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Did Paul Institute the Last Supper tradition?

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Hngerhman

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September 14, 2019 - 4:40 pm

Robert said

I think it just means that God began working with the Jews with Abraham and even his eventual salvation for the other nations was promised first to Abraham. The law and the scriptures were also entrusted to the Jews. For Paul they all point toward the Messiah who had now come.

Ah. Got it. Thank you.

This conceptualization does indeed dispense with my first/economy class prattle earlier. It also would maintain a sense of historical specialness, but one that ultimately in the Kingdom will be a distinction without a difference.

Robert said

I suspect Paul if and when he were to be in the exclusive company of other Jews, he would keep kosher, partly out of respect for his and their Jewish identity and partly out of a strategic desire on his part not to cause offense and thus hinder his evangelical purpose of winning them over to the messianic sect within Judaism or even as an eventual coworker with him in his mission to the gentiles.

Gotcha – and agree.

That still leaves open in my mind the question of how Paul conceptualized his own standing with respect to the law. Meaning, this (your thoughts above) is what he does, but what does he believe? “[T]hough I myself am not under the [Jewish identity and ceremonial/purity portions of the Mosaic] law” (when I read it, in English) connotes a continuous state of not being under the law. He seems to think his status is somehow different than his potential Jewish Christ-converts with respect to being under the law. Unless he only means by those under the law as a turn of phrase, not as an actual in-force (religious) status.

Does the Greek read differently?

Robert

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September 15, 2019 - 6:22 am

Robert

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September 15, 2019 - 6:29 am

Hngerhman

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September 15, 2019 - 11:59 am

Robert said

I think it was originally part of a communal meal. There are other references to some kind of love-feast or common meal. Even Pliny the Younger makes note of this practice by Christians…

…Yes, I think that sounds reasonable, something like an informal liturgical practice…

OK, excellent. Sounds like we’re tracking.

And I’m very glad you made mention of those allusions/references: I had thought about saying that I had dimly remembered from somewhere the existence of love-feast observances (but couldn’t remember where or who) and Pliny’s report from several of Bart’s trade works (although I couldn’t remember who said it…), but my lack of familiarity with the breadth of the scholarship here made me a little gun shy. Your background, however, lends the citations much more heft.

Robert said

I do agree [with the assessment that it seems likely Paul’s version of LS in 1 Cor was touched by Peter’s influence (directly or indirectly)]…

Assuming that (my reading of) your statement tracks with the braced insertion in the above quote, it sounds like we’re essentially on the same page. Please tell me if have misstated. I’m certain there’s more nuance than I typed, but I’m more talking about the gists being in harmony.

Robert said

…but I’m not sure what you mean by a can of worms. That sounds ominous.

Ha. More a can of worms in my own head than an actual one, but I’ll wait to unpack that feeling a little more once I make sure I’ve not mistaken that our views are close together here. Would rather wait to make sure I’m not wandering off the path…

Robert

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September 15, 2019 - 12:06 pm

Hngerhman

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September 15, 2019 - 6:14 pm

Robert said

… יהי תולעים

Let there be worms …

Ha!

Ok, to take stock:

– LS is a deeply insider tradition

– Paul received LS from others, fairly early in the life of the movement

– LS is an important tradition/practice for Paul, which he shared and implemented LS fairly early with communities (Corinth being paradigmatic)

– Paul-founded communities (and likely in other communities) likely practiced LS in the communal meals

– We know the content of Paul’s version of LS by the time he called it back to the Corinthians in 1 Cor

– Given all the previous arguments, it is likely that Peter’s influence touches Paul’s LS

– Without going so far as to say this is Peter’s LS tradition (one could argue that, but one would at the least be arguing up on tiptoes…), we can say that (because of all the foregoing argumentation) likely Paul’s version couldn’t be too far at odds with what Peter allows as accurate

– The metaphors employed within LS that we have from 1 Cor are rooted in taboo (as are the ones in the gospels, but they conceivably could be genealogically derivative on Paul’s)

– These metaphors interacted with and were alloyed by Petrine influence and content, ranging from direct confirmation by Peter (on the aggressive end of interpretation) to indirect lack of disconfirmation by Peterine influence (at the conservative end of interpretation)

That the LS tradition likely has Peter’s influence, and yet still has the taboo embedded within it, seems to entail that there’s a tacit (or explicit) affirmation that the taboo is “accurate” (at the least, Petrine influence did not deny it). Not that the taboo was just overwritten into LS in the game of telephone by retellers, but that it was there very early in the tradition (perhaps as early as the first retellings).

Presuming the above, it leaves three main (families of) scenarios:

A) Jesus said it or something like it, or

B) Peter *thought* Jesus said it or something like it, or

C) Peter is ok with adding it afterwards despite it not being true

The can of worms is, which derives from our prior interchange on the taboo topic, starts with:

– I don’t like A and B because they don’t seem to make sense (probabilistically) given the presumed background beliefs of the key participants, and

– I don’t like C because of what it says about Peter (although it does have some other circumstantial evidence in its favor, given the somewhat thinly attested fact pattern of Peter’s behaviors) and/or the tradition (more than just ahistorical, embellished at source/close to source)

Note: I have no real dog in this fight, other than keen historical interest.

Hngerhman

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September 15, 2019 - 10:09 pm

Robert said

The Greek is pretty simple here, no different from the English. It’s tempting to see it as merely a turn of phrase, but knowing Paul I wouldn’t be surprised if the phrase relates to his sense of exaggerated eschatological self-importance. That said, I think Paul would quickly attribute the same status to any of his coworkers in his urgent mission to the gentiles.

This is interesting – it is a status that is seemingly distinct from traditional (I think you have labeled it pre-messianic) Judaism, but (if he did indeed see himself as still essentially Jewish, as I think we’ve touched on previously) also distinct from gentiles (who are by definition not under the portions of the law we’re isolating for conversation here). It’s like a middle position that seemingly only “formerly pre-messianic Jews” could share.

I may, though, be trying to put boundary markers down in land that cannot actually be divided – meaning, it could be that the distinctions he draws in his status labels may only be applicable when looking in the rearview mirror, and not on a post-Jesus/pre-Kingdom prospective basis (aligning with your pre-messianic/post-messianic distinction).

Robert

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September 16, 2019 - 9:36 am

Robert

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September 16, 2019 - 9:53 am

Hngerhman

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September 16, 2019 - 10:13 am

Robert said

Not all Jews kept kosher or other non-moral commandments as strictly as others, especially when living among the gentiles, whether as a matter of necessity, practicality, or even philosophical belief for a few.

Completely agreed on the lack of monolithic observance across the population at the time. If the spotlight is focused solely on Paul and his immediate backdrop, though, he was an ex-Pharisee. I am somewhat ignorant of the full range of 1st century Pharisaic belief – I’m only acquainted with what might be called the more “standard” version (perhaps joyful yet fairly strict law observance). Are there examples of practicing Pharisees who broke kosher for spiritually-pressing practical purposes? Please forgive the naïveté of the query – I am aware of your deep respect for some of the key houses of rabbinic tradition from the time, I just know precious little and would love to learn.

Robert said

For Paul, his ultimate purpose was to save as many people as possible among the gentiles and even perhaps some of the lost Israelites mixed in with the gentiles for centuries. For Paul, I suspect his choice not to follow kosher when among non-Jews was justified along the lines that other rabbis would justify saving the life of an animal when it has fallen into a pit, even when this might require breaking the law of the Sabbath. If such was permitted for an animal, how much more so to save humans in the last days?

Agree – both that this was very likely his practical mindset and that it may well have been his justification for the practice when with gentiles. I’d also personally go so far as to say that, given the context of what he apparently believed about eschatology, it was a very laudable practice (one that epitomizes Jesus’s #2 commandment).

What I still fall over, which may be more my own issue rather than one of Pauline importance, is that he used “am not…under the law” without qualifying it temporarily, connoting a continuous state. He didn’t say “sometimes I’m not under the law, but sometimes I am”; rather (presently to me at least) it reads more like “I am (continuing to be) not under the law, although sometimes I practice its rituals when I am with those who do” – that “am not under” is the (semi-)permanent default. And more than solely just a practical act of “not being under”, but rather a status distinction that (reads like it) is more important/essential in nature than one-off breaches of kosher. Perhaps I’m making way too much of this…

Hngerhman

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September 16, 2019 - 3:13 pm

Robert said

Which is more taboo, to partake in a symbolic meal whereby one shares in the death of the now resurrected Messiah, and thereby promises to imitate his faithfulness even unto death, or that the land of Israel be cursed by a dead body, even that of the Messiah, hanging on a tree?

Really nice tack. It’s pithy, with a strong intuition and a nice emotive hook. I like it. A lot.

Now let me see if I can adequately grapple with this clever framing. I’m responding in a hurry, so please forgive typos/lack of clarity.

Admitting of comparative taboo presumes that taboo isn’t a digital concept – on/off. What if taboo is taboo, and it doesn’t allow for relative comparison? I think there is some merit to that line of thinking, and it cannot be dismissed out of hand, but I’m not intuitively persuaded that taboo can be reduced to on/off. So I’ll lay that to the side.

Let’s stipulate that taboo admits of degrees. Just because taboo can be ordinally ranked and cardinally quantified, that does not obviate the fact that it may still be a threshold concept. Like worse crimes that are still crimes, a sufficient level of taboo still means it’s “wrong” (or against the commandments). In legal systems, the wrongness of stealing, assault and murder follow that same ascending rank order of offense: stealing<assault<murder. Yes, murder is the worst, but they’re all still wrong and all still a crime.

And conversely, because one is worse than the other doesn’t make the lessor (a) the right choice nor (b) the only other choice. Framing the question as only a binary choice seems to makes it a relative of a false dilemma.

In my opinion, I think the bus would stop here. But, let’s say I’m wrong to stop at this point and play through that assumption set.

Let’s now assume the dilemma isn’t false, and it’s a quasi-Sophie’s choice (and the degrees matter, not just an absolute and threshold level of taboo). Even then:

– The LS as depicted is not solely a participation in the death of the resurrected Messiah. It’s ingesting symbolically his blood and flesh (I think in Pauline metaphysics we’re talking sarx not pneuma, but I may be mistaken, given my Koine blindspot?). It’s not “when eating bread and drinking wine together, remember Jesus’s last meal with the apostles just before his crucifixion and mighty return”. Rather, it’s “let’s remember Jesus and his sacrifice by pretending to eat him”. I know it’s not quite as stark as I’m (intentionally, for emphasis and emotive efficiency) slanting it, but I’m not sure it’s as bland as the other way either.

– The curse on the land from a body hanging on a tree is indeed quite the taboo. Understatement. It’s Paul’s alluded-to stumbling block; so (underscoring your point), we know this taboo had some real force in the 1st century Jewish context.

That said, one distinction to make at the outset seems to be: Who perpetrated this taboo? The Romans (and perhaps the temple authorities, per our prior conversation). Neither the Jesus movement nor Jesus (unless one argues suicide by centurion) committed the act of crucifixion. The LS tradition, in contrast, places the source of the taboo directly onto Jesus’s lips (and, again, the words we’re talking about are directly or indirectly from Petrine influence). Which implies that this taboo arose as a call coming from inside the house.

Another distinction to draw would be that, retroactively, the resurrection seemingly directly lifted the “curse” of the crucifixion (from Jesus at least), as Jesus was glorified by God (I have in mind Bart’s Pauline reverse-engineered logic, as well as some of Paul’s own words around the paradoxical nature of this). Unless one is arguing that the resurrection (Jesus’s or the general one, if there is in fact any distinction in the minds of the early Jesus movement participants) retroactively undoes corpse (Jesus’s or otherwise; symbolic or actual) consumption as taboo, the symbolism still remains rooted in unlifted taboo.

Upshot: In this light, the responsibility for the taboo of symbolic human consumption is one that would be placed at the feet of Jesus/Peter (vs. the Roman/Temple power structure), and it is seemingly a taboo that wasn’t lifted by the resurrection. If that’s all correct, then it would (in the end) invert the initial gut intuition that the crucifixion is the “worse” of the two traditions rooted in taboo.

All that said, I may be seeing this all wrong, so please correct my thinking.

NB – Another distinction would be publicly available fact (crucifixion) vs. private/insider fact (what happened at that dinner). I haven’t worked my way in the dark through that one yet, as it can cut more than one way.

Robert

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September 17, 2019 - 5:22 am

Hngerhman

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September 17, 2019 - 11:30 am

Ah, ok, sorry. I misunderstood the thrust of your rhetorical question of juxtaposition. Flag on the play!

I need to consider more what you wrote above. It is beautiful – both in illustration and as written. It does indeed harken back to some of the prior taboo territory we’ve covered together (and you held my hand through), and it highlights (as it did before) a place where our set-points are seemingly modestly different. And, I want to see if I can walk myself to where you are. You got me there on Paul’s stance on the law – and I want to get there here.

To avoid me running down the field again too far on a misunderstanding, let me lay it out (to make it explicit, in my words, to ensure I’m understanding you) and ask couple of quick questions to make sure I’m fully grasping your view.

Your view is that:

– in the chaotic environment and intense stress of the Last Week, it is possible that Jesus, foreseeing his impending death, said something on the nose of or close enough to 1 Cor that either scenarios A or B obtained.

– it is also possible (this seems consistent but slightly more conservative than the immediately above) that, in the trauma of the aftermath, that Peter et al remembered, after the fact (and probably after much soul-searching reflection), Jesus’s words (possibly words equating a life of God as food and drink) as being something like 1 Cor (even if had we been there, above the fray, we might/might not have drawn a different distinction); which would be a variant within scenario B.

Is this a roughly accurate summation?

And if so, do you think it is – more than plausible – probable (on an embedded dissimilarity argument or otherwise)?

To make explicit where I’m currently struggling:

– I think we still have a slightly different set-point on how much Jesus foresaw his end; not sure it in the end matters all that much, but it seems to motivate some of the impending-doom-engendering-taboo, if I am understanding the psychological milieu correctly

– there is also seemingly a set-point difference on stance/angle of attack:

– if I’m not misstating, you seem to be reasoning from the given of the (dissimilar) datum of LS taboo as the starting point, back to the plausible (probable?) scenario that would explain both its existence as a tradition and why it would not be “untrue”.

– if I’m not blind to my own biases, I seem to be reasoning from the starting point of the ostensible background beliefs of the participants, and then struggling to get from those premises to an argument that would be probable (not possible) that we get 1 Cor, without it also being “untrue”.

I don’t think (but perhaps I’m wrong…) that I have a problem understanding how to get from (1) LS in 1 Cor form (x) as given and (y) as “true”, back to (2) a plausible scenario that generates it (and yours is an excellent one). I’m struggling to motivate in my mind how such a scenario would be ex-ante probable, given the background beliefs, if I don’t already hold (y) as a prior.

Please tell me if this in not also your diagnosis of where we each are, and the points where we might be slipping past one another. I greatly appreciate it, as you know. In the interim, I’ll keep chewing on what you wrote above.

Robert

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September 17, 2019 - 12:07 pm

Robert

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September 17, 2019 - 2:52 pm

Hngerhman

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September 17, 2019 - 3:32 pm

Robert said

Yes, it is a fairly accurate summary of the ideas/arguments that I am currently playing around with.

Ok, great – wanted to confirm.

Robert said

For the time being its seems more plausible than other reconstructions that do not effectively deal with the Jewish background of Paul and Cephas.

Completely agree that Paul and Cephas’s Jewish background (almost most especially Paul’s, given his pharisaic genealogy, by birth and by belief) is a massive consideration at issue with LS (hence all my prattling about it).

In my naïveté, however, I don’t have a lot of other alternative reconstructions in the background to implicitly argue against – I just don’t know enough. Any decent ones you’d point me to (acknowledging that they are insufficient)?

Robert said

I am reluctant to say it is probable, because I am aware of our limitations here…

…I don’t think the Eucharist is ex ante probable.

Fair.

I’m trying to get the intuitions you lay out aloft in my own head, so please forgive any unintentionally unseemly pressing of the point.

Robert said

By the way what is an embedded dissimilarity?

‘Embedded’ here is intended as the modifier of the noun phrase ‘dissimilarity argument’. I can see how that could read unclearly.

I mean to say/ask: embedded in your broader argument, are you doing the probability work for LS’s “veracity” by way of a (suppressed) argument from dissimilarity? Above, you are saying you don’t see it as probable, so that’s a partial answer to my intended question.

Another way of getting at the remaining unanswered portion would be: the only way (overstatement, for emphasis) I can currently see clear to making a probability argument for LS’s “veracity”, rather than helping myself at the outset to the assumption that it is “true”, is via dissimilarity. That it cuts so hard against the grain of taboo that this brute fact in itself means LS is likely to be “true” (either on Jesus’s lips, or in Peter’s head after the fact). So, one would establish its probability through dissimilarity, then wrap your insightful (and touching) narrative to explain its genesis.

But below you add another interesting layer (which is a scenario B-type case) that now (post me reading it) makes my “only way” above an overstatement.

Robert said

I don’t think the Eucharist is ex ante probable. Perhaps it is best understood as arising out of chaos, the traumatic and taboo chaos of a crucified messiah, hung from a tree as a threat and curse upon the land, but out of which Jesus’ followers nonetheless found hope and strength to continue, believing that their teacher, unconquered in death, must have seen it all ahead of time.

It could not have been predicted, but ‘Jesus must have predicted it’, at least in the minds of some of his disciples. I do suspect Jesus may have had some sense of foreboding and presumably would have wanted to prepare his disciples in some way, thus I doubt Cephas made it up out of whole cloth.

This second paragraph (in the light of the first) struck me. A genuinely (positive connotation) retrojected confabulation of a remembered event through the lens of a reverse-engineered prophecy fulfillment – analogical to the other retrojected predictions placed on Jesus’s lips in the (later) gospels. This is a very interesting tack that hadn’t previously occurred to me. I want to think more about it.

Robert

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September 18, 2019 - 8:15 am

Hngerhman

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September 18, 2019 - 7:45 pm

Robert said

I’m primarily thinking of those attempts to find the origin of the Lord’s supper tradition as an imitation of some type of Mithras cultic rite or in something other mystery religions, or perhaps some type of Hellenistic symposia dining club. These might overemphasize the incompatibility of the words of institution with the Jewish taboo regarding consumption of blood.

Thank you – I’ll have to go acquaint myself with these. As is obvious from my own (over?) focus on the taboo, I’m sympathetic to the intuition that seemingly motivates these theories. However, given that I think it is unlikely that the LS tradition in 1 Cor doesn’t have Petrine fingerprints on it, any theory positing extra-Judaism sources doesn’t have the feel of cogency for me currently.

If we stipulate that the tradition got pushed through a Petrine filter, the only way I can presently see to get the idea aloft would be that Paul imported the consumption taboo and then Peter (or the Petrine-infused communities as strainer) were somehow cool with the synthesis. Which strikes me as so wildly unlikely that I’m almost embarrassed to give it voice.

Robert said

On the other hand, one also has to consider other early descriptions of the Christian Eucharist that do not include the words of institution, eg, the traditions embedded in the Didache. Thus, the Pauline (and possibly Petrine) account may not be the only one circulating, which obviously brings up the problem of the last supper in John’s gospel, which does not include the words of institution but does nonetheless does contain the likely Eucharistic Bread of Life discourse.

Good point. Perhaps I’m being myopic. I’m implicitly operating under the paradigm that earlier (Paul’s epistles; and Mark) and closer to Jesus (direct or indirect Petrine influence) is better. I don’t know much about the Didache (other than it is comparatively late). If what I understand of Johannine scholarship is correct, John is layered, redacted and late. Even if one posited that the beloved disciple both dictated the stories and was John son of Zebedee, and one then argued that its account is equidistant from Jesus via John SoZ, your point about the Bread of Life discourse in that layered/redacted work still stands. Is this off base?

Robert

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September 18, 2019 - 8:38 pm

Hngerhman

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September 18, 2019 - 8:55 pm

Robert said

An argument from dissimilarity would be pointless against those who see the tradition as so taboo that it necessitates a foreign origin of the Eucharist in Mithras or other mystery religions or a purely Hellenistic origin.

Now that I have probabilistically painted myself into the corner of Petrine influence, with respect to the idea of extra-Judaism influence, I’m compelled to pull a Laplace and vigorously assert that I have no need of that hypothesis. I see their pointlessness objection, and raise them them a dismissal out of hand! Ha.

Robert said

…if one is already inclined to accept the Petrine origin/endorsement of the Pauline tradition.

Hard for me to say, at present, that I’m not so inclined.

Robert said

If Paul knew of it from or had it confirmed by Cephas, is it likely that Cephas would have consciously fabricated it out of whole cloth as his own theological creation?

No, it strikes me that it would not be likely.

I’m still noodling on your prior retrojected prophecy confabulation hypothesis.

Robert said

Wouldn’t he have been more likely to have been trying to make sense of at least something that Jesus himself said or did?

Yes. However, this is precisely where I run up against competing probabilistic arguments. It’s more likely Peter would have been trying to make sense of something Jesus said or did. But it’s much less likely (given the background beliefs) that Jesus would say something this taboo, and it’s also seemingly similarly unlikely that Peter retroactively would come to a conclusion that Jesus would have said or done such a thing (unless he did).

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