From: gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Problems with Paul's history of Jesus
Date: 23 Nov 92 23:45:48 GMT
Organization: DSC Communications Corp, Plano, TX


In article <fVDSUnJ@quack.sac.ca.us> pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey) writes:
>In article <1992Nov19.194604.4997@digi.lonestar.org> 
>gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo) writes:
>>No, I don't mean his reincarnation.  I am firmly convinced that
>>Christ incarnated once and only once in Jesus of Nazareth, that he
>>died, and rose again. And that he will come again, but not ever again
>>in a fleshly body.
>
>OK, Jesus incarnated once in Jesus of Nazareth. Then he died and rose
>again, that's the second incarnation, and he will come again, that's the
>third incarnation. Now, all these incarnations are different, right?
>Hence, reincarnation, multiple incarnations.
>

No. By incarnation I mean being conceived and born into a body of flesh.  
This is connected with Karma.  The resurrection of Christ is not an incar-
nation in this sense.  The resurrection is, in my view, one of the least 
understood things in Christianity.  The second comping will also not be an
incarnation.  To interpret the reappearance of the Risen Christ and the 
second coming of Christ in this way is to reduce the concept to a meaningless
abstraction.  We would need to go further into things to get a better idea.

The important thing is that Christ incarnated once in a physical body, just
as Christians everywhere believe.  The Body of Resurrection in which he
appeared on Easter and the days following is something else, which has 
significance for the whole future of humanity and the earth.  The second
coming, or the "reappearance of Christ in the etheric", as Steiner put it,
is something that occurs in our time, but it is not the end of the world
or the last judgement. And it is not a physical incarnation.

>Incarnations don't have to be into a physical human body. And how will
>Christ reappear if not as a physical incarnation. Note that what you are
>saying is that Christ exists in some form now that is not apparent to
>most of us but that in the future Christ will incarnate into a form,
>though not physical, that will be apparent to most of us. Right?
>

I distinguish between a birth in the human body, "sarx", flesh, from other
manifestations such as one goes through in the spiritual world after
death. We are far from an understanding here of how a divine being, the
Christ, incarnated in a human body.  But he only did this, only needed to
do this once.  His reappearance will be, if it is not already occurring,
in a supersensible body, called by Rudolf Steiner the etheric body.  All
living things have such a body. The human being has one as well.  It is
visible to supersensible organs of perception, which everyone has, but they
are dormant.  They will increasingly awaken over the coming times. Some
people have had experiences of these organs of perception, either naturally
or by a conscious path of development. Steiner indicated that more and more
people will have an experience of Christ something like what Saul/Paul went
through on the road to Damascus. The exact details of what the etheric body
is, how it relates to the whole human being, and what the reappearance of
Christ is, again would carry this out quite far, so I don't go into it here.

>>This is only a sketchy indication, but I felt it needed to be said.
>>I would be happy to discuss it further, including by e-mail.
>
>Please, discuss it further. You're thinking and being creative and that's
>certainly something we could use more of here.
>
I am not trying to put together a new eclectic theory but trying to put into
my own best concepts information for which I have to thank Rudolf Steiner's
Anthroposophy.   I don't expect either to prove everything or to give a full
exposition of things, but I try to emphasize some of the basic ideas especially
as they relate to the fundamental concepts of Christianity.  I also approach
it as best as I can without dogmatism.  But I'm not weaving it out of
speculative thought.

>>As four first paragraph, there is good evidence to believe that Jesus
>>actually did speak Greek most of the time.
>
>This may be possible, but it goes against the theory that he was an
>uneducated man and was Jewish. Uneducated Hellenistic Jews at the time
>spoke Aramaic, educated ones spoke and read and perhaps wrote Hebrew.
>

This whole statement is basically questioned here.  Also, I just pointed
out new scholarship that suggests otherwise.  But I don't mean to try to
prove the gospels or the nature of Christ from the point of view of external
scholarship.  Christians and those who believe the gospels to be valid records,
however, should be quite interested in this development if it turns out to be
true. But it is not essential.

>Possible, but not very likely. We have no texts called the Gospel
>according to Jesus.
>
>>There are a few places where he apparently did speak Aramaic,
>>and often these places are indicated by the gospel writers.
>
>Why would Jesus speak in Aramaic at all, if it wasn't his native
>language? Greek was the language of the empire, Hebrew was the language
>of Judaism and Aramaic was the language of the Hellenistic Jews. If
>Jesus spoke in Greek, whom was he speaking to?
>
I think it is not as simple as that.  Conventional scholarship builds up 
a picture of Jesus as a simple carpenter and so on. But I don't think that
can be cast in concrete. From a purely external point of view, there is 
at least plausible evidence for the scenario I sketched out, that Greek
was what everyone spoke  -- sort of like French in Algeria and Morocco during
the French occupation.  Only the Greek language had been in place basically
since Alexander the Great.  I don't think the scholars are as absolutely sure
as you are about the use of language in those days.  For a long time it was
thought that the Koine was a special language divinely inspired for the
purposes of writing the New Testament.  Then large numbers of documents
were unearthed that showed that Koine Greek was the every day language.  The
position of Aramaic and the degree to which the large numbers of people spoke
it and/or Greek, is still much a matter of speculation.

Althoff believed that most of the people to whom he spoke understood Greek,
with a few exceptions.

As for the translation of the Lord's Prayer, this is a matter of subtle inner
linguistic logic that a person who is really fluent in both languages can
see.  Someone reading the best translation of, say, a Goethe poem can see
instantly which is the translation and which is the original, even if he has
never read Goethe before. This has to do with the different capabilities for
expression of the German and English languages.  Goethe's play Faust, for
example, is well known to be hopelessly impossible to translate.  It was
that sort of thing that led Althoff to make that statement about the Lord's
Prayer having to have been originally in Greek.  Again, it is an interesting
angle, but not critical.  I remember Althoff explaining the inner logic of
the two languages and the details and of the Lord's Prayer, which is really
a remarkable composition.  By comparison the Aramaic was like a mosaic as
compared to a painting.  It all evaporated, of course, as I didn't carry on
in language studies, but I can report my amazement at all there was to see
in it.  Just a personal experience.

>>As for your question about whether Jesus existed at all, that debate
>>I leave to others on this forum.
>
>There is little to debate because there is almost no information about
>Jesus. Even the Greek Gospels are scant or contradictory on the historical 
>record of Jesus.

Yes, and the reasons are not insignificant.  It is important to grasp that
the gospels are not and were not meant to be biographical accounts in the
usual sense.

One conceptual problem that arises over and over has to do with, not the physical,
but the spiritual evolution of man.  We have spiritual and soul capacities that
human beings did not have a few centuries ago, and they had capabilities that have
withered and we no longer have.  In the future, new capabilities will arise. 
These include the capacity to perceive things that most people do not perceive
now. One capacity that modern man has that his earlier counterparts do not have
is a strong sense of "I" or self.  This was not at all the case before.  But this
drawing into our self, our individual personality, has been accompanied by a loss
of other capacities.  Here traditional and fundamentalist Christianity parts ways
with what I am saying, and there is a tendency to treat Adam, say, as if he were
a modern man in a modern soul and body, dressed up in skins like you see in Sunday
School pictures.  Likewise the modern scientific picture that you seem to favor
does not account for an evolution of consciousness.  That is one reason why there
is, IMO, much disagreement about history and society around the time of Christ.

Regards,
Gerry Palo (73237.2006@compuserve.com)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc