Corpus-Paul

["cfjacks" <cfjacks AT attbi.com>]

Vince and Richard,

I appreciate greatly the lengthy and detailed responses which both of you
made to my questions about your postings about issues concerning Paul's
letters to Corinth.  But while I appreciate them, I am finding that
responding to them would involve me in all sorts of other questions, since
both of your suggestions operate in terms of a reconstruction about Paul's
career, ideas about which I have doubts and questions, ones which might
perhaps take us far astray from the questions you have both been focusing
on.

So while I mull over what (if anything) to say, I make this preliminary
response by sharing a bit of intellectual background about myself, just to
clarify "where I'm coming from."

First of all, I have not really done all that much work on these letters but
have (perhaps inappropriately) operated on the assumption that II Cor. 10-13
is the "painful letter" for which Paul apologizes so profusely in II Cor.
1-9.  Also, I have simply assumed that I Cor. 6 contained a fragment of
Paul's first letter to Corinth.  Thus, Paul wrote four letters in a brief
span of time.  I realize that this is very much debatable, so I am not
trying to "make an argument," just sharing my position.

More to the point, I most espouse the position about "Paul's visits to
Jerusalem" held by John Knox and presented in his important little book,
"Chapters In A Life Of Paul," a book that has most unfortunately little
impact on American scholarship
and even less in Europe, save for the important exception of Luedemann.  In
this book, Knox makes the important point that
in our reconstruction of Paul's career that we NOT allow too many years
between Paul's promise of making a collection for the benefit of Jerusalem
Christians and his "delivering the goods," a concern found so prominently in
the Corinthian letters as well as the "letter to Rome."  Richard's
reconstruction requires almost ten years to come between Paul's promise of
funds and his delivering funds to Jerusalem, and that seems just too long.

But it does seem to me that Paul's declared anxiety about completing this
"collection" impinges upon the issues the both of you are addressing, if
only because it suggests both a motive for his evident concerns as well as
requiring a more compressed time span for the writing of the "four letters
to Corinth" than I find in Richard's reconstruction.

So thanks again for your postings, which doubtless will prompt me to examine
the "letters to Corinth" in greater detail than I have done in recent years.
And once again, none of the above is intended to be a "convincing argument,"
just a sharing of my concerns, interests, issues, and back-ground.

Clive