Clivedurdle

It is not obvious at all.

Read the Creeds - fully god, fully man. What is historical about that?

I actually do not see much difference in Christology at the time of Paul - it was still god man stuff but there may have been very little man and it was a special new man.

Look at the entire history of art of pictures of Jesus. Where is the bloke having a cigarette with his mates in a pub? Everything is theologised in some way, Dali's Christ being a classic,

Didn't the dead Pope say that HJ is a heresy?

Imagine this Jesus is both god and man as being like a Siamese twin. If you seperate them you kill them both.

spamandham

By the end of the 2nd century, we have extant gospel texts containing geneaologies, birth narratives, teachings attributed to Jesus, etc. If you want to claim that these do not indicate a belief (or at least an attempt to enforce belief) in an earthly historical Jesus, it seems a comprehensive explanation for all this is in order. The gospels are much more than just creeds, and the arguments made by Origen, Polycarp, and other church fathers seem to reinforce the idea that they believed in (or at least promoted) a historical Jesus.

Clivedurdle

I would argue Paul may have put it quite near to him because of Daniel. It is equivalent to the end times people now - they may have helped cause the Roman clampdown.

But it is all mythical through and through - when something is alleged to have occurred is irrelevant - time and place are both characteristics of story - When shall we three meet again?

Clivedurdle

What evidence did they have that we do not?

spamandham

Huh? Are you suggesting that Paul's Jesus was a future prediction, rather than someone/something from Paul's past?

Whether it's mythical or not, is really not the topic of this thread. The question of this thread, is what did Paul believe?

ynquirer

That is additional reason to think that silence in the epistles on Jesus as a human being is immaterial. If Christology includes together a doctrine of who he was as a supernatural person and a story of who he was as a human being, then the very earliest times urged a development of the doctrine of the supernatural person first.

Doug Shaver

As far as the surviving historical record suggests, in the very earliest times of Christianity, Christians were all Jews, and their leaders were men who had known Jesus up close and personal. How did it happen that they became so fixated on his divinity that they seemed essentially unaware of his humanity?

ynquirer

Because they all knew him very well and that rendered writing about his humanity unworthy, while his divinity brought about such departure from the Jewish law that they had to discuss a lot to realize its main implications?

gurugeorge

I would expect it to be mentioned in connection with Cephas and/or the Pillars, as they are mentioned in the gospel summary itself. The fact that the historic manifestation was recent was made great play of later - after all, not many myths had their mythic entity so recent in the past - so it would seem natural for the historical aspecct to have been made great play of earlier, and it would seem natural for the fact of recentnesss, and any physical contact between Cephas/the Pillars, to have been mentioned.

But no, there's no tiniest hint that the Apostles were people who had first known Jesus personally as a human being and then had a vision of him. THEY JUST HAD A VISION (or "appearance", the Greek word for which Doherty says could in context also mean "understanding" or "grokking", on might say) OF HIM.

I'm lost We have the minus-gospel-Paul giving a fairly standard mythological-entity story, with a few pseudo-earthly, pseudo-historical (based on Scripture) details. This is just the same as other myths. The entity is spiritual but able to manifest on the earthly plane (to be "born") etc., or in heavenly planes.

The mythological entity looks the same as the Jewish mythological entity, to all intents and purposes (he is "the Anointed One") only with his advent placed in the past instead of the future.

What are you thinking is problematic about this picture?

No, "could appear in different forms" ANYWHERE in the sublunar realm. There have been numerous quotes given recently about events happening in heaven (Doherty recently quoted Isaiah again). All sorts of materially-detailed events (wars in heaven, etc.) happening in a "somewhere" that is vaguely connected with the "up" direction but is clearly NOT on earth.

Doherty is IMHO right that the definitions of these things in the ancient mind were "fuzzy", there wasn't much of a clear-cut distinction between simple physical events on earth and mythical events happening in timeless, or eternally present "heavens".

(This "fuzziness" is quite easy to understand if you understand that religious visions are like dream visions irrupting into ordinary everyday reality (almost the opposite of lucid dreaming, where a sense of ordinary reality irrupts into a dream). The mutability of dream experience mixes with ordinary everyday reality to produce a sense of, on the one hand, miraculous happenings on earth or, on the other hand, earth-like happenings in a miraculous nonmaterial realm; there is also a sense of communicating and interacting with entities that, as we would say, don't exist, but seem to the experiencer very strongly and lucidly to exist. The sense of ascent (flight, as in dream flight) and descent (falling, again as in dreams) are also notable features of some of these kinds of experiences - ascent to "heaven" or descent to the "underworld".)

gurugeorge

No it's the other way round, the supposition is that he did believe in a historical Jesus, when the picture he presents is evidently mythical.

The Aquinas example is not apposite because we already know from sources independent of Aquinas (outside his text) that he was part of a tradition in which the historicity of Jesus was well established. For him to believe in a purely mythical Jesus would be an aberration, an oddity, and would need to be proved. The default position for Aquinas is that he was talking about a historical entity.

We simply have no such equivalent independent (outside his text) reason to believe Paul believed in a historical Jesus, no reason to believe it. What he says about "Christ" looks mythical, therefore in leiu of any such independent attestation that what he was talking about was a historical person, the default position for Paul is that he was (as he seems to be) talking about a mythical entity. It's the idea that he believed in a historical entity that has to be proved.

It certainly is possible, but it has to be shown - and it cannot be shown from Paul's text alone, since the picture in the texts we have is a mythical picture.

The situation is the same for Hebrews, for the Didache, for the Shepherd of Hermas: the entity they talk about looks, on the face of it, purely mythical, with merely pseudo-historical events and doings of the type all myths have, and mostly based on Scripture. Therefore the default position is that the entity is, as it appears, mythical, and what has to be proved or shown is that the entity is, contrary to appearances, actually historical.