spamandham

What do you make of Gal 4:4 then, where Paul refers to the Son being "born of a woman, born under the law"?

I'm starting to wonder if even Paul knew what he believed about Christ.

k_smith123

Virtually everything Paul says is in metaphor and "woman" and "law" are represent "cover". The top layer of allegory is associated with "life" and women are the givers of life. Paul in his allegoric interpretations destroyed the "law" and brought forth "dead" things from the underworld, but these dead things were given new feminine covers provided by "anointing" and "baptism" (or "frankincense" and "myrrh"). Since "fathers" are often associated with "history" (or lifeless "rock"), Christ's birth to a "virgin" meant that he was entirely non-historical.

Solo

I would be careful here with causation: the "conversion" experience does not happen as a consequence of "thinking about the [conversion] subject". The theme may actually arrive later, when a subject is already showing signs of being non-compos. It is quite common as a matter of fact that a religious epiphany happens while people get worked up about something (or someone) else.

The Acts story suggests "persecution" as the primary cognitive content of Paul's Christ experience. But given Paul's letters, this is extremely unlikely. 2 Cor 12 (which I read as Paul's description of his initial episode of manic excitement) was primarily euphoric and only later he experiences "skolops th sarki" (7), which articulates the depressive or persecutory side of the syndrome. Importantly, he ascribes the persecution to Satan, not Jesus ! That the initial "discovery" of the Son in himself was an euphoric affair is confirmed by Gal 1:15-16.

The genuine Paulines also mostly deny that their writer was feeling guilty about persecuting the Church. In fact the highly suspect 1 Cor 15:3-11 passage imputing guilt to Paul on account of his persecution of the Jesus assemblies is at loggerheads with everything else Paul says on the subject. In Gal 1, Paul proudly owns up to his former violent career in supressing the Jesus nonsense, ascribing it to his advanced education in Judaism and zeal for the tradition of his ancestors. As this passage immediately precedes the "euphoric" revelation of Christ to Paul, it seems as though Paul takes it as a confirmation of a special status he has with God. Philippians 3:6 (as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless) ratifies his former anti-Nazarene stance as a mark of moral fibre.

Jiri

Amaleq13

Never (ie "does not happen")? Do you have research to support this level of certainty? It seems to me to be counterintuitive to claim that all conversion experiences occur when an individual is thinking about something other than their beliefs.

You've gone from "does not happen" to "may arrive later" and "quite common". Which is it?

spamandham

Perhaps you would be interested in giving your perspective, and the reasons you hold it, in this thread. http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=183659 , where I have not even been able to get people to admit the mere possibility that an interpretation such as this may be what Paul meant.

Gamera

I have to disagree Jay. I think you've been "taken in" by Platos fictive frame. I don't think most scholars believe anymore that the dialogs are in any sense transcriptions of anything Socrates said, but rather tendentious arguments leading toward a predetermined conclusion using the trope of a dialog. It's all staged to score points for Plato's philosophical claims.

And those claims are undeniably that there is a world of Forms that are the basis of the our world of phenomena. I don't see how you can deny that.

Heidegger's 1931-32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth makes a convincing case that Plato is engaged in the earliest western attempts to work through "truth" as the fundamental experience of the unhiddenness of Being, and that Plato's ontology flows from there.

In any case, I think Plato and Paul have a lot in common -- they are both driven to reinterpret reality according to a preconceived "revelation" they have about the "truth." And nothing (no empirical data) can stand in their way.