Re: Seeing a life-giving spirit with a camcorder

tdavis@messiah.edu wrote:
> I'm curious to know your own answers, Steven. Now it's my turn to ask
> questions. Let me put to you a middle case. What would a camcorder have
> seen, if it were present at the wedding at Cana? Or at the feeding of the
> thousands? Or at the healing of the lame man or the blind man? Anything at
> all? Would the wedding guests have drunk wine that they could not see?
> Would the thousands have eaten food they could not see?

Wel, of course, the miracles are as much literary constructs as the Koran and the Book of Mormon, and for much the same reasons.

By applying techniques developed by Christians, http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm shows the literary nature of these reports.

<skip>

> This is easy IMO to defend from Paul's own very
> non-Platonic interpretation of his own quite mystical experience, as well as
> from Thomas' actions and Peter's clear reference to the "resurrection of
> Jesus Christ from the dead," using a term and concept that had a clear
> meaning to a second Temple Jew, as NT Wright shows so well in The
> Resurrection of the Son of God (I recommend this particular book, esp its
> lengthy but wonderful concluding section, to all on this list; Wright's
> historical sensibilities are exactly where mine are on this issue).

Wright's book is certainly a tour de force. The Gospels say that the body which
came out of the ground is the body that went into the ground, complete with
wounds. The Gospels deny that the resurrected Jesus was a spirit. They
maintain that flesh and blood did inherit the kingdom of God.

Wright spends many, many words making Paul say the same thing. No mean
task when Paul says 'And as for what you sow, you do not plant the body
that is to be'

 Paul says 'The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.'

 Paul says 'Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.';

Wright has to turn 'a life-giving spirit&' into flesh, and
empty it of any reference to real spirit, and , for good measure, he then has
to empty Paul's 'flesh and blood cannot inherit' of any
reference to real flesh.

Wright also has to have Paul believing that Jesus was God made Flesh
while on earth, yet only had a spiritual body after the resurrection.

  How much more spiritual can a body be than one which houses God Himself?

I would be very happy to debate just what Paul meant by 'a life-giving spirit' on my page http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/ and Paul's conviction that Jesus had a heavenly body - ie one not made from flesh as Adam was.

Anybody like to defend the idea that Paul thought our destroyed , decayed bodies would inherit the kingdom of God when he declares in 2 Corinthians

 Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

Nobody who wrote that could have believed that a resurrected body was the earthly body transformed into Wright's new form of matter - transphysical matter . (incidentally, isn't this terminology of Wright's meaningless?)

And nobody who had experience of a body of Jesus which could be touched or knew people who had touched Jesus would have ommitted such recollections when trying to describe to the Corinthians what a resurrected body could possibly be.

Paul works entirely from theological first principles in 1 Corinthians 15. Fine in itself, but ignoring the elephant in the room that says that people supposedly already knew exactly how tangible and flesh and blood a resurrected body supposedly was.
Received on Tue Oct 18 16:49:15 2005