Clivedurdle

http://www.elifeonline.net/elife10-j...ristianity.htm

ApostateAbe

Cool, what do you make of that?

Clivedurdle

That the primary understanding of Jesus Christ is as a god! All this wandering around Jerusalem is Hercules stuff.

bacht

I don't understand your argument here Abe. Here are two possibilities:

- a real Jesus who taught something to followers a few years before Paul was converted

- a mythical/spiritual Jesus who only appeared to certain believers, including Paul, but never in the flesh in public

In the first case, wouldn't we expect Paul to have been interested in the earthly career of the Son of God? Wouldn't he have sought out any information he could find about this person, such as his movements, his sayings, his miracles etc?

If Paul believed there was a real Jesus but had no interest in his life in Palestine, then why should we be interested? What need would there ever have been for the gospels? If Paul's focus was on the risen spiritual Christ, who cares where or when he lived or what he said?

Of course if Paul is repeating words "from the Lord" in heaven, there's no colloboration, whereas public utterances of Jesus would have had witnesses.

Toto

Not if "Jesus" referred to a spiritual disembodied entity which communicated with Paul through revelation.

If Jesus were a fictional character in a well developed novel that Paul had read, we might expect Paul to quote the fictional Jesus.

The theory with the least amount of conflict with the evidence is that later Christians added those "examples" and claims of Jesus coming in the flesh to force Paul's writing to conform to their orthodox beliefs. All of those claims merely restate orthodox doctrine. They do not contain the sort of content that we would expect if Paul knew anything about a historical Jesus or based his religious beliefs on such a person.

David Koresh quoted Jesus (from the Bible.)

Rev Moon claimed that Jesus appeared to him and spoke to him. Moon appears to have studied the Bible, but he believes that Jesus was a failed prophet. He quotes what Jesus said to him in his spiritual visitation, as he also quotes other historial figures who appeared to him.

Any other examples?

ApostateAbe

OK, I get it, thanks. I figure you must take this evidence much more seriously because it is archaeological, not textual, and maybe the texts could have been authored just as late. I accept the standard dates of the texts. Given that framework, there seems to be an evolution in the character of Jesus from human-like to god-like, not the reverse. I think a reversal of that progression is an interesting idea, but maybe it needs stronger evidence. To me, it is about choosing the most probable dates and most probable interpretations, and then fitting the best theory to them. Because of the ambiguity of the evidence, I think too many people are tempted to instead fit the evidence to some favorite theory.

ApostateAbe

Cool, I'll go back to my model of Paul again. If Paul was a scoundrel, and his teachings generally do not match what Jesus actually said, then I don't think Paul would have much of an interest in the correct information concerning Jesus. The people who had the correct information were his rivals.

The alternative hypothesis, that Paul believed Jesus never appeared in the flesh, conflicts with Paul saying that Jesus was born of a woman according to his fleshly nature, among many other things. I think it is best to exhaust all of the other possibilities before choosing a hypothesis that directly conflicts with the evidence many times over. Maybe I am being too hyperbolic, but the theory that Paul never thought of Jesus as a human being seems to be probably the biggest headscratcher in this debate. There is a long a list of quotes from the Pauline writings where Jesus is described as very physical and very human, and it seems to take many unlikely explanations for each passage to make the theory of a merely spiritual Jesus make any sense.

aa5874

But, the Pauline writer did not claim Jesus was disembodied. He claimed that Jesus had SUPPED on the night he was BETRAYED.

So based on the Pauline writings, JESUS was completely IDENTIFIABLE to have been BETRAYED and he had a body that could DEVOUR food.

The Pauline JESUS not presented as disembodied.



The Pauline writers are presenting a NEW Doctrine DIRECTLY from JESUS who was in Heaven. There was no need to quote the Earthly Jesus.

The revelations from JESUS to the Pauline writers would make the teachings of the earthly JESUS obsolete.

Ga 5:2 - When JESUS was on earth he himself was circumcised. The Pauline writers could not quote the obsolete earthly JESUS of the past.

show_no_mercy

This was written by a contemporary of Paul. If you substitute "Jesus" in the blocks where I have xyz, do you think Paul would agree? What about John?

ApostateAbe

I do think both Paul and John would agree, though it seems more in the style and theology of the author of the gospel of John (if that is what you mean by "John").