Did Paul indicate he expected Christ's return in his time?

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MrMacSon
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Did Paul indicate he expected Christ's return in his time?

Post by MrMacSon »

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This question^ was recently posed on reddit and some of the responses seem interesting -eg. -

bill_tampa -
1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 sort of addresses this issue, the actual question in this verse seems to be what will happen to those who die before the parousia, but the answer does seem to suggest that Paul felt that "we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds" -- the use of the word "we" suggests Paul thought that some of those now living ("we") would still be around for the second coming.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... t/djyr4ow/

  • reslumina -
    This depends on a literal interpretation of Paul's words, of course. Aristotelian (or rather, Alcmaeonian and Platonic) ideas about sleep, wakefulness and death as developed in the parva naturalia are analogical and in some cases explicitly non-literalist, and there's nothing in the Pauline epistles or the gospels to preclude a non-literalist interpretation. We see this explicitly in Mark 12:18-27, for example, where the character of Jesus enjoins the Sadducees against interpreting the resurrection literally.
    • Domhnal
      How do you see [Mark 12:18-27] being an argument against a literal resurrection?
      • reslumina -

    • brojangles -
      Paul was being literal. He was addressing a literal question about people who had literally already died and whether or not they would get to go to Heaven. There's also 1 Corinthians 7:29-31:
      • This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, 30 and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, 31 and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.
      Paul expected an imminent parousia. It is not reasonable to argue that this passage shows anything else.

      There is also the fact that the author of 2 Thessalonians is forced to call 1 Thessalonians a fake in order to do damage control after these expectations failed within the first generation. https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... t/djz7goo/
      • benjam33 -
        Genuinely curious: where does 2 Thessalonians call 1 Thessalonians fake?

        • brojangles -
          2:2: Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.

koine_lingua -
I just want to throw out two other Pauline texts that I think are crucially important here, but actually have a tendency to be overlooked in certain aspects when this issue comes up.

The first is Romans 13.11's νῦν ἐγγύτερον ἡμῶν ἡ σωτηρία ἢ ὅτε ἐπιστεύσαμεν. Paraphrased/interpreted, here Paul's saying that eschatological salvation had already "come near" to Paul and co. at the time they first became believers; but now the time between Paul's current time (the time of his writing of the epistle) and the eschaton itself would be even shorter than this first block of time (between the "coming-near" of salvation and their conversion).

This "coming-near" of salvation is to be identified most plausibly as either the resurrection of Jesus or Jesus' proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom; and so, to quote Andrew Perriman's comment on Romans 13.11,
  • The nearness of this “salvation,” however it is to be understood, must be measured in relation to a period of no more than about twenty years. (The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church, 115)

Secondly:
One thing you occasionally hear people argue about the final verses of 1 Thessalonians 4 -- usually more conservative scholars or apologists -- is that "we who are alive" doesn't necessarily mean Paul's own contemporaries, but simply those who are alive at whatever time the parousia takes place in (so, potentially far off into the future).

Now, with this in mind, if we look toward 1 Corinthians 15.51f., starting with πάντες μὲν οὐ κοιμηθησόμεθα, πάντες δὲ ἀλλαγησόμεθα -- and also note that it's pretty widely agreed that there's a clear intertextual relationship between these verses and the final verses of 1 Thessalonians 4 -- then if someone would similarly argue that Paul's claim here is implicitly aimed not necessarily at his own contemporaries but rather "those who are alive" at whatever future time, the fact that Paul says "We will not all die" in 15.51 is very puzzling: all together he'd be saying that not everyone who's alive at some point in the future will have died before the transformation happens... which is just intolerably circular.

In light of this, I think one of the only other possible ways to meaningfully interpret "We will not all die" in this sense is if here Paul's countering a view that everyone will first die at the eschaton before being resurrected. But there are several reasons to believe that it's highly unlikely that this is what Paul meant to challenge -- including that such a view (that everyone will die at the eschaton) is only really attested in 4 Ezra 7.29.

The final option I can think of is that "We will not all die" is a continuation of Paul's counter-argument against the more general kind of Greco-Roman skepticism of the resurrection/afterlife. But there are several things against this, too. For one, if you look at what leads up to this in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul counters this (hypothetical) view with things like the repetitive "If the dead [νεκροί] are not raised..." Basically, by the time he gets to 1 Cor. 15.51, he may have moved on from simple arguments against "the dead are dead, and aren't coming back."

We might even be able to expand on this to make an even more subtle linguistic argument here. Again, the "mystery" Paul imparts in 15.51 is that πάντες μὲν οὐ κοιμηθησόμεθα, πάντες δὲ ἀλλαγησόμεθα. But if here (and specifically with his usage of κοιμηθησόμεθα) he intended to counter a Greco-Roman skepticism, might we have expected him to have used different terminology? For example, in 1 Corinthians 15.17-18, he speaks of the idea that if Christ hasn't been raised, then οἱ κοιμηθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ -- those who've fallen asleep "in" Christ -- ἀπώλοντο, have perished. Further, in refuting the Greco-Roman (or whatever) pessimistic view in 15.32, he quotes LXX Isaiah 22.13, which uses ἀποθνῄσκω.

Finally, in the four most recent uses of κοιμάομαι before this in 1 Corinthians, these all pretty clearly refer to those who've recently died -- which could further suggest that in 15.51 Paul's suggesting that he and the Corinthians (including those who've recently died) are a part of a fairly narrow temporal "block" of elect people who live at the end of history and who will all undergo the resurrection/transformation together. (Recall here also 1 Thessalonians 4.15, 17, where Paul characterizes himself and Thessalonians, et al., as ἡμεῖς . . . οἱ περιλειπόμενοι, "we . . . the remaining.")
When we consider all these things, then, in a sense we might say that the emphasis in Paul's "mystery" in 1 Cor. 15.51 is precisely and deliberately on the imminence of the eschaton/resurrection. (And in this sense, it bears more than a passing resemblance to things like Mark 9.1, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before/until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." Further, recall the specific emphasis on the shortness of time back in 1 Corinthians 7.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblic ... t/djz9zhi/

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FransJVermeiren
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Re: Did Paul indicate he expected Christ's return in his time?

Post by FransJVermeiren »

The starting point is wrong. Paul never speaks of the return of the Christ, he only speaks of his future coming on the future day of the Lord. Return and second coming are nothing but interpretation, finding their origin in the forged chronology of the gospels.
www.waroriginsofchristianity.com

The practical modes of concealment are limited only by the imaginative capacity of subordinates. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
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