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  • From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Pauline and Jesus Movements
  • Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2000 01:31:50 -0500


On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Mark Nanos said in response to Dave Hindley:

>>Would you mind elaborating [your statement that "The only real
difference between my approach and the traditional one is that I do
not see a connection between Paul's movement and that of Jesus's
followers until the time that they "merged". Most commentators see
them as related all the way"]?<<

What I was attempting to summarize by my statement that Paul's
movement and that of Jesus' (original) followers were "related all the
way", was the commonly held idea that Paul's message had its source
in, but diverged from, that of the original Jewish followers of Jesus.
In time these two dueling movements are supposed to have become
reconciled. Here the epistles, authentic and spurious, with their
unique mixture of conflicting ideas, are relics of the tug-of-war that
went on between these movements.

My proposal would instead have Paul's movement exist as an independent
and unrelated movement, the members of which were later courted by
members of a radically reformed version of Jesus' original movement.
The Pauline epistles here served the purpose of recruitment
literature, seeking to draw to the new version of the Jesus movement
those Gentiles who revered Paul's message, but created in their
present form some time after the period of Paul himself. Whether they
were successful or not in their recruitment effort is hard to say, but
the recruitment literature itself survived, perhaps as handy
encapsulations of the Christ theology that became incorporated in
liturgy.

With regard to the "Jesus movement", there are still the same
questions as before: e.g., how the Christ theology evolved out of a
Judaic environment, or what its influences were.

What I am proposing is that we cannot restrict our solutions to those
which assume that the Pauline literature was developing concepts
originating from the Jesus movement, as there is an alternative that
could make all the Christ theology in the corpus secondary. Just about
every other solution to the Pauline problem has been attempted, but
disassociating the Christ theology from the body of the epistles seems
to be taboo and it really should not be.

Regards,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA






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