Hole in the Wall

by peacefulpete 7 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  A recurring motif is generally used by writers to connect stories and characters to the past or suggest parallels. The Gospels and Acts are filled with them. An example of this is found at Acts, 2 Cor, 1 Sam and Joshua.

  In Joshua 2 the King of Jericho seeks the Jewish spies but is saved by Rahab:

  3 So the king of Jericho sent this message to Rahab: “Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house...15 So she let them down by a rope through the window, for the house she lived in was part of the city wall. 16 She said to them, “Go to the hills so the pursuers will not find you. Hide yourselves there three days until they return, and then go on your way.”

  In 1 Sam 19 The Saul the King of Israel seeks David but is saved by Micah his wife:

  11 Saul (the King) sent men to David’s house to watch it and to kill him in the morning. But Michal, David’s wife, warned him, “If you don’t run for your life tonight, tomorrow you’ll be killed.” 12 So Michal let David down through a window, and he fled and escaped.

  In 2 Cor 11 the Nabatean King Aretus seeks to kill Saul but is saved by unnamed others:

  32 In Damascus the ethnarch of Aretas the King was watching the city of the Damascenes, wishing to seize me, 33 and through a window in a rope basket I was let down, through the wall, and fled out of his hands.

  In the Acts version/expansion of the story the enemy has shifted to "the Jews" and is saved by his followers:

  23 After many days had gone by, there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill him, 24 but Saul learned of their plan. Day and night they kept close watch on the city gates in order to kill him. 25 But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall.

  
  

  Clearly the stories are intertextually related .

  As a side note, I thought the rest of the David story interesting, David and his wife have a life size 'idol' in their home to slip into the bed to look like David. ???
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  KerryKing

  The Jews wouldn't have had any jurisdiction in Damascus to attempt an attack on Saul, it's a badly done re write of Paul's original account where he has to run away from Aretas, the ruler of that city. He got into trouble for preaching in Damascus to gentiles who'd probably never even heard of a peasant called Jesus.

  Luke has quite a few of those awkward changes of Paul's previously written accounts.

  Whether he was trying to discredit Paul or bad mouth the Jews is the question.
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  peacefulpete

  Actually Aretus did not have jurisdiction, despite many apologist efforts to suggest otherwise. Trying to place Aretus in the context of Acts makes no narrative sense either. Saul is a brand new convert but somehow a King of a neighboring land has such anger he plotted his capture. It just doesn't work in the Acts context. It opens questions about direction of influence between the finished Paulines and Acts. Some have suggested the Corinthians version was a revision of the Acts story. The enemy unsurprisingly is an 'archon' of the world in 1 Cor, and equally unsurprisingly the bad guys are 'the Jews' in Acts. Both are consistent with the overall themes in those books.

  It certainly stands out as an addition to the list of traumatic near death experiences in 1 Cor., so it might represent a pretty late Paulinist effort to harmonize with Acts by someone with poor knowledge of first century politics. I'm sure the transmission/textural history is complicated however you look at it.
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  peacefulpete

  I see too late that I wrote 1Cor rather than 2 Cor in my last comment. Sorry
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  Anony Mous

  @peacefulpete: elsewhere I made the claim that Paul’s story was basically a rip-off/rewrite of an even older Greek tragedy that was well known at the time. Everything from his conversion to his death is a literal reference to that Greek story. Much like the Jesus stories as well as most of the (apocryphal) stories about the apostles later life. I find it thus extremely unlikely that the people referenced were ‘real’ in the sense that they actually experienced those things. They may have been figures that existed, but they were made into ‘superheroes’.

  So too many Bible stories are rewrites and references to older stories. The Bible wasn’t written in one go and most writers did not know of other books, so they are different versions of the same story that later were (poorly) rewritten into some kind of single story. Much like today you have stuff written like the Captain America, X-Men and Superman stories. Someone has been writing those stories since early 1900s, but they’re not the same writers and as time goes on they reboot them, they rewrite the characters to fit modern times, they have different timelines and universes, and people also make knock-offs and fan-fiction.

  We’ve done this for 100 years now, let’s say the distributor wants to make all the official and fan-fiction and derivatives into a single authoritative book on the characters, they’ll have to pick what they want from the stories, the book will never be fully coherent, it will have to be written by multiple authors that need to coordinate etc. You will have your super-hero Bible but a committee (let’s call it a council) will have to get together and agree on what goes in the final version. And all the superhero stories have literal references to prior stories, the ubermensch (Superman) and scientifically enhanced beings were a popular trope and like characters can be found in literature back in Victorian times, the Marvel and other writers took sometimes very strong inspiration from those stories.
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  peacefulpete

  AnonyMous....Many years ago I did some research on the claim of direct reuse of story elements from Euripides and other famed playwrights. I came to the slightly more nuanced conclusion that rather than conscious 'copying' it was more of a case of drawing from a milieu of imagery and idiom for the storyline. Your illustrating that with popular superhero fiction is a pretty good parallel. There is just no way to honestly overlook the emulation of Homer, Euripides or Ovid in the Luke/Acts narrative for example, but at the same time I found the Jewish writer Artapanus had similarly drawn from this literary body of work for his stories about a superhuman/divine Moses hundreds of years earlier. The miraculous prison escape scene for example:

  "The king of the Egyptians learned of Moses' presence, summoned him and asked for what purpose he had come. He responded that the master of the universe had ordered him to release the Jews. When the king learned of this, he confined him in prison. But when night came, all the doors of the prison opened of themselves and some of the guards died, while others were relaxed by sleep and their weapons were broken." (On the Jews, fragment three).

  The point being, the NT was not unique in drawing motif and idiom from the Greco-Roman literary world.

  The 'letters' of Paul represent a complicated case of likely fragmentary material having come through at least 2 phases of expansion and redaction. Dating the material then gets very subjective. The usual model, that 'Paul's' version of his conversion (and escape through a window etc.) predates the Acts version, might be correct but then again, a number of well-respected scholars have reversed that order and suggest the differences reflect community recensions of inherited traditions rather than a conscious refutation/rewrite. (I'm inclined to describe it, regardless direction of influence, as a more direct revision because of inclusion of the otherwise irrelevant detail in both Acts and 2Cor. of the use of a "basket") That dates much of the finished 'authentic' Paulines to the 180s or so. That is a minority view but a scholarly one. The more we dig the less confident we are that anything reflects an historical core that we crave for reconstructions of Christian origins.
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  Anony Mous

  That’s what I agree with as well, although I think a lot of the scholars still look through the lens of Christian apologetics. So a lot of scholars are theologians rather than archeologists.

  People here often quote scholars like Ehrman that even defend the JW interpretation without realizing that scholar is likely a JW or at least models his belief system according to it. Thus I have to discount their interpretations for clear bias. Likewise theologians often believe the story is the important part rather than the facts surrounding.
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  peacefulpete

  Yep. The assumption of historicity still dominates the discussion. Even among secular scholars it seems the default position due to traditional (theologically biased) scholarship is a core element of historicity. Relatedly, the assumption of an oral transmission stage is postulated to explain contradictions while preserving that core. Neither assumption shows awareness of the intertextual and novella nature of the texts.