Corpus-Paul

[Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>]

Gary Burnett wrote:

> >So people from pre-industrial agricultural
> societies have little or no
> >concept of the future? Sounds just the sort of
> claim we might expect from someone who has suggested
> people from this background had no sense of their
> own selves as distinctive, unique and self-aware, or
> of others as distinct and unique beings - people for
> whom individual psychology, uniqueness and
> self-consciousness were of no conseqence. (see
> Malina's "New Testament World" & my own "Paul & the
> Salvation of the Individual")

Zeb Crook correctly responded:

> This is far overstating the claims made by Malina
> et. Al...It is not the claim of NT Social Scientific
> critics that ancient people "had no sense 
> of their own selves as distinctive, unique and
> self-aware," but rather that unlike their modern
> western counterparts they did not tend to be 
> governed by that awareness.

All people have a privately defined self ("Who do I
think I am?", "Who do I want to be?"), an in-group
defined self ("Who do family, friends, and peers think
I am?", "What do they expect from me?"), and a
publicly defined self ("How do people in general
perceive me?"). All three dimensions make up the human
self, and no Context Group member -- not Bruce Malina
nor any other -- has adopted the ludicrous position
that people from collectivist cultures lacked
self-awareness or a privately defined self. It's a
question of how the self-parts relate to one another.
In collectivist cultures, the publicly defined self is
generally expected to coincide with the in-group
defined self, and the privately defined self recedes
into the background -- but it's obviously still there.

[Gary Burnett]
> >Could I suggest that Malina's extreme views owe
> more to 21st century
> >US/Western imperial culturalism than to a
> sympathetic approach to other
> >cultures? Attributing such simplistic outlooks to
> other cultures, including that of the 1st century
> Mediterranean world, seems much too patronising for
> my liking - 

Caricaturizing Malina in this way undermines your own
credibility. I happen to know one of the Context Group
members (a friend and associate of Malina), and the
whole point of their social-scientific and
anthropological approach is to foster a sympathetic
understanding of people who think differently than we
do in the west. 

> aside from the fact that in extensive
> travel and work amongst both the urban and rural
> poor in Asia, I have never come across either the
> sort of community "embeddedness" so much touted by
> Malina, nor this latest idea that such people cannot
> have a thorough understanding, appreciation and hope
> for the future. Yes, I've seen much more
> community-orientation, but "dyadic" personalities?
> Not at all.

Interesting. I've certainly seen dyadic personalities
in action (living for two years in Africa), so I have
to wonder how much you really assimilated into these
cultures. However -- and hopefully now returning my
initial subject -- I do have doubts about Malina's
idea about peasant societies (not necessarily having
to do with collectivist or dyadic personalities in
this case) being indifferent to the future. On the one
hand, he acknowledges that such peoples can have
(immediate) future expectations ("forthcoming"), but,
on the other, that such expectations must be
undeerstood as part of a prolonged "now" (present). I
can't help but suspect that (a) distinguishing between
"forthcoming" and "future" is a semantic quibble which
eliminates "future" as a term, and (b) subsuming
"forthcoming" under a present dimension is a further
way to diffuse the issue, which eliminates "future" as
a concept. But I may be wrong; I'm still trying to get
a better hold on Malina's argument.

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

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Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 16:23:22 -0700
From: Richard Fellows <rfellows AT shaw.ca>
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Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Paul's poverty in Ephesus and the cost of travel
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Most commentators believe that Paul made an unplanned trip to Corinth
shortly after 1 Corinthians, and that he then sent Titus to Corinth. But the
commentators do not explain how these hypothetical journeys were funded.
Paul would not have budgeted for these unscheduled trips.

In 1 Cor 4:11 we read that Paul and his companions were hungry, thirsty,
poorly clothed and homeless. How, then, could they afford to make the
unscheduled trips to Corinth that the commentators propose? Given that Paul
was barely able to feed and clothe himself, he surely did not command the
resources to fund journeys for which he had not budgetted. I find it
difficult to reconcile the language of  1 Cor 4:11-12 with the idea that
Paul had a store of money reserved for unexpected journeys. Nor is it
sufficient to propose that the journeys were paid for by the Ephesian
church. If they were able to pay his travel expenses, why did they not look
after him properly in Ephesus? It is hard to imagine that the Ephesian
Christians would have paid for Paul and Titus to go to Corinth to discipline
the Corinthian church, but let them go hungry in Ephesus.

The problem, of course, disappears once we realize that the journeys never
happened. Titus-Timothy (one and the same person) had already been sent to
Macedonia, and the churches there probably assisted him on his journey on to
Corinth. And Titus never planned nor undertook a sea voyage to Troas.

Does anyone have information on the cost of travel by land and sea in the
ancient world?

Richard Fellows.