{"id":3868,"date":"2016-05-08T16:50:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T23:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=3868"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:49:34","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:49:34","slug":"reading-in-and-around-the-bible-epistles-of-paul-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2016\/05\/08\/reading-in-and-around-the-bible-epistles-of-paul-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading In and Around the Bible: Epistles of Paul, 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/New-Oxford-Annotated-Bible-Apocrypha\/dp\/0195289552\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/oxfordbible_217x300.jpg\" width=\"199\" height=\"290\" align=\"right\"><\/a>First Corinthians:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> 1:7, \u201cas you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ\u201d. Another allusion to Paul\u2019s prediction of the imminent Second Coming, which has conspicuously failed to happen for some 2000 years now. Again, why hasn\u2019t this most egregious example of a failed prophecy undermined everything else Paul said? Because selection bias, as we now understand it: people are sensitive to prophecies that come true, no matter how vaguely, thus Paul\u2019s numerous citations of Hebrew scripture, while ignoring all the ancient prophecies that never managed to come true. For contemporary Christians, it\u2019s a matter of ignoring the ones that don\u2019t come true, including this one. Only the hits count.\n<li> 1:18, \u201cFor the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved&#8230;\u201d Another appeal to tribalism; us v. them, and how Paul\u2019s followers should feel very special for being among the chosen elite.\n<li> 1:19, appeal to scripture, and anti-intellectualism. (Because the more you know, the less susceptible you are to the power of magical tales of miracles.)\n<li> 1:22, \u201cFor the Jews demand signs and Greeks demand wisdom\u201d \u2013 as opposed to Paul\u2019s followers; in other works, we don\u2019t need evidence! We don\u2019t need reason!\n<li> 1:26-27, All about upstaging those elites \u2013 how this does resemble contemporary American politics, with a certain candidate appealing to the ignorant base against the \u2018establishment\u2019! \u2013 which leads me again to wonder, if there was this god, how it is he didn\u2019t manage to reveal his truth to everyone, if it\u2019s really the truth? Why play favorites? Why does it not instead *seem exactly* like the conceited fantasies of a tribe or cult who fancied themselves the chosen of their particular, local god?\n<li> 3:19, \u201cfor the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God\u201d. Again\u2026\n<li> Ch5, again, Paul is much concerned with sex. This suggests more about him than about god or Jesus.\n<li> 5:5, \u201cdestruction of the flesh\u201d, Oxford\u2019s annotators seem to bend over backwards to explain how it doesn\u2019t really mean that.\n<li> 5:9, \u201cnot associate with sexually immoral persons\u2026\u201d Really? WWJD? From later letters Paul seems familiar with the various \u201csayings\u201d of Jesus, but not, of course, with the NT gospels as we know them.\n<li> Ch6, Don\u2019t associate with non-believers! Very tribal, and self-righteous.\n<li> 6:9, rather obsessed with \u2018wrongdoers\u2019. [I never realized until now that George Bush\u2019s phrase \u2018evildoers\u2019 came out of his close attention to the themes of these ancient religious manuscripts which have, alas, informed so much of human history for the past two millennia.]\n<li> ch7, more about sex! This is about Paul. Apparently he is unmarried and finds the whole idea of sex rather distasteful, and would just as soon counsel everyone else to consider it just as distasteful. Who is he to lay down such rules\u2026? Apparently the one who won.\n<li> 7:26, \u201cimpending crisis\u201d, again, Paul predicts the Second Coming is happening soon.\n<li> 7:31, \u201cFor the present form of this world is passing away.\u201d Yet another statement of the most failed prophecy of all time.\n<li> 10:20, Our god is real, theirs is not.\n<li> Ch11, So many rules! Who says?\n<li> 11:9, \u201cNeither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man\u201d. Obviously, antiquated gender roles, which many adhere to, to this day. Is there some atavistic evolutionary reason for this belief? Is this something that can be, or should be, overcome? Obviously US laws cites equality before the law, yet that \u201cequal rights amendment\u201d never passed.\n<li> 11:14, \u201cDoes not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him\u2026\u201d Really?? Why?? Doesn\u2019t that iconic portrait of Jesus show him with long hair? (And how, and how often, did men cut their hair in those days\u2026? Do we know?)\n<li> 12:8, a ranking in descending order of the values of wisdom, knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, then miracles, and so on. But later, 12:28, these are aligned with apostles, prophets, teachers and so on, so the ideas of wisdom and knowledge didn\u2019t mean what we think of them now.\n<li> 13:1, in NRSV, \u201ca noisy gong or a clanging cymbal\u201d, to mean saying without love; KJV says \u201cI am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal\u201d, a phrase adapted by SF author Robert Silverberg for essay about his career up to a point: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.isfdb.org\/cgi-bin\/title.cgi?121613\">Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal<\/a>\n<li> Throughout these passages, NRSV uses the word \u201clove\u201d where KJV uses \u201ccharity\u201d. Asimov, p444-447, discusses the original Greek word, \u201cagape\u201d, and how neither translation exactly matches its meaning.\n<li> 13:8, everything will end but love. Often-quoted: \u201cWhen I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.\u201d (I think this is true, or should be true, in a greater way, as our species learns about the reality of the universe around us, and puts away childish, mythical beliefs of our tribal ancestors.)\n<li> 13:12, KJV\u2019s famous \u201cthrough a glass, darkly\u201d becomes in NRSV \u201cin a mirror, dimly\u201d.\n<li> 14:1-2, seems to equate \u2018prophesy\u2019 with \u2018speaking in tongues\u2019, which is not commonly understood, I\u2019d guess.\n<li> 14:34, the famous injunction against women speaking in churches \u2013 but the Oxford annotators think these passages were later additions, not by Paul (for what that\u2019s worth)\n<li> Ch15, Paul goes on about the resurrection, which the Oxford annotators think is derived from \u201cthe philosophical proof of the immortality of the soul\u201d in Plato\u2019s <i>Phaedr<\/i> and others. Of course, Paul\u2019s entire argument begs the question.\n<li> 15:6, Jesus appeared to some 500 people?? First mention of this I\u2019ve read. (And curious that the four Gospels, written later, didn\u2019t describe any such thing.)\n<\/ul>\n<p>Second Corinthians<\/p>\n<p>In this book especially, it struck me when I read it, it seems that Paul is using lots of words to say very little; that his prose is obsequious with flattery to his followers on Corinth on the one hand, boasting with unseemly self-importance, while at the same time reproving those followers like a father to unruly children, and almost desperate in his repeated appeals to the coming eternal life in the heavens.<\/p>\n<p>Fewer specific notes. By Ch3, Paul has a new theme: he\u2019s decided that the covenant of Moses is a \u201cministry of death\u201d and only belief in Jesus is the way. Ch8 is a beg for money, like any contemporary preachers \u2013 as a \u201cproof of love\u201d. All the commentators seem to agree that Chs 10-13 come from an earlier, angrier, letter, that was grafted into this scroll by later editors. 10:10 describes Paul\u2019s unimpressive appearance and presence. 10:5 insists that a believer\u2019s every thought must be subsumed to Christ. 11:5, Paul is worried about the appeal of other \u201csuper-apostles\u201d, as if is followers might be easily swayed. (By rhetoric, of course, not by any kind of evidence.) And 12:7, Paul\u2019s apparently infamous \u201cthorn\u201d, about which no one really knows what he means, but about which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Complete-Guide-Bible-Stephen-Miller\/dp\/1597893749\/\">Miller<\/a>, anxious to justify every biblical passage through allusion to any kind of contemporary knowledge, speculates wildly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First Corinthians: 1:7, \u201cas you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ\u201d. Another allusion to Paul\u2019s prediction of the imminent Second Coming, which has conspicuously failed to happen for some 2000 years now. Again, why hasn\u2019t this most &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2016\/05\/08\/reading-in-and-around-the-bible-epistles-of-paul-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3868"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3973,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3868\/revisions\/3973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}