aa5874

An entity that is both God and Man is a MYTHOLOGICAL entity. If Jesus was just a man the Pauline writer would not have worshiped him as a God.

The Jesus Christ character in the Pauline wrings must be a God to be worshiped as a God.

Gods are MYTHOLOGICAL entities.

It must be noted that not a single author of the Canonical NT wrote that they personally saw Jesus and that they personally conversed or interacted with him.

No human being could have personally saw and interacted with an offspring of the Holy Ghost.

The offspring of a Ghost, holy or unholy, is a MYTHOLOGICAL entity.

show_no_mercy

Of course. This assumes that "according to the flesh" is original to Paul. The first person to present Romans as "holy scripture" was Marcion, and Marcion did not believe that Jesus came "according to the flesh". In other words, this phrase couldn't have possibly been in the very first New Testament canon.

Phrases like "according to the flesh" and "born of a woman" just so happen to refute 2nd century heresies.

I think simply ignoring this fact is one of the mistakes that people are making in this whole endeavor. Which is why I don't think we can rely on Paul's letters as any sort of smoking gun into the historicity of Jesus.

Paul was originally the apostle of the heretics. The Catholics/orthodox "recruited" Paul as a reaction to heresies.

This is a map of 2nd century Christianities (from the blog Vridar)



Blue = “non-orthodox” (e.g. Marcionites, Valentinians, and other such “gnostic” types)
Red = Roman-orthodox strongholds
Purple = contested areas; where “orthodoxy” was struggling, often in some form of “rear-guard” action, against the “non-orthodox”
Red stars = minority presence of “orthodoxy” (Edessa is a special case: the “orthodox” were also described as “gnostics”)

It doesn't seem like "heresies" were a falling away from "orthodoxy". It actually looks the other way around. I mean, why would a movement that started in Judea and Galilee have a "first pope" in Rome?

bacht

And creating an historical back-story gave the minority Catholics more ammunition.

dog-on

Apostolic succession.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Don,

Here is my interpretation of Romans 1-4:

I assume Paul is introducing himself to the Romans and therefore this passage is all about him and his God, Jesus Christ.

Paul:
1. is a slave of the God Jesus Christ
2.called to be an apostle of the God Jesus Christ who promised good news about his son through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures}.
3)Was born Jewish according to the Flesh (i.e. he was circumsiced)
4) became a son of God through his Spirit
5) was resurrected from the Dead, (i.e. spiritually reborn as a Christian from the dead religion of Judaism)

This passage is about Paul and his God named Jesus Christ. I find no reference to another man or another God in this passage.

A dog may be trained to salivate when she hears a bell. After such training she may believe that she smells a treat when she hears a bell. To the neutral objective observor, there is just 1) the bell and 2) the dog, to the subjective dog, there is 1) a bell, 2) the dog and 3) a treat.

To me, the references in this passage are to just Paul and his God named Jesus Christ. There is not 1) Paul, 2) his god and 3)a god-man named Jesus Christ.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

EarlDoherty

Apparently you did not finish your reading of the Pauline epistles, or did not pick up on the fact that Paul speaks of "flesh" and "body" in quite mystical ways which do not refer to physical realities. He regularly refers to the "body of Christ" of which believers form the limbs, Christ being the "head" (as in 1 Cor. 12:27, or Col. 1:18, or Eph. 1:22-23 in which the church becomes Christ's "body.") In Eph. 2:14-16, Christ "abolishes the Law in his flesh" with the result that "he might create in himself a new man out of the two, and in this one body reconcile both [Jew and gentile] to God through the cross." Hebrews, non-Pauline, speaks of Christ's "flesh" as the "curtain" through which believers can enter the new sanctuary where Christ made his sacrifice (in the heavenly world) by offering his blood. Here, "blood" is clearly presented as a form of non-material/earthly blood in a non-earthly dimension.

There is no support for finding an 'out' here by declaring that all these things are metaphors or allegories. Paul never states or treats them as such. They seem to be literal concepts within a mystical, spiritual dimension. When he wants to present an allegory, Paul states it as such, as in Galatians 4's allegory of the sons of Abraham. And even there, the phrase kata sarka is applied in some kind of mystical way, since he makes it a point of applying it only to one of the sons, while declaring the other was born kata pneuma. (Would they not both have been born kata sarka if all the phrase meant was a literal physical birth?)

It is also possible to understand the kata sarka of Romans 1:3 as not referring specifically to Christ's flesh itself, whether material or spiritual, but rather is a phrase which conveys the idea of being 'in relation to flesh, to the fleshly realm,' or if you like, even the world of human flesh. A similar form of non-literal meaning one finds in 2 Cor. 5:16. The phrase, then, describes Christ's relationship to the human David, but not in the sense of physical descent. Whether he understood it or not, he got it from scripture which states that the Christ will be of the seed of David. Even the word "seed" in Romans 1:3 need not have a literal meaning, as we know from Romans 9:6-8 and Galatians 3:29, where the gentiles are Abraham's "seed" even though they are not physically descended from him. Even Christ, declared to be Abraham's "seed" in Gal. 3:16, is said to be so solely on the basis of a single word in scripture, with no appeal made to him being in a physical descent from Abraham.

Also, If you know any of the OT Pseudepigrapha, you would realize that Jewish sectarian writers were very capable of presenting pictures of activities that go on in various layers of the heavens which have very human-sounding descriptions, but involve spiritual equivalents.

So things are not quite as straightforward as you might imagine. I can only recommend my new book which discusses this sort of thing at great length, including an entire chapter on the language of sarx in the epistles of the New Testament.

Earl Doherty

ApostateAbe

Romans 9:6-8

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel; nor are they all children because they are Abraham's descendants, but: "THROUGH ISAAC YOUR DESCENDANTS WILL BE NAMED." That is, it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.

Galatians 3:28-29

28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise.

EarlDoherty, as I understand it, your argument is, Paul sometimes uses the words for "seed" in a merely spiritual manner. Therefore, it is possible to understand that he was using it the same way in Romans 1:3 and elsewhere.

I have to bring up this point a lot, but the context is much more important to understanding the meaning of a particular phrase than the external pattern of usage. In Romans 9:8 and Galatians 3:29, Paul had a very explicit and clear theological motivation for using the phrase, "seed," in a spiritual sense: he wanted Gentiles to be accepted as among the seed of Abraham. Without that explicit theological agenda, his readers would be confused, or they would catch him on that. "Wait a minute, Greeks are not seed of Abraham." You can see it directly in the passage: "...if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to promise." If they did NOT belong to Christ, then they would NOT be seeds of Abraham one way or the other!

What would be the motivation for same meaning of the same phrase in Romans 1:3?

...concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh...

Whatever the motivation may be, it certainly is not apparent from the context or otherwise. And, yep, it misled Christians for millenniums afterward, until you came along and gave us what Paul really meant!

spamandham

That's also the approach mythicists take. It's simpler to chalk up to editing 3 or 4 single line verses that irrefutably refer to an earthly Jesus, than it is to dismiss the vast majority of the Pauline corpus that supports a mythical/mystical suffering messiah derived directly from Jewish scripture, particularly when we know the works were edited over in multiple layers (according to scholars anyway), and 6/13 letters previously believed to have been written by Paul have since been shown to be wholly inauthentic (according to scholarship).

Yes, but he also tells us his gospel was not told to him by anyone, that his knowledge of Jesus came from a vision, that he was specially chosen by god to reveal this mystery that had been hidden in the scriptures throughout the ages, etc. None of those statements are consistent with a historical Jesus. Now you could simply hand wave them away the same way I hand wave away the 3 or 4 sentences that irrefutably refer to an earthly human Jesus, but then you still have inconsistencies to deal with from an HJ perspective:

- why didn't Paul quote from Jesus?

- why doesn't Paul tell us what made Jesus' particular crucifixion special?

- why does Paul repeatedly use variant of the word 'crucify' in places where it is impossible that it's referring to a historical crucifixion?

- why is the cruficixion/resurrection coupled to a rejection of Jewish law if it's historical rather than symbolic?

- in a couple of places, Paul refers to a demonstration of the crucifixion? How can he possibly be referring to a historical crucifixion

- why does Paul only refer to witnesseses of jesus who are post-resurrection?

- what happened to Jesus family? why do they just fall off the face of the earth?

- why was Jesus tomb' not venerated? There is no evidence that Christians ever knew where it was.

- why does the passion read like it was constructed right out of Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22?

These are difficult questions to answer form an HJ perspective, and I've addressed them to you in the past. Yet these questions simply vanish from a nonhistorcial perspective:

- Paul didn't quote from Jesus because Paul's Jesus was a revealed heavenly person and not a historical person

- Paul doesn't need to tell us what made the crucifixion of Jesus special, because he's using it symbolically and both he and early christians knew that

- Paul uses 'crucify' loosely because he is not referring to a Roman crucifixion, but instead to the complete annihilation of a fleshly outlook on life

- The crucixion is intertwined with the end of the law, because those who are fully devoted to a spiritual life are aligned with the real spirit of god rather than the silly legalistic ways of the law. Paul explains this explicitly in Galatians, and even makes an 'out' for Jews who follow the law because they understand this, rather than those who do so for legalistic reasons. The crucifixion of the flesh and the subsequent ending of the law is what makes a gentile mission possible at all.

- Paul's demonstration of the crucifixion is simply his argument for how the idea is derived from scripture

- Paul's witnesses are all post resurrection witnesses, because Jesus only ever appears in visions

- Jesus family disappears from history because they never existed in the first place

- There was no tomb, so there was nothing to venerate. The gospel authors concocted an empty tomb story in response to this problem.

- The passion reads like it was constructed directly from Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, because it was. There was no collective memory of any details of a historical crucifixion, so they could easily get away with this. They placed the events an exact symbolic 40 years prior to the destruction of the temple.


It's all really very simple and clean, and flows directly from the best/earliest evidence we have.

Except that Paul tells us that his gospel was a secret revealed to him directly by god (1 Cor 2:6-10), that it was not given to him by any human but revealed instead (1 Cor 2:13, Gal 1:1, Gal 1:11-12), that the death and resurrection are both derived from scripture (1 Cor 15). How is this evidence for anything but a spiritual crucifixion?

That's because they aren't interpolations. They are central to Paul's entire message...it's just that they don't refer to a Roman crucifixion.

You (and other HJers) simply refuse to accept the direct words of Paul at face value. When he tells us his gospel was not given to him by any person, HJers hem and haw about how that isn't what he really means.

When Paul outright tells us that the death and resurrection are concepts derived from scripture, HJers are more than happy to attribute those verses to interpolation. (never mind that that doesn't explain why an interpolator would pen such things).

When Paul goes on and on about he (Paul) was specially chosen by god to be the revealer of the hidden secret, HJers hand wave it away as referring to some other unkown secret that Paul must be referring to. Who knows what it means, all we know is that it doens't mean what it plainly says.

The general ideas on cult behavior I got from Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, but it was not so much the intent of that book to prove such behaviors (they are taken as a given in the book).


[HJer]Of course, his ideas are not mainstream, since he proposes an ordinary rise of Christianity rather than a massive overnight explosion of Christians as the consensus has it. Since his position is not mainstream, his arguments should be dismissed out of hand as improbable. Also, Stark lambastes Biblical historians as being willfully ascientific. This is to be expected of people like creationists and sociologists.[/HJer]

gurugeorge

Awesome post! It's quite shocking to see it all laid out in black and white like that.

It's possible to think of Paul as responding distantly to a real event of the crucifixion of a human being. It's possible to imagine him unconcerned about the real person and wrapped up solely in his visionary experience of (who he supposed to be) that person (albeit deified). These are possible construals, but they're way down on the list after the far more plausible:-

It's just what it says on the tin: mystical revelation.

That's the only positive evidence we have as to the type of thing that was going on here (and we have it from "Paul"'s own words): we DON'T have positive evidence of a man Jesus, we DO have positive evidence that AT LEAST Paul was a mystic/visionary. Combine that with the ABSENCE of evidence for any of the people he talks about - the other "apostles" - ever knowing any human Jesus PERSONALLY. So: there is no evidence OF a human Jesus, and there is nothing that logically necessitates that there BE a human Jesus (because we can very easily explain how these things might have come about without one, based on the evidence we DO have).

ApostateAbe

I was shocked, too, and you may want to check out my new thread:

Paul's Jesus according to spamandham and me.