spamandham

It wasn't the end of the age of law yet. Paul says so much in the passage we've just been discussing.

Does Paul directly tell us why God would wait to reveal this secret? I don't think he does, but, Paul emphasizes the idea of secrets being revealed more than once. This doesn't fit with the idea of Paul's contemporaries personally knowing Jesus. Paul also makes no distinction between the nature of the appearance of Jesus to him in a vision, and the appearance of Jesus to everyone else, including James.

Suppose for a moment that Paul viewed Jesus as a figure from the foggy past, and that Paul had a vision in which certain secrets about salvation were revealed. Why would we expect Paul not to claim it was the right time for that to happen?

But it seems to me that for Paul to make such a claim sucessfully, there would have to be some commonly accepted pre-existing expectation that it was the end of the age. Paul never gives us details as to what the basis of that expactation was, but I think we can reasonably venture some guesses. One possibility is that it was the calculated end of Daniel's 70 weeks. A second possibility is that it was the dawn of the age of Pisces (which may be what spurred Daniel's predicted end of the age anyway).

There are other options (not intended to be exhaustive):

c) Paul views the death of Christ as the starting point for some chronology, which ends in his day

d) Paul views history as broken up into appropriate time periods, with the death of Christ in one of these periods, and the revelation of the secret in another

e) Paul's Jesus is a mystical character representing a past age of Israel

andrewcriddle

Paul's statement implies that the coming of faith based on the death and resurrection of Christ means that the law is no longer necessary.
technically at least c) and d) may well be possible. They are however rather ad-hoc and far from immediately obvious.

Andrew Criddle

spamandham

I agree that's what it means. But importantly, Paul emphasizes the faith rather than the death, implying that no-one he's talking to was aware of the events regarding Jesus first hand. If they were, it would be natural to reckon back to that rather than emphasizing a revealed faith instead.

At least they do not require ignoring significant aspects of the evidence.

Amaleq13

Sure it does. It fits as a contrast favoring Paul (he hoped). They knew personally the living Jesus while Paul knows personally the risen Christ.

Isn't this entirely consistent with the notion of Paul trying to establish himself as just as genuine an apostle.

andrewcriddle

In Colossians (which IMO is Pauline and in any case is almost certainly well before 100 CE) we have for example ch 2 v 14-15
This seems to say that it is the crucifixion itself which brings an end to the age of law.

Andrew Criddle

(PS I regret it if you found my comments on your alternative interpretations of Paul over-brusque.)

spamandham

Colossians is not generally considered to be authentically Pauline. It would be best to leave it out of the discussion.

andrewcriddle

Colossians if not Pauline (on which there is no consensus) is at least very close in time to Paul. Even if the author of Colossians is not Paul, he is prima facie a very early interpreter of what Paul meant.

In any case passages like Galatians 3:13 are similar. which seems to mean that the power of the law to condemn us is ended by the death of Christ.

Andrew Criddle

spamandham

...but in the very next verse, Paul explains that it's faith that does the job

"14He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit."

I read this to mean that Jesus' death was a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

gurugeorge

This word is interesting. Nowadays "faith" usually means something like trust, especially trust in something that seems to go somewhat against reason.

Apparently, for Plato, pistis was a form of doxa (belief, opinion), a form that relied on the evidence of the senses. IOW, pistis was empirical knowledge. In fact, ironically, this is all that we moderns call (properly) knowledge, and place above Plato's episteme (necessary, demonstrable knowledge), which has been downgraded to mere logical necessity due to social conventions in the meaning of words sustained over time.

So what does pistis mean in Paul and early Christianity? Does it mean something similar to the Hebrews' "substance of things hoped for, evidence of things unseen"? Was this the same as the silly modern sense of "faith"? Or was it, on the contrary, just what it said on the tin: the substance, the arrival in one's life and experience, of what was hoped for, and the becoming-evident in one's experienceof things that were previously not seen? (IOW does it actually have a proper connection with the older meaning, unlike the "belief in the absurd" sense, which actually turns that older meaning on its head?)

In some slightly later proto-orthodox writings it seems to mean something like "belief in literal the veracity of the canon". (Can't remember where I got this from, Ehrman's Lost Christianities I think.)

It's only later that the "absurd" sense creeps in.

(Incidentally I think it's clear that Tertullian's actual point in the identifiable quote from which this pseudo-quote was probably derived was "Humean" - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - and he believed the Apostles of his belief were honestly telling that they'd seen extraordinary events. And that's in line with the earlier sense, so I don't attribute this "absurd" sense to him; but the "absurd" sense does seem to come in to Christianity more and more once orthodoxy is established. This is unsurprising, since most people couldn't read the evidence that Tertullian was talking about - ex hypothesi, they had to hear it third-hand.)

andrewcriddle

In Galatians 4:4 Paul says This seems to imply that Christ's coming into the world was the time when it was appropriate for salvation to be revealed without any need for a further delay.

(What passages in Paul would you regard as evidence that Paul thought of the crucifixion of Christ as long ago ?)

Andrew Criddle