Originally Posted by jgibson000

You did? Why? What specifically has led you to think what you think about Gal. 4:9-10? Can you produce any scholars who say what you claim they say, let alone show that what you claim to be the "accepted" position is the "accepted" position among critical students of Galatians?



Have you actually read the letter or done any work in the commentaries or the periodical literature on Gal. 4:9-10 or the standard NT introductions on the occasion of Galatians?

Is the internet your primary resource for your claims about NT background?

JG

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Actually it is from Dr Anne Ross, I cannot find anything more up to date than this.

Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

"Gakusei" is a Japanese word meaning "student". "Gak" doesn't sound so friendly! Call me "Don".

Originally Posted by jgibson000

I'm blown down not only by your assininity in giving me URLs when I asked you not to, but to know how it is that anything within these URLs (one of which doesn't work) stands as an answer to any of the questions I asked you or as proof of the things you must demonstrate for your claims about how "alchemy" is the background of, and informs, the "themes" you find in the NT.

I think it's time to say "put up or shut up".

JG

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

And when you do that, the silences are deafening. In other words, in the end it hardly matters where "the pagans" thought their gods did stuff; the issue is where Paul and the other early epistle writers who had visions of Jesus thought Jesus did stuff. And it certainly was not on earth, or they would have made that plain -- which they never do.

Originally Posted by Amaleq13

If "where" was irrelevant to their beliefs, why would we expect them to make any reference to location let alone make it plain?

Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Whoever wrote Paul's letters was a polytheist....

Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

The key aspect of my particular ‘rendition’ of the mythicist case which most people seem to seize on is the location of Christ’s crucifixion: not on earth itself but in some heavenly, spiritual realm at the hands of evil spirits. I’m not entirely sure that I should claim this as original (among mythicists) to myself, at least as a general idea, but it is dependent on a lot of other ideas whose observation is certainly not original to me: that of descending and ascending gods through layers of the heavens, Platonic-style (such things existed outside Platonism as well) correspondences between the spiritual and material, between the corruptible and incorruptible, and so on. These latter ideas were part of the intellectual baggage of the time, and I don’t think there are any here who would make a blanket denial of them (such as Bernard Muller seems to have done), so I’m not going to bother defending them, although certain details about them may well be pertinent and could come up for discussion.

….

“Of flesh other than human,” including “transcendent entities” who “take on” this “other kind of flesh” when they enter the fleshly realm of humans—which, if we are to concur with Don’s insistence that the sublunary sphere is an unbroken entity (more on which later), has to extend all the way up to the moon, giving Christ plenty of space to engage in his sacrifice, in his ‘other kind of flesh,’ at the hands of the demons without setting foot on the ground.
….

Thus, in one way or another, sarx refers to what everyone wants it to refer to, namely the realm of humanity, the world of flesh, things pertaining to the flesh, the material and corruptible; things belonging to, or taken on, in that ‘geographical’ location, the region below the moon. In Platonic terms, it refers to the sphere or conditions within that limit. This is why I appeal to Barrett’s translation, because this is how he translates kata sarka in Rom. 1:3: “in the sphere of the flesh.” It matters not what he himself may envision as included in that realm, or how he himself would locate Christ’s activities within it. The translation is a valid one, and it is valid for me to step beyond Barrett’s understanding and ask: yes, but what does that sphere encompass and what can go on in it? For Platonism and the philosophers, extending all the way to Julian, the essence of the sublunary realm was its corruptibility, its capacity for change, suffering, death, regeneration, etc. For a god to undergo that, he had to enter the sublunary realm. That’s all we can say.
…
Except in regard to the Ascension of Isaiah, I did not in The Jesus Puzzle focus specifically on the idea of the area below the moon, but rather on general distinctions between the material and spiritual, higher and lower worlds, corruptible and incorruptible, and so on, and on the counterpart activity and relationships between what went on in the layers of that dual universe. I frankly don’t know if Paul thought in specific terms of above and below the moon. It looks like the author of the Ascension did, although he doesn’t use the word in relation to his reference to the firmament. But all this fixation on whether the sublunary area was officially defined as a unity or some kind of multiplicity is a red herring. The question is, how was it regarded—or ‘used’—in practice? [Recalling Vork's insistence that enumerating beliefs is not pertinent, that we should simply look at behavior and see how people acted, if we want to know their beliefs]. And the best indicator we have from any document is the Ascension. I quote two passages from it:

And we went up into the firmament, I and he, and there I saw Sammael and his hosts; and there was a great struggle in it, and the words of Satan, and they were envying one another. And as above, so also on earth, for the likeness of what (is) in the firmament is here on earth. [7:9-10; translation by M. Knibb in The OT Pseudepigrapha, vol.2]]

and

And I saw when he sent out the twelve disciples and ascended. And I saw him, and he was in the firmament, but was not transformed into their form. [11:22-23, the first verse of which is part of the interpolation, as discussed in previous threads]

From being on earth, Christ “ascended” and only then was “in the firmament,” where he could transform himself (though he chose not to). Earlier, from a position of standing on the surface of the earth, Isaiah and the angel rose “into the firmament.” “Above” in the firmament, where Satan and his angels are engaged in a struggle, occurs something which has a “likeness” to things on earth. If language means anything, the writer is referring to two different locations—in his mind—between which movement can be spoken of, two locations which can be compared, in which respective things go on which bear a relationship to one another. Official doctrines (if there were any) about what the sublunary realm constituted, a unity or multiplicity, are beside the point. What is important is the writer’s own understanding and use of his material to express his faith.

We can compare that to our modern understanding. Incidentally, Knibb gives a definition of “the firmament” on p. 166, note ‘g’: “the vault of the sky (cf. Gen 1:6-8), here thought of as separating the earth from the seven heavens.” But even Knibb is being woolly—and offering multiplicity. What is the definition of the “sky”? Usually we think of it as “the clouds or upper air, the upper atmosphere of the earth” (my dictionary’s definition). But is there a boundary between the air at the level you and I breathe and that cloud layer? Certainly not. But we still think in terms of levels and distinctions. Look at our terms air, sky, firmament. When we are standing on earth we certainly would not say we are standing in the sky, or in the firmament. Yet within the earth’s atmosphere there are no such official or scientific distinctions, no such layers in any real sense. It’s just that in our thinking and usage we give them distinctions, and we assign different characteristics and activities to them. So, clearly, did the author of the Ascension. If he moved from the surface of the earth “into the firmament” then for him there was a distinction, even if it didn’t conform to Ocellus’ Manual. Remember that we’re talking about ideas here, ideas that had no scientific basis (let alone relation to reality), and no central authority to dogmatize. I don’t care what Ocellus says. He wasn’t writing about Christ or the descending Son. The author of the Ascension was.

I don’t know what distance the ancients envisioned between the earth and the moon. I suggest it had plenty of room in it for imagining different areas and locations in which things could take place. Satan and his evil angels were “struggling” not on the surface of the earth, but up there, up in the firmament as the Ascension puts it. If they were struggling on earth, then the writer would be saying that “as on earth, so also on earth.”

…

And while I don’t suggest that there was a direct continuity or contiguity between Paul’s circles and those of the author of the Ascension, they are living in the same philosophical world within a common cosmological framework (even if details or interpretations could vary), and the Ascension of Isaiah’s descending Son killed by the demons of the firmament points directly to the meaning of 1 Corinthians 2:8 and its rulers of this age who crucified the Lord of Glory unwittingly while he was kata sarka.