Corpus-Paul

[Jeff Peterson <peterson AT mail.ics.edu>]

>Paul reports on his persecution of the Church of God in
>Gal 1:13, 1 Cor 15:9 and Acts is replete with mentions of
>Paul the Persecutor. I suppose, then, we can rest assured
>that Paul did in fact persecute the Church of God roughly
>33-37 AD.
>
>I would appreciate it if y'all could tell me what is generally
>thought to have motivated this persecution?

No single answer commands general assent. Presumably Paul's persecution was
motivated by something Jesus' adherents did (or were thought to do) or
something they said (or were thought to say).

Probably the majority opinion is a case of the former option: Jesus'
Messianist followers engaged in practices that were felt to violate the
Torah (e.g., disregard of Sabbath or kashrut, laxity in association with
Gentiles). It's interesting that the strongest evidence for this widely
held position is in Acts 7:13-14, one of those rare instances where Acts is
given historical credence in mainline scholarship (apparently because of
its usefulness to the argument). One problem with this interpretation is
the scarcity of evidence for real violation of Torah among Jesus and the
vast majority of his Jewish adherents, nicely pointed out in Ed Sanders's
essay on "The Synoptic Jesus and the Law" in _Jewish Law Between Jesus and
the Mishnah_.

An intriguing example of the second sort of explanation (that Messianists
were persecuted because of what they taught about Jesus) is offered by Alan
Segal in _Two Powers in Heaven_: the proclamation that Jesus had been
raised to share the divine throne "at the right hand of God" was felt to
compromise the devotion reserved for God by pious Jews (of the sort that
started revolutions, at least partly out of motives that we would call
religious), especially as the one said to be so exalted had been shamefully
crucified (and might per Deut 27:26 be regarded as cursed of God; Jeremias
suggested that this verse figured prominently in Paul's motive for
persecution, and that in his subsequent role as proclaimer he simply added
the interpretive hYPER hYMWN of Gal 3:13).

It's gratifying by the way to see y'all spelled correctly, and by a
non-Southerner (?); even here people want to spell it ya'll, a contraction
without sense.

Jeff

------------------------------------
Jeffrey Peterson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of New Testament
Institute for Christian Studies
Austin, Texas, USA
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