gurugeorge

Those sorts of things weren't included in the definition you gave (on the basis of which you called bs on Kittel) - so if the trusted dictionary you rely on didn't include them, where are these people getting the idea from?

So Paul and those other folks are literate, so they can't have been "ordinary Jews", they were already in a literate elite. Paul, at least, is in a literary and a mystical-visionary elite. (I appreciate the arguments about books being read out to congregations, but in Paul's time, this religion was small beer, and if writing was so involved even at the early stages, the core group must have had a disproportionate amount of literary people, it seems to me.)

Sure, but that's also compatible with: they were rebels, whose idea wasn't particularly acceptable to other Jewish thought.

Of course, of course - and how can the issue be decided? Really, all we can have (until that lucky archaeological or literary find! ) is a clash of hypotheses. Numerous internally coherent stories can be generated based on the evidence. Since it's hard to decide which is true, one can only go by things like parsimony, elegance, coherence with general and background knowledge. Balance of probabilities (which could of course be waaaay out).

No, god's having sent his emissary already, in a way that makes the millennium inevitable, and the assurance that you are included in the millennium because of this, is better than the news that you can be included in the millennium.

But yea, "dead man" is how you could hear it, and it would seem like a "stumbling block".

Well, to be fair, I'm using the conventional analysis because it makes sense, up to a point - but it's only an aspect of the conventional analysis, if you think of the whole of it as including the idea of a human Jesus known to the Messengers, who sent them out. I don't see the necessity for that, the whole thing could easily have gotten off the ground without one.

How is it ignored? Everyone accounts for it in their own way, so far as I can see. One way of explaining it is as I posited earlier on: he got a teaching from a Messiah entity in a visionary experience, but there were already some people around who'd had an idea of a Messiah that's similar to the entity he has a revelation of. (Whether he'd heard of the entity prior to his revelation, or merely looked around to see if anybody else had had a similar idea, and found some people in Jerusalem after his revelation? - both these fit with the text AFAICS.)

What's the problem? What argument are you perceiving that makes someone's having a revelation of an entity, and getting a teaching from that entity, incompatible with their having heard of that entity before the revelation; or their having communicated with other people who'd had a similar idea of an entity, after the revelation?

It seems plain that on the face of it, Paul is talking about one of these kinds of scenarios. Interestingly, in the Marcion Galatians, it's like it only occurs to Paul quite late on, and in a casual way, to check in with the Jerusalem people. One gets the impression that he's really only tidying up a loose end, just seeing these people for the sake of good form, as it were. This seems more compatible with having subsequently heard about people who had a similar idea of a Messiah to the Messiah he'd experienced in his vision. (i.e. he gets a vision that the Messiah has already been; some other people already had had the idea that that was the correct way to view the Messiah, from Scripture.)

No, what you've got is traditional Messianists being forward-looking in that way, and these other Messianists saying it has already happened (in a "revalued values" way, with material repercussions to follow).

Well, they could look at it the way I'm looking at it

Is that a bad thing or a good thing?

Yes. But they didn't just "send him away", did they? It looks like they got him to pay dues (to the "poor" - i.e. to the Ebionites). (Again, I'm looking at Price here, where he looks at the haunting similarities between this scenario in Paul and the scenario with Simon Magus and Peter in the Pseudo-Clementines, and other echoes of the event in Acts and Luke.) How would that fit with your scenario (if he really was, in effect, paying dues)? Why would Paul agree to "send money back home" to these people, collected from his Gentile converts?

spin

Doh! They're all examples of good news.

Which other folks at the time of Paul?

We don't know too much about Paul's literacy. There are signs that he used a scribe. When he did write himself, he commented on the malformation of the characters he wrote.

Torah observance is Jewish thought, something that all Jews would normally not have needed to even think about. Paul was advocating the abandonment of this most Jewish thought.

I thought the issue could be decided by the fact that Paul claimed he learnt about Jesus from a revelation, which excludes in his mind from prior contact and that what he was selling was so far off the beaten trail for ordinary Jews that the Jerusalem crowd could hardly have considered what he was on about serious.

But what's that to do with messianism??

It was for Justin's Jew, Trypho.

So the whole thing, ie the "Jesus"-based religion of Paul, didn't need any real Jesus for Paul to kickstart his religion?

Explain away, not "account for". If Paul tells you he didn't get his Jesus from other people, why is it that everyone is trying to say that he did??

Can you give a reason from what Paul said that he needed prior information of a real live Jesus for him to have believed in one? ie is Paul in any sense a reliable source for the historicity of Jesus?

Shit, have you really read what he said yet? His gospel didn't come from other people. He didn't learn it from other people. He is explicit. He talks of an event in which Jesus is revealed to him, before which time he didn't know about Jesus. Yes, god had set him apart before birth, but Paul unknowingly had to wait until the moment of revelation.

Not based on what Paul says.

Yes, interesting.

The JtB movement was not traditional messianist. His religion required a value added tax: repent and be baptized. But they were fundamentally traditional Jews in that they would have observed the torah. To any torah observant Jew the notion advocated by Paul of not observing the torah puts Paul outside Judaism.

Zing! Damn, I wish I could find the over-one's-head smilie.

(It's a parenthesis.)

This thing about Ebionites seems to be an uncalled for assumption. Read Deut. 15:7-11. Remembering the poor is an ordinary Jewish religious notion.

He still had a few vestiges of Jewish praxis in him.


spin

rlogan

Yes. The Jews circumscribed it with "created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27)

Human form God. We are compelled to take this as a premise.


So what does an HJ proponent think they are doing?


It is inescapable. Those that believe in the human-form God have to describe a human form.

Therefore it is impermissible to take that tautology and force it to mean something else: historicity.


The only way you can do that "logically" is to pretend a premise is a conclusion:


Premise: "Human form description is history" (ignore that a human form description is inescapable in all human form myths)

Data: Human form described

Conclusion: It is history


And golly Gak - you just keep repeating the premise to us buddy. There are a bathtub full of human-form Gods, and I'll bet you do not take as a default that the fact Zeuss has human description means there is a historical Zeuss.

There were Zeuss cults too. Contemporaneous to an alleged Christ. And it is just as silly to have a default that their existence is evidence of a historical Zeuss.


I the Christian default is understandable coming from a Christian culture. But we should check this bias at the door. We should guard against it at all turns.

GakuseiDon

Just to clarify: Are you asking:
1. Do I take that Paul calling Jesus a 'man' means that there was a historical Jesus?
2. Do I take that Paul describing Jesus as a 'man' means that PAUL thought there was a historical Jesus?

I think (1) is a stretch based on that fact alone. But I think (2) is the more probable conclusion, if we are looking at how they thought back then.

One of the issues I find is that some mythicists are retrograding Doherty mythicist concepts onto pagan beliefs. But there is no evidence that pagans thought that way. When Doherty finally answered my question "Is there any evidence that the pagans in Paul's time placed the myths of their savior gods in the upper world?" he said there was no clear-cut statement to that effect, and that he was working FIRST from the early Christian record.

IOW, he got his "myths of saviour gods in the upper world" from his readings of Hebrews and Paul, and THEN applied it to Plutarch, Sallustius and other pagan writers. But other mythicists who have read Doherty have then come in, claiming that pagans had this idea about "myths in the upper world", which therefore supports Doherty's reading of Hebrews and Paul!

I keep promising myself to stop getting involved in these arguments, since there doesn't appear to be any way of breaking out of this circular logic. It's like those mythicists who support the "Horus and Mithras were virgin-born and crucified, just like Jesus!" idea. While they hold to that idea, any debate is futile.

So: IF the argument is that Paul is representative of the same kind of thinking as the pagans, then Paul calling Jesus a 'man' means he places him on earth. It isn't proof that Jesus is historical -- anymore than William Tell or Ebion were historical -- but it does strongly suggest that Paul thought that Jesus acted on earth and was therefore historical (just as people think that William Tell and Ebion acted on earth rather than a mythical plane.)

Rlogan, if you have any information about how the pagans around Paul's time thought about where Zeus or Hercules or any other god acted when they were in human form, I'd be more than interested in hearing it. What is your view on the matter?

DCHindley

For those who jumped on TDNT

Try this web page.

Christology and discipleship in the Gospel of Mark By Suzanne Watts Hend, Volume 135 of Monograph series (Society for New Testament Studies), Cambridge University Press, 2006, 287 pages

This Google Books preview gives examples of related forms of the verb used in military victory contexts in 2 Sam 4:10, 18:20, 25, 26, 27, 31; 2Kings 7:9; Isaiah 40:9, 52:7, 60:6, 61:1.

DCH

Toto

Doherty is not here to defend himself. What he has written:

GoguelDoherty's main objection, it seems, is that just calling Jesus "anthropos" is too vague to count as a historical detail. And in that part of Romans, Paul speaks of Adam, the first man who brought sin into the world, versus Jesus, the man who takes it away:

This is a theme in Paul - see 1 Cor 15 - the first man versus the [last] man. Is either one real? Certainly Adam is not a figure of recent history.

The question here is how much you can read into the use of the term "anthropos" in this poetic / allegorical section, not whether pagans used the term for their gods. (The Greeks did envision their gods as taking human form and doing various embarrassing human stunts, and I think this is what rlogan had in mind.)

GakuseiDon

I agree that Paul's use of "anthropos" for Jesus needs to be evaluated. It probably would be best to determine what Paul meant where he isn't silent, before drawing conclusions from the silence itself (though the OP is asking a more general question about the silence)

Steven Carr

Which is pretty clear.

Galatians 4
Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.


Paul says straight out that there is a Jerusalem above us.

Of course, GDon insists on pagan parallels before accepting that Christians could think of a certain thing.

If a pagan had not thought of it, then no Christian could.

The logic is quite simple.

If pagan parallels are found, then this is 'parallelomania' and we need evidence that these parallels were deliberately copied.

If no pagan parallels are found, then obviously the whole thing could never have occurred to Christians. What would they have to copy from?

gurugeorge

Aha! Hang on a sec, the game's not over yet. DC Hindley has found a cite from a scholarly book that makes the same connection - what do you think of this?

Yeah, for Gentiles who want to have something to do with this new, albeit Jewish-rooted religion.

He doesn't say he learnt about the entity from revelation, he says he received his gospel from that entity in revelation. As I've explained, the following is compatible with the text:

1) A, B and C have an idea about an entity, X, that they get from poring over Scripture.

2) a) D, living roundabout the same time, hasn't heard about X from A, B, and C, but he gets a visionary experience of X, or a revelation of something very X-like. X gives him a teaching in his vision. He subsequently hears about A, B and C's idea, and thinks that the entity he's had a divine revelation from must be the same entity they were talking about.

OR

2) b) D has heard about X from A, B and C, but he gets his own direct, visionary experience of X, who gives him a teaching in his vision.

Both 2a and 2b are compatible with 1.

Yes, that's what I've been saying.

There is no evidence of a human being called Jesus who was eyeballed by anyone Paul had contact with.

However, the texts are compatible with there being a sect of an odd kind of Messianists who had the idea of an odd kind of Messiah prior to Paul.

From these last two comments, I get the feeling that in all these posts I still haven't managed to get my idea across to you yet:-

1) The concept of the Messiah, as traditionally understood, includes the notion that he's one to come. Hence at any point in time, you will have some living Messiah candidates that some Messianists will believe is the Messiah (either the candidate is self-proclaimed, or proclaimed by others).

2) But what if you alter the very concept of the Messiah itself, so that his advent isn't something to wait for, but something that has already occurred? People who believe in this concept of the Messiah won't be looking to any contemporary human candidate, far less someone they know personally, but will be looking for proof in Scripture that the Messiah has already been.

"Joshua Messiah" is a revision of the very Messiah concept itself, that puts the Messiah in the past instead of the future.

All this fits beautifully with the idea of the Messiah having come "sub rosa", having come in humble aspect, etc., etc. He did it that way to fool the Archons.

Misdirection, you see? The Archons were lying in wait for some manly, kingly fellow to come along and make a great fuss, and win military victories, and generally cause a great stir. But the Messiah fooled them all: he spread the disinformation that he would be coming in this form (that's what all the other, ordinary Messianists believed, more fool them), but while people were looking to the horizon for this splendid fellow to come along, he stealthed it, and won his victory, in an unexpected manner.

It's like one of those hero stories: there's the dastardly villain, with the hero in his clutches, giving his great speech about how he's fooled the hero. Then the hero says something quietly and calmly, pointing out that some switch has already been clicked somewhere that has set in motion something inevitable that means the defeat of the villain's plans.

Wrt the Jesus myth, the villains are already defeated on the spiritual plane, all we need to do is wait for the inevitable repercussions of the victory that has been won on a spiritual plane to work themselves through to the material (hence the Second Coming).

And because the villains of the piece are already defeated, the term "euaggelion", having victory connotations, is particularly apt.

No, he doesn't know prior to that revelation about the gospel that he taught. You can't say he didn't know about any Jesus at all prior to his visionary experience, nor about any gospel that Jesus might have taught to others; those ideas are not obvious in the text.

spin

Nothing much. The person has trawled the LXX and selected examples. I showed you examples from the same source where it wasn't the case.

(Not just for Gentiles. Torah observance is not necessary when you accept Jesus.)

I specifically pointed you to the second comment on the issue as well, so that you would understand the first: god revealed Jesus to him (1:15-16).

You just have to deal with a wider net for your origin of Jesus believe, because you are opening the question of source up rather than getting to a source.

Not in this thread, you haven't.

That's only part of the problem. If Paul got the Jesus idea from someone else, then you have to follow that source back... oh, but you can't. You have no objective way pointing to a beginning.

I can just say: look at Paul he brought to birth the Jesus stuff in his own incubating brain.

There's no need. There was already a group of odd messianists in the followers of JtB. You don't need an odd kind of messiah prior to Paul. You're just making more work for yourself.

We haven't really been talking about your idea, though I gather it has been the source of your presuppositions.

The concept of the messiah who's been is what I impute onto Paul, as the only person necessary to have developed it. It's sufficient to have indicated to the Jerusalem crew just what was happening in Paul's head. No wonder they shook his hand and sent him off to the gentiles.

No, I don't.

Back to this victory stuff. You've really swallowed it, haven't you? Tickled your fancy, if you know what I mean, know what I mean.

I thought the gnostic issue was "deutero"-Paul. Besides, gnosticism was something that hit both christianity and judaism.

He consistently contrasts Jesus and his salvific death with torah observance. It is his Jesus that is central to his message, not the stuff the other guys are waffling on about. The notion of the messiah is old information, but his Jesus (who has already been) seems to be new information, otherwise he wouldn't have to work so hard flogging his very non-messianic Jesus.


spin