The Proposed Non-Pauline Interpolation that Carrier-school Mythicists Tend Not to be Aware of.
https://jesustweezers.home.blog/2019/02 ... -aware-of/
Central to the Richard Carrier-school mythicist thesis is the idea that Paul believed Jesus’ crucifixion occurred not here on Earth at the hands of ‘earthly’ ruling elites like Pilate and the Sanhedrin, but in outer-space at the hands of demons. One of the school’s most beloved proof-texts is 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, in which Paul is reported to have written:
“Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers (Gk: ‘archons’) of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers (‘archons’) of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory”
Carrier says of this passage: “In the mythicist thesis, it was originally believed [by the earliest Christians that] the Prince of This World [i.e. the head demon] killed Jesus not knowing who he was (1 Cor. 2.8), because everything about him was kept hidden (1 Cor 2.7), and only revealed spiritually, by revelation to his elect (1 Cor. 2.10)” (“On the Historicity of Jesus”, 2014, p.321)[
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But there is another option that must be considered at least a further small hurdle for the Carrier-school thesis to overcome – that the passage might not even be from the hand of Paul. While this view is not widely held, several scholars over the years have proposed 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 to be a later non-Pauline interpolation. I do my best below to paraphrase and summarize the arguments of William O. Walker as found in his 1992 publication “1 Cor 2:6-16 – A Non Pauline Interpolation” (JSNT 47, 1992, p.75-94) who openly builds on and defends the work of the German scholar M. Widmann who came to the same conclusion about the inauthenticity of the passage in the 1970s. Basically, the reasons for thinking 1 Cor 2:6-16 might well be an interpolation include:
1. Contextual considerations – the relation of the passage to its immediate context. Consider, for example, the smooth and coherent flow had the text initially read from 2:5 to 3:1. Note also the abrupt shift beginning at v.6 from singular (‘I’) to plural (‘we’), from aorist to present tense.
2. Linguistic considerations – the distinctive language and style of the passage. Several words and phrases appear in the passage that are nowhere else found in the authentic epistles, including loaded theological terms that we might have expected Paul to use elsewhere. These include: “the rulers of this age” (v.6, 8), “before the ages” (v.7), “the Lord of glory” (v.8), “the spirit of the man” (v.11), “the spirit who is from God” (v.12), “natural man” (v.14), and several others.
3. Ideational considerations – the distinctive and potentially contradictory set of ideas in the passage. For example, Christian speech is now viewed as the mysterious hidden divine Wisdom or ‘the things of the deep’ *rather than* as the openly proclaimed word of the cross. Indeed, a positive view of Wisdom is now made *rather than* the rejection of Wisdom and, paradoxically, identifying the cross as Wisdom.
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If it is true that 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 is an interpolation, it must surely be seen as a significant blow to the Carrier-school thesis as it would remove the only hint of a verse in the authentic Pauline corpus in which Paul might attribute the death of Jesus to demons (that is, if by ‘archons’ he means demons).
Arthur Droge
14 Martin Widmann, “1 Kor 2 6–16: Ein Einspruch gegen Paulus,” ZNW 70 (1979): 44–53, esp. 46, 50–53,
though he gives no indication about when this happened. Widmann refrains from calling Paul’s opponents
“Gnostiker,” but believes that his analysis “has unburdened [Paul] of the ‘strange’ [fremdartige] statements
of 2 6–16” (53). Alas, there is no accounting for theological taste. William O. Walker, Jr., Interpolations in
the Pauline Letters, JSNTSup 213 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 127–46, mounts a solid
defense of Widmann’s case (absent the value judgment) over the objections of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor,
“Interpolations in 1 Corinthians,” CBQ 48 (1986): 81–94, esp. 81–84. Still, it is important to bear in mind
that Widmann never referred to 2:6–16 as an “interpolation.” Whether he was right to describe it as a
“gloss” is a question to which I will return.
I don't know if Carrier has ever addressed the issue of an 'interpolation' in 1 Cor.2. However, what is central to the debate at this junction is that Droge has dated the 'interpolation' to around 140 c.e. Hence, adding additional problems for Carrier's Jesus from Outer Space theory prior to, re Carrier's dating re NT Paul, 70 c.e.