gstafleu

No, I don't, and if you say that we need a dative here, following Acts 13:26, then I'm quite willing to accept that. So, if the two genomenon's were to change to the dative (because of that literate scribe) would a pronoun then be necessary, or could the "one" be implicit in the dative?

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

If the participles were in the dative, I do not think any explicit pronoun would be necessary. It would be implicit in the participle.

(And please note that I am not absolutely demanding that a dative would be necessary here; it is just what I would expect based on usage elsewhere.)

Ben.

Toto

Then he has to mention it to explain it away. Why did Paul decide to follow Christ or The Way? If there was a historical Jesus associated with the movement, Paul has to speak to people who knew him, and explain why this historical person became a spirit, why those things that happened in history don't change Paul's message which he got from the risen Jesus. He can't just ignore "the most important person in history" when there were other people walking around who actually knew him.

Chris Weimer

And you know this how?

TedM

Surely the subject would have been important. I agree. But maybe he made a choice early on to not get caught up on discussions about Jesus' life--what he may had said or done, because it didn't really matter to him and in his opinion shouldn't matter to others. As such, that would have been one of the things he would have made very clear right off that bat. All that mattered for Paul's gospel was that he rose again.


If not a true revelation then my guess is it was because after much reflection the resurrection suddenly made a lot of sense to him. Paul was a man who was passionately anti-Christian, yet quite a deep thinker, and also a man with an extensive education in the Jewish scriptures, so surely he reflected upon whether a risen man some claimed to be the Messiah could have been. Maybe the revelation to Paul came not from hearing conflicting, possibily strange accounts of Jesus' life, but from seeing how if Jesus did rise again he could have been The sacrificial lamb who forever breaks the curse of sin.


I agree, and think that was basic. Jesus was sinless. He was killed on passover as the pashal lamb. He rose again. He mentions, or at least alludes to the first two once and the last many times. Once established there is little need to repeat, though he does mention the resurrection repeatedly--perhaps because it most directly related to their salvation.

What delineated Paul's gospel from others who already believed in Jesus that is what affect resurrection had on their potential salvation. That's what he spends much time on in his epistles.


How would "those things that happened in history" have changed Paul's message?

Maybe the people who knew or claimed to know him is exactly why he didn't say much.. After all, they had the inside track and he was preaching something many of them may not have liked.

Or, maybe those people who knew Jesus never got outside of Israel much anyway, so for the epistles written to churches hundreds of miles away there was little need to mention them.

ted

GakuseiDon

That's fine, and useful to put into the mythicist framework. One of my issues with Earl are his "throw away" or ad-hoc responses to questions, where one answer raises questions elsewhere. Often this is more a matter of getting Earl to clarify, but such clarification is vital in order to test his answers.

Do you agree that Earl appears to be suggesting the following?

1. If there had been a historical Jesus, then using "born of a woman" would have been redundant, so the phrase is probably not original to Paul.

2. If there had been a mythical Jesus, then "born of a woman" would have fitted the atmosphere of myth, so the phrase is probably original to Paul.

3. Earl currently leans towards "born of a woman" probably being an interpolation.

I use the word "probably" above, which may be stronger than what Earl is suggesting. But if it is stronger, then it would be good to see what weight Earl is placing on those statements.

Toto

Hi Chris - this question doesn't make a lot of sense. This whole side discussion is based purely on speculation and probabilities.

To TedM: This is going nowhere. You are just repeating the standard excuses that Christians give for why Paul was not interested in the details of a historical Jesus. None of them make any sense to me, and all of them seem to go against normal human nature, which is to be curious about the details of famous people (or any people). And it looks like it comes down to your belief that Paul knew that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

Toto

I share Earl's frustration in trying to communicate with you.

I don't think that Earl is suggesting this. He is more likely to be suggesting that if there had clearly been a historical Jesus, the phrase "born of a woman" would have been redundant, so this casts doubt on whether Paul originally believed that there was a historical Jesus.

I cannot figure out where you got this. Your statement just sounds confused. If Paul thought of Jesus as a spirit, he might have used the phrase "born of a woman" in a mythical sense, but that does not imply that the phrase was probably original to Paul. :huh:

As do many of us.

I don't think that these phrases are central to Earl's theories.

GakuseiDon

By "original to Paul", I mean "originally in Paul".

To be fair, I don't think there are any phrases that are central to Earl's theories, which is not unexpected in a cumulative case. But in a cumulative case, how one phrase is interpreted may later affect how others can be viewed, so it is important to clarify what is being meant.

To rephrase then:

1. Earl suggests that if there had clearly been a historical Jesus, the phrase "born of a woman" would have been redundant, so this casts doubt on whether Paul originally believed that there was a historical Jesus.

2. Earl suggests that if Paul thought of Jesus as a spirit, he might have used the phrase "born of a woman" in a mythical sense, so if it was originally in Paul, it is suggestive that Paul thought of Jesus as a spirit (assuming that statement #1 -- "born of a woman" being redundant in a historicist sense -- is true).

TedM

Ok. If there were few details worthy of discussion (the toned down version of Jesus I suggested), it appears from your original post to me that you still would have expected a discussion in Paul's epistles anyway--even if it was to say that there was nothing worthy of discussing. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me considering that he would have already stated that early on in his preaching.

I do agree though that it is odd that Paul didn't give more information about Jesus' sayings and doings, and within a historical context, even when considering the idea that Paul's gospel didn't require it.

Here's a last speculation. Paul hated Christians prior to his conversion. It is not unreasonable that he had also personally hated and disrespected Jesus and his teachings (remember that Jesus was ruthless against pharisees, which Paul was). It may be that he never fully could come to terms with those feelings and thus had a kind of mental block with regard to discussing Jesus the man and his ministry, preferring to only focus on the act of salvation. Have you heard that one before?

ted