Doug Shaver

OK, on your reading, Paul was telling the Galatians that Jesus was just like us with the implication that he was in fact one of us. I am suggesting a reading in which he says that Jesus was like us in certain relevant respects -- relevant to his role as redeemer of mankind -- without any intended implication regarding his having been an actual man.

I think either reading is equally plausible on its face if we can lose certain 21st-century presuppositions. The question then becomes which is the better fit with all the other evidence relevant to what Christians would have been thinking about Jesus during the middle of the first century.

I had a reason for calling it a "variant," and that they've never heard it called by that name doesn't mean they don't think it.

Yes, that is the dogma. But it is incoherent, and many of them know it is incoherent, and that is why they have to spout so much nonsense in order to try to make it coherent. Why devote to a sermon to Jesus' humanity if there is no question about his having been 100% human? Because you cannot say he was 100% without raising that question.

I'm not trying to defend the coherence of Paul's Christology, but if we give him and his readers some benefit of doubt, then a divine Christ who had some human characteristics but was not actually human is not quite as absurd as a Christ who was both fully God and fully man -- and more to the point, I think it more consistent with Hellenistic thinking in general, foreign though it be to modern thinking.

Granted, but only on the assumption of your conclusion.

A common defense of Paul's overall silence on Jesus' biography is that his readers were already familiar with it. Whatever the general merits of that argument (for example with regard to his birth in Bethlehem), surely the Galatians would not have needed Paul's assurance that Jesus was a real human being, that he actually had a mother?

But if the object of their worship was not a recently martyred preacher, if instead they supposed that he was a spiritual being, then Paul would have had occasion to tell them that notwithstanding his spiritual essence, he did have some human attributes that enabled him to be a redeemer of sinful human beings.

If Paul and his readers believed that a god had become a man and died for their sins, then he was explaining why the god had to become a man in order to effect the redemptive process.

If he and his readers believed that a god had died for their sins, then he was explaining what the god had to do -- i.e. become like a man -- in order to effect the redemptive process.

I think the latter fits better with the totality of evidence.

Doug Shaver

I have none at all. Do you think I should therefore ignore the opinions of all those who do, or just some of those who do? If only some, which ones?

Ben C Smith

The reading that I offered actually had nothing in it about Jesus really being one of us. I was more general than that, which is why Doherty could agree with me, then get more specific about what just like us means.

That is not to say that I do not think Paul had a real human being in mind. I do think that. But my argument really only went so far here as to point up the reason why Paul wrote as he did; he had a principle in mind whereby the redeemer had to become like the redeemed.

IOW, my argument goes to explaining what Paul wrote, not necessarily to explaining what exactly he meant by it. The former is a pretty simple matter which depends on context and cross references; the latter would depend on an examination of what born from a woman means, which has not yet been done on this thread.

I do not find it incoherent, even if I do not really agree with it.

I did not assume my conclusion. I argued it from context (born under law in order to redeem those under law) and from cross references (all those other places in which the redeemer becomes like the redeemed). You are free to dismiss both my argument and my conclusion, but I do not think you can accuse me of assuming the latter without the former.

That defense works, IMHO, with some points.

I do not tend to think that this is one of those points. But we have better reasons than the mere silence of Paul to think that the birth narratives are mostly fiction.

That is correct. That is not what Paul was assuring them of, as I have already argued.

Both of these scenarios are not only compatible with but even presumptive of my argument.

My argument was general enough to allow you to connect the dots two different ways. Deciding which way is better would depend on what made from a woman means, as well as of the seed of David, Christ according to the flesh, and other phrases.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

If you see shifting of burdens here, then I think the logic of the argument so far has eluded you. Nobody, whether historicist or mythicist, has really gotten down to brass tacks about the meaning of those phrases one way or another. Gibson has posted a few items on the differences and similarities between made and born, but nobody has delved into the extant literature to make a positive case for one interpretation or another.

You are correct to note that the historicist is limited to only one basic interpretation of most of those phrases while the mythicist has several options. If those options, however, are mutually exclusive, the mythicist really has to argue for only one of them.

Think of the meaning of any one of those phrases as a problem. There is probably only one basic solution (that is, if we could interview Paul in person on the matter, we could probably narrow down his intended meaning to one basic thing). But all problems have more wrong solutions than right ones. To point to the multiplicity of options on the mythicist side (when only one of those, if any, can be correct) is meaningless.

Consider, as a trivial example, the meaning of the phrase to the church of God which is at Corinth in 1 Corinthians 1.1. Those who take this phrase as evidence that there was a community of believers in the Greek city of Corinth at this time have only one basic way to read that phrase; church means group of believers, and Corinth means the Greek city. Those who think that this is not evidence of a community of believers in Corinth, OTOH, have several options at their disposal. (1) Church is metaphorical in some way, or means the assembly of Jews, not Christians, in that city. (2) Corinth is metaphorical in some way, or a slip of the pen for Athens. (3) The line is a gloss from the pen of a scribe in century II.

Does enumerating the alternate possibilities in this case make the usual reading any less likely? Of course not. And those options, at least, do not appear to be mutually exclusive (unlike the options for Galatians 4.4 given on this thread)! It is still a matter of how we would expect Paul, based on his own usage elsewhere and the meaning of the words in other Greek literature, to be using those terms.

Likewise, in the present case, it is a matter of how we would expect Paul to use the phrase made from a woman. It is not a matter of tallying up how many alternate (and in this case mutually exclusive!) possibilities exist; that number is limited only to the imagination of the reader.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

No you didn't. What an utter waste of time.

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...&postcount=105

:wave:

Jake Jones IV

jgibson000

The question is how do you know which ones do and do not?.

You should not ignore anyone who knows Greek and whose arguments about Greek are well informed.

But the hidden assumption here is that you think Earl is Greek competent and that his claims and arguments about particular Greek phrases are well informed and stand up to scrutiny. What makes you say this if you are not -- as you admit -- competent to evaluate them?

Jeffrey Gibson

jgibson000

Well, for the sake of argument, let's accept your claim as true and that In didn't address them to you.

I'm doing so now now. What are your answers? Or is it really the case, that you yourself have none?

Jeffrey Gibson

JoeWallack

JW:
May I ask Dr. what is the nature and extent of your training in Biblical Hebrew? And how many related publications do you have? Have you ever offered an opinion on the Hebrew Bible or at least a Greek reference to the Hebrew Bible?

If you are not fluent and experienced and trained by Rabbis in Biblical Hebrew than how are you competent to Judge who is?

Wasn't the whole thing (Christianity) started by those unknowing of the Original language? Are you afraid that if you point this out to your Fellow Greek speaking Christian colleagues it could jepardize your Position (based on the amount of time and nature of your arguments here you must be tenured)?

I may or may not have an email from a Professor which Implies to me that your Hebrew is inferior to Richard Carrier's.

By the way, is it "Dr." or "Doctor"?



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

jgibson000

I'm not sure why you are asking this question. Have I ever made a claim about the rendition of a Hebrew text or my (or anyone else's) expertsie in that langauge?

Are Rabbis the only people who know or who are qualified to teach Biblical Hebrew? And have I ever spoken of anyone's Hebrew competence?

The claim that Christianity was "started" by people who spoke only Aramaic is something of which scholars are quite well aware. So even assuming that it is true (and there is much debate about this -- have you read Porter or Fitzmyer?), my pointing this out to them would hardly be anything that would jeopardize my "Position".

But more importantly the question of the language the "starters" of Christianity spoke is wholly irrelevant to the matters in hand since the issue isn'rt what langage Jesus or the apostles spoke (or didn't), but the language in which the earliest Christian documents (like those from Paul or those attributed to John) were written.

What?

I was unaware that Carrier had any Hebrew.

Um .. what? Do you not know what Dr. is an abbreviation of?

Jeffrey Gibson

Ted Hoffman

I have reread Rick's argument regarding the adhocness of Doherty's possible approach. Ben has even made Rick's argument clearer with some analogies.
So, yes, I appreciate the argument and I can see the reasoning behind it. What I would like to do is use Ben's analogy to rebut the argument.
By way of analogy, Ben cites a DA addressing a defense lawyer : "So... your client wasn't there. But if she was there she didn't do it. And if she did do it she was acting in self defense."

If this analogy fits, Doherty's suggested approach would be truly ad hoc. No doubt about that.

But is the analogy fitting?
First of all, the client either wasnt there, or she was there. This is consistent with Rick's objection, contra Doherty (but rather incorrectly), that the two arguments that Doherty was considering are mutually exclusive. Doherty is not stating that they both explain born of woman, but he is arguing that they may both be considered as alternative explanations for the peculiar expression.
Secondly, it can be determined whether the client was there, or was not there. An alibi immediately eliminates the possible adhocness even in Ben's analogy. But we do not have an alibi, or an explanatory note from Paul.

We cannot determine, factually, that what Paul meant was either X or Y. This is a question of interpretation and we cannot talk about facts, but about probabilities. We have no alibi. Paul died ceentruries ago and hence cannot be recalled to check the accuracy of our interpretation of what he meant.
Obviously, Paul never wrote down everything he believed. He only wrote what he thought was important or relevant. And what was preserved is what his contemporaries and the early church thought was important. And we are studying Pauline letters from a modern view, trying as much as possible to understand his ideology so that we can empathize with his perspective and determine what he meant.
What this means is that we only have traces of what Paul believed. And these traces merely act as limits of our interpretation.
This is therefore a historical problem that confronts exegetes (the problem of underdetermination) and the conceptual difficulties that we face are not similar to the ones that lawyers face.

Thus on these grounds, the analogy does not fit.

Our conceptual apparatus and available traces do not allow us to make any firm conclusions. We simply attempt to organise the available traces of the past in a coherent way to arrive at the most probable explanation of what Paul meant. Hence the appeal to Platonism, gnosticism and the like, to get a handle on what Paul's position may have been.
Unlike the defense lawyer, we have no witnesses to answer specific questions. We have no peculiar phraseology like "kata sarka" , "archontes" and "born of woman" . We have no competing beliefs like Marcionism, Gnosticism and orthodoxy. In the DA's analogy, we are not looking at the leftovers of actions like councils of Nicea and systematic destruction of herectic beliefs. The lawyer is not confronted with a text that may have been interpolated. We do know that Pauline epistles have been interpolated here and there so interpolation is a possible explanation for any identifiable peculiarities. Based on the expression if, the lawyer's self-defense argument is actually a prediction in case alternative outcomes emerge, while we are not predicting, but offering possible interpretations for an actual and single peculiar expression.

Diagrammatically, it can be represented as follows:

Client wasnt there--------\
----------------------------\
-----------------------------\Client is innocent
-----------------------------/
----------------------------/
Acted in self-defense-----/

Thus the lawyer aims at arriving at one conclusion in all cases.

But we provide alternative explanations for a single case.

------------------/Incarnated in a sublunar realm
-----------------/
born of woman/
---------------\
----------------\
-----------------\anti-Marcionite redaction

And the lawyer's do examine factual evidence and seek to prove "beyond reasonable doubt". We seek to determine, based on the balance of probabilities, the most probable interpretation and which overall case accounts for peculiarities present in the documentary record.

The lawyers try to determine what happened. This is a factual question. But we are trying to determine what Paul meant or how those phrases came to be in the texts in question and what the possible redactors had in mind. Again, these are text-critical questions of interpretation, not factual questions.

Thus we come to Ben's phrasing of Doherty's supposed "revision":

How about this?