Gal 1:19 interpolation

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Giuseppe
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Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Giuseppe »

Assuming the priority of Marcion's Evangelion, it becomes more probable that Gal 1:19 is a late interpolation.

Richard Carrier is right when he says that, alone, ''brother of the Lord'' is not evidence of James being physical brother of Jesus because there is no way to overcome the ambiguity of the construct in the absence of more specific.

I think a case can be made that that ambiguity is deliberately sought by the interpolator.

Until now, the best case in favor of Gal 1:19 being a interpolation (together with its broader context Gal 1:18-24) is made by dr. Detering here.

http://www.radikalkritik.de/DetGalExpl.pdf
Inventing this first trip the editor wants to prove, against the text, that Paul
did not delay entering into contact with the heads of the Jerusalem Church.
...
Against the above given explanation one might object: Why does the editor
heavily emphasize the fact that he hasn’t seen anyone but Peter and James,
since his interest is said to have been in connecting Paul as closely as possible
with those in Jerusalem? Moreover, why doesn’t his insertion follow even
more accurately the depiction of Acts?
Keeping in mind the editor’s task, these questions can adequately be
answered: We have to consider: in 1,17, Paul had explicitly denied to have
been in contact after his conversion with those, who were apostles before
himself. The editor now could erase this statement, – or reinterpret it. As a
skilled editor, who did not want to write a new text but to alter the extant one,
he chose the second way. So he reinterpreted 1,17 in the sense, that Paul had
seen Peter and James, yet not the other apostles. Because of the context, this
was a concession he could not dispense with. Though this splitting up results
in a rather artificial construction (as already B. BAUER noticed: did then the
other apostles happen to be on a journey? did Paul consciously avoid meeting
them?), Paul nevertheless was set into the Jerusalem tradition. Paul had seen
Peter and James and had been with Peter for two weeks! — that should be
enough to prove (to the Marcionites) that the Paul of Galatians had not any
more than the Paul of Acts received a special revelation and consequently was
not the subject of divine revelation in his own right. May then the report in
Galatians not fully be in agreement with Acts (9, 27), where Paul is conducted
to the apostles (the author surely meant ‚all of the apostles’) by Barnabas. It is
the logical result of the special task undertaken in this place by the editor: one
way or the other, he had to pervert the meaning of 1,17 to get Paul in contact
with the other apostles after all. And his depiction does not really contradict
Acts: by his construction he managed to explain why, in 1, 17, Paul
nevertheless could say he had not gone up to Jerusalem to those, who had
already been apostles before himself (in fact, he had not gone to all of the
apostles!) — and, the all important project, he had managed to confirm the
Catholic point of view.
(p. 24-25)

But what Detering omits in his acute explanation is precisely what Richard Carrier disclosed in OHJ about Acts:
i.e. that the author of Acts presents certainly the idea that the early church would gather even fleshly brothers and sisters of Jesus, but is not able to better identify them by name (never saying that James is the brother of Jesus, for example).

If the interpolator knows Acts, then he should be ignorant about who precisely is brother of Jesus kata sarka because he would know only that some brothers of Jesus were Christian (but not their names).

This ignorance is reflected in Gal 1:19 (seen as an interpolation) but with an ambiguity that is basically anti-marcionite in nature and therefore deliberate.


Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles but only James, the Lord's brother.


If the interpolator meant precisely James 'brother of Jesus' because he used the ambiguous expression ''brother of the Lord''?

It is a case similar to Gal 4:4 :
if the anti-marcionite interpolator meant precisely ''born of Mary'' because he wrote instead the more ambiguous ''born of woman'' ?

The question is answered if we see what happens in Luke 8:19-21.

As I say in this thread
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1658

assuming the Evangelion's priority, the proto-catholic 'Luke' inserted Luke 8:19 in order to read the next answer of Jesus ''who are my mother and my brothers?'' in a non-literal sense - as relative rejection of his blood relatives - contra marcionite interpretation that instead did read these words as an explicit absolute negation made by Jesus of his having a blood family.

According to marcionites, Jesus had absolutely only a unique family: the true Christians by faith.

(that means: no need, for them, to read ''brothers of the Lord'' in a epistle, but only ''brothers'').

According to proto-catholics, Jesus had a blood family but his true family is the Church.

A physical brother of Jesus can be also a Christian (therefore a 'brother of Lord' at the same time).
A physical mother of Jesus can be also a Christian (therefore a member of the future 'celestial Jerusalem', i.e. the allegorical Sarah of Gal 4 at the same time).

In this way it's explained Gal 1:19 as anti-marcionite interpolation: the interpolator did introduce deliberately the intrinsic ambiguity of the expression ''brother of Lord'' because he wanted to remember that James was mainly a Christian and yet could also be a blood brother of Jesus, so that now the riotous Paul not only submits himself to Peter, but bears eventually homage to a potential blood brother of Jesus, too.

In this way, Paul was so induced to recognize on the one hand the supremacy of Peter, on the other hand to recognize the possibility that behind a mere ''Lord's brother'' was hiding a blood brother of Jesus.

Note that the Catholic interpolator cannot insert 'brother of Jesus' explicitly because in that case he would risk of going against the 'Catholic hierarchy' who wanted a generic Christian still higher than any blood brother of Jesus (according to catholic interpretation of Luke 8:19-21).

For the catholic interpolator, to insert ''brother of Jesus'' means to go against the same words of Jesus in Luke 8:20 that rejected his blood family in favor of his true ''brothers'': the Christians. In doubt (because he didn't know, basing on Acts, if James was really the brother of Jesus), the interpolator wrote ''brother of the Lord'' in Gal 1:19, so to raise at least the possibility that James was a carnal brother of Jesus, in addition to being already a Christian.

The heretic readers of that interpolation would not understand at first sight if James was a simple Christian or the brother of Jesus (just like us, today!) so the most economic explanation that they would appeal was that James was both, but so recognizing the humanity of Jesus.

Their reaction, so as not to give victory to the Catholics, was to create Gnostic legends around James, then favoring ultimately the process of historicizing of Jesus.

If I am right, then Richard Carrier was able, in OHJ, to go back to the true meaning of Galatians 1:19 as the Catholic interpolator wanted to give to it : a deliberate ambiguity about the true identity of James.

If am right, then the original pauline epistles, if a historical Paul existed at all, didn't have Gal 1:19 and his broader context.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Giuseppe »

Note that the pattern is repeated with the all too obvious anti-marcionite interpolation of Galatians 4: 4

born of woman, born under the law

If the Catholic forger in this case wanted to react against Marcion and the marcionites - because it is a FACT that that's what he was doing writing those words (so Bart Ehrman, for example) - for which other reason he did not write quite ''born of Mary'' instead that ''born of woman'' ?

The answer is now simple:
if he had written ''born of Mary'', he would magnified the role of Mary only and only as the biological mother of Jesus, in contravention again, even then, against Luke 8:19-21 that expressly prohibits, in the own words of Jesus, that a relative of Jesus, was even his biological mother, is recognized as his true relative only for the blood (with the risk of valuing the blood more than the faith).

The Catholic forger prefers in this case identifying the woman in question, not in virtue of the blood (which he, as a Catholic, believed, too) by saying his name 'Mary', but only by virtue of her identification with Sarah (cited shortly after in the original letter to Galatians), symbol of the future 'heavenly Jerusalem', i.e. allegory of the Christian Church, aka the set of the true spiritual ''brethren of the Lord'': the Christians.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Peter Kirby »

Earlier thread on this topic:

Shorter Readings of Paul
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... f=3&t=1447

Non-HJ Interpretations
http://www.earlywritings.com/forum/view ... ation+paul

Especially starting here ("90% of the passages..."):
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1458&p=33194#p33194

An extremely high proportion of the supposed references to a historical Jesus in the letters of Paul are absent from the Apostolikon... and, in all likelihood, absent from the letters of Paul and inserted as post-Marcionite interpolations (some of them anti-Marcionite interpolations).

The phrasing "born of a woman, born under the law" is very easy to understand as explicitly anti-Marcionite, while it stands as an odd sort of bland faith statement if taken as the words of Paul. Likewise the anti-Marcionite function of Galatians 1:18-24 is not hard to discern, as it manages to neuter some of the force of the Marcionite canon's first epistle, with its glittering declarations of Pauline independence. It also has incidental support in the manuscript omission of the word "again" after the interpolation (went up to Jerusalem "again").

The conclusion is resisted because (a) interpolations in general are seen as a threat to the integrity of the text, which are a threat to the security of knowledge (of a maximal/traditional type) about Christian origins, which therefore have to be "debunked" as non-interpolations in mainstream scholarship, especially in the absence of explicit manuscript support (a line in the sand that supports the function of "securing" so-called "knowledge" of the original text) ... and (b) obviously, once the pattern is clear and the threat to the notion of a historical Jesus in the letters of Paul is detected, the urge to deny is very high.

This urge to deny is singularly responsible also for the trend towards believing in an "uninterpolated" reference to Jesus in Josephus. The apologetic value of such conclusions appears to be too high to ignore.

PS -- Fridge logic (why didn't you think of that?) should lead to the conclusion, IMO, that the remaining, very clear Apostolikon references to a historical Jesus (1 Corinthians 11:23-26 and 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16) are Marcionite interpolations (or at least 'post-Pauline'), hewing as they do towards Marcionite themes ([non-alcoholic] water [the Greek word for 'cup' used] and bread meal ritual, anti-Judaism). They also each have additional markers of interpolation (verbal agreement with the synoptic / Marcionite Evangelion, which came later than the epistles of Paul, and implied reference to the destruction of Jerusalem, which also came later than the epistles of Paul).

PPS -- Of the 12 or so references to a "HJ" of some degree of semantic validity in the letters of Paul, 10 of 12 are post-Marcionite interpolations, while 2 of 12 are Marcionite or pre-Marcionite interpolations. For all practical purposes, this shows (as well as we'll ever be able to know) that the original letters of Paul had nothing to do with a HJ.

PPPS -- Unfortunately we'll forever be at an impasse because of the grip of Jesus on the western imagination (and preference for 'interpolation-free' texts).
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Ben C. Smith
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Peter Kirby wrote:The conclusion is resisted because (a) interpolations in general are seen as a threat to the integrity of the text, which are a threat to the security of knowledge (of a maximal/traditional type) about Christian origins, which therefore have to be "debunked" as non-interpolations in mainstream scholarship, especially in the absence of explicit manuscript support (a line in the sand that supports the function of "securing" so-called "knowledge" of the original text) ... and (b) obviously, once the pattern is clear and the threat to the notion of a historical Jesus in the letters of Paul is detected, the urge to deny is very high.
The thing about Marcion, though, is that we do have (indirect) manuscript support for the omissions in the form of patristic testimony to the Marcionite text itself; I think an arbitrary assumption that only Marcion would deliberately mutilate an epistle stands in the way of considering his text as a full-fledged (and extremely early) manuscript witness. It is not quite the same as those suggested interpolations which are based on critical reasoning alone.

I point this out, at risk of (re)stating the bleeding obvious, because I am one of those who are very reluctant to accept interpolations based on critical reasoning alone. I can honestly attest that this reluctance of mine stems, not from a desire for texts free of interpolations, but from a genuine fear of reading modern and personal concerns into them. (Thus it concerns me, for example, that so many of the interpolations that W. O. Walker proposes wind up removing material that a modern liberal Christian might find objectionable about Paul.)

To propose an interpolation on the basis of Marcion, however, is simply to propose accepting an extremely early textual variant; I think we should remind ourselves of that daily.

Ben.
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Ben C. Smith »

Let me add that, to the extent that we both (A) accept the apparent composite nature of some of the epistles (Philippians, 2 Corinthians, et cetera) and (B) lack Pauline manuscripts which attest to this composite nature, we possess proportionally strong evidence that there is a gulf between the autographs and our extant copies. If someone could assemble the epistles into their present form with little or no impact on the manuscript tradition, surely someone could have interpolated passages with little or no impact on the manuscript tradition. (Another reminder to myself and to those like me.)

Ben.

ETA: The old comparisons to classical manuscript traditions may not be entirely accurate if the texts of Tacitus and Plutarch were not fought over as we know the New Testament texts to have been.
Last edited by Ben C. Smith on Sat Jul 04, 2015 9:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Giuseppe
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Giuseppe »

thank you for the clarity of your comments, suggestions and depth of the linked topics. But you forgot the biggest problem, and the most tormenting, in my eyes:

if Paul believed in the God of the Jews, why his best preserver and ensign - that is Marcion - was an enemy of the god Creator?

This is something that I just can't to explain, taking a historian Paul. Even more so when the only plausible ''historical'' reconstructions of this ''historical'' Paul provide all a very devoted man in the god Creator , not a dualist:
(1) Traditional Protestant.
(2) The New Perspective on Paul.
(3) The Apocalyptic/Barthian Paul.
(4) The Radical Perspective on Paul.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion ... perplexed/
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

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Giuseppe wrote:But you forgot the biggest problem, and the most tormenting, in my eyes:

if Paul believed in the God of the Jews, why his best preserver and ensign - that is Marcion - was an enemy of the god Creator?
http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/st ... htm#_ftn11
Cf. Harnack’s famous statement that ‘in the 2nd century only one Christian—Marcion—took the trouble to understand Paul; but . . . he misunderstood him.’ (‘Marcion and the Marcionite Churches’, 534, cf. also History of Dogma [ET of 1893; 3rd German edition; 7 vols.; London, Williams & Norgate 1894-1899] vol. 1, 89).
Marcion's idea is lifted straight out of Plato (and Hellenism generally, therefore). It is a development. Obvious explanation is obvious.
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Bernard Muller »

I have a blog post on Gal 1:19
http://historical-jesus.info/51.html

I have also a blog post on Gal 4:4:
http://historical-jesus.info/18.html
An extract: "Paul used the common knowledge Jesus had been an earthly man (from a woman) and a Jew (as descendant of Abraham) in order to clinch a long & complicated argument. If the existence of Jesus on earth was not accepted or even doubted, then the argument would simply not work."

Cordially, Bernard
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by toejam »

Giuseppe wrote:Richard Carrier is right when he says that, alone, ''brother of the Lord'' is not evidence of James being physical brother of Jesus because there is no way to overcome the ambiguity of the construct in the absence of more specific.
Did Carrier say this? Are you sure you haven't misquoted him? If so, that's careless nonsense. By any sound historical methodology, an epistle writer claiming to have met a "Bob, the brother of Fred" is absolutely evidence of physical kinship between Bob and Fred. Is it proof of physical kinship? Of course not. Does it convince one of physical kinship? Depends on other factors. But alone, such a reference is evidence. To say otherwise is just playing word games. I really hope, to help resuscitate my dwindling opinion of Carrier, that this is a misquote or has been taken out of context.
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Giuseppe
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Re: Gal 1:19 interpolation

Post by Giuseppe »

judge for yourself:

Image
Image
Not one time in all of Paul's letters does he ever say or even imply that this phrase means only biological brothers.
(Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 585)
What I am saying is that even a proto-catholic interpolator would have every interest in create deliberately ambiguity, because if his purpose is to present Paul to people who are superior to him, he can not say that James is superior to him only by virtue of blood (by writing: ''James, the brother of Jesus'') because it would conflict with the very words of Catholic Jesus of Luke 8:19-21.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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