Toto

"Capable" but obviously somewhat reluctant.

I don't think this is dispositive evidence one way or the other. Paul did not say that the Savior operated in a spiritual realm, but he did not say that the Savior was clearly anchored on earth in recent historical time. He can mention the third heaven, but he hesitates to talk about it.

You are making an argument from silence in a way. Paul is silent about the Savior in a higher realm. But can you show that Paul would have written about this mystery if he believed in a cosmic savior? This might have been a mystery reserved to the initiates.

Rick Sumner

I'm not making any argument, at the moment, just stating what would constitute conclusive proof to me that Paul did not believe in an historical Jesus. Or, for that matter, conclusive proof that there was any mythical Jesus movement. To use andrewcriddle's analogy, I'd be interested in seeing a mythicist equivalent to Ignatius, or Martyr, and I'm curious as to what explanations can be offered as to why there isn't one from a mythicist position.

[Editted to add] And he's only "obviously somewhat reluctant" if you presume that he should be mentioning it. What if we don't have that presumption? Where's the reluctance then? How "obvious" is it?

Regards,
Rick Sumner

JohnHud

the parts of Valentinian thinking preserved by Irenaeus describe a Christ engendered by the Mother which sounds fairly mythic....although Fragment E suggests that it assumed a historic Jesus (although one who could eat and drink without excreting).

Basilides seems to have assumed a historic appearance of Christ, even though his nature was mythic (so he did not suffer etc).

so maybe the categories historic/mythic are not adequate?

The forthcoming research by Joe Atwill definitively proves that the historic Jesus was a Roman invention and that the Gospels are Flavian forgeries....

Amaleq13

That doesn't seem probable to me at all. Paul appears to me to be clearly referring to the gap between their resurrection experiences and his own.

It is certainly the central event of Paul's beliefs but neither is given a specific place in recent time. Instead, they are both connected to Scripture.

It is only the appearances that are explicitly connected to recent time and it is the appearances that are described as conclusively establishing the truth of the death and resurrection.

It appears to be entirely consistent with Paul's gospel. What evidence supports your probability assertion?

I would be more than happy to find learn of it since, as far as I can tell, Paul can be just as easily read either way.

How are you using "early" here? Unless they actually knew Paul, why should their opinions about his beliefs be relied upon to inform us as to the true nature of those beliefs?

Amaleq13

Where is a shepherd boy stumbling on a hidden cache of scrolls when you need him?

Why would they? How is the spiritual location of the sacrifice relevant to Paul's gospel? Paul preached his gospel to obtain faith in the "fact" that, in accordance with Scripture, Christ was sacrificed and resurrected. How would focusing on the location of that sacrifice in a spiritual realm help achieve that goal?

It seems to me that the location of the sacrifice was clearly not considered relevant to Paul whether Jesus was historical or not.

I don't understand why we should expect these kinds of statements to be made by believers in the theology described by MJ theorists.

Rick Sumner

Yeah. Right. Stumbling. "Oh, where is my goat. Look at this! Scrolls that I have no conception of the value of! I'll take those promptly to my local cobbler! Kando, local shoeguy who I have no idea deals in antiquities, do you know what I can do with these scrolls I found while looking for my goat?"

By "stumbling" I can only presume you mean "looting antiquities."

This is a double-edged sword. One could apply the same reasoning to suggest that there's no reason for Paul to mention an historical context.

Chaching.

Which is precisely my point. The silence isn't as valuable to the MJ position as it's often made out to be. There's some odd silence no matter what position you're advocating.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Vorkosigan

Doherty doesn't limit the silence to Paul's epistles, but to a wide range of documents from early Christianity. The argument from "silence" has to be addressed in its proper context. Pauline silence would be a serious problem by itself, but it is truly serious when assessed against other documents.

The underlying assumptions are all wrong. Beliefs do not have to be widespread to be foundational. For example, the Marian apparition at Lourdes was not announced by Bernadette to be Marian in nature for a month after she saw it (only after interrogation by a Catholic priest). As stories come under various forms of social shaping, they mutate. The foundational belief of this modern Catholic miracle was actually ambiguous (see study of Zimdars-Schwartz). Another good example is the historical Jack Dawson, whose tomb was visited by clueless viewers of the movie Titanic. The Jack of the movie has mated with a real but unrelated Jack to produce a kind of tomb veneration! One can think also of numerous hoaxes and urban legends that have grown out of jokes and misunderstandings. Or the Lubavitcher nuts who think Rebbe Schneerson is the messiah even though he and the majority of Lubavitchers deny it. Who remembers today that the Nazi party started as a right-wing socialist party that wanted to disenfranchise big business? Beginnings are small and uncertain, and what comes out at the end is never like what started.

We have information that many Gnostic sects flourished, some quite popular. How many of their own explicit and unambiguous statements of their beliefs exist? All we have are distorted and self-serving statements in the orthodox apologetic literature, and only about certain, not all gnostic groups. By analogy, one need only look at the vast silence in the modern conservative NT scholarly literature (post-WWII) about mythical Christ theories to see how the ancients would have treated the last holders of that heretical and dangerous idea.

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

There seem to be two not easily compatible positions here.

If for example Paul believed in a mythical Jesus and everyone else misunderstood him then explicit statements of such a belief would not be expected.

However if the suggestions earlier in the quote that a large number of early Christian writings probably shared this belief were to be correct then the absense of explicit and unambiguous staetments to this effect does become surprising.

Andrew Criddle

Vorkosigan

Not really. As you pointed out earlier, the sword of ambiguity cuts both ways. Perhaps the audience of those writings understood them in one context, perhaps they understood them another.

It seems to me that Paul's statement in Col 2:15 is pretty clear. What Doherty is asking you to do is discard about 2,000 years of presuppositions about how the text is to be read, particularly presuppositions that involve back-reading the gospel story into the Pauline corpus. If you read Col 2:15 without any gospel preconceptions, then it is a straight and explicity statement of what happened.

Another problem is that all of these documents have been edited and interpolated. Whatever was in there has been hacked on -- for example, the clearly Cosmic Christ hymn in Philippians has had an insertion to historicize it. So again, perhaps these documents were once a lot more explicit. The trend of interpolation appears to run in one direction only.

Vorkosigan

andrewcriddle

Paul is I agree referring to the gap between their experiences and his own. He regrds this gap as a prima facie problem. If their experiences and his were witnessing to an non-recent event it is not clear why the fact that his was a few years later should be an issue. If however the first experiences were witnessing to a recent event in a way that Paul's experience did not then the problematic nature of Paul's experience becomes clearer.

the death and resurrection of Christ are clearly an event in history to Paul in the sense that his understanding of the Law requires that Christ had not died at the time when the Law was given, and his understanding of the death of Christ requires it to be understood in the context of the preexisting authority of the Law.

In Galatians we are told (4:4) that Christ was sent forth 'when the time had fully come' to redeem mankind (In 3:7 we are told that redemption is by the crucifixion of Christ hence 4:4 refers to Christ being sent forth to suffer death.) In the context of Galatians 4:1-7 the 'time' must mean the time appointed by God for mankind to enter into the new relation with God which Christ's death makes possible.

Hence Paul believes that at the time set by God for mankind to enter into a new relation with himself, Christ died and was resurrected in order to make that new relationship possible. I can find no plausible reason why Paul should hold that although when Christ arose from the dead this new relationship was now both possible and appropriate in terms of God's time-scale, nevertheless there was a long period before this relationship was actually instituted by the revelation of the risen Christ to the apostles.

(Would in general evidence that someone is speaking of recent events imply that they are to be regarded as speaking historically and not mythically ?
I ask because some works sometimes regarded as 'mythicist' seem to be talking about (reasonably) recent event quite unambiguously. Hebrews ('in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son' ''he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself') would be a good example)

I'm not sure if we're actually disagreeing here or failing to communicate.

I'm NOT saying we should rely on Paul's early readers as to what Paul really meant. I'm saying that if X is clearly understood by many of his early readers to teach A and not apparently clearly understood by any of his early readers to teach not-A then this does not prove that X did not teach not-A but it does show that X did not explicitly/clearly/unambiguously teach not-A. This seems true almost by definition.

Andrew Criddle