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  • From: "Roy E. Ciampa" <roy_ciampa AT compuserve.com>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: '14 years' of preparation/seclusion
  • Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 12:13:47 +0100

Perhaps I have missed part of this dialog, but I did want to respond to the idea of "the problem of the 14 relatively inactive years" that has been explicitly mentioned or implied in several of the messages.  In several messages it has been suggested they were years of seclusion and/or preparation.
 
Since the reference to 14 years comes from Paul in Galatians it would be good to see how he represents those years.  I think the reader of Galatians would understand that since God's encounter with Paul was in order that he might "preach Christ among the Gentiles" (1:16) that that was what he went to do when he went to Arabia and then return to Damascus.  Indeed the reader's suspicion that that was the case would have been confirmed in 1:23 when Paul informs them that the report was going around that "The man who formerly persecuted us is now preaching the faith."
 
In the context of the 14 years mentioned in 2:1, Paul says that he went to present "the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles" (2:2), the present tense clearly implying that the gospel he was preaching to the Galatians and others was the same gospel he had preached from the time of his conversion up until that encounter in Jerusalem.  That was the message to which the Jerusalem leaders had "added nothing" (2:6), the one that he had been preaching with such success that they could see that God had entrusted him with it (2:7) as a special appointment by grace (2:9) and that God had been at work through Paul's ministry to the Gentiles (2:8).
 
So it seems extremely unlikely that the original readers of Galatians would have thought that Paul had had a 14 year period of relative inactivity, of seclusion or preparation.  The text clearly indicates that they had been 14 very active years in which Paul had been involved in preaching the gospel to Gentiles with great/powerful results that caused the Jerusalem leadership to recognize that God was at work through his ministry.
 
I don't see symbolism in the reference to 14 years.  But I do see quite a few elements of intertextuality in the passage.  Anyone interested those elements can consult pages 130ff. in my book The Presence and Function of Scripture in Galatians 1 and 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988)!
 
All the best,
 
Roy Ciampa
 
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  • Re: '14 years' of preparation/seclusion, Roy E. Ciampa, 03/31/2001

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