Steven Carr

From Galatians for Everyone (or via: amazon.co.uk) page 3

Wright translates Galatians 1:1 as follows :-

Paul, an apostle.... (my apostleship doesn't derive from human sources!) Nor did it come through a human being. It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the father who raised him from the dead.

Why was Paul so keen to stress that Jesus was not a human being?

DCHindley

For Jesus was Metatron, who was Enoch, who under the direction of Michael and Gabriel grew in size until his body filled the whole universe. He sprouted 72 wings, grew 365 eyes and was arrayed with lights like an assembly line worker's Cadillac, and his material body burned away to be replaced with a form of pure fire.

Holy scripture says:

3 Enoch 9:1-5 (1) [T]he Holy One, blessed be He, put His hand upon me and blessed me with 536O blessings. (2) And I was raised and enlarged to the size of the length and width of the world. (3) And He caused 72 wings to grow on me, 36 on each side. And each wing was as the whole world. (4) And He fixed on me 365 eyes: each eye was as the great luminary. (5) And He left no kind of splendour, brilliance, radiance, beauty in (of) all the lights of the universe that He did not fix on me.

3 Enoch 15:1 As soon as the Holy One, blessed be He, took me in (His) service to attend the Throne of Glory and the Wheels (Galgallim) of the Merkaba and the needs of Shekina, forthwith my flesh was changed into flames, my sinews into flaming fire, my bones into coals of burning juniper, the light of my eye-lids into splendour of lightnings, my eye-balls into fire-brands, the hair of my head into hot flames, all my limbs into wings of burning fire and the whole of my body into glowing fire. (3 Enoch Ch 15)

I believe.

DCH

PS: In the flesh my name is David. Pray for me, for I have been translated by Wright, which was sooo wrong.

Transient

When "Jesus" was on earth he was partly human so he had only partial knowledge of what his father (himself really) was doing etc.
So after he died and was raised from the dead and had a face to face chat with himself he finally understood everything.
But alas he realised that he had picked the wrong chappies to do his work.
They were a bit simple and not capable of understanding the "true" gospel and quite unfit to take it to the gentiles.
So he came up with a brilliant plan - he would come to a man called Paul in a vision and give him all the crap he needed to write stuff like Romans (nicely complicated so hardly anyone can understand it without inside knowledge - given only to the chosen ones).
Paul was ideally suited because he had never met "Jesus" and didn't have the foggiest about him really.

Doug Shaver

I don't see him stressing it at all. I see him writing about Jesus as if he presumed that it would never have occurred to his readers that he could have been talking about a human being.

DCHindley

I think you are wrong here. There are several places in the Pauline corpus where a human Jesus Christ are referred or alluded to.

Besides, if the intended audience was totally unaware of a human Jesus, then why 2 Corinthians 5:16?

"16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer"

DCH

Ben C Smith

If you both think that Paul is denying Jesus was a man in Galatians 1.1, do you think he is affirming Jesus was a man in 1 Corinthians 15.21, 47?

Ben.

Solo

Good ! Here is my version:

Ever since God created humans he would be making some of them go temporarily insane, from time to time making them think they were like him - supermen - and then drop them like hot potatoes, restoring their normal perception of reality, and making them realize, they were being fooled. But some really liked the idea of being something special and getting high and tried to hang on to the grandiose feelings and find some sure-proof way to demonstrate themselves as God's favorites. The Jews had a name for such guys (who used to keep to themselves most of the time) and kept sort of a log of them, where they recorded their inanities just in case YHWH really told them something that could be useful in the future.

At a point in time, when the Jews were overrun by decimals and geometry, a word got around that this God-insanity was actually available to ordinary folks and could be taught just like decimals and geometry. Led by the more ambitious God-seers, they formed communities dedicated to making folks with nothing else to do find the God-like mind space. They were starved and kept away from sex and sleep and made recite strange incantations and doven all day until their brain gave up under the stress and they really started seeing things. So the guys who got high naturally, said : 'you see, we told you'. So many in those times would look for believers who would reinforce the idea that the insanity really was a special connection to God and that they had a guaranteed way of restoring Israel which they were told during the time out with God, was a rotten place and about to be wasted by heathen and sinners if the restoration plan was not followed.

So about this time along comes this bright guy from some village in the north who was 'a natural' and caught the God fever. He grabbed some local dudes not particularly fond of manual labour, who were ready to believe anything. He made rounds in his native region calling for repentance of sins and forgiving them as a way of getting his group provisioned by complete strangers. He got the authorities excited and so he moved south convinced that God would do what is necessary to make the euphoric kingdom a permanent affair. Running out of options, he decided to force the sign by making a ruckus in the temple. He was nabbed, taken before council which agreed in majority that he was a nuisance and best be handed over to the superpower. The marines nailed him to some crude carpentry which was the Roman way of showing to aliens that it's stupid to fight a civilized way of life.

But this was not the end of it because there were God-fever folks in Jerusalem who thought the council was dumb Jews, kissing Roman ass, and wasting a God's messenger who was saying what they were saying albeit in accented Aramaic. So they took in the village companions and send them on missions to spread the word in the diaspora that the end was near and another God's true love was killed by the abominable heathen in Jerusalem and their quislings.

The word reaches another bright underachiever who dabbles in theopolitics. He is incensed by the missions, by the apocalyptic nonsense, by the backwater anti-Roman knee-jerk, and gets worked up psychadelic. And God tells him: ' Ha, fooled you too...now you know what it is like getting God-insane, and get that feeling that you are manipulated by me, and doing crazy things without realizing they look crazy to other people and yourself when you come down........but I tell you what, there is another way of looking at it, a way out of the humiliation I wrought on you....let's say I am right and you were a conceited prick kicking against my idea to reveal myself to someone just like yourself, an obscure earthling with no claim to power and fame......blah, blah, [read Paul for details] ......so, here's the deal: you are going to preach my 'wisdom' of JC - 'the last on earth - first in heaven gospel', or you will be destroyed in madness. I have plans to create a new religion out of Jesus and you...no...never mind Moses...I am the law...all you need is love...hell, who said that ?'

Jiri

Toto

Jiri:

:notworthy:

Steven Carr: please get over your obsession with the Bishop of Durham. He wrote this book under the name "Tom Wright" as an indication that he was getting all folksy and trying to relate to the unwashed masses, so I doubt that he expected anyone to actually analyze what he wrote. But when I read the first page on Amazon I . . . well, I started to remember why I gave up on Christianity.

Ben C Smith

What, if I may ask, disturbs you about the first page of the book?

Ben.

ETA: (Other than its obviously having been written for a very lay readership.)

gurugeorge

Hehe, wonderful stuff (although as a bit of a crazy person myself, I'd perhaps take a slightly less jaundiced view ) but I think the bit I've highlighted in red is an interpolation.