Ben C Smith

My apologies in advance for a rather lengthy post.

Recently Peter Kirby linked back to an old thread of his that attempted to disprove that silences on an HJ in the NT epistles were evidence that their authors did not know about an HJ.

My goal on this thread is slightly less ambitious. I hope to perform a similar exercise with a different author (Peter picked Samuel Rutherford) in order to disprove the following proposition:

That Paul did not mention an HJ is evidence that he did not know of an HJ.

Notice that, whereas Peter extended his argument to include all the NT epistles, I am going to look only at Paul. It may be possible to extend my observations to the other epistles, but one thing at a time.

But, before I get into my comparison, I wish to look at a few of the objections that were raised on that thread in order to anticipate and perhaps avoid any pitfalls in my own comparison.

Most of the objections were quite vacuous.

This is false. Rutherford would have had access to what was considered at the time to be direct eyewitness testimony. That modern critical scholars no longer hold Matthew and John to be such cannot help us here.

In my exercise I hope to show that my author of choice had access to the New Testament as it stands, at least through the Catholic liturgy.

The correct answer is yes. We more critical modern thinkers do not have to agree with the consensus of several centuries before us, but Rutherford would have had access to what was considered at the time to be direct eyewitness testimony.

The Pauline epistles are spiritual in nature. We would not expect him to tone down or dilute such deep spiritual messages with earthly, carnal, and mundane details, now, would we?

Paul even claims that he imparts spiritual gifts (Romans 1.11), that he speaks of spiritual things (1 Corinthians 2.13), and that what he sows is spiritual (1 Corinthians 9.11).

If this is required to make the silence in Rutherford stick, then it is also required to make the silence in Paul stick. What we need to do is to demonstrate that at one point in the Pauline epistles Paul is concerned to impart historical messages about Jesus to his readers. Then we will be able to press the Pauline silence as an argument against his knowledge of an HJ.

Is there any evidence that people from three or four centuries ago were not interested in dates or places concerning historical characters? No.

Clearly, then, there is no a priori objection to Jesus being, for Paul, a mythological god on a higher plane. The question is whether or not he is absolutely obliged to tip his hat to gospel details in his epistles.

Did Rutherford read only Paul and ignore the gospels? If he can do this, then surely Paul can focus only on the risen savior and ignore his earthly ministry.

Peter aptly responded to this:

In other words, the only thing that people who knew Jesus would actually give Paul is access to eyewitness testimony, but at the time when Rutherford was writing it was generally believed that two of the gospels were precisely that, eyewitness testimony. So both Paul and Rutherford would have access to eyewitness testimony. And I will argue that my author of choice had access to what he would have deemed eyewitness testimony.

Other objections carried more weight.

This is a good point. It is hypothetically possible that Rutherford was a closet mythicist.

But it turns out he was not, so it is difficult to see the purpose of this objection.

This is an argumentative faux pas, since genre is at issue here, too. Had Paul written a gospel we would of course expect some biographical details from the ministry of Jesus, since that is what a gospel (at least as I am defining it) is. The question is whether or not we should be expecting them in his epistles.

Writings from Rutherford other than epistles or letters prove that he was not a closet mythicist, but that he could keep his letters free of historicism ought to show us something.

Toto insisted on that thread that genre was a live issue, and he even took its considerations to an opposite extreme.

True, there is at least hypothetically a difference between a personal letter and a letter intended for wider reading, but, if one is trying to formulate a positive argument from Pauline silence, it is up to such a one to show how our expectations ought to vary from personal to public letters.

Notice also how this distinction completely disarms the objection by Michael Turton above. If there is a hypothetical difference between two kinds of epistle, then there is most certainly a difference between epistles and other kinds of writings, and our expectations ought to adjust accordingly.

Nevertheless, in the case that I will offer there will be a mixture of private letters and public writings, neither of which offers any information about an HJ.

Surely the all is misplaced, since the collected epistles that Kirby pointed out are lacking in such information.

The link is to a writing by Rutherford that is not a letter.

Nevertheless, it is true that the existence of writings from Rutherford that reveal knowledge of the gospels may muddy the waters for many on this board who are not willing to weigh genre considerations. In the comparison that I shall propose, then, I hope both (A) to look at a corpus of writings that, in its entirety, reveals no knowledge of an earthly Jesus and (B) to show that, despite this, the author was no closet mythicist.

This is a good point, and I hope to deal with it satisfactorily in the comparison I intend to offer.

These statements are true, and I wish to emphasize that my argument on this thread is intended to disarm only the issue of Pauline silence. It may be that the silence of other epistles (such as that of James or those of Peter) prove fatal to historicism; my only intent here is to show that the silence of the genuine Pauline epistles is certainly not, nor is it even a good mythicist argument.

In order to avoid erecting a straw man (and I do not think that Peter erected one), I reemphasize that this thread is aimed solely at disarming an argument from silence that runs something like this:

1. Had Paul known about an HJ he would certainly have mentioned him.
2. Paul never mentioned the HJ.
3. Therefore, Paul did not know about an HJ.

Specifically, I intend to disprove that first proposition. I intend to offer an author who knew about an HJ but never mentioned him.

(Notice also that Peter expressly extended his arguments to cover the NT epistles in general, whereas Toto is answering in terms only of Paul.)

Well, of course, and the letters of Rutherford were presumably preserved for similar reasons.

This is what I aim to demonstrate, that it is possible, perhaps even probable, that a mystic like Paul might almost go out of his way to ignore an HJ, even if he knows of him, in favor of the trancendent son who sits at the right hand of God his father.

Please note that I am not attempting on this thread to prove that Paul knew of an HJ. I am simply disarming an argument from his silence on an HJ to the effect that his silence is a good indicator that he did not.

The author to whom I intend to compare Paul is brother Lawrence, born Nicholas Herman, a Carmelite lay brother from century XVII in France.

He is best known for his devotion to God through a process (if that is a good word for it) that he called practicing the presence of God. The book based on his collected letters, Practicing the Presence of God, influenced John Wesley, Watchman Nee, and other later authors. Of all Christian devotional books, it is perhaps my favorite for its utter simplicity (well, perhaps I should set it alongside, rather than over, The Imitation of Christ).

It was Joseph de Beaufort, who knew Lawrence personally, that collected his letters and other writings into a single volume; he also added a section of what he called conversations with brother Lawrence, which are informal paraphrases of things Lawrence supposedly said. Finally, de Beaufort also tacked on a brief biography, his own doing, of brother Lawrence.

These texts are available in English translation (upon which I am dependent) on the web:

Index.
Conversations 1-4.
Letters 1-6.
Letters 7-13.
Other writings.

The biography by de Beaufort comes last:

Life of Lawrence.

As a lay brother, Lawrence was assigned kitchen duty at the Discalced Carmelite Priory in Paris. He would not have necessarily been expected to have studied the scriptures to the extent of a choir brother, but what is important for our purposes is that he would most certainly have been exposed, through the liturgy if not through personal study, to the entire New Testament, including the gospels.

This is confirmed by Joseph de Beaufort in his biographical summary:

He made a firm resolution to accept the teachings of the Gospel and walk in the footprints of Jesus Christ.

Lawrence regarded those around him with the same affection he felt for the Lord. He believed that this was what Christ expressed in the Gospel: that anything he did for even the humblest of his brothers would be counted as being done for Jesus.

This latter reference is to Matthew 25.40, which is part of one of the parables of Jesus.

Lawrence himself may refer to (one of) the gospel(s) in one of his own letters:

Letter 6: Wouldn't we be happy if we could find the full treasure described in the Gospel? Nothing else would matter.

But such a reference is very vague, and Paul uses the word gospel, too (in 1 Corinthians 9.18, for example), just as vaguely.

I regard it as certain, therefore, both from intrinsic probabilities and from these explicit references by de Beaufort, that brother Lawrence was not a closet mythicist.

Nevertheless, one would never suspect him as an historicist based on the conversations and the letters! Here I collect all references in them to Christ:

Conversation 1: The Church's only road to the perfection of Christ is faith.

Conversation 2: Only the blood of Jesus Christ could cleanse us of sin. For this reason, we should strive to love Him with all our hearts.

(Is reference to the blood of Jesus Christ a reference to an HJ? I am told it is not in passages such as 1 Corinthians 10.16.)

Conversation 3: With this assurance, Brother Lawrence wasn't afraid of anything. He added that he wasn't afraid of dying to self or losing himself in Christ, because complete surrender to God's will is the only secure road to follow.

Conversation 3: If difficulties arise, simply turn to Jesus Christ and pray for His grace, with which everything will become easy.

Conversation 4: Brother Lawrence added that when we begin our Christian walk, we must remember that we have been living in the world, subject to all sorts of miseries, accidents and poor dispositions from within. The Lord will cleanse and humble us in order to make us more like Christ.

Letter 5: I remain yours in Christ.

Letter 8: I remain your brother in Christ.

Letter 9: When I consider the blessings God has given, and still continues to give I feel ashamed. I feel I have abused those blessings, barely using them profitably to become more like Christ.

(Does a desire to become more like Christ imply an historical Jesus? I am told that it does not in passages such as 1 Corinthians 11.1.)

Spiritual Maxim 2: From the very beginning of our Christian walk, we should remember who we are and that we are unworthy of the name of Christian, except for what Christ has done for us. In cleansing us from all our impurities, God desires to humble us and allow us to go through a number of trials or difficulties.

Means of Acquiring the Presence of God 1: The first means is a new life, received by salvation through the blood of Christ.

Several of those references to Christ also included references to Jesus, but here is the only remaining reference to Jesus (apart from Christ):

Letter 13: Let us banish from our heart and soul all that does not reflect Jesus. Let us ask Him for the grace to do this, so that He alone might rule in our hearts.

Contrast these relatively few mentions of Jesus or Christ with the number of references to God: 277! I bring this up because it has been observed that Paul is very theocentric, and this is sometimes pressed as an objection against his having known an HJ. But Lawrence is even more theocentric. Consider this, for example:

Letter 10: Remember what I advised you to do: Think about God as often as you can, day and night, in everything you do. He is always with you. Just as you would be rude if you left a friend who was visiting you alone, why abandon God and leave Him alone?

Do not forget Him! Think of Him often; adore Him ceaselessly; live and die with Him. That is the real business of a Christian; in a word, it is our profession. If we do not know it, we must learn it. I will pray for you.

Interestingly, the real business of a Christian here has nothing explicitly to do with Christ; it has to do with God. Can Lawrence have written such a thing if he knew that the word Christian came from Christ, who was a real historical personage? Of course he could have. He did.

But I digress.

Here I collect the explicit references to NT books:

Conversation 3: He will also not allow such a person to suffer through trials for very long, but will give him a way of escape that he might endure it (1 Corinthians 10:13).

Conversation 4: Therefore, we should rejoice in our difficulties, bearing them as long as the Lord wills, because only through such trials will our faith become purified, more precious than gold (1 Peter 1:7; 4:19).

Letter 12: Take courage! God often allows us to go through difficulties to purify our souls and to teach us to rely on Him more (1 Peter 1:6-7).

Practice Necessary to Acquire the Spiritual Life 3: By this continual attention to God, we will "resist the devil and cause him to flee" (James 4:7).

All from the epistles! How could he have so thoroughly ignored the gospels?

Let me point out that, while the conversations and letters are evidently private in nature, the spiritual maxims and other writings that de Beaufort placed after them in the book are apparently intended more generally, for a wider readership.

I mentioned that I would touch upon word counts relative to those of the Pauline epistles, since Michael Turton brought it up. Here goes. The word count for what I consider the genuine 8 epistles of Paul (I include 2 Thessalonians) is 24916. The word count for the works of Lawrence (I am not counting the biography by de Beaufort) is (in English translation) a bit greater than 10000.

So we do have a discrepancy, though that discrepancy is not exponential.

But let me offer the following observation about the word counts. I do not think, even if Lawrence had written thrice as much material as we have of his, that we would be very likely to find much about an HJ, for he himself tells us at one point:

Letter 2: If I were a preacher, I would preach nothing but practicing the presence of God. If I were to be responsible for guiding souls in the right direction, I would urge everyone to be aware of God's constant presence, if for no other reason than because His presence is a delight to our souls and spirits.

Here brother Lawrence is telling us exactly what his focus is. He even specifies that this is what his public focus (as a preacher) would be (to recall what Toto said about private versus public letters). And it has nothing explicitly to do with Christ, nor especially with an historical Jesus.

Compare this statement to what Paul claims as his focus:

For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to gentiles foolishness.

But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

These are 1 Corinthians 2.2; 1 Corinthians 1.22-23; Galatians 6.14a.

I submit, therefore, that the analogy between brother Lawrence and the apostle Paul is close enough to dismantle any argument against Pauline knowledge of an HJ based on his silence on an HJ. Brother Lawrence, too, is silent on an HJ, but there is virtually no way he could not have known about him. The reason for the silence is similar (ex hypothesi) in both cases: Lawrence and Paul were both mystics, and both had chosen a focus that did not deal with the historical Jesus.

Again, this is not intended to prove that Paul knew about an HJ. It is intended solely to show that the argument from Pauline silence is faulty.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

Assume there was a guy called Jesus. What is the real connection to the spiritual Christ?

How did Jesus and Christ become Jesus Christ?

The xians do not help here - some propose he always was, some at conception, some include his mum, some at Baptism, possibly at transfiguration, possibly at death, at resurrection or ascension.

If there is a historical kernal, he did not start xianity - there is nothing obviously different and new, but there are several things in Paul - going to the gentiles for example that was resisted by the alleged followers of Jesus.

Isn't the problem more that all of xianity including the new testament is silent about a historical jesus? They are always discussing a godman, and any human with even .00000000001% part god is by definition mythical.

There is a church around here with a poster - Did you hear the one about the bloke who walked on water?

Ben C Smith

Is there some connection here to the OP?

Ben.

Clivedurdle

Yes. if you look at my main point and ignore my tendency to produce throat clearing mumbles!

Everyone was silent about an hj because no-one thought in these terms - everyone envisaged a variation on a godman.

Toto

There is a lot of Christian literature that doesn't mention that Jesus is a historical figure. But it was written long after that Jesus would have had any personal impact on anyone still living.

Paul didn't just write about a mystical Christ spirit. He wrote about church organization, about or to people who would have known or known about Jesus if he existed. I don't see these at all comparable.

It might be more comparable to look for an 18th century writer who wrote about the spirit of the American Revolution without mentioning any actual founding fathers.

ynquirer

Excellent post, Ben.

To your Carmelite, I would add these two Spaniards: Teresa of Avila aka Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross. They were, precisely, the reformers of the Discalced Carmelites. Because of the dates of birth and death, brother Lawrence never met either Teresa or John, though he may have read their work - in Spanish, in a French translation?

Both Teresa’s and John’s writings display mystic notes akin to Paul's epistles. (Teresa met difficulties with the Inquisition because she pretended to entertain direct communicaion with God.) They seldom mention the gospel(s) and/or characters of the Passion Narrative. Much of their work, especially Teresa's, was written in epistolary style, as a collection of letters addressed to the members of the order of which she was head. John's Spiritual Canticle has been depicted as a modern Song of Songs.

There are English translations for Teresa’s The Way of Perfection and Interior Castle and John’s Dark Night of the Soul and Spiritual Canticle.

It is noteworthy that we have identified a group of Christian writers, all belonging in the same religious order, who look like closet mythicists, sort of a replica of the writers of the NT epistles - not Paul alone. It proves nothing but doesn't help the mythicist case. Fine!

PS: The links to Lawrence's life and writings don't work.

gurugeorge

Nice post, but I think this is a bit of a strawman, no mythicist I know would say "certainly", just "likely", given the proximity to The Man, to his (supposedly) living disciples. Totally different situation from Lawrence. I hardly think even a mystic like Lawrence, were he in contact with people who had known God, his God, in real living human flesh, he would have been silent about it. On the contrary, he would have been beside himself with excitement. (This is an analogue of Toto's point about someone in the 18th century writing about the spirit of the American Revolution without mentioning the founding fathers.)

But anyway, with regard to the meat of the issue, you just have to ask yourself: is any of Lawrence's stuff evidence of a historical Jesus? No. Next.

Is any of Paul's stuff evidence of a historical Jesus? No. Next.

No it's not a close enough analogy for the reasons Toto and I have pointed out. Try someone foaming at the mouth about the Messiah-ness of Sabbatai Zevi, while avoiding decently unambiguous historical markers, or something like that. You need the temporal and spatial proximity, not just mystical temperament, to make it realistic.

Anyway, it's not about "Pauline knowledge of an HJ", screw Paul's knowledge, we're not interested in Paul's knowledge, we're interested in evidence of a human being mythologised in Paul. That could come in any number of ways other than direct mention, but it doesn't. Whether he would or could or should have spoke about it is beside the point - there's no evidence of it, full stop. There's plenty of evidence of a mythical entity with some "historical" characteristics. That isn't enough reason to say there's no historical Jesus, it's just simply to say that there's no evidence in Paul for a historical Jesus.

Does Lawrence believe in a historical Jesus? Probably if you asked him he would say yes. But clearly the historical Jesus isn't important to him in the teaching context. The only thing that's important to him is the myth. Now here's the crunch: is that equally true of Paul? We don't actually know.

IOW we don't have anything comparable to the passage from his biographer that you use to dissuade your readers from the suspicion that Lawrence might have been a closet mythicist. The very fact that you had to use that information should tell you something. That's what enables you to make him plausibly an HJ-er. But there's nothing comparable that you could point to to make Paul plausibly an HJ-er, who speaks mythically, because all we've got is the equivalent of just having Lawrence's own writing. Same point goes for the mystics yinquirer piped up with: we already know they believed in a historical Jesus, the belief was well established at that time, that's what collapses the on-the-face-of-it ambiguity.

We don't actually know enough about Paul as a person to know that if there had been a historical Jesus he either would or wouldn't have mentioned him, especially given the temporal and spatial proximity to someone he (supposedly) believed to have been the entity he "saw" in his vision, and to people who had supposedly known that person. All we do know is that there isn't any unambiguous evidence for a historical Jesus in Paul's writings.

Once again, what's needed is a decently unambiguous connection between Paul, some people Paul knew, and the eyeballing of a human being. All the rest is just fluff.

Ben C Smith

It does not matter whether Jesus would have had an impact on people still living. Paul is our author here; it matters only whether Jesus would have had an impact on him.

How does church organization require a discussion of the historical Jesus?

How is that remotely analogous? Paul mentions his founding father, Jesus Christ, early and often. It is just that his founding event, his own commissioning to go to the gentiles, happens to have come after the resurrection.

Nevertheless, I do not think the Federalist Papers mention any of the founding fathers.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Okay, I aim to remove likely, as well.

Cite your evidence for this, and we can go from there.

What in blazes do I have to write in order to head off such distractions on these threads?

Correct! We do not know (on your terms); and therefore the argument from Pauline silence fails (on your own terms).

Should tell me what? That Lawrence should have invested his letters with this information?

Do you mean that without it you would prefer to believe that Lawrence, a Carmelite lay brother from century XVII, was a mythicist?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I like them both, but I have not read all of their stuff. The Dark Night of the Soul is chilling.

They did as of yesterday evening. Hopefully it is only a temporary server problem.

Thanks.

Ben.