Yes, I’ve read them. The impression I got of Paul from them is different from yours; that’s why I asked.
I don’t see an awful lot of that in the Pauline Epistles either. There’s a lot of “Act in moderation”, “Don’t make the pursuit of pleasure your primary or sole goal”, and, "Don’t act in ways that would offend other people or tempt people weaker than you (ie, the ‘Don’t drink in front of alcoholics’ principle), but not really anything that says that pleasure is bad or Paul was against people enjoying themselves.
There’s also don’t have sex or get married unless you really, really can’t get by without sex. (1 Corinthians 7)
What’s to boggle, it, as stated, is a patriarchal society, so yes the male role will be given much more weight then the female.
We don’t hear about Mother God nor Daughter of God either in this book (though Mother God is hinted about).
But even in this the Word of God comes through this patriarchal text, the message of universal acceptance and defense by powers way beyond understanding who may come through the humblest source regardless of the sexism of society or the appertain unfairness of this world. The woman was exonerated by God, and perhaps even encouraged to dissolve her marriage and stay with the one she loves (sin no more could equate to get out of that unholy marriage that I did not desire for you and follow the path of Love I have made for you). God ordered the disolvation of unholy marriages in Esra 10, and never condemns King David for his ‘adulterous’ relationship with Bathsheba.
It is only humans that seek to condemn.
Okay, you nudged me to go re-read 1 Corinthians 7.
[QUOTE=Paul]
Now for the matters you wrote about: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. 3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. … 6 I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.
8 Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Paul]
25 Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. 26 Because of the present crisis, I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. 27 Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife. 28 But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.
…
32 I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. 33 But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— 34 and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. 35 I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
[/QUOTE]
This doesn’t strike me as unreasonable advice, from someone in Paul’s circumstances to people in the circumstances of those he was writing to.
The impression I get of Paul is not of someone who’s inherently anti-pleasure, anti-sex, anti-marriage, or anything like that. It’s of someone who’s on a Mission From God and doesn’t want anything to interfere with that mission. In an analogy the he pretty much uses himself, he’s like an athlete training for the Olympics, who doesn’t fill up on pizza and ice cream or stay up all night playing video games, not because these things are inherently bad or wrong, but because they aren’t going to help him reach his goal.
Yeah, that’s the one that made the impression. And women should shut up when men are having a conversation. Really, I don’t have a use for Paul.
The stoning was (IIRC) illegal as well as non-customary: the law at the time stated that only the Roman authorities, not the Jewish ones, could impose a death sentence. Actually, the Jewish authorities themselves effectively abolished the death penalty in practice around 30 AD by making the requirements impossibly stringent, but I don’t know exactly when this event happened, it might have been slightly before or slightly after the Sanhedrin ruling.
Why do you think that?
John explicitly purports to be an eyewitness to the events of the Gospel as a whole, and the wealth of minor details in the Gospel (including in this scene, e.g. the writing in the dirt) seem to back that up.
Really? Verse 8 and 25 directly advise not to get married. Unless your lust is so strong that you’ll go to hell for fornication…then go ahead if you must.
Yes, he uses himself as an example but not just an example but as the ideal for everyone to try for. (Which incidentally, goes against the whole be fruitful and multiply command from Genesis)
In the first place, verse 8 doesn’t say anything of the kind. “It is better to marry than to burn with passion” has nothing to do with going to hell for fornication.
And verse 25 doesn’t directly advise not to get married. It says he has advice to offer, not a commandment, but you need to read on to see what the advice is. And he starts out, in verse 26, by offering advice “because of the present crisis”. You need to be willing to disregard this if you are to convince yourself that this advice is for all times and all places. And the advice is not “don’t marry”; it’s “don’t change your current situation”. Again, you need to read it selectively in order to turn it into an anti-marriage policy.
In the second place, it’s childishly easy to cherry-pick quotes from Paul to caricature his position. His arguments are usually quite nuanced, and are laid out at some length. You need to be willing to follow his argument through before you can mount a credible attack on it. And you have to remember that all his letters are explicitly addressed to specific communities (or specific individuals) facing specific situations; if you want to elevate what he says into something more general, you need to be able to point to something which justifies that.
The Second Stone’s claim is that Paul is always against any kind of enjoyment. The texts cited in support of this refer only to sex, which perhaps tells us more about those who claim Paul is against all forms of enjoyment than it does about Paul, but let that pass. Even confining ourselves to the texts cited, and cherry-picking as freely as we wish, we find Paul advising couples that they should be having sex and should not deny one another in this regard (verse 7), that they should marry if they find being unmarried makes them unhappy (verse 9), that they should not divorce over disagreements about religion (verse 12), that you should not worry unduly about your position in society (verse 17 and following), that anyone who feels he should marry should do as he wants (verse 36). My point here is not that this is a fair characterisation of Paul’s position; it’s that selective quotations aren’t a useful way of engaging with Paul; they’re mainly about creating a straw man.
I heartily disagree with you, but too tired to debate theology at the moment. Especially theology that I don’t have an ounce of belief in. Of course, this line of discussion has nothing to do with the OP anyway.
So why is it that not a single scholar in the world believes this verse is an eyewitness account?
Everyone acknowledges that this verse was added to the scriptures long after Jesus was dead. In its earliest forms it doesn’t even appear consistently in John, and when t does it appears in different chapters. Nobody belives it was written by John or any other eyewitness.
This verse is so widely acknowledged as being a fake added to the Gospels that it’s hard to find a Bible these days that includes it except as a footnote or italicised entry noting that it’s a later addition.
So given that, how confident are you that a wealth of minor details is evidenceof an eyewitness account? Why would you think that if someone is manufacturing a lie, they wouldn’t include details?
I think you state the case against the pericope too strongly (although I agree with your overall point, that what we have today is not the testimony of an eyewitness).
For example, there are modern scholars who believe it to be authentically Johannine*. Per Wikipedia these include “Hoskier (1920), O.T. Fuller (1978), Pickering (1980), Hodges & Farstad (1985), Pierpont, and Robinson (2005).”
There are also strong similarities to other canonical and non-canonical stories told about Jesus; so the episode may simply be another version of one of these traditions (as opposed to being “a fake” which implies deliberate fiction).
*Using Johannine to mean, from the Johannine school – those followers devoted to the teachings of John. Not necessarily written by the apostle John himself.
ETA: I meant to add that it is theorized by some scholars that the pericope was removed from the earliest copies of the Gospel because it implied that Jesus was unconcerned with adultery; and later copies are actually restorations of the original text. Whether or not this is likely, it is at least plausible since our earliest manuscripts only date as far back as about 120 CE, IIRC.
Okay, someone has to make a movie about Paul starring Dan Ackroyd just to have him say the line “I’m on a mission from God.”
How can the incident be a story added later to the Bible? Isn’t the Bible the actual word of God? And God cannot lie?
How can he be omnipotent if he cannot lie?
I have a hunch that if Paul had been present at the “woman taken in adultery” bit, he’d be the first to be picking up a rock and scream “Stone the bitch!”
- It was added (or, possibly, restored) before the Gospel of John was collected with other works into “the Bible.”
2 & 3. Those are questions for theologians, not biblical scholars. Most would distinguish between the Word of God (the divine logos) and the words of God, as though the scribes were taking dictation from the Almighty.
Yes: there’s no contradiction in believing that it describes something that actually happened, or that it deserves to be considered canonical, without believing that it was originally written as part of the gospel of John.
It’s a story curiously out of place in John, too; John is mostly theological. The story of the adulteress reads like it came out of one of the Synoptic Gospels.
I have a hunch that if I persistently bet against your hunches, I’d make money on the deal. But that’s just a hunch, not a reasoned criticism of your point of view.
Paul (not Saul) stoned people when again?