maryhelena

Yes, I would say all this makes more sense once the Jerusalem temple is no more - and would help to date Paul post 70 ce. I'm interested though in why you would think that a post Hadrian date is to be preferred rather than the events of 70 ce.

my bolding

ApostateAbe

Don't use hyperbole where you shouldn't. We have at least some reason for the inference. If Paul thought of Jesus as the agent of the apocalypse, then it is reasonable to suspect that Paul's Jesus knew that the apocalypse was going to happen. If Paul's Jesus was the authority of Paul's religion, then it is reasonable to suspect that Paul would have believed (or claimed to believe) that he got the information from Jesus. And, as it turns out, that seems to be a reasonable interpretation of 1 Thessalonian 4:15. My emphasis:

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.

Clivedurdle

Did Paul think he had already been? Why did he not write return of the Lord?

Toto

Actually, you don't. There is no reason.
Is this what you meant to say? Paul's Jesus knew that the end of the world was coming?

But Paul did get his information from Jesus - the Jesus of his visions, "not from any man."

maryhelena

Quite - Paul has given himself that role - the apocalyptic prophet. Thus, dating Paul post 70 ce - Paul's apocalyptic 'message' becomes related to something other than the end of Jerusalem and it's temple. Related to something more 'spiritual', more intellectual, than physical, material things. (as go things in our physical world - so in our intellectual/spiritual world. Ideas come and they go in our intellectual/spiritual 'temple' - as do the literal sacrifices in earthly temples). So, maybe, if Paul is on about the Lord coming again - all he is probably saying is something along the lines of - 'another vision is on the way, don't know where, don't when - but it will come'. Which is nothing more than a realization that intellectual evolution is part of our human identity...


my bolding

spamandham

By and large, is that really Paul's message? His message is about internal transformation. His 'kingdom of god' refers to the body of believers not some end-times silliness. Paul's resurrected Jesus is *clearly* a spirit being, rather than a zombie, and Paul refers to Jesus as the first fruit and uses his resurrection as proof that believers would be resurrected in the same way. Paul's resurrection refers to a spiritual afterlife, not a hoard of zombies.

Even today you see confusion among Christians as to whether you go to heaven when you die*, or are physically resurrected and then ascend to heaven, etc. This was a point of contention in the early church. So while you do find a small amount of apocalyptic language in Paul, this seems to me to be in conflict with Paul's overarching ideas, and so is best explained as the work of another author who preferred the zombie approach to eternal life.


(* the most common belief seems to be that you go to heaven immediately when you die, then at the end of days your body is physically resurrected for the rapture, whereby you are finally judged to determine whether or not you get to live in physical form forever in heaven)

spamandham

The temple was destroyed in 70 CE, but 2 Thes. is not actually about the destruction of the temple, it's about the actions of the "man of lawlessness" and the rebellion. The Bar Kochba revolt was a direct response to Hadrian's razing of the remains of the temple and desecration of the temple mount. This well matches the description found in 2 Thes.

I'm willing to consider that it's describing the events of 70CE, but am unaware of anyone matching the actions of the "man of lawlessness" in regard to 70CE. Also, the destruction of the temple in 70 CE was a reaction to rebellion, and though 2 Thes. might be read that way, it seems more natural the other way around....that the rebellion is the result of the actions of the "man of lawlessness", which again matches the Bar Kochba revolt, but does it match the events of 70 CE?

spamandham

I tend to think Paul thought of himself as the one who brought the lord to the world.

Gal 1:15+
But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles...

ApostateAbe

Your evidence for the claim that there isn't enough data to form a general theory of Christianity is that there is a diversity of such theories in the scholarship. I must again warn you of the fallacy of inferring that the large number of models in the scholarly population is conclusive evidence that there is no consensus, that it is instead a chaotic arena of diversity. It may be easy to get that impression from the diversity of ideologues with their models of Jesus each to suit their own ideology (including the people in this forum), and news media that prefers to report on scholars with their own pet theories on Jesus (again to suit their own ideologies). But, there is a consensus, by which I mean a majority opinion, not a 100% agreement. I did a search in Google Scholar for jesus consensus eschatology. The inclusions of eschatology may slant the search in my favor, but, if you like, you may do your own search. Here is a sampling of quotes that assume a scholarly critical consensus that the beginning of Christianity was Jesus the apocalyptic prophet.

"The Continuum history of apocalypticism," 1998, Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins and Stephen J. Stein.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of a noneschatological Jesus today is John Dominic Crossan. As early as 1973 he wrote that the scholarly consensus that Jesus' message was "apocalyptic eschatology" had become "extremely problematic."

"The Corrected Jesus," Richard B. Hays, 1994, First Things 43 (May 1994): 43-48,

In contrast to this arbitrary procedure, consider the following statement of the mainstream critical
consensus by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a scholar who can hardly be accused of traditionalist bias:
"Exegetes agree that it is the mark of Jesus' preaching and ministry that he proclaimed the basileia of God
as future and present, eschatological vision and experiential reality." Characteristic of early Christian
preaching is its proleptic eschatology, its conviction that God's coming kingdom has already begun to
impinge upon the present in such a way that God's final justice is prefigured-but hardly fully realized-now.
(For an elegant extended example, see Romans 8.) The gospel tradition offers us strong reasons to believe,
as Schussler Fiorenza indicates, that a similar proleptic eschatology characterized Jesus' own proclamation.

Bart Ehrman has some very useful reflections on the subject, that may provide both an answer to the question of consensus and an explanation for why it may seem otherwise to lay observers.

Jesus: apocalyptic prophet of the new millennium (or via: amazon.co.uk), BD Ehrman, 1999, p. 127.

No one any longer agrees with Schweitzer's particular reconstruction of Jesus' message and mission (at least no one I've ever met). But his basic emphasis--that Jesus is to be situated in the context of first-century Palestinian Judaism and that he was himself an apocalypticist--have carried the day for much of the twentieth century, at least among critical scholars devoted to examining the evidence. In recent years, however, the apocalyptic view of Jesus has come under increasing attack in academic circles. For anyone conversant with the ebb and flow of historical study, this should come as no surprise.^2]

For one thing, very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want--especially when dealing with such potentially dry matters as history and such potentially inflammatory matters as religion--is relevance. If Jesus was completely a man of his own time, with a worldview and a message totally out of sync with our own materialist, postcolonialist, secular-humanist, or whatever-ist society, then he may be an interesting historical figure, but he is scarcely relevant (or so it's commonly thought) to the issues and concerns people need to confront today. And so it's no wonder that some scholars--who are human after all--want to make Jesus into something else--a proto-feminist, for example, or a Neo-Marxist, or a countercultural Cynic.

From superscript #2, the discussion continues at the endnotes on p. 250:

2 For one thing, the way scholarship proceeds is by taking a consensus, disputing it, and establishing a new consensus (which is then disputed, leading to a new consensus that is itself then disputed, and so on, ad infinitum). In part, this kind of back and forth occurs because, well, frankly, historians have to write about something, and if everyone agrees about a particular issue, then there's nothing more to write about it. Radical shifts in scholarly opinion occur throughout all the disciplines of all time; they are as natural as vine-ripened tomatoes.

For some of the more interesting among the recent studies that take a nonapocalyptic view of Jesus, see the following in the bibliography given at the end of the book: Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, F. Gerald Downing, Robert Funk, Richard Horsley, Morton Smith, and N. T. Wright.

Cool, thanks for the clarification. Since I took four courses of physics in college (including a course that focused on Einstein's theories of relativity), I know that you are talking about something else from what I tentatively understood your claim to be. You said, "Science builds more comprehensive models up from collections of less comprehensive models," but Einstein's theory of relativity in no way contains Newton's laws of motion. Newton's equations were pretty good approximations for objects at low speeds, but Einstein's theory explained all large-scale movement at all speeds. What you mean to say is that Newton's model among other scientific advances led up to Einstein's theory of relativity.

You may be conflating the collection of new data with the discovery of new theories. Your initial complaint was that we do not have enough data. If nobody formulated the physical laws that Newton did, if instead history formulated only calculus and Maxwell's equations, then there would be an equal (if not greater) probability that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have been discovered. However, you can switch your argument from Newton's laws to Maxwell's equations. Without the unity of the equations of classical electromagnetism, then it is much less likely that anyone would have thought of what we know to be the special theory of relativity.

So, the issue is that you need to separate one claim from the other.

1. Do you mean that we do not have enough data to understand the beginnings of Christianity, or...
2. ...do you mean that we have not yet developed the necessary predecessor models for understanding the beginnings of Christianity?

If you say #1, then I say that we have plenty of data. If we did not have enough data, then the established model would not have the explanatory elegance that it does.

If you say #2, then I say that we already have developed the necessary predecessors. We have the functional methodologies of history, we have the patterns of how religions begin, we have much of the data, and there is no reason to think that there are some oblique unfamiliar patterns that we don't know about that would be essential to explain a phenomenon of sociology like the beginning of Christianity--that would be where the studies of history and physics diverge. If we know the patterns of the present world, then we already have our basis of understanding the past. In geology (a field of history), they call it the theory of uniformitarianism.
Your choice, but I think it is unfortunate that you think so. In my opinion, if we do not agree on the fundamentals, then we will always be talking past each other. This is the bony core, the stuff that really needs to be agreed upon before any more debate effectively proceeds. I keep bringing up the same objections over and over again--that criticisms of an explanation are useless unless a better explanation is supplied, that we can use other early Christian writings to corroborate an interpretation, that explanations can be defended and established even with uncertainty and a scarcity of data if they excel over the competition, that such a reproach to conclusions is foreign to the field of history and all fields of inquiry. I wish that we would continue with this. I certainly don't want to repeat the same old set of objections if they have no effect because of differences in fundamental philosophy. Thanks anyway.

DCHindley

Oh, they are there. They don't have to be direct statements.

I'd suggest Galatians 4:25

Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.

This seems to me to be an anachronism, referring to the capture of Jerusalem and the enslavement of the inhabitants who were not killed by internecine fighting, the famines and disease brought about by the siege, and the final Roman assault and plundering of the city.

Another one would be 1 Thessalonians 2:15

[Jews/Judeans] who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men 16 by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved -- so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God's wrath has come upon them at last!

Just what kind of wrath of God is the author talking about? The kind where God allows the destruction of the capital and the destruction of the temple itself?

FWIW, both these passages would come from an editor who wrote after the rebellion of 66-74 CE.

Or how about Romans 2:21

you [Jews] then who teach others, will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? 22 You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? 3:5a But if our wickedness serves to show the justice of God, what shall we say? 8 And “why not do evil that good may come?”--as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just

The "robbing temples" thingy, plus the fact that the things the author says these people preach is from the 10 commandments, seems to identify the addressees as Jews. This part is possibly from the real Paul, the point being that the law (symbolized by the commandments he says the Jews preach) cannot make one righteous before God because it is in people's nature to break them. The last two sentences are likely the editor's opinion. The grammar is weird, but I take the point here as that these people, the Jews, suffered a condemnation for "doing evil [i.e., revolting] that good may come [i.e., the kingdom of God]." Condemnation being the destruction of the national capital.

DCH