Who crucified Jesus for Paul and where (in my view)

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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Who crucified Jesus for Paul and where (in my view)

Post by Giuseppe »

All he [Marcion] would have gleaned from Simonianism was the belief that someone had seemingly undergone crucifixion among the Jews.
(Robert Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle, p. 125, my bold)
Paul, too, believed in a Jesus who lived at some unspecified period as a descendant of David and was put to death (Paul specifies crucifixion).

(G. A. Wells, The Jesus of the Early Christians, p.2 287-288, my bold)
Paul is not clear about the exact location of Christ’s crucifixion, but there are certain indicators (such as 1 Corinthians 2:8) that he, and others, regarded the agency of that crucifixion as the demon spirits. They were denizens of that “sphere of flesh” below the moon, inhabiting the firmament or “air” up to the region of the moon and possessing their own kind of material corporeality, though not of human flesh. (Again, see The Jesus Puzzle, p.103.)
(Earl Doherty in his answer to a reader)

It is curious that Price's view and Wells's view are similar insofar they have a (more possible single) author of the epistles who puts the crucifixion of Jesus on the earth in a distant past from his time.

This says us that a global vision of the epistles -- seen as the product of a single author, even if from second century --, for Price, reveals an earthly Jesus of the distant past of which he knew very little.

I agree with Price about the fact that the autor of the epistles hated ''the God of this Age'' (2 Cor 4:4), i.e. the Creator God.

But I don't follow him in his criticism of Rylands:
Unlike L. Gordon Rylands, Walter Schmithals, J. C. O’Neill, and others, I make no attempt here to get back to the original Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, or other missive. That would be like the numerous attempts to peel away inauthentic Jesus materials to get back to those which are authentic to Jesus. I think both goals are equally futile. All I feel confident in doing is laying bare the composite character of each epistle, tracing each jigsaw piece to its likely origin. My goal is to make a running start at doing for the Pauline epistles what Rudolf Bultmann did in his History of the Synoptic Tradition. I am no more sure about restoring pristine, original autograph versions of the epistles, whether by Marcion, Simon Magus, Paul, or anyone else, than I am that the Jesus traditions took their rise from a single historical figure. These texts we now read as
epistles may have been patchwork quilts from the start. We see the historical Paul come in and out of focus like the projection of a flickering hologram.
(ibid., p. 136, my bold)

Therefore, the place of the crucifixion of Jesus is not so important when you consider who was his principal killer. Not simply the ''archons of this age''. Even they were mere mere instruments of someone else. As such, there is no difference if they were spiritual or earthly agents: after all, they were only tools of someone else.

The true killer of the angel Jesus for Paul was the Creator, the god of the Jews.

Seen from this point of view, the Creator and his worshipers were interchangeable for all practical purposes of propaganda.


In Antiquity the God of a nation was easily (and deliberately) confused with the inhabitans of that nation, in propositions like ''The gods have abandoned us'', ''Their gods were more powerful than their's'', etc.


To say that the Creator killed the true (Son of) God is equivalent to say that his servants (spiritual demons and/or earthly worshipers) were the killers of Jesus.

Paradigmatic Parallelism (Doherty docet, here): just as the Creator crucified the Son of God between the Earth and the Moon, as well the earthly servants of the Creator (=the Jews) killed Jesus called Christ.

Insofar they continued to adore the Creator, the Jews were co-responsible, along with their god, for the crucifixion of Jesus.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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