Robert said
Flosshilda said
You seem to be suggesting that Paul had some connection with Qumran. What is the evidence for that?No, I am not suggesting that. Merely that this form of Jewish peshar exegesis was current at the time. There are, however, some additional potential connections (eg, ‘works of the law and justification’ language in 4QMMT, ‘Damascus’ language referencing the community, Isa 40,3 referencing the community [general Christianity, not Paul specific]) that have led some to consider the possibility. I don’t think the evidence is near strong enough to assert this, rather it seems much more likely that these things are not unique identifiers but relatively common in Judaisms at the time.
Not as far as I am aware outside of the Qumran community. Do you have any other attested evidence? As I understand it, according to Vermes, the Qumran “pesher” which means “interpretation” is a particular form of Bible exegesis that used existing prophetic texts as fulfillment for incidents or individuals which occurred/existed in the contemporary period of the interpreter.
That would certainly explain Paul’s language but then we have to assume Paul was conversant with that practise and had a detailed knowledge of that community. That sounds rather unlikely to me.
Robert said
Flosshilda said
Not as far as I am aware outside of the Qumran community. Do you have any other attested evidence? As I understand it, according to Vermes, the Qumran “pesher” which means “interpretation” is a particular form of Bible exegesis that used existing prophetic texts as fulfillment for incidents or individuals which occurred/existed in the contemporary period of the interpreter.
That would certainly explain Paul’s language but then we have to assume Paul was conversant with that practise and had a detailed knowledge of that community. That sounds rather unlikely to me.I’m not sure if I’m correctly following your line of reasoning, and I don’t want to represent it, so let me just offer a few observations:
Without seeing the context of Géza Vermes’ remarks, I have no problem affirming that pesher exegesis, as it is found in the surviving texts from Qumran, is relatively unique firstly because they are applied to their leader, the Teacher of Righteousness, the leader of their community, and secondly it is found sometimes in a running commentary on a particular prophetic book, ie, Habbakuk. But just because it has unique properties as used by one writer does not limit the general method from being applied in other circumstances by other interpreters to apply to other people and current events. So if the general method can be found outside of Paul’s writings, no familiarity with the community need be assumed on the part of Paul.
Several other examples in the New Testament could be easily cited, and these might be the closest parallels, but a devil’s advocate might argue that these ultimately came from Paul, and before him supposedly from Qumran, ‘though I, like you, think this is an unlikely source for these examples of pesher exegesis.
But there are additional examples. Perhaps the oldest, general example discussed in this context is from the book of Daniel, where the 70 years’ prophecy of Jeremiah is applied not to the end of the Babylonian captivity, as it is in Jeremiah, but to contemporary events at the time the book of Daniel was being written, toward the end of seven times 70 years later:Jer 25,11-12 & 29,10
This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, says the LORD, making the land an everlasting waste. …
For thus says the LORD: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.Dan 9,1-2.24-27
In the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, by birth a Mede, who became king over the realm of the Chaldeans, I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the LORD to the prophet Jeremiah, must be fulfilled for the devastation of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. …
“Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. Know therefore and understand: from the time that the word went out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the time of an anointed prince, there shall be seven weeks, and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with streets and moat, but in a troubled time. After the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing, and the troops of the prince who is to come shall [corrupt] (שׁחת hiphil) the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. He shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall make sacrifice and offering cease, and in their place shall be a desolating sacrilege until the decreed end is poured out upon the desolator.”This contemporary event is explicitly described in 1 Maccabees 1,54
Now on the fifteenth day of Chislev, in the one hundred forty-fifth year, they erected a desolating sacrilege on the altar of burnt offering. …
Several early rabbinic examples of pesher exegesis are typically cited, for example:
The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael (c 2nd Century CE) contemporizes Exodus 19,4 (“You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”) by applying it to the Roman occupation. The eagle is, of course, identified with Romans, while the wings are God’s protection of the Jews. Deuteronomy 28,47-48 (“…you will serve your foes…”) is taken to be a description of paying taxes and serving the Romans.
Sifre Devarim (c 2nd-3rd Century CE) interprets the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy as a coded history of the post Bar Kokhba era. For example, Deut 32,30 (“How could one man chase a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the Lord had given them up?”) is said to speak of Roman military superiority.
Midrash Tanhuma (Toldot 14) contains a messianic interpretation of Ps 121,1 and many other scriptural references to the Messiah, including Num 11,12 (Moses asks God: “Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? Why do you tell me, ‘Carry them in your arms, as a nurse carries an infant…?'”), which is re-interpreted as “He [the Messiah] shall be uplifted more than Moses, of whom it is said: ‘Carry them in your arms.
Again, what does all the above, interesting although it undoubtedly is, have to do with Paul?
Some of the scholars of Marcion’s Apostolos / Apostolicon would also raise the question of how much can we trust that what we have as Paul is entirely Paul. After all, if the seven least contested epistles are from a collection of genuine Pauline epistles that were then edited to remove support for Marcionite beliefs and increase support for anti-Marcionite arguments sometime near the middle of the 2nd century CE, and were edited by the same editor, letters originally from Paul’s hand (or dictations) and then all edited by the same editor might have the internal consistency which is how we distinguish the “uncontested Pauline” epistles from the deutero Pauline and pseudo Pauline epistles.
Investigation of the attested Marcionite and attested non-Marcionite sections of the uncontested Pauline epistles might show more of this pesher exegesis in the one portion or in the other. Under the Marcionite priority of the Pauline canon, that would indicate whether this exegesis is a survivor from the first century or an interpolation of the 2nd by one of the proto-orthodox strands of second century Christianity.
Robert said
BruceRMcF said
… Under the Marcionite priority of the Pauline canon, that would indicate whether this exegesis is a survivor from the first century or an interpolation of the 2nd by one of the proto-orthodox strands of second century Christianity.I would expect pesher exegesis to be more likely the product of a 1st-century Jew such as Paul than 2nd-century Christianity. It’s a very interesting scholarly question, but the various attempts to reconstruct a pre-canonical version of Marcion’s Apostolikon have not met with much scholarly consensus.
It is true that scholars attempting to do different things have different results, but that is to be expected. Are the critical minimalist reconstructions substantially more out of line with each other than reconstructions of manuscripts of the canonical gospels prior to the surviving variants?
To be sure those who are attempting to “best attested” version of a complete reconstruction of the Apostolos that is feasible are going to include material from Luke (and in one case elsewhere) based on their argument regarding useful indirect attestation that those providing a minimalist reconstruction will omit.
But the fact that they are attempting to do different things, rather than attempting to do the same thing and being unable to agree on how to do it, represents more of an opportunity than an obstacle here. In the above kind of argument, one would compare directly attested work from the Apostolos to Canonical Luke material directly attested to not be contained in the Apostolos, and simply set the unattested material to one side.
Now, admittedly, there are some evident weaknesses in some of the “maximalist” approaches — on the one hand, whether the heavy reliance on “western variants” as an indirect attestation of knowledge of Marcionite texts is justified, and on the other hand, whether the stilometric analysis should be using pre-critical reconstructions, as discussed in the following Youtube of the (minimalist) M David Litwa:
Flosshilda said
I have always had issues with the opening verses of I Corinthians chapter 15. Yes most academics accept that this creed predates Paul because he writes that he received it.
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures 4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”
However, what did he mean by received (παρέλαβον)? Paul is very keen to stress in Galatians 1 that he received his gospel directly from a revelation of Jesus Christ
“for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Paul is also our earliest written source for this creed and repeats his comments in 1 Galatians
“who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father”
So why do so many accept that what Paul was teaching was something he had been told and that others also believed?
Paul also holds that accepting Jesus died for all humankind and as a sacrifice for our sins is the way to achieve salvation as he writes in 3 Romans
“But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ[d] for all who believe.[e] For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement[f] by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to demonstrate at the present time his own righteousness, so that he is righteous and he justifies the one who has the faith of Jesus.”
I find that some of Paul’s writing have echoes of a cult leader.
I have the only true belief.
Do not challenge me.
Ignore anyone else.
Only accept what I tell you.
Certainly it is Paul’s ideas (or ideas he promoted) that have come down to us as some of the central tenets of Christianity.
We are all sinners
Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins
Jesus was resurrected
Jesus is going to return (Parousia)
Jesus was something more than a mere human being.
So how far can we be sure that what Paul preached about Jesus dying for our sins and being resurrected were told to him by other human beings who believed that?
Or was it all based on his own mystical experiences and idiosyncratic beliefs?
this is an old OP and probably none, including the publisher, will read this, but there is pretty straightforward logic to the answer.
The fact that in Galatians Paul is adamant to claim authority for himself is evidence that in his letter to the Corinthians he is being honest when he claims he “received” something.
Here we are dealing with basic human psychology. If we know that a man tends to be defensive and arrogant, what do we do when he shows a moment of humility and subordination? Well, we must inspect whether these are deceptions, fakes. And what reason do we have to suppose that Paul would make up that he himself received from humans what he has delivered.
It seems obvious that Paul did in fact deliver the content to the Corinthians; if he hadn’t, they would be like “what the hell, I don’t remember that, do you?”
I think that there is a major problem, almost disease, spread across specifically biblical historians. They all read texts like they were dropped from heaven. They don’t consider that there were real people writing these texts. And acknowleding that requires some psychology. But NT historians rarely even consider the fact that we have real people writing these letters and gospels. Consider Dr. Ehrman’s proposal that Paul did not know about Judas’s treachery simply based on the single TEXT that Paul relates, “…and he appeared to the twelve.” yes, Paul says that, he says that Jesus appeared post-mortem to the twelve when we know that there were only eleven.
From this Dr. Ehrman concludes that Paul knew nothing of the Jesus tradition because in it Judas obviously was not around after Jesus’ burial.
From Dr Ehrman’s conclusion I must conclude that Dr Ehrman knows nothing about human psychology. For Paul to know nothing about the actual history of Jesus’ crucifixion, Paul would have to be almost psychotically uninquisitive. Are we really going to allow the possibility that Paul just didn’t care about how Jesus got crucified and that Peter (or any of the others) just forgot to tell him?
There is, on the side of critical scholarship, at least in America, a kind of mirror like phenomenon, where critical scholars are acting like fundamentalists. Fundamentalists obey every word of the bible without logic. Are some historians, like Dr. Ehrman, doing the same???
Robert said
David is speaking of the reconstruction of the Evangelion, not the Apostolikon.
Certainly, but similar observations apply to the data mining efforts at reconstructions of both the Evangelion and the Apostolos. The minimalist’s results will be fragmentary, because direct attestations simply are fragmentary. They will, indeed, be more fragmentary than the earlier pre-critical reconstructions which take the heresiologist’s description of Marcion’s theology at face value and use that as a basis to select among unattested (neither attested as included nor attested as excluded) passages.
The maximalists that take Western variants of early texts of Luke & Pauline epistles that are at greater variance with balance of texts as an indirect witness to Marcion, well, I guess they are going to come up with whatever you get when going down that path.
The maximalists that take the attested text from Marcion’s NT and use data mining stylometric comparisons of unattested text to both attested Marcionite and attested non-Marcionite passages are going to get different results from that earlier maximalist approach.
David’s criticism of the database of the stylometric analysis surely applies to both the stylometric maximalist’s Evangelion reconstructions and their Apostolos reconstructions. And as an economist, I would have a preference for pre-critical reconstructions of Marcion’s NT being excluded from the stylometric database.
As far as the Western “extreme variants”, I would be more inclined to accept those that are selected on the basis of stylometric analysis (though under the above proviso), than the earlier maximalist … it’s plausible that some extreme Western variants are preserving Marcion’s text, but accepting all Western variants “if they diverge far enough from the norm” seems to me certain to include variations that appear for other reasons.
As far as the critical minimalists, do you have any examples of those whose work varies strongly from each other?
Robert said
I don’t have any examples at hand, but two notes of caution may be in order. Apologies if I’ve already mentiined these or if they are already obvious to you. Reconstructing Marcion’s text of Paul is even more problematic than reconstructing his text of Luke, and the so-called Western text of Paul does not share the same obvious tendencies as that of Luke-Acts, and is in some ways considered fairly reliable or neutral, if it even exists as a genuine text type. There are Western tendencies but these tend to be minor types of variations.
You surely can’t cause offense if something happens to be obvious to me, because if something is, that can be considered fortuitous. This isn’t my area of scholarship, after all.
For instance, it’s not surprising I was unaware that, unlike the stylometric approach, the “Western-variant” maximalist approach is only available to the Evangelion, since my skeptical reaction to the “Western variant” approach as “first tier” indirect evidence did not inspire me to dig deeper into it.
The minimalist reconstructions being more fragmentary and the stylometric reconstructions include a larger proportion of unattested text for the Apsotolos versus the Evangelion do not strike me as being as problematic as disputes, if they exist, between modern minimalist reconstructions on substantial portions of the reconstruction at the level of evidence they require for inclusion. If the shorter reconstruction from a more stringent level of evidence required is mostly nested within the longer reconstruction, I wouldn’t necessarily view their different word counts as being a serious issue.
But anyway, that’s for me to chase up if I have the resources (including time) to do so. Thanks for the pointers.
Flosshilda said
I have always had issues with the opening verses of I Corinthians chapter 15. Yes most academics accept that this creed predates Paul because he writes that he received it.
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures 4 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”
However, what did he mean by received (παρέλαβον)? Paul is very keen to stress in Galatians 1 that he received his gospel directly from a revelation of Jesus Christ
“for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Paul is also our earliest written source for this creed and repeats his comments in 1 Galatians
“who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father”
So why do so many accept that what Paul was teaching was something he had been told and that others also believed?
Paul also holds that accepting Jesus died for all humankind and as a sacrifice for our sins is the way to achieve salvation as he writes in 3 Romans
“But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ[d] for all who believe.[e] For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement[f] by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to demonstrate at the present time his own righteousness, so that he is righteous and he justifies the one who has the faith of Jesus.”
I find that some of Paul’s writing have echoes of a cult leader.
I have the only true belief.
Do not challenge me.
Ignore anyone else.
Only accept what I tell you.
Certainly it is Paul’s ideas (or ideas he promoted) that have come down to us as some of the central tenets of Christianity.
We are all sinners
Jesus was a sacrifice for our sins
Jesus was resurrected
Jesus is going to return (Parousia)
Jesus was something more than a mere human being.
So how far can we be sure that what Paul preached about Jesus dying for our sins and being resurrected were told to him by other human beings who believed that?
Or was it all based on his own mystical experiences and idiosyncratic beliefs?
If we are to operate as historians, we must ask the implications of all hypotheses. If the hypothesis is that Paul lied about the whole thing (i.e., he had never forwarded the tradition) that would of course require us to imagine the recipients at Corinth, upon reading his letter, scratching their heads and wondering, “when the hell did he say this?” Which would of course require us to ask, “Why would anyone so deliberately set themselves up for easy exposure?”
This is not a specialized logic. Suppose you got a letter from an acquaintance which mentioned another correspondence youre sure you never received; or recounted a visit of yours you never made. You would probably think, “she is unwell”.
Paul is relying on their memory. the fact that the letter was preserved and circulated indicates the recipients did not think Paul was “unwell”. When he relayed to them past conversations, they must have remembered them.
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