Prof: King Abgar over in
the East Syrian region writes to Jesus saying,
"I've heard this great stuff about you,
I'm a little sick, can you come heal me?
The people in Jerusalem don't
like you, you'll find a nice peaceful home here."
Jesus wrote back apparently:
Blessed are you for believing in me, although you have not
seen me. For it is written concerning me
that those who have seen me will not believe me,
and that those who have not seen me they will believe and be
saved. But concerning what you wrote
to me namely to come to you, it is necessary for me to
complete here all for which I was sent,
and after the completion to be received up to Him that sent me.
But when I am received up,
I shall send one of my disciples to you to heal your
affliction and to impart life to you and your people.
There you have it.
Letter from King Abgar to
Jesus, a letter to Jesus back to King Abgar;
do you believe it? Kind of go like this or like
this. Come on take a stand.
Go out on a limb.
Decide you're just going to do
something wild and crazy and have an opinion.
Do you believe that those
letters are authentic? No.
Does anybody believe they're
authentic? If so I've got some land I want
to sell you. Nobody believes that the
letters from King Abgar to Jesus are authentic letters,
and nobody believes that the letter from Jesus to Abgar is
authentic. We believe they are
pseudepigrapha; remember this from before?
What's the meaning of anonymity?
Name me a document in the New
Testament that is anonymous. Student: The Gospels.
Prof: The Gospels,
exactly. The names in the Gospels were
added by later scribes. They weren't part of the
original document, so they're not pseudonymous,
because the Gospel of Matthew actually doesn't claim itself to
be by Matthew. It just is out there,
so they're anonymous. The letter to the Hebrews is
anonymous; it doesn't even claim to be by
Paul or by anybody else that we know of.
It's just a letter that's there
in the text. The text is just there by
itself. Name me a document we've talked
about that is pseudonymous, anybody?
What?
Student: I,
II, III John. Prof: I,
II, III John, actually they don't claim to be
by John. That's again anonymous letters.
We will get to them today.
Pseudonimity means it claims to
be by someone who it's not by, who we just don't believe it's
by. The letters of Abgar--the
letter of Abgar to Jesus and of Jesus to Abgar,
scholars call that pseudonymous.
They're written in their names
but we don't believe they actually wrote them.
Now why do you say you don't
believe those letters are authentic?
I mean obviously the tone of my
voice, I was messing with them, so that could have tipped you
off. And you may think,
well I've just never heard that there was an actual letter of
Jesus of Nazareth that survives, so you would think that you
would have heard about that in The New York Times
if there actually was one that was authentic.
What else about the letters
that you heard might tip you off that they're pseudonymous?
Yes sir.
Student: If the letter
was written in Greek then that would be a good indication.
Prof: Exactly,
the letters are written in Greek.
If the letters are written in
Greek-- well we don't really have any
evidence that Jesus spoke Greek, and if he did speak Greek he
probably didn't write Greek at the literary level that those
letters were obviously written. I mean I don't know if you
noticed but there's a certain style to them,
even in the English translation, that sounds like
these are written by educated people.
They know how to write good
letter forms. Jesus--we don't know anything
about King Abgar much but we can certainly say that most of us
don't believe Jesus had the kind of education that he could have
written a Greek letter like that,
so that's one indication. Anything else?
Yes sir.
Student: Sounds like
the Gospel of John. Prof: It sounds like the
Gospel of John exactly. Remember the line that said,
some people have seen me and not believed in me,
it's just almost like a quotation from the Gospel of
John. You kind of think,
this sounds like something that some Christian scribe would
write long after the life of Jesus.
And why not?
I mean, if you're a Christian
scribe living in the third century,
some scholars date these letters to around 250,
the year 250 or so, that's a guess but--
if you're a scribe living in around the year 250,
and to you Jesus is the Son of God,
he's divine, he's this miracle--he's
powerful, he's a miracle,
he's the emperor of the cosmos, the world.
And so you kind of think in
your popular mindset, well, why wouldn't kings who
lived during the time of Jesus have heard about him and know
about him? He did all these miraculous
deeds; wouldn't he have been world
famous? In fact a lot of modern people
have the same idea. They're very surprised when
they realize that Jesus actually--nobody knew anything
about him in his lifetime. They say, but he did all these
miracles and the Gospel-- these crowds that followed him
and these kinds of things, wouldn't that really have made
the headlines of the time? You say, well there actually
were a lot of miracle workers running around the ancient
world. There were a lot of prophets;
there were a lot of people claiming to raise the dead.
It wasn't that unusual a thing.
So, no, Jesus wasn't famous
during his own lifetime. But you can imagine how a
scribe, a Christian scribe, in the middle of the third
century would naturally think that this person he worships as
Lord must have been famous, and, therefore,
it's entirely believable that there could have been
correspondences between Jesus and kings around the world,
and so these letters get made up as part of just basic
Christian piety. If the letters didn't exist,
they ought to exist, so we'll write them.
We have other examples of
pseudonimity. We have, for example,
letters between Paul and the philosopher Seneca,
which nobody believes they're authentic,
nobody believes that the philosopher Seneca,
who is the aide if you recall, to the Emperor Nero.
He was an advisor to Nero until
he fell out of favor, and Nero kicked him out and all
that sort of thing. But Seneca was one of the most
famous first century Stoic philosophers.
Somebody wrote letters years
later which Seneca writes to Paul and says,
you are such a great philosopher Paul.
I wonder if we could get
together and have a little coffee klatch?
Paul writes back and says,
I'm really busy right now but we've got some--so they write
letters back and forth. We have all kinds of things.
These are not just Christian
letters. There are a whole bunch of
letters written under the names of very famous Cynic
philosophers. Now the word "cynic"
in this context doesn't mean just the adjective for someone
who is cynical. It comes from the Greek word
for "dog," kunos,
and certain--there's a certain philosophical movement in the
ancient world in which certain men,
and in a few cases, women, tried to teach that you
should live completely according to nature.
For example,
if it's natural to eat and have sex then you should--there's
nothing shameful about eating or having sex, even in public.
If it's natural for people to
follow their desires, then you should just follow
your desires. And so these Cynics got called
"doggie philosophers" by other people,
because they did the kinds of stuff that humans don't do in
public but dogs do in public. Or they also got the nickname
for several other reasons. Somebody in late antiquity
decided that they wanted a series of letters that talk
about the philosophy of Cynicism and so they have letters back
and forth under the names of famous philosophers of the Cynic
movement which talk about the morality of the Cynic movement
or debate different issues about the Cynic movement.
There are all kinds--letters of
Plato, we have a big difficulty trying
to figure out, are all the letters that exist
in ancient Greek manuscripts that claim to be letters of the
philosopher Plato, are they really by Plato?
Almost no scholar believes they
all are by Plato. Many scholars believe that at
least some of the letters that have been passed down over
tradition being by Plato may really be by Plato,
but certainly not all of them. The phenomenon of
pseudepigraphy, that is,
writings under a false name, was very,
very popular in the ancient world, and we have all kinds of
evidences for it. Now you have to imagine how
would this work? How would, for example,
these letters be produced? Well I've said Christians might
do it because it's a work of piety.
They think that these letters
ought to exist. But then you have to say,
well how would they have been published?
Remember we don't have printing
presses, so you can't just send
something off anonymously or pseudonymously to a publisher,
and just try to get it published with a printing press.
Everything's done one copy,
by one copy by hand. Everything in the ancient world
has to be copied by hand, one letter at a time.
In fact, they did copy one
letter at a time. You can tell by reading
manuscripts: they're almost all capital letters;
they're kind of block capital letters, and they don't have
spaces between words. Most of the time,
they don't have spaces often between sentences,
and you can tell these scribes are copying one letter at a
time, often. And that's why we get so many
mistakes in our New Testament manuscripts.
We have thousands of New
Testament manuscripts, and there's not two of them
that are alike exactly. We have more mistakes in
New--in the Greek copies of the New Testament than we even have
manuscripts of the Greek copies of the New Testament,
and that's in the thousands. Nobody knows how many mistakes
we have in the Greek New Testament and different
manuscripts. There are so many,
nobody's ever been able to count them, and it would be
almost impossible to count them. The reason we have this is
because it all had to be done one letter by one letter,
one scribe with one scribe, and that's why you have them.
You have to imagine,
then, if you want to publish a letter from King Abgar to Jesus
and then a letter from Jesus back to King Abgar,
well how do you do it? Well, you know you're a scribe
so you write up these letters and then maybe you write up a
few copies and send them around to people,
or show them to people, or you might claim that you
found this in a library of a monastery where you work,
or you might just send it to a book seller and get the book
seller to notice it, or you might put it in a page
of another manuscript. Say you're compiling a
manuscript, a book that has the different
Gospels, and you decide,
I'm going to put this on the back fly leaf of this book that
I'm copying. Pseudepigraphic letters were
distributed and recopied and passed around the world.
It's not a Christian phenomenon;
it's not just a Jewish phenomenon.
Everybody was doing it.
Today we get to the first two
letters we're going to talk about of the Pauline Corpus.
The last time we talked about
the seven undisputed letters of Paul.
Now we're going to get to the
time where we talk about the disputed letters of Paul.
Remember I've talked about how
Paul's letters can be divided up into three camps,
the undisputed seven letters which are listed--
I've already listed them for you and I'm not going to do it
now, they're also in your textbook,
and then there's the letters that almost all scholars,
critical scholars, believe are pseudepigraphic,
which are I and II Timothy and Titus.
Then there are the disputed
letters that some scholars will accept as being by Paul and
other scholars doubt are by Paul.
The two that are the most
debated probably now are Colossians and Ephesians.
Some people,
like me, say that they're not written by Paul,
but they're pseudepigrapha. And some people say they are
written by Paul. Yes sir.
Student: What is the
church's opinion on the letters? Prof: The church's--
Student: The Catholic Church.
Prof: The Roman Catholic
Church? The Roman Catholic Church
traditionally would have said there's no such thing as
pseudepigraphy in the Bible, but that's changed in the
twentieth century, especially with Vatican II,
which happened in the 1960s. The Roman Catholic Council of
Vatican II said that historical criticism as it's practiced in
the twentieth century is perfectly legitimate to practice
on the New Testament documents. So you will even find good
faithful Roman Catholic scholars who will also either accept or
reject the Pauline authorship of this.
The Roman Catholic Church has
no official doctrinal position on the authorship of the
different pieces of the Bible. They may have at one time just
assumed that everything that says it's written by Paul was
written by Paul, but especially since Vatican II
Roman Catholic scholars are completely free to make their
own decision about this based purely on the kinds of
historical and linguistic criteria that Protestant
scholars use also. Any other questions before I
move on? Why do I say that Colossians
and Ephesians were not written by Paul but by a disciple of
Paul later? The main reason I want to give
is writing style. Just like if you turn in a
paper to your teaching fellow, and say the first paper that
you turned in early in the semester was written in a
certain kind of style and then you turn in the second paper and
it's in a very different style. Say it has very elaborate
sentences whereas your first paper had sort of
straightforward simple sentences.
It uses lots of dependent
clauses whereas your first paper didn't use so many dependent
clauses. Your first paper used rather
simple language, your second paper uses all this
kind of language, and you either have all of a
sudden gotten a different kind of education or you went
thesaurus crazy or something. So your teaching fellow might
say, I'm getting suspicious that this letter doesn't look like
it's written by the same person. We can tell things by writing
style. Now you've read seven letters
that almost all scholars believe Paul actually wrote.
Here is the way Colossians
starts out, this is Colossians 1:3-8.
In fact, get your Bibles out,
follow along with me because what is our motto for the
semester's course? De omnibus dubitandum,
doubt everything. Why do you bring your Bibles to
class? Because I'll lie to you,
exactly. I'm going to read my own
translation of Colossians 1:3-8, notice this is a good five
verses. I read my translation because
you will notice in your translation that the editors
have broken up this one sentence.
This is all one sentence in
Greek. The editors have broken it up
into several different sentences because it just doesn't read
like an English sentence. Here's what it is in Greek:
We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
always for you when we pray, hearing of your faithfulness in
Christ Jesus and the love which you have toward all the holy
ones [that is, the saints]
because of the hope laid in store for you in the heavens,
which hope you heard about before in the word of the truth
of the Gospel that came to you, just as also in all the cosmos
it is bearing fruit and growing, just as also among you from
which day you heard and recognize the grace of God in
truth, just as you learned from
Epaphras, our beloved co-slave, who is your trustworthy servant
of Christ and who also made clear to us your love in the
spirit. One sentence.
Notice how yours was chopped up
into several other clauses and smaller sentences.
I kept using relative pronouns
like "who did this," "which this,"
and using ing-words, participles,
because that's what you use in the Greek to string along clause
after clause after clause. Now if you turn in a sentence
like this, expect to get a C on your paper because this is not
good American English writing style, right?
You recognize that now,
don't you, right? Nod your head;
yes we recognize that's not good English writing style in
contemporary America. But it actually was pretty good
writing style in the nineteenth century.
Sometimes in the--you read
older English and they-- educated writers will often
write with these complex sentences with dependent clause,
and dependent clause, and dependent clause all
nestled together. That's called periodic style,
a period is this looping Greek or Latin sentence that loops
around on itself and then comes into this nice big whole.
Now that was a good writing
style in Latin, it was a good writing style in
ancient classical Greek, and so this writer is actually
writing in a fine style; there's nothing bad.
Just because our styles have
changed, and it's no longer considered good writing style in
modern English, but it was good writing style
in Greek. And you can recognize it when
you read it in the original Greek in a way that you can't
recognize it so much when you read it in your English
translation. Now here's the first
sentence--not the first sentence but Ephesians 1:3-14,
again one sentence. Now if you thought that
Colossians sentence was long, listen to this one.
Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who blessed us with every
spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ,
just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the
cosmos, that we might be holy and
blameless in his presence and love,
having foreordained for us the sonship [or the adoption],
through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the
pleasure of his will for the praise of the glory of his
grace, which he granted us and the one
he loves, in whom we have the washing
through his blood, the forgiveness of
transgressions, according to the riches of his
grace, which he lavished on us in all
wisdom and prudence, making known to us the mystery
of his will according to his pleasure,
which he set forth previously in him until the building up of
the fullness of the times, recapitulating everything in
Christ, things in the heavens and on
the earth in him, in whom also we have become
heirs foreordained, according to the plan of the
one who accomplishes everything, according to the plan of his
will, so that we might exist for the praise of his glory,
we who were the first to hope in Christ in whom also you,
hearing the word of truth, the announcement of your
salvation, and in whom also you believed,
who were sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit which
is the seal of our inheritance for the washing of the
possession for the praise of his glory.
Thank you very much.
It sounds like--who's the
comedian? George Carlin doesn't it?
It sounds like something George
Carlin would come up with, this stringing together all
this stuff together, that's actually one sentence.
In Greek it's 201 words by my
last count, or incidentally,
when I translated this into English it actually comes out to
be 250 words in the English translation,
so that's a long sentence. Now I do all that just to say
this is a good lesson, you should learn Greek,
you should learn Greek because it's actually fun to read some
of these texts in the original language because the English
translations change it enough that you don't get the feel of
it. You can get the feel of it even
in English. If you sit there and read all
those verses in the first chapter of Ephesians,
just in your own English translation,
you'll get some of that rhythm because they try to maintain a
little bit of that long kind of feeling.
But it's only in Greek that you
figure out that this is one sentence.
Now Paul is capable of writing
a complex sentence like that, but he just doesn't.
You can search all the way
through the seven authentic letters of Paul and you just
tell-- especially the Ephesians
passage, it just doesn't sound like Paul.
Paul writes fairly
straightforward sentences. Sometimes they have grammatical
problems, sometimes he kind of starts and
stops, sometimes it's hard to figure
out exactly, syntactically,
how a sentence works together, but Paul's capable of writing
perfectly fine Greek sentences. But Paul writes his letters
almost more the way you would expect somebody to talk,
not like this, which is very elaborate in its
construction. This author is obviously
working to make an elaborate introductory sentence that's the
first thing that's heard in this congregation who's hearing this
letter read out loud. One of the first things that I
would say is that I just don't think these letters are by Paul
because they don't sound like Paul,
they don't sound like his style. They're very,
very different as far just the style of the writing and the
Greek. Other people could say,
well there's also the vocabulary, the vocabulary is
quite a bit different in Colossians and Ephesians.
If you noticed the Colossians
sentence was long but it was not nearly as elaborate as that
Ephesians sentence, right?
If you notice they sounded
similar in places. They both talk about the
heavenlies. It's the plural for heaven,
so the heavens or the heavenly places is this Greek word.
They both used that kind of
language. As we'll go through,
they both--Colossians and Ephesians--
look a lot alike, both in their theology and in
their style, and in even the structure of
the two letters. Were they written by the same
person? Some people think so,
some people say they think it's more likely that Paul may have
written Colossians because it at least is not so different from
some of his other letters, and then they'll say,
but a pseudonymous writer wrote Ephesians.
What I think is that Colossians
was written by one disciple of Paul.
He knew Pauline theology;
I think that he knew Paul's theology pretty well.
It's just that it's not--what
he ends up teaching in Colossians is not exactly Paul's
theology, as I'll show today. I think, though,
that Ephesians came along and was written by somebody else
using Colossians as a model. And that's why I think--if you
get Ephesians you have this long,
long, long sentence that is longer than the similar sentence
in Colossians but seems to borrow some from it.
I think a different disciple
came around, knew about the letter to the
Colossians, used Colossians as a model,
and then wrote the letter to the Ephesians as another
pseudonymous letter. The way I'm going to teach
this--and this is something that some scholars won't agree with
me about, obviously--but I'm going to
take the seven undisputed letters of Paul as being by
Paul. Colossians I'm going to teach
is written by one disciple of Paul using his ideas but
elaborating them differently and using a very different writing
style. And Ephesians is written by
another disciple of Paul using Colossians and Paul's letters as
models. What is the issue?
Let's start with Colossians
now, what is the issue in Colossians?
First I'll stop,
are there any questions or outbursts about what we've done
so far? Yes sir.
Student: What says the
seven confirmed ones are his and the other two are not his?
Why is one style his and one
style-- Prof: Okay the question
is what says that the seven that I've called the undisputed
letters are actually Paul and the others are not Paul?
In other words you--basically
what it is is that you've got to have something that you're
willing to say is Paul if you're ever going to say something else
is not Paul. The undisputed letters,
we just say that's the historical Paul,
if there's anything. Now of course there's a joke in
scholarship that basically says, well the seven letters that are
the undisputed letters of Paul-- called that by some scholars,
they weren't really written by Paul,
they were written by another guy named Paul.
At some point you just have to
say, well we're going to posit that
there was a historical Paul, and if anything in the Bible
was written by that guy that we're going to assume was the
historical Paul, it's those seven letters.
They have enough of the style
the same, they cohere well together, all seven of them.
Now there are scholars who will
doubt some of those seven also, one of the seven,
but it's sort of like somebody else said,
well I don't believe Romans and Galatians were by Paul,
than I kind of say, well then they're written by
another Apostle who was named Paul and had the exact same
ideas and the same writing style.
I mean I--at some point you
just have to throw up your hands, but yes it's a good
question. Basically scholars just start
off saying, if there is a historical Paul
then what are the letters that look enough alike to form one
body of literature, and those are those seven
letters. Any other questions?
Let's look at Colossians now
and go through it and talk about what's at issue in Colossians
and what is this letter actually about?
Now I asked you to read
Colossians before Ephesians, although it comes after in the
Canon because I think Colossians predates Ephesians and instead
of-- basically you've got a choice.
These are similar enough in
their style and content that you sort of have to say either the
same person wrote both of them and that's why they're so much
alike, or if you said,
like I did, that different people wrote them,
one of them used the other as a model.
I argue that Colossians was
first and used as a model by Ephesians because I think
Colossians is more elaborated in the Ephesians document.
Of course Colossians doesn't
come before Ephesians even though I'm saying it was written
before it, and why does Colossians come
after Ephesians in the Canon? You should be able to guess
this now if we haven't already talked about it.
I think we talked about it
earlier in the semester. Why does Colossians come after
Ephesians in the Canon? Why does 1 Corinthians come
after Romans in the Canon? Anybody want to make a guess?
How are the letters of Paul
arranged in the Canon by order? Sorry, somebody said it.
Student: Length.
Prof: Length,
exactly that's right. The longer letters are first,
and they get shorter as you go, so Colossians is shorter than
Ephesians and therefore it comes after Ephesians in the Canon but
that's just the way the Canon got to be formed.
Let's look and see what's going
on here and for this what is the issue?
Let's look at Colossians 2:16:
Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food
and drink, or of observing festivals, new moons or
Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what
is to come but the substance belongs to Christ.
Do not let anyone disqualify
you, insisting on self abasement and worship of angels,
dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a
human way of thinking and not holding fast to the head from
whom the whole body, nourished and held together by
its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is
from God. If with Christ you died to the
elemental spirits of the universe [remember those are the
stoicheia we talked about in Galatians,
the elemental spirits of the universe],
why do you live as if you still
belong to the world? Why do you submit to
regulations? "Do not handle,
do not taste, do not touch,"
all these regulations refer to things that perish with use,
they are simply human commands and teachings.
These have indeed an appearance
of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety,
humility, and severe treatment of the body,
but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.
What's going on here?
This is basically some form of
asceticism, the control of the body.
Asceticism comes from the Greek
word for exercise, an ascetic is someone who
disciplines the body. So "asceticism"
refers to usually the avoidance of something like food or
luxurious foods or sex, or anything that has desire or
passion as part of it. So apparently this author is
writing to a community that's been bothered by people who are
teaching certain forms of self-control and discipline of
the body, the worship of angels.
Now there's a debate about
whether this refers to people worshipping angels or whether it
refers to people who think they're joining with angels in
the worship of God. I think it must refer to people
who believe they're worshipping angels because this author does
link that to stoicheia of the universe.
I think what the author is
doing is something that Paul sort of did too,
which is somehow equate in a sense the stoicheia of
the universe with angels who try to manipulate things on the
earth and below us. I think that what this author
is probably referring is that somebody has come along and is
teaching some churches of Paul, Paul's churches,
to do some elaborate sort of ascetic practices to gain some
kind of great spiritual status. Maybe these people are
teaching, you live on the earth now but if you want to fly up
through the different regions of the heavens--
remember there are several different layers of heavens in
ancient cosmology-- if you want to fly up through
the different layers of heavens then you have to stop eating
meat, you have to stop having sex,
you need to join in this worship of the angels.
Why?
Because angels control the
gateways to all these different layers of heaven.
What's going on is some aspect
of asceticism is being taught to these people and some of them
seem to be giving into it. What is the answer this author
gives? 1:19:
For in Him, that is in Christ [Colossians 1:19]
all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all
things whether on earth or in heaven,
by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Look at 3:1-4.
In other words,
what the author says is, you don't need all these
ascetic practices because if you are in Christ you already
possess everything that the heavens have to offer.
You don't need these extra
practices. So he says in Chapter 3:1,
"If you have been raised with Christ,"
that's interesting. He's basically attributing the
resurrection already to these people's current state.
Now maybe he's talking about
baptism. Maybe the idea is that in your
baptism when you go down into the water;
remember in ancient baptism they all dunked them like good
Baptists these days, not a little sprinkling of
stuff; they dunked them in the water.
If you go down in the water
like you're being buried, you come up out of the water,
and that's like you're being raised from the grave.
He may be talking about if
you've been baptized you have been raised with Christ already.
If you've been raised with
Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is,
seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things that
are above, not on things that are on
earth, for you have died, [he's talking about these
people as if they've already experienced death]
and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ who is your life is
revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
This author basically is
saying, you don't need these different practices because you
already, perhaps in your baptism,
have experienced death and resurrection.
The only thing these people
haven't experienced, that they will experience in
heaven, according to this author,
is simply the revelation of their glory.
They're still leather workers,
and waitresses, and working in the quarry,
so they don't look like kings right now.
Their skin doesn't glow.
When Christ is revealed then
their skin will glow and all their neighbors will go,
oh my God I thought you were just a waiter,
now I see that you're living in glory in heaven.
That's the only thing they
have, now all that you would possess in the heavens,
this author says, you already possess.
Now compare this with Paul,
keep your finger in Colossians and go back to Romans 6.
"What then are we to
say?" Now remember in Romans Paul is
defending himself against charges that he has been
antinomian--no law, just anything goes,
do anything you want to do. What are we to say?
Should we continue in sin in
order that grace may abound? By no means!
How can we who died to sin go
on living in it? Do you not know that all of us
who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into
his death? Paul's Christians have also
been baptized into death. "Therefore we have been
buried with him by baptism into death so that just as Christ was
raised from the dead by the glory of the Father so we also
have been raised from death."
You all are like sheep,
no that's not what it says! I'm lying to you,
that's why I want you to read along with me.
That's the way most modern
Christians read that passage though.
They take the Colossians
account that has-- the author kind of acts like
they've been not only buried in baptism but also risen in
baptism, and they take that Colossians
and read it back into Romans 6. That's not what Paul says in
Romans 6, he doesn't say they have been raised yet.
Christians have been buried,
but then he says, "So we too might walk in
newness of life," that's not happened yet,
according to Paul. "If we had been united
with him in a death like his we will certainly be reunited with
him in a resurrection like his."
For Paul the resurrection of
Christians hasn't happened yet. Christians for Paul are living
in this in between state, having been baptized into
death, but not having been raised yet.
We know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed
and we might no longer be enslaved to him.
For whoever has died is freed
from sin. There are some of these things
like that but basically for Paul in baptism you participate in
the death and burial of Christ, but you don't yet participate
in the resurrection. Notice that's quite different
from what you found in Colossians.
Colossians pulls the
resurrection, that for Paul is still in the
future, and he puts it in the present.
This is called by scholars
"realized eschatology."
What's eschatology?
Somebody say it.
Student: The end of the
world. Prof: Sorry,
the end of the world, doctrine about the end of the
world, doctrine about the last things,
eschaton is the Greek word for "the end"
or "the last," so eschatology is what do you
believe about the last things, how things are going to end up.
"Realized
eschatology" basically is the term we
scholars give, this is not Paul's term or any
other ancient writer. The idea that the
eschatological expectations that Paul expected to happen at the
end of this world is-- has already been realized in
the lives of the church. What Paul has is not realized
eschatology because the resurrection and all the
benefits that you get from being saved by Christ are still in the
future. Let's just call that
"reserved eschatology."
So whereas in Paul's letters
it's very important for Paul's theology that the end hasn't
happened yet, the resurrection hasn't
happened yet. The resurrection of
Christ has happened, but remember Paul says he's
just the first fruits of those who sleep.
He's the first apple on the
tree. That's Christ's resurrection,
but all the rest of us are just little apple blossoms,
or little immature apples. We haven't gotten to maturity
yet. We have to wait until either
Jesus comes back in the parousia or we die and
are resurrected at the end. Colossians has a realized
eschatology and Paul has a reserved eschatology,
and this is one of the major theological differences between
Paul's undisputed letters and Colossians,
that some of us scholars grasp onto to say it's not Pauline.
Now other people would say,
no, no, no Paul just was emphasizing different things
when he wrote Colossians because the situation was different.
He changed his writing style a
bit because he was writing to a different group,
and he wanted to have a more elevated style.
He changed his eschatology a
bit and emphasized current enjoyment of these things
because of the different situation.
That's one way to read this,
so some people say either Paul's views changed or Paul
just emphasized different aspects of theology--
if you want to say Paul wrote Colossians,
and there are many scholars who do.
I say, no this is good evidence
that we're talking about a different author who has a
slightly different theology that would be,
in some ways, pretty fundamentally different.
Like Paul was doing,
though, notice how these people are doing what Paul's people in
Galatians did. They're looking for something
else to add onto the requirements of faith that will
somehow guarantee their possession of the blessings of
salvation. This author though provides a
different answer. Paul's answer,
what was Paul's answer to people in Galatians who wanted
to add on circumcision and kosher?
He basically said no,
you're actually nullifying the faithfulness of God.
Justification for Paul in
Romans has always been by faith, even Abraham was justified by
faith not by circumcision. And so Paul makes a big
argument by saying, justification has always been
by faith, therefore nothing else can be added onto it.
This is important for Paul
because that's God's faithfulness.
For Paul the most important
thing is, if God wasn't always justifying
people by faith that would mean God changed his mind and God was
not faithful to the original covenant to Abraham.
For Paul, God justifies by
faith, he always has justified by faith, even all the way back
to Abraham. The Colossians writer does it a
bit differently. He also talks about faith,
that's important to him, but basically he says,
you don't need all these additions because you already
possess them, you've already experienced the
resurrection of Jesus, you already sit in the heavenly
places, and therefore you don't need
these other things. Now Ephesians uses Colossians
as a model and then just builds on it even more.
Let's look over to Ephesians
and look at Ephesians 1:20: God put this power to work in
Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his
right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and
authority, and power, and dominion,
and above every name that is named not only in this age but
also in the age to come. He has put all things under his
feet and made him the head over all things for the church,
which is his body, the fullness of him who fills
all in all. Christ is already now seated in
the heavenly places, which he is for Paul theology
too, but what makes it different is--
look at 2:6, chapter 2, verse 6,
"And raised us up with him" So again the
resurrection is something the Ephesians writer says they've
already experienced.... and seated us with him in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come he
might show the immeasurable richness--
riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ
Jesus. Already--notice verse 8 of
chapter 2, "For by grace you have
been saved through faith and this is not your own doing it is
the gift of God." Now that's something that you
might not notice, but scholars like to pick on
little things like that, and most scholars will point
out that if you look at just Paul's seven undisputed letters,
salvation is something that for Paul exists in the future.
Justification is something that
you've experienced in the past. So Paul can say you have been
justified, but Paul almost never acts like Christians have been
saved. For example,
when someone knocks on your door and someone says,
"Have you been saved?"
You can say,
well, no, because the Apostle Paul reserves salvation for the
end time. I've been justified but I
haven't been saved. That's good Pauline theology.
The people who talk about
"have you been saved?" they're using theology from
Ephesians perhaps, or from Colossians,
but it doesn't really fit Paul's theology.
For Paul's theology,
justification is something you've experienced,
but salvation is something you still have to wait on.
For Ephesians,
though, salvation is something you have experienced through
faith. Notice that Ephesians therefore
actually looks like it's using Colossians in the example,
it has some of the same themes, some of the same styles,
but Ephesians actually looks even more like a treatise and
not like a real letter. If you outline Ephesians,
you get the first three chapters,
which are very elaborate doctrinal teachings about what
Christ has accomplished, what you, if you're a follower
of Christ, have experienced.
And one of the main focuses of
Ephesians is that Gentiles and Jews, the whole world,
has been joined at one humanity in the body of Christ.
The dividing wall of hostility
between Jews and Gentiles, probably the law in this guy's
thinking, has been broken down and all
followers of Christ have experienced this.
The first three chapters do
that, and then chapters 4-6 in Ephesians look more like a
section on ethics, or as scholars will often say,
paraenesis. This is just a fancy,
anglicization of a Greek word, which means
"instruction" or "moral
instruction." It's like when your mom says do
this, don't do that,
behave yourself, don't pick your nose at the
table, say excuse me when you burp,
so there's a lot of Christian material that are sort of do
this, don't do that ethics and that's
what the last half of Ephesians looks more like.
So scholars will often say
Ephesians looks like a very nice treatise, a very well organized
outline of Christian doctrine and teaching;
the first half of it being doctrine and the second half of
it being ethics. Why do I say that Ephesians was
written by a different author and not simply the same author?
There's really just one reason
and this was argued by a young man,
Jeremy Hultin, who teaches in The Divinity
School here and he did a PhD here at Yale several years ago.
The PhD was mainly on foul
language in early Christianity. What counts as cussing?
What counts as dirty language?
Why both Ephesians and
Colossians talk about don't use--the term in Greek is
aischrologia, shameful speech.
Well Jeremy kind of sat there
and he thought, well--back when I was a kid my
mom wouldn't let us say "darn,"
we were really strict. You certainly couldn't say
"dang," that was worse than
"darn," and "damn"
was worse than any of them, so don't get caught saying
"damn." Now I've actually caught my
mother saying it a few times lately but things change.
What makes "damn"
bad for some people and "darn"
okay? Well these are cultural
differences, right? Why is it that in some cultures
body parts, certain body parts,
or excrement is considered a foul word that you're not
supposed to say in polite company?
Why is it that some cultures
have curse words and some of those curse words are related to
sacred things? Like why in some cultures is it
considered bad language and offensive language to say
"Jesus Christ," especially if you say
"Jesus H. Christ"? Whereas, as in other cultures,
calling on the name of a god or a goddess wouldn't be considered
shameful language at all. So Jeremy said,
what do these people mean by shameful language?
How do you know shameful
language when you see it in the ancient world and what were they
talking about? His dissertation is on that,
but one thing he points out is that although both the writer of
Colossians and Ephesians tell people not to use shameful
language, the writer of Colossians
actually tells people in his church to use witty language.
He says, and your translation
may something like this, "Let your speech be
seasoned with salt." And Jeremy pointed out that
this is a reference to witty language, to a language of wit.
The writer to Ephesians
condemns that kind of language. He just noticed that these two
writers are very similar in some ways but when it comes down to
what counts as shameful speech, the writer of the Ephesians
considered shameful speech even to include witticisms,
making jokes, that also was considered
shameful speech. Whereas the writer of
Colossians doesn't include that. In fact, he tells people to use
wit in their language. So that's just one of the
reasons. Before that I kind of thought,
well, probably the same person wrote both these letters,
and they were just different in some ways.
But he convinced me that quite
probably they were written by two different,
very similar, but two different followers of
Jesus, with Colossians being the
earlier letter and the Ephesians writer using Colossians as a
model and then capitalizing on it.
Another interesting thing is we
don't really know whether the letter to the Ephesians was
written to the Ephesians. There's an interesting problem
in the Greek manuscripts. A lot of the Greek manuscripts
don't have "to the Ephesians,"
some of them have another place name there,
and some of them seem to have just a blank.
This has led some scholars to
say maybe Ephesians was written as a circular letter.
In fact some people have even
said, maybe Ephesians was written
when a collection of Paul's letters was made and some scribe
or editor decided, well I'm going to write an
introductory letter that will encapsulate Paul's Gospel in
Paul's message, and I'm going to do it in a
very elevated style, and we'll put that at the
beginning of the collection to sort of be an introductory
letter for all the collection of Paul's letters.
One of the things is that we
think that Ephesians may have been a circular letter because
of this idea that not all the Greek manuscripts have Ephesians
and some have other things. The idea is that the guy may
have written a letter with the idea that you would leave
"to the blank" and then fill it in with
different place names, according to where you were
going to send the letter, or that you would send it one
place and then they could fill in another name and send it to
other places. Ephesians, by many of our
reckoning, may have been written as a
circular letter, intended to be circulated
around different churches, maybe even as sort of an
introductory letter to a collection of Paul's other
letters. What, though,
are the other developments, and we'll close in just a few
minutes here. What makes these letters
different from Pauline Christianity?
There are a few things.
Number one, I said Colossians
and Ephesians both have realized eschatology;
Paul has reserved eschatology. In other words,
for Paul all the enjoyments that Christians would experience
are still in the future. It's like for Paul the
blessings of the eschaton,
the eschatology, is still horizontal.
We're here, we're going there,
we're on earth, we'll be in heaven.
We have experienced death,
we will experience resurrection.
For Ephesians and Colossians,
they've taken this axis and turned it like this,
so that the things that--there's the cosmos and
there's the heavenlies but they all still exist right now,
so the rest of the world is down here on earth,
but followers of Jesus have been translated already right
now into the heavenly places, and they already enjoy these
benefits. It's almost as if the
eschatological timeline, the axis in Paul's letter,
has been just flipped up like this in Colossians and
Ephesians, so that's one major difference.
Another major difference is
Colossians and Ephesians have a slightly higher Christology.
The Colossians writer,
very famously, says, in Christ the entire
fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
Paul never says anything quite
like that. In fact, Paul's letters are
kind of problematic from a good orthodox theological point of
view because Paul seems to assume what we would later call
a subordinationist Christology. Subordinationist Christology,
which was declared heretical by the time you get to the creeds
in the fourth century, says that Jesus is another
person, separate from God the Father,
and Jesus is inferior to God the Father,
so Jesus is subordinate to God the Father.
There are several passages in
Paul's letters, one of them in 1 Corinthians 15
that we've talked about and read in this class already,
where Paul seems to still believe that God the Father is
here, Christ is here.
Then there was 1 Corinthians 11
where Paul talks about, "Man is the head of woman,
Christ is the head of man, and God is the head of
Christ." Well that's a hierarchy.
God, Christ, man, woman.
So Paul seems to hold what we
would call almost a subordinationist form of
Christology, whereas Colossians and
Ephesians tend to have Christ as more fully God.
Another of the changes,
and I won't go into this too much,
but if you look at the household codes,
and we'll get to this later when we talk about Christianity
in the family. In Colossians 3:18-4:1 and
Ephesians 5:21-6:9, you have an elaborate set of
rules for the head of the household, the wife,
the children, the slaves.
Everybody has their job to do.
In Colossians and Ephesians
there is clearly a patriarchal household structure that's
hierarchical. The wife and the children
submit to the husband, the father, the slaves submit
to the master. This is much more hierarchical
and pro-household than what you get in Paul's authentic letters.
Paul is perfectly willing to
kind of have women and men, husbands and wives more mutual.
He says in 1 Corinthians 7,
"The husband controls the wife's body but the wife also
controls the husband's body. They each have authority over
each other's body." That's not the way it is in
Colossians and Ephesians where it's much more hierarchical,
much more patriarchal. There are some kinds of
differences, but what does it say about Paul?
Already by these letters,
then, by these pseudonymous letters,
we have Paul being thought of now as a figure in the past
whose reputation can now be built on to advance a slightly
different version of the Christian Gospel and Christian
message than you got in Paul's letters.
Paul is already starting to
recede into the past now, and, as we'll see as the
semester goes on, we'll read other texts that
have Paul even further in the past,
and then he can be drawn on to justify or promote another form
of early Christianity. Any questions about that?
Next time what we'll do is
we'll look at the letter of James in which we have someone
who may indeed be actually opposing Paul's Gospel and
Paul's message rather than just building on it.
See you next time.
