Sunday, October 09, 2005

Pauline Chronology

On Novum Testamentum, Brandon Wason has a very useful chart on Pauline Chronology:

A Chronology of the Apostle Paul

Make sure you go to the blog site itself rather than just reading the feed in your aggregator, because the formatting works properly on the site. Brandon reveals that he was responsible for the Blue Letter Bible Timeline, which comes up top on a google search for Chronology Paul. I rather like Brandon's approach in his revised Chronology, except that I would myself push Galatians a little later -- I think it has to have been written after 1 Corinthians but before 2 Corinthians. Brandon's chart rightly avoids the mistake criticized by John Knox and others of getting Paul to Jerusalem straight after his conversion (Acts 9); Galatians 1 makes it clear that this did not happen. But Brandon does not mention the Acts 11 Jerusalem visit, which I think explains the Acts 9 visit because it is identical with it. It is a typical example of a Lucan flash-forward, in which a later event is narrated earlier in the sequence for strategic reasons, just as Luke narrates Jesus' Rejection at Nazareth out of (Marcan) sequence (Mark 6) in Luke 4.

I have a similar chart I give out to my undergraduates on Pauline Chronology (MS Word format, sorry):

Chronology of Paul's Life

Found that on the Birmingham server; looks like I didn't remove everything before I left. That's quite useful since I'm only steadily transferring older materials onto my new Duke-provided blogging machine (a nice IBM ThinkPad).

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