spin

Something similar happened to my school as well, but how is really relevant to your argument about continuity, when you don't seem to have any knowledge of prior to Paul's time?

Ideas don't come out of a vacuum, but what makes "continuity of identity" for the sake of meaningfulness in our conversation?

Could you answer these questions I asked you last time?

Are christians really Jews, for example (Roman Mithraists really Zoroastrian)? Is there a "continuity of identity" there? If so, how does the notion help us?

It may point to the relevance of your notion or lack thereof.


spin

J-D

It seems obvious to me that there was something before Paul's time. I don't need to know about it in detail to see that Paul's own account in Galatians refers to an existing religious movement to which he purported to attach himself. Would you concede that much? That's the point I'm most interested in. I can see that if that were settled, you still might perhaps want to go on and say 'that movement can't be called Christian because it didn't believe in Jesus as messiah' or 'we can't definitely call that movement Christian because we don't know whether it believed in Jesus as messiah'. But if you did, I wouldn't have the same sort of problem with it. That's just a question of terminology. It's interesting, but not essential.Christians now (as a group; individual exceptions pose a more difficult question) clearly aren't Jews, and Christianity now clearly isn't a branch of Judaism. The separation now is not only doctrinal but also institutional, and what's more, nobody now regards Christianity as a branch of Judaism: not Christians, not Jews, not adherents of other religions, and not the non-religious. Talking about nineteen and a half centuries ago, however, it is at least possible (I think highly likely) that the question would have a different answer, that Christianity overlapped with or even (perhaps earlier still) was contained within Judaism (Paul appears to consider it possible for somebody to be both a Jew and a Christian). And the same possibility exists for Mithraism and Zoroastrianism, although I would need more information to be equally confident (and perhaps that information doesn't even exist any more).

spin

As I have said, ideas don't come out of thin air. Paul got his ideas from somewhere, so obviously there was something prior to him to provide the seeds of those ideas. So, at a minimal level there must have been some continuity. But that doesn't seem to help in any way to get "continuity of identity".

There may be more to the continuity than what may have filtered through Paul's brain, perhaps enough to give you what you term "continuity of identity", but it is not something to be assumed.

It is the 1950 years ago type context that would be of interest to us. You think it is highly likely that there was your "continuity of identity". While I agree that it is possible, I cannot see where you get anything to make it "highly likely". But then I think your school image suggests that the notion of "continuity of identity" is so elastic, it may be sufficient for the gentile believers to be told that they are functionally Jews to give you "continuity of identity". It therefore doesn't seem to hold much other than the ability to confuse the issue of the relationship between the religion of Paul and what came before.


spin

J-D

I think you have not fully grasped what I am suggesting. I am not merely suggesting that Paul got ideas from somebody before him, I am suggesting that Paul attached himself to an existing religious movement and purported to be continuing it. That is what it looks (to me) as if Paul himself is saying. Hence, if you had asked Paul, or the people who listened to him, whether he was founding a new religion, it seems to me that he, and they, would probably have said 'No'.

spin

Actually, I have. Till you can get before Paul though, you are left with an unsupported conjecture.

This is a variety of the status quo.

The thing is, reading Galatians, all I see is that he acknowledges that there were earlier apostles, he never acknowledges for what exactly they were apostles. He has clearly said however that what he was teaching didn't come from them. That probably explains why he didn't get the reception he might have liked.

When you've asked some, let me know! I see no reason for you to insert the "probably" in the statement though: it merely seems like you find your opinion more appealing for reasons that don't seem to be based on any evidence.

It should be relatively simple. Either Paul latched onto a Jesuine messianism or he didn't. They are both possibilities, but, given the reception the Judean contingent gave him (they sent him off to the gentiles leaving him totally unsatisfied with the reception), there doesn't seem like much to indicate any continuity. If they were anticipating the arrival of the messiah, they probably wouldn't have been particularly interested in Paul's non-messianic messiah who'd already been. If they were Jesus believers, then what did Paul do to get in the bad books?


spin

J-D

I don't think you have. See below.I don't understand your point.True, but let's read a little more. 1:1, Paul describes himself as an apostle. 1:17, he refers to others who were apostles before him. Isn't the clear implication that he is presenting himself as being an apostle in the same sense that they were apostles, implying that whatever they were apostles for, he is an apostle for the same thing? And isn't this interpretation further supported by 2:7-9?I agree that the account in Galatians suggests that Paul disagreed doctrinally with the other apostles and that this created conflict. But what Paul appears to me to be asserting is that he got his doctrine from the same source that they purported to get theirs from. In 1:11-12 Paul asserts that his gospel was revealed to him by Jesus Christ; in 2:7 he asserts a parallelism between the commitment of this gospel to him and the commitment of another gospel to Peter. The natural reading is that he is assuming or acknowleding that Peter's gospel was also committed to him by Jesus Christ, the same source as his own gospel.

When we put this together in context with the account of the doctrinal clash, the picture I see is this: an established religious movement with recognised leaders preaching a message attributed to Jesus Christ and a challenger for power in that movement (Paul) putting forward a claim to have a message which has the same authority because it comes from the same source. The difference between Paul's preaching (wherever he actually got its content from) and that of the earlier apostles is either the motive for his challenge for power or a weapon for use in it, or both. That's what I see in Galatians.The evidence is text of Galatians, as analysed above.And this is what makes me think that you still haven't fully grasped my point. You don't think that Paul latched onto an existing doctrine ('Jesuine messianism'). But I think that Paul latched onto an existing movement, as outlined above.They couldn't have 'sent him off' unless he had come to them in the first place. But the fact that he did that is evidence of a connection: they belonged to the same movement.

spin

I have put forward a case here many times that 2:7-8 is an interpolation (archives don't go back far enough, but here and here I've touched on it, for a number of reasons including the use of the name Peter only in these verses, while Paul elsewhere uses Cephas. 2:9 is in conflict with 2:8 over who was to go to the circumcised, 2:8 says that Peter was to be the apostle to the circumcised, while 2:9 says that James, Cephas, and John were to go to the circumcised. Reading 2:9 as following 2:6, this has the appearance of Paul pulling something out of the debacle. They pissed him off back to wherever he was and he took it to mean that he was sent to the gentiles. Everyone was happy.

I can't see how 1:1 is any help to you. It's just his "I didn't get my gospel from any man" stuff.

2:7-8 being an interpolation, Peter is not in Paul's world. We just have Cephas.

You haven't got the "attributed to Jesus Christ", which is your missing content.

I didn't see it.

This doesn't give you continuity. All you've got is Paul attempting to get recognition that he is an apostle. Run along back to your gentiles...

While I accept what came before the colon, what followed didn't... ummm, follow. Of course there was a connection. Paul shows one. What that connection truly is you haven't elucidated.


spin

J-D

I was not previously aware that you argued that Galatians 2:7-8 is an interpolation, and I am not able to say how strong your case for that is. However, I don't think relying on those verses is essential to my point.

To repeat: in Galatians 1:1, Paul describes himself as an apostle. In Galatians 1:17, he refers to others who were apostles before him. The natural reading of this is that he is claiming to derive his apostolate from the same source as the unspecified (in that verse) others. It's not an absolute logical necessity, because in the abstract it's true that apostles can have different origins. But in context, on a plain reading, I would expect that somebody who meant 'others who were apostles before me from somewhere/somebody else' would have said something to make that meaning clear. In the absence of such a qualification, I infer that Paul is not claiming an original apostolate, but one he shares with others who have priority over him in time. The evidence of disagreement over content ('the gospel') does not automatically disprove shared origin of the apostolate, still less that shared origin of the apostolate was claimed.

I think we should try to deal with this point before trying to get any further, otherwise I think we risk confusion.

spin

Yes.

I have tried to indicate that Paul wanted a link with other religionists, with the past: that's one reason why he must have got involved with the Jerusalem bunch. But he didn't get it. One of the reasons why he stresses that his gospel was not from humans obviously was because the in-crowd didn't accept him on his terms. Paul's text is manipulating the facts to make himself out above the others despite being a johnny-come-lately: he was set aside before birth; he was a student of Judaism who was advanced beyond his years; his gospel was through revelation; the other apostles can take a hike.

The first part of Galatians is a self-justification for why he is isolated.

Hopefully what I've already said reflects here. Paul sought a link, but obviously didn't get one. He wanted to be a part of the already existing group, but couldn't make it. He then repackaged the events for his reading audience.


spin

J-D

If you don't think that Paul succeeded in achieving a link with the people he talks about in Jerusalem, how do you interpret Galatians 2:9? You didn't include it as part of the text you consider to be an interpolation. Do you consider it an outright lie, with no foundation of any kind in fact? If so, why?