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  • From: "Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Romans 13:1-7
  • Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 19:49:07 -0400


Robert,

Re: your saying, "My greatest objection to your position is that in a couple
of places, as you point out, Paul tells us something of his history ... but
neither there nor anywhere else does he say unequivocally, 'I ceased to be a
Jew."

You are clearly wrong in this. In both Galatians 1:13-14 and Philippians
3:6-8, Paul makes logically inescapable, that is, he there
logically-necessarily implies, that he formerly had been a Jew, but that he
no longer is a Jew.

For Paul--and he was quite consistent in maintaining this--to be a Jew was
not merely a racial thing, but a matter of belief in the Law, the Jewish
covenant, as the pathway to one's salvation. In these passages, Paul states
that he had originally been such a person, a Jew, and that his having been
such is what had caused him to have persecuted the Christians. But Paul
clearly refers to all of that in the past tense, not as what he is now, as
the writer of these letters, which is clearly a Christian, a believer in his
own gospel of Christ.

Thus, Paul is, indeed, saying there, quite unequivocally, that he has ceased
to be a Jew.

Perhaps what you are objecting to here is that what a person states by
logically necessary implication--that is, what he logically buries at the
implicit level of his expression, rather than stating explicitly for all to
understand, even for the least intelligent reader or hearer to receive from
his writing or speaking--ought not, in your view, to be considered to have
been expressed at all by him. However, often it is the implicit, unstated
assumptions in a person's statements that convey the deepest penetration
into that person's belief-system and world-view. This is especially so if a
writer happens to be political or tactful, or especially if the individual
happens to be at all deceitful, as Paul certainly was. He even, in one of
his more stunning admissions, confessed--albeit, again, tactfully, which is
to say in this case, as a rhetorical question, rather than as a blatant
admission--in Romans 3:7, that to lie in the service of God is no sin;
instead, he indicated there that he would feel proud to do it (again,
however, without ever explicitly saying that he had, in fact, ever done it;
Paul's writing is the very model of slipperiness, which is why scholars have
so many debates about what it all "means"). A good example of what he was
actually referring to in Romans 3:7 was Romans 3:31, which baldly
contradicted his actual and repeatedly stated message, that was given so
well just a few lines earlier in 3:28; he elsewhere explained in 1 Cor.
9:20-27 why he lied such as he did in Romans 3:31: he did not want to lose
the few Jews that he had won, even though his message was, in fact, totally
supersessionistic towards Judaism, as expressed both in 3:28 and generally
throughout his writings as his core teaching, his gospel of Christ. To say
(as in 3:28) that a person is viewed favorably by God only through faith,
and not by following God's commandments, is to tell Jews: accept Jesus as
the Christ, or else be damned by God. 3:28 means just what it says, but
Paul also did not want to push away the few Jews whom he had managed to win.
After all (1 Cor. 9:24), Paul was determined to win, and at all costs. And
so (Romans 3:7), a lie that would help this happen was good, not bad, in his
eyes.

You have interpreted Philippians 3:7-8 as stating "that God through Christ
has opened the way for Gentiles to come in, on an equal basis, without the
requirements of the Law." However, that's not what it actually says here.
It says, again very clearly, that Paul once was a Jew, but now recognizes
that Judaism is mere rubbish that he has cast off in order to win Christ.
That's what he unambiguously says here. But furthermore, when he said, in
Romans 3:28, Galatians 2:16, etc., that the Jewish pathway toward salvation
has been terminated by God after the Crucifixion, he wasn't telling Jews
that their pathway to salvation stands on an equal footing along with the
Christian one; to the contrary, he was saying that unless they convert to
Christianity, they'll be damned by God. Paul, you see, had nothing against a
born Jew, so long as that person converted to his, Paul's, Christian
religion. David Kertzer's masterpiece, THE POPES AGAINST THE JEWS, gives
numerous examples of this same view as official Church policy prior to the
Holocaust. But it still is, only it's no longer "officially".official. How
could it even possibly change? It's in the New Testament itself. It's
imbedded in Christianity, right along with such beliefs as 1 Thessalonians
2:15-16, John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and other blatantly anti-Semitic
convictions, supposedly from a god himself.

These are the reasons why you really need not be so puzzled as to why Paul
didn't state *explicitly* "I am no longer a Jew," but merely
logically-necessarily *implied* it. This was not a message that Paul, who
had himself been converting Gentiles, prior to 50 CE, to the Jesus-sect of
Judaism, wanted to make explicit to his congregations. After all, until that
event which created Christianity in the year 50, and at which James, the
brother of Jesus, virtually forced Paul to choose between following Jesus
and keeping his many thousands of uncircumcised "converts" as members of
the Jesus-sect, or else Paul's having to go his own way and create an
entirely new and non-Jewish religion, Paul had been teaching a different
gospel of Christ, one in which he was inviting Gentiles into this sect of
Judaism. But now, after 50 CE, Paul had to finesse his keeping these
thousands of "converts." He certainly did not want to say, to all these
thousands of uncircumcised men, "Well, folks, now you're going to have to
become circumcised,in accord with the covenant-forming commandment, Genesis
17:14, and undergo this medical operation, in this era when no such thing
as either anaesthesia nor antibiotics exist." He wanted to keep them as
followers of what, actually, was, indeed, Paul's *new* gospel of
Christ--only he had to keep insisting to them that it wasn't new, because
what these men had been previously sold on *by him* was, indeed, a Jewish
sect.

Paul was thus torn. But he was determined to be a winner, at all costs. And
that's why he deceived like the very devil, in the service of his God, which
was, truth be told, actually success itself. And he succeeded. He won the
race. But, in order to do so, he had to design and carry out a violation of
the historical Jesus that was, if anything, even worse a violation of Jesus
than the crucifixion itself, because the victims this time were not only
Jesus, and not only Jesus' people, the Jews, that Jesus had been trying to
save, in the way that the mashiach had been prophesied to do. The victims
now were going to include, also, the far greater number of Paul's deceived
"Christians," who were going to be manipulated by him, and by his followers
who wrote the New Testament.

Why is it that Jesus and his disciples have left no writings, nothing even
in the New Testament (unless James is authentic, which is doubtful), whereas
Paul and his followers left everything in writing there--and yet Paul never
even met Jesus (except in a "revelation")?

Why is it that "Jesus' religion" ended up having its headquarters in the
city where his crucifiers actually did, Rome, rather than in the city where
he and his successor James did, Jerusalem?

Why did this religion cook up the story that Peter, who remained faithful to
Jesus, and then to James, in Jerusalem, till death, as a member of the
Jesus-sect of Jews, became, instead, the "First Bishop of Rome and first
Pope" in the city of Jesus' crucifiers?

Why did James, Jesus' very own brother, who had been appointed by Jesus as
his successor (explicitly in the Gospel of Thomas 12, and implicitly in
Galatians 2:12 and Acts 15:13-28) get virtually written out of this actually
Roman-directed New Testament?

In order to understand such things, I am exploring Paul's writings and
finding some amazing answers, most of which are at the implicit level of
reading Paul, and not at the explicit level, upon which you, Robert, seem to
insist. I believe that anyone who would insist upon reading a deceptive
writer solely on the explicit level of his expression, ignoring the deeper
things that are logically-necessarily implicit in these writings, is
insisting upon continuing to be fooled by that writer. I don't think that
that makes much sense, unless one insists upon maintaining his faith at the
cost of being fooled. It's not my way. I want to understand how
Christianity came to be the way that it is. I've already found conclusive
proof that the first pope was appointed not by Jesus in Matthew 16:28,
appointing Peter, as is emblazoned on the Sistine Chapel dome next to the
papal residence, but instead sometime between 116-144 CE, at a secret
conclave of bishops. I'm finding answers, and it's because I want to know,
rather than because I want to believe.

So, I'm not reading Paul the way you evidently are. I hope that this
clarifies both why, and how.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net
. . .
----- Original Message -----
From: <RSBrenchley AT aol.com>
To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 5:24 PM
Subject: [corpus-paul] Re: Romans 13:1-7


> > Consequently, your argument that we should start with the assumption
that
> > Romans 13:1-7 ought to be interpreted within the framework of Judaism,
is,
> > from my perspective, starting from a false premise. When you refer to
Paul
> > as "a 1st Century Jew," this is not the Paul who wrote the epistles; it
is
> > the man prior to that, and whom he now repudiated. Romans 13:1-7 was
> written
> > by a Roman and a Christian, not by any kind of Jew, except a former
Jew.
> >
> > Eric Zuesse
> > cettel AT shoreham.net
>
> I don't actually accept your premises, but never mind. Even if Paul
had
> consciously abandoned Judaism, he would still have been a man brought up
> within it, steeped in Judaism to the very core of his being. You can't
change
> something like that to more than a limited extent; even if he changed the
way
> he thought to something anti-Jewish - as a convert to another faith will
> sometimes turn violently against his former faith - that would still have
> only a limited effect on the way he felt and reacted to situations. I
think
> the person who reacts strongly against a former faith probably does so
> because of an internal conflict; it still influences them. So Paul would
> still respond, at least partly, as a Jew. I wouldn't have thought it
likely,
> for instance, that he would just abandon the idea of a single, ethical,
God -
> and of course his letters abundantly show that he did not.
>
> My single greatest objection to your position is that in a couple of
> places, as you point out - Galatians and Philippians - Paul tells us
> something of his history; in 1 Cor 15 he tells of the message he
received -
> but neither there nor anywhere else does he say unequivocally, 'I ceased
to
> be a Jew'. I don't see what he says in Philippians as being incompatible
with
> what I believe to have been his position, that God through Christ had
opened
> the way for Gentiles to come in, on an equal basis, without the
requirements
> of the Law, which had after all been given to Jews not to Gentiles. Thus,
it
> is no longer an advantage to be a Jew, and Paul can say so without in fact
> ceasing to be one. I realise that this is to some extent an argument from
> silence, but if it is important to Paul or his hearers to talk about his
past
> as a persecutor, it seems odd that the new, non-Jewish Paul doesn't
> accentuate the break with that past a bit more by telling his audience
> clearly that he is no longer a member of that faith, if that is indeed how
he
> sees it. Other Jews, of course, may well have seen it differently.
>
> Regards,
>
> Robert Brenchley
> RSBrenchley AT aol.com
> Birmingham UK
>
> ---
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