Why Paul never quotes Jesus

[Paul the Uncertain]

It seems to me that we have a classic problem here: inference of an author's intent as expressed in a series of letters (real or imagined) without the benefit of the other side of the correspondence (equally real or imagined).

In general, an epistolary argument that seems rambling or incoherent when standing alone can easily become recognized as cogent when seen as point-by-point rebuttal of a series of objections. In this case, we don't even know if the objections are coming from some single individual faction or summarizing several factions' distinct objections, handily grouped together for Paul to answer. Further, some of the objections may have been voiced by critics outside the group, and now Paul's followers want advice on how to answer these criticisms.

In any case, Paul seems to be discussing at least three different kinds of cheatings of death:
(1) Whatever happened to Jesus after he died, so that he was seen by people afterward
(2) Whatever is going to happen to people in general (or maybe only to believers) who have died, and
(3) A physical transformation different from death to living believers who still live when Jesus flies overhead

Some relationship is being claimed among the three kinds of event, but it is perfectly clear that there is no logical necessity from which "I will experience either (2) or else (3)" follows from (1), or any interpretation of what the "whatever" that happened to Jesus actually was. Therefore, any argument connecting the three event-types is contingent, or else based on additional premises, or both.

One source of additional premises is Jewish scripture, and specifically what can be selected from that material which favors Paul case. But as the proverb says, the devil can quote scripture to his own ends. Maybe Paul's opponents can. too. Or maybe they think that's what he's doing.

For example, what did happen to Jesus anyway? We have eyewitness testimony plus hearsay about eyewitness testimony that many people saw Jesus out and about after he was entombed. Of what is that evidence?

Well, according to the elder Pliny (Natural History 7.53) "We have instances also of men who have been seen after their burial ; but, for the present, we are treating of the operations of nature, and not of miracles." Note the plural (exempla sunt), and consider that Pliny doesn't seem impressed by these examples. At 7.56 we read "All men, after their last day, return to what they were before the first ; and after death there is no more sensation left in the body or in the soul than there was before birth."

Pliny doesn't deny that there are exempla, but he doesn't infer from them that there is a real revenant form of the deceased.

The topic resurfaces in Pliny's discussion of magic and magicians, among whom he numbers necromancers (Natural History 30.5), those who "converse with ghosts and spirits of the dead." Pliny clearly rejects the reality of this and other operations of the magicians' art.

OK, back to the mines of Jewish scripture, then. What are we to make of the necromancer of Endor, whom Saul (interesting coincidence of names, eh?) commissions to summon up the dead and buried Samuel (1 Samuel 28:3-25)?

Is she faking it? Hmm, maybe Paul and his many eyewitnesses, too, are victims of flim-flammery. Was Samuel really there then? If so, we notice that he can convey teaching to the living, but also notice that there is no indication of a physcial body in the sense that the woman and Saul have physical bodies. Samuel only comes when called (this once, but she only gets to try once). Does he exist in the meantime? Does he have conscious experience? Where does he live?

The Endor story, if taken as true as written, would have similar evidentiary value with Paul's witnesses to Jesus. Presumably, nobody infers that they will escape death altogether, event type (3), from the Endor story. While hope spings eternal, and all that, it is not obvious that God allowing exceptional individuals like Samuel and Jesus to visit Earth after they've died has any relevance whatsoever to my fate after death or the prospects of (2) coming to pass.

At best, if I accepted Jewish scripture as factually accurate and admissible in debate, I have a proof text that simple extinction is not inevitable. Assuming, of course, that the moral of the story wasn't that Saul was only compounding the sin that justified his destruction by God, and had fallen so low as to hire a ventriloquist to tell him what he already knew: that he had lost the mandate of heaven.

All that, and that's only item (1).

Conclude: Paul, whether real man or literary invention, has his work cut for him selling anybody on all three points. I'd cut him some slack on combining testimony, scriptural minings, and pagan philosopher style analogies to nature in order to make his case.

[neilgodfrey]

I'm sure that a lot of early converted Christians actually did believe in a general resurrection of the dead based on Scriptures. But apparently there were some -- the 'Sadducee' Christians (not to mention pagan converts) -- who did not. It's those that Paul addresses:

What could Paul's original message about salvation mean to his audiences if there was room for any doubt about the resurrection? And how could members be converted by Paul's teaching if they doubted the resurrection -- or how could they come to reject what they had believed after Paul left? What sort of belief or message are we talking about that was preached in the first place?

[John2]

I'm sure that a lot of early converted Christians actually did believe in a general resurrection of the dead based on Scriptures. But apparently there were some -- the 'Sadducee' Christians (not to mention pagan converts) -- who did not. It's those that Paul addresses:

What could Paul's original message about salvation mean to his audiences if there was room for any doubt about the resurrection? And how could members be converted by Paul's teaching if they doubted the resurrection -- or how could they come to reject what they had believed after Paul left? What sort of belief or message are we talking about that was preached in the first place?

If Paul is trying to convince all Corinthian Christians of his message, maybe it didn't work for everyone. And since he says there were Christians with different messages about Jesus (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:4), maybe one of them is reflected in 1 Cor. 15:19.

If our hope in Christ is for this life alone, we are to be pitied more than all men.

[GakuseiDon]

I'm sure that a lot of early converted Christians actually did believe in a general resurrection of the dead based on Scriptures. But apparently there were some -- the 'Sadducee' Christians (not to mention pagan converts) -- who did not. It's those that Paul addresses:

What could Paul's original message about salvation mean to his audiences if there was room for any doubt about the resurrection?

It's clear that Paul's "some among you [Corinthians]" believed that Christ was raised but there was no general resurrection of the dead. So: no room for doubt that Christ was raised, but doubts about the general resurrection of the dead.

And how could members be converted by Paul's teaching if they doubted the resurrection -- or how could they come to reject what they had believed after Paul left? What sort of belief or message are we talking about that was preached in the first place?

That's a great question! If they didn't believe in a general resurrection, why care about Jesus's resurrection? But I think the answer is straight-forward. As Paul writes in 1 Cor 15:

12. Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13. But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
14. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
15. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
16. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
17. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
18. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
19. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

I'm guessing that there were Christians who had "hope in Christ" only "in this life", which sounds consistent with Sadducee beliefs. So at least some of the early Christians converted from Sadducee-like beliefs. It goes back to what I wrote earlier about early converts to Christianity coming from different groups.

According to my "magic Jesus" theory, early converts from various groups -- Jewish and pagans -- converted to Christianity because invoking the name of the Risen Jesus for magical purposes worked. Those converts brought their own metaphysical assumptions into the mix, causing the different gospels that Paul complained about. That's my speculation, at least.

[neilgodfrey]

You, and John2, missed my question. What was it that Paul taught about salvation in the first place if there could be any doubt about the general resurrection?

[GakuseiDon]

You, and John2, missed my question. What was it that Paul taught about salvation in the first place if there could be any doubt about the general resurrection?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, so forgive me if my answer doesn't answer your question!

Paul's gospel is that Jesus died for our sins, and his particular version is that Jesus died also for the sins of Gentiles as well:

1 Cor 15: Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.
3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
...
17. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.


So Christ died for our sins. Like a sin-offering at the Temple, this clears the ledger we have with God. After we die, the next stop is heaven! The after-life!

But what actually happens in that after-life? Opinions varied. Some believed that when we die, our soul/spirit goes straight to heaven. The body is left behind, and that's that. No resurrection of the body. Others believed that the body lies in the grave, sleeping until the End Times. At that point the soul goes to heaven. Still others believed that at the End, God comes down to Earth, replacing the Earth with Heaven, and the body itself is resurrected.

This drove questions, like: What is the after-life body made from? Can we get married in the after-life? There were a variety of beliefs, depending on what the convert was converting from. The common one, at least for Paul's gospel, is that "Christ died for our sins", putting us right with God. After that, people weren't so sure!

Might you be confusing the ideas of "resurrection of the dead" with "after-life"?

[neilgodfrey]

Might you be confusing the ideas of "resurrection of the dead" with "after-life"?

What did Paul preach? Surely he was asked what happens after death. What did he teach about that?

[Paul the Uncertain]

You, and John2, missed my question. What was it that Paul taught about salvation in the first place if there could be any doubt about the general resurrection?

What human teaching is there, on any subject, about which there cannot be doubt? Even mathematical proof was questioned in light of Gödel's Theorem. There is no proof of proof itself (and never will be - on pain of this particular proven theorem being false).

Some of Paul's teaching is on the page (or at least somebody's estimate of what it ought to have been). He heard about a dead man being seen by many as if he were alive again. Then he saw that dead man himself. From this, Paul inferred that the dead man wasn't dead anymore.

That is a disputable inference. We have Pliny's testimony that despite his own familiarity with plural stories of the same kind, that he did NOT infer that the individuals who'd been seen had resumed life. Paul doesn't say whether or not he had heard of other similar stories. However, the more people with whom he shared his experience, the more likely it is that some in his audience had heard such stories about other dead people.

On the other hand, some in the audience believed Paul. So, they moved on to: "What's in it for me?"

That shifts the problem to making an interpretation of the dead man coming back to life. That, too, will be an inference. In Paul's case, his interpretation is to some extent based upon selected parts of the Jewish scripture.

The more widely Paul shared his story, the more likely his audience would include other people who'd read Jewish scripture. Some of them would plausibly recall how Saul met dead-and-buried Samuel at Endor. That story, too, offers God-breathed interpretation(s) of experiences like Paul's.

For example, while the Endor story offers little insight about Samuel's ontological status, he is portrayed as capable of sharing information with living people. In this case, the information was pertinent to life-and-death problems faced by those people. The news was dismal, but in principle it could have been useful to know earlier during Saul's natural life. It has no application to Saul's afterlife, if any.

It follows that one possible coherent state of mind for a listener to Paul is "I accept that Jesus has at least attained the capability that scripture attributes to Samuel, and so I will attend to the post-mortem teachings of Jesus, testing everything and holding fast to that which is good." What more than that is needed to sign on to Paul's economical and undemanding bacon-cheeseburger-Judaism-lite?

Those seeking independent-of-Paul confirmation might follow GakuseiDon's suggestion about the invocation of Jesus's name for magical operations in Paul's absence.

More formally, there are pseudo-dominance arguments for adopting a supernatural strategy so long as the adopter isn't certain that it won't work. "Pascal's wager" is a familiar example. Folk analyses of the situation typically converge on "how do you know you've picked the right supernatural strategy?"

You don't, and it is irrelevant to the force of the argument. Somebody offers you a free ticket to the next drawing of the Lotto. How do you know it's the winning ticket? You don't, but you do know that you cannot be worse off holding some ticket than not holding any ticket, and that you may be better off holding this ticket. You accept the ticket.

(Pascal never publicly offered the argument that bears his name. It was recovered after he died from notes for writings he never published. Those notes include an argument that accepting the faith he wrote about paid for itself. That is, virtue was rewarded in this life.)

What was it that Paul taught about salvation in the first place if there could be any doubt about the general resurrection?

That information cannot be recovered from the given hypothesis. First, bacause there is no teaching whatsoever except that there is also the possibility of doubt about it, and second because there is a dominance (= independent of uncertain belief) argument for someone having accepted whatever Paul taught, or whatever part of it sufficed for membership in good standing of the local Paul fan club.

[neilgodfrey]

What was it that Paul taught about salvation in the first place if there could be any doubt about the general resurrection?

That information cannot be recovered from the given hypothesis. First, bacause there is no teaching whatsoever except that there is also the possibility of doubt about it, and second because there is a dominance (= independent of uncertain belief) argument for someone having accepted whatever Paul taught, or whatever part of it sufficed for membership in good standing of the local Paul fan club.

If you simply mean to say that all knowledge is tentative and provisional then I agree totally.

[Paul the Uncertain]

If you simply mean to say that all knowledge is tentative and provisional then I agree totally.

Could we go the next step, then, and consider that "cafeteria Christianity" may have existed even that far back?

If so, Paul need not even have been coherent (= avoided paradox or contradiction within his teaching), so long as within his teaching, there were parts that appealed to a segment of his audience.

Modern example: Politicians in representative democarcies do this all the time. Yes, I voted for Jones, but I disagree with Jones about <whatever>. No matter, we agree on things I care about, so Jones it was.

If Paul was as savvy as a mediocre modern politician, then that may spell doom for a quest to recover the real teachings of Paul. As in, maybe the truth of it is that he actually was all things to all people.