Rick Sumner

This claim gets made a lot, but it's actually false, and everybody knows it. For some reason it just ends up ignored.

The earliest literature (Paul) exceeds almost all later literature in terms of christology. There is no smooth curve in early christianity.

One of the greater strengths of Earl's case is that he can explain this rather surprising anomaly.

This is tangential to the present topic, of course, except as an example of how expectations color claims.

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Diogenes the Cynic

The original Christians didn't do that. The Jerusalem cult didn't do that.

Diogenes the Cynic

Paul never says that Jesus is God, and the Jerusalem cult certainly didn't think Jesus was God.

Steven Carr

Evidence please. (And none of those arguments from silence....)

Are you claiming that when Paul said his Lord had instituted this on the night he was betrayed, Paul was telling porkies, and the people in Jerusalem never took part in any such ceremony?

Did Paul also lie about his Lord being betrayed?

And just how did Christians in other churches get away with pretending that Jesus had said such things, when the heartland of Christianity did not take part in such things?

Steven Carr

And nobody thought Mercury was Zeus, which means nobody thought Mercury was a god.

Paul, of course, simply ate the body and blood of his Saviour, while telling everybody that Jesus was a normal human being....

Diogenes the Cynic

How does this have any application to Judaism?
They didn't.

Diogenes the Cynic

It's theologically impossible and absurd, and we know that the Ebionites (the Jewish-Christian movement closet to the original movement) didn't do it, and we know that Paul claims the Jerusalem cult still followed the la and kept kosher, which means they could not have had any awareness of Paul's
"new covenant," which was the putative point of the eucharist.
Correct. Paul never says the Jerusalem cult did it.
He didn't say "betrayed," he said "delivered," which is too vague to draw a strong conclusion about. He could have easily just meant the Temple priests.
What do you mean by "get away with it?"

It's not like there was anything stopping them. They had no contact with the Jerusalem cult, for the most part, and Paul as much as admits the Jerusalem church didn't recognize any new covenant when he says they still observe the law.

Steven Carr

I thought we were talking about Christianity.

A clue. Jews and Christians believe different things.

Steven Carr

SO how did that oral tradition get developed, when people outside Judea had virtually no contact with the Jerusalem cult?

But why would they need contact with the Jerusalem cult? They could read all about Jesus in scripture. After all, Paul had no need to find out anything Jesus had done from going to Jerusalem. He only went once and didn't learn much.

It was almost as though there had been no Jesus in Jerusalem.

dog-on

How do you know this?