Anyone read The Great Angel?

[Ben C. Smith]

Interesting. Not to derail, but I've been thinking that the Gospel of John may reflect the theology of Apelles.

Have you read Roger Parvus on that matter?

[rgprice]

I assume you mean this: https://vridar.org/2013/03/24/the-teach ... -deserter/

If so, then I'm reading it now...

[Ben C. Smith]

I assume you mean this: https://vridar.org/2013/03/24/the-teach ... -deserter/

If so, then I'm reading it now...

Yes, that is where he starts to discuss Apelles. Here are the links to the relevant posts:

https://vridar.org/2013/03/24/the-teach ... s-deserter
https://vridar.org/2013/03/24/the-autho ... -christian
https://vridar.org/2013/03/25/the-ignat ... les-part-1
https://vridar.org/2013/03/28/the-gospe ... nd-apelles
https://vridar.org/2013/04/02/final-of- ... -questions

The last one is the one that discusses the Gospel of John in particular.

[rgprice]

Thanks, that's perfect.

Also, this is all making so much sense now, re Paul and Elohim vs Yahweh.

To me this all makes sense now. When Paul talks about revealing mysteries, I think what he's talking about is the "rediscovery" of the relationship between Elohim and Yahweh. It seems that many Jews had conflated Elohim and Yahweh, but Paul was redrawing the distinction.

There are additional complications with the Jewish scriptures, because of the way they were written, with many parts of the Torah being written much later, including the opening of Genesis (which is 3rd century BCE), but people who weren't making the same distinctions between Elohim and Yahweh that earlier writers had made. And then you have the harmonization that take place, etc. which add to confusion.

So it appears that what was taking place was the rise of Jewish/God-fearing groups that were making a distinction between the Highest God, Elohim, and the God of Israel, Yahweh. There was perhaps a question about whether that was proper, or whether there was really only just one God and that the God of Israel was the Highest God.

[rgprice]

Here is Romans 10 YLT with substitutions for God and Jesus.

Romans 10
1 Brethren, the pleasure indeed of my heart, and my supplication that [is] to Elohim for Israel, is -- for salvation;
2 for I bear them testimony that they have a zeal of Elohim, but not according to knowledge,
3 for not knowing the righteousness of Elohim, and their own righteousness seeking to establish, to the righteousness of Elohim they did not submit.
4 For Christ is an end of law for righteousness to every one who is believing,
5 for Moses doth describe the righteousness that [is] of the law, that, `The man who did them shall live in them,'
6 and the righteousness of faith doth thus speak: `Thou mayest not say in thine heart, Who shall go up to the heaven,' that is, Christ to bring down?
7 or, `Who shall go down to the abyss,' that is, Christ out of the dead to bring up.
8 But what doth it say? `Nigh thee is the saying -- in thy mouth, and in thy heart:' that is, the saying of the faith, that we preach;
9 that if thou mayest confess with thy mouth the Lord Yahweh, and mayest believe in thy heart that Elohim did raise him out of the dead, thou shalt be saved,
10 for with the heart doth [one] believe to righteousness, and with the mouth is confession made to salvation;

Using BeDuhn's reconstruction of Marcion:

Romans 10:
2 For I bear Israel witness that they have a zeal for Elohim; but not according to experience.
3 Since, ignorant of Elohim, and seeking to establish (their) own rectitude, they did not subject themselves to the rectitude of Elohim.
4 For Christos is an end of law for rectification for everyone who trusts...

I know that Paul didn't use the words Elohim and Yahweh, but I think it clarifies the concept. It's much easier to understand Marcion this way. Of course Marcion wouldn't have read Jesus as Yahweh, he would have seen Yahweh as the evil god, who presumably isn't mentioned by Paul.

[Giuseppe]

El would be the hidden God described by Marcion, while Yahweh is the Creator God of the Jews. Of course, it doesn't work out quite like that because El is not unknown to the Jews

Which is the principal reason why any modern attempt to 'judaize' Marcion is doomed to failure as essentially grotesque.

It would be equivalent to claim that the evangelist knew who was the Father of Barabbas. (try it if you can ).

[rgprice]

For me a big question still is what does Paul mean when he says Jesus Christ of Christ Jesus?

I think that many people, including Barker , have been confused on this point, because they treat Romans 1:3 as authentic, and thus think that Paul is talking about a Davidic messiah. But Romans 1:3 is surely an anti-Marcionite interpolation, it is not what Paul wrote, and thus there is no indication that Paul thought of Christ Jesus as Davidic.

Working under the view that "Jesus" represents Yahweh in some way, the question is what is the difference between "Jesus", "Christ Jesus", "Jesus Christ", "Lord Jesus Christ", "Christ".

I notice that in Galatians Paul only uses "Jesus" by itself one time, when he says, "Gal 6: 17 From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus."

However, BeDuhn notes:

6.17 Tertullian, Marc. 5.4.15 (v. 17b); Adam* 5.22 (Schmid does not credit
the evidence of Adamantius). The Greek text of Adamantius reads
tōn d’allōn eikē instead of tou loipou (but Rufinus’ de cetero reflects the
latter), and parechesthō instead of parechetō. Tertullian reads “Christ”
rather than “Jesus,” in agreement with several Greek manuscripts; but
Adamantius has “Jesus.”

So Paul may not have written Jesus actually, he may have written Christ.

I think its an error to conflate "Christ" with Messiah, though I used to do this as well. Is Christ Paul's word for Memra or Logos?

Is "Jesus Christ" the Memra of Yahweh? I'm not entirely sure that's right either. For what is "the Lord Jesus Christ"?

My own interpretation using footnotes and various translations:

Philippians 2:
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be taken advantage of, 7 but set aside His divine rights by taking the form of a slave and taking on the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death by staking. 9 For this reason also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This passage surely seems to be key to understanding what the hell Paul is talking about.

Is "Jesus/Yehoshu'a" really the name that is above every name or is YHWH? Or is Yehoshu'a above every name because it is a pronounceable name that contains YHWH?

Is this a matter of returning a name to YHWH instead of hiding him behind "the Lord" or making him unpronounceable? Is the reason that YHWH was not the Lord of all nations because his name was unknown and could not be said because he was a God, so he had to humble himself to obtain a human name, and thus be knowable to all nations?

So, Yahweh, the son of El Elyon, needed to humble himself before he could become the Lord of all nations, instead of just the Lord of Israel. To do this, Yahweh descended from High Heaven, took on human form and suffered the most humiliating form of death, proving to his father, El Elyon, that he was deserving of being Lord of all nations. In doing do, El Elyon gave Yahweh the name Yehoshu'a, so that the people of all nations could call him by name. Christ identifies Jesus as the "son of El Elyon". I would think then that Christ literally means, "son of God" in Paul's usage.

[MrMacSon]

For me a big question still is what does Paul mean when he says Jesus Christ of Christ Jesus?

< . . omitted . . >

Working under the view that "Jesus" represents Yahweh in some way, the question is what is the difference between "Jesus", "Christ Jesus", "Jesus Christ", "Lord Jesus Christ", "Christ".

I notice that in Galatians Paul only uses "Jesus" by itself one time, when he says, "Gal 6: 17 From now on let no one cause trouble for me, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus."

However, BeDuhn notes:

6.17 Tertullian, Marc. 5.4.15 (v. 17b); Adam* 5.22 (Schmid does not credit the evidence of Adamantius).
The Greek text of Adamantius reads tōn d’allōn eikē instead of tou loipou (but Rufinus’ de cetero reflects the latter), and parechesthō instead of parechetō. Tertullian reads “Christ” rather than “Jesus,” in agreement with several Greek manuscripts; but Adamantius has “Jesus.”

So Paul may not have written Jesus actually, he may have written Christ.

I think its an error to conflate "Christ" with Messiah, though I used to do this as well. Is Christ Paul's word for Memra or Logos?

Is "Jesus Christ" the Memra of Yahweh? I'm not entirely sure that's right either. For what is "the Lord Jesus Christ"?

My own interpretation using footnotes and various translations:

Philippians 2:
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be taken advantage of, 7 but set aside His divine rights by taking the form of a slave and taking on the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death by staking. 9 For this reason also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This passage surely seems to be key to understanding what the hell Paul is talking about.
.

I'm mostly posting to bookmark this
(though will add the posts I did on "Jesus", "Christ Jesus", "Jesus Christ", "Lord Jesus Christ", "Christ" in the texts.)

1. Romans to Ephesians
2. Philippians to Revelation

[MrMacSon]

Is "Jesus/Yehoshu'a" really the name that is above every name or is YHWH Or is Yehoshu'a above every name because it is a pronounceable name that contains YHWH?

Is this a matter of returning a name to YHWH instead of hiding him behind "the Lord" or making him unpronounceable? Is the reason that YHWH was not the Lord of all nations because his name was unknown and could not be said because he was a God, so he had to humble himself to obtain a human name, and thus be knowable to all nations?
.

I've been wondering the same thing.

Interestingly, some of, if not the earliest extant documents we have of the LXX/Septuagint have Tetragrammaton in place of κύριος, or have a potential space that may have been left for it to be inserted.

Papyrus Fouad 266 is the second oldest known manuscript of the Septuagint, having been assigned palaeographically to the 1st century BCE (though there's discussion about whether the text itself is original or a later recension of the Septuagint). Papyrus Fouad 266, in the midst of Greek text, has the Hebrew Tetragrammaton (in Aramaic "square" or Ashuri script). Some have proposed the Greek text had indeed originally rendered the divine name YHWH by the Tetragrammaton (ie. not by the Greek, κύριος), while others have proposed that the text in this manuscript is the result of a Hebraizing revision of 'the original' Greek text* (and it would have originally had κύριος).

Papyrus Rylands 458 introduction: (TM 62298; LDAB 3459) is a fragmented Greek copy of the Pentateuch which has been assigned palaeographically toward the middle of the 2nd century BC (It is believed to have come from Fayyum, where there were two Jewish synagogues). It's 8 small fragments of a papyrus manuscript, previously in roll form, containing Deut 23:24(26)—24:3; 25:1—3; 26:12; 26:17—19; 28:31—33; 27:15; 28:2. The words are not divided by spaces, but written continuously. The writer uses the colorimetric system, regularly leaving a space at the end of sentence or clause. It's agrees more with Washington Manuscript I (WI) or Codex Alexandrinus than with Codex Vaticanus.

Papyrus Rylands 458 has a gap in Deut. 26.18 where one would expect either κύριος or the Tetragrammaton. Some say this gap is because the fragment simply breaks off at this point. Other says there is still a gap before the fragment edge which is large enough to accommodate both words. There is disagreement among scholars as to what might have been intended if the gaps is significant, though one might have expected a scribe writing in Greek to have written κύριος. As noted in the previous introductory paragraph, it's believed to have came from Fayyum, where there were two Jewish synagogues.

In looking at P.Lond.Lit. 207, which is dates 250-300 CE, Don Barker has wondered if Kurios/κύριος is consistently abbreviated as a nomen sacrum ("but significantly θεός is not"), in what he says is in a Semitic fashion, to notify the reader that this nomen sacrum is being used to translate the personal name (the Tetragrammaton) of the Hebrew deity.

Barker noted -

.
Judging by the various ways the Tetragrammaton was written in the text of the Greek Old Testament, it appears that scribes struggled with the problem of how to present it. Some left a space in which the Hebrew word was to be written later; others used paleo-Hebrew writing, whilst others wrote the Greek letters ΙΩΑ or ΠΙΠΙ and it seems that in some cases κύριος was used instead of the Tetragrammaton.16

But why write κύριος in a contracted form using the first and last letters as it is in P.Lond.Lit. 207? ... Millard has drawn our attention to the peculiar Semitic custom of contracting proper names to their first and last letters. It is found on Phoenician and Palestinian coins of the Hellenistic period and also on pots in the Punic Sites of North Africa where they occasionally also occur on coins and graffiti.17

https://ut.ee/klassik/sht/2007/barker1.pdf

16. Pietersma, A. (1984) ‘Kyrios or Tetragram: a renewed quest for the original Septuagint.’ — Pietersma, A.; Cox, C. (eds.), De septuaginta: studies in honour of John William Wevers on his sixty-fifth birthday. Mississauga Ont.: Benben Publications, 85–101.

17.a. Millard, A. (1994) ‘Ancient abbreviations and the nomina sacra.’ — Eyre, C. J.; Leahy, M. A.; Leahy, L. M. (eds.), The unbroken reed: studies in the culture and heritage of Ancient Egypt in honour of A. F. Shore. (Egypt Exploration Society, Occasional publications; 11.) London: Egyptian Exploration Society, 221–26.

17.b. Millard, A. (2001) Reading and writing in the time of Jesus. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
.

So, Yahweh, the son of El Elyon, needed to humble himself before he could become the Lord of all nations, instead of just the Lord of Israel. To do this, Yahweh descended from High Heaven, took on human form and suffered the most humiliating form of death, proving to his father, El Elyon, that he was deserving of being Lord of all nations. In doing do, El Elyon gave Yahweh the name Yehoshu'a, so that the people of all nations could call him by name. Christ identifies Jesus as the "son of El Elyon". I would think then that Christ literally means, "son of God" in Paul's usage.
.