Peter Kirby wrote:Regardless of whether we view it as an interpolation or not, there is still the question of whether Doherty's reading is plausible ... or whether a similar reading might be plausible.
I've split off the interpolation discussion (including spin's nice post):
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2019
So that this thread can focus on the possible interpretations of this passage.
A few months ago I took a stab at defending a modified Wellsian mythicist position on the life and times of Jesus Christ. Essentially, this mythicist position proposed that the whole genesis of the Jesus myth was a combination of the following: (A) a revelation or series of revelations (dreams, hallucinations, flights of fancy, or whatever), (B) certain scriptural or apocryphal passages about Wisdom or the Son of Man, which passages may well have fueled the vision(s) in the first place, and (C) certain calendrical texts like the 70 weeks of Daniel or the generations of 1 Enoch that might be read to imply a particular date for the advent of the messiah... a date in the past obviously requiring some fancy reinterpretations. I proposed that at first very little was "known" about this messianic savior figure, who was now thought (based on the abovementioned revelations and exegesis) to have already visited the earth at some point, in secret and in humility, in order to prime the apocalyptic pumps, as it were, for a(nother) visit, this time in manifest glory. (I actually rather like the idea that originally the visit was imagined as to the abyss, as Peter has suggested, but I have not gotten far enough down that path yet to confidently add it to my basic scenario, so I will continue for now to treat the alleged first advent as an earthly coming.)
I would love to say that this proposal met with universal acclaim, but alas,
it did not. Andrew Criddle and Peter Kirby both, in particular, leveled reasoned criticisms at it, among which the one that stands out to me the most is Peter's assertion that basic mythmaking requires a name and a place; examples were given, including Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, Arthur in Camelot, and others. My proposal had Jesus visiting earth, but not
originally specifying which part of earth, simply because the kind of exegesis and revelation that would pinpoint a particular place on earth may not have been done yet.
Now, there are two ways I could respond to this kind of criticism. The first would be to modify my proposal slightly so as to make
Israel the imagined venue for the first advent; I would do this on the basis of passages such as Wisdom of Sirach 24.8, in which Wisdom pitches her tent in Jacob/Israel. The original impetus for suspecting that a specific earthly location was not part of the first layer of the story came from the observation that, in so many epistles (both Pauline and Catholic) the specific location of the crucifixion or other events is never specified. I suppose that, if I modified my scenario to specify Israel, I would have to argue that Israel seems so obvious a venue to Jewish authors that it need not be mentioned. Perhaps the same could be said of the even more specific venue of Jerusalem, if one should choose to specify even further. The second way to respond would be to double down on my original claim, and try to explain why I feel that Robin Hood and Arthur are poor parallels to what I see happening in the Jesus myth. I already, at the time, offered modern evangelical speculation on the Antichrist as a partial parallel; many evangelicals will describe this apocalyptic figure's future career in some detail, based on accepted evangelical interpretive strategies, but few will specify what country or city he will come from, simply because the Bible does not say. I will add now that it just seems to me like the original story would have been told from the perspective of heaven, not of earth. Jesus starts in heaven, descends to earth for what from an eternal perspective would be an infinitesimally small amount of time, visits the nether realm briefly, and then ascends and finishes in heaven again. Stories told from this heavenly perspective sometimes treat earth as a location all to itself, without specifying further which continent or country the actions take place in. One example is
the Muslim story of Azrael, the angel of death, which I posted some time ago in the Muslim Texts & History forum. Another is
the account of the 13 kingdoms in the Apocalypse of Adam, in which earth is sometimes mentioned as a cosmological location on the same semantic level as heaven, without further specification.
Honestly, I am still deciding which approach is best, though I still lean toward the second (the nonspecific-at-first). But I do still think that the best mythicist approach will have to involve this kind of construction of the Jesus story from a combination of scriptural details, personal revelations, and (later) didactic and prophetic materials attributed to Jesus rather than to the early Christian teachers and prophets who actually created them.
All of this to suggest that, even if we assume that this passage about the Last Supper is genuinely Pauline, it does not adversely affect this kind of mythicist approach. I have noted that the imperfect tense of "handed over" and (especially) the chronological detail, "on that [particular] night," both imply that Paul is referring to a storyline already known to the Corinthians. The fact that he seems to be sharing something new with them now, plugging it into the storyline at a particular point ("on that night"), meshes well with my proposal that personal revelation contributed to the construction of this storyline. Paul is claiming, on this view, to have received direct revelation from the Lord about another, previously unknown, event that happened at one point during the story.
At this stage the (plural) individuals addressed by Jesus in this revelation are still simply companions of Jesus from the story itself; that is, they are not living apostles or pillars such as Cephas or James or John. They are, rather, companions of Jesus created from scriptures such as Psalm 55 (54 LXX). They belong to the story being fabricated from scripture, not to the contemporaries of Paul. Only later would that equation (disciples of Jesus = apostles contemporaneous with Paul) be made, leaving traces in the literature in the form of
shadowy apostolic doubles. (Who knows? Maybe in the original story the disciples did not fail their Lord and flee at the eleventh hour, as Matthew 19.28 = Luke 22.28-29 might be read to imply. Maybe their failure was written in only later, when reactions to actual, historical apostles were at stake.)
Such a scenario preserves, I think, the full force
both of Paul purportedly revealing something directly from the Lord
and of him apparently referring to a known storyline. It would be, in fact, an extant example of how the storyline was added to from personal revelation. Prophets and apostles with prophetic gifts (1 Corinthians 14.1-5, 13-19) would be qualified to add to it in this manner.
The question might naturally arise:
was the storyline already this developed, even in Paul's time? After all, as has been pointed out, this is the most detailed scenario from the life of Christ that Paul ever offers; it does rather stick out in this sense. The more one feels the force of that question, in my humble opinion, the more one should consider the interpolation option instead. I myself have not decided yet.
Ben.
