Corpus-Paul

["Mark D. Nanos" <nanosmd AT comcast.net>]

Dear Billy,
I will comment below yours.

on 11/10/04 10:30 PM, lejeune at lejeune AT comcast.net wrote:

> Thank you, Dr. Nanos, as well as the others who responded to my questions. I
> am reading Paul with these ideas in mind. I do have one follow-up question:
> 
> Nanos said:
> I believe that Paul upheld the "traditional" (normal, common) understanding
> of the covenantal relationship of the righteous God to Israel, the righteous
> ones. Jews were born into this membership, and brought up in covenantal
> relationship to God.
> 
> Billy:
> Please forgive my ignorance here, but I am wondering if there wasn't more
> tension and divisiveness in the Judaisms of the time. (I can't remember the
> source) but I thought that some Jewish groups excluded opposing Jewish
> groups from being "true" Jews. Didn't the Essenes reject the other forms of
> Judaism and go off to form their own? (major ignorance here as I have not
> read the scrolls only about them.)

Without going into details and nuances here, it is possible to understand
some Dead Sea Scrolls to indicate this level of intolerance of their Jewish
brethren, but it is not the only way to read the data, that is, in this kind
of way and about "other forms of Judaism" (perhaps better, about "a specific
group of Jews who had what they wanted, control of the Temple").

>Would it be that much of an anomaly for
> Paul to consider those groups who had stumbled to be out as members (at
> least temporarily?)

It is of course possible to read Paul that way, and many have, regardless of
whether the DSS comments are consulted as a parallel or not. But in Romans
11 Paul is explicit that stumbling and falling are two different things, and
the latter has not occurred.

Imagine a group in which some subset of members want to make a change to the
group norms. They do not do this with the idea that those outside the subset
are outside the group, but they represent a coalition within the group
working on behalf of the change. How do they regard those not of their
subset thinking? As mistaken, but not as condemned, and in time, it is hoped
in believed, they will see things "as they should." That is a judgment along
a subgroup in/out line, but not of the level that Christian theology has
approached the matter, as if a group in/out line. That happened later than
Paul, when it was decided that those outside of the subset were outside of
the group (when it was concluded that the others have not and will not see
things as they should), in effect that no one was in the group unless one
joined it, because the group was itself something new instead of something
continuous,  instead of that all were in the group, but not the
subgroup--yet.

Regards,
Mark
-- 
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D.
Rockhurst University
Co-Moderator
http://home.comcast.net/~nanosmd/