ps. Don't worry about long emails: you better use your time to write books - books like yours' are much better than emails.
Dear Markus,
Sorry if I am writing to you so soon. Blame Amazon.de, which put
Offener Anfang on my doorstep already on Friday.
Curiously, I was then happily reading another book of yours! Your fantastic
Detachment-book. I cut short my ecstatic trip, let Martha and Mary bickering, and began reading your brand-new book.
At first, my
congratulations: writing a book is Herculean work. I have been learning a lot with your books. I feel embarrassed about writing to you because I never met you personally. However, since I seldom go to international events, it is the only way I have to ask you some questions. I hope I am not inopportune. Anyway, I solemnly promise that I will never write another massive email again to you.
I began inspecting the bibliography. For the first time, you listed Hermann Detering: someone I highly praise, but you chose to ignore in the Marcion- and in the Resurrection-book. He was the first one who distilled my uneasiness with the dating of the letters attributed to Paul into an array of academic well-formulated questions. Unfortunately, you never engaged with his books, not even in a brief footnote (or am I wrong?). You listed Robert M. Price, too. Dennis MacDonald shows up only with a book of 1983, before his research on Greek literature and NT. Neither Stephen D. Moore nor Janice Capel Anderson is listed, though you discuss homosexuality.
I have no training in NT Studies and, consequently, profited a lot just in my first reading. Your book is not as I had anticipated (after all, it is your book, not mine). I thought you would present the complex philosophical, literary, and religious debates of the second half of the 2nd Century and descend, as far as possible, to the earlier controversies related to what may have happened in the 1st Century. On the one hand, you achieved more; on the other hand, less than I had expected. In fact, you began latter, touching base beyond the 2nd Century, with Gregory of Tours, Paulus and Seneca, Origin… so went on, always anticlockwise, until you reached Paul’s letters, which, following Trobisch (?), you understand as have been written around the first half of the 1st Century.
What I did not like is the fact that you dealt preponderantly with Christian literature. You almost left out: Gnosticism, Greek literature, the debate around dying and rising gods, and philosophical ideas or attitudes pertaining to Stoicism and Cynicism. Justice be done: Marcion has proud of place.
However, let me make my point clear. The hero of your book is Trobisch, who shows up 24x in the Register (Moderne Autoren). Paul’s Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins is an amazing book. One can learn in it many things about letters collection in Antiquity, but hardly anything about a letter-writing Paul. Trobisch takes for granted that there was – indisputably – a Paul, who wrote the letters and even supervised an original collection of them. Since the material discussed is in many ways difficult to date and that the first texts which give some hint about the letters have many times questionable authorship and are difficult to date as well, i.e., since there is much leeway to come up with harmonizing appreciations of the material, tacit presuppositions may be easily imposed and, once they get into the mainstream scholarship, they become hard to be questioned or even to be spotted.
For instance, Trobisch in the subchapter “Addenda” points out that Cicero (and others) adds some sentences to a letter with his own handwriting and that, to authenticate the authorship of letters or documents; only the signature was not enough in Antiquity: the author should definitely drop some lines in his own handwriting in lieu of an authenticating seal. Thereby Trobisch is arguing that when “Paul” allegedly writes in 1Cor 21-24 with his “own hand,” it corroborates the authenticity of the letter. It is preposterous. He is preaching to converts. Only those who already accept Paul as the author of the first documents of Christianity will see Trobisch’s tale as a convincing argument. All of Trobisch’s arguments are for converts. Even my students are aware that forgers know the tricks to make their forgeries plausible. So, a chapter as “Characteristics Features of Letters of Paul. Inscription, Expression of Thanks, Wish of Grace” may be read rather as tricks to deceive the readers. In your Marcion-book you, inadvertently, also offer comments that cut both ways, in favor or disfavor of Paul’s authorship.
The unshakeable feeling of certainty that there had been a letter-writing Paul becomes a delusional core around which, falling back on vaguely datable material, it turns possible that a worldwide, well-subsidized academic apparatus becomes highly effective in creating unnerving arguments, or slogans, like the “consensus,” “the majority of modern research,” “not seriously disputed,” “it is well-established” and so on. As erudite as it can get, books like the Trobisch’s, regarding a serious debate on the authorship of the seven lucky epistles, are just gaslighting what should have been put up front.
Heavy-weight NT scholars as Trobisch, Brakke, Pagel, Tyson, Ehrmann, and so on, all of them just accept the authorship of the lucky seven. Then an enormous erudition effort is made to debate the order of the letters, how many letters were fused to put 2Cor together, etc. Some questions in their books are, however biased, particularly relevant: when Acts was written? Which was the role of Marcion (your book)? But if the author has already decided that Gal was written in 57 CE, any critical astuteness will be biased and instrumental in protecting the delusional, so that s dominant narrative will keep thriving on the cocooned postulate of the early dating of Paul (at least you vigorously discussed the dating of the Synoptics).
I thought you would in
Offener Anfang keep the authorship question of the letters attributed to Paul open: when did it become rhetorical important to establish an authoritative genealogy beginning from Jesus, then postulating the twelve apostles, and so on? When did it become rhetorical effective to have letters ascribed to Paul? (Letters that brought to light a dramatis personae, independent from the twelve-apostles genealogy.) How and when the, let’s say, “two” groups clashed?
How in the 2nd Century would people write history? They would not talk about demography, social conflicts, biopolitics, and necropolitics, but would focus on what they understood as the life and decisions of kings or generals; in other words, they would emphasize the individuals. (They don't command social-sciences concepts and language; they tend to write plays and novels (or "scientific" and philosophical tractates.) Geographical descriptions and more ample appreciations would probably be restricted to the beginning, but the narrative would center on individuals and moral arguments (the moral virtues of a people – similar to the courage of an individual – could be taken into account, too). Ideological conflicts would be attributed to the leadership and genius of individuals. So, whatever Christian sects in the 2nd Century may be debating they would relate it as the sayings of individuals, who would debate or proclaim their ideas and attitudes. The rhetorical confrontations needed dramatis personae. Not to mention that in that pre-Netflix era, they were in need of entertainment: catchy or memorable stories.
Justin Martyr, for whom Jesus was born in a cave, had to comment two or three times on the similarities of Jesus and Mithras. He argued that the devil – knowing about the future – had inspired previous people to come up with stories to disseminate doubts about Jesus. It is clear that for Justin to have well-accepted stories that could reinforce the plausibility of where and when Jesus had been born would be handy. Moreover, such stories were already in the making (soon Jesus, in the Synoptics, would no longer be born in a Mithras-alluding cave).
We have to establish when it became rhetorical necessary and plausible to assert a flesh-and-bone historical Jesus as well as to publish letters attributed to Paul and to explain how and where such documents would have been written. It is an unjustifiable methodological blunder to take for granted that there were Paul’s letters around the 50s CE; letters, which were very popular, and that, after being forgotten, were rehabilitated in the middle of the 2nd Century. If you take it for granted, you will not be putting forward any retrospection, but rather, from the get-go, smuggling into your narrative a delusional core. Moreover, the delusional core will keep, even if silently, distorting all your narrative.
If Detering had not been just a hapax legomenon (exiled in the Register) in your book, but if you had taken into account what he said about the Ignatius’ letters, you would probably not have argued that letters, which are clearly fictional, are instead authentic.
It is astounding that so many bright minds keep parroting, for instance, that “Pliny wrote to the emperor asking for advice…” and no one ever questions the authenticity of the letter. We are dealing with gaslighting in high style! Detering knew better (see: Detering, Falsche Zeugen, 2011 – a book you never engaged with). I regard the late Hermann Detering, a Pastor in Steglitz, as a sort of Father Brown of NT Studies.
As you see, my criticism is not personal. I am not up to argue against your books. My problem is also not exactly that so many highly erudite scholars systematically chose to swallow a delusional core, but why so many contemporary thinkers, so smart people as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Badiou and Agamben (Agamben comment the beginning of Romans [a bizarrely long greeting, which sounds as if someone else is introducing Paul], which is clearly a Catholic addition – he didn’t pick even a Marcionite passage for a close reading –, and speculates wildly about the individual Paul who, so we can guess, would have prophetically – bringing about a Christian exceptionality? – uttered words unleashing some messianic power still affecting us today…) simply accepted what theologians say about Paul and assume a reverential attitude toward him. In February 1986, Jacob Taubes, a feeble skin cancer terminal patient, dragged himself to Heidelberg to hold a four day seminar – Monday-Tuesday-(Wednesday in hospital)-Thursday-Friday –, an extreme effort only to have a last chat with his life-long buddy Paul, who, after all, was for him the last as well as the ultimate interlocutor, just to die three weeks later. Taubes, too, a critic of the lectura greca of the Western intellectual history, was cognitively deeply dependent on his cherished Paul image.
NT scholars are cognitively thoroughpaced in nailing down a letter-writing Paul in the middle of the 1st Century so that everything else will be, as in a paraphrenia, structured and legitimated from this fulcrum: the historical Jesus becomes incontestable evidence. Cantankerous mythicists, especially the belligerent ex-apologists, give up the historical Jesus entirely but do not question the letter-writing Paul, because they read Paul as preaching a cosmic Jesus, which would be a proof that those who argue for a historical Jesus are liars or demented conspirators. However, why contemporary philosophers cling to a supposedly sagacious Paul, who would have even, as Taubes contends, declared war to the Roman Empire? I don't care much about criticizing these "contemporaries" thinkers, almost all of them are already dead: what I want to do is to understand the phenomenon. And which is the “phenomenon”? Namely why so many talented people can be so found of such a blunder? So gullible as to unblinkingly take what theologians hand them down. Nonchalantly considering Paul as the maverick leader who was ahead of time… [Agamben p. 14: “...the messianic calling is a central event in Paul’s individual history, as it is for the history of humanity”; therefore, the calling of this individual, namely Paul, is cognitively ingrained in Agamben’s worldview.]
Only the question related to contemporary thinkers has, in fact, to do with my current academic position – indeed, around here, I am the maverick, though without fame or publications on the subject.
I wonder if you will ever grow more detached from the passionate and much-flogged Paul of the 1st Century, who would have written letters that came to light only almost one hundred years later.
While you don’t do so, I am going back to the grunt, resume the chat with Martha and Mary, and reembark on the mystical tour I was delightfully in.
Once again, congratulations on your new book.
Friendly greetings to you and Jutta.
Yours
André
