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  • From: "Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>
  • To: Corpus Paulinum <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: The background of 1 Cor 15:3
  • Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 18:17:46 -0500


I've been reading Sam Wilson's _Jesus Death as Saving Event_, and while
working through his treatment of what is being presented in 2 Maccabees,
especially in the speech in Chp. 7 of the sixth martyred brother ("it is
our fault that we are suffering such things since we sinned against our
own God [hAMARTANONTES EIS TON hEAUTON QEON]), something resonated with
Paul's quotation in 1 Cor 15:3 of the early Christian tradition that
"Christ died for ours sins" (XRISTOS APEQANEN hUPER TWN AMARTIWN).

Now, I was raised to believe -- as I'm sure many on this list were as
well -- that Paul's reference here is "sins" here is to personal sins
committed by individuals, so that the confessional formula he quotes is
something that is grounded in a penal substitutionary view of Jesus
death, with the composer of that creed the first Anselmian.

But the Maccabees text, not to mention Paul's noted reluctance to speak
of personal sins, makes wonder whether the referent in the formula is
not personal sins but the sin of national apostasy. This, after all, as
Williams shows, **is** the referent in the Maccabees text. Why not then
in 1 Cor?

So I'm wondering if List members would like to chime in on the validity
(or invalidity) of this idea. Is the formula that Paul is quoting
grounded in a counterproposal -- one that asserts that Jesus, not the
Maccabean martyrs, is the true exemplar of the kind of faithfulness
that, as later on 4 Maccabees says of the deaths of these martyrs, God
accepts as that which rids the nation of the consequences of the sin of
apostasy?

Yours,

Jeffrey
--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT ameritech.net





  • The background of 1 Cor 15:3, Jeffrey B. Gibson, 07/27/1999

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