Social Science and the Christian Scriptures, Volume 1: Sociological Introductions and New Translation

By Anthony J. Blasi

Sociologist Anthony Blasi analyzes early Christianity using multiple social scientific theories, including those of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz, and contemporary theorists. He investigates the canonical New Testament books as representative of early Christianity, a sample based on usage, and he takes the books in the chronological order in which they were written. The result is a series of "stills" that depict the movement at different stages in its development. His approaches, often neglected in New Testament studies, include such sociological subfields as sect theory, the routinization of charisma, conflict, stratification theory, stigma, the sociology of knowledge, new religions, the sociology of secrecy, marginality, liminality, syncretism, the social role of intellectuals, the poor person as a type, the sick role, degradation ceremonies, populism, the sociology of migration, the sociology of time, mergers, the sociology of law, and the sociology of written communication. Needing to treat the New Testament text as social data, Blasi uses his background in biblical studies and a review of a vast literature to establish the chronology of the compositions of the New Testament books and to present the "data" in a new translation that is accessible to non-specialists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532611513

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Social Science and the Christian Scriptures

Sociological Introductions and New Translation, Volume 1

Anthony J. Blasi

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Social Science and the Christian Scriptures

Sociological Introductions and New Translation, Volume 1

Copyright © 2017 Anthony J. Blasi. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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April 18, 2017

Scripture quotations from the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament cases that take up translation per se are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, ©

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National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Nrsbibles.org/index.php/licensing/

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1: Introduction: Social Science and the Christian Scriptures

Chapter 2: The (First) Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians

Introduction

End-Time Consciousness

English Translation

The (First) Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians

Chapter 3: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Introduction

Charisma

Commensalism

Conflict

Adoption

English Translation

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Chapter 4: First Letters of Paul to the Corinthians

Introduction

Stratification

Gendered Stratification

Movement, Sect, Church

English Translations

Fragment from the Previous Letter (Second Corinthians 6.14—7.1)

The Canonical First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians

Chapter 5: The Subsequent Corinthian Correspondence

Introduction

Methodology

Stigma

English Translations

2 Corinthians 10–13

2 Corinthians 2:14—6:13, 7:2–4

2 Corinthians 1:1—2:13, 7:5—8:24

2 Corinthians 9

Chapter 6: The Letter of Paul to Philemon

Introduction

Slavery

English Translation

Letter of Paul to Philemon

Chapter 7: The Letter of Paul to the Philippians

Introduction

Female Leadership

The Christian Movement and the State

English Translation

Letter of Paul to the Philippians

Chapter 8: The Letter of Paul to the Romans

Introduction

The Sociology of Knowledge and Theology

The Issue of Unnatural Sexual Relations

Feminist Aspects of the Letter of Recommendation for Phoebe

English Translations

The Letter of Paul to the Romans (1—15)

Paul’s Recommendation for Phoebe to the Churches of Ephesus (Rom 16:1–24)

Chapter 9: To the Hebrews

Introduction

New Religious Movements

English Translation

To the Hebrews

Chapter 10: The Gospel of Mark

Introduction

Secrecy and the Sociology of Secrets and Secret Societies

Therapeutic Miracles

Pharisees

English Translation

Gospel of Mark

Appearance Legends Added to Mark

References

Chapter 1

Introduction

Social Science and the Christian Scriptures

The educated public of today shares a different mind from that of earlier centuries. It reads cultural documents differently. In pre-modern times, people were less concerned about the literal truth of historical statements and more sensitive to the point or lesson of a historical narrative. They did not conceive of natural phenomena the way we do; nature was not a dominant category for them. They did not place cultural products in social contexts the way we do; they tended to understand them ethnocentrically. And they did not report legends as legends and documented facts as documented facts. Moreover, they explained illnesses in terms of demons and moral deservedness. They sometimes saw religious practices as legal prescriptions, indistinguishable from moral decisions and political impositions. So while we might read much of the Acts of the Apostles as missionaries’ exuberant narrative, the ancients might have taken it as something resembling our journalism. And while we might see a healing either as a miracle reversing a natural process or as psychosomatic faith healing, the ancients might have seen it as a divine personage rebuking a troublesome demon; while we might dismiss a healing as magic, the ancients had no concept comparable to magic since the latter implies its opposite—nature—which was foreign to their way of thinking.¹ And while a pre-modern reader might have read a Pauline argument as explanatory theologizing, we might interpret it as one side of a conflict, and conflicts in turn as reflecting social relationships undergoing normal adjustments.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the natural scientific perspective spread among the intellectual classes. It affected the reading of the creation poem in the Book of Genesis most dramatically, and today there are people who deny the facts summarized in the concept of evolution because of a commitment to biblical literalism—a commitment, incidentally, that would have appeared as alien to ancient readers as it does to competent biologists and educated people in general today. But the scientific perspective affected the reading of the New Testament as well, and the results are almost as alien to the contemporary way of reading as is the ancient perspective. The nineteenth century scholar conformed the New Testament texts to the natural scientific epistemology, with a presumed correspondence between statement and event. We are more sensitive today to the fact that histories are always written from some viewpoint and that historical accounts reflect the frames of mind in which events are experienced, committed to memory, and recounted. Miracles became a major issue in the natural scientific perspective; nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars considered them to be impossible claims that had to be deleted from the narratives or explained away. Today we are more likely to place miracle narratives in a different universe of discourse, one to be appreciated for the genre of discourse that it is. Moreover, the natural scientific approach was culturally incompetent; it did not allow for the interpretation of statements in terms of their function in social processes or the states of mind they were intended to elicit from readers and hearers.

From the late twentieth century onward, the reading public has benefited from some degree of education in the cultural and social sciences. University graduates have typically completed some coursework in cultural anthropology, sociology, or social psychology. The history courses they have taken are likely to have been social scientifically informed. Contemporary educated people may have even completed coursework in religious studies, which is no longer merely a literary museology that focuses on religious texts and rituals, but a social scientific account of religious human activity as well. This emergence of the social scientific perspective within general higher education came at a time when the social sciences themselves ceased imitating the natural sciences and adopted an interpretive framework. In German scholarship, Georg Simmel approached societies as patterned interactions rather than as entities, and Max Weber promoted sociology as understanding the mentality of people inhabiting the various strata of society. No longer were people enthralled with Auguste Comte’s social physics or Herbert Spencer’s linking history to natural processes of societal evolution. Anthropology took a cultural turn, while in sociology Simmel’s focus on forms of social activity developed into symbolic interactionist thought, a system that was based on the philosophy of George Herbert Mead. The symbolic interactionist approach serves as the implicit working philosophical anthropology of most sociologists today.

These developments have led to a situation in which the kind of public that is ready to read the Christian scriptures is different from the readers of past centuries, or even of the twentieth century. But does the typically available text of the New Testament lend itself to the kind of reading today’s public is prepared to give it? To be more precise, are the translations at hand sufficiently interpretable? Do pre-modern assumptions and modern blinders obscure as much as they reveal the message of the ancient texts? Are the annotations and commentaries answering questions that contemporary readers do not have and not answering the questions that they do have? Are the modern biblical aids still framed in the perspective of the eighteenth and nineteenth century natural science model, a model that most scientists today find naïve? Are theological issues that are not really issues today still informing elucidations of the texts? The translations that are available today are undoubtedly superior to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the more closely one examines these more recent translations the more questions come to mind. Excellent commentaries are also available today, but they are pricey volumes that can be too elaborate for the generally educated person to use efficiently. And one will find on the shelves of a theological library many commentaries, some of them also on the market in paperback edition, that are at least a century out of date. One precise way that they are out of date is that they are strong in the philological aspects of analyzing texts but not in the application of social scientific perspectives. Moreover, textual finds such as the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls provide contemporary scholars with additional information that their predecessors did not have a century ago.

The newly-discovered as well as other extra-canonical texts raise the question of what early Christian writings should be included in a sociological study of the Jesus movement and the early Christian movements. Some would include all identifiably Christian writings from the first one or several centuries CE.² Much can be said for such an approach, since it is an alternative to a theological pre-delimitation of the literary materials to be taken into consideration. I am not following that approach, however, because of sampling issues. A sample is a selection of material that is supposed to be representative of a larger body of such material. If we include a work such as the Didache, for example, which was discovered in the late nineteenth century, we do not know whether the bulk of early Christians would have considered it representative of their movement or as an oddity or something quaint. If we include the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, we would be ignoring the fact that they were controversial among Christians in their day and are still controversial. The canonical books of the New Testament, by way of contrast, have been identified by Christians as their literature through usage, relatively early on. While there is genuine value in studying extra-canonical works for purposes other than characterizing the general Christian movement, the canonical works are the ones to which we turn for that latter purpose. In this volume, extra-canonical works are cited in footnotes when they help in the analysis of canonical works.

There are two steps to preparing for a genuinely contemporary reading of the Christian scriptures. The first step involves biblical scholars and social scientists collaborating on specialized studies. This step has begun, and while not all of the results are of equal value there are high quality treatises in the social scientific study of the early Christian movement. In 2002, I and two colleagues brought together the works of a variety of scholars into a Handbook of Early Christianity: Social Science Approaches for use by specialists,³ and there have been further developments since then. The second step involves bringing the results of the specialized studies together in a form that is accessible to the general reader. Accessibility does not merely consist of translating social scientific terms of art into more common phraseology but of arranging materials and scientifically-informed interpretations in a place where the general reader can use them. What I try to do in the present volume is present the reader with the New Testament text with social scientific introductions to each book of the New Testament, and to array the textual and contextual material in a manner useful for purposes of sociological interpretation.

First are the introductions to each book of the New Testament. Not every social scientific concept is important in the reading of every New Testament book. The introduction to each book highlights the several concepts that are important for that particular book. In the interest of avoiding repetition, where a concept is important for more than one book, the introduction to the later one will refer the reader back to the introduction to the earlier one. Social scientists are keenly interested in historical information that can contribute to establishing the social context in which a cultural product is created. Consequently, the introductions also highlight the information that is available about the author, place, and time of composition of each book.⁴ Many of the New Testament books contain multiple layers of tradition, with earlier materials incorporated into their text and edited for a later intended audience (or, readership—I say audience because ancient texts were meant to be read aloud, performed, for an assembled audience). Consequently, it is sometimes necessary to identify and characterize as much as possible more than one social context for a given book. For example, a given passage in the Gospel of Luke may incorporate a saying of Jesus from an earlier source, Q, which Matthew also used for his gospel; and an even more primitive form of the saying may appear in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, albeit in a Coptic translation from the Greek or Aramaic. There is the social context of Luke and his audience, and the social context of Q and the audience for which Q was written. Since the Thomas version is a bare saying without much or any evidence of its social context, differences between Thomas and Q and between Thomas and Luke can be studied for clues about the world of Q and Luke, but not the world of Thomas.

Then there is the very order in which the New Testament books are presented. As textual data, a social scientist would want them in the chronological order in which they were written and published. That way one can see a series of stills of the development of the early Christian movement over time. Consequently, the traditional order of the books in modern Bibles is not satisfactory. The first book of the New Testament should be the First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, not the Gospel of Matthew, and the last book should be the pseudonymous Second Letter of Peter, not the Book of Revelation. Moreover, some books traditionally contain interpolated texts that needed to be considered apart because they were not originally part of the books in which they are found in modern Bibles. The love poem in First Corinthians and the periscope on the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John are cases in point. Then there is Second Corinthians, which is a seemingly random assemblage of several different Corinthian letters that were written by Paul; the sections need to be put into chronological order so that they can be understood as a sequence of letters.

The missionary work of the early Christian movement was carried on in the common Greek of the time, a trans-local language used by elites and in business in cities.⁵ I have found that the very translations found in commonly available Bibles will not serve scientific purposes. Their language is often stilted and churchy, and invariably they smooth over difficulties. Sometimes stilted language can be to some extent an accurate rendering of the original; Luke in particular imitated the Greek of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which was an archaic Greek that was full of Semitisms. But sometimes the social information that comes by way of the manner in which something is said is lost in modern stilted translation language. In addition, recent scholarship may lead to a different conclusion about what a text is actually saying than what an available Bible says; if possible one would want to have the English translation reveal what has been discovered to be the original meaning. There are also places where paragraphing makes a difference; published Bibles do not always appear to cut at the joints. The ancient texts lacked much that we take for granted today—capital and lower case lettering, punctuation, chapter and verse numbers, quotation marks, spaces between words. Sometimes words were left out, much as television and radio news reporters drop the verb to be today. The ancient reciter had to interpret the text much as a modern musician interprets a music score. The result is that translations in modern languages are themselves interpretations; it is necessary at least to attempt to make our translations parallel the interpretations the ancient reciters would have made. I have found it necessary to translate from the Greek anew. I do not claim to be better at translation than others, but I am often aiming at a different aspect of the meaning of the text and able to benefit from modern commentaries and from scholarly journal articles. In the scholarly literature, an author is likely to focus years of study on one sentence or a few words; a competent reading and translation should not ignore the results of such effort and expertise. All New Testament quotations in the introductory portions of the chapters below as well as the designated translations of the New Testament books are my own translation. Occasionally in footnotes I reproduce phrases from the Revised Standard Version or the Berger and Nord Das neue Testament to explain the differences selecting among varying Greek manuscripts make in modern translations.

English is a very precise language insofar as it has a different word for different shades of meaning where other languages may group several meanings into one word. Ancient Greek was not particularly precise by modern standards, though it was more precise than ancient Hebrew. The difference in precision leads to dilemmas in translating from ancient Greek into English. For example, whether to use the term Judeans or Jews is important for communicating the social situation that resides behind a text; the difference between the influentials in Jerusalem and Judea on the one hand and the religio-ethnic group on the other was simply presupposed by literary context in the community for which the ancient authors formulated their texts. Similarly, the same word in Greek, angelos, refers to earthly agents or messengers, divine messages in dreams, and spiritual powers in the heavens. Translating the term in an adequate fashion requires selecting among these alternative meanings, not mechanically rendering the term as angel in every instance. In the case of another common word, Christos, mechanically translating it as Christ ignores the fact that the English term has become a name for Jesus of Nazareth, while it originally meant Messiah and had become something of a title used along with the name Jesus. Translating the term as Messiah restores the ancient meaning. The New Testament, however, sometimes uses it with the definite article, sometimes without, and sometimes with the name Jesus before or after; the translation seeks to replicate these varying usages. In general, I try to use standard American English that is contemporary—and contemporary English is gender inclusive. This requires transferring clauses from the singular to the plural in order to avoid the his or her pronoun problem; when doing this, I advise the reader in a footnote that I have done that. The Greek usually uses the term anthropos for a person, and I translate it as human or person rather than man; however, in a few instances the Greek uses anēr, which means man or husband. I do not translate anēr as human or person.

An expression that may go back to Jesus himself, son of man, poses a particular problem. The word son conveys his male identity, but man is anthropos, human. In the Semitic languages, the equivalent of of is an adjectival form; for example, God of might is equivalent to mighty God. Consequently, son of man can be understood as human son. In a linguistically Semitic context, as with the Gospel of Matthew, it would be a very natural expression, and we can take human son as an obvious English rendering. However, in Greek son of man would not be natural for the audiences of the other gospels but rather seem a bit stilted. Consequently, I render it less naturally in the other three gospels, as son of humanity. Whether my strategy is the best is open to discussion, for sure, but I mention it here to make a point: A translation that is easy to understand is not necessarily the most accurate rendering; sometimes the original posed a difficulty for the intended audience, and an accurate rendering must portray the difficulty, if at all possible, without being incomprehensible. That is to say that I do not aspire to provide an easy to understand translation for the sake of ease; that would be analogous to reproducing a Picasso with a cartoon.

There is another feature of ancient Greek that poses a challenge to those who would translate it into modern English. It is known as the historical present. The author uses the present tense of a verb to replace the normal past tense (aorist indicative)  . . . in a vivid narrative at the events of which the narrator imagines himself to be present. . . . ⁶ Some decades ago in Greek classes, I was instructed to translate the historical present with the English past tense and to place hp in parentheses immediately after, to indicate to the teaching assistant who would be marking my paper that I knew the Greek verb was in the present even though the passage was to be read in the past. In the translation of the New Testament offered here, I translate the historical present in the English present. First, the historical present does occur in informal English; at least I recall from my youth that my peers would speak in the present when excitedly describing some exploit or event they had witnessed.⁷ I choose to use this phenomenon as a tool in translation. Second, we live now in an age of video documentaries; a narrator in that genre does not simply say what happened but introduces it in the past tense and then shows a clip of the event as it unfolds in the live present. The narrator’s voice-over introduction establishes the historical time of what follows, while the event is vividly shown to occur in an analog of real time. The ancient Greek texts often seek to accomplish what the documentary film maker seeks to accomplish. A translation should make it evident to the reader what the ancient author is trying to do. The result may not be dignified enough for liturgical use, but it does preserve the vividness that the narrator intends.

In addition to the introductions, the ordering of the New Testament books, and the translation, I add a considerable footnote apparatus. I indicate the footnotes with superscript numbers in small case after a word, so as not to confuse them with verse numbers, which I indicate with superscript numbers before a word. Some footnotes explain the translation where I depart from what a reader may be accustomed to find. In such cases I give the wording of my translation in the footnote, followed by the Greek, and then an account of why I rendered the Greek the way I did. Oftentimes, the rendering is in light of an article in a specialized New Testament studies journal or some other publication that I have found cogent. The general reader may or may not find these footnotes useful, but as a matter of responsibility for the translation I am obligated to provide such documentation. Other footnotes provide sources and alternative versions of traditions that appear in a text; the general reader may find these more germane. The ancient came to these texts with a civilizational context of echoes and potential allusions; the footnotes attempt to bring these to the fore. Moreover, social science is inherently comparative, and such notes allow the reader to make comparisons. Oftentimes, the point of a verse in the New Testament is implicit in the differences between its wording and that of its source or rival versions. These notes are of critical importance for other sociologists, who may not have a technical background in Greek and New Testament studies, to make sociological analyses of the New Testament text. Sometimes, my best effort at translation fails to carry the full significance of something in the text; so another kind of footnote provides explanation that goes beyond the literal text itself.

The introductions and footnote apparatus are not intended to serve as substitutes for commentaries. The New Testament scholars differ among themselves over numerous points, and a good commentary will review decades, sometimes centuries, of literature on items of major debate. I do not attempt that here. Inevitably, at a number of junctures, I have had to take sides with some specialists and against others, and I am in accord with what is regarded as the mainstream at most of these junctures. But the nature of the volume does not permit my writing the rationale for differing with every given scholar in the history of New Testament research. What I usally attempt in the footnotes, however, is to give the rationale for agreeing with a scholar where I do, and that rationale comes by way of an explanation of the translation, in a footnote. Commentaries also draw out the theological implications of a text; I do not attempt that.

Here is an example of what needs to be done with a small New Testament excerpt: First Thessalonians 4:15–18.

RSV Translation

¹⁵For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. ¹⁶For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; ¹⁷then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. ¹⁸Therefore comfort one another with these words.

This is the passage that inspires the fanciful rapture books. An introduction, of course, needs to survey the general sociology of end time thinking. It would also take up the literary topic of eschatological imagery. But it would be useful to do something with the translation itself. Why declare to you? The Greek says simply, We say to you. Why word of the Lord, a much theologized expression? What follows that statement is a traditional saying, and saying is as accurate a translation as word and fits the context much better. And what is the trumpet about? The passage calls for explanation and a translation that fits the context. Here is what I do with it:

New Translation

¹⁵For we say this to you by a saying of the Lord: That we the living survivors at the coming of the Lord will not at all overtake those who have fallen asleep.⁸ ¹⁶That at the command, at the voice of an archangel, and at God’s trumpet call,⁹ the Lord himself will come down from heaven, and the dead will rise with the Messiah first;¹⁰ ¹⁷then we living survivors will be swept up together with them in clouds into an encounter of the Lord in air; and thus we will be with the Lord always. ¹⁸So comfort one another with these sayings.

I grant that this translation sounds less familiar to the Christian ear than the Revised Standard Version; that is because the saying of the Lord came from Jewish apocalyptic; there was not yet a separate Christian religion when Paul wrote First Thessalonians. The first footnote calls attention to the fact that Paul was contending with a belief that was held by some people in the Jewish religious world. The second footnote identifies some of the imagery as coming from the Hebrew scriptures and as being part of Jewish ceremonial to this day. The third footnote explains that there was no question of people being posthumously dead in Christ but that they will rise with the Messiah, a view that is clearly coherent with Paul’s theology. This is not a particularly unusual passage; a sensitivity to the historical, cultural, and social context of a passage typically has implications for its meaning and, therefore, translation.

A word is in order about the list of references at the end of the volume. It is exactly that, a list of works that I cite in the introductions and the footnotes. It is not meant as a bibliographic guide to New Testament studies or to the social scientific study of the early Christian movement. A reader who wishes to pursue a particular point I make can follow it up by consulting one or more items I cite, but it would be necessary to look elsewhere for a general reading list in the field. The Handbook mentioned above provides a bibliography that may be of help.¹¹

Finally, it needs to be made clear that this is a work in sociology, not theology or, in a narrow sense, biblical studies. That is easily said but not so easily understood. It is helpful to consider the meanings of hermeneutics. There are three moments of hermeneutics—understanding, interpretation, and application. Understanding, or verstehen as sociologists are wont to refer to it in German, seeks the meaning of a text. A jurist seeks to access what a legal text means to say; a reader seeks to call to mind the image a poem is meant to conjure up. Interpretation places a text in a context. A jurist considers the debates and issues amidst which a legal text was formulated. A reader situates a poem in the biographical context of the poet and in the literary trajectory of the poet’s times. Application draws out implications for action from a text. A jurist compares the meaning of a text with a course of action. A reader of a poem recognizes a subjective disposition that may encourage one kind of activity and discourage another kind. Biblical studies aim at understanding; I do not aim principally at new understandings of New Testament passages, though doing so is occasionally necessary. I do aim at interpretation, specifically sociological interpretation. This involves highlighting the dialectic of text and context insofar as that context can be established as a social formation. I do not aim at application, which would be a matter of moral theology.

1. On ancients’ lack of a concept of magic, see Aune, Use of the Term ‘Magic.’

2. E.g., Das neue Testament und frühchristliche Schriften, edited by Berger and Nord. When using the term Christian with reference to first century phenomena, we are using a word that is a part of our own vocabulary, which is etic. The corresponding concept is not to be retrojected back into the meanings in the understanding of first century people, which would be to treat the word as though it were part of the ancient’s discourse, which would be emic.

3. Blasi, et al., Handbook of Early Christianity.

4. In one way of speaking, there were writers but not authors in antiquity. An author produces an individual perspective, often derives a livelihood from and has a property interest in what is authored; see Malina, Were There ‘Authors’? As I am using the term, an author is simply someone intending to communicate through a written work.

5. Ebner, Stadt als Lebensraum,

18

–

19

. Local languages in the era included Coptic in Egypt, Middle Aramaic in Syria, Western Aramaic in Palestine, Celtic in Galatia, and Armenian in Cappdocia, with an enclave of Persian. People spoke Latin among the elites in Rome and the Roman administration, especially in the Western Mediterranean. Diaspora synagogues used Greek—ibid.,

19

–

20

.

6. Blass and Debrunner, Greek Grammar of the New Testament,

167

.

7. However, when youth today have an excited narrative, like I don’t know whether they, like, use the present?

8. Delobel, Fate of the Dead,

345

, explains this assurance as opposing a conviction among some Jews that those who are alive at the eschaton will be in a better condition than the dead; that conviction is attested by a few apocryphal writings; Delobel cites

4

Ezra

13

:

13

–

24

.

9. Trumpet call, σάλπιγγι; see Exod

19

:

16

and

19

in the Septuagint, where a σάλπιγγος is part of a theophany on Mount Sinai. Technically, the instrument is a shofar, a horn made from a ram’s horn; the shofar is of symbolic significance in Jewish ceremonial to this day.

10. According to Konstan and Ramelli, Syntax of εν Χρίστω, the phrase εν Χρίστω, which is used often by Paul, usually modifies the verb. Hence, The dead will rise in Christ. I take in here as by or with, which εν often means, rather than in a spatial sense.

11. Blasi, et al. For sociological concepts, one may consult the bibliographic database on the website of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Chapter

2

The (First) Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians

Introduction

The letter of Paul of Tarsus, Silvanus, and Timothy to the Christians, whom they had converted in Thessalonica, the First Thessalonians of the Christian Bible, is generally regarded as the earliest of the Christian scriptures, dating from about the year 50 CE.¹² For that reason alone it is an important witness to the Christian movement in an early stage of its history. In a later Christian work, The Acts of the Apostles, an author traditionally known as Luke provides a legendary account of Paul’s stay in Thessalonica, during which Paul’s presentations in a synagogue had mixed results and after which Paul stayed in the home of a reasonably prosperous individual named Jason.¹³ Acts 17 goes on to say that the Jews, rivals of Paul and Silas, recruited a rabble to attack them, and not finding them seized Jason and others and brought them before the politarchas, as the city officials were locally termed. Jason posted bond, and Paul and Silas left town.¹⁴ It is entirely possible that the trouble Jason faced and for which he had to post bond had nothing to do with Paul’s activity.¹⁵ It is not known how accurate the legend presented by Acts 17 is; there is evidence in addition to Acts that there was a Jewish synagogue in Thessalonica at that time.¹⁶ What information can be found about Thessalonica for that period of time would obviously be relevant for understanding the letter.

Thessalonica was founded in 315 BCE by King Casander of Macedonia. The younger contemporary of Paul, the geographer Strabo, relates this history:

Cassander named the city after his wife Thessalonice, daughter of Philip son of Amyntas, after he had razed to the ground the towns in Crusis and those on the Thermaean Gulf, about twenty-six in number, and had settled all the inhabitants together in one city; and this city is the metropolis of what is now Macedonia.¹⁷

The fact that the city was a synthesis of different populations from the outset is important, as is the fact that it had the cosmopolitan character of a seaport with expatriate communities. The different peoples brought their respective deities, and King Casander as well as later rulers would select which would become part of the civic cult.¹⁸ In the era leading up to the establishment of the Roman Empire, the Roman consul Gnaeus Pompey met the military challenge of Mithradates of Pontus and thereby consolidated Rome’s protectorate over Greece and Macedonia. Pompey had been sent by the Roman Senate as a general, but in instituting governance in the East in 59 BCE his arrangements depended on ratification by the Roman senators, many of them his rivals. The other Roman consul, and later Pompey’s chief rival, Julius Caesar, secured the necessary ratifications from the Roman Senate. The civic cult in Thessalonica that symbolized the protection by Rome against the threat from the East was the cult of Cabarus. Rome’s civil wars continued until 31 BCE, and Thessalonica managed to side with the winners. Roman construction projects would continue to benefit Thessalonica under the guise of a self-governing city and with the Cabarus symbolism.

So what cults were there in Thessalonica? The cult of Dionysus was important in the city. Dionysus was part of the civic cult, appearing on local coinage from 187 BCE, but not during the period of the Roman Empire. Still, an epitaph for a priest of Dionysus dates from as late as 132 CE.¹⁹ As one looks at the Dionysiac mysteries in general, there are several components which are of particular interest. . . . The hope of a joyous afterlife is central and appears to be symbolized by the phallus.²⁰ There was a temple of Serapis from the late third century BCE,²¹ a Greek (human form) substitute for the Egyptian deity Osiris promoted first by the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. Osiris was a deity of regeneration and rebirth. The civic cult included another Egyptian deity, Isis, whose cult sought to extend her claims of salvation and eternal life. In the Isis cult humility, confession of sin, and repentance were urged prior to a nocturnal initiation.²² Private associations pursued the cults of Heracles, god of strength known in the West as Hercules; Zeus Hypsistos (Zeus Most High), and Asklepeios, the god of medicine.²³ By the reign of Emperor Augustus, members of the city’s upper strata were showing interest in the cult of Cabirus, a beardless hero who appeared on coinage as the protector of the city.²⁴ Outside Thessalonica Cabirus was a set of twins, Cabiri, who were conflated with the Dioscuri twins (Castor and Polydeuces), who were protectors of sailors and, because of their brotherly love (philadelphia) alternated in the heavens rather than allow one to live and the other die. Firmicus Maternus and Clement of Alexandria say the cult of Cabirus pertains to two brothers (Corybantes) murdering and burying a third brother, to whom they then set up a cult; evidently this was derived from the Orpheus legend.²⁵ Jewett notes that the Cabirus figure worshipped in Thessalonica was structurally similar in some respects to the Messiah-to-come proclaimed by Paul. "He was a martyred hero, murdered by his brothers, buried with symbols of royal power, and expected to return to help lowly individuals and