tell you that? Short answer: nowhere. :constern02:

As you haven't provided anything tangible for months, any response would be as good if not better.

Doh! Amaleq13, your coyness with facts betrays your empty-handedness.


spin

gurugeorge

Bingo! Exactamundo. The sense of "seeing" is ambiguous; from what I gather, the term is more like "recognised". Now of course it could refer to eyeballing, but (again, from what I gather) the word used, if it was used in the way it was generally used roundabout that time, more likely referred to "seeing" in the sense of "getting" or grokking, with the connotation of divine self-revelation. The fact that the same term is used for Cephas/James and Paul, knocks the "eyeballing" possibility out, and so we are left with this: the passage refers to a religious community lighting on a new idea about the Messiah (putting him into the past, making him a sub-rosa Messiah).

Indeed, this passage is so knife-edged balanced, it makes me suspect it may be the original source of the confusion, or at least the "wedge" that gave some people licence to think that the original apostles of the Joshua Messiah idea were people who had known him personally.

Basically there are two things:

1) A religious community's Big Idea: they displace the Messiah into a recent-ish, vague-ish past, and have him be the winner of a spiritual rather than military victory. This is a variant form of Messianism, strongly spiced with some kind of disappointed-apocalyptic, proto-Gnostic outlook, also perhaps somewhat cosmopolitan and influenced by the Mysteries soter concept. i.e., the members of this religious community (led by Cephas and James) purport to see the truth about the Messiah to be revealed in Scripture - that he has been, fairly recently, only he came in obscurity, fooled the Archons, etc. Some of them also undoubtedly have religious visionary experience of the Messiah, prophesy, give inspired teachings from Him, etc.

2) A later idea that creeps in - the Messiah's time is pulled closer to the Apostles', and the Apostles, rather than the early spreaders of a myth, are thought of instead as people who knew the Messiah in person. Clearly this kind of confusion is more prone to have occurred after 70CE, and then again after 134CE, with the upheavals then meaning that some original information and perhaps some of the original people, were lost.

EarlDoherty

Another latecomer to the party….So I will have to back up and pick up on earlier posts on the OP issue which has just resurfaced (namely, the meaning we can and should take from Galatians 1:11-12).

Rick said this about his perennial view of what constituted Paul’s gospel and his “secret of Christ.”

No room for a gospel as including any kind of knowledge about Jesus’ actions? On what basis were the Gentiles to be “saved” then? Simply by believing that they were saved? They first had to believe in something about Jesus. There has to be a content to the chance for faith they are being offered. How can Paul go to gentile communities who had never heard of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the Christ as the spiritual Son of the Jewish God, and not preach what Jesus did in either the mythic or historical realm? What Paul is telling them is that the opportunity to believe in those things is being extended to the Gentiles, and to do it without having to conform to Jewish ritual, especially circumcision.

Both sides of the coin are necessary: the content of the faith, and the opportunity for the gentiles to accept that content. You can’t have the second without the first. And the content is the story of Jesus and his redeeming acts. I have tried to get across in the past that the total “secret” of Christ (at least from Paul’s point of view) involves more than one aspect, and in various passages of the epistles certain of those aspects may be highlighted. Paul is offering a double-edged secret. God’s long-hidden “mystery” involves not only the fact of the existence of the Son, the fact of his death in the spiritual world revealed by scripture and the Holy Spirit and its consequences for salvation, but—in Paul’s own thinking and mission—the availability of that mystery to the gentiles.

In Eph. 3:4-6, pseudo-Paul is highlighting (and it is almost the only place it is stated as this) this latter element essential to Paul’s mission, that the gentiles can get in on the action. This is the source of Paul’s dispute with the Jerusalem group who believed that gentile converts could only be brought in if they conform to certain aspects of the Jewish Law. But brought into what? Obviously, into membership in a cult which believed in the Son of God and what he had done (in a dimension which is never historicized, never located in time and space, with a crucifixion never allotted to human agents). So when in Romans 16:25-7 or Colossians 2:2 the “secret” is defined as Jesus himself and knowledge about him, that’s the essential content of the gospel. Paul in fact defines the basics of that essential content in 1 Cor. 15:3-4, something which Peter carries to the Jews and Paul carries to the gentiles (Gal. 2:7-8), although we may not know the exact definitions or parameters of it in the James-Peter camp, so there can be room for Paul to claim that his version is the product of his own revelation rather than something he took from others. Paul has an additional dimension to his gospel, that the gentiles are offered the chance to believe as well. But he also has another distinct dimension which is mentioned in Colossians 1:26—“Christ in you.” This is not being restricted to the gentiles. Paul nowhere claims that believing Jews are not welcome, or do not form part of “the church” whether in his own circles or the circles which Peter was proselytizing (Gal. 2:7-8), namely Jewish ones.

So the effort to restrict Paul's message and "secret" simply to the availability of salvation to the gentiles is not tenable.

What does this do for understanding the meaning of Galatians? I’m quite willing to accept that the principal issue in view in this letter is the question of circumcision for gentiles (and by extension their need to follow the whole Jewish Law), with Paul arguing against it. Pressure on the Galatian converts from Judaizers advocating circumcision could well be what is in view when Paul (1:6) admonishes them for turning away from his own message to “a different gospel.” I agree with those who maintain that he is hardly, in this letter, up against people who deny Jesus himself or the fact of his crucifixion, wherever it took place. (He does that elsewhere.) But this does not mean that when he gets to 1:11-12, and even at points beyond, he is still speaking, and always speaking, within that narrow range of meaning.

For example, the first thing he says after 1:11-12 is (1:16): “God, who had set me apart from birth and called me through his grace, chose to reveal his Son to me and through me, in order that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” He does not say—in defence of his supposed gospel of “no circumcision necessary”—that God “chose to reveal to me that the Gentiles could be saved and without circumcision, in order that I could preach this to the gentiles.” This reference to his preaching message is far more inclusive and focuses on the Son himself, including his very existence. (Just because we know that knowledge of the Son in some form preceded Paul does not rule out that Paul can claim for himself a degree of personal revelation: that’s his schtick, to put the spotlight on himself and claim some kind of superiority.)

Then a few verses later, he tells how “Christ’s congregations in Judea” were saying: “Our former persecutor is preaching the good news of the faith which once he tried to destroy.” Those congregations in Judea were more than likely Jews. They were hardly referring to the “good news of no circumcision necessary for the gentiles,” or to the fact that Paul was preaching such a thing. They, again, are referring to the content of Paul’s preaching as being Christ himself, and what he had done.

In his first specific mention of circumcision (2:2f), it is in the context of ‘running by’ the Jerusalem apostles the content of his gospel to the gentiles--in respect of that aspect of it which relates to them, namely, that they don’t need to be circumcised or follow other strictures of the Jewish Law. This in no way restricts the overall gospel he preaches to that dimension. He is simply seeking approval from them of that aspect of his preaching—a necessary aspect in the context of his own adopted mission. The secret or mystery, long-hidden, is for Paul both Christ himself and the availability of faith in him to the gentiles. And it remains so in the eyes of those who subsequently wrote in his name.

Amaleq (along with others in the past) has made the claim that the “gospel” Paul insists he has gotten by revelation in 1:11-12 can be restricted to the ‘adherence to the Jewish Law’ issue and only that. There are too many problems with this. I suggest that even if Paul’s focus in this epistle is on the issue of adherence to the law, he can still be stepping outside that narrow circle and making a statement which encompasses his entire gospel, one that includes much more than the Law issue. That would be a natural understanding in the language of those verses. Paul in this letter is basically debating one aspect of his total gospel, non-adherence to the Jewish Law; in defence of that particular aspect, he stands up and declares: “the whole of the gospel you heard me preach is the product of revelation, none of it is from other men.” By declaring such a source for his entire preaching, he strengthens his claim for one part of it.

The "natural language"? In verse 11, he says, “the gospel you heard me preach…” What would they have heard him preach? Hardly only that gentiles did not have to conform to the Law. As argued above, the gospel they heard would have comprised content about Christ himself with the added proviso that gentiles could believe without being circumcised.

“I received it through a revelation of (about) Jesus Christ.” That’s too broad and hardly means to say: “I know that gentiles are exempt from the Law through a revelation about Jesus Christ.”

It is very unpersuasive to think that Paul would stand up and declare, “That part of my gospel—and only that part—is something God (or Christ) revealed to me; the rest I got from others.” How likely is Paul to make such a statement, and so vociferously? He would never voice even an implied acknowledgement that any of his gospel was dependent on others. Yet that amounts to what Rick and Amaleq are trying to read into it.

Furthermore, why would anyone think or be accusing Paul of getting the “no Law needed” message from others, so that he would feel a need to declare the opposite? Who would they be claiming he had gotten it from? Peter? James? Hardly. There would be no need for Paul to make such a declaration in the first place, since it would go without saying that gentile exemption from the Law was his idea!

Paul refers to his “gospel” in other places. In Romans 1:2 it is the “gospel about the Son as found in the prophets.” Where in the prophets does it say, or does he imagine it saying, that the gentiles are heirs to the Abrahamic promise, or don’t need circumcision? In 2 Corinthians 10 & 11, rivals are going about preachings “another Jesus”. How can their preaching the necessity for adhering to the Law constitute ‘preaching another Jesus’?

The bottom line in all this is that in Galatians 1:11-12, Paul is referring to his gospel as a whole. Whether his statement should be regarded as a legitimate claim, or to what extent he is exaggerating or misrepresenting the matter, is another thing entirely. But the effect it has is that we must take that reading with us to 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 and regard the “gospel” he enumerates there as something he has received through revelation, from the scriptures. It is not a gospel from others.

Earl Doherty