GakuseiDon

Doesn't Paul call Jesus a "man" (anthrōpos)? What else can Paul's Jesus be but at least a human being?

Rom 5:15 But not as the offence, so also [is] the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, [which is] by one man [anthrōpos], Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.

1 Cor 15:21 For since by man [anthrōpos] [came] death, by man [anthrōpos] [came] also the resurrection of the dead.

It also matches with Jesus being a Jew:

Romans 9:3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites... from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came

gurugeorge

Maybe, but on the other hand it could be that by the time of Mark, "gospel" had taken on more of its current Christian meaning (IOW, the passage looks sort of self-referential - especially if you think of the oft-proposed scenario of Mark being post-Diaspora, and his gospel being a sustained polemic twitting the Jews for ignoring Jesus at that earlier time, and getting themselves into a whole heap of trouble - note the irony of "the good news according to Mark" in that context!)

gurugeorge

Sure, he can be a human being or have a human aspect. I'm not a Doherty mythicist. A fleshly aspect does seem to be an integral part of this particular myth.

The reason why there's no reason to believe any human being sent the messengers off and charged them with spreading the message, is that there's no evident connection between the messengers and some man who sent them off.

(As I said recently in another thread, suppose you had a passage in Paul that said something like "but Cephas told me that's not what Jesus had said to him". That would be the sort of thing we moderns would need to distinguish merely pseudo-historical detail in a myth, from a nugget of something that might show there was a real man there at the origin of the myth. You need some kind of eyewitness report of a living human being, some kind of connection between human Apostles and a human Jesus; without that, human-like aspects in the myth are merely suggestive, merely hold open the possibility of a human founder.)

(But, on Doherty's side of the argument, doesn't "Anthropos" have mythical connotations in certain contexts? So even that could be mystical "code"! It's still ambiguous, it's not evidence of a human being in the way that "Cephas told me that's not what Jesus had said to him" would be.)

GakuseiDon

I think Paul appears to believe that he was sent off by Christ, though this was after Christ had been resurrected. Still, there is no doubt that Paul regarded Christ as being a man and a human being, at least looking at his genuine letters.

True enough. We have what we have.

Well... I think the possibility of a human founder is pretty strong, based on Paul's description. Whether Christ sent the apostles out before resurrection or after is a separate question.

Not that I'm aware. IIRC Doherty said that other gods were described as men. But this doesn't help him, since those gods were described as being men on earth. If you could find where he says that "Anthropos" has mythical connotations in certain contexts, please let me know.

Steven Avery

Hi Folks,

Now we are in the ballpark. These examples can be interesting. And they will surely allow for a theory that there could be variants of signficance in some manuscripts (at least in one language) that vanish from the line.

We would have to look at the specifics to see if they remotely address the idea of an addition, a redaction, making it into multiple language manuscript lines all at the same time -- without a trace of the non-addition line. You can express your idea as to whether these are apples and apples or oranges, while giving what you think is the best example or two.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

show_no_mercy

I'm still seeing the false dichotomy between "Jesus was a wandering preacher who had disciples" and "Jesus was wholly mythical". Right now I would suggest a middle ground that makes sense of all the evidence: Jesus was some sort of pious hermit (like a "Nazirite") and was wrongly executed. That way we have a "historical" Jesus that makes sense of why Paul and other epistle writers don't mention any life stories or teachings by this Jesus character. But this historical Jesus has no relation whatsoever to gospel Jesus.

bacht

Maybe, or maybe the apostles were simply those who claimed a revelation of Christ as Paul did. Maybe there was a first generation of disciples whose visions became legendary to later believers, or who were the first to discover Christ in their new interpretation of scripture. Maybe like Osiris their Christ was a historical man from the past whose true identity as God's son was only understood "in these last days" by the apostles :huh:

The whole NT is about selling this message, that a seeming innocent nobody was in fact a divine being only truly understood by a small group of witnesses. It's a bit like hero stories where the protagonist as a child is hidden/disguised until the moment when his true identity is revealed and the bad guys are punished: we get the humble origins of the hero who will eventually judge all mankind, when human injustice is replaced with divine righteousness.

spin

I'm working with the soundest Greek dictionary available, been that way for over 100 years and regularly revised. It's not theological.

It says of the verb euaggelizomai, I. "bring good news, announce them"; II. "preach or proclaim as glad tidings". For the noun euaggelion, I. "reward for glad tidings (given to the messenger)"; II. "good tidings, good news". In fact in all the entry for the family of related words, not one mention is made of victory. You will forgive me if I think the Kittel source you cited is bs.

Warning bells are ringing, gurugeorge.

Beats me.

That's normally called tunnel vision, gurugeorge, ie you won't look at the other options because one has captured your vision.

Something great coming (which requires you to take part and you can if you repent and be baptized) is obviously better news than the fact that someone is dead (and therefore cannot [be] the messiah in the eyes of ordinary Jews of the time).

Merely the fact that it's the only other form of organized messianic expectation that we know about and that it fits under the Jewish umbrella of thought, unlike christianity. Paul's opponents were Jewish messianists of some sort, which doesn't suggest the belief in a dead savior being tarted up as a messiah. I should add that christianity presupposes the existence of John and his disciples and obviously such a movement didn't need a Jesus to exist.

No.

When Paul used the word, are you sure that he thought he was using it in a manner different from the way the word was usually used in Greek? He thinks his good news is better than anyone else's, but is it a special use? I think not. Others don't need to call their messianic beliefs euaggelion for Paul to contrast his own good news with the message that the others were flogging. You have invented your own problem.


spin

Doug Shaver

Nevertheless, many people doubt it.

jakejonesiv

I think there was considerable doubt, especially since Philippians 2:6ff describes Christ in Docetic terms.

"Of course the Marcionites suppose that they have the apostle on their side in the following passage in the matter of Christ's substance----that in Him there was nothing but a phantom of flesh. For he says of Christ, that, "being in the form of God, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied Himself, and took upon Him the form of a servant," not the reality, "and was made in the likeness of man," not a man, "and was found in fashion as a man," not in his substance, that is to say, his flesh;"
Tertullian AM 5.20.3.

Jake