Ben C Smith

You are right. I do not understand your reading of Romans 1.3 at all. It sounds like you want Paul to be saying that Jesus is a human descendant of David yet not have any conception that Jesus was ever human.

Chalk it up to lack of imagination on my part, I guess, but I find myself unable to connect those dots.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Please give me some time to grasp the most fundamental part(s) of your case before going into all that. If I cannot comprehend what you are saying about Romans 1.3, where the language seems clear, how will I comprehend you in 1 Corinthians 15, where it is not quite so straightforward?

Do what you feel you must do. I honestly do not understand your position. And I think I am giving it a pretty good try.

(And, just for the sake of avoiding unnecessary tangents, I agree with you that the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is not fleshly; it appears to contradict what Luke and Ignatius and others later did with it.)

Ben.

Dreadnought

None of my business surely, but I don't understand whats so difficult to understand about Dohertys position on Romans 1.3.

"Seed of David" is there because, based on scripture, Paul thinks the Christ will be of Davids lineage. "according to the flesh" has a similar meaning as elsewhere, "in relation to humanity". As Doherty translates it: “as Christ relates to humanity, he is of the seed of David.”

That you don't agree with it and so would like to claim that such a reading is impossible is a different matter.

ETA: Since I'm out of my depth I might as well continue. I don't really understand why this is such a big deal. Kata sarka could here mean according to (human) flesh without implying an actual person because his lineage in this world is supposed to be from the kings as opposed to his spiritual lineage which is from god. It only serves to underline the first half of the sentence, but with the unmentioned caveat that he isn't only of Davids lineage, but also of Gods.

Ben C Smith

But I agree with that reading. Paul thinks Christ is of the seed of David as pertains to humanity. That is not the difference between us. The difference is that I think this means, as it does everywhere else, that Paul thinks Jesus was human; Earl apparently does not.

Ben.

Dreadnought

It just occurred to me that the exact wording of Romans 1:3 makes perfect sense when taken together with 1 Cor. 15.42 and 44 in a mythical context.

Romans 1.3 ".... from the seed of David, according to the flesh"

1 Cor. 15.42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable….44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.

What happened to "the seed of David" according to 1 Cor. 15:44? It grew into a spiritual body and this spiritual body is (somehow) Christs connection to this world. And it wouldn't do if he had said "descendant of David" - it had to be seed, unless he wanted to make the point that Christ really was a man who walked the earth. It appears like he didn't.

If this has been the mythicists point all along then I'm just slow I guess.

ETA: Just saw your post, Ben. Perhaps this explains why Earl thinks this doesn't neccesarily imply a human.

ETA2: My last word on this I promise. But would it make sense of all the other verses about resurrection and born of a woman and what not if the Christ Paul actually refers to IS/WAS Davids spiritual body (grown from his "seed") quite literally. Not a descendant, not a heavenly merger, but actually David as he is in heaven.

Ben C Smith

Wait a minute. Did you not write the following?

This is from the OP of the thread that you started specifically about the phrase according to the flesh in Romans 1.3. What was the point of bringing up angelic or spiritual flesh if you do not think it helps elucidate that phrase in Romans 1.3? You certainly seem to be saying in that quotation that Christ had, according to Paul, a kind of spiritual flesh or a spiritual form of flesh.

Perhaps you have never used those exact words, but you did say that flesh was a good term for those early Christians like Paul to use, even if Christ did not assume actual human flesh, and in the very next breath you stated that there are spiritual kinds of flesh. If you did not mean to say that what Christ took on was a spiritual kind of flesh, what did you mean to say? Why did you bring up angel flesh at all?

Ben.

Ben C Smith

This is the whole point of bringing those other passages in. Seed means descendant. It is not as if Paul used seed of Christ and descendant of himself. No, he used seed of Christ and seed of himself, as well.

Ben.

Dreadnought

Thanks for your patience with me, but doesn't the word "seed" here mean literally seed as in seed of a plant as well as descendant also in Greek? And so "descendant" is an indirect/metaphorical, but very common usage of the word while seed (as of a plant) is the direct meaning. Because this concerns humans, i.e David, it seems natural, indeed obvious, that it means descendant, but maybe it is the literal seed (as of a plant) as 1 Cor 15 seems to open up for. I'm not saying it must be so, but the word used doesn't actually contradict what I'm saying, does it?

And surely there are more literal and unambiguous terms for descendants than this also in Greek?

And when Paul is talking about himself it is as a descendant of Abraham and that phrasing nods back to the promise to Abraham that his "seed" should be plentiful and so the meaning is very clearly descendant. It's not really his own choice of words there, is it?

EarlDoherty

I think I don’t need to quote the quote you are referring to. First of all, I took it from a previously written essay. And even though the second paragraph started with a mention of Romans 1:3, that doesn’t mean that what I said in it specifically applied to that passage. In fact, as you must have noticed, I brought up that verse in order to appeal to C. K. Barrett’s phrase “in the sphere of the flesh” as one way of translating "kata sarka". The second paragraph was an expansion on what I wrote in the first paragraph, which was a general consideration of what could be meant by early Christian use of the word “sarx” and involved some variety in itself.

Since then, I think I have made it further clear that there were a number of meanings involved in that usage, not all of them present in every single occurrence, and I gave plenty of examples of that variety in listing the passages in the Paulines and others using “sarx”. But it is true that, unless my memory fails me, I’ve never said that the particular case of Romans 1:3 was meant to carry the sense of non-human flesh as applied to Christ. It does elsewhere, but not there. In 1:3, I think I have always said that it has one of the other connotations: “relating to the realm of flesh,” the word “flesh” then being a reference to whatever Paul envisioned as the sphere in which Christ operated when he related to humans and their salvation, not a reference to his spiritual ‘body’.

Earl Doherty

Ben C Smith

Do you think that perhaps the following rhetorical question, then, might have been a little harsh and unnecessary?

In a paragraph that starts off with Romans 1.3 and then tries to define kata sarka, a phrase found in Romans 1.3, you go on to discuss how Christ in his spiritual fleshly form relates to the sphere of flesh implied (in your judgment) by that phrase.

I already noted that I am unaware of any place where you explicitly linked Romans 1.3 with nonhuman or spiritual flesh, but I feel that the notion is implicit in the paragraph you offered, even if you did not, or no longer, intend such a meaning.

At the very least, you might be a trifle more patient, especially as you admit your views are still developing on the concept. You are welcome, naturally, to change your mind or to finesse things a bit more finely, but I do not think my OP was very far off the mark of what you were implying in that paragraph.

Ben.