I was listening to the audiobook version of Scot McKnight’s new translation of the New Testament called The Second Testament. I began to notice the use of the word status and how a higher status is a bad thing. So I did a word search of the word "status" on my Kindle ebook version of McKnight’s new translation. As I went through all the passages where the word status occurs, I could see a clear ideological agenda on the part of Paul to criticize the pursuit of wealth, status, and power (the very ingredients of masculinity and a thriving capitalist economy and culture). For example, in his introduction to Romans, McKnight writes:
In Romans 5– 8 [[Paul’s]] major terms (Flesh, Sin, Death, the Covenant Code [Law], Gift, Grace, etc.) have become agents, actors in the drama of redemption, and are not simply personifications. Capitalization of such terms is designed to emphasize the terms indicate an agent. ... Romans is best read if one first reads Romans 12– 14 , where we meet two parties—the weak and the strong. ... The weak are poor and low status and powerless, while the strong are wealthier, high status, and powerful (15: 1). ...
What this means is that Sin is an agent literally possessing you, making you do things you don’t want to do (see Romans 7). "Mr. Sin" makes you seek wealth and status, but being possessed by Christ means to be possessed with a spirit of accepting poverty and a lower status. Christ acts as a psychological "avatar" for seeking low status and willful poverty as signs of piety (see 2 Corinthians 8:9 and Philippians 2:6–8).
Because of the cosmic agent Sin and the curse of the Flesh, Paul condemns masculine biology that drives men in particular to seek wealth, status and sex for procreation. Paul creates an imaginary divide between Spirit (Pneuma) and Flesh (the Biological Body). With God's Pneuma in an imaginary "tug of war" with our Biology. Thus, Paul encourages single women and widows to remmain unmarried, as the ideal for Paul is permanent life-long celibacy (see 1 Corinthians 7). McKnight’s translation of Galatians 5: 16-26, quoted below makes this battle between Biology and Paul's God more clear (words in brackets my own):
Flesh versus Spirit
16 I [Paul] say, walk around in Spirit and you will not complete flesh’s desire. 17 For the flesh desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, these things oppose one another so—whatever you want—these things you don’t do [compare Romans 7]. 18 If you are led in Spirit, you aren’t under [the Mosaic Law] Code. 19 The flesh’s works are apparent, which are sexual immorality, impurity, flaunting sensuality, 20 demon-idol worship, drug-induced sorcery, enemy-makings, strife, zeal, fury, status seekings, divisions, factions, 21 envies, boozings, parties . . . and things comparable to these, which I say in advance to you, just as I said before, that the ones practicing these things will not inherit God’s Empire. 22 The Spirit’s fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, graciousness, goodness, allegiance, 23 meekness, self-discipline. Against such things there is no Code. 24 The ones of Christos Yēsous [Christ Jesus] crucified the flesh with the passions and desires. 25 If we live in Spirit, let us walk the line in Spirit. 26 Let us not become airheads, calling out one another, envying one another.
In McKnight's introduction to 2 Corinthians he writes:
[Paul]...spent the better part of a decade in back and forths with a disgruntled, denouncing, and disaffected set of house churches [in Corinth]. Their issues with [Paul], which can be heard behind the lines and between the words of nearly every verse in this letter, concerned his disapproval of their desire for status ... They expected a man of his status to boast in his status-shaping accomplishments: he refused to boast like that but turned the tables and boasted in what was for them all the wrong “accomplishments” in suffering. ...
In McKnight's translation of 2 Corinthians 12:7, we see how Paul even argues that God had Satan as messenger attack him with a "thorn in his flesh," to lower his status, by saying: "Therefore, so I may not raise my status, a thorn-piercing-the-flesh was given to me, a Satanas[Satan]-envoy, to punch me, so I would not raise my status."
Ironically "status seekings, divisions, factions, and envies" is what drove the spread of Christianity and the growth of thousands of Christian sects all competing for power and status in the market place of ideas. Instead of "love, joy, peace, patience, graciousness, goodness, ... and meekness" and "crucifying the flesh with its passions and desires," most Christians in America are driven by their flesh's biology which fuels our free market capitalist economy, sports competitions, and bio-driven competion for a mate which drives the romance and marriage industry.
In his intro to 1 Corinthians, McKnight writes:
The Corinthian believers were populated with Roman wannabes, and they were comfortable in Corinth—their faith and practices seemed to have created very little tension with the Kosmos. That is, many had embraced the Roman way of life— status, power , wealth, and opportunistic sexual freedoms. They imposed such a way of life on the Christians, and [Paul] battled their impositions with rhetorical force. ... [Paul] urges in this letter for the Corinthian believers to embrace an anti-Roman way of life marked by love, by unity, by mutual spiritual formation, and by holiness or a devoted way of life. ...
McKnight translates 1 Corinthians 1: 11, "For it has been divulged to me about you, my siblings, by the ones from Chloē, that there are status seekings among you." He translates 1 Corinthians 13:4 in part as "... [love] doesn't appeal to status." He translates 2 Corinthians 12: 20 as Paul complaining there is "status seekings ... using natural status, ..." Paul's message is clear, competion for status is evil (caused by the posessing agent Mr. Sin and our cursed Flesh-bodies), so one in Christ (possessed by Christ) should/will voluntarly lower one's status now on earth in a servant role (as a "slave of Christ"), so that then after death God will raise their status in heaven. But why is wishing for a higher status in heaven good, but seeking a higher status now on earth is a bad thing?
For Paul only condemns status-seeking on earth, because of the god of this world (Satan) and the cosmic agents Flesh, Sin, Death and the Covenant Code [Law], all of which in his mind are causing unholy disunity from competition for wealth and status and sexual partners (mate selection competion). Side Note: Paul also believes that the Christian's biological body will be replaced with a new heavenly body at death when they will basically become asexual or androgynous (presumably genderless or without genitals), which is why the Pauline-Jesus says that in heaven resurrected-humans do not marry. So because Paul argues for the ideal of celibacy and low status through willful poverty as piety, the biological drives for territory, status, and sex is removed from his holiness ideal: so that seeking a higher status and srength (which in turn increases your biological well-being via wealth and sexual access to partners in the real world) becomes in Paul's mind the path of evil and being unholy; and instead a life of voluntary monastic poverty is the righteous pious path, and low status weakness and poverty is the ideal.
However, Paul does accept status-seeking in pursuit of your status in heaven, which is good but only in the context of after you die in the afterlife: when, in death, Paul says his followers will be exalted to such a high status they "will judge the world" and in fact will be so high up in the heavenly hierarchy that they "will judge angels" (see 1 Corinthians 6:1-3). Jesus himself is "exalted in status over the heavens" (Hebrews 7:26, from The Second Testament or TST). For Jesus was high status and powerful in heaven prior to his birth on earth, when he voluntarily chose to model a life of lower status as a slave, as a human. So Paul’s followers should not seek wealth and status but radical egalitarian communitarian unity. Only when the Christian dies will they earn and enjoy their higher status, when Jesus will eventually force everyone on earth to bow before him as basically a high-status celestial emperor. As Paul writes in Philippians 2 (TST):
Unity through humility
2 Therefore, if [there is] any encouragement in [Christ], if any of love’s comfort, if any of the Spirit’s common life, if any empathies and sympathies, 2 [then] fill out my joy so you may think the same, having the same love, co-selves, thinking one thing, 3 not [acting] consistent with strife, not consistent with airheadedness, but, in impoverishment, considering one another superior to themselves, 4 each person not scoping out matters for themselves but each of you [scoping out] matters for the others. 5 Think this among you, which is also in Christos Yēsous [Chris Jesus], 6 Who, being in God’s form, Did not consider being equal with God [a status to be] seized, 7 but hollowed himself, taking a slave’s form, becoming representation of humans; and, being found in a scheme like a human, 8 he impoverished himself, becoming obedient all the way to death (death on a cross). 9 Therefore also, God exalted him in status, and graced him with the name above every name, 10 so at Yēsous’ [Jesus'] name every knee would bend, in the heavens, on the earth, and in the underworld, 11 and every tongue openly agrees that Yēsous Christos [Chris Jesus] is Lord, to Father-God’s splendor.
But why is a high status in the heavens OK for Jesus and future Christians but it's not OK for humans to seek status here and now on earth? Ironically, Jordan Peterson has a whole rule in his book 12 Rules for Life about the importance of increasing your status and "standing up straight with your shoulders back," otherwise your very health and well-being will be negatively affected. So it is clear that even though Peterson finds value in some of the New Testament's psychologically useful symbols and metaphors, he clearly rejects Paul's core message on status.
I also noticed a consistent attack on intelligence in Paul's letters. For example, verses began to become more clear regarding what Paul was really saying. For example here is 1 Corinthians 1:27-31 from the NIV and the TST (The Second Testament):
NIV:
But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not —to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
TST:
“But God selected the Kosmos’s idiots to degrade the wise, and God elected the Kosmos’s weak to degrade the strong, and God elected the Kosmos’s ignoble and devalued—the ones who “are not”—to undo the ones who “are,” so that no flesh may boast before God.”
I already knew that the word foolish was based on the word that means moronic. As in, Paul was saying that compared to the logical wisdom of the Greeks, his message sounds moronic. So McKnight’s use of "idiots" is interesting. As in, Paul's message sounded idiotic to the wise philosophers.
The fact is that Paul's audience was mostly the less intelligent (or the illiterate and uneducated due to poverty), those considered unwise, the low status (poor), and slaves, etc.; i.e. those who were more prone to magical thinking and superstitious ideas (which was shunned by many of the "wiser philosophers." He was telling his select low-status audience that this earthly world where your intelligence (education), social status, and being weak or strong and sexually attractive, all matters a lot, is all going to be annihilated by his coming Messiah: i.e. biological life and competitions for status will end very soon when his sky messiah will float down from the sky as a celestial dictator/emperor to set up a levelled Utopia. Paul was saying this was going to happen soon in their lifetime, so it was better to start living now as an egalitarian utopianist and shunning status competion.
Paul did not convince his followers of his claims with logic or evidence but alleged supernatural acts of the miraculous: speaking in tongues (glossolalia), prophesying, exorcisms, healing handkerchiefs, etc; not to mention Paul himself claiming to channel the voice and will of the deceased Jesus as a spirit possessed medium or shaman.
It's no wonder his appeal to magical/miraculous acts like faith healing, glossolalia and exorcisms, etc., (as demonstrations that he was possessed by a deceased messiah) worked among the uneducated and superstitious. Because, most people who were more skeptical and educated were not buying his anti-status message through an attempt at logical argumentation, so Paul didn't try to win converts with logic and admitted his claims sounded idiotic; and he presented no actual empirical evidence for his claims either, instead Paul appealed to subjective internal revelatory or visionary experiences (which being subjective remained outside objective scrutiny). Paul was thus able to persuade his uneducated and superstitious low status audience with an appeal to magical thinking and their desire for a higher status: by promising them that their low status would be reversed in heaven, where they would become higher status and even judge the world and even judge angels!
After Paul died, later Christian writers present a Pauline version of Jesus in the Gospels who basically goes around promoting a low status, saying "the First, shall be Last": meaning the low status will become high status, and the high status will be forced to become low status, in the future apocalypse (the end of the mortal world and the arrival of the celestial utopia).
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