No Robots

The conflict in question being the one between the orthodox and the docetists.

Clivedurdle

It seems probable that there is more evidence that Merlin existed than Jesus! There is a line that he was in a battle and went mad. There are variations of this, expansions, in various poems, but the conclusion is that a bloke called Merlin was involved in a battle and did go mad.

Why is there nothing trackable in the same way with jesus?

The discussion above seems to be forgetting comparisons with other heroes born of women - like Hercules.

Solo

My answer to that is that I don't care a hoot who will profit from the truth. The 10,000 bodies of Polish officers murdered by Stalin's NKVD in 1939 did not help the Allied war effort. So ???? What relevance does that have in determining whether NKVD actually killed them ?

Ehrman argues well against Rom 1:3-4 coming from Paul. The idea of Jesus as royal Davidic flesh & blood is preposterously un-Pauline.

But he has nothing to show for Gal 4:4. In that passage, Paul is being Paul - Jesus was nobody on Earth, born like everyone else, inter urinas et faeces, God hid his true nature, even from him. With God all things are possible ! His Son appeared on earth a fool and a criminal ! He sent Paul to show the world the glory of the celestial Christ. Paul had the taste of eternity, the sight of the glory of the life beyond. Will you be like Paul ? He is like you (4:12)!

If Gal 4:4 is a later insert, it's a perfect forgery !

Jiri

spamandham

I am admittedly not a Greek scholar, so I'm willing to simply accept that the phrase really does mean "born of a woman" rather than perhaps "an idea originally created by a woman" or some other interpretation no-one has considered in this thread. You seem to know much more than I do regarding the meaning of this expression, so I'll simply yield to your translation and leave it at that.

The primary contention is that simply because Josephus uses the phrase "born of a woman" where he is clearly referring to an actual birth by an actual woman, and Paul uses the exact same expression, does not in any way counter the idea that Paul's Jesus is mystical.

Mystical language necessarily parallels ordinary language. I would expect to find common idioms show up in mystical usages. The whole idea behind mysticism is the hidden symbolism. If I were on a jury and Paul were being tried for being a mystic, I'd have to find him overwhelmingly guilty based on the evidence I'm aware of. I'm curious if you would judge differently.

spamandham

Perhaps your idea of "contemporary" and mine are different. I do not consider someone a contemporary unless there is geographical and temporal overlap between the two. Paul talks about Jesus in the past tense, and seems to know almost nothing about Jesus. Paul also never appeals to the authority of anyone who supposedly knew Jesus. How could Paul be a contemporary of Jesus, and apparently not even know people who personally knew Jesus? I have never seen anyone answer this with anything but unrealistic apologetic style answers. Sure, it's possible Paul was a contemporary, it just seems extremely unlikely given his silence.

My purpose here is to understand what's most probable. In that spirit, I think I'm more than justified to say Paul was clearly not a contemporary of Jesus.

What hallucinations? There are no eyewitness accounts at all. I have no answer as to why there would already be multiple Christian congregations recorded in the earliest records. But in no way does my lack of knowledge imply a historical Jesus.

The earliest records we have DO prove there was a Christian movement, but more importantly, they prove that there was significant discord within this movement. Paul's letters were letters of persuasion more than anything else, and they record significant differences between these churches.

If you wish to claim that the existence of this movement provides evidence for a historical Jesus, then it seems to me it's also up to you to explain how such a movement could diverge so quickly after the passage of it's founder. Did they all have mass amnesia and forget what he taught? You also get the task of explaining why Paul seems to be totally ignorant of every detail of the founder and yet he (and several others he records) considers himself authoritative nonetheless.

Ben C Smith

I absolutely think that Paul was a mystic. He regularly uses mystical language to refer to spiritual realities. I just do not happen to think that born of a woman is mystical language, at least not in the way you seem to be thinking. If you think that born of a woman is yet another example of his mystical language, one that I have missed, then you will need to provide evidence for such a view, since it is in fact a rather common way to express humanity.

My main purpose in adducing outside examples of this phrase (such as from, say, Josephus) is to counter a misconception that seems to pop up frequently on this very board, namely that born of a woman is an unusual way to call Jesus human. It is not unusual at all. Ancient texts from the OT to the Dead Sea scrolls to Euripides to the NT to the church fathers to Shakespeare (not ancient, I know) use such a phrase to mean human. Another misconception that I have encountered here is that Paul uses the wrong participle, that without the right one Paul must mean something else. While it is true that the Pauline word choice in Galatians 4.4 is not the most common choice out there, it is simply false that the force of the expression depends on the exact word used. Different verbs or participles may be substituted for the most common one, and Josephus uses the same word as Paul on several occasions.

I have a list of instances of the expression born [or made] of a woman on one of my web pages. That page resulted from a nice little debate I had with Earl Doherty on this board some time ago. Enjoy.

Ben.

jjramsey

I don't have to assume that at all. Certainly, the exaltations of Moses and Enoch in Judaism and the Trinity in Christianity are creative ways to stay within the letter of the commandment while veering from its original intent.

My point is that whether you realize it or not, you are trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, the commandment "You shall have no other gods before me" is supposedly revered so much that Jews would not countenance deifying any man, even in a way that nominally avoided making him a separate god. On the other hand, this same commandment was regarded so loosely that you propose a group of Hellenized Jews thought the savior-god was their messiah. You say the difference between the two cases is that in the latter, the savior-god "had never been a man of this world." Yet you never justify why this would have made a difference, especially since the commandment is at least as creatively interpreted under the latter case as the former.

Soul Invictus

It's my understanding that a contemporary historian during the common era that the character commonly referred to as Jesus the Christ would have lived would have been Philo of Alexandria (~c25 BC-47 AD). Doesn't Philo predate Josephus?

From my reading Josephus's voluminous work at best makes a very insignificant mentioning of a character that could be construed to be the Jesus character, and that even that isn't definitive association. This even takes into consideration that his writing is considered to be interpolated or forged.

Isn't it the position of history that Philo makes no mentions at all regarding Jesus and/or his works/accomplishments/miracles? If so, I'd think that this would be very telling especially since he would have lived right in the environment of such sensational and noteworthy events in such a climate.

spamandham

There is no such thing as "mystical language" per se. Mystics use ordinary language, including ordinary phrases common within the society they find themselves in. Do we have concensus on that much?

Once Paul is accepted to be a mystic, and to be using a mystical perspective in a given context (would you agree Galations seems to be a mystical message rather than a historical record?), then the default assumption takes on that mystical background unless it is made clear by the context that a particular thought is not mystical.

4:4 is a continuation of a train of thought that starts out as clearly mystical, and ends as mystical. Why would we even suspect Paul has switched tracks to a historical mindset halfway through that train of thought?

Sure, it's possible that Paul thought of Jesus as god incarnate, and was using this snippet to demonstrate that, but to extract a single small phrase out of its mystical context to counteract the balance of evidence to the contrary doesn't seem to be a very unbiased approach. From a mystical perspective, I don't know what Paul meant by that phrase or why he said it, and will probably remain ignorant on that unless someone here is an expert in early Christian mysticism and cares to fill in the gap.

I'll throw my own perspective in on this as an aside here to be ignored as you see fit, merely for the purpose of demonstrating why I believe mystical writings need to be understood to be mystical in entirety (unless the author makes it clear otherwise): I believe the 'son of god' concept in this passage is symbolic for the potential godliness we all have within us. I would say the phrase "born of woman, born under the law" indicates that his intended audience for this letter is a group of Jewish mystical Christians, and that this phrase is a reference to them rather than some ethereal being of some kind. I think it's intentional that the Son is not specifically referred to as Jesus in this passage, because I think Paul's "son of god" is the manifestation of his "jesus christ" within us (the precursor to the holy spirit concept). Can I prove this is the right interpretation? No. I pulled it out of my ass.

But as I've stated several times in this thread, I'm just an ordinary guy with no special expertise in this area, so I certainly welcome any explanations as to why this thinking is wrongheaded. :huh:

Doug Shaver

He didn't specify any location, but if he supposed they were real, as he clearly seems to have supposed, he had to think they were somewhere. That is even if, had you asked him "Where are they?" he would have said, "I don't have a clue."

Yes, strictly speaking. Sometimes for the sake of brevity I say "Platonic" when I mean only "derived from Plato."

Not just yet. I wrote that essay shortly after my first reading of Doherty but before undertaking my own research specifically directed to his assertions. I noticed that what he wrote was entirely consistent with what little I had already learned of hellenistic thinking, and partly for that reason (the other main reason being Carrier's endorsement) I was assuming that he knew what he was talking about. I may yet discover that my assumption was unwarranted. I haven't yet, but I'm still checking as time and resources allow me.