Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

If the Nabatean king Aretas IV wanted to persecute Paul in Damascus by his commander, it would be very strange by Paul to go in the wolf's den of all places.

The moral of the story is that Paul, the hero, escaped the danger not by eluding it, but by going through it.

This moral is the same that is found in Acts: in the Diaspora Paul is persecuted again and again by Jews. And he what does? Does he avoid the Jews in virtue of this experience? No. He went into Jerusalem itself, i.e. into the wolf's den.

It is not that he has not learned the lesson. It is that he wants to prove that he has gone through any possibile sufference.


Galatians therefore knows the moral of this story because the author of Galatians has learned it from Acts.

He knows also that in 2 Corinthians 12:32 Paul has escaped to the Aretas's men by going through their guards on the walls of Damascus.

Hence the author of Galatians has instantiated again the motive of the story found in Acts: not satisfied for having faced the Aretas's men in Damascus, Paul has to go into the territory itself of Aretas: in Arabia. Is it sufficient? No. He has to return also in Damascus. He is really a hero. How can you doubt?

From 1 to 10, how much does this "coincidence" count as evidence that Galatians knew Acts?

If it is not a mere coincidence, then on the traditional dating (= Galatians before Acts) it would be equivalent to say that Acts has invented the sequence "persecutions by Diasporic Jews ---> Paul goes to Jerusalem" because he had in mind the causal link between 2 Corinthians 11:32 and Galatians 1:17 ("Persecution by Arabs in Damascus ---> Paul goes into Arabia") and not because he wanted that Paul posed as alter Christus.

It is clearly impossible.


Therefore Acts precedes Galatians.
□

Hence it is wrong the idea that Mark makes Jesus go into the wilderness because Jesus is posing midrashically as Paul going into Arabia.

The correct chronological sequence is:

Mark ---> Acts ---> Galatians

and not

Galatians ---> Mark ---> Acts.

Can the midrash Arabia/"wilderness" be a real thing even given the truth of the important finding described above?

Yes, it can.

Under the condition that an interpolator added the wilderness's episode in proto-Mark (that therefore was without the baptism's episode and the wilderness episode) after the fabrication of both the Acts of the Apostles and Galatians.

No. The statement in Galatians is very obscure and would be out of sequence.


The incident with Paul escaping the "ethnarch of Aretas" happened after he went to Arabia, so how would going to Arabia have anything to do with facing his persecutors? And he had just apparently converted, so why would that have anything to do with being persecuted?

Its not clear why anyone in Damascus was looking for Paul, but if it had anything to do with worship of Jesus Christ it couldn't have happened until later. It would seam to me that if there is any merit to be put into the story at all, then Paul would have done something in Arabia that caused Aretas' men to notify the governor of Damascus to be on the lookup for him when he returned.

So the best way to understand the sequence of events is that Paul converted while in Damascus. Then he traveled to Arabia. There he got into trouble. He returned to Damascus. Word was sent from Arabia to Damascus to be on the lookout for him.

That's quite different from: Paul evangelized to Jews in Asia Minor and was persecuted by them. Paul is warned that if he goes to Jerusalem he will be apprehended. In spite of being persecuted by Jews and warned by prophecy, Paul heads to Jerusalem where he enters the temple and gets arrested, having to face the Sanhedrin.

No, these things have no relationship.

The premise to the entire discourse is that the episode of Damascus in 2 Corinthians 12:32 is already per se an interpolation based on the similar episode found in Acts (where the Jews, and not the Arabs, are the persecutors).

Given that premise, the question is raised: why did Paul go into Arabia after the conversion?

The idea that he did so to remark his independence from the Pillars is true beyond if Galatians preceded Acts or viceversa. But why just the Arabia?

Because the moral of the fable is the parallelism in the way Paul faced persecution: by going in the same wolf's den.

Acts	2 Corinthians and Galatians
Paul is persecuted by Jews in the Diaspora	Paul is persecuted by Arabs in Damascus
Persecution in the wolf's den: Jerusalem	Persecution in the wolf's den: Arabia

Why did the author of Galatians invent a parallel persecution by Arabs?
Because the final intention of the persecution by Jews is to oblige Paul to go in Jerusalem (the wolf's den). Corollary: centrality of Jerusalem. Read: submission to the Pillars.

Going into Arabia (as a new invented wolf's den) doesn't imply the same risk for the independence of Paul from the Pillars.

Rather the contrary.

There is nothing in the letters about Paul being persecuted in Arabia. As I said, there is no reason to think that Paul was persecuted in Damascus prior to going to Arabia. That anyone writing something about Paul going to Arabia in Galatians would have expected a reader make a connection to the 1 line statement in 2 Cor is highly dubious.

There is nothing that lays out a claim that Paul suffered persecution by the Arabs or the government of Aretas. We have only one statement in 2 Cor about the governor of Damascus and even that doesn't indicate that the governor was acting on behalf of Aretas, merely that he was a governor appointed by Aretas.

It seems to me that your argument is the following:
Aretas and Arabia cannot be explained.
Therefore they have to be genuine details reported by a genuine Paul.

Giuseppe wrote: ↑Wed Jul 03, 2024 9:29 pm It seems to me that your argument is the following:
Aretas and Arabia cannot be explained.
Therefore they have to be genuine details reported by a genuine Paul.

I've never said anything about being "genuine", only that the statement in Galatians about going to Arabia has nothing to do with Acts of the Apostles. Its not a statement made in order to present Paul as going into "a lions den" to face persecutors.

Once we agree that the digression in Arabia served to remark the independence of Paul from the Pillars (a fact that is true under all the possible hypothesis) then it is not surprising the "coincidence" that in Acts the visit of Paul to Jerusalem served to make him subjected to the Pillars. One may well conclude from this antithesis that Acts is a reaction to Galatians.

I am only wondering about another parallelism that may serve to reinforce the antithesis described above: the visit in Jerusalem is preceded by the persecutions of Paul by the Jews in the Diaspora. Why couldn't Paul be persecuted by the Arabs in the Diaspora, too? The parallelism becomes concrete when I see that indeed an Arab (the Aretas's governor) persecuted Paul in a city of the Diaspora (Damascus).

The author of Galatians wanted to point out the antithesis: the lion's den becomes the Arabia and not Jerusalem. Paul didn't go to Jerusalem not for fear of the Pillars (even if the false "Paul" feared just a such meeting as example of submission!) but because the his heroism moved him in a different "lion's den": Arabia. The courage of Paul is not compromised.

Προς Κορινθίους B΄ (GNT)	2 Corinthians (RSV)
11:32 ἐν Δαμασκῷ ὁ ἐθνάρχης Ἁρέτα τοῦ βασιλέως ἐφρούρει τὴν πόλιν Δαμασκηνῶν πιάσαι με,	11:32 At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me,
33 καὶ διὰ θυρίδος ἐν σαργάνῃ ἐχαλάσθην διὰ τοῦ τείχους καὶ ἐξέφυγον τὰς χεῖρας αὐτοῦ.	33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped his hands.

It doesn't really say when this occurred. However, the term Ethnarch representing the interests of Nabateans ruled by king Aretas IV suggests that he "had his ways" to represent his own lord, Aretas.

If there was a real Paul, I think you endorsed Eisenman's article suggesting that Saul/Paul was a retainer of a Herodian house. I do not recall what Herodian prince he thought Paul was a retainer for, but I have recently suggested that the best fit might be Antipas.

Everyone remembers that Aretas spanked Antipas' army in the ass, and humiliated Antipas so badly that he pushed for the Roman emperor to send a legion to spank Aretas' ass. Why, because Antipas had previously divorced his wife, who happened to be Aretas' own daughter.

So, a time later, Antipas is banished to Spain via Gaul, and all his income lands were taken away. "Royal" wealth would be confiscated for the successor (Agrippa I), but Paul did not want to transfer his allegiance from Antipater to Agrippa I. Rudderless for the first time, he launches an effort to have himself appointed as an "Apostle" authorized to collect financial gifts for transfer to Jerusalem. An earlier case had established that the emperor(s) were cool with that, and regional governors could not interfere with the transport, or confiscate the money as suspect.

We get the name "Apostle" used for them in the 4th century CE (Epiphanius, SG wrote his thesis on his account of alleged shenanigans going on in the Jewish Patriarch's HQ), but I don't think it a stretch that this was a designation for the ones dispatched by the Temple authorities in Jerusalem in NT times as well. Just an accident of preservation.

Then he gets in trouble when he makes his delivery, and is directed to defray the costs of a group of pilgrims ready to fulfil Nazarite vows, who must be in a state of ritual purity the whole time. The whole mess may have been a reaction where locals suspected Paul and his associates were ritually unclean by Judean standards. While I am sure that they did what was required by Judean traditions, as they interpreted them in the Diaspora, the locals may have not wanted any part of that.

He is arrested by the Roman commander of the Cohort as a troublemaker, and he asked to see the emperor. Maybe he hoped that, at worst, he could join his former patron in Spain. Maybe he did, and like Antipas, disappeared from the stage.

DCH