Loading...Now that I’ve given a 50-word summary of the book of 2 Corinthians and a fuller discussion of its contents “in a nutshell,” I can turn to the questions of “Who, When, and Why.”
As with Romans and 1 Corinthians there is not a lot of debate about who wrote the letter: it is one of Paul’s undisputed epistles and there are no real doubts about its authorship among the majority of critical scholars.
As to when: the letter dates to some time not long after 1 Corinthians – maybe a matter of months? And so it too is usually dated to the mid 50s.
But the issue is complicated by the fact that we appear to have at least two letters that have been spliced together, and these were written at different times. They were written for very different reasons. And so to make sense of the “why” of 2 Corinthians, I’ve decided to give the play-by-play of the sequence of events that we can reconstruct of Paul’s history of the community – from the time he founded it to the time of his final surviving letter (or at least the final fragment embedded in 2 Cor. 1-9).
I am taking this from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.
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Can we speculate about the identity of the “super apostles”? Might Acts contain veiled references to conflicts between Paul and Peter’s ministries, with stories like “Elymas” and “Simon Magus” subtly alluding to the super apostles Paul encountered?
I suppose it would be case to be made if they were located by Acts in Corinth. Paul doesn’t identify them almost certainly because the Corinthians knew who he was talking about. We, alas….
You said “…in which God’s enemy Satan is still active and in control.” The context here is Paul defending his apostleship against “super-apostles” (2 Cor 11:5, 13) who were Judaists (11:22). Wouldn’t the ‘Satan’ still active and in control have been the high priest, Jewish Sanhedrin or some other form of Jewish authority that was hostile to Paul and trying to infiltrate his assemblies and Judaize his converts?
And … “they (the apostles) are the chief opponents of the cosmic powers of evil who are in charge” What cosmic powers of evil? The rulers and authorities of Colossians 2:15 were Jewish rulers and authorities. In Ephesians 6:12, the Greek word for principalities / rulers refers to Jewish magistrates in Luke 12:11….Again, Jewish judges and authorities, the very people Paul referred to as Satan in 1 Thess 2:18, 2 Cor 11:14 and Romans 16:20.
Paul never talks about the high priest or the Sanhedrin, whose domain was entirely in jerusalem.
That’s true. Paul didn’t mention the high priest explicitly. However, synagogues were under the authority of the archisynagogos / synagogue rulers. These synagogues of the diaspora would have been a source of those Judaists / super apostles who were attempting to infiltrate Paul’s assemblies and Judaize them.
You had no reply to the rest of my comment, which shows that the modern day assumption of Satan / the devil is terribly mistaken, that Satan / the devil was associated with Jews who were hostile and resistant to both Jesus and Paul.
Mr. Ehrman, I would like to ask something not related to 2 Corinthians – or one could argue loosely related, since we’re talking about God and Jesus here!
So, I’m reading Luke again and I just bumped into that passage in chapter 8, where Jesus heals that poor possessed fellow who had the legion living inside him. So, what caught my attention is the ending in which Jesus says:
“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.
Luke 8:39 NRSV
I checked the same story in Mark and Matthew, and there’s not that high Christology there, Mark says Lord and Jesus, not God and Jesus; Matthew doesn’t cite that last bit (he also has 2 possessed people, which is kind of funny).
I was wondering if that’s an indication of Luke having a really high -the highest, I guess- Christology, equating Jesus to God. And I was also wondering if there are any textual variances there, because usually there are in such cases – maybe some later scribe wanted to exalt Jesus higher than the puny “Lord”?
Sorry for the extent.
Yes, it looks like a high Christology if you’re accustomed to the lingo of high Christology. But Luke is not. Jesus tells him to be grateful for what God has done and the man instead says what Jesus has done. He’s not saying Jesus is God; he’s transferring the credit, giving Jesus the glory instead of God (the opposite of what Jesus wants)
I really don’t mean to be disrespectful to others, but, to tell you the truth, Paul has always seemed to me to be more than a little odd and not very persuasive with presenting evidence for his views. So, how in the world, did he then, and now, get so many to follow his views? Does it say “something” about people as “followers” in general? If so, what? Maybe something about gullibility or people seeing what they want to see? Moreover, do we have any clues about why Paul was seen as being “weak” and not a very good speaker? Did he have some sort of illness, maybe some sort of speech impediment, like a stutter, or some sort of “thorn in his side,” that he could not get rid of??? If so. what? His main argument seems to have been if you don’t agree with me then it is your fault, and you need more “faith.”
It’s interesting, a lot of my PhD students in NT at UNC over the years have not been big fans of Paul; whereas the PhD students at Duke Divinity school largely have been!
Why was Paul regularly beaten up? Who would do this?
Apparently Jews who thought he was proclaiming a crazy message and gentiles who thought he was a rabble rouser.
`Bart wrote: “it is one of Paul’s undisputed epistles”.
I have a question about this. There would seem to be two issues here – did these epistles have the same author, and was that author Paul. Bart has given a clear and convincing explanation of why textual critics believe they had the same author, but why did that author have to be Paul? Paul is also described in Acts, but Acts was written decades later, and the author of Acts presumably had access to these epistles, so Acts may or may not provide independent corroboration. Is Paul mentioned in any other writings?
It’s a good question. The short answer is that we have good reasons for thinking Paul wrote letters. One reason is that not long after his day other writers — a number of them all independently of each other, claimed to be him, a claim that makes sense only if he was widely known to be a writer. If so, then do any of our letters appear to be by the same author with the same basic writing style, thematic concerns, theological views, ways of arguing, etc., and if so, then they would likely be a group by one author. And if the major issues addressed are ones that make sense in the early decades of the first century, and if all these claim to be by Paul… then the burden of proof would be on someone who thought it was a forger. As you know, I’m not afraid of identifying forgeries, but I think these letters really do go back to Paul.
Dr. Ehrman,
I hope it’s okay to ask this question here.
Are you familiar with Simon Gathercole’s “The Alleged Anonymity of the Canonical Gospels”, (The Journal of Theological Studies. 69 (2): 447–476.) ?
I see many apologists using Gathercole’s paper to argue that the gospels were never circulated anonymously.
How should I respond to them and are there any scholars who engage with or reply to Gathercole’s arguments ?
Thanks so much for your time.
Yes, I am. I don’t find it at all convincing. I go into the issue at some length in a few of my books, including Forged. Simon is a smart guy, but we disagree on a lot of things. We had a radio debate once: now I’m wondering if it was on this topic?!