GakuseiDon

In Middle Platonism, the physical world ended at the firmament. Things above the firmament belonged to the permanent, incorruptible realm. Thus, any beings that lived above were eternal and unchanging.

Even things below the firmament could be considered gods, if they were thought to be eternal and unchanging. Thus the sun and the stars were considered gods by some. The moon, because it changed and yet seemed unchanging itself, came to represent a demarkation point. The earth was also considered eternal in some way, even though it itself changed. So the "World Soul" came to be considered a kind of god also.

For some Jews like Philo, God created the physical world via an intermediary, the Logos. The Logos was an emanation from God yet part of God, like a sun ray emitted from the sun is still somehow part of the sun.

Actually, the sublunar sphere was everything below the moon, and included the earth itself. It was part of the material world, which consisted of four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Everything in the sublunar realm, including mankind and the demons, were thought to be made up of one or more of these four elements. Some proposed a fifth element, aether, for things that existed above the firmament.

It probably isn't accurate to call the spirits "disembodied". They were thought to have bodies ("soma"), but they weren't thought to have flesh ("sarx"). Flesh was thought to be a mixture of earth, water, air and a little fire. Thus Man was made up from each of the four elements, but mostly earth and water. The demons OTOH were generally thought to consist of air and/or fire. Some earth-bound spirits may have also been made up of a little water or earth, as earth and water were naturally attracted to the centre of the earth, while air and fire naturally rose.

sschlichter

yes, it is free online (i think in an html version and a word version) the tranlation is pretty good, but what I really like is the translation notes that come with it (very helpful).


I meant your interpretation renders the rest of Pauls sentence illogical.


I beleive much of this qualifies as presuppositional. I do not know to what extent Paul was influenced but I would say you are opting for much more than is possible from much of his writings (or even later in Romans).

I cannot tell where you feel Paul is saying he (Christ) descended to. You mention human essences but I beleive Paul makes it clear that he is referring to a material body.

1) Rom 3:25 refers to his death as public
2) the seed of David (whome we know to be flesh) is illogical otherwise
3) Rom 5:19 refers to him as a man

I will avoid seeking beyond the immediate context of the first few chapters of Romans, but while it cannot be proven from this passage that Paul was not a gnostic (like the rest of his writings can), it does seem evident that if you insist on an emanation, then the emanination in question descended into the material world of Paul and the belivers in Rome.

There is nothing in this passage about ascension or of ridding himself of the form he took.

GakuseiDon

Technically the "sublunar realm" means everything below the moon, down to the surface of the earth. However, it's often used on this board to mean the sky above, or "the lower heavens", between the earth and the moon. The "higher heavens" were above the firmament.

Doug Shaver

Maybe. I prefer to think of it as inferential

You asked for my interpretation of the first three chapters of Romans. I barely have time to present it, let alone defend it, at least until we get to the parts where Paul discusses sin in some detail.

sschlichter

I am not in a hurry. I am answering quickly because my wife is camping and I am avoiding the projects I promised to finish. Let it sit for as long as you need to. She did not realize that I only promised to work on them in the sub-lunar realm.

~Steve

Doug Shaver

Thank you. In hindsight, I probably should have disregarded the historicity issue. Paul says Christ was crucified and resurrected. I'm not sure it matters to the interpretation of anything else he wrote whether he thought those events happened in Jerusalem or somewhere out of this world.

sschlichter

it is very difficult (IMO) to come at it with a blank slate. I could have pulled the Nicene Creed out of this passage left unchecked.

I think an Irish Monk said (but not sure who)

"Wonderful things in the Bible I see, most of them put there by
you and me."

~Steve

Doug Shaver

One wise monk, whoever he was.

Doug Shaver

Unless someone thinks I've neglected or overlooked sometime important in Chapter 1, I'm going to move on so that this doesn't become interminable.

Chapter 2 opens with some general comments about the certainty that wickedness will be punished and righteousness rewarded. The passage begins a warning against hypocritical judgments. Starting with verse 12 Paul elaborates on God's impartiality. He says all righteous people intuitively know right from wrong, and if they do what is right they will be judged accordingly regardless of religious, ethnic, or other affiliation.

From verse 17 through the end of the chapter Paul excoriates Jews who give their religion a bad name by their hypocrisy. He says in effect that circumcision does not make anyone righteous and neither does it lack render anyone unrighteousness. God judges everyone by how they live, not by whether they have undergone a certain surgical procedure.

In Chapter 3 we get to the nitty-gritty. Paul first asserts that the Jews were privileged with custody of "the oracles of God." It is not clear exactly what he meant by that, but one may suppose that if nothing else, he was thinking that at least until his own time, God had spoken directly to the world exclusively through Jewish scripture. This is followed by a question-begging declaration of the irrelevance of skepticism:

He has a point, up to a point. Paul is asserting, though not in exactly so many words, that the scriptures are the word of God. But some people don't believe that. Does their disbelief prove that the scriptures are not God's word? No, of course it doesn't. But Paul's assurance that they are God's word doesn't prove that they are, either. On the assumption that they are God's word, though, Paul can claim in effect that anyone who disagrees with him when he cites scripture to prove a point is disagreeing with God.

Verses 5-8, I must confess, are simply opaque to me. I get that according to Paul, God is righteous. And I get that some of Paul's adversaries have accused him of endorsing evil behavior. But what the overall point of the passage as a whole is, I have no idea.

The next several verses are perfectly clear. Pulling several proof texts from the Psalms (and offering no other arguments), Paul affirms the utter depravity of all mankind: nobody is righteous; we are all sinners, every one of us.

Notwithstanding the forceful language he uses here, Paul could be just making the trivial observation that nobody is perfect, but I don't get the impression that he would have been that charitable. It seems to me that he believed in something very like what later Christians came to call Original Sin. We are no good, and there is nothing we can do that will make us good -- not even perfect compliance with God's law, assuming that were possible, which it is not.

But there is a way out, which Paul discusses beginning with verse 20. We can be made righteous -- i.e. justified -- by divine intervention. But justification is not effected by anything we can do. It is effected by something we can believe. We are justified by faith.

But here the fog descends again. The Greek term for the salvific belief is pistis christou. Historically, the usual translation has been "faith in Christ," but according to the NET translators, "an increasing number of NT scholars are arguing" that it should be rendered "faith of Christ," i.e. "Christ's faith."

We need not resolve that dispute here. The point I take from what Paul says is that righteousness is not so much about how you live as about how you think. No doubt he would also argue that you cannot be thinking righteously if you're not living righteously, and I don't have a major problem with that. The point remains that according to Paul, no matter how you act, there is something you have got to believe in order to have any hope of escaping God's wrath.

OK . . . "for all who believe" . . . who believe what? Whether it's my faith or Christ's faith that justifies me, just what it is that I have to believe in order for that faith to effect my justification?

I think trying to answer that would take us too far afield for this thread, since the answer is to be found elsewhere in Paul's writings -- assuming that there is any clear answer.

So, that is how I interpret Romans 1-3.

sschlichter

yes, but clearly Paul beleives they are.

calvinist playground

Paul defines (IMO) the object of faith in the next couple chapters of Romans. (meaning of Christ's faith).

Do you see that your interpretation of Romans 1-3 is different from how a Christian would read it (evangelical, for example). I do not. I am not suggesting that you are ascribing authority to it like I do, but how is your understanding of Pauls view on sin different from mine?

~Steve