GakuseiDon

Yes, but I wonder if that came about only after he was already thought to be the Messiah. I was hoping to find where Paul (or any other early writer) explicitly makes that connection: e.g. "Jesus was resurrected, therefore he must have been Christ".

gurugeorge

If Jesus appeared to Paul in vision, why would Paul feel any need to "prove he was the Messiah"?

GakuseiDon

Not so much whether Paul needed to do it, but whether he (or early Christians) did it at all. For example, something along the lines "I saw Jesus in a vision, therefore he was the Messiah". AFAICS it is mostly that Jesus was a descendant of David.

aa5874

But, the Jews called Simon bar Kokchba the Messiah one hundred years after the supposed Jesus. A Messiah was expected to be a military leader, not a vision, one who liberated the Jews from their oppressors.

It would appear that the so-called "revelation Messiah" was a failure or that Jews, in general, up to 135 CE, had never heard of this vision induced Messiah who Paul claimed ROSE from the dead and ascended to heaven.

Ben C Smith

Great idea for a thread, GDon.

I do not think that Paul ever explicitly tells us what exactly makes Jesus the messiah in his eyes. On the one hand, he does say that Jesus was declared the son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead, and the son of God concept is linked to the messiah concept in numerous texts (refer, for example, to Matthew 26.63; John 20.31; 4Q174 and 4Q252); on the other hand, Paul seems to think that Jesus was the son of God or the messiah before he died and rose again (see Galatians 4.4, for example, or Romans 1.3). So the declaration in Romans 1.4 seems to be just that, a declaration (with power).

Good luck with that!

More to the point, how would the author know that any given death was, in fact, a sacrificial death or an atoning death? Again, I think we are thrown back into an area that the epistles do not address very specifically; what made Jesus the messiah or the son of God before he obeyed unto death? What made that particular death matter?

Ben.

aa5874

When did this resurrection take place?

How is it that the words of an author based on an imagined event make someone a Messiah? And how can an imagined RISEN man be declared to have POWER to save people from their sins and then the author declared that the Risen man will come back for those that are dead?

The author of the Epistles clearly appear to be at least delusional.

Paul appears to be a bit unstable. I don't think he knew what he was talking about.

There is no Jewish tradition, based on Philo and Josephus, for a DEAD man who will come back for the DEAD to be called a Messiah

gstafleu

GakuseiDon, I know you want to focus on specific textual evidence, but I want to mention a conceptual issue nevertheless. For the Jews the "Messiah" was somebody who was yet to come, he was not somebody who had already done his thing in the past. That means there must have been a transition, and that means that we would a-priori expect less mention of Jesus as a Messiah in earlier documents (like Paul) and more in later (like the gospels). Early Christians would have been closer to Jewish tradition, meaning they thought of a Messiah as somebody yet to come. The idea of Jesus as a "has already been here" Messiah had to develop, in other words, and with any luck we can see some traces of that.

We can, I think, expect some parallelism between the amount of historical detail about Jesus a document contains and how much it reason it gives to see Jesus as a Messiah. Both would be aspects of the evolution of the Jesus concept.

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

But the authors of the Epistles refer to Jesus as Christ almost 400 times, but the authors of the Gospels only refer to Jesus as Christ about 60 times.

And there cannot be found any transition in Jewish tradition or writings where the Messiah was expected to be a DEAD man who had resurrected and was returning for the DEAD.

This "risen dead man" Messiah seems to have originated outside of Jewish tradition and by unknown persons, and at least after the fall of the Jewish Temple, since up to 135 CE, Simon bar Kokhba, a Jew, was called a Messiah based on his military exploits not on the expectation that he would RISE and come back for the DEAD.

gstafleu

Good point, and it brings up something I was assuming as implicit: what is the difference between calling someone "anointed" and thinking of him as the traditional Jewish Messiah, the guy who at some point in the future was supposed to show up and do good things for Israel? It has been pointed out before that the concept of "anointed" is more general than that of Messiah (lots of people were anointed, no Jewish Messiah ever showed up (almost by definition)). If we find little stated reason in the early docs for Jesus' Messiahship, can we then conclude anything more than that these docs thought of him as somehow anointed--but not necessarily as a Messiah sensu strictu?

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

But, now there is John 4.25, according to this passage, the Messiah is to be called Christ.

So, the Messiah of the authors of the Epistles was a RISEN dead man, quite unlike Simon bar Kokhba of the 2nd century. Anointing with oil was not the author's idea of a Messiah, only a RISEN dead would do.

It is clear, Jesus was Paul's Messiah because the author of the Epistle imagined the Messiah was a risen DEAD man.