Loading...Here are a couple of the tricky and interesting questions I have received lately on the blog, along with my answers to them. They seem important enough to me to share more broadly for everyone’s benefit. As you’ll see, they cover a range of topics.
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QUESTION:
| I was wondering if in Paul’s letters themselves, if there is any concept of Jesus worship like we see in the gospels? Many examples including the word proskuneo (προσκυνέω) where it is argued Jesus is being worshiped in the New Testament; are these present in Paul’s letters?
MY RESPONSE: PROSKUNEO is a tricky word in Greek. It is a compound verb formed of KUNEO, which means to “kiss”, and PROS which means “before” and is generally used in the sense of falling down in reverence before someone and/or to show humility in their presence (by kissing their feet?).
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“In none of these cases does it appear to mean that Christ was the one back in Genesis who created life on earth.”
Not sure how popular or broadly accepted it is among Christians as a whole, but I have the impression that many of them (especially conservative evangelicals, but maybe others too?) hold that Christ — being God the Son, being the Logos, etc. — is indeed the Creator of everything (presumably thereby including earthly life).
They point to verses like John 1:3 (“All things were made through him”), and Colossians 1:16 (“For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him”).
How do such verses track with those in Acts?
Yes, John 1:3 says it. I’m talking about the verse in Acts.
I guess I’m just wondering how some theologians square the two.
Often they’ll say that a verse means something that it doesn’t actually say….
Dr. Ehrman,
You’ve seemed to ask the question, Was Jesus the Son of Man or Was a third person the Son of Man. If Paul thought Jesus was coming back, was Paul picking up on, “You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds”?
Steefen
Google AI:
The Apostle Paul describes Jesus’ return to judge the living and the dead in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11.
So, whereas Jesus’s disciples knew Jesus as the Son of Man in the first half of his ministry but learned of a third person Son of Man in the second half of his ministry, including after the Wicked Tenants parable where the once former Son of Man is going to be killed by the Wicked Tenants, Paul does not think there is a third person Son of Man?
If so, that is fascinating we postulate a third person Son of Man but Paul does not.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea of vrarious sons of man for Jesus. Paul, of course, does not use the term.
we’re all going to die,,, all of us,,, what a circus
that alone should make us love each other
but it doesn’t
(poet/philosopher Charles Bukowski)
Dr. Ehrman,
I read your.book on Hell and really loved.it. I have also watched several of your talks on the subject. I might have missed it, but why didn’t the King James translators choose the classical word ” Hades” for the Aramaic “Gahenna”? And is ” Hell” derived from the “Hel” of Norse mythology? If so, why would they have used that as the preferred term? Why not Hades, which would seemingly have been more in line with their classical background? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on that.
They really believed he was talking about the place of eternal conscious torment, not the shadowy world of Hades or some other alternative.
It seems to me that the issues here point to an important question at the heart of early Christology. By and large (always??) the NT texts seem to cohere with a consistent distinction between Jesus (the human person) and (the) Christ (the title denoting a personage, that is – minimally – God-anointed King). The latter is not mortal flesh and blood, but can be thus embodied. (Paul’s *soma pneumatikon* raises real ontological questions here.) In any case, depending upon what ontology Paul understood to underlie Genesis, it would be possible for him, and other Christians, to have held that the *role* of anointed King would be “baked into” the world at its creation, even though Jesus wasn’t there. 1 Thes. 4 is rather perplexing to me since since it refers to “the Lord Jesus” (kyrios ‘jezes), most naturally, perhaps, understood as the Messiah-embodied human being. But note that, in mentioning Jesus’ resurrection, 1 Thes. 4:14, he omits the title ‘Lord.’ I wonder whether Paul’s Christology might have evolved a bit between the 1 Thessalonians and later letters.
My granddaughter received the Jesus Bible for her 14th Birthday. I was told that she had recently become interested in Christianity. It is a highly interpretative reading of the NIV, based on extensive examples of passages in the Hebrew Bible that are claimed to be forecasts of Jesus. I am troubled by what seems to me to be false interpretation. Could you recommend some introduction-to-Christianity book that might be more helpful to her?
If she is closely connected with a community that endorses those kinds of views, I would imagine that any book providing an alternative perspective would be seen as threatening and not insightful, and thus might reinforce the views she is learning in her group. That is at least is how I would have reacted at that age. I don’t know what would be most suitable for someone that age to see an alternative view, but maybe some other members of the blo can suggest some ideas for us?