Paul and Jesus

21. See Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 156–85, for a discussion of various New Testament manuscript traditions. The Western Text (Codex Bezae, designated D) has a number of significant omissions, particularly in Luke, that some scholars have argued are more authentic but the example of Luke 19b–20 seems to be a clear attempt by the textual editors to remove the difficulty of the two cups. It is more likely that Luke’s original text had both than that a later manuscript tradition would have added the second cup. Additions and omissions are almost always in the service of harmonization, that is, when the scribes see difficulties they wish to help resolve with the text they are copying.

22. See The Messianic Rule 2.10–20 (1QSa), in Vermes, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, pp. 159–60.

23. See Preserved Smith, A Short History of Christian Theophagy (Chicago: Open Court, 1922). Parallels have been suggested with Attis the Phrygian god, Mithras, and particularly Dionysus, where an animal was torn apart and eaten raw.

24. Dennis Edwin Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003).

25. See the discussion and references in Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 217–19.

26. Bruce Chilton has suggested that Jesus did indeed refer to “body” and “blood”; not to his own, but to that of the Passover sacrifice that he was rejecting as part of a corrupt Temple system: “This is my body”—the bread; “This is my blood”—the wine, so no need for the literal flesh-and-blood sacrifice of a lamb. As attractive as I find this alternative, it seems to me unlikely since the juxtaposition of the terms bread/body and wine/blood comes from Paul and has no independent source. See Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, Jesus in Context: Temple, Purity, and Restoration (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 59–89.

27. See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 385–510.

28. On this point see Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, pp. 18–24.

29. In Galatians 4:3–4, Paul refers to the astral spirits who enslave humankind but are defeated by Christ.

30. See Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, pp. 16–20.

CHAPTER 7: ALREADY BUT NOT YET

1. For a good effort at putting a positive face on Paul’s views of women see Garry Wills, What Paul Meant (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 89–104. Wills agrees that Paul, as a man of his culture and time, could not wholly escape the sexism common in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, but Wills concludes that Paul taken overall defends women’s equality. What Wills has failed to take into account, in my view, is the inherent and unavoidable contradiction between Paul’s “already but not yet” stance on all of these related gender issues. An evangelical Christian attempt at the same task is Brian J. Dodd, The Problem with Paul (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996).

2. See Cynthia L. Thompson, “Hairstyles, Head-coverings, and St. Paul: Portraits from Roman Corinth,” Biblical Archaeologist 51:2 (June 1988): 99–115.

3. This prohibition against braided hair, put up above the neck and ears, shows up elsewhere in the New Testament: “Women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair” (2 Timothy 2:9); “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair” (1 Peter 3:3).