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  • From: Jeff Peterson <peterson AT mail.ics.edu>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Cc: kraft AT ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Robert Kraft)
  • Subject: Re: On 1 Thessalonians in the Pauline Corpus
  • Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 11:19:47 -0700


At 11:52 AM -0400 4/11/99, Robert Kraft wrote:
>. . . at the moment I'm less interested
>in the initial assumptions about where to START the process of
>differentiating authentic from inauthentic, early from late (and middle),
>"Judaic" from "pagan," etc., and more about the PROCESS itself, once it
>is underway. If letters with these sorts of variation (apart from the
>specific content) were attributed to, say, Josephus, or Philo's nephew
>Tiberius Julius Alexander, or simply an unknown author of that time, what
>would we do with them? I suspect that the treatment would be quite
>different.

How different is the case of Paul from the case of Philo? Would it be
plausible e.g. to challenge the _Legatio_ on the grounds that an author
whose passion was for Middle Platonic allegory of the Torah would never
trouble himself with political matters, or on the other hand to accept the
_Legatio_ and call everything else spurious? (The same question might be
asked of Josephus' _Life_ and _Antiquities_, on both substantive and
stylistic grounds.) Or could one challenge either the _de Opificio Mundi_
or the _Allegorical Interpretation_ on the grounds that their
interpretations of Genesis do not agree?

It seems arguable that when compared with criticism of Philo and Josephus
Pauline criticism tends to be hyper-sensitive towards differences in
expression and theology among the letters. Since Baur this has tended to
support a very Lutheran reading of Paul, with Romans and Galatians at the
center (even though these letters exhibit [e.g. regarding the estimation of
Torah] differences not less pronounced than those cited to render
Colossians un-Pauline [e.g., regarding baptismal eschatology]).

If one begins the process with a recognition that Paul's project was not
primarily literary or even theolgical in the sense of composing a school
theology, but was rather missionary -- the founding and nurture of
self-sustaining EKKLHSIAI devoted to Christ as Lord -- then one has a
context in which to reckon with differences (the analogy with Wesley rather
than Aquinas or Tillich that I proposed in a post last week). And 1
Thessalonians (e.g.) looks like a compressed version of the exhortation in
1 Corinthians, in a situation free of the challenges to Paul's authority
evident in 1 Cor 1:12; 4:18 (or to put it in the likely chronological
order, 1 Corinthians looks like a considerable expansion on the topics of
exhortation taken up in 1 Thess in a situation where Paul must first
re-establish his authority as a basis for exhortation). This is just to
take up the example that Bob Kraft mentioned -- the real action is of
course with the deutero-Paulines, and my suggestion would be simply that
the conventional use of diffferences of style and matter to reach the
determination of un-genuine is not in all cases convincing.

Jeff

------------------------------------
Jeffrey Peterson
Institute for Christian Studies
Austin, Texas, USA
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