Vinnie

I think I have misunderstood you when I first read this and the rest of that paragraph. My comments were accurate but they were refuting something you never argued so my apologies.

So I will now say that I never said this should be or should not be seen as more of a scandal to Paul than "God become man."

I'm not sure I understand the mythicist position here. Is it the lack of HJ details in the Pauline corpus (silence) that is the argument against historicity or as Vork alluded to, is it positive statements in the Pauline corpus that indicate Paul believed in a non-historical Christ? Or both? If its positive statements I would like to see them and also an explation of the HJ material found in Paul which coincides with Gospel details.

If Wright is correct and we are to understand Paul and Jesus in the timetable of Jewish eschatology this tells us something about Paul's lack of interest in the details of jesus' earthly life. As Wright said, "we are forced to realize that for Paul to be a loyal ‘servant of Jesus Christ’, as he describes himself, could never mean that Paul would repeat Jesus’ unique, one-off announcement of the kingdom to his fellow Jews. What we are looking for is not a parallelism between two abstract messages. It is the appropriate continuity between two people living, and conscious of living, at different points in the eschatological timetable."

The center of Paul's theology is the Cross. He thought the death and resurrection was a climactic event in Jewish salvation history and that is what he largely centered on. He was preaching in light all-important event.

Why couldn't they have leared about the trial before Pilate? I am not saying they did, I just want to know why you rule it out as being impossible for them to have obtained this information?

Also, lets look at an example which could demonstrate fidelity on the part of the first generations of Christians that is found in the Pauline corpus:

1 Cor 7:10-13
10 To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. 11But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.
12To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord); If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him.

As Meier said in V1 Marginal, p. 46. "Paul carefully distinguishes (1 Cor 7:10-13) between Jesus' saying on divorce and Paul's own application of that saying to a new situation (marriages between Christians and pagans). For all his claims to apostolic authority, Paul does not feel free to create teachings and put the, into the mouth of Jesus. We might ask: Who in the first generation did?"

Vinnie

Gregg

How do you mean? Do you mean original manuscripts? Anyway, I'm the wrong person to ask--I'm just going by scholarly consensus here. I'm not sure what implications all the Christian writings being 2 c. or later would have for mythicism OR historianism. After all, you now have this weird situation where:

1. Nobody bothers to write anything about the HJ for 70-80 years after his crucifixion.

2. When they do start writing about him, some people write about him in a purely spiritual fashion, mixing in very little in the way of biographical data. There appears to be a huge gulf between the Jesus of history found in the Synoptics and the Christ of faith found in the letters, which the writer of the Johannine gospel tries to bridge but without a great deal of success.I'll need to do some research here...I must admit, in re-reading Doherty's argument regarding 1 Corinthians, it is NOT clear to me (at least not now) that Apollos was among those Paul said were calling the crucifixion a "folly" (although they still could have been "Christians." I'll have to look into this some more.I'm not sure that makes a great deal of difference. Just because an epistle was written after a gospel doesn't mean the writer of the epistle was aware of the gospels. Especially if you are arguing that all Christian writings are 2 c. or later--that gives the Gospels even less time to have circulated.

And there's still the matter of people denying the resurrection of the dead, which is found in 1 Corinthians 15:12.I think this is splitting hairs. It doesn't really matter what intricate theological webs the writer of the Paulines, or Christians in general, wove in their minds regarding the exact relationship between God and Jesus. What matters in this case is what their critics would have thought of the idea of them worshipping ("every knee shall bow--and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord") a (former) man. Resurrections, ascensions, and appearances did not make for a unique resume in those days.

And, in fact, we do find criticism of this idea--after the gospels have become more widely known and accepted as histories. But while some of the letters refer to people dismissing the crucifixion as "folly," there are no references to those who dismiss the worship of a man as folly, nor is this cited as being among the reasons the Jews rejected the gospel.

(I have some more thoughts about this but I'll have to bring them up later--gotta go to work!)

Gregg

Ted Hoffman

Loaded question. I dont know what "Christian Document" means or even "single" - and its significance considering we talk of the "Pauline corpus", and others like Revelation (oft dated circa 90) seem to have been written by many people (The Johannie Community as per Doherty?). Taking in midrash etc, makes "single" quite, um, tricky.

One of the reasons Hebrews is dated before CE 70 because there is no mention of the destruction of Jerusalem in it.

Ellegard (in 100 years Before Christ?) uses words like "Synagogue", "Saints" to date all the Gospels to the early second century.
Doherty notes in his review that Ellegars says:Gospel of Barnabas is dated slightly post CE 70 because of its clear reference to the destruction of the temple.
Ellegard also dates the entire Pauline corpus (minus the Pastorals), plus Sheperd of Hermas, Didache, 1 Clement and Revelation within the first century.

Are those "single" and "Christian documents" and "before 100 CE"?

Ted Hoffman

Mayhaps that should be "epistle of Barnabas" instead of Gospel of Barnabas (an apocryphal gospel) since I use the expression "the entire gospels" just before it.

But of course "the entire Gospels" denotes the canonical Gospels, unless specified.

GreggLD1

I have an announcement to make! I, the most slave-ishly slavish of the Doherty Disciples, have decided that my Great Guru is wrong, wrong, WRONG about something! Yes, I believe his enthusiasm got the better of him in this instance. In fact, I am going to e-mail him tonight and tell him so.

In his first supplementary article, Doherty makes the case that Apollos should be included among those Paul derides for finding the crucifixion a "folly" and a "stumbling block."

I have reviewed the relevant passages carefully, and I've concluded that Earl is utterly and completely wrong on this point. Frankly, I think he should remove this page from his Web site. The argument he makes is just plain bad. He misses the point of Pauls' argument entirely.

It's clear from the first few chapters of 1 Cor. that Paul has no major theological disagreements with Apollos. His concern is with the Christians in Corinth segregating themselves according to which apostle baptized them (he even professes relief that while he was in Corinth, he shared the Gospel, but didn't baptize many people). The stuff about the "wisdom of the world," the crucifixion, etc. is meant, in part, to show that he, Apollos, and Cephas are all teaching essentially the same thing. There is no doctrinal disagreement here.

This does leave us with the question of who these Jews and Greeks were who regarded the crucifixion as "folly." Personally, I think they were Jews and Greeks who accepted Jesus Christ (or the Logos) as one who saved by revealing spiritual knowledge, but rejected the belief that he had been crucified.

If Jesus had been a historical figure, I think the primary issue "Jews and Greeks" would have had with Christian teaching would not have been with the crucifixion, but with the very idea that a human being could be worshipped. No matter what else the Christians claimed about Jesus, Jews and Greek neo-Platonists would have kept coming back to this extremely blasphemous notion. And I doubt they would have let it go just because the Christians explained that Jesus was somehow "special."

Gregg

Iasion

Greetings all,


I gather you mean that,
whilst there WERE those who claimed Jesus did not come "in the flesh" (e.g. the Johanine epistles),
these (doketics) still believed Jesus did APPEAR, (but not physically).

Yet it seems to me that this doketic view of Jesus actually supports Earl's spiritual being Jesus.

Consider the background of the neo-platonic layers - Jesus descended to the airy realm or dimension just "above" ours - the dimension which controls or inlfuences ours.

This dimension is inhabited by various non-physical entities - demons, lower angels, disemodied spirits, ghosts etc.

A doketic Jesus, a "phantom", a spiritual entity, who APPEARS to humans on Earth in non-physical form, is entirely consistent with Earl's divine Jesus who descended to the realm just above the physical.

This doketic Jesus may have served as the bridge between Paul's totally spiritual Son who only appeared INTERNALLY in visions, and Jesus of Nazareth who was believed to have incarnated physically.

The early centuries shows many Christians with generally doketic views - that Jesus was NON-physical - I think these many, early, non-physical views of Jesus directly support Earl's thesis:

2 John,
Marcion,
Basilides,
Bardesanes,
Simon and Cleobius,
Celsus (according to Origen),
Heretics (from Constitution of Holy Apostles),
Faustus (from Augustine),

These non-physical views of Jesus stretch from the 1st century to the 5th, and support Earl's thesis that the Jesus was seen as a spiritual being.

Quentin David Jones

Vorkosigan

If we're going to question fundamentals, let's question fundamentals. Can we show that a single Christian document dates before the year 100 CE?

This whole thread was going here, wasn't it?