gstafleu

Ah, so we do agree the two are different.

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

I am arguing for three bodies!

An individual believer's real flesh and blood body.
Christ's
The body of believers together in communion - otherwise known by the Church through the centuries as the body of Christ - we are all partakers in one body. When the bride of Christ marries Christ the two fleshes become one - Genesis.

So we might be seeing an evolution in thinking here. Paul is talking about believers coming together for a good meal probably in a magial mystical fashion in Christ's name. Someone later comes along and eucharises this and gets rid of the meal element.

We are left now with a muddle of theological ideas, and a possible further clue that the body of Christ was first the believers coming together and only later morphs into an hj.

And thus the whole bit is an interpolation.

judge

You are still being too kind. The bible is the most over analysed book in the world and it would be nice to find new textual insights, but because of the extreme ammount of analysis already done it is hard to find genuine stuff, and so the temptation is to find stuff that isn't there.

andrewcriddle

Hi Ben

Give Paul's usage of "delivered up" for the death of Christ in Romans (4:24 and 8:32) if the passage in Corinthians means "delivered up" it should mean "delivered up to death" this would imply that Paul had a tradition in which Jesus was either a/ killed at night or b/ sentenced to death at night.

a/ seems unlikely and IMHO it is more likely that Paul's tradition lacked a formal death sentence by a Sanhedrin sitting at night than that it lacked a reference to Jesus being betrayed by a follower.

Hence I tend to prefer the translation "betrayed"

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

The words on the night when imply that Paul knew some narrative, however brief, of the events that led to the crucifixion. If so, then delivered up [to death] could indicate the time at which those events got underway, and could thus be the arrest. This is similar to how the term is used in Mark 9.31, in which the delivery itself (into the hands of men) cannot be the death proper.

Out of curiosity, what do you do with the 12 in 1 Corinthians 15.5?

Ben.

andrewcriddle

Hesitantly I regard the twelve as a symbolic term like century in the roman army which did not need to have exactly one hundred men on its payroll.

It is only much later that Luke thinks that the twelve needed replenishing with Matthias after the death of Judas.

Andrew Criddle

ApostateAbe

My new thread was locked apparently because spin had a problem with redundancy or plagiarism or whatever, so I am resurrecting this one. spin's updated version of the OP is posted on his blog here. spin referred to his blog post as a rebuttal to the idea that 1 Corinthians 11:23-28 is original to Paul, and his reasoning seems to be good and worthy of attention. I will now give my counterpoint. The phrase that spin has in red, "of the Lord," is something that spin takes as a clue that the passage in green is not original. I have another explanation.

When I read the book, Misquoting Jesus (or via: amazon.co.uk), it seemed to be a great introduction to New Testament interpolation. There are reportedly tens of thousands of variations among the early New Testament manuscripts, some of them huge (the existence of the story of the adulterous woman and Jesus), and some of them negligibly small (accidental changes in grammar or spelling). Interpolations can be found by comparing an earliest manuscript to a later manuscript, and finding the differences. Many times, the motivation of changing the text was a good one. The scribe "corrected" the text to line up with what the original author was thought to mean. Ehrman has a wonderfully ironic example of a fourth-century text that has a note in the margin, “Fool and knave, leave the old reading, don’t change it!” That scribe changed a word in the text back to what it was "supposed" to be, but actually the previous scribe got it right: he changed the word to match the very earliest text. At least three changes were made in a line, with at least two out of those three changes apparently being motivated to preserve the original reading.

According to spin, an earlier manuscript does not have the phrase, "of the Lord." Without the phrase, it seems to mean that the "body" is the body of the individual subject, not of Jesus. Here is the passage without the phrase in red:

28 A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. 31 But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment.

The motivation for the interpolation appears similar to what spin suggests: without the clarification, then a reader may get the mistaken idea that Paul is asking a person to discern the body of his own self while eating the bread and drinking of the cup. If not for the clarification, then the passage contains potential for mistaken interpretation. However, spin suggests that the alternative interpretation was not a mistake, but is original to Paul!

In order for that explanation to apply, then the whole passage in green must be an interpolation, of which we do not have an earlier version to show such a thing for certain, and we seem to have no reason to give it any significant probability. The passage in green flows easily in the surrounding context to form a unified sermon. Paul's point is that the church members eat the Lord's supper in a spirit of competitive vanity, without discerning the meaning of the bread and drink. We would have reason to believe that the passage in green is an interpolation if it looks like it does not belong, but it is spin's proposed reconstruction that would make the passage appear disjointed and ambiguous. It is Occam's razor that tells us that the more likely explanation is that the passage in green is original and the scribes inserted the phrase in red simply to correct a potential misunderstanding.

show_no_mercy

There's already a prescedent for interpolations in Paul's letters: almost half of them are pseudepigrapha, there are other non-canonical Pauline letters (like 3 Corinthians), and seven letters that are deemed "authentic" were first presented in the hands of heretics -- thus the Catholics had very good reasons to "correct" them.

The probability actually weighs in favor of interpolation. Since the majority of the known Pauline letters are not by Paul and we have evidence of different versions of Paul's authentic seven (like Marcion's Galatians, as it arrived at Tertullian and others).

It's a "lord-like" supper. The only other time "lord-like" is used in Christian writing is at the very beginning of John's Revelation, the part which seems to have non-Christian origins.

I think Occam's heuristic favors interpolation.

ApostateAbe

It is hard for me to make a judgment about whether κυριακὸν means "lordly" or "Lord's," because of my inexperience with translating Greek. It is the only time that word form is used in the New Testament. An allegedly close relative of the word is in Rev. 1:10 (κυριακῇ). In 1 Cor. 11:20, the word form according to biblos.com is "Adjective - Accusative Singular Neuter." It is an adjective, so spin translates it as "lordly." As it happens, the word form in Rev. 1:10 is also an adjective, so he should he should also translate that word as "lordly." But that wouldn't really make sense given the passage: "I was in the Spirit on the (Lord's/lordly) day and heard behind me a great voice as of a trumpet." The translation "Lord's" makes more sense than "lordly" in that verse. I think spin chose the translation "lordly" in 1 Cor. 11:20 primarily because it is the translation that suits his theory.

We have a precedent of pseudepigrapha among Paul's letters, but the letter of 1 Corinthians is (for whatever reason) widely accepted as an authentic letter. The normal and good practice in Biblical scholarship is to presume the originality of each passage within the authentic letter until good evidence is found that the passage is unoriginal. You should not arbitrarily discount certain passages just because it goes against your own unlikely theory of early Christianity. There are objective methods and reasons for choosing passages to be unoriginal.

1) Does it fit the point of view of scribes more than the original author's confirmed point of view?
2) Does the passage seem out of place in the context?
3) Does the passage not match the author's writing style and language?
4) Is there external evidence of interpolation (citations, quotations, earlier manuscripts)?

That sort of thing.

Toto

That is "normal" for Biblical scholarship, but not for any other branch of learning. In fact, it has no basis in logic or reason. It is a devise to avoid some embarrassing issues over the authenticity of documents, and just one of the reasons that the reputation of Biblical scholarship is so low on this forum.

That sort of thing. You can generally fix the criteria to get the result you want, if you are creative enough.

Here spin has shown that the passage seems out of place, and removing it makes the text flow more naturally. This by itself indicates that this is not an arbitrary decision.

I just had this debate with Rick Sumner and have no energy to repeat it. Please refer to William O. Walker's Interpolations in the Pauline Letters (or via: amazon.co.uk) on google books. He discusses the lack of manuscript variations and why this should not be used against the idea of interpolations.