Loving God = Eternal Torture?

[muhammad_isa]

I asked first:

So what?
I take it that you don't wish to state what the fundamental difference is that you claim..

I don't know exactly how the after-life will be .. I haven't got there yet..

..But I DO know that as is in this life, we can be blessed or damned (by our own doing)

 

[BilliardsBall]

You know good and well that the Gospels are the last-written books of the NT, and that they express a fully-formed theological tradition. Pretending that we have the direct, verbatim words of Jesus from his own lifetime is disingenuous. At best we can posit that a number of the sayings attributed to him did actually come from his teachings as they were handed down.

On top of that, I'd say the passage in question is one of many that put into Jesus's mouth things that were known at the time of writing. Just as Jesus is made to speak of the destruction of the temple a couple of generations early, so he is also made to speak of his own death. In that light, the idea that his own death would be a necessary price for the liberation of others need not suggest any sort of bizarre human sacrifice scenario; it could simply mean that he knows his teaching in that time and place will result in his death, yet he has chosen to do it anyway because his teachings will lead others to salvation.

The idea that it was actually his death that brought about salvation was a later permutation of the theological tradition. Early Christians focused on his life and emphasized his death only in the sense of something that could not actually destroy him, as a model for how others could also triumph over it. The idea that he was literally a human sacrifice would have been seen as bizarre. Even the metaphors to that effect are a bit strained, given the cultural context.

I don't know any such thing, and I would stick to conservative dating that says, for example, that the Revelation closed the canon and was written last.

And do you think Paul made up the gospel as backfill? And ransom and substitution and so forth? You know as well as I that most people say Paul was written AFTER the gospels to try to create the new Xian religion... I also have no trouble saying we have direct words from Jesus. Was it so difficult to remember what one's God said to you in person a few years after He died and rose? Really? Or do you doubt the historicity of Jesus...?

 

[Vishvavajra]

I don't know any such thing, and I would stick to conservative dating that says, for example, that the Revelation closed the canon and was written last.

The Gospel of John and Revelation are thought to have been composed, or at least arrived at their final form, around the same time, c. 90 CE. As early as the 4th century there was a tradition that they had been written by the same person, although that's no longer considered likely.

As for closing out the canon, there would be no canon as such for about two more centuries. It's not as if the books of the NT were written in order and slotted in as they arrived. The only reason the Gospels were placed first was so the story of Jesus (in its various forms) would precede the commentary of the epistles, even though the epistles actually came first and informed the Gospels. It's a thematic ordering, not a chronological one.

And do you think Paul made up the gospel as backfill? And ransom and substitution and so forth? You know as well as I that most people say Paul was written AFTER the gospels to try to create the new Xian religion... I also have no trouble saying we have direct words from Jesus. Was it so difficult to remember what one's God said to you in person a few years after He died and rose? Really? Or do you doubt the historicity of Jesus...?

What you're saying is not what "most people say." It's at best an isolated fringe of Biblical scholarship, which has for quite a long time held the consensus that the Gospels were composed in the last two decades of the 1st century by anonymous authors who had no first-hand knowledge of Jesus (Luke may be the exception to anonymity, but not to first-hand knowledge, as he even makes explicit in his introduction). Mainstream scholarship does not doubt the historicity of Jesus but at the same time does not accept the Gospels as historical accounts. In fact, I've been quite active in the latest historical Jesus thread, arguing the affirmative.

The Gospels are biographies in the ancient fashion, written decades after the fact with very little factual information to go on, especially about Jesus's early life, which is why they construct it via allusion to the Hebrew Bible and common mythic topoi. That's why they frequently disagree on the details: it's not because they're incompetent or forgetful, but because what they're doing is a great deal more sophisticated and actively creative than just recounting facts. The point is not to tell you what Jesus did, literally speaking, but rather to tell you who Jesus was, constructing appropriate narrative scenes to that end. Insofar as they are faithful representations of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, it's important to understand that the phrasing of those teachings has already been filtered through an existing theological tradition by the time we get them in the Gospels. We're not getting it directly from the Messiah's mouth.

Paul's writings would date anywhere from the 30s through the 50s CE, and he was probably dead before the destruction of Jerusalem, whereas the Gospels all date from after that event. It is highly unlikely that Paul lived to see a single Gospel like the ones we have. What he does have is a very basic narrative that was probably handed down to him from Peter et al.: Jesus gathered disciples and delivered teachings, he instituted the practice of the Eucharist, he was arrested and executed, and he was resurrected. That's pretty much all Paul has. The Gospels are based on that core but add a great deal of stuff to it, including some stuff Paul probably wouldn't have liked very much, such as an increasingly carnal view of resurrection.

As for ransom and substitution, none of that appears in Paul's letters. Those are later rationalizations, with ransom being an early example of atonement theory and penal substitution being a much later one (being formulated about 400 years ago as a Calvinist revision of Anselm's satisfaction theory). I'd argue that Paul's theology and soteriology are free of anything that could properly be called atonement theory, as he does not see the crucifixion itself as the key to salvation. In fact, Paul differs sharply from today's orthodoxy on a number of key points.

 

[BilliardsBall]

The Gospel of John and Revelation are thought to have been composed, or at least arrived at their final form, around the same time, c. 90 CE. As early as the 4th century there was a tradition that they had been written by the same person, although that's no longer considered likely.

As for closing out the canon, there would be no canon as such for about two more centuries. It's not as if the books of the NT were written in order and slotted in as they arrived. The only reason the Gospels were placed first was so the story of Jesus (in its various forms) would precede the commentary of the epistles, even though the epistles actually came first and informed the Gospels. It's a thematic ordering, not a chronological one.


What you're saying is not what "most people say." It's at best an isolated fringe of Biblical scholarship, which has for quite a long time held the consensus that the Gospels were composed in the last two decades of the 1st century by anonymous authors who had no first-hand knowledge of Jesus (Luke may be the exception to anonymity, but not to first-hand knowledge, as he even makes explicit in his introduction). Mainstream scholarship does not doubt the historicity of Jesus but at the same time does not accept the Gospels as historical accounts. In fact, I've been quite active in the latest historical Jesus thread, arguing the affirmative.

The Gospels are biographies in the ancient fashion, written decades after the fact with very little factual information to go on, especially about Jesus's early life, which is why they construct it via allusion to the Hebrew Bible and common mythic topoi. That's why they frequently disagree on the details: it's not because they're incompetent or forgetful, but because what they're doing is a great deal more sophisticated and actively creative than just recounting facts. The point is not to tell you what Jesus did, literally speaking, but rather to tell you who Jesus was, constructing appropriate narrative scenes to that end. Insofar as they are faithful representations of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, it's important to understand that the phrasing of those teachings has already been filtered through an existing theological tradition by the time we get them in the Gospels. We're not getting it directly from the Messiah's mouth.

Paul's writings would date anywhere from the 30s through the 50s CE, and he was probably dead before the destruction of Jerusalem, whereas the Gospels all date from after that event. It is highly unlikely that Paul lived to see a single Gospel like the ones we have. What he does have is a very basic narrative that was probably handed down to him from Peter et al.: Jesus gathered disciples and delivered teachings, he instituted the practice of the Eucharist, he was arrested and executed, and he was resurrected. That's pretty much all Paul has. The Gospels are based on that core but add a great deal of stuff to it, including some stuff Paul probably wouldn't have liked very much, such as an increasingly carnal view of resurrection.

As for ransom and substitution, none of that appears in Paul's letters. Those are later rationalizations, with ransom being an early example of atonement theory and penal substitution being a much later one (being formulated about 400 years ago as a Calvinist revision of Anselm's satisfaction theory). I'd argue that Paul's theology and soteriology are free of anything that could properly be called atonement theory, as he does not see the crucifixion itself as the key to salvation. In fact, Paul differs sharply from today's orthodoxy on a number of key points.

"...who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time." - 1 Tim 2:6

Are you saying Paul did not write the epistles to Timothy?

 

[Vishvavajra]

"...who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time." - 1 Tim 2:6

Are you saying Paul did not write the epistles to Timothy?

No, Biblical scholars do not generally regard the epistle to Timothy as having been written by Paul and have not for quite some time. As for whether it's referencing ransom theory as such, that's another question. Its apparent references to emergent Gnosticism may be evidence of 2nd-century composition, at which point a nascent ransom theory might have already been in the works. But even then it's hardly clear that it's referencing something like the fully-formed ransom theory of atonement that would later be formulated by Origen of Alexandria and serve as a basis of orthodox church doctrine for a thousand years.

Origen's ransom theory was certainly influenced by statements like the one above, but there's rather more to it than just a manner of expression like what we see in the epistle (which by itself does not mean much, as the Pauline tradition employs a wide variety of mystical metaphors are often mutually incompatible if taken at face value). It's tricky because it's tempting to read the epistles in light of later doctrinal developments, when often those developments were theoretical frameworks constructed specifically for the purpose of making sense of statements in the epistles for which the original context was lost or uncertain. That means it's terribly easy to place the cart before the horse, as it were.

In fact, it's controversial whether the ransom theory as people think of it now is even a fair characterization of how it was understood in late antiquity. At least, that's what Aulén thought, and I think there's something to it, as it would account for how such a fundamental concept for the first thousand years of the Christian tradition could be jettisoned so thoroughly in the West in the middle ages--hence the ransom theory's rarity in Catholic and Protestant circles even now and the near-universal adoption of the satisfaction theory.

 

[BilliardsBall]

How do you interpret the opening of 1 Timothy?

"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, 2 To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord."

Who do you think wrote the two Timothys? Do you have a citation that proves this authorship? Is their documentary evidence apart from the statement above that I might review?

Thanks.