Corpus-Paul

["Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT mailhost.chi.ameritech.net>]

Because I think it is of interest to,  as well as something that might
provoke some discussion among C-P members, I'm forwarding an exchange
between me and David Lupher that appeared on the Classics list on
whether the age of Paul was, as for instance Marty Soards (The Apostle
Paul, p. 15) and many others have claimed, "an age of anxiety" and of
"failure of nerve".

Yours,

Jeffrey

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• From: dlupher AT ups.edu (David Lupher)
• To: classics AT u.washington.edu
• Subject: Re: age of anxiety?
• Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 15:02:19 -0800

Jeffrey Gibson writes:
>One claim that seems to occur over and over again is that the age in
>which Paul lived and moved and had his being , at least so far as the
>Greco-Roman world was concerned, was "an age of failure of nerve" and
>that the first century CE was a period of general existential anxiety.

First, a chronological quibble. The "failure of nerve" comes from the
eponymous fourth chapter of Gilbert Murray's "Five Stages of Greek
Religion," and it seems to refer not specifically to the time of Paul
but to the Hellenistic age in general. E.R. Dodds' notion of an "age
of anxiety" (a term he borrowed, of course, from his friend W.H. Auden)
refers not so much to the first century as to "the crucial period
between the accession of Marcus Aurelius and the conversion of
Constantine" ("Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxeity," p. 3).

>What I would like to know, then, is whether this is an accurate
>characterization of the age. My own sense is that such a
>characterization is a scholarly construction that has no real -- or only
>a tenuous -- relationship to the way things were perceived.

You might find useful an collection of essays called "Pagan and
Christian Anxiety: A Response to E.R. Dodds," edited by Robert C.
Smith and John Lounibos (Univ. Press of America, 1984). See esp.
the essay "The Dodds Hypothesis" by John Gager (pp. 1-12). See also
Robin Lane Fox's "Pagans and Christians," pp. 64-66. He does not
"buy" the "age of anxiety" thesis.

> Or is the truth somewhere in between - an anxious age for
>elites, not so for the under classes, etc.?

Wouldn't one be more apt to suppose that *every* age has been an "age
of anxiety" for the "under classes"? As Lane Fox notes, "The major
anxieties of this age were not spiritual, but physical and geological,
the plagues and earthquakes which beset whole cities, not a few
individuals in their inner lives." (Cf. John Gould on 5th cent.
B.C. Attica: "a world constantly vulnerable to crop failure and
sickness and far closer to present-day village India than to anything
in our own immediate experience," "On Making Sense of Greek Religion,"
in Easterling and Muir, "Greek Religion and Society," p. 6.)

As for the anxieties of Paul's clients, I am curious about the
current communis opinio regarding Wayne Meeks' interesting claim
that "status inconsistency" or "status dissonance" was a prominent
feature of the "first urban Christians." This is the notion that
many of the spiritual drifters of the Roman period were people who
were relatively successful in some respects but suffered from a lack
of respect in others---e.g. reasonably well-off freedmen. College
professors should have an innate sympathy with a theory like this.

David Lupher
Classics Dept.
Univ. of Puget Sound





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