Loading...In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7.
I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem.
First Thessalonians was, more or less obviously, the first letter Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica. We don’t know how many other letters he wrote to the church there. In the New Testament we also have 2 Thessalonians, but scholars have had long and protracted debates for well over a century over whether that book was originally written by Paul or was written by someone *claiming* to be Paul who wanted you to *think* he was Paul. The latter is my rather strongly held personal view. I talk about it a bit in my book Forged, and at substantial length, in case anyone is interested, in my book Forgery and Counterforgery.
But that’s of no moment here. My point right now is that
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It is also, as it turns out, the very first letter of Paul’s that we have, chronologically. That also makes it the very first writing of any kind that we have from any Christian author, so that it is particularly special and important to us. There are not particularly heated debates over its date (at least that I’m aware of) (and you’d be amazed at things I’m not aware of). It is usually dated to 49 or 50 CE – so about 20 years after Jesus’ death and about 15 before Paul’s.
The letter is an unusually joyful and affirming letter from Paul. In most of his other letters, he is rather hot and bothered about something – which is almost always why he writes in the first place. Often he is disturbed by the “false teachers” who have arisen within (or from outside) a community who, in his opinion, are leading the church astray (e.g., the letters to the Galatians and Corinthians); often he about disturbed by ethical issues (or huge moral failings) that have arisen in the community, or about community infighting (e.g., again, Corinthians, and Philippians).
In his letter to the Thessalonians, he is not particularly disturbed about ethical issues, although there is an important section of the short five-chapter letter in which he urges his readers to lead sexually upright lives and not to engage in lustful activities (1 Thess 4:1-8). Possibly that is because he has heard there are some ethical improprieties going on? Within this particular passage there is a very difficult verse that very much affects the meaning of what Paul is trying to say. It is *not* a textual problem – that is, it is not a problem because different manuscripts have different readings – but an interpretation/translation problem. (So this is not the textual problem I’ll eventually be talking about, which is the raison d’être for this mini-thread).
After urging his readers to avoid all forms of sexual immorality, he tells his (male) readers to understand how they are to “hold their own vessel in holiness and honor.” The word “vessel” is much disputed. There are reasons for thinking that it means body, or more specifically penis (= keep your pants zipped) and other reasons that it means wife (= stay faithful to your spouse; or stay true to your own wife; or hold on to your *own* wife).
It’s a very difficult passage to work out and a very difficult issue to resolve, but as I said, it doesn’t involve a textual problem.
Paul also is not particularly worried about false teachers in the Thessalonian community, which makes one suspect that none had come there (yet). But there is a doctrinal issue that he is very deeply concerned about, and it is the reason he is writing the letter. The point of the letter becomes clear after he has finished spending three chapters praising the Thessalonians, remembering them fondly, recalling in warm terms the time he had spent with them when he converted them and then communed with them as they set up their Christian community. The problem, which is discussed at length in the final two chapters (4:13-5:12), is that some of the Christians in the community have begun to question or doubt Paul’s teaching that the end of the age, and the return of Jesus, were to happen right away.
This was the core of Paul’s message when he preached his Gospel: the end of the age has come; Christ who died has been exalted to heaven and is soon to return; people need to prepare for this imminent inbreaking of the Kingdom of God; it could happen any time now.
Paul convinced some of the pagan Thessalonians of this message (his Christian community appears to be made up entirely of former pagans, as becomes clear in 1:9-10 and its reference to their past lives); they converted to join his movement; after he established the church then he moved on somewhere else to do the same thing.
But in the meantime, over the weeks, and months, following Paul’s departure, nothing happened. Jesus didn’t come back. And now some people in the community have died. Those who are still alive are perplexed and worried. Does this mean that the ones who have died have lost out on the salvation they were to have with Jesus’ return?
Paul writes to the Christians of Thessalonica to assure them that Jesus still will arrive suddenly from heaven and they need to be ready for his advent. But in the meantime, they should not worry about those who have died. They too will be rewarded at Jesus’ second coming.
This letter is meant, then, to renew Paul’s relationship with his devoted followers, to comfort and exhort them, and to give them some instruction about what will soon take place at Jesus’ return.
I will pick up the story there in my next post. All of this is simply background to a discussion of a very interesting textual variant in chapter 2 of Paul’s letter, a textual variant that determines the meaning of a passage, and is a difference of precisely one letter of the alphabet. Some manuscripts have the letter and others don’t.
I know it’s not the main theme, but ” vessel” intrigued me, as in the HB it only refers to a material vessel.( כלי klee)
I see “vessel” in other places in the NT such as Timothy, Romans, Acts, and, in 1 Peter, woman is a ” weak vessel”, perhaps disclosing clearly that “vessel” is meant as the body. Thus, in Thessalonians, it could mean that men need to keep their wives honourable. ( ” cherchez la femme”😊)
Is the Greek word the same in all these examples?
The problems are that Paul probably didn’t know Hebrew and when he uses his Greek terms, he uses them simply in the ways Greek speakers do. ANd so exegetes explore how Greek words (“vessel” or whatever) mean what they do in various contexts, to see which meaning makes best in one *particular* onctext. So yes, “vessel” could mean “woman/wife” in 1 Thess — that’s a common interpretation. A less common one (that I”ve always been inclined toward, but without strong feelings about the matter) is that it means “penis”. In either case, of course, it is a material “object” (or “subject” rather…)
So, Paul problably didn’t understand Hebrew. But did he understand Aramaic? He should have done that, because otherwise he would not have been able to speak to James and Peter/Cephas without an interpreter.
I don’t think so. My sense is that people in antiquity had to use translators a lot if they weren’t well educated.
If one of the main ways that some letters are determined to be authentic is the similarity of their message and “rhetoric” (eg, vocabulary), how do we do we know that one or two of the “inauthentic” (that are similar in message and rhetoric to each other) are not in fact the authentic letter(s) and the seven inauthentic?
My point is simply that, at least ideally, it seems like there would need to be something independent of all the letters to use as a standard of comparison for determining authenticity.
I’m sure there are other ways of making a highly probabilistic determination of which are authentic, but do you see the logical point involved?
Yup, it’s a good question. And it’s why the judgments are not made strictly on teh basis of vocabulary and style; otherwise we’d really be sunk. It’s a matter of a range of considerations and it gets pretty dense at times. But the basic idea is that the seven cohere well not just in terms of writing style and diction, but also in theologial perspectives, presupposed historical situations, sundry other connections with one another, an so on, and each of the other six are discrepant in *several* of these ways. But it’s always a debate, of course. Though very few scholars have been inclined to reject any of the seven after looking over all the evidence carefully.
When Paul talks about false teachers in his various letters is he talking about a single group of teachers and teachings or would there have been more than one? What, according to Paul, were these false teachers teaching? Was it along the lines that people needed to become Jews in order to become followers of Christ?
Are there indications of “false” teachings that actually made it into orthodox Christianity, perhaps something about the relationship between faith and works?
I believe you’ve written about Pascal’s wager One major flaw is that there is not just a single religion to bet for or against.
What about the idea of having faith (or trust or hope) in the idea or act of faith (or hope or trust)? I seem to remember Tillich and/or Richard Niebuhr advocating that. In my own life that seems to be fruitful.
Related to that is the idea that it’s reasonable to search for (something like) God even if, currently, it’s not reasonable to actually believe in God. Our lives are aimed at the good and (something like) God can be the hypothesis of an ultimate or everlasting good in which we can share. And even if that ultimate good doesn’t exist the search for it can be “continuous” with increasing the amount of good.
We can’t know for certain there is no God and won’t know until we die. But at some point the probability must become so low that it doesn’t makes sense to worry about it any more. For you (if your thinking was along similar lines) what was the “crossroads” when it made more sense to give up the search?
One big issue, of course, is that most religions are not about faith. And many of those that are have completely contrary things to believe “in”!
Clearly different ones. Those in Galatia are very different indeed from those in Corinth; and it’s hard to know what the characterisitcs of the false teachers are in other situations (Philippians, e.g.). The intersting thing is that one “false teaching” that came to be eliminated from most of Xty was the view held by the earliest followers of JEsus, that it was important for everyone who accepted the Jewish messiah to keep the Jewish law! Throughout history, there have been lots of “orthodox” positions that, centuries later, came to be declared as heretical. That would be an interesting book, now that I think of it!
Since the original texts were not divided into verses/chapters, would it possible the division may have changed the meaning in some cases? Is there any discussion between scholars about how the changes in verses/chapters were decided? Or are they pretty obvious?
Yes, the divisions can affect the meaning. I”ve heard some scholars, for example, claim that Jesus never talks about the coming son of man and the future kingdom in the same breath. Uh, well, check out Mark 8:38 and 9:1. If you think of them as SEPARATE CHAPTERs then you don’t realize it almost literally *is* in teh same breath. There have not been too many decisions to change verses and chapter divisions though; it would just cause confusion anytime someone referred to a verse, if it was a different verse!
Is there any particular critical commentary on 1 Thess that you would recommend?
Thanks
I rather like Robert Jewett’s, though he takes positions that I think are completely wrong (e.g. a somewhat odd claim about 2 Thessalonians not being forged because it was too soon after Paul’s life. Jewett — a very fine scholar otherwise — apparently didn’t know that we have firm records of forgeries circulating in authors’ names in antiqutiy from their LIFETIME!). But the exegesis is solid.
“After he established the church then he moved on somewhere else to do the same thing.”
I do not agree with this view of Paul’s first steps in his preaching in Macedonia.
Paul and his companions arrived at Thessalonica from Philippi after they “ had already SUFFERED AND BEEN SHAMEFULLY TREATED AT PHILIPPI” (1 Thess 2:2).
Things were not better in Thessalonica since Paul’s recall that “when we were with you, we kept telling you beforehand that we were to SUFFER AFFLICTION, just as it HAS COME TO PASS(1 Thes 3:4).
So Paul left Macedonia and went to Achaia because of the problems aroused in Philippi and Thessalonica as Acts also recorded (Acts 16:12 – 17:15) not just because “he moved on somewhere else to do the same thing”.
In fact, Paul “ wanted to come to [Thessaloniki]—I, Paul, again and again—but SATAN HINDERED US.” (1 Thes 2:18)
The situation in Thessalonica was so dangerous that it was impossible for Paul to visit them after he left Macedonia although he really wanted to do it (“I, Paul, again and again”).
Paul finally accepts to send Timothy and be “left behind at Athens alone” (1 Thes 3:1).
So it’s clear that Paul would be not welcomed in Thessalonica and the situation there was still hard because Timothy was sent in order “to establish and exhort [the thessalonians] in [their] faith, that no one be moved by THESE AFFLICTIONS”.
(btw – Contrary to Acts I think that 1 Thess was written in Athens when Paul and some companions were en route from Corinth to Thessalonica but then he received news about how the situation in Thessalonica had worsen and then he was “left behind” in Athens while Timothy continued the journey to Thessalonica , it is worth to note that in 1 Thess 1:7 Pauls speaks about “all the believers in Macedonia and IN ACHAIA” and from 1 Cor 16:15 we know that “the first converts IN ACHAIA” were from Corinth so the corinthian church was already founded when Paul wrote 1 Thess….but all this is for another article)
Dr. Ehrman: Paul and Jesus seem to be quite different in their views of the afterlife; in some cases, Paul writes our resurrection will be purely spiritual, like of our soul; in other examples, he writes that we will possess a new physical body. What am I curious about is where do Christians get the idea that we be reunited with loved ones in the afterlife?
Saint Cyprian of Carthage writes this: “We ought never to forget, beloved, that we have renounced the world. When the day of our homecoming puts an end to our exile, frees us from the bonds of the world, and restores us to paradise and to a kingdom, we should welcome it. What man, stationed in a foreign land, would not want to return to his own country as soon as possible? Well, we look upon paradise as our country, and a great crowd of our loved ones awaits us there, a countless throng of parents, brothers and children longs for us to join them. Assured though they are of their own salvation, they are still concerned about ours. What joy both for them and for us to see one another and embrace!”
In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is emphatic that the resurrection will be physical just as Jesus’ was; he is arguing against the view that the resurrecdtion is purelyspiritual. I have a long discussion of this in my book Heaven and Hell. (Where, among other things, I show how the verse “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom” is *completely* misunderstood when taken ut of its context). As to being united with loved ones, in both Jesus and Paul that would only be loved ones who also are raised. Not in heaven in teh spirit….
I myself tend to think that the “coming of the kingdom” is inside us and scattered among us and not everyone sees or finds it, as stated in the gospel of Luke and the gospel of Thomas. Likewise I’m thinking that the “2nd coming” is within us as well. It’s also apparent that this takes time.
Is there anyway that Paul’s understanding of these events can be understood or translated in this way?
Obviously the end of the entire world/earth hasn’t happened and a new one hasn’t been remade or reconstructed in it’s place. But in a certain sense, the old world, or the old way of looking at the world and things, was ending, and a new way of looking at things, a new and better understanding and “reality” about things was taking it’s place.
Thanks for reading
Yes, that’s a very popular view and its attractions are very clear. But no, it’s not what Paul thought or wrote. As an apocalypitic Jew he was expecting a future event that would be physical and transformative of the entire cosmos. MOst of his theology is rooted in that view.
It’s actually an idea that I got from a small bible study group leader at church that I was visiting many, many years back.
“It’s not the end of the world, but the end of a kind of worldliness.” (or something like that)
By the way, do you think Paul was influenced by Gnosticism? Especially in Romans, which some suggest is a composite work that Paul didn’t even write.
No, I don’t think that “Gnosticism” as a set of religions had come into existence yet in Paul’s day.
Why do we think “Paul” really existed? Why do we think that his churches existed? If there was a Paul, and he did found church communities and write to them, why did the communities bother copying the letters for posterity given they were told not to expect a future? By the time they no longer believed that, would the letters still have been in someone’s possession, someone who thought they should be copied and preserved? Would there have been a member of the community capable of making a copy and been willing to do so? The “churches” as I understand it were simply groups of people meeting at one another’s homes. Would the letters have been sent to someone’s home on the expectation they would be shared? The logistics of how the letters survived, and managed to be copied, bothers me. It is as if they were written later by an individual creating religious history – that the common language, the individuality of the “authentic” letters, is an artifact of the person who wrote them in order to give voice to a system of beliefs.
We have to investigate teh past existence of every person and institution that is claimed to have existed: compile all the evidence on both sides, try to explain it in as many ways as we can, find the problems with various explanations, and then reach a sensible judgment. When that is done, the evidence for Paul and his churches really is quite overwhelming. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who was able actdually to consider the ancient evidence come up with an alternative explanation.
And I often wondered if letters that went to Paul were ever found. Surely he was informed of situations via letters. Do you happen to know or Dr Ehrman if you’re seeing this. If not, I’ll ask it again another time.
Or is this answer obvious and I’m not seeing it?
Paul mentions communications that he has received from his churches in Corinth and Philippi, and we can assume there were lots more. Alas, they are all gone. Didn’t survive. Or at least have never been found. We do have *apocryphal* correspondences written to him, though; these are completely legendary, but fascinating for analysis. They include “3 Corinthians” (in the Acts of Paul) and the correspondence of Paul with the philosoher Seneca (!).
Hi Bart, I would like to say a few words.
I joined the blog in September 2020, and since then I’ve been carefully through the archives, recording favourite nuggets of information, and leaving comments on between 150 and 200 posts.
I’ve now made about as much use as I can of the archives, so from now on I will change pace and focus on reading new posts as they come out.
Come September 2023, I’ll have been on the blog for three years. That’s the typical length of an undergraduate course (but none of the work). My current thinking is that this is about the right length of time to be a member, and that I will let my subscription expire at that point. (I think subsciption cancellations are done through Paypal?) Of course, you may tempt me to stay by scheduling a particularly fascinating thread.
Meanwhile, I intend to continue enjoying and learning from the blog for the next nine months, and I am inclined to try at least one of your online courses. If I like the first course I try, I’ll purchase others.
Just want to say thanks for the ride.
Thanks!!
In the seven undisputed letters of Paul, did he ever identify things that had to happen before Jesus would return? Romans 11?
Yes, I’d agree: he did think that Gentiles had to be converted and that the word had to be preached to “all the world.” But, well, he appears to have thought that he was the one doing that and that the task was virtually complete. That’s why in Rom 15 he wants to go to Spain to finish it off (the “ends of the earth)
Paul wasn’t seeking all gentiles everywhere, but rather, unfaithful Israelites who had been absorbed into pagan nations from the Dispersion. They were referred to as gentiles because they had stopped being Torah observant and had stopped practicing circumcision.
Paul’s first mission was to Jews who believed they were faithful to Yahweh. Immediately after being commissioned to go to the gentiles, he returned to visiting synagogues, to seek unfaithful Jews and non-Jewish descendants of the ten northern tribes of Israel, people he referred to as ‘gentiles’. It was never about converting entire nations.
The word ‘nations’ in English translations misleads people today anyway. The Greek word is ‘ethnos’, and simply means people, tribes or nations. The people Paul was after was not entire nation-states as we use the term, but rather, the people of Israel who were dispersed among and had been absorbed into pagan cultures and were still under the curse of the Law, which was an everlasting curse.
Anyone since AD70 (when the need for the gospel came to an end) who has believed they were a sinner on the way to a judgement and in need of Jesus and salvation has been terribly mistaken.
#theIObookiscoming
The evidence that Paul believed the need for the gospel was coming to an end comes from the text itself. As we know, Paul was the chosen vessel to deliver the gospel to the ethnos. According to Paul, the mission was accomplished during his life.
(2Ti 4:17) Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that BY ME the preaching might be fully known, and [that] ALL the ethnos might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.
All the Ethnos (gentiles, people, nations) meant to hear the gospel had heard it by the time Paul died in AD68. There are no more ethnos that need to hear the gospel.
#theIObookiscoming
Additionally, according to Jesus in Mat 24:14, allegedly speaking to the disciples around AD33, the gospel would go out to the nations and then the end would come. According to Paul, writing in the late 50s to mid 60s, the gospel had already gone out to the nations, the whole world and to every creature (all creation) (Rom 10:18, a quote from Ps 19:4 which pertained to Israel. Also, Rom 16:26, Col 1:6, 23). Obviously, the gospel had not gone out to the entire planet by the mid 60’s. This is proof that terms like ‘nations’, all creation’, ‘all the earth’ and ‘world’ were not universal in scope but were symbolic and had a limited, Israelite context.
The gospel went out to the ethnos because that’s where the covenant world of descendants of the tribes of Israel (Abraham’s descendants through Isaac) had been dispersed to. The world the gospel was intended for was the covenant world, not our world. All that was left was the end to come, which Jesus said would happen in their generation and which John said the would “soon take place”. Today’s Christianity is the result of Greek-cultured people misappropriating ancient Israel’s redemptive narrative.
#theIObookiscoming
Understanding who Paul’s audiences were is important to understand other aspects of his writings. The church in Thessalonica was made up of 1st century descendants of the tribes of Israel who Paul’s pseudepigraphal author said had been chosen as FIRSTFRUITS…a term that Paul got from the Old Testament and that was only associated with Israelites.
(2 Thess 2:13 ESV) But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as firstfruits to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.
Who was this group of “firstfruits” made from? John provides the answer in Rev 14:4. Only Israelites. They were the 144,000 who at the end of the story, were redeemed from the earth, and this group was made up of Israel only. (Rev 7:4).
#theIObookiscoming
Dr. Ehrman,
A key question on Paul that I’m striving to understand: Is it true that in 1 Cor. 15 “natural body” is more carefully translated as “soulish body?”
…But of course we don’t say we are bodies “made of/composed of soul;”
In The Same Way, why is it that the “spiritual body” is considered by some to mean a body “made of/composed of spirit,” Or does Paul really mean to say just that it is a body enlivened by the Spirit?
THe key is to understand what Paul means by “flesh.” It does not mean the physical body (for which there is a different term in Greek) per se. It means that part of the human that is subject to and succumbs to the power of sin. The resurrected body will not have “flesh” but it will still be a body — a material/physical substance. But a non-fleshly substance, one made of psyche or pneuma, soul or spirit (which until Descarte were understood to comprise “stuff” — they were not immaterial, but were much *finer* material than the course stuff we are made of now)
Dr. Ehrman,
The following is a quote from Crossan; it seems like he implies that “The Twelve” may have been formed after Jesus’ death, do you agree? If so, how do we make sense of 1 Cor. 15:5?
“Although establishing “The Twelve” during his life-time would be another proof that Jesus proclaimed the Divine Rule (“Kingdom of God”) as present–collaboration rather than imminent-intervention, I think “The Twelve” was a creation of the earliest community and the ascendancy of Peter. In either case, the establishment of “The Twelve” indicates the presence and not just the imminence of “the Kingdom of God” and that is its importance and significance …”
You’ll notice he doesn’t provide any argument or evidence for what he thinks. 🙂 (And he does indicate why he wants to think it: otheriwse it would be another piece of evidence that Jesus had apocalyptic views, which Crossan denies; in my book on Jesus: Apocalypti prophet I give some arguments why the twelve almost certainly come from Jesus himself)