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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul's persecution of the Church
  • Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 19:54:00 -0400


Hyam,

>>Roughly speaking, the Noahide Laws are universal ethical
principles (which apply to all mankind), while the
ceremonial laws of the Holiness Code, of which circumcision
is the most important, form the Rule of the priest-nation,
the Jews.<<

You will get no argument from me about the issue of
circumcision as the defining Judaic boundary marker,
although I still have to wonder whether there was any sort
of consensus among the various manifestations of Judaism as
to what universal ethical principals applied to Gentiles.
There may have been disagreement among Jews, in the first
century CE, concerning just how close to hold those Gentiles
who revered the God of the Jews. I will take your
recommendation and follow up with the works of Louis Feldman
and David Novak. Could you recommend specific works?

FWIW, I have to disagree with you that "Paul ... wished to
institute a new single Covenant, applicable to all mankind,
Jews and Gentiles, sealed by the sacrifice of Jesus." My
position, similar to that of Mark Nanos, is that Paul was
not trying to abolish the distinction between these two
covenants. Instead, Paul was himself an observant Jew
(within the strictures of what "observant" meant to Jews of
the Diaspora communities he seems to have visited), and that
Paul saw the two communities as different but holding a
common distinctive value.

Mark might agree with you that this common value was faith
in Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, but I doubt he would agree
that this necessitated abandonment of Jewish ceremonial laws
*by Jews.* To Mark, I think, the atoning sacrifice of Christ
was the middle term linking the two communities. I, on the
other hand, think that the dogma of an atoning sacrifice by
Christ is too developed a concept to have crystallized by
Paul's supposed time of activity (late 40's - mid 60's CE).
The ingredients may have been in the mix, but the synthesis
required more heat and pressure than the period 30-50 CE
(the period when the letters are thought to have been
written) can account for.

This is why I am interested in the ideas coming out of
scholars like Richard Horsley, Gerd Theissen and others, who
are attempting to bridge the gap between the rural Jesus of
the Gospels and the urban savior Christ of the Pauline
epistles. Even so, I do not personally see the right mix of
idea-bending circumstances present, at least for a long
enough period of time, to create what we see present in
Paul's surviving letters. That is, not until the war of
66-73 and its presumed aftermath in terms of Jewish self
re-identification and their relationship with Gentiles on
all levels, completely changed the playing field. Naturally,
if the key event that served as the catalyst follows the
supposed period of the letter's composition, something had
to have been retrofitted into them.

I'm sorry, but I just cannot endorse the idea that Paul
consciously engineered the split from traditional covenental
Judaism as you seem to suggest in _The Mythmaker_ (which I
have read). To me the contradictory threads woven together
in his surviving letters suggests adulteration rather than
the fermenting of division.

Respectfully,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA










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