This might help you out ....
BTW , do have any favorite verse from Peter ?
Like the ones dealing with Christian faith manifesting in humility and trust in God and
not pushing or forcing your idea of "God" on anyone ?
I'll be happy to cut and paste some quotations for you.
;-)
...........CHRIST AS “MAN”
Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?
human.st
While scholars are the first to admit that Paul is woefully silent on just about everything the Gospels tells us about Jesus of Nazareth, they are quick to point to a handful of passages in his letters which seem to indicate that he has an historical figure in mind. For all the talk in the New Testament epistles of Christ Jesus as a transcendent deity, of scripture and the Spirit as the channel of knowledge about him, or the constant reference to God as the source of Christian ethics and the Christian gospel, most scholars continue to fall back on a limited number of phrases about Christ’s nature as “man,” his “flesh” and “blood,” words implying birth, or his “coming into the world.” Such things they take as proof that all these writers, even if seemingly indifferent to the Gospel story, nevertheless know that the human man existed and had recently walked the earth.
But do they? Is there another way of reading such passages? If the Christ of the epistles is in other respects a revealed entity, a mystery or “secret” newly disclosed by God who seems to operate in an entirely spiritual dimension with mythological characteristics, can we look for an interpretation of these “human” sounding features which fits into such a context?
Higher and Lower Worlds
Even before Plato, near eastern mythology envisioned primal or archetypal forms existing in heaven, of which earthly things were counterparts. But it was Plato who inserted into the intellectual consciousness of the ancient world the concept that the upper realm of spirit contained the primary manifestations of things, in perfect and eternal forms, and that the lower material world contained only transient, imperfect copies of them. Platonism eventually envisioned a ‘chain of generation’ from the mind of God, through emanative spirit prototypes and models, down to earthly end-products in matter.
These concepts became expanded in various ways, showing a range of expression in Greek philosophy as well as in Jewish and other near-eastern thought. A sacred site such as the Jerusalem Temple, for example (as in Hebrews 8 and 9, Wisdom of Solomon 9:8, etc.), was the earthly counterpart of a greater, more perfect heavenly Temple. (Even the Babylonians had held such an idea.) Nations, rulers, groups on earth possessed a corresponding angelic or divine being who represented them, a superior counterpart in heaven, a champion. Evil nations possessed evil angels. This counterpart embodied the qualities which they claimed for themselves, or looked forward to achieving when the time of salvation arrived (such as in the Similitudes of Enoch: see below.) Events expected to take place on earth had already been worked out in some fashion in archetypal processes in the heavenly realm, or in the mind of God; figures to be revealed in the future already existed and were preparing themselves in heaven. And so on.
Paul and the earliest Christians thus lived at a time when the world of matter was viewed as only one dimension of reality, the observable half of a larger, integrated whole, whose other—invisible—half was regarded as the “genuine” reality, accessible to the intellect. It was characteristic of mythological thinking that the heavenly counterpart was more real and permanent than the earthly one, and prior to it in order of being. |
