My thanks for the link to Arthur Droge's article. I've read through the article. I don't know Greek so it was Droge's conclusions that interested me.
As I have tried to suggest, it would be better to think of “First Corinthians” at the pre-collection stage as an active site or open file, more along the lines of an archive or dossier, and certainly not a unified, much less actual, letter. So conceived, the process that yielded the letter known as “First Corinthinas,” as well as the collection known as the corpus paulinum, would be analogous to the process of the composition of the gospels. In other words, at some point in the second century materials of heterogeneous origin, date, and provenance began to be fashioned into a loose epistolary form and attributed to a figure from the first century. What would such a scenario imply about the authenticity of the very texts upon which Pauline scholarship is based? At a minimum it would challenge the current scholarly consensus that presumes it is in possession of six (or seven) of Paul’s authentic letters. It would also require greater circumspection on the part of scholars who would presume to read these letters as if they provided a gateway to the first century, as well as access to a “real” (viz., historical) first-century figure whose biography can be recovered. It would mean, in other words, that the corpus paulinum will no more yield a historical Paul than the gospels have yielded a historical Jesus. But we would surely be none the worse for that.
footnote 72: On this, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1975), 1–6, 57–59, 88, though she is working from the premise that 1 Cor. 2:6–16 is
Pauline. To be clear, my point is not that 2:6–16 influenced the Valentinians, but that the Valentinians
“influenced” Paul. Yet this was not only true of the Valentinians. “Paul” (or better, “Pauls”) was (were) a
literary fabrication of the second century, and in general assumed three separate generic forms: epistolary,
commentarial, and narratival. Cf. the similar second-century creations of “Peters,” “Johns,” “Thomases,”
“Jameses” et al. Whether a “historical” Paul can be disentangled from this is a question to which I will
return shortly.
“Whodunnit? Paul’s Peculiar Passion and Its Implications”
Arthur Droge
Pre-print version. Forthcoming in a collection of essays on Paul.
https://www.academia.edu/43327375/_Whod ... lications_
Maybe a scholar to keep a watch on....
The NT has two crucifixion stories. The 'heavenly' cosmic 'crucifixion of the Pauline epistle and the gospel Jesus crucifixion. The Jerusalem above and the Jerusalem below. The body and the spirit. The flesh and blood and the spiritual/intellectual/philosophical nature of man. Physical reality, history and the evolutionary nature of our 'spiritual' intellect.
It's not a choice between the Jerusalem below and the Jerusalem above - the NT upholds both. It's not a choice between the Pauline epistles and the gospels - they can no more be separated than can our mind function without our physical reality.