The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

454 Pages·2012·2.58 MB·English

by  Robert M. Price

Contents
Deconstructing Paul
1. The Legend of Paul’s Conversion
2. By Posthumous Post
3. The Evolution of the Pauline Canon
4. The Apocalypses and Acts of Paul
5. The Original Gnostic Apostles
6. Paulus Absconditus
7. The Secret of Simon Magus
8. Salvation and Stratification
9. The Epistle to the Romans
10. 1 Corinthians
11. 2 Corinthians
12. Galatians
13. Laodiceans and Ephesians
14. Philippians
15. Colossians
16. Thessalonians
17. The Letter to Philemon
18. The Pastoral Epistles
A Canticle for Paul
Index
The
Amazing
Colossal
Apostle
The
Amazing
Colossal
Apostle
The Search for the
Historical Paul
Robert M. Price
Signature Books | Salt Lake City | 2012
© 2012 Signature Books. Signature Books is a registered
trademark of Signature Books Publishing, LLC. All rights
reserved. The Amazing Colossal Apostle was printed on acid-
free paper. It was composed, printed, and bound in the
United States of America.
For more information, consult www.signaturebooks.com.
Cover design by Ron Stucki
16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Price, Robert M., 1954-, author.
The amazing colossal apostle : the search for the historical
Paul / by Robert M. Price.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56085-216-2 (alk. paper)
1. Paul, the Apostle, Saint. 2. Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul—
Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BS2506.3.P75 2012
225.9’2—dc23
2012011325
Contents
(Print Edition)

Introduction: Deconstructing Paul vii

1. The Legend of Paul’s Conversion 1

2. By Posthumous Post 25

3. The Evolution of the Pauline Canon 45

4. The Apocalypses and Acts of Paul 89

5. The Original Gnostic Apostles 131

6. Paulus Absconditus 173

7. The Secret of Simon Magus 185

8. Salvation and Stratification 235

9. The Epistle to the Romans 253

10. First Corinthians 299

11. Second Corinthians 377

12. Galatians 411

13. Laodiceans and Ephesians 437

14. Philippians 455

15. Colossians 469

16. Thessalonians 483

17. The Letter to Philemon 501

18. The Pastoral Epistles 505

Conclusion: A Canticle for Paul 533

Index 537
Deconstructing Paul
A Short Introduction to What Follows

The Perils of Pauline Studies
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is a strange time for Pauline
studies. After seemingly having run out of other ideas to beat to death, the
academy has ventured into new territory. One might even say that, on analogy
with the intrepid Netherlanders of old, Pauline scholars have created new
territory to settle. A visit to the seminary book store or the religion aisle at
Barnes & Noble will acquaint the reader with books arguing that Paul was a
culture critic of Hellenistic Judaism, that he was a Jew and remained a Jew, that
he wrote against U.S. foreign policy, and so on. Indeed, more than ever, he
seems like a new Oracle of Delphi whose equivocal utterances may be read as
conveying whatever message one most wants to hear. Like the infamous
“historical Jesus,” Paul has become a reflection of the scholars studying him.
Part of the reason for this state of affairs is that Jesus has recently been
unavailable for these uses. As scholars have become more skeptical about
recovering the goods on the historical Jesus (as witness the Jesus Seminar’s
claim that only 18 percent of the sayings database was reliable), the less
plausible it has seemed to make him the poster boy for green politics, feminism,
whatever. Granted, this hasn’t stopped a number of scholars who still write
books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like them, since the less
evidence there is, the more room is left for speculation; but some have retreated
to Paul instead. Perhaps he can be the bulwark theologians once thought they
had in Jesus. But great ironies lie this way.
First, the closer scrutiny the Pauline texts receive, the clearer it becomes
(and by now it seems mighty clear indeed) that the epistles present us with many
of the same challenges the Gospels did. They appear to be filled with the same
variety of redactional seams, non-sequiturs, and double-audience rhetorical
tricks we find in the Gospels. In short, the historical Jesus problem replicates
itself in the case of Paul. The epistles reveal themselves to the discerning reader
to have exactly the same sort of limitations as the Gospels do: both are
collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and
communities of very different theological leanings. Both present barriers to the
access of the individuals under whose names they appear, not open doors.
Confronting the Protestant Christ
Second, scholars are more reluctant to recognize the data surrounding Paul
and their implications. In short, Protestants of whatever vestigial degree have
long ago elevated Paul over Jesus as their dogmatic master. Conservative
evangelical Edward J. Carnell[1] was forthright about this: the epistles interpret
or, in other words, trump the Gospels, and Romans and Galatians interpret (or
trump) all the other epistles. I find a certain analogy from religious history
helpful at this point. In esoteric Ismail’i Islam,[2] there is a belief that Allah
sends pairs of incarnations of himself. First comes the “proclaimer” who gives as
much of the gospel to the masses as they can understand: the milk, not meat.
Shortly after him the “foundation” arrives, the master of esoteric meaning of
what was preached by the proclaimer, truth that may sound quite strange to the
run-of-the-mill believer and may indeed be rejected by them as heresy. But this
is the meat. Rudolf Bultmann[3] understood the Gospel of John to be cognizant
of something like this when it has Jesus predict the advent of the paraclete who
will unveil new truths to the disciples, for which they were not yet ready during
Jesus’s earthly sojourn. The Beloved Disciple implicitly filled the role of the
paraclete, and this is why the Gospel of John differs so much as to content and
style from the Synoptics. It embodies the advanced course provided by the
paraclete. Some Marcionites believed Paul was the paraclete, seeing in him the
definitive interpreter of Jesus Christ’s significance. Marcionites liked to depict
Jesus sitting on a central throne with Paul to his right hand and Marcion to his
left, and I would say that Protestants believe that too. Jesus gets reduced to “the
Christ event,” the naked and mute act of God which means nothing until some
prophetic voice (Paul’s) comes along to tell us what it means.
In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the so-called magisterial
reformers made Paul their figurehead and the source of their theology. It is he,
not Jesus, who speaks in terms of justification by faith. It is Jesus who threatens
to unravel the whole thing by enumerating commandments of the Torah and
telling inquirers, “Do this and you will live.” Ahem, enough of that, if you
please! On the other hand, it is the Anabaptist Hutterites, Amish, and
Mennonites who take their marching orders from Jesus: turn the other cheek, do
not swear oaths. Three centuries later, liberal Protestants of the Harnack stripe
discarded Paul for Jesus. “Paul” meant Protestant orthodoxy. And it was the
ostensible historical Jesus they sought as a substitute for him, a Jesus who could
be assumed to have preached a kind of Reform Judaism. This was a relief: no
more Nicene Creed, no more worship of Christ, no more theology at all, just
individual piety and the social gospel. Liberals wanted the religion of Jesus, the
one he himself practiced, and no longer the religion about Jesus. They held Paul
responsible for the changeover from one to the other. They dubbed Paul the
“second founder of Christianity.”[4]
Post World War I neo-orthodox theology went back to Reformation-era
Paulinism, relieved at the seeming failure of the historical Jesus enterprise. As
Albert Schweitzer showed, most of the historical Jesus models proposed by
scholars reflected only their own biases. Schweitzer felt keenly Jesus’s moral
demands and famously obeyed them by founding a hospital in French Equatorial
Africa but did not feel obliged to agree with Jesus theologically. He was able to
see Jesus preaching a message of apocalypticism that sounded fanatical to
modern ears, his own included, but categorized it as somewhat irrelevant
theology. The neo-orthodox seized the distinction and reinterpreted the
apocalyptic discourse of Schweitzer’s Jesus in a different key. Jesus had come to
bring, not the literal end of the world, but the end of the Jewish dispensation, to
be followed by the Christian Church, not by the sky-descending kingdom of
God. It was a bit of a shell game, but it provided passage back from Jesus to
Paul. Indeed, it was surprising to see theologians willing to admit that Jesus had
been wrong about the end of the world. But then, that only meant one could
more easily put Jesus on the shelf and have recourse to Paul as one’s chief
theological oracle.
One receives the impression that Protestants, however liberal, have
retreated from the perimeter wall—Jesus Christ—and taken refuge in the castle
keep—namely Paul. The same moves made in the case of Jesus (refitting him as
a post-colonialist, a feminist, an Orthodox Jew, and a green activist) have been
made in the case of Paul. After this, there is nowhere to run. That is why
scholars, so critical about the historical Jesus, have proven reluctant to accept
significant higher criticism of the Pauline epistles. Just as an earlier generation
of theological moderates surrendered John as unhistorical but retained the
Synoptics for their picture of the historical Jesus, so Pauline scholars have cut
off the Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) and relegated Colossians,
Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians to deutero-canonical status, products of the
“Pauline school.” Having done so, they nevertheless insist on the inviolable
Pauline corpus containing the magic number seven: Romans, 1 and 2
Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Ferdinand
C. Baur already debunked all but the first four as spurious, but even Bultmann
dared not follow Baur that far. Bultmann needed enough of Paul’s writings to
build a theology on. Is the will to believe corrupting scientific criticism—again?
I think so.
Paul and Sisyphus
I have been privileged to study with some outstanding New Testament
scholars, including J. Ramsey Michaels, Andrew T. Lincoln, Gordon D. Fee,
David M. Scholer, Donald Juel, Helmut Koester, Howard Clark Kee, Darrell J.
Doughty, William Stroker, and Kalyan Dey. Lucky for me, they expressed a
wide range of viewpoints, and all were seemingly omniscient. I recall Gordon
Fee[5] bringing 2 Corinthians to life almost as if he were channeling the writer! I
remember how he would hoist himself from one mighty peak of 1 Corinthians to
the next, trying to demonstrate what one passage had to do with another, how
text B was an answer to the question brought up in text A. There must have been
some connection, but what was it? But then I recall several years later listening
as Darrell Doughty pointed out that such reasoning was essentially
harmonization, the kind of thing critics had long since stopped doing in the case
of the Gospels. When we notice that a chapter of the Gospels is jumping from
one topic to the next with no real connection except broad topics or catchwords,
we learn to read this as a collection of originally separate sayings, stories, and
aphorisms and do not insist that a single individual said all these things, much
less that he did it in just that order and on that occasion. However, when reading
the epistles, we see the same sort of rough edges and we want to make sense of
them as moments of a single, spontaneous discourse set to paper. What is
stopping us from recognizing, precisely on the basis of such phenomena, that we
have been barking up the wrong tree? We have been harmonizing instead of
exegeting. Doughty commented that virtually all commentaries on the epistles,
including Fee’s erudite tome on 1 Corinthians, are largely exercises in
harmonization: What would the text have to mean if it were a unitary discourse?
But it isn’t one, and therefore such an approach bids us construct elaborate
theological latticeworks, giving every verse a place in the structure that makes a
synthetic whole much greater than its parts.
Doughty and I began to look into the neglected work of the Dutch Radical
Critics who denied that the historical Paul had written any of the letters ascribed
to him. On second thought, for instance, Walter Schmithals’s brilliant book
Gnosticism in Corinth explains many puzzles in the first letter to the Corinthians
by reference to Gnostic trends that are attested only for the second century. It
would make much more sense if he had placed 1 Corinthians in the second
century. I began to weigh Willem van Manen’s claim that the epistles made no
lasting impact on any of the church communities to which they were ostensibly
sent. From this, Van Manen inferred that the letters had not in fact been written
or sent within the lifetime of the historical Paul but later. The Pauline letters
were the favorites of Gnostics, Encratites, and Marcionites. Tertullian called
Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics,” and indeed it was