Reading the Bible again for the First Time
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76. John 6.22–59.
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77. For Crossan’s powerful exposition of this point, see A Long Way from Tipperary, pp. 167–68. I condense it to its essentials. Jesus tells the disciples, “You give them something to eat.” But “they almost jeer at him.” They virtually have to be forced “kicking and screaming, as it were,” into the process. “It is the duty of the disciples, the Twelve, the Church to make sure that food is distributed fairly and equitably to all. And, the Church is very reluctant to accept that responsibility. . . . Reluctant then, reluctant now. This [the story of the feeding of the five thousand] is a parable not about charity, but about justice, about the just distribution of the material bases of life, about the sharing of that which is available equitably among all.”
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78. See chap. 6 above, p. 136.
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79. John 6.35, 48, 33.
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80. John 6.53, 55.
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81. John 6.35. The thirst metaphor is also found in the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.1–42. There Jesus speaks of “living water” (vv. 10–11) in contrast to the water from Jacob’s well and says, “Everyone who drinks of this water [from Jacob’s well] will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty” (vv. 13–14).
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82. Prov. 9.5. See chap. 7 above, p. 150.
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83. John 6.56.
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84. John 15.1–12.
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85. John 6.49, 32; see also 6.58.
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86. John 6.32, 51.
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87. See chap. 3 above, p. 45–46.
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88. John 9.22, 34–35.
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89. John 9.5, 25, 30.
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90. John 8.12.
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91. Though John’s prologue refers explicitly only to “the Word of God” and not to “the Wisdom of God,” I use both here because, as many scholars have pointed out, the two phrases are close equivalents in John: what John says about the former is also said about the latter in the Jewish wisdom tradition.
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92. John 1.5, 9.
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93. Imagery of darkness and light is used in passages such as “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them has light shined” (Isa. 9.2); “Arise, shine for your light has come” (Isa. 60.1); “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Ps. 119.105). Imagery of blindness and sight is used, for example, in these passages: “The eyes of the blind shall see” (Isa. 29.18); “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened” (Isa. 35.5); “You that are blind, look up and see” (Isa. 42.18); “Bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes” (Isa. 43.8). In all of these cases, blindness and seeing are used metaphorically, not literally.
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94. See earlier in this chapter.
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95. The “born again” or “born from above” text is the story of Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3.1–10. It is interesting to note that the story begins with Nicodemus coming to Jesus “by night”—that is, he is in the dark.
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96. John 17.3.
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97. Persuasively argued about thirty years ago by J. Louis Martyn in History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968), it is now widely accepted by Johannine scholars.
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98. See John 8.31–59, esp. 39–44.
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99. John 14.6.
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100. “Way” or “path,” as noted in the previous chapter, is a central image in the Jewish wisdom tradition. It is also a central image in Mark (as well as the other synoptics), as argued in this chapter: to follow Jesus is to follow him on his way.
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101. The death of Jesus is anticipated already in John’s inaugural scene, the wedding at Cana; “my hour” in v. 4 refers to Jesus’ death.
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102. John 12.24.
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1. I Tim. 2.8–15. Passages about wives submitting to husbands: Eph. 5.22–24, Col. 3.18–19. As I will soon note, these letters are among those that scholars think were probably written not by him but in his name sometime after his death.
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2. These charges against Paul are, at most, only partially fair. Many of the offensive passages come from letters written by others in his name, and at least some of the rest can be read more than one way.
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3. Acts 9.1–19, 22.3–21, 26.4–18. In his letters, Paul does not provide a detailed description of this experience, though he does allude to it, most clearly in Gal. 1.13–17. He also speaks of having “seen the Lord” in I Cor. 9.1 and includes himself in the list of those to whom the risen Christ “appeared” in I Cor. 15.3–8. Whether these two texts refer specifically to his Damascus experience or also to additional experiences of the risen Christ is impossible to know.
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4. Acts 9.3–5.
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5. These differences need not suggest either carelessness or historical inaccuracy on the part of Luke; rather, they may reflect the nature of such experiences: they are on the edge of the ineffable, and thus language about them is necessarily imprecise.
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6. Acts 9.10–18.
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7. Acts 9.15, 22.15, 26.17–19; Gal. 1.16.
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8. The other candidate is the author of Revelation. As I will say in the next chapter, he seems to have had visions. But whether some of the accounts of visions in Revelation are “vision reports” or whether they are all literary creations is a difficult question. Though I think it likely that other New Testament authors had dramatic religious experiences, and though they report the experiences of other people, they do not write about their own religious experiences.
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9. In what follows, I will report what is generally accepted by scholars without reporting the arguments. When a point is quite uncertain, I will indicate that.
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10. The New Testament provides no indication of when Paul was born or his age at his conversion (or at any other point in his life). The basis for the guess: he was vigorously active into the 60s of the first century, suggesting that he was probably not born before the beginning of the current era. If he was born in the first decade, his conversion experience would have happened when he was twenty-five or thirty years old.
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11. On Tarsus, see Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 33–35.
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12. Strabo and Philostratus, cited by Murphy-O’Connor, Paul, pp. 34–35.
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13. Günther Bornkamm, Paul (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), trans. by D.M.G. Stalker, p. xxvi.
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14. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, cited by Bornkamm and described as “the great Greek scholar,” pp. 9–10.
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15. My impression is that at least a slight majority of Pauline scholars accept the tradition that Paul studied in Jerusalem.
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16. Gal. 1.14, 13.
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17. Ph
il. 3.5–6.
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18. Emphasized by Alan Segal, a Jewish scholar, in his Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 2.
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19. II Cor. 12.2–4.
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20. It is difficult to know whether Paul’s language refers to the ineffability of mystical experience or to the Jewish prohibition against talking about such experience to all but a very few mature people.
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21. II Cor. 12.7.
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22. I Cor. 15.5–8.
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23. Gal. 2.19–20.
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24. II Cor. 3.18. A few verses later we find another passage reflecting mystical consciousness: II Cor. 4.6.
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25. See the interesting article by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “On the Road and On the Sea with St. Paul,” Bible Review 1 (1985), pp. 38–47.
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26. I and II Corinthians are two of his longest letters; together, they are longer than Romans, his longest letter. Moreover, he clearly wrote a letter (two?) to Corinth that we no longer have, and II Corinthians is a combination of two letters. Thus he wrote at least four and maybe five letters to Corinth.
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27. II Cor. 11.23–28.
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28. As I will mention at the end of this chapter, early and probably reliable tradition reports that Paul was executed in Rome in the 60s. Because Acts ends without reporting his death, readers have often thought that Acts must have been written before his death: If the author knew about it, how could he omit it? However, most scholars think that the purpose of the author of Acts was not to write a biography of Paul but to report the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome. For this purpose, the end of Acts is perfect. Indeed, the author’s purpose would have been poorly served if, after reporting Paul’s preaching in Rome, he had then written, “And then they killed him.”
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29. There is no uniform term in the New Testament for Gentiles associated with the synagogue. Acts refers to such Gentiles as people who “feared God” (10.2, 13.16, 13.26), “devout persons” (17.4, 17), and “worshipers of God” (16.14, 18.7).
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30. This estimate comes from Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997). Stark’s estimates are based on a growth rate of forty percent per decade, matching the most rapid rate of growth known for a new religious movement in the modern period (the Mormons).
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31. For the distinction between “villa house churches” in the home of a wealthy patron and “shop or tenement house churches,” and the distinction between “patronal share-meals” and “communal share-meals,” see John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. 424–30. See also Robert Jewett, “Tenement Churches and Communal Meals in the Early Church: The Implications of a Form-Critical Analysis of 2 Thessalonians 3.10,” Biblical Research 38 (1993), pp. 23–43, cited by Crossan.
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32. It is illuminating to see the typical form of an ancient letter reflected in Paul’s letters. To illustrate, I use I Thessalonians. Letters began by identifying the sender (1.1a) and the recipient (1.1b), then moved on to a greeting (1.1c), a thanksgiving (1.2–10), the body (2.1–5.22), and a closing. The latter was typically made up of greetings, a close, an exhortation, and a benediction (5.23–28).
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33. I owe the phrase to the subtitle of Calvin Roetzel’s helpful introduction to Paul’s letters, The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, 4th ed. (Louisville: Westminster/Knox, 1998; first edition published 1974).
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34. I Cor. 11.2–16 and I Cor. 8. Much of the meat for sale in butcher shops in Corinth was left over from sacrifices to the gods. Thus the question was a very practical one: Is it all right to eat such meat?
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35. I Cor. 7.1–3.
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36. And thus the NRSV puts the sentence in quotation marks.
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37. The brief story is found in Acts 16.13–15. Paul and his companions Timothy and Silas then stay at her house, which apparently became the location of the “house church” in Philippi. See also 16.40.
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38. This is not taken for granted by New Testament scholars. Some (perhaps even a slight majority) assume, simply because Paul says little about Jesus in his letters, that the historical Jesus did not matter very much to him. This strikes me as incredible.
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39. That Paul expected the return of Jesus soon is mentioned often in his letters, most clearly in I Thess. 4.13–18 and I Cor. 15.51–52.
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40. See the comment of Joseph Fitzmyer in Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, and Roland Murphy, eds., The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990), p. 1394: “Lord” is “perhaps an even more important Pauline title for Jesus” than “Christ,” which Paul clearly uses in a “titular sense” only once. See also, among others, James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1990), p. 50: Jesus is Lord “is undoubtedly the principal confession of faith for Paul and his churches” (italics in original).
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41. Phil. 2.9–11. The passage begins in v. 5.
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42. The quoted phrase is from Dunn, Unity and Diversity, p. 50.
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43. Gal. 3.28.
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44. Even as Paul refers to Jesus as “Lord,” he remains a Jewish monotheist. The notion of the Trinity was still in the future, and it is best understood as the Christian way of affirming the divinity of the risen Christ within the framework of monotheism.
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45. See, for example, Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); and Richard Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997).
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46. Phil. 2.6, where Paul contrasts Christ with Adam; Adam did regard equality with God as something to be grasped or seized, building on the serpent’s temptation in Gen. 3.5: “You shall be like God.”
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47. Rom. 5.12–21. Note the language of death exercising “dominion” in vv. 14 and 17 and sin exercising “dominion” in v. 21. This passage is sometimes associated with the doctrine of original sin, but that doctrine was not developed until centuries later. Paul is referring here to a universal way of being.
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48. The whole passage is found in Rom. 7.7–24; quoted verses are 15–17. A formerly common interpretation of this powerful passage (especially among Protestants) saw it as Paul’s description of his pre-Damascus life under the (Jewish) law. But other passages in Paul (esp. Phil. 3.6) suggest that Paul did not experience life under the Torah this way. Rather, the passage describes life in “the Adamic epoch,” to quote a footnote in The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 2125.