This documentary by NOVA is a very interesting and fascinating archaeological exploration on Hebrew history before Ancient Israel. It shows how contemporary archeology not only shows significant discrepancies with the Bible stories about how the people of Israel settled and developed, but also it helps shine on our understanding how the Bible originated, and how it evolved. Enjoy it!
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
Introduction
Ever since I began writing the series on evolution, I’ve received some e-mails or messages from young-earth creationists. Among their objections I find, they say:
- Were you there when the world was created?
- It was believed that the world was flat, today we know it is round. We believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, we now know the sun is the center of the Solar System. Therefore, what we may hold as true of evolution and old-earth formation may be false, and tomorrow it will be shown to be true.
- Carbon-14 is the only method to establish the age of rocks, it can go as back as 6,000 years ago. So, I have no basis to believe that the Earth is really billions of years old, or that evolution is a fact.
- The "myth" of evolution rests in the "belief" that the Earth is billions of years old. However, there is no way to know how old it is, so a dating based on Genesis is as reliable as the "atheist" billion years belief.
There are other sorts of responses but these were the ones I either found most prevalent or more reasonable.
My Response to (1): No, I wasn’t there. So, you may ask, "with what authority do I say then that the Earth is old?"
First, we can say that this reasoning is not only bogus, but dangerous to an extent if you wish to take it seriously. This is the same reasoning any assassin may use to defend him or herself in court. He or she could say to the judge: "But your honor, no one was there during the murder. By what authority does the district attorney claim that I am a murderer? He wasn’t there!" And the judge will say: "Oh geez! You’re right! Let him loose".
Why doesn’t this happen in court? Because neither the judge, nor the attorneys, not even defense lawyers would accept it. No one was there, of course, but there can be evidence left in the scene of the crime which can be used to point out who is most probably the assassin. If the knife the murderer used was left accidentally, he or she might have left fingerprints on it, or maybe a bit of his or her blood. We can notice his or her modus operandi. The district attorney and the defense may argue whether the man is innocent or guilty, but the evidence will state with high probability or conclusively one or the other.
Scientists use exactly the same approach. No scientist "was there" when the Earth was formed, but the evidence science has accumulated decides with high probability or conclusively whether the Earth is young, or billions of years old. My intent in this article is to show the reliability of how scientists have concluded that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old.
Response to (2): Well, all of that might be true. Science has changed its theories over time. What previously was believed to be true is no longer true now. This is due to our limitations in knowledge, but the best part is that science has a self-correcting mechanism in its social dynamic.
However, I want to ask the people who have argued like this to please pick better examples. Some of those examples show how science triumphed over Bible literalism. In ancient times, there are parts of the Bible that seemed to hold that the Earth is flat (take the phrase "four corners of the Earth", or "borders", or "ends" of the Earth: Num. 15:38; Is. 11:12; Ezek. 7:2; Job 37:3; 38:13), while there are others that state that the Earth is round (Is. 40:22; Prov. 8:26), yet it was science, not the Bible, that not only showed that the Earth is round, but showed how you can measure its actual size. Eratosthenes, at the time, using simple rules of geometry, inferred the size of the Earth which was very close to the actual size. There have been clever attempts to reconcile these contradictory passages of the Bible, but, the problem is they want to stretch the meaning of the original Hebrew words so that it turns out that "corners", "borders" or "ends" don’t really mean corners, borders or ends. However, they miss the fact that most of those passages that talk about the four corners of the Earth came from earlier writings than those which say the Earth is round. The book of Numbers and Proto-Isaiah (Is. 1-39)were probably composed around 715-686 B.C., while Ezekiel as composed during the sixth century B.C. Deutero-Isaiah (Is. 40-55) was composed (later than 550 B.C.), and the final version of the Book of Proverbs seems to have been compiled before 200 B.C.). Job seems to have been composed in the fourth century B.C., or perhaps earlier, but seems to have a language that is ancient (compare with Gen. 6, composed about the ninth century B.C.) and the language of later books of wisdom (such as the Books of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes). It may well be that Job assumed much of earlier language while the cosmovision was changing.
And the thing about the Earth being the center of the universe? This was fiercely defended by Bible literalists in Galileo’s time. Did Galileo go to space to see the Earth orbiting around the sun? No. All he did was to use more or less the same approach used by Eratosthenes … a mathematical approach. Using mathematical principles, he did show that Copernicus was most probably right. His convictions were reinforced when he saw through the telescope that planets were not bright stars, but spheres … and that there were moons orbiting some of those spheres. Galileo strongly advised against taking the Bible literally, and the Catholic Church that condemned him learned that lesson the hard way.
Anyway!!! … Young-earth creationists are the ones who have to design an experiment and show scientifically how can you determine that the the Earth is "young", and that the Bible is literally right. However, many of the creationists I have challenged to do this said either that they were not interested in doing it, or that even if confronted with the evidence, they would believe the Bible regardless. In that case, you lose all moral and ethical rights to state your opinion on the subject. Of course, from a juridical standpoint you are free to believe whatever you want, even that the moon is made of cheese and can be eaten with syrup; but at the end of the day, you are not apt to make a decision regarding what should be taught as science in the schools. Science is based on evidence, and a person who likes to disregard evidence on purpose should not make any decisions concerning what should be taught or not in a science classroom. And if someone says that he or she is 100% sure that the Bible is literally true and that all of what it says is exactly what happened … I would ask that person: "Were you there?"
Response to (3): We have to clarify some things. Carbon-14 has a half-life of approximately 6,000 years (or more precisely 5,730 years). However, it can be used to date organic material less than 60,000 years old. Of course, you can never infer the age of the Earth from Carbon-14, and in this sense I agree with young-Earth creationists. For that very reason, Carbon-14 is never used to measure the age of the Earth.
This is a straw man argument which rests on a confusion. It confuses half-life of radioactive isotopes with Carbon-14. Certainly, Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope, but not all radioactive isotopes are Carbon-14. Whoever is scientifically literate cannot make this mistake. The best advice is to first understand how the Earth’s age is measured, and then make an opinion.
Response to (4): Scientific evidence has absolutely nothing to say about God’s existence. This is a point stressed by many scientists and philosophers of science today. Of course, it can refute some particular notions about God, such as the one which states that He created the Earth 6,000 or 10,000 years ago. But Christians who have no attachment to Bible literalism, and do consider much of what the Bible says just at a symbolic level, or as a reflection on the mentality of the people at the time, have no problem with an Earth that is billions of years old, nor evolution as the means used by God to make living things appear, including us. I happen to be that kind of Catholic who holds only the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of creation in Genesis, just as John Paul II did, and just as today’s Pope Benedict XVI does (see John Paul II, 2006, pp. 138-139, and Horn & Wiedenhofer (2008)). There are Protestant churches and denominations everywhere which have absolutely no problem embracing evolution, and there are even organizations dedicated to somehow explore the theological implications of evolution. Some of these are: the Biologos Foundation, Christians in Science, American Scientific Affiliation. I also have to mention the fact, that many of the partisans for Intelligent Design do favor an old-Earth creation view of the world.
Science is not "atheistic", but methodologically naturalist. This means that what makes science science is the search for natural explanations to phenomena on Earth. This is indeed fruitful in terms of our knowledge about the world. During Galileo’s time, no one could explain how the planets moved around the sun, so they attributed that motion to God Himself. This is argumentum ad ignorantiam, that is, they used God as a way to "fill in" a gap in the knowledge of why planets move. This is the famous "God of the gaps" argument. Then came Isaac Newton and showed that if you assume that gravity is what prevents planets from being released to empty space, and that motion is caused by its momentum, then you can explain perfectly why planets move around the sun without using God as the argument. Of course, Newton did not know how did this odd "action at a distance" called "gravity" worked, so he assumed that God was creating gravity and holding things together miraculously. Then came Einstein, and showed that gravity is nothing more than the result of the way space-time warps around massive objects.
Many Catholics and Protestants see this methodological naturalism as extremely important, because it has enabled us to understand the world much better. You can embrace methodological naturalism because that corresponds to the nature of science as an enterprise. That does not mean that you have to embrace a naturalistic philosophy as your own way or thinking, or as your own view of the universe. In fact, I think that theology’s embrace of evolution will represent a great advance in our respective religious beliefs.
What are Half-Lives of Isotopes?
In order to understand how old is the Earth, we need to understand the basics of half-life.
As you all know, matter is composed ultimately of atoms, which are the smallest units of matter. That does not mean that this unit is not made up of other units. There are the nucleus, made up of protons and neutrons, while it is surrounded by a cloud of electrons, which orbit in different energy levels. At least, not many young-Earth creationists dispute this fact (as far as I know).
If you look at the periodic table, you will notice that each element has two numbers. In the illustration I linked to, the number at the top is called "the atomic number", the number at the bottom is the "atomic mass". The atomic number consists of the number of protons that the atoms of such elements have. In the case of hydrogen (H), for instance, it has only one proton. In the case of helium (He) it has two protons. However, the atomic mass consists of the amount of mass the nucleus has (mass of proton + mass of neutron).
Finally, the properties of the elements are not determined by protons, but by the electrons, because they are precisely orbiting around the nucleus. The atom usually is electrically balanced. This means that the proton, which has a positive electric charge, will attract an electron, which has a negative electric charge. This neutralizes the charge of the atom. If there are less electrons than protons (positive ion), or more electrons than protons (negative ion) in an atom, then usually the atom will "search" (so to speak) to neutralize itself electrically. The way electrons organize in energy levels can determine the properties of an element: i.e. solid, liquid or gas at certain temperatures, or what color it will be, or the way it crystallizes, or the way it will chemically react with other elements or compounds, etc.
In the case of neutron, the story is a bit different. Because the neutron is electrically neutral (it has no electric charge) the amount of neutrons in an atom can vary. Hydrogen (H) in its natural state has no neutrons at all, but you can add a neutron (deuterium) or even two neutrons (tritium). It will behave exactly as usual hydrogen, except that it will be radioactive, and later I will explain why. Helium normally has two protons and two neutrons, but it can have more or less neutrons.
Elementary knowledge in electricity will make you ask the following question. A positive charged object will repel another positive charged object. If this is true, how do protons "stick together" in a nucleus along with the neutrons. The answer is that there is a force recognized and measured by scientists called strong-nuclear force. The energy released when an atom divides during a nuclear fission is in part due to the fact that this force is released. It can give you an idea of how strong this force might be.
On the other hand there is a weak-nuclear force. Neutrons have a peculiar trait that makes them different from protons … they tend to degrade. Neutrons are slightly heavier than protons. When they degrade, they release a beta particle (literally an electron), and the neutron becomes a proton. That means that, for instance, if you have a carbon atom, and one of its neutrons degrades into a proton, it ceases to be carbon and becomes nitrogen. It literally changes the atom from one element to another.
Such degradation of neutrons is not expected when atoms are stable, that is, when there is a stable amount of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. However, some amounts of neutrons can make the atom be unstable, leading to radioactive decay. For instance, a stable atom of Carbon-12 usually has 6 protons and 6 neutrons. Carbon-14, on the other hand, has 6 protons and 8 neutrons. This combination usually makes it unstable, leading it to radioactive decay, which makes Carbon-14 transform into a stable Nitrogen-14. When an atom is unstable in this manner, it is said to be a radioactive isotope, also called radioactive nuclide.
Now we are in a position to explain what is a half-life of a radioactive element. If you take, let’s say, a large or small sample of pure Carbon-14, it will decay at a predictable rate. A half-life has to do with the time it takes for a radioactive element to decrease in half. Size, in this sense, does not matter. You may have 10 kg. of Carbon-14, or 4 kg. of Carbon-14, and the radioactive element will decrease in half at a predictable rate: 5 kg. and 2 kg. respectively. For instance, Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730 years. If that is true, then that means that it will take 5,730 years for half of our chunk of Carbon-14 to degrade into Nitrogen-14. In another 5,730 years an additional fourth of our original chunk will have degraded, then an eighth, and then a sixteenth, and so on.
However, Carbon-14 is not a very good to measure the Earth’s age for two reasons. First, the one stated above, Carbon 14 is only good to measure up to 60,000 years old organic material. Secondly, there is Carbon-14 produced every day in the troposphere and the stratosphere due to bombardment of neutrons outside the Earth (cosmic rays) and their interaction with nitrogen atoms. Usually nitrogen’s interaction with a neutron coming from cosmic rays will produce Carbon-14 and Hydrogen.
How Can We Use Half-Lives to Get a Hint of How Old the Earth Is?
I won’t show in this part of my article how do I know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, just that it is older than 80,000,000 (much older than 4,000 B.C. or 6,000 B.C.). We’ll leave the 4.5 billion years old evidence for Part II of this article. The following is a very, very simple demonstration made by Kenneth Miller (2004, pp. 70-71).
If we can’t use Carbon-14 for our purposes of establishing the age of the Earth … which other radioactive isotopes may we use? There are radioactive isotopes that are not produced constantly in the Earth, but have been in the Earth all along. Let me give you a list of the half-lives of these isotopes and organize them from longest half-life to shortest:
Vanadium-50 —- Half Life: 6.0 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 6,000,000,000,000,000 years)
Neodymium-144 —- Half Life: 2.5 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 2.500,000,000,000,000 years)
Halfnium-174 —- Half Life: 2.0 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 2,000,000,000,000,000 years)
Platinum-192 —- Half Life: 1.0 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 1,000,000,000,000,000 years)
Indium-115 —- Half Life: 6.0 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 600,000,000,000,000 years)
Gadolinium-152 —- Half Life: 1.1 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 110,000,000,000,000 years)
Tellurium-123 —- 1.2 x 10¹³ years (i.e. … 12,000,000,000,000 years)
Platinum-190 —- 6.9 x 10¹¹ years (i.e. … 690,000,000,000 years)
Lanthanum-138 —- 1.12 x 10¹¹ years (i.e. … 112,000,000,000 years)
Samarium-147 —- 1.06 x 10¹¹ years (i.e. … 106,000,000,000 years)
Rubidium-87 —- 4.88 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 48,800,000,000 years)
Rhenium-187 —- 4.3 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 43,000,000,000 years)
Lutentium-176 —- 3.5 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 35,000,000,000 years)
Thorium-232 —- 1.4 x 10¹? years (i.e. … 14,000,000,000 years)
Uranium-238 —- 4.47 x 10? years (i.e. … 4,470,000,000 years)
Potassium-40 —- 1.25 x 10? years (i.e. … 1,250,000,000 years)
Uranium-235 —- 7.04 x 10? years (i.e. … 704,000,000 years)
Plutonium-244 —- 8.2 x 10? years (i.e. … 82,000,000 years)
You may ask: "Hey! How do scientists know that these are the half-lives of all of these radioactive isotopes? These scientists have not been around THAT long to measure them!" The answer is that scientists have taken these isotopes in nature, and have measured the rate they decay in seconds, which gives them a clue as to how long their half-lives are.
You may ask: "But … but … these millions, billions, trillions of years are such a long time. Certainly there can be gazillion factors which may alter the whole half-life period." Unfortunately, this statement is false. These and other isotopes found in nature have been subjected to every single natural influence imaginable, from electricity, to radiation, to many other factors. … Guess what?… They will not affect at all the decay rate of these radioactive isotopes. Simply speaking, these elements will decay at their own predictable rate, regardless of outside natural influence.
If this is true, we are not talking about a "mere opinion" scientists have on half-lives of elements. We are talking about solid, hardcore science.
Now, look at the data above. Remember that these are radioactive isotopes found in nature, we are not talking about isotopes found in space or created in labs… they are found on Earth. We can see in the list the longest (Vanadium-50) and the shortest half-life found in nature (Plutonium-244). Are there radioactive isotopes found in nature which are shorter than Plutonium-244. The answer is: there may have been, but none of them are found.
What does this mean? Simple!
- The Earth is not infinitely old: if that were the case, we would find no radioactive isotopes intact in nature.
- The Earth is not young (10,000 or 6,000 years old): if that were the case, we would find radioactive isotopes in nature younger than 80,000,000 years old (such as Halfnium-182 or Lead-205).
- The Earth is not younger than 80,000,000 years: which is what the half-life of Plutonium-244 implies.
This fact alone shows that Young-Earth Creationism is wrong! The world is not 10,000 years old, nor 6,000 years old. The half-lives of these isotopes found in nature reveal a very old Earth, whose age is older than 80 million years and is younger than 6.0 x 10¹? years.
References
Horn, S. O. & Wiedenhofer, S. (2008). Creation and evolution: a conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
John Paul II. (2006). Man and woman he created them: a theology of the body. Boston: Pauline.
Miller, K. (2007). Finding Darwin’s God: a scientist’s search for common ground between God and evolution. New York: Harper Perennial.
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
(This is the continuation of Part I, Part II)
Did Saint Paul Hate Women?
I consider myself a feminist, but give me a break! Give me a quarter for every time I have had read or heard feminists complaining against St. Paul ad nauseam. Sometimes, it gets to the point of outright demonization of the guy. In the best of cases, they say that St. Paul was "ambiguous" regarding women.
The extreme way of dealing with this is what I call the "tabloid approach": "Was St. Paul gay?!" Yes, "tabloid" because that is the basic question every show-business news-reporter asks about famous artists. "Is Tom Cruise gay? Is Megan Fox lesbian?" I reply: "Who cares? Get a life!" Apparently these people have nothing more intelligent to ask.
Of course, there is an academic version of this, of academics who ask if St. Paul is gay or not. There is also an element that GLBTT communities have asked this question. I have nothing against the GLBTT communities, and I am in favor of gay marriage … but please, to further your cause you don’t have to make everyone famous in history gay. Sometimes, if I show signs that the person in question is more probably not gay, then the answer I receive from some of them is the annoying "you never know". Please, leave that kind of answer to the X-Files and the Twilight Zone, and out of historiography!
Why would he be gay? They argue, because St. Paul was celibate (1 Cor. 7:8), complained about a "thorn on my flesh" constantly bothering him (2 Cor. 12:7-10), and that he supposedly "hated women". Wow! I don’t know if this sort of question will ever help the GLBTT community by spreading the false stereotype that gay men hate women, and that lesbians hate men. Such stereotypes serve little to history or historiographical research about anyone, much less St. Paul, and they definitely do not serve to advance GLBTT causes.
But, where is the evidence that St. Paul hated women? Well, the passages are not difficult to find. Take, for instance, this passage:
But I should like you to understand that
the head of every man is Christ,
the head of woman is man,
and the head of Christ is God.
For any man to pray or to prophesy with his head covered shows disrespect for his head. And for a woman to pray or prophesy with her head uncovered shows disrespect for her head; it is exactly the same as if she had her hair shaved off. Indeed, if a woman does go without a veil, she would have her hair cut off too; but if it is a shameful thing for a woman to have her hair cut off or shaved off, then she should wear veil. But for a man it is not right to have his head covered, since he is the image of God and reflects God’s glory, but woman is the reflection of man’s glory. For man did not come from woman; no, woman came from man; nor was man created for the sake of man: and this is why it is right for a woman to wear on her head a sign of the authority over her, because of the angels.
Decide for yourselves: does it seem fitting that a woman should pray to God without a veil? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but when a woman has long hair, it is her glory? After all her hair was given to her to be a covering.
If anyone wants to be contentious, I say that we have no such custom, nor do any of the churches of God. (1 Cor. 11: 3-10; 13-16).
Geez! Now that sounds discouraging and degrades our view of St. Paul. We could show further evidence:
As in all churches of God’s holy people, women are to remain quiet in the assemblies, since they have no permission to speak: theirs is a subordinate part, as the Law itself says. If there is anything they want to know, they should ask their husbands at home: it is shameful for a woman to speak in the assembly. Do you think that you are the source of the word of God? Or that you are the only people to whom it has come? (1 Cor. 14: 33b-36).
Ouch! There is more!
During instruction, a woman should be quiet and respectful. I give no permission for a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. A woman ought to be quiet, because Adam was formed first and Eve afterwards, and it was not Adam who was led astray but the woman who was led astray and fell into sin. Nevertheless, she will be saved by child-bearing, provided she lives a sensible life and is constant in faith and love and holiness (1 Tim. 2: 11-15).
And last, but not least:
Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, since, as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church is subject to Chris , so should wives be to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives, just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy by washing her in cleansing water with a form of words, so that when he took the Church to himself she would be glorious, with no speck of wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless (Eph. 5:22-27)
Maybe there is no passage that subordinates women to men than this passage! In this article, though, I wish to make a daring claim: St. Paul did not hate women, had deep respect for them, and he encouraged women leadership. After all the evidence I just presented, is there any possibility to rehabilitate St. Paul in such a way? On trial he should be condemned for misogyny … an open and shut case! Is it?
The Case of the Post-Pauline Letters
There is a problem taking some of these passages as expressing St. Paul’s real opinion on women, especially when some of the letters quoted above were not written by him. This is the case of the post-pauline letters. These are letters in the corpus paulinum which scholars, for different reasons, consider that were not written by St. Paul, but made later by members of the communities he established.
There are different criteria to determine the difference between the post-pauline and genuine letters. The history of how these letters were adopted shows that at the very beginning, when they appeared, they were not considered genuine by Christians in the first-place. For example, during the second century, only ten letters of the corpus paulinum were considered genuine letters, with the exclusion of 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews. By the end of that century 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were included, but Hebrews was still excluded. It was not until the third century that Hebrews was integrated to the corpus paulinum, first in the Eastern Churches, then in the West. By this history, we should take into consideration the fact that 1 and 2 Timothy were excluded in the first-place, which means that they were not considered genuine Pauline letters by Christians of the first half of the second century.
There are other indicators that 1 and 2 Timothy were not written by St. Paul. First, the style is completely different, and reflects the reality of the end of first century and beginning the second century C.E. For instance, 2 Timothy makes an explicit reference to the Gnostics, a group that did not exist until the second century C.E., which places 1 and 2 Timothy’s composition in that same century:
My dear Timothy, take great care of all that has been entrusted to you. Turn away from the godless philosophical discussions and the contradictions of the ‘knowledge’ [gnóseos: ???????] which is not knowledge at all; by adopting this, some have missed the goal of faith. Grace be with you (1 Tim. 6:20-21).
This means one very important thing: the opinion we find in 1 Timothy about women shutting up is not St. Paul’s opinion, but that of some of his communities long after he died.
The same happens with the Letter to the Ephesians. If we notice the letters to Colossians and Ephesians, which came from one sole source, they deal with a growing problem of the Christian churches at the very end of the first century C.E. There is already a growing influence of proto-gnostic groups, especially the radical dualist views on God and the cosmos, and extreme ascetic practices. Look, for instance at these passages: Col. 2:8, 18, 23. Ephesians builds on the worries of Colossians, and both letters elaborate a conception of the Cosmic Christ that is an alternative theology to these proto-Gnostic groups, but consistent with much of genuine Pauline theology: Col. 2:14-15; 3:2,5-6,9-10; Eph. 2:13-16; 4:9-10,15-16; 5:8,10-11,14. Scholars have also identified an unusual vocabulary compared to the known authentic Pauline letters. This means that Ephesians does not necessarily represent St. Paul’s views either, but instead of that of his communities long after he died.
An Interloper …
Of course, even if we say that 1 Timothy says that women should shut up is not a genuine Pauline letter, there is still a problem within a genuine Pauline letter: a passage where St. Paul seems to say that women should shut up in assemblies (1 Cor. 14: 33b-36). Yet, most scholars have recognized this passage as an interpolation in the genuine text. The problem is, how do we know? Let’s look at the whole passage again, and I’ll highlight the controversial passage:
Let two prophets, or three, speak while the rest weigh their words; and if a revelation comes to someone else who is sitting by, the speaker should stop speaking. You can all prophesy, but one at a time, then all will learn something and all receive encouragement. The prophetic spirit is to be under the prophets’ control, for God is a God not of disorder but peace.
As in all the churches of God’s holy people, women are to remain quiet in the assemblies, since they have no permission to speak: theirs is a subordinate part, as the Law itself says. If there is anything they want to know, they should ask their husbands at home: it is shameful for a woman to speak in the assembly. Do you really think that you are the source of the word of God? Or that you are the only people to whom it has come?
Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have any spiritual powers must recognise that what I am writing to you is a commandment from the Lord. If anyone does not recognise this, it is because that person is not recognised himself (1 Cor. 14: 29-38).
Don’t you get the distinct feeling that the highlighted passage is actually interrupting the original subject? Let’s read it without it:
Let two prophets, or three, speak while the rest weigh their words; and if a revelation comes to someone else who is sitting by, the speaker should stop speaking. You can all prophesy, but one at a time, then all will learn something and all receive encouragement. The prophetic spirit is to be under the prophets’ control, for God is a God not of disorder but peace. Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have any spiritual powers must recognise that what I am writing to you is a commandment from the Lord. If anyone does not recognise this, it is because that person is not recognised himself (1 Cor. 14: 29-33a,37-38).
And, as we shall see later, this passage is completely inconsistent with St. Paul’s genuine regard for women leadership in Christianity. This shows that the controversial text in 1 Cor. 14 is a later interpolation, most probably by the same guy who wrote 1 Tim. 2:11-15.
Women, Cover Your Heads!
Now, there is also this passage 1 Cor. 11:3-10, 13-16 which was written by St. Paul, no question about it! First it is known that St. Paul was influenced by several Hellenistic philosophies, among them Judeo-Hellenistic philosophies. Remember, he was born in Tarsus, lived in Damascus, and was plenty acquainted of both Jewish and Hellenistic thinking. This controversial passage is a very clear example of one aspect of Judeo-Hellenistic philosophy which conceived a hierarchical authority in the world. This can be seen in passages implying the hierarchy of God-Christ-man (1 Cor. 3:23). Since according to Genesis, women came from men, then the order of authority should be God-Christ-man-woman. Also, the authority he is talking about is only stated within the relationship of wife and husband.
Let’s not be deceived. St. Paul did hold a male-centered conception of man-woman relationship. This is the reason why he advised women to cover their heads. For a former zealous-Jew, this is not surprising at all. Every hard-core Jewish man would hold this male-centered view of women.
What is not expected, though, is that this male-centered view would be so mild. What do I mean? Despite the fact that in a way he sees women inferior to men, he feels uneasy supporting such male-centered view, and he later seems to correct it. Immediately after saying that women should cover their heads because woman came from man, he thinks it over and says:
However, in the Lord, though woman is nothing without man, man is nothing without woman; and though woman came from man, so does every man come from a woman, and everything comes from God (1 Cor. 11:11-12).
Wow! That one is unexpected!
But it gets better than that . . .
St. Paul’s Respect and Deep Love for Women
The New Testament has a Letter to the Ephesians that was not written by St. Paul, and another letter to the Ephesians that is! Of course, it is not called "St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians", but it is attached to one of St. Paul’s genuine letters. I’m talking about Romans 16:1-16;21-23, which itself was an independent letter which a later editor attached to the rest of the Letter to the Romans. How do we know this? If you follow the passages I’ll quote later, you realize that a lot of the people he greets in this passage did not live in Rome, so it is highly unlikely that he would send a letter to the Romans to people who lived too far from it. It’s like sending a letter to a community in Washington D.C. so it sends greetings to friends who live in London.
This letter was written probably in A.D. 54 or 55. He was about to deliver the collected money to the Church of Jerusalem. Phoebe was a deaconess of the Church of Cenchreae, a place in Corinth which serves as port. St. Paul has been staying in her house, and she is about to travel to Ephesus to deliver a letter. How do we know that it is addressed to Ephesus, in Asia Minor? Because much of the people he greets in the letter are from Asia, and some of them were living in Ephesus (e.g Rom. 16:5, see also Acts 18:1-2,18-21,24-26; 20:16-17; 1 Cor. 16:19).
This letter is a gem! It lets us see in all its glory the deep love and affection that he had for women, especially those who served as Church leaders. Let’s take a look at it.
He wants Phebe, a deaconess of the Church of Cenchreae to deliver this specific letter, and says: "give her, in the Lord, a welcome worthy of God’s holy people, and help her in with whatever she needs from you — she herself has come to the help of many people, including myself (Rom 16:2)
Next, he greets "Prisca and Aquila", apparently a married couple. The interesting part about these names is that the woman appears first. At that time, who appears first in the order of names meant a superiority in leadership. It is simply unusual to find the wife mentioned before the husband. This is repeated in another letter of St. Paul (1 Cor. 16:19), and even the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 18:18,26). Apparently St. Paul in this letter is not only respecting her leadership, but also says: "my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks to save my life; to them, thanks not only from me, but from all the churches among the gentiles, and my greetings to the Church at their house (Rom. 16:3b-5).
The next woman who appears is a certain "Mary" who is described as the one "who worked so hard for you" (Rom 16:6).
Then he greets another couple … a very interesting couple: Andronicus and Junia, the latter being the name of a woman. St. Paul describes them as "those outstanding [among] the apostles . . . my kinsmen and fellow-prisoners, who were in Christ before me" (Rom. 16:7). A woman apostle???!!! Now, THAT is interesting!
He also greets Tryphaena and Triphosa whom he says are very hardworking in the Lord (Rom. 16:12a).
Next he greets Persis, whom he describes as beloved friend and hard-worker for the Lord (Rom. 16:12b).
He even greets Rufus’ mother, whom he loves her as if she were his own mother (Rom. 16:13b).
He also greets a certain "Julia" and also someone who is "Nereus’ sister" (Rom. 16:15).
The evidence is not limited to this brief letter to Ephesus, but in other genuine letters, he expresses loving concern and admiration for other women leaders, such as in the case of Chloe (1 Cor. 1:11), and about Euodia and Syntyche (Phil. 4:2-3).
Finally, let’s not forget that at one point even St. Paul complained that he was not being allowed to have women missioners with him, and says: "[Have we not] every right to be accompanied by a Christian wife, like the other apostles, like the brothers of the Lord, and like Cephas [Peter]?" (1 Cor. 9:5).
If St. Paul is a woman-hater, then Paris is Venezuela’s capital.
P. S. …
- Why was St. Paul celibate? Answer: Because like every Christian at that time, he was waiting for Jesus Christ to arrive soon, and did not want his attention divided between things of the Lord and addressing the needs of a wife and kids. If you don’t believe it, read again the passage where St. Paul talks about his celibacy within context (1 Cor. 7:1-9).
- About the thorn of the flesh that bothered St. Paul (2 Cor. 12:7b-9a), it is most probably an illness of which he asked God to be healed from. It is not a sexual problem. Among the weaknesses he mentions later, he explicitly mentions illnesses and makes no allusions to any temptation of the flesh, such as a sexual problem (2 Cor. 12:10).
- Even when St. Paul supports a mild male-centered view of women, he also implies in his theology that before the eyes of the Lord, men and women are equal (Gal. 3:28).
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
(This is the continuation of the first article on this subject)
Saint Paul has been accused of all sorts of things. I have known authors who have blamed him for the Great Fire of Rome, but this is impossible given that recent Bible scholarship has established solid chronology locating his death in the year A.D. 58, long before the Great Fire (A.D. 64). There are others who have accused him of creating a struggle between Judaism and Christianity, which, as we saw in our earlier article, is not the case. Some, like Robert Eisenman, accused him of being "the Teacher of Lies" whom the Dead Sea Scrolls talk about, which is impossible, because the texts in question have been dated all the way before Christ was born using carbon-dating. There are other more outrageous theories which compare him to Simon Magus (and it is something very interesting which I plan to write about in the future), or that he is somehow related to Herod’s family (the Idumean Dinasty). This shows how much St. Paul fires the passions and the imagination of scholars and not-so-scholars.
This does not mean that Bible scholarship is made up of people with outrageous claims. Quite the contrary, it has made significant progress regarding the corpus paulinum, making a critical evaluation of the Acts of the Apostles, and creating a better philosophical and theological profile of St. Paul. I will share only part of the most recent profile in this article.
For purposes of research, I will only take into consideration his genuine letters: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemo and Philipians. The rest of the letters are post-Pauline, written after St. Paul died, and are not helpful for our task: 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and Hebrews.
St. Paul: the Anti-Semitic?
One of the most widespread criticisms against St. Paul is that he supposedly hated the Jews, and that he made explicit anti-semitic statements. This is not surprising when we find such passages in the corpus paulinum like these:
[The Jews] put the Lord Jesus to death and the prophets too, and persecuted us also. Their conduct does not please God, and makes them the enemies of the whole human race, because they are hindering us from preaching to the gentiles to save them. Thus all the time they are reaching the full extent of their iniquity, but retribution has finally overtaken them (1 Thes. 2:15-16)
Beware of dogs! Beware of evil workmen! Beware of the castrated! We are the true people of the circumcision since we worship by the Spirit of God and make Christ Jesus our only boast, not relying on physical qualifications, although, I myself could rely on these too. If anyone does claim to rely on them, my claim is better. Circumcised on the eighth day of my life, I was born of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrew parents. In the matter of the Law, I was a Pharisee, as for religious fervour, I was a persecutor of the Church; as for the uprightness embodied in the Law, I was faultless. But what were once my assets, I now through Christ Jesus count as losses. . . . Brothers, be united in imitating me. Keep your eyes fixed on those who act according to the example you have from me. For there are so many people of whom I have often warned you, and now I warn you again with tears in my eyes, who behave like the enemies of Christ’s cross. They are destined to be lost; their god is the stomach; they glory in what they should think shameful, since their minds are set on earthly things. but our homeland is in heaven and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transfigure the wretched body of ours into the mould of his glorious body, through the working of the power which he was, even to bring all things under his mastery. (Phil. 3:2-7,17-21).
Not only that, but we know many episodes in the Acts of the Apostles where St. Paul was victimized by the Jews: Acts 18:12-17, 22:1-29, 23:29-30. And even Saint Paul himself talks about how he was chastised and mistreated by Jews: Gal. 5:11; 2 Cor. 11:24, 26.
He even has some angry discussions with the part of the Church which favors a more Jewish approach to the Law (Gal. 2:1-14). He even refers to them as the false brethren (Gal. 2:4). The reasoning of many people who read these passages is as follows: "Saint Paul was persecuted by the Jews, and hated the most Judaizing sector of Christianity, hence he hated the Jews. He became a rabid anti-semitic."
Is this true?
Conflicts with the Jews: Are They Guilty of Everything?
It is far more complicated than that. Christianity was at first one branch of Judaism. Jesus did not intend his movement to become another religion, since He wanted the conversion of Israel and establish God’s Kingdom (Matt. 10:5-7). This view contemporary Christians have that Judaism persecuted Christianity just because it followed Jesus is a bit exaggerated. There was no doubt that a confrontation between Jesus and Jewish authorities existed, but after Jesus died there were two main branches of Christianity which existed many years before St. Paul converted: one was a Christianity which wanted to preserve the ways of Jewish Law, and a Christianity which did not adhere to many aspects of Jewish Law. The latter established itself outside of Palestine, for example, in places like Damascus or Antioch. This was the sector of Christianity which was most persecuted by Jewish authorities. If you think of the first martyr to die in the hands of the Jews, St. Stephen, shows this is true. The name "Stephen" is not Jewish, it is Greek: ????????. St. Paul himself, as we have discussed in the previous article, was born outside Palestine with a strong Jewish background, but surrounded by gentility. It is highly probable that the reason why he persecuted Christians in Damascus was because they didn’t adhere to Jewish Law. I don’t deny that Jewish authorities also persecuted Jewish Christians, but they were limited to chastisements. In St. Stephen’s case, it went as far as death.
Despite this, Christians, especially those who adhered to the Law, continued assisting to Synagogue meetings, and kept worshiping in Jerusalem’s Temple. All of that changed after A.D. 70, when Christians were banned from Synagogues, and in many cases were persecuted by Jewish authorities. In this case, the relationship between Christians and Jews became very bitter, and this can be seen very clearly in the Gospels of Luke and John, two of the latest Gospels, where Jews are almost always on the losing side, and sometimes refer to them in very strong words (e.g. John 8:44).
The Acts of the Apostles was presumably the same author of Luke’s Gospel, and the antagonism between Jews and Christians is displayed all over that writing. He wants to display St. Paul as a respected and eminent person before Christians and the authorities, but presents the Jews as antagonistic. Hence, we must be critically evaluate what it says.
For instance, in three passages of the Acts, St. Paul seems to remind authorities of his citizenship when he’s about to be whipped: Acts 16:37-38; 22:22-29; 23:27. In the last two of these texts, the problem originated with the Jews and the authorities backed off due to his citizenship. Indeed, any form of whipping or torturing Roman citizens was strictly forbidden by the lex Porcia. Yet of these three occasions only in the first one (Acts 16:37-38) he says he was whipped despite him being a Roman citizen. Saint Paul in his letters revealed he suffered far more than that. Without a doubt he suffered under the hands of the Jews and gentiles alike. Among the sufferings he went through we can mention: five times he was given thirty nine lashes, three times he was beaten with sticks, and once he was stoned (2 Cor. 11:24-26), practically contradicting the claim of the Acts that he was a Roman citizen, or that he constantly recalled it to the authorities.
Also St. Paul reveals in his letters that, unlike the claims of the Acts, much of the suffering Christians endured came from the authorities themselves, not the Jews per-se. For instance, the Acts of the Apostles says that the Jews were planning to kill him in Damascus (Acts 9:23-25), yet St. Paul says that this persecution came from the Damascene ethnarch Arethas, not the Jews (2 Cor. 11:32-33).
What was Saint Paul’s Real Relationship with the Jewish Tendency in the first Christian Church?
St. Paul’s relationship with the Judaizing sector of the Church was not easy, but that does not mean he hated it. On the contrary, he tried his best to recognize the authority of the Jewish Church authorities in Jerusalem, and to have a conciliatory approach with much of his opponents. This is apparent in many of the passages we find in Saint Paul’s letter, where he recognized St. Peter, St. James and St. John as being the pillars of the Church (Gal. 2:9). He even complained because of some of the divisions of leadership that appeared within the Church, which he feared would lead to disparate Churches not joined together in Christ (1 Cor. 3).
However, to understand well the relationship between St. Paul and the Jewish sector, we have to take a look at the Acts of the Apostles. It basically presents the Church as an organization where there are differences, but where the solution could be reached almost with ease. For instance, Acts says that the controversy regarding circumcision was discussed, leading the Church authorities to be convinced of St. Paul’s arguments against it, and submitting a letter to be followed by Antioch’s community and its missions (Acts 15:1-29). Following the meeting, St. Paul returned to his community in Antioch, where they finally received the letter, everyone was very happy and the Jerusalem party went back home (Acts 15:30-35). However, the meeting at Jerusalem and Antioch were far from peaceful.
St. Paul says that he discussed his case against circumcision and other issues in the Jerusalem Council, and then privately with the recognized leaders. However, he refers to the "false brothers" who accused St. Paul of subverting Christianity by saying that gentiles should not fulfill Jewish Law (Gal. 2:1-5). Yet, there is a problem with his account, apparently at the end of that passage he interrupts the sequence of events. For scholars, this silence is a sign that St. Paul lost the argument that day. The Jerusalem Council, contrary to what Acts claimed, was a total failure due to the irreconcilable position of the most fundamentalist Jewish sector within Christianity, which wanted it to require gentiles to follow the Law, and the Antioch community represented by Saint Paul and St. Barnabas. The letter that Acts is talking about was not written that day (Acts 15:23-29). St. Paul was not the one who was being intolerant to the Jewish sector of Christianity, but in this case we find the very extreme fundamentalist Jews in Christianity who were intolerant … the ones he calls "false brothers". This was the reason St. Paul wanted to discuss these issues later privately with the Church authorities.
There, they went into a process of mutual discovery of each other, which St. Paul describes as the recognition of St. Peter as the one in charge of the mission among the Jews in Palestine, and that it was up to St. Paul to be in charge of the mission among the gentiles. They also reached an agreement of solidarity, of Antioch should contribute to the Church in Jerusalem. This is due to the fact that by the years AD 47-48, there was lack of food in Palestine, during the Sabbath year.
Although the conflict seemed to be over, it was not so. St. Paul tells us in Galatians:
However, when Cephas [St. Peter] came to Antioch, then I did oppose him to his face since he was manifestly in the wrong. Before certain people from James came, he used to eat with gentiles; but as soon as these came, he backed out and kept apart from them, out of fear of the circumcised. And the rest of the Jews put on the same act as he did, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity.
When I saw, through, that their behavior was not true to the Gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all of them, ‘Since you, though you are a Jew, live like the gentiles and not like the Jews, how can you compel the gentiles to live like the Jews? (Gal 2:11-14)
Apparently the most fundamentalist Judaizing Christians from Jerusalem’s Church (whose head was St. James) went to Antioch, and their show of force was so strong that even St. Peter felt he should Judaize despite his acting like a gentile before they arrived. What was the problem?
If you look at the letter as shown in Acts (15:23-29) it states that gentiles are no longer required to be circumcised, but it says the following: "you are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from illicit marriages. Avoid these, and you will do what is right" (Acts 15:29). In other words, "you don’t have to circumcise yourselves, but have a Jewish diet". Before the Jerusalem party arrived, St. Peter participated in the meals with the gentiles. After the Jerusalem party arrived and read the letter, he was forced to not share some of their meal, and required the Antioch community to abide to this Judaizing determination. St. Paul was not happy. The intriguing silence after telling the story reveals again that St. Paul lost this meeting as well.
Despite his anger at the whole situation, especially at the "false brothers", the rest of his missionary life was marked by his allegiance to Jerusalem’s Church, by collecting money which he finally delivered to Jerusalem in A.D. 55, when he was accused, which led in the end to be condemned to death in A.D. 58.
Saint Paul’s Real Views about the Jews
While many authors entertain the idea that Saint Paul hated the Jews, a close look at his attitude shows that this is not the case. For him, Jews should be saved through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross along with gentiles.
Let us look at the two quotes we mentioned in the first section of this article: 1 Thes. 2:15-16. The letter to the Thessalonians is presumably the first letter written by St. Paul (A.D. 51) and the first Christian writing that we have available. If we take a very good look at this passage, we become aware of two interesting things. First, it interrupts the flow of the text only to say that the Jews were the ones who killed Jesus Christ and the prophets. Secondly, it says that "retribution has finally overtaken them". What does this mean exactly? What kind of retribution? The only thing that comes to mind is the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, yet this happened years after St. Paul died. The interruption of the text, the harsh tone of the passage, and this little detail leads us to believe that 1 Thes. 2:15-16 has the traits of being interpolated in St. Paul’s original letter by a later copyist (presumably from a Pauline school during the last two decades of the first century C.E.). This passage, then, does not reflect St. Paul’s actual opinion about the Jews.
Let’s take a look at Phil. 3:1b-4:1, where St. Paul apparently refers to Jews with extremely harsh words: "dogs", "castrated", etc. But there are some things in this passage that seem too out of character for St. Paul. For instance, nowhere in the genuine letters St. Paul offers himself as a universal ethos or ethical example to be followed universally by Christians. The term "Pharisee", as I explained in our earlier article, is used to mean a pious Jew, which is a meaning developed by Christians after A.D. 70, after they were banned from all Synagogues and excluded by Jews. This long passage also interrupts the flow of the text between Phil. 3:1a and Phil. 4:2. Once again, we are at a piece of text which was not written by St. Paul, but interpolated within the original text of the letter to the Philippians. This interpolation does not count to find out Saint Paul’s views about the Jews.
To look at his real views, I suggest looking at his letter to the Romans. There are some reasons for that. St. Paul’s letter to the Romans is the latest letter he wrote (approximately A.D. 55), which means that he wrote it after having so many conflicts with the Jews, after being chastised and mistreated by them, and after his conflicts with Judaizing Christianity. Let’s see what he has to say:
This is the truth and I am speaking in Christ, without preference, as my conscience testifies for me in the Holy Spirit; there is a great sorrow and unremitting agony in my heart; I could pray that I myself might be accursed and cut off from Christ, if this could benefit the brothers who are my own flesh and blood [the Jews]. They are Israelites; it was they who were adopted as children, the glory was theirs and the covenants; to them were given the Law and the worship of God and the promises. To them belong the fathers and out of them came Christ according to the flesh. God is above all, may He be praised for ever! [Psalms 41:14] Amen (Romans 9:1-5).
So, for St. Paul, the Jews have an extremely important place in the history of salvation, and for that reason they should be respected as children of God. They were the chosen people where Jesus Christ came from.
There is still another very important passage regarding this subject:
What I am saying is this: it is possible that God abandoned his people? Out of the question! I too am an Israelite, descended from Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God never abandoned his own people to whom, ages ago, he had given recognition. . . . What I am saying is this: Was this stumbling [Jews not understanding the Gospel] to lead to their final downfall? Out of the question! On the contrary, their failure brought salvation for the gentiles, in order to stir them to envy. And if their fall has proved a great gain to the world, and their loss has proved a great gain to the gentiles — how much greater a gain will come when all is restored to them!
Let me say then to you gentiles that, as far as I am an apostle to the gentiles, I take pride in this work of service; and I want it to be the means of rousing to envy the people who are my own blood-relations and so of saving some of them. Since their rejection meant the reconciliation of the world, do you know what their re-acceptance will mean. Nothing less than life from the dead!
. . .
As Scripture says:
From Zion will come the Redeemer,
he will remove godlessness from Jacob,
And this will be my covenant with them,
when I take their sins away.
As regards to the Gospel, they are enemies, but for your sake; but as regards those who are God’s choice, they are still well loved for the sake of their ancestors. There is no change of mind on God’s part about the gifts he has made or of his choice. (selections from Rom. 11:1-32)
I invite people to read the whole passage of Rom. 11:1-32, perhaps one of the most beautiful ever written by St. Paul. One thing about it is clear, St. Paul was definitely not anti-semitic in any sense. He may have had harsh encounters with them, but this letter, the latest written by St. Paul, reveals that he feels a very deep love towards the Jews. His belief is that their failure to recognize the Gospel as coming from God prevents them from knowing the truth, but that in the end they will recognize Jesus as the Christ (the Messiah), and that through faith in Him God will forgive all of their sins.
Equality of Jews and Gentiles in Christ
According to St. Paul, Jews and Christians should never be distinct from one another in the eyes of God. Immediately after talking about the disagreeable incident in Antioch and his disgust at St. Peter’s actions, he expresses the reasons why he is so angry at the decision reached by the Jerusalem Church:
We who were born Jews and not gentile sinners have nevertheless learnt that sometone is reckoned as upright not by practising the Law but by faith in Jesus Christ; and we too came to believe in Christ Jesus so as to be reckoned as upright by faith in Christ and not by practising the Law; since no human being can be found upright by keeping the Law. (Galatians 2:15-16).
Later, he elaborates:
But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the Law, locked up to wait for the faith which would eventually be revealed to us. So the Law was serving as a slave to look after us. So the Law was serving as a slave to look after us, to lead us to Christ, so that we could be justified by faith. But now that faith has come we are no longer under a slave looking after us; for all of you are the children of God, through faith, in Jesus Christ, since every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ.
There can be neither Jew nor Greek,
there can be neither slave nor freeman,
there can be neither male nor female
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
And simply by being Christ’s, you are that progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise (Gal. 3:23-29).
Are these the words of an anti-semitic?
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
Book Review
Evans, C. A. (2006). Fabricating Jesus: how modern scholars distort the Gospels. IL: InterVarsity Press.
I bought several books some months ago regarding theology and Bible scholarship, so I could read them this Summer. I admit that when I bought this particular book I was a bit skeptical about its content. The author was relatively unknown to me, although I did notice that he co-authored a book with N. T. Wright, one renowned Christian and Bible scholar, today an Episcopal Bishop, who has made very significant contributions to serious Bible scholarship.
On the face of it, this book seemed apologetic at least, but when I glanced at it, it seemed full of useful information for my future research. Only recently did I notice that it was far more interesting and stimulating than I thought. Yes, this is from a Christian who wants to establish a debate with other renowned Bible scholars, especially those of the more skeptical tendency. By "skeptical", I mean skeptical about the reliability of the Gospel accounts. The book is apologetic in nature, but it is "apologetic" in the best sense of the word. It presents a great defense for his case.
I already saw some other books which tried to respond to the skeptical positions of modern Bible Scholars. For example, Timothy Paul Jones wrote the book Misquoting Truth as a response to Bart Erhman’s Misquoting Jesus. Unfortunately, Jones response was apologetic in the bad sense of the term, relying not much on scientific Bible scholarship, like Ehrman’s, but rather his conviction about the fact that what the New Testament says about Jesus is true. In this case, I highly recommend Misquoting Jesus thousands of times over Misquoting Truth. I also recommend Ehrman’s Jesus Interrupted.
When we are reading Craig A. Evans we are not in such a situation. He does believe that the Gospels are more reliable than people usually suppose, but Evans shows that he is a high caliber Bible scholar, he knows what he is talking about. And what makes his book much more interesting is that many of the skeptics who have published over the years consider mostly Greek texts in order to discredit the Gospels. Many of them are not familiar with Hebrew, and if they are, they are not familiar with Aramaic.
For instance, contrary with usual scholarship, which considers Luke’s (Q) version of the Lord’s Prayer as the original, he opens the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Matthew’s version could be the original. After all, the missing sections that appear in Matthew’s Gospel can be correlated with well-known prayers of Jesus’ time. I’m not a Bible scholar, although I read texts on Bible Scholarship, but it seems to me that the conventional (skeptical) view on the Lord’s Prayer is correct. Even if what Evans says is true, the question is why would the author of the Gospel of Luke omit the text that appears in Matthew’s. Still, Evans opened my eyes to a new possibility, although it still seems to me unlikely.
However, there was something that made me uneasy regarding the consensus among skeptics in New Testament scholarship for many years. Since I was in high school I’ve studied the Bible extensively, even to the point of buying a volume on the Dead Sea Scrolls and read much of them (not all of them). I completely understood that scholars did not want to suppose that Jesus made miracles, since Bible scholarship is a scientific enterprise. On the other hand, using that discipline’s own tools, I concluded that at the very least Jesus must have been famous in His own time for doing miracles. Whether He actually did can be questioned by skeptics, but it seemed to me beyond doubt that he created a fame for miracle-working.
How do I know? Because of an "embarrassing" passage (for Christians) where John the Baptist in jail sends his disciples to ask Jesus if He is the one who is to come (the Messiah) or if there was another (Luke 7:18-21). Why is this an embarrassing passage? If you take the Gospels’ content, when John the Baptist baptized Jesus, he saw the Holy Spirit descend on Him and heard a voice stating that Jesus is the Messiah and His Son. Why would John the Baptist, after having witnessed something like that, ask if Jesus was the Messiah or not? As Bart Ehrman, Senén Vidal, and many others have argued, embarrassing scenes like this are a methodological mark to consider this particular story as factual, or at least close to what actually happened. Jesus’ answer is very interesting from this view: he includes miracles as a sign that the freedom of the Kingdom of Heaven has come (Luke 7:22). In high school, I noticed that this passage corresponds almost exactly to one passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course, I’m no scholar, I knew no Aramaic at the time (I still don’t), so I shut up about it publicly. However, I still felt uneasy with the reduction of Jesus’ miracle-worker fame as being just part of a set of mere legends elaborated a long, long time after He died, so that His followers could compete with lots Pagan religions. Yet, if you use Bible scholarship’s own methodology, you can arrive safely at the fact that already in his own time, Jesus already had the miracle-worker fame.
The same thing happened to me with the claim by much of the skeptics that Jesus did not consider Himself as the Messiah. Yet, it is simple to observe, even from a skeptical standpoint, that everything He did and pointed to the fact that He saw Himself as the Messiah. His own response to John the Baptist, using a statement widely associated with the Messiah at the time, confirms it, according to the people of the time He was certainly considered a Messiah by others, and perhaps he did call Himself the Son of God or others called Him that, although not in the sense that Christians today associate in the Trinitarian conception of Christ. "Son of God" at the time merely meant that He inherits the Kingdom for being David’s descendant. According to Judaism, David is considered son of God in the sense that he was king with an authority given by Yahweh (2 Sam. 7:14-16; 1 Chron. 17:13-14; Psalms 89:27-28; 132:10-12), and Jesus was called the "Son of God" only in this sense, since he was also called "Son of David" by the people.
The rationale for many skeptics to suggest that Jesus never called Himself "Son of God" or the "Messiah" has to do with the fact that the Gospels tell the story about how Jesus forbid his Apostles to tell anyone that He was the Son of God or the Messiah (Matt. 16:13-20; Mark 8:27-30; Luke 9:18-21). If this is so, as the reasoning goes, then He never proclaimed himself "Messiah" publicly. This passage, they say, is a post-Paschal reflection, which was placed in the Gospels to explain why neither Jesus nor the Apostles said anything about Jesus being the Messiah during His lifetime. Yet, as Evans says in his book, Jesus always said and acted according to what was expected of the Messiah, including the way He entered Jerusalem. I wish to add to Evans’ observation something pointed out by Hugh J. Schonfield in The Original New Testament: it may well be that Jesus did consider Himself the Messiah, but He forbid his followers to say it publicly for fear of the Romans, and Jewish authorities. Such proclamation was an act of betrayal and insurrection, worthy of crucifixion.
Evans also demystifies certain prejudices made by many skeptical scholars. For instance, he shows good evidence that, contrary to what scholars usually say, Pontius Pilate as portrayed in the Gospels is fully consistent with the way he is portrayed in other sources, such as Josephus’ writings. He also tries to refute the allegation that the Barrabas affair didn’t happen because there is no evidence of the famous custom for releasing prisoners before Passover. Although I’m still with skeptical scholars in that one, Evans does show that even when that custom is never mentioned in non-Biblical sources of the time, Pilate and other Roman officials carried out similar activities.
I wish to mention that I was overjoyed when he criticized the famous Jesus Seminar. I remember first learning about them recently when Fee mentioned it to me. For those of you who don’t know, the Jesus’ Seminar was founded by Robert Walter Funk, and consisted of several scholars who discussed several controversial topics and adopted an official position about them through voting. Of course, the voting part, was what made the whole enterprise questionable to me. I think that for those who want to have a healthy Bible scholarship, as any science (from Natural Sciences to Social Sciences) reasonable discrepancy is needed, and voting is not necessary. One of the most renowned scholars of the Jesus Seminar is the former Dominican Priest called John Dominic Crossan. I would say that half of the book Fabricating Jesus is directed at the Jesus Seminar, including Crossan, for its sloppy way of thinking and arguing, showing that most of its controversial positions are either uncalled for or unnecessary in light of evidence we already have regarding Jesus’ time. I think that most of what I enjoyed from the book was his whole careful and thorough refutation of the Jesus Seminar.
He refutes bad scholars such as (if she can be called a "scholar") Barbara Thiering, the statement that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the fraud of the "Jesus’ Papers" supposedly discovered by Michael Baigent (who, in my judgment, no one should pay attention to him), the other authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, who should be considered pseudo-scholars), the forgery of the Clement of Alexandria letter made by Morton Smith, among others. Of course, for many serious scholars, most of the people who write this stuff are just crackpots proposing outrageous claims to sell books. Unfortunately, the uninformed public doesn’t know that, and are led by flawed documentaries about them in the History and Discovery channels.
If there is a criticism I can make about the book is that in some small, very small, unscholarly portions where the author’s Christian convictions are too obvious. Another criticism I have about the book is that he must have made a better job establishing a distinction between skeptical scholars. For instance, some believe that Jesus Christ never existed, a position that is not shared by the vast majority of scholars today. However, if Bart Ehrman is classified as skeptical, at the very least Evans should make sure of the fact that Ehrman does think Jesus existed, and he defends that position. Ehrman is an atheist, though.
A final note: Another thing I like about Evans his criticisms to the extremist position that sometimes is assumed by many of skeptical scholars, which is exactly the same one adopted by Jewish or Christian fundamentalists — that the Bible has to be literally true in every word, or it is wholly false. No in-between. And this radical literalistic position on the Bible doesn’t open itself to all of the richness that can nourish spiritual life. Unfortunately, it closes the door to viable hermeneutical positions which can be appreciated by believers and unbelievers alike, without taking an either-or position. I also like the fact that Evans is honest enough to recognize other scholarly positions and does not restrict himself to C. S. Lewis pseudo-dilemma: either Jesus was nuts, or that He was telling the truth about Him being the Son of God. Many scholars have adopted all sorts of positions which can be pretty consistent without subscribing to Lewis dilemma.
I certainly enjoyed Evans’ Fabricating Jesus and highly recommend its reading.
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
Rarely do we find a person in history who has been so loved and at the same time hated than Saint Paul. Christians in general love him and have a deep respect for him. There is a reason for that. For all practical purposes, Saint Paul provided the philosophical and theological foundations of Christianity as we know it. Still, there are some who despise him. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that he was the founder of Christianity as the religious movement we know today. What about Jesus Christ? In the words of Nietzsche: "There was only one true Christian and he died on the Cross" (The Antichrist).
On the other hand, there are those who hate him for good reasons. First, there are the Jews. We can find plenty of statements from St. Paul where he said that the Torah, the Law of Moses, was no longer valid after Jesus’ death. According to him, Jesus’ sacrifice means the end of the Law. Only faith in Jesus Christ, and not the deeds of the Law, saves the soul. But for Jews, that is a minor transgression compared to several passages where St. Paul apparently demeans Jews in a big way, and even it seems that he is happy that they had suffered some of God’s chastisements.
Feminists are among the first who hate St. Paul. If you read his letters, you get the impression that he was a misogynist, declared women inferior, and even ordered them to shut up in assemblies. After all, sin entered the world thanks to women! Furthermore, for the modern mind, his views of matrimony where women should be subordinated to men are outdated and completely unfounded. And to worsen the whole thing, he even tells people to practice celibacy.
Last, but not least, the GLBTT (Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transsexual-Transgender … etc.) community hates the passages where he actually says that effeminates and homosexuals will not go to heaven, because they carry out contra-natura acts.
This article is not meant as a Christian apology of Saint Paul, but rather an exposition of the best historical profile we can provide according to the most recent studies by serious Biblical scholars. I will use Senén Vidal’s analysis, but I’m not going to agree with him in everything. The purpose of this article is to show the most important points where Christianity and its opponents agree and diverge to who Saint Paul really was.
Some Considerations Regarding the Acts of the Apostles
Scholars have been skeptical about some claims made by the Acts of the Apostles. It is true that whoever wrote the Gospel of Luke also wrote the Acts, but we don’t really know his identity. We can recognize, though, that he wrote the Acts many years after St. Paul’s death (A.D. 58), about A.D. 80 or 90. We also know that it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus (A.D. 70). This means that the Acts came to be after Christians were banned from synagogues, as a result of being blamed by Jews in part for such horrendous outcome.
The author of the Acts showed a tendency among Christians who lived such dismissal from Judaism. Let us remember that Jewish leadership at the time was divided between different sects: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes (the latter established itself in Qumran). The Pharisees were members of the priestly elite in Jerusalem, and used their religious authority to preserve the purity of the Jewish ways. Unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees wanted to preserve the Torah and its integrity, while rejecting gentile or pagan influence. It is highly probable that the Pharisees were the ones who wanted Christians to be banned from synagogues after A.D. 70. Although not all zealous Jews were Pharisees, in the minds of many Christians, especially in gentility, they were synonymous.
If you read the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the term "Pharisee" is used to mean a pious or "zealous Jew", not always it meant "the Pharisee priests".
Also, St. Paul’s influence in the Mediterranean, and the way people regarded him as an Apostle of Christ, led many Christians to question his authority, given that he never met Jesus. The author of the Acts of the Apostles was interested in showing St. Paul as an eminent figure with Apostolic authority.
At the same time, he liked to present St. Paul as someone who is respected by gentiles, especially by the Roman authorities.
Some Considerations Pertaining the Corpus Paulinum
To have an accurate profile of St. Paul we have to face the problems that come from the corpus paulinum, i.e. a set of letters in the New Testament which are considered to be written by St. Paul. I don’t have space to talk much about them, but there are three problems regarding it:
- First, some of the letters allegedly written by Saint Paul were not written by him. Some of the letters written by St. Paul reflect the Christian mentality of his time and were widely accepted in Christianity before the second century C. E. However, there were some others which were not recognized as coming from St. Paul until much later during the second and third centuries. These post-pauline letters are: 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews. All of these letters speak of the situation of the Pauline communities at the end of the first century or the first part of the second.
- Still, there is another problem with the authentic Pauline letters: there are later Christian interpolations in many of them. Much of these interpolations reflect opinions which are clearly not St. Paul’s. Scholars had a hard job digging them out of the authentic texts, trying to make sense out of them.
- Finally, even if we take out the interpolations, and the pseudoepigraphic letters, we have the problem regarding the way these letters are arranged. For instance, according to the most recent scholarship, 1 and 2 Corinthians were originally five different letters. The sixteenth chapter of the Letter to the Romans was in reality a separate letter to a community in Ephesus. The letter to Philemo consists of two different letters.
Keeping in mind the inherent difficulties of the Acts of the Apostles, and the real authentic letters, let us proceed to find out who St. Paul was, and was not.
Different Aspects of St. Paul’s Life
Both Christians and opponents have a particular conception of St. Paul as being a person born in Tarsus, who inherited Roman citizenship, studied in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, was a witness of St. Stephen’s death, and traveled to Damascus to persecute Christians where he had a vision of Jesus and converted to Christianity.
There are many aspects of this that need to be clarified. It seems true that St. Paul was a Jew, specifically from Benjamin’s tribe. It also seems true that he was born in Tarsus, which can explain why he had two names, one Jewish (Saul) and one Hellenistic (Paul). However, he did not acquire Roman citizenship by being born in Tarsus or inheriting it, since being born there is not really a way to be a Roman citizen by birth. If we look at the documentation we have available in the New Testament, the only place where it says that he is a Roman citizen is in the Acts of the Apostles. Nowhere in the authentic letters does St. Paul say that he is a Roman citizen. In fact, if we explore them, we realize that he could not have been a Roman citizen, because particular chastisements he suffered were strictly forbidden for Roman citizens:
Five times I have been given the thirty-nine lashes by the Jews; three times I have been beaten with sticks; once I was stoned; three times I have been shipwrecked, and once I have been in open sea for a night and day (2 Cor. 11:25, my bold).
Why would the author of the Acts say that St. Paul is a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37-38; 22:25-29; 23:27)? The answer lies in the fact that he wants to show St. Paul as generally a good Roman citizen, as a respectable figure in gentility. However, everything we have from St. Paul himself speaks against that fact.
Also there is a problem with the allegation that St. Paul was formed by Gamaliel in Jerusalem, and that he witnessed St. Stephen’s death. But St. Paul’s own words seem to contradict all of these facts. In his letter to Galatians, he states the following regarding his conversion:
But when God . . . called me through his grace and chose to reveal His Son in me . . . I was in no hurry to confer with any human being, or to go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already Apostles before me. Instead, I went off to Arabia, and later I came back to Damascus. Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas (Gal. 1:15-18).
Some verses later, he says:
After that I went to places in Syria and Cilicia; and was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ, they simply kept hearing it said, ‘The man once so eager to persecute us is now preaching the faith that he used to try to destroy,’ and they gave glory to God for me (Gal. 1: 21-24).
Notice the curious scenario vis-a-vis the traditional knowledge on St. Paul. Why would St. Paul "return to Damascus" and only went to Jerusalem briefly? More puzzling still is his statement that none of the Christian communities in Judaea knew about him. Jerusalem is in Judaea. In other words, everything points to the fact that St. Paul did not live in Jerusalem, nor did he persecute anyone in that place. Apparently he persecuted Christians in Damascus because he was from that place. Only in the Acts of the Apostle does he appear as going from Jerusalem to Damascus to persecute Christians.
Which leads us to the next question: was he a Pharisee priest? This is a very difficult point. The Acts of the Apostles is a late document, whose author equates Pharisees with pious or zealous Jews. So, it could be possible that St. Paul was a zealous Jew, but was not a Pharisee strictly speaking. We could also say that his letters do not reflect the language of a Jew formed in Palestine, but rather as one formed in a Hellenistic environment, which would further reinforce the point that he did not grow up nor was he formed in Jerusalem.
We have to mention, though, that in the authentic Pauline letters we find a statement that St. Paul was a Pharisee, and it is in his letter to the Philippians:
Circumcised on the eighth day of my life, I was born of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrew parents. In the matter of the Law, I was a Pharisee; as for religious fervour, I was a persecutor of the Church; as for the uprightness embodied in the Law, I was faultless. But what were once my assets I now through Christ Jesus count as losses (Phil. 3:5-7)
However, this passage itself forms part of a bigger passage (Phil. 3:1b-4:1) which has signs of being a later interpolation within the original letter. Practically such a passage demonizes the Jews (as we shall see, St. Paul never did that), it seems to reflect strongly on St. Paul’s death, and praises St. Paul in the first person (suggesting that St. Paul is writing his own praise, something out of St. Paul’s character). It also interrupts the sequence of the argument between Phil. 3:1a and 4:2. As expected, the term Pharisee, in this case, is used in the sense of zealous Jew, a person who wanted to follow the Law to the letter.
On the other hand, it seems that the one of the few reliable data provided by the Acts is that probably St. Paul grew up to be an artisan (Acts 18:3).
There is the issue regarding St. Paul’s own conversion. There is no reason to think a priori that the story of his conversion as presented in the Acts of the Apostles is wrong. St. Paul is sincere when he says that he had revelations. In fact, there were many times he had these kinds of mystical experiences. For instance, approximately by the year A.D. 40, he had experienced an abduction to the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2-4). Some neurologists theorize that he may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, which would have led them to those kinds of experiences.
Regardless of whether this is epilepsy, or revelations of Our Lord, or both, we have to take the story we find in the Acts of the Apostles cum granus salis. Not all of the details offered in the Acts agree with each other. We know that St. Paul had a vision and ended up blind because of it. He saw a bright light, heard a voice, and fell from his horse. However, it is not clear whether the other men with him saw the light, or heard the voice, or fell from their respective horses, or were standing up (Acts 9:1-9; 22:5-16; 26:9-18). Maybe the core of the story regarding St. Paul’s experience might be true, but the discrepancy of the three versions of the story cry out "Handle with care!"
Finally, there is another very important point to this story. Why was St. Paul persecuting Christians in Damascus? As we now know in this analysis of the Biblical texts, he actually lived in Damascus as an artisan, but he was admittedly a pious and zealous Jew. Christians in Palestine were, for all purposes, a branch of Judaism, which practiced the Torah just like all other Jews. How can we explain St. Paul’s persecution of Christians before his conversion? The only possible explanation is that the Christian community in Damascus already showed signs of rejecting the strict path of the Jewish Torah. Damascus itself was very influenced by Hellenistic ideas, and already by 30 A.D., shortly after Jesus’ death, there were Christian communities which started to depart from Judaism.
This demystifies a statement made by many opponents of St. Paul: that he was the one who made Christianity depart from Judaism. Quite the contrary. It seems that before his conversion, St. Paul was furious at the fact that the Damascus community would betray one of the very foundations of Judaism. This also explains why he opened up to gentiles after his conversion to Christianity.
St. Paul’s First Partial Profile
From a biographical standpoint, we now have a partial idea of who Saint Paul really was. He was born in Tarsus, from a Jewish family, from the tribe of Benjamin, who was brought up in the ways of Judaism and Hellenistic thought and philosophy. He was a professional artisan, and was highly intolerant of those Jews who diverged from their Jewish roots and accept Hellenistic ways of thinking. For him, that would be a contamination of Judaism. While he lived in Damascus, he persecuted Christians for not adhering to Jewish Torah. During one of his persecutions, he had a revelatory experience which completely changed his views towards Hellenistic Christians. He converted to a more Hellenistic branch of Christianity, and actively advocated for tolerance towards them.
In my next post, I will talk more about traditional misconceptions about his thoughts and ideas about Jews and women.
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
