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Welriekend evangelie, geur verspreidende apostel en goddelijke wijsheid. Sapiëntiële tradities in de tweede brief van Paulus aan de Korintiërs

In my doctoral dissertation I investigated how St. Paul uses sensory language to express his experience of the apostolic calling. More specifically, I focused on the intricate olfactory metaphor in 2 Cor 2:14-16 as a particularly perplexing and multifaceted instance of the application of sense imagery to the proclamation of the good news. My survey of other passages where Paul employs sense imagery to depict his own experience of God (and that of other believers) demonstrated to what extent his understanding of the appropriate God-talk was influenced by his own notion of sense perception as well as the role of the senses in the workship and religious literature in antiquity, both in Judaism and in the Greco-Roman cults. With regard to 2 cor 2:14-16, while not excluding other possible connotations, and the obvious significance of scent in virtually all the major relious traditions of the Roman Emprie, I contended that the backdrop against wich Paul's metaphor is best understood is the sapiential cluster of motifs associated with personified Wisdom, the hymn praising the odoriferoud, life-giving Wisdom in Sir 24 in particular. Scholarly opinions concerning the detailed interpretation of this text may differ, yet there is an overall agreement that the array of intertwined images in Wisdom's self-praise presents us with a rich intertextual structure, and that Ben Sira encapsulates the multiplicity of elements which will appear in various constellations, more or less overtly, in later writings. While in much of Jewish wisdom literature the attitude toward cult is rather ambiguous, Ben Sira's outlook is decidedly positive, which allows him to depict Wisdom in cultic terms, interwoven with paradidiacal imagery. Similar cultic overtones, as I argued, come to the fore in the Pauline metaphor of scent. Whereas wisdom literature, including Sir 24, had sometimes been cited as a possible background of 2 Cor 2:14-16, this was a rule done in connection with the general notion of scent as a sign of divine presence and divine life. Authors who attempted to interpret Pauline olfactory imagery seem to have been largely unaware of the profuse scholarly literature on Sir 24. This prevented them from perceiving all the implications of understanding 2 Cor 2:14-16 in the light of the sapiential tradition. It is noteworthy that in Sir 24:23 Wisdom is related to, or possibly even identified with, the Torah. 2 Cor 2:14-16 implies that for Paul Wisdom's divine fragrance is manifested in the proclamation of the good news about Christ'l life, death and resurrection. Yet the somewhat bewildering interplay of images makes it difficult to establish whether it is the gospel, Christ, or Paul himself, that is equated with the divine Wisdom.
Datum:1 okt 2008 →  30 sep 2010
Trefwoorden:Saint Paul, 2 Corinthians, Wisdom, New Testament