spin

Yup, Ben C., we're now heading into full fledged repetition.
Naaa.

You're not thinking of the dynamics of the meeting.

OK.

Agreement? They didn't press the issue before testing the temperature.

That isn't said.

We're not communicating. I'm getting the snake oil sale routine.

This false brethren adding things bit has lost me. You will not take notice of what the text says about the pillars and you will not take notice of the sequence of the false brethren and then the people who were supposed to be someone. Paul's negative rhetoric is thick.

I may not have been clear enough. Paul accepted the leaders of the Jerusalem group as a point of reference, people who could confirm and support him. This was the case up until the meeting, but during the course of the meeting Paul smelt a rat with the report regarding the false brothers and his negative observations of the pillars.

We did not agree upon the "...until Cephas" bit which is you overlooking the already negative presentation of the pillars.

Your not dealing with the content 2:6 amazes me.

The principal part of the sentence is

apo de twn dokountwn einai ti...
but from the supposed-to-be-somethings...
emoi gar oi dokountes ouden prosanaQento
the supposed-to-bes didn't confer on me anything

You find nothing wrong with the representation of the leaders of the community. Paul adds into the gap to be even clearer

opoioi pote hsan ouden moi diaferei
whatever they be bears nothing to me
proswpon Qeos anQrwpou ou lambanei
god doesn't take the appearance (face) of man

This addition merely helps the reader get Paul's negative view already stated in the main part of the sentence.


spin

spin

Whatever other works say has no weight in this discussion. The worth of Acts is long disputed here and Ephesians is not thought in scholar circles to have been Pauline. We are therefore safer to stick with the integrity of the one work.

Perhaps if you imagine that Paul went to the meeting hopeful, but during the course of the meeting with the matter of praxis coming up and with his observations of the pillars, Paul's view changed radically.

I don't understand your thought.

As I pointed out earlier, what makes Judaism of the period is expressed in the praxis of the religion, a praxis which Paul mainly turned his back on. We know that praxis was dealt with in the meeting of the report of the false brothers whose aim was to "enslave" Paul's flock through praxis. Those false brothers of course were probably reflective of the opinions of the pillars, the most likely senders of those brethren. The meeting has the earmarks of an exercise in futility at least in the understanding of the pillars, who happily got rid of him with a handshake recognizing his grace sending him off back to the gentiles, leaving them with what interested them.


spin

Ben C Smith

That, spin, is exactly what I said:

I did deal with it, right down to noting the verb tenses! And you even responded to that part of my post.

How can the simple concept of the false brethren wanting Paul to start circumcising gentiles have lost you?

Ben.

Gamera

Well, looking to the mss in the school of "Paul" is certainly relevant to how people understood Paul, and it's clear he was understood to be a man who had revelations, and who obeyed them, without entertaining doubts. That accords in fact with the Paul we perceive in Galatian, a Paul who doesn't bother with the Church at Jerusalem for 16 year, says he got his gospel by revelation, and then when he gets a revelation to go to Jerusalem, wham!, he goes. He never tells us he was looking for approbation from the pillars, so given what we know, it doesn't appear he was seeking such approval.

Paul doesn't seem inclined to question his revelations. He is obedient to them. This suggests he didn't go to Jerusalem looking for approbation from the pilllars. He went because, as he tells us explicitly, he got a revelation to go there.

The problem with this is threefold.

First we know little about 1st century Judaism except what we learn from the Christian scriptures. At best it was in flux.

Second, the Jerusalem Church, while continuing some kind of affinity and modus vivende with Judaism, wasn't Judaism. It had parted ways.

Finally, Paul seems to make a distinction between "the false brothers" and the pillars. The pillars clearly saw the influence of Paul's ministry -- they asked for money for heaven's sake, so desperate they were. Paul's ministry is clearly more successful than the impoverished and insular Jerusalem church, which has to ask for handouts, and which Paul has done quite well without even visiting them for 16 years. I see Paul having the upper hand in this meeting, and the pillars somewhat chagrinned at his success, but willing to make peace with him because his success suggested how right he was. Perhaps they hoped to influence him on the issue of ceremonial observances. If they did, how little they understood the man. (I don't pass judgement on whether Paul has utterly mischaracterized the episode to aggrandize himself, but merely take what he's said at face value).

My sense of the whole episode is that the church was passing the Jersalem pillars by, and they were at a loss to deal with it, but hoped that Paul's ministry wouldn't obliterate them completely and would in fact be a complement to their work in Judea.

J-D

That doesn't answer my question. It only confuses me further.

gurugeorge

Hmm, me too - standard messianism was already not making a splash among the Jews.

J-D

I don't understand what you're saying either, which makes me think that you may not have understood me, which makes me think that spin might not understand what I'm getting at, either, which suggests that perhaps I should explain at greater length.

I was reading the suggestion spin was making along these lines: in the first century, most Jews did not hold it as an article of faith that a messiah would come. A minority did. Paul first persecuted this minority, but then changed his position and began preaching a message about a messiah. The people who he had persecuted heard that Paul was preaching about a messiah and assumed that he now agreed with them (see Galatians 1:17). Subsequently it emerged that Paul's ideas about the messiah were in fact quite different.

This story, as I said before, is coherent. However, it does leave the question 'how did the belief that a messiah would come become a mainstream article of faith in Judaism?', given that at a later period in Jewish history belief that a messiah would come did become a mainstream article of faith. I would be interested to hear what spin has to say about this question, but I don't think a resolution of it is necessary to spin's case.

What I do want to be clear on is whether spin is excluding another version of the story, in which the belief that a messiah would come was a mainstream view in the first century, and what distinguished the minority that Paul persecuted was their belief that a particular known indidivual was the messiah, because that version of the story would leave us asking 'who was that individual?'.

spin

Your noting of the verb tenses was a red herring. The inclusion reinforces Paul's sentiment in the verse. You can't eke out a change of mind there.

You were trying to invent a linguistic connection between the false brethren adding and the pillars not adding. That false brethren adding things bit has lost me.


spin

spin

Sorry, I was neither trying to answer your question nor to confuse you. I was trying to focus on what was known about messianism and its relevance to Paul's faith in context of others' messianism.

Christianity accepts the existence of believers of JtB's message and its spread outside Judea. This message as I've noticed was of a coming messiah, one whose messiahship couldn't be falsified in its not having manifested itself to be false. From the gospel material the supporters were adherents to Jewish praxis. These adherents are eminently suitable as candidates for the messianists in (and out of) Judea that Paul had hassled and to whom he now turned.


spin

J-D

I don't see how what 'Christianity accepts' is a relevant consideration here. I also don't know on what basis you accept (if you do accept it) that John the Baptist's message spread outside Judea, but that's beside the point I was getting at. The point I was getting at is this: is it part of the view you're putting that this message, that a messiah would come, was, in the first century, the view of a distinct minority among Jews? because if that's not your view, I see a problem, which I mentioned in earlier posts, but will repeat if necessary once you've answered the question.