Reading over 1 Corinthians, I am again brought to marvel over the political acuity of Paul, his almost ineffable slipperiness–he begins with self-effacement, talking about how he came to them in weakness and trembling, and goes from there to saying he gave the people in Corinth milk to drink, because they were not ready for solid food (might as well have said “Who’s Your Daddy?”). 

He does not say “Of course you must listen to me and ignore these charlatans you wrote to me about” even though that is precisely the result he’s aiming for.  He says all must bow to Jesus, but Jesus isn’t around, and who’s the one Jesus spoke to in a vision? 

Right now, I’m not reading up on ancient Christianity.  I’m reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and let me just say, LBJ would have studied his bible as a young man, like any boy in rural Texas, and what he would have gotten out of Paul’s epistles was not how to get to heaven, but how to win influence without seeming to be doing anything of the kind.  He also knew how to be all things to all men. 

You’ve read the book?  I assume you’d have said so.  It’s masterful. Caro lays it all out, Johnson’s rapid rise  You hate and admire the man at the same time.  He makes Shakespeare’s Richard III look like Anne of Green Gables.  

I’m most of the way through the first volume, which is about how he began his rise to power.  He fooled everybody.  People with vastly more experience, to whom he was nobody important–they thought they were using him, and they got used.  They never saw him coming, until it was too late.  By the time he was Senate majority leader, he could afford to be more obvious about the way he employed his power (though it hardly came out in the papers).  So that reference you made isn’t really to the point.    

I don’t necessarily want to ascribe the same degree of Machiavellian deviousness to Paul–it’s a very different stage he’s playing on, with a very different script.  I certainly think his faith was genuine, however self-serving at times–but read over the epistles.  Read the story in Acts about how he put the Pharisees and Saducees at each other’s throats, while he got away clean.  Paul had a remarkable gift for manipulation.  A trickster par excellence.  He never had the kind of power an LBJ gets, but in his own way, of course, far more influential over the long run.  

I apologize for giving even the (extremely false) impression I did not think you’d read them.  You’ve read them in Greek.  But to read a text you’re very familiar with through new eyes, sharpened by new ideas, new perceptions, increased context–can be revelatory.  There can be whole depths to the text that previous eluded you.  Forest for the trees.  

Robert said

Hngerhman said 

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 of 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.  

I see nothing or anyone to eviscerate. As you know, I’m not especially good at pushing strings, but I agree it’s is a relatively safe presumption that Paul had not yet heard of traditions inscribed in later texts when we’re might otherwise expect him to have mentioned such.   

‘pushing strings’?  

And since when do we assume that Paul not mentioning something in one of a handful of letters we can be reasonably sure he wrote means he never heard of it?  The empty tomb isn’t mentioned in Acts, which certainly references the resurrection, since the risen Jesus is still hanging out with them in the beginning–are we of the opinion the author of Luke never heard of the empty tomb?

What Paul doesn’t mention in a handful of short missives to far-flung communities he’s trying to hold together isn’t proof of anything.  And if you’re going to argue that the omissions are significant, you need more than Paul to sustain that. (All the more since we know that the Pseudo-Pauline epistles written after Paul’s death–possibly long after–also don’t mention the empty tomb, or the Virgin Birth, or any number of other important ideas in early Christianity, that would have had adherents well before they became the majority view.

Of the 27 books in the New Testament, only the four gospels mention the empty tomb. Clearly the authors of some of these non-gospel texts did know the story.  And did not reference it.  Therefore, there is no solid case to be made that a failure to mention it means it isn’t known to the author.  There are many other potential reasons for its absence.  The author doesn’t consider the story relevant, the author doesn’t like (or believe) the story, the author simply doesn’t want to distract from the point he’s making, and figures everybody already knows about the empty tomb. 

As has been pointed out many times, the notion that Christianity went from a unity to disparity is precisely the opposite of what occurred.  There was great diversity of opinion, a wide range of stories, that gradually got weeded down to more defined consensus (that would periodically break down, leading to conflict, and more weeding). 

And what more is there to say?  If the answer is ever found, it won’t be found here.  Abandon thread.  🙂