gurugeorge

I don't know, presumably he persuaded them? He did spend a few days with them after all. They shook hands, so it was an amicable division of labour.

Again, none of it implies your "narrative", not even about a living person. It's an idea, a vision, the good news of a spiritual victory already won, rather than some military victory to come, only Paul sees the true implication of the victory as being for all mankind rather than just the Jews.

ynquirer

No, it doesn’t. Your meaning is that rejection of kata sarka excludes a flesh-and-bones, historical condition, so that 2 Cor 5:16 may be read as a confession that the Messiah is a purely spiritual entity that has never lived on earth as a real man.

There are four verses in Second Corinthians that mention the clause kata sarka, namely, 1:17, 5:16, 10:2 and 11:18. Apart from the one under discussion (5:16) none of the other three support your interpretation of the clause. Thus says the RSV - translation of kata sarka in bold type:

• 1:17 Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans like a worldly man, ready to say Yes and No at once?
  
  
• 10:2 I beg of you that when I am present I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of acting in worldly fashion.
  
  
• 11:18 since many boast of worldly things, I too will boast.

None of them supports the rejection of historicity you talk about. All of them lend support to my interpretation that kata sarka means subjection to mundane desires, so that rejection of it by no means excludes historicity of the entity represented by the word(s) to which the clause is attached, whether the subject of the verb - in the middle voice - or its object - in the active voice.

Furthermore, kata sarka is twice mentioned in 5:16, and you may not contend for the interpretation that excludes a historicity in the first occurrence, which is in reference to ordinary human beings. Therefore, out of five occurrences of the clause in Second Corinthians the bare possibility of historical existence is admitted in four, and you still assert that such possibility is ‘evidently’ rejected in the fifth, the sole one that speaks of Christ. On what grounds?

spamandham

No, I'm quibbling with what you are reading into 1 Cor 15, that simply isn't there. Here are points I think we can agree on.

Paul claims:
1. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures
2. Christ was buried and raised on the 3rd day according to the scriptures
3. Christ appeared to Peter, then to "the twelve", then to more than 500 others, then to James, then to "the apostles", and finally to Paul.

I'm not the one making any distinction, you are. My claim is that a straightfoward read of 1 Cor. 15 does not make any distinction at all between the type of appearances in list item 3. Further, Paul tells us that the basis of his claim that Jesus died and then rose on the 3rd day, is the scriptures! Why does he not say "Christ died and was raised on the third day, as witnessed by Peter and the 12"? Instead, he says "according to the scriptures". Note that he does not say "in accordance with the scriptures", which might suggest a fulfillment of prohecy, but instead, indicates the very knowledge of the resurrection is derived from scripture.

It's plain as day what Paul is saying.

"According to the scriptures, Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day." No-one Paul is talking about knew Jesus personally, they simply knew of him through the scriptures. To Paul, Jesus is not someone from the recent past, he's a figure from the scriptures. This is why Paul makes no distinction between the types of appearances.

Agreed. There are countless examples in the Pauline epistles that the difference centered around abiding with ritual laws, particular circumcision and food prohibitions.

Agreed. Importantly though, there is no distinction made in these experiences.

Agreed. Paul and the Jerusalem church come to an accord that Paul will teach the gentiles, but that they will teach the Jews. Paul indicates the rift involves Jewish ritual law.

It's more than that. Paul claims directly to be the apostle to the gentiles (Romans 11:13, Romans 15:16, etc.). The differences seem to be related to the Jewish mission of the Jeruslame church, and the gentile mission of Paul. Paul, simply, is the author of gentile Christianity as derived from the Jeruslame church.

I agree that Paul's gospel is basically the same as the Jerusalem church, according to Paul. That doesn't imply it's identical to it. The Jerusalem church emphasized being Jewish, as well as abiding by Jewish ritual law. Paul saw neither of these as fundamental to the gospel of salvation.

He never made such a distinction! The thing that distinguishes Paul from the others is his rejection of circumcision and food prohibitions. He spells this out explicitly and even chastizes Peter for being a hypocrite about it. Search for the word 'circumcize' in the Pauline epistles. You'll get dozens, if not hundreds, of hits. Paul's innovation is the idea that the gospel of resurrection could be taught to gentiles without demanding they be circumcized and abide by food laws. Paul makes it pretty clear that the Jerusalem church still emphasizes these, and that he teaches just the opposite.

I think I just did.

No it's your turn to point out anywhere that Paul directly claims anyone contemporary knew Jesus on earth, or where Paul ever uses the phrase 'living Jesus' that you keep repeating over and over. These are distinctions you are making that do not exist in Paul's writings.

gurugeorge

Nicely constructed post, but I think you're getting yourself into a tangle here. Think of "kata sarka" as meaning "materialistically" (and "kata pneuma" as meaning "spiritually") and substitute that in the passages you quote and the passage under discussion.

So, again: previously the Anointed One was conceived materialistically, as a warrior/priest who would bring the Jews to power and usher in an earthly Utopia. Now the Anointed One is to be conceived spiritually and universally (i.e. not just Jewishly - that's Paul's added wrinkle), as a Logos-type "intermediary" Redeemer.

See? Not at all problematic, and both versions of the idea are mythical.

But as I keep saying, that's not the real nub of the matter because it's still logically possible that we could be talking about a man mythologised into this Redeemer figure.

But the evidence for that has to be found in some sort of link between Paul, the Jerusalem people, and some person the Jerusalem people knew prior to the "appearance" of this spiritual entity to them. That's the thing that's really lacking to make the historical Jesus plausible in Paul. Absent that, "myth all the way down" is the preferable and obvious explanation of what "appeared" to the Jerusalem people and what Paul is talking about. (And also what the other early Christian materials are about.)

ynquirer

Yes, both versions of the idea as you espouse them are mythical, but they so are in a different way.

The traditional Jewish messiah was mythical because it was placed in an indeterminate future that was never to come true. That’s a way of being mythical.

Paul’s Christ according to you is also mythical in a different way - the way in which a god is a myth for a nonbeliever.

Now, Paul’s idea according to himself, as shown in my previous post, is neither of the former. He saw Christ as a man that was not loaded with the burden of rising the Jews to world power, that is, as a man like many others, in this sense as non-mythical in the first way. This is what is necessary to render him historical even though mythical for the atheist in the second. Yet, this second mythicism, so to speak, is wholly immaterial to issue of historicity.

spamandham

Where do you get the idea that there was such a thing as a traditional Jewish messiah expectation at the time of Paul among hellenized Jews? This was a period before the end of the Jewish wars, before the building of Galilean synagogues, before the Mishnah, before Rabbinic Judaism. I'm not saying the idea has no speculative merit, I just don't think there is much historical evidence of it in that time period.

Can you really reconcile Paul with a historical Jesus figure from Paul's recent past? To the extent Paul may have been referring to a Jesus he deemed historical, it seems to be a Jesus from the indeterminate past.

gurugeorge

Where have I said I don't believe in Paul's Christ? What I don't believe, and what I think there's no evidence for at all in Paul or the early Christian material, is that Paul's Christ was at any time a human being known to the Jerusalem crowd. There's no evidence of the relevant necessary man , not in Paul (and more generally, not in contemporary history independently of any of the cultic texts). That's precisely what I think is the error/fabrication (initially probably just an error or misreading after the diaspora, fading into fabrication with the invention of Acts) of "apostolic succession" of the proto-orthodoxy, that they used to give them psychological and political ascendancy over other Christians.

You still need to show that Paul thought of Jesus as a man and not as a spiritual being interacting with the world. As I pointed out, those phrases are ambiguous between your reading and mind - see, I'm not saying your reading is implausible, I'm saying you need to pin it down by showing something in Paul that ties the Jerusalem people to a human being they knew in the past. That's the only thing that would actually tilt the interpretation in your direction. Absent that, while both readings are plausible, yours is a stretch and mine is more natural.

Religions start in many ways, sometimes small communities engaging in visionary and mystical practice, sometimes some charismatic mystic or visionary starts teaching, sometimes a bit of both. Sometimes the charismatic is indeed deified by his followers. In order to show that this last is the case in Christianity you have to have some reason to believe that there was a human being, who preached, and who was then deified. There's no reason in in the early Christian materials, and of themselves, to take that position, it's just something people came to believe over time and then reimported into their reading of the early Christian materials. IOW, had there been no lasting Christian religion, and somebody unearthed the Epistles and Hebrews, etc., today, there would be no reason, just from reading those texts alone, to think that they were talking about some human being who had been known personally to the Jerusalem people, and who they had a vision of. It just looks like they had a vision.

Solo

I am afraid it is not at all clear what Paul is saying and frankly the passage is so confusing, that it is best explained as an interpolation that came after Paul.

According to G.A.Wells, the passage would instantly be found fraudulent if it were proven that the two references to "scriptures" (in 3, 4) meant scripts of the New Testament, as these would not have been known to Paul. If, on the other hand, Paul would have been authenticating his theory by some OT passage, then we should be able to find that passage. That is impossible for the first instance: that Christ died for our sins is not an idea originating in OT. For the second, the sign of Jonah (1:17) was suggested and also Hosea 6:2, ("on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him") where the resurrected one is Israel, however, not the Messiah.

As Price argues persuasively in Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 (in The Empty Tomb (or via: amazon.co.uk)) the scriptural reference by the letter's real author likely originates in the shift of meaning of "gospel" that Paul preached (1 Cr 15:1). To Paul (as witnessed by Galatians), the gospel is a product of revelation which he received directly from God. The writer of the passage however seems to relate "gospel" to some (as yet undefined) scriptural corpus on which he/she believes Paul would have drawn (as it became the norm in the church by the time of the interpolation). However, no such "scriptures" were known in Paul's time that we know of.

As I argued here, the passage also belies Paul's view of himself in relation to other apostles. Again, the writer seems to have an external view of Paul as a lesser apostle who joined the movement late and should have felt guilty about persecuting the Church. It is not the way that Paul viewed himself.

Jiri

spamandham

I agree that 1 Cor. 15 is probably not fully authentic, but it seems unlikely to me that there was nothing originally there from which to interpolate. If you pick a few oddities out, it could easily be referring to Isaiah's suffering servant.

Is it simpler to imagine wholesale insertion of fraudulent paragraphs, or is it simpler to assume a bit of tweaking? I certainly don't know, but lean toward the latter.

That's an interesting point.