Paul Proclaimed His Gospel: Who Made Up His Audience?
Vložit
- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
- Paul: how did he communicate? Did he preach and write to Gentiles, people very different from his culture, beliefs, education, and status? Or did he instead evangelize people who were like-minded and who shared many similarities? Were Jesus and Paul like American individualists?
#jesus #bible #christian #christianity
What type heretical teaching is this. Pauls main ministry was preaching to the gentiles. Non israelites.
^ this is what spurious familiarity looks like, folks. And it can be deadly, one step removed from a witch hunt or Inquisition.
@@BibleAlivePresentations Romans 15:16 KJV - That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.
@@flipstylez11 Sorry friend that you think Paul wrote in the King’s English of some four centuries ago.
Don’t you mean this?
εἰς τὸ εἶναί με λειτουργὸν Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ εἰς τὰ ἔθνη ἱερουργοῦντα τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ Θεοῦ ἵνα γένηται ἡ προσφορὰ τῶν ἐθνῶν εὐπρόσδεκτος ἡγιασμένη ἐν Πνεύματι Ἁγίῳ
Let me help you with that…
…to be a minister of messiah Jesus to [those living among] the peoples in performing the priestly service of the Gospel of God, so that the offering up of the peoples may be acceptable, sanctified by a holy spirit.
As Bruce Malina and John Pilch explain, first Paul opens in this section (vv. 15-18) explaining why he felt bold enough to express himself the way he did in this travel-arrangement letter we call “ROMANS,” and then he explains his choice of the topics. He says he wrote “by way of reminder,” presuming, of course, that the Hellene-Israelite Jesus-groups at Rome ALREADY KNEW about what he explained to them. So, where did Paul get the cajones to speak to this Jesus-group he NEVER founded, has NEVER visited, and only know about him through the gossip network? Well, according to his view Paul could speak the way he did throughout this longwinded travel-arrangements document about what he did because of the patronage favor he received from the God of Israelites, who appointed him change agent (what “apostle” meant) with the task of proclaiming “the Gospel of God.”
So now Paul describes his activity with the analogy of priestly Temple service. Like a Temple priest Paul offers to the God of Israel not Gentiles like our crude English translations render the Greek blind to the context of Paul, but rather those ISRAELITES AMONG THE GENTILES who have welcomed the innovation Paul proclaimed. See Paul hopes that his offering of Israelites resident among non-Israelites might be acceptable to the God of Israelites. Just as Temple offerings are made exclusive to the deity, so Paul expects these Jesus-group Hellene-Israelites would be made exclusive (what “holy” meant) to God by God’s wind or breath or spirit (Paul is a few centuries early for the Third Person of the Trinity). Such work on God's behalf is the basis of his boasting.
@@flipstylez11 There are no "Jews and Greeks" in the Bible, despite our bad English translations. Since words, like language itself, have their meanings from social systems, Bible translators and interpreters are essentially anachronistic when they assert that the New Testament Greek word "Ioudaios" means "Jew" and that "Ioudaismos" means Judaism in the sense of Jewishness. Actually "Ioudaios" means of or pertaining to Judaea; "Ioudaismos" means the behavior typical of and particular to those from Judaea. "Jewishness" and those espousing it, "Jews," are a post-fifth-century phenomenon at the base of the Jewish tradition, with its Talmud and rabbinical structure. The fact that people known as Jews today have their kinship religion rooted in the Babylonian Talmud would indicate that this form of religion dates back to the Babylonian Talmud, the fifth century CE.
In Israelite usage, the terms "Judaean and Greek" form a general binary division of the house of Israel, like the Hebrew-Hellenist division in Acts 6. (For "Judaeans and Greeks," see Romans 1:16; 2:9, 10; 3:9; 10:12; see also 1 Corinthians 1:24 and passim; Galatians 3:28; Colossians 3:11. This perspective is likewise evidenced in the narratives of Acts-Acts 14:1; 18:4; 19:10, 17; 20:21.)
"Greek" was the general designation for "civilized," living in a Hellenistic way. The opposite of "Greek" was "barbarian." In this collocation, as used by Paul, "Judaeans" refers to Israelites resident in Judaea, Galilee, Perea, and nearby cities with high Israelite populations (Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria). Similarly, for an Israelite "Greeks" were Israelites in Roman Hellenistic cities with low Israelite populations.
CONTEXT! CONTEXT! CONTEXT!
From THE SOCIAL SCIENCE COMMENTARY ON THE LETTERS OF PAUL by Bruce Malina and John Pilch:
If Paul's letters attest to anything, they indicate his concern to spread what he called the gospel of God. This gospel, the Good News, was that the God of Israel would soon establish a theocracy for Israelites, "the kingdom of God." The trigger event behind this news was that the God of Israel had raised Jesus (of Nazareth, a geographical reference Paul does not use), an Israelite, from the dead. Jesus would be Israel's Messiah with power, ushering in the forthcoming theocracy.
It is quite significant to note that Paul's proclamation was Israelite-specific in all of its dimensions: in its means of transmission (Paul received it through a revelation ascribed to the God of Israel who calls prophets), in its origin (the God of Israel), in its medium (a revelation of Israel's Messiah, the crucified and resurrected Jesus), in its content (an Israelite theocracy), and in its rationale (spelled out according to Israel's scriptures). Hence it is fairly obvious that this proclamation was meant specifically for Israelites.
There are other indications of the exclusively Israelite nature of Paul's task. Consider the following features:
- Paul's use of Israel's scriptures follows Israelite usage. These scriptures would hardly be authoritative or probative for non-Israelites. Wherever non-Israelites appear in these scriptures, it is only as supporting cast to applaud the God of Israel, who lavishes such benefits on his own people. Non-Israelites are expected to give a grant of honor to Israelites. This of course is the role of non-Israelites throughout the Bible, in all the books of the Bible including the allegedly universalistic outlooks of Second Isaiah.
- Paul's references to God are references to the God of Israel and of Israel's ancestors, the God who sent his son to Israel for Israel. This is Israel's henotheistic God of the Israelite confession of faith (Deuteronomy 6:4; "the Lord our God is one"). What characterized Israel is that it was a people with a single God. If this God were a monotheistic, universal, and sole God, there would be nothing special about Israel. Such a God would be the God of all people, not of a single chosen people. The creed would be "the Lord God is one," not "the Lord our God is one."
- Paul describes his call to be "apostle" as a prophetic call. That is typical of Israel's prophets, who were called by the God of Israel to proclaim God's message to Israel alone.
- The God of Israel is in covenant with his people Israel, and not with any other people in the rest of the world. There is really no biblical indication that Israel's God has any concern for those not in covenant with him.
- The God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead for the benefit of his people Israel, specifically with a view to a forthcoming "kingdom of heaven/God," an Israelite theocracy, centered in Jerusalem in the land of Israel, with Jesus as Israel's Messiah.
- Paul's use of the "we" versus "they" language sets Israelites off from Everyone Else. For Paul the population of the world consisted of two peoples: Israel and Everyone Else, that is, theother peoples (NRSV: "Gentiles"). For all practical purposes Everyone Else form an undifferentiated mass, all equal, all the same, all non-Israelites. Israel, on the other hand, has differentiation and graded distinctions of clean and unclean, sacred and profane. This is typically ethnocentric.
- Paul was punished by Israelite communities, that is, synagogues (2 Corinthians 11:24: "Five times I have received at the hands of the Judeans the forty lashes less one"). These events point to the fact that he perceived himself as a member of these communities and interacted with them as an ingroup member. Israelite communities would not bother to single out any Israelite member unless he belonged to their communities and was judged to be doing damage to their communities.
- Paul's clients were Jesus-group Israelites. But there were other types of Jesus-group Israelites seeking clients of their own. These were the traveling ing "Judaizers" who sought to have Paul's clients adopt one of their Judean versions of the gospel of God. Their goal was not to convert Paul's clients to some uniform, basic Judaism but to direct them away from Paul's gospel of God, adapted as it was to Israelites living among majority non-Israelite populations.
- The difference in theology between Israelites and non-Israelites is that Israel worshiped one and only one God in monarchy, while non-Israelites worshiped many gods in hierarchy. Greeks, that is, civilized people, had no difficulty in identifying the God of Israel with Zeus or Jupiter, thus identifying the God of Israel with the most high god of their own systems. Israelites, on the other hand, while denying the reality of other gods in the forms of statues, nonetheless believed in entities with all the features of lesser deities, whom they called "archangels" and "angels." In other words, apart from different labels, we have the same sort of entities functioning in the world in the first-century Eastern Mediterranean world no matter in which cultural context-Greek or Israelite or other. While fights about labels might be significant, in practice, as Paul says, "there are many lords and many gods" (1 Corinthians 8:5). This is henotheism.
czcams.com/video/rbuHQ_ORJVA/video.html