Paul and the Gospel traditions

[Ulan]

There is nothing in any of these quotes that show knowledge of a historical Jesus or of any Gospel traditions. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is from Leviticus 19:18. Paul didn't write the Pastoral Epistles.

For from the Lord I received what I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus, on the night in which he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, And, having given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body, which is [being broken] for your sake; do this for my remembrance.” Likewise, after supping, the cup also, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this as often as you drink, for my remembrance.”

1 Corinthians 11:23

First, this doesn't address what Diogenes the Cynic posted, which was a correct statement. Which is the reason why you had to go and search for something else that's not from the OT in a genuine Paul letter. Congratulations, you found one of about three things Paul ascribed as a saying to the lord.

Second, as Paul himself stated, everything he "received from the Lord" came to him in visions, which means it, again, doesn't prove what you want this statement to prove.

[dbz]

No letter of that fictional phantasm named Pazul exists; those abstrusely assigned to one chimerous Paul are all impious forgery and late piecemeal. Naive apologists are notoriouslty unable to see that simple and straightforward truth.

Is it possible that some small amount of original material was authored via the Marcionism school of "heresy", circa 50 CE?

[Diogenes the Cynic]

There is nothing in any of these quotes that show knowledge of a historical Jesus or of any Gospel traditions. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is from Leviticus 19:18. Paul didn't write the Pastoral Epistles.

For from the Lord I received what I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus, on the night in which he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, And, having given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body, which is [being broken] for your sake; do this for my remembrance.” Likewise, after supping, the cup also, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this as often as you drink, for my remembrance.”

1 Corinthians 11:23


Compare to Luke:

And taking a cup and having given thanks he said, “Take this and share it among yourselves, For I tell you, I most surely will not drink from the yield of the wine from now until the Kingdom of God comes.” And taking a loaf of bread, having given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is being offered for you; do this in my memory.” And after supping he did likewise with the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is being shed for you. But look: The hand of him who betrays me is on the table with mine. For the Son of Man does indeed proceed as has been determined; yet alas for that man by whom he is handed over.”


Luke 22:17

Notice that Paul says he got his Eucharist from a hallucination. Luke got it from Paul. That was not a historical event. Theophagic rituals are pagan, not Jewish. It is absurd to take Paul's admitted "revelation" (i.e. a hallucination) as historical. To be honest, I don't even believe Paul saw it in a vision. I think he just made it up. Luke (or the ecclesiastical redactor of Marcion's Gospel who probably also wrote most of Acts), took it over from Paul. There may have been a eucharist or a "Lord's Supper" as described by the Didache but the ritual in the Didache is independent of the Pauline tradition, is earlier and closer to the original movement and it has no blood and body component, no theophagic elements, no mention of the bread and wine representing Jesus, nothing about Jesus' death. It says the wine represents the "vine of David" (i.e. the Davidic bloodline or the idea of a revived Davidic dynasty) and the bread is Israel broken and scattered. That echoes the breaking and scattering of Osiris, but Paul's Eucharist steals from both Osiris and Dionysius.

1 Corinthians also doesn't say "betrayed." It says "On the night he was handed over." using a word paradidomi, which literally means to hand somebody something, but which is also used elsewhere by Paul to say that Jesus was "handed over" by GOD. There is no historical betrayal in view for Paul. He's just saying the night he died. "Handed over" is like "passed away."

[MrMacSon]

According to the church's own history (and this has always been the understanding) the Gospels were oral traditions that were written down in the era of Papias, which was obviously after the death of Paul.

• Papias is, afaik, dated ~120-140/150 AD/CE (or maybe 90-140 AD/CE)

• A Prologue to a version of the Gospel of John attributed to Papias strongly suggests Papias and John were contemporaries and also with Marcion

To then say -

So Paul knew an oral tradition not a written Gospel, just like everyone else in the early church.

- is a non-sequitur ie. it doesn't follow ior doesn't necessarily follow

The proposition that there was a strong Oral Tradition underpinning early Christianity has been argued against by a few scholars including

• Thomas L Brodie, chapter 6 in The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006

• Tom Dykstra, Mark, Canonizer of Paul, 2012

[Diogenes the Cynic]

I think the notion of "oral tradition" behind any of the Gospel narratives is virtually an article of faith even among a lot of critical scholars. The evidence for it is almost non-existent and the reworking of LXX material is so obvious that it was taught to me in my first New Testament class. The Passion narrative, as an example, is constructed virtually entirely from OT passages and smatterings of Josephus' Wars. There is still this faith, though, that at least some stories have some kind of oral tradition behind them. Look, it has Aramaic words, that proves it, right?

I think a lot of NT scholars don't read other ancient literature, though. If they did, they'd see how ordinary and explicable the Gospels are as literature and how absurd it is to take them as history. Ancient writers were also just as smart as we are. They knew how to do things like use foreign words to create verisimilitude. Brodie's book shows how almost everything in Mark's narrative is a reworking of the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Randel Helms Gospel Fictions does much of the same but is pitched at a more popular level. It's easier to see the parallels in Greek. In fact, I think English translations tend to conceal the word correspondences.

[mlinssen]

I think the notion of "oral tradition" behind any of the Gospel narratives is virtually an article of faith even among a lot of critical scholars. The evidence for it is almost non-existent and the reworking of LXX material is so obvious that it was taught to me in my first New Testament class. The Passion narrative, as an example, is constructed virtually entirely from OT passages and smatterings of Josephus' Wars. There is still this faith, though, that at least some stories have some kind of oral tradition behind them. Look, it has Aramaic words, that proves it, right?

I think a lot of NT scholars don't read other ancient literature, though. If they did, they'd see how ordinary and explicable the Gospels are as literature and how absurd it is to take them as history. Ancient writers were also just as smart as we are. They knew how to do things like use foreign words to create verisimilitude. Brodie's book shows how almost everything in Mark's narrative is a reworking of the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Randel Helms Gospel Fictions does much of the same but is pitched at a more popular level. It's easier to see the parallels in Greek. In fact, I think English translations tend to conceal the word correspondences.

Yup.
Biblical academic is not a science, it's not even a profession - its only purpose is to have a mass collection of rats on a starvation diet who wouldn't dsre bite the hand that feeds them.
Upholding the status quo is not the main or primary directive, it is the only directive. look at Koester, Crossan, Davies: they slightly bended the knee towards Thomas and were immediately excommunicated

Biblical academic is an isolated echo chamber of mediocre minions, although there are rare exceptions.
Yet ask any "scholar" this:

"Are you prepared to accept that the larger and significant part of Jesus wasn't historical, that many phrases and verses of the NT have been "borrowed" from other writings - labelled apocryphal soon after - in order to satisfy then contemporary criticism, that essential parts of the NT narrative (such as the birth of IS and the Passion narrative) are based on and copied from the Tanakh alone?"

[Diogenes the Cynic]

I think the notion of "oral tradition" behind any of the Gospel narratives is virtually an article of faith even among a lot of critical scholars. The evidence for it is almost non-existent and the reworking of LXX material is so obvious that it was taught to me in my first New Testament class. The Passion narrative, as an example, is constructed virtually entirely from OT passages and smatterings of Josephus' Wars. There is still this faith, though, that at least some stories have some kind of oral tradition behind them. Look, it has Aramaic words, that proves it, right?

I think a lot of NT scholars don't read other ancient literature, though. If they did, they'd see how ordinary and explicable the Gospels are as literature and how absurd it is to take them as history. Ancient writers were also just as smart as we are. They knew how to do things like use foreign words to create verisimilitude. Brodie's book shows how almost everything in Mark's narrative is a reworking of the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Randel Helms Gospel Fictions does much of the same but is pitched at a more popular level. It's easier to see the parallels in Greek. In fact, I think English translations tend to conceal the word correspondences.

Yup.
Biblical academic is not a science, it's not even a profession - its only purpose is to have a mass collection of rats on a starvation diet who wouldn't dsre bite the hand that feeds them.
Upholding the status quo is not the main or primary directive, it is the only directive. look at Koester, Crossan, Davies: they slightly bended the knee towards Thomas and were immediately excommunicated

Biblical academic is an isolated echo chamber of mediocre minions, although there are rare exceptions.
Yet ask any "scholar" this:

"Are you prepared to accept that the larger and significant part of Jesus wasn't historical, that many phrases and verses of the NT have been "borrowed" from other writings - labelled apocryphal soon after - in order to satisfy then contemporary criticism, that essential parts of the NT narrative (such as the birth of IS and the Passion narrative) are based on and copied from the Tanakh alone?"

Yeah, the reflexive deference to canononized works as somehow critically more significant than non-canon is either pure politics or based on residual, unexamined faith assumptions. Methodologically speaking. Thomas should be seen as earlier and more critically important than John or Luke-Acts, but because Constantine didn't publish it, it just gets dismissed or casually characterized as "late" or Gnostic" (it's neither, at least not in its earliest layer).

I did ask NT profs essentially the question that you posed (to be exact, what I always asked was "do you believe a dead body literally came back to life and flew up to outer space?") Most were always were willing to admit that the Gospels were not historical and that the "resurrection" did not have to be literal (although it's really hard to get them to just say flatly that it didn't happen). We were assigned John Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. My main prof didn't even believe in the empty tomb. I had another one who was a Catholic Priest. He taught theology and was way more conservative. When I asked him about the Jesus Seminar he gave me a bunch of articles of conservatives critiquing them but he was cagey about hard historical questions. He wasn't a fundy, he was a smart guy and I learned a lot from him, but I couldn't get him to answer the question about whether he thought a dead body literally came back to life.

[davidmartin]

I did ask NT profs essentially the question that you posed (to be exact, what I always asked was "do you believe a dead body literally came back to life and flew up to outer space?") Most were always were willing to admit that the Gospels were not historical and that the "resurrection" did not have to be literal (although it's really hard to get them to just say flatly that it didn't happen). We were assigned John Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. My main prof didn't even believe in the empty tomb. I had another one who was a Catholic Priest. He taught theology and was way more conservative. When I asked him about the Jesus Seminar he gave me a bunch of articles of conservatives critiquing them but he was cagey about hard historical questions. He wasn't a fundy, he was a smart guy and I learned a lot from him, but I couldn't get him to answer the question about whether he thought a dead body literally came back to life.

There's a fine line between a witness seeing a dead body return to life and the same witness having a vision of the body's spirit appearing in front of them. There's all sorts of accounts of people seeing apparitions and so forth, I've even had some odd things happen to me
What I find strange is that surely all that matters is the essence of the person lives on, what does it matter if it's a literal dead body returning to life or not?
I suppose the dogma requires it be a physical thing and they don't want to go against it
I think that if a 'theist' is just anyone that believes in life after death, that's the same thing whether you believe in a physical resurrection or not
After all, go all the way back to Gobekli Tepe about 12,000 years ago people believed in life after death. What is the difference?
Whatever it is, it's something that intelligent people seem to have a problem with, but I suspect many quite conservative folks have actually rationalised it and don't quite believe what they are supposed to. That doesn't make them atheists, so they should be able to get away with it, just don't tell anyone!

[DCHindley]

"Wells and others have insisted that it is just inexplicable, on the usual understanding of a historical Jesus, why the epistles never quote him."

The Christ myth theory by Robert Price, p.35

What is truly inexplicable is how people who call themselves scholars never bothered to read the source before making arguments from its supposed silence.

Two claims that have now become common place among atheist critics of Christianity are that "Paul knew nothing of the Gospel traditions" and that "Paul knew nothing of a historical Christ".

Would it be possible to provide some citations for these two assertions, particularly the latter? While I have offered a "has to be wrong" proposal that the Jesus movement in Judean regions including southern Syria and the Paul movement in the diaspora never had any direct contact. Several sets of letters of this diaspora Paul were "updated" in a later time by the remnants of the original Jesus movement to introduce the idea of Christ, a divine redeemer figure. I always felt that it was imposed over it, as much of the original letters are coherent (without the christ theology). The christ theology is far less coherent, IMHO.

I was under the impression that such an idea has never crossed the minds of most scholars of early Christian development. There may be a similar concept among mythicists, but I do not follow mythicists so I don't know.

Thanks!

DCH