thief of fire

Ehrman is saying there are two possible ways someone could return from the grave. One as a ghost, spirit or soul. The other in the same earthly body they died in.

Steven Carr

And that a dying and rising god can only return in the same earthly body they died in, or else they are not a dying and rising god.

I wonder what Ehrman makes of 'the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.'?

Chaucer

R. Joseph Hoffmann has a delightful take on the Carrier/Ehrman to-and-fro --

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Mythtic Pizza and Cold-cocked*Scholars
by rjosephhoffmann

<snipped>

. (http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com...cked-scholars/)

[WARNING! Wordpress pages sometimes carry malware. I did not go directly to this page. Instead, I got it from Google and retrieved Google's cache version instead -- strongly advise users here to do the same! Here's the safer cache link for this article --

http://webcache.googleusercontent.co...hl=en&ie=UTF-8 ]

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Chaucer

Chaucer

And here's the newest interview with Bart Ehrman --

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... (http://www.religiondispatches.org/bo...h_bart_ehrman/)
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Chaucer

Toto

Chaucer - there are copyright problems with reproducing that much text, and we prefer that you post a few paragraphs and a link, for bandwidth problems.

EarlDoherty

This has been the biggest red herring from NT scholarship right from the beginning of the D&R gods controversy more than a century ago. If it ain't exactly like Jesus (i.e., the Gospel Jesus, not the epistles, which never make their Jesus rise in an earthly body) it just don't cut it.

Scholarship has ignored the whole Greek/Hellenistic attitude toward the body and the guarantees for personal 'resurrection' which it looked for. For the Greeks, a god rising from death to a spirit state of pure soul inhabiting an afterlife in the heavens was perfectly good, it's all that was needed, since only the Jews seem to have looked for some kind of return as the walking undead on earth (which is the way the Greeks would have looked at it). Over its first hundred years, the figure of Jesus, at first spiritual, was created as a version of a D&R god to serve Jewish--and wannabe Jewish--needs, although at the beginning, the Christ cult did not revolve around a human-body-to-human-body progression. That does not make the Christian Jesus worthy of rejection as yet another Dying and Rising god. This is desperate apologetics, pure and simple. (Anyone ever read Gunter Wagner's Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries for a prime example of a book-length apologetic farce along these lines?)

Yes, and this highlights--if we were to take this verse (1 Cor. 15:45b), misleading translation and all, the way mainstream scholarship insists on doing--would be precisely the same as the Greek savior gods. It represents a belief that Christ upon his resurrection is a spirit, not a Buffy-vampire type who clawed through the dirt in some undead human body. Scholars galore have long recognized that the epistles seem to have the attitude that Jesus rose directly into spirit form to heaven, since there is never a hint of a rising to earth in flesh. How is such a view to be distinguished from that of Osiris, who was rejuvenated to life in the Underworld? (Why, because Osiris went down to a supposedly dark place, while Jesus went up to the heavenly light?)

Of course, it used to be that those scholars galore never quite brought themselves to admit, and certainly not to their readers, that this 'seeming attitude' they recognize in the epistles indicates quite clearly that Jesus, even if he was on earth, was not at first seen to rise in flesh, but only in spirit, making the later Gospel account a crock. Though I suppose Ehrman, being a declared atheist and non-Christian, would be willing to admit this. And now, come to think of it (my mind is a bit foggy amid the pain), some of the Jesus Seminar put forward that scenario in 1995, though not all mainstream scholars have subscribed to it even today.

In any case, as I said, "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit", entailing an intended implication by Paul that he went from the state of being human to a state of being a heavenly spirit, is simply an invalid and misleading translation. (You can check with spin on that.)

Earl Doherty

spin

Earl tried real hard to sell this folly last time, but no-one was buying, so here he is as if he were in some back street trying to sell it at a reduced price (direct from his warehouse).

The basic problem is that Paul described a process that one went from a worldly body to a spiritual body when one died and was raised and he was extremely clear that christ died and was raised from among the dead (νεκρων, ie other dead bodies). Adam was the first to have life breathed into him to become a living being. Christ was the first to be raised to a life-giving spirit, thus becoming a new Adam--the last Adam (v.45). Earl feels he needs to uncouple his christ from the rails of the process Paul establishes. Christ for Earl didn't have a worldly body, as he was never human. This is the theory dictating what the text should say, but sadly doesn't.

The body of the first man was from the dust and the body of the second was from heaven. Christ being raised from the dead was raised to the spiritual body from heaven. And everyone will bear the image of the man from heaven (v.49b). The dead will be raised imperishable (v.52b).

Earl just couldn't see the obvious, ie that christ was the new Adam, who, having died to his perishable body, as all humans must, was raised, showing the way that all believers would follow.

And if christ wasn't raised from the dead then the dead are not raised. But in fact christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died (v.20).

I guess Earl must be using the word "dead" in some personal, idiosyncratic manner so that christ's dying has nothing to do with ordinary people's deaths, nothing in common. Paul says that death came through one man (ie Adam), the resurrection has come through one man (v.21). Paul cannot be plainer about death here: it is the consequence of being human. Christ was human, died, and was raised spiritual. But Earl seems to have a different idea from Paul's notion of death. If there is no resurrection of the dead, then christ has not been raised (v.13). Wasn't he (a) dead (body) (νεκρος) like everyone else who preceded him? Earl says he can't have been. :constern02:

Yup.

stephan huller

Marcion. Oh Marcion. Come forth thou Marcion:

Back to this nonsense I guess.

spin

Ehrman needs to find a better expert. This quoted statement is simply not so, as I have pointed out before. Prior to the reign of Claudius a procurator was merely in charge of financial matters in an imperial province. Both Tacitus and Suetonius are aware of the chronology of the change in role of the procurator. With a few very well-known exceptions--the city prefect, the chief of the fire brigade and the guardian(s) of the treasury--, a prefect was a straight military appointment. Obviously they weren't the same job, though it would seem that the procurator took over the administration of small provinces, replacing the prefect, when Claudius lent the procurator his judicial powers, enabling legal decisions necessary for a provincial administrator. Previously the prefect, as a commander of a small province, acted as an extension of the regional military commander, usually of proconsular rank.

spin

Told you it was your fault. You gotta act more responsibly.