Since Paul considered Jesus to be a pre-existent divine being born into a human body, why would he need to believe in a physical resurrection of that body?  I think he believed it because it was the one thing basically all Christians believed then.  He believed Jesus had spoken to him, and that meant Jesus must have somehow survived crucifixion.  But the story we have about his vision seems to be quite different from the accounts in the gospels, and it’s unclear whether he saw Jesus in bodily form at all.

I think it’s pretty clear that Paul had heard a lot of conflicting and overlapping stories about the resurrection, so he avoided getting too specific, for fear of offending anyone.  According to him, hundreds saw the risen Jesus.   But what he personally believed–I think we have to recognize that there’s a canny politician there, as well as a talented theologian.  

Isn’t it what we’re all supposed to be doing here, Stephen?

Question–you read Bart’s last book, right?  The Triumph of Christianity.  In it, he suggests that Paul made many of his early converts out of people who came to his leather working shop, that he would set up in a community he came to.  He’d talk to people who came in, and get them interested. 

What indisputable evidence do we have that Paul was a leather worker, kept a shop, or used it as a front for his evangelizing?  There’s one passage in Acts referring to him as a tentmaker.  But it would have been hard for him to take all the tools and materials for tentmaking around with him from place to place.  So from a relatively early time period (but well after Paul’s death) it has been suggested he was instead a leather worker.  We know he did work to support himself, because there are references to that in his epistles (he didn’t want to be rely on contributions from the church, it’s easy to divine, because he wanted as much freedom as possible to conduct his mission as he saw fit).  But we do not, in fact, know that Bart is correct about what he (and other scholars) have said about him converting people who came to his shop.  It’s a reasonable supposition. Not a proven fact.  But it’s in a published book.  This is a lightly populated message board frequented by non-scholars.

I don’t see the problem.  I don’t think there is any problem.  Or maybe you’re the one with a problem.

🙂

The subject being discussed here is history.  Period.  That’s what we’re doing.  Discussing history.  Not writing books.  Not publishing papers.  Not impacting the field in question one bit.  But understanding it better (we hope) by trading ideas, insights, information. 

And anyone who says that real historians don’t get into the heads of ancient figures is speaking in complete ignorance.   For example, where did Constantine ever say (that we know of) that his interest in a monotheistic religion came in part from his own experience as one Roman ruler among several, and his desire to simplify that real-life pantheon?  Nowhere.  It’s historians getting into his head, making a reasonable supposition. And one of those historians is Bart Ehrman.

But before I read passages where he suggested this, I’d come to the same conclusion myself.  Because it’s obvious.  When you pay attention.  When you learn how to think. 

Try it sometime.  🙂

Hngerhman said

Guys, thanks for jumping in headfirst.

 

Godspell, I share your initial skepticism on how Acts relates Paul’s Jesus experiences. I myself am squarely on team Bart with respect to Acts’s fidelity to Pauline history, broadly (and on Paul’s experiences of Jesus specifically). Which is to say, I do not place a lot of weight on Acts, particularly given its internal inconsistencies around its three recountings of his Damascus event.
Turning to his own letters, Paul seems to believe that Jesus (like others will upon their/general resurrection) obtained a new pneumatic body in the process. So, it seems whatever he thinks appeared to him in the instances where he experienced Jesus, a new body of pneuma is what his view of the underlying resurrection metaphysics is.
I’m wrestling with getting my head around the intricacies of what that implies for Paul’s view of: what would have been the contents of Jesus’s place of burial (in the Pauline sense) post-resurrection. Hence my 1st question, posed broadly, hoping it would sufficiently interesting for to engage.
Robert, you put your finger directly on one of the things that sparked my 1st question – Bart’s view (based at least partly on Dale Martin’s tome Corinthian Body. I read it on Bart’s rec. Dense. Fantastic.) as contrasted with Tabor’s. Out of haste I’m probably going to mangle it, but I’ll attempt to outline what I think the state of play is.
Both think the end-state is new pneumatic body, but as I understand it, it’s the transition that’s most at odds between them. Bart/Martin argue that Paul believed the sarx (flesh/bones) is changed/transformed into the newly re-constituted pneumatic body. This suggests any Jesus’s earthly remains would have “disappeared” in the transformation process. Tabor marshals arguments that the new pneumatic body re-clothes the soul, and leaves the former sarx untouched. Which implies you’d still have human remains (and hence his view of the Talpiot tomb).
In an ideal world, it’d be great to find simplified but full-throated versions of the competing textual cases for each view (rather than just the simplistic single-use trotting out of this proof text, then that one), in order to winnow down to just what narrow (textual) points the issue turns on.

 

 

As to the second question, agreed that any answer is speculative, and any arguments mostly derive from silence, but there seem at first pass to be good reasons (in no way dispositive) to think it’s unlikely he held any of the gospels’ versions of the Empty Tomb story. The mention of burial but attendant lack of grave/tomb found empty (and let’s stipulate for the moment that Paul would append things to received traditions/creeds, and he didn’t here). And there’s no mention of any Mary getting an announcement nor an appearance. Paul generally wasn’t shy about hammering home his point when making a case, and he seemingly had legit shots on goal but didn’t take them. And his silence seems all the more intriguing in relief of how big a deal it would have been to any community that heard it – especially if we think that the stolen-body pushback was sufficiently early.

 

Ok, that’s a flimsy first step to push on a string. I’ve got to turn my attention elsewhere at the moment. Please eviscerate as you see fit.  

Again, I think Paul is so indefinite about what happened that the only thing we can be sure of is that he believes Jesus was crucified, buried, rose from the dead, and appeared to some of his followers (because everyone agreed on those points).  He takes no definitive stance beyond that, and that’s because he wants to stay in good graces with all the different factions in the larger Christian community, who are arguing about what happened and what it meant. 

Given Paul’s attitude towards women in general, his failure to mention the story of the women discovering the empty tomb could also be motivated by him not wanting to give that story a boost. Might as well say his failure to mention Mary Magdalene proves she never existed.  Nobody thinks that’s a possibility, that I know of. 

Quite a large difference between arguing over the meaning of what happened and what actually happened.  Paul considers the latter to be his particular area of strength.  He’s not telling people what happened, he’s telling them what it signifies.  Or rather, what he believes it signifies. 

He wasn’t present in Jerusalem then, nor was he a follower of Jesus, and he’d be at a a considerable disadvantage taking a stance on matters that occurred when he was nowhere nearby, and not part of the group. (Actively hostile to it for some time afterwards, in fact–don’t think that never came up in passing).

The term ‘all things to all men’ has been used so many times since–and so often in a political context. 

I’d be very surprised to learn that real historians haven’t made similar points already.  I doubt very much I’ve ever said anything about early Christianity that some professional scholar hadn’t already said, possibly quite some time ago.