Ben C Smith

Well, yes, of course.

Not exactly, no, but I think we know it happened before Paul.

Just using the name Christ to a Greek readership would probably not establish that role, no.

The gentile readership may never have fully understood the messiah role. I do not think seeing Jesus as the Jewish messiah started with readers at all. I think it started with apostles (those who came before Paul).

Correct, I think.

I think it originated (A) before Paul (B) in the Judean churches (Galatians 1.22, the Judean churches which were in Christ), which would have spoken Aramaic or Hebrew. IOW, I think the Judean believers started thinking of Jesus as messiah first, then later this was translated into Greek as Christ.

Ben.

gstafleu

Could be, but as we don't seem to have any evidence for this (pre-Paul Christian-like documents in Aramaic or Hebrew that show this, e.g.), this will have to remain a guess for now. It could also be that Greek speaking members of the Hellenistic Jewish community had gathered that something called a "Christ" was an important good guy, and started from there without having too many details. These details were then added later, not all that difficult to imagine given the Christ=anointed=Messiah link.

Gerard

Ben C Smith

Paul says that there were Judean churches (who would speak Aramaic or Hebrew) in Christ before him; Christ is the standard translation for the Hebrew messiah; Paul thinks of Jesus as the messiah (based on his OT quotations); and going from messiah to Christ is not problematic at all, while going from Christ to messiah brings up some unanswered questions (such as, what did Christ mean to the Greeks who originated this usage?).

How then is it a guess to think that, based on this, the messiah concept originated amongst Aramaic speakers in Judea and was later translated to Christ when the religion went Greek? We may not have a whole lot of evidence, but all the evidence we do have seems to point one way.

Ben.

gstafleu

In the OP GakuseiDon asked:
A large number of answers does not seem to be forthcoming. So maybe we can extend the question a bit, in two ways:

1. What kind of evidence would lead us to conclude that Jesus was seen in a Jewish-Messiah-like role,
2. Where do we first see this evidence.

Not knowing the answer to (1), I went to Jewish_messianism, and found the following list of Scriptural Requirements:

• The Sanhedrin will be re-established (Isaiah 1:26)
• Once he is King, leaders of other nations will look to him for guidance. (Isaiah 2:4)
• The whole world will worship the One God of Israel (Isaiah 2:17)
• He will be descended from King David (Isaiah 11:1) via Solomon (1 Chronicles 22:8-10, 2 Chronicles 7:18)
• The Moshiach will be a man of this world, an observant Jew with "fear of God" (Isaiah 11:2)
• Evil and tyranny will not be able to stand before his leadership (Isaiah 11:4)
• Knowledge of God will fill the world (Isaiah 11:9)
• He will include and attract people from all cultures and nations (Isaiah 11:10)
• All Israelites will be returned to their homeland (Isaiah 11:12)
• Death will be swallowed up forever (Isaiah 25:8)
• There will be no more hunger or illness, and death will cease (Isaiah 25:8)
• All of the dead will rise again (Isaiah 26:19)
• The Jewish people will experience eternal joy and gladness (Isaiah 51:11)
• He will be a messenger of peace (Isaiah 52:7)
• Nations will end up recognizing the wrongs they did to Israel (Isaiah 52:13-53:5)
• The peoples of the world will turn to the Jews for spiritual guidance (Zechariah 8:23)
• The ruined cities of Israel will be restored (Ezekiel 16:55)
• Weapons of war will be destroyed (Ezekiel 39:9)
• The Temple will be rebuilt resuming many of the suspended mitzvot (Ezekiel 40)
• He will then perfect the entire world to serve God together (Zephaniah 3:9)
• Jews will know the Torah without study (Jeremiah 31:33)[3]
• He will give you all the worthy desires of your heart (Psalms 37:4)
• He will take the barren land and make it abundant and fruitful (Isaiah 51:3, Amos 9:13-15, Ezekiel 36:29-30, Isaiah 11:6-9)

How does this compare to Jesus, in any stage of his development? Many people would say that the most defining characteristics of Jesus were:

• He was the Son of God
• He died via crucifixion and rose again.

I don't see anything about a Son of God in the list, but that can be a shortcoming of the list. There is no crucifixion either, but the "ceasing of death" is mentioned a few times, and the resurrection could be a (rather limited) form of that. We do of course have descent from David, even Paul tells us that. "He will include and attract people from all cultures and nations" can be found in the mission to the Gentiles. "There will be no more hunger or illness, and death will cease" can, again in a limited form, be seen in miracles like the healings and the feeding of the multitudes and the resurrection. But only in a very limited way, by no means had hunger and illness ceased in any general way, not had death been overcome in any general way.

Anyway, is this the sort of evidence we are looking for, and if so, where do we first find it?

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

You're right, that is indeed evidence that raises it above the level of a guess.

Gerard

gurugeorge

Who's talking about all the people in Jerusalem? The way I picture it is just a small religious group (to be precise, about 500 give or take a few ) with a novel take on the Messiah concept (which of course includes the putative fact that their Joshua Messiah did exist and take on embodiment, but there's no particular great concern about precision at this stage, his past existence doesn't need to be anything more than vague, in fact obscurity is part of the concept). i.e. it's a bunch of highly religious people with a bright idea, who claim their Messiah revealed himself to them in scripture, and they had visions of him. Then "Paul", separately, has a visionary experience of the same novel Messiah (that previously he'd scorned), takes the idea over and universalises it.

Unless early Christianity just was that particular variant! (I've never undrstood that particular requirement that some people have - "well there wasn't anything else like it around" Well of course there bloody wasn't, that was that religion, that particular variant on the Messiah idea!!!)

aa5874

Yeah, who is talking about "ALL" the people in Jerusalem? I never used the word "ALL".

On the other hand, you are just speculating and making stuff up to support your guesses. I hope you realise that what you have imagined cannot be supported by any facts. Revelations and visions cannot be tested for veracity. The author of the Epistles is more likely to have read or heard about Christ than to have visions or revelations that appear to agree with the Jesus stories.

But you have failed to provide any external information to support your variant.

Basically, you are really saying whatever the unknown authors of the Epistles wrote is true.

gurugeorge

But people talking about revelations and visions can be tested. In this case we have Paul, who talks about his own visionary experience; and we also have Corinthians 1-15, which could viably (in terms of analysis of the word for "appeared" used there) refer to visionary experience (or more accurately, the self-revelation of Joshua Messiah to this religious group "in scripture", combined with some visionary experiences, perhaps something like the "mass hysteria" of Lourdes).

Well it's more like, "if they are valid documents from that period, much as Biblical scholarship analyses them, then what sort of circumstances would have likely led to their being written?" You then have a hypothesis, against which other facts can be tested.

gstafleu

It looks as if we have an answer to the question in the OP. The reason Paul thinks of Jesus as a Messiah is because the churches in Judea told him so. As these were Hebrew/Aramaic speaking churches, they were familiar with the concept of a Messiah and apparently had some reason to think that Jesus was the Messiah. What exactly led them to this idea may be less clear, but going by Paul it seems a fairly safe bet that reading the scriptures played a large role in it.

Paul's Hellenic audience OTOH was not familiar with the concept of a Messiah, hence Paul didn't stress it much, and the Greek translation, Christ, became a nickname for Jesus more that a title signifying "Messiah."

Something similar may have happened to the name "Jesus." For the Judean churches this could have carried the meaning "savior." So for them "Jesus" would have been an "anointed savior," an "messiah-type savior" or, as Robert Price would have it, a "Joshua-type Messiah." For Paul's audience this meaning would have been lost, hence "Jesus" became nothing more than a common name (no doubt helped by the fact that it was indeed a rather common common name).

This also helps us make sense of Romans 1:3, where Paul says that Jesus is "of the seed of David." Irrespective of whether Paul thought of Jesus as a historical figure or not, the idea that Jesus was of David's seed would come naturally to him. He knew that Jesus was the Messiah, he also knew, from Judean tradition, that being of the seed of David was a requirement for a Messiah (see the list in a previous posting), hence it would have been an obvious matter of fact to him that Jesus, being the Messiah, was of the seed of David. Any actual genealogical, or other historical, knowledge would not have been necessary in order to reach such an obvious conclusion.

Given that the next verse, Romans 1:4, states that Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead," it does indeed seem that the resurrection was an important contributor to the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. What I'm interested in knowing is: was this a pre-existing idea in Jewish tradition, or was it one of the "improvements" the Judean churches made?

So for a while Jesus lost his meaning as Messiah, at least for the ordinary believer. The cognoscenti, like Paul, would still have been aware of it, but it was not generally known lore. At some point the idea of Jesus=Messiah must have come to the surface again. A quick search in biblegateway shows that the term "Messiah" only appears in two places in the NT: John 1:41 "He first found his own brother Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated, the Christ)" and John 4:25 "The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will tell us all things.”" (IOW, the Greek transliterates "Messias" here, and translates it as "Christos.") This might point to a rather late resurfacing of the Messiah idea.

Doherty is fond of pointing out that it is not just Paul who is sparse with historical detail, but that this applies to all early writers. Is this also true of the Messiah idea? IOW, do we see more than some hints, as we do in Paul, that the author may have been aware of the idea? Rather, do we see the Messiah (as opposed to Christos) idea actually promoted to the audience?

Gerard Stafleu

aa5874

A vision or revelation as stated in the Epistle cannot be tested for veracity. The author of the Epistles claimed he had revelations or visions but no-other person can verify as true that he had revelations or visions and the scope of these revelations.

If I were to tell you that Jesus revealed to me that he ROSE from the dead while I was in Arabia, could you use the case of "mass hysteria" in Lourdes to verify that my revelation did occur?

You cannot use "Paul's revelations" to verify "Paul's revelations", that is, you cannot use Paul's revelations in Corinthians to verify the truthfulness of revelations in Romans or any other Epistle.

There are documents but their validity is now under scrutinity and analyses by biblical scholars have shown that what was previously thought to be true may no longer be so.

For example, biblical sholars have deduced that gLuke was written well after the Fall of the Jewish Temple, yet the author of the history of the Church, Eusebius, claimed "Paul" was aware of the author of Luke and knew that gLuke was written before Nero died in 68 CE.

There are documents ,of course, but their validity and veracity is another matter, and it is naive to use parts of a single source to verify other parts of the very same single source.