spin

Short of sticking a hose down a horse's throat I can't force it to drink.


spin

Solo

I would not read 2:2 as implying Paul intended to lay out his gospels before the pillars. The inference of 2:9 'hoi dokountes styloi einai' is that Paul did not have a clue as to the organization of the church. What's the guarantee that the "pillars" actually were thought of as apostles in Jerusalem ? 1 Cor 15:3-11 ?

"False brethern brought in by who ? The meeting was private, Paul said.
We don't know who sent them into the meeting, but we do know that when in Antiochea the spies (or law-enforcers) from (the big) James appeared Cephas quickly sneaked out of the Gentile dining hall. My reasoning that James of 2:12 (and 1:19-20 ) is not the James "the pillar" of 2:9, is based on how men behave in hierarchies. If Cephas (and the rest of the Jews) changed their behaviour on sight of just his emissaries then the transference power of James was too big ! He would not be just one of the "pillar" boys. He was the big boss ! Besides the historical trace of James the Just indicates that he was a Nazirite saint; compare that with Cephas/Peter or the lack of dietary observance imputed to Jesus by the JtB followers in the gospels.

I don't think Paul wanted to meet with the Jesus' buddies. He wanted to get his gospel certified by (the big) James (as the official line of the church ? was that the revelation ?). Now from the confused tale of Hegesippus it looks like that James was not, a) Jesus' sibling, and b) his church was not organized primarily around the worship of Jesus. The evidence points to a group that existed well before Jesus (Epiphanius makes James 30 years older than Jesus), and Galatians more or less testifies that there existed a tension between the church boss and the Jesus adoptees (the pillars), as the latter were known to misbehave (Acts 6-8 may have some historical kernel). James might have accepted the martyrdom of Jesus as a political play against the Temple hierarchy, but would not tolerate departures from observances.

This is propaganda aimed at Paul's flock in Galatia. You are right in saying Paul did not get anything that he already did not have. The division of missions (to the "circumcised" vs to Gentiles) was most likely in Paul's head. He was required to pay "a license fee" for being tolerated, which he was doing already - trying to get noticed by (the big) James which he didn't.

The relief effort is to the "poor saints" (Rom 15:26). I interpret that as the ascetic apostolic directorate of James (which may later morphed into the "Twelve")....the very thing Paul was eager to do. Relieve the saints: get recognition of his 'kharis' from the apostles.

Jiri

J-D

As an excuse for not answering a simple direct question, that's not impressive.

(If, in the course of the thread, you've lost track of what the question is that I now have in mind, I'm happy to restate it--but will you answer it if I do?)

spin

I don't think you can get that from 2:9. The dokountes theme runs through the passage (vv.2, 6 & 9). This is an attack on the leaders, not apparently so in v.3, but becoming apparent in v.6. For apostles, Paul introduces the idea in 1:19, making both Cephas and James apostles, thus already showing them to be important. (But I note your idea about more than one James later, which at the moment seems strange that Paul gives us no signal to distinguish, but let's see...)

(This post resurrection synopsis has numerous problems. I've been trying to stick with Galatians as relatively coherent in itself.)

It would seem there were two aspects of this meeting, a public and a private, if there was discussion regarding both Paul's gospel and the apparent interference with the Galatians which is tied to the praxis theme (both in the meeting and the letter).

You can still have three leaders of which one is given more significance than the others, one seen as more stringent for the rules.

I'm wary of bringing in outside ideas, especially from a separate tradition whose relationship with the case being studied is not clear if there is any relationship. That's why I try to work just with Galatians looking for its internal coherence.

One reason I reject the authenticity of 2:7-8 is because it assumes this equivalence, not justified in this text. the name Peter appears unprecedented. Discourse has its own coherence. There is no reason to think that James in 2:12 is any different from that already recently mentioned. There would be no reason in the discourse for Paul to switch from Cephas to Peter unannounced.

What was expected of Cephas in Antioch is in accord with the disciples of JtB.

Part of the discussion in this thread was whether there were any Jesus buddies before Paul, or was he the first. The point I've been making is that one can read Galatians as showing that Paul's gospel didn't come from any Jesus tradition, but, as he claims, from a revelation. He had been giving people who weren't as he was, ie zealous for the traditions of his ancestors, until his revelation. What those people actually believed is not transparent from Galatians. We tend to read into it from other texts and perhaps lose the reality.

So, were there any Jesus buddies before Paul, or were there only messianist expectors (of the JtB ilk -- and not considering the various messianic hopefuls' supporters)?

Yes, the situation looks like he was seeking a) the stamp of approval for his revelation and b) how it compared with whatever it was that the pillars' community believed. Except for a brief stay with Cephas, Paul hadn't had the opportunity to get any feedback about his gospel -- if he got anything theological from Cephas (1:18).

Assuming that Jesus really lived and did so for over 30 years, that would make this James almost eighty when the meeting was supposed to have happened. I'm more inclined to think Epiphanius got it wrong.

I haven't plowed through the James morass since I leafed through Eisenman's works on James (it's now a doorstop somewhere), from which the only thing I gleaned was that there was a separate James tradition and that means to me that it is difficult to understand how the James of Galatians fits with it.

We agree on the first part of this. The "license fee" is an interesting take, though it sounds too commercialized for the age.

Maybe, but again it's using material from elsewhere and I'm adverse to doing so until we can get as much as we can from Galatians itself. The text doesn't talk about the Jerusalem poor or the poor saints or any other specific reference.

It may be that it was his attempt at a concession in order to curry favor. Then again, as we don't have any indication of what oi ptwchoi ("the poor") referred to, it may have simply been a generic request, as per my previous explanation to which you commented.

The reading that I offered was based on the notion that Paul's religion of his Jesus learnt by revelation and needed no earlier Jesus believers, just simply messianists of the sort seen with JtB, ie Jewish believers of the coming of the Jewish messiah who would liberate his people and set up world peace, yadda, yadda. Paul's christ, Jesus, is naturally inconsequential to the Jerusalemites, who are most interested in Paul's proselytes following Jewish praxis. Failing that, Paul's efforts lose any value to them, as the proselytes don't adhere to what is Jewish. Theology is secondary to the praxis which unites Jews.


spin

Solo

I tend to think of 1:19-20 as a gloss. At any rate, 1 Cor 15:3-11 is a later (but still early) attempt to harmonize Paul which does not have Cephas one of the twelve (5), and not even an apostle (7) ! What 1 Cor 15:7 also tells us, - more or less -, is that the apostolic function attaches to James's church and not to historical Jesus (if there was one). The interpolation of 1 Cor 15, also establishes a "priority" in appearances to a group around Cephas to that of the apostolic "appearances". To me this signifies that Cephas (,the other pillars,) and "brethern" (not "brethern of the Lord") were most likely a faction in James' church, and that the apostolic function had nothing to do with Jesus appearances, at least initially.

The apostles most probably were dignitaries, wise men in James' church (some of them no doubt ascetics) who interpreted the scripture from Spirit for the "last days". Then there were solo preachers like Apollos and Paul, who would have wanted to be thought of as "apostles". Cephas does not fit (1 Cr 9:5), except perhaps in Paul's hugely sarcastic designation of him as one of super duper apostles ('huper lian apostoloi') in 2 Cr 11:5. Paul liinks those to the preaching of another Jesus (allos Iesous) something I am sure you have registered. The origin of sainthood and apostolic office for Peter is a mystery second only to the date of the Catholic dogma of Immaculate Conception.

That is a possibility, but one with a very, very low probability. If Cephas changed his behaviour at the sight of mere emissaries of James, it cannot normally signify but huge dominance of James over Cephas. In psychology we would speak of "transference" of power, and the theory is that men project their dominance in a group. If an alpha male emerges in a group, he will project his power beyond his physical presence, i.e. use symbolic substitutes, formal (envoys) or informal (spies/enforcers) to assert his primacy. (You can see Paul's letters in that function too ! e.g. 1 Cr 5:1-3). These subs, even though they would often rank lower than people with whom they are sent to interact, hold sway over them, and are usually feared by the higher ranking "dignitaries", for their reports would be actionable. A classical example of this would be the "ambassador syndrome" of Stalin's USSR. The diplomatic corps of Stalin's times was the creme-de-la-creme of the Soviet intelligentsia. And yet they lived in mortal fear of diplomatic "couriers" who while very low in rank had real or imagined power
to harm them.


I am with you on that. Beside the changing of Cephas to Petros verses 7-8 knows in advance about an arrangement between the parties in the division of missionary labour which is only announced by verse 9. This duplicates the intent of 9. adding only a parenthetical note that the missions were allied.

These two issues are not connected. I agree with 7&8 being interpolated. But...

If you believe in the authenticity of the oath in 1:20, it should give you a pause before agreeing that it relates to the James of 2:9. I hope you will not deny that 1:19-20 identifies James in a singular manner. (Why would Cephas not have introduced Paul to the Zebedees then ? Maybe they were on missions, collecting tributes. Maybe they were not thought of as apostles.)

I don't count on the authenticity of 1:19-20 (and possibly the whole first visit account 1:18-24). But I reason that if James the Just the undisputed leader of the Church in Paul's time he would need no special introduction or "description". The leadership would emerge from the context of what Paul writes. 2:9 discounts the authority of Paul's interlocutors. Ergo that James not likely be James the Just. 2:12 reinforces the reports from elsewhere that James the Just was the undisputed leader - even though Jesus of the gospels designates Peter as the founder of the Church.

In my reading of Corinthians & Galatians, Cephas emerges as "a sponsor" and "a missionary agitator" of a gnostic Jewish messianism (one most probably derived from the historical Jesus himself - I get rolleyes when I say things like that but if you approach the matter with an open mind you will quickly admit that without the "halo effect" of Paul's Christ, there certainly there is a probability of a historical wandering preacher who taught in essence that the world was at end, and if you repent your sins, he had "something" that would make the messianic kingdom come to you. Mark tells us that Peter and the Zebedees knew the messianic secret and it related to the "transfigured body". So, perhaps Cephas "authority" (non-apostolic) did derive from a personal relationship with Jesus, and there were others like him. So there might have been something going on within that group that Paul was waxing agonistic about in the Galatians and derided at Corinth.


...or any other Nazirite leader of a Jewish apocalyptic sect. And if Cephas notoriously did not comply with the requirements and the gospel tells me that it was because his former leader was lax or at loggerheads in observances, I tend to think that Cephas really was a buddy of someone called Yeshu'a.


You are right, spin. I am absolutely convinced that Paul during his agitation against the Petrine Jesus messianists, suffered a classical conversion mania episode, from which, over time he crafted his Christ theory. But the problem for the 'early church harmonists', was this: Paul never liked the earthly Jesus. Before his conversion he openly despised him; after his conversion he ignored his career in flesh - he used his experience to craft a seemingly fantastic story of God sending his Son to earth to redeem humanity from sin at the end of ages and beam up the worthies to Christ. This teaching was in direct opposition to the beliefs and thaumaturgy of the of the Palestinian Jewish (,and the original Hellenic,) Jesus following. Significantly, only Paul had access to the cosmic Jesus Christ ! As Paul's theory made direct allusions to common experiences of his audience (of pneumatics), and had a higher social cohesion potential, it flourished for a while independently and after the first Jewish War came to dominate the Jewish Jesus apocalyptics .


Perhaps, and perhaps not. Some historical reconstructions will be more realistic than others. We get at these things intuitively. Imagination bridges facts. Bottom line is, you will be connecting historical dots in your head whether you admit it or not. And someone will come around and say: this is not the right way to connect them...this is better.

Or .....if you prefer, you can waste away in the ivory tower contemplating what the historical devil in the desert AD 29 was trying to do to Jesus 'psychological needs'.

If Paul went to Jerusalem (by revelation, no less) to lay out his gospel, the gospel would have had to have enough common points of reference for him to make an impression. What you are saying - even though you might not be aware of the implication - that the Jesus connection to the messiah was something unknown to the group. That does not strike me as probable. If the messianists were of only of the JtB variety (I believe there may have been some of those too in the heterogeneous group around James) why would the Spirit tell Paul to go to talk to them about Jesus and not John ?
In other words, where would Paul get the idea that what he would be telling them about Jesus had any meaning to them ?

As it is, it seems clear that the revelation of Paul did not inform him that his Jewish-Greek-diasporic-cosmompolitan-universalist grasp of the Messiah had nothing to add to a Jewish apocalyptic sect sitting by the Temple. The idea that Jesus was the Messiah might not, of itself, have sounded crazy in the Jamesian milieu (there was after all the model of the Teacher, with which some were likely familiar). But, Paul's universalism where circumcision and non-circumcision would come as one before God would have. He would have sounded like a Jewish apostate (as he was in the Ebionite tradition).

Maybe, but it`s just as strong an argument against kinship.

I think the strongest argument for James as independently revered entity is Gospel of Thomas verse (12). "Go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being". Strong coffee, spin, and doubtless early tradition since such a saying would not have made sense after James the Just was gone. Further, just look at the Hegesippus tale of James' martyrdom:

How probable is it that after all those years of operating the church in Jerusalem based on the belief in the messiahship of his sibling, James would be approached by the same bad sort of people that Jesus argued with and who killed him, and who apparently do not know that James is mischpoche ? And if they knew, why would they even try to make him restrain the multitudes brought into frenzy over Jesus ? At passover again !!!

Boy, oh boy ! Hard question that, i'n'it !?

But my point is this : the tale, in essence supports Paul's Galatians view of James (of 2:12) as a leader of the observant (and dominant) faction of the church. Coincidence ?

Ok, think of it then as tribute for the bare necessities. Come on, man, some of these saints were married, ya know !


Crossreferencing Paul's letters, not a good method to you ? Not much I can do about that, is there ? :huh:

Jiri