Tabor on Paul

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Kishkumen
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Tabor on Paul

Post by Kishkumen »

Increasingly, I find it hard to say I am Christian. I am not an atheist, and it is not as though I dislike Judaism and Christianity. I just see them as historically contingent phenomena. The ideas of human beings, perhaps with some divine insight, but certainly not uniquely or exclusively true. Christianity, in particular, became an imperial belief system. It started as a tiny following of an apocalyptic preacher. Paul turned it into a mystery cult of Jesus the dying and deified savior god. Jesus is the key.

The idea that one person is the key to eternal life doesn’t work for me. Tabor has some worthwhile things to say about Paul’s creation of Christianity. I recommend it.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Philo Sofee
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by Philo Sofee »

Yeah, I am growing on Tabor myself... truly, the guy just has so many insights we never got in church because of the controlled proof texts they always used and we thought was the meaning of them. Tabor's analysis uses scripture I never knew existed... :D
huckelberry
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by huckelberry »

Well I listened to the link had reserved reaction. I can see that Paul struggled to express his ideas and in doing so made some stretches with scripture references. He was a bit of a risky thinker and the loose ends have occasioned disagreement for close to 2000 years now. I find Paul interesting and inspiring but not inerrant. Sometimes he narrows in his thought or rhetoric. I found the observation about muzzling the ox an interesting example.

I find no reason to think I have to like everything about Paul but I hold a very positive view of what I think Paul was reaching for and trying to point to.

And of course he realized he was involved in something new.

I suppose if a person does not like the idea of hope in just one person , all the eggs in one basket some alternative could be proposed. Perhaps people hope in Jesus , Tom Brady and Donald Trump a little something for everybody. Of course one person does not present the total of all valuable ideas and wisdom. Maybe it would be nicer if I proposed a team of like minded or at least harmonious folks. I was thinking that desirability of likeminded might suggest a value in one person who most clearly presents the center of that unity, well if such a person is to be seen.

/////////// adding something a day later,
Kishkumen, I realize there are fundamental reasons you may be thinking of when you see serious problems in placing final trust in one person. what I noted above leaves much unaddressed. People need openness to further learning which too much weight on one person might block (but to my view not necessarily)
Last edited by huckelberry on Tue Jan 24, 2023 9:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Physics Guy
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by Physics Guy »

I don't think I ever even thought I understood the concept of Holy Scripture, of a sacred text of which the words are guaranteed to be not only true but also perfectly expressed. Certainly the letters attributed to Paul were hard for me to take that way. They seemed pretty rambling. Often Paul seemed to be quite excited about something but it was hard to tell exactly what he was trying to say.

A Lutheran guy I knew at Los Alamos once agreed with me about that, but suggested that we could still read Paul with respect if we thought of his letters as being like the first academic papers on a new topic.

The first papers about something new are usually hard to go back and read, once the subject has become better known. They belabor side issues and fail to emphasize important things clearly. They are still confused about basic things. And they describe everything from an outdated viewpoint, using archaic language. They are written as if some old controversy that has now been forgotten were the urgent issue facing everyone. The big contribution for which an old paper is often reverently cited may be a brief side remark in the middle of thirty pages of pedantic confusion based on a misconception that is hard to reconstruct as ever having been plausible.

You can still get valuable things out of those old papers, though, if you read them right. You have to expect them to be confused and mistaken and badly expressed; you thresh the wheat from the chaff, expecting it to be a small fraction. By thinking harder about how those grains of wheat managed to grow on those particular stalks of chaff, you can get insight into why those grains are important. That kind of insight can be missing from lucid, modern treatments that explain the ideas more clearly, but don't explain why they are important, because they take their importance for granted.
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dastardly stem
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by dastardly stem »

I like Tabor too...read his book Paul and Jesus which I can recommend to explain more on your opening post here for anyone interested.

Your line here caught my eye though:
The idea that one person is the key to eternal life doesn’t work for me.
Same here. I suppose that's why I'd most closely fit as an atheist. The idea that some unknown and unknowable character is the key to eternal life doesn't work for me. As it is, and as I've expressed here many times before (so I don't know exactly why I'm doing it again), God isn't even a definable concept, at least not in a way that is coherent. He's a something but a nothing but an everything but so incomprehensible we don't even know. Of course to each their own, though. As it seems to me, religion is man-made from the start. If and when God is incorporated, He is as a player in the myths. If there's God and religion is his project, he surely likes to confuse us.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by PseudoPaul »

I believe we only have a lot of what Paul wrote because Marcion (considered a heretic) saved his epistles.

Christianity didn't have much of a future as long as it remained Jewish. Saying Jesus was the messiah after he was crucified by Rome would be like a modern person claiming the Arizona Diamondbacks won the world series last year despite having the worst record - no one would believe it.

Paul was kind of a weirdo, but pushing the religion out to the gentiles who didn't really understand Jewish scripture was the way to give the movement some longevity.
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by huckelberry »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxt7Gu7jGk8

This is another presentation by Mr Tabor. It covers the development of dualism ,the expanding focus on a spiritual life after death in the Abrahamic religions. It includes a bit about the Mormon ideas of being spirits from the spirit world and our divine destiny. Well he doesn't mention Mormons just the developing ideas.

It does a good job of placing Pauls thought in the stream of historical development of ideas hopes and concerns. He opines that Paul is not so much concerned with the saved by faith idea as he is with the development of the spiritual self. I think that observation has merit.
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by huckelberry »

Physics Guy, it is perhaps a matter of personal taste or inclination and habits but I find Paul more to my liking than you do. Still I think you make some interesting and I suspect valid observations about how to read him. Perhaps your expectation of technical clarity makes Paul's experimental analogies and impressionistic efforts to present his ideas into a frustration you suffer through to get anything out of him.

Or perhaps I could say you are unapologetic about stating the difficulty we all have with Paul.
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by huckelberry »

PseudoPaul wrote:
Tue Jan 24, 2023 5:16 pm
I believe we only have a lot of what Paul wrote because Marcion (considered a heretic) saved his epistles.

Christianity didn't have much of a future as long as it remained Jewish. Saying Jesus was the messiah after he was crucified by Rome would be like a modern person claiming the Arizona Diamondbacks won the world series last year despite having the worst record - no one would believe it.

Paul was kind of a weirdo, but pushing the religion out to the gentiles who didn't really understand Jewish scripture was the way to give the movement some longevity.
PseudoPaul you have somewhat different picture of this than I do. I was not going to state my difference but in truth I have zero interest in discussing Daniel Peterson so am casting about for some other diverting difference in viewpoints for exchange.

I realize Marcion favored Paul but it seems unlikely that he was the only one. For some reason there were people who saw Paul as enough of an authority to write letters in his name. Part of you observation is that Paul is instrumental in creating a Christianity outside of Judaism. Those followers would have included Marcion but would include many more people as well.

I can see some point in observing that Jesus did not fit many messianic ideas. However it is pretty clear that the first followers of Jesus after he died were Jewish.I do not think that the trajectory of thought for those people was completely different than with Paul. They were close enough together to fight over circumcision.

Paul does some reinterpretation of Jewish scripture as Tabor points out. He also pointed out the Jewish rabbis do some of the same. What the scriptures mean is in some ways a moving target. Paul's handling of scripture does not make him a weirdo but perhaps you were thinking of other things. ..well obviously somebody devoting his life to spreading a new religious understanding is clearly unusual, perhaps that is weird.
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Re: Tabor on Paul

Post by Manetho »

huckelberry wrote:
Wed Jan 25, 2023 9:39 pm
I realize Marcion favored Paul but it seems unlikely that he was the only one. For some reason there were people who saw Paul as enough of an authority to write letters in his name.
If I remember correctly, the importance of Marcion was that he collected Pauline epistles and (according to his detractors, anyway) edited them in such a way as to support his novel version of Christianity, which treated the god of Judaism as entirely different from the god Jesus represented. Proto-orthodox Christians reacted by collecting copies of Paul's letters that weren't tainted by Marcion's editing.

More generally, Marcion's collection of texts, which consisted of the Gospel of Luke plus the Pauline epistles, was really the first Christian canon, and it moved the proto-orthodox Christians toward assembling their own. For example, Marcion's exclusive use of Luke prompted Irenaeus to argue that you can't rely on one gospel in isolation and declare that four of the many gospels that were circulating at the time were authoritative — the four gospels that ultimately made it into the canon.
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