TedM

Jiri, I didn't say he derived JC from the OT. I said he may have derived his gospel of salvation to the Gentiles from the OT, and that he may have had insight that JC was the bridge to make that happen. Adam's sin was punished with death. It is human nature to want to live forever. Much of the OT is about the Jews being separated from God because of their sins and failure to worship him. The messiah was expected, and it was also believed that he would usher in an age of peace and union with God. Why are you so sure that some pious Jews weren't looking for a way to fix the problem that caused the separation?


So what if it was just in the context of the law to Paul? The fact remains that Paul saw Jesus as sinless regardless of whether he was guilty by law. That is the main point I"m making. By being sinless the grip of death is released for him, and for all, in Paul's mind.


ted

gstafleu

That is still a "not interested" argument (NIA), only you have now moved the position of not-interestedness back a square. Where the normal NIA says Paul may have had trump cards in his possession but didn't bother to play them, your NIA says Paul didn't bother to pick up the trump cards because he wasn't interested in them. That is just as unlikely as not playing them while he had them, saying that Paul had his own trump cards in the form of the gentile mission doesn't help, given that the other trump cards would have helped him achieve that mission.

It is, in other words, logically possible to construct such an NIA, but it is just as unconvincing as the standard NIA. I think that, in order for your "didn't know" argument to succeed, you need to show that Paul couldn't know, not that he didn't want to.

He didn't have the trump cards because he didn't bother to pick them up. That it was too late to know J in the flesh is irrelevant, as the people in the Jerusalem church (supposedly) knew him, and that is close enough: "James, the well-respected pillar, personally saw the following happen..." That is not even a FOAF argument.
Do we really need to repeat the usual argument that there were lots of people hawking saviors at the time and that the fact that this savior had been personally witnessed by someone in the recent past would have given Paul a huge competitive advantage?

Gerard Stafleu

DramaQ

No, you drew this as a conclusion using faulty logic. Paul never tells us any such thing.

Here’s the fault in the logic. Why are these the only two alternatives?

3. The other apostles had similar revelatory/hallucination experiences as Paul that included reading scripture and re-interpreting it.

Like with Paul, this requires no information from existing believers OR interaction with a real person on the part of the other apostles.

Any distinction Paul draws between himself and the other apostles (and as you pointed out, he goes to pains to make it clear his gospel is NOT substantially different) doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with how he got his commission vs how they got theirs.

So that’s it? Your whole argument rests on the fact that Paul’s experience was “different”?

I thought he spelled out the difference pretty plainly: That Paul’s vision allows inclusion of Gentiles. (And the subsequent legal wrangling that entails.)

No problem. I don’t see any reason to conclude that the other apostles had prior apostles.

If your 1. and 2. above were the only possibilities. And if you imposed the very conclusion that you seek to make: ie. That the “difference” is that the others knew the historical Jesus.

Going by alternative 3. that I suggested, the prior apostles became apostles in a way similar to Paul. Thus you’re looking in the wrong place for what makes Paul’s message different anyway.

The reasons cited above do nothing to make that conclusion implausible. It is perfectly plausible that the other apostles received their vision of Christ very much like Paul did. Which fits very well with what Paul actually tells us about the compatibility of their gospels. And the “difference” between them that you seek to make a case out of is nothing more than Paul’s spin to direct this “message” to the Gentiles.

DQ

Ben C Smith

This is exactly the sort of thing I can scarcely imagine Paul saying. Trust me because I got it from James. The apostle who would say such a thing is not the same man who penned Galatians.

Ben.

Solo

There are two different views operating here: Jews were "reconciled" to God via Mosaic law. The "separation" from God was in their collective / individual unwillingness to live righteously according to the law. Paul however saw the separation as emanating directly from living in the "flesh". In that he was blazing a trail (AFAIK) previously untrekked in Judaism.


Paul did not see Jesus as sinless - that is a different kind of piety which the later church sought to impose on Paul - ...for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do; ending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, in order that the just requirement of law (i.e. the crucifixion) might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit...(Rom 8:3-4) For Paul it sufficed that Jesus being (a form of) God did not know he was a sinner (2 Cr 5:21, Phl 2:6).

So for Paul, Jesus was God who suffered human fate of misunderstanding, humilation and death, but as all that was part of a special mission from God, properly communicated to Paul, a glorious resurrection followed, for Jesus Christ, and all those who believed that and would live spiritual lives as prescribed by Paul.

PS.: one of the few people who clued in on my little theory asked me if in my view Paul believed himself holier than everyone on earth, including Jesus. I said, but yes, of course, that was the sine qua non of Paul's conversion ! :angel:

Jiri

gurugeorge

Look forward to it!

Not necessarily fiction (interpolated with proto-orthodox fiction later perhaps). Still mostly heartfelt myth with pseudo-historical details, but with a sense of history, in the rational sense, creeping in from the proto-orthodox side. Still not breaking out of that circle.

The best breakout would of course be some contemporary historical traces in non-Christian writers of the day, but without that (and I'm sure you are too smart to clutch at those straws), these Christian sources are all you've got. I wouldn't say it's impossible to find your breakout point(s) in these places, but I'm sure you see how thin the thread is that you'd be hanging HJ on even if you could find them.

At any rate, there's nothing I can see in Paul, Gamera's typically straw-clutching "all the apostles" point above notwithstanding Clearly, Paul's audience was already familiar with other apostles, so a reference to "all the apostles" could just mean "all the apostles (of whom you've met a few)". He's referring in the present to something happening in the past, and the people he's referring to in the past are people who still exist in the present, there's no necessary implication that they were already apostles when the "appearance" happened. So you're still in the ambiguous "could be myth/could be historical in the rational sense" area so far as I can see. There's still nothing unambiguous and satisfactory as evidence of historicity in a rational sense like "... Cephas (who had known and walked with Jesus before his crucifixion)". The more I think about it, the more I think that the misreading people make of this passage now may well be precisely the kind of misreading the people who became the proto-orthodox made after 70 CE, leading them to come up with the idea of "Apostolic Succession", which in turn led to a strengthening of the concept of Jesus being historical in the rational sense.

What I mean is, the language is ambiguous in a way that reminds me of a Necker Cube. Tilt your mind one way and it looks plainly historical, tilt it the other way and it looks plainly mythical.

However, one thing I would say in favour of mythical is that, supposing the letters were about somebody historical, but just had this ambiguity about them, the proto-orthodox could have easily (with the best of intentions, as always ) falsified the letters to make the historical point even more unambiguously, they could have tilted the balance more towards historicity in the rational sense by putting in more unambiguously historical-looking stuff (such as in the gospels) in there. The fact that they didn't is telling - it means that the letters must have been familiar enough that too much tampering might have raised a hue and cry. But if the letters were familiar in that ambiguous form, that to me tilts it a bit towards myth.

i.e. the relative silence re. historical details (that could just as easily be pseudo-historical "historical" mythical details), and the relative volubility re. plainly mythical stuff (in terms of revelation, "appearance", the evident mysticism of Paul, etc., etc.), if that balance is what was in the original letters and had to be pretty much preserved, otherwise people would have noticed - that balance in and of itself doesn't seem to bode well for the "historical" details being historical.

Clivedurdle

Now that makes a lot of sense! Paul does see himself as being told directly by God the secret of the universe!

Jesus was just a pawn.

spamandham

You are postualting that Paul simply didn't care about what the Jerusalem church had to say regarding Jesus. Paul doesn't actually tell us that. Since he gives deference to them repeatedly, it seems unlikely that he simply didn't care about their teachings.

The alternative is then to claim he viewed them as a competing sect - which certainly could be the case. But if that is the case, human nature would still drive him to know enough about what they taught to be able to explain why they were wrong and he was right. And in fact, we see Paul do exactly that in regards to circumcision and food laws, so we know that Paul knows enough about the Jerusalem church's teachings to attack their insistence that gentiles abide by Jewish ritual law.

Further, in order to persecute them, he would have to have known enough about them to be able to identify their members or to at least mock their teachings (if that's all he meant by "persecute").

It doesn't make sense that he would know these things, yet know nothing about their teachings in regard to Jesus. The simpler explanation is that the Jerusalem church simply didn't hold anything about Jesus except possibly the creedal teachings Paul replicates.


Fair enough, but I think implicit in this assumption is that the Jerusalem church is more of an adversary than an ally to Paul.

gurugeorge

Again this is a circular argument: this traditional, eye-winking interpretation of Paul as the crusty old bastard who clung to his spanky, shiney, universal revelatory Jesus in opposition to the silly old Jewish sticks-in-the-mud, sort of depends on the historical Jesus idea being true. If it's not true, all that's evidenced in the letters is something that was at first merely a difference of opinion (amicably settled by a handshake and an agreed division of labour) that only got heated at the point where following Jewish law or not became the point at issue, and where other apostles are actively interfering with his ministry. None of the actual disagreement depends on historicity of a man known by the Jerusalem crowd.

Not only that, but it ignores the strong likelihood that if Paul's audience had become aware of apostles who had actually known the cultic figure in the flesh, they would have preferred them, and no amount of Paul's "revelation", theological wrangling re. Law/materialism vs. Spirit/spiritualism yammer would have swayed them. It would obviously be preferable to hear the gospel from the mouths of the guys who knew The Man.

This is in fact the point clearly made by "Peter" in the reconstructed Kerygmata Petrou, where "Simon" boasts of his revelation from the spirit, but Peter easily and clearly trumps him by fingering the old school tie of personal acquaintance with the cultic figure. It really is beyond credence that even people in those days would have taken a-man-who-never-knew-The-Man's "revelation" more seriously than the teachings of apostles who had supposedly known The Man.

(Later thought: so actually what we would expect Paul to say under those circumstances would be something like "even thought those guys actually knew Jesus in person, you should still follow my revelation, because ..." IOW, there ought to be a trace of linkage back to historicity in Paul's justification for people to follow his version of the gospel.)

Gamera

Cut me some philological slack here, Ben -- my biblical Greek is etziketzi, as I have always admitted (my expertise is Old English, curiously) but I do have the advantage of having a Greek father!

I'm sure they're are, but I would be surprised if they would ever be used in the way Paul does here, namely, in a long chronological sequence where the point is in fact the sequence (first, then, after that, last of all -- is the structure of the passage).

It would seem like a very poor rhetorical strategy.

As we say in the lawyer business, anything is possible. But we must identify the plausible in interpreting ancient texts whose meaning is unclear.

I would first note that 1 Cor 15 purports to paraphrase the gospel Paul preached to the Corinthians or at least that portion of it that was "foremost" (in importance or time?) (prwtoiV). So Paul is not writing off the cuff, but treading a well-worn path, something he's thought about and presumably preached repeatedly.

This is important because I gather that your proposed counter-reconstruction involves an event nowhere recorded in Christian writings: namely a kind of total gathering of the apostles after they have all been appointed by the risen Christ. If I understand this proposed reading, the risen Christ appears to Cephas, and makes him an apostle. Then he appears to the twelve, and makes them apostles, and so on until after having appointed all the apostles (except Paul), he appears before all the apostles he has thus designated.

That sounds like a momentous event. An iconic event. It's something like the first annual organizing convention of the apostolic association of Judea. If Paul thought it happened, you would expect that other writers would have been aware of this tradition -- either directly from Paul or indirectly from another source -- and wrote about it. It's filled with dramatic potential -- just the kind of thing apocryphal writers look for.

Yet no such event is recorded anywhere in Christian writings. Not in the canon, and not in any writings outside the canon (that I'm aware of). Instead, Christian writings directly support the view that the living Jesus appointed the first apostles, subsequent apostles were appointed by those apostles (see Acts 1:26), and only Paul was appointed in an unusal way, by the resurrected Jesus.

Based on this I have to conclude that this interpretation of "all the apostles" is implausible and hence should be rejected in favor of the more plausible obvious sense: that the risen Jesus came to apostles who were already made apostles while he was still living.