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Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
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Jesus Seminar: The Authentic Letters of Paul
The Authentic Letters of Paul: A New Reading of Paul's Rhetoric and Meaning (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Arthur J. Dewey, Roy W. Hoover, Lane C. McGaughy, and Daryl D. Schmidt
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Press Release
Since the 1880s, the Apostle Paul’s often-used phrase “faith in Jesus” has been mistranslated. “What happened in 1881 is that a new theological agenda gained sway. The rhetorical sound and flow of Paul’s speech was altered to fit that theological orthodoxy,” say scholars of the Jesus Seminar. In a new Scholars Version edition, entitled The Authentic Letters of Paul: A New Reading of Paul’s Rhetoric and Meaning, they translate the Greek phrase ek pisteos christou as “trust of Jesus,” rather than “faith in Jesus.” This new translation of Pauline letters joins The Complete Gospels—the Scholars Version edition of all of the canonical and noncanonical gospels from the first three centuries, which was just released in a fourth edition in September 2010.
Fellows of the Jesus Seminar began their work on Paul by distinguishing his authentic letters from others attributed to him, and disentangling the composite letters—2 Corinthians and Philippians—so that readers can see how their components look as separate pieces of correspondence. They then restored Paul’s voice in a fresh translation from the original Greek.
The Acts of the Apostles is a second-century text and cannot be trusted as an accurate history and framework for Paul’s letters, they say. Pauline terms like faith, Christ, grace, flesh, and sin were understood much less rigidly by first-century readers than they are now. Furthermore, Paul was not a Pastor sermonizing on established orthodoxy, because in Paul’s day orthodoxy did not yet exist. He was, rather, a visionary who employed a multitude of rhetorical devices to tease out the meaning of Jesus’ message for new converts. It was past time, according to authors Arthur Dewey, Roy Hoover and Lane McGaughy, to free Paul’s language from 2000 years of theological accretions and orthodox mandates, and rediscover its original meaning. “This ‘new reading’ of Paul’s letters is, like the apostle’s own thinking and writing, fresh, full of energy, and constructively provocative,” says Victor Paul Furnish of Southern Methodist University. “It speaks to us as the letters were probably heard in the first centuries,” added his colleague Joseph B. Tyson.
Readers who are new to Pauline scholarship may be surprised to learn that not all of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament were written by him. Scholars have long observed that it was accepted practice in the ancient world for followers of famous figures to write in their names. Paul was no exception. It is widely thought that followers of Paul probably penned 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, for instance, as well as Ephesians and Colossians. The authors of The Authentic Letters of Paul judge seven letters to be authentic. And, in a near-complete reversal of the canonical order, they reorder the letters chronologically from first to last as follows: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans.
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There is a review on Amazon that lists some of the translations:
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The Jesus Seminar Scholars gifted rendition of Paul's truths has given us a mighty stratagem at a time when traditional religious practices have tanked in the 21st century. On page 79 they translated in beautiful English the message of Paul about institutional experts. Paul says, I remind you that it is written in the scriptures, "I will bring to ruin the wisdom of the expert, and I will confound the intelligence of the best and the brightest."
On page 132 Paul continues the verbal slap on the head of the expert and is once again rendered in our contemporary turning of the phrase, "But it must be said, when they become a mutual admiration society and indulge in self-congratulation, they don't know what they are doing." Thus, Paul (the nonexpert) boastfully says, "We were the first to arrive with the world-transforming message about God's Anointed."
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On page 80 Paul is once again beautifully restored to speak to us about God's Anointed. "God has chosen people who have no status in the world and even those held in contempt, people who count for nothing, in order to bring to nothing those who are thought to be really something, so that no human beings might be full of themsleves in the presence of God. It is God's doing that you belong to the people of the Anointed Jesus. God has made him our wisdom and the source of our goodness and integrity and liberation."
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11-01-2010, 09:03 PM
