Clivedurdle

:notworthy:

The Bishop

I'm afraid I just don't get the point even if it does mean "not human". The only way this could be significant would be if it was Paul, specifically, who was inventing Jesus. And if that was the case, why would he complain about Peter and James having been privileged enough to meet him in the flesh? Jesus was all about the spiritual as far as Paul is concerned, but I don't see however much Paul writes about Jesus in spiritual, heavenly and divine terms makes the slightest difference to whether Jesus existed or not, since he never met him.

There's a segment of Christianity which reinterprets the entirety of the Old Testament in terms of the Christian gospel. Barbara Thiering believes that every word of the Gospel is a "pesher" of events that took place in Qumran. The whole of the Deuteronomistic History interprets its history entirely through whether what the people was good or bad in the eyes of God. It simply strikes me that clearly some events are written about in a way as to be interpreted as scripture fulfillment, but that doesn't mean that something never happened in the first place. There are really too many non-Old Testament details for the idea to hold water that the whole thing is a fictional re-imagining of OT stories. Jesus was a Galilean carpenter. Where is that in the OT? If you're just talking about the general storyline, a great deal of that was simply filling in narrative between sayings of Jesus, the only pre-existing documentary account of his life, known as Q. I'm not really concerned with their historicity.

In any case, I was specifically talking about the miracles, because they are routinely dismissed as fictional on the simple grounds of absence of supernatural forces. Soul Searching by Nicholas Humphrey discusses psychic phenomena in general (from a critical and skeptical viewpoint) and makes reference to Jesus's miracles in particular, pointing out that for the most part they are the equivalent of conjurer's tricks, and as is well known, faith healers operate right up to the present day. Harry Potter is clearly fictional, because the imagination allows him to fire unmistakeable lightning bolts from his wand and fly around on an extremely un-airworthy broomstick. If they were making up miracles, why not go the whole hog?

From my very earliest being told the story of Jesus's crucifiction, I assumed that he never died. When you are told that crucifixees generally last a few days, but Jesus died within hours, it immediately seems quite suspicious, don't you think? As a devout child I saw Jesus's "resurrection" as simply the hero of the story successfully cheating death. As an atheistic adult, I look back on that story and think, "Hmm... interesting...."

The Bishop

Please do correct me if the policy here is exclusively no double-posting. AnywayThis is one reason I'm on the HJ side. It's quite specifically a technique of the religious proselytiser to go from "it need not be literal" to a firm conclusion "it's a metaphor" with no intermediate argument. I myself do not like seeing rationalists using the techniques of the religious.

When people talk about metaphors in other contexts, they are generally a lot more specific. Can you explain specifically what crucifiction is a metaphor for? If he died and then was reborn in the spirit (something Paul himself believed he had evidence for, having spoken to Jesus in spiritual form), exactly what is metaphorical about the death part? And, since this was a couple of decades afterwards, and Paul never met the real Jesus, how does any of this make any difference to Jesus's historicity?

It's like I could be enticed into a fan club for John Lennon. I become a huge fan myself. All I have to go on is his music. I write in my diary how much I love John Lennon, how much he means to me, how his music makes my spirit soar. If it wasn't for that spawn of the devil who shot him in 1980, we could be enjoying his beauty to this day. Quite a lot of people, I think, write about dead people that they are fans of in spiritual and metaphorical terms, doubly so if they never met them. But pointing out all the metaphorical parts of my writings makes not a jot of difference to whether the original object of my desire really existed or not. The very fact that Paul is writing in hagiographic terms about a specific, named person, is pretty much enough evidence for me that there was such a person, but that is not my point. My point is that you can't deduce from metaphorical language the absence of a real person being written about.

Ted Hoffman

Wow,
MJers sure have a lot of work to do.
Bishop, are you aware that there were Christians, like Marcion, who did not believe in a historical Jesus?

Iasion

Greetings,

I think Paul meant something like this :

the Christos = our soul, an image of the Godhead reflected inside all humans.

crucifixion = incarnation of the soul in the lower world, or by extension, to be deadened

to be buried = similar to crucified, buried in the physical

to be raised = to be initiated, to realise the higher self within, to rise above the fleshly passions

the cross = the body, the physical plane.
OR
to disconnect from the lower physical (see Clement below), a verb meaning to cross over into the higher reality.


Heraclitus :
"We live their death and they live our death"
(referring to the psyche or the subtle body.) The idea being that our higher soul "dies" when it ensouls us in physical life, but then lives again when we die.


Clement :
' "For the minds of those even who are deemed grave, pleasure makes waxen," according to Plato; since "each pleasure and pain nails to the body the soul" of the man, that does not sever and crucify himself from the passions. '
...
' For if you would loose, and withdraw, and separate (for this is what the cross means) your soul from the delight and pleasure that is in this life, you will possess it, found and resting in the looked-for hope '

This last comment is the only time anyone explains any of these terms that I have found, the term "cross" seems fluid and uncertain in Paul.


Iasion

Llyricist

Where does he do this?

Are you talking when he said that Jesus appeared to the 12, to Cephas, and the 500.... and then, as one born out of time (or the wrong time, or abortion, or whatever), to himself?

The appearances he speaks of in all those cases are appearances of the risen Christ, not of the living Jesus "in the flesh".

ETA:
To put a finer point on it, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 (Darby):

For I delivered to you, in the first place, what also I had received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; 4 and that he was buried; and that he was raised the third day, according to the scriptures; 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the most remain until now, but some also have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James; then to all the apostles; 8 and last of all, as to an abortion, he appeared to *me* also.

yalla

Gidday Bishop,
You wrote ''And if that was the case, why would he [Paul] complain about Peter and James having been privileged enough to meet him [JC] in the flesh?"
I added the bits in [].

AFAIK Paul does not state or even imply that anyone met JC in the flesh.

Can you cite something that says that they did, according to Paul?
Paul does not regard his "experience" of JC to be any less than that of anyone else. I thought I saw a reference to that in this thread, perhaps it was elsewhere, but anyway it is nowhere stated that anyone saw a real live JC by Paul, ''appearances'' yes, but no indication that they differed from the "appearances'', the revelations, to Paul which were not real.

Your question "Can you explain specifically what crucifiction is a metaphor for? " is answered by Galatians 5.24 '' they that are Christs have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts'' and Romans 6.6 "our old man [ie. the impure person pre faith in JC] was crucified with him [Christ], that the body of sin might be done away and we might be no longer enslaved by sin"

The metaphor of "according to the flesh", where flesh =ungodliness, sin, impurity, mortality and so in is continued.
Crucifixion is the method by which JC died and thus sacrificed for people, acc. to Paul.
Metaphorically believers in JC can do the same and thus conquer sin, death and so on.
After that believers are no longer "in the flesh" but ''in the spirit" /"in Christ" see Romans 8.4.
Now obviously they are in exactly the same physical bodily state they were in prior to their belief.
Thats why its a metaphorical change.
Its the essence of Paul's argument in Romans.

Have I answered your questions?
Not being religious I have difficulty in translating these concepts, they tend to be outside my mind set, and I have pinched much of the above from F.F.Bruce who believes in an HJ.
cheers
yalla

Edit; 2 posters snuck in before me.

jjramsey

Marcion was a docetist, not a mythicist. Docetists believe that Christ only appeared to take on flesh but that this was an illusion, which implies that there was some illusion to be seen at some point in history.

Doug Shaver

I don't think it would be at all reasonable to consider them equally likely prima facie. I have no problem with an initial assumption, held before any examination of the evidence is undertaken, that the gospels are embellished versions of actual history -- as long as the assumption is treated as tentative, subject to abandonment when the evidence suggests it ought to be.

I think that a careful examination of the entire body of relevant evidence fails to support that conclusion. I also think think reasonable people can disagree about that. What I don't think reasonable is any claim that Jesus' historical existence is so well demonstrated by hard evidence that only crackpots or fanatics can doubt it.
How do you explain, to either friend or foe, how and why his life meant anything for personal salvation without discussing that life? Paul talks about only his death (and resurrection). How could anyone discuss the importance of anyone's death while treating his life as an irrelevancy? Surely, if his death was considered important, it had to have been because of something about his life?

The Bishop

Don't be sillly, Ted. Marcion, as a Gnostic, may have believed Christ's appearance to have been some kind of illusion of incarnation, but that's completely different to "not believing in a historical Jesus". That would be not believing that the events that gave rise to Christianity occurred, and if Marcion believed that, why did he include Luke in his first version of Christian Scripture?

Hey, Iasion. It's actually Silas from sciforums here. I'm probably not going to be The Bishop for long. At any rate, I still don't see how crucifixion being a metaphor in later writings debars crucifixion as an actual event. See below.

I'm not religious either, why are you "translating concepts"? If crucifixion is being used as a metaphor for separation from sin or whatever, it hardly gives any credence to the concept that there was no actual crucifixion in the first place.

Quite right. I was quoting what someone else said, without checking properly. On the other hand, (and tying in with yalla's question below) I think the implication there is that if Jesus appeared "to the twelve" that there was a twelve for him to appear to - that "the twelve" were the companions of Jesus in life. In other words, it's too much to state that what Paul wrote fits with the following scenario: someone called Cephas had a great idea. "What if the Son of God came down to us and revealed himself to us in all his glory in the guise of a man named Jesus?" he says to 11 mates. He later tells a man called Paul about this who claims something similar happen to him - and then later someone called Mark thought that if Jesus had appeared after death to "the twelve" and later to Paul who wrote of these things, then it's time someone worked up a back story that made Jesus a living person who lived, had 12 companions, died, rose from the dead and appeared in front of the 12.

Galatians 1:17-19: <<17 Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.

18 Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

19 But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother.>>

Claims that there are no hints of Gospel tradition in Paul tend to forget the fact that when for example he mentions Peter and James here without any apparent context, the evident reason is that the people he describes are already well known as Apostles to the Christian community - and they must know the Apostles from Gospel tales no less than they know about Jesus. MJ'ers ask "Why no mention of Gospel specific facts?" when nothing in the epistles indicates that he is preaching to the unconverted, to people who don't already know the story of Jesus's life and of the role of Peter etc in it. In this passage in Galatians he appears to be emphasising the strength of his faith despite only having met Peter and Jesus's brother James of all the apostles.