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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-Paul List" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Horsley's use of Draper
  • Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 11:19:38 -0400


Greetings,

During the recent seminar with Richard Horsley, mention was
made of socio-economic motivators as they function in urban
settings. This, of course, led to comments being made
regarding the transition period between an undeniably rural
origin of the Jesus movement and the form it took under Paul
(as traditionally understood).

The subject of Jonathan Draper came up. Horsley referred to
a recent collection of essays published by Draper, which I
took to be a reference to several essays on the subject of
the _Didache_ published by Brill in 1995 and 1996. Upon
looking these essays up (I luckily happened to have copies
of these two volumes available to me) I was struck by the
unique nature of Draper's interpretation of the evidence
regarding the _Didache_'s origins.

In Draper's view the Jesus movement, centered around the
radical, itinerant and quite charismatic Jesus during his
lifetime, immediately routinized after his death and
centered itself physically and financially in Jerusalem.
>From this authoritative center, apostles were sent out to
spread the message, backed up by itinerant prophets and
their associated teachers who were themselves displaced from
Galilee by "Jewish nationalists." Somewhere in time, one or
more of the settled Jewish communities of Jesus followers
reached out to Gentiles, guided by the rulings, utterances
and instructions of the apostles, prophets and teachers.

One of these outreach communities was at Antioch in Syria,
and it was here that the _Didache_ was produced by a process
in which local bishops and deacons asked the teachers to put
the instructions of the prophets in writing, and these
writings eventually evolved by stages into the authoritative
document we now know. This community had demonized
representatives of a position that they felt was too
anti-nomian, and ultimately expelled them from their
community. Draper suggests that one of these persons was
Paul.

Eventually, the Jerusalem based central authority was
scattered by the war of 66-70 CE, and the apostles stopped
coming - replaced by vagabond rascals posing as apostles -
resulting in severe restrictions on the hospitality to be
afforded those that do visit. They do allow them, along with
the prophets and teachers, to settle down among them in the
capacity of priests, which they support with firstfruit
tithes.

This is a somewhat abbreviated (and thus not quite accurate)
outline of suggestions that Draper offers quite cautiously,
but I felt that they dovetailed somewhat with Horsley's idea
that Paul's communities saw the Christ cult, based upon a
kind of universal appeal inherent in the Israelite prophetic
tradition, as a form of passive resistance to the Roman
empire's ethic of systematic exploitation of subject
peoples.

How much can we take this kind of reconstruction of early
Christian development seriously? It does offer a connection
between the rural Jesus and the urban Paul, but is it
realistic, or plagued by the same kinds of selective use of
sources and circularities of reasoning that Draper
complained about in his 1989 SBL paper "Weber, Theissen and
the Wandering Charismatics of the Didache" and again in
"Wandering Charismatics and Scholarly Circularities" in
_Whoever hears you hears me : prophets, performance, and
tradition in Q_ (Richard A. Horsley with Jonathan A. Draper,
Trinity Press, 1999)?

Comments please!

Respectfully,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Chronological thumbnail sketches of the three important
essays forming the above summary:

Draper's paper at the 1989 SBL meeting in Anaheim, CA,
entitled "Weber, Theissen and the Wandering Charismatics of
the Didache," was critical of Theissen's use of sources for
sociological theory. Draper seems to have objected to
Theissen's characterization of the period following Jesus'
death as a period of radicalism, since Max Weber would have
predicted a period of routinization (settling in one place
and control over the financial resources of the
organization) immediately after the death of a radical
charismatic leader. The period of radicalism would only be
appropriate for the life-time of the charismatic leader.

In Draper's 1991 essay "Torah and Troublesome Apostles"
(Novum Testamentum 33/4, and reprinted in _Didache in Modern
Research_), he concludes from an analysis of the enemies of
the Didache community that this community was "still living
within the ambit of the Torah, though threatened by those
former members of the community who are, in its view,
advocating the abolition of the law." Draper says "Our
contention here is that the _Didache_ is the community rule
of the Matthean community ..." He also thinks that "it is
not difficult to extrapolate from the scenario which has
emerged from our study, that the false apostle who advocated
abolition of the Torah is Paul, and that the community of
the _Didache_ is Antioch."

Finally, Draper's 1995 essay "Social Ambiguity and the
Production of Text ... " (in _The Didache in Context_,
Brill), Draper envisions a community that vilified opposing
parties as demonic forces that seek its overthrow, and
consequently drive them out of it. He sees textualization of
formerly verbal traditions as the result of a conflict
between untestable charismatic prophets coming from outside
the community and the local patrons of the community (its
bishops and deacons). The conflict is resolved over time by
itinerant teachers producing text from oral traditions
derived from the words and tradition mediated by the
itinerant prophets. These texts then serve as a control
mechanism by which the sayings of the prophets themselves
can be tested by the community.

Draper figures that the Didache community would have
continued unrestricted support for visiting Apostles had
they come from a center of authority, and infers that the
_Didache_'s restrictions on the hospitality to be granted
them was due to the drastic reduction in visits of bona-fide
Apostles and an increase of scoundrels posing as Apostles.
He reasons that this deterioration of the situation must
have been due to the disappearance of a center of authority
from which the Apostles had formerly emanated. This center
of authority, Draper proposes, was Jerusalem, and the event
that stopped their coming was the Jewish war and the
subsequent destruction of Jerusalem.

The Prophets and Teachers, on the other hand, were visiting
with the intention to settle among the community. These he
suggests originated in Galilee but had been driven out by
the "Jewish nationalists." That the community could absorb
them and support them by means of their "first fruits" meant
that a fairly large community was involved. In addition,
common tradesmen were settling among the community, a
situation reminiscent of the way that marginalized peasants
migrated to the larger towns and cities. All this makes
Draper conclude that the Didache community was situated in
an urban environment. This environment, he says, was likely
Antioch after the expulsion of Paul.

Draper sees this as a Jewish-Christian community oriented
towards the conversion and initiation of Gentiles. These
Gentiles are admitted without the having to accept
observance of the full Torah, but only as much as they could
bear. The minimum level of observance was abstinence from
food offered to idols, and they were expected to improve
their level of observance in order to reach "perfection."






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