Corpus-Paul

[iscott2 AT uwo.ca]

Loren,

Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions. My responses are as follows:

> IV Maccabbes has been dated as early as 20 CE, so I
> don't see how this becomes a deciding factor. My take
> on Paul is that while most of his ideas are grounded
> in Jewish thought, he assimilated Greco-Roman ideas in
> evagelizing the pagan world.

My point was not that IV Maccabees was dated too late to be a part of the
picture. Rather, I was pointing out that the "death for" formula did not
originate with Paul. It was already a traditional formula when he wrote in the
50s. If this language was being used (as is probable) in Antioch or Jerusalem
prior to Paul's missionary work, is it likely that these communities would 
have
been working in the same sphere of thought as is IV Maccabees? I think what
evidence we have suggests rather that these communities tended toward very
traditional Jewish apocalyptic thought for their central conception of Jesus'
significance. So if this is the context in which the language developed, and 
in
which Paul himself learned it, would that not be the context within which we
should first understand Paul's own use of it?

> So if Rom 7:7-25 can be taken as illustrative of the
> way Paul worked Hellenic ideas into more fundamental
> Judaic beliefs, what would we say about the Noble
> Death?

I agree with your depiction of the way Jewish and Hellenistic thinking is
interwoven in this section of Romans and elsewhere. At the same time, the
hellenistic language and thought forms in chapter 7 do not determine the basic
theological framework. Paul is not adopting an Hellenistic anthropology here,
but rather using Hellenistic language in service of a very different picture 
of
the human condition. We must remember that in the Hellenistic world the plight
of people like Medea, dominated by passion, was seen as a sign of individual
moral weakness. The Stoic wise man possessed a mind in complete control of the
passions, and this control was generally seen to be a viable possibility for
human beings. Paul, however, takes this condition of individual human weakness
and (based on, perhaps, the story of Adam) makes it paradigmatic for *all* of
humanity. His fundamental moral pessimism, then, does not come from the
Hellenistic sphere of thought, even though he uses those terms to express it.
This kind of situation should warn us, I think, against depicting Paul's
thought in other areas as being cast in at bottom Hellenistic terms.

> Realistic to whom? I'm not sure I see the language
> used in Rom 6-8 as realistic in any sense; that's what
> apocalyptic mysticism is about. But it could very well
> be argued that the mimetic understanding advanced by
> Seeley is more "realistic" than the alternative you
> describe. Certainly the Maccabean martyrs and
> Greco-Roman philosophers considered such a paradigm
> realistic. Why not Paul?

By describing the identification of the believer with Christ as "realistic,"
what I mean is that Paul thinks of an actual causal relationship between the
two persons. He is not simply talking about a relationship in which one person
imitates another, one person provides new knowledge for the other, or one
person's actions have political ramifications which affect the other. There is
a direct causal relationship between the death of Christ and the believer's
freedom from sin, wrath, and death. Certainly Romans 6 is ambiguous on this
count. It is not clear there exactly how this "new Adam" has an impact on 
those
he represents. In 7:1-6, however, Paul emphasizes that in some sense the
believer has *actually* died with Christ. The believer is free from the
jurisdiction of the law because they have somehow actually died. This is not
merely a metaphor or a new way of thinking. The whole logic of Paul's argument
require that the death is a real one, but one which the believer underwent
vicariously. This is the same logic as that at work in the passage I quoted
before from Gal 2.

> Ian, would you care to elaborate more on your own
> ideas? Would you say that Paul had something like a
> Danielic "Son of Man" in mind before assimilating the
> Noble Death into such a scheme? Or have you no use for
> Seeley's theory at all?

I am at a disadvantage in not having read Seeley's book (and with end of term
approaching my marking load keeps me from reading much right now), but what
makes me wonder about his model as you describe it is that there seems to be 
no
precedent in Hellenistic ideas about martyrdom for this kind of real
participation in another's death -- a participation which has the same causal
results (at least in some spheres) as if one had actually died oneself. Yet
this "realistic" participation in Christ's death and resurrection seems to 
form
the basis of all of Paul's talk about being "in" Christ. It certainly
constitutes a large part of what he understands by Christ having died "for 
us."
This forces me, thus far, to conclude that Paul's understanding of Jesus' 
death
is not shaped in its fundamental outlines by Hellenistic ideas about 
martyrdom.
Whether he might use some martyr language in expressing his (essentially
different) Christology is, however, another matter.

One other question that occurs to me is whether there are older Jewish 
parallels
to some of the ideas which Seeley sees as an expression of the "noble death"
typology. Although talk about Isaiah's "suffering Servant" may be out of 
vogue,
that figure certainly constitutes a model for a "noble death" which has
vicarious effects for others in the community. The traditions about the deaths
of the prophets also would provide precedents for the idea of noble martyrdom.
Are there specific elements of Paul's language which Seeley identifies as
distinctively Hellenistic?

Cheers,

Ian.

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Ian W. Scott
Lecturer in Religious Studies
King's University College (at the University of Western Ontario)
email: iscott2 AT uwo.ca
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Please visit my web-site at http://www.ian-w-scott.com
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