rlogan

Juicy thread here.

I tried to find one of the varsity squad's comments with respect to Toto's post on the Dutch Radical school:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...2&postcount=37

but nobody seems to have taken up the matter (falsifications coming from Marcionite circles).

I think this idea is an interesting counterpoint to the development argued by Doherty. It points to an amalgamation of views, with a triumph of the canonical view ultimately, as opposed to a linear development from the spiritual plane to the historical.


Spin, I'm wondering in particular why you never took this up. Be nice, I'm just a scrub team player here...

spin

What in particular took your attention?

I have not come down on a date for Paul. I have been trying to find evidence, but have been waylaid over the Aretas factoid.

Marcion provides us with a terminus ad quem for Paul's letters with his collection of those letters.

The notion that they were written by someone else, well, let's call him Paul for simplicity. There seems to be a particular range of attitudes that emerge from some of the letters which I think represents an individual.

As to Ignatius's letters I have advocated a date in the 160s elsewhere here, not as fraudulent work, but because he seems to me to have more probably fit that time frame. And I don't know how to start dating the letter of Clement -- I just lack the info.

So, back to the Dutch Radical school...


spin

Ted Hoffman

Varsity squad? Hmmm.... interesting reference. Maybe its time we looked at the works of the Dutch radicals. I am myself very skeptical about the strength of their arguments.

yalla

spin
Ignatius or Polycarp c.160 ?

the_cave

If Damascus is the nest of robbers, and is in Trachontis, then why would Vitellius be concerned with it? It wouldn't belong to him at the time. Am I missing something?

It's actually inconvenient, and I do want to trust him, but he at times he seems to contradict other historians, so at that point it gets hard. (Not to mention Josephus the text may be different from Josephus the author...)

I can look up meanings of words. What I can't look up is context. Now, I could teach myself decent Greek and try to use my judgment, and maybe I will someday, but even then it wouldn't be a simple matter of "looking it up". That's all I'm saying.

And yet in 13.12 I think he's clearly refering to Syria as a region, because he also refers to "Ida in Troas", but Troas was not a Roman province. Damascus is indeed ostensibly in the region of Syria.

And indeed, you yourself seem to be saying it was in Trachonitis, right?

What I don't have is hard and fast evidence that it was politically a part of the political division known as Syria at the time, so its status in that regard seems up in the air to me.

Let me put it this way, and maybe you'll see that it's not so a priori:

If you take away the rest of the text, of all Paul's letters, even the authorship of someone named "Paul", and you ignore everyone's treatment of the text, and you just look at the words themselves alone, then "In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king guarded the city of the Damascenes desiring to arrest me" does ostensibly refer to Aretas III. So, if that's what you're saying, then we agree. It's still possible it refers to Aretas IV, but if we're just considering those words alone all by themselves, there's no independent reason to assume it refers to anyone besides Aretas IV.

However, that wasn't the OP--the OP is about dating the "Pauline corpus", which is about much, much more than a single anonymous sentence refering to Aretas. Once you start taking everything else into consideration, including the history of Christian literature, of the Christian religion, of Christian-Jewish conflicts, of Christian theology, of Roman history, and so on and so forth, the probability that the person who wrote II Corinthians lived and wrote sometime around 60-70 BCE (and that this person is the same person who wrote the rest of the Pauline corpus, and who called himself "Paul") decreases significantly. Not to zero, but significantly. This increases the relative chance that those words refer to Aretas IV. If there is no evidence which eliminates this possibility, then it remains a real possibility.

And that's about as far as I can get with it myself. So, again, we do in fact agree--in the limited sense that I describe above.

spin

Both.

I wrote a bit about it some time back in a thread. You can search for

ignatius polycarp lucius verus

in BC&H


spin

Toto

This one?

spin's post

the_cave

Oops--I meant Aretas III--"anyone besides Aretas III" (but this should be obvious from the context.)

yalla

spin & toto

Thank you.
I think I may have learned the search trick now. Ta.

spin

Damascus is not the nest of robbers.

[QUOTE=the_cave]It's actually inconvenient, and I do want to trust him, but he at times he seems to contradict other historians, so at that point it gets hard. (Not to mention Josephus the text may be different from Josephus the author...)


Find texts in Greek here.

Yeah well, Troas soitainly ain't in Syria and noither is Macedonia. They are mentioned because one found terebinth there as well as Damascus in Syria. I don't think that your attempted point here is based on a close reading of the text.

Indeed not. And I don't see why you might construct such an idea. The nest of robbers referred to was in Trachonitis. From there they attacked the Damascus area. BJ 1.20.4 is relatively clear.

When Herod's kingdom was dividied after his death (AJ 17.11.4), Philip is given "Batanea, with Trachonitis, as well as Auranitis, with a certain part of what was called the House of Zenodorus" (and no Damascus). Herod Antipas was given Galilee and Perea. "There were also certain of the cities which paid tribute to Archelaus: Strato's Tower and Sebaste, with Joppa and Jerusalem; for as to Gaza, and Gadara, and Hippos, they were Grecian cities, which Caesar separated from his government, and added them to the province of Syria." Gadara and Hippos, "Greek cities", were returned to Syria and these cities were northern cities of the Decapolis along with Damascus. Later AJ 18.1.1 says that all the territory of Archelaus returned to Syria. Damascus returned to direct rule by the Romans.

But then it's possible that there was another Aretas king of something or other in the possible world you are constructing.

Understand that I don't advocate that Paul lived during the time of Aretas III, just that the reference to Aretas's control over Damascus refers to Aretas III.

When you start adding undated efforts "including the history of Christian literature, of the Christian religion, of Christian-Jewish conflicts, of Christian theology", rather than using what has been shown to relate to the historical period, such as the classical sources, then all you do is multiply your uncertainly level.

This is the reason the topic is about dating Paul from scratch, because we need to shed the unsupported assumptions to see what we really can say.


spin