Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1998, Qupperneq 173

Death, Jesus, Derrida
novel writing of the early Christian era or literature influenced by the New
Testament gospels and Acts in particular. In the Early Roman Empire similar
literature emerges about the same time from the hand of pagan authors whose
sources were the Greek epic such as Homer.32 It is in the interest of fictional
writing that Bowersock finds a most common thread between pagan culture
and Christianity.33 This parallel development makes Bowersock sceptic about
attempts to use later pagan sources to explain such fabrications as the account
of the Last Supper, as well as to explain the compositional character of works
like Acts from later novels of the Early Church. Each may, indeed, be more
indebted to the New Testament literature rather than the other way around in
Bowersock’s reconstruction of the sources and their chronology.34
If the hand (source) behind Paul may be accredited with the creation of
this short account in First Corinthians, it is a testimony to the author(’)s(‘)
greater abilities how he/she, if not they, fabricated the fantastic tale about the
Apologia Pauli (see Gal 1:11-2)—a motif that is used over and over again in
the Pauline corpus in smaller or larger contexts. Thus, the figure of the apostle
Paul emerges not as one that mediates between the still more remote a figure,
Jesus, and the audience past and present but one that makes claim to speak
by means of heavenly revelation and to silence the voice whose are but a few
traces of sayings in the traditions attributed to Paul. The defendant takes center
stage35 and the founding figure is all but lost in hidden sayings kept in the
sand and imbedded in the Synoptic gospels.
32 Ibid., 121-143. Bowersock wams, “that the invocation of sources and antecedents never
provides an explanation of an innovation: they can only reveal, inadequately at best, some
building blocks that were used to construct it,” ibid., 124-125.
33 Says Bowersock, “Fiction became antiquity’s most eloquent expression of the nexus
between polytheism and scripture,” ibid., 141.
34 Bowersock criticizes Morton Smith for having applied a pagan text by Áchilles Tatius
(Leucippe and Cleitophon) to explain the eucharistic text in 1 Cor 11. Rather than assuming
that a common older source underlies both as Smith argues, Bowersock simply suggests
that the pagan story may be influenced by the Pauline account, ibid., 125-129. Likewise,
he criticizes Richard I. Pervo for explaining Acts as under the influence of later novels,
as Pervo argues, since Acts is, as Bowersock observes, an older novel that made its imprint
on many later literary compositions of the same character, ibid., 138-139.
35 Rudolf Bultmann argues that Paul was dependent on certain precursory elements of the
Hellenistic Church that had developed out of the Palestinian church (the primitive church).
Yet, reconstructing a picture of this pre-Pauline Hellenistic Christianity is a task hard to
accomplish. Bultmann claims that this precursor continued to develop in some instances
independent of Paul and in other cases under his influence, v/z., whether dependent on the
synagogues or the Gentiles. Sources (inaccurate as they may be) for reconstructing this
stage in the history of the early church are, according to Bultmann: a) the Antiochean source
used in Acts 6-8, 11:19-30; b) traditions in the Pauline letters that Bultmann identifies
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