The Gospel of Paul

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

FelixAndor wrote:One of the profoundest parts of the N.T. is Sermon on the Mount--Not contained in Mark or in Paul's writings.
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It is also considered fiction by most every scholar out there for good reasons. It mirrors the Emperors divinity of speaking to large crowds, but the reality is the parables lose all meaning when read as is in the NT text. These parables were meant to be read one by one and absorbed, each was rich with meaning these peasants needed to think about.

So profound to a theist with no understanding of historicity.

Reality is these were collections of parables which today we have no idea if they came from John or Jesus, more then likely these are just typical Galilean Aramaic apocalyptic parables at best. and that is a stretch since we have so few Aramaic transliterations
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

Blood wrote:Paul's gospel doesn't tell us when, where, or why "the Lord Jesus" was crucified. So that's a bit of a shortcoming.

Knowing Romans crucified Jews like we used hang up laundry to dry, there is no shortcoming here.

Paul had to deal with the evolving theology, that was HIS communities importance, and he was competing against sects that claimed to be from real witnesses and he could not claim to know Jesus personally other then spiritually which amounts to Pauline communities collective conscious thought. Most of his text was a community effort NOT just penned by one guy.
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

FelixAndor wrote:
I am new to this list, but maybe I was mistaken is thinking that (most of) the scholars here (who have studied more than I have, to be sure) are actual Christians.
Nope, any known bias would be obvious here.

Most if not every person so educated we are atheist. We only see mans hands involved in great detail
Stefan Kristensen
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by Stefan Kristensen »

JCarp wrote:
Paul of Tarsus wrote:
This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. God’s word is not chained. Therefore, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.

The gospel of God — the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption. Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil.

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, also the cup, after supper, saying ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

For you, brothers and sisters became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out.

We preach Christ crucified; Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

He was buried, he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me as to one abnormally born.

For to be sure, he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God’s power. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is interceding for us. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares. Amen.
There it is; the closest thing we have to a Gospel of Paul, a hypothetical construct created from everything Paul said about the itinerant preacher Jesus.

The Gospel of Paul has been a bit of a pet project of mine for quite some time now. I am aware that we do not have any such text — called the Gospel of Paul — but we have tantalizing glimpses of his underlying gospel message, a framework that can be gleaned and hypothesized from his extant letters. Whether Paul ever wrote a gospel himself is something we probably will never know; if such a thing ever existed it has been lost in the sands of time.

The interesting thing about constructing a theoretical Gospel of Paul, is how it links directly to the Gospel of Mark. The Markan Gospel is most probably the earliest gospel text, and there is but a decade or so between the last Pauline texts and the Markan Evangelion, some scholars say perhaps even less. The links can be striking; the wording of the Eucharist in Galateans is found almost verbatim in the Gospel of Mark, for example. There are of course numerous hypotheses how this has happened.

In any case, it has been said that the two most important authors in the NT are, indeed, Paul and Mark. Almost all of the rest of the NT are either extrapolations on them, rather trivial additions, or completely unnecessary stories about the apostles. It is entirely possible to summarize the entire Christian tradition and theology by using Paul and Mark alone.

Therein lies my interest.

What do we know about how the two authors can be linked up? What can we with certainty say about the provenance of the texts? We know Paul wrote for a mostly Hellenized/Romanized, Greek/Latin speaking, gentile audience. Then again, so did Mark, perhaps even more so. But what can we say about the manuscript histories? Do we have evidence of any contact between Mark and the Jesus Movement in Jerusalem, bar a few alleged, fleeting contacts via relatives of Mark?

Some thoughts.

Regards,
Hello JCarp,

Interesting thoughts. I also have a great interest in Paul and Mark and their relationship. I'm interested in understanding the theological messages of the texts, what the authors thought themselves about the world (cosmology) and history (salvation history and eschatology) and what they, Paul and Mark, intended to convey in terms of theology and preaching.

The great question is first and foremost of course: What kind of text is gMark? The answer to this will obviously determine where we might go with this comparative exercise. My own view is very close to a somewhat obscure and forgotten German scholar of the 19. century called Gustaf Volkmar who suggested that gMark was Pauline theology in narrative form. That the author of gMark was a capable theologian, writer and poet who wrote gMark as a "didactic poem" trying to convey the Pauline teachings about salvation history (including the post-Easter events) and Paul's teachings about the function of Christ (the risen, heavenly Christ) within salvation history. Mark had to convey all these teaching encapsuled within the story of the ministry of the earthly Christ. As such, Volkmar thought, Mark used traditional material and also composed his own to build a story, or ' poem', that would symbolically (or allegorically) convey his theological messages.

As such Volkmar regarded gMark pretty much the same way I do: as a unified text written by a clever author capable of using symbolism on a sophisticated level and capable of composing stories about Jesus with underlying layers of meaning. Mark most likely possessed traditions about the historical (or 'earthly') Jesus, but in using them Mark would have made his Jesus character say and do things exactly the way Mark wanted him to.

Volkmar (influenced by the socalled Tübingen-school of his day) believed that Mark only had knowledge of the four 'great' Pauline letters, Rom., Gal. and 1-2 Cor. But also, surprisingly, Revelation. Personally, reading gMark as a sophisticated piece of symbolic story-telling, I surmise that Mark also had knowledge of the letters to Colossians and Ephesians, despite them being perhaps pseudo-Pauline. I believe that Mark wants to convey a message about conversion (at baptism) as the believer's taking part in Christ's dying and resurrection the same way that Paul understands it. Also I think that for Mark the Book of Daniel was as a big part of his theological understanding (i.e. world-view) whereas for Paul it doesn't seem to have played a big part.
Stefan Kristensen
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by Stefan Kristensen »

Volkmars work is only available in German I'm afraid, but anyway, perhaps you should also look more to the overall theology of Paul (and Mark) instead of just the Christology. In that way you'll get a fuller understanding of the texts imo, whether your interest is historical or theological or whatever. Pose the question: In Mark's view, what is God's role in the story in gMark? When you wanted to really know who God were, in Mark's day you'd go to the Scriptures, i.e. Old Testament. So what is the role of this character, God, in gMark, a character known especially from Scriptures? This character hardly even enters the stage, only twice, Mark 1:11 and 9:7,"there came a voice", but at the same time this character is very special in that he can do things supernaturally. So: What is the role of God in the story of Mark? Indeed, what is the role of God in history according to Mark? Does Mark even have an opinion about that? I think these are important questions if we want to understand gMark.

The field of comparing Mark and Paul is actually a growing field of interest withing NT scholarship these days, I think. See for example the two volumes Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays from De Gruyter, 2014. There was a time when scholars generally were of the opinion that gMark had nothing to do with Pauline theology or was anti-Pauline, but the tides are turning and more scholars now see a more or less clear relationship.
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Blood
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by Blood »

outhouse wrote:
Blood wrote:Paul's gospel doesn't tell us when, where, or why "the Lord Jesus" was crucified. So that's a bit of a shortcoming.

Knowing Romans crucified Jews like we used hang up laundry to dry, there is no shortcoming here.

Paul had to deal with the evolving theology, that was HIS communities importance, and he was competing against sects that claimed to be from real witnesses and he could not claim to know Jesus personally other then spiritually which amounts to Pauline communities collective conscious thought. Most of his text was a community effort NOT just penned by one guy.
But according to the Pauline letter community, it was "the Jews" who "killed Lord Jesus," not Romans.
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
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JCarp
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by JCarp »

Hey Stefan,
Stefan Kristensen wrote:See for example the two volumes Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays from De Gruyter, 2014.
That book has been on my reading list for the lonest time; perhaps now I will have more incentive to actually get around to reading it. :|
I've read Elizabeth Dowling's essay, perhaps because it's in English.
Stefan Kristensen wrote:There was a time when scholars generally were of the opinion that gMark had nothing to do with Pauline theology or was anti-Pauline, but the tides are turning and more scholars now see a more or less clear relationship.
The progression from Paul to Mark was pretty much lost throughout the 20th century, but it has been making quite a comeback in recent years.

A rather common argument has been that the Eucharist had been in place for a long time, and that it was regularly practiced by Jesus and his followers. This view has fallen out of favor, in part due to the view of the wine as the blood of the Passover Lamb; Jews are strictly forbidden to consume anything with even trace amounts of blood in it; whether that "blood" is figurative or not matters little. If such a tradition had existed for any length of time, it would have assuredly been wider known, and would certainly have been grounds for investigative, if not discplinary action by the Pharisees, and also grounds for not having access to the Temple on account of the Sadduccees. We possess no evidence of any of this.

Further ancillary corroboration exists in the Didache by evidence of omission; the "blood and body" of the Eucharist is not mentioned in the Didache what so ever. The Didache purportedly stems from one of the Jerusalem (Jamesian) cogregation traditions, and little if any Pauline influence can be discerned. The view of the Didachean tradition is very much a question about the date of its' composition.

The Pauline account of the Eucharist in 1 Corinthinans does not specifically state when the events transpired, the date must be gleaned from other Pauline texts. In any case, the Markan and Pauline traditions a clearly distinct from the traditions of Matthew and Luke. This is difficult to reconcile without acknowledging the progression from Paul to Mark. Tradition holds that Mark and Paul were both present in various locations throughout the early Christian church. The Roman connection between them is obvious, and needs no further exposition. Mark is clearly aimed at a Roman gentile audience, rather the same as Paul's audience.

Thank you for the tip, Stefan. I will surely try to slog through the German text.

Regards,
QUAECUMQUE · SUNT · VERA
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

Blood wrote:
outhouse wrote:
Blood wrote:Paul's gospel doesn't tell us when, where, or why "the Lord Jesus" was crucified. So that's a bit of a shortcoming.

Knowing Romans crucified Jews like we used hang up laundry to dry, there is no shortcoming here.

Paul had to deal with the evolving theology, that was HIS communities importance, and he was competing against sects that claimed to be from real witnesses and he could not claim to know Jesus personally other then spiritually which amounts to Pauline communities collective conscious thought. Most of his text was a community effort NOT just penned by one guy.
But according to the Pauline letter community, it was "the Jews" who "killed Lord Jesus," not Romans.

Jews did not crucify people. The Hellenist running the corrupt temple may have had authority from the Romans as Caiaphas worked hand in hand with Pilate to keep peace, their lives depended on it.

When you are writing a new religion for Roman citizens, you do not make Romans the bad guys here.
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

JCarp wrote:
A rather common argument has been that the Eucharist had been in place for a long time, and that it was regularly practiced by Jesus and his followers.

Regards,

That is an apologetic understanding not a historical one.
outhouse
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Re: The Gospel of Paul

Post by outhouse »

Stefan Kristensen wrote:The field of comparing Mark and Paul is actually a growing field of interest withing NT scholarship these days, I think.

.

The nest we can do is infer plausibility based on common oral traditions. Mark is a compilation and thus some traditions by all rights existed a long with Pauline communities evolution of theology. Common traditions like the passion narrative a high plausibility, but there is no connection with any degree of certainty between the two.

Pauline text was not all that wide spread by the time Markan text was compiled, or we would see more parallels and or reaction against it. Instead we see different branches of the same tree.
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