MrMacSon

I agree with you last sentence - if there was no one named Paul writing these letters, a person named Paul is unlikely to have existed. We do have argument that a lot of the series of letters written under Paul's name, including some of the so-called "undisputed Pauline epistles", were not written by Paul. There has been the universal assumption and tradition of the "pseudepigraphical texts" of Paul being based "on a historical individual" - "Paul". Yet, we have no other information about "Paul".

We must consider Paul and writings attributed to him are is a literary device, given the large amount of evidence for literary embellishments in oral traditions and other contemporary canonical texts of the times.

LegionOnomaMoi

That's because it is missing a word. What I meant to say was:
But unless we have any evidence of anyone ever just inventing a character and writing a series of letters under that character's name, then why consider it plausible? Except, of course, to fit it into some radical skepticism which one only applies to christian sources. Because if there was no one named Paul writing these letters, then we have no reason to think that virtually ancient any author existed.

LegionOnomaMoi

Galatians alone refers to different ideologies within the Jesus sect, and the beginning of whether or not it was a Jewish sect or moving into something else. And this is the first generation. Acts is not.


An extremely significant ideological difference. The had the view which Paul opposed prevailed, it's quite possible "christianity" would never have evolved and we might have seen something like the Ebionites or it simply would have died out because it was no longer easy enough for "gentiles" to join.



Scribal interpretation, alteration, and pseudo-authorship are a part of the entirety of greco-roman literary history. All this is evidence of is that Christians did it to. We just have better evidence of their texts to work with. The use of the phrase "perverted texts" is just your obvious and overt bias. Textual corruption was not just the norm, it was a guarantee.


Since when is does the Johannine community constitute "heresy" ?

We know that Mt & Lk have a literary depedence on Mk because of the close verbal/syntactical parallels. However, unless you think some form of Q didn't exist, then they share another source independent of Mark. And John and Thomas appear independent from all of the above. However, acts concerns the early church. For this we have Paul, Acts, the Didache, Papias, and a handful of other documents or fragments. At the foundations of source analyses for texts is agreement. If one author doesn't appear to have copied another, showing dependence becomes quite difficult. In order to do so, you build assumptions upon assumptions upon assumptions which violate just about every principal of historical inquiry, textual criticism, textual analysis, genre/register, socio- and cognitive linguistics. Of course, so do many NT scholars and historians of the early church. However, this is changing (e.g., Mark's Memory Resources and the Controversy Stories (Mark 2:1-3:6): An Application of the Frame Theory of Cognitive Science to the Markan Oral-Aural Narrative by Park, volume 2 of Linguistic Biblical Studies).

You haven't offered a single plausible reason for suggesting that the author of Acts was aware of Paul's letters. Your argument is based on an assumption of some coherent ideology within not only the Jesus sect but "christianity" (it is, after all, in acts where we first find the term christians), despite varying traditions within our sources and ideological rifts within the first generation.

MrMacSon

That is a logical fallacy - the composition fallacy.

spin

In the Pauline corpus there is no sign of a Jesus sect outside Paul's communities. It is merely assumed. What was the theology of those in Jerusalem? Nobody knows for sure, because Paul didn't tell us. What was the theology of those in the assemblies of Judea in christ? Again nobody knows. And of those people disturbing the Galatians? Nobody knows.

Only conjecture.

This doesn't help establish independence of attestation.

Confusion comes from not remembering the mention of Marcion or Valentinus. Doh!

We don't know when "Q" was composed: it could have been before or after Mk, but almost certainly after Paul. It's coming into Mt & Lk just unites two strands of internal development.

Thomas is certainly not independent in that many of the logoi are found very closely in the synoptics, ie there is a literary relationship between them.

How John fits in requires some relational dating. If there were any we could evaluate its significance.

But when was it written???

We are not looking to show dependence: we are looking to show independence. Otherwise we cannot talk of independent attestations.

There should be no shifting of the burden here. If one wants to claim multiple independent attestations, one has to show independence.

Why do I smell that slimey smell of burden shifting? Oh, that's right, someone was trying to claim independence, but not wanting to demonstrate it.

Coherence is not at all necessary. We are interested in evidence for history through the claim of independent attestation. In the end if one cannot show independence one basically has no evidence at all for doing history. There is just multiple reflections of a single source, a complex version of witness collusion. The witnesses are independent entities, but their testimony is derived from an agreement, then shaped by the eccentricities of the individual witness.

The christian collusion is the tradent's acceptance of the tradition of the time, which is taken away and transmitted, but the transmission alters the story and we get different versions of the tradition, giving us the eccentricities, such as two versions of the feeding story found in Mk, or the irreconcilable birth narratives, or such as the desire to improve on the original, fixing the language, or discourse order. And so the one tradition diversifies within the extended community. (The diversity can naturally lead to what is later called heresy. There can also be fusion of different traditions where religions meet, such as the weaving together of esoteric notions found in the more divergent gnosticism.)

The ultimate task is to find ways of doing history in order to draw historical conclusions about the start of christianity. Assuming conclusions such as independence of attestation merely guarantees failure from the start.

Solo

Hoffman is wrong if he imagines the "brothers of the Lord" would have been an a witness of an "adelphic" model. By context in which Paul uses the term in 1 Cr 9:5, this looks to have been some kind of honorific title in Jerusalem, and it did not relate to Lord Jesus.

Best,
Jiri

LegionOnomaMoi

That's only true if we have some reason for asserting thatany of the letters ascribed to Paul were not written by him which would also explain why we should accept authentic authorship elsewhere. As I said, there is a lot of scholarship on pseudepigraphy in the ancient world, even when limited to letters. There are methods historians have used to determine whether or not it is likely this or that letter was really written by Plato, whether or not the same author is behind both the Iliad and the Odyssey, whether Demosthenes actually wrote the speeches attributed to him, etc. These are the same methods employed when it comes to Paul. And they are the reason that many of the letters attributed to him are widely believed to be falsely attributed. Yet you want to go beyond that and claim that we are seeing something historically unprecendented. A series of epistles (not literary works), which spontaneously developed a character "paul" who then continued to be used. In the modern world, this isn't a stretch. Mass communication. In a highly illiterate culture centuries before the printing press, such collective behavior would require some precedent. After all, while history, myth, narrative fiction, biography, technical texts, etc., were all genres with "fuzzy" boundaries and sharing many essential features, letters were a comparatively clearly demarcated "genre." In fact, they were even a business. You could go out and buy certain size sheets during Paul's day and have your letter written by a professional scribe. However, certain letters by people like Cicero were considered qualitatively different because of their literary worth, or because they were instructive. And people forged letters under such names. Just like they did with Paul. In all cases, however, where we have a traditional of forged letters, they go back to a historical individual. And we aren't talking here of a forged letter of Socrates written centuries after he was dead. We're talking about a fairly short span of time in which (according to you) we find a collective invention of a "character" who is simply the author of letters. Not a "character" in plays like Socrates.

So unless you have some reason which explains why this unprecedented spontaneous collective epistolic tradition arose, and thus why we can continue to use the standard historical-critical methods when it comes to authorship elsewhere in the ancient world, then all you have is no more than speculation based on mere possibility that it could happen. And we have the same type of evidence for every single author.

judge

delete

maryhelena

Hoffmann is contrasting 'brother of the Lord' with the hierarchical structure of 'apostles'. A contrast within the context of Gal.1:18,19. If all are brother in the Lord - then take that idea to it's logical end. Which is what Philo has done with his Essenes:

That is the logical reality of a fellowship of all 'brothers'. And that is not what 'Paul' is referencing in the Gal. 1 passage. 'Paul' is referencing 'brother' in contrast with 'apostle'. So, either it's a case of Orwell - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" - which makes nonsense of the equality ideal - or, 'brother in the Lord' has, in the Gal. 1 context, a limited, specific connotation. In other words; the focus in Gal.1 is upon the differentiation between a natural biological order, flesh and blood, and a man-made order, a hierarchical order of 'apostles'. That 'James' is being used to symbolize, or reflect, a natural order, and 'Cephas/Peter' is reflecting a hierarchical order, is simply a re-use of gospel figures to demonstrate a point of logic: Reality, flesh and blood, a biological order, has a higher value than the man-made hierarchical order of apostles.

Methinks, to continue a 'fight' over the Greek words in this Gal. 1 passage will not do the ahistoricist/mythicist position any good at all. The ahistoricists/mythicists need to raise their game here and not get stuck in an argument over translating Greek words - an argument they cannot win. Focusing on the 'trees' here, focusing on the Greek words involved in the 'brother of the Lord' phrase - is to fail to see the 'wood'. It's a failure to take the context of Gal. 1, 18,19 into serious consideration. A contrast between 'brother' and 'apostle'.

footnote; It might well be, for the ahistoricists/mythicists, in connection with Gal.1:18,19 - a case of having to lose the linguistic 'battle' in order to win the 'war'....

aa5874

It is most amusing that you seem not to realise Spin is an Agnostic who is fighting with LOM.

However, the matter has already been resolved over 1600 years ago.

1. Apologetic sources mentioned the parents of the Apostle James.

2. Apologetic sources mentioned the parents of Jesus.

The Lord Jesus is NOT the brother of James the Apostle--the father of Jesus was NOT Joseph or Alphaeus and his mother was the Sister of the Mother of James the Apostle according to Apologetic sources.

See De Viris Illustribus and the Fragments of Papias.