gurugeorge

I've been reading a lot of the HJ vs. MJ stuff on this board recently. I was reading one of the other threads when something someone there said just struck me particularly forcefully. What the guy's responding to is a specific point in their argument, but the point he makes is generally applicable:-

Bingo! This is the nub of the matter. This is what's so strange. It's natural for Christians, even modern educated people generally, to try and read the early Christian stuff with the Gospel "Jesus" in mind, but if you don't do that, there doesn't seem to be anything in the material that plainly speaks of that "Jesus" at all!

To find that "Jesus" in the early Christian texts, you really have to strain your interpretation, you can't read the texts naturally and simply as saying exactly what they mean.

Whereas when you read them naturally (well, as naturally as you can given you don't speak the language and are relying on scholarly translation and redaction), they seem to be presenting, as Doherty says, a quaint kind of "Logos" religion.

The important point to note is: when you read them like that, they seem to say exactly what they mean. No interpretation, no straining, seems to be required.

I think this is the "positive" side of Doherty's argument that some of the apologists here are overlooking. It's just as much what they do say as what they don't, that's puzzling. Granted that they don't seem to talk hardly at all about the "Jesus" we think we know from the Gospels, and that would be puzzling enough. But what they do talk about (when you don't immediately leap in and try to "interpret" it as talking about "Jesus", i.e. when you read it straightforwardly) is the strange thing - and more and more, to me, the more I try and abstract the Gospel "Jesus" away when I'm reading that early Christian stuff, it seems that what they are talking about is a mystical/philosophical/visionary sort of cult.

In fact, there seems to be a "basket" of such cults, more or less closely related, evinced in those early documents.

I know this is a bit of a vague post, but a lot of the threads on this subject get very detailed and bogged down; I thought it might be interesting if people talked about the bigger picture a bit.

(As a side-note: one thing this mini-revelation has led me to realise is that I should go a bit easier on the apologists here, in my mind. It's hard enough for me, who am not a Christian, to read early Christian texts without the Gospel "Jesus" in mind. Even with the best will in the world, it must be even harder for people who are committed Christians to do so! One approach might be to look at those texts and sort of metaphorically ask: "Ok, teach me about the Jesus I know, what do you directly and plainly proclaim about the Jesus I know and love?")

Peter Kirby

Interepretation is required to get "no earthly existence" out of these epistles. Right or wrong, it's an interpretive act.

Whether an interpretation requires straining is, of course, a bone of contention.

Even if I were convinced that there are no descriptions of Jesus as having earthly existence in these epistles, I would not find that at all strange. (That is, I would not find that at all strange under the hypothesis that they accepted an earthly existence for Jesus.)

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

gurugeorge

But if you have this silence combined with a positive effusiveness about an unearthly Christ, what then? Doesn't that strike you as strange?

Peter Kirby

No. To Christians throughout history, Christ is not on earth.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

gurugeorge

So who was the fellow by that name who is supposed to have been born in Galilee, to have preached throughout Judea, and to have been crucified by the Romans, etc.? Some kind of impostor?

It seems to me that Christians throughout history (except in this early bit) have been very concerned with that living, breathing person alongside His Godhead! Certainly, having been raised a Catholic, I know Catholics are as concerned about the fleshly Jesus as the spiritual Jesus, because after all, His (the unearthly one's) taking on the burdens of flesh was supposed to show us how to deal with that burden ourselves! No "God mode" for that Jesus - he suffered as a man, etc., etc. Both aspects are important and talked about in the Christianity I'm familiar with, because the contrast is important to the theology.

So why doesn't that fellow show up in the early Christian stuff, and why do we have only the unearthly variety? Especially so soon after his supposed earthly showing?

Peter Kirby

Note the present tense in the statement I made about what Christians believe.

So we are back to just talking about the alleged "no descriptions of Jesus as having earthly existence in these epistles," i.e. the negative argument e silentio. The "positive" argument has dropped out of view here.

Again, I do not find it strange. Perhaps we can find some way to move beyond such gut feelings or arguments from ignorance.

What's the relevance of this comment? That is, what is the intuition that you are presupposing, and is there any way to push it beyond mere intuition?

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

gurugeorge

Noted and implicitly accounted for in my response, I thought.

No, as I said:

There seems to be only the unearthly variety, wall-to-wall unearthly Christ - that's the "positive" side of the argument, as I understand it. That the unearthly Christ is a mystery of some sort, immanent yet transcendent, etc., etc. - all that's fine. That He should be of some interest to early Christians, just as He has been of some interest to Christians throught history: also fine. But that He should be the only thing that seems to be of interest to early Christians: that's a puzzle, considering He's not the only thing that's been of interest to all Christians since then, considering they've also been interested in the living, breathing man who lived at a certain time and place.

Oh no, let's stick to intuitions for the moment. These arguments, although they seem, on the face of it, to be about texts, are actually all about intuitions, about what various people consider reasonable.

That a physical person who lived in a recent time and place should have proclaimed himself to have had this unearthly component, etc., etc., would seem to be a fact worth mentioning, at least - wouldn't it have needed some justification to Jews of the day, for a start? OTOH, if the fleshly fellow was being swept under the carpet, why? What would be the point of being so disingenuous? To me, it seems unreasonable that this fellow isn't mentioned, and only the unearthly aspect is mentioned. If there were apostles, then their memories of the physical fellow would have been fresh, and it seems reasonable to me that part of the story they told would certainly have included things about the physical man, about his teachings while on earth, his suffering, his resurrection.

You say you don't find the absence of the fleshly fellow/presence of the unearthly fellow unreasonable because to Christians throughout history "Christ is not on earth". If this were wholly true, then Christians throughout history would have been mythicists. Clearly Christians throughout history haven't been mythicists because as well as speaking about the transcendent aspect of Jesus, they've also spoken of his life and ministry on earth.

Except those pesky early Christians.

There's the puzzle.

Peter Kirby

I use the terms straightforwardly, in that a "positive" argument derives from some particular statement which a writer affirms, while a "negative" argument derives from the absence of a type of statement. If you put the argument in terms of premise and conclusion, you will see this is an argument from silence, that is, an argument from absence, a "negative" class of argument.

The above slides between several categories without distinction, i.e.:

1. What a person believes.
2. What a person speaks.
3. What a person is interested in.
4. What a person writes in letters.
5. What a person finds necessary to write in his or her particular texts.

In respect of the epistles thought early and their authors, we have direct access only to a subset of (4), what a person writes in letters, and what of these letters has survived.

We usually assume that a person writes about what they find necessary to write about for the purposes of a particular piece of writing, so it is possible to reach some negative conclusions about what was not considered necessary to write about in a particular text from any known silence.

Otherwise, the negative conclusions are quite precarious; that is, to assume from a lack of mention in extant texts that a person was not interested in something, or did not believe in it, or never spoke about it. Some additional argument is necessary to fill the gap.

You have stated above (unless I misunderstand):

1. The authors of these epistles did not believe Jesus to have had an earthly aspect.
2. The authors of these epistles did not speak of Jesus as having an earthly aspect.
3. The authors had no interest in anything earthly concerning Jesus (and, they should have had some such interest if they believed such).
4. The authors of these epistles did not write of Jesus having an earthly aspect in their letters.
5. The authors would have found it necessary to write about the life of Jesus on earth in these extant letters if they had believed anything about such.

The most interesting claim here is (5) combined with (4), because with these two claims one can mount an argument in logical form, while that's not necessarily the case for (1), (2), and (3).

The argument in logical form is:

1. The authors of these epistles did not write of Jesus having an earthly aspect in their letters.
2. The authors would have found it necessary to write about the life of Jesus on earth in these extant letters if they had believed anything about such.
3. If the authors would have found it necessary to write about the life on Jesus on earth, the authors did write of Jesus having an earthly aspect in their letters.
4. The authors did not find it necessary to write about the life of Jesus on earth in these extent letters. (From 1 and 3.)
5. The authors did not believe anything about the life of Jesus on earth. (From 2 and 4.)

For full disclosure, I do not accept (1) but am not focusing on it at present.

Of the three premises, I would like to focus on (2). Please present your own reasonable argument, in some logical form if you like, in support of (2).

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Amaleq13

Obviously, I couldn't agree more. Given the placement of the Gospel stories before the letters of Paul in the Christian Bible, it is almost impossible to avoid this even with one's first reading of the texts.

OTOH, I have made a conscious effort to try to read Paul without allowing the later stories to influence my understanding and I have to admit that I would probably have assumed the described incarnation took place on earth. Perhaps it would naturally occur to someone who was more familiar with Platonic philosophy but I don't think it would have occurred to me. In fact, given that it seems to me that Paul describes an incarnation that really only served the purpose of disguising the true nature of Christ so that the 'archons' would execute him, I doubt I would even question the absence of details about the "life" of the incarnation.

The only question I might have asked Paul is how the incarnated Christ got the 'archons' to kill him.

NOGO

It is all in the way you frame the issue.

My problem is not that Paul is silent about Jesus' earthly life.
My problem is that Paul does not declare Jesus' earthly life as a source of revelation.

Paul spends his time talking about scriptures being a source of revelation and also having direct revelation from the risen Jesus. One, the other or both of these appear in almost all of his letters. One can say that the source of revelation is an important reccuring theme. Yet not once does Paul say that Jesus' earthly life was a source of revelation!!!

Paul also states that he got no information about Jesus from flesh and blood ie from other apostles.

Paul declares having the mind of Christ and that Jesus speaks through him.

In other words Paul does not consider the life of Jesus on earth as a source of revelation concerning the mystery of Christ/salvation.

That is absolute astonishing!

To Paul the earthly Jesus is not the founder of Christianity.
We can tap dance around this problem or acknowledge it.

Strictly speaking this does not prove that there was no earthly Jesus but it does make it very doubful.