NOGO

The question here when did Jesus' "presence" begin.

I presume that the twelve must have felt Jesus' presence during his life. Also those who believe in him during his life but died before Jesus did would also be saved. Again I presume.

Paul on the other hand seems to believe something entirely different. I pick the Young's Literal Translation here because it translates the verse correctly, that is, without reference to the second coming but rather to Jesus' "presence".

So Jesus came first. He resurrected.
Then those who believed in him during his presence.
Then the end.

So for Paul Jesus' presence started when he resurrected and those saved are those who believed that he resurrected.

Paul does not consider the period when Jesus walked the earth.
It is safe to say that Paul did not know of any such period.

Peter Kirby

The statement "for Paul Jesus' presence started when he resurrected" is false, for the resurrection of Jesus lies in the past (Galatians 1:1, 1 Thessalonians 1:10, and many other places) and the eschatological presence of Jesus lies in the future, which is close to the time that believers will be raised. If the Parousia of Jesus were coincident with the resurrection of Jesus, then believers (whose resurrection is supposed to be near the Parousia) would already be raised. That is the very idea Paul is exercised to disprove! For Paul says, "And God has both raised up the Lord, and will raise us up from among [the dead] by his power." (1 Corinthians 6:14) See also 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, "For this we say to you in [the] word of [the] Lord, that we, the living, who remain to the coming (τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ κυρίου) of the Lord, are in no way to anticipate those who have fallen asleep; for the Lord himself, with an assembling shout, with archangel's voice and with trump of God, shall descend from heaven; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we, the living who remain, shall be caught up together with them in [the] clouds, to meet the Lord in [the] air; and thus we shall be always with [the] Lord." You might say that Paul believes Jesus is present now, but in a real sense he isn't for Paul, who asks that "your whole spirit, and soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5:23), which is the time of judgment. Paul says that Jesus has been raised in the past and will appear in the future.

The phrase that Young translates "in his presence" may be an acceptable rendering of the Greek (ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ), but the usual translation is "at his coming"--and this latter translation is better for your point. If Paul is simply saying that those who belong to Christ will be raised in the presence (company) of Christ, then that is something different (and less supportive of your conclusion)--if Christ is present now (after the resurrection of Jesus) in the same sense that he will be present at the general resurrection, then one might as well say that Jesus has been present since Paul's call, since Pentecost, since the great commission, since the resurrection after three days, since the crucifixion, since the epiphany, since the birth, from all eternity, or whatever: there would be no way to say when this presence began on such a reading where Christ is present in the time of Paul. But I prefer "at his coming," as the word, transliterated Parousia, is used in the sense of eschatological arrival in Paul's earlier letter 1 Thessalonians (2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23).

So the point could be made, why does Paul refer to "his coming" instead of "his second coming"? This is a point that Doherty makes, when he argues that the death and resurrection was on a heavenly plane while the (first and only) coming of Jesus is near the end of time.

I was in the middle of composing something on that point, but it became an essay, and I am not precisely sure what you are arguing, so I will wait for your response.

best,
Peter Kirby

Bernard Muller

Peter Kirby wrote:
So the point could be made, why does Paul refer to "his coming" instead of "his second coming"? This is a point that Doherty makes, when he argues that the death and resurrection was on a heavenly plane while the (first and only) coming of Jesus is near the end of time.

Some remarks of mine:

a) What strikes me is that the expression "second coming" came late (2nd, even 3rd century?). So why would Paul use an expression which was not existing in his own times?

b) 1Cor15:20 specifies dead Christians will experience resurrection as Jesus did as the firstfruits. These Christians lived on earth.
Why would Paul parallel a death (followed by alleged resurrection) which, according to one 20th century writer, happened out of sight in the lower heavens, to death already suffered on earth by Christians (followed by the hoped for future resurrection)?

c) Doherty seems to presuppose there was a "mythicist" issue in the time of Paul, forcing Paul to reassure his Christians, "Yes, he did appear a first time on earth", here & there. There was no issue of that sort then (but many others, as well evidenced in Paul' letters!) and up to modern times. So Paul's attitude is very logical and shows that Jesus already been on earth was not doubted by his audience. There was no need to address an issue which was not existing then. Furthermore, Paul's gave quite a few tidbits about a human Jesus in his letters. Sure he did not elaborate on that; but why, if his addressees knew Jesus had been a human being on earth already? And why specify human beings live on earth? Is there other human beings in Paul's letters which are said to live somewhere else?

d) BTW, I think 1Cor12:23-28 is a later Christian interpolation:
From one of my pages, http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/co1c.shtml

>> Addition D

15:23 But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. 24 Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. 25 For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet. 26 The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. 27 For "He has put all things under His feet." But when He says "all things are put under Him," it is evident that He [God, according to Heb2:8] who put all things under Him is excepted. 28 Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.

For Paul, Jesus is the gentle & meek Christ ("by the meekness and gentleness of Christ" 2Co10:1a) and never a king. His role during "the day of the Lord" is to welcome the Christians (resurrected or alive then), between earth and heaven (1Th4:16-17). Also, at Judgment Day, Paul had Christ assisting God in exposing the motives of men's hearts: 1Co4:5,
Ro2:16 "in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel."
For Paul, that's the extant of Christ's role on the day of the Lord.
And in 'Hebrews':
Heb10:12-13 "But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool,"
However later, that will change and culminate in 'Revelation', where Jesus is leading the reconquest (as suggested in 1Co15:24-26):
Rev19:11b-16 "... He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. ... He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God ... He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS."
Note: the author of '1Timothy' tried to "correct" the claim of 'Revelation':
1Ti6:15 NASB "... He ["... the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, ..." (1:17)]
` who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords,"

In 1Co15:26 ("The last enemy that will be destroyed is death"), the interpolator added up a piece of apocalyptic beliefs which came after Paul's times, as in 'Revelation', where Death is put to death:
Rev20:14 "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death."

In 1Co15:27-28, the interpolator probably reacted against those who believed (or preached) that Christ (the Son) would supplant God (the Father). That was never an issue addressed in this letter, where Christ is presented always below God:
11:3 "the head of every man is Christ, ... , and the head of Christ is God"
However, beliefs that Christ had assumed God's functions and replaced him appeared later:
Rev22:13 "I [heavenly Jesus] am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."
However it seems 1Co15:27-28 is mainly addressing the following from 'Ephesians', written around 80-100, and likely to generate some debates:
Eph1:20b-22a "... [God] seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet, ..."

Then why would Paul have made such a (badly written, confusing & highly concentrated) digression on topics (apocalyptic scenario, Jesus as the King of the great reconquest, death of Death, against Jesus being above God), which do not appear anywhere else in his letters? <<

Best regards, Bernard

Prophetessofrage

Hi Peter, you are taking his comments out of context. Paul was speaking in general with regard to the matter. Of course, he believed in Yahshua's 'walk on earth.' He speaks of that in several other of his letters (Hebrews, Ephesian, Galatians).

We have to 'digest' and keep in context the fullness of all that was said by Paul, in order to understand where he was coming from when he wrote the comments you question.

Peter Kirby

You are addressing NOGO! I already responded to NOGO myself.

Paul did not write Hebrews or Ephesians. Such a view was decisively abandoned by researchers in the nineteenth century. You got Galatians right by luck.

best,
Peter Kirby

NOGO

Hi Peter and thank you for your feedback.
I contend that although the physical coming of Jesus lies in the future the "presence" is now.

I do not have time right now to look up and quote verses but Paul believes that the Christian community had the "living word of God" in their midst. He compares that to the old testament which is non-living. This I believe is the "presence" which Paul speaks of.

In the Gospel of John it is stated very clearly that those who accept the Word of God (Jesus) will be resurrected at the end.

So what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthian 15:23 is that those who have accepted Jesus during their life-time will be saved at the end.


I believe this to be a bias rendering. Biased from the earthly Jesus camp.

Interesting! I would be grateful if you can show me how you came to this conclusion.

That is what I am getting at as well.

I am sorry that I can't answer in full here but I will write something to complete my points.

Perhaps one last point. In the Gospel of John it is said that the disciples did not receive the spirit until after Jesus resurrected. Odd isn't it?
I believe that this was added to correct an obvious problem with the GJohn story. Early in the GJohn John the Baptist says "I baptised with water but he will baptise with the holy spirit" or something like that, but that did not happen until after his resurrection. The disciples then did not get the spirit of God and were not saved until after Jesus resurrected just as Paul is saying in 1 Corinth 15

Peter Kirby

NOGO: I contend that although the physical coming of Jesus lies in the future the "presence" is now.

The "presence" in 1 Corinthians 15:23 lies in the future, when believers will be raised. This is obvious from YLT or any other translation. See below (and above).

NOGO: He compares that to the old testament which is non-living. This I believe is the "presence" which Paul speaks of.

Finding the context of the passage "for even as in Adam all die, so also in the Christ all shall be made alive, and each in his proper order, a first-fruit Christ, afterwards those who are the Christ's, in his presence, then -- the end, when he may deliver up the reign to God, even the Father, when he may have made useless all rule, and all authority and power" (YLT) in analogy with the concept of scripture being the "living word" now, though not technically alive, is a moribund hypothesis, and not in the sense that anyone before you has held it (to my knowledge), but in the sense that is justly convicted as false with all haste. Christ has become a life-giving spirit to Paul, but at present the body is just a seed, of something that will be transformed through Christ at the end time, so that through Christ God will be all in all. This hasn't happened yet, even if the "gnostics" (so-styled in the book Gnosticism in Corinth) with which Paul is disputing have claimed to experience the resurrection on earth. That is the very thing which Paul sets out to dissuade his brothers from believing, as is shot through the 1 Cor 15 passage read with any care, and also hinted throughout the letter. Pick up any commentary, and they will tell you that Paul teaches that the life-giving presence of Christ, the resurrection of the faithful when Jesus finally arrives (hopefully soon), is to come in the future. Ask Doherty.

NOGO: So what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthian 15:23 is that those who have accepted Jesus during their life-time will be saved at the end.

In my interpretation, this is true, though you might have gotten some extrapolations from this fact with which I disagree. But at least we can agree on something.

NOGO: I believe this to be a bias rendering. Biased from the earthly Jesus camp.

I can show this belief to be based on misinterpreted data, although I am not making the speculative accusation of bias. The basic idea is that YLT says "in his presence" while all the others say "at his coming," and that this latter translation is a forced fit for an earthly Jesus, as the Young's is "Literal" and so the meaning is otherwise. This is based on a misunderstanding of the Greek terms (if considered), a misunderstanding of translation theory, a misunderstanding of Paul's established usage in an eschatological context, and a misunderstanding of the implications for the earthly Jesus debate.

Misunderstanding of the Greek terms as necessarily meaning "in his presence": The terms of concern are en and parousia, the former translated "in/at" and the latter translated "presence/coming." Taken as Greek words as they appear in the range of Greek literature, as also in Paul's letters, the words are polysemantic. Parousia here is a feminine noun, singular in number, in the dative case. Feyerabend's Handy Dictionary of the Greek and English Languages defines en as a preposition with the dative as having the following range of meaning: "in, at, on; between, among; during, within; by means of, with, through; from; upon, by dint of." (p. 132) In short, the Greek word in itself is useless for deciding a battle between "in" and "at" interpretations in English (which, for that matter, aren't technically precise themselves). Feyerabend, a secular dictionary, defines parousia with these variant connotations: "presence; arrival, return; assistance; right time." Stripping the word from its context, it can mean either "presence" or "arrival" or even "return"! There is only a little help from the generally triumphalist and religious context of a Christian writer talking about Jesus. Gordon D. Fee indicates, "In the political sphere it had to do with the arrival of a ruler, in religion the epiphany of a deity" (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, p. 753)

Misunderstanding of translation theory: the "Literal" in "Young's Literal Translation" does not mean "more accurate." It basically means that there is a conscious attempt to be consistent in translating a particular Greek word by a particular English word. It is thus a thinly disguised guide to the Greek, but highly misleading for someone who knows only English. My preferred choice for reading without recourse to Greek is a "word for word translation," such as the NAB or NET. Here the translation philosophy is to keep the sentence structure as close to the original form as possible, to substitute an equivalent English word for each Greek where possible, and to make the choice of word based on the most probable connotation of the various options for translating within the context of the Greek passage and usage in such a context. Thus the word Christos can be translated as "Christ" or "Messiah" depending on whether a cognomen of Jesus or a Jewish title is under concern. This is less restrictive and thus can be more accurate for the English reader, who can't "back-translate" YLT into Greek in their heads and know what is said. There are other translation philosophies--"phrase for phrase" or "dynamic equivalence," which is unfortunately a license for conservativism in the New Inaccurate Version, as well as the so-called "amplified" editions that add to the text and substitute modern idiom to make it more clear and fresh to the reader. I don't prefer these last ones for scholarly work.

Misunderstanding of Paul's established usage in an eschatological context: this was mentioned in the previous post, and it is of paramount importance for an accurate rendering. The word, transliterated parousia, is used in the sense of eschatological arrival in Paul's earlier letter 1 Thessalonians (2:19; 3:13; 4:15; 5:23). Please look up all four references, but especially 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 (Darby translation), "For this we say to you in [the] word of [the] Lord, that we, the living, who remain to the coming of the Lord (ten parousian tou kuriou), are in no way to anticipate those who have fallen asleep; for the Lord himself, with an assembling shout, with archangel's voice and with trump of God, shall descend from heaven; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we, the living who remain, shall be caught up together with them in [the] clouds, to meet the Lord in [the] air; and thus we shall be always with [the] Lord." To interpret this eschatological parousia as lying in the past is an exercise in obtuseness--and the same goes for the wholly eschatological passage in which 1 Corinthians 15:23 is embedded.

Even before considering the actual implications of the English phrases "in his presence" and "at his coming," which I tried to bring out in my last post, your "earthly Jesus camp" explanation of the non-YLT translation is disproved by two facts. Young was a conservative Christian. Doherty is an outspoken mythicist. Doherty defines "the Parousia" in Paul as "his 'coming' at the End-time," coming in quotes for emphasis and to indicate that it is both first and final, in the future, in the view of Doherty, as he goes on to elaborate on those pages (The Jesus Puzzle, p. 50).

If you do not conclude that "at his coming" is an acceptable rendering of the Greek, at such point I would honestly consider you to be biased.

NOGO writes: Interesting! I would be grateful if you can show me how you came to this conclusion.

My conclusion is that one can draw no conclusion from the assumption that Paul regards Christ as "present" with believers now in the eschatological sense of parousia in 1 Corinthians 15:23. There is no evidence in Paul to draw a conclusion on when exactly in the past this parousia began...especially seeing as the assumption that this parousia started in the past is false.

NOGO writes: Perhaps one last point. In the Gospel of John it is said that the disciples did not receive the spirit until after Jesus resurrected. Odd isn't it? I believe that this was added to correct an obvious problem with the GJohn story. Early in the GJohn John the Baptist says "I baptised with water but he will baptise with the holy spirit" or something like that, but that did not happen until after his resurrection. The disciples then did not get the spirit of God and were not saved until after Jesus resurrected just as Paul is saying in 1 Corinth 15

This is a consistent belief throughout early Christian writings: the dispensation of the spirit to the church came after the resurrection, or what modern scholars euphemistically term "the Easter experience," the formative period of three weeks to three years in which the apostles developed basic beliefs about the significance of the suffering death of Jesus and Jesus having actually been raised by God, thus established as the Son of God in power, and as to come in all glory soon in the future. The reason that the dispensation of the spirit can't be backdated to the ministry of Jesus is that it didn't happen that way; there were no "Christians" while Jesus lived. This is also why Mark makes a theological point of the "messianic secret," where Jesus tries to hide his true identity as Son of God while on earth, which as long ago as Wrede was identified and attributed to wishful fantasy in a scholarly way. Even the Gospel of John has Jesus saying some things which the disciples didn't "remember," i.e. "come to believe," until the time of the resurrection (John 2:22). The general method of the evangelist is to do the best with what he's got, embroidering and remolding as necessary, sometimes making excuses for what he's made up, not to create ex nihilo an entire superstructure that nobody would recognize and would cavalierly be rejected.

best,
Peter Kirby

NOGO

I would add that given
1 thess 4:16 "and the dead in Christ will rise first. "
that the above
"residence in the believers themselves"
is what gives them salvation.

As I stated Paul believes in the "living word of God" in the community of believers and this state of affairs clearly started after the resurrection of the heavenly Christ.

The presence can also be attested by the fact that Jesus appeared to Paul, Peter and others after the resurrection.

"Christ has taken up residence in Christian believers themselves."

This statement by Doherty also points to the GJohn where Jesus is a human who is possessed by the divine Word of God.

Let me ask you a question.

Last Supper
Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body."

What does the bread symbolize?
And how is it Christ's body?

Amos

Nogo, may I?

If it IS the body of Christ it does not symbolize anything but is exactly what Jesus said it was: "the body of Christ." Notice his prayer of thanksgiving wherein the body of Christ is universal among us and we as Christians must consume our equals to stay alive. Here it is the daily bread that we eat and the fruit of the vine we drink. Notice also the words "my body is real food and my blood is real drink" which also means that real food is the body if Christ and real drink is the blood of Christ and all we have to do is recognize this as our equals under God = pantheism = the end of religion for the consecrated.

Note, a distinction must be made between the body of Jesus and the body of Christ because when Jesus said "this is my body" he was referring to the body of Christ and not his body as Jesus.

NOGO

Hi Amos,

First let me say that I was not trying to start a theological debate when I asked the question of what does the bread symbolize?
A very precise answer can be found in the texts of the NT. No not some obscure sentence which only I can figure out. It is stated quite clearly and supported by many other passages.

I agree that the body of Christ is not the body of Jesus.

This, of course, brings up the question who was the Christ?
His body is distributed for consumption at the Lord's supper.

Can you guess what I am talking about?