Corpus-Paul

[Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>]

Ian wrote:
 
> I did not really catch the specific parallels which
> you outlined. What I
> remember is more general statements about there
> *being* parallels, but this may
> be a slip in my memory at a busy time of year. Would
> you be able to provide
> some specific examples of parallels in this
> literature with the kind of
> identification-bringing-eschatological-transfer
> which we see in Paul?

Ian,

For vicariousness, Seneca says that Socrates remained
in prison unt death "in order to free mankind from the
fear of death" (Epistulae Morales 24:4). And Epictetus
says, "Now that Socrates is dead the memory of him is
perhaps more useful than what he did or said while he
still lived" (Epictetus 4:1:168-169). People thus
follow the example of Socrates in dying the Noble
Death. So too with Paul: Christ died in order to set
humanity free from sin and death. Christians follow
his example and die as he did in baptism; they are
crucified with Christ (Rom 6,8). 

For obedience and military context, Epictetus
describes Socrates as "subject to the law and obedient
to the law", and "when it was his suty to serve as a
soldier, he was the first to leave home, and ran the
risks of battle most ungrudgingly...there was
something else he wished to preserve; not his paltry
flesh, but the man of honor and reverence that he was"
(Epictetus 4:1:159-161). (Similarly, he portrays
Diogenes as "obedient to the gods" and a figurative
soldier willing to sacrifice his leg and "whole paltry
body" for his philosophy.) For Paul Jesus was obedient
to God in dying (Philip 2; Rom 5) -- and there is
plenty of military imagery in the Pauline corpus, as I
cited earlier.

There are no sacrificial metaphors applied anywhere to
Socrates -- only to a few philosophers like Thrasea
(described by Tacitus, Annals 16:35), Seneca (again
Tacitus, Annals 15:44), and Demonax (described by
Lucian). But that is Seeley's point, that the
sacrificial dimension is the least frequent and thus
least important. The other four factors
(vicariousness, obedience, military context (literal
or figurative), and overcoming physical vulnerability)
can be found in most examples of the philosophers who
die the Noble Death. But I think the sacrificial
dimension is more important in IV Maccabees and Paul
than Seeley seems willing to grant, even if Paul mixes
sacrificial metaphors (passover in I Cor 5:7, day of
atonement in Rom 3:25) implying they weren't so
central.

As I said before, I'm persuaded by the notion that the
Noble Death was in the back of Paul's mind as he
worked through his own ideas on the vicarious nature
of Christ's death in a Jewish eschatological scenario.
The vicarious deaths of the philosophers were cliches
-- "stories which have been droned to death in all the
schools", says Seneca (Epistulae Morales 24:6) -- and
Paul seems to have adopted some of their usage for
polemical purposes.

Does this help, Ian? I recommend Seeley's book for the
full catalog of references and parallels in IV
Maccabees and the Greco-Roman literature. There are a
lot, some explicit and some implicit. 

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html