Well, it’s reached the point where Robert is arguing with Robert.  🙂

Self-evidently, Paul’s extremely high Christology (second only to that found in John’s gospel among early Christians) isn’t pagan, nor is it derived from Qumran.  It’s a Pharisaic Jew looking for a more personal deity than the one he was raised with (who he still believes in, can never abandon).  And finding him in a vision inspired by his encounters with early Christians (whose stories and ideas fascinated him even as he persecuted them).  But as with all truly high Christologies, it couldn’t be based on personal acquaintance with Jesus.  Because the real Jesus was too powerfully and individually human to ever be seen as wholly divine by anyone who knew him, and least of all by those who loved him.  

To Paul, Jesus was wholly divine, from the dawn of creation.  That’s quite different from beginning life as mortal, then through faith and understanding experiencing communion with the divine, being lifted up to a higher realm of existence.  That latter idea probably exists in all religious outlooks (the entire world is not Jewish or Pagan).  Because what is religion but an attempt to reconcile humanity with divinity?  

In his own way, Paul wants to do the same, but he can’t believe humans could ever be that good (because he knows he’s not–there’s a great deal of self-loathing there, I believe–‘all things to all men’).  He’s looking for pure divinity, to raise all of humanity up, because we’re too weak to make the journey ourselves.  Jesus could only do it because he was created in that state, second only to God.   Augustine was fleshing out Paul’s ideas in his own work, and largely ignoring Jesus, because he also wanted pure divinity, because he also felt human nature was hopelessly corrupt, and could only surrender to the divine, never join with it on its own terms.  

I hope they were wrong.  

Paul never says “Jesus was an angel.” That is Bart’s inference, that I happen to agree with.  Does any scholar say anybody else got there first?  Obviously that would be hard, since we have no writings about Jesus that predate Paul.

With repect to you being able to read Paul in Greek, no writer worth reading needs to be read in the original in order to grasp his or her core ideas–it’s the fine points that sometimes get lost in translation, and this isn’t one.  To Paul, Jesus was only externally human.  And believing that so deeply, how could he ever accept a Jesus who was anything other than pre-existent, all-knowing, and infallible?  

I’m not sure most people do embrace a more personal view of God, and anyway, that can take on a lot of different forms.  (Think about how different Hinduism is, in its abundance of deities, great and small, cosmic and earthy).  

I think Paul’s ideas were pretty well developed by the time he wrote the epistles.  I can’t know what he thought later, but I do know he never met Jesus, at least not as a human being, which is the key difference between his epistles and the other early sources we have, which mainly do stem from recollections of the flesh and blood man. Very unlikely he read even Mark’s gospel–perhaps he had access to earlier sources–but would he have accepted them?  I think he’d have mentally edited them.  

I am not going to assume anything about how he would have developed after we lose sight of him.  Anymore than I’m going to assume anything about Jesus’ development before we have any credible stories about him.  But I get a very strong feeilng from Paul–that having formed his ideas, he would change them only under extreme psychological duress.  Which could have happened.  I don’t know.

Robert said

godspell said
Paul never says “Jesus was an angel.” That is Bart’s inference, that I happen to agree with.  Does any scholar say anybody else got there first?  Obviously that would be hard, since we have no writings about Jesus that predate Paul.

Yes, Hurtado and others, the latter group Hurtado jokingly referred to as the Early High Christology Club, which Bart eventually joined before writing How Jesus Became God, ‘though of course his views are not identical to Hurtado’s. That’s what I was trying to discuss with you earlier by providing quotes from Ehrman.  

Hurtado thinks others before Paul thought Jesus was a pre-existent divine being sent from heaven, who had been there since the dawn of creation?

Because that isn’t what I got out of what you posted.  

I’m not saying there were no high Christologies before Paul.  But in any event, we have no Christologies of any kind before Paul, so Hurtado’s opinion, however interesting, remains unprovable.  

Not exactly…..

Hurtado argues that both things were simultaneously true: Christians maintained there was only one God, and they worshiped Jesus as God alongside God. How was this possible? Hurtado sees Christianity as developing a binitary worship—in which Jesus was worshiped as the Lord, alongside God, without sacrificing the idea that there is only one God. In his view, Christians maintained that since God had exalted Jesus to a divine status, he had not merely permitted but even required the veneration of Jesus. Hurtado sees this as a unique development within the history of ancient religion—the worship of two divine beings within a theology that claims there is only one.

Ehrman, Bart D.. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

See, here’s the problem.  They began as thinking Jesus was elevated to divine status.  Paul (and perhaps others at the same time or earlier, but we have zero evidence of this) flipped it, and said Jesus was an angel temporarily demoted to human status.  

I agree with this (been a while since I read the book).  However, I don’t think we agree in our interpretation of what Hurtado and Erhrman said.  We can argue about whether we should talk about ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ Christologies, as Hurtado and Ehrman think perhaps we shouldn’t.  But if we are, we have to acknowledge being created a divinen being in heaven is a higher Christology than being born a man, adopted as God’s, son, and elevated after death.

And Mark’s gospel clearly shows the latter idea was still very strong even after Paul’s death.  It’s not entirely abandoned in Matthew and Luke.

I think again we’re talking at cross-purposes.  Because I’m not arguing against what Hurtado and Erhrman wrote, but the spin you’re putting on it, which I think is misleading.  Paul believed Jesus began as divine and became human.  That is not a view found anywhere else in the New Testament except in John’s Gospel, which takes it further.

I don’t see where Bart says “Paul was just agreeing with everybody else.”  If that isn’t what you meant, you need to work a bit on your delivery.  

Bart disagrees that adoptionism is a low Christology, because people in that time thought being a ruler’s adopted son could be a higher honor than being the monarch’s natural issue.  It’s an interesting idea, true as far as it goes, but I think most people would agree that being a divine being from the dawn of time is closer to being God than being born a mortal and then being lifted up by God.  And this didn’t become the consensus view in Christianity–as Bart says in that book–until much later.  When they just sort of split the difference and said Jesus was wholly divine and wholly human at the same time.  Because there was no other way to try and reconcile the very divergent views on Jesus one finds in the NT.

Bart is not saying that most early Christians thought Jesus was a divine spirit temporarily clad in human flesh.  Paul did think that.  It’s his personal conception, based on a personal revelation he believes he had, and it was in contradiction to what most other Christians were saying.  He was, in fact, saying the precise opposite.  Jesus was not born human.  He was created before Adam, and he was never truly a human being at all.  I don’t think this is what Hurtado was referring to.  Hurtado is trying to recreate what Jewish Christians believed before Paul showed up–without any documentation.  Just as Roger David Aus is trying to imagine what Aramaic sources for Mark’s gospel might have been.  It’s interesting scholarship.  It’s also very hard to prove.  

Could Jesus have ‘become God’ without Paul?  Sure. (Assuming you believe there would have been a lasting Christian church without Paul.)  But would this idea of Jesus have developed in precisely the same way?  Unlikely.  

I read How Jesus Became God immediately after it came out.  So yes, my memories were a bit fuzzy.  Not that fuzzy.  I may be misunderstanding you (I do all the time, right?)–not Bart.  He’s a much better writer than you.  

Great!  We agree!  What a productive waste of time.  😀