The Evil One

I don't think there can be many scholars who would deny that at least one gospel was in circulation among Christian groups all over the place (inc. Rome) by c 108-115 CE which was the date you mentioned for Tacitus.

capnkirk

Spin,

I think you forgot who you were responding to...It wasn't me who put forth that idea. I was responding to it also. Note the last phrase of the pull-quote; we agree that this solution is most unsatisfying.

What this analyses does is to cast doubt on the reason that Aretas IV attacked Herod. It may well be that it was a red-herring in the first place, an understandable excuse so to speak. That is the third possibility (that Aretus IV had entirely different reasons for his invasion, but needed political cover). Anyway, that's just a sidebar.
No I don't, primarily because there are several more reasonable hypotheses. Mack's for example. If "the Passion" never happened, as Mack contends, then Luke's depiction of Saul's career under the High Priest in Jerusalem didn't happen either, thus unlinking Luke's account of Paul's experience with Aretas from Paul's brief, almost incidental mention of it. But Paul in his letters did claim to have persecuted Xtians before he was converted, which begs another question. If Paul's conversion was the profound event that Luke's account makes it, why then does Paul never speak about it except to say that he was converted? One would expect Paul to have FEATURED such a profound and supernatural experience which supposedly happened before witnesses.

This forces us to consider reacharacterizing Paul's conversion (as a much more mundane event, akin to contemporary conversions) and his life before conversion (to that of a fairly Hellenized Pharisee in or around Antioch who was in strong disagreement with Xtian groups there). We know that later Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and his passing reference to Damascus (in the process of bragging about the various authorities who had persecuted him on account of his faith) didn't even seem to count very highly in that list. It seems that Paul didn't place the import on that event that Luke later did, nor that we do now. Of course, the reason that we do now is because this is about the only thing that Paul wrote down that might give us a fairly secure date-hook.

The problem I have with dating Paul to Aretas II (who died in 96 BCE) is what else has to be revised subsequent to such dating, which, considering the current state of scholarship would be extremely unlikely.

spin

But what it doesn't do is change the dating for John the Baptizer, who harangued Herod Antipas for divorcing his Nabataean wife for Herodias. It must have been the middle 30s, therefore there is no reason to question Aretas IV's motives, which seem eminently plausible.

Sorry, I left off an "I": Aretas III, who was in charge of Damascus circa 85 BCE. There of course was no other time for an Aretas to have been in charge of Damascus. So either Paul is wrong or the common dating is.


spin

Yuri Kuchinsky

There's no proof that Paul wrote any of these letters. So this is the first question that needs to be dealt with.

It's possible that he wrote some parts of these letters, though...

Best,

Yuri.

capnkirk

Spin,

I see THREE posibilities for error here, and I am undecided which one is correct:

1. The gospel references to JBp being executed before Jesus are incorrect. "Mark" screwed up.
2. The Jesus of the gospels lived later than is thought (after Pontius Pilate was recalled). Mark made a different error.
3. Mark was correct in dating JBp's death to early 30's. Aretas' stated reason for invading Herod was trumped up.

You have picked the second choice.

The consequences to the timelines for the whole period of the birth of Xtianity caused by the presence of Paul in Damascus in 85 BCE are just as problematic as prior to 96 BCE, so I think we can safely presume that Paul didn't precede the consensus Jesus-period by fifty or more years.

I have seen varying conclusions about Aretas IV re: Damascus, and I remember your position from an earlier thread. A thorough discussion of that topic would seriously derail this thread, so for the moment, let us just agree that any dating of Paul's letters based on this link is suspect. Besides, for that incident be definitive, one would have to take Luke's account in Acts as factual in defining Paul in Damascus at the beginning of his Xtian career. Without that, its value as a dating tool becomes more problematic without questioning the historicity of Aretas in Damascus. As it is, more than 10 years passes between the alleged Damascus event and the dating of Paul's earliest letters. That in and of itself seems more than passing strange.

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Enterprise...OUT.

capnkirk

Yuri,

Thank you for your post. While I agree that there are questions about the authorship of some of Paul's letters, and that some letters attributed to him are clearly not his, but I would respectfully request that we reserve that discussion for another thread.

At the moment my sole concern is to discover the scholarly basis for the currently accepted dating of Paul's letters to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Philippians Colossians, and Ephesians. While the dating of the Gospels has been debated endlessly, there seems to be no similar debate about Paul's letters...so much so that even the scholarly basis for the accepted dates seems extremely dificult to discover. Even on this thread, discussion has ranged all over the place while still failing to address the OP.

I might want to question some of those dates, but only AFTER I ascertain what basis the scholars have used to determine the currently accepted dates. This task has proven more difficult than I had imagined when I started the thread.

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Enterprise...OUT.

Toto

I was not able to get the search function to work last night, but I argued in a previous thread that Paul's references to Damascus were clearly not to be taken literally, and that Damascus was probably a code name for Qumran or some other city, and the escape symbolic for finding some loophole in the laws. The whole story of the escape from Damascus was part of a theatrical routine in which Paul is clearly playing the "fool" - going through various stock characters of the theater of his time. (See The Runaway Paul)

The answer to the question in the OP is clearly that mainstream scholars date Paul's letters by reference to Acts, and by accepting the Christian legend (that has no Biblical or other support) that Paul died around 60 something CE. If Paul's letters were dated the way the gospels are, internal references would probably lead to a post-70 date. Leidman in The Fabrication of the Christ Myth argues for a post-70 date for most of Paul's letters (but he does not consider the possibility of interpolations.)

rlogan

Don't these two problems (gospel dating vs epistles) also closely relate to one another?

That is, if one believes he has pinned down the date for the written gospels, then one has an upper bound for the early epistles.

The reason why I questioned the Tacitus entry is that by the time of the epistles, Paul was preaching "Christ Crucified". True, that the entry has another layer of detail with Pilate. Some have challenged the use of the term "procurator" rather than "prefect".

In any case, is this an oral tradition or a written one? Is there a passion narrative predating Mark? There is debate on this point.

But if we challenge the gospel dating, then we have removed the 'lid" on daing the epistles.

I did not wish to derail the thread, but rather argue that the two are related in this way.

capnkirk

My whole point in continuing to pull us back to the OP was that it is very difficult to challenge scholars' dating of the epistles without knowing what their bases for such dating were. To do so is to set one's self up for a rude surprise from an unexpected direction...after you have spent considerable time and effort refuting something that you thought was real only to find out that it was your own straw dog. That is why it was worth the extra effort to try to find out just what their arguments were based on before proceeding to the kinds of questions that several on this thread have wanted to START with.

The points you make are valid points, like Pilate's title. A recently uncovered inscribed stone at Caesarea Marina records Pilate's title as Prefect, but rather than get lost in a discussion about whether Tacitus should have known this, or whether there might have been some oral tradition before GMark, there were more important issues to settle first.

Toto has confirmed my speculations concerning scholars' ability to date many of Paul's epistles to not just a year, but to a season, and to where he was when he wrote each one. The unanimity of opinion seen practically demanded a recognized body of underlying source material, as evidenced by those same scholars' inability to agree within a decade on the dating of the gospels speaks of a lack of similar source material. My question, plain and simple, was: What was it? Since after all my cajoling, no one has presented any better basis than Acts, I am ready to accept that, and proceed from there.

Toto

I have in my notes a reference to Henry Wansbrough An Introduction to the Pauline Letters which discusses the dating problem and Acts and the Epistles, which also discusses dating. They both rely on Acts, in particular the mention of Gallio, and do not mention any markers in Paul's letters, except to point out how the chronology can be fit to Acts.