bacht

The Jews had been writing about mythical figures for centuries. People like Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Daniel etc have little historical confirmation but loom large in Jewish legend. If the Christians were related somehow to people like the Qumran sectarians they might have been quite willing to mythologize real or imagined persons. Their Teacher of Righteousness could've been embellished, but like Jesus we don't know the facts.

We can't expect to see ancient authors following modern standards of historical or journalistic writing. Religious material by definition isn't scientific, there are too many irrational elements in play. There's often an "ends justify the means" rationale: bending the truth is okay if it serves a higher purpose.

spin

Even in apologetics.

"[T]angent"? That means you're not dealing with what Paul actually said.

Umm, I didn't. And you had the nerve to ask me about the meaning of "If"!

You're in no position to say this. And what follows is mere apologetics...

Why don't you read what Paul says and not ignore both parts of my post, pretending to consider one of them?

The bit that you completely passed over requires you to understand what Paul was saying, so that you stop your errors about Paul believing in a historical Jesus, when Paul didn't get his information about Jesus from a historical source. As I said, "Just mull over the words of Gal 1:11-12." Here they are to make it easier for you:

11 I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

"I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it"!


spin

rlogan

The question is garbled because the thinking is incoherent. Is the argument from silence silenced because of a silence? Kind of a triple negative.

The more clearly you can state a question, the more clearly you have been thinking. Another tip-off is the "quick thought" confession.

I think you start with the premise that there is a Historical Jesus. Then you have this convoluted way of begging the question - you can interpret whatever is said to mean there is a historical Jesus.

Or a homosexual. Or what have you. Well, if we begin by assuming he is a homosexual and interpret everything in the text to mean that, then we can show he is a homosexual.

Admittedly the interpolations and redactions, the hand of the police power of the state, and religious institution political gaming clouds everything we hold.

And sadly that gives license to grant every benefit of the doubt to your premise in one gigantic circularity.

But why bother. You do the work by assuming it in the first place. Seems to me I'd take the rest of the day off.

Petergdi

This is just silly. Paul doesn't use "gospel" to mean "information about Jesus." He uses it to mean that you can have the mind that was in Christ, and be an inheritor of the Kingdom of God.

Paul did not get his understanding of this from the other apostles and this really shows in his understanding of the place of the Law.

Peter.

aa5874

The information that Marcionites taught the truth was given to Paul exclusively actually came from a church writer not from Marcion.. And if a passage in Against Heresies by Irenaeus is examined , it will be noticed that the writer horribly contradicted himself when he wrote that he would refute even the portions of gLuke and the Pauline that were shortened by Marcion.

Marcion, in effect, had discarded ALL OF gLuke and the Pauline Epistles.


Against Heresies 3.12.12 Irenaeus is not credible at all. He is a fiction writer. His arguments are absurd.

Based on a writer who used the name of Tertullian, it is claimed that Marcion did not admit the resurrection of the flesh.

Now, both gLuke and the Pauline writings claim Jesus was both God and man, and that Jesus the God/man was raised from the dead.. Marcion could not have thought that Paul knew the truth.

Against Marcion 5.10. Marcion’s Jesus did not die, resurrect, nor was born. Marcion’s Jesus was a phantom. And was NOT predicted by the Hebrew prophets.

This a Pauline writer claiming Jesus was dead and then resurrected.

Corinthians 15:12-15 – Now , once you propose that the proto-orthodox were interpolating the Pauline Epistles then it is likely that the supposed 2nd century proto-orthodox writers, like Irenaeus, and Tertullian were actually the ones doing the interpolation.

Once you propose that the proto-orthodox interpolated the Pauline Epistles then you are implying that the proto-orthodox writers were aware of the interpolations but did not admit them and were not credible.

And once you propagate that the Pauline letters were inertpolated and also written very late,then the writings of the proto-orthodox writers, like Irenaeus and Tertullian, have become obsolete.

Steven Carr

I see Vinnie just ignores the fact that the letters of Paul have standardised names, which proves that the collection we have was produced by one authority, which decided to give them the names we now see.

rlogan

Obviously, the term "gospel", anachronistically, is used by many to mean the Jesus Story in the four.

I can't help but feel this way about this kind of excruciatingly contorted artifice in the OP:

Take any genre, and spend just a little while listening to it: An auctioneer. A lawyer defending a client. A drunk on a barstool. A math professor. Whatever. Just a little bit of listening and immediately you say "auctioneer, lawyer, drunk, professor... etc." So hard to mistake one for the other.

Now we have religious mumbo-jumbo before us. And we are told that it is a history lecture.

Immediately your radar should be blaring about "historical" anything. What is the bible ostensibly? Some kind of guide to everlasting life. That premise is false. The events described are fantastical. It can be detected immediately on inspection, by a youngster. It cannot be mistaken for history. By anyone.

The one who seeks such an interpretation falls back on "oh, it has real place-names, some of the references can be interpreted just-so, etc..."

But I think this is really vinnie's core argument:





It's a new low in the arguments for a historical jesus: They destroyed the evidence.

I knew it. I just knew there had to be a real Jesus. but I couldn't figure out why there wasn't any evidence.

And here, the answer is so convincingly supplied. Of course!


It's a wonder all this time nobody thought of it...

andrewcriddle

IIUC Vinnie is parodying here the tendency to rewrite our existing texts to fit our theories.

IE if it is legitimate to speculate, with no solid evidence, that our existing text of Paul has been edited so as to increase the allusions to a Historical Jesus, then it is equally legitimate to speculate, with no solid evidence, that our existing text of Paul has been edited so as to reduce the allusions to a Historical Jesus.

Andrew Criddle

show_no_mercy

Both events are possible, and I think that both events happened. Which is why I think it's a hopeless endeavor to try to find any sort of "historical Jesus" from Paul's letters. The MSS evidence is abjectly one-sided - e.g. why would any orthodox Christian keep around manuscripts of Paul's letters that contradicted or didn't explicitly support "orthodox" dogma?

This was also what I was getting at when I sarcastically said that only "heretics" manipulated epistles and narratives and the "orthodox" simply presented the "originals", therefore all of our extant manuscripts are simply "the originals".

spin

Another one who cannot read. The text says that Jesus Christ was revealed to Paul. To reinforce the notion 1:15-16 says that god "was pleased to reveal his son to me". Before the moment of revelation Paul didn't have knowledge of his son. What you base your claim of knowledge of what the gospel is that Paul received doesn't deal with the text. Paul's gospel came to him when Jesus was revealed to him. This is an indication of Paul's conversion for before that he was "zealous for the traditions of [his] ancestors".

What shows in Paul's teachings in Galatians is a contrast between the justification through the law and the knowledge of the death of Jesus: "for if justification comes through the law, then christ died for nothing." There's no way out of knowing Jesus in Paul's eyes and you know when Jesus was revealed to Paul.


spin