Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

spin wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:08 pm

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 12:34 am

Philologus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 11:17 pm Why does Paul never quote Jesus, unambiguously, even in contexts where it would have helped his arguments?

1 Corinthians 7

1 Corinthians 11

Peter, are you saying 1 Cor 7 was cited by the collator of Mk and that 1 Cor 11 has a direct quote from Lk (which was written 50+ years after Paul)?

Some days, I don't even know why I post. This is one of them.

I consider it quite plausible (but not completely certain) that the 1 Corinthians 11 passage was interpolated.

I also consider it plausible that the author of Mark was familiar with Paul's teaching about a saying of the Lord on divorce.

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:24 pm I consider it quite plausible (but not completely certain) that the 1 Corinthians 11 passage was interpolated.

I also consider it plausible that the author of Mark was familiar with Paul's teaching about a saying of the Lord on divorce.

I don't have any certainty myself, though the evidence for the first seems relatively strong.

I just find it strange that you used "(sayings of) the Lord" suggesting that Paul uses "the Lord" (the Jewish substitute for YHWH) regarding Jesus. A major passage supporting that usage is 1 Cor 11:23ff (the other being 1 Cor 6:14, disrupting the rhetorical structure of its context).

spin wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 5:16 am I just find it strange that you used "(sayings of) the Lord" suggesting that Paul uses "the Lord" (the Jewish substitute for YHWH) regarding Jesus. A major passage supporting that usage is 1 Cor 11:23ff (the other being 1 Cor 6:14, disrupting the rhetorical structure of its context).

Do you have a link to a thread on this?

spin wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 5:16 am ... "the Lord" (the Jewish substitute for YHWH) ...

I presume you mean a Hellenised-Jewish substitute for YHWH as occurs in the Septuagint, and in the Pauline epistles of course; and I think there is some discussion of whether that happened in the Septuagint/LXX or as Paul was writing: so perhaps concurrent to Paul or even later (?) ...

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 1:44 pm
This is about setting expectations. The statement that Paul is silent and that needs to be explained implies that this is unexpected and odd. But if this unexpected and odd, then it suggests that other texts are not so silent. Is this the case? Thus my question about the other NT texts that are regarded as 'historicist'.

I believe Paul's silence is odd without comparing it to any texts. And I don't believe we need to.

The entire point of Paul's life's career at that point was Jesus. All the contents of his letters are directly or indirectly about Jesus. How is it not odd that he doesn't quote Jesus?

Irish1975 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 9:07 am We shouldn’t omit:

1 Thss 4:15

For we say this to you by the word of the Lord (Τοῦτο γὰρ ὑμῖν λέγομεν ἐν λόγῳ κυρίου), that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep.

In the Pauline Corpus, there is no basis for distinguishing a remembered tradition of what some possibly historical Jesus said, versus a revealed “word” from the heavenly/resurrected Jesus.

It is only by faith in the canonical story of Acts that anyone can say, “this ‘word of the Lord’ in Paul is a revelation from heaven, whereas that one is a tradition Paul received from other apostles who knew the historical Jesus.

Thanks for the reference.

It's odd that people are saying that Paul "doesn't quote Jesus" like it's an established fact.

We've seen from spin that this can be maintained by arguing that (a) the Paul doesn't refer to Jesus as "the Lord" and (b) that 1 Cor 11 is interpolated. However, neither of these are matters of fact. I'm pretty sure that someone could maintain that either or both are plausibly not true. In which case, it's at least plausible that Paul did "quote Jesus." Maybe more than that, depending on what you think of the interpolation hypothesis and the identification of the Lord as not being Jesus hypothesis.

Another hypothesis:

In short: Paul was silent because the actual sayings of Jesus contradicted his teachings. Later Pauline Christians rectified his silence by redacting the offending parts and incorporating a sanitized version of the Jesus sayings in the gospels.

Details: Paul's teachings were at odds with some of the sayings of Jesus recorded in multiple accounts possibly present during his time (such as Q, M, L), and Paul did not want to give such sources any legitimacy, even by quoting some of the content that he does agree with.

Like another poster said, "Paul's silence is a feature, not a bug." He intentionally avoided all that material, possibly regarding it as corrupted and unreliable, especially if the Jerusalem church at the time had adopted that material as its "official" material, approved by people who actually knew Jesus (such as James and Peter).

It is also possible that the Jerusalem church considered Paul a heretic. I don't have evidence for that, but there are possible hints in Paul's letters regarding his stance on keeping Jewish law. By definition, if you insist that one must keep the Torah to be a "proper Christian", then those who oppose that are heretics.

Technically, Paul would have considered the opposing view as heretical as well but it probably would have been infeasible for Paul (an outsider who never met Jesus) to accuse Jesus' actual brother and companions of being heretics, so he had to be extremely diplomatic (and he shows hints of that in his letters).

But after 70 A.D., the Jerusalem church was destroyed, and its elders were killed. It's possible the reason we don't even have Q, M, and L is because the winning Pauline wing of the church redacted the offensive parts while copying the material into Mark, Matthew and Luke, and then destroyed the original material. The destruction wasn't necessarily conspiratorial and intentional, but simply because no one bothered to maintain the originals, possibly even considered heretical by Pauline Christians.

Philologus wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 5:35 pm

GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 1:44 pm
This is about setting expectations. The statement that Paul is silent and that needs to be explained implies that this is unexpected and odd. But if this unexpected and odd, then it suggests that other texts are not so silent. Is this the case? Thus my question about the other NT texts that are regarded as 'historicist'.

I believe Paul's silence is odd without comparing it to any texts. And I don't believe we need to.

The entire point of Paul's life's career at that point was Jesus. All the contents of his letters are directly or indirectly about Jesus. How is it not odd that he doesn't quote Jesus?

As I've said: it's about examining Paul in context with other early writers in order to setting expectations. Is the silence odd? Yes, if we'd expect Paul to have believed in an itinerant preacher who became famous for his teachings and his miracles. Is the silence unexpected? I'd argue "no", since the other literature -- including 'historicist' literature -- of the time has the same kind of silence if we expect that they believed in an itinerant preacher who became famous for his teachings and his miracles.

Unfortunately no-one seems to want to compare the silence in Paul with the silence in other early proposed 'historicist' Christian literature. And as I've said many times, the silence isn't just about Jesus, but details about times and places and events of the early church.

Peter Kirby wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 4:42 pm

spin wrote: ↑Tue Jan 25, 2022 5:16 am I just find it strange that you used "(sayings of) the Lord" suggesting that Paul uses "the Lord" (the Jewish substitute for YHWH) regarding Jesus. A major passage supporting that usage is 1 Cor 11:23ff (the other being 1 Cor 6:14, disrupting the rhetorical structure of its context).

Do you have a link to a thread on this?

I know I've written on the use of κυριος in Paul's letters, but I couldn't find a write-up here, so I've put together one here.