Thoughts on Antiquity

Bruce Malina and John Pilch’s Social-Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul contains one of the most interesting and radical proposals to the Ioudaios debate that I have seen. In their reading of Paul, the apostle consistently used “Israelite” as an implicit antecedent in every use of Ἕλληνές and Ἰουδαῖοι. Thus, they argue that Paul had no interest in converting gentiles (ἔθνη), but was interesting in the relationship between Israelites whose lives were “Hellenistic” as opposed to “Judean” (i.e., kosher). The argument is more plausible that it might at first seem, so I would encourage interested parties to read the book if they have not already. One passage, however, seems to be particularly problematic for their interpretation; 1 Cor 1:18–31 finds a considerable density in the terminology and betrays certain assumptions about each what constitutes Ἕλληνές and Ἰουδαῖοι. Upon reading this pericope, one is once again struck by something that seems wholly incompatible with the reading advocated by Malina and Pilch: ἡμείς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐvσταυρωμένον, Ἰουδαίοις μὲν σκάνδαλον, ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωρίαν…. (1:23) The paralleling of Ἰουδαίοις with ἔθνεσιν goes against what one would expect in their paradigm. Judean is a type of Israelite and in Malina’s paradigm one would expect the corresponding word to be Hellene. Instead, “Judeans” are contrasted with the goyim; this would exclude from consideration diaspora Jews, including those to whom Malina and Pilch believe Paul was writing. The scholars, though, suggest that Ἕλλησι was the original reading, which would render the verse to be wholly consistent with their hypothesis. “[T]he coupling ‘Jews and Gentiles’ disturbs the parallelism of the next sentence speaking of ‘Jews and Greeks.’ … In fact the word ethnē—translated ‘Gentiles’ in the NRSV—is not found in a number of good manuscripts, and from those manuscripts we adopt the reading ‘Judeans and Hellenists’….” (Malina & Pilch, 67) While this emendation is initially appealing, investigation of their claims leaves one feeling cold to their interpretation.

To start, suggesting that parallelism was lost in transmission goes against almost every principle behind the practice of textual criticism. The scribal tendency to create parallelism and to harmonize passages – especially with roughly synonymous words – is as demonstrable a fact as one can find in current biblical studies. Similarly, the “number of good manuscripts” reading Ἕλλησι is far from accurate.. This reading is dominant in the Textus Receptus and found with moderate frequency in later minuscules, the earliest being manuscript 6, written in the 8th Century. Things fare little better among the uncials: only the corrector to Codex Claromontanus and the third hand from the Ephraemi palimpsest attest this reading. Indeed, these are “good manuscripts,” as Malina and Pilch said, but such was clearly not their earliest reading and to imply such is misleading. While it is conceivable that the redactors of these codices had very early manuscripts available to them, there is little reason to speculate such, especially given the aforementioned tendencies in scribal harmonization. The suggestion must have seemed quite improbable to the UBS committee, since neither reading received a grade at all; one might infer that they regarded the “textually” correct reading to be so obvious that alternatives did not need to be considered. It might be noted, in order to avoid overstating the case against this reading, that this is surely exceptional in terms of uses of these terms in the uncontested Pauline corpus. Here might want especially to contrast 1 Cor 5:1, where the Corinthians are contrasted with the ἔθνη; if self-identified non-Israelites were a part of the assembly, one can easily imagine them cringing at this verse. Their surprisingly-compelling and very novel reading of this text as referring to the two types of Israelites that constitute the Corinthian Jesus-group: Judean (kosher and thus barbaric) and Hellenistic (civilized and thus non-kosher), addressing the concerns of each faction becomes quite problematic without a conjectural emendation of the text. In sum, if Paul believed ἔθνη and Ἕλλην to be totally synonymous – as a text-critically conscious reading of this text might suggest – , then such a reading becomes completely untenable.