Jane H

Finally, whilst the other discussions are important, to return to the OP. I still find it utterly remarkable that a Jew as fiercely monotheistic as Paul was should, in a statement of that monotheism, include a human being; and that this created no problems in the way Torah observance did. The likes of Peter continued to work with him, instead of going mad on what was, for a Jew, a core non-negotiable part of their beliefs.

dog-on

I guess your astonishment may simply be a result of your assumptions.

So I suggest that you might try to assume a bit less.

Julio

That's good enough reason for Paul never to declare Jesus God, not even infer it in the [trinitarian] benediction at the end of 2 Corinthians 13:14.
"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen."

[Who added that piece nobody knows. Possibly some second century bishop of Rome to promote/create a special baptismal formula.]

bacht

Well, there is the idea that both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were related branches of the old Mosaic temple cult. We have some idea of how diverse the pre-70 situation was among Jews, such as the various messianic beliefs.

By the mid-2nd C the average Jew may have vilified any ideas that were associated with messianism or Zealotry or "kingdom of heaven" movements against Rome. Pre-135 Jewish gnosticism, if there was such a thing, might have included primitive Christian ideas (I don't presume that Jews started the whole thing, but it is one possibility).

Paul might represent the "fringe" of Jewish speculation before bar-Kochba, a messianic or gnostic midrash that later Jews would find totally unacceptable.

show_no_mercy

Now this is just poisoning the well. Josephus says there were chariots flying around Jerusalem, but this doesn't mean that he can't be used as some sort of history. Besides, Josephus' Antiquities is a different book than his Life, the latter is where he mentions investigating the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. The reason why the TF isn't admissible is because it's more than likely an interpolation. Suspiciously, Josephus nowhere else uses the heavily loaded religio-political word "christ" other than the two times he's describing the Jesus of Christianity. He doesn't even use the term "christ" when he describes Cyrus the Great, whereas Isaiah 45:1 LXX does. It's especially suspect because Josephus argues that Vespasian was the messiah.

Just because one paragraph (and possibly the James reference) is corrupt doesn't mean that almost 30 volumes of his other works must be inadmissible. That would be like throwing out a physics book just because on page 55 out of a 3,000 page tome it has the typo "E = mc⁴".

There's no prescedent for the supposition "not likely". It's a messainic phrase which any messanic Jews would have been using.

This is true. But we actually have no writings from any messainic Jews of the time period other than Greek speaking Christians (and some of the DSS) and their spiritual savior - and this includes whatever the beliefs were of the Jesus-movement in Jerusalem. Messainism was smacked down in 70 CE and utterly wiped out in 135 CE.

It's a transmission that would have occured between any Jews. You seem to be under the assumption that Greek speaking Jews and Aramaic speaking Jews avoided each other like the plague, and that only Christians had any dialogue between the two groups.

Why not?

The only Jews who seem to know who Jesus was were the Jerusalem movement and Paul's gentiles. And we don't even know what the Jerusalem movement thought about Jesus, unless we take Ebionite/Desposyni belief as a marker. Jesus was a veritable nobody in most of the non-Christian Jewish writings describing the time period. The impression that Jesus was insanely popular is due to treating the gospel accounts as actual history. There's no corroboration of Jesus' popularity in any Jewish, Greek, or Roman writings in the 1st century.

And Jews do not say The Name YHWH out loud. The conflation of Jesus as "lord" is due to Hebrew ignorant, Greek speaking Christians (Paul included) thinking the unnamed "lord" (kyrios) in the LXX had the revealed name Jesus, whereas the kyrios theos was god the father. There is no distinction between the Hebrew "lord" (adonai, as opposed to "adoni" which is a human title) and YHWH, since YHWH is usually given the vowel points of adonai to instruct Hebrew-literate Jews to pronounce The Name as "adonai" (or it is given the vowel points of Elohim to instruct Jews to pronounce YHWH as "god").

But we're talking about Aramaic, not Hebrew. Aramaic was the spoken language of 1st century Judaea (Hebrew was more for synagoge use), where the phrase maranatha would be spoken out loud with possible messainic intention by any messanic Jews.

Toto

I don't see any analysis of the issues behind dating Paul's letters there. This is not a textual issue. The texts all date to much later than they were written.

No.

aa5874

But, we are dealing with the writings of Philo with respect to the Logos.

Philo was also a contemporary of the so-called Jesus.

Philo wrote not one thing about Jesus and did not compare any character called Jesus with the Logos.

So, this would mean or suggest that even if Jesus did exist, he had not one single effect on Philo, physically or spiritually.

And further, Philo was selected by Jews of Alexandria to go on an embassy to Gaius to argue AGAINST having effigies or statues of Emperor at Jewish sacred places and the deification of humans.

This is Gaius about the Jews on deification of Emperors in Philo's "On the Embassy to Gaius."

It is recorded that the Jewish nation was considered by Gaius to be the only nation on the WHOLE face earth that did NOT worship him as a God, yet the author of Acts of the Apostles implied that while Gaius observed that the Jewish nation did NOTworship him as a God that there were thousands of Jews worshiping a blasphemer as a God and was asking him to forgive their sins while these very Jews obeyed the Laws of the God of Moses and the Temple was still standing.

Jesus was placed in the wrong nation.

See http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com

show_no_mercy

I just wrote that to explain that some Jews did believe in a second power that created the world. It's just that Christians shoehorned Jesus into Philo's Logos 100 years later.