Doug Shaver

I don't know if I can present them in algorithmic detail, but this essay might give you a hint of where I'm coming from: http://dougshaver.com/christ/socrates/socrates.html.

bacht

I think for some ex-believers there's a bit of "we won't get fooled again" attitude: we swallowed the orthodox story and now resent being misled.

Skeptics in general get frustrated at the frequency with which silly ideas are adopted by large numbers of people. There's bitterness about human gullibility and dishonesty. And so much time gets wasted arguing about whether UFOs exist or the Holocaust didn't happen when real life has enough challenges to keep us all busy with constructive activity.

Petergdi

Interesting. It seems to me that your argument rests quite strongly on the idea that Paul says that he got his information about Jesus from revelation. I am personally convinced that Paul claims no such thing; he got his understanding of what Jesus accomplished from revelation, but it would be a mistake to understand him as saying that he got his knowledge of the crucifixion from revelation.

If I were to convince you that this is a more probable reading of Paul, would that affect your argument about the relative strength of evidence for the historicity of Jesus and Socrates?

Do you depend on Galatians 1:11-12 and 1 Corinthians 11:23 for your understanding, or are there other passages involved?

Peter.

dog-on

Paul got his good news through revelation and scritpure (most likely the LXX).

He states this fact quite plainly...

Doug Shaver

That is one key premise of my argument, yes, although perhaps I should revise the way I say it in the essay. Much of what he said about Christ seems to have its origin in his reading of scripture. I think he was under the impression that God was telling him how the scriptures should be interpreted, so in that sense his source was still divine revelation, but I should probably make the distinction between scripture and direct revelation more explicit.

You are so convinced. OK.

You could prove that by quoting him as saying he got his knowledge of the crucifixion from X, where X is not revelation or scripture.

I will concede this much. Paul claims to have persecuted the church before his conversion. Presumably, he would not have done that if he had not heard something about the church's teachings that, in his opinion, was represehensible. What he heard could have been that Christians worshipped a crucified god. But we don't know that that was what he heard about the church, because he doesn't tell us what he heard about the Church or whom he heard it from. All he tells us is that whatever he was told, and whoever told him, he didn't like it one bit.

I would have to revise my argument considerably, if not give it up entirely, if you were to convince me that Paul ever told anyone in effect, "X told me Y about Jesus," where X was unambiguously a man of his acquaintance and Y was some ostensible fact of Jesus' earthly life.

I try not to do proof-texting. Those passages, especially Galatians, are vital to my case, but my case ultimately rests on a gestalt involving the entire body of facts pertinent to an understanding of Christianity's origins. It's ultimately an all-things-considered argument. But one of the things I regard as most important to that consideration is Paul's failure to say a single thing that (a) unambiguously implies knowledge of any man like the central figure of the canonical gospels or (b) unambiguously implies that he received instruction regarding any key tenet of Christian faith from anyone who had been personally acquainted with the man we call Jesus of Nazareth. Galatians 1:11-12 looks to me like an explicit denial of having gotten any such instruction, but I think it quite relevant that no other statement anywhere in the undisputed Pauline corpus contradicts that interpretation of what he said to the Galatians.

Petergdi

How about if I presented a compelling argument that the semantic range of euaggelion in Paul's letters and the NT was such that the interpretation that Paul is claiming that his knowledge of the crucifixion is from revelation in Galatians 1:11-12 is not tenable?


As any good argument should be. But we somehow have to start with the bits and pieces in order to overturn our understanding of the whole.


You have probably seen all of the things that I might bring up for this, and have rejected them for one reason or another.


If it were to be shown that this intepretation is not a probable one, is it enough of a keystone in your interpretation of the rest that you would find it necessary to try putting the other bits and pieces together differently?

But does the rest of the Pauline corpus, disputed or not, contain anything to show that Paul ever used euaggelion to mean what you take it to mean in Galatians 1?

Peter.

Doug Shaver

If you present an argument, I can promise to give it a fair hearing. I cannot promise that when I'm done examining it, I will agree with your assessment of how compelling it is.

Well, I would be surprised if you presented an argument that I haven't already seen. But I don't mind surprises.

It would present an interesting challenge.

I do not know Greek and I have not studied Paul's use of that word specifically. I have been relying on what appears to be common knowledge that the word means "good news" or something more or less equivalent thereto. From that, and from Paul's claim to apostleship, and from my understanding of what the word apostolos apparently meant in his day, I infer that when Paul wrote "my gospel" or "the gospel," he meant something like "the message that God commissioned me to bring to you."

Petergdi

It is going to take time. The only way I can think of showing that Paul does not use "gospel" to mean what your interpretation requires it to mean is to look at every time Paul uses "gospel." That's about seventy places. Some similar uses can be treated in summary, but it is still going to take me a while.

I hope to show that it is a bit more specific than this.

Peter.