Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

From ~19:30:

Derek:
What are we to make of the common scholarly presumption that Paul expected his audiences to know and engage with the original context of the scriptural passages that he cites in his letters, in order to understand what he was saying to them? Are these other scholars wrong? If so, what difference does it make?

Dr Stanley:
We do have this puzzling phenomenon of, 'why does Paul quote and allude to the Jewish scriptures when he's writing to people who don't have any background for the most part in the Jewish scriptures?'

That's something I've devoted a lot of my scholarly career to: to teasing apart.

In fact, I got started in this area, back when I was working on my PhD dissertation at Duke, exploring the question of, if you get into the Greek language and you compare the Greek of Paul's quotations with the Greek of the, ah, text that we would call the Septuagint, you find a lot of places where the wording doesn't agree.

And it's been common to say, um, that Paul was, these are probably just memory slips, you know, or something like that. And what I explored, what I demonstrated to the satisfaction of virtually everybody, ah, who works in this field now, is that, no, Paul was consciously and intentionally changing the wording of texts so they can accord better with his own interpretations of them.

Which raises questions for us a kind of moral integrity or something like that. So, the rest of what I did was explore how quotations were handled by other Jewish authors and also how Greek authors handled quotations from Homer. And you know what I found out? Everybody did this. They didn't have such basic notions as a fixed, ah, text. Manuscripts were different.

They didn't feel any obligation to quote text accurately, so the idea you would incorporate word transl... ah, meaning into the wording of your interpretations was simply a normal part of their culture that's very different than ours.

So, anyway, that's what got me into studying these things but that didn't get the question of or what about the meaning of the way Paul is using the text in these letters, which is often intention[al], where they're even very different from any natural reading of their meaning in, ah, the Jewish scriptures, what Christians have come to call the Old Testament, and so the more you explore that, it raises questions about, well, if Paul can quote from these texts surely he must be assuming...that his audiences know these texts.

in fact Richard Hayes in 1989 wrote a book that's been very influential called 'Echoes of Scripture in/and the Letters Paul' where he argued that Paul is expecting his audiences not only to know the original context of everything he cites but to go and engage in detail with that context and even be able ta, to hear and bring out elements that Paul didn't even state: [supposed] resonances between that original text and his quoted text. And, ah, I knew Richard when he was starting this work; he's a few years older than me. We had a number of public engagements over the years at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature.

And, over the course of three or four years after I wrote my, my work in this area, where I was arguing that's just not possible, it's historically anachronistic because they could not read, and they did not know these texts. And one of my, um, most satisfying moments as a young scholar was when Richard grabbed me after one of the meetings and said, 'Look we need to settle this and talk about it.' We stood there about 10 to 15 minutes in the hall and he finally said. 'OK, I get it. I think you're right; I should have been clearer. I should be more careful about how I use [this/these?].' And from that time forward he was.

And, so you know, it's, I've been able to reshape a lot of the conversation in this area by highlighting the fact that any assumption that people in Paul's audiences know and [are] engaging with the original text in its quotations is, makes no sense historically.

ah, It doesn't mean perhaps there [hadn't] been a person or two in the congregation who had some knowledge of the original context and could talk others. I'm not totally excluding those kind of possibilities because, as we're going to see today, what I've gone on to do is argue that, in fact, as odd as this might sound, I think Paul often counted on the fact that his audiences could not go back and check the context. Because we're gonna see examples where, if you do go back and look at the context, the original text could actually be used against Paul.

I'd love to see a "Septuagint" of at least 3 books that doesn't have Christian scribal signs

Just one

From ~7:55

All Dr Stanley

... most people simply assume that Paul, because he was a Jew, ah, you know, knew Hebrew because the Hebrew bible, the Jewish scriptures, were [supposedly] written in Hebrew and Aramaic, and therefore that he must have consulted that text regularly.

Interestingly, when you look up in Paul's letters, the, ah, the kind of technical, careful study to examine the texts that he actually uses, there is no evidence whatsoever in Paul's letters that he ever quotes from the Hebrew text. What does he quote from? Well in a couple, beginning a couple of centuries before Paul's time, perhaps three centuries, the, ah, [the] Jews who lived outside of Israel, and, by the way, they outnumbered the number of Jews who lived in Israel by the time of Jesus and Paul, coz they had left due to emigration and they'd had children, and slavery and various other things.

And they, because he lived in a Greek-speaking world -even under the Romans everyone spoke Greek- the Romans did not, um, try to get people to speak Latin. To be a good Roman was to be able to speak Greek well. And, so Greek was the lingua franca, the common language and culture, and there was true for Jews also. So Jews, um, had nearly lost their knowledge of Hebrew in what was called the Diaspora, the lands outside of Israel.

And so they began to translate the Hebrew text into Greek. Ah, there's some legends about how it was done and it might have been done by people in Palestine. It's not very clear what the story was there, but the bottom line is that, by Paul's day, all of the books of the Jewish scriptures, which are essentially the same as what Christians call the Old Testament, had been translated into Greek. The modern name for that, ah, kind of collection of translations that were made over time is the Septuagint, often abbreviated to LXX, which is the Roman number for 70 for those who might remember learning about Roman numerals in elementary school.

And the reason it's called that, the 70, is because of a, a legend in, um, a Jewish text called the Letter of Aristeas, that it was translated by 70 elders of Israel, um, and that they all indep, independently and came up with exactly the right, the same wording. Whaddaya know, it's a divine miracle! I mean, the book was written in order to affirm the, um, divine authenticity not just of the Hebrew text but of the Greek text as well. And so this is a text that Paul would have known and grown up with and been nurtured in, and that he would have recited, ah, quoted, alluded to when he, ah, uses it in his letters.

So for Paul then, to answer the question, scripture, the word scripture is just a modern term meaning 'the written things'; ah, it's a shorthand in modern language for sacred texts of any religion, and for Paul that sacred text was the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures that we would call the Septuagint.

So, want to see in some slides when we start looking at pictures in a moment, that Stephen has set out, the, when he shows the text from the Jewish scriptures that Paul is using, he has this little abbreviation LXX after the Greek there to indicate this is the Septuagint.

Just a quick little final word, even the term Septuagint is, um, a term that veils a lot of debates and uncertainties, and complexity, because this was not like one translation made at one time. Books were translated at different times, some of them multiple times. People did not have books in a cover like we do today, a, a 'collection of books' was simply a stack of scrolls, and so, ah, the Septuagint did not exist as a collection of books (in a single cover) until perhaps the 4th century AD. So, ah, yeah, we got a collection there in modern English and a modern collection with a cover, but for Paul it was an issue of individual scrolls.

I just wanna say one more word about that before we move on. Ah, the, if Paul wanted to consult his scrolls, where would he do it? People did not, very few people owned books in the ancient world, as we'll see in a minute, very few people could read or write, and, ah, certainly Paul, as travels, he's not lugging around a stack of dozens of scrolls with him, and so really the only place you could consult a collection of scrolls was in the local Jewish synagogue, and even they would not necessarily have translations of all the texts: what mattered to them, was the Torah, the first five books, and so we'll get into some questions later about, well, how much does Paul, ah [know], he's quoting generally from memory, from when he had access to those texts, so to some degree, but we might summarise that scripture is those texts that Paul has, ah, devoted to memory sometime in the course of his studies over the years and is able to meditate on, to ruminate on, to, um, ah, quote or allude to when he wants to. In some sense that's going to be a subset of the actual texts that we find in the Jewish scriptures: those idiom(?) found important [&] relevant over the years ...

Most people are therefore naive and superstitious.

There is no such thing as a travelling Jewish preacher called Paul except in dogmatic patristic fiction, and the falsely so-called letters are patristic dogmatic piecemeal using a variety of sources of different eras and provenience.

The whole NT is an anthology of misuse of scripture, and so there is no need for a special treatment of Paul.

"Misusing scripture." How does one "misuse" garbage? Garbage should be thrown out. Anything less than throwing out scripture is misuse.

schillingklaus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 4:00 am There is no such thing as a travelling Jewish preacher called Paul except in dogmatic patristic fiction

With all due respect, I would not call Acts patristic, and Earl Doherty's model, although rightly controversial, is not "dogmatic patristic fiction" - yet both accept Paul as a travelling Jewish preacher.

A better question is what is 'correct use' of scripture? Just about every text in the Jewish writings including the Torah was NOT written by the person claimed to have written it. So what's the correct approach? I know what scholarship does. It allows adults to indulge in 'studying' forgeries asking questions like "what prompted 'Isaiah' to write X?' To some degree this can be justified as the 'correct' use of scripture EXCEPT for the fact that Paul wasn't a scholar. Paul wasn't trying to get an idea about the social conditions centuries before him. He was trying to apply them to current events (if in fact he actually used scripture and the citations weren't added two generations later). But as I said any use of scriptures to apply to current events is a misuse of those same writings.

MrMacSon I agree what you said but isn't there a larger point here? Paul's gospel is radical compared to Judaism (the end of the law, circumcision, a divine son of God). 'Misusing' scripture goes along with this surely. It seems unlikely his audience was too familiar with Judaism or they might challenge it on many fronts. A tight Jewish community would have him thrown out and /ban TheApostle.
That happens in Acts but it's interesting that he doesn't seem to run up against local opposition from teachers of Judaism in his epistles. His opponents are other apostles. That would make sense if he avoided Jewish proselytes and communities and focused on gentiles with a skimpy grounding in things Jewish.

Is Paul's use of scripture more problematic than say early Rabbinic Midrash ?

Andrew Criddle