Jesus of Ramathaim

[pakeha]

...(ETA: also, I just can't get enough of harping on Paul's using other people money. Notice how the Macedonians gave to God, but at the end of verse 5 Paul sneaks in, "by the will of God also to us." He's like a reverse Robin Hood, taking the money of those he just described as being in extreme poverty, and, by the will of God, using them himself.)

It's good to know I'm not the only one powerfully struck by that detail!
Off to read more on the subject.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

If I'm understanding this situation correctly, it has a parallel in the divvying up of the New World between Portugal and Spain as set forth in the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Maybe, or maybe not.

It depends on whether everyone involved actually thought about it as dividing a pie, so to speak.

It's at least possible though that James and his gang simply had no interest in preaching to the gentiles in the first place. It could be like, dunno, if I came to you and asked for permission to go tell the Mexicans that they don't have to obey the USA federal laws when they're in Mexico. I think more than "how do we divide the pie?", the question that would come to your mind would be "dafuQ'?"

ETA: And what tells me that this might have been the case is that, really, at that point Paul has been preaching for 17 years, out of which it's 14 years since meeting Peter and James. If it took that long for Paul's paranoia to kick in and make him seek an agreement, tells me that there plausibly was no real conflict between them in that time.

 

[JaysonR]

Hans,

Regarding the Conspiracy against Paul;
I can go with the idea that Paul and James had a bargain and that Paul failed his end, and that the entirety of everything was not a setup.
That said, I think that final trip was absolutely a setup.

It's impossible for James to not have been aware that what his group was telling Paul to do was going to directly get him in trouble, and it's incredibly suspect that the Jews who charge him are from the very region he just happened to skip visiting, and so therefore could not be warned of any Jews against him who had traveled to Jerusalem.

Even if we remove the Asia Minor bit; the rest of what James' group was telling Paul to do was impossible for James to claim ignorance on really.
James should never be found to encourage Paul to go to the Temple with Gentiles in tow for cleansing rituals; that's rank of a setup.

It looks at the least, to me, that James set Paul up for entrapment after Paul broke the bargain.

Well...at the least, I think I've got one college paper material setup for myself now; so that's cool!
I can do a paper employing hermeneutics (well...more properly, exegesis), as the excuse, and write this construct up as a proper proposal and hack it out over a few years and see if I want to use it as my thesis (trying to collect a few different options early).



Regarding "the poor";
What makes those two entries that I pointed to stand out is the article employment of "The", as opposed to all other entries (including the ones you just cited) where it is simply an adjective and not an adjective driven by an article for definite identification of a specific group; especially in Romans where it's also coupled with "holy" as an additional description of the group.

In both cases of the article employed version of "poor", it is in reference to James or James' turf.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well, I've argued a couple of years ago that the story in Acts smells of James trying to get Paul stoned, so, yes, I'll agree that it may well be a setup at that point. All I was saying is that it doesn't have to be some mastermind plan all the way from way back.

 

[JaysonR]

Quite so; I'll admit that's a reach.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

That said, about that adjective, I'm still not that convinced. The exact same form appears for example in Matthew 11:5 and Luke 7:22, plus in Luke's Sermon On The Plain at 6:20, AND in Matthew's sermon on the mount at Matthew 5:3.

And really, it's hard to support that some special meaning is hidden in "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" or "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Especially since the rest of the beatitudes (and in Luke's case, woes too) seem to just mean the plain meanings of the words used.

I mean, compare with, say, Mathhew 5:5 where "the meek" (πραεῖς) is just the same form of using an adjective. And I don't think it meant there's a group of Christians called The Meek.

The more mundane reality is that in Koine Greek an adjective could effectively be used as a noun, same as in many languages, including English, and be used in a definite form just like a noun. In fact, I'd say the Greeks were arguably even more liberal with the definite article than the English are nowadays.

Basically while Paul MAY be denoting some group with that, I would disagree that we can read that much in his particular use of the word "poor".

 

[JaysonR]

Are you sure you haven't read Eisenman?

I've not read Eisenman.

To be honest, I don't read much of anything people publish on Jesus and Christian history outside of anthropological publications here and there when I'm researching a specific tangent.

The last book I read (can't recall the title) close to the topic was a massive book that cataloged the history of the Christian Bible...not the history IN the Bible; the history OF the Bible through time.
I really tried to stick with it, but damn...that was just boring as hell.
I finished the book, but I cannot recall many items from it; it was an incredibly boring authorship and to be honest; the catalog of the Bible over time is really, really not terribly interesting (well...occasionally it's interesting, but 90+% of the time...it's boring has crap; actually scatology would be more interesting).

 

[JaysonR]

That said, about that adjective, I'm still not that convinced. The exact same form appears for example in Matthew 11:5 and Luke 7:22, plus in Luke's Sermon On The Plain at 6:20, AND in Matthew's sermon on the mount at Matthew 5:3.

And really, it's hard to support that some special meaning is hidden in "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" or "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Especially since the rest of the beatitudes (and in Luke's case, woes too) seem to just mean the plain meanings of the words used.

I mean, compare with, say, Mathhew 5:5 where "the meek" (πραεῖς) is just the same form of using an adjective. And I don't think it meant there's a group of Christians called The Meek.

The more mundane reality is that in Koine Greek an adjective could effectively be used as a noun, same as in many languages, including English, and be used in a definite form just like a noun. In fact, I'd say the Greeks were arguably even more liberal with the definite article than the English are nowadays.

Basically while Paul MAY be denoting some group with that, I would disagree that we can read that much in his particular use of the word "poor".

Yes, but that's why I didn't compare against the Gospels.
I don't (currently, and I admit I have not done really granular comparisons of Acts and Luke in fine detail) hold that Acts and Luke were written by the same hand, and the only "hand" I was interested in comparing was "Paul's" hand.

When doing a comparison like this, we are comparing the grammatical function as used by one mindset, and not a comparison of multiple authorship functions of grammar.
We would be doing the latter if we were just looking at the early Christian use of the term's grammatical function in general, but not if we were looking at one authorship.

Similarly, when I outlined (in another thread) how it is that we may be able to identify a different author for the prologue and epilogue of Matthew from the Body of Matthew, I compared grammatical patterns between just that text onto itself in the questioned sections.
I didn't compare it against the functions in other texts.

Similarly here, I only compared Pauline use; not Synoptic use.

It's not conclusive, but it is compelling for further inquiry as is possible...if ever there is further material to compare against.

 

[zakarpatska]

Hi JaysonR,

I hope you don't mind a layman jumping in with a question. I'm interested in reading Paul's letters, but I'm afraid my Koine Greek isn't up to the task. You mentioned that the NASB is a bad translation - is there a good translation of Paul's Epistles in English? If yes, which translation would that be?

Thanks.

 

[JaysonR]

Hi JaysonR,

I hope you don't mind a layman jumping in with a question. I'm interested in reading Paul's letters, but I'm afraid my Koine Greek isn't up to the task. You mentioned that the NASB is a bad translation - is there a good translation of Paul's Epistles in English? If yes, which translation would that be?

Thanks.

Sorry for the late response.

It's hard to pin down a single translation that works best.
The best I can suggest is a mixture.

1. Complete Jewish Bible
2. Wycliffe Bible
3. Young's Literal

I don't think any of those on their own are completely accurate, but if you mix and match them together; you get a decent idea.

The problem with all translations (and this will come as odd, I'm sure) is that they are all theological - even the NRSV, which claims to be the academic choice (completely misleading claim).

The fact of the situation is that there (to my knowledge) remains no single translation which just translates what the Greek states and aims to retain the Greek grammatical rules in place.

A great example of this is Matthew 4:1.
The amount of translations that translate it as "Devil", or even "The Devil" are remarkable...it's basically all of them; if you are lucky, you might get "The Adversary".
Yet, "τοῦ διαβόλου" is in the genitive casing (possessive of the subject), and διαβόλου is an adjective; not a participle flipped into a noun (sometimes done), or a noun of any kind.

That means the English equal would be something like: "...the slander of his.", or, "...his slander"; or, "the accusing of his", or "his accusing".

We might wonder off and make it "accusations", but then we're deviating too much.
To maintain the adjective format in the English; it would be best represented as, "accusingly".

To accomplish that, we'd have to say it in a somewhat different manner:
"...to have examined accusingly himself"

Which can cause some confusion.
So I personally leave it as:
"...to have examined under his accusing"

Either of these, however, would be markedly better in representing the Greek than what the translations spit out:
My take of the Greek, paying attention to the grammar:
"Then the Jehoshoua departed into the desolate space of the desert under a strong force of spirit from within, to have examined under his accusing"

NIV:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

NRSV:
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

KJV:
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.


These are all terrible renditions.

By comparison...

Complete Jewish Bible:
Then the Spirit led Yeshua up into the wilderness to be tempted by the Adversary.

Wycliffe Bible:
Then Jesus was led of a Spirit into desert, to be tempted of the fiend [to be tempted of the devil].

Young's Literal:
Then Jesus was led up to the wilderness by the Spirit, to be tempted by the Devil,


----
You'll notice Young's is like the above bad examples; and that is often the case.
However, there are times where Young's is helpful so I add it in even though I would often place it in error.

Wycliffe will many times place a note that refers to the common translation when deferring (such as in this example), rather than wipe out and place the dogmatic translation over the Greek (all to common method, as can be seen above).

The CJB offers a very different approach that can be helpful as that one is definitely dogmatic; but it's dogmatic with an interest to show Hebrew culture and customs - which can be helpful in understanding texts like Matthew and Mark if a person is not heavily familiar with Hebrew cultural contexts.


Anyway; I wish I had an answer as to which translation was the best...but there really isn't a good translation out there.
No one just preserves the Greek in the English...for what reason, I have no idea...I really don't.
Instead, they all slant it into assuming a wide range of things about what the author intended by something rather than just sticking to the grammatical restraints represented in the Greek texts.