Freethought & Rationalism Archive

gnosis92 · 06-17-2006, 08:48 PM

one reason i originally posted this thread "Jesus myth not accepted by professional historians" is that i doubt Doherty's thesis would be accepted by peer-reviewed respected academic journals since Doherty would not be able to explain to the satisfaction of competent academic historians the fact Paul *does* refer to a historical Jesus in several passages (what Doherty calls "human sounding*), and that the onus of proving Jesus non-existence, despite documents from antiquity asserting the contrary, rests on Doherty, and he had not met that burden of proof nor shown that his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Pauline corpus is superior to the one which assumes a HJ. Paul was writing to a specific audience, and it seems clear to me his audience were people who believed in a HJ rather than a MJ.

that said, i would be facinated for Doherty to publish in respected academic journals devoted to serious new testament scholarship, and i would like NT heavy weights from Crossan, Ehrman, Pagels, Riley, Mack, etc cetera to weigh-in. i imagine they would use the same arguments others have suggested, such as the gospels having embarrassing information on jesus that works against their theology, the contextual credibility of the gospels within first century palestine, a historical Jesus remains the most parsimonious explanation and historically plausible explanation for the origins of Pauline Corpos, gospels, and the early Christian movement.

while i have not read, nor plan to read, Clement 1, other early Christian authors such as Marcion, Papias, Iraneous, Justin, Tertullian, clearly believed Jesus existed as a figure of history. this is where professional academic historians, at respect universities (pagels is at Princeton, Ehrman is at UNC) come in useful. i do not know, nor have any interest in learning, Koine Greek.

As far as arguments of silence are concerned, if Jesus did not exist, i would expect Celsus or Pliny or Tacitus to use this argument against Christianity, if it were true. Celsus not only does not use this argument, but goes so far as to suggst Jesus' father was a roman soldier.

EarlDoherty · 06-17-2006, 09:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jramsey

Quote:
Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
And in 1 Cor. 15:44f, Paul speaks of Christ’s “body” in entirely spiritual terms, contrasting it with Adam’s physical body and identifying it as out of heaven. What is missing in this passage is any implication that Christ had ever had a physical body

Actually, Paul's line of argument implies that Christ did have a body of flesh before being resurrected. He is pointing to Christ as the first instance (or first fruits) of the kind of resurrection that is to come (1 Cor. 15:23). If those who are to be resurrected (i.e. the dead among the Corinthians) had perishable bodies when they died, Paul's logic implies that Christ had a perishable body when he died.

You are simply reading into the text what you want to see in it. 1 Corinthians 15:23 absolutely does not say that Christ is the first instance of the kind of resurrection that is to come. The text says, literally: “But each one in his own order, Christ the firstfruit, afterward the ones (belonging to Christ) when he comes at the Parousia.” All the text is saying is that Christ’s resurrection has preceded that of the believer, who will be resurrected when he comes at the End-time. There is nothing to imply or require, here or anywhere else, that Christ had a perishable body when he died.

I am going to post here an extended passage from my article on Paul’s view of “Christ as ‘Man’”, dealing with 1 Corinthians 15:44-49. I regard as the single most revealing passage in the entire Pauline corpus. There is much more related material on either side of this excerpt, particularly on the concept of “man” and “heavenly man,” as in Philo, but this is the crux of the matter. (Sorry for not taking the trouble to put the Greek words and others into italics.)

Quote:

The Physical and the Spiritual

But let’s turn to the Pauline passages themselves and see what can be gleaned from them. The most important for our purposes is 1 Corinthians 15:44b-49. Here it is in a more-or-less literal rendition based on standard translations:

[44b] If there is (such a thing as) a natural/physical body, there is also a spiritual (body). [45] And so it is written: “The first man, Adam, became a living soul”; the last Adam (became) a life-giving spirit. [46] However, the spiritual (body) is not first; rather, the material (one), then the spiritual. [47] The first man (was) out of the earth, of earthly (material), the second man (is) out of heaven. [48] As the man of earth (was), so also (are) those of earth; and as (is) the man of heaven, so also (are/shall be?) those of heaven (or the heavenly beings). [49] And as we bore the image of the one of earth, we shall also bear the image of the one of heaven.

There can be few passages in the epistles where scholars are more guilty of reading into the bare words all that they wish to see in them. The first thing to note is that there is a lot of ambiguity in this passage, for Paul has left out almost all the verbs. Some of those supplied are natural, but read the passage without the words in brackets and one can see how much critical ambiguity resides in the sense of it all. Translators tend to use verbs and prepositions which connote the idea of Christ as someone who recently came from heaven down to earth, fitting the Gospel presentation. (As Jean Héring puts it, Christ “descended from heaven.”) But the Greek words convey no necessary sense of movement. We can compare a similar common misreading of 15:21:

For since it was a man who brought death into the world, a man also brought resurrection of the dead. (NEB)

Here such verbs are supplied by the translators. Literally, the sentence reads: “For since through a man death, also through a man resurrection of the dead.” The verbs usually inserted convey the sense of some recent event on earth, yet the next verse, 22, actually points to the future: “So in Christ all will be brought to life,” which may be closer to Paul’s concept of Jesus as “man”: something oriented toward the future. We’ll look at this point more closely in a moment.

But the most critical mistranslation occurs in verse 45:

The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam (became) a life-giving spirit.

The verb “became” (egeneto) governs both parts, the references to both Adam and Christ. Yet the English “became” is misleading, for it suggests a conversion from one thing, one state, to another. This is indeed one of the meanings of “ginomai” but it cannot be so here, for such a concept cannot apply to Adam. Paul must mean ginomai in the more fundamental of its senses, that of “coming into existence as,” to form the nature of, for he surely means that Adam was created as “a living soul” (just as the Genesis passage he is quoting does). He is defining Adam here, not speaking of a change from one state into another. (The preposition “eis” need not denote “into” in the sense of conversion, but has more the sense of “as” in a predicate accusative phrase, like 1 Maccabees 11:62: “He took the sons as hostages.”)

It follows that the second half of the verse (where the verb is only understood) should imply the same thing: that Christ is of the nature of a life-giving spirit, not that he went from some previous state to another state. Yet the latter is the way scholars like to interpret it—indeed, they are forced to do so: their preconceptions about an historical Jesus require them to maintain that Paul is referring to Jesus’ state only after his resurrection, when he had taken on a spiritual body, even if this is not borne out by the text or its context. Jean Héring (1 Corinthians, p.175) is the only commentator I have seen who provides what I suggest is the proper kind of translation:

The first Adam was created to have a living nature, the second Adam to be a life-giving spirit.

This removes any implied reference to the resurrection of Christ. We are thus left with a passage (verses 35-57) which focuses on the resurrection of Christians and what form their raised body will take, and yet one which makes not the slightest glance toward Jesus’ own resurrection—an amazing silence! The scholarly claim that Paul is describing the body Christians will receive in terms of the one possessed by Christ after his resurrection has no foundation in the text.

An Impossible Silence

Paul’s silence on this point is extremely revealing. If by the term “man” Paul were referring to Jesus of Nazareth, the historical figure, then such a silence could not be allowed to stand, for it would get Paul into all sorts of difficulties. The recent presence of Christ on earth as an “earthly” man would destroy Paul’s carefully crafted antithesis. Note how he compares Adam and Christ. The main point of contrast is that the first “man”—Adam—is made of earthly material; this material corresponds to the “flesh” which Paul has been discussing in the previous verses (35-44a), where he contrasts earthly bodies of flesh with heavenly bodies, the sun and stars which were regarded as spirit beings or angels. He sums up (verse 44a) by saying that the present “physical” body of the Christian is to be raised as a “spiritual” body, which for him is something completely different in substance from the physical one.

This is the whole point of his discussion, that the spiritual body will be something new and different. His purpose here is to counter those in Corinth who seem to have denied the resurrection of the dead because they could conceive only of the resurrection of the physical body, something Greeks generally rejected as repugnant. Paul is presenting an alternative: the resurrection body will be a spiritual body, modeled on Christ’s own.

But how can he do this? How can he go on to offer the last Adam, Christ, as the prototype for the resurrected body of Christians? For Christ himself, when on earth, would have possessed a body not of heavenly material but of earthly stuff, the same as Adam’s. If Paul’s term “man” as applied to Christ refers to the man Jesus of Nazareth—which most scholars declare it does—this ruins everything, for that man did not possess a spiritual body but one made of the same, physical, material which Christians are now composed of. It would be absolutely necessary for Paul to clarify things. If at no other place in his letters, here he would have to make a clear reference to the historical Jesus. He would have to point out that the “man” he is referring to, the body which this “man” possesses, is not the body he had when he was on earth, the one of dust like Adam’s, but rather the one he now possesses subsequent to his resurrection. A clear reference to the resurrection as producing a change of state would be unavoidable.

Scholars, of course, declare that this is implied. But a mind as precise and comprehensive as Paul’s would not have left this ambiguity hanging in the air, especially when it could have been dealt with in little more than a phrase. He could not have gone on to align earthly beings with the earthly man Adam, and heavenly beings with the heavenly man Christ, and totally ignore one glaring loose end: what was the earthly man Jesus of Nazareth to be related to? How did he fit into this neat, two-compartment picture of things? (I am not, of course, questioning here that Paul believes in Christ’s resurrection, which he refers to often; but neither here nor anywhere else is that resurrection presented as one from an historical human body to a divine heavenly one.)

But more than that. There is something else which Paul could not possibly have ignored, an opportunity he would never have passed up. If Christ is now a “spirit,” possessing purely heavenly stuff, then he provides the perfect illustration for the point Paul is striving to make. For Jesus of Nazareth, from his physical, earthly body passed through resurrection and took on a different spiritual body. Is this not exactly what Paul is contending will happen to his own readers? Why would Paul pass up the ideal analogy in Jesus’ own resurrection?

This also raises a collateral difficulty, but perhaps the reader is already ahead of me. Paul here and elsewhere is stating, adamantly and unambiguously, that human resurrection is to a new state. As he says in verses 50-53: “flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God . . . the dead will rise immortal and we shall be changed . . . mortality will be clothed with immortality.” Robin Scroggs (The Last Adam, p.93) is forced to conclude that verses 47-50 “indicate that for the Apostle his Lord rose from the dead in a spiritual body.” What then would Paul make of the Gospel tradition that Jesus rose in the flesh, that he appeared to his disciples in earthly form, and even let Thomas press his fingers into his fleshly side and wound? If Christ (in the scholars' context of 'implication') were to provide a parallel to the fate in store for Christians, a resurrection not into flesh but into spirit, how would Paul deal with this contradiction? How could Jesus serve as a model if his own resurrection experience doesn’t fit Paul’s presentation of things? The very fact—according to the Gospel story—that Jesus had risen from flesh to flesh would present a glaring anomaly with the pattern of resurrection that Paul is setting up in this passage, and would have to be dealt with.

By now, of course, we know that Paul nowhere addresses such complications. By now, the reasoning reader must realize that Paul knows of no bodily resurrection, of no recent physical incarnation, no human Jesus of Nazareth. When Paul wrote, no story of the empty tomb existed; the graphic accounts presented in the Gospels were unknown to him. Scroggs goes on to allow that Paul understood that Christ had appeared to him (the vision described in 1 Corinthians 15:8) in an entirely spiritual form, and that he equated this appearance with the appearances to all the others (the ones described in verses 5-7). Modern critical scholars have recently come to acknowledge that they were all the same (see Supplementary Article No. 6). Scroggs, writing in 1966, contents himself with remarking that “the New Testament church does not agree about the nature of Christ’s resurrection body.”

Paul’s Heavenly Man

We can now go back to 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 and take a fresh look at things. If the last man is a life-giving spirit, the term “man” is obviously being used of a heavenly figure. Since no qualification is put on this to relate it to a previous physical state of this “man” on earth, since there is no addressing of the complications which all that the latter would involve, we are justified in concluding that the concept of a purely “heavenly man” exists for Paul, and that Christ is such a man. Here we also see another Christian thinker (cf. Hebrews 10:5, above) using the term “body” and locating it in the spiritual world, which allows us, by implication, to do the same for terms like “flesh” and “blood.”

Most scholars cannot bring themselves to such plain conclusions. Moffat (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, p.258f) fudges Christ’s spiritual body and Paul’s rigid separation between physical and spiritual by offering a far too sophisticated—and modern—reading of Paul’s thought, no doubt wishing to preserve the later Apostles’ Creed declaration that we shall indeed be resurrected in the flesh. Scroggs (op.cit., p.100f) recognizes that Paul calls Christ “man” even though in a spiritual body, and so he is led to define Christ’s heavenly nature as “human,” a prime example of forcing words into so-called meanings which exist only in the minds of those who must engage in this kind of double-think. To justify this by defining “human” as the post-resurrection destiny of human beings after the End, using phrases like “eschatological humanity” and “true man,” could only be done by a theologian. It need hardly be said that Paul himself gives us no hint in the text of all this tortured, implicit meaning.

Paul makes straightforward statements about his heavenly man. As opposed to Adam, who was of earth and made of earthly stuff (“the dust of the earth,” as many translations put it), the second man is “out of heaven” (ex ouranou), meaning he belongs to, or is a product of heaven, just as Adam is “out of earth” (ek gēs). Here again we can see the problem of misleading translations, for if ex ouranou is rendered “from heaven,” implying that Christ came to earth from there, this makes nonsense of the ek gēs, for where did Adam come to “from earth”? No, the preposition in both places (it’s the same one) simply means that each figure belongs to its own sphere. Adam is a part of earth, made of earth (choikos); Christ is a part of heaven, made of heavenly stuff (understood). Scroggs calls it non-corporeal and “like that of the angels.” It is this heavenly stuff which resurrected Christians will take on; they shall bear Christ’s “image,” meaning his nature, as verse 49 states.

One final point: the so-called sequence of “first” and “second/last” is automatically assumed to support an understanding of Christ as a recent historical person. He arrived “second”—in history—in contrast to Adam who was, historically, the first man. If Paul, it is claimed, were reflecting some kind of Primal Man idea, or Platonic concept of prototypic man, Christ would need to be ranked first, before or higher than Adam. Perhaps so, but there is nothing to prevent Paul from coming up with a special ranking for his own purposes, one he can justify. Here Paul’s need is to provide a parallel to the destiny of Christians, to their progression from an earthly body to a spiritual body (verse 46). He may legitimately present Adam and Christ in the order in which these respective “men” had an effect on humanity. At the beginning Adam brought sin and death into the world, but in this present, final age it is the man of heaven who has been revealed, the one who provides salvation from sin and death and a prototype for the resurrection body.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

Steven Carr · 06-18-2006, 02:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gnosis92

that said, i would be facinated for Doherty to publish in respected academic journals devoted to serious new testament scholarship, and i would like NT heavy weights from Crossan, Ehrman, Pagels, Riley, Mack, etc cetera to weigh-in. i imagine they would use the same arguments others have suggested, such as the gospels having embarrassing information on jesus that works against their theology, the contextual credibility of the gospels within first century palestine, a historical Jesus remains the most parsimonious explanation and historically plausible explanation for the origins of Pauline Corpos, gospels, and the early Christian movement.

So you don't think they would even bother to try to explain the silences Doherty points out in his 20 top silences?

What is the most historically plausible explanation for the early Christian movement which, according to 2 John 1:7, denied that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh?

2 John 1:7
'Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world.'

He must be talking about Christians. Naturally the world contained many people who denied that any Christ had come, but they were already in the world. That was the default belief of the world.

He must be talking about people who were evangelising with a message that the Christ had come , but not in the flesh.

But what is the most historically plausible explanation for such Christians?

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 03:15 AM

Quote:

A clear reference to the resurrection as producing a change of state would be unavoidable.

Is it not interesting that this change of state is acted out in the Eucharist? Bread to the Body of Christ, wine to the Blood of Christ? Paul is not only silent about the resurrection, he is very noisy about the correct source - the Eucharist!

I think we must dump this modern concept of a difference between flesh and spirit if we are to understand this fascinating religion.

Flesh and spirit exist on BOTH sides, the difference is that one type is corruptible, the other incorruptible. Listen to the Messiah please!

Da Vinci with http://www.aiwaz.net/Leonardo/vitruvianman/ and Dali with Christ of St John have superbly expressed this perfect type human.

These ideas were repeated in Revelation and the Gospels with the concept of a NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH!

Xianity does not see heaven as purely spiritual - in my house there are many mansions, the marriage of the bride of Christ, etc. Historically it should be possible to trace this division of spiritual and flesh - is it a reaction to enlightenment thinking?

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 03:30 AM

Quote:

Except Hebrews 10:20 doesn't say "curtain of flesh." Rather, it reads, "he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)." Again, the context is sacrificial; Jesus's sacrifice (flesh) becomes the doorway (curtain) into the sanctuary. This is a metaphor, straight up

In the OT sacrifices - and priests - had to be without blemish. Priests sacrificing themselves.....

I would wysiwyg Hebrews - metaphor is our thinking now. We must try to dump all our later assumptions and experiences if we are to get at least a reasonable picture of how the world was seen by the participants then. And as aboriginal peoples might give clues, very well hidden, to ancient hunter gatherer lifestyles, xianity as practised now also gives fascinating anthropological clues, especially in the Eucharist.

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 03:48 AM

Quote:

You fail to understand that in the philosophy of the time, the realm of flesh, when used in application to the idea of corruptibility, changeability, decay, etc. (not in regard to every meaning or usage of the word sarx), meant everything below the moon. Within that region lay earth itself, humans who inhabited it, but also the aer or firmament above the earth and below the moon, which demons inhabited. The demons were spirit beings, but regarded as having a type of corporeality different from that of humans. (I’ve appealed here to the TDNT, not simply to interpretations of Middle Platonic pagan writers.) I failed to persuade GakuseiDon, and no doubt will fail to persuade you, that the activities of the demon spirits belonged to the realm of flesh. This means that both material and spiritual activities went on in that sublunar realm. Thus, Christ’s salvatory acts, including the actions of the demons in hanging him on a tree (as in the Ascension of Isaiah), when he had descended to that sublunar realm and adopted a form of non-human ‘flesh’ (again, see the TDNT), could be spoken of as “kata sarka”.

I wonder if this assumption of corruptible and below the moon is correct

Satan and his angels fell from heaven (Enoch and NT references). Why the concept of a new heaven if only the sub lunar realm is affected by corruption? What is this idea of the marriage of the church and christ about?

Maybe the problem is a confusion of death and decay with sin and rebellion?

Imagine the universe from their perspective - first is god separate from and above or integral to "heaven and earth"? Is not separation of the gods understood as an evolutionary stage in religious thinking? As Zeus et al continuously interfered, so did this judaic god, and this probably roman god jesus interfered in the affairs of man. Until a century or so back lightning rods were not liked because....

Assuming corruption is in the sub lunar bit looks like a later idea imposed on animist ideas.

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 04:11 AM

http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/Anthropology.htm

Maybe historians are the wrong academic group to discuss myth?

Quote:

Other twentieth-century definitions of religion (e.g., Spiro, Jacob Pandian, E. E. Evans-Pritchard) follow Émile Durkheim (1912) in positing a rigid dichotomy between the so-called supernatural and natural, or sacred and profane orders. These alternative definitions have proved no more satisfactory than Geertz's because distinctions between supernatural and natural are seldom obvious and may vary dramatically from individual to individual and from society to society.

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 04:23 AM

Quote:

A number of promising studies have focused on ritual and ritual forms. From this perspective, rituals are seen as the fundamental unit of religious expression and the building blocks for all religions.

I have definitely felt like a voice crying in the wilderness here because I want to focus on ritual - the eucharist - and I do see the focus on the human jesus in contrast to the high priest jesus as a red herring!

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 04:32 AM

Quote:

In the nineteenth century, scholars such as Lady Jane Harrison argued valiantly for the primacy of ritual over myth. All mythology, they argued, has its roots in ritual activity. The myth-ritual debate raged for more than 60 years until 1942, when Clyde Kluckhohn offered a satisfactory compromise by recounting multiple instances in which a myth clearly began as a ritual and other instances in which a ritual clearly began as a myth.

Are there any studies of the Christ Myth and the Eucharist, and which might have come first or how they co-evolved?

Clivedurdle · 06-18-2006, 04:52 AM

http://faculty.cua.edu/anderson/anth537.htm

Quote:

ANTH 537 - Anthropology of Religion, Systems of Thought & Moral Imagination
Fall 1999, Thursday 10:10-12:30, TBA

(Dr. Anderson)

This is a course on the social anthropology of religion, cultural analysis of myth and symbolism and recent approaches to religious practices in complex societies. It focuses primarily on systems of thought and dilemmas of combining belief and social action and examines model studies of religious belief and institutions that bear on work, business, education, health, leisure, sex, politics, communication and government in complex societies.

The course has three goals. The first is to familiarize students with classic problems and contributions of the anthropology of religion, its roots in issues of mind and society and views of religion as a kind of social "mind." The second is to introduce its methodological redevelopment as symbolic anthropology for analyzing of systems of thought and ritual action. The third is to examine extensions of research findings from studies in small-scale and third world societies to change and complex societies.

The first half of the course concentrates on anthropological studies of religion in small-scale third world societies and introduces the main outlines and methodological applications developed in studies of religion. The second half concentrates on analysis of belief, representation, symbolism settings of social action addressed in recent studies from complex societies, particularly Islamic settings.

It does feel as if these sociological and anthropological tools have not yet been turned on xianity. Maybe the references here should be required reading - I strongly recommend Durkheim Elementary Forms!

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06-17-2006, 08:48 PM	#161
gnosis92 Veteran Member Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: usa Posts: 3,103	one reason i originally posted this thread "Jesus myth not accepted by professional historians" is that i doubt Doherty's thesis would be accepted by peer-reviewed respected academic journals since Doherty would not be able to explain to the satisfaction of competent academic historians the fact Paul does refer to a historical Jesus in several passages (what Doherty calls "human sounding*), and that the onus of proving Jesus non-existence, despite documents from antiquity asserting the contrary, rests on Doherty, and he had not met that burden of proof nor shown that his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Pauline corpus is superior to the one which assumes a HJ. Paul was writing to a specific audience, and it seems clear to me his audience were people who believed in a HJ rather than a MJ. that said, i would be facinated for Doherty to publish in respected academic journals devoted to serious new testament scholarship, and i would like NT heavy weights from Crossan, Ehrman, Pagels, Riley, Mack, etc cetera to weigh-in. i imagine they would use the same arguments others have suggested, such as the gospels having embarrassing information on jesus that works against their theology, the contextual credibility of the gospels within first century palestine, a historical Jesus remains the most parsimonious explanation and historically plausible explanation for the origins of Pauline Corpos, gospels, and the early Christian movement. while i have not read, nor plan to read, Clement 1, other early Christian authors such as Marcion, Papias, Iraneous, Justin, Tertullian, clearly believed Jesus existed as a figure of history. this is where professional academic historians, at respect universities (pagels is at Princeton, Ehrman is at UNC) come in useful. i do not know, nor have any interest in learning, Koine Greek. As far as arguments of silence are concerned, if Jesus did not exist, i would expect Celsus or Pliny or Tacitus to use this argument against Christianity, if it were true. Celsus not only does not use this argument, but goes so far as to suggst Jesus' father was a roman soldier.

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