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  • From: Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Tim Gallant <tim AT rabbisaul.com>, Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] The Symbolic Paul
  • Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 04:21:16 -0700 (PDT)

Tim Gallant wrote:

>the fact of the matter is: it is impossible
>to operate without presuppositions,
>no matter how "objective" one may claim to
>be. No one demonstrates this
>more eloquently than Arnal himself in the
>quotation you cite so favourably.

The fact that no one operates without presuppositions
is trivial. Some agendas loom more ominously than
others. Furthermore, Arnal has no pretensions to
objectivity, and attempts in no way to shield himself
from the charge of having agendas. He makes this clear
in the book -- "indicting himself" as it were. I won’t
hold my breath waiting for like humility from you.

>1) There is *no need* to make Jesus or
>Paul "honorary Jews," since after
>all, they *were* Jews.

Precisely Arnal's point: **everyone** agrees that
Jesus (and Paul, unless you're Hyam Maccoby) was a
Jew. Since this is the case, why so much defensiveness
over the issue -- as evidenced, for instance, in your
own summary statement on the web-page? Any of the four
agendas outlined by Arnal can be easily seen in the
background. Perhaps your webpage targets a different
audience than the academic community of C-P, but
shrill or repeated insistences about Jesus/Paul's
"Jewishness" raise natural questions about agendas in
academic discourse. Again: does so much really depend
on the historical Paul's Jewishness? Does the
perception that it does matter so much interfere with
proper reconstructions of Paul?

But there's another point to Arnal's book. When you
say that Jesus and Paul were obviously Jews, it's
indeed not only an obvious statement about which
everyone sane and sensible agrees, it raises the
question of what kind of Jews they were, since Judaism
was highly diversified. Throw Galilee into the mix,
and questions of "Jewish identity" get even more
murky. In Paul's case there's less fog, for we know
what kind of Jew he was (Pharisee).

>It also presupposes that the only
>solution to anti-Semitism is relativism. I
>and many others simply refuse to
>recognize the legitimacy of
>the presupposition,

For myself, I condone relativism only when confronted
with its odious opposites -- like proselytizing
triumphalism. Paul and I live in different universes
here.

>let us be clear: the apostle Paul was more
>than ready to carry out
>his apostolic task with "a mode of
>self-definition" that was in "strong
>contradistinction" to what is *now* generally
>called "Judaism" - not to mention, in
>strong contradistinction to all the
>sundry religions that populated the ancient
>world...

And you evidently like this, as your own rhetoric
makes plain. I agree that Paul was in many ways
defining his gospel contradistinctively to his parent
faith, especially in Galatians, and even in Romans,
though in the latter he pulls back and attempts to
salvage things.

>The radically-postmodern agenda of
>having all claims to truth flattened
>out never could have been the agenda
>of Paul or Jesus or virtually any
>other figure of 1st-century Judaism and/or
>Christianity. Thus if there is a
>danger in the "real Paul" being
>hijacked, the danger is far greater
>in the hands of Arnal than in the
>hands of "supersessionists" (leaving
>aside what on earth *that* term means).

You know what supersessionism means: removal and
replacement. Applied to Christianity it refers to
Israel being either supplanted or thwarted pending
later acceptance of Christ. In any event, no scholar
I'm aware of is making Paul into a postmodernist (in
the way you describe), and any "dangers" you perceive
here seem to be phantoms.

It's clear that Arnal (not only based on his book, but
posts from another list) has little to no interest in
"hijacking Paul" (or Jesus), as you claim. His
approach, as I understand him (Bill, jump in if I need
correction), is that figures like Jesus and Paul
should speak for themselves -- to whatever degree the
sources allow these figures, as historical personages,
to speak for themselves; Bill is extremely dubious in
the case of Jesus -- regardless of how appealing they
are; for "the historical Jesus is historically
insignificant" (p 76). While I disagree with Bill's
conclusion, I agree with much of what leads him to the
point.

But I still don’t know how much of this epistemology
Bill is willing to apply to Paul, and whether or not
he would conclude that the historical Paul is
"historically insignificant". Bill?

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

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