spin

Either the Jews killed Jesus or they didn't. Paul doesn't give any space for fudging in the matter.

Diogenes the Cynic

They didn't. Nobody thinks they did. Paul was just being a demagogue (and a bit of a quisling).

Acknowledging that Paul blames the Jews is not the same thing as actually believing him.

aa5874

The Pauline writer did NOT Claim the Romans crucified the Lord Jesus the Messiah and Son of God. You are employing an ASSUMPTION from Silence.

Diogenes the Cynic

It goes without saying (and the audience to which these missives were addressed certainly understood), that anyone who was crucified was crucified by the Romans.

spin

Wiggle, wiggle, squirm and niggle,
Logic warped and higgledy-piggle.



You are merely saying that you don't believe our earliest commentator on the subject. That's of little significance. You need to deal with him and not just use rhetoric to wiggle around his clear comment. Asserting your ontology this way doesn't change anything.

spin

It goes without saying that assertions are not evidence and if Paul says that Jesus was killed by the Jews isn't that the earliest form of the tradition we have? I'm not really interested in your attempts to historicize Paul. You don't have any evidence as a basis for doing so.

Diogenes the Cynic

That depends on what you think Paul was literally claiming. It is historically impossible for "the Jews" to have crucified Jesus. Paul's audience knew that. His blaming of the Jews could not have been intended as anything but rhetorical because everybody knew crucifixion was Roman, just like everybody knows Iraq was invaded by the US.

As a matter of fact, you can find stuff online blaming Israel for the invasion of Iraq, or for any number of other things that even those kinds of websites do not intend to be taken in the most literal way.

Diogenes the Cynic

The historicity of Paul is irrelevant. What matters is that the audience for these missives knew that only the Romans practiced crucifixion. It cannot have been the intention for any author to make a literal claim that the Jews had killed Jesus, only that they were to be blamed for the Romans doing it.

spin

I gather you interviewed them and are not simply asserting what you believe.

In other words you aren't interested in what Paul was talking about: you've reconstructed how it must have happened assuming historicity. In sum are you or are you not just bullshitting?

Iskander

Augustine said this:


Bishop Augustine of Hippo
ON THE CREED: A SERMON TO THE CATECHUMENS.
[DE SYMBOLO AD CATECHUMENOS.]


“15. "Forgiveness of sins." .........Name any heinous thing thou hast committed, heavy, horrible, which thou shudderest even to think of: have done what thou wilt: hast thou killed Christ? There is not than that deed any worse, because also than Christ there is nothing better. What a dreadful thing is it to kill Christ! Yet the Jews killed Him, and many afterwards believed on Him and drank His blood: they are forgiven the sin which they committed.


10. Scripture saith............................................. ........... In this is "the end of the Lord." The Jews hold Him, the Jews insult, the Jews bind Him, crown Him with thorns, dishonor Him with spitting, scourge Him, overwhelm Him with revilings, hang Him upon the tree, pierce Him with a spear, last of all bury Him. He was as it were left: but by whom? By those insulting ones.”



Drinking the blood of the hung one takes you to heaven even if as a Jew one is guilty of the worst possible crime!

The Christian god is a very ugly one. Paul and Augustine are a pair of sinister inventors.