Corpus-Paul

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

on 1/18/05 2:43 PM, Tim Gallant at tim AT rabbisaul.com wrote:

>>>I continue to say that Paul from day one was building an understanding of 
>>>the
>>>Hebrew Scriptures among his hearers.

To which Jim West (I believe) responded:
>> To what end?  Would they have run down to the local Synagogue and picked
>> up a copy?  If they had, could they have read it?

And Tim Gallant replied:
> That is not the point at all. The first century culture was not a reading
> culture, but that does not mean that it was not rooted in literature.
> 
> In any case, when I said "Hebrew Scriptures" I was primarily referring to
> the corpus known to Jews as canonical, and not first of all to the original
> language. Forgive me for making the point muddy by using the term "Hebrew."
> 
> I think it scarcely questionable that the LXX found wide usage almost
> immediately in the Gentile churches (if not outright immediately). The
> question is not so much whether the texts used from Eucharist to Eucharist
> were in Hebrew or Greek; the issue is that the LXX (whatever its defects)
> just as much as the Hebrew gives an accounting of *Israel's* faith, gives
> the creational and messianic background to Paul's preaching, and everything
> else one could desire.

Tim and Jim,
I think that this issue is very interesting for the interpreter of Paul to
wrestle with. How did he expect non-Jews he addressed with the kind of
argumentation he in engaged in, which was largely reliant upon Jewish
Scriptures and methods (not to deny other interesting phenomena to explore,
i.e., Greek rhetoric, philosophy, religious expressions, politics, etc.), to
follow his arguments and find them convincing? All the more to the degree
that one grants/supposes that most if not all of them were poor and unable
to read his letters (but only hear them read), much less the passages in
texts to which he referred or to which he alluded (including echoes, word
and idea play, etc.). They often assume a level of learning that we do not
accomplish after studying these texts and traditions for many years (and
they don't provide the nice cross-referencing readily available to us).
Moreover, even if they could read these texts, how could they access them in
the pre-press age in which they lived, when such manuscripts were cumbersome
and expensive and rare, again, all the more to the degree that most if not
all were poor?

In addition to suggesting that many of these non-Jews had been socialized
into Jewish communal life to some degree before contact with Paul or other
Christ-believing teachers, it seems most likely to me that Paul and these
teachers continued to socialize them into Jewish communal life to account
for this expectation of his audiences. There they would hear the Scriptures
read regularly in the daily and weekly liturgical readings, and discussed
(of course the details of how this worked in the mid-first century are a
matter of debate). It seems to me that Paul's addressees in Rome and Galatia
at least, the two letters I have had the opportunity to investigate in some
depth, likely are meeting and engaged in Jewish communal life in order to be
expected to understand Paul's communication to the level his arguments and
citations of Scripture presume of them.

In other words, I do not think we can make the best sense of the issue you
are discussing by simply talking about these texts as if readily available
to and readable by the non-Jewish addressees in post-press terms, and thus
we must try to account for (largely oral) access to them via contact with
Jewish communal life. In my view, they functioned within subgroups of the
Jewish communities of Rome and Galatia (I am not yet prepared to say for the
other letters).

One other interesting thing that has occurred to me along this line. If
their access is largely if not entirely oral within Jewish communal life,
then it is interesting to wonder if Paul might have concentrated on certain
texts and concepts related to a) those most frequently read and discussed in
liturgy, etc., and b) those most likely read and discussed, for example, in
the liturgical reading cycle of Torah and Haftarah (I know, we cannot prove
what this cycle included, or even if it was practiced according to later
traditions) at approximately the time he wrote, or expected the letters to
be read, so that familiarity would be at its highest level. Then he is
putting his interpretive twist upon the Scriptures upon which they have been
recently reflecting according to other interpretations (with which he may
disagree, at least in these cases, because of his/their Christ-faith). Pure
speculation, but trying to work with the limitations of an oral cultural
phenomenon that these cases suggest.

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