Stephen said
What did Paul mean in 1 Corinthians when he said Jesus was buried?Scholars have been arguing about this since they could do safely do so. Paul is repeating a credo of some sort but given his view of the Resurrection body I wonder just how concerned he would have been about the disposition of Jesus’ corpus. Paul’s view was that in the Resurrection the sarx, the “flesh”, would wither away. The psyche, the “soul”, would also wither. The finer portion of the body, pneuma, the “spirit”, would be transformed into the resurrection body.
If Paul is repeating a credo statement, I don’t understand why Paul’s views on resurrection matter at all. It’d be like taking of a recording of my singing of the Star Spangled Banner and making the point that vergari doesn’t believe that the “twilight’s last gleaming” happens until after 9pm. It really doesn’t matter what I think about the meaning of those words; it’s what Francis Scott Key thought.
Stephen said
Where did the idea of resurrection happening on the “third day” come from?Once again we have no real idea.
Askshully, we have a pretty darn good idea of where it came from. You seem to be willfully ignoring evidence that contradicts your position and then making a generalized appeal to futility.
“Everything we know about Massachusetts due process suggests that the Salem Witch Trials are not historical.”
“But then why did Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley authorize financial compensation to 22 people said to have been convicted during the Trials?”
“We have no real idea.”
If Paul is repeating a credo statement, I don’t understand why Paul’s views on resurrection matter at all.
Because Paul is not simply repeating a credo. He is using it as a springboard to discuss his view of his own authority and the nature of the resurrection.
…we have a pretty darn good idea of where it came from. You seem to be willfully ignoring evidence that contradicts your position and then making a generalized appeal to futility.
Any appeals to futility I make will be quite specific I assure you. Pray tell us “where it came from“. Based on the brevity of our exchange I am sure you have no idea what my position is.
Stephen said
If Paul is repeating a credo statement, I don’t understand why Paul’s views on resurrection matter at all.Because Paul is not simply repeating a credo. He is using it as a springboard to discuss his view of his own authority and the nature of the resurrection.
Unless you’re suggesting that Paul interpolated “he was buried” and “on the third day,” I simply don’t see what relevance it is the purpose for him quoting the credo; either it is a preexistent credo or it’s not. If we accept that it is a preexistent credo, then we can say that this belief dates back to the earliest days of the Church.
Stephen said
…we have a pretty darn good idea of where it came from. You seem to be willfully ignoring evidence that contradicts your position and then making a generalized appeal to futility.Any appeals to futility I make will be quite specific I assure you. Pray tell us “where it came from“. Based on the brevity of our exchange I am sure you have no idea what my position is.
“It came from” the very early belief that Jesus died on the day of his crucifixion and was raised on the third day, meaning the first day of the week, Sunday. Obviously, we cannot “know” anything for 100% certainty from the past, particularly from antiquity; but on the scale of probabilities, the existence of a very early belief that Jesus died on the cross, was buried on the day of his crucifixion and was raised on the third day is about as high a probability as we can get.
I simply don’t see what relevance it is the purpose for him quoting the credo; either it is a preexistent credo or it’s not. If we accept that it is a preexistent credo, then we can say that this belief dates back to the earliest days of the Church.
Have you spent any time actually reading the letter? A good commentary would help. Hermaneia perhaps?
Scholars think Paul is writing in the mid-50s. The credo need be only slightly older than that.
For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.
-Matthew 12:40 NRSV
Doesn’t quite work does it?
Why would Paul say that Jesus had been buried if he knew that his body had been left on the cross for many days?
Paul was literate, so was among the top 10% of people in Jerusalem who would normally be informed of events.
He was certainly in Jerusalem soon after the crucifixion persecuting those who claimed Jesus’s resurrection and
he is said to have studied there beforehand so it is reasonable to conclude that he was living there when Jesus was crucified.
(Where else could he have been?) What better argument could he have used against resurrection claims than to say that
he knew that Jesus’s body had been left on the cross to rot? The whole point of crucifixion was to make a public spectacle
of the victim, so it was no secret and Paul should have been aware of the matter through gossip even if not from personal experience.
The supposition that the bodies were taken down after a few days also makes no sense. Who would have done it and for what purpose?
It would still have required Roman permission, and for even less reason than if they had granted Jewish requests on the Friday evening.
Overall, the most probable reason why Paul says that Jesus was buried is that he knew that this is what happened.
Stephen said
I simply don’t see what relevance it is the purpose for him quoting the credo; either it is a preexistent credo or it’s not. If we accept that it is a preexistent credo, then we can say that this belief dates back to the earliest days of the Church.Have you spent any time actually reading the letter? A good commentary would help. Hermaneia perhaps?
Scholars think Paul is writing in the mid-50s. The credo need be only slightly older than that.
Again, anything is possible. Nothing “needs” to be anything. However, a very young credo makes 1 Corinthians 15:3 (“what I received I passed on to you as of first importance”) a very hard read. In Galatians, Paul tells us that he met with Peter in Jerusalem almost certainly before the Year 40. If Paul had been conversant with Church luminaries like Peter for more than a decade by the time 1 Corinthians is written, it makes little sense that this creed had only recently been received by him as first importance. This is just another example of using simplest explanation for a tradition.
Stephen said
“It came from” the very early belief that Jesus died on the day of his crucifixion and was raised on the third day, meaning the first day of the week, Sunday. Obviously, we cannot “know” anything for 100% certainty from the past, particularly from antiquity; but on the scale of probabilities, the existence of a very early belief that Jesus died on the cross, was buried on the day of his crucifixion and was raised on the third day is about as high a probability as we can get.Except it’s not so cut and dried as that.
For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.
-Matthew 12:40 NRSV
Doesn’t quite work does it?
Isn’t this a textbook example of what Mark Goodacre calls tradition scripturalized? We have no good reason to believe, do we(?), that the tradition behind Matthew 12:40 predates the credo in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. Matthew 12:40 isn’t a Markan redaction, and Matthew 16:21, 17:23, 20:19 and 27:64 all agree that Jesus was raised on “the third day,” which was “first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1). The effort to scripturalize the tradition is very Matthean.
Paul was a diaspora Jew whose first language was probably Greek. Acts is historically suspect because when we can compare its accounts with Paul’s authentic letters there are wide discrepancies. Paul gives no indications in his authentic letters of any career in Jerusalem. His reference to a burial is part of a credo which he is repeating. We have no idea what the composers of the credo meant by it nor how Paul interpreted it.
I wouldn’t say anything is possible. A credo by its very nature is a subsequent development in a tradition precisely because it is an easily remembered account of the important features of the faith, necessary for those who were not original witnesses (like Paul).
Isn’t this a textbook example of what Mark Goodacre calls tradition scripturalized?
There would have been a tendency to iron out the rough edges of the tradition as time passed and the stories were shared. Much ink has been spilt over the “third day” and most people don’t even realize there’s a issue until it’s pointed out to them. We don’t know what the composers of the credo in 1 Cor 15 meant by the “third day” or how Paul interpreted it. He does not mention the Empty Tomb so it’s not unreasonable to suppose its origins post-date his letters.
JAS said
Stephen said
. . . He does not mention the Empty Tomb so it’s not unreasonable to suppose its origins post-date his letters.
And just for acknowledging the full picture, nor is it unreasonable to suppose its origins pre-date his letters.
Well if your point is that we don’t know for sure that’s certainly true. But how likely is it that the composers of the credo or Paul knew about it and just didn’t think it was important enough to mention?
Stephen said
Well if your point is that we don’t know for sure that’s certainly true. But how likely is it that the composers of the credo or Paul knew about it and just didn’t think it was important enough to mention?
My point is that when we do not know, we do not know. There is a tendency for too many on this site to put a thumb on the scale in favor of their preferred side of every question. Replacing “certainty” with “likelihood” is an improvement, but really just another shade of the same problem.
Certainty is impossible in any case, past or present. All we have are likelihoods and probabilities. It becomes manifest in the study of ancient history chiefly because of the dearth of primary sources. You do the best with what you’ve got – or you’re silent. Silence seems a poor choice simply because of a lack of certainty. You’re either going to do history or not.
I invite critique of this chain of reasoning. A credo by its very nature is an easily remembered statement of what the community considers the most important aspects of the faith. If an aspect of the faith that a later generation considered important is missing from an earlier statement of faith then it seems logical to suppose that the earlier generation were either unaware of this aspect or did not consider it important. Paul demonstrates his willingness to modify the credo he received for his own ends so if he knew about the Empty Tomb then we would have to wonder why he would omit it.
These seem to be reasonable questions.
Whether or not a tomb was empty would have been a mere detail of no particular interest . . . if you already accept Jesus as resurrected. (It does make for a dramatic moment if you are detailing the crucifixion.) And Paul claimed to have had his own resurrection vision. What we might think important need not be what Paul thought was important. I think some are putting a lot of emphasis on an “aha” that isn’t the “aha” they think it is.
Stephen said
Paul was a diaspora Jew whose first language was probably Greek. Acts is historically suspect because when we can compare its accounts with Paul’s authentic letters there are wide discrepancies. Paul gives no indications in his authentic letters of any career in Jerusalem.
I wasn’t referring to Paul’s alleged adolescence in Jerusalem form Acts; I was referring to Galatians 1:18, where Paul says that after three years in Arabia, he went to Jerusalem to meet with Cephas (and also met with James).
Stephen said
Paul’s reference to a burial is part of a credo which he is repeating. We have no idea what the composers of the credo meant by it nor how Paul interpreted it.
Again … it is not the burial on its own; it’s the phasing “that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:4).
We seem to agree this is from a preexisting credo. I don’t understand this generalized appeal to ignorance (“We have no idea what the composers of the credo meant by it”); this type of scholarship is easily used to erase history as a discipline.
Can we say for absolute certain what they meant? No. We never can.
Can we employ basic techniques, including literary criticism, to make a probabilistic argument for what they meant? Of course. Let’s start with plain meaning: What would early Christians mean by “buried”? What would early Christians have understood as “the third day”? Paul himself in 1 Corinthians 16:2 makes it pretty clear that the Christian day of gathering is the first day of the week.
What about the significance of Paul’s interpretation of the credo? Unless Paul is modifying or interpolating the credo, then his interpretations simply aren’t relevant as to what the credo itself actually said.
JAS said
Whether or not a tomb was empty would have been a mere detail of no particular interest . . . if you already accept Jesus as resurrected. (It does make for a dramatic moment if you are detailing the crucifixion.) And Paul claimed to have had his own resurrection vision. What we might think important need not be what Paul thought was important. I think some are putting a lot of emphasis on an “aha” that isn’t the “aha” they think it is.
Paul mentions his own conversion experience several times and post-crucifixion appearances to the disciples just once so it is not remarkable that he does not mention an empty tomb at all. It was just not one of his priority arguments. After all, the first reaction to hearing that the body of Jesus was missing would be that someone took it (which is what the Jews claimed) not that he had been resurrected. So, as JAS says, we might think that the empty tomb story is important but Paul didn’t think so.
Stephen said
Paul does not mention the Empty Tomb so it’s not unreasonable to suppose its origins post-date his letters.
Now you’re introducing the Empty Tomb (never previously raised) into the argument.
Like the introduction of Paul’s “interpretation” of the credo throughout the rest of 1 Corinthians, this is a straw man.
The point about the credo is not how Paul interpreted it, or whether later Christians may have embellished on its theme. The point about the credo is that we have very good reason to think that it depicts some of the oldest surviving beliefs of early Christians.
And, there are important points to be made off these beliefs. For example, unlike in the case of the stolen body narrative (which Matthew seeks to refute) or Jesus being fathered by a Roman centurion (Talmud), we have no hint at all of an early counter-tradition which suggested that Jesus was not buried and could not have been raised on the third day, because his body was still on the cross.
That early anti-Christian polemicists never seized on this argument is interesting. Obviously, this makes for an argument from ignorance, but then again so does the argument that Paul never mentions an empty tomb.
Stephen said
JAS said
Stephen said
. . . He does not mention the Empty Tomb so it’s not unreasonable to suppose its origins post-date his letters.
And just for acknowledging the full picture, nor is it unreasonable to suppose its origins pre-date his letters.
Well if your point is that we don’t know for sure that’s certainly true. But how likely is it that the composers of the credo or Paul knew about it and just didn’t think it was important enough to mention?
This is an argument from silence on steroids. Your argument is basically that the writers of the credo and Paul somehow mentioned everything they believed to be important and in documents that survived!
In the case of Paul, we know he wrote other letters to the Church at Corinth that didn’t survive. Is it your position that those lost letters didn’t include “anything important enough to mention” in (I guess) all other letters.
Using this argumentation we would have to believe that the Last Supper was invented by Mark, because Paul never thought it was important enough to mention. Oh, but wait, it turns out that Paul did have occasion to mention the Last Supper — but only in one of his surviving letters.
Stephen said
Paul was a diaspora Jew whose first language was probably Greek. Acts is historically suspect because when we can compare its accounts with Paul’s authentic letters there are wide discrepancies. Paul gives no indications in his authentic letters of any career in Jerusalem. His reference to a burial is part of a credo which he is repeating. We have no idea what the composers of the credo meant by it nor how Paul interpreted it.
Paul says that he savagely persecuted the church of God when he was still a practicing Jew, which was in Jerusalem before he left for Damascus, so he was living there soon after the crucifixion. Of course, we do not know for sure how long he had been living there but he gives no indication that he had recently arrived. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that he had been there for several years, and the reference in Acts to him being a pupil is consistent with this. Where else could he have been living? It is then probable that Paul was living in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion, but not involved in the matter in any way.
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