Corpus-Paul

[Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>]

Mark Nanos wrote:

>How is it deemed to be respectful of the
>other for someone who believes the Mosaic
>legislations is now obsolete, and thus the
>practice of Judaism, to use the word rabbi
>in their e-mail signature...

Hi Mark,

Evangelicals who fancy themselves "rabbis" are odious,
but not necessarily wrong. As you know, there are days
when I find myself in agreement with the following
commentary:

"There is absolutely no sense that Christ is the
'goal' or 'natural result' of anything to do with the
law... He did not come at the tail-end of a process of
which the law represented the earlier stages. He was
the person who liberated Israel from the law's mess."
(Philip Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans, p 285)

The idea being that for Paul the law was finished, and
Christ-believers had access to the best the law
promised but never delivered, by an entirely different
route (the Spirit) (Gal 5:13-6:10; Rom 8:1-17,
13:8-10).

Remember that Paul was a millenarian thinker, and
millenarians often thrive on desecrating the most
valued religious symbols of their own heritage. The
sacred is often mediated through new channels, with
radical disregard for what used to set standards for
the holy.

This, at least, is one way of reading Paul. On other
days I find your (opposite) approach equally
persuasive. But "supersessionist" interpretations of
Paul are not in and of themselves implausible, nor
merely the province of "rabbinic" evangelicals. As P.
Esler, for instance, isn't!

That out of the way, I did like your post, sarcasm and
all. :)

=====
Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com

"In the natural sciences a person is remembered for his best idea; in the 
social sciences he is remembered for his worst."


                
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