Month: September 2011

Logos 4.3 and the Duke Papyri Collection

The Perseus Collection for Logos includes the Duke Papyri Collection.  I am just starting appreciate the extent of this collection of papyri, but I can say that this is the most valuable of the sub-collections in the massive collection of books Logos is offering for free.

What are the “papyri”? Papyrus (plural, papyri) is a writing material made from reed-like plant and is more or less like paper.  While this material is may not seem as durable as vellum or a potsherd, there are papyri documents which date back to the second millennium BC.  While the material could potentially be found in any location, the climate of Egypt is ideal for preserving papyri so a large percentage of these documents are Egyptian in origin.  The papyri may contain biblical books or other classical literature, but likely as not a collection of papyri will contain receipts, legal documents, government memos, perhaps even personal letters.  Papyri documents often give a reader access to the “normal life” of ancient people since we are reading their mail or legal documents.  There are two problems with this material, however.  First, most of the papyri are fragmentary, missing letters, words and even whole lines.  This makes reconstructing the text extremely difficult.  Second, the content of the fragment is often difficult because the content is obscure.  I am not sure a future scholar could examine the receipts in my wallet and make much sense of my life.  (Perhaps they might think I worship a goddess named Starbucks since I have so many texts with her name.)

What is the Duke Papyri Collection?  The Duke Papyri collection consists of about 256 volumes of published papyri fragments, ostraca, inscriptions, and other Greek texts.  Many of these Logos books are actually multi-volume series published over many years. (Here is a master list of papyri, inscription and ostraca with full publication dates.)  Not everything on this index page is included in the Logos package.  For example, P.Worp, (Sixty-Five Papyrological Texts Presented to Klaas A. Worp on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday) is not included, possibly because of the recent publication date (Leiden, 2008).

Not all the documents in a particular volume are included, sometimes because they are not in Greek, other times (I assume) because of copyright issues.  For example, the volume entitled Papyri Greek and Egyptian Edited by Various Hands in Honour of Eric Gardner Turner on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. P.J. Parsons, J.R. Rea and others (Egypt Exploration Society, Graeco-Roman Memoirs 68; London 1981), (P.Turner) should have 55 items, but in the Logos collection numbers 1-15 are missing, as is number 55 (which was in Coptic).  According to the Duke site, document 15 was in Demotic, but it may be that documents 1-15 were in Demotic and not included for that reason.  Without looking at a physical copy of the book, I am not sure.  Omitting non-Greek papyri is the norm for the collection, likely because that data was simply not collected in to the Perseus project in the first place.

Even with the omissions, Logos provides an impressive collection of texts.  In the next installment, I will discuss some of the more important items in the collection and how Logos can be used to navigate this massive amount of data.  Later, I will briefly discuss the value of this material for NT exegesis.

John 1:35-36 – What Do You Want with Jesus?

When John declares Jesus is the “Lamb of God,” two of his disciples follow Jesus (John 1:35-39). This is the third day in John 1. In John’s gospel significant events take place on the “third day.” In this case, John the Baptist publicly identifies Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

The Apostle AndrewThe first disciple to follow Jesus is Andrew. The other gospels tell us nothing about Andrew, but in the Gospel of John he figures significantly in several stories. In each story, Andrew brings someone or something to Jesus. The relative silence about Andrew led to the development of several legendary stories about Andrew’s ministry. According to Dennis MacDonald, the apocryphal Acts of Andrew was “a lengthy, verbose expansion on the slight bit of scripture devoted to Andrew. In it Andrew’s missionary efforts took him to Achaia, but had to leave in order to save Mattias from cannibals. It appears that the writer of the Apocryphal work was attempting to write some kind of Christian Odyssey” (“Andrew” in ABD 1:242-243). The other disciple may be the “disciple whom Jesus loved” in the second half of the gospel, although John’s gospel has a number of unnamed disciples so it is not necessarily important that this unnamed disciple is the Beloved Disciple.

John recommends Jesus to his own disciples as a new teacher. This indicates the superiority of Jesus: John is saying he has taught his disciples all he can, they are ready to move on to a superior teacher.

The first words of Jesus in the gospel are “what do you want?” These may be programmatic in the gospel. Köstenberger (John, 74) points out that the gospel writer has a tendency to use double entendre to make several points at once. On the surface, Jesus is responding to these two disciples who have followed him. But on the level of the whole gospel, the question asks the reader “what do you want” with Jesus?

In the Gospel of John people frequently approach Jesus and want something from him, but it is not necessarily what he came to give! The woman at the well asks for water, but Jesus is offering living water; the people in the wilderness want bread, Jesus is offering the Bread of Life.

This question ought to be on our minds whenever we read John’s gospel. What is it we want with this Jesus? Salvation, with no real responsibility? A warm feeling of belonging with no real commitment? Or do we want to enter into a serious relationship with God as his child, ready to be a disciple of Jesus no matter where that takes us?

Galatians 2 – Who Were the Judaizers?

will work for salvation signBy Acts 15, there appear to have been some Jewish Christians that did not like the implications of Gentile salvation that Paul was preaching.  Individuals from this group went into churches established by Paul and taught that circumcision was required for converts to Christianity.  Who were these opponents of Paul?

The traditional answer to the identity of the opponents of Paul is that they are Jewish Christians that desire to impose the law on Gentile converts – Judaizers.  The term appears in the New Testament only in Gal 2:14 (although a form appears in  but is found in a number of secular sources (Plutarch, Cicero 7:6; Josephus JW 2.17.10; Ignatius, Magn 10.3) with the basic meaning of  “to  live as a Jew in accordance with Jewish customs.”

As early as 1831, F. C. Bauer (from the Tübingen school) suggested that there was a split within early Christianity.  Based on 1 Corinthians, he understood that there were two major parties, a Peterine party (which included the “Christ party”) and a Pauline party (which included the Apollos party).  Those that followed Peter claimed to be “of Christ” since their leadership had been followers of Christ in his earthly ministry, while Paul and Apollos did not know Jesus directly.  The Jerusalem Christians were of the Peter division, a party that was unable to counter Paul’s argument for a gentile mission, but were not particularly pleased with it either.  The opponents at Galatia were the radical elements of the Peterine division.  The serious problem with this view is that it makes Peter the Judizing element in Galatians, despite his rather conciliatory speech in Acts 15.

A real problem with the view of Bauer is that it makes Paul an independent apostle who is the only one that fully understood the teaching of Jesus and the mission to the Gentiles.  While this is quite similar to the view of Paul in some more conservative Dispensationalist circles, it does not reflect the variety of thought in the Jewish element of the church.  The situation was not “either Peter or Paul.”  Peter seems more moderate than James, Barnabas and Silas are a step further towards Paul.

Bauer also seems to have thought that Paul was in continual conflict with the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.  This does not seem to be the case, although one might describe the situation as “cool” between the Gentile mission and the Jerusalem church based on Acts 21.

In 1865 J. B. Lightfoot argued against Bauer and the Tübingen school.  The Judaizers were not authorized at all by Peter or the Jerusalem church, although the Jerusalem church were slow in stopping them.  The Jerusalem Church wanted to find a way to compromise between the radical teaching of Paul and the traditional teaching of the Judaizers.  J. F. A. Hort suggested that these Jewish opponents of Paul were lead by James, although mistakenly so.  James himself did not authorize the teaching in direct opposition to Paul, but his followers took James’ example of a Law-keeping Jewish Christian to the logical extreme and forced Gentiles to keep the law.

More recently, Robert Jewett argued that the Jewish opponents of Paul in Galatia were from the growing Zealot movement of Palestine [1].  The Zealot movement was a rather radical anti-Rome movement that sought strict obedience to the Law for all Jews.  Any Jews that were “Gentile-sympathizers” were the enemy.  These teachers sought to supplement Paul’s teaching, according to Jewett, by teaching a form of perfectionism to counter the libertine paganism from which they were converted.

It is perhaps the statement made by Paul in Galatians 6:12-13 that gives us an insight into who the false teachers may have been. They are people that think that by compelling Gentiles to be circumcised they might avoid persecution for the cross of Christ.  Likely Jewett’s theory has some merit; some Jewish Christians thought that by making Gentile Christians conform to the basics of the Law they might avoid persecution by the growing radical elements of Judaism.

Galatians 6:12-13 It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh.

Who were the Judaizers, then?  Jewish Christians, likely Pharisees according to Acts 15, who, with good intentions, sought to supplement Paul’s gospel by requiring that the basics of the Law be followed: circumcision and food laws. Perhaps the real issue at stake here is the status of the Gentiles within the people of God.  Could an uncircumcised Gentile be part of God’s people along with Israel?  Could a person be faithful to God and not keep the key elements of the covenant?

Paul reversed this argument in Galatians:  can a Gentile be a member of the people of God and allow himself to be circumcised?  Can a Gentile be “free in Christ” and keep the Jewish laws concerning food, festivals, etc.?  The answer in Galatians is a resounding no.

A potential problem here is the value of Galatians for contemporary Christians.  If the Judaizers were solely interested in converting Gentiles fully to Judaism, then what is the contemporary application of the book? How do we get from Judaizers to “Church Legalists,” as most contemporary preachers do with this passage?

[1] Robert Jewett, “The Agitators and the Galatian Congregation.” NTS 17 (1971) 198–212.  See also Howard, G. Paul: Crisis in Galatia, 1–19.

[NB:  This is a re-post of something I wrote in 2009 as part of a survey of the book of Acts.  Since Acts 15 and Galatians 2 both concern the Judaizers, I  have re-posted my earlier essay with little change other than the final paragraph.]

N. T. Wright and James Dunn on the New Perspective (Video)

A few weeks ago I did a short series introducing the New Perspective on Paul.   Mason Slater from New Ways Forward pointed out a nice introduction to the New Perspective featuring N. T.  Wright and James Dunn.  This is a video produced by St. Johns Nottingham and is a part of their larger Timelines project.  Many of these videos are worth viewing.

Galatians 1:10-24 – Paul’s Freedom as an Apostle

At the beginning of the letter to the Galatians, Paul must clarify his relationship with the Jerusalem church.  Polhill wonders why Paul thought he had to spend so much effort at the beginning of this letter to prove his independence of his Apostolic office (Paul and his Letters, 146).  The usual answer, he comments, is that his opponents, the Judaizers, are attacking him as an illegitimate apostle, forcing him to defend his calling.

There is another possibility for this autobiographical section, according to Polhill.  He may be offering his life as a model for the Galatians.  Paul was converted to a gospel of freedom on the road to Damascus, just as the Galatians were when Paul preached that gospel to them.  Just as Paul did not go back to Jerusalem and place himself under the authority of the old order, now the Galatians ought to resist “returning to Jerusalem” by keeping the Law.

The bottom line is that if Paul is under the authority of Jerusalem, then it is at least possible that the “men from James” could claim that Paul has not been authorized to preach a gospel to the Gentiles which frees them from the Law. These Judaizers may have styled themselves as the real followers of Jesus and Paul as the aberration.  Paul therefore stresses that his calling is from the resurrected Jesus himself and that his gospel came directly from the Lord.

At issue here is not the Gospel that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures (1 Cor 15:3-5). Paul clearly states that this gospel was passed along to him as the primary core of the gospel.  It is also clear that the preaching of Christ Crucified can be found in the apostolic preaching form the beginning.  What Paul is going to argue in the next two chapters is that his Gospel is Christ Crucified, but when the death and resurrection of Christ is applied to the gentiles, they are not under the Law.  They are not converts to Judaism by rather adopted children of God and therefore free from the law.

Paul is therefore adamant that Gentiles who try to keep the Law are not really followers of Jesus,  but rather Gentiles who are converting to Judaism.  What sort of ethical and social ramifications will this “freedom in Christ” have on his churches?  That is the point of the last third of the letter.