MrMacSon wrote:maryhelena wrote:MrMacSon wrote:.
There was a session at the AAR/SBL conference in San Diego where several scholars critiqued Bart Ehrman's book
How Jesus Became God
- viz. Craig Evans, Michael Bird, Larry Hurtado, Dale Martin, and James McGrath.
Nothing new here....The response book to Ehrman'
"How Jesus Became God" was out around the same time.
The points I am making are
- a. Ehrman's claim that there was a kind of cult of angels in Judaism and that Galatians 4:14 casts Jesus as an angel
b. Ehrman's view that "early Christianity saw Jesus only as an 'angel' - not one with God; a view he says developed only much later."
c. this view of Erhman was, apparently, peer-reviewed out of his book - was that censorship??
I'm not getting this bit about something being "peer-reviewed" out of Ehrman's book.
I HAVE READ, PONDERED, researched, taught, and written about the writings of Paul for forty years, but until recently there was one key aspect of his theology I could never quite get my mind around. I had the hardest time understanding how, exactly, Paul viewed Christ. Some aspects of Paul’s Christological teaching have been clear to me for decades— especially his teaching that it was Jesus’s death and resurrection that makes a person right with God, rather than following the dictates of the Jewish law. But who did Paul think Christ was?
One reason for my perplexity was that Paul is highly allusive in what he says. He does not spell out in systematic detail his views of Christ. Another reason was that in some passages Paul seems to affirm a view of Christ that, until recently, I thought could not possibly exist as early as Paul’s letters, which are our first Christian writings to survive. How could Paul embrace “higher” views of Christ than those found in later writings such as Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Didn’t Christology develop from a “low” Christology to a “high” Christology over time? And if so, shouldn’t the views of the Synoptic Gospels be “higher” than the views of Paul? But they’re not! They are “lower.” And I simply did not get it, for the longest time.
But now I do. It is not a question of “higher” or “lower.” The Synoptics simply accept a Christological view that is different from Paul’s. They hold to exaltation Christologies, and Paul holds to an incarnation Christology. That, in no small measure, is because Paul understood Christ to be an angel who became a human.
Christ as an Angel in Paul
Many people no doubt have the same experience I do on occasion, of reading something over and over and not having it register. I have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians hundreds of times in both English and Greek. But the clear import of what he says in Galatians 4: 14 simply never registered with me, until, frankly, a few months ago. In this verse Paul calls Christ an
angel. The reason it never registered with me is that the statement is a bit obscure, and I had always interpreted it in an alternative way. Thanks to the work of other scholars, I now see the error of my ways.
In the context of the verse, Paul is reminding the Galatians of how they first received him when he was ill in their midst and they helped restore him to health. Paul writes : “Even though my bodily condition was a test for you, you did not mock or despise me, but you received me as an angel of God, as Jesus Christ.”
I had always read the verse to say that the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ himself. In fact, however, the grammar of the Greek suggests something quite different. As Charles Gieschen has argued, and has now been affirmed in a book on Christ as an angel by New Testament specialist Susan Garrett, the verse is not saying that the Galatians received Paul as an angel or as Christ; it is saying that they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ. By clear implication, then, Christ is an angel.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2014-03-25). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (pp. 252-253). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
my formatting
Thus, Ehrman has a Pauline
incarnation Christology and a Synoptic gospel
exaltation Christology. Methinks he will not be persuaded, any time soon, to drop either of these two positions. A point that Carrier would do well to take notice off: There are two Jesus stories in the NT. A Pauline story and a gospel story. Two very different stories that need to be considered on their own merits. Attempts to run with one story and drop the other, as though one story has priority over the other - is to shortchange research into early christian origins.