Dr. Sarah's Friendly Refutation of all Mythicism

[RandyHelzerman]

Rather than chapter&verse, my speculation is that a circumstantial case may be made that Paul is engaging in a religious syncretism with “middle platonic” philosophy and mystery cults that also have savior god myths.

cf. Neitzsche: "Christianity is Platonism for the masses." I don't know what the hell Paul is talking about, so I don't mention it to refute you or anything like that, but you might find it interesting. In Richard Rorty's book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", he actually quotes from Paul to support an argument he is making against the Cartesian view of the Mind/Body relationship.

Which is fascinating to me, because its the only time I've ever seen an analytic philosopher use Paul as an integral part of arguing about a contemporary problem in philosophy.

On St. Paul himself, it is useful to note that, unlike modern writer on philosophy of mind, he does not identify body (soma) with what is buried after death. The later is flesh, whereas, according to J.A.T. Robinson, soma is the nearest equivalent of our word 'personality'. (The body: a Study in Pauline Theology) .... As Robinson says, it is not that soma and sarx are distinct parts of man, but rather "the whole man differently regarded.: The notion of man divided into parts does not come naturally to non-philosophers even after Plato; see van Person, "Body, Soul, Spirit" chap. 6. For examples of the un-Cartesian ways in which soma, sarx, psyche, and pneuma are used by Paul, see 1 Corinthians 15;35-54

Absolutely fascinating. By "un-Cartesian" here, Rorty means to claim that Paul does not think that any part of the human is immaterial. Paul is just distinguishing between different kind of material bodies, just like he is distinguishing between different kinds of flesh when he compares fish with birds.

[dbz]

Rorty, Richard (2009) [1979]. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press. p. 44, n. 13. ISBN 978-0-691-14132-9.

Screenshot 2023-11-12 at 01-08-18 Philosophy and the mirror of nature - Google Books.png (293.31 KiB) Viewed 2348 times

[RandyHelzerman]

Yup. I've read virtually everything written by Rorty, but I still can't follow him here. Probably because I'm still mystified by Paul's poetic but imprecise description of what he was getting at....if he even had any firm idea.

Help in understanding this would be appreciated!! And it would clarify many other discussions, e.g. RG Price's speculations that Jesus was originally conceived of as a spirit descending to earth---exactly what conceptions of "spirit" were available to the author of Mark, or to Paul? And certainly Carrier's Jesus from outer space schtick.

Which greek word means "spirit" in the docetic christian sense? Is it something that can die? And be buried, and rise again? Or is it more like an optical illusion?

p.s. Rorty talks about the greek conceptions the relation of mind to the body throughout the entire chapter. Click on the link in dbz's post: its worth a read.

[Paul the Uncertain]

It is regrettable that we cannot channel Paul to solicit his views on the "transporter problem," based on the imagined short-range transportation technology in the Star Trek universe.

The premise is that the transportee is destructively mined for information, and then that information is sent as a message and used to build a new instance of the transportee somewhere else. How very like Paul's seed which is consumed in order to produce a new plant.

I am skeptical about the prospects of recovering Paul's thoughts from how other Greek-language authors used the same words. I accept that necessarily that's where we must begin in order to read any composition in a dead language, but it is by no means clear that even the best beginning will end well.

In particular neither Paul nor his readers have any personal experience of resurrection. Paul is persuaded that it happened once, and that it produced a being with capabilities very different from those of living people (e.g. able to reside off-earth), and yet resulting from some previous mortal state of being.

Even if Paul had a clear idea about what happened that one time (and about why that singular occurrence has any relevance at all to what might happen to other people in the future), effective communication in natural language correlates with shared experience. Absent shared experience (indeed absent any real-life experience at all), you are left with metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech. And one thing even schoolchildren know: you can't reliably recover the meaning of a figure of speech from the definitions of the words used.

I think we're stuck.

[davidmartin]

what Paul says doesn't make any sense to me either. he is certainly skilled in rhetoric though
which is why i suspect he is riffing on prior concepts to support his ideas

as a guess what they might of been
over in the odes the Christ there is not the Christ of the epistles, there the little used word represents the Messiah more traditionally and whatever "Christ" is is something else, more like "God's essence" cause it has to be milked - it's an essence. this is personified as a man that cannot die which the Messiah represents a type of or something like that and Paul is coming along and making it literal, adding a new meaning to the Messiah's death
and sure enough Paul has to argue for his new interpretation using all his rhetorical skills

"I would expect all Christians would agree that a person can’t be resurrected until they are a dead human corpse"
the odes dismiss the significance of a dead corpse, it's just the material around the immortal soul and this gnosis means "death" as they put it "is destroyed" as a concept
the epistles are the exact opposite, they resurrect "death" as a concept to establish "resurrection" as one
there is no agreement on what death is
like in the epistle quote he says if he's wrong Christians are "still in their sins" but the odes never establish a base where people are in their sins in the first place so he's using "sin" in a new way also

just throw away Paul's interpretations and look for other ones

[RandyHelzerman]

Rolling together replies to both davidmartin and Paul the uncertain.

effective communication in natural language correlates with shared experience.

Yeah, I think that observations hit the nail squarely on the thumb. Unless the phenomenon is in some intersubjective space, you can't really say much about it. cf Paul's mystical experience in II Corinthians; he didn't know whether it was in the body or out of the body, or even perhaps whether it was happening to him or to a star-trek transported version of himself or not. And of course he couldn't even say anything about it anyways.

That's probably as close as you'll get to asking him about the transporter and looks like he's as confused as we are about whether personal identity is preserved during the transport.

what Paul says doesn't make any sense to me either. he is certainly skilled in rhetoric though
which is why i suspect he is riffing on prior concepts to support his ideas

and

I am skeptical about the prospects of recovering Paul's thoughts from how other Greek-language authors used the same words. I accept that necessarily that's where we must begin in order to read any composition in a dead language, but it is by no means clear that even the best beginning will end well.

He's clearly expressing something so new that language hasn't caught up with it yet, and so transcendent that language might never catch up with it. And yeah he (and all the other early authors) are riffling through all the literature they have available to them to try to find some kind of language to express it. That is, I think, the grain of truth behind prima facie implausible hypothesis like Roman hypothesis or that Mark was based on Homer, etc etc. They *were* searching everywhere to try to find language to use, and alas they did not find any exact fit.



In particular neither Paul nor his readers have any personal experience of resurrection. Paul is persuaded that it happened once, and that it produced a being with capabilities very different from those of living people (e.g. able to reside off-earth), and yet resulting from some previous mortal state of being.

Even if Paul had a clear idea about what happened that one time (and about why that singular occurrence has any relevance at all to what might happen to other people in the future), effective communication in natural language correlates with shared experience. Absent shared experience (indeed absent any real-life experience at all), you are left with metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech. And one thing even schoolchildren know: you can't reliably recover the meaning of a figure of speech from the definitions of the words used.

I think we're stuck.

Well do we at least have a firm grasp on exactly the concepts they would have found when they went riffling for them?
Is there a definite meaning for spirit? The kind of spirit which docetists thought Jesus was? Is it something that can die?
For Richard Carrier's jesus in outer space, is there a definite meaning for what was happening out there? Is it like olympian deities? Platonic forms

What concepts did Paul have available to him?

[dbz]

I think we're stuck.

Well do we at least have a firm grasp on exactly the concepts they would have found when they went riffling for them?
Is there a definite meaning for spirit? The kind of spirit which docetists thought Jesus was? Is it something that can die?
For Richard Carrier's jesus in outer space, is there a definite meaning for what was happening out there? Is it like olympian deities? Platonic forms

What concepts did Paul have available to him?

And all too often, I see biblical scholars make logical claims without the vitally important critical framework of the analytic philosopher. I believe that both are needed to answer questions of this sort. We need the knowledge and nuance of the specialist scholar of religion and the logical acuity of the analytic philosopher.
(pp. 83–84)

---

--Lataster, Raphael (2019). "Defending Jesus Agnosticism". Think 18 (51): 77–91. doi:10.1017/S1477175618000362.

• also specialist scholars of Classics & Religious Studies

Paul, he is one among a number of figures touting themselves as specialists in textual interpretation, divination, and other so-called religious practices. An investigation along these lines would situate Paul in a highly competitive field of self-styled apostles, super-apostles, and so forth,illuminating a dynamic social landscape for the early stages of the Jesus movement in which something like the cohesion of the participants would need to be demonstrated. [See Jennifer Eyl, Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Early Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).] (p. 42, n. 63)

---

--Walsh, Robyn Faith (2021). The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-83530-5. (Middle Platonism & Paul the Apostle: pp. 7, 126, 192)

[dbz]

Is there a definite meaning for spirit? The kind of spirit which docetists thought Jesus was? Is it something that can die?

[Docetism did exist in antiquity], ancient heresiologists did name a sect “the Docetists”—I don’t think it existed in reality, because what ancient heresiologists meant by the term does not correspond to what modern scholars reinvented that word to mean. “Docetism” as now and commonly understood is a modern construct, not an ancient one. And that simply didn’t exist. I have not confirmed this. Like Gnosticism did, it requires a fuller study that I haven’t had time to conduct. So I will discuss here what that fuller study would consist of, but the gist of this article is simply to outline a suspicion, not a conclusion—my current working hypothesis.

---

--Carrier (20 June 2023). "Did 'Docetism' Really Even Exist?". Richard Carrier Blogs. [NOW BOLDED]

[Per] Platonic scholar, Lutoslawski, Plato's writings can be divided into four very definite periods: the Socratic period, the first Platonic period, the middle Platonic period, and the latest Platonic period. The purpose of this thesis has been to study the use of the term "soul" in each one of the periods of his writings to determine how he commonly uses the word "soul," how consistent he is in his use of the term, and how his use of "soul" in the latest of his writings compares with the earliest of his works. From this study, this thesis has sought to define the Platonic concept of "soul" from its most consistent, most common, and latest usage.

---

--Newman, Lester I. (1958). "The concept of the soul in Plato and in early Judeo-Christian thought".

Part of the Soul	Early Platonism	Middle Platonism
Rational	Highest and most important, responsible for reason	Nous, or intellect
Spirited	Responsible for courage, will, and ambition	Psyche, or soul
Appetitive	Responsible for desires, passions, and bodily appetites	Pneuma, or spirit (ghost in the shell)

Plato's theory of soul, which was inspired by the teachings of Socrates, considered the psyche (Ancient Greek: ψῡχή, romanized: psūkhḗ, lit. 'breath') to be the essence of a person, being that which decides how people behave. Plato considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of a person's being. Plato said that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think. He believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn (metempsychosis) in subsequent bodies. Plato divided the soul into three parts:

• the logistikon (reason),
• the thymoeides (spirit, which houses anger, as well as other emotions),
  and
• the epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures).

---

--"Plato's theory of soul". Wikipedia.

Summary
Thumos, often translated “spirit” or “spirited part”, acts as an intermediary between reason and appetite, imposing the dictates of reason on our irrational desires and pleasures. Yet the precise nature and function of the thumos is poorly understood and it has often been the object of criticism. Those who have defended it have portrayed it as essentially honour-seeking, reflecting the social dimension of our existence.

---

--Jorgenson, C. (2018). Thymos. In The Embodied Soul in Plato's Later Thought (Cambridge Classical Studies, pp. 6-38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316795651.003

As regards the human soul, Plato’s division of it into a rational plus two irrational parts was maintained, along with his doctrine of transmigration. There was also an increasing focus on the intermediary role played by daemons in the functioning of the world.

---

--"Platonism, Early and Middle - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy". rep.routledge.com.

[RandyHelzerman]

Thanks dbz. So this would have been one concept of "soul" available to Paul and to the evangelists. Is it the same thing the docetists meant by Jesus being a spirit who descended?

Doesn't seem like it is something that could die, although it is something which survives death and goes on to inhabit a new body. Cf with Paul saying our fleshly body is transformed to a spiritual body--but its still "us".

Compatible with the proto-orthodox view (reflected in later creedal statements) that after Jesus died he descended to hell and freed the souls there, before being re-embodied in the resurrected, glorified body. (Platonism for the masses again).

It really seems to put pressure on the standard theories of salvation though--Jesus died for our sins. On a docetist view, he actually wouldn't have died, it would just have been an illusion, perhaps to trick the OT god. On an orthodox view, it was only Jesus's body which died, his spirit didn't die at all---how could that serve for propitiation of sins? Was the death of one human body sufficient? If so why did we need an incarnation at all?

just thinking aloud here....

[RandyHelzerman]

After having given Canonical Mark a good rake-over in another thread, it seems to me that this platonic concept of a soul was *not* what Mark had in mind about Jesus. A holy spirit does descend on him, and it drives him "straightway" all over the place in the gospel of mark. But this spirit seems more akin to the Spirit of the Lord which episodically came over Sampson, and drove him to do his heroic deeds.

RG Price doesn't (I think) mention any allegorizations from Judges, but Sampson has long been recognized by type theologists to be a type of Christ. His miraculous birth to a barron woman parallels Jesus's virgin birth, the "Nazarite/Nazorean" pun is harped on, both are betrayed, both died with outstretched arms, in shame, both purified/tore down a temple, etc etc.

I hypothesize that this conception of spirit was the mental model which Mark had in mind for Jesus. The spirit descends on him at baptism, drives him to do all manner of heroic deeds, and when it is done with him, abandons him on the cross leaving him to die in agony and shame like it did to Sampson.

This is just for canonical Mark though--its still an open question if there were an earlier version of Mark with a more docetist view, which then evolved into the Evangelion, or whether this Sampsonite spirit evolved into a more docetist view....

Also conveniently side-stepped in Mark is the question of just what kind of resurrection Jesus had. The body disappears, but the lack of resurrection appearances avoided a lot of awkward questions about exactly what kind of resurrection it was.

Still very unclear to me what kind of spirit the docetists throught Jesus was. And it goes without saying that this doesn't really help us out for Paul at all.