stephan huller

Why is this twisted into a matter of personal belief? The question is what was believed in antiquity by ancient Christians. There is no doubt that all ancient Christians believed in the supernatural and that some ancient Christians believed that was a spirit. To ridicule people for maintaining that Marcionite beliefs represented a sizable part of second century Christianity is absolutely incredible. Most of Celsus's anti-Christian work is anti-Marcionite. This may be an inconvenient truth for some but it is a truth nevertheless.

judge

the question was "how were you going to introduce marcion into this thread" , wasn't it?

GakuseiDon

We don't know whether the Gospel Jesus was married or not. The Gospels don't tell us. Nor does Paul. Tell me why that leads you to conclude "Jesus was a spirit".

That's not the issue I raised. I don't care whether you have the historical Jesus or not. It's not my point. My point is the logic being used is flawed. That's nothing to do with MJ or HJ, it has to do with logic.

aa5874

Are you a Marcionite or a secret Achyra S fan?

stephan huller

Why shouldn't it be introduced? Why stick with what is found in the Catholic canon? The discussion is whether or not it is reasonable to assume that Jesus was believed to have been the angel of the presence or a spirit. End of discussion with Marcion introduced. Without Marcion being introduced a bunch of middle aged men haggling to no purpose.

stephan huller

There is no early tradition of Jesus being married. Period.

Toto

Paul makes pronouncements on marriage. How could he not have referred to Jesus' marital state? He could have said - "be like our Savior - unmarried" or "Jesus was married, but he tells you not to marry."

This is only consistent with Paul not knowing whether Jesus was married. This leads me to believe that Jesus was not a person who existed around Paul's time - and the major alternative to the recently existing historical Jesus is the spiritual Jesus.

This is not a logical proof, but it is an inference based on probabilities.

You only get problems in the logic if you ignore critical words - if you ignore that Doherty refers to Gospel Jesus. I have yet to see you identify a problem using Doherty's own words.

EarlDoherty

Once again Don demonstrates that no matter how many times you tell him something, if he can choose to forget or ignore it to serve his own purposes, he will. My latest book is neither directed solely at critical scholars nor solely at conservative-minded Christians. Some remarks are directed at either one or the other, many are applicable to both. I think criticial scholars are eminently capable of recognizing which would apply to their level of thinking, and which are not. If I devote a paragraph to discrediting the existence of Judas or the infeasibility of the Barabbas incident, they are hardly going to toss my book in the garbage as utterly worthless just because they have already agreed with me on a certain number of such points. There is more than enough in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man to engage the highest levels of critical scholarship.

And Don is overlooking another dimension which I spell out a couple of times in my book. Yes, Paul may not be expected to draw on a Gospel element if that Gospel event is not historical and was not ‘invented’ until after he wrote. But that very invention demonstrates a principle which I have regularly appealed to. In any issue under debate, the tendency will be to quote or impute to Jesus, a supposedly charismatic preacher, an opinion which suits a given side in such debates. We see that in spades once the Gospels come along. Why should we not expect that tendency to appear even in limited fashion in all the Christian correspondence beginning a couple of decades after Jesus’ passing, whether authentic or inauthentic? The epistles as a whole witness to no teachings of Jesus, no prophecies of the imminent End, no opinion on the applicability of the Law to gentiles, no reports of miracles in support of the preaching of the End, no reports of whether he was married, whether he was circumcised, whether he was in favour of carrying the gospel to the gentiles, and on and on.

Had the man said nothing whatsoever on any subject whatever that could be used by the epistle writers? (Paul had to resort in two paltry instances to declaring he had received instructions directly from Jesus in heaven, and an account of the mythical beginnings of the Lord’s Supper by direct revelation.) Could those writers and preachers of the kingdom, a movement supposedly begun by Jesus himself, have invented nothing from him in word or deed that would help argue or settle the debates that were plaguing the early movement? What, they were too honest to invent? (Yeah, right.) If he wasn’t regarded as teaching ‘to love one another’, with Paul having to say that it was God who had so taught us, what was he regarded as teaching? Where did the later attributions of ‘love one another / love your enemies’ stuff come from? If everything in the Gospels was invented post-Paul, what the hell made Paul find such an appeal in a non-entity who said and did nothing and who couldn’t even be imagined to have said or done anything. Why did he turn him into the Son and image of God, creator and sustainer of the universe, rising from his grave and redeeming the world from sin?

Can anyone, including Don, make sense of the kind of non-sense he appeals to to get around mythicist arguments like mine?

Earl Doherty

GakuseiDon

The problem here is that you need to show that this is something that should have been mentioned by them. I know you refer to "human nature", but in a high context culture where marriage is assumed as a normality, is this something we would expect them to point out?

Take another example: Was Jesus gay or straight? Should Paul have written "be like our Savior - straight" or "Jesus was gay, but I tell you that man should not lay with man", in your opinion?

Because of our own cultural norms, we would find such an expression strange and in fact gratuitous. But it isn't our cultural norms we need to understand here.

I agree, but based on what we would expect. Unless it is based on what they would have expected, then there is always going to be an issue with that kind of analysis. We need to work in terms of how they thought in those times. In that, I definitely agree with Doherty.

By the way, why do you think that the Gospels don't provide Jesus' marital status? They give him a genealogy (two different ones, in fact!), a mother, brothers and sisters, but no marital status. Why is that, in your view? Is it because Jesus was thought to be a spirit?

What about the example I gave earlier?

Doherty writes (from my link above):

The descent of the dove into Jesus would have provided the perfect parallel to Paul's belief that at baptism the Holy Ghost descended into the believer. The voice of God welcoming Jesus as his Beloved Son could have served to symbolize Paul's contention (as in Romans 8:14-17) that believers have been adopted as sons of God. (Page 65)

I doubt very much that critical scholarship would expect to find the Gospel story of the dove descending on Jesus in Paul, given that Paul states that Jesus was appointed Son of God by his resurrection from the dead rather than by his baptism (as seen in Mark).

What do you think, Toto? Should we expect Paul to have referred to the descent of the dove into Jesus, given that Paul believed that Jesus was appointed Son of God by the resurrection?

Toto

It's not a question of just assuming his marital status. Paul discusses marriage and advises people on whether to be married - without using Jesus as an example.

Gay and straight are modern concepts that would not be meaningful to early Christians.


There's no room in the gospel story for any sort of domestic life for Jesus. It just doesn't fit into the plot. Jesus rejects his family, doesn't have a wife or kids or even any close friends he can talk to - just 12 clueless disciples, one of whom betrays him. He communes with his father in heaven.

Since I don't think that the baptism happened, I don't see why Paul should have mentioned it. But most historicists believe that the baptism of Jesus is an indisputable fact. I would expect Paul to have mentioned Jesus' baptism in the context of his discussion of baptism, if it had in fact happened.