Who knew that Penn State was not only a university but a line of pretzel products, that according to the website “was the first brand to bring an authentic American-style baked pretzel to the UK. . . . crispy pretzel knots – made to an authentic American recipe and perfectly baked every time!” I had a small bag of Penn State’s sour cream and chives pretzels on the flight back to the U.S. yesterday. They were good, surprisingly so for a country that isn’t as accomplished as the U.S. is at providing salty snacks to beer drinkers. I mean, when do you ever see two men sipping pints in an Irish or British pub while snacking on handfuls of party mix?
But given the shakiness of Penn State’s image after the Jerry Sandusky conviction or how protective most universities are of their brand and image, I can’t believe that the pretzel company is still called Penn State. So far, though, I haven’t found any signs of hostility between the university and a company that has so obviously borrowed from the university’s identity. Since Pennsylvanians love their pretzels, have university officials been bought off with lifetime supplies of Paterno Parmesan twists?
Old Life 
I’m confident a licensing fee is paid to Penn State. And apparently Europeans either don’t know about Jerry Sandusky or don’t find his sort of behavior off-putting.
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American-themed names of things / businesses in the U.K. and Ireland often make little sense. (And they almost certainly don’t know nor care about that scandal.)
They have a dish over there they call ‘Chicken Maryland’; it consists of deep fried chicken with deep fried bananas and deep fried pineapples. Doesn’t exactly scream Chesapeake Bay, does it; I think they should call it ‘Chicken Honolulu’, myself…
In Belfast, I found a coffee shop called the Arizona Espresso Company. I have no idea what specifically Arizona has to do with espressos, lattes, cappuccinos, etc., but that’s what they decided to name it…
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(Then again, here in Canada, we have a Canadian pizza chain called ‘Boston Pizza’ (what has Boston to do with pizza? Not like it has clams on it…), so I shouldn’t laugh too hard at the Brits / Irish…)
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Oh, and BTW, they do like their salty snacks while sipping beer: they call them ‘chips’, we call them ‘fries’…
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Will, but a chip is not a crisp and in the State of Penn, the home of the snack food capital of the world, fries are a side dish. Pretzels and chips are the air we/they breathe.
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The very best Penn pretzels were the soft, hot, salted pretzels slathered with yellow mustard we used to get on the street by Franklin Field going into an Eagles game back in the sixties. It was the one treat, along with the hot chocolate inside the stadium, that I always looked forward to and my Dad always sprang for…
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@ DGH: I realize; I do like Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels.
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Responding to post Jeff Cagle Post
https://oldlife.org/2014/06/luther-like/comment-page-6/#comment-141935
here to avoid rolling off the bottom since I suspect this will be long.
@Jeff
Meaty post. It is going to require several responses. Let’s hit the first point what the thesis is we are discussing
We should definitely lock down the thesis first and agree on terminology. I’ll call that definition above “creedal incarnation”. I only need something substantially weaker. Feel free to object to this the thesis.
I’ll define the incarnation as having 4 properties and provide inline examples. We can call it the BEHE criteria.
1) Bodily: Jesus has a normal (or mostly normal) human body. In particular it must both be capable of and need to perform bodily functions. The body gets energy from metabolizing sugar in the normal way so he must have to breathe, and eat. He must have been born not arrived. He must respond to the material environment, so he must blink. He is capable of getting sick.
2) Earthly: The place where Jesus was incarnate was on earth at a particular near (to the ancient Christians) time and happened in places they can reach through normal transportation means. So for example a mythic past, the future or the Jerusalem are all excluded. So would places that the ancient writers can’t reach like Venus (the 3rd heaven) or near / above the clouds even if we can reach those places today.
3) Human soul: Jesus soul / Christ soul it is fully integrated into the body. In particular Jesus’ body is not a puppet of some external spirit (usually the Christ spirit) The mind that speaks physically to other humans is fully human though may be perfect or enlightened or…
4) Extended: The earthly interactions lasted more than a brief time. He had a normal duration human life.
My thesis is there are no 1st century Christians that we know of that believe that Jesus met the BEHE criteria. That there are only vague references in the early 2nd century to Christians who might and it isn’t until around 140 that you see comfortable references that likely meet BEHE.
In particular 1JA fails all 4 criteria though. I’m not going to be able to prove that in isolation but he’s going to make comments which strongly imply the negation of these 4.
So feel free now to adjust this criteria however you think is fair and ask questions. Hopefully you see this as creating a firm definition.
I’ll hit your 7 criteria next. Though we can weave responses.
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addendum
or the Jerusalem are all excluded
That should read: or the heavenly Jerusalem are all excluded
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@Jeff
Good evidence let’s hit these points.
Again I’d check the context of that very verse 4:1-6
The community learns about Jesus by way of spirits. That’s a big problem for what you mean by flesh. People don’t learn about Lyndon Johnson via. revelations from God, scripture or spirits. They learn about things like the Astral Plane or the after life or that their dead alcoholic mother really loved them and was sorry that way.
There is another problem here btw that’s worth thinking about. The whole point of the letter. Think about the opponents. If they were are denying that Jesus of Nazareth came in the flesh that would obviously be nonsense. So whatever 1JA’s community thinks “Jesus” means, they don’t think it means Jesus of Nazareth or he wouldn’t have to bother. In 4:5 he indicates that the world finds the opponent’s views convincing so it isn’t just this community. And moreover he has to convince his listeners that the opponents aren’t really Christian.
Could you imagine this debate happening in your church? Of course not. And that’s pretty strong evidence that the community doesn’t believe in HEBE and whatever they mean by Jesus is something for which coming in the flesh is optional.
First off 1JA (for lurkers 1JA is author of 1John) never says anything Jesus bleeding. There are 2 blood references
1.7: Blood of Jesus cleanses us from sin
5:4b-8: Jesus came by water and blood
That’s it for 1JA on blood. Both of those references are symbolic referring to a rite, they aren’t historic. It is the Spirit that testifies to the water and the blood, the three agree which is how we know that Jesus is the Son of God. The water and the blood bear witness to Jesus, they part of the revelatory channel.
Once we say it is a rite I think the most likely context is the eucharist (I’m using this loosely). Water (baptism) and blood (eucharist) being the two central Christian rites. Again this is 1John being early and that the blood part is contented by his opponents. Note again this is another place you’d expect gospel quotes if 1JA knew anything about the gospels. “On the night before his death…”. Or even if I’m wrong (which is doubtful given the context) and he did mean bleeding that scene from GJohn with the spear piercing his side why wouldn’t he mention that?
As an aside creatures in the lower realms but above earth can bleed. So that really doesn’t get you much further even if I was wrong about the interpretation.
There are two ideas here
a) That 1JA sees Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. That one I agree unqualified.
b) The implication that you are drawing that others handled his flesh I don’t see any signs of in the text. If you want an example of a Christian explicitly having sacrifices in heaven the book of Hebrews comes immediately to mind.
Where does 1JA make that tie? 2:15-7 is explicitly about this world. He never ties that to Jesus. If he did, then you wouldn’t have the full HEBE but you would at least start getting some of the letters.
I think I responded fully in #2 to this one. So I suggest we consider this point a repeat.
I think he means Jesus died for us in the higher realms. So no argument with even your stronger interpretation of death. Though this is a mythic death, not a physical actual death.
I’ll hit #7 separately. The evidence is long and the response will be longer.
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Jeff,
Would you mind looking through this page and telling me if this is what you understood about Q ?
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09323a.htm
Kind Regards,
Susan
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Hey DGH, welcome back to the U.S. of A. Were you gone long enough to miss the entire run of Fargo on Fx? It is very very good. You MUST find a way to stream it, or maybe they’ll replay it in a marathon or something.
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Rube, Fargo is in the queue. It was in lots of telly ads in the UK.
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@Jeff
I’m going to hit #7 out of order
First off he says (I’ve marked it above in the Greek so that there is no question): “This one(i.e the Son) is the true God and eternal life” or more naturally “He is the true God and eternal life”. The identification is Jesus with God. An identification as I’ve mentioned he does in other verses as well.
I agree that the life is seen but seen through Scripture.
I’m going to try this we thing again. Let’s deal with the grammar of the Greek. John is not writing an essay.
I’m going to write verses 1-4 keeping the grammatical structure of the Greek.
What was the the beginning
what we have heard
what we have seen with our eyes
what we look at
and what our hands feel
(3) and the word [logos] of life[zoe]
and the life is revealed
and we have seen and testify
and we proclaim to you
the eternal life
of the sort which was towards the Father
and is revealed to us
and we have seen and heard
we proclaim also to you
so that you too may have communion with us
and indeed our communion with the Father1
(1) and with His Son Jesus Christ,
and we ourselves write(2) these things
so that our joy may be fulfilled.
(Now that I’ve done that exercise I don’t know why it isn’t always translated like that). Do you see the structure? That looks like responsive prayer. This is not an essay.
Let’s make two changes. To the above
(1) we delete line (1) the “and with His Son Jesus Christ,”
(2) we change “write” to “pray” or “call out”
Then the above is perfectly normative Hellenistic Judaism responsive prayer. Nothing Christian about it at all. drop (3) and it isn’t even Hellenistic anymore . This isn’t any different than the kind of a prayer you could hear at a synagogue today in America.
For example in America every year just about every in the country:
a- Whoever is hungry,
b – let him come and eat;
a- whoever is in need,
b – let him come and conduct the Seder of Passover.
a- This year [we are] here;
b – next year in the land of Israel.
a – This year [we are] slaves;
b – next year [we will be] free people.
0% of those people are actually slaves. Pretty close to 0% believe that the messiah is going to come and take them to Israel, if they wanted to be in Israel they could jump on a plane tomorrow and get there.
Maybe Reformed guys don’t do responsive prayers but I’ve said stuff like “I/we have seen the risen Lord” in responsive prayer 1000x in my life while I and everyone else in those churches has actually seen the risen Lord never.
If you agree that this sort of language is part of response prayer then
Somebody whether it is 1JA or a recorder changed this from say to write. Whether 1JA is making a strong allusion to prayer or quoting a prayer or the original form was a speech redistributed as a letter. (2) is a minor change and doesn’t shift whether he saw Jesus in the HEBE sense or not.
We know that (1) isn’t enough to create a belief in incarnation from 1John himself. His opponents believe that Jesus is the Son of God they just don’t believe he has come in the Flesh. Absolutely I agree these verses are ambiguous. The way to resolve the ambiguity is to look elsewhere where 1JA keeps saying stuff that contradict him having a 3 year apostleship with a material Jesus. Which I’ve pointed to regularly.
Which has been my point all along there is no “we/you” distinction between who has seen what. This is why you couldn’t build a cohesive theory of who was “we”.
OK I’ll pass the ball to you at this point.
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@ Susan:
I did read the article, but I didn’t understand what is at stake. The article points out that the existence of Q rests entirely on inference, which I agree with.
It’s not a big point. As I said, I’m not sold on Q. I just wondered why a Q would be incompatible with a genuinely matthaean Gospel of Matthew.
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@ Cd-H:
I agree with the procedure of nailing down a thesis. I would prefer to ground the terms of the thesis in Biblical terms, since questions of Jesus getting E. coli or needing to blink are simply not addressed anywhere. I can imagine several frustrating rounds of trying to parse textual silence.
What about:
B: Jesus had an earthly body capable of eating, being tired, being seen, touched, born, beaten, killed.
E: Jesus had an earthly existence in Israel.
H: Jesus had a human soul capable of being tempted.
E: Jesus had an extended life encompassing birth to death
And then the question is whether John teaches BEHE, might believe BEHE but does not teach it, probably does not believe BEHE, or could not reasonably believe BEHE.
Some clarifying questions:
As for 5.20, are you saying that John identifies Jesus as God, but not as eternal life?
Your reference to “heavenly sacrifices” in Hebrews – are you referring to ch 8-9?
You’ve mentioned several times that ch 4 has that “The community learns about Jesus by way of spirits.” What precisely do you mean by that?
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We can’t seem to get away from “we”, do you? (See what we did there?)
If you release me from my pledge to give you the last word, I’ll give it another shot. But we do need to find a way to make a reasonable endpoint. My downstairs bathroom has no light, outlets, or vanity, which situation must change soon.
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Some counterpoints:
(1) Think about the opponents. If they were are denying that Jesus of Nazareth came in the flesh that would obviously be nonsense.
I take the opponents to be proto-docetics.
And if so, then “they” do not believe BEHE, but John wants “We” to believe at least Body.
This is a fairly simple read, I would think.
(2) Once we say it is a rite I think the most likely context is the eucharist (I’m using this loosely). Water (baptism) and blood (eucharist) being the two central Christian rites.
Yes, that’s a strong possibility. But now push that thought further. If John is writing to a group that already celebrates the Eucharist, then we have a bleeding Jesus. That’s where i was getting the notion of bleeding from: the Eucharist says that blood has been shed. So does “sacrifice.”
Now, you contend that this could still be symbolic or mythical blood. But the minor point at least is that it is *shed* blood. That’s what (2) is getting at.
(3) Note again this is another place you’d expect gospel quotes if 1JA knew anything about the gospels. “On the night before his death…”. Or even if I’m wrong (which is doubtful given the context) and he did mean bleeding that scene from GJohn with the spear piercing his side why wouldn’t he mention that?
At some point you will have to explain your notion of a sound argument from silence. If I were to use your method on the gospels, I would argue that since none of the synoptics show any notion that Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the the temple was fulfilled, they must all be dated prior to AD70.
In my experience with communication, people do not say what we expect them to say. In fact, it is rare and gratifying to find someone with whom communication is easy.
So it is here: assuming that John is referring to the sacraments with “water and blood”, he would certainly have known the formula that Paul repeats to the Corinthians, or something similar. He might also have mentioned “body”!?
Yet he repeats no formula at all. Yet he cannot have had a rite without a formula. Does his silence show that he knew no formula? Me genoito.
I say that to say this: what John actually does say – that Jesus has come in the flesh – carries much more weight than anything he doesn’t say. Our notions of what he should say are highly colored by later questions.
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@Jeff
Feel free. I added a bit there.
Now I recognize that you made a good faith attempt at the thesis. This is where I have you at a bit of a disadvantage since I think we both agree I’ve get better familiarity with the non-canonical literature. I’ll indicate my objections to your definition and I’m not trying to be difficult but yours are muddled (though again I believe this was good faith).
Well actually blinking for example does show up. For example when the John character lists the various signs by which he identifies Jesus, “ Yet to me there then appeared this yet more wonderful thing: for I would try to see him [Jesus] privately, and I never at any time saw his eyes closing (blinking), but only open.” (Acts of John 89). In particular the John character understands this not blinking to mean he isn’t seeing Jesus but a projection of Jesus into the world. Not only does he not blink there is theological implications of his not blinking. Jesus’ glory would be too much for John at this stage. So Acts of John’s Jesus has a body and is able to touch and interact but doesn’t have bodily processes. Getting sick or drunk or tired from work are all full biological processes rather than imitations of biological processes. That’s what I’m trying to distinguish.
I don’t know where this conversation goes but I suspect that Acts of Peter, Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, Acts of Thomas and Acts of Paul are likely to come up since we need the explicitly Encratite literature as a nice clear middle point between Gnostic and Catholic. Two of those books explicitly have blinking as a sign, and one explicitly makes theological conclusions. What they provide are clear examples of the timeline in texts that don’t preach a human Jesus but show Jesus getting more human. More importantly texts that the Catholics didn’t corrupt by injecting their own theology into the texts after the fact, not being tampered with makes it much easier to draw inferences from. Also you don’t have theological baggage when discussing these books since you assign no importance to them. There aren’t implications for you believing that the author of Acts of John is a Docetic the way their would be for author of 1John. And while 1John I believe is too early to worry about Encratites yet, if we start moving to the Pauline corpus or the Gospels their theology is all over the place it makes it easier to spot if you see it in undiluted and uncorrupted form.
Capable of eating or needing to eat. Very very different.
Being tired (from exertion) is fine.
Being seen is way weaker (think about the burning bush or the various angels).
Being born doesn’t prove much of anything. Lots of mythical being are born by other mythic beings. Being born at a specific non-mythic time at a specific earthly place is fine (Bethlehem at the time of King Herod) qualifies.
Being killed can certainly happen in the middle realms not just in the lower realms absolutely. Again way too weak.
Being beaten… I’m not sure I’d have to think about that one. Certainly beaten by humans and feeling pain is enough.
Being tempted by human temptations (like sex, greed or laziness) and I’m good with that one. Abstract temptation effects many divinities.
You need an amount of time in there and that those happen in the proper order or earth. That’s why I specified normal human duration. For example if he is tightly tied to the aion of the fish (“age of Pieces”) then his “life” might extend 1 to 2150 CE That ain’t human.
_____
Yes I think the grammar doesn’t break the way you had it breaking and then the context is clear.
5:11 life is in his Son the life isn’t his Son.
5:13 believing in the name of the Son of God is how you know you have eternal life
5:16 God grants eternal life
The eternal life comes from being in Jesus it isn’t identified as Jesus.
Yes though I’d say the theme runs throughout the book.
I believe that 1JS’s community has read the scriptures and drawn conclusions from them that Jesus exists and is God’s Son. They’ve come to gain some insights into his properties from scripture. But by far the cardinal one is his existence. They have also likely associated emotionally from scripture and make leaps. They are calling that process being led by spirits. 1JA’s theological opponents agree that Jesus exists and are willing to assign some properties to him (for example they might consider Jesus the name of the Angel of the Lord).
For 1JA’s sub-community Jesus has become the focus of their faith and that is creating tension. In particular all of Judaism is becoming more interested in and attaching growing importance to messianic prophecy. The entire body of messianic properties require being earthly not heavenly. John’s group has resolved this tension in a way that allows them to keep the focus on Jesus while still being part of the messianic movement. They do this by having Jesus come to the lower realms in the flesh so that a symbolic fulfillment is possible. Which means they are rewriting the notion of salvation (i.e. messianic fulfillment) from a national theme to an individual property of eternal life with God (which does have scriptural support but isn’t the normative interpretation). They need a symbolic fulfillment since obviously Jesus is not the earthly King of earthly Judaea bring in earthly political changes as per the traditional understanding of the messianic prophecies. The opponents consider this entire flight into symbolism idolatry and are calling 1JA a liar. They might very well also use the language of prophecy and say they are being led by spirits since rather than that they are drawing conclusions if they are also into Jewish mysticism. Alternatively only 1JA’s subgroup is into mysticism and 1JA is attributing the spirit language to them, it is unclear.
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@ CD-H:
Thanks for the refinements. I agree with “needing to eat” and “being born at a specific time and place” and “a life of normal human duration.”
As a theoretical matter, your desire to distinguish Getting sick or drunk or tired from work are all full biological processes rather than imitations of biological processes is probably subject to a No True Scotsman problem. Jesus shed his blood? Well, that could be an imitation of a biological process …
So I think we would have to establish ahead of time what counts as a true biological process over against an imitation — and I suspect that this is impossible to do prospectively.
CD-H: I don’t know where this conversation goes but I suspect that Acts of Peter, Acts of Andrew, Acts of John, Acts of Thomas and Acts of Paul are likely to come up since we need the explicitly Encratite literature as a nice clear middle point between Gnostic and Catholic. Two of those books explicitly have blinking as a sign, and one explicitly makes theological conclusions.
I think it would be best for you to make the salient points from these texts, and I will listen. It would be foolish of me to try to engage on those texts, and it would be foolish for a different reason for me to incorporate ideas from those texts (such as blinking) into the thesis.
After all, what I’m trying to defend is certainly not that Jesus in 1 John shows characteristics that are same as/different from the extraBiblical characteristics.
—
So with those in view, I’m ready to debate a thesis: as defined above, John presents Jesus in a way that is consistent with BEHE and requires some version of B.
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JRC: As for 5.20, are you saying that John identifies Jesus as God, but not as eternal life?
CD-H: Yes I think the grammar doesn’t break the way you had it breaking …
Actually, it’s a very straightforward sentence diagram:
This one | is / the true God AND eternal life.
Both θεος and ζωη are nominative and must function as subject (impossible, since that slot is filled by ουτος) or predicate nominative; the parallel structure is clear; and even removing the punctuation and reparsing yields nothing sensible other than the above.
Add to my primary analysis the fact that every single English translation I looked at from Wycliffe to NLT gives the same structure to this sentence: Subject IS Predicate Nom 1 AND Predicate Nom 2.
I feel very confident that John is saying that “this one is the true God and eternal life.”
CD-H: and then the context is clear.
5:11 life is in his Son the life isn’t his Son.
Not so. In the text, the life is in his Son. We cannot assume “and therefore is not his son.” Both statements might be true for John.
By analogy, the author of the Gospel of John says that Jesus is the life. He also says that eternal life is knowing God and His Son.
5:13 believing in the name of the Son of God is how you know you have eternal life
5:16 God grants eternal life
The eternal life comes from being in Jesus it isn’t identified as Jesus.
Can you at least grant that at the grammatical level, he says those words: “This one is eternal life”?
I think you are trying to encourage not over-reading, and that’s a valid concern. I’ve linked the beginning and the end, and it’s possible that I’ve over-read what’s happening there.
So you probably have reasons in mind as to why 5.20 doesn’t mean that Jesus is eternal life. But as it is, your case starts off by saying “the life is in his son, it isn’t his son” (which John doesn’t say) and “the eternal life is from being in Jesus it isn’t identified as Jesus” (which John does in fact say; at least he says those words). This doesn’t persuade.
So what do you have in mind?
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JRC: You’ve mentioned several times that ch 4 has that “The community learns about Jesus by way of spirits.” What precisely do you mean by that?
CD-H: I believe that 1JS’s community has read the scriptures and drawn conclusions from them that Jesus exists and is God’s Son. They’ve come to gain some insights into his properties from scripture. But by far the cardinal one is his existence. They have also likely associated emotionally from scripture and make leaps. They are calling that process being led by spirits. 1JA’s theological opponents agree that Jesus exists and are willing to assign some properties to him (for example they might consider Jesus the name of the Angel of the Lord).
That’s helpful, thanks. I will chew on this. My first reaction is that 4.1-6 occurs in the context of a long list of ways to know the spirit of the antichrist, which is pretty much the point of the book.
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@Jeff
What is their theology of Jesus? What do they think is special about Jesus? Where would they agree or disagree with you? For example I’ve focused on their primarily objecting to Jesus being the Christ (John 2:22)? If you mean docetic in the way Evangelicals traditionally talk about docetism, why would Jesus being the Christ be an issue? The docetics whom Protestants usually talk about (whom as an aside I think are a mental conflation of different groups and don’t actually exist in reality) would agree with the Christ but might not with the Jesus = Jesus of Nazareth part.
Oh I see what the debate is. This comes down to the order:
M) The Egyptians and Greeks have a eucharist ritual. That ritual gets borrowed by sectarian Jewish groups that evolve into Christians. The Christian eucharist gets associated with sacrifice.
J) There are traditional Jewish rituals involving ceremonial meals (passover) involving wine and matzah. As Jesus and his heavenly sacrifice gets associated with the passover all the parts become symbolically associated with Jesus and written into the story.
S) There is a theology of a heavenly sacrifice. The Jewish groups evolving into Christians want a ritual and so they borrow the form of the Greek ritual.
We know (M) happened at least once among the Sethians. Sethians had the Eucharist before they associated it in any way with Jesus. For them a sexual magick rite migrated over from Egyptians prior to their contact with Christians. That is a menstrual blood and semen rite gets adopted and slowly becomes a wine and bread rite. Then after that it becomes a wine and bread rite associated with Jesus.
The Didache gives us an example of (J) at an intermediate stage where the Eucharist rite is still a communal meal of thanks. Wine still means wine but we give thanks to Jesus. Of course the blood association with the wine is there (pascal blood and circumcision blood). Jesus is simply replacing Yahweh in what would otherwise be a normative Jewish rite.
Paul in 1Cor likely gives a pretty good example of (S).
And of course there may be others I don’t know about. The point of this is, don’t assume the Eucharist blood (either really blood or wine not clear from 1JA) is a symbol for Jesus’ blood from the sacrifice if we agree that 1John is early. I think your interpretation that 1JA believes Jesus bleed during his sacrifice is more likely than not but far from certain, say 60%. With the Johannine corpus we see parts of later Christianity broken apart and since we have multiple works we see them gradually coming together. Assuming they are already together just because they exist is begging the question the about what 1JA believes.
Sure that’s fair. Let’s assume I want to make an argument from silence. I have some variables whose value I don’t know yet.
p = probability that X knows / does X
MpT = probability given p that in any sentence mentioning a T they would also mention X
Let M = MpT*p
I have a collection of sentences S. Some of those sentences have T in them. If I set a confidence C then using a Bernoulli test (taking into account serial correlations) I can bound a maximum value for M. If I have enough silences M will be very very low (like .001). If I’m sure that MpT is itself not extremely small then p must be low. If the maximum value of p is less than 1-C then I’ll just say p is falsified by the silence. If that’s not true then this procedure allows me to engineer a minimum value for C where it would be true and still talk about what is likely true.
So yes I think that the synoptics not mentioning the temple is evidence for dating prior to AD70. But that evidence is contradicted by much stronger evidence in the case of Matthew, Luke and John for dating much later. I think the bar should be set high for weird hypothesis like an author intentionally trying to make their book sound older than it is. Luke/Acts in particular flies over this high bar.
Why would he certainly have known Paul’s formula to the Corinthians? I don’t see evidence that 1JA knows Paul. More importantly GJohn doesn’t seem aware of Paul. And more importantly still Paul does name drop a lot and nowhere does he indicate any knowledge Johannine corpus or this community.
Remember I’m willing to date 1JA as potentially earlier than Paul. Moreover we know for the Catholics that their knowledge of Paul was limited. Prior to Marcion most proto-Catholic writers only know of 1Corinthians if they know anything at all. It is only with later decades that Paul is seen as important and that is certainly after the biblical Johannine corpus is written.
I agree, I’m not disagreeing. 1JA believes that Jesus entered a lower realm. All other things being equal “came in the flesh” that would be reason to believe 1JA at least sees Jesus as having spent some time on earth. But all other things aren’t equal. If he said something like “Jesus Suffered Under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried” then we wouldn’t be any doubt about what 1JA believes. You still are a long way of showing 1JA knew Jesus and studied under him but at least the possibility that all 1JA means is that Jesus came to the lower realms but not necessarily the Palestine of the 1st century would be excluded.
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@CD-H: The docetics whom Protestants usually talk about (whom as an aside I think are a mental conflation of different groups and don’t actually exist in reality) would agree with the Christ but might not with the Jesus = Jesus of Nazareth part.
Right, and this is where your specialized knowledge could be helpful. Docetism a la Marcion or similar is obviously too late for John. But the teachings of the Sethians would not be, but I’m ignorant of those. So feel free to lay out your understanding of what was happening in AD 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, which would span the possible authorship dates of 1 John (we agree, right?)
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Do you agree that the use of ιλασμος requires John to be thinking of at least J) if not S)?
Also, are you understanding M), J), S) to be in chronological development order? If so, then where do you date the Didache relative to 1 Cor?
Finally, if one believes that 1 John is likely to have been written by the apostle John, then the Jewish community of believers would skip (or be ignorant of) M) and go straight from J) to S). Are you saying that didn’t happen, or simply that we can’t rule out M)?
CD-H: Why would he certainly have known Paul’s formula to the Corinthians?
He wouldn’t necessarily. My point is just that if John knew a rite, then he knew *some* formula (not necessarily Pauline) to go with that rite. Yet he does not mention any rite.
And the point of that is simply to probe at your understanding of argument from silence, but we can do that much better by hitting the math. So …
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CD-H: Let’s assume I want to make an argument from silence. I have some variables whose value I don’t know yet.
p = probability that X knows / does X
MpT = probability given p that in any sentence mentioning a T they would also mention X
Let M = MpT*p
I have a collection of sentences S. Some of those sentences have T in them. If I set a confidence C then using a Bernoulli test (taking into account serial correlations) I can bound a maximum value for M. If I have enough silences M will be very very low (like .001). If I’m sure that MpT is itself not extremely small then p must be low. If the maximum value of p is less than 1-C then I’ll just say p is falsified by the silence. If that’s not true then this procedure allows me to engineer a minimum value for C where it would be true and still talk about what is likely true.
I think I’m going to have two questions about this, but first I want to recast the method in terms more familiar to me so that I have confidence that I’m understanding properly. (For the sake of lurkers — the math will not permeate the conversation for too long, I’m hoping).
You want to estimate p = P(X), the probability that the author thinks X. To do so, you examine sentences where the author says “T” and “T” would be expected to be accompanied by “X”, a statement of X.
For example, if John really believes that (X) Jesus was bodily sacrificed, then when he mentions (“T”) the blood of Christ, you would look for some definitive statement (“X”) that Jesus suffered in his flesh, or some other indication that the blood was not mythic.
So we have
M = P(“X”), the probability that the author would say “X”, modeled by a Bernoulli distribution.
MpT = P(“X” | X & “T”), the probability that the author would say “X” given that he has said “T” and believes X.
And we compute
M = MpT * p , which is in my notation,
P(“X”) = P(“X” | X & “T”) * P(X) in circumstances where P(“T”) = 1.
Estimate an upper bound on P(“X”) from Bernoulli, assign a reasonable prior for P(“X” | X & “T”), and compute the upper bound on P(X).
Do I have that translated correctly?
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@Jeff
Good point on 5:20 I’m going to have to concede that one grammatically.
On the HEBE vs. BEHE I think we are close. But I think we are likely to end up spending too much time quibbling about details where I’m trying to exclude various heresies and you are trying to end up without having a vague thesis. It occurs to me that there is another well known set of criteria you might go for that was specifically designed (in a slightly more primitive form as a baptismal oath) to accomplish exactly what we are trying to do. So instead of me spending a round quibbling about your list let me try something else entirely:
And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried
or breaking this out as thesis statements:
O: Jesus and Christ are a single entity
B: Jesus was born the Christ i.e. they were always one being from birth to death on earth (no claims of a Christology beyond that)
S: Jesus Christ was capable of suffering
P: Jesus Christ lived in a particular earthly place (Palestine)
T: Jesus Christ lived in a particular time (the rein of Pilate back at most 50 years)
D: Jesus Christ was capable of biological death
We’ll scramble the letters and call this the BeDPOST criteria. Fair? My thesis with 1JA is that he rejects P, S, D. The text is not long enough to prove this in isolation but it is long enough to show that:
P’: 1JA has no knowledge of any specific earthly acts or teachings of Jesus at all and doesn’t attribute anything to him.
T’: He gives no indication of any of the events of Jesus “life” having happened recently (during his lifetime) at all.
Now as an aside remember in the back of my head I’m not entirely sure 1JA even knows who Pilate is since IMHO it is entirely possible that 1John predates Pilate’s rein as procurator or prefect.
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I think we have gotten incrementally closer on the understanding of pronouns.
We agree, for example, that There are clearly some members of “you” who are not yet members of “we.”
In other words, “you” is a distinct (not necessarily *disjoint*) set from “we.”
And, you have posited that John is flexible in his use of pronouns. On your account, he slips back and forth between “you” and “we.” On my account, he slips back and forth between two meanings of “we.” But we both agree that he is flexible.
And, I think you’re probably right that his flexibility is more political and less accidental or sloppy — though John is certainly a plain-vanilla Greek writer.
I want to come back now to 1.1 – 6 because I’m not sure that I was being clear.
Verse 3: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.”
When I insisted that “no-one writes like this”, I was not saying that no-one slips back and forth between “we” and “you.” That’s actually common in English, and your citation of Pres. Obama was a clear example of it.
What I meant more specifically is that no-one creates a sentence in which “we” is the subject and “you” is the object and in which “we” and “you” refer to the same sets of people.
Consider further the semantics of 1.3. In your scenario, “we” seems to mean something like “all of us collectively, as I am hoping that we will be” and “you” seems to mean something like “the church, especially those sitting on the fence.”
Now, 1JA is standing at the front of the church, or nailing a letter to the door, proclaiming, “We (us collectively) proclaim to you (the church, esp those on the fence) what we (all of us) have seen and heard (in the Scriptures), so that we (who?!) might have fellowship with you (the church, esp those on the fence)”
That second “we” is problematic IF there must be a consistent meaning to “we.”
I’m proposing what seems to me to be a much simpler solution. In 1.3, “we” refers to John and his party. I’m conceiving of them at a distance, taking my cue from 2 John and 3 John; but even if not, “we” refers to John and his party. “you” refers to the church as a whole, whom John wishes to enfold into his party. (Theologically, I would argue, because John believes he knows the truth about Jesus and believes that the church should also).
Now we have: “We (our party) proclaim to you (the church) what we (our party) have seen and heard, so that you (the church) may also have fellowship with us (our party).”
And then starting in 1.6, John now shifts “we” to incorporate “you”, so that he is now speaking of “all of us”: If we claim to have fellowship with him ….
What’s at stake? I think the point is this: In 1.2-3, it seems clear to me that John is grounding his authority to be heard in the fact that he and his party have seen, heard, and handled something that the members of “you” have not.
If this were not so, then there would be no point in “proclaiming and testifying.”
(Naturally, I think that what has been seen, heard, and handled was Jesus of Nazareth himself. But clearly he does not say so in 1.2-3.)
Put this another way: If everyone in the church had all seen, heard, and handled the same things that “we” had, then wouldn’t John say something to make clear that this was a shared experience? He might say: “You yourselves heard and saw and handled it with us”
Instead, twice, “you” heard the message (2.7, 3.11). And then a single ambiguous, “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the savior of the world.”
Testify to whom? To ourselves?
In other words, in your account, 1JA is calling on “you” to affirm a previously shared experience of “seeing” Jesus in the Scriptures. Yet he makes no mention of explicit writings; he makes at most one ambiguous reference to a shared experience; and he leads off the letter by sharply demarcating “we” who have seen, heard, and handled and are now testifying to “you” — who therefore have not.
Is that making more sense, or am I just being a bore at this point?
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I like “BeDPOST.” You have something specific for rejecting D,S,P, so have at it.
Aside: You think 1 John could be as early as AD26?
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This all ends with Jeff becoming an atheist, CD-Host becoming a Christian, or the two of them getting a room.
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@Jeff
Not quite, there is conflation between thought and writing. But I can recast my argument in your notation.
X = something the author believes
Y = statement the author could write which is dependent on belief X
T = type of statement where you would expect Y to appear
Then the dictionary between our notations is:
P(Y|X & T) = MpT
P(X) = p
Because of the dependency here between Y and X P(Y|T&(~X)) = 0
or alternatively P(X)*P(Y|X&T) = P(Y|T)
P(Y|T) = M
Estimate an upper bound on P(Y|T) from Bernoulli taking into account serial correlation (i.e. P(Y|T) will be higher than it otherwise would be since we expect that if an author doesn’t say something he should in one place he is more likely to not say it another).
Then estimate P(Y|X&T) using common sense for a single occurrence.
From above: P(X) = P(Y|T)/P(Y|X&T)
so if P(Y|T) is tiny P(X) will be low and you have a valid argument from silence.
Remember M evolves into the same thing as J and S. But yes I’d agree if there were any traces of M’s origins left in 1JA’s thinking then he wouldn’t use ιλασμος.
I hadn’t intended any chronology I was just listing options about where the eucharist came from for various early Christian sects. I’d have to do a lot of research to figure out which likely came first. For example (M) starts since more or less the beginning of human history, but when does the first group that will eventually become Christian pick up that rite? Also there is an evolution. (S) happens almost instantly and (M) takes multiple generations so even if (M) starts before (S), (S) might still finish first.
I was mainly saying that you couldn’t assume (S) or knowledge of Paul. The Eucharist developed multiple times among Christians. Knowing about the Eucharist and knowing about the 1Cor formula are two different things. We can’t know about John’s theology of the Eucharist if we agree 1John is early.
I’m sorry I’m losing a question in the postulates. Let me just break this apart.
Let me also just break this one comment apart:
if one believes that 1 John is likely to have been written by the apostle John: As
We both agree 1John is early. It is possible that John of Zebedee is the leader of the early Johanne community at the time of the writing of 1John. It is possible that John of Zebedee was an apostle, and it is certainly the case that after 1John he comes to be thought of as an apostle. This community in later years will certainly associate themselves with the myth of John of Zebedee the apostle regardless of history.
i.e. there are 4 cases for 1JA
a) John of Zebedee is an apostle who founded the community and is earlier than 1JA (perhaps a century or more earlier)
b) John of Zebedee is the founder of the community and during the Encratite era becomes thought of as an apostle.
c) John of Zebedee is 1JA (either is or is not an apostle)
d) 1JA predates John of Zebedee by a little bit or is contemporaneous and 1John gets attributed to John of Zebedee later.
I know you won’t agree with this but where I’m coming from is this outline (oversimplifying a bit):
Early Christians / Gnostics Christian really do have apostles, but those apostles have no connection to an earthly Jesus. The same way you have officials from parachurch organizations.
Encratite Christians don’t have apostles but they have an elaborate theology where the apostles have become mythical and for them these historic apostles play a crucial theological role in the effectuality of the passion.
Catholic Christians don’t have apostles but they inherit a lot of the Encratite theology and myth. They try to rewrite it so that the apostles become instruments and founders for their institutional hierarchy but the underlying Encratite theology bleeds through more than they intend. In particular this is where the students of a historic Jesus comes from.
So you see the problem when you talk about apostles. One of our areas of disagreement is what the apostles are.
____
Your thought experiment with the Sethians deserves a long response and I’ll hit that tomorrow.
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@John
OK this is a really interesting thought experiment. What makes the Sethians a great choice is they are the heretics we know the most about, we have a timeline for them (a better timeline than we have for the Catholics). So I can do what I think is a pretty good job of playing this scenario out. They do work well as proto-docetists since we know their theology. But from a theoretical standpoint this thought experiment has two big problems:
a) The Sethians in 50-90 CE who would be Ophites mainly are proto-Christians. They already believe a lot of doctrine in Christian theology. But in their theology Jesus doesn’t play much of a role, the roles that will later get assigned to Jesus are played by different mythic beings. Jesus as personified Logos is not yet a syzygy (complementary quality) for Sophia (personified wisdom). It is their children/grandchildren (depending on whether we are at 50 CE or 90 CE) both in the spiritual and possibly physical sense who will react strongly to Jesus myth and make Jesus a central character in their myth. 2nd century Sethianism is the product of the two reactants of late Ophite Christianity and Encratite Christianity. Neither 1JA nor the Sethians are ready to have what I think you are picturing for this debate. We know as a matter of historical fact they didn’t react to the more primitive Christianity in Alexandria at this time. That mid 1st century Christianity doesn’t solve the theological problems they are interested in. So even if they ran into one another there wouldn’t be the in-group dynamics of 1John.
b) The Sethians are Egyptians and 1John is happening in Asia minor. You can’t disentangle the Egyptian from the Sethians without changing things that are fundamental to them. You would have the same problem of creating a thought experiment where the OPC Presbyterians are debating a bunch of nearby Brazilian Pentecostals.
These two things are going to present a particular problem because the Egyptian Judaism and Asian Minor Judaism in the time 50-90 CE are having very different reactions to the Judean political situation and thus very different reactions to the motivation behind Jesus came in the flesh.
Let’s take a bunch of doctrines that are at the corner of 1John.
a) The Christ comes in the flesh
b) Jesus is the Son of Man
c) Jesus is the Son of God
d) Jesus is the Christ
e) Therefore Jesus came in the flesh
f) There is a historical Jesus that we know about.
The Sethians are in the process of changing their opinion about (a) during 50-90 CE. (I’ll break this down more below). (b) and (c) are doctrines they encountered and most likely some Sethians believed others didn’t. On the whole the Sethians are friendly with the Christians and when they later try to merge with Christianity (b) and (c) aren’t the issues in dispute. So I think we can safely say the dispute isn’t about those. They would not have called anyone a liar who preached (b) or (c).
(f) is a theology there is no sign of them having ever come in contact with. When they do come in contact with it, they are further along in their theology. That being said even much later they consider the historical Jesus material to be theological myth along the lines of how you feel about Paul Bunyan stories. They reject the idea of an apostolic witness to historical events.
So now let’s hit the tricky ones (d) and (e). All Christians are going to go through a transformation from a belief in an earthly messiah tied directly to earthly kings to a heavenly savior who will fulfill the messianic prophecies. But if you pick any year in your range the the Christians of Asia Minor are going much further along in that process than the Christians of Egypt.
The Agrippa dynasty is popular in Egypt, a huge chunk of the Agrippa powerbase lives in Alexandria. The Sethians hated the Hasmoneans and are thrilled with the Agrippa’s having replaced them. The Catechetic School which might very well be the epicenter of Sethianism is funded by the Agrippas. Their leadership is filled with people who are kinsmen of King Agrippa as well people only one generation removed from directly working for the Agrippa Dynasty. It wouldn’t be shocking if 1 in 10 Sethians are in some vague sense biologically related to the Agrippa family. This means their messianic theology until the later period in your range is still going to be Agrippa propaganda.
Conversely 1JA’s community is more divided. While most of them are not either Hasmonean or Agrippa supporter the majority think they both stink. They don’t have a belief in earthly kings anymore. So they are going to be much more comfortable with the normative Christian view of the messiah than the Sethians will be.
Now let’s break that period apart to see how this plays out.
50-66 CE the earthly messiah, the one they consider the messiah for most Sethians is going to be Marcus Julius Agrippa (King Agrippa II). Think of the relationship between the Aprippas and the Sethians as being like the relationship between the Bushes during his presidency and Texas or Obama and the North East. The Sethians do however believe in the messianic prophecies don’t apply to Marcus Julius Agrippa. Their theology believes that Seth will return or reincarnate as an earthly messiah to fulfill the messianic prophecies.
Sethianism was one of the varieties of Jewish neo-mysticism that Marcus Julius supported. You should think of him as Christian sympathizer. Marcus Julius sought to fulfill the worldwide unity of the messianic prophecies to create a new peace. He sought to unify Greek thought with Judaism but unlike Philo (who was also a quasi relative) he had no problem using state terror to accomplish his ends. His problem was the Romans didn’t want victory they just wanted peace and as a client king they kept boxing in his ambitions.
As the situation is breaking down in Palestine the possibility for Marcus Julius to create a more perfect world through conquest is growing and that’s going to be exciting for the Sethians. Ironically enough at this point in history are going to be more material than 1JA’s group whom you consider orthodox 🙂
1JA’s failure to distinguish between the fulfillment of messianic prophecy at some future date and the messiah they would likely view as outright treasonous. The Sethians have an inconsistency between their belief in a future messiah who will bring salvation in a spiritual and not a national sense at this point in time and their mainstream Jewish political view of the messiah. The way they reconcile this is seeing their spiritual messiah as having no tie to the earth governments at all. Which is why savior and messiah are two totally different ideas. One of the defining characteristics of Gnosticism is this spiritual abstraction of their religion and they absolutely have it. The messianic prophecies don’t apply to the messiah. 🙂
In 66 CE Nero essentially fires Marcus Julius, Nero dies in 68 and a war starts in 69. I won’t worry about those 3 years. But here the two communities are going through a weird thing.
For the Sethians who are political players they are backing the rise of Flavian dynasty (Nero’s backers being overthrown) with Vespasian and later (and especially) Titus as the messiah. The Agrippas are backing the new dynasty and adored by them. I’m sure the Sethians are divided some wanting a second coming of Marcus Julius others Marcus Antonius Agrippa (son of Governor Antonius Felix and Princess Drusilla Agrippa). Marcus Antonius is at the very least a Christian sympathizer and might very well have been a Christian. There is good reason to believe that Marcus Antonius might be the the historical character behind the John Mark of Acts he is also a possibility for the founder of the Marcosians if Iraneous was wrong about him having been a disciple of Valentinus. Princess Berenice Agrippa is at this point the domestic partner of soon to be emperor Titus. They are experiencing the end times when the world (Rome) comes together to bring in a new faith.
For the Asia-minor Christians what they have is multiple claimants who all seem ridiculous. Many of their Palestinian cousins believe this disastrous war is going to end with Simon bar Giora as messiah. Jewish messianic speculation has infected the gentile world. In Asia-minor they are confronting the socially the supporters of the Julio-Claudian dynasty who have a theme Nero Redivivus: Nero will rise from the dead and usher in a new world. They have a full on anti-Christ religion they are facing. For them the debate is Jesus vs. the alternatives. Jesus and only Jesus offers salvation because Nero, Titus, Vespasian, Marcus Julius… are men and cannot be the perfect savior.
So you could imagine this debate in the 2nd period. And it would play out pretty much like in the 50-66 CE. Sethians are just one more variety of people backing anti-Christs. The Sethians aren’t going to be nearly as passionate in the other direction because their own community is so divided about the messiah. They won’t claim that 1JA is a traitor even while rejecting his view in favor of more likely candidates.
By late in your period the Sethians are devastated. By 79 CE Marcus Antonius dies. Titus has reduced his ties to the remaining Agrippas who are all old and satisfied. Titus dies in 81 CE and Domitian assumes power. Domitian is hostile to all Christians and Jews, not differentiating the good Sethians from their troublemaking counterparts in Palestine. Alexandrian Judaism is now on an unstoppable downward trajectory. The Romans printed a coin at the end of the 1st Jewish-Roman war showing the victory of Jupiter over Yahweh. Sethians are taking this to heart. Their hopes are dashed. Their religion is going from playful speculation to darker and angrier. They have always believed that the higher God and the God of creation were distinct but now the lower God is often seen as outright evil. They no longer worship the God of the Jews. As such they are more free to reinterpret the messianic prophecies in ways totally alien to that fake’s God torah. This is where you get Ialdabaoth (son of Chaos for Yahweh) Christ is the child of the 2nd man… Sethianism will have a huge influx of Jews after the Kitos War (ends 117 CE) and after that will get further and further way from Judaism. They will never again ever believe in an earthly messiah. Seth and Jesus can start to be identify because the heavenly Jesus taking over the role of Seth allows Seth to becoming heavenly and cut his ties with the earthly Adam.
Asia minor’s Christians don’t have money and social class holding them together. But we are out of the period of 1John and into the period of Revelation. Jesus is Christ’s vicar not to just some vague lower realm but is capable of descending to earth itself. When he comes he will overturn injustice and allow the righteous (1JA’s community) to prevail. Their anger is not director at the creator but at how the creation has does not obey the creators good commands.
For both Jesus is redemption. But their understanding of flesh is so different that this would be the point of debate. For the Sethians savior might need to appear as flesh so that we can communicate but there would be no reason for him to be flesh. I suspect this is the debate you are picturing.
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Wow did I screw that sentence up. Should be:
Their anger is not directed at the Creator but at how the creation does not obey the Creator/God’s commands.
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@Jeff
@Jeff
Yes. I think so too. That makes sense. Good we may have agreement.
Right. Now assume for a moment you have a physics study group. Some of the members understand why the speed of light being a universal constant means time dilates and some of them don’t. In some sense they’ve all “seen” the equations. They’ve all heard the same lectures but they haven’t “seen” the solution yet.
To the world, he’s making a firm assertion. This is a common rhetorical device. Look at 1John 1:2 again. Assume there were an earthly incarnation of Jesus. How would that possibly allow John to know what was or was or was not with the Father? Even if your theory of the history and who 1JA is were 100% true he can’t testify the Son was with the father or that the Father sent the Son to the savior of the world (4:14). The most he could possibly testify to is that Jesus told him those things. I think the context of chapter 5 is clear, that he knows because God (i.e. scripture) is testifying. He’s testifying what “we” have learned to see in the scriptures.
No you were right. We are making progress on the pronouns.
Well OK let’s start with my two weaker statements:
P’: 1JA has no knowledge of any specific earthly acts or teachings of Jesus at all and doesn’t attribute anything to him.
T’: 1JA gives no indication of any of the events of Jesus “life” having happened recently (during his lifetime) at all.
Think back of the list of various verses and our discussion. Do you agree these two weaker points are true?
1 think it could be much earlier. Here is my thinking on dating.
The Hellenistic Judaism is much more mature that books like Maccabees. 1JA is comfortable saying things like “God is light”. There is no evidence of anything like that prior to Roman conquest during the Third Mithridatic War. So that gives us our first lower bound of 63 BCE. There is a clear dependency on Tzadok theology that we (the Jews) are in need of a better sacrificial system. But that’s again early. So let’s put a lower bound around 50 BCE for the Judaism with an upper bound of around 125 CE. So the Judaism in 1John eliminates extreme dates but doesn’t do much else for us.
2) This letter seems clearly earlier than Revelation and Revelation was likely composed during the rein of Domitian (81-96 CE). (For the reasons I mentioned before). The community had to evolve to get to revelations so say 20 years before 95 CE seems like a good upper bound.
Now let’s try and tighten the bound.
3) Most Christian literature shows clear signs of Philo. 1John doesn’t strongly enough to insist it is post Philo. The later we date this book the harder is going to be to not show signs of Philo. So every year after 40 CE gets more difficult to justify.
3) This is Asia minor and there is no explicit knowledge of Paul at all. There only book that even has paraphrases in common is 1Cor the earliest of “Paul’s” books. It is not clear who is borrowing from who or even if there is any borrowing. So we can’t date on other books.
5) Finally for me the killer piece of evidence. 1JA does not appear to have encountered others playing with his ideas.
1:10 — counters moral perfectionism
2:2 — counters that the Christ aion had come only to save the elite
2:9 — counters the division of Christians into the enlightened and normative
2:14 — support the pre-existence of the Gnostic elite souls
2:20 — counters the division of Christians
3:12 — supports the Sethian doctrine of the satanic sexual generation of Cain
4:1 — counters the doctrine that Jesus had not come in the flesh
5:6 — shows ignorance of bleeding water being a god in human form
5:20 — support Jesus as reveler rather than savior
5:20 — True God / false God dichotomy
The area where we see this the best is he has some aspects of Gnostic moral perfectionism (2:12-17, 3:6-13, 4:4-6, 5:18-21) but then hasn’t really thought these doctrines through. His Gnostic theology is wildly inconsistent. This either means the letter was heavily redacted by both sides (a cop out IMHO when avoidable) or early enough that a Christian could be saying these things without thinking through the implications of his doctrines. I think it is most likely he’s inventing this stuff, 1JA has not met Gnostics before.
But if he hasn’t met Gnostics who are the docetic opponents? Well the most obvious possibility given he’s early is that they are plain old normative Hellenistic Jews. And that kind of conflict: Hellenistic Jews vs. early Christianity with the Christians on the defensive doctrinally screams early.
So my possible date range is really wide: 50 BCE – 75 CE. But I think the likely date range is 6 BCE-45 CE.
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CD-H: From above: P(X) = P(Y|T)/P(Y|X&T)
I like this.
One observation, one question:
The updated value of P(X) = p will be highly sensitive to P(Y|X&T) = MpT which is an unknown parameter and will often be small. In the end, disagreements about arguments from silence basically come down to disagreements about the value of MpT.
Now, about using a Bernoulli distribution. Take two cases, one where John says T three times, and Y no times. Then you would estimate a confidence interval for MpT and estimate p. That makes sense.
In the second case, John says T three times and Y once. Now we estimate a confidence interval for MpT and hence a value for p … Except that p is now 1 (or close to it), since P(~X|Y) is basically 0.
So in this case, we are simply finding an updated value for MpT.
The question is, does this point to a flaw in the computation, or does it point to a need for circumspection in employing it?
(stats is not my area … I’m an analysis guy, more or less)
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@Jeff
If P(Y|X&T) is small than the number of occurrences of T needs to be very large to get a sound argument from silence. For example if P(Y|X&T) is estimated at .2
You would need T to be at least 4 to even get below 50/50 not counting for serial correlation. Counting serial correlation you would need something like T > 5 to get below 50/50. And 50/50 isn’t really what you want since that’s not saying much. To get to say P(X) 20. So either you need a very large number of verses which can only come from a common T, a large corpus of material or you need a far more likely Y given X & T.
Remember Y is dependent on T. Son once John says Y once X is confirmed. This is about an argument from silence. P(Y|~X) = P(~X|Y) = 0.
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@Jeff
Remember Y is dependent on T
Sorry that should be: Remember Y is dependent on X.
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I’m sorry that I won’t be able to give this the time it deserves. Answers and questions:
I think it is most likely he’s inventing this stuff, 1JA has not met Gnostics before. But if he hasn’t met Gnostics who are the docetic opponents?
I can’t give a specific name to the opponents because I am frankly ignorant of 1st century Asia Minor religious groups. I can take a stab at “reading back” their beliefs from 1 John, but that’s a perilous procedure.
I would suggest as a method that when John says “if anyone says”, the ‘anyone’ refers to “those who are misleading you” of 2.26. The questions are then whether John has specific, first-hand knowledge of those things OR he is responding to rumor.
I would suggest by the style of writing that the latter is more likely. He doesn’t quote the opponents except in general terms; he doesn’t name them at all. That could be a political move (“some have said…”), but the generic statements that John opposes suggests that he has not been directly privy to the discussions. This suggests, btw, that he is writing at a distance. And that is consistent with your observation that John is “making this stuff up” NOT in the sense that he is fabricating it, but in the sense that he is responding to beliefs that are new on the scene and that he has not spent time around.
So what are these beliefs or practices?
* “walking in darkness” while claiming fellowship with God (1.6)
* claiming to be without sin (1.8, 10)
* disobeying God’s commands while claiming “I know him” (2.3)
* Claiming to be in the light while hating brother or sister (2.9)
* Loving the world (2.15)
* denying that Jesus is the Christ (2.22)
* Anyone who does not do right (3.10)
* Anyone who does not love (3.14-15)
* Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (4.3)
* Whoever is not from God does not listen to us (4.6)
* Whoever does not love does not know God (4.8)
* Whoever does not believe God or have the Son (5.10-12)
Some subset of these will describe the opponents, at least from John’s point of view.
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CD-H: T’: He gives no indication of any of the events of Jesus “life” having happened recently (during his lifetime) at all.
Well, there are two candidates for events of Jesus life happening during his lifetime.
The first is being a sacrifice. Paul in the 50s sees this as a concrete and real event. Why not John?
The second is the shared expectation that his readers know what it means to walk as Jesus walked (περιπατεῖν). This insinuates that Jesus walked around, carried out a life on earth, which they (a) know about and (b) are to imitate.
So I would consider T’ to be uncertain. We have two candidates for falsification. Both could be contested.
CD-H: P’: 1JA has no knowledge of any specific earthly acts or teachings of Jesus at all and doesn’t attribute anything to him.
This gets really interesting and goes to 1 John’s relationship to the Gospel of John.
At minimum, we can say that 1 John and GJohn both teach
* God’s children are born of God
* Jesus Christ came in the flesh
* Jesus was the sacrifice for sin
* That Jesus’ command was to love one another
* believing in Jesus’ name
* Whoever has the son has life
This language is common to both. And while the concepts are found in Paul and the other gospels, I believe it to be the case that the specific language and syntax is fairly unique to both. [Note: I haven’t done a thorough check of this claim]
Now, logically speaking, there could be several reasons:
(1) Same author
(2) 1 John imitated GJohn
(3) GJohn imitated 1 John
(4) Amazing coincidence
Option (1) is the least problematic. But even if not, the points above are items that were believed to be teachings of Jesus. Were they believed to be so by the author of 1 John? He got them from somewhere.
So I would provisionally question T’ as being uncertain and reject P’ as being less likely than that 1 John is making references to sayings and commands attributed to Jesus.
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@ CD-H: When you speak of “seeing Jesus in the Scriptures”, this raises several questions
* Which scriptures?
* Are there any writings that use the name “Jesus” that predate the canonical books?
* Why “see, hear, and handle” instead of simply “see”?
* Why does John make no specific references to those scriptures (that you have in mind) in the letter?
* What do you make of the fact that in 3.8, the “Son of God appeared”? (εἰς τοῦτο ἐφανερώθη ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ …) Does this affect our understanding of what appeared in 1.2?
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@Jeff
Just to clarify I don’t think 1JA is making the stuff up about the opponents I think he’s making up his own doctrines. It is his doctrines / theology that I was pointing out the inconsistency in. Where he seemed to be playing with ideas but without having through through their implications.
I’m going to take your list and mark them in order
I: “walking in darkness” while claiming fellowship with God (1.6)
S: claiming to be without sin (1.8, 10)
S: disobeying God’s commands while claiming “I know him” (2.3)
L: Claiming to be in the light while hating brother or sister (2.9)
I: Loving the world (2.15)
F: denying that Jesus is the Christ (2.22)
L: Anyone who does not do right (3.10)
L: Anyone who does not love (3.14-15)
F: Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (4.3)
I: Whoever is not from God does not listen to us (4.6)
L: Whoever does not love does not know God (4.8)
F: Whoever does not believe God or have the Son (5.10-12)
I = is just an insult.
L = is that the other side is unloving. They are calling 1JA’s party liars after all. I think 1John is responding and as I mentioned I think he’s trying to cause a schism. Both factions don’t like each other. So the unloving doesn’t tell us anything about their theology just that they are another party in the dispute. But what is important is how passionate 1JA is being. They other party is influencing 1JA’s community (or the recipients) the “you”. Why would he just have rumors if this is happening to people he sort of knows?
S: The sin ones I covered. 1JA is playing around with the idea of sinless perfectionism through Jesus. He’s being radically inconsistent in the letter himself on this doctrine so it is hard to get clarity on the opponents.
F: We agree the opponents disagree that Jesus came in the flesh, thus deny that Jesus is the Christ.
W: The opponents I suspect are the world. They are the more powerful or more respected party.
So really the main thing we know about the opponents is they believe in Jesus but deny he is Christ or came in the flesh. They are more powerful so 1JA can identify them with the world. That’s the key two facts.
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Neither one of those is a concrete event. And I’d also disagree with you that Paul sees it as a concrete real event. He never mentions Calvary, nor Gethsemane garden, he never mentions the crown of thorns, the praying blood, the two thieves, the women washing the body…. And the one time he indicates where the crucifixion took place he uses language indicating he believes it happened in the heavens and was done by sky demons 1Cor 2:6-10. Now mainstreams commentators take that as he is using a metaphor and Paul doesn’t mean it literally. I’ll agree that 1Cor 2 allows for that read but given the context I think it is tortured. But it is extremely telling that’s the only occurrence of a where statement regarding the crucifixion which. No Paul does not consider it a concrete and real event either. The entire gospel story about the crucifixion is completely unknown to Paul. And with Paul because the corpus is so large we don’t have a few telling silences but literally hundreds. Because we have so much Paul, Paul helps explain the kind of theology that 1JA likely held to.
As for walked where did he walk and from where? When…? There is nothing. As for 2:6 we’ve talked about that. That’s another place where John is using ἐκεῖνος “that one”. Which he uses ambiguously for God and Jesus. Sure Jesus is the means by which God walks. That’s not a concrete event. It is just a saying. “Be righteous as your Father in heaven is righteous” is not a statement that the author believes in a specific earthly concrete event where the Father in heaven was righteous.
I agree with you that the language is common to both and rather unique to this community. Which is why I have no problem believing that GJohn and 1John come from the same sect (though by the gospel it might have matured and we can call it a denomination). I’m coming down firmly on (3), that GJohn is imitating 1John. I see it as likely that 1JA may be the sect’s (or by the time of GJohn denomination’s) founder and established much of their language. Which explains why the language is more mature in GJohn but harkens back to 1John.
If I were to go to your church I’d hear language which is unusual in Christianity as a whole but but common from Calvin, Edwards, Kuyper… There is a reason for that.
Absolutely he does. But he doesn’t attribute them to Jesus. That’s a situation where P(Y|X&T) or MpT is very high. Preachers want to attribute key points to the highest authority they can. The fact that he doesn’t shows he doesn’t know of Jesus having taught those things. That’s not evidence for your position it is evidence against it.
That GJohn later has those things coming from Jesus’ mouth I think shows the evolution. By GJohn there is a desire to at least symbolically or mythically (and possibly historically) attribute these beliefs to Jesus. The Jesus myth is much more developed and we are at most a generation or two from one this is believed as history not myth.
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@Jeff
I’d assume Septuagint. He might be including other books like Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Ascension of Isaiah, Baruch, some or all of Enoch, Testament of Abraham…
Too many to count. The Greek for Joshua is Ἰησοῦς. Joshua is a central religious figure for Jews. If it weren’t for attributing monotheism to Jews, I’d call him a Jewish god. In 1st century literature 4Q522 Joshua engages in an imaginary discourse about current events, anti-Roman anti-Sadducee, anti-Agrippa. In this book a mystically resurrected (not a bodily resurrection) Joshua is discoursing on his intent and thus the Zealots are reading back into Joshua their theology. We have the same book from Masada so it was evidently popular.
Philo has a brief mention of the angel Joshua but doesn’t associate him with the Son of God (described in the Confusion of Tongues) or the intermediary he writes about all the time.
Joshua via. Jerico is associated with the Shofar (which is odd you would think the association with Abraham or Isaac would be stronger) whose 4 symbols (even today) are:
God is all-powerful. God is the Creator. God is the Sustainer. God is the Supervisor.
Both sides in the first Jewish war use the Shofar of Joshua (Jesus). Jews to this day crown their Christ (God) via. the Shofar at the start of every year. Marcus Agrippa (who remember is already the Christ) uses it in his symbolism while his opponents use it as a negative symbol against Rome. Also Mount Gerizim which is the Samaritan temple is where Abraham was commanded by God to offer Isaac. The Shofar is explicitly linked to temple theology. Which is why the Book of Joshua in Samaritan theology is much larger than in the Jewish canon. The version we have today can’t possibly be pre-Christian canon (it used 4th century words and makes reference to 2nd century events) but there are references to earlier versions. This would be a long topic.
Finally there is a Jesus the Nasorean in Dosithean literature i.e. proto-Christian and pre-canonical but he is not a central figure just portrayed as another sect member.
We see fewer Joshua as angel references then we would expect by chance alone if we exclude the Christian literature. A central focus on Joshua / Jesus seems to be mostly a Christian distinctive.
What I would say though is we see Christian like theology developing around heavenly beings: Sophia being the most common but Michael, Melchizedek… also exist. I don’t think it takes much imagination to see how it could have developed around Jesus.
I suspect mainly emphasis. But you are right this is a bit strong for having read stuff. But 1JA does make explicit reference to prophetic revelations so things people heard via. prophecy.
Because both sides agree on Jesus. There is no dispute about the scriptural issues. The dispute is over whether those scriptures could imply that Jesus is the Christ and not just God’s Son. Why refer to something not in dispute?
In 3:8 he says “revealed” not appeared. Jesus’ existence was recently revealed to us sect members. Only now has God (through his Spirit) allowed us sect members to learn about the Son and what he did in heaven. That’s the recent event. To hit again on the Paul theme we see the same idea. God is revealing Jesus to us now. But the events involving Jesus didn’t happen now.
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CD-H: The Greek for Joshua is Ἰησοῦς.
*head-smack*
I knew the words were cognates, but I didn’t bother to check how close they were …
OK, so this makes a little more sense now. You are hypothesizing that the Joshua (high priest of Zech 3) becomes a mythic figure in pre-Christian Judaism, and 1JA latches on to this mythic figure as the Christ.
JRC: Why does John make no specific references to those scriptures (that you have in mind) in the letter?
CD-H: Because both sides agree on Jesus. There is no dispute about the scriptural issues. The dispute is over whether those scriptures could imply that Jesus is the Christ and not just God’s Son. Why refer to something not in dispute?
That’s fair. Your argument points out one of the tricky parts about estimating MpT: if X and T are *very* strongly associated, asserting X in addition to T might be redundant or otherwise unnecessary. On your hypothesis, 1JA does not need to say “as we have seen in the Scriptures”; he needs merely to say “as we have seen” and everyone understands. Hence, MpT is lower than it might first seem precisely because (on your account) T says it all.
I have to say, I’m not entirely satisfied, inasmuch as the usual formula here is “as it is written” (per Jesus, Paul, Hebrews). Granted, the formula is not always used. But it is very common.
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JRC: What do you make of the fact that in 3.8, the “Son of God appeared”? (εἰς τοῦτο ἐφανερώθη ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ …) Does this affect our understanding of what appeared in 1.2?
CD-H: In 3:8 he says “revealed” not appeared. Jesus’ existence was recently revealed to us sect members. Only now has God (through his Spirit) allowed us sect members to learn about the Son and what he did in heaven.
φανεροω does include the sense of “revealed”, but not generally of a mystery made clear. Its range covers things generally associated with making plain through sight or evidence or possibly proclamation (Mark 4.12). The word for revealing a secret message is typically more αποκαλυπτω.
So we could advance either of these theses:
(1) That Jesus is the Christ has been made plain to “us” by proclamation and the Scriptures
(2) That Jesus is the Christ has been made plain to “us” because we beheld that fact.
But not
(3) That Jesus is the Christ is a secret revealed to “us” but not to “them.”
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CD-H: Neither one of those is a concrete event. And I’d also disagree with you that Paul sees it as a concrete real event. He never mentions Calvary, nor Gethsemane garden, he never mentions the crown of thorns, the praying blood, the two thieves, the women washing the body…. And the one time he indicates where the crucifixion took place he uses language indicating he believes it happened in the heavens and was done by sky demons 1Cor 2:6-10.
I’m sorry, but I think this is certainly one of the major points of disagreement. Not only because it is a mirror image of how I’ve read Paul, but because I think your expectation of concrete detail is not a reasonable one; that is, MpT is lower than you seem to think for these kinds of statements.
When I first teach my students how to conduct a lab and write it up, I give them all manner of detail. Once they have that detail mastered, I use short-hand: “Write up this lab by Wednesday.”
Paul in 1 Cor and John in 1 John are both writing to congregations that are already familiar with their teaching. There is not a general need to rehearse details. Paul does not need defend the historical fact of Jesus’ crucifixion, for that is a given for the Corinthians, just as it is a given for the Galatians (Gal 3.1).
Now, when he comes to the observance of the Eucharist, Paul supplies sufficient detail (1 Cor 11.23 – 25) — sufficient in his eyes to be satisfactory to the Corinthians. And again when Paul argues for the reality of Jesus’ bodily resurrection, he again supplies sufficient detail (1 Cor 15.3 – 8).
The probability of his supplying what would be extraneous detail to support an argument that he isn’t making is really fairly low. I really think you need evidence more extraordinary than simple silence to convince me that Paul, who believed in a bodily resurrection of Jesus, did not also believe in a bodily death of Jesus.
In the case of 1 John, we need to adequately address style and purpose in our reckoning with level of detail.
John’s style is clearly not one of making detailed observations about anything. He writes one sentence. He writes a second sentence. There are no coordinating conjunctions linking his sentences. The content of each sentence either stands on its own or is paired with one or two other sentences either repeating or contrasting to the first.
Even when he is speaking about his opponents, who are most certainly real and concrete, he supplies no details. He waves his hands generally in the direction of their teachings and expects that his general statements will be enough — either because they are sufficiently comprehensive, or because his readers know him well enough.
Contrast that with Paul, who says of the Corinthians,
I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.”
Paul supplies the whos and the whats, laying out the facts, because that is his style. John, in a similar situation, does not. In fact, he is so vague that you and I have had trouble nailing down exactly what John thinks his opponents think. Is that because he does not know? Well, he knows something — but he doesn’t mention how he knows. There is no “Chloe” in 1 John.
The point is that John’s writing style makes MpT low for any topic.
Now consider purpose. As we have agreed, John’s purpose is to draw a theological line and to invite his readers to join with John on this side of that line.
As we read John’s appeal, he does not build a significant case for any of his points, nothing longer than two or three sentences. So when he says, “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God”, his purpose is not to persuade his readers that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. If that were his purpose, then we would expect supporting detail. No, his purpose is to persuade his readers that anyone denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is antichrist.
He is operating at the level of “this is how you know the antichrist”, not at the level of “this is how we know that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.”
He expects that his readers already agree with him on the latter point.
Putting that purpose together with his style, I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable that John does not supply details about Jesus’ life or death. That’s not a reliable sign of ignorance.
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It would be interesting at this point to run a sample calculation. I’ll give that a shot tomorrow. But also, I would like to consider a different calculation: Given that John says that Jesus is eternal life, and that the life was manifested and that “we” have seen it; given that John says that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; given that John says that Jesus was manifested; given that John says that Jesus was the ιλασμος, and given that the writer of GJohn (even if we take him to be different from 1JA) considered Jesus’ life to be historical (and therefore understood 1 John to be literal, assuming that 1 John came first) — putting all of that together, what is an upper bound on the probability that all of this language is meant to be metaphorical?
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@Jeff
Thread moved to: https://oldlife.org/2014/07/mr-jefferson-gubmint/comment-page-1/#comment-143045
to avoid rollover.
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