Doug Shaver

Two questions for HJers:

1. Why did Paul say that Jesus was born of a woman? Would anybody have questioned that he was, if it was common knowledge that he was (or had been) a human being?

2. Can you quote any other ancient writer saying, in reference to any other man whose historicity is undisputed, that he was born of a woman?

Doug Shaver

I posted the previous this morning before I went into the "Jesus myth not accepted by professional historians" thread and got caught up there. The duplication was inadvertent. If the moderator sees fit to delete this thread, I will have no objection.

Ben C Smith

Matthew 11.11 says that John the baptist is the greatest of those born of women.

Ben.

John Kesler

Job 15:14 appears to use "born of woman" in poetic parallelism with "mortals":

yalla

A suggestion I have made before is that it may be a reference to "earthly/fleshy/evil/lustful/immoral/without god'' as opposed to "divine /'spiritual/moral/with god'.
IIRC correctly the context is in a section where Paul is contrasting the former and the latter.
As such, given the corrupting influence of the evil female flesh, the impure JC would have to be born of woman, so that he could undergo transformation to his spiritual pure nature. [ Which may be why later writers got into the virgin birth bit so that JC can be more pure than any other, no corrupting by conception of a woman in the conventional manner].
I believe women and impurity were a matched pair at the time.
Just a thought.

EarlDoherty

As you know, I have always been very reticent about claiming interpolations in the pauline texts, and limit myself to only one and possibly another two. The first is widely suggested by mainstream scholarship: 1 Thess 2:15-16 (“the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus…”). The others are 1 Timothy 6:13’s reference to Pilate (which could be authentic anyway given that the Pastorals are generally dated to the 2nd century), and Galatians 1:19 “the brother of the Lord” which makes sense as a 2nd century marginal gloss to specify James (now regarded as Jesus’ sibling) and avoid confusion with the Gospel apostle James.

Recently I read Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and am now wondering if I’ve been needlessly conservative on the question of interpolations. He made observations about orthodox Christian tampering with all sorts of passages, scribal emendations done for the purpose of making it clear that Jesus was such-and-such in opposition to heretical doctrines like adoptionism, separationism, and docetism. These observations were based on variant manuscript readings, of course, coming from the 3rd and later centuries, because we have no manuscripts to speak of from earlier than around the year 200, although he was able to make certain deductions about emendations that could have been made as early as the first half of the 2nd century.

The passage in the book that really jumped out at me was headed “Christ: Born Human” (p.238) from his chapter “Anti-Docetic Corruptions of Scripture”. It focused on Galatians 4:4 and Romans 1:3-4, the two passages most often cited against mythicists like myself. Here is some of what Ehrman has to say:

I’ll remark here that Ehrman’s reasoning is a little off. If Irenaeus and Tertullian could use genomenon (come, or “made from”) in Greek, why could Tertullian not use the Latin equivalent, especially since even this version would have been useful? Wouldn’t another explanation recommend itself: that Tertullian’s version contained neither phrase, indicating that his Old Latin text was derived from an earlier version of Galatians which did not have “come/born of woman”? If scribes could alter words in the periods from when we do have manuscripts (3rd century on), and even insert them (Ehrman’s book provides evidence of all sorts of orthodox insertions, not just emendations), there is nothing to prevent them from having been doing it in the preceding century, when we happen to have no direct textual evidence for it. “Born of woman” would be a natural insertion in Galatians (let’s say around the middle of the 2nd century to counter docetics like Marcion and others) to make the point that Jesus was in fact a human man from a human mother. The question is always raised why Paul would need to make this obvious point to his readers. This is doubly true if he wrote long before docetics came along whose views would need counteracting. The first insertion would have been of genomenon ek gunaikos, but later this was regarded as not graphic enough since it used the verb ginomai, and so later emendations changed it to the more direct gennwmenon, from the verb gennaw.

Ehrman goes on:

It is possible that we need to give more credence to the idea that key phrases appealed to by historicists may not have appeared in the original texts or were changed to make them more historical-sounding. If later scribes had their fingers all over them in the textual evidence we do have, in order to make Jesus more human, there is no reason to think that the same wasn’t happening in earlier periods when Jesus was undergoing a change from mythical to historical.

As far as I can see, thanks to Ehrman (his book in 1993—and I’m sorry I didn’t read it earlier—surprised everyone with the scope and amount of corruption for polemical purposes by Christian scribes that he uncovered), the historicist case just got even weaker. It would appear that very little trust can be placed in the integrity of our texts, and historicist arguments that are based on these phrases, and on exact wording of any given passage, rest on quicksand.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

jgibson000

This is a curious claim. And this is not only because it overlooks how GENOMMENON EK GUNAIKOS is the Greek equivalent to a biblical and 1st century Jewish idiom and how much it engages in question begging mind reading, but because (if I read you correctly) of how your rest your case upon assertions about GINOMAI and GENNAW that would not be made by someobne who is, as you claim to be, competent in Greek. For GENNAW is not, as you assert, a verb that is different and distinct from GINOMAI. It is the causal form of that verb. See, e.g.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin...try%3D%2321903

Jeffrey Gibson

dog-on

Mr. Doherty, what is your view regarding the argument made in the following document:

THE FIRST EDITION OF THE PAULINA
BY PAUL-LOUIS COUCHOUD – 1928
http://www.radikalkritik.de/couch_engl.htm#_ftn1#_ftn1

The main point, in my mind, being the "priority of the Apostolicon", and the possibility that, contrary to the claims of the church, Marcion's collection is actually the original.

I know this causes the historicists to go into convulsions, but I think they are trying to dismiss the whole issue of possible Marcion priority simply by relying on the apologetics of those who had a vested interest in declaring Marcion a heretic.

If in fact Marcion priority is the case, wouldn't this seem to clarify why we seemingly have two Pauls, (Epistles versus Acts)?

Ben C Smith

Tertullian did use the Latin equivalent in On the Flesh of Christ 20:

Sed et Paulus grammaticis istis silentium imponit: Misit, inquit,
deus filium suum, factum ex muliere.

But even Paul imposes silence upon these grammarians. He says: God sent his son, made from a woman.

(Yes, Tertullian calls his opponents grammarians here; the context, an argument over prepositions, explains why.)

The Latin version he used above apparently contained the phrase in question.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

Have some of the points above been accepted and used by translators? The leaner Paul, to me, seems more like the one I am familiar with!