Toto

The "normal" scholarly dating of Paul's letters is explicitly based on dating the events in Acts and assuming that Paul wrote his letters on his travels as described in Acts.

There are various passages in Paul's letters that appears to refer to events after the Jewish War. These are marked as probable interpolations by most of those normal scholars.

Harold Leiden, in The Fabrication of the Christ Myth (or via: amazon.co.uk), has a rather imaginative interpretation of the dating of Paul's letters, which assumes that he survived the Jewish War.

gstafleu

Do you know if they are seen as interpolations just because they don't fit the "normal" timing for Paul, or are there other reasons to see them as interpolations as well?

Gerard Stafleu

Ben C Smith

The keystone to this Acts dating is the Gallio inscription (refer to my Paul page and scroll down almost to the bottom) as compared with Acts 18.12-17.

I am aware of 1 Thessalonians 2.14-16, of course; what are the other passages that you have in mind?

Ben.

Toto

In at least one case (Thessalonians), there are language differences. I think Leidner has other examples. I don't have time to review this now - you could do a search on Leidner in this forum.

Identifying interpolations in Paul is fraught with difficulties, because someone will always object - but Paul is like that, he wanders all over the place and makes off topic digressions in the middle of a sentence.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Ben,

Thanks.

I'm wondering if we might not be dealing with a bit of old harmonization here. It might be interesting to look at the manuscript evidence of these passages. Unfortunately, I have 10 or 12 urgent projects on my schedule, so I won't really have the time.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

gurugeorge

And this is the striking thing about Marcion's Galatians I thought (2 versions here and here, this latter being actually positively beautiful in places) - there's much less of this oddly confusing element, and it seems much more like the voice of one man (although I took DC Hindley's point that Marcion probably did snip and add his own bits, but less than orthodoxy would say he snipped, and with a total result that's less confusing, and more like the voice of one man - I'd like to see DC Hindley's reconstruction actually, I think judging from what he was saying, it would be pretty authentic-sounding).

But I guess "style" is too subjective for the kind of textual analysis we find here. Still, there are some phrases and sayings in "Paul" (whoever he was) that do have a literary power that has become part of common language, and it would make sense to think of someone who kick-started a religion as being a genuine genius with a strong voice of his own rather than some sort of "attention deficit disorder" sufferer.

spin

You don't agree that the passage is inherently problematic?

The Qabbalah is medieval. Gematria is a red herring. The claim of a trope has no precedents in this issue. Mark clearly talks of three days and three nights as prophecy, as does Matthew. It is only when the passion narrative is attached to the end of Mark that the prophecy starts to be problematic. (Yes, I think Mark was originally written without a passion, stopping at the end of chapter 13 with the admonition to watch.)

Interpolations not based on either manuscript tradition or internal philological evidence makes them difficult to sustain. I note your reference to the reconstruction of a Marcion version, but that is rather difficult to use for text purposes.


spin

DCHindley

Gotta watch out for that whacky Hindley guy.

I didn't remember him saying that Marcion "probably did snip and add his own bits," but I do remember him saying something about Marcion likely started with the epistles as we know them (well, maybe the first five) and whacked out the Jewish parts.

I don't recall exactly, but I seem to remember Hindley saying somewhere that he thought Marcion could have been aware of shorter versions, and thought he was actually reconstructing the originals by snipping away any Jewish theology he thought had infected them.

That, of course, is not exactly what Hindley has done with his own whacky slash job. His is based on simmering down the arguments expressed in the (Greek) letters to those which seem to have a start as well as a conclusion, and moving the digressions etc to one side. Then he compares and contrasts these two groups of sentences.

It turns out, he says, that they have different grammatical characteristics, at least with regards to the use (or non use) of the definite article ("the") with QEOS (God) and KURIOS (LORD/Lord/lord).

Anyways, he says tha the pile of sentences that contain the arguments that have beginings and conclusions are all about faithfulness of gentiles justifying them in God's sight and thus entitling them to be included among those who will inherit what God promised to Abraham's seed. The other pile, it seems, is all commentary or reinterpretations of statements that relate to the former pile of sentences, and this is the pile with all the Christological statements.

I have it, from personal conversation with this Hindley fellow no less, that he thinks the attempt to fashion Paul into a bit of a rhetorical genius is a byproduct of many critic's desire to see Christology as the jewel that crowns Christianity's ethical quantum leap over the Jewish religion. Marcion thought it did, so did the early Dutch Radicals. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was a commonplace assumption among critics that Jesus' message was so radical or antinomian that early Christianity actually had to re-Judify itself (usually along lines that Paul expanded on Jesus' antinomian message and the conflict to be resolved was with a more traditional Jewish Peter faction) before everyone was happy.

Hindley puts a lot of stock in Albert Schweitzer's _Paul and His Interpeters_, which he laments is the only one of Schweitzer's books NOT currently in print. But I digress ...

DCH

Toto

Are you sure? Paul and His Interpreters (or via: amazon.co.uk) is on Amazon and other places.

gurugeorge

Not for the "Messianists wouldn't like it" reason you have mentioned to Amaleq13, no. Messianists, as the concept of the Messiah was traditionally understood, would certainly have had big problems with Paul; but what if the Jerusalem crew were themselves a new type of Messianist, who believed scripture told them that the Messiah had already been, rather than being Messianists who looked to a Messiah to come? That seems to be what Paul is saying: the general tenor of the passage seems to be that this novel Messiah concept was passed down to him, and the way he talks about Cephas, etc., it sounds like they're the guys who passed it on to him, they're the guys to whom the Messiah "appeared" (theophanically) in this way (as a Messiah who'd already been and done his work) first - only he modified it through his own visionary experience.

Well I just mean that type of numerological messing-around with texts. Was that sort of thing known at the time or not? There seems to be "gematria"-like numerology in the Apocalypse, so why can't these guys have gotten some of this novel idea of a "value revalued" Messiah from that kind of messing around with Scripture? (I mean this in reference to the difficulty of finding overt potential references that might match "died for our sins, was buried and rose on the third day" in scripture - apart from the Hosea one, which does at least show "third day" as some kind of meaningful 3-day reference.)