spin

We can be blase' over the fraud charge because we've had a lot of training to accept the prevalence of fraud.

And you'll note I didn't say you asserted it. I commented on the position and if you felt it necessary try to argue the position.

You need to verify it in the specific case, not just make aspersions. So if you want to argue the case, by all means. However, in my view it is still bothunverifiable and unfalsifiable.

OK, so let's drop the fraud stuff as it isn't relevant to either of us.

No, I'm just reading Galatians 1:13-24 and 2:7-9, especially 1:13, 1:17, and 1:23. The clearest single verse is 1:23, in which Paul says that the faith he preaches is one which he formerly persecuted, which is only possible if the religion existed before he adopted it.[/QUOTE]
As I predicted it would be retrojection. What do you suppose Paul was attacking exactly? What were these assemblies in Judea that were in the messiah? Paul of course was apparently one of those arch conservatives whose zealousness for what he once considered the right way caused him to persecute those who weren't doing it the right way. Messianism would obviously been a wrong way, so he attacked messianists somehow. Paul acknowledged that there were apostles before him, but he doesn't tell us what their beliefs were. You notice Paul doesn't ever use the name Jesus with regard to the messianists, only about his position and that of those with him. Your original claim was "it is not the case that he [Paul] originated Christianity, since he refers to its predating him" and as I said, it "needs to be argued". And it still does.


spin

Solo

No, I am after something else. What I was asking was if the brain that copes with the world was any different then than in our world.

Are there not human responses to things like praise, insult, care, neglect, abuse, indifference, very much the same across cultures, throughout history ? Wasn't headache a headache then as it is now ? How about Weltschmerz ? Why is it that native cultures across the European continent in the nineteenth century read "Christ years" (KristusJahre) as male midlife crisis ? Why is it that the Celts thousand years ago developed the same perception of St.Paul as neurophysiologists did in the 19th and 20th century, namely relating his visions to temporal lobe seizures ? (Epilepsy has been called "St.Paul's Disease" in Ireland since time immemorial).

And it is sort of obvious that even if the world 1 AD was very, very different from ours and to talk about it intelligently we have to know how different it was, there is still something that ties us to it, that makes us "translate" beyond words and phrases.

Yesterday, before going to school my twelve-year old wanted to know whether my Complete Works of Shakespeare also had Romeo & Juliet. Yes, of course, why do you want to know about R&J, I asked. "It's a dumb plot, completely random", he said matter-of-factly. It turned out he watched the movie at his mom's house because his fourteen-year old sister put it in the DVD player. She liked it, he said, because she is a girl. I told him, no that's not the reason. It's a tragedy about teenagers overwhelmed by hormones. When you get yours, you will understand the plot.
Now, spin, I am sure you can dig, that no matter how much a person knows about Elizabethan England and its cultural ties to Renaissance Italy, a scholar who does not remember his first three years with hard-ons and the girls who caused them, would not have a clue what Romeo & Juliet were doing. He would be bested by the goths and emos who at fifteen cannot spell and will break into sweat when you give them the 15 cents in change on a $16.15 purchase and they have already punched $20.00 into the cash register.

It works the other way too: certain feminists since Annie Besant read "The Taming of the Shrew" as a celebration of patriarchal rule over women. (Besant made her one-time lover, G.B.Shaw, write a pseudonymus pamphlet urging a boycott of the play). But that's just taking one's dick-control a bit too far. Kate's final submission speech looks like a show mocking male vanity. It's a female dominance ploy described among S&M afficionados as "playing the pushy bottom" and Shakespeare points to it to poke fun at the effects of the new house mores imported into the rough-and-tumble English burger house by the new courtier regime. Since its first print in England in 1561, Castigliano's Book of the Courtier was the trend-setting manual of ettiquette, in which the bourgeous domestic idyll came to be anchored for centuries to come. Shakespeare transparently spoofs in Katharina the neo-platonic "appreciation" of women and the phony high-brow "education" of them as courtezans (Given away in the tutoring of Bianca by Lucentio).

So, to decode many historical artifacts, one needs to know the historical landscape in which they occur. No doubt. But one cannot reduce history to inventories of people and events on a timeline. Imagination and the awareness of the vantage point of one's self (and one's time) to whatever one is surveying, is a big part of it.

All reading of history is someone's reading of history.

Jiri

J-D

I don't understand the relevance of this statement. If you are suggesting that modern people are more accustomed to the existence of fraud than ancient people were, I see no reason to think this is true. And if you are suggesting that allegations of fraud would have made people more uncomfortable in ancient times than they do in modern times, not only do I see no reason to think that this is true, I also think that discomfort over allegations of fraud does not affect how likely they are to be true.If you want to take that view, I think you need to argue your case.I don't know what Paul was attacking. I don't even know whether Paul was attacking anything. What I do know is what the text of Galatians 1:23 says that Paul was attacking, namely, the same faith that he had subsequently come around to preaching. According to Galatians 1:23, there was a faith which Paul was at that time preaching but which at an earlier time he had persecuted. Hence that faith, whatever it was, had existed before Paul preached it. Hence the faith that Paul preached, whatever it was, was a faith, according to the text of Galatians 1:23, which had originated before Paul started preaching it.

spin

I'll just let you crap on about suggesting fraud while not actually making the accusation. All right?

Further burden shifting.

Messianism.


spin

spin

Something not related to what I was talking about.

I think, whether you like it or not, you've dealt with your own problem. But to understand, think of a pc for a moment. Computers are basically just bigger stronger and faster, but software can now do a hell of a lot more than it could. The computer's parts are still basically the same: calculator, calculation space, storage, and communications interface. The software has evolved. The brain needs software and that's had 2000 years of evolution since the time of Paul.

And not just project our world onto it and neaten up the result.

The thing with Shakespeare is that the stories were never his. They were stories that his audience usually knew. It's what he did with them that made his work his. He took an old story and re-presented it to his own era.

We usually take his work and re-present it for ours, rarely caring about where he got his stories from. How can one appreciate what Shakespeare was doing when we have no way of contextualizing his efforts? We just give it a naive reading based on what we know of our time. What doesn't fit gets ignored. That doesn't help us understand Shakespeare.

That vantage point is often the blinkers that prevent one from seeing what one is trying to look at. It is a hurdle. The job is to find ways of overcoming that vantage point if you ever hope to see what you are trying to see. (You may never know the full significance or context of the past, but you can remove some layers of mystification.)

Is this to be a mantra for you?


spin

J-D

My point is that Galatians 1:23 says that the faith Paul was then preaching was the same faith that he had previously persecuted. What label you attach to it is beside the point. If your response 'Messianism' is supposed to mean that the faith which Paul persecuted was not 'Christianity' but something different, then it follows, if we accept Galatians 1:23 as accurate, that the faith Paul himself preached was also this same 'Messianism' and not 'Christianity', and hence that Paul could not have been the originator of Christianity. If we accept Galatians 1:23 as accurate, there are two possibilities: the faith Paul is talking about is Christianity, in which case Paul preached Christianity but did not originate it, or the faith Paul is talking about is not Christianity, in which case Paul did not preach Christianity and hence could not have originated it. The only way you can maintain both that Paul persecuted a 'Messianism' which was not Christianity but later himself originated and preached 'Christianity' is to reject as inaccurate the statement in Galatians 1:23 that the faith which Paul preached was the same one he had previously persecuted.

spin

Do you think your point's any different from the way Paul has been read for a l-o-n-g time? Why not try to deal with what he actually says rather than toe the traditional line?

Well, he was, except for the part where he rejected Jewish praxis and apparently didn't understand what a messiah really was.

The people speaking of Paul didn't know him. All they knew was that he had caused problems for other messianists. If Paul now proclaimed himself a messianist, would they have known what he was on about? No.

What do you intend by "accurate" here, that they meant what you want them to have meant?

How 'bout the faith they were talking about was not christianity and Paul did not preach christianity...

One person's messiah may be another's pariah.


spin

Sheshbazzar

I see a couple of problems with your line of reasoning here, you are only allowing for one of "two possibilities" as being correct, but the subject indicates that there must be more "possibilities" than only those "two" which you have here provided.
You interpret Galatians 1:23 to mean that Paul's preaching was the same faith as was held by those Disciples who were previous to him, to which he simply converted.
Yet Paul's writings reveal that these previous Disciples had remained faithful to the requirements of The Law, in requiring that Gentile converts be must Circumcised, and be taught to abstain from unclean foods, and the many other requirements of The Law.
But we find Paul disputing and opposing those beliefs which were held by The Pillars and the Disciples who had preceded him in the Faith.
Call these former believers "Christians" or "Messianists" it makes no difference for this consideration. ("Christ" and "Messiah" supposedly being equivalent, then "Christianity" and "Messianisim" would also be equivalent, so this tangent is a non-productive dead-end)
Paul's doctrine and preaching was distinctively different from that which had prevailed amongst the believers previous to his coming on the scene with his own, new and innovative version of the Gospel.
The accommodation and alleged agreement that was arrived at, was that Paul could go preach his own form of Gospel to the Gentiles, but it is also made quite clear that the original "Pillars" and "Disciples" who had been present with, and personally taught by their Messiah, would continue in the practice of their own religion, in their own way, Paul's antinomian teachings and preachings not withstanding.

Thus Paul does most definately introduce a distinctly different form of "Christianity" (or "Messianisim") than what was believed or practiced prior to his coming upon the scene. His "conversion" then being somewhat of a sham in that he rejects many of the basic tenets and teachings held by the leading Apostles of that faith that he is claimed to have "converted" to.

J-D

I don't know, but since it makes it neither more nor less likely to be true, I don't see that it matters.That's exactly what I am doing. I am looking at the words in Galatians 1:23. I have no idea what the traditional line on that is, or whether there is one.I'm not talking about what other people said about Paul. I'm talking about what the text says. I was assuming that you were assuming that the text of Galatians is Paul's words. If you are not assuming that, I apologise for my error. Please let me know.Galatians 1:23 doesn't refer to 'messianism' (or to 'Christianity', either). It refers to 'the faith he once tried to destroy'.What I mean by 'accurate' is 'conforming to fact'. In order to agree on whether it's accurate, it's necessary first to agree on what it means. It seems to me to mean that the faith Paul was preaching was the same faith he had once persecuted. If that's not what you think it means, what do you think it means?Yes, how 'bout that? That's exactly one of the possibilities I mentioned, and if it's accepted, it follows from Paul's not preaching Christianity that he did not originate Christianity.Undoubtedly, but I don't see the relevance of the remark.

J-D

Martin Luther introduced a distinctly different form of Christianity from that practised before he came on the scene. Luther was the originator of that particular form of Christianity. But Christianity predated Luther. Luther himself would have identified the religion he preached with the Christian religion which predated him, and would not have identified himself as the originator of a new religion. Most people, including Lutheran Christians, non-Lutheran Christians, and non-Christians would agree with Luther that the word 'Christianity' is correctly used to refer to both Lutheran Christianity and pre-Lutheran Christianity as one religion, despite the indisputable differences in form.

In exactly the same way, even if Paul introduced a distinctly different form of faith, it doesn't follow that that faith was (in the eyes of Paul, of other contemporary adherents of that faith in any form, or of contemporaries not adhering to any form of that faith) a different faith from one predating Paul. And Galatians 1:23 is an explicit assertion that the faith Paul preached and the faith that predated him were one faith.