John Dominic Crossan ”Paul the Pharisee” pt. 1

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[00:01:03] Deconstructed these walls

[00:01:05] Welcome to The Deconstructionists. I'm your host, John Williamson, and this week we have a returning guest that I'm very excited about.

[00:01:13] I welcome back Dr. John Dominic Crossan. Dr. Crossan is one of the foremost New Testament scholars alive today and historian of early Christianity.

[00:01:23] His research has focused on the historical Jesus, the theology of non-canonical Gospels, and the application of postmodern hermeneutical approaches to the Bible.

[00:01:33] We talk all about his latest book, Paul the Pharisee, A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization.

[00:01:38] If you're not super familiar with him, though, I'll give you a little bit about him, but also recommend you go back and listen to our first interview with him.

[00:01:45] But Dr. Crossan was trained at Stonebridge Seminary and ordained as a priest back in 1957.

[00:01:50] He later returned to Ireland where he earned his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1959 at St. Patrick's College Maynooth, the Irish National Seminary.

[00:02:00] He then completed two more years of study in biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.

[00:02:07] He was a great podcast guest the first time.

[00:02:09] He is absolutely brilliant and a wealth of information, and we really get into it in this interview, too.

[00:02:14] So I think you're going to love it.

[00:02:16] So let's get to it.

[00:02:17] Here's John Dominic Crossan.

[00:02:22] We built a church uncertainty that fears everything again.

[00:02:30] All right.

[00:02:30] Welcome to the Deconstructionist.

[00:02:31] I should say welcome back to the Deconstructionist podcast, John Dominic Crossan.

[00:02:35] Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

[00:02:37] Always a pleasure and an honor.

[00:02:39] Thank you, John.

[00:02:40] Absolutely.

[00:02:40] Well, you've got a new book out, and I was kind of laughing to myself as I picked it up,

[00:02:45] because the last time you were on, I asked a question about the authority of Paul and why the Western church puts such a heavy emphasis on what Paul has to say.

[00:02:57] And then you wrote a book about it.

[00:03:00] Just for you, John.

[00:03:02] Just for you.

[00:03:02] Hey, I appreciate it.

[00:03:05] I'll take that.

[00:03:06] But tell folks a little bit about, you know, obviously your last work about Easter was an absolutely beautiful book filled with lots of pictures and photos of the different frescoes and things that you encountered.

[00:03:19] And the two kind of fed into one another.

[00:03:21] So tell folks a little bit about what inspired you to write this particular book.

[00:03:25] Oh, thank you very much, because it really flows out of that last one.

[00:03:30] And the basis for it is, don't think of me sitting in a study just thinking.

[00:03:35] In the year 2000, Sarah and myself were invited with Marianna Marcus Borg to become co-leaders, annual pilgrimage throughout Turkey in search of Paul.

[00:03:46] And honestly, I was interested in Paul as part of the historical Jesus.

[00:03:50] I wasn't shifting.

[00:03:51] I thought, you know, what Paul had to say about Jesus reflected on Jesus.

[00:03:56] And if he had betrayed Jesus, I wanted to know it.

[00:03:58] Anyway, so we started going to Turkey every year.

[00:04:02] And honestly, with 40 people watching them and ourselves.

[00:04:09] Locate Paul in the ruins of the Roman Empire and not in the debates of the Reformation.

[00:04:16] A different Paul.

[00:04:18] Honestly, I watched it happen.

[00:04:20] Marcus said to me one time, are we getting better at this?

[00:04:23] No, we're not getting better at it.

[00:04:24] People see Paul differently when they're looking at these giant stones tumbled by an earthquake.

[00:04:33] And they're also thinking about America, you know.

[00:04:37] So that's the first thing.

[00:04:39] Now, the second thing that was important for me is we were in Turkey.

[00:04:42] And obviously, that's the Byzantine world.

[00:04:46] The Eastern Roman Empire, we call the Byzantine Roman Empire.

[00:04:50] That's just to confuse people.

[00:04:52] It's the Eastern Roman Empire.

[00:04:54] The West has quietly disappeared.

[00:04:56] The East has gone on for a thousand years.

[00:04:58] So we ended up going into Byzantine churches.

[00:05:03] Simply, they were there.

[00:05:04] And it would have been a cultural crime to bypass Cappadocia and say,

[00:05:09] well, Paul was never here.

[00:05:10] So we keep going, keep going.

[00:05:12] And of course, we stopped and we went into these magnificent

[00:05:17] mini Byzantine churches carved inside the Tufa.

[00:05:21] And what we began to see was people could look around them and see all the scenes from the life of Christ.

[00:05:27] And you recognize them all, all the way up to the crucifixion.

[00:05:30] And then you hit the image of the Anastasis.

[00:05:35] It says that over it.

[00:05:36] So you knew it was the crucifixion.

[00:05:38] But instead of Jesus coming out of the tomb, you know, gorgeous, triumphant, but alone,

[00:05:44] we saw him taking Adam and Eve, the human race, that is, by the hand, out of death, out of Hades.

[00:05:53] Not out of hell, but out of Hades.

[00:05:55] So now, every night, Marcus and I do a half-hour lecture.

[00:06:00] We agreed not to say the same thing, obviously.

[00:06:03] So he said, I have lectures on Paul.

[00:06:04] I give one every night.

[00:06:05] I said, that's fine because every day I'll try and adapt what I want to say about Paul to where we were.

[00:06:12] Now, lots of times it worked fine.

[00:06:13] It was the Roman Empire and something.

[00:06:15] But what are you going to do on the nights when you've gone into, say, Cappadocia, Gourame,

[00:06:21] the park there, Gourame?

[00:06:23] People have seen this.

[00:06:24] They've seen all the recognizable scenes, you know, the birth, the transfiguration into Jerusalem.

[00:06:35] All the things they recognize.

[00:06:36] And then this.

[00:06:38] How come their picture of the resurrection, totally different from ours?

[00:06:44] Everything else is kind of the same.

[00:06:46] All right, anyway.

[00:06:47] So I got to talk about that.

[00:06:49] I got to talk about Paul and the resurrection when they've seen this.

[00:06:52] And at the end of it, and that's what the main point of the book was, that you mentioned resurrecting Easter in 2018, I think.

[00:07:00] It wasn't really I was shifting from exegesis to art or even Jesus to Paul.

[00:07:07] I wanted to know this.

[00:07:09] We have the Western image of the resurrection.

[00:07:12] Everyone knows it.

[00:07:13] Jesus is coming out of the tomb, utterly triumphant but alone.

[00:07:18] Eastern coming out with the whole human race.

[00:07:20] Okay.

[00:07:22] If Paul had been asked, say, by the Corinthians, because they ask a lot of questions, the Corinthians.

[00:07:27] So it wasn't they said, now, we know this crucifixion thing you're always talking about.

[00:07:31] We've seen them.

[00:07:32] We've seen runaway slaves.

[00:07:34] We know what it looks like.

[00:07:35] You talk about resurrection.

[00:07:38] Could you tell us what we would have seen if we were there?

[00:07:42] Could you describe?

[00:07:44] Better, Paul, draw us a picture.

[00:07:46] Now, here is my question.

[00:07:48] Would Paul have drawn something about Jesus coming out all by himself?

[00:07:52] Or would he have drawn something like the Eastern one who comes out with the human race?

[00:07:57] So that was a question that was there for me in 2018.

[00:08:03] And that's really the genesis of this book, to look at Paul and try and see if I could answer those questions.

[00:08:11] Yeah, absolutely fascinating.

[00:08:13] And that was one of the most interesting things about that book was the fact that we have two, you know, we have a split in two different directions in terms of the way that both art and just the theology, you know, sort of understood the resurrection.

[00:08:28] And so getting into sort of how we understand it and using the sources and the materials that we have, you talk about the term matrix or context and how it and as it relates to how we understand the Bible.

[00:08:41] Explain that a little bit.

[00:08:42] What do you mean by matrix?

[00:08:43] And then the three sort of matrices that you discussed.

[00:08:47] And John, I really don't want people to think that matrix is some brand new weird type of scholarly term.

[00:08:53] It's a common sense term.

[00:08:55] Here's what was going on.

[00:08:56] We talk about text and context.

[00:08:59] Of course we do.

[00:09:00] And then I noticed people, when they get to the Bible, say it, but then they all talk about text and the context disappears.

[00:09:06] The Romans sort of disappear.

[00:09:08] They talk about background and foreground.

[00:09:11] Sounds right.

[00:09:12] But then background disappears and it's all foreground.

[00:09:15] So I was looking for some word that wouldn't let you split it.

[00:09:19] And by matrix, I mean simply the background and foreground absolutely interlinked together so you can't separate them.

[00:09:28] For example, Martin Luther King.

[00:09:30] Let me say, I'm going to talk about Martin Luther King, but I want to talk about the foreground.

[00:09:36] I'm not interested in all that background about American racism.

[00:09:39] Now, you can't do it.

[00:09:43] Each is influencing the other.

[00:09:45] That's matrix.

[00:09:46] So there have been three great matrices, matrices, I don't know the plural, in which scholars have investigated Paul.

[00:09:59] The first one is the Christian matrix.

[00:10:01] Second, the Jewish matrix.

[00:10:02] The Roman matrix.

[00:10:04] And then we'll get to the fourth matrix after that.

[00:10:07] Here's what I mean by Christian matrix.

[00:10:11] In the Reformation, it was great fun and great polemics.

[00:10:15] Think of Paul was a Jew, but he left that evil Judaism and became a good Christian.

[00:10:22] See, it was just like Luther.

[00:10:24] He was a good Catholic, but he left that evil Catholic and became a good Protestant.

[00:10:29] It was perfect.

[00:10:30] You could take Paul right in and give a Christian interpretation of Paul.

[00:10:35] Basically, that's what I mean about Paul.

[00:10:37] You're imagining him as already within Christianity, which he wasn't, of course.

[00:10:43] Second, the Jewish matrix.

[00:10:45] And especially after the Second World War and when scholars began to recognize their responsibility

[00:10:52] in the anti-Judaism that was so characteristic of Christianity for maybe the racism, the anti-Semitic

[00:11:00] racism on the hearts of the Holocaust.

[00:11:02] They said, OK, let's take another look.

[00:11:04] When Paul says, for example, as he says again and again, that he's proud to be a Jew, but,

[00:11:11] but, but, but a Messianic Jew.

[00:11:14] OK, that gets him in trouble with his fellow Jews, but that's a fight within the family.

[00:11:21] He ain't converting from Judaism to Christianity, as it were.

[00:11:28] So you have to put that within the matrix of that.

[00:11:31] Now, you can't deny it.

[00:11:33] Paul is absolutely a Jew.

[00:11:35] There might be another Jew that looks at Paul and says, ah, you're a renegade.

[00:11:39] Fine.

[00:11:40] OK.

[00:11:40] But there's other Jews who say, no, no, he's the future of Judaism.

[00:11:45] So it's a little bit like where we live today.

[00:11:47] I mean, people, it doesn't help you to say, well, he or she is an American.

[00:11:54] OK, you might want to ask questions about politics and everything else.

[00:11:57] Anyway.

[00:11:59] Now, the next, the third thing is you can't talk about Judaism in the first century,

[00:12:04] especially in the homeland, without saying it's under Romanization.

[00:12:09] This is not the elephant in the room.

[00:12:11] It's the herd of elephants stampeding through the room.

[00:12:14] So you have to think of the homeland Judaism or diaspora Judaism within Romanization.

[00:12:22] And that's been very influenced, I think, in scholarship since the 1990s, when America began,

[00:12:28] after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boast about one world power and we are the new Roman Empire,

[00:12:36] which is a strange thing since it crucified Christianity and burned Jerusalem to the ground.

[00:12:44] So you wonder why any Christians or Jews would boast about being the new Roman Empire.

[00:12:48] Anyway.

[00:12:50] Now, that's where we were.

[00:12:52] I'm pushing it to a fourth matrix.

[00:12:55] And here's what's going on.

[00:12:57] I want to see it, to see Paul, and in fact, everything else, within the matrix of evolution.

[00:13:04] And it came about like this.

[00:13:07] In 2020, I had a lot of time to read.

[00:13:11] Like most people, I was confined to the barracks, as it were.

[00:13:15] And so I read certain European philosophers, Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, German and French,

[00:13:28] and then the Italian, Georgia Agamben.

[00:13:30] And all of them amazed me because as philosophers, obviously, Taubes was Jewish.

[00:13:38] They were not reading Paul as Christians.

[00:13:40] In fact, Alain Badiou couldn't, was emphatic that he wasn't a Christian.

[00:13:46] It was obviously one who said, oh, we got it.

[00:13:48] We got it, Alain.

[00:13:51] They all said Paul was terribly relevant for the 21st century.

[00:13:56] Now, they were reading him from philosophy.

[00:14:02] I used them in the book as epigraphs to the chapters because they had inspired me in this sense.

[00:14:08] Don't be so defensive then.

[00:14:11] Very often on those tours, we're talking to people who said, well, we don't know if we like Paul.

[00:14:16] We're just here to see if maybe you guys can make any sense of this jerk.

[00:14:21] Here's at least where people, non-Christian, who are claiming that Paul was important politically, socially, economically, right now, not just theologically or religiously.

[00:14:35] So, okay, that was really the inspiration.

[00:14:38] Let me take a look at Paul from that point of view.

[00:14:40] But I know better about Paul without due respect than you guys do.

[00:14:49] I can't debate with you philosophy.

[00:14:51] No, you'll lose me and find me.

[00:14:53] I've only read your books on Paul, but I've read them very carefully.

[00:14:57] I think on your own principles, you could do a better job if you knew more of the history of Paul and knew more about how to read Luke Acts on Paul.

[00:15:07] So that was the purpose of the book.

[00:15:09] But the other thing I was saying, what if we looked at Paul from the point of view of big history, capital B, capital H, evolution?

[00:15:19] Not just historically, but the big history, which is the biggest history around evolution.

[00:15:26] In other words, whether you're a theist or an atheist or couldn't care less about either of them, I think we all are living under evolution.

[00:15:39] So, it's not like, well, I don't believe in God, so I don't believe in heaven or hell, so I don't believe in all of that.

[00:15:45] So, fine, fine.

[00:15:47] Then why are we creating heaven and hell every day on earth?

[00:15:52] And why does it look like hell seems to be winning hands down?

[00:15:56] Are there other things that control us, shall I say, besides the classic view of the theistic God?

[00:16:07] So that when Nietzsche announced that God is dead, fine, but evolution ain't.

[00:16:13] Maybe he should have been reading more about evolution and less about theology.

[00:16:19] So, that's the genesis.

[00:16:21] The fourth matrix I'm proposing is how we should start looking now at Paul, at Christianity, at religion.

[00:16:31] In the umbrella of evolution.

[00:16:34] Yeah, I love that.

[00:16:36] And so, let's talk about Paul.

[00:16:38] In order to talk about Paul, we have to sort of understand what was happening at the time and some of the issues that people have with Paul.

[00:16:45] And that is to say that, you know, Paul didn't know Jesus personally, was not one of the original disciples.

[00:16:52] He was a later convert.

[00:16:53] And so, talk a little bit about how that plays into it.

[00:16:57] And then also, you know, when it comes to, and you talk about this in the book, when it comes to the records that we have, we've got the Gospels.

[00:17:05] And then there's even some debate in there.

[00:17:09] And then we've got the letters of Paul.

[00:17:11] So, talk about that a little bit.

[00:17:13] All right.

[00:17:14] Let me see where exactly to begin.

[00:17:19] Let me give you where you began.

[00:17:20] Paul never met Jesus.

[00:17:22] He didn't wander through the roads of Galilee.

[00:17:26] So, he's diffident about it.

[00:17:27] He's mildly embarrassed.

[00:17:29] I mean, Peter did.

[00:17:30] So, doesn't Peter, you know, Peter would probably, so it's a question of authority and identity.

[00:17:37] And so, he dismisses it.

[00:17:39] Well, even if we have known Jesus in the flesh, we don't know him that way anymore.

[00:17:43] We all know him in the Spirit.

[00:17:44] Okay, that's a little bit defensive.

[00:17:46] Fine, fine.

[00:17:48] But his claim is, and it's a self-eradical claim, that he has seen Jesus by vision.

[00:17:56] Not by delusion or hallucination, but in a vision.

[00:17:59] He knows it's a vision.

[00:18:01] He's even willing to say, I don't know if I was in the body or out of the body when I had these visions.

[00:18:05] That's an honest statement.

[00:18:07] He tells you, I went up to heaven.

[00:18:09] He says, maybe I was in the body and imagining up to heaven.

[00:18:13] He's very wise on that.

[00:18:14] But he claims a vision.

[00:18:17] And he claims in that vision, he's called by God to be the apostle of the Gentiles.

[00:18:24] The apostle of the nations.

[00:18:26] You should remember that Esna in Greek we translate as Gentiles.

[00:18:30] It's the nations.

[00:18:31] Everyone out there.

[00:18:35] Now, Peter also has had visions.

[00:18:38] So part of the fight moving into the source in Luke Acts, and I always say Luke Acts because I think of it as a two-volume work that was designed and written and published, so you want to use that word, as a unity.

[00:18:54] It took two scrolls.

[00:18:56] That's why it's two.

[00:18:57] The Latin word for scroll is volumen.

[00:18:59] It gives us our word volume.

[00:19:01] So Luke Acts is nothing extraordinary.

[00:19:04] It's like if I proposed to my editors a thousand-page book.

[00:19:09] I know what they'd say.

[00:19:11] If they accepted it, they would not give me a thousand-page book.

[00:19:14] It would be too costly.

[00:19:15] They'd give me two volumes, and I could run it then page one to 500, page 500, and one to 1,000.

[00:19:22] That's all that's going on.

[00:19:23] It's not mysterious.

[00:19:24] It's just the mechanics of publication.

[00:19:26] So I look at Luke Acts, and what I notice in Acts especially is that Luke, let me still use that as the author just for convenience.

[00:19:39] This author really is considering Peter as much more important than Paul.

[00:19:46] Now, of course, Paul takes up half the book.

[00:19:49] You say, oh, it must be more important.

[00:19:51] Watch, though.

[00:19:52] Almost everything that happens is important to Paul.

[00:19:55] Like a miraculous escape from prison, raising of a dead person, debating with a magician, happened to Peter first.

[00:20:05] And even this apostle of the Gentiles.

[00:20:09] Well, that happens to Peter in chapter 10 and 11, and again in chapter 15.

[00:20:15] He's announced as the one who brought in the Gentiles.

[00:20:18] Who's in charge?

[00:20:21] So the joke I ask is, who's afraid of the big bad Paul?

[00:20:27] And I answer it most of the New Testament.

[00:20:30] Because you have letters that are kind of trying to control Paul, the ones written after his death.

[00:20:36] You have Acts trying to control Paul.

[00:20:39] He's kind of like explosive.

[00:20:42] So you have to understand, you know, I have absolute respect for Lukács.

[00:20:49] I don't think he's making mistakes.

[00:20:50] He knows exactly what he's doing.

[00:20:52] I think it's a he, so I'm going to use that.

[00:20:57] But think of it at the beginning of the second century.

[00:21:00] The beginning of the second century, in the 90s, we have Josephus.

[00:21:06] In the beginning of the second century, we have Tacitus, Jew and Roman historians.

[00:21:10] And they have their little story about who these Christians are.

[00:21:15] And they're using that term, the followers of Christ.

[00:21:21] Well, he started a movement over there in Judea.

[00:21:25] We had to execute him.

[00:21:28] And doggone it, they're still around.

[00:21:31] Now, along comes the counter story.

[00:21:35] Or we might say, controlling the narrative.

[00:21:38] That's what Luke is going to do.

[00:21:41] It's a giant apologia pro vita Christiana.

[00:21:45] We're not the bad, evil followers of a crucified person, which is a little bit embarrassing, you know.

[00:21:52] If I was a neutral Roman, I never heard them.

[00:21:54] I said, who are these guys Christians?

[00:21:56] He said, oh, we crucified their founder, Christ.

[00:21:58] Oh, there must be a bad crowd.

[00:22:00] Then let's crucify them too.

[00:22:02] So Luke writes a magnificent story, which is the first great step towards Constantine.

[00:22:12] He really gets it right, whether we like it or not.

[00:22:15] He says the future is not Jewish Christianity, like Paul would hope, but Roman Christianity.

[00:22:22] And yes, he's right.

[00:22:23] See, 100 years later, 200 years later, Constantine is going to look around and say, hmm, one emperor, one empire, one new capital, one religion.

[00:22:36] Makes sense.

[00:22:37] So Luke imagines the future and starts the process.

[00:22:44] Now, that's where you have to understand that Paul is just a component in this story.

[00:22:50] That's what Luke is interested in.

[00:22:52] And you must read him like that, with Luke's intention.

[00:22:59] Yeah, that is interesting.

[00:23:00] You do talk about that in the book as well, as the division between the two and the result of dividing the two into two separate sort of texts.

[00:23:09] Because, as you say in the book, you know, it takes away from some of, maybe I'm reading into this, but it feels like you're saying it takes away from some of the authority of, you know, one of the volumes versus, you know, had they kept the two together in one.

[00:23:27] Yeah, and we have Luke is the best storyteller in the New Testament after Jesus the parable.

[00:23:36] You know, we still talk about on the road to Damascus.

[00:23:40] Our Damascus experience is a cliche.

[00:23:42] Like prodigal son, our good Samaritan have become cliche phrases.

[00:23:47] But the trouble is we have to remember that Jesus tells parables and parables are fictions.

[00:23:54] They're stories you can't forget, but they didn't happen.

[00:23:59] Now, be very careful when you read Luke.

[00:24:02] Luke, it's almost impossible to forget his story about the road to Damascus.

[00:24:11] It really is because if you're having somebody who's converting from being, say, a persecutor to a supporter,

[00:24:20] wouldn't it be great to have it happen on a road when he's going from one place to the other?

[00:24:24] So the road kind of is a great metaphor for you're changing your mind.

[00:24:28] Oh, it's magnificent.

[00:24:31] It's magnificent theater.

[00:24:32] Now, I don't criticize him for that.

[00:24:35] I criticize Luke for what happens on the road.

[00:24:39] If he wanted to say Paul's revelation, which Paul mentions in Galatians, almost in passing,

[00:24:45] happened on the road to Damascus, fine.

[00:24:46] And some theatrics, that's fine.

[00:24:50] That's poetic license.

[00:24:51] But Paul is blinded on the road.

[00:24:56] That means he cannot see Jesus.

[00:24:59] And for Paul, his whole integrity, authority, equality even with Peter, is that I have seen the Lord.

[00:25:08] That's what he says.

[00:25:09] Not I have heard him.

[00:25:10] I have seen him.

[00:25:12] And even the hearing doesn't work because Paul says, who are you?

[00:25:15] Who are you, Lord?

[00:25:17] He doesn't get it in a way.

[00:25:20] He doesn't get it until he is brought in and baptized.

[00:25:24] Now, that's great symbolism.

[00:25:27] Tells any baptized person, you only get it, you're blind before, and then you're baptized and you see.

[00:25:33] It's great.

[00:25:35] It just, Paul would be screaming, I have seen the Lord.

[00:25:40] That's what makes me equal to Peter.

[00:25:43] Yeah, I didn't go around Galilee, but I have seen the Lord.

[00:25:47] No, you haven't, says Luke.

[00:25:50] And that makes Peter, the one who had the great vision of all animals being clean as the apostle of the Gentiles.

[00:26:01] Wünschst du dir jemanden, der dich versteht wie kein anderer?

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[00:26:57] That's so interesting because I think that modern-day Christians would probably not have considered the fact that there was sort of this kind of push and pull, you know, in the early days of Christianity after Jesus' crucifixion.

[00:27:12] And it seems like, oh, it was just this easy transition into whoever was leading the movement at that time.

[00:27:18] And that was seemingly not the case.

[00:27:21] Yeah.

[00:27:21] And that's the great telling of the metaphor.

[00:27:23] It's like, you know, so many stories of origins, including our own in this country.

[00:27:28] Everything is beautiful.

[00:27:29] You just sail across.

[00:27:31] And it's hard not to, you know, because you know somehow or other you got through it all.

[00:27:37] And certainly if we're reading the disputes, we might say, well, we're not interested.

[00:27:43] That's not a big dispute for us anymore.

[00:27:44] Yeah, but we have ours.

[00:27:46] We have our different ones.

[00:27:47] So, yes, it's very important for me that you read Luke, understand what he's doing, that you don't use him like a Pauline buffet.

[00:27:58] You know, take this, leave that, like this.

[00:28:03] What integrity do you have in choosing this about Paul from Acts, but not taking that?

[00:28:12] At least have some reason within the purpose of Luke.

[00:28:17] What is Luke up to within that purpose?

[00:28:19] And now I see why he put it that way.

[00:28:21] I see why he disagrees with Paul.

[00:28:24] And in this case, I'm certainly going with Paul.

[00:28:26] No, I don't think Paul is lying in Galatians.

[00:28:30] I think Luke is writing from his point of view to say Christians are innocent.

[00:28:38] Yes, this is the dangerous part.

[00:28:41] Jews tend to riot a lot.

[00:28:42] Not our fault.

[00:28:44] And every Roman that Jesus or Paul ever meets, everyone declares them innocent.

[00:28:51] Wow, it's a perfect storm of innocence.

[00:28:58] Yeah, it's so interesting.

[00:28:59] One of the other things I'd love to have you touch on really quickly before we move on to this next section here.

[00:29:04] You also mentioned the fact that, and this is something we've talked about in the podcast before,

[00:29:09] is there's even some dispute amongst the writings attributed to Paul in terms of which ones were authentically Paul versus someone writing using the authority of Paul.

[00:29:20] Talk about that a little bit because I do think that's important as well.

[00:29:23] All right, it is.

[00:29:26] And here I'm going to go with the consensus of scholarship.

[00:29:30] That doesn't prove it's right, but it just moves.

[00:29:32] It's a consensus.

[00:29:33] That there are seven authentic letters of Paul.

[00:29:36] And those are Romans and Galatians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and who am I missing?

[00:29:42] 1st Thessalonians.

[00:29:43] Okay, seven.

[00:29:45] Now, the other letters that are attributed to Paul, we used to say in the seminary, well, those are simply written by disciples after his death to say, well, if he was here today, this.

[00:29:57] They really aren't.

[00:29:58] They are not just post-Paulite, which they are.

[00:30:01] They're not just pseudo-Paulite, which they are.

[00:30:04] They're in many ways anti-Paulite, not in everything.

[00:30:08] But, for example, in the, I hate what I'm going to say, in the social effects of Christianity, but that makes it seem like these are up for discussion.

[00:30:20] They are the heart of Christianity as it operates.

[00:30:24] I mean, that's the best way to put it.

[00:30:26] So it's not, well, you know, whether you can have slaves or not.

[00:30:32] That's not a Christian question.

[00:30:34] Yes, it is.

[00:30:34] I think Paul in Philemon is quite clear, as I understand Philemon, that Philemon is a slave.

[00:30:41] His name is Anesimus, by the way.

[00:30:43] He uses his name.

[00:30:44] Most Romans, when they talk about their slaves, don't bother with their names.

[00:30:49] It means useful in Greek, but anyway, it's a slave name.

[00:30:52] And he's telling Philemon, you know, you can't have a Christian slave.

[00:30:57] At least a Christian can't have a Christian slave.

[00:31:00] Whether he's willing to say that's for everyone, that's more.

[00:31:06] Now, when you read Colossians and Ephesians, the answer is, of course, Christians have slaves.

[00:31:12] Of Christian slaves.

[00:31:15] But they should be kind to their slaves.

[00:31:18] And slaves should be obedient.

[00:31:21] And by the way, the same goes for husbands and wives.

[00:31:24] Husbands should rule their wives.

[00:31:26] And wives should be kind to them, of course.

[00:31:33] And wives should obey.

[00:31:35] This would be exactly what a Roman paterfamilias would say.

[00:31:39] Yes, I should be kind to my slaves.

[00:31:42] Yes, I should love my wife.

[00:31:45] They should obey.

[00:31:48] So, in a way, what they're doing is they're dragging Paul, kicking and screaming, back into Romanization.

[00:31:56] And if you say, well, their theology is fine.

[00:31:58] Of course, their theology is fine.

[00:32:00] But theology is about how you run the world.

[00:32:05] It's not just about me.

[00:32:07] And everything else out there is systemic.

[00:32:09] So, that's fine.

[00:32:10] That's somebody else.

[00:32:11] That's politics.

[00:32:12] No.

[00:32:14] No.

[00:32:15] Jesus was talking about God's rule for the world.

[00:32:19] We call it the kingdom of God.

[00:32:21] Rome had their kingdom.

[00:32:22] So, the letters, for example, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians are the first stage in de-radicalization of Paul and re-Romanization.

[00:32:38] And I would say Timothy and Titus are the next step even more because, at least in Colossians and Ephesians, Paul speaks to slaves and masters.

[00:32:50] He addresses them.

[00:32:51] He tells them their mutual obligations, even if we're not impressed by them as being kind and being obedient.

[00:32:59] But in Timothy and Titus, he simply talks to the owners, tells slaves, husbands, tell your wives to be quiet, to be silent.

[00:33:14] And the last great step within the New Testament now for the de-radicalization of Paul is the Acts of the Apostles.

[00:33:23] He's not even an apostle.

[00:33:25] You know, at least those letters say he's an apostle, an apostle even of the nations.

[00:33:34] In Acts, as we saw, he's not even an apostle, let alone an apostle of the nations.

[00:33:38] So, there is a whole process in the New Testament itself of getting Paul under Peter.

[00:33:47] And that goes on then later in the first hundred years.

[00:33:54] Of then, well, Christians think, well, how do we get Paul and Peter back together again?

[00:34:01] Because the Romans had Romulus and Ramos as the hero twins of their city.

[00:34:09] Rome, we would like to have Petrus at Paulus, Romulus at Ramos, see it almost rhymes.

[00:34:16] We'd like to have them as the hero twins of Rome.

[00:34:18] But in the New Testament, they're all fighting.

[00:34:22] Paul calls Peter a hypocrite.

[00:34:24] And Peter says in the epistle of truth to Peter, lots of people can't understand Paul and get him wrong.

[00:34:32] So, they have all of these images of Peter embracing Paul.

[00:34:37] I mean, they're embracing one another.

[00:34:39] But look at whose arms are on the outside.

[00:34:42] It's always Peter.

[00:34:43] And I'm thinking of a belt buckle that was found in the ruins under Vesuvius, found at Stabia, so in 79 CE, obviously.

[00:34:52] It's a belt buckle of a Christian, obviously.

[00:34:56] And it has Peter and Paul embracing one another.

[00:35:00] This is the last great act in what we're watching.

[00:35:04] First of all, they're deradicalizing them.

[00:35:09] And then Peter and Paul embrace.

[00:35:11] And so, we're home.

[00:35:13] Peter and Paul now are the hero twins of Christian Rome.

[00:35:17] They didn't kill one another.

[00:35:19] They didn't even fight with one another.

[00:35:23] Romulus and Ramos.

[00:35:24] Ramos, well, Romulus killed Ramos.

[00:35:27] Those are your hero twins.

[00:35:28] So, we have arrived and we're better than you are.

[00:35:32] And that's the whole sweep.

[00:35:34] And that's within the New Testament.

[00:35:37] The two, the embraces in 79, that's even before Luke.

[00:35:42] Because anyone who'd heard the story would know there was some kind of a row between Peter and Paul.

[00:35:49] Have a face.

[00:36:17] How does she care that I have a face?

[00:36:59] His face must look like yours.

[00:38:24] Her face must look like a Tina.

[00:38:44] A Russ and his husband.

[00:38:47] Gus and their children.

[00:38:49] Face like a Kim.

[00:38:52] A Ted or Tyron.

[00:40:50] Wünschst du dir jemanden, der dich versteht wie kein anderer?

[00:40:54] Jemand, der deine Wünsche wahr werden lässt und mit dir das schönste Abenteuer deines Lebens erleben möchte?

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[00:41:06] Mit Shopify richtest du im Nu deinen Online-Shop ein.

[00:41:09] Ganz ohne Programmier- oder Designkenntnisse.

[00:41:12] Dank der effizienten Einrichtung und intuitiven Social-Media- und Online-Marketplace-Integration

[00:41:17] kannst du über Instagram, Ebay und Co. werben und verkaufen.

[00:41:21] Neue Zielgruppen zu erreichen war noch nie so einfach.

[00:41:25] Shopify bietet auf einer einzigen sicheren Plattform alle Tools, um dein Online-Business aufzubauen.

[00:41:31] Kostenlos testen und dein Business der Welt präsentieren.

[00:41:35] shopify.de-try besuchen.

[00:41:37] Einfach shopify.de-try eingeben und loslegen.

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