J-D

Was I? What makes you think so?

And how about you? Were you born into a Western society? And if you were, what makes you think that your views are less influenced by Christian hegemony than mine?What relevant information am I missing? And what is supposed to the logical connection between the first part of your sentence and the second.I have not used the word 'continuity' to define a basic claim.Wot?Christianity.How do you know what concept of messiah they had? And what makes you think they heard that Paul 'supports messianism'? What do you suppose they had actually heard about Paul?Why not? Is it impossible to know anything substantial about a subject without consulting primary sources? And what primary sources have you consulted on this subject?Is it impossible for there to be a parallel with the history of the Baha'i Faith? The original Babis were not Baha'is. They believed the Bab's prophecies of 'He whom God shall make manifest', but they did not originally identify Baha'ullah as the Promised One. Later, most Babis did accept that Baha'ullah was the Promised One to whom the Bab had alluded, and thus became Baha'is.

I don't know what you mean by saying that both the followers of John the Baptist and Paul 'claimed to be messianists'. Which statements are you alluding to?How do you know what praxis the Judean assemblies followed? And how can you tell what ideas about the Messiah they might have combined that praxis with?The mapping is there in the words of Galatians 1:23. I don't see what other grammatical parsing is possible.I don't understand what you mean by 'functional criteria'. Can you give some examples to illustrate the concept?It is possible for people to suppose, and hence to say, that two things are the same and yet for them to be mistaken in what they suppose and say and for the two things to be different. But just because it is possible is not by itself any reason to suppose that it is so in a given case.That depends on what they'd heard. They must have heard something, though. What do you suppose it was?Not without some reason to think that we know what the faith of those assemblies was.

If Paul's faith was not the faith of the Judean assemblies, what made them think it was?

spin

Your location.

Yup, western society. They have strongly been influenced by christian hegemony. But the task I see is to confront it.

Information such as that in Gal 1:11f.

It's obvious if you follow our dialogue back.

You haven't shown its relevance in any way.

Jews who adhered to Jewish praxis makes it clear that it is not the idiosyncratic "messiah" of Paul.

Messianism is belief based on a messiah or christ. That's what Paul talked about, the christ. They needn't have heard much else to say that he now holds the faith he once persecuted.

You can only believe what the secondary or tertiary source tells you.

Paul, messianic texts in the DSS and the Psalms of Solomon and others.

Dunno. I know nothing substantial about the material. Sounds vaguely analogous.

The gospels' JtB talks of the one who comes after him, an allusion to the messiah. Paul talks of his messiah frequently.

Jewish praxis is alluded to in the Hebrew bible and in the antagonist material in Gal.

That's irrelevant. Paul was subtracting praxis.

I've told you what I know about those people mentioned in Gal 1:23 and you've added no substantiated extra information. So, you seem to have nothing to support your assumed understanding of the text.

In this case it is your methodology in confronting the source information. You have to interpret the information somehow and I'm asking for the coherent "how you interpret it".

You're missing the point. You can come at it from one direction and I can from another. If you wish to propose the ascendancy of your approach you have to deal with the alternative, not simply define it as an alternative. In fact your alternative has more assumptions. It assumes that Paul is falsifying things when he says that his gospel didn't come from humans. I don't assume that the people of the Judean assemblies were lying or false. What they said in my eyes was correct for what I think they knew. Then I need no more than Paul for the start of the process which led to christianity. You want to put the cart before the horse and inject the gist of the gospels back before Paul.

From Paul's antagonism with various people including Cephas, we learn a bit about the Judean adherence to Jewish praxis and that gives us some insight into the religious position they held, a Jewish one as against a non-Jewish one advocated by Paul with his sidelining of Jewish praxis and a non-messianic messiah.

If Paul was persecuting messianic Jews and those people heard that he now supported the messiah, what more do you need? We know from what Paul says that if they knew what he believed they probably wouldn't have said what they had.


spin

Solitary Man

I find it funny that Korean scholars are among the most supportive of the historical Jesus. They must be western too.

J-D

spin, I think I begin to get some inklings of what your position is, so I'm going to set aside some of the subsidiary points for the moment in the hope that a tighter focus may clarify things.

What you appear to me to be suggesting is the following: please correct me if I have misunderstood.

There were Jews in Judea who believed in a messiah. Paul persecuted them. Later, Paul stopped persecuting these messianic Jews and started preaching about a messiah himself. The Judean messianic Jews heard that Paul had stopped his persecuting activities and was now preaching a messiah. Hearing no more details, they assumed that Paul was now preaching the same faith that they held themselves, although this was not in fact the case. Later, the divergence of Paul's messianic concept became apparent and conflict arose.

Is that what you're suggesting? I'll leave everything else until I know whether I've understood you correctly on this point.

spin

Basically, yes.

In this scenario, Paul would also not have been aware of any substantial differences until much later, perhaps even after his disagreement with the so-called pillars became evident. In fact it might have been that he considered the Jerusalem group to be an aberration. What made a person a credent Jew in the ancient world was their adherence to the praxis that Paul had rejected. Differences of theology were aberrations within Judaism, which might not even have been gone into in too much detail when Paul went to Jerusalem.


spin

Solitary Man

I absolutely love it when people harp on "no evidence" and then proceed to produce their own theory devoid of any hard evidence as well.

J-D

If I have correctly understood your suggestion, then I can explain the problem I have with it.

Your suggestion depends on there being a distinction in the first century between a minority of Jews who had faith in a messiah and a majority who didn't.

With that assumption, your story hangs together. Paul persecuted the minority of Jews with a messianic faith; then he changed sides and started preaching a messianic faith himself; the 'Judean assemblies' referred to in Galatians are the messianic minority; when they heard that Paul was preaching a messianic faith they assumed that he had come over to their side and they (and perhaps he) were not aware of the divergence between his messianic faith and theirs until later.

However, if belief in a messiah was part of the general faith of Jews in the first century, your story doesn't hang together in the same way. On that assumption, persecution of Jews with a messianic faith could only mean persecution of Jews in general, preaching of a messianic faith could only be perceived as preaching of a general Jewish faith, not the faith of particular 'Judean assemblies', and the distinctiveness of the 'Judean assemblies' would have to consist in something more than messianic faith.

So I arrive at this question: what independent reason is there to suppose that there was a distinction in the first century between a minority of Jews who believed in a messiah and a majority who didn't?

spin

Why would you think that messianism was even a majority position? Are there any hints from either Philo or Josephus? Perhaps we can't trust Josephus when he indicates that the war was the responsibility of a minority, a war that was perhaps over twenty years after the time of the writing of Galatians. Are there any indications that the Sadducees or the Pharisees accepted the notion of a messiah? (Wasn't the first person in the Pharisaic tradition to support messianic claims r. Akiba during the Bar-Kochba Revolt?)

If you have any reason to suspect that messianism was a part of mainstream Judaism at the time Paul wrote Galatians, I'd like to hear it.


spin

Ben C Smith

How, in your view, did this misunderstanding survive the agreeable meeting described in Galatians 2.1-10?

Ben.

gurugeorge

Spin,

this summation of your position by J-D looks reasonable, but for one thing - and I think it hearkens back your dispute with Amaleq13 a few months ago re. what exactly the dispute was with the Jerusalem crowd.

To make your story consistent, it looks like you have to take the Corinthians 1:15 passage as dubious. However, if you take it more seriously, as I think Amaleq13 and I (FWIW lol) do, then all that has to happen is that your scenario has to be amended slightly as follows:

The messianists that he's talking about were a deviant minority within a deviant minority - they were messianists who had inverted and revalued the values of the normal messiah concept (not military victory but spiritual, not a king but insignificant, not to come in the future but has been in the past, etc., etc.), and perhaps were even Samaritans (hence the "Joshua cult" aspect). His (post-Joshua-Messiah -grokking) difference with them was simply with regard to how universal the message is.

I think the pivotal thing here is, how seriously ought one to take the idea that he persecuted anybody? Is it more likely that that is an interpolation in the letters than that Corinthians 1:15 is an interpolation? Perhaps the idea of persecution - subsequent "Damascus experience" is a bit too pat to be true? We can keep the idea that his revelation was a personal religious one, because that's well supported elsewhere in the letters; but do we need to keep the overly-neat story of persecution/conversion?

So: no persecution, just an idea that he'd vaguely heard of (an inverted/ revalued messiah) that at some point he gets a personal revelation about, but with his own twist, then at some point he remembers to go and see the guys who had the original idea, but it's not terribly important to him whether or not they "sanction" his version. (The Marcion version of Galatians would support this.)

Somewhere above, you say that Paul's messiah idea bore little relation to the traditional Messiah idea. But that's not true: it bears an almost exact inverse relation to the traditional idea that's too precise to be accidental. I think this is absolutely crucial to note: not military, spiritual; not king, insignificant; not future, past. This smacks of an intellectual/religious construct that riffs off the traditional idea, that has an agenda behind it (possibly a Samaritan agenda, in view of the "Joshua" aspect). But if we take Corinthians 1:15 seriously, this basic inversion in itself wasn't Paul's original idea, it was an idea that already existed, and existed in the religious community Paul feels himself (although only as a latecomer) to be in the lineage of.