Corpus-Paul

["Mark D. Nanos" <nanos AT gvi.net>]

Frank,
You are right, it is not 1 Thess. itself, but the portrait of "the early
Paul" that has been applied to derive its chronological place, to which I
am responding. I do not mean to suggest that we cannot do chronolgy, but to
what seems to be a weak point in the existing case. And I am very
interested in the "early Paul," not least because that is whom Paul
describes in Gal. 1--2. I am not concerned with the information in Acts,
pro or con, in my response. Perhaps if I state the problem in another way
you will see why I am chasing your earlier comments with this discussion.

>My judgment is that if you don't want to posit an "early Paul," Baur's
>conclusion
>concerning the authorship of 1 Thessalonians is the most consistent one.
>In other
>words it is impossible for us not to compare 1 Thessalonians with the
>Hauptbriefe; the
>question is what we make of our comparisons.  When you have all of the
>other authentic
>letters of Paul having quite consistently justification and the issues and
>language
>that go with it, and then when you see that 1 Thessalonians doesn't have
>those things,
>it seems logical for us to account for that lack historically.  When you
>also look at
>the naivete of what Paul says about the Parousia and the fact that, as
>John Hurd
>pointed out form-critically, Paul thought he was giving the Thessalonians
>information
>they didn't previously have in 1 Thess. 4:13 ff., it seems to me that the 
>most
>consistent picture we can get for 1 Thessalonians is to describe it
>historically as
>coming from "the early Paul."  It seems to me that given the apparent fact
>that on his
>founding visit Paul didn't preach to the Thessalonians about the
>resurrection of
>Christians but only that of Christ, one should raise even more questions
>about what
>"the early Paul" did and did not teach.

Paul describes "the early Paul" in Gal. 1--2, even if this is constructed
for his purposes in a later situation. This covers some 14 or more years of
his early life as a Christ-believer, the kinds of social issues which
arose, and how he dealt with them, even if his descriptive language may be
different than what he had exactly said at the earlier time. His activity
was from Arabia to Damascus to Syria to Cilicia, and included trips to
Jerusalem, but he did not come close to Thessalonika until after these
events.

You wrote of the pre-Galatians Paul with reference to some agents you label
"judaizers" as defining a point where the early Paul changes in response to
their activity, and locate 1 Thess. before this point. But the events
narrated in Galatians regard an early Paul concerned with just those
things, in terms of justification by faith, that you describe 1 Thess. as
preceeding. It seems to me that this is a "later Paul" by the time he could
have written this letter to Thessalonika, a "mid-Paul," maybe, after at
least some 14 or so years of dealing with just such issues that
justification by faith of Jew and gentile alike was formulated to
legitimate.

Anyway, my point is that the model for describing the early Paul that
includes 1 Thess. on the basis usually argued does not seem to me
successful within the corpus paulinum, regardless of Luke's chronology,
because of the information Paul provides in Gal. 1--2 about "the early
Paul."

The problems that are addressed in 1 Thess. 4:13ff. may point to an early
and naive Paul, but they might point other places. I noted some in my
earlier post. Why not consider that in a fully Greek city an issue like the
ultimate destiny of the individual was of greater concern than it had been
in the areas worked by the "early Paul," where perhaps not as much
emphasis, or the presuppositions brought to bear by new Christ-believers,
did not lead to developing this position statement until pressed upon Paul
"later," thus 1 Thess.? The earlier Paul dealt with the problem of
integrating gentiles into Jewish communal situations, thus justification by
faith and all the "DIK" language; maybe this "mid-" or "late-Paul" has to
deal with "pagan" social situations that only now begin to arise outside of
a Jewish communal situation, and in Greece. They have different concerns.
If so, this "early" justification by faith program is not as immediate, and
he needs to address other concerns that arise among these people, and
develop a different language to express it. (I am wondering if the
sequential scenarios do not depend upon definitions of justification by
faith as more personal than social, such as Baur's, and thus that they need
to be reapproached. Maybe justification by faith language is missing from 1
Thess. because it was not thought by Paul to apply to their kinds of
problems, if not involving the communal identity of gentiles in Jewish
environments.)

Thanks for the interaction,
Mark Nanos