2024-08-25

Questioning the Identity/Historicity of the Apostle Paul

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

These past few weeks I’ve been trying to untangle my way through the data strands that seem to relate to Christian origins and early development (again) and I find myself coming back to the chimerical figure of Paul (again).

When I reach this point, as I have done so many times before, I tend to seek out (again) critics of the radical views and defenders of some form of canonical figure. This time, one of those critics I have dusted off from my database of electronic files is Richard Carrier. About nine years ago he posted The Historicity of Paul the Apostle in which he sharply criticized the arguments of Hermann Detering and Robert Price proposing that Paul was not a historical person. In this post I am more interested in what he has to say about Detering’s case than Price’s since it is Detering’s work (and works he engages with: Schoeps and Schwegler in particular) that I have been deeply immersed in recently. Carrier writes of Detering:

The best formal attempt to argue for the non-historicity of Paul is that of Hermann Detering (see The Fabricated Paul). I cannot ascertain his qualifications in the field. But his writings are well-informed. They just trip over logic a lot. His case is not sound. Nor is anyone else’s I’ve examined. They falter on basic methodology (like ignoring the effect prior probability must have on a conclusion, or conflating possibility with probability) and sometimes even facts (e.g., Detering seems to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery; in fact, they are commonly found on real letters—I’ve seen several examples in papyrological journals).

Before I continue, some readers may think that my focus has been slanted towards “extreme” or “fringe” positions — terms that I find problematic despite their appearance in scholarly publications — but I must hasten to explain that the reason I don’t post so often on mainstream views is simply because they are widely recognized and readily accessible for anyone interested anyway. There are in fact two recent works on Galatians in particular that have made rich contributions to reading that epistle in new ways but within the parameters of “mainstream scholarship” that I would like to post about here, too. But I need to see if I can unravel a few questions relating to core issues first. Everything in its time. And speaking of time, I do point out again that the post by Carrier I am addressing is almost a decade old so I am not assuming he would necessarily write the same today.

I must also make it clear that I am not addressing the Paul-Simon Magus connection argument even though that was the focus of Richard Carrier’s criticism. I will address what I consider a few less well-founded criticisms of Detering, however.

But to the chase, and I have no doubts that that will be a collegial dialogue. (I further note that the blog post of 2015 has a tone of one of those pieces “written on the fly” — leaving the reader with the impression that more care and detail would have been added in a different venue at another time.)

Carrier’s first specific criticism:

Detering seems to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery

I do not see evidence to support that criticism in any of Detering’s work, including in the specific item I understand Carrier was addressing: The Falsified (or Fabricated) Paul. The specific passage in focus here is Galatians 6:11

See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!

The link is to a page with thirty plus translations of the same passage.

Detering’s focus in The Falsified Paul is the inconsistency among scholarly exegetes:

The writer’s reference to his handwriting in 2 Thessalonians 3:17—’I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write’—is regarded by most exegetes as a sign of the letter’s inauthenticity. Why is the corresponding reference in Galatians not so regarded?

(Detering, p. 55, my bolding)

What would interest me is a comparison of the specific terminology of the signatures we have in the Pauline letters and an explanation for these statements. A quick cross check on ChatGPT yields the following instances:

Self-referencing signatures in ancient letters were a way for the author to authenticate the document, demonstrate authority, or add a personal touch. Here are a few notable examples from different cultures:

1. Letters of Cicero

The Roman statesman Cicero often ended his letters with a personal note or signature. In some letters, he explicitly mentions writing with his own hand, such as in a letter to Atticus: “Ego enim has quidem, Attice, litteras scripsi meis manibus.” (“For these letters, Atticus, I wrote with my own hand.”)

2. Aramaic Letters from Elephantine

In the 5th century BCE, Jewish mercenaries stationed at Elephantine in Egypt sent letters back and forth, some of which include self-referencing signatures. For example, in a letter from the archive, one of the writers adds a line in his own hand, noting that he wrote the letter himself as a way to authenticate it.

3. Papyri from Oxyrhynchus

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of Greek texts from Egypt, includes many personal letters where writers occasionally mention that they are writing with their own hand. For instance, one letter might end with the phrase “ἐγὼ αὐτός,” meaning “I myself,” to indicate the writer’s personal involvement in the composition.

4. Babylonian Cuneiform Tablets

In ancient Mesopotamia, some cuneiform letters on clay tablets were signed by the scribe or author. Although they might not have used the phrase “with my own hand” due to the nature of the script, they often included personal seals or mentions of the scribe’s name as a way of authentication.

5. Biblical Letters

As mentioned earlier, Paul’s letters in the New Testament include self-referencing signatures, such as in 2 Thessalonians 3:17, where he writes, “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand,” to assure the recipients of the letter’s authenticity.

6. Egyptian Hieratic Letters

In some ancient Egyptian letters written in hieratic script, the writer might add a personal note or a self-referencing line at the end of the letter to indicate that the content was personally composed or approved by them, though this was less common than in Greek or Roman letters.

These examples show that self-referencing signatures were a widespread practice across various cultures and periods in antiquity, often serving as a way to authenticate or personalize a document.

Unless Paul expected the original single letter to “the Galatians” — presumably implying a very wide geographical area with multiple church assemblies — should be preserved for a reading (and visual inspection) in each church area, without it being copied, one must wonder what such a distinctive handwritten signature was likely to accomplish. Did not the author expect the letter to be copied by another hand? In the case of Cicero writing to Atticus I can understand such a signature. But in a letter to be circulated among a wide geographical distribution of churches? Not so much. Either way, such a signature cannot serve as decisive evidence for the historicity of its claimed author.

With respect to Carrier’s criticism of Detering, I may have missed the evidence for Detering seeming “to think self-referencing signatures commonly appear only in forgery“. If that has been a point in any of his arguments it is one I have not recently located — though I cannot say I have read everything or even most of his works, in English or German.

Carrier launches into the main body of his criticism with “The Prior Probability” rubric. Now I like Bayes’ theorem. It has a place in research of any kind, as the cover and title of Sharon McGrayne’s book on the theory demonstrates:

McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012.

Don’t knock Bayes’ theorem.

But historians work with multiple tools, not just one. And much depends on the way we conceptualize the questions. Here is an example of what I mean:

Jesus belongs to several myth-heavy reference classes. He is a worshipped savior deity. He is a legendary culture hero. He is a Rank-Raglan hero. And he is a revelatory archangel (already as early as the earliest writings we have, granting the letters of Paul are such). All of those classes of person already start with a high prior probability of being mythical, because most members of them are mythical (or for culture heroes, about even). And these are beings all of whom are claimed to be historical, yet are usually in fact mythical. Just like Jesus.

(Carrier, The Historicity of Paul the Apostle)

Agreed. But we can make it even simpler. The Jesus that all historians have to work with is a literary Jesus — by definition. He is found in no other ancient place than literature or inscriptions or scribblings. The same, we must hasten to add, is true of any “historical” person — whether we are talking about Winston Churchill or Julius Caesar. What I am saying is that history is dead; it no longer exists; there is nothing there — except in written or other forms of recording. All our historical persons live only in our minds as we read the surviving records. Some of those imagined figures once had a historical reference figure who was real — but that reality now escapes us in its fullness and can only be reconstructed according to our “best lights” of imagination fuelled by inscriptions or writings or other evidence. The historian’s job, or at least one of them, is to study those texts and images to discover what led to their creation, whether it was a reality or a fiction.

Yes, Bayes’ theorem can help us answer the question of whether certain texts and images reflect a real or an imaginary figure as their source of inspiration. But there is a but. It begins with how we frame our question.

So let’s get back to Paul. In contrast to Jesus, Carrier writes:

Paul … falls into the class of ordinary persons who wrote letters and had effects on history. In ratio, most of such people claimed to exist, actually existed.

So in Carrier’s blog post of nearly ten years ago Jesus was presented as a miracle working, death-defying man-god — a clearly mythical figure — while Paul was, by strikingly mundane contrast, an “ordinary person who wrote letters and had effects on history”.

That starting point is where I have a problem.

No, Paul did not write letters like any “ordinary person”. An “ordinary person” reveals their personality or their ideas through letters. Contrast Paul as a letter writer as summed up by Albert Schweitzer:

The odd thing is that [Pauline scholars] write as if they understood what they were writing about. They do not feel compelled to admit that Paul’s statements taken by themselves are unintelligible, consist of pure paradoxes, and that the point that calls for examination is how far they are thought of by their author as having a real meaning, and could be understood in this light by his readers. They never call attention to the fact that the Apostle always becomes unintelligible just at the moment when he begins to explain something; never give a hint that while we hear the sound of his words the tune of his logic escapes us.

(cited in Hart, 131f)

Carrier referred to an article on Paul by James Tabor and it is worth returning to Tabor’s words in this context:

There are four different “Pauls” in the New Testament, not one, and each is quite distinct from the others. New Testament scholars today are generally agreed on this point.

(Tabor referencing F.C. Baur and more recent scholars such as Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Jerome Murphy-O’Conner)

So which one is “the historical Paul”? We know that the author of Acts most certainly did not consider an “ordinary letter writer” to be the historical Paul.

I could fill several posts pulling out similar statements by scholars testifying either to the obscurity, or to the anything-but-ordinary “incomprehensible genius”, of a figure behind the letters.

Furthermore, on what basis can we assert that Paul “had effects on history”? Does not the evidence indicate that Paul’s letters had been somehow lost or forgotten while the churches grew, and that it was only from the mid second century that the letters were coming to light and being embraced. Christianity was evidently well established quite apart from any memory of Paul by the early second century. That sounds like Paul had little impact on history in the first century. Does not the evidence rather suggest that Paul was a product of second century history?

Another question comes to my mind here: Is it not somewhat hard to understand how a “brilliantly inconsistent” thinker could have had a serious and long-lasting impact on many other persons? A philosopher can be expected to write with a bullet directed point of view. Paul’s many contradictions, non sequiturs and mis-matches are sometimes said to be indications of his febrile genius or simply of an expansive and fluctuating intellect. Maybe that was the case. I wonder how many such persons have dramatic impacts on history, though. (I am open to being better informed here, so leave a comment if you can contribute to this point of discussion.)

Let Bayes be used to test the different options.

Carrier writes,

We can say several things about what are regarded as the six authentic letters of Paul . . .

First, they all cohere in style (idioms of vocabulary, connotation, grammar, punctuation, sentence length). The forged letters do not. They neither cohere with each other (except when produced as a unit, like the Seneca correspondence), nor with the style features of the authentic six. So one person did write those six (even if, as the letters openly state, they also reflected the views of a co-worker whom Paul sometimes names in each case).

No, they do not all cohere in style. I recently posted Harold Hoehner’s demonstration that Galatians has a style quite distinct from other letters attributed to Paul. Douglas Campbell in Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography, reminds readers that Paul’s letters are…

characterized by a remarkable variation in argumentation, structure, and expression. Just Romans and 1 Corinthians, whose authenticity is usually uncontested, when placed side by side, seem to come not infrequently from overtly different places in conceptual terms. Meanwhile, adding only 2 Corinthians and Galatians to the comparison diversifies the overall situation further, creating a fundamental methodological challenge. How are interpreters to supply a unified account of various aspects of Paul himself as his texts strain in multiple directions?

The same scholar addresses the range of stylistic differences that have divided scholars over questions of authenticity of both whole letters and parts of letters. While Campbell seeks to resolve many of these arguments (including with a discussion on computer assisted stylometric analysis), his detailed work is at the same time a reminder that scholars have long been troubled by what they see as a lack of coherence and inconsistency of style in the letters of Paul. Paul may have used a vastly varying range of styles or maybe we should test the idea of multiple authors as the preferred explanation — either way we must explain the lack of coherence in style! It makes no difference to the question of historicity. But let’s adhere to the real state of the evidence.

Carrier’s next claim:

Second, they are stitched together from pieces of other letters. Each full letter named in the New Testament actually contains pieces of several letters, whose full content and original destination are now lost (see OHJ, p. 511). Sometimes so badly connected up as to be nearly unintelligible (e.g. the transition between 1 Cor. 8 and 9: OHJ, pp. 582-83). One does not forge letters that way. Which makes this another good indicator that these are not forgeries. Rather, someone tried to semi-reverently keep an original collection, but just the parts they liked, and assembled them together into a new whole in the most logical way they could. Their meddling after that was small and nitpicking, as the manuscript evidence shows, or blatant and obviously un-Pauline, as some of the interpolations made before 150 A.D. show.

Here Carrier is assuming that a historical Paul wrote the pieces of letters stitched together when in fact that is the question being raised. If we have a “Pauline school” of scribes, with different authors contributing individual perspectives to a whole, we then have a literary corpus not unlike some of the Old Testament works claiming to be by this or that prophet or by Moses himself. Collaborative efforts found ways to accommodate different perspectives up to a point, often stitched somewhat crudely together. This is arguably part of the catholicizing process that we see in other New Testament writings (especially Luke and Acts). So the evidence is open to multiple interpretations.

Next,

Third, they all make arguments and interact persuasively in a context where the Jewish temple was still standing and its cult operating. And in a context where views of Jesus and the Church that appear in the Gospels have not yet come to exist (not even to denounce or counter or rebut, much less use or co-opt or transform). This is very unlikely unless the letters were written before the year 66 A.D. (when the Jewish War began, an event wholly unknown to the author), and before the Gospels were written (which could be as early as 70 or 75 A.D. for Mark).

This is a common point of view but it is not a solid argument. The most basic principle of dating documents is to begin where we have the most certain evidence. That means it is sound method to begin with the middle of the second century for the indisputable existence of the Pauline letters. It is only in that century that we have independent confirmation of the existence of the letters. As we work back we rely more on hypothetical reconstructions. Mark “could be as early as 70” but it could equally be as late as the second century (cf arguments for the influence of Josephus and the abomination of desolation pointing to Hadrian’s time). There are passages in Romans and 1 Thessalonians that make a lot of sense in a context after (even well after) the destruction of the temple and end of its cult. So the historical context is not so clear cut. Similarly for the opponents of Paul that we read about in Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence. Scholars have had to assume the existence of various types of “heresies” for which we have no first century evidence. It is only when we come to the second century that we begin to read evidence for the existence of “false gospels” and some Christians attempting to impose circumcision on believers and the heated controversy over the teachings and authority of Paul vis a vis Jerusalem apostles. The second century does indeed look very much like a potential home for the letters of Paul. I elaborate a little on this point in addressing the next section of Carrier’s argument.

In Carrier’s view,

That third point is important, because the letters explicitly present themselves internally as having been written in the 50s A.D. . . . So the congruence of that fact with their content totally ignoring later existing doctrinal and tradition battles in the Church is very likely if the 50s is indeed when they were written.

I have to disagree. It is in the second century that we find debates over circumcision and whether the law should be obligatory on Christians (one example: Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho), over whether meat sacrificed to idols should be eaten, speaking in tongues (Montanism in Asia Minor from the 150s), questions of celibacy, the competitive status of Paul and the Twelve (Marcionism from the 140s). It is as if Paul’s letters (and the Jerusalem council of Acts 15) had all been forgotten somehow. But how convenient it was that in the midst of those competing claims we find the first evidence of Paul’s letters and, lo and behold, they happened to give decisive — “historical” — answers to such pressing second century questions.

Carrier continues:

Note that letters that don’t speak to a forger’s own time and circumstances, even covertly or obliquely or prophetically, run counter to a forger’s interests; the last thing forgers want to do is work hard to produce a document that is circumstantially obsolete before it is even published.

Circumcision and the requirements of the law were questions in Justin Martyr’s time (mid second century) and Justin had no knowledge of a first century apostolic council to bring to bear on the discussion. The Elchasite “heresy” originated in the early second century (the time of Trajan) and was so significant that it became influential in the subsequent rise of Manichaeism and Islam. The Elchasites taught a “gospel”, a “good news” that required circumcision for believers in Christ (who happened to be a great angel from heaven) and revered certain days and “elements of the world” (water, heaven, earth, bread, oil, salt, wind) — blithely unaware of Paul’s letter to the Galatians that sought to combat the distinctive features of that second century “heresy”.

So I do sympathize with Carrier when he writes:

I can’t even think of a single example of an ancient forger successfully ignoring all the central doctrinal and tradition disputes of their own day merely to produce a convincing period-accurate but thereby contemporarily-irrelevant document. The temptation to support or attack the then-going views (usually by fabricating early support for them, e.g. 2 Peter) is simply too strong, and in fact is the usual motivation for forging documents in the first place.

Very true. But I believe he is mistaken when he adds, “In short, the letters of Paul make no sense in the second century.” On the contrary, the second century is when we find the most relevance for Paul’s letters.

As far as I aware we have no evidence outside the letters themselves (and Acts) for these controversies existing in the first century.

Carrier:

Most Detering-style arguments are based on claiming hundreds of interpolations in these letters that conveniently and circularly support Detering’s conclusions, all based on a series of ad hoc assumptions about the second century history of the Church, when in fact almost everything we know about that is speculation, not established fact. The more assumptions you have to rely on, and the more conveniently complex they are, the lower the prior probability of your thesis. Speculation in, speculation out. Detering does not seem aware of this logical fact. He thus falls into the common trap of all bad historians: any theory you can gerrymander to fit all the evidence must be true. Because look how well it fits! Sorry. Illogical.

I don’t know the evidence on which Carrier bases the above characterization of Detering’s arguments. I have not seen arguments of his that are “based on claiming hundreds of interpolations . . . . and . . . . ad hoc assumptions about the second century history of the Church”. On the contrary, I have seen in Detering’s works an abundance of documented source material from the second, third and fourth centuries that address the state of “the Church”, with varying degrees of reliability, in the second century. I have translated a 270 page essay by Detering on this era and you can make the judgment for yourself. As for the 85 page book Falsified Paul a word search on “interpo” (for interpolation/interpolator…) yields only three hits. Nor should we overlook the undeniable fact that letters and biographies of Paul really were written by forgers in the second century. We have several of those forged letters in the New Testament (the Pastorals, for example). And we know for a fact that there were disputes about what was original in Paul’s letters, what had been cut out by opponents, and so forth. This situation is a fact that any historian must be aware of when examining the evidence.

It is true that the state of the evidence does not often allow a historian to do more than reconstruct “a more plausible scenario” for early Christianity. To that extent there is inevitably a degree of speculation in our reconstructions. The use of Bayes can help us refine the “most plausible” scenario. But when it comes to the question of “how/when/where Paul began”, whether as a historical figure behind the literature or as the literary figure itself, I think at least some “Detering style arguments” are well worth serious consideration.

Campbell, Douglas A. Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.

Carrier, Richard. “The Historicity of Paul the Apostle.” Richard Carrier (blog), June 6, 2015. https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7643.

Detering, Hermann. “Die Gegner des Paulus – Judaistenthese 2. Jahrhundert – Radikalkritik,” July 4, 2018. http://radikalkritik.de/die-gegner-des-paulus-judaistenthese-2-jahrhundert. — Translation: The Opponents of Paul: A Second Century Judaizers Thesis

Detering, Hermann. The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight. Journal of Higher Criticism, 2003.

Tabor, James. “The Quest for the Historical Paul.” Biblical Archaeology Society, June 13, 2024. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/the-quest-for-the-historical-paul/

Hart, Patrick. A Prolegomenon to the Study of Paul. Leiden ; Boston: BRILL, 2020.

And with thanks to Chrissy Hansen’s articles alerting me to more works to read and ideas and criticisms to ponder, if not always to agree with.

2024-08-19

Hermann Detering’s works translated to English

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Others have translated several of Hermann Detering’s works into English and these are available on Radikalkritik.

I have translated a number of additional works of his but copyright prohibits me from making some of them public. Some works that are otherwise only available in German on HD’s Radikalkritik website can be made public — as far as I am aware. I have attempted to make contact with guardians of Radikalkritik without success. I am more than willing to work with them should contact be made in the future.

Translation of the independently published Inszenierte Fälschungen: Die Paulusbriefe in der holländischen Radikalkritik. This is based on HD’s doctoral thesis:

Staged Forgeries: The Pauline Epistles in Dutch Radical Criticism

Contents

Preface
Preface of the dissertation
Introduction
- Inducement and purpose
- Older works in the history of research
- Structure and outline
1 The Dutch Radical School
- 1.1 On the concept of the Dutch radical school
- 1.2 Prehistory
  - 1.2.1 Preliminary remark
  - 1.2.2 Edward Evanson (1731-1805)
  - 1.2.3 Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860)
  - 1.2.4 Bruno Bauer (1809-1882)
- 1.3 The Representatives of Dutch Radical Criticism
  - 1.3.1 Allard Pierson (1831-1896) – Samuel Adrianus Naber (1828-1913)
  - 1.3.2 Abraham Dirk Loman (1823-1897)
  - 1.3.3 Willem Christiaan van Manen (1842-1905)
  - 1.3.4 H.U. Meyboom (1842-1933)
  - 1.3.5 G.J.P.J. Bolland (1854-1922)
  - 1.3.6 Van den Bergh van Eysinga (1874-1957)
2 The history of Christianity in the first two centuries
- 2.1 General
- 2.2 The Loman Hypothesis (“Hypothese-Loman”)
- 2.3 Van Manen
- 2.4 Bolland
- 2.5 Van den Bergh van Eysinga
- 2.6 Criticism
- 2.7 Result
3 The Criticism of the Pauline Epistles
- 3.1 The inauthenticity of the so-called main letters
  - 3.1.1 Argumenta externa
    - A. Non-Canonical Christian Witnesses
    - B. Non-Christian Witnesses
    - C. The New Testament
    - D. Argumenta externa from the Canon History
    - E. History of the Apostolate
  - 3.1.2 Argumenta interna
- 3.2 The inauthenticity of the remaining Pauline letters
  - 3.2.1 The Letter to the Philippians
  - 3.2.2 The Letter to Philemon
  - 3.2.3 The Epistles to the Thessalonians
  - 3.2.4 The letter to the Colossians
  - 3.2.5 The Epistle to the Ephesians
  - 3.2.6 Pastoral Epistles and Letter to the Hebrews
- 3.3 Criticism of Paul’s letters in the Probabilities
  - 3.3.1 Structure and intention of the Probabilities
  - 3.3.2 Paul’s letters as “patchwork”; on the “lacera conditio Novi Testament i”
  - 3.3.4 Paulus episcopus as collector and editor
  - 3.3.5 The development of Christianity in the first two centuries
  - 3.3.6 Reception of the Probabilities
  - 3.3.7 Critical Appraisal
4 Methodological Presuppositions
5 Theological Consequences
6 Reception
- 6.1 Holland
- 6.2 Germany
- 6.3 Switzerland
- 6.4 England/U S A/Canada
- 6.5 France
7 The Dutch Radical Criticism and the Current State of Pauline Research
- 7.1 Preliminary note
- 7.2 History of the early reception of Paul (argumenta externa)
- 7.3 On the Literary Criticism of the Pauline Epistles
- 7.4 Ecumenical address and un-Jewish character of the letters
- 7.5 Gal 1-2
- 7.6 Result
Literature
Abbreviations
Translation of Dutch quotations

—o0o—

Another translation of a major work of Detering’s. It was not finished, but there is nonetheless much to follow up in what HD did make available:

The Opponents of Paul – a 2nd Century Judaizers Thesis

Contents

Preface
Introduction
Paul versus Elchasai – the letter to the Galatians
Elchasai in the Letter to the Colossians
To the Philippians – Against the Elchasaite “Dogs”
Paul versus Cerinthus – 1st and 2nd Corinthians

(Published on Radikalkritik as Die Gegner des Paulus – Judaistenthese 2. Jahrhundert on July 4, 2018, by H. Detering)

Elchasai and the Heresy of Colossians

This article appears to be an earlier draft (2012) of the matching chapter in The Opponents of Paul (2018)

Gnostic Elements in the Pauline Epistle

Contents

Title and overview of Gnostic Elements in Paul’s letters
Introduction
Phil 2:6-11 or: Jesus versus Jaldabaoth
1 Corinthians 2:6-8 – Who are the “rulers of this age”?
1 Corinthians 15:8 – The Apostle as a “Miscarriage”
Bibliography

—o0o—

The following is a copy of files I produced for my own personal use in January 2022. They almost certainly will not be of a quality for general reading, but I upload them here simply because I suspect I will not get around to tidying them up for more general use and others may make allowances for their drawbacks and still find them useful:

Buddha, Joshua, Jesus — and the Way to the other Shore

The Gnostic Interpretation of the Exodus and the Beginnings of the Cult of Joshua Jesus

I could see no publisher proprietary data in my Kindle version so I have posted my machine translation in good faith, believing that this upload is not in violation of any laws.

More to come if/as permission is granted.

2023-04-10

Third and Last Section – g. Conclusion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

118

Conclusion

The final conclusion of the investigation into the relationship between the Pauline letters and their position in relation to the Acts of the Apostles will be provided by the decision on the letter to the Galatians.

It is certain that the Pastoral letters are the last products of this epistolary literature. The first letter to the Thessalonians presupposes the Acts of the Apostles and, apart from the Corinthian and Roman letters, also presupposes the Galatian letter with its current introduction.

The author of the letter to the Philippians, a letter that concludes the series to which it belongs, used the second letter to the Corinthians, the first and second sections of the letter to the Romans, and the first letter to the Thessalonians.

The letters to the Ephesians and Colossians presuppose familiarity with the first letter to the Corinthians and with the letter to the Galatians.

When the third section of the letter to the Romans was written, the Acts of the Apostles did not yet exist, for the author of the latter has (in the speech of Paul to the elders of the church of Ephesus in Acts 20:35) inserted the catchphrase of that section regarding the reception of the weak in a completely foreign context and on a highly unmotivated basis *)—at least in its current form, the Acts of the Apostles did not yet exist even then, when the concluding section of the letter to the Romans was written, for the one who gave the Acts of the Apostles its final redaction imitated, in his reference to the words of the Lord, which he added to his unmotivated exhortation to receive the weak, the example of Christ for the reception of the believers among themselves (Romans 15:7).

The first section of the letter to the Romans is the oldest product within the circle of this literature, for it was known to the author of the first letter to the Corinthians, which immediately follows it in time and reproduces the catchphrases of his dialectic *) concerning sin as the sting of death and the law as the power of sin —if even the third section of the letter to the Romans precedes the Acts of the Apostles, then even more so does the first letter to the Corinthians, which was before the author of that section.

It can even be demonstrated that the Apollos of the Acts of the Apostles owes the essence of his character, his attitude, and his successes to the first letter to the Corinthians: he was originally (Acts 18:24) an Alexandrian Jew, hence speculatively educated,**) and thus represents in his beginnings human wisdom, whose contrast to the divine the author of the first letter to the Corinthians deals with in the section in which he sets Paul and Apollos against each other—he goes from Ephesus to Achaia and Corinth, thus coming to the stage he occupies in that letter—by his struggle with the Jews, he performs a great service for the believers here, thus doing again what the Apollos of the first letter to the Corinthians does, he waters the planting that Paul has laid out***): only the author of the Acts of the Apostles has, in his own way, subjected the Alexandrian-educated dialectician both to Paul and to Christian Judaism, by giving him through Aquila and Priscilla, that couple friendly to the Gentile apostle, the Christian completion (Acts 18:2, 3, 26)—finally, that unmotivated and highly unfortunate appeal of the apostle to the selflessness he has shown in providing for his own livelihood *) was formed according to the presuppositions of the first letter to the Corinthians.

*) Acts 20:35 πάντα ὑπέδειξα ὑμῖν ὅτι οὕτω κοπιῶντας δεῖ ἀντιλαμβάνεσθαι τῶν ἀσθενούντων.
Rom 14:1 τὸν δὲ ἀσθενοῦντα τῇ πίστει προσλαμβάνεσθε.

*) 1 Cor 15:56. Rom 7, 8-13

**) The writer of Acts even marks him out. emphatically (ibid.) as a scientifically educated man ανηρ λογιος.

***) Acts 18:27-28. 1 Cor 3:6

*) In that speech to the ecclesiastical leaders of Ephesus (Acts 20:33-34).

120

I must admit that I am not yet able to make a definitive decision regarding the relationship between the Second Corinthians and the Acts of the Apostles. However, one thing is certain: the Second Corinthians presupposes a detailed treatment of Paul’s life. Its author firmly assumes that the life of the Apostle was distinguished by miracles and miraculous experiences. He already lives with the idea that suffering was the essential attribute of the Gentile Apostle but was always resolved into victory through divine miraculous help (Ch. 6:5-10). Even the enumeration of his sufferings, such as being beaten by the Jews and then whipped (Ch. 11:24-25), corresponds to the order in which the Gentile messenger,**) after being persecuted and mistreated by the Jews in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra, is whipped in Philippi in the Acts of the Apostles. The fact that the alms collected in Antioch and sent by Paul of the Acts of the Apostles and his fellow traveler Barnabas to the brothers in Judea is referred to as a service also agrees with the usage of the Second Corinthians. One of the two, the author of this letter or the author of the Acts of the Apostles, must have had the other’s work in mind, but who? The way in which the latter (Acts of the Apostles 24:17) describes the gift that Paul brings to Jerusalem as one that he sacrifices to his people as his personal gift seems to me to be compelling evidence that the author of the Second Corinthians had an earlier treatment of the Acts of the Apostles in mind, and that the one who gave the latter work its final redaction borrowed its keywords from that letter.

**) Acts 11:29εἰς διακονίαν. Compare 2 Cor 8:4; 9:12

121

Therefore, there must be a kind of pivot point where the Galatians letter stands: the letters that precede it do not yet know the present Acts of the Apostles, and among those that follow, the first Thessalonians and Philippians letters assume familiarity with it, not to mention the pastoral letters.

So what about the letter itself?

It knows the present Acts of the Apostles*). When Paul is brought into conflict with it, whether he should circumcise Timothy, who had a Jewish mother but a Greek father, but circumcised him because of the Jews among whom he lived, the conflict is just as naturally shaped as resolved. In contrast, the corresponding conflict in the Galatians letter, as I have shown, is already flawed and misshapen in its conception, and the author of this letter neither understood nor dared to give it a real solution, a real conclusion. Although he would like to contrast with the flexibility that Paul shows in the Acts of the Apostles, he would like to bring it about that the apostle freed the Greek Titus from the claims of Judaism, and yet he is so dependent on his original, the Acts of the Apostles, that he borrows a turn of phrase*), which would lead to the apostle submitting to the consideration of the Jews. Only the embarrassment into which this dependence on his original has entangled him is so great that he leaves the sentence that the turn of phrase demands unfinished and drops the verb completely.

*) Therefore, I must also overturn the opposite assumption that I left standing in my work on the Acts of the Apostles.

*) that expression that describes the authoritative character of the consideration for the Jews – Gal. 2:4 διὰ δὲ τοὺς παρεισάκτους ψευδαδέλφους. Acts 16:3 διὰ δἐ τοὺς Ἰουδαίους τοὺς ὄντας ἐν τοῖς τόποις ἐκείνοις

122

The Paul of the Galatians is so jealous of his independence, which is even guaranteed by a special divine revelation, that from his side, it is inconsistency, false concession, even mistrust in the revelation he received when he goes to Jerusalem and presents his Gospel to the apostles of circumcision, whom he himself despises as only supposed pillars of the Church – even for the express purpose of testing his concern that he might be or have been running in vain, at the right source, at the right authority. Even this inconsistency can only be explained by the dependence on the Acts of the Apostles, in which the outbreak of the Antiochian discord over the validity of the law of circumcision – a discord that could not be resolved outside Jerusalem, naturally led to the sending of Paul and Barnabas to the apostles and elders of the early Church, to obtain a decision from them (Gal. 2, 2. Acts 15, 2).

123

The comparison between Paul and the original apostles was accompanied by a clause, as was also the decision that Paul and Barnabas received from the council in the Acts of the Apostles*). The Paul of the Galatians assures that he made every effort to fulfill the obligation that clause imposed on him to support the poor of the original community, just as in the Acts of the Apostles, the decision of the Antiochene community to send aid to the brothers in Judea is carried out by Paul and Barnabas**). The recognition by the original apostles in Galatians, upon seeing the grace given to Paul, that he had the right to testify to the community, is imitated in the Acts of the Apostles by the joy Barnabas felt when he saw the grace of God among the believers in Antioch, whose conduct he had investigated on behalf of the original community in Jerusalem***). Finally, in the Galatians, when the communities in Judea hear that the one who once persecuted them now preaches the faith he once destroyed, we hear in this stiff and laboriously formed sentence the patchwork of keywords from the Acts of the Apostles’ account of the impact that Peter’s report on the conversion of Cornelius had on the community in Jerusalem and the news of the conversion of the former enemy of the community †).

*) Gal 2:10 μόνον. Acts 15:28 πλὴν.

**) Acts 11:30 ὃ καὶ ἐποίησαν.
Gal. 2:10 ὃ καὶ ἐσπούδασα αὐτὸ τοῦτο ποιῆσαι.

***) Gal 2:9 καὶ γνόντες τὴν χάριν τὴν δοθεῖσάν μοι . . . . . δεξιὰς ἔδωκαν ἐμοὶ . . . .
Acts 11:23 καὶ ἰδὼν τὴν χάριν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐχάρη.

†) Gal 1:23 μόνον δὲ ἀκούοντες ἦσαν ὅτι ὁ διώκων ἡμᾶς ποτε νῦν εὐαγγελίζεται τὴν πίστιν ἥν ποτε ἐπόρθει, καὶ ἐδόξαζον ἐν ἐμοὶ τὸ Θεόν.
Acts 11:18 ἀκούσαντες δὲ ταῦτα . . . . ἐδόξαζον τὸν Θεὸν.
Acts 9:21οἱ ἀκούοντες. . . . ἔλεγον· οὐχ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ πορθήσας
Compare also Acts 8:1, 3 22:4 Gal 1:13

124

The haphazard way in which the quarrel between Paul and Peter is brought about in the Galatians is also due, as we can now demonstrate with certainty, to the clumsiness with which the author copied his original: only in the Acts of the Apostles is the accusation made by the Jewish faction against Peter that he has entered and eaten with uncircumcised people naturally brought about – only here is it really justified that Peter is living like a Gentile – only here was there a real reason for complaints against him (Acts 11:2-3).

In short, it is not the author of the Acts of the Apostles who is strange to Galatia, as I once thought, nor is Galatia a threatening land for him because of the struggles presupposed in the Galatians, which Paul must quietly and loudly pass through – but the author of this letter chose it as the scene of his struggles because it was still, as it were, virgin territory, not yet occupied by the Acts of the Apostles, which only presupposes communities here in general, and his successor, the author of the letter to the Colossians, followed him in choosing Phrygia as the scene of his struggles, which is only mentioned in passing in the Acts of the Apostles. *)

*) After this result, one can judge how well-founded all the previous analyses were of the “Galatian” and “Colossian” heresies and their relationship to the “seduced” communities.

Until now, the contradictions that I have demonstrated in the assumptions of the Galatians, for example, have been overlooked. Instead, people have attributed to the “seduction techniques” of the heretics in individual communities what was, in fact, encountered by the authors of these letters as a general ecclesiastical condition. Unfortunately, the authors of the letters had to force this general condition into the entanglement and history of a single community, since they had to assume that Paul intervened in these situations and had to fight personal adversaries who were trying to turn his followers away from him. The inner struggle of the church with its own Judaism, the struggle of its freedom with its own bondage, was now turned into an intrigue of individual Judaizing heretics who wanted to make up for the damage that Paul had done in individual communities, resulting in the relapse of Pauline free thinkers into bondage, and the Apostle’s clumsy wounds over the possibility that a community he had just engendered and that had just been securely free, had allowed itself to be lured back into legal servitude.

125

We are able to test the validity of the above conclusions by examining the relationship between the Pauline letters and the various redactions that the Gospel of Luke underwent, as well as the Luke writings that were used by Ur-Luke, the author of the first redaction.

The letters that presuppose the current Acts of the Apostles also know the accompanying Gospel of Luke, and their diligent use of it testifies to the authority it had already gained in the circles in which they themselves originated.

For example, how does the author of the Galatians come to call the original apostles “those who were reputed to be something” (Galatians 2:2) without any preparation for this abrupt expression and without any explanation of it, before he designates them in verse 9 as “those who were recognized as pillars,” and in verse 6 as “those who were supposed to be something”? He has before him the clumsy expression of the Gospel of Luke (in the section dealing with the dispute among the disciples at the Last Supper), “who should be the greatest among them.*)

*) Gal 2:2 τοῖς δοκοῦσι. Ch. 2:6 τῶν δοκούντων εἶναί τι Ch 2:9 οἱ δοκοῦντες στῦλοι εἶναι. Compare Ch. 6:3
Luke 22:24 τίς αὐτῶν δοκεῖ εἶναι μείζων.

126

The assertion of the Apostle in the Philippians’ letter that he forgets what is behind and strains toward what is ahead is reminiscent of the saying of the person who is focused on what is behind, imitated **). Additionally, the “rejoice” in the Philippians’ letter and the designation of the Apostle’s co-workers as those whose names are written in the book of life echoes the saying, “rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Philippians 4:3, Luke 10:20).

**) Phil 3:14 τὰ μὲν ὀπίσω ἐπιλανθανόμενος. Luke 9:62 βλέπων εἰς τὰ ὀπίσω

The remark in the Ephesians’ letter that one should not be swayed and tossed by every wind of doctrine is based on a symbolic application of Luke’s account of the storm on the sea. Only Luke explicitly mentions the disciples not only battling against the storm wind but also against the waves.***)

***) Eph. 4:14 κλυδωνιζόμενοι. Luke 8:24 τῷ κλύδωνι

The frequent recommendation of prayer found in all these later letters aligns with the assumption in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus sought prayer in solitude. Moreover, the exhortation in the Colossians’ letter (4:2) to stand firm in prayer reflects the praise that Luke’s Gospel gives to shameless persistence in asking (Luke 11:8).

127

The lost catchword in the Galatians letter about the false friends who want to “exclude” the believers, as well as that in the first Thessalonians letter about the Jews who want to hinder the apostle from bringing salvation to the Gentiles, is taken from the lament in the Luke Gospel about the legal experts who have taken possession of the key to knowledge and prevent those who are entering *) – likewise the catchwords in the exhortation of the Ephesians letter: “therefore, gird up your loins,” and the exhortation of Luke: “let your loins be girded” **).

*) Gal 4:17 ἐκκλεῖσαι ὑμᾶς θέλουσιν. 1 Thess 2:16 [corrected from 1:16] κωλυόντων. Luke 11:52 τοὺς εἰσερχομένους ἐκωλύσατε.

**) Eph 6:14 στῆτε οὖν περιζωσάμενοι τὴν ὀσφὺν ὑμῶν.
Luke 12:35 ἔστωσαν ὑμῶν αἱ ὀσφύες περιεζωσμέναι

—————————-

On the other hand, the one who composed the original version of the current Luke’s Gospel, known as “Urlukas,” already knew the first Corinthians letter – he could have taken the twisted wording of the saying of the Lord, according to which his followers should take up their cross daily,***) only from the naturally related expression of the same letter: “I die daily.” He also used the category of the faithful steward in addition to that of the faithful servant in the parable of the wise servant †), only because of his dependence on the same letter. The addition to the interpretation of the parable of the sower (Luke 8:12), “so that they may not believe and be saved,” which is patterned after the first section of the letter to the Romans, is just as unnecessary, since the fate of those who are like the seed that fell on the path is already sealed by the fact that the devil comes and takes the word from their heart, as the birds come and eat the seed along the path in the parable itself.*) Likewise, Urlukas, like the authors of the later letters, remained faithful **) to the supposed Pauline category of “the kingdom of God” (the abstraction and universalization of the kingdom of heaven, which is the standing category of the original gospel). The Apostle’s phrase in the first Corinthians letter (15:9) that he is the least of the apostles seems to me to be too natural and much too fully worked out, and the contrast to which the glory of the grace that has raised him above all other apostles forms (v. 10) seems to me to be too subtly elaborated and motivated for me to believe that the author had that saying in mind, which in the Luke’s Gospel ***) is nothing more than a lost cause. The most I could agree to is that the gospel source material that Urlukas and the author of the first Corinthians letter used contained that saying in a more appropriate, more prominent position. However, it is certain that there was already a gospel document before Urlukas that took a reconciling view of the apostle to the Gentiles. The mechanical and inappropriate manner in which the saying about the foreign exorcist is inserted in Luke’s Gospel (9:49-50), which represents the father who revealed this to the wise and understanding but hid it from the infants, leads us back to an original gospel source from which the author of the first Corinthians letter borrowed the material for his antithesis between the divine favor of the foolish and the humiliation of the wise (1:27) and for the hidden wisdom of God (2:7).

***) Luke 9:23 ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καθ᾿ ἡμέραν 1 Cor 15:31 καθ᾿ ἡμέραν ἀποθνήσκω.

†) Luke 12:43 is the name of this servant, the Matth. 24:45 [corrected from 24:25] ὁ πιστὸς δοῦλος is also δοῦλος, against it V. 42 πιστὸς οἰκονόμος — compare 1 Cor 4:2.

*) Even in the redaction that Urlukas gave to the parable itself, it is an inappropriate exaggeration when that seed (v. 5) is also trampled.

**) Compare, for example, the natural wording of 1 Cor. 4:20 with the convoluted wording of Luke 17:20.

***) Luke 9:48 “Whoever is the least among you all is the greatest.”

129

In short, my discovery that the author of the first Corinthians had access to that Gospel text from which Urlukas borrowed a great deal of his enrichments of the primitive Gospel has now also been secured from this perspective – as for the other letters, I believe I have done enough for the beginning if I founded the rational basis for research, even though the futility of the questioning corresponds to that of the most decisive answers – supported by this success, I therefore turn back to the Gospels to first determine their relationship to the ecclesiastical literature of the second century.

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BRUNO BAUER: Criticism of the Pauline Epistles – in English: TOC

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Criticism of the Pauline Epistles

3 sections in one volume

B. Bauer

Berlin, 1852

Published by Gustav Hempel

Reprint 1972 – Scientia Verlag Aalen

Machine translated by Neil Godfrey from https://archive.org/details/kritikderpaulini0000baue/page/n81/mode/2up – March 2023

First Section

The Origin of the Letter to the Galatians

Preface__________________________________________________Page 3

Introduction (1:6-10)________________________________________ ” 8

The Call of the Apostle (1:11-16)_______________________________ ” 13

The Apostle’s Relationship with Jerusalem (1:17-2:14)_______________” 15

The Theme of the Letter (2:15-21)______________________________ ” 27

Doctrinal Controversy (3:1-4:31)________________________________” 33

Exhortations and Conclusion (5-6)_______________________________” 57

Second Section

Origin and Composition of the First Letter to the Corinthians

Introduction (1:1-9)___________________________________________Page 3

Factions in the Church (1:10-4:21)________________________________ ” 6

Concerning Immorality (5:1-6:20)_________________________________” 34

Concerning Food Offered to Idols (8:7)______________________________” 42

Concerning Eating Meat Sacrificed to Idols (8:8-11:1)__________________” 48

Concerning the Lord’s Supper (11:2-34)_____________________________” 62

Concerning Speaking in Tongues (12:1-14)___________________________” 66

The Resurrection (15)____________________________________________” 70

Conclusion (16)_________________________________________________” 74

Third and Final Section.

The Second Letter to the Corinthians________________________________Page 3

The Letter to the Romans___________________________________________” 47

The Pastoral Letters________________________________________________” 77

The Letters to the Thessalonians______________________________________” 89

The Letters to the Ephesians and Colossians_____________________________” 101

The Letter to the Philippians__________________________________________” 110

Conclusion________________________________________________________” 118

BRUNO BAUER: Criticism of the Pauline Letters – in English

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Machine translated by Neil Godfrey from Kritik der paulinischen Briefe – March 2023

I compiled the table below to illustrate Bruno Bauers’s conclusion (see “10. Third and Last Section – g. Conclusion”) on the order in which the New Testament works were composed:

Pastorals	The final documents
Philippians	↑
1 Thess Philip Eph Col	↑
Galatians	↑
Acts – Luke ?=====? 2 Corinthians	↑
Possibly Part 2 of Romans precedes Acts-Luke – but not absolutely certain	↑
Part 3 of Romans	↑
Ur-Luke	↑
1 Corinthians	↑
part 1 of Romans	↑
1st Gospel Document	The earliest document

2022-05-18

Miscellany

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Was a crucifixion in heaven possible? conceivable?

But the following, again, is the cause of men’s dying: A certain virgin, fair in person, and beautiful in attire, and of most persuasive address, aims at making spoil of the princes [= archons] that have been borne up and crucified on the firmament by the living Spirit . . . .

Acta Archelai 8, describing a third century Manichean answer to the question, Why death?

What gave rise to Gnosticism from within Judaism?

Birger Pearson’s answer is very similar to what I think led to the emergence of Christianity from within Judaism. If gnostics fell away from Judaism by rejecting its god as a blind and ignorant Demiurge who gave a law that enslaved its followers to the ways of the flesh, Christianity offered a positive response to similar circumstances, a new covenant grounded in an allegorical revision of the old rather than an outright rejection of it:

One can hear in this text echoes of existential despair arising in circles of the people of the Covenant faced with a crisis of history, with the apparent failure of the God of history: “What kind of a God is this?”‘ (48,1); “These things he has said (and done, failed to do) to those who believe in him and serve him!” (48,13ff.). Such expressions of existential anguish are not without parallels in our own generation of history “after Auschwitz.”

Historical existence in an age of historical crisis, for a people whose God after all had been the Lord of history and of the created order, can, and apparently did, bring about a new and revolutionary look at the old traditions and ‘assumptions, a “new hermeneutic”. This new hermeneutic arising in an age of historical crisis and religiocultural syncretism is the primary element in the origin of Gnosticism.

Pearson, Birger. Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1990. p. 51

How to explain Paul’s letters if we see signs of Philo and Seneca in them?

Philo: Continue reading “Miscellany”

2021-08-15

Reason to Doubt the Only Historical Date Marker in Paul’s Letters?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Several discussions have broken out on “Biblical Criticism & History Forum” over the verses in 2 Corinthians describing Paul’s escape from Damascus by being lowered in a basket from a window in the city wall.

2 Corinthians 11:

³⁰If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. ³¹The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised forever, knows that I am not lying. ³²In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me.³³But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands.

This passage is the only explicit chronological marker in Paul’s letters. In this post I leave aside the question of which Aretas is being referred to and play the villain by looking at those arguments that raise doubts about the very authenticity of the passage.

First, a brief word in defence of its authenticity:

Against all these conjectures [against authenticity] one must object that manuscript evidence of an interpolation is lacking. “There is no evidence that the epistle ever existed without these verses at this point.”60 Nor is the difficulty alleviated by the hypothesis of a scribal gloss, which merely transfers the problem to the copyist who would have inserted the verses at this point.61

60 Plummer, Second Epistle, 332. [the link is to archive.org where Plummer suggests that if there is interpolation it may even have been made into the original letter by the Apostle himself]

61 Barrett, Second Epistle, 303. [again, like is to the relevant page in archive.org where this time Barrett sees a problem if we try to imagine a scribe inserting such a passage at this point.]

Welborn, Laurence L. “The Runaway Paul.” The Harvard Theological Review 92, no. 2 (1999): 122.

Welborn also posted a list of critics who have thought the passage should be deleted entirely:

J. H. A. Michelsen, “T Verhaal van Paulus’ vlucht uit Damaskus, 2 Kor. XI:32,33; XII: 1, 7a een interpolatie,” Theologisch Tijdschrift 7 (1873) 424-27;
J. M. S. Baljon, De tekst der brieven van Paulus aan de Romeinen, de Corinthiers en de Galatiers als voorwerp conjecturalkritiekbeschouwd (Utrecht: Boekhoven,1884) 159-61;
Windisch, Zweite Korintherbrief, 363-64;
Hans Dieter Betz, Der Apostel Paulus und die sokratische Tradition: Eine exegetische Untersuchung zu seiner “Apologie” 2 Kor 10-13 (BHTh 45; Tubingen: Mohr/Siebeck, n. 201.

What did they say?

In short, the episode is thought not to fit with the other experiences Paul has been writing about and it doesn’t seem to follow from the preceding words. It even seems to get in the way of what would otherwise be a coherent sentence. Paul insists that he will boast of his weaknesses, and then declares most emphatically that he is not lying …. and then, the basket escape. Is that not an odd scenario to follow a boast in weakness and an oath that he is not lying?

Remove the basket escape and we have Paul saying he will boast in his weaknesses, then swears he is not lying — then speaks of his vision and being taken up to the third heaven and being made to suffer a thorn in the flesh as a result. Does not that sound like a coherent line of thought? Where does the escape from Damascus fit?

Machine translations, with a little human polishing here and there, follow. Highlighting added for easier focusing on the main points.

First, for reference, here is the passage in context:

³⁰If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. ³¹The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, who is to be praised forever, knows that I am not lying. ³²In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me. ³³But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands.

12 I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. ²I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. ³And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— ⁴was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. ⁵I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. ⁶Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, ⁷or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. ⁸Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

The arguments quoted: Continue reading “Reason to Doubt the Only Historical Date Marker in Paul’s Letters?”

2021-05-11

Celestial or Earthly Christ Event? Why So Much Confusion About Paul?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Arthur Droge has made available on his academia.edu page an article in which he presents

a strong case for that “rulers of this age … crucified the Lord of Glory” passage in 1 Corinthians not being part of the original letter
reasons to think the passage was added to the letter around 140 CE
evidence for a wide variety of early Christian views about the crucifixion (some had it on earth, some in the firmament, with and without suffering…)
implications of the above that point to Paul’s letters evolving through various hands over time and no more being penned by “Paul” than any of the surviving letters, acts, gospels and apocalypses bearing the names of Peter, James, John, Thomas, Barnabas, Mark, Matthew, Luke, etc were genuinely penned by those figures.

The article is Whodunnit? Paul’s Peculiar Passion and Its Implications. The link is to the article on academia.edu.

I will certainly have to write out the key points of Droge’s article and add it to my archived series “Rulers of this Age” in 1 Cor. 2:6-8 but till then I leave the above link for interested readers to check out the full 22-page article for themselves.

Some interesting excerpts.

What is an Interpolation?

By interpolation I simply mean a retrospective change in an older text, usually introduced with the intention of “clarifying” or “improving” it, or bringing out what was thought to be its “real” meaning. The change may have taken place when a work was copied and perhaps re-edited at some point after its original composition. That is to say, interpolations are an all-too-common feature of texts that have come down through a succession of manuscripts or handwritten copies. While the identification of interpolations is unremarkable in other disciplines, whose canons likewise derive from manuscripts, it is looked down upon by New Testament scholars. (p. 6)

Indeed. See, for example, a list of 30 ancient texts cited to justify the term “a culture of interpolations” see A Case for Interpolation Does NOT Rely On Manuscript Evidence. See also my 2009 post Forgery in the Ancient World for another list of mostly classical texts. Recall, further, most recently Greg Doudna’s proposal that the John the Baptist passage in Josephus is a “misplaced” passage — another type of “interpolation”.

Droge offers two criteria for identifying interpolations:

significant differences in language, style, and subject matter.
the removal of the suspect passage has to make the resultant rejoining of the surrounding material more cogent, smoother….

On the basis of those criteria Droge demonstrates a very strong likelihood of the “rulers of this age” being an interpolation.

No consensus in early Christian texts about who crucified Jesus, or about when, where, how, or why

For even a casual sampling of texts from the Christian archive makes it patently clear that there was no consensus about who crucified Jesus, or about when, where, how, or why Jesus was crucified. Indeed, as we shall see, there was not even a consensus about whether Jesus was crucified. Each of these questions was a point of conflict and contestation for centuries before the Christians finally managed to get their story (more or less) straight. (p. 12)

I confess I was somewhat thrilled to see Droge make the use of some of the same archaeological evidence that has influenced my own thinking: the crucifixion of Jesus was not the primary focus of early Christian belief if one turns to early sarcophagi and catacomb art. Jesus is more likely to be depicted as a youth, a good shepherd, a healer than crucified. Droge adds the significant point:

The silence of the archaeological record in this case is a stark warning about extrapolating from texts ideas widely shared by the rank and file, or by the socalled “communities” supposedly lurking behind the texts we read and to which they provide access. (p. 12)

Droge directs readers to Stowers and Rüpke. I’ll quote a little from each:

The pervasive assumption that all Christian literature and history in the first one hundred years or so sprang from and mirrored communities inhibits historical explanation by social and psychological theory that is normal for the rest of the academy. A community in this sense is a highly coherent social formation with commonality in thought and practice. The idea that the Christian movement began with these communities derives from Christianity’s own myth of origins, but has been taken as historical reality. The myth can be traced to Paul, Acts and Eusebius. (Stowers, 238)

and

If the authentic letters [of Paul] (which might themselves be the result of later redactional combinations) are seen as an example of the formation of a network among like-minded persons in Jewish diaspora communities in Asia Minor and the Greek mainland, we could expect hundreds of letters – and we cannot exclude that they were in existence. The published corpus, however, is characterised not by the documentation of a network, but by a pseudepigraphical supplementation, which partially even theologically reflected on pseudepigraphy. The different agents of this continuation had heterogeneous interests. They were engaged in the prolongation of Paul and contested others’ interpretations; they venerated and instrumentalised Paul. These conflicting views were certainly connected to the interest in and critique of the specific Pauline practices and beliefs which we find even more prominently outside of the corpus, in Lukan Acts for instance. All this indicates that we are not dealing with archives of communities and local identities, but with professional exegesis and philosophical schools (and with Marcion, even historical research). (Rüpke, 180)

Now that makes a lot of sense when we recall Justin Martyr’s identification of himself as a philosopher and recall Abraham Malherbe’s demonstrations that the Pauline writings suggest we are closer to the mark when we compare early Christian thought and propagation with the philosophical schools of the day than with “mystery cults”.

Droge brings the Ascension of Isaiah into the discussion and reaffirms the view that the section on the birth, miracles and crucifixion of Jesus is a later addition and that the original text depicted a crucifixion in the Firmament. We recall Earl Doherty’s and Richard Carrier’s works. I have lately gone a bit back and forth on that question so I am willing to resume a back seat for a while and watch and learn with more reading and reflection. A significant difference, however, is that Doge insists on the Ascension of Isaiah being a post-Pauline second-century work whereas Doherty was prepared to lean towards those who dated it as early as the late first century. Droge’s point is that an Ascension of Isaiah scenario of Rulers of this Age crucifying Jesus points to the Pauline passage being added in the second century.

The idea that Jesus did not actually die on the cross is traced from a very literal reading of the Gospel of Mark (it was Simon of Cyrene who was crucified), the related view of Basilides in the second century, through the Second Treatise of the Great Seth and Apocalypse of Peter. Ignatius and Justin further indirectly hint at this rival belief. The spiritual dimension of the event is presumably a reaction to a narrative set in the mundane realm.

But if that’s the case, why? We don’t normally expect sectarian branches to rewrite a historical tradition as having happened in the heavens. But it does make sense if that mundane narrative involving Galilee, Pilate, a lynch mob of Jews, etc. was built from a “midrashic” reading of Hebrew Scriptures. If so, there was room for others to disagree and propose other interpretations of those scriptures. Hence I found most intriguing Droge’s pointing out the way gnostic myths were derived from particular readings of Psalms. Psalm 2 has God laughing at rulers thinking they can defy God and his anointed. Enter the gnostic accounts of Jesus laughing at those who are thinking they are crucifying him on the cross. Similarly for the myth of descent and ascent through the heavens: Psalm 24 speaks of the King of Glory which is close to the Ascension’s Lord of Glory, and it also speaks of him progressing through “gates”.

But why?

Why were those verses about spirit beings crucifying Christ added? Best for you to read Droge’s article. Meanwhile, no, Droge does not suggest they were polemical or deviously attempting to undermine the original views of Paul. He sees the addition of the passage more as a commentary.

The more interesting and important consequence is the recognition that our passage was a second-century gnostic attempt to ventriloquize Paul, to make him say what he should have said – indeed, must have said – and to do so in a fashion not dissimilar to the way in which the modern guild of scholars continues to carry on the time-honored task of Pauline commentary.

Claude Lévi-Strauss is worth recalling at this point:

[A] myth is made up of all its variants, [therefore] structural analysis should take all of them into account. . . . . There is no one true version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth. (pp 435f)

Commentaries as expansions and explanations become another version of the myth. Droge points the finger at the Valentinian scholars of the second century,

for whom Paul’s letters were a major focus of their commentarial endeavors, and who succeeded in creating a Paul in their own image, and then esteemed him as the chief architect of their mythmaking. Our passage is one, very small, but precious, piece of that enterprise, which has managed, purely by chance, to survive as a page in the archive or dossier that only later would be called “First Corinthians.”

How the sausage is made

So how did the letter-making sausage machine work, according to Droge?

By recognizing that our passage is an interpolation of the second century, we can see that individual letters were still under construction well into that century, and we can begin to discern some of the ways in which that building process worked. Already at a pre-collection stage, Paul’s “letters” were far from static or inert data, moving through time under the guardianship of vigilant Christian scribes. Rather, the materials out of which individual letters would be constituted were still in flux, and provided occasions for innovative and improvisational interventions from a variety of sources, with a variety of interests, and in a variety of forms (e.g., emendations, deletions, glosses, interpolations, commentary, short narratives, and so on). As I have tried to suggest, it would be better to think of “First Corinthians” at the pre-collection stage as an active site or open file, more along the lines of an archive or dossier, and certainly not a unified, much less actual, letter. So conceived, the process that yielded the letter known as “First Corinthinas,” as well as the collection known as the corpus paulinum, would be analogous to the process of the composition of the gospels. In other words, at some point in the second century materials of heterogeneous origin, date, and provenance began to be fashioned into a loose epistolary form and attributed to a figure from the first century. (21f)

Droge, Arthur. “‘Whodunnit? Paul’s Peculiar Passion and Its Implications.’” Accessed May 10, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/43327375/_Whodunnit_Paul_s_Peculiar_Passion_and_Its_Implications_.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 428–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/536768.

Rüpke, Jörg. “The Role of Texts in Processes of Religious Grouping during the Principate.” Religion in the Roman Empire 2, no. 2 (2016): 170. https://doi.org/10.1628/219944616X14655421286059.

Stowers, Stanley. “The Concept of ‘Community’ and the History of Early Christianity.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 23, no. 3 (2011): 238–56. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006811X608377.

2020-12-25

Once more — Paul’s Letter a Rewritten Scripture?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Modern epiphany procession: St Josephs, Singapore, Good Friday 2009

This one is my own “find” (if it is indeed a real find; that’s up to you to decide). I begin with Paul’s reference to the veil of Moses. That’s the easy part. What we are looking for, however, is not scattered references to “Old Testament” passages but indications of lengthy passages that have been rewritten for a “New Covenant” context.

So we begin with Moses veil and Paul’s comparison of that with the blindness of the unsaved as well as the complementary comparison of both Moses and Christians taking on the glory of God.

What precedes Paul’s points about being changed into a glorious image is

Paul’s refusal to visit the Corinthians and instead sending them a letter that made them grieve
An appeal for mercy to the wrongdoer
The image of the church as a procession of a divine epiphany that promised life and death [many translators have described a prisoner in a Roman triumphal procession but we will see that that image is incomplete and misleading]
Comparison of letter and spirit: letter kills.

God passes before Moses, Mount Sinai, circa Pentecost, 1400 BC

What precedes Moses having a shining face is

God’s refusal to go with his people and their remorse
Moses appeals to God for mercy for the wrongdoers
God showing himself to Moses and making promises of both mercy and death
The ten commandments repeated: the cause of the death of 3000

What follows Paul’s point about being transformed into God’s glory is a discussion of

our earthly tabernacle and how we long to have it changed into a heavenly tabernacle, with tabernacle being a metaphor for body, of course.

What follows the description of Moses face shining with divine glory is

the construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness.

That is:

2 Corinthians 2-5	Exodus 32-40
Paul’s refusal to visit the Corinthians and instead sending them a letter that made them grieve	God’s refusal to go with his people and their remorse
An appeal for mercy to the wrongdoer	Moses appeals to God for mercy for the wrongdoers
The image of the church as a procession of a divine epiphany that promised life and death	God showing himself to Moses and making promises of both mercy and death
Not administering the letter which kills, spirit gives life	Ten commandments engraved in stone by Moses
Christians transformed into glorious image of Christ	Moses face transformed by and into God’s glory
Our earthly tabernacle and how we long to have it changed into a heavenly tabernacle	The construction of the tabernacle in the wilderness

The details where the devils are. . . Continue reading “Once more — Paul’s Letter a Rewritten Scripture?”

2020-12-23

Paul’s Letters as Re-written Scripture

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Recall that a case can be made that the epistle to the Galatians, for all of the “raw emotion” that we read there where Paul accuses his readers of stupidity and orders them to stop and think whether they received Christ by faith or by works of the law, was not at all written in white heat by an indignant apostle but by a calm and methodical author who was imitating a passage in the book of Jeremiah. See

Well, a funny thing happened to me the other day as I was strolling through Jstor articles made available through the State Library of Queensland: I found another article making the same point, only this time in relation to 1 Corinthians 5-6. The author is Sean M. McDonough, professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Massachusetts. The article is “Competent to Judge: The Old Testament Connection Between 1 Corinthians 5 and 6” and was published in The Journal of Theological Studies in 2005.

Before setting out McDonough’s main points I should protect his integrity and warn you that his conclusion is very different from mine. McDonough thinks Paul was so immersed in meditations on the Old Testament writings that he shaped his way of addressing a contingent administrative issue with the Corinthian church by mentally structuring his message as a mirror of a passage in Deuteronomy.

Here is what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 5-6. I think you’ll agree that it certainly looks like a genuine instruction from an offended apostle addressed to a very specific church:

5.1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife! 2 And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. 3 For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. 4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, 5 deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

6.1 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. 8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

9 I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. 10 Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.

12 For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? 13 But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.” [as per many Bible’s with marginal notes Paul is here quoting Deuteronomy 17:7]

Paul concludes by quoting the “cast out” passage (he uses a form of the same word found in the Septuagint) that we find in Deuteronomy’s instruction on how to respond to “abominations” in Israel’s midst — “which is clearly parallel to Paul’s discussion of removing from the church the man living with his mother-in-law.” The passage in Deuteronomy 17 has God telling his people how to respond to “abominations” in their midst.

McDonough acknowledges in an interesting footnote that the larger passage’s similarity to Deuteronomy 17 is not immediately noticeable:

The relevance of Deut. 17:1-6 is obscured in most treatments of I Corinthians 5, probably due to the fact that commentators feel its contents are adequately summarized in 17:7. My thanks to Professor Morna Hooker for emphasizing its significance here. Brian Rosner does note the significance of Deut. 17:2, 3 in his treatment of 1 Corinthians 5; see Rosner, Paul, Scripture, and Ethics: A Study of 1 Corinthians 5-7 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994), pp. 65, 69.

Sean McDonough was struck by something when he re-read Deuteronomy following the passage Paul cites (“cast out – exarate, ἐξάρατε -the evil person”), Deuteronomy 17:8 Continue reading “Paul’s Letters as Re-written Scripture”

2019-06-14

Mythicism and Paul’s Claims to Supernatural Revelation (Engaging with McGrath — 2)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In Australian private hospitals we are likely to see pictures of a crucifix or Mother Mary. In Thailand we see Buddhist paraphernalia. View of one taken by me from a hospital bed where I arrived as result of accident. Life is always full of unexpected surprises.

Again waylaid by life experiences so surfacing here another post begun way back. The first post in this series is Addressing James McGrath’s Arguments Against Mythicism — 1

This time we are addressing

McGrath, James F. 2011. “Mythicism and Paul’s Claims to Supernatural Revelation.” Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. McGrath (blog). October 18, 2011. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2011/10/mythicism-and-pauls-claims-to-supernatural-revelation.html.

McGrath begins:

Mythicists regularly claim (as one commenter on this blog recently did) regarding Paul that “Our earliest Christian source claimed to have learned nothing from the Christians who came before him. He claimed to know what he knew by divine revelation.”

Since the subject has come up once again, in the same form in which it always seems to, let me devote a blog post solely to this topic, in the hope that any mythicists who desire not to be like creationists (who are notorious for repeating the exact same arguments even though they have been addressed adequately on countless other occasions) may at least show a willingness to consider the evidence and respond.

Here are the main relevant points that need to be considered.

First, in Galatians 1:15-17, Paul claims not to have consulted with anyone before starting to proclaim the Gospel.

That “first main relevant point” that McGrath informs readers needs to be addressed simply avoids the problematic verse that the commenter was addressing. McGrath begins with Galatians 1:15 but fails to acknowledge that the commenter, Vinny, was referring to Galatians 1:11-12. Vinny’s comment that McGrath claims to be addressing is:

Our earliest Christian source claimed to have learned nothing from the Christians who came before him. He claimed to know what he knew by divine revelation. He didn’t tell us why he persecuted the Christians who preceded him. Most of the communities he addressed were communities that he founded. The only evidence we have for what those communities knew and understood about Jesus is what we find in Paul’s letters. It is not unreasonable suppose that they knew other things but any declarations concerning what those things actually were are little more than conjecture and speculation. How much of his message came from those who preceded him and how much was the product of his own imagination and creativity is also a matter of conjecture and speculation. Those are pieces of the puzzle that we don’t possess.

The passage to which Vinny was referring was Galatians 1:11-12 (I am using the same NIV translation as McGrath is using):

11 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

But let’s see how McGrath addresses the comment. As we just noted, he glosses over the above verses and begins at verse 15:

Here is how the New International Version renders it:

But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.

Important things to note are

(1) that Paul had previously persecuted the church (Neil: The persecution reference is two verses earlier), and so was not entirely unaware of what Christians had to say,

(2) his aim here is to emphasize that his authority is not dependent on the apostles in Jerusalem,

(3) he does not in fact say that he received everything he knew about Jesus or the Gospel by supernatural revelation, and finally

(4) if he did mean to claim that everything that he knew was by supernatural revelation, no historian would believe him, since there is obviously a more mundane explanation available for how Paul knew the things that he did.

I think we can all agree with the first three of McGrath’s four things to note. Concerning #4, historians have no problem “believing” that mystics and visionaries claim to have visions and revelations from spirit realms. Historians acknowledge that Joan of Arc heard voices without believing that a heavenly saint really was speaking to her, that Saint Francis had visions without believing God was really communicating with him, and that people speak in tongues without believing that a real “holy spirit” is doing the work. I learned through an article by Stephen Young that “the now classic analysis” explaining the difference was set out by Wayne Proudfoot in 1987 in Religious Experience:

Descriptive and Explanatory Reduction

We are now in a position to distinguish two different kinds of reduction. Descriptive reduction is the failure to identify an emotion, practice, or experience under the description by which the subject identifies it. This is indeed unacceptable. To describe an experience in nonreligious terms when the subject himself describes it in religious terms is to misidentify the experience, or to attend to another experience altogether. To describe Bradley’s experience as simply a vision of a human shape, and that of Mrs. Edwards as a lively warm sense that seemed to glow like a pencil of light, is to lose the identifying characteristics of those experiences. To describe the experience of a mystic by reference only to alpha waves, altered heart rate, and changes in bodily temperature is to misdescribe it. To characterize the experience of a Hindu mystic in terms drawn from the Christian tradition is to misidentify it. In each of these instances, the subject’s identifying experience has been reduced to something other than that experienced by the subject. This might properly be called reductionism. In any case, it precludes an accurate identification of the subject’s experience.

Explanatory reduction consists in offering an explanation of an experience in terms that are not those of the subject and that might not meet with his approval. This is perfectly justifiable and is, in fact, normal procedure. The explanandum is set in a new context, whether that be one of covering laws and initial conditions, narrative structure, or some other explanatory model. The terms of the explanation need not be familiar or acceptable to the subject. Historians offer explanations of past events by employing such concepts as socialization, ideology, means of production, and feudal economy. Seldom can these concepts properly be ascribed to the people whose behavior is the object of the historian’s study. But that poses no problem. The explanation stands or falls according to how well it can account for all the available evidence.

(Proudfoot, 196f. bolded emphasis mine)

Thus McGrath’s suggestion that Paul’s claim to have received by revelation his gospel of Jesus is implausible confuses acceptance of Paul’s claim with belief in Paul’s own beliefs about his claim. Historians can and should explain Paul’s words without themselves personally believing Paul’s interpretations. It is absurd to suggest that they should reject Paul’s words because they themselves don’t believe his account.

So we can correct #4 to say that “if Paul did mean to claim that everything that he knew was by supernatural revelation, no historian would believe his visions were genuinely from another realm; historians would be quite content to accept that he claimed to have had a direct revelation by whatever means.”

McGrath Does Make a Serious Point

It is too easy to dismiss everything McGrath writes after we read the above lapses where he fails to address the verse Vinny was discussing and confuses the historian’s choices of descriptive and explanatory interpretations. McGrath does, in fact, make a serious point in the next section of his post. Continue reading “Mythicism and Paul’s Claims to Supernatural Revelation (Engaging with McGrath — 2)”

2019-04-25

What Christians Said About Jesus Before the New Testament Canon …. a post for Paul George

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by Neil Godfrey

Another post I promised a commenter, this time Paul George. The point here is to clarify the grounds upon which Nodet and Taylor claimed that our canonical gospels are not the best place to start in order to understand Christian origins. The evidence they cited for this claim came from the Christian writings we have prior to the appearance in the literature of any explicit knowledge of our gospels. Our gospels evidently carried very little (= zero) weight as authoritative information about Jesus until the late second century.

Before there was a “written authoritative reference point”, that is, before the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were embraced as standard narratives about Jesus, how did Christians write about Jesus?

Ignatius of Antioch (we will assume here the conventional identity and date for Ignatius, with his writings dated early second century)

For Ignatius, the documents about Jesus to be relied upon were not written in ink:

My documents are Jesus Christ; my unimpeachable documents are his cross and resurrection, and the faith that comes from him. — Phil. 8:2

The Roman Creed

1. I believe in God the Father Almighty
2. And in Christ Jesus, his only Son, our Lord;
3. Who was born by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary;
4. Was crucified under Pontius Pilate and was buried;
5. The third day he rose from the dead;
6. He ascended into heaven; and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
8. And the Holy Ghost;
9. The Holy Church;
10. The forgiveness of sins;
11. The resurrection of the body (flesh)

Ignatius speaks often of Christ, but refers to precise events only in succinct statements which are very close to the primitive kerygma—the proclamation of the saving death and resurrection—or which resemble those of the Roman Creed. (Nodet and Taylor, 4)

Clement of Rome (writing 15 years before Ignatius)

As Christian Scripture he knows at most 1 Cor and recalls the context of crisis in which it was written. He refers often to salvation in Jesus Christ, but, like Ignatius, without ever alluding to the facts of the life of Jesus. Only once does he cite words of Jesus (13:2), but the logion is not known in this form in the NT, which shows that for Clement there is no official text (although that does not, of course, exclude the existence of some documents). He speaks of Jesus only by way of the OT. Thus, when speaking of Christ as the suffering servant, he makes no direct reference to his life but uses only a biblical passage (the song of Isa 53:1-12). It is interesting to note that Heb 10:5 does exactly the same: “Coming into the world, Christ said: ‘You did not want sacrifice or oblation, but you formed for me a body [. . .]’ (Ps 40:7).” (Nodet and Taylor, 5)

The Didache (widely judged to be first century CE)

The Didache knows and interprets the OT. It also quotes words of Jesus related to the Sermon on the Mount, but without a precise literary link with the Matthaean text, and a very similar version of the Lord’s Prayer; there is probably a common origin in the liturgy. (Nodet and Taylor, 5)

Didache chapter 9:
1. And concerning the Eucharist, hold Eucharist thus:
2. First concerning the Cup, “We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the Holy Vine of David thy child, which, thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy Child; to thee be glory for ever.”
3. And concerning the broken Bread: “We give thee thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy Child. To thee be glory for ever.
4. As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, but was brought together and became one, so let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom, for thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.”
5. But let none eat or drink of your Eucharist except those who have been baptised in the Lord’s Name. For concerning this also did the Lord say, “Give not that which is holy to the dogs.”

Not mentioned by Nodet and …. but surely significant is that the Didache interprets the eucharist as a thanksgiving meal without any relationship to a death of Jesus.

The Didache further admonishes a high regard be held for those who spread the word, for the importance of staying with likeminded saints and warning against false teachers. The scenario appears to be entirely oral. No written gospels (nor even epistles, for that matter) to rely upon to maintain true teaching.

Epistle of Barnabas

The Epistle of Barnabas is a Christian interpretation of traditions from the OT or related texts . . . . This interpretation is totally based on a typological reading of the OT, with several facts or words relating to Jesus, but in a rather stylized form and in any case without a literary link with the gospels as we know them. (Nodet and Taylor, 5)

Polycarp of Smyrna

Polycarp of Smyrna, whose background is similar to that of Ignatius of Antioch, is familiar with the writings of Paul and makes a number of references to them. He has some knowledge of Matt, perhaps in the form of written notes (compilations of logia), but certainly not as a normative work. (Nodet and Taylor, 5)

Polycarp also speaks of being attentive to the word handed down orally in order to refute those who deny the incarnation.

The Shepherd of Hermas

The Shepherd of Hermas belongs to the timeless world of apocalyptic and knows no Scripture apart from itself (cf. also Rev 22:18 f.). (Nodet and Taylor, 5)

Continue reading “What Christians Said About Jesus Before the New Testament Canon …. a post for Paul George”

2019-04-09

The Relative Insignificance of the Acts and Teachings of the Historical Jesus

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Amazon cover of *Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis*

The early Jewish Christians remained Jews, with no thought of embracing a new religion; they were merely convinced that Jesus was the “Messiah” or the “Christ,” and they regarded his Messiahship as much more important than any new moral message he might be bringing. That is, they believed in Jesus, rather than that what Jesus taught was true — an attitude that remained characteristic of most Christian thought until the nineteenth century. This conviction involved certain intellectual beliefs or expectations: notably, that only righteous, Law-observing Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah would share in the Kingdom he would set up on his second coming. But their faith in Jesus was primarily a commitment to Jesus: it was practical rather than intellectual.

Much the same holds true of Paul, though his conception of the nature of the work of Christ was quite different. For him, this was not to found the Kingdom, but to transform human nature from flesh to spirit, and thus to save individual souls from bondage to sin and death. By accepting and believing in the Christ, men are united to him in a mystical union, die with him to the old Adam, put off the flesh with him, and rise with him, completely transformed in their nature, to live a new and divine life, a life “in Christ.” This is all for Paul an intensely personal and practical religious experience. Believing in Christ is no mere intellectual assent, and acceptance; it is utter absorption.

Hence neither the early Jewish Christians nor Paul made central what Jesus taught.

Randall, John Herman. 1970. Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis. New York: Columbia University Press. pp 146f

2019-03-31

Another thesis introducing a Simonion gnosis into Paul’s letters

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by Neil Godfrey

If you find the following mix of machine translation and my own editing horrific enough you may prefer to read the original French itself that I copy afterwards. But first, some background will help. Earlier in the article several redactions of Paul’s epistles have been postulated (credit to Turmel):

The original letters of Paul:

inspired by his faith in the forthcoming restoration of the kingdom of Israel which had been announced by Jesus and which constituted the initial substance of the Gospel.

A second redacted version had been attributed to Marcion and

corrected this messianic nationalism by the anti-Jewish gnosis of Marcion.

A third series of redactions produced the versions closer to what we have today, and

maintained the Gnostic Spiritualism of [Marcion’s edition] by dismissing or hiding its anti-Judaism.

The following passage we read a modified hypothesis:

(2) After the revolt of the Jews in 66 and their final crushing in 70, a strong current of anti-Judaism spread in the eastern part of the Roman Empire but especially in Syria. The Judeo-Christians of Jerusalem had retreated to the confines of Transjordan, where they lingered, under the name of “Nazarenes” or “Ebionites”, away from the rest of the Christianity, almost foreign to his life and evolution, so that they soon became heretics.

Antioch became the great metropolis of the Christian world. There was formed a “school of theology” which claimed Simon, the former Esmoun of the Phoenician coast, became the saviour god of the Samaritans. It repudiated the God of the Jews, considered the spirit of evil. It was said that Simon, whose name means “obedient”, had come from heaven to obey the will of the Most High and bring to men the “Gnosis”, that is, the true knowledge, that of their origin, of their nature and their end. The mind, it was said, came from God but fell because of an original fault, in the bonds of the flesh. It can recover its original purity and return to lost Paradise only by rejecting the traditional laws, especially those of the Jews, made to enslave him, and professing a docile faith in the liberating doctrine of Simon. With him, by the grace of the supreme God of whom he is sent, one is freed from sin. It is liberated from this mortal body to reach the life of the spirit by the practice of mortification, abstinence and continence.

It is a Christian transposition of this simonian gnosis offered to us in the econd redaction of Paul’s epistles. It differs singularly from the first. If it was added by a series of skilful interpolations and convenient suppressions, it was because she found there points of attachment which allowed her to benefit from the prestige of the Apostle without risking the disfavor of novelty in religion.

The original

(2) Après la révolte des Juifs en 66 et leur écrasement final en 70, un fort courant d’anti-judaïsme se répandit dans la partie orientale de l’empire romain mais surtout en Syrie. Lés Judéo-Chrétiens de Jérusalem s’étaient repliés sur les confins de la Transjordanie, où ils végétèrent, sous le nom de « Nazaréens » ou d’ « Ebionites », à l’écart du reste de la Chrétienté, presque étrangers à sa vie et à son évolution, de sorte qu’ils firent bientôt figure d’hérétiques.

Antioche devint la grande métropole du monde chrétien. Il s’y était formé une Ecole de théologie qui se réclamait de Simon, l’ancien Esmoun de la côte phénicienne, devenu le Dieu Sauveur des Samaritains. L’on y répudiait le Dieu des juifs, considéré comme le Génie du mal. On y disait que Simon, dont le ùom signifie « obéissant » était venu du ciel pour obéir à la volonté du Très-Haut et apporter aux hommes la « Gnose », c’est-à-dire la Science véritable, celle de leur origine, de leur nature et de leur fin. L’esprit, expliquait-on, est issu de Dieu mais tombé par suite d’une faute originelle, dans les liens de la chair. Il ne peut recouvrer sa pureté première et regagner le Paradis perdu qu’en rejetant les lois traditionnelles, surtout celles des juifs, faites pour l’asservir, et en professant une foi docile en la doctrine libératrice de Simon. Avec lui, par la grâce du Dieu suprême dont il est l’envoyé, on s’affranchit du péché. On se libère de ce corps mortel pour atteindre à la vie de l’esprit par la pratique de la mortification, de l’abstinence et de la continence.

C’est une transposition chrétienne de cette Gnose simonienne que nous offre la seconde rédaction des Epîtres de Paul. Elle diffère singulièrement de la première. Si elle lui a été adjointe par une série d’interpolations ingénieuses et de suppressions opportunes, c’est qu’elle y trouvait des points d’attache qui lui permettaient de bénéficier du prestige de l’Apôtre sans risquer la défaveur qui s’attache aux nouveautés en matière de religion.

Alfaric, Prosper. 1956. “Les Epitres de Paul.” Bulletin Du Cercle Ernest Renan 35 (April). p. 4

Please note, though, that I present the above as a summary of an idea that has connections with others that have been presented on this blog, especially though Roger Parvus’s posts — in the last of which he finds himself leaning towards a historical Jesus at the root of it all. As for my own views they are far from decided. There is simply so much material I have yet to consider and think through.

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https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
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Conclusion

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Criticism of the Pauline Epistles

3 sections in one volume

Contents

First Section

The Origin of the Letter to the Galatians

Second Section

Origin and Composition of the First Letter to the Corinthians

Third and Final Section.

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Was a crucifixion in heaven possible? conceivable?

What gave rise to Gnosticism from within Judaism?

How to explain Paul’s letters if we see signs of Philo and Seneca in them?

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But why?

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McGrath Does Make a Serious Point

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