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  • From: "Mark D. Nanos" <nanos AT mail.gvi.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Pauline and Jesus Movements
  • Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 11:37:20 -0500


Dear Dave,
Some comments below.

On Sun, 2 Apr 2000, Mark Nanos responded to a post by Dave Hindley:

>>This [i.e., that Paul's message had its source in, but diverged
from, that of the original Jewish followers of Jesus] is a thesis
(Baur now articulated again by M. Goulder's Two
Missions) with which I disagree as well.<<

Could you elaborate?
What kind of theology do you think Paul may have
brought with him when he become associated with the Jesus movement?
Are you basing your opinion, in part, upon the testimony of Acts with
regards to the early history of Paul? How seriously should we take the
"history" related in Acts? Forgive me if this has already been stated
in earlier posts to Moon, etc, but I could not take the time to tease
them out of the archives.

The views I refer to and my own are too general to elaborate here. I do consider Acts, but I am working on Galatians presently with no attempt to bring Acts to consider or solve the anomalies that arise when compared. I assume Paul came from a Pharisaic group of some kind, based upon Phil. 3 (and Gal. 1). And I believe that he says his reason from leaving the life in Judaism of that group for the life in Judaism of the Christ-believing group he now represents (in unity with the Jerusalem apostles, even if initially independent of them) involved a revelation of some kind that led him to believe that the meaning of the death of Christ was to direct his work thereafter among the nations (Gal. 1:13-16).

>>where is [it] inicated [that "the members of which were later
courted by members of a radically reformed version of Jesus' original
movement"]? Why did they do so? How/why did Paul
respond? How/why did his communities respond?<<

I am perplexed by the Gospels, which show a simultaneous
semi-familiarity with, and contempt for, Judaism, and I think that
this is best explained by them being written by Gentiles who were at
one time proselytes or full converts to Judaism.

Have you considered re-reading them as intra- and inter-Jewish polemic rather than anti-Jewish? Is it contempt for Judaism, or for a rival Judaism in the aftermath of the destruction of the structure of authority with the loss of the Temple and prevailing norms?

Obviously, if they
were converts, they no longer considered themselves Jews, as they saw
the Christ as a vehicle for salvation that superceded the sacrificial
and legal system of Jews. The only event close to the traditional
period of Jesus' life that could account for such a radical reversal
of thinking is the war with Rome, 66-74 CE.

There is a growing body of work that challenges whether such supersessionism is at work in general in the gospels. Have you considered that this fundamental issue for your critique is questionable? If the Gospels can be read as Torah-observant (with a normal Jewish redefining of halakhot being witnessed in view of changed circumstances) but for a few passages; perhaps it would be a shorter path, if seeking unanimity of voice, to cut-out those? But this is C-Paul...


Since the authors of the Gospels had relatively inaccurate knowledge
of Judaism and its practices, and relied on the LXX for their
understanding of the Jewish scriptures, I am inclined to think that
this reformed Jesus movement primarily consisted of Gentiles who had
once been close to messianic Judaism (i.e., the Jesus movement, which
was likely one of many messianic groups) as converts.

These conclusions are also questioned in recent works on the Gospels.

>>Please explain, I do not follow you here [when you say "the Pauline
epistles here served the purpose of recruitment literature, seeking to
draw to the new version of the Jesus movement those Gentiles who
revered Paul's message, but created in their present form some time
after the period of Paul himself."]<<

Part of the redefinition process for these members of a revised Jesus
movement would appear to be disassociation from their messianic (and
hence, in Roman eyes, seditious) roots. In time. the gospels are
published to present Jesus as a misunderstood wisdom teacher, and Acts
is written to try to place Christian "origins" firmly in a
"historical" framework, likely due to any lack of mention of it in
Josephus' War or Antiquities.

Why then present the movement in Acts as messianic, or even Jewish, for that matter, with a leadership still worshipping in the Temple and zealous for the Law, and a Paul who aligns himself with this movement to dispel rumors that he thought or behaved otherwise?


In this process, it is natural to want to attract a more sophisticated
element to itself, and the urbanites that would have been attracted to
Paul's message seemed like good targets. These likely also had to deal
with a certain amount of rejection by some natural born Jews, and may
have felt like rudderless boats with the destruction of the
sacrificial system.

How many people in the Diaspora settings that Paul interacted with felt like this because of the loss of the sacrificial system?


80-85 CE is some 20 years after Paul's time, and Paul is at this point
likely a fond memory. If his epistles circulated, it wasn't
extensively. Someone managed to get their hands on a collection,
perhaps in one of those trunks like the one Paul left a Troas, or
perhaps available on the book market, and revised them to make Paul a
"Christian". This was made available as recruitment propaganda (term
used in its neutral sense).

This comment is interesting, as well as some other comments not repeated above. Without engaging your argument exactly, since I think that some prior points need to be questioned before you turn to Paul here, the following occurs to me. Do you not need for this (forgotten but discovered) collection to be the only collection thereafter available, that is, after it is revised? And have you considered that the proposed editor has failed to describe Paul's addressees precisely as you do, that is, as though identifiable as a distinct institutional body, such as by a term like Christians, so that it is clear that this is a different way to identify the group, but instead still as Jewish groups would identify people, as Jews and gentiles. The christological focus you posit as added to the text still functions to identify within Jewish terms of social reference, rather than as though a separate christological entity that has replaced or separated entirely from interests defined by other Jewish people and institutions. That change one finds developed later than the Pauline texts.

Thanks for your thorough post.

Regards,
Mark Nanos





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