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  • From: "Tim Gallant" <tim AT rabbisaul.com>
  • To: "Loren Rosson" <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>, "Corpus-Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] The Symbolic Paul
  • Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 11:00:20 -0600

Loren, thanks for continuing the conversation.

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.

Well, I openly said in my post that we *all* have presuppositions, and in no way excluded myself. I don't think the issue is one of humility, but honesty with oneself.

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.

Well, perhaps that was his point. But it didn't really seem to come across to me. Perhaps I missed something in your quotation.

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.

There's nothing shrill about my statement on my web page. Is everything that doesn't sound wishy-washy "shrill"? And no, I was not targeting Corpus-Paul's community with that statement (or with any article there), which long predated my membership on this list.

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?

Yes, it does, although I am referring to Paul's devotion to his own heritage rather than referring to his ethnicity as such. You must recognize that my aim is to fight against the notion that Paul has essentially invented a brand new religion, or one only tangentially related to the faith of his fathers.

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).

Agreed.

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.

Or, perhaps I could say that my own rhetoric is a faltering attempt to imitate Paul.

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.

Well, I disagree there, because I believe what he targets in Galatians is not at all the same thing he treats with respect in Romans. In Galatians, he is dealing (in my view), not with "his parent faith," but with an attempt to claim that Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to be "real" members in the new covenant community; his opponents think of themselves as "Christians." In Romans, he has a lot more in his sweep, and the contradistinction he does engage in centers around his kinsmen's widespread rejection of Jesus as Messiah. But in both Galatians and Romans, he maintains the Scriptures of his "parent faith" as authoritative. (I know that is a controversial point.)

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.

Well... I could along with some form of that, as long as you also say that Jeremiah was a supersessionist.

Whether the dangers I see are phantoms or not. . . well, I'm not convinced of that.

But as far as Arnal, I could only work from the limited material you provided. And the quotation you cited favourably at the end sounded like the spectre was alive and well.

In your present post, however, you do suggest an alternative which I honestly had not thought of, but should have: if the authority of Jesus and Paul is not recognized from the get-go, or at least is minimized dramatically, it matters little what they were. We can vilify them, leave them alone, study them out of academic curiosity, engage in vague appreciation, or whatever. Not that I'm convinced they will be properly understood that way, either, since they aimed at faith.

This, of course, boils down again to presuppositions, as always. My cards are face up on the table: I believe that it is encumbent upon me to believe in Jesus and believe Paul.

Thanks again for your response.

tim

Tim Gallant
Pastor, Conrad Christian Reformed Church

http://www.timgallant.org
tim | gallant site group






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