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  • From: "John Dickson" <dicksonj AT bigpond.net.au>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: gospel
  • Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 11:03:40 +1000

Rick Strelan wrote:
Jerome, for one, thought that when Paul spoke of 'his gospel' he was referring to the Gospel of Luke. What made him think Paul was referring to a written gospel? Is it possible that Paul himself wrote 'a gospel'? If an EUAGGELION of any type [marriage announcement, holy-day declaration etc] was initially a written text, and then of course the contents of that text, is it at all possible that Paul wrote a gospel - not necessarily, in the later Gospel sense, a 'life' of Jesus, but even something like 1 Cor 15:3-8??
 
Irenaeus also claimed that that Luke recorded for posterity the gospel preached by Paul (Adv. Haer. 3.1.1). This may be nothing more than an attempt to give weight to that Gospel (Peter was behind Mark; so Paul must be behind Luke). However, no such polemical tone can be discerned in his text. The association with Paul may also have resulted from the early church's belief that Luke was the 'Luke' mentioned in Paul's letters.
On a less skeptical note: judging from the structure and content of the speech placed in Paul's mouth in Acts 13, one may conjecture that Luke himself thought his Gospel reflected Paul's gospel, since what Paul preaches there follows the logic of Luke's first narrative far more closely than does Peter's preaching (Acts 2 and 10) which, as many have pointed out, seems to have a closer affinity with the Gospel of Mark. Perhaps when Luke was initially written/published it was claimed that this was the gospel approved of by Paul.
Also, you're right, Rick, many 'gospels' in the ancient world were written down, both in Greek and Jewish tradition. In fact, in my opinion it is clear that the use of gospel language among the first Christians came directly from the the use of euaggel/bsr language in Jewish literary traditions concerning the Isaianic herald. So Paul will have had no problem conceiving of the 'gospel' as a written announcement.
Further, I'm not sure we need to baulk at the idea of Paul possessing/composing a 'life of Jesus'. 1 Corinthians 11 makes clear that Paul had a last supper tradition and the summary in chapter 15 looks to me like a deliberate series of simamim - a well attested rabbinic device by which a teacher could refer in short-hand to a larger body of material already known to disciples, whether to a narrative in Scripture or a legal ruling, etc.(on this, see Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, 143-145, 153-56, where ample examples are set forth). So I for one do not doubt that Paul possessed established Jesus traditions (probably focused on the death/resurrection/appearances) in some narrative form. Whether this existed in a truely literary form (as opposed to disconnected 'notes') and whether he himself composed what he possessed are, I think, more difficult questions to answer.
Looking forward to the discussion.
John
 
John Dickson
Department of Ancient History
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia
 
 
I tried this out on the Synoptic List without any response. Maybe that's what it deserves! It's just a thought, and one which I'm happy to dismiss.
 
Rick Strelan
Studies in Religion
University of Queensland
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