Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

corpus-paul - Re: Pauline and Jesus Movements

corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Corpus-Paul

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Pauline and Jesus Movements
  • Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2000 00:39:28 -0400


On Tuesday, Apr 4th, Mark D. Nanos responded to a post by Dave
Hindley:

>>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).<<

Yes, I see where you are coming from there. Phil 3:4-6 is
straightforward enough, and I can find no reason to dispute its
integrity:

Phil 3:4 Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh
also. If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the
flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of
Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the
law a Pharisee, 6 as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to
righteousness under the law blameless.

This is in substantial agreement with Gal 1:13-14, where again I find
no reason to dispute its integrity:

Gal 1:13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I
persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it; 14
and I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people,
so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.

However, when it comes to his motivation, I have to take another
direction that you have.

Gal 1:11 For I would have you know, brethren, that the good news
which was preached by me is not man's good news. 12a For I did not
receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a
revelation . . .

Later, Paul declares the content of that revelation:

Gal 1:15 But when it pleased God {with the article}, who had set me
apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, 16a [.
. . ] 16b that I might declare <God's> good news among the Gentiles
... [with 16a, "to reveal his Son to me", interpolated]

Paul's "good news", then, was to announce to Gentiles that
righteousness before God was obtainable to them apart from becoming
Jews:

Phil 3:7a But whatever gain I had {by being a Jew and observing the
law}, I counted as loss {with respect to the matter of righteousness
before God} 7b [. . . ]. 8a Indeed I count everything
{enumerated in vs 4} as loss 8b [. . . ], 8c and count them as
refuse, in order that I may gain 8d [. . . ]. 9a and be found
9b [. . . ], 9c not having a righteousness of my own, based on
law, but that which is through faith. 9d [. . . ]9e - 11 [. .
. ]

This does not have to mean that he considered being a Jew or observing
the law a bad thing, only that these things did not justify him. His
faith did. This theme is also emphasized elsewhere in the corpus.

As for my suspected interpolator, I would deduce the nature of his
interest in this last passage by looking at the bracketed material in
succession:

Phil 3:7b for the sake of Christ 8b because of the surpassing worth
of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the
loss of all things 8d Christ 9b in him 9d in Christ 9e The
righteousness from God that depends on faith; 10 that I may know him
and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings,
becoming like him in his death, 11 that if possible I may attain the
resurrection from the dead

In other words, his idea of righteousness is that which comes from God
(anarthrous) through the resurrection of Christ, rather than an
emphasis on righteousness based upon faith.

>>Have you considered re-reading them [i.e., the Gospels and Acts] 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?<<

and

>>There is a growing body of work that challenges whether ...
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..<<

You have a valid point. There is no reason that these differences of
opinion cound *not* be inter-Jewish, although my opinion is that the
Christ doctrines are far more heterodox than I would expect to see
within Judaism.

The mildest passage relating to Jews is Romans 10:2 (which I have
bracketed BTW):

Rom 10:2 I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is
not enlightened ...

And 1 Cor 1:24, which I also bracket, does indicate that this
interpolator considered some Jews as "called".

Even so, the one passage that clearly treats Jews as enemies is also a
passage that exhibits what appears to be an anachronism:

1 Thes 2:15 [Jews,] who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets,
and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all men. ... 16b -- so
as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God's wrath has
come upon them at last!

While it is possible that 16b is a scribal interpolation, I included
vs 15 because it drips with the same invective against Jews, calling
them displeasing to God and opposing all men. I am particularly drawn
to the statement that the Jews "drove us out". Where in Paul's
biography is it ever stated that Paul was "driven" out of Judea by
*non-Christian* Jews? However, being driven out *is* one of the forces
I think helped shape the formation of a revised Jesus Movement:
Gentile messianist proselytes expressing anger or frustration over
rejection by natural-born Jews in the aftermath of the war with Rome.

In the synoptic gospels, Luke's parable of "The Barren Fig Tree"
(13:6-9) and the related "Cursing of the Barren Fig Tree" (Mark
11:12-14, and Matt 21:18f), plus the "Parable of a Great
Supper/Marriage Feast" (Matt 22:1-10, and Luke 14:15-24) strongly
suggest to me that the authors of these Gospels were cryptically
implying that the Jews have been rejected by God. But why would a sect
of Jews (assuming that the gospel authors belonged to a sect within
Judaism) reject the entire ethnic group of which they are part? If
their authors were Gentiles, or at least "no-longer-Jews", then many,
many, passages in them can be interpreted as tropes of Irony intended
to create a model of historical change (along the lines of Hayden
White's "history as narrative" model).

>>Why then [would the author of Acts] present the [Jesus] 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[, if the redefinition process for members of a
revised Jesus movement would appear to be disassociation from their
messianic (and hence, in Roman eyes, seditious) roots]?<<

In Acts, it could be to establish their claim as legitimate heirs to a
religious tradition (Judaism) that was legal under Roman law. They
were not, by this account, once associated with a seditious messianic
movement, but with an acceptable, Temple oriented Judaism, with
Stephen's speech in Acts meant to "explain" why they diverged from the
"mainstream". And even here the anger at Jews is clear:

Acts 7:51 "You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears,
you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. 52
Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?
And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the
Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, 53 you who
received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep
it."

I wonder whether the accounts of Peter's three denials has anything to
do with the process that led to this tactic. "Certainly you (the
former proselyte) were a disciple of that Messianist Jesus!" "I do not
know the man!" After this is asked of them by Vespasian, Titus and
Domitian, it may have dawned on them to just own up to it by way of
explanation ... <feel free to ignore the bad pun>

>>How many people in the Diaspora settings that Paul interacted with
felt like this [i.e., rudderless ships] because of the loss of the
sacrificial system?<<

Evidently, quite a few, including (as you seem to be implying) Jews
themselves. In B. Pearson's model for the development of Jewish
Gnosticism, which I borrow from, the newly minted Jewish Gnostics no
longer considered themselves Jews at all. Still, this "Jewish Gnostic"
literature expresses some scathing critiques of the God and religion
of the Jews. Even so, I do not see them hating their ethnic brothers
themselves, but perhaps I have missed something.

Assuming, with Travers Herford, that at least some of the Minim were
Jewish Gnostics, they too suffered rejection. The difference was, I
think, that Jewish-Gnostic minim, all likely natural born Jews, could
not bring themselves to hate the very people of which they were part
but could only direct their anger and frustration at Judaism as a
religious expression, whereas the authors of the Gospels thought of
themselves as outside of, and distinct from, Jews as well as Judaism,
and directed their criticisms at *both* Jews and Judaism.

>>This comment [that a corpus of Pauline letters might have turned up
well after his time to be made use of by newer parties] 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.<<

It is a problem for the conventional models as well as mine. David
Trobisch specifically mentions how the expectations that he grew up
with, that the individual letters were so treasured that they were
carefully preserved and copies passed between communities from the
very beginnings of Paul's activities, were not born out by his studies
of naming conventions and grouping orders in mss collections. These
suggested instead that the existing corpus represented copies from a
single archetype rather than a consolidation over time from a variety
of archetypes.

As I mentioned in another post, I find the issue of the authenticity
of the books of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (1 Clement, Polycarp,
Ignatius, etc) to be a problem yet (and perhaps never) to be resolved.
But if, say, the Pauline citations in 1 Clement, Ignatius (Ephesians &
Romans) and Justin's Dialogue are genuine, then they suggest the
circulation of an uninterpolated set of Romans, 1 & 2 Cor, and Titus,
in the first half of the 2nd century CE.

It would not require some sort of conspiracy theory to explain why
competing archetypes are not copied in deference to one favored by the
group doing the copying. This happened in Rabbinical Judaism with
regard to the Massoretic text. As far as I know, after the adoption of
this text type (somewhere between the 4th & 8th century?) no
alternative version (such as those which the LXX or the Samaritan
Pentateuch represent) was preserved by the copyists who followed the
Rabbis (although there may be some variant mss preserved by the
Karaites, but I would only be guessing if this was the case). Rabbis
were hardly monolithic hard liners goose-stepping on the issue of
textual transmission, but the loss of competing text types still
occurred.

Regards,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page