Steven Carr

You seriously claim that the historical Jesus taught his followers to symbolically eat his body and drink his blood, and knew he was about to be secretly betrayed, but that his followers would not be killed and would need a way of remembering who he was? (Typical conversation - Remember that Jesus guy? Who? Eat this bread and it will come back to you. Mmmm, bread.... I remember now. He was that guy who banged on about the end of the world. Eating that bread brought it all back.)

The passage explains how the cult can obtain access to the body of its founder in a ritual.

This reeks of mythicism.

You may as well have Paul conjure up the devil,and then say that that is historical.

johno

My point was that all the historical method can achieve is to find evidence for the existence of a human person: it can't find evidence for the existence of a god. So even if a historical person could be identified that was an apocalyptic preacher, that was crucified, that was called Jesus, it wouldn't provide any evidence at all that this apocalyptic preacher was divine. Furthermore, there might have been an apocalyptic preacher called Jesus, and a second Jesus who was crucified, and a third Jesus who thought he was god.

As an experiment I made up a mythical person. I chose a common name for him, John Smith, I made up the fact that he was a clergyman, Rev. John Smith, and the implausible fact that he was hanged. Then I looked for him in Google, and there he was, the historical Rev. John Smith involved with the Demerara Slave Rebellion, and he wasn't quite hanged, because he died of natural causes before the sentence was carried out, but near enough, and just the working of coincidence. How can the search for the historical Jesus, even if it succeeds in identifying somebody, achieve any more than I did with my imaginary John Smith?

Steven Carr

But not prior to the death of Jesus.

Logical

LOL. The "pure atheism" cult to the rescue. Oh my Gosh. Someone attributed something to atheists other than simple, pure lack of belief in God. Wait a minute. Atheism is just lack of belief in God. Nothing more.

We get it! We get it!

graymouser

Or, you know, it's exactly what the mythers are demanding: a place where Paul references the actual life and teachings of Jesus when making his point about the practices of the church, in this case the communal meal.

Mythicism has too many "exceptions that prove the rule" for my taste.

Of course, nothing but the ceremonial phrases actually appear in 1 Cor 11, so you're reading other material back into it. Whatever it meant originally, it's an important break in the "pattern" of non-reference to the living Jesus that mythers make such a big case out of.

ApostateAbe

The passage is written in the literary style of Paul, it has the apocalyptic theology of Paul, it fits the purpose of Paul, it fits well with the surrounding context, it is necessary to make the writing flow consistently, no relevant manuscripts show an absence of this passage, and therefore no scholar believes this passage to be the product of anyone but Paul. Bart Ehrman calls the mythicist proposition of interpolation, "scholarship by convenience," which is being generous--"scholarship"?

It is of course the clearest example of Paul citing the teachings of Jesus, but it is not the only example. There are two more.

• Paul believed that Jesus taught that "those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel" - 1 Corinthians 9:14, see also Luke 10:7.
• Paul believed that Jesus commanded that a wife should not separate from her husband and a husband should not divorce his wife - 1 Corinthians 7:10-11, see also Mark 10:11-12.

So, we actually have three exceptions that prove the rule, somehow.

spin

I don't care about mythicism or historicism. Both positions are underwhelming. What I'm interested in are the ruts that those positions have created in the discussion. They have droned on for so long saying the same sorts of things, they seem incapable of generative responses. One could write a computer simulation with two Eliza scripts, mythicistbot and historicistbot, and you could all go on vacation. It would save the ruts from getting any deeper. Mythers demand this and historicists demand that. And, click whirr, you get the usual response. I'm more interested in the actual passage.

The last supper in 1 Cor 11 is a commercial break during the real program. It advertises the ideas of the church's sacrificial meal in a performative manner yet devoid of the actual performers, except of course, the priest's role embodying Jesus. This is in stark contrast to the haber meal (κυριακον δειπνον = "lordly lunch") in Corinth which was about fellowship. Now some of these crass Corinthians were gluttonizing and imbibing at the expense of poorer αδελφοι and you think Paul should be happy about it? Of course not. (Cut to the commercial, then...) Instead of thinking only of their bodies which will only have bad effects, they should eat at home and allow everyone to partake in the communal meal. Of course it's a targeted ad. One doesn't usually stick material just anywhere. And of course you can try to argue that it honest was part of Paul's argument all along despite the fact that it has nothing directly to do with the discourse, but hey once you've seen one ritual meal you've seen'em all.

ApostateAbe

The dispute is not over what the historical Jesus actually did. The dispute is over what Paul BELIEVED according to his own writings. If the mythicist point of view explains a proposed silence of Paul that does not actually exist in the writings of Paul, then it doesn't actually count for anything, and obviously all they have left is your own preferred methodology--ridiculing the historical evidence and hoping the unworthiness of the evidence amounts to proving the absence of a historical Jesus.

hjalti

No scholar? ApostateAbe, where did you read that no scholar thought that this might very well be an (or part of an) interpolation?

ApostateAbe

It is an inference based on an argument from silence--to my knowledge, no Jesus-minimalist ever cites such a scholar.