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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
Some reasons not to go along with Bart Ehrman in trusting in the authenticity of 1 Thess. 2:15-16:
Romans 11 speaks of Elijah’s words about the Jews who have killed Gods’s prophets, but Paul inserts no mention about them having killed the Son of God himself. In 11:7-12 he speaks of the Jews having “blind eyes and deaf ears”—not to Jesus’ own person and preaching but, as Romans 10 has just presented it, to the voice of apostles like himself; he refers to this as their “failure” but no failure in regard to murdering God’s divine messenger. Strange that an authentic Paul, according to Ehrman, can speak of God’s wrath coming upon the Jews for killing the Lord Jesus in 1 Thess., yet here that wrath and killing are nowhere in evidence in Paul’s mind.
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There is no reason to suspect that 1 Thess. 2:15-16 is inauthentic. It is in harmony with the gospels and all other early extant Christian literature, as part of the project to deflect attention away from their wholesale theft of Judaism by the expedient of dehumanizing ethnic Jews. So we are constantly told that "The Jews" killed Lord Jesus. His blood is on their hands and their children. They are the enemies of all men. And so on.
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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
Why would Paul say that it was the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus? That indeed *would* be “truly odd on the pen of Paul.” He constantly says that Jesus was crucified. Did he truly believe that the Jews had crucified Jesus, or that they had a legal right to do so, or that crucifixion was their practice? Could he possibly have believed that the Romans had no role, or possibly have been ignorant of it? If it be suggested that he deliberated twisted history to demonize the jews, that would speak to an utter rejection and vilification of those Jews, something not borne out in the rest of his writings, or even contradicted by them, such as in Romans 11:
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I ask them, has God rejected his people? I cannot believe it!...did their failure mean complete downfall? Far from it! [NEB]
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Romans 11 does not contradict 1 Thess 2:15-16. Paul's point in Romans is that God did not "reject" his people -- his people rejected God. And their failure didn't mean complete downfall, for "because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles." (Romans 11:11)
And this supposed rejection of God by the Jews is in complete harmony with the sentiments in 1 Thess 2:15-16: they didn't please God, and are contrary to all men.
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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
Ehrman, of course, fudges Paul’s words by declaring that he meant that the Jews were “ultimately responsible” for Jesus’ death, even if the Romans performed the crucifixion. Of course, that's 'reading into' the passage something that isn't evidently there. In fact, Paul nowhere else states that *anyone* on earth was responsible for Jesus’ death, but it was the “rulers of this age” which is judged by many of today’s scholars and virtually all the ancient commentators, to be referring to the demon spirits. (This is reminiscent of those who claim that Paul in 1 Cor. 11:23 meant by “for I received from the Lord” not the plain meaning of personal revelation from the Lord to Paul himself, but that these words ultimately derived from Jesus.)
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1 Thess 2:15-16 simply makes explicit what is implicit in the rest of the Pauline epistles. Nowhere does Paul imply that Romans should be held responsible for Jesus's crucifixion.
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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
Strange that Ehrman can seize on Paul’s authentic use of the term “wrath” of God in a general sense to make it specifically apply to Jews in order to authenticate their ‘killing of the Lord Jesus’, yet he cannot on the reverse side take into account the many indicators in Paul that such sentiments as 1 Thes. 2:16 are likely INauthentic.
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I see no reason to think that they are inauthentic. As the Paul character states elsewhere, "For the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them." (Romans 1:18-19 )
Romans 1:18 is the exact same sentiment as 1 Thess 1:16. The "wrath of God" has come upon the Jews. They are suppressing the truth.
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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
(Whereas it is precisely in a time later than Paul, namely early in the 2nd century, that we could envision an interpolator being precisely guilty of twisting history—or rather the account in the Gospels—in order to demonize the Jews who by then were in a state of alienation from the Christian movement. Can Ehrman truly believe that Paul would have called the Jews “enemies of their fellow-men”?)
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Nobody twisted history. All of the early Christian literature available to us consistently demonizes Jews, so we have little reason to suspect that this attitude was somehow a later development. It points to the demonization of Jews as being an essential component of Christian identity from the beginning (whenever that was).
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Originally Posted by EarlDoherty
Nor is Ehrman’s argument about no textual evidence of an absence of 2:15-16 in surviving manuscripts very compelling, considering that a good century could have elapsed between interpolation and our first extant witness to the epistle.
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If that's the case, then nothing in the epistles can prove or disprove anything -- too much time elapsed, and anything could have been interpolated into them (or taken out of them). We have to deal with the texts as we have them, not as we imagine them to have been in some supposedly more pure earlier state. 1 Thess 2:15-16 would only be a big problem if it was utterly at odds with everything else in the NT, but the opposite is true: it is in complete harmony with everything in the NT. The entire NT is a prolonged demonization of Jews. "They killed the Lord Jesus and are the enemies of all men" is the same sentiment as Matthew's "his blood is on us and our children."
05-19-2012, 04:48 PM
