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  • From: "Hyam Maccoby" <h.z.maccoby AT leeds.ac.uk>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Paul's persecution of the Church
  • Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 12:23:46 +0100


Dave,
You asked:
>the works of Louis Feldman
> and David Novak. Could you recommend specific works?

I would recommend:

Louis H. Feldman, JEW AND GENTILE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD: ATTITUDES AND
INTERACTIONS FROM ALEXANDER TO JUSTINIAN, Princeton Univ. Press, 1996

David Novak, THE IMAGE OF THE NON-JEW IN JUDAISM, Lampeter, 1983.

Hyam

____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________


Dr.Hyam Maccoby
Research Professor
Centre for Jewish Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds.LS2
Direct lines: tel. +44 (0)113 268 1972
fax +44 (0)113 268 0041
e-mail: h.z.maccoby AT leeds.ac.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>
To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2002 12:54 AM
Subject: [corpus-paul] Re: Paul's persecution of the Church


> Hyam,
>
> >>Roughly speaking, the Noahide Laws are universal ethical
> principles (which apply to all mankind), while the
> ceremonial laws of the Holiness Code, of which circumcision
> is the most important, form the Rule of the priest-nation,
> the Jews.<<
>
> You will get no argument from me about the issue of
> circumcision as the defining Judaic boundary marker,
> although I still have to wonder whether there was any sort
> of consensus among the various manifestations of Judaism as
> to what universal ethical principals applied to Gentiles.
> There may have been disagreement among Jews, in the first
> century CE, concerning just how close to hold those Gentiles
> who revered the God of the Jews. I will take your
> recommendation and follow up > FWIW, I have to disagree with you that
"Paul ... wished to
> institute a new single Covenant, applicable to all mankind,
> Jews and Gentiles, sealed by the sacrifice of Jesus." My
> position, similar to that of Mark Nanos, is that Paul was
> not trying to abolish the distinction between these two
> covenants. Instead, Paul was himself an observant Jew
> (within the strictures of what "observant" meant to Jews of
> the Diaspora communities he seems to have visited), and that
> Paul saw the two communities as different but holding a
> common distinctive value.
>
> Mark might agree with you that this common value was faith
> in Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, but I doubt he would agree
> that this necessitated abandonment of Jewish ceremonial laws
> *by Jews.* To Mark, I think, the atoning sacrifice of Christ
> was the middle term linking the two communities. I, on the
> other hand, think that the dogma of an atoning sacrifice by
> Christ is too developed a concept to have crystallized by
> Paul's supposed time of activity (late 40's - mid 60's CE).
> The ingredients may have been in the mix, but the synthesis
> required more heat and pressure than the period 30-50 CE
> (the period when the letters are thought to have been
> written) can account for.
>
> This is why I am interested in the ideas coming out of
> scholars like Richard Horsley, Gerd Theissen and others, who
> are attempting to bridge the gap between the rural Jesus of
> the Gospels and the urban savior Christ of the Pauline
> epistles. Even so, I do not personally see the right mix of
> idea-bending circumstances present, at least for a long
> enough period of time, to create what we see present in
> Paul's surviving letters. That is, not until the war of
> 66-73 and its presumed aftermath in terms of Jewish self
> re-identification and their relationship with Gentiles on
> all levels, completely changed the playing field. Naturally,
> if the key event that served as the catalyst follows the
> supposed period of the letter's composition, something had
> to have been retrofitted into them.
>
> I'm sorry, but I just cannot endorse the idea that Paul
> consciously engineered the split from traditional covenental
> Judaism as you seem to suggest in _The Mythmaker_ (which I
> have read). To me the contradictory threads woven together
> in his surviving letters suggests adulteration rather than
> the fermenting of division.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Dave Hindley
> Cleveland, Ohio, USA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
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