I am not certain, Jeff, that this post will get us much farther than where
we are at the moment. You mentioned that my "own account of Jesus' death,
while of course making sophisticated use of the Gospels, is hardly a simple
retelling of their narrative." My point was not that the gospels make all
necessary historical links between the life and execution of Jesus while
Paul does not. It was, and I repeat it, that the data seems to me present in
the gospels for historical reconstruction and I do not, still do not, find
such data present in Paul. It is, of course, a completely different question
whether you can simply correlate the gospels with Paul and find an adequate
reconstruction. That is a different question. But to my mind, what you get
in such a correlation is not the historical Jesus, but the
Pauline/synoptic/Johannine Jesus.
You mention that "Paul's designation of Jesus as 'the crucified Messiah'
implies that Jesus' death was the result of a conflict between Israelite
expectation and Roman imperial policy." Once again, if I only had Paul, I
could easily conclude that Jesus had led a holy war against Roman oppression
in the name of God, had been crucified and resurrected, and that, therefore,
followers of Jesus were called to continue that holy war no matter how
hopeless or lethal it might become. In summary, you conclude that you
"remain optimistic about the possibility of deriving a genuinely historical
Jesus from Paul." I am not as optimistic as you are, but we may have to
leave it at that.
With regard to your final question about the perdurance of John the
Baptist's sect in Acts 19. Even if I give that the maximum amount of
historicity and continuity, it does not seem that the future was with it. No
doubt all sorts of residual threads of JB continued for a generation or two,
but the movement was finished as a vital and ongoing phenomenon. What I
underline, in any case, is that what was special or particular about JB in
comparison with all other water purifications in contemporary Judaism was
that he had to do it to you, you did not do it to yourself. And, as you may
know, I do not find the desert and the Jordan in the JB tradition to be
simply a matter of sand and water. I think, in other words, that he was
reenacting the Exodus and that was why it was so necessary that he do it to
you. Granted that exceptional role, his execution ended his movement as a
vital force for the future.
>


----------
>From: Jeff Peterson <peterson@...>
>To: hjmaterialsmethodolgy@egroups.com
>Subject: [HJMatMeth] Re: Paul as Primary Source for Jesus
>Date: Sun, Feb 20, 2000, 1:01 AM
>

>>You spoke, Jeff, about the "assessment and use of the Pauline evidence for
>>Jesus' ear[th]ly ministry." My point about Pauline testimonia for the
>>historical
>>Jesus is a little stronger than John Meier's. It is not just that I do not
>>find very much there especially when I try to imagine it as data from the
>>50s and do not fill in its lacunae immediately from the gospels. I find, of
>>course, that this Jesus was executed and rose from the dead. I do not
>>understand, from Paul alone, why he got himself executed. In fact, I might
>>easily conclude that such a question is irrelevant, that God could have made
>>the same point by raising anyone from the dead. My problem with the Pauline
>>testamonia is that they do not link the life to the death (death to
>>resurrection, of course).
>
> It's a fair point that Paul is little interested in accounting for Jesus'
> death in historical terms, but then so are the Gospels, as Ed Sanders notes
> in THE HISTORICAL FIGURE OF JESUS; your own account of Jesus' death, while
> of course making sophisticated use of the Gospels, is hardly a simple
> retelling of their narrative. Paul does include a hint or two towards an
> historical understanding of the death. E.g., 1 Thess 2:15 sets Jesus in the
> line of the prophets on the one hand and the risen Lord's apostles on the
> other, suggesting parameters within which his ministry can be understood.
> Further, Paul's designation of Jesus as "the crucified Messiah" implies
> that Jesus' death was the result of a conflict betwen Israelite expectation
> and Roman imperial policy, especially as it's in this context that Paul
> names "the rulers of this age" as having crucified the Lord (1 Cor 2:8);
> Dahl's eponymous essay suggests that for Jesus to have been crucified as a
> claimant to the throne there must have been something about his ministry
> susceptible of a messianic-royal interpretation. So I remain optimistic
> about the possibility of deriving a genuinely historical Jesus from Paul.
>
> Thank you for the reference to Fredriksen, which I have only been able to
> glance at. Another pair of scholars I might have mentioned as making
> foundational use of Paul is Sanders and Margaret Davies (STUDYING THE
> SYNOPTIC GOSPELS), who suggest that the strongest form of multiple
> attestation is to be found when Paul and the Gospels concur. Again I find
> it striking that all the Pauline material finds parallels in the Synoptic
> (viz. Marcan) account of Jesus' ministry.
>
> It is also, for me, the point where Jesus' program and John the
>>Baptist's differ profoundly in style and strategy apart completely from
>>content and theology. John was THE Baptizer and all Antipas had to do to
>>destroy his movement was to kill him.
>
> While it's somewhat tangential, I wonder whether this is really quite the
> case in view of the Acts 19 report of an Ephesian community maintaining
> John's practice of baptism, albeit under Jesus' influence, and inasmuch as
> the Matthaean, Lucan, and Johannine pericopae on the Baptist have all been
> seen as evidence of a following that survived his death.
>
> Jeff
>
> --------------------
> Jeffrey Peterson
> Institute for Christian Studies
> Austin, Texas
>
>
>
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