Doug Shaver

Is anybody running around the country claiming he was resurrected?
No. And what do his followers say about him?

Doug Shaver

I could understand his trying such a tactic. I'm having trouble supposing he might have thought it would actually work. If the pillars actually had been disciples of Jesus, could Paul have imagined that his congregations wouldn't know that if he just kept his own mouth shut about it?

hjalti

Yes.

And even if you dispute that, even if we just assume that few students were running around the country claiming that Applewhite had reached "the level above human", would you really expect books like "The history of the USA in the 20th century" to mention him?
That he's god/Jesus.

gurugeorge

Isn't he just being sarcastic? If he is, then it seems he sees himself on the same footing as them. i.e. he's imputing to them airs and graces just because they have temporal priority wrt a teaching, but he considers his "revelation" not inferior to theirs. But had they been personal disciples, his "revelation" would very decidedly have been inferior to their personal discipleship, and he couldn't have gotten away with any kind of fudging of the issue.

Which fits with him merely being the last in a list of persons to get the same quality of "revelation", as per 1 Cor 15. This is another piece of the puzzle that has to be factored in. This passage does seem to be at least partly interpolated, but even so, there's no distinction in quality between type of revelation. You might say what was revealed was the "risen Christ", and indeed that might work even if there was a human Jesus (the orthodox idea of some visionary "Easter event" or whatever). It's just odd that there's no hint whatsoever of any personal discipleship, personal teaching, etc, such as is found in the later tradition of the gospels, here at this point where there's supposed to be some sort of credo.

It's at this point HJ-ers often say "oh he just wasn't interested in Jesus' career before the resurrection". But that's psychologizing. The fact is, there's no personal discipleship (such as is quite clear in the later tradition) of Jesus by anybody, mentioned in the "Paul" text.

It's that ringing silence, plus the broader context of what Walter Bauer found in Orthodoxy and Heresy (that, seemingly paradoxically, orthodoxy looks like it's a later offshoot from "heresy"), that makes me lean towards MJ (orthodoxy being almost defined by the concept of apostolic succession).

Not all the synoptics, GMark definitely takes a dim view of the disciples, but they are rehabilitated somewhat in GMatthew and GLuke. (This is what has led some people to think GMark is sort of Pauline.)

gurugeorge

Yeah, that's my thought. Picture the situation: on the HJ conception, unless he simply lied to his congregation and didn't tell them the truth, his congregation knew that these apostles were personal disciples, and he wasn't. But the point is supposed to be that these other apostles had been preaching to his flock, so there's no way they couldn't have known the truth, if it was the truth.

Is it reasonable to suppose that they wouldn't automatically have gone with the people who'd had personal contact with the Saviour, and ditched the mere visionary? How could he fight back against that by just (metaphorically) putting his fingers in his ears and going "la la la"? It doesn't make sense to me. I mean it's just about conceivable if there's some mitigating factor we don't know about, but just on these supposed facts alone, it doesn't make sense in terms of any normal human psychology.

Whereas, if they were all mere visionaries, if the whole idea at that time was just an idea, just a variant conception of what the Messiah was, then yeah, they're just competitors on the same footing, and the congregations just have to choose between which variation-on-a-theme, which tenets they prefer.

Bottom line: personal disciples with teachings from the horse's mouth would always have trumped a mere visionary, he wouldn't have stood a cat's chance in hell of competing. But if they were all visionaries, there's no problem - he was just the most successful visionary.

gurugeorge

At this point I'm prompted to wonder, and ask of the more experienced scholars here - where in the timeline do we first see a connection made in any text, between Paul's "Pillars" and "apostles", etc., and the (very definitely) personal-disciple-type apostles of the gospel tradition?

It looks like GMark to me, but maybe there's some obscure earlier text where the connection is made?

Frankly, it seems to me that GMark is post-Diaspora, and he just muddles up the earlier tradition - it's GMark who places the Christ events at the 0 CE mark, and who makes the "apostles" personal disciples, where in reality they were just "messengers" of a new concept of the Messiah.

GMark's innocent mistake is then picked up and run with by the nascent Roman-Alexandrinian orthodoxy, who like this specific historicization, who use it to shore up the authority of their lineage by means of the concept of apostolic succession. Except they don't like the way GMark makes the disciples look like idiots, so they make their own versions, GMatthew and (even later) GLuke, in which the apostles are more ... well, apostolic.

(Note that so far as orthodoxy was concerned - IIRC - the most important gospel in the early days was GMatthew - a gospel favourable to the disciples - that was considered the original and best, it's only modern investigators who have discovered that GMark had temporal priority.)

Vivisector

Can't disagree with any of your logic - the cycle repeats, and we return to the same texts, the same people in those texts, what we can make of them, and what seems to be more or less probable of them.

Cheers,

V.

Vivisector

If this was happening, then I don't think there's any way it would have worked, and I (like you) can't believe Paul would have imagined that simply refusing to mention them would have erase his congregations' knowledge of the pillars/disciples and their connection to Jesus. It just seems possible, at least, that Paul was following the political strategy of refusing to provide any free and positive publicity to his opponents by mentioning their credentials (if only to re-emphasize his own). But I realize I could easily be guilty of gross retrojection here.

Cheers,

V.

Vivisector

I think we might be agreeing here. But I'd also say, regardless of the source of the opponents' authority, I think Paul didn't get away with it, at least not completely, and not in his own time.

Agree completely.

Still hanging on (for now) to my possible explanation of why Paul himself might not have referred to personal discipleship, if it occurred. As to personal teaching, that one's still a struggle. The oddness of its omission would seem to depend on what the opponents were teaching (which we've touched on and remains elusive to me). It seems that it goes back all the way to why the opponents thought Jesus was the Christ. Was it because of what Jesus may have taught prior to his death, was it because of their "Easter experience," both, or neither? And if some of both, what was the balance that these opponents emphasized in their teaching?

Cheers,

V.

Vivisector

Great point, implying that the disciples' rehabilitation was something that happened fairly quickly (within a couple of decades or so, as per standard dating). To the degree the disciples are rehabilitated, Matthew is perhaps less pro-Paul than Mark (assuming that Mark is pro-Paul at all in this sense). I can't remember, but would be interested in, any other areas in which Matthew might be kinder to the disciples than Mark and the degree to which, if any, Matthew moves away from anything Paul wrote. Sounds like homework for me.

Cheers,

V.