Gawen

The Jerusalem Church must have been very weak to concede to Paul.

Thanks...I'll see what I can do.

Gnomelord

Actually they were. Deprived of what amounted to their free meal ticket after the death of Christ, they were dependent upon the income from the wealthy Gentiles, which was controlled entirely by St. Paul.

Doug Shaver

I can understand that, but your question cannot be answered with assuming one or the other.

My opinion? There were no anecdotes for the vision to reign over because there was no real Jesus for there to be any anecdotes about. In Paul's day, no Christian or anyone else had ever heard of any Jesus of Nazareth.

Assuming the contrary for the sake of argument, it appears to me that all efforts to reconcile Paul with the gospels are essentially nothing but rank speculation. The reconciler just takes a guess, and everybody's guess is as good anyone else's.

My own guess is that if there was a real Jesus, then Paul was a just a maverick whose writings, for reasons we'll likely never know, happened to get preserved while writings of other Christian leaders of his time, for equally unknown reasons, did not. (It is possible that no Christian leader contemporary with Paul wrote anything about Jesus, but that strikes me as too improbable for serious consideration.) Under this scenario, I think it likely that the men who had known Jesus were bad-mouthing Paul to no end and telling their flocks to have nothing to do with him or his teachings. But, the men who had known Jesus were Jews and were confining their preaching to Jewish communities, while Paul was going out to the gentiles. Paul's version of Christianity was largely unaffected by the Jewish War, which virtually wiped out the Jewish version along with almost all traces of the conflict the between the two.

Now fast-forward to the late second century. Christian leaders of that day have the gospels, and they have Paul's letters, and they have the book of Acts, wherein one of the gospel authors claims that Paul was no maverick at all, but rather one of the church's founders who just happened to come on board a little later than all the other founders. There is also a letter from someone claiming to be Peter, vouching for the authority of Paul's letters. And so the church leaders, as apologists have been doing ever since, simply denied that there was any inconsistency between Paul and the gospels.

gurugeorge

Gerard, great post and I agree with what you are saying, but I'd just say that it looks more like the original "time inversion/god-man" idea wasn't Paul's idea, but the idea of the people by whom Christ was "seen" in Corinthians 15:1 (which could mean either in the sense of visionary experience or in the sense of "was grasped", or, more probably, both) - i.e. first Cephas, then James, the "Pillars", etc.

i.e. the original bright idea of putting the Jewish Messiah into the past and turning him into a dying/rising entity was the invention of a Hellenized Jewish spiritual community. Paul at first persecuted those very first Christians, then came round to grokking their Christ idea, and then it was he who had the further bright idea of universalising what was still at that stage a mythical, spiritual entity.

dog-on

That is, unless the epistles were written by "Marcion" or "Magus"...

wordy

To an amateur like me that is one of the more likely scenarios unless it is all made up.

Gamaliel? Is he confirmed to be historical then?

gurugeorge

Yeah, again, this is working with the standard picture.

Actually not much really needs to change except the names, if you take the Detering route. That and a little bit of the timeline has to be shifted around. It's still basically the same scenario of a cute time inversion of the Jewish Messiah, spiced up with the common dying/rising mytheme, initially a Jewish movement (that's where I'd disagree with the Radikalkritik school, I'd retain the Jewish origin), taken over by someone (either Jewish or Samaritan) who was tremendously charismatic and very busy, who spread it round the Mediterranean in a universalised form (proto-Gnostic).

Meanwhile the cute time inversion invited people to fill in the "gap", various stories were made up (using Midrash and elements of popular novels and biographies, which in turn themselves probably made use of Mysteries symbolism), Mark's version became the most popular (initially just because it's a damn good story, but after the diaspora because of its apocalyptic quality, which was the result of the fact that he used an apocalyptic Jewish sect's sayings as the basis for his Jesus' sayings) and the basis for many others. Gradually the historicisation hardened and was turned (via the invention of Acts and the bowdlerization of the "ur-Luke" that was also used by Marcion) into a justification for the concept of apostolic succession, which strengthened the Roman-Alexandrinian version of a strongly historicised Christianity, which got taken up by Constantine (mainly because a fair proportion of his army was Christian by this time).

Eventually all the other ("docetic" - i.e. the remants of the mythic and gnostic who'd gone along with the strong historicisation, along with the gnostic strictly so-called, and probably several other varieties, including the original Jewish) versions of Christianity were suppressed, along with Paganism, and Bob is your live-in Auntie - the rest is, as they say, history.

gstafleu

We'll probably never know exactly who came up with the idea, but given that Paul refers to other people (than him) seeing the event, it makes sense that it wasn't Paul himself.

The dying/rising bit was very likely Hellenistic in origin, although I would like to point, in passing, to Inanna (Sumerian) and Isis/Osiris (Egyptian, at least in origin). The moving forward in time of the appearance of the Messiah, though, may have been a purely Jewish thing.

As I understand it, the last two centuries before the turn of the Era were a mess in Israel. We had Maccabees starting a revolution, and, once in power, wreaking general havoc among their opponents. There were sons (in law) of kings killing the king, leaders intriguing now with Rome, then with Syria, kings waging war left right and center, and the Pharisees and Sadduccees in continued strife. It was, as I said a mess. Such a mess in fact that it might well have looked as if the latter days had already started (Joseph Campbell takes this position in his Occidental Mythology). The Qumran sect certainly thought they were close, they had a whole scroll with a detailed plan where the Sons of Light (the Qumranies) would fight and conquer the Sons of Darkness (the rest of the world).

So when it comes to time-shifting the Messiah, we seem to have a progression from the Zoroastrian idea (which the Hebrews may or may not have shared at some point) of the Saviour appearing at the end of time, to the Israelite idea that the Messiah would appear in the foreseeable future to save the Israelites, to the general panic in the last century BCE that led to the idea that the end was in fact here, to the Pauline idea that we had now passed the end. I'm not sure if Hellenistic influences are needed here.

An interesting side effect was the question what to do with the end of time given that the Saviour had already come and gone. The gospels, in the little apocalypses e.g., seem to say that there still will be an end of time. Obviously a Saviour would then be needed, which led to the interesting idea that Christ would put in a repeat performance in his second coming. This may explain some of the differences between Paul and the gospels, as original apocalyptic thought didn't seem to hold that the hero of the story would have to do a "If at first you don't succeed..."

Gerard Stafleu

gurugeorge

Yes, actually Robert Price often notes that the dying/rising mytheme wasn't just a feature of Hellenistic things like the Mysteries, but actually quite common round the Middle East generally, even in the very area of Palestine.

(I mean Baal was a Canaanite deity ferchrissakes!)

I think we do have to thank the apologists for their critique of the original Kersey-like attempts to show the mythological nature of Christ. It's true that that initial attempt was off-track in that because it was originally a Protestant attempt to impute paganism to Roman Catholicism, it tried to show theft or copying.

But what makes more sense is that initially it was just the bare rising/dying element that was part of the inspiration of the Joshua Messiah idea, and that most of the other Mysteries-like aspects, and pagan-like aspects, the full-on mythological aspects (even things like Greek numerology, astrological symbolism, etc.) just crept in accidentally over time. (Possibly into the Jesus stories via the influence on those stories of Greek popular-novel tropes, which I think themselves probably had tinges of Mystery symbolism in them - if you think about it, that would be a natural "cool" thing for novels of the day, if lots of literate people were "in on the secret", so to speak, and themselves initiates of the Mysteries, as I understand many literate people were at the time.)

gstafleu

Inspiration, or a just-in-time solution to a problem that a Messiah-in-the-past posed? After all, if the guy has already done his thing and kicked the bucket, what good is he to us now? Fine, we can believe in him and go all gooey-eyed over this revelation, but things are still a mess and we need some help, either physically as in the second coming, or spiritually by a Jesus to whom we can pray with some hope of effect. Both need the by now has-been Messiah to have re-arisen, or else he is the kind of old news one throws out together with worn-through Tshirts. To the rescue then comes the idea of a dying and, most importantly, rising god/saviour, and the bacon of the old-news-Saviour, which was about to go extra-crispy in the fires of uselessness, is saved.

Gerard Stafleu