Corpus-Paul

["David C. Hindley" <dhindley AT compuserve.com>]

Eric Zuesse,

Without getting too much into detail, I am afraid that you are falling into
some of the same traps you believe others have already succumbed to. I would
agree with you that modern interpreters still have a bad habit of letting
their personal ideologies govern their analysis of data (some do so
wittingly but others completely unaware), it also is clear that you have an
emotional investment in the subject at hand that is affecting your
reasoning. You have a tendency towards hyperbole and are more defensive than
you should be, traits which tend to detract from your message.

Also, while I am intrigued by your attempts to apply the forensic and
interpretive methods and rules of law to historical evidence, I am not at
all sure that you have worked out the details sufficiently to use it in
support of some of your historical hypothesis. Perhaps I am simplifying this
too much, but it appears that you have simmered the rules of evidence down
to this: Primary texts (such as the Paulines) can be used to formulate
explanatory hypotheses, while secondary texts (such as Acts and the four
gospels) cannot, but rather are useful only to support hypotheses. This may
even be true (actually, it *does* seem to make sense), but I think you are
not directing enough attention to the forensic aspect of modern scholarly
investigation of biblical and other early Christian and contemporary Jewish
and secular documents.

This is evidenced by your willingness to accept the consensus views about
relative order of documents and the authenticity of certain Pauline
documents. "Consensus" is a relative term. What is the consensus among
scholars at Bob Jones University will not even come close to the consensus
of  scholars at Harvard Divinity School. Your attempt at explanation of the
relationships between Paul and early Jewish-Christian figures does not
demonstrate familiarity with many of the literary issues relating to
authenticity and reliability of the Pauline documents, either in part or in
whole, that many folks active on this list study quite seriously. It is just
too simple to say "Book X is undisputedly genuine," and then use all of its
statements with equal authority, when the authenticity of certain passages
within it are doubted by many (among other problems). As in life in general,
the devil is in the details.

The upside of this is that you are in good company. Albert Schweitzer, as
brilliant as he was (and he *was* brilliant), after deftly pointing out how
the early modern critical historians of the bible and Christian origins had
let their ideologies interfere with their otherwise valid criticism of the
sources, let himself do exactly the same thing. However, if he were alive
today, I think he would happily admit as much and find an amusing way to
allude to the irony of it all. His criticism of the critics was not
punctuated by emotional statements (well, maybe a little is evident in the
turns of phrase he employed), defensiveness or broad generalizations. As
pre-postmodern as he was, Schweitzer was fully aware that the critic
interprets the past from the present, and the present consequently
influences those interpretations.

A work that I have found very helpful is Hayden White's _Metahistory_, which
includes a multi-contextual method for evaluating the products of historians
in the modern period (about the 18th century onwards). "Meta," a term I
usually hate because it is commonly used to oversimplify a complex problem,
here actually refers to the complexity of a historical narrative. To White,
narrative works at several levels: A deep level expressed as TROPES (figures
if speech that deploy words in such a way as to turn or translate meaning,
primarily metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony), and surface levels such
as EMPLOTMENT (story line or plot structure that imparts meaning to a
historical narrative, primarily romance, tragedy, comedy and satire),
ARGUMENT (a set of premises and the conclusion drawn or inferred from them,
primarily formist, mechanistic, organicist and contextualist), and
IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATION (a coherent set of socially produced ideas that lend
or create a group consciousness, which in modern times tends to fall in the
categories of anarchism, radicalism, conservatism and liberalism).

This method, even though White limits its use to the analysis of the works
of "modern" historians, possesses a certain degree of backwards
applicability when it comes to ancient sources. I think the value of his
approach is appreciating the fact that there is more than one way to look at
a historical narrative (or historical source, if one includes letters within
the scope of narrative), and that the "correctness" of any one approach is a
very complex issue not amenable to broad generalizations.

Respectfully,

Dave Hindley
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

PS: Eric, I still plan to critique the book draft you sent to me, and I will
be more specific in that response. Until then ...