Corpus-Paul

["Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>]

Re: Mark Nanos's reply to my:

> > As a legal investigator, I don't necessarily need to know exact dates,
but I
> > do often need to know the sequence, the order in which the various
documents
> > were generated.
>
> To the degree that this does need to be know to use this methodology, this
> is a major problem, since it begins with what are clearly hypotheses and
> theories, and far from facts, regardless of how many interpreters may
repeat
> them. We do not know the order of these documents, and any theory that is
> dependent upon this is already off to a highly dubious start.

Mark is here (as opposed to his opening comments that I'm not excerpting
because they were purely ad-hominem against me) raising an authentic issue,
namely: Is it important, if one is to interpret Paul's letters so as to
employ them scientifically in a reconstruction of Christian origins, that
one identify correctly the order in which they were written? Mark is saying
no; I have said yes, and here is why I do:

First of all, I must point out that it is important to know this order
*only* so as to make certain *types* of inferences from these letters, such
as how they relate to each other, and how Paul's thinking evolved over time.
If all of Paul's letters expressed one single point of view, and did that in
a thoroughly consistent way, then this type of question would not arise;
however, that is not the case. For example, 1 Thessalonians 4 presents Paul
saying that he used to teach obedience to the Law (4:1-12) and that "whoever
rejects this teaching is not rejecting man, but God"; but that (4:13-18) he
is now teaching a different gospel of salvation by faith, so that (4:15)
"what we are *now* teaching you is the Lord's teaching."

By contrast, Galatians (1:7-9) says that there is only a *single* gospel
message and that he, Paul, has been its preacher. Furthermore, it says that
anyone who teaches any other gospel will go to hell. This entire letter is
emphatic on the side of the second of Paul's 1 Thessalonian gospels
(4:13-18); Galatians could hardly be more emphatic on that.

Furthermore, Romans 3:28, reinforcing Gal. 2:16, says that this new gospel
is the only pathway toward salvation, and that the old, Jewish, gospel (1
Thes. 4:1-12) is no longer approved by God. A few lines earlier (Romans
3:20-26), Paul explained that God used to enforce the Jewish gospel of
obedience, but that after the Crucifixion the only gospel that God supports
is Paul's new, Christian, one, of faith. Paul even says (3:25-26) that God
was previously merciful to disobedient Jews because no one was obedient, but
that God's mercy has now ended and He will punish every sinner, but that
everyone who believes in Jesus will be saved--no exceptions: everyone must
be a Christian in order to be saved.

Now, one can deny these contradictions within Paul's letters, and
manufacture, by fiat, an "interpretation" or "reading" of "what Paul meant,"
which is fixed and the same throughout, and which imposes this manufactured
structure upon Paul, and to do that is common in scholarship. Or else, one
can have sufficient respect for this subject to be scientific in approaching
it, and try to *explain* Paul's contradictions instead of simply ignore
them. Those contradictions are there, but a religious "interpreter" of Paul
can ignore them, and does; a scientist cannot, and does not.

In the theory that I have come up with, 1 Thessalonians was written in the
heat right after the conflict that's described in Galatians 2:11-21, so that
Paul was addressing 1 Thes. to people who had always known Paul as a Jew and
never as a Christian, since Paul had invented Christianity at that event
described in Galatians 2:11-21--he had *first* stated his gospel of Christ
on that specific occasion, and so these Thessalonians had never heard it
from him before this letter to them. Paul, in other words, was newly
introducing these people to Christianity, hoping to convert them away from
James's sect of Judaism that had been started by Jesus. Since Paul had sold
these Thessalonians on joining the organization that was headed by James,
Paul couldn't attack James himself just yet, even just implicitly, as he was
to do soon after when he wrote Galatians 1:8-9, 5:7-12, and 6:12. That would
not have gone down well with these readers--not at all. But these
Thessalonians felt no personal investment in Jews as a people; all of these
Thessalonians were new Gentile converts to Judaism--they weren't converts to
the Jewish people. This is why 1 Thes. 2:14-16 is anti-Semitic but not (like
the later Philippians 3:8) anti-Judaic: Paul is here weaning the
Thessalonians away from "the Jews," not yet from James's organization, and
he is blaming "the Jews" and not James, saying, (1 Thes. 2:16) "They even
tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles {i.e., preaching to you, the
reader] the message that would bring them [i.e., bring you] salvation." He
was prying these people away from Jews before he would start to pry them
explicitly away from Judaism. But in 1 Thes. 4:13-18, he was just barely
beginning the process of prying these people away altogether into
Christianity.

This is just a small example of how a scientific approach to these letters
can be useful, here in understanding (for example) the *evolution* of
anti-Semitism and of anti-Judaism in the writings of the New Testament.

Obviously, in order to understand how such anti-Semitic lines as Matthew
23:31-8 & 27:25, and John 8:44 & 19:18 came to be written retrospectively
into the "history" and "words" of "Jesus  Christ," it is essential to
understand that the Gospel-writers were writing long enough after Paul so
that such bolder lying would be able to pass as credible among the people of
the Gospelists' own times.

I mention these things partly because I think that Mark might find them
particularly interesting; as a Jew, he might even have lost relatives in the
Holocaust--who knows? Hitler himself was profoundly shaped by the New
Testament's anti-Semitism;  on 26 December 1926, he confided to a small
group of supporters, "The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for
the battle against Jews as the enemy of all Mankind; the war that Christ
began, I shall finish." In Hitler's private comments to friends and
supporters, in his private notes and letters, and in speeches to fellow
Nazis prior to his political success, Hitler drew from over a hundred
biblical passages in developing his theory behind the Holocaust to come. One
of these passages was 1 Thes. 2:15, which calls Jews, as Hitler did in that
quote from 26 December 1926, "the enemy of all Mankind." However, Hitler was
smart enough a politician so as never to cite by book-and-number the verses
he was paraphrasing or even parroting, from, as he called that lone source,
only in his private notes, "The Bible--Monumental History of Mankind."
Hitler knew that there were secular Germans who would ridicule a politician
who admitted that he got his understanding of "History" from that book
rather than from other sources. Hitler read voraciously, but it was that
book he knew since the crib that had by far the deepest impact upon him.
Only when he came up with the outline for his theory behind the Holocaust in
1919 in his private notes, and figured out there that "the Jews" were the
snake in Genesis 3, did he transform, from that very moment on, into a rabid
anti-Semite and formulate his idea for the Thousand-Year Reich, from
Revelation 20:1-6, the basis of his grand vision. In his notes, in 1919, he
equated "the People of God" with "the Aryan," and all of them were
descendants of Adam and Eve; Jews descended from the snake. But the concept
of the Jew as the snake Satan was actually invented by Paul's followers.
Hitler, for his part, despised Paul as a Jew, but was convinced till the
very end that "it's certain that Christ was not a Jew." Hitler even
formulated the Nuremburg Laws so that Jesus, by virtue of Joseph's
supposedly not having been his biological father, would not have qualified
for extermination. The geneological data that the Nazis accumulated on the
basis of which Jews were selected for persecution and ultimately for
extermination were collected by Germany's clergymen from their church
baptismal records in late 1933 and early 1934, and supplied to the Nazi
Government. One of these clergymen, in an interview in Augustin Hedberg's
1992 FAITH UNDER FIRE, admitted, "We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this
was Christian." It was. And it is. But people are becoming less Christian,
just as they are becoming less Jewish, etc. However, maybe not. Are we
headed forward to the future, or back to the past? Who knows?

There are lots of other reasons to understand the true history of
Christianity than to understand the true history of anti-Semitism, but
unless historians start to take very seriously the order in which their
documents were created, historians' claims to being scientific will continue
to be false, and only religion will really be served, not science.

I shall not comment upon Mark's other objections, because they are generally
of the same nature: claiming that it is acceptable to reconstruct the
beginnings of Christianity on the basis of assumptions about Christian
history, before one makes assumptions about the order in which the
documentary evidence itself was generated. I do not deny that Mark's
viewpoint is respectable among scholars; but I do assert that it is *not*
respectable among scientists.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net

PS:

Re: Mark's:

> The problem, noted already above, is that the "experts" are in the case of
> the sequence/dating every bit as much interpreters as they are in those
> other areas which you discount their voice as interpretive. You do not
have
> the evidence you claim, for we do not know the dates or sequence, do not
> have the evidence required to do so, so we must hypothesize.

A scientist employs a careful, systeamatic, step-by-step analysis, which
first determines what types of assumptions must be established first; which
kinds next; which kinds after that, etc.

The first kinds of assumptions that a scientific historian will establish in
order to reconstruct history from an evidentiary body composed of documents,
is to date these documents, as best as can possibly be done, paying
attention, at this first stage of the scientific enterprise, to interpretive
issues in those documents as little as possible, since interpretation must
come at the last stage of this scientific enterprise. To the extent that
interpretive assumptions are embedded into sequencing the documents, one is
prejudicing the "history" that will be produced from them. A scientist wants
to prejudice his findings as little as possible.

Mark, you are assuming to the contrary. We certainly do disagree about
method. However, I've stated mine, and you haven't stated yours; you have
said merely that you don't use mine. I would have inferred that long ago,
from your previous postings. What I would not infer is that you actually
have a method. I know that you have conclusions, but conclusions without a
method are pure prejudice. I think that all I know of you are your
prejudices. Might you be so kind as to tell me something other than
that--your method?

PPS:

Re: Mark's reply to my:

> > We indeed know that Paul's letter was being read by a congregation who
had
> > heard from James's people, and that at least one member of the
congregation
> > had been persuaded so much by James's people as to become circumcised
> > himself (Gal. 1:6 & 5:7).
>
> We know no such thing. You have gone from earlier snipped comments which
> were rightfully tentative about this matter, to claiming evidence of it.
But
> it is an interpretation. Whatever happened in Galatia, Paul never says in
> his letter that it has anything to do with James or representatives from
> James. It is not in the evidence, but in the interpretative spin that this
> claim is found. Moreover, the evidence does not say a member had been
> persuaded to become circumcised, or that it was because of Jame's people.
In
> addition to adding to the texts, you are conflating comments made about
> Antioch (which also do not say way you assert)  and about Galatia, two
> different places with different people and events at two different times.
> That is clear in the evidence.

I gave the evidence right there, Gal. 1:6 & 5:7, but you ignored it.

1:6 & 5:7 refer to James's agents in Galatia having persuaded one or more
members of the Galatian congregation to become circumcised. Once Paul has
lost one member to James, the obvious result is that either others will do
likewise or else Paul will grab this thing before it falls entirely to the
ground and breaks into pieces. Paul had merely been the salesman who had
sold these Galatians on entering James's Jewish sect; Paul wasn't more than
a salesman in James's organization; James was the leader they all looked up
to.

This is the reason why Paul avoids condemning James by name. Do you think
he's so stupid as to do such a thing? Try to put yourself into Paul's place:
You had spent 17 years (Gal. 18 + 2:1) evangelizing among Gentiles to get
them to join the Jesus sect of Judaism headed by Jesus's brother James, and
now James has ordered that all of these men have to be medically operated on
without anaesthesia and without antibiotics, or else, if they refuse, all of
your work during the past 17 years could go down the drain (Galatians 2:2).
That's pretty awful for you, wouldn't you say? I mean, just look (1:6 &
5:7): you've already lost at least one of these people to circumcision. If
one goes, then of course he'll try to persuade his Galatian "brothers" to do
likewise. This is a matter of core personal identity. Paul had sold these
people on their joining the Jesus sect of Jews. But look at what Judaism is:
It's the covenant that God offered to Abraham in Genesis 17:13-14, saying to
Abraham, "Each one of you must be circumcised, and this will be a physical
sign to show that my covenant with you is eternal. No uncircumcised man will
be one of my people." And then Abraham and his people signed on the dotted
line 17:23-27, and so Judaism began. And it was "eternal." But you, Paul,
know that, if you tell your men to become circumcised, most of them will
say, "Go to hell!" and leave you. You can't do that. In 1 Cor. 9:24-27,
you've admitted that your own success is more important to you than anything
else. You'll reaffirm this in Romans 3:4&7. You have just reiterated it
again in Galatians 2:2.

What would you do? What did Paul do? He was a pretty smart guy,  don't you
think? He said that God has changed his mind; the covenant wasn't "eternal"
after all. His men didn't have to become circumcised. Now look again at 1
Cor. 9:24-27. Paul won his race, and, as he predicted "we do it to win a
victory that will last forever."

PPS:

Re: Mark's close:

> I believe that you are unaware of the just how much is in debate currently
> among scholars who study these documents, especially as the practice of
> historical method increases in sophistication, and even if there was a
> unanimous agreement, how little this constitutes evidence rather than
> interpretation. Perhaps you should spend some time studying the field of
> enquiry as well as developing the methodology by which to supposedly
correct
> it. I find some of the methodological observations interesting and worth
> further consideration. But no method can hope to correct a naive reading
of
> the evidence itself, or a failure to distinguish the evidence from its
> interpretation; it might, however, provide a fancy new way to try to
> manipulate to one's point of view while presenting it as something else.
Or
> should I be suspicious of all interpreter's but you?

My methodology does not entail "suspiciousness" of "interpreter's" but
rather suspicion of all sources, and no interpreter is a source, because in
science no opinion is evidence. In science, only the data (here, the primary
sources) are evidence (some of much higher quality than others), but no
scholar's interpretation is evidence for anything. To say otherwise would be
just as foolish as to say that, for example, Einstein's theory of relativity
is "evidence"; it's not, the Michaelson and Morley experiment is evidence,
but no theory is. Nor is any scholar's opinion, or anybody else's opinion.

This does not mean that I ignore scholars' works; I look to scholars to
obtain their consensus opinions on authenticating and dating the evidence.
These sorts of opinions I accept as starting assumptions. In the very few
matters where I find scholars' opinions in such matters to be insupportable
(such as the view that many scholars hold that 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 is a
later interpolation, not authentic), I explain, in detail, why I disagree.

Now, Mark, will you please be so kind as to tell me what your method is,
instead of simply insulting mine and me?