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  • From: peterson AT austingrad.edu
  • To: "Corpus-Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] Voluntary Associations and the Pauline Church
  • Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:44:39 -0700 (PDT)

> Speaking of the whole VA debate and Meeks versus Kloppenborg and
> Kloppenborg's students such as Phil Harland and R. Ascough, has Meeks
> ever responded to the idea that the Pauline communities are more like
> VA's than synagogues? Has anyone else tried to refute what Kloppenborg
> and his students have tried to say about all of this?
>
> David Reed
> Regis College, U of Toronto


It's only a rather superficial reading of Meeks that would see his work as
in opposition to the thesis that the Pauline churches have significant
similarities with voluntary associations. On pp. 77–80, Meeks carefully
totes up the similarites and differences between the collegium and the
ekklesia, and at the conclusion of his treatment of analogies to the
Pauline communities, he offers this summary :

"The fact is that none of the four models we have now surveyed captures
the whole of the Pauline ekklesia, although all offer significant
analogies. At the least, the household remains the basic context within
which most if not all the local Pauline groups established themselves, and
the manifold life of voluntary associations, the special adaptation of the
synagogue to urban life, and the organization of instruction and
exhortation in philsophical schools, all provide examples of groups
solving certain problems that the Christians, too, had to face. For the
structures worked out by the Pauline movement itself, however, which may
after all have been unique, we must turn to the primary sources it has
left us." (84)

I.e., Meeks doesn't reduce the Pauline community to any other ancient
community, but he holds that there are four types of ancient groups that
are especially illuminating. I wouldn't understand subsequent work as
having refuted this position, either by identifying one master category
that entirely accounts for the features of Pauline communities to the
exclusion of Meek's other analogies or by conclusively knocking any of the
four off the list as inappropriate for comparison.

Jeff Peterson
Austin Graduate School of Theology
Austin, Texas




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