Steefen said

Robert said

I’m sorry, but I don’t think you credibly discuss your views  until you deal with the issue of the messianic Jesus of the letters of Paul.   

I give your thought a failing grade. For the time being, given the status of Paul in history, his being at odds with Judaism to the point of being run out of town, his inability to repeat the parables of Jesus, the Beatitudes of Jesus, and the Our Father Prayer, and Paul does not refer to Jesus as the Son of Man, Paul is not part of every discussion about the historical Jesus. You are in error.

I look forward to your absence from the continuation of this thread based on your failed criterion.

You do not have the grace to contribute constructively where needed.  

1. You aren’t in a position to give anyone any grade at all.  

2. The status of Paul in history is that he’s the earliest Christian writer we have, and one of the most influential figures in early Christianity.  

3. All early Christians (and Jesus before them) were at odds with elements of Judaism, because they believed Jesus was Messiah.  Paul may have believed he was more than that, though still less than God.  

4. What town was Paul run out of again? (By sundown, I suppose.  Are we confusing the Middle East with the Old West?)  Paul, like other early Christian proselytizers, had to make many a hasty departure, but what’s that got to do with anything?  

5. We have no basis for knowing what sayings attributed to Jesus he could repeat on the basis of his letters to scattered Christian communities, which were never meant as exhaustive treatments of everything Paul and other Christians believed.  There was clearly great diversity of ideas in early Christianity, and Paul was trying to make his ideas the dominant ones, but clearly he began with the basic ideas of the first Christians and went from there.  And being a contemporary of Jesus, who had talked to people who had met him (including Peter and Jesus’ brother James), he was starting out with a lot of solid information.  

6. Paul certainly doesn’t have to be part of every discussion about the historical Jesus, but he is an indispensible part of the overall discussion, because he is still the earliest Christian writer we have, and the reason you’re trying to get rid of him is that he’s a problem for your unsupported claims about the historical Jesus.   Anything that contradicts your ideas you try to erase, which is a clear sign of lazy thinking.  

7. If you don’t like being contradicted when you prate nonsense on the basis of zero authority, go somewhere else.  If you think this is your forum, think again.  You’re just renting, like the rest of us.  

I really wish he would stop saying ‘mariners’–the ‘Sea’ of Galilee is a freshwater lake.  And probably no more than a third or so of the original disciples were fishermen.  (Paul was a leather worker–is that better?)

And why would history mention them at all, before they became influential enough for history to take notice of them?  There’s a reason Christian history was originally written by Christians–nobody else gave a damn.  Other than a brief mention by Josephus, nobody wrote a thing about John the Baptist in the century following his death except for Christians looking for a way to make him retroactively one of them.  

There is a paucity of information about many figures in ancient history who were far more influential and well-known in their own time.  But somehow, this is only suspicious to some people when it applies to Jesus.  Because Jesus is more interesting to most people than any of those other figures.  Including the people who claim he didn’t exist.  (Especially those people!)

I have no doubt his followers considered him Messiah (in a different sense) before his death. 

‘Lord’, in the languages we’re talking about, is a title with many uses and meanings, as bren and I discussed elsewhere.  One of which is ‘teacher’–and of course he was that to many people before his death.  I think they just transitioned to it meaning King, Son of God, and finally God.  The further away from him they were in time, the easier it became to reimagine him.  That’s not just a Christian thing, obviously. 

I think they hoped he was the Jewish Messiah, who would end the rule of Rome, and reign as King over Israel.  Probably not the military conqueror some Jews prayed for, but rather a nonviolent spiritual Messiah, whose reign would come about through supernatural means.  The shocked response to his claims he would die sound like a genuine memory to me, albeit refracted through a lot of new interpretations reached after his death.  I don’t believe Jesus told his disciples he would be an earthly ruler, but as someone who seems to have had a very indirect allusive way of expressing himself (and who probably had a lot of questions in his own mind about what was going to happen), it was not difficult for them to recast what he had told them, give it a different meaning that made sense to them in light of what had and hadn’t happened (ie, they had visions of him risen but the Kingdom didn’t come).

Paul never addressed Jesus by any title in person, since they never met.  Having only encountered Jesus (he believed) as a blazing light and a disembodied voice, Paul was never going to see him as anything other than a divine being who had temporarily worn human flesh as part of some greater plan.  (Tellingly, the visions of those who had known him seem to have typically involved a physical manifestation of some kind, because their unconscious minds possessed the memories needed for that.)

So when he heard those who had followed Jesus address him as Lord, Paul would put that in a context germane to what he had experienced on the road to Damascus.  He would put the highest possible interpretation on the word ‘Lord’ (short of actually meaning ‘God’ which was a step he could not take, though others would use his words as a justification for doing so). 

Except that the one who exalted him obviously still stands above him.  

“The name that is above every other name” comes with a caveat As a devout Jew, Paul can’t utter God’s name aloud, but he can still utter Jesus’ name.  Meaning Jesus is not God.  He is ‘merely’ ranked above all other created beings.  And therefore, seriously overqualified for the title ‘Lord” which could be applied to the head of a human household. 

I’m hardly going to take issue with two such fine scholars as Hurtado and Ehrman, and I would agree that Paul’s Christology kept getting higher as he went along, but not so high as to rank Jesus as equal to YHWH.  But perhaps getting close to the evangelist John’s idea (possibly influenced by Paul) that Jesus was the earthly avatar of God, his incarnate word.   

Yahweh may be transliterated as Lord, but that’s a bit like saying “You can’t look at Medusa directly, but you can look at her reflection in the mirror.”  

Paul has no problem referring to Jesus as Jesus, in spite of what he regards as Jesus’ incredibly exalted status, going back (as you say) to the dawn of creation.  However, God still came before creation (don’t ask how, it’s impolite), so Jesus remains a created being in Paul’s eyes–an angel, as Bart has said.  But not just some workaday cherub or seraph.  

One thing I figure about Paul is that even though he was a devout believer in the faith he was raised in, he still must have found it unsatisfying in some ways–not least in that the Jewish God was so impossible to come to grips with.  You can’t even address him by name, or look him in the face without being blasted to oblivion.  Jesus provided Paul with what I suppose we must call a personal relationship with the godhead.  YHWH is inaccessible, but Jesus can intercede, act as a gateway to the divine (Judaism dabbled with this, you might say, with the stories about the prophets, certain Wonder Rabbis, but never went the whole nine yards to deify them).  

I mean, it’s a lot to figure out from a handful of letters.  🙂

Me neither, but he certainly saw Jesus quite differently than Peter and James.  

I think Hurtado tends to lean towards everything happening very early; the deification, the virgin birth stories, etc.  It probably happened faster for some than others, but the ones who actually knew Jesus were in control at first, and they didn’t believe he was God’s begotten son, or an angel, or the incarnate word of God–he was their teacher and friend, first and foremost.  He was someone they loved, someone they missed every day of their lives, and their image of him was based on knowing a real person, not a glorified icon.  Over time, they did idealize him more and more, as we all tend idealize loved ones we’ve lost, but with the added difference of how they had lost him, and what they had experienced immediately afterwards.  

Paul’s image of Jesus came from a vision, which he believed took precedence over mere personal acquaintance.  Bart remarks on how little Paul tells people about Jesus in his letters, even though he talked to Peter and others who could have told him just about anything he wanted to know about Jesus the man.  

I’m not convinced he did want to know.  

You know the saying “Don’t meet your heroes”?

Probably an even worse idea to meet your God (primary or secondary).  

I think Paul probably asked fewer questions than he might have, because he thought he already knew.