aa5874

Please do not associate me with your "HEAVENLY PLANE JESUS" who OPERATED in the HEAVENLY PLANES.

angelo

Is it forgotten that all these tales came about in days when most people believed spirits could disguise themselves to look like men and were everywhere. An extremely superstitious time when gods were still thought to inhabit the heavens as well as the Earth.
A small step in thinking that a heavenly being had just been on the Earth, and was not reconised as such seemed not too far fetched by the time Paul or whoever wrote the epistles to get this cult of the very first xtians to start expanding. After all, no one wants to die, a tale of some dude who came back from death would make a huge impression on these simple people who knew no better.

spin

I don't think Paul's is a spiritual christ. Paul's Jesus by necessity is born under the law (Gal 4:4). If he were not human, he would not be a suitable substitute sacrifice for those people who are under the condemnation of the law, ie everyone.

The logos seems to be a parallel thread in Jewish thought based on hokhmah speculation, for wisdom (hokhmah) is every word from the mouth of god. I haven't seen it in Paul, but it certainly is big in John.

I think the "critical phase" is the transformation of the expectation of the messiah into the belief of his having already come. If, as Paul says, all things are under the power of sin (Gal 3:22), then we have a provocation that Paul would need to deal with, a problem in need of a solution, for would his god leave his people imprisoned? Such a solution would be a revelation. It wouldn't matter that this messiah was not--in any meaningful sense--a messiah, but a savior.

I see no sign of anyone before Paul with a notion of a messiah already come.


spin

maryhelena

spin - interesting to see you give some idea of your own ideas on the historicity issue.

So, it's not a question of no history being relevant to the NT storyline - it's really a question of what history is relevant for the creation of the NT storyline...

And so, are we not back to taking a look at Wells? Sure, he does not have any historical evidence for his Galilean preacher figure - but the point is, surely, that Wells is maintaining that a human figure was deemed to somehow be relevant to the NT storyline.

Debates over Jesus of Nazareth (or wherever) are really besides the point - the nobody preacher is useless for history and useless for theological or prophetic speculations. If any man can do - everyman is game....Consequently, the basic, the fundamental question, is not whether the NT Jesus was historical or mythical - neither of these questions do justice to the issues involved: The search for Christian origins. The question is what history is relevant to the creation of the NT Jesus storyboard. What historical figures, what reminiscences of past history, were deemed to be of relevance to a 'salvation' prophetic interpretation of historical realities.

EarlDoherty

A couple of problems here. There are just too many indicators elsewhere in Paul and the rest of the epistles that no human Jesus had lived on earth, done things which set precedents, taught and prophesied, etc., too many exclusions of any HJ in the presentation by those writers of the origin and development of their movement. Galatians 4:4 simply cannot stand in the balance scale against them, and since reading Ehrman several years ago, I think the 'born' phrases in 4:4 can be reasonably dismissed as a probable interpolation in the face of later docetism.

Second, if Paul and the early movement writers really thought their Jesus had lived on earth (even if in an unknown past, a la Wells), we would expect all sorts of speculation as to when he had lived, where, what he had done, etc., even if they had been forceed to go to scripture to fuel those speculations. After all, scripture, as Paul tells it, had given him the info about Jesus’ death, its purpose, his resurrection. Why wouldn’t he have used it equally to tell about Jesus’ unknown life on earth? He could hardly preach a man who had been on earth in the past without addressing possibilities and theories about that life, especially in the face of inevitable queries and demands on the subject. The Gospels show that this is precisely what the evangelists did, as virtually everything in their tales has been derived from scripture. Paul would at the very least have been led to offer scripture as containing pointers to the details of that life, not just to the mere fact of a death and rising.

This is one of the basic failings of Wells' theory. And he misses the point about the traditions found in Q which ended up in the Gospels. True, there is very much an historical basis to them, but this does not have to involve a specific originating figure we could label an historical Jesus, but was simply the product of a sectarian movement, later come to be focused on an imagined founder. There is a very good case to be made (and I’ve made it in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (or via: amazon.co.uk)), that the founder figure which surfaces in later Q and was imported into the Gospels to be amalgamated with Paul’s spiritual Christ, was a later addition during the course of the Q community’s development. Where scholarship tends to find a “genuine Jesus”, namely in the earliest ‘wisdom’ layer of sayings, is precisely where he is missing, and those sayings can be easily identified as having an ultimately Cynic source (something many scholars now admit).

You say that if Jesus were not human, he would not be a suitable sacrifice for humans, but this is actually quite contrary to the evidence. My books have always discussed and stressed the ancient salvation principle of paradigmatic parallelism which we find throughout the record of the times, especially in Jewish sectarianism, and which certain scholars have recognized without, unfortunately, laying it all out in coherent and comprehensive form, no doubt because they have dismissed any idea that it figured in early Christianity since it supposedly wasn’t needed if Jesus was historical. But it’s there quite distinctly, including in Paul, if one can remove those Gospel-colored glasses. Groups and nations on earth had a heavenly counterpart, a paradigm, a champion, with shared characteristics existing and operating between the two. (A good example can be found in the Similitudes of Enoch, and an early influential prototype in Daniel 7.) This parallelism worked precisely because the spiritual counterpart was in heaven, operated there, and had a relationship with those on earth he represented. This feature in itself, once recognized, is actually evidence that the heavenly champion had not been on earth, because that is not how the system functioned. It was a relationship between heavenly and earthly, not human to human. Both Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews present their soteriology in such a way that the presence of a Jesus on earth, in a physical body, would have thrown a monkeywrench into those presentations. Scholarship analyzing documents and passages such as these are often guilty of the most egregious twisting of the texts (or simply ignoring such features altogether) to avoid having to deal with the anomalies created by forcing an earthly Jesus into the picture. Both my books, but especially the latest one, offer in-depth analysis of such passages to illustrate this problem.

Ignatius’ letters (even if written in his name after his death) shows that the idea that earthly suffering by humans could only be given meaning and salvation by a corresponding earthly suffering on the part of the redeeming god was something he used to justify regarding Christ as having been on earth, born of Mary and crucified by Pilate, in the face of those who denied or failed to preach such things, arguments relating not to docetism but to the historicity of those events. Such argumentation on Ignatius’ part shows that the idea of the god’s earthly suffering was not something that had been around for almost a century since an historical Jesus had given rise to the faith. Rather, it was now being put forward to support a concept that was new (under the influence of recent and misinterpreted Gospels) and struggling to be accepted as history.

The problem is, there’s no sign of it in Paul, either. The epistles entirely lack the idea of Jesus’ coming at the Parousia as a “return.” God's promises and the anticipation of the Parousia are nowhere previously fulfilled in any earthly incarnation. Outside of 1 Cor. 11:23 (which enjoys other interpretation, particularly as Paul is saying right there that he got this info about the Lord’s Supper from Christ himself, meaning by revelation), there is virtually nothing that can be identified as “history remembered.” Not even the language employed by the epistle writers bears it out, as everything is a case of God revealing Jesus, not Jesus living an earthly life; and use of words like "flesh" and "body" fit into the mystical and mythological context which those writers are presenting through such language. This, too, is thoroughly discussed in my book. Incidentally, my chapter on Galatians 4:4 finds much more revealing about this passage of 'God sending his Son' than simply the question of whether it is interpolated or not. And mythicism can work in either case.

I would urge anyone to get a copy of Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (or via: amazon.co.uk). Then we could have a truly informed discussion of these issues.

Earl Doherty

Doug Shaver

I just ordered mine, and it should be arriving in the mail any day now. But then, I've been convinced ever since reading The Jesus Puzzle a decade ago.

I plan to write a critique, as time permits, to put on my Web site. The site doesn't get much traffic, but we can suppose that every little bit helps.

maryhelena

Why? Paul, with his Jesus construct, is focusing on spiritual/theological matters. Why would he want to complicate his position by finger pointing to any human man? Surely, from a Jewish perspective, the move would be away from any appearance of turning any man into a focus of theological speculation, of deification. It’s unthinkable for Paul to be in the business of deifying any human.

Gal. 5:24,25
“Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit”.


Indeed, Paul has his very own interpretation of ‘salvation’ relating things - what things? Interpretations are, in the context of the OT, related to historical events. ‘Salvation’ history - not ‘salvation’ speculation, ie speculations that relate to any flight of pure fantasy. Agreed, scripture gave Paul what he needed for his spiritual Jesus construct.

Well, that’s his choice is it not - to pick and choose from scripture what suits his topic of the moment...

Paul says he is late on the scene. Such an admission concedes a prior situation that did not have his interpretations, his vision, in mind. Was this prior situation simply another interpretation, another vision - and Paul comes along and we end up with a battle of the visions? Hardly. What preceded Paul was something his vision, his interpretations, could not get along without - historical realities. That is the trump card, the ‘hold’, that those who preceded Paul had in their hand. Paul has no need to teach, to instruct, to address, the historical realities. All Paul wants to do is offer his own views, his own ‘salvation’ interpretations of these historical realities.

Some will argue that he did do so: Gal.4:4, Rom.1:3. Interpretations are anyone’s game and, consequently, should not be allowed the upper hand in any discussion that is seeking the historical origins of Christianity. The search is not for the ‘correct’, the ‘true’, interpretation - the search is for the historical realities that could have contributed towards the Jesus storyline in the NT - itself a ‘salvation’ history interpretation.

Methinks, Earl, it is one of the basic failings of your theory...

Great! ..... “...the founder figure which surfaces in later Q and was imported into the Gospels to be amalgamated with Paul’s spiritual Christ, was a later addition...”. But, surely, we are not about to argue about dating and layers of Q! . Seems to me you have just conceded the point Wells is making - all that remains is an argument over the date of the amalgamation. Or as Wells would put it - the “fusion” of the two Jesus figures, Paul’s spiritual Jesus construct, and his Galilean Jesus preacher.

Wells, of course, has no historical evidence for his Galilean preacher - a preacher who, according to Wells, was not crucified. The point, however, is that Wells has conceded that a human figure, that historical realities, were fundamental to the gospel storylines. In other words; historical realities have meaning, relevance, for the gospel storyline.

What were those historical events, and what historical figures, were deemed to be relevant is what historical research into early Christianity should be focusing on - instead of an endless historical search for the gospel figure of Jesus of Nazareth. A figure that has been created from the amalgamation process; a figure that has been “fused” from historical elements with spiritual/theological interpretations. To unravel the ‘fusion’ is not to find the assumed gospel carpenter from Nazareth - it is to find the historical elements that were used to create that figure.

Here is a suggestion regarding a historical figure that could have influenced prophetic interpretations re a messiah figure: Agrippa I, the last King of Judea.

Agrippa I

For the first time since the death of Antigonus in 37 bc, Judea was ruled by a King who carried Hasmonean blood - 41 – 44 ce. A historical event that could well have sent the more prophetically minded in a tail spin; restoration of a dynasty that was cut down earlier by Rome. Whatever the historical intrigue involved, the historical reality had the potential to light the imagination of prophecy addicts.

The issue is not what did Agrippa do re any early pre Christian movement - the issue is that he was the man of the moment, in the right place at the right time. That’s all - prophecy, prophetic interpretations of historical realities can do the rest.

Here is a historical figure that could have influenced Paul's crucified Jesus construct:

Antigonus II Mattathias

Paul’s problem, if you like, was that he could not go it alone - he could not just offer speculation. He had to, in a Jewish context, be seen to be offering an interpretation, a ‘salvation’ interpretation of history. Jewish prophetic interests resolved around Jewish history. Explaining that such and such a prophecy has a fulfilment in some spiritual realm was going to be a very hard sell. Without an anchor in history, prophecy is meaningless, it becomes pure speculation. Paul’s job, if you like, was to acknowledge specific historical events as relevant but at the same time to keep his focus on his spiritual/theological creation. History, for Paul, needed to be put on the back burner not placed in an open window. It is interpretation of history that is relevant; ‘salvation’ history not mundane historical realities. (other issues are relevant of course, bloodlines and all of what that could produce...). Historical realities are the ‘anchor’ - an anchor that can be pulled up to allow some free floating - but when the need arises in some storm or controversy, that anchor can be laid down once again.

Yes, Paul, probably, took things in a new direction – but to imagine that Christian history has its historical core with Paul’s vision is to cut out any historical reality that might be at the core of Christian history. It would make the gospel storyline superfluous, meaningless. Something, I’m afraid, that mythicism might be in danger of doing. Methinks that Wells has seen this danger and realized that spirituality concerns, if they are to have any relevance for living on earth, need to have a grounding in historical reality. Hence his idea re a historical non-crucified Cynic type preacher figure alongside Paul’s spiritual Jesus construct. In other words; history and its ‘salvation’ interpretation ‘fused’ together in the new creation of the gospel Jesus of Nazareth.

And what would such a Hasmonean background contribute towards an understanding of early Christian history? Big question....and lets not forget to add the writing of that other Hasmonean to this potent mix - the prophetic historian, Josephus....

Doug Shaver

How do you discover the historical realities without interpreting the documents that allegedly report the realities?

maryhelena

You take out a history book......the NT documents reflect 'salvation' interpretations of historical realities. First comes the history book...

spin

If you don't like Gal 4:4, there are plenty of other indicators that Paul saw Jesus as really having done his deed on earth. Take for instance the rhetorical "was Paul crucified for you?" (1 Cor 1:13), leading to "we proclaim christ crucified". Paul measures christ's sacrifice on the human plane. Then I suppose that Romans 1:3 was interpolated, for, if not, we are told that Jesus descended from David according to the flesh. Jesus is put on a par with Adam, as sin came through one man (ανθρωπος), this was compensated for by "the gift of grace of one man (ανθρωπος), Jesus Christ" (Rom 5:12, 15b). What does it mean for death to have "dominion" over someone (Rom 6:9)? Why talk about raising christ in the same breath as raising believers if there was some qualitative difference? Since death came through a man (ανθρωπος), by a man (ανθρωπος) came resurrection from the dead (1 Cor 15:21). What Adam is typologically, so is Jesus.

Paul's Jesus is frequently painted as a man. He could die the death that has dominion over a man. He could be crucified in the same way as Paul could.

The speculation plainly came. The gospels are full of it and show developing speculation.

However, at what stage would you want this speculation, at the time of the realization that salvation had come? When would there have been time for such speculation? One has to make sense of what they had discovered. The last supper material in 1 Cor 11 is demonstrably post-Lucan, for one can see how Luke develops on Mark and 1 Cor 11 decontextualizes Luke: one can't hold out hope for serious Jesus tradition in Paul. He can only offer one thing, belief in salvation through the death of his savior and that in contrast with torah observance. That is his persistent message in Galatians.

(Talking about the gospels with regard to the start of christianity would appear to be anachronistic. The gospels build on the salvific act that Paul preached.

Add also that the Similitudes/Parables is a late addition to the Enichic pentateuch. Milik argued that in its place was the Book of Giants among the Dead Sea Scrolls. We first see the Similitudes in the Ethiopic version.)


spin