Corpus-Paul

["John C. Hurd" <John.Hurd AT Squam.org>]

Thanks to Frank Hughes for his sensible comments on the early position
of 1 Thessalonians in the sequence of Paul's letters.  To those I would
briefly add that for me the firmest argument is that 1 Thess. 4:13-18 is
Paul's first teaching to the Thessalonians on the subject of how to
think of Christians who have died before the Parousia.  The epistolary
formula, "we do not want you not to know, brethren, concerning . . ."
means that this is new information (cf. 2 Cor. 1:8), that is, the death
of Christians is a new problem unforeseen by Paul at the time that he
founded his earliest congregations.  In my "Origin of 1 Corinthians" I
attempted to reconstruct what in the conversation between Paul and the
Corinthians lay behind 1 Cor. 15.  I concluded that a simple, pastoral
statement in the "Previous Letter" that the Christian dead are to be
resurrected and to rejoin the surviving believers at the time of the
Parousia would give rise to Corinthian questions about the nature of
resurrection itself.  Just such a statement appears in 1 Thess. 4:13-18.

    In 1 Cor. 15 Paul seems to be affirming that at least SOME believers
(including himself) would survive to the Parousia.  By the time of 2
Cor. 1-9, however, Paul has come face to face with the real possibility
of his own death.
    I believe that the letters and the ideas that they contain must be
related to Paul's life situation.  So the question is, not "could Paul
have held this or that idea at this or that time in his life?" but "what
is there in Paul's experience of life that raises this issue?"  To drop
Galatians into the sequence as the earliest letter means that we have to
postulate a Judaizing crisis in Galatia which gives rise to a set of
theological pairs of terms which do not appear in 1 Thessalonians or 1
Corinthians.  And this not not just an argument from silence.  In an
earlier post I called attention to the "un-Pauline" way in which Paul
uses the word PISTIS in these two letters.  He even speaks of a "work of
faith" in 1 Thess. 1:3!
    Of course, we are dealing only with probabilities, and any question
that begins, "Couldn't Paul have . . ." has to be answered "Yes".  But
some of the probabilities seem rather high to me, among them that the
mortality tables applied to believers as well as non-believers then as
now, and that 1 Thessalonians precedes 1 Corinthians.
    Greeting to all!   --    John Hurd

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