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Subject: Corpus-Paul

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  • From: Robert M Schacht <bobschacht AT juno.com>
  • To: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Cc: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: ideas
  • Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 20:22:14 -0700




On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 12:22:56 +1000 Craig S de Vos
<csdevos AT trinity.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
>Liz Fried wrote:
>>This is the issue to which I was speaking. I am saying that Paul's
>>statement in Gal.1:1, 11, 12 cannot be used to argue that he did not
>get his
>>ideas from someone else. This is because people are simply not good
>at
>>knowing where their ideas come from. ...
>>
>
>I've not bought into this debate as yet, but I can restrain myself no
>longer. You may be right, Liz, as far as the psychology of the modern
>western mind is concerned. What you need to demonstrate is that people
>in
>the ancient Mediterranean had a similar psychology to us.
>Anthropological
>studies of pre-industrial, agrarian and collectivist societies would
>suggest otherwise....
>

I'm suspicious of most of those studies. I look at it this way: Being
acutely aware of one's sources is a mostly modern artifact of the
Germanic obsession with footnotes.

There is one good ancient parallel: The legendary rabbinical technique
reported in the Mishna in which rabbinical decisions were based on Rabbi
X who got it from Rabbi Y, etc. Unfortunately, this is a post-Biblical
tradition that apparently developed after the time of Paul. The Dead Sea
Scrolls show a variety of approaches to awareness of sources.

Paul sometimes tries to be definite-- as in the case under discussion,
and also in the case of his famous "Not I, but the Lord" dicta.

But here we're dealing with proving the negative: That Paul denies
influence but was influenced. That's hard to do unless you've got
concrete texts known to exist at the time, and can demonstrate likelihood
that Paul was exposed to them. The suggestion has been made that sources
in the Tanakh underlie some of Paul's theology, and that seems worthy of
further exploration.

Bob
Robert M. Schacht, Ph.D.
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ


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