Posted: Jul 21, 2013 4:12 am
Clive Durdle wrote:What if the phrase Lord Jesus Christ is not a name of someone at all, but a phrase, God's saving messiah? The works attributed to Paul have so many permutations of Lord, Jesus and Christ maybe they are just ways of expressing this saviour figure Paul dreamed about?
Paul's use of "Christ/Messiah" was very likely quite in conformity with the range of views about the term generally among Second Temple Jews -- nothing so radically novel at all. Matthew Novenson (now Uni of Edinburgh) has made a pretty good case for this. I've tried to share the highlights of his book at http://vridar.org/category/book-reviews ... -messiahs/ --
There has been a swing back to interpreting everything about Christian origins within as "Jewish" a milieu as possible in recent decades, but with this trend it has been too easy for many to overlook just how Hellenistic so much of "Judaism" really was at that time.