Re: Does anyone have On the Historicity of Jesus yet?
Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:09 pm
Bernard,Bernard Muller wrote:Good post, Gakuseidon
Carrier explained that mainly on these pages:
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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
you were probably not participating in the debates over the demons that crucified Christ in "this age" that we had on FRDB long time ago. I distinctly remember the gauntlet thrown to Doherty by Jeffrey Gibson to show one document of antiquity in which demons did not act through human agency but in the abstract and in outer space as he proposed. Nothing was produced. I commented sarcastically on Doherty's (which is now also Carrier's) reading of 1 Cor 2:6-10:
Solo, IIDB #3545349 wrote: So, what's the problem with the archontes ? How can anyone even come close to doubting they are a reference to 'demonic, supernatural powers' ? Surely if they had been informed of God's hidden wisdom, they would not have not molested Paul's theological abstract. Such is the nature of demons.
JS
Best,
Jiri