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Originally Posted by spin
Game 5. "Explain your hypothesis." "Christianity didn't need a real Jesus if we trust what Paul says that he never met Jesus or heard of him through anyone." "Sorry, that doesn't explain your hypothesis." "What do you want?" "Something that will make your hypothesis clear to me." "Any information that may have been available prior to Paul was expressly ruled out by Paul's description of the circumstances of his revelation, ie any prior information regarding Jesus is irrelevant to Paul's religion." "But that doesn't tell me anything..." And so on and so on.  |
Yea because the sum of your theory is that Paul had a revelation and no supporting data to suggest that it was the start of Christianity. You have no explanation about what happened after Paul at all and haven’t been clear on where you are getting your interpretation of his gospel and the nature of the revelation.
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This is yet another tangent. In you want an answer, try what you glean from Paul's writings.
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I think he had a simple revelation about a man being the messiah. You seem to think he had a revelation about something more but haven’t been clear on what.
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Paul calls Jesus the christ, ie messiah (as shown from its usage in the LXX).
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That doesn’t tell me if you view him suggesting an earthly messiah or a supernatural pagan god entity.
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Did you know Pilate was gay? "[I]f you see no objections to the possibility" of Pilate's gayness, then we should incorporate it into our world view, shouldn't we?
In short you can make any cockeyed conjecture about the past you like, but without evidence it remains cockeyed.
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Another great spin example.
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History is a matter of what can be shown. You claim a historical core yet you are incapable of showing such a core. You do not have a historical core you have a theory that the core of the gospel story actually happened.
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Crutch Crutch.
You mean your creative interpretation of a passage of scripture.
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What exactly can you show is real in the gospel literature that you consider makes up this supposed historical core. We have to know what exactly you are imagining it is in order to deal with it, yet every time you have been asked you have failed to provide any evidence. Your complete and utter failure to engage in evidence for your theory renders it a sham. It is on the level of Pilate being gay.
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I don’t know what you mean by “show” but what I suggest is the historical core is a guy sacrificing himself and telling his followers to do the same and them doing it spreads the faith of the man who started the original sacrifice. Any logical problem you see with that hypothesis?
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What is your problem with the notion that Paul tells you he didn't get his information about Jesus from any other person? If he didn't, as he claims, then any real Jesus is inconsequential to his religion based on Jesus.
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What is your problem in understanding that you haven’t been able to establish what the information was about. If you can’t say the revelation wasn’t about someone who existed and definitely about a strictly spiritual/vision/revelation entity then you have no theory at all.
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Here's a task for you: show that there was information about Jesus available for Paul to lie about.
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What information did Paul ever display about him? He never met him. Again, what text do you think best expresses what you think Paul’s world view to be so that I can maybe understand the nature of this revelation he had?
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I have cited content of the gospel already, which you sadly miss most of. Read it again. It isn't just anti-law stuff but important information about Paul's gospel, what he believes Jesus did and why, what believers have to do. In short it helps you understand his religion.
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You may want to go into it with a little more detail instead of sorry you missed it. You need to show what you think his gospel is and what you are basing that information on.
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Do you understand the distinction between what happened in reality and what happened in your head? You don't seem to.
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Sure I can distinguish it. So do you think that to Paul Jesus’ death was in reality or in his head?
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Already explained. Paul is quite articulate. You refuse to rea him carefully.
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Then you are incorrect about him getting his beliefs from a revelation and are incorrect about what his gospel is. You are taking one passage out of context of the story and trying to pin a theory onto it.
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Where did Paul get the information from that indicated this?
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From the revelation that Jesus was the messiah after persecuting the church.
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So you think that every sizable event in the past must have been recorded for posterity. Why?
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No that’s your theory. If it didn’t leave tangible evidence then it didn’t exist/happen. You can just simply say you don’t have any evidence to support messianic Jews being attacked by more conservative Jews and we can move on.
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Why do you think that? Is it based on your unsupported conjecture about sizable events?
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It’s based on if it was a minor offense then Paul wouldn’t have any reason to persecute them. If he was speaking about persecuting a general type of messiah worship while preaching about a specific messiah he most certainly would have mentioned it.
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Paul says god revealed Jesus to him. That's rather plain. Why don't you understand it?
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I don’t understand where you are getting that the revelation contained this set of beliefs you think is his gospel.
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Then you original statement doesn't seem comprehensible. WHo's the specific Christ?
This doesn't parse.
And you've just said the general christ is Jesus, but now you're saying the specific christ is.
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At all times when talking about the Bible the specific messiah/Christ will be Jesus Christ.
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Really? Where do you get the indirect fact about a leader of a group of messianists who was executed earlier?
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Always playing dumb. So you don’t know if the groups he was persecuting had a leader who was executed recently then.
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The process that I am going through is to get rid of these apologetic constraints on reading the original text.
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Or trying really really hard to see what you want.
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It's just that you aren't a regular reader or one that is awake enough to see what else goes on here. There are two grammatically different usages of kurios. One as a title one (see LXX Gen 19:18) as a direct reference (LXX Gen 19:24). "The lord Jesus Christ" should obviously be seen as a title to you, while Rom 4:8 has the absolute reference.
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If he is using “Lord” for Jesus then he is probably going to continue to do so for the length of the letter.
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According to Acts who sent Stephen out? Obviously for Acts, Jesus was already dead.
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Was Stephen an apostle? So you have no suggestion of who they were apostles of then, just Jesus Christ seems too easy.
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It seems to me that you are happy creating history rather than finding it. If you don't have evidence you don't have history. You shirk your responsibilities, because you aren't interested in history at all. You're apparently only interested in your pet theory.
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You are the one who is having to rewrite history to fit their theory. Who knows what tricks you will pull out of your hat if you actually ever try to explain what happened in your theory after Paul’s revelation.
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Rubbish. You cannot acknowledge what Paul says, and if you can't deal fairly with evidence you cannot work with anyone who doesn't believe what you believe. Evidence speaks for itself. You either deal with it, showing it has been misapplied or you accept it.
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All I’m saying is that if your theory has open the possibility of a historical core I don’t know why we are discussing this.
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No, I keep looking for means to save you from your extended demonstration that a person can choose not to see anything if they want hard enough to be blind.
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You are either trying to prevent your theory from being scrutinized or from being revealed that you don’t’ really have a theory at all but just a vague concept that Paul had a revelation that was confused for history.
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The development of traditions is an important issue. Christian literature is evidence of tradition development. (For example both Matthew and Luke are developments on Mark. All of them make developments on Hebrew Bible materials.)
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That stuff develops does nothing for explaining what you believe happened with Jesus/Paul and how it became what it did.
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What we see in Paul is a fairly primitive tradition (only natural if it started with him grafting his ideas onto Jewish messianism in a way disfiguring that messianism to look much more like Greek notions of saviors).
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So Paul isn’t preaching a Jewish messiah at all but a Greek god concept? Kind of like how Philo was mixing Greek philosophy and Judaism, Paul was mixing Greek mythology with Judaism?
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I've elicited interpretations of the relevant passages from you but your are not forthcoming. You cannot provide anything better than my "crazy interpretation".
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I provided my interpretation but since you wanted to use your crutch and say you didn’t like the evidence I was using so you didn’t have to listen or respond to my theory. Games games games. If you aren’t capable of pointing out anything that is unreasonable about my theory then just admit it so we can move onto yours and find something equally agreeable and then decide which one is most probable.
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Here's your opportunity to explain what Paul meant when he claims god revealed Jesus to him and that he got his gospel solely by revelation.
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That he wasn’t converted normally, by one person convincing another person but by an epiphany/revelation from god that he was the messiah.
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This may be true, but the fact that he says he didn't get any information about the guy, makes that supposed existence irrelevant.
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He doesn’t say that he didn’t have any information about the guy just that it was revealed that he was god’s son. That’s just your interpretation.
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No, you're not. You are avoiding the references I've given in Paul's letter to the Galatians. He says a lot about his gospel views ideas that he claims to have derived from a revelation from god. Where did he get the information he says that no person told him?
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The references are inadequate for what you are suggesting then. Feel free to try and make a better case that what you say his gospel is actually is what it is and that it was revealed in revelation.
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The request has an inbuilt error. There is no mistake in the process that followed the revelation. Paul indicates he believed the revelation to contain veracious information.
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Yea but how he describes the revelation explains how someone else could have understood him for talking about a historical figure. Why is it so hard to just explain what you think Paul was preaching?
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For the fourth time, please answer the question meaningfully:
What do you think the nature of his revelation can tell you that is relevant about the fact that after it he had knowledge about Jesus and his role in salvation though before it he didn't?
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I’m not trying to figure out anything about his knowledge base at the time of the revelation here. I’m asking to figure out how someone listening to Paul believed he was talking about a historical figure. What do you think that Paul knew about Jesus after his revelation? How long do you think the conversation was? Why didn’t Paul quote everything he was told by Jesus?
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Paul says in Galatians that he preached about the fact that Jesus came to the world and was crucified as a means of redemption from the consequences of not fulfilling the torah for anyone who believed in him. The redemption indicates that as Jesus was resurrected, so would his believers. He preached that salvation was available to the Gentiles.
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Is he preaching a Jesus who is a Jewish messiah who died or a Greek pagan mythological type god?
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Other than based on his vision he went out and converted people to a religion which you cannot explain came into existence for Paul.
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You haven’t explained this part yet? Who did he convert? Anyone we would know? What happened to his following after he died? Who succeeded him? When did the martyrdom start and who was the first.
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Paul indicates he believed his Jesus was a real person: god revealed him to Paul. You are not dealing with what he says. Your theory of what no one logically believes is an untested theory which doesn't seem to deal with the followers of people like David Koresh and others of that ilk before him.
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No I’m just not accepting your interpretation of it without some reason. Nor am I impressed with people do crazy things so that explains them mistaking Paul’s messiah.
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There is little historical evidence. What we have is the fact that his letters survived, indicating that his followers valued them, that when Acts was written, Paul had to be contended with and belittled before the legends of his exploits could be presented, that 1 Clement assumes Paul, that Paul is perceived as one of the earliest martyrs, indicating him being seen in the earliest part of christian tradition.
Paul himself has entered tradition as legend has developed around him, but early christians perceived of him differently from Jesus, as simply a human who did things. No miracles or indications of divinity grew around him. He was not significant in the political world. His only contacts were ordinary people from lower classes (as the emperor Julian was happy to point out), so one cannot expect preservation of materials of use to historians.
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Nice double standard of expectations of evidence. Did your Paul martyr himself in Rome?
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Jesus on the other hand has very different claims made for him, claims that should require a response from a wider world of his time if such a person performed such acts. While the historical silence for Paul is understandable, it certainly isn't for Jesus.
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What claims about him that are possible do you think should have left tangible evidence? What is your expectation of this evidence based on? Go on pull your crutch out.
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Any blanks you perceive in the theory you are arguing against are present in yours. You may be prepared to bullshit your way along, but I'd rather leave the unknown (and apparently unknowable) to the speculators.
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You don’t seem to be pointing out any holes or unreasonable points to what I’m suggesting.
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You are claiming to want to compare things. You are showing you cannot, because you will not present your theory clearly. You admit that it has no evidence. No evidence usually means the theory's rubbish. Why isn't your theory rubbish?
Evidence is funny stuff. It allows you to talk about history. If you have a historical core theory, it means you want to talk about history, yet you say you don't. Go figure.
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Back to your evidence crutch again. A lot easier then presenting your position to just lean on your crutch.
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Without ever meeting of him or hearing about him from anyone else?
Are you deliberately misrepresenting a theory you've been told about several times or are you simply incapable of understanding simple English?
How many times have you been told that Paul says that he didn't get his information from anyone else? He had his gospel and Jesus revealed to him by god.
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Try to understand that you haven’t shown at all that his revelation wasn’t about someone he already knew existed. It’s just your interpretation that you haven’t supported
at all.
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Don't waste your time and other readers' time, not considering the basic facts presented to you.
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I’ll try again. You try to respond with any logical errors on unreasonable suggestions with my theory without leaning on your crutch. If you don’t see any just admit so and then we can move back to your theory.
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Originally Posted by Elijah
How does my theory explain that Paul believed in Jesus without ever meeting him? Well the story says he was persecuting the Christians and was involved with Stephen’s stoning in which Stephen imitated the sacrifice of the Lord. Paul being a serious religious person takes that sacrifice as a sign of conviction in Stephen’s beliefs. Paul (seems) to take this as a sign that Stephen really did see the dead rise because Paul needed an explanation for the conviction in his followers. Realizing he may have killed a follower and be persecuting the real deal he has an emotional breakdown which leads to the revelation that Jesus really was the Messiah.
Now Paul believes Jesus is the Messiah but how does he convince others of this? Well there is a few ways he can go. He can go with reason, but the reasoning behind Jesus being the actual messiah is a tough sell especially if you yourself don’t understand it that well. He can go with scripture which he does and he can go with revelation which he does also.
Now why does revelation or vision give weight to a person’s message back then is debatable but they were used as ways of convincing others of certain things. I had a vision that god wanted us to yadda yadda yadda resonates with people for some reason. And that’s all the vision stuff is, a marketing tool to help justify his faith since he didn’t have actually meeting him he had to go with what he did have.
This is also a changing of the guard somewhat. It’s one thing for somebody to convince another man like a fisherman that they are someone special, it’s another to convince a serious religious zealot who never meet the man he was the messiah. You can’t assume the story begins when the first person who can write proficiently joins up. The divide between the uneducated early apostles and the educated Paul is why they have disagreements on just what Jesus’ death meant and would have wanted.
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Paul says he got his information about Jesus from god, without hearing about him from anyone else.
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Again you are not demonstrating that the information he got was of his existence and not that he was the messiah.
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It took him 17 years to check out his gospel with other messianists (Gal 2:2), so apparently yes.
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Or three years. Galatians 1:18 2:2 is “again”. But you’re proving my point either way, unless you think there was another reason he sought them out?
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For Paul to initiate his religion, his revelation was sufficient. There may have been others (of whom we have no tangible evidence). Who invented calculus, was it Newton or Leibnitz? Fortunately we know that there were both who worked independently. If you would like to propose some other initiators from the available evidence I'll listen.
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No I was just wondering how clearly you understood the origin of your theory and how many holes you had.
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It is part of his gospel. Jesus came to present a new way for redemption, ie circumventing the pain of the law.
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You saying “Jesus came to present” sounds weird for it being Paul had a revelation. So his gospel is a whole set of beliefs that include circumventing the law?
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It is what he frequently evokes when dealing with his opponents in Galatians. That Jesus offers redemption is part of his gospel. The consequences are that the law has been circumvented through belief in Jesus.
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Please provide the examples that you think best illustrates him explaining his gospel as this set of beliefs you think he is pushing and that he received this information from revelation.
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It is sufficient that Paul saw the consequences that he did from his vision. It can take a while to "understand" your revelation.
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Ok what was the revelation then and what did it mean to Paul after he understood it?
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But I don't need to. He says his gospel came from the revelation. That doesn't prevent him from extrapolating.
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Then you haven’t shown what exactly his gospel is then.
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Stop projecting. To understand the creation story a believer has to see that after god's labors for six days he rested. If they weren't six ordinary says or if god didn't really rest on the seventh, the sabbath wouldn't be significant.
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So is Paul understanding Jesus symbolically like you would God in Genesis?
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As much as you need any evidence for yours?
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Crutch
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I've given you enough for you to understand the hypothesis and work with it. You are kidding yourself if you want more from me when you are not prepared to provide anything.
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Yea I’m sure you’re just holding back the really good stuff.
02-09-2009, 12:39 AM
