Corpus-Paul

["Jim Hester" <hester AT jasper.uor.edu>]

On May 2 Paul Miller asked about current opinion on the dating of Galatians.
While not wanting to represent myself as reflecting current opinion, I did
want to comment on the question.

I think the attempt to harmonize Acts and Galatians is at its heart
fruitless.  It assumes that Acts gives us enough historically reliable data
on Paul's so-called missionary journeys that we can know where the Galatian
churches were, and it assumes that the meeting in Jerusalem that Paul
mentioned in Gal 2 was known to the author of Acts.  Both are dubious
assumptions.  As to the latter, if he knew, he certainly butchered its
description and its output, and muddled things enough that we can't be sure
that he is reporting it!

Furthermore,  there is a kind of unexamined assumption in pauline
scholarship that the meeting in Gal 2 was then followed by Peter's visit to
Antioch.  However, if you look at the temporal adverbs used in describing
the experiences Paul has marshalled for his argument, the phrase used in Gal
2:11 is OTE DE, not EPEITA as is true up to this point.  It is indeed
possible that the Antiochian visit is not in a temporal trajectory with the
rest of the report.  That could allow for an early dating of Galatians,
having been written, for those who assume the basic reliability of Acts,
before the second visit to the province of Galatia.

There is one other factor that seems to get lost in the discussion.  The
letter is addressed to more than one church and deals with more than one
exigence.  That means that the argumentation of the letter has to be fairly
sophisticated, a point that Frank Hughes has made in earlier postings about
Paul's ability in general.  However, Paul's argumentation get pretty muddled
in places in his correspondence, and he tries to make the point to the
Corinthians that he isn't all that "sophisticated" a rhetor.  All that leads
me to wonder if someone else didn't write Galatians for him, a point that
gains some strength by the interpolation in 5:2-12 and the autograph in 6:11
and following.

So, where does all this lead me as regards dating?  For what it is worth, I
don't care and hope that we can abandon such ultimately futile pursuits!

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Jim Hester
736 Buckingham Drive
Redlands, CA  92374
(909) 792-0533
hester AT uor.edu
"Let the games begin!"