Brad McAdon
Fall 2011
2011-2012
During my PDA, I continued my examination of the polemical / rhetorical controversy between
Jewish Christians (represented by Peter, the earliest followers of Jesus, and the leaders of the earliest
Jerusalem congregation) and the Hellenistic Christians (represented by the historical Paul—the selfdubbed “apostle to the gentiles”) as this controversy is evident within the texts of earliest
Christianity. My interest is to examine, analyze, and then classify the rhetorical devices and literary
conventions employed and / or developed by the historical Paul and the anonymous authors of the
canonical gospels of the New Testament (and now the book of Acts). During my PDA (fall semester,
2011), I was able to finish a 65-page chapter on Paul’s Corinthian letters, a longer chapter on
Galatians, the complexity of which led to my decision to add a chapter on the book of Acts, which is
now over 100 pages long. I will briefly describe the work completed during my PDA and some of the
more significant conclusions drawn.
The first chapter that I finished during my PDA (and that I had begun during my FRG) was a 65-page
chapter on the Corinthian correspondences (1 and 2 Corinthians), two of the very earliest Christian
texts that are extant. Conclusions drawn from this chapter include:
 In 2 Corinthians (a composite text), Paul referred to his Jewish Christian opponents as “false
apostles,” “deceitful workers,” “messengers of Satan,” “false brothers,” and to substantiate
that these opponents were also “of the faith,” Paul refers to them as “servants of Christ.”
 Based upon an analysis of 1 Corinthians 1-4 in comparison with 2 Corinthians, those whom
Paul characterizes as “false apostles” in 2 Cor. are members of the Petrine faction identified in
1 Cor. 1-4.
 Paul created numerous neologisms (terms and / or phrases not found in Greek literature prior
to Paul) that he used to describe his opponents. My conclusion is that words and expressions
were not available in the Greek language that would adequately allow Paul to express what he
sincerely thought about these opponents, so he created them himself.
 Paul’s claim that he received his apostleship via a revelation from (an allegedly resurrected)
Jesus is examined and it is determined, via a comparison of Mary Magdalene’s alleged vision
of Jesus in (possibly Gnostic) The Gospel of Mary, that Paul here invokes the common
rhetorical device of revelatory narrative (common in Second Temple Judaism and Christian
Gnosticism) in an effort to grant himself authority and his message legitimacy against his
opponents’s claims that he, in fact, was not an apostle—was not one of them.
 Similarly, Paul’s claim about his so-called “heavenly ascent” (2 Cor. 12) was also examined.
The heavenly ascent narrative, like the revelation narrative, was a common rhetorical
convention in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. After analyzing a few of these
other heavenly ascent narratives (including 1 Enoch and Testament of Levi), I conclude that
Paul invoked the heavenly ascent in an attempt to authorize and legitimize his apostleship and
his gospel, both of which he claimed to have received via supernatural means—just as the
authors of these other ascent narratives attempted to achieve by crafting their narratives.
Next, I moved on to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. A few of the more significant conclusions include:
 Galatians does not lend itself to a rhetorical analysis that attempts to pigeonhole it into one of
the classical rhetoric categories (deliberative, forensic, epideictic). Rather, and like 2 Cor. 1013, elements of the blaming, reproaching, censoring, admonishing, threatening, advising,
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responding, accusing, and apology, as identified in Pseudo Demetrius’s Epistolary Types, are
evident, so it may be best to recognize Galatians, like 2 Cor. 10-13, as a mixed letter.
Paul’s anger and resentment against his Jewish Christian counterparts may be more evident
and intense than in 2 Cor. 10-13:
o Those (Jewish Christians) who are presenting “another gospel” (a phrase from 2 Cor.)
are, in reality, Paul claims, perverting the real gospel—i.e., his gospel.
o Those (Jewish Christians) proclaiming a more Jewish gospel (that includes the
necessity of circumcision) should be “damned” and should “castrate themselves”.
Paul’s letter to the Galatians generated tremendous controversy during the first two centuries
of the Common Era—so much so that:
o early Christians tried to distance Peter from involvement in the controversy between
Peter and Paul described in the letter (2:11-14),
o a later editor (or editors) inserted an interpolation into the text in an attempt to quell
the controversy between Paul and the leaders of the Jerusalem congregation, and
o the author of the book of Acts used Paul’s Galatians as a primary source for a
significant portion of Acts (7:58-16:3) and completely rewrote what Paul wrote in
Galatians in an attempt to whitewash the controversy between Paul and the Jewish
Christians.
The last two points, especially, suggest the extent to which early Christian editors and authors reacted
to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. There is no question that Paul is extremely irritated with the Jewish
Christian followers of Jesus in the letter. In an attempt to soften or completely deflect this anger, a
later editor (or editors) wrote and inserted a passage into the letter—that these Jerusalem “pillars” had
accepted Paul’s gospel and extended to him the “right hand of fellowship”—an event that never could
have historically taken place (for reasons that space does not allow me to explain). It is a clever
emendation of the text, but, upon close and critical analysis, it does not fit grammatically or
ideologically into a letter written by the historical Paul. This emendation of the text of Galatians, as
significant as it is, is minor compared to the (anonymous) author of Acts’ revision of Galatians. This
author turned Paul’s Galatians upside-down by using it as his primary source for much of Acts, but
turning the controversy between Paul and the Jerusalem followers of Jesus into a controversy
between Paul and non-believing Jews and by completely erasing the controversy between Paul and
Peter described in Galatians by never allowing the two to meet or even say one word to one another
at all and by aligning the two into the same ideological camp. This author was an exceptionally clever
and skillful thinker and writer and his rhetorical (and deceptive) tactic of rewriting Paul (a rhetorical
device foreign to the Greco-Roman handbooks on composition) has effectively confused readers,
whitewashed the heated debate, and presented a unity within earliest Christianity between its two
most prominent leaders that, historically, never existed.
The extent of the author of Acts’ rewriting of Galatians led me to add a chapter to my original project
that outlines in detail how the author of Acts used Galatians as a source and the extent to which he
revised (better: rewrote) his source. This chapter is now over 100 (manuscript) pages long and
nearing completion. The PDA allowed me the time to recognize the importance of this additional
discussion and its necessity for demonstrating how the author of Luke (who is also the author of
Acts) revised the gospel of Matthew, which will be the focus of the final chapter (as I am now
combining what would have been three chapters into one).
In addition to the research and writing that I completed during the PDA, I also presented an invited
paper, “The Birth Narratives as Counter-Narratives” at the Creation to Christianity conference hosted
by the Judaic Studies program here on campus in March. I was also able to incorporate, to the benefit
of the students, much of the material from my research into the Bible as Literature course (Engl
4461) that I taught in the spring.