Corpus-Paul

["David Inglis" <david AT colonialcommerce.com>]

Erice Zuesse wrote:
> 
> 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."

Eric,

You show here that you are just as capable of making incorrect and
un-scientific assumptions as anyone else.  Neither of the two "implicit
assumptions" that you mention are correct.  In the first place, I class
myself as both a scientist *and* spiritual, and in the second place I
fully accept that people can be both religious and unspiritual, or indeed
spiritual and non-religious.  However, I deliberately avoided any
reference to religion to avoid even suggesting such comparisons.

As I now have direct evidence that you can completely misinterpret
something that I personally wrote, I'm afraid that I now find it very hard
to treat seriously any of the interpretations you have given regarding any
implicit meaning in the Pauline letters, for example in your
interpretation of 2 Cor 12:1-7 as given below (Note: I have highlighted
all the things you identify as implicit):
[snip]
>
> 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).

As far as I can see the implications stated above are just your
interpretation of the text, and unless there is any scientific evidence
behind the interpretation, then why should I or anyone else place any
weight on them?  If you have any scientific evidence (*not* scholarly
opinion) for your interpretations then I would love to see it, but if you
cannot supply the evidence then I can only assume that in practice your
methodology is no more scientific than anyone else.  So, let's see the
evidence, please.

Dave Inglis
david AT colonialcommerce.com
3538 O'Connor Drive
Lafayette, CA, USA