krosero

It’s true, here I used the term “modifying,” though even I could not have meant to imply that the birth of the Son actually modified the sending. That makes no sense. It's just an imprecise use of terms on my part. However, I see now much better what you meant by “restating or defining”, with the example of having answered he said.

Yeah, I agree that there’s some common ground here, which prompted me to write that his argument, on this point, was slightly different from yours but not necessarily contradicting it. What might be interesting at this point is asking why Burton comes to this conclusion. Is it, as Earl has said on various occasions about many authors, that he’s simply grafting the Gospel picture onto his analysis, or is he suggesting something specific and technical about the range of connotations that may and may not be carried by EXAPESTEILEN?

It would be interesting if the phrase did read that way, and we’ll see how it goes.

I can tell you that your comments about the interpolation hypothesis had prompted me to wonder, Why didn’t the interpolater avoid the supposed grammatical error and simply say, God sent his Son to be born of a woman, to be made subject to the law so that he might redeem those under the law? Or anything like that. An interpolater doesn’t have to fall into grammatical error. And if this particular proposed error would have sounded to listeners back then like a strong implication that Christ was previously born in the heavens, I would expect the interpolater to get rid of such a meaning – especially if corruption of Scripture was as pervasive and as heresy-fixated as is sometimes claimed.

I can understand a claim that the interpolater threw a pair of phrases about the Son into a sentence that had previously flowed cleanly without them, and that it was preferred to leave the original parts of the sentence unspoiled, hence the grammatical awkwardness. That’s plausible, and the claim is easy to understand. What I don’t get is the simultaneous claim that the resulting awkwardness would imply something heretical/docetic about Christ (such as his being born in the heavens) and that the Church was extremely keen to erase such heresies and to corrupt the Scriptures to whatever extent might be necessary. The stronger the claim about the pervasiveness and heresy-fixation of the corruption, the weaker must be the claim about the awkwardness/docetism of the passage. It must have been a very weak, almost hidden, hint of docetism if even the Church’s interpolaters left it in.

If there had been any strong hint of Christ’s heavenly birth, Marcion might even have liked the verse.

Another point you made about interpolation is that the original author can just as easily make a clumsy construction. I can’t think of how many times my own writing exhibits that pattern: I write something that flows smoothly, then I go back and try to stuff other ideas into the existing sentences, resulting in transitions that are sometimes awkward in a grammatical sense and occasionally unhelpful in getting my main points across. It’s easy to picture Paul writing that the Son came to redeem those under the law, then being prompted himself, or prompting others, to add almost immediately the irresistible point that Christ could truly do this because he was himself subject to the law. That’s a kind of corruption, perhaps – but I think some underemployed concepts here are drafts and revisions by the original authors and their close contemporaries.

That’s my rant for the day.

Kevin Rosero

Solo

I have read the passage now that Jeffrey posted it(...great service, really appreciated it, Jeffrey). No, I must confess, what Dunn says does not square with my understanding of Paul's beliefs. I am completely taken aback by the proposition that in the passage, "poverty" should be understood as material in nature as opposed to the poverty of "flesh" which Paul taught Jesus humbly wore, being made sin without "knowing" sin.
In my reading of Paul, no doubt esoteric if Dunn passes for academic standard, the notion of pre-existence or an extra-temporal heavenly limbo, if you prefer, would have been the natural way to interpret his own "descent" from the ecstatic experience he describes in 2 Cor 12. Nothing else makes sense to me. An article of faith, I suppose.

Jiri

jgibson000

My pleasure.

I think, then, that it is pertinent to ask the question not only of (1) what the sources of your understanding of Paul's beliefs actually are, but (2) whether, what ever they may be, they are they are generally recognized as, to put it bluntly, any good for gaining an understanding of Paul.

Jeffrey

Solo

Jeffrey, with respect: I already have an understanding of Paul, from the office upstairs who gives out brains, and from reading Paul. BTW "what Paul's beliefs actually were".

When I come visiting this board, it's not for lectures what to read and how to think (,though I am grateful for reading suggestions pertinent to specific queries I have). I am not shopping for a degree or ersatz. I am here to compare notes, throw some ideas out and see what comes flying back. Ok with that ?

Jiri

jgibson000

Actually no. To think, as you seem to do, that Paul is understandable without the brain that I'm sure you have making some good contact with contemporary and classic Pauline studies and the history of the interpreration of Paul and the new perspective on Paul, let alone without some broad and sure grounding in knowledge of

--the world in which he wrote, or

--the background to, and the import of, the issues he discusses, or

--the meaning, as this is is established through diachonic and synchronic
lexical studies, of the imagery and language he uses,

--the cultural force and the 1st century presuppositions about the import of
and the expectations created by the rhetorical ploys and the topoi he
takes up or fights against,

--the contours and the aims of the methods of the exegetical and typological
tricks he employs,

--the nature and the history and the stakes of the conflicts he was involved
in,

--the understanding of how, according to Paul (and not to Luther or to Calvin
or the other reformers), God reveals his righteousness

how atonement takes place

what reconciliaition is

what PISTIS and PISTIS IHSOUU entails,

what his soteriological and anthropological terminology would have
meant in the first century

what his view of what it means to be a faithful Jew was

what the story of Israel is and how his view on this it differs from or is
similar to that of other Jews and Jewish groups,

none of which can be gained simply by reading Paul

all you are likely, if not certainly, to do is to engage in eisegesis when you read him,. All you are likely, if not certainly, to have, is an "understanding" of Paul that is as unsound as it is untrue. And you will be not know with any degree of certainty when your understanding of Paul's beliefs don't square with someone like Dunn, whose understanding is actually better.

Not a lecture. Just a statement of the facts.

Jeffrey

darstec

:huh: Please don't tell that to the compilers of Liddell & Scott, as they do seem to think there is such a Greek word as archon.

krosero

I for one have no problem with this, especially since you're honest about your attitude and your aims; and respectful in all the posts of yours that I've seen.

jgibson000

Really? What I see they say (not think) in the entry in their Lexicon you presumably have looked at is that there is "such a Greek word as" ARCWN (alpha rho chi omega nu).

But they neither say, let alone think, seemingly or otherwise, that there is anywhere in Greek, as you claim there is, such a word as ARCON (alpha rho chi omicron nu). And they certainly don't say (or give any reason for saying that they think), that, as Jake initmates, there is such a Greek word as ARCONS (alpha rho chi omicron sigma), especially, again as Jake intimates, as a/the plural form of ARCWN.

So how did you not see this? The only explanation that comes to mind is that you are unable to distinguish the siglia L&S use for omega from what they use for omicron, and that you can't read with any facility the notes on the various inflected forms of ARCWN that are set out and discussed in the entry in question.

But I'd be happy to be corrected on this.

Jeffrey Gibson

Ted Hoffman

In spite of Jeffrey's failure to handle the issue of archontes directly and comprehensively he has made two valuable contributions IMO. He has allowed himself to be bogged down with questions about spellings, whether I have read the sources myself, whether I learnt about the sources firsthand or tenth hand, demanding a bibliography, citations and so on instead of references, asking for further information about Delling and the rest yet he can access them from the web and other petty issues.

The first point almost got lost when I allowed his introduction of the word "actual" (as in "actual notes"), to distract me. In response to the reference R. Brown, J. Fitzmyer and R. Murphy in The New Jerome Critical Commentary, 1990, p.782, Jeffrey stated that: I haven't been to the library these past few days to check this but if true, but it is more explicit and directly contravenes the passage I had in mind, which indicated that Paul saw this age as dominated or ruled by satan. I had inferred from that passage that the authors consequently understood the Pauline phrase "rulers of this world" to refer to demonic powers.
This is the passage I had in mind:
I will drop it provisionally.

Secondly, he asks whether "these authors held to the view that these specific demonic powers never used human beings as the instruments through which they carried out their will, and, more specifically did not use human agents to carry out what in 1 Cor 2:6-8 they are said to have carried."
This is a very important question. It is important because the authors can hold the expression to mean demonic powers while at the same time holding that Paul believed that these demonic powers used human agents to execute their will. But this is a point Jeffrey has to argue. It cannot just be assumed.

Consider Origen, who writes: [Emphasis mine]
Origen, Contra Celsum, Book V,2, Translated by Henry Chadwick, 1965 (see also De Principiis Book One, Chapter V, IV, p.256-7, Book Three, Chapter III, 1-3 (ANF IV, p.334-5)

[Chadwick notes that the "prince of this world" in this passage refers to 1 Cor. 2. Leon Morris (1 Corinthians, pp. 53-54) also says Origen took the 'princes of this world' to mean demons]

Buttrick G.A.'s argument is consistent with Jeffrey's. In The Interpreter's Bible, Vol X, 1953, p.37-38 he writes:
But we have others that disagree with Jeffrey, like Branson. Doherty writes:
There are several others. The important thing is that Jeffrey's point cannot just be assumed. He has to argue it on a case by case basis. And even if it were indeed the case that these scholars that favour the interpretation offered by mythicists do not constitute the majority (as Leon Morris states), it remains true that that interpretation has support from several scholars.

You cannot assume your case. You have to prove it.

You had marginal success. You are yet to deal with the following:

1. Paul Ellingworth, A Translator's Handbook for 1 Corinthians, p.46
2. W. J. P. Boyd, '1 Corinthians ii.8,' Expository Times 68. p.158.
3. C. K. Barrett, First Epistle to the Corinthians, p.72
4. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, p.56
5. Jean Hering, The First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, p.16-17
6. S. G. F. Brandon., Time History and Deity, p.167
7. And those mentioned by Doherty and others like Delling, Jean Hering, Conzelmann, Thackeray, Schmiedel, J. H. Charlesworth.

Marcion's understanding of archons, per Tertulian's Adversus Marcionem v.6, was consistent with that of JM. Marcion is indeed a good basis and so is Ignatius (note that Robertson and Plummer indicate that the Marcionite interpretation "perhaps exists already in Ignatius", A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, p. 37) . Ignatius still applies because the mythicist argument is that we do not have to assume that Paul meant earthly rulers. All we have to argue is that there is another viable alternative interpretation to the HJ. That is enough to make the JM hypothesis a competing paradigm to the HJ hypothesis.

Whether one picks one paradigm or another then, will be based on ones presuppositions (Ignatius assumes a HJ) and the explanatory power of each hypothesis.

Yes, Prof?
Answered above. Most scholars demonstrate awareness about this question when they make their stand regarding the meaning of the rulers of this world.

Frankly, tangential; issues aside, I do not see how you can pull this off without demonstrating that I am wrong about this, without you locating Schmiedel, Conzelmann et al and proving e.g. Robertson and Plummer, Leon Morris etc wrong about them. If Leon Morris says Conzelman says X, without any reason to question Morris, Conzelman agrees.
As an amateur, I am right to rely on experts. If you disagree with these experts. Just prove them wrong. Now.

Ted Hoffman

Consider the following passage from Brown, J. Fitzmyer and R. Murphy in The New Jerome Critical Commentary, 1990, p.782
Those who understand ransom soteriology, does it make sense for Christ to be offered by God, killed by man, and thereby confer salvation (from demons) to mankind?
Or does it make more sense for Christ to be killed by demons, who then release mankind from their hold in exchange?
One age is dominated by satan/demons/demuigre. The other by God. God wants mankind to join him. God gives a ransom - his son, for this to happen. Man kills Christ or demons kill Christ?
Anyone wants to break down how salvific death worked?