But I would say the story has always been that angels were a different order of being from humans, and the Christian story has always been that people become saints when they die, not angels. Can you point to a time when the official doctrine/dogma was that angels are dead people/people become angels and not saints?
“Dead people do not become angels” was shorthand for “the orthodox view is that dead people become saints and not angels, and angels are a whole different order of being from humans”.
I mentioned the Immaculate Conception in the OP in the same vein – a lot of people get this confused; here is the orthodox view.
Unfortunately I keep catching “Don’t Laugh at Me” on my iPod – “someday we’ll all have perfect wings” gaaah!
There wasn’t a time when Jesus wasn’t around, but there was a time before he was incarnated.
And I think there’s a Biblical passage that says that in Heaven, we will be like angels. So if you’re going to suppose that angels have wings and harps, beings like them might have those things, too.
I can’t be sure of what the Holy Tabernacle of Holiness Temple of East Armpit, Idaho, says, but that’s way off the beam for any kind of standard-issue Protestantism. In general, apart from occasional eirenic gestures toward the East regarding the Filioque, mainstream Protestants are no different from Roman Catholics when it comes to issues of the Trinity and Incarnation.
Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that it was a mainstream idea. After digging a bit, I find that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists both believe as doctrine that St. Michael was the pre-incarnate Christ. The JWs are nontrinitarian (very much a minority view, of course), and I’m not sure about the SDAs. In other words, I don’t know if they believe that Christ was a created being or that St. Michael was not.
Beyond that, the idea seems to have been floated by a few mad Englishmen and some other possible obscure sources that I cannot track down past secondhand references.
Dr. Richard Carrier has put forth some decent evidence which supports the idea that early Christians didn’t believe that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human, but rather a non-corporeal being, like an angel. Consider, for example, Paul’s account of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus. Carrier notes that this type of encounter was exactly what you’d expect from a non-corporeal Jesus and it wasn’t until decades later that the story changed to insist that Jesus was born, lived, and died. It’s interesting to note that there are darned few places where Paul even mentions anything about Jesus being born, living, or dying, despite the fact that Paul wrote roughly half of the New Testament. Jesus Studies by Dr. Carrier Here’s a line from that website: “I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the Christian mind as a celestial being (like an archangel), believed or claimed to be revealing divine truths through revelations (and, by bending the ear of prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages planted in scripture).”
Paul’s meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus was post-resurrection. There is a marked change between the pre- and post-resurrection forms of Jesus; even so, in John chapter 20 we have the account of Thomas being told to touch the wounds of Jesus in order to convince himself of whom he was seeing. Carrier’s thinking resonates strongly of gnosticism.
Yep, that’s what modern Christians would say. But I wonder what the early Christians would say (the ones who lived in the decades after Paul’s writings but before the four canonical gospels had been written).
If you rearrange the books of the New Testament in the order they were written, the early books say almost nothing about Jesus being born, walking around like a human, and dying. It’s the later books which have that stuff in it. The Gospel of John was written a LOONNNG time after Paul’s writings. Like, 50-70 years or so. In many ways, the Gospel of John reads like it’s a rebuttal. It’s as if the writer is saying to the early Christians “No, dummies, you got it all wrong. What I’m telling you is the REAL story”… which kinda makes you wonder just how prevalent those other beliefs were at the time, so much that “John” felt that he needed to rebut them.
If by that, you mean “Carrier seems to be claiming that first-century Christians had beliefs that resonated strongly with Gnosticism” then I’d agree with you. But that’s very different from saying it’s what Carrier himself thinks or believes.
The Monophysite heresy (at least as defined by Chalcedonians) is that Jesus was neither Man nor God, but a sort of middle-muddle. Standard Christianity is very explicit about Him instead being both completely human and completely divine at once.
As to the rest, Paul very much emphasizes the Crucifixion, which is an absurdity from the Docetic point of view. One might add that the story of the Road to Damascus is written by Luke as part of a sequel to his Gospel.
There is some debate about which parts of the Pauline scriptures are genuine and which ones have been altered (or even forged) by someone else writing under Paul’s name. But that as it may, my exact words were “there are darned few places where Paul even mentions anything about Jesus being born, living, or dying, despite the fact that Paul wrote roughly half of the New Testament”. I didn’t say there were none. I said darned few. And I said “the early books say almost nothing about Jesus being born, walking around like a human, and dying”. I didn’t claim it’s nothing. I said it’s almost nothing. When you look at the huge volume of words which are attributed to Paul, it’s rather striking how such a tiny fraction of it discusses Jesus’s life at all, let alone any words of wisdom that Jesus is alleged to have preached.
Hmm that’s an interesting point. When Paul himself tells the Corinthians about his conversion, he doesn’t say anything about a blinding light or even describe what road he was on. He just says that Christ appeared to him. It seems rather strange to me that Paul would sweep the whole incident under a rug, only to have Luke turn it into a dramatic scene written 30 years later. This seems out of character for Paul, who frequently goes to great lengths to convince his readers that we should listen to him. Paul also fails to mention a blinding light when talking to the Galatians, just saying “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”
Interesting to note there that Paul says he got his information from Jesus and not from a man. That seems to imply that Paul thought Jesus was not a man. Either that, or Paul expressed himself poorly.
