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From: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: In Defense of St. Paul
Message-ID: <1338@shark.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Apr-85 18:12:59 EST
Article-I.D.: shark.1338
Posted: Mon Apr 15 18:12:59 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Apr-85 02:57:07 EST
References: <1013@phs.UUCP>
Reply-To: hutch@shark.UUCP (Stephen Hutchison)
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
Lines: 58
Summary: 

[ bugs are forbidden to wear excessive ornamentation and may not teach ]

In article <1013@phs.UUCP> lisa@phs.UUCP (Jeffrey William Gillette) writes:
>[]
>By the way, for the benefit of historians, Paul's letters are the 
>earliest witnesses to Christianity.  All the authentic Pauline epistles 
>were written before 60 AD - 5 years before the earliest Gospel (Mark), 
>and at least 30 years before the last Gospel (John).  The words in red 
>are not the words that Jesus said.  They are the words the evangelists 
>thought he said, the words he might have said, and, sometimes, the words 
>he should have said (or so they felt).  I suspect that a good deal of 
>history can be gleaned from the pictures of Jesus presented by the 
>Gospels, but it is simply not fair to say that Matthew, Mark, Luke and 
>John give us history, while Paul gives us theology.  Every book in the 
>New Testament is primarily an *interpretation* of God's work through 
>Jesus. 
>
>
>        Jeffrey William Gillette                duke!phs!lisa
>          The Divinity School
>            Duke University

Oh dear.  And from someone who ought to know better, too.

The "words in red" are very likely to be exactly the words which Jesus
said, barring the vagaries of translation.  Remember we are dealing
here with people who were NOT paper or television junkies.  They
depended for the most part on very well trained memories for what we
(with our plentiful paper and pencil, and our lazy untrained memories)
would tend to write down.  So, there would be a number of people around
who actually recalled the exact words Jesus used.  When possible, they
also had scribes present, who were (according to the Gospels) often set
there to take an accurate record of what Jesus taught so the Sanhedrin
could discredit him as a false teacher if that was what they found him
to be.  Some or all of these records would have been available during
the Pentecostal expansion and undoubteldy would have been used to teach
with, especially since the Sanhedrin, for a while, also had Christians
on it.

The structure of many of Jesus' sayings shows them to be direct quotations
from Jewish Scripture (no surprise, eh?).  Some others are rephrasings of
some Scripture, using popular forms (especially Essene teaching forms).
All of these would be very familiar and very good mnemonic hooks.

So, I strongly disagree with the assertion that they are what the writers
THOUGHT were what Jesus said, or that they were what he "might have said".
There were too many witnesses who were still around, who committed those
words to very good memories, for this to be a general case.

(Note that there ARE places which support Jeff to some extent.  There
 are variations on the Sermon on the Mount, which look a lot like notes
 from different parts of a very long lecture.  There are variations on
 the ending of the Lord's Prayer.  But the places where conversation is
 related, or where specific Scriptural quotations are involved, or where
 Scribes or other trained observers were present, I maintain that there
 is a good deal of accuracy and that Jeff's claims are not borne out.)

Hutch