Amaleq13

I'm calling that a foul tip off the end of the bat so it is still a strike. You may, of course, appeal the the Commissioner.

Why wouldn't the connection between the sacrifice and the traditional meals of Passover and Yom Kippur be sufficient to inspire an assumption of a meal on Paul's part?

The ritual would be "old information" to the community since they have presumably been enacting it ever since Paul first taught it to them.

But aren't the apostles who initially taught the Didache meal the same former companions you assume were present in the vision? Do you see why I contend that considering it a vision makes an assumption of companions problematic? What happened to the guys you think were present since they apparently did not teach this ritual to anyone?

Since they were not teaching the same ritual, then they either were not present or they, gulp, Failed Jesus (insert link to Joe's thread here ).

Amaleq13

Not necessarily implied but rejected on the abovementioned grounds and the passage is assumed genuine for the sake of the argument. Strike three pending a decision by the Commissioner.

TedM

The issue to me is why he would NOT mention them if he were interpolating to add some historicity to Paul's accounts to make them look more like the gospels. Do you think such interpolations were added for some other reason?

The issue is that based on the above argument there wasn't much time to forge the sections alleged to be fogeries. This, reduces the chance that they really were forgeries. Both the content and the implication with regard to timing are strikes against forgery.

IT's a long one. I'll have to check it out some other time. thanks.


For me the presence of companions is implied and the lack of explicit mention is an argument against interpolation with an aim to add "historicity". I haven't studied the issue enough to judge whether it is an interpolation or not though.

In addition, the mention of being delivered up at night is supportive of an interpretation that the term means "arrested" and handed over multiple times, which is more in sinc with the gospel version than God delivering Jesus over to demons either on earth or in some other sphere..

ted

Julian

But then why didn't the interpolator mention Gethesemane? Judas? The swords? Where should he stop? Apparently, he felt that he had provided enough, you think there should have been more. I see no strength in your argument here, just opinion on what you would have done if it had been you who wrote it.
Indeed, I do. I think they were inserted to add legitimacy to the newly emerged gospel traditions. They would work much better if it could be shown that Paul knew about them. Hypothetical scenario: Luke and Acts have just been published so Paul is now a bonafide church hero of 'antiquity,' i.e. there from the beginning, so lets have him affirm what the gospels say. Paul doesn't seem to know anything about the gospels except in the last third of 1 Cor., very suspicious, in my mind.
My point was that if it was added between Paul and Mark, which I don't think it was, the forger would still have years to pull it off, certainly more than enough time no matter how slow his pen.

I would put the addition somewhere in the second century after Luke and potentially link it with the pastorals, but I cannot show any solid evidence for that yet.

Julian

Ben C Smith

I guess I am not understanding how the existence of traditional sacrificial meals in Jewish culture prompted Paul to assume that Jesus celebrated one on the night of his arrest. Jesus was supposed to be the sacrifice, right? But being the sacrifice and celebrating the sacrificial meal (which would normally follow the sacrifice) are two very, very different things. Almost incompatible things.

And if it was not a sacrificial meal after all, then your purported connection vanishes.

I think you missed the parenthetical explanation I gave for why we should treat the wording of our passage as if it were the first transmission. Paul is apparently repeating it as he had originally given it.

I was not making that assumption for the purposes of this thread. That Jesus was speaking to companions at his last supper was going to his communication of his messianic purpose within his lifetime, not to the clean identification of who those companions were.

Again, that may spell doom for my little experiment, but it has nothing to do with the main point of our discussion, namely that Jesus communicated his messianic purpose within his lifetime and was probably killed precisely for that.

Ben.

Post-script: Julian has already weighed in on the side that 1 Corinthians 11.23-25 implies the presence of companions at the supper, and let me add one more to that list: Mark the evangelist.

Mark clearly assumes that the words of institution were spoken to companions at supper. If he got this notion apart from Paul, then we are dealing with an actual tradition, and the whole vision interpretation vanishes anyway. If he got it from Paul, then he had to make some decisions on how to historicize it, right? So he has a supper (presumably because Paul speaks of a supper), and he has it at night (presumably because Paul said it was at night), and he has Jesus arrested later that night (presumably because Paul said that this was the night he was delivered up), and he has companions at the meal (presumably because Paul has Jesus speaking to somebody in the second person plural).

I do not point this out in order to read Paul in terms of the gospels, but rather in order to identify someone much closer to him in time and place who apparently read him as I do.

Toto

How can you call it "brave?" It is very conventional. Many people would be willing to grant some kernal of historicity behind the NT accounts; the problem is discovering what it is.

For most of the "Jesus questers" of the last 4 centuries or so, there has been an assumption that there is some kernal of historicity in the gospels, and that it could be recovered somehow so we could know the real Jesus of history. Some have naively assumed that they could take the gospels and remove all of the supernatural aspects, and that what was left would reflect real history. Others tried to refine the search, removing improbable or theological aspects that appeared to be later additions.

But the result of all of this quest has been like peeling layers off the onion and finding nothing in the center. As Robert Price put it, if there was a Jesus of history, there is no more. All of his distinguishing characteristics have been lost.

If you think you have a method for recovering the historical basis of a myth, please let us know. Start a new thread.

Ben C Smith

So Paul became a hero because of Acts? You could pep up your case a bit by providing an ancient analogy to this, a biography written, not about a person already admired or famous, but rather in order to make him admired or famous.

Ben.

Julian

Oh, I am not saying that Acts created this status. I only meant to imply that it greatly added to a well-known figure. I mean, the Paul of the epistles and the Paul of Acts have nothing really to do with each other but I think no one will disagree when I say that Acts serves to glorify Paul and probably made him more important, retrospectively, than he really was. From being a well-known, but regular, figure he becomes a giant, larger-than-life, miracle wielding, monster truck apostle. And if he said that this stuff happened in an 'authentic' letter who are you to contradict that?

Julian

Ben C Smith

Monster truck apostle. That may be the first time in history those three words have ever come together in that order.

Thanks for the explanation. I was taking your words too mathematically.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

The so-called Last Supper in 1 Cor. 11:23-26 is an idealization of the common thanksgiving meal (i.e.eucharist). The gentile order bread-cup is given priority over the Jewish order, and the institutions of bread and wine are reduced to a single circumstance.
Was it is derived ultimately from Mithraism? Either that or Justin Martyr's ridiculous defense that Satan invented the Mithraic eucharist as an imitation. First Apology, Chapter LXVI. The wine in from the Dionysiac cult.

Moreover, Cicero (106 BCE-43 BCE), De Natura Deorum , Book 3, ch 16 (On the nature of the Gods) ridiculed the notion of eating god in corn (cf. bread) and wine in the century before the alleged time of Jesus.

"When we speak of corn as Ceres, and of wine as Liber, we use, it is true, a customary mode of speech, but do you think that any one is so senseless as to believe that what he is eating is the divine substance? ..."

So to answer the question, "Did the last supper really happen," no it is an entirely derived myth, and to credit Cicero, believed by senseless people.

Jake Jones