Corpus-Paul

["David C. Hindley" <DHindley AT compuserve.com>]

Professor Hurd,

On 04/03/99, ""John C. Hurd" <John.Hurd AT Squam.org>" wrote:

> Dave Hindley wrote:
> >Just out of curiosity, does anyone consider the epistles heavily
> >redacted anymore?  It does appear to me to be the easiest way to 
> >explain the incompatable threads to be found in the Pauline corpus.
> 
> Yes, Bill Walker and some of his friends take this path. (Prof. William
> O. Walker, Jr., Trinity University, San Antonio, TX).  "Heavily" is, of
> course, a relative term, and some have gone much father than he in the
> past, but from my point of view the term does apply to him.  He is a
> responsible scholar and not a crazy.

Thank you for the great response! As a non-professional in this field, I am 
not always able to discern where modern scholarship is going, especially 
relating to a relatively unpopular subject such as potential interpolations 
in the Pauline corpus.

>     The problem with this approach is the same as the problem with the
> literary dissection of the letters (e.g., Schmithals):  the idea is not
> impossible, but improbable to a degree which depends on the complexity
> of the hypothesis.  Such theories are also unverifiable and lack a
> control.  In my experience, if we think that the source documents need
> to be improved by editing, it means that we have not understood them
> sufficiently.  One has only to look at the history of the discipline to
> see how some of the difficulties that scholars in the past have had with
> the sources smooth away with advances in knowledge and technique.  (This
> is one reason why theories of interpolation were more popular then than
> now.)

"Improved", I think, is the key word here. That would imply that someone is 
letting a theological bias color their interpretation if the textual 
material, yes? I would think of the problem as related more to the "flow" 
of ideas, but even "flow" is to some extant a subjective matter.

>     At the 1989 annual meeting of the SNTS in Dublin Prof. Gehard Sellin
> read a paper to the Corinthians Seminar titled, "1 Kor 5-6 und der
> 'Vorbrief' nach Korinth"  (later published in NTS, 37 [1991], 535-558).
> He divides 1 Corinthians into eleven pieces.  I was asked to do the
> response paper.  As part of my reply I did an analysis of the structure
> of his argument and attached probability estimates to each step.  Then I
> did the math which the structure required and came up with an over-all
> probability of  about 8%.  His rejoinder was that scientific methods
> were not appropriate this type of investigation.  (An enlarged version
> of my paper is now published as "Good News and the Integrity of 1
> Corinthians" in "Gospel in Paul: Studies on Corinthians, Galatians and
> Romans for Richard Longenecker" edited by Ann Jervis and Peter
> Richardson ['JSNT Sup. Ser., 108; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
> 1994], pp. 38-62; and reprinted in my collection, "The Earlier Letters
> of Paul" [1998].)

Probability is a science that is easily subject to misuse, unfortunately. 
How many ultra conservatives have used probabilities to "prove" some 
specific dogma is the only real solution? I have not read your paper (but 
plan to remedy that as soon as possible) and would like a chance to examine 
the method you used to calculate the probabilities. The assumptions that go 
into the mix also will be important, and this is where I am probably at 
odds with most professionals. However, I will leave that go for another 
discussion.

>     Many scholars take 2 Cor. 6:14--7:1 to be an interpolation.  I agree
> and consider it to be an inserted fragment of the "Previous Letter" (see
> the argument in my The Origin of 1 Corinthians [1965, 1983], pp.
> 235-240), although there is no manuscript support.  With many, many
> scholars I divide 2 Corinthians into 2 Cor. 1-9 and 10-13.  And I think
> that 1 Cor. 14:34-35 is probably an interpolation.  Here there is
> manuscript evidence.  But that is as far as I go with pre-editing the
> source documents.  In any case, these decisions should not be a
> preliminary step to the study of the text but only a last resort.

Yes, your last statement is of concern for me. My study seems to indicate 
systematic interpolations across all 13 epistles, and I can isolate a 
couple of (admittedly not very sophisticated) grammatical characteristics 
of the proposed interpolated material I could attribute to a single (?) 
redactor, as well as two other related characteristics for the remainder. 
Yet this is completely at variance with the bulk of professional thinking, 
so of course I want now to make sure that I become more familiar with 
alternative positions.

Again, Thank you!

David Hindley
DHindley AT compuserve.com