Amaleq13

Would you provide your source for the specific belief I've put in bold, please?

Didymus

I'll sure try. It was from weak memory, so I'll need to do some searching. But while I'm doing that, I hope you'll consider responding to my point as well as to my example.

I don't want to publish misinformation; on the other hand, I don't think my point - that there existed a receptive atmosphere for the idea a crucified savior - would be any less valid without it.

Didymus

Doug Shaver

Yes, I would need to show that -- if I were claiming to have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that that was Paul's thinking. But I am not claiming that. I am claiming that it is a plausible hypothesis. I am also claiming that it is more plausible than any hypothesis that assumes a historically real Jesus, but that is a separate although obviously not unrelated issue.

The original Judaism knew nothing of it because Judaism originated a few centuries before there was any Hellenistic philosophy. But then along came Alexander, and, like everything else in the Middle East, Judaism itself was never the same again.

By assuming the conclusion that Paul was talking about a man who had lived in Palestine a few years earlier.

The interpretation must be adapted to all the relevant facts, including the intellectual milieu of the writer and his intended readership. If that milieu was significantly different from ours, we are compelled to consider interpretations that would make sense in theirs even if they would be nonsense in ours.

If Doherty and Carrier are right, we're not talking about any metaphors. In Paul's universe, "born of a woman" would have been as literatlly true of a spiritual Jesus as it would have been of a human Jesus, if not more so. To a Platonist, the spirit world was more real than the material world, and he was not making any figure of speech when he said so.

That would be suspicious if Paul had said a whole bunch of things that suggested he thought Jesus was human. But he didn't. We have "born of a woman," we have Davidic descent, and we have him eating a meal. That's out of seven letters in which everything else Paul says suggests that he though Jesus was a god. I don't think it's exactly a case of special pleading to make those three remarks fit all the others rather than vice versa.

No, Paul's silences are not the only basis. If Paul were the only early Christian writer to have nothing to say about Jesus' life, then his silences could be dismissed as a personal eccentricity of his. But he was not the only one. Essentially no first-century Christian writer has a word to say about Jesus' life. All they know is his death and resurrection. Assuming (as I don't) that the gospels were written during the first century, they would be the only exceptions.

What did Paul say about the last supper that was uniquely earthly, i.e. inconsistent with a sublunar venue?

You're correct. I am surely not saying that. But I was responding to your apparent assumption that the Paul's meanings would certainly have been "hidden" from his readers. That assumes in turn that they were certainly not familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of his views. Once again, I am not claiming to have proved anything to a certainty. I am arguing only for plausibility. I believe the notion that Paul's readers would have been familiar with the prevailing philosophy of their time is a plausible one. Have you any evidence to the contrary, that Paul's readers were probably a bunch of uneducated rubes?

I don't see how. Together with all the first-century silences (not just Paul's), I think it just about clinches the case against any version of historicity, yours just as well as the more conventional ones.

The more obscure we assume he was to explain the silences, the more inexplicable his almost immediate deification becomes. But the more spectacular we assume he was in order to explain the deification, the more inexplicable the silences become. The silences are not just a lack of evidence. When they are this complete and this pervasive, they become evidence. They become a fact that needs an explanation. Or, dare I say, evidence that demands a verdict.

Oh? I haven't read a lot of Josephus yet, but didn't he have a thing or two say about what was happening in Jerusalem about that time?

Doherty covers that at great length and I can't think of anything useful to add. For the benefit of lurkers who haven't read him yet, the answer in a nutshell is that while not even Hellenized Jews could have believed any man was divine, many of them could have accepted, alongside the One True God, a divine being who never had been a man.

You make it sound like rank speculation. Every educated person of that time and place would at least have known about it even if he didn't believe it, but a great many of them would have believed it. Paul was not writing on the assumption that anybody living in a land he didn't even know existed would trying to understand him 2,000 years later.

Of course not. MJ or VMJ creates it. But its solution is trivially easy under either scenario. In this case, what works for me should work just as well for you.

The point is, neither is "brother of the lord" = "brother of Jesus" except, and only except, on the presupposition of historicity. Otherwise it commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Yes, if Jesus was real, then Paul's reference to James almost certainly meant "brother of Jesus." But the converse is not a valid argument.

Didymus

How could I have forgotten Isaiah 53? It deals with sacrifice of the Suffering Servant for "the many." It seems to me to be at the very heart of early Christian soteriology:

1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression [a] and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken. [b]

9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes [c] his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

11 After the suffering of his soul,
he will see the light of life [d] and be satisfied [e] ;
by his knowledge [f] my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, [g]
and he will divide the spoils with the strong, [h]
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.

These "Suffering Servant" verses are often regarded as antecedents to the Passion narrative. But Verses 1-4 sure don't apply to the Jesus of the gospels. In fact, in comparison with the Markan narrative, a crucified reclusive or deranged holy man makes a better savior, at least from the perspective of Isaiah.

While Isaiah addresses the notion of one-suffers-for-all substitutionary atonement through a suffering servant, I should have distinguished between that and the later, more commercial idea of a ransom payment, i.e., Jesus' death in exchange for access to God's grace. The OT didn't allude to that particular "soteriological economy."

Thanks for prompting me to refresh my memory and "flesh out" this idea a bit more.

Tom

Amaleq13

Whether the Suffering Servant passage was intended or even understood to be messianic is far from established. We've had several discussions of the subject here in the past.

For example:

Isaiah 53 - The Suffering Servant (Again)

Isaiah 53 - The Suffering Servant

Didymus

Right. But, aside from Paul, can you point to any evidence of Jewish belief in, or even recognition, of a sublunar intermediary sphere during the 1st-4th centuries? I do not know how influential middle Platonism was among Diaspora Jews during the first century. Nobody else seems to know this either.

But I just finished scanning Philo's (20 BC - 40 BCE) "Treatise on the World." Here was a Jewish philosopher who was strongly influenced by Hellenistic ideas, a mirror image of Paul in that sense. He was a major figure and a leader of the Alexandrian Diaspora, the intellectual center of Hellenized Judaism. As far as I can tell, in his entire treatise, and in the Wiki summary of Philo's ideas, there's not word one regarding anything like an intermediary sphere between heaven and earth.

Where are the references that support this belief, especially with regard to Judaism?

But MJ'ers do exactly the same thing when they de-literalize and redefine selected material in "middle Platonist terms." Paul's references that seem to regard Jesus as a human being who lived on earth in recent history, they assume the conclusion that Paul was talking about a sort of non-fleshly man who lived on a spiritual plane. We all interpret the words to fit our personal hypothesis; MJ'ers just do a lot more hypothesis-driven interpreting than I need to do. In VMJ, you can give just about everything its most common meaning.

I understand that you're talking about alternate meanings, not metaphors. But you might be taking this a bridge too far.

I have a hunch that terms like "man" and "flesh" were commonly understood just as they are today. Would your above-average literate inkeeper, when confronted by his wife with "What kind of man are you?" respond with "An earthly man, perhaps. Or I could be an earthly counterpart of an identical man in the sphere of earthly-heavenly intermediation. Which would you prefer?"

Not unless he wanted to spend the night with the goats!

A joke, but even in religious discourse, I think the contention that the term "man" could as readily be taken either way needs more evidence to support it. Earl can do pretty well with "kata sarka," but that's ambiguous to begin with. And he's still playing defense all the way.

But what is "everything else"? "Suggesting he was a god" is not the same as saying that he didn't live on earth. Or that his lineage, birth and death all took place in a spiritual venue. The Christians have a point when they say that Paul was more concerned with Jesus' godliness than with his manliness, but that that priority doesn't negate his belief that Jesus was a man. For Paul, a few essential "facts" were all he needed to know. If he needed a man/god with a ripping good yarn, he was born too soon.

After all, we are talking about Christianity here. Paul's a) thinking that Jesus was a god and Paul's b) thinking that Jesus lived as human being on earth, may seem like contradictory thoughts, but they are not mutually exclusive thoughts. The Council of Nicea proved that.

Perhaps you were trying for brevity, but in more conventional views of Paul's theology, his indication of Jesus' godliness is by no means suggestive of MJ. Nothing Paul says rules out his believing that Jesus existed as a man on earth, and, unless you take "man" to mean "not man" or "sort of like man but not here," nothing he says puts places him unequivocally on an ethereal plane. Or unless you take the encrypted meaning of "died" as "died, not physically, but sort of semi-physically and semi-spiritually on a plane with which you are all familiar and which therefore I don't need to mention."

Seems to me that MJ has created a whole new set of Pauline Silences. The old puzzle has been replaced with "If Paul believed Jesus existed on an intermediary plane between heaven and earth, why didn't he just effing spit it out?

Doherty's chronology may differ, but - because Paul was the first Christian writer and that makes the omissions particularly glaring - I think the Pauline Silences were the ones that started it all. The later examples serve to support the notions that a) Jesus was thought to be a mythical figure, and b) nobody knew much more about Jesus than Paul did. You're right, and Doherty's right, that the gospels didn't get much notice in Christian writings until well into the 2nd century. But Doherty sometimes confutes familiarity with the gospels with belief in a human Jesus. For examples, he goes on about how Ignatius (ca 100) didn't clearly show knowledge of any of the gospels. But, whether on not he knew a written gospel, Ignatius was adamant about his belief in a sketchily described, but human, Jesus, now historicized with a named persecutor and named mother:

Stop your ears, therefore, when any one speaks to you at variance with Jesus Christ, who was descended from David, and was also of Mary; who was truly born, and did eat and drink. He was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate; He was truly crucified, and [truly] died, in the sight of beings in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

Of course, an MJ'er might interpret the above as referring to events in a sublunarian sphere. Isn't it plausible that Ignatius' readers, reading his epistles 50 years after Paul's, were equally familiar with Middle Platonist concepts? Couldn't Mary and Pilate have existed in the sublunar sphere?

If you use the same definition as with Paul - Ignatius uses kata sarka - can you really rule out the possibility that Ignatius regarded Jesus as not having lived as a man on earth?

Does it ever end? Is there a cutoff point somewhere, when Christian writers started to mean "male human being living on earth" when they wrote the word "man"? And "human material" when they wrote "sarka"?

According to the lights of the time, eating and drinking.

But, although you haven't supported your view, you seem to disagree that those things were widely thought to be strictly of the material world. Well, in that case, is anything inconsistent with a sublunar venue? How are we to tell the difference? Perhaps you can fill us in on the distinctions, if any, between life in the sublunar sphere and life in this one.

And, while we're trying to sort that out, what sort of earthly things did not transpire in a sublunar venue? Farming? Fishing? Sex? Bodily excretions? The Tour de France? And what about exorcisms and healing of lepers? And even trials? :devil3:

Sorry for the reductio ad absurdam, but see where this is going?

Oh, I think it's plausible that Paul's readers would have been familiar with the prevailing philosophy of their time. Not likely, given what we know about most people and their knowledge of the PPOTT, but plausible. (An enormous percentage of Americans simultaneously embrace - as fact - Genesis and the Big Bang and Evolution. Go figure.) And it's even less likely that they would be familiar with one aspect - the division of the "upper world" into seven layers, one of which is dedicated to earth-like events - of one subset - cosmology - of one Hellenistic philosophical system - Middle Platonism - the extent of whose 1st century popularity can only be guessed at.

To my knowledge, Doherty doesn't support his contention that "most views of the universe also saw a division of the upper world into several levels—usually seven" with quotes from writers of the period. There's plenty of evidence of belief in a layered universe, of course, beginning with Plato - the heavens, the essential world, the material world of shadow, the underworld - but seven layers and all the rest? Well, maybe some, but I can't find evidence that such a belief pervaded the Eastern Mediterranean diaspora. Can you?

But regardless, mere plausibility isn't enough. We need evidence that Paul was speaking in such terms, and I think the limited acceptance of MJ
suggests a lack of such evidence, Carrier's conversion notwithstanding. TMK, he hasn't heard about VMJ yet. We shall see.

Well, I understand it to mean that the nature of a god/man's biography is a factor in deification, the higher the profile the better the chances. If MJ is correct, Jesus had no biography whatsoever, so that's not borne out.

I dont' see how.

Even more inexplicable than the deification of a non-entity that wasn't even imagined to have lived on earth? Why would such a ethereal being have an advantage over a man who was unjustly crucified and who met the terms set forth in Isaiah 53?

For a small piece of the relatively small VMJ puzzle, see those first four verses of Isaiah 53 in my reply to Ameleq13.

A big problem with thinking that the Jesus of the gospels existed. But that's an argument against MJ, not against VMJ.

Awk! Are you planning to occupy the Lee Stroebel counterpart position in the sublunar sphere?

(I agree with you, of course.)

Not much. But I need to review in light of VMJ. I recall that the most pertinent is Josephus' narrative about the unjust execution of James the Just. It was blamed for bringing about the divine retribution that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Other than that, there's the TF, but that's for another thread. I don't think it's especially pertinent to this discussion.

Whew. I'm running out of steam. With regard to BOTL: I think Jesus existed. Nonetheless, "Brother of the Lord" may not have meant sibling at all, but could have been used in the senses of the modern terms "caregiver" or conservator or brother's keeper. Because that role could be assumed without knowledge of an individual's origins, biography etc., one of those would be a better fit for VMJ. What's good for the goose...

Didymus

Didymus

Viewed. Thanks!

My concern isn't so much Isaiah's intent, but the post-crucifixion interpretation of the passage. If you've been following this discussion, you know that the Virtual Mythical Jesus scenario doesn't posit a historical Jesus similar to the figure described in the gospels, so the lack of Isa 53/gospel correspondence doesn't constitute a problem, nor does Isa 53's lack of traditional messianic (kingly) descriptors. To the contrary, the Jesus of VMJ is the obscure, sketchy Jesus of Isa 53 and Paul.

(As far as I can tell, the merger of Suffering Servant and Davidic messiah into a single savior figure is a Christian innovation.)

For the Virtual Mythical Jesus idea, the question is whether the unjust crucifixion of an obscure man named Jesus would have been viewed the light of Isa 53 after the crucifixion took place. I think it would have, and that Isa 53 served either as a portal to the notion that this Jesus had a divine nature, or as confirmation of that hunch.

Didymus

Amaleq13

It seemed to me you were talking about preexisting conditions that could have inspired those post-crucifixion interpretations. :huh:

For example:
You went on to identify specific beliefs that included the one in which I was particularly interested:
If these beliefs did not exist prior to the crucifixion, then they cannot be offered as influencial in the development of later interpretations, right?

Didymus

To the contrary. Old ideas, even if they are initially on the periphery, can be influential in the development of later interpretations. And a merger of similar ideas can certainly take place, as with the Suffering Servant and Davidic messianic traditions.

But regardless of that, the Book of Isaiah and the idea of a Suffering Servant sacrificing for "the many" did exist prior to the crucifixion. The Suffering Servant idea is also present in the Wisdom stories. So it seems entirely reasonable to think that the unjust crucifixion of an man whose description fits Isa. 53 1-4 would be seen in the light of Isa 53 and Wisdom. And later, as we see in the gospels, as a fulfillment of Davidic messianism.

I'm not sure if I'm addressing your concerns, but your questions and requests seem to be coming out of the blue. It might be helpful if your questions were accompanied by some indication of your own views.

Didymus

Amaleq13

That isn't contrary to anything I've written. In fact, I've been asking if there is evidence that that "the death of one man could serve as "payment" for the sins of all mankind" is one of those "old ideas".

Asking for evidence that it was seen in this light in no way suggests that the idea is unreasonable.

They follow directly from your assertion.

My view is that I would like to know if there is evidence of pre-Christian belief that the death of one man could serve as payment for the sins of all mankind.