Steven Carr

'And taking bread, giving thanks, saying ,'This is my body that is given for you. Do this in my remembrance. And the cup likewise after supper, saying 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood that is poured out for you'' Why does the RSV have these famous words by Jesus as a footnote?

They are not in Codex Bezae , from the 5th century.

Probably because they were not original to Luke's Gospel. The phrase 'for you' occurs twice in that verse , but nowhere else in Luke-Acts. The word for 'remembrance' occurs nowhere else in Luke-Acts and nowhere else does Luke use the term 'the new covenant'. More importantly, nowhere else does Luke say that Jesus died 'for your sins' or 'for you'.

Luke , in the Gospel or in Acts, had many opportunities to say that Jesus died 'for' anybody or 'for' anything, but he consistently spurns them all. For example, in the famous 'prophecy , Isaiah 53, Luke in Acts 8 ignores 53:5 'wounded for our transgressions', or 53:5, 'bruised for our iniquities' or 53:10, 'an offering for sin'.

As Luke never says that Jesus died 'for our sins', why would he add those words in Luke 22:19-20?


If he did write those words, why would any scribe have dropped them?

No supporter of the originality of these words has ever come up with a good explanation of why Codex Bezae would drop them.

It is clear that the RSV is right and they were not original to Luke's Gospel.

Solo

No, that is not a parsimonious inference. The most parsimonious inference is that Paul knew of the earthly Jesus, had a negative opinion of him, but that opinion was superseded by what he believed was the revelation of the heavenly Christ and his purpose in the lives of Paul's converts.

2 Cr 5:16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we [him] no more.

Jiri

Steven Carr

(Wasn't the resurrected Jesus of the Gospels alleged to still be flesh?)


'know we *no* man after the flesh'.

Paul can't simply be saying that people knew a fleshly Jesus and now know a non-fleshly Jesus, as he now knows *no* man after the flesh.

Solo

Yes, he was but that is not what the argument you started is about. You said : My only certainty about this statement is : you don't know that !


Why not ? It is what the verse says. Why would someone who wishes to be parsimonious want to deny the possibility of the verse's simplest meaning ?

Something happened to Paul that dramatically changed his outlook on Jesus and the Jerusalem church that proclaimed him (as what we do not know) such that made him turn from a prosecutor to a proselytizer seeking the acceptance of the church'es inner sanctum.

What else do you think is impossible ?

Jiri

Doug Shaver

The story to which I was referring, which I assumed was the story that you insisted I already knew, was the one about Paul learning the truth (as defined by Christians) about Jesus from the people who had known him during his time on earth.

Your statement was about the historical Jesus. What other one is there but the man called Jesus of Nazareth? It is not disputed that Paul wrote about some entity whom he named Jesus. The issue is whether that Jesus and Jesus of Nazareth were one and the same.

That seems to assume your conclusion.

He tells us that someone -- a god-like being if not an actual god -- was crucified and resurrected, and he calls him Jesus. He does not say when or where this Jesus was crucified, nor does he give us any other biographical data. He also does not identify the crucifiers except as "the rulers of this age."

At least a generation, more likely two or more, later, the books we call the gospels started circulating, alleging that an itinerant Galilean preacher named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and resurrected sometime while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Christian dogma subsequently claimed that this Jesus of Nazareth was the same Jesus about whom Paul wrote. Is Christian dogma reason enough to believe that they were in fact the same person? And if not, then what other reason is there to believe it?

Doug Shaver

Well, that really is what the entire debate all boils down to, isn't it? We have the Pauline corpus and other Christian writings from the first and early second century, and we have everything else the Christians have ever written about their origins, and we have a smattering of second-century secular references to Christianity, plus a couple of references in Josephus concerning which there is no unanimous judgment about their authenticity. From all this, we are to make an inference about what it is most reasonable to believe about how Christianity got started.

Any hypothesis is going to entail a few assumptions. A reasoned debate will focus on what those assumptions are and how plausible they are. And I think that when day is done, reasonable people can reach different conclusions, at least at this stage of our intellectual history. Perhaps in a hundred or few hundred years, one side or the other will be rightly regarded as not worth anyone's serious attention, but I don't think that is the case right now.

Solo

It is not plausible to someone who sees Paul primarily through the later gospel traditions and the church dogma. I believe it is quite plausible and, in fact very probable, that Paul carefully avoided references to the earthly Jesus. In Paul's schema, Jesus was sent to earth to reconcile man to God through a supreme sacrifice: he agreed to take on a human form and suffer all the humiliations and disappointments of an ordinary human being. And more than that, he agreed (in its pre-existent form) to become a despised man, to be thought of as a blasphemer and a fool and to die on the cross as the accursed one, for Paul to make his (#1) theological point that no-one (except Paul through a glass darkly kinda) knows the mind of God and his purpose in making us the way we are and assigning us our earthly fate. (I take 1 Cor 1:18-31 to be the key to understanding Paul's Christ).

I would go as far as saying that it would have been impossible for Paul to make references to the earthly figure of Jesus without being impious (on Paul's terms) and exaggerating his exploits the way some of the naive idolators of the "other Jesus" no doubt did. Paul could not make Jesus more than an authentic human being of flesh could be - an imperfect sinner in the eyes of God. Only God could absolve Jesus of sin - and he did that by making him unaware (2 Cor 5:21) that his ecstatic passion for God on earth would be seen as insanity and rebellion by other men (1 Cr 2:8). Making Jesus the perfect human in flesh, as the later gospels and the orthodox church did, runs counter to the very theology Paul taught: Jesus was a nobody on earth, just like you and I.

Jiri

Amaleq13

Yes and what is your point? He tells us he persecuted them before changing his mind. That requires that he knew something about their beliefs. We've already established that Paul had good reason to avoid any reference to any potentially greater authority for other apostles so why are you still confused on this point?

Obviously the one to whom that birthplace may have been attributed later. It is a detail that may have originated with the Gospels and, as such, introducing it as early only confuses the issue.

No, the issue is whether Paul's failure to describe the Gospel Jesus in his letters has any significance for the MJ/HJ argument.

Then you haven't been paying close enough attention to my posts. My conclusion is that Paul's silence does not carry any significance for the MJ/HJ argument. :banghead:

Steven Carr

Why does Paul never produce any apologetic to show that Jesus was innocent of whatever he was charged with?

How could he get over the cross being a stumbling-block to Jews if he never deals with the criminal charges that got Jesus killed as a criminal?

Amaleq13

I think the claim that those responsible (ultimately or directly demonic powers) didn't know what they were doing is as close as he gets.