Craig B
How it happened is not described in the sources.
Nor is
that it happened described in the sources. "Two Jameses" is an inference based on interpreting one author (Paul) with just the right balance of selective figurativeness, making some assumptions about Luke's
Acts, and assuming finally that Josephus was talking about our Jesus, and forgot to mention that his James was head of the Christian church in Jerusalem, forgetting this while explaining why James was hip deep in political intrigue.
As I said to
Brainache, I don't aspire to sort all that out, certainly not today. But it is thin, and there is a missing "obligatory scene," as those things used to be called in the theater.
If Jesus was considered to be a Davidic messiah--and I have argued that the expression "son of God" is a Davidic Royal title--then Jesus might well have been succeeded by a blood kinsman as the head of the messianic group. In this conception Peter would be the "chief minister" of the movement, and James would be its "monarch".
Odd, then, that Josephus neglected to mention that James was a Davidic claimant, and was head of a group that backed him in his pretension.
In any case, the main focus of the discussion is Paul. Paul has ranks, but offers no "dynastic" rank, although he gives Jesus his prophesized Davidic status. It is unclear how Paul arrived at that, since he would have no competent natural source for Jesus' actual ancestry, and unclear that Paul would deny "Davidic" status to any man born in Paul's time of a Jewish mother.
In any case, Paul's top rank among the living is apostle with portfolio, of which there are exactly two: himself (to the Gentiles) and Peter (to the Jews). At no point does Paul depict Rocky taking orders from James, nor from the men sent by James to Antioch.
proudfootz
I think Jesus being an ordinary human might be 'lower' than a pre-existing angel.
OK, but Paul is culturally Jewish. Paul doesn't carry the baggage of a surrounding Christian culture. Bart does. I don't bother to mention Islamic culture. Angels don't even have free will in Islam (Isa is directly created in that religion, as a human being).
In any case, that isn't the chief feature that drives the "height" of christology. Creator
versus created is the big cut, not bragging rights and jockeying for position among the created. Paul clearly has his Jesus made man, and stayed man. If Paul's Jesus took a reduction in rank to do that, in Bart's reading, then so be it.
John would still show much improvement upon that, over an interval of two generations or so.
(Even in orthodox Christian thought,
resurrected human very well may be higher than angels, even if angels are higher than "fallen" humans for such thinkers.)
But he does seem to be possessed of some pretty far out ideas which would seem to pose some difficulties for the HJ hypothesis that Jesus was a mere mortal who perhaps taught and preached then died and stayed dead but around whom legends and myths gradually accumulated.
That's what we need - where is that stuff in Paul? It must be pretty good, though, since Paul himself has floated in the cosmos (and cannot exclude that that was bodily), did the signs and wonders appropriate to an apostle, and has some practical expereince speaking in tongues. Whoever wrote that stuff, Paul or an impostor, is a mere mortal who taught and preached then died and stayed dead about whom legends and myths gradually accumulated. It's hard to imagine what this guy could have written about Jesus that would bar Jesus from being the same.
That sounds rather odd as I was under the impression Paul thought Jesus was something special.
Mostly after Jesus died, that is, after there was no longer any historical Jesus. Paul anticipated that Jesus would re-enter history, and that would have been very special, but it didn't happen.
As we know, the dying-and-rising god idea was around and known even among the Jews, ...
Perhaps so, but that doesn't put Paul on the hook for Jesus being God, even if Bart's reading is granted, since angels aren't God, either.
But that brings up an interesting point: if Jesus was a preacher of some sort who died (as in the HJ hypotheses), whatever became of those who revered him as a wise but fully mortal man who did not rise from the dead?
I like the question, but I missed who didn't rise from the dead, the believers or their Jesus? If the former, that's why Paul needed a tune-up; if the latter, then there are modern cultural Jews with that opinion (Einstein, for example, who seems to have thought of Jesus like a proto-Spinoza). So, maybe nothing special happened to them.
but did Jesus (according to Paul) undergo this from one sort of body to another?
Yes, Jesus is the first, but not the last. Pharisees, like Paul, taught a general resurrection of the righteous (including Gentiles, hence the business opportunity) at the end of days. Paul's innovations seem to be that the GR is a process not an event (everybody doesn't rise together), and he seems to have improvised (received from God?) what to do with people who hadn't died when the balloon goes up (which Paul associated with the return of Jesus to Earth). The synoptics have a much gloomier outlook on all that than Paul does.
