Steven Carr

In other words, if scripture was cited, we would be assured that it was not an argument from scripture.

Hebrews 5
But God said to him,
"You are my Son;
today I have become your Father."And he says in another place,
"You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek."

Scripture has been cited, so people like Juststeve will need to find another way of explaining why it was not an argument from scripture.

They can do that. Any argument will do for them, as the conclusion is certain already.

gurugeorge

Sure he was passing on what he was told - he was told by the Jerusalem guys (something like this):- that they had found, in Scripture (and probably also, like him, in their own mystical and visionary experiences), evidence that everyone had gotten the idea of the Messiah wrong - that in fact, the Messiah had already been and done his stuff, that he had come obscurely instead of as a great military victor, and that in doing so he had won a great spiritual victory over the archons, and that this was a great secret, etc., etc. (you can see these elsewhere in the Epistles). This was the "great secret" that's IN SCRIPTURE. And some of them were having mystical and visionary experiences about it. As was "Paul", independently.

It's almost ludicrously insane that people haven't read "according to Scripture" literally. The hypnotic power (or rather authority derived from long-standing tradition) of the orthodox origins story is so strong. (But let me remind you that that story cannot be right, since the very eartliest proto-orthodox writings complain of "heresy" being established wherever they go).

Check through "Paul", nowhere will you find anywhere, any evidence whatsoever, that any of the people "Paul" is talking about knew personally, or eyeballed, anyone called "Jesus". That's an inference people import automatically into their reading of the text, in light of writings that came later.

The only thing that comes even vaguely close is the reference to "James, Brother of the Lord". But that's a real stretch, since elsewhere in "Paul", the term "brother" is clearly used as a term of art to denote some kind of position in the Church (for instance the reference re. "taking sisters as wives, as do other brothers of the Lord" - unless you think there's a whole bunch of other sibling-brothers and sisters of Jesus we haven't heard about, and "Paul" was recommending incest?).

Again, to highlight the particular distinction I'm trying to make, suppose somewhere in the "Paul" writings, there was a passage that said "James told me Jesus had said to him ...." Ah! Now THAT would be a tolerably good bit of evidence of personal contact that we moderns could accept as evidence of a person-Jesus at that time.

But there is nothing whatsoever of that sort.

i.e. the evidence sits just as comfortably with the hypothesis that the "Christ" that Paul and the Jerusalem people were talking about was a revised concept of the Messiah, one that put him in the past, as a spiritual god-man rather than merely a kingly victor to put the Jews back on top. i.e., for them, the Messiah was NOT someone to wait for, or someone to look around and expect to find a contemporary candidate for the role of, he was an entity they believed had already been and gone.

And, oddly, there are all sorts of tidbits that show this spiritual god-man concept of a Messiah is closer to more ancient concepts of the Jewish Kings as god-men - i.e. this Messiah movement may have had a somewhat revivalist tinge - cf. Margaret Barker's writings. It has often been remarked how "gnostic" this "Paul" fellow sometimes sounds. Well, it's not really full-blown gnosticism as it came later, of course, but something that developed into gnosticism and shared roots with apocalypticism, which had roots going back even further in time, to older Temple traditions and to more "pagan"-like forms of Jewish religion. (And that's exactly what the gnostics said - that they were lineally descended from "Paul".)

Doug Shaver

Which contradicts what he wrote to the Galatians -- and rather emphatically at that -- about not having gotten his gospel from any man.

show_no_mercy

Paul also says that he got his message that he preaches to the nations from a "revelation" and only went to the Jerusalem bunch so that they could leave his converts alone.

Galatians 1

11 I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up.

12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

13 For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.

14 I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased

16 to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man,

17 nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus.

18 Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days.

Galatians 2

1 Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also.

2 I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders, for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain.

3 Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek.

4 This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.

5 We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you.

Note, this means that Paul was already preaching his message and then went to the Jerusalem bunch; meaning that he already had a bunch of [gentile] converts before going there. It was only after some "false brothers" had infiltrated his ranks after preaching his message to the gentiles for some 17 years that he goes again to the Jerusalem bunch so that he hadn't run his [17 year] race in vain.

gurugeorge

I know we went through a big thing on this with spin a few years ago, so I don't want to open that whole can o' whoop ass, but as far as I'm concerned there's no big problem here.

It's possible that the Jerusalem people were preaching earlier a similar idea to the idea that he'd come up with independently (and got from his own visionary/mystical experience), and that he varies in his feelings as to whether he should feel himself part of their tradition or not. So sometimes he stands by his own revelation, sometimes he feels himself situated in a community.

That's what it looks like in Galatians (and even more so in the reconstructed Marcion version): he gets his visions, gets his gospel "from the horse's mouth", but hears of some people who had the same or similar idea prior to him , then EVENTUALLY he visits them (after quite a long time actually), and is at first sort of willing to slot into their tradition, and at first everything seems ok, but eventually they have an acrimonious break.

So if we catch him in the Epistles at various points in the course of this, sometimes it will seem like he's claiming it all from himself, his own revelation, at other times he's respectfully conceding that it's not just his idea, that it's a community's vision.

("It" being the idea of the Messiah as having been and gone in some not-too-distant but semi-mythic past, and having transformed the world in a spiritual sense "if you but have eyes to see", etc., and this having been a big secret that fooled the archons - i.e. it's a bridging religious idea between apocalypticism and gnosticism, sort of a proto-gnosticism.)

GakuseiDon

But isn't that just his gospel he's referring to ("Christ is salvation to the gentiles also")? He doesn't mean he learned everything he knew about Christ from revelation. If he did, and it matched up with what others were already saying about Christ, then that's quite an amazing claim.

aa5874

The Pauline got NOTHING from the resurrected dead. It is quite amazing that you seem to KNOW what the Pauline writers could have received from the resurrected dead.

The Pauline writers are fiction writers.

Up to now no external source can locate a Messiah called Jesus who could have revealed any gospel to Paul before the Fall of the Temple.

Please STATE exactly how the Pauline writers could have received information from a resurrected dead and how did they POSITIVELY identify or CERTIFY that it was the resurrected dead, Jesus, who gave them a gospel.

Ga 1:1 -11 I would be amazed if you can CERTIFY what the Pauline writers received from the resurrected dead, Jesus.

Steven Carr

Paul was only passing along the 'milk'.

The teachings of the Corinthians Lord and Saviour would never have been regarded as mere ‘milk’, fit only for infants who were not ready for solid food.

Whatever the ‘milk’ was that the Corinthians had been given, it was not a detailed biography of Jesus – of the kind that apologists assure us Paul never mentions because everybody had already been taught it in such detail that there was no longer a need to expound upon it.

That sort of detailed oral tradition about what Jesus had said and done would not have been ‘milk’.

However a basic analysis of how the Messiah was in the Old Testament would have been regarded as ‘milk’, and the ‘solid food’ could have been the detailed exegesis of the kind which led early Christians to see the cross in the number of servants Abraham had.

You can imagine that new Christians would not have been ready to start reading the Bible to find the cross in passages about Abraham, just as new converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses are spared some of the more bizarre intepretations of the Bible, being fed ‘milk’ first about the claim that Revelation is about the end of the world.

But mainstream Biblical scholarship has to maintain that the ‘milk’ new Christians got was such a detailed account of Jesus life that Paul could simply assume it was all understood and not allude to it.

How could that have been ‘milk’, given to Christians who were not ready for the juicy stuff?

aa5874

When was Paul only passing along the "milk'?

It must be realized that the Pauline writers HAVE NO external corroborative evidence whatsoever for passing anything to anyone BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

1. No external source of antiquity can show that there was a Messiah called Jesus before the Fall of the Temple.

2. No external source can show that Roman citizens worshiped Jesus the Messiah as a God, the Creator of heaven and earth BEFORE the FALL of the TEMPLE.

When ALL the Roman writings about events in the 1st century are examined not one Roman writer wrote about Roman Christians who believed in a Jesus God/man Messiah.

The Pauline writings do NOT reflect the history of the 1st century Before the Fall of the Temple with regards to Jesus the Messiah and the apostles.

Doug Shaver

Yes, that is possible.