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  • From: "Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: our historianship
  • Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 09:25:49 -0400


Re: Vince Endris & David Inglis

Re: Vince's:

> Eric wrote:
>
> >However, Paul and James were both in a real bind, and therefore could
>not
> >afford to become public, overt, and explicit, about their conflict:
>
> Eric, I found this part of your post particularly interesting. I rather
> enjoyed it. Thank you.

Thanks for the comment, Vince. To me, the bind that held both Paul and James
in its grip, and by which each of these two enemies needed to keep their
conflict secret in order to achieve success at their respective personal
agendas, appears as a tragedy beyond words, and as a tragedy that has had
incalculable historical consequences, shaping today's cultures. This is how
I see the creation-event of the Christian faith, the moment in time in which
Christianity broke away from being a sect of Judaism, to becoming, instead,
an entirely new religion, an entirely new covenant with God.

Re: David's:

> I understand that in the current scientific age a belief in spiritual
> things is looked on by some as a kind of 'mental weakness', but I don't
> believe that a true scholarly approach should reject out of hand a genuine
> spiritual explanation of, for example, Paul's actions. Instead, it would
> seem more reasonable to me to allow spiritual explanations as one of a
> number of possibilities, and only reject those explanations if the
> evidence does not fit, rather than rejecting them prior to even examining
> the evidence.

I am happy to see that your note was posted, because I believe that it is
appropriate and relevant to discuss in a forum such as C-P the questions
you've raised here. Pauline studies concern the historical foundations of
the world's largest religion, and you've here raised questions concerning
the assumptions by which that historical investigation ought to proceed.

However, I take issue with two implicit assumptions that seem to me to be
behind your statement: that one cannot be a scientist and be "spiritual,"
and that one cannot be religious and be "unspiritual."

One can also be deeply religious and yet not spiritual (like Adolf Hitler)
or entirely non-religious and yet deeply spiritual (like Richard Strauss).
Many of the world's moral monsters filled with hatred (such as Osama bin
Laden and Martin Luther) were of unswerving faith, while many people of
highest caliber (such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
Ben Franklin, John Adams, Galileo, Darwin--the list goes on and on) were
scientific in their orientations, and either disdained religion outright or
else spoke in platitudes about religion when they were not, more privately,
heaping their contempt upon it.

Nor have religious training and education been effective at inculcating the
best into people. Joseph Stalin spent five years studying for the priesthood
before he converted to Communism, Pol Pot also spent some years at a
Buddhist monastery prior to his conversion. Hitler, of course, never needed
to convert: he remained a committed Roman Catholic to the very end.
(Furthermore, he was never excommunicated, nor did the Church ever ban his
Mein Kampf. Mussolini, the grantor of the Vatican territory in 1929,
described fascism in his 1932 "The Doctrine of Fascism," as "a spiritualized
conception, itself the result of the general reaction of modern times
against the flabby materialistic positivism of the 19th Century, and neither
sceptical nor agnostic, ... clearly an ethical conception." When a person
worships The Almighty, power itself takes on a deeply moral cast. Paul had
represented this view in Romans 13:1-7.

Therefore, as to the Damascus road experience you focused on in the rest of
your note: Paul himself, in 2 Cor. 12:1-7, admits ( in lines 2-4) that it
might not really have happened; but notice the way in which he does so:

He is here alternating between referring to himself in the first person and
in the third person, using the third person "he" as the person who had these
visions that might have been either delusional or even made up, and the
first person "I" as the person who is so modest that he will not brag about
having had that experience. This entire passage occurs in a context in which
Paul implicitly is trying to boost his status in the readers' eyes against
that of his opponents, James and the other disciples, who had known Jesus
while Jesus was alive and who have consequently enjoyed among this
readership a higher status than Paul. These readers have known Paul as the
salesman who sold them on joining James's organization, but not as someone
who actually lived and spoke and dined with Jesus and knew "in the flesh"
what Jesus said and did. As you page forward from this, the very end of 2
Corinthians, to the very start of Galatians, you find Paul in Gal. 1:1
referring to himself as someone whose call to be an apostle came not from
man or by means of man, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father. Paul is
here very carefully laying the groundwork for actually implicitly
criticizing James and the disciples for their having known the living Jesus.
Their claimed authority, when they have communicated with the Galatians, has
evidently been precisely this: that they knew Jesus "in the flesh," while
Paul did not. Paul is here trying to turn this lemon into his own lemonade,
by implying that his own authority comes direct from God the Father and God
the Son (the latter being his own, Christian, Christ, that Paul is trying to
convert these people to after his having originally brought them into merely
the Jesus sect of Judaism). This gives Paul a direct line to God, just like
the Jewish Moses had. The implication here is that Jesus's disciples, even
though they too had been visited by the resurrected mashiach, represented
primarily the fleshly Jesus, whereas Paul's understanding of his here Diune
God (Father/Son) was direct, and not contaminated by such merely physical
matters. Then in Gal. 1:11-12, Paul digs in further, by amplifying on this
implicit superiority of his own authority over the authority of the
disciples who, in 1:6-9, will be condemned to hell for their having
persuaded one or more members of the Galatian congregation to become
circumcised. Paul, near the end of his letter, in 5:1-12, says that the
disciples should be castrated for having done this. Then, in 6:12, he
implies that they were the actual people who were responsible for Christ's
Crucifixion--this being the second of the two recorded assertions by Paul
that it was Jews instead of Romans who caused the Deicide, the other being
the first of Paul's surviving letters, 1 Thes. 2:14-16, where this supposed
guilt is charged more broadly against all Jews. When Paul was writing 1
Thes., hot in the wake of his conflict against James that's recounted in
Galatians 2:11-21, Paul couldn't publicly lay a hand against James, because
everyone knew that James was his boss and the head of the organization that
Paul had sold them on entering. But, since those Thessalonian readers were
all Gentiles, Paul felt at least somewhat free to attack born Jews, even if
only implicitly. This is why Paul's anti-Semitism preceded his anti-Judaism.
Later in his career, when he wrote Philippians 3:8 calling Judaism itself
garbage, the focus was entirely against Judaism, and not at all against
Jews. Indeed, in the passage leading up to this, Philippians 3:2-8, he is
saying that the reason he had himself attacked Christians when he was young
was not that he was a Jew but that he had believed in Judaism; so the thing
that threatens his readers is not Jews but Judaism, the beliefs that Paul
had himself been committed to when he was young (3:5-6).

Consequently, I believe that what Paul's letters said about his Damascus
road experience can be scientifically understood only within the context of
his rhetorical strategies and tactics. Strategically, Paul knew that his
credibility to his readers rested upon his supposed Damascus road
experience. Without that claim, James and his men would have simply
overwhelmed Paul, who would then have been just another member of their
organization, no better than his readers were, the people in Galatia,
Thessalonica, etc., whom he had converted. His claim to authority would have
been purely organizational, not at all religious. In order for Paul to have
a religious authority, he needed to have this claim to supernatural
authorization, since religion is founded upon a belief in the supernatural.
Paul's only natural authority was organizational, and James would have
easily won on that basis.

This is the reason why Paul had to assert his Damascus road experience even
if he never had such an experience. Your question is whether or not he did
have that experience. This is a kind of question that science, almost
certainly, will never be able to answer to anything approaching a certainty,
because the evidence concerning it is poor and heavily contaminated, even if
every word of Paul's letters is authentic. However, a scientist deals with
such uncertainties routinely. Even though we can never know to a certainty,
we do have very strong and overwhelming reason to believe that Paul was so
trapped into the necessity to assert his Damascus road experience, that our
inferences, as historians, will not be drawn from any answer to that
question, unless we are ourselves people of faith, in which case our work as
historians is propaganda for whatever religion we happen to hold. No
scientific historian will answer this question beyond the evidence.

A scientific historian is trying to reconstruct history from the most
reliable evidence available for every part of that reconstruction or theory.
Such a reconstruction, like all of scientific understanding, is an attempt
to discover the system that lies behind the often apparently chaotic data
that are at hand. To Albert Einstein and all great scientists, this is a
search for "God," but it is not a search to understand the supernatural; it
is not religious. It is a search to understand nature.

As a scientist, I don't understand much of the universe, but I have grown to
understand enough of it to stand in awe of it. To me, this is a "spiritual"
experience. I have no need for the "supernatural." The purpose of science is
not to not-understand the world. That is the purpose of religion, and I do
not consider it spiritual. Some religious people have been spiritual; until
the Renaissance, almost everyone was religious, and consequently almost all
spiritual people then were religious. But, I believe, Mankind is starting to
get beyond the Religious Age to start the Scientific Age, and this will not
reduce our spirituality. I believe that any equation of religion with
spirituality is based upon cultural prejudice from Man's past, and not on a
truthful understanding of Man's present and Man's future. As historians, I
feel that we should proceed as scientists and not as religionists, and that
the distinction between the two is not a spiritual one at all, but is
entirely a methodological one--really an epistemological one.

Paul was a thoroughly religious person, but I do not consider him to have
been spiritual. He was, however, incredibly brilliant, the best salesman the
world has ever known, and a master strategist who would be the envy of any
corporation for being their CEO. The closing chapter of my book argues that
his having broken the God/Law link freed nations to be non-theocratic and
even to be democratic, and that this, his unintended gift to posterity, was
the seed that flowered in 1789 when America's Founding Fathers established
the world's first constitutional democracy. Here, the Law came from the
people themselves, not from God (and also not from any other dictator).
Could an Islamic majority nation ever do the same? Not if it remains a
majority Muslim nation. When the constitution, the basic Law, comes from
God, there is not even the possibility of a stable democracy, because the
majority will sooner or later vote for a fundamentalist government, and
whenever the Law comes from God, any democratic constitution will be thrown
out. Paul freed his posterity from such a theocratic prison. He didn't
intend to, but he did, and it took over 1700 years for that seed to bear its
first democratic fruit. To me, this is much more interesting than Paul's
Damascus road experience.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net





  • Re: our historianship, Eric Zuesse, 08/29/2002

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