rlogan

Hi Gak.

Sure, in the same sense that the Asians spoke of three elephants on the back of a turtle giving birth to the earth.

You know, Jesus is human as opposed to turtle or elephant and any one of the other infinity of superstious forms humans gin up out of ignorance and fear.

This is again one of those things so basic to religion you just can't overlook that necessity: What form are we worshiping here? The bible from front to back is all about that exact thing: Moses abolishes the "golden calf" form of worship along with the multitude of other gods. It was a big innovation just to have one god. The Christian God is human form.

It isn't a pig or a cow or one-spirit-per-tree form of religion.

Logically, it is impossible to have something to worship without description. One cannot then take that basic distinction between whether it is human or a cow to say: see! Historical Cow!

No Robots

This is always the problem with Mosaism: we are commanded to worship that which lies beyond description. It is the embodiment of the ideal by the genius that renders the indescribable accessible to the commonality of mankind.

bacht

Any representation of divinity is limiting. Idol worship in the Bible is ridiculed by the prophets, with some justification: why bow down to inert wood or stone made with human hands? The Jews preferred the invisible presence in the Holy of Holies. After the exile they didn't even have the ark of the covenant, just a temple built around...nothing

show_no_mercy

And then they had that temple destroyed; and Christians - in all of their ignorance of Judaism - started worshiping another idol: a human being.

GakuseiDon

1. The Marcionites apparently believed that Jesus walked the earth.
2. Paul still calls Jesus a "man" in a number of places.

One issue with looking at the silence in Paul, is:
1. Framing it in its context of how people wrote in ancient times, and:
2. Ensuring that the 'silence' takes note of what Paul did say.

Going back to the OP: From a perspective of (1), I think the silence of a HJ (and the silence of historical details generally) is more due to the pseudonymous authors writing in a style common at that time (as I mention on another thread), rather than a copying of a distinctive 'Pauline' style.

gurugeorge

Maybe so, but if it's not I still think my logic is sound. Hey, I'm easy, just having fun

Btw, in another scholarly book on the gospels that I checked on Google books (dam can't find the link, I think it's "'Gospel' in Herodian Judea" by Bockmuehl somethingorother), the word is said to have been associated with births, accessions and victories, in common language use of the time.

Where are these people getting this idea from, then, if it's total bullshit?

Again, maybe. I'm happy for you to criticize it

Were early Christians ordinary Jews? I thought the early Christians were literate (isn't it noted for being a particularly literate affair?). Were ordinary Jews all literate at the time?

I'm positing an unusual form of Messianism, a variation of Messianism, partly based on that argument I was using (which is now in doubt because we think Kittel might be bullshitting). But that's not the only argument I have for the idea of an unusual form of Messianism.

As I said before, you don't know how allowing of variation Judaism might have been at that time. Robert M. Price cites The Great Angel. He says that Ms Barker investigates this idea of variation in pre-Diaspora Judaism, and I've seen some other scholarly bits and pieces that support the same idea.

The story as Paul describes it fits the idea of an obscure sect of fairly well-educated mystics who pored over Scripture who think they see in Scripture a better way of understanding what the Messiah is (and maybe have visions themselves).

In which case my version of what must have been "good news" to them is more good-newsy than yours

As I said, Messianists already knew the Messiah was coming, that's not news. Baptism as preparation, ok that's got more to it.

You could help yourself to JtB in that way if Paul hadn't given any clue as to what those Messianists were like, but you don't need to because he does. Paul's opponents weren't just Jewish Messianists "of some sort", they were a specific kind of Messianists, Messianists who believed in a different idea of what the Messiah was. (Then we go to that argument you've had with others before - a) the argument with them doesn't seem to be about anything as basic as whether the Messiah was to come or had been; b) it's not reasonable to think that he would even have gotten an audience with them if he was so whacky in their eyes, far less been allowed to preach in association with them. You can't have your cake and eat it: either they viewed him as a total whackjob - in which case how come he could get an audience with them? - or they viewed him as a wayward brother of sorts.)

Why are you opposed to the idea that there might have been a variation in the very concept of the Messiah itself, and that Christianity just was such a variation? Look, there it is! We already know there are some variations in the Messiah concept anyway - some regions saw it in a more kingly way, others in a more spiritual way (the Samaritans?), already. (And btw, the Samaritans seem to have already had "Joshua cults", according to Acharya S.) Already, the Jesus Christ figure is in the more spiritual family of interpretations, not so much of a warrior king.

I grant you, reversing the time of his coming, and making him some poor, crucified schmuck who is yet a chip of God is a big change, but isn't it just the kind of striking change that might perk up some peoples' interest? It's not just another boring ho-hum variation on the Messiah theme, it's strong meat! A stumbling block, perhaps ...

And as Paul describes it, there doesn't seem to be any fundamental doctrinal antagonism between him and them.

Coincidentally, I was just browsing in the bookshop today and I saw a recent work claiming that very thing. Maybe it was a new usage with Paul, and nobody had used it in quite that way before. (Hmm, "Memoirs of the apostles" certainly doesn't sound like "gospels".)

Yeah it's possible, he could be just applying to them his own idiosyncratic use of the word, maybe they didn't self-describe themselves as messengers of good news And you've definitely given me pause with the Kittel thing. I'm going to see if I can do some library research in town at some point soon about this. It intrigues me, why he (and others) would say there are military victory/kingly-accession-associations to the word, if it's bs.

(Incidentally, to me, the fact that a book comes from a theological perspective doesn't automatically imply to me that it must contain biased or inaccurate scholarship. Theology is actually pretty interesting, and many of these ancients we are talking about were steeped in theology.)

gurugeorge

Yes that's what I think. The trouble is, it's too much like the orthodox story, spin wants to be more original

To me, it just seems obvious that the simplest origin is that a bunch of mystical types came up with a different concept of the Messiah (putting him into the past instead of the future, reversing his tropes, "revaluing values").

Then someone else who was extremely charismatic and energetic had an ecstatic visionary experience of that Messiah, who told him to universalise the message. (Maybe he'd already heard of this Messiah from those others, maybe he had a vision and subsequently noticed that these guys had had a similar idea.)

Clean, simple, clear. Everything is explained.

(Not, for that reason, necessarily true, of course )

Steven Avery

Jake, since this discussion quite different from the thread, and I believe fundamental to real understanding of the differing historical paradigms, if all is fine in a few days I will try to reopen this as its own thread, continuing from our last post.

You have given the one attempted substantive response to my "Redaction Impossible" question, and, time and energy and privileges willing, we can try to get to it a bit later. Feel free to post on it here or its own thread, but no rush, I will bookmark and try to return shortly.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

gurugeorge

Yeah, that's a good idea, it does neatly explain the early lack of personality. Aren't Ellegard's idea (100 years before Jesus) and Wells' slight move to the HJ side also in this family of ideas?

spin

Births, accessions, victories, weddings, winning the lottery. Anything else?

I don't really think I need to any more.



Paper I read estimated there was a less than 5% literacy rate among Judean Jews.

With this sort of stuff you can claim that Jews believed in the Great Spaghetti Monster. Instead what you are claiming amongst other things is that the earliest christians were Jews, a common apologetic claim which accepts the text on face value. The texts say that they originated amongst the Jews, so they must be Jewish, so their savior/messiah must have been acceptable to some Jewish thought. You don't really need to go beyond this sort of waffle.

Well, what do you know? There are alternate thoughts on the issue!

<edit>
Dead man is better news than you can be included in the millennium. OK.

The only way you can partake in the millennium is through repentence and baptism. So what are you going to do, repent or miss out?

Tunnel vision, gurugeorge.

Read Mt 3:7-12 for example.

I have put forward a scenario which you are merely trying to put aside for the conventional analysis of the relationship between Paul and the Jerusalemites. Sorry, but that really doesn't mean much to me, because I can get it anywhere. I'm trying to read the text in a way that is functional from knowledge we have that makes sense of what Paul says (which the conventional interpretation doesn't, because it ignores the claim that Paul had Jesus revealed to him and that his gospel came not from other people but directly from the revelation). In the JtB movement we have a messianic group that is purely Jewish, who as Jews would have thought Paul's gospel was off the wall. The messiah is going to do big damage and you're either prepared for him or it's burning in unquenchable fire... or we got some dead guy saying this world doesn't matter.

Now it may not have been the JtB movement, but in reading Paul differently people want explanations: "well, if they weren't christians, what were they?" They will not be content if you just tell them that we are reading Paul only from apologetic hindsight.

(Acharya S. lifted the idea of a Joshua cult from Bob Kraft.)

Paul doesn't say anything that would disturb his readership too much. He packages the information the way he sees fit. He calls the theology of his opposition "another gospel", but what did they call it? He clearly says that he got nothing useful from the people in Jerusalem and showed immense disrespect for them, yet they shook his hand and sent him away (to gentile lands). Be careful of Paul spin.

It's not idiosyncratic, per se. He labeled his theology good news.

To me if it comes from a theological perspective, you can't tell when something is or isn't biased.


spin