• In total there is 1 user online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 616 on Thu Jan 18, 2024 7:47 pm

Commentary on Romans 8

Engage in conversations about worldwide religions, cults, philosophy, atheism, freethought, critical thinking, and skepticism in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote: DWill, the dominant assumption is that Gnosticism arose as a mutation from an original literal orthodoxy. This assumption is behind your comment here, but is precisely what is contested by the mythicist reading. Instead, the presence of Gnostic ideas in the Bible itself leads to the interpretation that in fact Gnosticism was a far older and more central theme in Christian origins, conceptualising religion against the hermetic principle that events on earth can be understood as part of the natural whole seen in the ordered movement of the cosmos. This central Gnostic idea is incompatible with supernatural dogma, and as a result the church developed its claim that the later Gnostics simply had wrong speculative interpretations of the historic Gospel events.
I think you're wrong about the "dominant assumption," Robert. Historians have no trouble with the existence of Christian gnosticism from an early date. Christian gnosticism follows in the broader tradition of gnosticism, which was quite an old one going back to ancient Greece as well as other cultures. Further, there was no "original literal orthodoxy" from which the Gnostics could even be said to mutate. Orthodoxy refers to something quite different, a condition of doctrinal standardization that wouldn't arrive for a few centuries. There was no orthodoxy based on Jesus having existed, set against an assertion that he did not. This is a present-day belief slapped onto the ancient past. Whereas no doubt the Gnostics didn't make biography a matter of importance, I haven't seen anything that indicates that all these stories and sayings of Jesus, of which their books consist, equate to what we know as fiction. Our own concern with literalism simply wasn't a hallmark of those times. Please remember that all I've cared to argue is that Jesus was put forward as having been a man. I haven't argued that he was indeed real, although I think the probability does point to a man as having started the ball rolling.

It may be strictly true that Gnostics didn't have supernatural dogma, in the sense of required belief. But to imply that they had no supernatural theology is counterfactual. You don't dip into the Gnostic books to seek refuge from supernatural woo-woo. Again you're recasting the Gnostics in an image more to your liking.
I haven’t heard of Wilken before, so thank you for mentioning him. But your quoted text contains what for me is an alarm bell, in the phrase ‘the new revelation’. Orthodox theologians assume that Jesus Christ was the historic founder of Christianity, and brought this new teaching. But if in fact Jesus was a Gnostic invention, then the structure of Wilken’s argument is thrown into doubt.
What the Romans had heard so much about was this religion that claimed as its leader a slain man who was actually the son of a god. This was the "new revelation," from their point of view. I'm going to defer to Flann on the arguments that Jesus could not have been an invention of the Gnostics. As he says, you need to have not just one invention, but a whole skein of them going forward, and that should arouse extreme skepticism of the Gnostic origin idea.
The actual debates which formed the New Testament are lost, so reconstructing their probable content requires careful analysis, including about how Gnostic ideas found their way into texts such as Romans 8. My view is that the melting pot at Alexandria where Mark wrote his Gospel produced a syncretism between not only Judaism and Hellenic thought, but also other less well known traditions from Egypt, Babylon and India. So the Gnostic concept of Jesus Christ as alpha and omega did not emerge from dialogue between a Palestinian Gospel and the oikoumene as Wilken posits, but rather was embedded from the start.
Wilken doesn't posit anything about the origin of particular ideas of Jesus Christ. He only examines the Roman view of the Christians, which can be an instructive perspective. To the Romans, Gnostic vs "orthodox" would not have made any difference. What made a difference was the separatism of the people who called themselves Christian
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Flann 5 wrote:Hi Dwill, Thanks for your ideas on these things.I'm not really well up on this history but try to make sense of it on reasonably uncontroversial grounds.
It's evident that there were conflicts and disputes within early Christianity as is clear in the letters of Paul for instance. Arguments can be made on dating and authorship as a point of dispute for or against and it's what makes most sense of what is known that is decisive for me.
Scholars generally acknowledge authorship and first century dating for most letters but some are rejected for various reasons so it makes sense to focus on those generally accepted for good reasons.
Even though the latest comments in the thread are very interesting, I will continue to work through responses in order.

“What makes most sense of what is known is decisive”. This is precisely the scientific method. But theory of Christian origins has to start with some assumptions. Traditionally, orthodoxy assumes the New Testament has the status of “Gospel Truth” regarding the existence of Christ and the intervention of God. Modern materialism assumes that the physical universe is consistent and that miracles have a natural explanation, probably involving human error in the description. My view is that the Christ Myth Hypothesis makes most sense of what is known.
Flann 5 wrote: I suppose from a materialist perspective it's hard to make sense of the supernatural content as being historical.
God is a bit like string theory or the multiverse, a hypothesis that lacks evidence but helps to explain the phenomena. Positing God means imagining a being outside the physical universe, for whom there is no evidence except fervent belief. There are no attested examples of miracles that bring into question the consistent operation of the laws of physics in the universe. So as David Hume argued two and a half centuries ago, it is easy to make sense of the supernatural content as being psychological and political delusion.
Flann 5 wrote: If we take Paul's first letter to the Corinthians as reasonably uncontroversial on authorship and dating how can this be understood? I think it's reasonable to accept that these churches actually existed in the first century and Tacitus' reference to Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome would accord with this. So Paul writes to the Corinthian church reminding them of the gospel he had preached to them in founding the church along with addressing other practical issues and problems.
In chapter 15 he specifically addresses the question of physical resurrection which some are denying in one way or another.
The Tacitus reference is isolated, and like many of these supposed early references, would have been used by early apologists if it were genuine. The absence of the Tacitus and Josephus mentions of Christ from several centuries of Christian discussion of their work, against interest, indicate that these references are clearly fraudulent.

1Cor15:14 says “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.” This can be used as moral blackmail for literalism, to argue that any allegorical meaning in the resurrection destroys faith. I think that is plausible for a popular mass audience who rely on signs and wonders, but intellectually, people do not rise from the dead, so Paul must be speaking allegorically or in error. I vastly prefer the allegory of the sun, which indeed does rise every day and year, providing the stable basis of light and love and grace for the world. Along Hume’s line, it makes sense to consider Jesus as an imagined metaphor for the sun, and to read Paul in that light.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote: “What makes most sense of what is known is decisive”. This is precisely the scientific method. But theory of Christian origins has to start with some assumptions. Traditionally, orthodoxy assumes the New Testament has the status of “Gospel Truth” regarding the existence of Christ and the intervention of God. Modern materialism assumes that the physical universe is consistent and that miracles have a natural explanation, probably involving human error in the description. My view is that the Christ Myth Hypothesis makes most sense of what is known.
Why start with assumptions? History tries to ferret out assumptions. Maybe you feel that little knowledge of this period is available, putting mythicism and the accepted materialist view on equal footing, but they aren't comparable at all. We know more than enough from history and from biblical context to see that the balance is way in favor of the view that Jesus was always regarded as having been real, even if his historicity wasn't what was chosen for emphasis, as with the Gnostics.
God is a bit like string theory or the multiverse, a hypothesis that lacks evidence but helps to explain the phenomena. Positing God means imagining a being outside the physical universe, for whom there is no evidence except fervent belief. There are no attested examples of miracles that bring into question the consistent operation of the laws of physics in the universe. So as David Hume argued two and a half centuries ago, it is easy to make sense of the supernatural content as being psychological and political delusion.
Just to clarify that this has no bearing on the argument of how Christianity arose.
The Tacitus reference is isolated, and like many of these supposed early references, would have been used by early apologists if it were genuine. The absence of the Tacitus and Josephus mentions of Christ from several centuries of Christian discussion of their work, against interest, indicate that these references are clearly fraudulent.
What does "isolated " mean? How does it disqualify this quotation as evidence in belief that Jesus existed? The absence of these references to Jesus by others is easily explained if there in fact was never any controversy about the existence of Jesus. I ask you again to look at the discussions of Jesus by the "pagan" critics, who of course were opponents of Christianity. These are not direct evidence that Jesus existed, but they are indisputable evidence of the general belief that he belonged to history, which is all that is needed to disprove mythicism. None of these non-Christian writers tell us that Jesus was a myth.
1Cor15:14 says “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.” This can be used as moral blackmail for literalism, to argue that any allegorical meaning in the resurrection destroys faith. I think that is plausible for a popular mass audience who rely on signs and wonders, but intellectually, people do not rise from the dead, so Paul must be speaking allegorically or in error. I vastly prefer the allegory of the sun, which indeed does rise every day and year, providing the stable basis of light and love and grace for the world. Along Hume’s line, it makes sense to consider Jesus as an imagined metaphor for the sun, and to read Paul in that light.
But you'll realize, I think, that what you vastly prefer doesn't tell us anything about what really obtained. To me, it's remarkably unlikely that Paul is springing on his audience the "news" that, behold, it's all about the ancient sun symbolism after all! That is probably the most conservative message anyone could have delivered, and why it would have seemed to be needed at this time is a puzzle.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

http://www.booktalk.org/post141037.html#p141037
Flann 5 wrote: He starts with asserting that the gospel he had received and preached to them was that; Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, was buried and rose again. And that he subsequently appeared to various individuals and groups at different times.
This “according to the scriptures” point from 1 Corinthians 15:4 that I have emphasised in Flann's comment coheres far better with the view that Christ was invented than with the idea that he was historical. It reads as though Paul is saying his primary source about Christ is the Jewish prophecies from the Old Testament scriptures, given that the Gospels did not yet exist much less have the status of ‘scripture’. This sourcing of information about Jesus by Paul from text rather than history is truly bizarre against the conventional historicist reading, since if Paul’s source was actual historical knowledge of a real man called Jesus of Nazareth, he would surely indicate that. Instead Paul talks about ancient prophecy in a way that reads more like imagined wish fulfilment that a record of events. As Earl Doherty argues, " "according to the scriptures," ... is traditionally interpreted as meaning 'in fulfillment of the scriptures,' it may also have the meaning of 'as we learn from the scriptures.'"
Flann 5 wrote: He finishes with the argument that if in fact Christ was not risen from the dead then their faith was futile and that he and the other apostles were false witnesses about this in testifying that he had risen from the dead, and their labours and troubles on this account were inherently futile bordering on insane.
Your “bordering on insane” is a fine paraphrase of Paul’s terms ‘lost’ and ‘miserable’. As I noted in an earlier comment, this touching faith in the physical resurrection is a fine piece of emotional blackmail. On the surface, Paul appears to be saying unless you think God broke the laws of physics you cannot be a Christian. This is certainly the conventional interpretation. But that idea makes no sense at all against any reasonable concept of truth, since we have no reason whatsoever to believe that God really brought Jesus back from the dead. This whole idea is a symbolic allegory. To understand it we have to ask what this meme of resurrection really signifies in actual human experience.

Far and away the simplest answer is that the allegory of rebirth points to the real source of light and life that returns from the dead every day and year with monotonous regularity, our good friend Sol. Paul is certainly saying that the way of the world has to be overturned through Christ as a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), but if we wish to understand this metanoic transformation as real, then we should analyse how the delusion of the world can be overcome through a higher truth.

Positing a supernatural interventionist being who breaks the laws of physics in some Bullwinkle Rabbit display is hardly the basis of an enlightened vision. (“Hey Flann, watch me pull a messiah outta this tomb. RRHAHRGH!RH No doubt about it, I gotta get another cave.”
Flann 5 wrote: The post death appearances make little sense as visions, or of an incorporeal being in the context of an extended argument on the resurrection of the body. So an orthodoxy exists early in these churches going by the letters but there are problems with views within and without.
The primary problem is that these ‘appearances’ look like myth historized, not history mythified. The agenda here is that in order to gain popular traction, the early church found that claims of signs worked wonders in persuading the gullible. You have to remember, if you can fake sincerity you have got it made. If the Bible admitted a shred of doubt we would lose the ability to successfully instruct mountains to remove hence to yonder place, that well known Christian ability described by Our Blessed Lord Himself in Matt 17:20. The fact that Paul expresses such strong certainty about the resurrection provides no grounds for certainty on our part that Paul meant this literally.
Flann 5 wrote: Denial of bodily resurrection, asceticism, and Docetism as examples which are argued against. The Christology then is of someone more than a human prophet whatever that might mean in a non supernatural context. So it seems the supernatural view is early and the progressive accretion of myth not really explanatory for this.
”Docetism” is the heresy that Christ only “seemed” to appear in the flesh. This is precisely the view that our good Saint Paul expresses in one of the first verses in discussion in this very thread, Romans 8:3, where Paul describes “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” This term “likeness” directly states that Christ only seemed to appear in the flesh, a Docetic Gnostic viewpoint.

In my commentary in the opening post, I explained my view that this “seeming” appearance of Christ could be explained by the imaginative union of time and eternity. This myth is a complex Platonic metaphysical idea that was carried over into Christianity from earlier philosophy. The parable of the Son of Timaeus (Mark 10:46) provides an indication of this reliance on Plato, whose Timaeus discusses the cross in the sky as the union of time and eternity, in an entirely coherent observational way.

There is no evidence for your assertion that the supernatural view is early, considering that this Docetic material in Romans 8:3 is far better explained as Paul popularising Platonic philosophy in parable.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Fri May 01, 2015 6:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Flann 5 wrote: Gnosticism for instance, starts off with a philosophical view in relation to origins, the source of good and evil and a possible remedy for the human predicament in gnosis. It seems though that this is imposed interpretively on the gospels for example rather than arising from a natural reading of them. The same is true I think of astro-theology.
The real imposition at work is the modern Christian reading of the Epistles through the lens of the Gospels. The Epistles lack any historical Jesus except for a few ambiguous mentions which make much more sense as spiritual myth. Once we learn to bracket the false presupposition that Jesus existed, we obtain a far more coherent and consistent and ethical message in Paul.

The supposedly “natural reading” of the Gospels described by Flann is equivalent to an equally “natural reading” of the stories of Adam and Eve, Jason and the Argonauts, Exodus, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood, Don Quixote and Star Wars. It is immensely pleasant and comforting to read all these fictional accounts in a state of suspended disbelief, naturally assuming they are historical accounts, just like the Gospels. But the oxymoronic natural supernaturalism in the Gospels breaks down under the slightest rigor, and is only sustained by faith that moves mountains in order to avoid seeing what is really there.

Astral reading of the New Testament is about producing a coherent interpretation of the authors’ intentions against the reality of ancient culture, not imposing a purely modern concept.
Flann 5 wrote: natural reading of the texts would lead to a conclusion of descriptions of supernatural events.
But Flann, your argument here applies equally to stories of alien abduction. Your so-called ‘natural reading’ would take the fervent sincerity of these alien stories as evidence for their truth, even though psychological analysis provides a more plausible interpretation that these stories are fantasies.

With the Bible, it is not just fantasy, but parable wrapped in miracle. The fantastic stories have the deliberate political intention to inculcate belief. The motive, method and opportunity for the propagation efforts in the Jesus Myth are all highly sophisticated. The great advantages of inserting plausible supernatural claims for the agenda of creating a mass movement included that the Jesus stories have immense emotional power and are impervious to rebuttal.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

http://www.booktalk.org/post141068.html#p141068
DWill wrote: materialism comes in for me not just in the supernatural elevation of Jesus, or in the miracles he was said to perform, but in the development of the new religion.
Materialism is in direct conflict with claims of supernatural elevation, so a different meaning of the term would be required to claim that “materialism comes in” in elevation and miracles.

By contrast, an astral teleology provides a coherent scientific materialist account of Christian development, and rejects all talk of 'elevation' and 'miracles' as allegory. An astral reading provides a valuable way to see how matter enfolds spirit. Matter enables spiritual identity to construct culture while shaping the boundaries and direction of historical events, just as the banks shape the flow of a river.
DWill wrote:The question I would ask people of faith is whether, even assuming that Jesus performed the miracles and was raised, we could have not ended up with a Christianity.
This assumes something that clearly is untrue. Making incorrect assumptions will never be particularly helpful in arriving at the truth. Jesus did not perform miracles or return from the dead, unless all our science is in vain, to paraphrase Paul.
DWill wrote:The impression I get from the faithful is that God or the Holy Spirit was working to make things happen just as they did. Questions of teleology are obviously raised.
An astral reading focussed on precession does in fact present an evolutionary teleology in the Jesus story. The content of this teleology can be understood by examining how our lives are structured by the orderly movements of the cosmos. Waking and sleeping follow the solar cycle of day and night. Sowing and reaping, and all annual patterns of life, follow the equally orderly solar cycle of the year. The point of a precessional analysis is that there is in fact a third motion of the earth, to use a phrase from Copernicus.

Precession produces a cycle of light and dark over a 20,000 year period, causing the regular rise and fall of seas and glaciers. Placing the Jesus story within this orbital climatic pattern, we find that the myth coheres directly with the orbital pattern, with Jesus close to the transition from fall to winter, marking what the Vedic myth saw as the presence of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age. While such language may appear fanciful, it presents an entirely scientific way to construct an understanding of an inherent purpose in human life, a scientific basis for what DWill calls “God or the Holy Spirit working to make things happen just as they did.”

If instead of a supernatural God, we see the agency behind the Biblical stories as resting within the real big orbital cycles of the earth, it becomes possible to see how the effects of these real cycles could have been intuited in mythology. So rather than being driven by a supernatural God working in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, the order and purpose of life on earth are well explained against the real astronomical cycles of climate.

The key marker of this cycle is the date of the perihelion, when the earth is closest to the sun. This date moved through the fall from about 5000 BC to 1000 AD, and is now moving through winter, occurring on about 4 January every year.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Fri May 01, 2015 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:http://www.booktalk.org/post141068.html#p141068
DWill wrote: materialism comes in for me not just in the supernatural elevation of Jesus, or in the miracles he was said to perform, but in the development of the new religion.
Materialism is in direct conflict with claims of supernatural elevation, so a different meaning of the term would be required to claim that “materialism comes in” in elevation and miracles.

By contrast, an astral teleology provides a coherent scientific materialist account of Christian development, and rejects all talk of 'elevation' and 'miracles' as allegory. An astral reading provides a valuable way to see how matter enfolds spirit. Matter enables spiritual identity to construct culture while shaping the boundaries and direction of historical events, just as the banks shape the flow of a river.
You missed my point here, but maybe it wasn't very clear. I was commenting that materialism does not only disallow the miracles of the Bible, including someone being resurrected, but it also disallows any aspect of culture escaping development and change through the operation of historical contingency (accident) and the influence of the rest of culture. Christians of the most serious sort need to claim that in fact Christianity did escape the cycles of cultural evolution, that it was specially created as one thing and did not become anything else through either accident or influence. This is where the opposition to considering syncretism is strongest.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:The question I would ask people of faith is whether, even assuming that Jesus performed the miracles and was raised, we could have not ended up with a Christianity.
This assumes something that clearly is untrue. Making incorrect assumptions will never be particularly helpful in arriving at the truth. Jesus did not perform miracles or return from the dead, unless all our science is in vain, to paraphrase Paul.
I was trying to make the point that Christians are asking for acceptance of the even greater miracle that Christianity did not develop in response to cultural conditions, that it was in other words proof against contingency. People of faith would probably say that God or the Holy Spirit drove the contingencies, so that what happened was exactly according to the divine intention. I'm saying that, just as nature is uniform and disallows miracles, human culture has a general uniform law that disallows any part of it from not being touched by evolution.
Roberrt Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:The impression I get from the faithful is that God or the Holy Spirit was working to make things happen just as they did. Questions of teleology are obviously raised.
An astral reading focussed on precession does in fact present an evolutionary teleology in the Jesus story. The content of this teleology can be understood by examining how our lives are structured by the orderly movements of the cosmos. Waking and sleeping follow the solar cycle of day and night. Sowing and reaping, and all annual patterns of life, follow the equally orderly solar cycle of the year. The point of a precessional analysis is that there is in fact a third motion of the earth, to use a phrase from Copernicus.
I'm most interested in the reading that would accord with the precedents, conditions, and intentions of the time in which the Jesus story was written, and which preserves the textual integrity of the writings. The astral reading you advocate simply does not do a very good job of this, and if you were to lay out the Gospel stories along these lines, in detail, the result would probably seem ridiculous to me. Have you done this, or can you cite someone who has, so we can have a look?
Robert Tulip wrote:Precession produces a cycle of light and dark over a 20,000 year period, causing the regular rise and fall of seas and glaciers. Placing the Jesus story within this orbital climatic pattern, we find that the myth coheres directly with the orbital pattern, with Jesus close to the transition from fall to winter, marking what the Vedic myth saw as the presence of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age. While such language may appear fanciful, it presents an entirely scientific way to construct an understanding of an inherent purpose in human life, a scientific basis for what DWill calls “God or the Holy Spirit working to make things happen just as they did.”
Referring to my point above, how do you make any sort of match of these beliefs with the literal text of the Gospels (or other parts of the Christian Bible), which is what must be done to give any credence to your view. It is, indeed, fanciful unless you can bring it down to basics. And "scientific" is superfluous.
Last edited by DWill on Sat May 02, 2015 7:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Two books I know of that demonstrate how star lore and precession made it into our myths and histories are Henry Melville's Veritas and the book Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend.

A pdf of Melville's book can be found here:

https://ia700402.us.archive.org/15/item ... lvgoog.pdf

And a pdf of Hamlet's Mill is found here:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hamle ... etmill.htm

I found Melville's book, which I read about 15 years ago, quite eye-opening in that we know almost nothing about the sovereigns of England (Melville was an Englishman) because their life histories are so intertwined with star lore taken from celestial charts. It does answer questions I've always had such as why William the Conqueror died the same death as Judas in Acts and Arius--namely the bowels or entrails gushing from the body.

Another thing I've always found strange was that in the NT, Mary had a cousin Elizabeth and Mary was called the Virgin Queen of Heaven; while England had two sovereigns--Mary and Elizabeth--who were half-sisters and Elizabeth was known as the Virgin Queen.

The historical method we use today is a very recent development. The old histories were written often by priests or nobles because only they could read and write. We can be pretty certain the histories they fed us were not accurate. Many of our histories today are not accurate so we can imagine how bad they were then. Many of our modern pop approved-for-mass-consumption histories are grossly inaccurate but most people believe them completely and if you try to set them straight, it won't end well for you.

For those who would point to Josephus, his histories are, at best, speculation rather than fact. His account of the siege of Masada, for example, can only be a fiction as far his relaying of what went on among the Jewish rebels simply because none of them survived to tell their side of the story. We can't be sure of what he relays about the Romans is fact because he never even bothered to interview Flavius Silva even though both men were living in Rome when Josephus wrote the account.

We tend to treat these ancient historical accounts as though they are unassailable when they are, at best, questionable.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

Flann 5 wrote: I don't think you can say that Paul had no evidence that Christ lived as an actual man, since he spoke with Peter, James and John who did testify of this, and he also says that Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus, albeit in a blinding vision.
The scales that fell from Paul’s eyes in seeing Christ on the Damascus Road are a purely spiritual vision providing no support for the historicity of Jesus. The Book of Acts where this story appears is a late piece of political fiction with no historical merit. The absence of the Damascus Road fable from the Epistles indicates its flimsy status.

As for the Jerusalem meetings, Earl Doherty again has a comment that casts this into radical and legitimate doubt. At http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/jhcjp.htm Earl Doherty says:
“If Paul were preaching a man who was God, would not his listeners and converts have demanded to know about the life of this man, his sayings and deeds? Whether Paul liked it or not, the human Jesus would have become a focus of discussion between himself and his congregations, details of which would certainly surface in his letters. None do.

Paul could hardly have set out on a career to bring the message about Jesus to the gentile all across the known world without possessing a certain amount of information about the man he intended to preach. Yet what effort did he make to acquire such information?

During the first 17 years following his conversion, and after waiting three of those years, he spent exactly two weeks in Jerusalem with the men who had presumably known Jesus in his ministry and were the custodians of that information. All he did at the time, so he tells us (Galatians 1:18-19), was "get to know Peter" and see James. Did they give him a crash course in their memories of Jesus’ life and ministry? Paul gives no hint of such a thing, and no details are ever relayed to his readers.

Christianity was in competition with the Graeco-Roman mystery cults, with many salvation messages spread by wandering philosophers and devotees of the cultic gods. An important benefit offered by these deities was protection against the evil spirits. Yet the pseudo-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians, which have a special interest in these matters, fail to point out that, unlike the other savior deities, Christ had been incarnated in flesh and blood in recent history.”
Paul's flimsy improbable implausible story about an alleged brief meeting in Jerusalem, when we would naturally expect such a relationship to be far more intensive if it were real, illustrates how Christian reliance on such stories involves a triumph of faith over reason.

If we look at a real historical relationship of people who work together, like the Triumvirates of Rome, the history allows far less room for doubt, or for later amendment by people with political agendas, since the events are so well known and fit so well as causes of great events. But the events of the rise of the church do not depend on real founders in any similar way, with Jesus and the twelve better explained as invented allegorical symbols for the sun and moon rather than real people.
Flann 5 wrote:
Plus the explanations for "James the brother of the Lord" in Galatians, are lame from those who seek to get around it.
Again, this is material which has been analysed in some detail by Earl Doherty, whose arguments are compelling regarding the widespread use of the term ‘brother’ just to mean someone who was part of the church. It is very strange that a brother of Christ could be mentioned in this passing way by Paul when Jesus himself is described in such a sketchy and silent way.

The problem is that people have been taught to read the epistles through the lens of the Gospels. The nearly complete silence of Paul about Jesus then requires believers to latch on to these ambiguous scraps to reconcile the entirely spiritual Jesus who is Paul’s main focus with the Gospel legends. Even purported events like Paul’s “Lord’s Supper” are far better explained as symbolic ritual myth than real history.
Flann 5 wrote: To take the technical point; In Romans 11:1 Paul says; "I say then, God has not rejected his people has he? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin." NASB. In Romans 9:3 he says; " For I could wish that I were myself accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." And Romans 9:4-5 he says; "Who are Israelites...............whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever." The Greek phrase Paul uses in Romans 9:3 for "according to the flesh" is identical to the one used for Christ in Rom.9:5. In context, Paul speaks of the Israelites who he calls his kinsmen and brothers "according to the flesh." Very unambiguously his human descent.
Actually, Paul's phrase “according to the flesh” – kata sark - is entirely ambiguous and does not serve as any proof of Jesus of Nazareth, let alone provide an explicit statement that a man Jesus Christ was descended from Jews.

The ambiguity in this ‘Cutty Sark’ line is not about whisky or sailing ships or tunics, but about the emergence of the Christ story among the Jews. While Paul obviously wants to leave open the idea that Christ was an actual man, if this historical claim was not actually the case then we do find a simple ambiguity in 'kata sark'. Rather than discussing descent by blood, it can readily be read to indicate that the prophecy of a messiah arose among the Jews as a physical people.

The prophecy of the coming messiah, which as Paul emphasises is his main source about Jesus “according to the scriptures”, does not at all directly imply the common reading of genetic descent. It is also worth noting that genetic descent contradicts the virgin birth, a major teaching which Paul does not mention. The most coherent reading is to recognise that Paul's cultural references placing Christ are about a spiritual tradition, not a real person.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Sun May 03, 2015 10:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Robert Tulip

2B - MOD & SILVER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6497
Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
18
Location: Canberra
Has thanked: 2717 times
Been thanked: 2659 times
Contact:
Australia

Re: Commentary on Romans 8

Unread post

While I am very much looking forward to eventually responding to DWill's excellent question about how precession appears in the Bible, I will continue the orderly response to comments.
Flann 5 wrote: Furthermore in Hebrews 7:13-14 we have this; "For the one concerning whom these things are spoken comes from another tribe, from which no one has officiated at the altar. For it is evident, that our Lord was descended from Judah, a tribe with reference to which Moses spoke nothing concerning priests." The contrast is between the Levites whose priesthood was based on physical genealogical descent from Levi and Christ who is from the tribe of Judah. This would carry little weight with these Hebrews if it referred to some non human sub lunar being with no actual ancestry and the language in all of the above references, of Israel, and tribes is self evidently genealogical. The same goes for a sun based anthropomorphism which has the dual problem of paganism and no real possible genealogy, for these mono-theistic Hebrews. "Cultural tradition" is not good enough here.
Hebrews is possibly the most flagrantly non-historical book regarding presentation of Jesus Christ as a purely spiritual imaginary being. On the mention of Moses, it is worth noting DM Murdock’s book Did Moses Exist?, which provides a conclusive account of the impossibility of the Bible stories emerging from fact.

As I understand it, there was no mention of Moses in any books written before the 7th century Deuteronomic texts and then the captivity in Babylon, presenting more than half a millennium between the purported events of the Exodus and their appearance in the Bible. Together with the archaeological impossibility of the Exodus story, since Egypt ruled Canaan at the time of the purported Exodus, there is no basis to cite a mention of this esoteric fictional character Moses as somehow proving that Hebrews considered Jesus to be real, let alone for a genealogy to refer to any attested people.

“Sub lunar” generally means “terrestrial”. Again, the interlinear Bible that I cited earlier in the flesh to correct the false modern historicist translations will be a good reference on this alleged claim of descent of Christ. Flann again accepts the systematic literalist mistranslation, designed to read the Gospels into the Epistles. In Hebrews 7:14 the original does not say “Our lord was descended from Judah”. http://biblehub.com/interlinear/hebrews/7-14.htm provides the actual literal translation. Where Flann has “descended”, the original Greek is “anatetalken” or “has sprung”.

I have had a look at the sources now, and this word ‘sprung’ is associated closely with the word ‘anatellei’ used in Matthew 5:45 about the sun rising. The French and Greek name Anatole means sunrise. Another meaning, in the form ‘exanatello’ is 'to germinate'. These allegorical meanings indicate that this verse can in no way be used to claim the author of Hebrews is stating anything about the physical descent of Jesus Christ, but rather appears to be drawing an esoteric connection between Jesus and Moses as connected symbols of the sun.

An excellent analysis of Hebrews is at http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp14One.htm
Post Reply

Return to “Religion & Philosophy”