This essay argues that Luke’s strong association of Jesus with the manual-labor class in Acts 4:13b, and specifically with the disciples’ “illiteracy” and “unlearnedness,” is out of step with a sustained redactional strategy in his Gospel, whereby he consistently removed the Gospel of Mark’s associations of Jesus with the manual-labor class and offered an alternative image of Jesus as a scribal-literate teacher.
Adherence to this new covenant, they held, was facilitated by God’s gracious gift of the spirit, a spirit that transformed human intentionality so that perfect obedience to the stipulations of the Torah could be construed as an attractive possibility. They were rather something a little less spectacular: individuals striving to mediate the renewed covenant between God and humans. The “agents of righteousness” were not “pneumatics” in the sense in which Sumney, Furnish and Georgi use the term (i.e., those to whom the spirit imparts visions, revelations, and perhaps the ability to perform miracles). This hypothesis allows us to advance beyond recent reconstructions of the role played by the spirit in the preaching of Paul’s rivals. The use of this data enables us to advance a reasonable hypothesis about the position of Paul"s rivals in Corinth: they likely preached a variant of the traditional theologoumena advanced in these texts. The concerns that Paul addresses in 2 Cor 3-4 cohere closely with the concerns addressed in these comparative texts, although Paul at times draws strikingly different conclusions vis-à-vis the comparative material. The polemical material in 2 Cor 3-4 includes a cluster of terminology and motifs (i.e., Moses, law/spirit, death/life and most importantly, new covenant or covenant renewal) that also appear in the comparative material that I adduce. Each of these texts posits a future period of covenant renewal (i.e., a “new covenant”) in which it is expected that the presence of God"s spirit will enable individuals perfectly to fulfill the stipulations of the Torah. The comparative material that I draw upon comes from Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jubilees, the Community Rule, and the Letter to the Hebrews. While in agreement with many of Sumney"s conclusions, I propose a new approach to this problem one that draws upon comparative material that has hitherto remained unexploited.
Following Sumney's method, the only data at one"s disposal for reconstructing the position of Paul"s rivals in Corinth is the text of 2 Corinthians.
Jerry Sumney has outlined methodological difficulties involved in reconstructing the position of Paul's rivals in Corinth and proposed his own minimalist reconstruction.
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