St. Paul’s Reliance on Sacred Tradition

St. Paul’s Reliance on Sacred Tradition August 3, 2015

A reader writes:

I got into a discussion with someone who questioned the Catholic Church’s teaching on (what a surprise!) homosexuality.He, of course immediately brought up the fact that Jesus never spoke about homosexuality. I mentioned that Jesus did not speak about a lot of things that we know are not good but we still know they are not good. I was leading him to Sacred Tradition and the fact that St. Paul mentioning homosexuality in his epistles tells us that Jesus did in fact speak on it. Am I correct in that thinking?

Jesus does not speak about homosexuality, or exposing infants, or cruelty to animals, or gladiatorial games, or the practice of footbinding, or wifebeating, or pornography or a host of other issues.  But in various ways, the law of Moses addresses these things, as does the law of love.  Jesus is not a legal positivist, playing legal games in which every syllable of his teaching is to be parsed for loopholes.  And so, Jesus doesn’t speak about homosexuality, but he does speak about marriage:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?” He said to them, “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery.”*

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” (Mt 19:3–12).

This is a vision of marriage that is entirely rooted in Genesis 1-2 and has no room whatosever for gay unions.

The game that is being played here is what I call the Semi-Permeable membrane of the Various Protestantisms (a game now played by many Catholics too).  It works this way: when the Church forbids something the Protestant wishes to permit (such as gay “marriage”), the demand is made “Show me where Jesus forbade X!”  When the Protestant wants to forbid something the Church permits (say, prayer to the saints), the demand is “Show me where Jesus commanded X.”

Now my main question is this…..I started thinking about St. Paul and Tradition and wondered why we do not just use him as an example in talking with non Catholics about Sacred Tradition. Not just the fact of the Bible verses where St. Paul mentions all that I have taught you in written word and orally but the figure of St. Paul himself.. St. Paul did not know Jesus while he was on this earth. The three years that we do not know what St. Paul was doing he quite possibly was getting instruction from other Christians, right?

And beyond.  He was instructed at Antioch like any other newbie Christian.

Now he was inspired by the Holy Spirit and his writings are of Divine Revelation but would it be improper to say that he was also influenced by what he heard from other Christians, maybe the apostles themselves?

Sure.  He himself says as much when he says “I handed on to you  what I also received…” on multiple occasions to the Corinthians.  That’s rabbinic jargon meaning “I am handing on a tradition I got from the apostles.”  That tradition was enshrined in the liturgy and in the sayings and writings “delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word (Luke 1:2).

Let me see if I can phrase it better….where does the Catholic Church say that Sacred Tradition started…..with St. Paul or with the original twelve? Hope that’s clear and thanks for any insight.

Dei Verbum.  But they are just repeating what Paul said.  I discuss this at some length in my book, By What Authority?:  An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition .  Here’s a snippet:

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus begins, not on the Damascus Road, but with the martyrdom of Stephen. Saul heard Stephen preach, and his preaching set goads in Saul’s spirit (Acts 26:14). Yet the thing that distinguishes (and dooms) Stephen when he preaches to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7 is not his faith in Scripture, but his faith in the oral tradition of the apostles. After all, the elders and Saul know their Jewish Bible as well as Stephen. Both he and they have been reading it for years and are intimately familiar with its stories, lessons, and prophecies. But only Stephen sees his Bible focused through the lens of apostolic paradosis. It is this paradosis which provokes the elders (and also Saul) to notice something of a difference between the way they read their Bibles and the way Stephen reads his.

The interesting thing is that this difference in interpretation is not healed for Saul by more diligent Bible study or by “letting Scripture interpret Scripture” (as my Evangelical background urged). On the contrary, healing comes when Saul sees Scripture through the same lens by which Stephen saw it — a lens given by the revelation of Christ (on the Damascus Road) and by the paradosis of the apostles. For as Paul repeatedly affirms later, Christ not only revealed himself in that moment of mystical ecstasy; he just as reliably revealed himself through “what I received” from the apostles (cf. 1 Cor 15:3).

This came as a surprise to my friends. After all, didn’t Paul say to the Galatians that he did not receive his gospel “from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:12). Yes. But he did not say this to issue a sweeping denial of any dependence on the teaching of the Twelve. Rather, he said it to deny the claims of certain people that he wasn’t really an apostle and didn’t really have authority from Christ.

To prove this, we need only note that Paul, a few lines later, notes that he made certain to have his preaching vetted by the Twelve, “for fear I was running or had run my race in vain” (Gal 2:2). Further, even a cursory reading of the New Testament shows that Paul has no difficulty relying on tons of apostolic Tradition in the form of doxologies (Gal 1:5; Phil 4:20; Rom 11:36; Eph 3:21), hymns (Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20; Eph 5:14), stories (1 Cor 11:23-25), and prayers (1 Cor 16:22),which he faithfully passes along without blinking an eye. This is why, even though he did not know Christ during his earthly ministry, Paul can nonetheless frequently quote and allude to historical sayings of Christ (Acts 20:35), and facts about his life, trial, death, resurrection, and ascension. For example, Paul knows Jesus is a Jew of David’s line (Rom 1:3); that John the Baptist was his forerunner and had disavowed any claim to his own Messiahship (Acts 13:24-25); that his chief disciples were Peter, James, and John (Gal 2:9); that he had predicted his return “like a thief” (1 Th 5:4); that he had instituted the Eucharist (1 Cor 11:23-25); that he had been rejected by the Jewish leaders (1 Th 2:15), tried under Pontius Pilate (1 Tm 5:13), and crucified for us (Gal 3:1); that he was laid in a tomb (Acts 13:29); that he had been raised from the dead and seen by many witnesses (1 Cor 15:3-8); and that he had ascended (Eph 4:9-10). All these data are quite obviously treated by Paul as part of a common deposit of apostolic Tradition to which all Christians are privy, not as things mystically revealed to him alone on the Damascus Road.

So the mere fact that Christ once revealed himself to Paul without any human mediation does not mean Paul was not subsequently instructed in the faith of the Twelve by the Christian community—nor that he did not regard it as divine revelation. On the contrary, the very first  thing the Risen Jesus does is refer the blinded Saul of Tarsus to the Church by giving him a vision of a member of that Church (Ananias) coming and laying hands on him so that he might regain his sight and be baptized (Acts 9:12).  Not surprisingly then, after his sojourn in the desert, Paul deliberately “went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days” (Gal 1:18). There he also met James. After this, he spent years in Tarsus and Antioch before he was sent on his first mission. During that time he would have done what Scripture said all new Christians did: learning, as Hebrews puts it, the “elementary teachings about Christ” and “instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment” (Heb 6:1-2). We forget that Saul was taught, like every other new Christian, that Christ had told the Twelve, “He who listens to you listens to me” (Lk 10:16), and thus to make no distinction whatever between the Tradition of the apostles and the authoritative revelation of Christ. Forgetting this, we thus forget that Paul often appeals to this Tradition handed down from the Twelve — and that he does so in a way which plainly shows such Tradition is, for him, “from the Lord.”

That is why Paul twice tells the Corinthians that “what I received I passed on to you” (1 Cor 11:23; 15:3). What did he receive? In this case, the teaching concerning the events surrounding the Lord’s Supper and the Resurrection. From whom did he receive it? “From the Lord,” says Paul. Is Paul therefore saying he was given direct, Spirit-infused knowledge of these events?

No. He is saying he was given an apostolic paradosis. For in using the terms “received and handed on,” Paul is repeating standard rabbinical jargon which means literally, “I am transmitting, without addition or subtraction, a tradition I have been taught.”[1] Since “he who listens to the apostles listens to Christ,” Paul simply refers to the traditions as “from the Lord” since they are, in fact, the core of what the apostles have, by Christ’s authority, drummed into their churches wherever they have gone.

That is why the two gospel stories he relates in 1 Corinthians (of the institution of the Lord’s Supper and of the Resurrection) bear such a strong resemblance to other accounts of these events (in the gospels) which are separated from this epistle by many years and many miles. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul are drawing on a common paradosis, known to all the churches, which has set the words of the story in a sort of liturgical concrete that admits very little variation. It is precisely adherence to this common paradosis which Paul commends when he tells the Corinthians:

 

I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you (1 Cor 11:2 RSV).

 

For “traditions” is, once again, the English translation of paradosis and it means, once again, not merely written but extra-biblical tradition as well. Precisely what Paul does not do is give the Corinthians the slightest indication that his writings alone are the word of God or that they will someday contain everything he has delivered extra-biblically. Nowhere does he say, “One of these days we’ll crystallize what we’re saying into a complete New Testament, but until then just stick with the clunky and unreliable tradition we gave you.” On the contrary, he praises them for remembering his paradosis, which has already been handed on to them before his letters were written, and urges them to stick to both his letters and this extra-biblical tradition. Thus, in Corinth as in Thessalonica, the total paradosis — Scripture and Tradition — is the word of God. It is on this word, not the Scripture alone, that these churches are founded.

[1] The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Vol. 2, p. 804; Gordon D. Fee, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), p. 449, n. 29; James H. Moulton and George Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament Illustrated From the Papyri and Other Non-literary Sources (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), p. 483.

 


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