Corpus-Paul

[Antonio Jerez <antonio.jerez AT privat.utfors.se>]

Dear Moon,
you wrote:

> Dear Antonio,
> many thanks for your comments. I am enjoying interacting with
> Mark Nanos because he is saying things different from what I am
> familiar to, and I am not satisfied with the known positions.

And I have also enjoyed interacting with Mark Nanos thoughts. It has
really made me rethink quite a few things about Paul that I once took
almost for granted. One point where Mark has almost swayed me to
his side is the question if Paul saw his gentiles as part of Israel. On other
things I am still unconvinced by Mark's arguments.

> Mark thinks that Paul believes Christ died for the redemption of the Jews,
> and this for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. But his interpretation of
> "to redeem those under the Law (the Jews)" is not the same as the
> typical interpretation. He takes it "to redeem them from the constraints
> or barrier put by the Law toward the new age, to redeem them from the 
> stage
> of being child to mature stage  where they can be one with
> Gentile-believers on equal footing, that is in Christ. I need to study 
> more
> in order to evaluate this position. But I think it is worthy to consider.

I believe Mark's interpretation run into heavy difficulties - not the least 
with
Romans chapter 1-8. As I see it Paul's whole argumentation is leading
towards one inescapable conclusion: that the Law could never be
the vehicle towards Israels salvation - only Christ could be that. When Paul
says that "Now, however WE are released from the Law; we have been dead
to what once held us in its grip... (7:6) " he is talking to both Jew and 
gentile.
The WE includes both himself and his gentiles. Rom. 7:9-24 makes it even
clearer. This has little to do with with Christ putting down barriers between
Jews and Gentiles, but a lot more with arguing that the Mosaic Torah could
never be the "curative medicine" many Jews believed it was.

>But I think it is worthy to consider that
>Mark does not believe that it could mean "to redeem individuals from 
> their individual sins".  The redemption that the Jews were waiting for 
> would have been the redemption of the covenant people as a whole. 
> The fact that they are now able to worship the one God together with 
> the Gentiles on equal footing could be an important aspect of this awaited 
> redemption. Anyway, I would like to know more about how Mark takes
> "the redemption of the Jews through Christ", which he does not deny.

Maybe that was a view Jews held 500 years before Paul, but the texts
from the first century indicate that many (if not most) Jews had also started
thinking more and more in terms of individual salvation.

> I noticed from your previous posts that you take "the law of the 
> Spirit of life" in Rom 8.1-5 as the Torah viewed from faith in
> Christ. Is it what you refer to by "Christ's Law"?

Yes. Christs Law is not the same thing as all of the Mosaic 
commandments, although it retains parts of it.


Best wishes

Antonio Jerez
Goteborg, Sweden