No, no. There is nothing (legitimate) in the Pauline letters that say Jesus is, "Jewish man born normally". The opening of Romans and the "born of a woman" passage are obvious later orthodox interpolations. Certainly outside of the opening of Romans noting indicates that Jesus is "Jewish".GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2024 2:34 am I would disagree, if we are looking at the commonly held beliefs around timings: Paul --> Mark --> Matthew/Luke --> John --> Marcion's *Ev.
In Paul and Mark, Jesus is arguably a Jewish man born normally who is taken by God to heaven like Elijah and Philo's Moses. In Matthew/Luke, Jesus is a man born of a Jewish virgin under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In John, Jesus is the incarnated Logos who is born as a man. In Marcion, Jesus is a spirit not born as a man at all.
In Marcion we see the ideas that the material world is corrupt, created by an ignorant being which thought of itself as God. Thus the need to remove any origin by flesh, which is part of the material world. That is a pagan idea. In Jewish thought, the world created by God was good.
I guess if one regards the timing differently the analysis would vary.
It's not just the idea that Jesus was a spirit from heaven that needs to be considered. It's also that the Creator god was either ignorant or evil. Your theory would need to explain why that would get flipped. AFAICS it is explainable by Christianity starting out as Jewish and then adopting Greek philosophical ideas as it expanded into the Roman empire, with Marcion a pagan product of that expansion. I find it harder to believe that the initial story had Jesus descending to fight an ignorant/evil Creator Jewish god, and then Jews adopting that story to modify it.
There is also nothing in Mark that indicates that Jesus "a Jewish man born normally". His origin in canonical Mark is unknown. John says nothing about Jesus being "born" at all. John says he entered the world and became flesh. The opening of John is entirely compatible with Apelles:
- Against All Heresies; Tertullian
The birth stories of Matthew and Luke are clearly late and reactionary additions to earlier narratives that gave no account of a birth of Jesus. They are specifically anti-docetic inventions. The case that the birth accounts are late anti-docetic inventions is very strong. So much has been done on this in the past 10 years in relation to scholarship about Marcion's scriptures. I don't think *Ev was the first Gospel, but certainly *Ev came before Matthew and canonical Luke.
There is no reasonable way to arrive at the belief that Jesus was a Spirit who descended from heaven from stories that clearly indicated he was a person who was born on earth. The only way to think that this happened is to follow the logic of the church fathers. To claim that the docetists willfully took stories that clearly said Jesus was a person and forced a very unintuitive interpretation on them. Why do this? Why not just reject the story altogether? Why not just invention their own stories? It must have been that at the very least, the earliest Gospel narratives were open to multiple interpretations.
It has to be that at the very least a reasonable reading of the earliest stories could lead to the conclusion that Jesus was a spirit who had come from heaven. The corollary of this is that one could say that it must also then be that it must have been a reasonable interpretation of the earliest stories that Jesus could have been a person as well. And perhaps that's the case. I think the Gospel of John is one that provides such ambiguity. If one starts from the Gospel of John, or at least a presumed proto-John, one could conclude that Jesus at least came from heaven. Of course John as we have says explicitly that he "became flesh". But one can easily see how that could be a later orthodox revision.
What clearly doesn't make sense is if there was originally an established group of people who worshiped some Jesus figure, who believed that he was a real person and told and wrote stories about him clearly indicating that he was a person, that then people would come along and claim that he was a spirit from heaven. It defies all credulity, and even the church fathers have to strain to make their claims, blaming the existence of these beliefs on Satan and evil forces that are trying to intentionally confuse the world to prevent the success of Christ's mission, etc. So even they had no real rational explanation for the "rise" of these heresies, they just blamed it all on the devil.