jakejonesiv

Hi Stephen,

The earliest NT manuscript is Chester Beatty P46.

You are missing the very pertinent point that there are textual variants discernable in the writings of the Church Fathers that are not reflected in the extant textual record. Ergo, you statement that "... any significant doctoring, on any side, in purpose or accidental, is very likely (understatement) to leave a marker in the extant manuscript evidences" is disconfirmed. Do you need examples?

Best,
Jake

gurugeorge

Hmm, and what else have I written that you haven't read carefully? (Mind you, I don't blame you! )

It tells me it's theological - so?

OK what does Liddell & Scott say about the word? In Perseus LSJ I see the Kings quote you mentioned comes first - but that one does have some reference to military victory. The rest - well I don't have most of those texts and it all gets very scholarly beyond my means at that point. (Btw I'm d/ling Diogenes for an offline LSJ, and looking for a bitTorrent of Kittel atm. I'm now curious to see what the fuller context of the quote from Kittel is, and to check his sources and compare them with the LSJ sources quoted. )

Well call me crazy, but I'm guessing this Kittel fellow was familiar with the LXX and Josephus. I'm guessing that if he said "euaggelion is closely linked with the thought of victory in battle" that it was a considered, scholarly opinion taking into account all the sources.

(Sure, that doesn't mean he's right, but ... well, at least you now know I wasn't totally pulling this whole thing out of my ass )

Yeah, some folks might have thought that peace would be achieved by the Messiah by alliance. How common was that idea amongst Messianists?

No, no, it kind of makes sense too. It's just a bit wishy-washy. To be told that something great has already happened seems to me to be more worth getting excited about than to be told you've still got to wait for it.

But while I'm at it, and while I was thinking about this when I was on the bus just now - what is your justification for linking JtB-ism and your baptism-as-good-news idea with the proponents of "another gospel" in Paul? Does Josephus or any other non-Christian source say JtB preached a gospel? The more I think about it, the more it looks like an assumption of yours. (I appreciate the Apollos business you quoted, but we also know that Paul did baptise sometimes, so it's possible for someone involved in all this to be not baptizing in a JtB sense, i.e. in preparation for a Messiah.)

I asked you if there were any other uses of the same word by known traditional-style Messianists. You said no. (I'm guessing that this is because we have no writings from them in Greek?) Then how come you are making this connection re. Paul's letters?

bacht

If the letters are reliable then it seems that Paul believed both: that Christ had come (manifested to his apostles at least) and was to come again publicly at the Parousia.

The victory was over death ie. immortality had been won for believers

jakejonesiv

Hi spin,

You make a good point. The Pauline epistes are remarkably free of historical markers. One of the few alleged markers is 2 Cor. 11:32-33. "At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus, in order to seize me, but I was lowered in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands."

There is absolutely no evidence that King Aretas IV excercised authority over Damascus during the conventional lifetime of Paul. The redactor conflated Aretas III and Aretas IV from Josephus. It wouldn't be the first time a New Testament writer misread Josephus. In any case, one of the key markers to date Paul is unreliable.

Yet supporters will concoct all manner of scenerios to justify the text! But under no circumstances would the Romans appoint an Alexandrian ethnarch and have report to some powerful third party, and not to themelves.

The redaction is marked off by the lying oath; 2 Cor. 11:31 is indeed a hint that a redactor is adding new material, and the readers need the extra assurance that the never before seen material is true. "The God and Father of the Lord Jesus knows, he who is blessed forever, that I do not lie." He protests too much!

Then follows the "lie" of Paul being let down in a basket from the walls of Damascus.

Another example of the lying oath occurs at the beginning of Romans chapter 9.
Romans 9:1, "I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the holy Spirit in bearing me witness...". This too is an oath; the writer is invoking the Holy Spirit as his witness. And it also marks the beginning an interpolation- Romans chapters 9-11. (Chapters 9-11 always uses "Israel, before that in Romans, always "Jews" See "The Pre-Nicene New Testament" Robert M. Price, page 412, footnote i.)

The lying oath is used because the readers need extra conviction to accept the never before seen material.

Best,
Jake Jones IV

Elijah

Agree. :thumbs:

show_no_mercy

I was going to say this. The Christ concept of Paul was similar to the High Priesthood. The HPs jobs were to be the intermediary between YHWH and the common Jew, entering the Holy of Holies and was the one mediating the sacrifices to YHWH. Of course, all HPs are "christs" since they are anointed with oil once taking office.

According to Paul's logic, death entered the world through sin, and by inference the HPs job was to ward off "death" (or any other consequences of sin that normal Jews thought was the result of sin) as long as Jews were making their animal sacrifices.

The situation with "Bar Abbas" and Jesus being crucified to coincide with the killing of the Paschal lamb in John reflects this sort of sacrifice for sin motif. Jesus wasn't the military King Messiah, he was the Priestly Messiah - much like Philo's Logos. The good news was that sacrifices in the Temple were no longer needed, since Jesus the High Priest had done the sacrifice for them. However, this would have only made sense in the light of the destruction of the 2nd Temple, when animal sacrifices were no longer possible.

Elijah

I think Paul’s thinking has more to do with an actual resurrection he believes is coming and that faith in Jesus now will get your name called latter. More so than a symbolic super sacrifice of some type.

Also according to Philo while describing the kinds of individuals he made note that the idea of the Jewish leader wasn’t a military figure.

“And the most excellent of all, having taken the post of leader as if in a chorus, is piety and righteousness, which Moses, the interpreter of the will of God, possessed in a most eminent degree. On which account, besides an innumerable host of other circumstances which are recorded of him in the accounts which have come down to us of his life, he has received also four most especial prizes, in being invested with sovereign power, with the office of lawgiver, with the power of prophecy, and with the office of high priest. For he was a king, not indeed according to the usual fashion with soldiers and arms, and forces of fleets, and infantry, and cavalry, but as having been appointed by God, with the free consent of the people who were to be governed by him, and who wrought in his subjects a willingness to make such a voluntary choice.” Philo On rewards and Punishments

gurugeorge

Yes, it's like, you have the sleight-of-hand spiritual victory (Jesus slipping under the Archons' radar by coming as a humble nobody, crucified ignominiously, a broad-spectrum event, with spiritual and material aspects), which is one thing, and then that has repercussions that manifest, in due time, on the material plane (e.g. downfall of Rome, Second Coming, resurrection, etc.). But who knows when? You still have the same waiting game, but it's eased by the comfort of thinking that irresistible forces have now been set in motion on the spiritual plane, that will eventually issue in your deathlessness.

That's the "good news", the spiritual accession of Christ, and the victory over death, won in the recent past - this is what's worthy of being heralded ("preached") by messengers ("apostles"). The only thing is, there's no reason to believe there was a human being at the root of it, who actually manually sent those heralds out.

It's all compatible with the usual religious startup - some charismatic mystic has visionary experiences, meets a god/spirit/God, gets a teaching, and spreads the word. There might have been a Jesus person like that, quite easily; but the culprit is more likely to have been Paul. Jesus is a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a sock puppet; Paul is still a bit of an enigmatic sock-puppet, but at least there's a recognisable charismatic mystic - an identifiable and expectable type - somewhere there, in amongst all the interpolations and sock-puppetry.

[Rambling on ... ]

I think the really deep thing to sort out here is which came first:-

1) The mystical idea of what Eastern systems would call "satori" or "jnana", occurring here and now, as the literal seeing of one's deathlessnes, as one really, really is (as a wee chip of God)? or:

2) The temporal assurance of eventual physical resurrection?

1) is fairly strongly evidenced, I think, in the passage in Galatians about redemption and God sending the spirit into the heart to cry Abba! (especially in the "cleaner" Marcion version), and all those gnosticky-sounding bits sprinkled throughout some of the letters, and those bits about the congregation prophesying, speaking in tongues, etc., and the stuff about resurrection, which does sometimes look like coded mysticism, but most especially in the stuff about having the "mind of Christ", being "in Christ", and "Christ being in" the devotee. I mean, isn't that just obvious non-dual mysticism?

Was 2) actually a code for 1), originally? What if the original, Pauline teaching was 1), clothed in the symboilism of 2) for hoi polloi (remember that curious phrase "we no longer view Christ after the flesh" - is Paul here initiating the assembly)? In time (especially after the Diaspora, when the movement must have become somewhat disorganised) by a process of "Chinese whispers", you eventually get Romanised rationalists who turn the whole ting into something like an exemplary Stoic biography, a philosophy and theology, and try to democratize and popularize the movement, in the course of which they invent the concept of "Apostolic Succession", to marginalized the original mystics like Paul (sorry, Simon Magus ), who are seen as elitist kooks (Gnostics). (But of course they still need "Paul"'s sanction!)

(I favour this because it fits with Bauer's investigations in "Orthodoxy and Heresy", and it also fits with the Gnostics' self-description as students of Paul. Why not take that seriously? What if the "Prayer of the Apostle Paul" in the Nag Hammadi collection really is a prayer of the Apostle Paul? (April DeConick recently saw similarities between it and Paul in her blog.) The other alternative is of course the usually-touted one, where some human being, or some event, or some theologico-mythical idea, sparks a more mundane movement, which in time attracts mystical kooks.)

rlogan

I realize you think you are saying something, but it is vacuous. State the case specific to us, in positive terms, without the "circular circles cycle cyclically" chiasms.

Here you are trying:

But we have a "conclusion" smuggled in as an assumption - begging the question, to wit:


The Default Assumption: Historical Jesus.

Your argument, stated in positive terms, is this:


As you remove the evidence, you are left with nothing but an assumption.

ph2ter

Regarding the gospel polemic, Mark 1.14-15 may shed some light:
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel."
Jesus preaches the gospel, although there is no victory yet.