Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

corpus-paul - Re: Paul: Renegade or Insider?

corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Corpus-Paul

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul: Renegade or Insider?
  • Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 10:44:10 -0400


Loren,

Re. your

"Esler and Nanos both agree it was not dietary issues
which were objectionable at Antioch, but rather the
indiscriminate nature of the table-fellowship. They
disagree, however, on what was at stake in such
fellowship. Esler believes idolatry was the issue,
since by sharing eucharistic vessels Gentiles might
taint the wine and transform it into a pagan libation.
Nanos thinks indiscriminate seating arrangements were
the issue."

I would like to propose yet a third alternative: that what was as issue in
this incident was Peter's violation of the principle that was expressed in
Exodus 12:48-49 with regard to the ban on the uncircumcised sharing in the
Passover meal.

According to Galatians 2:3-4, 2:12, and also according to Acts 15:1-2, what
was at the council in Jerusalem was the circumcision-forming commandment,
Genesis 17:14, which was the covenant-forming commandment given to Abraham.
That also is the reason why Paul's argument in Galatians 3:1-20 against its
enforcement upon the uncircumcised was based upon the Abrahamic account,
specifically on Genesis 15:6 (even though Paul, in accord with the principle
that he asserts in Romans 3:4-7, ignores there that Genesis 17:24 disproves
the point that he makes). Consequently, it is clear that the entire issue
here was the covenant-forming commandment.

Paul further indicates this by saying at both the end and beginning of
Galatians that circumcision was the issue that had occasioned him to have
written this letter in the first place: In 5:2-3, he specifically warns his
readers against becoming circumcised, and then says, in 5:7-12, that unnamed
persons, who presumably are agents from James just like those that Paul
himself had been opposing on this issue in the event that he recounted in
2:12, have evidently persuaded at least one of these Galatians to become
circumcised, and should themselves become castrated for having done so. Yet
furthermore, in 1:6 at the beginning of the letter, he referred to that very
same fact as the occasion for this letter.

Consequently, given the specific background of this climactic occasion for
the letter Galatians, and also for the council in Jerusalem that had been
called in order to decide this very same issue of enforcement of the
covenant-forming commandment, we can understand what Paul is actually
referring to in Galatians 2:11-21, in which he gives his account of what had
happened immediately after the council in Jerusalem; and this, Loren,
concerns the issue that you are here speaking about.

Quite evidently, although James had issued an order at the end of the
council saying that circumcision, at least for the time being, did not have
to be imposed upon Paul's presumably thousands of adult male Gentile
converts, because, according to Acts 15:19, to impose it would be to place
too heavy a burden upon these men, James changed his mind about this
immediately after the council ended, and sent a two-contingent delegation to
Paul instructing him that it had to be imposed upon them after all. The
first such agent from James to arrive was Peter. However, because (according
to Acts 15:7-11) Peter had been Paul's defender on this very same point at
the council, and also because (Acts 11:2-18 and Galatians 1:18) Peter had
been Paul's own personal predecessor and mentor in the mission to the
Gentiles and had refused to impose circumcision just as Paul, Peter
obviously had an extremely difficult mission to perform here, and (Galatians
2:11) was passionately upbraided by Paul for doing so. However, evidently,
Peter backed down sufficiently to join Paul and his uncircumcised "converts"
at dinner. Paul has elsewhere (such as in 1 Cor. 8) indicated that he had no
problem with imposing upon his congregations the kosher laws, and there is
no indication at all that in Peter's dining with these men he would have
been dining at an unkosher table; furthermore, kosher violations had not
even been the source of conflict that had occasioned James to call together
the council in Jerusalem; circumcision clearly was. But according to
Judaism and many other religions, food, in the sense of dining together, is
nonetheless a matter of religious significance, and the principal that Peter
was caught violating in Galatians 2:12 was the one stated in Exodus
12:48-49, that Jews should not dine with non-Jews, especially on important
occasions such as this clearly was.

Then came the second contingent from James, who had probably been sent by
him as backup, both in order to check up on Peter's carrying out his
personally very uncomfortable mission, and as reinforcement for that
mission.

In Galatians 2:12, this backup contingent from James caught Peter dining
with the very same uncircumcised men whom James had sent Peter to declare
not to be converts. Thus, Peter was caught in direct violation both of
Exodus 12:48-48, and of James' assignment to Peter.

Consequently, Peter, being enormously embarrassed, backed away from the
table and reasserted, now probably far more forcefully than before, what
James had sent him to assert.

Paul (in accord with his convince-your-audience-at-all-costs doctrine in
Romans 3:4-7) doesn't even so much as mention what his opponents, Peter and
the other agents from James, said on that climactic occasion, but he gives
only his own side of this dispute, in Galatians 2:14-21, which therefore
recounts the first time that Paul publicly broke with the authentic
Jesus-followers, and announced his new, supersessionist (2:16), gospel of
Christ.

Consequently, I disagree with your formulation that what was at issue was
"the indiscriminate nature of the table-fellowship." Peter's dining with
uncircumcised men there must, I think, be viewed within the broader context
of the events that had led up to this occasion, and also of the references
in the beginning (1:6) and end (5:2-12) of Galatians referring to this very
same circumcision-issue as the letter's own reason for having been written.

Re. your:

"Again, the issue at Antioch had nothing to do with
unresolved dietary issues. It had to do with the issue
resolved in Jerusalem: proselyte conversion
(circumcision) (2:12). The pillars simply broke the
agreement. But then why didn't Paul accuse Peter of
exactly that? Why dance around the issue with the
"hypocrisy" charge (2:13)?"

I feel that this question goes directly to Paul's statement in Romans 3:4-7
and in 1 Cor. 9:24, that all that matters is winning, convincing the reader,
converting the Gentile, etc.

When Paul was writing this letter to the Galatians, he knew that they either
had already heard about this dispute from his enemies, James' men, or else
that they very well might have. However, because of the slowness of
communications in that era, he could not have known just what these readers
already knew about it, or even for certain that they had heard about it at
all.

Obviously, if they had not heard about it, then they had not received from
the head of their sect, James, notification that, and how, Paul was now in
violation. Paul, for all of the 17 years leading up to the incident
recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, had been converting all of his people to
this sect of Judaism, whose leader was James. This is the reason why Paul,
in this letter to the Galatians, does not criticize James himself, but only
Peter. Paul knows that his readers look up to James as their sect's leader.
Paul knows that, if he is going to be able to continue to keep these men,
and not to become abandoned by them to the sect he had originally sold them
on converting into, he mustn't make explicit to them, beyond what they might
already know, the extent of his own fissure from that sect.

This is the reason why he had addressed the Galatian congregations as
"ekklesia" or assemblies, instead of as "sunagoge" or Jewish assemblies: he
was now working on them to think of themselves in bbroader than merely
Jewish terms, as a more generic kind of congregation, and yet not as being
explicitly non-Jews either, such as "threskei" would have indicated to them,
which would have offended these men, since they had all thought themselves
to be Jews, and not to be members of any new and different religion.
Similarly, Paul's follower who wrote Matthew 16:18, used "ekklesia" instead
of "threskeia," which would have immediately exposed to his readers the
fraudulence of this supposed Jesus-quotation. Paul and his followers who
wrote the New Testament were very careful about such things.

Now, directly to your excellent question: "why didn't Paul accuse Peter of
exactly that [having broken the agreement]?"

You are here taking at face-value the lines in Galatians prior to this, in
which Paul refers to himself, such as in 2:9, carefully so as to imply, but
carefully never to state explicitly, that his status within the sect was
equal to that of James and the other authentic Jesus-disciples, all of whom
had known Jesus, which Paul did not. However, this was no "agreement" at
all; it was a ruling, by James. Perhaps the Gospel of Thomas is accurate in
its line 12, where it states that Jesus had himself appointed James to be
his successor as the sect's leader. But, in any case, James was the
successor, and Paul had joined his organization, and didn't abandon it to
form his own religion until 17 years later.

Consequently, the answer to your question would be that, if Paul were to
have made explicit in this letter to the Galatians that he had violated
James' command, then Paul would have lost these men. Paul did not know
whether or when James might publicly announce his excommunication from the
group. He was probably hoping that it would be postponed at least long
enough for Paul to be able to win these "converts" away from that Jewish
sect and into his own coup d'etat against it. He had to know that this could
not be achieved overnight; he would have to work on these men in order to
achieve this.

But why, then, would he expect that maybe James would not publicly announce
Paul's excommunication? As you know from Paul's collections for the poor in
Jerusalem, James' group was being substantially subsidized by Paul's
"converts." Probably by 50 CE or thereabouts, when the split occurred, most
of James' "members" were Paul's people, and without them James would have
had not only a vastly smaller sect, but also a vastly poorer one, consisting
of poorer people than Paul's Gentile "converts," who even included some
residents in the Emperor's palace.

Re. your:

"Paul didn't accuse Peter of breaking the Jerusalem
agreement, because he would have made a fool of
himself for having been deceived."

What was at issue here, I maintain, was not whether Paul had been
"deceived," but whether Paul had violated an order from the sect's chief,
who was James, for to do that would have been not merely insubordination but
mutiny and an attempt at a coup d'etat. Paul, as overwhelmingly the best
salesman in James' organization, knew quite well that he had James in a real
bind here. In a sense, it was a contest at who would blink first. If Paul
did, then he'd be finished. If James did, then he'd suddenly be the leader
of a vastly smaller and poorer organization. But if neither did, then you'd
have the Christianity we do today, and Paul would win in the long term,
which he, of course, did. Paul was a brilliant general, and not merely a
brilliant con-man. You don't become the most powerful person in human
history by being anybody's fool, and Paul's having been Peter's fool is
probably the last thing that Paul would ever have worried about, if, indeed,
he wouldn't have outright laughed at the possibility.

Re. your:

"That the pillars stiffed Paul by flagrantly
breaking the agreement is easy enough to imagine,
given what we know about honor-shame cultures. Rivals
generally had no right to hear the truth or expect
promises to be kept, unless they were accompanied by
oaths (thus, for instance, Jesus lied in Jn 7:8 to his
brothers "who did not believe in him" (Jn 7:5)). On
the other hand, I've become convinced that Paul was
not a rival apostle. That he subordinated himself to
the pillars (Gal 2:2) and worried about his work being
acceptable to them (Rom 15:31) points to an in-group
phenomenon."

Again, I take issue with your assumption that the conclusion of the council
in Jerusalem was in any truthful sense an "agreement" as Paul implies--but,
please notice, he does not explicitly state this in 2:10, for to have done
that would have been immediately recognized by his readers as having been
false. Paul tries to give the impression that he was the equal of James and
of all the other authentic disciples, but he never states explicitly that
this is so, because everyone knew that it was not, and that, moreover, James
was its leader.

Your use here of "Rivals" I also take some issue with, because Paul and
James were, as I see it, actually enemies, who were cast by fate into each
others' embrace, and who couldn't, either of them, afford to stick the knife
into his opponent.

Your reference to Jesus lying in Jn 7:8 is based upon an account by that
author, who never saw nor heard Jesus, and who fabricated so unrestrainedly
about him that he even quoted him in 8:15 vs. 8:26 as directly contradicting
himself within the span of only 11 lines. John also has the Crucifixion
being performed by the Jewish priests in 19:16-18, and by (the Roman)
soldiers in 19:23 (obviously the priests had no soldiers). Consequently, you
are drawing your conclusions from highly unreliable evidence, which would be
rejected by any court as being hearsay, and furthermore as being hearsay
from a demonstrably untrustworthy source, and so as being unpresentable to
any jury.

Your reference saying that Romans 15:31 "points to an in-group phenomenon"
would be in agreement with my own view only if Paul's who-will-blink-first
game with James can accurately be so characterized.

Re. your:

"while I don't believe Paul was a renegade apostle,
he was certainly a troublesome insider"

I do not agree; I see Paul as the successful perpetrator of a coup d'etat
against James, and thereby against Jesus. I believe that Paul's ultimate
victory in this who-will-blink-first contest was a reflection not merely of
his own brilliance, unencumbered by authentic restraints of conscience, but
was also a reflection of the realities of the power-situation at that time:
Rome ruled, and the Jews were a defeated people whom they ruled.

I do not believe that it is by mere coincidence that the supposed church of
Jesus ended up being headquartered in Rome where his crucifiers had their
headquarters, instead of in Jerusalem where Jesus and his brother James had
theirs.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page