Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

^I'm not talking "knowledge", but most reasonable hypotheses. Whether they make your or my grades of "knowledge" is a different question.

I wasn't making a "proposition", but an observation: That the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis requires Paul not to refer to Earthly rulers crucifying Jesus, and as such, must interpret the "rulers of this age" line as not referring to Earthly rulers. Historicist hypotheses don't require it as a necessity the way Carrier-Doherty do.

toejam wrote:^I'm not talking "knowledge", but most reasonable hypotheses. Whether they make your or my grades of "knowledge" is a different question.

I wasn't making a "proposition", but an observation: That the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis requires Paul not to refer to Earthly rulers crucifying Jesus, and as such, must interpret the "rulers of this age" line as not referring to Earthly rulers. Historicist hypotheses don't require it as a necessity the way Carrier-Doherty do.

Pontius Pilate was the ruler of this age..... Quite a grandiose title. Not even President Obama, the most powerful man on the planet calls himself 'the ruler of this age'.

^I think you're mistaken in thinking I'm arguing that "rulers of this age" refers to Pilate. That is not my position.

toejam wrote:To maryhelena and MrMacSon:

I haven't offered a "false dichotomy". It would be a false dichotomy if I said:

"if Paul did mean it as in any way referring to Earthly rulers, then historicity is correct and mythicism is false."

But that's not what I said. What I said was:

"if Paul did mean it as in any way referring to Earthly rulers, then the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis is shot."

I did not read your point as referencing a 'false dichotomy'. ie if the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis is 'shot' then the historicist position is 'correct'. I was simply pointing out that a position is not correct because another position is faulty. Faults on both sides.

However, re the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis, the Pauline writer has to be referencing spirit powers not earthly powers in 1 Cor. 2.8. Carrier has acknowledged that the relevant Greek word can be used for earthly powers. Even if, for the sake of argument, the JC historicists were to accept spirit rulers in this passage this would still not negate their premise. After all, the Pauline author, in Romans, says all governmental authority is by the authority of God i.e. unseen spirit. Thus, the wicked unseen spirits could have, re l Cor.2.8, influenced the earthly Roman rulers in the gospel crucifixion story (or even in the historical execution of Antigonus....). So, the Pauline writer wants it both ways - the JC historicists can handle both ways - but the Carrier-Doherty hypothesis can only handle one way......

^Yep, I agree.

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For what it's worth, here is how the "historicist texts" of the Gospels and Acts view the "rulers" (archon) and how they crucified Christ, followed by how Paul uses "ages/world" (aoin) in 1 Cor.

First, "ruler" (archon) in Gospels and Acts:

• Act 4:26 The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers (archon) were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ.
  
  Mat 20:19 And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again...
  Mat 20:25 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes (archon) of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.
  
  Luk 24:20 And how the chief priests and our rulers (archon) delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.

Now, Paul's use of "ages/world" (aion) in 1 Cor:

• 1 Cor 1:20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world (aion)? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
  
  1 Cor 3:18 Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world (aion), let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
  
  1 Cor 10:11 Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world (aion) are come.

My points:
1. "Archons" were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, according to "historicist" texts
2. Paul uses "aion" as applying to men, i.e. **men** who are "wise in this world (aion)", "**our** admonition" upon whom "the ends of the world (aion) are come."

Nothing particularly shocking, i know. But to me it adds support to reading "princes of this age" as referring to earthly rulers. I find it difficult to read Paul as talking about "the wisdom of demons" in 1 Cor 2. It seems out of place in context, as I'll explain below, by going through part of 1 Cor 2:

• 4 And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:
  5 That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

Paul is contrasting the "wisdom of men" with the power of God.

• 6 Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world (aion), nor of the princes of this world (aion), that come to nought:

"Wisdom of this world (aion)" seems to me to be about the wisdom of men. Some have proposed in the past that "aion" is associated with spiritual beings, but clearly this is a use of "aion" being used of men. Then comes the controversial part: "wisdom of the princes of this world (aion)".

So what is the difference between "wisdom of this aion" and "wisdom of the archons of this aion"? The first is wisdom generally, perhaps wisdom of the "natural man" (1 Cor 2:14). "Wisdom of the archons of this aion" would be the wisdom of the rulers of men. I find it hard to put "wisdom of demons" into that context. E.g. "Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the demons of this world, that come to nought". Does Paul really need to tell his Christian readers that he is not talking about the wisdom of demons to Christians???

I agree with Origen, that what Paul is talking about as "the wisdom of the rulers of the world" is astrology and "secret and occult philosophy", etc; used by the rulers (interestingly, Origen also suggests that certain earthly rulers may have been supernatural beings).

• 7 But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, [even] the hidden [wisdom], which God ordained before the world unto our glory:
  8 Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
  9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

Here again Paul talks about men ("entered into the heart of man") after talking about what "the princes of this world" knew. And again, thinking that Paul is talking about the wisdom of demons seems out of place. If Paul thought demons had crucified Christ, then the "But it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man" line straight after that is odd. How would what was in the "heart of man" apply to what the "princes of this world" knew, if those princes were demons?

Throughout, seeing "princes of this world" as demons seems out of place and contrived. I don't how Richard Carrier sets out to show that demons are referred to here. If he is using Ascension of Isaiah, then he has problems, since the AoI, in the earlier Slavonic/Latin texts seems to show a Christ that descends to earth in the form of a man rather than a crucifixion in the sky. Can someone who has Carrier's book provide Carrier's explanation for why "princes of this world" refers to demons?

The rulers of the eon were the conspiratorial senators. Mark Antony is said to have said during the funeral that the senators were demon-possesed. (They were given amnesty and fled to the provinces.) That's why they seem to be demons in addition to earthly rulers. That's the simplest explanation. The rest is subsequent adaptations of the same story.

Good post, Gakuseidon
Carrier explained that mainly on these pages:

564 On the Historicity of Jesus
Indeed, the 'cross' of Jesus (as in Gal. 6.14; 1 Cor. 1.17; and Phil. 3.18) sounds like a cosmically potent object, and not just some everyday pole or crossbeam manufactured by the Romans and used repeatedly for the executing of countless others besides Jesus. In fact, the one time Paul says any-thing about who killed Jesus (apart from one passage many scholars agree is an interpolation, which I shall discuss next), it looks more like he means the demons of the air than any earthly human authority. Paul writes:

We speak a wisdom among the mature [i.e. the fully initiated: see Element 13]. a wisdom not of this age. nor of the rulers of this age [archonton tou aionos toutou]. who are being abolished. but we speak God's wisdom, in a mystery. that has been hidden. which God foreordained before the ages [aionon] for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age [archonton tou aiOnos toutou] had known. For if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. But as it is written, 'Things which eye saw not. and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of a man, those things God prepared for those who love him'. For God revealed them to us through the Spirit . . . (1 Cor. 2.6-10).

Here we are told that all these things were hidden and revealed only to the elect. No one saw or heard them transpire. That means God's plan, not necessarily that Jesus had died. But what is key here is that the 'hidden things' Paul is talking about are the fact that Christ's death rescued us from the wages of sin and thus secured us eternal life. In other words, that Jesus had thereby 'atoned for our sins' (1 Cor. 15.3). Paul is saying that if 'the rulers of this age' had known that that would be the effect of his death, they would not have killed him.

This cannot mean the Jewish elite, or the Romans, or any human authority. None of them would have been dissuaded by knowing such a fact indeed they would either have gladly gone through with it (to save all mankind) or not cared one whit (if they didn't really believe it would have such an effect). There is only one order of beings who was invested in preventing such a result: Satan and his demons, those who reveled in maintaining death and corruption in the human world, the only beings uniformly set against God's plan. It is not plausible to suggest that Paul really meant the Jews wanted to prevent our salvation and deliberately thwart God's plan. Such an anti-Semitic notion is not found anywhere in Paul's letters. More-over, Paul does not say 'the Jews', but the 'rulers of this age', as a collective whole. This cannot mean just Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin. This is everyone in power: they killed Jesus, and did so only because they went kept from knowing their doing so would save the human race. This entails a whole world order whereby if any of 'the rulers of this age' had knot. what would happen, they would have told their peers and stopped the crucifixion, to prevent its supernatural effect. This does not describe any human

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world order. This describes the Satanic world order, the realm of demons and fallen angelic powers. Thus, when Paul says 'the rulers of this age' (archonton tou aionos toutou) were the ones kept in the dark and who in result crucified Jesus, he is using archon in its then-common supernatural sense: the demonic powers (Element 37).69 Paul almost never uses this word of earthly authorities, and never so uses it in conjunction with the cosmic vocabulary of aeons. And here he certainly cannot be using it in a human sense, as the motives he is imputing to these archons then make no sense. Rather, this exactly describes what we saw in the earlier redaction of the Ascension of Isaiah: Satan and his demons kill Jesus only because his identity was kept hidden from them, so they wouldn't know what his death would accomplish (see Chapter 3, § 1; with Chapter 8, §6). And they would have known had Jesus not disguised himself, because a self-sacrifice of the high priest of God's celestial temple would have had effects as obvious to them as to the author of Hebrews (see §5). The same could not be said of Pontius Pilate or the Jewish Sanhedrin, who did not possess the requisite supernatural knowledge. And even if we imagined they did (if God had revealed it to them, for example), why would they then stop the crucifixion? Obviously they would see its value and recognize it as what the supreme God of all peoples wanted; and if they didn't, they would have no reason not to kill Jesus anyway.
It is usually assumed that what Paul means here is that had the authorities known Jesus was the messiah they would have bowed down to him rather than killed him, although that would not make sense to the Romans (who would try all the more to kill a Jewish messiah). It also ignores the fact that in earliest Christian understanding the messiah's death is precisely how God effects our salvation. This is clear not only in Hebrews 8-9 but also throughout the letters of Paul, as he most elaborately explains in Romans 5-6. That is, again, the 'hidden mystery' Paul is talking about, the very `stumbling block' that trips up the Jews and seems 'foolish' to the Gentiles (1 Cot. 1.23; on which see Chapter 12, §4). Which means if the Jews had known this, they would not have bowed down to Jesus rather than kill him; they would have done both. Only if they wanted to prevent the salvation of mankind would they have refrained from carrying out the sacrifice God commanded. And that kind of cosmic vindictiveness is not the sort of thing Paul ever attributes to the Jews—or the Romans. To the contrary, Paul's view of earthly authority is that it always does God's will (Romans 13), not that it is genocidally warring against it. It also makes no sense for God to hide his plan of salvation from his own chosen people; whereas it does

69. See Verenna. `Born under the Law". pp. 145-50: and Doherty. Jesus: Neither God nor Man. pp. 104-109.

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make sense that he had to hide it from Satan and his minions by communicating it to his chosen people in code (Element 8).
It therefore makes more sense to conclude that it is the archons of the sky that Paul is saying God wanted to thwart by keeping all of this hidden, so they would kill Jesus, not knowing it would secure their destruction. For Paul says these archons are 'being abolished' (katargoumenon, a present passive participle). This does not plausibly refer to the Jewish or Roman elite (who were still fully in power, and could still be as saved as anyone by joining Christ). It most plausibly means that those sharing in the sacrifice of Jesus now had power over the demons, to exorcise them and escape their clutches—thereby escaping the power of death. Because it is by his death that Jesus had triumphed over those dark celestial powers (just as Col. 2.15 would later say). The early Christian scholar Origen agreed: he could only understand Paul here to be saying that unseen powers of darkness were being abolished, not any earthly authorities, and that these demonic powers were the ones who plotted against and crucified Jesus.70
Someone still mired in dogma and tradition might not be ready to see this. They can still say (as perhaps Origen meant) that this is all just a veiled way of referring to Pilate and the Sanhedrin, or some such thing, that Paul is somehow imagining a world conspiracy of the Roman Empire and the Jews to thwart God's plan, and thus all the oddities just noted can be explained away with a battery of ad hoc excuses. So a historicist reading of this pas-sage can be shoehorned in. But what cannot reasonably be denied is hove well the mythicist reading of this passage fits without any shoehorning at all. It then matches exactly what is said in the early redaction of the Ascension of Isaiah. And nothing at all is then odd about it. Nothing needs to be explained away. The probability that Paul would write this passage if mythicism were true is therefore surely higher than the probability that he would write it if historicity were true. On the latter we would sooner expect something far less vague and far less bizarrely damning of the Romans and Jews as the enemies of God (and indeed of all humankind), and something far more plausible about how they would have acted had they 'known the truth'. Whereas on the former theory, this is pretty much exactly what we'd expect Paul to write. On the one reading, we need excuses for everything: on the other, we need none.
Diehards will then appeal to another passage as their prize counter-example, where indeed Paul appears to say the Jews specifically (no mention of Romans) are the ones who killed Jesus, and then got their just desserts for it: 1 Thess. 2.15-16.7' But this has long been recognized as an interpolation. It

70. Origen. Commentary on I Corinthians. fragment 9.14-25. 71. The opposite is said in 1 Tim. 6.13. which declares that Jesus 'testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate', thus claiming (supposedly) that the Romans killer

Well, look at this:

https://divusjulius.wordpress.com/reception/#webpopular

The contents of a moderated e-mail debate between Carotta, Richard Carrier and Earl Doherty were also made public.

I find it hard to believe Carrier didn't already know about the tropaeum with wax figure before writing his book. So I think this is willful ignorance: he doesn't mention it on page 564 because he doesn't want readers to know the protagonist of Christianity is the most famous Roman emperor. He's doing theology, not history.