1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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Jax
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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neilgodfrey wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 12:54 am
Jax wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:24 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:34 pm
davidmartin wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:26 pm If you want a concrete example consider 'hell'
where does Paul ever mention it as a concept, or name it by any names Sheol, Gehenna, outer darkness, tartaros…
Romans 10.7 mentions the abyss as the abode of the dead.
Is Romans 9-11 actually Paul though?
Who disputes this section of Romans?
Hi Neil, this is from page 222 of The First New Testament by Jason D. BeDuhn
The version of Romans in the Apostolikon differed from even the more widely-circulating fourteen-chapter version, however, since it had a shortened text in other sections of the letter as well. It apparently lacked much, if not all, of chapter 9, and the bulk of chapter 11. Many commentators have seen chapters 9-11 of Romans as a separate essay, not well-integrated with the rest of the letter, regardless of whether it was original to the letter or a later addition. C. H. Dodd, for example, states that these chapters "form a unity in themselves. They can be read and understood independently, and equally without them the epistle could be read through without any sense of a gap in the sequence of thought." Reaching the end of chapter 8, Paul has prepared his readers for an exposition of Christian ethics, pointing forward to it multiple times, and so the "immediate sequel" to 8:31-39 is 12:1ff., not chapters 9-11. Dodd goes on to surmise that Paul may have composed the latter piece separately, as a sermon, and incorporated it at the time he composed the letter. "The sermon (if we may call it so) starts abruptly, with no connection with what has preceded," even if Dodd refuses to consider it "a mere interpolation." Francois Refoule has taken the next step of considering the possibility that it is an interpolation, either an authentic composition of Paul added secondarily to the letter, or a non-Pauline intrusion.
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Jax
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

Post by Jax »

Ben C. Smith wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 4:13 am
Jax wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:24 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:34 pm
davidmartin wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:26 pm If you want a concrete example consider 'hell'
where does Paul ever mention it as a concept, or name it by any names Sheol, Gehenna, outer darkness, tartaros…
Romans 10.7 mentions the abyss as the abode of the dead.
Is Romans 9-11 actually Paul though?
May not be, which is why I said "Romans 10.7" instead of "Paul." I myself am undecided, and I have no idea what others on this forum think of the issue. :cheers:
It's a tricky one, agreed. Personally, I lean more towards a later interpolation by someone else than Paul, but I'm not a real scholar in this field, rather I just play one on the internet. ;)
John2
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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Secret Alias wrote: Sat Oct 12, 2019 9:59 pm Yes he knows things. But like Trump he's dishonest. So of what value is his testimony really?

As Luomanen points outs in the link I gave above, what Epiphanius says about Ebionites lines up fairly well with the earlier Ebionite sources used in the Clementine writings, so we can use that as a control.
Last edited by John2 on Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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davidmartin wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 12:38 am
Given that Epiphanius says the Ebionites emerged sometime after 70 CE from the earlier Nazarene faction of Jewish Christianity (which was okay with Paul), I doubt there was "a kind of merger" between them and Paul in the 80's CE. And given that they are said to have been vegetarians and opposed to sacrifice, I doubt they had anything to do with the NT Matthew, which espouses sacrifice.
If the Ebionites emerged from a Nazarene faction then we're talking about the same thing, whether you call them 'Judaisers' or 'Ebionite' or 'Nazarene faction'. It's a posited more normative Judaic version of Christianity... that wasn't original IMO
I don't see them being 'ok with Paul' but rather having issues with him and tensions which turn up in various places, eg Galatians. But by the time of Acts they're best buddies, why? Because of the 'merger' or reproachment of the branches that occurred much later, not during their lives
Your point about sacrifice - true, Ebionites were anti-sacrifice but that seems to be more the temple sacrifices but either way in the 'merger' it required compromise. To merge the 'Judaiser' with the 'Pauline' had to accept a lot of parts from each other, hence Matthew reflects this
Not everyone accepted this, which is why the Ebionites proper appeared who would have nothing to do with this as the church fathers later reported
On the Pauline side you get many factions that wouldn't join the party too
I suspect even within the greater body of orthodoxy that emerged you still had 'wings' more favourable to one or the other
The merger also reflects in 1/2/3 John but of the Johannine community instead of the 'Judiaser'

I see the Nazarene faction as being the original form of Christianity and that Christianity subsequently became more "Gentilized," and to judge from what Jerome says about them I would say that, depsite tensions regarding Torah observance (as per the Letter of James and Acts 21:18-24), they were "okay with Paul."

Jerome On Is. 9:1-4:

The Nazarenes, whose opinion I have set forth above, try to explain this passage in the following way: When Messiah came and his proclaiming shone out, the land of Zebulon and Naphtali first of all were freed from the errors of the Scribes and Pharisees and he shook off their shoulders the very heavy yoke of the Jewish traditions [i.e., the oral Torah, cf. Mk. 7:1-13]. Later, however, the proclaiming became more dominant, that means the proclaiming was multiplied, through the good news of the emissary Paul who was the last of all the emissaries. And the good news of Messiah shone to the most distant tribes and the way of the whole sea. Finally the whole world, which earlier walked or sat in darkness and was imprisoned in the bonds of idolatry and death, has seen the clear light of the good news.
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Secret Alias
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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It's nice that you have developed the understanding that appears in Eusebius. But if we are honest, Eusebius simply (a) compiled things said by previous writers (b) corrected them slightly and (c) added 'eyewitness' testimony of a dubious nature. When you speak of the Clementine literature it has to be acknowledged that Homilies and Recognitions go back to some underlying source. Rufinus was a corrector of older material. How he got a hold of the original Clementine material is a mystery. But to say that the ur-text behind the Clementine literature lines up 'fairly well' with what is reported about the Ebionites is an overstatement.

Yes for certain there is an underlying animosity against 'Paul.' But if it were not for the Clementine literature we wouldn't know that Paul was understood to be Simon Magus. Similarly there is a lot in the ur-text that is unexpected - for instance the bizarre understanding of world-history unfolding according to masculine and feminine powers where 'the feminine' represents a necessary degeneration of the original masculne godhead.

I don't want to spend too much time on this distraction but I have to admit you tend to oversimplify in order to save your own 'pet project' - i.e. rescuing a 'Jewish' Christianity of some kind. Do Patristic sources explicitly tell us that Jesus was known to the Ebionites as 'the prophet'? The Church Fathers say all sorts of things about 'Jewish' Christianity and identify various Jewish Christian sects as Ebionites, Nazoreans and the like. My issue with you is that you take bits and pieces from Eusebius basically to put 'meat on the bone' of a particular pet project you have. If we were honest we'd have to admit we know very little about this phenomenon and ANY reconstruction is unlikely to be historically accurate.
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John2
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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Secret Alias wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:35 am It's nice that you have developed the understanding that appears in Eusebius. But if we are honest, Eusebius simply (a) compiled things said by previous writers (b) corrected them slightly and (c) added 'eyewitness' testimony of a dubious nature. When you speak of the Clementine literature it has to be acknowledged that Homilies and Recognitions go back to some underlying source. Rufinus was a corrector of older material. How he got a hold of the original Clementine material is a mystery. But to say that the ur-text behind the Clementine literature lines up 'fairly well' with what is reported about the Ebionites is an overstatement.

Yes for certain there is an underlying animosity against 'Paul.' But if it were not for the Clementine literature we wouldn't know that Paul was understood to be Simon Magus. Similarly there is a lot in the ur-text that is unexpected - for instance the bizarre understanding of world-history unfolding according to masculine and feminine powers where 'the feminine' represents a necessary degeneration of the original masculne godhead.

I don't want to spend too much time on this distraction but I have to admit you tend to oversimplify in order to save your own 'pet project' - i.e. rescuing a 'Jewish' Christianity of some kind. Do Patristic sources explicitly tell us that Jesus was known to the Ebionites as 'the prophet'? The Church Fathers say all sorts of things about 'Jewish' Christianity and identify various Jewish Christian sects as Ebionites, Nazoreans and the like. My issue with you is that you take bits and pieces from Eusebius basically to put 'meat on the bone' of a particular pet project you have. If we were honest we'd have to admit we know very little about this phenomenon and ANY reconstruction is unlikely to be historically accurate.

We are talking about Epiphanius and not Eusebius, but in any event you are of course free to take or leave what he or anyone else says about Ebionites.
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Secret Alias
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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Yes that's true.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
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neilgodfrey
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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Jax wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 7:26 am
Hi Neil, this is from page 222 of The First New Testament by Jason D. BeDuhn
The version of Romans in the Apostolikon differed from even the more widely-circulating fourteen-chapter version, however, since it had a shortened text in other sections of the letter as well. It apparently lacked much, if not all, of chapter 9, and the bulk of chapter 11. Many commentators have seen chapters 9-11 of Romans as a separate essay, not well-integrated with the rest of the letter, regardless of whether it was original to the letter or a later addition. C. H. Dodd, for example, states that these chapters "form a unity in themselves. They can be read and understood independently, and equally without them the epistle could be read through without any sense of a gap in the sequence of thought." Reaching the end of chapter 8, Paul has prepared his readers for an exposition of Christian ethics, pointing forward to it multiple times, and so the "immediate sequel" to 8:31-39 is 12:1ff., not chapters 9-11. Dodd goes on to surmise that Paul may have composed the latter piece separately, as a sermon, and incorporated it at the time he composed the letter. "The sermon (if we may call it so) starts abruptly, with no connection with what has preceded," even if Dodd refuses to consider it "a mere interpolation." Francois Refoule has taken the next step of considering the possibility that it is an interpolation, either an authentic composition of Paul added secondarily to the letter, or a non-Pauline intrusion.
Thanks. I'd forgotten that reference. I'll follow up the two Refoule articles cited. There is no suggestion of any study casting doubt on the authenticity of those chapters in either Munro's or Walker's books on Pauline interpolations.
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davidmartin
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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That bit in Romans isn't hell, it's just the traditional Sheol of Judaism
You really have to scratch around in Paul's writings to find he held anything like that concept, and he never names it
I see the Nazarene faction as being the original form of Christianity and that Christianity subsequently became more "Gentilized," and to judge from what Jerome says about them I would say that, depsite tensions regarding Torah observance (as per the Letter of James and Acts 21:18-24), they were "okay with Pau
OK, that theory IS very logical and it can be supported I admit
But there's interesting alternatives
If you bring the Odes of Solomon forward, here you have a rare Jewish-Christian writing that has many pointers to an early date
It is the writing of a messianic Jewish sect, it appears to oppose temple sacrifice and observance of Sabbath and circumcision, a 'spiritual Torah'
Yet it isn't given proper scrutiny it deserves from what it says about itself
It also has many, many similarities with Paul's theology such as salvation by grace, the spiritual body of the messiah, and much more
It also differs from Paul in other respects, such as a lack of emphasis on atonement or sin but the same end result
It also has no hell concept at all, in fact it says the messiah abolished Sheol!
What if this were the original Christianity?
Then you can see how Paul could have emerged from it...
This would make the Nazarene faction a deviant version, perhaps originating from the outskirts of the core Jewish Christian group rather than from it's centre. It has to be considered whether the Nazarene faction was Jewish or Samaritan as well.. the Clementines has many 'Samaratisms'
So here are 3 separate branches of the early church at least, the original 'odes' community, the Pauline and the Nazarene
I think the dispute between Paul and the Nazarenes was very significant in it's day but healed in the decades after leading to the merger
The book of James in the NT can be read as a veiled attack on Paul even
This would make both Paul and the Nazarene's divergences from the original Christianity
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Re: 1 Clement & the Gospel of Matthew?

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davidmartin wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 11:42 pm That bit in Romans isn't hell, it's just the traditional Sheol of Judaism
Okay, but this is what you had asked for:
davidmartin wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:26 pm If you want a concrete example consider 'hell'
where does Paul ever mention it as a concept, or name it by any names Sheol, Gehenna, outer darkness, tartaros…
Do with it what you will, but the answer did match the question.
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