The Folly of 'Jewish Christianity' Theories

[lsayre]

How can he be "a normal human Jesus who had a normal human family" if "his way of 'procuring innovations and changes of government' was to suffer, die, resurrect and then come back on the clouds of heaven as a Son of Man/Suffering Servant/Davidic Messiah hybrid"?

What if he existed (at some as yet undetermined actual time, and under some as yet undetermined actual name) but it wasn't his conception that he must "suffer, die, resurrect and then come back on the clouds of heaven as a Son of Man/Suffering Servant/Davidic Messiah hybrid"?

What if instead he rudimentarily was known (while alive) to speak of a coming son of man, but he never even remotely envisioned himself to be this figure? And if it was only at some later date that he was back-projected into such a high Christology as its Christ...

[MrMacSon]

... The complete lack of any (and I mean 0) Christian works of the first few centuries...in Aramaic and or Hebrew seems very odd.... We know that the vast majority of the DSS are in these languages (with only a small smattering of Greek texts) and yet not only are there no Christian documents in these languages but also no mention of Christianity by anyone from the Levant. Odd.

I agree. Though Christianity may have been a more isolated sect that we have been led to believe, and in Asia Minor (+/- Greece) as you indicated -

Everything that we have about early Christianity seems to originate from Greece and Asia Minor however.

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Paul is the joker in this deck however as he seems to be continuing a Jewish line of theology (after a fashion) and seems to have other Jews with him in it.

In The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul, Robert M Price talks about the Pauline texts being from and by a mixture of sources. He thinks Galatians was mostly written by Marcion. Other snippets -

Second Corinthians seems to have shared the sad fate of the Gospel of John, in that both look to have been reassembled from a pile of fragments or reshuffled pages and not very successfully ...

Most of 2 Corinthians is probably taken from a pair of letters that had been composed to counteract a Catholicizing program of extracting a number of churches from the heretical Pauline sphere of influence. Second Corinthians paints Paul as having taken aim at rivals who were poaching among his converts, moving in to undermine his work after he has moved on when they should be striking out with pioneer evangelism efforts in new territories. But as Willem van Manen points out, the perspective here is retrospective: the labors of Paul are in the past, over and done. The writer looks back on them, marking out the boundaries of the Pauline mission field like the Deuteronomic historian mapping out ancestral lots of the tribes of Israel. Looking beneath the pseudonymous surface, we find the argument is aimed at posthumous attempts to supplant the legacy of Pauline congregations by proposing new foundation legends about Peter or John founding this or that Pauline congregation.

Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Locations 7939-7946). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.

Two great New Testament scholars, Günther Bornkamm and Walter Schmithals, independently concluded that Philippians must be a compilation of three earlier letter fragments. Both scholars ascribed all the fragments to the historical Paul. I do not, but I do accept Bornkamm’s and Schmithals’s division of the epistle into its component parts, Epistles A, B, and C.

Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Locations 9912-9916). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.

In 3:2b-8 we have a Catholic Judaizing of Paul, an attempt to bring him into the Old Testament, or “Judeo-Christian,” orbit, exactly as in Acts 22:3; 23:6. Remember, part of Paul’s legacy comes from Simon Magus, a Samaritan who never upheld Jewish Torah-observance. Simon believed the Law was an elaborate con-game perpetrated on mankind by devious angels. Our Catholic author supplies Paul with Jewish credentials and then at once flushes them away. Why such an improbable juxtaposition? It is precisely what we ought to expect from Catholic Christianity. The Jewish Torah was not to be cut off from the canon since Judaism was the parent of Christianity in the providence of the Creator. But with the coming of Christ, Judaism was virtually demoted to the status of a false religion, all within the same epistolary passages. The Old Testament scriptures are interpreted in terms of allegorical ventriloquism, as if the Torah taught Catholic Christianity.[11] The nascent Catholics made a bold move to both co-opt Judaism and condemn it ... (Kindle Locations 10098-10105).

[Previously, Price wrote] In 2:17 we recognize a piece of “Paulology,” in which the death of the apostle is seen as a kind of secondary sacrifice alongside that of Christ himself (Kindle Locations 10060-10062).

By the time Colossians was written, Paul had become, like Jesus, an atoning savior. Faith in Paul’s atoning suffering meets us explicitly in Colossians 1:24: “Now I rejoice over my sufferings on your behalf, and I fill up what remained lacking from the afflictions of Christ in my flesh on behalf of his body, namely the Church.” Note the tripartite parallelism here:

1. I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.
2. In my flesh I share suffering on behalf of his body.
3. I do so for the church, filling up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings.

My suspicion is that someone has subsequently added the phrase “which is the Church,” to soften an even more jolting statement in which “his body” meant precisely the crucified body of Jesus. (Kindle Locations 10341-10350)
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As Bultmann and others have noted, Colossians seems to embrace Gnostic realized eschatology, the notion that the end-time events have already occurred in symbolic symbolic form, especially through baptism. Romans 8:11 envisions only the believer’s death with Christ as accomplished in baptism, with his or her resurrection still a future prospect, scheduled to coincide with the Parousia, or second coming, of Christ. Colossians 3:1-4 crosses this line, inculcating a sort of Gnostic perfectionism like that discussed in 1 John. Second Timothy 2:18 seems to be referring to the same doctrine. (Kindle Locations 10459-10464)

First Thessalonians appears, according to the analysis of Walter Schmithals,[1] to be a compilation of two short letters. According to the analysis of Winsome Munro,[2] these letters suffered the further addition of Pastoral material meant to facilitate the Catholic acceptance of the epistles. But if we are to attempt to place 1 Thessalonians along the developmental timeline, there is reason to make the original document already Catholic, though friendly to Paul as retooled in Acts.
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The use of Jewish scripture in this fashion underscores the Catholic nature of 1 Thessalonians. Marcionites and Gnostics would have made no such use of the Jewish Bible.

Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Locations 10692-10696, 10741-10742). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.

... Stephan Hermann Huller...says that Philemon is a pseudepigraph intended to beef up the authority of Bishop Onesimus by linking him fictively with Paul. This would mean, of course, that the Letter to Philemon stems from Catholic Christianity.

[3]. Stephan Huller, “Against Polycarp,” online at Stephan Huller’s Observations, www.bibliobloglibrary.com/p/32157.

Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Locations 11026-11036). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.

.. the Pastorals seem at home linguistically and ecclesiastically in a later world than we envision for Paul, they are equally alien to what can be pieced together of his biography and career, whether we accept the rather schematized outline of three missionary journeys in Acts or stick to references interior to the other epistles. There does not seem to be room for the itinerary of Paul implied in the Pastorals. They fit better into the chronology of the apocryphal Acts of Paul. Finally, we should note that the traditional order of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus is arbitrary and does not seem to reflect the probable order of writing. In fact, it seems to be just the reverse.

Price, Robert M.. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (Kindle Locations 11098-11105). Signature Books. Kindle Edition.

[MrMacSon]

How can he be "a normal human Jesus who had a normal human family" if "his way of 'procuring innovations and changes of government' was to suffer, die, resurrect and then come back on the clouds of heaven as a Son of Man/Suffering Servant/Davidic Messiah hybrid"?

What if he existed (at some as yet undetermined actual time, and under some as yet undetermined actual name) but it wasn't his conception that he must "suffer, die, resurrect and then come back on the clouds of heaven as a Son of Man/Suffering Servant/Davidic Messiah hybrid"?

What if instead he rudimentarily was known (while alive) to speak of a coming son of man, but he never even remotely envisioned himself to be this figure? And if it was only at some later date that he was back-projected into such a high Christology as its Christ...

I think that is a distinct possibility. I think it is likely to apply to someone in the early 2nd century such as Joshua ben Hananiah, a leader of the Jewish people in the rule of Hadrian who interacted with Hadrian.

[Ben C. Smith]

Christianity has too many overlaps with the Dead Sea Scrolls to be purely of gentile origin. The lack of Hebrew or Aramaic texts is easily explicable: after 70, Judea was in chaos; much was lost; the Dead Sea Scrolls cache itself was a stroke of luck, one which may never be replicated.

[John2]

Isayre wrote:

What if instead he rudimentarily was known (while alive) to speak of a coming son of man, but he never even remotely envisioned himself to be this figure? And if it was only at some later date that he was back-projected into such a high Christology as its Christ...

To judge from Mark (which, again, I think could have been written by a follower of Peter, like Papias says), Jesus saw himself as the Son of Man, like in 2:8-12

Mk. 2:5-11:

And Jesus seeing their faith saith unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins are forgiven. But there were certain of the scribes sitting there, and reasoning in their hearts, Why doth this man thus speak? he blasphemeth: who can forgive sins but one, even God? And straightway Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, saith unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins (he saith to the sick of the palsy), I say unto thee, Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thy house.

If Jesus is only referring to himself as a son of man in the regular guy sense (as some suggest), what is the point of saying "the Son of man hath authority on earth"? Wouldn't that be obvious? And this "authority" is the same word that is used to describe the "authority" that is given to the "one like a son of man" in LXX Dan. 7:14 ("He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him").

And Mk. 2:24-27:

And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? And he said unto them, Did ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was hungry, he, and they that were with him? How he entered into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the showbread, which it is not lawful to eat save for the priests, and gave also to them that were with him? And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: so that the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath.

And Mk. 8:31-38:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again ... whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

What is the point of Jesus saying he will be resurrected here if it has nothing to do with the coming of the Son of Man? Note also the reference to the "glory" of the Son of Man, which echoes the "glory" mentioned in Dan. 7:14 above. And he drives the point home again in 9:9:

And as they were coming down from the mountain, he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, save when the Son of man should have risen again from the dead.

And again in 10:45:

For the Son of man also came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

I suppose this philosophy could have been attributed to him by others after his death, but that's not the way it is being presented, at least.

[John2]

Ben wrote:

Christianity has too many overlaps with the Dead Sea Scrolls to be purely of gentile origin.

I'm not sure who this is addressed to, but I certainly agree.

[Ben C. Smith]

Ben wrote:

Christianity has too many overlaps with the Dead Sea Scrolls to be purely of gentile origin.

I'm not sure who this is addressed to, but I certainly agree.

It was addressed to whoever would listen.

[Jax]

Christianity has too many overlaps with the Dead Sea Scrolls to be purely of gentile origin. The lack of Hebrew or Aramaic texts is easily explicable: after 70, Judea was in chaos; much was lost; the Dead Sea Scrolls cache itself was a stroke of luck, one which may never be replicated.

I personally see the origins of Christianity in the DSS.

What I don't understand is why Christianity is seemingly anchored in Asia Minor and Greece with no mention of it in the sphere of the DSS community.

[Ben C. Smith]

What I don't understand is why Christianity is seemingly anchored in Asia Minor and Greece with no mention of it in the sphere of the DSS community.

I think the War in 66-70 explains that, as well. After 70, little or nothing of Christianity was left in Judea.

We have more than Asia Minor and Greece on the map, as well. Alexandria seems early, Rome is definitely early, and Syria is too.

[MrMacSon]

After 70, little or nothing of Christianity was left in Judea.

.. if ever there had been Christianity in Judea before 70 AD/CE

• as opposed to a less descript messianity ...

We have more than Asia Minor and Greece on the map, as well. Alexandria seems early, Rome is definitely early, and Syria is too.

What do you see as evidence or even just signs of these places being early?