Rick Sumner

No, he's not right (and neither are you). All I'm doing is critiquing Clivedurdle's argument, not presenting my own. I don't need to tell you anything about what I think to do that.

The gospel is salvation for the Gentiles. Its realization occurs when Paul becomes convinced that he is living in the Messianic age. He tells us how it takes place, he takes it from scripture. Even if he didn't tell us, it would be painfully obvious--most of his career is devoted to explaining it. And all of this was an aside, and is utterly irrelevant to whether or not Clivedurdle is right about adding the word directly. I'm not obligated to present my own opinion in order to show that he's adding a word that does not appear in Paul's epistle to the Corinthians. The mention of the gospel was to provide an example of why it's wrong to think that Paul means the same thing at all times, to counter your description of the Lord's Supper as a "teaching."

Wrong is wrong. I don't need to present an alternative for "directly" not to appear in the text. It simply doesn't appear there. You've already acknowledge the accuracy of this, beyond that, I had no point make here.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Clivedurdle

I feel as if we are using terms differently and starting from different basic assumptions.

Are we agreed on the term "vision" for example?

I do not get how an interpretation that you state is possible is also false.

There is a huge chain of if statements here, a different interpretation of any will lead to different conclusions.

Basics - the entire Pauline corpus has been labelled pseudo.

This bit about the eucharist, and the surrounding bits in 1 Corinthians are key to xian theology. I favour Pagels here and see this received as gnostic - he is declaring a bit of secret knowledge that is part of the salvation of the world - actually I am also puzzled by your separation of Paul's gospel and the eucharist - are they not both integral to each other?

"Do this in remembrance of me"

Many peoples loved for example sitting in volcanic fumes and having visions. We have examples of the same things - sweat lodges, getting high.

Sorry, Paul believed "the Lord" was telling him this stuff. We might interpret hearing voices now as schizophrenic - I do not - I call it authentic religious experience, stuff our minds do. He used the Hebrew Bible to back up his ecstatic experiences - we rationalise things now.

William James varieties might help explain where I am coming from.

RalphyS

Over the last 2 days I've read (a lot of) this thread and the concept of the JM fascinates me.

I have especially enjoyed the discussions/debates between Didymus and The Bishop over what Paul's silence about the pre-resurrection Jesus meant.

I'm not a scholar on the subject, most of my info on the subject I learned from this boards (and therefore I was a bit annoyed at Didymus for biting the head of a lurker, who wanted a layman's interpretation).

As there are probably more layman here, who want to learn more about the possibility of the JM as opposed to a HJ, I too am reading this thread for that reason.

I haven't read any books on a HJ, nor did I read the Jesus Puzzle or anything else on a possible JM, my knowledge on the bible is even extremely poor.

But can I throw in, what I now know to be the Jesus Myth, Paul founded a religion/cult or bended some cults in a certain direction, based on his (delussional) visions of a resurrected Christ. Several years later Mark tried to describe a pre-resurrection Christ. The question is if Mark tried to base this person solely on the OT prophecies, mixed with parts of other current religious figures or did he also base (part of it) on a historical figure or maybe even more figures.

It would make sense to me, that if Paul only preached about the resurrected Christ, that his followers would be extremely interested in the person that Christ was before his resurrection and death and that they would look back to who that possibly may have been. There may even have been differing opinions in who that person might have been. I know I am speculating, but so is the nature of humans. Ofcourse followers of any Christ would only attribute good and even miraculous qualities to him.

One question that pops into my mind, I've also read here that Mark has little mention of the resurrection, while Paul's letters are all about the resurrection, as I said I don't know too much about the subject, so correct me if I'm wrong, but could the joining of Mark and Paul be the fusion of 2 different cults?

I do think in regard to everything I've read here and the basics that I already knew, that there is too little evidence for a HJ, who is anything like the Jesus mentioned in the gospels. If there was a HJ, his followers would only know him from his preaching period, so his birth story is a myth clearly.

I tend to think about Jesus as I think about Robin Hood, there might be an actual person on whom the story was based, but he was clearly nothing like the stories that are told about him, so the historicity is of less value than the myth that was created.

Rick Sumner

[QUOTE=Clivedurdle]I feel as if we are using terms differently and starting from different basic assumptions.

Are we agreed on the term "vision" for example?

And I don't get what makes you think I said it was false.. What's false is adding the word "directly." If it said "directly," you wouldn't be offering an "interpretation," (your word), you'd be quoting him.

By virtually no one. But that's neither her nor there. Somebody wrote them. We'll call him Paul.

They're key to modern Christiian theology--indeed, 1Cor 15 is largely the creedal confession that defines modern Christianity. It wasn't key to Paul. He shows no awareness of Christianity at all, and by all appearances would have thought "Christian theology" a strange concept indeed. To Paul there were Jews, and their were non-Jews.

You weren't saved because you ate the Lord's Supper.

I don't. He attributes no salvific aspect to the Lord's Supper. In fact, his epistles emphatically argue against such things--Gentiles are saved by faith, not by actions. The Lord's Supper is most certainly the latter. Pagels' entire take on Paul as some sort of proto-Gnostic is based on the misguided notion that Gnostics wouldn't have drawn from him if he wasn't sympathetic to them. If this argument has any merit, then Paul truly was all things to all people, because he's been drawn on by an awfully diverse group.

No. Jesus died for Gentile sin. Because of that they can now be righteoused. That is Paul's gospel. The Lord's Supper isn't connected to that salvation.

Paul's concern in mentioning the Lord's Supper is that people are coming to it hungry and thirsty, which cheapens its symbolism. He's bringing it up to address that concern, not to fit it in with his gospel of salvation.

Excellent. If you can show me where in the Pauline epistles he mentions his own favour of such activities, I might think this has merit. Otherwise, it's a specious analogy at best.

Repeating this isn't going to make it true. You need an argument, not a declaration.

Paul didn't rationalize? I can only reccommend you reread Romans and Galatians. All of them--the entirety of both epistles is rationalization.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

Apologies, I'd missed this earlier.

What was revealed?

That would be the gospel, or the "mystery," as he sometimes calls it. Citing this verse does nothing to negate anything I said about the gospel and the lack of room for a "vision" or "dream" above.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

aa5874

If Jesus is mythical then Paul is of the same thread. Nothing in the Christian Bible can be validated. Paul appears to be an assumed person, the letters appear to me to be written by someone who knows before hand that his writings will be cannonised.

It stands to reason that if Jesus never existed, then Paul's conversion was a hoax, and that nothing was revealed to him. So without wasting much time, I will show that Jesus never existed.

The flood story is fiction. The Tower of Babel story is untrue. The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are contradictory. The Christian Bible is irreconcilable. Paul could not have heard from Jesus. The Christian Bible is of no factual value.

post tenebras lux

Hmmm, do we need to start a new thread called 'The Mythical Paul turning point'?

What is the historical evidence for Paul/Saul (either or both) anyhows?

Didymus

Glad you enjoyed it. Alas, we'll probably never know what Paul and his congregations really thought about Jesus. But that shouldn't keep us from trying to figure it out.

Lurking is fine, but this was different. After a long disclaimer about how little he cared, he asked for an "exhaustive analysis." More than a bit much, I felt.

Getting the question right is half the battle, and I think you've done that very well. For a genuine "exhaustive analysis" (!) of Mark, I highly recommend Michael Turton's "Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark" at http://users2.ev1.net/%7Eturton/GMark/GMark_index.html. He lays out all the connective tissue between the OT and Mark. As indicated by the title, Michael works from the perspective of a historian, and a skeptical one at that. An easy read, packed with information, and the product of an obvious labor of love.

It would make sense to me, too. This is another glaring omission, and one I don't recall Doherty mentioning. Here are some possibilities:

-- Paul's congregants didn't think Jesus was historical, so there was nothing to ask about.

-- Paul's congregants thought Jesus was historical, but...

a. they were an incurious lot and so didn't broach the topic of Jesus' life. (Highly unlikely, in my estimation.)

b. they were afraid to ask questions for fear of God's/Paul's wrath.

-- Questions about Jesus' life on earth were raised, but either...

~ Paul knew about Jesus' recent ministry on earth, but either believed that that information should be kept secret, or was dismissive of his congregants, figuring that they "couldn't handle the truth" about Jesus' life. Nothing in Paul's writings leads us to believe this.

~ Paul ignored the questions because he had no knowledge (other than what he deduced from Scripture and did mention in his epistles) regarding Jesus' sojourn on earth.

Not sure what you mean by "the joining of Mark and Paul," but yes, I think Mark's greatest contribution was in merging the beliefs of two very disparate communities of Jesus worshippers into a more or less coherent story - The Gospel of Mark - which ultimately became the core document of orthodox Christian belief.

The question about how Mark treated the resurrection is a tricky one because the ending is in dispute. Michael Turton's Excursus: The Missing Ending of Mark is a concise summary, so I'll paste it here:

The Gospel of Mark currently ends at 16:8. This ending has always made readers uneasy, and in antiquity there were several attempts to graft an ending onto Mark. These endings are all considered spurious by the scholarly community. Basically, the current ending offers the reader the choice: did the writer mean for the Gospel to end at 16:8, or did the writer supply another one that has gone AWOL somehow?

Evidence from the Patristic fathers indicates that if the ending went AWOL, it did so quite early, for Longer Ending (Mark 16:9-20), found in some Bibles, is known from sometime early in the second half of the second century. Around that time it was incorporated into a harmony of the four Gospels known as the Diatesseron and generally attributed to Tatian, a heretic who was a student of Justin Martyr's in Rome in the middle of the second century. However, the Longer Ending was apparently unknown to Origen, and Jerome and Eusebius claimed that it was absent from almost all the Greek manuscripts they knew (Donahue and Harrington 2002, p462).

In addition to the Longer Ending, there is also a Shorter Ending found in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts. That ending consists of a few sentences in which the women report briefly to Peter. It is then reported that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then sent them forth to proclaim the "sacred and incorruptible" message of eternal salvation. The style and vocabulary are decidedly unMarkan.

The so-called Freer Logion adds a number of verses to the Longer Ending. It is generally regarded as scribal gloss inserted to soften the Risen Jesus' criticism of the Eleven in 16:14. (Donahue and Harrington 2002, p463).

Against these, Evan Powell proposed in his 1994 book The Unfinished Gospel that the ending of John, John 21, was formerly the ending of Mark. Powell's argument was based on linguistic and stylistic affinities. David Ross has an excellent review of the idea on his Mark website, along with more evidence to bolster it.

Of course, I also suggest reading the gospel itself! It's short.

Didymus

Clivedurdle

Discussion of Paul's views on faith and works has a huge amount of historical baggage and has resulted in several of the major sects of xianity.

I am very interested in your separation of the eucharist and paul's gospel. I note you did not pick up on "do this in remembrance of me."

I am quite clear the eucharist is absolutely central and core to Paul's beliefs.

The stuff about eating beforehand is evidence of how he saw it as holy, as sacred.

Early xians believed they were coming into the presense of god at the eucharist. "this is my body".

The eucharist was Paul's evidence of the truth of the gospel!

Diaspora jews had a problem. They could not worship at the temple. Post destruction they all had that problem.

A solution is to universalise the sacrifice ( the sacrifice of the high priest himself) and localise the ritual in the local synagogue. Paul did this. Once the sacrifice is universal it becomes available to all mankind, allowing spreading the gospel to the gentiles.

Sorry the eucharist is and always has been central to all forms of xianity, including Paul's. It is the logical replacement of entering the holy of holies annually.

Would not making Jesus a real human have been blasphemous to Paul?

Clivedurdle

I was not contrasting above - I meant Paul used the Hebrew Bible to rationalise his ecstatic experiences in an identical fashion to how we rationalise our things that go bump in the night by picking on various solutions in text books or ufologists. He had far fewer choices though, and the HB was the accepted textbook.