36 replies to this topic

[Dying Seraph]

First and foremost thank you everyone for contributing your thoughts.

eight bits, on 02 October 2012 - 10:52 PM, said:

Hi, DS

That would be the way to bet, in my opinion.

It's intriguing, isn't it? We have so little Paul, probably just the seven genuine letters, and a lot of them are a response to mudane problems in his far-flung network of churches. And this rare glimpse at Paul teaching something from Jesus' biography, it seems to be there to refresh the congregation's memory of the Lord's Supper re-enactment ritual, something they already know.

But what do they know? There's no "Gospel" in the sense we know it for them to consult; maybe there's a "Passion Narrative," now either lost or incorporated into the canonical Gospels.

Here's a heretical thought: some in Paul's audience might know more about the biographical details than Paul does. Paul complains that other teachers with different Gospels are repeatedly showing up. Maybe all Paul knows, apart from what he gets in his visionary interviews with Jesus, is what he picked up when he was persecuting the Way.

I do love this stuff.

Greetings 8 Bits,
All this time it's long been speculation and of course we don't really know but it's a breath of fresh air to not feel nuts in seeing not just sympathy for Judas but see him as a "good guy" per se.

Indeed what do they know? That certainly is an issue since his writings predate Mark.   

LMAO while someone following Ireneus or such would find that heretical it makes a lot of sense. For the longest time after all Acts and Ireneneus had masses decieved into believing everyone was in agreement and organized until the surface of all these "heretical" works showed just how little agreement and organization there was. That said...how "heretical" of you.
The department of seperating which letter Paul truly wrote and didn't are foreign to me. There is this one murky instance after all in one of the letters where he seems to be condemning Peter (perhaps condemn is a bit strong but certainly criticizing Peter) and calling him a hypocrite. Perhaps that was one not written by Paul at all? That he would travel with Peter and make statements about a "brother" in Christ?
The other is as mentioned the narcisism presented in the letter where he states that Jesus died because he loved Paul so much. That certainly now in retrospect seems more suspicious and likely not written by Paul but a follower to make such a declaration.

Is it incorrect to assume that even though Paul embraced Jesus Christ and his message, he still worshipped the same God he always did? I am under the impression that he came to see that his God had new plans for him in a sense. Or did he embrace a "new" god when he converted?
Paul, "Who are you Lord?" "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting."
Acts 9:4

And then an even more grave scenario. The Bible points out that Paul was blinded by light. This leads one to question is this literal or a metaphorical attempt to convey that he was "blind" to the persecution he was involved in and this "light" opened him to an awakening of sorts?

seishin, on 03 October 2012 - 02:15 AM, said:

The problem is such that if Judas is to be seen as an instrument of God (not vilified for that reason), surely one would have to argue that Hitler was also an instrument--all people for that matter.

I would reason that that's exactly the point of the New Testament; saved by the blood... yadda.

Well, to any extent, it appears to be quite the paradox.

However, as with the nature of religion, the true meaning is never as clear as the lie being propagated.

Greetings seishin,
Indeed some texrts more then others perhaps. Some argue that natural disasters are part of God's plan as well. Certainly it's a matter of how literal one accepts such and perhaps also in part to how invested one is in "faith."
You present a great point. Adolf Hitler could be seen as an instrument of Gods plan, just like the Jews who had a hand in the creation of the Atomic Bomb. Perhaps God's divine plan is for mankind to destroy ourselves?

SINcerely,

[seishin]

Dying Seraph, on 03 October 2012 - 10:29 PM, said:

First and foremost thank you everyone for contributing your thoughts.



Greetings 8 Bits,
All this time it's long been speculation and of course we don't really know but it's a breath of fresh air to not feel nuts in seeing not just sympathy for Judas but see him as a "good guy" per se.

Indeed what do they know? That certainly is an issue since his writings predate Mark.   

LMAO while someone following Ireneus or such would find that heretical it makes a lot of sense. For the longest time after all Acts and Ireneneus had masses decieved into believing everyone was in agreement and organized until the surface of all these "heretical" works showed just how little agreement and organization there was. That said...how "heretical" of you.
The department of seperating which letter Paul truly wrote and didn't are foreign to me. There is this one murky instance after all in one of the letters where he seems to be condemning Peter (perhaps condemn is a bit strong but certainly criticizing Peter) and calling him a hypocrite. Perhaps that was one not written by Paul at all? That he would travel with Peter and make statements about a "brother" in Christ?
The other is as mentioned the narcisism presented in the letter where he states that Jesus died because he loved Paul so much. That certainly now in retrospect seems more suspicious and likely not written by Paul but a follower to make such a declaration.

Is it incorrect to assume that even though Paul embraced Jesus Christ and his message, he still worshipped the same God he always did? I am under the impression that he came to see that his God had new plans for him in a sense. Or did he embrace a "new" god when he converted?
Paul, "Who are you Lord?" "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting."
Acts 9:4

And then an even more grave scenario. The Bible points out that Paul was blinded by light. This leads one to question is this literal or a metaphorical attempt to convey that he was "blind" to the persecution he was involved in and this "light" opened him to an awakening of sorts?



Greetings seishin,
Indeed some texrts more then others perhaps. Some argue that natural disasters are part of God's plan as well. Certainly it's a matter of how literal one accepts such and perhaps also in part to how invested one is in "faith."
You present a great point. Adolf Hitler could be seen as an instrument of Gods plan, just like the Jews who had a hand in the creation of the Atomic Bomb. Perhaps God's divine plan is for mankind to destroy ourselves?

SINcerely,

Or it is merely our nature, but I'm open to either

[eight bits]

Hey, DS

Well, we're getting away from Judas a bit, but both passages you mentioned are from Galatians, which is taken by almost everybody as genuine Paul.

2: 11-14
And when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he clearly was wrong. For, until some people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised.And the rest of the Jews [also] acted hypocritically along with him, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all, "If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?


2: 19-21
For through the law I died to the law, that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ;yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing


The only thing I can say about the latter is that Julius Caesar was lavish when praising himself, too. I think we are used to a different style. Paul's position, I think, is that Jesus died for everybody, and so died for Paul... it's just we might phrase a point like that a little differently today.  Paul also brags elsewhere about having been a very good Jew .

The consensus non-fundamentalist attribution on Paul is

Probably Genuine: Romans, 1* & 2 Corinthians, Galatians*, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemom

Seriously doubtful (but maybe "Pauline School") : Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians

Unlikely to be Paul: "The Pastorals" (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus) and Hebrews (only sometimes attritubuted to Paul anyway)

* These two contain a lot of autobiographical material, relatively speaking, and there are secular reasons to believe that they were written by the same person. In some sense, then, they are "by definition" genuine - we can simply define "Saint Paul" to be the author of these two letters.

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Is it incorrect to assume that even though Paul embraced Jesus Christ and his message, he still worshipped the same God he always did? I am under the impression that he came to see that his God had new plans for him in a sense. Or did he embrace a "new" god when he converted?

Looking at the second passage above, he certainly has a new relationship to God. I don't see that Paul ever gives up being a Jew, or being a Pharisee. He seems to think the end times have begun, as Jews conceived of them,  and sees a new covenant appropriate for that phase of history. Righteous Gentiles have a role, as Gentiles, in the Jewish end times, and maybe he, as a Jew, has a different way to worship God than he had before the end times.

I also don't see that Paul saw Jesus as his God (which isn't a very Jewish thought, no matter how you'd spin it), but rather somebody whom the one God has granted some very special status. Even 1 Clement, which is way later than Paul (but maybe the earliest proto-orthodox epistle not to make the canon, or close) seems equivocal on that point.

Pliny the Younger, our favorite pagan witness to early Christianity, says his ca. 112 CE Christians sing hymns to Christ "as if" to a god... an intriguing hedge, "as if to" instead just plain "as a god." As a Roman, Pliny wouldn't have had a problem singing to a man as a god. He insisted that others should do just that, the Emperor being the god.

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The Bible points out that Paul was blinded by light. This leads one to question is this literal or a metaphorical attempt to convey that he was "blind" to the persecution he was involved in and this "light" opened him to an awakening of sorts?

That whole "conversion experience" is very murky. And then when Luke tells it, suddenly Ananias, who is nowehere in Paul, is a major factor in shaping Paul's understanding of what happened to him. Bottom line: I wish I knew how it really went down.

[Dying Seraph]

Where/why/how does Judas Didymus go from being a "twin" and close to Jesus, to becoming Judas Iscariot and the traitor? Indeed in Mark there are no specifics of WHY Judas does what he does, and the later tales imply betrayal however even in Mark there is this seperation going from being closest to Jesus, to being simply Judas Iscariot. Were there two Judas's as some of the later lists of the 12 conveys? Or was this latter an attempt to take away any chance of seeing Judas as a goodguy by making the point that there were two different Judas's? Or can it all be chalked up to literal confusion of characters? After all we see that Jesus apparently had a brother named Judas, in Acts and Matthew Judas acts a crucial question, "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not the world?"

IN essence how did a dead man continue on to become a traitor? Merely a dicergence in traditional story telling? Is there an amalgamation of a few characters infuzed?

SINcerely,

[eight bits]

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IN essence how did a dead man continue on to become a traitor?

Rule #1 in bureacracy... never be absent from any meeting where tasks are being assigned or blame is being decided. Whoever isn't there will get the dirty end of the stick. Being dead is even worse for blame, although it may help avoid the lousiest of the work assignments .

Celsus called it. All of Jesus' closest male associates ran out on him. Or all except one (depending on who John's Beloved Disciple was, and whether he was one of the Twelve). Somebody's got to take the fall for this. Otherwise, how is Jesus' church going to get founded and properly led? Nobody's available except those who went AWOL when the crunch came.

Eleven guys who see the error of their ways once the cops stop looking for them can easily agree that the guy who didn't show for the reunion is the somebody who should fall.

[Dying Seraph]

eight bits, on 08 October 2012 - 03:20 PM, said:

Rule #1 in bureacracy... never be absent from any meeting where tasks are being assigned or blame is being decided. Whoever isn't there will get the dirty end of the stick. Being dead is even worse for blame, although it may help avoid the lousiest of the work assignments .

Celsus called it. All of Jesus' closest male associates ran out on him. Or all except one (depending on who John's Beloved Disciple was, and whether he was one of the Twelve). Somebody's got to take the fall for this. Otherwise, how is Jesus' church going to get founded and properly led? Nobody's available except those who went AWOL when the crunch came.

Eleven guys who see the error of their ways once the cops stop looking for them can easily agree that the guy who didn't show for the reunion is the somebody who should fall.

Greetings 8 Bits,
Coincidently you present my next area of questioning, and granted John was written so long after the other gospels, but is there any likelyhood at all that John's beloved disciple was Judas? John certainly makes no mention and is written long after the Judas DIdymus "twin" issue and the general concensus varies from John to Mary as being Jesus's beloved disciple and John further portrays Judas Iscariot as less then savory. Is the author of John being ominous on purpose? After all the auther has no issues diverging from the other gospels to stress his own points. And in John there appears to be another Judas not Iscariot that asks Jesus, "Lord how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" John 14.22 Some have suggested that this Judas is the Thaddeus of Matthew 10.3 and Mark's 3.18 however in John it appears that two alternate Judas's are in the 12. Could this "beloved disciple" be Judas and not mentioned because of the condemnation being heaped on Iscariot? Could the Judas in John's mind that asked such a question be Judas Iscariot or Didymus and the author John doesn't want anyone believing that Judas a traitor would ask such a question of faith hence "beloved disiple?"

SINcerely,

[eight bits]

Hi, DS

There are a lot of candidates for the Beloved Disciple. The case for the traditional identification with John the Apostle (who is not especially likely to be the author of the Gospel of John) is tenable, but there are plenty of other lively contenders.

Judas of Kerioth (Iscariot) is a tantalizing possibility. The Christian message, like John the Baptist's from which it derives, is about redemption and "metanoia," change of heart. A great deal is made of the cowardly depiction of Peter in Mark, versus the tradition that he was eventually courageously martyred. So, why not show a bad, Satan-possessed Judas?

And, as you say, that doesn't even exhaust the candidates named Judas . One thing, though, is that the author of John says he is working from a written source. I believe that the author of that source is dead when the Gospel is written (or at least its last chapter). So, when John writes that Judas, not the traitor, says something, I wonder what his source actually says. Just that? Or just "Judas," and the gospel author says, "Oh, that must have been another Judas."

The killer is that I think everybody in "John's" original audience knew who the Beloved Disciple was, and that he was the "last man standing," the indicator life for Jesus' Olivet prophecy that he would return in the lifetime of at least one listener to his speech. It's all very murky why the Gospel doesn't just name the guy (if everybody knows anyway), or why he suddenly pops up in the narrative so late, and why the traditional attribution to John the Apostle is so little explained.

While I do love this stuff, there are aspects of it that are pure frustration .