dog-on

Here's Mark's story in a nutshell.

The Jews simply don't get it.

(and everything that this simple fact implies for the nacent catholics.)

TedM

Actually not archibald. Paul's claim to exclusivity is in his Gospel of salvation through faith for all of mankind. This is his gospel and he refers to this as the mystery and manifestation and wisdom and revelation. Though the gospels have some passages to the contrary, it seems most reasonable to conclude that Jesus did not preach this message-not widely at least--especially given the opposition Paul faced from Jews who insisted that converted Gentiles be circumcised, not eat certain meats, etc..

However, there are 'prophetic' writings in the OT, especially in the latter part of Isaiah, which talk of a time in which lamb and wolf will lie together and all nations will be blessed through Israel. These were believed to be Messianic passages. In the same part of Isaiah is the famous chapter 53 which paints a picture of a Savior-Messiah with a number of similarities to Jesus Christ.

Paul interprets these passages as fortelling salvation through Jesus for all of mankind--thus his gospel to Gentiles. Thus his claim that he got his gospel through revelation. Thus his claim that he got his gospel through no man.

The claims to having seen Jesus are found in only 2 places, I think, both in 1 Corinthians-ch 9 and 15. The revelation from God of Jesus to/in Paul is found in Galatians 1 , and probably refers to the same appearances he talks about in 1 Cor. Acts has 3 accounts, which differ on some details, of Paul's vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Hope that helps,

Ted

archibald

Sorry. I was being Ironic, and should have flagged it up. :redface:

What I meant was, if Paul had been the only one to see Jesus, he surely would have mentioned this fact somewhere.

At which point, those who only prefer 'odd silences' of one particular flavour will now chip in with, 'not necessarily......' :]

aa5874

Of course, you are mistaken. It is the COMPLETE opposite.

The very first time "Paul" claimed he SAW the resurrected Jesus is in 1 Corinthians and he was LAST out of OVER 500 people.

TedM

Oops..I thought that seemed an odd thing for you to say..I'm slow this morning..

aa5874

Again, as I said before, your claim is blatantly erroneous. The QUESTION is right there in the passage and "Paul" attempted to ANSWER the question and referred to the resurrected Jesus Christ in eight consecutive verses.

The CLAIM by Paul that Jesus was resurrected is QUESTIONED by those who say there is NO resurrection.

1Co 15:12 - The Pauline RESURRECTION claim of Jesus Christ is QUESTIONED.

"how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead ?

Now we have the Pauline answer.

avi

He heard the ghost, rather than observing it.
Acts 9: 5


The significance here is of a person who is deranged, manifesting clear evidence of psychotic behaviour, not someone suffering from mere depression, illusions, or dreaming. Whether he "saw" the ghost, or "heard" the ghost is irrelevant, in the sense that, the therapy for the neurological disease does not change according to the modality affected....

avi

stephan huller

I find this discussion was becoming tiresome a week ago. Here is something new. I found this in the ignored Book Three of Against Marcion. I wonder whether this sheds new light on the Marcionite reading of the passage:

From DCH's original post:

It doesn't seem that Tertullian is following the Marcionite text in his citation of 1 Corinthians 15. I have to go back to work but it would be interesting to see if the order matches the Catholic version exactly.

TedM

sorry Stephan, but plowing on with the tiresome stuff...

He ties the appearances to the preaching by one or more of them and then he references such preaching in your passage. What you are saying is that he doesn't use the information as you would expect him to. I've shown why I would not expect him to use it. The question is whether it qualifies as a 'reminder' or not. It does. Whether Paul NEEDED to remind them of the foundation of the their faith (ie what they were taught) or not is another question, but is not far out to have mentioned it.

The question of resurrection in Mark is unsettled. The angels said that he would be appearing to the disciples in the short version, so that actually supports the idea that a group of his followers claimed resurrection for him.


Since the passage claims neither that Jesus' physical body was resurrected nor that Paul had the exact same kind of vision, I don't see the relevancy of those comments to whether the passage was interpolated or not.


Since we have no other instance of how Paul learned of the resurrection, Paul's use of the word elsewhere is fairly irrelevant; ie it is not helpful to knowing what verb Paul would have used for the receiving of a creed meant to be instructional and passed on.

From a brief review I see that there are not a lot of references in the NT to receiving instructional information or traditional information from others. Most use of the 'short' 'receive' word describes either taking something or receiving material things or something that is given that is not then passed along to anyone else. It may well be that the only requirement for using the longer word was the idea of 'succession' in the sense of passing along a tradition/creed that is meant to then be passed along to others. If this is really the case, the objection on the grounds that it is meant to imply some kind of superiority of ranking --as opposed to of knowledge meant to be passed along in succession-- is questionable.


Paul is asking questions that pertain to his belief that he is a worthy apostle:

Two things should guide our thinking:
1. His question (claim) about seeing Jesus immediately follows his question (claim) about whether he qualifies to be an apostle.
2. It would be very uncharacteristic of Paul to NOT trumpet the idea that Jesus appeared to him and him alone--making him in some respects superior to the other apostles--in this passage.

The most reasonable conclusion to make is that all or some of those considered to be apostles had claimed to have seen a resurrected Jesus.



If it was an organized church doing damage control they could have done a much better job than to carelessly mention 'Twelve' instead of 'Eleven', throw in a reference to 500 seemingly out of the blue, raise the ranking of James even higher against their Petrine supremacy concept, and credit Paul with having worked harder than all of the apostles they venerated. IOW, it was very sloppily done if done by someone with an agenda--so much so that it makes more sense to add in one or more other authors (Paul or another interpolator) than to claim complete interpolation for the entire block. Each of the items I just mentioned can be argued to be supportive of a pre-gospel tradition of resurrection appearances, especially since the list as a whole does not tie very well to any of the gospel accounts that we have.

Do you have a date range in mind?

dog-on

How many in Acts, Ted?