Lesson 3.7,3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14, 3.15.

I publish all this stories at the same time because I had them in a word document and medium won’t let me publish so many different stories in the same day which I did not know.

Lesson 3.7

Lesson 3.7

I found the connection between 1 Corinthians 15 and “The material Spirit” by Engberg Pederson rather interesting. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul is talking to people that doubt the dead can be resurrected so therefore they doubt Christ’s resurrection so that means their faith is meaning less and I still find it strange that even today 2000 years later devout Christians believe in Christ resurrection without a doubt but followers of his shortly after his death and resurrection would doubt it. Paul then is shown that he really cares about this topic and is trying really hard to convince this people in how wrong they are because as apocalyptic Jew he believes Christ raising from the dead signals the coming of the end of times and this means that they too will be raised from the dead so saying resurrection is impossible is going against a core belief of his. And this is where “the material spirit” connects with this passage of 1 Corinthians as there is also confirmed that Paul is an apocalypticist.

Lesson 3.8

In 2 Corinthians we see Paul’s relationship with the people in Corinth has really changed quite a bit because they have had exposure to other teachers other than him and their way of thinking has changed so he is quite desperate at trying to convince them that his words are right and they have been hoodwinked by those other teachers. Reading this letters using rhetorical criticism and understanding rhetorical situation give the reader the tools to try to make sense at a deeper level of what Paul is trying to do because Paul is using rhetoric on the people of Corinth so understanding how to analyze all his different words, phrases and gestures can lead us to more information.

Lesson 3.9

I found the idea of seeing Paul as a freelance religious expert as something very curious because it’s a way to humanize the holy man that Paul is normally seen as. It gives insights to in what kind of environment early Christianity developed and the level of competition it had to deal with to spread, as it could very easily just remained as another one of hundreds of religious beliefs that would be lucky to find its own small following instead of the behemoth it became. It honestly just makes so much sense to see Paul like this because at the end of the day all he was its a normal man trying to do a job.

3.10

Justification by faith is something I started believing in a long time ago without particularly understanding that it was a thing, it just seemed logical to me that if god loves us all we gotta do is believe in him sincerely and that will be enough for him, so seeing this mentioned in official Christian theology its very reassuring for me and my thinking about it has not changed.

Something that fascinates me is the debate that existed in the ancient world with Paul accepting Gentiles without circumcision and how other Jews hated this because it went against the covenant Abraham made with god and how the example of women was used to try to go around this. Since women could not be circumcised, they would normally be included by the Jews through their husbands by worshiping their husbands god, something that worked with foreign women too as shown in the story of Joseph and Aseneth. In the story Aseneth, an Egyptian woman, marries Joseph and gives up her worship in Egyptian gods and starts to worship Joseph’s god, she locks herself up in a tower where an angel visits her and accepts her repentance and conversion. So, what this story shows is if a woman who could not get circumcised could be wholly accepted why can’t gentiles do the same.

3.11

I found the quote in Gal 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek,

neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus”, to be very important because it goes to the core of the reason that makes Christianity so popular and that under Christ we are all the same regardless of ethnicity or status and it is fascinating to see how Paul used this to his advantages when trying to find a way to include Gentiles as for other Jews the fact that they were not ethnically Jewish made it impossible for them to accept them into their religion so if Paul manages to destroy this ethnic boundary the issue is gone showing Paul’s skilled used of rhetoric.

I also read “Asian American Perspectives: Ambivalence of the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner” and I was surprised that Asians feel that its hard for them to assimilate and they are perpetually seen as foreign even if they have been here for generations. I don’t know if its because I am an immigrant too but I never felt they had this problem I have met many Asian Americans and they all seemed to be perfectly suited for life here, they don’t seemed out of place at all and it was not for the accent some have I could not tell them apart from any other American.

3.12

As according to the trinity I do believe that Jesus is divine like god but I tend to see them as two separate entities and I do consider God to be at least slightly above Christ because god is the creator and Jesus is the way he gives us his teachings so I also got a little debate going on. So it is reassuring to see that Paul seem to have this doubts in this too or at least from his writings it seems some things are unclear to him, like if he regarded Jesus as divine when he was a human walking on earth or if he only became divine after his resurrection, this gives me a lot to think about because I had not considered that before. And this question still remains unclear to me.

3.13

My knowledge of homosexuality in the Ancient world was limited before reading this was limited all I knew was that many Greek men indulge on it and society did not think much of it but now I see that it was more complex. First of all that being homosexual wasn’t a thing is intriguing and all you had was men who would have sexual relations with men and women alike just for pleasure. Also that it boil down to status was fascinating because it would have never occur to me that something view as an act of pleasure could have so many nuances. Dunning mentions that being a man who was impenetrable meant that you were someone of the highest status and being penetrated meant you were someone of lower status who could be dominated.

This example shows that seeing the passage of Roman 1 as condemning homosexuality is flawed since when it was written our modern concept of homosexuality just did not exist and so Paul could not have condemn something he did not know about. At the time of the writing what was wrong with homosexuality was “the feminization of the

penetrated man and the unfruitful expenditure of seed by the penetrator” (Dunning p.584), but the actual act of two men having relations was not seen as immoral.

3.14

I found Zetterholm’s “Paul and Self Control” quite interesting since he mentions how Paul was to at least some degree a product of the Hellenistic cultural environment so we need to understand the setting to understand his letters properly since is very normal that when people read ancient texts like this they look at them with a modern mindset and don’t have the proper knowledge of the historical background and the context which leads to misunderstandings. Paul mentions that Gentiles are saved in a different way from Jews and their way to become righteous is different so Gentiles should not seek to convert to Judaism when following christ, which is something many gentiles did because Jews tended to practice self-control and that was a trait many men strive for in the ancient world.

3.15

I found this concept of Righteous remnant particularly interesting since apocalyptic Jewish beliefs are very intriguing to me and Paul as an apocalyptic Jew was the main topic in my second paper. So Paul was afraid of what would happen to Jews that did not believe in Christ at the end of time, how will they be saved? he probably asked himself. This reinforces the belief that Paul kept seeing himself as Jewish instead of just a Christian since he still cared what would be the faith of other Jews