I want to spell this out some more ...
I think you'd have to go into more detail to be precise.
I’m thinking that everything in the writings of Paul that is called “high Christology” is actually diaspora cosmology translated into Hellenistc language, based on the same scriptures that are evoked in the Synoptics and Acts.
Generally, I agree – there is a school of thought (I can dig out the references) that argues that the writings address a given audience, and that audience must have a context within which to understand the writings. If there was no context, then the reader would have difficulty fathoming what the writer was going on about,
and what that means.
That last bit can also mean, is what we deduce from the text, in light of 2,000 years of Christian thought, the same as what the writer intended?
By the same token, Paul's congregation will receive the letters and interpret them according to their understanding, so there has to be a ground of understanding that Paul is building on, to say what he says and thinks is unique about Christ.
David Armstrong writes:
"Jewish and gentile followers of Yeshua or Jesus of Nazareth, who came to believe that he was
christos and
Kyrios – that is, a divine and deified messiah – also narrativized his divinity in ways that consciously or unconsciously assimilated him to common Mediterranean and Near Eastern expectations of divinity. Many aspects of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension as reported in the Gospels or by Paul evoke no direct parallel from Jewish Scripture, even if they draw on scriptural texts to make the case, but are more directly and easily compared with the panoply of demigods, heroes, and other divinized humans readily available in surrounding Greco-Roman culture.
"This is not a reductionist fallacy of presuming that the Evangelists wrote the story to make Jesus like these other demigods; it is the acknowledgement that the thoroughly Jewish Jesus that the Evangelists want to talk about is, because thoroughly Jewish, also simultaneously Greco-Roman, and that the dominant cultural models for reception and interpretation that would have been available to their audiences were to be drawn from these mythic resources. Jesus turns water into wine in John not to say “Jesus is Dionysos,” but also not
not to say that; Jesus’ corporeal immortalization and theonymy through ascent are similar to those of Asklepios, Herakles, and Romulus without being strictly equatable with them. The principle here – exploited rather than ignored or hushed by early Christian writers – is that Jesus is like these figures but exceeds them and so is the paradigm for them, of which they are the shadows, preparatory iterations, and demonic mimicries."
YHWH and Christ Among the Gods
