Solo

There is definitely a lot to this. On personal level, the Jewish sense of identity is a quite amazing thing. I am saying this is a descendant of a family of Catholic Jews, who converted and ended up in Bohemia because of the messed up 1781 Toleration Edict of Joseph II. of Austria. The measure was to grant Jews equal status of subjects (as it did to Protestants) but because of a strong anti-Jewish reaction, the situation actually worsened as new quotas were established regulating the number of "tolerated Jews" in the provinces of the Habsburg Empire. A number of Jews converted to Catholicism to avoid hassles and resettlement. So did my father's ancestors who lived near Salzburg. They were resettled into Bohemia anyhow ! They retained their Catholicism, initially to avoid trouble in the new place but eventually became regular Catholics, wearing their hateful attitude to unconverted Jews. My grandmother was packed to the Theresienstadt ghetto by the Nazis whence she wrote to the archdiocese in Prague every week, imploring to be released from the captivity rightfuly designed for the Christ-killers but pray not faithful Catholics like her. Her pleas went unanswered and she died in the ghetto of typhoid fever.

Yet, even though the grandma I never knew hated Jews, she had mostly Jewish friends, talked Czech with hundreds of yiddish words, made traditional šoulet (goose with trimmings) every šábes (sabbath) and would have been very indignant if anyone criticized her adherence to things Jewish. So said my dad. He was caught by the Gestapo in 1944 living under assumed identity to avoid being sent to Auschwitz. He was promptly sent to Auschwitz. When he came back, some people thought he was one of the kapos (the notorious murdering inmate helpers of the SS guards in the camps). My father won a lawsuit against the libellers but the rumour resulting from his pathetic and public anti-semitism, he received next to nothing in damages. Yet my dad too was fond of his Jewish heritage. All the boys in his family were circumcised (a practice which was rationalized as hygienic measure by non-religious Jews and performed as hand surgery by Jewish physicians), and he often brought me books of Jewish legends and showed me the haunts of the old Prague ghetto. Incidentally, both of my dad's character witnesses at his trial were friends who were traditional Jews. They cleared his name so far as it could be done. I remember overhearing my dad and one of them, Felix (also an Auschwitz survivor), who was visiting, shortly after the trial. They were laughing and arguing and calling each other kike (židák) and meshumed (yiddish for apostate).

I believe the diaspora experience has had some constants, in the sort of pressures it exerted on the exiles. Even outside the periodic assaults on the Jews, culminating in the WWII Holocaust, the tension between the Jewish belief in being the chosen people of God and the reality of a technically and culturally dominant civilization which was not Jewish defined their attitudes both, to the outside world, and to each other. For the smarter Jews, the restrictive religious code, the parochial traditions (enforced by the ghetto culture) , and their implied hostility to, and mistrust of, the outside world, were always management issues. For most of them a formula had to be found by which they would remain members of the community (which had access to an international network with often unmatched resources) and at the same time, present themselves to the outside world as people properly 'civilized': reasonable and dependable.

The tension was always particularly felt by the Jewish intellectuals. I see in the likes of Karl Marx and Rudolf Steiner the modern equivalents to Philo and Paul; a cry for Jewish assimilation to a philosophical universalism (or, in the case of Josephus, a political universalism represented by Rome). Did Paul (of the Galatians) go to Jerusalem to convince James' saints of his revelation that the ascended Jesus of the Nazarenes fulfilled the law, and that it was time to modernize the faith ? I'd say, yes, probably.

Jiri

bacht

Yes, I suspect that diaspora Jews have always faced challenges like this, going back at least to Hellenistic times if not to Babylon. Maybe the clash between strict Mosaic Judaism and Hellenism was a precursor to the tension between secular science and religious authorities after the Renaissance, ie modernism vs medievalism.

Clivedurdle

I wonder if the Diaspora and the idea of exile are also myth. The festival of lights does celebrate the victory of the fundies against Greek thinking Jews in a civil war.

The later loss of the Temple by the fundies in a war with the Romans they started would definitely be mythologised - maybe it also created a Lord Jesus Christ or Yahweh Saviour annointer.

Rick Sumner

Arguing for interpolation, not just in the Paulines but in any ancient text is necessarily very, very heavy burden. If we start bandying the possibility about without careful argumentation we open the door to a slippery slope, where authenticity exists at the whim of the exegete.

Perhaps the author simply feels that the evidence doesn't meet that burden, and it has nothing to do with whether she teaches at a Christian seminary.

How about if we let the quality of the scholarship speak for itself, and spend less time worrying about whether or not the author has any relationship to any Christian organization. You offer that criticism constantly. It is worth nothing critically.

I'd welcome your careful argument for interpolations. You raise the possibility routinely, but offer nothing of substance for it. Let's take a look at what you've got and why you think it's there. We could start another thread.

From the excerpt, what do you see that you consider new? While the title looks provocative, the subject matter seems to be just another popularization of an NPP variant. It might have something substantial in the subtleties, but, at least from the excerpt, it doesn't look like anything fundamentally different from what has been getting published for the last thirty years.

Solo

Hmm, the problem is that things are never that simple. Paul himself was a reformer but a puritan, perhaps more strict than the Jerusalem dignitaries (1 Cr 9:5). And Urban VIII. whose Inquisition ordered a territio verbalis (showing of the instruments) for Galileo, was actually a close friend of the scientist and quite willing to let him argue heliocentrism as a hypothesis. It was only when Galileo carricatured the Ptolemaic defender as Simplicio (simpleton) in one of his writings that his one-time friend took offense and resolved to take Galileo to account over a broken promise. Incidentally, Urban VIII., though late, was the epitomy of the Renessaince man. He also was the only pope (that I know of) who publicly admitted the possibility that God did not exist. The occasion was the death of Cardinal Richelieu, to which he is said to have commented: If God exists then the cardinal has much to answer for, if not, he did very well.

Jiri

Toto

Why should be be a very, very heavy burden, as opposed to a medium burden or a light weight burden? After all, we know that there were interpolations routinely in various texts as a matter of course.

William Walker has discussed this issue and proposed that anyone arguing for interpolations need only meet a simple burden of proof - but he offers this as a compromise. It could be argued that, given the known interpolations, anyone arguing for authenticity must meet a heavy burden of proof.

If this leads to a slippery slope where authenticity can never be assumed, those are the breaks.

Rick Sumner

I believe I explained why. If we set the bar too low, we open the door to any exegete simply screaming interpolation whenever they don't like a passage.

That isn't quite what William Walker said. I caught you out on that previous times you've cited him. One would think you'd learn.

Here's what Walker actually says on the matter, for anyone interested:

The Burden of Proof in Identifying Interpolations in the Pauline Letters (NTS 33 p.610-618)

It is Walker's position that we need to approach the Paulines with the general idea that interpolations almost certainly exist, but that we cannot assume any individual passage is interpolated unless we meet a high standard of evidence.

Walker's creates a "lighter" burden by suggesting that we can, by rigorous analysis of the epistles, identify interpolations without manuscript evidence. But he does not suggest that the burden is "light," just lighter than some would have it.

Walker's reasoning for this is exactly the same as mine. He agrees with me. Not you.

The frequency with which you've abused his work over the years leads me to strongly suspect that you either didn't read him carefully, or didn't grasp what he was saying. In either event you're ill-equipped to employ his reasoning, because you don't understand what that reasoning is.

That's not where it leads us. It leads us to a slippery slope where authenticity is taken or left by convenience.

ETA to head off quote-mining

Here's from Walker's book:

Interpolations in the Pauline Letters, p62 (emphasis added)

In other words, Walker suggests that passages that are already suspected of being interpolations can safely be considered interpolations by the exegete. He addresses the move from "suggested interpolation" to "claimed interpolation" is a small one. He does not suggest that those "other grounds" need be insubstantial.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Clivedurdle

On interpolation, the problem may be more related to the assumptions brought to the text.

Gnostic-Paul-Exegesis-Pauline-Letters (or via: amazon.co.uk)

bacht

Right, the parallels are never exact. But in our modern world of Creationists and Islamic fundamentalists there is still tension between faith and the scientific method. Independent Christians like Mennonites and Amish still resist modernism. Jehovah's Witness have a "medieval" policy against blood transfusions.

Jews in the Hellenistic period confronted a well-developed polytheistic urban culture armed with sophisticated philosophy and the beginnings of natural science. In Palestine the conflict between Maccabees and Seleucids was in part a cultural one, with "reactionaries" resisting "innovators"

Toto

And your quotes from Walker show that you are wrong, although you appear at first to be quoting from an earlier essay and not his book, Interpolations in the Pauline Letters (or via: amazon.co.uk). (see google books)

In that book, Walker specifically rejects imposing a heavy burden of proof on anyone claiming that there are interpolations, in favor of a simple burden of proof. He discusses this at p 57 ff.

He quotes Darrel Doughty as saying that the burden of proof on the authenticity of any passage should rest on those claiming authenticity, and says that he has "sympathy" for that position, but adopts a "safer position" that the burden rests with the person making the claim. Then on page 59 writes, as you quote, that the burden is "signficantly lighter than has generally been assumed."

How any of this validates your original claim that any claim of interpolation must meet a heavy, heavy burden of proof is quite beyond me.

I wonder if you actually read all of Chapter 3. :huh: