Was Judas an afterthought?

[rgprice]

Reading Justin alone I don't think we would have any idea that there were Pauline letters.

Not to sidetrack you, but your statement makes me wonder if there is any evidence that Justin knew any of the NT letters. If not (and I haven't seen anything that suggests it yet), I suppose it could mean that a) all of the NT letters were written after Justin; or b) any or all the letters may have existed, but Justin didn't view them as being as authoritative or useful as the gospels (or whatever writings he means by "memoirs" and such) and he didn't necessarily have a problem with Paul.

I think simply that Justin was not aware of the New Testament. Irenaeus held in his hand a collection known as the New Testament, which was the orthodox answer to Marcion. That New Testament contained canonical Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the orthodox version of the Pauline letters, and most of the rest of the stuff we call the NT today. But JM wasn't aware of that collection. He must have just known works separately, before the NT was created.

[GakuseiDon]

Reading Justin alone I don't think we would have any idea that there were Pauline letters.

Not to sidetrack you, but your statement makes me wonder if there is any evidence that Justin knew any of the NT letters. If not (and I haven't seen anything that suggests it yet), I suppose it could mean that a) all of the NT letters were written after Justin; or b) any or all the letters may have existed, but Justin didn't view them as being as authoritative or useful as the gospels (or whatever writings he means by "memoirs" and such) and he didn't necessarily have a problem with Paul.

I think that you'd first need to think of his audience before weighing the problem of what an author knew or didn't know.

Of the three letters generally thought to be genuine to Justin:

(1) Two were addressed to the pagans: now known as "First Apology" and "Second Apology"
(2) One was a reconstructed debate with a hypothetical or actual antagonist Jewish scholar named Trypho: "Dialogue with Trypho"

Given the arguments that Justin uses in those texts, it's hard to see a case for Justin to refer to the letters of the NT. Certainly not in his works addressed to the pagans. Possibly in his Dialogue with Trypho. But where would the contents of the letters of the NT be useful in his reconstructed debate against a Jewish scholar, such that the Gospels (interestingly Justin much more often refers to "memoirs" of the apostles which may well include the NT letters anyway) didn't suffice?

[neilgodfrey]

Reading Justin alone I don't think we would have any idea that there were Pauline letters.

Not to sidetrack you, but your statement makes me wonder if there is any evidence that Justin knew any of the NT letters. If not (and I haven't seen anything that suggests it yet), I suppose it could mean that a) all of the NT letters were written after Justin; or b) any or all the letters may have existed, but Justin didn't view them as being as authoritative or useful as the gospels (or whatever writings he means by "memoirs" and such) and he didn't necessarily have a problem with Paul.

I am backtracking here on my initial response to your comment.

I have just re-read some older files and must now concede that Justin very likely did know and use Paul's letters. See in particular

• Werline, Rodney. “The Transformation of Pauline Arguments in Justin Martyr’s ‘Dialogue with Trypho.’” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 92, no. 1, 1999, pp. 79–93.

I was re-reading Justin's Dialogue with Trypho and was hit early with a few phrases that can remind one of what one has read in Paul but then was hit with the following:

11.5. “We have been led to God through this crucified Christ, and we are the true spiritual Israel, and the descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, who, though uncircumcised, was approved and blessed by God because of his faith and was called the father of many nations.

Justin does not mention Paul but surely that thought is part of Paul's world. So I followed up a citation and read the Werline article again. Look at the second footnote there for a list of other discussions apparently on Justin's use of Paul's letters.

Why might Justin have not used Paul's name? Werline, pp 80-81:

Justin probably avoids citing the apostle for two reasons. First, Justin's goal lies
in convincing Trypho that Jesus is God's Messiah and the Son of God. If Trypho
does not accept Jesus as Messiah, he certainly will not adopt Paul's theology. Jus-
tin might find the apostle's arguments helpful, but he has no reason to bring his
name into the conversation. Second, citing Paul is not pertinent to Justin's strat-
egy. In order to convince Trypho that Jesus is God's Messiah, Justin must appeal
to an authority that he and Trypho mutually hold in respect, the Jewish scriptures.
He especially relies on the Jewish scriptures prophecies for his arguments that
Jesus is the promised Messiah. In fact, Justin tells Trypho that he will avoid quot-
ing Christian writings. He even shows restraint in his use of logia of Jesus. A
second important authority that the two interlocutors share is philosophy. Justin
seeks to prove to Trypho that Christianity is actually the best philosophy. For Jus-
tin, the prophets are even philosophers who testify to the truth of Jesus' identity.
Paul, however, is not an authority figure for Trypho, and, consequently, it is futile
to cite him in this regard.

and in conclusion:

While Justin clearly borrows ideas and exegetical arguments from Paul,
albeit without citing him, he consistently recasts the apostle's arguments for
his own purposes and in response to the changing relationship between Jews
and Christians in the mid- and late second century CE. Paul's writings discuss
how both Jew and Gentile are on an equal footing, even though the Gentiles do
not have to submit to circumcision. In both Romans 4 and the more polemical
Galatians 3, Paul's goal is to make Abraham the spiritual father of both Jews
and Gentiles. By the time of Justin, however, the climate between the Jews and
the church has changed. The church, its members now labeled "Christians," is
predominantly a Gentile phenomenon. Consequently, the line between Judaism
and Christianity is much clearer, not only theologically, but also sociologically
and culturally. Also, the disaster of the Bar Kochba revolt in 132-135 CE and
Hadrian's subsequent ban of the Jews from Jerusalem further distinguish Chris-
tians from Jews. The difference between the two groups may be even clearer to
Rome and pagans as a result of the two revolts. At any rate, Gentile Christians
easily recognize the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt as a disaster that the Jews,
but not Christians, suffer. In this new social and historical context, Justin shifts
Pauline arguments for inclusion of Jew and Gentile to exclude Jews from the prom-
ises and God's mercy. Essentially, Justin ignores the original contexts of Paul's
letters and reads them through his own sociohistorical setting and theological
agenda. For him, even the Hebrew prophets have become Christian voices. Fur-
thermore, he "Mattheanizes" Paul by combining Paul's words with Matthew's
portrait of the eschatological feast from which the Jews appear to be excluded.
Rereading Paul through these lenses, Justin makes Abraham the father of the Gen-
tiles only, and as a result, Gentile Christians are the true, spiritual Israel.

Further I would add that given that Justin begins his dialogue with Trypho by stressing his belief in the same Creator God of the Jewish Scriptures, it might well have been extra-wise of him not to refer to a source that was known to be the foundation of the Marcionite beliefs in another god.

So now I want to think through afresh if the above position of Justin might shed light on his failure to refer to the gospel narrative we know from our canonical gospels.

[rgprice]

@neil, BUT.... BeDuhn notes that there were no references to Abraham in Marcion's version of the Pauline letters. BeDuhn also suggests that the references in Abraham in the current version of the Pauline letters may be later interpolations.

This is a huge red flag: "Justin probably avoids citing the apostle for two reasons."

These types of arguements are used again and again to try and rationalize things in our current understanding of a text. Why didn't Paul attribute his teachings to Jesus? "Paul probably avoids citing Jesus because..." When we read Pausanias on the Sibyls, Pausanias uses similar such reasoning to try and explain features of the Sibylline texts that we now understand as being products of multiple writers and works that were revised by later interpolators.

When a text has such unusual features, the first thing we should do is not try to rationalize the usual features, but to question whether the text we have is the same as the text someone else was reading.

So, did Justin really know the Pauline letters? Or have the Pauline letters been conformed to Justin's arguments?

This is the exact same conclusion I have reached in regard to the Gospel of Mark and the Pauline letters. Did Paul really record teachings of Jesus while not attributing those teachings to Jesus? Or were the Gospel writers using the Pauline letters and putting Paul's teachings in the mouth of Jesus?

We must ask the same question here. Did Justin really channel Paul without citing Paul, or were the Pauline letters revised by putting Justin's teachings into the mouth of Paul? This question may at first seem to crazy to ask, but I would suggest that its not really so radical as it may seem.

Justine appears to pre-date the New Testament. Irenaeus appears to hold the New Testament in his hand. There are just 30 years between the two.

The fundamental logic of Justin runs throughout the New Testament. I would submit that the New Testament enshrines Justin's theology.

Justin opposed Marcion.
The New Testament is anti-Marcionite.
Justine believed that the God of Israel was the Creator and also the God of Jesus.
The New Testament presents the God of Israel as the Father of Jesus.

I would submit that Justin's position at the time he wrote his Dialogue was a fairly unique one. Justine was not explaining the teachings of a community, rather Justin was putting forward his own philosophy, which he had developed from his own reading of various Gospel narratives and the Jewish scriptures. Justin assembled his own theological framework. That theological framework is identical to the New Testament, which Justin did not appear to know.

I suggest that we entertain the possibility that the creator of the New Testament was familiar with Justin's work and that the creator of the New Testament and/or the proto-orthodox editor of the Pauline letters, may have revised Marcion's Apostolikon, writing Justin's arguments into the Pauline letters.

Now, as I've said before, one scenario that I view as likely is that the person who wrote Luke, is the same person who at least wrote Acts, the Pastorals, and also created the version of the Pauline letters that we find in the New Testament. What I see as a minimal "publication" by this person is the following: At minimum they produced a collection that consisted of the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Apostles, and the letters of Paul. This would have been produced in reaction to Marcion. This collection was fundamentally build upon Marcion's "New Testament". This collection appropriated Marcion's works. GLuke is Marcion's Gospel with a different beginning and ending slapped on it, and minor revisions throughout. The Pauline letters were taken from Marcion and revised in a manner similar to how GLuke was written. They took the Marcionite base, put Romans in front and made major revisions to Romans and Galatians, with minor revisions throughout the rest, adding the Pastorals at the end. So just as GLuke has major changes to the beginning and end, with minor revisions throughout, so too the Catholic Pauline letter collection has major differences at the beginning and end, with minor differences throughout, when compared to Marcion's collection.

So, if this person, who wrote Luke, also produced the Catholic version of the Pauline letters, that person may have been working within the framework established by Justin. Someone familiar with his work and his arguments and his logic. That could mean, then, that the similarities between Justin's birth narrative and the narrative in Luke, come not from Justin having read Luke, but the other way around.

Something to think about...

[rgprice]

To follow-up: From BeDuhn:

The version of Galatians included in the Apostolikon lacked a set
of verses found in the catholic version of the letter. Does this material
represent a later addition to the text, or something edited out
from the original? 44 The set of verses involved belongs to a passage
that is “one of the most difficult in the Pauline corpus.”45 “There
is agreement among the exegetes that Paul’s argument in this section
is extremely difficult to follow.”46 Paul appears to interweave
two themes without successfully joining them. The first theme
deals with reception of the spirit through trust, not through the
Law (3.2–5, 10–13, 14b); the second theme, absent from Marcion’s
text, declares all those who trust to be like Abraham, and therefore
his spiritual descendants as part of the blessing of the nations
through him promised in Genesis (3.6–9, 14a; cf. Gen 12:3; 18:18).47
This second theme then gets developed in 3.15–21, where God’s
promise in Genesis to bless the nations through Abraham’s “seed”
(in the singular) is interpreted as referring to Jesus, culminating in
the idea that Christians, through Jesus, count as Abraham’s “seed”
and heirs (3.29). Meanwhile, the first theme resumes with an exploration
of the tension between trust and the Law, and of the believer’s
union with Christ through the spirit, and culminates in the
idea that the Christian, through Christ, is a child of God (3.21–4.7).
An inescapable contradiction exists between the respective conclusions of the two themes:
are Christians children of Abraham or children
of God?

Modern commentators labor to connect the two themes of the
passage in ways Paul never explicitly offers to his readers. True,
both themes evoke the contrast of trust and Law; yet that connection
could explain an interpolation as much as it could signal an original
interweaving of the themes. The central role of the spirit in the
first finds no parallel in the second, and its line of argument needs
nothing from the Abraham motif. Most significantly, Paul makes
the adoption of Christians as children of God a central concept of
his message,48 whereas the idea of Christian descent from Abraham
is found nowhere else in Paul (but is found in a closely parallel passage
in Acts 3.25).

Hans Dieter Betz has pointed out just how odd
it is for Paul to base his argument on passages from Genesis that
would have been the centerpieces of his opponents’ teaching,49 in
which the blessing and promise given to Abraham and his “seed”
is signified by circumcision. This very passage must certainly have
been part of the argument made by Paul’s opponents for circumcision
of the Galatians, in order to bring them into the covenant and
make them heirs of Abraham. The best that can be said for Paul
taking up this very material, is that he is bravely appropriating and
counter-interpreting the proof texts of his opponents, accepting
the application of the passage to the situation, while insisting that
something other than circumcision signifies entry into the covenant
and inheritance. But his argument that the covenant with Abraham
predates Torah, and so cannot entail Torah observance, achieves
nothing with regard to his chief concern—circumcision—which is
explicitly stipulated for Abraham in the very section of Genesis he
invokes. If Paul’s Galatian readers received the letter in its catholic
form, they would have been baffled by just what Paul meant. That
does not mean that Paul could not have written the baffling passages;
but even Paul rarely writes at such dramatic cross-purposes.

So, these passages make the God of Abraham the Father of Jesus, which is exactly contrary to Marcionite teaching. Thus, confused as these passages are, they can certainly be read as anti-Marcionite. It is quite unclear in many places in the Pauline letters that the Father of Jesus is the God of Abraham. This makes that connection explicit. But is not the explicit nature of this passage reactionary to the teaching that the Father of Jesus was NOT the God of Abraham?

[neilgodfrey]

@neil, BUT.... BeDuhn notes that there were no references to Abraham in Marcion's version of the Pauline letters. BeDuhn also suggests that the references in Abraham in the current version of the Pauline letters may be later interpolations.

This is a huge red flag: "Justin probably avoids citing the apostle for two reasons."

These types of arguements are used again and again to try and rationalize things in our current understanding of a text. Why didn't Paul attribute his teachings to Jesus? "Paul probably avoids citing Jesus because..." When we read Pausanias on the Sibyls, Pausanias uses similar such reasoning to try and explain features of the Sibylline texts that we now understand as being products of multiple writers and works that were revised by later interpolators.

. . . . .

On the other hand, Turmel suggests that the Abraham references in Paul's letter were the core of those letters and the rest was largely interpolation!

We need to go beyond BeDun's and Turmel's conclusions and reexamine the details, of course.

Did you read the linked article? I ask because Werline does not argue his canse on the basis of his proposed reasons for Justin's failure to mention Paul's name. He studies specific passages by analytical comparison.

It has occurred to me, as you suggest, that Justin's thought was interpolated into Paul's letters, but when one looks at the details, and tries to understand how that was done in each case, the very idea becomes very difficult to imagine. It is far easier to understand how the reverse happened, and that is what Werline does with a sample of comparative studies.

Once it is demonstrated why and how Justin has selected passages in Paul and often modified their original thought, only then does the question arise: How do we explain Justin's failure to name Paul? That question and its proposed answer is not the basis of Werline's argument. That Justin used Paul is established on other grounds entirely. The problem of why no explicit mention of Paul in Justin is an afterthought.

[MrMacSon]

Justine appears to pre-date the New Testament. Irenaeus appears to hold the New Testament in his hand. There are just 30 years between the two.

The fundamental logic of Justin runs throughout the New Testament. I would submit that the New Testament enshrines Justin's theology.

... Justin was putting forward his own philosophy, which he had developed from his own reading of various Gospel narratives and the Jewish scriptures. Justin assembled his own theological framework. That theological framework is identical to the New Testament, which Justin did not appear to know.

I suggest that we entertain the possibility that the creator of the New Testament was familiar with Justin's work and that the creator of the New Testament, and/or the proto-orthodox editor of the Pauline letters, may have revised Marcion's Apostolikon, writing Justin's arguments into the Pauline letters ...

... the similarities between Justin's birth narrative and the narrative in Luke, come not from Justin having read Luke, but the other way around.
.

I agree with that.

There could be an intertextual relationship among chapters 70, 78 and 106 of Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, Matthew 2:1-12, the Protevangelium of James and Revelation of the Magi (and maybe Contra Celsus 1.51): see viewtopic.php?p=117956#p117956

[neilgodfrey]

It may be thought somewhat too glib to say that Justin's theology is the same as the writings found in the NT. If the NT calls for a unification of gentiles and Jews in one new body Justin is, on the contrary, pronouncing the replacement of the Jews by the new body of Christianity.

Justin's words are not identical to those found in Paul. The similarities also draw attention to the differences. It is easier to argue, I think, that Justin changed the meaning of Paul's words to make them fit with what became orthodox thought.

This discussion requires an in-depth thread of its own for those with the energy and interest.

[Paul the Uncertain]

Returning to this discussion, then, what is an afterthought in the context of your question?

Our first knowledge of the Judas character comes from a fully developed work of storytelling, a work which is by any standard one of the enduring landmarks of world literature. The character is one half of what is among the best known scenes-in-two in our culture. To reach that moment, the character is fully integrated into the progress of the work, as was discussed in an earlier post.

None of that suggests any kind of "afterthought" with which I am familiar.

Whether the character was missing from some "first draft" of what became Mark, who knows? Did the character exist, either in real life or in legend, before Mark's masterpiece acquired its earliest concrete form? Ditto.

If none of the above provides an answer to the topic title question, then what information are you seeking?

[maryhelena]

Returning to this discussion, then, what is an afterthought in the context of your question?

Our first knowledge of the Judas character comes from a fully developed work of storytelling, a work which is by any standard one of the enduring landmarks of world literature. The character is one half of what is among the best known scenes-in-two in our culture. To reach that moment, the character is fully integrated into the progress of the work, as was discussed in an earlier post.

None of that suggests any kind of "afterthought" with which I am familiar.

Whether the character was missing from some "first draft" of what became Mark, who knows? Did the character exist, either in real life or in legend, before Mark's masterpiece acquired its earliest concrete form? Ditto.

If none of the above provides an answer to the topic title question, then what information are you seeking?

Real life or legend ?

Where money is involved - follow the money:

The Gospel story has Judas receiving 30 pieces of silver.

Slavonic Josephus: The teachers of the Law were [therefore] envenomed with envy and gave thirty talents to Pilate, in order that he should put him to death. 27. And he, after he had taken [the money], gave them consent that they should themselves carry out their purpose. https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/gno/gjb/gjb-3.htm

Josephus Antiquities:
....but Herod was afraid lest Antigonus should be kept in prison [only] by Antony, and that when he was carried to Rome by him, he might get his cause to be heard by the senate, and might demonstrate, as he was himself of the royal blood, and Herod but a private man, that therefore it belonged to his sons however to have the kingdom, on account of the family they were of, in case he had himself offended the Romans by what he had done. Out of Herod's fear of this it was that he, by giving Antony a great deal of money, endeavored to persuade him to have Antigonus slain, which if it were once done, he should be free from that fear. Antiquities 14: 16.4.