gurugeorge

So you're laying stress on a fair amount of this Corinthians passage being interpolation? I can see where your ding-dong with Amaleq13's coming from then!

My response to two of your points would be: re the "three days", Mark's trouble fitting it in to his story could equally suggest that it's some kind of pre-existing "trope" with its own independent life that he inherited and had to fit in somehow into his own narrative, like a square peg into a round hole. "Three" has always been a mystically significant number, obviously, and as I said above somewhere (though please correct me if I'm wrong) numerological analysis of scripture (what was much later called "gematria" in Qabalah) was already underway at that time.

Re. the Luke point - what about the "Lukan priority" idea? Of course Luke as it stands is post-Mark, but what about the idea that there was a kind of "ur-Luke", bits of which predate Mark, that formed the basis for Marcion's gospel? (And, taking the Gnostics self-perception of their genealogy back to Paul seriously, along with their preference for Luke as a gospel ...? Dunno, just tossing that carrot into the air.)

Where I put the interpolation in this passage is in the notion that Paul, as a strict Jew, formerly persecuted the Jerusalem crowd. I think that's part of the prestidigitation perpetrated by canonical Luke/Acts orthodoxy, to Judaize Paul (who was in fact "Simon Magus", the ancestral founder of the bare majority of mostly proto-Gnostic Christian churches the time of the growth of orthodoxy). The idea of Paul's persecution of the Jerusalem Christians also betrays its own later origin in that it implicitly holds a more monolithic understanding of Judaism. According to some recent scholarship that I've seen reviews of, Jews roundabout 0 CE seem to have been a bit more diverse in their beliefs than you'd get the impression from reading the gospels.

Interestingly, if you check the reconstructed Marcion version of Galatians, there's no persecution:

There's no hint of him even knowing the apostles personally beforehand, but there most certainly is the idea that the Jerusalem apostles predated him, i.e. that this new Messiah idea was around before him - only, he was inspired by the Messiah himself to preach a more Gentile-friendly version.
It sounds from this as follows: the Jerusalem people were known to be the apostles of this new kind of Messiah idea. Paul has an vision or revelation that he subsequently realises is of the same entity as these guys have already been preaching about, so he goes to check them out.

Malachi151

Well first of all, there is no mention of "twelve" or "The Twelve" anywhere else in any of Paul's letters, so its pretty easy to pick that out as a later interpolation. I don't see what Luke even has to do with it. The concept of "the Twelve" is introduced in Mark.

As for any "Lukan-priority" ideas, they are ridiculous, and again don't really have anything to do with the passage in question anyway.

Regarding the "three days" discrepancy in the Gospel called Mark, I think that the discrepancy was intention. The writer of the Gospel of Mark viewed the whole Christian movement as a failure and the work is filled with irony and enigmas and self-defeating symbolism. The Gospel of Mark is really a very pessimistic and highly negative work.

aa5874

Without Acts these passages would probably have no way of determining when "Paul" made those statements.
I find that the idea of early Christian belief relies heavily on the seemingly fiction of Acts.

gurugeorge

That's an interesting point, and I've often wondered how deep the roots of "taking Acts as history" permeates down through all the accepted datings of texts.

Regardless, it's been interesting to me to take the text at face value and notice that even as it stands it can be understood pretty easily in an AJ manner, as bespeaking an initial revision of the Messiah concept itself by a religious community in Jerusalem, which then got taken up by Paul in a more visionary sense.

The key point to notice, as far as I'm concerned, is that there's no actual explicit link made between any of the people to whom the Messiah "appeared" (in a sense, remember, that is likely meant thoephanically) and any actual human being called the Messiah that they knew personally. And this, to me, speaks against any massive interpolation, since if it was heavily interpolated, that link could easily have been made more explicit. Which suggests that the text was so well known it couldn't be tampered with too much.

gstafleu

Is there any reason to limit the scriptures, the graphas, to just the OT?

As GuruGeorge points out, the innovation of Christianity re the Messiah was to say that he had already done his business, rather than posit a Messiah somewhere in the future, one who in practice doesn't show up when he is needed. But there are lots of examples of just such "saviors" who already had done their thing in the past, well know at the time of Paul: Inanna/Dumuzi, Demeter/Persephone, Isis/Osiris. Maybe Paul had laid his hands on a pamphlet from his friendly neighborhood mystery cult?

Gerard Stafleu

PhilosopherJay

Hi All,
Here is the key scripture that the writer is referring to when he says that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures (Hosea 6):
The passion narrative seems irrelevant in seeing how the writer gets the Christ resurrection story from reading this. In fact, in the case that the passion narrative did exist, Paul would almost certaining have to explain the connection. However, another myth, a Christ/Word of God as first or second Adam myth (which Philo refers to) does seem relevant.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Vivisector

Does Philo refer to a Christ/Messiah?

Cheers,

V.

gstafleu

Jay, I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know that Paul is referring to this bit of scripture? Just because of "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence."? Could be of course, but it is a bit tenuous. Hosea seems to talk here about us (the people) being raised after three days, not some Messiah...

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

Are you saying that, according to the passion narrative (in the gospels), Jesus was never buried? Or are you saying that, according to your own reconstruction of events, Jesus was never buried?

Thanks.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

The messiah is usually conceived of, in such arguments, as representing the people of Israel; he does what Israel was supposed to do but, for whatever reason(s), could or did not. (Compare how the suffering servant figure in Isaiah is both an individual and a corporate entity.) Under this notion, finding scriptures that originally applied to Israel and applying them afresh to the messiah seems appropriate; and, in fact, it happened quite a bit.

I doubt this verse in Hosea is the only scripture in mind in 1 Corinthians 15, but it always figures high on lists of possible references.

Ben.