andrewcriddle wrote:stevencarrwork wrote:andrewcriddle wrote:chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter arguing that the infrequency of references to the Historical Jesus in Paul and other epistles does not imply that the authors did not believe in a historical figure.
I see ex-Professor Casey's point.
There are many Soviet pictures where people who used to be in the picture have now vanished. Does that mean they never existed? Of course not.
There are many North Korean webpages where there is now no mention of Kim Jung Un's uncle. Does that mean he never existed? Of course not.
Doherty produces many examples of places in the Epistles where Paul seems to be deliberately leaving no room for Jesus to have acted.
Perhaps Jesus was subject to Communist style airbrushing from history by early Christians.
I'm sure ex-Professor Casey will complaining that I am strawmanning his arguments. Hard to avoid strawmanning people who are clutching so many straws...
Casey argues that in the ancient world (where writing letters was more hard work than posting messages on the Internet) a writer would only mention things that both he and the readers already knew if there was a real reason to do so.
Andrew Criddle
I agree with this. But it does make the Pauline corpus as a whole rather strange.
In the first century, you have writers like Seneca pushing the medium. This makes sense. Very wealthy, very connected, very literate guy.
At the same time -- the same exact time -- he is only second place, if the epistolary Paul is accepted as a construct. Nice try, Seneca. Somebody else was writing the longest letters known from the time. And who? Someone not as wealthy, whose connections are implied to be the middle class (the second 1% more than the top 1%), and who knows rhetoric certainly but who doesn't seem to be as literate as Seneca.
Now you can understand Seneca. The motive for pushing the medium the way he did was not practical. It was literary. While others might have to worry over word count (picture the telegraph era when people were charged by the word--now picture the ancient era where you would double costs for using a second sheet of papyrus), Seneca was wealthy and wasn't writing at length for a primarily practical purpose. Like Pliny the Younger later, he was writing for the benefit of those who would read the epistles later as much as anything.
Can we easily understand Paul? Ostensibly, as we are frequently reminded, he was writing for a practical purpose. He needed to deal with situations that arose in churches, such as the one at Thessalonica or the one at Corinth, when he was absent. While Romans appeared to be planned out and has little direct occasion pretended for it, several letters at least pretend to be written to address an immediate need for the author's own particular circumstances.
Even if a letter of the historical Paul to Corinth could have been written for a practical purpose, would we expect to see it to be as long as 1 Corinthians is? Would it have a statement of the faith that everybody agreed on as part of 1 Cor 15? Would it repeat the known story regarding the institution of the Lord's supper in 1 Cor 11? Would it add a poem about love in a letter already growing long in 1 Cor 13? Would it not find a way to address the important issues with a letter no more than half the length?
Wouldn't it be more efficient just to tell someone very carefully how to instruct the Corinthians, with the letter serving as little more than a device by which to establish the authority of the person acting on Paul's behalf and reassuring them in broad strokes?
In Acts 15, for example, dealing with circumcision, the letter purported to have been written is much more historically plausible as a real letter. (Even if it is not in fact a real letter, it reflects the sensibility under which a real letter might have been written.)
While I agree that arguing from silence is not that wonderful a tactic when applied to Paul's letters, I'd also suggest that they are already very strange in their cultural and historical context unless they are interpreted as writings falsely ascribed to an authoritative figure after his death (in which case, they make a lot of sense, given the large amount of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha written to reinforce religious opinion in such a way).
