Corpus-Paul

["Tony Buglass" <tonybuglass AT fish.co.uk>]

John wrote:
The ethnographer Adolf Bastian has noted "elementary ideas common to
all individuals. He believed that Völkergedanken (folk ideas) develop
differently among societies due to different physical surroundings
and historical events, he says that there are only a small number of
elementary ideas, or Elementargedanken, that result in the different
folk ideas. The elementary ideas are uniform to all people. In order
to prove his belief in Psychic unity, he collected data on the
resemblances of artifacts and of behavior."
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/bastian_adolf.
html
Does this help in addressing your caveats, Tony?

Now I've had time to visit the site linked, I have to say not really.  I
have to profess a fair degree of ignorance in this area, and would be
interested in hearing what an anthropologist has to say about Bastian.  My
initial response is that this is all very old stuff, all his publications
being between 1860 and 1905.  If I submitted a dissertation based on
commentaries written by 19th C scholars, my supervisor would send it back.
I can't say that Bastian is not worth reading any more, but I'd be happier
if I knew that later and modern anthropology has taken up his ideas and run
with them.

In general, I remain suspicious of the theory.  Indian religion felt like an
alien land alongside the Hebrew and Hellenistic world which I was studying
at the same time.   Many of teh underlying assumptions (Elementargedanken?)
were fundamentally different to those of the Hebrew world, ISTM.  The only
point where I found similarity was in the bhaktivedanta tradition of
Hinduism.  I would argue that it was similarity rather than influence.  The
only hypothetical influences I found were between the Hindu and Greek
thought-worlds due to their common ancestry in the ancient civilisation
which migrated Westward into what became Greece and Southward into what
became the ancient Indus valley civilsation - but that was no more than a
common philosophical tendency to dualism and a negative view of the material
world.  By contrast, I felt that Hebrew thought has a much more positive
view of the world (hence a doctrine of creation, for example).

To return to Paul, your attempts to link Christos and Logos seem to me to be
based on a given understanding of Logos (ie the Platonic) which in turn
depends on Paul having assimilated works such as Cicero.  It is in principle
possible that Paul had read literature pertaining to the world which he saw
as his mission field.  I don't see a great deal of evidence that he actually
did.  The only direct quote which comes to mind is that Luke portrays Paul
as using non-Jewish literary sources when preaching to Greeks in Athens
(Acts.17:28) - that is Luke's view, rather than primary Pauline evidence,
and as such is of secondary value.  To refer to Jim West's suggestion of the
Wisdom of Solomon, Logos and Sophia were used as personifications of Wisdom,
which is the starting point for John's use of Logos.  Paul doesn't follow
the same christological route, although he is clearly influenced by Wisdom.
The logos-concept which you define as equal to lex ratio, and link to
Rom.1-2, is not the same as the logos-idea derived from Hebrew wisdom
literature.  I think you are connecting of chain of unconnected ideas -
indeed, possibly another set of "faux amis".

Am I being naive in suggesting that it all looks a bit too complicated, and
there are simpler explanations for Paul's choice of words?  And that it is
all much more easily explicable by reference to Paul's Jewish sources and
background?

Cheers,
Rev Tony Buglass
Superintendent Minister
Upper Calder Methodist Circuit
W Yorks