jakejonesiv

Didymus!

Where did the attitude come from? Did I accidently hit a weak spot?

Your arguments above are circular reasoning, You assuming that Jesus was human, and then leaping to the conclusion that he was historical. A common logical fallacy. You can't prove that Jesus was human by reading the Bible; the best you can do is to say the writers believed he was human, and this is a question very much in doubt.

No I have two very simple questions for you. If Jesus was historical, when and where did he live? How do you know? Oh, that's right, you have already said you don't know!
You "think" Jerusalem? You don't know. It could be Samaria, right? And with Jerusalem in the doubtful list, you can toss Pontius Pilate and King Herod in the trash bag too. You have to, Paul doesn't mention them.

1. When did Jesus live? You don't know.
2. Where did Jesus live? You don't know.
3. Who killed Jesus? You don't know.
4. What did Jesus preach? You don't know.
5. Who did Jesus talk to during his life? Name one person. You don't know.

.

Man, you don't know anything. Give it up!

Jake Jones IV

Didymus

Yes, you hit a weak spot, but the claim that it was "accidental" strikes me as disingenuous. I confess: I don't like it when my statements are mischaracterized and then called "fallacious." Silly me.

I am not "assuming" that Jesus was human, but I've concluded as much. If he was human, then he was certainly historical, wasn't he? He lived in historical time. Is there any other meaning for the word "historical"?

You have yet to provide the allegedly fallacious "converse" of "If Jesus was not human, then he was not historical."

It appears that you don't know what a fallacy is. Or what historical proof is. Or what "converse" means. But... I can't prove that. Nor do I care to do so.

End of conversation.

Didymus

jakejonesiv

OK, I can understand that.If Jesus was human, he could still be a fictional human character. Or Jesus was human but had lived hunderds of years before Paul. Or Paul could have believed that Jesus was human, but Paul was mistaken. Or Jesus could have been a composite figure of several human characters. Or Paul could have been an inveterate liar. Or you could be completely wrong, and Paul did not consider Jesus to be human at all, but instead a Docetic phantom. Or several other possibilities, none of which you have considered.
Let's return to Sherlock Holmes. Was he human? By all attestation in the novels he was, but he wasn't historical. Same thing with Jesus. Which part of this do you not understand?End of conversation.
Didymus[/QUOTE]

So your position is that Jesus was historical, but you don't know anything about him and can't prove it. Wouldn't you be better as a Jesus agnostic, and just admit you don't know?

Jake Jones IV

Doug Shaver

Oops. So did I.

A trifling detail, in and of itself. As part of a pattern, I think it becomes very significant.

Yes, it can get confusing. I think the mere fact that the evidence engenders such terminological chaos belies any suggestion that any hypothesis has been established beyond reasonable doubt.

Eh-h-h. I don't want to get off on a semantic tangent, but those aren't things he did. Those are characteristics he had, and that he had to have in order to do what Paul says he did. And it takes us back to the question I raised in another thread. If the subject of Paul's discussion was a man known to have lived and died just a few years earlier, why make a point of the fact that his mother was a woman?

Whatever or whoever Paul's Jesus really was, his Davidic lineage had to be an invention, either Paul's own or someone else's that he incorporated into his own christology. Assuming the existence, in the ancient Middle Eastern ideosphere, of a spirit world paralleling the material world, I see nothing improbable about a Davidic lineage being carried on there as well as here.

This is the problem with most of the proof texts for historicity. "Paul said X about Jesus, and only a man can be X" begs the question of how similar Paul's universe was to our own.

It was a ritual meal, a Platonic form that got expressed when Christians perfromed the ritual themselves.

Whatever Paul said about Jesus -- wherever we must assume he actually said it -- has to be accounted for somehow. The challenge for mythicists is to establish the plausibility of an alternative to the conventional accounting.

In the mythicist scenario, the meanings are hidden only to 21st-century readers who are ignorant of first-century world views. They would have been plain enough to any literate person of the time and place in which they were written. (Speaking of tired old apologetics )

Your hypothesis does seem to solve that one problem, but it does nothing to address another. How did a man who was so obscure in his own lifetime that nobody remembered anything about him beyond his manner of death get deified by a bunch of Jews?

It may seem so if your mind is made up that Paul was talking about a man about whom he knew nothing except that he had been crucified a few years previously.

I will grant that nobody has proved the contrary. Doherty certainly does not claim to have proved it, if you mean "prove" in any mathematical sense. But the issue is whether it is plausible to suppose that Paul was thinking in terms of a cosmology that, while accepted by nobody in the modern world, was accepted by some people in the ancient world.

I meant "resort to; use or apply" (AHD sense #5), but I'll try to remember to use another word next time.

If Paul had made it clear, we wouldn't be having this discussion, obviously. The question is how parsimoniously we can explain what he wrote without supposing that he was thinking in terms of those concepts. Granted that the concepts were in the air, it cannot be argued that he was prima facie unlikely to have thought that way.

If Doherty's thesis depended on Paul's having been, just for example, a heliocentrist, then he would have a serious problem. There were, or at least had been, proponents of heliocentrism in Paul's day, but apparently the notion never caught on. There was not enough known evidence to overcome the counterintuitiveness of a moving earth. But Middle Platonism was not a fringe movement, so far as I can tell.

If those precepts were as basic to his readers' thinking as to his own, that could explain why he didn't mention them directly. I have read lengthy articles about the origin the solar system that made no explicit reference to Kepler or his laws, but the articles would have made little sense to me if I had been unfamiliar with Kepler's laws. I might have assimilated the articles' information as a set of brute facts, but no more than that. I would have gained little or no real understanding of the process of planetary formation.

But it is quite sufficient to support the premise that Paul believed such a sphere existed. And if he believed that, then he also probably believed a lot of other related things. If someone knows that I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old, then they can pretty safely assume that I also believe birds evolved from dinosaurs. Even though neither fact by itself logically implies the other, what leads people to believe the one tends to lead them to believe the other.

We all continually infer that people believe certain things without their making clear, unequivocal assertions of those beliefs. You do it, I do it, everybody does it. And, those inferences are sometimes wrong. But we are compelled to make them anyway, even knowing that occasional errors will be unavoidable. The best we can do, if we're smart enough to do it, is to minimize the errors.

The issue is whether, given a passage that really is ambiguous, an MJ exegesis is reasonable. That is a judgment that must be made in light of the totality of evidence, not just an analysis of the passage itself in isolation from everything else that is known or reasonably believed about Christianity's origins.

Maybe we are. It depends on how those particular passages fit in with everything else Paul wrote and everything else we know or think we know about Christianity's origins. Quite regardless of what those two passages might seem to mean on a prima facie reading, if it is reasonable on the basis of all other evidence to suspect that there was never a real Jesus, then we must at least consider alternative meanings.

Now you seem to be reifying the text. The words mean nothing in themselves. They are just symbols for something that was on Paul's mind. All words, in all documents, have to be interpreted, always. An interpretation that requires no deliberate analysis nor any conscious thought is still an interpretation. The mere fact that one particular interpretation would be forced on us if Paul had lived in the 20th century does not make others unreasonable considering that he actually lived in the first century.

If you think it improbable, let's see your argument.

Well, when J. P. Holding tried it, Doherty had a response: http://home.ca.inter.net/oblio/silpost.htm. Let's see yours.

If his congregations were as representative of the general population as today's church congregations are, most of them couldn't even have read his letters no matter what was in them. But whether they were literate or not, the simple fact that they had joined a particular religious cult meant they must have had some acquaintance, perhaps indirect, with the philosophy that provided the foundation of the cult's thinking, no matter what philosophy was and even if they are in some sense unaware of it.

I used to be an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Its teachings are directly based on the teachings of an early 20th-century Christian sect called the Oxford Groups, founded by one Frank Buckman. Today there are plenty of people in the meeting rooms of AA who have never heard of the Oxford Groups and wouldn't know Frank Buckman from Frank Sinatra.

If you're saying I can't cite a fictional character, you're begging the question.

As for those particular two characteristics, the issue is whether there was anything about Hellenistic cosmology that would have ruled out their attribution to a spiritual entity. I frankly don't know, because I'm not that familiar with Hellenistic cosmology. But Doherty and Carrier are, and they say it works. Pending a counterargument from someone of comparable expertise, I'll take their word for it.

If it works both ways, then it cannot work as a proof of either way.

Yes, "in addition to." Exactly. Paul was a Hellenized Jew. The scholarly consensus on that seems pretty clear.

His only reference to having been a Pharisee is one passage in Philippians, where he is making a big deal out of his Jewish heritage. It might be about as significant as Lee Strobel's claim to have been an atheist. Because of their portrayal in the gospels, Pharisees are sometimes thought to have been something like Jewish fundamentalists, but nothing in my research to date has indicated that they were uniquely immune to Hellenistic influences. Paul's claims to have persecuted Christians come with no specifics at all. We don't know what he did, and whatever it was, he doesn't say anybody hired him to do it. The stories about the priests hiring him to throw Christians in jail is from Acts, not Paul's own writings.

Sure, if his readers had never heard of it.

If it was on the fringe, what was in the mainstream? The Romans didn't have anything. Philosophically speaking, that whole part of the world was Greek in those days.

What "cosmology of Judaism" was there to reject? The Old Testament says earth is down here and heaven is up there somewhere past the firmament. What else? Middle Platonism didn't deny any of that. It just added a bunch of detail.

A time machine would certainly facilitate the answering of a lot of our questions. Until we get one, we're stuck with a few documents that managed to survive a thousand years in the custody of orthodox Christians. I'm not one who believes that the church engaged in the wholesale destruction of heterodox writings, but I do think it reasonable to think the church did nothing to preserve those writings, either. And without deliberate effort, practically nothing would have survived except by accident.

I'm not sure. If I remember correctly from what I've read so far, I think the closest match at the level of detail you're thinking about would be in Plotinus, from the third century. If that is so, then we get the question of whether we must assume that Plotinus was the first philosopher to have had those ideas and spelled them out in detail, or is he just the earliest one whose writings survived to modern times?

I'm not disputing the issues. I'm disputing the assumption that a couple of orthodox documents from the second century are representative of what Christians were thinking in the middle of the first century.

I have read it, although it has been too long for me to remember much in the way of specifics. The issue of representativeness still arises, and not just as to whether Ignatius is tracking the thoughts of Christians a couple of generations before his time. We don't know how typical his thinking was even in the second century. What we do know is who, during most of an entire millennium, was in charge of preserving any early Christian writings.

Argumentum ad numerum noted.

I'm saying it is vacuous to argue that Paul meant "brother" when he wrote "brother." The assertion is necessarily true for any X in "For Paul, brother meant X"

There was not only one. There is one other: I Cor. 9:5.

It is clear from the context that Paul is complaining about not being accorded certain privileges that were due him by virtue of his being an apostle. Apparently, it was understood that apostles were entitled to those privileges, as also were a certain other group of men whom Paul refers to here as "brothers of the lord."

So Paul knew of at least one -- no telling how many altogether -- "brother of the lord" besides James. Are we really compelled to assume that in this context, "brothers of the lord" could not have meant anything besides "male siblings of Jesus"? Is it such a reach, so out of the question, to think that maybe this was a group of men who had in some way distinguished themselves within the Christian community and thus earned an honorific title of this sort?

In your VMJ scenario, Jesus himself was such a nobody that the gospels had to be made up out of whole cloth and OT prophecies. But a few men whose only claim to fame was that they had the same parents as Jesus were thought worthy of special treatment? I don't think so.
When applied to one particular argument that is inherently weak, it suggests desperation.

Consider it from this angle. Let's suppose that the gospels not only had failed to mention Jesus' brothers and sisters. Let's suppose that all four of them had explicitly asserted that he had none, that neither Mary nor Joseph ever had any other children. And let us then suppose that skeptics were in the habit of pairing that assertion with Paul's references to James and other unnamed people as "brothers of the lord" and throwing them in the inerrantists' faces as a contradiction. The inerrantists would laugh at that -- and they would be right to do so.

Not, not at all. I am denying vehemently that he could not possibly have meant anything else.

Of course it's possible. The question is how likely it is that that was what he meant. That likelihood depends mainly on (a) the inherent plausibly of alternate interpretations and (b) the best interpretation of all the other evidence that bears on the issue of Jesus' historicity. If all the other evidence, analyzed without any reference to "brother(s) of the lord," says there was probably no real Jesus, then that one phrase just is not heavy enough to tip the scales back toward historicity.

TedM

Obviously it would not have been to let everyone know something that they already knew.

I didn't check out the 'born of a woman thread', but it seems to me that Paul is saying the following:

Jesus is God's offspring. Yet he is born of a human woman to show that we humans can also become God's offspring. He is born a Jew to break the curse of sin, as illustrated through Jewish law. Since God honors faith above all (see points about Abraham's faith), then through faith ALL sinful humans can also become God's offspring.

Paul was relating concepts and not historical biographical facts. I might point out that just as Paul doesn't identify Mary by name, neither does he identify Sarah by name in Galations even though he clearly references her in 4:22-31 as the mother of those who became God's children of promise, who corresponds to Mary as the mother of God's child of promise.

ted

Doug Shaver

Are you suggesting that Paul believed in the virgin birth?

TedM

No, not necessarily. I'm just repeating what Paul has written.

jgibson000

Here's Jimmy Dunn's answer to Doug's question. The materials in brackets are Dunn's footnotes.

Jeffrey Gibson

(c) Do the following phrases shed any more light on our question 'born of woman, born under the law'? GENOMENON (born) refers to Jesus as one who had been born, not necessarily to his birth as such.

[Cf Schlier, Galater, p. 196; Betz, Galatians, pp. 207f]

The more specific word for the event of giving birth is GENNAW (e.g. Matt. 1. 16; 19.12; John 3.5-8; Gal. 4.23), whereas there is a less specific time reference in GINOMAI (to become, come to be) which often makes it difficult to distinguish it from the verb 'to be' (EINAI)

['Only at John 8.58 (in the NT) is there any special distinction between GENESQAI and EINAI.' (F. Buchsel ' TDNT 1, p. 682).]

and which allows the participle GENOMENOS to be used regularly with a noun in the sense 'former' ('who had been').

[159. Moulton & Milligan, GINOMAI.].

Moreover, 'born of woman' was a familiar phrase in Jewish ears to denote simply 'man' (Job 14. 1; 15.14; 25.4; IQS 11.20f; IQH 13.14; 18.12f, 16; Matt. 11. 11) - man is by definition 'one who is/has been born of woman'. So the reference is simply to Jesus' ordinary humanness, not to his birth.

Why then does Paul introduce this phrase if not to emphasize the true humanity of a heavenly being? If the natural implication of Paul's language was that he was referring to the manjesus, whose ministry in Palestine was sufficiently well known to his readers, why bother to say that he was a man? [emphasis mine] Here is a consideration of some weight whose import can be clarified only by seeing the passage as a whole. Only then will we see the relation of each clause to the others and its function within the whole. The movement of thought is best illustrated by setting out the passage as. follows:

[leaving out the Greek text]

A When the fullness of time had come
B God sent forth his Son,
C born of woman,
D born under the law,
E in order that he might redeem those under the law,
F in order that we might receive adoption (as sons).


Two points call for comment. First, it is fairly obvious that a double contrast is intended: most clearly between lines D and E - 'born under the law to redeem those under the law'; but also between lines C and F -'(his Son) born of woman ... that we might receive adoption (as sons)'. Here the larger context is important for our understanding of 4.4f. Paul has been talking towards the end of chapter 3 and into chapter 4 of the offspring of Abraham (the Jews) as children, minors, and as slaves, in bondage to the law. So in v. 4 Paul's intention seems to be to present one who also knew what it means to be a child, a minor, to be under the law, but whose divine commissioning aimed to free the offspring of Abraham from their bondage and inferior status (as children who are no better than slaves v.1). We have in fact here what M. D. Hooker has called 'interchange in Christ"

[M.D. Hooker, 'Interchange in Christ', JTS 22, to Gal. 4.4 on p. 352)]

- Jesus was sent as one who experienced the condition of man in all its inferiority and bondage in order that man might be delivered from that condition and given a share in Christ's sonship (through the gift of the Spirit of the Son - v.6), no longer a slave but a son (v.7). Indeed we are in touch at this point with an important strand of Paul's christology which we will examine in detail below - his Adam christology (ch. IV). Jesus was sent as man (born of woman, not of a woman), that is, his divine commissioning was as one who shared the lot of (fallen) Adam (= man), in order that man might share in his risen humanity, as last Adam (cf. Rom. 8.29 and see further below pp. 111-13).

Second, the chief thrust of Gal. 4.4f. is clearly soteriological rather than christologicall

[As most recognize - e.g. E. Schweizer, Jesus, 1968, ET 1971, pp. 84f; Hengel, Son, pp. 811; Stanton, Incarnation, ed. Goulder, pp. 154f.]

" - God sent his Son in order to redeem.... This observation obviously strengthens the conclusion reached immediately above, that the phrase 'born of woman' is chosen to express a primarily soteriological point 'born of woman' as -describing a state prior to the decisive act of redemption (as also 'born under the law') rather than a particular event in the life of Christ. For the redemptive act is clearly not Jesus' birth;

[Against Kramer, Christ, p. 114. EXAGORAZEIN obviously refers to Jesus' death as such (as in Gal. 3.13); cf. Schelkle, Passion, pp. 135-42; L. Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, Tyndale 1955, pp. 52-6; G. Delling, Der Kreuzestod Jesu in der urchristlichen Perkfindigung, G6ttingen 1972, pp. 20f.]

Jesus' being or having been born of woman, born under the law is rather the prior condition which makes possible the act of redemption ('. . . in order that tic might redeem'). In other words Cal. 4.4f really bclongs with the preceding and distinctively Pauline group of Son-passages (§5.2c) and is actually directed more to Jesus' death as Son than to the event of his birth.

[This can be expressed diagrammatically:

not an assertion about Jesus

before after
---------------I-----------------
incarnation


but an assertion about his redeeming action

previous state (slave) present state (son)
----------------------- I----------------------
act of redemption]

Thus it becomes still clearer that Paul has no intention here of arguing a particular christological position or claim, incarnation or otherwise.

Didymus

Noooooo.... contrary to what you seem to think, fictional characters are not real human beings. They are imaginary human beings. They may be believed to be human, or depicted as human, but they are still imaginary. Because my four-year old thinks Popeye the Sailor is human does not make Popeye a human being in history.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that Jesus was a human being about whom we know very little, except that his execution led to the belief that he was the messiah. Because we know very little about someone does not make that person less human. Or not human. I have explained how this applies to Jesus elsewhere in this thread.

Then Paul would have at least one thing right - that Jesus was human.

If Paul believed Jesus was human, but Paul was mistaken, then Jesus was not human. It's elementary, Dr. Jones.

Once again, that would make him imaginary, not human. Tom Joad was an imaginary composite of young male Dust Bowl refugees. He was an imaginary character, not a real human being. I realize this is a difficult concept, but are you starting to see the difference?

My position is that Jesus existed, but that he was an obscure figure about whom almost nothing was or is known, except that he was crucified. If you'd go to the trouble to read previous messages in this thread, you might understand why that's significant.

In any case, I hope that you now understand the difference between real things and imaginary ones.

Didymus

Didymus

You actually need to assume/demonstrate much more than that. It's not sufficient to show that Paul might have been operating in such an "ideosphere," or even that he was influenced by such ideas. You need to show that he actually believed in such a parallel universe and that he - Paul - regarded Jesus as having existed on an intermediary plane between heaven and earth.

(Of course, the normal assumption would be that his congregations understood it in the same way. But that's not 100% essential. If indeed he was talking about a "sublunar" Jesus, Paul could have been speaking cryptically, knowing full that his readers didn't know the "truth" behind his words. Unlikely, but anything's possible in religion.)

The fact that such ideas were in the air may be used to support such a showing, but the mere fact of that milieu is not sufficient in and of itself. It was certainly not pervasive, and what we know of Paul suggests that he also influenced by Judaism, which AFAIK knew nothing of intermediary spheres.

"Begs the question"? How?

If there's a tautology in the mix, it's the danger of adapting one's interpretation of the text to fit the theory, i.e., MJ seems to hold that when Paul said "man," he must have meant "man" in a spiritual sense, because if he meant it in the conventional, human sense, the (MJ) hypothesis would be undermined.

I think the default reading should always be a literal one, unless we have good evidence that the author intends a metaphor. But what I get from MJ folks is that anything that suggests that Paul regards Jesus as human can only be viewed in the light of middle-Platonism. And the only basis for that seems to be the Silences: If Paul knew/cared so little about the human Jesus, he must not have viewed him as a human being who lived in recent history. If he didn't view him as the human Jesus of the gospels then he must have viewed him in the light of Middle-Platonism, that is, he existed on an intermediary plane between heaven and earth.

And that's where things stand in Earl Doherty's MJ universe. But there's an alternative explanation for the Silences, that is, Paul believed Jesus to have lived on earth as a human being, but he didn't know anything about the actual Jesus, and not a jot about the Jesus of the yet-to-be conceived gospels.

I agree that the "Lord's Supper" was almost certainly fiction, and that it may indeed have already been church ritual. Nonetheless, Paul depicted Jesus as a human being speaking at an evening meal, not as a spiritual entity operating in a sublunar sphere. Why would he paint an earthly picture if he intended to depict an unearthly one? As you yourself have said, there was plenty of that stuff going around; a spiritual setting would not have seemed strange.

This strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Surely you're not saying that Paul's congregations might have been familiar with such views, therefore we must assume that any ambiguity in his epistles must reflect such views? That just doesn't follow.

Hmmm. That sure sounds like an argument from historicity! Have you switched to HJ? :wave:

How did an obscure crucifee get tagged with the messiah label? Well, political and social conditions were right. The Disapora was ready, willing and waiting for the coming of a messiah and a new "dispensation" that would overthrow the ancien regime (Jewish and Roman alike) and offer the possibility of a better future - "salvation" - for a people who believed they had been victims of oppression.

There were specific beliefs - that the prophets had been killed; that Wisdom had been sent to save mankind, failed, and then returned to the Father, rejected and dejected; that the death of one man could serve as "payment" for the sins of all mankind, - which fostered great receptivity to such a possibility.

And there was also the situation "on the ground" in Jerusalem. That gets a bit watery, because with the loss of Tacitus' Annals for that period, and there being no other independent accounts extant, we don't know what actually happened. And we may never know. But there are gospel and Pauline elements that may actually be historical and which may have promoted the belief that the crucified man Jesus was the messiah. I've already mentioned a couple; there may be more.

Now, I have a question for you: How did an entity who was believed to have existed only in an intermediary sphere that wasn't even recognized by Judaism, get deified by a bunch of Jews?

(I think you might give some thought to the wording of that last phrase. Sometimes directness can unintentionally come across as rudeness or worse. I'm using it to underscore the parallel, but I won't use it again.)

In any event, it seems like your problem in this regard is worse than mine.

Sure, that's plausible. But lots of things are plausible for which we have no evidence. Or meager evidence. I think MJ is an example.

That's right.

It's possible, of course, that their stature grew as the legend about their dead brother grew. I'm not saying that that happened, but only that it could have happened. Alas, the "Jesus' brother" conundrum is not solved by either MJ or VMJ.

Or frustration that others can't see what is obvious to the writer.

If indeed that were the case, then I would agree. But MJ is by no means a slam dunk.

Didymus