The paper which James Waddell read at SBL San Francisco is online here. It may well interest visitors to this awesome bit of bloggery. If it does, be sure to run over and read it. If not, just hang around here and enjoy all the joyful tidbits of enlightenment.
hello, all. the paper is my 25 minute “elevator” presentation of my dissertation research, which was just published by T&T Clark under the title, “The Messiah: A Comparative Study of the Enochic Son of Man and the Pauline Kyrios,” link here …
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=160573&SearchType=Basic
It’s cheaper on Amazon.
thanks for linking to my paper and allowing the shameless plug. and i’m more than happy to exchange ideas, discuss, etc.
Jim Waddell
Dr. Wadell,
An interesting paper, though, since I never took Milik seriously, I don’t need much convincing. Could you say something about how your work relates to that of Alan Segal in Two Powers in Heaven and Paul the Convert?
Thank you, Helena, for your thoughtful question. As you might expect I both agree and disagree with Segal. I agree with Segal to the extent that he viewed Paul as a Jew reading prior Jewish traditions from within Judaism, and that Paul essentially did not intend to invent a new religion. There is a simplicity to this argument that is very compelling for me. On the other hand, in Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven, which I believe grew out of his dissertation at Yale, he argues that early christological developments did not assume a previous, preexistent messiah figure whose role Jesus was thought to have adopted. I may have misread Segal, but I believe he has argued that the development of early christology about Jesus should be read in light of early rabbinic midrash and exegesis about two powers that pressured the early followers of Jesus to do their own midrash and exegesis about Jesus. I don’t entirely disagree with this. The literature in the NT describing the early Jesus movement is filled with midrash, exegesis, prooftexting, allusion, rewriting, etc., of hundreds of biblical texts and extra-biblical traditions. Where I am not convinced is that it must be an either or. It seems clear to me that the Enochic Son of Man traditions played a key role at least in the early Jesus movement’s understanding of Jesus, if not also in Jesus’ self-understanding.
I realize the Son of Man designation is a bit controversial today, with Maurice Casey, Geza Vermes, Larry Hurtado, and others, arguing that the Son of Man designation is not titular. This conclusion is problematic in light of the detailed evidence in the Parables of Enoch. The Parables do in fact offer a variety of Ethiopic expressions that are all translated “Son of Man” in English. In my opinion it is not only the verbal expression “Son of Man”, but also the nature and the various functions of this figure in the Parables that lead me to conclude that the Son of Man expression should be taken as a title. Diachronic linguistic analysis of the Aramaic bar enash in my opinion is not sufficient to allow us to be conclusive about its meaning. Synchronic analysis within a single document and other documents in close chronological proximity (Parables of Enoch, Paul, early Jesus traditions before the Gospel and later embedded in the Gospels) is equally important as, if not more important than, the diachronic analysis done by Casey, Vermes and others. I’m almost to the point where I think the whole “title” debate about the Son of Man is a bit of a red herring. Leave it aside, and just look at the nature and the functions of the figure. When they are compared this way between texts, they line up so beautifully that it just makes sense. The early Jesus movement (including Paul) was influenced by these Son of Man traditions.
And by the way, you don’t have to call me Dr. Waddell … please call me Jim.
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