Was Jesus a human being?
The Bishop of Durham, NT Wright, wrote a book called 'Galatians for Everyone'
Wright translates Galatians 1:1 as follows :-
Paul, an apostle.... (my apostleship doesn't derive from human sources!) Nor did it come through a human being. It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the father who raised him from the dead.
Why was Paul so keen to stress that the resurrected Jesus was not a human being?
Wright translates Galatians 1:1 as follows :-
Paul, an apostle.... (my apostleship doesn't derive from human sources!) Nor did it come through a human being. It came through Jesus the Messiah, and God the father who raised him from the dead.
Why was Paul so keen to stress that the resurrected Jesus was not a human being?
posted by Steven Carr at 12:18 PM
2 Comments:
Could be because he was a human being.
Consider that in the Acts 9 account of his conversion, not only Saul heard the voice, but also the men with him! And it might have occurred in the dark of night (except for the blinding fireworks), as there's no mention in this account that it didn't.
However, the other two accounts, in Acts 22 and 26, seem to go out of their way to say it occurred at midday, when a "resurrected" Jesus preasumably could not have gotten away with such a trick.
I conclude that the encounter involved a "raised" Jesus who was still alive, which accounts for the many pieces of evidence that he later traveled much, first from Damascus through Anatolia and Ephesus, then along the Silk Road to northern India and Srinagar.
Surely Jim it was because Paul believed Jesus was *more* than a human being? The function of the emphasis in Gal. 1.1 is to distinguish the (humanly-inspired) rabble-rousers perverting what P understands to be the true Gospel vs the (divinely-inspired) message P believed he was authorised to preach to them?
P pre-empts a challenge to the basis of his authority by claiming it derives from a source transcendent of the natural processes of life and death. To see this verse as evidence of some kind of proto-docetic christology is surely mistaken.
Evidence for the Silk Route/India stuff has been comprehensively repudiated I'm afraid. There's an outside chance of Thomas having made it to India - but it's very much a long shot.
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