In these two, materially unrelated cases, it has been demonstrated how a saying of Jesus, which had passed into the tradition of the early Church, was used to regulate its life as a command of the Lord. Or, to be more precise, it was showed how the Church tried to use sayings of the Lord in its tradition, despite the fact that new developments in the Church frequently made this difficult. It was one of the major themes of this demonstration that if Paul and the editors of the Synoptic gospels are compared in this respect, that is, if the Synoptic editors' intentions, as to how the older traditional sayings of Jesus were to be interpreted and applied, are comapred with Paul's actual interpretation and application at Corinth and elsewhere, they turn out to resemble each other almost perfectly. Even the degree of divergence and discrepancy is the amount we would expect. As far as these two cases are concerned, Paul stands squarely within the tradition that led to the Synoptic gospels, and is of similar mind with the editors of those gospels in the way he understands what Jesus (the Lord) was commanding in the sayings themselves and also in the way he prefigures the Synoptic editors' use of them.
For example, this was shown in the first case through Paul's accurate paraphrase of the Lord's command that there be an unrestricted scope in the support to which apostles were entitled (I Cor. 9.14). As we saw, this was the intention in Jesus' original instruction. On the other hand, we showed that Paul disregarded this command of the Lord most of the time, defending his course in such a way that we could see the problem was a financial one. This corresponded to Matthew's alteration of the original (i.e. Q) account, in which -- by interpolating a strict injunction that apostles were not to accept "wages" (Matt. 10.8b) -- he limited the original open-endedness of the saying, and it corresponded also to Luke's complex alterations, the eventual outcome of which was to recommend that apostles be given no support whatever.
Furthermore, it seemed to be the case that Paul's whole series of arguments in I Cor. 9.4-14 was little more than a homiletical rehearsing of the two aspects of Matthew's (i.e. Q's) version of the workman-food saying in Jesus' instructions (Matt. 10.10 as opposed to Luke 10.7). On the other hand, Paul stood together with Luke, over against Matthew, in discussing the question of support for apostles in a context dealing with the problem of unclean foods, while Luke introduces a few words of advice from "Jesus" regarding unclean foods in a context dealing with support for apostles. A verbatim correspondence was even found to obtain between Luke 10.8 and I Cor. 10.27: "eat whatever is set before you."
In the second case, Paul's self-contradictory manner of citing and applying the command of the Lord proved to be completely inexplicable on the basis of the evidence in his letters alone. Yet, once we turned to a careful examination of the Synoptic accounts, one riddle after another cleared up, as crucial insights emerged, not only from a series of comparisons with the way the Synoptic editors handled the same saying, but most importantly from a careful inquiry into what the central thrust of Jesus' original statements on remarriage had been, as this was comapred and contrasted with various groups in the contemporary Palestinian milieu.
It turned out that Paul had, again correctly, interpreted Jesus' original saying to forbid remarriage but not divorce, and that the clash between Paul's application and the wording of the command he actually cites simply reflected current practice, as shown by the Synoptic editors' referring to Jesus' saying by means of a rough approximation of the final phrases in Jesus' answer. In this case, Mark and Matthew provided the crucial clues as to how the tradition was operating to produce something like Paul's behavior. In addition, Paul's overall stance regarding the advisibility of (single) marriage for the majority, with celibacy being the higher way for the few, was shown to correspond precisely with the way Matthew took the Lord's advice -- Marik and Luke being rather different at this point. But again, Paul seemed in some ways to be closer to Luke than to Matthew or Mark, as far as sharing Luke's intensely ascetic outlook was concerned....To repeat, Paul's concrete application of these traditional sayings of the Lord in the context of his churches fits almost perfectly into a general pattern of similar interpretation and application of the same sayings in the Church in his day, as typified by the three Synoptic editors....
It has been frequently noted in the past that in these two commands of the Lord, Paul does not directly quote the saying of the Lord but just "produces a halakah based on such a saying." That is, he only alludes to the actual saying; he uses it indirectly. Now we must go further and point out that Paul's indirectness is a major aspect of his use of these two sayings of the Lord in both contexts. For example, we found grounds for suggesting that Paul is alluding to the workman/food saying all through the context of I Cor. 9.4-14. Even when he comes to the actual reference to the Lord's command he does not stop alluding to this saying. As for the other case, we found traces of the original saying (as reconstructed from the Synoptic material) lying beneath several different points in Paul's argument. He derives the proper application regardless of the distorted, short-hand excerpt he mentions as the Lord's command, he uses the same original account again while claiming not to (I Cor. 7.12-16), and it also seems to be beneath the surface when he is discussing the porne (I Cor. 6.15f). The rather surprising result may be formulated as follows: It is precisely when one examines Paul's explicit use of the sayings of the Lord that one most clearly perceives how indirectly and allusively he depends on them.
A further observation should be added. In neither case does Paul give any indication that his interpretation of the saying of the Lord is in any way controversial, and in the second case, the fact that he can give an extraordinarily misleading paraphrase of the saying involved, and practically in mid-breath, apply it in contradictory fashion -- all with no explanation whatever -- these things plainly say that it is a situation filled with signs of mutual understanding and common reliance upon sayings that are well known, including their proper interpretation and application. Paul does not stop to explain because he does not need to. But this means, as far as the allusiveness we described above is concerned, that Paul's use of the command of the Lord everywhere in his remarks would certainly not have been lost on the Corinthians. They would have recognized the source of his views immediately.
In the second place, we have already discussed above how much Paul has in common both with the oral tradition lying behind the Synoptic accounts as well as with the Synoptic editors' own points of view. We should speak here of Paul's intimate relation with this entire tradition, as indicated by these two examples (and a few others). But this raises a very interesting possibility: the great number of admittedly authentic sayings of the Lord contained in the Synoptic gospels suggests that the amount of Synoptic tradition current among the Pauline congregations and known to Paul could have been far higher than the number of times he openly refers to sayings of the Lord. Is this reflected in any way in his letter? How many sayings of the Lord does Paul actually use in his letters?
It is not necessary to repeat here the many familiar arguments which deal with the question of how many sayings of Jesus Paul knew of or used in his work. In general, those urging a high number have had recourse to two types of proof: one which simply claimed that Paul must have desired to know and use such traditions, and another which pointed to the numerous parallels between the ethical teachings in Paul's letters and sayings of Jesus recorded in the canonical gospels. The weaknesses of both arguments have long since been exposed. In more recent times, a third line of argument has been advanced, to the effect that Paul's use of technical tradition-transmission terminology in his letters proves that he had a role in this process, which was to be understood to have taken place in much the same way as the later rabbinic transmission-process was carried out. This hypothesis is still being considered.
On the other side, those contending that Paul had few sayings of Jesus tend to advance two chief arguments. First, the very few times Paul refers to such sayings is pointed out as manifest evidence of the general number in his possession, while on the other hand, it is argued that, regardless of how many may have been available to Paul, he was not interested in what Jesus taught in any case. He was proclaiming faith in Jesus, not the faith of Jesus.
When it is asserted that Paul rarely uses sayings of Jesus, what, precisely, is meant by this? To judge from standard procedure, what is meant is use, scil. use explicitly. Let us hear a typical statement of Bultmann's on this once again: "That Paul considered it valuable to have a word of the Lord for the purposes of discipline, i.e. community order, 1 Cor. 7.25 demonstrates. All the clearer is it, then, when he otherwise cites none where one might be expected, it is because he knows of none." The problem with this view becomes apparent immediately if we ask when did it become customary to refer to the sayings of Jesus explcitly, carefully, and as it were, accurately? The answer to this is well-known. Although a Tertullian and an Irenaeus may have succeeded most of the time in keeping their citations explicit and unscrambled, the same thing cannot be said for Justin Martyr, or II Clement, or I Clement. In them, however, the degree of explicitness is clearly on the rise. But if we go back farther, to someone like Polycarp or Ignatius, or the other Apostolic Fathers, we can see much less explicit citation of traditional material (whether sayings of Jesus or of Paul or of the Old Testament). On the contrary, a general allusiveness covers the dependence we know is there, thanks to our modern critical editions.
In other words, it is not anachronistic to assume that Paul has not referred to a saying of Jesus if he did not do so openly, carefully, and with quotation marks as we do. But we have demonstrated that Paul does not refer to the sayings of the Lord in this way. Perhaps the most revealing example is I Cor. 7.12-16 where Paul uses Jesus' saying to guide his decision precisely in a context where he has expressly claimed he is not! Now if that can happen, what are we to say about those long stretches of theological argument, advice, command, hymn, blessing, and exhortation, where Paul says nothing about his sources?
Therefore, if Paul was part of a larger pattern of Synoptic tradition transmission, and represents an early stage of its interpretation and application, as we have for these two sayings shown to be the case, and if it is precisely Paul's characteristic way to specifically cite sayings of the Lord by doing do allusively, then the argument that Paul knew only a few sayings because he only mentions a few openly and only allusively, falls to the ground, and the numerous verbal correspondences between his text and those of the Synoptic gospels, as well as other more distantly related parallels in ethical exhortation, show that Paul actually used a considerable number of Synoptic sayings in the Jesus tradition (pp. 139-149).
I'm glad I found the book again because it addresses pretty much the same issues we've been discussing at length. The actual analysis of these two dominical commands shows how material elsewhere in Paul's argument other than the specific commands betrays his knowledge of original sayings, and how in the case of Paul's discussion of support for apostles (1 Corinthians 9-10), there is both an allusion to the "Lord's command" and a verbatim citation of the relevant Q saying in the course of the same argument (p. 46-47).
