ApostateAbe

For sure.
Yeah, you would know better than me.

show_no_mercy

I'm not sure that a spiritual vs human distinction existed in the 1st century CE, which is why I think a lot of this mythical/historical language is anachronistic and or misleading. It's also along the lines of what spin has been trying to get people to understand - we need to have some sort of agreed upon terminology for the words that we're using in this "debate".

Really, I'm not even sure what "mythical" means to each mythicist who writes here, because they seem to all have their own particular nuances about what "mythical" means and never express their assumptions plainly.

Robin Hood is "mythical", yet he didn't rob from the rich and give to the poor in some spiritual realm.

aa5874

So, please say what you know "Paul" really wrote?

"Paul" wrote nothing under his name?

You mean no-one in the Church knew what "Paul" wrote to the very same Church and that when he preached "LIVE" to the very Church no-one remembered!!.

Did you not say or imply you believe that "Paul's" real writings are NOT available to us?

You have "Paul's" real writings?

It is CLEAR that the Pauline writings are about the RESURRECTED God/man Jesus and that it was the RESURECTION of the Pauline Jesus that was the fundamental basis for his apostleship, gospel and the REMISSION of Sins for ALL of Mankind.

1Co 15:17 - The Pauline Historical God/man Jesus was the Messiah who was RAISED from the dead but there is no history of such a Messiah in the history of mankind when a Pauline writer was in a basket by a wall in Damascus.

ApostateAbe

I take "mythical" to be intended to mean non-historical, someone made it up, and the set of claims went from person to person in branching succession. In the technical sense of the term, myths may contain historical realities, but that isn't the sense that we tend to use it.

There really wasn't a clear difference between a spiritual person and a physical human--everyone was thought to be both. I do think, though, that we can retrospectively draw such distinctions, so that such mythicists are not completely out of the loop when they make the claim that Paul's Jesus was merely spiritual or visionary. They mean that Paul's Jesus was not the sort of person who can interact with other human beings on a social level, talking, walking, eating, drinking, being born, having sex, dying, at least not in all of the ways that normal human beings know it. That is, after all, how the ancients thought of angels, demons and gods. There was a very clear and commonly-accepted distinction between human and divinity (until Christianity, anyway).

spamandham

...somewhat of a loaded question since it seems to presume that lack of influence is the default state and that a single person, Paul, pretty much penned the Pauline corpus as we know it. But nonetheless, the creed of 1 Cor. 15 looks to be a later addition influenced by a tradition similar to the gospel stories, and also 1 Tim 6:13 looks to have knowledge of the passion story.

So what then is the answer? If the phrase is genuine to Paul, why did he not mention Mary?

Clivedurdle

And that is precisely what Xianity is - an idea for a solution of the problem of how do gods become man that gets "fleshed" out!

A way to solve the problem of the gods over here and humans over there.

And is the cross then some form of alchemical solution to the problem of how to turn humans into gods?

The Roman Emperors were playing this game, is xianity gods for the masses? GodsRus?

mountainman

Thanks for the references here.
Impressive material here.

and in the same article, an excellent expose the reliance
of the Historical Jesus position on "Criteriology" !!!!!

Well done ...

aa5874

But, the Pauline Jesus did interact with other humans based on a Pauline writer.

And it was the resurrected Jesus who told the Pauline writers of his interaction.

1 Corinthians 11:23-25 - The Pauline writings are about the interaction of the resurrected Jesus and the Pauline writers. It was precisely because of those iteractions that the Pauline writers received the apostleship, and gospel.

mountainman

Good point JW.

GakuseiDon

Not meant to be a loaded question. It's just that declaring something to be an interpolation doesn't necessarily end the question. Who interpolated it, and why? For example: If we would expect "born of Mary" instead of "born of woman", then this suggests that the interpolation was made before "Mary" was introduced to the Jesus story, which suggests an early Christianity that didn't have many historical details about Jesus (with the obvious consequence of the possibility that Paul himself might have belonged to such a group).

Could be. And from that, we can start to build a picture of early Christian beliefs, as they transform from Paul to Second Century Christianity.

I don't know.