Corpus-Paul

[Shawn J Kelley <skelley AT daemen.edu>]

At 12:00 PM 1/24/05 +0000, you wrote:
> 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.


As a lurker who follows this list with a modest amount of interest,
please allow me to raise a red flag about relying on 19th century notions
of folk ideas.  There have been some important objections already
raised: such notions are very seriously dated and were discarded in
sociology and anthropology long ago.  They were discarded in the
wake of more serious and rigorous anthropology.  Furthermore, the
very notion of a unified folk is extremely problematic.  For what is
the ground of such a supposed unity?  Blood?  Language? 
Land?  Culture?  Ultimately the category of folk presents
rigorous intellectual thought with far more problems than it
solves.  

There is another reason that is also worth mentioning: the very category
of "folk/volk" emerges from, reflects, and is essential to 19th
century notions of race, nationalism, and European (and sometimes
Germanic) superiority.  The category of folk functioned differently
in different thinkers: Herder, Hegel, late 19th century historiography,
Heidegger, the interwar radical German right, American racial radicals in
the turn of the century South, Nazism, etc.  Some, like the Nazis
and the American radicals, were brutal racists obsessed with the sexual
health/purity of their folk/volk.  Others, like Herder, really tried
to avoid ethnocentrism.  Most were somewhere in the middle. 
But, the category of "volk" inevitably elides into the category
of race.  Given that "folk" assumes that each people has
some sort of essential spiritual unity, how could it not?  

Biblical scholars like F.C. Baur employed the category of
"folk" to read Paul in the 19th century (as I show in
Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical
Scholarship; I also discuss the category in Herder, Hegel and
Heidegger).  While there was much to applaud in Baur's scholarship,
his appeal to volk is not to be included in this list of positives. 
At least when Baur was using folk it represented the pinnacle of the
learning of his day.  I wouldn't recommend using the category now-
especially now that we know how much damage it has done.

I realize that this is something of a digression from Paul scholarship,
but since the term was raised on the list I felt it appropriate to
indulge in such a digression.

Shawn Kelley
Daemen College
Amherst, NY