judge

But were any of these people resurrected to be immortal (unable to die). FWIW the distinction between being resurrected back into mortal flesh and the kind paul wrote about was recognised in other early xtian texts such as in hebrews chapt 11.

mountainman

We should not pretend to know for certain whether any of these people actually lived in history, let alone knowing the answer to the claim that if they were historical people who really got resurrected after their deaths, were in fact immortal historical figures. For example, I for one - on the basis of all the evidence that I have seen with my own eyes - neither belief in the historical possibility of resurrection nor immortality. It's like trying to split fictitious hairs.



[T2]{c:bg=silver}List of resurrectees nominated for the title "First Born of the Dead"|{c:bg=silver}divine action?|{c:bg=silver}Result of Action|{c:bg=silver}GPS Reference||
Adam|breathes life|'living soul'|LXX?||
Elisha the prophet | 'just luck?' | "alive again"|(2 Kgs. 4.32-35)||
Lazarus | via Jesus | "alive again" | John 11:43f ||
In the time of the Passion “many bodies of those who had fallen asleep” | "zombies walked the streets of Jerusalem (eg: Leucius and Karinus) | were miraculously raised | Matt. 27.52f||
Jesus|resurrection|'life-giving spirit'| 1 Cor 15:20 [/T2]

mountainman

Are you travelling to the Dura-Europos exhibition spin?

mountainman

That's not a nice attitude GakuseiDon.

mountainman

:hitsthefan:

GakuseiDon

But accurate, and built on six years of debating with Earl. Still, he did better than you. I lost interest in your ideas within six weeks, though I used to love your "imperial mafia thug" line about Constantine. If you write a book, that would be a great title: "Constantine: imperial mafia thug!" aa__ lasted about six minutes.

Doug Shaver

No, but you might be the last of the old-timers around here to have noticed that he is rarely if ever intelligible, if you're just now noticing.

Toto

A digression has been split off here and moved to E.

EarlDoherty

This is a good example of how so many of the HJ defenders here are incapable of properly conducting a debate. The idea of a debate, after you have stated your position, is to rebut the opponent's position. And you can further enlarge on your own in light of that; it helps hone your own presentation in the direction of discrediting the opponent’s. Just labelling them “speculations and flights of fancies” does not constitute a counter-argument. Neither does calling my explanations “pretzels”. In my debates with spin, I take apart his position and arguments, and then try to take a different run at my own readings in a further attempt to clarify them against his. The two go together. By addressing the other’s reading and rebutting it, you show that you at least understand it and can perceive and demonstrate its failings. Without that, the whole exercise is rendered useless, and you are simply preaching. (Admittedly, spin does attempt to rebut in some cases, though not enough.)

Here is another example of how not to conduct a debate. Introduce something which is merely designed to distract. We all know what Paul means by “physical being” and since I am defending what Paul means, then we all know what I mean by it in the context of our discussion of this passage. Paul means a physical human being, modelled on Adam who himself was “made of the dust of the earth” (a poetic rendition by the NEB of xoïchos, ‘earthy’). Paul neglects to tell us that Christ was ever a “physical body” in this sense. If elsewhere I say Christ that descended into the sphere of the flesh where he took on something in human flesh’s “likeness,” this does not somehow make me inconsistent or dishonest, as Don would like to imply.

Of course he can’t respond at this point that “Christ was raised.” You are garbling the arguments I put forward, so it’s no wonder you can’t answer them effectively. It is only at the point when Paul starts to argue that the resurrected human beings will acquire spiritual bodies like the spiritual body of Christ (from verse 44b on) that it would be very pertinent and very useful to mention that, not only will they acquire a spiritual body like Christ’s, they will go through the same process, from physical to spiritual, that Christ himself did, from his incarnated state on earth to his resurrected state in heaven. The former he appeals to, the latter he is completely silent on, and indeed, as I said before, he excludes it, because he specifically states that the human/physical Adam was followed by the heavenly/spiritual Christ (v.46), with no human/physical Christ intervening—whether such a thing was directly pertinent to his argument or not (as Barrett likes to claim). It is still an exclusion.

Let me give you an example. Suppose an historian is writing about the relations between Germany and France between 1850 and 1950, and his focus is on the two German chancellors Bismarck and Hitler. The former had to do with the war between Germany and France around 1870 (can’t remember the term referring to that war), the latter with the Second World War. In discussing them, the historian makes a remark which styles the latter war the “next war” between the two countries after the 1870 war. Even if the First World War was not directly pertinent to his discussion about Bismarck and Hitler, he has still made a glaring exclusion by calling the WWII the “next war” after the 1870 one. One would be very justified in saying that this historian seems unaware of the very existence of WWI. That is what Paul has done in verse 46. You might claim some excuse to explain Paul’s silence, or try to read all sorts of things into the text to allegedly put it there, but it won’t change the fact.

If Christ was “in the flesh” before crucifixion, why do so many writers in so many communities, especially in the absence of any centralizing authority or unifying influence, consistently tell us that it was only in the ‘likeness’ of flesh (notice, judge, that I only put single quotes around “likeness”) and similar expressions? Wouldn’t that be one factor to indicate that the “flesh” Christ assumed was at least somewhat different than the normal kind of human flesh of people living on earth?

And no, it is not obvious that if “the last Adam was made a quickening spirit”, this means there was a transformation of him, just as there was for Adam. You see, if you had actually attempted to understand and rebut my reading of verse 45, you would probably not have made this mistake, since I spelled things out quite clearly. What was Adam “transformed” from in being “made” a living being? What was he before God created him? This makes no sense. Clearly, the ‘transformed’ idea cannot be applicable here. Neither is it applicable in the case of Christ in 45b, which ought to be in parallel with 45a. Paul doesn’t even bother to give us a verb in 45b, and yet you and spin (and most standard translations) claim that here he wants to get across the idea of Christ ‘progressing’ from the physical state to the spiritual state after his resurrection from the grave on earth, even though the thought would be anomalous with the first half of his comparison with Adam???

This isn’t a pretzel, Don. The twisting into odd and contorted shapes is entirely on your side. (And although I have nothing against pretzels, my aim is to untwist the contorted shapes that have been imposed upon Paul for almost two millennia.)

Now, you are right in suggesting that, from modern critical scholarship’s point of view, Paul would not appeal to living eyewitnesses for a bodily resurrection of Christ right in front of his followers. I’m well aware of that, but I included it partly in case you didn’t agree with them. Now I know you do. (Which raises the question of why, if you don’t subscribe to beliefs that usually make Christians Christians, why you adhere to historicism with such fierce tenacity and little evidence, and why you are so fiercely closed-minded to mythicism and dismissive of its evidence. Even more curiously, you are far from alone in that situation, which I have long remarked on. But I digress…)

But I could also make the point that even a conviction of the presence of Christ and firm belief in his resurrection (whether through revelation or study of scripture), Paul could still appeal to such convictions in his argument of 35-49. As long as he held a belief that Christ had been in physical human form in an incarnation on earth, then any testimony to a belief in Christ’s resurrection—even directly to spirit in heaven without a bodily return to earth, as all the epistles have it—would have served him in his argument that humans would go from physical form to spiritual form, just as Christ did. The silence remains just as noticeable and perplexing.

How can you think that you may be wrong, but are not in any doubt? Nor am I interested in going over all that again either, considering the impossibility of making any chink in your armor.

Earl Doherty

TedM

Wasn't that what he did when he said the last Adam (Christ, already described as a man) became a life-giving spirit?

Without qualification that 'man' means something other than the normal usage of the word why should we assume it means something else? And the word 'became' refers to a transformation, a process. Therefore the most natural way to interpret this verse is that Christ transformed from a man to a spirit--physical to spiritual. There is no need for him to explain anything more.

If Paul meant that Christ went from a likeness of man in another dimension to a spirit why doesn't he try to explain that? Surely you can see that the exclusions you point out pale in comparison to the exclusions that would exist if your theory is correct. Those exclusions (that would support your theory) only make sense when you allow for lots of interpolations in the passages. Is THAT ultimately what you think happened to Paul's writings?