gurugeorge

The other thread about 1 Cor 15 reminded me of something I'd wanted to say about this, a particularly ironic thing I noticed.

Ok, I was raised a Roman Catholic, and I remember when I came across that passage when I was a kid, my automatic thought was that "Scriptures" meant the Gospels.

IOW, I took "according to the Scriptures" to mean that the Scriptures (i.e. the Gospels) literally reported the Jesus events.

Much later, when I came to delve into these matters more, of course I realised that that couldn't possibly be what it meant - that "according to the Scriptures" wasn't a report of the Jesus events, but rather something like a foreshadowing of them, a prophecy of them, that could be found in Scripture (i.e. the OT, or maybe something like Ascension of Isaiah).

But now "mountains are again mountains" (ref. to Zen saying ) - the passage could indeed mean simply a report - i.e. that Scripture (in the sense of the OT) is precisely the place (and the only place) where the Jerusalem people and Paul got wind of Jesus from. i.e. they read Scripture as indicating that the Messiah had already been and gone.

And this fits because elsewhere we see in Paul that this was a "secret" (e.g. in 1 Cor 2 and Romans 16:25-26):-

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith.

(One gets the impression of some sort of qabalah-like or gematria-like exegesis. This wouldn't make sense if one thinks of early Christianity as a broad-based movement based on a preacher - but it makes sense if one thinks of these people as the contemporary equivalent of modern, middle-class "dabblers in the occult", as the saying goes.)

GakuseiDon

I think we need to be careful in not underestimating the influence of the Hebrew Scriptures and the writings of the prophets had on the minds of the Jews and the Christians at that time. Acts 17:11 shows the importance that people placed on 'finding' Jesus in the OT and their implications:

But the people of Beroea were more fair minded than those in Thessalonica, and gladly listened to the message. They searched the Scriptures day by day to check up on Paul and Silas' statements, to see if they were really so.

Paul himself sees the scriptures as foretelling events in the future, presumably in his own time. The scriptures foretell that the promise made to Abraham and his seed was eventually fulfilled in Christ:

Gal 3:8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, [saying], In thee shall all nations be blessed.
...
Gal 3:16 Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.
...
Gal 3:19 Wherefore then [serveth] the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made...

aa5874

What I find extremely fascinating is how words in the Pauline writings seem to have no generally accepted meaning. Even names of characters that commonly occur in the gospels are suddenly not the same common characters. Events that are generally accepted as occurring on earth are somehow elevated to heaven in order to keep the Pauline writings early or before the Fall of the Temple.

These "verbal gymnastics" are totally unnecessary once it is realized that the Pauline writings like all the books of the NT are after the Fall of the Temple.

Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline writings and the genearal Epistles were fabricated for the sole purpose of inventing a continuous history from the supposed ascension of Jesus to the fall of the Temple.

It is not a co-incidence that the Roman Church "killed" Peter and Paul just before the Fall of the Temple.

Once the entire NT Canon is moved after the Fall of the Temple then everything falls into place without the use of "forced verbal gymnastics".

gurugeorge

This right here is the problem I find with your interpretation aa. At a time when the church was struggling against docetism and gnosticism, it makes little sense for them to invent (as purportedly early) writings which present a more spiritualised Jesus, from what sometimes seems like a proto-Gnostic viewpoint.

gurugeorge

None of this is any reason to read "according to Scripture" as being an example of justifying something in the apostles' recent experience by prophecy.

A good reason to do so would be if we had reason to suspect that there was a human Jesus - then, yes, it would make sense to interpret "according to Scripture" as meaning they looked to Scripture to see if it had prophesied recent events.

Or, to put it another way - in either interpretation, Scripture is being used to justify, and in either interpretation it's foretelling something. But on an HJ interpretation, that "something" has to be something within the lifetimes and within the experience of some of the people Paul is talking about. But that's the link that's missing. There's nothing in the Paul writings (apart from the slim chance of "brother of the Lord") that gives that personal, experiential, eyeballing link to a human being that the historical Jesus hypothesis needs.

Absent that link, then Scripture is foretelling something that happened in Paul's (and the Jerusalem's peoples') past - sure, they believed it happened, and they believed there was some fleshy aspect to it. But there's no reason to think that any of them actually experienced it, it's just something they believe Scripture foretold (albeit in a hidden way - that's quite important, the several references in Paul to "secret" or mystery).

aa5874

Well, it is not really any surprise that you would find problems with my interpretation since we do not agree.

Now, please show that Docetism was ever about a character called Jesus.

You seem not to understand that there were multiple Christian sects in antiquity with doctrines that made each other appear senseless.

There was a Christian cult that believed in entities called Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia and Dynamis, and that there were three hundred and sixty-five heavens.

Another Christian cult believed in entities called Pater, Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia.

How can anyone explain the sense of inventing all these heavenly entities and heavens by Christian cults?

What sense then would it make for the authors of the Gospels to give "flesh" to the Pauline Jesus, if assumed to be early, when the church was struggling against docetism and gnosticism?

All we know is that they were invented and that people invented them.

But, you have assumed that there was a Jesus cult as stated by Paul that was spread all over the Roman Empire based on his assumed letters to the churches even though some letters may be forgeries.

The Pauline letters to the Churches all over the Roman Empire give the false impression that the Pauline Jesus cult grew exceedingly rapidly at a time when there was no crisis for Jews or Roman citizens regarding salvation.

Based on Justin Martyr the Jesus cult was really not well known and even Celsus in "Against Celsus" claimed Christians were operating in secret, so we have evidence that the Pauline writings may not be historical but was just propaganda.

So since there appears to be evidence of forgeries, evidence of non-historical renderings, no evidence that the Synoptic Jesus was aware of the Pauline Jesus and that the Pauline corpus do not appear to reflect a time period before the Fall of the Temple I cannot support the theory that the Pauline writings were early.

The Synoptic Jesus did not teach his disciples that the salvation of mankind was directly linked to his resurrection only the Pauline gospel his Jesus.

The authors of the Synoptic did not write that the Synoptic Jesus was equal to God and was the creator of heaven and earth.

It was the Pauline corpus and gJohn where it is found that Jesus was God and equal to God, and then became flesh, and was the Creator of heaven and earth.

gJohn was after the Synoptics. The Pauline corpus is after the Synoptics.

There need not be any "verbal or linguistic gymnastics" for the Pauline corpus.

show_no_mercy

The OP is the only reasonable interpretation of 1 Cor 15 based on the traditional dating scheme of 1 Corinthians.

On the other hand, κατα τας γραφας is a phrase that Paul never uses anywhere else in his writings. He usually says "as it is written". So maybe your initial Catholic interpretation was correct; that it really does refer to the gospel narratives. But these gospel narratives only became "scripture" after Markion...

GakuseiDon

But doesn't Paul appear to use the Scriptures to indicate some event in the future, from the Scriptures point-of-view? E.g. "till the seed should come".

Paul appears to put Christ's death in the past. So if Paul is using the Scriptures to get details of Christ, doesn't he appear to be placing Christ as appearing at some point after Abraham and before Paul?

Well, no. Wells for example has Paul's Christ living at some unspecified period in the past, probably a couple of hundred years before.

Let's not confine this to MJ and Gospel HJ. Let's look at what Paul is saying.

Something Paul seems to believe that Scripture foretold about something that will happen in the future from Scriptures' perspective, correct?

gurugeorge

Yes, some un-determinable (from this little bit of evidence alone) time in the past.

It's one of those "how long is a piece of string" things innit? If the connection to a historical person is either very vague (Popeye) or very distant (Arthur), then it ceases to be meaningful to call it a historicist explanation.

Let's not forget that what exercises most people here most of the time is the (initially plausible!) idea that there was some preacher guy (or revolutionary or whatever) called "Jesus" who was (who ex hypothesi must have been) known personally by the people Paul was talking about. That's the most important "historical Jesus" that people talk about and are interested in.

Yes, but the ordinary interpretation of that would be that the future spoken of is something that had just happened (i.e. was roughly contemporary). i.e. the ordinary interpretation would have it that these people believed Scripture had foretold events that had recently happened in the living memory of the people being talked about (the Jerusalem people), and that they were justifying their belief that this remarkable fellow who they'd all met and known was in fact THE Messiah.

The correct interpretation (IMHO) is that the thing that was prophesied about in Scripture was something that happened in the future relative to Scripture, but NOT contemporary with any of the people spoken about, and that it was the advent of (the very same, i.e. mythological) THE Messiah, in some not too distant past.

In both cases, from the point of view of some assumed time of the writing of Scripture, the events are in the future; in both cases, what's in Scripture is a prophecy.

But in one case, the meaning of "kata tas graphas" is "in accordance with Scripture", and in the other case it's "according to Scripture".

Another way of looking at it would be to say that in the first case, the events in question are something they already knew about, had personal experience of, and were seeking to interpret rightly. In the second case, they didn't know about the events in question, it was news to them, and Scripture was informing them of those events.

gurugeorge

Read the Pseudo-Clementines ("Peter"'s argument with "Simon Magus", who is a thinly-veiled Paul) and you will see the sense it makes: if you can claim your bishops are in a direct lineage from one of these divine intermediary figures (were actually taught in person by him), you have a bit of an advantage over people who are only claiming divine inspiration. Divine inspiration is all well and good - people believed in it then, it was a decent source in their eyes, but far better source, as "Peter" argues, would be to have actually been taught by the divine entity during the period of his sojourn on Earth.

It's this need for a justification for apostolic succession that drives the heavily specific historicization, the fleshed-out story of a preacher who taught the apostles personally, of the synoptics and orthodox Christianity. (Although I think it's possible that when the idea first appears in GMark, it's perhaps more of an innocent, post-Diaspora and therefore ignorant, equation - it just gets taken up with enthusiasm in GMatthew - the first proper orthodox gospel, be it noted - and everyone just rolls with it after that.)

Well we went over this, but I think the bigness of the size of the cult in Paul is just your perception. There are a few letters from various places, and there's a bit of boasting, but honestly I don't get the sense from the Paul letters that he was claiming there was a big cult.

To compare and contrast - Tertullian's is the type of writing I would say gives the impression of a big cult in his writings. (And whether we should believe him is another question.)