[RD] Ask a Theologian V

[Plotinus]

Show how much you know about the Bible, very little. Paul wrote those based on the salutation he wrote at the end of his writings. The general theme goes is along the lines of "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you always." It is not always that exact phrase but the wording and meaning is similar. This is how we can know Paul wrote Hebrews and also by the style of the book. Plus the fact that each of them specifically states that Paul is the author and the author of all the pastorals knew both Timothy and Titus, whom Paul knew.

There's no need to be offensive. I know just as much as you do about the content of the Pastorals and Paul's writing style, but my interpretation differs from yours. The mere fact that a text contains in it a claim to be written by Paul does not, in itself, mean that it was.

For example, consider this series of texts, in which Paul and Seneca exchange letters. These also contain salutations by Paul. But you surely don't think that these are genuine. Paul and Seneca didn't really write to each other - someone just forged a bunch of letters to make it seem like they did. So unless you think that Paul really wrote to Seneca, you must admit that just because a text appears to be a letter by Paul, that doesn't mean it really is.

Moreover, 2 Thessalonians 2:2 specifically states that there were letters circulating "as if from" Paul, so we know that such texts existed (indeed 2 Thess itself may well be one of them). There is on the face of it no reason, therefore, why the Pastoral epistles or indeed any other Pauline text should not be among these pseudonymous writings. Each one must be evaluated according to the evidence. The mere fact that a text says "lots of love from Paul" at the end isn't good enough evidence, since that's exactly what a pseudonymous text would say too.

In the case of the Pastorals, New Testament scholars are nearly unanimous in thinking them inauthentic. This is on the basis of the language (they are written in a very different style from Paul's authentic letters), the theology (again, it is quite different), and the church situation they seem to presuppose (it is far more structured than the much more informal situation envisaged in texts such as 1 Corinthians). Plus, if the Pastorals are authentic, then Paul survived his imprisonment in Rome and travelled to Spain as he planned, but there is no other evidence that this happened, which is not what you'd expect (where are all the letters to the Spanish churches, descriptions of his travels in Acts or other texts, etc.?).

You may think that this evidence is inconclusive, but don't label those who disagree with you as ignorant. That is neither very charitable nor sensible.

I'm puzzled that you think the book of Hebrews is written in the same style as Paul's letters. It isn't. Indeed it isn't really a letter at all, but a treatise, written in a rhetorical Greek style with a well structured overall argument. This is quite different from Paul's letters, which are occasional writings (i.e. responding to specific issues) without overall structure of this kind, and where the arguments are short and to the point. They also follow the conventional structure of classical letters, although they distort it, whereas Hebrews doesn't. As I said, it's not really a letter at all. There's good reason to think that Paul's letters proved so popular in the early church that people came instinctively to think that any Christian writing ought to be in letter form, which is why Hebrews imitates this form in a very slight way. But no way is it by Paul. If it were, it would say so. Paul was not a modest man.

 

[Agent327]

I didn't make any such assertion. I said merely that that's an alternative possibility, and the existence of such alternative possibilities means we can't make bold assertions one way or the other.

And I asked on what grounds would 2 gospel writers be opposed to baptism? If they were, they would at least mention it to show why it was to be rejected. But they don't. That's hardly a basis for claiming they were against it.

 

[Plotinus]

And I asked on what grounds would 2 gospel writers be opposed to baptism? If they were, they would at least mention it to show why it was to be rejected. But they don't. That's hardly a basis for claiming they were against it.

Not at all, they might just quietly drop anything from Jesus' ministry that doesn't reflect their own practice. You might just as well say that if in fact Jesus didn't baptise, and those Gospel writers who say he did are inventing this detail to fit their own practice, you'd expect them to make more of it and argue that those who don't baptise are wrong. The evidence is so slight that you can't be definite either way.

 

[Agent327]

To which I thought we were in agreement. I see your point, for instance when thinking of the claim that Jesus was from the house of David, where the gospel writer makes up an elaborate story to substantiate the claim. Or the mention of Joseph's genealogy, which is then self-defeated by the mention that Joseph wasn't Jesus's father. So yes, the evidence such as it is is flimsy.

 

[Agent327]

I have a question: What is the point of "blessed are the poor in spirit' In the beatitudes?

Matthew:

Blessed are..

....the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. (5:3)
....those who mourn: for they will be comforted. (5:4)
....the meek: for they will inherit the earth. (5:5)
....those who hunger and thirst for righteousness: for they will be filled. (5:6)
....the merciful: for they will be shown mercy. (5:7)
....the pure in heart: for they will see God. (5:8)
....the peacemakers: for they will be called children of God. (5:9)
....those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (5:10)

There is a promise of the kingdom of Heaven to both the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted fro righteousness' sake.

Luke has

Blessed are you...[2][3]

...who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
...who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
...who weep now, for you will laugh.
...when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of man.

Woe to you...:[2]

...who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
...who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.
...who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
...when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

Now this makes sense. No repetition, no apparent contradictons.

Assuming there actually was a sermon, Matthew has Jesus losing the crowd with his opening sentence ("Blessed are the poor in spirit? What is this guy talking about?"), whereas Luke captivates the audience with a good one-liner ("Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God? This guy knows what he is talking about!")

So, why the "poor in spirit"?

 

[Plotinus]

The obvious answer is that Matthew has changed "blessed are the poor" (which is probably the original version in Q) into "blessed are the poor in spirit" because his community is relatively wealthy, and he wants the saying to have some relevance for them. Possible further evidence for this is the difference between Matthew's parable of the talents and Luke's parable of the minas. A talent was a very large sum of money, while a mina wasn't. Matthew also omits the story of the widow's mite, which is found in Mark. All of this may indicate that he wanted to downplay the anti-wealth and pro-poor aspects of Jesus' teaching.

 

[Mouthwash]

David Goldman suggests that anti-Semitism is a result of a particular strain of nationalist Christianity, in which each country thought of itself as the "Chosen People" of the OT. French theologians regarded France as the penultimate Christian nation, as did Spaniards and Englishmen and all others. The survival of the Jews was a challenge to these sorts of claims, so the response was persecution and a denial of Jewish heritage (e.g. British Israelism). Would you say that this is accurate?

 

[Arakhor]

For the record, 'penultimate' is the last or greatest but one. Is that what you intended?

 

[Mouthwash]

For the record, 'penultimate' is the last or greatest but one. Is that what you intended?

Whaaaat? I'm going to sue Netflix for their video descriptions.

 

[Arakhor]

Paene is 'almost' or 'nearly' and ultimus is 'farthest' or 'most remote'. It's just like 'peninsula' meaning 'almost island'.

 

[_random_]

So a while back you told me that Jonathan Edwards gets a bad reputation based on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and that his overall theological tone is quite joyful and focused on nature. What are some notable works of his that fall more into that category?

 

[SeekTruthFromFacts]

David Goldman suggests that anti-Semitism is a result of a particular strain of nationalist Christianity, in which each country thought of itself as the "Chosen People" of the OT. French theologians regarded France as the penultimate Christian nation, as did Spaniards and Englishmen and all others. The survival of the Jews was a challenge to these sorts of claims, so the response was persecution and a denial of Jewish heritage (e.g. British Israelism). Would you say that this is accurate?

I agree that there's a definite tendency for Christians to give their nation an eschatological significance that fills the salvation-historical slot occupied by Israel in the OT. In this European examples you mention, this was at least partly because Israel was the principal model for nationhood open to them - the classical inheritance of city states and universal empires steadily lost ground.

However, two important counter-examples (one which of should be obvious to you) suggest this is far from a sufficient explanation for anti-Semitism. Firstly, the US. Both American Christianity and American civil religion tend to assign the US a Chosen Nation role, but both are strongly Zionist. Secondly, Mormonism takes this to an extreme, but to my knowledge Utah is not notorious as a hotspot of antisemitism.

I would suggest that the answer is found more in the fear and loathing for a community that visibly and radically rejected prevailing norms in a highly homogenous European societies that held a tightly integrated worldview. It was just easier to blame all your problems on the very obviously Other.

 

[Agent327]

Not to mention that antisemitism is quite a bit older than nationalism. The first already appears in the NT.

 

[bhavv]

Why shouldn't a man lie with another man as he would with a woman? What are you and your God going to do if I do?

 

[Plotinus]

David Goldman suggests that anti-Semitism is a result of a particular strain of nationalist Christianity, in which each country thought of itself as the "Chosen People" of the OT. French theologians regarded France as the penultimate Christian nation, as did Spaniards and Englishmen and all others. The survival of the Jews was a challenge to these sorts of claims, so the response was persecution and a denial of Jewish heritage (e.g. British Israelism). Would you say that this is accurate?

I know very little about this, but it seems on the face of it implausible, given that people were quite capable of seeing themselves as "the chosen people" long before any nationalist sentiment appeared. The letter of Barnabas, for example, was written in the second century and specifically argues that Christians have replaced Jews as the chosen people and inheritors of the promise.

But it also depends on what you mean by "antisemitism" anyway. Is it criticism or dismissal of Judaism as a religion, or of Jews as a race or people? It's questionable, and obviously very contentious, to what degree anti-Jewish statements from antiquity or the Middle Ages (or for that matter the Reformation) should be read in the same way as anti-Jewish statements from modern times. It's often argued that the former tend to be directed against Judaism as a religion, while the latter tend to be against the Jews considered in more biological terms as a race. This is obviously a very emotive subject that is hard to be objective about.

If Goldman's talking about modern antisemitism as something distinct from the anti-Jewish sentiment of previous ages, I would assume he's thinking of race-based antisemitism, i.e. the kind of thing that became widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was central to Nazism. But if that's so then seeking a religious-type explanation seems to me implausible, since this was an antisemitism that didn't typically express itself in religious terms. These antisemites might not even have been Christians at all. Guido von List, for example, expressed a very virulent form of antisemitism in Germany in the early twentieth century, which may have influenced Hitler. But List wasn't a Christian - he was a sort of Theosophist.

Not to mention that antisemitism is quite a bit older than nationalism. The first already appears in the NT.

This ties in with what I just said - one can certainly find negative statements about Jews in the New Testament (as well as very positive ones), but to call that simply "antisemitism" assumes a lot.

Why shouldn't a man lie with another man as he would with a woman? What are you and your God going to do if I do?

If you read the OP you'll find that I don't believe in God, so I'm not at all bothered what you do on that score.

If your question is why the Bible contains prohibitions of that sort, I'm not sure what the answer is. But I think it has something to do with a desire to preserve the perceived order of nature. The passages in the Law prohibiting homosexuality also prohibit planting different crops together or weaving different cloths together, and enforce gender-specific behaviour such as what clothes to wear, how to shave, and so on. So it seems to be about a fear of letting boundaries between different categories (whether human and sexual or not) become blurred. As for why the ancient Hebrews were worried about that, I couldn't tell you.

 

[Mouthwash]

I know very little about this, but it seems on the face of it implausible, given that people were quite capable of seeing themselves as "the chosen people" long before any nationalist sentiment appeared. The letter of Barnabas, for example, was written in the second century and specifically argues that Christians have replaced Jews as the chosen people and inheritors of the promise.

But it also depends on what you mean by "antisemitism" anyway. Is it criticism or dismissal of Judaism as a religion, or of Jews as a race or people? It's questionable, and obviously very contentious, to what degree anti-Jewish statements from antiquity or the Middle Ages (or for that matter the Reformation) should be read in the same way as anti-Jewish statements from modern times. It's often argued that the former tend to be directed against Judaism as a religion, while the latter tend to be against the Jews considered in more biological terms as a race.

Well, yes, he talks about a conflict between the idea of a "Christian empire" and nationalist Christianity which he claims is responsible for the Thirty Years' war. And a lot of his claims are sociological, and really involve doctrine. But the jist of his argument seems to be that any nationalist ideal in Europe necessarily had to be anti-Semitic (unlike early Christianity) because they sought to become the Chosen People themselves.

 

[Agent327]

This ties in with what I just said - one can certainly find negative statements about Jews in the New Testament (as well as very positive ones), but to call that simply "antisemitism" assumes a lot.

Care to elaborate based on the 'Let his blood come down upon us and our children' bit? Because that has been a very fruitful source of antisemitism right until the 20th century.

 

[Flying Pig]

If your question is why the Bible contains prohibitions of that sort, I'm not sure what the answer is. But I think it has something to do with a desire to preserve the perceived order of nature. The passages in the Law prohibiting homosexuality also prohibit planting different crops together or weaving different cloths together, and enforce gender-specific behaviour such as what clothes to wear, how to shave, and so on. So it seems to be about a fear of letting boundaries between different categories (whether human and sexual or not) become blurred. As for why the ancient Hebrews were worried about that, I couldn't tell you.

Sounds a bit like Claude Levi-Strauss on mythology - he argued that people categorise the world from a particularly human standpoint, and then are confronted with problematic areas where those categories don't quite work. He said that where animals fall into these, we end up attributing supernatural roles to them in our myths - hence snakes are nearly always seen as embodiments of evil above and beyond other dangerous animals, because they are fast movers without legs, which shouldn't work according to human schematics, and scavengers (who eat meat but don't kill) usually feature in mythology as having supernatural power or knowledge. It's certainly no accident that a disproportionate number of our monsters either swim or fly, placing them outside the human sphere of experience. Perhaps transgressing gender boundaries provokes the same primal unease?

 

[Mouthwash]

Is this plausible?

 

[Perfection]

I've heard some people say that we reside in the mind of God as if reality is a figment of the Lord's imagination. Is that taken seriously in Christian traditions or by any theologians?