aa5874

Again, you are SPECULATING. The Pauline writers did NOT claim they started the Christian Faith and that they STARTED the Christian Faith through visions.

Your IMAGINATION has gone WILD.

Or perhaps Sub-lunar???

The Jesus story and character was EXPLAINED, not by visions of "Paul", but by the WORD of God in the books of the prophets and the Gospels by virtually ALL apologetic sources, including even the Pauline writers.

What total nonsense!!! It is quite ACCEPTABLE UNIVERSALLY to use translated material. Even in court trials translated texts are used.

And further, every day ordinary people, Non-Experts, who "haven't got languages" examine evidence for credibility.

You should KNOW that. Have ever heard about THE JUROR?

THE JUROR "who hasn't got languages" does NOT have to be an EXPERT to examine evidence or translated text for credibility and ORDINARY people "who haven't got languages" can present written evidence.


You have IDENTIFIED your own problem. You listen to the WRONG people.

When it comes to what is CREDIBLE and what is NOT I examine the relevant TRANSLATED sources of antiquity.

These are some of the people I LISTEN to.

Philo, Josephus, Justin Martyr, Aristides, Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, Celsus, Lucian, the NT Canon, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Ignatius, Origen, Eusebius, and Chrysostom,

[ What a load of BS. This is the worse I have seen from you . It is just ridiculous to assert that one must KNOW Greek to determine the credibility of a translated text.

But, you ADMIT you are AMATEUR yet argue about "AUTHENTICITY" of copies of copies of copies of copies...........of copies of NT texts although you "haven't got the languages".

What authority do you have to argue for AUTHENTICITY as an amateur?

You don't really KNOW what you are talking about.

Solo

Oh you did keep me laughing, Earl, in the sections on Q, and yes, I will address the way you establish the existence of Q in a longer essay - on which, btw, I am working on already. As for Hebrews 8:4, if I remember correctly you claimed that it was a 'smoking gun' for historical Jesus, and I laughed it off with you, given that nothing changed anywhere in the New Testament scholarship as a result of your monumental discovery.

But you see Earl, this sounds to me just a tad too naive. Sure, 'Q stands or falls on the neutral evidence for and against it'; those are true words. But the problem, not to say irony, here is there is no Q, so the 'evidence' for it may in fact be just confessions - very much like some of the naive defenders of Jesus historicity make against you - that it is plainly preposterous to think Q did not exist, and that Luke actually knew Matthew.

But as I have promised I will write something longer, addressing the points that you make for Kloppenborg in defending the two-source theory against Goodacre. I will not address the analysis of the putative document however. You understand, I trust, that if I don't find a reasonable case for Q's existence made, issues like the stratification of Q, or whether Q pre-supposes a historical founder, become moot and are not really interesting to me.

Best,
Jiri

archibald

I have been revisiting certain passages, to honestly try to see them as referring to non-earthly, and it's a struggle.

Here, for example:


1 Corinthians 2:7-9

King James Version (KJV)


'7But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory:

8Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

9But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.'

This links to my question (which nobody answered) about why Jesus was crucified. I've wondered, if he had descended into a lower realm, what did he do to confuse or annoy the residents? It doesn't appear to be explained. What sort of myth is that? It's as if......heresy alert.......the premise of the letters is that a crucifixion has already happened! Imagine that.

The only brief explanation as to reasons offered might be in the above verse, where 'they' hadn't known his 'secret'. Is that it? Is that the lot? But what secret message could he have brought to the sublunar realm that could have been so notable and controversial?

Surely there is a giant clue in verse 9. The 'secret' (whatever it was, and it's not hard to guess, since it's clarified in v9 as 'the things which God hath prepared for them that love him') from God has not entered into the heart of..........man. That's the 'them' in 'the things which God hath prepared for them'. Not the heart of wispy sublunar entities. Us. Does it make sense to say that inhabitants of an upper realm crucified him because they did not understand a message that was not directed at them, but at humans? Does Paul's God send secret messages to demons? Why would a God of the humans be addressing messages to upper realm entities?

Furthermore, what could his message mean to such supposed entities? That they could die and rise? Surely again, that's meant to be us, the people Paul is writing to.

On the face of it, there seems no strong reason, other than a tenuous quote mine out of context, to try to get archontes to mean non-earthly.

I have tried the same thing with a number of other verses, in their contexts. Try as I might, it seems almost obtuse to think that there is an upper realm myth going on. Can nobody see that whether Jesus was a real historical figure or not, the text is, in fact, littered from end to end with earthly/human references?

As for the text having been so reworked that it's unrecognizeable, I'm still open to that as a possibility, but it would have required a heck of a lot of revamping, IMO. And not just revamping to recongfigure Paul into a Catholic pigeon-hole. To get Paul to be doing a non-earthly myth figure, it would have to be something much more than that. And why would anybody revamp to achieve that? It's not as if there's much evidence of a 'non-earthly Jesus' heretic cult to counter in the first place.

archibald

To add a thought:

The text above says rulers of THIS world. Greek 'toutou'. Sounds very like the one that in Romans 12:2, apparently using the same words, Aioni touto, he asks his (human) readers 'not to be conformed to'.

Now, how is it not likely that 'this' refers to the one he and his readers share? The one the oh-so important prophecies seemed to be about?


I'm taking alternative interpretations now. :]

No, in fact, I'll do the first one myself.

Jesus was on his way to earth, with the message for the humans, as per prophecy. He had to go via the sublunar realm. While there, the rulers there crucified him, maybe just because he was not a resident, but something like an illegal immigrant, or because they didn't realise what a heavenly bigwig he really was. So when the text says that they did not understand his message, it means that they killed him without understanding that he had an important message to deliver next level down, which he never got to, because, unfortunately, they killed him, for reasons not specified.

I know. It's a pretty crap explanation and fails to match the text very well. Not only that, but it sounds like an odd datum for thinking his death had anything to do with salvation of 'our' sins. Sounds to me like if God sent his son down in disguise as it were, and the local mob snuffed him out and sent him back up, God would be very cross and do something bad to the sublunar archontes. Or at least try to get the message through again.

TedM

Yes archibald, I have made the same point a number of times and it never gets acknowledged here on the thread. The entire text surrounding 1 Cor 2:9, starting in the prior chapter, is all about the wisdom of men that only God, or his Spirit, reveals to them, and that verse makes clear that he is still only talking about wisdom of men. It is so obvious even I could see it.

Toto

Archibald: Doherty has a long discussion of the meaning of "rulers of this age." It has been the subject of a lot of critical commentary.

This argument doesn't seem to be on his website, but there is a discussion of it here from a Christian who argues that these demons were working through the earthly rulers.

aa5874

So, it was rulers on earth who supposedly crucified Jesus but they were possessed by demons.

The NT denies that Jesus was crucified in the Sub-lunar. There is ZERO argument for or against any notion that Jesus was crucified in the Sub-lunar from any Skeptics, Heretics or Christian writers in antiquity.

archibald

Thanks Toto. My bad. Yes, I have been in threads where that has been discussed. I don't see it radically affecting my reading of the passage above (1 Cor 2:7-9). I think I badly worded my comment about archontes, having previously agreed and understood that it was ambiguous (though personally I don't see enough reason to not opt for earthly rulers or at a pinch earthly rulers under the influence of evil demons). I should have said, 'to try get the events to be non-earthly'.

Incidentally, I see that 'article' claims Doherty agrees that Philippans 2:6-7 is a pre-Pauline hymn? That seems odd, since it contains a reference to Jesus being made in the likeness of humans. Not only is there (as ever) no reason to think this means 'humanlike but in an upper realm', but, more interestingly, if it's pre-Pauline, what does it do to the arguments of those who say Paul was the originator of the religion, and that there were no followers before him already?

gurugeorge

Joshua the Anointed One, the Son of God, Saviour, of course - who else? So what is there to connect that figure to any person who ever actually lived?

Where are the "followers" in the "Paul" writings? That's precisely the causal chain I'm banging on about - there is none, unless you simply take it for granted that the people "Paul" is talking about are the same as the "apostles" mentioned in the gospels.

There are possibly some people involved with a Messianic cult or cults, who "Paul" may or may not have persecuted (I think that stuff is dubious, interpolation in the letters based on the much later Acts, but it would take too long for me to fish out the arguments for that position here - it's been discussed here a few times).

But I challenge you to find anything in the "Paul" letters, that suggests that anybody "Paul" is talking about either saw or heard a human being called "Jesus". Also look in "Hebrews" (the other earliest writing) to see if there's anything suggestive of a human being.

But it's not just a ghost, is it? It's the Son of God. To say it's a ghost is to accept that it's a vision of someone who "Paul" had known of as a human being before that. So how often does it happen that someone has a vision of someone recently deceased who appears as the Son of God?

Where is the human being - in any of "Paul"'s writings, where is he talking about a human being?

FOR WHATEVER REASON, there's no evidence of a human being - it simply isn't there. So why even bother hypothesizing one? What so much as gives you the idea of one?

Just later tradition, which fills in some earthly biography for the deity's earthly sojourn; and centuries after that leads some rational Christians who want to keep their cake and eat it, to hypothesize that maybe there was a wise human being at the root of the myth.

gurugeorge

No, you're just talking about logical coherence between texts, not credibility. Your position is based on your understanding of what coheres and doesn't cohere in translated texts.

That has nothing to do with credibility. You are confusing scholarly study of ancient texts with legal practice.

Whether what someone says in an ancient text is believable or not involves deeper investigation than you're capable of - because you don't have the languages.

IOW, if text A contradicts text B, how do you know which is the text that's telling the truth?

If at all, only by means of lot of investigation utilizing good knowledge of the languages involved, a whole bunch of other, background literature, etc., etc., etc. You can't just stare at translations of text A and B and arbitrarily decide based on whatever you fancy.