The case for Post First War Paul?

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andrewcriddle
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by andrewcriddle »

1 Corinthians 9:13
Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings?
seems to imply that the temple is still in operation.

(There are long threads about this verse and its implications if you search the forum)

Andrew Criddle
andrewcriddle
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by andrewcriddle »

neilgodfrey wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 1:35 pm


<SNIP>


I think the strongest reason for beginning with a second century provenance for the letters is Lemche's point about "scientific dating". If they were from the mid-first century we seem to have no evidence of any impact they -- or Paul himself -- made at that time, and hence no obvious reason why the letters were preserved.

Also we have what I consider to be a fact -- that the letters are stylized with intertextuality from the OT. They are not "natural" writings but literary compositions. Example: the author parallels himself with Jeremiah and others, and his emotional rage is an artistic adaptation of a passage from Jeremiah. Is not Paul -- all the different Pauls -- are they not all suddenly found in the second century?
Clement of Rome provides evidence of knowledge of Paul's letters c 100 CE. (I'm not sure whether you accept the traditional dating of this work.)

Andrew Criddle
mbuckley3
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by mbuckley3 »

RGP

1 Thess.2.14-16, with its "but the wrath is come upon them [the Jews] to the uttermost", is pretty clearly a reference to 70 in an 'authentic' letter. Across the spectrum of Pauline scholarship it is generally regarded as an interpolation.

But this does not 'save' early dating. You dismiss Romans 11 and various verses in Galatians as interpolations. I raise an eyebrow at the abrupt transition at 1Cor.3.16, where a man's work is a building tested by fire, redefined as a temple, which is the body. Candidates for interpolation multiply, and these are not copying errors but creative additions. It seems naive to assume that it is a matter of scraping a few barnacles off the hull to reveal a pristine Pauline vessel (akin to 'demythologising' the gospels to find History). Methodologically, Neil is right to stress independent attestation. 'As we have them' (sic), these are C2 documents, engaged with by various parties in ways we can trace. This is what they are primarily evidence for, 'reception history'. The pre-history of the texts, some of which may in part go back to a mid-C1 Paul, is a fascinating but speculative venture, and should be admitted as such.

As to what is conceivable, Irish1975 , in a fine recent post on Paul-skepticism (27 Sept) wrote this re pseudepigraphy : "We already have the well established phenomenon of this happening, i.e., of people forging epistles in the name of Paul. One could argue that this idea has a better factual basis than any of the theories of the authentic Paul."
Giuseppe
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by Giuseppe »

The temple is still in operation after the 70. It was the place that had religious value, not the building.

After the 135, the place itself was profaned.
Giuseppe
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by Giuseppe »

The sexual scandals Paul signals in 1 Corinthians and Romans appear to be deliberate anti-nomian scandals made by Christian Cainites, against the Law of the Creator.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by neilgodfrey »

andrewcriddle wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 2:05 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 1:35 pm


<SNIP>


I think the strongest reason for beginning with a second century provenance for the letters is Lemche's point about "scientific dating". If they were from the mid-first century we seem to have no evidence of any impact they -- or Paul himself -- made at that time, and hence no obvious reason why the letters were preserved.

Also we have what I consider to be a fact -- that the letters are stylized with intertextuality from the OT. They are not "natural" writings but literary compositions. Example: the author parallels himself with Jeremiah and others, and his emotional rage is an artistic adaptation of a passage from Jeremiah. Is not Paul -- all the different Pauls -- are they not all suddenly found in the second century?
Clement of Rome provides evidence of knowledge of Paul's letters c 100 CE. (I'm not sure whether you accept the traditional dating of this work.)

Andrew Criddle
You must think there are lots of silly scholars out there who simply don't know the basics of their trade. If we read the sources uncritically, naively, then your remarks carry weight. But for those of us who are more interested in critical approaches to the sources, to investigating the provenance of the sources, the evidence for their integrity, etc, .... that is, all the things historians in other fields routinely do, then no, Clement does not provide the evidence you claim. You will need to present an argument to justify such a claim -- with awareness of the relevant critical scholarship.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by neilgodfrey »

andrewcriddle wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 1:57 pm 1 Corinthians 9:13
Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings?
seems to imply that the temple is still in operation.

(There are long threads about this verse and its implications if you search the forum)

Andrew Criddle
Again, this is a naive reading that needs to be justified. Yes, it does appear to say that, but we have other instances where temple cult practices are spoken of in the present tense even long after the temple ceased to be.

Naive readings are not superior to critical readings. Naive readings assume a certain provenance, context and character of the sources being read and they are often blind to the interpretative nature of their readings. All interpretations require justification. That usually requires one to study the critical scholarship relevant to any discussions of interpretation.
rgprice
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by rgprice »

neilgodfrey wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 1:35 pm I don't know of any a priori reason to treat the letters as either genuine or forgeries. But if one were wanting to claim a founding figure then it seems reasonable to set one in the years immediately following the resurrection, especially if one wanted that founder figure to oppose other founding figures like the Twelve.
My conclusion is that at the time the Pauline letters were written, there was no concept of "the twelve" nor any idea that there was some real resurrection in recent history. All of that came after the writing of the Pauline letters. So I don't see how such logic can be used as a motive for projecting a fake Paul back in time.

If we consider than when the first Pauline letters were written, none of the ideas we find in the Gospels yet existed, I don't see why anyone would try to forge the Pauline letters to appear as though they were written prior to the war and to do it in the way that they did. Almost always when such types of forgeries were done there are tells that indicate this was the goal, such as predicting things that had supposedly not yet happened.

And if the writer of the Pauline letters knew of traditions like the twelve and other aspects of the Gospel stories, why wouldn't that have made any mention of them (the one reference to the twelve being a clear interpolation)? To me that scenario seems to require imagining the most genius forger ever who would had to have had a superhuman level of foresight to understand how the writings may be analyzed by sophisticated future generations, etc. I've never seen any examples of such find of forgery among ancient writers. Clearly, the most obvious thing to do if one were trying got forge a fake Paul back in time would be to have Paul predict things about the war/Temple, (as Jesus does), have Paul be aware of Gospel details, have Paul claim to have met the living Jesus, have Paul talk about specific things that could date the time of his writing prior to the war, like naming rulers of the time, etc. But none of that is done. People trying to make their writings appear to be from a certain time period left obvious clues as to the time period they were trying to covey. Again, if nothing else they would have mentioned a governor of Judea or emperor of Rome or who was high priest or something, if the goal was to indicate that the writing was produced at a certain time.

So I just don't find the hypothesis that the letters were forged to appear as if they were written before the war very convincing, because there are no obvious markers that indicate when the letters were written. Using merely a lack of references to the destruction of the Temple and nothing else to place the letter priors to the war supposes a level of deceptive sophistication far beyond the typical forgeries of the period.
A gospel didn't have to exist before it might be understood that the Passion was pre-70. Doesn't Paul indicate that it happened at the beginning of time and was only revealed to have happened much later?
Yes, but if the letters are all total forgeries prior to the writing of any Gospels, then why not just place the Passion after the war? Paul's letter make no meaningful mentions of the Temple, its a non factor. So, if one is writing in the second century and fabricating Paul, then why not just describe a Passion that occurs after the Temple has been destroyed?

My problem with this scenario is that it seems to only make sense if one supposes that the Pauline letters were forged after the the popularization of the Gospel story. But in a world in which the Gospel stories don't yet exist and none of the concepts of the Gospels are part of any community, then I just don't see any motivation to try to project Paul to a pre-War setting. That only seem to make sense if it were already believed that Jesus were killed by Pilate, which I find entirely unbelieve. Clearly, at the time the original Pauline letters were written there was no concept of a Jesus person who had been killed by Pilate.
I think the strongest reason for beginning with a second century provenance for the letters is Lemche's point about "scientific dating". If they were from the mid-first century we seem to have no evidence of any impact they -- or Paul himself -- made at that time, and hence no obvious reason why the letters were preserved.
This is agree with, and its really the only thing that gives me some pause. If we assume that a Pauline ministry took place any time in the first half of the first century, then we have to explain why it is that his writings didn't seem to surface, and movements related to his ministry didn't really show up on the radar, until the early second century. But I think we can.

If we assume that the Pauline letters were written between 50 and 65 and the first Gospel was written around 110, what would explain the gap from 65 to 110? If we assume that the first Gospel was written in 80 CE, then what would explain the gap between 80 and roughly 120, when maybe Marcionism started to rise?

The original Pauline letters appear to me to reflect ideas within God-fearing communities, that address issues we know to have existed prior to the war, regarding the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism. Questions about circumcision and following Jewish law are known issues that God-fearing communities grappled with prior to the war. Furthermore, it seems that the ministry being described was one that would be difficult to imagine after the war, because there would have been less interest in adopting Judaism. For example, it appears that the Galatians were trying to convert to Judaism without undergoing circumcision. But why would Gentiles be trying to convert to Judaism in the midst of a bunch of Jewish revolts? I guess its possible, just as there were Americans and Brits who were joining Islam during the Iraq and Afghan wars, so we can't totally count it out I guess. But there is considerable evidence that God-fearing communities and Jewish sympathizers were thriving prior to the war.

Let's say there was some real Paul active around 60 CE. His letters could easily reflect nothing more than a God-fearing movement that viewed the "God" and "Lord" of the Jewish scriptures as two separate beings. The sect viewed the Suffering Servant of Isaiah as an incarnation of the Lord. Was this literal? Was it thought to be a historical event? Was it celestial? All unclear. Many of the ideas seem similar to those of Philo with regard to the separation of the Highest God from some other godlike entity who was his son. For Philo it was the Word, among this group is was the Lord. And we know that "the Lord" actually was the son of God at some level, because the Jewish scriptures were written by combining the stories of the Highest God El with those of his son the Lord YHWH. In the scriptures these are presented as a single being, but it seems that Jews and possibly God-fearers had difficulty with this structure and detected that underlying the scriptures were two separate beings. This is also what Philo was grappling with. Philo's solution was the the separation of the Logos from the Father.

So it seems to me that the Pauline letters reflect some Jewish mysticism that we can locate to a pre-war period, which was involved with God-fearing Gentile communities, and sought solutions to the problem of circumcision and following Jewish law, which many God-fearers were reluctant to embrace, in spite of their use of the Jewish scriptures and desire to convert to Judaism because they believed in the prophetic truth of the Jewish scriptures and in religious monotheism.

But we also have to recognize that Marcion was really the earliest person to bear witness to a collection of Paul's letters, AND that those letters were bundled with a Gospel. In other words, we really have little if any evidence, certainly nothing reliable, that bears witness to pre-Gospel Pauline communities. Given that the Pauline letters were first surfaced bundled with a Gospel, we have to also acknowledge that the Pauline letters became prominent because of their association with Gospels. In other words, these letters themselves may never have gained any notoriety on their own.

Given that the Gospel of Mark uses the letters, and Marcion's Gospel appears to have been derived from Mark, and Marcion's Gospel was bundled with the letters, this would seem to indicate that the Gospel of Mark was also likely bundled with Paul's letters. I imagine that whoever wrote Mark possessed a collection of Pauline letters and that Mark was originally bundled with the letters.

My analysis shows a link between Marcion's Gospel (or rather Luke) and Colossians and Ephesians. I think Mark was written based on the original 6 or 7 letter collection and that that was part of some Pauline community in Ephesus. That community then produced Colossians and Ephesians, as well as Marcion's Gospel. The sermons that we find in Colossians and Ephesians inspired the teaching material in Marcion's Gospel/Luke -- the Sermon on the Plain, etc. Colossians and Ephesians were written by Gentile God-fearers, while the "original" Paulines were written by a Jew.

So as for the answer to why -- if the Pauline letters were written prior to the war, did they not really surface until in the second century, I think the answer that they didn't receive significate notice until they became bundled with a Gospel. The Gospel stories are really what drew notice -- the Pauline letters just along for the ride. I think if not for the Gospels we never would have known about the Pauline letters. I mean quite honestly the Pauline letters aren't anything special. They are kind of a mess and actually don't do a very good job making any kind of case. I think on their own they are pretty unremarkable. Which is all the more why I think there was a real Paul, because as writings go, the Pauline writings are pretty piss poor. They aren't the works of Plato, that's for sure. This is all the more why I think they weren't forged, at least not the original 4-7. Surely someone trying to concoct a fake Paul would have done a better job.

I think the evidence from Justin Martyr and others is enough to indicate that there were other stories floating around that have been entirely lost with hardly any trace. I suspect very strongly that such stories about Paul must have existed. But as I said, Paul himself had a relatively insignificant following. His letters weren't really of much repute, probably very few people knew much of anything about him and a Pauline following was very minor prior to the writing of the Gospels. So Paul was an extremely minor figure. The whole "Jesus" community of which Paul was a part was tiny and probably not very cohesive or well defined. It all blew up when the Gospels came out.

So I can see how this Paul fellow could have had a ministry prior to the war, how it would have lingered on for a while as a minor and barely noticeable loose community and probably got integrated into Gnostic sects. Teachings about Jesus at this point were just part of the broader Gnostic fabric, and not particularly prominent -- until the first Gospel was written. Once the first Gospel was written (presumably Mark) then "Jesus worship" started to really take off. The Gospel of Mark is somewhat esoteric, but the Gospel used by Marcion was more accessible. The Gospel that Marcion adopted would have been far more popular that Mark, because in it Jesus is a comprehensible teacher as opposed to an inscrutable flinger of insults. So why did Paul get noticed when he did? Because that's when his letters were attached to Gospels.
Also we have what I consider to be a fact -- that the letters are stylized with intertextuality from the OT. They are not "natural" writings but literary compositions. Example: the author parallels himself with Jeremiah and others, and his emotional rage is an artistic adaptation of a passage from Jeremiah. Is not Paul -- all the different Pauls -- are they not all suddenly found in the second century?
Seemingly. What about Philo? Now Philo was a much more prominent person, about whom I would expect to find more evidence. Josephus of course mentions him, but outside of Josephus doesn't it also seem that there is an increased interest in Philo in the second century? Other than Josephus, what references are there to Philo from the first century? Maybe there are tons I really don't know. But from what I know, Philo's writings also became more prominent in the second and third centuries than they were in the first century.

Pauline letters also do contain a number of trifling issues that seem difficult to reconcile with staged dialogues. Romans may be suspect, but the Corinthian letters would seem to be very strange things to forge.
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Irish1975
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by Irish1975 »

neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 5:41 am
andrewcriddle wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 1:57 pm 1 Corinthians 9:13
Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings?
seems to imply that the temple is still in operation.
Yes, it does appear to say that, but we have other instances where temple cult practices are spoken of in the present tense even long after the temple ceased to be.

Naive readings are not superior to critical readings. Naive readings assume a certain provenance, context and character of the sources being read and they are often blind to the interpretative nature of their readings. All interpretations require justification. That usually requires one to study the critical scholarship relevant to any discussions of interpretation.
And it is not as though biblical writers were incapable of archaism, the practice of deliberately making texts appear older than they are. Indeed, they had incentives to do just this in the 2nd century because of the polemical value of claims to apostolicity.

Another likelihood is that very old texts got reworked across the generations by many different hands. The sedimentary layers in most of these texts almost requires this hypothesis. Jaques Berlinerblau has a good discussion of this phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible, in his book the Secular Bible.
Charles Wilson
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Re: The case for Post First War Paul?

Post by Charles Wilson »

rgprice wrote: Mon Oct 11, 2021 10:00 amThe original Pauline letters appear to me to reflect ideas within God-fearing communities, that address issues we know to have existed prior to the war...
Do we,in fact, know that?

We have the Baptism of the Holy Spirit replacing the Baptism of John before people knew there was a Baptism of the Holy Spirit. "Paul's" knowledge of the life of the Jesus Character is very, very thin, maybe even non-existent. In that case, the Novellas of the Life of Jesus stand in very sharp contrast to the salvific story given in the Paulines.

So: "God fearing communities"? That's a big step right there. There were plenty of other gods to fear, some even sanctioned by the State.
What happened to them?

CW
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