Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Post Reply
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Giuseppe »

This passage is very enigmatic, probably one of the more enigmatic passages in Paul:

12 Now about the gifts of the Spirit, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. 2 You know that when you were pagans, somehow or other you were influenced and led astray to mute idols. 3 Therefore I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,” and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit

(1 Cor 12:1-3)

Cursing Jesus under the assumption of being the voice of the Spirit is compared to submission to mute idols under the assumption of being pagans. This means that one can be Pagan but without being necessarily slave of mute idols.

Paul is placing himself in the middle of two positions, both radical.

Who is cursing Jesus were these Jews and/or Judaizers who had realized who was "Jesus" for the gnostics: only another name for the Serpent of Genesis.

Who is proclaiming that "Jesus is Lord" (meaning the Demiurge) is not under the Spirit insofar he believes that Jesus is the Demiurge who repented for the his crimes (i.e. Sabaoth).

Note that the Spirit served to purify the repented demiurge (so the baptism in proto-Mark). Paul is denying that the demiurge could repent since Paul adored the creator as supreme god.
.

So Paul is introducing a third solution. Jesus is not the Serpent and not the repented demiurge, but he is the son of the creator who was fully obedient to his father.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Giuseppe »

The possession by the Spirit is what purifies Jesus from any false view about Jesus himself.

If a Christian is possessed by the Spirit, then he has to have a positive view of the creator as father of Jesus and therefore the supreme god.

If Jesus is possessed by the Spirit then he, whoever he could be believed (the Serpent or the repented demiurge) is now the son of the creator "with power", i.e. sharing the power of the creator himself.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
User avatar
arnoldo
Posts: 969
Joined: Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:10 pm
Location: Latin America

מרנא תא

Post by arnoldo »

According to Jermome Murphy O’Conner, that statement may’ve been regarding those influenced by Alexandrian philosophy in the Corinthian church. Namely, Philo of Alexandria's teaching regarding the dichotomy between earthly/spiritual bodies. Hence, an earthly Jesus wasn’t held in esteem by certain individual in the Corinthian church whom Paul addressed. O’Conner writes,
The body was a fundamental point of disagreement between the heavenly and the earthly man. The wisdom possessed by the former revealed to him that “the body is evil by nature and treacherous to the soul” (Leg. All. 3.71), whereas the earthly man was a “body lover’ (Leg. All. 3.74). . . To recover the body after death would have been meaningless. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that the spirit-people could have accepted Paul’s preaching of Jesus as the Risen Lord in the sense that he intended. Perhaps they thought of him as a purely spiritual “Lord of Glory ( 1 Cor 2:8). In reality, they had no sense of Jesus; their attitude to him in effect said “Anathema Jesus!” ( 1 Cor. 12:3).
https://books.google.com/books?id=aDbaq ... 20&f=false


The races of men are twofold; for one is the heavenly man, and the other the earthly man. Now the heavenly man, as being born in the image of God, has no participation in any corruptible or earthlike essence.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book2.html

Secret Alias
Posts: 18362
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Secret Alias »

I've noticed the parallel in reading Philo. We should be careful assuming that Philo was 'making shit up.' It might have been an Oniad tradition which took root in Alexandria.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Giuseppe »

A possibility is that who “was cursing Jesus” was seeing him still kata sarka:

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view (kata sarka). Though we once regarded Christ in this way (kata sarka), we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

(2 Cor 5)

Jesus was the Christ “in the appearance of flesh”, for Paul. There is a reflection of this in the final of Mark, where the risen Nazarene is clearly so different from the mere man possessed by the spirit of Christ, despite of being the same person. We would expect that the mere man was left in the tomb, once the Christ abandoned him on the cross. Just as we would expect that Paul has to curse (still) the Jesus seen ''kata sarka''. So the my point here is that both 1-2 Corinthians and Mark are replying against separationists who curse Jesus while they adore the Christ.

This distinction between Jesus and Christ is at work in the episode of Barabbas, too, only with the difference that there ''the Jews'' allegorize Christians who hate the Christ while they adore the Jesus Son of Father.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Giuseppe »

But what does it mean to curse Jesus kata sarka? The more probable solution is that the crucified Jesus is who has to be cursed, so to realize the prophecy of Deut. about the hanged corpse as cursed by God.

Insofar he is cursed (by crucifixion) it is the Law itself that is cursed, for Paul.

Only, Paul is a judaizer (just as Mark) insofar he calls the Possessor Spirit as ''Christ'', since for him the supreme god is the creator and not a higher god. The real separationists (against which Paul was polemizing) assumed that the Possessor Spirit was not Christ, but the unknown Son of Father, the Serpent of Genesis.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
Posts: 13732
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 5:37 am
Location: Italy

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Giuseppe »

A third option is that the Possessor Spirit was neither the Christ nor the Son but the Holy Spirit himself, the original Spirit (Sophia) who purified/punished the demiurge by leading him to the cross. Just as Simon of Cyrene ''helped'' to crucify Jesus (and in the Gospel Simon is sanitized by showing him as doing the act itself against the his will, while Simon Magus was deliberately posing as the true Jesus to crucify the demiurge Jesus in the his place). The separationism assumes that this demiurge Jesus was crucified without resurrection/redemption for him.

The creator is cursed forever by the his same Law.

The Judaizers (Paul himself was one of them) would have searched for less radical solutions, obviously. In order to show again and again the creator as the supreme god, and not as an evil deity.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Bernard Muller
Posts: 3964
Joined: Tue Oct 15, 2013 6:02 pm
Contact:

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by Bernard Muller »

"no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus be cursed,”"
Non-believers, because they do not have the Spirit of God, are the ones who would be cursing Jesus. If they had the Spirit of God, they would not do that.
“and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit".
In order to say "Jesus is Lord", you must be inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Cordially, Bernard
I believe freedom of expression should not be curtailed
perseusomega9
Posts: 1030
Joined: Tue Feb 04, 2014 7:19 am

Re: Who was cursing Jesus and who was adoring the Lord Jesus without the holy spirit

Post by perseusomega9 »

Those saying Jesus be cursed could be some form of adoptionists who see the prophet Jesus as bearing the Spirit onlym but not a prexistent man, so they adhere to the Christ Spirit but the man himself is not Divine.
The metric to judge if one is a good exegete: the way he/she deals with Barabbas.

Who disagrees with me on this precise point is by definition an idiot.
-Giuseppe
Post Reply