Robert said
It’s not really an issue that’s solved by appeal to the Greek, which can also be read in a more ‘conventional’ manner, but our modern conventions are sometimes less elastic.
Ah, got it. So, I take it that the noun translated as “years” could have rougher edges in antiquity than we assign it today (+/- 365.25 days, one revolution around the sun, frequency with which we must attend bratty nephew Timmy’s birthday parties). I’d be interested in any literature recs you’d have on how the ancients approached the concept of time (of which the topic of ‘year’ in 1st century CE Palestine/diaspora being a special case).
Robert said
I just do like Lüdemann’s approach to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome.
Noted and thanks.
Robert said
He mentions but doesn’t really deal with this particular question in his popular book on Thessalonians. His argumentation in his earlier book on Pauline chronology would be rather tedious to recite and unpack. I’m mostly interested in his formal discussion of rhetorical strategy (pp 57ff), but see also pp 75ff for how he applies it to this passage. I may have a slightly more positive evaluation of the strength of Paul’s rhetorical strategy here than Lüdemann.
Looks like I’ll have to find room somewhere for this book…
The pillars meeting itself is a fascinating tangle of issues to me unto itself. The timing, as we are discussing here, but also (but not limited to) the topics covered, how they were addressed, the circumcision issue remaining a controversy even post-pillars, and the clear imprint of money on the meeting’s resolution. That’s a lot of waterfront to cover in one event.
Robert said
Not really; I’ve just seen it discussed by exegetes as flexible. It’s not so broad as differing approaches to the whole concept of time, but more a matter of part of a calendar year. Even today, I might similarly say quickly in February of 2019 that something that happened in November of 2016 was three calendar years ago (2019-2016 = parts of 3 calendar years, but only 16 months).
So, a less demanding standard for precision than typical (but per your example not universal) modern anglophone usage of ‘year’. Thanks for the patience walking me there – it potentially speaks to time-language more broadly, and I wanted to make sure I have the contours and feel of it down.
Robert said
Short term, it sounds like he was losing the argument with the Galatians (maybe also at Antioch, hard to say), and Jewish Christian criticisms of Paul certainly continued among some for a couple of centuries, but within Paul’s own continuing sphere of influence and elsewhere he certainly won in the long-term. Yet gentile Christianity lost big-time in the continuing parting of the ways between what ultimately became the separate religions of Judaism and Christianity. Christians largely lost the cultural context in which to best understand the person and ministry of Jesus, their founder, and ultimately became the oppressor of Jews for many centuries, a despicable heritage that is only recently begun to be faced.
Couldn’t agree more on the parting of the ways. I appreciated Joel Marcus’s words of insight here at his retirement speech (excerpts of which on the Duke NEWT New Testament Review podcast), and relatedly found J. Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword to be an emotive analysis. I’d hoped Bart’s proposed book touching similarly relevant thematics would have come to fruition. And completely agree on the indisputable fact that Pauline-flavored Christianity ultimately prevailed in the long-run – although I am still wrestling with whether that was primarily a function of relative growth rate, rooted in differential effort in the (relatively) more fertile gentile soil.
Not to tarry too long in digressive minutiae, but do you have an opinion as to the outcome and local Antioch ramifications of the Peter/Paul table incident (per my a-c above)? Or is it too speculative a territory? I’m curious and would love to know your position (e.g., yes/no Paul lost in Antioch) and/or meta-position (e.g., too hard).
Robert saidI’m not sure how much the weight of continuing controversy can effectively imply a relative chronology of these two events. Regardless of when the Pillars agreement occurred, it seems to me it was at least in some important respects more of an agreement to disagree than genuine agreement and true collaboration, let alone communion (note the inclusio with the original topic).
In reverse order: after thinking through it with you, agree on more of a detente than an armistice. And, in the background, I’m probably willing to entertain intermingled financial entanglements as part and parcel of the terms of detente. But, I try to hold that speculative suspicion around the collection firewalled from our current discussion.
And, to your point and my prior one regarding what continued strife might mean for relative dating (i.e., not much), I agree – with small one caveat: the psychological and sociological moves you made on (a) sunedrion/Pilate and whether Caiaphas would have wielded crucifixion authority at that moment and (b) the overly convenient nature of the pillars “agreement” speaks to possibly Antioch kicking it off; these moves speak to the possibility that counterfactual reasoning in the domain of human nature can (just maybe) elicit insights where gaps in the textual evidence exist.
It’s because I didn’t lay it out well, the thought experiment that gets there is speculative, the relative probability boost (if it’s even successful) is very slight, and the reasoning appears mildly circular; but not irreparably so – more elliptical, if one moves step-wise. Plus, I’m not sure I’m even convinced by it. With that ringing endorsement, I’ll try to unpack it better…
Robert said
…bottom-line, Peter may have been seen as having won the day in Antioch at least for a while, but probably not to the extent that the broad strokes of ultimate Pauline success were compromised. Rather they were enriched with the continuation of the Jewish-Christian traditions about Jesus and his first disciples.
Thank you. The interweaving of the Markan, Matthean and Luke-via-Acts themes sets the narrative ideas against the evidence of the evolving traditions, which I found helpful. It took what I generally had already understood about those themes, and combined them with, and thereby contextualizing, my rather antiseptic historical question, situating the answer within the broader backdrop of the evolution of the gospels.
FWIW, I have (to date) conceptualized the ultimate winning out of Pauline gentile strain vs. the “original” Jerusalem strain within a rather simplistic model of cross-interaction and differential growth. You have the two strains interacting (sharing and vetting ideas and traditions), but one strain (due to its far more approachable palate to gentile tastes, plus the sheer determination of the Pauline mission) overwhelmed the other via the power of compounding. That simple mental model would allow for just what you outlined: (gist) that Peter et al may have prevailed in Antioch incident, but the Pauline strain was both (a) triumphant in the end and (b) still influenced by the Jerusalem strain. It’s a simplistic mental model and (for brevity) a very simplified description of the data, but perhaps it lays open certain priors I have that need correction or steeling.
– Crucifixion
Welcome back – hope all is well.
Robert said
I think I followed and agreed with most of this, but we’d probably need a huge sheet of drafting paper in front of us along with some wings and a few beers in a sports bar before I’m sure. Is it sort of like sabermetrics or Nate Silver doing exegesis?
The wing+beer process is generally the right one for due diligence of all sorts…
Sabremetrics is a polite description of the Rube Goldberg monstrosity outlined above. Perhaps Ptolemaic epicycles is more accurate.
In the interim, I have become increasingly convinced of my initial intuition/fear that the probability boost, if any, is likely so small as to easily be argued de minimis. It provides a infinitesimal edge – and one in which no hypothetical casino in perpetuity could earn a sufficient profit. It’s an interesting intuition, but not much more.
Stepping back and editorializing just a bit, yes – for those of us not as thoroughly steeped in the material, sometimes we have to tack from other angles to prime the intuition pumps or get the arguments off the ground. In my interactions with the scholarly literature, I always find it extremely interesting that arguments turn on the (often implicit) putative historical likelihood – but there is often (aside from when someone like BDE outlines the criteria used and their rationale) very little critical discussion about what confers higher or lower assessments of probability, beyond taste. There are often heated disagreements about the bounds of epistemic access, but few which I’ve encountered that attempt to (rigorously) convert assessments of possibility into relative likelihood, much less (approximate) absolute probability. Clearly, it’s hard, and fuzzy – there’s no getting around that. That said, other disciplines (academic and applied) have tried to attack these difficult issues with a variety of siege machinery – counterfactual- and scenario-based reasoning being just a couple.
In history, evidence is the input, argument is the program, and probability is the output. Scholars naturally tend to read that left-to-right. Those of us at a knowledge disadvantage sometimes have to resort to right-to-left (or completely orthogonal).
Now, let’s talk more about that brilliant wing and beer idea…
Robert said
We also should not ignore the possibility of changes on the ground in Jerusalem. If, for example, the messianic Jewish believers were making headway with the Judean authorities, or at least were hoping to do so, this may have increased their interest in stressing their orthopraxis as a sign that the movement was genuinely of God. Such a dynamic might have put stress on an earlier, less critical acceptance of Paul’s mission to the gentile nations. In response to criticism or potential criticism from Judean authorities, James and his messengers to Antioch may have been more circumspect in their willingness to relax standards of table fellowship. That’s all conjecture, perhaps with a few hints from Luke’s perspective in the book of Acts, but nothing more than mere hints, at most. But I think the bottom line is that there’s so much we don’t know and it’s very difficult to come up with criteria to judge among various plausible conjectural reconstructions. But it is fun!
And this is just another reason why I throughly enjoy our interactions – I get to vicariously tap into an impressive web of associative memory.
And I couldn’t agree more, the changes on the ground in Jerusalem are of huge import here. I am aware of some of them, not of others, but don’t have a mental/conceptual map at my easy command/disposal. Thank you for sharing yours.
Should this have been the genesis of the breach in agreement (rather than say lack of sufficient mutual understanding; these are in no way necessarily mutually exclusive, but could be defined as such), I think the reasoning one level up in the Rube Goldberg machine still would apply the same way. It would be additive to the infinitesimal probability boost, but still de
Thanks for tangling with this bramble bush.
Robert said
There’s also the the complicating factors of the Judean wars, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the Flavian propaganda vs the Jews that limited the growth of the Jesus messianic movement and its survival within Judaism and encouraged the gentile Christian disparagement of Judaism.
Thanks for adding these – again, the associative memory map.
They all pressure the same way – a headwind effect.
Differential growth = Gentile Christian growth – Jewish Christian growth
In my inertial state, I tend to focus on the things of which Gentile Christian growth is a positive function. I appreciate the help on these: factors of which Jewish Christian growth is a negative function.
Robert said
Yes. The only thing I haven’t formed a strong opinion about is whether or not all of the first letter(s) to the Corinthians were necessarily written after the Antioch incident. Especially if it is a composite letter, I think some of it could have been written before the Antioch incident, but ‘it’ could also have been written later.
This is an intriguing distinction – would you mind unpacking it a bit?
By ‘all of the first letter(s) to the Corinthians’, do you mean 1 Cor, or 2 Cor, or certain strata within each? And, I’m aware of the scholarly debate around the seams (and thus layers) in 2 Cor, but do you see strata/layers/seams in 1 Cor?
Thanks!
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