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  • From: "Mark D. Nanos" <nanos AT gvi.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: C-P: Paul and Plato
  • Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 15:00:54 -0600


Liz Fried wrote:
>The major part of the letter is Paul's contrast between spirit and flesh.
>This contrast is based on Platonic thought it seems to me. This same
>dichotomy is present in Philo, but it is based on Plato.
>
>If Paul is not based on Plato, then I am not understanding Plato or I am
>not understanding Paul, so perhaps we can discuss this.

The major contrast in the letter is about whether gentiles who believe in
Christ should become proselytes (i.e., gain Jewish identity by way of
completing the ritual process of conversion, which is marked for men by a
cut in the "flesh" of the penis) or not. As Paul puts it in 3:3, having
begun in the Spirit (i.e., by the confession of faith in/of Christ), are
you now ending with the flesh (i.e., by becoming proselytes). Paul says
they must not.

Why? Because the gentile addressees already have the ultimate identity they
would gain by way of proselyte conversion--i.e., they have already become
righteous ones, children of Abraham, children of God--without this change
in their flesh, without becoming Jews/Israelites, but as representatives of
the other nations now reconciled to God in Christ. That this change is
complete, Paul argues, is witnessed by their receipt of the Spirit (3:5).
Thus the contrast is between spirit and flesh, between being justified as
gentiles by faith in/of Christ which has been witnessed by the Spirit, or
the traditional way, by proselyte conversion, which is witnessed in the cut
flesh (of a male).

Two Judaisms, if you will, are in disagreement about how to identify
non-Jewish people in the present age with regard to whether they are
members of the righteous ones of God or not. There is nothing dualistic in
a Platonic sense of body and spirit going on, in my view, but a contrast
between the traditional and normative way to recognize this identity and a
"revealed" way now since the work of Christ, which rests on the argument
that the age to come, when gentiles are reconciled to God as well as
Israel, has begun. This disagreement is taking place though in the midst of
the present age, and thus subject to the kind of difference of opinion to
which Galatians bears witness about whether the age to come has dawned or
not, and thus about what is the proper way to re-identify non-Jews, by
proselyte conversion or by faith in Christ.

The various activities associated with the flesh are those characteristic
of communal struggles for identity in comparative terms in the agonistic
world of these people. And this is accented in a ritualized setting for
determining people's proper place vis-a-vis each other. Paul is saying that
they must not be engaged in the process of proselyte conversion and the
implications of seeking honor and goods on the basis of the ranking system
which applies. Instead they are equal in status through Christ, they are
one, and that though the differences (between people in flesh measured
terms, or how we know each other in the flesh face-to-face, e.g., Jew and
gentiles, male and female, slave and free) remain, the discrimination
(which characterizes the status distinctions in the present age) must not.

That this creates problems in the structure of community in the present age
is noticed by Paul, but he believes if the believers in Christ live in the
Spirit, they will live as appropriate for the age to come in the midst of
the current age, and thus will escape this comparative court of reputation
which characterizes communal ranking in the present age. Instead of
challenging each other for place/honor/goods, or envying the
place/honor/goods of the other who advances, they will instead give
themselves, content with their own status/honor/goods as God's confirmed
children to "waiting for the hope of righteousness" (5:5), and thus to the
service of the other (note 5:24-26; 6:1-10). At least, that is how I take
his contrast between flesh and spirit to work, on the ground, as it were.

Regards,
Mark Nanos
Kansas City






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