Steven Carr

STARK
Equally alien to paganism was the notion that because God loves humanity, Christians cannot please God unless they love one another

SOME RANDOM CHRISTIAN
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others?

CARR
Why was it a 'revolutionary idea' to greet your brothers?

DCHindley

Hmmm,

Not sure what you were saying then.

Maybe I am like the pot calling the kettle black, but have you ever tried, you know, actually saying anything plainly?

Naaaaah! Too wild!

FWIW, I think the (original) writer of the Paulines was proud of his Jewishness and simply wanted his fellow Jews to accept those gentiles who appreciated the Jewish god as a kind of "brother." Apparently he got push-back from his brethren who felt that doing so would 'dilute the brand' and jeopardize the considerable concessions that Jews had won from the Romans over the years.

Now that *other* "Paul" who added the Christ language to those letters didn't like Jews at all, as if they as a people somehow betrayed him and his kind. He and his posse had a completely new and transformed view of Jesus's significance, no longer a Jewish messiah but a heavenly redeemer. Together, they hijacked the old Paulines and refashioned them into something new by adding the Christ language. It was a marketing move, I suppose, and seemed to have worked.

Because I also think the original author didn't appear to know a thing about Jesus, like him I get a lot of modern push-back from those who just cannot disassociate Jesus from Paul. The need to rationalize the Jewish message of the old Paul with the anti-Jewish redeemer message of the new Paul has created the modern *rhetorical genius* Paul. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Instead, I have subjected it to decomposition until it was in 3rd normal form. Think of "old Paul" and "new Paul" as tables of a database.

DCH

Ben C Smith

Here it is, December 8, and I am responding.

It is not addressed; it is blankly dismissed.

I am not certain how this parallel works; dismissed quotations are fairly common in 1 Corinthians. Again, this is not my preferred solution (interpolation is), but there are very real problems with assuming that 1 Corinthians 14.34-35 stems from Paul himself, including the apparent contradiction with 1 Corinthians 11.5, the blanket use of as the law says, and the textual relocation.

I brought Crossan in as support for my contention that both Colossians and Ephesians are disputed epistles. I agree that Crossan projects ideology (more so with Jesus than with Paul, IMHO).

However, the notion that all men would eventually be equal did not start on campuses in the sixties. Can you locate the following text?

Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. No one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together.

Where does Paul say this in the undisputed epistles. I see clearly in Colossians and Ephesians.

I agree with this. But there is a big ethical difference (a nod to the title of this thread) between not advising revolution among Christian slaves and envisaging Christian masters. The crime is not in being a slave, after all; it is in being a master.

It is not my position that the prepositional phrase in Christ makes this clear; I was simply using that phrase in the (or a) way I think Paul uses it.

Here, in nuce, is why I think Paul disapproved of Christians owning slaves:

1. Paul pulled no stops in getting Philemon to free Onesimus, calling it the right thing to do.
2. Paul describes Christian relationships of various kinds in 1 Corinthians 7, and the two classes of people he talks about concerning slavery are slave and free. No masters are discussed.
3. During the course of that same discussion Paul advises slaves to become free if possible (no violent revolution, but a clear preference for freedom over slavery) and also not to become slaves to men (id est, not to sell oneself into slavery, a pretty common thing in antiquity, usually for economic reasons). It would be pretty inconsistent if Paul instructed believing freemen not to become slaves but accepted believing masters acquiring slaves; now, maybe Paul was inconsistent in this respect, but I do not think we should assume he was without clear evidence, and Ephesians and Colossians are both doubted as genuine on other grounds. The only loophole here is the possibility of a believing master owning an unbelieving slave; Paul does not address this contingency, even indirectly (to my knowledge), so we can only guess what he might have said. I do have a guess, but it may not be the same as yours.
4. In Galatians 3.28 Paul again divides humankind into classes (in order to dismiss the class system, at least in some respect). We get Jews and Greeks, males and females, and slaves and free. Again masters are missing as a class; they are certainly not missing in the disputed epistles.

The bottom line here is that no respectable Roman under the Augustan program could ever have accepted the balanced marital and social approach of 1 Corinthians 7 or ever have uttered Galatians 3.28; but take out the obviously Christian language (the bride of Christ stuff, for example) of the household tables in Colossians and Ephesians and any virtually well bred Roman could subscribe.

Ben.

andrewcriddle

Hi Ben

Would the Paul of Corinthians have disapproved of a believing master maintaining his stock of slaves by encouraging marriage and child rearing among his household ?

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

I suspect so. He encouraged celibacy (if possible) to begin with. Why do you ask? (Did I miss a verse in 1 Corinthians in which Paul instructs Christian masters to do this? )

Ben.

Sheshbazzar

Not certain of how serious you are, but the above is very convergent with my own line of thinking.
The original Paul (or Pauline writer(s)) were proud Jewish nationalists, proclaiming a Jewish national emblem and symbol of endurance and victory to a Jewish nation and culture that was in eminent danger of sinking under the tidal wave of Hellenistic syncretism.
Their "Joshua" The Messiah, not an actual person, but like the U.S. "Uncle Sam" a nation unifying symbol, to be respected by all who were proud of their Israeli heritage and zealous for their distinctive Jewish culture and religious traditions.
I believe that this is what the original Nazarenes were teaching, and Paul was simply an envoy carrying this nationalistic ideal to the synagogues of the Diaspora.
The other "Paul's" (writers) already "gone over" to Hellenism, hi-jacked Paul's original message and reputation to promulgate their Greek written, Gentile fabricated, quasi-Jewish religion.

mountainman

Dear DCHindley,

The schema of this database ideally should also contain the tables "[Old Apollonius of Tyana]" and "[New Apollonius of Tyana]". The wandering sage and man of letters collected after his death, respected author and sponsor of temples and churches, subscriber to lineage of the LOGOS and its preservers. Much referential integrity is actually surprisingly apparent between the four tables, you only need to swap the religion flag between "Pythagorean" and "Early Christian".

Best wishes,


Pete

Casper

Gerard,

I don't have the depth of knowledge to wade through what is modern pagan hoodoo-voodoo and what is really scholarship of some sort in my googling, but would Stark's ideas be somewhat invalidated if we could cite some pagan practice honoring charity? A cult of Asclepius for instance?

DCHindley

Quite serious.

Unlike you, though, I could not find a way to retain the Jesus references to the core letters. It added nothing to the argumentation, all related to the idea that if gentiles displayed the same faith in God's promises that Abram did before he circumcised himself, God would count that as righteousness on their part in the same way as he did for Abram. There is perhaps a kind of future-looking kingdom theology at work here, but not overt messianism.

However, since "Jesus" is pretty much always associated with the Christ language (usually as the phrase "Jesus Christ" or "Christ Jesus"), I had to treat it as part of the second "Paul's" vocabulary, a vestigal remain of the transformation that had changed Jesus a Jewish messianic figure into Jesus "Christ" a divine redeemer figure.

Since the Opening Post is about the so-called "superiority" of Christian ethics, I'll relate what we have just been discussing to it. Western culture, where Christian ideas and world-view permeates everything we read, see, and symbolize, includes the seminal idea that while Jewish ethics was inherently superior to pagan ethics, Christian ethics replaced Jewish ethics because it too was superior in every way to its predecessor.

Christ theology is the jewel in the crown of Christian thinking, and thus epitpomizes what makes it superior. As a result, if Christ language is in the Paulines, then by gum it HAS to be the key to understanding them. It is how I originally approached them as a teen reading the NT for the first time. Yet I could not really make sense of it all - lines of reasoning that seemed to go here, then suddenly switch direction and go there, and never, it seemed at first, really going anywhere. I could really understand the frustration of the author of 2 Peter 3:15-16, but also shared his optimism that there had to be something of value there.

Getting beyond the concept that Christ theology simply has to be the key to understanding the Paulines took about 10 years of slow and painful analysis. I gained an appreciation for the metaphor of Acts 9:18, where after relaying an account of Paul's revelation the author says "something like scales fell from his eyes."

The way by which people relate Jesus' relationship to messianic prophecy is connected to our cultural conditioning regarding the inherent superiority of Christ theology. It actually hinders one when looking for the historical roots of the early Jesus movement. Looks as though you have had some luck in disassociating them. While getting our head around the Jesus movement is important, I do not think that the Paulines will help one do that, as the "Jesus" theology and traditions contained in them have already been transformed from any sort of truly Jewish messianism.

Luckily there are other resources available in early Christian and 1st century Jewish (Philo and Josephus) literature. Clear as mud? <g>

DCH (on morning break ... now back to work)

gstafleu

You would then have to show that the cult of Asclepius failed while otherwise being similar to Christianity (e.g. in its attitude towards exogamy, in its attitude towards women, in its attitude towards infanticide...).

Gerard Stafleu