dog-on

But, unlike the rat pack, you would have to assume that a physical Christ actually came, whereas it works just as well, in Paul, if only a revelation of Christ actually came.

The fact that Paul is stumping on a faith in the Christ of revelation through the scriptures and not about a faith based on the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, I believe, supports my position over G-Don's and that his case is not necessarily helped by this particular bit of Galatians.

Besides Paul also says this, about that pesky seed:

aa5874

So!

The letter writers called Paul probably wrote after Justin Martyr. The first mention of the gospel called Luke was by Irenaeus at the end of the 2nd century.

And!

This information is consistent with or tends to augment the probability that the letters of the writer were produced after the writigs of Justin Martyr.

The letter writers called Paul are not likely to be the first writers.


A concensus based on faith or bogus methodology can be mis-leading and baseless.

Such a concensus is irrelevant in determining when the letter writers called Paul actually wrote.

As of right now, today, there is no evidence or information to place the letters of the writers called Paul earlier than the middle of the 2nd century.

The Pauls were not the earliest christian writers based on the evidence as of right now.

Any concensus can be challenged when there is no evidence whatsoever to support the concensus. The concensus about the letter writers is NOT cast in stone.

dog-on

I am unaware of the evidence you are referring to. I would sincerely appreciate seeing it, or at least point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

aa5874

Are you unaware that Irenaeus was the first to mention a gospel called Luke?

Are you unaware that Justin Martyr did not mention a gospel called Luke?

Are you unaware that Justin Martyr only mentioned memoirs of the apostles?

Are you unaware that the author called Luke was not called an apostle?

Are you unaware that Eusebius in Church History claimed it was said that the letter writer called Paul was aware of a gospel called Luke, and called the gospel of Luke "my gospel", and that the letter writers called Paul died by the hands of or during the time of Nero?

Are you unaware that the history of a letter writer called Saul/Paul is found in Acts of the Apostles which is filled with fictitous events and that Acts' credibilty is uncertain.

And are you are aware that the conversion of the letter writer called Saul/Paul, as described in Acts, is fiction?

All this information can be found in the writings of Justin Martyr, Eusebius, Acts of the Apostles, the letters with the name Paul, Irenaeus and P46.

The concensus has no basis except on faith or bogus methodology.

dog-on

Got ya, but regardless and this is all well known information, the consensus exists and I have simply referred to it, for the sake of the discussion.

Is that wrong?

gurugeorge

I'm aware of those kinds of arguments, and I think there may be some interpolation in the "list" of people, but I'm curious to see how far a mythicist position can go if the passage (including especially "according to Scripture") is mostly genuine.

It's really hard to get rid of the glasses of tradition when reading that passage, but if you do, I think it's actually one of the strongest supports for mythicism. I've tried several times to get the irony of this across in discussions here, but I seem to have failed miserably. Perhaps you will "get" it.

When Paul (and before him Cephas, etc.) are talking about "Christ" or "the Christ", they are talking about the Messiah, the same Messiah other Messianists are expecting to come in the future, or betting their shirts on in the present.

But this bunch seem to think they've discovered something in Scripture that tells them everyone else (e.g. other Messianists) is misguided about Him. Everyone else is misguided about His advent (He's already been, and isn't one to come), about the nature of His work and victory (spiritual and not kingly/military) and His worldly fame (he was totally obscure, and did his work sub rosa).

So when Paul says what he believes: "that according to Scripture, the Messiah died for our sins; and that according to Scripture, he was buried and rose again on the third day", this is implicitly a critique of the traditional view of the Messiah. i.e. other Messianists (who are either piously waiting, or fastening their hopes upon the nearest passsing madman) have gotten it wrong about the Messiah. Paul and the Jerusalem crowd have (in their estimation) gotten it right.

IOW if you bracket the (tempting) traditional background thought that the entity being spoken of is a human being known personally to anybody mentioned by Paul, including himself, it's pretty plain and obvious that Paul is saying, quite simply:

"THE MESSIAH died for our sins, was buried and rose again on the third day" - as opposed to "THE MESSIAH will come and sort out all our problems with a great victory", which is the traditional view. (Obviously, he isn't quite making an explicit side-by-side comparison in this passage, which is in the context of a discussion about resurrection, but the juxtaposition is implicit, especially when taken together with other passages which show the "tropes" of the Messiah idea being reversed (not kingly, spiritual; not famous, obscure; not glorious, ignominious).)

Both Messiahs are myths; the original Christian message is a revisionary myth, with its origin perhaps even in a simple reversal of the common tropes.

As a suggestion for further research, if I had the time and the language capabilities, I'd be looking at the question of where in Scripture did traditional Messianists get their idea of the Messiah from? Then I would look at how the meaning of those passages (and nearby or otherwise related passages) could be reversed. (e.g. perhaps through numerological analysis, or shifting some of the letters around, etc., etc.) I'm sure this has probably been done many times and I'm just ignorantly reinventing the wheel here, but I think this would be a profitable line of research.

No, he needn't be ancient (except in the sense that he's coeval with God). His advent on Earth, in the past, in obscurity, and his death and resurrection needn't be ancient. If we check what's required for a revision of the Messianic idea of this kind, all that's required is that he be in the past. It's actually not important when. (In fact, a Middle Platonic "Dreamtime"-like astral/mythical stage on which the events are archetypally played out is quite plausible. I think they probably believed there was also some specific earthly moment of death and resurrection, but it's not really important to them when and where. The Messiah could be lost amongst any number of people who were crucified under the Romans. In fact, this obscurity is part of the whole deal. Obscurity and vagueness were themselves part of the Messiah's modus operandi, it's how the Messiah managed to fool the Archons, who were laying in wait for the traditional, kingly, glorious Messiah who would make a big splash. It was a case of prestidigitation on a grand scale.)

He's neither, he's a proposed revision of the traditional myth.

And why "Joshua"? To have named the Messiah "Joshua" is like calling him "Jewish Everyman"; again, the obscurity, the lack of pin-down-ability is part of the idea, part of the revision.

aa5874

Well, I find it more prudent to discard a mis-leading concensus in discussions where veracity is of utmost importance.

bacht

Good stuff george, much food for thought. If Paul did espouse a "reversal of the common tropes" then he might have seemed foolish to the average Jew.

As far as the messiah idea, is it still reasonable to point to the pre-exilic Israelite royalty? We can see in early post-exilic writers like Zechariah the desire to restore the Davidic line. Kings were expected to be 'commanders-in-chief' were they not?

It seems fair to assume that the Hasmonean period prompted some re-thinking about authority divided between Jewish kings and high priests. Maybe populists never gave up on the royal idea (?)

dog-on

Indeed, but to be fair, I did propose to accept this consensus as a basis for this discussion. Otherwise, we would never get to the actual issue we wanted to discuss.

Ben C Smith

I am not talking (here and now) about the physicality or nonphysicality of the coming. I am talking about its timing. I did not mean to imply that this supports everything GDon has ever written about the coming of Christ. I meant only that it supports his argument that the coming of Christ, for Paul, postdated Abraham and predated Paul himself.

He says this only after the relevant discussion. The reader of the epistle has no reason until this point to think he or she is the seed of Abraham; at the point of text represented by verse 19, the reader has so far seen only that the seed is Christ.

Ben.