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  • From: "Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>
  • To: Corpus-paul <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: C-P: Paul and Plato
  • Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 15:41:24 -0500


Liz Fried wrote (in response to a post from Mark Nanos):

> >
> I understand the letter is about how to be righteoused, and whether you
> need to become Jewish (ie circumcised) or not. Still the fact is Paul
> compares an earthly Jerusalem to a heavenly one; children after the
> promise=spirit to children after the flesh. I don't think he would have
> made this sort of dichotomy if he weren't thinking along Platonic lines.
> To Paul spirit is good, flesh is bad. Flesh is heir to sin, spirit is not.
> However Jewish the *use* he makes of this dichotomy, the dichotomy itself is
> Platonic. I think one cannot understand Paul or this dichotomy without
> knowledge of Plato. Paul did not think this up de novo.
>

I think is is entirely misleading to think that when Paul says that SARX
(whether
flesh is a good translation is another question) he is doing what Plato does
when he
speaks of the evil body. Paul is not talking about a body, let alone -- as
Plato
inclines towards doing -- that material things such as the body are evil.
After all,
Paul can claim that those who are enfleshed in a body or, more accurately,
who are
bodies are in the Spirit. And this is something Plato could hardly claim --
unless the
person he was speaking of was dead and his soul had gone back to the world of
the
forms.

In any case, you've engaged above in bifurcation in assuming that since Paul
uses a
dichotomy and Plato uses a seemingly similar one, then Plato must be the
source of
Paul's use. But the actual source for Paul's non neutral use of SARX (it can
simple
mean "the human race, cf. Gal 2:16; 1 Cor 1:29; Rom 3:20) -- especially his
use of the
term as a cipher for fallen humanity or (from the point of view of the moral
stance
designated Spirit) an ethically negative sphere is the moral and not
ontological
dualism of Qumran and Jewish apocalyptic -- see 1QS 11:7, 9, 12; 1 QM 4:3;
Test.
Judah 19:4; T. Zeb. 9:7).

By all means, read Plato. But do so to discover how different his use of any
flesh/spirit dichotomy is from what Paul intends to say when he uses it.

Yours,

Jeffrey
--
Jeffrey B. Gibson
7423 N. Sheridan Road #2A
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT ameritech.net






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