God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N.T. Wright 9783161538513, 316153851X

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
among Pauline Theologies
N. T. Wright’s Biblical Hermeneutics
Wright’s Version of Critical Realism
Historical Methodology
Wright’s Paul and the Paul of Acts
Wright’s Understanding of Paul’s Use of Scripture
N. T. Wright’s Narrative Approach
Wright’s Paradigm of Early Jewish Thought
Wisdom or Foolishness?
“A World of Shrines and Groves”
Paul and the Roman Empire
Law and Covenant in
Election and the Role of Israel
An Insider’s Perspective on Wright’s Version of the New Perspective on Paul
N. T. Wright’s Understanding of Justification and Redemption
Messianism and Messiah in Paul
Participationism and Messiah Christology in Paul
YHWH’s Return to Zion
The Spirit in Its Second Temple Context
God and His Faithfulness in Paul
Demythologizing Apocalyptic?
Individual Eschatology
The Faithfulness of God and Its Effects on Faithful Living
Ecclesiology as Ethnology
as Postmodern Scholarship
The Spirit and God’s Return to Indwell a People
Barth, Wright, and Theology
Bishop Wright
Evangelism and the Mission of the Church
The Challenge of Dialogue
Index of Ancient Sources
Index of References to
Index of Names
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament · 2. Reihe Herausgeber / Editor Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber / Associate Editors Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) · James A. Kelhoffer (Uppsala) Hans-Josef Klauck (Chicago, IL) · Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg) J. Ross Wagner (Durham, NC)

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God and the Faithfulness of Paul A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N.T. Wright edited by

Christoph Heilig, J. Thomas Hewitt, and Michael F. Bird

Mohr Siebeck

Christoph Heilig, born 1990; 2009–2014 studied theology; 2013 Master of Letters in “Biblical Languages and Literature” at St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews; since 2014 research at the University of Zurich (SNF Project). J. Thomas Hewitt; BS, Furman University (Psychology, Music); MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary; MLitt, St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews (Scripture and Theology); currently PhD candidate in New Testament and Christian Origins, New College, University of Edinburgh. Michael F. Bird, born 1974; 2005 PhD from University of Queensland; 2005–2009 New Testament Tutor at Highland Theological College; 2010–2012 Lecturer in Theology at Crossway College; since 2013 Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College.

ISBN 978-3-16-153851-3 ISSN 0340-9570 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2. Reihe) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

© 2016 by Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohr.de This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents Part I: Prologue Michael F. Bird, Christoph Heilig, and J. Thomas Hewitt Introduction ..................................................................................................... 3 Benjamin Schliesser Paul and the Faithfulness of God among Pauline Theologies ....................... 21

Part II: Methodological Issues Oda Wischmeyer N. T. Wright’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Considered from A German Exegetical Perspctive........................................ 73 Andreas Losch Wright’s Version of Critical Realism .......................................................... 101 Theresa Heilig and Christoph Heilig Historical Methodology ............................................................................... 115 Eve-Marie Becker Wright’s Paul and the Paul of Acts: A Critique of Pauline Exegesis – Inspired by Lukan Studies ...................... 151 Steve Moyise Wright’s Understanding of Paul’s Use of Scripture .................................... 165 Joel R. White N. T. Wright’s Narrative Approach ............................................................. 181

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Part III: Contextual Issues James Hamilton Charlesworth Wright’s Paradigm of Early Jewish Thought: Avoidance of Anachronisms? ...................................................................... 207 Gregory E. Sterling Wisdom or Foolishness?: The Role of Philosophy in the Thought of Paul ........................................... 235 James Constantine Hanges “A World of Shrines and Groves”: N. T. Wright and Paul among the Gods ....................................................... 255 Seyoon Kim Paul and the Roman Empire ........................................................................ 277

Part IV: Exegetical Issues Gregory Tatum Law and Covenant in Paul and the Faithfulness of God ............................. 311 Sigurd Grindheim Election and the Role of Israel .................................................................... 329 James D. G. Dunn An Insider’s Perspective on Wright’s Version of the New Perspective on Paul ................................................................... 347 Peter Stuhlmacher N. T. Wright’s Understanding of Justification and Redemption .................. 359 Aquila H. I. Lee Messianism and Messiah in Paul: Christ as Jesus?............................................................................................ 375 J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V. Novenson Participationism and Messiah Christology in Paul ...................................... 393

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Larry W. Hurtado YHWH’s Return to Zion: A New Catalyst for Earliest High Christology? ........................................... 417 John R. (Jack) Levison The Spirit in Its Second Temple Context: An Exegetical Analysis of the Pneumatology of N. T. Wright .................... 439 Torsten Jantsch God and His Faithfulness in Paul: Aspects of the History of Research in Light of the Letter to the Romans ............................................................ 463 Jörg Frey Demythologizing Apocalyptic?: On N. T. Wright’s Paul, Apocalyptic Interpretation, and the Constraints of Construction ............................................................ 489 Richard H. Bell Individual Eschatology ................................................................................ 533 Volker Rabens The Faithfulfness of God and Its Effects on Faithful Living: A Critical Analysis of Tom Wright’s Faithfulness to Paul’s Ethics ............ 555

Part V: Implications Andrew McGowan Ecclesiology as Ethnology: The Church in N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God ................ 583 James G. Crossley and Katie Edwards Paul and the Faithfulness of God as Postmodern Scholarship .................... 603 Frank D. Macchia The Spirit and God’s Return to Indwell a People: A Systematic Theologian’s Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul’s Pneumatology ........................................ 623 Sven Ensminger Barth, Wright, and Theology ....................................................................... 645

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Edith M. Humphrey Bishop Wright: Sacramentality and the Role of Sacraments ................................................. 661 Eckhard J. Schnabel Evangelism and the Mission of the Church ................................................. 683

Part VI: Epilogue N. T. Wright The Challenge of Dialogue: A Partial and Preliminary Response ............................................................ 711

Indices Index of Ancient Sources ............................................................................ 771 Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God ........................... 801 Index of Names ........................................................................................... 815 Index of Subjects ......................................................................................... 827

Part I Prologue

Introduction1 Michael F. Bird, Christoph Heilig, and J. Thomas Hewitt N. T. Wright stands as one of the most prominent voices of the last quarter century not only in Pauline studies, but also in New Testament studies more generally.2 There have been other book length interactions with Wright’s works on Jesus and Paul.3 Wright has engaged topics as diverse as Second Temple Judaism, the “Third Quest” for the historical Jesus, the background and historical questions surrounding Jesus’s resurrection, plus dozens of publications on Paul. Despite his academic breadth, and notwithstanding his ability to write for both scholarly and popular audiences, it would be fair to say that Wright is truly a Paulinist at heart. Early in his career, he published an article in which he was trying to adjudicate on the debate about Paul taking place between Krister Stendahl and Ernst Käsemann in the late 1970s.4 Soon after, his DPhil thesis was accepted at Oxford, and there he argued that Paul articulated a view of Jesus as the messianic representative of God’s people in the Letter to the Romans.5 Wright cut his scholarly teeth in Pauline studies and, despite various pastoral duties and broad professional interests in adjacent areas, he has constantly returned to Pauline scholarship time and again. Over the last four decades, Wright has produced an industrious amount of work on the Apostle Paul. We can note an early volume on Colossians and Philemon,6 a series of popular commentaries covering the entire Pauline cor1

N.B. Throughout, abbreviations are according to the SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed. (2014). 2 See John J. Hartman, “Nicholas Thomas Wright,” in Bible Interpreters of the 20th Century, ed. Walter A. Elwell and J. D. Weaver (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 434–45. 3 Carey C. Newman, ed., Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999); Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays, eds., Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011). 4 N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” TynBul 29 (1978): 61– 88. 5 N. T. Wright, “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans,” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1980). 6 N. T. Wright, The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon, TNTC (Leicester: Tyndale, 1986).

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pus,7 and an intermediate level Romans commentary.8 In addition, Wright has published two collections of essays on Paul,9 a popular level introduction to Paul (which sparked much controversy for such a little book),10 a volume length rejoinder to his conservative critics on justification,11 plus a Pauline Forschungsgeschichte.12 All this work, not counting reviews and lectureships, was largely prefatory for Wright’s epic magnum opus on Paul and the Faithfulness of God, the gargantuan fourth volume in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series.13 Paul is the epicenter for Wright’s bold synthesis (or reconciliation?) of New Testament History and New Testament Theology. Paul and the Faithfulness of God (henceforth, throughout the volume, PFG) is near-encyclopedic in the aspects of Paul’s career and thought that Wright covers as well as critically engaging particular elements in Pauline scholarship. Wright covers the Jewish, Greek, and Roman background to Paul’s thought. He traces Paul’s developing mindset and his articulation of a particular worldview. Thereafter he identifies the salient features of Paul’s theology understood as a re-working of the Jewish worldview. Finally, Wright locates Paul within the intellectual climate of the first century. Along the way, a plethora of texts are discussed and a multitude of scholarly melees are described. Some examples are the nature and expression of Paul’s Jewishness, the relative height of his Christology, the πίστις Χριστοῦ debate, whether Paul was an apocalyptic or covenantal theologian, the influence of Stoic philosophy upon Paul, Paul as counter-imperial agent, and the meaning of “justification” in Paul’s letters. Wright leaves very few stones unturned, he generously attempts to cast the net wide in his bibliography and brings historical, theological, and philosophical horizons together when necessary. John Barclay comments on the breadth and ambition of Wright’s volume:

7 N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (London: SPCK, 2002); N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters (London: SPCK, 2002); N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (London: SPCK, 2003); N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: 2 Corinthians (London: SPCK, 2003); N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters (London: SPCK, 2003); N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, 2 vols. (London: SPCK, 2004). 8 N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” NIB 10:393–770. 9 N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013). 10 N. T. Wright, What St Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion, 1997). 11 N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009). 12 N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015). 13 N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 4 (London: SPCK, 2013).

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Wright here advances in full the synthetic vision of Paul’s theology that he has developed and promoted over more than thirty years. The scale reflects his ambition: to integrate all the motifs in Pauline theology within a single large-scale schema; to elucidate its Jewish roots and its points of interaction with Graeco-Roman philosophy, religion and politics; to engage in most of the recent debates on Pauline theology; and to defend and advance his own distinctive theories on justification, covenant, and the Messiahship of Jesus, against 14 critics who have lined up against him on several sides.

The significance of PFG can be seen simply in the volume of responses it has received in the last couple of years. Several journals have given venue for significant article-length reviews, with one even dedicating an entire issue to the evaluation of PFG.15 Wright also has already produced a volume that distills PFG into a shorter length and continues his response to his many critics.16 Not since the publication of James Dunn’s The Theology of Paul the Apostle in 1998 has a single book on Paul so dominated the scholarly landscape, at least in the Anglophone world.17 This strong reception demonstrates the need for a volume such as this one in a twofold manner. On the one hand, it is an expression of the interest in Wright’s work and, hence, calls for further examination. In this context, it is especially noteworthy that there seems to be a gap between the English and German speaking world – a gap that we hope to bridge to a certain extent with this volume. On the other hand, it is not the aim of this book simply to offer even more reviews of PFG, since the format of book reviews and review articles is not only associated with benefits but goes also hand in hand with certain limitations. While they can identify certain issues that would deserve more discussion they cannot offer either that detailed analysis itself nor can they sufficiently deal with the emerging big picture. This volume aims at providing both: On the one hand, taken as a whole, the volume offers an evaluation of Wright’s over-arching claim about Paul and his most substantive contribution to Pauline studies. That is, namely, 1) That Paul invented the genre of “theology” by re-working the Jewish worldview in light of the messiah and the Spirit; and 2) Paul’s most lasting symbol of his theology and apostolic work was casting the church as a united body of Jews and Gentiles 14

John M. G. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, SJT 68 (2015): 235. 15 See the cohort of review articles in Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4.1 (2014). See also Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (by Wright), 235–43; Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay,” Anvil 31 (2015): 45– 69; James D. G. Dunn, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, JTS 66 (2015): 408–14; and Larry W. Hurtado, “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65. 16 N. T. Wright, The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the Apostle (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). 17 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

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worshipping the God of Israel.18 Wright’s concern is to map the tectonic plates of Pauline thought, its origins, context, and significance. This goes to show that, in Markus Bockmuehl’s words, “Where lesser mortals may acquiesce in losing the wood for the exegetical trees, N. T. Wright deals in intergalactic eco-systems.”19 Or as Robert L. Webb once mentioned to me during my doctoral studies, “Wright paints with a thick brush on a broad canvass.” Wright is a master at trying to describe the big story behind the story, something he opines has been insufficiently appreciated by his critics. On the other hand, with regard to the individual essays, the present volume allows for a thorough and robust engagement with Wright’s near-exhaustive tome on the Apostle Paul by allowing authors to concentrate in detail on individual proposals made in PFG. Book reviews and even article reviews are limited in the amount of praise, criticism, and questions that they can pose. Hence the desire, or perhaps even the need, for an intentional and comprehensive engagement with Wright’s PFG. We, the editors, have intended this volume as a substantial work proposed for tackling Wright’s big picture and his finer details, identifying the place of PFG in contemporary scholarship, assessing its value, weighing its claims, and showcasing its implications. What is more, we have deliberately attempted to include perspectives from outside the Anglophone world and even beyond the realm of biblical studies, to provide the widest possible cast of contributors with a view to highlighting a cache of diverse perspectives on PFG. As the subsequent essays make clear, this volume is neither a Festschrift nor a refutation, but something entirely different. It is perhaps best described as a conversation among those involved in biblical and theological scholarship as to the positive achievements, potential failings, matters requiring clarification, and future questions that Wright’s PFG elicits for his scholarly peers. We hope this book proves to be a definitive moment in the reception of PFG and also a key moment in setting the agenda and questions for Pauline scholarship in the twenty-first century that Wright’s volume has – for better or worse – bequeathed to us. Part I, the prologue of the volume, includes Benjamin Schliesser’s prefatory work which situates Wright’s volume in the scholarly landscape of other 18

In Wright’s own words: “My proposal is that Paul actually invents something we may call ‘Christian theology’, in this particular way (Jewish beliefs about God, reworked around Messiah and spirit), for this particular purpose (maintaining the new messianic people in good order)” (PFG xvi, italics original). Thus for Wright, Paul not only believed God had remained faithful to his covenant promises, but he also understood himself as remaining faithful to the God of Israel and the Jewish scriptures, even as he advocated a “radical mutation on the core beliefs of his Jewish word” (PFG xvi). This is a reciprocal dynamic of faithfulness we have attempted to capture with the title of the present volume. 19 Markus Bockmuehl, “Compleat History of the Resurrection: A Dialogue with N. T. Wright,” JSNT 26 (2004): 489.

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relatively recent Pauline theologies with his essay, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God among Pauline Theologies.” Schliesser plots the backdrop of recent Herculean efforts at producing a full-scale synthesis of Paul’s theology (e.g. James Dunn, Thomas Schreiner, Michael Wolter, and Udo Schnelle) with a view to showing how all Pauline theologies reflect the ideological frames and methodological premises of their creators. According to Schliesser, PFG is very much a negative reaction to the legacy of Rudolf Bultmann’s NT Theology and Wright’s primary contribution is his account of Paul’s “re-reading and re-telling of God’s single story in the light of the event of the Messiah” which he assesses to have “compelling intrinsic cogency” even if it is guilty of “narrative positivism.” Apart from a comparative interest, the essay is also concerned with bringing into conversation Anglophone and German-speaking scholarship on Paul, two discourses increasingly drifting apart from each other. Part II looks at a wide variety of methodological issues ranging from hermeneutics to history. Oda Wischmeyer tackles “N. T. Wright’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Considered from a German Exegetical Perspective” (translated by Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig), and she immediately notes the specific differences in the presentation of Pauline theology in the German and Anglo-Saxon spheres. Wischmeyer notes that Wright succeeds in creating a new paradigm: theology in the interplay of world, mindset, and theology, and in the context of the Roman Empire – an approach spurred on by his underlying pastoral-ecclesial interpretation of Paul, which is a model of biblical hermeneutics that works with the “continuous story” of God and the messiah and of the Bible as “story retold.” What is gained by Wright’s analysis of the big picture, however, is often lost at the point of individual Pauline texts, where such hermeneutic paradigms have limited capacity to illuminate. Andreas Losch writes on “Wright’s Version of Critical Realism” and notes the origins and debates surrounding critical realism. Contrary to Wright’s own claim, Losch argues that Wright’s framework developed largely independent of Ben Meyer’s work on the subject. As a result, Wright’s approach differs in a significant aspect from Meyer’s paradigm. Losch regards Wright’s “hermeneutic of love” as a valid appropriation of critical realism as it carries forth the epistemological concerns of Richard Barbour and the Whiteheadian notion of interrelatedness, although Losch would prefer the title of “constructive realism” for those who wish to pursue this path further. In sum, while Losch questions some of Wright’s explicit statements concerning the location of his version of critical realism, he finds much that is worth further consideration, stating that it is “a pity” that Barbour never picked up Wright’s version of critical realism. Theresa Heilig and Christoph Heilig assess PFG in terms of historical method in their piece on “Historical Methodology.” They confirm Wright’s

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own claim that his approach can be labelled “abductive.” Indeed, Wright’s historical synthesis that aims at synthesizing the many “surprising facts” that emerge in Paul’s letters by offering a hypothesis that would explain them, seems to be a prime example of the approach imagined by C. S. Peirce himself. Still, they see some work to be done – both with regard to Wright and his critics – in more precisely analyzing the explanatory power for each claim on a case-by-case basis. Further, they argue that Wright’s “inference to the best explanation” is not limited to the realm of discovery but also extends to the question of the confirmation of hypotheses. Here, they argue that it would be useful for Wright’s methodology to be married to Bayesian confirmation theory. In that light, several of the unique Wrightian contributions as well as some of his inferential problems become clear. Eve-Marie Becker embarks on a comparative study in “Wright’s Paul and the Paul of Acts: A Critique of Pauline Exegesis – Inspired by Lukan Studies,” which discusses Wright’s use or non-use of Acts. In general, she finds that Wright does not sufficiently integrate Luke’s testimony into his portrait of Paul beyond making occasional use of Acts as a historical source for Paul’s biography. Instead of referring to Luke’s portrayal of Paul, Wright restricts himself to the discussion of scholarly prejudices against Luke which largely ignore fresh insights into early Christian historiography that derive from historical studies and narratology. Becker finally points to two particular narratives about Paul – the Pauline concept of humility and Paul as miracle worker – in order to show how the Lukan portrayal of Paul in Acts could substantially question as much as enrich current heuristic rationales in Pauline studies. Steve Moyise touches upon “Wright’s Understanding of Paul’s Use of Scripture” and he assesses what Wright makes of the debated issues concerning the use of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles in Paul’s Letters. In particular, Moyise notes and critiques Wright’s claim that a Deuteronomic conception of exile constituted the over-arching narrative of both Second Temple Judaism and even Paul. While Moyise appreciates certain facets of Wright’s account, he complains that Wright intrinsically favors allusions and echoes because their speculative nature makes it much easier to posit a connection with the metanarrative and that Wright’s emphasis on an overarching metanarrative also appears to lie behind his reluctance to link Paul’s exegesis with specific Jewish exegetical techniques. Joel R. White discusses “N. T. Wright’s Narrative Approach” and he regards Wright’s approach to Paul as largely unique in that it assumes that Paul is tapping into a “grand story” that first century Jews believed they inhabited, one in which Israel’s exile continues. Wright’s Paul offers his own twist by reconfiguring this story around the messiah Jesus and constituting it as the narrative substructure of his entire theology. White regards this as an intriguing thesis which raises methodological questions and demands careful

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analysis in order to determine the veracity of such an early Jewish metanarrative and Paul’s appropriation of it for his theological vision. Part III contains a series of studies on specific contextual issues related to Paul’s philosophical, political, and religious environment. James Hamilton Charlesworth latches onto the subject of “Wright’s Paradigm of Early Jewish Thought: Avoidance of Anachronisms?” to assess Wright’s account of Second Temple Jewish history. Charlesworth genuinely appreciates Wright’s efforts to locate Paul within ancient Judaism and specifically commends him for avoiding supersessionism. However, Charlesworth makes several suggestions as to how Wright might have improved his presentation of Second Temple Judaism in relation to monotheism, election, eschatology, covenant, Jewish identity, and Jewish unities. Charlesworth hastens to add that Paul’s genius should not be prosecuted at the expense of his continuity with ancient Judaism, which would unfortunately make Paul the “founder of Christianity.” Gregory E. Sterling evaluates Wright’s account of Paul in relation to Hellenistic philosophy in his essay on “Wisdom or Foolishness?: The Role of Philosophy in the Thought of Paul.” Sterling applauds Wright’s inclusion of philosophy as specific topic for investigation in relation to Paul. In Sterling’s judgment, Wright is at his best when thinking through how Paul responded to Hellenistic philosophy. He further suggests that while Wright’s summary of ancient philosophy is accurate in what it covers – primarily Stoicism – yet it omits some important dimensions. He notes, in particular, that Hellenistic philosophy was much more concerned with the First Principle (or God) and with assimilation to God than Wright acknowledges. Sterling also argues that Middle Platonism, especially as it became a factor in the Jewish exegetical tradition, should have been addressed more fully but was unfortunately absent. Sterling is in basic agreement with Wright’s comments on "logic" and “ethics.” He seeks to supplement Wright’s analysis of "physics" by pointing to prepositional metaphysics and the Platonic interpretation of the Image of God, both concerns that the Middle Platonic tradition contributed. The main critique is not so much of Wright’s exegetical conclusions as it is with the background that led to those conclusions. By minimizing the role of philosophy in Paul’s letters, Sterling thinks that Wright was closer to Paul rhetorically than he was to the letters in fact. On the subject of “religion,” James Constantine Hanges writes on “‘A World of Shrines and Groves’: N. T. Wright and Paul among the Gods.” According to Hanges, Wright offers a two-part proposition about Paul’s religious world: first, that the apostle Paul can be understood and interpreted accurately only when he is described thickly in his cultic world, and second, that the key to such a “thick description” of that cultic world is the pervasive influence of Roman cultic forms, religiones. Hanges argues that the while the powerful public presence of the imperial cults is unquestionable, specific

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evidence from Corinth and elsewhere shows that the influence of Roman cultic forms on the complex and multiform cultic world of the Greekspeaking eastern Mediterranean is not so easy to demonstrate. He suggests that what dominated Paul’s thought was not a single constant such as Roman imperialism, but a shifting collage of contested socio-religious spaces. While the Roman Empire was undoubtedly the most potentially threatening of those powers, it is not clear that Paul, or many of his fellow imperial subjects, spent his days constantly and consciously obsessed with all things Roman. Seyoon Kim assesses the counter-imperial portrait of Paul found in PFG with his study on “Paul and the Roman Empire.” Kim remains singularly unpersuaded by Wright’s depiction of Paul as possessing a counter-imperial message. Kim alleges that Wright does not meet his critics, who ask how, in the pertinent texts, Paul was trying to subvert the Roman Empire by presenting the salvation of the Lord Jesus in completely different terms from those of the Roman “gospel” – namely, in terms of redemption from God’s wrath at the last judgment, the resurrection life, or conforming to Christ’s image and obtaining God’s glory. Kim also sees Rom 13:1–7 as a clear falsification of the type of counter-imperial perspective that Wright imputes to Paul. While Kim appreciates how Wright sees the messiahship of Jesus as central, he thinks that Wright neglects to explain how the messiah actually exercises God’s kingship in order to destroy the real enemies of sin and death. Part IV addresses a series of exegetical issues, covering an assortment of areas, and constituting the main body of the volume. Gregory Tatum covers a crucial issue in his contribution on “Law and Covenant in Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” He believes Wright seeks to provide a new foundation for forensic justification in terms of a grand covenantal narrative to replace its former foundation in terms of an odious and erroneous caricature of Judaism as a religion marked by legalistic practices. Yet, Wright’s grand covenantal narrative is built on privileging Gal 3 and Rom 4 with their Abrahamic promises/heir schema rather than on Paul’s use of new covenant language (i.e., participationist eschatology). What is more, Wright’s reading of the curse of the Torah salvation-historically blames premessianic Israel for being pre-messianic Israel, and his reading of the Torah as divisive for the early church falsely presupposes that Paul abolished the observance of the Torah for Jewish Christians. In the end, Tatum concludes that Wright’s presuppositions and approach significantly skew his reading of Paul’s treatment of both Covenant and Torah. Sigurd Grindheim tackles a topic close to the heart of PFG by engaging Wright on “Election and the Role of Israel.” In a nutshell, Grindheim believes that Wright has put the cart before the horse in Paul’s doctrine of election since election is about God’s unconditional choice of Israel, and only secondarily about Israel’s vocation. He concludes that in Paul, just as is attested in the Jewish scriptures, the vocational obligation is more frequently described

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as cultic, as being a priestly kingdom, a nation that demonstrates what a relationship with God entails. They fulfill their purpose not by participating in the task of the messiah, but by worshiping him for having completed it. James D. G. Dunn, a long time dialogue partner with Wright, provides a titillating essay on “An Insider’s Perspective on Wright’s Version of the New Perspective on Paul.” Dunn laments that the positive achievements of the New Perspective on Paul (a more nuanced account of law, covenant, and ancient Judaism) are spoilt by Wright’s claim that Sanders’ and Dunn’s contributions are diminished by their failure to see “end-of-exile” as the narrative backdrop to Second Temple Judaism. For Dunn, the way Wright constructs his arguments and takes swipes at critics suggests Wright is using Paul for a demonstration of Wright’s theology rather than reading after Paul’s own theology. In the end, Dunn judges that PFG is insufficiently aligned with the New Perspective by failing to prosecute many of the great insights that the New Perspective has brought to scholarship. From New Perspective advocate to New Perspective critic, Peter Stuhlmacher offers his own assessment of PFG with his offering on “N. T. Wright’s Understanding of Justification and Redemption” (translated by Lars Kierspel). Stuhlmacher lauds elements of Wright’s approach, not least the central place of the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection in Paul’s theology. However, Stuhlmacher believes that Wright loads too much freight on the salvific nature of the Abraham story, adopting what is actually a late rabbinic view, which is not indicative of Paul’s own approach. This leads to categorical failure since Wright’s statements about justification are interwoven with exegetical hypotheses and speculations, which necessitate a critical renovation of his entire project. Aquila H. I. Lee touches upon Wright’s account of Paul’s messianism in “Messianism and Messiah in Paul: Christ as Jesus?” Lee first sets the discussion of his chapter in the context of Wright’s own views on Jesus’s messiahship in Paul and the broader trends of scholarship on the issue. Following Novenson’s recent monograph, Lee believes that Χριστός in Paul is neither a name nor a title, but an honorific descriptor. Such an understanding of the term not only makes better sense of the frequency of its use and the retention of its messianic significance, but it also helps unlock the longstanding nameversus-title stalemate in a most compelling way. Lee believes that Wright’s placement of a discussion of Paul’s messiahship under “election” rather than “monotheism” may have some important christological consequences. He contends that placing Jesus’s messiahship under the umbrella of “election” puts too much emphasis on Jesus as Israel’s messiah, the representative of God’s people, and neglects the significance of Jesus with respect to God’s person. Lee suggests that Wright’s understanding of Jesus as messiah needs to take into account the fact that in Paul Jesus’s messianic sonship and his eternal sonship are ultimately merged.

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J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V. Novenson pair together in order to discuss “Participationism and Messiah Christology in Paul” with a view to assessing Wright’s incorporative-messiahship scheme, which holds together Paul’s theology and his Jewish worldview throughout PFG. While they affirm Wright’s generally Schweitzeresque approach of explaining “participation” with reference to Paul’s understanding of messiahship, they demur, preferring a “ground-up approach” that highlights the significance of Paul’s messianic exegesis of scriptural source texts. They propose that Paul’s messiah christology is in part constructed from the specific Abrahamic promise of a coming “seed,” which provides a proverbial source for Paul’s “in Christ” language, and the relation of the “one like a son of man” and the people of God in Dan 7, which provides a conceptual background to “soldarity” in the messiah. Larry W. Hurtado engages a distinctive feature of Wright’s Christology with “YHWH’s Return to Zion: A New Catalyst for Earliest High Christology?” Hurtado notes that the personal manifestation of YHWH forms a notable part of the expectations of an eschatological restoration/salvation of Israel in biblical texts and extra-biblical Jewish texts of the Second Temple period. In line with this, Wright has proposed, in PFG and earlier, that the claim that Jesus in his ministry, death, and resurrection is the embodied and personal return of YHWH was the crucial initial step in earliest christological development, serving as the clue and explanation for the “high Christology” reflected in the New Testament. There are, says Hurtado, several problems with his case. To begin with, analysis of Jewish texts shows that YHWH’s eschatological manifestation typically involved a divinely authorized agent, and so Wright’s sharp contrast between the eschatological manifestation of YHWH and the agent of YHWH is dubious. Moreover, analysis of several Pauline texts shows that the appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return was with reference to Jesus’s future parousia, with scant evidence of the theme applied in the manner in which Wright claims it was. Further, the initial historical catalyst of christological claims was the conviction that God had raised Jesus from death, thereby vindicating him as messiah, and therewith had also exalted him to supreme lordship, now requiring Jesus to be reverenced accordingly. From this conviction developed the various christological claims reflected in the NT, including the appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return. Viewed this way, several features of Wright’s account of Jesus in early christology prove to be problematic. Returning again to the topic of God’s Spirit, a vital component of Wright’s account of Paul’s reworking of the Jewish worldview, is John R. (Jack) Levison’s contribution on “The Spirit in its Second Temple Context: An Exegetical Analysis of the Pneumatology of N. T. Wright.” Levison begins by identifying what Wright considers to be the three core elements of Second Temple Judaism, which feature in Pauline pneumatology, viz., the Shekinah, the tem-

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ple, and the messiah. Levison then discusses the three principal Pauline innovations in pneumatology according to Wright: a Spirit-driven redefinition of election, the conviction that the Spirit enables believers to do what Torah could not – to fulfill the essence of the Shema, and a radical, high, and early pneumatology. Levison then surveys Wright’s account of the impact of the Spirit on believers, principally, the ability of the Spirit to generate faith, the role of the Spirit in the resurrection, and the unique ability of the Spirit to transform believers. While Levison is largely affirmative of what Wright has to say in these materials, he does note some deficiencies. Levison avers that Wright’s description of Pauline pneumatology would be suitably improved by taking into account Isa 63:7–14, Hag 2:4–9, and various excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which together show that Paul’s pneumatology is not quite as radical as Wright alleges. Thus, Levison challenges Wright’s claim that a Spirit-filled temple means the return of the Shekinah, and he more firmly places Paul’s discussion of the Spirit in a Jewish matrix. Torsten Jantsch probes into Wright’s description of God, theology proper, with “God and His Faithfulness in Paul: Aspects of the History of Research in Light of the Letter to the Romans.” Jantsch evaluates two premises of PFG against his own theocentric reading of Romans: first, Paul’s gospel with its central subject of God, and second, the characteristic of divine faithfulness as expressed in God’s promise to Abraham. Jantsch opens by surveying recent research on the place of God in Paul’s letters which shows that Paul’s discourse is thoroughly “theocentric.” After that, he discusses several texts from Paul’s Letter to the Romans in order to describe Paul’s concept of God. Related to that, he then describes and evaluates Wright’s interpretations of these texts. To that end, Jantsch summarizes thirteen “theocentric” premises exhibited in Romans. Jantsch detects much agreement between Wright and recent studies on God in Paul, but there are also points of contention. Not the least is Wright’s double identification of Messiah Jesus with the people of God and with God himself. PFG is typified by a robust critique of a particular school of “apocalyptic” interpretation of Paul, and Jörg Frey addresses this subject in “Demythologizing Apocalyptic?: On N. T. Wright’s Paul, Apocalyptic Interpretation, and the Constraints of Construction.” Frey analyzes the polemical rejection of the so-called “apocalyptic interpretation of Paul” and posits a neutralization of apocalyptic in Wright’s view of Paul. Apocalyptic, appropriately understood and perceived in its wide variety, appears as the “Achilles heel” of the “great narrative” N. T. Wright fashions as the background of almost all Jews of Paul’s time and the basis of Paul’s thought. Describing four basic strategies of neutralizing apocalyptic in Wright’s works (symbolic interpretation, reference to socio-political situations, integration into a “covenantal worldview,” and integration into the context of an “inaugurated eschatology”) Frey locates Wright’s reading within a long history of distancing Jesus and the apostles

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from apocalyptic (from Semler to Bultmann). While acknowledging the problems of the interpretations by Käsemann and his followers and confirming parts of Wright’s criticism, Frey points to the more recent insights (from Qumran, the Enochic tradition and other texts) into the variety and complexity of apocalyptic thought, which are not adequately considered in the concepts of apocalyptic in the NT or Pauline debate. In Frey’s view, Paul is definitely an apocalyptic theologian, but there is no alternative between apocalyptic and a reference to salvation history. On the other hand, Frey asks whether Wright’s denial of any possibility of an “end of the world” in Pauline thought is rather a constraint of his construction, or even a result of an ideology, so that the gap between Wright’s Paul and the real Paul should not be overlooked. Richard H. Bell enters into dialogue with Wright on the subject of “Individual Eschatology.” Bell chooses to focus on two particular aspects: first, justification by faith and its relation to the final judgement, and second, Paul’s understanding of the post-mortem life. According to Bell, since the verdict given in justification is a “language event,” which achieves an ontological change in the one who receives the gospel, final salvation is consequently assured. Judgment according to works for Christians is to be seen in light of this, whereby Christians receive their “reward” (e.g., 2 Cor 5:10). In Bell’s view the judgment described in Rom 2:1–6, 29 is in a different category, speaking as it does of two possible outcomes; the pious Jews and Gentiles of Rom 2:14–15 simply do not exist, and the whole section 1:18–3:20 serves to establish that there will be no justification by works of the law. Although much of this discussion concerning justification is at odds with Wright, the conclusions on the second issue, post-mortem existence, are in many respects similar although the arguments are somewhat different. Bell argues for an ontological dualism of “body and soul,” not a dualism of substances but rather an earthly/heavenly or phenomenal/noumenal dualism. The soul, which transcends both space and time, can account for participation in Christ, provides the element of continuity between the “physical body” and the “spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44), and is humans’ essential being which lies in the hands of God. Volker Rabens writes on PFG and Pauline ethics with his discussion of “The Faithfulness of God and its Effects on Faithful Living: A Critical Analysis of Tom Wright’s Faithfulnes to Paul’s Ethics.” Since the ethical quality of faithfulness is such a central theme in PFG, Rabens raises the question whether Wright also attributes a central role to divine faithfulness in shaping and enabling human faithfulness (i.e., ethical life). To begin with, Rabens maintains that Wright’s thinking on what is wrong with this world is not wrong, but that the emphasis is in the wrong place. Paul’s personal focus is on the solution, not on the plight. And with regard to the plight, his emphasis is on human enslavement to the external powers of Sin, Flesh, etc., and less

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so on internal incapacities. Next, Rabens argues that Wright’s model of cognitive change through the “renewal of the mind” presents only one of several aspects of moral transformation in Paul, and that it puts too little trust in the empowering dynamics of Spirit-shaped intimate relationships. Thereafter, Rabens largely agrees with Wright’s presentation of Paul’s ethical aims and aspirations focusing on reconciliation, virtues, and fulfilment of the Torah, but he demurs on the question of practical morality as Wright’s highflying study fails to be grounded. Rabens finally concludes that faithfulness plays a central role in Wright’s soteriology but only a marginal role in his ethics. He draws attention to the transforming experience of love as the link between divine and human faithfulness that any exposition of Paul’s theology-andethics that wants to be faithful to the apostle needs to appreciate. In Part V, on implications, thought is given to the wider meanings and implications of PFG in relation to ideological currents in scholarship and its relevance for ecclesiastical communities. Theologian Andrew McGowan offers his own thoughts on PFG with his piece on “Ecclesiology as Ethnology: The Church in N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” McGowan identifies Wright’s ecclesiology as a sort of “ethnology,” given the importance of the “people of God” not only in the largest chapter of PFG but throughout the work. McGowan gives critical attention to three aspects of thinking about the church (or better, ekklēsia; see his note on transliteration of the term), viz., considering its identity, purpose, and character in turn. The first of these involves ekklēsia as a new version of Israel, and the difficult question of supersessionism. While concurring with the broad thrust of Wright’s positioning of ekklēsia as Israel re-thought, McGowan is unconvinced by Wright’s final verdict on historical Israel’s future, and by his treatment of the hermeneutical questions related to supersessionism. Regarding “purpose” McGowan discusses the criticism made that Wright subsumes soteriology under ecclesiology; something like the reverse turns out to be just as plausible a reading. Finally, McGowan considers the way religion and sacrifice play a more significant role in PFG than in many readings of Paul, and suggests this emphasis on communal praxis is an underrated contribution Wright makes to understanding Paul’s view of what becomes “Church.” James G. Crossley and Katie Edwards situate PFG in its intellectual environment with their piece on “Paul and the Faithfulness of God as Postmodern Scholarship.” They see Wright’s PFG as a source for understanding contemporary cultural trends in Pauline scholarship. In particular, they examine the ways in which Wright and PFG function in the context of postmodernity. While some consideration is given to the economic context of postmodernity, the primary focus is on PFG as a reaction to the fragmentation of identities over the past 40 years, evidenced in Wright’s construction of a fixed, essentialist identity, especially the construction of “Jewishness.” They investigate

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some of the ideological functions of his understanding of ancient “Jewishness” in relation to Paul, including the ways in which Wright simultaneously stresses Paul’s “Jewishness” and Paul’s difference from what is deemed to be “Jewish” in early Judaism. Crossley and Edwards then describe how Wright appears to assume a timeless core at the heart of Judaism and Wright’s handling of twentieth-century Judaism in the context of European totalitarianism. Finally, they examine how Wright’s grand narrative potentially reinscribes a form of theocratic totalitarianism in his critique of postmodernity. Frank D. Macchia looks at the issues of Spirit and church with his study on “The Spirit and God’s Return to Indwell a People: A Systematic Theologian’s Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul’s Pneumatology.” He is largely appreciative of Wright in helping readers to recognize the vital truths about the Spirit that are of relevance ecumenically to the witness of the churches today. When one reads about the return – God to the temple, the Spirit to earth, and the messiah from heaven, all of creation becomes involved. Such a reading of Paul opens up new vistas in spirituality and mission, it ties together various dimensions of the Spirit’s work, and challenges the church to appreciate the broader horizons of the kingdom of God in the world. Macchia believes that Wright’s vision of Paul correctly locates the church within God’s broader agenda to indwell all things, to inaugurate a new humanity, and to make all things new. Next, theologian Sven Ensminger brings Wright into conversation with Karl Barth in “Barth, Wright, and Theology.” Ensminger examines Wright’s reading of Barth and, for that purpose, the chapter provides a comparison of the two thinkers under three major headings: first, the understanding of scripture in light of the doctrine of revelation, second, the topic of religion, and third, some reflections on the christological implications of Wright’s wider work. By way of conclusion, Ensminger also offers a reflection on the interaction between biblical studies and theology, and argues for Biblical Studies to be undertaken in committed dialogue with theology. Edith M. Humphrey writes about the view of the sacraments exhibited in PFG by reflecting on “Bishop Wright: Sacramentality and the Role of the Sacraments.” Humphrey applauds Wright’s treatment of Paul and the sacraments in PFG for its care in situating the apostle’s thought and praxis within the first century and for its critique of interpreters who mute Paul’s proclamation of the covenant, his emphasis upon the corporate body of Christ, and the church’s prophetic role. She explores Wright’s treatment in terms of his overall approach (by which the church emerges as Paul’s load-bearing symbol), his theology (which clearly distinguishes creator from the creation), and his concentration upon historical continuity. She seeks, then, to demonstrate that in Wright’s scheme the sacraments speak more particularly to the identity of the people of God and to their counter-cultural position in the world, than to the character and action of God. She makes a plea that, due to Paul’s under-

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standing of how God has redeemed the temporal-material world, the sacraments should also be seen as acting in a theophoric manner. That is, they provide the God-given locale for the church’s communion with God, and themselves reveal God to those who are in Christ. Eckhard J. Schnabel explores what Wright’s book tells us about mission and evangelism in his essay entitled, “Evangelism and the Mission of the Church.” Schnabel focuses first on Paul’s missionary work, in particular his missionary preaching upon arrival in a new city, his geographical strategies, the founding of local congregations, and the missions of Paul and Peter. A second focus is the concept and reality of conversion, including interaction with Wright’s refusal to use the term for Paul’s Damascus experience. Third, a discussion of the explication of the gospel traces the importance of what Wright says about Jesus’s messianic identity and the centrality of Jesus’s death on the cross as the event in which God solved the problem of the world, of human beings, and of Israel, while emphasizing that one should not allow this triple “back story” to take center stage. Finally, a discussion of definitions of mission and evangelism takes issue with Wright’s charge that both in the Middle Ages and after the Reformation, Christian missionaries only wanted to collect “souls” for a future heaven. Fittingly, in Part VI, N. T. Wright is then given the chance to engage the praise, questions, and criticism of his interlocutors as an epilogue to this volume. On the whole, this book proves that Paul, the man and his letters, make for a great scholarly conversation and interest in the subject is not going to evaporate any time soon. In addition, N. T. Wright’s PFG is by no means a conversation stopper but a great stimulus for studying Paul, his God, his messiah, and the mission of the church. We hope that such conversations, in the classroom, in churches, and at conference tables, will well continue into the foreseeable future. Many people need to be thanked for the production of this volume. First, we wish to express our admiration to Wright for his massive tome, his work on Paul is a source of great inspiration and insight, and while no one can agree with all of it, we all concur that PFG is a landmark volume that deserves wide attention and concerted reflection in the guild of New Testament studies. Second, we are grateful to the contributors for taking the time to read PFG – a task which depletes at least two months from anyone’s intellectual life – and committing themselves to writing quality reflections about it. Third, we wish to acknowledge the good folks at Mohr Siebeck, especially Henning Ziebritzki, as well as the series editor Jörg Frey, for their support and confidence in this project. Fourth, we want to thank Andrew W. Pitts for his assistance at the initial phase of this project. Fifth, we are grateful to Anthony Fisher for proofreading the manuscript and to the theological faculty of the University of Zurich for a grant that facilitated the production of this volume. Sixth, among the editorial team, Christoph Heilig was the Baumeis-

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ter, or grand architect, who conceived the idea for this book and had the drive to bring it to realization. J. Thomas Hewitt was an industrious work-horse, providing an invaluable contribution to the nitty gritty details of making this book happen, despite the birth of another child in the family and even enduring an unexpected move of home. Michael Bird had the privilege and pleasure of acting as more of a consultant to his two junior colleagues and providing advice on the various complexities of dealing with several plates all moving at once. Finally, we all wish to thank our spouses – Naomi Bird, Theresa Heilig, and Andrea Hewitt – for their support and encouragement during the production of this volume.

Bibliography Barclay, John M. G. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. SJT 68 (2015): 235–43. Bockmuehl, Markus. “Compleat History of the Resurrection: A Dialogue with N. T. Wright,” JSNT 26 (2004): 489–504. Dunn, James D. G. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. JTS 66 (2015): 408–14. –. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Elwell, Walter A. and J. D. Weaver, eds. Bible Interpreters of the 20th Century. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999. Hurtado, Larry W. “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65. Newman, Carey C., ed. Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Perrin, Nicholas and Richard B. Hays, eds. Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011. Tilling, Chris. “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay.” Anvil 31 (2015): 45– 69. Wright, N. T. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. London: SPCK, 2009. –. Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates. London: SPCK, 2015. –. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 4. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians. London: SPCK, 2003. –. Paul for Everyone: 2 Corinthians. London: SPCK, 2003. –. Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians. London: SPCK, 2002. –. Paul for Everyone: Romans. 2 vols. London: SPCK, 2004. –. Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters. London: SPCK, 2003. –. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters. London: SPCK, 2002. –. Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians and to Philemon. TNTC. Leicester: Tyndale, 1986. –. “The Letter to the Romans.” NIB 10:393–770.

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–. “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1980. –. The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the Apostle (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). –. “The Paul of History and the Apostles of Faith.” TynBul 29 (1978): 61–88. –. What St Paul Really Said. Oxford: Lion, 1997.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God among Pauline Theologies Benjamin Schliesser The life and work of N. T. Wright are associated with many superlatives,1 as is his most recent scholarly publication, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Those who read and write on Wright’s magnum opus do not spare sympathetic, respectful, and sometimes exuberant words on its size, scope, and scholarly significance. They acclaim the breadth of its author’s learning, the depth of his thought, the accessibility of his prose, the lucidity of his argument, and also his pastoral wisdom, which elucidates the relevance of Paul for today and “for everyone.” As with hardly any other book in biblical scholarship before, the “event” of its release arose great public interest: Prior to its publication bloggers made their bid to build up tension, and when the book was finally distributed, radio and TV stations conducted interviews, magazines printed articles, and academic institutions organized talks, panels, and conferences. Also, the present collection of essays is not the only volume exclusively dedicated to PFG.2 It is tempting to quote some of his colleagues in order to illustrate the superlative impression made by his work in the field of Pauline studies. They describe the length, substance, readability, and significance of Paul and the Faithfulness of God in superlative terms, calling it “the largest single-author work on Paul in print, perhaps the largest ever pub-

1

See, as a telling example, the first paragraph of the cover story “Surprised by N. T. Wright” in Christianity Today: “People who are asked to write about N. T. Wright may find they quickly run out of superlatives. He is the most prolific biblical scholar in a generation. Some say he is the most important apologist for the Christian faith since C. S. Lewis. He has written the most extensive series of popular commentaries on the New Testament since William Barclay. And, in case three careers sound like too few, he is also a church leader, having served as Bishop of Durham, England, before his current teaching post at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland” (Jason Byassee, “Surprised by N. T. Wright,” Christianity Today 58.3 [2014]: 36). 2 See the 2014 spring edition of the Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters with reviews by Thomas Schreiner, Michael Gorman, David Starling, Martinus de Boer, Markus Bockmuehl, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, and Nijay Gupta, and with a response by N. T. Wright. See also, on Wright’s earlier publications, Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays, eds., Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright (London: SPCK, 2011).

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lished” (Larry Hurtado),3 “the most complete account of its kind in existence today” (Markus Bockmuehl),4 “an enormous intellectual achievement” (Chris Tilling),5 and “not merely a page-turner; often, it is a paragraph-turner” (Michael Gorman).6 “This book will surely be the defining standard, the Bultmann for our age, the text from which everyone will work and argue and revise their (and his) thinking about Paul for the next decade at least” (Daniel Boyarin).7 In this essay, I intend to place Wright’s magnificent monument in the landscape of Pauline scholarship, next to other such monuments, with the goal of comparing major features of their surface and deep structures. With the exception of Rudolf Bultmann’s studies on Paul, the works of comparison are of recent date, and they all present a synthetic, large-scale monographic treatment of Paul’s theology. The section on Bultmann therefore serves as a prologue to the dialogue between PFG and the “regular Pauline theologies” (PFG 1046n18) of James Dunn,8 Thomas Schreiner,9 Michael Wolter,10 and Udo Schnelle.11 Comparing full-scale Pauline theologies rather than thematic monographs or commentaries proves attractive, as their authors cannot retreat 3

Larry W. Hurtado, “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65 (361). 4 Markus Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul and the Cloud of (Other) Witnesses,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 (2014): 59–69 (69). 5 Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay,” Anvil 31 (2015): 45–69 (45). 6 Michael J. Gorman, “Wright about Much, but Questions about Justification: A Review of N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 (2014): 27–36 (28). 7 This quote is from Boyarin’s endorsement (PFG i), of which the book contains ten – again, a possibly record-breaking number. The selection of praising remarks should not obfuscate the fact that there are also hard-hitting reviews. Among the harshest is John M. G. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, SJT 68 (2015): 235–43, which however is easily outranked by Paula Fredriksen, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, CBQ 77 (2015): 387–91. 8 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 9 Thomas R. Schreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). 10 Michael Wolter, Paulus: Ein Grundriss seiner Theologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011). A translation of Wolter’s book is now available from Baylor University Press: Michael Wolter, Paul: An Outline of his Theology, trans. Robert L. Brawley (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). 11 Udo Schnelle, Paulus: Leben und Denken, 2nd ed., de Gruyter Lehrbuch, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). The first German edition from 2003 has been translated as Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). I will use the English translation where the text of the new German edition is identical with the translated one.

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to a single exegetical problem or a single writing but have to keep in mind the whole of Paul’s thought; they cannot be content with only seeing the pieces but have to arrange the puzzle so as to see the whole picture. I will first highlight prominent features of the Pauline theologies in discussion and then compare them selectively with Wright’s account.12 Most of the comparative issues raised in this contribution will be taken up in the other essays of the volume; a detailed exegetical assessment is therefore neither intended nor necessary.

1. Rudolf Bultmann and N. T. Wright 1.1 Paul as a Thinker of “Believing Existence” Boyarin’s placing of Wright next to Bultmann is indeed suggestive, though only future generations will be able to validate its verisimilitude: Both offer an innovative, “fresh perspective” on Paul, a panoramic view, highly influential and controversial in both the academy and the church; both put their hermeneutical cards on the table and play them with admirable rigorousness; both display a remarkable stability of their basic convictions; and both are committed to wrestling with the most fundamental historical and theological matters, with “Christian origins” and “the question of God.” Yet beyond such external overlaps, a comparison will rather note irreconcilable differences, which Wright himself is eager to point out. Nonetheless, we will also identify unexpected correspondences.13 Bultmann did not publish a monograph on Paul’s theology.14 However, he wrote an exceptionally influential and remarkably concise dictionary entry on 12

See also my essay “Paulustheologien im Vergleich: Eine kritische Zusammenschau neuerer Entwürfe zur paulinischen Theologie,” in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, ed. Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, Biblisch-theologische Studien 140 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013), 1–80. 13 On Bultmann and Wright, cf. also Oda Wischmeyer’s essay on hermeneutics. 14 Within the past two years three insightful articles on Bultmann’s interpretation of Paul appeared: Richard B. Hays, “Humanity Prior to the Revelation of Faith,” in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 61–77, 288–90; John M. G. Barclay, “Humanity under Faith,” in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 79– 99, 290–95; Christof Landmesser, “Rudolf Bultmann als Paulusinterpret,” ZTK 110 (2013): 1–21. See also Angela Standhartinger, “Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament in Context,” in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 233–55, 310–19.

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Paul in the second edition of Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1930), which he penned during a two week stay at a health spa.15 There he presents the substance of Paul’s theology in terms of a theological anthropology and lays out its basic structure; years later, he would recapitulate and develop his ideas in his Theology of the New Testament. According to Bultmann, the apostle did not think in metaphysical or cosmological patterns, but started from anthropology: God’s acting does not manifest itself in supernatural events, but in the history of human beings. As a consequence, human existence presents itself as “prior to the revelation of faith” and as “under faith.”16 Two important and related corollaries are associated with his disposition of Pauline theology: an existential-ontological and an epistemological one. First, the “revelation of faith” does not envisage the arrival of a cosmological entity, but rather the moment of the individual’s decision to accept the kerygma – which is, in Bultmann’s parlance, an “eschatological event.”17 Second, this twofold disposition “presupposes, since theological understanding has its origin in faith that man prior to the revelation of faith is so depicted by Paul as he is retrospectively seen from the standpoint of faith.”18 Existential analysis in its Christian form does not work from an objective, neutral standpoint, but only from the perspective of faith. Particularly in the Anglophone world, it has become commonplace to see in Bultmann the prime example of a misguided anthropocentric reading of Paul. The dedicatee of Wright’s monograph, Richard Hays, even branded him, retrospectively, his “great adversary.”19 From the beginning of his publishing career, in his 1978 article “The Paul of History and the Apostle of

15

Rudolf Bultmann, “Paulus,” RGG, 2nd ed., 4:1019–45. On the circumstances of the article see Konrad Hammann, Rudolf Bultmann: Eine Biographie, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 177. 16 Bultmann, “Paulus,” 4:1031. See the disposition in Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1951–1955), 1:190–269 (“Man Prior to the Revelation of Faith”) and 1:270–352 (“Man under Faith”). 17 Cf. Bultmann, Theology, 1:305–6. 18 Bultmann, Theology, 1:191. As will be seen, Michael Wolter takes a similar hermeneutical starting point. 19 Richard, B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed., Biblical Resource Series, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), xxv. Cf. Hays, “Humanity,” 62 (“a frequent reference and sparring partner during my doctoral studies”). Incidentally, with reference to Wright’s grand overall project, Hays underlined that “no New Testament scholar since Bultmann has even attempted – let alone achieved – such an innovative and comprehensive account of New Testament history and theology” (Richard B. Hays, back cover of N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 [London: SPCK, 1992]).

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Faith,” Wright chimed in with the anti-Bultmann tone.20 But what of his most recent volume? Virtually every direct engagement with Bultmann strikes a critical, sometimes derogatory tone. In a nutshell, Wright insinuates that Bultmann eclipses central aspects of Paul’s theology: narrative/salvation history (including the Jesus story), the corporate and the transformational dynamics of Christian existence, and Paul’s Jewish identity.21 I will deal briefly with each of these reproaches, which all coalesce, in Wright’s view, with a far-reaching hermeneutical dissonance: “I persist in the claim that the best argument is always the sense that is made of whole passages in Paul rather than isolated sayings” – unlike Bultmann, who in his Theology is concerned with isolated sayings and largely disregards “actual arguments of whole passages” (PFG 965n532). Clearly, Wright puts his finger on weak spots of Bultmann’s theology of Paul, though some of his assessments require a closer look and must be reviewed in the light of Bultmann’s own hermeneutical program. 1.2 Bultmann’s “Non-Narratival” Paul Wright interprets Bultmann’s disposition of Paul’s theology as reconceptualizing the gospel “in a non-narratival form” (PFG 457), but adds that in actual fact Bultmann “encoded his own basic narrative … in his New Testament Theology, in which ‘Man Prior to the Revelation of Faith’ gave way to ‘Man under Faith’” (PFG 458). In a suggestive psychoanalytical effort, Wright enters into the mind of both the existential theologian Bultmann and the German nation when he says that

20 N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith” [1978], in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 3–20 (11, 15). In the widely read volume Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), originally written by Neill and updated by Wright, the comments on Bultmann are less polemical, but slightly ironical at times. Bultmann’s “great reworking of Pauline theology” (410) is said to resemble that of Luther: “Here is the life of faith, the glad response to the Gospel, the release from the shackles of a Judaism which corresponds so interestingly to medieval Catholicism. Such a scheme is eminently preachable, and there are still plenty of people preaching it, and believing it to be the heart of what Paul was saying” (412). Certainly, this is not “historically correct” (412). In N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015), Wright does not discuss Bultmann extensively but refers his readers to The Interpretation of the New Testament (and promises that a further edition of the book is in preparation). 21 Wright also takes issue with Bultmann’s “famous ‘Dass’!” (PFG 71), his idea that Christ is the end of history (PFG 141), his concept of “myth” (PFG 167–68, 457–58), the “gnostic” paradigm (PFG 459, 1261), his take on Jesus’s divinity (PFG 647), God’s righteousness (PFG 882, 991), the “I” in Romans 7 (PFG 896, 1016), and the correspondence between “indicative” and “imperative” (PFG 1098).

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one can understand why someone whose national story had gone so badly wrong as Bultmann’s had (fancy living in Germany through the first half of the twentieth century!) might want to sweep all stories aside. (PFG 457)22

Bultmann’s treatment opens the doors to a “very individualistic” misunderstanding of the apostle (PFG 778), as it is merely concerned with “a new understanding of one’s self [that] takes the place of the old”23 and potentially ignores “the larger whole of the church on the one hand, or of a continuous history of Israel on the other” (PFG 778). Along these lines, Wright also finds Bultmann’s “rejection of ‘the historical Jesus’” (PFG 1362) highly problematic. The “impact of Jesus’ own life, his personality, his words and deeds, not to mention the drama of his death and resurrection” have been obscured by Bultmann and the “Bultmann school,” even though it is “obvious to the naked eye” (PFG 649). How does Bultmann set up his argument? For the Bultmannian Paul, history – and with it all stories and narratives – are “swallowed up in eschatology,”24 eschatology being the goal of individual human existence. “The decisive history is not the history of the world, of the people Israel and of the other peoples, but the history that everyone experiences himself.”25 The key event is the encounter with Christ, which leads to the individual decision of faith, to eschatological existence. With sermonic pathos, Bultmann said in his Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1955: The meaning in history lies always in the present, and when the present is conceived as the eschatological present by Christian faith the meaning in history is realised. Man who complains: ‘I cannot see meaning in history, and therefore my life, interwoven in history, is meaningless’, is to be admonished: do not look around yourself into universal history, you must look into your own personal history. Always in your present lies the meaning in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your responsible decisions. In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.26

22

More precisely, Wright thinks “that a great many Germans, by the 1950s, were looking back (a) at the Kaiser’s regime, (b) at the first war, (c) at the Weimar Republic and of course (d) at the Nazis and the Holocaust, but also (e) at the rise of communist movements and governments in Eastern Europe, and were thinking, as Walter Benjamin obviously did, that ‘the story’ had gone so badly wrong that one should look for ‘vertical’ solutions instead” (private email-correspondence, 30 April 2015). 23 Bultmann, Theology, 1:269 (quoted in PFG 778). 24 Rudolf Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” NTS 1 (1954/1955): 5–16 (11, 13, 16) (Bultmann’s Presidential Address to the SNTS in 1953). See already Rudolf Bultmann, “Die Bedeutung der Eschatologie für die Religion des Neuen Testaments,” ZTK 27 (1917): 76–87 (in a Festgabe for Wilhelm Herrmann). 25 Bultmann, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” 13. 26 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology, The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 155.

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Eschatology transmutes into the existential decision of the individual. History is swallowed up in eschatology, eschatology is swallowed up in the Augenblick. The result is not only the loss of (salvation) history, as Wright has pointed out, but also a loss of eschatological alternatives to the state of affairs of the present culture.27 As for Wright’s psychologizing assumptions on the non-narratival shape of Bultmann’s theology of Paul, one has to consider the remarkable fact that its basic structure and substance did not experience major modifications in the years between his RGG article (1930) and his New Testament Theology (1948–1953).28 The horror of World War II did not change his basic view of Paul, nor did it affect his perspective on “narrative.” I leave it undecided here how Bultmann’s theological stability should be assessed, but it obviously is grounded in his foundational hermeneutical-theological conviction that no matter what the historical circumstances of Paul’s interpreters are, the significance of his theology lies in affording to the Christian faith its adequate selfunderstanding, then and now.29 In other words: The course of the world does not inform the question “what is faith?,” but “faith gives the freedom to alter the world.”30 As faith is independent from historical circumstances, it does not and must not rely on (the story of) the historical Jesus. Bultmann does not reject the “historical Jesus,” but reliance on the results of the quest for the “historical Jesus.” Nevertheless, he is convinced that Jesus’s eschatological message and the Pauline kerygma correspond, though Jesus looks into the future (the coming kingdom), Paul into the past (the presence of salvation).31 Wright’s basic point of criticism, certainly, is valid: Paul is far from untying the devotion to Christ from the historical Jesus and from untying Jesus from the empirical people and the story of Israel. 27

Cf., e.g., Jürgen Moltmann, “Sein Name ist Gerechtigkeit”: Neue Beiträge zur christlichen Gotteslehre (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2008), 23. 28 Cf. Standhartinger, “Bultmann’s Theology,” 252–53. 29 But see the trenchant comment of William Albright in a review of Bultmann’s Gifford lectures; William F. Albright, “Bultmann’s History and Eschatology,” JBL 77 (1958): 244–48 (248): “He passes over the Nazi Abomination of Desolation in complete silence, ‘wie ein römischer Senator’ (to quote a letter from a Continental colleague written to me in the winter of 1945–46, with specific reference to the author of our volume).” Günter Klein rejected this as “impertinent accusation,” claiming that this epoch did not produce a concept of history (Geschichtsentwurf), which would have to be dealt with in the book in question (Günter Klein, review of Geschichte und Eschatologie, by Rudolph Bultmann, ZGK 71 [1960]: 177). Surely, Bultmann’s thinking as a whole did not remain unimpressed by Germany’s devastating national story. See the chapter “Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus” in Hammann’s biography (Hammann, Rudolf Bultmann, 255–74). 30 From an unpublished letter to Dorothee Sölle, written in response to her book Politische Theologie in August 1971 (quoted in Standhartinger, “Bultmann’s Theology,” 255). 31 Cf. Landmesser, “Rudolf Bultmann als Paulusinterpret,” 18–21.

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1.3 Bultmann’s “Non-Transformational” Paul Wright not only finds fault with Bultmann’s “non-narratival” reconstruction of Paul’s theology but also with its “non-transformational” character. He takes issue with Bultmann’s often-repeated statement concerning the change from the situation under the law to the situation under grace: “No break takes place; no magical or mysterious transformation of man in regard to his substance, the basis of his nature, takes place.”32 He regards it as the elimination of “any notion of an inner transformation” (PFG 779) and attributes it both to the Reformation idea that the bestowal of grace is independent from an actual change in “nature,” and to the “protestant nervousness about ‘mysticism,’” which even “peeps out in contemporary writings” (PFG 779n13). It is important to note that, according to Wright, Paul does not refer to the “inner transformation” with the words “justification” or “righteousness,” but by the idea of the “indwelling of the Messiah-spirit” (PFG 958). In a helpful response to some reviews of his work, Wright specifies what he means by “transformation”: He makes clear that his central thesis is “that Paul believed he was called … to teach people to think Christianly.” For Paul, the task of theology is encapsulated in the imperative “Be transformed … by the renewal of your minds” (Rom 12:2). This corresponds to a “new, gospel-initiated way of ‘knowing,’” and it was Paul’s aim to get “Messiahfollowers to think in a new way about new topics.”33 Wright’s idea of “inner transformation” as a renewed way of knowing, as the “birth” of a new identity (PFG 860), is not incompatible with Bultmann’s idea of a transformed, believing self-understanding, which is “a how, a way of life itself.”34 Both obviously place a particular emphasis on the “cognitive” dimension of transformation and its impact on Christian identity, or Dasein, as a whole. Now for Bultmann this has two consequences: First, only “under faith,” i.e., from the perspective of believing existence, the revelation of faith and its implications can be understood, and only faith itself is able to apprehend the new status conferred by God.35 Second, the very fact that “I believe,” the indicative of salvation is not something that is perceivable by a natural, empirically verifiable “change of the moral quality of the human being,” but by a re-

32

Bultmann, Theology, 1:268–69 (quoted in PFG 779). N. T. Wright, “Right Standing, Right Understanding, Wright Misunderstanding: A Response,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 (2014): 87–103 (92–93, partly italicized). Cf., e.g., PFG 1327. 34 Rudolf Bultmann, “The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul,” in Faith and Understanding, ed. Robert W. Funk, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 1:220–46 (245). 35 Bultmann, Theology, 1:191. 33

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newed mind.36 Bultmann’s view might indeed be criticized for its onesidedness, in particular its construal of faith as an “abstract” entity, but its theological thrust should not be ignored or misrepresented. Bultmann shares the idea of the abstractness of faith with Karl Barth,37 though unlike Barth and contrary to what Wright assumes, Bultmann is not preoccupied with a clear-cut anti-mystical bias but rather expresses his disagreement with the biographical-psychological explanations of faith of the history-of-religions school.38 Even in this regard, Bultmann remained remarkably consistent: Faith for him is a conscious decision (“obedience”) but not objectifiable; therefore, it is invisible for psychological reflection, which is why the New Testament has nowhere described it “in terms of its psychological development.”39 1.4 Bultmann’s “De-Judaized” Paul Wright launches the most serious attack on Bultmann when he contends that “the deeper aim of Bultmann’s analysis” was “a radical deJudaizing” of Paul (PFG 458).40 Bultmann was “a massive and central figure” in the early twentieth-century effort to reconstruct early Christianity “in as unJewish a light as 36 Bultmann defended this view in an early essay, in which he coined and developed the famous conceptual pair “indicative and imperative” as a characterization of Pauline ethics (Rudolf Bultmann, “Das Problem der Ethik bei Paulus” [1924], in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. Erich Dinkler [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967], 36–54, 49). Cf. Wright’s discussion in PFG 447, 1098–1100. 37 Barth expressed this concept in an even more radical manner. Cf. Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief: Zweite Fassung 1922, Gesamtausgabe II, Akademische Werke 47, ed. Cornelis van der Kooi and Katja Tolstaja (Zürich: TVZ, 2010), 184: “Der Glaube begründet Gewissheit, sofern er der ewige Schritt ins ganz und gar Unanschauliche und also selbst unanschaulich ist.” The English translation is misleading; Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 134: “But faith establishes certainty when it is the advance into what is invisible and eternal, and when it is itself invisible.” On Wolter’s idea of faith’s Unanschaulichkeit, see below. For an evaluation of PFG from a theological perspective – in dialogue with Karl Barth – see the contribution by Sven Ensminger. 38 Cf., e.g., Wilhelm Bousset, “Paulus,” RGG 4:1276–1309 (1302): faith as a “new religious basic mood (Grundstimmung)”; G. Adolf Deissmann, St. Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, trans. Lionel R. M. Strachan (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912), 147: “Faith is not the condition precedent to justification, it is the experience of justification.” 39 Rudolf Bultmann, “πίστις κτλ.,” TDNT 6:174–82, 197–228 (217, quoting Adolf Schlatter, Der Glaube im Neuen Testament, 6th ed. [Stuttgart: Calwer, 1982], 260). 40 Beverly Roberts Gaventa has rightly noted that this statement goes beyond pointing out flaws in Bultmann’s understanding of first-century Judaism; “it implies that Bultmann himself intended to separate Paul from his Jewishness” (Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “The Character of God’s Faithfulness: A Response to N. T. Wright,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 [2014]: 71–79, 79).

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possible” (PFG 443n322) – just “like Marcion” (PFG 1290; cf. 1109). With sharp irony he comments that “the Lutheran existentialist knows that all things Jewish are, for Paul, part of the problem rather than part of the solution” (PFG 779) and that, since Bultmann, we know that Paul rejected ‘Judaism’ and the ‘works of the law’ which stood at its heart; we know he was the ‘apostle to the gentiles’; very well then, he must have left behind not only the specifics of self-righteous Jewish theology but also the thought-forms of Judaism as a whole. He must, therefore, have recast the message into non-Jewish forms, and we should try to discern what those forms were. (PFG 459)

Wright’s far-reaching (and widespread) accusation that Bultmann intended to “de-judaize” Paul is to be confronted with Bultmann’s own, quite sensitive remarks. It is off the mark to say that Bultmann “knows that all things Jewish are, for Paul, part of the problem” (PFG 779). Rather, according to Bultmann, “Paul knows nothing about the law being a burden for the subjective feeling of the Jew, and in his Christian fight against the law he never presents faith as the liberation of such a burden.”41 The Christian message called into question the way to seek justification through works of the law, now that “God has inaugurated the time of salvation through the sending of the Messiah.”42 Such assertions in fact come close to “New Perspective” tenets and do not quite fit in the “de-judaizing” allegations against Bultmann.43 It was not Bultmann’s main mistake to “de-judaize” Paul, but to “judaize” humanity and, in the same vein, to “de-ethnicize” Judaism. Judaism is for him the representative, indeed the climax of humanity,44 though of a humanity that grounds its existence on its own activity. By way of his “pessimistic anthropology” he reached at a negative and indeed problematic portrayal of Judaism.45 Bultmann’s view that Paul was the most profound interpreter of Christian existence next to John is the result of a close and theologically committed – 41

Bultmann, “Paulus,” 4:1023. Bultmann, “Paulus,” 4:1022. 43 Cf. Oda Wischmeyer,“Paulusinterpretationen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine kritische relecture der ersten bis vierten Auflage der ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,’” in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 649–85 (664). 44 Bultmann, “Paulus,” 4:1022. The idea of the “Adamic nature of Israel” is also present in Wright’s account (PFG 514, 894). 45 Cf., e.g., Bultmann, Theology, 1:240 (on Phil 3:3–7): “This passage makes it especially clear that the attitude which orients itself by ‘flesh,’ living out of ‘flesh,’ is the selfreliant attitude of the man who puts his trust in his own strength and in that which is controllable by him.” Rudolf Bultmann, “καυχᾶσθαι κτλ.,” TDNT 3:645–54 (645–46): “For Paul, καυχᾶσθαι discloses the basic attitude of the Jew to be one of self-confidence which seeks glory before God and which relies on itself.” 42

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albeit one-sided – reading of the Pauline texts rather than an exercise in an arbitrary theological construction driven by questionable philosophical and history-of-religions, let alone “quasi-Marcionite” (cf. PFG 1109), presuppositions.46 Is it carrying things too far if I suggest that the basic epistemological rationales of Bultmann and Wright resonate with each other? The bipartite structure of Wright’s book reflects Bultmann’s disposition of Paul’s theology: “Paul’s World” and “Paul’s Mindset” correspond to Bultmann’s “Man prior to the revelation of faith,” while “Paul’s Theology” and “Paul in His World” correspond to “Man under Faith.” Sub specie fidei all things are seen in a different light, a “radical mutation” (PFG xvi) of core beliefs is taking place. If Bultmann had read a statement like: There is … an epistemological revolution at the heart of Paul’s worldview and theology. It isn’t just that he now knows things he did not before; it is rather, that the act of knowing has itself been transformed, (PFG 1355–56)

he would have probably nodded his head. After this preface on Bultmann we turn to more recent accounts of Paul’s theology, starting with a few remarks on their material basis, hermeneutical methods, structural designs, and their intended audiences.

2. Form, Style and Design 2.1 Material Basis: Paul’s Authentic Letters The authors of the selected Pauline theologies made quite divergent decisions as to which letters they treat as authentic; such decisions reflect historical judgment as much as theological commitment.47 The spectrum of opinions reaches from the critical “German” academic consensus about a seven-letter Pauline corpus (Schnelle, Wolter),48 to the conviction that, in addition, 2 Thessalonians and possibly Colossians are authentic (Dunn),49 to the forthright claim that Paul penned all thirteen letters traditionally attributed to him (Schreiner).50 Wright himself comes close to the maximalist view: “Colossians is certainly Pauline, and to be used without excuse or apology,” both Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians are “highly likely to be Pauline,” 2 Timothy 46 Cf. Francis B. Watson, “New Directions in Pauline Theology,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 11–14 (11). 47 On this issue, cf. also the essays by Eve-Marie Becker and Theresa Heilig and Christoph Heilig. 48 Cf. Wolter, Paulus, 6; Schnelle, Paulus, 18–19 (= Paul, 41). 49 Cf. Dunn, Paul, 13n39, 298n23, 733n21: “In my view Paul may have given his approval to Timothy’s penning of his message to the Colossians (Col 4.18).” 50 Schreiner, Paul, 10.

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resonates Pauline “style, mood and flavour,” much more so than 1 Timothy and Titus, which is why these two Pastorals are appealed to “for illumination rather than support” (PFG 61). A pithy comment in another context summarizes his reasoning: Few seem to have noticed that Ephesians fits well with the ‘new perspective’; that if Paul was an ‘apocalyptic’ thinker 2 Thessalonians ought to be central; and that a ‘new perspective’ reading of Galatians fits well with the historically plausible early date and South Galatian destination. The pseudo-historical grin on the liberal protestant Cheshire Cat remains, long after the Cat itself has vanished.51

In the end, however, Wright wants to allow the smaller corpus of the undisputed seven letters to bear most of the argumentative weight, and from this group Romans and Galatians stand out (PFG 61).52 Obviously, the interpreter’s decisions regarding the number (and chronology!) of Paul’s letters is of utmost importance for their reconstruction of his theology and have to be kept in mind, even if their consequences cannot be discussed in greater detail here.53 Beyond that, one should also note that the divergence concerning authenticity is emblematic for the apparent drifting apart of the Germanspeaking and Anglophone discourse on Paul. Wright seems convinced that on the whole Pauline scholarship experiences “a turn from Germany to America” and more generally to the Anglophone world. As a consequence, his interaction with German literature is rather limited, even though he himself bemoans that “just as older German scholars seldom cited non-Germans, the Anglophone world has often reciprocated.”54 2.2 Method: How to Write a Theology of Paul Without appealing to a specific hermeneutical or historical theory, Dunn talks about two methodological decisions that were formative for his attempt to write his theology of Paul: first, that his preferred model is that of dialogue, i.e., he seeks to “enter into a theological dialogue with Paul,” and second that 51 N. T. Wright, “Paul in Current Anglophone Scholarship” [2012], in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 474–88 (476). 52 Contrast Larry Hurtado’s impression “that Wright reads Paul essentially using Ephesians as the lens” (Hurtado, “Review,” 364). 53 See Schnelle’s persuasive critique of Wolter’s methodological decision (Wolter, Paulus, 6) to take no account of the historical order of the letters so as to keep his account unaffected by disputed assumptions (Schnelle, Paulus, 18–19). 54 Wright, “Paul in Current Anglophone Scholarship,” 475. Barclay criticizes that “less than 60 of the 1,300 items in the bibliography are in German” (Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God [by Wright], 235n2). Wolter, on the contrary, is a case in point for the habit of “older” German scholarship, as he hardly takes note of the Anglophone discourse with the exception of a small group of “New Perspective” authors – not including Wright!

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the starting point of this dialogue must be Romans, “the most sustained and reflective statement of Paul’s own theology by Paul himself.”55 In effect, Dunn’s historical method comes close to what Wright calls “critical realism.”56 Schreiner touches only lightly on the question of methodology, taking his lead from Adolf Schlatter and arguing that it is his goal “to see what Paul says and to see it in the right proportions.”57 But Schlatter’s maxim “seeing what is there” carries within itself the challenge that “the task is so large that no one can claim to have seen all that is present in the documents before us.”58 Both Schnelle and Wolter operate with a moderate constructivist approach. In Schnelle’s words: The past event itself is not available to us but only the various understandings of the past event, mediated to us by various interpreters. History is not reconstructed but unavoidably and necessarily constructed.59

Schnelle offers a most thorough account of his underlying theory of history, by means of which he seeks to illuminate the particular quality of Paul’s theology as being compatible with the ancient symbolic world.60 In his preface, Wright point to the importance of making transparent one’s larger hypotheses. He labels his own methodological foundation “critical realism,” explaining that this method is not merely about assembling mere facts, but rather attempts “to make sense of them through forming hypotheses and then testing them against the evidence” (PFG xviii). “Critical realism” takes its place in between “naïve realism” and “narcissistic reductionism,” is aware that “objectivity” is unattainable but still explicitly aims at “truth,” “the truth in which the words we use and the stories we tell increasingly approximate to the reality of another world” (PFG 51).61

55

Dunn, Paul, 24–25. While in Dunn’s theology of Paul the technical term “critical realism” does not occur, he explains in his book Jesus Remembered that (and how) the category of dialogue relates to this specific historical approach (James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making 1 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], 111). 57 Schreiner, Paul, 16. 58 Schreiner, Paul, 16. 59 Schnelle, Paulus, 4 (= Paul, 28). Wolter is much briefer, but he too is convinced that all “reconstructions” of Paul’s theology are at the same “constructions” (Wolter, Paulus, 2; cf. 227). 60 Schnelle is particularly indebted to Jörn Rüsen’s theory of history. (Unfortunately, with regards to these historiographical concepts, the English translation of Schnelle’s book is not always clear and consistent.) 61 For a fuller account see Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 332–37. Wright indicates (PFG xviiin2) that he borrowed the phrase “critical realism” from Ben Meyer. For a detailled discussion of Wright’s notion of “critical realism,” cf. now the essay by Andreas Losch. 56

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2.3 Design: Mapping the Landscape of Paul’s Thought The five authors also provide an insight into the decision-making process, which resulted in the structure and design of their respective books. Dunn chose to engage with Paul’s “mature theology,” which he finds in Romans and which reflects Paul’s desire “to set out his understanding of the gospel in a fuller and in some sense definitive or final way” at a significant juncture in his missionary work.62 Using Romans as a template, Dunn is able to offer a coherent exposition of the themes which Paul addresses in his most elaborate letter, while recognizing that working primarily from Romans “does give less place to Paul the polemicist of Galatians and strong counsellor of 1 Corinthians.”63 Incidentally, these themes correspond to the traditional dogmatic loci and, furthermore, reflect a pattern that has been famously dubbed “from plight to solution,” i.e., from “Humankind under Indictment” (ch. 3) to “The Process of Salvation” (ch. 6).64 Schreiner notes that differently from Dunn he wants to take into account particularly “Paul as a missionary”65 and his “apostolic sufferings.”66 In fact, the missionary dimension figures in the first chapters of his book, while the remainder basically walks in the paths prepared by Dunn, steering from chapters called “dishonoring God” (chs. 5–6) to one by the title “God’s Saving Righteousness” (ch. 8): “The plight of human beings is such that a solution is needed.”67 Wolter claims for himself to have developed a distinct manner of organizing his account, being aware of the inherent inconsistency of this decision. In the chapter headings of his book “emic” terminology alternates with “etic” or “dogmatic” terminology; for instance, the chapter on the “Salvific Reality of Jesus’ Death” (ch. 6) follows upon the chapter “The Faith” (ch. 5). Compared with the previously mentioned authors, his account stands out in placing the chapter on Paul’s doctrine of justification right next to the chapter on ecclesiology. Schnelle, in line with his historiographical premises, chooses a bipartite structure for his book: A diachronic, historical part, which takes seriously the correspondence of Paul’s life and thinking in its continuity and change, constitutes the foun-

62

Dunn, Paul, 26, 731–32. James D. G. Dunn, “Rejoicing in Dialogue: A Response to Lee Keck,” SJT 53 (2000): 391–93 (391). 64 E. P. Sanders had rejected the idea that Paul argued from “plight” (human sin) to “solution” (salvation through Christ); rather, Paul reasoned backwards, “from solution to plight”: “For Paul, the conviction of a universal solution preceded the conviction of a universal plight” (E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion [London: SPCK, 1977], 474; cf. 442–47). 65 On the issue of missions in PFG, see Eckhard Schnabel’s essay. 66 Schreiner, Paul, 9. 67 Schreiner, Paul, 150; cf. 119. 63

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dation for a synchronic, theological synthesis, which is oriented at the classical dogmatic topics.68 Wright’s Pauline theology offers another distinctive structural plan. He deliberately decides against a combination of a diachronic and synchronic reading of Paul, as proposed by Schnelle, not for methodological reasons but for both practical and “biographical” reasons: The length of the work would expand unduly and, besides, the diachronic work has been accomplished by his previous publications, especially his commentaries, and by his lifelong studying, teaching, and preaching (PFG xix). Likewise, a “topic by topic”-approach in the manner of Dunn will not do because Paul’s letters – “short but pithy documents” – must be investigated “from several angles all at once” (PFG 45).69 Right at the beginning, the reader is supplied with a map that lays out the alternative approach in the book. It consists of four parts, “Paul’s World” (chs. 1–5), “Paul’s Mindset” (chs. 6–8), “Paul’s Theology” (chs. 9–11), and “Paul in His World” (chs. 12–16). Wright says that “the real climax of the book” (PFG xv) is the Part III, which offers a fresh account of Paul’s theology using as a framework “the three main elements of secondtemple Jewish ‘theology’, namely monotheism, election70 and eschatology71” (PFG 610). According to Wright, Paul has reworked these Jewish themes and in fact every single aspect of his native Jewish theology “in the light of the Messiah and the spirit” (PFG xv, 46, 455, 1093). Importantly, however, worldview-analysis must precede the analysis of Paul’s theologizing. “Only when we have understood Paul’s worldview do we understand why his theology is what it is, and the role it plays precisely within that worldview” (PFG 55). A worldview involves basic beliefs – “story,” “praxis,” “questions,” and “symbols” – the sort of things that people habitually presuppose as they engage in issues such as theology. Metaphorically speaking, “a ‘worldview’ is not what you normally look at, but what you normally look through” (PFG 28). The structure of the book, therefore, reflects Wright’s claim to first study the worldview, both in general terms (Part I) and focused on Paul (Part II); only then, the import of Paul’s radical transformation of his central beliefs – 68

Cf. Schnelle, Paulus, 25 (= Paul, 46). Wright also takes issue with the layout of other authors’ studies of Paul’s theology. For instance, he criticizes that in the books of Dunn, Schreiner, Wolter, and Schnelle “‘the church’ and related topics [are] tucked away towards the back” and intimates (rightly so?) that their assumption is “that what mattered was sin and salvation and that questions about church life were essentially secondary, or even tertiary” (PFG 385n121). Furthermore, he asks whether it is adequate to treat eschatology as a separate topic at the end of a list, as in the just mentioned works. He attempts to treat it both as a separate topic and as fundamental category. 70 On the concept of election, cf. the contribution by Sigurd Grindheim. 71 On individual eschatology, cf. the essay by Richard Bell. Cf. also Jörg Frey’s essay on apocalyptic. 69

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his “theology” – becomes comprehensible (Part III), and finally one can discern how he engages his theology with the wider cultural and religious context72 (Part IV). 2.4 Style and Audience: Paul for Everyone? The concept of “dialogue” not only characterizes Dunn’s approach to the ancient texts but also his interaction with other, even controversial, scholarly opinions. In a judicious and non-polemical way he engages in a conversation with his colleagues and is prepared to think over his own standpoints without being self-opinionated. Despite the plethora of material dealt with, the lucid organization and the unpretentious jargon make the book accessible even to readers beyond the circles of biblical scholarship. Dunn’s theology intends to address a wider audience with the goal of not only enabling “the reader and the church … to enter into the thought world of Paul but also to engage theologically with the claims he makes and the issues he addresses.”73 Schreiner’s theology of Paul is purposefully written at an introductory level and lacks extensive interaction with secondary literature. It is his stated aim “to write a textbook on Pauline theology for students at both the college and seminary level” and to “introduce a fresh vision of Paul to students in a relatively nontechnical way.”74 Throughout his professedly evangelical Pauline theology, Schreiner seeks to overcome the “nasty gap” between Paul’s time and our time; the intended result is a Pauline theology “that is not only informative but spiritually uplifting as well.”75 Wolter proposes to demonstrate the inner coherence and unity of Paul’s thinking, epitomized by the notion of “Christfaith.” Wolter’s book is characterized by an admirable conceptual clarity and terminological precision. At the same time, he is not slow to launch sharp attacks against his colleagues; in particular, he goes after Schnelle, whose views on the history-of-religions background of central Pauline ideas and on the participatory structure of Paul’s theology he deems objectionable. In line with German academic tradition, Wolter does not address directly the contemporary reader of his book, though the virtually omnipresent talk of “identity,” “reality,” “construction,” etc. shows that Wolter has written his work from the perspective of current philosophical discourses. Both Paul and his communities had to wrestle with the question of the “Christian management of identity,” as Wolter repeatedly calls to attention,76 and this obviously asso72

The aspect of ancient religions is discussed by James C. Hanges. Dunn, Paul, 8–9. Dunn asks for the contemporary (ecclesial) relevance of his findings mostly in brief interjections and in greater detail in the chapter “Innovative and Lasting Features” (733–37). 74 Schreiner, Paul, 9. 75 Schreiner, Paul, back cover. 76 E.g., Wolter, Paulus, 389, 423, 434, 443. 73

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ciates them with “postmodern”77 Christianity, which is per se a “pluralistic affair.”78 Schnelle’s volume is designed as a textbook and has soon become the standard work on Paul’s theology in the German-speaking world (and via its excellent translation has also entered English-speaking scholarship). Characterized by an admirable structural and expository clarity it covers all essential facets of Paul’s life and thinking, and it documents in a non-polemical manner a wide spectrum of scholarly positions. At the same time, Schnelle’s study reflects a deeper hermeneutical concern, which is to show “how the New Testament traditions can be appropriated without destroying the committing force of the truth they contain.”79 There is a clear link between Paul’s and our time. Paul “set forth the meaning of the new being in Christ (ἐν Χριστῷ) and lived it out within the horizon of the Lord’s parousia. This is the bond that unites him with Christians of every generation.”80 Wright’s book is the product of a brilliant, prolific writer.81 There is not a single page in the book that creates the impression of Wright retreating into the academic ivory tower, tackling abstract historical questions. Rather, Wright’s work is earthed in history, he haunts Paul in his world and brings him into ours. He is interested in the set of questions “that confronts the scholar, and for that matter the preacher and teacher, today” (PFG 37).82 Throughout, he is skeptical about those exegetes who postulate unnatural and unnecessary either/or-schemes in their interpretation of Paul (cf. PFG 865). Nowhere does he discern tensions or contradictions in Paul’s thinking; rather the different Pauline “circles of thought” all co-exist in harmony. For instance, the five stories in Paul (the story of God and the cosmos, the story of Christ, the story of Israel, Paul’s story, and the story of believers) “do actually have a coherent interlocking shape, nesting within one another like the sub-plots in a play” (PFG 474). Likewise, the central topics in Paul’s theology – seven in number: justification, anthropology, being in Christ, salvation history, apocalyptic, transformation/deification, covenant – all “have proper roles to play, and … each needs the others if it is to be understood in the way Paul understood it (PFG 777); they, too, “cohere and nest within one another throughout” (PFG 966). Wright’s gracious, integrative approach to Paul is not paralleled in his conversation with Paul’s interpreters. Within Paul, he 77

For an analysis of PFG in relation to postmodernity, cf. the essay by James Crossley and Katie Edwards. 78 Wolter, Paulus, vii (“pluralistische … Angelegenheit”). 79 Udo Schnelle, “Neutestamentliche Theologie als Sinnbildung,” in Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft: Autobiographische Essays aus der Evangelischen Theologie, ed. Eve-Marie Becker, Uni-Taschenbücher 2475 (Tübingen: Francke, 2003), 135–45 (135). 80 Schnelle, Paulus, 1 (= Paul, 25). 81 On the hermeneutical significance of Wright’s style, cf. Oda Wischmeyer’s essay. 82 For the relation between PFG and the church, cf. the essays by Andrew McGowan and Edith M. Humphrey.

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emphasizes coherence, in relation to his fellow exegetes he tends to highlight demarcation lines. Both areas of discourse, the synthetic reconstruction of Paul’s argument and the scholarly discussion, exude Wright’s extraordinary argumentative and rhetorical gift as well as his wit and astuteness. Mostly, they are an asset, but – as noted by Beverly Roberts Gaventa – they sometimes run “out of control.”83 To be sure, the passages that contain extensive debates with other scholars are both illuminating and entertaining. I am thinking of his critical dialogue with Francis Watson on hermeneutics, Larry Hurtado on early high christology,84 John Barclay on Paul’s anti-imperial theology, J. Louis Martyn and Martinus de Boer on the “apocalyptic” reading of Paul,85 or Troels Engberg-Pedersen on Paul and Stoicism.86 Yet his engagement with his opponents – particularly with the three last-mentioned – is not always in optimam partem, his criticisms occasionally misguided, and at times his style even descends to caricature.87 Furthermore, Wright is not slow to point out that exegetical tradition and/or all exegetes “fail to realize” or “miss” or “overlook” important insights, which in the end set them on the wrong track. To give just one example: He claims that his soteriological model offers a “bigger picture,” convicting “traditional western soteriology, whether catholic or protestant, liberal or conservative” of serious shortsightedness (PFG 755).88 While some might indeed enjoy the seething volcanic force of Wright’s prose, others will much rather appreciate the sober restraint of a James Dunn, to whose Theology of Paul the Apostle we now turn.

3. James Dunn and N. T. Wright 3.1 Paul as a Jewish-“Nazarene” Theologizer James Dunn’s monograph on Paul, which appeared in 1998, has rapidly established itself in the Anglophone world “as a standard point of reference 83 Gaventa, “The Character of God’s Faithfulness,” 79. Abundant references of uncharitable rhetoric are given in Tilling, “Review Essay,” 64–67. 84 See now Larry Hurtado’s response in this volume. 85 Cf. Jörg Frey’s comments on Wright’s engagement with those scholars. 86 Cf. Gregory Sterling’s essay on this topic. 87 The very expression “caricature” is used in the reviews of Hurtado, “Review,” 362; Tilling, “Review Essay,” 64; and Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (by Wright), 235. 88 Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul,” 66n16 refers to other such claims and comments: “While anyone would gladly receive such dramatically clarifying instruction, purple rhetoric of this kind might also be more persuasive if it engaged a little more patiently with dissenting points of view in traditional Western scholarship, whether classic or modern, liberal or conservative, Anglophone or allophone.”

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because its scope is comprehensive, its discussions thorough, its arguments clear, and its stance positive.”89 Dunn designs his work, as it were, as a “dialogue within a dialogue,”90 that is to say that he conceives of Paul’s theology itself as a dialogue and that he describes his own hermeneutics as a dialogic enterprise. According to Dunn, Paul’s own theologizing can be characterized as a dynamic interaction on several levels: He interacts with his “inherited convictions or traditional life patterns,” with his life-changing encounter on the Damascus road, and – most immediately – with the addressees of his letters.91 As an exegete of Paul’s letters, Dunn wishes to “theologize with Paul,”92 applying a hermeneutical model that defines interpretation as a “dialogue with a living respondent.”93 It is not necessary to call attention to the fact that one of the great innovations in more recent Pauline scholarship is associated with James Dunn. In fact, he is generally considered the name giver to the “New Perspective on Paul,” and he provided decisive impulses on the route to a fresh understanding of his theology.94 On this way, Wright has been his constant companion, which is why Dunn and Wright, together with E. P. Sanders, happened to be labelled the “three musketeers of the so-called ‘New Perspective.’”95 To be sure, in the course of time, Dunn himself rethought and reworked several aspects of his portrayal of Paul,96 but his basic tenet persisted: “‘Justification by faith’ was Paul’s answer to the question: How is it that Gentiles can be equally acceptable to God as Jews.”97 In one of his provocative theses, which 89

This prediction, expressed by Leander Keck in a thoughtful review of Dunn’s book, has proven true (Leander E. Keck, review of The Theology of Paul the Apostle, by James D. G. Dunn, SJT 53 [2000]: 380–89 [389]). 90 Dunn, Paul, 17. 91 Dunn, Paul, 18; cf. 713. 92 Dunn, Paul, 24. 93 Dunn, Paul, 8. 94 Cf. James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul” [1983], in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays, WUNT 185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 89–110. But see James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul: Whence, what, whither?,” in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays, WUNT 185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 1–88 (7n24) where he credits Wright with the first recorded use of the phrase “new perspective” (cf. Wright, “Paul of History,” 10). Wright himself recalls that “Dunn was sitting in the front row when I gave the original 1978 lecture” (Wright, “Paul in Current Anglophone Scholarship,” 475n3). For a continuation of this dialogue, see now Dunn’s essay in this volume. 95 Simon J. Gathercole, Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1–5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 16. A critical analysis of Wright’s version of the New Perspective on Paul is provided by Peter Stuhlmacher in this volume. 96 Cf. above all his comprehensive essay “Whence, what, whither?,” which contains balanced and partly self-critical reflections. 97 Dunn, Paul, 340.

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brought several critics to the scene, he suggests that Judaism at the time of Paul “misunderstood” the ideas of the law and Israel.98 Thus, Paul’s “eschatological criticism” of the law is not directed at the law per se, but at his fellow Jews who mistakenly believe that their exclusive, privileged status remains valid, even though their Messiah has already come. The mistake was all the worse since Gentiles were being persuaded to follow suit. They were being persuaded that they too had to enter inside Israel’s protective boundary when the promised blessing was already more freely available outside.99

The Jewish people failed to realize that the function of the law as a “guardian angel”100 is temporary and that the coming of Christ has instigated an eschatological, indeed apocalyptical turn of the eras: The new and final stage of God’s dealing with humankind implies that the law belongs to the “passé, fleshly column.”101 All efforts to maintain the status of privilege are predicated by Paul as sinful,102 since such efforts represent a distortion of “God’s greater purpose to extend his call to all.”103 Dunn is, however, keen to emphasize that Paul does not replace Israel’s restrictiveness with a new, Christian restrictiveness; “he does not say ‘not of law, but only of faith,’ but ‘not only of law but also of faith.’”104 Another, related concern of Dunn is to demonstrate the largest possible degree of continuity between Paul, the Pharisee, and Paul, the follower of Christ. For Dunn, it is a serious mistake to argue – as does, for instance, Jürgen Becker – that “the Christian Paul has almost entirely disposed of the

98

Cf. C. E. B. Cranfield, “‘The Works of the Law’ in the Epistle to the Romans” [1991], in On Romans: And Other New Testament Essays (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 1–14 (13): Dunn “actually reduces Paul’s argument to polemic against a misunderstanding.” Stephen Westerholm counts a total of six “misunderstandings,” which Paul finds with his opponents (Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004], 190–92). See, as a response, Dunn’s chapter “A wrong attitude/a misunderstanding” in the aforementioned essay “Whence, what, whither?,” 26–33. 99 Dunn, Paul, 145. 100 Cf. Dunn, Paul, 141, 143–44, 515. 101 Dunn, Paul, 147. 102 Dunn, Paul, 119. Dunn makes clear that in his opinion Paul does not have in mind “self-reliance” (against Rudolf Bultmann), but rather “national reliance.” 103 Dunn, Paul, 519. 104 Dunn, Paul, 378n181. With respect to the encounter between Paul and Peter in Antioch, this theological aspect has been discussed in Christoph Heilig, “The New Perspective on Peter: How the Philosophy of Historiography can Help in Understanding Earliest Christianity,” in Christian Origins and the Establishment of the Early Jesus Movement, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts, Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture 4 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

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Jewish period of his life.”105 Rather, Paul “remained a Jew and an Israelite,” and his “conversion” was not from one religion to another, but from one theology to another, or rather: “from one form (or sect) of the religion of his people (Pharisee) to another (Nazarene).”106 In effect, Paul’s conviction that righteousness is from faith deeply corresponds to Jewish “covenant theology,” which attributes Israel’s status before God to his grace. Dunn goes as far as to claim that Paul’s teaching on justification is, in its essence, “simply a restatement of the first principles of his own ancestral faith.”107 As a consequence, even though Dunn allots the law to the “fleshly column,” he sees Paul as defending the law wherever possible108 and confirming its potential to serve as “a guide to life/living” even for Christ-followers.109 The argumentative rationale for this seeming inconsistency lies in Dunn’s distinction between a “primary” and a “secondary” righteousness. When Paul, for instance, appeals to Lev 18:5 (Gal 3:12; Rom 10:5), he has in mind that the law is “a guide for living”110 (= “secondary righteousness”) relevant for the covenant people, i.e., for those who are justified by faith (= “primary righteousness”). From this perspective, Israel’s key misunderstanding can be restated: It confused the two kinds of righteousness and gave the righteousness from the law “a more fundamental status – as something required of Gentile believers as much as the primary righteousness.”111 The dialogue between Dunn and Wright is best introduced by a word of Wright, which encapsulates his appraisal of their scholarly relationship: For much of my career I have been in implicit and sometimes explicit debate with Jimmy Dunn … Since we are often lumped together under the broad and now unhelpful label of ‘new perspective’, it is worth noting that despite much two-way traffic of thought our disagreements loom at least as large, in my mind at least, as our agreements. (PFG 925n426)112

A number of such disagreements and agreements shall be pointed out in the following, starting with their respective take on the “fresh perspective” on

105 Jürgen Becker, Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles, trans. O. C. Dean Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 33. 106 Dunn, Paul, 179. 107 Dunn, Paul, 345. 108 Cf., e.g., Dunn, Paul, 98, 157, 472, 645–46, 721. 109 Dunn, Paul, 154, 179, 725. 110 Dunn, Paul, 721; cf. above all the chapter “A law for life? – or death?,” in Dunn, Paul, 150–55. 111 Dunn, Paul, 516. 112 In fact, a cursory glance at the references to Dunn in PFG indicates that Wright cites Dunn largely in order to reject his position.

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Paul and followed by their approach to the questions of “narrative” and “christological monotheism.”113 3.2 Two “New Perspectives” on Paul In his already mentioned first essay on Paul, which appeared five years prior to Dunn’s famous “The New Perspective on Paul,” Wright had argued that justification by faith is “a polemical doctrine, whose target is not the usual Lutheran one of ‘nomism’ or ‘Menschenwerke,’ but the Pauline one of Jewish national pride.” Moreover, it is “a polemical doctrine because it declares that the way is open for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to enter the family of Abraham.”114 While in this early statement on the polemical nature of Paul’s doctrine of justification Wright sided with Wrede and Schweitzer, the tone has changed en route to PFG. There he says that Schweitzer was wrong “to suggest that ‘justification’ was a mere polemical tool for use in key debates” (PFG 1140) and that he cannot emphasize too strongly that the reason Paul regarded Jesus as Messiah was not because of polemical intentions in relation to his own idiosyncratic plan to include gentiles without them being circumcised …, but because, and only because, he believed that Israel’s God had raised this crucified would-be Messiah from the dead and that therefore … his messianic claim had been demonstrated beyond question. (PFG 905)115

Dunn’s and Wright’s emphases and modes of expression differ, but both agree that Paul reacts against Jewish exclusivism that binds membership in the elected people to distinctive badges of Sabbath observance, dietary laws, and circumcision.

113 I will not deal with their dissenting views on the pre-existence of Christ (PFG 534n202, 686n212), baptism (PFG 418n233), Paul’s parousia-teaching (PFG 1084n181), and the “divided self” (Rom 7:14–20) (PFG 1016), etc. 114 Wright, “Paul of History,” 10; cf. N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 261. Both Dunn and Wright agree that Luther significantly misunderstood Paul, with Wright occasionally coming close to simplistic generalizations (cf., e.g., PFG 499: Lutherans tend to say “that God has cut off the Israel-plan and done something completely different”). See further Wright, Climax, 258–59; N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion Books, 199), 120. 115 But see also PFG 962: Paul’s doctrine of justification “is central, not marginal; polemical, yes, but not merely polemical.” He criticizes Michael Bird for lumping his view together with those of William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer (PFG 962n522; against Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective, Paternoster Biblical Monographs [Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007], 30).

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On the other hand, both scholars represent a “thesis of continuity to Judaism.”116 In accord with Dunn, Wright makes clear that Paul “was, and remained, a Jew” (PFG 205). “He has not abandoned his Jewish roots and meanings, but simply gained a radical new insight into them” (PFG 1422), and the Torah has a positive significance, even for believers in Christ (PFG 1109). In fact, Dunn’s distinction between a “primary” and a “secondary righteousness” (not spelled out by Paul!) is paralleled by Wright’s talk of the difference between the “works of the law” which cannot justify and the “work of law” which enables even gentiles to reach toward the real intention of the law. Regrettably, says Wright, Paul never made plain this difference as precisely as we would like him to do (PFG 1109). Presupposed argumentative gaps on Paul’s side, such as these, should at least urge caution and not backhandedly be transformed to central pillars in one’s own argument. Furthermore, Wright rephrases Stendahl’s insight into the continuity between Saul of Tarsus and Paul the apostle, locating it “near the heart of the so-called ‘new perspective’”: “the same God, the same ‘religion’, the same overall narrative, but just a new task” (PFG 1420; cf. 542–46). What Dunn identifies as Israel’s misunderstanding reappears in Wright’s account – with a different, likewise debatable emphasis – as “Israel’s failure.” He speaks of “Israel’s failure (and Paul’s own earlier failure) to understand what was going on,” now that the (single) original purpose of God is unveiled (PFG 500). Her “sinfulness” relates to her “abuse of Torah as a charter of national privilege” (PFG 533), but also to her “failure to be ‘faithful’ to the vocation to be the light of the world” (PFG 927n429), indeed, “to rescue and bless the world” (PFG 839). Wright’s repeated claim concerning the designated salvific role of Israel should expect serious, well-justified criticism. John Barclay contends that Wright is unable to produce Jewish texts that support the claim that Israel was God’s means to rescue the world,117 and with respect to Paul’s reasoning Larry Hurtado maintains that for Paul it was Jesus and the gospel that produced the question of whether Israel had ‘fallen’ irreparably (Rom 11.11), and not a putative prior failure of Israel as elect people that had then required Jesus to take on Israel’s elect status single-handedly, and then convey it to the Church.118

Despite much agreement on central “New Perspective” insights, Wright takes issue with a number of Dunn’s positions. Most importantly, he seems to marvel at Dunn’s stubbornness to appreciate the benefit resulting from a narrative 116

The phrase has been coined by Christian Strecker in his report “Paulus aus einer ‘Neuen Perspektive’: Der Paradigmenwechsel in der jüngeren Paulusforschung,” Kirche und Israel 11 (1996): 3–18, 11. On the broader issue of Wright’s assessment of early Judaism, cf. James H. Charlesworth’s contribution. 117 Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (by Wright), 239. 118 Hurtado, “Review,” 363.

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hermeneutics: “To this extent my proposal here about the ‘real nature’ of the NP is not only controversial but polemical” (PFG 460n14). 3.3 The Grand Narrative – an “Idée fixe”? Dunn contends that the multilayered character of Paul’s theology could also be recast in the language of narrative theology.119 He could speak of the story of God and creation, the story of Israel, the story of Jesus, which intertwines with Paul’s own story at a decisive turning point, and finally the stories of Paul’s fellow believers, which partly interrelate with Paul’s story.120 Though Dunn allowed for the possibility to structure his account of Paul’s theology according to different stories, he obviously decided not to follow this strategy. In keeping with his goal “to grasp at and dialogue with the mature theology of Paul,” he chose to take Romans as a template to organize his account of Paul’s theology. Elsewhere, he states more clearly that he prefers to work from the actual argument of Paul’s letters rather than from a presupposed underlying narrative. In order to distinguish his approach from the narrative analysis of Richard Hays, he says: “The trouble is that neither Galatians nor Romans is a narrative but an argument.”121 On a more subjective and humorous level, he states “I confess that when I see a Greimasian diagram laid out in preparation for the analysis of a text I groan inwardly … the deeper the structures discerned, the more banal they usually seem to me” (cf. PFG 475n52, 487).122 At this point we could evaluate, for instance, the disagreement between Dunn and Wright in the “faith of/in Christ”-debate as part of their dissenting construal of the story of Jesus,123 but it seems more pertinent to point to the narrative in Wright’s theology: the exile.124 Wright voices his surprise that Dunn (and Sanders) never worked out the idea of continuing exile – even though “the texts were there to tell them they should” (PFG 140–41). In fact, Dunn thinks that Wright has exaggerated the significance of 119

Dunn, Paul, 17–18. Dunn, Paul, 18. 121 James D. G. Dunn, “Once More, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ” [1997], in The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, by Richard B. Hays. 2nd ed. Biblical Resource Series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 249–71 (270). 122 James D. G. Dunn, “The Narrative Approach to Paul: Whose Story?,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 217–30 (220). 123 Cf. PFG 836n181 (referring to Dunn, Paul, 384–85): “Dunn … claims that the ‘flow of argument’ in the key passages supports the ‘objective’ reading of pistis Christou, but it is precisely the flow of argument in Rom 3 that provides the strongest case for the ‘subjective’ reading, at least in 3.22.” 124 The authors in this volume are also divided concerning this quesiton: See Moyise and Stuhlmacher for a sceptical stance towards this interpretative figure and see White's essay for a defence of it. 120

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the motive of the “return from exile” in Paul (and in Second Temple Judaism) and in a footnote dismisses his “Israel-in-exile”-perspective as a misguided “idée fixe.”125 What remains in the end is an irreconcilable methodological antagonism: Wright speaks glowingly of his insight that narrative analysis sheds a positive flood of light – direct light, not surreptitious moonbeams – on passage after passage of tricky exegesis, and problem after problem in the theological coherence of the letters, (PFG 475)

surmising that if Dunn had integrated a narrative perspective into his hermeneutics, the unsolved problems Dunn himself concedes would immediately be illumined (PFG 475n52). Dunn, on the contrary, cautions: We should heed postmodernism’s warning against uncritical dependence on grand narratives, against the superimposition of a unitary meta-narrative on much more complex data.126

Many readers and most reviewers seem to share Dunn’s uneasiness with Wright’s idea of a “single narrative,” into which all of Paul can be fitted. 3.4 “Christological Monotheism” With a twinkle in his eye, Dunn noted in a review of Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ that he considers himself “a (slightly deviant) member of the Early High Christology Club.”127 This comment expresses both his reservations concerning an early development of a high Christology and his agreement with the thesis that Jesus-devotion originated in the circles of Jewish believers. In his interpretation of Pauline texts, Dunn shows a clear focus on passages that distinguish God and Christ. The fact that Paul addresses his thanks to God, not to Christ, that he glorifies God, not Christ, etc. should, according to Dunn, “make us hesitate before asserting that Paul ‘worshiped’ Christ.”128 When Paul attributes the lordship of God to Jesus in 1 Cor 8:5–6, the confession of God as one is compromised not in the least. Rather, “the lordship of Christ was not thought of as any usurpation or replacement of God's authority, but expressive of it.”129 Dunn stresses that in the light of the 125 Dunn, Paul, 145n90. The index of Dunn’s theology does not even feature the term “exile.” While in his Theology of Paul the actual engagement with Wright’s proposal is minimal, subsequent publications on Paul, but also on Jesus, go into greater detail (cf. the lengthy remarks in Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 473–77; see the following footnote). 126 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 477. 127 James D. G. Dunn, “When was Jesus First Worshipped? In Dialogue with Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity,” ExpTim 116 (2005): 193–96 (196). 128 Dunn, Paul, 259. 129 Dunn, Paul, 253, with a reference to Wright, Climax, 121, 128–32. Interestingly, on Rom 9:5 Dunn comments that, possibly, Paul’s christological reserve “slipped at this

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revelation of Christ Paul did have to redefine his inherited faith in God as one, but not in terms of a “complete redefinition,” which could be a threat to Jewish inherited convictions.130 In this respect, he agrees with Wright, though he remains skeptical whether this redefinition of monotheism is best expressed by Wright’s phrase “christological monotheism,”131 which regards Jesus both as Messiah and as the human embodiment of the return of God. Wright himself would probably feel (more or less) comfortable in the “High Christology Club,” even if one of the leading voices in this circle feels grossly misrepresented by his account132 and even if Wright himself comments that “the inscriptions on the coffee-mugs that were distributed among the members of the ‘Early High Christology Club’ … have themselves shown a tendency to fade over time” (PFG 647n97). Throughout his work he highlights Paul’s Jewish-style, but christologically redefined, monotheism and holds “that monotheism is indeed at the heart of Paul’s theology” (PFG 37). He explicitly follows Richard Bauckham’s proposal of a “christology of ‘divine identity,’” which includes Jesus “in the unique identity of this one God.”133 In the end, Wright deems it almost inconceivable that after the work of Hengel, Hurtado, and Bauckham one should want to “go back to the older days of Bousset and Bultmann (or even of Dunn, Casey, and Vermes)” (PFG 647).

4. Thomas Schreiner and N. T. Wright 4.1 Paul as a Preacher of God’s Saving Righteousness Thomas Schreiner’s Paul, written primarily for the needs of students, could be regarded as an evangelical counterpart to Dunn’s work. Schreiner is convinced that all thirteen letters of the Corpus Paulinum are authentic, and he point,” but that one should not hear the benediction as “a considered expression of his theology” (Paul, 257). Dunn summarizes his point as follows: “If we observe the ancient distinction between ‘worship’ and ‘veneration,’ we would have to speak of the veneration of Christ, meaning by that something short of full-scale worship” (Paul, 260). On Rom 9:5 see PFG 707–9. 130 Dunn, Paul, 293. 131 Several times in his Theology of Paul, Dunn cites Wright’s phrase “christological monotheism” (30n6, 253n100, 293n126), though he cautions: “Whether a redefinition in terms of a phrase like ‘christological monotheism’ best restates that faith [sc. faith as God in one] remains an item for the ongoing dialogue. We see tensions within the monotheism so defined” (718). 132 Hurtado complains that “Wright offers more of a caricature of my proposal than an accurate characterization of or engagement with it” (Hurtado, “Review,” 362). 133 Cf. PFG 651–52, citing Richard Bauckham. At the same time Wright is critical of attempts to identify Jewish “divine agent”-traditions as one possible background of Paul’s christology.

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also uses Acts “as a reliable historical source.”134 He chooses a somewhat lopsided metaphor to describe the various dimensions of Paul’s theology: “the foundation is God and Christ, salvation history portrays the progress being made on the house, and the theme of the house is the gospel.”135 Among the distinctive features of Schreiner’s book is not only his conservative stance but also his treatment of Pauline topics that others tend to pass over, such as mission, suffering, or gender roles. Discerning the center of Paul’s thought, Schreiner seeks to argue “inductively” from within the letters, not imposing an external rationale. He describes this center as “God’s glory in Christ,” “God’s work in Christ,”136 “the centrality of God in Christ,”137 or as “the supremacy of God in and through the Lord Jesus Christ,”138 obviously implying that these descriptions convey one and the same thing.139 Schreiner’s chapter on “God’s saving righteousness” documents a major shift in his thinking. He contends that the nature of righteousness is forensic rather than transformative. Note by contrast his argument on Rom 6:1–14 in his commentary on Romans. This point is crucial for Paul’s argument. Justification cannot be separated from sanctification … Only those who have died with Christ are righteous and thereby are enabled to conquer the mastery of sin. Many commentators have struggled with the use of δεδικαίωται [Rom 6:7] in a context in which power over sin is the theme because they invariably limit justification to being declared righteous. The use of the verb in this context, however, suggests that righteousness is more than forensic in Paul. Those who are in a right relation to God have also been dramatically changed; they have also been made righteous. This is confirmed by the language of being enslaved to righteousness (cf. 6:18, 20, 22); believers have been transformed by the Spirit (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:8–9).140

Within three years, a radical change of mind occurred, triggered by conversations with Bruce Ware and Don Carson.141 Now, Schreiner forthrightly argues “that righteousness is forensic rather than transformative.” “In other words, God declares us righteous and does not make us righteous.”142 In terms of the relationship between justification and transformation, Schreiner says: The forensic and the transformative are not merged together here [Rom 5:19], but we do see that the legal is the basis of the transformative. Paul never confines the gospel to the 134

Schreiner, Paul, 9–10, 42n8. Schreiner, Paul, 20. 136 Schreiner, Paul, 9. 137 Schreiner, Paul, 18. 138 Schreiner, Paul, 35. 139 See also the title of Schreiner’s New Testament theology: Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). 140 Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 319; cf. 63–71. 141 Schreiner, Paul, 192n2. 142 Schreiner, Paul, 205. 135

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idea that we have been declared righteous before God. To be declared righteous without living righteously would be a monstrosity and an impossibility.143

The agent enabling transformation is God’s spirit. Schreiner suggests that the gift of righteousness is the basis for the gift of the spirit, who empowers the righteous ones “to live in a new way.”144 In his Pauline theology Schreiner speaks very respectfully of Wright’s exegetical insights and notes that “in many ways I stand in agreement with Wright and have profited significantly from his scholarship.”145 Nevertheless, some major differences remain. Schreiner rejects Wright’s understanding of God’s righteousness as covenant faithfulness and, more generally, thinks that Wright “goes astray” insofar as he adopts tenets of the “New Perspective.”146 Wright’s critical dialogue with Schreiner in PFG revolves mainly around Paul’s understanding of justification, and this is also the focus of Schreiner’s lengthy review of PFG.147 4.2 Justification and Transformation According to Schreiner, Wright is “most controversial – at least for confessional and evangelical Protestants” – when it comes to justification.148 On first glance, however, there is agreement between (the later) Schreiner and Wright on the nature of justification: It is forensic, not transformative. Though acknowledging Schreiner’s change of mind, Wright criticizes several features of Schreiner’s “new” understanding, of which I highlight two: First, Schreiner should have embraced a “covenantal meaning” of justification, “which would not have undermined the ‘forensic’ one but rather enhanced it” (PFG 958n518). In his theology of Paul, Schreiner had discussed Wright’s well-known covenantal view as being “enormously popular,” but eventually dismissed it: “God’s righteousness surely fulfills his covenantal promises, but 143

Schreiner, Paul, 209. Schreiner, Paul, 208; cf. 194. 145 Schreiner, Paul, 197n16. For instance, in line with and with reference to Wright, Schreiner deems it fitting “to describe the redemption in Christ as freedom from exile since the promises in Isaiah were not completely fulfilled in his day” (230; cf. Schreiner, Romans, 108–9n7 and his defense of Wright against Mark Seifrid’s cautions). 146 Schreiner, Paul, 197, 73n1. Schreiner has also called Wright’s interpretation of 2 Cor 5:21 “strange and completely implausible” (201n22; cf. Wright’s response in PFG 881n300, and again Thomas S. Schreiner, “Paul’s Place in the Story: N. T. Wright’s Vision of Paul,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 [2014]: 1–26 [25]). 147 Cf. Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 22–26, and Wright’s rejoinder in “Right Standing,” 100. In PFG Wright explicitly mentions as other points of contention the way how Schreiner works out the “centrality of God” within Paul’s thought (PFG 626n26), his understanding of the phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ as an objective genitive (PFG 836n182), and his interpretation of Israel’s role according to Rom 11:25–27 (PFG 1244n686). 148 Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 22. 144

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it does not follow from this that we should define righteousness as covenantal faithfulness.”149 Second, another contentious issue is the role of the spirit, or more precisely, the relationship of the spirit to faith, justification, and transformation.150 Indeed, as Gordon Fee has argued, this is “one of the more complex issues” in the writings of Paul.151 While Fee, with good reason, rejects the construction of a clear logical and temporal sequence, both Wright and Schreiner assume such a sequence, though with opposing order: Schreiner suggests that “the forensic gift of righteousness becomes the basis (and the only basis) on which believers receive God’s powerful Spirit,”152 whereas Wright argues that “the spirit works … to generate faith in humans” (PFG 952) and that the same spirit “produces the radically transformed life” (PFG 957). Apart from their disagreement over the place and role of the spirit within the ordo salutis, they agree that Paul was profoundly concerned with appropriate Christian living through the power of the spirit – a concern that western protestant tradition tended to eclipse for fear of the intrusion of works-righteousness (cf. PFG 1096n223).153 This is not the place to enter into an in-depth discussion of Paul’s understanding of justification. I will leave it at a few remarks on Wright’s proposal, indicating my impression that his analysis not only fails to do justice to basic Pauline thought structures but is also inconsistent by its own presuppositions. First, the attempt to find appropriate schemes and labels for specific dimensions of Paul’s thinking runs the risk of making a “category mistake” (cf. PFG 530) and of separating what for Paul actually belongs together. A clearcut attribution of justification to the forensic realm, divorcing it from transformation, does not account for the inextricable connection of being and act in Paul. The status of righteousness and living out one’s righteousness are intertwined, the alternative between iustitia imputativa and iustitia efficax is

149 Schreiner, Paul, 197, 199; cf. “Paul’s Place,” 22–23. On this, see again PFG 928n435: “The attempt to split up ‘covenant’ and ‘righteousness’ … fails not least because of Paul’s central use of Gen. 15 where the two are inextricably intertwined.” On Paul’s silence on the covenant in Rom 4, see also Benjamin Schliesser, Abraham’s Faith in Romans 4: Paul’s Concept of Faith in Light of the History of Reception of Gen 15:6, WUNT II 224 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 419–20. 150 On these issues, cf. the contributions by Volker Rabens, Frank D. Macchia and John R. Levison. 151 Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 853. Fee goes on: “Its very complexity bears mute witness against our attempt to fit all of Paul’s words about the Spirit into our own prior categories.” 152 Schreiner, Paul, 194. Wright also disapproves of Schreiner’s using the term “gift” within the description of the forensic category of righteousness (PFG 991n616). 153 See especially Wright’s popular book N. T. Wright, Virtue Reborn (London: SPCK, 2010) (= After You Believe [San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010]).

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inadequate.154 In other words, God is both judge and creator in the process of justification, and his “creative justification” really effects something. God not only declares that someone is “in the right,” but at the same time his declaration “creates the status it confers,” as Wright correctly states (PFG 946).155 Here we encounter an immanent inconsistency in Wright’s account. He draws on speech-act theory and cites approvingly Anthony Thiselton’s insight that the declaration of justification is an “illocutionary speech-act of declaration and verdict” (PFG 945). But he obviously does not recognize the theological impact of the idea of a performative verbal pronouncement.156 Michael Gorman in particular takes him to task in this regard, asking: Does Wright’s “justification really effect anything, or does it just announce or perhaps acknowledge something?” And he summarizes the difference between Wright and himself this way: [for Wright,] justification is a divine acknowledgment of human faith and a declaration of ‘status’ – the status being ‘in’ (which hardly seems very illocutionary) – whereas for me justification is a divine act of incorporation (change of location) and transformation (change of identity). The difference is subtle but significant.157

The dispute between Schreiner and Wright regarding the work of the spirit is rooted in the ambiguity of Paul’s own reasoning (e.g., Gal 3:2–5; 5:22; 1 Cor 12:8; 13:2; 2 Cor 4:13). After considering the relevant Pauline passages, Fee concludes that faith itself, as a work of the Spirit, leads to the experienced reception of the Spirit that also comes through that same faith. Although it does not fit our logical schemes well, the Spirit is thus both the cause and the effect of faith.158

This paradoxical duplicity should not be dissolved in one or the other way for the sake of some kind of secondary logic. Schreiner (like Bultmann and 154

Cf. Schliesser, Abraham’s Faith, 337, with reference to Eberhard Jüngel, Jesus und Paulus: Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie, HUT 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1962), 46. 155 The phrase “creative justification” (“schöpferische Rechtfertigung“) has been coined by Peter Stuhlmacher to express the idea “[dass] Gott in der Rechtfertigung nicht nur (be-)urteilend, sondern ständig schaffend auf den Plan tritt” (Peter Stuhlmacher, Gerechtigkeit Gottes bei Paulus, 2nd ed., FRLANT 87 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966], 220n1). 156 On justification and speech-acts, cf. also the comments in Section 1 of Richard Bell’s contribution. 157 Gorman, “Wright about Much,” 36; cf. Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 102. 158 Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 853. Similarly already Schlatter, Glaube, 365; cf. 460n1: “Die Schwierigkeit für die Benennung entsteht hier überall aus der Begrenztheit unseres Bewusstseins, das sich Gleichzeitiges als einander folgend vorstellen muss und von den echten Kausalvermögen nur dürftige Ahnungen hat.”

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Wolter) opts for a sequence of faith/righteousness and the gift of the spirit,159 while Wright (like Schnelle) sees a direct link between the spirit’s inspiring “the first whisper of faith” and the spirit’s going to work “so that the person who has believed ‘does the work of the law’” (PFG 954).160 4.3 Human Plight and Divine Solution Schreiner places great emphasis on the human “plight”; about one tenth of his book – 50 pages out of 500 – deal with the problem “that something has gone wrong in the world.”161 It is no wonder that in his review of PFG he complains that the wrath of God and the judgment to come “does not receive enough attention” in Wright’s “exceedingly long book on Paul.”162 The brevity of his comments have consequences, for he does not give the same weight to escaping God’s wrath and the final judgment as Paul does. Getting the story right does not mean just including every bit of the story; it also means that each element in Paul’s theology is given proper weight.163

In his own theology of Paul, Schreiner goes to great lengths to explore the depth of sin, the essence of which is “the failure to honor God as God.”164 The more terrifying the abyss of sin and the ensuing wrath of God, the more glowing the “joy of salvation.”165 Obviously, highlighting the dramatic contrast between the Adamic dishonoring of God and believers’ glorifying God in Christ is at the theological heart of Schreiner, and he sees it at the heart of Paul. Therefore, he criticizes that Wright “does not linger over what sin is” and “does not focus on its refusal to honor and glorify God.”166 Wright explains that “Paul did not retain an original ‘plight’ and merely discover that Jesus was the ‘solution’ to it” (cf. Schreiner, but also Bultmann167), nor was he “plightless, confronted with a ‘solution’ for which he felt compelled to cobble together a somewhat random ‘plight’” (cf. Sanders

159

Schreiner, Paul, 194. Cf. Bultmann, Theology, 1:330; Wolter, Paulus, 80–81. Cf. Schnelle, Paulus, 570 (= Paul, 522). See further Volker Rabens, “Power from In Between: The Relational Experience of the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in Paul’s Churches,” in The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Turner, ed. I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 138–55 (142). On “doing the Torah,” cf. Gregory Tatum’s essay. 161 Schreiner, Paul, 103. The relevant chapters are called “Dishonoring God: The Violation of God’s Law” (103–25) and “Dishonoring God: The Power of Sin” (127–50). 162 Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 23. 163 Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 24. 164 Schreiner, Paul, 127. 165 Schreiner, Paul, 151. 166 Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 24. 167 Cf. Bultmann, Theology, 1:191. 160

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and Schnelle168) (PFG 752). The antithesis is a false one.169 Rather, according to Wright Paul rethought the plight of humanity and the cosmos in light of the revelation of Jesus in a revolutionary manner: It was Israel’s purpose to provide the solution to the problems of the rest of the world, but the “tumultuous apocalypse focused on the crucified Messiah” unveiled the problem in its “horrible depth” and revealed that “that the chosen people themselves were just as much part of that problem as anyone else” (PFG 772). This poses the poignant question of the validity of God’s election of Israel, of its vocation to be the light of the world. Here we find ourselves in the “heart of Paul’s theology,” and indeed in the heart of Wright’s theology of Paul: At the heart of Paul’s theology, holding together its many varied features in a single, supple, harmonious whole, we find his passionate conviction that the ancient divine solution to the world’s problems had not been changed. The creator God would indeed save the world through Abraham’s seed. Israel would indeed be the light of the world. But all this, Paul believed, had been fulfilled, and thereby redefined, in and around Israel’s Messiah and the holy spirit. (PFG 772)

The question of course remains: Where does Paul say what Wright presupposes throughout, namely that God “will save the world through Israel” (PFG 840; cf. 511, 814, 912) and that Jesus, the “faithful Israelite,” takes the place of (unfaithful) Israel so that God can remain faithful to his “covenant plan” (PFG 1470; cf. 498, 531)?170 For Wright and those who are willing to follow him, the logic works out immaculately once we understand Christos as the Messiah, Israel’s representative, Israel-in-person if you will … (a) The covenant God promises to rescue and bless the world through Israel. (b) Israel as it stands is faithless to this commission. (c) The covenant God, however, is faithful, and will provide a faithful Israelite, the ‘faithful Israelite’, the Messiah. (PFG 839)171

168

Schnelle, Paulus, 544–45 (= Paul, 502): “The Pauline doctrine of sin is thus in practice the attempt at a later and supplementary rationalization for the already firmly fixed conclusion of an argument. Also, the relation between the character of sin as a power/fate and a particular deed … results from Paul’s cognitive starting point: the magnitude of the saving act by which all human beings can be saved must correspond to the magnitude of the fate in which all human beings are enmeshed.” 169 Cf. already Wright, Climax, 260. Dunn has also offered a christologically formed redefinition of the plight-solution scheme, though with a different emphasis. He is convinced that “Paul’s gospel met real and felt needs” (Dunn, Paul, 332) and that his addressees experienced the gospel as a positive, liberating transformation, as a God-given “solution” to their human “plight” (cf. 53, 181, 225). On the other hand, Dunn holds that Paul’s theologizing has been radically reshaped in the light of his christophany and thus reflects a retrospective rationalizing of a life-changing event. Therefore, “in some sense at least Paul did reconstruct his theology ‘from solution to plight’” (181). Cf. also, on this issue, the comments by Volker Rabens. 170 On “faithfulness” as a characteristic of God, cf. the essay by Torsten Jantsch. 171 On the issue of “messiah” in general, cf. the essay by Aquila Lee.

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This logic elucidates how God decided to cure the disease from which all humans, Jews and Gentiles, were suffering (cf. PFG 770), and it also alerts to his “radically revised view of election,” which dovetails with his “radically revised view of a monotheistically framed ‘problem of evil’” (PFG 760–61). However, should the basic thesis about Christ prove labile – as insinuated not only by Schreiner – the whole intricate construction is in danger of collapsing like a house of cards.172

5. Michael Wolter and N. T. Wright 5.1 Paul as an Inventor of Christian Identity Wright’s attempt to fit together a “compelling … single picture” (PFG 44) by way of his worldview-analysis resonates with Michael Wolter’s project that seeks to construct a general picture (Gesamtbild) of Paul’s theology by way of his Sinnwelt-analysis.173 Both enterprises are profoundly hermeneutical in their design, while the results betray their widely divergent academic traditions and philosophical frames of reference. In the prologue of his work, Wolter clarifies that he does not present a theology “according” to Paul, but a theology, which is “contained” in Paul’s letter. He does not claim to have discovered a foundational system of thought at the basis of, or beyond the actual texts; still, he attempts to create an image of Paul’s theology beyond the contingencies of his letter writing (cf. PFG 45). Wolter places “Christfaith” at the center of Paul’s theology and identifies three dimensions of faith, of which the last stands in tension to the first: a soteriological, a social, and an epistemological one. Faith is more than a selective acceptance of religious truths, more than the human relationship to God or to oneself, but rather a comprehensive concept of reality (Wirklichkeitsverständnis), which constitutes the exclusive identity of the Pauline congregations and which demarcates them from their Jewish and non-Jewish context. Faith functions both as “identity marker” and as “boundary marker,” which overrides the distinction between Jews and non-Jews.174 As such, “faith imparts membership to God’s 172

Cf. Schreiner, “Paul’s Place,” 21. Chris Tilling also objects to Wright’s concept of “evil” (Tilling, “Review Essay,” 57–58), arguing that the Wrightian language of “disease” or “infection” superimposes itself on the Pauline language of “enslavement”: The matters that Paul associates with “evil” (such as sin, death, flesh, etc.) “exercise force and in so doing enslave” (57). 173 Cf. Wolter, Paulus, 2. On Wolter’s book, see the collection of essays in Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, eds., Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, Biblisch-theologische Studien 140 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 2013). 174 Wolter, Paulus, 83–84.

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people and participation in God’s salvation.”175 The social function of faith is therefore inherently related to a soteriological one. However, this determination of faith is in tension with Wolter’s assertion that faith is by its nature a cognitive entity with epistemological significance.176 Accordingly, faith not only makes ineffective the differences between ethnic groups but also defines the “fundamental difference between a Christian and non-Christian concept of reality.”177 Either one is inside the Sinnwelt of faith, or outside; the realities on both sides are completely different.178 In other words, faith considers a previously unknown reality as the reality of God, in relation to which all other concepts of reality are realities of the “flesh,” i.e., realities created by humans.179 Faith remains “abstract” (unanschaulich) – just like “love” or “sin” – for outward appearances do not testify to one’s faith.180 As the cognitive comprehension of a certain concept of reality, faith does not enclose social and ethical transformation but produces it.181 We are reminded of Bultmann, who argued for a similar cognitive character of faith, stating that the reality of “man prior to the revelation of faith” can only be seen and described from the standpoint of faith and that it does not come along with a tangible inner transformation. Others have already noted the remarkable fact that although Wright is a most prominent figure in Anglophone Pauline scholarship and in the formation of the “New Perspective,” his work has not been properly discussed in the German-speaking sphere.182 Wolter’s Pauline theology in fact is a case in 175

Wolter, Paulus, 406. Wolter, Paulus, 85–86. Wolter himself calls this evidence a “characteristic tension for the Pauline congregations.” 177 Wolter, Paulus, 126. 178 Wolter, Paulus, 92. Elsewhere Wolter argued that it is of pivotal significance to distinguish the external perspective from the internal perspective (Michael Wolter, “Τί οὖν ἐροῦµεν πρὸς ταῦτα;,” in Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, ed. Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, Biblischtheologische Studien 140 [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013], 257–87, 264–66). 179 Wolter, Paulus, 95. 180 Wolter, Paulus, 86, 263 (“man kann niemandem ansehen, ob er glaubt oder getauft ist”). 181 On a harsh critique of Wolter’s concept of faith, see Stefan Alkier, “Konstruktionen des Glaubens: Terminologische, philosophische und theologische Probleme in Michael Wolters Konzept des Glaubens als Wirklichkeitsgewissheit,” in Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, ed. Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, Biblisch-theologische Studien 140 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013), 81–113; see also Schliesser, “Paulustheologien,” 73–74. 182 Cf. Simon J. Gathercole, “Deutsche Erwiderungen auf die ‘New Perspective’: Eine anglophone Sicht,” in Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, ed. Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, Biblisch-theologische Studien 140 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013), 115–53, 134. 176

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point: Despite occasional convergences with “New Perspective” ideas, he entirely ignores Wright’s work. Vice versa, Wolter’s Pauline theology is not a key dialogue partner for Wright. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to compare certain facets of their construals. Over some aspects such as the interpretation of the syntagma πίστις Χριστοῦ they could not disagree more, while in other respects such as the place of “justification” they are close together. 5.2 Christ-Faith and Christ’s Faith In accordance with Wolter, Wright highlights the social and soteriological function of faith, showing a remarkable proclivity for the “badge”-metaphor. Whereas Jews agreed that “the ‘works of Torah’ in the sense of sabbath, circumcision and food-laws … were the badges one would wear” (PFG 186; cf. 79, 361, 929, 966, 1034), in the Pauline worldview this place is taken by πίστις: “pistis is the badge that functions … as the sign of membership in God’s people” (PFG 406), as the “one and only both necessary and sufficient badge of membership in the Abrahamic family” (PFG 363). Becoming a member of God’s people is equivalent to being declared to be “in the right,” to being justified, and this status is given on the basis of πίστις (PFG 832). However, with regard to the character and nature of this badge, there is utmost disagreement between Wolter and Wright, at the basis of which lies their divergent interpretations of πίστις Χριστοῦ. For Wright, faith is not merely a cognitive entity, and it does not simply conceptualize a reality, but rather entails displaying the “Messiah-badge” (PFG 931, 952, 991) and living out the reality it represents. The badge of faith “is defined in close relation to the Messiah” (PFG 363) and worn “on the basis of the Messiah’s own faithfulness” (PFG 991). Indeed, “Jesus’ pistis evokes the pistis of all those who believe the gospel” (PFG 1000). Paul’s understanding of πίστις includes “cross-and-resurrection-shaped belief, trust and faithfulness” (PFG 931), “‘weakness’, suffering, shame and ultimately death” (PFG 432), but also “spoken ‘faith’” (PFG 383). Faith is “what it is because it looks away from itself, and looks towards, and leans all its weight upon, the single act of the one God in the Messiah” (PFG 952). By contrast, Wolter’s sharp distinction between the external and internal (“cognitive”) affords to him an (all too) evident answer to the interpretation of the debated phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ. Only from the perspective of faith can Jesus’s death be regarded as a “loving act of faithfulness (πίστις) to God.”183 Jesus’s faithfulness is not a reality per

183

Wolter, Paulus, 77, quoting Richard B. Hays, “Πίστις and Pauline Christology: What Is at Stake?” [1997], in The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, by Richard B. Hays, 2nd ed., Biblical Resource Series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 272–97 (275).

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se but only a reality of the faith of the believers: “After all, solely ‘faith in Christ’ can say that there is something like the ‘faith of Christ.’”184 Their opposing understandings of πίστις Χριστοῦ suggests that Wolter and Wright are not only poles apart with respect to their concept of “faith” but also with respect to their concept of “Christ.” For Wolter, Paul’s proclamation of Christ is exclusively focused on his death and resurrection as a single salvific event; it is a reality of faith (Glaubenswirklichkeit), which discloses itself solely to believers, and which is only real inasmuch as faith itself ascribes to it a salvific effect.185 The idea of faith being a cognitive activity is carried to extremes here. Faith appears as the mental key player that ascribes meaning to the story of Jesus Christ, a salvific effect to Christ’s death, and existential significance to our existence “in Christ.”186 “In Christ” is the leading paradigm of the Sinnwelt of faith, the simple, general characterization of their Christian identity.187 Christ-faith – understood in cognitive terms – effects and characterizes believers’ mode of existence “in Christ” and implies nothing like a local-mystical or transformative notion.188 Beyond the reality of faith, both Christ’s life and death, and our being “in Christ” are neither invested with meaning nor comprehensible or tangible by “outsiders.” Accordingly, the “objective” data of Christ’s biography – his character, his proclamation, his deeds, his political impact – are not of interest to Wolter (nor to Wolter’s Paul) but only Christ as “abbreviation” for Paul’s missionary proclamation, to which faith attributes meaning.189 In contrast to Wolter, Wright offers a “christology” whose relevance pertains to a world beyond the reality of faith, to the real world, even to the political realm. For Wright, one does not have to be a believer to get a grasp of the implication of the Messiah’s faithfulness in relation to the story of Israel (cf. PFG 840), to perceive the political cutting-edge of Paul’s messianism, and to appreciate the transformative impact of a person being “in Christ.” In whatever way we should assess the single interpretative issues, Wolter’s cognitive-metaphorical perspective 184

Wolter, Paulus, 77. Quite boldly Wolter contends that, from a theological perspective, supporters of the subjective genitive interpretation did not think through to the end their proposal. Wolter’s certitude has been zeroed in on by Wolfgang Stegemann, “Wie wörtlich müssen wir die Worte des Apostel Paulus nehmen? Einige Überlegungen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters ‘Grundriss der Theologie des Paulus,’” in Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss, ed. Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser, Biblisch-theologische Studien 140 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013), 185–212 (187–90). 185 Wolter, Paulus, 99. “Wirklichkeitscharakter kommt der Heilswirkung des Todes Jesu darum nur zu, als ihm der Glaube eine solche Wirkung zuschreibt.” 186 Wolter, Paulus, 77, 99, 91. 187 Wolter, Paulus, 240–41. 188 Wolter, Paulus, 244. 189 Wolter, Paulus, 64.

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surely fails to do justice to the realism of Paul’s thinking, which does not confine “Christ-faith” to a new Sinnwelt but reckons with tangible transformations in the real world. As no other Pauline theology discussed, Wright’s has underlined the realism of Paul’s thought. On the other hand, both Wolter and Wright miss the profoundly relational and emotional dynamics of Pauline christology. Wolter fails to see the significance of Christ’s actual presence as a result of his cognitivist approach while Wright’s blind spot is due to his description of Paul’s “christological monotheism” as “an agenda” (PFG 734) – an overly pragmatic description given the “mystical” overtones of Paul’s “in Christ”-language.190 5.3 Justification – An “Ecclesiological Doctrine” Reading Wolter’s “Theology of Paul” against the backdrop of the German academic tradition, one is struck by the fact that he decided to place the chapter on justification almost at the end (ch. xiii), after the chapters on ecclesiology (ch. xi) and ethics (ch. xii). He is well aware that with this decision he lines up with proponents of the “New Perspective,” who typically position the doctrine of justification in the dogmatic locus of ecclesiology, not in anthropology, as does the “Lutheran Perspective.”191 As might be expected, some reviewers have commented on this critically,192 but the arrangement is obviously rooted in Wolter’s conviction that Paul’s doctrine of justification is an “ecclesiological theory”193 or – somewhat differently – a “soteriological theory” having its proper place in ecclesiology.194 Wolter finds a straightforward, rather pragmatic connection between the anthropological-soteriological and the ecclesiological dimensions of Paul’s justification theory: “Ecclesiology stands for the problem, anthropology is part of the solution, or, ecclesiology poses the question, anthropology pertains to the answer.”195 Wright and Wolter seem to agree in their placing of justification in the framework of ecclesiology. In earlier publications, Wright attempted to keep the soteriolog-

190

Cf. Tilling, “Review Essay,” 61. See also Schnelle, Paulus, 304 (= Paul, 292) on the “communion with Christ.” It “not only opens a new understanding of reality but indeed creates a new reality that equally includes the cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic dimensions of human existence.” On the issue of Paul’s “in-Christ”-language, cf. now the essay by J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V. Novenson. 191 Cf. Wolter, “Τί οὖν ἐροῦµεν,” 277–78. 192 Dieter Zeller says ironically that the chapter on justification has the unlucky number 13. He deems it problematic that justification should follow upon moral deeds (Dieter Zeller, “Gedanken zu Michael Wolters Paulusbuch,” BZ [2013]: 122–29 [122–23]). 193 Wolter, Paulus, 5. 194 Wolter, Paulus, 406. 195 Wolter, “Τί οὖν ἐροῦµεν,” 278; cf. Wolter, Paulus, 406.

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ical dimension at arm’s length from justification,196 whereas in recent years he tends to relate the two dogmatic loci in a more integrative way.197 Though he does not use the terminology, justification seems to represent for Wright an “abstract,” unanschaulich category, just as faith does for Wolter. Justification does not stand for a transformative event but for a declarative speech-act, similar to the marriage registrar’s declaration: “‘I pronounce that they are husband and wife’” (cf. PFG 945). As a consequence, there is a remarkable discrepancy in Wright’s account between the concepts of “faith” and “justification”: His stress on the tangibility of faith chafes at his rather “thin” description of justification; whereas faith means living out the reality it represents, justification remains strictly confined to the declarative realm, effecting the change of a status but not the existential realization of this new status. Wolter is quite consistent in that he associates the unanschaulich entity of faith with a non-transformative meaning of justification.198 At the other end of the spectrum we find Udo Schnelle’s thoroughly transformative understanding of “justification by faith,” perceived as a subset of Paul’s participatory soteriology.

6. Udo Schnelle and N. T. Wright 6.1 Paul as a Versatile Cross-Cultural Hermeneut Udo Schnelle’s reconstruction of Pauline theology is characterized by two closely related basic tenets, both of which surface already in his dissertation and pervade his entire work on Paul. First, Paul’s theology has been subject so significant modifications, and, second, despite such modifications, it displays thematic coherence: All of his letters are deeply shaped by the ideas of transformation and participation. The theology of Paul “cannot be delineated in the timeless form of a doctrinal system of central theological concepts”199 since historical and biographical contingencies elicited major modifications of his thought. Schnelle wants to use the term “modifications” in a neutral sense and applies it to aspects of Paul’s theology that reveal “substantial

196

Cf. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 119: “In standard Christian language, it wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about salvation as about the church.” 197 Cf. Gathercole, “Deutsche Erwiderungen,” 148n139. 198 Cf., e.g., Wolter, Paulus, 344. 199 Schnelle, Paulus, 19 (= Paul, 42). See most recently Udo Schnelle, “Gibt es eine Entwicklung in der Rechtfertigungslehre vom Galater- zum Römerbrief?,” in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. PaulGerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 289–309.

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changes … in the course of several letters.”200 Most importantly, such modifications occurred in Paul’s idea of justification: “A consistent Pauline doctrine of justification is … a fiction!”201 Schnelle does not dispute the relevance of Paul’s Damascus experience for his understanding of the law and righteousness, but maintains that the Pauline writings represent a later stage of his theology and “cannot simply be traced back … to the Damascus experience.”202 Schnelle summarizes succinctly: “The subject matter of justification and law had always been present with Paul …, but not the doctrine of justification and law as found in Galatians and Romans.”203 The latter was the result of “retrospective rationalizations.”204 Paul’s doctrine of justification, which makes its first literary appearance in Gal 2:16, represents a “new response to a new situation.”205 When his opponents radically challenged his missionary work, he took the decisive step towards an exclusive doctrine of justification. This step is more than an activation or actualization of his conversion, but rather a “really new insight and argumentation within Paul’s thought.”206 In spite of the fluidity of Paul’s thought, Schnelle affirms that he was a “significant thinker,” whose work possesses “systematic quality” and who stands in comparison with the philosophers of his time.207 The second major feature in Schnelle’s reconstruction of Paul’s theology therefore concerns the question of the heart of Paul’s theology. Schnelle is convinced that the doctrine of justification should not be elevated as the “central interpretament of Pauline theology.”208 He proposes a “hermeneutics of distinction,” which differentiates between the “abiding deep insight, the determining structure, and the inner logic” of Paul’s thinking from the “applications based on these 200

Schnelle, Paulus, 22 (= Paul, 43). This is an early statement of Schnelle made in his dissertation Gerechtigkeit und Christusgegenwart: Vorpaulinische und paulinische Tauftheologie, GTA 24, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 100. 202 Schnelle, Paulus, 90 (= Paul, 99). 203 Schnelle, Paulus, 91 (= Paul, 100). 204 Schnelle, Paulus, 421 (= Paul, 391). 205 Schnelle, Paulus, 312 (= Paul, 299). 206 Schnelle, Paulus, 312n131 (= Paul, 299n120). The new edition of Schnelle’s book features an extensive critique of Wolter’s proposal to differentiate between the context of discovery (Entdeckungszusammenhang) and the context of rationalization (Begründungszusammenhang) of Paul’s doctrine of justification (cf. Wolter, Paulus, 404). 207 Schnelle, Paulus, 25 (= Paul, 46). In the preface to the new edition, Schnelle remarks that in his revision he intended to undergird in particular the idea Paul was a veritable theological thinker. Contrast, e.g., E. P. Sanders, “Paul,” in Early Christian Thought in Its Jewish Context, ed. John M. G. Barclay and John P. M. Sweet, FS Morna Hooker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 112–29 (124): “As a religious genius, he was free of the academic requirement of systematic consistency.” 208 Schnelle, Gerechtigkeit, 165. 201

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guidelines but shaped by the actual situations.”209 Clearly, for Schnelle, the doctrine of justification is a situational application of a deeper, central truth, which he conceptualizes as the “new possibility of human existence, opened up in Jesus Christ, realized in the gift of the Holy Spirit, and to be completed at the parousia of the Lord.”210 In other words, “basis and center” of Paul’s theology is the “eschatological presence of God’s salvation in Jesus.”211 Schnelle’s appreciation of interpreters such as Wrede and Schweitzer is evident when he declares “that it is not juridical categories but the concepts of transformation and participation that always provide the foundation of Pauline thought” – even in Galatians and Romans.212 However, he does not follow Wrede’s and Schweitzer’s depreciation of the doctrine of justification and calls it a mistake.213 Christ’s resurrection marks the beginning of an allencompassing process of transformation, which “will end with the transformation of the whole creation into the glory of God.”214 God initiated the new being with Christ, and those who belong to Christ participate in this universal process and in the present and future salvation.215 Joining the reality of salvation occurs in baptism, for “in the ritual, the theological and social construction of the new person ‘in Christ’ takes place.”216 The agent creating the new being is the Holy Spirit, who seizes the entire existence of the Christians and becomes “power and principle” of their new lives.217 In the end, justification and participation stand for two soteriological models of which the first represents a late and secondary, but nevertheless appropriate, interpretation of the Christ-event. The two tenets of Schnelle’s theology of Paul provide the basis of the following comparison between Wright and Schnelle. As for an immediate dialogue between the two interpreters, it needs to be noted that in PFG Wright does refer to Schnelle on several occasions but without engaging with the specific historical and theological profile of Schnelle’s account. Schnelle, on the other hand, had ignored Wright’s work in the first edition of his Pauline theology with one notable exception relating to the anti-imperial emphasis of Paul’s thought. In the second edition, Schnelle deepens this aspect of their

209

Schnelle, Paulus, 22 (= Paul, 44) Schnelle, Gerechtigkeit, 165. 211 Schnelle, Paulus, 419 (= Paul, 389). 212 Schnelle, Paulus, 422 (= Paul, 391). Cf. the chapter “Soteriology: The Transfer Has Begun” (Paulus, 515–25 [= Paul, 478–85]) and Udo Schnelle, “Transformation und Partizipation als Grundgedanken paulinischer Theologie,” NTS 47 (2001): 58–75). 213 Cf. Schnelle, Gerechtigkeit, 102–103. 214 Schnelle, Paulus, 421 (= Paul, 390). 215 Schnelle, Paulus, 632 (= Paul, 579). 216 Schnelle, Paulus, 517 (= Paul, 479–80). 217 Schnelle, Paulus, 530 (= Paul, 490). 210

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scholarly exchange and extends it to a critical evaluation of Wright’s thesis that Paul confronted and undermined the worldview of his pagan audience. 6.2 The Systematic Quality of Paul’s Thought Wright is not interested in the question of modifications and changes in the apostle’s thinking, nor does he intend to weigh or play off against each other the various strands or themes of Paul’s theology.218 This is not least due to a preliminary hermeneutical decision: Wright calls it “the serious, scientific imperative to get in all the data” (PFG 45) and elsewhere asserts quite frankly that he is looking for a coherence “in which the different major themes, and their varied contextual expression, will be seen to offer mutual reinforcement even if not always expressed in precisely the same terminology” (PFG 617). He does not presuppose a “cheap coherence” of Paul’s thinking, but rather a “kind of harmony which often characterizes profound thinkers” (PFG 45). A musical metaphor, which resounds time and again in Wright’s work, might allow us to perceive his image of the apostle more clearly: Paul is described as a virtuoso “symphonist” (PFG 453), who at the top of his game wrote Romans, a “tightly composed symphonic whole” (PFG 1209; cf. 397) with four movements that have their own integrity but are also interconnected in a creative way (PFG 1011). Not only this particular letter but also his work as a whole calls for a “symphonic” hermeneutics rather than a reconstruction of the “sequence of separate songs” (PFG 46). More concretely, Wright argues that Paul’s theology has an “inner coherence,” which calls for an interpretation that balances potentially competitive perspectives: ‘juristic’, ‘participationist’, ‘transformational’, ‘apocalyptic’, ‘covenantal’ and ‘salvationhistorical’ – and no doubt many more besides, including those old and potentially dualistic geometrical metaphors, ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. (PFG 609)

Clearly, such a “symphonic” reading that attends to the “big picture” is contrasted by Schnelle’s more analytical, prosaic interpretation that focuses on the single tones and chords, their (broken) sequence and their (lack of) consonance. While their methodologies vary significantly, both exegetes agree that Paul was a deeply coherent thinker. There is one specific interpretative issue in Wright’s account that is repeatedly criticized by Schnelle: his assessment of Paul’s view of the Torah.219 Schnelle holds that Wright unduly reduces the Pauline critique of the Torah’s origin and function and regards the role of the Torah unqualifiedly posi-

218 When Wright discerns “the origin and development of Paul’s view of justification” (PFG 965), he does so with a quite different agenda than Schnelle. 219 On this issue, cf. also Gregory Tatum’s essay.

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tive.220 In his exegesis of Gal 3, Schnelle argues contrary to Wright that the “promises to Abraham and his authentic descendants derive directly from God, in contrast to which the law/Torah was merely a later supplement.”221 Even more poignantly, Schnelle speaks of Paul’s dismantling the Torah by assigning to it a secondary rank, both in temporal and material terms.222 6.3 The Pragmatics of the Doctrine of Justification Wright’s attention to the panoramic view of Paul’s theology keeps him from identifying a “center” to the apostle’s world of thought. Rather, he is looking for a “vantage point, a summit from which we can survey, and see the way to explore, the lesser hills and valleys, the pathways and streams, that form the complex landscape of the letters and their implicit worlds” (PFG 46). The “vantage point” that Wright has located and now wants his readers to discover is found in the assumption that Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans. (PFG 46)

If one should retain the term “center,” it would have to refer to the “story of the Messiah,” around which “Paul’s worldview, and his theology, have been rethought” (PFG 22; cf. 485, 735). As indicated in the previous paragraph, Wright offers an account that seeks to transcend the binary opposition of “participation” and “justification.” But how do the two concepts relate to each other? In agreement with Schnelle (as well as Schweitzer and Wrede), Wright holds that the juridical language of justification belonged ultimately within the participationist language of “being in Christ,” though in obvious contrast to Schnelle and his precursors he does not think that juridical language is a “pragmatic offshoot of something more fundamental” (PFG 1039), owed perhaps to the critical situation in Galatia. Throughout his account, Wright takes great pains to show that “participation” and “justification” “coexist perfectly coherently in Paul and … should not be played off against one another” (PFG 1039).

220

Schnelle regards as futile all attempts at harmonizing the various strands of Pauline statements on the Torah, naming Wright as one author, who fails to differentiate between them (Paulus, 564n100, referring to PFG 1036). 221 Schnelle (Paulus, 302n95, referring to PFG 871) holds that Wright bypasses the concrete exegetical problems of Gal 3 when he denies that Paul relativized the Torah and criticized its origin and function. 222 Schnelle, Paulus, 559. Again, Schnelle refers to Wright as an opponent to this view, since Wright – wrongly according to Schnelle – says that “the mention of angels assisting in the giving of Torah, or of its being given through a ‘mediator’ in no way suggest that Tora is less than fully God-given and God-intended” (PFG 1033).

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6.4 Empire and Philosophy In line with Wright,223 and in striking contrast to Wolter, Schnelle is quite sympathetic to the anti-imperial reading of Paul. In view of the fact that in Thessalonica the emperor attained divine status, the early Christian preaching that God has enthroned the crucified Jesus of Nazareth as king “could have seemed anti-empire to those responsible for law and order in Thessalonica.”224 The Christ-hymn in Philippians with its proclamation of the selfhumiliating Christ as the true lord (Phil 2:6–11) clearly possesses a political dimension, as does the title κύριος (2:11) and the title σωτήρ (3:20).225 When Christians used the word εὐαγγέλιον, this had “political-religious overtones and a virtually anti-imperial connotation,” and even Paul consciously drew on the political-religious semantics of the word in order to describe the salvific message of cross and resurrection.226 Notably, in the new edition of his monograph, Schnelle inserted a new chapter on “eschatology and cosmology,” including a section entitled “criticism of the Roman Empire?”227 There, he submits that in several instances Paul alludes to Roman imperial ideology, though without constructing a comprehensive and purposeful “anti-imperial” theology. Paul enacts a “theological revolution,” which is by far more foundational than any political revolution can be, for the transformation of the world has already occurred.228 According to Schnelle, Paul not only engages with imperial ideology but also, and even more thoroughly, with the philosophy of his times. Throughout his monograph, Schnelle highlights Paul’s ability to make contact with, and to enter into a discourse with contemporary philosophical concepts.229 He charges Wright with overemphasizing the differences between Paul and the philosophers and by that neglecting the openness of Paul’s theology to the existing discourses of the ancient world.230 As indicated, it is one of Schnelle’s argumentative goals to point to the intellectual achievement of the early Christian authors, particularly that of Paul. There is a marked perspectival difference in Schnelle’s and Wright’s assessments: Schnelle bases his 223

On PFG and the Roman empire, cf. the essay by Seyoon Kim. Schnelle, Paulus, 164n122 (= Paul 163n106). 225 Schnelle, Paulus, 403. 226 Schnelle, Paulus, 437 (= Paul, 406). Schnelle refers to N. T. Wright, “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire,” in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation, ed. Richard A. Horsley, FS Krister Stendahl (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 160–83. 227 Schnelle, Paulus, 655–57. 228 Schnelle, Paulus, 656, referring to PFG 1306–7: “Paul did not, however, advocate the normal sort of revolution … A different kind of revolution. A different kind of ‘subversion’ − and, Paul would have said, a more powerful and effective one.” 229 Cf., e.g., Schnelle, Paulus, 670 (= Paul, 598). Schnelle prefers the term Anschlussfähigkeit, which could be rendered by “adaptability” or “compatibility.” 230 Schnelle, Paulus, 61 and 64n126. 224

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judgment on the premises of a distinct theory of history, according to which “the formation of symbolic universes [Sinnbildungen] can only begin, become successful, and endure, if they manifest plausibility, the ability to make contact with and incorporate new concepts.”231 In this sense, the “quality of Pauline theology as meaning formation [Sinnbildung] is seen in its capacity for incorporation and combination.”232 By contrast, Wright choses a theological starting point when he explicates the epistemological transformation taking place in Paul. While he “is well aware of ideas and worldviews ‘out there’” (PFG 1357), his epistemology is formatted christologically, revolutionized by the “Messiah of Israel.” Wright argues: Ultimately, Paul does not have a quarrel with pagan philosophy, just as one does not have a quarrel with a jigsaw that is hard to do because fifty or more pieces are missing, so that those attempting the puzzle are reduced to joining together pieces that do not really belong … Paul is proclaiming Jesus himself, and discovering as he does so that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge find their key in him. (PFG 1382)233

7. Conclusion This essay pursued the goal of bringing out basic features of N. T. Wright’s Paul via a comparison with other major Pauline theologies. In the end, the combination of three propositions can be said to be unique to Wright’s (re)construction: the thesis of a thoroughly Jewish structure of Paul’s thought, the thesis of a single story of God’s people, and the thesis of a Christ-driven epistemological revolution. I will briefly explicate each of these propositions. First, Wright delivers a forceful broadside against the “old perspective,” as represented by Rudolf Bultmann and his followers, who themselves are seen as inheritors of Martin Luther. According to the “old perspective,” as portrayed by Wright, “Paul had to ditch everything about his previous worldview, theology, and culture – the old symbols, the ancient stories, the praxis, the view of God himself” (PFG 460). No, says Wright: “Paul remained stubbornly and intentionally a deeply Jewish thinker” (PFG 1408). Correct as this statement and major elements of his criticism may be, Wright 231

Schnelle, Paulus, 670 (= Paul, 598) (“Plausibilität, Anschlussfähigkeit und Erneuerungskraft”). 232 Schnelle, Paulus, 11 (= Paul, 35): “Die Qualität der paulinischen Theologie als Sinnbildung zeigt sich in ihrer Anschlussfähigkeit.” 233 In an earlier publication, Wright had stated forthrightly: “The direction of Paul’s message was confrontation with paganism” and his missionary program constituted in replacing the pagan worldview “with an essentially Jewish one, reworked around Jesus” (Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 79). Schnelle disagrees with this “model of opposition,” as it cannot explain the missionary success of Paul, and instead makes the case for a “model of difference and adaptation” (Schnelle, Paulus, 61).

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reinforces the contrast between “old” and “new” by a problematic and partly misleading portrayal of the “old perspective.” I have pointed out a number of critical issues above, most importantly the allegations of an anti-Jewish bias in “old perspective” representatives. Second, Wright develops his “fresh perspective” on the basis of his insight that Paul offers a revolutionary redefinition of his worldview, theology, and culture around the Messiah Jesus. As a Pharisee Paul was aware of “living in a continuous story” and of “being called to be an actor within that drama” (PFG 113). The “cataclysmic revelation” (PFG 611) that Christ has been raised effected a radical transformation of his worldview and theology, though he remained convinced that there is a “single divine plan” (PFG 499), a “single story of the chosen people” (PFG 1017). The manner of how Wright has this Israel-story unfold distinguishes him markedly from the other Pauline theologies discussed; as we have seen, the “chapters” of this story are controversial without exception: 1) The covenant God has promised to Abraham not only to bless, but to save and rescue the world through Israel (PFG 504, 839–40); 2) Israel failed and was faithless to its commission to be the “light of the world” (PFG 564, 771, 927n429, 1049); 3) The “direct corollary” of Israel’s failure is the exile (PFG 503), a symbol of Israel’s own partaking in the darkness: “Israel, too, is in Adam” (PFG 895); 4) God, however, is faithful to his plan, as he provides “a faithful Israelite, the ‘faithful Israelite’, the Messiah” (PFG 839), an “Israel-in-person” (PFG 512, 521, 842) as “Israel’s substitute” (PFG 1182); 5) The Messiah is faithful to the God by his “obedience unto death; the faithful obedience which Israel should have offered but did not” (PFG 910); 6) Through his πίστις, he both accomplished the divine purpose and completed Israel’s vocation, bringing “rescue and restoration to the human race” (PFG 521); 7) Human πίστις, in turn, is evoked by Jesus’s πίστις; it is the “one and only both necessary and sufficient badge of membership in the Abrahamic family” (PFG 363); 8) Finally, the end and goal of Israel’s story “does not have to do with the abolition of the universe of space, time and matter, or the escape of humans from such a wreckage, but with its consummation” (PFG 163). As has been seen, Wright’s re-reading and retelling of God’s single story in the light of the event of the Messiah is of compelling intrinsic cogency, but leaves much room for further discussion due to its “narratological positivism.” Third, now that the plan of God has finally come to fruition, it is time to bringing the mind into line with the present age. A Messiah-shaped, christological way of thinking reshapes human striving after wisdom and redefines Israel’s hope for salvation. To the philosophers Paul says: Put Christ “in the middle of the picture … and all your aspirations after wisdom and right living will fit together at last” (PFG 1382). To the Jews Paul says: Put Christ “in the middle of … history” and see that you will be compelled to evaluate afresh “more or less everything else … ‘Look! The right time is now! Look! The

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day of salvation is here!’” (PFG 1061–62). Hence, Paul did not “ditch” his former Jewish beliefs, but “redefined” (or “reshaped,” “reworked,” “rethought”) them in a “revolutionary” (or “radical,” “fresh”) manner around the crucified Messiah: second-Temple monotheism (PFG 37, 702, 773, 1045), election (PFG 760–61, 899), eschatology (PFG 1094, 1258, 1306), the inherited stories and the single, larger story (PFG 114), the people of God (PFG 375, 760, 1027), the kingdom of God (PFG 627), Torah (PFG 1263, 1464), mysticism (PFG 415), to name but the most important. His redefined Jewish worldview does not seek to adapt to, but rather challenges “the world of ancient paganism” as a whole (PFG 21), including specific socio-cultural norms (PFG 9) and pagan “logic,” “physics,” “ethic,” “politics,” and “religion” in particular (PFG 1382). At the basis of all this is a renewed mind, a transformed act of knowing, an “epistemological revolution” (PFG 1355–56). Highlighting the revolutionary transformation of Paul’s entire worldview in one word: his “worldview-redefinition” (PFG 369) is at the core of Wright’s enterprise and reveals a remarkably pragmatic epistemology in regard to the Christ-event. Paul and the Faithfulness of God is not a µέγα βιβλίον in Callimachus’s sense, but indeed a magnum opus, which will benefit all who engage with it. It is not a modest book, and its author is not modest either. Attempting to write a comprehensive account of “Christian Origins and the Question of God,” of which PFG is the fourth volume, demonstrates courage, confidence, and ambition. At the end of this eminent stage of the grand journey he declares that now his “sketch of Paul’s theology is complete” (PFG 1258), a statement emblematic for the scholarly habitus of this grandseigneur of New Testament studies. In times when virtually every day a new monograph or article on a particular issue of Paul’s theology sees the light of day (cf. PFG xxi), it is of inestimable value that from time to time seasoned scholars offer a synthesis, their “big picture” on the inventor of “Christian theology” (cf. PFG xvi). Wright wanted to write his work on Paul for forty years.234 We are grateful for his patience and eager to observe the reception of his mature work in the forty and more years to come.235

234

Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul,” 60 (Bockmuehl refers to a personal communication on 11 May 2013; cf. PFG xix). In 1973 Wright was 25 years old! 235 At a conference in Fribourg on N. T. Wright’s theology of Paul, Ulrich Luz stated: “I suppose that in fifty years one will speak of your overall view on Paul just as in our days one is appealing to Bultmann and Schweitzer” (11 June 2014; I am grateful to Ulrich Luz for making available to me the manuscript of his lecture).

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Bibliography Albright, William F. “Bultmann’s History and Eschatology.” JBL 77 (1958): 244–48. Alkier, Stefan. “Konstruktionen des Glaubens: Terminologische, philosophische und theologische Probleme in Michael Wolters Konzept des Glaubens als Wirklichkeitsgewissheit.” Pages 81–113 in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss. Edited by Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser. Biblisch-theologische Studien 140. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013. Barclay, John M. G. “Humanity under Faith.” Pages 79–99 and 290–95 in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. –. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. SJT 68 (2015): 235–43. Barth, Karl. Der Römerbrief: Zweite Fassung 1922. Gesamtausgabe II. Akademische Werke 47. Edited by Cornelis van der Kooi and Katja Tolstaja. Zürich: TVZ, 2010. –. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Becker, Jürgen. Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles. Translated by O. C. Dean Jr. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993. Bird, Michael F. The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007. Bockmuehl, Markus. “Wright’s Paul and the Cloud of (Other) Witnesses.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 59–69. Bousset, Wilhelm. “Paulus, Apostel.” RGG, 1st ed., 4:1276–1309. Bultmann, Rudolf. “Das Problem der Ethik bei Paulus” [1924]. Pages 36–54 in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments. Edited by Erich Dinkler. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967. –. “Die Bedeutung der Eschatologie für die Religion des Neuen Testaments.” ZTK 27 (1917): 76–87. –. History and Eschatology. The Gifford Lectures 1955. Edinburgh: University Press, 1957. –. “History and Eschatology in the New Testament.” NTS 1 (1954/1955): 5–16. –. “Paulus, Apostel.” RGG, 2nd ed., 4:1019–45. –. Theology of the New Testament. Translated by Kendrick Grobel. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1951–1955. –. “The Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul.” Pages 220–46 in vol. 1 of Faith and Understanding. Edited by Robert W. Funk. Translated by Louise Pettibone Smith. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Byassee, Jason. “Surprised by N. T. Wright.” Christianity Today 58.3 (2014): 36 Cranfield, C. E. B. “‘The Works of the Law’ in the Epistle to the Romans” [1991]. Pages 1–14 in On Romans: And Other New Testament Essays. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. Deissmann, G. Adolf. St. Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History. Translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan. New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912. Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. –. “Once More, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ” [1997]. Pages 249–71 in The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, by Richard B. Hays. 2nd ed. Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. –. “Rejoicing in Dialogue: A Response to Lee Keck,” SJT 53 (2000): 391–93.

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–. “The Narrative Approach to Paul: Whose Story?.” Pages 217–230 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. –. “The New Perspective on Paul” [1983]. Pages 89–119 in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays. WUNT 185. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. –. “The New Perspective on Paul: Whence, what, whither?.” Pages 1–88 in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays. WUNT 185. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. –. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. –. “When was Jesus First Worshipped? In Dialogue with Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.” ExpTim 116 (2005): 193–96. Fee, Gordon D. God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994. Fredriksen, Paula. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. CBQ 77 (2015): 387–91. Gathercole, Simon J. “Deutsche Erwiderungen auf die ‘New Perspective’: Eine anglophone Sicht.” Pages 115–53 in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss. Edited by Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser. Biblisch-theologische Studien 140. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013. –. Where Is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1–5. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. “The Character of God’s Faithfulness: A Response to N. T. Wright,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 71–79. Gorman, Michael J. Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. –. “Wright about Much, but Questions about Justification: A Review of N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 27–36. Hammann, Konrad. Rudolf Bultmann: Eine Biographie. 2nd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Hays, Richard B. “Humanity Prior to the Revelation of Faith.” Pages 61–77 and 288–90 in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. –. The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11. 2nd ed. Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. –. “Πίστις and Pauline Christology: What Is at Stake?” [1997]. Pages 272–97 in The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, by Richard B. Hays. 2nd ed. Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Heilig, Christoph. “The New Perspective on Peter: How the Philosophy of Historiography can Help in Understanding Earliest Christianity.” In Christian Origins and the Establishment of the Early Jesus Movement. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts. Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture 4. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Hurtado, Larry W. “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65. Jüngel, Eberhard. Jesus und Paulus: Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie. HUT 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1962. Keck, Leander E. Review of The Theology of Paul the Apostle, by James D. G. Dunn. SJT 53 (2000): 380–89. Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976.

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Klein, Günter. Review of Geschichte und Eschatologie, by Rudolph Bultmann. ZGK 71 (1960): 177 Landmesser, Christof. “Rudolf Bultmann als Paulusinterpret.” ZTK 110 (2013): 1–21 Moltmann, Jürgen.“Sein Name ist Gerechtigkeit”: Neue Beiträge zur christlichen Gotteslehre. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2008. Neill, Stephen, and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986. 2nd rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Perrin, Nicholas and Richard B. Hays, eds. Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright. London: SPCK, 2011. Rabens, Volker. “Power from In Between: The Relational Experience of the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in Paul’s Churches.” Pages 138–55 in The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Turner. Edited by I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. Sanders, E. P. “Paul.” Pages 112–29 in Early Christian Thought in Its Jewish Context. Edited by John M .G. Barclay and John P. M. Sweet. FS Morna Hooker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. –. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. London: SPCK, 1977. Schlatter, Adolf. Der Glaube im Neuen Testament. 6th ed. Stuttgart: Calwer, 1982. Schliesser, Benjamin. Abraham’s Faith in Romans 4: Paul’s Concept of Faith in Light of the History of Reception of Gen 15:6. WUNT II 224. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. –. “Paulustheologien im Vergleich: Eine kritische Zusammenschau neuerer Entwürfe zur paulinischen Theologie.” Pages 1–80 in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss. Edited by Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser. Biblisch-theologische Studien 140. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013. Schnelle, Udo. Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology. Translated by M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. –. “Gibt es eine Entwicklung in der Rechtfertigungslehre vom Galater- zum Römerbrief?.” Pages 289–309 in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag. Edited by Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. –. Gerechtigkeit und Christusgegenwart: Vorpaulinische und paulinische Tauftheologie. Göttinger theologische Arbeiten 24. 2nd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. –. “Neutestamentliche Theologie als Sinnbildung.” Pages 135–45 in Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft: Autobiographische Essays aus der Evangelischen Theologie. UniTaschenbücher 2475. Edited by Eve-Marie Becker. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. –. Paulus: Leben und Denken. 2nd ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. –. “Transformation und Partizipation als Grundgedanken paulinischer Theologie.” NTS 47 (2001): 58–75. Schreiner, Thomas R. New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. –. Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001. –. “Paul’s Place in the Story: N.T. Wright’s Vision of Paul.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 1–26. –. Romans. BECNT. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.

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Standhartinger Angela. “Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament in Context.” Pages 233–55 and 310–19 in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikael C. Parsons. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. Stegemann, Wolfgang. “Wie wörtlich müssen wir die Worte des Apostel Paulus nehmen? Einige Überlegungen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters ‘Grundriss der Theologie des Paulus.’” Pages 185–212 in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss. Edited by Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser. Biblisch-theologische Studien 140. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013. Strecker, Christian. “Paulus aus einer ‘Neuen Perspektive’: Der Paradigmenwechsel in der jüngeren Paulusforschung.” Kirche und Israel 11 (1996): 3–18. Stuhlmacher, Peter. Gerechtigkeit Gottes bei Paulus. 2nd ed. FRLANT 87. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966. Tilling, Chris. “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay.” Anvil 31 (2015): 45– 69. Watson, Francis. “New Directions in Pauline Theology.” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 11– 14. Westerholm, Stephen. Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Wischmeyer, Oda. “Paulusinterpretationen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine kritische relecture der ersten bis vierten Auflage der ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.’” Pages 649–85 in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag. Edited by Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Wolter, Michael. Paul: An Outline of his Theology. Translated by Robert L. Brawley. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015. –. Paulus: Ein Grundriss seiner Theologie. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011. –. “Τί οὖν ἐροῦµεν πρὸς ταῦτα;.” Pages 257–87 in Die Theologie des Paulus in der Diskussion: Reflexionen im Anschluss an Michael Wolters Grundriss. Edited by Jörg Frey and Benjamin Schliesser. Biblisch-theologische Studien 140. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013. Wright, N. T. Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates. London: SPCK, 2015. –. “Paul in Current Anglophone Scholarship” [2012]. Pages 474–88 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire.” Pages 160–83 in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium, Interpretation. Edited by Richard A. Horsley. FS Krister Stendahl. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. –. “Right Standing, Right Understanding, Wright Misunderstanding: A Response.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 87–103. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith” [1978]. Pages 3–20 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Virtue Reborn. London: SPCK, 2010. (= After You Believe. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010.) –. What Saint Paul Really Said. Oxford: Lion Books, 1997. Zeller, Dieter. “Gedanken zu Michael Wolters Paulusbuch.” BZ (2013): 122–29.

Part II Methodological Issues

N. T. Wright’s Biblical Hermeneutics Considered from a German Exegetical Perspective Oda Wischmeyer1 N. T. Wright’s volumes on Paul – Paul and the Faithfulness of God – deserve a substantial analysis and a qualified response. In particular, his biblical hermeneutics is a challenging topic, especially for a scholar who herself was educated in the German theological and hermeneutical traditions shaped mainly by Rudolf Bultmann and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Apart from the hermeneutical statements of Wayne A. Meeks and Francis B. Watson and some meaningful remarks on Paul’s interpretation of scripture and Wright’s own interpretation of Paul, Wright himself does not pay too much attention to the subject of hermeneutics, at least not in an explicit way.2 So, at first we will have to find our way to Wright’s predominantly hidden hermeneutics. The most successful way to interpret texts is to uncover and consider both positions, namely the hermeneutical position of the author and that of the author’s interpreter. Therefore, I will start by investigating my own academic hermeneutical and exegetical experiences, then move to general questions of N. T. Wright’s implicit hermeneutics and especially his implicit Pauline hermeneutics, and finally try to draw a picture of what one could label his Biblical hermeneutics.

1. Hermeneutical Approach: The German Tradition and its Impact on the Topic in Question Exactly one hundred years after the publication of Wilhelm Bousset’s great Paul article in the first edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,3 1

Translated by Wayne Coppins and Christoph Heilig. Wayne A. Meeks, “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment,” HTR 79 (1986): 176–86; Francis B. Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2004). 3 Wilhelm Bousset, “Paulus, Apostel,” RGG, 1st ed., 4:1276–1309. Cf. Oda Wischmeyer, “Paulusinterpretationen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine kritische relecture der ersten bis vierten Auflage der ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,’” in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 649–85. 2

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N. T. Wright in his two-volume work Paul and the Faithfulness of God has again struck that sonorous tone4 which one could probably last hear in Germany in the Pauline research of the history of religion school. With his exceptionally extensive and independent presentation, Wright gives new expression to the fundamental claim and the ingeniousness of Paul’s world interpretation (Weltdeutung) in its historical-political, religious, and theological dimensions. At the first reading of Wright, it is the perception of the lofty tone, the liveliness of the historical narration and methodological discussion, and finally the certainty, elegance, and joy in the details of the presentation that excites an exegete who comes from the Bultmann school. Pauline exegesis in the German language sphere has passed through the acid bath of the strict Bultmannian existentialist systematic, though accompanied by a highspirited, theologically grounded self-interpretation of the existence of the interpreters. What followed was, on the one hand, the countless stimulating exegetical detail studies of the post-Bultmann period, and, on the other side, the demanding and sometimes tantalizing readings of the hermeneutic of suspicion and the endless discussion for and against the New Perspective on Paul with its hermeneutical implications – a discussion which is still not concluded.5 But amidst all excitement and innovation, in the course of time the huge amount of scholarly production and the open question concerning the integration of individual aspects into a coherent image of Paul have come to lie like mildew upon the exegetical work.6 4

Cf. also the tone in the presentation of G. Adolf Deissmann, Licht vom Osten: Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt, 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1923). 5 Cf. the chapters by James D. G. Dunn and Peter Stuhlmacher in this volume. 6 Cf. Martin Hengel, “A Young Theological Discipline in Crisis,” in Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology: Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honour of Martin Hengel, trans. Wayne Coppins, ed. Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston, WUNT II 320 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 460–61. N. T. Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study” in Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2013), 357 judges similarly: “For such people, as well, the endless and increasingly labyrinthine productions of the Great Exegetical Factory, especially the older Germans on the one hand and the newer Americans on the other, leave them cold. The lexicographical, historical, sociological, and rhetorical mountains of secular exegesis all move, and every so often there emerges a ridiculous mouse that squeaks some vaguely religious version of a currently popular self-help slogan.” I thank the editors for the reference to the text. (This twenty-second chapter in Wright, Pauline Perspectives was published originally, in slightly shorter form, as “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture,” in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008], 59–72.) I share the feeling of the “overproduction” of the exegetical literature on Paul, but I cannot fail to note that precisely exegetes like Hengel and Wright himself have contributed in different ways to this overproduction.

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Against this background the basic hermeneutical perception upon reading Wright’s work is even clearer: Wright writes today as Bousset – whom Wright mentions a few times more in passing, but with whose history of religion paradigm he is not involved – wrote a hundred years ago and as one does not write in contemporary German-language exegesis. He writes as a free master of his subject, fearless and eager to fight, somnambulistically self-confident, without analytical brakes and without a guilty conscience, under obligation to give an account to no one but “his Paul,” extraordinarily discursive with constant double reflection, on the one hand, on himself and his endeavor to present Paul in a comprehensive way, and, on the other hand, on Paul as the one who brought something new into the world, all the while being fully aware that the category “new” always raises doubts and opposition among postmodern (and classical) historians, for historians always search for continuity and analogy: But – a new way of life? One can already hear in the background, at the very suggestion of such a difference between Pliny and Paul, a whirring of cogs in the postmodern imagination … Sometimes this proposal is part of the contemporary drive to make Paul simply yet one more Hellenistic thinker and writer. He can’t, people think, be as different as all that! It must ‘really’ be all about social manipulation. (PFG 6)

This feel for the difference between what is possible in German and AngloSaxon scholarly language has hermeneutical significance, which can be formulated in the question: How should an analysis of the Wrightian hermeneutic take place from a German-language exegetical-hermeneutical perspective? This question, of course, immediately provokes the counter-question: Is a “national” analysis necessary? Exegetes will readily answer in the negative with the argument that the texts that must be interpreted are the same in Germany and Great Britain, and therefore the results should also be identical.7 Hermeneuts will judge differently. There are differences in the interpretations, and they are hermeneutically relevant. For what may apply to data, socalled historical facts, and the sphere of textual reconstruction,8 does not apply to textual interpretation. In textual interpretation, the interpreter, in addition to the author and the text, comes into play as a distinct species in the potentially infinitely large host of readers: there is no interpretation without the pre-understanding of the interpreter and his or her traditions, on the one hand, and simultaneously no critical interaction with an interpretation without a discussion of these very conditions of understanding of the interpreter and the critic, on the other hand. This gives rise to the unending chain of interpretations and hermeneutical reflections in which we ourselves stand. In the field 7

Fortunately, Wright himself does not represent this undifferentiated position. Cf. the introduction in ch. 13 where Wright portrays his first encounter with “German” hermeneutics (PFG 1320). 8 But even here there are national, denominational, and cultural preferences.

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of hermeneutics, the question of the perspective of the respective exegetical tradition is fundamental, and without a corresponding reflection an approach to Wright’s work remains hermeneutically irrelevant. Thus, there are different theological, cultural, and biographical traditions that influence the interpretation of biblical texts as well as the understanding of great theological texts from the history of Christianity, and this means positively that such traditions make interpretations possible in the first place and give them their individual meaning. For “German” ears or, more specifically, for a hermeneutical perception from the German-language exegetical tradition it is first – this deserves to be repeated once more – Wright’s tone or style that demands our full attention. It is the tone of the United Kingdom, its language and its way of thinking. Here there are “princes,”9 “the kingdom of God,” “the master,” “the Messiah,” “Caesar,” “the empire,” and “the glory.” And last but not least we read that kind of narration that reminds a German reader of Mommsen or of Churchill, but not of contemporary exegetical scholarship. It would be hermeneutically negligent to think that these terms have no other valence in the United Kingdom than in Germany in the year 2015 and that no hermeneutically relevant signals are sent here. Behind the pages of Wright we hear Handel’s music and Shakespeare’s language and we might not only be impressed by the force and energy of the presentation, but even saddened, or at least discontent, that we ourselves have lost this tone so completely and can no longer rhetorically orchestrate “grandness.” Or we react critically and regard this tone as too pious, too triumphalistic, too selfassured, not analytical enough – depending on our own academic background. Precisely these signals should be observed hermeneutically. Why this difference in the tone of the presentation? The German history of the twentieth century teaches enduring caution in relation to all lofty tones of professorial rhetoric and all academic self-confidence. The one question – namely, “Where was the great German Pauline scholarship during the National Socialist rule?” – is sufficient to destroy false romanticism, false claims, and false certainties with regard to the earlier academic glory of the German philosophical and theological university faculties. This applies in particular when the concern is with a key question of New Testament scholarship: How do we want to understand Paul? Precisely this question is virtually poisoned by the bitter history of völkisch “German” Luther interpretations, whose traces some exegetes have claimed to find also in Bultmann’s interpretation of Paul, which was regarded for a long time as magisterial:10 9

The book is dedicated (PFG vii) to Richard Hays: “A prince among exegetes.” E.g. Magnus Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2009), 69–76. In the Anglo-American exegesis there is still suspicion of a combination of Luther’s doctrine of justification, Bultmann’s existential Paul interpretation, and anti-Semitism. Cf. the influential analysis in E. P. Sand10

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Can we understand Paul at all from the German tradition? And can we, as German scholars, after the Shoah still interpret Paul? These problems stand behind many exegetical debates that are carried out with great scholarly effort, without the hermeneutical question being openly discussed in each case. Remembering the end of World War II in May 2015 should force us once more to deal with these questions most sensitively. After Rudolf Bultmann, in his perhaps not explicitly courageous,11 but certainly methodologically exemplarily clear and terminologically and materially incorruptible manner that avoids every false rhetoric, had already removed the overly great grandioseness from the Pauline interpretation of the Harnack period12 and the history of religion school and replaced the image of the religious hero with an anthropological framework, the exegetical generation of the post-war and post-National Socialism period received a possibility of engaging with Paul in a new way. Objectification in the sense of minute reconstruction of the historical, social, economic, cultural, philosophical, and religious lifeworlds (Lebenswelten), etc. replaced the “great picture.” Critical and controversial description of details replaced the theological fundamental structure. The crisis of hermeneutics after Gadamer then prohibited every form of Nachempfindung (responsive sensation) with what had been set forth in the grand pictures of the personality of Paul13 in the sense of Wilhelm Bousset, Adolf Deissmann, William Wrede, and Johannes Weiß. But the same also soon applied to the theological Einverständnis (agreement) with Bultmann’s anthropological-soteriological structure analysis of human beings and thus also of the “I” of the exegete, which my generation had, in our studies with Ernst Käsemann, Hans Conzelmann, Erich Dinkler, Günther Bornkamm, and other Bultmann students, experienced as a given presupposition of exegesis and whose emotional and intellectual power enlivened and energized our studies.

ers, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 33–59. 11 This statement on the extent to which Bultmann was “courageous” refers to the political level (cf., however, the address at the beginning of the Spring Semester on May 2, 1933: Rudolf Bultmann, “The Task of Theology in the Present Situation,” in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Schubert M. Ogden [New York: Meridian Books, 1966], 159–65; Bultmann’s advance to “demythologizing” was extremely courageous). 12 See e.g. Adolf von Harnack, Das Hohe Lied des Apostels Paulus von der Liebe (1. Kor. 13) und seine religionsgeschichtliche Bedeutung, Sitzungberichte der KöniglichPreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 7 (Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 132–64. 13 For this term cf. Walter Sparn, “Einführung in die Thematik: ‘Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus,’” in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus, ed. Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer, WUNT 187 (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck: 2005), 9–28.

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Instead, the last generation of German-language Pauline scholarship has been concerned with the scholarly honorable,14 but hermeneutically not always fruitful, parameters of true and false in the sense of ever new approximations toward the historical placement of Paul and its evaluation. And the concern is with the question of anti-Judaism and antisemitism not only with respect to individual German theologians, but also with respect to the texts of the New Testament and Paul himself. Was Paul a Judenfeind (Jew enemy)? Or, conversely, was he a Jew and nothing but a Jew, and had the German Paul scholarship not perceived Paul the Jew? And for what reasons? And, even more fundamentally, had the Christian tradition taken Judaism away from Paul? Here first Krister Stendahl and later the New Perspective on Paul (which is initially connected with Ed. P. Sanders and James D. G. Dunn, but also with N. T. Wright) opened up a debate that has deeply and enduringly changed the “German” Paul perspective (which had been shaped by Bultmann during the time of my studies) and has unsettled the relation to Paul as a whole by calling into question the fundamental line of existential theology from Paul via Augustine to Luther and Bultmann in its theological valence and moral integrity. At the same time the field of the Septuagint and early Jewish writings became a focus of attention again, decisively fuelled above all by the publications of Martin Hengel – who took the field “to fight the spirit of Marburg”15 – and his school. The historical approach to the writings of the New Testament via ancient Judaism, which the international Qumran studies had already pioneered, was expanded and with it the horizon of interpretation. The deep, indeed lethal Judaism-oblivion (Judentums-Vergessenheit) of German scholarship since the violent expulsion in the 1930s and 1940s of leading representatives of ancient history, history of art, and literature and philosophy (to name just these spheres) found its late end,16 and Paul became what he was by origin and ethnicity, namely a figure of early Judaism. But the hermeneutic bound up with this remained largely determined by the hermeneutical tool of suspicion: On the one hand, by the suspicion that Paul was not sufficiently integrated into early Judaism and was read too much from an – anachronistic – Christian and at the same time per se anti-Jewish perspective; on the other hand, by the suspicion that Paul himself at the core (however this was specified) had an anti-Jewish stance. What remained of Bultmann’s claim that Paul was the first Christian theologian? Through the debate over the New Perspective, Bultmann’s Paul interpretation was – 14

This sort of documenting scholarship that starts in the nineteenth century did not, however, hinder the catastrophic scholarly development of the German-language universities between 1933 and 1945. 15 Cf. Hengel, “Theological Discipline,” 462–63. 16 Cf. the short presentation in Oda Wischmeyer, “Die Konstruktion von Kultur im Sirachbuch,” forthcoming.

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wrongly – connected so closely with Luther (not with Melanchthon, which would have been more appropriate!) that the catchphrase of the Lutheran Perspective caused the Heidegger-influenced existentialist analysis of Bultmann and Bultmann’s own hermeneutic to recede into the background. But, as I have already mentioned, the so-called Lutheran Perspective17 stood and stands, in turn, under the suspicion of an unexplained or directly inimical relationship to Judaism.18 Since then, Lehrbücher (textbooks) that in addition to the historical framework present the theology of Paul by means of a cautious-conservative normal theological systematic have not by chance held the field in German-language Paul scholarship.19 Every personally accounted for picture of Paul that is set forth beyond the generally accepted theological basic categories stands under suspicion of one-sidedness from the outset.20 In summary, an analysis of the hermeneutic of N. T. Wright from the perspective of the German exegetical-hermeneutical tradition will first perceive the lofty language and the wide horizon, then the freedom and independence of the thinking and the forgoing of continual self-justification, further the fundamental Christian perspective in the combination of connectedness and lack of anxiety vis-à-vis the topic of Judaism, and finally the underlying certainty that one is dealing with one of the most important subjects of theology and church. Since Wright himself has actively and critically collaborated on the development of the New Perspective on Paul, he has especially great interpretative elbow room at this point. By contrast, contemporary German New Testament scholarship is given neither the hymnic tone of the concluding statement (PFG 1516–19), the stupendous rhetoric, and the sovereign treatment of the topic “Paul the Jew,” nor the un-anxious trust of having obtained in the course of a scholar’s life the freedom and right to write down one’s own reconstruction or construction without continuous justification, without a sea of footnotes, yet with constant awareness of the scholarly context of Cultural Studies and Ancient History. 17

Strongly influenced in support and opposition by Scandinavian exegetes who originated from Lutheran state churches. 18 But cf. my position statement in Wischmeyer, “Paulusinterpretationen,” 681–82; in the twentieth century Paul scholarship had long emancipated itself from Luther’s theology. 19 Bultmann’s Theologie des Neuen Testament was already a Mohr-Lehrbuch. The same applies for Udo Schnelle, Paulus: Leben und Denken, 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014); Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012); Michael Wolter, Paulus: Ein Grundriss seiner Theologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011); Michael Wolter, Paul: An Outline of his Theology, trans. Robert L. Brawley (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015). The aspects of the comprehensive contextualization, the fair presentation of different interpretative approaches, the correct description of details, and the safeguarding of results predominate. 20 The best example for this intention to avoid any interpretative one-sidedness is Friedrich W. Horn, ed., Paulus Handbuch (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). There, any overall picture of Paul is avoided, indeed, even rendered impossible.

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Now this cannot, however, mean that a new hermeneutic of suspicion is needed in relation to Wright, which asks about “right and wrong”21 like a schoolmaster and everywhere sees missing literature, lacking mastery of texts, appreciation of problems, and incorrect thematic emphases – reproaches that belong to the standard reactions to important new publications in the German exegetical literature. Instead, a critical examination of the Wrightian hermeneutic coordinates can be a welcome double exercise: for a better understanding of N. T. Wright from the German-language tradition and vice versa. And beyond this it promises a fresh view on Paul. This brings us to the end of the hermeneutical self-enlightenment of my essay, which forms the foundation for my attempt to understand Wright’s interpretation of Paul and its underlying hermeneutics.

2. Wright’s Implicit Hermeneutics What then do we mean by hermeneutics in general and by hermeneutics with reference to Paul and Wright’s Paul monograph? To what extent does a distinct hermeneutic underlie Wright’s presentation? And what does “biblical hermeneutics” mean? I begin with the question of general hermeneutics. A theoretical doctrine of understanding of its own cannot be developed in a historical monograph,22 but nonetheless there will be an implicit hermeneutic underlying it. In Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a practical, text-based hermeneutic in the form of one or multiple methods of interpretation is applied, and this means: methods that not only explain the texts of Paul in the sense of a commentary on the subject matter, but integrate them in an eigene (independent) overall interpretation of the ideational and argumentative world of Paul and his activity. Wright himself places special emphasis on his combination of exegesis and the worldview models: It is an indication of how the implicit hermeneutical spiral of my own method is supposed to work: having begun (a long time ago) with exegesis, I have been driven to worldview models to try to understand what early Christianity was all about. At every point, the aim is to be able to return to exegesis, not saying ‘well, that was an interesting diversion; now let’s get on with the real thing’, but ‘now at last we can make sense of what before was incomprehensible.’ Where, then, to start? The obvious answer is to begin with what seems the largest, framing story of all, which also happens to be the one element of narrative which is allowed even by the contemporary proponents of ‘apocalyptic’: the story of God and the world. (PFG 502; the emphasis is mine) 21

I apologize for this wordplay. For Wright’s hermeneutic, see also N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011). I refer here only to PFG. 22

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What general understanding of interpretation guides Wright in his presentation? I wish to highlight four features of Wright’s hermeneutical approach: 1) Wright always starts from the texts. 2) Wright works with the tools of Clifford Geertz in order to demonstrate the connection between Paul’s worldview and theology. 3) Wright’s own person is always in play. 4) Wright writes not in an exegetical insider or textbook language but rather argues and, first and foremost, narrates. 2.1 First, Wright always starts from the texts It belongs to the surprising and extraordinarily inspiring reading experiences to read as the opening of a monumental 1,500-page work on Paul and the Faithfulness of God a precise exegetical miniature about two short letters of the early imperial period, namely a letter of Pliny (Ep. 9.24) and Paul’s Letter to Philemon. The careful comparison leads to the following result: “Paul does not say, as Pliny does, ‘He seems genuinely penitent, so you’d better let him off.’ He says, ‘Put it on my account’” (PFG 20). And: This is what most clearly marks Paul’s letter to Philemon as breathing a different air from Pliny’s to Sabinianus. Paul’s Jewish worldview, radically reshaped around the crucified Messiah, challenges the world of ancient paganism with the concrete signs of the faithfulness of God. That is the summary both of the letter of Philemon and of the entire present book. (PFG 21)

Wright discusses this thesis under three different aspects: I take these various topics in the order they will appear in the overall structure of the present book: first worldview/mindset (the ‘mindset’ being the individual’s particular variation on the present ‘worldview’ of the community to which he or she belongs), then theology, then history. This may seem counter-intuitive to those who are used to seeing ‘history’ as the kind of preliminary work, the bedrock for everything else, but all these elements are at any case involved in a continual hermeneutical spiral, and the particular argument I wish to advance in the book as a whole begins where a preliminary historical survey leaves off (our brief study of Philemon doing duty, synecdochically and representatively, for the larger picture) and moves forwards from there with the questions we have just raised. (PFG 24)

Hermeneutically this means that Wright interprets the letters of Paul first from what he calls “mindset.” According to Wright, this individual form of general convictions and views that are shared by a community can be presented in a quadrangle of mutually influencing entities, namely story, praxis, symbols, questions.23 The last of these is especially important. With this term Wright records the opinions and ideas that represent the foundation of the 23 It is important that Wright adds two general entities to this quadrangle, namely culture and worship (PFG 35). The significance of these entities is often underestimated not only for the reconstruction of the lifeworld but also of the theology of Paul.

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symbolic and practical world of a person: “Who are we, where are we, what’s wrong, what’s the solution and what time is it?” (PFG 33). Wright points out that the mindset of the pagan inhabitants of the cities of western Asia Minor differed markedly from Paul and that a discussion of these fundamental convictions can lead to a change of people and societies. Explained with reference to the Letter to Philemon, Wright’s thesis about the possibility of change reads as follows: Paul is teaching Philemon, and indeed Onesimus … to think within the biblical narrative, to see themselves as actors within the ongoing scriptural drama: to allow their erstwhile pagan thought-forms to be transformed by a biblically based renewal of the mind.24 Here we see one of the most fundamental differences between Pliny and Paul. Pliny’s appeal, we remind ourselves, reinscribed the social dynamics already present. Paul’s subverted them. (PFG 15)

2.2 Second, Wright works with the methodological tools of Clifford Geertz in order to demonstrate the connection between Paul’s worldview and theology He writes as follows about the so-called “thick description”: ‘Thick description’, in Clifford Geertz’s now famous phrase, is what is required: a laying out of as much of the picture as possible, so that one may make connections and avoid generalizations … It is time to relocate ‘theology’. Not to marginalize it, as though the study of everything else … is ‘real’ and theology is to be dismissed as irrelevant theory. (PFG 26)

Wright also makes recourse to Wayne A. Meeks’s sociocultural hermeneutic.25 This methodological approach leads Wright to the point in his Paul interpretation that, ultimately, is decisive for him: The life of the mind was itself elevated by Paul from a secondary social activity, for those with the leisure to muse and ponder life’s tricky questions, to a primary socio-cultural activity for all the Messiah’s people … For Paul, there is no question that the praxis of the Messiah-following people created a context within which it made sense to think the revolutionary thoughts he urged his converts to think. (PFG 27)

By connecting worldview and theology Wright succeeds in two things. First, Wright succeeds in overcoming the accusation with which Paul has been (and continues to be) charged, especially in the last generation of Germanlanguage sermons, namely that he was, allegedly, unrealistic and “overly theological.” Secondly, he succeeds in presenting a new integrated Paul in24

Wright refers here to Exod 21 and Deut 15. The fact that in Philemon Paul does not quote the Scripture would probably not unsettle Wright. He assumes that a Jew always associates the topic “slave” with the liberation of Israel out of Egypt. But slavery was also part of the Jewish society and economy (see Alejandro F. Botta, “Slaves, slavery,” Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism 1132–33, lit.). 25 Meeks, “Hermeneutics,” 176–86.

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terpretation: Paul is not overly theological, elitist, and incomprehensible for the communities; rather, his theology makes it possible for community members to think theologically in the first place. He does not “think” for them and fob them off with paraenesis; rather, he lets them share in his theology and makes theological thinking part of their existence. According to Wright this is not simply democratic, but revolutionary in terms of ancient intellectual and educational history.26 Thus, Wright always combines the political-social reality of the empire and the everyday circumstances of Paul with his message and forgoes a purely theological structural analysis in favor of a double synthesis: first, of theology and history, and, secondly, of scholarly theology and ecclesial proclamation. In his words, this reads as follows: But to allow this theology to be detached from history, either in general or, in particular, from the actual historical exegesis of texts written by Paul and the other early Christians, is to alter quite radically the character of that theology itself. The present book has approached the task of this greater reconciliation from the side of history, attempting to place Paul in his actual (if complex) historical setting and offering a historical/exegetical account of his writings and especially of his newly minted ‘theology’ itself. (PFG 1517)

Wright formulates very precisely the result that he hopes to achieve for the understanding of Pauline theology on the basis of this connection (or atonement) of theology and worldview: In fact, one of the extraordinary achievements of Paul was to turn ‘theology’ into a different kind of thing from what it had been before in the world either of the Jews or of the pagans. One of the central arguments of the present book is that this was the direct result and corollary of what had happened to Paul’s worldview. Paul effectively invented ‘Christian theology’ to meet a previously unknown need, to do a job which had not, until then, been necessary. (PFG 26)

2.3 Third, Wright’s own person is always in play This may, first, be shown in a small endearing detail, and, then, described as a consistent structure. At the end of the preface – an important place after all – Wright reports that he has worked on this book for “most of my life.” This could sound boastful, or at least overly dramatic. Therefore, Wright corrects himself in a rather ironic fashion: “I did not think much about Paul between the ages of five and fifteen” (PFG xxvi) – but at the age of five he read the Letter to Philemon with his sister because it was so short and Wright could already read: “Philemon, a single page, and something like a real story. We read it together. That is where I began” (PFG xxvi). He read it from the Bible that he received as a gift from his parents on the day of the crowning of queen Elizabeth II – on the day of the birthday of his 26 Here there is a material connection with the reevaluation of the relationship between education and early Christianity, as this is developed by Udo Schnelle, “Das frühe Christentum und die Bildung,” NTS 61 (2015): 113–43.

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mother. Does this have a hermeneutical significance, or is it “only biography”? It is both: Wright narrates – the narrating is significant – an important episode from his childhood. One could recall Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. This episode shows, on the one hand, the continuity between Wright’s first encounter with the Bible and his great work on Paul, the history between Paul and N. T. Wright, and, on the other hand, the continuity of the monarchy, which has accompanied his life so far from the beginning. For him the two belong together biographically and are connected in his own action, and to this extent we have here a building block of Wright’s Paul interpretation. And the great line, the structure: Wright already begins to speak with the reader on the second page (PFG 4): “We met him in an earlier volume.”27 Contact is established. Wright maintains the communicative “we” until page 1516. And already on page 7 it is joined by the “I” of the author, which is tangible and almost addressable for the reader, and always vivid in his reflections and judgments, and especially in his narratives. Wright wants to take the reader along with him. Let us just hear the impressive beginning of ch. 12: “The Lion and the Eagle: Paul in Caesar’s Empire” (PFG 1271). Wright begins with an equally general and picturesque description of the significance that Caesar had for the activity of Paul: Every step Paul took, he walked on land ruled by Caesar. Every letter he wrote was sent to people who lived within Caesar’s domain, who paid taxes to Caesar and whose civic leaders were eager to impress on them how lucky they were to enjoy the peace and prosperity that the Caesars had brought to their region. Paul himself declared that he had long wanted to visit Rome, Caesar’s capital city; according to Acts, the way he got there was as a prisoner under guard, being looked after by Caesar’s soldiers until Caesar himself would hear his case. (PFG 1271)

Here a historical picture emerges, which may be more or less correct, but is in the first place vivid and makes clear the level on which Wright situates his Paul, namely on an equal level with Caesar. But it does not remain with the suggestion of the picture. The following sentence is surprisingly formulated as a question: “Was Caesar insignificant for Paul? Hardly. But was that ‘significance’ merely a matter of trivial outward circumstances, or of inner meaning?” (PFG 1271). And at once there begins a detailed discussion with the history of research about the question of what “Caesar” meant for Paul.28 The 27

Cf. also the account he gives of his own journey of thought with Paul (PFG xviii). However, Wright never interacts with the question of why “Caesar” is never mentioned in Paul. Philippians 4:22 mentions only “people from the imperial palace” without mentioning Caesar’s name. This attests that Paul had proximity not only to provincial governors but also to the imperial palace but not that this perspective was as important for him as for Luke: Acts 25:12. The text of Wright is magnificent and the historical text is correct. But how is it with the personal perspective of Paul? 28

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way in which Wright deals with the history of research and current discussion is always simultaneously personal and accountable to the reader, not a Lehrbuch but his own interpretation with a running record of his argumentation for the readers – in constant communication.29 2.4 Fourth, Wright does not solely write in an exegetical technical language, but he argues and narrates Are we dealing here too with a hermeneutically relevant matter? This question can be best clarified on the basis of an example from the conclusion of his book. Wright writes: The inevitable sadness and frustration of the ‘not yet’, well known to all who work in the church, is always to be balanced, in prayer and hope, with the ‘already’, the ‘now’ of the gospel. For that to happen in prayer, there must be theology; for it to happen in theology, there must be prayer. Not just any prayer, and not just any theology. At the heart of it all, shaping thought and firing devotion, there is ‘the love of God in the Messiah, Jesus our lord’ (Romans 8.39). (PFG 1518)

And then the last sentences, which refer to the doxologies in the letters of Paul: The renewed praise of Paul’s doxologies takes its place at the historically situated and theologically explosive fusion of worlds where Paul stood in the middle, between Athens and Jerusalem, between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world, between Philemon and Onesimus, between history and theology, between exegesis and the life of the church, between heaven and earth. Collection at a middle point. This is language forged and fashioned in the shape of the cross, both as the decisive apocalyptic event in which the covenant faithfulness of the creator God was unveiled once and for all and as the character shaping truth which was now carved into world history and into the hearts and lives of all those ‘in the Messiah’, all those with Messiah-faith. For Paul, prayer and theology met in his personal history, as in the once-for-all history of the crucified and risen Messiah. Paul’s ‘aims’, his apostolic vocation, modelled the faithfulness of God. Concentred and gathered. Prayer became theology, theology prayer. Something understood.30 (PFG 1519)

What we read here is part of a homily, which flows at the end into hymnic speech. This is no accident but part of Wright’s interpretation. He mirrors in his language the linguistic ductus of those sentences of Paul, which are decisive for his Paul interpretation. Wright’s language is echo and answer to the language of Paul: narrative, autobiographical, paraenetic, hymnicdoxological, exegetical in relation to the Scripture. Thus, for Wright – as for Paul in Wright’s interpretation – theology is not systematics but speaking of God in the different language forms of narrative, argumentation, theological 29

E.g. at length on PFG 1269 where he presents his plan in its development. I am grateful for J. Thomas Hewitt’s note that this last phrase is a direct allusion to the closing line of George Herbert’s poem “Prayer (I).” 30

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presentation, homily, and prayer. Correspondingly, Wright’s language is neither popular-scholarly language nor academic technical language but rather an instrument for passing on his interpretation of Paul.

3. Interpreting Paul’s Texts This leads us to the heart of the specific hermeneutical implications of Wright’s Paul interpretation. I will restrict myself to three central aspects, which viewed together make up the distinctive character of Wright’s Paul interpretation: 1) Wright starts from the unity of Pauline theology (synthesis as an Interpretationsfigur, an interpretative tool). 2) Wright understands Paul as a Jewish thinker. 3) Wright speaks throughout of the “theology” of Paul. 3.1 First, Wright starts from a unity or a center of gravity in the theology of Paul Wright attempts to describe all the aspects of the Pauline worldview, life reality, and theological thinking in their connectedness, but without taking a system as a basis like Bultmann did: The hypothesis I shall now present, as the material centre of my argument, is that there is a way of understanding Paul’s theology which does justice to the whole and the parts, to the multiple historical contexts within which Paul lived and the multiple social and ecclesial pressures and questions he faced – and, particularly, to the actual texts of the actual letters. (PFG 609)

This announcement is carried out in the different synthetic lines of interpretation. The foundation is formed by the Interpretationsfigur of the great biblical narrative, which holds everything together. I will return to this in my discussion of the biblical hermeneutic. 3.2 Second, Wright understands Paul as a Jewish thinker, who newly defines the Jewish tradition He formulates this as follows: The first move in my overall hypothesis, then, is to propose that Paul remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker … This opening (theological) move is correlated with my basic (historical; an earlier generation would have said, ‘religio-historical’) assumption about where Paul stood in relation to the thought-worlds of his day. Like many other Jewish thinkers of his and other days,31 he radically revised and rethought his Jewish tradition (in his case, the viewpoint of a Pharisee) around a fresh understanding of the divine purposes, thus gaining a fresh hermeneutical principle. In other words, I proceed on the assumption that, however we describe what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus (‘conversion’? 31

One would like to know whom Wright means here: Philo? Josephus?

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‘call’?), its effect was not that he rejected everything about his Jewish life and thought and invented a new scheme, with or without borrowed non-Jewish elements, but that he thought through and transformed his existing Jewish worldview and theology in the light of the cataclysmic revelation that the crucified Jesus had been raised from the dead. (PFG 611; the emphases are both mine)

Wright’s most important hermeneutical decision actually lies here. To understand Paul as a “Jewish thinker” is neither a given nor a historical statement but rather an interpretation. I will contrast it with just a single definition in order to highlight the fundamental significance of Wright’s interpretation. In 1992, Hans Dieter Betz writes as the opening sentence to his great Paul article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary – another of those influential lexicon articles of the twentieth century on Paul in addition to those in the four editions of the Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Paul … An early Christian apostle who was perhaps the most important and creative figure in the history of the early Church, whose formulations of Christian faith as expressed in his epistles to fledgling churches have become part of the foundation for orthodox Christian theology.32

The two interpretations – Paul as Christian apostle and as Jewish thinker – demonstrate how different the paradigms are that underlie Pauline hermeneutics and steer the exegetical work. Here it is of special significance that Wright does not merely say: “Paul was and remained a Jew,” but more pointedly: “Paul remained a Jewish thinker” – i.e. a Jewish theologian. With this Wright does not make it easy for himself in light of the fact that it is controversial whether a Jewish theology existed at all.33 Wright comments on his own Paul interpretation in connection with 1 Cor 9:19–23, esp. v. 20: “I became to the Jews as a Jew in order that I might win Jews!” In particular, he introduces an annotated dialogue with Paul about this sentence, which introduces hermeneutical differentiation into the topic “Paul the Jew”:34 ‘I became a Jew!’ Surely, Paul, we want to say, you are a Jew; you can’t become one. No, indeed; and Paul will, on reflection acknowledge the point and even use it within his argument … But his most fundamental identity is no longer found in his ethnic identity, however significant that is in itself. As in Philippians, he has looked at all that and declared it to be skybala. What then are the symbols of Paul’s own deepest identity? In Philippians 3, as we shall see presently, it is the Messiah himself. (PFG 393–94)

32

Hans D. Betz, “Paul,” ABD 5:186; the emphasis is mine. The discussion around how one should define “theology” and whether theology is not a priori a purely inner-Christian phenomenon has long been carried out with quite different results not only in connection with Jewish thinking. It is likewise controversial whether and how one can speak of a pagan or philosophical theology, for instance in Plato, Cicero, or Plutarch. Currently a corresponding debate is being carried out about “Islamic theology.” 34 Cf. also the remarks in PFG 1434–49. 33

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The Interpretationsfigur of the Jewish thinker is then concretized by Wright in connection with his reconstruction of the “theology” of early Judaism in such a way that the main elements of ancient Judaism form the unified center of gravity: “I take as the framework the three main elements of secondTemple Jewish ‘theology’, namely monotheism, election and eschatology” (PFG 610). Here, with a certain rhetorical exuberance for oneness, Wright speaks of “One God; one people of God; one future of God’s world” (PFG 179). The fact that he simultaneously speaks against understanding soteriology as the center is a result of his non-Lutheran theological tradition (PFG 611). While this may be understandable or at least a clear theological option that can be debated,35 from a hermeneutical perspective, this formation of slogans is at least fragwürdig (questionable, “question-worthy”) in the literal sense. It should be uncontroversial that εἷς θεός is a representation of both Jewish confession and Pauline theology. However, this confession is not only Jewish but also known in the religious mix of Asia Minor among non-Jewish God-fearers, about which there is a wealth of history-of-religion literature.36 In light of εἷς θεός inscriptions of Asia Minor in particular, the hermeneutical capacity of this to function as a point of contact must be emphasized. By contrast, the relevance of the other two slogans is unclear to me, for neither the question – controversially discussed in early Judaism between the socalled αἱρέσεις – of who is chosen nor the abundance of eschatological scenarios evokes the “oneness” rhetoric. And while εἷς θεός is found in Paul, it occurs in connection with a second entity of equal status, who is qualified by Paul not merely as Messiah but as creator: εἷς κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς δι᾽ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡµεῖς δι᾽ αὐτοῦ (1 Cor 8:6). At this point there arises the challenge of describing the theological significance of Christ. Wright calls this “the christological reworking of monotheism” (PFG 393) – one could, however, just as well call it also the end of ancient Jewish monotheism. But here too the concern is not primarily with “right and wrong” but with the interpretation of complex sentences that follow their own logic and initially are neither “monotheistic” nor “non-monotheistic,” neither “Jewish” nor “non-Jewish” nor “Christian,” but precisely withdraw themselves from these assignments to modern terminology. As with the topic “Paul the Jew,” a differentiated hermeneutic must again reflect first on the terms used in the exegesis and their

35 This is not the place to deliberate on what “Lutheran” theology means. But one remark is of hermeneutical importance. There is no point in commenting critically on “Lutheran Paul” without reflecting the theological tradition behind the person who comments on another tradition. The Anglo Saxon theological tradition which is different from the German Lutheran theology is as much to question as the Lutheran tradition itself. Only Selbstaufklärung on either side will lead to fresh insights. 36 Cf. Wolfgang Wischmeyer, “ΘΕΟΣ ΥΨΙΣΤΟΣ: Neues zu einer alten Debatte,” ZAC 9 (2005): 149–68.

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suitability for the description, on the one hand, and for current understanding – an issue that is always important for Wright – on the other hand. 3.3 Third, Wright speaks throughout of the theology of Paul How does he construe “theology”? From the German perspective we could also ask: Do we find in Wright a new model of interpretation after Bultmann? One must – this much has already become clear – answer this question affirmatively and stress that with Wright a New Testament scholar again understands Paul vehemently as a theologian – even if this is done explicitly against Bultmann. For Wright’s work is set up in such a way that it represents his own interpretation not only of Paul but also of what he wants to understand as “theology.”37 The “Theology of Paul after Bultmann” presents an integrated viewing together of “Paul’s world,” “Paul’s mindset,” “Paul’s theology,” and “Paul in his world,” which only in its entirety represents “the theology of Paul.” Wright writes as follows: I have argued, in particular, that a historical study of Paul and his communities, and the worldview which Paul does his best to inculcate in his communities (Part II), necessarily required that Paul would develop what we must call his theology, as a quite new sort of discipline, consisting of scripture-based, communal and prayerful reflection and teaching on God, God’s people and God’s future. Without this theology, Paul believed, the central worldview-symbol of a united and holy church would be a far-off fantasy … But to allow this theology to be detached from history, either in general or, in particular, from the actual historical exegesis of texts written by Paul and the other early Christians, is to alter quite radically the character of that theology itself. (PFG 1515–16)

Neither recourse to an existentialist philosophy (so Bultmann) nor to the formal terminological structure of Christian dogmatics (so recent Germanlanguage presentations of the “theology of Paul”) form here the background for the interpretation, but rather does the integrative overall concept of “Paul and his world,” which underlies Wright’s understanding of theology precisely on the basis of his Paul interpretation. Here we find a classic example of the hermeneutical circle, which is indispensable for every individual understanding: Wright interprets theology from the perspective of his Paul interpretation and finds in Paul this “theology” from the perspective of his integrating transsystematic approach. It is a part of hermeneutical fairness not to designate Wright’s model from the perspective of Bultmannian strict conceptuality as 37

In this respect Daniel Boyarin’s reference to Bultmann (in the endorsements for the book; PFG i) is justified. Here we find a new and fundamentally different paradigm, a counter-paradigm. The extent to which it will have resonance and how long it will survive is open. In view of the abundance and variety of current New Testament conceptions, I doubt that it is still possible at all for works experienced as magisterial as Bultmann’s Theologie des Neuen Testaments to emerge. The great length of the book could perhaps also prove problematic.

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pre-theological or simply pious or ecclesial. It is sufficient to point to the different traditions of thought and life worlds.

4. Wright and Biblical Hermeneutics Wright’s use of biblical hermeneutics can now be presented in conclusion as an essential part of, and as the actual foundation of, his Paul interpretation. The expression biblical hermeneutics encompasses various concepts, which can incorporate the canonical approach as well as less decidedly canonoriented models that work more with the model of intertextuality.38 Wright should rather be assigned to the latter model, whereby for him the concept of story, or of narrative, however, plays the decisive role in the hermeneutical sense and not only in the literary sense. That Wright ultimately understands this story as the great theological narrative of the history between God and human beings becomes clear in a sentence such as the following: Deuteronomy 27–30 … functioned for many second-Temple Jews (including, most likely, the kind of Pharisee that Paul of Tarsus had been) not merely as a type, or as the model of an abstract pattern of divine action in history, but as long-range narrative prophecy. It told a story: Israel would fail, would be disloyal to YHWH and would fall under the ‘curse’. The ultimate sanction of that ‘curse’ was exile, not as an arbitrary punishment but precisely because the covenant had always been about the land. There would come a time, however, when God would circumcise the hearts of his people so that they at last were able to fulfil Torah. That was when the great renewal would come. This is the second-Temple story, rooted in Deuteronomy, which Paul inherited. (PFG 502)

The summary at the end of the chapter on “The Plot, the Plan and the Storied Worldview” is even shorter: “I have restrained myself in particular from setting out what seems to me a strong implicit story, consistent across his writings, about the people of God in the Messiah, indwelt by the spirit” (PFG 536; the emphasis is mine). In the short study on Pliny and Paul there is already an initial pointer to this hermeneutical deep structure of the Wrightian work: The major difference between Pliny and Paul is that the heart of Paul’s argument is both a gently implicit Jewish story, the story of the exodus which we know from elsewhere to have been central in his thinking, and still more importantly, the story of the Messiah who came to reconcile humans and God, Jews and gentiles, and now slaves and masters. Paul’s worldview, and his theology, have been rethought around this centre. Hence the world of difference. (PFG 22)

38 Cf. A. Schart, “Canonical Approach,” Lexikon der Bibelhermeneutik 115; James Alfred Loader, Oda Wischmeyer, Wolfgang Wischmeyer, and Christoph Schwöbel, “Biblische Hermeneutik,” Lexikon der Bibelhermeneutik 90–95.

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Both terms, “restrained” and “gently implicit,” together are best translated with “deep structure.” This deep structure is made explicit by Wright in his chapter on “The Faithfulness of the God of Israel,” the first large chapter of his monograph, upon which everything that follows depends.39 Under the title “The Continuous Story,” Wright discusses with great clarity and precision how he reads Paul, or in other words, how he understands Paul’s “biblical hermeneutics.” According to Wright, Paul stands in the line of Pharisaic understanding of the Bible, which is less a typological understanding (Philo) but rather is narrative in character.40 This is not the place to present Wright’s very detailed reconstruction of Pharisaic worldview and Pharisaic understanding of the Bible.41 What is important, however, is to see what kind of Pauline understanding of the Bible Wright derives from this reconstruction. For Paul the Bible is: not merely a source of types, shadows, allusions, echoes, symbols, examples, role-models and other no doubt important things. It was all those, but it was much, much more. It presented itself as a single, sprawling, complex, but essentially coherent narrative, a narrative still in search of an ending. (PFG 116)

Wright distinguishes here very clearly between the allegorical-typological interpretation of the Torah by Philo and the historical-messianic understanding that he finds not only in the Pharisaically stamped early Jewish writings but above all in Josephus.42 Again we strike here not upon an exegetically correct result – the importance of τύπος for Paul’s understanding of Scripture is evident,43 and, unlike in the speeches of Acts, a narrative of Israel is lacking precisely in the letters – but on a fundamental Interpretament (tool for interpretation). Wright’s biblical hermeneutics is not affected by this absence 39 PFG 75–196. It is preceded only by the introduction with the interpretation of Pliny’s letter to Sabinianus and the letter to Philemon. 40 See PFG 114, 117, 139. Wright often refers to Deuteronomy, Psalms, Prophets, especially Daniel, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Judith, Sirach, 1–4 Maccabees, 1 Enoch 85–90, Damascus Document, and others up to Psalms of Solomon and Josephus. 41 Cf. Charlesworth’s chapter in this volume. 42 PFG Parts I and II; see esp. 116–17 with reference to the significance of Daniel. Paul quotes Daniel only once (Dan 2:46–47a in the mixed citation in 1 Cor 14:25b). For this topic see recently Florian Wilk, “‘Die Schriften’ bei Markus und Paulus,” in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer, BZNW 198 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 189– 220 (literature). Cf. especially the table on 219–20. 43 Cf. Oda Wischmeyer, “Stephen’s Speech before the Sanhedrin against the background of the Summaries of the History of Israel (Acts 7),” in History and Identity: How Israel’s Later Authors Viewed Its Earlier History, ed. Nuria C. Benages and Jan Liesen, Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2006 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 341– 55. Paul, of course, knew the content of what is narrated in the speeches of Acts, i.e. the summaries of the history of Israel. But did he preach in this way? And were these retrospectives so important to him? Cf. the question in n28 above.

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of explicit manifestations of story and narrative, which is not unknown to him. He appeals not primarily to the texts of the letters – his aforementioned nearness to the texts notwithstanding – but to the religious background of the Pharisee Paul, which connects Paul to a certain degree with Josephus. This background, and not “the Scripture,” presents – in Wright’s reconstruction – the framework for his biblical hermeneutics. Furthermore, it is clear that for Paul the historical dimension in the form of the history of Israel and the history of humanity since Adam and Abraham had fundamental significance, as texts such as Rom 5 and 1 Cor 15 or Gal 3 and 4 show. But this perception of the text can be placed in different nexuses. Wright chooses the nexus of the “Continuous Story” of God and of the Bible as “story retold” (PFG 114) and establishes in this way a framework that Paul certainly knew and within which he thought and argued. Paul, however, also had entirely different parameters for making clear the historical dimensions of his message. He reflected on time as fulfilled present and could place Jesus Christ in “the time” (Gal 4:4–5) or sketch the new history of the Christ-confessing communities, without invoking or narrating the history of Israel.44 The exceedingly emphatic sketching of the Pauline thinking in terms of the hermeneutic category of biblical narrative truncates the other possibilities of the Pauline interaction with Scripture.45 What applies for the concept of story can also be developed in relation to another concept that plays a central role and has perhaps given his Paul interpretation the decisive hermeneutical stamp, namely the Messiah title. Wright always writes of “Jesus the Messiah” (PFG 815–1042). In Paul, however, we read not Ἰησοῦς ὁ Μεσσίας,46 but Ἰησοῦς Χριστός. When Wright does not reflect this usage of Paul in an explicit and careful way he has made a hermeneutical decision, and he is very conscious of the significance of this.47 He takes up the debate on the very first page of his great Jesus-Messiah passage and enters into critical debate especially with Martin Hengel, who interprets Χριστός with reference to a non-Jewish audience as part of the double name Jesus Christ (PFG 817n128). In the framework of a hermeneutical analysis the concern cannot be with the question “name, title, or honorific,” which can

44

Cf. Oda Wischmeyer, “Konzepte von Zeit bei Paulus und im Markusevangelium,” in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer, BZNW 198 (Berlin: de Gruyter), 361–92; Eve-Marie Becker, “Die Konstruktion von ‘Geschichte’: Paulus und Markus im Vergleich,” in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, Ian J. Elmer, BZNW 198 (Berlin: de Gruyter), 393–422, especially the table on 369–70 with the corresponding lexemes. 45 Cf. Steve Moyise’s chapter in this volume. 46 Cf. John 4:25: “the Messiah, who is called the Anointed.” 47 He already claims that Χριστός and “Messiah” are equivalent in PFG xxii.

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be controversially discussed,48 but with the question of how far the title Χριστός actually evoked the Jewish Messiah concept in a non-Jewish environment – if this concept existed in this unity at all.49 In any case we must take into account the Greek semantics that included “anointed ones” also in the context of non-Jewish religious ceremonies. More important is the fact that in addition to the Χριστός-title Paul used the κύριος- and the υἱός-titles. From a hermeneutical perspective this should prohibit a Messiah-story from being a “grand narrative” of the Pauline εὐαγγέλιον. Every biblical hermeneutic is naturally concerned especially with the topic of “Scripture.” In ch. 15 Wright returns once more in detail to the topic “Paul and Scripture.”50 He enters into critical debate with F. B. Watson’s monograph Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith.51 What is at issue is above all the interpretation of Hab 2:4. The exegetical details cannot be discussed here. For the topic of biblical hermeneutics, however, a statement of Wright’s is especially important: It will come as no surprise, though, that I find Watson’s account focused far too much on scripture as ‘normative’ and far too little on scripture as ‘narrative’. When Watson speaks of scripture as ‘normative’ for Paul he regularly seems to move to abstractions: it is ‘normative saving truth’, speaking of a ‘proper relationship to God’ or an ‘ordained way to salvation’. There are times when the summaries of Paul’s message sound almost Bultmannian, which it seems is less a problem for Watson than it would be for me. (PFG 1459)

Here one could, of course, ask again whether a nearness to Bultmann must always be a problem. But that would be rather cheap polemic. Hermeneutically relevant in Wright’s statement is the question that is, in fact, closely connected with Bultmann’s portrayal of Paul: How does a Paul interpretation like that of Wright deal with the fact that Paul predominately writes in a nominal style and often conceptually, that he argues in an extremely complicated way with “Scripture,” and that he narrates only rarely and almost only in autobiographical contexts – and there in an extremely restrained manner?52 With this question I would like to conclude, for my contribution is primarily focused on the presentation of Wright’s biblical hermeneutics in PFG. However, the topic “concept (Begriff) versus narrative” is so central for every biblical hermeneutic and especially for Wright that I have to go beyond Paul and the Faithfulness of God at this point and draw on a short essay in which Wright 48

Cf. Aquila Lee’s chapter in this volume. Cf. just the qualifications in K. E. Pomykala, “Messianism,” Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism 938–42. 50 PFG 1449–72: ”Paul and Israel’s Scriptures.” 51 Francis B. Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2004). 52 Cf. Oda Wischmeyer, “Paulus als Ich-Erzähler,” in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus, ed. Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer, WUNT 187 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 88–105. See there for the relation of narrativity and argumentation in Paul. 49

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reflects on his Paul interpretation and especially on the relationship between narrative and concept, but in which he uses “doctrine” instead of “concept,” namely “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture.”53 This essay leads us to the most important hermeneutical decision of Wright, namely his pastoral-ecclesial interpretation of Pauline theology. I will compile briefly the most important ideas from this essay and comment on them critically. Firstly, Wright begins with the narrative: the canon as it stand is irreducibly narrative in form, enclosing within that of course any number of other genres, but displaying an extraordinary, because unintentional to every single individual writer and redactor involved, overall storyline of astonishing power and consistency.54

Wright speaks of a “massive narrative structure” of the canon.55 We are already familiar with this thesis. It refers to the structure of the canon between “in the beginning” of Gen 1 and the “new heaven and new earth” in Revelation. Between these lie the formulations of the new beginning in Mark 1 and John 1 and the continuity between Malachi and the coming of Jesus in Luke 1 as well as the genealogies of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. Wright himself points out that this great structure is that of the church, which put together the biblical canon, but he is simultaneously certain that Paul had sufficient insight into this great narrative, although he did not know all the parts of this narrative. This is undoubtedly correct, for Paul also looks back to Adam and ahead to an “end” of the great history of God with human beings (1 Cor 15:28) at whose culmination point the coming of Christ stands (Gal 4:4). Wright concludes: “But with Paul, we are ‘thinking Scripture’ all the way, and that means ‘thinking narrative.’”56 With this Wright has laid a foundation for his further argumentation, which is devoted to the applicative hermeneutic in the sense of an ecclesially bound Scripture hermeneutic. His actual interest is devoted to the question of how far a narrative can have doctrinal character: “How can a narrative, or more specifically this narrative, relate to the abstract questions, cast frequently in non-narratival mode, which have formed the staple diet of doctrine and dogma?”57 Secondly, the topic “concept or doctrine and narrative” comes into play here. Wright develops the attractive thesis of doctrines as portable narratives: “I want to propose that we see doctrines as being, in principle, portable nar-

53

Now, in slightly modified form, N. T. Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” in Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2013), 356–78. Cf. n6 above. 54 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 357. 55 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 358. 56 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 358. 57 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 359.

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ratives.”58 Doctrines and their terminology are cupboards or suitcases in which the great narratives are made transportable59 and stored for quick and short communication. Wright finds this back and forth between narrative and doctrine or conceptuality in Paul and describes this finding very vividly and accurately: “Part of my general point … about Paul is precisely that he is constantly doing this packing and unpacking, compressing and expanding, hinting in one place and offering a somewhat fuller statement of the same point elsewhere.”60 Thus, Wright is very conscious of the theoretical, conceptual (begrifflich) – so Bultmann would say – or doctrinal – so Wright says – quality of the language and the texts of Paul. The fact that he nevertheless uses the category of narrative so vehemently as a hermeneutical key category for the theology of Paul is explained by his deep conviction of the significance of the “story of Israel”: The thing to which the church has persistently given far too little attention (including, I believe, the classic creeds themselves) … [is] the story of Israel. It is this story that drives the whole of the New Testament, which is not surprising because it is what drove Jesus himself. When Paul says that ‘the Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures’ he does not mean that one can find a few helpful proof texts if one looks hard enough. What he means – and what we see in the great sermons in Acts, particularly chapters 7 and 13 of which many subsequent summaries are just that, summaries of the longer biblical narrative – is that the story of Israel from Abraham to the Messiah is seen as the plan of the one creator God to save the whole world. It is remarkable how difficult it is to get this across to people who are deeply embedded in a rather different story, namely one that reads simply ‘creation–sin–Jesus–salvation.’ Interestingly, of course, if you miss the ‘Israel’ stage of the story you not only become a de facto Marcionite, as many alas in both Protestant and Catholic traditions seem to be, but you also leave yourself, most likely, without an ecclesiology, or with having to construct one from scratch far too late in the narrative.61

Thus, Wright does not restrict himself to a formal understanding of what is called γραφή in Paul, but he sees behind the Pauline quotations of Scripture always the history of God with Israel and with humanity. This is certainly correct but not yet sufficiently concrete. The “story of Israel” is common to contemporary Jews of different αἱρέσεις and early Christian authors of different character. But it is at the same time in the form of Scripture the object of controversy, of interpretation, indeed of different and opposing claims to possession. Thus, Paul as well and in particular – whether on account of his Pharisaic education or a general Hellenistic education need not be discussed here – uses Scripture not only and also not primarily as the great narrative of 58

Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 359. German readers will recall here Heine’s metaphor of the Torah as portable fatherland (cf. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans Kaufmann, 13 vols. [München: Kindler, 1964], 128. 60 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 361. 61 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 363. 59

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God to which he implicitly refers in the compressed doctrine, but he actively and often polemically participates in the interpretation of the γραφή in the sense of the written Torah. And this interpretation is highly controversial between the Christ-confessing communities and the Jewish scribes as well as among different groups or heads of Christ-confessors. The best example of this is the synoptic controversy dialogues in their thematic specification and gnomic brevity and precision. Paul proceeds in a much more intellectual – the word may be permitted – and much more differentiated manner than Mark. It is sufficient to point to Gal 3 and 4: We exegetes find it difficult today to trace the complexity of the Pauline argumentation. To be sure, in this text Paul wants to retell God’s history with Israel and human beings in a compressed manner,62 but he does so by means of terms such as Scripture, law, sin, and faith in a complex polemical line of argument against another kind of understanding of the law (Gal 4:21). James 2 highlights how difficult and often probably hopeless it could be to come to an understanding about the Scripture. Paul and the author of James completely agree in the recognition of the great history of God with Abraham.63 But they draw opposing theological conclusions. A hermeneutic that is obligated to understanding and interpreting the texts of Paul will perceive precisely this textual structure and describe it as what it is, namely an equally learned and up-to-date polemical dispute over the interpretation of the Scripture of Israel in light of the present, which is characterized for Paul by the “sending of the Son of God” (Gal 4:4). Wright, of course, knows all this. But here what is at issue is the question of emphasis, and this brings us to the third point. Wright’s hermeneutic always has an eye on proclamation. He reads the letters of Paul as “Scripture” not although but precisely by placing them so consequently into their world and into the manner in which this world is reflected in the thought of Paul – into his worldview: To begin with, it means that we must constantly struggle to hear Paul within the world of his implicit, and often explicit, narratives, especially the great story that starts with Abraham … Protecting Paul from that story – the phrase is not too strong – has been a major preoccupation both of some academic exegetes who have wanted to locate him solely within a Hellenistic world and of some dogmaticians and preachers who have wanted to make sure he is relevant to, and addresses clearly, the pastoral and evangelistic issues of which they are aware.64

Here we find for the last time the hermeneutical tool of the synthesis. Wright wants to reconcile academic and pastoral “Scripture interpretation.” His actu-

62

The highest degree of compression is reached in Gal 4:4. It need not be discussed here whether and how James “answers” Paul. It is certain that the concern is with the controversial interpretation of the “righteousness of Abraham.” 64 Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 377. 63

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al goal is scriptural proclamation, which he understands as narration of the history of God with Israel and humankind. All that remains a great challenge at the level of pastoral and ecclesial practice. But I think, as well, that at the academic level we need to see far more open exchange between serious historical exegesis – not done in a corner or by bracketing out questions of meaning, doctrine, and life, but engaging with the realities of which the text speaks – and a dogmatic theology which itself remains open to being told that it has misread some of its own key texts; a dogmatic theology, in other words, which itself does not hide in a corner or bracket out questions of history, text, and original sense.65

5. Hermeneutical Prospectus The pastoral-ecclesial interpretation of the theology of Paul is, of course, legitimate and stands in a great tradition that leads in changing historical form from the ancient church via – I may be forgiven for mentioning this – Luther and in a certain way also via Bultmann down to the immediate present.66 But in order to at least indicate that a Pauline hermeneutic can lead also in another direction and to consider how open this task – necessarily – always remains, I refer to the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians. First Corinthians 13 is a text that combines nominal and verbal aspects, that makes use of Septuagint vocabulary, on the one hand, and is close to the Aristotelian emotion teaching, on the other hand, and that describes love as active subject and human characteristic and simultaneously narrates its eschatological history. With such a text, which Wright himself rightly accentuates in particular as a great ethical text,67 little is gained by referring to the Jewish thinker Paul and the story of God, the Messiah, and the end time. References to popular philosophy or Stoic ethics, let alone Plato, ultimately help us even less. What would benefit us hermeneutically – i.e., what would help us to understand why Paul wrote this text in the way in which he did, although he also could have written it in a completely different way – would be the tracing of Paul’s own voice in each particular text (of which we have not many, and therefore they are most valuable), a voice that we hear here in 1 Cor 13 without God, without the Messiah, without God’s people, and without the apocalyptic end perspective – even though all this is present in Paul’s worldview and this chapter, like all other Pauline texts, would not have emerged without this 65

Wright, “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study,” 378. It is no accident that the title of Bultmann’s collected essays is Glauben und Verstehen (i.e. “faith and understanding,” in allusion to Anselm of Canterbury). In this way the hermeneutical approach of Bultmann is deeply Christian in the sense of the selfinterpretation of existence through the message of the New Testament. 67 Wright, PFG Parts III and IV, esp. 1118–20. It is, however, not only an ethical but also an important theological text. 66

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background. I would therefore like to ask N. T. Wright how from the pen of Paul or the stylus of his secretary this particular text could have arisen, which appears to stand so obliquely to everything or, rather, which does without everything that Wright has vividly presented to us on so many pages as Paul’s religious and ethical “background” and his story? Precisely here a new hermeneutical endeavor would begin, which would aim to understand the texts of Paul in detail, without applying them ecclesially, pastorally (or via an existentialist analysis). Perhaps the British author Kenneth Grahame could help us here with his text on ἀγάπη:68 “See,” said my friend … “how this strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning? Barren acres, all! But only stoop – catch the light thwartwise – and all is a silver network of gossamer! So the fairly filaments of this strange thing underrun and link together the whole world. Yet it is not the old imperious god of the fatal bow – ἔρωι ἀνίκατε µάχαν – not that – nor even the placid respectable στοργή – but something still unnamed, perhaps more mysterious, more divine! Only one must stoop to see it, old fellow, one must stoop!”69

Bibliography Becker, Eve-Marie. “Die Konstruktion von ‘Geschichte’. Paulus und Markus im Vergleich.” Pages 393–422 in Paul and Mark. Comparative Essays Part I. Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer. BZNW 198. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014 Bousset, Wilhelm. “Paulus, Apostel.” RGG, 1st ed., 4:1276–1309. Bultmann, Rudolf. Glauben und Verstehen. Gesammelte Aufsätze. 4 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1964. –. Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Edited by O. Merk. 9th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984. –. Theology of the New Testament. 2 vols. Translated by Kendrick Grobel. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007. –. “The Task of Theology in the Present Situation.” Pages 159–65 in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann. Selected, translated, and introduced by Schubert M. Ogden. New York: Meridian Books, 1966. Collins, John J., and Daniel C. Harlow, eds. Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010. Deissmann, G. Adolf. Licht vom Osten: Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt. 4th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1923. Freedman, David N. Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Harnack, Adolf von. Das Hohe Lied des Apostels Paulus von der Liebe (1. Kor. 13) und seine religionsgeschichtliche Bedeutung. Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 7. Berlin: Reimer, 1911. 68

The term ἀγάπη is not used. Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age (New York; John Lane, 1905), 112–13. The emphasis is mine. 69

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Hengel, Martin. “A Young Theological Discipline in Crisis.” Translated by Wayne Coppins. Pages 459–71 in Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology: Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honour of Martin Hengel. Edited by Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston. WUNT II 320. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. Horn, Friedrich W., ed. Paulus Handbuch. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Meeks, Wayne A. “A Hermeneutics of Social Embodiment.” HTR 79 (1986): 176–86. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Schnelle, Udo. Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology. Translated by M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012. –. “Das frühe Christentum und die Bildung.” NTS 61 (2015): 113–43. –. Paulus: Leben und Denken. 2nd ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Sparn, Walter. “Einführung in die Thematik: ‘Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus’.” Pages 9–28 in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus. Edited by Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer. WUNT 187. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Watson, Francis B. Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Wilk, Florian. “‘Die Schriften’ bei Markus und Paulus.” Pages 189–220 in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer. BZNW 198. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Wischmeyer, Oda. “Die Konstruktion von Kultur im Sirachbuch.” Forthcoming. –. “Konzepte von Zeit bei Paulus und im Markusevangelium.” Pages 361–92 in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer. BZNW 198. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. –, ed. Lexikon der Bibelhermeneutik. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. –. “Paulus als Ich-Erzähler.” Pages 88–105 in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus. Edited by Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer. WUNT 187. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. –. “Stephen’s Speech before the Sanhedrin against the background of the Summaries of the History of Israel (Acts 7).” Pages 341–55 in History and Identity: How Israel’s Later Authors Viewed Its Earlier History. Edited by Nuria C. Benages and Jan Liesen. Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2006. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006. –. “Paulusinterpretationen im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine kritische relecture der ersten bis vierten Auflage der ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart.’” Pages 649–85 in Paulus – Werk und Wirkung: Festschrift für Andreas Lindemann zum 70. Geburtstag. Edited by Paul-Gerhard Klumbies and David S. du Toit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Wischmeyer, Wolfgang. “ΘΕΟΣ ΥΨΙΣΤΟΣ: Neues zu einer alten Debatte.” ZAC 9 (2005): 149–68. Wolter, Michael. Paul: An Outline of his Theology. Translated by R. L. Brawley. Waco: Baylor University Press. Forthcoming. –. Paulus: Ein Grundriss seiner Theologie. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011. Wright, N. T. “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture: ‘Atonement’ as a Special Study.” Pages 356–78 in Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2013). –. “Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture.” Pages 59–71 in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics. Edited by Markus Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008. –. Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. 2nd ed. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011.

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Zetterholm, Magnus. Approaches to Paul: A Student’s Guide to Recent Scholarship. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2009.

Wright’s Version of Critical Realism Andreas Losch N. T. Wright’s research project “Christian Origins and the Question of God” is characterized by its use of the method of critical realism. Now, “critical realism” is a term that has been used in connection with different epistemological positions because the term has been “constantly reinvented.”1 It is very easy to make up a term when one wants to distinguish oneself from an assumed naïve approach to reality. As has been observed earlier, the use of a distinct term does not necessarily mean the same if used by another author; the context is important. One has to track literal dependencies to evaluate whether continuity with former uses of a term is intended.2

That is to say, the term “critical realism” has proven to be equivocal, also this has rarely been noticed. This does not mean that taking such a critical realist stance cannot present a decisive advantage over rather unreflective approaches to whatever sort of reality. Nevertheless, philosophically it can probably only be a start.3 The purpose of this contribution to this compendium will be to analyze the content claims and the status of N. T. Wright’s critical realism in these regards, with a special emphasis on Paul and the Faithfulness of God, of course. Wright himself tends to relate to two sources when reiterating his understanding of critical realism: to his methodological Part II in The New Testament and the People of God,4 where he explored the concept, and to a book by Ben F. Meyer, Critical Realism and The New Testament.5 Wright informs the reader in The New Testament and the People of God that Meyer’s book appeared after he had already written a first draft of the relevant section 1

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Andreas Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” Theology and Science 7 (2009):

Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 85. To perceive it at the “forefront of philosophical reflections on theological interpretation” (Thorsten Moritz, “Critical Realism,” Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible 147) probably mainly reveals something of the status of hermeneutics in some areas of approach to scripture. 4 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992). 5 Ben F. Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 17 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989). 3

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of his methodological part.6 This may explain why two types of critical realism appear in Wright’s works: his preliminary considerations, informed by Ian G. Barbour’s type of critical realism, and the critical realism Meyer is relating to, which is Bernard Lonergan’s. The two developed independently from each other and show a different understanding of the realism involved. Our task here is, on the one hand, to disentangle these influences on Wright and, on the other hand, to analyze the sort of synthesis Wright develops, in which he obviously does not notice that the term carries a slightly different meaning in Barbour and Lonergan. Of course, there are also certain “family resemblances” between the several types of critical realism, but let us firstly have a look at them separately.

1. Barbour’s Critical Realism Ian Barbour coined the term “critical realism” in the evolving science and theology debate by introducing the term in his highly influential 1966 Issues in Science and Religion.7 Here, Barbour defines “critical realism” in such a way that it must acknowledge both the creativity of man’s mind, and the existence of patterns in events that are not created by man’s mind. Critical realism acknowledges the indirectness of reference and the realistic intent of language as used in the scientific community.8

As the parlor of “events” as constituting reality clearly shows, the basic idea is Whiteheadian – “a consciousness of ourselves as arising out of rapport, interconnection and participation in processes reaching beyond ourselves.”9 Also important for Barbour is that critical realism presents an intermediate position, avoiding the extremes of positivism, instrumentalism, and idealism.10 Ian Barbour’s idea of critical realism was picked up around 1980 by Oxford scholar Arthur Peacocke11 and some years later by his Cambridge

6

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 32n3. Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966). Actually, his first use of the term is in the opening issue of Zygon the same year; Ian G. Barbour, “Commentary on Theological Resources from the Physical Sciences,” Zygon 1 (1966): 29. 8 Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, 172. 9 Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, 171. For tracking the source of this quote, see Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 90. 10 Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 89. 11 Arthur R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures, 1978 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 21–22; Arthur R. Peacocke, Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion, The Mendenhall Lectures 1983 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 7

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colleague John Polkinghorne;12 this way, it became the dominant position in the Anglo-American science and religion debate for some decades. It may have been in this context that N. T. Wright came upon the concept.13 The different receptions of Barbour’s concept did not take place without modifications, of course,14 and so in Wright’s case as well. One should not forget, however, that critical realism in the science and religion debate was especially designed to relate just these two so diverse domains15 and that it has the touch of a scientific realism to it.16

2. Lonergan’s Critical Realism Bernard Lonergan’s early use of the term “critical realism”17 has been formative at North American Catholic universities. It is used as another description of his general method, developed in Insight18 and subsequently applied to theology.19 Also, Lonergan’s starting point is science, yet he goes “behind the procedures of natural sciences to something both more general and fundamental,” that is the transcendental method to be discerned in the procedures of the human mind.20 Lonergan’s approach is in some regards very similar to Barbour’s. Also, Lonergan presents critical realism as a middle way, to be distinguished from a naïve realist or empiricist stance and from an idealist epistemology: 12

John C. Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 22. 13 Wright refers to the Gifford Lectures of John Polkinghorne in N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996), 593–94; and also N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003), 16, 580, 605–6, 688, 716, referring to other writings of Polkinghorne. 14 Robert J. Russell, “Ian Barbour’s Methodological Breakthrough: Creating the ‘Bridge’ Betweeen Science and Theology,” in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and His Legacy, ed. Robert J. Russell, Ashgate Science and Religion Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 15 Andreas Losch, “Critical Realism: A Sustainable Bridge Between Science and Religion?,” Theology and Science 8 (2010): 393–416. 16 Actually, the terms “critical realism” and “scientific realism” sometimes have been used as if they were synonyms. Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 92–94. 17 Cf. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “Critical Realism and the Integration of the Sciences,” Lonergan Research Institute, library file 253 (1961). 18 Bernard. J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). 19 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972). 20 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 4.

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The naïve realist knows the world mediated by meaning but thinks he knows it by looking. The empiricist restricts objective knowledge to sense experience; for him, understanding and conceiving, judging and believing are merely subjective activities. The idealist insists that human knowing always includes understanding as well as sense; but he retains the empiricist’s notion of reality, and so he thinks of the world mediated by meaning as not real but ideal. Only the critical realist can acknowledge the facts of human knowing and pronounce the world mediated by meaning to be the real world; and he can do so only inasmuch as he shows that the process of experiencing, understanding, and judging is a process of self-transcendence.21

It may have been because of this similarity of Lonergan’s description to Barbour’s that John Polkinghorne integrated Lonergan’s critical realism into his understanding of the concept. 22 To apply this sort of critical realism – as does Ben Meyer – to exegesis makes, of course, much sense since Lonergan himself does so.23 Barbour, on the other hand, only uses a broad slogan to describe the impact of his critical realism on scriptural research: the Bible should be understood seriously, but not literally.24 It is probable, also, that there is one fundamental difference between Barbour’s and Lonergan’s conceptualizations of critical realism, and that is the meaning of the realist component. It appears to me that Lonergan also includes under “realism” the medieval sense of the term,25 where it relates to the reality of the universals, while Barbour’s critical realism is clearly realism in Kant’s sense, relating to the question of the existence of the temporospatial world.

21

Lonergan, Method in Theology, 238–39. John C. Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991). 23 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 153–74. 24 Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 102n46. 25 Cf. Lonergan, “Critical Realism and the Integration of the Sciences,” 25, where he relates the question of universals to the term: “there are all sorts of realists. … And they don’t mean the same thing when they are talking about anything. How do they get the different realism? Supposing you don’t pay any attention to this notion of cognitional structure. Then every activity has to be an instance of knowing, else it isn’t cognitional. When you see, that’s knowing; when you understand, that’s knowing, when you think, that’s knowing; … etc. Listen to the consequences if you suppose that thinking is knowing. You think of a universal therefore, you know the universal. Is the universal then ante rem, vel in re, vel post rem, only in the mind or is it just the flatus vocis? The medieval problem of universals comes right out of the idea that thinking is knowing. And what makes it a problem is that when you make the judgement: ‘Universals don’t exist!’” 22

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3. Wright’s Understanding of Critical Realism While Meyer’s account of Lonergan’s critical realism may resonate very well with many traits of Wright’s critical realism, I am convinced that Wright developed it at the hand of a different conceptualization and only later compared his findings with Meyer’s approach (finding it similar). To prove this thesis, let us focus now on Wright’s understanding of critical realism. In his review of the term found in PFG, he calls it “a phrase I borrowed from Meyer 1989, and use heuristically without intending a full evocation of the way it has been used as a technical term by philosophers like R. W. Sellars and A. O. Lovejoy” (PFG xviiin2). This shows his growing awareness of a more developed philosophical critical realism (of yet another type, though, unconnected to either Barbour or Lonergan26). The question that concerns us here is: Did he really borrow the term from Meyer? Or did he borrow it from Ian Barbour, and when realizing that Meyer employed the (apparently identical) term in exegetical studies, added a footnote to Meyer without recognizing the slightly divergent character of Meyer’s critical realism? This is what will be assumed here. Wright defines critical realism as a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’).27

Like Barbour (and Lonergan), Wright distinguishes his critical realism as a middle way, in this case between positivism28 or naïve realism29 and … – well, here Wright differs as he does not seem to oppose his critical realism to idealism. What is Wright’s second pole here, between which and the first pole critical realism navigates? It seems to be that this is “the much discussed contemporary phenomenon of cultural and theological relativism” as the “dark side of positivism,”30 also identified as phenomenalism.31 Regarding reading the Bible this means: 1) we find positivism among “naïve theologians, who complain that while other people have ‘presuppositions’, they simply read the text straight”; and 2) we find its “dark side” among those

26

See Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism.” Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 35. 28 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 32. 29 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 33. 30 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 33. 31 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 34–35. 27

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“who claim that, because one cannot have ‘direct access’ to the ‘facts’ about Jesus, all that we are left with is a morass of first-century fantasy.”32 Now, Wright’s answer to this situation of history “stuck between the two poles” of objective or subjective knowledge33 is the concept of story. “Knowledge … although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.”34 It takes place “when people find things that fit with the particular story or (more likely) stories to which they are accustomed to give allegiance.”35 One could think the phenomenalists and subjectivists have won, says Wright. At this crucial point, Wright evokes Ian Barbour’s portrayal of verification in the scientific process, contrasting it with a positivist approach: It is very unlikely that one could construct a good working hypothesis out of sense-data alone, and in fact no reflective thinker in any field imagines that this is the case. One needs a larger framework on which to draw, a larger set of stories about things that are likely to happen in the world. There must always be a leap, made by the imagination that has been attuned sympathetically to the subject-matter, from the (in principle) random observation of phenomena to the hypothesis of a pattern.36

Thus, in Wright’s account, stories take the place that hypotheses have in Barbour’s idea of critical realism. From here, it is understandable when Wright defends himself in PFG’s preface against critics who have accused him “of first inventing a picture, or a ‘controlling story’, and then superimposing it on the early Christian writers” (PFG xviii). This certainly is a naïve accusation, as “everyone comes to the text with pictures and controlling stories – and indeed with philosophical, theological, cultural, social and political assumptions and presuppositions.” (PFG xviii) In addition, Wright makes himself especially vulnerable because he lays these stories out for discussion. This can only be praised. Yet is he really applying “the same overall procedure as is used in the hard sciences” (PFG xviii), which is the attempt to make sense of the facts “through forming hypotheses and then testing them against the evidence” (PFG xviii)? I will come back to this in my critique. Wright is certainly right that unless we are explicit about this there is a constant danger that exegetes will simply talk past one another, labeling one another’s proposals as ‘unconvincing’ because they have not

32

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 34. PFG 1477: “To say this is not of course to revert to a naive realism, but to grapple … with the application to historical method of a properly critical realism, fully aware of the postmodern critique of all external knowledge but equally aware that to cut off that access is to collapse into a cleversounding solipsism.” 33 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 34. 34 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 35. 35 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 37. 36 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 37.

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glimpsed the larger hypotheses within which those proposals might make sense. (PFG xviii)

The realist outlook of critical realism, however, reminds us that although “all exegetes come with their own agendas and presuppositions, … this does not mean that no advances can be made” (PFG 49), a self-critical attitude provided. There remains the question “in what way do the large stories and the specific data arrive at a ‘fit’?”37 First of all, Wright clarifies his understanding of stories as something much more fundamental than usually assumed. “Human life … can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another,” which sometimes – regarding world views – exist even “at a much more fundamental level than explicitly formulated beliefs, including theological beliefs.”38 Wright also describes the plot of the specific story of the New Testament as one told by “a certain group of first-century Jews,”39 yet as it is general methodology that concerns us here I will not elaborate on this. What happens when different stories told by different groups come into contact? It may result in confirmation or confrontation. In a critical realist manner, Wright makes clear that “there is no such thing as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ proof; only the claim that the story we are now telling about the world as a whole makes more sense … than other potential or actual stories that may be on offer.”40 Criteria for such a better fit are: 1) simplicity of outline; 2) elegance in handling the details within it; 3) the inclusion of all the parts of the story; and the 4) ability of the story to make sense beyond its immediate subject-matter.41 This is Wright’s adaption of the criteria for the verification of a scientific hypothesis as laid out by Ian Barbour.42 We perceive external reality within the prior framework of a worldview, which is characterized by certain types of story.43 Wright picks up Barbour’s idea of the theory-ladeness of data as a sort of story-ladenness of objects. “We only know what objects are when we see them, at least implicitly, within events”44 made up of intelligible actions. This conversation between storytelling humans and events of a story-laden world clearly shows that there are stories on both sides of the dialog. Hence, the “distinction between objective and subjective must be abandoned as useless.”45 37

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 37. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 38. 39 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 41. 40 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 42. 41 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 42. 42 Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, 267. 43 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. 44 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43–44. 45 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 44. 38

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Wright in some way also picks up Barbour’s Whiteheadian, core idea by characterizing his critical realism as an essentially relational epistemology. “To know is to be in a relation with the known,” which means – interpreted within the Christian framework – that knowledge can be “a form of redeeming stewardship,” a form of love.46 The ‘knower’ must be open to the possibility of the ‘known’ being other than had been expected or even desired, and must be prepared to respond accordingly, not merely to observe from a distance.47

The connoisseur may find an echo of Hartshorne’s interpretation of Whitehead’s God as acting through persuasion rather than coercion here. 48 These insights lead Wright to a critical-realist account of the phenomenon of reading.49 Here, he discerns three stages of reading, viz., reader/text, text/author, and author/event. At each of these stages, the mutual interdependence of its two components has to be recognized. Such a theory of reading first “will do justice both to the fact that the reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an entity on its own.”50 Second, it must also do justice both to the fact that the author intended certain things, and that the text may well contain in addition other things which were not present to the author’s mind – which it normally does not represent in whole, although it tells us ‘quite a bit about him or her.’51

Third and finally, we must recognize “both that authors do not write without a point of view … and that they really can speak and write about events and objects … which are not reducible to terms of their own state of mind.”52 Wright’s hermeneutical model is a hermeneutic of love, in which “both parties are simultaneously affirmed,” and by which each stage of the reading process becomes a conversation “in which misunderstanding is likely …, but in which, through patient listening, real understanding … is attainable.”53 So, for Wright, critical realism is understood as a hermeneutic of love. In PFG, Wright very nicely sums up what he means by the concept of critical realism: A self-critical epistemology which, in rejecting the naive realism which simply imagines that we are looking at the material with a God’s-eye view, rejects also the narcissistic reductionism of imagining that all apparent perception is in fact projection, that everything is really going on inside our own heads. Critical realism engages determinedly in a manysided conversation, both with the data itself and with others (including scholars) who are 46

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 45. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 45. 48 Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, 457. 49 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 61. 50 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 62. 51 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 63. 52 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 63. 53 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 64. 47

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also engaging with it. This conversation aims, not of course at an unattainable ‘objectivity’, but at truth none the less, the truth in which the words we use and the stories we tell increasingly approximate to the reality of another world, in the historian’s case the world of the past. … We must not, in our proper anxiety about projecting our own assumptions on to the past, compound the problem by imagining that we can actually know nothing much about the past because our reconstructions remain our reconstructions. (PFG 53)

4. … And the Reference to Meyer? I have sufficiently shown the fundamental influence of Barbour’s ideas on these thoughts. What about Meyer, then? I tend to assume that Wright found Meyer’s findings so similar that he did not recognize any significant difference and equated the terms. Meyer develops his understanding of Lonergan’s critical realism with seven traits:54 1) The authority of fact, which aims at a fundamental empirical and realist orientation while acknowledging the “primacy of performance.”55 “It is a technique typical of this realism to reduce conflicting views respecting … objectivity or subjectivity to coherence or incoherence with cognitional fact.”56 We have seen that this general trait is typical of Wright’s balancing approach as well. 2) Meyer’s next trait is the correlativity of “true” and “real,” which means “reality becomes known through the (act of finding out what is) true,” which entails “understanding and judgement taking account of sense data.”57 This is one of the core ideas of any critical realism, and hence is present in Wright’s approach as well. 3) In contrast to universalistic and generalizing science, critical-realist hermeneutics accords a primacy of insight into the text as individual. Of this I hear no echo in Wright’s considerations, which does not surprise me as this trait is absent from Barbour’s approach to critical realism. Furthermore, Barbour develops a “spectrum thesis,”58 largely neglecting the uniqueness of humanities’ hermeneutic access. 4) Then, Meyer portrays the “intended sense” of a text as constitutive of discourse, while also acknowledging 5) the indispensability of judgement in the process of understanding. Both traits appear in Wright’s theory of reading. 6) The hermeneutic circles between the triangular structure of reader, text, and referent (= things written about) are important to Meyer and Wright as well. 7) Of Meyer’s requisite that the interpreter measures up to the text

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Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament, xiii. Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament, x. 56 Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament, x. 57 Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament, xi. 58 Losch, “Critical Realism: A Sustainable Bridge Between Science and Religion?.” 55

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and maybe even faces a “conversion” (Lonergan), we maybe could again find a resemblance in Wright’s hermeneutics of love. As I have said, these traits are in general very similar to Wright’s interpretation of Barbour, so Wright may have overlooked the slight difference, which is the emphasis on the individuality of the text over against Barbour’s efforts to negate uniqueness as much as possible. I therefore hope to have convinced the reader that despite Dunn’s analysis,59 Wright’s ideas do not originate from Meyer’s interpretation of Lonergan, although it may have been later influenced by it due to its apparent similarity.60

5. Critique Initially I have said that, philosophically, critical realism probably can only be a start. What are its shortcomings? The major problem with its Barbourstyle version lies in its use to connect science and theology epistemologically through the parallelization of their methods. As I have said elsewhere, critical realism “accounts for the similarities between the methods of science and religion, but it does not take into account the differences between the two.”61 Aware of the important impact this parallelizing move had on the development of the science and religion debate, I nevertheless doubt the adequacy of equalizing scientific criteria for research with those valid in the humanities and theology. Rather, I would support the idea that “it is the nature of the object that determines the form of its possible science,” to borrow a phrase from Roy Bhaskar.62 A similar idea has been expressed by Thomas F. Tor59 Dunn nevertheless provides a concise analysis of Meyer’s critical realism (James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making 1 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], 110–11). The reference to Andrew Collier is misleading there, as Collier refers to Roy Bhaskar’s again divergent critical realism, see Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism.” 60 Richard Bell’s use of transcendental idealism in his contribution to this compendium “to make sense of the resurrection appearances and indeed the whole resurrection life” (541) seems an interesting alternative to critical realism to me. I am not sure, however, if I would concur with the notion of the soul as the “‘thing-in-itself’” which “provides continuity between the body of the earthly Jesus and the resurrected Christ” (541–42), as this at first sounds rather platonic to me. For a review of biblical perspectives on the issue see Nancey C. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16–22. 61 Andreas. Losch, “Our World Is More Than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” Theology and Science 3 (2005): 280. 62 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, Harvester Philosophy Now 8 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), 3. Bhaskar’s realism is yet another version of critical realism, however I discovered ideas similar to my own thoughts (Losch, “Our World Is More than Physics”) in his writings, so

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rance and further developed by John Polkinghorne.63 For Torrance, it is therefore faith that is needed for adequately approaching theology.64 This is indeed a hermeneutical question, too: Can one understand scripture by an objectivist approach alone, even when aware of one’s subjective part in the process of understanding? Alternatively, does it need a faithful immersion into, and a dwelling in the text to validate its deeper meaning?65 This resembles the remarks I have made regarding Meyer’s seventh trait and Wright’s hermeneutic of love. Bhaskar generally adopts the idea of the necessary fit to the object of research as inherited from the hermeneutical tradition, which he says is correct to point out that the social sciences deal with a pre-interpreted reality … that is a reality already brought under the same kind of material in terms of which it is to be grasped. … So that, to put it crudely, the human sciences stand, at least in part, to their subject matter in a subject–subject (or concept–concept) relationship, rather than simply a subject–object (or concept–thing) one.66

I have wanted to emphasize the differences between the disciplines even more than Bhaskar’s (critical) naturalist unity of method does: It is my hypothesis that a critical realist position [in Barbour’s sense] is only fitting with natural science. When we consider the human sciences or even the arts, the contribution of the subject cannot be viewed mainly critically any more, but becomes essential to what is going on.67

Hence, a purely “critical” realism is not enough. Finally, theology’s subject – God – is indeed a subject and not an object. God is a personal counterpart,68 who can be encountered in scripture.69 Here, Wright’s critical realism as hermeneutic of love appears very appropriate to me. As Wright explores the fundamentally Whiteheadian idea of interrelatedness (which is so important I leave the floor to the one who explored them earlier here. I would not have taken notice of Bhaskar without Alister McGrath’s reference to him (Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology, T&T Clark Theology [London: T&T Clark, 2006]). McGrath also elaborates on the idea of adaptation of the epistemological process to its subject. 63 Losch, “Our World Is More than Physics,” 281–83. 64 For his interpretation of Michael Polanyi’s theory of science, see T. F. Torrance, “The Framework of Belief,” in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi’s Thought For Christian Faith and Life, ed. T. F. Torrance (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998). 65 Cf. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 66 Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 27. 67 Losch, “Our World Is More than Physics,” 280. 68 Andreas Losch, “Wissenschaftliche und religiöse Welterfassung: Ein Kommentar zu Martin Bubers Perspektive auf ein spannungsreiches Thema,” Theologische Zeitschrift 70 (2014): 160. 69 Cf. 1 Cor 13:12: “then shall I know even as also I am known.”

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to Barbour) in a much more consequent fashion than Barbour himself, his approach seems to be free of the shortcomings of Barbour’s critical realism. One question nevertheless remains: Why should one still call this approach a “critical realism”? When the contribution of the subject becomes essential to what is going on, while holding fast to a realist orientation, I will propose to call this mutually balancing approach encompassing opposites a “constructive realism.”70 I am convinced, this could also help us better to “remember that you too are hermeneutically conditioned” (PFG 67), and maybe even help Wright countering misunderstandings. I do not expect him to assume his own attempt at a realistic picture of exegetical matters to have a superior status than other meta-stories. It is a human construction as well, attempting for maximal approximation to truth, knowing that we only “know in part” (1 Cor 13:9). His reference to the “hard sciences” is, however, easy to misunderstand because he is not referring to science as it is commonly understood but rather to an already hermeneutically conceived model of how science works. Nevertheless, the following critique could be justified: since the exegetical “data,” differently from science’s, consists of an already preinterpreted reality, the subjectivity involved in any exegetical approach is naturally higher than in science. Hence, the danger of proclaiming a personal conviction as scriptural truth is increased.71 A self-critical attitude, therefore, is indeed highly important. So there is some justification for sticking with the attribute “critical” with regarding to realism, but I still think its realist orientation needs a stronger counterpart in realism’s attribution when it comes to scholarship in the humanities. The best thing about the usual term “critical realism” may be “that as it is so easily taken up and widely used, it can facilitate dialog be-

70 See Losch, “Our World Is More than Physics,” 281: “Realism at its core is a personal belief and a commitment to an external reality.” John Buitendag, “Epistemology, Ontology and Reciprocity: Bringing Bram van de Beek in Dialogue With John Polkinghorne,” in Strangers and Pilgrims on Earth: Essays in Honour of Abraham van de Beek, ed. Eduardus van der Borght and Paul van Geest, Studies in Reformed Theology 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), makes use of this idea. A more elaborated account of this thought is to be found in Andreas Losch, Jenseits der Konflikte: Eine konstruktiv-kritische Auseinandersetzung von Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 133 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), ch. 10, aiming at a “constructive-critical realism” as sufficiently diversified epistemology encompassing the whole spectrum of humanities and science. 71 Maybe the development of more objective tools to study scripture will be helpful; for an interesting, because almost mathematical, approach to a specific question, see Sascha Flüchter, Die Anrechnung des Glaubens zur Gerechtigkeit: Auf dem Weg zu einer sozialhistorisch orientierten Rezeptionsgeschichte von Gen 15,6 in der neutestamentlichen Literatur, Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 51 (Tübingen: Francke, 2010).

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tween quite different accounts.”72 A pity that – to my knowledge – Barbour never picked Wright’s version up.

Bibliography Barbour, Ian G. “Commentary on Theological Resources from the Physical Sciences.” Zygon 1 (1966): 27–30. –. Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966. Bhaskar, Roy. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Harvester Philosophy Now 8. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979. Buitendag, Johan. “Epistemology, Ontology and Reciprocity: Bringing Bram van de Beek in Dialogue with John Polkinghorne.” Pages 779–95 in Strangers and Pilgrims on Earth: Essays in Honour of Abraham van de Beek. Edited by Eduardus van der Borght and Paul van Geest. Studies in Reformed Theology 22. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Flüchter, Sascha. Die Anrechnung des Glaubens zur Gerechtigkeit: Auf dem Weg zu einer sozialhistorisch orientierten Rezeptionsgeschichte von Gen 15,6 in der neutestamentlichen Literatur. Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 51. Tübingen: Francke, 2010. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. “Critical Realism and the Integration of the Sciences 1.” Lonergan Research Institute, library file 253, 1961. –. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. –. Method in Theology. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972. Losch, Andreas. “Critical Realism: A Sustainable Bridge between Science and Religion?” Theology and Science 8 (2010): 393–416. –. Jenseits der Konflikte: Eine konstruktiv-kritische Auseinandersetzung von Theologie und Naturwissenschaft. Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 133. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. –. “On the Origins of Critical Realism.” Theology and Science 7 (2009): 85–106. –. “Our World Is More Than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate.” Theology and Science 3 (2005): 275–90. –. “Wissenschaftliche und religiöse Welterfassung: Ein Kommentar zu Martin Bubers Perspektive auf ein spannungsreiches Thema.” Theologische Zeitschrift 70 (2014): 142–61. McGrath, Alister. E. A Scientific Theology. T&T Clark Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Meyer, Ben F. Critical Realism and the New Testament. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 17. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1989. Murphy, Nancey C. Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? Current Issues in Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Peacocke, Arthur R. Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures, 1978. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. –. Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion. The Mendenhall Lectures 1983. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. 72

Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” 99.

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Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Polkinghorne, John C. One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. –. Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991. Russell, Robert J. “Ian Barbour’s Methodological Breakthrough: Creating the ‘Bridge’ Betweeen Science and Theology.” Pages 45–60 in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and His Legacy. Edited by Robert J. Russell. Ashgate Science and Religion Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Torrance, Thomas F. “The Framework of Belief.” Pages 1–27 in Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi’s Thought for Christian Faith and Life. Edited by Thomas F. Torrance. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998. Vanhoozer, Kevin J., ed. Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. London: SPCK, 2005. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003.

Historical Methodology Theresa Heilig and Christoph Heilig 1. Introducing the Task N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God deals with many different questions, a great portion of which could be described as “historical” in nature. This is evident even in the title alone of the series to which the book belongs. It deals not only with the theological question of “the Question of God” but also the historical issue of “Christian Origins.” Also, Wright leaves no doubt in the introduction to PFG that he wants his reading of Paul to be understood as reflecting the intentions of the historical Paul. When he writes that “we need to go on investigating why Paul wrote what he wrote and what he intended to convey by it” (PFG 48), it becomes clear that Wright is claiming that all his other interests – exegesis, theology, and “application” (PFG 48) – cannot be pursued independently from historical analysis. Indeed, this definition of the historical task makes it clear that, for Wright, history cannot be limited to questions about context, “about the social world of the first century” (PFG 48), but extends into the territory of exegesis. When we ask, for example, how “the individual sentences relate to the whole, and the individual words to the sentence,” (PFG 48) this is not simply a literary question able to be explained sufficiently at the textual level. Rather, we must inquire into the individual aims and consequent intentions that give rise not only to “actions” but also to “words” (PFG 29; italics are ours). This is a brusque rejection of a post-modern shift from author to reader (PFG 53). Of course, Wright does not end his analysis with the reconstruction of the past. He also discusses potential relevance for our own time, but not before going “inside the mind of, and be[ing] able to expound the thought of, people whose worldviews, mindsets, aims, motivations, imaginations, likes and dislikes are significantly different from our own at, potentially, every point” (PFG 1388). Hence, it is appropriate to speak of Wright as a “historian” and PFG as aiming to be, among many other things, an instance of “historiography.”1 Accordingly, in this essay we are going to focus on Wright’s historical methodology, i.e. the way he chooses to move from the evidence to his particular 1

The terminology follows Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

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reconstruction of the past. This relationship is the subject of the “philosophy of historiography.”2 In the same way as the philosophy of science studies the sciences, which deal with evidence, the philosophy of historiography studies historiography, which again “studies history through its evidential remains.”3 Before expounding what it means to offer an analysis of Wright’s method from the perspective of the philosophy of historiography, we must first clarify what it does not entail. We will not focus on that sub-field which could be described as the “philosophy of historiographic interpretation.” A “historiographic interpretation” is “the final historiographic product that is ready for popular consumption.”4 To analyze PFG from this perspective would be worthwhile indeed,5 since it certainly belongs in that category. However, this is an ethical question, whereas we are interested in the epistemological questions discussed in the other branch of the “philosophy of historiography,” namely the field of “scientific historiography.”6 Furthermore, we will not discuss Wright’s “philosophy of history,” i.e. the ontological question that inquires into the nature of history itself,7 although one could certainly argue that Wright’s work would justify an independent analysis of this issue too.8

2

Tucker, Knowledge, 2. Tucker, Knowledge, 2. 4 Tucker, Knowledge, 1–2. 5 Some of the relevant aspects, such as the technique of re-narration, are discussed in Oda Wischmeyer’s essay in the volume. 6 Tucker, Knowledge, 10. 7 Cf. Tucker, Knowledge, 14–17. In the literature, it is quite common to designate Tucker’s “philosophy of historiography” also as “philosophy of history” (often differentiated by adjectives such as “substantive” vs. “speculative”). The advantage of this terminology is that it does not imply that “all history is a matter of writing” but only at the cost of using the term “history” in an ambiguous way, as ‘the past’ and ‘the study of the past.’ See Mark Day, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2008), xii. On the basis of Tucker, “Introduction,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 41, repr. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3, who translates German Geschichtsforschung as “historical research,” one could also suggest to speak of the “philosophy of historical research,” which would avoid the problems of “philosophy of historiography” as well as “philosophy of history.” 8 This becomes clear even on the basis of the title of an early work – very influential in the English sphere but almost completely ignored in German scholarship – alone, namely The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). One’s conception of ‘history’ exerts, of course, a certain influence on the way it is approached. Such considerations are, however, more relevant for historical enquiries into the life of Jesus than of Paul. For a recent example that aims at doing methodological justice to a “theistically motivated historiography,” cf. Roland Deines, Acts of God in History, ed. Christoph Ochs and Peter Watts, WUNT 317 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). The quoted phrase is taken from Deines, Acts, 6. 3

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The epistemological perspective – the question of how we can get knowledge of the past – is, of course, complex in itself. Our own contribution can be located in the middle of the web of many of the other contributions in this volume. We enter the discussion at a later point than Andreas Losch, who deals with the general perception of reality in his chapter on “Critical Realism.” Also, we do not deal in detail with the parameter of evidence itself. This is, for example, done in the chapters by Eve-Marie Becker on Acts and the essays on Paul’s context. Rather, our own analysis is located between this evidence itself and Wright’s conclusions that are reached on the basis of this evidence. Hence, we are investigating the inferential structure that bridges evidence and Wright’s exegetical and theological theses that are discussed in many of the other contributions to this volume.

2. Introducing Abduction 2.1 Wright’s Explicit Methodology The introduction in chapter one (PFG 3–74) is an impressive account of the role Wright sees for “history” in the overall task of his work. However, there is not much that would advance one’s understanding of how the historical inferences are reached (and whether this corresponds with the way they ought to be reached). Still, in the preface of PFG one can find some comments by Wright in which he speaks explicitly in categories that belong to the sphere of the philosophy of historiography when explaining his methodological approach. After having referred to his “method of argument” in terms of “critical realism,” he explains what this implies for him: What I mean by this is the application to history of the same overall procedure as is used in the hard sciences: not simply the mere assemblage of ‘facts’, but the attempt to make sense of them through forming hypotheses and then testing them against the evidence. (PFG xviii)

In the footnote that follows, he names this approach “abduction”9 or “inference to the best explanation” (which is “another familiar term for the same process”). 9

He refers to Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey, Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: John Knox, 1996), ix–x and notes that the term was introduced by Charles S. Peirce, Science and Philosophy, ed. Arthur W. Burks, vol. 7 of Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 89–164 “to deal with what he called ‘the logic of discovery’ and the economics of research.” In what follows, references to Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958) will be made by referring to paragraphs, not pages, in the respective volume. For illustration, Wright’s

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Unfortunately, Wright does not explain specifically what this entails for his procedure. In part, this might be excused in light of the fact that Wright regards himself as an exegete, not a philosopher. As he wrote elsewhere: “Much as I enjoy philosophy, I have not had the time or space to engage with philosophical issues beyond what has been immediately necessary for my historical and exegetical work.”10 However, is not the explication of what it means to follow an abductive kind of reasoning exactly what one would classify as “immediately necessary for [Wright’s, and indeed anyone’s] historical and exegetical work”? After all, Wright himself continues his preface by stating: Unless we are explicit about this there is a constant danger that exegetes will simply talk past one another, labelling one another’s proposals as ‘unconvincing’ because they have not glimpsed the larger hypotheses within which those proposals might make sense. (PFG xiii)

From the perspective of the philosophy of historiography, what is important is not simply “the larger hypotheses” in the sense of yet another historical thesis even broader than the one it is supposed to explain. Rather, what is needed is a philosophical (and thus, “larger”) framework, that provides a normative inferential structure for historical research. Accordingly, Wright would do very well to explain in more detail how his argument follows abductive structures and, at least as important, whether abduction/inference to the best explanation really is the best framework for determining plausible historical reconstructions. In what follows, we will discuss these two aspects. We will describe what it might mean and what it actually means for Wright’s work to be abductive, and we will discuss how his methodology might be evaluated in light of more recent philosophical discussions. 2.2 Deduction, Induction, and Abduction Wright correctly notes that the term “abduction” was introduced by the philosopher Charles S. Peirce (PFG xviii). Describing what he meant by this term, which is his attempt to translate ἀπαγωγή in Aristotle, An. pr. 2.25,11 is reference to the document “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, Especially from Testimonies” is equivalent to Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:164–255. 10 N. T. Wright, “Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All – Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in His Complex Contexts,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 455, in the introduction to a paper that he had delivered in 2011 at the Society of Christian Philosophers’ Regional Meeting (Fordham University). 11 On the alternative translation as “reduction” see Anya Plutynski, “Four Problems of Abduction: A Brief History,” HOPOS 1 (2011): 3n1. For a recent proposal of finding the predecessor of Peirce’s “abduction” in Aristotle’s writings (namely, with regard to ἀγχίνοια [LSJ: “ready wit, sagacity, shrewdness”] in An. post. 1.34), see Jorge Alejandro

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complicated by the fact that Peirce’s notion evidently evolved over the course of his career.12 In most contemporary discussions of abduction, the concept is introduced as a third major type of inference alongside deduction and induction.13 In deductive arguments, the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. The following example (in which the horizontal line separates the two premises from the conclusion) is deductively valid:14 If one gets a flat tire, the car will begin to shudder. Driving along the road, I just got a flat tire. My car will suddenly begin to shudder.

Inductive and abductive inferences share the common trait that they are not deductively valid. Rather, they are ampliative; that is, they go beyond what is logically contained in the premises. However, they do so in different ways. Inductive arguments extend an assertion concerning a certain sample beyond that limitation. For example: Driving along the road, the car suddenly begins to shudder. I just got a flat tire. If one gets a flat tire, the car always begins to shudder suddenly.

Obviously, this argument cannot be deductively valid. Even if the premises are true, the conclusion does not automatically have to be true too. Of course, inductive arguments can differ with regard to their strength and this inference is a rather strong inductive argument. Imagine, by contrast, that my car begins to shudder because there is something wrong with the suspension. Analogously, one could infer that if something is wrong with the suspension, the car will always begin to shudder suddenly. But we would probably regard this inductive inference to be rather weak because we can imagine many problems of the suspension that do not automatically lead to shuddering. So, while inductive inferences go beyond their premises by extending them quantitatively, abductive arguments do so by inferring a different category. Most

Flórez, “Peirce’s Theory of the Origin of Abduction in Aristotle,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50 (2014): 265–80. 12 Cf. Douglas R. Anderson, “The Evolution of Peirce’s Concept of Abduction,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 22 (1986): 145–64. 13 Cf., e.g., Igor Douven, “Abduction,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2011 Edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/ entries/abduction and Elliott Sober, Core Questions in Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 5th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson, 2009), 7–34. 14 “Validity” refers to the feature of the conclusion necessarily following from the premises, if the premises were true. This judgment does not say anything regarding the truth of the premises and, correspondingly, the truth of the conclusion.

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often, they are formalized in the following way based on a suggestion by Peirce himself:15 The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

To understand what this means, let us apply this structure to the example of the drive on the road16 – an example adduced by Wright himself in the methodological section of The New Testament and the People of God:17 Driving along the road, the car suddenly begins to shudder. But if I had a flat tire, it would be a matter of course for the car to shudder. Hence, there is reason to suspect that I have got a flat tire.

In other words, in making such a conclusion I “adop[t] an explanatory hypothesis.”18 Or, as Wright says, I formulate an “explanatory story.”19 I formulate an explanation; I move from the observation to answering the question of why I observe the things I do. 2.3 The Comparative Nature of Abductive Inferences Just like inductive inferences, abductive ones are not deductively valid; the premises do not necessarily imply the conclusion. This is the case because in principle one might devise more than one explanation for a phenomenon. Wright also addresses this aspect explicitly. Besides the possibility of having a flat tire, he mentions the options of suspension problems or the road being in disrepair.20 Peirce himself was aware of this comparative aspect: “When we adopt a certain hypothesis it is not alone because it will explain the observed facts but also because the contrary hypothesis would probably lead to results contrary to those observed.”21 Correspondingly, it is understandable 15

Cf. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:189. If one assigns the role of “rule,” “result,” and “case” to the three propositions, it is possible to transform inductive, deductive, and abductive inferences into their respective counterparts. Cf. Peirce “The Natural Classification of Arguments.” Cf. Sami Paavola, “Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference,” Semiotica 153 (2005): 132 on how this applies to the different phases of Peirce’s views on abduction, 17 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 43. 18 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:189. 19 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. 20 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. 21 Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:628. In this essay (Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:619–44), he distinguishes between deduction, induction, and “hypothesis” (abduction). On our distinction between induction and abduction, cf. there (Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:624): 16

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that abduction is often discussed under the label “inference to the best explanation” (subsequently abbreviated IBE).22 Besides taking into account potential alternative explanations, abductive inferences can be strengthened by further strategies. One can, for example, attempt to take into account evidence that discriminates strongly between competing hypotheses.23 Instead of simply observing a general shuddering, which could be explained by different hypotheses equally well, I could observe the precise pattern and intensity of the movement, which might be more readily explicable by one of the three hypotheses over the others.

3. Explanations: Does Wright “Explain” Paul? Against the background of what has been said so far, it should be quite obvious that, in a certain sense, Wright’s PFG is abductive par excellence. Confronted with the many puzzling details of Paul’s letters, Wright suggests a breath-taking synthesis that – if true – would make Paul’s idiosyncratic statements understandable. He “attempt[s] to make sense of [facts] through forming hypotheses” (PFG xviii). Accordingly, Wright is constantly telling us that in his framework Pauline passages suddenly become understandable. For example, with regard to the assumption that we should read certain Pauline texts as reflecting the Danielic tradition of a “return from exile” (a quite important feature of Wright’s paradigm) he claims: “This substantial and varied tradition is not usually factored into discussions of Paul. But there are key passages in his letters which will not make sense … unless we see them in relation to this tradition” (PFG 117). And when justifying his general assumption of “stories” underlying Paul’s arguments, he writes: “After all, all exegetes of virtually all texts have to assume various things from time to time if they are to ‘make sense of’ what lies before them” (PFG 466). The goal of developing such a framework of narrative substructures is to return to exege“Induction is where we generalize from a number of cases of which something is true, and infer that the same thing is true of a whole class. Or, where we find a certain thing to be true of a certain proportion of cases and infer that it is true of the same proportion of the whole class. Hypothesis is where we find some very curious circumstance, which would be explained by the supposition that it was a case of a certain general rule, and thereupon adopt that supposition.” 22 Cf., e.g., Douven, “Abduction.” Plutynski, “Problems,” 11–13 wants to keep a distinction between Peirce’s notion of abduction as a first step in construing explanations, and IBE as a further task of analysing respective confirmation. Calling attention to the differing contexts of discovery and confirmation is certainly valid. However, since IBEs can also be construed in a variety of manners, it is possible to equate abduction and IBE and to discuss the question of context when looking at the warrant of this approach (cf. section 4). 23 Cf. the nice examples by Sober, Core Questions, 28–30.

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sis of specific passages and to be able to say “now at last we can make sense of what before was incomprehensible” (PFG 475). With regard to the question to what extent Wright is successfully implementing Peircean abduction, one inquires as to whether he is really making sense of – “explaining” – Paul (or, more specifically, the letters from him that we have). In fact, Oda Wischmeyer in her contribution to this volume is skeptical of whether the Pauline worldview sketched by Wright really can account for concrete phenomena such as 1 Cor 13. To be sure, she says, all the elements expounded by Wright (e.g., the messiah, God’s people) are there in Paul’s worldview and “this chapter, like all other Pauline texts, would not have emerged without this background,” but is this sufficient to explain why Paul wrote such a text? Similarly, Steve Moyise in his essay explicitly raises the issue of satisfactory explanation in his concluding remarks (italics added): It is worth asking whether such a general theme [i.e., end of exile] could ever exert the sort of specific influence that Wright claims. It is rather like appealing to the theory of gravity in order to explain why I slipped on the pavement last week. It is of course true but not really the sort of explanation that is required. In fact, the north of England was covered in snow last week and I should have chosen more suitable footwear.24

In other words, narrative sub-structures, like gravity, might indeed be a part of the causal history of an event, but, as Moyise points out, intuitively there is something problematic about assigning explanatory status to such a factor. What can be said regarding this issue beyond expressing a vague impression that something is wrong here? First, we can note that Moyise shares Wright’s conviction that “explanations” have something to do with offering an account of the causal history leading to the event that is to be explained.25 In what follows, we will build on the account of Peter Lipton, who has provided an intuitive, as well as sufficiently detailed, account of this causal model of explanation.26 One objection the causal model of explanation faces is that “causal histories are long and wide, and most causal information does not 24

See below, 179. See also Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 99: “A hypothesis … is essentially a construct, thought up by a human mind, which offers itself as a story about a particular set of phenomena, in which the story, which is bound to be an interpretation of those phenomena, also offers an explanation of them.” Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 99 on the underlying question: “why?” Cf. also PFG 34. 26 See Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd ed.; London: Routledge, 2004), 21–29 for a discussion of other models. This does not mean, of course, that the causal model of explanation is adequate for all kinds of explanations (cf. Lipton, Inference, 31–32). Cf. Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:192 for a definition of explanation by Peirce himself: “What an explanation of a phenomenon does is to supply a proposition which, if it had been known to be true before the phenomenon presented itself, would have rendered that phenomenon predictable, if not with certainty, at least as something very likely to occur.” 25

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provide a good explanation.”27 To go to an even more fundamental level than Moyise, one could argue that the Big Bang would not be a good explanation for most events, although it is part of their causal history. Hence, what we need is a way of selecting the relevant causal information. This process is helped by two interrelated characteristics of explanation as conceived by Lipton. First, usually we do not explain events as a whole, but only aspects of events, and the selection of these aspects determines what factors of the causal history are of interest. When explaining an eclipse, we do not explain it as a whole, “but only why it lasted as long as it did, or why it was partial, or why it was not visible from a certain place.”28 As a consequence, we can concentrate on those parts of the causal history that are connected with the aspect in question. Second, the questions we are trying to answer with explanations can be specified as contrasting a fact and a foil. We do not simply ask “why this?,” but “why this rather than that?”29 The important point that follows from this is that it is the choice of the contrastive foil that determines what information is explanatorily relevant. When providing an explanation for why event P rather than event Q happened, we must thus “cite a causal difference between P and not-Q, consisting of a cause of P and the absence of a corresponding event in the case of not-Q.”30 Often, Q is identical to not-P; in other words, we are asking why something happened instead of it not happening. In his illustration above, Moyise raises the implied contrast of why he fell rather than not falling. The difficulty in identifying the absence of the corresponding event is that not-P is “not a limited negation, but encompasses all the different specific ways P might not have been the case,”31 and therefore we are looking for something that “will be missing from the history of all the foils.”32 As Lipton points out, this search is facilitated by the fact that we can limit ourselves to excluding only those “incompatible foils with histo27

Lipton, Inference, 32. Lipton, Inference, 33. 29 Lipton, Inference, 33. 30 Lipton, Inference, 42. This focus on the “absence” of a corresponding event distinguishes Lipton’s proposal from alternative suggestions, which only point to a cause of P. Such definitions are identified as problematic by Lipton, because they allow for “unexplanatory causes” (Lipton, Inference, 40). While the fact of an invitation to a certain location might explain why somebody went there (P) instead of somewhere else (Q), the situation becomes problematic if there exist invitations to both places. After all, the invitation to the first place is an element that would still be missing in the causal history of Q. In Lipton’s paradigm, the “Difference Condition” rightly rules out the existence of an invitation as a cause for P if there is also an invitation for the second location. In other words, there is no absence of a corresponding causal event. A “corresponding” event in the case of not-Q is defined as “bear[ing] the same relation to Q as the cause of P bears to P” (Lipton, Inference, 43). 31 Lipton, Inference, 49. 32 Lipton, Inference, 50. 28

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ries similar to the history of the fact.”33 To modify Lipton’s example, we do not need to explain why Moyise fell rather than never being born. This limits our selection of foils to such potential instances of not-P, in which Moyise would have had the chance to hold onto a nearby fence, been gripped by another pedestrian, or had put on snowshoes in the morning. What do these considerations regarding the nature of “explanation” imply for the assessment of whether Wright is “explaining” Paul’s letters in a meaningful sense? Let us first pick up the observation that we usually explain aspects of events, not events as a whole. It is useful to focus on a specific text as explanandum instead of the more abstract notion of making sense of “Paul.” This corresponds to the procedure of Wischmeyer. Still, the criticism might be even stronger if the specification went further: What is it in 1 Cor 13 that is not sufficiently explained by Wright’s broader framework? Thus, it would be possible to delineate more concrete contrastive foils. Moyise makes such a move when he asks: Even if Paul did think that the coming of Jesus and the Spirit are the fulfilment of Deut 30, can that really explain why he chose to use Isa 52:5 as an accusation in Rom 2:24 or Isa 59:20 in Rom 11:26, despite it saying the opposite of what he wants to say?34

This allows us to specify a meaningful contrastive foil: Why did Paul chose to use Isa 52:5 as an accusation in Rom 2:24 rather than choosing a different text from the LXX, which would not exhibit the element of undeserved suffering? It would then have to be answered whether the reference to the coming of Jesus and the Spirit as the fulfilment of Deut 30 is a sufficient explanation35 for this contrast.36 In sum, one might conclude that it is not expedient to deny Wright’s argument the status of being an “explanation” simply by pointing out that he is only constructing a far-removed causal background for his Pauline interpretation. After all, his synthesis is an explanation for some negative foils. Wright’s version of Paul’s modified monotheism explains why he worshipped one God rather than many even if one thinks that it has difficulties explaining why Paul described Jesus with divine categories.37 To pick up Moyise’s example of his fall, reference to gravity is an appropriate explanation indeed if the question is why he fell down rather than flying away or (with focus on a different aspect) why he fell down rather than did an astro33

Lipton, Inference, 50. See below, 179. 35 Presupposing for our purpose that this is Wright’s actual – i.e., full – explanation for this phenomenon. 36 Of course, even if answered negatively, this would not mean that Wright’s framework of end-of-exile is unexplanatory per se, for it might still explain why Paul used a passage from Scripture rather than using a completely different text. 37 Cf. Hurtado’s essay in this volume. 34

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naut in the International Space Station. We conclude that a more precise understanding of what “explanation” means could facilitate fruitful discussion of PFG – both for Wright, in that it allows him to clarify what aspects exactly he claims to explain, and his critics, by offering them a suitable tool for specifying where they see explanatory weaknesses in Wright’s argument.

4. From Discovery to Confirmation 4.1 Two Aspects in Peirce So far, we have raised the question of in what sense Wright’s PFG is an example of Peirce’s abductive generation of an explanatory hypothesis. And indeed, it was important for him to emphasize that abduction is “originary in respect to being the only kind of argument which starts a new idea.”38 Further, “it is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.”39 One can thus understand abduction in this sense as the logic of discovery. To be sure, there are statements in Peirce’s writings that seem to question the status of abduction as a kind of logical inference,40 but it remains clear that he regarded abduction (defined as generating new explanations) to be a “logical inference.”41 With this position, he is diametrically opposed to philosophers like Karl Popper, who do not think that there can be any logic of discovery.42 Indeed it has been questioned by many scholars whether Peirce’s abduction can serve as a model for discovery since, after all, the “new” explanation is already contained in the premise.43 However, as Anderson has argued, the fact that the explanation 38

Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:96. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:171. 40 Cf., e.g., Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:219: “and abduction is, after all, nothing but guessing.” 41 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:188: “It must be remembered that abduction, although it is very little hampered by logical rules, nevertheless is logical inference, asserting its conclusion only problematically or conjecturally, it is true, but nevertheless having a perfectly definite logical form.” Cf. Peirce, Collected Papers, 2:107: “It is also to be borne in mind that mind that there is a purely logical doctrine of how discovery must take place.” Cf. also Charles S. Peirce, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science: A History of Science, ed. Carolyn Eisele, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), 2:§899: “Any novice in logic may well be surprised at my calling a guess an inference. It is equally easy to define inference so as to exclude or include abduction. But all the objects of logical study have to be classified; and it is found that there is no other good class in which to put abduction but that of inferences.” 42 Cf. Plutynski, “Problems,” 13 on this matter. 43 Cf., e.g., the references in Plutynski, “Problems,” 8–10. 39

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is logically prior to the conclusion does not mean that it needs to be temporally prior.44 Peirce’s main argument for why there needs to be a certain logic of discovery is that abduction, although only a kind of guessing, is much more successful than one would expect on the basis of pure chance.45 Here, the aspect of instinct becomes very important for Peirce,46 and Wright seems to be quite close to this position, although he does not develop or ground it further.47 Some authors would prefer to treat abduction as nothing more than a “heuristic of scientific discovery.”48 In other words, it does not say anything regarding the question of whether the assumption of a certain explanation is justified by being confirmed in light of the evidence.49 Indeed, there seems to be a development in Peirce’s thought (roughly around 1900), from considering abduction from an “evidential viewpoint” as a weak kind of inference to a “methodological viewpoint” as generating hypotheses, which “should then be tested with deduction and induction.”50 Arguably, Peirce never completely resolved this tension in his writings, and there have been a variety of suggested solutions. For Anderson, it is clear that Peirce “quite explicitly states that abduction is both an insight and an inference. This is a fact to be explained, not to be explained away.”51 He continues:52 “Clearly this is not a case of careless inconsistency stemming from writing at different times. Peirce quite intentionally conjoins insight and inference in his description of abduction.”53 Paavola has argued that while in Peirce’s writings both aspects are indeed mixed, one should differentiate between “abductive instinct” and an analogous but distinct “abductive inference.”54 Regardless of how exactly one wants to differentiate between the contexts of discovery and confirmation with regard to abduction in Peirce’s own writings, one has to keep in mind how the discussion has moved on after him. 44

Anderson, “Evolution,” 157. E.g. Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:172. 46 There is an excellent discussion of the different kinds of abductive instincts (naturalistic, idealistic, and theistic) in Paavola, “Peircean Abduction,” 134–40. 47 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43: “These hypotheses offer themselves to me as potential missing links within the stories; when inserted appropriately, they turn my habitual stories into would-be explanatory stories. Where they themselves come from is difficult to describe, though it is not unimportant: they appear to arrive by a process of intuition.” 48 Plutynski, “Problems,” 14. 49 For an overview on the problem of justification with regard to abduction, see Plutynski, “Problems,” 8–10. 50 See Paavola, “Peircean Abduction,” 132 and the references provided there. 51 Anderson, “Evolution,” 155–56; italics are ours. 52 Commenting on Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:181. 53 Anderson, “Evolution,” 156. 54 Paavola, “Peircean Abduction,” 144. 45

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Much of the complications in this discussion are due to shifts in perspective due to other developments in philosophy – for example, the differentiation between discovery and justification.55 As Plutynski notes, “many, if not most, accounts of IBE take it to be thoroughly in the context of confirmation.”56 If one is not willing to see similar elements in Peirce, one can differentiate between (Peircean) abduction and (contemporary) IBE instead of speaking of two different aspects of abduction – relating to both discovery and justification.57 What is important for us is to note that much of the discussion regarding what Peirce called “abduction” is concerned with the question of how this concept relates to the evaluation (not just generation) of hypotheses.58 In what follows, we will pick up some aspects of that discussion since, for Wright, “abduction” seems to refer to both “forming hypotheses and then testing them against the evidence” (PFG xviii; italics are ours). 4.2 Bayesian Confirmation 4.2.1 Abduction/IBE and Bayesian Confirmation The discussion of abduction in the sense of “abductive inference” (Paavola) or IBE (Plutynski) mainly centers around the question of how it is related to Bayesian confirmation theory.59 This approach is built on a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities, but it goes beyond this mathematical basis by interpreting it as applicable to statements about the probability of hypotheses. Basically, Bayes’s Theorem offers a solution for how to calculate the probability P(H|E) – that is, the probability of H, presupposing E. If we take H to represent a specific hypothesis and E specific evidence it is apparent why this theorem is important for the question of confirmation: it allows for the calculation of the probability of a hypothesis in light of new evidence. To be sure, it is by no means automatically clear what it

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Paavola, “Peircean Abduction,” 2. Plutynski, “Problems,” 11; cf. Plutynski, “Problems,” 12. 57 The former is the way taken by Plutynski, “Problems,” 12–13. Cf. also above, n22. 58 For an excellent analysis of how this shift in focus is associated with other developments in philosophy (although this often remains unconscious), cf. Plutynski, “Problems.” 59 As Plutynski, “Problems,” points out, this problem is only part of a larger web of issues. See the excellent overview over competing views on the “four problems” of abduction (boundary problem, formalization problem, descriptive problem, justification problem) in Plutynski, “Problems,” 6. 56

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means for a hypothesis to be “probable,”60 but for our purposes it will suffice to think of this as the degree of belief in the truth of a hypothesis.61 Against this background, it becomes clear why Bayes’s Theorem is relevant for abductive inferences. When one concludes that “there is reason to suspect that A [the explanation for the observation; read H] is true,”62 how does this relate to the probability P(H|E), the so-called “posterior”probability, the probability after having taken into account E? There have been a great variety of answers, and we need not discuss all of them.63 On the one hand, it is possible to keep abductive and Bayesian inferences separated by noting that Peirce’s “reason to suspect” cannot be explicated in probabilistic terms. From this perspective, abduction is simply a “heuristic stance” and recommends a hypothesis for further investigation without making claims concerning its probability.64 On the other hand, if one assumes that it really is the goal to infer in abduction an explanation that one should accept (not only investigate further), this requires more explanation regarding how acceptance and probability are related. Generally, two courses are possible: one assuming identity of interests between both approaches and one not. The first course – that is, assuming that abductive as well as Bayesian inferences aim at basically the same thing – has been associated with problems for explanationists. Simply put, it is difficult to see how explanatory considerations might go beyond what is contained in Bayes’s Theorem anyway.65 As a result, if one thinks that it is the goal of IBE to infer the “best” explanation in the sense of the “most probable” one, abduction essentially becomes reduced to Bayesian confirmation.66 In other words, the elements considered in abductive inferences are also part of the considerations Bayes’s Theorem requires us to take into account. What are these considerations? According to Bayes’s Theorem, the aspects that determine the relation of the probabilities of two hypothesis H1 and H2 in light of a certain evidence E – P(H1|E) and P(H2|E) – depends on 60 See Richard Swinburne, “Introduction,” in Bayes’s Theorem, ed. Richard Swinburne, Proceedings of the British Academy 113 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–5 for different kinds of probability. 61 See Philip Dawid, “Bayes’s Theorem and Weighing Evidence by Juries,” in ,” in Bayes’s Theorem, ed. Richard Swinburne, Proceedings of the British Academy 113 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73 for a pragmatic approach in the similar context of using Bayes’s Theorem for weighing evidence by juries. 62 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:189. 63 Cf. Douven, “Abduction,” on the spectrum. 64 Cf. Plutynski 14–17. 65 Cf., e.g., William Roche and Elliott Sober, “Explanatoriness is Evidentially Irrelevant, or Inference to the Best Explanation Meets Bayesian Confirmation Theory,” Analysis 73 (2013): 659–68. They use the example of smoking cigarettes and lung cancer to argue that frequency data offer a sufficient estimate of likelihood and posterior probability. The fact that smoking can explain lung cancer does not add anything to the probabilities. 66 Cf. Plutynski 15–17

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taking into account two factors. The first factor consists in the so-called “prior-probabilities” (“prior” meaning before taking into account evidence E) of the two hypotheses – that is P(H1) and P(H2). The second factor which must be taken into account as well consists in the “likelihoods” of H1 and H2. In this context,“likelihoods” is a technical term refering the respective probabilities of E on the assumption that H1 and H2, respectively, are correct. Only if the product of prior-probability and likelihood of the one hypothesis is greater that the product of prior-probability and likelihood of the other hypothesis can one say that in the light of the new evidence the probability of the former is higher. Or, more concisely: P(H1|E) > P(H2|E) if and only if P(E|H1)·P(H1) > P(E|H2)·P(H2). This might seem quite complicated at first reading. But what is important to take away is that in order to see whether a hypothesis is more probable in light of new evidence, one has to take into account two aspects, both of which must to be considered a) with equal emphasis and b) in a comparative manner: 1. The prior degree of belief in the respective hypotheses (in light of other background information).67 2. An estimation of the “predictive power”68 of the competing hypotheses.

In this paradigm, which equates IBE with following a Bayesian structure in determining the “best” explanation, one might say that, on the one hand, the degree to which a hypothesis explains certain evidence can offer an estima-

67 It is one of the most hotly debated questions within Bayesianism of how priorprobabilites are to be determined. From the perspective of what is commonly called “subjective” Bayesianism, priors simply reflect a subjective degree of belief. From the perspective of “objective Bayesianism,” there are rules that objectively determine the distribution of prior-probabilities among hypotheses in light of no evidence at all at hand. Cf. William Talbott, “Bayesian Epistemology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2011 Edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/ epistemology-bayesian. Note that sometimes terminology is used differently. Elliott Sober, “Bayesianism: Its Scope and Limits,” in Bayes’s Theorem, ed. Richard Swinburne, Proceedings of the British Academy 113 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36, who rejects the idea that such principles could yield “objective” priors, uses this characterization to designate a stance “in which priors are objectively justified by a plausible account of a chance process.” In this essay we assume that the priors we talk about are based on some empirical information (cf. Sober, “Bayesianism,” 24). It should be noted, however, that from the perspective of objective Bayesianism it might be possible to assign a more substantive role to IBE than in the framework of the compatibilist version of IBE. While in the latter IBE is basically dependent on representing updated subjective degrees of belief, it could contribute to objective Bayesianism as providing further guidelines in how to distribute prior-probabilities. Cf. Jonathan Weisberg, “Locating IBE in the Bayesian Framework,” Synthese 167 (2009): 125–43. 68 Swinburne, “Introduction,” 10.

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tion of P(E|H1) and P(E|H2).69 On the other hand, other “explanatory virtues” (such as simplicity, etc.) might offer us some indications of which hypothesis we should assign to the higher prior-probabilities.70 However, we might often reach conclusions without causal considerations, basing them simply on statistical data.71 Some have argued that such a view on IBE might better be labeled “inference to the best hypothesis” since explanatory considerations do not go beyond Bayes’s Theorem.72 As long as the hypothesis that is inferred has the characteristics of an “explanation,” however, this seems overly restrictive.73 But it should be admitted that, for many, such a notion of explanatory goodness is not “thick enough to preserve the spirit of IBE.”74 Taking the second course – that is, keeping a distinction between the goals of IBE and Bayesian confirmation – one can insist that although IBE and Bayes are compatible, the former cannot be reduced to the latter.75 This differs from the heuristic stance mentioned above in that this kind of abductive reasoning is not only concerned with making suggestions for further exploration but also with the rational acceptance of hypotheses. Thus, it is more congruent with Peirce’s own conception (cf. section 4.1). The most influential current account of such a compatibilist approach is by Lipton, who differentiates between understanding the “best” explanation as, on the one hand, the “likeliest” explanation and the “loveliest” explanation, on the other hand.76 He is interested in explicating the latter conception: There is a natural temptation to plump for likeliness …. But … choosing likeliness would push Inference to the Best Explanation towards triviality. … We want our account of inference to give the symptoms of likeliness, the features an argument has that lead us to say that the premises make the conclusion likely.77 69 Cf. Lipton, Inference, 114: “For although likelihood is not to be equated with loveliness, it might yet be that one way we judge how likely E is on H is by considering how well H would explain E.” 70 E.g., because simpler hypotheses tend to be more often correct. 71 To give an illustration: In order to estimate the likelihoods P(Eshuddering car|Hflat tyre), P(Eshuddering car|Hsuspension problem ), and P(Eshuddering car|Hroad works), one might simply observe how frequently E is associated with H. 72 Roche and Sober, “Explanatoriness,” 665. 73 Inference to the Best Explanation as an inference to the likeliest explanation thus is a sub-category of such an “inference to the best hypothesis.” 74 Weisberg, “Locating,” 132 75 Cf. Plutynski, “Problems,” 17–18. 76 Lipton, Inference, 59: “It is important to distinguish two sense in which something may be the best of competing potential explanations. We may characterize it as the explanation that is most warranted: the ‘likeliest’ or most probable explanation. On the other hand, we may characterize the best explanation as the one which would, if correct, be the most explanatory or provide the most understanding: the ‘loveliest’ explanation.” Cf. also Lipton, Inference, 59–62. 77 Lipton, Inference, 60.

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One could argue that such an account of IBE is compatible with Bayes in the sense that it aims to infer the same explanation but on the basis of different considerations. IBE, from this perspective, can amount to a more or less reliable rule for making inferences whose validity is basically determined in Bayesian terms. One might wonder, of course, whether such an inquiry is of any use. However, for pragmatic reasons it arguably would be helpful to have a good idea of “symptoms of likeness” in order to have a kind of shortcut inference. Further, such considerations are of special interest when one is not only discussing normative issues of how confirmation should be done (i.e., how one should update one’s subjective degrees of belief in light of new evidence), but also descriptive issues of how research is actually done.78 Additionally, one can argue that if abduction is “not concerned exclusively with testing or confirmation but with the extended strategic process of discovery and investigation of hypotheses worth exploring,”79 then this seems to remain a valid issue from the perspective of the philosophy of science. 4.2.2 Wright and Bayesian Confirmation Against the background of the admittedly complicated relation of IBE and Bayesian confirmation theory as discussed in the last section, we can now analyze where Wright could be placed on this map. Answering this question is relevant for seeing whether his procedure allows for a Bayesian analysis (and, consequently, for suggestions of improvement from that perspective): Does he adjust his prior beliefs concerning a hypothesis P(H) in light of new evidence E so that his new degree of belief corresponds to P(H|E) in the way Bayes’s Theorem prescribes? First, in Wright’s account of the inference concerning the shuddering car discussed above, we note there is a small indication that demonstrates he had an empirically grounded tendency towards assuming that something might go wrong with the tire even before the shuddering began: “I always was just a bit suspicious of the garage where I had bought those tyres.”80 Apparently, Wright does not assume similar things regarding the alternative hypotheses; he probably had not had problems with the car’s suspension before. (However, one could note that Wright’s account remains incomplete since it is difficult to imagine that he did not have any prior expectation of roadworks.) What Wright is adducing here – and what can be interpreted as an evaluation of prior-probabilities from a Bayesian stance – is quite close to what Peirce regarded as “reasoned marks” of a good hypothesis. One should note that it would be a grave misunderstanding to suppose that for Peirce abduction meant only to evaluate how much a phenomenon “would be a matter of 78

Cf. Plutynski, “Problens,” esp. 17. Plutynski, “Problems,” 18. 80 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. 79

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course” if a certain explanation were true (as the formal structure as found above in section 2.2 might imply). By contrast, he writes: “A hypothesis then, has to be adopted, which is likely in itself, and renders the facts likely.”81 Accordingly, Peirce’s own writing invites an explication of what it might imply for a hypothesis to be “likely in itself.”82 Second, let us look at the outcome of “testing” and “ultimately … verification.”83 Wright mentions that among competing hypotheses one emerges as being the most “successful” explanation.84 Later in the same chapter he describes this process, which he labels “verification,” as “stories attain[ing] a degree of success.”85 Although he does not state it explicitly, it seems as if he is equating this success with the probability he is willing to assign to a given hypothesis. In his book on Paul, he writes, for example: “And this, finally, increases the probability that …” (PFG 670), “The same probability emerges through …” (PFG 1065), “This probability is strengthened by …” (PFG 1149), “I have suggested that there is a massive prima facie probability that, granted what Paul believed and granted what Rome claimed, the two would necessarily come into conflict” (PFG 1284).86 81

Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:202; emphasis ours. Peirce mentions three fundamental considerations that influence the choice of hypotheses: the ability of a hypothesis to be tested, its ability to explain the facts under consideration, and “economy.” The latter category consists of practical limitations of conducting experiments (“cost”), the effect on other projects, and “value.” Under the heading of “value,” Peirce understands those considerations “which tend toward an expectation that a given hypothesis may be true” (Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:220). He further divides this category into “instinctive” and “reasoned” aspects. The former includes what is often referred to as “explanatory virtues” in contemporary discussions of IBE (Plutynski, “Problems,” 12; cf. Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:220), namely impressions of “simplicity – which here means facility of comprehension by the human mind, – of aptness, of reasonableness, of good sense” (Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:220). The “reasoned marks” show close resemblance to considerations that are still relevant in estimating empirically grounded priors. They are explicated as follows: “Of course, if we know any positive facts which render a given hypothesis objectively probable, they recommend it for inductive testing. When this is not the case, when the hypothesis seems to us likely, or unlikely, this likelihood is an indication that the hypothesis accords or discords with our preconceived ideas; and since those ideas are presumably based upon some experience, it follows that, other things being equal, there will be, in the long run, some economy in giving the hypothesis a place in the order of precedence in accordance with this indication.” Cf also Peirce, Collected Papers, 5:193 on how abduction is complemented by other modes of inferences. Cf. Plutynski, “Problems,” 8. 83 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 99. 84 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43: “One of the stories I have been telling has emerged as a successful explanatory story.” 85 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 98. 86 Cf. also the statements in PFG 206, 331, 358, 450, 664, 1064–65, 1148, 1200, 1252, 1255, 1313. 82

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Third, let us now look at how these beliefs in competing hypotheses change in light of new data. Admittedly, Wright’s determination to “get in all the data” (PFG 45) is reminiscent of recent suggestions that formulating abductive inferences amounts to constructing explanations on the basis of a mass of facts that is to be explained all at once.87 But at least in this example, we clearly see how he updates his beliefs successively in light of new evidence: Then (resuming the illustration) the car behind me flashes its lights, and the driver points at one of my wheels. At once the second story [i.e., the flat tyre] looms larger. I pull over and examine the tyre, which, sure enough, is looking decidedly sorry for itself. Two further bits of data, namely the action of the other driver and the sight of the tyre, convince me 88 that the second story meshes with reality.

From this, one gets the impression that for Wright – in accordance with Bayes’s Theorem – the pointing of the driver and the examination of the tire is new evidence that increases the probability of the hypothesis that the tire is flat because these events are more expected in this explanatory framework than they would be assuming that the other explanations were true. If the problem were the road, we would not expect the other driver to point to anything; if the problem were the suspension, we would expect the driver to point to it rather than to the tire.89 However, explicitly, Wright is not pursuing a Bayesian line of reasoning by comparing the plausibility of competing hypotheses before taking the evidence into account (shuddering, pointing, etc.) and then examining how much one would expect the events to occur presupposing that the respective hypotheses were true. Rather, he mentions three “requirements”90 of good hypotheses: including the data, being simple, and shedding light on other

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Paavola, “Peircean Abduction,” 146: “Typically ideas are not searched for in relationship to only one anomalous phenomenon (although the basic formulas of abduction suggest so) but a mass of facts is taken into account at the same.” 88 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. 89 In this context, we should also mention that so-called “confirmation bias” often influences one’s search for and evaluation of new evidence. In other words, since I am already tending towards the hypothesis of the flat tyre from the beginning, I may perceive evidence more readily that supports that hypothesis while overlooking other evidence that might support the alternative hypotheses. Further, my intuitive evaluation of how well the new evidence fits into my preferred hypothesis, in comparison to how much it would be predicted in the framework of the other explanations, might be overly optimistic. The essays in this volume have exactly the function of pointing to other evidence and differing evaluations of evidence, by analyzing Wright’s position from different perspectives, thus maybe emphasizing aspects that have not been taken into account sufficiently so far. 90 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 99.

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issues.91 Accordingly, Wright seems to offer something of a compatibilist account of IBE (cf. above, section 4.2.1), by naming “criteria”92 that make possible a reliable route for deciding which hypothesis should be adopted – which obviously for Wright means something like having the highest probability (cf. the references provided above for Wright’s use of “probability” language). Since Wright seems to fit more into the compatibilist part of the spectrum of relating IBE and Bayesian confirmation theory, rather than into the reductionist one, an analysis from a Bayesian perspective should not presuppose that it captures all that is relevant for such an approach (e.g., abductive reasoning as general research strategy). However, where Wright takes into account evidence to confirm his hypotheses, his argument should be compatible with the structure of Bayes’s Theorem. There are two general strategies for evaluating Wright’s inferences with regard to their compatibility with Bayesian inferences. First, we could analyze how these three criteria relate to the two aspects of prior-probability and likelihood in order to see whether these lovely features are “symptoms of likeliness” indeed (Lipton; cf. above). Such an approach can be helpful, for example, in pointing out gaps in the argument and imbalances. To give an illustration, with regard to Richard B. Hays’s famous criteria for identifying inter-textual “echoes,” it can be demonstrated that this set of tests is at risk of leading to wrong conclusions by exhibiting exactly such a problematic pattern.93 Regarding Wright’s understanding of his three criteria, an initial impression might point in a similar direction. To give one example, it is by no means clear that Wright is using the concept of “simplicity” consistently in order to refer to a feature of the hypothesis itself (i.e., as an estimate of the prior-probability), but he is also using it to point to the likelihood factor. For example, he says that in the scenario with the shuddering car, he prefers the explanation of the flat tire because it is “the simplest explanation … that the shuddering was caused by the flat tyre.”94 Now, it is very difficult to see what exactly should be simpler in the hypotheses of a problem with a tire com91 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 99–100. Cf. now PFG 54, where Wright mentions his “criteria for ‘better answers’ and ‘real advance.’” According to Wright, a “historical hypothesis, like a scientific hypothesis, must (a) get in the data, (b) do so with appropriate simplicity, and (c) shed light on areas outside the basic subject-matter of the inquiry.” It would be intriguing to compare Wright’s criteria to the set of six “rules,” which Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:225–30, lists for evaluating historical (!) hypotheses. However, for our purposes it will be more pertinent to stick to the more recent discussions concerning IBE. 92 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 100. 93 Cf. Christoph Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 40–43. 94 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43.

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pared to a problem with the suspension per se. Thus, in the end, this reference to “simplicity” is equivalent in this context with the explanation being more “successful”95 (i.e., that it is more successful in predicting E given that H were true). What Wright probably intends with his reference to simplicity is that in order for the alternative hypotheses to explain the evidence equally well they would have to be more complex (i.e., include more auxiliary hypotheses).96 For example, the additional evidence of a driver “pointing at one of my wheels” can be explained by the suspension-hypothesis equally well if we assume that either the other driver made a mistake or we did not correctly perceive the direction of her pointing. Accordingly, the alternative hypotheses can be modified in order for them to better account for the data by adding auxiliary hypotheses and making them more complex. But note that the original hypotheses of road works or a dysfunctional suspension per se are not more complex while at the same time also failing to explain the data equally well. This raises the suspicion that, in Wright’s understanding, explanations which have more difficulties integrating evidence are sanctioned twice: first by pointing to their lack of predictive power and second by pointing to their increased complexity in order to include the data. This might be interpreted as an indication that Wright’s notion of ‘simplicity’ might influence inferences in a way that contradicts Bayesian results. For, from a Bayesian perspective, one can either say that the original (!) hypothesis of road works has an acceptable prior-probability97 but a very bad likelihood,98 or that a modified version of it (including auxiliary hypotheses) has a low prior-probability but a good likelihood.99 To summarize this initial exploration of one of the three criteria Wright mentions, it appears that such an analysis might yield an 95 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43: “One of the stories I have been telling has emerged as a successful explanatory story.” 96 Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 101 on the complexities involved in keeping a hypothesis “simple” by explaining evidence away by means of auxiliary hypotheses. 97 On German motorways, we have 800 construction sites that are there for at least eight days and over 50,000 construction sites of only one day (http://www.bmvi.de/ SharedDocs/DE/Artikel/K/allgemeines-zu-baustellenmanagement-auf-bundesfernstrassenfragen-antworten.html). Depending on how much you drive on the almost 13,000 km of autobahn, it might be very probable that you get into at least one of them. (Of course, not all construction sites are associated with shuddering.) 98 For example, only very rarely do people point to other drivers’ tires when there are street works in progress. 99 Assume, for example, that the workers are renewing the street surface and due to my reckless driving style, the tar is splashing on the other cars. Therefore, the other driver points to my car, attempting to communicate to me what my tire is doing to the other road users. Then, just before pulling over, the specific surface of the road destroys my tire so that it looks “decidedly sorry for itself.” This story explains the evidence quite well, but it will be very difficult to find the corresponding specific road surface anywhere.

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informative impression of how reliable Wright’s three criteria are in approximating Bayesian inferences. However, it is questionable whether it would be helpful to enter the debate on which explanatory virtues amount to the best approximation of inferring “lovely” explanations that most frequently overlap with the “likeliest” (i.e., most probable) explanations for two reasons. First, “the problem is that none of the said virtues is presently particularly well understood,”100 and it is even more difficult to locate Wright within this complex discussion. Second, since Wright does not consistently refer to these criteria in his exegesis and historical reconstruction, the payoff of such an analysis is questionable. Accordingly, we chose a second path and investigate Wright’s actual inferential praxis – that is, what aspects he considers in reaching conclusions, how this relates to a Bayesian framework, and where it might be improved.

5. Bayesian Considerations for Improving Wright’s Arguments 5.1 Likelihoods As one would expect from a grand Peircean abductive proposal, Wright’s reading of Paul’s letters results in an impressive synthesis that would, if it were true, explain the data very well. In other words, in many places of PFG, the likelihoods of Wright’s hypotheses are high and this is probably the reason why so many find his work to have an especially persuasive force: he manages to make passages that formerly seemed very odd to be a “matter of course” (to use Peirce’s phrase once again) in his framework. To be sure, if we are speaking not only about the predictive power, the likelihood, of Wright’s proposals, but also about the overall probability of his theses in light of the evidence, then we also must take into account the prior-probabilities of these suggestions. We will do so in the next section (5.2), but first we will comment on those cases in which the prior-probability of Wright’s position is uncontroversial. Here, Wright’s contribution is arguably of great significance. Take, for example, his statements on the “sources” of his Pauline theology, where he discusses claims about authenticity regarding the Corpus Paulinum (PFG 56–63).101 Without going into the complexities of relevant issues,102 we 100

Douven, “Abduction.” On this issue also cf. the comments by Schliesser and Becker in this volume. 102 On a very basic level one could, for example, raise the question of whether Wright’s opposition of authenticity and inauthenticity is not too dichotomous, or, at least a simplification of the range of options discussed. Cf. Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul,” 66, who says that “there seems little scope … for complex or shaded scenarios.” To be fair, Wright’s comments in Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 2004), 5 imply that the spectrum he considers is indeed more variegated: “We do need to remind 101

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note that it is very difficult to imagine how the prior-probability of the inauthenticity of any letter of this corpus might be especially high. After all, we usually assume that a letter is authentic unless we have evidence to the contrary (cf. Becker).103 This is not arbitrary bias; rather, it is based on our experience that people often do produce authentic works and that pseudepigraphical works are the exception rather than the rule. One might, of course, qualify this statement with regard to early Christian literature. But even if one had demonstrated convincingly that the Pastoral Epistles, 2 Thessalonians, and Ephesians were almost certainly inauthentic, we could hardly come to Colossians expecting it to also be pseudepigraphical before looking at its form.104 Therefore, if we conclude in this situation that Colossians probably is pseudepigraphical, this can only be on the basis that its actual form (wording, ideas, and arguments) would be more understandable under the assumption that the letter was not written by Paul – in other word, only on the basis of likelihoods. And this is, of course, how the argument is usually constructed, namely by pointing out how specific features of style and content appear to be less predictable against the background of the undisputed Pauline letters than on the assumption of a later Paulinist being the author.105 How does Wright react to this position? Interestingly, he does not refer to the virtues mentioned above. He does not, for example, assume the authenticity of disputed Pauline letters on the basis of this hypothesis being “simpler,” as one might have expected in light of his methodological discussion (cf. above). Not taking this route seems to be a prudent move indeed. After all, since Wright does not seem to be interested in excluding the possibility of ourselves that when these letters were written – that is, some time between about 50 and 100 AD – it was quite common for someone to write in someone else’s name. This didn’t necessarily mean they were (as we would say now) committing forgery. They might be genuinely following through the thought of the person whose name they were using, and applying it to a new situation. I don’t think this is a full explanation of the facts in this case, but it’s worth bearing in mind.” 103 Cf. also – with focus on testimony, not authenticity – Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:226, a passage whose polemic regarding those who have the tendency to believe that testimonies are false Wright would certainly enjoy. Cf. also the discussion that follows, namely Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:232–55, again with polemic against German critics in Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:255. 104 After all, the five inauthentic letters would be in contrast with seven authentic ones. Of course, in theory, there might be background knowledge that might raise the priorprobability of the inauthenticity of Colossians, but such information usually does not play any role in the discussion. 105 Cf. the description in PFG 57, which is, of course, a simplification but correctly captures the inferential dynamic: “The real Paul, such scholars assumed, taught ‘justification by faith’, and since this was held to be radically incompatible with what was seen as a high view of the church (sometimes, too, with a high view of Jesus), Paul could not have written those letters.”

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Paulusschüler as authors of at least some of the letters in the Pauline corpus (cf. PFG 61 with regard to 1 Timothy and Titus), he cannot base his case on omitting an auxiliary hypothesis. Further, hypotheses that integrate a larger set of variegated data will naturally be more complex, in this case by making additional assumptions in order to explain stylistic differences (PFG 60).106 Instead of getting tangled up with such a rather problematic argument, Wright emphasizes that if one follows the insights of the New Perspective on Paul and political readings of the apostle with regard to Colossians and Ephesians, these two letters seem to fit quite well with the image of the apostle that emerges from a reading of the undisputed letters in those frameworks (PFG 57–61). Similarly, Wright thinks that the appreciation of apocalyptic in New Testament studies allows for 2 Thessalonians to be much more expected from the pen of the Apostle to the Gentiles himself (PFG 61). In other words, he is addressing the issue of likelihoods, which we have seen is crucial for this topic. To be sure, Wright’s argument is certainly far from being conclusive, and one might argue that he is not explaining some of the evidence (e.g., stylistic features), but explaining it away (cf. PFG 60). Nevertheless, from a methodological perspective, his argument is much better than one might think in light of its brevity. For, after all, the whole of PFG – an interpretation of the seven undisputed letters, in which Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians would feel at home (PFG 61) – can be read as a lengthy argument for reconsidering those letters’ origin. To be sure, further discussion is needed on a) whether the (new, political, and apocalyptic) perspectives Wright adopts for reading the undisputedly Pauline letters are warranted themselves107 and on b) whether Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians really fit into the emerging paradigm and whether they do so better than in the alternative framework.108 But at any rate future assertions of the pseudepigraphical status of these letters will have to demonstrate that they are still better explained in a framework assuming inauthenticity. Thus, even if one does not agree with Wright’s assumptions or conclusions, his position is a welcome reminder that claims regarding the inauthenticity of letters in the Corpus Paulinum need to 106

Wright knows of the relatedness of simplicity and explanatory scope. See Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 104–9. 107 On which cf. the essays by Kim (political), Frey (apocalyptic), Dunn (New Perspective), and Stuhlmacher (New Perspective) in this volume. 108 One general consideration regarding likelihoods that might be worth to be investigated further, is the question of whether Wright sufficiently takes into account the comparative aspect of inferences. To give another example, Rom 6–8 certainly makes sense on the basis of assuming that Paul has a “massive retelling of the Exodus-narrative” (PFG 659) in mind – but would we really predict it more on such grounds than without this assumption? Cf. already N. T. Wright, “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3–8,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1973–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 162–63, which was originally published in 1999.

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be backed up by reference to the likelihood of this hypothesis. And the changing face of Pauline scholarship might require a shift in explaining how the disputed letters fit into such a framework, or it might require a change with regard to the assumptions regarding the concept of authorship itself. In any case, reference to scholarly tradition will not suffice. A reasonable approach might argue that since Paul (as accessible in the undisputed letters) should not be interpreted in the framework of the New Perspective, for example, Colossians still fits better into the paradigm of pseudepigraphy. What is not a feasible procedure is to argue that Colossians is inauthentic because of its New Perspective content and to argue at the same time that Paul should not be interpreted within the framework of the New Perspective, using a selection of evidence that excludes that letter. One would rather have to offer some independent reason for assuming the inauthenticity of Colossians (such as its style). Otherwise, reasoning becomes circular. In sum, Wright’s contribution in cases where likelihoods have been determinative in deciding between competing hypotheses can be seen as challenging the status quo by offering an alternative with strong predictive power. 5.2 Prior-Probabilities In the last section, we discussed a case in which Wright expectedly and justifiably focuses on likelihoods. “Expectedly” because of his claim to generate an explanation for the evidence at hand in an abductive manner. “Justifiably” because in this case it is difficult to see how the prior-probability might be decisive for the position Wright is challenging. This does not mean, however, that in PFG Wright is only providing a nice story on Paul that would explain his letters if it were true. Admittedly, one might, at first, get this impression from Wright’s strategy of embedding explanatory stories in all kinds of other stories,109 thus conveying the impression that all he is doing is offering one extensive story. On second thought, however, it becomes clear that Wright is addressing the aspect of priorprobabilities too. Note that he says in the introduction that we have to take into account “the larger hypotheses within which those proposals might make sense” (PFG xviii).110 Next, we might note that Wright has written an entire volume – The New Testament and the People of God – in order to provide an analysis of early Judaism and Christianity that might serve as background for his further work. So we should expect Wright to address the aspect of priorprobabilities in his work in some way. But how exactly can we identify where Wright takes into account priorprobabilities? The key can be found in his earlier discussion of “simplicity.” 109

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 43. On “abductive” reasoning in PFG, see now the essay by Theresa Heilig and Christoph Heilig. 110

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There, he writes that “the areas where simplicity might count strongly are in human aims and motivations, in the continuity of the person.”111 In other words, Wright proceeds on the assumption that underneath what people actually do (including, of course, what they write in letters), we can find a “worldview” (the “mindset” being an individual expression of it in Wright’s terminology) that informs the aims and intentions of those persons, which are then expressed in actions.112 We do not need to investigate in more detail here how Wright examines these worldviews.113 What is important for us is simply to note that Wright’s reconstruction of worldviews offer the background against which concrete behavior is evaluated. In other words, Wright is establishing a background knowledge regarding Paul’s aims and motives in chs. 6– 8 of PFG, which enables us to make judgments on the prior-probabilities of specific exegetical questions. Would we generally expect the “Paul” of Part II of PFG, with this specific mindset, to hold to the positions as explicated in Part III? Far from being a confused structure,114 this order reflects the need to ground conclusions regarding the probability of hypotheses not only in their predictive power, but also in their prior-probabilities. Thus, from a Bayesian perspective, Wright’s worldview model finds a comfortable home. It becomes understandable, on the one hand, why Wright’s references to praxis, stories, questions, and symbols are perceived by many as improving his argument. This is the case because with these categories, he is attending to aspects that are very important for evaluating the strength of hypotheses. On the other hand, this perspective explains why Wright’s specific procedure has not gained acceptance as the standard approach in biblical studies but why this does also not imply that his analysis is problematic. Speaking about “worldviews” is his way of getting an approximation of prior-probabilities – but it is not the only way this consideration can be expressed. Wright himself has never been dogmatic about his use of terminology and categories. As he writes: One of the great gains of the last few decades of scholarship has been the emergence, as a main topic, of what I continue to call ‘worldview’, though others label it and approach it differently. It doesn’t do at this point to be too fussy about labels, since they all function in any case heuristically, as signposts to a complex and yet vital phenomenon. (PFG 25)

Hence, we conclude that Wright’s analysis of worldviews should be welcomed as his specific way of addressing the vital element of priorprobabilities. That being said, we would like to close with some initial queries regarding Wright’s evaluation of prior-probabilities by means of worldview-analysis. 111

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 107, his emphasis. Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 126. 113 Cf. Oda Wischmeyer in this volume. See below on the tool of analyzing “praxis.” 114 Cf. e.g. the criticism by Dunn in this volume. 112

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First, we would like to ask whether Wright overemphasizes likelihoods 115 over against prior-probabilities at times. This is not a reproach but rather a request for clarification. It applies in particular to Wright’s theses on Paul’s interaction with Scripture. Already in the introductory chapter, Wright explains Paul’s intention behind the letter to Philemon by assuming an “allusion to the pentateuchal law” in Phlm 17 (PFG 13). To be sure, Wright offers an extensive defense of the idea that Paul’s worldview was informed by a Jewish narrative (PFG 108–79). But does this raise the prior-probability with the result that we should conclude a scriptural echo is present even though the advantage of this hypothesis with regard to its predictive power seems limited? It is one thing to demonstrate that certain things are possible in light of a specific mindset, but it is a completely different thing to demonstrate that this reconstruction of the mindset actually leads us to expect a scriptural allusion before analyzing the wording of any verse in Paul. After all, is it not the case that the majority of Pauline verses do not have concrete allusions to Scripture? If so, it would not be enough for the paradigm of intertextuality to make sense of a specific verse, nor would it be sufficient to explain it better than hypotheses that do not assume such a background; rather, the predictive advantage would have to be so large that it would counterbalance the disadvantage with regard to the prior-probability.116 Accordingly, we would like Wright to clarify two things: 1) Would he affirm that the majority of verses in Paul’s letters do not contain specific references to Scripture? If so, the priorprobability for any verse to exhibit such an intertextual link would be lower than the alternative hypothesis that such a background should not be assumed. 2) If so, has he sufficiently demonstrated in the concrete inferences of scriptural “echoes” how this assumption makes the wording more predictable than it would be without presupposing such a background? And has he demonstrated this to the extent that, as a result, the posterior probability is higher? We are not saying that these two issues could not be demonstrated, but we would like to raise the question of whether Wright sufficiently indicates how he reaches those verdicts.117 This critical inquiry might seem to be only a quibble, but it is actually a quite important issue. For illustration, take again the example of the shuddering car. Presupposing that the shuddering 115

With regard to the question of authenticity, we discussed a case where it is appropriate to focus on likelihoods, not because prior probabilities were somehow unimportant in that regard, but because we concluded that it will be difficult to find a significant difference between prior probabilities of competing hypotheses, so that it follows that the likelihoods will bear the main weight in deciding between them. 116 Cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 29. 117 Interestingly, this suspicion that Wright might privilege likelihood over against prior-probability here, runs counter to the structure of Hays’s criteria, of which only “satisfaction” and “volume” relate to the likelihood factor, which would seem to facilitate prioritizing prior probabilities over likelihoods. Cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 40–43.

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would be most predictable if one assumes that the hypothesis of the flat tire were true, this does not yet imply that it is the most probable hypothesis. After all, if upon entering the street, I have seen a sign that says street works are in progress, this might raise the prior-probability of this hypothesis such that I conclude it has the highest posterior probability after taking into account the shuddering, although it might have less predictive power than the hypothesis of a flat tire.118 Accordingly, even if a specific Pauline wording might be slightly less surprising on the assumption of a scriptural background, this might not be enough evidential support to make this the most probable hypothesis in case the prior probability of that explanation is too low. Second, we would like to raise the question of whether Wright misses important aspects of prior-probabilities because his worldview-analysis privileges abstract elements. In order to avoid generalized judgments on Wright’s method, let us qualify this statement. On the one hand, there seems to be a trend of analyzing ancient people as thinkers. This seems problematic because the “continuity of the person” arguably does not only reside in his or her convictions but also in his or her character and personality. And evaluating how people behave, how they react to certain situations by action and by word, is influenced by these kinds of dispositions. In order to understand, for example, the conflict between Peter and Paul in Gal 2:11–21 and, consequently, in order to understand this important passage on justification, it might be helpful not only to establish what Paul thinks about basic aspects of reality, but also what kind of personality he has.119 On the other hand, it would be unfair to say that Wright is only interested in abstract ideas. He vividly describes the “wider world of real life” as including “love, sleep, shopping, sex, sickness, work, travel, politics, babies, death, music and art, mountains and oceans, food and drink, birds and animals, sunlight and moonlight” (PFG 25). Further, it would be unfair to say that the inventory of his worldview analysis does not allow for these aspects to be captured. After all, the focus on “praxis” seems to be an appropriate tool for identifying such elements. However, one might get the impression that Wright’s description of ancient worldview is quite abstract nevertheless. Maybe this is due to his 118

Street works do not necessarily result in car shuddering whereas a flat tyre seems to go automatically hand in hand with shuddering. 119 The volume by Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer, eds., Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus, 2nd ed., WUNT 187 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009) might offer a good start into the topic. Our question mirrors, in part, the observation that Wright’s part is “a thinker” made by Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul,” 64. Bockmuehl’s criticism, however, goes beyond our enquiry in that it emphasizes Paul’s acts and biography not simply as an instrument for better understanding the apostle’s thought. Rather, Bockmuehl argues that from a theological perspective the prioritizing of Paul’s thought over against these other elements is itself what is questionable.

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classification of individual mindsets into broad worldviews of Jews (ch. 2), Greek philosophy (ch. 3), and religion (ch. 4)? The everyday experience of humans in general does not seem to feature prominently here. To be sure, there is nothing to be said against prioritizing fundamental aspects of mindsets and classifying them into broad worldviews in assessing priorprobabilities. After all, Wright is not simply offering a study of the Umwelt of Paul, and there would be absolutely no use for his project in assembling many details that are of no relevance for understanding Paul’s letters. Accordingly, the pure wish to learn more about Paul’s contemporaries would certainly not be a fair criticism. Still, it seems to be Wright’s intention to include these everyday realities as the quotation from PFG 25 indicates. Further, this seems to be a reasonable intention in light of the situatedness of Paul’s letters. Thus, offering rough sketches of worldviews might offer prior-probabilities for differentiating between equally broad categories of exegesis. What we want to stimulate is the consideration of whether at certain points more detail and less abstractness might not be necessary in order to get a clearer picture.120 For example, let us take a short look on the aspect of food, mentioned in the list above. In order to evaluate statements on this concept, it is prudent to get an idea of the everyday role of food for people in antiquity. What and how did people eat in antiquity? What did it mean for them? These are, no doubt, important questions when we face the task of interpreting early Christian discourse that includes reference to such events – especially since our own experiences differ markedly in many respects.121 However, Wright’s analysis remains quite vague, only referring to food as a Jewish boundary marker in the index (PFG 92). And this is also the context in which Wright later refers to this issue in relation to Paul’s mindset (e.g. PFG 358). To be sure, this is the most important background for understanding the issue behind, for example, Gal 2. However, we cannot sufficiently understand passages such as 1 Cor 11:20–22 on abuses at the Lord’s Supper, if we do not add details to our background knowledge. Interestingly, this passage is not even mentioned in PFG, although it offers a very vivid glimpse into early Christian praxis and its relations to underlying worldviews. Accordingly, it seems justified to raise the question of whether Wright might not have gained significantly from focusing more on a) social realities that are not reducible to the main categories of worldviews he adduces122 and b) on the aspect of praxis in general. At 120 This corresponds to our observation on different levels of detail of explanations, depending on the choice of the negative foil. Cf. section 3. 121 Who would say, for example, to have been ἐν λιµῷ καὶ δίψει often (2 Cor 11:27)? 122 To be sure, food also features in Wright’s description of Greek philosophy (PFG 233: symbols of simple lifestyle), religion (PFG 265: ritual), and Roman ideology (PFG 280 and 288: grain supply; PFG 288n26 and 305: abundance in the new Augustan age) – but do these comments advance our understanding of how people in Corinth might have felt when coming together for this purpose?

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least, the concern should be taken seriously that his worldview analysis might actually turn out to be a rather “thin” description (cf. his reference to Geertz in PFG 25–26; cf. 29) at some points. In some respects, Wright is certainly continuing Meeks’s social-scientific paradigm (PFG 37), but it remains to be answered whether his observations might not be supplemented in an important way by a greater focus on the particularities of the dynamics at work in the Pauline communities and the surrounding societies in general. Third, we would like to raise the question of whether Wright’s assessment of prior-probabilities might have been improved by widening his selection of “worldviews.” Reading through Wright’s descriptions of Jewish, Greek, and Roman worldviews, it is very conspicuous that Wright then turns immediately to Paul himself (PFG 351–569). It seems as if there were a “missing link” that he is ignoring, namely the early Christian worldview in general. We should keep in mind Charlesworth’s protest to Wright’s assertion that “until Paul, nobody had imagined what it might mean for the people of God if the Messiah appeared and was crucified” (PFG 1146; his italics).123 Would we not expect to learn much from taking into account the other early Christian mindsets (which are, after all, varieties of the same worldview according to Wright) for our interpretation of Paul?124 What is the purpose, one might wonder, of Wright’s analysis of “The First Christian Century”125 if it does not offer us much support in understanding one of its most influential proponents? In particular, one might refer to Wright’s treatment of the book of Acts in PFG. As Becker criticizes,126 Wright’s decision that “nothing massive will rest on Acts” (PFG 63) excludes important aspects from his analysis of Paul. One might speculate that Wright’s reluctance to build anything on Acts is due to his perception of skepticism towards its historical credibility in some parts of the scholarly community (cf. PFG 62). However, this does not seem to excuse Wright’s neglect of Acts in all cases. After all, neither are all accounts of Acts subject to the same degree of debate regarding their authenticity, nor is Wright’s alternative route into Paul’s mindset at every point met with less skepticism. To give an example where Wright would have benefitted from taking into account another prominent early Christian mindset, we might refer to the prior-probability of Wright’s interpretation of Gal 2:15–21, which 123

See below, 230. Again, a critical discussion in Markus Bockmuehl, “Wright’s Paul in a Cloud of (Other) Witnesses,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 68 can be found that both mirrors our concern as well as goes beyond what we are focusing on for our purpose: “Is ‘Christian Origins’ essentially about the ‘historical’ Jesus and Paul, but relegating the original Christians and their actually remembered, experienced, and imitated Jesus (and Paul) to the status of also-rans with an inferior grasp on what really happened and was really said?” 125 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 339–464. 126 See below, 155–58. 124

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is absolutely crucial for his version of the New Perspective (e.g., PFG 966– 71). According to Wright, Paul is presupposing that Peter had been living “like the Gentiles” in Gal 2:14 (e.g. PFG 1440). In his reading, this is not a criticism (PFG 1435), but Paul is rather reminding Peter of their shared convictions regarding the full membership of Gentiles in the messianic community. We have already mentioned above that taking into account what we know about Paul’s personality might offer important clues for the priorprobabilities of different interpretations of that encounter. This seems even truer with regard to Peter.127 But even if we regard this information to be too speculative to be included in our background knowledge for evaluating priorprobabilities, one might argue that on the basis of Acts we can ascertain aspects of Peter’s worldview that might influence the plausibility of certain types of behavior, which are presupposed by the different interpretations of the passage. What Peter did when he “drew back” (Gal 2:12) and what the rebuke by Paul means depends in part on what we assume to have been Peter’s stance towards Gentiles before “certain ones came from James.” Why not take into account some basic aspects that seem to be implied by the Cornelius episode and its aftermath in Acts 10–11?128 Wright only comments on these events briefly (PFG 93), and he does not seem to notice that this information could be used to bolster the prior-probability of his own exegesis over against a) interpretations from an “old” perspective on Paul that assume more fundamental confrontation here as well as b) Dunn’s position within the framework of the New Perspective.129 Fourth, we would like to raise the question of whether Wright’s worldview analysis – in particular the focus on stories – might not from time to time confuse the argument instead of clarifying it and whether a more systematic treatment could help in that regard. In order to illustrate what this means, let us take a short look at ch. 12, where Wright defends against Barclay’s criticism his reading of Paul as criticizing the Roman empire by means of “echoes” against Barclay’s criticism (PFG 1271–1319).130 If one examines how 127 See now Jack J. Gibson, Peter between Jerusalem and Antioch, WUNT II 345 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 128 Helpful in many respects is Richard J. Bauckham, “James, Peter, and the Gentiles,” in The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul: Tensions in Early Christianity, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, NovTSup 115 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 91–142. 129 Fore a detailed analysis see Christoph Heilig, “The New Perspective on Peter: How the Philosophy of Historiography can Help in Understanding Earliest Christianity,” in Christian Origins and the Establishment of the Early Jesus Movement, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts, Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture 4 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 130 See John M. G. Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire was Insignificant to Paul,” in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews, WUNT 275 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 363– 87.

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Barclay’s criticism refers to different aspects of the prior-probability and likelihood of Wright’s hypothesis, it becomes clear that while some points he raises hardly affect the plausibility of the argument, some of his considerations seem to be fatal to Wright’s argument if one were willing to accept them. Barclay correctly identifies important aspects that should be analyzed in assessing the prior-probability of Wright’s hypothesis. If one tries to explicate the nested necessary conditions of Wright’s thesis, it becomes apparent that Barclay comments on all of them:131 1. Are the Pauline letters affected by the rules of public discourse at all? 2. Do these rules forbid open criticism of aspects of the Roman empire? 3. Did Paul have an exposure to these elements and perceive them as specifically Roman? 4. Can we expect him to have a critical stance towards those elements? 5. Is it reasonable in light of Paul’s personality to assume that he expressed this critical stance in the subtext of his letters?

Wright responds to this by grounding his interpretation in the clash of narratives between Roman ideology and the Jewish story (PFG 1274–75 and 1278–84). He concludes: Up to this point I have been content with an outline argumentative strategy. I have suggested that there is a massive prima facie probability that, granted what Paul believed and granted what Rome claimed, the two would necessarily come into conflict. (PFG 1284)

In other words, Wright has addressed the above questions 3132 and 4 – Paul’s stance towards Rome.133 Wright, then, “with the echo chamber properly and historically constructed … turn[s] to the texts themselves” (PFG 1284). In other words, he examines the likelihood factor of his interpretation, whether it makes more sense of the texts at hand. Since Barclay raises questions regarding this issue too, such a discussion is no doubt important, but it follows what seems to be a rather incomplete defense of the prior-probability. At the same time, at least for some readers, Wright’s emphasis on narration might have a greater rhetorical effect, implying that all which is of fundamental importance for establishing the prior-probability has been addressed. Wright later (PFG 1309) comes back to Barclay’s “specific criticism.” First, he addresses Pauline epistemology (relevant for the second half of question 3; PFG 1309–12). Second, he picks up Barclay’s doubts on whether the Pauline “vocabulary” in question is best 131

Cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 45 and the chapters corresponding to this list for references to Barclay’s article. Other critiques are not as thoroughgoing. Cf., e.g., Hidden Criticism, 45 on Stefan Schreiber, “Paulus als Kritiker Roms? Politische Herrschaftsdiskurse in den Paulusbriefen,” Theologie und Glaube 101 (2011): 345. 132 The first part only implicitly, of course. However, his ch. 5 certainly counts as a detailed answer to the first part of the question, which is also much more pronounced than in Barclay’s critique in, e.g., the article by Colin Miller, “The Imperial Cult in the Pauline Cities of Asia Minor and Greece,” CBQ 72 (2010): 314–32. 133 For a critical evaluation see Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 110–25.

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explained by assuming criticism against the Roman empire (PFG 1312–14). Here, he defends the predictive power of his hypothesis quite convincingly.134 Third, he discusses the issue of the fact that the criticism is said to be in the subtext of Paul’s letters (PFG 1314–19). By questioning the validity of the examples adduced by Barclay for open criticism of Roman ideology, Wright succeeds in at least partially demonstrating that question 2 should be answered affirmatively to some extent (PFG 1315–16). Although Wright does not discuss question 1 in detail (the concept of “hidden transcripts” is only picked up in PFG 1277 and 1314), he addresses the question of the relation between Paul’s letters and public discourse in a footnote (PFG 1315n134). Further, we find a hint of answering Barclay’s objection regarding Paul’s personality (question 5) in that Wright suggests that Paul’s choice of the subtext for his criticism might not only have been due to “safety” but also due to considerations regarding the dynamics within Christian communities (PFG 1315). But no rebuttal of Barclay’s concrete criticism is found here.135 Although the reader has not yet been given a sufficient answer to question 5, Wright turns to other issues. The rest of his argument136 aims at providing examples of “coded” criticism from other Jewish authors (PFG 1316–17), mainly with reference to Josephus, with a footnote on Philo, and, above all, the book of Revelation. Even if the parallels of “coded” criticism in Jewish authors are stronger than Barclay thinks,137 the value of such parallels seems quite limited. They do not provide a good basis for estimating the priorprobability of whether Paul also would have done similar things.138 Beyond this, one could argue that these considerations are relevant for question 2 (if these authors used code for their criticism, this might be due to the restrictiveness of the Roman power?), but Wright does not follow this line of reasoning. Wright’s main point with regard to Revelation is, however, that it offers “at least a partial answer to Barclay’s comment about my use of Hays’s criteria for detecting allusions and echoes” (PFG 1317). Barclay objects to applying Hays’s criteria for identifying echoes of Scripture to the area of Roman ideology because we have clear scriptural quotations but nothing comparable from the Roman realm. Wright counters that “Rome” is not named in Revelations either but that nonetheless “almost everyone now thinks [it] was intended as a direct subversion of Rome and its blasphemeous claims” (PFG 1317). Further, he points to the fact that it is possible to identify an abundance of scriptural motifs in this book despite the lack of citations from Scripture (PFG 1317). While the reader may or may not judge this to be a good defense of his methodology, it does not address the question of what the result of this methodological procedure is.139 If the reader has not already, he or she will certainly at this point begin to wonder whether the structure of Wright’s response is helpful in understanding his cause. After

134

For an evaluation of Barclay’s objections, see Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 139–55. For a discussion of this rationale for Paul’s choice of the subtext for his criticism cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 130–31. 136 Further, after this, in PFG 1317–18, Wright then interacts with Barclay’s own exposition of Paul’s political theology. 137 Cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 1–20, a chapter that deals with Philo, Somn. 2. 138 Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 43–44. Cf. also Peirce, Collected Papers, 7:178 on the problem of calculating the “truthfulness” of a witness. 139 Nor does it address the question of whether Hays’s criteria are helpful in general, i.e., regardless of whether the context is Roman ideology or Scripture. Cf. on this Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 21–46. Since Barclay does not object to Hays’s criteria for echoes of Scripture, it is justifiable that Wright does not address this issue. 135

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all, why is the methodology defended only after being implemented? This might only be a minor quibble, but we think it points to a larger problem.

Regardless of whether Barclay’s criticism is judged to be convincing or not, one cannot escape the impression that Wright’s decisions regarding the selection of aspects to which he wants to respond is driven by his ability to make goods points in that regard rather than by the impact of Barclay’s objections. Accordingly, one could argue that if Wright had assessed Barclay’s critique from a Bayesian perspective,140 this might have helped him in identifying and then addressing the really crucial issues. After all, a negative answer to any of the above questions would result in falsifying Wright’s hypothesis in its original form.141 Accordingly, if question 1 cannot be affirmed, it is irrelevant if the consequent questions turn out to be answered positively. Therefore, an attentive reader of Wright’s response – though possibly impressed by its narrative force – will hold back his or her approval until PFG 1315n134 even if he or she can agree with most of the preceding discussion. Taking into account how arguments build on each other, Wright’s presentation might have been improved significantly. Most importantly, Wright does not seem to fully appreciate the significance of question 5.142 Here, we seem to have a real challenge to the classic subtext hypothesis.143 Analyzing Barclay’s criticism in the way we suggest could have helped to identify and meet that challenge. Of course, every scholar has his or her own preferences with regard to the presentation of arguments, and Wright certainly has not been unsuccessful with his focus on narration and his multi-perspective responses to criticism. Still, the considerations mentioned here might prove to be a very helpful structuring supplement.

6. Conclusions Wright says that his argument in PFG is “abductive.” Although Wright does not claim to offer an extensive philosophy of historiography, his reflections are worthy of discussion from this perspective. As we have seen, his grand synthesis of Paul’s thought can indeed be seen as an attempt to make sense of the many “surprising facts” we find in the apostle’s letters. He seems to fol140 Barclay’s essay itself does not present the criticism in such a framework. Accordingly, the same could be said with regard to his argument: it might have been even more convincing if he had shown how the path to an anti-imperial Paul is lined with consecutive, problematic necessary conditions. 141 Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 43. 142 Cf. also above, at the beginning of our second question concerning the importance of personality in establishing prior-probabilities. 143 Cf. Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 125–38.

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low Peirce’s logic of discovery quite closely here. Future discussion will profit from concentrating on what aspects Wright successfully explains and how these explanations relate to alternative suggestions. Further, we have seen that beyond generating a reading of Paul that would make sense of the data, Wright aims at confirming his hypothesis by taking into account more evidence and by testing the basic presuppositions of his paradigm by means of worldview-analyses. These features allow the argument of PFG to be brought into dialogue with the more recent discussion about how IBE relates to Bayesian confirmation theory. Wright’s approach can be interpreted as a compatibilist notion of IBE, and therefore it is possible to analyze Wright’s argument in more detail by taking into account Bayesian considerations rather than the three criteria Wright himself mentions. We look forward to seeing how an evaluation from the perspective of the philosophy of historiography in general, and the aspects we adduced in this context in particular, might contribute to a fruitful discussion of Wright’s work.

Bibliography Anderson, Douglas R. “The Evolution of Peirce’s Concept of Abduction.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 22 (1986): 145–64. Barclay, John M. G. “Why the Roman Empire was Insignificant to Paul.” Pages 363–87 in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews. WUNT 275. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Bauckham, Richard J. “James, Peter, and the Gentiles.” Pages 91–142 in The Missions of James, Peter, and Paul: Tensions in Early Christianity. Edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans. NovTSup 115. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Becker, Eve-Marie and Peter Pilhofer, eds. Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus. 2nd ed. WUNT 187. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Bockmuehl, Markus. “Wright’s Paul in a Cloud of (Other) Witnesses.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 59–69. Day, Mark. The Philosophy of History: An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2008. Dawid, Philip. “Bayes’s Theorem and Weighing Evidence by Juries.” Pages 71–90 in Bayes’s Theorem. Edited by Richard Swinburne. Proceedings of the British Academy 113. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Deines, Roland. Acts of God in History. Edited by Christoph Ochs and Peter Watts. WUNT 317. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Douven, Igor. “Abduction.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2011 Edition. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/ entries/abduction. Flórez, Jorge Alejandro. “Peirce’s Theory of the Origin of Abduction in Aristotle,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50 (2014): 265–80. Gibson, Jack J. Peter between Jerusalem and Antioch. WUNT II 345. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. WUNT II 392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.

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–. “The New Perspective on Peter: How the Philosophy of Historiography can Help in Understanding Earliest Christianity.” In Christian Origins and the Establishment of the Early Jesus Movement. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts. Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture 4. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Lipton, Peter. Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. Malina, Bruce J. and Jerome H. Neyrey. Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality. Louisville: John Knox, 1996. Miller, Colin. “The Imperial Cult in the Pauline Cities of Asia Minor and Greece.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 72 (2010): 314–32. Paavola, Sami. “Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference.” Semiotica 153 (2005): 131–54. Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. 8 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. –. Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science: A History of Science. Edited Carolyn Eisele. 2 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985. –. Science and Philosophy. Edited by Arthur W. Burks. Vol. 7 of Collected Papers. Edited by Charles Harthshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Plutynski, Anya. “Four Problems of Abduction: A Brief History.” HOPOS 1 (2011): 1–22. Roche, William and Elliott Sober. “Explanatoriness is Evidentially Irrelevant, or Inference to the Best Explanation Meets Bayesian Confirmation Theory.” Analysis 73 (2013): 659–68. Schreiber, Stefan. “Paulus als Kritiker Roms? Politische Herrschaftsdiskurse in den Paulusbriefen.” Theologie und Glaube 101 (2011): 338–59. Swinburne, Richard. “Introduction.” Pages 1–20 in Bayes’s Theorem. Edited by Richard Swinburne. Proceedings of the British Academy 113. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Talbott, William. “Bayesian Epistemology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2011 Edition. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2011/entries/epistemology-bayesian Tucker, Aviezer. “Introduction.” Pages 1–6 in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography. Edited by Aviezer Tucker. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 41. Reprint. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. –. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Weisberg, Jonathan. “Locating IBE in the Bayesian Framework.” Synthese 167 (2009): 125–43. Wright, N. T. “Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All – Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in His Complex Contexts.” Pages 455–73 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3–8.” Pages 160–68 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1973–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 4. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul for Everyone: The Pastoral Letters. 2nd ed. London: SPCK, 2004 –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992.

Wright’s Paul and the Paul of Acts A Critique of Pauline Exegesis – Inspired by Lukan Studies Eve-Marie Becker 1. The “Bultmann for Our Age”? In his monograph, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, N. T. Wright has presented a most comprehensive picture of Paul’s theology in a broader sense, with a strong focus on Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and eschatology (PFG Parts III–IV). Within more than 1,650 pages Wright shapes his interpretation, which is thought to be a “thick description” (PFG 25) of Paul’s apostolic mission, assuming that Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans. (PFG 46)

Wright intends to resolve “multi-layered dichotomies” (PFG 45) he detects in contemporary research as, most importantly, seeing Paul either as a Jewish thinker, exegeting his Bible and letting the chips fall where they would into the non-Jewish world, or as the apostle to the gentiles, engaging with the pagan culture of his day and grabbing, almost at random, ideas and texts from his previous life in order to do so. (PFG 45)

At the same time Wright himself pursues a threefold target: he wishes to investigate Paul’s “worldview/mindset (the ‘mindset’ being the individual’s particular variation on the parent ‘worldview’ of the community … ), then theology, then history” (PFG 23). The “worldview-model” – consisting of the patterns of “story, praxis, symbol, questions” – aims at illuminating the intellectual and religious context of Paul’s thinking (PFG 32–33); the depiction of Paul’s theology is thought to be the “real climax of the book” (PFG xv). In general, Wright prefers a historical approach to Paul in that he makes “history” – including “history of ideas” (PFG 50) – to be the heuristic link between studying Paul’s historical world, exegeting his writings and judging about the relevance of Paul’s arguments (PFG 48). In the frame of favoring a historical approach, Wright formulates some principal theoretical statements about the concept of history: “Exegesis is a branch of history” (PFG 52); history “acts as a brake, a control, on our oth-

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erwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas” (PFG 54); history, “of course, is never ‘neutral’” (PFG 55). These statements basically refer to how the modern interpreter approaches Paul and his world. In Wright’s rationale they are not applicable to ancient history-writing itself, and thus to how Luke – probably the first “historian” of Paul – has shaped his historiographical account. Wright in contrary is interested in reading Luke/Acts as a source to early Christianity rather than as a historian’s narrative work. This approach – at least as outlined in PFG1 – dismisses contemporary debates about the methods and narrative outline of Acts as ancient historiography,2 and its eminent role in the early reception history of Paul.3 In regard to the current state of research in Lukan studies as much as theoretical debates about “history,” Wright’s concept implies a limited view on Acts’s value for Pauline studies. We will come back to this. In terms of quantity as much as intellectual purpose, Wright’s project is nevertheless as impressive as it is ambitious. Daniel Boyarin calls this opus magnum “the Bultmann for our age.”4 Whatever Boyarin’s detailed thoughts and intentions when comparing Wright and Bultmann may be, in this contribution we will ultimately come close to approving this statement – however, possibly from a different angle – indeed, mainly by seeking matters of deficiency out. By seeing how Wright, in his interpretation of Paul, de facto in most parts is not taking Luke’s portrayal of Paul sufficiently into account, but rather tends to downplay it, we will reach the conclusion that the British exegete in fact does Bultmann credit. As the latter widely takes Luke out when depicting an overall understanding of Paul’s life and theology,5 Wright, in fact, does not consequently take Luke in enough beyond occasionally making use of Luke as a historical source to Paul’s biography. He instead tends to overlook various challenges in how Luke creates an early narrative and theological interpretation of Paul, and thus provides an additional, valuable access to the apostle – his life, thinking, and work. 1

I will restrict my comments on Wright’s interpretation of Paul to what he has outlined so far and most comprehensively in PFG. 2 Cf. Eve-Marie Becker, “Historiography II: Greco-Roman Antiquity,” EBR 11 (forthcoming). 3 E.g., cf. Daniel Marguerat, “Paul après Paul: Une histoire de reception,” NTS 54 (2008): 317–37, esp. 334ff.; Daniel Marguerat, Paul in Acts and Paul in His Letters, WUNT 310 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 4 Cf. PFG i, Daniel Boyarin’s statement: “This book will surely be the defining standard, the Bultmann for our age.” 5 Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testaments, ed. Otto Merk, 9th ed., UniTaschenbücher 630 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), esp. 467ff.: Bultmann nearly exclusively refers to Acts in the context of §53: “Die Wandlung des Selbstverständnisses der Kirche.” In that respect, Wright’s critical analysis of the tendency of traditional exegesis to downplay Acts is correct (cf. PFG 62). Besides, there are some notes on Acts when Bultmann describes the history of the early church (Bultmann, Theologie, 28, 56ff., 133, etc.).

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Does Wright simply ignore Luke/Acts then? We can and will come close to saying so even though Wright himself pretends to do something different. With regard to the commissioning account, he states early on in Part I: Whatever we say about the precise events reported three times in the book of Acts, and alluded to briefly by Paul himself, the blindness mentioned in the story may well have come upon him at several levels simultaneously. (PFG 34)

However, we might doubt that this is Lukan exegesis stricto sensu for the sake of Pauline studies. What we find here is de facto an allegorical reading of Acts which is obviously thought to escape the dilemmas of historical methodology (PFG 62–63).6 We will also get back to this. In what follows first we summarize Wright’s hermeneutical approach to Acts (section 2), and then give some examples of demonstrating his exegetical work with Acts by uncovering his – what we call – deficient reading of the Paul of Acts and its consequences for Pauline exegesis (section 3).

2. Sources and Narrative Concepts: The Role of Acts in Pauline Studies Whenever exegetes work on a comprehensive portrayal of Paul, they start out by reflecting on the literary and historical sources which are available. In Paul’s case we have to think primarily of the so-called authentic letters, and secondly of Acts. Thirdly, we will even refer to the pseudepigraphical letters stemming from what we call deutero- and trito-Paulinism, since those writings might provide the earliest critical reflex or interpretation of Paul’s theology. These are the earliest Christian sources of knowledge and textual analysis. They can, of course, be further enlarged by non-Christian texts and documents, depending on the particular research quest: a) When depicting Paul’s biography, various historical and textual (including epigraphical) sources above all provide additional evidence (e.g., Hellenistic-Roman historians; Gallio-inscription) for reconstruction Paul’s life and apostolic career in the frame of Hellenistic Judaism in the early Roman Imperial time. b) When focusing on Paul’s intellectual life and his thoughts, his reading of the Septuagint is of pivotal importance. However, especially philosophical texts from Hellenistic-Roman times – preferably from contemporary writers, such as Epictetus, Seneca, or Pliny (cf. PFG 3ff.) as well as HellenisticJewish authors (esp. Philo) – help us to better detect various ancient mechanisms of thinking behind Paul’s arguments. Hereby, we can contextualize Pauline letter-writing – beyond matters of rhetorical and epistolographical 6

On Wright’s explicit interest in allegory, cf. also PFG 68ff.

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practice and theory only – more comprehensively in its first-century CE intellectual setting. Recently, such a research quest has gained new importance,7 even though we are actually dealing here with a well-established insight of New Testament hermeneutics that was already discussed in nineteenthcentury continental European scholarship.8 To put this into more general terms, pagan literary sources can help to illuminate the sphere of intellectual (religious) discourse and its various ancient literary forms and argumentative mechanisms. Since Wright is not only interested in Paul’s biography, but rather more in investigating Paul’s (intellectual) “worldview and mindset” (see above) also, we might presume that his approach to ancient textual sources would be comparably broad and extensive. We might guess that it covers Pauline letters – authentic and pseudepigraphical ones – as much as Acts, and might reflect the source status of a wide range of non-New Testament writings and documents also. And indeed, Wright opens up his monograph by programmatically providing a comparative reading of Pliny and Paul (PFG 3ff. ), and hereby enlarging Paul’s intellectual world right from the beginning. Bearing this in mind, how does Wright present his methodological ideas about source theory and the role of Acts (PFG 56ff. )? He first of all expresses his awareness of how historians approach sources (PFG 56). Does he hold to this, especially when identifying his sources in a material sense? Wright names the seven so-called authentic letters first (PFG 56), and in this frame also discusses the scholarly “prejudice against Ephesians and Colossians” (PFG 59) and 2 Thessalonians (PFG 61). Wright does not prove the authenticity of these letters,9 but rather tries to falsify pseudepigraphy claims; he applies a kind of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” to the state of the art in current Pauline studies and its prehistory. He wishes to uncover for what reason and how the deutero-Pauline letters have been dismissed during the history of research. He identifies primarily theological reasons, such as the scholarly skepticism against the apocalyptic character of 2 Thessalonians, and – by pointing to contemporary needs and trends in New Testament exegesis – votes for a reconsideration of pseudepigraphy verdicts and instead argues for the sustainability of authenticity claims (PFG 61).

7

Cf., e.g., Kendra Eshlemann, The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians, Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 8 Cf. Mogens Müller, “H. N. Clausen,” Handbuch der Bibelhermeneutiken (forthcoming). 9 By refusing to do so, Wright in fact follows the basic principle of philological work (Echtheitskritik), according to which only literary authenticity can be questioned by means of textual analysis while pseudepigraphy in return can hardly be falsified. Reasonably enough, Wright seems to avoid getting into the trap of pseudepigraphy research.

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Consequently, Wright wishes to assume Colossians to be “certainly Pauline,” Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians to be “highly likely … Pauline”; 2 Timothy “may well be by Paul” (PFG 61). In other words, he suggests three grades or degrees of certainty regarding the claim of Pauline authorship which includes nearly all pseudepigraphical Pauline letters also – only 1 Timothy and Titus are put “in a different category, and will be used, in the opposite way to that in which a drunkard uses a lamppost, for illumination rather than support” (PFG 61). We cannot further examine whether and how Wright in his overall approach to Pauline theology sticks to the assumptions made here, and what the suggested “three degrees of certainty” will concretely mean for textual interpretation. How are they applicable if we wish to exclude arbitrariness from exegetical work? It is nevertheless more important to reflect on how at this point the book of Acts fits into the “arsenal of sources.” Acts appears as a final source and concludes the listing of ancient sources: Wright does not consequently enough – as historians would do – reflect in his “Paul-project” on the source-status of Jewish or pagan documents and literary texts (see above). He rather sticks exclusively to the New Testament canon as source book, and herein gives some final thoughts about the source value of Acts (PFG 62–63). The line of argument is similar to the discourse about pseudepigraphy. We can keep it short: again, Wright attempts to invalidate hermeneutical prejudices about Acts, either high or low level of historical reliability as being articulated by “conservative” or “radical” scholars, originally stemming from “the older liberal protestant ruling paradigm … to suggest that the writing … of Luke in particular, represented a ‘failure of nerve’ on the part of the early church” (PFG 62). Wright again incriminates certain “fashions in biblical scholarship” which have let to the shape of dichotomies when reconstructing early Christianity (F. C. Baur), or to the image of Luke looking “tendentious or just silly” (PFG 63). Wright rather intends “to step back from these particular agendas” (PFG 63). He instead formulates the following “action plan” for reading Acts: [Acts cannot] be used naively as it stands as a historical source. But … we must hold off from dogmatic negativity and look at the actual evidence afresh. For our present purposes, we will take the line I have taken with Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians: nothing massive will rest on Acts, but it will be interesting from time to time to see what new possibilities emerge as we look at Paul from fresh angles. (PFG 63)

In general, we might sympathize with Wright’s balanced revaluation of Acts as being expressed here – last but not least for reasons of ideological criticism. If there are certain positions which ex officio argue in favor of or against Luke’s “historical” validity, we have to overcome them. However, we have to be critical with Wright’s line of argument for conquering positional readings – and this we must for reasons of academic validity. First, we have to ask back: does

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Wright himself in his view about Luke/Acts escape “dogmatic negativity”? His narrative account about the history of research can hardly be satisfying. Instead of giving a short report about various research quests and hypotheses10 and hereby presenting a multicolor, possibly much differentiated, picture of the scholarly dealing with Acts as a source for Paul, Wright only names polarized positions, being labeled as either “conservative” or “radical.” There is not only a lack of information visible in Wright’s presentation of Lukan studies in PFG, but this valuation (nolens volens) also continues “positionalism” as much as “dogmatic negativity.” Pointing to the limits and problems within the history of interpreting Acts when working with Paul would best make sense if such an undertaking was accompanied by the aim of also revealing explicitly the heuristic and subject-related outcomes for contemporary Pauline exegesis. Second, there is a problem with methodological clarity and stringency in how Wright reaches his action plan for reading Luke/Acts: he says that he will refer to Acts “from time to time” (PFG 63). How does this (methodological principle?) of textual reading work, and how will the exegete – again – protect his understanding of the “Lukan Paul” from the danger of interpretive arbitrariness? Further, Wright claims to be aware of the task of a historian and the key function of history (see above). Current studies in ancient history, however, vary significantly from how Wright approaches Luke/Acts in PFG. On the one hand, historians have a different understanding of the historical and literary value of a source: they would self-evidently consider Acts to be a constantly useful historical source for Paul without ever forgetting its possible tendentious character. The appropriate method is “Tendenzkritik.” Wright’s overall statement, not to read Acts as a continuous “historical source” (see above) to Paul sounds at least cautious, if not discouraged – or is it meant to be apologetic? More seriously however is the fact, that it does not follow the overall interpretive standards of historical analysis. Historians of early Roman Imperial history will use sources about Augustus as they use the Monumentum Ancyranum besides a mass of multi-faceted texts documenting political and social history (only a short remark on PFG 62). Hereby, historians tend to read Augustus’s autobiography even more critically than they value historiographical or biographical accounts about the Principate (Suetonius, Tacitus, etc.) because they constantly look for (literary) patterns of selffashioning. I would not dare to presume that Wright does not know about the rationale behind the study of antiquity. It seems, however, as if he himself is wedged in intellectual aporias that are probably caused by dogmatic prejudices and/or ecclesial wishes regarding New Testament exegesis.

10 Such a differentiated report on the history of research can already be found in: Ernst Haenchen, Die Apostelgeschichte, 6th ed., KEK 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 13ff.

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To be quite clear on the matter of prejudices: as I will not come to label Wright’s approach in any sense as positionalist, I am not willing to be understood here as a voice of a certain position either – neither as a “conservative” exegete who argues in favor of Luke/Acts as historiography (which is rather an ancient concept of construing the past), nor as a “radical” or “liberal” theologian who, “from time to time,” questions the credibility of Luke’s account of Paul (which seems to be much more plausible than we dare to think). My points rather are: 1) we have to be sensitive about sources and the methodology which steers textual interpretation; 2) we have to exceed any simple exegetical thinking along the lines of labels and positions. Positionalizations do not help to develop academic discourses. Rather, we have to look for interpretive options, plausibility, stringency, methodological transparency. I consider both academic propositions as formulated here, to be the leading principles of scientific work. On the other hand, historians have meanwhile successfully applied the insights of the linguistic and the narrative turn to the study of ancient history: as we today know that even modern “history” basically is the interpretive result of reconstructing and conceptualizing the past, we are aware how historians themselves – ancient and modern – have shaped history by interpreting past events and creating a narrative outline that approves or revises already existing master narratives. This applies likewise to the gospel writings and Acts as narrative literature of the early Roman Imperial time, but it applies also to Paul and his letter writing. Even Paul himself puts his thinking into a narrative frame – indeed, beyond the purpose of writing autobiography, missionary history, or salvation history.11 Already Paul’s self-designation as a δοῦλος Χριστοῦ, which authorizes theological as much as ethical arguments (Phil 1–2; Rom 1–15), can be read as shorthand for an identity that is above all construed in narrative terms (e.g., 1 Cor 15; Gal 1–2). Certainly, Wright is aware of current debates about the narrative character of Pauline theology. He picks it up extensively (PFG 456ff.), and by making the “story” to be a crucial element of investigating “worldview” (see above), he himself employs the intellectual concept of (ancient) narrativity. Surprisingly enough then, Wright does not take the opportunity of applying the concept of narrativization to his reading of the Lukan Paul, so that – consequently – Luke’s approach to Paul would appear as a genuine narrative shape of the apostle which complements Paul’s own self-portrait. To turn this around and put it in other words: using Acts consistently as a source for Paul and applying the insights about history and narratology to Paul and Luke/Acts 11

Cf. Eve-Marie Becker, “Die Konstruktion von ‘Geschichte’: Paulus und Markus im Vergleich,” in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer, BZNW 198 (Berlin: de Gruyter), 393–422.

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will lead to the necessary conclusion that Pauline letter writing and Lukan historiography are likewise to be considered as equally ranking narrative sources for Paul – his life, thinking, and work.

3. Between Critical Attestation and Redirection: Luke’s Challenging Portrait of Paul So far, we have identified two basic problems in Wright’s interpretative approach to the Lukan Paul viz. the Paul of Acts: First, Wright does not consequently and consistently enough consider Luke/Acts to be a valuable historical source for Paul, which has its proper place among a wide range of ancient texts providing additional knowledge about first-century CE life. Second, Wright does not sufficiently take into account that each depiction of Paul’s life, thinking, and work must necessarily rely on portraits that are the result of narrativization – this applies to the Pauline self-portrait as much as it applies to Luke’s portrayal of Paul. The latter insight must be a conditio sine qua non for Pauline studies if we take seriously the scholarly paradigm according to which history and narrative constantly interact in the (ancient and modern) process of construing the past – a paradigm that also Wright proposes to us. This paradigm, however, cannot lead us to simply adding memorial traditions and avoiding proper historical judgment.12 Interpreting memorial cultures and source materials always includes critical analysis and interpretation. In a next and final step we will look at how Wright’s reflections about the (limited) source status of Luke/Acts affect his consecutive reading of Acts and his particular consideration of the Paul of Acts, and how they finally influence his picturing of Paul. By extension, we will identify a third problem which reinforces once more the impression that Wright’s deficient reading of Acts also leads to a deficient exegesis of Paul: Wright overlooks how Luke’s portrayal of Paul does not only provide a further source for the apostle but also provokes a critical attestation or redirection of Paul’s self-portrait. And, once again, Wright instead tends to push back the image of Paul that Luke has shaped in Acts. Luke’s portrait of Paul seems to be only interesting to the modern exegete as long as it does not interfere with our hermeneutical interests in Paul. What does it concretely mean, then, when Wright wishes to refer to Acts “from time to time”? Within two volumes and ca. 1,650 pages Wright rather rarely makes reference to Acts. Beyond his reflection about sources (PFG 56–63; see above), 12 Cf. Norbert Frei, “Kriegsende und Urteilskraft: Der 8. Mai 1945, die Erinnerungskultur und die transnationale Perspektive der Geschichtswissenschaft,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 100 (2015): 58.

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we find all in all a bit more than 40 explicit instances mentioning Acts beyond the pure documentation of single textual references.13 Most of these instances serve the value of Acts as a source (Quellenwert) viz. the comparison of “the portrait of Paul in Acts” with Paul’s “own self-portrait in the letters” (PFG 87; cf. also PFG 205, 419, 436, 1153, 1271, 1411, 1498). This is basically done according to traditional scholarly debates about the chronology of Paul’s life.14 Additionally, Wright offers interpretation of some crucial texts like Acts 2, 7, 9, 10, 17, or 22.15 All the way through, however, his view of Acts tends to be distanced and critical,16 though he does finally leave it open for us to discuss what we might “think of the historical value of Acts” (PFG 1350; cf. also 1504). In terms of historical status and narrative quality, the Paul of Acts – as proposed by Wright – appears to be a chimera rather than an impressive picture of its own at which interpreters of Paul are stimulated to look. Undervaluing Luke’s historical and narrative value for Pauline studies, however, goes hand in hand with dismissing some aspects of the genuine Lukan depiction of Paul which in fact might be crucial for our comprehensive and critical understanding of Paul’s life, thinking, and work. I will bring up two examples – one referring to Paul’s ethical teaching, the other one to an elementary religious aspect of Paul’s apostolic ministry. 1. Paul’s admonition to the Philippians to practice “humility” (Phil 2:3, ταπεινοφροσύνη) is mostly seen in contrast to contemporary moral debates of first-century CE society:17 philosophers like Epictetus tend to use the semantics of ταπειν- in a pejorative sense. Also Hellenistic-Jewish authors like Philo and Josephus reveal an ambiguous or even more negative attitude toward the semantic field even though it is deeply rooted in Septuagint language. Consequently, Paul’s ethical demand in Phil 2 sets itself widely apart from Hellenistic, especially Stoic, ethics. Wright moves on a similar track when he claims that “the virtues which are to be produced include four which no ancient pagan would have recognized as positive character-traits: patience, humility, chastity and above all ἀγάπη, ‘love’” (PFG 1116). 13

On the documentation of textual references, cf. PFG 1609–10. Explicit mentioning of Acts can be found on: PFG 8, 22, 34, 76, 81, 86, 87, 89, 93, 156, 172, 205, 213, 242, 280, 356, 364, 376, 416, 419, 429, 431, 436, 854, 1066, 1119, 1153, 1158, 1164, 1185, 1271, 1303, 1321, 1350, 1411, 1419, 1431, 1440, 1441, 1443, 1495, 1498, 1504. 14 E.g., on the Ephesian imprisonment (PFG 7–8); on Paul as a student of Gamaliel (PFG 86, 205) and Gamaliel (PFG 156); on Paul’s origin from Tarsus (PFG 89), his citizenship (PFG 280), and religious education (PFG 364); on Paul’s preaching activities (PFG 1441, 1498) and collaborators (PFG 854). 15 E.g., PFG 34, 86–87, 93, 205, 213, 242, 356, 376, 1066, 1158, 1164, 1185. 16 PFG 431: “swashbuckling tales of Acts.” 17 Cf. most recently: Reinhard Feldmeier, Macht – Dienst – Demut: Ein neutestamentlicher Beitrag zur Ethik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

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So far, so good. If we follow this line of interpretation, we are accepting the presumption that Pauline ethics can exclusively be extracted from Pauline letters. But what if we take in Acts likewise as a source for Pauline ethics? How would Luke’s contribution to interpreting Pauline ethics work? Does it help to better contextualize it in its Hellenistic-Jewish and -Roman setting? Or does it provide additional interpretation? Does Luke approve Pauline thinking, or does he suggest a different picture of Paul as a moral teacher? In general, Luke avoids the semantics of ταπειν-, and hereby indicates an intellectual proximity especially to Josephus. In particular, he refers to the Pauline concept of ταπεινοφροσύνη, indeed at a most prominent place: in the farewell speech addressed to the Ephesian Elders in Miletus (Acts 20:19). This incident is hardly accidental. It might shed some light on the overall connotation of ταπειν- in its Hellenistic setting, and on Luke’s understanding of a crucial element of Pauline ethics.18 According to Luke, Pauline ethics is grounded in the apostle’s personal engagement in his ministry. Luke’s critical attestation of Pauline terminology helps to shape a nuanced picture of the rise of early Christian ethics – a picture that will in the end exceed any generalizing statement about the concept of Christian virtues or, more particularly, the function of love in early Christianity (e.g., PFG 429, 1119). Luke’s view on Pauline ethics – which may be or may be not based on his reading of certain Pauline letters – illuminates the concept of ethics as much as the moral authority of its teacher. 2. In Acts, Paul appears frequently as a miracle worker (Acts 13:6–12; 14:3, 8–10, 19–20; 15:12; 16:16–19, 25–34; 19:12; 20:7–12; 28:3–6, 7–9).19 Is this role specific for the Paul of Acts20 – as Ernst Haenchen has already pointed out?21 Without a doubt, the picture of Paul as thaumaturge in Acts serves various literary ambitions. Last but not least it is shaped due to the narrative function of miracles and fiction in Hellenistic-Roman historywriting.22 Can this narrative aspect of Paul’s ministry likewise be exclusively explained, then, by Luke’s historiographical approach to Paul – can it thus be 18 Cf. more extensively on this: Eve-Marie Becker, Der Begriff der Demut bei Paulus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). 19 Cf. Stanley E. Porter, “The Portrait of Paul in Acts,” in The Blackwell Companion to Paul, ed. Stephen Westerholm (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 124–38, 131. In what follows, I will gratefully refer to some ideas that have been worked out in a student’s MA-exam paper on the topic: “Paul as Miracle Worker: A Critical Reading of N. T. Wright” (Daniel Vigtoft Jakobsen, “Paulus som mirakelmager: en kritisk læsning af N. T. Wright” [MA exam paper, Aarhus Universitet, 2015]). 20 Cf., e.g.: Jens Schröter, “Die Paulusdarstellung der Apostelgeschichte,” in Paulus Handbuch, ed. Friedrich W. Horn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 542–51. 21 Cf. Haenchen, Apostelgeschichte, 99ff.; Porter, “Portrait,” 131. 22 Cf. Eckhard Plümacher, “ΤΕΡΑΤΕΙΑ: Fiktion und Wunder in der hellenistischrömischen Geschichtsschreibung und in der Apostelgeschichte,” ZNW 89 (1998): 66–90.

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reduced to a literary pattern viz. the popular religious characterization of Paul as a magician?23 A close reading of Paul reveals to us that Paul himself points to “signs and wonders” (σηµεῖα, τέρατα, Rom 15:19)24 that are related to his apostolic ministry (cf. also 2 Cor 12:11–12; 1 Cor 12:9–11, 28; 14:18; Gal 3:5). It thus seems to be a natural element of how Paul understands his missionary activities and strategies: it is part of his self-portrait and his theological conceptualization of charisms. Nevertheless, as it is the case with Wright’s monograph, contemporary theological portrayals of Paul tend to overlook the aspect of Paul the apostle as miracle worker.25 In more recent research on Paul, there are at least a few exceptions to this general lack of interest in Paul as a religious person.26 Contemporary Pauline exegesis should take notice of that development and consider in Lukan studies more comprehensively. This is even more desirable with regard to Wright’s comprehensive project of interpreting Paul: Since he wishes to illuminate the world, mindset, and religious personality of Paul thoroughly – even by referring to Acts “from time to time” (see above; e.g., PFG 1303; 1321) – failing to incorporate Paul’s activities as miracle worker into the overall portrayal of Paul reveals a 23 Cf. Bernhard Heininger, “Die Rezeption des Paulus im 1. Jahrhundert: Deutero- und Tritopaulinen sowie das Paulusbild der Apostelgeschichte,” in Paulus: Leben – Umwelt – Werk – Briefe, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, 2d ed., Uni-Taschenbücher 2767 (Tübingen: Francke, 2012), 349–80, 373 (Bernhard Heininger, “The Reception of Paul in the First Century: The Deutero- and Trito-Pauline Letters and the Image of Paul in Acts,” in Paul: Life, Setting, Work, Letter, ed. Oda Wischmeyer [London: T&T Clark, 2012], 309–38) – with reference to: Bernd Kollmann, “Paulus als Wundertäter,” in Paulinische Christologie: Exegetische Beiträge, ed. Udo Schnelle and Thomas Söding, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 76–96; Hans-Josef Klauck, Magie und Heidentum in der Apostelgeschichte des Lukas, SBS 167 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996). 24 Wright only refers to that text by not discussing its reference to the miraculous: PFG 1203. 25 There are no references to be found on Paul as miracle worker, e.g., in Udo Schnelle, Paulus: Leben und Denken, 2nd ed., de Gruyter Lehrbuch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 147ff. (“Missionstrategien”); Michael Wolter, Paulus: Ein Grundriss seiner Theologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011), 8–51 (on Paul’s biography and his apostolic ministry). Cf. too a critique of such a deficiency: Bernhard Heininger, “Im Dunstkreis der Magie: Paulus als Wundertäter nach der Apostelgeschichte,” in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus, ed. Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer, WUNT 187 (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck: 2005), 271–91. 26 Cf. Graham H. Twelftree, Paul and the Miraculous: A Historical Reconstruction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013); Heininger, “Dunstkreis”; Craig A. Evans, “Paul the Exorcist and Healer,” in Paul and His Theology, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Pauline Studies 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 363–79; Stefan Alkier, Wunder und Wirklichkeit in den Briefen des Apostels Paulus: Ein Beitrag zu einem Wunderverständnis jenseits von Entmythologisierung und Rehistorisierung, WUNT 134 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Stefan Schreiber, Paulus als Wundertäter, BZNW 79 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996).

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crucial deficiency. It seems as if Wright’s portrait of Paul “and the faithfulness of God” is, rather, painted according to its outcomes for (Christian) theology: it ultimately reveals itself as a concept that is basically designed by the wishes of dogmatic concerns and constraints. We cannot know whether Bultmann would approve of it. Certainly, Luke – and with him the longstanding tradition of Christian historians – would be disappointed.

Bibliography Alkier, Stefan. Wunder und Wirklichkeit in den Briefen des Apostels Paulus: Ein Beitrag zu einem Wunderverständnis jenseits von Entmythologisierung und Rehistorisierung. WUNT 134. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001. Becker, Eve-Marie. Der Begriff der Demut bei Paulus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming. –. “Die Konstruktion von ‘Geschichte’. Paulus und Markus im Vergleich.” Pages 393–422 in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer. BZNW 198. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014 Bultmann, Rudolf. Theologie des Neuen Testaments. 9th ed. Edited by Otto Merk. UniTaschenbücher 630. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984. Eshleman, Kendra. The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Evans, Craig A. “Paul the Exorcist and Healer.” Pages 363–79 in Paul and His Theology. Edited by Stanley E. Porter. Pauline Studies 3. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Feldmeier, Reinhard. Macht – Dienst – Demut: Ein neutestamentlicher Beitrag zur Ethik. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. Frei, Norbert. “Kriegsende und Urteilskraft: Der 8. Mai 1945, die Erinnerungskultur und die transnationale Perspektive der Geschichtswissenschaft.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 100 (2015): 58. Haenchen, Ernst. Die Apostelgeschichte. 6th ed. KEK 3. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968. Heininger, Bernhard. “The Reception of Paul in the First Century: The Deutero- and TritoPauline Letters and the Image of Paul in Acts.” Pages 309–38 in Paul: Life, Setting, Work, Letter. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer. London: T&T Clark, 2012. –. “Die Rezeption des Paulus im 1. Jahrhundert: Deutero- und Tritopaulinen sowie das Paulusbild der Apostelgeschichte.” Pages 349–80 in Paulus: Leben – Umwelt – Werk – Briefe. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer. 2nd ed. Uni-Taschenbücher 2767. Tübingen: Francke, 2012. –. “Im Dunstkreis der Magie: Paulus als Wundertäter nach der Apostelgeschichte.” Pages 271–91 in Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus. Edited by Eve-Marie Becker and Peter Pilhofer. WUNT 187. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Jakobsen, Daniel Vigtoft. “Paulus som mirakelmager: en kritisk læsning af N. T. Wright.” MA exam paper, Aarhus Universitet, 2015. Klauck, Hans-Josef. Magie und Heidentum in der Apostelgeschichte des Lukas. SBS 167. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996.

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Klauck, Hans-Josef, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. 30 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009–. Kollmann, Bernd. “Paulus als Wundertäter.” Pages 76–96 in Paulinische Christologie: Exegetische Beiträge. Edited by Udo Schnelle and Thomas Söding. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Marguerat, Daniel. “Paul après Paul: Une histoire de reception.” NTS 54 (2008): 317–37. –. Paul in Acts and Paul in His Letters. WUNT 310. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Plümacher, Eckhard. “ΤΕΡΑΤΕΙΑ: Fiktion und Wunder in der hellenistisch-römischen Geschichtsschreibung und in der Apostelgeschichte.” ZNW 89 (1998): 66–90. Porter, Stanley E. “The Portrait of Paul in Acts.” Pages 124–38 in The Blackwell Companion to Paul. Edited by Stephen Westerholm. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. Schnelle, Udo. Paulus: Leben und Denken. 2nd ed. de Gruyter Lehrbuch. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Schröter, Jens. “Die Paulusdarstellung der Apostelgeschichte.” Pages 542–51 in Paulus Handbuch. Edited by Friedrich W. Horn. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Wischmeyer, Oda, et al., eds. Handbuch der Bibelhermeneutiken. Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming.

Wright’s Understanding of Paul’s Use of Scripture Steve Moyise 1. Introduction In order to compare and contrast Paul’s worldview with that of Pliny, Wright opens his magisterial Paul and the Faithfulness of God with a discussion of the letter to Philemon. Far from being devoid of theology, as many have concluded, Wright states that the reconciliation, for which Paul is arguing, is thoroughly biblical: Paul, faced with a dilemma concerning a slave and a master, would naturally reach, not for our post-Enlightenment narratives of liberation, but for the material on this very subject within his own scriptures, which after all told their own large-scale narrative of the freeing of an entire nation of slaves. That was the way his mind most naturally worked – especially because he believed, and taught repeatedly, that the ultimate ‘exodus’ had now occurred in and through Jesus. (PFG 13)

Traditional questions, such as whether there is sufficient verbal similarity with another text to warrant such an inference, or whether Paul’s readers/hearers would have the wherewithal to detect such a reference, are swept aside, for “Israel’s scriptures were as familiar to Paul, and as readily available in his well-stocked mind, as Beethoven’s sonatas to a concert pianist” (PFG 13). The point is well made but it should be noted that such questions are not so much directed to what Paul could or could not have done but to our ability to give an accurate account of them. Thus many scholars have drawn on the seven criteria listed by Richard Hays (availability, volume, recurrence, thematic coherence, historical plausibility, history of interpretation, satisfaction) to assess the probability of particular proposals.1 Hays acknowledges that “there will be exceptional occasions when the tests fail to account for the spontaneous power of particular intertextual conjunctions,”2 and these might well be important. As I have said elsewhere, one would not expect music

1 Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). He has since expanded on these criteria and how they should function in Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination. Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). 2 Hays, Echoes, 32–33.

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critics to confine their comments to the loudest instruments in the orchestra.3 Nevertheless, the point of such criteria is to help us assess the probability of particular proposals, with the implication that we must be much more cautious if such evidence is lacking.4 Wright develops this notion of a controlling narrative or worldview in the following chapter. After a brief survey of biblical 5 and post-biblical texts,6 he acknowledges that “there are considerable and obvious differences between the examples,” and in particular, “there is no single picture of the ‘the Messiah’ which emerges even from these narrative texts, let alone from any wider consideration of the Jewish evidence” (PFG 135). However, it would be wrong to conclude from this that scripture offers “a mere ragbag of examples and warnings to be drawn on at random” (PFG 136). The variations merely support the fact that the “overall story was obviously well enough known for the various elements in it to retain their place in relation to one another even if quite different lessons are being drawn from it” (PFG 136).7 This might be correct but we should note the rhetoric: those who hold a different view are aligned with an (unnamed) group who believe that Paul thought of the scriptures as “a mere ragbag of examples and warnings to be drawn on at random.” One is bound to ask whether this is the only alternative to Wright’s view. There then follows a defense of Wright’s “continuing exile” theme, which has been a characteristic of his work since The New Testament and the People of God.8 A brief review of the evidence follows, concluding that it is the combination of Deuteronomy and Daniel, and their regular retrieval in the key sources, that compels us to go on highlighting ‘exile’ as the best controlling metaphor to 3 Steve Moyise, The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation, JSNTSup 115 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 18. Stanley Porter notes that listing seven criteria like this gives a false impression of objectivity, and some scholars have unfortunately attempted to use them in this way. But it is clear that judgements about “volume” are related to judgements about “recurrence,” and judgements about “coherence” are related both to “historical plausibility” and “satisfaction.” See Stanley E. Porter, “The Use of the Old Testament in the New: A Brief Comment on Method and Terminology,” in Early Christian Interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel: Investigations and Proposals, ed. Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, JSNTSup 148, SSEJC 5 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 79–96. 4 The view that we should take into account what Paul’s first readers were capable of detecting is particularly associated with Christopher D. Stanley, Arguing with Scripture: The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul (New York: T&T Clark, 2004). 5 Deut 27–30; Pss 78, 105, 106; Isa 40–55; Ezra 9; Neh 9; and Dan 9. 6 Judith, Ben-Sirach, 1 and 3 Maccabees, 1 En. 85–90, Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen ar), 4QMMT (4Q394), Josephus, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. 7 As also argued by Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper (New York: Doubleday, 2011). 8 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992).

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characterize this continuing moment in the single, though complex, perceived narrative of a great many Jews, including Pharisees, in the second-Temple period. (PFG 162)

The importance of this for understanding Wright’s view of Paul’s use of scripture lies in two further comments. First, worldview trumps languagesystem. Wright thinks that scholars have often been led astray by finding parallels to obscure texts or themes but “it is worldview, rather than the language-system, which determines how the relevant metaphors work” (PFG 166). Thus Wright very rarely refers to Jewish exegetical techniques, such as gezera sewa, to explain how Paul moved from one text to another: these are subsumed under the much more significant category of narrative. Second, when Paul does allude to some aspect of this story, the presumption should be that he intends his readers to understand his words in the light of it: “When the metaphors in question come laden with earlier meanings in well-known texts, the question presses even more: what justification have we for ignoring those earlier meanings?” (PFG 173). Lest this sound like special pleading, it should be noted that Wright is happy to extend this principle to other Jewish writers. Thus while Qumran exegesis may seem odd to us, it was “not an arbitrary or fanciful exercise, but flowed directly from their belief that they were indeed the people of the renewed covenant, for whom therefore all the ancient prophecies must now be finding their ‘yes’” (PFG 176). In particular, it did not simply “foist strange and unnatural interpretations” (PFG 176) onto the texts but did its best to take the texts with the utmost seriousness. He is even willing to extend this to the Pharisees, though he acknowledges that direct evidence for their beliefs is limited. Thus focus on purity and Torah is not an arbitrary choice but “contributes directly to the vision of Deuteronomy 30: this is how Israel must turn back to YHWH with heart and soul, and discover and obey the full meaning of Torah” (PFG 176). As a result, we must make the point that, even when it often seems obscure to the present-day reader, the context of a scriptural allusion or echo is again and again very important. Whole passages, whole themes, can be called to mind with a single reference. This point, naturally has to be tested against individual passages, but when that is done the test regularly comes out positive. Those who studied scripture intensively, which of course includes Essenes and Pharisees in particular, knew the material inside out and could evoke a whole world of textual reference with a word or phrase. The rabbis continued this tradition. (PFG 176–77)

Thus before we even discuss particular examples of Paul’s use of scripture, it is clear that Wright is going to assume that the “context of a scriptural allusion or echo is again and again very important” and that Paul “knew the material inside out and could evoke a whole world of textual reference with a word or phrase.” Some examples will illustrate the point. Most scholars recognize an allusion to Isa 45:23 (“To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear”) in

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Phil 2:10–11 (“at the name of Jesus every knee should bend … and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”) but Wright goes much further: The door which swings open when that key is turned in the lock is the door to the entire scriptural vision of Israel’s one God working out his sovereign purpose through his obedient, and as often as not suffering, servant, and then exalting that servant to power and glory. (PFG 688)

Conscious of the lack of verbal parallels to these other passages, he says in a footnote: The point does not depend on exact verbal echoes (against the objections of e.g. Hooker 1959, 120f.) … What counts is the entire flow of thought, with the explicit verbal and thematic echoes functioning as an anchor. (PFG 683n199)

Wright notes that the theme of the “unveiling of God’s righteousness” occurs five times in Rom 3:21–26 and so “the obvious thing to do is to look for a biblical passage with a similar concentration of the same theme; and the obvious candidate is Isaiah 40–55” (PFG 998). After a brief description of the contents of these chapters, Wright concludes that the evidence is enough to warrant the firm conclusion that when Paul describes the death of Jesus in sacrificial language … he is deliberately setting up a complex chain of allusion and echo in which Isaiah 40–55 in general, the figure of the servant in particular and the fourth servant song climatically, are central and loadbearing. (PFG 999)

It has often been remarked that Rom 8:1–17 draws on exodus imagery (slavery, adoption, freedom, inheritance) but Wright makes a more specific point. The claim that “God works all things together for good to those who love him” (Rom 8:28) is taken as an allusion to the command to “love YHWH with all the heart, life and strength” that follows the Shema (Deut 6:4). From this, he deduces that Paul’s point is that the “Spirit enables God’s people to keep the Shema” (PFG 722). Wright believes that Gal 3:10–14 has often been misinterpreted by focusing on verse 13 (“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’”), as if the point of the passage was individual salvation. But if we take our cue from verse 14 (“in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles”), it becomes clear that this “small, sharp-edged ‘story of Jesus’ within the story of Israel (itself within the story of humanity and of the world)” (PFG 527) makes perfect sense. The emphasis falls on the earlier quotation of Deut 27:26, which evokes the whole narrative of Deut 27–30, in order to show that the bearing of the curse by Israel’s Messiah (as representative and substitute) has led to the promises of covenant renewal being realized at last. There is no discussion of how Paul thought a command about not

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leaving dead bodies overnight (Deut 21:23) supports his case 9 or the fact that Paul has changed the wording so that it begins with the same words as Deut 27:26 (ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς).10

2. The Significance of Deuteronomy 30 Given the weight that Wright places on the importance of Deut 30, it is surprising to discover that the only references listed by Nestle-Aland occur in just three passages: Rom 2:26–29, 10:6–8, and Gal 3:10. It is even more surprising to find a scholar like Hays referring to Paul’s exegesis of Deut 30:12– 14 in Rom 10:6–8 as “wild and disingenuous,”11 although he later adds that it is perhaps not quite as arbitrary as it first appears.12 Wright begins his exegesis of Rom 9–11 by arguing that it has a chiastic structure, with 9:1–5 corresponding to 11:33–36, 9:6–29 to 11:1–32, 9:30–33 to 10:18–21, and 10:1–4 to 10:14–17. This leaves the central section as 10:5–13 with the interpretation of Deut 30 (10:6–8) at its center. Thus structurally, Wright argues for the central importance of Deut 30 for Rom 9–11 and indeed, the whole letter. The difficulty that many scholars have with Paul’s exegesis here is that he appears to be driving a wedge between two statements about the Torah that all other interpreters would have taken as complimentary. According to Lev 18:5, Moses says that keeping God’s commandments will result in life (ποιήσετε αὐτά ἃ ποιήσας ἄνθρωπος ζήσεται ἐν αὐτοῖς) and according to Deut 30:11–14, this is “not too hard for you” (οὐχ ὑπέρογκός ἐστιν) because it is “not in heaven” (30:12) or “beyond the sea” (30:12) but “very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (30:14). Paul quotes Lev 18:5 as the words of Moses but personifies the author of Deut 30:11–14 as “the righteousness that comes from faith” (Rom 10:6) and equates it with the gospel that he preaches: Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe 9 The only reference to Deut 21:23 in the index is to page 407, where Wright is discussing the scandal of the cross and notes that there is that “stray curse in Deuteronomy against one who is hanged on a tree.” 10 The LXX of Deut 21:23 reads κεκατηραµένος ὑπὸ θεοῦ πᾶς κρεµάµενος ἐπὶ ξύλου, and most scholars think that Paul has deliberately changed the wording to conform to the opening of Deut 27:26 (ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς ἄνθρωπος). 11 Hays, Echoes, 74. 12 Hays, Echoes, 82.

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in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. (Rom 10:5– 10)

Although Wright does call this a “bold and creative” (PFG 1173) interpretation, he denies that it is in any sense arbitrary or forced. Paul understood Deut 30 as describing a covenant renewal after a (long) period of exile and curse. Since Paul believed that this renewal had taken place in the death and resurrection of Israel’s messiah and the giving of the Spirit, he is simply expounding what he believes to be the true meaning of the text. Historical critics would want to point out that the use of “today” in Deut 30:11 (“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today”) and Deut 30:15 (“See, I have set before you today”) makes it clear that the (primary) reference is to the giving of the law and so would want to discuss how Paul thinks he can apply it directly to his own day. Wright, however, has little sympathy for such questions, commenting in a footnote that once we see the wisdom tradition in the parallel Bar. 3 (highlighted by Suggs, 1967; made central by e.g. Keck, 2005, 253) not as an independent feature but as part of the widespread second-Temple new-covenant and return-from-exile reading of Dt. 30, the exegesis is neither capricious, wild, nor disingenuous, and poor historically sensitive readers may be put out of their misery. (PFG 1167n489)

At least three issues are raised by this comment. First, most scholars would agree that Paul did not share our “historically sensitive” frame of mind and it would be anachronistic to expect him to do so. However, we are not talking about modern historical criticism, with its fixation on sources: we are simply talking about the literary context of the quotation, something that Wright is deeply passionate about. Even though Deut 30:1–10 looks ahead to a future restoration, Deut 30:11–20 appears to be returning to the choice that Moses is told to set before the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land: If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. (Deut 30:16)

It is therefore quite reasonable for readers, historically sensitive, or otherwise, to ask how Paul thought the promise “then you shall live and become numerous” refers to the preaching of the gospel in his own day. Second, many “historically sensitive” readers are quite prepared to accept that a text can transcend its contextual meaning and speak to future generations. Much of the debate in “Paul’s use of scripture” circles has been finding the best way of describing this.13 Indeed, at the heart of Wright’s book is the 13

See the two volumes that emerged from the “Paul and Scripture” seminars at the SBL: Stanley E. Porter and Christopher D. Stanley, eds., As It Is Written: Studying Paul’s

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proposal that Paul has reinterpreted the three core themes of Judaism, namely, monotheism (ch. 9), election (ch. 10), and eschatology (ch. 11), in the light of the fulfilment of God’s promises in Christ: The earliest Christology was thus firmly anchored in scripture, but the reading of scripture in question was highly innovatory, and did not itself generate the belief. (PFG 693) Paul’s fresh understanding of Jesus as YHWH in person, returned in glory, drove him back to the scriptures to ferret out14 texts he knew but had not read that way before. (PFG 828)

We shall have more to say about these quotations later, but for the moment the point is that one is bound to ask whether Paul thought the words “then you shall live and become numerous” applied both to the wilderness generation and to his own (and one would want to explore the hermeneutics of such a position) or that his new revelation-inspired hermeneutic implied that the words were only ever intended to apply to the gospel in his own day. Third, Wright appears to be saying that Paul’s interpretation should not be seen as “capricious, wild, nor disingenuous” because others were doing the same thing. By the same token, one could say that he should not criticize “poor historically sensitive readers” for doing what most of their generation were taught to do in school, college, and university. Indeed, it is precisely these “historically sensitive readers” (including Wright himself in his commentary series) who remind us that Paul comes from a very different world from our own. It is true that some scholars use terms like “capricious” or “disingenuous” to discount Paul as a serious interpreter but this is hardly true of the majority.15 When the Habakkuk commentary says that certain things were not made known to the prophet but have now been revealed to the Teacher of Righteousness, what we want to know from Wright is whether he thinks that the same is true of Paul.

Use of Scripture, SymS 50 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008) and Christopher D. Stanley, ed., Paul and Scripture: Extending the Conversation, ECL 9 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). 14 The use of the expression “ferret out” is surprising, since Wright constantly argues against those who use terms like “arbitrary” or “ad hoc” to describe Paul’s use of scripture. One can only assume that for Wright, the expression is completely positive and denotes a determined investigation on Paul’s part to arrive at the true meaning of the texts. This true meaning is only found among those who have accepted that Jesus is the promised Messiah, who has brought Israel’s long exile to an end. 15 As well as Hays, see Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); David Lincicum, Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy, WUNT II 284 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); J. Ross Wagner, Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul ‘in Concert’ in the Letter to the Romans, NovTSup 101 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); and Francis B. Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2004).

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3. Respect for Context There are countless examples where “historically sensitive” scholars feel the need to explain how Paul took texts from one context and applied them to another. For example, Isa 52 is a glorious prophecy of salvation but Paul manages to take words from verse 5 and use them as an accusation against hypocritical Jewish teachers: But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God and know his will … will you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You that forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You that abhor idols, do you rob temples? You that boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (Rom 2:17– 24 abbreviated)

The problem is not only that the wider context of Isa 52 is about salvation; it is also that verse 4 and verse 5 both state that Israel’s suffering is “without cause”: For thus says the Lord GOD: Long ago, my people went down into Egypt to reside there as aliens; the Assyrian, too, has oppressed them without cause. Now therefore what am I doing here, says the LORD, seeing that my people are taken away without cause? Their rulers howl, says the LORD, and continually, all day long, my name is despised. (Isa 52:4– 5)

Paul is following the LXX by including the phrases ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν (“among the Gentiles”) and δι᾽ ὑµᾶς (“for/because of you”) but the context is still on God’s pity for Israel. Verse 3 has God declaring that “you were sold for nothing (δωρεάν) and you will be redeemed without money” and then verse 5 picks up the δωρεάν (“for nothing”) when it states that “my people were taken for nothing” (ἐλήµφθη ὁ λαός µου δωρεάν).16 Brendan Byrne says: According to both the Hebrew original and the LXX it was Israel’s misfortune that led to the reviling of God’s name by the nations. Paul, however, interprets the LXX phrase “on account of you” as “because of your fault,” thereby converting what was originally an oracle of compassion towards Israel into one of judgment.17

Wright begins his explanation by stating that the Jews are not being indicted for claiming to be morally superior but for failing (as a nation) to be the solution to the problem. He then notes that what follows in Rom 2:25–29, namely, “the spirit, the law in the heart, the fresh keeping of Torah’s requirements” (PFG 814) shows that Paul has Ezek 36:26–27 in mind and this makes it very probable that Ezek 36:20–23 lies behind Paul’s accusation:

16 The Hebrew uses ‫“( חנם‬without payment/for nothing”) in v. 5. In v. 4, ‫“( אפס‬extremity, end”) is rendered βίᾳ (“by force”). The text is generally recognized as difficult. 17 Brendan Byrne, Romans, SP 6 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 110.

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But when they came to the nations, wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, in that it was said of them, “These are the people of the LORD, and yet they had to go out of his land.” But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came. Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes. (Ezek 36:20–23)

This has of course been argued before but it does not answer the question of why Paul uses the words of Isa 52:5 when the chapter is about salvation and the particular verse about God’s pity for Israel. Wright argues that Paul has taken two passages which both “come in the middle of sequences of thought in which Israel’s God is not only charging Israel with this fault but also announcing the remedy” (PFG 812, emphasis original). Paul is not, therefore, taking the words of Isa 52:5 out of context but citing them because [the] passage points dramatically forward to the revelation of God’s ultimate plan of salvation, the personal obedience of the servant through which that worldwide light-to-thenations plan would after all be put into operation. (PFG 814)

What are we to make of this? First, Wright does not distinguish between the rhetorical effect of quotations and allusions. This is in part following the trend set by Hays to view quotation, allusion, and echo as points along a spectrum but it is surely worthy of comment as to why Paul alludes to words from Ezek 36 but specifically quotes Isa 52:5. All the more so given that a quotation from Ezek 36:20–23 would have made his point far more effectively. Timothy Berkley has written a monograph on this, arguing that it is Paul’s allusions that reveal where the exegetical activity has taken place, while the quotations are often simply convenient summaries of the point being made. It would have been useful to have had a response to this.18 Second, unlike most commentators on the passage, Wright does not inform us that the Greek of Isa 52:5 differs significantly from the Hebrew and that this has aided Paul’s application of the verse. Of course, one cannot expect him to provide all the textual details of the passages he discusses but his silence is mirrored in other passages. For example, he notes that Rom 15:12 is 18

Timothy W. Berkley, From a Broken Covenant to Circumcision of the Heart: Pauline Intertextual Exegesis in Romans 2.17–29, SBLDS 175 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). Although Hays wants to argue for the significance of allusions and echoes, his book is nevertheless structured around the quotations. His view of Paul’s use of Isa 52:5 is that Paul deliberately held back the salvation theme until Rom 10: “The letter’s rhetorical structure lures the reader into expecting Israel’s final condemnation, but the later chapters undercut such an expectation, requiring the reader in subsequent encounters with the text to understand the Isaiah quotation more deeply in relation to its original context” (Hays, Echoes, 46).

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a quotation of Isa 11:10 and indeed gives the Greek for the phrase “who rises up to rule the nations” (PFG 820), but does not mention that the Hebrew lacks the idea of “rule” (MT: ‫“ – דרש‬to seek/inquire” of the nations). Neither is Wright bothered by the fact that Paul sometimes modifies the wording of his quotations to make his point. Thus at the climactic moment of Rom 9–11, Paul introduces a quotation from Isa 59, a passage of scripture that Wright says is “clearly very congenial to Paul” for its common themes of “the revelation of God’s righteousness, resulting in judgment and mercy, in the renewal of the covenant, in the gift of the spirit, in the words (rhemata) in the mouth” (PFG 1249). However, Wright says that Paul does not wish to reinscribe the “centripetal tradition,” whereby the redeemer comes to Zion (MT) or on behalf of Zion (LXX). He therefore “radically adjusts” the wording, so that the Redeemer now comes from Zion (Rom 11:27, quoting Isa 59:21). He speculates that Paul may have had in mind such texts as Isa 2:3 (the law goes out from Zion), Deut 33:28–29 (the Lord came from Sinai), or Ps 14:7 (deliverance would come from Zion) and perhaps all three, providing support from Torah, prophets, and writings. Wright does not feel this needs any justification and indeed can say that Paul’s thought fits “exactly with the two lines of Isaiah 59 as Paul has adjusted them” (PFG 1251). One feels bound to reply: “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?” Similarly, he agrees with many commentators that Rom 3:20 (“For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law”) is an allusion to Ps 143:2 (“Do not enter into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you”). However, far from thinking that Paul’s addition “by deeds prescribed by the law” (ἐξ ἔργων νόµου) requires an explanation, he celebrates it, commenting that Paul has rubbed in the point of his addition about the law by adding at the end, ‘through the law, you see, comes the knowledge of sin’ – an idea to which he will return, particularly in chapter 7. (PFG 995)

Now it is true that some scholars cite such things (ignoring the immediate context, modifying texts, exploiting variants, using catch-word links) to show that Paul did not respect the context of his quotations (e.g. Stanley) but the majority use them to show that Paul was thoroughly at home with Jewish exegesis in the first century. Given that Wright is urging us to understand Paul in his proper historical context, it is surprising that he hardly ever refers to this. For example, most commentators note that Paul’s exposition of Gen 15:6 in Rom 4:3 (“Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”) is an example of gezera sewa. Paul first states that David also speaks of “those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works” (Rom 4:6) and then substantiates it with a quotation of Ps 32:1–2, which includes the line “blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon

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sin” (Rom 4:8). Although Wright devotes considerable space to Paul’s exposition of Gen 15:6, Ps 32:1–2 does not even occur in the index. Similarly, in his discussion of Gal 3:16, where Paul argues that God’s promise to Abraham to give him “seed” uses the singular σπέρµα, and thus refers to an individual, namely Christ. Wright translates the verse as: “It doesn’t say ‘his seeds’, as though referring to several families, but indicates a single family by saying ‘and to your seed’, meaning the Messiah” (PFG 869). He then states that there is nothing “strange” or “rabbinic” about this exegesis for “Paul has not forgotten, as many exegetes have, the incorporative meaning of the honorific Christos” (PFG 869). However, given his positive statements about rabbinic exegesis cited earlier, it is not clear why exploiting the particular form of a word in this way needs to be denied. Indeed, there is surely no reason why this methodological explanation cannot go hand in hand with Wright’s theological explanation. It is perhaps inevitable in a book this size that there is sometimes some ambiguity between what is said in one place and what is said in another. For example, in ch. 9, Wright appears reticent to acknowledge an allusion to the Aqedah in Rom 8:32 (“He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up”), noting that the differences between the two pictures are as important as the similarities, and it is never simply a matter of ‘God displacing Abraham’ in a traditional picture, still less of ‘Jesus displacing Isaac’ in a plot-line which otherwise continues as before, only now with a different cast. (PFG 697)

However, in ch. 10, “it is precisely this story to which Paul goes back, through the clear allusion of Romans 8.32,” which has been “deliberately held back for this climactic moment” (PFG 904). This could be no more than forgetfulness across a very long book, but it is interesting that Wright can both play down the allusion when it does not support the point he is trying to make and maximize it when it does.

4. Paul and Israel’s Scriptures Towards the end of the second volume (PFG 1449–72), Wright has a specific section on “Paul and Israel’s Scriptures,” where he seeks to summarize and clarify his position.19 He begins by crediting Hays20 as initiating a “right19

He cites the significant contributions by Wilk, Wagner, and Watson and jokes that since his name also begins with “W,” he hopes what follows will make a further contribution. See Florian Wilk, Die Bedeutung des Jesajabuches für Paulus, FRLANT 179 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); Wagner, Heralds; and Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith. 20 Hays, Echoes.

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brain” understanding of Paul as a sophisticated biblical theologian, contrary to the prevailing “left-brain” focus on the minutiae of textual form, introductory formulae and details of syntax and vocabulary. He notes that Stanley 21 has used the probable lack of literacy among Paul’s congregations to oppose this but suggests that Paul: a) would certainly have expected his letters to be read more than once and be the subject of much study and discussion; and b) was “quite capable of allowing a particular resonance to sit patiently, like an unopened letter, waiting to be delivered” (PFG 1453). He reiterates the view that Paul saw Israel’s story coming to a climax in Deuteronomy and that Israel’s Messiah can be described as τέλος νόµου (Rom 10:4) because he is the “goal, aim, ultimate fulfilment, of Torah” (PFG 1454). In addition, “Paul is working with key texts from the Psalms and prophets, filling in the single narrative line with multiple hints of messianic fulfilment” (PFG 1454). The rest of the chapter is devoted to a review and critique of Francis Watson’s magisterial, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith. He begins by praising Watson for two major achievements. First, Watson demonstrates that Paul is a subtle and intelligent reader of scripture, not a purveyor of proof-texts. Paul views scripture as a whole and in particular has been significantly influenced by the structure of the five books of Moses. Second, Watson locates Paul among other readers of scripture, not to argue dependence or even necessarily influence but to provide an appropriate context for understanding his writings. However, the conclusions that Watson reaches are very different to those of Wright, for he thinks that Gal 3:12 (“But the law does not rest on faith”) and Rom 10:6 (“But the righteousness that comes from faith says”) clearly show that Paul does see an antithesis between “faith” and “works.” However, this antithesis is not something that Paul learned from the gospel and then imposed on scripture: it is at the very heart of the Torah itself: In reading the Torah, Paul chooses to highlight two major tensions that he finds within it: the tension between the unconditional promise and the Sinai legislation, and the tension between the law’s offer of life and its curse. These are tensions between books: Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. (PFG 1456 quoting Watson22)

The unconditional promise of Gen 15:6 is correlated with Hab 2:4, which has a pivotal role in Rom 1:17 and Gal 3:11. Wright focuses on Rom 1:17, noting that detailed comments on Gal 3:11 will have to wait for a future commentary (PFG 1470n238). The point of issue is that Watson thinks that Hab 2:4 is clearly talking about a human quality (“the righteous shall live by his faith” – RSV) and this ought to determine Paul’s meaning. Indeed, Watson thinks that Rom 1:16–17 is a gloss on Hab 2:4: “The one who is righteous (that is, with a righteousness of God, revealed in the gospel) by faith (since this righteous21 22

Stanley, Arguing with Scripture. Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, 22.

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ness is received by faith and is intended for faith) will live.”23 As evidence, he notes that Paul hardly came up with the unusual ἐκ πίστεώς24 (“of/from faith”) and only later noticed that its only occurrence in scripture was in Hab 2:4. Rather, both Paul and the Qumran commentator saw in Hab 2:4 the “divinely ordained way to salvation with a clarity and brevity virtually unparalleled in the rest of scripture.”25 And once that has been agreed, the most likely origin of the equally unusual ἐξ ἔργων νόµου (“of works of law”) is a deliberate attempt by Paul to provide a suitable antithesis.26 Interestingly, in order to resist this conclusion, Wright is forced to counter that the actual words of a quotation do not determine Paul’s meaning: So far from the prophet providing a fixed point around which the meaning of dikaiosynē theou must be reconfigured, the wider usage of the phrase and its cognates, and associated ideas in Romans, creates a massive presumption in favour of taking it to refer to the divine ‘righteousness’ in the sense of ‘faithfulness to the covenant’. (PFG 1471)27

One might correlate this with our earlier discussion of Rom 2:24, where it would appear that the allusions to Ezek 36 that follow are more significant than the actual words of the quotation. As Wright states, “I find Watson’s account focused far too much on scripture as ‘normative’ and far too little on scripture as ‘narrative’” (PFG 1459). On the other hand, Wright thinks that Watson has been unduly influenced by the supposed antithesis in Gal 3:12 and Rom 10:6 and allowed himself to see a “deep faultline” in the Torah where none exists. Of course, the Torah is a lengthy piece of writing and so there are inevitably differences of emphasis but it is more about “two moments in Israel’s covenantal narrative” (PFG 1465; emphasis original) than two antithetical voices. And since Paul understands the covenant renewal of Deut 30 as having been fulfilled, his exposition of Lev 18:5 in Rom 10:6–8 is effectively, “and this is how it’s done” (PFG 1464).

23

Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, 48. Rom 1:17; 3:26, 30; 4:16; 5:1; 9:30, 32; 10:6; 14:23; Gal 2:16; 3:7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 22, 24; 5:5. 25 Though of course the Qumran commentator took this to be a renewed faithfulness to the law. 26 See Steve Moyise, Evoking Scripture: Seeing the Old Testament in the New (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 49–62. 27 Indeed, Wright cites the majority LXX reading of ἐκ πίστεώς µου as evidence for the meaning “my faithfulness,” either as an interpretation of the Hebrew or the use of a different Hebrew text. In either case, it shows that a human quality is not as certain as Watson assumes. 24

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5. Conclusion Undoubtedly the major feature of Wright’s account of Paul’s use of scripture is the dominance of a Deuteronomy-inspired “end of exile” metanarrative. According to Wright, this was the normative understanding of scripture by Paul’s contemporaries and much of PFG aims to show how this brings coherence to passages which scholars have often found puzzling (e.g. Gal 3:10–14; Rom 10:6–8). However, unlike other scholars who wish to emphasize continuity between the two testaments, Wright does not try to show that the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were deducible from scripture prior to his coming. To be sure, the events are “firmly anchored in scripture” but “the reading of scripture in question was highly innovatory” (PFG 693). Paul the apostle was compelled by the gospel events to search the scriptures afresh, to ferret out passages and themes which might not have been central in second-Temple reflection but which now pressed themselves upon him. (PFG 933)

This allows Wright to claim that Paul is a sophisticated contextual theologian, while also acknowledging that he sometimes felt free to change both the wording and the meaning of his quotations. For some, this will constitute a contradiction. If Paul “radically adjusts” the wording of Isa 59:20 so that the redeemer comes “from” Zion rather than “to” Zion, it is not what most people would call “contextual.” But Wright would say that this is “left-brain” activity which fails to distinguish the wood from the trees. What Paul has done is to interpret the text in the light of the overall “end of exile” narrative that has been surprisingly but truly fulfilled in the events of Jesus Messiah. In short, Paul’s exegesis is both a “major relativization as well as a major recalling of that most critical moment in Jewish election-theology” (PFG 905). However, this emphasis on seeing everything in the light of the “end of exile” metanarrative (albeit transformed) does have certain implications. For example, it intrinsically favors allusions and echoes because their speculative nature makes it much easier to posit a connection with the metanarrative. Much of what Wright says about allusions is illuminating but it is often at the expense of a full account of the quotations. Is it really adequate to say that Paul chose Isa 52:5 because it lies in the middle of a narrative that moves from Israel’s sin to Israel’s salvation? That would be true of a whole host of passages, so why this particular one? And going to the heart of his thesis, can Deut 30 really be the key to understanding Romans when readers have to wait until ch. 10 for the first explicit reference? Second, the emphasis on an overarching metanarrative also appears to lie behind Wright’s reluctance to link Paul’s exegesis with specific Jewish exegetical techniques. Thus he suggests that Paul may have had in mind texts like Isa 2:3 (the law goes out from Zion), Deut 33:28–29 (the Lord came from Sinai), or Ps 14:7 (deliverance would come from Zion) when he modified Isa

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59:20 but does not mention the principles that made such a move acceptable and indeed convincing. Despite the positive things he says about Jewish exegesis noted earlier, it would appear that forging too close a link might be seen as a liability for modern readers. On the other hand, he seems to assume that an emphasis on narrative can automatically transcend the distance between Paul’s world and ours. It is beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate whether the Deuteronomyinspired “end of exile” theme was as prevalent as Wright claims, but it is worth asking whether such a general theme could ever exert the sort of specific influence that Wright claims. It is rather like appealing to the theory of gravity in order to explain why I slipped on the pavement last week. It is of course true but not really the sort of explanation that is required. In fact, the north of England was covered in snow last week and I should have chosen more suitable footwear. Similarly, even if Paul did think that the coming of Jesus and the Spirit are the fulfilment of Deut 30, can that really explain why he chose to use Isa 52:5 as an accusation in Rom 2:24 or Isa 59:20 in Rom 11:26, despite it saying the opposite of what he wants to say? Scholars interested in “Paul’s use of scripture” will find much to ponder in Wright’s two volumes but will continue to search for answers to questions like these.

Bibliography Berkley, Timothy W. From a Broken Covenant to Circumcision of the Heart: Pauline Intertextual Exegesis in Romans 2.17–29. SBLDS 175. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000. Byrne, Brendan. Romans. SP 6. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Campbell, Douglas A. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Lincicum, David. Paul and the Early Jewish Encounter with Deuteronomy. WUNT II 284. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Moyise, Steve. Evoking Scripture. Seeing the Old Testament in the New. London: T&T Clark, 2008. –. The Old Testament in the Book of Revelation. JSNTSup 115. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995. Pitre, Brant. Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Porter, Stanley E. “The Use of the Old Testament in the New: A Brief Comment on Method and Terminology.” Pages 79–96 in Early Christian Interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel: Investigations and Proposals. Edited by Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders. JNTSSup 148. SSEJC 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997.

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Porter, Stanley E., and Christopher D. Stanley, eds. As It Is Written: Studying Paul’s Use of Scripture. SymS 50. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008. Stanley, Christopher D. Arguing with Scripture: The Rhetoric of Quotations in the Letters of Paul. New York: T&T Clark, 2004. –, ed. Paul and Scripture: Extending the Conversation. ECL 9. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. Wagner, J. Ross. Heralds of the Good News: Isaiah and Paul ‘in Concert’ in the Letter to the Romans. NovTSup 101. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Watson, Francis B. Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Wilk, Florian. Die Bedeutung des Jesajabuches für Paulus. FRLANT 179. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992.

N. T. Wright’s Narrative Approach Joel R. White Anyone with a modicum of familiarity with the discipline of New Testament theology will sense quite quickly, after recovering from the initial shock at the sheer immensity of the volume, that N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is not simply another Pauline theology but something of a novel approach to the subject altogether. When Protestant theologians set themselves to the task of interpreting Paul, they usually give pride of place to Romans – James Dunn does so quite explicitly1 – with good-sized pieces of Galatians serving to corroborate the main points. This reflects the fact that they tend to view Paul’s thought in stark dogmatic terms; i.e., they attempt to lay out carefully and systematically what Paul believed.2 It is perhaps only natural that they should gravitate toward those letters that lend themselves best to the articulation of such a theological construct. Wright, on the other hand, begins his magnum opus with seventy pages devoted to the significance of Paul’s letter to Philemon, that odd little piece at the back end of the Pauline corpus that makes only the slightest of nods to Christian teaching and that in a fairly standardized thanksgiving formula. Philemon’s importance, according to Wright, is not to be found in what it explicitly teaches, but what it attempts to accomplish:3 not simply the release of a slave – that would hardly merit its inclusion in the canon of Scripture – but a radical realignment of Philemon’s worldview. Paul is nudging, even cajoling Philemon (as well as Onesimus and indeed the entire church in Colossae, which is listening in on the conversation) “to think within the biblical narrative, to see themselves as actors within the ongoing scriptural drama: to allow their erstwhile pagan thought-forms to be transformed by a biblically based renewal of the mind” (PFG 15, italics original). 1

James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), esp. 25. 2 Two very different examples of this approach are Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975); and Udo Schnelle, Paulus: Leben und Denken, de Gruyter Lehrbuch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003). 3 Wright’s thoroughgoing reflection on literary criticism and hermeneutics has made him especially sensitive to the pragmatic aspect of texts, a modern linguistic insight that exegetes still too often ignore. Cf. esp. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 31–80.

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1. The Narrative Substructure of Paul’s Theology 1.1 Introduction It is this – Wright’s unabashed and steadfast commitment to illuminating the narrative substructure behind Paul’s theology – that sets him apart, in important ways, from those who have written Pauline theologies before him. This is not to say that Wright thinks of Paul as a story-teller; Paul isn’t,4 and Wright doesn’t. Wright believes, however, that Paul’s theology is, in fact, informed by a narrative substructure through and through.5 That by itself would be less controversial if Wright were merely arguing that this substructure involves various strands of stories taken from the OT that were available in early Judaism for intertextual wordplay – i.e., to underline his main points in midrashic fashion. Even Wright’s critics are willing to concede that much. Francis Watson, for instance, is quite happy to admit that “there is indeed a ‘narrative substructure’ to Pauline theology” that “consists in scriptural narratives relating to Israel’s history with God, whose significance Paul contests” with his opponents.6 John Barclay likewise maintains that “the grace of God is not, for Paul, an idea … but the action of God in history” that, as such, is “inevitably ‘storied.’”7 What catalyzes Barclay’s withering critique of PFG is not some vague references to narratives behind the text, but rather Wright’s insistence that a particular narrative, one based on Deut 27–30 and epic in scope, was the controlling metanarrative throughout early Judaism and that Paul’s theology, more or less in toto, can be explained as a particular retelling of this grand narrative.8 This is, indeed, a stark claim that is bound to encounter heated resistance in some quarters. It flies in the face of postmodern skepticism regarding

4

So also Francis B. Watson, “Is There a Story in These Texts?,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 232. 5 Drawing heavily on Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed., Biblical Resource Series (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 22, I define “narrative substructure” as a story that influences a discourse, regardless of whether it is explicitly referenced, to such an extent that the discourse is not completely intelligible without knowledge of the story. 6 Watson, “Story,” 232. 7 John M. G. Barclay, Paul’s Story: Theology as Testimony,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 154. 8 Cf. John M. G. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, SJT 68 (2015): 235–43, esp. 236.

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metanarratives in general,9 and it smacks of Heilsgeschichte, which those trained in, or influenced by the tradition of Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Käsemann – and they are many – are conditioned to find eo ipso untenable,10 or of “narrative theology,” which for some scholars is, if anything, even worse.11 Further, in a project as vast as, and involving a thesis as expansive as Wright’s there is plenty of material to criticize. It is doubtful whether anyone’s argumentation can be consistently stringent over 1,500 pages, and Barclay is correct that Wright’s lucidity sometimes labors under a rambling style.12 That being said, Wright’s main argument is actually quite coherent, and it cannot be dismissed simply on the basis of antipathy to metanarratives or salvation history.13 On the other hand, it should not be accepted due to the 9

Jean-François Lyotard famously characterized postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 10 This reaction to the concept of Heilsgeschichte among Germany’s twentieth-century dialectic theologians was, as Käsemann himself readily admits, socially conditioned. In the middle of his review of the groundbreaking article, Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215, Käsemann indulges in a “personal reminiscence.” The “idealist view of history” made the doctrine of justification by faith “incomprehensible to our fathers and forefathers.” This realization “immunized us deeply against a concept of salvation history which broke in on us in secularized and political form with the Third Reich and its ideology.” Cf. Ernst Käsemann, “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans,” in Perspectives on Paul (London: SCM, 1971), 64. 11 It is perhaps important to note that Wright, despite his stress on narrative, should not be thought of as a proponent of “narrative theology.” That term, as it is often construed, suggests a rather fast and loose approach to the historicity of the narrative that Wright cannot conceivably be accused of. I wonder, however, whether the fact that Wright has been largely ignored by German New Testament scholars, even those in the Hengel/Stuhlmacher tradition, who would have a natural ally in Wright on many fronts, stems from their deep mistrust of any approach that emphasizes “narrative.” Cf., e.g., Roland Deines’s blistering critique of Boris Paschke in Roland Deines, Review of Particularism and Universalism in the Sermon on the Mount: A Narrative-Critical Analysis of Matthew 5–7 in the Light of Matthew’s View on Mission, by Boris Paschke, Jahrbuch für evangelikale Theologie 27 (2013): 265–71. 12 Cf. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (by Wright), 235. Wright’s inimitable style served him well in N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996), which I found hard to put down, but it lost some of its luster in the latter volumes of the “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series. Part of the problem (one all scholars would like to have!) is that Wright has moved into that elite circle of authors, whom theological presses are willing, even eager, to publish without rigorous editing. Very few people could submit a 1,500page manuscript with much hope of seeing it published without major revision! 13 This tends to color Barclay’s assessment of PFG to such an extent that many readers will find his rhetoric, normally the model of measured scholarly dispassion, as shrill as he

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innate appeal of epic stories, especially those that are thought to linger elusively behind other texts.14 It needs to hold up under scrutiny, and it is to the task of scrutinizing Wright’s argument that we now turn. Several points need to be kept in mind throughout. 1.2 The Primacy of “Worldview” To begin with, Wright is convinced that, for Paul, “worldview” is primary, and theology is secondary; or, as he puts it, “it is by studying Paul within ‘worldview’ categories that we acquire a new way of seeing … what was really important” in his theology (PFG 30).15 For Wright, the goal of Paul’s theologizing was not to delineate belief systems but to bring about a transformation in the mindset of the believers in the communities of Christ followers he founded. Paul, in other words, wanted to effect what Richard Hays calls a “conversion of the imagination” 16 in the minds of his hearers/readers that would, in turn, revolutionize their social interactions. That is why Paul invented theology (!) and why his theology has the particular shape it does (PFG 30–31, 36–37). It serves his overarching goal of establishing and sustaining a uniquely Christian worldview as the foundation for living within his churches. Two ramifications of this approach are obvious, and they make themselves felt throughout Wright’s project. First, it becomes necessary to describe Paul’s worldview in great detail; thus, sections devoted to Paul’s worldview, mindset, and their historical context make up two-thirds of PFG. Second, since every worldview has a controlling narrative (PFG 64–68), and “narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview,”17 a correct

accuses Wright’s of being. Cf. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God (by Wright), 243. 14 To Morna Hooker, for instance, it is self-evident that the biblical writers are tapping into a grand story, and it is only against the background of this story that individual episodes – in the case of Paul, the respective emphases of Romans and Galatians (in contrast to the approach of she is criticizing) – can properly be understood. Cf. Morna D. Hooker, “‘Heirs of Abraham’: The Gentiles’ Role in Israel’s Story: A Response to Bruce W. Longenecker,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 85–96, esp. 85–86. 15 Wright developed this point more generally in New Testament and the People of God, 38–44, 122–31, and it is fundamental to his whole approach. 16 Cf. Richard B. Hays, “The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture, and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians,” NTS 45 (1999): 391–412. Wright’s debt to Richard Hays is apparent in the fact that he dedicates PFG to Hays (PFG vii). Though Wright seems to have formulated his views on the importance of worldview and narrative for the construction of Paul’s theology parallel to rather than in dependence on Hays, it is clear that Hays has deeply influenced Wright’s mature thought at many points (see below). 17 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 123.

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estimation of the metanarrative that embodies Paul’s particular worldview is absolutely crucial for understanding Paul’s theology. 1.3 A Jewish Metanarrative Further, in analyzing Wright’s thesis it is important to recognize that his argument is two-fold and not to allow the two parts of his argument to collapse in on each other in one’s thinking. The first part involves the controlling narrative that, according to Wright, was widely affirmed in early Judaism. He is not arguing that Paul invented a narrative out of bits and pieces of familiar OT stories in order to ground his theology, but rather that such a grand narrative was already in place and more or less agreed upon by Jews in the Second Temple period and that it heavily influenced their understanding of who they were and what they were “there” for. Briefly, the grand narrative that Paul believed he and his fellow Jews inhabited is, according to Wright, a tale about God setting right what went awry after his creation of the world. Human beings were intended to bring God’s plan for the world to fruition, but their ability to perform their God-ordained role was compromised by their sinful rebellion. As the narrative unfolds, God goes about the task of putting humanity back on track, which is fundamentally what his unconditional promise to Abraham entails. To that end he chooses the people of Israel and initiates a covenant with them at Sinai, by means of which the blessings they incur as a result of their renewed relationship with their creator might become available to the entire world. The story takes an unexpected turn for the worse, however, with Israel’s breach of the covenant, which leads to Israel’s banishment into exile. This is where Deut 27–30 becomes important, for according to Wright it functions as a template for understanding Israel’s subsequent history right up to Paul’s day and, indeed, well beyond it. Jews in the Second Temple period, Wright argues, and especially Pharisees like Paul, viewed themselves as living within that period of exile that Deuteronomy promised would come about as a result of Israel’s failure to maintain covenant with Yahweh and that Daniel predicted would last not 70 years as Jeremiah prophesied, but 490 years – i.e., right up to the first century CE. This, then, was the controlling narrative in Paul’s time: Israel is still awaiting the promised restoration of Israel and in its wake the promised new creation. It is therefore – and this is crucial for Wright – a “story in search of an ending” (PFG 109) because Israel remains in exile, and first-century Jews were at odds with each other about how God would manage to demonstrate his “righteousness” – i.e., his faithfulness to the covenant. Israel’s continuing exile thus becomes the overarching paradigm within which Paul’s theology must be understood (PFG 139–63).

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1.4 A Complex Narrative in Paul The second part of Wright’s thesis involves his conviction that Paul is essentially offering a particular reading of this Jewish narrative with a unique ending in view. According to Wright, Paul’s worldview is a thoroughly Jewish one (and it would have been recognized as such by Paul’s contemporaries). 18 Paul is a Pharisee who has “rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in light of the messiah and the spirit” (PFG 46). From this flows Wright’s central conviction that Paul is not fundamentally concerned with individual soteriology (Western theology’s mistaken assessment) but with a theme that “generate[s] and sustain[s] a complex but essentially single narrative” of “the long and often strange story of God’s faithfulness” to his covenant promises to Israel (PFG 77). At this point Wright’s assessment of the narrative behind Paul’s theology becomes somewhat complicated. It is, of course, all wrapped up with the basic Jewish story, but Wright could do a better job of explaining where the one ends and the other is picked up. Further, it is no longer the simple trajectory of exile and return that he laid out in The New Testament and the People of God19 and that he hinted at in previous works on Paul. Rather, in the crucial ch. 7 of PFG (“The Plot, the Plan and the Storied Worldview,” 457–537), Wright postulates that the apostle’s thought should be understood in terms of a complex narrative interaction of three layered stories that “have a coherent interlocking shape, nesting within one another like the subplots in a play” (PFG 474). The “outer story” (PFG 484) is that of the creator and the cosmos, about how God created the world with a particular purpose in mind and how humans, who were entrusted with the task of bringing that purpose to fruition, rebelled against God and his plan (PFG 475–76). Forces – and not only anthropic ones – are thereby set in motion that thwart the creator’s intentions and call into question his ability to attain his desired ends. The dramatic tension ensues, according to Wright, because God’s faithfulness to his creation is called into question (PFG 480). Within this cosmic matrix, the first subplot emerges, that of “Humans, Their Vocation, Failure, Rescue and Reinstatement” (so the subheading on PFG 485). Since human beings rebelled and could no longer fulfill their Godordained role and became marred in the process, they need to be restored. That goal is held out in God’s promise to Abraham that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. Often, Wright maintains, this subplot is recounted as if were the entire story, yet it must not only be seen within the

18

It is a tribute to the elenctic power of this insight of the New Perspective that hardly anyone calls it into question any more. If this alone were to prove to be its lasting contribution, much will have been accomplished. 19 Cf. esp. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 403–9.

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larger cosmic narrative but also in relation to a further subplot that effects it dramatic resolution. This second subplot is the story of Israel, and it will not be understood correctly unless one is clear about the fact that it was “the vocation of Israel to be the means by which the creator God will solve the problem of the world” (PFG 496, italics original). To that end, Torah – God’s gift to Israel – was designed to play a positive role, but due to Israel’s disobedience, its attendant curse “prevents the intended Abrahamic blessing from reaching the world” (PFG 507). It is within this context that Paul’s story of the Messiah takes on its particularly Christian shape: By means of his death and resurrection Jesus does what Israel failed to do: “His Israel-work rescues Adam’s people; his Adam-work rescues creation itself” (PFG 507).

2. A critical assessment of Wright’s Narrative Approach 2.1 Introduction What are we to make of all this? Wright offers a coherent and gripping account of the narrative substructure of Paul’s theology, but is it accurate? To determine that we must ask four further questions: First, does Wright offer a reliable methodology that allows a measure of confidence that his reading of Paul is on the right track? Second, does Wright correctly describe the grand Jewish narrative that he says lies behind all Second Temple theologies? Third, does Wright’s reading of Paul’s narrative square up with what Paul actually says? Finally, what benefits, if any, accrue for understanding Paul’s theology from a correct assessment of its narrative substructure? We will deal with each of these questions in turn. 2.2 Methodological considerations Wright is to be commended for his thoroughgoing reflection on methodological issues. Already in The New Testament and the People of God he demonstrated his great facility with the epistemological, literary, and historical aspects of Biblical hermeneutics.20 Wright’s understanding of narrative dynamics is heavily influenced by the groundbreaking work of Richard Hays in this area,21 as Wright himself readily concedes (PFG 110n145). It was Hays who 20

Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 31–144. Cf. Hays, Faith of Jesus Christ, 82–117. The first edition Hays’s book, a slightly revised version of his 1981 Yale dissertation, was published as Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, SBLDS 56 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983). Strictly speaking, of course, that is the work that influenced Wright, but it is not readily available, at least in Europe. The second edi21

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introduced Biblical theologians to the actantial model of the French structuralist A. J. Greimas,22 according to whose semiotic theory all narratives have a basic structure that may be graphically represented as follows: Sender

Object

Receiver

Helper

Agent

Opponent

After Hays, actantial graphs began turning up in all sorts of theological works.23 Wright explains his understanding of the model as follows: The ‘sender’ is the initiator of the action, who commissions the ‘agent’ to perform it, i.e. to take or convey the ‘object’ to the ‘receiver’. The ‘agent’ is prevented from doing what is required by a force or forces, i.e. the ‘opponent’, and is, at least potentially, helped by the ‘helper’.24

Wright, in particular, has appropriated actantial analysis with alacrity for his narrative approach. There are dozens of actantial graphs in the sections of PFG where he lays out his narrative approach and describes the narrative substructure of Paul (chs. 2 and 7). Typical is Wright’s analysis of the socalled “outer story” (see above, and cf. PFG 493):

tion contains a lengthy new introduction and two appendices, but otherwise the text is identical (so Hays, Faith of Jesus Christ, xxiii), and it thus seems expedient to refer to it here. 22 Cf. Algirdas J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For an introduction to the method for biblical scholars, cf. Daniel Patte, What is Structural Exegesis?, GBS (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 35–52. 23 Hence Dunn’s understandable, if somewhat crotchety, reaction: “I confess that when I see a Greimasian diagram laid out in preparation for the analysis of a text I groan inwardly” (cf. James D. G. Dunn, “The Narrative Approach to Paul: Whose Story?,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002], 220), for which Wright feigns sympathy (PFG 487). 24 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 71. See pp. 69–80 for a fuller discussion.

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God

vocation

plan in creation

God’s call

humans

sin, death

Actantial graphs may well be a useful method for quickly assessing the narrative trajectory of a given story, but questions arise in view of Wright’s profligate use of them. It is, for instance, by no means self-evident that a tool developed for the study of actual narratives – folk tales of the sort that Greimas analyzed – is particularly helpful for articulating metanarratives. This is especially true when one considers that Greimas, reflecting structuralism’s concern with archetypal “laws” or “deep structures,” is at pains to identify functional constants in all narratives.25 This would seem to have the effect of leveling all metanarratives by divesting their particularities of any real significance; they are all ciphers for something else.26 If the structuralists are correct, Wright’s entire project falls apart.27 A related concern involves the fact that throughout the “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series Wright does not use actantial analysis in the manner he claims: as a heuristic tool for bringing the narrative substructure of texts to the surface.28 He does not really rely on it, in other words, to analyze texts, but rather to graphically depict the underlying narratives he believes are there on other grounds. There is actually a fairly thick layer of interpretation between the texts and the graphs. That is why a lot of abstract concepts end up filling the slots of “helper,” “opponent,” or “object” in Wright’s diagrams and why so many of them have a rather arbitrary feel to them when compared to those that analyze a real story like Little Red Riding Hood (Wright’s ex-

25

Cf. Richard N. Soulen, Handbook of Biblical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981), 185. 26 I am not the first to raise this question, of course. Barry Matlock, for example, notes how “odd is the marriage of Greimas with Hays and Wright” (who by no means share Greimas’s structuralist presuppositions) and wonders whether the latter can use Greimas’s model to good effect while disavowing its explicit “antihumanism and antihistoricism.” Cf. R. Barry Matlock, “The Arrow and the Web: Critical Reflections on a Narrative Approach to Paul,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 49. 27 For Wright’s defense of the use of actantial analysis in spite of its structuralist suppositions cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 70. 28 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 73.

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ample in his initial explanation of the model).29 He is simply using Greimasian categories to illustrate how he thinks Paul’s theology coheres, rather than heuristically to uncover it. There is nothing wrong with that, to be sure, but I think part of the frustration with Wright that can be heard wherever New Testament scholars meet has its source here: Wright’s diagrams may well be the result of careful attention to individual texts, but the links to these texts are seldom made explicit. More fruitful, in my opinion, is Wright’s interaction with Norman Petersen’s influential work on what the latter calls the “sociology of narrative worlds”30 (PFG 463–64). Petersen helpfully differentiates between the referential and poetic sequences of a text. The referential sequence is a reconstruction of the events in the real world that are explicitly or implicitly referred to in the text according to their logical and chronological order. The poetic sequence is the order in which these events are referred to in the text. Intriguing narratives mix up the referential order to creative effect. As Petersen puts it: It is possible that the two sequences may be identical, that a narrator will describe events in a strictly chronological order. His textual sequence would still be poetic because it is a concrete representation of the abstract referential sequence. But it would not be very poetic, in the sense of being very artful.31

For our purposes it is important to note that, according to Petersen, a comparison of the poetic and referential sequences and an analysis of their differences not only offers insight into aesthetic aspects of a composition, but also holds out the prospect of deeper understanding with regard to the narrative substructure – Petersen’s “narrative world” – of a text: Because the actions enjoy one set of relations to one another in their chronological [i.e. referential] sequence, the process of rearrangement [in their poetic sequence] may represent other than chronological relations between them, and thereby provide further material insights into both the story and the epistolary texts.32

Petersen’s approach offers greater promise for uncovering the actual metanarratives that inform texts, and I want to propose it as a way of moving forward the discussion of Wright’s thesis. Wright uses it in his description, to which we will turn shortly, of the controlling narrative that, according to him, lies behind a broad swath of early Jewish texts, but he has perhaps not sufficiently grasped its truly heuristic value for establishing his argument (in contrast to the actantial graphs). One rather gets the feeling in reading PFG that Wright has only recently begun to reflect on this perquisite of Petersen’s 29

Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 71–73. Cf. Norman R. Petersen, Rediscovering Paul: Philemon and the Sociology of Paul’s Narrative World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), esp. 17. 31 Petersen, Rediscovering Paul, 48; italics original. 32 Petersen, Rediscovering Paul, 48. 30

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work. In any case, it seems to me that Petersen’s analytical method can be used when comparing various early Jewish texts, including Paul’s writings, in order to draw out evidence of a common metanarrative behind them (or, alternately, to call into question the presumption of a common metanarrative). Specifically, my working hypothesis is as follows: If these texts have similar poetic sequences that refer, whether explicitly or implicitly, to the same aspects of the OT narrative, that would seem to constitute evidence of a “grand story,” about which they are in agreement. If, on the other hand, their poetic sequences differ from one another greatly, with major strands of OT tradition popping up in wildly different places for very different textpragmatic reasons, then it would seem more likely that they are using the OT narrative for essentially illustrative purposes.33 In other words, the less artful (to use Petersen’s term) the variation in the poetic sequence among texts, the more likely it is that those texts are evoking the same “grand story.” Used in this way, Petersen’s approach can point out where smaller stories tap into larger ones. 2.3 A Common Jewish Narrative? With these methodological insights in hand we are in a position to address our second question: Can we accept Wright’s thesis that Second Temple Jews shared a more or less unified narrative as the expression of their world view? Wright points to “remarkable commonalities” in early Jewish literature, in which “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the exodus and the giving of the Torah, all feature again and again” (PFG 135). Reference is often made, he continues, to David, to the establishment of the temple, and to the exile and return. Not all accounts refer to the same events, but they never tamper with the order of the events as they are related in the Bible. From this Wright infers that “there is no sense of the ancient events being a mere ragbag of examples and warnings to be drawn on at random” (PFG 136). Most scholars would probably agree with that statement as it stands. The various groups that dotted the landscape of first-century Judaism shared a common history up to the exile and seem to have been in broad agreement with regard to the historical narrative up to that point. They would all have insisted that the story be told in a manner that respected its linear flow, and certainly no one questioned its fundamental veracity in the manner that modern historical critics do. Wright, however, is claiming more than that, and it would perhaps be helpful to remind ourselves again of the breadth of his

33

This is more or less what Barclay postulates for Paul when he maintains that “what links Paul’s stories is most crucially their homology, their common ‘syntax’ or pattern, their cruciform or grace-molded shape” (Barclay, “Paul’s Story,” 155), rather than their presumed evocation of a larger metanarrative.

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claim, which he makes clear in a passage from one of his earlier books that he quotes in PFG (114): The main point about narratives in the second-Temple Jewish world, and in that of Paul, is not simply that people liked telling stories as illustrations of, or scriptural proofs for, this or that experience or doctrine, but rather that second-Temple Jews believed themselves to be actors within a real-life narrative … The main function of their stories was to remind themselves of earlier and (they hoped) characteristic moments within the single, larger story which stretched from the creation of the world and the call of Abraham right forwards to their own day, and (they hoped) into the future.34

At two points, in particular, Wright’s understanding of this story have been challenged. The first involves his assessment of the roles played by Abraham and Israel in God’s plan.35 Wright takes a more or less Reformed approach here,36 stressing the continuity of what one might call (admittedly anachronistically) the ecclesiological element of the story. That this has much to commend it becomes clear when we note how the command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28) is alluded to in God’s promise to Abraham to make him a great nation (Gen 12:2) and to make his offspring as numerous as the stars and the sand (Gen 15:5; 17:2, 6; 22:15– 18). This promise is repeated to Isaac (Gen 26:3–4) and Jacob (Gen 35:11). Israel becomes that great nation – the language of “being fruitful and multiplying” (Gen 47:27; Exod 1:7) evokes God’s command and promise – and becomes the means by which God intends to bless all the nations, an important tradition which is picked up especially by the prophets (Isa 2:2–3; 11:10; 14:1–2; 19:19–25; 56:6–7; 60:1–3; 66:18–21; Mic 4:1–2; Zeph 3:9– 10; Zech 2:11; 8:20–23; 14:16).37 For Wright, Abraham represents the point in the Biblical narrative where God’s plan begins to unfold; it is becomes clear as the story progresses that his offspring Israel will be the means by which Adam’s sin is undone.38 In my opinion, Wright makes a strong case for 34

N. T. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005), 11; italics original. Cf. Peter Stuhlmacher’s contribution to this volume. 36 Cf., e.g., William J. Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 47–125; Willem VanGemeren, The Progress of Redemption: The Story of Salvation from Creation to the New Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 42–128; Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2000), esp. 292–355. 37 Cf. Terence Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 69–74. 38 Stuhlmacher contends that Wright attributes salvific functions to Abraham: “Wright says explicitly: ‘Abraham will be God’s means of undoing the sin of Adam.’” (Cf. Stuhlmacher’s contribution to this volume, 360; the quotation is taken from N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991], 21.) This, however, is not a fair characterization of Wright’s position. First of all, the quotation is not how Wright describes his own position, but rather, as he states, how later Rabbinic tradition puts things. Second, it is clear that for Wright the focus is on 35

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the fact that this is, indeed, a crucial subtext in the OT narrative and that many early Jewish groups understood it in this way (PFG 783–86; 804–15). A more serious bone of contention is Wright’s claim that first-century Jews were also more or less in agreement that they were temporally located “at a particular stage within the overall continuing narrative” (PFG 140). They believed, Wright maintains, that the promise made by Moses (cf. esp. Deut 30:1–5) and repeated by the prophets (especially Jeremiah and Daniel) that Israel would return to the land after a period of exile had not yet been fulfilled – that they viewed themselves, in fact, as being in a state of ongoing exile.39 This is a startling claim, and it is not the first time Wright has made it,40 though, in fairness to his critics, he has never laid out the case for the ubiquity of the “ongoing exile” narrative as clearly and convincingly as he does in PFG. This time around he presents an impressive amount of evidence from a broad variety of early Jewish sources (PFG 139–63), and it is important to note that it is not simply a matter of various and sundry references to “exile” or wistful reminiscences of prophetic depictions of post-exilic halcyon days

Israel – “Abraham’s people, as the people through whom the creator was intending to rescue his creation” (PFG 495, italics original). This may still be controversial for some, but it is certainly less so than Stuhlmacher’s depiction of Wright’s view. 39 Odil Hannes Steck, Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten. Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im AT, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum, WMANT 23 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1967), esp. 110–95, seems to have been the first to put forward this idea, and his influence on Wright’s thinking is palpable. Wright is quite right that the discussion would be advanced appreciably if more scholars would interact with Steck’s groundbreaking work. For a summary of Steck’s argument see my forthcoming Joel R. White, “Führt der Messias sein Volk aus dem Exil? Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit N. T. Wrights These eines impliziten Metanarrativs hinter dem paulinischen Evangelium,” in Der jüdische Messias Jesus und sein jüdischer Apostel Paulus, ed. Armin D. Baum, Detlef Häusser, and Emanuel Rehfeld, WUNT (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). 40 Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 268–70; Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 126–27. For positive assessments of Wright’s thesis, cf., e.g., James M. Scott, “Paul’s Use of Deuteronomic Tradition,” JBL 112 (1993): 648–49, 662–63; Craig A. Evans, “Jesus and the Continuing Exile of Israel,” in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 77–100. For critical assessments cf., e.g., Maurice Casey, “Where Wright is Wrong: A Critical Review of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God,” JSNT 69 (1998): 99–100; James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2003), 472–77; Douglas J. Moo, “Israel and the Law in Romans 5–11: Interaction with the New Perspective,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume II: The Paradoxes of Paul, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, WUNT II 181 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 200–3.

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that had not yet come to pass.41 What ultimately convinces me of its essential veracity is rather – to apply the insights we have garnered from Petersen – that the poetic sequences of the works Wright surveys are so similar. They pick up on not just the same key words or concepts (though there is plenty of that sort of thing going on, as well), but take up, digest, and interact in various ways with the narrative of Deut 27–30. They recount or allude to the apostasy of Israel, view her subsequent exile as entirely justified, reckon with her return, and grapple with the problem of squaring their present reality with Moses’s prophetic utterances (as they deemed them to be). The Jews of Jesus’s and Paul’s day really do seem to have believed, on the basis of Daniel’s vision as it is recounted in Dan 9:22–27, that the time of exile had been extended into their day (PFG 142–46), and many of them were quite busy trying to figure out when exactly it was scheduled to end.42 All of this does indeed have the feel of a controlling metanarrative about which there was broad consensus among Jews in the Second Temple period. It is not necessary for Wright to prove – and, in fact, he does not try to prove – that all first-century Jews affirmed the ongoing character of the exile. As he notes: My case is not that all Jews throughout the period understood themselves to be living in a state of ‘continuing exile’, only that such an understanding was widespread, and was particularly likely to be true of zealous Pharisees. (PFG 158, italics original).

He sets forth this case admirably enough, as we have noted. Still, Wright could do more to make clear that exile was a concrete reality for Jews in Paul’s day and not merely (like New York in Billy Joel’s eponymous song) a “state of mind.”43 Much of the criticism of Wright is that this is, essentially, how he views exile, and he has not done enough to deflect this charge. Israel’s hope was, after all, not that some inchoate, tribeless mass of Jews would return to the land (i.e., that it would look something like the modern state of Israel) but that all twelve tribes would be reconstituted and regain their inheritance. This is a constant theme in OT prophecy (cf. Ezek 48:30–35; Isa 11:11–16; 49:5–6; 63:17) and a palpable longing among various groups in the Second Temple period and beyond (cf. Sir 36:10–13; 48:10; Pss. Sol. 17:26–31; T. Benj. 9:2; T. Naph. 5:8; 4 Ezra 13:39–47; 2 Bar. 78:1– 41

This is the basis of Wright’s complaint that Steven Bryan, Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgment and Restoration, SNTSMS 117 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–21, has not really understood or dealt with his argument (PFG 162), and it could, I think, legitimately be directed at others as well. 42 Cf. esp. Roger T. Beckwith, “The Year of the Messiah: Jewish and Early Christian Chronologies, and their Eschatological Consequences,” in Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies, AGJU 33 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 217–75. 43 Cf. Billy Joel, “New York State of Mind,” © Skematics Music, Inc., 1976.

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7; 1QM II, 2–3; III, 12–13), including the messianic movement that grew up around Jesus of Nazareth (cf. Matt 19:28; Luke 22:30; Acts 26:7; Jas 1:1). The two tribes that returned from exile were very much aware that ten tribes were still dispersed among the nations, “hidden” but not “lost” (the latter assessment reflects later developments in Judaism; cf., e.g., b. Sanh. 110b), and the hope that they would one day be gathered back to Israel was very much alive in the first century.44 Until they returned, exile would continue to be a stark and undeniable reality, not simply a sense of disappointment, however profound, with life in the Promised Land. Brant Pitre pointed to this over a decade ago as the strongest argument in favor of the “ongoing exile” thesis,45 but Wright seems not to have recognized the force it adds to his argument.46 Still, I regard Wright’s identification of a controlling “ongoing exile” narrative as the expression of dominant Jewish worldview of the NT era as his major and, as I think it will prove to be, most enduring scholarly accomplishment. 2.4 Paul’s narrative? We turn now to our third question: Does Wright’s description of Paul’s narrative world correspond to what Paul actually says? Is he able to point to any evidence that Paul picks up the controlling early Jewish narrative of “ongoing exile” and expands upon it in terms of the complex layered story with three interwoven plots he describes? Paul is not, as we noted above, a storyteller, and therefore he does not give us direct access to the narrative or narratives that shape his thinking. In principle, however, a careful reading of Paul’s theology should allow us to describe the metanarrative that informs it.47 How successful is Wright when it comes to laying bare that metanarrative? We begin with the first part of Wright’s thesis: that Paul affirms the ongoing exile of Israel and that his theology takes this Jewish narrative as its point of departure. Wright avers that this should be uncontroversial, but legitimate questions remain. He seems work on the assumption that, since John the Bap44 Cf. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), 95–98; William Horbury, “The Twelve and the Phylarchs,” NTS 32 (1986): 509–13; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume III: Companions and Competitors, ABRL (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 148–54. 45 Cf. Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile. Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement, WUNT II 204 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), esp. 38– 39. 46 For a fuller presentation of this argument, cf. Joel R. White, “The 144,000 in Revelation 7 and 14: Old Testament and Intratextual Clues to their Identity,” in From Creation to New Creation: Essays on Biblical Theology and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of G. K. Beale, ed. Daniel M. Gurtner and Benjamin L. Gladd (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2013), 185– 86. 47 I find Wright (and Hays) quite convincing on this point. See above.

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tist’s and Jesus’s message can be understood against the background of exile and return,48 more or less the same end-of-exile paradigm can simply be presumed to be equally operative in Paul. At least it must be said that Wright’s actual exposition of Paul’s letters does little to allay this impression. He deals rather cursorily with six Pauline texts under the heading “Jesus and the God of Exodus, Return and Wisdom” (PFG 656–88), and he seems curiously indisposed to provide more thoroughgoing exegesis, implicitly dismissing the need for it with statements like “Anyone familiar with second-temple Jewish writings…will recognize that [Gal 4:1–11] is indeed a compact Exodus story” (PFG 656) or “There are so many Pauline echoes here [i.e., allusions to Wisdom of Solomon in Rom 8:1–4] that it would be tedious to tabulate them all” (PFG 661). There is a subtle ad hominem slant to these statements that has the effect of dismissing out of hand the reservations of those who remain unconvinced that such echoes are, in fact, present. Careful exegesis is still needed to show that specific Pauline texts actually make better sense if we assume the presence of an end-of-exile narrative49 or that they exhibit a poetic sequence that corresponds to the referential sequence of the “ongoing exile” narrative in the OT an early Judaism – Petersen’s approach (see above). Wright begins to address this desideratum in PFG, but he seems to lose sight of this aspect of his hypothesis among the many tradition-historical strands he attempts to follow through his lengthy exegesis of Paul. As far as Paul’s particular narrative substructure is concerned, we noted above that this involved what Wright refers to as an “outer story” involving God’s purpose in creating the cosmos and interwoven in two subplots that describe humanity’s failure to fulfill its role in God’s plan and Israel’s failure to restore humanity to its rightful vocation, respectively. The work and substitutionary death of the Messiah Jesus is, of course, Paul’s answer to the question of how God brings both of the subplots to satisfactory resolution and

48

Wright argues this case in Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, esp. 538. I have in mind what Christoph Heilig, in his recent discussion of the methodological issues that impinge on the determination of subtexts (cf. Christoph Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015], 24–35), refers to as “explanatory potential.” Though the focus of Heilig’s concern is not OT allusions per se, much of his work is broadly applicable to our topic as well. He argues that Hays’s well-known seven criteria for establishing the presence of such Biblical allusions (cf. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 29–32) can be reduced to the two elements that according to Bayes’s famous theorem (at least it is famous in philosophy of science circles) are necessary to establish the veracity of historical inferences: background plausibility – the probability that a hypothesis is correct apart from the new evidence to be considered – and explanatory potential – the ability of the hypothesis to satisfactorily account for the new evidence and to do so better than other hypotheses. 49

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ensures that the outer story has an ultimately happy ending, thus establishing God’s faithfulness. For my part, I am generally in agreement with Wright’s characterization of the subplots. These involve, in his opinion, a particular retelling of the fundamental Biblical narrative of God’s calling of Abraham in order to set aright by means of Abraham’s offspring Israel what had gone wrong in Adam’s fall (see above). Israel did not fulfill her vocation, and in Paul’s view it thus devolved on the Messiah Jesus (PFG 825). There is, of course, no doubt in the apostle’s mind that Jesus fulfilled it: “The purpose for which the covenant God had called Israel had been accomplished, Paul believed, by Jesus” (PFG 815, italics original). This aligns well with Paul’s argument in Gal 3; he clearly believes that the promises God made to Abraham have been fulfilled in Christ (Gal 3:13–14). All this is, in my opinion, well and good. Where I find myself at odds with Wright’s reading of Paul is precisely at the point where he departs from a typical Reformed understanding of God’s ultimate purposes in creating the cosmos. To be sure, no one – at least no Biblical theologian – needs to be overly exercised about the fact that Wright parts company from the Reformed tradition. Indeed, this would be salutary if Wright offered a better reading of Paul, but that does not seem to be the case. First of all, he is curiously vague about what God’s purpose actually entails. We are told only that “God made the world with a purpose, and entrusted that purpose to humans” (PFG 476, italics original). Wright’s actantial graph of the outer story is of no help either, since “plan in creation” fills the slot of “receiver” in the initial sequence (see above). A later graph characterizes the plot in terms of God as “sender” desiring to impart “image, glory, sovereignty,” as the “object” is called, to the “world” in the role of “receiver” (PFG 520), which at least is not tortuously tautological (like the first graph), but it hardly adds clarity to the picture. This unfortunate opacity at a point where lucidity is crucial results, it seems, from Wright’s unwillingness to entertain the idea that God wants to impart “image, glory, and sovereignty” to human beings. That is how Edward Adams, who shares Wright’s affinity for actantial analysis, depicts it,50 thus earning a mild rebuke from Wright (PFG 487). In my opinion, however, Adams’s model is the more convincing one, even if putting humans at the center of things has fallen out of vogue in our postmodern eco-conscious age. First, it intrinsically makes more sense to speak of humans, rather than some abstract entity called “world,” receiving “image, glory, and sovereignty.” Second, and more importantly, this coheres more closely with Paul’s actual pronouncements. Though he nowhere explicitly addresses the question of 50 Cf. Edward Adams, “Paul’s Story of God and Creation: The Story of How God Fulfils His Purposes in Creation,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 31.

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why God created the world, he does seem to share the conviction of the psalmist that human beings were invested with “glory and honor” (Ps 8:5) and to believe that the crux of the problem is that they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” for idols (Rom 1:23). In other words, they sinned, and “death entered the world” (Rom 5:12). Sin thus negatively affected creation’s ability to sustain (human) life and enable humanity to carry out its vocation of bringing glory to God. This seems to be the point behind Paul’s statement that “creation was subjected to futility” (Rom 8:20) and finds itself in “bondage to decay” (Rom 8:21), a perspective he may have gleaned from Isa 24:1– 6,51 because it now brings about the death of human beings against its will (Rom 8:20), and thus it finds itself at cross purposes with its God-ordained role. That is why creation is “eagerly awaiting the revelation of the sons of God” (Rom 8:19). Paul’s argument presumes that the world is there for human beings, rather than the other way around.52 Wright’s replacement of humanity with creation itself as the object of God’s purposes in creation seems to lead him, further, to a rather un-Pauline attachment to the present created order. In any case, I am not convinced that he has gotten the end of the story right when he adamantly asserts that for NT authors, including Paul, the parousia does not involve the end of the spacetime universe (PFG 163–75). To be sure, Wright is correct that language of the dissolution of the cosmos often functions to augur the disruption of what we would call the political order rather than the collapse of the physical universe,53 but it is not clear that these must be considered mutually exclusive options. If, as Adams has argued, social order and cosmic order are inexorably linked in ancient cosmologies,54 then perhaps major political upheavals serve in Scripture as typologies of the ultimate cosmic conflagration that Paul and other early Jews believed would shake both the stars and the political systems. Wright is also correct, of course, to emphasize the continuity of the old cosmos with the new heavens and earth, and while it may be that on the popular level “going to heaven” means ascending to the aether to live among disembodied souls forever, most NT scholars surely agree with him that this 51 Cf. Harry A. Hahne, The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8:19–22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, LNTS 336 (Edinburgh: T& T Clark, 2006), 45. 52 Cf. my fuller argument on this point in Joel R. White, “Paul’s Cosmology: The Witness of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians,” in Cosmology and New Testament Theology, ed. Jonathan Pennington and Sean McDonough, LNTS 355 (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 90–106, esp. 95, 97–98. 53 In this he follows the path marked out by his Doktorvater. Cf. G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980), 256–59. 54 Cf. Edward Adams, Constructing the World: A Study in Paul’s Cosmological Language, SNTW (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 69.

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is not the way Paul envisioned the final state. This parry by Wright is actually something of a foil since by discussing two distinct topics – the pragmatic function of apocalyptic language and the nature of what we call “heaven” – as if they were one, he implies that it is necessary to choose between the idea of a cosmic cataclysm or a renewal of creation. If that were the case, the choice would be clear, since the latter is quite clearly affirmed by Paul.55 Yet the author of 2 Peter, taking his cue from the Genesis flood narrative, seems to affirm both the dissolution of the material cosmos at the time of the parousia and its subsequent restoration as the place where believers will dwell in eternity (2 Pet 3:1–10). There seems to be no reason – at least Wright has not offered one – to rule out a priori that Paul could have viewed things similarly. 2.5 Exegetical and Theological Benefits Finally, we need to ask what benefits accrue from analysis of the narrative substructure of Paul’s theology. Some express skepticism that there are any at all,56 but in one sense it matters little whether Wright’s narrative approach works in the same way for others with the same results. Its heuristic importance for Wright’s project is incontrovertible. It has infused his thinking with enormous creative energy and has aided him in articulating a refreshingly new and provocative theological reading of Paul. In any case, I applaud Wright’s insistence that central Pauline doctrines such as God’s righteousness be understood within the biblical narrative of God’s faithfulness to his covenant with Israel, i.e., his commitment to carrying out his original plan to fulfill his promises to Abraham by means of his election of Israel (PFG 803). This, in and of itself, is not really new, but emphasizing the narrative aspects of Paul’s thinking has the benefit of framing old questions in new ways that have the potential of generating new answers. Wright’s approach can, for instance, profitably be applied to Rom 9–11. He addresses this text at length (PFG 1156–1258), but, surprisingly, he gives little attention to the underlying narrative it evokes, focusing instead on its presumed chiastic structure. This is unfortunate because, to my mind, this is the clearest example we have in Paul of metaleptical appropriation of a central text in the Deuteronomic tradition.57 That this is what is intended becomes clear when in Rom 10:19 Paul quotes a verse from the so-called Song of Moses (Deut 32:1–43): “I will make you jealous of a people who are no 55

Cf. White, “Paul’s Cosmology,” 101–2. Cf., e.g., Watson, “Story,” 238–39. 57 Hays, Echoes, 20, defines metalepsis as “a diachronic trope … [in which] a literary echo links the text in which it occurs to an earlier text, [and] the figurative effect of the echo can lie in the unstated or suppressed (transumed) points of resonance between the two texts.” 56

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people, and by means of a foolish nation I will arouse your anger” (Deut 32:21).58 With this allusion to the Song of Moses Paul lays the foundation for his argument in Rom 11:11–16 that the “hardening” of Israel plays an important role in God’s plan, one that was long ago foreseen by Moses. The quotation shores up Paul’s argument in two ways, both of which are illustrated in the olive tree metaphor of Rom 11:17–24: First, the hardening of Israel opens up an unexpected heilsgeschichtliche epoch in which the nations are incorporated into the people of God without sacrificing their ethnic identity. Paul’s later quotation of Deut 32:43 in Rom 15:10 confirms this interpretation. Second, Paul discovers a divine purpose in Deut 32:21 with regard to Israel: The turning of the nations to God is designed to provoke jealousy on Israel’s part. The quotation thus supplies an answer to the pressing theodicy problem that arises due to the fact that the majority of Israel has rejected Jesus as her Messiah. Paul insists that only a portion of Israel has been hardened (Rom 11:25). The remnant, provoked by the wild branches which are flourishing on the tree, will be grafted back onto it and claim their inheritance. Paul, however, is not thinking only of this verse; rather he has the entire Song of Moses in mind. A comparison of Deut 32:1–43 with Rom 9–11 reveals that the former serves as a template for the latter. The Song can be divided thematically into the following sections:59 Prologue: Deut 32:1–3 Israel’s election: Deut 32:4–9 Israel’s salvation: Deut 32:10–14 Israel’s rebellion against God: Deut 32:15–18 Israel’s rejection by God: Deut 32:19–25 God’s determination to have mercy on Israel: Deut 32:26–43

Intriguingly, Rom 9–11 is arranged along these same lines: Israel’s election (which always involved a chosen remnant): Rom 9:1–29 Israel’s salvation (not yet accomplished): Rom 9:30–10:4 Israel’s rebellion against God (in spite of hearing the message): Rom 10:5–21 Israel’s rejection by God (except for the remnant): Rom 11:1–10 God’s determination to have mercy on Israel: Rom 11:11–32

This brief comparison reveals that Paul is not simply appropriating one aspect of the Song of Moses for his argument; rather, he is following its referential sequence throughout. He closely adheres, in other words, to the narrative

58 Paul quotes Deut 32:21 LXX (which is a literal rendering of the MT) verbatim, except that he converts indirect discourse (αὐτούς) to direct discourse (ὑµᾶς). 59 Here I follow the form of the outline provided by J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, AOTC 5 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 451, except that McConville divides Deut 32:26–43 into two parts.

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substructure of Deut 32:1–43 in constructing his argument in Rom 9–11.60 This in turn makes it clear that, from Paul’s vantage point, Israel finds itself in the phase of God’s rejection. Paul is convinced, in other words, that Israel is presently in exile, albeit on the cusp of the next heilsgeschichtliche epoch when God will show mercy to his rebellious people. Wright’s thesis of ongoing exile thus finds confirmation in this central Pauline text. That is not to say, however, that I agree with Wright at all points. In fact, in several areas I have my doubts that his assessment of Paul’s theology is correctly aligned with the story. Perhaps the best example involves the ongoing debate about the correct meaning of πίστις Χριστοῦ in Paul, if for no other reason than that the subjective genitive reading, introduced by Hays and modified by Wright, is so clearly the result of a narrative approach. I agree with Wright that not nearly as much hinges on the matter as some of those involved in the debate think (PFG 967), providing one affirms, as Wright does, the theological truth behind both the subjective and objective reading of the genitive. If Scripture teaches, as Wright aptly puts it, that justification is accomplished both a) through the faithfulness of the Messiah, and b) for the benefit of those who believe in the Messiah (PFG 839), then it becomes a matter of assigning the various πίστις Χριστοῦ texts to the proper category. That is a second-order theological task. I will, however, register my conviction that Wright veers so strongly in the direction of the subjective genitival interpretation that his reading of Romans, in particular, threatens to lose touch with the narrative at a crucial point. Paul does not, as far as I can see, explicitly recount the “faithfulness of the Messiah” in Romans. He certainly presumes it, but it is God’s faithfulness, not the Messiah’s, that is the subject of his scrutiny.61 He does, on the other hand, quite explicitly build his case around the faith of Abraham in the promises of God at what is arguably the most important pivot point in the letter (Rom 4).

60

The quotation of Deut 32:21 in Rom 10:19 is not quite where we would expect to find it, occurring as it does in the third section of Rom 9–11 rather than the fourth, but even that minor discrepancy is explicable on the basis of the fact that the OT quotations in Rom 10:19–21 function as a hinge between the sections. On the one hand they confirm Israel’s guilt; on the other they ground the following argument concerning God’s rejection of Israel. 61 Lest this be seen as mere quibbling, we should not forget that Wright himself makes much of the very same distinction when discussing 2 Cor 5:21 and its implications for the doctrine of imputation (PFG 883). He notes that the verse says nothing at all about the Messiah’s righteousness, but only God’s.

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3. Conclusion In the last section I have, of course, ultimately been asking how well Wright’s assessment of Paul’s theology coheres with the controlling narrative he claims to have uncovered in early Judaism and in Paul. This question cannot be posed independently of that of correspondence (i.e., whether Wright has correctly identified Paul’s controlling narrative), which I examined above, but it is important to recognize that it is a distinct question with its own legitimacy. Only a convinced positivist will demand that the question of correspondence be answered definitively before addressing the question of coherence. In reality, we are confronted with a hermeneutical circle here that forces us to ask both questions at once while at the same time critically examining our methodology. It seems to me that on all counts PFG has opened up promising venues for further investigation. In my opinion, Wright has established the existence of a common first-century Jewish metanarrative highlighting God’s faithfulness to Israel in spite of her “ongoing exile” that grounds a presumption that it is present in Paul, as well. That is no mean achievement, and all the questions that surface in its wake do not detract from it in the least.

Bibliography Adams, Edward “Paul’s Story of God and Creation: The Story of How God Fulfils His Purposes in Creation.” Pages 19–43 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. –. Constructing the World: A Study in Paul’s Cosmological Language. SNTW. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. Barclay, John M. G. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. SJT 68 (2015): 235–43. –. “Paul’s Story: Theology as Testimony.” Pages 133–56 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. Beckwith, Roger T. “The Year of the Messiah: Jewish and Early Christian Chronologies, and their Eschatological Consequences.” Pages 217–75 in Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies. AGJU 33. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Bryan, Steven. Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgment and Restoration. SNTSMS 117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Caird, G. B. The Language and Imagery of the Bible. London: Duckworth, 1980. Casey, Maurice. “Where Wright is Wrong: A Critical Review of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God.” JSNT 69 (1998): 95–103. Deines, Roland. Review of Particularism and Universalism in the Sermon on the Mount: A Narrative-Critical Analysis of Matthew 5–7 in the Light of Matthew’s View on Mission, by Boris Paschke. Jahrbuch für Evangelikale Theologie 27 (2013): 265–71.

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Donaldson, Terence. Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. Dumbrell, William J. Covenant and Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984. Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2003. –. “The Narrative Approach to Paul: Whose Story?” Pages 217–30 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. –. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Evans, Craig A. “Jesus and the Continuing Exile of Israel.” Pages 77–100 in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God.” Edited by Carey C. Newman. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Greimas, Algirdas J. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Translated by Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Hahne, Harry A. The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8:19–22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. LNTS 336. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. –. “The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians.” NTS 45 (1999): 391–412. –. The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, SBLDS 56. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983. –. The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11. 2nd ed. The Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. WUNT II 392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Hooker, Morna D. “‘Heirs of Abraham’: The Gentiles’ Role in Israel’s Story: A Response to Bruce W. Longenecker.” Pages 85–96 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. Horbury, William. “The Twelve and the Phylarchs.” NTS 32 (1986): 503–27. Käsemann, Ernst. “Justification and Salvation History in the Epistle to the Romans.” Pages 60–78 in Perspectives on Paul. London: SCM, 1971. Kline, Meredith G. Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview. Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2000. Longenecker, Bruce W., ed. Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on K nowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Matlock, R. Barry. “The Arrow and the Web: Critical Reflections on a Narrative Approach to Paul.” Pages 44–57 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. McConville, J. G. Deuteronomy. AOTC 5. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002. Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume III: Companions and Competitors. ABRL. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Moo Douglas J., “Israel and the Law in Romans 5–11: Interaction with the New Perspective.” Pages 185–216 in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume II: The Para-

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doxes of Paul. Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. WUNT II 181. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Patte, Daniel. What is Structural Exegesis? Guides to Biblical Scholarship. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. Petersen, Norman R. Rediscovering Paul: Philemon and the Sociology of Paul’s Narrative World. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Pitre, Brant. Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of Exile. Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement. WUNT II 204. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Ridderbos, Herman. Paul: An Outline of His Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975. Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. London: SCM, 1985. Schnelle, Udo. Paulus: Leben und Denken. de Gruyter Lehrbuch. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003. Scott, James M. “Paul’s Use of Deuteronomic Tradition.” JBL 112 (1993): 645–65. Soulen, Richard N. Handbook of Biblical Criticism. 2nd ed. Atlanta: John Knox, 1981. Steck, Odil Hannes. Israel und das gewaltsame Geschick der Propheten: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des deuteronomistischen Geschichtsbildes im AT, Spätjudentum und Urchristentum. WMANT 23. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1967. Stendahl, Krister. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215. Steven Bryan Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgment and Restoration. SNTSMS 117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. VanGemeren, Willem. The Progress of Redemption: The Story of Salvation from Creation to the New Jerusalem. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998. Watson, Francis. “Is There a Story in These Texts?.” Pages 231–39 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. White, Joel R. “Führt der Messias sein Volk aus dem Exil? Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit N. T. Wrights These eines impliziten Metanarrativs hinter dem paulinischen Evangelium.” In Der jüdische Messias Jesus und sein jüdischer Apostel Paulus. Edited by Armin D. Baum, Detlef Häusser, and Emanuel Rehfeld, WUNT. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming. –. “Paul’s Cosmology: The Witness of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians.” Pages 90–106 in Cosmology and New Testament Theology. Edited by Jonathan Pennington and Sean McDonough. LNTS 355. London: T&T Clark, 2008. –. “The 144,000 in Revelation 7 and 14: Old Testament and Intratextual Clues to their Identity.” Pages 185–204 in From Creation to New Creation: Essays on Biblical Theology and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of G. K. Beale. Edited by Daniel M. Gurtner and Benjamin L. Gladd. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2013. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. Paul: Fresh Perspectives. London: SPCK, 2005. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992.

Part III Contextual Issues

Wright’s Paradigm of Early Jewish Thought Avoidance of Anachronisms? James Hamilton Charlesworth The editors have asked me to assess N. T. Wright’s massive two-volume work of 1,660 pages, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by evaluating his methodological approach to Second Temple Judaism and Paul’s place within it. The two-volume masterpiece is the product of mature reflections (Wright has taught and preached Paul for over 40 years). It flows impressively from his previous books in his series “Christian Origins and the Question of God”: The New Testament and the People of God (1992), Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003).1

1. Twelve Questions I am pleased to examine Wright’s presuppositions, methodology, and presentation of Paul’s Judaism. It seemed best to me, before reading Wright’s volumes, to choose the 12 most important questions that would guide my review in anticipation of reading his oeuvre. When I choose 12 questions as the most important, scholars will debate that these are the most important questions; and that is good, as it stimulates them to present a list that they feel comfortable defending. The procedure chosen will allow me to classify the best approach to the very complex world of Second Temple Judaism in ancient Palestine and in the Diaspora, Paul’s relation to it,2 and Wright’s presentation of 1 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992); N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003). I have enjoyed Tom Wright’s powerful commitment and stimulating intellect, beginning when he joined my SNTS seminar in Durham and then many times in various places, including Westminster where we discussed Paul’s rhetoric. I knew then, and acknowledge now, that he has mastered and appreciated Paul far more than I have. 2 For videos, see James H. Charlesworth, “How Do These Jewish Texts Help Us Comprehend Paul and the Evangelists?” in The Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible & Covenant: Under-

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each. Is it not best, before examining a book, to compile a list of concerns that will alert each of us to the author’s focuses, strengths, weaknesses, purposes, and conclusions? Likewise, we should ask if the focus is well chosen and sharp; and what is blurred by the precise focus? Having read Wright’s work, I now present these prior questions and my observations. 1.1 I am certain that Wright would assiduously avoid any semblance of AntiJudaism (Anti-Semitism),3 but would he agree with the stellar group of Pauline specialists who convened in Rome in 20144 to demonstrate how Paul now must be understood within Second Temple Judaism? Yes! Note his claims that of the three “completely intertwined” worlds that shaped Paul (Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Roman imperialism) we must begin with Judaism “where Paul began” (PFG 77) and that Paul’s announcement of the “good news” is “the essentially ‘good news’ about the Messiah” (PFG 1440).5 Wright inherits a century of research in which scholars have shown that “most of Paul’s key themes” derive “from the world of Israel’s scriptures and Jewish traditions” (PFG 201). Wright correctly perceives that Paul remained a devout Jew and a thinker defined by Judaism.6 Note especially his opening comment: “Part of the overall argument of the book is that Paul remains a decidedly and determinedly Jewish thinker” (PFG xvi). Wright is clear: “His call was to be the apostle to the non-Jewish nations. He came with a Jewish message and a Jewish way of life for the non-Jewish world” (PFG 1408). Note again: “One of the central arguments of this whole

standing the Early Christian Texts, Biblical Archaeology Society Lecture Series DVD, 2006 and James H. Charlesworth, “Paul and the Reinterpretation of Jesus’s Message” in In Search of Christian Origins: Lectures on the History of Early Christianity. Biblical Archaeology Society Lecture Series DVD, 2011. 3 See James H. Charlesworth, “Did They Ever Part?,” in Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013), 281–300, 363–67. For more, see James H. Charlesworth, review of AntiJudaism in Early Christianity: Vol. 1: Paul and the Gospels, ed. Peter Richardson and David Granskou; and Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: Vol. 2: Separation and Polemic, ed. Stephen G. Wilson, PSB 9 (1988): 71–72. 4 “Re-Reading Paul as a Second-Temple Jewish Author,” Nangeroni Meeting of the Enoch Seminar, 23–27 June 2014 (http://www.enochseminar.org/drupal/rome-2014--overview). 5 Also see Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 181–203. 6 Also see James H. Charlesworth The Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research: With A Supplement, SBLSCS 7 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981) and the contributions in James H. Charlesworth and Gerbern S. Oegema, eds., The Pseudepigrapha and Christian Origins: Essays from the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 4 (London: T&T Clark, 2008).

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book, after all, is that Paul remained stubbornly and intentionally a deeply Jewish thinker” (PFG 1408). Absolutely! 1.2 Paul states that he is proud to be a Jew and a Pharisee, so does Wright err and cast Paul as a “Christian,” a sociological and theological category which is anachronistic to many experts for the period before 70 CE? Wright perceives that Paul “prior to his conversion” was a Pharisee who was “excessively zealous for the traditions” cherished within Second Temple Judaism (PFG 94). Unfortunately, he often refers to followers of Jesus as “Christians” (e.g., PFG 86, 1154), to “Christianity” (e.g., PFG 1119), and to Paul’s “Christian rethinking” (PFG 86). Scholars who teach their students not to use the designation “Christian” for phenomena that predate 100 CE would have been more pleased with Wright’s use of “believing Gentiles” and “believing Jews” (PFG 924) or “non-Jesus-believing Jews” and “Jesusbelieving-Jews” (PFG 1411). There is no need for further precision; “believing” would cover the diverse titles that individuals believing in Jesus would have chosen for him (further, see PFG xxi). Does Wright follow Alan Segal, who portrayed Paul as a convert, or Krister Stendahl, who argued Paul was not a convert and that such a concept of “conversion” is anachronistic?7 Wright realizes that too often the concept of conversion disparages Second Temple Judaism (PFG 1419). Wright correctly emphasizes that Paul would reject the interpretation that he moved from Judaism to “Christianity” (PFG 1419). Paul must not be evaluated as the first Christian; thus, Wright follows Stendahl and speaks about Paul’s calling, thus perfectly representing Paul’s use of “call” in Gal 1:15–17 (PFG 1418–26). Yet, Wright learns from Segal and with great appreciation; acknowledging Segal is “perhaps the most thorough and sensitive Jewish writer on Paul in modern times” (PFG 1423). 1.3 Does Wright avoid such misleading dichotomies as “Hellenistic Judaism” versus “Palestinian Judaism” and “Orthodox Judaism” versus “Sectarian Judaism”? “Hellenistic Judaism” was once used to refer to the Jewish world outside ancient Palestine; now, scholars should use the term only to denote a chronological period (that is, the Persian, Greek, Roman, or the Egyptian world after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE). The Jewish world outside Palestine is certainly Diasporic Judaism (and one should then 7

Alan. F. Segal, Paul the Convert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) and Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976). Wright continuously brings forward an emphasis that began with Stendahl: Paul must no longer be conceived in modern western categories. They are anachronistic.

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clarify what is included; is it Egypt, Parthia, Italy, or Asia Minor?). No leading scholar now uses the term “Orthodox Judaism” for pre-70 Jewish phenomena. Moreover, “Sectarian Judaism” should be clarified; is one referring to Qumran Scrolls as “sectarian,” (that is, composed or definitively shaped at Qumran) or to “Sectarian Judaism” (that will include all discussions of the Enoch corpus and other social phenomena, such as Samaritan studies). Wright uses the appropriate nomenclature; for example, endorsing Barclay’s insight that “Diasporic” Jews identified themselves as Jews via a combination of ethnicity and cultural practices (PFG 94), and discussing “the Diaspora” in opposition to “the holy land” or “Palestine” (PFG 89).8 Though inconsistently, Wright seeks to stress the varieties of Judaism throughout Mediterranean culture before 136 CE. 1.4 In examining pre-70 CE sociological and theological contexts, does Wright choose to use terms that are now relegated to the dust bin, according to most leading scholars, such as “canonical,” “canon,” “extra-canonical,” as well as “church,” “orthodoxy,” and “heresy”? Wright is aware that many nouns and terms have one meaning in Second Temple Judaism and another meaning today (and gracious, there are so many cultures in our global culture). We should try to avoid “theology” when imagining Jewish thought and be careful about using “eschatology” when explaining the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it is a Greek noun that misrepresents Jewish views of “the latter days” and the “Endtime.” “Salvation” (pervasive in the Hodayot) and the “Fall” (4 Ezra) are preChristian terms that were created and developed by early Jews; but followers of Jesus used them and appreciably added to their meaning. That is certain; but an argument may be too circular; that is, assuming a text is Jewish and not influenced by the Palestinian Jesus Movement (PJM; certainly not “the early Church”) and then translating and interpreting the text with that presupposition (which may be false). Translations should not be overly interpretive. Ambiguities in a text must remain (notes are thus necessary for explanation). Literal translations alone bring forth the problems found in a text that was composed in Hebrew but translated into Greek and extant only in Latin or Ethiopic. How should scholars translate ‫ משיח‬in a text? Should we chose “an anointed one,” “the Anointed One,” “a messiah,” or “the Messiah?”9 There are no capital letters in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. When should the noun be capitalized? Additionally, how do we know that a definite article should be 8

For reflections on Paul and his life in the Diaspora, see Ronald Charles, Paul and the Politics of Diaspora, Paul in Critical Contexts (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2014). 9 See the contributions in James H. Charlesworth et al., eds., The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992).

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represented, especially when ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek Jewish compositions (which have forms for a definite article) are extant only in Latin or Syriac in which there is no definite article? Too many translators think they are avoiding Christian theology by rendering ‫ משיח‬as “an Anointed One,” or “the Anointed One.”10 That translation misrepresents the text if the author had in mind “the Messiah.” Choosing “an anointed one” assumes there is a clear border between Jewish and early socalled Christians terms for this eschatological figure; and it certainly implies that we know the difference between “the Messiah” and “the Anointed One.” No one does, because the ancient authors often imagined each. The Messiah means “the Anointed One.” The Greek Χριστός evolves from χρίω; the verb, especially when used with oils, means “to anoint” and “to anoint oneself.” So, Χριστός means “the Anointed One” and “the Christ.” When in the early thirties, Jesus’s followers were convinced he was the longawaited “Messiah,” they imagined him in the line of the “prophet,” “priest,” or “king” (those who were anointed in the Bible) and thus God’s “Anointed One.” We scholars too often imagine only religious issues; politics and sociology are sometimes even more important. Most likely some of those attached to the Herodian dynasty, and probably during the time of Herod the Great, knew the prophecy that “the Messiah,” David’s son, was promised the throne of the kingdom, and since Herod (or a Herodian) was “king” and on the throne, one should conclude that Herod is the Messiah.11 Most of the compositions in the Old Testament, the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls do not mention a “Messiah.” And when they do, almost always they do not supply a check list for the Messiah – the Psalms of Solomon are habitually quoted, but they are an exception in describing the Messiah’s function. The early Jews were brilliantly insightful; they knew that to describe the functions of the Messiah would be tantamount to usurping God’s freedom and integrity. Paul did not have that problem; for him Jesus himself defined all meanings of the Messiah.12 That is to say, the sources of Paul’s messianic ideas were the historical Jesus. For Wright, what drove Paul was the unswerving conviction that

10 This explanation may apply to the translation of 2 Baruch in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1983, 1985), 1:615–52. 11 See James H. Charlesworth, “Who Claimed Herod was ‘The Christ’?” in Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies: Ehud Netzer Volume, ed. Z. Weiss et al. (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, forthcoming), 31:29–39. 12 See Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah. More precisely and importantly, that the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord. (PFG 1409, italics his)

As Wright states: “The early Christians [sic], already by the time of Paul, had articulated a belief in the ‘divinity’ of Jesus far more powerfully, and indeed poetically, than anyone had previously imagined” (PFG 648).13 He rightly adds that Christology does not seem to “be a point of contention between” Paul and Jesus’s earliest followers. Unfortunately, Wright claims that “Paul’s own messianic belief is one of our best and earliest evidences for Pharisaic views on the subject” of the Messiah (PFG 183n415).14 Saul who became Paul is not representative of Pharisees and in no way should be paraded as representing “our best evidence for Pharisaic views” on anything. Wright may have been implying that we have no Pharisaic text that is pre-70; if so, he would be correct. It is clear, however, that numerous times Wright slips in his attempt at historical analysis – and he claims his book is basically about history (PFG 1413) – when he refers to “canonical texts” and books “not in the canon” (see e.g., PFG 85). These are anachronistic and misleading terms, as he and all scholars know in light of such masterpieces on canon criticism as those by Lee M. McDonald.15 1.5 Does Wright appreciate how significantly the concepts and terms in the Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized scholars’ approach to Second Temple Judaism, Christian Origins, and Paul? And specifically, how does he use the evidence of “works of the Law” now found in Second Temple Judaism to clarify the same term in Galatians? While Wright shows evidence of being gifted in Qumranology and Qumran palaeography, and not suffering from Qumran fever, he does not sufficiently report how significant the Dead Sea Scrolls have revolutionized our understanding of Second Temple Judaism and our assessment of Paul’s creative genius. Paul did not create the concepts of salvation and justification only by 13 Wright’s words seem confused unless he is referring to the developments of exalted figures in Early Judaism. If that is his meaning, then we must discuss in depth how that conclusion is possible in light of the claims in the Self-Glorification Hymn. The exalted figure is seated with “the Elim” in heaven. He declares he is “the beloved of the King,” God and that no one “can compare” to “my glory.” Indeed, “no one can be exalted except me. And none can go with me” (my translation). 14 I do not think this claim is representative of Wright’s basic position; he may have expressed himself without due caution when citing Alan Segal; but he does state that the claim is a “fact” (PFG 183n415). I am convinced that it is wrong headed to think that Paul can be “one of our best and earliest evidence for Pharisaic views” on any subject. 15 Lee M. McDonald, The Biblical Canon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007).

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God’s grace-filled forgiveness. They are articulated in a very developed and sophisticated fashion in the Rule of the Community and in the Hodayot.16 Note this one excerpt: But I, I know that righteousness (is) neither for the human, nor for the son of man (is) the perfection of the way. To God Most High (belong) all works of righteousness. And the way of the human is not established except through the spirit God formed for him, to make perfect the way for the sons of Adam, so that they will know all his works through the power of his might. (1QH XII, 31–33; composite text, my translation)

Wright also does insufficient justice to Paul’s opponents who advocate “works of the Law,” according to Gal 3:1–14. This term was once thought to be unknown in Judaism. Paul’s use of the terminus technicus “works of the Law” is now more comprehensible in light of the claims made by and use of “works of the Law” by the author of 4QMMT.17 1.6 If Wright sees a unity within Second Temple Judaism, what is it and how does he obtain that insight; and if he sees only diversity, how does he explain the colossal change in 66 CE? Wright perceptively sees the galvanizing force of Torah in Second Temple Judaism, noting that in “the world of ancient paganism” such books as the Sibylline Oracles “never played anything like the role of Israel’s scriptures in Judaism and Christianity” (PFG 263). Yet, his claim that Torah is about “praxis” and “precise patterns of behavior” (PFG 91) misses the point that for Jews Torah, God’s Will for all, is a command to a way of living that includes all that humans do: think, conceive, imagine, and act obediently. He also repeatedly stresses that most Jews within Second Temple Judaism affirmed a “classic” monotheism; and he explains the differences evident in “Aseneth’s Prayer” and in “Judith’s Prayer” (PFG 622–23). Wright notes correctly (PFG 84) that “the heart of Pharisaic Judaism” was daily prayer, Shema, and the Amida (Eighteen Benedictions); but he makes little mention of the vast amount of non-Qumran prayers found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wright claims to see “monotheism” as a matter of life and death for Jews from Mattathias to Akiba (PFG 625); while he is generally right, he diminishes the fact that demigods threaten monotheism. Moses’s apotheosis seems 16 James H. Charlesworth, “Saint Paul et Qumran,” RB 76 (1969): 624–26; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor with James H. Charlesworth, eds., Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Christian Origins Library (New York: Crossroad, 1990). 17 Also, see my concluding comments on 4QMMT and Galatians in James D. G. Dunn and James H. Charlesworth, “Qumran’s Some Works of Torah (4Q394–399 [4QMMT]) and Paul’s Galatians” in The Scrolls and Christian Origins: Volume 3: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. James H. Charlesworth (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 187– 201.

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described in Old Testament language (Orphica lines 25–29 [long version]) and he is depicted on a mighty throne abandoned by God, ruling men. Note Moses’s dream that was interpreted by Jethro: On Sinai’s peak I saw what seemed a throne So great in size it touched the clouds of heaven. Upon it sat a man of noble mien, Becrowned, and with a scepter in one hand While with the other he did beckon me. I made approach and stood before the throne. He handed o’er the scepter and he bade Me mount the throne, and gave to me the crown; Then he himself withdrew from off the throne. (Ezek. Trag., Exagōgē 68–76)18

The author of the Self-Glorification Hymn may elevate an anonymous person (for some scholars [not me]) who threatens God’s sovereignty; and – most importantly, the Hodayot preserves hymns that are a combination of monotheism and henotheism (celebrating god [= God?] as the greatest among the gods). If “monotheism” was the “solid rock on which Jewish identity was built” (PFG 625), that would apply to Pharisees (probably all of them) but not to all Hellenized Jews within and without the land of Israel (see also b. Ḥag. 14a). More discussion is needed; perhaps “eschatological monotheism” in which God ultimately triumphs makes more sense of all the data (see Bauckham and Wright on PFG 633); clearly, not all who threaten the concept of monotheism are evil beings. So-called “Ethnicity” is important, both non-Jews and Jews within and outside the Holy Land tended to recognize “the Jewish people” as “a single people” (PFG 91). Wright insightfully adds to Barclay’s helpful work on Jewish identity (ancestry and cultural practices) an implicit relationship to sacred geography: the Holy Land, the Holy City, the Temple (see esp., PFG 95 and 354; such perceptions can now be enriched by the reflections of those who contributed to Jesus and Temple19). All these insightful claims need to be muted in light of the plethora of meanings of “Jew” used by those in the Mediterranean world before 136 CE. Wright reports that we have few artifacts from the Second Temple period that guide us in imagining the “visual symbolic world” (PFG 101) of Second

18

R. G. Robertson in Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2:811–12. Wright treats cavalierly Philo’s reference to a δεύτερος θεός and Akiba’s suggestion that Dan 7 refers to a throne for God and one for David (b. Ḥag 13a); see PFG 627. Still full of wise insights is the monograph, Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven (Leiden: Brill, 1977). 19 James H. Charlesworth, ed. Jesus and Temple (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2014).

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Temple Judaism.20 In fact, the massive and well carved stone Torah stand found within the pre-70 Migdal synagogue does help us imagine the symbolic world of Galilee and the symbols in the Temple. Wright adds that the Temple was “the focus of the whole of Jewish life and way of life” (PFG 95). That is true of the zealous Pharisees, but the Temple and its cult also were the cause of fractionalization and divisions, notably defining the Samaritans, much Qumran thought, some ideas found in the Books of Enoch, the baptist groups, and some of Jesus’s actions.21 Can one completely ignore the other temples at Gerizim in Palestine, at Casiphia in Babylonia, at Elephantine and Leontopolis in Egypt, at Lachish and Beersheva in Indumea, at Antioch in Syria, and at ‘Araq el-Emir in Transjordan?22 And “monotheism” for Saul was not the same for Paul (as Meeks and Wright admit). Should one be concerned that Wright cavalierly refers to “ancient paganism;” and is that category not pejorative and disparaging of the advances obtained within Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman cultures (see PFG xxi and 79)? 1.7 Does Wright appreciate the many groups and sects within Second Temple Judaism and does he do justice to the Samaritans? Wright reads carefully and has a remarkable memory. For example, he warns about the dangers in using the Psalms of Solomon as proof of pre-70 Pharisaic thought (PFG 81) but then he proceeds to claim that these psalms “come from the same movement” or “as close as we are likely to come to a specifically Pharisaic text from the period” (PFG 127). These psalms are not Pharisaic; we should perceive that they come from a movement similar to what we know about the Pharisees according to post-70 sources. Moreover, Philo (Spec. 2.253) may not be referring to Pharisees since the description of Jews who are “strictest guardians of the ancestral institutions” includes at least the Essenes (see PFG 83). Moreover, Wright’s certainty that Philo has in view Pharisees is distorted by the correct perception that “the great majority of Jews” were “not aligned with any particular ‘party’” (PFG 90). There should be no doubt, in light of archaeological work at Bethzatha and Siloam, that all religious Jews, not just Pharisees, were concerned “for purity” and had to be pure to enter the Temple.23 Jesus observed these rules and was not a Pharisee. 20

See Mordechai Aviam, “The Book of Enoch and the Galilean Archeology and Landscape,” in Parables of Enoch, ed. Darrell L. Bock and James H. Charlesworth, T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series 11 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 159–69. 21 See the contributions in Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and Temple. 22 See the sources on these temples in Anders Runesson, Donald D. Binder, and Birger Olsson, The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins to 200 CE: A Source Book (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 274–94. 23 For images and further reflections see James H. Charlesworth, “The Tale of Two Pools: Archaeology and the Book of John,” Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 56

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Wright’s work would be so much better if he had perceived how paradigmatically important are archaeological discoveries and research.24 Wright sees the Pharisees as basically a coherent unity; I see them as much more latitudinarious and find vast differences between Shammai and Hillel (maybe these two would not have claimed to be “Pharisees”).25 1.8 How does Wright treat the “sacred writings” in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (that is, does he find God’s Word in any of them, as did the early Jews and “Christians”?); and does he engage the authors who have claimed Paul quoted from or at least knew one or more of these documents? Wright is one of the few New Testament scholars who can read Qumran palaeography, consults images of Qumran scrolls, and offers insightful and thoughtful reflections. He also does not ignore the vast advances made in the study of Second Temple Judaism; such is imperative for any reflection on Paul’s theology and its original context. Wright does not treat the apocryphal works as “spurious” or pseudepigraphical. He may not find God’s Word in these sacra scriptura, but he knows Paul’ contemporaries certainly did and that such a recognition is fundamental in perceiving Paul’s life and thought.26 One may harbor the thought that Wright would have given more appreciation to the Jewish sacred insights, and the sacred texts now too cavalierly discussed as “extra-canonical,” if he had crafted his words for Jewish scholars like Alan Segal, David Flusser, Doron Mendels, and Michael Stone. Certainly, Wright is writing almost only to Christians today.27 Wright also does (2011): 1–14; James H. Charlesworth with Mordechai Aviam, “Reconstructing FirstCentury Galilee: Reflections on Ten Major Problems,” in Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions, ed. James H. Charlesworth with Brian Rhea and Petr Pokorný (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 103–37. 24 For my own reflections on archaeology and New Testament research see James H. Charlesworth, “Jesus Research and Archaeology,” in The World of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts, ed. Joel B. Green and Lee M. McDonald (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 439–66. Also see the contributions in James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Finally, see James H. Charlesworth, Walking Though the Land of the Bible: Historical 3D Adventure, photography by Michael Medina (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2014). 25 See the contributions in James H. Charlesworth and Loren L. Johns, eds., Hillel and Jesus: Comparisons of Two Major Religious Leaders (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997). 26 Note the insights shared in James H. Charlesworth, Lee M. McDonald, and Blake A. Jurgens, eds., Sacra Scriptura: How “Non-Canonical” Texts Functioned in Early Judaism and Early Christianity, T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 20 (London: T&T Clark, 2014). 27 It seems obvious that Wright is in favor of Jews converting to Christianity today and that “evangelism among Jews” is not to be branded as “politically incorrect” (PFG 1414). This stance is disappointing in light of Rom 11:1 and the tragic history of the Shoah in

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not sufficiently engage the scholars who are convinced Paul knew and may have quoted from some of the so-called Pseudepigrapha.28 1.9 Does Wright perceive that Paul’s main inheritance from Judaism is apocalyptic eschatology? Admitting that many scholars are confused by the concept of “apocalyptic,” Wright wisely affirms that “apocalyptic” denotes “something which Paul does seem to have made central” (PFG 40; cf. 781). In previous publications and in this massive tome, Wright reduces “apocalyptic” thought to symbolic language that is directed to political events. He also tends to equate apocalyptic thought with eschatological thought, which is then miscast to signify not future events as the term demands but to the redemptive power of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the continuous presence and protection of the Holy Spirit.29 Many Pauline experts will contend that Paul’s apocalyptic scenario (1 Thess 4) and journey into the third heaven (2 Cor 12) are thence misrepresented. I have been convinced that Paul’s experience and reflections cause him to move from apocalyptic expectation in 1 Thess 4, when God brings with Jesus those who have died, to eschatological hopes in Rom 9–13, because time has moved closer to the Endtime: “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near” (Rom 13:11–12 NRSV). This symbolic eschatological language (not apocalyptic vision) is harmonious with the imagery supplied by the author of 2 Baruch: the youth of this age is past and the pitcher is closer to the well.30 While this claim needs discussing, more needs to be reported. Wright rightly perceives that apocalyptic eschatology involves both a radical newness and a continuous flow of history (as is clear in 4 Ezra and Gal 4:4–5). which no one can deny that interpretations of the New Testament led many, not only the Nazis, to conclude Jews are [not were] responsible for killing Jesus. During the time I was writing this review, a Polish priest who is a professor told me that it is certain that Jews are responsible for killing Jesus. When I demurred, he claimed that fact is a part of ideology and ideology cannot be changed. 28 See my reflections in James H. Charlesworth, “Paul, the Jewish Apocalypses, and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Paul the Jew: A Conversation Between Pauline and Second Temple Specialists, ed. Carlos A. Segovia and Gabriele Boccaccini (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, forthcoming). 29 See James H. Charlesworth, “Prolegomenous Reflections Towards a Taxonomy of Resurrection Texts (1QHa, 1En, 4Q521, Paul, Luke, the Fourth Gospel, and Psalm 30),” in The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity, and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity, ed. Ian H. Henderson and Gerbern S. Oegema, Studien zu den Jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 2 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006). 237–64. 30 See James H. Charlesworth, “Paul, the Jewish Apocalypses, and Apocalyptic Eschatology.”

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Wright is also thoughtful and careful when studying Jewish conceptions of “the Messiah.” For example, he includes reflections on the “new white bull” in the Animal Apocalypse (1 En. 85–90), advising caution about any messianic claims; and he explains his position in dialogue with Charlesworth, Collins, and Goldstein. Ingesting secondary sources on Paul’s own comments, Wright comes to a clear conclusion: “To put it plainly: the ‘incorporative’ thought and language which so pervades Paul is best explained in terms of belief that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah” (PFG 825). Wright’s use of simple English, devoid of jargon, is attractive to many readers. Wright might answer that the reason Paul does not write an apocalypse or explain that he is writing an apocalyptic epistle is because apocalyptic eschatology was Paul’s worldview; “a worldview” is what “you normally look through, not at” (PFG 463). Yet, Wright misses one aspect of some apocalyptic texts; they are not to be systematically organized into one story that is linear with the fulfillment of promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by the restoration of Temple and its liturgy “and the long-awaited judgment on the pagans” (PFG 108–11). Some apocalyptic Jews (and one must not claim none influenced Pharisees) imagined a story after “the story,” a Temple not on this earth and a fulfillment in one of the heavens or another age. Wright and all of us need to contemplate if his account of the “basic Pharisaic story” (PFG 111) is representative of the diversities within early Pharisaism or a modern construct demanded by some clarity. I prefer to see extreme variety not only within Second Temple Judaism, before 70, with at least 24 groups, subgroups, and three sects (the Samaritans, Essenes, and the PJM) but also within pre-70 Pharisaism. Even within the conservative Qumran Yaḥad at the same time and within the same person there were cherished, but conflicting, loyalties, perceptions, and expectations. That being said, I do like Wright’s focus on God’s ultimate rescuing of “the whole world” and God’s “faithfulness to all creation” (PFG 113). This universal expectation is reflected in the many works focused on Noah and Adam and found for the first time in the Qumran caves.31 Wright’s exegesis includes discussions of Jewish apocalyptic thought that use categories such as “apocalyptic metaphor” being “cashed out,” “rhetorical effect,” “rhetorical exaggeration,” “coded symbolic metaphor,” and “literal.” Well, gracious, I must confess some confusion with these categories, even if we may be moving in the right direction. I find no help in ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature to guide me in defining and employing such terms. Wright can distinguish between “metaphor” and “metonym” (PFG 173); but 31

See my introductions, translations, and texts of these works in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations: The Thanksgiving Hymns, Self-Glorification Hymn, and Related Documents, PTSDSSP 5A (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming).

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the latter term was first used in 1862 so is it anachronistic to apply it to pre136 CE phenomena? Or, does such a restriction severely hinder us? After all we use English to describe these early phenomena and such “speech” is not ancient. How do we interpret texts that mention comets destroying the earth, a star like a sword, stones speaking, blood dripping from wood, rolling mountains, and the folding up of heaven? What enables us to decide if such images are to be comprehended metaphorically, literally, or an exaggeration for rhetorical effect? The numerous allusions to Sinai in early Jewish texts seem to be meant metaphorically, as in Pseudo-Philo, but the author of the Prayer of Jacob and Aristobulus (2nd c. BCE) should be allowed to intend them literally.32 Paul used that selfsame tradition as an “allegory” (Gal 4:24). We should not strive to be precise since varieties of expression are regnant in our early Jewish texts. Is it not possible that all these categories may overlap and even be represented at the same time in the mind of an early Jew who knew that chaotic circumstances cannot produce lucidity? Chaos is not a friend of clarity. Fine, agreed, Josephus does really imagine “concrete events” (not metaphors) when he wrote about a star like a sword suspended over Jerusalem, a cow giving birth to a lamb, and the Temple gates opening by themselves (B.J. 6.289–90). But, did not Josephus use such exceptional images to warn against articulating the absurdly unusual via usual diction? More attuned to the dynamic of apocalyptic language is Wright’s question: “And if the language is – as we may readily agree – ‘metaphorical and colourful’, how can there be ‘no doubt’ that it is none the less literal?” (PFG 172) The apocalyptic authors were not logical, consistent, or systematic. Words were not chosen, despite the claims by Sartre.33 They appeared as thought sought escape, not clarity, in a world waiting for and hoping in God’s final triumph. As poetry must never be presented as eloquent prose, apocalyptic thought and imagination should not be over interpreted and made palatable to us today. Thus, insightful is Wright’s admission: “I suspect, in fact, that our late-modern discourse will struggle to provide us with categories adequate to express what Paul thought he was doing” (PFG 1472). For me, it is far better to avoid clear categories and immerse myself in the creative, swirling, and dynamically exciting world of the apocalypses; reading them (especially in

32

See the careful work of Dale C. Allison, The End of the Ages has Come (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) and Dale C. Allison, “Jesus & the Victory of Apocalyptic,” in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 126–41. 33 See James H. Charlesworth, “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Description of ‘Word,’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1970): 609–13.

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the ancient languages) awaken many reflections at once as we are transported to another time and another place.34 More certain is Wright’s argument that 4 Ezra 11–12 and 2 Bar. 35–40 indicate how Dan 7 was being understood in the decades after 70 CE. We should observe how such exegesis is guided by observations on what is included, excluded, and exaggerated. On target is Wright’s interpretation: The authors of these two apocalypses are, on the one hand, clearly tracking Dan 7. On the other hand, they are perfectly happy to drop his particular image (the heavenly court and the arrival and enthronement there of the ‘one like a son of man’) and to substitute their own: “in Ezra’s case, the roaring lion, in Baruch’s case, the fountain and the vine” (PFG 171). These exegetical moves enable Wright to conclude that the “apocalyptic metaphor of Daniel 7” retains what it meant initially: “the victory of God’s people” (PFG 171). 1.10 Would Wright agree with those that conclude Paul broke from Jesus by rejecting the purity laws, dietary restrictions, circumcision, and taking the “good news” to Gentiles? Well, Paul did break with the historical Jesus on all these points, being imbued with the freeing power of resurrection faith and the risen Lord whom he claims to have met. It is misrepresentative to explain Paul as if he knew little about Jesus or that he was primarily influenced by the historical Jesus. Paul and Jesus were on the opposite sides of the crucifixion and resurrection. And Paul should be perceived as shaped definitely by each of these experiences that could not have shaped Jesus’s public ministry. If Jesus had no interest in Gentiles, as Matt 10:5–15 reports, Paul believed something new had occurred when God raised “his son” from the grave. He claimed that he had been chosen to be the “Apostle to the Gentiles.”35 With Richard Hays and Morna Hooker, Wright rightly emphasizes that Paul has a narrative (and grace may abound within it). God’s explosive new revelation (“apocalypse”) is part of God’s activity in and through history. For Paul “salvation history” is an implicitly “comprehensible, and indeed comprehensive, narrative” (PFG 468; see Part II, ch. 7). Particularly insightful are these words: The kind of Jew who became a Pharisee was implicitly aware of living in a continuous story going back to Abraham, perhaps even to Adam, and on to the great coming day, and 34

R. H. Charles did not appreciate the logic of apocalyptic eschatology; see James H. Charlesworth, “Charles, Robert Henry,” EBR 4:1–4. One should be encouraged to explore how dissimilar to Charles is Wright. 35 For a discussion of how Paul was perceived during the century after his death, see Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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of being called to be an actor within that drama, to play a particular part in bringing that story forward into its final, decisive moment. (PFG 113, italics his)36

This perspective helps us comprehend Paul’s frenetic drive, despite horrific sufferings, to take “the news that was good” to Rome and even to Spain. Paul felt called “to be an actor” in the eschatological final act that was shaped by apocalyptic expectations, visions, and journeys. There can be no doubt that a major support of Wright’s position is the continuous “re-writing” of the ancient story from the earliest stratum in the Pentateuch, through Deuteronomy and Chronicles and to Jubilees, 4QMMT, the Qumranic corpus of “Re-written History,” Pseudo-Philo, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, Josephus’s Antiquities, the History of the Rechabites, and de Jona as well as de Sampsone.37 The well-known narrative is a celebration of history in which the One and only God must repeatedly forgive his chosen nation (so central in the Jeremiah-Baruch Cycle). Thus, we scholars must debate whether the same basic story mutates without changing “the same narrative shape and overall intent” (PFG 118). I am attracted to Wright’s claim that Paul knows the narrative, is part of it, and that most early Jews were imbued with “the sense of a possible over-arching story” (PFG 115). Heilsgeschichte was not rejected by all apocalypticists; some of them included “salvation history” within their apocalypses (as in the recital of God’s continuing mighty deeds in the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch). 1.11 Has Wright found “the heart of Paul’s theology” or has he allowed Paul to be as contradictory as he seems to be in his authentic letters? Many experts on Paul have assumed Paul had a central thought and then tried to explain it. Martin Luther found Paul’s central idea in salvation by grace through faith (affirmed and expanded by Bultmann and Käsemann). That is certainly one of Paul’s main thoughts and Luther’s approach has had a long and influential history; but modern scholars have not been persuaded that salvation by grace through faith is the heart of Paul’s thought. Some see Paul’s central thought in the triumph of God.

36

The Holy Land was literally imagined as a land flowing with “milk and honey.” Excavating at Tel Rehov, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of bees (genus Apis) and an apiary (a collection of beehives) that was operative from the Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age II. So the Holy Land was literally a place flowing with “milk” from animals and “honey” from bees. See Amihai Mazar and Nava Panitz-Cohen, “It is the Land of Honey: Beekeeping at Tel Rehov,” NEA 70 (2007): 202–18. 37 The latter two texts are presented in Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds., Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

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Wright posits God’s faithfulness as central to Paul. Certainly, Wright has focused on a unifying factor in Paul’s complex theology; but, as Wright would readily admit, such a focus allows us to see other main thoughts that should also then come into focus. Have too many scholars assumed that Paul must have a central thought and then sought to explain it? Maybe Paul had many important concepts and tailored them to the questions he was asked in letters now lost or in oral disputations that were not put in writing. J. Christiaan Beker argued very persuasively that Paul’s coherence was shaped by the fluctuating contingencies he faced.38 Surely, a systematic theologian would analyze Paul’s thought, excerpt passages for discussion, and construct a system of thought. As all Pauline scholars should know, what is interpreted is not Paul; it is fragments from his writings. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrated, we must not remove portions of something we are studying and assume they are what we are examining. Analysis extracts and distorts.39 We must look at the whole before us and endeavor to “indwell” the phenomena. That means contradictions are not to be resolved or removed; they are to be appreciated. A great mind like Paul’s should not be forced to be consistent, keeping an eye keenly focused on what had been expressed maybe a decade earlier. The sole focus should be on what is important in the present sphere of intentionality, and with Paul that commitment includes the experience of being moved spiritually. Abstractions can be systematic; but the world of thought in which all of us live is contradictory. That Paul can be so contradictory when discussing Torah or Law does not mean he is inconsistent and therefore untrustworthy as a thinker; it means he is consistently attending to the complexities of theological reflection on Christ as Savior in light of Torah and the vastly different interpretations of Torah within Second Temple Judaism.40 Paul must be allowed to present enriched thoughts evolving within a world faithful to experience and reflection. Experience is not experienced in neat categories; it is phenomenologically creative.

38

J. C. Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 39 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Also, see James H. Charlesworth, “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Description of ‘Word,’” 609–13 and James H. Charlesworth, “Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt in Svetopisemska Hermenevtika,” in Biblija Simpozij ‘96 Ljubljana: International Symposium on the Interpretation of the Bible (Ljubljana: Organizacijski odbor Mednarodnega simpozija o interpretaciji Svetega pisma, 1996). 40 For more reflections, see James H. Charlesworth, review of Paul and the Mosaic Law, by James D. G. Dunn, Journal of Law and Religion 18 (2002): 345–48.

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1.12 Where do we find Paul’s genius and creativity and how do we know that when so many ideas we all once concluded had originated with Paul are now being discovered in early Jewish texts? Wright notes that the double commandment to love God and neighbor “hardly” constitutes “a major or central theme” in Second Temple Judaism (PFG 1119). In my opinion, Wright correctly emphasizes that the elevation of “love” in the PJM and in Paul (1 Cor 13) is not prominent in Second Temple Judaism (PFG 1119). He then continues to explain his position: the emphasis on love was “something which was there in the ancient scriptures, but which emerges in a new way as a result of the work of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit” (PFG 1119). This claim seems sound; after all, before David Flusser,41 some leading Jews claimed that only a fool would teach his disciples to love their enemies in a hostile and occupied territory. Even if some scholars judge Wright too confessional, all should allow a former bishop the luxury of being controversial (and to use AD 70).

2. Paul’s Theology and the Complexities Within Second Temple Judaism42 Having presented and reflected on the twelve most important questions raised by presenting Paul in light of what we now know about Second Temple Judaism, it is helpful to explore other general issues. These are chosen in light of the previous questions and the problems they raise. 2.1 Missing Wright misses the monumental contributions to the three-volume The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls.43 In volume three, Charlesworth and Dunn discuss the importance of 4QMMT and its “works of the Law” for the perplexing selfsame expression in Gal 3 (yet see Wright’s careful editing and reading of 41

See James H. Charlesworth, “Introducing David Flusser’s Jesus,” introduction to The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’s Genius, by David Flusser with R. S. Notley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). 42 Corrections to PFG: Bar Kokhba was probably defeated in 136 not 135 (e.g., 82–84). A Roman inscription was found near Beth Shean indicating the date is probably 136; see Werner Eck, “The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View,” JRS 88 (1999): 87–88. The statement that the “earliest actual mention of ‘Pharisees’” comes “in the New Testament” (PFG 81) can be easily misunderstood. As we know from 1 Maccabees and the Pesharim (as well as the Talmudim), this Jewish group appeared in the second century BCE, probably during the time of John Hyrcanus (134/5–104 BCE). 43 James H. Charlesworth with James D. G. Dunn, “Qumran’s Some Works of Torah (4Q394–399 [4QMMT]) and Paul’s Galatians,” 187–201.

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4QMMT in many places, notably on PFG 185). He also misses the extreme importance for Paul of the Samaritan papyri, the Self-Glorification Hymn, and the Parables of Enoch.44 Despite the excellent observation that for Paul God is the final Judge, especially in Rom 2:1–11 (PFG 978, 1085–88), the latter composition might help him perceive that many Jews (including Jesus) imagined that the Son of Man will be the final judge and not God “the Creator” (PFG 801). That the Son of Man is the coming eschatological Judge is quite unique, even shocking, within Second Temple Judaism. According to the Parables of Enoch, the primordial Son of Man (ch. 48), who became “the Chosen One (ch. 48),” is also “the Elect One” who sits “on the Seat of Glory” and is the eschatological Judge: Says the Lord of the Spirits: “Kings, potentates, dwellers upon the earth: You would have to see my Elect One, how he sits on the throne of glory and judges Azaz’el and all his company, and his army, in the name of the Lord of the Spirits.” (1 En. 55:3–4)45

The Elect One, or Son of Man, will “judge all the works of the holy ones” (61:8). The Elect One, “that Son of Man,” shall sit on the throne of glory” (62:5) on “the day of judgment” (62:3) and condemn kings, governors, high officials, and all who have seized the dry land (1 En. 62).46 Scholars should discuss why Jesus’s concept of the Son of Man (‫בר נש‬/‫ ;בר נשא‬ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου) who is coming to judge – as so evident in Mark 8:38, Matt 19:28, and especially Matt 25:31–46, Luke 21:36, John 5:27 – was not influential on Paul. Few will fall into the pit in assuming “the Son of Man” Christology was unknown until after those in the PJM claimed they had seen the risen Lord. 2.2 Questions Regarding any Construct of “Early Judaism” Wright is convinced the three fundamental Jewish categories that shaped Paul’s theology are monotheism, election, and eschatology. To what extent are these three terms Semitic or sadly anachronistic? 2.2.1 Monotheism “Monotheism” is not a term found in any ancient Semitic or Greek composition. It first appears as a Christian concept; in Jewish sources we hear that 44

See the contributions in Darrell L. Bock and James H. Charlesworth, eds., Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift, T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 11 (London: T&T Clark, 2013). 45 Cf. Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:38. 46 The author of the Parables of Enoch was composing an apocalypse; he is not easy to comprehend. As expected, he did not simply state that the Son of Man will sit in judgment on the Day of Judgment. One has to study his words and the different terms he often uses for the same person seated on the heavenly throne, and there seems to be more than one throne in heaven.

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“God is one.” This claim can mean that there is a unity and harmony in the Godhead, that there is only one God to be worshipped among the many gods, or that there is only one God. Actually, the Shema claims “the Lord” is one. That claim could mean for Israel there is only “one Lord,” leaving open what other nations may claim. Monotheism and henotheism appear in many early Jewish compositions, including the Hodayot. At Qumran, the reverence for YHWH led to writing the ineffable Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew, red ink, gold (now lost), and even four dots (Tetrapuncta); and that adoration reappears in Wright’s preference for YHWH instead of “LORD.” 2.2.2 Eschatology The concept “eschatology” is a Greek term that can misrepresent the apocryphal books composed in a Semitic language and all of the Qumran Scrolls that are in Hebrew and Aramaic. As J. Carmignac clarified, “eschatology” is frequently misunderstood and misapplied, and as S. Talmon pointed out, the early Jews talked about “the latter days.”47 2.2.3 Election and Universalism Why did Wright choose to include “election”? We can find words that are represented by “election” in ancient Jewish sources, but the doctrine of “election” is too often forced on the amorphous comments. And what does “election” mean in the diverse compositions. Is it election to suffer, as some Jews retort? Is it election to witness and to include all in an inclusive Adamic or Noachic covenant? Is it election to special status? The early authors were ambiguous. Perhaps perceptive Jews were persuaded that ambiguity allows God to be free to act as God may wish. The uniqueness of “Israel” is understandably clear in some early Jewish compositions but a universalism is also evident in the selfsame often edited composition; note, for example, this passage in the Hodayot: And for your sake [you have] acted to magnify the Torah and [truth] to make one 14 the men of your council among the sons of Adam, to recount for the eternal generations your wonders. And about [your] mighty deeds they [contem]plate 15 without ceasing, So all peoples shall know your truth,

47 See Jean Carmignac, Le mirage de l’Eschatologie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1979) and Shemaryahu Talmon, “Eschatology and History in Biblical Thought,” in Literary Studies in the Hebrew Bible: Form and Content (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 160–91.

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and all nations your glory. (1QH XIV, 13–15; my composite text)48

No one should miss the inclusion of “all peoples” and “all nations.” Nothing precludes contemplating that this universalism was for some early Jews a part of “salvation history.” If this appears in the conservative and priestly Qumran Community, it cannot be reserved for Jews who have become Hellenized. 2.3 The “Jew” Many of Wright’s comments reveal that he recognizes the problems with his construct of Early Judaism. For example: first, he admits that “Israel” does not mean “Jew,” and that this term can “strictly” denote only Jews in the tribe of Judah (PFG 1145–46). But the Persian coins have “Yehud” (Judah) stamped on them; it denotes a region. Finally, Wright correctly admits that “Jew” and “Israel” were used by Jews “in a variety of ways” (PFG 1146). That is pellucid when we include “Samaritans” who claim to be “Ancient Israel,” and imagine “Jews” as those who misinterpret and use an impure Pentateuch and do not worship on holy Gerizim. In any study of Early Judaism the “Samaritans” must be discussed; but extreme subjectivity has marred that inclusion. And in the “Good Samaritan Parable” of Luke 10:29–37 we have a tradition that Jesus warned about castigating Samaritans. One must not forget that “Judeans” and Galileans tended to refer to themselves as “Israelites,” as we know from many sources including the early traditions preserved in speeches attributed to Peter: “You Israelites (Ἄνδρες Ἰσραηλῖται), why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we caused him to walk?” (Acts 3:12) Certainly, ringing in our ears are Paul’s own words: “I myself am an Israelite” (Rom 11:1). 2.4 Covenant These reflections raise a major question: In choosing what was fundamental for early Jews, why has Wright not included the concept of “covenant” (as he did when contemplating what was so important for Paul)? The noun “covenant” appears frequently in early Jewish sources. The term and concept did unite early Jews; it was also fundamental. Yet, again, when attending to the varieties of authentic Jews before 70 CE, “covenant” cannot be reduced to one definition. Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, baptist groups, members be-

48 See James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations: The Thanksgiving Hymns, Self-Glorification Hymn, and Related Documents.

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hind the Enoch Books, Zealots, Jesus’s group, Herodians, and especially Samaritans defined “covenant” in appreciably different ways. Yet, so was “Torah” defined in challenging and diverse ways. And given over twelve textual versions of the Hebrew Scriptures should alert all against jumping to conclusions regarding a unified or common Judaism. If the “Proto-Masoretic Text” represented some in the Temple cult, other versions of the Torah obviously did also (as we know from the Deut 27:4 fragment I just published).49 2.5 Centralized Covenantal Judaism? All experts in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament want to see such a construct as “Centralized Covenantal Judaism,”50 but any scholarly construct distorts the complex world of Second Temple Judaism. Any definition of any concept floated by any Jew before 70 CE, even in the Temple, would elicit sharp debates by Jews who heard the speaker; and that insight is extremely important for understanding Paul’s arguments in Jerusalem and in the Temple. Within Judaism “to debate” is often “to honor.” Does that mean debates about Torah should be a fundamental unifying feature? The phenomenology of debating and arguing would include (not unite) Sadducees, Pharisees, Samaritans, those who produced the Books of Enoch, Essenes, baptist groups, Herodians, Boethusians, Zealots, and members of the PJM like Paul. To avoid debating is to ignore and that means to disrespect; yet, all debates are not evidence of admiration or appreciation. Arguments can lead to stoning (according to Rabbinics, stoning purified the Jew so he would be included in the Age to Come). 2.6 What Backdrop? Moreover, any portrayal is against what backdrop? Is it the Isis cult, Stoicism, Parthian Zoroastrianism, Ancient Israel (which few would label mono49

See James H. Charlesworth, “What is a Variant? Announcing a Dead Sea Scrolls Fragment of Deuteronomy,” MAARAV 16 (2009): 201–12, plates IX and X; James H. Charlesworth, “The Discovery of an Unknown Dead Sea Scroll: The Original Text of Deuteronomy 27?” Ohio Wesleyan Magazine, July 2012, http://blogs.owu.edu/magazine/ the-discovery-of-an-unknown-dead-sea-scroll-the-original-text-of-deuteronomy-27; and James H. Charlesworth, “An Unknown Dead Sea Scroll and Speculations Focused on the Vorlage of Deuteronomy 27:4,” in Jesus, Paulus und die Texte von Qumran, ed. Jörg Frey and Enno E. Popkes, WUNT II 390 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 393–414. 50 See E. P. Sanders’s impressive attempt to include almost all early Jewish thought under “covenantal nomism”; E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) and E. P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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lithic), or a putative Temple-based dominant Judaism (I see heated debates even there and even among the various groups we cavalierly define as “Pharisaic”)? The only Pharisees we know who wrote a composition we can study is Paul; and no scholar would dare to come forward to argue Paul was the typical Pharisee (and Shammai and Hillel may only have been adopted after 70 CE as “Pharisees”). 2.7 YHWH If monotheism, election, and eschatology are fundamental for Jewish thought, then what about what was fundamental for Paul’s theology? Wright claims it is the uniqueness of YHWH, Israel’s covenant election, and the hope of God’s final victory over evil and the redemption of the whole world. But, what are we to contemplate about Paul’s radical alteration of almost all previous Jewish concepts and perceptions? Wright argues that for Paul YHWH’s uniqueness appears as “Christological monotheism.” Jesus is both Messiah and the embodiment of YHWH. And Jesus’s life was the return of YHWH to Israel. Such comments allow Paul and Wright to remain controversial. Some critics will contend that Wright has become supersessionistic when he claims YHWH returns to Israel as Jesus. Reading the early Jewish texts, such as the Prayer of Manasseh (which too many thought was Christian), the Hodayot, and Amidah (Eighteen Benedictions) for spiritual nourishment makes it obvious that YHWH was present within Second Temple Judaism. And Paul knew and experienced that fact. 2.8 Overview What should we then conclude about Wright’s voyage into heady waters? He deserves not so much praise as admiration and engagement on all conclusions. Unlike too many New Testament scholars, Wright knows the stupid anachronisms regnant in works on Paul. In contrast to too many Pauline experts, he does not ignore the phenomenal advances in the study of Early Judaism. He knows Hebrew (and of course Greek) and he speaks with clarity and insight, even if all who claim to agree with Wright on every conclusion should be exposed as unreflective idiots. Supersessionism. Can Wright be charged with emphasizing Paul’s genius, his concept of fresh revelation, and a new hermeneutic defined by Jesus Christ so that he is guilty of supersessionism? NO! Wright perceptively observes that Paul does not say there is anything wrong with being Jewish or that Jews adhere to a “bad religion” (PFG 924). He carefully explains the dangers of superssionism and how it is misrepresentative of pre-136 phenomena within Judaism (PFG 1408–17). Wright knows that Paul would join Jews today on Simchat Torah when they celebrate “the Joy of the Torah” during

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the end of Sukkot, “the Feast of Tabernacles,” when the reading of the Torah is completed for the year and all dance. Note his sagacity: His [Paul’s] message, and the life of his communities (to say it yet again) remained essentially Jewish, making claims which only made the sense they made within a Jewish worldview, as a new dramatic variation on themes common in much second-temple Jewish life. He believed that in Jesus Israel’s Messiah had arrived, ushering in the new age for which Torah and prophets had longed, fulfilling God’s promises to Abraham (PFG 1440).

Wright must reiterate this conclusion because too many experts on Paul are supersessionists, even Docetists, missing the Jewishness of Paul and the importance of the historical Jesus for Paul. And Paul certainly knew the narrative of Jesus as evident in the opening phrase: “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor 11:23). Does Wright adequately engage Paul’s knowledge of the historical Jesus? This is an area for future discussion.51 2.9 What United Early Jews? Mutatis mutandis (and that is imperative and may undermine all that I am about to conclude), I do see forces that tended to unite all early Jews. First, there is the belief in One Lord; but the confession is an amorphous claim that demands exposition. Second, there is Torah; but there are many versions of Torah and the different Jewish interpretations are tantamount to different documents in Torah; and do we mean by Torah the first five books or the anachronistic BHS? Third, there is ethnicity; yet David was not an Israelite and the concept of mamzer warns us that we can never prove who is our mother and who is our father, as babies can be confused (as Solomon’s story proves) and genealogy (if accurate) alone proves a Jew to have been born a Jew (but the Temple archives were burned by Jews). 2.10 Summary My focus was to be limited to an assessment of Paul and the Faithfulness of God and Wright’s presentation of Paul focusing on his skill in presenting Second Temple Judaism. Many other foci are demanded. For example, Wright claims that Paul’s view was “very much like” that of contemporary Jews but also “very different” (PFG 625). OK, that leads into a different focus that demands a different and continued dialogue. It is here that Wright is excessive (understandably) and needs to be corrected. His urge to present Paul as the great genius and innovator needs historical correction. Wright states: “Until Paul, nobody had imagined what it 51

See Kathy Ehrensperger, “At the Table: Common Ground between Paul and the Historical Jesus,” in Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions, ed. James H. Charlesworth, Brian Rhea, and Petr Pokorný, The Second Princeton Symposium on Jewish Research (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 531–50.

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might mean for the people of God if the Messiah appeared and was crucified” (PFG 1146; his italics). NO! The pre-Pauline PJM was so well defined by this proclamation that Saul raged against it. Likewise, Paul quotes confessional formulae from the early PJM in Galilee and Judea (Rom 1:1–6) and inherits from them hymns (Phil 2 and Col 1 [and my point remains if a Paulinist compiled Colossians]). These anonymous Jews, and also Peter and James (and the other Twelve), were the first to witness and then imagine what it meant for the Messiah to appear and be crucified. Colleagues need to protect Wright from the gaping door he inadvertently opened: Wright wisely does not want his readers to imagine Paul was the real founder of “Christianity.”52 Prior to Paul there were many gifted thinkers in the PJM, as we know from studying the early traditions inherited by Paul and by the tracts that clearly lie behind the Gospels of Mark and John. I am impressed with the perspective of D. E. H. Whiteley who in 1963 concluded: “There is almost nothing in St. Paul’s writings which could not have been derived from Judaism or from the apostolic church.”53 Of course, I contend the “apostolic church” is an anachronism; the PJM is more accurate historically and is not filled with centuries of presuppositions.

3. Conclusion Wright treats scholars with respect even while rejecting their conclusions.54 Yet, how can anyone, even a Pauline specialist, be expected to concentrate on Wright’s massive publication when the focus should be on the few epistles Paul wrote? Wright wisely chose a superb title for his thoughts. Paul is certainly theocentric (and not Christocentric); and Paul is convinced of God’s faithfulness and final triumph. Wright understands that “story” (and the need to tell stories with oneself in them) is one of the primordial needs of humans.55 Note his words: “We can and must say that most Jews of Paul’s day perceived themselves, at a deep, 52 Many times Wright acknowledges the importance of the developments within the PJM before Paul; but the quotation we are now trying to correct ignores these perceptions. Frequently, the careful reader wishes that Wright had hired a perspicacious editor. 53 D. E. H. Whiteley, The Theology of St. Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 1. 54 Wright does not mince words and can be critical: “Engberg-Pedersen, 2010, 248 n. 5 … someone who clearly has little idea of what Judaism actually was or how it worked, and who uses the word ‘apocalyptic’ in a fairly unreconstructed, and certainly unhistorical, Bultmannian sense (see below, 1386–406, esp. 1402f.)” (PFG 168n367). 55 See my reflections in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament: Prolegomena for the Study of Christian Origins, SNTSMS 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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worldview level, as living in a story in search of an ending” (PFG 109). I am in full agreement with Wright that we must recognize narratives in Paul and that his life and thought were lived out within a narrative structure with an eschatological triumph that he partly already experienced. Indeed, biblical scholars study not only the Book of the People but the People of the Book – and today those believing and living in the story are also People of the Book. In summation, Wright has earned the adoration he is receiving from so many; and his teachers, George Caird and Charlie Moule, would be proud and pleased. In a world losing the biblical culture that has shaped it for well over 2,000 years, we may find and hear in these pages a Believer from the past who is alive in a Believer among us today.

Bibliography Allison, Dale C. The End of the Ages Has Come. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. –. “Jesus & the Victory of Apocalyptic.” Pages 126–41 in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N. T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. Edited by Carey C. Newman. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999. Aviam, Mordechai. “The Book of Enoch and the Galilean Archeology and Landscape.” Pages 159–69 in Parables of Enoch. Edited by Darrell L. Bock and James H. Charlesworth. T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series 11. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Beker, J. C. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Carmignac, Jean. Le mirage de l’Eschatologie. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1979. Bock, Darrell L., and James H. Charlesworth, eds. Parables of Enoch: A Paradigm Shift. T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 11. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Charles, Ronald. Paul and the Politics of Diaspora. Paul in Critical Contexts. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2014. Charlesworth, James H. “An Unknown Dead Sea Scroll and Speculations Focused on the Vorlage of Deuteronomy 27:4.” Pages 393–414 in Jesus, Paulus und die Texte von Qumran. Edited by Jörg Frey and Enno E. Popkes. WUNT II 390. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. –. “Did They Ever Part?” Pages 281–300, 363–67 in Partings: How Judaism and Christianity Became Two. Edited by Hershel Shanks. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2013. –. “How Do These Jewish Texts Help Us Comprehend Paul and the Evangelists?” in The Dead Sea Scrolls, Bible & Covenant: Understanding the Early Christian Texts. Biblical Archaeology Society Lecture Series DVD, 2006. –. “Introducing David Flusser’s Jesus.” Introduction to The Sage from Galilee: Rediscovering Jesus’s Genius, by David Flusser with R. S. Notley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. –, ed. Jesus and Archaeology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. –, ed. Jesus and Temple. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2014.

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–. “Jesus Research and Archaeology.” Pages 439–66 in The World of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts. Edited by Joel B. Green and Lee M. McDonald. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013. –. “Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Description of ‘Word.’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1970): 609–13. –. “Paul and the Reinterpretation of Jesus’s Message” in In Search of Christian Origins: Lectures on the History of Early Christianity. Biblical Archaeology Society Lecture Series DVD, 2011. –. “Paul, the Jewish Apocalypses, and Apocalyptic Eschatology.” In Paul the Jew: A Conversation Between Pauline and Second Temple Specialists. Edited by Carlos A. Segovia and Gabriele Boccaccini. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, forthcoming. –. “Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt in Svetopisemska Hermenevtika.” In Biblija Simpozij ‘96 Ljubljana: International Symposium on the Interpretation of the Bible. Ljubljana: Organizacijski odbor Mednarodnega simpozija o interpretaciji Svetega pisma, 1996. –. “Prolegomenous Reflections Towards a Taxonomy of Resurrection Texts (1QHa, 1En, 4Q521, Paul, Luke, the Fourth Gospel, and Psalm 30).” Pages 237–64 in The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity, and Other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity. Edited by Ian H. Henderson and Gerbern S. Oegema. Studien zu den Jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 2. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2006. –. Review of Paul and the Mosaic Law, by James D. G. Dunn. Journal of Law and Religion 18 (2002): 345–48. –. Review of Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: Vol. 1: Paul and the Gospels, edited by Peter Richardson and David Granskou; and Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: Vol. 2: Separation and Polemic, edited by Stephn G. Wilson. PSB 9 (1988): 71–72. –. “Saint Paul et Qumran.” RB 76 (1969): 624–26. –. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations: The Thanksgiving Hymns, Self-Glorification Hymn, and Related Documents. PTSDSSP 5A. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming. –. “The Discovery of an Unknown Dead Sea Scroll: The Original Text of Deuteronomy 27?” Ohio Wesleyan Magazine, July 2012. http://blogs.owu.edu/magazine/thediscovery-of-an-unknown-dead-sea-scroll-the-original-text-of-deuteronomy-27. –, ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1983, 1985. –. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament: Prolegomena for the Study of Christian Origins. SNTSMS 54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. –. The Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research: With A Supplement. SBLSCS 7. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981. –. “The Tale of Two Pools: Archaeology and the Book of John.” Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 56 (2011): 1–14. –, ed. The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992. –. Walking Though the Land of the Bible: Historical 3D Adventure. Photography by Michael Medina. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2014. –. “What is a Variant? Announcing a Dead Sea Scrolls Fragment of Deuteronomy.” MAARAV 16 (2009): 201–12, plates IX and X. –. “Who Claimed Herod was ‘The Christ’?” Pages 29–39 in vol. 31 of Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical Studies: Ehud Netzer Volume. Edited by Z. Weiss et al. Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, forthcoming. Charlesworth, James H., Lee M. McDonald, and Blake A. Jurgens, eds. Sacra Scriptura: How “Non-Canonical” Texts Functioned in Early Judaism and Early Christianity.

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T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 20. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Charlesworth, James H., and Loren L. Johns, eds. Hillel and Jesus: Comparisons of Two Major Religious Leaders. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. Charlesworth, James H., and Mordechai Aviam. “Reconstructing First-Century Galilee: Reflections on Ten Major Problems” Pages 103–37 in Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions. Edited by James H. Charlesworth with Brian Rhea and Petr Pokorný. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. Dunn, James D. G., and James H. Charlesworth. “Qumran’s Some Works of Torah (4Q394–399 [4QMMT]) and Paul’s Galatians.” Pages 187–201 in The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Volume 3: The Scrolls and Christian Origins. Edited by James H. Charlesworth. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. Eck, Werner. “The Bar Kokhba Revolt: The Roman Point of View.” JRS 88 (1999): 76–89. Ehrensperger, Kathy. “At the Table: Common Ground between Paul and the Historical Jesus.” Pages 531–50 in Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions. Edited by James H. Charlesworth with Brian Rhea and Petr Pokorný. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. Feldman, Lous H., James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, eds. Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture. 3 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Klauck, Hans-Josef, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. 30 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009–. Mazar, Amihai, and Nava Panitz-Cohen. “It is the Land of Honey: Beekeeping at Tel Rehov.” NEA 70 (2007): 202–18. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. McDonald, Lee M. The Biblical Canon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007. Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome, with James H. Charlesworth, eds., Paul and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christian Origins Library. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Novenson, Matthew V. Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Oegema, Gerbern S., and James H. Charlesworth, eds. The Pseudepigrapha and Christian Origins: Essays from the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts in Contexts and Related Studies 4. London: T&T Clark, 2008. Runesson, Anders, Donald D. Binder, and Birger Olsson. The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins to 200 CE: A Source Book. Boston: Brill, 2010. Sanders, E. P. Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. –. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Segal, Alan F. Paul the Convert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. –. Two Powers in Heaven. Leiden: Brill, 1977. Stendahl, Krister Paul among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. Talmon, Shemaryahu. “Eschatology and History in Biblical Thought.” Pages 160–91 in Literary Studies in the Hebrew Bible: Form and Content. Leiden: Brill, 1993. White, Benjamin. L. Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Whiteley, D. E. H. The Theology of St. Paul. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996.

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–. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003.

Wisdom or Foolishness? The Role of Philosophy in the Thought of Paul Gregory E. Sterling 1. Introduction Justin Martyr wrote: I confess that I both pray and strive with all my resources to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not similar in every respect, so neither are those of others: the Stoics, poets, and historians.

He explained: “For each spoke well on the basis of the partial reception of the spermatic, divine, Logos, seeing what was related to it.” He suggested that those who contradicted themselves on key concepts proved that they did not possess divine Wisdom. On the other hand, “Whatever things were well said among all, belong to us Christians.” He added: “For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the seed of the implanted Logos that was in them.”1 It is in much the same spirit that Tom Wright has included a discussion of philosophy in his expansive treatment of Paul, although the former bishop and New Testament scholar differs from the second-century apologist in the rationale for the agreement. Wright wrote: “When Paul saw what life in the Messiah was really like in terms of renewed humanity it was bound to overlap with what non-Christian moralists had glimpsed as the way to behave.” He explained: “This was entailed by Paul’s belief in creational (and now eschatological) monotheism.” More specifically,

1

Justin Martyr, 2 Apol. 13.2–5. Translations are mine. Cf. also 2 Apol. 8.1, where he pointed to the Stoics in particular; 2 Apol. 10.1–8, where he compared Jesus to Socrates; and 1 Apol. 46.2, where he said: “We were taught that Christ is the firstborn of God and have previously declared that He is the Logos of whom every race of humans have participated. Those who lived with reason (µετὰ λόγου) are Christians, even though they were considered atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.”

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if humanity was really being restored in and through Messiah and spirit, one would not expect the result to be out of step at every point with the best that the rest of the human race had seen. (PFG 1378)2

Like Justin, Wright writes from an unambiguously Christian perspective but recognizes common ground between Paul and Hellenistic moralists, especially Stoics. His inclusion of philosophy as a separate point of discussion is a significant contribution in itself. One only needs to make a quick scan of recent treatments of Paul or his thought to recognize that the major syntheses include discussions of philosophy, but not as a separate category: Philosophy is included en passant when it is deemed appropriate.3 Wright has made it a central element. He did so in his effort to contextualize Paul historically. He devoted four chapters to the Umwelt of the Apostle that discuss Judaism, philosophy, Greek religion, and Rome in Part I one (chs. 2–5) and then returned to these same four in Part IV only in reverse order (chs. 12–15). Between these two discussions he developed his understanding of Paul’s mindset (Part II) and theology (Part III). The overall argument is thus to sketch the larger world, to develop Paul’s own thought, and then to situate Paul within the larger world. For the purposes of our essay, we will consider Wright’s sketch of Hellenistic philosophy (ch. 3), his analysis of Paul’s response to it (ch. 14), and then make some general comments in concluding.4

2. Hellenistic Philosophy Wright begins with a sketch of Hellenistic philosophy that highlights the role of Stoicism (PFG 197–245). His treatment includes an introduction in which he sets out the three subfields of philosophy, an overview of the major schools, and the Jewish response. I will respond to each briefly. 2 Cf. also PFG 380–81, 1356, and esp. 1382: “Ultimately, Paul does not have a quarrel with pagan philosophy … Just as Paul is not trying to invent a new ‘religion,’ so he is not trying to ‘construct a philosophy’ as such, though as we have seen his version of early Christianity is in some ways more like a philosophical school than anything else known at the time. Paul is proclaiming Jesus himself, and discovering as he does so that all the treasure of wisdom and knowledge find their key in him.” 3 Two of the most important comprehensive treatments in recent years treat philosophy in this way: James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); James D. G. Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, Christianity in the Making 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); and Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). 4 Since others are commenting on the rest of the text, I will prescind from doing so unless the texts involve philosophy directly.

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2.1 Hellenistic Philosophy as a Field Before I make specific responses, it is important to make a few general observations about the state of our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy. One of the great challenges that confronts everyone who works in this field is the fragmentary nature of our evidence. For example, we do not have a full text by a Stoic until the late period: It is not until Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius, and Marcus Aurelius that we have full texts.5 The same may be said for Platonic tradition. The evidence for the Old Academy is fragmentary.6 The skepticism of the New Academy probably did not help with the preservation of either the works of the Old Academy or their own. Similarly, we do not have full works for the two transitional figures that turned away from the skepticism of the New Academy and created what we now conventionally call Middle Platonism: Antiochus of Ascalon7 and Eudorus of Alexandria.8 It is not until Plutarch that we have full treatises. While Philo of Alexandria was Middle Platonic in his epistemology and metaphysics, and his treatises can be used as evidence for Middle Platonic thought, his unambiguous commitment to Moses and Judaism require that we recognize the special character of his works. The evidence is slightly better for the Epicurean tradition (we have three letters of Epicurus,9 the poem of Lucretius,10 the inscriptions at Oenanda of the works of Diogenes,11 and the library at Herculaneum12), but the

5

Ioannes von Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903– 1924), collected the fragments that attest the earlier period. Hereafter SVF. 6 On the Old Academy see John M. Dillon, Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7 See Hans J. Mette, “Philon von Larisa und Antiochus von Askalon,” Lustrum 28–29 (1986–1987): 9–63. 8 See Claudio Mazzarelli, “Raccolta e interpretazione delle testimonianze e dei frammenti del medioplatonico Eudoro di Alessandria,” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 77 (1985): 197–209, 535–55. 9 Epicurus to Herodotus (Diogenes Laertius 10.35–83), physics; Epicurus to Pythocles (Diogenes Laertius 10.84–116), celestial phenomena; and Epicurus to Menoeceus (Diogenes Laertius 10.122–35), ethics. 10 Lucretius, De rerum natura. 11 See Martin F. Smith, The Epicurean Inscription (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992). 12 In 1752 and 1754 a villa containing ca. 800 papyri books was discovered at Herculaneum containing a significant number of philosophical works, including works by Epicurus and Philodemus. The history of the publications is complicated. Marcello Gigante founded the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri in 1970 and began publishing the journal Cronache Ercolanesi that is devoted to the Herculaneum papyri, including the philosophical works of Philodemus and their editions. See Marcello Gigante, Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum, trans. Dirk Obbink (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

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tradition is not as important for Paul as the Stoic and Middle Platonic.13 All that we have for the Neopythagorean tradition is an early poem14 and a series of pseudonymous letters.15 The same is true of the Cynic tradition: we only have pseudonymous letters.16 While this survey is far from complete, it provides an idea of the limits of our evidence. These limits often mean that the most important sources for our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy are collections of fragments. Yet these pose their own challenges. Let me illustrate in two ways. First, it is not always clear whose views are preserved. For example, in Cicero’s De legibus, the orator articulated the Stoic understanding of natural law.17 However, it is not clear whether he is expressing the views of the Stoic Panaetius or the Academic Antiochus of Ascalon who subsumed Stoic thought within the Platonic tradition.18 The thought is Stoic, but it is not clear to whom we should attribute the fragment. Another problem posed by the fragments is that it is often difficult to disentangle the views of the author who preserved the view from the view cited or to know whether the author preserved the view of others accurately. For example, Ioannes von Arnim used Philo as a source for the Stoics 198 times in his famous collection of old Stoic fragments.19 Only Cicero, Galen, and Plutarch are more frequent sources of information. Tony Long has criticized von Arnim for his use of Philo and argued that von Arnim should have drawn more heavily from Cicero and Seneca and less from Philo.20 Long has a good point, although he appears to push it too hard. In the collection of

13

There are occasions when the evidence from Philodemus, in particular, is valuable for reading Paul, e.g., Clarence E. Glad, Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychagogy, NovTSup 81 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 14 Johan C. Thom, The Pythagorean Golden Verses: With Introduction and Commentary, RGRW 123 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 15 See Holger Thesleff, An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1961); Holger Thesleff, The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1965); and Alfons Städele, Die Brief des Pythagoras und der Pythagoreer, Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 115 (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1980). 16 Abraham J. Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition, SBLSBS 12 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977). There are authors who may be called Cynic, but the identification is arguable, e.g., Dio Chrysostom. 17 Cicero, Leg. 1.6.18. 18 On Panaetius, Antiochus, and Cicero see the summary statement of David M. Sedley, “The School from Zeno to Arius Didymus,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7–32, esp. 22–23. 19 Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta. 20 Anthony A. Long, “Philo on Stoic Physics,” in Philo of Alexandria and PostAristotelian Philosophy, ed. Francesca Alesse, SPhAMA 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 121–40.

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fragments of Hellenistic philosophers that he and David Sedley compiled, they only used Philo 10 times for the Stoics.21 All of this is a way of saying that caution is always in order when working with Hellenistic philosophical materials. Wright works as a New Testament scholar whose expertise is in the New Testament rather than in Hellenistic philosophy. His comments reflect those of a well read New Testament scholar, but not those of a specialist in Hellenistic philosophy – a claim that he does not make for himself. 2.2 Wright’s Introduction to the Subfields of Hellenistic Philosophy Wright needed to find a way to structure Hellenistic philosophy that would allow him to deal with it meaningfully and fairly. He elected to use the distinction that the Stoa popularized for the subfields of philosophy: physics, ethics, and logic (PFG 198).22 According to Plutarch, Chrysippus thought that the order should be logic, ethics, and physics: “First, I think that in keeping with the things said correctly by the ancients, that there are three types of a philosopher’s fields of thought: the logical, the ethical, and physics.” He continued: “of these it is necessary that the logical be placed first, the ethical second, and physics third; the last of physics is the account of the gods.”23 The division became a commonplace,24 although the order varied.25 Philo of Alexandria knew the sequence of logic, ethics, and physics,26 as well as the order of physics, ethics, and logic.27 Alcinous treated logic, physics, and then ethics.28 The order was apparently not fixed.

21

Anthony A. Long and David M. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 46M, 46P, 46R, 47P, 47Q, 52A, and 53P, all deal with Stoic physics; 28P, 59H, and 67H, deal with other issues. 22 For a treatment of the division in the ancient world see Augustinus C. J. Habets, “Geschiedenis van de indeling van de filosofie in de oudheid” (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 1983). I have not seen this dissertation. The tripartite division was often attributed to Plato, e.g., Cicero, Acad. 1.19; Diogenes Laertius 3.56. 23 Plutarch, Stoic. rep. 1035A. See also Aëtius, Plac. Proem. 1.2 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.35); Sextus Empiricus, Math. 7.16 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.38); 7.22 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.44); Diogenes Laertius 7.39 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.37); 7.40 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.38). 24 It was accepted by Antiochus of Ascalon (in Cicero, Acad. 1.19) and Eudorus (in Seneca, Ep. 89.9–17). 25 According to Sextus Empiricus, Math. 7.22–23 and Diogenes Laertius 7.39–40, both Chrysippus and Zeno are credited with the order: logic, physics, and ethics. 26 Philo, Leg. 1.57; Ebr. 202; Spec. 1.336. 27 Philo, Agr. 14–16; Mut. 74–76. 28 Alcinous, Didaskalikos 154, 10–160, 40 (chs. 4–6), logic; 161, 1–179, 34 (chs. 7–26), physics; and 179, 35–189, 11 (chs. 27–34), ethics.

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Wright correctly recognized that we should not think of Paul as a professional philosopher but could compare him to philosophy more broadly understood. He wrote: In Paul’s day, however, ‘philosophy’ covered the sort of things that a reasonably well educated person might expect to discuss over a meal with friends, or in a letter. There were technical terms and various developed ideas, but ‘philosophy’ in general was a much more street-level activity than it would be for us. (PFG 204)

There is truth in this, but it hides a significant discussion that should at least be mentioned. Can we speak of popular philosophy? It is a debated concept.29 There are a number of issues, including the impact of the destruction or partial destruction of the schools in Athens by Sulla in 86 BCE,30 the eclectic nature of a great deal of Hellenistic philosophy,31 the extent to which one can speak of philosophy without an identifiable connection to a school or a αἱρέσεις,32 the distinction between technical philosophical thought and its use in other contexts, and the category of “professional philosopher.” Wright was wise to sidestep this debate, but he should have flagged it since it addresses the appropriation of philosophy by Paul. 2.3 Wright’s Overview of the Major Schools of Hellenistic Philosophy The second part of ch. 3 is the survey proper. In general it is a reliable survey of the basic concerns of Hellenistic philosophy beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (PFG 207–11). Wright then covers the Epicureans (PFG 211–13) and Stoics (PFG 213–29), the Cynics (PFG 229–30) and Sceptics (PFG 230–32). He concludes with a summary of the major concerns of Hellenistic philosophy (PFG 232–37) and a note about the school (PFG 237–38). It would be easy to find fault with any survey of Hellenistic philosophy that was constrained by the space limits of this overview. There are two areas that I would like to explore. First, the Hellenistic schools formulated different goals that can be quite revealing. Wright might have found these to be a shorthand way to convey some of the basic qualities of each school. These are particularly important in the context of theology. The Stoics argued that 29 The most important recent treatment of this is Johan C. Thom, “Paul and Popular Philosophy,” in Paul’s Greco-Roman Context, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach, BETL 277 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). I read this in manuscript form but have not yet seen the printed form. 30 On the importance of the sack of Athens for Hellenistic philosophy, see Sedley, “The School from Zeno to Arius Didymus,” 7–32, esp. 24–32. 31 On the eclectic nature of Hellenistic philosophy see John M. Dillon and Anthony A. Long, eds., The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, HCS 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 32 A case can be made that we should think of the Hellenistic schools as αἱρέσεις since it is the term that they used. See David T. Runia, “Philo of Alexandria and the Greek Hairesis Model,” VC 53 (1999): 117–47.

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an individual should live “according to nature” (κατὰ φύσιν), understanding nature in panentheistic terms.33 Middle Platonists picked up a phrase from Plato’s Theaetetus and made “likeness to god” (ὁµοίωσις θεῷ) the ultimate aim.34 Neopythagoreans had a similar although different formulation; they made the tag “follow God” (ἕπου θεῷ) their goal.35 Epicureans made “pleasure” (ἡδονή) the ultimate aim, although it was pleasure in the sense of freedom from disturbance – as Wright pointed out.36 In this way the Epicureans made the goal likeness to the gods who were unperturbed. The point is that the Stoics, Middle Platonists, Neopythagoreans, and Epicureans all made life in harmony with god(s) the basic goal of their systems. There was a common ground between Paul and the Hellenistic philosophical systems that should not be missed. It is why Hellenistic philosophers have a degree of piety that is sometimes surprising to moderns. The second and more serious concern is that Wright omitted a sketch of the later Platonic tradition. I am not sure why. There is no coverage of the turn generated by Antiochus of Ascalon and Eudorus of Alexandria. The former rejected the skepticism of the New Academy and turned back to the Old Academy, although he incorporated Aristotle and the Peripatetics into the tradition and subsumed Stoicism as a legitimate development within the larger Platonic tradition.37 The later Alexandrian did not accept Antiochus’s reconstruction of the Platonic tradition, but subordinated Pythagorean thought within the Platonic framework. The most important result was that he elevated the First Principle (often called God in texts) to a transcendent level and posited an intermediary or Second Principle (called many things such as the 33

The Stoics had different formulations. Arius Didymus 5b3, put it this way: “The goal of all these virtues is to live in conformity with nature (τὸ ἀκολούθως τῇ φύσει ζῆν).” Arius later said that Cleanthes was the first to make this specific formulation: “the goal is to live in agreement with nature (τέλος ἐστὶ τὸ ὁµολογουµένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν)” (6a). For other accounts see Diogenes Laertius 7.87–89; and Stobaeus 2.77.16–27 (Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 3.16) and 2.75.11–76.8. 34 See Plato, Theaet. 167B. Eudorus is credited with the adoption of the language as the goal for Middle Platonism. See John M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 122–23. Philo of Alexandria knew this, Fug. 63, 82. Alcinous, Didaskalikos 181, 19–182, 14 (ch. 28.1–4), devoted an entire chapter to it. Cf. also ch. 2.2. 35 This was formulated in various ways. Plutarch, Superst. 169b, reported that Pythgoras said “that we are at our best when we approach the gods (πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς βαδίζοντες).” Iamblichus, Vit. pyth. 86 and 137, wrote that “their entire way of life is arranged to follow god (πρὸς τὸ ἀκολουθεῖν τῷ θεῷ).” Cf. also The Golden Verses 46, for a variant formulation. 36 Epicurus in Diogenes Laertius 10.127–32; Cicero, Fin. 1.29–30. 37 A pivotal work in the assessment of Antiochus is John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, Hypomnemata 60 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978). On Antiochus thought see David M. Sedley, ed., The Philosophy of Antiochus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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Logos).38 They helped to initiate a movement that we call Middle Platonism.39 This system of thought was critical for some ancient Jews and some early Christians. 2.4 Wright’s Analysis of Jewish Responses to Pagan Philosophy This leads us to the final point that Wright made. Long before Paul, Jews began dealing with Hellenistic philosophy.40 Wright recognizes the importance of considering this engagement. He elected to use the Wisdom of Solomon as a test case. His comments on Wisdom are solid with one jarring exception: He does not address the place of Platonism in the work. He focused on the Stoic elements which are there but failed to recognize the Platonic character of some of the key components. There are two that are most striking. 41 First, Wisdom posited the immortality of the soul.42 In a paraphrase of Gen 1:27, the author wrote: “For God created humanity for incorruption (ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἔκτισεν τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπ᾽ ἀφθαρσίᾳ) and made us in the image of divine eternity (καὶ εἰκόνα τῆς ἰδίας ἀϊδιότητος ἐποίησεν αὐτόν)” (Wis 2:23). The nature of this incorruption or eternity is clarified by later statements. Wisdom has Solomon claim: “As a child I was gifted, a good soul fell to my lot; or 38

Mauro Bonazzi, “Towards Transcendence: Philo and the Renewal of Platonism in the Early Imperial Age,” in Philo of Alexandria and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy, ed. Francesca Alesse, SPhAMA 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 233–51 and Mauro Bonazzi, “Pythagoreanizing Aristotle: Eudorus and the systematization of Platonism,” in Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC, ed. Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 160–86, esp. 171–72. The key text is Simplicius, in Phys. 181.7– 30. 39 The most important treatment of Middle Platonism as a whole remains Dillon, The Middle Platonists. 40 For a sketch of this history see Gregory E. Sterling, “Philosophy as the Handmaid of Wisdom: Philosophy in the Exegetical Tradition of Alexandrian Jews,” in Religiöse Philosophie und philosophische Religion der frühen Kaiserzeit, ed. Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, Herwig Görgemanns, and Michael von Albricht, SAC 51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 67–98. Cf. also Gregory E. Sterling, “‘The Jewish Philosophy’: The Presence of Hellenistic Philosophy in Jewish Exegesis in the Second Temple Period,” in Ancient Judaism in its Hellenistic Context, ed. Carol Bakhos, Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series 95 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 131–53. 41 I have treated these and the Stoic elements in “The Love of Wisdom: Middle Platonism and Stoicism in the Wisdom of Solomon,” in From Stoicism to Platonism: The Development of Philosophy 100 BCE–100 CE, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (forthcoming). 42 Wright addressed these texts in an earlier publication, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003), 162–75, esp. 172. While he recognized the possibility of Platonic influence, he ultimately minimized it. It is noteworthy that he did not address the clear parallels in language between the Platonic texts and Wisdom of Solomon that we cite below.

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rather (µᾶλλον δέ), being good, I entered an undefiled body” (Wis 8:19). While the specifics of the text can be debated, the text assumes a body/soul dichotomy in which an eternal soul enters a physical body. In a further text, Wisdom wrote: “for a corruptible body weighs down the soul (φθαρτὸν γὰρ σῶµα βαρύνει ψυχήν) and this earthly tent creates a heavy load (βρίθει) for a mind full of cares” (Wis 9:15). The language is unmistakably Platonic. For example, Plato has Socrates describe the departure of a soul from the body of an evil person: It is necessary to believe that this [the corporeal state] is loaded down (ἐµβριθές), heavy (βαρύ), earthly and visible. Such a soul is loaded down (βαρύνεται) and dragged back into the visible sphere.43

The similarities between the statement in Wisdom and this Platonic text indicate that the author held to a Platonic anthropology, including the immortality of the soul. Second, Wisdom posited a Second Principle or intermediary principle between the Deity and the cosmos and humanity, i.e., Sophia.44 The text described Sophia in a famous poem that falls into halves: the first has twentyone characteristics of Sophia that are followed by Sophia’s functions,45 and the second has five statements that are again followed by Sophia’s functions.46 The final statement in the second half affirms that Sophia is “an image of his goodness.” The basis for this statement is Plato’s Timaeus where the Athenian said: “If these things hold then it is absolutely necessary for this cosmos to be an image of another (εἰκόνα τινός).”47 Plato made the statement to express the dependence of the sense-perceptible cosmos on the intelligible cosmos. It is quite likely that the author of Wisdom linked the εἰκών θεοῦ of Gen 1:27 with Plato’s εἰκόνα τινός to identify Sophia as God’s Image. The connection would have been attractive for any Platonizing exegete. Philo of Alexandria made this same association with the Logos.48 The move that both Wisdom and Philo made is in keeping with the practice of Middle Platonists who posited a Second Principle since the First Principle was transcendent. The point is that Wisdom used not only Stoic concepts but also Middle Platonic thought. It is important to remember this when thinking about Paul’s appropriation of philosophy.

43

Plato, Phaed. 81C. Cf. also Phaedr. 247B. For the sake of clarity, I will use Sophia to describe the hypostasis Wisdom and Wisdom to refer to the text. 45 Wis 7:22–24. 46 Wis 7:25–8:1. 47 Plato, Tim. 29E. 48 Philo, Opif. 25. 44

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3. Paul’s Response Wright sets out Paul’s response to Hellenistic philosophy in chapter fourteen. As we noted in our introduction, Wright is clear that Paul did not reject Hellenistic philosophy out of hand: “Has Paul then rejected all the wisdom, understanding and insight of the pagan world? Not at all” (PFG 1356). The question is how he reacted to it. Wright works through the material by considering the questions that Paul would pose and then by providing a critique of one major scholar’s work. I will offer some comments on each. 3.1 Paul’s Questions to the Philosophers Wright begins by asking how Paul might have reacted to the sketch that he has provided of Hellenistic philosophy. His perspective is Pauline. It is an intriguing perspective that enables us to think about philosophy in a different frame. Rather than working with potential parallels, Wright uses the method that Ed Sanders employed in Paul and Palestinian Judaism when he explored “patterns of religion.”49 The effect this has is to move the perspective out from a narrow consideration of a series of specific texts to a broad perspective that explores large questions. It also allows Wright to play to his own strengths as a specialist in Paul. There is, however, a downside to Wright’s use of the method. Wright has not adequately sketched Hellenistic philosophy so that we can understand the “patterns.” He has devoted a massive amount of attention to Paul, but not to the other half of the comparison. It is not helpful that Wright rarely cites a Hellenistic philosophical text in this section. In fact, of the eighty-one footnotes in this section, only five refer to philosophers.50 A reader needs to be aware that this is an exposition of Paul with a sketch of philosophy, but not a full comparison as Sanders executed. Wright begins by suggesting that Paul would have rejected the standard analysis of philosophy into its three subfields since this subordinated theology as a subcategory of physics (PFG 1360). He is undoubtedly correct; however, he might have pointed out that a number of philosophers shared this concern. For example, in the text we cited above from Chrysippus that outlined his understanding of the order of the three subfields, Plutarch went on to critique the “Second Founder of the Stoa” for violating his own order: But this teaching that he (Chrysippus) says must be put last, the teaching about the gods, he routinely puts first and makes it a preface to every ethical question.51

49 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 12–24. Wright followed Sanders by first sketching the nonPauline world and then the Pauline. 50 PFG 1365n36, 1376n78, 1376n79, 1379n86, 1383n99. 51 Plutarch, Stoic. rep. 1035B.

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There was a sense of piety that developed in Hellenistic philosophy that is different from Paul’s, but one that should be noted. The classic early expression of it is Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, but this hardly exhausts it.52 As we noted above, the Hellenistic philosophical schools made assimilation to god(s) a central concern – even though they understood assimilation in various ways.53 Wright is correct that there is a difference between Paul and the philosophers, but he does not adequately recognize one of the crucial developing similarities between the two. Wright turns to each of the three subfields of philosophy and asks how Paul would have reacted. He notes that Paul would have differed in epistemology by positing a break that was a result of human rebellion and by claiming that this could only be healed through the new dawn or new creation. Once the healing of humanity had occurred, it was possible to use the tools of philosophical discourse, e.g., diatribe (PFG 1362–67). The absence of a treatment of Middle Platonism becomes a problem when he deals with physics. He treats two texts in Paul that describe God’s work of creation through “his image bearing son”: 1 Cor 8:6 and Col 1:15–20.54 I think that Wright understands the thrust of the texts; however, he does not recognize the role of philosophy in the shaping of these texts. There are two ways in which philosophy played a role that Wright does not recognize. The first deals with prepositional metaphysics.55 As is well known, Aristotle distinguished among four causes (αἴτια): the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause.56 Hellenistic philosophical schools assigned prepositions to these causes, depending on their own metaphysics. Seneca recorded a summary of the debates in Ep. 65.57 The Stoics typically held that there are two principles: the active and the passive.58 Seneca wrote: “Therefore there must be that from which (unde) something is made, then that by which (a quo) something is made. The latter is the causa,

52

For an analysis see Johan C. Thom, Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus: Text, Translation, and Commentary, SAC 33 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). 53 It is worth remembering that pagan monotheism began to flourish in this period. See Polymnia Athanassiasdi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nuffelen, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 54 He dealt with these earlier in developing their Christology. See PFG 661–77. 55 I treated this in Gregory E. Sterling, “Prepositional Metaphysics in Jewish Wisdom Speculation and Early Christian Liturgical Texts,” SPhiloA 9 (1997): 219–38. 56 Aristotle, Phys. 2.3 (194b-195a); 2.7 (198a); Metaph. 1.3.1 (933a-b); 5.2.1–3 (1013ab); Apo. 2.11 (94a). 57 On this letter see Giuseppe Scarpat, La Lettera 65 di Seneca, 2nd ed., Antichità classica e critiana 7 (Brescia: Paideia, 1970). 58 Seneca, Ep. 65.2. See also Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, 2.300–4.

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the former is the materia.”59 Seneca and the Stoics understood the cause to be God. While Seneca did not apply the concept to prepositions apart from the sketch above, later Stoics did. For example, Marcus Aurelius wrote: “All things are from you (ἐκ σοῦ), all things are in you (ἐν σοί), and all things are for you (εἰς σέ).”60 Similarly, Aelius Aristides addressed Sarapis in these words: “For all things everywhere are through you (διὰ σοῦ) and have become for us on account of you (διὰ σέ).”61 For the Stoics there was, in the final analysis, a single cause and all prepositions could be used with respect to that cause, a point that does not negate recognizing the secondary role of other causes. More importantly, Seneca sketched the Platonic tradition’s application of the prepositions to their metaphysical system. He outlined a cosmology: God is the agent or the a quo, matter is the material or the ex quo, the shape of the world is the formal or the in quo, the pattern (exemplar) is the idea or ad quod, and the goodness of the Creator is the final or propter quod.62 Seneca’s addition of a fifth cause reflects the type of speculation that took place in Middle Platonism. Philo of Alexandria preserved one of the classic statements of the Platonic position applied to the cosmos: The cause (αἴτιον) is God, by whom (ὑφ᾽ οὗ) it came into existence, its material is the four elements out of which (ἐξ ὧν) it has been composed, its instrument (ὄργανον) is the Logos of God (λόγος θεοῦ) through whom (δι᾽ οὗ) it was constructed, the purpose (αίτία) of its construction is the goodness of the Demiurge.63

The most important development in this schema is the incorporation of the instrumental cause (δι᾽ οὗ). This is critical because the elevated texts in the New Testament – including the two under consideration – routinely use the instrumental cause to set out the function of Christ. This is true for John 1:3, 10; 1 Cor 8:6b; Col 1:15–20; and Heb 1:2. First Corinthians 8:6 is one of the more complicated of these texts.64 In my judgment the first half uses Stoic categories to refer to the Father, while the second half uses Middle Platonic categories to refer to the Son. The hymn in Col 1:15–20 is more straightfor59

Seneca, Ep. 65.2. Marcus Aurelius 4.23. 61 Aelius Aristides, Orat. 45.14. 62 Seneca, Ep. 65.7–10, esp. 8. 63 Philo, Cher. 124–27. Cf. also QG 1.58. 64 Wright dealt with the text more extensively in The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 120–36. In this text he cites the work of Richard A. Horsley, “The Background of the Confessional Formula in 1 Kor 8 6,” ZNW 69 (1978): 130–35 and Richard A. Horsley, “Gnosis in Corinth: 1 Corinthians 8.1–6,” NTS 27 (1980): 32–51, who argued for a Hellenistic Jewish background for the intermediary role of Christ. Wright accepted this, but qualified it by arguing that 1 Cor 8:6 is a retelling of the Shema. I am not taking issue with this but want to point out that prepositional metaphysics play a role in these texts that has been overlooked. 60

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wardly Middle Platonic, using δι᾽ οὗ and two other prepositional phrases: ἐν αὐτῷ and εἰς αὐτόν.65 Philo used the dative as an instrumental in parallel to δι᾽ οὗ66 but did not use εἰς ὅ in the same way that the hymn in Colossians did. It may be that the early Christians who composed these texts did so creatively since they worked without the constraints of a strict philosophical system. What is most important is that they consistently used the instrumental cause (δι᾽ οὗ) in the same way that Middle Platonists did to mark out the role of the agent in creation. It may well be that early Christians were influenced by Jewish speculations on Wisdom or the Logos, but applied these to Christ. The content of this conclusion is the same as Wright’s but indicates how philosophical thought might have influenced the development of Christology.67 There is a second way. Prior to Paul, Jewish interpreters like Philo of Alexandria interpreted the image of God to be the Logos.68 In his interpretation of “day one” in Gen 1:1–5, Philo suggested that day one referred to the creation of the intelligible world that God used for the creation of the senseperceptible world on days two through six. God first thought the “ideas” and then fashioned the physical cosmos. He used the image of an architect to illustrate the concept. “If someone wanted to use clearer words he would say that the intelligible cosmos is nothing other than the Logos of God in the act of creating the cosmos.”69 He explained with the architectural metaphor: For the intelligible city is nothing other than the reasoning capacity of the architect who is in the process of thinking through the founding of the intelligible city.70

In case someone thought that this was more eisegesis than exegesis, Philo continued: This teaching comes from Moses; it is not mine. For as he describes the creation of the human being, he expressly acknowledges in the following statements that he was cast in the image of God (κατ᾽ εἰκόνα θεοῦ).71

65

Wright has treated this text in numerous publications, including Climax of the Covenant, 99–119. Wright recognizes the place of Jewish wisdom speculation but does not take into account the specific use of prepositional metaphysics or the way in which the Image of God plays out in the elevated Christological texts in the NT. The use of the prepositions and the use of “image” are more Platonizing than he acknowledges. 66 Philo, Sacr. 8. See also Deus 57; Fug. 12, 95; Somn. 2.45. 67 For a more extensive treatment of 1 Cor 8:6 in this tradition, see Ronald Cox, By the Same Word: Creation and Salvation in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, BZNW 145 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 141–61. 68 For details see Gregory E. Sterling, “‘The Image of God’: Becoming Like God in Philo, Paul, and Early Christianity,” in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology, ed. Susan E. Myers, WUNT II 321 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 157–73. 69 Philo, Opif. 24. 70 Philo, Opif. 24. 71 Philo, Opif. 25.

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The Logos is God’s Image in whom the ideas reside.72 This also means that humans are created in the image of God’s Image, the Logos. The Logos is not only the agent of creation, but the means by which humans come to understand God. It is striking that the hymn in Colossians makes the same points, only identifies the Image with Jesus Christ rather than the Logos.73 The connection between cosmology and soteriology thus took place prior to Paul among Jewish interpreters who were influenced by Hellenistic philosophy. The third subfield that Wright explores is ethics. He recognizes that this is the area where the greatest overlap exists. Yet he also recognizes a fundamental difference. In one of the most impressive statements in his treatment of philosophy he wrote: They [Hellenistic philosophers] believed that once one had discovered and understood (‘logic’) what the world was, how it worked and what human beings actually were (‘physics’), it was the task of humans to live in accordance with that, rather than against its grain (‘ethics’). (PFG 1371)

By way of contrast, Paul believed that the world had been renewed in the Messiah; that those who were themselves ‘in the Messiah’ had also been renewed as image-bearing human beings; and that the task of such people was to live in accordance with the new world, rather than against its grain. (PFG 1371)

The common ground came when there was overlap between what Hellenistic philosophers recognized as the best of humanity and the renewed humanity as Paul understood it. As Wright put it, [Paul] has not derived his moral framework from the surrounding philosophies, but he is happy to recognize that at many points the Christian is called to walk the path of genuine humanness that others have sketched before–and perhaps to do so more effectively. (PFG 1377)

Wright does not recognize one of the key places where the overlap is the strongest in my judgment. He argues that the Gentiles in Rom 2:12–16 and 2:25–29 are Gentile Christians, a position that goes back to Augustine and is held by a number of interpreters today (PFG 1379–81).74 The problems with 72 Philo identified the Logos with God’s Image seven times: Opif. 25; Leg. 3.96; Her. 231; Spec. 1.81; 3.83, 207; QG 2.62. 73 For a detailed treatment see Cox, By the Same Word, 161–193. 74 This view is at least as old as Augustine, C. Jul. 4.3.25. Others who hold it include C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 1:155–56 and Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 212–13. Wright has dealt with this at length in “Romans 2.17–3.9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans?” [2012], in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 489–509 and “The Law in Romans 2” [1996], in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 134–51, esp. 137–39. The most important argument that Wright makes is that the contrast between

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this position in my judgment are that the condemnation of all in Rom 1:18– 3:20 requires that these are Gentiles (there is no indication in the text that they are Christians) and the argument of Rom 2 is intended to undermine Jewish arguments of entitlement by pointing to Gentiles who live by Jewish principles.75 This is simply a case where New Testament scholars disagree on a difficult text. 3.2 Paul and the Stoics in Recent Study The last section is largely a critique of the work of Troels EngbergPedersen.76 Wright has selected the work of Engberg-Pedersen for at least two reasons. First, Wright has privileged Stoicism in his discussion; it would be hard to ignore the work of the scholar who has promoted the comparisons between Paul and Stoicism more than any other scholar in recent decades. Second, Engberg-Pedersen is a significant scholar who deserves to be taken seriously. Wright’s critique involves a number of areas: the use of terms, exegesis, the individual character of Stoic philosophy versus the community approach of Paul, the failure to take the text of the LXX (or Hebrew text) into account in key exegetical issues, the distinction between the Stoic understanding of the repeated nature of the ἐκπύρωσις versus Paul’s single eschatological event, and Stoic pantheism versus Pauline creational monotheism. On these counts, Wright is more right than Engberg-Pedersen. I do not say this to discourage someone from reading Engberg-Pedersen; he deserves to be read. I do think that Wright’s eschatological creational monotheism is a more accurate reading of Paul than Engberg-Pedersen’s Stoicized Paul. The great weakness is that Wright has overlooked at least three major efforts to explore Paul’s relationship to Hellenistic philosophy. The first is the Corpus Hellenisticum project. While the project has had ups and downs, there are enough publications that it should not be set aside.77 The second is the “letter” and “spirit” (γράµµα vs. πνεῦµα) is the contrast Paul routinely draws between Jew and Christian (Rom 7:6; 2 Cor 3:6; cf. also Phil 3:3). He is quite correct about these texts; however, the point in Rom 2:28–29 is that the Gentile who is circumcised with the circumcision of the heart is different than a Jew living with the letter. This does not require that the Gentile be a Christian, a point that would undermine the strength of Paul’s argument since it would reduce it to a Jew versus Christian contrast rather than a Jew versus Gentile contrast. 75 I have developed this in Gregory E. Sterling, “‘A Law to Themselves’: Limited Universalism in Philo and Paul,” ZNW (forthcoming). 76 In particular Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000) and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 77 For a history up to the 1990s see Pieter van der Horst, “Corpus Hellenisticum,” ABD 1:1157–61.

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work of Abraham J. Malherbe and his students, especially through the Hellenistic Moral Philosophy and Early Christianity program unit in the Society of Biblical Literature.78 Wright acknowledges Malherbe, but only in a footnote. Malherbe’s work deserves more treatment.79 The third is the work of many who have compared the exegetical treatments preserved in Philo of Alexandria and in Paul. Recent work does not make the claim that Paul knew Philo’s treatises – there is no solid evidence for this – but that the exegetical traditions preserved in Philo circulated in Jewish synagogues and were used by Paul in his letters.80 In fairness to Wright, he was not trying to offer a comprehensive treatment, only a select treatment of the authors who were most relevant to his own perspective.

4. Conclusions Was philosophy wisdom or foolishness for Paul? One of the great accomplishments of Wright’s work is to recognize the importance of taking philosophy seriously in the study of Paul. I applaud his decision to give it the due that he has. His work is a healthy corrective to many in this regard. The strength of his analysis lies more on the side of Paul than on the side of Hellenistic philosophy. I do not mean that he knows one but not the other, but that his control of one is better than his control of the other. To his credit, he recognizes this and writes from a Pauline perspective. This is evident in the way that he sets up his survey of Hellenistic philosophy and the way that he approaches Paul’s response to it. I found the reading of ch. 14 to be provocative and rewarding. It was fascinating to think about how Paul would have reacted to Hellenistic philosophy from within the framework of Paul’s own thought. This was Wright at his best.

78

For a brief summary of Wettstein, the Corpus Hellenisticum project, and Malherbe’s work see Gregory E. Sterling, “Hellenistic Philosophy and the New Testament,” in Handbook to Exegesis of the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter, NTTS 25 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 313–58, esp. 315–17. 79 There is now a convenient collection of his essays: Carl R. Holladay et al., eds., Light from the Gentiles: Hellenistic Philosophy and Early Christianity: Collected Essays, 1959– 2012, by Abraham J. Malherbe, 2 vols., NovTSup 150 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 80 These studies are scattered in many places. The best access is through the standard bibliographies on Philo. See the indices in Roberto Radice and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1937–1986, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1987–1996, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 57 (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1997–2006, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 109 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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Wright should have recognized the contributions of Jewish exegetical traditions that made use of Middle Platonism, especially Jewish authors who incorporated it in their exegesis. This, in my judgment – as one who has spent years studying Philo – is a real limitation. At the same time, I also understand that Wright stands in good company with many New Testament scholars who have ignored this tradition. Was philosophy foolishness or wisdom for Paul? Wright has offered a nuanced answer that suggests that it was wisdom when it was understood within Paul’s own frame of reference rather than the frame of reference of the philosophers; otherwise it was foolishness. My own view is that there was more philosophy in Paul than either Paul or Wright would readily acknowledge.

Bibliography Arnim, Ioannes von. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta. 4 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–1924. Athanassiasdi, Polymnia, and Michael Frede, eds. Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bonazzi, Mauro. “Towards Transcendence: Philo and the Renewal of Platonism in the Early Imperial Age.” Pages 233–51 in Philo of Alexandria and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy. Edited by Francesca Alesse. SPhAMA 5. Leiden: Brill, 2008. –. “Pythagoreanizing Aristotle: Eudorus and the Systematization of Platonism.” Pages 160–86 in Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC. Edited by Malcolm Schofield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cox, Ronald. By the Same Word: Creation and Salvation in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity. BZNW 145. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007. Cranfield, C. E. B. The Epistle to the Romans. 2 vols. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975. Dillon, John M. Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. –. The Middle Platonists, 80 B.C. to A.D. 220. Rev. ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Dillon, John M., and Anthony A. Long, eds. The Question of “Eclecticism”: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy. HCS 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Paul and the Stoics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000. –. Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Freedman, David N. Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Gigante, Marcello. Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum. Translated by Dirk Obbink. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Glad, Clarence E. Paul and Philodemus: Adaptability in Epicurean and Early Christian Psychagogy. NovTSup 81. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Glucker, John. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Hypomnemata 60. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Habets, Augustinus C. J. “Geschiedenis van de indeling van de filosofie in de oudheid.” PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 1983.

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Holladay, Carl R., John T. Fitzgerald, Gregory E. Sterling, and James W. Thompson, eds. Light from the Gentiles: Hellenistic Philosophy and Early Christianity: Collected Essays, 1959–2012, by Abraham J. Malherbe. 2 vols. NovTSup 150. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Horsley, Richard A. “The Background of the Confessional Formula in 1 Kor 8 6.” ZNW 69 (1978): 130–35. –. “Gnosis in Corinth: 1 Corinthians 8.1–6.” NTS 27 (1980): 32–51. Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007. Long, Anthony A. “Philo on Stoic Physics.” Pages 121–40 in Philo of Alexandria and Post-Aristotelian Philosophy. Edited by Francesca Alesse. SPhAMA 5. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Long, Anthony A. and David M. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Malherbe, Abraham J. The Cynic Epistles: A Study Edition. SBLSBS 12. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977. Mazzarelli, Claudio. “Raccolta e interpretazione delle testimonianze e dei frammenti del medioplatonico Eudoro di Alessandria.” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 77 (1985): 197–209, 535–55. Mette, Hans J. “Philon von Larisa und Antiochus von Askalon.” Lustrum 28–29 (1986– 1987): 9–63. Mitchell, Stephen and Peter van Nuffelen, eds. One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Radice, Roberto, and David T. Runia. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1937–1986. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 8. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Runia, David T. “Philo of Alexandria and the Greek Hairesis Model.” VC 53 (1999): 117– 47. –. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1987–1996. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 57. Leiden: Brill, 2000. –. Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1997–2006. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 109. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Scarpat, Giuseppe. La Lettera 65 di Seneca. 2nd ed. Antichità classica e critiana 7. Brescia: Paideia, 1970. Schnelle, Udo. Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology. Translated by M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. Sedley, David M., ed. The Philosophy of Antiochus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. –. “The School from Zeno to Arius Didymus,” Pages 7–32 in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. Edited by Brad Inwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Smith, Martin F. The Epicurean Inscription. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992. Städele, Alfons. Die Brief des Pythagoras und der Pythagoreer. Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 115. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1980. Sterling, Gregory E. “‘A Law to Themselves’: Limited Universalism in Philo and Paul.” ZNW (forthcoming). –. “Hellenistic Philosophy and the New Testament.” Pages 313–58 in Handbook to Exegesis of the New Testament. Edited by Stanley E. Porter. NTTS 25. Leiden: Brill, 1997. –. “Philosophy as the Handmaid of Wisdom: Philosophy in the Exegetical Tradition of Alexandrian Jews.” Pages 67–98 in Religiöse Philosophie und philosophische Religion

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der frühen Kaiserzeit. Edited by Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, Herwig Görgemanns, and Michael von Albrecht. SAC 51. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. –. “Prepositional Metaphysics in Jewish Wisdom Speculation and Early Christian Liturgical Texts.” SPhiloA 9 (1997): 219–38. –. “‘The Image of God’: Becoming Like God in Philo, Paul, and Early Christianity.” Pages 157–73 in Portraits of Jesus: Studies in Christology. Edited by Susan E. Myers. WUNT II 321. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. –. “‘The Jewish Philosophy’: The Presence of Hellenistic Philosophy in Jewish Exegesis in the Second Temple Period.” Pages 131–53 in Ancient Judaism in its Hellenistic Context. Edited by Carol Bakhos. Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplement Series 95. Leiden: Brill, 2005. –. “The Love of Wisdom: Middle Platonism and Stoicism in the Wisdom of Solomon,” in From Stoicism to Platonism: The Development of Philosophy 100 BCE–100 CE. Edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Forthcoming. Thesleff, Holger. An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1961. –. The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1965. Thom, Johan C. Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. SAC 33. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. –. “Paul and Popular Philosophy.” In Paul’s Greco-Roman Context. Edited by Cilliers Breytenbach. BETL 277. Leuven: Peeters, 2015. –. The Pythagorean Golden Verses: With Introduction and Commentary. RGRW 123. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Wright, N. T. “The Law in Romans 2” [1996]. Pages 134–51 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013 –. “Romans 2.17–3.9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans?” [2012]. Pages 489–509 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003.

“A World of Shrines and Groves” N. T. Wright and Paul among the Gods James Constantine Hanges For N. T. Wright, no historical reconstruction does the apostle Paul justice that fails to situate him adequately within the complexities of his world, a world which Wright believes he understands better with the help of social scientists, especially Clifford Geertz. Wright must situate Paul within the “webs of significance” that bind the human and divine worlds (PFG 24–30).1 Wright’s devotion of two major sections of this magnum opus to Paul’s religious world requires this anthology, focused largely on his theological project, to include a chapter pondering Wright’s description of the intersection of the historically reconstructed apostle and the matrix of his world’s cultic forms.2 What follows is devoted to that endeavor. The fundamental problem with the cultic contextualization of Paul, as Wright sees it, is that New Testament, and particularly Pauline, scholarship approaches this task with serious theoretical and methodological handicaps.

1. The Present Focus Specifically, I want to respond to Wright’s contextualization of Paul within the “world of shrines and groves, of priests, processions, garlands and music, omens, oracles” (PFG 246) presented primarily in ch. 4. Along the way, I will pose some questions about his understanding of the role of Roman religion in the Greek east, answering them with the suggestion that the complex cultural realities “on the ground” may not be so easily comprehended by employing “Roman religion,” “empire,” or even Roman “religiones” as analytical categories as Wright claims.3 Justice for Paul requires wrestling with a greater, not lesser, degree of complexity. 1

For Wright’s use of Geertz’s “thick description,” see PFG 25, 29. Ch. 4, “A Cock for Asclepius: ‘Religion’ and ‘Culture’ in Paul’s World,” PFG 246– 78, and ch. 13, “A Different Sacrifice: Paul and ‘Religion,’” PFG 1320–53. 3 On his discussion of Roman cultic forms (religiones), more in due course. “Thick Description,” as Geertz carries it out, is not framed by grand categories like “empire” or even 2

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2. Categories and Contextualization 2.1 Defining “Religion” Henceforth, scholars will find it impossible to ignore Wright’s manifesto calling for deeper cultural contextualization of Paul. He makes his case after voicing two major concerns: first, following E. A. Judge, Wright demands that scholars of Christian origins address the problems associated with our use of the term “religion” (PFG 249–50); second, Wright reminds us that Paul’s reality, especially the reality we label “religious,” was not only an inextricably entangled matrix of cultic forms, but also one pervading and pervaded by forms moderns separate into categories like “political” or “economic.” Citing Cicero, Wright argues: What one did in relation to the gods, not just in worshipping them in some private way but in the proper public ordering of worship, sacrifice, prayer and so forth, was a central expression of the larger life of the community … That was what religiones, the various forms of religio were all about. All was done, as far as Cicero was concerned in this passage and elsewhere, in relation to ‘a political community or body of citizens, one that included both humans and gods’. The whole point was to maintain and enhance the pax deorum. (PFG 253)

Wright goes further, What we can call, loosely and heuristically, the ‘religion’ of Paul’s world was not set apart from the rest of ancient culture … with every part of the body politic related to that heart by active and throbbing blood vessels. If the world was full of gods, the world was also therefore full of religion, full of cult; full of a god-soaked culture. (PFG 254)

Wright states as obvious the realization that Paul could not have been totally immune to the influence of such intertwined cultural complexity. “Whether we like it or not (clearly some do not) it remains the case that there are several elements of early Christian practice which at least overlap with this entire world of ancient ‘religion’” (PFG 251). Yet, in the midst of all this knottiness, Wright singles out Roman religio-political imperialism as the panpermeating, primary shaper of Paul’s cultic world, essentially isolating it as the hermeneutical key that entails the divine imperialism of the conquering Roman gods, the divinized emperors, and the cults that serve them. Undoubtedly, the power of Rome and its gods unquestionably weighed heavily on Paul’s mind. Our present questions are, however, in what forms, in what relations, and to what degree? Regarding Wright’s first major point (the problematic nature of the category, “religion,” PFG 248–52), most scholars would applaud his charge that we not project our understanding of “religion” and all that goes with it into “Roman,” but by minute local details of remote village cockfights, e.g., “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” Daedelus 134 (2005): 56–86.

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Paul’s world.4 Wright criticizes E. P. Sanders’s use of “patterns of religion” because it refers to an “entire system,” a generalization like Christianity or Judaism, and because Sanders includes “within ‘religion’ all sorts of things which in the ancient world would have been seen as part of ‘philosophy’ or even ‘theology’” (PFG 1321–22). But can Wright avoid self-contradiction when he argues for an ancient “sphere of activity, right across the ancient world, which implied and symbolized a tangled network of beliefs, traditions, expectations and (not least) a sense of civic identity and security, [something] not set apart from the rest of ancient culture … its beating heart,” and then claims that the ancients would have excluded something of “religion” from taxa like philosophy or theology (PFG 250, 254)? Wright illustrates the difference between our word “religion” and the ancient term “religio,” by again citing Cicero: Clearly, for him, religio meant ‘religious observance’; one kind of ‘religion’ in this sense was traditional ritual, another kind of ‘religion’ was inspecting auspices, and yet another kind of ‘religion’ was interpreting prophetic oracles or special one-off signs. These were all 5 ‘obligations’, religiones, things which ‘bound’ humans and gods together. (PFG 252–53)

True enough. What we call religion is unquestionably a generalizing abstraction, while Cicero refers to a range of various practices, specific obligations to the gods – what we might otherwise call separate cults. Wright makes an excellent point to which we shall return momentarily; first, a caveat. Cicero, like everyone in his world, would have assumed that religion as practice is inextricable from geography. Scholars of the ancient world know full well that the ancients associated certain kinds of practices with specific locations and the ἔϑνη that live there. The very structure of the πολείς embodied this assumption. The ports of every πόλις were home to αἱ γειτονίαι ἐθνικαὶ and their cults – a clear and present danger.6

4

See PFG 1320–53. This is followed by the statements in the first quotation from Cicero. 6 The basic starting point for Athens, as but one example, remains Arthur Milchhoefer’s original contribution, “Schriftquellen zur Topographie von Athen,” to Ernst Curtius, Die Stadtgeschichte von Athen, with map sheets by J. A. Kaupert (Berlin: Weidmann, 1891), i– cxxiv; a copy of Milchhoefer’s “Schriftquellen,” with the original page numbers is reprinted with an English preface, select bibliography, and indices in Alkibiades N. Oikonomides, Ancient Athens, Piraeus and Phaleron: Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia on Their Topography, Cults, Monuments, and Ekistic History (Chicago: Ares Publications, 1977), following 32. For specific groups in the Piraeus, see: Sterling Dow, “The Egyptian Cults in Athens,” HTR 30 (1937): 183–232; William Scott Ferguson, “The Attic Orgeones,” HTR 37 (1944): 62–134. 5

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2.2 Importing Other Categories On a related problematic aspect of the importation of alien analytical categories, Wright appropriately chides scholars whose theological lens simplistically imposes on the historical description of the ancient world the Reformation dichotomy of faith and works, or faith and ritual – a versatile opposition that sectarian apologists can deploy to criticize Roman Catholicism or the dominant religions of Antiquity.7 To quote Wright: Just as Pauline scholars have been gradually learning that the categories of sixteenthcentury polemic are likely to be unhelpful when discussing first-century texts, so scholars of ancient religion, from whatever perspective, may still need to learn that the categories of post-Enlightenment polemic between ‘dogma’ and ‘tolerance’ may not be an improvement, in the task of getting inside first-century dynamics. (PFG 248)

On this point, I take Wright to be echoing, intentionally or not, in principle Jonathan Z. Smith’s notorious critique of modern New Testament scholarship.8 Curiously, however, Wright employs a diagnostic category that, in my opinion, prejudices his comparison of the early Jesus communities with other cults no less than the use of either reformationist dichotomies or heuristic categories like religion. Despite some qualification, Wright notes with approval, the common textbook comparative prolegomenon that “the ancient Greeks and Romans had no equivalent of ‘holy scriptures’, no priestly caste, no ‘articles of religion’, no dogmas to be enforced upon the faithful.” Nevertheless, can we accept this proposition uncritically? I find any absolute interpretation of the notion that Greeks, for instance, had nothing analogous to the Jewish “scriptures” a clear overstatement, potentially as obscurantist as the term “religion.”9 Accepting that the Greeks have no single normative text containing the whole of a shared narrative, the absolute claim that Greeks have no analogy to “scripture” suffers from two basic problems. First, given what he says previously, Wright’s continuing comments appear to rest on a tendentious category definition. To claim, on the one hand, that “pagan” religions lack 7 “Matters have not been helped,” he writes, “over many generations of modern scholarship, by the loose assumptions made by some Christians that they could lump together all Greco-Roman religion as ‘paganism’, characterized by ‘ritual’ rather than genuine faith”(PFG 247, cf. also 248). 8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, JLCR 14, CSHJ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 9 On the difficulties in comparing religious phenomena, see the essays in Thomas Athanasius Idinopulos, Brian C. Wilson, and James Constantine Hanges, eds., Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils?, Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions 113 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

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anything analogous to the Jewish scriptures or Christian dogma, and then describe, on the other hand, Greco-Roman cultic behaviors as “natural and normal” is self-contradictory (PFG 246). Functionally, should we agree that only written, codified propositions are capable of maintaining normativity? Do not the histories of religions show that unwritten cultic norms – concepts so deeply embedded in behavior that community members rarely question them – foster normativity just as rigorously as written δόγµατα. Does Wright really mean to argue that the vast body of oral traditions, the establishment of socialized cultic norms reinforced by multiple written sources, the reflective and critical analyses of these traditions by the philosophical schools, the constant dramatization of these traditions in the theater (a medium for which Jews indisputably had no analogy), and the serious and systematic gymnasium education of young males in these media did not fulfill for the Greeks a function in similar to the function of scripture for Jews, i.e., the formation of a common narrative of human and divine interaction that defined their identity in the world? The second problem with Wright’s generalization is that, based on the epigraphical record, were a percentage even close to the majority of what I have elsewhere called “cult bylaws” to have survived, the cumulative body of written Hellenistic and Imperial Period leges sacrae would likely rival in sheer volume and detail the whole of, or anything contained in, the Hebrew scriptures.10 I am skeptical of the argument that because Jews eventually gathered a disparate and multiform group of texts into a recognized collection in the process of creating their communal identity, these “scriptures” and the people who use them are radically and qualitatively distinct from Greeks and Romans who did not. In other words, if one locates the diagnostic characteristic of “scripture” in its normative function among Jews and devotees of the Christ-cult, then the degree of difference between Jewish scripture and Greek cultic literature narrows significantly. Before I am accused of making a blanket equivalency here, if we view “scripture” in terms of its role in the solidification of group identity, Jewish self-awareness of the inestimable value of a consensus anthology serving this function certainly stands apart from the dominant pattern and reveals the significant distinction of the place held by written divine statements and national or ethnic narratives among Jews. That said, we must never lose sight of the fact that in Paul’s day a vast array of cultic literature was in use among Hellenized cult communities representing, like the Jewish scriptures, a similarly wide array of literary genres (with the possible exception of the apoca-

10

James Constantine Hanges, “1 Corinthians 4:6 and the Possibility of Written Bylaws in the Corinthian Church,” JBL 117 (1998): 275–98.

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lypse11), “cult bylaws” being perhaps the most epigraphically common. Lengthy and detailed leges sacrae are ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean. The mention of one relatively older article dealing with a specific type of sacrifice, the τραπεζώµατα, suffices to illustrate this point, citing as it does leges sacrae covering τραπεζώµατα from Attika, Stratonikeia, Delphi, Sounion, Erythrai, Kos, Andania, Amorgos and Thebes of Mycale.12 Moreover, to my knowledge, every author of a surviving cult bylaws claims to have received them as a personal revelation of a god’s will. The genre’s variety of content ranges from ritual to the moral philosophy included in a Philadelphian text to which we shall shortly return.13 Like the Torah, many of these leges sacrae include etiological myth, cult foundation-legends, priestly rules, and purity regulations. There remains one unavoidable substantive distinction between Jewish scripture and Greek and Roman cultic literature – and it is a crucial factor for Paul and his “kinsfolk according to the flesh (Rom 9:3).” The Jewish scriptures were produced by a profundity of disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance arguably deeper yet certainly more creatively productive than other national identity-building narratives known from the ancient Mediterranean world.14 Continuing the theme of naming things, Wright certainly stakes out a middle ground when he imagines the way Paul’s contemporaries would have categorized his ἐκκλησίαι, “the early Christians met in groups which would almost certainly be seen (as many modern scholars have seen them) as very similar to the collegia” (PFG 252). Unfortunately, too many modern scholars have felt compelled to correct the ancient informants, our only solid foundation for judicious analysis. Since the foundational work of Poland we have known that Greeks applied a range of technical terms to their own and to

11

But note Hans D. Betz, “The Problem of Apocalyptic Genre in Greek and Hellenistic Literature: the Case of the Oracle of Trophonius,” in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: International Colloquium on Apocalypticism Proceedings, Uppsala, August 1979, ed. David Hellholm (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983), 577–97. 12 See: David W. J. Gill, “TRAPEZOMATA: A Neglected Aspect of Greek Sacrifice,” HTR 67 (1974): 117–37. The τραπεζώµατα, as the name suggests, were table offerings – small, unburnt, usually private offerings of meat, cakes, or vegetables. 13 On the use of sacred laws in governing appropriate deference and behavior, see: Eftychia Stavrianopoulou, “Norms of Public Behavior Towards Greek Priests: Some Insights from the Leges Sacrae,” in La norme en matière religieuse en Grèce ancienne: Actes du XIe colloque international du CIERGA (Rennes, Septembre 2007), ed. Pierre Brulé, Kernos Supplément 21 (Liège: Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique, 2009), 213–29. 14 Or, as Jonathan Z. Smith has termed it, “situational incongruity,” see: Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: A Study in Situational Incongruity,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, CSJH (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 90–101.

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immigrant cult communities.15 The epigraphical and literary record is filled with all sorts of ὀργεῶνες, ἐρανισταὶ, and θιασῶται.16 Sub-categories abound, Σαραπιασταί being one of the more recognizable.17 If we follow our evidence, we should anticipate that the proverbial “man/woman on the street,” at least in the Greek-speaking east, would have called the Pauline groups Χριστῶται, by analogy with θιασῶται, or perhaps ἐκκλησιασταί.18 The transfer and reception of cults is related to the naming of cult groups. On this matter, I deeply appreciate Professor Wright’s reminder that ancient Mediterranean polytheistic communities were not inherently welcoming to new, especially foreign, deities. The condemnation of Socrates was, in fact, so notorious that in his attempt to ameliorate the accusation that Jews are dangerously exclusive, Josephus cites it to show that even the Athenians excise religious deviance.19 I regret only that Wright went no further to show how resistant the πόλεις could be to immigrant cults. We may debate the relative importance of πόλις-identity, nevertheless, the πόλις embodied an important element of individual and group identity. Beyond the φρᾶτραι and the φυλαί was the πόλις, not only the geophysical-symbolic boundary, but the locus of πολίτευµα. We could easily summon examples to bolster Wright’s appeal to the condemnation of Socrates, e.g., the objections Sophocles faced as Δεξίων of Epidaurian Asklepios in Athens, or the account of Athenian 15

Franz Poland, Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens (Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1909); John S. Kloppenborg and Stephan G. Wilson, eds., Voluntary Associations in the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 1996); Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Thusias Heneka kai Sunousias: Private Religious Associations in Hellenistic Athens, Epetēris tou Kentrou Ereunēs tēs Historias tou Hellēnikou Dikaiou 37, Parartēma 4 (Athens: Academy of Athens, 2003); Philip Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003). 16 Distinguishing types of ὀργεῶνες, see: W. S. Ferguson, “The Attic Orgeones,” HTR 37 (1944): 131–32. The ὀργεῶνες appear to be an exclusively Attic phenomenon, since only two instances of the category are found outside of Athens. By the first century CE, the distinction between ὀργεῶνες, ἐρανισταί, and θιασῶται appears to have disappeared, Yulia Ustinova, “Orgeones in Phratries: A Mechanism of Social Integration in Attica,” Kernos 9 (1996): 228. On the two major categories of Greek cult associations, see: Ilias Arnaoutoglou, “ἀρχερανιστὴς and Its Meaning in Inscriptions,” ZPE 104 (1994): 107–10. 17 On the form, Σαραπιασταί, see Inge Nielson, “Buildings of Religious Communities,” in A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, ed. Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2015), 279–92. 18 Luke’s Χριστιανός (Acts 11:26; 26:28; cf. 1 Pet 4:16), is of course a Latinism, for which I will not account here, see: Elias J. Bickerman, “The Name of Christians,” HTR 42 (1949): 109–24; David G. Horrell, “The Label Χριστιανός: 1 Peter 4:16 and the Formation of Christian Identity,” JBL 126 (2007): 361–81; Todd E. Klutz, “Christianos: Defining the Self in the Acts of the Apostles,” in Religion, Language, and Power, ed. Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee, Routledge Studies in Religion 10 (London: Routledge, 2008), 167–85. 19 Josephus, C. Ap. 2.37.

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resistance to the importation of Spartan Pan, overcome only by the claim that Pan himself demanded entry into Athens.20 The list of examples for Athens alone is extensive, and similar elsewhere among the Greek homelands, e.g., the local resistance to the foundation of a privately operated, public temple for the immigrant god Sarapis on Delos.21 One final point on the heuristic device, “religion” (cf. PFG 254), citing approvingly E. A. Judge’s pronouncement that formative Christianity was not a religion in our sense, Wright grants that, “any citizen of the ancient world … observing the communities founded by Paul, might well have thought them to be an odd kind of philosophical school, rather than some kind of ‘religion’ in the sense used today to describe ancient practices” (PFG 252). Fair enough, but the fact is that our evidence reveals no one in the ancient world trying to identify the first ἐκκλησίαι as philosophical schools except, ironically, Christians themselves.22 The earliest descriptions of ἐκκλησίαι describe them in cultic terms.23 20

Etymologicum Magnum, s. v. Δεξίων. For the story of the encounter between Philippides and Pan on the road to Sparta, see: Herodotos, Hist. 6.105.1 (cf. Pausanias, Descr. 8.54.6). 21 James Constantine Hanges, Paul, Founder of Churches: A Study in Light of the Evidence for the Role of “Founder-Figures” in the Hellenistic-Roman Period, WUNT 292 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 140–259. 22 See, Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture, HUT 26 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989). For the general discussion of categorizing the early ἐκκλησίαι, see: John S. Kloppenborg, “Edwin Hatch, Churches and Collegia,” in Origins and Method: Toward a New Understanding of Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd, ed. Bradley H. McLean, JSNTSup 86 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 212–38; John S. Kloppenborg, “Collegia and Thiasoi: Issues in Function, Taxonomy and Membership,” in Voluntary Associations in the Greco-Roman World, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Stephan G. Wilson (London: Routledge, 1996), 16–30; Richard S. Ascough, What are They Saying about the Formation of Pauline Churches? (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998); Richard S. Ascough, “The Thessalonian Christian Community as a Professional Voluntary Association,” JBL 119 (2000): 311–28; Richard S. Ascough, Paul’s Macedonian Associations: The Social Context of Philippians and 1 Thessalonians, WUNT II 161 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); John S. Kloppenborg, “Associations in the Ancient World,” in The Historical Jesus in Context, ed. Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison, and John Dominic Crossan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 323–38; Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations; Edward Adams, “First-Century Models for Paul’s Churches: Selected Scholarly Developments since Meeks,” in After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later, ed. Todd D. Still and David G. Horrell (London: Continuum, 2009), 60–78. 23 E.g., Pliny reports to Trajan that he had concluded that the Christians belonged to nothing but quam superstitionem pravam et immodicam (Ep. 10.96.9); he implies that Christian groups understood his prohibition of hetaeriai to apply to them (Ep. 10.96.8). Josephus “Testimonium” (A.J. 18.63.1–64.6) is ambiguous due to his philosophicopolitical descriptions of Jesus as σοφὸς ἀνῂρ and διδάσκαλος, and his followers as τὸ τῶν Χριστιανῶν φῦλον. Nevertheless, Josephus’s eschatological Messianic understanding of

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Wright’s citations of Cicero are on target; ancient “religion” is all about obligations to the deities (PFG 253). What was owed the divinities commanded every “sphere of activity” (PFG 250). That said, I must confess to finding the recent problematizing of the term “religion” among scholars of Christian origins a bit tiresome. The shameful fact of the matter is that New Testament scholars actually need Wright’s chastisement on this point.24 Simply admitting “religion’s” heuristic utility and defining our object of study as explicitly and clearly as possible will be the best we can do.25 If we want to sidestep the problem, I propose, if one avoids “cult,” we defer to something the ancients would have easily understood, τὰ Θεοισοφειλόµενα (“the things owed to the gods”).

3. “Religion” as a Hermeneutical Lens 3.1 Testing the Lens in Philadelphia Given the present venue’s limits, I want to interrogate Wright’s appropriation of Roman religiones as a lens for describing Paul. Wright appropriately reminds us that Paul negotiated a social world in which a roughly-defined Greek cosmology still reigned. Despite the immigrant gods and the new σωτῆρες, “Olympus still retained its ancient power” (PFG 246). The cult reform Dionysios of Philadelphia preserved in SIG 3.985 illustrates adequately the enduring power of the Olympians, even over communities whose members were not traditional Olympian devotees.26 Jesus is clear from his following reference to ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὁ λεγόµενος Χριστός, A.J. 20.200.4 (of course, ὁ Χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν in A.J. 18.63.4 is a Christian interpolation). 24 Wright tells us nothing that scholars of Christian origins should not have already known, see: Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1963; repr., Minneapolis; Augsburg Fortress, 1991), esp. 17 and 18; Murray L. Wax, “Religion as Universal: Tribulations of an Anthropological Enterprise,” Zygon 19 (1984): 5–19; Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), crediting Cantwell Smith for spurring his interest in this question. The problems in defining “religion” are so commonly known that recent college textbooks find it necessary to preface their content with them, e. g., Robert Crawford, What is Religion? Introducing the Study of Religion (London: Routledge, 2002), ch. 1. 25 See Richard Machalek, “Definitional Strategies in the Study of Religion,” JSSR 16 (1977): 395–401. Wright seems to embrace this practical if not ideal reality, PFG 250. 26 We ought not dismiss this example because the founder may have be seeking through it enhanced social status. As Wright knows well, cultic innovations like Dionysios’s arise from a range of self-interests – things we might compartmentalize today, but never in Antiquity, e.g., political, economic, etc. Culture is all in all, everything inextricably intertwined with everything else, cult is not, therefore, simply politics, social status, or economics, PFG 251.

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The reformation of this private Philadelphian οἶκος-cult from one devoted to Agdistis to one headed by Zeus and open for the first time extra-οἶκος occurred sometime in the second-half of the second century BCE, roughly coinciding with the royal bequest of his city to Rome by its ally, the dying king Attalus III Philometer, last of the Attalid dynasty.27 If, as Wright presumes, the influence of Roman religiones pervaded the Greek-speaking east, we should certainly expect to find evidence of it in Philadelphia precisely at this moment. Given the new religio-political reality, any marginally ambitious person would want to make overtures to Rome. Even allowing that Dionysios was never so self-serving, we still might expect his cult reform to reveal some modest tip-of-the-hat to religiones romanae. Yet, there is no hint of anything Roman here. Dionysios grounds his reform, as all cult innovators did, in a deity’s personal command, in this case from Zeus in a dream. (lines 1–6a).28 Zeus, with a Greek entourage, enters the cult under the auspices of its original patroness, a Lydian variant of the Great Mother/Kybele.29 Dionysios validates his hybridization of the cult by claiming that Agdistis is Zeus and company’s willing host.30 Following the common pattern, Dionysios seeks additional validation for his innovation by claiming it is κατὰ πάτρια, a common strategy to root innovation in venerable tradition (line 14).31 I have argued elsewhere that this strategy presupposes the reformer’s awareness of the potential controversies his or her reforms might provoke from the larger community.32 A cultic 27

Philadelphia was founded in 189 BCE by Eumenes II of Pergamon (197–169 BCE). See: Otto Weinreich, ed. and trans., Stiftung und Kultsatzungen eines Privatheiligtums in Philadelphia in Lydien, SHAW: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 16 (Heidelburg: Winters, 1919), 6; Hanges, Founder of Churches, 260–304. 29 Agdistis is the Great Mother of Mt. Ida, Strabo, Geogr. 10.30.42; 12.5.3; “Mother Andise,” another name for Agdistis, SEG 37.1168 (150–200 CE, also SEG 30.714 [referring to mysteries of Ἀνγδίσση]); SEG 29.1205.9–11, Ἀνγδίστις; SEG 26.1382, Ἀνγδείσις (cf. SEG 30.1508, 1843, Imperial period); Thomas Drew-Bear and Christian Naour, “Divinités de Phrygie,” ANRW 18.3 (1990): 2021n436 for Phrygian Agdistis; also, H. Hepding, Attis: seine Mythen und sein Kult, RVV 1 (Gießen: Töpelmann, 1903; repr., Berlin: Töpelmann, 1967), 105–22. 30 Dionysios’s Zeus-given regulations were deposited with Agdistis, the venerable protectress of his οἶκος-cult, and now of its new deities, ll. 2–11, also ll. 51–60. On this cult transmission pattern, see Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance, trans. John E. Steely, PTMS 18 (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978), 117; trans. of Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1920). 31 Cf., κατὰ πάτρια, LSAM 9.22, ἐπιτελέσαι καθότ[ι] πάτριόν ἐστιν (the performance of the pomp); I.Eph 1a.10.12–15 (2–3 CE), κατὰ πάτρια refers to praying on behalf of the state; sacrifice, IG 22.1146 ([ … θύειν µὲν κατὰ τὰ] πάτρια καὶ κα[τὰ] τὴν µαντείαν, lines 6– 7), also IG 22.659 (= LSCG 39, l.12); κατὰ τὰ πάτρια, referring to the hereditary control of the Eleusinian Sanctuary by the Εὐµολπίδαί and the Κήρυκες, Aristotle, Ath. pol. 39.2. 32 Hanges, Founder of Churches, 165–66. 28

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synthesis of this sort entails good reason to anticipate opposition, and raises serious obstacles to any facile assumption that we can simply label Dionysios’s a Greek cult.33 This example represents an already long-standing period extending from the end of the mid-fifth century BCE to Paul’s day and beyond that witnessed an unprecedented expansion in cult reformations, the actual number of cult recipients of cult (we need only mention the evolution of Asklepios from hero to quasi-Olympian wildly popular in the Greek homelands, the islands, and Asia Minor34), and the re-founding of dormant cults. To further illustrate the need for greater nuance in Wright’s application of the lens of Roman religiones, I first want to turn to the cults of Corinth, and then to a specific example within the broader Corinthia. 3.2 Testing the Lens in Corinth As the intersection of the legacy of a prominent Greek homeland and Roman colonial power, Paul’s Corinthia illustrates for our purposes the problems in assuming that Roman religiones, or cult forms, dominated Paul’s consciousness. We must return to my earlier question, namely, in what specific ways did Roman religiones shape Paul’s cultic world? A brief look at Nancy Bookidis’s survey provides prerequisite contextualization for our coming specific example by challenging the persistent assumption that Mummius’s 146 BCE destruction of Corinth was total. True, the city was looted and severely damaged, but it still stood. In fact, specific features of the Greek city survived to shape the Roman rebuilding a century later.35 Summing up the pre-Roman cult situation, Bookidis writes, “the Hellenistic period reveals numerous local hero cults in the city,” and if one were to characterize the cultic demographics of Hellenistic Corinth, “the picture that emerges … is one of traditional Olympian cults mixed with others that were peculiarly Nilsson, GGR 22, 291, 578–79. Note the evidence for the popularity of the three major Asklepieia: Epidauros, Kos, and Pergamon, see respectively: Alison Burford, The Greek Temple Builders at Epidauros: A Social and Economic Study of the Building in the Asklepian Sanctuary, during the Fourth and Early Third Centuries B.C. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); Rudolf Herzog, “Aus dem Asklepieion von Kos,” AR 10 (1907): 201–28 and 400–15; Oskar Ziegenaus, Gioia De Luca, with contributions by Virginia Grace and Christof Boehringer, Der südliche Temenosbezirk in hellenistischer und frührömischer Zeit. Vol. 1 of Das Asklepieion. Altertümer von Pergamon 11 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968). 35 Nancy Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth: 146 B.C.E. to 100 C.E.,” in Urban Religion in Corinth: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Daniel N. Schowalter and Steven J. Friesen, HTS 53 (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 2005), 141–64, here 141, note also, “little evidence for Mummius’ destruction has been found anywhere within the city walls of Corinth,” 150. We now know that there was no 102-year period of abandonment at Corinth, although the re-habitation did not fully develop until forty to fifty years later, 148–49. 33 34

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Corinthian … local Corinthian cults far exceeded those of the traditional Olympians.”36 According to Bookidis, little evidence survives for the reconstruction of the civic cults of the Laus Iulia Corinthiensis.37 This brings up one of the crucial ambiguities entailed in Wright’s discussion, i.e., just what do we mean by the term “civic” cults? To use a modern idiom, we need to “follow the money.” Civic versus non-civic is the crucial distinction, not public versus private, if by the latter opposition we mean “in public” versus “within the οἶκος.” Rather, we should be distinguishing civic from privately funded, owned, and operated cults. Civic cults are certainly public, yet may include certain participation restrictions (e.g., the Eleusinian mysteries). Private cults, often owned and operated by individuals and their descendants (e.g., the Egyptian Sarapis cult on Delos), may be exclusive and non-public, or they also may restrict participation but be public, by which I mean open to participation by interested individuals outside the οἶκος.38 The impact of Roman imperial cult on the civic cults of Corinth is obvious. However, the intensity of the impact of the imperial cults on Paul’s sense of his place in and understanding of the Roman Empire is a different question than the question of the influence of Roman religiones on Paul’s cultic world. Though certainly intertwined, these two questions must not be confused. Seyoon Kim’s contribution to this volume ably treats the former question, considering Paul’s attitude toward the Roman Empire as a theological, eschatological-political power.39 Distinct from Kim’s task, we are focused on another matrix of relationships, one that is certainly not extricable from other cultural forms but nonetheless distinguishable, namely, Wright’s claim that specific cultic forms (Roman religiones) pervasively influenced the Greekspeaking cultic world and consequently Paul to the degree that Roman cult should be front and center in our cultic contextualization of Paul and his ἐκκλησίαι. It is this claim that I question. Unfortunately, for Corinth our sources are limited. Pausanias’s secondcentury account of Corinthian cults is our primary literary source. Pausanias tells us that the Romans populated the new Forum with small, typical podium temples, many representing the Iulian family and Rome.40 Widening our view 36

Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 144–45, 148. Referring to the early twentieth century archaeology, Bookidis reports that “precise stratigraphic, ceramic, and numismatic evidence that could have helped to date monuments has been lost” (Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 151). 38 The Philadelphian cult mentioned earlier also reveals both of these types in its history. 39 In addition to Kim’s present contribution, see also Christoph Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), passim. 40 Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 152–53. 37

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to the area adjacent to the Forum, some of the larger temples were rebuilt in Greek style.41 Moreover, while we should expect dedicated dining facilities in certain cults based on the Roman pattern, sacred dining is unattested in Roman Corinth.42 Outside the Forum, cults were heterogeneous. Bookidis mentions three reestablished Greek cults: that of Asklepios,43 of Demeter and Kore,44 and the Acrocorinth’s cult of Aphrodite.45 She assumes that during colonization, the Romans would have quickly rebuilt the familiar cult sites, the Asklepieion, the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore (Ceres and Proserpina), cults deemed essential to the new colony. To be sure, re-establishments also came with certain changes, e.g., discontinuing the pre-Roman chthonic pit sacrifices to Demeter. There was no proper Roman temple for Demeter/Ceres, and the existing dining facilities were “unsuited to Roman practice.”46 The type of votive offerings changed from the Hellenistic period's miniature pottery and figurines to large, honorific statues. Given such changes, just what does it mean to say such re-established cults were “Roman” or that they were shaped by Roman “religiones”? Are we referring to some diagnostic cultural markers, or simply to a time period in which otherwise hybrid cults arose? Interestingly, Bookidis admits that Corinth scholars continue to debate whether or not the re-established Demeter sanctuary can be called Roman or Greek.47 As for Aphrodite’s cult, Bookidis concludes that, “there is no reason to posit a different set of deities in the Roman sanctuary … the Acrocorinth cult underwent modifications in the course of its Roman history. The changes, however, came from the East rather than from the West and manifested themselves iconographically in symbols familiar from the worship of Isis and Sarapis.” To sum up Bookidis’s analysis, she describes three coexisting spheres of cult in the Corinthia: 1) the official or civic, Julian and imperial Forum cults; 2) the re-established civic Greek cults around and outside the Forum; 3) the local Greek cults, both public and private, that flourished out41

Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 154–55. Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 158. 43 The cult was re-established in its hellenistic τέµενος by Marcus Antonius Milesius; Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 159. Bookidis also points to the extra-forum temple that may have been a joint cult of Jupiter Capitolinus and Zeus Olympios, which was surprisingly serviced by a priest with the alternative Greek technical title, θεοκόλος, 159–60. 44 There is some ambiguity regarding the re-establishment of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the northern slope of Acrocorinth, it may be either Augustan or mid first century CE. Whenever, it was re-established in its Hellenistic τέµενος, even using some of the remaining Greek buildings, 160. 45 The Roman-period cult Strabo visited in 29 CE was re-established on the ancient Greek site, Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 160. 46 Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 161. 47 Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 162. 42

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side of the city center.48 This leaves us with nothing but a fog of complexity obscuring Wright’s assumed influence of “Roman religiones” in Corinth. On the one hand, the monumental cultic-symbolic imperial presence is obvious.49 Without doubt, no Greek Corinthian could understand the world apart from the constant monumental presence of the imperial cult in the Forum. Nevertheless, imperial cultic presence, even overpowering presence, while it may, does not necessarily connect us to quotidian cultic behavior. As a Jew, without a doubt Paul’s knowledge of the way the world works in his present age would certainly have been framed by the history of his people’s experience of successive waves of imperial powers. And it is, in my view, highly likely that this consciousness of the workings of the present world tilled fertile epistemological soil in which to nurture an anti-imperial “subtext” throughout Paul’s responses to and interactions with his world.50 Granting the potential usefulness of the anti-imperial lens for understanding Paul’s sense of eschatological time, we cannot consequently infer that Roman religiones serve similarly well to frame either Paul’s or his Greek converts’ sense of their cultic world. With that preface, I now want to focus our spotlight on the sanctuary of Palaimon associated with the famous Isthmian temple of Poseidon.51 Whether or not this sanctuary was active when Paul visited Corinth is irrelevant to the Palaimonion’s value as a challenge to Wright’s assumption of the pervasive influence of Roman religiones on the Greek cultic world. Following John Hawthorne’s assessment, Helmut Koester labeled this cult a “Roman mystery cult.”52 Few would quarrel with his category “mystery cult,” but Koester’s adjective “Roman” is problematic. To be sure, a Roman, P. Licinius Priscus Iuventianus (early second century), the high-priest of Poseidon and patron of the cult, apparently funded reconstruction of the Palaimonion.53 Nevertheless, what are we to make of the fact that despite Koester’s conclusion that Palaimonion was an innovation of the Roman colonists, with no substantive 48

Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 163. Bookidis, “Religion in Corinth,” 156–57, again, note: “The cults in the forum are nearly all closely tied to the Roman State,” 157. This would indicate that the cultic practice at these temples involved sacrifices to and on behalf of the emperor and his family. 50 On the nuances required here, see Heilig, Hidden Criticism?, 98–104, responding to Colin Miller, “The Imperial Cult in the Pauline Cities of Asia Minor and Greece,” CBQ 72 (2010): 314–32. 51 I choose this site not only because it is apt, but also because I was privileged to spend three summer work-seasons at the site under the supervision of its Director, Elizabeth R. Gebhard. 52 Helmut Koester, “Melikertes at Isthmia: A Roman Mystery Cult,” in Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, ed. David L. Balch, Everett Ferguson, and Wayne A. Meeks (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 355–66. 53 IG IV.203, lines 8–11. Also see: Oscar Broneer, “Paul and the Pagan Cults at Isthmia,” HTR 64 (1971): 169–87. 49

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connection to an earlier Greek cult, the current principal excavator, Elizabeth R. Gebhard, argues compellingly that “not only did the essential elements of [Melikertes-Palaimon’s] rites exist before 146 BCE, but … they were continued by the colonists of Roman Corinth when they assumed administration of the Isthmian Games?” She continues that, “by claiming the city's right to host the Panhellenic festival and by reinstituting worship of the Isthmian deities, the settlers reaffirmed one of the city’s most ancient traditions.”54 With no diagnostically Roman evidence, Gebhard argues that the cult reflects the traditional Greek myth and hero-cult practice, mysteries included. The pre-146/post-146 BCE continuities include: pine bough bedding for the dead Melikertes; celebration of his rites coinciding with the Isthmian games; Corinthian king, Sisyphos, in the role of discoverer of Melikertes’s body and founder of the games; a black bull sacrificed and burned in the hero’s honor; a priestly invocation inviting Palaimon to join the feast; a tomb associated with the dead mother (Ino-Leukothea) and child at the Isthmus; a ritual mourning song (the θρῆνος55) accompanying the ritual transport of an image of the corpse to its deposition; nocturnal rites (something Romans usually find subversive56); oracle.57 Gebhard restores all these features from sources referring to the pre-146 BCE ritual. But three centuries later, Plutarch assumes that the Palaimonion rites are nocturnal τελεταί, as the pre-Roman heroic rites must have been. Philostratos mentions both the θρῆνος and the τελεταί in association with the

54 John Hawthorne, “The Myth of Palaemon,” TAPA 89 (1958): 92–98; Koester, “Melikertes at Isthnmia,” 355–66; against both, see: Elizabeth R. Gebhard, “Rites for Melikertes-Palaimon in the Early Roman Corinthia,” in Urban Religion in Roman Corinth: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Daniel N. Schowalter and Steven J. Friesen, HTS 53 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 165–203, quotations from 166–67. 55 The θρῆνος appears in Roman period literary references in connection with rites and altars. 56 Cicero, exemplifying Roman attitudes toward such things, recommends cultic legislation protecting the reputations of Roman women by doing everything in public (lux clara custodiat, i.e., socio-cultic propriety implies that only daylight rituals are appropriate, nothing in the secrecy of night); only rites traditional in Rome should be practiced. To exemplify the potential danger, Cicero cites the story of the migration of the Greek Bacchanalia (on which, see: CIL 1.196, cf. Livy 39.8–19); Romans should follow the Theban precedent, abolishing all “nocturnae pervigilationes” (Leg. 2.37). With the establishment of the Palaimonion we apparently have, ironically, a Greek nocturnal mystery rite founded by Romans. 57 Note the Palaimonion statue base inscribed ΒΛΑΣΤΟΣ ΜΑΝΤΙΣ (ΙΣ 293), proving an oracular function at the site, Mary C. Sturgeon, Sculpture I: 1952–1967, vol. IV of Isthmia: Excavations by the University of Chicago under the Auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1987), 10.

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Roman cult.58 The traditional θρῆνος is described as τελεστικός (“initiatory”) and ἔνθεος (“full of god”), terms deeply embedded in mystery rites. Gebhard also emphasizes Palaimon’s strong association with Dionysos in both periods.59 In summary, “considering the current state of the evidence, a firm line probably cannot be drawn between what happened in Greek Corinth and what was done by the Roman colonists.”60 The continuity of mystery-rites from Greek to Roman cults obviously complicates any description of Roman colonial experience in Corinth. In fact, the Romans seemed quite comfortable reviving what they understood to be earlier Greek tradition. As Gebhard points out, “Favorinus would remind them a century and a half later, [that] the Corinthians were Romans who would like to appear Greek.”61 This is not to deny any Roman cult innovation, but its nature is not to be found in the content of myth or practice, but in the choice to locate the cult at the southeast corner of the τέµενος of Poseidon’s temple. Absent evidence for an earlier Greek Palaimonion, the question is why the Romans chose this spot when continuity apparently ruled their decisions at other Corinthian sacred sites? The simple answer is that, in fact, continuity continued to rule here. While rebuilding the sanctuary of Poseidon and uncovering the classical stadium’s underground water channel, the Romans appear to have concluded that they had found the ancient Palaimonion. Whether or not they realized its true nature, they apparently interpreted this narrow tunnel as Palaimon’s burial site. As Gebhard notes, the cult’s benefactor, Iuventianus, treated Palaimon as a hero because he provided τὸ ἐναγιστήριον, the traditional heroic sacrificial pit.62 “The archaeological remains,” Gebhard writes, “are in keeping with what we would expect for a hero cult,” and so the Romans understood it.63 At Isthmia, therefore, we have a hybrid cult, neither simply Roman nor totally Greek, but a new thing, at once both and more than both.64 Consequently, arriving at Corinth Paul found nothing outside his experience, a hybrid 58

Taking it all together, without mentioning even more evidence mentioned by Gebhard, the heroic-mystery nature of the Roman-period cult is not in doubt, Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 177–79. 59 “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 181. Gebhard suggests that the traditions could have been passed to the Romans through the Sikyonians, who took over the games during the postdestruction period. But regardless of the means of transmission, the point for our present purposes is that the Roman-period multi-phase construction of the Palaimonion was not simply a “Roman” cult. 60 Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 180. 61 Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 182. 62 Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 191–93, IG IV 203.9. 63 Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 194; Pausanias explicitly understood the underground chamber as Palaimon’s ἄδυτον (Gebhard, “Melikertes-Palaimon,” 197). 64 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2007), 49.

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city where Romans certainly influenced native Greek cultic patterns with the introduction of new divine rulers – obviously not by introducing to the Greeks the concept or the practice of ruler-worship – while the conquerors themselves appear to have been shaped by pre-existing Greek cultic forms. As postcolonial critique predicts, the evidence from Corinth shows that Roman religious imperialism never came close to obliterating native Corinthian cultic forms. Rather, the colonial Roman-Corinthian cultural encounter was mutually creative. Granting Wright the benefit of the doubt and his apparent recognition of this complexity, I still find it difficult not to read Wright’s treatment of the Greek cultic world as one that assumes de facto Greek cultic impotency under the weight he gives to the influence of Roman religiones.65

4. Conclusion Wright’s fundamental agreement with the growing consensus that Paul’s mission and theology promote a religio-political alternative to Roman imperialism raises a broader question than his specific focus on Roman cultic forms (religiones) – changing the objects of ruler cults does not constitute a radical departure in the Greek-speaking world. Regarding Roman religiones, our Corinthian examples show that even where Wright’s hypothesis suggests we should most expect to see substantive Roman influence on Greek cultic practice, i.e., in a Roman colony like Corinth, the evidence falsifies his hypothesis. My counter-hypothesis would be that were we to test Wright’s assumption about the influence of Roman religiones elsewhere in Greek homelands, we would find the same pattern we find in Corinth. In fact, if we return to the Egyptian Delian cult of Sarapis, the evidence limits Rome’s cultic role on this Greek island to that of a cultic arbitrator of last resort, not as the shaper of cultic forms in the Greek-speaking world.66 Fundamentally, the question is not Paul’s resentment toward or even contestation of Roman dominance, but whether understanding him fully should be as simple as concocting and deploying such a convenient lens? Is the Roman Empire, as some colonizing, religio-political whole the hermeneutical key par excellence? Certainly not, if what we are after is the “thick description” Wright lauds while largely ignoring the sensitivity to micro- versus macro-locality, diversity, intricacy, and multivalence with which Geertz practiced it.67 65

Note that even when speaking of Greek forms, Wright uses Roman terms, e.g., collegia, for Greek (ὀργεῶνες, ἐρανισταὶ, or θιασῶται, PFG 252). 66 This is clear from the Egyptian cult’s appeal to the Roman Senate and the responding senatus consultum of 164 BCE, Hanges, Founder of Churches, 165. 67 For a succinct contextualization of Geertz’s appropriation of the concept from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, see Joseph G. Ponterotto, “Brief Note on the Origins, Evolution,

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While this venue is understandably limited, were I to suggest a path forward, looking at Paul through a well-polished postcolonial lens would productively muddy the waters of our description of Paul, distorting the illusory clear lines often drawn between Paul the resister and Paul the assimilator, between Paul the political actor and Paul the religious actor, by showing us how he can be both and more simultaneously.68 Risking a misappropriation, Paul was consciously “all things to all” – all the time, as all colonials do, constantly negotiating his identity within the matrices of anisodynamic power relationships. Paul negotiated a plurality of identities, strategically trans-morphing himself in the face of an unknowable number of circumstances shaped by an equally unknowable and perhaps unidentifiable number of competing interests, powers, obligations, and threats.69 What dominated Paul’s thought was not a single constant (Roman religio-political imperialism) but a shifting collage of contested spaces.70 In practical terms, while the Roman Empire was undoubtedly the most potentially threatening of those powers, it is not clear that Paul, or many of his fellow imperial subjects, spent his days constantly and consciously obsessed with all things Roman. Transnational imperial power produces cultural multi-taskers.71 In other words, Paul not only negotiated colonialism but also, as an apostle to the Gentiles, a colonized Hellenistic culture, the competing power of his fellow Jews (another colonized minority), as well as threatening “proximate others” (some of his fellow

and Meaning of the Qualitative Research Concept “Thick Description,” The Qualitative Report 11 (2006): 538–49. 68 My concern about Wright’s focus on “Roman religiones” as the critical hermeneutical key to Paul is the all too convenient slide into a “cult” parallel to the distracting quest for Paul’s theological center that once dominated Pauline scholarship. The search for centers or keys to Paul’s thought, mission, and identity is, in my view, temptingly convenient and fraught with the dangerous self-delusion produced by oversimplifying Paul’s world. 69 On the question of identity and Paul, see Heilig, Hidden Criticism, 129–130 with reference to Tim Whitmarsh, “Resistance is Futile? Greek Literary Tactics in the Face of Rome,” in Les Grecs héritiers des Romains, ed. Paul Schubert, Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 59 (Geneva: Hardt Foundation, 2013), 57–58. On negotiated, plural identities, see: Bhabha, Location of Culture, 42–43. 70 Hanges, Founder of Churches, 8–9. 71 Postcolonial literature is filled with examples of the multi-spheric, multi-level negotiations required of individuals under transnational imperial dominance, e.g., see: Robert B. Potter and Joan Phillips, “Both Black and Symbolically White: The ‘Bajan-Brit’ Return Migrant as Post-colonial Hybrid,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (2006): 901–27. To consider this reality from the other side, i.e., British ex-patriots in Hong Kong and their cultural multi-tasking, see: Pauline Leonard, “Migrating Identities: Gender, Whiteness, and Britishness in Post-colonial Hong Kong,” Gender, Place and Culture 15 (2008): 45–60.

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Jewish Jesus devotees).72 Trying to prioritize which of these factors most reveals Paul may well be a fool’s errand; we must describe all factors thickly.

Bibliography Adams, Edward. “First-Century Models for Paul’s Churches: Selected Scholarly Developments since Meeks.” Pages 60–78 in After the First Urban Christians: The SocialScientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later. Edited by Todd D. Still and David G. Horrell. London: Continuum, 2009. Arnaoutoglou, Ilias. “ἀρχερανιστὴς and Its Meaning in Inscriptions.” ZPE 104 (1994): 107– 10. –. Thusias Heneka kai Sunousias: Private Religious Associations in Hellenistic Athens. Epetēris tou Kentrou Ereunēs tēs Historias tou Hellēnikou Dikaiou 37, Parartēma 4. Athens: Academy of Athens, 2003. Ascough, Richard S. “The Thessalonian Christian Community as a Professional Voluntary Association.” JBL 119 (2000): 311–28. –. Paul’s Macedonian Associations: The Social Context of Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. WUNT II 161. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. –. What are They Saying about the Formation of Pauline Churches? Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998. Betz, Hans D. “The Problem of Apocalyptic Genre in Greek Hellenistic Literature: The Case of the Oracle of Trophonius.” Pages 577–97 in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: International Colloquium on Apocalypticism Proceedings, Uppsala, August 1979. Edited by David Hellholm. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2007. Bickerman, Elias J. “The Name of Christians.” HTR 42 (1949): 109–24. Bookidis, Nancy. “Religion in Corinth: 146 B.C.E. to 100 C.E.” Pages 141–64 in Urban Religion in Corinth: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Edited by Daniel N. Schowalter and Steven J. Friesen. HTS 53. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Broneer, Oscar. “Paul and the Pagan Cults at Isthmia.” HTR 64 (1971): 169–87. Burford, Alison. The Greek Temple Builders at Epidauros: A Social and Economic Study of the Building in the Asklepian Sanctuary, during the Fourth and Early Third Centuries B.C. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Berlin, 1862– Coser, Lewis A. The Functions of Social Conflict. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1956. Crawford, Robert. What is Religion? Introducing the Study of Religion. London: Routledge, 2002. Dow, Sterling. “The Egyptian Cults in Athens.” HTR 30 (1937): 183–32.

72 On the concept of proximate others, see: See Jonathan Z. Smith, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 3–48, esp. 45–48, echoing Lewis A. Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1956), 70.

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Drew-Bear, Thomas, and Christian Naour. “Divintés de Phrygie.” ANRW 18.3 (1990): 1907–2044. Part 2, Principat, 18.3. Edited by Wolfgang Haase. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990. Droge, Arthur J. Homer or Moses? Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture. HUT 26. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989. Ferguson, William Scott. “The Attic Orgeones.” HTR 37 (1944): 62–134. Gebhard, Elizabeth R. “Rites for Melikertes-Palaimon in the Early Roman Corinthia.” Pages 165–203 in Urban Religion in Corinth: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Edited by Daniel N. Schowalter and Steven J. Friesen. HTS 53. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.” Daedelus 134 (2005): 56– 86. Gill, David. “TRAPEZOMATA: A Neglected Aspect of Greek Sacrifice.” HTR 67 (1974): 117–37. Hanges, James Constantine. “1 Corinthians 4:6 and the Possibility of Written Bylaws in the Corinthian Church.” JBL 117 (1998): 275–98. –. Paul, Founder of Churches: A Study in Light of the Evidence for the Role of “FounderFigures” in the Hellenistic-Roman Period. WUNT 292. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. Harland, Philip. Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. Hawthorne, John. “The Myth of Palaemon.” TAPA 89 (1958): 92–98. Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. WUNT II 392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Hepding, Hugo. Attis: seine Mythen und sein Kult. RVV 1. Gießen: Töpelmann, 1903. Repr., Berlin: Töpelmann, 1967. Herzog, Rudolf. “Aus dem Asklepieion von Kos.” AR 10 (1907): 201–228 and 400–415. Horrell, David G. “The Label Χριστιανὸς: 1 Peter 4:16 and the Formation of Christian Identity.” JBL 126 (2007): 361–81. Idinopulos, Thomas Athanasius, Brian C. Wilson, and James Constantine Hanges, eds. Comparing Religions: Possibilites and Perils? Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions 113. Leiden: Brill, 2006. I.Eph = Die Inschriften von Ephesos. Edited by H. Engelmann, H. Wankel, and R. Merkelbach. IGSK 11-17. Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 1979–1984. IG 22 = Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno anteriores. Edited by Johannes Kirchner. 4 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1913–1940. IG IV = Inscriptiones graecae Aeginae, Pityonesi, Cecryphaliae, Argolidis. Edited by M. Fränkle. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902. Kloppenborg, John S. “Associations in the Ancient World.” Pages 323–38 in The Historical Jesus in Context. Princeton Readings in Religions. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine, Dale C. Allison, and John Dominic Crossan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. –. “Collegia and Thiasoi: Issues in Function, Taxonomy and Membership.” Pages 16–30 in Voluntary Associations in the Greco-Roman World. By John S. Kloppenborg and Stephan G. Wilson. London: Routledge, 1996. –. “Edwin Hatch, Churches and Collegia.” Pages 212–38 in Origins and Method: Toward a New Understanding of Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd. Edited by Bradley H. McLean. JSNTSup 86. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993. Kloppenborg, John S., and Stephan G. Wilson, eds. Voluntary Associations in the GrecoRoman World. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Klutz, Todd E. “Christianos: Defining the Self in the Acts of the Apostles.” Pages 167–85 in Religion, Language, and Power. Routledge Studies in Religion 10. Edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee. London: Routledge, 2008. Koester, Helmut. “Melikertes at Isthmia: A Roman Mystery Cult.” Pages 355–66 in Greeks, Romans, and Christians: Essays in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe. Edited by David L. Balch, Everett Ferguson, and Wayne A. Meeks. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990. Leonard, Pauline. “Migrating Identities: Gender, Whiteness and Britishness in Postcolonial Hong Kong.” Gender, Place and Culture 15 (2008): 45–60. LSAM = Lois sacrées de l’Asie Mineure. Edited by Franciszek Sokolowski. Ecole française d’Athènes. Travaux et mémoires 9. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1955. Machalek, Richard. “Definitional Strategies in the Study of Religion.” JSSR 16 (1977): 395–401. Milchhoefer, Arthur. “Schriftquellen zur Topographie von Athen.” Pages i-ccxxiv in Die Stadtgeschichte von Athen. By Ernst Curtius. With map sheets by J. A. Kaupert. Berlin: Weidmann, 1891. Miller, Colin. “The Imperial Cult in the Pauline Cities of Asia Minor and Greece.” CBQ 72 (2010): 314–32. Nielson, Inge. “Buildings of Religious Communities.” Pages 279–92 in A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Edited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke. New York: Wiley & Sons, 2015. Nilsson, Martin P. Die hellenistiche und römische Zeit. Vol. 1 of Geschichte der griechischen Religion. Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 5/2.2 München: Beck, 1967. Nongbri, Brent. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Poland, Franz. Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens. Leipzig: Teubner, 1909. Potter, Robert B., and Joan Phillips. “Both Black and Symbolically White: The ‘BajanBrit’ Return Migrant as Post-colonial Hybrid.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (2006): 901–27. Reitzenstein, Richard. Hellenistic Mystery Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance. Translated by John E. Steely. PTMS 18. Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978. Translation of Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Leipzig: Teubner, 1920. Smith, Jonathan Z. “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: A Study in Situational Incongruity.” Pages 90–101 in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. CSHJ. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. –. “What a Difference a Difference Makes.” Pages 3–48 in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity. Edited by Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. –. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. JLCRS 14. CSHJ. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Repr., Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991. Stavrianopoulou, Eftychia. “Norms of Public Behavior Towards Greek Priests: Some Insights from the Leges sacrae (Rennes, Septembre 2007).” Pages 213–29 in La norme en matière religieuse en Grèce ancienne: Actes du XIe colloque international du CIERGA. Kernos Supplément 21. Edited by Pierre Brulé. Liège: Centre international d’étude de la religion grecque antique, 2009.

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Sturgeon, Mary C. Sculpture I: 1952–1967. Vol. 4 of Isthmia: Excavations by the University of Chicago under the Auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1987. Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum. Edited by Wilhelm Dittenberger. 4 vols. 3rd ed. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1915–1924 Ustinova, Yulia. “Orgeones in Phratries: A Mechanism of Social Integration in Attica.” Kernos 9 (1996): 227–42. Wax, Murray L. “Religion as Universal: Tribulations of an Anthropological Enterprise.” Zygon 19 (1984): 5–19. Weinreich, Otto, ed. and trans. Stiftung und Kultsatzungen eines Privatheiligtums in Philadelphia in Lydien. SHAW: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 16. Heidelberg: Winter, 1919. Whitmarsh, Tim. “Resistance is Futile? Greek Literary Tactics in the Face of Rome. Pages 57–78 in Les Grecs héritiers des Romains. Edited by L. Van der Stockt, Paul Schubert, Pierre Ducrey, and Pascale Derron. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 59. Geneve: Fondation Hardt, 2013. Ziegenaus, Oskar, and Gioia De Luca, with contributions by Virginia Grace and Christof Boehringer. Der südliche Temenosbezirk in hellenistischer und frührömischer Zeit. Vol. 1 of Das Asklepieion. Altertümer von Pergamon 11. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968.

Paul and the Roman Empire Seyoon Kim As part of his grand scheme of interpreting Paul’s theology as an integral whole in his three contexts (Judaism, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire), N. T. Wright presents Paul as deliberately formulating his gospel in a way that implicitly subverts the Roman Empire. He rests this view partly on the assumption that Paul saw Rome as the unique agent of the evil forces, the fourth beast of Dan 7. Thus he makes Paul the twin brother of John of Revelation. But he is not quite successful in supporting his thesis exegetically with Paul’s actual teachings in his epistles. Furthermore, by repeatedly asserting Paul’s proclamation of Jesus the Messiah and Lord as counter-imperial but never explaining how the Lord Jesus actually exercises his God-given kingship, Wright presents a political theology of Paul that is not well integrated with his gospel of God’s/Christ’s kingdom and of justification and with his ethics.

1. Paul Preached the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in Antithesis to Its Roman Parody Since A. Deissmann’s pioneering observation,1 especially over the last two decades, counter-imperial interpreters of Paul have appealed, first of all, to the extensive parallelism of the vocabulary used in Paul’s preaching and in the Roman imperial cult and propaganda: υἱός θεοῦ (God’s son), κύριος (lord), σωτήρ (savior), εὐαγγέλιον (gospel), σωτηρία (salvation), εἰρήνη (peace), δικαιοσύνη (righteousness/justice), πίστις (faith/loyalty), παρουσία/ἀπάντησις (coming/meeting), etc. In this new book Paul and the Faithfulness of God, however, Wright stresses more the parallelism between the narratives of the two entities, and refers to the vocabulary parallelism in that context. He is so strongly impressed by what he calls the “almost uncanny” correspondence of those narratives as well as those words (PFG 1311) that, constantly referring to it, he draws his conclusion, in the most certain terms, that Paul “could not 1 G. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World, trans. Lionel R. M. Strachan from the 4th Ger. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 338–78.

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help but” see the inherent conflict between his gospel and the Roman ideology (PFG 1280–83 passim). So, for example, he summarizes the narratives and sets them side by side thus: Rome offered a long and powerful story of a divinely appointed city, nation and culture from which had emerged [Augustus] the divi filius himself, bringing peace and justice and world domination. Paul told the long story of a divinely appointed people from whom there had emerged [Jesus Christ] the theou hyios himself, bringing peace and justice and claiming worldwide allegiance. (PFG 1282)

Then, Wright draws the inference from the parallelism thus: Rome offered such a stark set of parallels to the narrative of Paul’s gospel that it was bound to appear not just one empire among many, which happened to be there at the time, but as a strikingly specific parody of the message of Jesus and the community of his followers. (PFG 1282)

The inner logic of Paul’s own worldview and theology, seen as the messianic redefinition of his second-Temple Jewish worldview, cannot help but have brought him into conflict, whether implicit or explicit, with the claims, the narrative, and the policies of the Roman empire (PFG 1283). As the Roman narrative of pretension, arrogance, and false promises misled the inhabitants of the empire to submission and even to the imperial cult, Paul had to expose its delusional character in his proclamation of the true gospel of justice, peace, and salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. So Wright concludes that Rome was “a central target of Paul’s implied polemic” (PFG 1283). For Wright, the fact that Paul was an heir to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition further strengthens this conclusion. According to Wright, in Second Temple Judaism, the apocalyptic language was employed for a “political” meaning, to speak about the rise and fall of great empires in codes, and so the apocalyptic literature was “a major carrier of social and political critique.” As an influential example of this, Daniel also talked about actual empires (PFG 1289–90). During the first century, Jews generally recognized that Rome was meant by the fourth beast in Dan 7, the final and most terrifying pagan empire that was to be destroyed with the coming of the Messiah, who would vindicate God’s people to share in his rule over the nations (PFG 1280–81, 1289). So Paul also saw Rome as such (PFG 1282 passim). Accordingly, Wright finds Paul issuing an implicit challenge to Caesar and his empire in passages such as Rom 1:3–4; 1 Cor 15:20–28; Phil 2:6–11; Col 1:15–20; 2:14–15; etc. that declare the Messiah Jesus’s enthronement and reign over the nations as well as in apocalyptic passages such as 1 Thess 4:13–5:11; 2 Thess 2:1–12; Phil 3:20–21; Rom 8:31–39; 1 Cor 15:20–28, 51– 57; etc. that speak of the Lord Jesus Christ’s parousia for eschatological redemption. And Wright interprets 1–2 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Romans as proclaiming the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in clear antithesis to

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its Roman parody. Thus, Wright insists that Paul’s gospel must be appreciated as fundamentally having a Rome-critical or counter-imperial dimension.

2. John M. G. Barclay: “The Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul” In his important essay,2 Barclay makes a searching criticism of Wright’s counter-imperial interpretation of Paul’s gospel. In PFG, Wright unfolds his thesis of Paul’s counter-Roman gospel anew in discussion with Barclay. So it is convenient for us to start our examination of Wright’s work by following their debate. Barclay’s thesis is that Rome was insignificant to Paul, and so he did not make it a special target of his polemic. For this thesis, Barclay first points to the absence of references to Rome in Paul’s epistles: Paul condemns pagan idolatry in general, but never singles out the Roman imperial cult; Paul frequently speaks of powers, authorities, and rulers of this world, but always anonymously and never identifying them with Rome; and Paul shows no interest in the Roman Empire as Roman.3 So, concluding that “thus Paul never specifies Rome on the countless occasions when he could have spoken of her empire, her rulers, and her cult,” Barclay rejects Wright’s attempts to see a special reference to Caesar and his empire in Paul’s general polemic against idolatry, the world, and its rulers.4 Then, observing a “general principle” that the use of common terms “does not in itself entail a competitive, or antithetical, relationship between the two entities using [them],”5 Barclay argues that Paul’s Christological titles cannot be taken as intending to counter the Roman honoring of Caesar as there is no indicator that they were so employed.6 Barclay contends that the same has to be said also for Paul’s soteriological terms as “Paul never places the terms ‘good news’, ‘salvation’, or ‘faith/loyalty’ in antithesis to a Roman form of the same,” and as he contrasts

2 John M. G. Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews, WUNT 275 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 363–87. 3 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 373–76. 4 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 375. 5 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 376. 6 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 376–78. Barclay (378) illustrates this point with the evidence both of the early Christian literatures (1 Tim 2:2; 6:15; Tit 3:1; 1 Pet 2:13–17; 1 Clem. 61; Tertullian, Apol. 30–34) and of Philo, who in his Legatio ad Gaium attributes both to God and to the Roman emperors similar titles such as “Master,” “Lord,” “king,” “benefactor,” “savior,” and bearer of justice and peace to the world, even while stressing Jewish monotheistic abhorrence of the imperial cult.

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“righteousness/justice” only with that of the Torah, but not with that of Rome.7 According to Barclay, Paul does not make Caesar and his empire the special target of his polemic because of his particular epistemology or worldview, rather than his apolitical pietism.8 Since the revelation of the Christ-event, Paul views the καινὴ κτίσις (“new creation,” which is represented by Christ’s church at present; 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:14–15) created by the Christ-event as standing over against the κόσµος (“the world”) dominated by “the god of this age” (Gal 1:4) or the Satanic or demonic forces of sin, death, and the flesh. The Satanic or demonic forces operate across all levels of existence – individual, social, political, and cosmic.9 Paul does not view the Roman Empire itself as one of those powers10 but as an agent that is, like any empire, co-opted by powers (Satanic or divine) that are greater than itself.11 Inasmuch as the Roman Empire practices evil, makes false claims, oppresses people, etc., it is driven by the power and wisdom of “this world” or the Satanic forces of sin and death and so manifests itself as part of “the world” or “the present evil age” doomed to destruction (1 Cor 1–2; 1 Thess 5:1–11; Phil 1:27–30; Rom 8:31–39). However, inasmuch as it carries out the functions of preserving and rewarding “the good,” it is to be recognized and honored as serving God (Rom 13:1–7).12 So Paul cannot be classified simply as pro- or anti-Roman. The point to stress is rather that instead of viewing Rome in the political categories created by itself or by modern political interpreters and trying to oppose or upstage it in those categories, Paul “relegate[s] it to the rank of a dependent and derivative entity, denied a distinguishable name or significant role in the story of the world.”13 Therefore, Barclay concludes that to view Paul as accord[ing] the Roman empire the kind of significance imagined by Wright (and other antiimperial interpreters) would not only grant Rome excessive respect but would reduce Paul’s theology to the political terms that Rome herself was accustomed to use. … Rather than adding a fresh dimension to Pauline theology, Wright’s interpretation diminishes the range and significance of Paul’s remapping of the cosmos.14

7

Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 379. Cf. Matthew V. Novenson, “What the Apostles Did Not See,” in Reactions to Empire: Sacred Texts in Their Socio-Political Contexts, ed. John A. Dunne and Dan Batovici, WUNT II 372 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 55–72. 9 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 383–84. 10 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 383. 11 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 386. 12 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 385. 13 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 383–85. 14 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 387. 8

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3. Wright Makes Paul a Twin of John of Revelation 3.1 The Roman Empire Was Unique to Paul Wright rejects Barclay’s argument against his (and other anti-imperial interpreters’) appeal to the parallel vocabulary of Paul’s gospel and of the Roman imperial propaganda. Apparently Wright takes Paul’s indebtedness to Jewish apocalyptic tradition, especially to Dan 7, and what he considers a unique phenomenon, namely, the narrative parallelism between the two entities, as sufficient indicators for Paul’s use of his Christological and soteriological terms in antithesis to the claims of Rome. An examination of Wright’s actual interpretation of some Pauline texts below shall show whether the two factors really amount to sufficient indicators. Given a negative result, Wright’s repeated appeal to them would be revealing his reliance only on deductive argumentation.15 Nevertheless, Wright agrees with Barclay on an important point, namely, that Paul saw the demonic “powers” as operating in and through pagan deities and human rulers and so set those “powers” of sin and death as the ultimate enemy of the gospel of Jesus Christ (PFG 1285–88 passim).16 Wright also agrees with Barclay that this worldview led Paul to relativize the Roman Empire as a puppet of Satan and so to dismiss its arrogant claims (PFG 1287, 1291 passim). So, resonating with what Barclay says,17 Wright states: To allow Rome, or any other empire, to set the agenda so firmly that it becomes ‘the’ enemy is to fail to see the real enemies hiding behind its armour and spear. (PFG 1287)

Yet Wright objects to Barclay’s drawing from this consideration the conclusion that Rome was insignificant to Paul. Instead, he uses it to sharpen his counter-imperial interpretation. Thus he declares that Paul saw the demonic powers “coming together and doing their worst precisely in and through Rome itself” (PFG 1311), and so he regarded Rome as “the specific and focused instantiation of what ‘the [demonic] powers’ were all about” (PFG 1318). Thus, asserting repeatedly that Paul viewed Rome as the fourth beast of Dan 7 (PFG 1299, 1311 passim), Wright declares “in the language of Revelation”: “when Paul looked at the Roman empire he glimpsed the face of the Monster” (PFG 1311). Would it be unfair then for us to summarize Wright’s view thus: Paul saw Rome as the embodiment of the Satanic forces or at least as their chief agent? Wright grounds this view on the uniqueness of Rome 15

Cf. Seyoon Kim, Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 30–31. 16 Wright (PFG 761–62) suggests that the Damascus revelation of the crucified Jesus as the risen and exalted Messiah and Lord also led Paul to realize that the real enemy was not Rome itself but Sin and Death. 17 Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 384, 386–87.

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and its imperial pretensions, the parallelism of the narratives and vocabulary in Paul’s gospel and the Roman imperial propaganda, the fact that only Rome could claim a worldwide “obedient allegiance” at Paul’s time, and the fact that in Rome “precisely the power of ‘death’ itself ha[d] been unleashed on to that ‘son of God’” (PFG 1311, 1318). Thus Wright thinks that Paul was opposed to Rome not simply because it happened to be the ruling power of his world, which the Satanic forces could co-opt like any other ruling power (cf. PFG 1273), but rather because its Caesar was the unique, hitherto unparalleled Satanic representative, the uniquely exact counter-image of the Messiah Jesus. Then, is not Wright, despite his denial (PFG 1287), suggesting in effect that Paul viewed Rome as “the” enemy?18 3.2 An Appeal to the Jewish Tradition This view, of course, raises an immediate question: how could Paul then exhort the Roman Christians to honor the governing authorities and be subject to them, saying that they promoted the good by executing justice as God’s servants (Rom 13:1–7)? To explain this, Wright repeatedly appeals to the double-shaped Jewish tradition: 1) for the moment, God has set the pagan rulers over the world and so Israel should obey them, but 2) the time will come when God will judge the pagan empire and replace it with Israel as the world kingdom (PFG 1275, 1283 passim). On the basis of this view, on the one hand, the prophet Jeremiah advised the Jewish exiles in Babylonia to settle down there and “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer 29:4–7), and Daniel is shown to have served the pagan king and his government (Dan 1–6); and on the other hand, both Jeremiah (50–51) and Daniel (7) prophesied God’s judgment on the arrogant and wicked pagan empire and God’s redemption of his people Israel (PFG 1274–75). So, pointing to the fact that exhortation to be subject to pagan rulers appears alongside denunciation of them in the same books of Jeremiah and Daniel (cf. also Wis 6:1–5), Wright argues that Paul was just reflecting this tradition – the positive understanding of human authorities in Rom 13:1–7 (cf. also Col 1:15–17) and the sharp critique of them in Phil 2–3 and Col 2 (PFG 1274–75 passim). In addition, blaming the modern Western split-mentality for seeing them in sterile antithesis (PFG 1288, 1307), Wright insists that Paul “cannot be placed on a flattened-out scale of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ Roman rule,” by playing the “supportive” passages in his epistles off against the “critical” passages (PFG 1308). However, it is questionable whether the Jewish tradition can really support Wright’s explanation of Paul’s stance toward Rome. For, in imparting the exhortation for the Jewish exiles to be good citizens in Babylon, Jeremiah (let 18 Cf. Christoph Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 120–21.

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alone Daniel) does not support it by speaking of the Babylonian rulers in such positive terms as Paul does of the (Roman) rulers in Rom 13:1–7. Surely Jeremiah imparts his advice not because of the good governance of Babylon, but rather in spite of its idolatry and wickedness. Did Philo, for example, see Augustus or Tiberius as the “Monster” of Dan 7 while at the same time heaping his praises on them (e.g., Legat. 140–61; cf. esp. 161 with Rom 13:3–4), or did he ever say about Gaius something like what Paul says about the (Roman) authorities in Rom 13:1–7 while castigating him for his self-deification and evil deeds, i.e., for being like the “Monster” of Dan 7? In fact, the Jewish groups that interpreted pagan empires along the lines of Dan 7:1–8 showed only an anti-imperial stance without balancing it with the Jeremiah-like exhortation, and they rather waged actual rebellion against pagan empires (the Maccabees and the Zealots) or hoped to do it in the near future (the Qumran sect). Wright himself suggests that as a “hardline Pharisee” the preconversion Paul used to hold that kind of stance (e.g., PFG 1283, 1306) – what Wright designates as the “Shammaite” stance that focused on the second half of the Jewish tradition over against the “Hillelite” stance that appreciated its first half and adjusted to the rule of a pagan empire (PFG 1280). 3.3 Paul’s Modification of the Jewish Tradition Wright repeatedly emphasizes Paul’s modification of the Jewish tradition in the light of the Christ-event (PFG 1274–75 passim). However, his appeal to Paul’s new eschatological perspective weakens his view rather than supporting it. Arguing that for Paul’s political theology “eschatology is all” (PFG 1275), Wright affirms that with the Damascus revelation of Christ Jesus, Paul was convinced that God had already judged “the rulers of this age” and the Messiah Jesus had already been installed to rule over the world in fulfillment of Pss 2 and 110 (PFG 1283, 1286). So he regarded the “rulers of this age” as part of the night that was coming to an end, and the old world order under their rule as being already in the process of being dismantled (PFG 1298). This new eschatological perspective amounted to a modification of the second half of the traditional Jewish stance toward the pagan powers: the Messiah was already reigning, the nations and their rulers were now subject to him, and God was even now leading his people in his triumphal procession in the Messiah (2 Cor 2:14; Col 2:15; Rom 8:37) (PFG 1299). Then, as usual, Wright also affirms the “now–but not yet” structure of Paul’s eschatology: Christ was already ruling the world (“now”), but he had yet to subjugate all his enemies under his feet (1 Cor 15:20–28: “not yet”). So, while there was still a “not-yet,” the evil pagan rule was still real. And so the first half of the traditional Jewish stance to the pagan rulers and the Jeremiah-like exhortation (the “Hillelite” position) were still relevant. Hence Paul exhorted Christians,

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as Jeremiah did the exiles, to be good neighbors and good citizens, doing good to all and obeying the governing authorities (Rom 12:14–13:7; Gal 6:10; Phil 1:27; 1 Thess 5:15) (PFG 1279–81 passim). However, with his appreciation of a “now,” Paul modified the traditional stance by “balanc[ing] his command to obey the authorities with a reminder that the night [was] far gone and the day [was] already dawning” (Rom 13:11–14; 1 Thess 5:1–11) (PFG 1298).19 Nevertheless, it is a pity that Wright does not ask why, with his new realized eschatology, Paul could not just ignore the first half of the Jewish tradition and embrace a doctrine of an all-out holy war against Rome (the alleged fourth beast of Dan 7) as bar-Kochba and his followers did. It is likely, as Wright says, that before his conversion Paul held the hardline Pharisaic or “Shammaite” position and therefore did not pay much attention to the first half of the Jewish tradition. But then why did he come to value it so much as to take up the “Hillelite” position after the Damascus revelation? Under Wright’s assumption, is it not more logical to think that Paul’s new realized eschatology would have hardened him in his hardline position against pagan rulers? Wright himself recognizes that “Paul’s viewpoint was closer … to the inaugurated eschatologies of Qumran … and bar-Kochba” (PFG 1280) and that “[realized eschatology] by itself might simply have meant, as barKochba’s followers believed, ‘So the revolution has begun!’” (PFG 1306). Even without a realized eschatology of Paul’s kind or bar-Kochba’s kind, the Maccabees were able to set aside the first half of the Jewish tradition and wage war against Syria. Then how much more could (or rather, should) Paul, with his realized eschatology, have done the same against Rome? When Paul, the hardline Pharisaic anti-imperialist, saw at the Damascus revelation the Messiah Jesus as victor over the Satanic forces and as true ruler of the world, would it not have been more natural for him to conclude that God had at last judged the pagan rulers and therefore their commission by God had expired? And, by extension, would he not have also concluded that they should be destroyed since, despite their defeat, they were not in submission to the Messiah Jesus but rather perpetrating evil and suffering in the world and even persecuting his church? But Wright thinks that Paul’s new eschatological perspective led him instead just to modify the first half of the traditional Jewish stance toward the pagan rulers as shown in Rom 13:1–7, 11–14. However, is it credible that while proclaiming that the Messiah Jesus was now ruling the world and was in the process of mopping up and destroying the defeated “rulers of this age” or Satanic forces in order to bring about what was reserved for the eschatological not-yet (1 Cor 15:20–28), Paul still commanded the Messiah’s people 19

What does Wright exactly mean with this concept of “balancing” here? To relativize submission to the authorities enjoined in Rom 13:1–7? To encourage or discourage it?

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in Rome to honor and obey the (Roman) authorities, whom he allegedly saw as the chief agent of the Satanic forces of sin and death, the fourth beast of Dan 7? Wright himself says that Paul taught that while waiting for the Lord Jesus’s return and transformation of the whole world (not-yet), the Messiah Jesus’s people “must not make the mistake of giving credence to the blasphemous claim of Rome,” the fourth beast of Dan 7, which “the one God is sweeping away” (PFG 1299). But is not honoring and obeying the Roman rulers precisely a way of “giving credence to the blasphemous claim of Rome”? Wright tries to make Rom 13:1–7 harmless by declaring it to be just “an implicit ‘nevertheless’” (PFG 1308). But is it possible to imagine that Paul said to the believers: “‘When you look at the Roman Empire you can glimpse the face of the Monster of Dan 7’ (PFG 1311), whom the Messiah Jesus has already defeated and is in the process of destroying. Nevertheless, the imperial rulers still remain as God’s servants who maintain justice for your good, and so honor and obey them and pay taxes to them”? Thus Wright’s theory in effect attributes to Paul a self-contradiction. It appears that so long as Wright maintains his assumption that Paul saw Rome as the unique agent of the Satanic forces, the Monster of Dan 7, he cannot get away with a mere declaration that there is just an “apparent tension” between 1 Cor 15:20–28 and Rom 13:1–7 (PFG 1280), which can be resolved through an appeal to the twofold Jewish stance to pagan rulers or a theory of eschatological modification of it. Seen under Wright’s assumption, the two passages contradict each other. Of course, Paul could have committed such a selfcontradiction. But before reaching that extreme conclusion, we need to ask why Wright’s assumption should be maintained when it is so clearly contradicted by the Pauline texts themselves such as Rom 13:1–7, which can be coherently explained without that assumption. 3.4 A Holy War against the Satanic Forces with the Weapons of Truth and Love Nevertheless, at least in the following statement, Wright presents the effect of the Damascus revelation of Christ quite properly: Paul did not, however, advocate the normal sort of revolution. There can be little doubt that Saul of Tarsus would have done so, had he stayed in Jerusalem as a hard-line-right-wing Pharisee through the 50s and on into the 60s and its disastrous war. The biggest revolution in his own political thought happened not simply because he believed that the Messiah had now come. That by itself might simply have meant, as bar-Kochba’s followers believed, ‘So the revolution has begun!’ The much larger transformation came with the apocalyptic unveiling of the saving plan of Israel’s God in the form of the crucified Messiah. The eschaton had not simply been inaugurated; it had been reshaped. A different fulfilment; a different kind of victory; a different kind of political theology. (PFG 1306, his italics)

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We have just seen how Wright misuses this correct insight about the realized eschatology to explain Paul’s exhortation to obey the authorities (Rom 13:1– 7). With that problem set aside, we can gladly agree with Wright’s statement above. The revelation of Jesus as the Messiah, God’s Son enthroned, that is, the Lord over the whole world (Rom 1:3–4; Gal 1:12–17), did lead Paul to think: “So the revolution has begun!” However, as Wright expands the above statement elsewhere (PFG 1287–88), the disclosure that the Messiah Jesus had won the victory not by a military campaign but through his crucifixion and resurrection was a revelation that led Paul to redefine the messianic war. This redefinition was also corroborated by the insight that the Satanic forces of sin and death operated behind human rulers as well as idols (and the subsequent knowledge that Jesus had fought those enemies, rather than Rome as such). So Paul came to understand that the messianic war that the Messiah Jesus’s followers had to carry on was not against any human kingdom or even Rome, but the Satanic forces of sin and death (1 Cor 15:20–28; Eph 6:12),20 and that the armor required was not physical sword and spear but “truth as a belt, justice as a breastplate, the gospel of peace for shoes, faith for a shield, salvation as a helmet and God’s word as a sword” (Eph 6:10–17; cf. also 2 Cor 6:3–10; 10:3–5; 1 Thess 5:8). In other words, Paul came to understand that the victory which the Messiah’s followers must now implement is not the transfer of ordinary political and military power from one group to another, but the transformation of that power itself into something different altogether … the greatest power … Love. (PFG 1288)21

With such an understanding of the Christian redefinition of the messianic war or holy war, Wright distances himself from R. A. Horsley, N. Elliott,22 etc. who understand it in terms of a real political revolution like the one pursued later by bar-Kochba’s followers (PFG 1273 passim). At the same time, criticizing (wrongly) those like C. Bryan and me23 for pietistically focusing only on the “supernatural and ‘spiritual’ forces” and ignoring “the political reali20

Cf. n16 above. Cf. also PFG 1282, 1298, 1306–7, 1319. 22 E.g., Richard A. Horsley, Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James Scott to Jesus and Paul (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004); Richard A. Horsley, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004); Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008). Actually in this new book Wright distances himself also from his earlier self, presenting a much modified version of the counter-imperial interpretation of Paul that he presented in his numerous earlier writings. 23 Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kim, Christ and Caesar. 21

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ties” (PFG 1273), Wright stresses that it is “through arrogant tyranny” as well as “chaotic anarchy” that the Satanic forces operate (PFG 1288), and that “Paul’s vision of the kingdom, its present reality and future consummation, remained emphatically this-worldly. … It was about the transformation, not the abandonment, of present reality” (PFG 1307). So, according to Wright, we must recognize that instead of pursuing “an apolitical and dehistoricized spirituality” (PFG 1307), Paul sought a real revolution, a real “subversion” of Rome with the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, albeit not the kind of bar-Kochba or a modern Marxist (PFG 1288, 1306–7). Except those who indeed have either a gnostic or a Marxist inclination (PFG 1288), few would disagree with the view that Paul sought to bring about a “subversion,” in the sense of a transformation, of the present reality of “this age/world” or the “crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:15) with his vision of the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus the Lord. However, questions still remain with Wright: Did Paul really think of Rome as the unique agent of the Satanic forces, as the fourth beast of Dan 7? If he did, how did he then concretely try to bring about a subversion or transformation of that present reality created and maintained by it? 3.5 So Wright Turns Paul into the Likeness of John of Revelation Below we shall examine how Wright handles the latter question. For the moment, however, we would like to point out that so long as he insists that Paul viewed Rome as the unique or chief agent of the Satanic forces, the fourth beast of Dan 7, Wright’s above explanation amounts to turning Paul into the likeness of John of Revelation. Having argued that Paul saw Rome as the Monster of Dan 7 in “the language of Revelation” (PFG 1311), Wright himself draws more parallels between Paul and Revelation (PFG 1317–18). He does this in order to justify, contra Barclay’s criticism, his search for many allusions to and echoes of Rome in the Pauline epistles (using R. B. Hays’s criteria)24 even if Rome is not mentioned. However, curiously, Wright fails to see the more important parallels between John of Revelation and the Paul of his own interpretation. First, Wright stresses the “uncanny” parallelism of the narratives between the gospel of the Messiah Jesus and the Roman imperial propaganda as well as the parallelism between the Christological titles and the Roman imperial titles. Second, Wright concludes that therefore the Roman imperial propaganda was a unique parody of the gospel of the Messiah Jesus. Third, Wright insists that Paul saw Rome as the unique or chief agent of the Satanic forces, the fourth 24

Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

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beast of Dan 7. These three aspects of Wright’s interpretation make Paul parallel to John, who 1) presents Caesar as the fourth beast of Dan 7, the chief agent of Satan the Dragon; 2) who also presents Caesar as a blasphemous claimant to divine names and worship and to universal lordship; and 3) who presents Caesar’s gospel of pax romana as a parody of the gospel of the Messiah Jesus (Rev 13; 17). A fourth aspect of Wright’s interpretation is his stress on Paul’s gospel of the Messiah Jesus’s victory over Satan through his crucifixion and resurrection as well as on his new doctrine of the church’s cruciform messianic war against Rome, the Monster, with the weapons of truth and love. This also makes Paul parallel to John, who presents Jesus “the Lion of Judah” as having won his victory over Satan as “the Lamb slaughtered” and raised to God’s throne (Rev 5), and as leading his church as the army of the holy war to win victory over Rome the Beast and his troops by following the Lamb, that is, by faithfully witnessing to his true gospel of God’s kingdom even unto martyrdom (Rev 7, 11, 12, 14, 17, 19–20). Thus, Wright makes Paul a twin of John of Revelation. 3.6 But Paul Is Different from John of Revelation Since both Paul and John preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, there are bound to be some parallels in substance, such as proclaiming the Messiah Jesus’s victory over Satan through his sacrificial death and resurrection and teaching the church to carry out the holy war against the Satanic forces by following his example, that is, by proclaiming his gospel of God’s kingdom in selfsacrificing love. However, there are clear differences between Paul and John of Revelation: whereas John conveys that message in clearly recognizable anti-Roman language and imagery, Paul does not do so. To begin with, Paul does not employ a “coded” language for Rome (on 2 Thess 2:3–10, see below), while John does it so many times and in barely hidden ways: the beast whose mortal wound was healed, 666, a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, the great harlot who is seated upon many waters, Babylon, “the city set upon seven hills, ruling the kings of the earth and welcoming merchants from around the world and so on” (PFG 1317). Thus, with these clearly recognizable codes for Rome, Revelation presents an entirely different situation from that of the Pauline epistles, in which there is no such code, so that Wright has to employ Hays’s method loosely to detect allusions to Rome,25 producing results that do not command an easy consent (see below). Nor can Paul’s scattered employment of various military metaphors (often alongside athletic metaphors) for diverse purposes or targets26 be compared with John’s striking use of them to produce his distinctive form of gospel preaching, namely, 25 26

For criticism, see Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 380. Cf. Victor C. Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 157–64.

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presenting Jesus as “the Lion of Judah,” commanding the twelve legions drawn from the twelve tribes of Israel in the holy war against the “Beast” and his troops and winning the victory. Furthermore, we must note that Revelation presents a clear example of what the inaugurated eschatology of the Messiah Jesus’s victory over Satan and his present reign over the world (chs. 4–5, 12) did to a Jewish Christian preacher of the gospel in the first century who saw Rome/Caesar as the chief agent of Satan, the fourth beast of Dan 7. It made John completely dispense with the first half of the traditional Jewish stance toward pagan rulers and concentrate on presenting the enthroned Messiah as destroying the Roman Empire (and thereby the Satanic trinity), and his church as serving as his army in his holy war. In Revelation there is nothing equivalent to Rom 13:1– 7! In view of what we observed earlier, we will have to say that with this consistent presentation in Revelation, John proved to be a logical and coherent interpreter of the twofold Jewish tradition in the light of the inaugurated eschatology. But then in the face of this clear example of John, should we accept the Paul of Wright’s reconstruction who produces only a muddled and self-contradictory application of the Jewish tradition to Rome, the Monster, in the post-Easter situation? These fundamental differences between the Pauline epistles and Revelation dissuade us from reading out essentially the same kind of anti-Roman polemic in the former as in the latter. Thus, this comparison of Paul with Revelation also makes it difficult to maintain Wright’s assumption that Paul saw the Roman Empire as the chief agent of the Satanic forces, as the fourth beast of Dan 7, as Revelation did. At this point, however, Wright might point to 2 Thess 2:1–12 as showing that Paul did see Caesar as the agent of Satan. There Paul says that before the parousia of the Lord Jesus Christ the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God (vv. 3–4),

that “the coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception” (vv. 9–10), and that “the Lord Jesus will slay [the lawless one] … by his appearing and his coming” (v. 8). Wright argues that since in the first century only the Roman emperor could fit the description of “the man of lawlessness” in vv. 3–4, and since the description was most likely made with Gaius Caligula as a template, Paul was here referring to a future Caesar who would act as Satan’s puppet (PFG 1290–91).

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However, even if we grant a literal interpretation of the description of “the man of lawlessness” and its reference to a Roman emperor,27 the point to be stressed here is that Paul thought of a future Caesar, who would appear only after “he who now restraints [his appearance] … is out of the way” (v. 7). Thus, Paul could have anticipated that a Caesar would appear as “the man of lawlessness” leading the whole world to rebel against God, his order and rule, and that then the Lord Jesus Christ would come to destroy him and judge the world and consummate the salvation of the saints. In other words, Paul could have envisaged a scenario of the eschatological drama taking place in the future, which is broadly similar to the one that John depicts in Revelation. But at the time of writing 2 Thessalonians (probably AD 50), Paul did not see the Caesar of his time as that “man of lawlessness,” whereas John saw the Caesar of his time (probably AD 90s), or the whole emperorship of the Roman Empire, as such, and therein lies the most fundamental difference between Paul and John of Revelation. As we have seen, Wright correctly declares that for Paul’s political theology “eschatology is all” (PFG 1275). We have pointed out that he nevertheless failed to use this insight to interpret Paul’s political theology properly. Here we note the same problem. Yes, for Paul’s political theology, “the key question is, ‘what time is it?’” (PFG 1275). But again Wright is not applying that insight correctly here. For John, it was already the time in which the Caesar, as the agent completely empowered and operated by Satan, was leading the whole world to rebellion against God, so that the Lord Jesus Christ’s coming to destroy him and redeem the world was imminent. For Paul, however, it was not yet the time for that Caesar to be revealed. Therefore, the time was not yet ripe for the Lord Jesus Christ to come. This means that Paul could well have seen that the Caesar of his time –not (or not yet) being that “lawless one,” the exclusive tool of Satan – was still serving God in some ways even if serving Satan in more ways. Hence, Paul could give the exhortations in Rom 13:1–7 and cautiously expect to be released at his forthcoming trial before Caesar (Phil 1:19–26), even while lumping him among “the rulers of this age/world,” the doomed opponents of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor 2:6–8). Certainly Paul was well aware, and sometimes even critical (e.g., 1 Cor 2:6–8; 6:1; 8:5; Phil 2:15; 1 Thess 5:3), of the negative side of the Roman Empire, the ultimately sham nature of its propaganda and the wickedness of its idolatry, oppression, injustice, corruption, etc. He had to bear these Satanic evils and sufferings in his own body and had to exhort Christians to persevere with them patiently during the short interim period before Christ’s parousia with the hope for the consummation of the salvation that they had already obtained in Christ (Rom 5:3–5; 8:18–39; 1 Cor 7:29–31; Phil 1:27–30; 27

A metaphorical interpretation is also possible: e.g., I. Howard Marshall, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, NCBC (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1983), 191–92.

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1 Thess 5:8–11; etc.). Yet he spoke about the (current Roman) rulers as God’s servants appointed by God to maintain order and justice in the society (Rom 13:1–4). Apparently Paul had here in view the Roman Empire’s political unity and security, social order, relatively fairer justice system for the ancient world, etc. Given his overwhelming sense of apostolic call, it is understandable that he appreciated them, despite all their imperfection (1 Cor 6:1; 1 Thess 5:3!), still as signs of the imperial rulers’ obedience to God’s kingship, especially since those features were facilitating his worldwide mission. Therefore, we may presume that believing that he had to complete his apostolic mission of bringing all the nations to “the obedience of faith” in the Lord Jesus Christ or bringing “the full number of the Gentiles” into God’s kingdom (Rom 1:3–6; 11:25–26; 15:18; 16:25–26) during the short period (1 Cor 7:29, 31) remaining before the revelation of that Caesar, the complete tool of Satan, and the parousia of the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul was more ready (than he otherwise might have been) to appreciate the positive side of the Roman Empire, pax romana, as it provided a necessary physical condition for his worldwide mission. Thus, Wright’s assumption that Paul saw Caesar or the Roman Empire (of his time) as the chief agent of Satan, the fourth monster of Dan 7, and Wright’s ensuing attempt to present Paul’s gospel as having a counter-Roman character similar to Revelation’s are not convincing.

4. Wright’s Interpretation of Some Epistles 4.1 1 Thessalonians 4–5 For Wright, the “clear and ‘apocalyptic’ reference to Rome” in 2 Thess 2:1– 12 supports his seeing a similar reference to Rome in 1 Thess 4:13–5:11, specifically in presenting Jesus’s parousia as an “upstaging of Caesar’s parousia” and in dismissing the Roman boast of “peace and security” (5:3). So, according to Wright, as Paul refers in 2 Thess 2 to “the blasphemous boasts of the Roman emperors,” in 1 Thess 5 he refers dismissively to “the imperial boast of protection” (PFG 1291–92). It is reasonable to see that by using the vocabulary παρουσία/ἀπάντησις in 1 Thess 4:13–18 Paul was conjuring up the pompous ritual of an emperor’s or other high official’s visit to a city in order to present the Lord Jesus’s eschatological coming in a majestic way, and that in the dismissive reference to the slogan of “peace and security”28 in 1 Thess 5:3 Paul was warning the Thessa28 E.g., Jeff A. D. Weima, “‘Peace and Security’ (1 Thess 5.3): Prophetic Warning or Political Propaganda?” NTS 58 (2012): 331–59; but cf. also Joel R. White, “‘Peace and Security’ (1 Thessalonians 5.3): Is It Really a Roman Slogan?” NTS 59 (2013): 382–95;

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lonians against buying that vain Roman propaganda and falling into complacency and conformity to the Roman world. However, can we see here a more active or serious counter-imperial intent of “subverting” the Roman Empire? If Paul meant to depict the Lord Jesus’s parousia really as an upstaging of the parousia of Caesar in 1 Thess 4:13–18, Paul was intimating that Caesar was a parody of the real Kyrios Jesus, and Caesar’s parousia was a mere parody of the real Kyrios Jesus’s parousia. This may be seen as naturally expected of Paul, if he was so conscious of Caesar and the Roman imperial propaganda being a parody of the Lord Jesus Christ and his gospel, as Wright insists. But then why did Paul fail to make that point clear in 1 Thess 5:1–11 while actually doing what he rarely did elsewhere – that is, referring explicitly to what could be regarded as an expression of Caesar’s “gospel,” namely, “peace and security”? Why didn’t Paul declare there that Caesar’s “peace and security” was just a parody of the real peace and security that the Lord Jesus Christ would bring? Why did Paul leave the whole category of “peace and security” as soon as he mentioned it and instead present Christ’s salvation in terms of the resurrection life (4:13–18) and redemption from God’s wrath (5:9–10; also 1:10; 3:12–13)?29 Had Paul intended to subvert Rome by contrasting Christ with Caesar in 4:13–5:11, would he not have connected his criticism of Roman “peace and security” directly with his description of the Lord Jesus’s parousia in the first half of the apocalyptic section (4:13–18)? But why did he connect that description with the resurrection of the dead and our being with the Lord Jesus, while connecting his criticism of Roman “peace and security” with redemption from God’s wrath (5:1–11)? Here, then, seeking to compare Christ’s benefits with Caesar’s benefits, did Paul end up comparing apples with oranges? If Paul had really thought of Caesar in 4:13–18, would he not have at least alluded to his impotence with regard to death or even to his being a bringer of death (PFG 1311), while affirming Christ as the bringer of the resurrection life? All these considerations make us wonder whether in 1 Thess 4:13–5:11 Paul was really polemicizing against Caesar and his false gospel. They rather lead us to conclude that being concerned to proclaim Christ’s salvation (the redemption from God’s wrath and the resurrection life)30 that transcended far beyond the “salvation” that Caesar boasted of bringing, Paul did not bother to compare Christ with Caesar except in warning the believers not to lose Joel R. White, “Peace’ and ‘Security’ (1 Thess 5.3): Roman Ideology and Greek Aspiration,” NTS 60 (2014): 499–510. 29 Cf. the questionable attempt of Heilig, Hidden Criticisms?, 129–36, to answer this question by arguing that counter-imperial criticism was not Paul’s “primary intention” in his epistles but something that he wanted only to imply in the subtext. 30 This proclamation of Paul is consistent with his understanding of (sin and) death as “the last enemy” that Christ was to destroy in his parousia (1 Cor 15:20–28, 54–56; Rom 5–8).

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Christ’s salvation by failing to stay awake in faith through being complacent in the supposed peaceful and secure life of the Roman world. Above we have noted that, like Barclay, Wright also thinks that Paul’s disregard of Caesar’s claim to deity and his relegation of him as a mere agent of the Satanic or divine “powers” amounts to a real anti-imperial act on his part. If in 1 Thess 4–5 we have to find anti-imperialism, we can find only that kind – not the kind that Wright and other anti-imperialist interpreters suggest. For Paul’s presentation of Christ’s salvation in an entirely different category from that of Caesar’s “salvation” (“peace and security”) and his refusal even to compare it as superior to Caesar’s may be said to amount to an “anti-imperial act” of simply ignoring Caesar and his empire or regarding them as not even worthy of a negative comparison with Christ and his kingdom. The same point can be observed in other Pauline epistles as well. 4.2 Philippians Wright has a field day with the hymn in Phil 2:6–11, arguing that it is “telling the story of Jesus so that it echoes and upstages the story of Caesar” (PFG 1294), and almost every detail, especially in vv. 9–11, sets Christ over against Caesar to declare him as the true Kyrios and Savior who is to receive the universal submission and homage (PFG 1294–95). Naturally linking Phil 3:20–21 with this hymn, Wright argues that there again Paul is presenting Christ’s coming from heaven as the savior to echo and upstage Caesar’s coming from Rome to rescue a beleaguered colony (PFG 1292–93). He backs up this interpretation by referring to the history of Philippi having been one of the key battle sites of the Roman civil war. As the victor of that war, Augustus claimed to have brought the whole world peace and prosperity, and hence he and his successors were acclaimed as “savior” and “lord.” The Philippians were constantly reminded of the blessings of Caesar’s empire by statues, temples, coins, inscriptions, festivals, etc. Wright argues that hearing within that “echo chamber” what Paul had to say in Philippians, the Philippian believers could not help but understand it in reference to Caesar and his empire (PFG 1292–93). So they would have understood Paul as saying not only that Jesus was the true “savior,” “lord,” and “Christos, the Messiah, the Jewish king destined to be lord of the whole world” (PFG 1293), but also that their citizenship (πολίτευµα) was not of “the merely earthly [city or kingdom],” but of the heavenly one that was “destined to come into being on earth as in heaven” (PFG 1293). Then, finding it interesting that in the immediate sequel to Phil 2:6–11 Paul urges the Philippian believers to “work at bringing about your own salvation” (2:12; Wright’s rendering), Wright interprets the exhortation to mean that the Philippian believers in Jesus as the true Lord and Savior had “the task of working out, in the practical details of everyday life within Caesar’s world,

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what it would mean … to explore the sōteria which Jesus offered instead” (PFG 1295). For this, according to Wright, Paul gave “some pointers” in Phil 3, trusting that God who was at work among them (2:13) would help them figure out “their own variety of ‘salvation’” as well as “their own variety of politeuma, ‘citizenship’” (PFG 1295). For Wright, the “pointers” that Paul gave in Phil 3 consisted in urging them to surrender their privileges as Roman subjects (3:18–21), imitating his giving up his own Jewish privileges (3:4– 16) as well as Christ’s surrender of his divine privileges (2:6–11) (PFG 1295–97). Then, in reference to Phil 3:1b, Wright claims that Paul gave just these “pointers” (in code, PFG 1314–17) for them to work out “‘their own salvation’ for themselves” from there because it would “be safer to make such a hint than to write a letter explaining in detail precisely what he thinks about the blasphemous claims of Caesar” (PFG 1297, 1315). Since it is reasonable to suppose the existence in Philippi of the “echo chamber” that Wright talks about, we need not deny that the Philippians could have heard echoes of Caesar in what Paul wrote in Philippians.31 However, we need to question whether thereby Paul was intending to subvert Caesar’s claims and shake the Philippians’ allegiance to his rule, as Wright suggests. To begin with, Wright’s interpretation of Phil 3 is full of difficulties. It is not just his idiosyncratic taking of the word “safe” (ἀσφαλής, 3:1b) 32 and connecting of ch. 3 with 2:12. More seriously, it is difficult to understand why Paul might have seen it politically more dangerous to advise the Philippian believers to surrender their privileges as Roman subjects than to present Jesus as the true Lord and Savior, countering “the blasphemous claims of Caesar” (2:6–11; 3:20–21), so that he had to put the former in coded language for the safety of his readers while declaring the latter so clearly that anybody who did not have deaf ears might hear, as Wright claims (PFG 1293). Wright says that not only for his readers’ safety but also for the letter’s brevity Paul could do no more than provide some “pointers” or “suggestions” (PFG 1295). But Phil 3 is a long enough space in which he could have provided a clear explanation about “their own variety of ‘salvation,’” instead of making those “pointers” as “a kind of sustained hint” about it (PFG 1296; italics added).33 It is a pity that, with only some “pointers” or “hints” but no clear explanation, the shape of the Philippians’ “own variety of ‘salvation’” still remains hazy to us even after Wright’s decoding of them. Would it have been 31

Pace Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 379. If Wright’s interpretation is correct, by choosing the all-revealing word “safe” to signal to his converts his “coded” message to follow, Paul foolishly alerted suspicious readers to investigate it! 33 Does Paul clearly explain to the Roman and Corinthian Christians “their own variety of ‘salvation’” in his much longer epistles to them? 32

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connected with the “transformation of [their] lowly body to be like his glorious body” that Paul said Christ Jesus the Lord and Savior would bring at his parousia? If it was, in what way? Nevertheless, Wright is making Paul a most erratic person: Having all but openly challenged Caesar as a fake lord and savior, a mere parody of the real Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2:6–11), he sought to hide his counter-imperial message in a coded language (3:1–17) but then turned again to mocking Caesar and his “salvation” unmistakably clearly! (3:18–21). If in 2:6–11 and 3:20–21 Paul had really meant deliberately to challenge Caesar in proclaiming the Messiah Jesus as the true Lord and Savior of the whole world, he must have been not just erratic but even lunatic. For he wrote that letter in a prison under the Praetorian Guard’s watchful eyes (1:13), waiting for a trial before Caesar and hoping to be acquitted and set free (1:19–26). By disclosing that the Praetorian Guard believed in his innocence of a political crime (1:13) and that he had won over some members of Caesar’s household with his gospel of Jesus the Lord and Savior (4:22), Paul was increasing Caesar’s alarm about his suspicious activities and endangering the safety of those two groups too! Or did Paul believe that Caesar and other Roman officials all had the kind of deaf ears that Wright is attributing to the critics of his counter-imperial interpretation (PFG 1293), while Christians in Philippi, Thessalonica, and elsewhere had “the ears to hear” (cf. esp. PFG 1315)?34 As we have seen, Wright stresses the history and nature of Philippi as a Roman colony to support his counter-imperial interpretation of Philippians. But strangely, he ignores those actual circumstances in which Paul wrote the epistle. Wright argues that “Paul would not have faced riots, imprisonment and the threat of death,” had he just taught “an apolitical and dehistoricized spirituality” (PFG 1307). Certainly some of those troubles could well have been caused by a suspicion of his gospel being not just religiously and culturally unacceptable but also politically subversive, as Luke well illustrates in Acts 17:1–9. But curiously Wright never considers the fact that Paul was set free from all those situations up to the moment of writing 2 Cor 11:23 (cf. 1 Thess 2:2; 2 Cor 1:8–10) and was now hoping to be released at the trial before Caesar again (Phil 1:19–26). Would it have been possible for the Roman and local officials to acquit and release Paul if they had found that his “gospel” was as counter-imperial as Wright insists it was? Would they not 34 Cf. Lynn H. Cohick, “Philippians and Empire,” in Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies, ed. Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 175–77. It is a serious flaw of Joseph D. Fantin, The Lord of the Entire World: Lord Jesus, a Challenge to Lord Caesar? (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), 219–66, to argue for the anti-imperial nature of the confession of Jesus’s Lordship in 1 Cor 8:5–6; Eph 4:5; 1 Cor 12:3; Rom 10:9; and Phil 2:11 by taking those passages out of their epistolary contexts and without considering the sort of concerns raised in this and the following paragraphs (pace his argument in 259–65).

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have rather turned him over to a slave market or even put him to death for treason and crack down on his churches? The fact of the matter is that, as in 1 Thess 4:13–5:11, so also in Phil 3:20– 21, Paul defined the salvation that the Lord Jesus Christ would bring, not as something comparable to Caesar’s salvation, such as peace and prosperity, but as something categorically different, as the “transformation of our lowly body to be like his glorious body.” Thus, even while presenting Christ’s parousia in a form that evoked Caesar’s majestic parousia, Paul was in fact discouraging his readers from understanding Christ in terms of Caesar. For by this striking definition of Christ’s salvation, Paul was meaning that the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ would give us a glorious resurrection body like his own (cf. 1 Cor 15:44, 51–53) and thus make us become like himself, who was in “the form of God” and was “the image of God” (Phil 2:6–11; 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15), so that we might become like God and participate in his glory (cf. Rom 8:29; 1 Cor 15:49; 2 Cor 3:18; Col 3:10). Here it is easy to imagine that some Greco-Roman hearers scorned Paul for teaching “Jewish religious nonsense” (cf. 1 Cor 1:18; 15:35; Acts 17:32; 26:24), but it is hard to see how anybody could have taken Paul as challenging Caesar or subverting the Roman Empire with such a teaching.35 Clearly the members of Caesar’s household who are mentioned in Phil 4:22 did not take Paul that way, and so they embraced his gospel. Apparently even the Praetorian Guard in Paul’s place of imprisonment did not see any problem with his gospel (Phil 1:12–14).36 Therefore, even while presenting Jesus in a majestic way with the language and imagery drawn from Roman imperial rituals as well as from Jewish tradition, Paul was cautiously hopeful that he would be acquitted by Caesar’s tribunal if he explained the real nature of Christ Jesus’s rule and salvation. Paul certainly knew that the Lord Jesus’s rule through the Holy Spirit had not only (so-called) spiritual effects but also political effects (cf. Phil 1:27; see below), but he did not see them as subversive to the Roman Empire in such a way as to antagonize its rulers.

35

Cf. C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 2:xlviii. 36 Note how innocently Paul speaks of the Praetorian Guard’s and others’ knowledge of his imprisonment as having happened “on account of Christ” and counts it positively as something that served the advance of the gospel. Had Paul loaded his gospel of Christ with a counter-imperial meaning as Wright and others insist, wouldn’t he have rather feared that the Praetorian Guard’s having that knowledge would endanger the safety of himself and his converts and hurt the advance of the gospel? And how could “most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord” because of his imprisonment and become “much more bold” to preach the gospel “without fear”?

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4.3 1 Corinthians Wright does not give 1 Corinthians a separate treatment as he does 1–2 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Romans. Nevertheless, 1 Cor 2:6–8; 8:5–6; and 15:20–28, 51–57 (cf. also 2 Cor 2:14) play an important role in his counterimperial interpretation of Paul’s gospel. From Paul’s statement in 2:6–8, Wright infers that we should take Paul’s references to “powers” or “rulers” not merely in terms of “spiritual” forces but rather in terms of the interplay between human “powers” and non-human “powers” – that is, as presupposing the worldview that, just as demons are at work behind and within the pagan “deities,” so also the “power of unseen forces [operate] behind and within the actual humans who wield power” (PFG 1284–85). So, in 1 Cor 15:20–28, Wright recognizes that, in line with this worldview, Paul was stressing that Christ Jesus God’s Son was to destroy not “Babylon, or Syria, or even Rome, but ‘sin’ and ‘death’ themselves” with God’s kingship delegated to him (PFG 1287). However, Wright immediately turns around and argues that saying “it isn’t empires that destroy human life, it’s the demons that stand behind them,” is as wrong as saying “it isn’t guns that kill people, it’s people that kill people,” and urges that we should therefore recognize that “dark forces operate through arrogant tyranny” (PFG 1288). Then Wright contends that Paul saw “[the demonic] powers [particularly ‘death’] coming together and doing their worst precisely in and through Rome itself” so that “when he looked at the Roman empire he glimpsed the face of the Monster,” the fourth beast of Dan 7 (PFG 1311). If so, when in 1 Cor 15:24–26 Paul speaks about Christ Jesus destroying “every rule and every authority and power” and “death” as “the last enemy” in his parousia, does he have Rome, the chief agent of these forces, especially in mind as Revelation does (cf. Rev 19:11–20:15)? In the long chapter of 1 Cor 15, he does not appear to be suggesting it in any way. Instead, when he comes to elaborate on the point of v. 26 later in vv. 54–57, he relates “death” to “sin” and “the law,” giving the impression that his thought is moving in the Jewish theological world rather than in the Roman political world, an impression that is further strengthened in Rom 7, which could well be seen as an unfolding of 1 Cor 15:54–57. It is reasonable to think that in 1 Cor 2:6–8 Paul quite consciously includes the Roman regime among “the rulers of this age” who crucified Jesus, and that in his reference to “many gods and many lords” “in heaven or on earth” (8:5), Paul includes Caesars venerated with such titles. So, then, what does Paul make of that consciousness in 1 Corinthians? What does Paul ask the Corinthian believers to do with Rome? Perhaps in 1 Cor 8–10 Paul implicitly includes the imperial cult in his warning about heathen idolatry in general. Otherwise, we find Paul exhorting them to do no more than this: Do not follow “this (Rome-dominated) world’s” wisdom, their ethos, or their idolatrous, self-seeking, and corrupt way of life as it

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is demonic and sinful, but live a life of faith, love, and hope, or pursue truth, righteousness, holiness, love, humility, communal peace, etc. This exhortation is the same as that which he imparts to the Philippians, the Thessalonians, and others (cf. Eph 6:10–20) and succinctly summarizes in Rom 12:1–2. How “subversive” was it to the Roman Empire, then? Is it proper to designate it as “counter-imperial”? 4.4 Romans Wright takes the inclusio between Rom 1:3–6 and 15:7–12 as one of the clearest signs of Paul’s counter-imperial gospel (PFG 1299–1301). In the opening section of his letter to the Romans, Paul defines the “gospel” as concerning “God’s Son,” who, in fulfillment of the promises of 2 Sam 7:12–14; Pss 2:7; 110:1; etc., was incarnate as the “seed of David” and raised from the dead and installed as “the Son of God” with God’s sovereign power invested, that is, as the “Lord” over all. And Paul identifies himself as an apostle of this Lord Jesus, who was commissioned to proclaim this gospel and bring all the nations to “the obedience of faith” to him. Wright sees that with this gospel Paul is countering Caesar Augustus and his successors, to whom similar titles and claims are attributed. Then, seeing that Paul concludes Romans by celebrating the fulfillment in the Messiah Jesus of God’s promises to the patriarchs of Israel and the prophecies about the nations also finding God’s mercy under the rule of “the root of Jesse” (Isa 11:10; etc.), Wright suggests that we should see Paul developing in the body of Romans this main theme announced in the inclusio, echoing the claims of Rome to have brought salvation to the world – justice, peace, and a golden age of prosperity: The ‘gospel’ of the ‘son of God’ provides apocalyptic unveiling of the divine justice, through which salvation comes to all who believe (1:16–17); this results in ‘peace’ (5:1), and in the ultimate new world when the whole creation will be set free from its slavery to corruption (8:19–21). (PFG 1301)

So in Romans, Paul is to be seen as “deliberately outflanking the ‘gospel’ of the emperor with the gospel of Jesus” (PFG 1301). To confirm this thesis, however, Wright will have to resolve convincingly the problem that Barclay raises: Paul never places the terms ‘good news’, ‘salvation’, or ‘faith/loyalty’ in antithesis with a Roman form of the same; the righteousness/justice of God is contrasted with that of the Torah, not of Rome.37

Furthermore, we will also need to consider the fact that in Romans Paul uses righteousness/justice/justification terminology mainly in reference to the God-human relationship with a view to God’s judgment, and he uses the 37

Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 379.

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concept of “peace,” if not in the Jewish sense of shalom (a state of overall well-being), likewise chiefly in reference to the God-human relationship and in association with “reconciliation” (Rom 5:1–11; 8:6; Eph 2:11–22; 6:15; cf. also 2 Cor 5:18–21). Sometimes he also applies both concepts to the relationships between people or social groups. He does so, however, only in the senses of behaving properly toward neighbors and living in harmony with them (Rom 6:16; 14:17–19; 2 Cor 6:14; Gal 5:22; Eph 2:11–22; 4:3; 6:14; Phil 4:2–9), but not in the political senses that evoke the Roman imperial propaganda of providing justice and peace to the world.38 Wright struggles to fit Rom 13:1–7 into his overall assessment of Romans as having a counter-Roman intent. So, first of all, he tries to diminish its relevance to the current discussion by stating: “This passage is not a comment on specifically Roman rule … It is a classic piece of Jewish writing about how to live wisely under alien rule” (PFG 1302–3). This is a surprising assertion from one who insists that not “this world” or its “rulers” in general, but specifically Rome, the fourth empire of Dan 7, was a target of Paul’s implied polemic in his gospel preaching, and who, chiding his critics for being ahistorical, argues to see Caesar lurking behind Paul’s mere use of the parousia language for the Lord Jesus’s coming, as well as his bare mention of “peace and security” in 1 Thess 4:13–5:11. Certainly the Roman readers of Romans would not have seen the passage 13:1–7 just as a “classic” statement about a Jewish tradition but as very concrete and relevant advice for their actual dealings with their rulers. Secondly, in order to render Rom 13:1–7 harmless, Wright argues that Paul’s statement about the rulers being servants of God really amounts to their demotion (PFG 1303). But Paul makes that statement positively to support his main point that Christians should honor and obey them! Then, thirdly, Wright stresses that Rom 13:1–7 should be seen in the context of Paul’s prohibition of “private vengeance” in 12:19 and his statement of realized eschatology in 13:11–14, or in the context of the whole of Rom 12–15 (PFG 1303–4). Certainly Rom 13:1–7 should be seen as an extended application of the teaching that Paul imparts to the Romans from 12:9 onward, to live in harmony with all people by practicing humility and love, even enemy love. However, it is unmistakable that in 13:1–7 Paul goes out of his way to stress the readers’ duty to honor and obey their rulers. And for a supposedly “classic” statement of the twofold Jewish tradition about pagan rulers, Paul stresses the rulers’ positive exercise of their powers for order and justice as servants of God far too one-sidedly, even to the total neglect of the other side of that tradition – namely, the idea that God would eventually judge the rulers for their failure to carry out their God-given functions 38

For all this, cf. Kim, Christ and Caesar, 16–21. Cf. G. Schrenk, “δικαιοσύνη,” TDNT 2:210; W. Foerster, “εἰρήνη,” TDNT 2:411–18.

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properly. As seen above, Wright repeatedly emphasizes that Paul modified this second aspect of the Jewish tradition in the light of his realized eschatology and affirmed that God had already judged the rulers through the Messiah Jesus’s death and resurrection and that God would destroy them at the parousia of the Lord Jesus. Then is it not rather strange that even referring to the realized or inaugurated eschatology in the subsequent passage of Rom 13:11– 14, Paul does not reflect that idea at all? For example, Paul does not say there that since “the day” is dawning, God would soon fulfill his pledge in Deut 32:35 cited in Rom 12:19 and avenge those who are suffering from the injustice and oppression of the rulers (and that therefore the readers are not to resist evil rulers but to persevere with and obey them for the moment). In 13:11–14, without any such idea, Paul imparts only a general teaching that as those who belong to “the day,” Christians must “conduct themselves becomingly” in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ, shunning a sinful life that the flesh dictates (cf. 1:18–32). Thus, it is rather strange that Wright apparently sees Paul as supporting his command in Rom 13:1–7 with that teaching in 13:11–14 (PFG 1303–4).39 To us, it appears best to see in Rom 13:1–7 that Paul did not present an academic statement on the Jewish tradition about pagan rulers or Christian view of the state, but he instead imparted a teaching immediately relevant to the Roman Christians: In view of some specific political and social problems that they were facing at that time, Paul was trying to dissuade them from joining some movements of civil disobedience or even rebellion. Because of this limited and specific purpose, in the passage Paul highlighted only the positive side of the Roman rulers, passing quietly over their negative side, which he often experienced himself and even criticized sometimes (e.g., 1 Cor 6:1; 1 Thess 5:3). Even so, it cannot be denied that his very positive evaluation of the Roman rulers in the passage reveals his underlying appreciation of the order and justice of the Roman Empire. Apparently, in spite of all their imperfection, Paul thought that they were far better than anarchy and chaos. Therefore, Rom 13:1–7 remains a stumbling block to any serious counterimperial interpreter of Paul.40 All these considerations make it quite uncertain how much Paul really unfolded his gospel of Christ Jesus in Romans with an intent to counter the false “gospel” of Caesar. Thus, Wright’s counter-imperial interpretation of the Pauline epistles is not convincing. Further, Wright has also their Wirkungsgeschichte to contend with: He has to explain how what he in the twenty-first century finds so clearly and critically attested in those epistles was apparently missed by Paul’s hearers and readers who actually lived under the Roman imperial rule – his Christian friends such as the members of Caesar’s 39 40

Cf. n19 above. For all these, see Kim, Christ and Caesar, 36–43.

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household (Phil 4:22) and Erastus, the city treasurer (Rom 16:23); his theological heirs like the authors of the Pastorals (cf. 1 Tim 2:1–2; Tit 3:1; 1 Pet 2:13–17) and Clement and Tertullian, who lived in the periods in which the pressure of the imperial cult and hostility to Christianity were increasing; and even the guardians of the Roman imperial order such as the Praetorian Guard who watched him in prison (Phil 1:12–13) and the officials who released him after imprisonment at different cities (cf. 2 Cor 1:8–10; 11:23; 1 Thess 2:2). Should we not conclude that Paul’s audience of the first century did not find a counter-imperial message in his preaching and writings because there was none to find?41

5. The Rule of the Messiah Jesus, Justification, and “a United and Holy/Righteous Community” Another test of whether Paul was a counter-imperial theologian, and if he was, exactly in what sense he was, could be to examine what Paul taught Christians to do toward Rome. Our survey above of the Pauline epistles has yielded the following: Do not trust in the Roman “gospel” of “peace and security” (1 Thess 4–5), and do not participate in idolatry including the imperial cult (1 Cor 8–10). To these, Wright would add a couple of more disputable points: Do not follow the wisdom or ethos of “this (Rome-dominated) 41

Cf. Kim, Christ and Caesar, 60–64; also Barclay, “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul,” 378; Gordon L. Heath, “The Church Fathers and the Roman Empire,” in Empire in the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, McMaster Divinity College Press New Testament Study Series 10 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 258–82. Wright (PFG 1313–14) counters this argument with the case of Polycarp refusing to “revile Christ” and confess “Caesar is lord” and “swear” by his “genius” at the trial before his martyrdom (Mart. Pol. 8.2; 9.2–3; 10.1). No doubt, many martyrs in the early church followed Polycarp’s example to their death when they were put to the same kind of ultimate test. Even the Jews like Philo and Josephus would have behaved in a similar way if they had been forced to do the same with regard to their Yahweh-Kyrios. But this does not prove that Polycarp and other martyrs understood the gospel as “subversive” to the Roman Empire and viewed the latter as an object to “subvert.” Did Philo and Josephus understand their loyalty to Yahweh-Kyrios as “subversive” to the Roman Empire? On the contrary, while refusing to vow to the imperial cult, Polycarp is said to have offered to explain to the proconsul “the doctrine of Christianity,” saying that “we have been taught to pay proper respect to rulers and authorities appointed by God, as long as it does us no harm” (Mart. Pol. 10.2) – obviously alluding to the tradition of Rom 13:1–7. Didn’t Philo and Josephus in fact do exactly the same thing with regard to Judaism as what Polycarp was proposing to do with regard to Christianity? Tertullian is a good example of those who were adamant against the imperial cult but were still loyal to Caesar and his empire. It is reasonable to believe that Paul’s Christian friends and theological heirs had the same stance toward the Roman Empire and the imperial cult.

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world” and their self-seeking and corrupt way of life (1 Corinthians; Phil 2– 3; Rom 12:1–2; etc.), and surrender your privileges as Roman subjects in order to be loyal to Jesus the true Lord (Phil 3). Quite apart from Rom 13:1– 7, these few negative teachings appear quite meager for a theologian who is alleged to have employed such a sustained and powerful polemic against Rome, the fourth beast of Dan 7. In connection with Rom 15:12 (along with 1:1–6), Wright observes that as an apostle “Paul was there to announce [the Messiah Jesus’s rule over the nations] and to make it a reality” (PFG 1281). Elsewhere, he stresses that “Paul’s vision of the kingdom [of God and the Messiah], its present reality and future consummation, remained emphatically this-worldly. … It was about the transformation, not the abandonment, of present [earthly] reality” (PFG 1307). And still at other places he states that the church of the Lord Jesus as “a united and holy community of love” was a demonstration of the Messiah’s present rule, and as such it issued a challenge to the whole world, especially to Rome (PFG 1277–78, 1299). Therefore, Wright might want us to consider not just the few negative exhortations above, but Paul’s whole paraenesis for building up that community as essentially having a counterimperial dimension. However, Wright does not explain how the Messiah Jesus’s rule actually takes place at present and how the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus the Messiah brings about the “transformation” of the present reality, issuing a challenge to the Roman Empire. So he explains even “the united and holy community of the Messiah Jesus” without any reference to the Lord Jesus’s present rule (PFG 384–450; cf. also 912–1042). This is rather strange of Wright, who insists on Paul’s use of Χριστός in its messianic sense, rendering the title regularly with “Messiah” and often also with “King” (PFG 815– 911), and who repeatedly stresses the Messiah Jesus’s present rule and its counter-imperial character. This unexpected thing happens because Wright concentrates on interpreting Jesus’s Messiahship in terms of his fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham or the covenant purpose for which God called him (Gen 12:2–3; 18:18–19; 22:18) (PFG 815–911). So Wright explains even the people of God and the Messiah or “the united and holy community” in reference only to this sense of Jesus’s Messiahship, but not to his kingly rule. Thus Wright makes little use of the category of the kingly reign of Jesus as the Messiah outside the context of setting Jesus over against Caesar. And even in that context (PFG 1271–1319), he uses it only to assert that Jesus is the Messianic king. Wright repeatedly refers to Rom 1:3–4; 1 Cor 15:20–28, and other similar texts in order to assert the counter-imperial character of Paul’s gospel, but he has little discussion as to how the Messiah Jesus, God’s Son, is actually exercising God’s kingship on his behalf in this world and destroying the evil forces at present in order to bring the whole creation under God’s kingship and establish the universal shalom (cf. also Rom 16:20).

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While insisting that with the gospel of justice, peace, and salvation in Jesus the Messiah, God’s Son and the Lord, Paul directly challenges the Roman “gospel” of justice, peace, and salvation secured by Caesar, god’s son and the lord, Wright provides little explanation as to how Jesus the Messianic King and Lord actually rules over the believers and the nations and brings about justice, peace, and salvation at present. He emphasizes the inclusio of Rom 1:3–6/15:7–12 and the unity between the two definitions of the gospel in Rom 1:3–4 and Rom 1:16–17, asserting that they lead us to see the whole epistle of Romans as having a counterimperial character (PFG 916, 1300–1). Yet he sees Paul affirming with them only that God has faithfully fulfilled through the Messiah Jesus his promises to Abraham so that Jews and Gentiles are united under the rule of the Messiah Jesus; and this view leads Wright to interpret Paul’s gospel of justification in the body of Romans only in terms of making Jews and Gentiles members of Abraham’s family (PFG 925–1042).42 Wright misses that Paul’s interpretation of the gospel of the kingdom of God and his Son, Jesus the Lord (Rom 1:3–4) in terms of the justification of Jews and Gentiles in 1:16–17 and throughout the main body of Romans43 reveals that Paul’s gospel of justification has an apocalyptic framework of God’s kingdom overcoming the kingdom of Satan. Therefore, justification (declaration as righteous) does not merely mean acquittal at the last judgment or an abstract sense of granting the status of righteous or recognizing someone as righteous. Rather, it means making a real righteous person by the creative divine word of declaration – a person who is in right relationship with God, one who has been forgiven of sins committed under Satan’s kingship, and restored to God’s kingdom.44 So justification is to bring both Jews and 42

So still the limitation of his “New Perspective” seems to remain with Wright in spite of his attempt to develop it into a new, more comprehensive “Fresh Perspective” (cf. N. T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005]; PFG). 43 Note esp. Rom 8:31–39, where Paul presents the redemption by the Messiah Jesus God’s Son in terms of justification at the last judgment through his atonement on the cross (8:1–4, 32) and intercession at the right hand of God (8:34), making it the final victory of the Messiah Jesus God’s Son over the Satanic forces. Thus in 8:31–39 Paul’s exposition of the gospel of the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus reaches an initial climax, forming an inclusion with his introduction of it in 1:3–4, 16–17. Cf. also 1 Cor 15:20–28, 50–57; Col 1:13–14 and 2:8–15; Phil 2:6–11 and 3:20–21; 1 Thess 1:10 (cf. 3:12–13; 5:9–10); Gal 1:3–4, where the gospel of the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus is interpreted in terms of redemption from the powers of sin and death, i.e., justification, as in Rom 1:3–4, 16–17 and 8:31–39. Note also how in Rom 6 Paul maintains the unified view of the kingdom gospel (Rom 1:3–4) and the justification gospel (Rom 1:16–17), or the apocalyptic framework of the justification doctrine, in his talk of “kingship/lordship” of sin and “serving/obeying” sin vs. “serving/obeying” righteousness. 44 So justification is a Lordship change, as stressed by Ernst Käsemann, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul,” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress,

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Gentiles, indeed all the nations, which have been estranged from God the creator and fallen to the Satanic reign of sin and death (1:18–3:20), back to God, to his reign of righteousness and life. It is to make them render “the obedience of faith” to God’s Son Jesus the Lord, who has been entrusted with God’s kingly power (1:3–6), and thus ultimately to render “the obedience of faith” to God the Father himself (16:26). That is why, having started Romans with an announcement of the gospel of Jesus the Davidic Messiah as having been installed as God’s Son to rule over all the nations (1:3–6), and having gone on to expound its meaning in terms of God’s justification of sinful, fallen Jews and Gentiles in the main body, Paul concludes the epistle with a celebration of both Jews and Gentiles coming to receive salvation and to praise God under the rule of Jesus the Davidic Messiah (15:7–12). Wright’s failure to interpret justification in terms of a restoration to the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus Christ leads him to neglect Christ’s actual kingly rule over his people and the world through his (i.e., God’s) Spirit and to leave Paul’s teaching on Christian living disjointed from his doctrine of justification. Even while seeing Pauline ethics as determined by his inaugurated eschatology, Wright still does not relate the various elements of Paul’s ethical exhortations to the actual rule of the Messiah Jesus whose installation as God’s Son and the Lord is the essence of the inaugurated eschatology (PFG 1095–1128).45 Christian living is by definition a living that renders “the obedience of faith” to the Messianic King Jesus the Lord. Yet Wright expounds Paul’s teaching on it without any reference to Jesus’s kingship/lordship and, therefore, also without asking whether or not it has a counter-imperial character – something strange for one who insists that Jesus’s Messiahship is foundational for Paul’s whole theology and that Paul’s understanding of it has a fundamentally counter-imperial character. Here, the limited space does not allow us to demonstrate positively 1) how Paul’s gospel of the kingdom of God and his Son Jesus the Messiah, presented in terms of justification, organically contains the Messiah Jesus’s present kingly rule over the “justified,” those who have been transferred from the Satanic kingdom of sin and death to God’s and his Son’s kingdom of right-

1969), esp. 174, 176–77, 181–82, or as Paul himself so succinctly puts it in Col 1:13–14. Cf. Seyoon Kim, “Paul’s Gospel of Justification and Jesus’ Gospel of God’s Kingdom” (forthcoming), which reworks an earlier essay, Seyoon Kim, “Jesus the Son of God as the Gospel (1 Thess 1:9–10; Rom 1:3–4),” in Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology; Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel, ed. Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston, WUNT II 320 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 117–41. 45 In reference to Eph 5:5, Wright does mention “the Messiah’s kingdom” (PFG 1106) and later even says that the concept “presumably indicates the present ‘rule of the Messiah’ in and through the present church” (PFG 1114, his italics). But he does not develop the theme at all.

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eousness and life,46 – “the united and holy/righteous community,” in which all the divisions of “the flesh” and the consequent injustice and conflicts are overcome (Gal 3:28; Rom 1:14–17; 1 Cor 7:17–24; 11:17–34; 12:13; Eph 2:11–22; Col 3:11; Philemon; 1 Cor 8–10; Rom 14–15; etc.); 2) how Jesus the King and Lord actually rules over this community through God’s/his Spirit at present; 3) how the “justified” as the people of God’s kingdom render “the obedience of faith” to his Son Jesus the King and Lord through the aid of the Holy Spirit and bear “the fruit of the Spirit/righteousness” in their daily lives (Gal 5:22–23; Phil 1:11; Rom 6:11–22; 8:4), which have sociopolitical significance as well as religious-moral; and 4) how thus the church, “the united and holy/righteous community of love,” demonstrates the Messiah Jesus’s present rule and issues a “subversive,” or better redemptive, challenge to the dark world (e.g., Phil 1:27–30; 2:15–16; cf. Matt 5:14–16), fighting against the Satanic forces of sin and death with truth, righteousness, love, etc. (e.g., Eph 6:10–20). A demonstration of these would present an alternative to Wright’s vision of Paul’s political theology. Anyway, Wright’s unexpected neglect of the kingly rule of the Messiah Jesus leads him to fail to expound the full implications (including the sociopolitical) of “the united and holy/righteous community” as a demonstration of the Lord Jesus Christ’s rule, and to substantiate adequately his claim that that community as such issued a challenge to the Roman Empire.

6. Conclusion Wright handles the question of “Paul and the Roman Empire” with four keys: 1) the gospel that the Messiah Jesus has defeated the powers of sin and death and been enthroned to rule over the whole world; 2) the parallelism in the narrative and vocabulary between the gospel of the Messiah Jesus and the Roman imperial propaganda; 3) the Jewish apocalyptic view of the Roman Empire as the fourth beast of Dan 7; and 4) the twofold Jewish stance toward pagan empires. Through a combination of the first three keys Wright determines that Paul “could not help but” see Caesar and his empire as a blasphemous parody of the Messiah Jesus and his kingdom, and that therefore Paul’s preaching of the gospel of the Messiah Jesus must have been “subverting” the Roman imperial propaganda or “gospel.” With this thesis, Wright in effect turns Paul into the likeness of John of Revelation. However, the obvious differences between Paul and John, such as Paul’s lack of coded references to Caesar and his empire as the fourth beast 46 Or over the “sanctified,” those who have been separated from the idolatry and impurity of the world and dedicated to the holy God as his own people, “the saints” (e.g., 1 Cor 1:2; 6:11).

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of Dan 7 and Paul’s exhortation for Christians to honor and obey the (Roman) rulers (Rom 13:1–7), make us question Wright’s thesis and its basic assumption that Paul saw the Roman Empire as the fourth beast of Dan 7, the chief agent of the Satanic forces. Nevertheless, Wright argues for a counter-imperial character of Paul’s preaching, appealing to the summaries of the gospel in Pauline epistles, such as Rom 1:3–4; 1 Cor 15:20–28; Phil 2:6–11; etc., that declare Jesus’s Messianic Kingship or Lordship, as well as to the passages that contain the words that are parallel to those of the Roman propaganda, such as κύριος, υἱός θεοῦ, παρουσία, σωτηρία, δικαιοσύνη, etc., and, above all, what may be taken as a Roman slogan, “peace and security” (1 Thess 5:3). However, Wright does not meet his critics who ask how in those passages Paul was trying to subvert the Roman Empire by presenting the salvation of the Lord Jesus in completely different terms from those of the Roman “gospel,” namely, in terms of redemption from God’s wrath (or justification) at the last judgment, the resurrection life, or conforming to Christ’s image and obtaining God’s glory. Like other anti-imperial interpreters of Paul, for his thesis Wright also has to account for Rom 13:1–7. For this he uses the fourth key above. According to him, the exhortation to honor and obey the (Roman) rulers is an application of the first half of the traditional twofold Jewish stance toward pagan rulers, namely, the view that for the moment God has appointed pagan rulers to maintain order in the world and that therefore Israel should obey them. Wright argues that Paul found this application necessary for the present because Jesus’s Messianic kingdom had not yet been consummated. But we have countered that Paul’s realized eschatology should have led Paul to understand that that first half of the Jewish stance had expired as the coming and triumph of the Messiah Jesus already fulfilled its second half, namely that at the coming Messianic age or eschaton God would judge pagan rulers for their arrogance and evil rule. In all the passages such as Rom 1:3–4; 1 Cor 15:20–28; 2 Cor 2:14; Phil 2:6–11; and Col 2:15, to which Wright appeals for his counter-imperial interpretation of Paul, Paul was affirming that at present the enthroned Messiah Jesus was in the process of subjugating and destroying all the “principalities and powers” or all the forces of sin and death with God’s kingship entrusted to him. Therefore, had Paul viewed Rome as the fourth beast of Dan 7, the unique and chief agent of the Satanic forces, he could not possibly have taught the Roman Christians to honor and obey the (Roman) rulers. Instead, his realized eschatology should have led him to wage a Messianic holy war against Rome as bar-Kochba’s followers did or at least to develop his gospel preaching as John did in Revelation. Thus Wright’s fourth key is quite useless for accounting for Rom 13:1–7, and the passage remains an Achilles heel for his thesis, calling into question his very assumption that Paul saw Rome as the fourth beast of Dan 7.

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Wright’s counter-imperial interpretation is a component of his grand scheme to interpret Paul’s theology as an integral whole in connection with his three worlds – Jewish, Greek, and Roman imperial. He rightly asserts that Jesus’s Messiahship is foundational for Paul’s theology. Yet while stressing that Paul’s preaching of the Messiah Jesus as enthroned as God’s Son and the Lord issued a challenge to Caesar, Wright neglects to explain how the Messiah Jesus actually exercises God’s kingship in order to destroy the powers of sin and death. He neglects it because he interprets Jesus’s Messiahship mainly in terms of God’s fulfillment of his promises to Abraham. So he expounds Paul’s teaching on Christian living as disjointed from Jesus’s Lordship and the doctrine of justification, and he explains the church as “the united and holy community of love” without any reference to the Messiah Jesus’s reign, even while asserting that it is a demonstration of that reign and that as such it issued a challenge to the Roman Empire. Thus, there is a serious shortcoming both in Wright’s presentation of Paul’s theology as an integral whole and in his counter-imperial interpretation of it.

Bibliography Barclay, John M. G. “Why the Roman Empire Was Insignificant to Paul.” Pages 363–87 in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews. WUNT 275. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Barrett, C. K. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles. 2 vols. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. Bryan, Christopher. Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cohick, Lynn H. “Philippians and Empire: Paul’s Engagement with Imperialism and the Imperial Cult.” Pages 165–82 in Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies. Edited by Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013. Deissmann, G. Adolf. Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World. Translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan from the 4th German edition. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978. Elliott, Neil. The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008. –. Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994. Fantin, Joseph D. The Lord of the Entire World: Lord Jesus, a Challenge to Lord Caesar? New Testament Monographs 31. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011. Heath, Gordon L. “The Church Fathers and the Roman Empire.” Pages 258–82 in Empire in the New Testament. Edited by Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall. McMaster Divinity College Press New Testament Study Series 10. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

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Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. WUNT II 392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Horsley, Richard A. Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James Scott to Jesus and Paul. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004. –. Paul and the Roman Imperial Order. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2004. Käsemann, Ernst. “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul.” Pages 168–82 in New Testament Questions of Today. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969. Kim, Seyoon. Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. –. “Jesus the Son of God as the Gospel (1 Thess 1:9–10; Rom 1:3–4).” Pages 117–41 in Earliest Christian History: History, Literature, and Theology: Essays from the Tyndale Fellowship in Honor of Martin Hengel. Edited by Michael F. Bird and Jason Maston. WUNT II 320. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. –. “Paul’s Gospel of Justification and Jesus’ Gospel of God’s Kingdom,” forthcoming. Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976. Marshall, I. Howard. 1 & 2 Thessalonians. NCBC. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1983. Novenson, Matthew V. “What the Apostles Did Not See.” Pages 55–72 in Reactions to Empire: Sacred Texts in Their Socio-Political Contexts. WUNT II 372. Edited by John A. Dunne and Dan Batovici. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Pfitzner, Victor C. Paul and the Agon Motif. NovTSup 16. Leiden: Brill, 1967. Weima, Jeff A. D. “‘Peace and Security’ (1 Thess 5.3): Prophetic Warning or Political Propaganda?” NTS 58 (2012): 331–59. White, Joel R. “‘Peace and Security’ (1 Thessalonians 5.3): Is It Really a Roman Slogan?” NTS 59 (2013): 382–95. –. “‘Peace’ and ‘Security’ (1 Thess 5.3): Roman Ideology and Greek Aspiration,” NTS 60 (2014): 499–510. Wright, N. T. Paul: In Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005.

Part IV Exegetical Issues

Law and Covenant in Paul and the Faithfulness of God Gregory Tatum N. T. Wright in Paul and the Faithfulness of God deploys his entire rhetorical armory in responding to E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion.1 Wright is convinced by Sanders’s central argument, that is, that the portrayal of Second-Temple Judaism standard in New Testament studies was an odious and erroneous caricature of the historical reality. Sanders further proposed the shorthand expression “participationist eschatology” to characterize Paul’s “pattern of religion.” By “pattern of religion” Sanders does not mean a theological system but rather a conceptual framework for describing how a religion functions. By “participationist eschatology” Sanders means that for Paul, the end-times have begun with the death and resurrection of Jesus so that God is saving his end-time people through being-in-Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.2 Wright’s acceptance of the former move (demolishing the caricature of Second Temple Judaism) and his rejection of the latter move (describing the functioning of Paul’s religion as participationist eschatology) give rise to PFG.3 Since the 1 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress 1977). I heartily thank E. P. Sanders, Richard Hays, Douglas Campbell, and Ross Wagner for discussing the issues raised in this essay. All errors and infelicities are my own. (Full disclosure to those who will dismiss my arguments as personal loyalty and/or odium theologicum: E. P. Sanders is my Doktorvater. I am a Roman Catholic priest and Friar Preacher. Forewarned is forearmed.) 2 Wright’s approach to participationist eschatology is to divide and conquer (PFG 777– 783). He divides it up into seven broad emphases: justification, participation, salvationhistory, apocalyptic, anthropology, transformation, and covenant. The major difficulty of this division is its arbitrary character. Why are participation and transformation isolated from one another? Such a division allows Wright to reduce participation to a merely notional or verbal union with Christ and to reduce transformation to a non-participationist activity of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the only reason for justification to head the list is the pre-judgment about the centrality of Wright’s understanding of initial justification as nontransformative. 3 Wright’s vast erudition and rhetorical virtuosity are indisputable. His assumption that forensic justification must mean nothing more than a change in legal status is not consciously tendentious. He simply cannot conceive what Paul’s ontological language might possibly mean. Wright’s conceptuality, trapped as it is in Modernity (in particular, Nomi-

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conventional notion of forensic justification lost its foundation (the false caricature of Judaism), Wright attempts to lay a new foundation by constructing a grand covenantal narrative based on Paul’s rhetorical use of select Abraham texts in Galatians and Romans.4 Wright’s treatment of Law and Covenant is thus the very heart of PFG. The first part of this essay examines God’s promises to Abraham versus the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants. The second part explores Torah and the unity of the people of God. The third part discusses the elephant in the room: forensic justification and “doing the Torah.” This essay does not examine Wright’s grand covenantal narrative in se, but rather examines its lack of foundation in Paul’s letters.

nalist metaphysics and Cartesian anthropology), consistently stands in need of Wiedermythologisierung. Wright does not consciously de-mythologize, he does so automatically, e.g., his Cairdian de-mythologizing of eschatology. Nominalist anthropology posits the human person to be an impermeable subject – the autonomous individual. Knowledge and love do not unite the subject to extra-mental reality. Further, the Nominalists de-ontologized theology so that salvation could only be understood as a divine decree of non-damnation, a change of legal status and nothing more. Descartes divided the human person into a mind/body duality in order to safeguard theology from the physical sciences. The machine/body became the domain of the physical sciences, the ghost/mind became the domain of the Humanities and theology. (The German expresses this clearly: Naturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften.) The only divine/human interaction possible becomes some kind of mental influence, often reduced to revelation, hence the noetic reductionism found throughout PFG. Jesus becomes a notional agent of salvation, playing a representative human role and a narrative divine role. On account of his anachronistic Modernity, Wright assumes that the Fathers and the Scholastics ontologized Paul’s thought (PFG 947, 1031). An author Wright cites “is anxious to avoid a ‘Greek ontology of pure being’ according to which the idea of ‘union with Christ’ would mean ‘a substantial participation in the being of Christ’ … but might there not be – as Schweitzer thought – precisely a Hebrew concept of such participation?” (PFG 950). This seems to presuppose an outdated History-of-Religions search for Hebrew rather than Greek origins for New Testament realities. Even if a “Greek” origin were found for Paul’s ontological language, Wright himself knows perfectly well that Alexander the Great rather forcibly hybridized Jewish culture in 332 BCE. Not reading Paul’s thought in terms of participationist eschatology is historically unsound because of its imposition of anachronistic modes of thought. For the history-of-ideas role of Nominalism in the birth of Modernity, see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press 1993). For the historical role of Nominalism in the birth of the Protestant Reformation, see Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 4 For a far more useful discussion of Abrahamic descent, see Caroline E. Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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1. God’s Promises to Abraham versus the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants The main, but not only, discussion of covenant and Torah in PFG comes in ch. 10, “The People of God Freshly Reworked,” which deals with covenant membership (soteriology) in light of the Messiah and the Spirit. Wright correctly understands that salvation for Paul entails at very least membership in an objectively identifiable social group, what Sanders calls “Getting In” and “Staying In.”5 Wright’s invocation of the Abrahamic Covenant as a “controlling theme in Paul’s soteriology” privileges “key passages in Galatians and Romans.” The point of invoking ‘covenant’ as a controlling theme in Pauline soteriology is to highlight the way in which, in key passages in Galatians and Romans in particular, Paul stresses that what has happened in the gospel events has happened in fulfilment of the promises to Abraham, and has resulted in the formation (or the re-formation) of a people who are bound in a common life as a kind of extension or radical development of the covenantal life of Israel. (PFG 781–82)

The choice of the word “controlling” reveals an unexpressed assumption at work. Considering the thematic wealth of Pauline salvation-discourse addressing a wide array of issues in differing contexts, why should the theme of the Abrahamic inheritance addressing circumcision in two rhetorical contexts be privileged above all other themes? Yet, even if the promises/heir schema of Gal 3 and Rom 4 were “key,” it cannot perform the theological task that Wright demands of it. According to Wright, Jesus’s fulfilment of the Abrahamic promises has resulted in the formation (or the re-formation) of a people who are bound in a common life as a kind of extension or radical development of the covenantal life of Israel. (PFG 782)

In Gal 3 and Rom 4, Paul uses the promises/heir schema to bypass salvationhistory, not to reinterpret it. The “covenantal life of Israel” cannot be separated from circumcision and Torah; the promises/heir schema does precisely that. Wright picks and chooses the passages he considers to be evidence; he sidelines Paul’s actual use of covenant language. How does Paul himself speak of covenant? Gal 4:21–31 explicitly identifies God’s promises to Abraham fulfilled in Jesus as a covenant. Paul allegorizes and subverts the Abraham story by speaking of Abraham’s children as two opposing covenants. The children of the slave girl, Hagar, are the members of the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision, whereas the children of the free wife, Sarah, are those 5

Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism and E. P. Sanders Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress 1983).

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Gentile believers who reject entry into the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision. Paul transforms Jacob into Ishmael, the enslaved offspring of the Abrahamic carnal covenant of circumcision; Paul transforms Ishmael into Israel, the free offspring of the spiritual heavenly covenant of the divine promises to Abraham. By dividing the promises from circumcision, Paul builds a detour around the history of the Jewish people. The two covenants are rivals (at least here). The “covenantal life of Israel” is grounded (and continues to be grounded) on the covenant of circumcision. Although Wright correctly notes that the Sarah and Hagar allegory opposes the Abrahamic promises/heir schema to the Mosaic covenant of Torah (i.e., the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision) (PFG 1139), he does not seem to realize that the two covenant allegory undermines him reading a single grand covenantal narrative into Paul’s arguments. In Galatians, the only references to a διαθήκη are 1) a merely human analogy of the Abrahamic promises/heir schema to a last will and testament (Gal 3:15–18)6 and 2) a clear dissociation of the promises/heir schema from the covenantal history of Israel in the Sarah/Hagar allegory (Gal 4:21–31). Paul’s references to Abraham are ad hoc, rather than foundational.7 Paul relates a tradition (1 Cor 11:23–26) he received from the Lord concerning the Lord’s Supper (which Wright does not even mention in “Part III: Paul’s Theology”). “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11:25). This cup makes present the New Covenant sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The cup of blessing is also “a κοινωνία of the blood of Christ” (1 Cor 10:16). The cup of the Lord’s Supper thus evokes rich layers of sacrificial language, imagery, themes, and narratives in the Scriptures of Israel for believers to encounter the inauguration of the New Covenant and the κοινωνία of Christ in the covenant-sacrifice of the Cross. Further, the cup of the Lord’s Supper is prefigured in the desert by the water flowing from the rock. It is “spiritual drink” communicating the κοινωνία of the Spirit flowing from Christ (1 Cor 10:1–11).8 The sacrifice of the New Covenant effects real more6

The promises to Abraham in Gal 3 and Rom 4 are not necessarily covenantal. On the basis of Paul’s allegory of the two covenants, one can read references to the promises in these two chapters as implicitly covenantal. Paul himself characterizes his first use of the promises/heir schema as a carnal, merely human analogy. Gal 3:15–18 speaks of a κεκυρωµένη διαθήκη to compare a merely human notarized last will and testament and the promises to Abraham. Compare other uses of κατὰ ἄνθρωπον (Rom 3:5; 1 Cor 3:3; 9:8; Gal 1:11). Wright wants to make the most of Paul’s use of the word “covenant/contract” but does not actually read the human will as the divine covenant (PFG 868). 7 Because Paul’s pattern of religion is eschatological, it necessarily presupposes the multiple narratives of the history of Israel in the Scriptures. Nevertheless, constructing a single narrative out of Paul’s ad hoc arguments about Adam, Abraham, and Moses begs the question. To claim that such a monstrosity somehow grounds or controls Paul’s soteriology is wantonly misguided. 8 Moreover, misuse of the cup has dire consequences. Defilement of the sacrificial cup leads to personal condemnation and liability for the blood of Christ as well as the outbreak

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than-notional communion with Jesus and the Spirit (i.e. participationist eschatology).9 2 Corinthians 3 contrasts two covenants: old and new. Paul opposes the ministries of letter and Spirit and the covenants of death and life, of condemnation and righteousness, of passing glory vs. permanent glory. When the Old Covenant/Moses is read by non-Christian Jews, a veil distorts their letterbound reading. When the holy ones read the same text, with unveiled faces, their reading is Spirit-endowed, transformative, liberating, and glorious. Notice that reading the Scriptures of Israel pneumatologically transforms and christologically transfigures the believer. The holy ones do not read in a carnal, merely human way. Since God has equipped Paul for the ministry of the spiritual New Covenant, the ministry of the New Covenant communicates the divine Spirit (2 Cor 3:4–6); the ministry of the Old Covenant could not. For Paul, New Covenant reading of Israel’s Scriptures according to the divine Spirit differs ontologically from Old Covenant reading of them according to the dead letter. Wright’s covenantal reading of Gal 3 and Rom 4 collapses the New Covenant into the Old. Paul’s actual use of covenant language excludes this move definitively; the New Covenant of “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” is a quantum leap beyond the Old Covenant according to the flesh. This point cannot be overemphasized. Participationist eschatology does not spring Athena-like out of covenantal nomism; the former is a fully Jewish development of the latter. Nevertheless, the difference in the descriptors indicates the radicality of the development. In other words, participationist eschatology describes the newness of the New Covenant. The actual covenant texts reveal a re-location of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants before, within, over against, and alongside the New Covenant. Wright holds that faith replaces circumcision as the badge of the Abrahamic covenant in its new and improved Messianic version. − Gentiles on account of the covenant badge of πίστις receive the legal status of membership in Abraham’s “family” for the first time (PFG 847–48, 864). − Members of Abraham’s actual family with the covenant badge of circumcision need to have their legal status as Abraham’s family “freshly rati-

of sickness and death in the church (1 Cor 11:27–30). Further, the effect on those who drank water from the rock in the Exodus generation when they defiled themselves with idolatry was death on a grand scale (1 Cor 10:5–11). The effect on those who partake of the cup of the Lord as well as the cup of demons is far worse, it calls forth the Lord’s jealousy (1 Cor 10:21–22). 9 Eating and drinking effect the three kinds of sacrificial κοινωνία in 1 Cor 10:16–22. Eating and drinking effect condemnation in 1 Cor 11:27–30. Many, for philosophical (and not exegetical) reasons, explain this correlation away.

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fied” or “renewed” on the basis of the covenant badge of πίστις (PFG 848, 864). − Those members of Abraham’s actual family with the covenant badge of circumcision who do not have the covenant badge of πίστις lose their legal status as members of Abraham’s family (PFG 1195–1257)! Something is seriously wrong with this reading of Gal 3 and Rom 4. How can the legal status as members of Abraham’s family possibly do the theological work that the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit does in Paul’s letters? Although he rightly emphasizes the subjective genitive πίστις Χριστοῦ, Wright misreads the righteousness at issue.10 He reduces divine righteousness to covenant membership and covenant membership to a legal status, rather than recognizing that righteousness here is divine and that covenant membership entails the real reception of the Spirit and embodied being-in-Christ. Not only is Wright wrong on the basis of Paul’s actual use of covenant language, but also because nothing in the select Abrahamic texts cited in Gal 3 and Rom 4 suggests such an interpretation. According to Wright’s line of thought, Christ died and was raised from the dead so Gentiles could become legally adopted children of Abraham without circumcision (PFG 862)! Manifestly, Christ’s death and resurrection provide something unavailable in the Old Covenant. Forgiveness of sins (by repentance and sacrifice), Abrahamic sonship (by circumcision), and even holiness (by descent, sacrifice, and the occasional activity of the Spirit of God) do not qualify as such. Participation in divine life through, with, and in Jesus Christ through the lavish eschatological out-pouring of the Spirit (i.e. participationist eschatology) does qualify. In Gal 3 and Rom 4, Paul implicitly contrasts the New Covenant with the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision. At the beginning of the chapter, Gal 3:1–5, the Spirit (of the New Covenant) is contrasted to the fleshly Abrahamic covenant (descent and circumcision), while the lavish endowment with the Spirit depends on the hearing of πίστις, not on circumcision. At the end of the chapter, Gal 3:19–29 argues from the greater, baptismal being-in-Christ, to the lesser, being a “son” of Abraham (a fortiori, qal wehomer).11 Jesus is the singular “seed of Abraham” (σπέρµα Ἀβραάµ) by descent, circumcision, and promised inheritance. Gentile believers are “sons of Abraham” (υἱοὶ Ἀβραάµ) not by descent and circumcision, but by their entry into ontological being-inChrist (the New Covenant) through πίστις Χριστοῦ/baptism. In Rom 4:13–21, both Jewish and Gentile believers are the σπέρµα Ἀβραάµ through the righteousness of faith. Moreover, in Romans, Paul reinterprets the Abrahamic covenant in such a way that the circumcision of Jewish believers in no way rivals their membership in the New Covenant (Rom 4:10–12). Paul’s reinter10 11

Sanders upholds the objective genitive side in the πίστις Χριστοῦ debate. Wright equates the two as if Jesus were no more a son of God than Israel (PFG 874)!

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pretation of circumcision as the sign of the seal of the righteousness of faith rehabilitates it for believers. Indeed, Paul’s rhetoric here subverts the rhetorical goal of Galatians. If Paul had used these verses in Galatians, the agitators could simply have responded, “Why do you so violently deny circumcision to Gentile believers since it is, as you say, the sign of the seal of their faith?” Wright’s flattening of the two covenants is not only mistaken in light of Pauline usage in general, but also because it is not borne out by Gal 3 and Rom 4 themselves. The New Covenant is not the Old Covenant recycled. Moreover, Wright reads salvation-history into the curse of the Torah in Gal 3:13 (PFG 863–67). This is a mistaken move on several counts: 1) The Torah is explicitly excluded from the promises/heir schema (Gal 3:18 and Gal 4:24–25), which for Wright is the spine of Paul’s reinterpretation of salvation-history. 2) Since Paul chose the word “curse” in contrast to the word “blessing,” the curse of the Torah in Gal 3:13 falls primarily on those who are not circumcised and only secondarily falls on Israel (pace PFG 865). After all, in Gal 3:10 the curse is upon all who do not do all the things written in the book of Torah, which is, in context, circumcision. 3) The removal of the curse and the “roadblock” (PFG 862–70) is only possible in the end-times (the inclusion of the Gentiles, the promise of the Spirit). Because Wright reads the curse of the Torah salvation-historically, he therefore holds that God condemns pre-Messianic Israel for being pre-Messianic Israel. In other words, the Messiah’s job was to redeem the people of God from the “damnation-history” (PFG 780, 1262, cf., 931) of “the covenantal life of Israel.” 4) Wright holds that Paul considers Israel to be in exile as a result of the curse of the Torah (PFG passim). The notion that Paul considers Israel to be in exile is demonstrably false. In 1 Cor 10:18, Paul speaks of contemporary Jews entering into the κοινωνία of (the holiness) of the altar by eating meat sacrificed to God. Such a κοινωνία would have been impossible if the divine glory were not resident in the Holy of Holies. In Rom 9:4, divine glory (δόξα) and the temple cult (λατρεία) are present tense privileges of Israel-accordingto-the-flesh. Since Paul holds that the divine glory resides in the Temple in his own day, ipso facto, he does not hold that Israel is in exile.12 Strangely, Wright recognizes in a certain sense the connection between the altar and the Shekinah but does not draw the obvious conclusion (PFG 1345). Thus, Wright’s attempt to read salvation-history into the curse of the Torah is eisegetical.

12 In 1 Cor 10:16–22, Paul compares the Lord’s Supper to Jewish and Pagan sacrificial meals. There is no reason to suppose that somehow the Jewish sacrificial meal is past tense while the Christian and Pagan sacrificial meals are present-tense; the present-tense is used throughout. In Rom 9:4, the only verb in the sentence is present tense (εἰσιν) and claiming that some of the items of the list, but not others, are no longer extant begs the question.

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2. Torah and the Unity of the People of God For Wright, Torah threatens to divide the “one single family” for Abraham into two families, so he erases Torah and Israel-according-to-the-flesh (PFG 860–73). This is clearly backwards. Paul accepts the standard ecclesial practice of not circumcising Gentile believers; he does not argue for the introduction of a new practice. The Abrahamic arguments are contextual arguments against innovators in Galatia who would de-eschatologize the New Covenant. On the basis of the prophetic vision of the eschatological inclusion of Gentiles among those who worship the God of Israel (without direct citation), the human authors of the New Testament presuppose that the Nations do not need to be circumcised. After all, they partake of the eschatological outpouring of the Holy Spirit without it. Thus, the eschatological people of God is binary by nature: Israel as such and the Nations as such worshiping the one God of Israel together in the unity of the κοινωνία of Christ (Rom 15:8–13). Paul argues against the circumcision of Gentile believers, not for the suppression of Torah-observance among Jewish believers. In 1 Cor 7, Paul assumes that Jewish believers observe the Torah and should continue to do so. In Rom 4:11, Paul describes circumcision as a good Jewish Christian practice. In Rom 14–15, Paul argues that Jewish believers who observe the Torah should be left alone to do so. At the beginning and the end of Rom 9–11, Paul refers to the covenant(s) of Israel-according-the-flesh. In Rom 9:4, “the covenants and the giving of the Torah” are among the present tense privileges of the Israelites. The choice of expression, αἱ διαθῆκαι καὶ ἡ νοµοθεσία, doubly emphasizes the Mosaic covenant alongside the Abrahamic. In Rom 11:26, Paul affirms fidelity to Israel-according-to-the-flesh despite the temporary hardening that has come partially upon Israel. When Jesus returns, he shall remove the impiety of Jacob (that is, not being in Christ), as he did with Paul near Damascus, and so all Israel will be saved along with the full number of the Nations. The covenant of circumcision is not an alternative route to salvation, they must enter the New Covenant (even if only at the last moment) to be saved. Nevertheless, God’s call is irrevocable (Rom 11:29). God remains faithful to Israel-according-to-the flesh, even in their ἀπιστία.13 13

Wright’s reading of Rom 9–11 ignores the difference between Rom 11:11–36 and Rom 9:1–11:10 (PFG 1195–1257). At Rom 11:11 the argument shifts from the exclusion of those Jews who do not believe in Jesus from salvation to their inclusion in the New Covenant before the end. Rom 11 argues that the hardening of part of Israel-according-tothe-flesh has benefited the Nations and is only temporary (Rom 11:11–16; Rom 11:1–10 is transitional). In Rom 11:25–26 Paul displays the mystery of all Israel joining the full number of the Gentiles in the New Covenant upon Jesus’s return to Jerusalem. For discussion, see Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress 2006), 666–712. Wright’s upside-down reading of Rom 9–11 interprets each and every reference to Israel to mean the Church. Paul never exhibits this kind of terminological consistency

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Wright bases his elimination of the Torah on the Antioch Incident (PFG 854–56). Gal 2:15–16 says nothing about the suppression of Torah but simply states what Paul presupposes Cephas takes for granted: circumcision is not necessary for entry into the κοινωνία of the New Covenant.14 By reading exclusive Jewish commensality as a “work of Torah,” Wright can introduce the issue of church unity into the Law rhetoric of Galatians. Of course, Jewish exclusion of Gentiles from table-fellowship is not biblical law and the issue of Galatians is not the unity of the Church, but its eschatological nature. The Nations, qua uncircumcised Gentiles, join Israel, qua Torah-observant Jews, in worshiping the God of Israel together in the end-times (Rom 15). On the other hand, Church unity is the issue of Romans: there is no διαστολή between Jewish and Gentile believers (recriminations between Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome on the eve of Paul’s delivery of his Macedonian and Achaean collections to Jerusalem being the occasion of the letter). But even here the Torah is not suppressed, but defended. The unity of the Church is based on being-in-Christ and the lavish out-pouring of the Spirit, not on the eradication of Torah and Israel-according-to-the-flesh. For Wright, Paul’s reinterpretation of Israel as the Church is absolute, total, and without remainder; Israel-according-to-the-flesh ceases to be Israel in any meaningful sense.15

3. The Elephant in the Room: Forensic Justification and “Doing the Torah” This ablation of the Torah and Israel-according-to-the-flesh is intimately tied to Wright’s reading of forensic justification. Wright focuses on Rom 2–3 in order to argue for the forensic character of the justification language in Rom 4 and thence Gal 3 and Phil 3 (PFG 777). The major difficulty here is the assumption that if he can establish the forensic character of Rom 2–3, then justification automatically means a divine decree of non-condemnation for the guilty, a mere change of legal status without any actual transformation. What is at stake for Wright is not forensic justification per se, but an anachronistic Nominalist reading of initial justification. elsewhere, why should he do so in this case? Wright apparently believes that God’s call is revocable after all (Rom 11:29). 14 For a cogent reading of the Antioch Incident, see E. P. Sanders, “Jewish Association with Gentiles and Galatians 2:11–14” in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Robert T. Fortna and Beverly R. Gaventa (Nashville: Abingdon 1990), 170–88. 15 This is not only an intellectual mistake, but from my perspective, morally unacceptable.

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Wright helpfully sets out the argument for the conventional notion of forensic justification in Rom 1–4. Since the language of ‘justification’, in itself (arguably) and certainly in the way Paul speaks of it in Romans 2 and 3, brings with it the idea of a law court in which all humans first stand guilty in the dock (Romans 3.19–20) and then, to their astonishment, hear the announcement that they are pronounced ‘in the right’ (Romans 3.21–6), the emphasis on justification is frequently spoken of as forensic. We should note, however, that the explicitly ‘forensic’ nature of justification is unique to Romans. If we only had Galatians and Philippians, the only reason for supposing that the language of ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification’ was ‘forensic’ would have to lie in the meaning of the words themselves, which would be problematic. (PFG 777)

Wright admits that the only reason he understands Paul’s use of righteousness and justification language to be forensic is the way in which he reads Rom 3:19–26. Otherwise, one would have to rely on the meaning of the words themselves, which would be “problematic,” and at best only “arguable.” Unfortunately for Wright’s argument, nothing in Rom 3:19–26 suggests, much less requires, reading initial justification as non-transformative and nonparticipationist. Rom 3:19–20 concludes the catena beginning in v. 9 in the context of Jewish/Gentile recriminations among believers in Rome.16 Rom 3:19–20 addresses those who are in the Torah, that is, the Jewish believers in Rome, continuing the chapter’s argument (Rom 3:1–2, 9, 22, 27). The point of Rom 3:21–26 (and the entire chapter) is found in v. 22: there is no distinction between Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome. Indeed this section leads directly into the transitional Rom 3:27–31: there are no grounds for boasting. What in Rom 3:21–26 suggests that justified sinners have not been transformed? “Being justified” (δικαιούµενοι) in Rom 3:24 does not in the least imply that initial 16

Romans as a whole is not an abstract treatise. Rom 1–4 (Jewish boasting) and 9–11 (Gentile judging) mirror one another in treating Jewish/Gentile relations among believers in Rome. Immediately before the mystery culminating Rom 9–11, Paul directly addresses Gentile believers in Rome who judge those circumcised who do not believe in Christ (Rom 11:16–24, cf., Rom 2:1–16). The paraenesis of Rom 12–15 principally concerns the unity of the Church. The last exhortation (to Gentile believers to stop inviting Jewish believers to dinner for the purpose of starting fights with them over food and Sabbath) segues into the peroratio of the letter, a catena of biblical texts concerning the end-time worship of Israel’s God by Jews and Gentiles together (Rom 14:1–15:13). The unusually long list of personal greetings of Rom 16 prominently acknowledges both Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome. Any playing of chapters 5–8 against 1–4 (or vice versa) is irrelevant because it presupposes that Romans is an abstract treatise rather than a contextual letter to the believers in Rome. Indeed, Rom 5–8 is a far better candidate than Rom 1–4 for the heading, “the problem of sin” (e.g., Rom 6:1–2). Finally, Paul has been blamed for causing the behavior of the Gentile believers by teaching that transgression of the Torah leads to grace (Rom 3:8) so that the mutual recriminations of Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome endanger the reception of Paul’s collection for the saints in Jerusalem.

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justification is nothing more than a change of legal status. In Rom 3:26, divine righteousness is demonstrated by declaring (that is, making) the believer righteous from the faith of Christ. God manifests his righteousness in the present time “by being righteous and declaring righteous the one who is [righteous] from the faith of Jesus” (εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν δίκαιον καὶ δικαιοῦντα τὸν [δίκαιον] ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ). The declaration of righteousness is divinely powerful and not the precarious verdict of a fallible human judge (Hebrew or otherwise). Why should righteousness from faith not be real righteousness? Why should forensic justification not be transformative? After all, God spoke and it came to be. God declaring sinners to be righteous can only mean that he makes them righteous because God is the one doing the talking. Divine speech is both powerful and creative. Because of Jesus’s death and resurrection, believers are a new creation (Gal 6:15; 2 Cor 5:17). The Gospel is God’s power unto salvation (Rom 1:16). The word of the cross is the power of God for those who are being saved (1 Cor 2:18); Paul claims not to evangelize with rhetorical sophistication, lest he empty the word of the cross of its power (1 Cor 1:17). The word of God is at work among the Thessalonian believers (1 Thess 2:13). Christ accomplishes Paul’s ministry by word and by deed (Rom 15:18). Furthermore, the power of the Gospel is directly implicated in God’s call of believers (1 Cor 7:17–24) and God’s call is creative, calling non-being into being (Rom 4:17; cf. 1 Cor 1:28). For Wright, “‘to be called’ is Paul’s shorthand for ‘hearing and believing the gospel and becoming a member of the Messiah’s people’” (PFG 1026–27). “The declaration creates and constitutes a new situation, a new status” (PFG 946). This is far too jejune; divine speech must surely effect more than subjective mental states and a legal status!17 Wright strangely but consistently empties Paul’s language of divine power, reducing it to the level of the legal, the notional, and the narrative. Wright’s modernity debilitates his reading of Paul’s Gospel (cf. 1 Cor 1:17). The real contribution of PFG to the contemporary discussion of Pauline soteriology is Wright’s brilliant insight concerning Paul’s use of forensic justification in Rom 2:5–13 in speaking of the Last Judgment. This final justification is referred to decisively much earlier in the letter, in Romans 2.12– 13, which itself summarizes the larger statement in 2.5–11. These clear and sharp state17

Once allowed to be multi-dimensional, “call” is Paul’s shorthand for God’s speech effectively manifest in/among his Elect through Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel, which becomes actively present concomitantly by: initial justification/participation in the faith of Christ (mediating divine righteousness), initial sanctification by the bodily indwelling of the divine Spirit, baptism/entry into the κοινωνία of Christ, and on-going transformation and growth in divine glory on the way to Jesus’s return and the culmination of God’s salvific plan for his chosen people and the cosmos. There is no reason to privilege one set of “transfer terminology” over another; they work together harmoniously. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 4–8.

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ments are by no means to be set aside, as is the habit of some, on the grounds either that they set up categories which Paul will then show to be empty (an odd way of laying the foundation for so carefully crafted a letter) or that Paul is here simply quoting a Jewish perspective which he does not himself share. … Hoi poiētai nomou dikaiōthēsetai – ‘those who do the law will be justified’: those words have struck terror into the hearts of unsuspecting Protestants. Some have expressed surprise that such words should be found in the New Testament, let alone in a letter by Paul. That, of course, is why some theories have done their best to muzzle or neutralize them. But there are plenty of signs elsewhere in the letters that Paul means exactly what he says. The question then is: what does he mean by ‘doing the law’, and what, in this instance, does he mean by ‘will be justified’? (PFG 936–37)

Rom 2:1–16 is a crux interpretum primarily because scholars have read Romans as an abstract treatise.18 The conventional reading of Romans sees chapters 1–4 as establishing the utter depravity of the human race, thereby setting the stage for the advent of grace in chapters 5–8.19 In the context of a contingent letter, however, Rom 2:1–16 forms the concentric high point of Rom 1:18–2:29, a thinly veiled address (in diatribal style as to a fictive interlocutor) to those Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome who judge one another. Rom 2:1–5 is a straightforward threat of divine condemnation and wrath on 18

For example, Sanders finds Romans 2 difficult to square with Paul’s other statements on the Law. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 123–36. 19 Rom 1–4 consists of three arguments: 1) Rom 1:18–2:29; 2) Rom 3:1–31; and 3) Rom 4:1–25: 1) The concentric arrangement of Rom 1:18–2:29 around Rom 2:1–16 makes clear that the vocative “every human who judges” addresses both Gentiles and Jews. Although Paul addresses a “fictive interlocutor” in diatribal style, this barely disguises Roman believers. After all, the letter is balanced everywhere except for Rom 1:18–2:29 where there is this third section between Rom 1:18–32 on the characteristic abominations of πορνεία and idolatry and Rom 2:17–29 addressing Jews who boast in the Torah. Jewett considers Rom 2:1–16 as a subtle sophisticated trap for the Roman believers; I consider it to be more straightforward (Jewett, Romans, 196–98). 2) In Rom 3, Paul addresses Gentile and Jewish believers in order to persuade them not to criticize one another over circumcision and Jewish advantage (Rom 3:1–2, 9, 22, 27). Indeed, the question and interrupted answer of Rom 3:1–2 immediately leads to the issue of the unbelief of part of Israel-according-tothe-flesh (Rom 3:3–6), which Paul later addresses in Rom 9–11. Rom 3:3–6, on Jewish unbelief, immediately leads to the calumnious comeback that Paul is a sinner who encourages transgression for the sake of a greater good (Rom 3:7–8), which Paul later addresses in Rom 5–8. After Rom 3:3–8, Paul returns to the issue of Jewish/Gentile advantage for the rest of the chapter. In Rom 3:2, Paul begins a list but is sidetracked by the issue of Jewish unbelief in Jesus. In v. 9, he resumes the issue of Rom 3:1–2. The point of this argument lies in Rom 3:22: There is no distinction between Jews and Gentiles. Rom 3:27–31 serves as a transition between ch. 3 (where then is boasting?) and ch. 4 on Abraham. 3) Rom 4:1– 25 argues that believers, whether uncircumcised or circumcised, are Abraham’s seed by faith: no boasting allowed. Thus, Rom 1–4 is not an abstract treatise on the universal need for salvation on account of sin, but rather, a precise hortatory address to the believers in Rome, circumcised and uncircumcised, to stop their mutual recriminations.

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the day of wrath for those who continue to engage in rivalry and disobedience to the truth (by judging their fellow believers). Rom 2:6–16 proclaims divine impartiality in judging believers, whether Jewish or Gentile, according to their deeds. Final judgment is “according to the truth” of their deeds (Rom 2:2). Thus, final justification is the declaration of righteousness on the Day of Judgment for those who do the Torah. In this context, “doing the Torah” means at very least that Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome stop their competitive rivalry. Unfortunately, Wright reduces “keeping the Law” to a restatement of initial justification (Rom 10:1–13). There is such a thing as heart-circumcision, as Deuteronomy had said. And this results in a new form of ‘keeping the law’ – whether or not the person concerned is a circumcised Jew. As it stands this is teasing and provocative: what can this ‘law-keeping’ consist of? Only in Romans 10 does it finally become clear: it consists of confessing Jesus as lord, and believing that the one God raised him from the dead. But we should allow Paul to state his own terms, not least the ones he formulates in, it seems, a deliberately paradoxical way. When he speaks of people being justified by grace in the Messiah (3.24) and through pistis (3.25), and then goes on to speak of the nomos pisteōs, the ‘law of faith’ (3.27), those who have read 2.25–9 ought already to catch on to what he is saying. When they reach 10.1–13 they should nod in recognition: this was what it was all about. Once the multiple misunderstandings of various ecclesial traditions have been put to one side, Paul is after all not so unclear. What he says in one place cryptically, he regularly explains more fully later on. (PFG 958)

What Wright gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. He complained of those who would “muzzle or neutralize” Rom 2:12–13 (PFG 936– 37), but does exactly that by chopping down “keeping the Law” to mean the act of faith that elicits initial justification. Final justification according to works is equated to initial justification (understood as non-transformative). Wright makes matters worse by continuing: ‘Transformation’, then, is emphatically part of the Pauline vision, the full picture both of ‘covenant membership’ and of ‘salvation’. The indwelling of the Messiah-spirit is a basic, not a secondary or subsequent, element in all Christian existence. But the powerful work of the spirit, in and through the proclamation of the gospel, is not the same thing as ‘justification’. ‘Justification’ is the declaration of the one God, on the basis of the death of Jesus: this really is my adopted child, a member of Abraham’s covenant family, whose sins are forgiven. And that declaration, in the present, anticipates exactly the final verdict which can also be described as ‘adoption’ (all this language, of course, reflects Israel’s ‘adoption’ as ‘God’s son’ at the exodus): ‘we who have the first fruits of the spirit’s life within us are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body’ (Romans 8.23). Whichever way you look at justification, whichever Pauline context you line up beside it, it always retains this character: the ultimate future brought forward into the present, and the two joined by the link of the spirit. (PFG 958–59)

This appears to be a simple contradiction. If initial justification is the Spirit’s prolepsis of final justification, it is based on works (Rom 2:12–13). If “trans-

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formation” (Wright’s category for the dynamic indwelling of the Spirit) gives “the full picture both of ‘covenant membership’ and of ‘salvation,’” then a Nominalist reading of initial justification becomes at best otiose. Transformation does all the heavy lifting and the change of legal status becomes merely decorative.20 This treatment of “transformation” simply contradicts Wright’s standard understanding of initial justification as non-transformative. What then does this initial justification mean? It means that, ahead of any transformation of character other than the bare, initial pistis which by definition looks helplessly away from itself and gratefully towards the saving work of the Messiah, this person is welcomed into the sin-forgiven family, with the badge of membership being that confession of faith and nothing else. (PFG 1031)

Both the Procrustean attempt to reduce final justification to initial justification by equating Torah-observance to Rom 10:1–16 and the peculiar hypothesis of initial justification as a prolepsis of final judgment point to a real problem for Wright. Taking seriously what Paul says in Rom 2:12–13 obviates Wright’s attempt to salvage an anachronistic understanding of initial justification as a mere change in legal status. Since final justification is forensic (i.e. judgment according to works), initial justification must be transformative, enabling believers to do the Torah by grace. In Paul and the Law, Heikki Räisänen speaks of Paul’s “oscillating” use of the word “Law.”21 Sanders points out that although Paul rejects the Law as a whole as an entrance requirement, he, at the very same time, considers the Law as a unity to be the guide for “staying in” the salvific community. (Sanders speaks of “different questions, different answers.”)22 Although this accounts for the vast majority of Paul’s usage, Rom 3:27 and 8:2 call for greater precision. The Torah of works does not exclude boasting, the Torah of faith does.23 The Torah of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus liberates believers from the Torah of cosmic Sin and Death. In these two passages, Paul geminates the Torah without dividing it. The Torah of faith and of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus is the Torah insofar as it is received by the justi20 Wright’s Jesus is oddly jobless between his resurrection and parousia; the Spirit does all the work. N.B.: Wright’s category of “transformation” belongs to the Spirit; a separate category, “participation,” belongs to Jesus and is merely notional and non-transformative. 21 Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). 22 Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. 23 Justification is an extravagant gift (Rom 3:27–4:5). No amount of merely human righteousness allows one to boast before God because God lavishly bestows the wealth of his own righteousness upon believers through, with, and in Jesus (Gen 15:6; Gal 3:6; Rom 4:3). Paul speaks of divine glory and righteousness as wealth (Rom 2:4; 9:23; 11:12, 33; 2 Cor 6:10; 8:9; Phil 4:19). Justification does not cancel a debt, it enriches. The final judgment of the holy ones purifies the Church from defilement and judges the human participation in divine righteousness (according to works) with greater or lesser degrees of corporeal glorification (1 Cor 15:40–42; cf., the loss in 1 Cor 3:15).

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fied, Spirit-indwelt eschatological believer (cf. Rom 2:13; 1 Cor 7:19; 9:21). The Torah of works and of Sin and Death is the Torah insofar as it is received by the person stuck in the past and in the flesh. The geminate Torah is paralleled by a geminate righteousness. Paul was blameless according to the righteousness that is in the Torah (Phil 3:6).24 He claims that his own righteousness that is from the Torah is worthless compared to the righteousness that is through the πίστις Χριστοῦ, the righteousness that is from God on the basis of πίστις. Paul’s participation in divine righteousness through the πίστις Χριστοῦ surpasses his merely carnal blamelessness according to the righteousness that is in/from the Torah. Since the πίστις Χριστοῦ is the death and resurrection of Jesus, the πίστις of believers is a transformative participation, an empowering κοινωνία, in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Phil 3:10–11; Gal 2:19–21; Rom 6:1–11). In other words, initial justification is transformative, initiating the New Covenant (i.e., participationist eschatology). Wright makes regeneration into a straw-man argument against initial sanctification. He rejects the word “regeneration” as too Johannine and not Pauline enough (PFG 954).25 Although this is true as far as the undisputed letters are concerned (cf. Tit 3:5), his rejection of the word does not reject the reality of initial sanctification in Paul’s letters. Justification cannot be separated from the initial gift of the Spirit (Gal 2:21; 3:2, 21). The embodied reception of the Holy Spirit is a constitutive part of becoming a member of the New Covenant κοινωνία (1 Cor 6:9–11, 19–20).26 God calls believers in sanctification, that is, the transformative gift of the Spirit (1 Thess 4:7–8) so that they are called (that is made) saints (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:2). Justification cannot be separated from sanctification (1 Cor 1:30; 6:11; cf. Rom 6:19; 14:17). Indeed, 24

Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 43–45. On PFG 954, Wright invokes the argument he calls “problematic” on PFG 777. 26 Wright dismisses talk of “infusion” as Catholic (PFG 956). He caricatures the notion in n513: “one can easily (but wrongly) suppose that [grace] refers to a kind of spiritual or supernatural substance.” Notice the rhetorical legerdemain; Wright isolates created grace (i.e. the elevation of human nature to participation in divine life, mis-categorized as “substance”) from uncreated grace (i.e., the embodied indwelling of the Holy Spirit) and then rejects both of them! The first move is a theological mistake; the second move is egregiously unwarranted. Infusion is perfectly good language for the outpouring of the Spirit of God into the bodies of believers. Volker Rabens helpfully speaks of the “infusion/transformation model” of the Spirit’s activity in and among believers. He unfortunately then proposes a false dichotomy between it and his “relational model.” This latter model forces Paul’s language through the filter of Modernity to produce a de-ontologized notion, that is, it demythologizes Paul’s language. The infusion/transformation model as applied to Paul’s language is necessarily relational because it is precisely God’s Spirit who indwells and transforms believers. Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2013). 25

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justification is the christological dimension and sanctification is the pneumatological dimension of the same process. Christ and the Spirit co-operate in the embodied inauguration of divine life in those who are being saved. Wright’s transformative model with final forensic justification (judgment according to works) is unnecessarily complicated by his anachronistic eisegesis of initial justification as non-transformative. Initial justification (the gift of divine righteousness by participation in the πίστις Χριστοῦ) and initial sanctification (the gift of divine holiness by the indwelling Spirit) cannot and should not be separated. Both incipiently transform the believer toward the goal of final glorification through, with, and in Christ. Wright wrote PFG to provide a new foundation for forensic justification (understood as a change in legal status and nothing more) in terms of a grand covenantal narrative. This grand covenantal narrative is built on sand – the select Abraham texts of Gal 3 and Rom 4 disconnect the promise/heir schema from the covenantal life of pre-Messianic Israel (circumcision and Torah). Wright’s reading of the Abrahamic promises collapses the New Covenant into the Old and eradicates the Torah and Israel-according-to-the-flesh both inside and outside the κοινωνία of the New Covenant. Wright’s reading of the curse of the Torah salvation-historically blames pre-Messianic Israel for being pre-Messianic Israel and his reading of the Torah as Church-dividing falsely presupposes that Paul abolished the observance of the Torah for Jewish Christians. Upon examination, forensic justification becomes the future declaration of actual righteousness/holiness (of those who do the Torah by their reception of and growth in the gift of divine righteousness/holiness) so that initial justification is the transformative participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus (πίστις Χριστοῦ). The proper starting point for unveiling Paul’s covenantal theology is the New Covenant (participationist eschatology) and the proper approach to Paul’s use of Law language must account for the geminate Torah (and geminate righteousness). Wright’s presuppositions and approach skew his discussion of Covenant and Law from the very beginning.

Bibliography Dupré, Louis. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 2000. Johnson Hodge, Caroline E. If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oberman, Heiko. The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Rabens, Volker. The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 2013.

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Räisänen, Heikki. Paul and the Law. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress 1977. –. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. Philadelphia: Fortress 1983. –. “Jewish Association with Gentiles and Galatians 2:11–14.” Pages 170–188 in The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn. Edited by Robert T. Fortna and Beverly R. Gaventa. Nashville: Abingdon, 1990.

Election and the Role of Israel Sigurd Grindheim According to N. T. Wright himself, “the only thing that is Lutheran about Paul and the Faithfulness of God is the fact that it was published by Fortress Press.”1 It would seem inevitable, then, that a Lutheran interpreter might find a thing or two with which to disagree. In an attempt to start things off in a less predictable way, I would therefore like to mention some of the things I find commendable about this book. First of all, it was published by Fortress Press. Second of all, N. T. Wright’s project is a very ambitious and highly impressive attempt at reading Paul’s theology as a theology of Scripture. His concept of election is drawn from the well of the Old Testament, reinterpreted as it must be in light of God’s climactic revelation in Jesus Christ and his cross. My third and fourth reasons for acclamation are closely related to the second: the New Testament chosen people must be understood in full continuity with the people of God in the Old Testament, and the nature of election must be understood in light of the covenant (I would say “covenants,” but that is a topic for another day) with Israel. Fifth, Wright consistently ties election to the cross of Christ and insists that the story of Israel is also a cruciform story (PFG 1182, 1195). To be the elect people of God means to be conformed to the cross of Christ, to be united with him in condemnation and subsequent vindication. These observations make it clear that Wright’s understanding of election is closely integrated with the central themes of Paul’s theology. Indeed, Wright places the concept of election close to the very center of Paul’s thought, as he reads his theology as a redefinition of Jewish convictions regarding monotheism, election, and eschatology (PFG 610–18). With election taking center 1

N. T. Wright, “Panel Review: N. T. (Tom) Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” SBL Annual Meeting (San Diego, 2014). I would actually beg to differ with Wright about this evaluation. Wright strikes a rather Lutheran tone when he talks about the purpose of the Mosaic law. He strongly affirms that the law served to increase sin and bring about condemnation. This function was not an accidental side-effect, but was at the heart of the divine plan. In Wright’s words, “the law, therefore, God’s holy, just and good Torah, had come with a purpose: not to attempt to rescue Israel from its Adamic state, but to draw out the force of sin all the more precisely in Israel, in order that sin might finally be condemned” (PFG 764; cf. 870, 878).

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stage, traditional theological issues, such as justification, the law, faith, and even to a large extent Christology, are subsumed under the concept of election. The function of these traditional theological concepts in Wright’s reading of Paul becomes clear when they are viewed in light of the overarching category of election. In the following, I will provide a more detailed overview of Wright’s understanding of election before I proceed with some relevant observations from the Old Testament and the Pauline corpus. In light of these observations, I will conclude with an evaluation.

1. Election in Paul and the Faithfulness of God To Wright, election means to be chosen to perform a task. This task is to save the world, or to repair what went wrong when Adam sinned (PFG 784). He contrasts this understanding of election with other possible views, especially the view that God’s election means that the chosen people have a special status in his eyes. “The point of Israel’s election was not ‘for the creator God to have a favourite people’ but for the sin of Adam to be dealt with” (PFG 1015, emphasis his; cf. 1208). The most important metaphor for election is therefore that the chosen people are the light of the world. The expression is taken from the Servant Songs in the book of Isaiah (frequently cited by Wright), where it is used twice: “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations” (42:6);2 “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (49:6). On Wright’s reading, this metaphor was also important to Paul’s understanding of election. To belong to God’s people meant to be a light to those in darkness. Paul reflects this understanding of Israel’s mission in Rom 2:19, a verse that is crucial to Wright’s description of Paul’s theology: “you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness.”3 Another key passage that describes Israel’s function as the elect people is Rom 3:1–2: “then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much, in every way. For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.” Several commentators have noted that to be entrusted with the oracles of God means to be given these oracles for the pur-

2 3

Unless otherwise indicated, scripture quotations are taken from the NSRV. With the search engine of Logos, I found forty-one citations of this verse in PFG.

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pose of sharing them with others.4 However, in Wright’s opinion, the significance of this observation has been seriously undervalued. To him, this reference to Israel’s responsibility is an important key to unlocking the whole letter to the Romans. It captures the role to which God had called Israel, and at the same time it describes their failure: they had not been faithful to their commission to be the light of the Gentiles.5 This lack of faithfulness on Israel’s part prompts the very question that drives the argument of Romans: “what if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?” (Rom 3:3).6 The answer to this question, according to Wright’s reading of Romans, is that God has been faithful to his promise to save the world through his people Israel (PFG 998, etc.). The required faithfulness is fully demonstrated by the people’s representative, the Messiah. In him, the chosen people are epitomized in one person. In him, the task of the chosen people is accomplished by means of his faithfulness (PFG 836). Two exegetical arguments therefore become very important to Wright. First, when Paul uses the term “Christ” he does not simply employ it as something of a common name, used to identify Jesus. The term carries its full connotations as the promised Messiah, the one who would come as the ultimate representative of God’s people. Second, the term πίστις Χριστοῦ should be understood as the “faithfulness of the Messiah.” It is a shorthand way of evoking the story of Christ: as the representative of God’s people he was faithful to the task, faithful to the point of death, so that he could repair the damage wrought by Adam and bring together a people consisting of Jews and Gentiles in unity. Paul’s language of justification is neatly fitted into this story of the chosen people. To Wright, justification “means to have God himself acknowledge that you are a member of ‘Israel’” (PFG 856). In contrast to common Jewish 4

C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans 1–8, vol. 1 of A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 179; Sam K. Williams, “The ‘Righteousness of God’ in Romans,” JBL 99 (1980): 267–68; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, WBC 38A (Dallas: Word, 1988), 131; Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 166–67; Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 243. 5 There is a tension in Wright’s precise account of Israel’s lack of faithfulness. In PFG, he focuses on Israel’s tendency to exclude the Gentiles by insisting on laws such as circumcision, kosher and Sabbath regulations (PFG 1178). In the essay, “Romans 2:17–3:9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans?,” however, he explains that Israel failed to be the light to the Gentiles because they did not present themselves as a perfect people. With reference to Rom 2:17–24, he observes: “for the ‘boast’ to be valid, Israel would need to present to the world the flawless image of a perfect people” (N. T Wright, “Romans 2:17– 3:9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans?,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2013], 497). 6 Wright, “Romans 2:17–3:9: A Hidden Clue,” 491.

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belief, this verdict is not passed on the basis of law-observance but on the basis of πίστις (PFG 839, 840, 847, 931, 991), the concept which links the people of God to their Messiah. Πίστις is therefore a rich concept, which entails “cross-and-resurrection-shaped belief, trust and faithfulness” (PFG 931). As this people are defined exclusively by πίστις, it consists of Jews and Gentiles alike. Wright strongly affirms that there is only one chosen people, and he is eager to insist that his view does not constitute supersessionism. Supersessionism would mean that God has forever rejected Israel as his people, and has begun with a new people consisting of Gentile Christ-believers. Wright passionately rejects such a view (PFG 805–10). Through the work of the Messiah, the chosen people end up fulfilling their purpose to bring salvation to the nations. They even suffer for the sins of the world. The Mosaic law, far from bringing salvation, served to concentrate the power of sin in the chosen people. The specialness of Israel consisted precisely, according to Romans 5.20 and 7.7–25, in being the people in whom, even paradoxically through Torah itself, ‘sin’ could do its worst, increasing and bringing into sharp focus the ‘problem of Adam’, allowing sin to grow to its full height. (PFG 1190)

As a consequence, Israel suffered the curses of the covenant, chief of which is expulsion from the land, which is a state that in essence continues even after the return from Babylon (PFG 867, etc.). In other words, Israel, the chosen people, had to suffer the wrath of God. As Wright puts it, “the doctrine of election always envisaged the elect themselves being the people through whom God would perform the negative task essential to rescuing the world, namely the outpouring of his anger and power” (PFG 1191; cf. 1183; 1207–8). In Rom 11:11–32, Paul shows that Israel’s suffering the wrath of God served his salvific purposes for the world. The key verse is Rom 11:15: “for if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead!” (cf. PFG 1197–1211). Their being cast away is not ultimately a rejection, therefore, but rather the fulfillment of God’s salvific purposes with the elect (PFG 1192). The fact that the hardening of Israel was “part of the saving purposes of God” (PFG 1192) becomes an important argument for Wright in his attempt to show that Paul in Rom 11 consistently refers to Israel as the elect people of God, the people of the Messiah. The majority interpretation today is that Paul refers to ethnic Israel when he in Rom 11:26 maintains “so all Israel will be saved.” The most important argument for this interpretation is that v. 25 refers to a partial hardening of Israel: “a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.” It is usually assumed that Paul would not refer to a partial hardening of the elect, but if the hardening is seen as part of God’s purposes with the elect, Wright argues, “Israel”

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should be understood as a reference to the elect throughout. Wright still struggles to explain that the elect are hardened, however, and ends up assuming what he calls a “double existence” of Israel: “Israel in verse 25 consists of the whole people of God, within which many Jews are presently ‘hardened’ but into which many Gentiles are being incorporated, so ‘all Israel’ in verse 26 must reflect that double existence” (PFG 1244). I am also not quite convinced by Wright’s account of Israel’s salvific suffering. Paul certainly makes a connection between Israel’s hardening and the salvation of the Gentiles in Rom 11:25: “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.” The question is, however, if the connection is of a causal nature. Is the hardening of Israel the cause, or a cause, of the salvation of the Gentiles? The language that Paul uses does not specifically indicate cause. The two Greek words ἄχρι οὗ are correctly rendered “until” in English translations, indicating that the connection between the hardening of Israel and the salvation of the Gentiles is a temporal one. The temporal sequence of Israel’s hardening and their salvation would correspond to the way in which God’s election works: through reversal (more on that below).

2. Election in the Old Testament Wright’s account of Paul’s theology is an impressive attempt at reading him in full continuity with the Old Testament. His reading of Paul presupposes that Paul’s thought world was considerably richer than what is contained in the letters, and he sees his task as teasing out this rich theology as a consistent development of Scriptural themes (PFG 1258). To evaluate Wright’s reading, it is therefore necessary first to take a closer look at the development of election themes in the Old Testament. The idea of Israel as God’s chosen people is a central concept that is rich in connotations.7 To be God’s elect people is a great privilege that entails a great obligation.8 This double aspect comes to expression in the well-known words of Exod 19:5–6: 7

For a more detailed study of election in the Old Testament, see Sigurd Grindheim, The Crux of Election: Paul’s Critique of the Jewish Confidence in the Election of Israel, WUNT II 202 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005) and the literature cited there. 8 Many scholarly studies fail to explain how these two aspects belong together. For an exaggerated tension, see Bertil Albrektson, “Mitt folk, min utkorade,” in Israel, Kirken og verden: Nordisk teologkonferanse Utstein kloster 1971, ed. Magne Sæbø, Gammeltestamentlig Bibliotek 2 (Oslo: Land og Kirke, 1972), 33–36. For a one-sided emphasis on obligation, see Theodorus C. Vriezen, Die Erwählung Israels nach dem Alten Testament, ATANT 24 (Zürich: Zwingli, 1953), 41–42; similarly, Harold H. Rowley, The Biblical Doctrine of Election [London: Lutterworth, 1950], 39–45, maintains that God elects that

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If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.

Israel is indeed special; they are God’s treasured possession, the most highly prized of his belongings.9 With this unique status comes a high responsibility: to be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.10 Israel’s privilege is not a reason for pride, however, as it has nothing to do with any merit on their part. The classic election text in Deut 7:7–11 drives the point home forcefully: The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. But those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction; he will not be slow to repay to their face those who hate him. Therefore, take care to follow the commands, decrees and laws I give you today.

God’s election effects a reversal of values. That which was not valuable in itself is given a new value by God. Israel was not special, but became special through God’s gracious election. God’s election is therefore a most undeserved privilege that entails a serious obligation: they must love him and follow his commandments. These twin aspects of election are unpacked in the prophetic books through a number of different metaphors, the most important being that of Israel as God’s bride.11 This metaphor highlights the privilege of being the object of God’s special love and care, and at the same time the obligation to be faithful. As God’s bride, Israel must show her faithfulness to Yahweh and

which is best suited for his service. Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006], 191–264, is more cautious, but also he finds election to be primarily for the purpose of bringing blessing to the world. Cf. also Ellen Juhl Christiansen, The Covenant in Judaism and Paul: A Study of Ritual Boundaries as Identity Markers, AGJU 27 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 40. For a balanced approach, see Joel S. Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007). 9 The term ‫ סגלה‬was used for things that were acquired at a high cost and would denote an especially treasured possession (Moshe Greenberg, “Hebrew Seg̱ llā: Akkadian Sikiltu,” JAOS 71 [1951]: 174). 10 Exod 19:4–5 is cited once in PFG 805. Wright’s exposition focuses exclusively on election as an obligation. 11 For the language of election in the Old Testament, see especially Seock-Tae Sohn, The Divine Election of Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 9–100.

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not look elsewhere for the love and security that he provides. Her failure to be faithful is the constant lament of the prophetic writings. The most graphic portrait of Israel’s election is found in Ezek 16, which in a sustained allegory narrates Israel’s history as the story of a woman’s life.12 Israel is likened to an infant girl that was thrown out by her parents and left to die. God found her as she was “flailing about in [her] blood” and gave her the gift of life (16:6). At the age of maturity, this castaway was once again cared for by the Lord, adorned with beauty, and made his bride. She owed her beauty to the gift of God, but the bride put her trust in her own beauty (16:15) and began to pursue other lovers. As a consequence, God, her husband, will reject and punish her, but in his great mercy he will once again look favorably upon her and restore his covenant with her (16:35–63). The allegory functions as a theological commentary on the relationship between God and Israel. It explains God’s election of Israel as a counterintuitive choice. Israel was not chosen because of her attractiveness, but despite her unattractiveness. Her beauty consisted in what God had done for her. The obligation that follows from her election is to be faithful to her God and not place her trust and loyalty elsewhere. The sin of Israel was just that: to replace trust in God with trust in secular alliances. Another important metaphor that is used for the chosen people is that of Israel as God’s son (Exod 4:22; Isa 43:6; Jer 31:9, 20; Hos 11:1). The obvious connotations are that Israel is the object of God’s special love and care, and that they will receive their inheritance from him (Jer 3:19), but also that they have a responsibility to give their loyalty to him and not seek other gods (Deut 32:18; Isa 1:2–3). That to be the elect is both a privilege and an obligation is clearly seen in the metaphors of servant, army, sheep, and vineyard. As God’s servant, Israel is provided for by God (Ps 136:22; Isa 41:8–10; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 48:20–21; Jer 30:10; 46:27–28; Ezek 28:25) and called to know him (Isa 43:10). As his army, they are protected by him (Exod 14:25; Ps 60:8–9; Jer 51:20) and not allowed to seek their security from someone else (Isa 31:1–3). As his sheep and vineyard, they are tended by him (Pss 78:52–53; 95:7; Isa 5:1–2), but they are also held accountable (Isa 5:4, 7). From all of these examples, it becomes clear that the most essential obligation of the elect is to trust in the Lord, and that lack of trust or misplaced trust is the most fundamental description of Israel’s failure. There is more to say about the obligation of the elect, however. The chosen people are a priestly nation (Exod 19:5–6). They are set apart from the other nations so that they can serve as the intermediary between them and God. This task is fulfilled when Israel take seriously their responsibility to be a nation that is different from the other nations. 12

The passage is not cited in PFG.

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Leviticus 19:2 sums up the ethos of the people that belongs to the Lord: “you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” This connection between the people’s elect identity and their separation from the other peoples informs the whole argument of the book of Deuteronomy as well. The rationale for the holiness laws is that Israel is God’s elect people: You are children of the Lord your God. You must not lacerate yourselves or shave your forelocks for the dead. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deut 14:1–2)

Their function as witness lies precisely in this separateness.13 When Israel obey the laws of the Lord, their obedience will lead the peoples to acknowledge that Israel are being called by the name of the Lord (Deut 4:6; 28:9–10; cf. Ezek 20:32). John Durham expresses very well the significance of Israel as a holy nation: “they are to be a people set apart, different from all other people by what they are and are becoming – a display-people, a showcase to the world of how being in covenant with Yahweh changes a people.”14 The idea that Israel is the light of the nations must be understood along similar lines. This expression occurs twice in book of Isaiah, where it refers to the Servant of the Lord, not explicitly to Israel (Isa 42:6; 49:6). Most scholars agree that this Servant is a collective symbol of Israel (cf. Isa 49:3), but many scholars also see the Servant as an individual who acts on behalf of Israel.15 There is therefore some uncertainty attached to the use of this term for the people of Israel. In any case, if Isaiah intended the term as a reference to Israel’s mission, its meaning must be determined in light of the broader context. The predominant idea in the book of Isaiah is that God is, and provides, Israel’s light (2:5; 9:2; 10:17; 42:16; 45:7; 51:4; 58:8; 60:1, 19, 20). When he brings salvation (51:5), his justice will also be a light for the nations (51:4). Israel’s role is not to bring salvation, but to receive it and serve as a demonstration of it. They do not even have a missionary function in announc-

13

Horst Seebass, “‫ ָבּ חַ ר‬, §5,” TDOT 2:83. John I. Durham, Exodus, WBC 3 (Waco: Word, 1987), 263. Kaminsky observes that “Israel functions as a mediator for God’s holiness by creating an environment in which the Deity will become manifest” (Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election, 96). 15 For example, Christopher Seitz takes the Servant in 42:1–4 to be Israel and the Servant in 49:1–6 to be an individual who fulfills the mission of Israel (Christopher R. Seitz, “The Book of Isaiah 40–66,” NIB 6:361, 429). Joseph Blenkinsopp argues that the Servant is Cyrus in 42:1–4 and the prophet in 49:1–6 (Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40–55: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 19A [New York: Doubleday, 2002], 210–11, 299–302). John Goldingay and David Payne think the Servant is Israel in 42:1–4 and the prophet in 49:1–6 (John E. Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40–55, ICC [London: T&T Clark, 2007], 1:155, 157, 2:212) 14

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ing it.16 They are called “witnesses” (43:10, 12; 44:8), but the context is that of a legal dispute between Israel and God. Despite the fact that Israel is both blind and deaf and unable to perceive the works of God (42:18–20; 43:8), they will witness his salvation. Israel’s function as witnesses therefore means to experience God’s salvation.17 The point is that God’s salvation reverses Israel’s state of affairs. Through punishment and restoration, through affliction and comfort, through judgment and reversal of judgment, the unrighteous, disobedient, and unperceiving are made witnesses of God’s salvation, and thus the unrighteous, disobedient, and unperceiving become the righteous, obedient, and perceiving. When they experience their redemption, the nations will take notice (41:20). Israel’s function vis-à-vis the nations is therefore to serve as a demonstration of the acts of God. That Israel is the light of the nations means that they are a shining example of God’s work of redemption. In the Old Testament, then, the purpose of election can hardly be reduced to the task of bringing salvation to the nations.18 It is rather a privilege that demonstrates the undeserved grace of God, a privilege that entails an obligation, an obligation to be faithful to the Lord as a bride to her husband. To trust someone or something else is the ultimate act of betrayal and unfaithfulness. Conversely, the priestly function of the elect is fulfilled precisely when they nurture and display their unique relationship to the Lord.19

16

Robert Martin-Achard notes the difference between the apparent missionary outlook of the Servant Songs and the rest of Isa 40–55, and he attempts to interpret the Servant Songs in light of the picture that is painted of Israel’s privileged status in Isa 40–55. He concludes that not even in the Servant Songs is there any missionary function in the sense of preaching a gospel to the nations. The nations are brought in as eyewitnesses to what God is doing for Israel (Robert Martin-Achard, A Light to the Nations: A Study of the Old Testament Conception of Israel’s Mission to the World, trans. John Penney Smith [Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962], 18–31). Sohn sees the Servant Songs as the exception that gives Israel an active role as witness (Sohn, Divine Election, 198–99). Cf. also David J. Bosch, who concludes that Israel was not called to go to the nations. The “missionary” of Israel’s Scriptures, he maintains, was God himself (David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, American Society of Missiology Series 16 [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998], 19; similarly Andreas J. Köstenberger and Peter T. O’Brien, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission, New Studies in Biblical Theology 11 [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001], 52). 17 Similarly, Sohn, Divine Election, 196–98. 18 Kaminsky aptly observes: “while election reaches its greatest heights when the elect humbly submit to the divine service God has placed upon them, it is not reducible to service. Rather, it flows out of God’s mysterious love for those chosen” (Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election, 156). 19 Christopher Wright, who emphasizes more strongly than I do that election is for a purpose, defines Israel’s mission as “to be the people of YHWH, worshiping him exclusively and living according to his moral demands” (Wright, The Mission of God: Unlock-

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3. Election Themes in the Letters of Paul The apostle Paul picks up several of the election themes from the Old Testament, and he plays them in his own characteristic key, profoundly impacted by the cross of Christ. The theme of reversal, which was an essential element of several important election texts in the Old Testament, is highlighted by the ultimate act of reversal: God’s choice to save the world through the cross of Christ. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Cor 1:21). In his first letter to the statusconscious Corinthians, Paul takes his audience on a rhetorical tour de force to show the paradoxical nature of God’s election: Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Cor 1:26–31).

God makes his choice in a counterintuitive way. Rather than picking from the best, he picks from the worst. His election is therefore a demonstration of his judgment of human accomplishment and status. At the same time, it is a manifestation of his grace. Those who are chosen have not deserved it; they have not been in a position where they could be considered the natural choice. Their choice owes to the creative power of God, the power to create something out of nothing. He took those who were not his people and who had no claim to being his people, and he made them his chosen ones. It follows from the paradoxical nature of God’s election that God’s people have no cause to boast, but rather to be humble. One might therefore conclude that Paul emphasizes that election is a privilege, but this conclusion needs to be qualified. Election is a privilege, but it is a privilege that draws attention to the grace and mercy of God who has made such a counterintuitive choice. To be chosen is therefore a cause for humility, not pride (1 Cor 1:29, 31). God’s election is therefore deeply paradoxical. To be God’s chosen is an ambivalent status. It is a privilege that is associated with humility, even shame in this world. This ambivalence shines through in Paul’s many allusions to the elect status of his churches. The fact that the Thessalonians received the word with joy in the midst of persecution is evidence of their elecing the Bible’s Grand Narrative, 241; similarly Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission, LNTS 331 [London: T&T Clark, 2006], 126–30).

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tion (1 Thess 1:4–6), and it is an expression of deep censure when Paul details how the Corinthians fail to share the humiliation that is his lot in this world (1 Cor 4:8–13). The theme of reversal runs through Paul’s discussion of Israel’s election in Rom 9–11 as well. Paul is showing the surprising and completely counterintuitive nature of God’s choice. His choice consistently embraces those who would appear the least likely to be chosen by him. That was the case with Israel’s original election, that was the case with the Gentiles’ inclusion, and that will also be the case with Israel’s future acceptance. As soon as Paul has stated his thesis that “not all from Israel are Israel” (9:6b), he introduces the theme of God’s counterintuitive election. He uses the story of Jacob and Esau to show that God’s election constitutes the unlikely choice. Esau was the older son, but Jacob was chosen (9:12–13). God’s subsequent choice of the Gentiles follows the same paradoxical pattern of God’s election: “those who were not [his] people [he] will call ‘[his] people,’ and her who was not beloved [he] will call ‘beloved’” (9:25). In another act of reversal, Paul takes this prophecy that Hosea spoke concerning Israel and reapplies it to the Gentiles. The reapplication is consistent based on Paul’s understanding of the nature of God’s election. If God’s choice embraces the outsiders and the Gentiles were outsiders par excellence, God’s election would with paradoxical logic necessity reach the Gentiles. This paradox repeats itself, with even greater force (“how much more”; Rom 11:12), in hardened Israel. Their status will also be reversed (Rom 11:25–26).20 Paul’s argument in Rom 9–11 does not show that to be elect is to be given the purpose of saving the world. It shows that God’s election is an amazing gift. It shows that God’s election entails a stunning reversal, a reversal so radical that it is best summed up with the words “life from the dead” (Rom 11:15). Paul is convinced that Israel’s hardening will be followed by their salvation, not because their hardening or their rejection is salvific, but because God works through opposites. The process highlights the gracious nature of the gift of God, not the inherent value of the people’s rejection. If to be chosen is a great privilege, it also entails an obligation. Paul’s argument in Philippians illustrates how the obligation springs organically from the privilege. The purpose of Philippians is that the audience live their “life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (1:27). The ultimate example of a life worthy of the gospel is the example of Christ himself, who abandoned his high status for the shame of the cross (2:5–11). The people of Christ must therefore trade their conceivable status claims for fellowship with the sufferings of Christ, as Paul has done. He is quite emphatic:

20

I go into further detail in my exploration of election in Rom 9–11 in Grindheim, Crux.

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Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh – even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh. If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ/the faith of Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Phil 3:2–11)

Paul’s conceivable status claims are based both on his accomplishments (“as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless”) and on his descent (“circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews”). The facts he mentions are intended to establish the claim that he was a member of God’s chosen people, Israel. It is quite astonishing, therefore, that he goes on to reject this claim with such passion. He had an impeccable claim to be a bona fide member of God’s chosen people, but he threw it away like dung! It is impossible to overstate how profoundly Paul’s understanding of God’s election had been reshaped in light of Christ and his crucifixion. Without the fellowship with Christ’s suffering and humiliation, any claim to elect status is worth nothing more than refuse. Election is cruciform. Without the cross, there is no election. To live a life worthy of the gospel of Christ is to live in a way that is appropriate to the ambivalent status of the elect. It is to embrace the gift of Christ, while rejecting all visible status claims. In this way, one’s life is patterned after the model of Christ, who was happy to appear in humility and whose life was crowned with heavenly glory. So also for the Christian. The hope of a visible manifestation of one’s true, elect status goes together with embracing a shameful status in this world. The reason why Paul goes into this discussion of the nature of election is, as always, very practical. He warns the Philippians against misplaced trust. The negative example is provided by those who insist on circumcision (3:2), and the positive example is himself, who was in a position to trust in visible status claims (3:4), but rejected them (3:7–8). From the fact that he includes being a member of the people of Israel on the reject list, it may be concluded that even one’s own status as being among the elect could become an object of misplaced trust. Such misplaced trust would result in forfeiture of one’s elect status. The contrast Paul draws is absolute. What he warns against is to

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be counted among the dogs and the evil workers (3:2), invectives that clearly denote those who are not included among God’s people, even though they have all the outward signs of such status. In other words, misplaced trust would constitute the ultimate failure of the elect, a failure that would annul their election.21 In direct continuity with the Old Testament prophets, Paul also uses the metaphor of the elect as the Lord’s bride in order to drive home the need for faithfulness, in the sense of unadulterated allegiance and loyalty (2 Cor 11:2). As the Corinthians are drawn towards a gospel without suffering, Paul is afraid that they will be led astray from their “sincere and pure devotion to Christ,” and that they will accept another Jesus, a different spirit, and a different gospel (11:4). The metaphor that Paul employs most frequently, however, is the one of the elect as God’s son. He highlights the connotations of an intimate relationship and of the right to inheritance (Gal 4:5–6; Rom 8:15–17; Eph 1:5). There is also considerable continuity between Paul and the Old Testament in the understanding of the priestly function of the elect. One of Paul’s favorite designations for believers is “the saints” or “the holy ones” (ἅγιοι), a term that is drawn from the Old Testament portrait of the elect as the holy people of God. Even though Paul objects to the imposition of the holiness laws upon Gentile believers, he affirms the theology that informs these laws: the chosen people should be different from other people. His arguments in 1 Cor 5–7 and 2 Cor 6:14–7:1 rely directly upon the holiness laws for the concept that God’s people are called to holiness, the implication being that they should not behave as the Gentiles do. Believers must remove the unrepentant sinners from their midst (1 Cor 5:2, 5, 7, 10, 11) and not “be mismatched with unbelievers” (2 Cor 6:14).22 In light of Paul’s insistence on the need for holiness and separation, it is unlikely that he would have understood Israel’s failure as excessive separation due to their attention to holiness laws. The cultic understanding of election comes to the fore even more clearly in 2 Thessalonians and Ephesians, where we find one of the most sustained developments of election themes in the Pauline corpus:23 21 Wright objects to this description of Israel’s failure as an explanation for Paul’s conflict with some of his fellow Jews. He insists that “the ‘faith’ in question is not a particular way of being religious (a ‘trusting’ way, say, as opposed to a ‘hard-working’ way), but is rather the way of being ‘faithful’ to the divine call and gospel which echoes, and reencapsulates, the ‘faithfulness’ of the Messiah himself, which was in turn the representative ‘faithfulness’ of Israel” (PFG 1027). 22 For the reliance upon holiness laws in 1 Cor 5–7, see Brian S. Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics: A Study of 1 Cor 5–7, AGJU 22 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 61–176. 23 Wright strongly affirms the authenticity of Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians, and he insists that we would understand Paul better if we gave more attention to these letters (PFG 56–61). It is therefore apropos to discuss these letters here.

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Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Eph 1:3–10)

Wright comments very briefly on this passage, and finds in it a striking confirmation of his understanding of God’s plan: the thanksgiving “is built around the single purpose of the creator and covenant God, a plan ‘for when the time was ripe’, to join up the whole cosmos, things in heaven and on earth, in the Messiah” (PFG 730). The identification of a single purpose in this passage seems to me to be overstated, as several purposes are explicitly mentioned. The believers are chosen in order that they be “holy and blameless before him in love” (v. 4). Their predestination is for “the praise of his glorious grace” (v. 6). The gathering up of all things in him is not the explicit purpose of God’s election, but of his plan, a plan that was revealed to the elect. The immediate purpose of election is cultic; the terms “holy and blameless” (v. 4) recall the requirements for the sacrificial animals (Exod 29:1; Lev 1:3; Num 6:14; etc.). Likewise, the term “before him” denotes the intimate presence of God. The most concrete frame of reference would be the priests who stand before God in the temple.24 The Old Testament idea of the chosen people as a priestly kingdom and a holy nation finds its fulfillment in the New Testament people of God. Through their receiving the grace of God, which is described in its abundance in Eph 1:3–10, this people also fulfill their obligation: to render their priestly service to God in the form of praise.25 Their function is here also portrayed with the metaphor of adoption as children, emphasizing once again that the intimate, familial relationship is the very essence of election. As the following argument in Ephesians will show, it is precisely when the elect community demonstrates its uniqueness as God’s elect that they will also play their important part in the plan of God “to gather up all things in him” (1:10). In Eph 3:10, Paul describes his lofty vision for the church: “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made 24

Markus Barth, Ephesians: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on Chapters 1–3, AB 34 (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 80, 113. 25 Frank Thielman says it well: “God’s delight in this act of free and lavish grace toward believers prompt them to praise him, and the praise of his people for his grace was the ultimate purpose of his primordial decision to make believers of his people” (Frank Thielman, Ephesians, BECNT [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010], 54).

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known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” The wisdom of God or the mystery that has now been revealed (3:9) is the full inclusion of the Gentiles, without the Mosaic law, into the people of God, demonstrating unity through their shared intimacy with God (described in 2:11–22 and summed up as “the mystery of Christ” in 3:4–6).26 This cultic understanding of election is also reflected in 2 Thess 2:13–14: But we ought to give thanks to God for you always, brothers and sisters who are loved by the Lord, as God chose you as the firstfruits for salvation, through the sanctification of the Spirit and by faith in the truth. For this purpose he called you through our gospel, so that the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ may become securely yours. (my translation)

God chose the Thessalonians to be the firstfruits, not in the sense that they were the first, but in the cultic sense that this term carries in light of the Old Testament.27 The firstfruits were dedicated to the Lord and brought into the sanctuary (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Lev 2:14). Correspondingly, the Thessalonian believers were chosen to be set apart and to be in the presence of God. The goal of their election is their salvation, and the process of salvation is once again described in cultic terms: they were sanctified by the Spirit. God’s call, which is the way in which he effectuates his election (cf. Rom 8:30), is also seen to serve a cultic purpose: that the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ may become securely theirs. The glory of God denotes his tangible presence and is especially associated with his presence in the tabernacle and the temple (Exod 29:43; 40:34, 35; Lev 9:23; Num 14:10; 1 Sam 4:22; 1 Kgs 8:11; 2 Chr 5:14; Ezek 8:4; etc.). In other words, the end of election is the climax of the cult: a permanent vision of God in his presence.

4. Evaluation The theme of election is very rich in connotations, both in the Old Testament and in the Pauline letters. Its significance cannot be reduced to the idea of election for a task, such as to be the light of the nations. I therefore conclude that Paul and the Faithfulness of God does not give an adequate account of all that St. Paul really had to say about election. To understand the significance of election, one must begin with its character of privilege. To be the elect means to be the object of God’s gracious choice. It is not a reflection of one’s merits, a point that is driven home by explaining that God’s election manifests a reversal of values. To employ a contemporary analogy: to be God’s chosen is not like being chosen to attend 26

Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 320. 27 Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 32B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 437.

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Harvard University. It is not a reflection of the merits of the applicant. God did not begin at the top of the list of qualified candidates. He began at the bottom and picked those who are “despised in the world” (1 Cor 1:28). The obligation that is entailed in election must also be understood in light of the privilege. The elect are who they are because of the grace of God. They would therefore contradict their own election if they defined their identity on any other grounds. The point is best illustrated by the marriage metaphor. The chosen people are God’s bride. They are therefore expected to be faithful to him. If they place their trust in someone or something else they are being unfaithful to God. The failure of those set apart to be the chosen people is therefore above all that of misplaced trust. The Old Testament prophets show that this applies to trust in idols and secular alliances. Paul shows that this applies to trust in one’s own accomplishments, in one’s piety, or in the visible signs of one’s elect status. The bride metaphor illustrates well the purpose of election. God did not choose his bride to use her to save the world, but to love her. He did not choose his people to give them a job, but to demonstrate his grace. This loving relationship and this demonstration of divine grace is also the way in which God brings his salvation to the world when the world sees what he has done for his people. Wright therefore puts the cart before the horse when he maintains that Israel’s error was to fail to be the light of the nations. They may have failed in that respect, but this failure was a consequence of their failure to trust in the Lord alone. They therefore did not allow him to demonstrate his grace through them. Both in the Old Testament and in Paul, the elect’s function as the light to the world is fulfilled by virtue of their relationship with the Lord. Their relationship serves as a demonstration to the nations, a demonstration of God’s character, of the riches of his grace, and of his ability to save and protect his people. In Paul, as in the Old Testament, this obligation is more frequently described as cultic, as being a priestly kingdom, a nation that demonstrates what a relationship with God entails. They fulfill their purpose, not by participating in the task of the Messiah, but by worshiping him for having completed it.

Bibliography Albrektson, Bertil. “Mitt folk, min utkorade.” Pages 21–38 in Israel, Kirken og verden: Nordisk teologkonferanse Utstein kloster 1971. Edited by Magne Sæbø. Gammeltestamentlig Bibliotek 2. Oslo: Land og Kirke, 1972. Barth, Markus. Ephesians: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary on Chapters 1–3. AB 34. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

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Best, Ernest. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. Bird, Michael F. Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission. LNTS 331. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Blenkinsopp, JosEph Isaiah 40–55: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 19A. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998. Botterweck, G. Johannes, and Helmer Ringgren, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Translated by John T. Willis et al. 8 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974– 2006. Christiansen, Ellen Juhl. The Covenant in Judaism and Paul: A Study of Ritual Boundaries as Identity Markers. AGJU 27. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Cranfield, C. E. B. Romans 1–8. Vol. 1 of A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975. Dunn, James D. G. Romans 1–8. WBC 38A. Dallas: Word, 1988. Durham, John I. Exodus. WBC 3. Waco: Word, 1987. Goldingay, John E., and David Payne. Isaiah 40–55. 2 vols. ICC. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Greenberg, Moshe. “Hebrew Seg̱ ullā: Akkadian Sikiltu.” JAOS 71 (1951): 172–74. Grindheim, Sigurd. The Crux of Election: Paul’s Critique of the Jewish Confidence in the Election of Israel. WUNT II 202. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007. Kaminsky, Joel S. Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election. Nashville: Abingdon, 2007. Köstenberger, Andreas J., and Peter T. O’Brien. Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission. New Studies in Biblical Theology 11. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001. Malherbe, Abraham J. The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 32B. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Martin-Achard, Robert. A Light to the Nations: A Study of the Old Testament Conception of Israel’s Mission to the World. Translated by John Penney Smith. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962. Rosner, Brian S. Paul, Scripture and Ethics: A Study of 1 Cor 5–7. AGJU 22. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Rowley, Harold H. The Biblical Doctrine of Election. London: Lutterworth, 1950. Seitz, Christopher R. “The Book of Isaiah 40–66.” NIB 6:307–552. Sohn, Seock-Tae. The Divine Election of Israel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. Stowers, Stanley K. A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Thielman, Frank. Ephesians. BECNT. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010. Vriezen, Theodorus C. Die Erwählung Israels nach dem Alten Testament. ATANT 24. Zürich: Zwingli, 1953. Williams, Sam K. “The ‘Righteousness of God’ in Romans.” JBL 99 (1980): 241–90. Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006. Wright, N. T. “Panel Review: N. T. (Tom) Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” SBL Annual Meeting. San Diego, 2014.

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–. “Romans 2:17–3:9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans?” Pages 489–509 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2013.

An Insider’s Perspective on Wright’s Version of the New Perspective on Paul James D. G. Dunn Tom Wright and I have been enthusiasts for Paul’s gospel and theology for many years. The association goes back at least to 1980 when I was privileged to be one of the examiners for his DPhil thesis at Oxford. The thesis was on Paul’s theology, with particular reference to Paul’s argument in his letter to Rome. And his interest in Paul’s theology has been a regular feature of his multitudinous writings since then – including The Climax of the Covenant,1 What Saint Paul Really Said,2 “The Letter to the Romans” in The New Interpreter’s Bible,3 Paul: Fresh Perspectives,4 Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision,5 Pauline Perspectives,6 and Paul and His Recent Interpreters 7 not to mention his individual commentaries on Paul’s letters. So the two volumes of Paul and the Faithfulness of God can fairly be judged to serve as the climax of some forty years of academic interest in Paul. My own intrigue with Paul has also been academic-life long, including particularly The Theology of Paul the Apostle,8 commentaries on several of Paul’s letters, and volume 2 of my “Christianity in the Making” project – Beginning from Jerusalem.9 The dialogue with Tom is evident in the indices of both volumes. But it was particularly in my collected essays volume on The New Perspective on Paul10 that the dialogue intensified – attested also by 1 N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). 2 N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion Books, 1997). 3 N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” NIB 10:393–770. 4 N. T. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005). 5 N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009). 6 N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013). 7 N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015). 8 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of the Apostle Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). 9 James D. G. Dunn, Beginning From Jerusalem, Christianity in the Making 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). 10 James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

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the dedication of the volume to him. The title of the volume was derived from my 1982 lecture entitled “The New Perspective on Paul,” which had been greatly stimulated (and provoked) by E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism.11 As I had not fully recognized at the time, Tom had similarly been stimulated (and provoked) by Sanders and had responded much more promptly in an article of his own.12 But in the lengthy opening chapter of my New Perspective collection of essays I was more than happy to acknowledge that Tom had been the first to recognize the significance of Sanders’ work and to engage quite intensively with him.13

1. The New Perspective on Paul For both of us Sanders was to be given the credit for challenging and undermining the then dominant view that the Christian Paul regarded his native Judaism as entirely legalistic. As I noted in my 1982 lecture, the Judaism of Paul’s day did not teach that obedience to the law was the means by which Israel entered into covenant relationship with God. Rather, God’s choice of Israel to be his peculiar people was the given, the spontaneously God-given covenant as the starting point of Israel’s relationship with God (Gen 15:5–6). The law had been given as an expression of this covenant, to regulate and maintain the relationship established by divine initiative in God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants. Paul took some pains (in Rom 4) to make precisely this point: that God justified Abraham through faith before he was circumcised; circumcision was the seal of the righteousness already reckoned to Abraham while he was still uncircumcised; the law was not given for another 430 years, and could not nullify the covenant given by promise. In other words, obedience to the law in Judaism was not thought of as a means of entering the covenant, of attaining that special relationship with God. It was more a matter of maintaining the covenant relationship graciously granted by God. It was not that some Judaizers had entirely denied this. Sanders showed clearly that earlier Jewish writers had consistently affirmed just this balance. Paul’s point, his specific point, was that by requiring Gentile believers to be circumcised, the Judaizers were in effect adding a requirement which effectively diminished the fundamental importance of faith. They were in effect 11

E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977). 12 N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” TynBul 29 (1978): 61– 88. 13 James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul: Whence, What and Whither?,” in The New Perspective on Paul, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 7n24.

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denying that justification was through faith, the very point at which father Abraham was the precise precedent and exemplar, as Paul argued so forcefully in Rom 4. For Paul’s judaizing opponents to insist that circumcision was a prior condition before Gentile believers could experience justification, then, was to deny the fundamental character of the Abrahamic covenant. In Paul’s perspective the Judaizers were failing to appreciate their own heritage. The “new perspective,” therefore, was a restatement and reaffirmation of Paul’s own (Christian) perspective on his Jewish heritage. The key summarizing phrase for Sanders was “covenantal nomism” – the key point being that “nomism” followed from “covenant,” not vice-versa. The law was given not as a means to attain righteousness, but to maintain the status of the people God had chosen. “Obedience maintains one’s position in the covenant, but it does not earn God’s grace as such.”14 My principal criticism of Sanders in the “New Perspective” lecture was that having clarified that Paul was responding to Judaizers making Gentile justification dependent on their being circumcised (not criticizing a fundamentally legalistic Judaism), he (Sanders) had seriously mis-appreciated both Paul’s own stand vis-àvis the law and the continuity of his gospel with his Jewish heritage. I developed this view of Paul in a sequence of lectures/essays over the next twenty years, more than twenty of them collected in The New Perspective on Paul volume already mentioned. My commentary on Romans15 and The Theology of Paul the Apostle are probably the best fruit of that whole phase of my work on Paul, in which the dialogue with Tom Wright continued quite extensively. Wright hails this phase of Pauline studies, justifiably, as “the Sanders revolution” in Pauline studies and indeed in Second Temple Jewish studies (PFG 114, 140–41), and glancing through my own New Perspective articles, it is of some interest to note how often we were in agreement. For example, we agreed that Paul’s critique of Israel’s boasting in Rom 2:17–23 was of boasting in covenant privilege, not in self-achieved righteousness;16 Wright makes the point in his PFG (particularly 847, 1000–3). His phrase “national righteousness,” a phrase coined in his Oxford D.Phil., was well chosen as indicating a status given exclusively to Israel,17 as also the description of circumcision as a “badge of national identity,”18 though, somewhat surprisingly, he makes hardly any use of both points in these his most recent two volumes on Paul. And therein, too, Paul’s critique of “works of the law,” on which we also agree19 (a proper understanding of which I found to be crucial 14

Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 420. James D. G. Dunn, Romans, 2 vols. WBC 38A–B (Dallas: Word Books, 1988). 16 Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 9–10. 17 Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 11n41. 18 Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 28n107. 19 Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 45n176. 15

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to understanding Paul’s gospel and theology), is again not given the prominence I would have expected. Wright’s role as a third partner with Sanders and Dunn on “New Perspective” issues is somewhat spoiled by his criticizing both of us for failing to recognize that “the idea of continuing exile” was, or should have been, seen to be part of that “revolution.” To be fair, Wright may well be justified in highlighting the thought of continuing exile in pre-NT writers (PFG 162), but his insistence that such was a continuing factor in shaping Paul’s (as also Jesus’s) teaching has hardly been demonstrated. His apparent determination to restate his “continuing exile” thesis (PFG 114–63), despite the many criticisms it has received, and without making any real attempt to demonstrate that Paul was influenced by it or responded to it is one of the less attractive features of the two volumes. He seems here to ignore his own stated principle in his recent Surprised by Scripture, namely “to allow the biblical writers to set the agenda rather than forcing on them a scheme of thought that does not do them justice.”20 A striking contrast is that whereas Wright spends 65 pages in PFG (Part II, ch. 4) defending his view regarding “return from exile,” whose relevance to an analysis of Paul’s theology he again does not seem to explain (or see the need to do so), in contrast he spends only two pages (PFG 193–95, “The Aims of a Zealous Pharisee”) on the important background and context of the pre-Christian Paul (though also PFG 86–89). En passant he raps my knuckles on Gal 2:16, that “we have here an inner-Jewish distinction, not a distinction between Jew and gentile” (PFG 185), without seeming to take the point that Gal 2 is all about inner-Jewish distinctions which were determining what should be demanded of Gentile converts and which Paul was directly challenging.21 In the course of the subsequent discussion, dropped in every so often are characteristic Wright motifs – like the return of Israel’s God – which appear to have been more read in than read out of the text referred to (PFG 356). And his critique of me in PFG 444n326 that I “explain” Paul’s setting aside of circumcision “in terms of Paul being, in his own day, a ‘heretic,’” seems to miss or misconceive the point entirely. Paul did not set aside circumcision because he was a heretic; rather, Paul saw that circumcision limited and restricted the gospel and therefore set it aside for Gentile converts, with the consequence that he was deemed by fellow Jews as a heretic.

20 N. T. Wright, Surprised By Scripture: Engaging With Contemporary Issues (London: SPCK, 2013). 21 Cf. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, 25n99.

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2. The Absence of New Perspective Issues For me, one of the curiosities of Wright’s PFG is that “the new perspective” features so briefly – something of a puzzle for me since I regard it as such a crucial outcome of Paul’s conversion: a key both to explaining his selfidentification as “apostle to the Gentiles,” and in helping to attain a better insight into Paul’s own perspective on his Jewish heritage. The rest of Part I, on “Paul and his World,” the equivalent of a small monograph in itself (nearly 350 pages in length), has little relevance to the questions raised by the “new perspective,” but well represents Wright’s own distinctive, one might properly say idiosyncratic, style. For example, in the first chapter, the restatement of historical method and “critical realism,” to recall the fuller statement of earlier volumes, allows him to slap down, rather severely, the “history of religions” method and to define exegesis as a branch of history – all somewhat frustrating if one has forgotten the full treatment of the earlier volume. In some contrast, ch. 3 (subtitle: “The Wisdom of the Greeks”) is a masterly account of the shape and content of first century philosophy, particularly Stoicism. Chapter 4 (subtitled “‘Religion’ and ‘Culture’ in Paul’s World”) is surprisingly brief on ancient religion but effectively gives the religious “atmosphere” in which Paul moved. On the other hand, ch. 5 on “Rome and the Challenge of Empire” probably tries to do too much on the “Reality” and “Rhetoric of Empire” (PFG 284–311), though the political context of Paul’s theologizing is indeed a too often neglected subject, and justification is properly offered as “the necessary attempt to ground the possible interaction of Paul with the Roman empire more securely in the actual realities” (PFG 312). Certainly the section on “The Religion of the Empire” (PFG 311–43) is well done, and not least because it corrects the common view that the Roman imperial cult was really established only in the Eastern empire, Asia Minor in particular, during Paul’s life and ministry. But still one might have hoped for some indication or reflection on whether a “new perspective” on Paul’s attitude to Judaism had any repercussions for his attitude to other religions. With Part I behind them, readers might well have thought they were ready to get into the main theme of the volumes, on Paul’s gospel and theology, and perhaps a little more on the new perspective, if it really had made a difference to the way Paul’s own understanding of his mission developed. Instead we have another 220 pages on “The Mindset of the Apostle,” with the somewhat disconcerting introductory note that in this section the author would be “bracketing out ‘theology’ as such in this part of the book” (PFG 351). Yet in the first chapter (PFG 6, on “The Symbolic Praxis of Paul’s World”), there follow sections, for example, on “The Symbols which Say: ‘We Are the People of the Messiah’” (PFG 404–11), a powerful statement on the shock of a gospel focused on the crucified and resurrected Jesus, and on “The Praxis of

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Messianic Monotheism” (PFG 411–37), including, somewhat surprisingly, sections on baptism (PFG 419–27) and Lord’s Supper (PFG 427–29). The puzzle is that in these sections theology is inevitably present, and much would appear to be corollary to rather than preliminary to the exposition of Paul’s theology. A section on Paul’s “in Christ” and “suffering with Christ” (PFG 431–37) would certainly be appropriate later – but before he has expounded Paul’s theology? Likewise the section on Paul’s ethics is rather frustrating (PFG 438–50). Since Paul’s ethics are the outworking of a rich and full theology, it would have been good to have the theology spelled out before the ethics so that the praxis which follows from and expresses the theology could be seen to be doing so. Chapter 7, “The Plot, the Plan and the Storied Worldview” (PFG 456– 537), is surely correct in Wright’s emphasis on the connectedness of the triple story which is integral to Paul’s gospel – creation, fall, Israel. But why does he ignore the role of the Spirit in the outworking of the story – such a vital factor in the new perspective on Paul – with the emphasis on the Spirit in Rom 8, 1 Cor 15:45 and Gal 3 largely ignored? And his insistence on using “spirit” rather than “Spirit” in his few references makes no sense when God’s Spirit was such a crucial element for Paul in the beginning as well as resolution of the tripartite story. He seems to have become so absorbed in his own way of expressing Paul’s theology that he can ignore other voices which say, “There is more to this than you indicate,” or can simply slap them aside in dismissive footnotes. A curiosity is that Wright refers to “the new perspective” and designates it thereafter as NP (PFG 460n14) even though “NP” does not seem to appear again. More striking is the fact that ch. 7 would seem to be the obvious place for a restatement of his view of “the new perspective,” so that the absence of such a restatement comes as both a surprise and a disappointment. The final chapter of Part II, “Five Signposts to the Apostolic Mindset,” asks five somewhat artificial questions – Who are we? Where are we? What’s wrong and what’s the solution? And What time is it? – perhaps an echo of one of his many lectures/sermons on Paul. Such an impression may perhaps be strengthened by the fact that in the chapter he rarely engages with other NT scholars, content simply to set out once again his own view without really engaging with other views or critiques of his earlier writings beyond a few unidentified side-swipes. Once again we seem to be delving into Paul’s theology before we have reached it. In answer to the first question, it is hardly so clear that for Paul Χριστός retained its titular force as integral to most of Paul’s usage, and the translation of ἐν Χριστῷ as “in the Messiah” is certainly open to question. Here he does give some prominence to the indwelling Spirit – somewhat surprising since he has given little attention to it earlier. And in answer to his fifth question – What time is it? – Wright seems to be incorporating ideas into Paul’s theolo-

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gy which cannot be well substantiated from what Paul actually says. In particular, his thoughts on “the newly constituted ‘Sabbath’” (PFG 555–61) seem to be more Wright’s reflection than Paul’s. Here, as elsewhere, I rather fear that Wright has extracted a single, coherent story from his own study of the Old Testament, Pseudepigrapha, etc., and that, rather unself-critically, he reads Paul in its light.

3. The Center of Paul’s Theology – Neither Old nor New Perspective When, at last, we arrive at Paul’s Theology, we are already in Part III, itself longer than Parts I and II together (PFG 609–1266). Here we expect something with the structure of classic studies on the subject, if not new perspective, then at least old perspective – including, for example, treatment of Paul’s anthropology, atonement, ecclesiology, and ethics. What we have, however, are three lengthy chapters, with nicely parallel titles – ch. 9 on “The One God of Israel, Freshly Revealed,” ch. 10 on “the People of God, Freshly Reworked,” and ch. 11 on “God’s Future for the World, Freshly Imagined.” But we look in vain for exposition where the ramifications of key terms like “body,” “flesh” and “sin” can be explained and explored (the subject index gives surprisingly little help here either). Likewise, somewhat puzzlingly, where we might have expected reference to substantial exposition of Paul’s atonement theology, the index refers (somewhat misleadingly) only to 897 and 1070–71. Indeed, the contents page leaves most of such questions unanswered, with so much of the text devoted to exposition of particular passages – for example, 1 Cor 8–10 (PFG 661–70), Gal 3:1–4:11 (PFG 860–79), Gal 2:15–4:11 (PFG 966–76) and Rom 9–11 (PFG 1156–1258). These expositions work quite well. However, since Wright is usually pursuing his own line (not always exactly that of Paul), including sometimes dismissive sideswipes at those who do not read Paul through the same spectacles, he revives concerns about what he is neglecting. If one is looking for critique of traditional views of Paul (“old perspective”), results are generally disappointing since the critique is usually of those who have disagreed with him (though, unfortunately, not much in terms of the “new perspective”). For discussion of Paul’s concept of church and ministry, the contents pages are similarly frustrating. And the concluding index is often as frustrating as helpful – for example, “Spirit and justification” (PFG 912–1032), where the treatment of each subject is at best spasmodic in the 120 pages. Chapter 9 is primarily an exposition of key Pauline texts which relate to Paul’s concept of monotheism, particularly as revealed by Jesus and the Spirit (PFG 644–727). The exposition often reveals a lot of keen insight, though it

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is rather odd that he takes Rom 8:1–4 as the basis for a focus on Wisdom Christology (PFG 659–61). Latterly he draws effectively on Sanders’s “plight and solution” formula in dealing with “the dark side of revised monotheism” in relation to the “problem of evil” (PFG 737–72). But here too new perspective issues pass him by, whereas again and again he draws in one of his own favourite slogan themes (Yahweh’s “return to Zion”), compressing a much more diverse OT expectation into one of his own summary formulae, and too often reading more into Paul’s theology than a text like 2 Cor 4:3–6 warrants (PFG 679–80). The bold assertion, that Jesus = κύριος would be taken to indicate that Paul identified Jesus with Yahweh (PFG 683), is far too much of an overstatement. And while much of the exposition of “Monotheism Freshly Revealed (2): the Spirit” (PFG 709–28) is good, the failure to bring out how essential it was for Paul that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ/the Son (as in Gal 4:6; Rom 8:9; etc.) is a surprising weakness. All too often what we have is an exposition of Wright’s reading of Paul rather than of Paul himself; it would even appear as though what does not belong to Wright’s rereading of Paul does not belong to Paul’s theology. The almost monograph-length ch. 10, “The People of God, Freshly Reworked” (270 pages), is presented as “the central chapter” of Part III, and “the very heart of our entire topic” (PFG 774), but is curiously lopsided. The treatment of Paul’s soteriology is almost exclusively focused on Paul’s doctrine of justification (PFG 925–1032). The prominent “in Christ” theme appears only briefly (PFG 950–52, 990) and, surprisingly, given its prominence in Paul’s letters, not in the index. Wright’s claim to “have shown the rich integration of ‘juridicial’ with ‘participationist’ language and thought” (1039) seems hard to justify. A disappointing feature is his too casual assumption that the Pauline phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ should be read as “the faithfulness of Christ” rather than “faith in Christ,” an assumption which ignores both the reading’s disputed character and the degree to which it downplays Paul’s own emphasis on “faith,” particularly in Galatians (most notably in PFG 967–76). The casualness in regard to what is an important exegetical choice is surprising since it leaves Paul’s gospel unclear at a point which is absolutely key in Paul’s theology. Even more surprising, however, is the way the importance of the Spirit (or, as Wright oddly prefers, “spirit”) in Paul’s soteriology is in effect downplayed – mentioned a lot, of course (as in PFG 952–60), but so often almost as an afterthought that the gift of the Spirit never seems as important as Paul obviously believed (Rom 8:9; Gal 4:6; etc.) and in effect becomes more of a subset of justification. As Paul’s train of thought from Gal 2:15–16 to 3:14 clearly shows, the gift of the Spirit, not least as opposed to “works of the law,” is the climax of Paul’s exposition of justification by faith, a key theme in several of the essays in my New Perspective. But when we look for the sort of exposition of the Spirit which Wright devotes to the passages he counts as

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important, we find very little, for example, on Rom 8:1–4 (PFG 901?) and Gal 3:1–5 (PFG 971–72); 2 Cor 3:6 is not really expounded and 3:17–18 not at all (PFG 980–84); there is no real exposition of the relation of the Spirit to God, or of the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ, or of how the experience of the Spirit is vital to Paul’s gospel and theology (despite PFG 971–72), no real discussion of key phrases like “having” the Spirit or being “led” by the Spirit (even in PFG 1023), no seeming appreciation that Rom 8 is Paul’s answer to the dismay of Rom 7:24; or, in ch. 11, of the Spirit as “first-fruits” and “first installment,” or of “walking” in accordance with the Spirit or being “led by the Spirit” (despite repeated references in PFG 1074–78 and 1089–95). Regrettably, I found it hard to avoid the impression that in Wright’s reading of Paul the Spirit is rather secondary in the whole affair, a kind of afterthought to be regularly added, but not really so central to the whole story. The sad irony is that in Wright’s examination of Paul’s theology, the Spirit does not have anything which really approaches the centrality it has in Paul’s theology itself. Chapter 11 focuses on Paul’s eschatology (only 223 pages!). Striking is the degree to which Wright makes much of “new exodus” and “return from exile” as though they were central to Paul’s theology and without which that theology could not be adequately understood, instead of being just part of a kaleidoscope of imagery and metaphor which Paul uses. The sad little lament that his key phrases, “new exodus” and “bring exile to an end,” mean too little to most readers today (PFG 1071) should have alerted Wright to the fact that he is exaggerating and giving too much prominence to themes on which Paul draws only occasionally, and that in doing so he is missing the richness of the range of imagery, metaphor, and motif on which Paul does draw. And the fascinating little self-apology pro vita sua (PFG 1132–33) should not be missed. It is interesting that he makes no reference to the new perspective at this point. The most striking feature of this final chapter on Paul’s theology as such, however, is an extended, often insightful, but rather idiosyncratic and self-indulgent exposition of Rom 9–11 (over 100 pages). It includes, for example, both a good treatment of the olive tree paragraph and reflection on Paul’s continuing positive hope for his own people through his own ministry. On a small but important point, the 22-page exposition of Rom 11:25–27 includes a reading of “Israel” in two different ways in the course of two verses, which comes across as more than a little improbable.

4. Paul in History The function of Part IV, “Paul in History,” is to set Paul and his theology within the different settings of the politics of his time (ch. 12), and in relation

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to “religion” (ch. 13) and the philosophies of his time (ch. 14), and not least to remind us of Paul’s Jewish identity (ch. 15). The freedom and enthusiasm with which Wright writes on the political context (ch. 12) gives the sense that he could easily have stretched the publication of his PFG to a third volume, though it might have been wiser to keep the argument tight and limited to what really needed to be said to introduce the theme to the Pauline context. His response to those who have disagreed with some of his many previous writings on the subject smacks somewhat of self-indulgence, and he cannot resist popping in one of his own distinctive themes (return from exile – PFG 1299) even though it is hardly evident in Paul. Somewhat curiously, ch. 13 on “Paul and ‘Religion’” is a good deal shorter than other chapters (PFG 1320–53), only beaten in brevity (!) by ch. 4, also on the “religion” of Paul’s world (PFG 246–78). The further critiques, of E. P. Sanders (PFG 1321–24 – “the idea of ‘staying in’ is not a category that would naturally suggest itself within the world of first-century ‘religion’”), of John Ashton (PFG 1324–27), and of Gerd Theissen (PFG 1327–30) in particular might have been more suitable as part of the introduction to the volumes. The chapter’s principal discussion of Paul’s Christianity as a religio is fine but rather limited, with the Spirit coming in once again more as a corollary, even an afterthought, and never really expounded. For example, and noticeably, a verse like 1 Cor 12:13, so crucial to understanding why Paul set the grace of the gospel so sharply over against works of the law, is not really clarified. In ch. 14 on “Paul among the Philosophers,” similar questions arise since Wright seems to remain happy with his single “return from exile” retelling of a more complex story of God’s dealings with Israel. He deals with Paul’s questions to the philosophers rather well (PFG 1359–83), though this reader could not help wondering why the section comes in Part IV rather than in Part III. It is always interesting to note the extent to which Wright’s treatment of Paul reflects his own distinctive reading of Paul and his reaction to criticisms of his earlier work. Chapter 15, relating Paul to “his Jewish context,” is one of the strongest, and, in terms of recent debate about Paul, one of the most welcome in its strong advocacy of the view, as throughout the book, “that Paul remained stubbornly and intentionally a deeply Jewish thinker” (PFG 1408). It includes a justified rebuttal of “supersessionism” – full of feeling, but very much to the point (PFG 1408–17) – an equally justified retelling or re-evaluation of Paul’s “conversion” more accurately as a call (PFG 1417–26), a strong affirmation of the Jewish character both of Paul himself and of his Gentile mission, a good exposition of 1 Cor 9:19–23 (PFG 1434–43) – including a strong and justified critique particularly of Mark Nanos – and a final intriguing and congratulatory review of and response to Francis Watson (PFG 1456–71),

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though latterly the discussion of Rom 1:17 becomes more confusing than clarificatory. Here again we might have expected a final allusion to and summary of a new perspective assessment of how Paul redefined his alignment with regard to his Jewish context and heritage – but nothing. The final chapter (ch. 16, “Signs of the New Creation: Paul’s aims and achievements”) has an impressive introduction (PFG 1473–84). In it Wright seeks to justify his entirely justifiable conviction that the best way to understand Paul and what he says today is to set him fully and clearly in his own historical setting and to explain how he dealt with the issues and challenges which arose for him in these settings. Here again, if he had been of the view that the “new perspective” had provided a crucial correction regarding Paul’s own perspective regarding his historical heritage, a comment might have been expected. Some of what he says (“Paul in Several Dimensions: the Ministry of Reconciliation” – PFG 1484–1504) takes us on something of a wander, with no convincing conclusion to be drawn from the evidence surveyed. But the more lasting impression is that Wright could go on and on and on. So, we have not so much a conclusion as a continued outpouring of his appreciation of Paul and of his theology as endlessly fascinating and stimulating.

5. Conclusion So, what to make of Wright’s (final?) assessment of and contribution to “the new perspective on Paul?” The chief sense is one of disappointment that the new perspective proved to be not very important for him in his climactic treatment of Paul. This is a disappointment since the “new perspective” has contributed significantly to contemporary reassessment of Paul in his relation to his Jewish roots and heritage. By recognizing that Paul’s reaction against “works of the law,” particularly against works of the law as a necessary expression of faith, was for Paul an essential part of his vocation to Gentile mission, it is possible also to recognize more fully the many positive features of his overall attitude to his Jewish heritage. The limited focus of his critique made it possible to affirm Paul’s Jewishness to an extent which had previously been more embarrassing than duly critical. It is Paul the Jewish theologian, not just Christian but Jewish-Christian, which made his gospel so resonant in the first century – and which ensured that a Marcionite perspective could never be counted an adequate expression of the Christian gospel. In short, the new perspective has helped to clarify how Paul fits into both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, and as such it should be given more attention.

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Bibliography Dunn, James D. G. Romans. 2 vols. WBC 38A–B. Dallas: Word Books, 1988. –. Beginning from Jerusalem. Christianity in the Making 2. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. –. The New Perspective on Paul. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. –. “The New Perspective on Paul: whence, what and whither?” Pages 1–98 in The New Perspective on Paul. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. –. The Theology of the Apostle Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977. Wright, N. T. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. London: SPCK, 2009. –. Paul and His Recent Interpreters. London: SPCK, 2015. –. Paul: Fresh Perspectives. London: SPCK, 2005. –. Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Surprised by Scripture: Engaging with Contemporary Issues. London: SPCK, 2013. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. “The Letter to the Romans.” NIB 10:393–770. –. “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith.” TynBul 29 (1978): 61–88. –. What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

N. T. Wright’s Understanding of Justification and Redemption Peter Stuhlmacher1 N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is a monumental and ambitious work. It contains more than 35 years of extensive exegetical research. Based on three profound studies on “Christian Origins and the Question of God,” one substantial commentary on Romans, and numerous essays,2 Wright wants to place the study of Paul in the twenty-first century on a new foundation. He wants to show scholars how to understand the letters of the apostle better historically than before: the exegesis of Paul’s letters is to be liberated from the straitjackets of dogmatic theology and the Enlightenment view of religion, which have dominated our understanding since the Reformation. The apostle is to be given back to his time. He is supposed to be the zealous Pharisee and persecutor of Christians who met the resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus and who developed his theology as a result of this dramatic confrontation. Paul is a fully Jewish thinker who developed his Christian worldview and teaching from a daring interpretation of monotheism, election, and Israel’s expectations of the end-times. A truly pioneering and fascinating program! It is driven by the conviction that the church must take its orientation and shape itself afresh according to Paul’s original teaching. Whatever one may think of the work, simply reading PFG demands more time than the normal professorial schedule permits. Furthermore, Wright’s work provokes critical reflection. Its readers need to follow the example of the Jews in the synagogue of Berea who, according to Acts 17:11–12, examined the Scriptures to see whether Paul’s message was true. They did not believe him until they found it confirmed. 1

Translated by Lars Kierspel. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992); N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003); N. T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009); N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans,” NIB 10:393–770; N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); and N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013). 2

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1. The Substructures of Wright’s Reconstruction Anyone who wants to understand Wright’s view must first detect the grand narrative substructures with which he interprets the apostle’s ideas. Two of them are of particular significance: 1) Despite the people’s return from Babylonian captivity, the majority of Israel and of the apostles supposedly thought that they were still in exile. They therefore still expected the return of the glory of God into the temple and looked forward to the redemption of Israel from the curse of her unfaithfulness. 2) The decisive redemptive act of God for Israel and for the nations is supposed to be found in the Abrahamic election and covenant. God instituted this covenant in order to undo the sin of Adam and to redeem the people of God as well as the people of the world nations through Abraham’s descendants. The first scheme already has been challenged repeatedly. Once again Wright makes another vehement effort to support it (PFG 139–63). Although he considers criticism of it as unreasonable, I still regard the scheme to be a modern construct. It is true that Israel was still cursed for her ungodliness during the time of Paul and that the redemption promised in Deut 32 was as of yet unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the people knew that the one God cared for them and that they would receive the forgiveness of their sins due to the (daily) Tamid offering (see Exod 29:38–42; Num 28:3–8; and Jub. 6:13; 50:11) and the Day of Atonement. The temple cult, the lethal conflict between Jesus and the priesthood, the persecution of Stephen that Paul supported, and Josephus’s description of the people’s disappointment when the Tamid offering ceased in the year 70 CE (B.J. 6.93–95) remain historically inexplicable if Israel was convinced that God was not present in Jerusalem’s temple and that the exile still continued. Wright’s second scheme, which is foundational for the whole of his reconstruction and particularly for his understanding of justification, is even more difficult to accept. In his various works, Wright repeatedly points to the Midrash Gen. Rab. 14:6, in which Rabbi Levi (third c. CE) says that Abraham was not created before Adam but after him in order to rectify the disorder that Adam had brought about. Wright says explicitly: “Abraham will be God’s means of undoing the sin of Adam” (PFG 181, 495ff., 776, 784, 811, etc.).3 According to this understanding (which is not undisputed4), God created 3 See also Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 21; Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 251; and Wright, Pauline Perspectives, 426. 4 My friend and colleague Otfried Hofius wrote to me in a personal correspondence that he considers this statement as one of the many “testimonies to the idea that the world was only created for Abraham’s sake. This idea is related here to the creation of man. The message is: Abraham, whose perfect piety and righteousness was evident to God from the beginning, was for the creator a ‘guarantee’ for achieving ‘the goal of the divine plan with the world’ (Str-B 1:733) and that despite the sin of Adam. And yet, it is not the intention of

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Abraham and established his covenant with him in order to redeem Israel and the nations through the patriarch and his descendants. Wright considers this rabbinic conviction so old that even Paul must have known it. It is supposed to be the rationale that underlies the argument of the apostle in Gal 3 and Rom 4, as well as Paul’s understanding of Jesus’s mission. But scepticism is in order here. Genesis Rabbah was not composed until the fifth century and there are no parallels from the time of Paul to the statement by Rabbi Levi. Nor is this remarkable. According to the studies of Martha Himmelfarb, Genesis Rabbah extols Abraham repeatedly as a “counterpart to the Christian savior.”5 The rabbis tried to counter the Christian view of redemption by attributing salvific functions to Abraham. This seems to be true also with Gen Rab. 14:6. Abraham is being presented in opposition to the Adam-Christ typology of the Church Fathers6 in order to show that the Jewish community does not need Christ Jesus in order to obtain redemption from her sins. She can rely on father Abraham and God’s covenant with him. The statement by Rabbi Levi is directed against the Church’s faith in Christ. When Wright projects the opinion of this rabbi from the third century back into the time of Paul and makes it a presupposition of both Paul’s view regarding Abraham and the apostle’s entire understanding of redemption, Wright commits a serious methodological mistake similar to the school of Rudolf Bultmann in the middle of the last century. In that instance, the Gnostic redeemer myth was considered pre-Christian, and Pauline Christology therefore was interpreted

the text to say that Abraham reverses the fall of Adam. There is a parallel in Jalqut Shimon, I §766 (cited in Str-B 1:733). We read there about God’s preview of the generation of Enoch and the flood and how he asks himself: ‘How can I create the world since these godless people will arise and make me angry?’ A little bit later we read: ‘When God saw Abraham who was going to arise, He said, Behold, I have found a rock upon which to build and establish the world.’” 5 Together with Peter Schäfer, an expert on Judaism, Martha Himmelfarb has pursued the question for some time now what influence the Christian tradition had on the ideas and arguments of the rabbis in the first centuries of the Christian calendar. Schäfer has presented the first results in the book: Peter Schäfer, Die Geburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums: Fünf Vorlesungen zur Entstehung des rabbinischen Judentums, Tria Cordia 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). In 2015 or 2016 Mohr Siebeck is planning to publish another collection of studies with the working title: Genesis Rabbah: Text and Contexts, ed. Sarit Kattan Gribetz, David Grossberg, Martha Himmelfarb, and Peter Schäfer. Martha Himmelfarb has contributed an essay which she kindly forwarded to me in advance of its publication: “Abraham and the Messianism of Genesis Rabbah.” My citation comes from this study. 6 See Theresia Heither, “Adam im Neuen Testament,” in Theresia Heither and Christiana Reemts, Adam (Münster: Aschendorff, 2007), 286–307, with many citations from the fathers.

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as a critical reception of this myth, especially Phil 2:6–11 and Col 1:15–20.7 But New Testament scholarship has abandoned such anachronism. Now they have to be on guard against following Wright’s scheme. This must be clearly stated: a rabbinic view of the covenant with Abraham that is fundamentally directed against Rom 5:12–21 and 1 Cor 15:21–22 is a useless tool for the study of Paul. Paul never speaks expressis verbis of the Abrahamic covenant, but only of the covenants established with Israel (Rom 9:4). As in Gen 12, so also in Gal 3 and Rom 4, Abraham was elected by God’s grace to be Israel’s patriarch and vessel of the promises. He is a type and witness of the faith that God justifies the ungodly (that is the sinner), that God “gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist” (Rom 4:17). But Abraham has no salvific function in Paul’s theology. Thus, the two most important substructures of Wright’s interpretation of Paul can barely stand the test of historical verification, if they do so at all. His presentation merits, therefore, critical revision, and that with respect to the whole system as well as individual statements. Such a revision has to search for better exegetical explanations while maintaining Wright’s biblicaltheological approach which brings a substantial interpretative advantage.

2. The Sacrifice of Christ Jesus According to Wright, Pauline Christology emerged as a new interpretation of Jewish monotheism. This fascinating view is well documented in Paul’s new version of the Shema in 1 Cor 8:6 and renders any search for Hellenistic roots of Paul’s Christology superfluous. Wright points out convincingly that Paul saw in Jesus the Messiah of Israel and that he never lost sight of the cross in all his explanations about Christ Jesus. 1. Wright translates Χριστός in all Pauline references with “Messiah” and considers the old historical question as obsolete if, where, and to what extent “Jesus Christ” or “Christ Jesus” were proper names (PFG 817, 824). Considering Acts 11:26, that is too sweeping of a conclusion, but we will not pursue that matter further here. Yet we have to point out that Wright is more interested in the general correctness of his reconstruction than in philological details. That can be illustrated with his understanding of the collocation 7

As examples we may refer to the two essays by Ernst Käsemann: Ernst Käsemann, “Eine urchristliche Taufliturgie,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 34–51 and Ernst Käsemann, “Kritische Analyse von Phil 2,5–11,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 51–95. Rudolf Bultmann’s own view of the Gnosis and its myth is evident in his book: Rudolf Bultmann, Das Urchristentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen (Zürich: Artemis, 1949), 176–87.

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πίστις (Ἰησοῦ) Χριστοῦ. According to Gal 2:16, it means “faith in (Jesus) Christ.” Wright recognizes that quite well (PFG 967). But this philological fact does not prevent him from translating the expression in many places with “faithfulness of Jesus.” According to Wright, Jesus was faithful to God. He believed in God representatively for Israel, and in this faithfulness he went to the cross. Those who have faith in him may now participate of the fruit of Jesus’s faithfulness (see PFG 841). Wright supports his view with a reference to Jesus’s obedience (ὑπήκοος) in Phil 2:8 (PFG 841). But he does not take into account that in his letters Paul never uses πίστις to describe the relationship between God and the pre-existent son of God who becomes human and, after resurrection and exaltation, receives the divine name Κύριος (Phil 2:9– 11). Nor do the other authors of the New Testament do so. Only Heb 12:2 might be an exception. Beyond such general references, it is not plausible from an exegetical standpoint why a certain christological perspective should obligate us to speak of Jesus’s own faithfulness. Paul places his emphasis elsewhere and writes: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19). 2. For the Old Testament and ancient Judaism, the Messiah was first and foremost the representative and vicegerent of God’s reign, which proceeds from Zion. Wright knows that, of course.8 If one relates the deutero-Isaianic Servant and the Son of Man of Dan 7 to the Messiah, then he is Israel’s corporate representative before God. This combination is especially characteristic for the Jesus tradition. But Wright says nothing about that in PFG. The letters of Paul neither quote Dan 7 nor speak of the Son of Man. Despite this absence, Wright assumes that, for Paul, the Messiah Jesus was Israel personified, who presented to God the obedience which God’s people owed him. With this repeated formulation, which recalls Anselm of Canterbury’s doctrine of satisfaction, Wright makes the sacrifice of Jesus fit into his guiding paradigm of Abraham’s redemptive covenant. But that is not the opinion of Paul. The apostle writes in continuity with 1 Cor 15:3–5, the old creed from Jerusalem, that God delivered Jesus into death “for us” (Rom 4:25; 8:32). Paul sees in Christ the servant of God who was given over to death for Israel and the world, the sin- and guilt-offering that God himself sacrificed. 3. Wright also emphasizes that Paul understood Jesus’s death on the cross as a sacrificial death and as an atonement. He accurately equates ἱλαστήριον in Rom 3:25 with the ‫ כפרת‬in the Holy of Holies of the temple (PFG 846)9 and correctly translates περὶ ἁµαρτίας in Rom 8:3 with “sin offering” (PFG 897). And yet, Wright lacks a precise understanding of the event of atone-

8

Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 307ff. For this equation see Dan P. Bailey, “Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Rom 3:25,” TynBul 51 (2000): 155–58. 9

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ment and the blood rite that is implied.10 When explaining Rom 3:25 he makes only general references to the ‫ פסח‬lamb, the sin offering in the temple’s holy of holies, the traditions of God’s servant and the Jewish martyrs, without giving further thought to the identification of Jesus with the ἱλαστήριον. Wright seems to be unfamiliar with the ground-breaking work of Hartmut Gese and Bernd Janowski regarding atonement and representation.11 Even Richard Bell’s reference to both scholars escaped Wright’s notice.12 Because of this regrettable oversight, Wright has missed not only the meaning of Rom 3:25 (see below), but also the recognition that juridical and participatory aspects of redemption are connected, something researchers repeatedly separate. While Wright is very interested in this connection, he merely sees the two aspects united in “covenantal thinking.” And yet, if one follows Gese, viewing the atonement through the blood of the representative sacrifice as a “coming to God through the judgment of death,”13 then the following context becomes evident: out of the representative giving of life and the execution of the death penalty (the animal sacrifice) emerge forgiveness of sins and a new communion with God. This connection is constitutive for the apostle’s Christology and understanding of justification. Because of it believers gain, according to Rom 5:2, “access” to grace and the gospel, which is preached by Paul, and which leads from God’s righteousness in Christ directly to σωτηρία (see Rom 1:16; 10:9). Wright sees this differently (see PFG 887, 913, 927, 1031).

10

In Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 274–75, he explains that for him and E. P. Sanders the following question remained open: “according to what inner rationale was the killing of animals or birds thought to effect the atonement and forgiveness which those who did it clearly believed it did effect?” He can only find an answer in the following assumption: “the sacrificial system functioned as a regular pointer back to the great acts of redemption such as the exodus, and equally as a pointer forward to the great redemption to come. Since it spoke of Israel’s reconciliation with her god, it could thus function as a cyclical reminder of a historical or historical/eschatological phenomenon.” 11 Neither author is mentioned in Wright’s literature index. We refer, therefore, to Hartmut Gese, “The Atonement,” in Essays on Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1981), 93–116 (Eng. trans. of Hartmust Gese, “Die Sühne,” in Zur biblischen Theologie: alttestamentliche Vorträge, BEvT 78 [München, Kaiser, 1977], 85–106); Bernd Janowski, Sühne als Heilsgeschehen: Studien zur Sühnetheologie der Priesterschrift und zur Wurzel KPR im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament, WMANT 55 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1982); and Bernd Janowski, “Expiation §II.1,” RPP 4:770–71. 12 Richard H. Bell, “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul,” JTS 53 (2002): 1–27. This essay is also never mentioned anywhere by Wright. 13 Gese, “The Atonement,” 114: “sanctifying atonement . is coming to God by passing through the sentence of death.”

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3. Justification by Faith Because of Christ By giving Paul back to his time, Wright’s perspective on the apostle’s statements on justification change as well. According to Wright, they belong to the context of Paul’s redefined election of Israel, which has to do with the question concerning the “membership in the people of God, in Abraham’s family, in Israel” (PFG 925ff.).14 He is adamantly opposed to making this teaching of the apostle absolute in the sense of the Reformation and to integrate it into the ordo salutis.15 Paul does not, according to Wright, speak anywhere of “works righteousness.” Furthermore, we may not identify justification and eschatological salvation. As we have emphasized already, Wright’s integration of the Pauline statements about justification into the (rabbinic) evaluation of the covenant with Abraham (see above) is historically wrong and theologically unfortunate. What about Wright’s positions on other subjects? 1. From the beginning, Wright welcomed the “New Perspective” as it was formulated initially by E. P. Sanders and developed further by J. D. G. Dunn. It has led to heated controversy.16 That is why Wright now makes the interesting proposal to measure the validity of the New Perspective by means of the question if and to what extent the letter to the Ephesians may be pulled into the interpretation of Paul (see PFG 772, 835, 909–10, etc.). If one follows this advice, then Eph 2:11–12 demonstrates that the apostle is indeed concerned about Gentile participation in the promises in the Old Testament and in their citizenship in the one body of Christ that forms the redeemed people of God. Due to the atoning death of Jesus, the dividing wall of the Torah between Jews and Gentiles has been torn down, and both may now form a new family of faith, which is spoken of in Isa 57:19. The Gentiles, who are “far,” are to be drawn into the people of God and, together with the 14

See also N. T. Wright, “Justification: Yesterday, Today and For Ever,” in Pauline Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2013), 428. 15 Wright’s criticism of Luther has a prominent predecessor in Adolf Schlatter. As legitimate as the criticism might be, the mocking comment that Luther’s interpretation of Rom 10:3 might be due to overindulgence of Wittenberg’s beer (PFG 1169) should be erased in future editions. It is unnecessarily condescending and does not fit a bishop and theologian of Wright’s stature. 16 Together with Donald A. Hagner, I have expressed opposition against various kinds of onesidedness of the New Perspective: Peter Stuhlmacher and Donald A. Hagner, Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001). In the following critical discussion of Wright, I am drawing from this book; from Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments I, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 310–11; and from Peter Stuhlmacher, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary, trans. Scott J. Hafemann (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), esp. 61–62.

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Jews who are “near,” are to find their salvation through faith in Christ Jesus, through justification due to the atoning death of Jesus (see Eph 2:8–9). In this regard Wright is quite right. 2. But these (deutero-)Pauline statements do not sufficiently encompass the depth of justification (see below). They also do not permit limiting the meaning of the “works of the law” (Ps 143:2; Rom 3:28; Gal 2:16; 3:2) to boundary markers, that is, to circumcision, the keeping of kosher laws and of the Sabbath. As important as these markers of distinctions were, especially for Jews in the Diaspora (for proof see Gal 2:11–21), keeping these few regulations is not tantamount to keeping the Torah. Pharisaic καύχησις is illustrated in Luke 18:11–12. According to Phil 3:6, Paul knew of it. As a fanatical Pharisee, he persecuted the followers of Stephen all the way to Damascus and suffered later as an apostle five times the synagogue’s punishment of forty lashes minus one (2 Cor 11:24). In all of this, there was much more at stake than boundary markers. The faith of the apostates in Christ meant that nothing less than the role of the temple and of the Torah as such were being questioned (see Acts 6:11–14). The discussion about the works (of the law) in Rom 9:12, 32; 11:6 and Eph 2:6 have little to do with boundary markers. In this regard, it is not an accident that James, the brother of the Lord, in Jas 2:14–26 contradicts the sola fide of Rom 3:28 and in contrast to the apostle himself or, perhaps, a Paulinist, reclaims a place for works (of love). The works of the law that are criticized in Paul’s letters encompass all laws of the Torah (see Gal 5:3) and not merely the boundary markers. 3. It is noticeable that Wright only in passing addresses the question as to whether Paul was the first who spoke of justification or if he elaborates on statements that were given to him by the Christian churches of Damascus, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Given the hints in 1 Cor 11:23–26 and 15:3–5, there is no doubt that the apostle knew such traditions. Even more direct indications are found in Rom 3:25–26, the language of Jesus’s deliverance based on Isa 53 (Rom 4:25; 8:32), and perhaps also 2 Cor 5:21 (see below). It is, furthermore, quite possible that Gal 2:16 is informed not only by the Old Testament (see Ps 143:2; Dan 9:18; etc.) but also by Christian traditions. 3.1 We may illustrate the significance of this question with Rom 3:25–26. The identification of Jesus with the ἱλαστήριον, that is the ‫כפרת‬, might very well go back to Stephen and his temple criticism.17 Paul knew the tradition, adopted it (in Antioch?) and completely agreed with it. Christ suffered the judgment of death as a representative for Jews and Gentiles. But his sacrifice has as little to do with an appeasement of God’s wrath18 as it does with the Passover or Jewish martyrs (see above). The statement of the text is much more daring: God made his own son the ‫כפרת‬, and through his blood he ob17 18

See Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie, 296–97. Wright, “Romans,” NIB 10:476.

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tained atonement once and for all. Jesus is true God, present at the ‫( כפרת‬Exod 25:22) and, at the same time, true man whose life (in his blood) was given for Jews (and Gentiles). Because of this atonement, the Christian church has, henceforth, no need for the temple in Jerusalem nor for any further blood sacrifices. All that matters is faith in the incredible event of Golgotha and in Christ Jesus. The text says that explicitly in Rom 3:25 (διὰ [τῆς] πίστεως) and 3:26 (ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ). We do not read here of Jesus’s faithfulness (see above), but of justification and redemption. In 3:24, the ἀπολυτρώσεως is explicitly defined as redemption “in Christ.” Therefore, similar to 1 Cor 1:30, the term does not allude to Abraham and the exodus (PFG 846),19 but to the unique redemptive event (on Golgotha). In this event, God’s saving righteousness is realized not only such that earlier sins will be forgiven, but so that God justifies “at the present time” everyone who believes in Jesus (3:26). 3.2 2 Corinthians 5:21 shows that justification establishes a new existence. Wright wants the sentence to refer to Paul and the other apostles, understood as representatives of God’s righteousness (PFG 558, 724, 881–84, etc.). But that is problematic if only for this reason: Paul boasts only of his weakness (2 Cor 12:8). In addition, the train of thought in 2 Cor 6:1–2 renders it improbable that the apostle speaks of himself (and the apostles). Second Corinthians 5:21 is either a quotation of a tradition that precedes Paul, or a well-thoughtout statement of the apostle himself. If we consider it a tradition, then it says, similar to Rom 8:3, that God made his innocent son (see Isa 53:9; 1 Pet 2:22; Heb 4:15) to be a sin offering “for us” – in Lev 4:21, 24; 5:12, the LXX translates sin offering (‫ )חטאת‬simply with ἁµαρτία – so that we may win a new righteous existence through him. Γενώµεθα signifies a determining of existence. The new life of the atoned ones is called “righteousness of God.” They are καινὴ κτίσις (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15) and participate in the righteousness that is God’s own. If we have here a genuine Pauline statement, the sentence says the same thing, with the one difference that God made his (preexistent20) son for us to be the one who carries all sin (see Isa 53:6); and who, through that, created a new existence for us. Regardless of whether 2 Cor 5:21 is a tradition cited by Paul or a Pauline formulation, it is evident in both cases that God’s salvific legal verdict, atonement, and participation in divine existence are all connected in justification. It is an establishing of new existence by an act of creation. 3.3 This comprehensive notion of justification is confirmed by a christological understanding of Isa 53. Paul received this understanding through the traditions of the Lord’s Supper and the Jerusalem Credo (see above). He adopts it and emphasizes in Rom 4:25 (perhaps again by using earlier Chris19

So also Wright, “Romans,” NIB 10:471. Together with Hans Windisch and others, Bell refers Jesus’s sinlessness to his preexistence (Bell, “Sacrifice and Christology,” 14). 20

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tian traditions) that Christ Jesus “was delivered up because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification (δικαίωσις).” What this means is that Jesus suffered the fate of the servant of God. He was God’s guilt offering for our sins, and as the resurrected one he will “justify many” (Isa 53:10–11). Romans 8:34 explains what that means: as the One who was raised and who sits at the right hand of God, he makes his vicarious death effective for “the many.” He intercedes for them and does so in such a way that they will escape the verdict of death in the (final) judgment. Wright rarely mentions Jesus’s heavenly intercession (PFG 1024). And yet, in Paul’s understanding, this intercession is the decisive theological reason that nothing can separate believers in the (final) judgment from the love of God, which is embodied for them in Christ Jesus, their Lord. Paul is not the only one who asserts this matter. In the Letter to the Hebrews, we also find a Christological combination of the final day of reconciliation with the heavenly intercession. 4. Our view about the righteousness of God ultimately determines our understanding of the apostle’s statements regarding justification. Together with Ernst Käsemann, Wright interprets δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ as God’s own righteousness (PFG 841). And yet, unlike Käsemann, he relates this collocation to God’s faithfulness to the covenant (with Abraham) and speaks, therefore, repeatedly of God’s “covenant faithfulness.” This definition includes for him God’s faithfulness as Creator, the dimension of God’s righteousness emphasized by Käsemann (PFG 842). Wright does not see (and cannot know) that it was the book of Revelation which informed Käsemann’s view of the end-time implementation of God’s righteousness in the whole world. The point of contact between Paul and the Apocalypse is especially evident in 1 Cor 15:23–28: the sequence of the resurrection events here corresponds exactly to those in Rev 20–21. The hope for the heavenly Jerusalem in Gal 4:25 (Phil 4:20) is displayed in Rev 21:2; 21:9–22:5. Wright refers to 1 Cor 15:23–24 repeatedly (PFG 639, 1063, etc.), but he does not mention the parallels to Rev 20–21. Both the seer John and Paul expect the realization of the βασιλεία through Christ Jesus, who fights for it in the final battle against the satanic powers (see 1 Cor 15:25–26 and Rev 19:11–12). Wright rightly criticizes Käsemann’s inadequate views of Paul’s statements regarding Israel and the Jews, and rightly claims that he underestimated the covenant (PFG 795, 807, 895). But neither mistake minimizes the apocalyptic approach. Wright thinks that it is no more helpful than Bultmann’s use of the Gnosis (PFG 1481–82). Yet Käsemann used it to confront the existential interpretation and demythologization of Bultmann himself and many of his students. He defended God’s entitlement to his creation as well as the biblical and Pauline understanding of the resurrection. Crucial for his understanding were the apocalyptic hymns of praise in Rev 7:12; 11:17–18; 12:10–12; 14:8; 15:3–4; 16:5–7; etc. Käsemann’s perspective remains crucial to the proper understanding of justification if we supply it

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with the necessary depth with regard to promissory history. Wright’s specific view of the covenant with Abraham does not help any further (see above). He also ignores the allusion to Ps 98:2 in Rom 1:16 (as emphasized by Mark A. Seifrid21), subordinates the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus’s sacrifice (Rom 3:21–31) to the fulfillment of covenant promises, and obscures the reality that, according to Rom 9–11, it is especially Israel who is called to justification by faith in the Redeemer who shall appear (at the end of the days) from Zion (11:25–31). Wright’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Rom 9–11 in the eleventh chapter of his book is not the main subject of our discussion. Here he relies on a onesided interpretation of the zealous motif from Deut 31:21–22 in Rom 10:19; 11:14.22 Furthermore, he does not pay sufficient attention to the statements about Israel’s justification in 9:12, 30–33; 10:1–3; 11:6. He even gives Israel’s fate a soteriological quality, which is entirely non-Pauline (PFG 1210). He does not understand Rom 11:25–32 as a reference to the parousia of Christ from Zion (according to Isa 59:20–21 and Ps 49:2 [LXX]) but to God’s coming (PFG 1210). Furthermore, he does not show how this reading of the text coheres with 1 Cor 15:24–28. Wright further supposes that the Pauline mission did not aim for the Gentiles streaming to Zion but that it had a centripetal character (PFG 1255). However, this clouds the historical fact, which is documented better than anything else, that Paul was an apostle of the Gentiles for Israel’s sake: According to his own words, the apostle’s way began in Jerusalem (Rom 15:19), was validated in Jerusalem (Gal 2:2, 6–10), and remained focused on Jerusalem. This led to his death because, upon delivering the collection, Paul lost his freedom and, as a consequence, his life. 5. Wright is entirely correct when he insists that Paul’s statements in Rom 2:1–11 about the final judgment are not hypothetical. They form the background for the statements about justification in Rom 8:2–3. Just as Käsemann repeatedly emphasized in his lectures and seminars, Wright explains that in Paul’s view, grace is only available in judgment and through judgment. He legitimately differentiates between initial justification and final justification. The first one is based on the atoning death of Jesus by grace and by faith 21 Mark A. Seifrid, “Righteousness Language in the Hebrew Scriptures and Early Judaism,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism I, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, WUNT II 140 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 441; Mark A. Seifrid, Christ our Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Justification, New Studies in Biblical Theology 9 (Leicester: Apollos: 2000), 38–39. 22 Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11, WUNT II 63 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 43, 154–66 draws attention to the juridical meaning of παραζηλοῦν in Rom 10:19. But then he also shows that the meaning in 11:11, 14 implies the hope that Israel would be provoked to imitate the believing Gentiles. Luke’s reports about Paul’s work in the synagogues illustrate how ambivalent the results of his ministry were; see Acts 9:19–25, 29; 11:26; 13:45; 14:1–7; etc.

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alone (Rom 3:28). The final judgment examines everything that Christians did (or neglected to do) in the power of the Holy Spirit who was given to them in baptism. That is also correct because the apostle can speak in 1 Cor 3:8, 14; 9:17; 2 Cor 5:10; Eph 6:8; Col 3:24; etc. without hesitation about the reward or punishment that will be received in the final judgment. The yardstick for this judgment is the will of God as revealed in the Torah and reinterpreted by Jesus. Wright’s discussion becomes imprecise when he speaks about the “law court.” Israel’s ancient law court, to which Wright refers (PFG 797–98),23 is not an adequate example for the heavenly law court. In Rom 8:33–34 there appear not merely three, but four parties: the one and only God on the judgment throne, Christ who sits to his right, the individual who is to be judged, and the accusations (from whomever) against them. The accused is threatened with the verdict, but due to the intercession of Christ Jesus he is exonerated and may enjoy God’s love as it is embodied in Jesus. (After his resurrection as a justified individual he may even participate in the final judgment of the powers, see 1 Cor 6:2; 15:23 with Rev 20:4). Paul emphasizes that no man is just before God, not even the one who can show “works of the law” (Rom 3:9–20). All participate in Adam’s fall (Rom 5:12). That is also true for believers, including the apostle himself (see 1 Cor 4:4; Phil 3:7–11). All have to account for their actions and omissions before the judgment throne of God (2 Cor 5:10; Rom 14:10). Then those whose works are approved will receive a reward, and those whose works were insufficient will suffer punishment. For both, however, entrance into the βασιλεία does not depend on their deeds but on their faith. In it they confess Christ Jesus (Rom 10:9–10), in whom and through whom God’s grace was ultimately expressed (1 Thess 5:9–10; Rom 8:38–39; Eph 2:4–10; etc.). Because of this grace they both will be saved. Christian assurance of salvation is also important for Wright.24 Yet, strangely, he never elaborates on the two texts in which Paul promises sinners participation in the βασιλεία – 1 Cor 3:15 and 5:5. The Reformers concluded from these statements that, for the apostle, the person is more important than the works. They concluded this correctly, although Paul only hints at it. He merely shows that while severe sins lead to punishment for the Christian, God’s grace in Christ cannot be nullified. Nevertheless, the apostle leaves no room for doubting the fact that unbelief and the rejection of faith excludes from the βασιλεία (1 Cor 5:9–13; 6:9–10; 2 Cor 7:14; Eph 5:5; etc.). The only exception from this rule is Israel, which God “hardened” temporarily. God himself included her in unbelief in order to have mercy on her in the end (Rom 11:32).

23 24

See also Wright, Justification, 68 and Wright, Pauline Perspectives, 430–31. See Wright, Pauline Perspectives, 436–37.

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If that is seen properly, then Paul’s statements about justification do not deal merely with participation in the people of God at the end of time. They are about a new existence and participation in the βασιλεία which the elevated Christ is supposed to establish as a mission from his heavenly Father (1 Cor 15:23–28). Justification and redemption are intimately connected (see 1 Cor 1:30; Rom 3:24; Eph 1:7, 14; Col 1:14).

4. Wright’s Method and His Result Rather than beginning with the historical origin of the individual texts and their statements, Wright prefers to work with entire passages, biblical contexts, and macro perspectives (PFG 965). He immerses himself into the Pauline world of ideas, Paul’s use of Scripture together with the expectations of salvation, reconstructs these and integrates Paul’s writings into that reconstruction. This constructive procedure uncovers some new matters that previously remained obscure. But it also gives Wright’s presentation a largely hypothetical character. After having reviewed critically various individual aspects, we need to mention other examples that are important for the understanding of justification. Among these, we note that the purposes of Galatians and of Romans are not identical. It is, therefore, barely possible to use the discussion about circumcision in Gal 3 as the background for the statements in Rom 4 and, as a consequence, alter the common translation of Rom 4:1 with the assumption that Christians in Rome also asked the question of whether they needed to get circumcised just as their patriarch Abraham (PFG 849, 1003).25 The subject of Rom 4 is not circumcision but justification! I am at a loss as to how to explain Wright’s opinion that the “I” in Rom 7 refers to Israel, who is “in Adam” confronted with the demands of Torah (PFG 510, 894, 1015). Paul is using Jewish tradition in order to show with reference to Adam that both Jews and Gentiles fail to do the law and find their salvation in Christ alone. Regarding the use of ἀββα in Rom 8:15, Wright refers to Exod 4:22 but neglects pointing to the Jesus-tradition in Mark 14:36 and the Aramaic version 25

In PFG 849, Wright translates Rom 4:1 by following Richard Hays’s “brilliant suggestion for the translation of verse 1: ‘Have we found Abraham to be our ancestor in a human, fleshly sense?’” Otfried Hofius pointed out to me that Theodor Zahn already suggested such a translation: “Was werden wir nun sagen? (werden wir etwa durch die vorgetragene Lehre von unserer Rechtfertigung aus und durch Glauben genötigt, zu sagen,) daß wir Abr[aham] als unseren Ahnherrn nach dem Fleisch gefunden haben?” (Theodor Zahn, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 6 [Leipzig: Deichert, 1910], 215). The new translation is, therefore, grammatically possible. But whether it fits exegetically depends on the analysis of Rom 4. While it matches with Wright’s presentation, it hardly fits with further analyses.

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of the Lord’s prayer (see Luke 11:2–4). He interprets Rom 8:26 with reference to the prayer of the Christian Shema (1 Cor 8:6), about which we know nothing historically. But he does not explain the difference between the heavenly and human language (see 2 Cor 12:4), as well as the intercession of the Spirit (that is, the Spirit of Christ Jesus, compare Rom 8:26 with 8:34; PFG 1012–13). In other words, decisive aspects of the text that are crucial for justification according to Rom 8:2–3, 31–32 are masked out. Finally, in light of 1 Cor 15:22–28, 50–58; Eph 1:21; Col 1:12; 3:1–4 and the reference to the heavenly Jerusalem (see above), it is extremely daring to relate the hope of believers resurrected from the dead to the (presently) visible world which shall be renewed by God (PFG 163–64, 1091, 1307). The expectation of a new heaven and a new earth in which there is righteousness (2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1) is not a theological mistake (PFG 130–31, 1484–85), but a hope that is also cherished by Paul.26 Wright emphasizes that Paul always upheld the Torah and never abrogated it. That is true. But a more precise explanation about the relationship between the Torah from Sinai, the law of the Spirit from Rom 8:2, and the νόµος Χριστοῦ from Gal 6:2 would have been helpful. Indeed, Paul views the church as the temple of God on earth and as both reality and symbol of the new creation (PFG 1041, 1494). Wright is to be commended for pointing out that Paul urges the members of the body of Christ to blameless conduct (PFG 1110, etc.) and that one should not diminish the apostle’s call to a sanctification that is active in deeds out of a fear of Christian works-righteousness (PFG 962, 1027, 1096–97).27 According to Paul, the members of the body are drawn from both Israel and the nations. At the end, the body of Christ will consist of the full number of Gentiles and all Israel, that is, it will consist of everyone who is justified by faith in Christ Jesus, and who are united and called to praise the one and only God (Rom 11:25–31). As long as the old aeon lasts, believers have to endure persecution and suffering, just as the apostle himself must do (see Col 1:24 and PFG 638, 941). Paul and the Faithfulness of God is an impressive work. It makes unmistakably clear that Paul was a Jewish thinker and teacher. He never neglected Israel’s election with all her privileges (see Rom 9:4–5). He considered God’s faithfulness to his once given word as irrevocable (Rom 9:6; 11:29). He saw in the sending of Christ Jesus the fulfillment of the messianic promises (see Rom 1:3–4; 15:8). The sending of the Son of God into the world serves first and last the salvation of Israel. In the letters of Paul, the church of Jesus 26 See only the statements in Rom 8:18–25 which, just as 1 Cor 6:2–3, point to the participation of the redeemed in the future reign of the resurrected Christ. 27 This long neglected subject is now examined in the fine study by Hanna Stettler, Heiligung bei Paulus: Ein Beitrag aus biblisch-theologischer Sicht, WUNT II 368 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

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Christ is never a replacement of Israel, but only the vanguard of the eschatological people of God, to which Gentiles are also permitted to belong. Salvation is available for Jews and Gentiles through faith in Christ Jesus alone, whom God made the Κύριος and whose power exceeds that of the Roman emperor. The problem with this amazing book consists in the fact that the analysis and presentation of Pauline thinking, the theology of the apostle and the statements about justification are interwoven with exegetical hypotheses and speculations that necessitate a critical review of the entire project.

5. Summary N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is a formidable work. It invites one to look at Paul as a Jewish thinker of the first century who reinterpreted Israel’s important traditions in his theology. In the center of this theology, we find the crucified and resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. He is Israel’s promised Messiah. Through his vicarious sacrifice, he completed the covenant which God made with Abraham in order to undo Adam’s sin and redeem the world through Israel. By contrast, the problem with Wright’s presentation is the fact that the late rabbinic view of the covenant with Abraham to which he appeals is opposed to the Christian faith in Christ. It cannot be (pre-)Pauline therefore and, as a consequence, Wright’s understanding of Paul’s doctrine of justification needs important corrections. This essay traces these mistakes and suggests corrections without abandoning the larger biblical-theological trajectories that Wright has discussed.

Bibliography Bailey, Dan P. “Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Rom 3:25.” TynBul 51 (2000): 155–58. Bell, Richard H. “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul.” JTS 53 (2002): 1–27. –. Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11. WUNT II 63. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. Bultmann, Rudolf. Das Urchristentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen. Zürich: Artemis, 1949. Gese, Hartmut. “Die Sühne.” Pages 85–106 in Zur biblischen Theologie: Alttestamentliche Vorträge. BEvT 78. München, Kaiser, 1977. –. “The Atonement,” Pages 93–116 in Essays on Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1981. Heither, Theresia. “Adam im Neuen Testament.” Pages 286–307 in Adam. By Theresia Heither and Christiana Reemts. Münster: Aschendorff, 2007.

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Himmelfarb, Martha. “Abraham and the Messianism of Genesis Rabbah.” In Genesis Rabbah: Text and Contexts. Edited by Sarit Kattan Gribetz et al. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming. Betz, Hans D. Sühne als Heilsgeschehen: Studien zur Sühnetheologie der Priesterschrift und zur Wurzel KPR im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament. WMANT 55. Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1982. Betz, Hans D., et al. Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion. 14 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007–2013. Käsemann, Ernst. “Eine urchristliche Taufliturgie.” Pages 34–51 in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960. –. “Kritische Analyse von Phil 2,5–11.” Pages 51–95 in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960. Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion. Edited by Hans Dieter Betz et al. 14 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2007–2013 Society of Biblical Literature (2015–04–28). The SBL Handbook of Style (Page 250). SBL Press. Kindle Edition. Schäfer, Peter. Die Geburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums: Fünf Vorlesungen zur Entstehung des rabbinischen Judentums. Tria Cordia 6. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Seifrid, Mark A. Christ our Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Justification. New Studies in Biblical Theology 9. Leicester: Apollos: 2000. –. “Righteousness Language in the Hebrew Scriptures and Early Judaism.” Pages 413–42 in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume I: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism. Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. WUNT II 140. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001. Stettler, Hanna. Heiligung bei Paulus: Ein Beitrag aus biblisch-theologischer Sicht. WUNT II 368. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Strack, Hermann L., and Paul Billerbeck. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 6 vols. München: Beck, 1922–1961. Stuhlmacher, Peter. Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments I. 3rd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. –. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary. Translated by Scott J. Hafemann. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994. Stuhlmacher, Peter, and Donald A. Hagner. Revisiting Paul’s Doctrine of Justification: A Challenge to the New Perspective. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. London: SPCK, 2009. –. “Justification: Yesterday, Today and For Ever.” Pages 422–38 in Pauline Perspectives. London: SPCK, 2013. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. “The Letter to the Romans.” NIB 10:393–770. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003. Zahn, Theodor. Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 6 Leipzig: Deichert, 1910.

Messianism and Messiah in Paul Christ as Jesus? Aquila H. I. Lee 1. Introduction No modern interpreter of Paul would deny that he believed Jesus to be Israel’s Messiah, the long-promised one from the line of David.1 For Paul, Jesus was indeed the fulfilment of Jewish messianic hope, the means by which God’s final deliverance was brought about. However, when it comes to assessing the extent to which Paul reflects Jesus’s Messiahship in his writings, especially with his use of the word Χριστός, there is no agreement among the Pauline interpreters. Traditionally, the majority of scholars maintained that Χριστός in Paul should be understood as Jesus’s surname rather than a title, and that the Messiahship of Jesus carries little or no significance in Paul’s thought.2 However, as early as 1980, N. T. Wright stood against this scholarly consensus and has been a “lone voice” in advocating the view that Χριστός in Paul means “messiah,” and “it refers to the Messiah as the one in whom the people of God are summed up.”3 In Paul and the Faithfulness of God Wright again insists that Jesus’s Messiahship “played a massively important role in his entire theological understanding” (PFG 824). According to Wright, when Paul employs the word 1

A very few exceptions to this scholarly consensus include Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), 6–7, 33, 113–14, who denies any messianic claims on Paul’s part; and Merrill P. Miller, “The Problem of the Origins of a Messianic Conception of Jesus,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller, Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 28 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 301–36, who argues that Χριστός had no messianic associations in the first century. 2 Some of the major proponents of this view include Nils A. Dahl, Werner Kramer, Martin Hengel, Andrew Chester, and Magnus Zetterholm. 3 N. T. Wright, “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1980); N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 41. James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 199n88, refers to Wright as a “lone voice” in arguing this view.

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Χριστός, he never forgets its messianic significance. For Paul the election of Israel is fulfilled in Jesus, for Jesus is the true Israel. Paul believed that the divine purpose for Israel itself had been accomplished through him. He was … the place where the God of Abraham and the people of Abraham met: monotheism and election in person. … This is the very heart of Paul’s theology. (PFG 816)

The following quotation shows how significant is the Messiahship of Jesus in his understanding of Paul: The fact that Jesus, in Paul’s understanding, had fulfilled and accomplished the divine purpose for Israel is encapsulated … in the notion of Messiahship. Paul’s theology turns, at its centre, on the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was and is Israel’s Messiah, the longpromised one from the line of David, the one through whom Israel’s final battle was to be fought, the Temple was to be cleansed and rebuilt, God’s justice and peace were to be established in the world and the ancient promises to Abraham were to be fulfilled. (PFG 816)

In Wright’s understanding of Paul, there is no doubt whatsoever that Paul really believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah and that such a belief was foundational for Paul’s entire theology. This essay explores the theme of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul’s thought and attempts to review critically his presentation of Paul’s messiah Christology.4

2. A Brief History of Interpretation It would be helpful for us to set Wright’s claim on Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul’s thought in the context of what other Pauline interpreters before him said on the subject.5 In 1953 Nils Dahl wrote an essay on the use of Χριστός in Paul. His main concern was to know whether the word Χριστός was used by Paul as a title or as a proper name. He made four negative philological observations about Χριστός in Pauline usage: 1) it is always used as a designation for Jesus and never as a general term; 2) it is never used as a predicate (as in “Jesus is the Christ”); 3) it never takes a genitive modifier (such as “the Christ of God”); and 4) it characteristically lacks the definite article (with the

4 It is noted, however, that critical discussions on the role and place of Paul’s messiah Christology within Wright’s formulation of Paul’s entire theological scheme, though necessary and helpful, is beyond the modest scope of this essay. 5 For a helpful overview of past scholarship on the subject see Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12–33. It is acknowledged that many critical observations of the present essay are to a certain extent indebted to his fine and groundbreaking monograph.

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definite article before Χριστός).6 Based on these fourfold observations Dahl concluded: If one understands ‘Christ’ only to be a surname of Jesus, all the statements of the epistles make good sense. This does not exclude the possibility that the name ‘Christ’ bears a fullness of meaning. However, the messiahship of Jesus is not stressed.7

While Dahl’s conclusion was drawn with some moderation, it was subsequently assumed to suggest that when Paul uses the word Χριστός, he means to connote nothing more than the person of Jesus.8 Later, in 1962 Werner Kramer conducted a more detailed study on the subject. Heavily influenced by the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Kramer argued that Paul used the term Χριστός not as a title but as a proper name because this Greek term has lost all its conventional meaning when it was taken over by Gentile Christianity. He explained: Although [Paul was] formerly a Jew, nevertheless even he uses Christ as though it were a proper name just like Jesus. For this reason the two names could be combined or used indiscriminately.9

Kramer’s conclusion has been very influential. In 1982 Martin Hengel also wrote an essay, in which he updated and reinforced Dahl’s philological study on the question.10 For Hengel, “all the statements in the letters make good sense even to those who only know that Christ is a surname for Jesus.”11 He concluded that “It is precisely as a ‘proper name’ that ‘Χριστός’ expresses the uniqueness of Jesus.”12 Ever since, the conclusions of Dahl, Kramer, and Hengel have become axiomatic in Pauline scholarship. It was in such a scholarly environment that N. T. Wright wrote his 1980 Oxford dissertation, in which he advanced his strong view that 6

Originally Nils A. Dahl, “Die Messianität Jesus bei Paulus,” Studia Paulina in honorem Johannis de Zwaan septuagenarii (Haarlem: Bohn, 1953), 83–95; Eng. trans., “The Messiahship of Jesus in Paul,” in Dahl, Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine, ed. Donald Juel (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991), 15–25. 7 Dahl, “The Messiahship of Jesus in Paul,” 16. 8 Since Dahl’s essay, many interpreters after him have taken his philological observations as axiomatic. 9 Werner Kramer, Χριστός Kyrios Gottessohn: Untersuchungen zu Gebrauch und Bedeutung der christologichen Bezeichnungen bei Paulus und den vorpaulinischen Gemeinden, ATANT 44 (Zürich: Zwingli, 1963); Eng. trans., Christ, Lord, Son of God, SBT 50 (London: SCM, 1966), 42–43. 10 Martin Hengel, “Erwägungen zum Sprachgebrauch von Χριστός bei Paulus und in der vorpaulinischen Überlieferung,” in Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honour of C. K. Barrett, ed. Morna D. Hooker and S. G. Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982), 135–58; Eng. trans., “‘Χριστός’ in Paul,” Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 65–77. 11 Hengel, “‘Χριστός’ in Paul,” 68. 12 Hengel, “‘Χριστός’ in Paul,” 72.

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Χριστός in Paul means “messiah,”13 and in subsequent publications he continued to affirm his position that “Χριστός in Paul should regularly be read as ‘Messiah’; and … that it refers to the Messiah as the one in whom the people of God are summed up.”14

3. The Philological Arguments Wright categorically denies that the term Χριστός in Paul merely functions as Jesus’s second name. He claims that Χριστός does not simply refer to an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, who happens to have acquired a second proper name through the flattening out of the royal title that other early Christians were eager still to affirm. The royal meaning of Χριστός does not disappear in Paul’s writings. It is present, central and foundational. (PFG 824)

On the other side of the debate, following the arguments of the majority of Pauline interpreters such as Dahl, Kramer, Hengel and others, Andrew Chester has recently stood up as one of the strong advocates of Χριστός-as-Jesus’s name view.15 He argues that Χριστός in Paul “is used almost entirely as a proper name, not a title.”16 He believes that Χριστός quickly becomes merely

13

Wright, “The Messiah and the People of God.” Wright, Climax of the Covenant, 41; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK 2003), 42–50; N. T. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005), 16: “the often-studied incorporative use of Χριστός in Paul tells heavily in favour of a messianic reference.” 15 Andrew Chester, “Christ of Paul,” in Redemption and Resistance: The Messianic Hopes of Jews and Christians in Antiquity, ed. Markus Bockmuehl and James Carleton Paget (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 109–21; Further, Andrew Chester, “Messianism, Mediators and Pauline Christology,” in Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology, WUNT II 207 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 329–96. See also Magnus Zetterholm, “Paul and the Missing Messiah,” in The Messiah: In Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Magnus Zetterholm (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007), 33–55, who also takes a similar approach to this question, but with an entirely different explanation. 16 Chester, “The Christ of Paul,” 110, in line with, e.g., Kramer, Christ, Lord, Son of God, 203–14; Dahl, “The Messiahship of Jesus in Paul,” 15–25; Hengel, “‘Χριστός’ in Paul,” 65–77; Marianus de Jonge, “The Earliest Christian Use of Χριστός: Some Suggestions,” NTS 32 (1986): 321–43. Scholars who take Paul’s Χριστός as a proper name, rather than a title include Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, 197; Larry W. Hurtado, “Paul’s Christology,” in Cambridge Companion to St. Paul, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191; Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 56; Douglas J. Moo, “The Christology of the Early Pauline Letters,” in Contours of Christology in the New Testament, ed. Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 14

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a second name for Jesus, and thus Jesus’s Messiahship plays no significant role in Paul’s writings and theology, although Jesus’s messianic status was taken for granted. Thus the old question of the place of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul’s thought still remains controversial. One of the main points of the debate still revolves around the philological question of whether Paul uses Χριστός as a title or as a name. Recently, however, we have witnessed a breakthrough in this nameversus-title stalemate. In an important monograph on this subject, Matthew Novenson points out two false assumptions in the old debate: one an assumption about what names and titles are and how they work and the other an assumption about the onomastic categories that were available to Paul.17

Regarding the first assumption, Pauline interpreters falsely assumed that titles always connote, while names merely denote (or in linguistic terms, titles speak, while names only name). This is not true, however. Drawing from the philosophy of language and linguistics, Novenson notes that “the difference between titles and names … is relative, not absolute, and it lies in the speaker’s deployment of the words, not in the nature of the words themselves.” Novenson concludes, “The problem of χριστός in Paul cannot be solved simply by ruling in favor of either name or title.”18 This is a criticism of both Dahl and Wright. No philological arguments either for or against the interpretation of Χριστός connoting Jesus’s Messiahship for Paul are conclusive. Regarding the second assumption, Novenson believes that both sides of the debate have missed the mark. Χριστός functions neither as Jesus’s second name nor as his title. On the one hand, Paul would not have used the common expression “Jesus Christ” as a double name because it would go against Paul’s own general practice. “In the seven undisputed letters, Paul names some fifty-five people, and he almost invariably uses a single personal name for each, never an alternate name or a combined form.”19 Second, he would not have used Χριστός as a title because he does not normally use titles with names except for Aretas, Phoebe, and Erastus. Novenson then makes a very important observation: Titles and names are not the only two onomastic categories available to Paul. For Novenson, the most appropriate category for Paul’s use of Χριστός is “honorific,” a second term normally used in recognition of a well-known public figure.20 The best known examples are “Alexan2005), 186; Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 247–48. 17 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 67. 18 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 70, 72. 19 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 80–81. 20 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 87–97. Wright also acknowledges that Novenson’s recent monograph “now sets the new standard for discussion” of the use of the term Χριστός in Paul (PFG 824).

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der the Great,” “Antiochus Epiphanes,” and “Shimon bar Kohkba.” Honorifics are distinguished both from personal names and titles of office. It is worth quoting in full Novenson’s summary of his fine research on the analogy between Paul’s use of Χριστός and other Greek honorifics: Paul’s ostensibly idiosyncratic use of χριστός is not really idiosyncratic, at least not in a formal sense. Granted, it is neither a proper name nor a title of office, but it is not therefore an onomastic innovation. Rather, it fits a known onomastic category from antiquity, namely the honorific. Honorifics, which are amply attested in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, were typically borne by rulers. An honorific was taken by or bestowed on its bearer, usually in connection with military exploits or accession to power, not given at birth. It was formally a common noun or adjective (e.g., hammer, star, savior, manifest, august, anointed), not a proper noun. In actual use, it could occur in combination with the bearer’s proper name or stand in for that proper name. It was not a uniquely Semitic-language convention but one shared among ancient Mediterranean cultures and even translated from one language to another. It is not coincidental that these are the very features of Paul’s use of χριστός that have so vexed his modern interpreters.21

Novenson’s solution to the old Pauline Χριστός problem does not only make better sense of the frequency of its use (as if it were a personal name) and the retention of its messianic significance (as it were a title of office), but it helps unlock the long held name-versus-title stalemate in a most compelling way. Against Dahl, Novenson has clearly shown that the philological arguments put forward against the interpretation of Χριστός connoting Jesus’s Messiahship do not hold up to close scrutiny. The facts that χριστός is not an appellative, that it is not predicate of a copulative sentence of which Ἰησοῦς is the subject, that it is not modified by the genitive κυρίου or θεοῦ, and that it is often anarthrous are no evidence that it does not connote messiahship.22

Novenson’s study also shows that Wright’s optimistic approach is not on target either. He writes: Τhe converse is also true: The relatively few instances where Dahl’s criteria are met in Paul are not special evidence of the role of messiahship in his thought. Moreover, if Dahl’s negative philological observations do not exclude the possibility of messianism in Paul, neither do Wright’s positive philological observations prove it. … None of the instances of χριστός in Paul absolutely must be translated as “messiah.” … In short, the sense of χριστός cannot be read directly off the syntax of the phrases in which Paul uses it.23

21 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 95–96. He acknowledges that he was not the first to suggest the analogy between Pau’s use of Χριστός and other Greek honorifics, citing scholars before him such as Earl Richard, Jesus, One and Many: The Christological Concept of New Testament Authors (Wilmington: Glazier, 1988), 326; Donald Dale Walker, Paul’s Offer of Leniency (2 Cor 10:1): Populist Ideology and Rhetoric in a Pauline Letter Fragment, WUNT II 152 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 163. 22 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 134, emphasis added. 23 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 134–35.

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4. Incorporative Messiahship and Pre-Pauline Precedents Wright firmly believes that not only did Paul regard Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, but “he saw and expressed that belief in terms of Messiah’s summing up of Israel in himself” (PFG 835). This is how he defines the “incorporative” Messiahship of Jesus in Paul’s thought. According to Wright, such “incorporative” thought and language is pervasive in Paul’s writings: In passage after passage in Paul the point being made is that Jesus, as Messiah, has drawn together the identity and vocation of Israel upon himself. … [Paul] exploited the notion of ‘Messiahship’ in such a way as to say two things in particular. First, the vocation and destiny of ancient Israel, the people of Abraham, had been brought to its fulfilment in the Messiah, particularly in his death and resurrection. Second, those who believed the gospel … were likewise to be seen as incorporated into him and thus defined by him. (PFG 825– 26)24

With regard to the question of the possible origins of such thought in Paul, Wright finds it unlikely that it was already well known in Paul’s day or that there was a ready-made category for him to use in Jewish thought. Rather, it was a product of Paul’s own creative theologizing process based on the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Wright suggests that “the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection compelled Paul in this direction, and caused him to read old texts in new ways” (PFG 827). Because Paul firmly believed that Jesus was raised from the dead ahead of everyone else, he also came to believe that Israel’s God had done for Jesus what it had been supposed he would do for Israel. Not only … did the resurrection demonstrate that Jesus was after all Israel’s Messiah … [but] also declared … that the divine purpose for Israel had been fulfilled … in this Messiah, this Jesus. He was, in effect, Israel in person. And it was precisely as Messiah that he therefore represented his people. (PFG 828)

Wright finds an interesting linguistic parallel in the books of Samuel and Kings, where the expressions “in David” or “in the king” occur several times in both MT and LXX (PFG 828–30).25 He gives the following examples: We have ten shares in the king (‫במלך‬, ἐν τῷ βασιλεῖ), and in David (‫בדוד‬, ἐν τῷ Δαυιδ) also we have more than you. (2 Sam 19:43) We have no portion in David, no inheritance (‫נחלה‬, κληρονοµία) share in the son of Jesse! (2 Sam 20:1)26

24 According to Wright, the principal strength of his hypothesis is that it puts together the different elements of Pauline soteriology in a remarkably coherent way (PFG 830). 25 See also his earlier discussion Wright, Climax of the Covenant, 46–47. 26 Wright also emphasizes the importance of the idea of “inheritance” for Paul in connection with the Messiah.

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What share do we have in David? We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse. (1 Kings 12:16)

While he acknowledges that “these texts cannot be cited as evidence of ideas prominent in the first century,” Wright insists that “they do at least suggest a matrix of biblical thought to which Paul might go back in his mind as he struggled to understand the significance” of Jesus’s resurrection for his followers (PFG 829). In his analysis of Wright’s OT linguistic parallels, Novenson points out several weaknesses in his proposal. First, the phrases “in David” and “in the king” do not actually provide a pre-Pauline instance of “in Christ” language in Paul. In the LXX Χριστός is never used with the preposition ἐν. Second, “the idiom in Samuel-Kings is specifically ‘to have a [share, part, inheritance] in the king,’ not simply ‘in the king.” Third, “the idiom is relatively obscure … and apparently without currency in Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.”27 Prior to Wright’s proposal, a different biblical precedent for Paul’s use of “incorporative” phrases has been suggested by Wedderburn.28 He gives as an example Paul’s quotation of Abrahamic promise (Gen 18:18) in Gal 3:8: ἐνευλογηθήσονται ἐν σοὶ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, “All the Gentiles will be blessed in you.” A few verses later Paul writes, ἵνα εἰς τὰ ἔθνη ἡ εὐλογία τοῦ Ἀβραὰµ γένηται ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ, “in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles” (Gal 3:14), the adverbial phrase “in Christ Jesus” taking the place of “in you” in v. 8. More importantly, in Gal 3:16 Paul highlights the fact that God’s promise to Abraham in Gen 22:18 uses the singular expression τῷ σπέρµατί σου, instead of τοῖς σπέρµασιν σου and makes the point that “the seed” of the promise “is Christ,” adding ὅς ἐστιν Χριστός.29 Wedderburn’s exegesis suggests that the parallel between the biblical expressions ἐν σοὶ and ἐν τῷ σπέρµατί σου and Paul’s incorporative phrase ἐν χριστῷ is not only a formal one but also a theological one.30 Wedderburn concludes that “Abraham and Christ are viewed as representative figures through whom God acts toward the human race.”31 Novenson believes that Wright provides the better semantic parallel (“in David” and “in the king” with “in Christ”), whereas Wedderburn supplies the better syntactical parallel. In the end, Novenson finds Wedderburn’s parallel more compelling than Wright’s:

27

Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 124. A. J. M. Wedderburn, “Some Observations on Paul’s Use of the Phrases ‘In Christ’ and With Christ,’” JSNT 25 (1985): 83–97. 29 Wedderburn, “Some Observations,” 88–89. 30 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 125. 31 Wedderburn, “Some Observations,” 91. 28

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Because Paul directly cites the Abrahamic promises in this connection but not the relatively obscure ‘a share in David’ references and because of the explicit interpretative move at Gal 3:16 (‘the seed [of Abraham] is Christ’).32

On the whole, I too find Wedderburn’s suggestion more persuasive than Wright’s. However, I am more sympathetic to the latter’s suggestion that it is much easier to believe that Paul came to this view as a result of his belief in Jesus’s resurrection, and then discovered resonances of it in the scriptures, than to suppose that he had always thought in terms of people being ‘in Adam’ or ‘in Abraham’ and then transferred that notion to the Messiah. (PFG 828)

5. Πίστις Χριστοῦ: Indicative of Jesus’s Messiahship? In order to argue for his position that Paul’s Χριστός should everywhere be understood in the “full titular sense” as meaning “Messiah,” Wright adduces as evidence his interpretation of πίστις χριστοῦ, one of the most controversial phrases in current Pauline scholarship (PFG 836–39). In an earlier publication Wright argued that the theme of the Messiahship of Jesus in Paul makes it very likely … that when Paul speaks in Galatians and Romans of pistis Christou, he normally intends to denote the faithfulness of the Messiah to the purposes of God.33

Similarly, Wright advances the same logic in this new volume as follows: Once we understand Χριστός as the Messiah, Israel’s representative, Israel-in-person …, the logic works out immaculately. (a) The covenant God promises to rescue and bless the world through Israel. (b) Israel as it stands is faithless to this commission. (c) The covenant God, however, is faithful, and will provide a faithful Israelite, the ‘faithful’ Israelite’, the Messiah. It is the tight coherence of this train of thought, rather than any verbal arguments about subjects and objects, prepositions and case-endings on the one hand, or preferential theological positions on the other, that persuaded me many years ago that Romans 3.22 speaks of the Messiah’s faithfulness. It persuades me still. (PFG 839)

In other words, Wright’s logic in his argumentation can be summarized in the following manner: “if one is convinced for other reasons that Χριστός in Paul means ‘messiah,’ then a subjective genitive reading of Pauline pistis Christou makes sense within and further confirms this interpretative scheme.”34 However, one wonders whether any correlation between these two separate questions can be legitimately drawn in the way Wright does. Novenson explains: One could read πίστις χριστοῦ, on the one hand, as “faith in the messiah qua messiah” – that is, objective genitive with messianic χριστός – or, on the other hand, as “the faithfulness of the person whose name happens to be Christ” – that is, subjective genitive with 32

Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 126. Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives, 48, emphasis his. 34 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 131. 33

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nonmessianic χριστός. In light of this range of options, πίστις χριστοῦ should not be invoked as evidence in the messiahship question in a manner independent of the wider debate.35

In support of his argument that the phrase πίστις χριστοῦ means “the faithfulness of the Messiah,” Wright uses Paul’s arguments in Rom 2–3. He contends that “the whole drift of the passage ever since 2.17, is not primarily about ‘Israel’s guilt’, but about God’s purpose, through Israel, for the world” (PFG 838). To clarify the meaning of the verse Wright adds the words “to their commission” to his own translation of Rom 3:3: “What follows from that? If some of them were unfaithful [to their commission], does their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?” Here, Israel’s failed vocation stands in contrast to Jesus’s vocation as the faithful Messiah, who was truly obedient even unto death. In other words, for Wright, the main criticism against Israel in Rom 2– 3 is not that they are sinners, but that they have been unfaithful to their vocation. Wright supports his view again by arguing that in Rom 2:17–20 Paul is talking about Israel’s vocation rather than salvation (PFG 496–99, 811). His interpretation is summarized in this way: This passage is not talking about ‘the boast of “the Jew”’ in the sense that ‘the Jew’ is supposing him- or herself to be morally superior to the rest of the world and therefore not to be in need of ‘salvation’. The passage is talking about ‘the boast of “the Jew”’ … to be the Isaiah 42 people, the Isaiah 49 people, the light of the gentiles, the one who would open blind eyes, the teacher of babes. Torah gives ‘the Jew’ the outline of knowledge and truth; it is then the responsibility of ‘the Jew’ to pass this on to the world, to obey the vocation to bring a balance to the world, to mend the world. (PFG 811)

While Wright’s argument for a subjective genitive interpretation of the πίστις χριστοῦ phrase cannot be positively proved or disproved in this essay, I find less convincing his interpretation that Rom 2–3 is primarily about Israel’s failure to be faithful to their vocation (an important element for his reconstruction of Paul’s grand narrative). Wright explicitly states that in Rom 3:3 “Paul is not accusing them of ‘unbelief’, of failure to believe in Jesus as Messiah and lord or in his resurrection” (PFG 838, emphasis added).36 While it is true that Israel’s “unfaithfulness” (ἠπίστησάν and ἀπιστία) includes a reference to their failure to meet their covenant obligations, one cannot exclude from this word the idea of their failure to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. The 35

Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 132. However, noting a verbal connection in the LXX between the word πίστις and David’s role as the χριστός in 2 Sam 23, he tentatively concludes that “if Paul’s usage reflects familiarity with this language, then it tends to lend some additional weight to the suggestion that πίστις χριστοῦ be read as ‘the faithfulness of the messiah’” (133). 36 Many commentators understand Israel’s failure in this passage as covenantal unfaithfulness. Cf. James D. G. Dunn, Romans, WBC 38A–B (Dallas: Word Books, 1988), 1:131.

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very reason why Israel is faulted lies in their failure “to believe in the very fulfillment of the covenant that the OT promised.”37 Here I agree with Douglas Moo that “faith” in God and the promises is … a significant and indispensable ingredient of true faithfulness to the covenant, and in that sense “lack of belief” is not excluded … Particularly, especially in light of 11:17 we should not exclude in this “unfaithfulness” to the word of God the Jews’ failure to embrace Jesus as the Messiah promised by that word. While, then, Paul’s reference cannot be confined to the failure of Jews to believe in Christ, this would certainly be a prominent component of his meaning.38

Seen from this perspective, a major problem in Wright’s understanding of Israel’s vocation lies in the fact that Paul nowhere speaks of Israel as having failed in their vocation of “bringing ‘the Abrahamic blessing’ to the nations,” that is, carrying out God’s purpose for the world, or, to borrow Wright’s expression, “to pass this on to the world, to obey the vocation to bring a balance to the world, to mend the world” (PFG 527, 811). Although Wright repeatedly places a strong emphasis on Israel’s failure to carry out her vocation, Paul in fact never explicitly refers in his own writings to Israel’s failure to be the light to the nations or about her problem of keeping God for herself. Throughout his entire corpus Paul makes only a couple of references to a failure on the part of ethnic Israel. In the first instance, Paul makes a reference to his fellow Jews as having a veil over their eyes, keeping them from truly recognizing Jesus as Messiah (2 Cor 3:12–4:6). Another reference is in Rom 9–11, where Paul grieves over his fellow Jews’ refusal to accept the gospel and to recognize Jesus as Lord. In this passage he refers to them as having “stumbled” over the gospel (9:32; 11:11) and as having their hearts “hardened” (11:7, 25). Thus the only conclusion we can draw from this is that Paul’s references to Israel’s failure are not about their failure to the covenantal vocation, but rather to their refusal to embrace the gospel and to recognize Jesus as their Messiah and Lord!

37

Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 150: “The ‘unfaithfulness’ of the Jews in 3:1–8 includes both failure to believe in Christ and the transgression of the law …. The Jews are faulted for both anthropological (violation of the law) and salvation-historical (unbelief in Christ) reasons. This two-pronged default of the Jews has informed the argument of ch. 2, and the emphasis is actually in the former, not the latter.” 38 Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 184–85. See also Charles H. Cosgrove, “What If Some Have Not Believed? The Occasion and Thrust of Romans 3:1–8,” ZNW 78 (1987): 97; and Heikki Räisänen, “Zum Verständnis von Röm 3, 1–8,” in The Torah and Christ: Essays in German and English on the Problem of the Law in Early Christianity, ed. Anne-Marie Enroth, Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 45 (Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 1986), 189–90.

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6. The Place of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul On the question of the place of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul’s writings and theology, we see two positions sharply divided among Pauline scholars today. On the one hand, Wright insists that not only did Paul believe that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, but “this belief played a massively important role in his entire theological understanding” (PFG 824). Wright is convinced that “the widespread and continuing messianic belief in the early church” is a clear indication that Jesus’s Messiahship “remained a powerful and important notion” throughout the first century. He concludes that “it would be very surprising if Paul … had allowed the notion of Messiahship to sink below the level of consciousness” (PFG 817–18). On the other hand, Andrew Chester sticks to the view that in his writings Paul’s “main focus is not on Jesus as messiah; nor do messianic categories play a prominent part in his theology.”39 Again, he asserts that “the number of specifically messianic references in Paul is very limited, and so also is their significance.”40 Chester writes: Although Paul presupposes that Jesus is the Davidic messiah promised in Scripture (and taken up in subsequent Jewish tradition), he never sets out to prove this, or to make use of the obvious messianic passages from the Hebrew Bible. Nor indeed does he use in this way those passages from the Hebrew Bible that are developed distinctively within the New Testament to show that Jesus is the messiah. Thus he lays no real emphasis either on Christ being the messiah, or on the specifically messianic implications of his use of χριστός.41

Chester explains such a lack of “emphasis” on Messiahship on Paul’s part in terms of his intentional downplaying of the messianic hope in his writings. He writes, Paul has deliberately ‘defused’ or ‘neutralized’ the messianic hope (… a process analogous to that which we find in Philo). That is, the terminology is kept, especially the term Messiah/χριστός, but the sense is changed.42

He gives two reasons for such a program of “de-emphasis” on Paul’s part. First, it was due to the delay of the parousia. Paul deliberately neutralized his messianic language “because the messianic kingdom has not manifested itself, contrary to what had been expected.”43 The second reason was the sheer impracticability of the messianic hope and the politically sensitive circumstances of his ministry. He explains: 39

Chester, “The Christ of Paul,” 109. Chester, “The Christ of Paul,” 112, acknowledges that only in a few passages (e.g. Rom 9:5; 1 Cor 15:23–28; Rom 15:7–12; 2 Cor 5:10) does Paul use the term Χριστός with specific messianic implications. 41 Chester, “The Christ of Paul,” 112, emphasis added. 42 Chester, “Messianism, Mediators and Pauline Christology,” 385. 43 Chester, “Messianism, Mediators and Pauline Christology,” 385. 40

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The radical implications of the messianic hope would present problems for him, especially as he and the Christian movement moved more and more into the main centres of the Roman Empire. Thus to retain or develop an emphasis of this kind would mean, for Paul and his churches (as relatively small and scattered groups set within large urban centres), focusing on something that was in practice incapable of being realized within society, and also potentially politically embarrassing.44

A similar approach, but with a different explanation, is taken by Magnus Zetterholm, who, building on Dahl and Kramer, contends that Paul’s emphasis on Jesus’s Lordship and his downplaying of his Messiahship must be explained in terms of Jew-Gentile relationship in the Pauline Christian communities.45 According to Zetterholm, Paul’s theological conviction and his effort to preserve the ethnic identities of Jews and non-Jews within his congregations “forced him to present Jesus in a way that would form an ideological resource for non-Jewish believers in Jesus – the gospel of Jesus Christ as lord.”46 When it comes to interpreting Paul, however, it is of utmost importance to remember the circumstantial nature of Paul’s letters.47 Many times Pauline scholars like Chester and Zetterholm find Paul “downplaying” or “neutralizing” concepts he is merely not intending to write about in view of a particular, concrete social setting. Novenson explains: The Gospels reflect a milieu in which there is knowledge of a category “messiah” that Jesus may or may not fit. In the Acts of the Apostles, likewise, it is an open question in the synagogue scenes whether or not Jesus the individual fits the category “messiah.” Not so Paul’s letters. Both the apostle and his churches are already convinced of the messiahship of Jesus; other things are at issue in the letters. If any of them previously thought of “Christ” as a class that may or may not have particular members, they do so no longer. That the messiahship of Jesus is agreed upon, however, does not mean that it is unimportant.48

James Dunn’s dictum goes right to the point:

44 Chester, “Messianism, Mediators and Pauline Christology,” 385. He does acknowledge, however, that “Paul has [not] simply abandoned the specific messianic hope entirely.” 45 Zetterholm, “Paul and the Missing Messiah,” 40: “Paul’s de-emphasizing of Jesus’s messiahship, while stressing his lordship, was a result of the fact that non-Jewish adherents to the Jesus movement were already familiar with Judaism, and partly identified themselves with the salvation history of the Jewish people in which messiah of Israel had a key role. I believe that this is the fundamental misunderstanding of the non-Jews that Paul is generally trying to correct.” 46 Zetterholm, “Paul and the Missing Messiah,” 54. 47 Joel Willitts, “Davidic Messiahship in Galatians: Clearing the Deck for a Study of the Theme in Galatians,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letter 2 (2012): 148. 48 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 103, emphasis added.

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What is characteristic and central to someone’s theology need not be distinctive; what is fundamental can also be shared, and as shared, little referred to; what is axiomatic is often taken for granted.49

One of the particular features of Wright’s formulation of Paul’s theology is his discussion of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul under “election” (ch. 10) rather than “monotheism” (ch. 9). In ch. 9 under the subsection “Monotheism Freshly Revealed (1): Jesus,” Wright introduces his controversial notion of “the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion” as “the hidden clue to the origin of [early] christology” (PFG 654).50 Wright suggests that early Christians recognized the divine identity of Jesus because he fulfilled the OT promise that God would return to Zion, that he would come to his temple. It was … a matter of Jesus’s followers coming to believe that in him, and supremely in his death and resurrection … Israel’s God had done what he had long promised. He had returned to be king. (PFG 654)

In this way Wright does not only appropriate – rightly in my view – Bauckham’s notion of “divine identity,” but also denies the importance of Jewish language of mediator-figures and relegates Hurtado’s emphasis on early Christian worship and prayer to secondary importance for the development of early high christology. His choice to place a discussion of Messiahship under “election” and to describe Jesus’s Messiahship mainly with respect to the question “Who are God’s people?” rather than “Who is God?” (or better still “Who belongs to God’s identity?”) may have some important Christological consequences. This same placement of Messiahship under “election” may have the strength of highlighting the relationship between Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and God’s people, in particular “Messiah’s summing up of Israel in himself” (PFG 835) – Wright’s notion of incorporative Messiahship (PFG 825–35). A major problem with his presentation of Jesus’s Messiahship under this rubric, though, is that it places too much emphasis on Jesus as Israel’s Messiah with respect to God’s people and neglects the category of Jesus with respect to God’s person. For Paul, Jesus is more than just Israel’s Messiah. As most Pauline interpreters agree, Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul is taken for granted. Restricting his understanding of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah with respect to his people seems to undermine the fact that in Paul Jesus’s Messiahship is inseparable from his eternal sonship. This is, I think, a major weakness of Wright’s placement of Jesus’s Messiahship under the rubric of “election” rather than monotheism. As Gordon Fee has rightly pointed out, in Paul’s writings 49

James D. G. Dunn, “How Controversial Was Paul’s Christology,” in The Christ and the Spirit: Collected Essays of James D. G. Dunn (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), 221. 50 For a critical assessment of Wright’s fresh proposal see Larry Hurtado’s essay in this same volume.

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the relationship between Christ as kingly, thus messianic, Son of God easily merges with the greater reality that the kingly (messianic) Son is in fact the eternal Son of God, whom the Father sent into the world in order to make us his children.51

Rom 1:2–4 is, for example, “the one certain place in Paul’s letters where Davidic Son and eternal Son merge.”52 While Paul’s Christology may have its roots in Jewish messianism and may have begun with the OT narrative of God’s dealings with Israel, it in fact goes beyond its historical messianic understanding. Elsewhere, I have argued that through the messianic exegesis of Pss 110:1 and 2:7 early Christians came to confirm what they were already beginning to believe as a result of the impression left by Jesus and his resurrection as well as a deepening of their understanding of him as Lord and Son of God enthroned at his right hand.53

Moreover, Novenson’s study helpfully makes a distinction between “the linguistic phenomenon (messianic language) on the one hand and the psychological (messianic hope) and social (messianism) phenomena on the other.”54 According to Novenson, while there were times in ancient Judaism in which a psychological messianic hope was widespread, the meaningfulness of messianic language is “independent of the fervency of the popular hope.” He writes: “Messianic language could be used meaningfully in antiquity because it was deployed in the context of a linguistic community whose members shared a stock of common linguistic resources.”55 Such line of reasoning serves as a valuable criticism of those interpreters who think that Paul used messiah language but did not mean it. When it comes to the question of Paul’s use of Χριστός, Wright is considered a maximalist. For example, in dealing with Gal 3–4 Wright asserts, “I take as axiomatic … that when Paul writes Χριστός he intends to denote Jesus and to connote his status as Israel’s Messiah” (PFG 860).56 Can this claim be fully supported by a careful exegesis of Paul’s writings? Novenson examines nine Χριστός passages in Paul, including three passages which modern interpreters have taken Paul to demur from or even polemicize against Messiah-

51 Gordon D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study (Peabody, ME: Hendrickson, 2007), 544. 52 Fee, Pauline Christology, 544. He also cites 1 Cor 15:24–28 and Col 1:13–15 as such examples. 53 Aquila H. I. Lee, From Messiah to Preexistent Son: Jesus’s Self-Consciousness and Early Christian Exegesis of Messianic Psalms, WUNT II 192 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 320. 54 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 43. 55 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 47. 56 See also N. T. Wright, “Messiahship in Galatians?,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 510–46.

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ship.57 His careful exegesis of the passages arrives at the conclusion that “in no case does he [Paul] ever disclaim the category of messiahship” and in the case of the latter three “none of them does Paul actually repudiate messiahship as a category and indeed that all three depend on χριστός bearing its conventional range of meaning.”58 Even in the case of Gal 3:16, Novenson agrees with Wright that Χριστός there connotes “Messiah.” He concludes that “there is a very particular logic to Paul’s choice of the word χριστός here. For Paul, ‘Abraham’s seed’ may be Jesus, but it is not ‘Jesus.’ Rather, it is ‘Christ.’” However, Novenson disagrees with Wright, explaining that “this kind of messianic reading was [not] largely fixed by the shape of scripture and presaged widely in Judaism before Paul.” He comments: As with other passages in this chapter, Paul’s messianic interpretation in Gal 3:16 was neither inevitable nor necessary. Nothing in the scriptures prescribed it; Paul need not have made it; other ancient interpreters did not in fact make it; and some who heard it may well have disagreed with it.59

It would therefore be wise to take heed of Novenson’s injunction: None of the instances of χριστός in Paul absolutely must be translated as “messiah.” … the sense of χριστός cannot be read directly off the syntax of the phrases in which Paul uses it.60

8. Conclusion In a 1991 essay entitled “Χριστός as ‘Messiah’ in Paul: Philemon 6,” Wright registered his complaint against the long-standing consensus in Pauline scholarship that Χριστός in Paul means nothing more than Jesus’s surname: “the time is ripe for a re-assessment of Messiahship as a major category within Pauline theology.”61 After more than twenty years later, his strenuous efforts have borne some fruit, and we are witnessing a great change in our understanding of this important subject. For that we are grateful for him. However, our critical observations made above on his formulation of Jesus’s Messiahship in Paul makes clear that his over-emphasis on Jesus’s Messiahship with respect to God’s people rather than God’s person needs to be revised.

57

The passages examined are Gal 3:16; 1 Cor 15:20–28; 2 Cor 1:21–22; Rom 9:1–5; Rom 15:3, 9; Rom 15:7–12; 1 Cor 1:23; 2 Cor 5:16–17; and Rom 1:3–4. 58 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 137–173, quotations from 138 and 160. 59 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 142. 60 Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 134–35. 61 Wright, Climax of the Covenant, 42.

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Bibliography Chester, Andrew. “Christ of Paul.” Pages 109–21 in Redemption and Resistance: The Messianic Hopes of Jews and Christians in Antiquity. Edited by Markus Bockmuehl and James Carleton Paget. London: T&T Clark, 2008. –. “Messianism, Mediators and Pauline Christology.” Pages 329–96 in Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology. WUNT II 207. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. Cosgrove, Charles H. “What If Some Have Not Believed? The Occasion and Thrust of Romans 3:1–8.” ZNW 78 (1987): 90–105. Dahl, Nils A. “Die Messianität Jesus bei Paulus.” Pages 83–95 in Studia Paulina in honorem Johannis de Zwaan septuagenarii. Haarlem: Bohn, 1953. –. “The Messiahship of Jesus in Paul.” Pages 15–25 in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine. Edited by Donald H. Juel. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991. Dunn, James D. G. “How Controversial Was Paul’s Christology.” Pages 212–28 in The Christ and the Spirit: Collected Essays of James D. G. Dunn. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998. –. Romans. 2 vols. WBC 38A–B. Dallas: Word Books, 1988. –. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Fee, Gordon D. Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007. Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Gaston, Lloyd. Paul and the Torah. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Hengel, Martin. “Erwägungen zum Sprachgebrauch von Χριστός bei Paulus und in der vorpaulinischen Überlieferung.” Pages 135–58 in Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honour of C. K. Barrett. Edited by Morna D. Hooker and S. G. Wilson. London: SPCK, 1982. –. “‘Χριστός’ in Paul.” Pages 65–77 in Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983. Hurtado, Larry W. “Paul’s Christology.” Pages 185–98 in Cambridge Companion to St. Paul. Edited by James D. G. Dunn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jonge, Marianus de. “The Earliest Christian Use of Χριστός: Some Suggestions.” NTS 32 (1986): 321–43. Kramer, Werner. Christ, Lord, Son of God. SBT 50. London: SCM, 1966. –. Χριστός Kyrios Gottessohn: Untersuchungen zu Gebrauch und Bedeutung der christologichen Bezeichnungen bei Paulus und den voerpaulinischen Gemeinden. ATANT 44. Zürich: Zwingli, 1963. Lee, Aquila H. I. From Messiah to Preexistent Son: Jesus’s Self-Consciousness and Early Christian Exegesis of Messianic Psalms. WUNT II 192. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Miller, Merrill P. “The Problem of the Origins of a Messianic Conception of Jesus,” Pages 301–36 in Redescribing Christian Origins. Edited by Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 28. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.

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Moo, Douglas J. “The Christology of the Early Pauline Letters.” Pages 169–92 in Contours of Christology in the New Testament. Edited by Richard N. Longenecker. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. –. The Epistle to the Romans. NICNT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. Novenson, Matthew V. Christ Among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Richard, Earl. Jesus, One and Many: The Christological Concept of New Testament Authors. Wilmington: Glazier, 1988. Räisänen, Heikki. “Zum Verständnis von Röm 3, 1–8.” Pages 185–205 in The Torah and Christ: Essays in German and English on the Problem of the Law in Early Christianity. Edited by Anne-Marie Enroth. Publications of the Finnish Exegetical Society 45. Helsinki: Finnish Exegetical Society, 1986. Schnelle, Udo. Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology. Translated by M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. Schreiner, Thomas R. Romans. BECNT. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998. Walker, Donald Dale. Paul’s Offer of Leniency (2 Cor 10:1): Populist Ideology and Rhetoric in a Pauline Letter Fragment. WUNT II 152. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. Wedderburn, A. J. M. “Some Observations on Paul’s Use of the Phrases ‘In Christ’ and With Christ.’” JSNT 25 (1985): 83–97. Willitts, Joel. “Davidic Messiahship in Galatians: Clearing the Deck for a Study of the Theme in Galatians.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 2 (2012): 143–62. Wright, N. T. “Messiahship in Galatians?” Pages 510–46 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul: Fresh Perspectives. London: SPCK, 2005. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992. –. “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1980. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003. Zetterholm, Magnus. “Paul and the Missing Messiah.” Pages 33–55 in The Messiah: In Early Judaism and Christianity. Edited by Magnus Zetterholm. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007.

Participationism and Messiah Christology in Paul J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V. Novenson 1. Wright on Stories and Messiahship In his monumental Paul and the Faithfulness of God, N. T. Wright undertakes to show that, and how, the apostle Paul invented Christian theology (PFG 26–27). To this end, Wright spends the first eight chapters of the book on questions of worldview (PFG Parts I–II). His method is to provide a thick description of the symbols, practices, narratives, and questions of Paul’s world so that he can sketch Paul’s theological outlook not with the questions, concerns, and categories of a different era, but with the ones of Paul’s own historical moment (cf. PFG 24–36). From this treatment, Paul’s categories turn out to be what Wright calls the distinctly Jewish ones of “monotheism, election, and eschatology: one God, one people of God, one future for God’s world” (PFG 46). The catalyst for Paul’s invention of theology is “the cataclysmic revelation that the crucified Jesus had been raised from the dead” (PFG 611), and the content of his theology is a reconfiguration of these three categories around the messiah Jesus and the spirit (PFG 612, cf. Part III). The direction of Paul’s theological reworking was toward the maintenance of believing communities and engagement with both Second Temple Judaism and the pagan world (PFG 612–13, cf. Part IV). On this map of Wright’s project, the hypotheses of incorporative messiahship and the source and meaning of Paul’s “in Christ” language, which are our focus in this essay, feature most prominently in two locations: Wright’s account of Paul’s storied worldview (PFG ch. 7, esp. 517–37) and his description of Paul’s reconceptualization of election (PFG ch. 10, esp. 825–35). In undertaking to describe Paul’s worldview, Wright takes it as a given that all worldviews have underlying narratives, and he therefore sets himself the task of delineating the stories that shaped Paul’s thought. This is salutary for Wright’s overall thesis because it becomes a tool to aid him in elucidating the coherence of Paul’s theology – both its internal coherence and its fit with a first-century Jewish worldview (PFG 485). This is no simple task since the primary texts have appeared to many to resist such harmonization at various

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points.1 But Wright’s hypothesis of Paul’s storied worldview is correspondingly intricate so as to account for such diverse data, and Wright explains this intricacy in terms of “layering” (PFG ch. 7, esp. 517–37). Wright asserts that Paul is influenced not just by one overarching meta-narrative but by three, interlocking narrative layers – the stories of God and creation, God and humanity, and God and Israel. Critical for Wright is the element of tragedy in each of these stories. God intended to display his glory in creation through image-bearing humans, but sin obstructed that goal. God then planned to rescue humanity through the family of Abraham, but sin was found there too. Therefore God set out to put Israel to rights in a person whose mission would not be derailed by sin – Israel’s messiah. From this innermost plot about the messiah unfold the dénouements of the other narratives, and thus the messiah becomes the “lynch-pin” (PFG 533–34) of each layer of Paul’s multi-storied worldview: When we understand the triple narrative which forms the basis of Paul’s worldview, we can see the way in which, bewildering though it often seems to us, Jesus the Messiah functions for him in relation to all three stories simultaneously. As Israel’s Messiah, he has accomplished Israel’s rescue from its own plight … As Israel-in-person, … he has completed Israel’s own vocation, to bring rescue and restoration to the human race … And as the truly human one … he has re-established God’s rule over the cosmos … Jesus does not have an independent ‘story’ all his own. He plays the leading role within all the others. He is Adam; he is Israel; he is the Messiah. (PFG 521)

Immediately evident here is Wright’s particular understanding of messiahship. As with the layered stories of Paul’s worldview, one finds with Wright a hypothesis nested within a hypothesis (PFG 531). The conceptualization of messiahship that makes this storied worldview tick is essentially incorporative: the corporate vocation of the many devolves onto the one (PFG 825– 35). The messiah not only rescues Israel but also fulfills Israel’s vocation of being the means of humanity’s redemption; and the messiah not only rescues humanity but also fulfills humanity’s vocation of reigning justly over the cosmos (PFG 531). According to Wright, the incorporative-messianic thread running through these stories holds together Paul’s theology and his Jewish worldview, for the story of the messiah is comprised of all those stories which shaped the existence of Second Temple Jews.2

1

See, e.g., the classic anti-harmonization of Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law, WUNT 29 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983). Cf. Wright’s discussion of what counts as coherence in N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 4–7. Cf. further Wright’s specific handling of torah with reference to Paul’s multi-layered worldview at PFG 505–16. 2 And thus Wright achieves in part his goal of demonstrating coherence between Paul’s gentile mission and his Jewish background.

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This is a bold claim, and it is susceptible to critique at various points.3 Not least is the absence of an explicit description of these stories in Paul’s own writings.4 Wright cautions, however, that a worldview is an implicit story, which, “like a pair of spectacles, you normally look through, not at” (PFG 463, emphasis original; cf. 536). Paul does not, therefore, explicate his worldview; rather, it peeks around the edges of his writings when he says unexpected things, or says familiar things in unexpected ways (PFG 467). An important example of this for Wright is Paul’s “in Christ” language – that hallmark Pauline idiom which has perennially resisted explanation of either the historical or the theological variety. For Wright, this curious prepositional phrase is effectively Paul’s shorthand for that facet of messiahship in which so many features of Pauline theology find their center.

2. Wright on Election and “In Christ” Language If the first place in Wright’s project where incorporative messiahship and Paul’s “in Christ” language feature prominently is in his account of Paul’s storied worldview, the second is in his account of Paul’s reconceptualization of election (PFG ch. 10). Considering what we have just described about Wright’s notion of the devolution of corporate vocation onto the individual messiah, this placement should come as no surprise: “Jesus does not have an independent ‘story’ all his own” (PFG 521). According to Wright, Paul’s “in Christ” language is an expression of the relation between the people of God (hence “election”) and the (incorporative) messiah with special reference to their vocation as specified by Paul’s multi-layered, storied worldview. In Wright’s estimation, the longstanding problem of explaining Paul’s “in Christ” language5 is perpetuated by a failure to recognize Paul’s inherently incorporative conceptualization of messiahship: 3

See, e.g., Joel R. White’s essay in this volume. On this issue, see R. Barry Matlock, “The Arrow and the Web: Critical Reflections on a Narrative Approach to Paul,” in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 44–57. 5 Friedrich Blass, Albert Debrunner, and Robert W. Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), §219.4: “The phrase ἐν Χριστῷ (κυρίῳ), which is copiously appended by Paul to the most varied concepts, utterly defies definite interpretation.” For a survey of grammatical considerations, cf. A. J. M. Wedderburn, “Some Observations on Paul’s Use of the Phrases ‘In Christ’ and ‘With Christ,’” JSNT 25 (1985): 84–87. On Paul’s participationist concepts generally, note E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977), 452–53: “We could do no better than guess by what chain of reasoning or under what history of religions influence [Paul arrived at his ideas of participation]”; and 522–23: “We seem to lack a category of ‘reality’ – real 4

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My own proposal … is that the two ‘unknowns’ are mutually explanatory: the ‘unknown’ solution to the question of en Christō goes with the normally ‘unknown’ Pauline feature of Jesus’ Messiahship. To put it plainly, the ‘incorporative’ thought and language which so pervades Paul is best explained in terms of his belief that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. (PFG 825)

In fact, Wright is one of a bibliographical minority who have argued that the participationist motif in Paul has everything to do with his christology, that both component parts of the phrase “in Christ” contribute equally to the work it does in Paul’s discourse.6 A minority they may be, but a distinguished minority. In particular, Wright’s foremost ally in this project is the great early twentieth-century Alsatian scholar Albert Schweitzer, who, in his Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (German original 1930), argues that the notion that participation in Christ, real possession of the Spirit – which lies between naive cosmological speculation and belief in magical transference on the one hand and a revised selfunderstanding on the other. I must confess that I do not have a new category of perception to propose here. This does not mean, however, that Paul did not have one.” Classic monograph-length treatments of Paul’s “in Christ” language include: G. Adolf Deissmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu” (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1892); Fritz Neugebauer, In Christus: Eine Untersuchung zum paulinischen Glaubens-verständnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961); and Michel Bouttier, En Christ: Étude d’exégèse et de théologie pauliniennes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962). Note also the pertinent exegetical section on ἐν χριστῷ (ch. 3) in Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012). 6 In this connection, one should note the work of Stanley Stowers, who likewise gives robust accounts both of Paul’s messianism and of his participationist logic, but very differently from Wright. On Stowers’s account, because Jesus relinquished his messianic vocation of judging the nations, he was vindicated as faithful in the resurrection and given the divine πνεῦµα. This he passes on to believers, who, since the πνεῦµα is a material substance, thereby share in the stuff of Christ. Since Christ is of Abraham’s physical lineage, so also are those who share in his stuff by possession of the divine πνεῦµα. Thus to be “in Christ” ultimately means to gain access to the Abrahamic lineage with all its attendant privileges, and this access is available to gentiles because Jesus deferred his messianic prerogatives. This conclusion has some affinity with Wright’s, especially in its emphasis on Abraham’s family. But whereas on Stowers’s reading, Paul thinks God’s plan is to pull gentiles into the family of Abraham, on Wright’s Paul thinks God’s plan is to push the blessings of Abraham’s family out toward the cosmos. See Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 37–38, 39, 229–30, 240, 257; and esp. Stanley K. Stowers, “What Is ‘Pauline Participation in Christ’?,” in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E. Udoh with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series 16 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2008), 352–71. On the material πνεῦµα in Stoicism and Paul see Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (London: Yale University Press, 1995); and Troels EngbergPedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Christ-believers somehow participate in or with Christ derives from the messiah myth current in early Roman-period Jewish eschatology. Schweitzer writes, In point of fact, eschatology offers such a conception. It is that of the preordained union of those who are elect to the Messianic Kingdom with one another and with the Messiah which is called “the community of the Saints.”7

The difference between Paul and, say, 4 Ezra, according to Schweitzer, is that whereas 4 Ezra envisions the union of the elect with the messiah as still future, Paul has to reckon with the surprising realization that the messiah has appeared before the end of time, thus effecting, albeit in an empirically nonobvious way, this eschatological state of affairs in the present.8 He explains: The problem how natural men can be in union with the already glorified person of Jesus thus receives the solution, that these Elect are in reality no longer natural men, but, like Christ Himself, are already supernatural beings, only that in them this is not yet manifest. By understanding and interpreting in this quasi-physical way the eschatological concept of the predestined solidarity of the Elect with one another and with the Messiah, the three problems of Pauline eschatology are all solved together.9

Thus Schweitzer. Wright’s account of the “in Christ” motif in Paul is likewise bound up with messiah christology, but differently from Schweitzer’s, and differently even among Wright’s several treatments of the topic over the years. The leitmotif of incorporative messiahship is prominent already in Wright’s 1980 Oxford DPhil thesis on Romans, where he writes, The Messiah, the anointed one of Israel, represents his people and sums them up in himself, so that what is true of him is true of them. When this aspect is linked to the information Paul received in his conversion, namely, that God in the resurrection had declared the crucified Jesus to be the Messiah, the main themes of his theology, and with them the main sections of Romans, are at once brought together in a new way.10

7 Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (London: Black, 1953), 101 (Ger. orig., Albert Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus [Tübingen: Mohr, 1930]). 8 See Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 104–05. 9 Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 110–11. These three problems, according to Schweitzer, are: 1) that those who die in Christ will not miss out on the parousia; 2) that those who are alive at the parousia will be transformed; and 3) that the one general resurrection has begun with the resurrection of Jesus. 10 N. T. Wright, “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology With Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans” (DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1980), 4.

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It is all-important for Wright that χριστός (Paul’s favorite way of referring to Jesus)11 means “messiah,” and furthermore that “messiah” means the one in whom the people of God are summed up. This, as we shall see, is not so very far from the fulsome account he has now given in Paul and the Faithfulness of God. In an ingenious essay in his 1991 collection The Climax of the Covenant, entitled “ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ as Messiah in Paul: Philemon 6,” Wright goes further and suggests a particular scriptural source for Paul’s manner of speaking about the elect being “in the messiah.” The burden of the essay is to explain the puzzling expression in Phlm 6 – παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ τοῦ ἐν ἡµῖν εἰς χριστόν, “every good thing which is in us into Christ” – which Wright does by invoking and further explicating his notion of incorporative messiahship, according to which the elect can be said to grow “into the messiah.”12 He writes, Why should ‘Messiah’ bear such an incorporative sense? Clearly, because it is endemic in the understanding of kingship, in many societies and certainly in ancient Israel, that the king and the people are bound together in such a way that what is true of the one is true in principle of the other.13

In other words, Paul calls Jesus “messiah,” which is an old scriptural word for the king of Judah, who, like other ancient Near Eastern monarchs, was thought to have carried the fate of his subjects in his own person. This lattermost claim, Wright acknowledges, is vulnerable to the standard criticisms of old-fashioned theories of “corporate personality” in the ancient Near East.14 Wright surmounts such criticisms, however, by pointing to cer11 In the seven undisputedly authentic letters, Paul uses χριστός some 269 times, Ἴησους 142 times, and κύριος 188 times, but this lattermost title does not refer to Jesus in every instance. 12 About Phlm 6, Wright concludes, “The verse as a whole, then, could be paraphrased as follows: ‘I am praying that the mutual participation which is proper to the Christian faith you hold may have its full effect in your realization of every good thing that God is accomplishing in us, to lead us into the fullness of Christian fellowship, that is, of Christ’” (Wright, Climax, 55). 13 Wright, Climax, 46. 14 In particular, Wright cedes the criticisms leveled by Wedderburn, “Observations,” 83–97. For the history of this discussion see H. Wheeler Robinson, “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality,” in Werden and Wesen des Alten Testaments: Vortraäge gehalten auf der internationalen Tagung alttestamentlicher Forscher zu Göttingen vom 4.– 10. September 1935, ed. Johannes Hempel, Friedrich Stummer, and Paul Volz. BZAW 66 (Berlin: Alfred Töpelmann, 1936), 49–62; Joshua Roy Porter, “The Legal Aspects of the Concept of ‘Corporate Personality’ in the Old Testament,” VT 15 (1965): 361–80; John W. Rogerson, “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality: A Re-examination,” JTS 21 (1970): 1–16; and more recently Stanley E. Porter, “Two Myths: Corporate Personality and Language/Mentality Determinism,” SJT 43 (1990): 289–307; and Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSup 196 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995). Wright maintains, however, that “there remain certain phenomena which the phrase

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tain scriptural texts which, he claims, expressly talk about the Judahite king in the same way that Paul talks about Jesus. All of these texts come from the narrative of the wars of succession in 2 Samuel, such as 2 Sam 19:43: “The men of Israel answered the men of Judah, ‘We have ten shares in the king, and in David also we have more than you (Δέκα χεῖρές µοι ἐν τῷ βασιλεῖ καί γε ἐν τῷ Δαυιδ εἰµὶ ὑπὲρ σέ),’” and 2 Sam 20:1: “Sheba son of Bichri, a Benjaminite … said, ‘We have no portion in David, and we have no inheritance in the son of Jesse (Οὐκ ἔστιν ἡµῖν µερὶς ἐν Δαυιδ οὐδὲ κληρονοµία ἡµῖν ἐν τῷ υἱῷ Ιεσσαι).’” Wright finds in these texts concrete biblical precedent for speaking of the people as being “in the king,” “in David,” “in the son of Jesse” (but not, admittedly, “in the anointed one”). Taking care not to claim direct or conscious literary dependence on Paul’s part, Wright concludes, While these texts are not sufficient in and of themselves to suggest that such language was familiar in the first century, it does at least suggest a matrix of ideas out of which a fresh incorporative usage could grow, namely, that of the king representing the people.15

In Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Wright stands by his account of incorporative messiahship and, indeed, develops it more fully, but he also repents of certain aspects of his previous treatments. About the “portion in David” and “inheritance in the son of Jesse” texts from 2 Samuel, which he had highlighted in his 1991 essay, Wright comments in 2013, “I do not now think (as I once did) that these interesting biblical passages themselves constitute the explanation for [Paul’s] usage” (PFG 830). And, moving on from SamuelKings to Hellenistic- and Roman-period Jewish messiah texts, Wright is also now pessimistic about identifying any parallels that might illuminate Paul’s idiom. It is true that we look in vain, in the messianic or quasi-messianic movements of the last two centuries BC and the first two centuries AD, for anything like the ‘incorporative’ language we find in Paul … The biblical texts regularly cited in second-Temple messianic speculation … do not include the idea, in whatever form, that the coming Messiah will sum up or incorporate his people in himself. (PFG 826–27)

By this point, the reader will note, Wright has moved some way from Schweitzer’s claim that early Jewish eschatology offers up the conception of the pre-ordained union of the messiah with the elect. ‘corporate personality’ was trying, perhaps unhelpfully, to explain” (PFG 827n155). He cites the work of Aubrey Johnson as a still significant contribution on the topic: Aubrey R. Johnson, “Hebrew Conceptions of Kingship,” in Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed. S. H. Hooke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 204–35; and Aubrey R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967). Wedderburn himself actually appeals cautiously to the concept of “corporate personality” as well (Wedderburn, “Observations,” 97n52). 15 Wright, Climax, 47.

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In another respect, however, Wright’s 2013 treatment stands quite close to Schweitzer’s, namely, in his emphasis on the cognitive dissonance wrought in Paul by Jesus’s resurrection out of due time.16 As Wright now sees things, it is this development, not any scriptural oracle or messiah haggadah, that gave Paul the idea that the saints are incorporated into the messiah. He writes: It is particularly the resurrection that matters here. A Pharisee like Saul of Tarsus undoubtedly believed passionately in resurrection; but it would be the resurrection of all Israel at the end of time. No Pharisee imagined that one person would be raised from the dead ahead of everyone else. When, therefore, it happened to one person, as Paul believed it had – and when, in particular, it happened to someone who had been executed as a wouldbe Messiah – it meant at once that Israel’s God had done for Jesus what it had been supposed he would do for Israel. … He was, in effect, Israel in person. And it was precisely as Messiah that he therefore represented his people. (PFG 827–28, emphasis original)

Thus Wright on Paul’s “in Christ” language as of 2013. How, then, should we assess these claims? A large part of the guild of Pauline exegetes has been content for some time simply to discount messiah christology out of hand and thus not to consider the particular arguments advanced by the likes of Schweitzer and Wright.17 There are some signs that this tide is turning,18 which we consider a welcome development. Paul is a late Second Templeperiod diaspora Jewish thinker, a participant in a number of Jewish discussions on topics theological, practical, and otherwise: the purity of idol meat, the permissibility of gentile circumcision, the cosmic justice of God, and the attributes of the messiah, among other things.19 Of course, Paul also had had a revelation of the son of God (Gal 1:16) and believed that the end of the present age was at hand (Gal 1:4), but he is no less – and is perhaps even more – a participant in Jewish messiah discourse for all that. In this respect, Schweitzer’s intuition to interpret Paul alongside the late Second Temple-period apocalypses was on the right track, but he went astray in homogenizing Jewish eschatology and in making Paul a more or less pas16

On this point, see Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 90–100. See, e.g., James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of the Apostle Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 199n88: “Wright … has been a lone voice in arguing that ‘Christos in Paul should regularly be read as messiah.’” 18 E.g., Stowers, Rereading, 213–26; Paula Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” JTS 42 (1991): 532– 64; Adela Yarbro Collins, “Jesus as Messiah and Son of God in the Letters of Paul,” in King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature, ed. John J. Collins and Adela Yarbro Collins (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 101–22; and Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19 Thus rightly John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE), HCS 33 (London: University of California Press, 1996), 381–96. 17

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sive recipient of preformed ideas.20 Each of Wright’s several treatments over the years has been subtler than Schweitzer’s in this respect, which is an important gain for scholarship on this issue. Wright’s 1991 effort to trace Paul’s “in Christ” language to a particular scriptural precedent in 2 Samuel, while ultimately unpersuasive,21 is just the kind of text-based, ground-up explanation that could conceivably work if, as we think is the case, Paul is undertaking a kind of messiah haggadah. Wright deserves credit for candidly backing down, in his 2013 treatment, from arguments that he no longer finds compelling. And yet, his renunciation of all text-based explanations and his entire dependence on the resurrection event as an explanans may actually concede too much. It may yet be possible to give a compelling account of the scriptural reasoning behind Paul’s “in Christ” language.

3. An Alternative Proposal: Pauline Messianism as Scriptural Discourse It seems to us that in his text-based account of Paul’s “in Christ” language, Wright sets out on the right foot but then takes two missteps. The sure footing is his assertion that Paul’s messianism and the development and use of his “in Christ” language are integrally related. The simple lexical observation that the phrase ἐν (τῷ) Ἰησοῦ never appears in the undisputed epistles is a significant indicator that this is pointing in the right direction.22 Wright’s two missteps, however, are his too-hasty dismissal of the Abrahamic narrative as providing a verbal source for Paul’s “in Christ” language and his unwarranted concession that there is no notion of participation anywhere within the scriptural stock drawn upon for messianic speculation in the Second Temple period. 20

For a critical assessment, see R. Barry Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism, JSNTSup 127 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 23–71. 21 See the discussion in Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 119–26. To summarize: the idioms in Samuel-Kings and Paul are not exact matches, and the Samuel-Kings texts are without currency in Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, including Paul. 22 Where χριστός and Ιησοῦς are used together to denote the object of the preposition ἐν, χριστός always appears first. However, in Gal 3:14 a few witnesses (‫א‬, B, and syp) transpose them, reading ἐν Ἰησοῦ χριστῷ. Since χριστῷ is included in either case, messiahship is arguably in view regardless. Ἐν αὐτῷ referring to the person of Jesus occurs six times in the undisputed epistles, and in every instance the antecedent is χριστός (Phil 3:9; 2 Cor 5:21; 13:4), χριστός Ιησοῦς (1 Cor 1:5), or Ιησοῦς χριστός (2 Cor 1:19, 20; cf. textual variant of Gal 3:14), but never Ιησοῦς alone. “In Jesus” (ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ) appears only once in the disputed epistles, in Eph 4:21. Cf. PFG 832.

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First, regarding Abraham and “in Christ” language: Wright takes his point of departure on this from A. J. M. Wedderburn, who conceives of the relation between Christ and Abraham as an analogy: Abraham provides an analogy to, though not, of course, a source of, the ἐν Χριστῷ … language of Paul … He remains for Paul the Old Testament patriarch who by the pattern of his life provides the model for the relationship of God's people with their God down the centuries.23

According to Wedderburn, Paul did not derive his “in Christ” language from the phrase “in you [=Abraham].” Rather, “in you” and “in Christ” express separate iterations of a pattern in the way that God relates to humanity – i.e., through representatives – and are therefore mutually illuminating.24 Wright concedes this point and then finds it insufficient for answering the historical question of the derivation of Paul’s “in Christ” language: Attention has often been drawn, in Paul himself, to the incorporative phrases ‘in Adam’ and indeed ‘in Abraham’, the former in close parallel to ‘in Christ’ and the latter in fairly close proximity. But even there we seem to be dealing with analogies, not with sources or origins of Paul’s remarkable way of speaking. (PFG 827)

While Wedderburn’s account of Paul’s “in Christ” language has the advantage over Wright’s of taking its cue directly from Paul’s own writings (the “in” phrases of the Abrahamic promises discussed in Gal 3), Wright is correct that “analogy” does not get us very far in understanding how and why Paul developed his hallmark idiom. Moreover, a bare instrumental reading of “in Christ” leaves a number of uses unsatisfactorily explained.25 But “analogy” is not the only way to frame Paul’s conception of the relation between Jesus and Abraham. Paul in fact gives reason in Gal 3:14–16 to think that he understood the relation of Jesus to the Abrahamic promises to be more integral than a simple comparison. Nils Dahl, in his own account of Gal 3, leverages the concept of messiahship to explain the association between Abraham and Jesus in Paul’s thought. In arguing that “Paul’s conviction that the crucified Jesus is the Messiah underlies his understanding of God’s promises, faith and the Law,” Dahl turns his attention to Gal 3:14 where he detects a possible ex-

23

Wedderburn, “Observations,” 91. Wedderburn, “Observations,” 91: “Abraham and Christ are viewed as representative figures through whom God acts towards the human race: he acts towards them ‘in’ those figures.” 25 Three examples: 1) the notion of being found in Christ, which trades on the spatial connotation of ἐν (Phil 3:9); 2) the substantive use the phrase to identify believers (Rom 8:1); and 3) instances in which Paul asserts that believers experience something not merely by means of Christ, but because Christ himself has experienced the same (cf. Rom 6:11, 1 Cor 15:22) – one might describe this as instrumentality by solidarity. 24

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planation for Paul’s “in Christ” language.26 He suggests that Gal 3:14a is a paraphrase of the Abrahamic promise, entailing the borrowed phrase, “the promise of Abraham,” from Gen 28:4 LXX and an allusion (of sorts) to the phrase “in your seed” from Gen 22:18 LXX. This is an allusion “of sorts” because Dahl perceives that Paul retains the syntax of “in your seed” but replaces “your seed” with “Christ Jesus.”27 Thus, according to Dahl the component parts of Gal 3:14a are sourced as follows: Gal 3:14a

ἵνα εἰς τὰ ἔθνη ἡ εὐλογία τοῦ Ἀβραὰµ γένηται ἐν χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ

Gen 28:4

καὶ δῴη σοι τὴν εὐλογίαν Αβρααµ τοῦ πατρός µου, σοὶ καὶ τῷ σπέρµατί σου µετὰ σέ

Gen 22:18 καὶ ἐνευλογηθήσονται ἐν τῷ σπέρµατί σου πάντα τὰ ἔθνη τῆς γῆς

Dahl goes on to explain that the replacement of “in your seed” with “in Christ Jesus” in Gal 3:14 “presupposes the messianic interpretation of ‘the offspring of Abraham’”28 – an interpretation Paul makes explicit in v. 16.29 In light of 26

Nils A. Dahl, “Promise and Fulfillment,” in Studies in Paul: Theology for the Early Christian Mission (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1977), 130 (Norwegian orig., Nils A. Dahl, “Paulus’ syn på løftenes oppfyllelse,” in Israel, Kirken og verden: Nordisk teologkonferanse Utstein kloster 1971, ed. Magne Sæbø, Gammeltestamentlig Bibliotek 2 [Oslo: Land og Kirke, 1972], 99–114). 27 Dahl, “Promise and Fulfillment,” 131. See also the slightly abbreviated, earlier statement in Nils A. Dahl, “Contradictions in Scripture,” in Studies in Paul: Theology for the early Christian Mission (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1977), 171 (Norwegian orig., Nils A. Dahl, “Motsigelser i Skriften – et gammelt hermeneutiskt problem,” Svensk teologisk kvartalskrift 45 [1969]: 22–36). 28 Dahl, “Promise and Fulfillment,” 131. So also Richard Hays, Donald Juel, and Jon Levenson. Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, 2nd ed., Biblical Resources Series (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002), 180: “Given an already established exegetical tradition that interpreted these ‘seed’ texts as messianic promises, the way was clear for Paul to affirm, as he does in verse 14, that the promise to Abraham was really a promise that the Gentiles would be blessed ‘in Christ Jesus.’” Donald Juel, Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 87: “The connections established among the various scriptural texts that underlie Paul’s arguments … depend upon the identification of Jesus as the ‘seed’. That identification, in turn, depends upon messianic oracles like 2 Sam. 7:10–14, which could be applied to Jesus because he was confessed as the Christ.” Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 211: “Once Jesus has displaced Isaac it follows that the promises and blessings that had been associated with the beloved son par excellence in Genesis must be available instead through the Christian messiah. This is, in fact, the implication of Paul’s first clause in Gal 3.14.” 29 Dahl, “Promise and Fulfillment,” 131. Concerning Paul’s interpretation of the generic singular in Gal 3:16, Hays concludes, “although Paul’s exegesis could never pass historical-critical muster, it is internally consistent and compelling, once one grants his premise

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this, Dahl postulates that the phrase “in your seed,” interpreted messianically, is the verbal source for Paul’s “in Christ” language.30 With respect to Wedderburn’s proposed analogy between Christ and Abraham, Dahl does more here than simply suggest an alternate analogy between Christ and Abraham’s seed.31 Instead, the shift is away from analogy altogether as an explanatory category and toward Paul’s own theological, and specifically messianic, hermeneutic. Paul’s language does not reflect a simple comparison between two representative figures but rather a conviction that that the Abrahamic promises were made to and fulfilled in the messiah.32 For Paul, Jesus is not like Abraham’s seed (or Abraham), he, as χριστός, is Abraham’s seed. Given Wright’s penchant for appealing to Paul’s messianism as a key to understanding his thought, it is striking that he does not consider this alternate reading of the data in Gal 3. Perhaps this decision is due to Wright’s commitment to a collective reading of σπέρµα in Gal 3:16 denoting the unified family of God,33 though Dahl’s suggestion really depends on v. 14 and not v. 16. It may be that in dealing with Paul’s “in Christ” language Wright prefers to emphasize the Davidic character of Paul’s concept of messiahship and by extension its royal character so as retain some aspect of the notion of the Near Eastern monarch as a “corporate personality.”34 But Davidic messianism is not outside the purview of Gal 3:14 if we understand “Davidic messianism” as an exegetical discourse rather than as a monolithic ideology. While it remains debatable whether Paul’s thought entails a Near Eastern kingship ideology of “corporate personality,” Paul’s words demonstrably exhibit a (not unprecedented) exegetical maneuver by which the Abrahamic promises were interpreted messianically in light of the Davidic promises. Dahl suggests that the basis for this sort of messianic interpretation of Abraham’s seed in Gal 3:14 is Nathan’s promise to David in 2 Sam 7:12 also con-

that σπέρµα is to be understood as a reference to the Messiah” (Hays, Faith of Jesus Christ, 180). Cf. Juel, Messianic Exegesis, 86; and Max Wilcox, “The Promise of the ‘Seed’ in the New Testament and the Targumim,” JSNT 5 (1979): 2–20. 30 Dahl, “Promise and Fulfillment,” 131. 31 Cf. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society 1 (London: University of California Press, 1994), 144: “Indeed, it is not so much Abraham who is the type of Christ but Isaac.” 32 Thus Dahl’s hypothesis calls into question Wedderburn’s assumption of semantic identity between “Abraham” and “Christ” as personal names (Wedderburn, “Observations,” 88) and instead comports with the hypothesis that χριστός meant “messiah” for Paul. 33 Cf. Wright, Climax, 162–68; and N. T. Wright, “Messiahship in Galatians?,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 530–33. Cf. also Boyarin, Radical Jew, 145. 34 See n14 above.

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cerning a future “seed”:35 “And I will raise up your seed after you (καὶ ἀναστήσω τὸ σπέρµα σου µετὰ σέ), who will be from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.” Midrashically, Paul understands the σπέρµα of the Abrahamic promises as the σπέρµα of the Davidic promises, who is also χριστός.36 A similar interpretive move, which also traded on the construction “in your seed” and applied the Abrahamic promise to the Davidic line, had already been made in Jewish tradition antecedent to Paul. Psalm 72 [OG 71]:17 makes petition for the king: “And all the tribes of the earth will be blessed in him (καὶ εὐλογηθήσονται ἐν αὐτῷ πᾶσαι αἱ φυλαὶ τῆς γῆς).” The Psalm is for Solomon (Εἰς Σαλωµων) – the original anointed seed of David. For Paul, as for the Psalmist, the messiah, σπέρµα τοῦ Δαυὶδ, is also the messiah, σπέρµα τοῦ Ἀβραὰµ.37 While it is true that none of this points directly to any sort of incorporative dynamic such as Wright detects in the Samuel-Kings texts mentioned above, the hypothesis that Paul’s messianic interpretation of the promises concerning Abraham’s seed provides the verbal source for his “in Christ” language is in the end more satisfying in two ways. First, it retains messiahship as the vital category for understanding Paul’s “in Christ” language but frames messianic discourse primarily as an exegetical project rather than appealing to a type of messianic ideology thought to be inherent in a Second Temple Jewish 35

Dahl, “Contradictions in Scripture,” 171. Cf. Rom 1:3. See also Juel, Messianic Exegesis, 87. As for the paucity in Paul of a clear citation of 2 Sam 7, Juel suggests, “There may well be OT passages that were foundational to the development of exegetical constructions that are never cited, either because their presence could be taken for granted or because their major function was to provide links with other, more readily applicable portions of the Scriptures” (Juel, Messianic Exegesis, 59, emphasis added). 36 Wilcox, “Promise of the ‘Seed,’” 16. Wilcox, like Wright and Schweitzer before him, understands the resurrection of Jesus as the primary catalyst of Paul’s messianic speculation. Unlike Wright, however, Wilcox’s hypothesis concerning this posits not simply a psychological phenomenon but a text-based inference rooted in the 2 Sam 7:12 phrase, ἀναστήσω τὸ σπέρµα σου: “The means by which the NT writers were able to make the final step from “Messiah” to Jesus was the resurrection, itself seen as disclosed in the promise to David that God would raise up his seed after him (2 Sam.(Kgd.) vii. 12)” (Wilcox, “Promise of the ‘Seed,’” 16). The conjunction of an allusion to 2 Sam 7 and mention of resurrection in Rom 1:3–4 suggests Wilcox is exactly right concerning Paul. Donald Juel suggests that a comparable instance of messianic “seed” exegesis is at play in Gal 3:19 (ἄχρις οὗ ἔλθῃ τὸ σπέρµα ᾧ ἐπήγγελται), which he understands to be a paraphrase of Gen 49:10 (ἕως ἂν ἔλθῃ τὰ ἀποκείµενα αὐτῷ; MT: [‫ )עד כי־יבא שׁילה ]שׁילו‬interpreted messianically as evidenced by the insertion of the word σπέρµα, itself derived from 2 Sam 7. Again, this is not wholly innovative; something similar appears in 4QCommGenA V, 5–6: “Until the Messiah of Righteousness comes, the branch of David.” Cf. also Frg. Tg. Gen 49:10: “Until the King Messiah comes, for the kingdom belongs to him”; and Tg. Neof. Gen 49:10: “Until the King Messiah comes, whose is the kingship; to him shall all the kingdoms be subject.” 37 Cf. Matthew V. Novenson, “The Messiah ben Abraham in Galatians: A Response to Joel Willitts,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 2 (2012): 163–70.

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worldview. This is not to say that Wright’s worldview reconstruction is detached from Second Temple texts or from Paul’s own writings, nor is it to say that his concepts of multi-layered stories or incorporative messiahship could not conceivably be harmonized with the hypothesis offered here. Our point, rather, is that a description of Paul’s actual handling of particular source texts is more readily demonstrable, and that is no small thing if our goal is achieving something approaching consensus. Second, without denying an element of innovation on Paul’s part – as far as we know from the sources, no one before Paul spoke about a messiah this much and in just this way – the alternative hypothesis sketched here situates Paul within the bounds of certain common features shared among a diverse range of messiah texts from this period. Paul’s own messianic speculation, catalyzed by his belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead, was especially concerned with a known person and past events rather than only future possibilities.38 But Paul’s methods were not unique – he drew from an established reservoir of scriptural resources, reading them in ways well attested in other contemporary messianic speculation.39 But what of incorporative messiahship? A messianic interpretation of the promises concerning Abraham’s seed do not in any obvious way account for those instances of Paul’s “in Christ” language which go beyond a simple notion of instrumentality.40 This leads us to Wright’s second misstep: his assertion that “the biblical texts regularly cited in second-Temple messianic speculation … do not include the idea, in whatever form, that the coming Messiah will sum up or incorporate his people in himself” (PFG 827) cedes too much. We suggest that in fact Dan 7 could be read, and was in fact read by Paul, to include precisely this idea, and it is at the very surface of the text, requiring no special interpretive framework for detection, since the same thing is predicated of both the “one like a son of man” and “the people of the holy ones.”41 This is clearly observable in Dan 7:14 and 27, where both are given an everlasting, worldwide kingdom. At v. 14, Daniel beholds this heavenly scene: And to [the one like a son of man] was given authority, and all glory, and all the nations of the earth according to kind worship him. And his authority is an everlasting authority which will never be removed, and his kingdom will never be corrupted.

38 And even this is not unique to Paul or to early Christian writers, on which point see Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 39 See Juel, Messianic Exegesis, 31–57. 40 See n25 above. 41 Daniel Boyarin has recently made a suggestion along these lines, although not with reference to Paul, in Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: New Press, 2012), 186n9.

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And at v. 27, Daniel’s angelic companion interprets the scene: And the kingdom and the authority and their greatness, and the rulers of all the kingdoms under heaven were given to the holy people of the Most High to reign as an everlasting kingdom. And all the authorities will be subjected to it, and they will obey it.42

There is of course a lively debate about whether the “one like a son of man” in Daniel’s vision is a “collective symbol”43 or an actual individual.44 If the former were correct, then there would be no great significance in the fact that the same thing is said about both. This is inconsequential for the question of how the text was later used in messianic speculation, though. The authors, for instance, of 4 Ezra 13, the Similitudes of Enoch, the Gospels, and Revelation all clearly regarded Dan 7’s “son of man” as an individual.45 Given, for these later tradents, a distinction between the “son of man” and the people, it is difficult to miss the dynamic of solidarity between the two – what is true of one is true of the other.46 Here again, it is striking that Wright does not exploit this scriptural connection. The reason could conceivably be that Wright is committed to his interpretation of the “son of man” as a “collective symbol” because of the interpretive payoff it provides for his reconstruction of the multi-layered, storied Jewish worldview: God’s enemies are beasts, but his people are a human – God’s “true humanity,” the recapitulation of Adamic humanity.47 Whatever one makes of this, it is not necessarily lost by admitting that later readers conceived of Dan 7’s “son of man” as a coming individual (or, for that matter, an already-come individual). Another possible reason that Wright does not go to Dan 7 here is that Dan 7 is admittedly not a commonly ad-

42

The lexical correspondences in OG are numerous: ἐξουσία, βασιλεία, αἰώνιος, πᾶς, and δίδωµι. Theodotian has the added correspondence of δουλεύω. There are also two significant conceptual correspondences: both the “son of man” and the people receive glory/honor (v. 14) and greatness (v. 27), and both receive worldwide obeisance. 43 So, e.g., N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 291–97. 44 John J. Collins is a major proponent of this view. Collins thinks that the “son of man” is an angel, though there are other possibilities. See John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Daniel, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), 304–10; and John J. Collins, “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 93 (1974): 50–66. 45 Paul probably did too, and if so, the exegetical maneuver should be no more troubling than the exploitation of the grammatical singular σπέρµα in Gal 3:16. 46 See also John J. Collins, “The Heavenly Representative: The ‘Son of Man’ in the Similitudes of Enoch,” in Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism, ed. George W. E. Nickelsburg and John J. Collins, SCS 12 (Chico, CA: Scholars, 1980), 111–33. 47 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 296. On Paul specifically, see Wright, Climax, 24–26.

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duced inter-text for Paul’s writings.48 While a full discussion of this possibility must wait for another occasion,49 one brief observation may at least stimulate conversation. Psalm 110 [OG 109] is not infrequently amalgamated with Dan 7 in both non-Christian Jewish texts and the NT.50 Examples include the “son of man” or “elect one” sitting on the throne glory in 1 Enoch,51 R. Akiba’s renowned saying concerning the plural thrones of Dan 7:9 (“one for God and one for David”),52 and the vision the “son of man” as the right hand of God repeated in the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.53 The same is true in 1 Cor 15:24–25, where Ps 110 [OG 109] supplies the justification of the need for Christ’s final victory – “it is necessary that he reign until such time as all enemies are put under his feet” – and Dan 7:27 supplies the imagery describing Christ’s enemies – “every rule and every authority.”54 And all of this in a mini-apocalypse in which solidarity between Christ and believers in the resurrection, expressed with “in Christ” language, is the basis of Paul’s theological logic. Thus 1 Cor 15:22–23: “in Christ (ἐν τῷ χριστῷ) all will be made 48

Maurice Casey denies any influence of Dan 7 in Paul (Maurice Casey, Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7 [London: SPCK, 1979], 151–54). Craig Evans produces a list of several “traces” (Craig A. Evans, “Daniel in the New Testament: Visions of God’s Kingdom,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, 2 vols., VTSup 83 [Leiden: Brill, 2001], 2:523–26). Florian Wilk lists only one allusion, which is not in Evans’s list (Florian Wilk, “Die Schriften bei Markus und Paulus,” in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer, BZNW 198 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014], 220). Others proffer undeveloped suggestions here and there. See, e.g., Martin Hengel, “‘Sit at My Right Hand!’: The Enthronement of Christ at the Right Hand of God in Psalm 110:1,” in Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) 164, 166 (Ger. orig., Martin Hengel, “Setze dich zu meiner Rechten: Die Inthronisation Christi zur rechten Gottes und Psalm 110.1,” in Le Thrône de Dieu, ed. Marc Philonenko, WUNT 69 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993], 108–94); Joost Holleman, Resurrection and Parousia: A Traditio-Historical Study of Paul’s Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15, NovTSup 84 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 113–14; and Wright himself, PFG 549n51, 1063–65, 1090, 1293. There appears to be no consensus. 49 See J. Thomas Hewitt, “In Christ: Participatory Language and Messiah Christology in Paul” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, forthcoming). 50 See David M. Hay, Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm 110 in Early Christianity, SBLMS 18 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1973), 26–27; and William Horbury, “The Messianic Associations of ‘the Son of Man,’” in Messianism Among Jews and Christians: Twelve Biblical and Historical Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 125–55. Cf. also C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology (London: Nisbet, 1952), 109; Hengel, “‘Sit at My Right Hand!,’” 169–72; and Boyarin, Jewish Gospels, 186n9. 51 1 En. 45:1, 3; 46:3–6; 51:3; 55:4; 61:8; 62:1–3; and esp. 69:27, 29. 52 b. Sanh. 38b. 53 Matt 26:64; Mark 14:62; Luke 22:69; Acts 7:46. Cf. Rom 8:34, 38; Eph 1:20–22; and 1 Pet 3:22. 54 Cf. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 144.

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alive, but each in his own order – Christ the firstfruits and then those of Christ (οἱ τοῦ χριστοῦ) in his appearing.” Here, it seems to us, Paul has recapitulated the dynamic of solidarity in victory from Dan 7, bringing it into conjunction with the same theme in Ps 110 [OG 109], re-interpreted in light of the resurrection, and applied to the messiah and his people. If this is near the mark, Paul’s exegesis in 1 Cor 15:20–28 looks strikingly similar to his other messianic speculation in Gal 3:14–19, which collates and interprets stock messianic texts in light of his conviction about the resurrection of Jesus. Thus Paul has woven into his messianism a notion of participation derived from Dan 7.55

4. Wright’s Paul in Contemporary Pauline Studies As with our suggestion that the scriptural “in your seed” oracles provide the verbal source for Paul’s “in Christ” language, positing Dan 7 as a conceptual background does not entail a hypothesis as intricate and all-encompassing as Wright’s conception of incorporative messiahship. What our proposal does is to provide a ground-up, text-based starting point from which scholarly discussion of Paul’s messianism can move forward. This is the heart of our response to Wright. We want to give a robust account of messiah christology and participation in Paul (thus agreeing with Wright on some fundamental points), but without the skandalon of Wright’s worldview meta-narrative. To return to the comparison with Schweitzer, it is fair to say that both Schweitzer and Wright respond to what they consider to be the major misapprehensions of their historical moments.56 For Schweitzer it was the religionsgeschichtliche Schule and their determination to locate Paul’s ideas strictly within the Greek and Roman religions of his time.57 Against this, 55 John Collins takes an analogous approach to 4Q246 (the “Son of God text” from Qumran), in which he elucidates the ambiguous correspondence between the one styled “son of God” and “the people of God” by way of a similar comparison with Dan 7. See John J. Collins, “The Messiah as the Son of God” in The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010), 171–90, esp. 178, 180. With respect to the study of the reception of Dan 7 in Second Temple Jewish literature – including the texts of the NT – Collins’s approach is notable because he posits an intertextual relationship between 4Q246 and Dan 7 despite the absence of the more commonly adduced Danielic footprints – the phrase “son of man” or the imagery of clouds or beasts. This suggests new avenues for exploring the influence of Dan 7 in the NT (here, 1 Cor 15) which bypass the potential red herrings of titles and apocalyptic imagery. 56 As we all are, to some extent, but in both Schweitzer and Wright, the note of polemic is especially prominent. 57 E.g., Richard Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: Nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (Berlin: Teubner, 1910); Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus,

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Schweitzer insisted that Paul was an essentially Jewish, and specifically apocalyptic, thinker.58 It is not as easy to isolate a single opponent against whom Wright directs his energies, but the refrain that Paul’s mind was a thoroughly Jewish one resounds throughout Wright’s opera as loudly as any.59 The consequence, in the matter before us, is that Wright introduces what is effectively an updated version of “the messianic idea.” It is true that, after surveying both scriptural texts and Second Temple literature, Wright insists “there is no single picture of ‘the Messiah’ which emerges” (PFG 135) and that “there are as many varieties of messianic expectation as there are relevant texts and movements” (PFG 138). Nevertheless, Wright explains these differences as “variations on a theme; and the theme is the great and often tragic story of Israel”: [it is] true that one of the key things about a Messiah, however varied the portrait in other respects, is that the Messiah will precisely bring the story of Israel to its goal, fufilling the ancient promises, especially those to Abraham, and rescuing the nation from the appalling mess into which its many rebellions have landed it. (PFG 138)

Wright’s version of a messianic idea here is subtler by far than the classic nineteenth- and early twentieth-century versions.60 His is essentially a biblical theology derived from scriptural and other Second Temple-period texts (PFG 114–39), rather than a systematization of themes present in texts such as

FRLANT 21 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913); and, to a lesser extent, G. Adolf Deissmann, Paulus: Eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1911). 58 Note Schweitzer’s acerbic assessment of Reitzenstein on Paul’s “in Christ” language; Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 27: “Reitzenstein the linguistic scholar is so completely under the influence of Reitzenstein the champion of Comparative Religion that he neglects the most primary linguistic foundations … He never mentions the fact … that from the side of Hellenism nothing can be adduced tending to explain Paul’s ‘in Christ’” (cf. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 16). 59 On this claim, see the critical assessment of James G. Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 85–132. 60 Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.– A.D. 135), ed. Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973–87), 2:514–47 lists eleven features of messianic hope in the Second Temple period: 1) the final ordeal and confusion; 2) Elijah as a precursor; 3) the coming of the messiah; 4) the last assault of the hostile powers; 5) destruction of the hostile powers; 6) the renewal of Jerusalem; 7) the gathering of the dispersed; 8) the kingdom of glory in the holy land; 9) the renewal of the world; 10) a general resurrection; and 11) the last judgment, eternal bliss and damnation. Wright recapitulates his conception of messianic expectation with a comparably modest five-part summary, PFG 816: “[1] the long-promised one from the line of David, [2] the one through whom Israel's final battle was to be fought, [3] the Temple was to be cleansed and rebuilt, [4] God's justice and peace were to be established in the world and [5] the ancient promises to Abraham were to be fulfilled.”

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4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.61 More significantly, whereas the older conceptions of a messianic idea were often invoked as a canon against which Paul’s thought could be measured and shown to be distinctly un-Jewish,62 Wright’s messianic idea, bound up as it is with Israel’s vocation of being the instrument of worldwide redemption, is leveraged precisely to show how thoroughly Jewish Paul’s gentile mission was: For the last hundred years or more Paul has been seen as the ‘apostle to the gentiles’, and it has been supposed that a nationalist Jewish category like ‘Messiah’ would be irrelevant in such an apostolate. How wrong can a tradition be? It is of the very essence of Paul’s worldview, rooted in Israel’s scriptures, that Israel’s Messiah brings Israel’s history to its strange and unexpected conclusion precisely so that he can then bring God’s justice to the nations. The world needs, and has been promised, the Jewish Messiah as its rightful lord. Paul insists that this promise has now been fulfilled. (PFG 518)

Wright is surely right to reject the scholarly commonplace that says that a messiah christology has no place in the thought of the apostle to the gentiles. Paul says in so many words that he has a messiah christology, and the onus is on us interpreters to follow his reasoning. Wright has now given us one of the most thorough attempts to date to do just this, rivaling even that of Schweitzer. The interesting question at this juncture is whether Wright’s way of doing it will be able to command consensus from the guild, and here Wright’s multi-story worldview approach poses a difficulty.63 For those who do not see the broad panorama the way Wright does, or who see no panorama at all, discussion about Paul’s thought may reach an impasse, and we fear this could be the case for his important account of Paul’s “in Christ” language and incorporative messiahship. In the end, this may betray a fundamental methodo61 Schürer, History of the Jewish People, 2:514. See also Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel: From Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah, trans. W. F. Stinespring (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 385. Klausner admits that not all links of what he calls the “Messianic chain” are always there, but the chain is apparently no weaker for their absence. Cf. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs, 35–37. 62 See, e.g., F. C. Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings; A Contribution to a Critical History of Primitive Christianity, 2 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 2:125–26 (Germ. orig., F. C. Baur, Paulus, der Apostel Jesus Christi: Sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre, ein Beitrag zu einer kritischen Geschichte des Urchristenthums, 2 vols. [Stuttgart: Becher & Müller, 1845]): “The apostle … saw in the death of Christ the purification of the Messianic idea from all the sensuous elements which cleaved it to Judaism, and its elevation to the truly spiritual consciousness where Christ … is infinitely above Judaism”; and William Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lummis (London: Philip Green, 1907), 86 (Ger. orig., William Wrede, Paulus [Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1904]): “The ordinary conception of a Messiah does not suffice to characterize the Christ of Paul. For the significance of the Pauline Christ is valid, not for Judaism, but for mankind.” 63 See the several contributions to Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4.1 (2014).

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logical question about the value of a worldview approach for making sense of puzzles in Paul’s letters. Some will find such an approach salutary, and others will not. One imagines that Wright will continue to stand by his method and perhaps to contend, as he has done before, that if no effort is made to establish Paul’s worldview, we will all unwittingly read Paul through the lenses of our own worldviews (PFG 66–67). Our proposal in this essay, by contrast, is more circumscribed. It points toward a conclusion that has some affinities with Wright’s conclusion (to wit: the messiahship of Jesus explains why Paul can speak of the holy ones being “in Christ”), but it gets there by means of tracing out the details of Paul’s scriptural interpretation. Because all ancient messiah discourse is scriptural discourse, we can describe Paul’s messianism in the same way that we describe the messianism of the Psalms of Solomon, or the Damascus Document, or 4 Ezra, not by reconstructing their implicit worldviews but by following what they do with their scriptural sources.64 This sort of ground-up approach may not promise the elegance of Wright’s layered, multi-story worldview approach, but it does promise some modest yet achievable exegetical gains around which greater consensus might be built. It is our view that, on this question of messianism and participation, Wright, like Schweitzer before him, arrives at the right conclusion by way of the wrong argument. If we have been able, in this brief essay, to sketch a rather different kind of argument for messianic participation in Paul, that will hopefully serve as a modest tribute to Wright’s considerable accomplishment in Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

Bibliography Barclay, John M. G. Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE – 117 CE). HCS 33. London: University of California Press, 1996. Baur, F. C. Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings; A Contribution to a Critical History of Primitive Christianity. 2 vols. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. –. Paulus, der Apostel Jesus Christi: Sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre, ein Beitrag zu einer kritischen Geschichte des Urchristenthums. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Becher & Müller, 1845. Blass, Friedrich, Albert Debrunner, and Robert W. Funk. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961. 64

See Gerbern S. Oegema, The Anointed and His People: Messianic Expectations from the Maccabees to Bar Kochba, JSPSup 27 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998) (Ger. orig., Gerbern S. Oegema, Der Gesalbte und sein Volk: Untersuchungen zum Konzeptualisierungsprozeß der messianischen Erwartungen von den Makkabäeren bis Bar Koziba, Schriften des Institutum Iudaicum Delitzschianum 2 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994]).

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Bousset, Wilhelm. Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus. FRLANT 21. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913. Bouttier, Michel. En Christ: Étude d’exégèse et de théologie pauliniennes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962. Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society 1. London: University of California Press, 1994. –. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ. New York: New Press, 2012. Campbell, Constantine R. Paul and Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012. Casey, Maurice. Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7. London: SPCK, 1979. Collins, Adela Yarbro. “Jesus as Messiah and Son of God in the Letters of Paul.” Pages 101–22 in King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature. Edited by John J. Collins and Adela Yarbro Collins. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008. Collins, John J. Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Daniel. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993. –. “The Heavenly Representative: The ‘Son of Man’ in the Similitudes of Enoch.” Pages 111–33 in Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism. Edited by George W. E. Nickelsburg and John J. Collins. SCS 12. Chico, CA: Scholars, 1980. –. “The Messiah as the Son of God.” Pages 171–90 in The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2010. –. “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel.” JBL 93 (1974): 50–66. Crossley, James G. Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism: Quests, Scholarship and Ideology. Oxford: Routledge, 2014. Dahl, Nils A. “Contradictions in Scripture.” Pages 159–77 in Studies in Paul: Theology for the Early Christian Mission. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1977. –. “Motsigelser i Skriften – et gammelt hermeneutiskt problem.” Svensk teologisk kvartalskrift 45 (1969): 22–36. –. “Paulus’ syn på løftenes oppfyllelse,” Pages 99–114 in Israel, Kirken og verden: Nordisk teologkonferanse Utstein kloster 1971. Edited by Magne Sæbø. Gammeltestamentlig Bibliotek 2. Oslo: Land og Kirke, 1972. –. “Promise and Fulfillment.” Pages 121–36 in Studies in Paul: Theology for the early Christian Mission. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1977. Deissmann, G. Adolf. Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu.” Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1892. –. Paulus: Eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1911. Dodd, C. H. According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology. London: Nisbet, 1952. Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of the Apostle Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Evans, Craig A. “Daniel in the New Testament: Visions of God’s Kingdom.” Pages 490– 527 in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. Edited by John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint. 2 vols. VTSup 83. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

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Fredriksen, Paula. “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2.” JTS 42 (1991): 532–64. Hay, David M. Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm 110 in Early Christianity. SBLMS 18. Nashville: Abingdon, 1973. Hays, Richard B. The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1– 4:11. 2nd ed. Biblical Resources Series. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002. Hengel, Martin. “Setze dich zu meiner Rechten: Die Inthronisation Christi zur rechten Gottes und Psalm 110.1.” Pages 108–94 in Le Thrône de Dieu. Edited by Marc Philonenko. WUNT 69. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. –. “‘Sit at My Right Hand!’: The Enthronement of Christ at the Right Hand of God in Psalm 110:1.” Pages 119–225 in Studies in Early Christology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Hewitt, J. Thomas. “In Christ: Participatory Language and Messiah Christology in Paul.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, forthcoming. Holleman, Joost. Resurrection and Parousia: A Traditio-Historical Study of Paul’s Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15. NovTSup 84. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Horbury, William. “The Messianic Associations of ‘the Son of Man.’” Pages 125–55 in Messianism Among Jews and Christians: Twelve Biblical and Historical Studies. London: T&T Clark, 2003. Johnson, Aubrey R. “Hebrew Conceptions of Kingship.” Pages 204–35 in Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel. Edited by S. H. Hooke. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958. –. Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel. 2nd ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967. Juel, Donald. Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Kaminsky, Joel S. Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible. JSOTSup 196. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995. Klausner, JosEph The Messianic Idea in Israel: From Its Beginning to the Completion of the Mishnah. Translated by W. F. Stinespring. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Martin, Dale B. The Corinthian Body. London: Yale University Press, 1995. Matlock, R. Barry. “The Arrow and the Web: Critical Reflections on a Narrative Approach to Paul.” Pages 44–57 in Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. –. Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism. JSNTSup 127. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996. Neugebauer, Fritz. In Christus: Eine Untersuchung zum paulinischen Glaubensverständnis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1961. Novenson, Matthew V. Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. –. The Grammar of Messianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. –. “The Messiah ben Abraham in Galatians: A Response to Joel Willitts.” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 2 (2012): 163–70. Oegema, Gerbern S. Der Gesalbte und sein Volk: Untersuchungen zum Konzeptualisierungsprozeß der messianischen Erwartungen von den Makkabäeren bis Bar Koziba. Schriften des Institutum Iudaicum Delitzschianum 2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994.

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–. The Anointed and His People: Messianic Expectations from the Maccabees to Bar Kochba. JSPSup 27. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Porter, Joshua Roy. “The Legal Aspects of the Concept of ‘Corporate Personality’ in the Old Testament.” VT 15 (1965): 361–80. Porter, Stanley E. “Two Myths: Corporate Personality and Language/Mentality Determinism.” SJT 43 (1990): 289–307. Räisänen, Heikki. Paul and the Law. WUNT 29. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983. Reitzenstein, Richard. Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: Nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen. Berlin: Teubner, 1910. Robinson, H. Wheeler. “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality.” Pages 49–62 in Werden and Wesen des Alten Testaments: Vorträge gehalten auf der internationalen Tagung alttestamentlicher Forscher zu Göttingen vom 4.–10. September 1935. Edited by Johannes Hempel, Friedrich Stummer, and Paul Volz. BZAW 66. Berlin: Töpelmann, 1936. Rogerson, John. W. “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality: A Reexamination.” JTS 21 (1970): 1–16. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1977. Schürer, Emil. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.– A.D. 135). Edited by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar. 3 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973– 1987. Schweitzer, Albert. Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus. Tübingen: Mohr, 1930. –. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Translated by William Montgomery. London: Black, 1953. Stowers, Stanley K. A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. London: Yale University Press, 1994. –. “What Is ‘Pauline Participation in Christ’?” Pages 352–71 in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders. Edited by Fabian E. Udoh with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series 16. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2008. Wedderburn, A. J. M. “Some Observations on Paul’s Use of the Phrases ‘In Christ’ and ‘With Christ.’” JSNT 25 (1985): 83–97. Wilcox, Max. “The Promise of the ‘Seed’ in the New Testament and the Targumim.” JSNT 5 (1979): 2–20. Wilk, Florian. “Die Schriften bei Markus und Paulus.” Pages 189–220 in Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays Part I: Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity. Edited by Oda Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer. BZNW 198. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Wrede, William. Paul. Translated by Edward Lummis. London: Philip Green, 1907. –. Paulus. Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1904. Wright, N. T. “Messiahship in Galatians?” Pages 510–46 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. “The Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans.” DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1980. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.

YHWH’s Return to Zion A New Catalyst for Earliest High Christology? Larry W. Hurtado The promise of a future act/manifestation of YHWH in redemption and/or judgment is found in a number of biblical (OT) and extra-biblical Jewish texts.1 In some cases the (older) biblical texts seem to portray some future historical reversal of the fortunes of Israel (e.g., Mic 1:2–7; Hos 6:1–3). In other (often later) texts, YHWH’s action is more universal (even cosmic) in scope, and final (“eschatological”) in effects (e.g., Isa 59:15–21; 66:12–16; Zech 14). Indeed, if we trace the references to YHWH coming for redemption and judgement across the biblical texts “it becomes more future oriented and, finally, eschatological.”2 Second Temple Jewish texts attest this theme of an eschatological coming/manifestation of YHWH frequently.3 In his massive recent opus on Paul, N. T. Wright contends that the theme of the personal return of YHWH to Zion was appropriated and interpreted with reference to Jesus in earliest circles of the Jesus-movement. More particularly, Wright claims that this was the initial and crucial early christological development and the key historical factor generating and defining all other early christological claims (e.g., PFG 633).4 In this essay, I indicate why I find this claim unconvincing. As we will see later in this essay, NT texts do show the appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return/coming for redemption and judgement to Jesus. That is not under dispute. The key question probed here is 1

See, e.g., the numerous texts cited by Edward Adams, “The ‘Coming of God’ Tradition and Its Influence on New Testament Parousia Texts,” in Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb, ed. Charlotte Hempel and Judith M. Lieu, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 111 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 3–6; and also the discussion by Robert L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Political Study, JSNTSup 62 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991), 219–60; and, particularly, Larry J. Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology, JSNTSup 19 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987). 2 Adams, “The ‘Coming of God’ Tradition,” 6. 3 Adams, “The ‘Coming of God’ Tradition,” 6–8. Key texts include 2 Bar. 48:39; LAB 19:12–13; 1 En. 1:2–9; 90:15–17; 91:7; 100:4; 102:1–3; 2 En. 32:1; Jub. 1:28; T. Ab. A 13:4; T. Mos. 10:3–10; T. Levi 8:11; T. Jud. 22:2. 4 Wright’s emphasis on the theme of the return of YHWH to Zion is set within his emphasis on the narrative of Israel’s exile and promised redemption.

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whether this theme was the initial christological conviction and impetus that encompasses and, more importantly, accounts historically for the body of christological claims and devotional practices reflected in the NT.

1. Wright’s Case I begin with a summary of Wright’s case. Earlier, in his major book on Jesus, Wright had pointed to the biblical promises of YHWH’s redemptive return to Zion and proposed that Jesus interpreted his own mission as in some way addressing these promises.5 This is not overtly attested in the Gospels.6 But Wright contended that it is a reasonable (he would likely say a necessary) inference from Jesus’s proclamation of the coming of the kingdom of God (i.e., as an emphasis on God as king instead of earthly rulers), from Jesus’s Temple-action (seeing Jesus symbolically enacting judgement on the Temple and claiming Messiahship), and from Jesus’s “riddles of return and exaltation” (various parables so interpreted by Wright).7 In sum, Wright proposed, “Jesus’ prophetic vocation thus included within it the vocation to enact, symbolically, the return of YHWH to Zion,” and Wright further proposed that in this theme (and “the Temple theology” that he saw linked to it) we have “the deepest keys and clues to gospel christology.”8 More recently, in what is for us here the relevant portion of his mammoth two-volume work on Paul, Wright takes up the theme of YHWH’s return to Zion in pursuing questions about what might have “pushed the early Christians” to their view of Jesus as included “within the reality of the one God,” and whether there was “a pre-Christian set of ideas that could be catalysed … to produce the early high christology” that is reflected in various NT writings (PFG 644–56, citing 648). Briefly noting scholarly analyses of earliest christological developments by me and Chris Tilling, Wright finds them basically

5

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996), 612–53. 6 To be sure, the Gospels do link Jesus with God in remarkably close ways, as reflected, e.g., in Mark 1:1–3, where the biblical texts that originally referred to YHWH are applied to Jesus, whose “way” is linked with “the way of the Lord.” For discussion, see, e.g., Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 27 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 147–48, and also 354, where he comments on Mark 5:19–20, summarizing the Markan view of Jesus in relation to God as “where Jesus acts, there God is acting.” Michael Bird pointed me also to Luke 19:44, which seems to allude to the theme. 7 E.g., Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 616, 629–45. 8 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 653.

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helpful but inadequate (things left “fuzzy”).9 He then cites Bauckham’s proposal, however, that earliest christological claims amounted to Jesus being included within “the divine identity” as “even more important” and insightful, “as far as it goes.”10 Judging that still “there is one thing missing” in it, Wright proffers “a significant step beyond” Bauckham’s “divine identity” proposal that allows “a larger perspective altogether” (PFG 650–53). Rejecting investigations about the role of human or heavenly “mediatorfigures” (his preferred term) in ancient Jewish religious thought as “looking in the wrong place,” Wright urges, instead, that we should ask whether there were “beliefs, stories, ideas about God himself upon which they [earliest believers] might have drawn to say what they now wanted to say about Jesus” (PFG 653, emphasis his).11 As an affirmative answer to this question, Wright points to the Second Temple Jewish belief that YHWH would “return in per9

Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. 1st ed. London: SCM, 1988; 2nd ed. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998; 3rd ed. London: T&T Clark, forthcoming); Chris Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology. WUNT II 323 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). 10 Richard J. Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998); Richard J. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008). “Divine identity” as defined by Bauckham is not an ontological category but rather consists in attributes and functions that he posits as unique to God, especially creation of all things and sovereignty over all things. He emphasizes that NT texts show Jesus sharing in these acts and attributes, and so included in the “divine identity.” 11 As for “looking in the wrong place,” it appears that Wright means my proposal that ancient Jewish traditions about various “chief agent” figures reflect a conceptual category that earliest believers may have drawn upon and radically enhanced in accommodating Jesus next to God in their beliefs and devotional practices. Note also his apparent critique of my work in his rejection of the significance of “mediator-figures” (a term I do not recall using) as irrelevant, and his evaluation of “the strong sense of Jesus’s personal presence during worship and prayer” (again, his words, not mine) as “essentially secondary” (PFG 654–55). Unfortunately, however, he has not conveyed accurately my views, and so his critique seems to me misdirected. For example, “the strong sense of Jesus personal presence during worship and prayer” (phrasing I cannot recognize from anything I have written) hardly captures my specific proposal that in earliest circles of believers various powerful revelatory experiences conveyed the firm conviction that God had exalted Jesus to heavenly glory and that God now required Jesus to be reverenced accordingly. See, e.g., Hurtado, One God, One Lord, esp. 117–22; Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 64–74; Larry W. Hurtado, “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament,” JR 80 (2000): 183–205; Larry W. Hurtado, “Revelatory Experiences and Religious Innovation in Earliest Christianity,” ExpTim 125 (2014): 469–82. In light of his rejection of the relevance of “chief agent” figures (my term) for the origins of christological beliefs, I am not sure what Wright refers to in writing that “indeed, I am convinced that Hurtado is basically right in his presentation and analysis of the phenomena” (PFG 650).

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son,” “in glory,” “to judge and save,” “to establish his glorious, tabernacling presence,” “to rule over the whole world,” and “to be king” (PFG 653, emphasis his). This expectation, Wright contends, “best explains not only Paul’s view of Jesus but also that of the entire early church,” and is “the hidden clue to the origin of christology” (PFG 653–54). It is important to underscore specifically that what Wright claims is that the “return of YHWH” belief/tradition was the key initial christological resource appropriated in earliest Christian circles, and is the best historical explanation for the christological beliefs and devotional practices that the NT writings attest. I repeat that these claims are what I want to test in this essay. Wright declares firmly that the earliest and primary christological belief was “that Israel’s one God had returned in person,” “in the person of Jesus.” As devout Jews longing for YHWH’s return, Wright contends, earliest (Jewish) believers saw “the events concerning Jesus,” and “deduced that it had happened.” Pondering the biblical promises of YHWH’s return to Zion, and “wondering what it would look like” when it happened, Jesus’s followers came to see in Jesus’s death and resurrection that “Israel’s God had done what he had long promised”: God had “returned to be king,” had “‘visited’ his people and ‘redeemed’ them,” and had “returned to dwell in the midst of his people” (PFG 654). Wright urges that “Jesus’ first followers found themselves not only (as it were) permitted to use God-language for Jesus, but compelled to use Jesuslanguage for the one God” (PFG 655). An immediate historical question seems obvious. What precisely generated these remarkable developments, this freedom in claims about Jesus? How did early believers come to feel compelled to link Jesus with God so closely in beliefs (and, I would add, in their religious practices)? More specifically, to take up Wright’s proposal for consideration, what would have led early Jesus-followers to see him as the return of YHWH? To my mind, Wright’s handling of these questions is less than adequate. He posits that, “the events concerning Jesus compelled the first Christians” to make their christological claims, and he insists, the more we understand the second-temple belief in the eschatological monotheism at the heart of the divine identity, the better we can see how the first Christians came at once to regard Jesus in the way they did. (PFG 655–56, italics original)

But what “events concerning Jesus,” and how did “eschatological monotheism” make the crucial contribution to earliest christological claims? It is not until much later in the discussion that Wright poses and addresses more fully the question of why early believers came to regard Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection as comprising “the embodiment of the returning YHWH” (PFG 690).12 But in the ensuing discussion, it remains unclear (at 12

The ensuing discussion ranges across PFG 690–709.

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least to me) that he provides an adequate answer. At one point he offers a set of factors that can be summarized as follows: a) the Jewish expectation of YHWH’s return; b) Jesus’s resurrection validating him as Messiah, and his heavenly exaltation and enthronement as “lord”; and c) the experience of Jesus “personally and powerfully present to and with them [earliest believers] in a new mode.” Given these factors, Wright contends, “the almost instantaneous rise of the christology” is fully explicable (PFG 690). A couple of pages later, he gives what seems to be intended as essentially the same proposal, but worded differently: What I am suggesting is that the resurrection, demonstrating the truth of Jesus’s precrucifixion messianic claim, joined up with the expectation of YHWH’s return on the one hand and the presence of the spirit of Jesus on the other to generate a fresh reading of ‘messianic’ texts which enabled a full christological awareness to dawn on the disciples. (PFG 692, emphasis his)

2. Jesus’s Resurrection I will examine this proposal more closely in due course. Before doing so, however, I want to address what I think is a relevant issue that Wright raises in between these two statements. Wright accuses Carey Newman and me of making “too little of Jesus’ resurrection itself, collapsing it in effect into the concept of ‘glorification,’” and thereby failing to accent adequately the messianic import of Jesus’s resurrection (PFG 691). My first response is that I consider Wright’s criticism inappropriate and misleading, as he fails to take account of the particular aims of the works that he faults. Newman’s study was not intended as an exposition of all that Jesus’s resurrection represents, but addressed instead the specific question of how Paul came to associate Jesus with the glory of God, contending that Paul interpreted his own “christophany” experience of the risen/exalted Jesus in light of biblical/Jewish traditions of divine glory.13 As for my work cited critically on Jesus’s resurrection by Wright, it has been devoted mainly to the particular question of why and how Jesus came to be linked and reverenced with God in early Christian devotion, as expressed in christological claims and especially cultic practice.14 So, in addressing that question I have stressed that for earliest believers Jesus’s resurrection involved not only a divine vindication of him as Messiah, but also particularly his heavenly exaltation as Kyrios, this connec-

13

Carey C. Newman, Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric, NovTSup 69 (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 14 See, e.g., the statement of the problem investigated in Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 2, and the focus set out in Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 1–4.

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tion evident in various NT texts (e.g., Phil 2:6–11; Acts 2:32–36).15 As will be widely agreed, there is scant basis in Jewish tradition for Messiah receiving such intense devotion as was given to the risen Jesus. It was God’s exaltation of Jesus as Kyrios that served as the decisive act that now requires acknowledgement (Phil 2:9–11), and that is affirmed in early Christian devotional practice (e.g., Rom 10:9–13; 1 Cor 12:3). In short, given our respective purposes, neither Newman nor I should be accused of failing to do justice to Jesus’s resurrection in emphasizing (rightly) that it involved particularly the exaltation and glorification of Jesus. Indeed, to turn the table around, one might respond to Wright’s misjudged critique of Newman and me by wondering if it is he who makes too little of Jesus’s resurrection, or at least inadequately represents it in comparison with NT texts. What does Wright mean in appearing to distinguish between “the resurrection itself” and what he calls “the concept of ‘glorification’” (emphasis mine)?16 It appears that Wright practically limits “the resurrection itself” to a divine confirmation of a prior belief in Jesus’s messianic status, and Wright seems to me reluctant to grant that Jesus’s resurrection accorded him anything significantly new. But the NT connects indissolubly as one action God’s raising Jesus from death to new/eschatological life (Jesus was not simply “alive again” but alive in a significantly new mode) and also God’s exalting/glorifying Jesus to a heavenly lordship that he did not hold and exercise before that exaltation (e.g., Phil 2:9–11; Col 3:1–4; 1 Pet 1:21).17 I submit that to do justice to what Paul and other NT writers say about Jesus’s resurrection requires precisely that we see it as integrally and emphatically including Jesus’s glorification and exaltation as Kyrios.

15

Contra Wright’s accusation, I have discussed the messianic import of Jesus’s resurrection and the place of the messianic claim in earliest Christian circles, e.g., Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 98–101, 167–70, 178–79, 188–94. 16 If the aim is to reflect the NT accurately, how is God’s glorification of Jesus a “concept” and not a divine action as real for earliest believers as Jesus’s resurrection, and, indeed, as a component part of God’s act in raising Jesus? And why the scare-quotes around glorification, as if Wright holds the topic at arms’ length? 17 “Alive again” is Wright’s phrase used in his book, N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003). Cf., e.g., these critical reviews, which press questions about the adequacy of Wright’s articulation of NT teaching about Jesus’s resurrection: Michael Welker, “Article Review: Wright on the Resurrection,” SJT 60 (2007): 458–75; Larry W. Hurtado, “Jesus’s Resurrection in the Early Christian Texts: An Engagement with N. T. Wright,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 197–208.

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3. Historical and Theological Issues But let us turn now to Wright’s proposals about how earliest christological claims emerged. As noted already, Wright basically makes Jesus’s resurrection a confirmation of a prior messianic claim. Wright grants, however, that in Jewish tradition Messiah is not “divine.” So, even Jesus’s resurrection by itself could not have generated the high view of Jesus (and, I would add, the remarkable devotional practice) presumed already in Paul and the NT generally. To press the historical question again, how then did earliest believers so readily acclaim the risen Jesus as more than Messiah, or at least as such a glorious and exalted Messiah, as in some sense bearing a divine status, and as rightful recipient of cultic devotion? As reflected in both of Wright’s statements cited earlier in which he summarizes his proposal for how early christology originated, the crucial factor in his schema seems to be the supposed role of the theme/expectation of the return of YHWH. Indeed, all through Wright’s chapter in which he considers the emergence of the lofty view of Jesus reflected in Paul, he repeatedly invokes this theme of YHWH’s return as crucial (PFG esp. 645–737, passim). But, to repeat the relevant question, how did this notion that YHWH would “return” in judgment and redemption come to play this supposedly crucial role? That is, what led early Jesus-followers supposedly to portray the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus as YHWH’s “personal” return? Although at one point Wright characterizes “the strong sense of Jesus’ personal presence during worship and prayer” as “important but essentially secondary,” at a later point in the discussion he seems to suggest a more significant role of “vivid ‘experiences’ of the presence and power of Jesus” by believers, which Wright apparently sets in the “post-Easter” period (PFG 690, cf. 654–55).18 I presume that he means what Paul ascribes to the Holy Spirit/Spirit of God, which Paul can also call the Spirit of Jesus (e.g., Rom 8:9– 11). Paul refers to the effects of the Spirit variously as including revelatory insights into Jesus’s high significance (2 Cor 3:12–4:4), an inner power of behavioural transformation (e.g., Rom 8:12–17; Gal 5:16, 22–26), and outward “charismatic” phenomena such as those in 1 Cor 12:4–11 and other texts, including revelations, prophecies, etc.19 But Wright seems curiously reticent to elaborate what he means in referring to the post-Easter Jesus being “personally and powerfully present” in circles of believers. Wright’s discussion of Paul’s view of the Spirit in this same chapter is devoted mainly to emphasizing that this too is essentially shaped by the theme of the return of YHWH: “The christology of ‘divine identity’ is thus matched by the pneuma18

Again, note the curious use of scare-quotes around “experiences.” Note also Gal 3:5, where Paul likely refers to God as “the one who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you.” 19

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tology of ‘divine identity’, in both cases focused in particular on the Jewish eschatology of the return of YHWH” (PFG 727).20 That is, Wright focuses on the conceptual content, “pneumatology,” leaving the specifics of the phenomena in question somewhat vague. So, it seems to me that we are left without an adequate answer to the question of how Jesus supposedly came to be seen as the personal and embodied return of YHWH. Perhaps part of the reason for Wright’s less-than-specific historical account of matters is given in an interesting paragraph in a section on the “Origin of Christology.” After a less than satisfactory characterization of scholarly work over the last few decades that supports the position that a remarkable level of Jesus-devotion erupted early and initially in circles of Jewish believers,21 Wright then states: In any case, the attempt to perform an essentially historical operation, i.e. the investigation of the dating and cultural setting of particular early Christian beliefs and motifs, was always at best an uneasy guide to the question of what might actually be true. Even if we came upon documents which demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that all Christians in the first decade of the movement believed most surely in a fully trinitarian theology, and believed that they could hold this view while remaining good Jews, that would be interesting but theologically inconclusive. (PFG 647, emphasis mine)

He is obviously correct. The historical provenance of given christological beliefs does not determine their theological validity. So, for example, the early emergence of a “high” christology among Jewish circles of Jesusfollowers does not necessarily make it any more persuasive theologically, e.g., for non-Christians or for Christians inclined toward a “low” christology.22 But I find it curious that he should make such a point of this. For, alt20

His discussion of the Spirit occupies PFG 709–28. One of the unsatisfactory features of Wright’s brief account of scholarly work on early christological developments is his characterization of it as essentially a theological controversy. In particular, he portrays the work positing an early eruption of “high” christology as “claiming to speak for the Christian tradition,” when, in fact, those involved in this work have included Jewish scholars such as Alan Segal, and others of a variety of confessional positions. Compare the insightful discussion of matters in these essays: Cilliers Breytenbach, “Erwägungen zu einer Geschichte der Religion des Urchristentums,” in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–25; and Jörg Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive: Larry W. Hurtados Lord Jesus Christ und die Herausbildung der frühen Christologie,” in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 117–69. 22 Cf. my own position that the historical provenance of a given christological conviction does not establish its theological validity, and that the historical investigation of early Jesus-devotion can and should be pursued for its own sake, without the intent “either to refute or to validate the religious and theological meaning of early devotion to Jesus” 21

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hough the results of historical inquiry into the origins of Jesus-devotion may be “theologically inconclusive,” I submit that questions about when, where, and how Jesus-devotion emerged and developed are, nevertheless, worth pursuing. We can aim to understand as well as we can how things happened, and attempt to avoid or correct misunderstandings of the historical developments. That is, we can try to do good historical work! Whatever the theological value, it is, for example, a valid historical question whether the acclamation of Jesus distinguished Pauline churches from circles of Jewish believers in Roman Judaea or emerged initially in the latter. Likewise, it is a perfectly reasonable historical inquiry to explore what factors may have helped to generate and shape early Jesus-devotion. After all, in considering the origins of earliest Jesus-devotion, we are dealing with historical phenomena, which require asking historical questions and attempting a historical analysis. The tone of Wright’s remarks suggests to me, however, that, for all his profession of historical interests, his own real concern is theological. There is, of course, nothing wrong with preferring theological concerns to historical questions. But I wonder if Wright’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the historical work of other scholars, or what appears to be his subordination of historical inquiry to his theological concerns, may help account for the lack of an adequate proposal about how, in terms of historical process, earliest convictions about Jesus emerged.

4. YHWH and Chief Agents A curious feature of Wright’s discussion of the theme of the eschatological return of YHWH is his sharp distinction between a personal return/coming of YHWH (himself) and the role of agents in YHWH’s eschatological manifestation. I have noted already Wright’s rejection of the relevance of what he calls “mediator-figures” in accounting for earliest christology (which he refers to as “semi-divine” figures). As my own work seems to be in view, I point out that “mediator-figures” is Wright’s term, not mine. I have referred to “chief agent” figures in Second Temple Jewish tradition, emphasizing thereby their prominent roles in the execution of God’s purposes.23 It is not clear why Wright prefers “mediator-figures,” but I wonder if it is because he wants to emphasize that they are less than YHWH, not fully “divine,” and so (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, 9). That is not to presume some unreflective notion of pure “objective” historical inquiry unaffected by who we are. All inquiry is shaped by the interests of those conducting it, the questions posed, etc. But there is a discipline of historical inquiry that we can seek to develop and practice. 23 E.g., PFG 653: “exalted mediator-figures might be all very well, but they would still not explain the phenomena.”

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not adequate for accounting for the level of christological claims that we have in the NT.24 In any case, in discussing the theme of the return/coming of YHWH, Wright repeatedly emphasizes the Jewish expectation of YHWH’s “personal presence,” YHWH’s return “in person,” which Wright contrasts with “Jewish beliefs about this or that mediator-figure” (e.g., PFG 633, 653, 656). To be sure, a number of biblical and extra-biblical texts emphasize YHWH’s direct involvement in eschatological judgement and redemption, often expressing this as YHWH himself acting as the judge, and/or redeemer, and shepherd of Israel: e.g., Isa 40:10; 59:15–20; 60:15–17; 63:1–6; 66:12– 16; Ezek 34:11–16.25 Indeed, in his survey of texts referring to certain eschatological figures, Robert Webb judged that “both in the OT and Second Temple Jewish literature the most prominent figure who was expected to act in judgment and restoration was Yahweh.”26 But there are also texts that portray this or that agent of YHWH’s actions.27 For example, in Ezek 34, after a lengthy passage emphasizing that YHWH himself will act on behalf of his people (vv. 11–22) and will shepherd them, the very next verses (vv. 23–24) tell us that this will involve “my servant David” appointed as shepherd and agent of God’s rule. Webb reviewed texts which feature in that role a Davidic King/Messiah, such as Pss. Sol. 17.28 In fact, this is an interesting text as it combines the acclamation of YHWH as “our king for ever and ever” (17:1) with the declaration that YHWH chose David as “king over Israel” (17:4), and the text combines confident predictions that YHWH will overthrow Israel’s enemies (17:7) with appeals that YHWH “raise up for them their king, the son of David” (17:21) to accomplish this. This human agent, the “righteous king, taught by God,” will act in God-like fashion in showing mercy to reverent nations and smiting the earth “with the word of his mouth” (17:34–35). This righteous king will be the agent through whom God will “hasten his mercy upon Israel” and “deliver us from the uncleanness of profane enemies” so that “the Lord is our king for ever and ever” (17:46). Likewise, in the Qumran text 1QSb (1Q28b) V, 17–23, “the prince of the congregation” (V, 20) appears to be the human royal-Messiah, the personal vehicle who is raised “to an everlasting height” 24

Although it bears noting that some NT writings readily apply to Jesus the Greek term translated “mediator” (µεσίτης): 1 Tim 2:5; Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:24. 25 See, e.g., Frank Schnutenhaus, “Das Kommen und Erscheinen Gottes im Alten Testament,” ZAW 76 (1964): 1–22. 26 Webb, John the Baptizer, 222. See 222–27 for his survey of texts in which YHWH himself acts. 27 I surveyed various “chief agent” figures in One God, One Lord, including “personified divine attributes” (41–50), “exalted patriarchs” (51–69), and “principal angels” (71– 92). 28 Webb, John the Baptizer, 231–32.

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(V, 23) and through whom God’s eschatological purpose is accomplished (V, 24–25). In other texts, the chosen agent of YHWH’s eschatological purposes is an angelic prince such as Michael (e.g., Dan 12:1–3), who in the Qumran War Scroll (1QM XVII, 6–8) will be exalted “above all the gods,” which in turn will secure “the dominion of Israel over all flesh.”29 In another Qumran text, 11QMelchizedek (11Q13), we have a mysterious figure who seems to be a principal angel who will “carry out the vengeance of God’s judgments” and deliver the elect from Belial (II, 13–14). Still more remarkable is the identification of this figure (11QMelch II, 10–25) as fulfilling the biblical text (Ps 7:8–9) that “God [MT: ‫ ]יהוה‬will judge the peoples,” also as the “Elohim” who will stand forth in the divine/heavenly assembly (Ps 82:1) to bring about eschatological justice, and as the one referred to in Isa 52:7 as “your God” (‫ )אלהיך‬who will free the elect from Belial. Other examples can be cited, and have been noted by various scholars in previous publications.30 Perhaps the chief agent most frequently noted is the figure in the Parables of Enoch identified variously as “the chosen one,” “the righteous one,” and “the anointed one.”31 Several other Ethiopic expressions that are typically translated “son of man” make it clear that this is a human figure.32 Yet his eschatological appearance is described in the most august terms. For example, he will sit in judgment “on the throne of glory” (45:3; 55:4; 61:8; 62:3), will de-throne the kings and mighty men of the earth, and “crush the teeth of 29

On Michael, see Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 77–78, and for fuller discussion, Darrell D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, WUNT II 109 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999). As Webb notes (John the Baptizer, 240n82), Michael is probably also the “Prince of light” mentioned in 1QM XIII, 10. On chief-agent figures in the Qumran texts: John J. Collins, “Powers in Heaven: God, Gods, and Angels in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. John J. Collins and Robert A. Kugler (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 9–28; and on Second Temple messianism more generally, John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature, (New York: Doubleday, 1995). On the relation to early Jesus-devotion, Larry W. Hurtado, “Monotheism, Principal Angels, and the Background of Christology,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 546–64. 30 E.g., Yahoel and other principal angel figures, Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 79–82. 31 See, e.g., Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 53–54; Webb, John the Baptizer, 242–49; and the various contributions in Gabriele Boccaccini, ed., Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). 32 On these expressions, see now Darrell D. Hannah, “The Elect Son of Man of the Parables of Enoch,” in ‘Who Is This Son of Man?’: The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus, ed. Larry W. Hurtado and Paul L. Owen, LNTS 390 (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 130–58. I cite here from the translation by George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2012).

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the sinners” (46:4). Named and chosen before creation (48:2–3; 62:7), he will be “a staff for the righteous” and “the light of the nations” (48:4), and all people of the earth will reverence him (48:5; 62:9). Note how the text combines the presence of “the Lord of Spirits” (YHWH) with the rule of this figure: “And the Lord of Spirits will abide over them, and with that son of man they will eat, and they will lie down and rise up forever and ever” (62:13). It looks like the enthronement and supremacy of this figure constitutes the eschatological triumph of God (69:26–29). As Webb concluded, in the Jewish texts the coming of these figures for judgment and/or restoration comprises “an expression and outworking of God coming in judgement and restoration.”33 Granting that Second Temple Jewish hopes of eschatological redemption were often expressed “in terms of actions by Yahweh,” Webb rightly observed that “expressing in vivid terms Yahweh’s future or eschatological judgment and restoration” went hand-in-hand with “the realization that such judgment and restoration would take place through Yahweh’s agents and historical events.”34 Thus, in the OT and literature of the Second Temple period there exists an interplay in expectation: Yahweh as God will judge and restore his people, and his agents will carry out that ministry of judgment and restoration.35

In short, this “interplay” simply represents two complementary emphases. References to YHWH as acting directly stressed “the theological necessity for divine involvement as the prime cause behind the eschatological judgment and restoration,” and the complementary depiction of the involvement of chief-agent figures expressed “the realization that Yahweh worked through these figures as his agents” to execute eschatological hopes.36 It is, thus, dubious in historical terms for Wright to make such a sharp contrast between the “personal” return of YHWH and the roles of chief-agent figures. To put it mildly, it is certainly not clear that this sharp contrast is there in the biblical or Second Temple Jewish texts. There may be theological reasons, however, for making such a contrast. Wright’s rhetorical emphasis that in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection he was, not the uniquely exalted agent of God, but, instead, the “personal” and “embodied” return/coming of YHWH himself seems to me to resonate obviously with a strong “incarnational” christology (although the latter doctrinal stance does not require the exegetical move that Wright makes). The “pre-existence” and “incarnation” of Christ is, of course, a teaching reflected in NT texts (e.g., Phil 2:6–8; 1 Cor 8:4–6; John 1:1–18) and in subsequent Christian tradition, and the incarnation

33

Webb, John the Baptizer, 256. Webb, John the Baptizer, 257. 35 Webb, John the Baptizer, 258. 36 Webb, John the Baptizer, 259–60. 34

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is a particularly traditional emphasis in Anglican theology.37 But the question here is whether Second Temple Jewish expectation shared the strong contrast that Wright asserts and makes so crucial in his case. I repeat that the preceding evidence illustrates that in Second Temple Jewish tradition, the theme of YHWH’s return that Wright makes so much of went quite comfortably (indeed, went typically, it seems) with the expectation that this manifestation of YHWH would involve and be expressed through one or another chief-agent figure. To be sure, the NT reflects a remarkably heightened view of Jesus in comparison to any of the chief-agent figures of Second Temple Jewish tradition (even “the chosen one” of the Parables of Enoch), and, still more remarkable historically, NT texts even align the risen/exalted Jesus along with God in devotional/worship practices.38 Nevertheless, what we may call the christological discourse of the NT consistently portrays Jesus’s significance with reference to God, positing Jesus as what we may term the unique agent of God’s purposes (e.g., as “Son,” “Image,” or “Word” of God).39 So, for purposes of historical analysis, it still seems to me more accurate to understand the remarkable developments that comprised the early Jesus-devotion already reflected in Paul’s letters as amounting to a novel, even astonishing, “mutation” in ancient Jewish chief agent traditions, and also, notably, in ancient Jewish devotional practices (as I have proposed over a number of years). In short, the NT comfortably presents Jesus both as the direct expression of God in redemptive purposes (e.g., 2 Cor 5:19; Col 1:19), and as the unique agent of God (e.g., 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:20), and it distorts the evidence to play up the one emphasis and play down the other. As defined by Bauckham (and endorsed by Wright), “divine identity” is the unique exercise of the attributes of universal creator and universal sovereign. So, with that definition we can say

37

I do not accuse Wright of theological bias, at least in any conscious manner. I simply note that his tradition places great emphasis on the doctrine of Jesus’s incarnation, and that his exegetical judgments align with that emphasis. 38 I have discussed this in various publications, e.g., Larry W. Hurtado, “The Binitarian Shape of Early Christian Worship,” in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus, ed. Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 63 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 187–213; republished in Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 63–97. 39 Larry W. Hurtado, God in New Testament Theology, Library of Biblical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), esp. 49–71; and Jens Schröter, “Trinitarian Belief, Binitarian Monotheism, and the One God: Reflections on the Origin of Christian Faith in Affiliation to Larry Hurtado’s Christological Approach,” in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 171–94.

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that NT texts show Jesus quickly included within the “divine identity.”40 But, as reflected in the NT texts just cited, Jesus was included in a role differentiated from that of God (“the Father”), Jesus being posited rather consistently as the unique agent of God, the unique and ultimate historical expression of God’s purposes. “Divine identity” and chief-agent categories are not really the alternatives that Wright (and, for that matter, Bauckham) claim.

5. The NT Appropriation of the Return of YHWH As noted earlier in this essay, the NT certainly reflects the christological appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return/coming in eschatological judgment and redemption. It is important to note that Wright claims that this involved initially and particularly interpreting Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection as YHWH’s return. But, actually, as Edward Adams has shown, where we can see the appropriation of this theme most clearly in the NT, it is with reference to Jesus’s parousia.41 For example, in what may be our earliest NT writing, Paul’s reference to “the coming/appearance [παρουσία] of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones” (µετά πάντων τῶν ἁγίων, 1 Thess 3:13; emphasis mine) is commonly seen as adapting wording from Zech 14:5, where we have the prediction of the eschatological appearance of YHWH (καὶ πάντες οἱ ἅγιοι µετ’ αὐτοῦ).42 Other Pauline texts are likewise widely recognized as reflecting this appropriation of predictions of YHWH’s return to describe Jesus’s future return, e.g., 1 Thess 4:13–18 (“the parousia of the Lord,” who will descend from heaven); 2 Thess 1:6–8 (“the revelation of our Lord Jesus from heaven”); and 2 Thess 2:8 (“the Lord [Jesus] will destroy [the “lawless one”] with the breath of his mouth”). Kreitzer referred to what he called a “conceptual overlap between God and Christ” in Paul, illustrated in how the future parousia of Jesus effectively functions as the fulfilment of OT promises of “the day of the Lord” and the return of YHWH.43 This is not confined to Paul, however. Note, for example, in Heb 10:37 the appropriation of the promise of YHWH’s coming (from Isa 26:20) to encourage believers to await in patience its fulfilment in Jesus’s future appearance. In 2 Pet 3:10–13, the author deploys wording from Isa 65:17 and/or 66:22 in predicting the future coming of “the day of the Lord,” who in this context is 40 Bauckham, God Crucified, esp. 6–13; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 6–13, 18–31, 182–232. 41 Adams, “The ‘Coming of God’ Tradition,” passim. 42 The Nestle-Aland list of biblical citations and allusions includes also Matt 25:31 and Luke 7:19 as other possible allusions to the Zechariah passage, but these are not so obvious. 43 Kreitzer, Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology, 116. See also Neil Richardson, Paul’s Language about God, JSNTSup 99 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994).

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Jesus. Mark 8:38 and 13:24–27 (and parallels) are additional instances. And Rev 19:11–16 is replete with wording that seems to be adapted from various OT texts that reflect the return of YHWH theme used to depict the future appearance of Jesus as eschatological warrior.44 In his chapter on Paul’s eschatology (later in the big work on Paul), Wright discusses briefly the Pauline use of the theme of YHWH’s return to portray Jesus’s future parousia, but he seems to me to present this as essentially an extension of what he posits as the more important appropriation of YHWH’s return to interpret Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection (PFG 1078–85). This is perhaps why earlier, where Wright initially presents his case about the christological appropriation of this return-of-YHWH theme in Paul, these rather clear instances referring to Jesus’s parousia are either mentioned only briefly or not at all.45 Instead, we have treatments of several other Pauline passages in which Wright strives to show at length that the theme of YHWH’s eschatological return is crucial: Gal 4:1–11; Rom 8:1–4; 1 Cor 8– 10; Col 1; 2 Cor 3–4; and Phil 2:6–11 (PFG 656–89). Instead of the parousia texts, it appears that he focuses on these texts because he wishes to marshal them for his claim that the theme of YHWH’s return was applied initially and (in Wright’s view) most importantly to Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection. But despite his extended and ingeniously argued case for each of these passages, it is not so obvious to me (and, I suspect, will not be so obvious to most exegetes) that the texts are what Wright makes of them. Indeed, I have to say that it seems to me that one can perceive the theme of the return of YHWH in these texts only if one commences with the prior conviction that it is there. Confidently armed with this conviction, Wright presses details of these passages into service as putatively subtle and deft allusions to YHWH’s return in Jesus. But Wright’s approach, presuming that the theme of YHWH’s return must have shaped the Pauline texts and then searching for any hint of confirmation of this, may seem to others somewhat exegetically coercive on the texts.46 44 See, e.g., discussion in Gregory K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 949–64. 45 E.g., he mentions 1 Thess 3:13 only briefly (PFG 706), curiously rendering the key phrase as “when our Lord Jesus is present again with all his holy ones,” which has the effect of making Jesus’s parousia a second installment of the return-of-YHWH that supposedly found more crucial and original expression in the past events of Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection. Cf. e.g., Walter Radl, “παρουσία,” EDNT 3:43–44. The NT usage of the term likely derives from its use from the Ptolemaic period onwards to denote official visits of rulers or other high-ranking figures. For examples, MM 497. 46 Of course, Wright has spent many years working through the textual evidence, and would surely answer that he has developed his exegetical framework through this. But, still, I have to say that his handling of the texts in question seems to me to involve looking for confirmations of a conclusion already reached.

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It would, however, take more space than available here to engage the intricacies of Wright’s discussion, and so I will confine myself to brief attention to one of these texts, Phil 2:6–11, to illustrate what I see as the problems in Wright’s exegetical approach (cf. PFG 680–89).47 I focus on this passage because it unambiguously shows the christological appropriation of an OT text that originally referred to YHWH. Every exegete recognizes the remarkable adaptation of phrasing from Isa 45:22–25 to predict a universal acclamation of Jesus as Kyrios in Phil 2:9–11.48 The Isaiah passage appears in a larger context declaring YHWH’s uniqueness and predicting YHWH’s future judgment on the nations and the restoration of Israel (e.g., 45:14–17). The Philippians passage reflects a creative christological reading of Isa 45:22–25, however, in which the eschatological supremacy of YHWH is to be recognized in the universal acclamation that is to be given to Jesus. But note that in Phil 2 Jesus is to receive this universal acclamation because it was with this intention (ἵνα, v. 10) that God “highly exalted him” and gave him “the name above every name” (which I take to be “Kyrios”).49 To underscore the matter, the text depicts God as having given Jesus a new and exalted status and role (as Kyrios) in response to Jesus’s complete obedience (διὸ, v. 9); and consequently, on the basis of that exaltation, Jesus is to be acclaimed by all spheres of creation. Wright’s approach to this passage, however, is to range through Isa 40–55, noting that there we have the theme of YHWH’s return, and urging that Phil 2:6–11 is “a fresh meditation on the original Isaianic passage.”50 That is likely so. But, whereas the Philippians passage makes God’s exaltation of Jesus in vv. 9–11 the crescendo, the point where Jesus is given the divine name and 47 I analyzed this passage earlier in How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 83–107. On the question of whether the passage preserves an early Christian ode/hymn, however, I am now far less confident. See, e.g., Jennifer R. Strawbridge and Benjamin Edsall, “The Songs We Used to Sing? Hymn ‘Traditions’ and Reception in Pauline Letters,” JSNT 37 (2015): 290–311, and the other works cited that question the hymnic nature of the passage. But cf. Michael Wade Martin and Bryan A. Nash, “Philippians 2:6–11 as Subversive Hymnos: A Study in the Light of Ancient Rhetorical Theory,” JTS 66 (2015): 90–138, who propose that the passage is hymnic. In any case, the compressed wording of the passage strongly suggests to me that it expressed christological convictions with which the original readership were already acquainted. 48 See, e.g., my discussion in “Two Case Studies in Earliest Christological Readings of Biblical Texts,” in All that the Prophets have Declared, ed. Matthew R. Malcolm (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015), 3–23 (esp. 14–20). I take the acclamation, Κύριος Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, as “Jesus Christ is Lord.” 49 See, e.g., Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 221–22. 50 See also Bauckham, God Crucified, 47–62; Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel, 33–45.

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is thereafter to receive universal acclamation, Wright seems concerned to make the preceding verses describing Jesus’s earthly obedience (vv. 6–8) the focus. This is apparently what Wright refers to in stating, “This is how Israel’s God came back to do what he had promised” (PFG 681–83, citing 683; note the past tense, emphasis mine). My point is that, if (as seems entirely warranted) we are to see in Phil 2:6– 11 a christological appropriation of the OT theme of YHWH’s eschatological return and supremacy, this appropriation is again with reference to Jesus’s “post-Easter” status and a future universal acclamation as portrayed in vv. 9– 11. It is from God’s exaltation of Jesus onward that he is the Kyrios, the future universal acclamation of him described in wording from Isa 45:22–23. This is similar to what we have in the other clear NT instances noted earlier, where YHWH’s return is appropriated with reference to Jesus’s parousia. To underscore the relevant point (contra Wright), the Philippians passage does not show the theme of YHWH’s return used to describe the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It certainly does not give evidence that the appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return was the foundational christological conviction upon which the full gamut of christological claims then developed. Instead, with some other NT texts, Phil 2 (esp. vv. 9–11) suggests strongly that the initial conviction that generated subsequent christological development and devotional practice was that God had raised Jesus from death and exalted him to share in divine glory and the divine name, and now required Jesus to be reverenced accordingly.51 Fired by this startling conviction, earliest believers searched their scriptures to find resources to grasp what God’s exaltation of Jesus meant, and what import it held for their understanding of God’s purposes. Phil 2:6–11 is a particularly remarkable example of this fervent activity (which I have referred to elsewhere as “charismatic exegesis”) in which biblical texts were read in a radically new way with reference to Jesus.52

6. Conclusion The biblical theme of YHWH’s return is evidenced in Second Temple Jewish expressions of hopes for eschatological judgment and redemption. In the Second Temple tradition that served as the matrix of the earliest circles of Jesus-believers, references to YHWH’s personal and direct return/manifestation were readily linked with references to this taking place through a 51

Note also, e.g., Acts 2:35; 17:31; 1 Pet 1:21; 3:22. Hurtado, “Two Case Studies,” 14–20, and also 4–14 on the early christological reading of Ps 110. 52

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chief-agent figure. The emphasis on YHWH’s direct action and the involvement of a chief agent were not in tension with each other, but served as complementary expressions of the eschatological hope. This is reflected also in the NT texts that illustrate the remarkable christological appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return. Despite Wright’s urgings, however, it is not clear that the theme of YHWH’s return was appropriated initially to interpret Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection. Instead, the identifiable NT instances of the appropriation of the theme present Jesus’s parousia as effectively being YHWH’s eschatological return/manifestation. Jesus’s return in glory (“the parousia of the Lord,” 1 Thess 4:15) will comprise the “day of the Lord” (e.g., 1 Thess 5:1–11). Yet the same NT texts also clearly posit Jesus as the unique agent of God: e.g., “through Jesus God will bring with him those who have died” (1 Thess 4:14); “God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 5:9). The two christological emphases, Jesus acting in the role of YHWH and as the unique agent of YHWH, are not in tension in the NT, and should not be played off against the other. Moreover, notwithstanding Wright’s contention, this appropriation of the theme of YHWH’s return was not the initial christological claim or the conceptual move that prompted or accounts for all other early christological developments. Instead, the conviction that God raised from death and exalted him to unparalleled heavenly glory was the likely ignition for the explosively rapid and remarkably early development of the intense Jesus-devotion that we see already presumed in our earliest NT writings (as reflected, e.g., in Phil 2:9–11). In its earliest form, this crucial conviction was that in raising Jesus from death, God confirmed Jesus as the true Messiah (e.g., Acts 2:35), declared Jesus as God’s unique Son (Rom 1:3–4), and exalted him as the Lord (Mar/Kyrios) who now shares the divine throne, glory, and “the name above every name” (e.g., Phil 2:9–11; 1 Cor 15:27; Heb 1:3–4). This conviction likely erupted in the earliest days/weeks after Jesus’s crucifixion, and was generated and confirmed by the interaction of experiences that included encounters with the risen/glorified Jesus, visions of him in heavenly exaltation, prophetic oracles (and perhaps Spirit-inspired odes) declaring his status and expressing God’s will that Jesus be reverenced, and new “charismatic” readings of scriptural texts that confirmed and helped believers to understand better how to accommodate Jesus in relation to God.53

53 David E. Aune, “Charismatic Exegesis in Early Judaism and Early Christianity,” in The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, JSPSup 14 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 126–50. In Hurtado, “Two Case Studies,” 20–23, I have proposed the sort of setting/circumstances in which this “charismatic exegesis” took place.

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At some very early point in this process, believers came to see (or perhaps came to see more fully) Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection/exaltation as prefigured in various biblical texts (prominently among these texts, Ps 110:1), and even felt free (obliged?) to apply what Capes termed “Yahweh texts” to the risen/exalted Jesus (e.g., Ps 24; Joel 2:32).54 As reflected in Paul’s letters, early christological developments also included ascribing to Jesus “pre-existence” in a divine mode (Phil 2:6) and the role of unique agent in creation as well as redemption (1 Cor 8:6).55 Still more remarkably, early believers felt obliged to incorporate the risen/exalted Jesus programmatically in their devotional/cultic practices, according to Jesus the sort of place that they otherwise reserved for God alone. For example, in both Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking circles, they invoked (“called upon”) and “confessed” the risen Jesus in their worship-gatherings (e.g., 1 Cor 16:22; Rom 10:9–13). Their initiation rite was a baptism in Jesus’s name. The corporate meal of fellowship was also identified with reference to Jesus (e.g., “the table of the Lord,” 1 Cor 10:21; “the Lord’s supper,” 1 Cor 11:20). In my view, this programmatic place of Jesus, producing a “dyadic” devotional pattern in which God and Jesus are linked as recipients, likely arose under the conviction that God required Jesus to be so reverenced. I seriously doubt that it would have arisen through some sort of inference or liturgical experimentation. This “dyadic” devotional pattern was in no way “secondary”! In the process of the early christological appropriation of biblical tradition, believers drew upon the theme of YHWH’s eschatological return/triumph, especially to describe Jesus’s future return in glory. That is, although (contra Wright) the appropriation of this theme is not the crucial step or clue to the eruption of other christological claims, it is a striking example of the latter process. But, finally, even though I find Wright’s claim about role of the return of YHWH theme unpersuasive, it appears that we are agreed that, in one form or another, an “early high christology” erupted initially among circles of Jewish believers and remarkably soon after Jesus’s crucifixion. In 54

As discussed by David B. Capes, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology, WUNT II 47 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); and David B. Capes, “YHWH and His Messiah: Pauline Exegesis and the Divine Christ,” HBT 16 (1994): 121–43. 55 In the logic of Jewish apocalyptic thought, final/eschatological things can also be posited as primal things, as reflected in the Parables of Enoch, where the “Chosen One” is referred to as named before creation (48:2–3). But the references to the “pre-existent” Jesus as ἐν µορφῇ θεοῦ, and as the agent of creation are unprecedented for any of the other chief-agent figures in Second Temple Jewish texts. The language of the unnamed voice of the Qumran “Self-Glorification Hymn” (4Q491c) perhaps comes closest, although the exalted status claimed in the text seems to be an eschatological one, with no ascription of a role in creation. On this fragmentary text, see, e.g., Collins, The Scepter and the Star, 146– 49.

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sharing this basic view, despite differences on some other matters, Wright also aligns with other scholars such as Bauckham, Tilling, Newman, Capes, Segal, Frey, Schröter, and a growing number of others, whose work amounts to a “Paradigmenwechsel in der Erfassung der neutestamentlichen Christologie oder immerhin von einer ‘neuen Perspektive.”56

Bibliography Adams, Edward. “The ‘Coming of God’ Tradition and Its Influence on New Testament Parousia Texts.” Pages 1–19 in Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb. Edited by Charlotte Hempel and Judith M. Lieu. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 111. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Aune, David E. “Charismatic Exegesis in Early Judaism and Early Christianity,” Pages 126–50 in The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation. Edited by James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans. JSPSup 14. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1993. Bauckham, Richard J. God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament. Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998. –. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008. Beale, Gregory K. The Book of Revelation. NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Boccaccini, Gabriele, ed. Enoch and the Messiah Son of Man. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Breytenbach, Cilliers. “Erwägungen zu einer Geschichte der Religion des Urchristentums.” Pages 1–25 in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte. Edited by Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey. Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Capes, David B. Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology. WUNT II 47. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992. –. “YHWH and His Messiah: Pauline Exegesis and the Divine Christ.” HBT 16 (1994): 121–43. Chester, Andrew. “High Christology ‒ Whence, When and Why?” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22–50 Collins, John J. “Powers in Heaven: God, Gods, and Angels in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Pages 9–28 in Religion in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Edited by John J. Collins and Robert A. Kugler. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. –. The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Fee, Gordon D. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. NICNT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.

56 Frey, “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive,” 125. See also Andrew Chester, “High Christology ‒ Whence, When and Why?” Early Christianity 2 (2011): 22–50, who refers to a “clear (though not unanimous) scholarly consensus” now that “a Christology that portrays Christ as divine emerges very early, in distinctively Jewish terminology and within a Jewish context” (38).

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Frey, Jörg. “Eine neue religionsgeschichtliche Perspektive: Larry W. Hurtados Lord Jesus Christ und die Herausbildung der frühen Christologie.” Pages 117–69 in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte. Edited by Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey. Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Hannah, Darrell D. Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity. WUNT II 109. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. –. “The Elect Son of Man of the Parables of Enoch.” Pages 130–58 in ‘Who Is This Son of Man?’: The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus. Edited by Larry W. Hurtado and Paul L. Owen. LNTS 390. London: T&T Clark, 2011. Hurtado, Larry W. At the Origins of Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. –. God in New Testament Theology. Library of Biblical Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 2010. –. How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. –. “Jesus’s Resurrection in the Early Christian Texts: An Engagement with N. T. Wright.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 197–208. –. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. –. “Monotheism, Principal Angels, and the Background of Christology.” Pages 546–64 in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Edited by Timothy H. Lim and John J. Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. –. One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. 1st ed. London: SCM, 1988; 2nd ed. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998; 3rd ed. London: T&T Clark, forthcoming. –. “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament.” JR 80 (2000): 183–205. –. “Revelatory Experiences and Religious Innovation in Earliest Christianity.” ExpTim 125 (2014): 469–82. –. “The Binitarian Shape of Early Christian Worship.” Pages 187–213 in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus. Edited by Carey C. Newman, James R. Davila, and Gladys S. Lewis. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 63. Leiden: Brill, 1999. –. “Two Case Studies in Earliest Christological Readings of Biblical Texts.” Pages 3–23 in All that the Prophets have Declared. Edited by Matthew R. Malcolm. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2015. Kreitzer, Larry J. Jesus and God in Paul’s Eschatology. JSNTSup 19. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987. Marcus, Joel. Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 27. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Martin, Michael Wade, and Bryan A. Nash. “Philippians 2:6–11 as Subversive Hymnos: A Study in the Light of Ancient Rhetorical Theory.” JTS 66 (2015): 90–138.

Moulton, James H., and George Milligan. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament. London, 1930. Repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997. Newman, Carey C. Paul’s Glory-Christology: Tradition and Rhetoric. NovTSup 69. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2012.

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Balz, Horst, and Gerhard Schneider, eds. Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament. ET. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990–1993. Richardson, Neil. Paul’s Language about God. JSNTSup 99. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994. Schnutenhaus, Frank. “Das Kommen und Erscheinen Gottes im Alten Testament.” ZAW 76 (1964): 1–22. Schröter, Jens. “Trinitarian Belief, Binitarian Monotheism, and the One God: Reflections on the Origin of Christian Faith in Affiliation to Larry Hurtado’s Christological Approach.” Pages 171–94 in Reflections on the Early Christian History of Religion/Erwägungen zur frühchristlichen Religionsgeschichte. Edited by Cilliers Breytenbach and Jörg Frey. Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 81. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Strawbridge, Jennifer R., and Benjamin Edsall, “The Songs We Used to Sing? Hymn ‘Traditions’ and Reception in Pauline Letters.” JSNT 37 (2015): 290–311. Tilling, Chris. Paul’s Divine Christology. WUNT II 323. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. Webb, Robert L. John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Political Study. JSNTSup 62. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991. Welker, Michael. “Article Review: Wright on the Resurrection.” SJT 60 (2007): 458–75. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003.

The Spirit in Its Second Temple Context An Exegetical Analysis of the Pneumatology of N. T. Wright John R. (Jack) Levison 1. The Centrality of Pneumatology for Paul In a discussion of justification, grace, and faith in Pauline theology, N. T. Wright brushes aside the whole of western theology for the scant attention it has paid to early Christian pneumatology. Wright claims, Clearly any attempt at an oversimplification, omitting the work of the spirit from the picture, will not do – however ‘normal’ such an omission has been in western theology. (PFG 956)

Wright’s statement cannot diminish, of course, the contributions of western theologians such as Karl Barth,1 Yves Congar,2 Elizabeth Johnson,3 Jürgen Moltmann,4 Wolfhart Pannenberg,5 and Karl Rahner,6 or the important work of biblical scholars such as Hermann Gunkel,7 Friedrich Büchsel,8 H. B. 1 Karl Barth, The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, trans. Michael Raburn (2002), http://people.duke.edu/~mr33/Barth%20Holy%20Spirit.pdf. 2 Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith, 3 vols. (New York: Seabury, 1983; repr., New York: Crossroad, 1997). 3 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992) 124–49. 4 Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992). 5 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) 1:373. See also Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 2:76–77 and 3:2. 6 See Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, 23 vols. (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 19:142. See also Rahner, Theological Investigations, 19:143–47, as well as Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury, 1978). For an analysis of Rahner’s pneumatology as well as Rahner’s influence on Lumen Gentium, see John R. Sachs, “‘Do Not Stifle the Spirit’: Karl Rahner, the Legacy of Vatican II, and its Urgency for Theology Today,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 51 (1996): 15–38. 7 Hermann Gunkel, The Influence of the Holy Spirit: The Popular View of the Apostolic Age and the Teaching of the Apostle Paul, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979; repr., 2008). 8 Friedrich Büchsel, Der Geist Gottes im Neuen Testament (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1926).

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Swete,9 W. D. Davies,10 James D. G. Dunn,11 Max M. B. Turner,12 Troels Engberg-Pedersen,13 and Anthony Thistelton.14 Though generalized, perhaps even overly generalized, Wright’s statement does point to the tendency of many theologians and scholars to sequester pneumatology, transforming it into a sort of sub-discipline, apart from allegedly more substantive – even more allegedly Pauline – discussions of justification, faith, and grace. Wright unmasks this fallacy by offering his own sustained study of Pauline pneumatology. This essay is a discussion of Wright’s reconstruction of Pauline pneumatology: the Second Temple narrative in which he sets Pauline pneumatology; key elements of Pauline pneumatology; and, by way of criticism, Second Temple texts Wright does not – but should, in my opinion – take into account. I do not intend to quibble over details because that would detract from a fundamental contribution Wright makes to the study of pneumatology: to bring pneumatology into the bloodstream of Pauline theology. The spirit is not one of many topics in Pauline theology, according to Wright. It is the driving force of Pauline exegesis and exhortation. The spirit is best understood along the lines of the ancient physiology of pneuma – the life-force that travels through arteries and veins, that goes fresh to the lungs, that gives vitality to semen.15 The gall bladder without pneuma, according to ancient physiology, ceases to function. So too the liver and heart – and every other organ. Along this vein, Wright has demonstrated, once and for all, that the spirit pulses through the whole of Pauline theology so that “any attempt at an oversimplification, omitting the work of the spirit from the picture, will not do” (PFG 956). Wright devotes two substantial slivers of Paul and the Faithfulness of God to Pauline pneumatology. The first sliver occurs in a protracted section on monotheism, in which Wright demonstrates that

9

H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the New Testament: A Study of Primitive Christian Teaching (London: Macmillan and Company, 1909) as well as H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church: A Study in the Earliest Christian Teaching in the Age of the Fathers (London: Macmillan, 1912; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999). 10 W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980) 177–226. 11 James D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970). 12 Max M. B. Turner, “Spiritual Gifts Then and Now,” VE 15 (1985) 7–63. 13 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 14 Anthony C. Thiselton, The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, Through the Centuries, and Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). 15 Typically in this study, pneuma refers to an overarching concept – representing pneumatology – rather than to the specific word. Consequently, it will not occur in Greek but in italicized English.

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Paul clearly, solidly, skillfully and dramatically reworked exactly this ‘monotheism’ around Jesus the Messiah and also around the spirit. It is for the sake of Jesus, and in the power of the spirit, that Paul faces, and knows that his ekklesiai are facing, the equivalent challenges to those faced by the Maccabees before him. (PFG 634)16

Within this framework, he turns to “monotheism freshly revealed” and the spirit. This first section on Pauline pneumatology occupies pages 209–28 of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. A second, much longer sliver occurs in an extensive section devoted to Paul’s reworking of election, titled, “The People of God, Freshly Reworked.”17 In this section occurs Wright’s treatment of election in relation to the spirit, titled, “Election Reworked around the Spirit: the Messiah’s Justified People.” This second section on Pauline pneumatology occupies pages 912–1038; its Leitmotiv is Paul’s “spirit-driven redefinition of election” (e.g., PFG 1007).

2. Pauline Pneumatology in Outline To begin, it may be helpful simply to untangle some of the threads Wright sews together in his construal of Pauline pneumatology. Fortunately, this job can be done in sets of three, which offer us both an excellent glimpse of Pauline pneumatology, as Wright understands it, and an outline of this essay. These sets of three will provide the substructure of the present study. Wright tethers Pauline pneumatology to what he considers to be three core elements of Second Temple Jewish faith: the Shekinah, the temple, and the messiah. Pauline pneumatology, Wright contends, can only be understood ultimately in relation to these elements of Israelite and Second Temple faith. Wright identifies three principal Pauline innovations. The first is a spiritdriven definition of election. The second is the conviction that the spirit enables believers to do what Torah could not: to fulfill the essence of the Shema. The third consists of a radical, high, and early pneumatology – or, to put it another way, a fully redefined monotheism. Toward the end of his second section on pneumatology (PFG 1028–32), Wright takes us to high ground, from which we are able to survey three primary points of the spirit’s impact on believers: 1) the ability of the spirit to generate faith; 2) the role of the spirit in the resurrection, including a proleptic resurrection in baptism; and 3) the unique ability of the spirit to transform believers during the period between the dawn of faith and resurrection. Notwithstanding Wright’s deft ability to set Pauline pneumatology in the context of Second Temple Jewish expectations, he omits three key texts from 16 17

This section spans PFG 619–773. This section spans PFG 774–1042.

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the literary corpora of Israel and Second Temple Judaism that, in my opinion, would call for a qualification, perhaps even a modification, of his interpretation of Pauline pneumatology. These texts include Isa 63:7–14, Hag 2:4–9, and various excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before proceeding further, it is important to note that Wright considers the experience of the spirit to be fundamental to the development of Paul’s pneumatology. The revisions Paul made within the context of Second Temple Jewish monotheism were theological, exegetical, and thoughtful, but this reality should not obfuscate the impact of experience on Paul. Wright puts the matter this way: When Paul, like the other early Christians, experienced that renewal [of the heart], and saw others experiencing it, they must have realized how badly it had been needed. Here, too, Paul found the clues in scripture, where Israel had been warned about its own hardheartedness. But he went looking for those clues, we may surmise, because of the revised monotheism in which the spirit of the one God, the spirit of Jesus, had produced previously unimagined effects on hearts and minds, not only his own but those of converts from every kind of background. (PFG 759)

3. Three Core Elements 3.1 The Temple In three passages in the Corinthian letters, Paul speaks of individual believers and the church as a temple. These passages, 1 Cor 3:16–17, 1 Cor 6:18–20, and 2 Cor 6:14–7:1, alongside Eph 2:19–22, combine to confirm a salient Pauline point of reference: When Paul speaks of the individual Christian, or the whole church, as the ‘temple’ in which the spirit ‘dwells’, such language from a second-Temple Jew can only mean (a) that YHWH has returned to his Temple as he had promised and (b) that the mode of this longawaited, glorious, tabernacling presence is the spirit. (PFG 711)

What Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Cor 3:16–17, for instance, prompts Wright to say, No ex-Pharisee could write this without intending to say that the founding and building up of the church through the gospel constituted the long awaited rebuilding of the Temple, and that the indwelling of the spirit constituted the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion. (PFG 712)

Wright adopts two exegetical perspectives to arrive at conclusions such as this one. On the one hand, he sets Pauline pneumatology in a credible Second Temple narrative setting. Rather than gathering random texts from the Jewish Bible, he creates from several allusions a story, a tale of convictions, which, to his mind at least, are foundational for Pauline pneumatology. On the other

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hand, Wright draws multiple connections between Pauline texts and contexts. He does not read Paul merely sequentially. He has an uncanny knack for reading Paul any which way: front to back, back to front, even circuitously. Wright’s ability to identify a credible web of allusions and a credible web of Pauline texts lies at the heart of his understanding of Pauline pneumatology. For example, Wright connects the spirit, temple, and eschatological expectations, when Paul does not do so explicitly, in 2 Cor 6:14–7:1. How? First, by discovering a “remarkable web of biblical allusions” (PFG 712) to texts such as Ezek 37 and, especially, Isa 52:11, in which exiles who carry the vessels of YHWH are told to depart, to touch no unclean thing, to go out, and to purify themselves. This passage, Wright notes, is part of a patchwork of themes celebrating the return of YHWH to Zion and, no less important, God’s leading people through the wilderness as at the time of the exodus. “Indeed,” claims Wright, “the whole passage is framed as a new exodus” (PFG 714). Second, Wright discerns the spirit in 2 Cor 6:14–7:1 by turning to its context. “But with 2 Corinthians 3 as part of the wider context,” he notes, “we can surely take it for granted that this detailed exposition of the church as Temple must presuppose the spirit as the new form of the Shekinah, the tabernacling presence of the God who has accompanied the new exodus” (PFG 715). Though neither spirit nor eschatological Shekinah plays an explicit role in 2 Cor 6:14–7:1, Wright employs a combination of allusions and contextual considerations to place them there. It is the assessment of the strength of allusions and contextual elements throughout Paul and the Faithfulness of God that will, in fact, determine a reader’s willingness to accept Wright’s construction of Pauline pneumatology. 3.2 The Shekinah The indwelling of the spirit in the church, we have noted already, can only mean – must only mean – some kind of identification of the divine spirit with the long-awaited returning Shekinah. For the divine spirit to take up residence in the church is for Exodus 40 and Ezekiel 43 to find a radical, unexpected and even shocking new fulfilment. But there can be no doubt that this is what Paul meant to say. (PFG 712)18

To make the point more concisely, Wright claims that the church, as it stands, is thus already the new Temple, and the spirit that dwells within is the new Shekinah. It is hard to see how a second-Temple Jew could give the spirit a higher value than this. (PFG 712)

18

On the significance of exodus traditions for Pauline pneumatology, Wright is dependent upon the study of his former student, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Paul and his Story: (Re)Interpreting the Exodus Tradition, JSNTSup 181 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999).

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The themes of temple and Shekinah, which lie at the base of Paul’s conviction that the Corinthians, as well as individual believers, are a spirit-filled temple, comes to fruition in the letter to the Ephesians, which reads: You are no longer foreigners or strangers. No: you are fellow-citizens with God’s holy people. You are members of God’s household. You are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with King Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole building is fitted together, and grows into a holy temple in the lord. You, too, are being built up together, in him, into a place where God will live … by the spirit. (Ephesians 2:19–22, Wright’s translation; PFG 715)19

This explicit declaration of the people of God as a spirit-filled temple provides Wright with the opportunity for a crescendo, a peroration even – were there not a thousand pages left in the book! In context, both of Ephesians and of second-Temple expectations, this too can only mean one thing. The hope that one day YHWH would return to Zion, to dwell in the renewed Temple for ever, has now been fulfilled – but in a radical, shocking and unexpected fashion. The role of God’s living presence, the glorious Shekinah, is taken by the spirit. Once again, in second-Temple Jewish terms there cannot be a higher pneumatology than this. The spirit is incorporated within the divine identity, the identity which is shaped particularly by the eschatology of YHWH’s return. (PFG 716)

Understanding the spirit in the context of Second Temple Jewish expectations of a new exodus deepens the resonance of other Pauline texts as well. For instance, Rom 8, in which the spirit comes to the aid of believers and pleads on their behalf, “is accomplishing what was accomplished in the original story through the tabernacling presence of YHWH during the wilderness wanderings” (PFG 720). To put it bluntly, “What the one God of Israel had done in the exodus narrative, and had promised to do himself at the eschaton, Paul sees being accomplished by the spirit” (PFG 721). Similarly, in the familiar contrast of slavery and sonship, of spirit and Torah, Paul accuses the Galatians of “trying to sneak off back to Egypt, trying to return to the slavery from which they had been rescued” (PFG 718). This retreat is, for Paul, untenable because “the role both of Torah and of the tabernacling presence of God with his people has been taken, jointly, by the Messiah and the spirit” (PFG 718). The messiah and the spirit. The joining of these marks the third in a remarkable web of allusions in Paul’s pneumatology. 3.3 The Messiah The relationship between messiah and spirit differs from those of the temple and Shekinah. The spirit fills the temple, the spirit is the eschatological Shekinah, but the spirit applies what the messiah has accomplished: “If the elec19

Unless otherwise noted, translations are from the NRSV, though the lion’s share of translations are Wright’s own, which will be marked as such.

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tion of Israel,” notes Wright, “was the solemn and unbreakable divine promise to save the world through Abraham’s seed, Paul sees that promise as accomplished in the Messiah and applied through the spirit” (PFG 912). Still, the relationship between spirit and Messiah is intimate, since the spirit is not only God’s spirit but also the spirit of God’s son, King Jesus, the messiah, so that “the gift of this indwelling Messiah-spirit is basic to all Christian existence: ‘anyone who doesn’t have the spirit of the Messiah doesn’t belong to him’ ([Rom] 8.9b)” (PFG 956).20 3.4 The Integration of Second-Temple Jewish Traditions Characteristic of Wright is his ability to highlight one strand of pneumatology while holding firmly to others. For this reason, the spirit-as-Shekinah dimension of pneumatology and the spirit-filled temple are never far from his mind, even when he focuses attention on the spirit and the messiah. All of this is of a piece. Unravel one strand, and you quickly discover another – then another. Consequently, Wright connects these elements in a variety of summaries. For example, he writes: In order to highlight the inauguration of God’s kingdom in and through him, particularly through his crucifixion … we are forced to put the category of Messiahship back where it belongs, right at the centre of Paul’s thought. The kingdom has been inaugurated through the work of Jesus, who, both as the embodiment of Israel’s God and as the single bearer of Israel’s destiny, has defeated the old enemy, has accomplished the new exodus, and is now, by his spirit, leading his people to their inheritance – not, of course, ‘heaven’, but the reclaiming of all creation. (PFG 735)

More succinctly, Wright prefaces a citation of 2 Cor 3:15–18 with this integration of Shekinah, temple, and messiah, three great expectations of Second Temple Judaism: “For Paul, the place where ‘the glory’ is now revealed – in other words, the new temple – is in the fellowship of the Messiah’s people, where the spirit is at work” (PFG 726).

20

This point is made similarly, though more cautiously, by Jörg Frey, “How Did the Spirit Become a Person?,” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 361: “The close correlation of the works of Christ and the Spirit is not without effect on how the relationships between God and Christ, as well as Father and Son, are understood. Surely, Paul is still far away from viewing the Spirit as a divine person, but on the other hand the Spirit is no longer simply an impersonal divine power (and certainly not a heavenly substance). Rather, from the relation with Christ, the Spirit has developed the profile of a subject who acts and speaks, so that it is at least tentatively conceptualized in personal categories.” Frey’s entire discussion (358–61) is relevant, though this article, published in 2014, was not available to Wright.

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4. Three Innovations Wright identifies three principal Pauline innovations. Like so much in Wright’s book – and Paul’s mind, Wright would argue – these innovations are integrated with each other. Consequently, there is significant overlap between them. 4.1 Spirit-driven Definition of Election Paul, argues Wright, has punctuated the election of God’s people with two principal exclamation points: the messiah and spirit. The verdict of the future has been brought forward into the present, redefining election around Messiah and spirit. (PFG 962) We are very close here [Rom 8:18–25] to Galatians 3.21–4.7, and with the same import: election redefined, first around the Messiah, now around the work of the spirit. (PFG 1023) Election is redefined. Around the Messiah; through the spirit. (PFG 1024)

A spirit-driven redefinition of election. But how? Wright’s analysis of 2 Corinthians offers a window into this radical redefinition. With the contrast between “letter and spirit” in this chapter, Paul is talking about the difference between the Mosaic law, which, being engraved on stone tablets, is unable to change the hearts of the hearers, and the holy spirit, unleashed through the preaching of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, transforming the hearts of the hearers so that they are now different people. (PFG 982)

A remarkable web of allusions in 2 Cor 3 explains this phenomenon further. An allusion to Ezek 36 tells the readers that their hearts are cleansed and renewed. An allusion to Jer 31 tells them they have new knowledge of the covenant God. Combined allusions to the exodus story, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah reveal the fresh possibility of obedience. Paul’s basic claim could not be clearer. The spirit has redefined ‘election’, the covenant status of the people of God. The covenant is not now a matter of possessing or hearing the Mosaic law. It is a matter of the transformation of the heart, wrought by the spirit. (PFG 983)

Wright does not let this redefinition dangle freely. He ties it to other key themes in Pauline pneumatology, as he construes it. First: the Shekinah. “The Shekinah dwelt in the tabernacle, separated from the people. Now, the divine spirit has come to dwell within the renewed people themselves” (PFG 983). Second, the messiah. While commenting upon the perplexing text, Rom 8:28–30, in which God’s foreknowledge leads to calling, justification, and glorification, Wright observes how these great affirmations, drawn from the narrative of the covenant people,

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constitute, in the first instance, a massive claim about the Messiah: upon him has now devolved the identity of the covenant people of the one God. They then constitute, following from this, an equally massive claim about those who are indwelt by the spirit: they are ‘in the Messiah’, and as such they are to be seen as the single family promised by the one God to Abraham, however much they may at present look like a somewhat strange and motley crew, having come in from gentiles as well as Jews. (PFG 1024)

We return, then, to the two foci of election redefined, messiah and spirit, where Wright discovers, at the heart of Pauline theology, a spirit-driven redefinition of election, in which people are now cleansed, learned, and obedient. In what way are they obedient? The answer to this question lies in the nature of the Shema for Christian believers.21 4.2 A Spirit-driven Definition of Obedience The goal of loving God with the whole of one’s heart, which lies at the heart of Jewish monotheism, is attainable. How? “The spirit enables God’s people to keep the Shema” (PFG 722). Of course, the situation is more complex than that, though the core of the spirit’s work lies in bringing believers to a full-on love of God: At precisely those points where Paul most strongly highlights the special work of the spirit, he does so within a narrative framework which reinforces the second-Temple Jewish monotheistic structure of thought. The spirit is the one through whom the new exodus comes about, and with it the Deuteronomic fulfilment/renewal of the covenant, the keeping of the Shema, the loving of God from the heart and (not least) the establishment of the community as the true temple. (PFG 727)

This interpretation of the spirit’s core work arises more generally from the observation that “again and again Paul speaks of the work of the spirit as enabling people to fulfil Torah in a way previously impossible” (PFG 1037). More specifically, a love for God – the central commitment of the Shema – arises for Wright from two passages in Paul’s letter to the Romans. The first, Rom 5:5, reads, “Hope, in its turn, does not make us ashamed, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the holy spirit who has been given to us” (PFG 722; Wright’s translation). Wright concedes that 21 Wright refers often to this spirit-driven redefinition. By this he means, if I understand him correctly, that the place of the spirit alongside the messiah in Paul’s conception of election calls for a thorough redefinition. Wright does not, as far as I can tell, explain the process by which Paul came to this understanding. What role did the spirit play in helping Paul to redefine election? In other words, Wright suggests that the content of election changed when the spirit was put into the formula, but how did Paul come to see election in this way? How did he experience the spirit so that he was prompted to redefine election? On this question – the spirit’s possible influence upon Paul as an interpreter of scripture, with particular attention to 2 Cor 3, which features significantly in Wright’s pneumatology – see John R. (Jack) Levison, Inspired: The Holy Spirit and the Mind of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 162–77.

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most commentators read “love of God” as a subjective genitive – God’s love for us – in anticipation of that theme in Rom 5:8–10 and 8:31–39. He asks, however, what sense it makes to have God’s love for humans in our hearts. It makes much better sense, he contends, to see believers’ hearts as “the places where, and the means by which, they are to love God, according to the Shema” (PFG 722). In a compelling summary of his argument, Wright waxes eloquent: Here again, therefore, we see what we might appropriately call pneumatological monotheism: the spirit, understood as the outpouring of the personal presence and energy of the one true God, enables his people to do what the Shema required, to love God with the heart, with the strength (6.12–23; 8.12–17)) [sic.], with the mind (8.5–11; 12.1–2) and if need be, as with Akiba himself, with the life (8.31–39). (PFG 722–23)

Wright recognizes that this interpretation of Rom 5:5 may be “controversial” (PFG 1013), but he thinks it is sealed by a similar text, Rom 8:27–28, in which believers are clearly identified as those who love God, as those who fulfill the central command of the Shema. Wright then goes out on a limb in a serious reflection on prayer: In the faith and love which the spirit generates, this worldwide people of the creator God offer to him the worship which was most centrally characteristic of Israel. Paul may even be hinting in 8.26–7 at the ‘prayer of the heart’, the habitual and eventually subconscious praying of a prayer such as the Shema which forms the innermost life of the one who thus prays. When, in the next breath, he refers to ‘those who love God’, we should take this as a sign that the prayer inspired by the spirit, and heard by ‘the one who searches the hearts’, may well be the Shema itself, perhaps in its messianic reworking. (PFG 1013)

At the heart of Christian faith, then, lies the work of the spirit. What Torah could not do, through no fault of its own, the spirit does: fill believers with the ability to obey the essential tenet of Israelite and Second Temple Jewish life. 4.3 A Radical, High, and Early Pneumatology A spirit that can energize believers to fulfill the one command that truly matters – love God with all your heart – is a spirit to be reckoned with, and Wright reckons with that spirit in detail. There is a scholarly backstory to Wright’s reckoning, and it is best to start our discussion there, in Wright’s own words: Indeed, with both Christology and pneumatology it seems that the normal assumption of many writers is radically mistaken. It is not the case that the New Testament is unclear or fuzzy on these subjects, and that the early Fathers invented a high view of Jesus and the spirit which was then wrongly read back into the early period. Rather, it seems as though the earliest Christians, precisely from within their second-Temple Jewish monotheism, leapt without difficulty straight to an identification of both Jesus and the spirit within the divine identity, which the early Fathers then struggled to recapture in the very different

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categories of hellenistic philosophy. As with Christology, so with pneumatology. The idea of a ‘low’ Jewish beginning from which a gradual ‘ascent’ was made on the dictates of Greek philosophy, is exactly wrong. The Jewish context provided the framework for a thoroughly ‘high’ christology and pneumatology, and it was the attempt to restate that within the language of Hellenistic philosophy, and without the help of the key Jewish categories, that gave the impression of a difficult doctrine gradually attained. (PFG 710)

In short? “As far as Paul was concerned, the spirit, just like Jesus, was doing what YHWH himself had said he would do. The spirit was the further, and ongoing, manifestation of the personal presence of the one God” (PFG 711). Other Second Temple Jewish authors might have made the jump to an early high pneumatology, but Paul was the one who did precisely this. Time and again, Wright attributes to Paul this small but significant leap, taken within the parameters of Second Temple Judaism. It was Paul who combined the grand traditions of Shekinah, temple, and messiah in the service of an eschatological vision in which all three were wrapped in the mantle of divinity. We saw this already in our discussion of Wright’s interpretation of Eph 2:19–22, in which the spirit takes the role of the Shekinah and fills the temple in fulfilment of eschatological expectations “in a radical, shocking and unexpected fashion” (PFG 716). This early high pneumatology is not a breach of Second Temple Jewish monotheism. It is its salient expression. Shocking, yes. Radical, true enough. Unexpected, certainly. But nonetheless a pneumatology that lies squarely within the parameters of Second Temple Jewish belief, a pneumatology that expresses rather than nullifies a heartily held monotheism.22

5. The Impact of the Spirit A spirit of this caliber, of this quality, a spirit that is “the further, and ongoing, manifestation of the personal presence of the one God” (PFG 711), has, for Paul, an undeniable impact on believers. These include the generation of initial faith, the transformation of believers, and the resurrection.

22

The question of Paul’s place in the development of pneumatology is not unique to Wright. See, for example, the statement by Frey, “How did the Spirit become a Person?,” 361. In a discussion of Larry Hurtado’s “binitarian monotheism” and the early veneration of Christ, Frey conjectures, “If true, then this veneration is further developed and broadened by the early ‘personalization’ of the Spirit in Pauline thought, so that (only in retrospect, of course) we can already see a very cautious step towards the Trinitarian concept that developed much later.”

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5.1 The Generation of Faith The spirit calls people to faith. If there is no spirit, no gospel, there can be no faith. The formula for Wright, notwithstanding the complexity of his exegesis, is that simple. It is not at all difficult to find Wright expressing this fundamental commitment in myriad ways. Here are some examples, in descending order of length: But then how does this ‘power’ [of the gospel expressed in Rom 1:16–17] function? Paul is in no doubt: when he tells the story of Jesus as the long-promised crucified and risen Messiah of Israel, and announces that he is now the world’s true lord, God’s spirit is at work. Gospel and spirit go tightly together in his theology. Paul does not envisage a sequence of events in which first he tells people about Jesus, then they decide whether or not they are going to believe his message, and only then does the spirit descend upon those who have already believed. (PFG 917) ‘The gospel’, then, is the instrument through which the covenant God ‘calls’; and when Paul says ‘call’ he means an effective, powerful summons. The spirit is the driving force behind this; belief of the truth is the first consequence, as one key element in being ‘set apart’ by the spirit for the divine purposes. (PFG 918) When the gospel is announced, the spirit works through the message that is proclaimed. (PFG 920) This faith is the first sign of the work of the spirit. (PFG 957) The spirit works through the proclamation of the gospel. (PFG 959)

Two corollaries of Wright’s emphasis upon the role of the spirit in the proclamation – and acceptance – of the gospel emerge in the course of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. The first has to do with justification, the second with the issue of subsequence. Though he sees an intimate relationship between justification and the impact of the spirit, Wright is loath to merge them. Justification is about the right standing of believers – not the experience of believers. “Nor do the adjective ‘righteous’ and the abstract noun ‘righteousness,’” contends Wright, denote anything about the change of heart whose first flutterings produce that faith. They denote the ‘standing’ which the believer has from that moment on, on the basis of the divine declaration, as a full, forgiven member of the single people of the covenant God. (PFG 957)

Therefore, “the spirit’s work is vital; the inner transformation by the indwelling of the Messiah himself is vital; but neither of those is what the word ‘justification’ means, or what the word ‘righteousness’ refers to” (PFG 958). The work of the spirit through which people come to believe the gospel is not justification. Justification “is the declaration of the one God, on the basis of the death of Jesus: this really is my adopted child, a member of Abraham’s covenant family, whose sins are forgiven” (PFG 959).

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The second corollary of Wright’s firm belief that the spirit, for Paul, generates faith is that there is no need of a so-called subsequent work of the spirit. It is clear to Wright that the gift of the spirit is not a further gift, out beyond initial Christian experience or even initial Christian faith, but is rather the life-giving energy by which someone is enabled, in the first place, to believe that the one God raised Jesus and to confess that Jesus is Lord. (PFG 917)

Again, “the indwelling of the Messiah-spirit is a basic, not a secondary, or subsequent, element in all Christian experience” (PFG 958). It looks as if there are echoes of J. D. G. Dunn in Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Dunn argued, much like Wright, that the gift of the Spirit was part of the event (or process) of becoming a Christian, together with the effective proclamation of the Gospel, belief in … Jesus as Lord, and water-baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus; that it was the chief element in conversion-initiation so that only those who had thus received the Spirit could be called Christians.23

Compare Dunn’s statement with Wright’s: The two events which Paul sees as tightly joined together, baptism ‘into the Messiah’ on the one hand and the emergence of faith on the other (calling God ‘Abba’; believing that he raised Jesus from the dead; confessing Jesus as lord), are the necessary and sufficient evidence that the spirit has been at work through the gospel, that this person has died and risen with the Messiah, that this person has the Messiah’s death and resurrection ‘reckoned’ or ‘imputed’ to them. (PFG 1028)

Faith. Water baptism. Initiation. These elements tether Wright to Dunn. However, Wright gives no indication, unlike Dunn, that he writes at this point in dialogue with Pentecostals who look to a subsequent work of the spirit, as evidenced by speaking in tongues.24 5.2 The Transformation of Believers Between the beginning and triumphant conclusion of justification, the spirit is hard at work. Wright notes,

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Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, 4. Dunn continues with a stronger emphasis than Wright, on the whole, upon experience: “that the reception of the Spirit was a very definite and often dramatic experience, the decisive and climactic experience in conversioninitiation, to which the Christian was usually recalled when reminded of the beginning of his Christian faith and experience.” 24 A point of departure is Frank D. Macchia, Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

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it is true that the spirit who, through the gospel, inspires the first whisper of faith is the same spirit who then goes to work so that the person who has believed ‘does the work of the law’ in the way spoken of in Romans 2, 3, 8, and 10. (PFG 954)25

Transformation occurs in several related ways. In general, the contrast in 2 Cor 3 between letter and spirit, tablets of stone and human hearts, is about the difference between Mosaic Torah and the holy spirit, “unleashed through the preaching of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, transforming the hearts of the hearers so that they are now different people” (PFG 982). Paul labels this living by the spirit and not fulfilling the desires of the flesh (Gal 5:16) or having “the mind of the spirit” (Rom 8:13; Col 3:5, 9). Wright suggests that it “is too shallow to call this ‘ethics’” (PFG 1030) and prefers “transformation of character” (PFG 1030).26 Paul gives transformation a more particular spin because he understands it as a Second Temple Pharisee. From this perspective, When Paul speaks of the spirit indwelling believers and giving them new bodily life, he is saying that what Torah had promised is now at last to be accomplished. ‘Do this’, says Torah, ‘and you will live’; Paul, radically redefining ‘Do this’ around Messiah and spirit, looks ahead and sees that what Torah could not do, through no fault of its own, Israel’s God has done in the Messiah and will do for all his people. (PFG 1037)

The most particular point of all – a point we have already outlined – is that the holy spirit enables people to love God with the whole of their hearts. In short, the most pivotal transformation of all is that believers do what the Torah could tell them to do but not make them do: obey the Shema.27 5.3 Resurrection In the wake of justification and transformation comes resurrection. There is the unbreakable promise that, by that same spirit, all the people thus described will in the end be raised from the dead to share the ‘inheritance’ of the Messiah, the worldwide inheritance promised to Abraham. (PFG 1029)28 25

See also PFG 1030. It would be interesting to see the dialogue that might transpire between Wright and Volker Rabens, whose pioneering work on the spirit and the ethical life of believers fills in many of the gaps that Wright leaves in relation to the impact of the spirit on believers. See Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life WUNT II 283 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). On 2 Cor 3, in particular, see Volker Rabens, “Pneuma and the Beholding of God: Reading Paul in the Context of Philonic Mystical Traditions,” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 293–329. 27 This includes love for others, as well. See PFG 1037, point nine. 28 Wright cites Phil 1:6 as support. 26

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Hope of resurrection is not merely a generalized hope. It is rooted in Second Temple Jewish belief and the complexities of Pauline exegesis. Torah’s aim, to give life, is fulfilled in the resurrection. … Now, by the spirit, not only is the principle of life implanted in the hearts of believers; the ultimate fulfilment is assured. And that is not just a miscellaneous, however glorious, future hope. It is specifically and uniquely the hope of Israel. That is exactly the point both of Philippians 3.2–11 and Romans 8.1–11. When Paul speaks of the spirit indwelling believers and giving them new bodily life, he is saying that what Torah had promised is now at last to be accomplished. … The promise of Torah, the hope of Israel, was ‘life’. It was, in fact, nothing other than resurrection. (PFG 1037)29

The “advance signpost” of this resurrection occurs, for Wright, during water baptism: The death of the son of God has dealt with that Adamic humanity, so that now, by the spirit, all who are part of the Messiah’s people (all this still depends upon the incorporated vision of baptism-into-Messiah in Romans 6) will share the bodily resurrection for which the earlier ‘resurrection’ which takes place in baptism itself is the advance signpost. (PFG 1020)

Resurrection, then, occurs proleptically in water baptism. For much of Pauline theology and exegesis, themes and texts are so intricately intertwined – recall Wright’s remarkable web of allusions – that it is impossible, and certainly undesirable, to untangle them. But with regard to the impact of the spirit, the scenario is tidier. 1) The spirit generates faith at the start; this work of the spirit is not justification. 2) The spirit transforms the hearts of people to fulfill Torah through love, particularly a love for God that is the quintessence of the Shema. 3) The spirit, which gives life to people by enabling them to obey Torah through love, gives the life of the age to come to the people-of-the-Messiah by means of the ultimate gift of life, the resurrection.

6. Missing Texts To suggest that biblical or post-biblical texts are missing in a study of the magnitude of Paul and the Faithfulness of God may seem ludicrous. Still, grasping what is missing – especially essential texts – may be just as important as grasping what is present in a book of this caliber.

29 Wright identifies the people of Rom 2:7, “who patiently do what is good, and so pursue the quest for glory and honour and immortality,” as those who will be given “the life of the age to come” (PFG 1029; Wright’s translation).

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6.1 Isaiah 63:7–14 Wright contends that Paul’s pneumatology led to a revision of monotheism that was “radical, shocking and unexpected” (PFG 716). A brief analysis of our first text, Isa 63:7–14, indicates that this may not be the case. Sandwiched between grand visions of temple restoration (Isa 56:1–8) and recreation (65:17–25) in Isa 56–66, Isa 63:7–14 is a short, self-contained hymn, in which the hymnist promises to “recount the gracious deeds of the LORD” (Isa 63:7). The first several lines are unremarkable, with traditional references to “the praiseworthy acts of the LORD,” to God’s favor, mercy, and steadfast love, and to an assurance that Israel is God’s people (Isa 63:7– 8). The next lines turn abruptly from praise in general to the exodus, wilderness, and settlement traditions, peppered by three references to God’s spirit: It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them … But they rebelled and grieved his holy spirit; therefore he became their enemy; he himself fought against them. … Where is the one who put within them his holy spirit … Like cattle that go down into the valley, The spirit of the LORD gave them rest. (Isa 63:8–14)

Though self-contained, this hymn is suffused with the exodus language that is characteristic of Isa 40–55: Then they remembered the days of old, of Moses his servant. Where is the one who brought them up out of the sea With the shepherds of his flock? … Who divided the waters before them … who led them through the depths … Like cattle that go down into the valley, The spirit of the LORD gave them rest. (Isa 63:11–14)

At once looking back and looking ahead, the hymnist transforms ancient traditions to create a distinctive hope – and, in this instance, warning as well. At the center of this hope lies the spirit, whose debut in this hymn, in relation to the rest of Jewish scripture, is startling: God’s presence saved Israel, yet “they rebelled and grieved his holy spirit.” Presumably God’s presence and spirit are identical. Still, the identification is not a simple one because the layering of traditions in Torah, which underlies this hymn, is complex. Torah contains references to a tradition of an angel that led Israel. Prior to the parting of the sea, the angel of God and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of (i.e., leading) Israel to a position behind Israel to protect them from

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Egypt (Exod 14:19). After the miraculous journey through the sea, God promises: I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression; for my name is in him. But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites . . (Exod 23:20–23)30

Alongside this tradition of an angelic deliverer is another, according to which God's presence or face went with Israel. God promises Moses, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (Exod 33:14), to which Moses reacts, “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here” (33:15).31 These two traditions – God's angel and presence – overlap in the book of Exodus. As we just saw, in Exod 33:14–15, God promises Moses God’s presence. Just before this, God had promised Moses an angel to lead Israel: “But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; see, my angel shall go in front of you” (32:34). God then orders Moses to leave, repeating the promise of Exod 32:34: “I will send an angel before you, and I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites .” (33:2).32 The traditions of God’s angel and God’s presence merge in Isa 63, where the holy spirit takes on their intertwined roles. No longer against an appointed angel did Israel rebel (Exod 23:21); now it is the holy spirit against whom Israel rebelled (Isa 63:10). No longer did God’s presence give Israel rest (Exod 33:14); now it is the spirit of the LORD who guides Israel and gives it rest (Isa 63:14). To put an exclamation point on it: it is no longer the Shekinah but God’s holy spirit that God put within the people to accompany them through the wilderness (Isa 63:11). What is so remarkable about this hymn is how markedly its view of the spirit mirrors Paul’s pneumatology, as Wright understands it. In Isa 63:7–14, the prerogatives of God’s angel and presence devolve onto the holy spirit in a context that is replete with the theology of a new exodus. What Wright says about Paul’s letters, in other words, describes just as well a text that circulated roughly half a millennium prior to the provenance of those letters. If the word church were replaced by the word Israel in this sentence, for example, 30

Moses refers to the angelic deliverer in a message sent to the king of Edom to request safe passage through Edom: “and when we cried to the LORD, he heard our voice, and sent an angel and brought us out of Egypt” (Num 20:16). 31 The Deuteronomist recalls a similar tradition: “And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves” (Deut 4:37–38). 32 In Exod 23:22, for instance, there is an explicit correlation between listening attentively to the voice of the angel and doing all that God says.

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we would encounter a description of Isa 63: “The indwelling of the spirit in the church [read: Israel] can only mean – must only mean – some kind of identification of the divine spirit with the long-awaited returning Shekinah” (PFG 712).33 Yet again, “What the one God of Israel had done in the exodus narrative, and had promised to do himself at the eschaton, Paul sees being accomplished by the spirit” (PFG 721).34 This, too, describes (minus the reference to Paul) the pneumatology of Isa 63. Isaiah 63, therefore, is an indication that an early, high pneumatology (to use Wright’s categories) existed centuries prior to Paul. Consequently, Wright’s effort to discover something “radical, shocking and unexpected” (PFG 716) in Paul’s revision of monotheism needs to be qualified substantially.35 There is no clear parallel between the development of an early, high Christology and the development of an early, high pneumatology, although Wright frequently pairs them in Paul and the Faithfulness of God. An early, high Christology did not yet exist. An early, high pneumatology did. Although the inclusion of Isa 63 tamps down the element of innovation, the realization that Isa 63 had already absorbed the spirit into a monotheistic framework underscores the credibility of Wright’s effort to ground pneumatology in Second Temple Judaism. It may not be a Pauline innovation, but a pneumatology which understands the spirit as the Shekinah, angel, or divine presence of the exodus tradition is rooted undoubtedly in Second Temple Jewish belief. If Paul did not need to revise monotheism in a radical way in order to accommodate the spirit, then was Paul innovative at all? Probably yes, since Paul drew an intimate and innovative connection between messiah and spirit. Paul did not, consequently, generate two revisions to monotheism, as Wright claims – one Christological, the other pneumatological – but he did connect integrally the messiah and the spirit of the exodus. The novelty of Paul’s pneumatology lies less in understanding the spirit as the ongoing manifestation of God’s personal presence – a conviction already present in Isa 63:7– 14 – than in an integral relationship between the narrative of a risen messiah and the holy spirit. 33 I am not altogether certain that the Shekinah, as opposed to the angel or presence of God, is paramount in Isa 63, but, given the merging of traditions, I am willing to accept the presence of the Shekinah for the sake of discussion with Wright, for whom the Shekinah features so prominently in Pauline pneumatology. 34 See further this quotation: “The role of God’s living presence, the glorious Shekinah, is taken by the spirit. Once again, in second-Temple Jewish terms there cannot be a higher pneumatology than this. The spirit is incorporated within the divine identity, the identity which is shaped particularly by the eschatology of YHWH’s return” (PFG 716). 35 Keesmaat, Paul and His Story, 62–64, upon whom Wright claims (PFG 71n306) to “owe a great deal,” discusses the importance of Isa 63 for Pauline theology, though only briefly.

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Finally, the introduction of Isa 63 into Paul’s foreground also provides something that Wright does not: an actual biblical text in which the spirit is associated with the exodus tradition. For all of his effort to demonstrate that the spirit is the Shekinah of the exodus, Wright produces no clear biblical antecedents. Isa 63 provides just that, and its inclusion in the foreground of Paul’s pneumatology would have gone a long way to strengthen Wright’s conviction that in Pauline pneumatology “the role of God’s living presence, the glorious Shekinah, is taken by the spirit” (PFG 716). 6.2 Haggai 2:5 It might be argued that my analysis has truncated Paul’s pneumatology, from the perspective of N. T. Wright, who contends that Paul saw the church as an eschatological temple filled with the spirit. Temple language is absent from Isa 63, and Wright argues vociferously that Paul sees the church as a Shekinah-spirit filled temple. By adopting Wright’s method of attending carefully to contextual considerations, it is possible to argue that the eschatological restoration of the temple lies within the purview of Isa 63 – in Isa 56:1–8, to be exact. That move, however, is unnecessary because, in the book of Haggai, spirit, temple, exodus, and eschatological glory combine to create an apposite foreground to Pauline pneumatology. In an oracle dated to 520 BCE, Haggai is told to say: Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt: my spirit stands in your midst. Do not fear. For thus says the LORD of hosts: once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts. (Hag 2:4–9)

There is no promise in the exodus tradition of the spirit in Israel’s midst. That is why the question in Isa 63:11, “Where is the one who put within them his holy spirit,” is so novel in Israelite literature. Haggai's affirmation that the spirit abides in Israel’s midst is, along with Isa 63, no less an affirmation of the spirit in the exodus tradition. This interpretation is borne out by the choice of the verb, ‫עמד‬, “to stand,” to depict the spirit's presence. The spirit’s standing in Israel’s midst evokes the image of the pillar of cloud which stood in the midst of the Israelites and which was closely associated with the angel of God. The first canonical reference to the angel of God, in fact, occurs in Exod 14:19, in which both this angel and the cloud move from the front of the camp to the rear in order to

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separate the Israelites from the Egyptians. Both the noun, ‫עמוד‬, “pillar,” and the verb, ‫עמד‬, “to stand,” appear in this context. Subsequently, the cloud is said to take its stand at the tent of meeting (Exod 33:9–10; Num 12:5), and the presence of the pillars of cloud and fire are identified with the presence of Yahweh in the midst of the people (Exod 13:21–22; Num 14:14; Deut 1:33). The oracle of Haggai differs in significant ways from Isa 63 – ways that make it perhaps even a more fitting foreground to Pauline pneumatology, were that possible. First, the hymn in Isa 63, while set in the context of a future-oriented new exodus perspective, looks back to the exodus; the spirit is introduced into a hymn about the past. In contrast, the oracle in Hag 2 looks exclusively to the future – probably the eschatological future. The shaking of the heavens and earth, the sea and dry land, even all the nations, seems to reflect eschatological hope rather than the near future of the inhabitants of the small province of Judea after their return from exile. The expectation, too, that the latter glory will exceed the former glory, that the temple will be full of glory – silver, gold, prosperity – is also an indication that the Shekinah, with its glory, will inhabit the temple. And what can this Shekinah be, other than the spirit of the exodus which stands in Israel’s midst? There is no need to rehearse how Wright’s take on Pauline pneumatology would be both weakened and strengthened by the inclusion of a text such as Hag 2:4–9 in the foreground. We did this already with respect to Isa 63. On the one hand, its inclusion would mean that expectations of a restored temple, filled with the spirit, do not “find a radical, unexpected and even shocking new fulfilment” in the context of Pauline pneumatology (PFG 712). On the other hand, had Wright considered Hag 2:4–9 as a foreground to Pauline pneumatology, he would have discovered a salient biblical text on which to base his view that Paul saw the spirit-filled church as the fulfilment of the promise that the Shekinah would return in glory to the temple. In light of Hag 2:4–9, is Pauline pneumatology radical, unexpected, and shocking? No. But it is more squarely biblical, and, for this reason, built upon a remarkable web of Israelite expectations – precisely the web of expectations that Wright thinks are fulfilled within the framework of Pauline pneumatology. 6.3 Dead Sea Scrolls In his analysis of 1 Cor 3:16–17, Wright says that “no ex-Pharisee” could describe the church as a spirit-filled temple “without intending to say that … the indwelling of the spirit constituted the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion” (PFG 712). Twice Wright says that the spirit-filled temple “can only mean” that the Shekinah has returned to the temple as the spirit. Notwithstanding the strength of his rhetoric, with phrases such as “can only mean,”

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Wright offers no specific texts, biblical or post-biblical, to support this statement.36 The closest Wright comes to offering specific texts is a footnote, in which he writes, It would in principle be good to explore further the second-Temple Jewish context of this theme: cf. e.g. 1QS 9.3–6, where the arrival of the ‘spirit of holiness’ constitutes the community as the true ‘house’ in which atonement is made. (PFG 711n283)

It is surprising that Wright, who ably musters evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls elsewhere, does no more than merely mention, in a note no less, a pivotal text from the Dead Sea Scrolls.37 This text, would, like Isa 63:7–14 and Hag 2:4–9, both call into question and confirm his interpretation of Pauline pneumatology. In the Community Rule, the community is to “make atonement for all who freely volunteer for holiness in Aaron and for the house of truth in Israel.”38 They are a living temple, the “house of Israel,” which exercises the priestly vocation of “atonement” (1 QS V, 5–6). Their leaders are an everlasting plantation, a holy house for Israel and the foundation of the holy of holies for Aaron, true witnesses for the judgment and chosen by the will (of God) to atone for the land. (1QS VIII, 5–6)

This community is a “precious cornerstone,” “the most holy dwelling of Aaron … a house of perfection and truth in Israel” (1QS VIII, 7, 9). They exist in order to establish the spirit of holiness in truth eternal, in order to atone for the guilt of iniquity and for the unfaithfulness of sin, and for approval for the earth, without the flesh of burnt offerings and without the fats of sacrifice,

for they are “a holy house for Aaron, in order to form a most holy community, and a house of the Community for Israel, those who walk in perfection (1QS IX, 3–6).39 36

Though it appeared too late for Wright to consult, a detailed and indispensable resource on spirit in the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written by Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, “Historical Origins of the Early Christian Concept of the Holy Spirit: Perspectives from the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 167–240. 37 See, for example, his discussion of 4QMMT and Pauline justification in PFG 930–31. 38 Translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls are from Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls; Study Edition, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997–1998). 39 On a similar combination of conceptions in 4QFlorilegium (4Q174), see Bertel Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament, SNTSMS 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 30–42. See in general John R. Lanci, A New Temple for Corinth: Rhetorical and Archaeological Approaches to Pauline Imagery, StBibLit 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church

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Despite the requisite need for caution in drawing parallels, strong parallels with Paul’s letters leap from the pages of the Community Rule: the church as a living temple, filled with God’s spirit; a penchant for holiness; prayers in lieu of sacrifices; the priestly character of the church; and the need for truth. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer profound contrasts as well. The community, not just a collection of spirit-filled individuals, is the locus of the spirit of holiness; the Corinthians, in contrast, are a fragmented community of cliques. Further, this spirit is associated with eternal truth, while the Corinthians, with their devotion to speaking in tongues with an “unproductive mind” (1 Cor 14:14), fail to strive for the truth. And finally, this spirit of holiness purifies, while shameful Corinthian activities, such as sex with prostitutes, fail to acknowledge that the human body is a spirit-filled temple (1 Cor 6:19). The annual covenant renewal ceremony offers another opportunity to describe the communal dimension of the spirit (1QS I, 21–III, 12): For it is by the spirit of the true counsel of God that are atoned the paths of man, all his iniquities, so that he can look at the light of life. And it is by the holy spirit of the community, in its truth, that he is cleansed of all his iniquities. And by the spirit of uprightness and of humility his sin is atoned. And by the compliance of his soul with all the laws of God his flesh is cleansed by being sprinkled with cleansing waters and being made holy with the waters of repentance. (1QS III, 6–9)

This description compares well with 1 Corinthians, according to which cleansing with water does not automatically produce lives of holiness or communal unity. Paul expends enormous energy to counteract this perspective and to communicate that the Corinthians are an organic holy whole – a temple, a body, a new covenant community. From what we can tell, the Qumran community was imperfect: ingrown, exclusive, obsessed with minutiae demanded of a desert community, and committed to self-referential biblical interpretation. Nevertheless, the Dead Sea Scrolls offer significant points of contact and contrast with Pauline pneumatology. The Corinthians, apparently unlike their desert counterparts, were fractured by rival claims to leadership and competitive hierarchies that arose from misperceptions of the relative worth of spiritual gifts. They lacked a wholesale desire for holiness and allowed moral lapses to fester. The metaphor of the temple, found in more detail in the Dead Sea Scrolls than anywhere else, addresses these Corinthian faults. A spirit-filled temple, for Paul, must exemplify holiness and unity – two great gaps in Corinthian perspectives and practice.

in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); and John R. Levison, Filled with the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 285–307.

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6.4 Summary Alongside Isa 63:7–14 and Hag 2:4–9, these texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls offer significant and solid antecedents to Pauline pneumatology. What difference would their incorporation in Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God have made? First, their inclusion would challenge Wright’s contention that Paul’s pneumatology was radical and shocking. Still, this hardly poses an insurmountable dilemma, since the credibility of Wright’s construction of Pauline pneumatology does not hinge on its novelty. Second, the inclusion of these texts would challenge Wright’s verdict that a spirit-filled temple “can only mean” the return of the long-awaited Shekinah as spirit. While exodus imagery in Isa 63 and Hag 2 do provide support for this point of view, the presence of the Shekinah is muted, at best, in passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which the community is a spirit-filled temple. Third, all of these texts, biblical and post-biblical, situate Pauline pneumatology precisely where Wright wants to situate it: in the world of Second Temple Judaism. They provide substantial evidence that Paul, thoroughly soaked in the language and hopes of second-Temple Judaism, could only write such a thing if he were fully convinced that the promises of YHWH’s return had been fulfilled, not only in Jesus but also in the spirit. (PFG 713)

Bibliography Barth, Karl. The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life. Introduced, translated, and annotated by Michael Raburn. 2002. http://people.duke.edu/~mr33/Barth%20Holy%20Spirit.pdf. Büchsel, Friedrich. Der Geist Gottes im Neuen Testament. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1926. Congar, Yves. I Believe in the Holy Spirit. Translated by David Smith. 3 vols. New York: Seabury, 1983. Repr., New York: Crossroad, 1997. Davies, W. D. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. Dunn, James D. G. Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970. Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Cosmology and the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911. Frey, Jörg. “How Did the Spirit Become a Person?” Pages 343–72 of The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Jörg Frey and John R. Levison. Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. García Martínez, Florentino and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition. 2 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997–1998. Gärtner, Bertel. The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament. SNTSMS 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Gunkel, Hermann. The Influence of the Holy Spirit: The Popular View of the Apostolic Age and the Teaching of the Apostle Paul. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Repr., 2008. Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

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Keesmaat, Sylvia C. Paul and His Story: (Re)Interpreting the Exodus Tradition. JSNTSup 181. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999. Lanci, John R. A New Temple for Corinth: Rhetorical and Archaeological Approaches to Pauline Imagery. StBibLit 1. New York: Lang, 1997. Levison, John R. Filled with the Spirit. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. –. Inspired: The Holy Spirit and the Mind of Faith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. Macchia, Frank D. Justified in the Spirit: Creation, Redemption, and the Triune God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. McKelvey, R. J. The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. Rabens, Volker. “Pneuma and the Beholding of God: Reading Paul in the Context of Philonic Mystical Traditions.” Pages 293–330 of The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Jörg Frey and John R. Levison. Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. –. The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for ReligiousEthical Life. WUNT II 283. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith. New York: Seabury, 1978. Sachs, John R. “‘Do Not Stifle the Spirit’: Karl Rahner, the Legacy of Vatican II, and its Urgency for Theology Today.” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (1996): 15–38. Swete, Henry B. The Holy Spirit in the New Testament: A Study of Primitive Christian Teaching. London: Macmillan, 1909. –. The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church: A Study in the Earliest Christian Teaching in the Age of the Fathers. London: Macmillan, 1912. Repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999. Thiselton, Anthony C. The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, Through the Centuries, and Today. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. Tigchelaar, Eibert J. C. “Historical Origins of the Early Christian Concept of the Holy Spirit: Perspectives from the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Pages 167–240 of The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Jörg Frey and John R. Levison. Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Turner, Max M. B. “Spiritual Gifts Then and Now.” VE 15 (1985): 7–63.

God and His Faithfulness in Paul Aspects of the History of Research in Light of the Letter to the Romans Torsten Jantsch N. T. Wright entitled his monumental work on Paul and his theology Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Titles are statements, and this title shows what Wright supposes to be the center of Paul’s theology: God’s faithfulness. This title seems to emerge from two basic convictions: First, Paul’s Gospel is a message about God. This point is not self-evident. The second basic conviction seems to be that the main characteristic of God is his faithfulness, namely to his promises to Abraham. This assumption is, in various aspects, debatable. We see that the title of Wright’s opus magnum poses many questions. I will address some of them in this essay. First, we will describe aspects of the history of research concerning the role of God in Paul’s letters. Second, we will discuss texts from the Letter to the Romans in order to outline Paul’s concept of God. Third, in a conclusion, we will summarize our observations and compare it with N. T. Wright’s view of Paul’s God.

1. History of Research: Paul’s God1 The recent history of research of the concept of God in Paul’s letters begins with a neglect: There are no detailed studies of God in Paul’s letters before the 1970s, and extensive examinations of this topic date back to the 1990s 1

For the following, see Torsten Jantsch, “Gott alles in allem” (1Kor 15,28): Studien zum Gottesverständnis des Paulus im 1. Thessalonicherbrief und in der korinthischen Korrespondenz, WMANT 129 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011), 1–19 and Larry W. Hurtado, God in New Testament Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), 9–26. Many shorter studies were published dealing with specific questions such as “names” and other designations of God (“explizite Gottesprädikationen”), the issue of monotheism, or the question of the relationship between Jewish and Christian aspects in the concept of God including the problem how to define the relation between God and Jesus Christ; see Jantsch, Gott, 6 with n26–29 and Hurtado, God, 10–17. In the following survey of recent research, however, I will focus on monographs on the concept of God in Paul’s letters.

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and later. In 1975, Nils A. Dahl claimed that God is the “neglected factor” of New Testament scholarship2 in the respect that for more than a generation, the majority of New Testament scholars have not only eliminated direct references to God from their works but have also neglected detailed and comprehensive investigation of statements about God.3

The reason for this neglect has, in my eyes, three reasons. The first one is the pronouncement of Christocentricity – i.e., the view that the person of Christ and particularly his redemptive work on the one side and a person’s faith in and loyalty to Christ on the other is the center of Christian thought and belief. Another reason was Rudolf Bultmann’s theology. Because “every assertion about God is simultaneously an assertion about man and vice versa,” he states, “therefore, Paul’s theology can best be treated as his doctrine of man.”4 Bultmann wanted to avoid making God an object of human considerations, and therefore he rejects any “objectification” of God.5 This had an enormous impact and influence on many exegetes during the second half of the twentieth century. The third reason is that God is not an issue in itself (“Gott an sich”) in the New Testament scriptures and in Paul’s letters. Instead, statements about God serve other argumentative aims.6 But even if this is true, the argument is shaped and determined by underlying convictions concerning God that include persuasions of who God is, what his qualities and attributes are, what he has done, and what his aims are. Another point is that early Christian proclamation included an account of events that happened: e.g., Jesus Christ’s coming, his dying, and his resurrection, which 2 Nils A. Dahl, “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology,” Reflections 73 (1975): 5–8; repr., in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991), 153–63. I cite according to the reprint. 3 Dahl, “Neglected Factor,” 154. 4 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 1:191. Rudolf Bultmann published his Theologie des Neuen Testaments in 1953. Bultmann was criticized for this concept, see, e.g., Halvor Moxnes, Theology in Conflict: Studies in Paul’s Understanding of God in Romans, NovTSup 53 (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 4. 5 Rudolf Bultmann, “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden? [1925],” in Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 26–27. This attempt was criticized, see e.g. Nils A. Dahl, “Die Theologie des Neuen Testaments,” TRu 22 (1954), 21–49, here 42–44; Antoinette C. Wire, “Pauline Theology as an Understanding of God: The Explicit and the Implicit,” (PhD diss., The Claremont Graduate School, 1974), 1–7. 6 Erich Gräßer claimed justly that in Paul’s letters, God is “die frag-lose Voraussetzung … , nicht aber der frag-würdige Gegenstand”; Erich Gräßer, “‘Ein einziger ist Gott’ (Röm 3,30): Zum christologischen Gottesverständnis bei Paulus,” in Der Alte Bund im Neuen: Exegetische Studien zur Israelfrage im Neuen Testament, WUNT 35 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1985), 231–58, here 232 (his emphasis). See also Neil Richardson, Paul’s Language About God (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994), 12.

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were interpreted as God’s activity. That means that early Christian authors, and also Paul, “used concepts of God expressed in words as their arguments. Consequently, we shall have to study what they actually said about God.”7 In his doctoral thesis, published in 1991, Paul-Gerhard Klumbies examines the language of God within its historical context.8 His objective is to prove that Paul (contrary to Jewish texts and texts from the pre-Pauline tradition) does not make God an object of his discussion, which was an issue of Bultmann’s. Indeed, Klumbies’s existentialistic hermeneutics often covers the examined texts. His result is that Paul’s concept of God is shaped by his Christology whose center is salvation; this is the starting point for a completely new theo-logy. In Paul’s letters, there is no continuity with concepts of God in the Old Testament and early Jewish texts. A study which undertakes the examination in a completely different way is Wilhelm Thüsing’s habilitation thesis Per Christum in Deum.9 His issue is the relationship between “christocentricity” and “theocentricity” with regard to Paul’s concept of salvation in his “main letters.”10 Thüsing argues that Jesus Christ’s κυριότης over Christians has its goal in God’s reign (see 1 Cor 3:23; 11:3; 15:28), and its objective is God’s honour (see Phil 2:11; Rom 15:5–12).11 The regularly occurring formula “through Christ” (διὰ Χριστοῦ) shows that Christ’s mediating work has its origin and its goal in God himself (see, e.g., 1 Cor 8:6; cf. also Rom 6:11). Thüsing concludes that Paul’s soteriology is theocentric in its structure – i.e., that God is “Urgrund … und Ziel … von allem, aber er wirkt auch alles,” not only with regard to his activity in creation, but also to redemption, as Rom 11:33–36 shows.12 In her dissertation thesis from 1974, Antoinette Clark Wire uses an interesting approach: She is not interested in Paul’s explicit assertions about God, 7

Moxnes, Theology, 5. He rightly states that “God’s freedom was not expressed through silence but through speech.” 8 Paul-Gerhard Klumbies, Die Rede von Gott bei Paulus in ihrem zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext, FRLANT 155 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). Klumbies’s study develops ideas of his teacher Andreas Lindemann, see Andreas Lindemann, “Die Rede von Gott in der paulinischen Theologie,” Theologie und Glaube 69 (1979): 357–76. 9 Wilhelm Thüsing, Per Christum in Deum: Studien zum Verhältnis von Christozentrik und Theozentrik in den paulinischen Hauptbriefen, NTAbh 2/1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1965). The 3rd ed. (1986) was published as vol. 1 of Gott und Christus in der paulinischen Soteriologie (there was no second volume). This edition has an appendix where Thüsing answers questions and defends his book against critique, and references were extended. The other parts of the book remained unchanged, and the paging is the same. Therefore I cite according the 1st ed. 10 Thüsing examines 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthains, Galatians, Philippians, and Romans. 11 Thüsing, Per Christum, 256 passim, calls this “die Hinordnung des Herrentums Christi auf Gott,” which is a common motif in Paul’s letters. 12 Thüsing, Per Christum, 1. As a result, he claims, “Welt und Menschen und alles Geschehen, das sie betrifft, sind unbedingt von Gott abhängig und auf ihn hingeordnet.”

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but she seeks the views that are implied and wants to make them explicit. Her result is that the main issue of Paul’s concept of God is the weakness of God.13 This surprising outcome of her study is based on the selected texts, which seem to be chosen in light of Wire’s hypothesis,14 but also on Wire’s methodology to seek an underlying (“implicit”) unifying intention that is set against the explicit assertions which, without any doubt, affirm also God’s power, his sovereignty, his divinity, eternity, and glory. Halvor Moxnes too points to Paul’s implicit theology. He started his doctoral thesis Theology in Conflict15 under the supervision of Nils A. Dahl, and he develops, not surprisingly, approaches and ideas of Dahl in his monograph. He examines Paul’s language about God within its literary and historical context. After an examination of formulaic expressions in Romans and of “God-language” in Rom 1–4 and 9–11, he focuses on Rom 4:13–22. He shows that Paul’s historical context is the conflict about the identity of the Church, and that Paul gave expression to the historical conflicts over the law, mission, group identity etc. in the form of a controversy over the understanding of God. That is, Paul theologized the conflict.16

That means that Paul’s argument in Romans is shaped by his “implicit theology which we may describe as Paul’s understanding of God.”17 Jochen Flebbe’s dissertation thesis is another important study on God in Romans.18 Moxnes’s thesis focused on Rom 4:13–22, so that many aspects of Romans remained for further examination, and therefore Flebbe continued with this subject. He focuses on statements about God in Rom 3:1–8, 21–31; 4; 9; 11:25–36; and 15:7–13.19 Flebbe is right in his point that God plays the decisive role in the argument of Romans, at least as the initiator of the message of justification and of the salvation of mankind, which derives from God’s sovereignty and his position as the creator. Against the view that God is defined in a new way by the Christ-event, Flebbe claims:

13

Wire, Pauline Theology, esp. 266–67. She examines 1 Cor 1:17–2:16; 2 Cor 4:1–12; 11:21b–12:10; the µὴ γένοιτοassertions and the qal waḥomer-arguments in Romans. 15 Moxnes, Theology. 16 Moxnes, Theology, 9. 17 Moxnes, Theology, 9. 18 Jochen Flebbe, Solus Deus: Untersuchungen zur Rede von Gott im Brief des Paulus an die Römer, BZNW 158 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008). 19 Flebbe selected these texts on the basis of rhetorical aspect, i.e. conclusions of sections of the letter (Rom 3:21–31; 11:25–36) and 15:7–13 as the closing of the whole writing. Rom 3:1–8; 4; and 9 are selected because God plays an important role in Paul’s argument. There are several debatable aspects in Flebbe’s thesis. Among others, his selection of texts is not fully convincing. See my critique of Flebbe in Jantsch, Gott, 16–18. 14

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Vielmehr wird die Identität und Selbigkeit Gottes im Hinblick auf Schrift und Tradition ausgesagt. Es geht darum, dass genau so, wie die Schrift und auch die Tradition Gott bestimmen, sich Gott in seinem Handeln in Christus manifestiert.20

That means: God is the same as ever, his identity does not change, and the Christ-event does not define God in a new way. In his dissertation thesis, Neil Richardson examines “Paul’s language about God.” This title shows Richardson’s theological awareness that God is a mystery,21 and that we only can study assertions about God which he calls “God-language.” Unlike the studies of Moxnes and Flebbe, his research does not focus on the Letter to the Romans. Richardson examines Paul’s language about God in Rom 9–11, 1 Cor 1:18–3:23, 2 Cor 2:14–4:6, and in Paul’s paraenesis. After that, he discusses the relationship “between Paul’s language about God and his language about Christ.” As a result, Richardson claims that Paul “has used traditional language about God in new contexts and new ways.”22 “Traditional” means that designations, descriptions, and assertions are the same as in the Old Testament and the early Jewish tradition. “New contexts and new ways” means that Paul modifies, redeploys, and redefines traditional Jewish God-language in the light of the Christ-event.23 Concerning the relationship between Paul’s God-language and his Christ-language, Richardson justly states that Paul’s “thought and writings are both theocentric and christocentric; Paul’s language about God and his language about Christ are so intertwined that neither can properly be understood without the other.”24 He claims that there is continuity and discontinuity between Paul’s language about God and traditional Jewish God-language, and that “Christ universalized and radicalized the Old Testament understanding of the grace and love of God.”25 “Universalized” means that the Gentiles are no longer excluded from God’s grace and his salvation. “Radicalized” means, according to Richardson, that in Paul’s gospel aspects are stressed that can be found in the Old Testament but are not very prominent there – e.g., the idea that God justifies the ungodly, which Paul traces back to Abraham (see Rom 4). In my own study on God in Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and in his correspondence with Corinth,26 I had two objectives: First, I showed that Paul’s argument is theocentric not only in his Letter to the Romans (as Moxnes and Flebbe have demonstrated), but also in his earlier writings before the Galatian crisis. My second issue was to demonstrate that there is a set of 20

Flebbe, Solus Deus, 445. See Richardson, Paul’s Language, 10–12. 22 Richardson, Paul’s Language, 308. 23 He calls this a “reminting of traditional God-language” (Richardson, Paul’s Language, 309). 24 Richardson, Paul’s Language, 312. 25 Richardson, Paul’s Language, 313–14. 26 Jantsch, Gott. 21

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basic convictions concerning God that can be deduced from Paul’s letters that, according to the current issue, are selected and rearranged to support Paul’s argument.27 A few years after her extensive and important study on the “names of God,” in which she examined early Christian predications of God within their ancient Hellenistic Roman and early Jewish contexts,28 Christiane Zimmermann published a concise but significant monograph in which she presented the theocentric substructure of the Letter to the Galatians.29 According to her, the main issue of Galatians is that God is the father of believers, who, by the Spirit, participate in Christ’s position as the Son of God. Zimmermann emphasizes the continuity between Paul’s proclamation in Galatians and Old Testament and Jewish concepts of God. This survey of the history of research can, of course, only be selective. Particularly after 2000, a number of books on God in the New Testament were published, which I can only mention here.30 The most recent and unique one among them was published by Hermann Spieckermann and Reinhard Feldmeier.31 This book is characterized by a deep integration of Old and New Testament aspects. The authors do not only outline predications of God, but display also narrative aspects and important motifs connected to the issue. Further monographs outlined the topic of God in the Gospel of Mark32 and in the Letter of James.33

27

See Jantsch, Gott, esp. 397–412. The constant motifs are outlined in 405–10. Christiane Zimmermann, Die Namen des Vaters: Studien zu ausgewählten neutestamentlichen Gottesbezeichnungen vor ihrem frühjüdischen und paganen Sprachhorizont, AGJU 69 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 29 Christiane Zimmermann, Gott und seine Söhne: Das Gottesbild des Galaterbriefs, WMANT 135 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2013). 30 Andrew A. Das and Frank J. Matera, eds., The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Paul J. Achtemeier on the Occasion of His Seventy-fifth Birthday (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002); Jerome H. Neyrey, Render to God: New Testament Understandings of the Divine (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004); Kurt Erlemann, Wer ist Gott? Antworten des Neuen Testaments (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2015); Larry W. Hurtado, God. 31 Hermann Spieckermann and Reinhard Feldmeier, Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine biblische Gotteslehre, Topoi biblischer Theologie 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); English translation: Hermann Spieckermann and Reinhard Feldmeier, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). 32 Gudrun Guttenberger, Die Gottesvorstellung im Markusevangelium, BZNW 123 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). 33 Stefan Wenger, Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios: Eine exegetische Studie über das Gottesbild im Jakobusbrief, ATANT 100 (Zürich: TVZ, 2011). 28

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2. God in Romans, or the Theocentricity of Paul’s Argument After our short survey of the history of research, we shall outline aspects of the “concept of God.” Paul’s Letter to the Romans gives us sufficient material to consider this question. 2.1 The “Theocentric Frame” of Romans If we consider the significance of God for Paul’s argument in his Letter to the Romans, we shall start with the praescript (1:1–7), the proem (1:8–15), and the statement which introduces the topic of the Letter to the Romans (1:16– 17). Already here, we see that Paul’s message has its basis in convictions about God. 2.1.1 Theocentricity in the Praescript (1:1–7) Paul claims that he is called as Apostle, i.e., that he is separated to proclaim the Gospel (v. 1). This message is specified as εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ θεοῦ, i.e., it has its origin in God himself (genitivus auctoris, v. 1). This is supported by v. 2, where Paul claims that God has promised this Gospel long before through his prophets in the sacred scriptures. In vv. 3–4, we learn the content of God’s Gospel: It is the Son of God, according to the flesh a descendant of David, according to the Spirit appointed to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. The aspect that Paul has received his apostolate through Jesus Christ (v. 5) does not contradict the theocentric orientation of the praescript. As texts like 1 Cor 8:6 show, for Paul the idea is essential that God is the initiator and Jesus Christ is the mediator of God’s actions. This seems to be the background of Paul’s claim that the Christians in Rome are “called ones of Jesus Christ” in v. 6, whereas in v. 7 the same people are the “loved ones by God” and those “called to be saints.” Here, God is the initiator of their calling, as the parallel of κλητοῖς ἁγίοις and ἀγαπητοῖς θεοῦ shows. Paul ends his praescript with the typical salutation, in which God and the Lord Jesus Christ are set side by side as the source of grace and peace (v. 7). The praescript of Romans shows that Paul’s apostleship as well as its content, the story of Jesus Christ, has its origin in God himself – it is theocentric. 2.1.2 Theocentricity in the Proem (1:8–15) This theocentric structure occurs also in the proem (1:8–15), which starts with the report of his thanksgiving to God through Jesus Christ (vv. 8–10). This motif is characteristic for Paul: Jesus Christ is the mediator of God’s actions towards humans and the mediator of the people’s gratitude and praise

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towards God.34 Paul thanks God that the belief of the Christians in Rome is well-known in the whole world. This means that Paul sees the origin of the addressee’s faith in God’s activity. In v. 9 Paul calls his message the “Gospel of his (God’s) son,” which refers back to his statement in vv. 3–4. This implicitly designates God as the initiator of the Gospel. Paul sees his work and apostolate as a service and worship for God (v. 9: λατρεύω [τῷ θεῷ]) – Paul understands his work as a holy service for God. This idea will become clearer in 15:9–13: The aim of Paul’s work is that the Gentiles praise God. This means that the Gospel has its origin in God, but its aim is also God. As Rom 1:9–10 (11–15) show, it is Paul’s conviction that God even directs his ways and work – he prays to God to let him come to the Christians in Rome. 2.1.3 The Theocentricity of the Thesis of Romans (1:16–17) After the proem, Paul proposes the basic assumption of his whole Letter to the Romans (1:16–17). Here he introduces the εὐαγγέλιον as a power of God εἰς σωτηρίαν. The syntagm with εἰς has final sense and expresses the effect of the Gospel as God’s power: It effects salvation for all who have faith, Jews as well as Gentiles. Paul explains in 1:17 why the Gospel is God’s power to salvation: It is because God’s righteousness is revealed in the Gospel, “from faith to faith,” and a quotation from the Scriptures (Hab 2:4) substantiates this view – “The righteous one will live by faith.” There are many questions concerning this very condensed statement,35 but one point is clear: Here again, we see that, for Paul, God is the initiator and the decisive actor of the events that lead to salvation. God is the one who causes the salvific effect of the Gospel for everyone who has faith, it is his power that effects salvation which is “the power of the creator God” (PFG 916). Belief is an effect of the spirit’s work and the proclamation of the gospel (PFG 917). In Wright’s interpretation, the statement of Rom 1:16–17 is eminently theocentric. Considering the quotation of Hab 2:4 within its context, according to Wright, “God’s righteousness is revealed, on the basis of the faithfulness of God, for the benefit of those who have faith” – i.e., “God has been faithful to the covenant by establishing, through the Messiah, an Abrahamic people whose only defining characteristic is pistis” (PFG 1470). 2.1.4 The Aim of the Gospel for the Gentiles (15:7–13) Towards the end of his Letter to the Romans, Paul writes about his apostolate for the Gentiles and its effect (15:7–13) – a section which N. T. Wright justly calls “the theological climax to Romans” (PFG 1494). This section is a key

34 35

See my discussion of Thüsing in section 1 above. Cf. the discussion in PFG 1466–71, see also 887–88.

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text for the interpretation of the whole letter.36 In vv. 7–8, Paul summarizes his argument concerning reciprocal acceptance in the Christian community (cf. 14:1–15:6), and these sentences lead to a new topic in vv. 9–13. Paul refers to God’s promise to the Fathers (v. 8) and affirms that the aim of the incorporation of the Gentiles into Israel’s salvation is that they praise God (v. 9, see already v. 6), which is proved by a number of quotations from the Scriptures.37 These quotations reveal the praise of God by all nations as the reason for the salvation in Christ, as Wright claims, “it was the vision of a new temple, a new house of praise, where songs originally sung in the shrine of Jerusalem would arise from hearts and mouths in every nation” (PFG 1494). The idea from the quotation from Isa 11:10 LXX in Rom 15:12 is picked up in the designation of God in v. 13 as “the God of hope” (ὁ θεὸς τῆς ἐλπίδος). Paul has invented this syntagm,38 but it is based on motifs from the Old Testament and early Jewish texts: In the Psalms, God and hope are connected regularly,39 and this connection expresses the confidence that God will help in a dangerous situation. In Rom 15:13, the designation of God as “the God of hope” is the addressee of a prayer: This “God of hope” shall fill the Christians in Rome with all joy and peace in their faith so that they have plenty of hope in the power of the holy spirit. This shows that God himself is the origin and the giver of χαρά and εἰρήνη in faith and of ἐλπίς; he bestows the believers with them by the power of the holy spirit. We can understand this as a hint that God not only opens ways to salvation for the Gentiles, but that he himself empowers them by the holy spirit to gain this salvation. This shows without any doubt what Paul meant in Rom 1:16(–17) when he called the Gospel a power of God εἰς σωτηρίαν for everyone who has faith. 2.2 God’s Impartiality – a “Theological Axiom” in Romans 1:18–3:20 Not only the frame of the Letter to the Romans is shaped by a theocentric structure, but furthermore the whole writing. This is also valid for the section 1:18–3:20, which we will discuss now.40

36

Cf. Flebbe, Solus Deus, 406. Ps LXX 17:50/2 Sam 22:50; Deut 32:43; Ps LXX 116:1; Isa LXX 11:10. 38 See Flebbe, Solus Deus, 426. 39 Cf. Pss LXX 61:8; 64:6. According to Pss LXX 72:28; 77:7 and other instances, the prayer sets his hope in God. See also 2 Macc 7:14. 40 Cf. Andrew T. Lincoln, who has pointed out that the section Rom 1:18–4:25 begins and ends with God (Andrew T. Lincoln, “From Wrath to Justification: Tradition, Gospel, and Audience in the Theology of Romans 1:18–4:25,” in Pauline Theology: Volume III: Romans, eds. David M. Hay and E. Elizabeth Johnson [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002], 130–59, here 155). 37

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After the thesis about Romans (1:16–17), a section begins whose topic is God’s impartial wrath upon all humans, Gentiles as well as Jews (1:18–3:20). This section is, so to speak, a “long account of universal sinfulness” (PFG 739). N. T. Wrigth justly states that Paul’s objective is not to answer the question, “Where did evil come from?” (PFG 740), but rather to explain how God treats sinful humans. The assertion in 1:18 is the header of this section: God’s wrath “is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (ESV), and indeed, the topic of God’s judgment determines this section. According to Wright, the revealed wrath of God (Rom 1:18) is a future event (PFG 767). This interpretation seems to neglect two aspects: ἀποκαλύπτεται in 1:18 is present tense, and, more decisively, Paul points in 3:21 to the revelation of God’s righteousness which happened “now” (νυνὶ δὲ … δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ πεφανέρωται) – i.e., in the Christ-event or the gospel. That means there is a temporal sequence of the revelation of God’s wrath and his rightouesness; the latter has changed the situation which was determined by God’s wrath. This aspect becomes clearer once we consider that God’s wrath not only refers to his eschatological judgement, but also to his will to judge the ungodly,41 and this will is already revealed. In 1:19–32, Paul uses typical motifs of Jewish polemic against Gentiles: Their exchange of true worship (1:19–23) leads to immorality, understood as surrender to their sinfulness and desires (1:24–31), whose punishment is death (1:32). Within this context, God’s wrath appears as death sentence. In 2:1–16, a subsection of 2:1–29, Paul changes his style and directly accuses a fictive interlocutor. It is not clear who this interlocutor is, but there is reason to regard him as a Jew who does not believe in Christ Jesus.42 Important for our issue is the “theological axiom” of God’s impartiality, as displayed in 2:1–16.43 According to this section (esp. vv. 11–16), God’s judgment is true and without any partiality: Everybody, Gentiles as well as Jews, will be judged according to their deeds – Gentiles without the Law will perish without the Law, and those who sin under the Law (i.e., the Jews) will be judged by the Law. His objective is to show that Jews too are sinners – and therefore, “in the coming judgement, Jews and gentiles will be on exactly the 41

I have shown this in Jantsch, “Gott alles in allem,” 113–35. Particularly 1 Thess 2:16 and Rom 1:18, 32 can only be explained coherently if we understand God’s wrath as “entschiedenen Strafwille[n] Gottes, der auf die Äußerung in einem richterlichen Akt zielt, aber mit dieser nicht identisch ist” (120). 42 In Rom 2:17, the interlocutor is identified as Ἰουδαῖος, but there is no indication that the fictive partner in the discussion has changed. The basic opposition between Jews and Gentiles which determines 2:17–29 supports this interpretation. 43 Cf. Jouette Bassler, Divine Impartiality: Paul and a Theological Axiom, SBLDS 59 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982); Jouette Bassler, “Divine Impartiality in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” NovT 26 (1984): 43–58.

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same footing” (PFG 768). This “theological axiom” is the basic theological conviction that determines Rom 2:1–3:20 because all humans, Gentiles and Jews, are under God’s wrath. In discussing Rom 2–3, N. T. Wright focuses on 2:17–3:8 (PFG 836–40). He understands 2:17–3:8 as a section dealing with “God’s purpose, through Israel, for the world” (PFG 838) – namely, that God will save the world through Israel. If Paul speaks about Israel’s unfaithfulness (3:3: ἡ ἀπιστία αὐτῶν), this refers to “their failure to do what their Abrahamic and Isaianic vocation demanded” (PFG 838). As a result, God has sent “the ‘faithful Israelite’, the Messiah” (PFG 839) “whose death has accomplished God’s saving plan” (PFG 879). Thus, Wright can claim that “the divine faithfulness has been embodied in the Israel-faithfulness of the Messiah” (PFG 910) because Jesus the Messiah represents Israel and sums up in himself “Israel’s vocation as the elect people of the covenant God” (PFG 910). The identification of the Messiah with Israel is a debatable aspect. Furthermore, Wright’s interpretation of 2:17–3:8 does not carefully consider the whole argument of (1:18–3:20), whose objective is to prove the guilt of Gentiles and Jews. Thus, this is the counterpart to 9:30–10:21, where Israel’s failure is interpreted as unbelief in the Gospel and as a misunderstanding of God (see esp. 9:30–10:3).

After a discussion of the equal status of Gentiles and Jews before God in 2:17–29 and a short discussion with a fictive interlocutor in 3:1–8,44 Paul proves his accusation of all humans with a number of Old Testament quotations in 3:9–20. Summarizing Paul’s argument in this section, his main argument consists of two aspects of equality: The first is the “theological axiom” that God treats all humans, Gentiles as well as Jews, equally – namely, according to their deeds. The second is an anthropological one: All humans, Gentiles as well as Jews, are equal with regard to their status before God as sinners because of their deeds. In other words, sin is “an infection from which all humans, including Jews, were suffering” (PFG 770). Therefore, Paul concludes, all humans are under God’s impartial wrath, or, as Wright puts it, “God will show no partiality: there will be no ‘favoured nation clause’” (PFG 768), which is a “biblical maxim” and “a standard Jewish theme” (PFG 1087, cf. also 939). The criterion of God’s judging45 are the people’s deeds, which are judged according to God’s Law (νόµος, see 2:12–29; 3:19–20). According to Rom 1:18–3:20, God is a just and impartial judge. 2.3 The Revelation of God’s Righteousness and Justification through Faith: Romans 3:21–31 The theological axiom of God’s impartiality is not only the theological ground for God’s wrath toward Jews and Gentiles, but also for his grace concerning Jews and Gentiles who set their faith in Jesus Christ – i.e., this con44 This short dialogue includes a first argument about Israel’s situation with regard to God’s covenant with the patriarchs (3:1–3), which is dropped until Rom 9–11. 45 Paul uses the lexemes κρίνοµαι (2:12, 16; 3:6), κατακρίνοµαι (2:1), and κρίµα (2:3).

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viction concerning God also determines Paul’s argument in Rom 3:21–5:11. Here we will focus on the first section, Rom 3:21–31. This section is a counterpart to 1:18–3:20, as the parallel of the initial expressions shows: 1:18: Ἀποκαλύπτεται γὰρ ὀργὴ θεοῦ ἀπ᾿ οὐρανοῦ 3:21: Νυνὶ δὲ … δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ πεφανέρωται

After the thesis of the whole letter in 1:16–17 (here v. 17) and the question of the interlocutor of 3:5, the lexeme δικαιοσύνη, referring to God, occurs for the first time in 3:21. This expression and the syntagm δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ occur primarily in Rom 3–4. God’s righteousness is an object of intense scholarly debate.46 N. T. Wright defines God’s righteousness as follows: The phrase does not denote a human status which Israel’s God gives, grants, imparts or imputes … or a human characteristic which ‘counts’ with God … Nor does it denote the saving power of the one God … It remains its primary scriptural meaning, which is that of God’s covenant faithfulness. (PFG 996, see also 795–804)

This is indeed an important point since God’s faithfulness to his promises to the patriarchs – above all, to Abraham – is emphasized several times in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (see Rom 4:13–25; 9:9; 11:1–2). But Wright identifies too hastily God’s righteousness with his faithfulness.47 And, as a glance at the Old Testament will show, this is not the “primary scriptural meaning” of God’s righteousness. It is important to see that Paul himself defines God’s righteousness in Rom 3:26. According to these assertions, God’s righteousness has its origin in God’s own attribute of being righteous, and it is realized insofar as God justifies a person who has faith in Jesus. It is particularly remarkable that lexemes of the semantic domain δίκαιος, δικαιοσήνη κτλ. cannot be found in Rom 1:18–3:20 (except 3:5).48 In this section, Paul uses the lexemes κρίνειν (2:12, 16; 3:6, 7), κατακρίνειν (2:1), and κρίµα (2:2; 3:8) to denote God’s juridicial justice, by which he condemns the sinner. This means, in my opinion, that Paul (except 3:5) avoids speaking about God’s δικαιοσύνη in Rom 1:18–3:20. This means he reserves δικαιοσύνη to denote God’s acting, which he discusses in the section beginning with Rom 3:21, whereas the formulation of κρίµα … κατὰ ἀλήθειαν refers to God’s just sentence as judge, which is discussed in 1:18–3:20. Beginning with Rom 3:21, however, the syntagm “God’s right46

See Michael Wolter, Der Brief an die Römer: Röm 1–8, EKKNT 6.1 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 2014), 119–25 for a concise discussion of the history of research. 47 This interpretation of God’s righteousness as his faithfulnesss to the covenant, is challenged by Charles Lee Irons, The Righteousness of God: A Lexical Examination of the Covenant-Faithfulness Interpretation, WUNT II 386 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). 48 The expression τὸ κρίµα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν κατὰ ἀλήθειαν (2:2) is not a synonym for δικαιοσύνη.

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eousness” refers to God’s acting by which he justifies the sinner instead of comdemning him (see 3:26 [cf. 3:25]; 4:5–6). God’s justifying action can best be explained against the background of the Septuagint, where lexemes of the domain δικ- are used to translate words derived from the Hebrew root ‫צדק‬. In light of a number of Old Testament texts, δικαιοσύνη (sc. τοῦ θεοῦ) is paralleled with God’s help and saving actions49 and also with his grace and mercy.50 If we take into account this background of the motif in the Old Testament, it becomes clear that God’s righteousness refers to his saving action in which he is merciful and grants his grace to humans who are not worthy because they are sinners. It is important for our issue that, according to Rom 3:21–31, God is also impartial concerning his saving (i.e., his justifying) righteousness. All humans, Jews as well as Gentiles, are sinners (see Rom 1:18–3:20; 3:22–24); therefore God justifies them on the basis of faith. This motif has its origin in the story of Abraham in Gen 15:6, as Paul shows in Rom 4. So we conclude that Paul’s issue of justification is grounded in his convictions concerning God: His righteousness refers to God’s saving activity, his grace, and mercy. The basis for this concept of salvation is Christ’s death (see Rom 3:25), 51 which is, again, interpreted as an event initiated by God. 2.4 A Fresh Interpretation of Monotheistic Belief: Romans 3:29–30 The assertions of Rom 3:21–26 (which will be developed and substantiated in 4:1–5:11) lead to questions of an interlocutor (or, more likely, to a fictive discussion) in 3:27 that are answered in a very short manner. After that, Paul deduces in 3:28: “For we conclude that a man is justified by faith without works of the law,” and he continues in 3:29–30 with a theological argument. Paul uses the syntagm εἷς ὁ θεός in v. 30. This formulation does not directly derive from the Septuagint, as, e.g., Wright claims when he states, “Paul returns to the most foundational confession of faith, the Shema” (PFG 848). A similar wording occurs only in Mal 2:10, but θεὸς εἷς refers here to “the one and the same God” who has created Israel. In early Jewish texts, εἷς (ὁ) θεός (or θεὸς εἷς) becomes a confessional formula which opposes the one and only 49

See, e.g., Pss LXX 30:2; 39:11; 70:15; 97:2; Isa 45:8; 46:13; 56:1b; Jdg 5:11; 1 Sam 12:7; Mic 6:5. See Frank Crüsemann, “Jahwes Gerechtigkeit (Ṣedāqā/ṣädäq) im Alten Testament,” EvT 36 (1976): 427–50. 50 See, e.g., Pss LXX 35:11; 114:5. This interpretation of God’s righteousness as his saving justice traces back to Hermann Cremer, Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhang ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1899). 51 The interpretation of Rom 3:25 (as well as the understanding of Christ’s death) is debated, see, e.g., Stefan Schreiber, “Das Weihegeschenk Gottes: Eine Deutung des Todes Jesu in Röm 3,25,” ZNW 97 (2006): 88–110 and Alexander Weiß, “Christus Jesus Als Weihegeschenk oder Sühnemal?” ZNW 105 (2014): 294–302.

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God to the idols of the Gentiles.52 The more common formulation combines µόνος and θεός,53 but this is, of course, synonymous, and this is also valid for formulations in which κύριος is used instead of θεός, such as the basic Jewish confession, the Shema Israel, in Deut 6:4–5.54 Paul modifies this formula in 1 Cor 8:6,55 and in Gal 3:30 he uses it, similarly to Rom 3:29–30, to justify his argument with this theological principle.56 In Rom 3:29–30, Paul concludes from this rationale that, if there is only one God, he is God for Jews and for Gentiles. This leads to the consequence that, if God is God also for Gentiles and not only for Jews, another criterion than circumcision must be the basis of the justification – namely faith.57 In sum, Rom 3:29–30 shows that Paul’s argument is based on convictions concerning God. 2.5 God is Sovereign to Justify the Ungodly: Theology in Romans 4 It is important to see that Paul’s argument in Rom 4 serves to prove assertions which Paul made earlier when he declared that his Gospel is in accordance with the Prophets (3:21), and that he, by his Gospel, does not nullify the Law, but on the contrary, upholds it (3:31). As the following section on Abraham (Rom 4) shows, νόµος in 3:31 refers most likely to the Pentateuch. Paul proves that his Gospel is in accordance to the Scriptures. Therefore, Abraham is not the focus of Rom 4, nor is his faith. One can rather say that Abraham in Rom 4 serves to prove that Paul’s proclamation of God is in accordance with God’s story with the patriarchs as it is told in the Scriptures. N. T. Wright would surely agree that Abraham as such is not the issue in Rom 4.58 According to him, the objective of the section is to show how Gentiles participate in the covenant – namely by election (PFG 1002–7, see also 996). This neglects the connection to 3:21–31 and the assertions about God in Rom 4, but it only shifts the focus – i.e., that to read Rom 4 as a covenantal argument and not as a theocentric argument is possible. The theocentric orientation of Rom 4 is shown by the important assertion of 4:5, where, in the form of a participial predication of God, God is said to be the one who justifies the ungodly (ὁ δικαίων τὸν ἀσεβῆ).59 The “ungodly” 52

See, e.g., Philo, Cher. 83; Spec. 1.30, 52, 65, 67; 3.29; 4.159; Opif. 171; Leg. 2.1–2, 51; 3.82, 105; Josephus, A.J. 8.335, 337; Ps.-Phoc. 54; Sib. Or. 3:11; 4:30. 53 This formula occurs already in the Septuagint, see, e.g., 2 Kgs 19:15, 19; 2 Macc 1:24; 7:37; Ps LXX 85:10; Isa 37:16, 10. In early Jewish literature the formula occurs, e.g., in LAE 13:5; T. Jos. 8:5; Aristob. 132, 139. 54 Cf. also Zech 14:9; Dan 3:17–18. 55 See Jantsch, Gott, 169–72. 56 For the use of the formulations in early Christian literature, see Jantsch, Gott, 171–72. 57 This was particularly pointed out by Wright, PFG 641. 58 N. T. Wright deals with Rom 4 in PFG 848–50 and N. T. Wright, “Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4,” JSNT 35 (2013): 207–41. 59 See Ernst Käsemann, An die Römer, HNT 8a (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1980), 105.

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here refers to Abraham, who, according to a number of early Jewish texts, is seen as a “proselyte” who converted from idolatry to the worship of the one and true God.60 This means that Abraham, before his conversion, is esteemed as a Gentile idolator similarly to the characterization of Gentiles in Rom 1:18–32. The other side of this aspect is that God did not change; he is the same God in Paul’s days as he was in the days of Abraham. God acts in the justification of Gentiles exactly as he did in the beginning of Israel’s election when he justified Abraham. God acts in the same manner today as he acted in the past – this is the theological principle of Paul’s argument in Romans, particularly (but not only) in Rom 4. In Rom 4:7–8, Paul uses a citation from Ps LXX 31:1–2 in order to clarify that the syntagm “God credits righteousness” (NIV; ὁ θεὸς λογίζεται δικαιοσύνην) refers to the idea that “God forgives transgressions, covers sins; he does not count his sins.” According to this section, δικαιόω, λογίζοµαι δικαιοσύνη, µὴ λογίζοµαι ἁµαρτίαν, and ἀφίηµι αἱ ἀνοµίαι are synonymous expressions. As 4:6 shows, Paul understands the passive forms (λογίζεται, ἐλογίσθη, ἀφέθησαν, ἐπεκαλύφθησαν) as passivum divinum. In the following section (4:9–12), Paul connects the blessing of Ps LXX 31:1–2 (cited in Rom 4:7–8) with the citation of Gen 15:661 and argues that the blessing (and its content: the forgiveness of sins) refers to Abraham when he was not circumcised. Therefore Abraham is the father of all who believe, whether uncircumcised or circumcised – i.e., might they be Gentiles or Jews. In short, this argument has its basis not only in the conviction that God acted in the past in the same manner as in the present, but also in the conviction that God is sovereign to justify whom he wants. (This argument of God’s sovereignty is pointed out more clearly in Rom 9:10–29.) Therefore, as Paul discusses in Rom 4:13–25, Abraham is the father of many nations – not “only to those who are of the law” (i.e., the Jews), “but also to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all” (NIV), and this formulation includes Jews as well as Gentiles. This means that God fulfills his promise to Abraham that he will be the father of many nations. The reason for this inclusion of the Gentiles is based on convictions about God, as Wright puts it, it is the “same God, same faith, same justification” (PFG 850). 60

See Jub. 11:15–17; Apoc. Ab. 8:1–5; Philo, Abr. 69–72; Virt. 212–216; Josephus, A.J. 1.154ff.; Gen. Rab. 39:8. See Siegfried Kreuzer, “‘Der den Gottlosen rechtfertigt’ (Röm 4,5): Die frühjüdische Einordnung von Gen 15 als Hintergrund für das Abrahambild und die Rechtfertigungslehre des Paulus,” TBei 33 (2002): 208–19; Flebbe, Solus Deus, 194– 205. For Rom 4 as a whole, see Moxnes, Theology, 103–206, 231–82. According to N. T. Wright, the syntagm refers to the Gentiles who will be justified, see Wright, “Paul and the Patriarch,” 223 and PFG 849–51, 1004. His reading of Rom 4 was criticized by Jan Lambrecht, “Romans 4: A Critique of N. T. Wright,” JSNT 36 (2013): 189–94. 61 Wright justly states that Rom 4 is “a sustained and quite detailed exposition of Gen 15” (PFG 996).

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This point becomes clearer in the following sections of Rom 4. In Rom 4:17, we find two further participle predications of God: Abraham believed in God who makes alive the dead and who calls the things which do not exist into being (θεοῦ τοῦ ζῳοποιοῦντος τοὺς νεκροὺς καὶ καλοῦντος τὰ µὴ ὄντα ὡς62 ὄντα). Both predications are rooted in Jewish tradition.63 These predications seem to add unexpected aspects, but Paul has chosen them with due consideration: As 2 Kgs 5:7 (cf. 2 Esd 9:8–9) shows, the idea that God kills and makes alive emphasizes God’s power, and this is also connected to Jewish monotheistic belief (see Deut 32:39 within its context; 2 Esd 19:6) in contexts where God’s power is highlighted. According to 1 Sam 2:6 (cf. Sir 11:14; Wis 16:13), this motif particularly accentuates God’s sovereignty to elect and reject whom he wants – which fits exactly Paul’s main argument in Rom 4. In Rom 4:23–25, Paul uses the motif that God makes alive the dead in order also to connect the faith of Abraham to the faith of Christians who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. The aspect of God’s sovereignty and power is highlighted because Paul calls God ὁ καλῶν τὰ µὴ ὄντα ὡς ὄντα in 4:17. This is traced back to Gen 1:5, 8, 10 (cf. Ps LXX 49:1; 146:4), where the verb καλέω is connected to God’s action as creator, which in itself emphasizes God’s mighty power over against all created beings.64 At this point, Abraham’s faith comes into play, and therefore I must limit my initial assertion that neither Abraham nor his faith are in focus in Rom 4. Of course, there is a double parallel in Rom 4. The first is that God justified Abraham in the past and that he justifies today on the same basis – namely, faith. Paul also points to a second parallel: The faith of Christians is parallel to Abraham’s faith (4:17–25). Christians believe that God has raised Jesus from the dead (4:23–25), as Abraham believed in God who makes alive the dead (4:17–22, see PFG 849). This second parallel, however, supports the thesis that the basic argument in Rom 4 is theocentric since the point of the analogy between the faith of Abraham and of Christians is that God makes alive the dead – i.e., it is a basic conviction concerning God and his action. 2.6 God’s Love as the Motive of His Acting: Romans 5:1–11 and 8:31–39 Romans 8:31–39 is part of the section in which Paul discusses the hope of salvation in light of grief and suffering (8:17–30) and which ends in a number of assertions where Paul states that “all things work together for good” (ESV; 62

῾Ως does not mean “as if,” but has a consecutive sense (“so that it exists”), see Eduard Lohse, Der Brief an die Römer, KEK 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 156. 63 Otfried Hofius, “Eine altjüdische Parallele zu Röm. iv. 17b,” NTS 18 (1971): 58–59 mentions Jos. Asen. 20:7 (and furthermore: 8:10; 12:1), the second benediction of the Amidah, 4Q521, and texts from the Talmud; 2 Bar. 21:4; 48:8; Apos. Con. 8.12.7 which he considers to trace back to a Jewish source. 64 See Jantsch, Gott, 184–98.

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πάντα συνεργεῖ εἰς ἀγαθόν) for those who love God. The reason is that God has chosen them (foreknew: προέγνω) to be similar to the image of his Son, who shall be the firstborn among many brothers (8:29). This refers to Christ’s resurrection from the dead. According to 8:30, God has “foreknown” them – that is, he has called them, and the called ones are justified and glorified by God. That means that God’s election is the basis for justification and glorification (which is the opposite of the lack of glory of sinners according to 3:23). After that, Paul emphatically asserts God’s love and his sympathy for believers in Rom 8:31–39. N. T. Wright justly states that love does not “indicate a strong emotion”: according to v. 33, it is associated with election (PFG 907, see also 1025). In 8:31–34 the image of a court proceeding is used. Already in the beginning (8:31), the rhetorical question states the issue of the section: “if God is for us, who can be against us?” That means that God, the judge, takes the side of believers. This judge is partial toward those who believe.65 That God is “for us” becomes clear because he did not spare his son, but he has given him “for us all” (8:32), which might be an allusion to Gen 22:12, 16.66 Here God is identified by his acting in favor of believers.67 Verse 32 is a a minore ad maius conclusion, according to which God will give “everything” – which might refer to eschatological salvation – to those for whom he has already given up his son.68 The formulation θεὸς ὁ δικαιῶν in 8:33b determines God as the one who justifies, as Michael Wolter justly claims, because the participle in the present tense does not refer to a specific act of God in the past.69 Furthermore, it is similar to the participial predication of God, ὁ δικαιῶν τὸν ἀσεβῆ, in Rom 4:5, which was also a principal characterization of God. Romans 8:33–34a takes up the initial question of v. 31. The answer to the rhetorical questions of v. 33–34a is, of course, “nobody.” That shows (maybe with an allusion to Isa 50:8) that nobody can accuse and condemn the elected ones because God justifies. In v. 34b the focus changes, and the argument becomes a christological one. The reason here for the situation in which no one can accuse and condemn the elected ones is that Christ died and was raised to the right hand of God and appeals for them. In the next section, the 65

This echoes the issue of God’s impartiality as treated in 1:18–3:20; 3:21–31, according to which Gentiles as well as Jews are under God’s wrath (1:18–3:20), and therefore for both groups the same criterion is valid for justification – namely faith (3:21–31). 66 See Lohse, Brief, 255–56 and also PFG 902–5. 67 See Wolter, Brief, 540: “doch haben wir es in Röm 8,32a–b nicht mit einem attributiven Relativsatz zu tun, sondern mit einem Pronominalsatz, der als Subjekt fungiert und Gott durch sein Handeln identifiziert.” 68 For the a minore ad maius conclusion, see Wolter, Brief, 541–42. For the rhetorical analysis of Rom 8:32, see Wolter, Brief, 540–543. 69 See Wolter, Brief, 544.

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love of Christ becomes the topic (8:35–37), but in 8:38–39 the focus changes to the love of God. These sentences justify the assertion of 8:37 where Paul emphatically claims that nothing can separate “us” from God’s love “that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 38–39). The formulation ὁ ἀγαπήσον ἡµᾶς is modeled on participial predications of God which define who God is.70 If we take in account that in the same section Paul claimed God’s partiality in favor of believers, 8:38–39 means that God’s love is the reason for justification in the court scene of 8:31–34. We see that Paul’s concepts of justification and salvation are basically theocentric. A near parallel to Rom 8:31–38 is Rom 5:1–11.71 This text has numerous problems, but it suffices here to mention one aspect. According to Rom 5:8, God shows his own love to “us” in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (see v. 6). In vv. 6–7 Paul emphasizes the unlikeliness of that event. With a minore ad maius conclusion, v. 9 claims that “we,” now justified by Christ’s blood, will be saved by Christ from God’s wrath. If we take into account the whole context, one can say that, here again, God’s love is the initiating event of salvation, since it is connected to Christ’s death “for us” that leads to eschatological salvation from God’s wrath. 2.7 God’s Faithfulness to His Promises: God in Romans 9–11 Romans 9–11 is the object of extensive scholarly debate.72 For our issue, it suffices to outline some aspects of the theocentric basis of Paul’s argument in these chapters. This section of Romans is, again, shaped by a theocentric argument. Paul discusses here – as Klaus Haacker claimed – “die Israelfrage als Gottesfrage,”73 and N. T. Wright justly claims “if Romans as a whole is a book primarily about God, that is particularly so here [in Rom 9 and 11]” (PFG 1157). The theocentric basis of Rom 9–11 becomes clear in the very beginning of the section, in the eulogy in 9:5 if v. 5c (ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς

70

Participial predications of God (“partizipiale Gottesprädikationen”) can be understood as definite assertions about God, see Gerhard Delling, “Geprägte Partizipiale Gottesprädikationen,” in Studien zum Neuen Testament und zum hellenistischen Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1950–1968, ed. Ferdinand Hahn, Traugott Holtz, and Nikolaus Walter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970), 401–16 and Moxnes, Theology, 22– 25. Cf. Ernst Käsemann, who stated concerning Rom 4:5 that ὁ δικαίων τὸν ἀσεβῆ is “liturgischen Gottesprädikationen nachgebildet” and therefore characterizes God’s acting principially (“grundsätzlich”), see Käsemann, An die Römer, 105. 71 See, e.g. PFG 903. 72 Wright discusses Rom 9–11 extensively in PFG 1156–1258, but there are references to these chapters or parts of it at numerous other pages. This issue is discussed in this volume in the essay by Sigurd Grindheim. 73 Klaus Haacker, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer, THKNT 6 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1999), 188. This view is supported by PFG 1157–58.

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εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας) refers to God instead of Christ, which is, in my opinion, more likely in the whole context of Paul’s Christology.74 According to N. T. Wright, however, the eulogy refers back to Christ in v. 5b (PFG 707–9, 1256–57). This interpretation derives from his conviction that Paul “reinterpreted” his Jewish monotheistic faith in the form of a “christologically revised monotheism” (PFG 661). For Wright, the Second Temple Jewish messianic belief that “YHWH would return one day” (PFG 690) is an important aspect. Wright interprets texts such as 1 Cor 8:6 and Phil 2:10–11 by assuming that in Jesus God is personally present: Jesus is “to be discerned as the personal presence of Israel’s returning God” (PFG 698), he is “the embodiment of the returning YHWH” (PFG 690). This interpretation goes, in my point of view, too far. Even in 1 Cor 8:6, where the acting of Jesus Christ is paralleled to God, God remains the initiator and origin of all, because all things come from him, and the Christians live towards him; the Lord Jesus Christ is the mediator of God’s acting. There is, as Wright himself states (PFG 684), a differentiation between God and the κύριος Jesus (see also 1 Cor 3:23; 11:3; 15:23–28) – God and the κύριος are not identified, but stand side by side. Furthermore, in Wright’s interpretation, it remains completely unclear what the identification of Jesus and God means: is it functional, or ontological? This point is reflected more clearly and is more differentiated by newer studies.75

If the eulogy in Rom 9:5 refers to God, Rom 9–11 has a theocentric frame since it ends in 11:33–36 in a doxology of God’s mysterious plan for the salvation of the whole of mankind.76 The theocentric basis of Rom 9–11 also becomes clear in 9:6–13, where Paul expresses God’s sovereignty to elect Isaac instead of Esau, because it was his will. As Wright puts it, if God was already choosing and calling people without any prior merit, there should be no problem about God then calling Gentiles despite them not having, or keeping, Torah. (PFG 1188)

In 9:14–21, Paul rebuts any possible objection with examples from the Old Testament and by asserting God’s superiority over man with the result that humans cannot accuse God (9:19–21). According to 9:22–29, God, in his sovereignty, wanted to show his mercy by electing Jews and Gentiles, which is again proved by citations from the Scriptures. According to 9:30–10:13,77 Paul traces the situation of Israel back to its misunderstanding of righteousness, law, and faith, which, according to 10:2, has its origin in a misunderstanding of God. Although Paul attests the Jews to be zealous for God, which 74

See Flebbe, Solus Deus, 270–73. See, e.g., Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); James McGrath, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in its Jewish Context (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009); James G. D. Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010). 76 Cf. PFG 1256–57. 77 Despite the new address in Rom 10:1, Rom 9:30–33 and 10:1–13 are semantically connected (see, e.g., δικαιοσύνη in 9:30, 31; 10:3–6, 10; πίστις in 9:30, 32; 10:6, 8). 75

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means that they are “eager for covenant status” (PFG 1194), they failed to recognize God and his righteousness. In the next section (10:14–21), Paul discusses the Gospel and the relationship between preaching and faith. For our issue it is important to see that, here again, God is the initiator of the plan to include Gentiles into Israel’s salvation, which is shown in the quotations from Deuteronomy (32:21) and Isaiah (65:1–2). A new section begins with the question in 11:1 of whether God did reject his people. Paul refutes this emphatically. In this section, different lines of his theocentric argument converge: 1) By no means did God reject his people, because there is a remnant of Israel – believing Jews like Paul. 2) The fact that not all Jews believe in Jesus as their Christ must be explained by God’s free choice to elect and to harden whom he wants, which takes up the argument from 9:6–30. In 11:11–24, Paul explains why God acts in this way. He wanted to include the Gentiles in the salvation for Israel, and the means to reach this aim is that the Gentiles participate in Israel’s history of salvation, which Paul illustrates with the image of offered dough (11:16a) and the grafting of the Gentiles into the olive tree of Israel (11:16b–24). This makes them, as Wright puts it, “a single family; a family rooted in the patriarchs and in the promises God made to them” (PFG 1213). Wright justly claims that, by faith, “a gentile believer then become[s] part of ‘Israel’” (PFG 1215). After this discussion, Paul explains that, at the end, the whole of Israel will be saved, which is deduced from prophecies of the Scriptures (Isa 59:20; Jer 31:33) – i.e., this has ever been God’s will. It is debated if this sentence includes all Jews. Wright assumes that only believing Jews are included, whereas those Jews who “refused to believe in Jesus … would forever remain in shallows and in misery” (PFG 1411). This is based on Wright’s view that the people of God is “reimagined” and redefined on the basis of faith: Everyone who has faith, Jews and Gentiles, belongs to God’s people. Although this is in line with Paul’s argument, Wright’s conclusion seems to stand against it. As 11:29 shows, this theocentric argument is based on another conviction concerning God – i.e., that God is faithful to his promises to the patriarchs. Wright attempts to resolve the tensions in Rom 9–11 by redefining the promise to Abraham: it is limited to the fact that many people shall belong to Abraham’s family. This promise can be fulfilled even if Jews ( or even their majority) do not believe in Jesus as their Messiah and consequently are not saved. This means that, according to Wright, God’s faithfulness refers not to Israel in the sense of “the Jewish people” – not to the covenant of Moses, as he formulates it (PFG 1071). This redefinition is not convincing because, by reshaping the promise, God would be faithful to his promises only in a formal manner. It unnecessarily limits God’s faithfulness to one aspect of his promise – namely that in Abraham all people shall be blessed. The reference to the patriarchs as a whole (9:15; 11:28), however, evokes the expectation that God’s promise includes more than only one as-

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pect of his promise to Abraham. Also the assertion that “God’s gifts and his call cannot be regretted” (11:29) – namely, concerning Israel – seems to refer to God’s whole promise to Israel and not only to the aspect that the people of God consists of some Jews plus Gentiles. In my opinion, God’s faithfulness to his promises is, according to Rom 11:17–32, best understood as his will not to reject Israel; if they stumble, they will not fall (11:11) – i.e., God will save the Jewish people after they have been disobedient in the meantime. Wright’s interpretation turns God’s initial promise to the patriarchs of Israel against Israel. This redefinition of God’s promise questions the basic theological conviction that God is unchangeable and that he is faithful to his promise to the patriarchs. Wright defends his interpretation by claiming, “it is certainly not a ‘covenant’ which God has made with the Jewish people behind the back of the Messiah and of Abraham himself” (PFG 1246). This argument conceals the fact that, according to Wright’s interpretation, God would have made a promise to Abraham which is – consequently – not actually in favor of Israel since it could operate without the majority of Israel. But in this case it would be an ambiguous, if not a pseudo, promise. In Rom 11:31–32, Paul takes up again his argument of impartiality: As God was merciful with the Gentiles in the time of their disobedience, so will he be merciful with the disobedient Jews. So we conclude that “all Israel” must include Jews who do not believe, because only then the argument of God’s impartiality against Jews and Gentiles works. This means that, according to Paul, all Israel will be saved in an eschatological event taking place when the deliverer comes from Zion (11:26–27). Wright argues against this interpretation, which, as he puts it, would entail “a large-scale last-minute conversion of Israel” (PFG 1246, 1251), because he understands πᾶς Ἰσραήλ in 11:26 as the new family of Abraham that consists of Jews and Gentiles. I doubt that this interpretation is correct, since πᾶς Ἰσραήλ stands in semantic opposition to πλήρωµα τῶν ἐθνῶν (11:25) – i.e., πᾶς Ἰσραήλ refers to the Jewish people, not to the new people consisting of Jews and Gentiles. That is why Paul calls it a mystery (11:25): it is hidden from human eyes. The prophetic words of Isa 59:20–21; 27:9 reveal that in the parousia the deliverer will convert Israel from its ungodliness. Wright claims concerning the quotations from Isaiah in Rom 11:26–27 that “the Redeemer now comes, with the gospel, from Zion to the world” (PFG 1250). This is not convincing; furthermore, an eschatological meaning of the quotations is more likely (see also 1 Thess 1:10). This is no Sonderweg for Israel; “all Israel” will be saved only as believers. Exactly as in the case of the Gentiles who came to faith by the work of the spirit; also the conversion of “all Israel” is a result of God’s act-

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ing. The fact that this includes “all Israel” derives from the “theological axioms” that God is faithful to his promises and that he does not change.78 Paul’s “treatise” ends with a doxology of God’s wisdom and knowledge that are too high for humans. This, again, emphasizes God’s sovereignty, his power, and his divinity which are above all humans, because he is the creator (11:36a). 2.8 God and His Faithfuless in Romans At this point, we can summarize some aspects of Paul’s theocentric argument in Romans: 1) God is sovereign to grant salvation but also to reject people whom he wants.79 2) God is faithful to his promises to the patriarchs and brings them to their end.80 3) This motif is based on the theological axiom that God does not change: he is the same now as he was in the past (Rom 4). 4) God’s will is salvation for all humans, Jews and Gentiles.81 5) This is deduced from the principle that there is only one God, therefore he is God for Jews and Gentiles (3:29–30). 6) God is impartial: Gentiles and Jews are in the same situation – i.e., they are disobedient and therefore sinners – but God is merciful with them both.82 7) Particularly in Rom 3–4 and 8, this idea is expressed in the vocabulary of justification (and in the image of a court proceeding). 8) The reason why God acts in this way is his mercy, grace,83 and love.84 Paul understands God’s righteousness in the light of these attributes. The syntagm “God’s righteousness” denotes God’s merciful saving action, which includes the forgiveness of sins, “justification.” 9) God will achieve his aim to save Jews and Gentiles because he has, in his wisdom, knowledge and power, instruments and means to do so.85 10) These outstanding attributes of God derive from the fact that he is the creator of the world,86 which puts him in a position over all creatures. 11) The means of salvation for Jews and Gentiles is the Gospel, i.e., the sending of God’s son87 and of Paul as his

78

Wright emphatically opposes the theory of a Sonderweg and the “two-covenant theory” (PFG 1212–13, 1219–21), which he, polemically and even distortingly, describes: “according to which Jews are saved by being good Jews and gentiles are saved by becoming Christians” (PFG 1175). 79 See Rom 9:11–13, 14–29; 10:19–21; 11:1–10, 11–16, 25–27. 80 See Rom 9:4–6; 11:1–5, 29; 15:8. 81 See Rom 9:30; 10:12–13; 11:11–16, 25–32. 82 See Rom 11:30–32; see also 1:18–3:20; 3:21–31. 83 Cf. ἐλεεῖν: Rom 9:15–16, 18; 11:30–32; ἔλεος: 9:23; 11:31; 15:9; χάρις: 1:7; 3:24; 4:4; 11:5, 6, and more. 84 See Rom 5:1–11; 8:31–39. 85 See Rom 11:17–24, 25–32. 86 See Rom 1:18–32; 4:17; 9:20–23; 11:36. 87 See, e.g., Rom 1:3–4.

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messenger:88 God is the initiator of the Gospel. 12) The criterion for salvation is faith and not obedience to the Law.89 God has initiated the Gospel as his means of salvation for Jews and Gentiles – therefore it is called “God’s power for salvation” (Rom 1:16–17). 13) The aim of God’s action is that all humans praise him.90 God’s right to be worshipped derives from the fact that he is the creator of the world and the one and only God (1:18–32), but it has also an anthropological aspect: People who reject God will be punished by surrendering them to their desires which leads to death as a result of God’s wrath (1:18–32).

3. Conclusion: N. T. Wright and the Question of God in Recent Studies Although N. T. Wright does not mention the studies on God in Paul’s letters as discussed in section 1, he proposes a reconstruction of Paul’s Letter to the Romans and of Paul’s theology that is eminently theocentric. This is not surprising if we consider that his PFG is part of a series entitled “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” In line with the recent studies on God in Paul, Wright is aware that the question of God “lies at the root of most if not all the issues” which are discussed in the New Testament.91 He justly points out that the “question of God” was eminent for the early Christians in their confrontation with pagan idolatry,92 and he highlights the fact that there was also a difference between Christian and Jewish concepts of God, because for the former, Jesus as the Messiah and the spirit shape their view of God, whereas for the latter, this point was idolatry.93 This claim is, in light of the studies discussed, debatable and needs at least more differentiation. This idea is worked out in more detail in PFG. According to Wright, Paul, as a firstcentury Pharisee, “believed that the one God had fulfilled his ancient promises through his son and his spirit,” which, according to Wright, is the coherent center of Paul’s thought (PFG 1258). Paul “has rethought monotheism, election and eschatology – and their complex interrelationship! – in the light of Jesus the Messiah and of the spirit” (PFG 1258, cf. also 899 passim). The central objective of Paul is, according to Wright, that, “in the apocalyptic gospel events, the God-given covenant purpose for Israel has come true at 88

See Rom 1:13–15; 15:14–21. See, e.g., Rom 3:21–31; 4; 9:30–33, 10:14–21. 90 See Rom 15:7–13. 91 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 471. 92 Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 135. 93 Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 474–76. 89

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last” (PFG 900). This is the reason why Wright’s monograph on Paul’s theology is entitled Paul and the Faithfulness of God: because, according to him, Paul’s main issue is God’s faithfulness to his covenant (PFG 838, 908–11, 1071 passim). He summarizes the underlying narrative of Paul’s argument as follows: “the one God has accomplished, through the obedience of the one man Jesus the Messiah, that which he purposed when he called Abraham and made the covenant with him, namely the rescue of the Adam-project” (PFG 890). Wright is not interested in God’s “attributes,” or qualities and concrete actions ascribed to God, as recent studies on God in Paul are. But he too emphasizes that Paul’s view of God is the very heart of Paul’s thought: freshly understood monotheism gives birth to freshly understood election, and both can be understood from the standpoint of freshly understood eschatology. (PFG 1166)

In this respect, the studies discussed in section 1 and N. T. Wright converge. God is the initiator of salvation. Another point of contact is God’s faithfulness to his promises. He is “the God of old” who acted in the past as he did in the eschatological Christ-event. Another parallel between Wright and the recent studies mentioned is the strong emphasis on God’s sovereignty in which he elects people and fulfills his aims. This is connected to the fact that, according to Paul, the motifs of God as creator and judge are linked together (PFG 638–41). Wright, as well as recent studies on God in Paul, emphasize God’s impartiality with respect to Gentiles and Jews, who are all under the sin. There are, of course, differences between Wright’s reconstruction and recent studies on God in Paul. These disagreements derive particularly from the fact that Wright reconstructs Paul’s theology from the view of the underlying narrative of God’s covenant, which is not in focus in the mentioned studies. To point to an underlying narrative is a strength of Wright’s attempt, but it is also a danger to explain all aspects of Pauline thought from this one unifying perspective. This explains why Wright underestimates or even neglects some important aspects of Paul’s view of God which are more prominent in the mentioned monographs on God in Paul’s letters. This also clarifies why Wright understands God’s righteousness as God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham, which unnecessarily limits the reference of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. This interpretation from one underlying narrative leads also to another aspect that is not convincing: the double identification of Jesus the Messiah with a) the people of God and b) with God himself. The first point – the Messiah representing God’s people – makes Wright’s understanding of God’s faithfulness to his promises unique, but it is debatable. The latter point – the identification of Jesus with the returning God – goes too far and needs some clarification.

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Bibliography Bassler, Jouette M. “Divine Impartiality in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.” NovT 26 (1984): 43–58. –. Divine Impartiality: Paul and a Theological Axiom. SBLDS 59. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982. Bultmann, Rudolf. Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1953. –. “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden? [1925].” Pages 26–37 in Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze I. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993. –. Theology of the New Testament. 2 vols. Translated by Kendrick Grobel. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007. Cremer, Hermann. Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre im Zusammenhang ihrer geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1899. Crüsemann, Frank. “Jahwes Gerechtigkeit (Ṣedāqā/ṣädäq) im Alten Testament.” EvT 36 (1976): 427–50. Dahl, Nils A. “Die Theologie des Neuen Testaments.” TRu 22 (1954): 21–49. –. “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology.” Reflections 73 (1975): 5–8. Repr., Pages 153–63 in Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1991. Das, A. Andrew, and Frank J. Matera, eds. The Forgotten God: Perspectives in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Paul J. Achtemeier on the Occasion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. Delling, Gerhard. “Geprägte partizipiale Gottesprädikationen.” Pages 401–16 in Studien zum Neuen Testament und zum hellenistischen Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1950– 1968. Edited by Ferdinand Hahn, Traugott Holtz, and Nikolaus Walter. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. Dunn, James G. D. Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. Erlemann, Kurt. Wer ist Gott? Antworten des Neuen Testaments. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2015. Flebbe, Jochen. Solus Deus: Untersuchungen zur Rede von Gott im Brief des Paulus an die Römer. BZNW 158. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Gräßer, Erich. “‘Ein Einziger ist Gott’ (Röm 3,30): Zum christologischen Gottesverständnis bei Paulus.” Pages 231–58 in Der Alte Bund im Neuen: Exegetische Studien zur Israelfrage im Neuen Testament. WUNT 35. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1985. Guttenberger, Gudrun. Die Gottesvorstellung im Markusevangelium. BZNW 123. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. Haacker, Klaus. Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer. THKNT 6. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1999. Hofius, Otfried. “Eine Altjüdische Parallele zu Röm. iv. 17b.” NTS 18 (1971): 93–94. Hurtado, Larry W. God in New Testament Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 2010. –. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Irons, Charles Lee. The Righteousness of God: A Lexical Examination of the CovenantFaithfulness Interpretation. WUNT II 386. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Jantsch, Torsten. “Gott alles in allem” (1Kor 15,28): Studien zum Gottesverständnis des Paulus im 1. Thessalonicherbrief und in der korinthischen Korrespondenz. WMANT 129. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2011.

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Käsemann, Ernst. An die Römer. HNT 8a. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1980. Klumbies, Paul-Gerhard. Die Rede von Gott bei Paulus in ihrem zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext. FRLANT 155. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. Kreuzer, Siegfried. “‘Der den Gottlosen rechtfertigt’ (Röm 4,5): Die frühjüdische Einordnung von Gen 15 als Hintergrund für das Abrahambild und die Rechtfertigungslehre des Paulus.” TBei 33 (2002): 208–19. Lambrecht, Jan. “Romans 4: A Critique of N. T. Wright.” JSNT 36 (2013): 189–94. Lincoln, Andrew T. “From Wrath to Justification: Tradition, Gospel, and Audience in the Theology of Romans 1:18–4:25.” Pages 130–59 in Pauline Theology: Volume III: Romans. Edited by David M. Hay and E. Elizabeth Johnson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002. Lindemann, Andreas. “Die Rede von Gott in der paulinischen Theologie.” Theologie und Glaube 69 (1979): 357–76. Lohse, Eduard. Der Brief an die Römer. KEK 4. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. McGrath, James. The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Moxnes, Halvor. Theology in Conflict: Studies in Paul’s Understanding of God in Romans. NovTSup 53. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Neyrey, Jerome H. Render to God: New Testament Understandings of the Divine. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004. Richardson, Neil. Paul’s Language About God. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994. Schreiber, Stefan. “Das Weihegeschenk Gottes: Eine Deutung des Todes Jesu in Röm 3,25.” ZNW 97 (2006): 88–110. Spieckermann, Hermann, and Reinhard Feldmeier. Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine Biblische Gotteslehre. Topoi biblischer Theologie 1. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. –. God of the Living: A Biblical Theology. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011. Thüsing, Wilhelm. Per Christum in Deum: Studien zum Verhältnis von Christozentrik und Theozentrik in den paulinischen Hauptbriefen. NTAbh 2/1. Münster: Aschendorff, 1965. Weiß, Alexander. “Christus Jesus als Weihegeschenk oder Sühnemal?.” ZNW 105 (2014): 294–302. Wenger, Stefan. Der wesenhaft gute Kyrios: Eine exegetische Studie über das Gottesbild im Jakobusbrief. ATANT 100. Zürich: TVZ, 2011. Wire, Antoinette C. “Pauline Theology as an Understanding of God: The Explicit and the Implicit.” PhD diss., The Claremont Graduate School, 1974. Wolter, Michael. Der Brief an die Römer: Röm 1–8. EKKNT 6.1. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2014. Wright, N. T. “Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4.” JSNT 35 (2013): 207–41. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. Zimmermann, Christiane. Die Namen des Vaters: Studien zu ausgewählten neutestamentlichen Gottesbezeichnungen vor ihrem frühjüdischen und paganen Sprachhorizont. AGJU 69. Leiden: Brill, 2007. –. Gott und seine Söhne: Das Gottesbild des Galaterbriefs. WMANT 135. NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 2013.

Demythologizing Apocalyptic? On N. T. Wright’s Paul, Apocalyptic Interpretation, and the Constraints of Construction Jörg Frey In N. T. Wright’s massive synthesis of Pauline thought, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, everything has its place – including “apocalyptic.”1 But it is easy to observe that apocalyptic elements in Paul’s letters and thought have been assigned only a marginal place in Wright’s map of Paul’s mind. Throughout the volumes, like a refrain, there is polemical and ironizing mention of those interpreters advocating an apocalyptic reading of Paul, and the term apocalyptic is consistently put within single quotation marks so as to point out that it is – in Wright’s view – a term that is at best unclear and at worst rather useless and to be avoided. To be sure, an author writing so much as Wright can always claim that he has already written elsewhere what a particular reader or critic misses in the work in focus. This is also true for apocalyptic which is – already put in single quotation marks – more extensively introduced and discussed in a chapter on “the hope of Israel” in The New Testament and the People of God.2 So we will have to include that basic treatment (and some more passages), but we will see that there is a continuity both in method and subject matters between the earlier work and the new Pauline synthesis. Furthermore, the debate with the advocates of an “apocalyptic reading” of Paul is extensively presented in the history of more recent Pauline scholarship Paul and His Recent Interpreters that should have appeared together with PFG, but is now being published two years later in 2015.3

But why does the author become so polemical and emotional4 when the “apocalyptic” reading of Paul is at stake? What is wrong with reading Paul in 1

Cf. the saying quoted in the review article by Martinus C. de Boer, “N. T. Wright’s Great Story and Its Relationship to Paul’s Gospel,” Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 49–57 (50): “A place for everything and everything in its place.” 2 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 280–307. 3 N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015). I am grateful to Tom Wright that I was allowed to work with the proofs when they were yet in press. 4 This has also been observed by John M. G. Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright, SJT 68 (2015): 235–43 (237n7).

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terms of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic? Is apocalyptic possibly the “Achilles heel” of the “great narrative” N. T. Wright relentlessly presents as the background of almost all Jews of Paul’s time and the basis of Paul’s thought as well? Is it the question mark to his presupposed common Jewish worldview, the stumbling stone for his comprehensive synthesis? In the following, I will first focus on the treatment of apocalyptic in PFG and Paul and His Recent Interpreters (section 1). Then, I will have a look at the so-called apocalyptic interpretation of Paul so plainly rejected by Wright and at the concepts of apocalyptic held by those interpreters in comparison with Wright’s concept (section 2) and discuss them in the light of more recent research on Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic (section 3). Finally, I will present my own considerations of Paul’s apocalyptic views and what that might imply for Wright’s interest in covenantal continuity or salvationhistory (section 4). A brief conclusion on the constraints of Wright’s (and other exegetes’) construction marks the end (section 5).

1. The Neutralization of Apocalyptic in PFG and the Critique of the Apocalyptic Reading of Paul Within the four parts of PFG, aspects of apocalyptic are occasionally discussed, but apocalyptic is never made a topic of its own, neither in the discussion of Paul’s world and mindset, nor in the discussion of Paul’s eschatological views or what is called “God’s Future for the World” (PFG 1043). A more comprehensive discussion of the respective Pauline scholarship, and the critique of the “would-be and self-styled ‘apocalyptic’ school” (PFG 1477) is presented in Wright’s accompanying study on Paul and His Recent Interpreters.5 With reference to the earlier discussion of the subject and particular focus on the discussion in PFG and Paul and His Recent Interpreters we will have to ask: How does Wright define apocalyptic and how does he put it in its place on his map of Pauline thought? Or, more critically: How does he tame or even neutralize Pauline apocalyptic language? 1.1 Presuppositions: Wright’s Earlier Discussion of “Apocalyptic” As already mentioned, Wright discussed “apocalyptic” earlier within his analysis of first-century Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. Drawing on some more recent introductions (esp. by John J. Collins and Christopher Rowland), he is aware of the difficulties in defining apocalyptic but presents two examples from the Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Baruch considered typical of the literary genre of apocalypse (quoting John J. Collins’s funda5

Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 135–218.

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mental definition of the genre6) and poses the question “how … such works should be read.”7 He points to the adoption of prophetic images and the multi-layered character of the images and visions and emphasizes that “such language cannot be read in a crassly literalistic way.”8 Joining the critique of Albert Schweitzer’s view that Jesus expected an imminent end of the world, as expressed especially by his teacher G. B. Caird,9 Wright states that even if eclipses, earthquakes, and other signs were expected, they were regarded as events on the way to Yahweh’s restoration of Israel “within … the thisworldly ambit.”10 Thus apocalyptic language is generally considered symbolic rather than literal, and more precisely, it is integrated into a general worldview that excludes the idea of an end to the space-time universe but rather considers this world to be the “world without end.” Wright further assumes that authors of apocalypses had some visionary experiences, that their works “reflect a context of social deprivation,” and thus they function as subversive literature by confidently (and with the claim of revelation) speaking of a reversal to come. He speculates that the symbolic language is a kind of “cryptical code that may get past the censor,”11 an idea frequently uttered in the debate on Revelation, although the image seems to be inspired by modern totalitarian regimes. Finally, Wright discusses the idea or literary technique of “representation” in which beasts represent kingdoms or rulers, angels represent nations, and the “Son of Man” in Dan 7 represents the vindication of the faithful Israelites. If the vision is taken figuratively in this way, there is no need to assume literally a figure “coming with the clouds,” thus the insight into the symbolic and representative character of apocalyptic language helps to avoid a reading others have considered mythological, implying a miraculous break of the time-space-continuum, etc. With regard to the dualities in apocalyptic texts, Wright again accepts that there are a number of dualities but postulates that the texts still express the worldview shared by many other (non-apocalyptic) Jewish writings, and again, he claims that they may see an end of the present world-order but not 6 Thus the fundamental definition of the genre by John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre, ed. John J. Collins, Semeia 14 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), 1–20 (9), also quoted in John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 4: “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an other-worldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in so far as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial in so far as it involves another, supernatural world.” 7 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 282. 8 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 284. 9 G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980). 10 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 285. 11 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 288.

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an end of the space-time world. The reason for this is the hermeneutical idea that the metaphor-system invests space-time reality with its theological significance12 (and not in a literalistic manner). So, if the texts are read with adequate consideration of the literary nature of the texts (i.e., symbolism and representation) and in their historical Jewish context, they cannot be intended to point to a “real” end of the world. The question we will have to ask later is certainly why so many recipients, both Jewish and Christian, have not grasped this hermeneutical key and so crudely misinterpreted apocalyptic texts such as Dan 7. Wright’s argument is mainly mounted on hermeneutical considerations rather than on texts, and in spite of the two initial examples from the Apocalypse of Abraham and 2 Baruch, his view of apocalyptic and its literary character primarily draws on the canonical texts from Daniel and on hermeneutical ideas developed with regard to the language of Revelation.13 Within Wright’s earlier work, the discussion of “apocalyptic” follows the exposition of monotheism, election, and covenant,14 and there already eschatology is exclusively linked to the covenant and considered its fulfilment. These are the systematic constraints that are then applied to the reading of apocalyptic texts. This leads to an exclusive stress on continuity and to an exclusion of discontinuity, which is then also applied to the views of the firstcentury Jew, Paul: In What Saint Paul Really Said, Wright can summarize that “because Israel trusts God’s covenant promises she believes he will create new heavens and a new earth,” but within this concept, “the sharp antitheses between old and new are gently smudged and blurred.”15 Even a “new” heaven cannot be really new but just the promised one, and an end of the space-time-continuum and the creation of a really new world would question God’s “faithfulness” and is thus excluded. Is this a “demythologizing” of apocalyptic? Certainly not in the precise sense of the term introduced by Rudolf Bultmann for his existential interpretation: For him, relating an atemporal Gnostic redeemer to the concrete existence of a single human being (i.e., Jesus) was Vergeschichtlichung and Entmythologisierung of the myth. For Bultmann, apocalyptic was not demythologized as was the Gnostic myth, but eliminated or abandoned (in Paul and even more in John) by the purified understanding of “eschatology” due to the encounter with Gnosticism. Of course, N T. Wright is far away from this hermeneutical figure of “demythologizing”: He is in the British tradition of scholarship (which was always critical of the Bultmann school), which right12

Cf. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 299. Cf. especially Caird’s commentary on Revelation: G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 14 Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 244–79. 15 N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion Books, 1997), 153. 13

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ly rejects any kind of Gnostic background in early Christian thought, and with his apology of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Wright became a kind of hero for those who consider Bultmann a heretic. But if the term “demythologizing” is understood more widely, N. T. Wright’s way of reading apocalyptic texts symbolically, as a mirror of a particular social or political situation and, at least partly, with a reduced reference to future events or cosmic, transcendent “realities,” he is in the line of modern interpreters trying to cope with the challenge of the early Christians’ erroneous hope for an imminent, miraculous parousia of Christ and end of the world. Since Reimarus and Strauss, exegetes have tried to cope with that challenge by interpreting early Christian eschatology psychologically, internally, symbolically, existentially, as realized, inaugurated, or atemporal, ingeniously reinterpreting,16 bending, and twisting the texts in order to “save” Christian faith from the “strained attempt to save Jesus [and the apostles] from Apocalyptic.”17 In a certain manner, N. T. Wright joins this illustrious group with his very strategy of reinterpreting apocalyptic by taming it with his presupposed covenantal worldview and thus neutralizing its critical potential. This can be seen with regard to Pauline thought in PFG, where we find four strategies of interpretation, or rather neutralization of apocalyptic. The most obvious difference in view of The New Testament and the People of God is that since its publication a particular school of apocalyptic interpretation of Paul has developed its views and now must be attacked from time to time to safeguard Wright’s construction and to make sure that the poison of discontinuity cannot really question the overall view of God’s “covenantal” faithfulness. 1.2 Four Strategies of Neutralizing Apocalyptic 1.2.1 The Symbolic Reading The primary and fundamental element should be mentioned first, although it occurs only in the later parts of PFG: It is the symbolic interpretation in the line of Cairdian hermeneutics. Especially with regard to the imagery of the end of the world, Wright assumes that biblical authors already knew that the world as a whole would not actually come to an end. They used and reused language, aware that it did not literally mean what it said. This implies that

16

I have described this chronique scandaleuse in my history of modern interpretation of eschatology in: Jörg Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I: Ihre Probleme im Spiegel der Forschung seit Reimarus, WUNT 96 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). 17 Thus the famous quote from Klaus Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik: Eine Streitschrift über ein vernachlässigtes Gebiet der Bibelwissenschaft und die schädlichen Auswirkungen auf Theologie und Philosophie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1970), 55.

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the imagery of the end has to be read differently, as referring to “sociopolitical” rather than “spiritual” realities (PFG 174). Here I ask myself to what extent we can presuppose our critical awareness for biblical authors and whether their awareness could provide the canonical legacy for our critical reasoning. Can we really assume that biblical authors were sensitive to the fact that they were using images or dramatizing language that did not mean what it said? It may be true that some authors were aware that not every cosmic catastrophe from prophecy came true in the manner described, and on the other hand, they knew that the reality they described was incommensurable with the images used (as, e.g., the author of Rev 21 when describing the cubic and gigantic New Jerusalem). But even Paul (although he was a genius) did not have our critical cosmological knowledge, and we should resist the desire to “modernize” him.

While a symbolic reading is obviously required for some apocalypses (as, e.g., the Animal Apocalypse in 1 En. 93:1–10; 91:11–17), it is not equally appropriate for all apocalyptic texts or images. Things are more complicated. The language of the book of Revelation, e.g., is certainly symbolic in many parts (cf. Rev 13 or 17). It is not, however, a cryptic code that must simply be deciphered from tradition or transferred into a political reality, but it also creates freshly combined images (as, e.g., Rev 1:13–17 or 12:1–18) from biblical and other Jewish texts, thus also creating an unprecedented meaning and a novel dramatic scenario.18 In the end, the New Jerusalem from heaven is thought to be a truly new, transcendent reality. Although it has the name of the earthly Jerusalem, it is not simply an element of the present space-time continuum but obviously transcends it in size, form, and character. With the biblical images used for its description, it appears as the climax of salvation history but is presented as a totally new creation (or “heaven and earth”). So it is repeatedly said that the present earth and heaven have fled and passed away (Rev 20:11; 21:1) before the appearance of the new heaven and earth (Rev 21:1).19 This indicates a strong discontinuity rather than a mere continuation of a given “space-time continuum.”20 A total destruction of the present cosmos and the creation of a new world is also envisaged in 2 Pet 3:5–13, where even the flood is reinterpreted as a total destruction of the “old world” by water, but here the imagery is probably also inspired by philosophical

18 Cf. my discussion in Jörg Frey, “Die Bildersprache der Johannesapokalypse,” ZTK 98 (2001): 161–85. 19 Cf. my discussion of the text within the eschatology of Revelation in: Jörg Frey, “Was erwartet die Johannesapokalypse? Zur Eschatologie des letzten Buchs der Bibel,” in Die Johannesapokalypse: Kontexte – Konzepte – Rezeption, ed. Jörg Frey, James A. Kelhoffer, and Franz Tóth, WUNT 287, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 473–552 (439–45). 20 The idea of a space-time continuum as used by Wright is perhaps also too modern a concept to be applied to ancient texts.

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ideas of the burning of the world by fire (ἐκπύρωσις), which are also adopted in the Hellenistic-Jewish Sibylline Oracles and in the Apocalypse of Peter.21 Apocalyptic language cannot be played down as “merely” symbolic nor trivialized in the sense that it could never envisage an end of the present creation, if indeed ancient authors could envisage the creation of a “new” world or “new” “heavens and earth” after a total destruction of the present world. Generally excluding such a possibility is indeed ideology, not exegesis. The question is what this means for Paul and his expectation of the parousia. Here we find the idea that the shape of the present world vanishes (1 Cor 7:13); the day of the Lord or of Christ, of wrath and judgment comes, and the present world lies in birth-pangs, but there is not a radical dissolution of the present world as is envisaged in Rev 19–21. Obviously, Paul expected the return of Christ from heaven (Phil 3:20–21), with a host of angels (1 Thess 3:13), during his lifetime, and connected with this a radical change of the world, the resurrection of the dead, and the transformation of the living, the change from corruptibility to incorruptibility. It is not possible to neutralize those expectations as merely symbolic. Paul actually hoped for such a change, and if we let Paul be Paul and do not create him according to our likeness, we should allow him to do so. The categories of interpretation that may be appropriate for some apocalyptic texts (including parts of Daniel and parts of Revelation) are not applicable for all apocalyptic motifs and cannot be used for “taming” or “neutralizing” Paul’s expectation of the parousia which was more realistic and more mythological than Wright is willing to allow.22 1.2.2 The Socio-political Reference With regard to books such as Daniel and Revelation, scholars have developed the view that apocalyptic imagery arose within critical situations and not only mirrors political realities but also inspires resistance and hope for particular changes.23 Accordingly, Wright says that “apocalyptic is deeply political,”

21

On this, cf. my extensive comments on the passage in Jörg Frey, Der Judasbrief und der zweite Petrusbrief, THKNT 15.2, (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015). 22 Cf. also the interpretation of the term παρουσία in 1 Thessalonians in N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003), 217–18 where he again states that the meeting of the Lord as he comes from heaven (1 Thess 1:10) is “in the language of apocalyptic imagery, not in literal spatial reality.” 23 Cf. most recently Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and Anathea PortierYoung, “Jewish Apocalyptic Literature as Resistance Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. John J. Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 145–62.

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giving “its hearers and readers an alternative reference within which to live their lives” (PFG 175). This is an important insight and may be more appropriate for Daniel and Revelation than for some other books. In view of the variety of apocalyptic genres, writings, and motifs, however, it is doubtful whether the political dimension can be the general clue for understanding apocalyptic language. Interpreting apocalyptic views simply as a result of political or social marginalization or a utopian reaction to disappointment would be too Marxist a view of religion and too much in line with the old negative view of apocalyptic as a utopian hope developed from disappointment. The sapiential elements in apocalyptic texts (e.g., in the early Enochic tradition) suggest that these texts do not originate in lower-class or totally uneducated circles but point to a considerable amount of knowledge. For many apocalyptic texts we are not in the position to determine more precisely the political circumstances that might have inspired their composition, and even if we can perceive social turmoil, political developments, or religious persecutions in the background of such texts, we should not underestimate the vividness of apocalyptic imagination in itself and the various forms of later adoption and reconfiguration of apocalyptic motifs that became traditional or even quasi-canonical in changed social situations. In any case, such a political dimension as is obvious for Revelation does not rule out the possibility that the author seriously imagined a transcendent reality intervening in the present world and not only the destruction of the enemy “Babylon”-Rome but also of the whole present world. 1.2.3 The Presupposed “Covenantal” Worldview In PFG Wright introduces apocalyptic texts, esp. 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, in his discussion of Paul’s Jewish world and traditions as examples of the retelling of Israel’s story after 70 AD (PFG 128–35). Both texts are considered basically to be variations of the great narrative of Israel or salvation history. Furthermore, they are read as testimonies of the general first-century reception of earlier historical apocalypses such as Dan 2 and Dan 7. From here, it is concluded that apocalyptic traditions were generally considered to culminate in the coming of the Messiah. While the reader gets no precise idea about the varieties of Messianic concepts within 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, let alone the large number of other apocalyptic or eschatological texts left unmentioned by Wright,24 both works are read as evidence for the Messianic expectation commonly shared by first-century Jews and thus also by Paul.

24 More recent research in Second Temple Jewish Messianism especially in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls has generally highlighted the variety of Messianic concepts, which cannot be harmonized into a coherent view or “narrative.”

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Wright decidedly underlines the commonalities between the various retellings of Israel’s story (PFG 135–36) and suggests that the majority of Jews in the first century (in Eretz Israel and the diaspora) largely followed a Deuteronomistic view of history for which Dan 9 serves as the key text. Apocalyptic, and especially the hope for eschatological deliverance, is thus considered to be embedded in that overall narrative pattern of covenant, exile, and Messianic salvation. Here, Wright introduces another significant hermeneutical figure of thought that efficiently helps to integrate and tame apocalyptic expectations. Whereas he cannot deny that sometimes “apocalyptic” language, motifs, and metaphors do express the idea of a dramatic end of the space-time universe, he states that “it is the worldview, rather than the language-system, which determines how the relevant metaphors work.” (PFG 166). The presupposed worldview is inserted by a relatively simple argument. As Jews of the first century did not wait for the annihilation of the world but for the restoration or healing of Israel and the world, Wright simply states that with regard to a “hard-core Pharisee” such as Paul there is no good reason to suppose that anybody in that tradition was expecting, wanting or hoping for the end of the space-time universe, or that the dramatic language … was intended to denote such an ‘event’. (PFG 167)

If (!) this is true, one can readily ask whether the apostle should have thought differently or whether such a change should be caused by the Christ event. Thus if the worldview of Paul, the Pharisee and the apostle, represents creational and covenantal continuity, the use of apocalyptic images in the texts of the apostle cannot be intended to point to a real break or to an end of history. This is a rather suggestive argument but a decisive step in Wright’s strategy of neutralizing apocalyptic language. The precise images, motifs, and terms do not matter because their real meaning is already determined by the presupposed worldview, the overall story or – as we might call it – the Wrightian “myth of redemption.” I choose this term to point to a striking analogy between N. T. Wright and Rudolf Bultmann insofar as the interpreter determines from an overall concept what a text can “mean,” regardless of what it actually “says” in its concrete language. Only the respective criteria differ. Whereas Bultmann’s criterion was the “true” existential concept of time and eschatology25 that leads to the neutralization of any future-oriented eschatology, Wright’s criterion is the covenantal worldview, the “great narrative” from Adam to Christ which leads to the conclusion that apocalyptic language cannot mean what it says, and that Paul, when

25

Cf. my analysis and criticism of this hermeneutical procedure in Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I, 86–118, see also Jörg Frey, “Johannine Christology and Eschatology,” in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikeal C. Parsons (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 101–32.

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using such motifs expressing an end of the created world, cannot really want to point to such an end.

This kind of “neutralization” of apocalyptic repeatedly occurs in PFG. Wright cannot deny that apocalyptic, including this sense of something radically new coming to pass and hence coming to be, must … be retained as part of Paul’s worldview – but it must be retained within the larger historical framework, (PFG 461)

i.e., within the creational and covenantal narrative which determines in advance what the apocalyptic images can only mean. An apocalyptic that “rules out all continuity” (PFG 461) by marking a radical break is therefore critically rejected. 1.2.4 Inaugurated Eschatology A further step in Wright’s neutralization of apocalyptic has to do with the transformation of the Jewish worldview in light of the coming of Christ (or, as Wright consistently phrases, of “the Messiah” 26). This is the decisive perspective of the description of Paul’s theology, where everything is claimed to be “freshly” conceptualized (“revealed,” “reworked,” “imagined”).27 Thus, the hope for the restoration of Israel, the removal of the evil powers, and the healing of the world is refigured through Jesus and the Spirit. Whether this is adequately and sufficiently described in terms of Yahweh’s return to Zion or restoring the glory of Zion can and should be critically discussed, but it is true that the hope refigured in Jesus results in the particular structure of the “already” and “not yet” in early Christian eschatology.28 Wright chooses the term “inaugurated eschatology” (PFG 1111) and exposes in particular ethical implications and implications for the hope of Israel (especially with reference to Rom 9–11). Of course, Wright does not completely rule out a second coming of Jesus – as did Bultmann – but he reinterprets it in such a manner that the “yet to

26

It is certainly correct that Paul himself does see the Messianic implications of (ὁ) Χριστός, and that those implications were unduly questioned by exegetes who wanted to distance Paul from any kind of Judaism or Jewish particularity. The consistent rendering with “the Messiah” stresses that point. It should, however, be asked whether Paul’s addressees, especially the Gentile believers, did also see this in the same way. It cannot be denied that in some passages Χριστός can already be read as a second name, and this is the tendency of development. 27 Cf. the headings in PFG Part III. 28 For an overview, cf. my introduction to New Testament eschatology: Jörg Frey, “Eschatology in the New Testament: An Introduction,” in Eschatology in the New Testament and Some Related Documents, ed. Jan G. van der Watt, WUNT II 315 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 3–32.

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come” loses its weight in the light of the “already.” This is also an apologetic strategy. If something is unimportant, it disappears from focus. The decisive question is how Wright interprets the aspects of Pauline eschatology which are still considered to come – e.g., Jesus’s parousia, the defeat of death, and the apocalyptic scenarios utilized in 1 Thess 4:16–17 or 1 Cor 15:24–28. A first observation is that the scenario of 1 Thess 4:16–17 does not play any role in PFG. It is quoted once (PFG 1235) but with a different focus.29 The apocalyptic imagery and the particular ideas about the future resurrection of the dead and the transformation of the living are not adopted for the reconstruction of Paul’s hope or the comfort for his addressees. The apocalyptic imagery with the trumpet and the archangel is thus silently demythologized. One might say this is in accordance with Paul himself, who only focuses on communion with Christ, not on the colorful description of resurrection, transformation, and rapture. I can also understand that Wright, in view of the ideas on rapture widespread in American dispensationalism, has an interest in downplaying those elements in Paul. In doing so, however, a clearly apocalyptic, future-oriented concept adopted by Paul in his earliest preserved letter is marginalized or even neutralized. 1 Cor 15:24–28 is an apocalyptic passage quoted frequently in PFG, as these verses are considered a “ground plan” of salvation (PFG 480) chiefly because of their climax in the ultimate and all-embracing kingdom of God. Here, Wright applies another hermeneutical technique of neutralizing apocalyptic: In his view, the sequence of events described is not linear, so that the reign of “the Messiah” mentioned in v. 25 in allusion to Ps 110:1 is not a future Messianic kingdom to be expected after the resurrection of the faithful, as paralleled in Rev 20:1–6.30 In Wright’s view, the apocalyptic idea of the cosmic battle against the enemies of God is transformed in Paul’s thought into the idea of the present reign of Christ, the Messiah.31 Thus v. 25 refers to the inaugurated kingdom of Christ and a present battle against evil powers (including death [v. 26] but also political powers).32 Exegetically, this is at least questionable: Although Ps 110:1 is often used with reference to the enthronement of the Risen One, the usage in 1 Cor 15:25 differs. At least the final act, the victory over all enemies (including death; cf. 1 Cor 15:52–54), is considered in cosmic and apocalyptic terms (cf. 1 Cor 15:54), and even Christ’s resurrection, as a victory over death,

29

In PFG 1084n177, Wright simply refers to his remarks in Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 214–19. 30 Cf., on the interpretation of the Millennium, my considerations in Jörg Frey, “Das apokalyptische Millennium,” in Millennium: Informationen zum christlichen Mythos der Jahrtausendwende, Kaiser Traktate 171, (Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1999), 10–72; and Frey, “Was erwartet die Johannesapokalypse?,” 543–49. 31 Cf. PFG 370 and 481. 32 Wright seems to be interested in protecting Paul against the accusation of being a “dualist” (cf. PFG 371) substantiated by such apocalyptic views. It is interesting that Wright, although praising the study, Klaus Koch, The Rediscovering of Apocalyptic, SBT 22 (London: SCM, 1972) (Ger. orig., Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik), with its diagnosis of the scholar’s “agonized attempt to save Jesus from apocalyptic” (quoted in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 137), himself joins the number of exegetes attempting to save Paul from apocalyptic.

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cannot be considered the ultimate defeat of death (which was still a mighty and threatening power in Paul’s time, as it is still today). Hermeneutically, Wright follows an interpretation well-known in the interpretation of Rev 20, going back to Tyconius and Augustine:33 Christ’s reign has already begun with his first coming or his exaltation and is present in a spiritual manner; the battle against the evil powers is already fought now in the presence of the church. Wright adopts this view for interpreting the “battle” mentioned in 1 Cor 15:24–28: Due to his victory on the cross, the evil powers are already being defeated at present until the final defeat. The “apocalyptic” battle is inaugurated or made present through Jesus’s victory. Thus, the integration of traditionally apocalyptic elements into the covenantal pattern implies that they lose their “mythological” future-orientation (although Wright does not deny that something remains to be fulfilled). Of course, we can concede that the apocalyptic sequence of events (or τάξις) adopted in 1 Cor 15:24–28 is unique in Paul’s letters, but even if Paul has adopted a traditional motif, the text clearly expresses the hope for a general resurrection (guaranteed through Jesus’s resurrection) “in his παρουσία” – and this is certainly not his spiritual presence but, according to the usage of παρουσία as a technical term, an expected return.34 Thus, regardless of whether the reign of Christ and the battle against his enemies is related to his present spiritual reign or to a Messianic kingdom expected for a future period, the ultimate defeat of death together with the resurrection of the dead (here: those in Christ) is clearly expected for the future.

Wright, however, also tries to “demythologize” the term παρουσία by use of a semantic argument. Of course, the term can denote “presence” (cf. Phil 2:12; 2 Cor 10:10) or “arrival” (1 Cor 16:17; 2 Cor 7:6–7), but in some passages it is very clear that Paul uses the term with regard to Christ’s final advent or return “with all his saints” (i.e., a host of angels; 1 Thess 3:13; cf. 5:23) or his advent “from heaven” (cf. 1 Thess 1:10; Phil 3:20–21). Paul clearly expected Christ’s return from heaven and together with that παρουσία (the arrival and new presence) the resurrection of the dead and a transformation of the living, including a final judgment, so that in his παρουσία believers should appear blameless (cf. 1 Thess 5:13). It is also hardly deniable that Paul had expected this to happen during his life-time, as 1 Thess 4:15–16 and 1 Cor 15:51–52 show. Only some experiences, probably in Ephesus, later urged him to consider that he might even die before the return of Christ, but even such a “delay” did not cause him to abandon his apocalyptic expectation (cf. Phil 3:20– 21 and also Romans). In his interpretation of the term παρουσία, Wright correctly states that the term is not a biblical one (PFG 1082) and suggests that in Paul the two meanings of powerful presence and royal advent are combined (PFG 1083). As a general claim, however, this serves to veil the precise meaning of some particular texts where either “presence” or “advent” is 33

Cf. Frey, “Was erwartet die Johannesapokalypse?” 487–88. In early Christian texts, παρουσία is never used for the first coming of Christ, his incarnation, until Justin Martyr. Its technical use is clear from the Synoptic eschatological discourses until the (rather late) hint at discussions about a “delay” of his coming in 2 Pet 2:4–13. For discussion, see Frey, Der Judasbrief und der zweite Petrusbrief, 343–44. 34

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clearly meant. Wright quickly proceeds to a list of five steps by which the παρουσία texts are all integrated into the overall idea of Yahweh’s return to Zion (PFG 1084–85). From here, he can also highlight the obvious contrast between the parousia of Yahweh and that of the emperor and speculate that many in Thessalonica would have thought of the “advent” of the emperor (PFG 1291). Thus, the hint to the socio-political relevance serves to marginalize the “mythological” meaning. The apocalyptic imagery of Jesus’s parousia should not be read in terms of the expectation of a mythological future but rather in terms of a political relevance of the gospel or the inaugurated kingdom of Christ. Thus, Wright consistently diminishes the mythological aspects of Paul’s eschatology, such as the parousia and the host of angels. He is well aware of the impending wrath of exegetes, ironically comparing the guild somewhat politically incorrectly with the “thousands of Pharisees” from Philo, Spec. 2.253 (PFG 165), but such irony does not improve his exegesis. When quoting 1 Thess 3:13, he combines that view with Phil 2:9–11 and states that “this eschatological vision has already become a reality in Jesus the Messiah, and his people” (PFG 706). This is simply not correct. Neither the universal adoration of Jesus according to Phil 2:9–11 nor his advent with the heavenly host according to 1 Thess 3:13 are already fulfilled for Paul, neither in Jesus nor in the church. Wright’s explanation follows the constraints of his construction but does violence to the texts if they do not fit his presupposed worldview. Wisely enough, he does not blatantly deny that there will be a “royal arrival” of the Messiah in the future (PFG 1063), but whenever possible, he stresses the present dimension (cf. PFG 1098).

In his interpretation, Wright does not plainly reject the hope for an imminent parousia of Christ but reduces its weight by a) stressing the “already,” b) integrating it into the overarching idea of Yahweh establishing his kingdom over the whole world, and c) highlighting the political relevance of the apocalyptic images. The temporal aspect, however – the fact that Paul had first expected this during his life-time and only later changed his views – and the various more precise apocalyptic images are downplayed, and the idea that the early Jesus movement had to face a “delay” of the expected parousia is plainly rejected as a scholarly “myth.”35 Thus, Wright also joins the number of the exegetes (from Semler to Bultmann) who have tried to minimize the weight of apocalyptic or futureoriented eschatology, for similar apologetic reasons: If we claim Paul as the predominant testimony for contemporary Christianity, we are always tempted to eliminate views that appear strange, mythological, or unbelievable and stress the “already” (and search for any evidence that Paul himself already 35 I do agree, that the “delay” of the parousia has been overemphasized in twentieth century scholarship, considered a driving force of theological development and interpreted from false alternatives between a world-negating enthusiastic beginning and a well-settled end in the “Early Catholicism” of Luke or the Pastorals. This is a play with false alternatives (cf. my criticism in Frey, “Eschatology,” 25–6). On the other hand, we cannot deny that there was an early expectation of the imminent parousia in the first generation (cf. Mark 9:1) or in Paul’s life-time which had to face some kind of disappointment. This is not a scholarly “myth.”

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did so when interpreting his traditions). And obviously, Wright accepts Paul’s theology (as he interprets it), and PFG is largely written with the gesture of assent.36 But in such an enterprise, modern interests easily take the lead, and the claim that this is a purely “historical” view raises hermeneutical and historical objections.

2. The Apocalyptic Interpretation of Paul: Käsemann, Martyn, and de Boer and their concept(s) of apocalyptic In PFG, Wright particularly rejects what he calls the “apocalyptic reading” of Paul in which apocalyptic is utilized as “the breaker of ‘narrative’, the saving divine power ‘invading’ the world vertically from the outside without connection to anything that has gone before” (PFG 460). Here, apocalyptic is put into a radical opposition to covenantal continuity or salvation history. In some passages Wright links those characterizations with polemical asides on Lutherans or Karl Barth (who was, notably, a Reformed theologian), which do not really help to explain the exegetical and theological positions rejected. But the alternative is clear: Whereas for Wright apocalyptic is (or should be) the same as covenant or covenantal continuity (and apocalyptic is only “good” if it stays within that covenantal system), he gives the impression that his favorite opponents advocate just the opposite – apocalyptic as a view of radical discontinuity, of a break between old and new, covenant and fulfilment, narrative or non-narrative concepts, God’s faithfulness and his abrupt “invasion,” Judaism and Christianity (or even anti-Judaism). Among the numerous polemical asides on the advocates of an “apocalyptic interpretation” of Paul, the most problematic use of vilifying rhetoric is Wright’s charge that it presents a “non-Jewish ‘revelation’” (PFG 612), “the myth of a non- or even anti-Jewish ‘Christianity’” (PFG 1481 on J. L. Martyn), or even the parallel drawn between the apocalyptic reading of Paul and the erasure of Jewish history or burning of the Torah in the Nazi period (PFG 1476–77 with n8). As Martyn has already died, he can no longer be hurt, nor defend himself. But such a deplorable excess of polemic not only leads to the question of whether the respective scholars are correctly represented and interpreted,37 but it also arouses the suspicion that there is too much at stake here for the author’s interpretation so that he obviously cannot avoid such an unacceptable vilification of his colleagues.

36

It may be appropriate to point to Bultmann’s commentary on John as an analogy. Serious doubts are expressed in Barclay, review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 237–38n7: “Wright’s tone here becomes so irritable, and the picture so distorted that scholars who know Martyn’s work but are favourable to Wright are likely to squirm with embarrassment.” 37

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The question is whether the discussion opens up false alternatives (possibly from both sides) and whether the true character of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic is missed in the debate. So, what is the intention of the “apocalyptic interpretation” of Paul, and what is wrong with it? Speaking of an “apocalyptic school” (PFG 402, 1477) or the “Union School,”38 Wright primarily draws on J. Louis Martyn,39 Martinus C. de Boer,40 and, as their intellectual (grand)father, Ernst Käsemann, who is particularly referred to in the dedication of Martyn’s commentary on Galatians.41 The debate is extensively presented in Wright’s retelling of more recent Pauline research (Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 135–218). There, he also presents a discussion of Douglas Campbell’s “apocalyptic rereading of Romans,”42 which is only rarely mentioned in PFG. It is the idea of apocalyptic introducing a radical discontinuity with salvation-history or the covenantal perspective, which is critically rejected. Looking more closely at Käsemann, Martyn, and de Boer, we will have to inquire regarding their argument and respective concepts of “apocalytic” to see in what respect Wright’s criticism is justified and where he may himself miss the varieties of ancient Jewish (and early Christian) apocalyptic and overstate his case. 2.1 The Establishment of the Apocalyptic Interpretation of Paul In the middle of the twentieth century, an apocalyptic interpretation of Paul was revolutionary. Due to the prevailing negative view of Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic in biblical scholarship43 from Lücke to Wellhausen and 38

Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 156 J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997); and J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997). 40 Martinus C. de Boer, Galatians: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011); and earlier Martinus C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup 22 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988); see also a short version of his findings in Martinus C. de Boer, “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards, JSNTSup 24 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 169– 90. 41 See also the autobiographical report by J. Louis Martyn, “A Personal Word About Ernst Käsemann,” in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn, ed. Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), xiii– xv. 42 Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); on this book, see Wright’s criticism in Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 187–218. 43 Apocalyptic was regarded as a Jewish element that can be properly left behind in modern Christianity; it was considered nationalistic and particularistic, negative of the world, utopian, speculative, and as representing a development of degeneration from the 39

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Bultmann, scholars had been eager to distance not only Jesus but also Paul and John from apocalyptic thought.44 The intention was an apologetic one: End-time speculation (considered typical for apocalyptic thought) and bizarre imageries had no plausibility for modern Christianity, thus a non-apocalyptic (universal, present-oriented, or ethical) concept of Christianity appeared more useful, and scholars tried to find those concepts already in the canonical sources so as to have a biblical foundation for contemporary Christianity. Bultmann’s hermeneutics of “demythologization” was just one more instance of contrasting “true” Christian thought (“eschatological awareness”) and “false” or inappropriate views, and apocalyptic speculation was clearly considered inappropriate. But while Bultmann acknowledged the role of apocalyptic for John the Baptist and Jesus from a historical point of view, he argued that Paul had practiced the “demythologization” of apocalyptic traditions, which then came to its climax in the purely present-oriented eschatology of the evangelist of the Fourth Gospel.45 The new interest in apocalyptic was generally stimulated by the Qumran discoveries and a growing interest in the Jewish world around the New Testament, but in Pauline studies it was predominantly a reaction to Bultmann’s influential interpretation.46 This is particularly true for Ernst Käsemann, Bultmann’s brightest student, who finally turned upside down his teacher’s

great prophets in “Late Judaism.” Cf. the history of research in Johann Michael Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran, 2nd ed. (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1976); Werner Zager, Begriff und Wertung der Apokalyptik in der neutestamentlichen Forschung, Europäische Hochschulschriften: Theologie 358 (New York: Lang, 1989); also Jörg Frey, “Die Apokalyptik als Herausforderung der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft: Zum Problem: Jesus und die Apokalyptik,” in Apokalyptik als Herausforderung neutestamentlicher Theologie, ed. Michael Becker and Markus Öhler, WUNT II 214 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 23–94 (27–38). 44 Some scholars tried to save predominantly Jesus from those elements and admitted that the apostles had to accommodate to their addressees and to the views of the ordinary people. Johannine research widely regarded the gospel as opposed to contemporary apocalyptic (cf. my analysis in Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I, 9–264. But also in Pauline research it was customary to distance the apostle from his apocalyptic traditions, especially in the Bultmann school, see e.g. Günter Klein, “Eschatologie IV: Neues Testament,” TRE 10:270–99 (279–86), who accepts an apocalyptic framework of imagination but states (in a typical Bultmannian manner) that Paul is not interested in such imagery, and that it is not constitutive for his eschatology (280). 45 Bultmann perceived a critical encounter of biblical (salvation-historical) thought and gnostic mythology, resulting in a ‘purified’ concept of eschatology (on this, cf. Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I, 106–7). 46 Käsemann’s approach cannot merely be explained from his Lutheran background, nor primarily from his experiences as a pastor and prisoner in the Nazi period, which made him an energetic and life-long fighter for the truth of the gospel, as he perceived it.

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views in all relevant fields of scholarship, in Pauline interpretation,47 Jesus research,48 and Johannine studies.49 For Käsemann, Bultmann’s existential interpretation of time and history50 and his elimination of future-oriented eschatology were historically inadequate, but – even more importantly – the “eschatological reservation,” the stress on the “not yet,” was theologically significant as a necessary answer to enthusiasm.51 But if apocalyptic was theologically valuable, it could also be accepted as a (fundamental) element in the thought of Paul, the most important testimony and “canon within the canon” for Käsemann’s theology. In contrast with Bultmann, Käsemann still distanced the historical Jesus from apocalyptic 52 and considered the influence of apocalyptic only in post-Easter times. He discovered that the framework for understanding Jesus’s resurrection as the beginning of the general resurrection was in fact contemporary apocalyptic. Thus, apocalyptic had to be considered the historical root of post-Easter Christian thought, the “mother of Christian theology.”53 In 47 Most significant is his ontological interpretation of justification as effective, thus bringing the believer into a new status, whereas for Bultmann only the self-understanding or self-awareness of humans is changed. On these issues in Käsemann, see the insightful review article by N. T. Wright, “A New Tübingen School? Ernst Käsemann and his Commentary on Romans,” in Pauline Perspectives. Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 52–76. 48 Thus in his inauguration of the so-called “new quest” for the historical Jesus against Bultmann’s view that the historical quest for Jesus was totally irrelevant for New Testament theology; cf. Ernst Käsemann, “Zum Problem des historischen Jesus,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 187–214. 49 Thus in his view of John as an enthusiastic, naïvely docetist or gnosticizing work, whereas Bultmann had considered the evangelist a converted former gnostic now in an anti-gnostic position. See especially Ernst Käsemann, Jesu letzter Wille nach Johannes 17 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1966); on Käsemann’s Johannine interpretation, see Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I, 160–70. 50 For my discussion of Bultmann’s concept of eschatology and his interpretation of eschatology, see the titles mentioned in n25. 51 Here, Käsemann also has in view contemporary views, Bultmann’s present-oriented eschatology, and – even more strongly – the Pietist movement he had to face in Tübingen. 52 This line of interpretation has been continued in later American scholarship by Norman Perrin with an atemporal interpretation of the parables and in the school of Helmut Koester and the so-called ‘Jesus Seminar’ with a strong consideration of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas for the historical Jesus and a hermeneutically naïve prevalence for a “non-eschatological” Jesus, which can only be explained in opposition to North-American fundamentalism. On the problems of those constructions of a non-apocalyptic Jesus, see my argument in Frey, “Die Apokalyptik als Herausforderung der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft,” 55–91. 53 Cf. Ernst Käsemann, “Die Anfänge christlicher Theologie,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964). 82–104 (ET: Ernst Käsemann, “The Beginning of Christian Theology,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969], 82–107); and Ernst Käsemann, “Zum Thema der urchristlichen Apokalyptik,” in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnugen II

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contrast with some earlier characterizations of apocalyptic, Käsemann saw the most important characteristic of apocalyptic thought not in the doctrine of retribution but in the hope for the establishment of the kingdom of God or for the parousia,54 or as he could phrase even more precisely (but somewhat too narrowly): in the imminent expectation (Naherwartung). Following the constructions of the history-of-religions school, Käsemann assumed that the Hellenistic community was a second stage in the development of earliest Christianity, historically and ideologically separated from the Palestinian community.55 In the Hellenistic community (e.g., in Corinth), Käsemann perceived an attitude of “Hellenistic enthusiasm,” in which salvation or even the resurrection of the dead was already considered to be present or completed in a spiritual (i.e., non-bodily) manner. Paul, instead, is perceived as a theologian reacting to those enthusiasts and rejecting their illusionist views of having already been elevated to a new spiritual life (without bodily and ethical consequences). Against that, Paul emphatically lays out his teaching of the cross (as a radical rejection of human wisdom and thought) and, most importantly, the eschatological reservation (eschatologischer Vorbehalt), the “not yet,” as a posture of true belief in the crucified one against the illusionist present-oriented eschatology.56 For Käsemann, apocalyptic – understood as “imminent expectation” – is thus a tribute to reality, ultimately the reality of suffering and the cross, a sign of resistance against any pious illusion.57 Historically, Käsemann’s constructions are questionable. Neither the separate stages of development from the Palestinian to the Hellenistic community, nor the “Hellenistic enthusiasm” as a characteristic of the Corinthian theology stand up under a more scrutinized historical view of the texts. Käsemann’s categories are often inspired by the later history of theology – not least from his own experiences in the struggle of the church within the Nazi period and in his later conflicts especially with the Pietists or the proto-evangelical

(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 105–31 (ET: Ernst Käsemann, “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969], 108–37). 54 Käsemann, “Die Anfänge christlicher Theologie,” 104. 55 These constructions, influentially developed by Wilhelm Bousset and largely adopted in the Bultmann school, have been efficiently questioned and overcome by the works of Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr, 3rd ed., WUNT 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988 (ET: Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine in the Early Hellenistic Period, trans. John Bowden, 2 vols. [London: SCM, 1974]); and Martin Hengel, Der Sohn Gottes: Die Entstehung der Christologie und die jüdisch-hellenistische Religionsgeschichte, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975) (ET: Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origins of Christology and the History of JewishHellenistic Religion, trans. John Bowden [London: SCM, 1976]). 56 Cf. Bernd Elmar Koziel, Apokalyptische Eschatologie als Zentrum der Botschaft Jesu und der frühen Christen? Ein Diskurs zwischen Exegese, Kulturphilosophie und Systematischer Theologie über die bleibende Bedeutung einer neuzeitlichen Denklinie, Bamberger Theologische Studien 33 (New York: Lang, 2007), 231–33. 57 Käsemann, “Zum Thema der urchristlichen Apokalyptik,” 130: “Gerade die Apokalyptik des Apostels gibt der Wirklichkeit, was ihr gebührt, und widersteht der frommen Illusion.”

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Bekenntnisbewegung of the 60s and 70s.58 “Fight” became a central metaphor for Christian life, and the true Christian’s fight is always considered to be between “orthodoxy” and “enthusiasm,” with Paul as the paradigmatic fighter of legalists on the right (i.e., “orthodoxy” in Galatians) and enthusiasts on the left (in 1–2 Corinthians).59 Historical and contemporary horizons are blended in Käsemann’s interpretations; this makes them hermeneutically fascinating and appealing for contemporary theology, but historically problematic and vulnerable.

What is the concept of apocalyptic underlying Käsemann’s views? We should note that he never studied Jewish apocalyptic texts in their own right. His views depend on the handbook knowledge of his time.60 So, Käsemann could see the most important element of apocalyptic in the dualism of the present and the coming aeons, a pessimistic view of the present world, a determinism of history and – notably – imminent expectation. A second aspect is important with regard to the idea of a “break” in history: According to the traditional views, apocalyptic had developed when Israelite/Jewish religion could no more rely on the earlier salvation history, as foreign powers were ruling over Israel, and unbelief and apostasy had even affected large segments of the Jewish people, including the leading classes. Therefore, the “apocalyptic circles” could maintain the hope for salvation only by longing for a totally new intervention by God himself, such as in the coming of the Son of Man according to Dan 7 or the establishment of the divine kingdom by a miraculous, transcendent intervention. It is this concept of apocalyptic that underlies Käsemann’s interpretation of Pauline theology. If Christian thought is based on an apocalyptic concept, and if in particular the cross was interpreted as an apocalyptic event in which all worldly wisdom was turned upside down (cf. 1 Cor 1:18–25), then the 58

Cf. also the perceptive description in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 185. Cf. my discussion in Frey, Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I, 165–70; further, Jörg Frey, “Paulinische Perspektiven zur Kreuzestheologie,” in Kreuzestheologie: Kontrovers und erhellend, ed. Klaus Grünwaldt and Udo Hahn (Hannover: VELKD, 2007), 53– 97. 60 Cf., e.g., Philipp Vielhauer, “Einleitung,” in Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes, vol. 2 of Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, ed. Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963), 407–27 (ET: Philipp Vielhauer, “Introduction to ‘Apocalypses and Related Subjects,’” in Writings Relating to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects, rev. ed., vol. 2 of New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964], 581–607); and Philipp Vielhauer, “Apokalyptik des Urchristentums,” in Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes, vol. 2 of Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, ed. Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963), 428–54 (ET: Philipp Vielhauer, “Apocalyptic in Early Christianity,” in Writings Relating to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects, rev. ed., vol. 2 of New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. by R. McL. Wilson [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964], 608–42). 59

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essence of Christian faith could also be characterized as radically otherworldly, fundamentally questioning other human religious views. Paul’s constant stress on the “not yet” could help to resist any kind of enthusiasm, according to which salvation could be considered already present,61 and furthermore it could help to resist any kind of political or pious ideology.62 Apocalyptic supports the truth that God claims authority over the whole world, not just in a spiritual dimension, and that Christian faith is not merely a change of human self-awareness (as in Bultmann’s theology). Thus bodily obedience, political resistance, and a hope for the whole world could be thematized. These are the most important intentions of Käsemann’s theology, and such an innate link between theological thought and consequences for church and social life was indeed fascinating to students. Even if we concede all the historical and hermeneutical problems of Käsemann’s constructions, there is a particula veri in his fundamental convictions that theology and Pauline interpretation should not abandon too easily. 2.2 De Boer and Martyn and Their Concept(s) of Apocalyptic The exegetes of the so-called “Union School,”63 J. Louis Martyn and his former student Martinus de Boer, largely draw on Käsemann’s view of apocalyptic, although de Boer in his work on 1 Cor 15 and Rom 5 gives a more precise study of Jewish apocalyptic texts. Aiming at an interpretation of Paul’s concept of death and its defeat (i.e., of salvation) from an apocalyptic perspective, he analyses texts from Isa 24–27 and the Book of Watchers until 2 Baruch,64 albeit with a taxonomy mostly inspired by Pauline issues and the Bultmann-Käsemann debate about the forensic or ontological views of justification. So, de Boer also wants to identify “two tracks of Jewish Apocalyptic eschatology,” a cosmological and a forensic one, oriented toward the question of whether human death is ascribed to a primordial cosmic tragedy such as the fall of evil angels (as in the Book of Watchers) or is due to human responsibility or the sin of Adam (as in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch).65 Such a taxonomy, however, does not really work for all the texts in view, as de Boer wisely concedes and N. T. Wright in his critical discussion happily notes.66 The “cosmic” type is 61

Käsemann sees Paul fighting an “anti-enthusiastic battle … under the sign of apocalyptic” (cf. Käsemann, “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,” 132). 62 For Käsemann, the Pietists he had to face in Tübingen were typically representing enthusiasm. Thus, his “apocalyptic” theology should be explained not only from his resistance in the Nazi period but also from the confrontation with the Pietists enjoying their spiritual life but without political consequences. 63 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 155. 64 Boer, Defeat of Death, 39–92. 65 Boer, Defeat of Death, 85–88; Boer, “Paul,” 174–76. 66 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 161–62.

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most clearly identified in the Book of Watchers, while the “forensic” type is most strongly present in 4 Ezra, and Paul’s views also have strong parallels in 4 Ezra. Thus, the usefulness of distinguishing between the two types remains doubtful. One should rather see that in Second Temple Judaism and its mythological explanation of the origins of evil, there is development from the earliest explanation in the Myth of the Watchers presented in 1 En. 6–11 (in the third century BCE) to the story of Adam which comes to the fore only later as an explanation for evil in the world, for the first time in Paul and then most explicitly in 4 Ezra.67 It is remarkable, however, that in the basic characterization of apocalyptic, de Boer still draws on the handbook knowledge Käsemann had presupposed, in particular Philipp Vielhauer’s introduction to apocalyptic in (the English translation of) Hennecke’s work (3rd ed.).68 From here, he gets the idea that “the essential characteristic of Apocalyptic” is “the eschatological dualism” of this age and the age to come.69 Such an eschatological duality, however, is only a feature of some later Jewish apocalypses (e.g., 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch), then similarly adopted also by the Rabbis, and in part presupposed in the New Testament, whereas the terms and concepts of the earlier apocalypses or heavenly journeys are different and vary considerably.70

Based on his ideal taxonomy, however, de Boer wants to show that Paul considered the reality of death in cosmic terms so that the defeat of death or salvation are also conceived of in cosmic categories (thus supporting Käsemann against Bultmann). In contrast to Käsemann, however, he does not stress the “not yet” but rather the “already” of the victory in Christ’s death and resurrection: Those in Christ share already Christ’s power over sin and death.71 Although de Boer’s study is a step forward in his detailed analysis of the Jewish texts, it basically draws on a taxonomy inspired from elsewhere and on an outdated view of Jewish apocalyptic and its basic features. In his criticism, Wright notes that de Boer correctly differs from Käsemann in the view 67 Cf. John J. Collins, “The Origin of Evil in Apocalyptic Literature and in the Qumran Community,” in Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic Roman Judaism, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 54 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 287–300; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Origins of Evil in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition,” in The Fall of the Angels, ed. Christoph Auffahrt and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Themes in Biblical Narrative 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 87–118. An extensive interpretation is given in the almost finished doctoral dissertation by Monika Götte, “Von den Wächtern zu Adam” (PhD diss., University of Zürich, forthcoming). 68 See n60. Although de Boer demonstrates awareness of more recent special studies on Second Temple Jewish apocalypticism (cf. Boer, Defeat of Death, 21–22). 69 Boer, Defeat of Death, 22; Boer, “Paul,” 173. 70 Cf. the overview in Frey, “Apocalyptic Dualism,” 271–94, that shows that within the range of apocalyptic texts different types of “dualism” (spatial, temporal, etc.) should be distinguished. The war dualism as, e.g., presented in the War Scroll from Qumran (1QM) is only one type, which is not typical for the majority of apocalyptic works. 71 Boer, Defeat of Death, 185.

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that the “apocalypse” “has happened in the death of Jesus,”72 but he notes the inadequacies of de Boers “two tracks” of Jewish apocalyptic and doubts whether a concept can adequately be called apocalyptic because it shares some features with Jewish apocalypses. However, when Wright then simply calls for a move to the larger screen of history, culture, thought, and writing of ancient Israel, he again neutralizes all differences, replacing the variety of concepts with the one story of Israel and the “covenantal” perspective.73 This does not lead to more historical clarity but simply mirrors Wright’s “covenantal” concept. In his commentary on Galatians, Martyn follows a track he had first tested in his SNTS paper from 198474 and utilizes the findings of his former doctoral student, de Boer. In the SNTS paper, Martyn had tried to solve this problem: If Paul is read in an apocalyptic context (pace Käsemann and Beker), Galatians “seems not to support the thesis,”75 as there are no clearly apocalyptic motifs in Galatians in contrast to 1 Thess 4:16–17 or 1 Cor 15:20–28. Martyn explores the possibility that Paul may in some phrases adopt formulations of his opponents and then answer their views. So he looks for antinomies in the letter that may show the opposed views and points to the phrase about Flesh and Spirit (Gal 5:16–17) and to the Hagar-Sarah-allegory (Gal 4:21–5:1). Martyn assumes that the opponents had taught that the law is a remedy against the evil impulse (= flesh), while Paul describes the fight between the Flesh and the Spirit as two cosmic powers (thus in an “apocalyptic” battle-imagery). Likewise, he thinks that it is the teachers who brought up the tale about Abraham’s two sons, whereas Paul inserts an interpretation focusing on the struggle of two opposing structures. This is – in Martyn’s view – thoroughly apocalyptic.76 In his commentary, Martyn has developed this approach. Throughout the letter, he argues that some phrases actually represent the theology of the opponents against which Paul is now positioning his views.77 The problem is, however, that (in contrast with 1 Corinthians) we do not have any indication that “slogans” of the teachers are explicitly quoted, so the separation appears rather arbitrary. Moreover – as Wright correctly infers – we should presuppose that a quotation is affirmatively adopted by the author if there is no clear 72

Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 159. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 162–63. 74 J. Louis Martyn, “Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” NTS 31 (1985): 410–24. 75 Martyn, “Apocalyptic Antinomies,” 411. 76 Martyn, “Apocalyptic Antinomies,” 415–20. 77 The method is similar to Bultmann’s early analysis of 1 John in which he distinguished between a gnostic source and the comments of the author. Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, “Analyse des ersten Johannesbriefes,” in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. Erich Dinkler (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967), 105–23. 73

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sign of rejection or antithesis. But the division between Gal 1:4a (Jesus’s death for our sins) and 1:4b (God’s act of saving from the present evil age), read as an apocalyptic interpretation of a traditional Jewish-Christian atonement formula,78 provides the clue for Martyn’s interpretation of the letter as a document of Paul’s “apocalyptic theology.” In his distinction, Martyn adopts the separation of two tracks cautiously proposed by de Boer, with the opponents representing the forensic apocalyptic eschatology while Paul represents the cosmological type.79 As Wright notes,80 de Boer’s wise caution, in view of the fact that both types do not occur purely in most apocalyptic writings, is now left behind. Martyn’s view of apocalyptic is strongly based on Käsemann, although he also thinks that God’s “invasion” has already happened in Jesus’s death, and so “apocalyptic” is not meant to stress imminent expectation. But as in Käsemann, “apocalyptic” stands for a radical break in history, resulting in a dichotomy of “apocalyptic” and “salvation history” or even more generally “revelation” and “religion.” The issue of Galatians is located on a theoretical level of theology rather than within the concrete Diaspora-Jewish debates about the inclusion of the Gentiles and its conditions. In his extensive discussion, Wright raises the methodological issues and disputes (in my view correctly) that the “fullness of time” in Gal 4:4 means “a clean break with the past.” 81 On the other hand, and in a way surprisingly, Wright seems ultimately to agree with Martyn that “Paul’s message is thoroughly ‘apocalyptic’” and that the Christ event is “cosmic in the sense that unseen suprahuman powers … have been overcome.”82 He even concedes that “Jewish apocalyptic was more rich and many-sided than he has supposed.” 83 Should we add: even more rich and many-sided than Wright himself now supposes?

If Wright and Martyn both agree that Paul was “an ‘apocalyptic’ theologian,” the question again is which concept of “apocalyptic” the two authors presuppose. For Martyn, “apocalyptic” is defined by the imagination of a battle of cosmic forces and a rejection of any kind of salvation history. This is certainly a one-sided and selective view of ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic, and Wright speculates about the implicit targets of Martyn’s fight.84 The plain rejection of salvation history is certainly not Lutheran85 but rather an effect of Bultmann’s existentialism from which neither the reference to previous history nor the expectation of future events could be of any relevance for “existence.” Wright rightly notes that all (perhaps more correctly: most) ancient 78

Martyn, Galatians, 97. Martyn, Galatians, 97–98n51. 80 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 168–69. 81 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 182. 82 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 184. 83 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 184. 84 Cf. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 185. 85 Wright is sometimes too quick in attributing the polemical label “Lutheran” to all “old-perspectivists,” perhaps ignoring that the fashionable rhetoric of the “so-called and self-styled” “New Perspective” often merely replaces one ideology by another, without clear hermeneutical reflection of its procedure. 79

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Jewish apocalyptic was actually referring to the biblical tradition and thus to the earlier history of Israel, although he might be too simplistic in integrating everything into his covenantal perspective.86 So we must again look at the more recent insights on Second Temple Jewish apocalypticism in order to overcome the shortcomings of the views represented in the older handbooks but also the rather harmonizing view as represented in Wright’s PFG (as well as in his earlier works).

3. The Roots, Variety, and Complexity of Apocalyptic in Recent Perspectives It is particularly due to the insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the image of apocalyptic in scholarship (at least among specialists) has dramatically changed.87 Whereas the image in earlier scholarship (since the introduction of the term Apokalyptik into scholarship by Friedrich Lücke in 1832)88 was first dominated by the two canonical apocalypses, Daniel and Revelation, it was later supplemented by numerous other texts made accessible in the nineteenth century: 1 Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, 2 Baruch, the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, 3 Baruch (Greek Apocalypse), 2 Enoch (Slavonic Apocalypse), the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah, and finally in 1910 the Apocalypse of Peter).89 But whereas all these texts were transmitted only in secondary translations, the Scrolls have revolutionized our view of the origins and characteristics of apocalypticism by providing insights into the literary activity of Palestinian Judaism from the third century BCE until the first century CE and by revealing previously unknown Hebrew and Aramaic texts of various genres, sapiential texts, literary testaments, exegetical texts, apocalypses (such as the New Jerusalem text, 11Q18, or the

86 It should be noted that a text such as the Book of Watchers does not draw on the covenant, nor on Torah and temple. We must take this into consideration if we fully appreciate the varieties of Second Temple Judaism. 87 For the following paragraphs, see my extensive survey: Jörg Frey, “Zur Bedeutung der Qumrantexte für das Verständnis der Apokalyptik im Früh-judentum und im Urchristentum,” in Apokalyptik und Qumran, ed. Jörg Frey and Michael Becker, Einblicke 6 (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2007), 11–62. 88 Friedrich Lücke, Versuch einer vollständigen Einleitung in die Offenbarung Johannis und in die gesammte apokalyptische Litteratur, vol. 4.1 of Commentar über die Schriften des Evangelisten Johannes (Bonn: Weber, 1832), 22–155; cf. Alf Christophersen, Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855), 2 vols., Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann 94 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 1:368–73. On the history of research, see Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik. 89 Cf. Koch, “Einleitung zur Apokalyptik,” 111–12.

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Son of God text, 4Q246),90 and also manuscripts of the Books of Enoch in the original Aramaic, and of Jubilees in the original Hebrew.91 Any further discussion of apocalyptic must be deemed insufficient if it does not take into consideration this vast amount of evidence. Although Wright occasionally notes a number of more recent works on apocalypticism (by Christopher Rowland, John J. Collins, Anathea PortierYoung, etc.) and readily admits that we can now know considerably more about apocalyptic literature than did scholars a hundred years ago and before the Qumran discoveries,92 his views and verdicts still lag behind the available insights. The changes of our views caused by the new manuscript evidence especially provide important corrections – not only to Wright’s own views but also to those of his “adversaries” in Pauline interpretation. When somewhat superficially “defining” apocalyptic as the worldview of biblical books such as Daniel, parts of Zechariah and Isaiah, post-biblical books such as 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra, and Revelation in the New Testament,93 he still draws on only a small selection of texts,94 probably too much focused on canonical writings and with insufficient consideration of the wide variety of genres and concepts. The traditional focus on the canonical apocalypses and the idea that Jewish apocalypses primarily draw on Biblical prophecy prohibit a more lucid perception of the variety of concepts and traditions. I can only point to some selected points where the evidence calls for revision of traditional views.

90

Cf. Jörg Frey, “The New Jerusalem Text in Its Historical and Traditio-Historical Context,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years After Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000), 800–16. 91 See comprehensively Frey, “Zur Bedeutung der Qumrantexte,” 23–34. 92 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 138. 93 Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 138. 94 Texts to be considered are, e.g., the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Abraham, 2 Enoch (Slavonic Apocalypse), and the fragments of the Apocalypse of Zephaniah; and from the Qumran library, the Son of God text (4Q246), the Visions of Amram (4Q543–548), the New Jerusalem document (11Q18), and the Words of Michael (4Q529), but also texts of a ‘non-apocalyptic’ genre but with related content such as the liturgical Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q400–407; 11Q17; Mas 1k), the reception of Ezekiel in the Pseudo-Ezekiel text 4Q385, the eschatological War Rule (1QM), the so-called Messianic Apocalypse (4Q521) (which is very illuminating for the message of the historical Jesus in its scriptural and messianic context) and parts of the eschatological wisdom compositions Mysteries (1Q27; 4Q299–300; 4Q301?) and Instruction (1Q26, 4Q415–418, 4Q418a; 4Q423).

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3.1 New Insights in View of the Full Range of Texts 3.1.1 Enochic Beginnings The historical origins of apocalyptic thought should now be located in the early Enochic tradition that goes back to the third/fourth centuries BCE and points to traditions from the East, especially to astronomic knowledge of Babylonian origin adopted in the Astronomical Book, the earliest part of 1 Enoch. The Qumran manuscript evidence has shown that the Book of Watchers (1 En. 1–36) was composed long before the Maccabean crisis, as we have already a manuscript from the late third century BCE. In this text (adopting cosmological and calendrical wisdom from the Astronomical Book), we find the earliest mythological tale of the origins of evil by the descent of some angels, the earliest traces of Jewish demonology, the earliest development of the idea of an eschatological judgment on the Watchers and the later wicked people, and very early traces of the belief in an eschatological resurrection. It was possibly the Maccabean crisis or the preceding events that led to a second stage of development with the writing of “historical apocalypses” in the Enochic tradition, the Apocalypse of Weeks (1 En. 93:1–10 and 91:11– 17), and the Animal Apocalypse (1 En. 85–90), and also in the book of Daniel. Thus, looking back to history from the creation and looking forward to the future stages of judgment and salvation or restoration is neither the first nor the most characteristic element of the apocalyptic tradition. The basic roots and objectives of apocalyptic thought should rather be explained from those earlier stages, not from the later works in which apocalyptic imagery has already become part of a widely held worldview or utilized to discuss new historical and religious problems. 3.1.2 Spatial vs. Temporal Orientation The orientation of the Book of Watchers is primarily spatial (with the divide between the heavenly and the earthly realms), and the sin of the angels is predominantly their violation of the creational order. The revelation conveyed to Enoch is also clothed in spatial imagery, in the form of cosmic journeys. Only in later parts of the Enochic corpus do temporal aspects come to the fore (as, e.g., in the Apocalypse of Weeks and the Animal Apocalypse). Since the period of the Maccabean crisis, we find comprehensive representations of history from the creation until the final endless state of peace (as in the Apocalypse of Weeks), historical accounts in the form of vaticinia ex eventu (as in Dan 11), and also the expectation of a (nearer or more remote) future deliverance of Israel (Dan 12) or judgment of all the evil powers in the world (as in the Apocalypse of Weeks). While the “historical apocalypses” focus on the temporal dimension, apocalyptic as such is from its very beginnings not focused on that dimension, nor

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is it generally characterized by temporal aspects in later periods. Jewish (and Christian) apocalypses always imply the spatial dimension in their worldview, and it is, and has always been, erroneous and misleading to “define” apocalyptic from certain kinds of future-oriented eschatology or even “imminent expectation” of the kingdom or a near end.95 3.1.3 No General Reference to Torah and Temple Apart from the very brief episode in Gen 6:1–4 paralleled by the Myth of the Watchers in 1 En. 6–12,96 1 En. 1–36 is almost unrelated to the tradition of the Torah, and it does not refer to the prophetic books. It is likewise unrelated to the Jerusalem temple. This is not insignificant and is probably no coincidence. In relation to the primordial father Enoch, traditions are collected and developed that are not primarily “Mosaic,” and even in the later book of Jubilees, where the Enochic tradition is intensely connected with the tradition from Genesis and Exodus, the tales from the Torah are re-narrated with a different chronology and also different legal practices under an authority superior to Moses, namely the heavenly tablets read by an angel. These techniques of establishing rival traditions have been extensively studied. Some of them may come from different social groups within Israel (deviant groups of priests, Levites, or scribes), but there are also good reasons to attribute the mythology underlying the Enochic tradition to circles in the Aramaic East, which may also explain the lack of orientation to Judaea or Jerusalem. Without going into detail here, this means that we have to consider the variety within Second Temple Jewish literature, which is not altogether oriented toward Jerusalem, its temple, or the Torah. This should also caution us against integrating everything into a Procrustean bed called “covenantal Judaism.” That term might have been useful in E. P. Sanders’s work, but it is historically inappropriate in view of the diversity of Second Temple Jewish literature or the complexities of Second Temple Judaism. Not all Jews of the Second Temple period were focused on the idea of covenant or the Jerusalem temple. 3.1.4 The Variety of Genres With the information from the Scrolls, the genre “apocalypse” could be freshly defined by John J. Collins to equally include “spatial” and “temporal” 95

It is this erroneous view that has led to the rejection of apocalyptic thought in liberal and Bultmannian theology, where any kind of future oriented eschatology was criticized or considered obsolete due to the fact that Jesus and his early followers had erred in their expectation of the imminent parousia. 96 It is even debatable whether Gen 6:1–4 is a brief summary of a more extensive tale of the “Sons of Elohim” that existed independently before. But these problems and the age of the myth or its formative parts cannot be discussed here.

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aspects97 and with a distinction of several sub-genres, such as “otherworldly journeys,” “symbolic apocalypses,” and “historical apocalypses.”98 Apocalypses can be integrated into texts of other genres or include elements or subtexts of different genres, as is also true, e.g., for the canonical book of Revelation and for 4 Ezra. The variety of genres includes the variety of motifs and themes, and there is no motif or theme that is represented in all apocalypses or related texts. Therefore, any attempt to define precisely apocalyptic according to a particular feature such as pseudonymity, symbolism, cosmology, future-oriented eschatology, or a “dualism” of two ages, etc. must necessarily fall short of accurately accounting for the wide range of apocalyptic thought. 3.1.5 No Coherent Group or Movement In view of the diversity of those texts, it has become more difficult to see a unified movement or intellectual tradition of “apocalyptic”: The Enochic tradition differs in a manner from Daniel and the Pseudo-Daniel texts (4Q243–245; 4Q552–553) or the War Scroll (1QM), the pre-Qumranic priestly Visions of Amram (4Q543–548) or the fragmentary New Jerusalem text (1Q32; 2Q24; 4Q554–555; 5Q15; 11Q18). Different texts are linked with different figures and occupied with different problems, referring in a very variegated manner to different parts of Scripture and probably originating in different groups. “It is not apparent … that the authors of Daniel belonged to the same circles as those of 1 Enoch,” and “4 Ezra and 2 Baruch represent a very different theological tradition from the Enochic literature.” Therefore, “it is misleading to speak of ‘the apocalyptic movement’ as though it were a single unified social phenomenon.”99 Therefore, all attempts to exclusively link apocalyptic thought with a particular movement (“Enochic Judaism,” the resistance in the Maccabean time, the resistance against Rome, or other kinds of “marginal” or “sectarian” groups) must be abandoned. Apocalyptic thought was widespread and adopted in various social and religious movements. 3.1.6 The Social Backgrounds The same is true with regard to social or political location. From Daniel (located in the Maccabean crisis) and Revelation (traditionally located within a 97

See n6. Cf. Armin Lange and Ulrike Mittmann-Richert, “Annotated List of the Texts from the Judaean Desert Classified by Content and Genre,” in The Texts from the Judaean Desert: Indices and an Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series, ed. Emanuel Tov, DJD 39 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 115–64. 99 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 38. 98

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time of persecution, although this has been seriously doubted in more recent scholarship), it was concluded that apocalyptic literature was primarily reacting to political, social, or religious turmoil (or at least to a kind of “perceived” crisis).100 Other scholars have even tried to locate the rise of apocalyptic hopes among deprived lower classes in Late-Persian and Hellenistic Palestine.101 But the amount of learning and also scriptural knowledge in apocalyptic texts should caution us against simply attributing them to lower class circles. Nor can the texts’ visions and utopias be explained by attempts of marginalized groups to cope with their own situation or to long for a “revolutionary” change. Apocalyptic imagery does not simply mirror external circumstances in symbolic language. The Animal Apocalypse with its allegorical representation of the whole history of Israel is an exception. The imagery of apocalyptic texts and visions creates highly complicated symbolic worlds which are largely independent from external circumstances and which could be reused and reconfigured in different situations and by different groups or even canonized and transmitted into completely different contexts (e.g., in the later Christian appropriation of Jewish apocalyptic texts). 3.1.7 The Intentions of Apocalyptic Thought The intentions and objectives of apocalyptic thought can be perceived in its early examples. As the early Enochic tradition shows, apocalyptic thought is stimulated by the perception of an apparent contradiction between belief in the divine order and its obvious violation in the present world or between belief in election and the apparently infinite power of foreign rulers or even demonic forces. Accordingly, trust in divine power and justice is fundamental and leads to inquiry into the origins of evil and its final removal. Although the expectation of the final defeat of the evil powers is not always related to the earlier (biblical) promises but expected from a new and, in that sense, unexpected divine intervention, it is actually an expression of faith in God the king and ruler of the universe even though his kingship is often invisible and hidden to humans.

100 Thus the suggestion with regard to Revelation in Adela Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis. The Power of the Apocalypse (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). 101 Cf. Rainer Albertz, Vom Exil bis zu den Makkabäern, vol. 2 of Religionsgeschichte Israel in alttestamentlicher Zeit, GAT 8.2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 643ff. (on Isa 24–27) and cf. 649ff. But see George W. E. Nickelsburg, “Social Aspects of Palestinian Jewish Apocalypticism,” in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979, ed. David Hellholm (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979), 641–54.

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3.2 The Insufficiency of the Concepts of Apocalyptic in the Debate In contrast with the earlier handbook knowledge, interpreters informed by the full wealth of Second Temple texts arrive at a much wider appreciation of the “Apocalyptic Imagination” and its symbolic worlds,102 which is not merely a reaction to external turmoil, nor an encoded message about political resistance, but a means of transmitting collective and individual hopes, heavenly and earthly wisdom in a vast variety of motifs (including different types of Messianism and eschatology). Apocalyptic thought cannot be limited to particular “sectarian” circles or groups, and, especially after the Maccabean crisis, it became widespread in various circles of Second Temple Judaism (perhaps except the Sadducees). Therefore, all attempts to marginalize apocalyptic elements in the late Second Temple period are historically implausible. In fact, the whole early Jesus movement (and also the circle of John the Baptist) was deeply apocalyptic, and a large number of the central terms and themes of the Jesus tradition (kingdom of God, Son of Man, resurrection, eternal life, judgment, etc.) is actually taken from, or predominantly attested to in Jewish apocalyptic texts. Why should Paul, then, be non-apocalyptic? All attempts to remove him from apocalyptic thought have proven to be unsuccessful and motivated by modern theological interests. We should, therefore, abandon efforts that distance Paul from apocalyptic or neutralize apocalyptic elements in his texts for apologetic reasons. But if Wright, in the end of the debate with his opponents, surprisingly acknowledges that “Paul’s message is thoroughly ‘apocalyptic’” and that the Christ event is “cosmic in the sense that unseen suprahuman powers … have been overcome,”103 this is also a problematic statement as the “apocalyptic” character of Paul’s message is only accepted within the strict limits of Wright’s concept shown above. Ultimately, the acknowledgement that Paul is thoroughly apocalyptic within the covenantal framework is also a way of marginalizing or neutralizing apocalyptic. Due to the new insights sketched above, a number of scholarly concepts or alleged characteristic features of apocalyptic are insufficient or misleading. If we call “apocalyptic” a worldview shaped by (some or a larger number of) elements developed and presented in apocalypses and related texts, and if we consider the variety and plurality of those texts within Second Temple Judaism, we can define “apocalyptic” neither by imminent expectation, nor by the “dualism” of the two ages, nor by the idea of a present or eschatological battle between good and evil forces. It is true that a cosmic dimension is characteristic, but it is also clear for any Jewish (and early Christian) apocalypse that the Lord of the universe is the creator, the God of Israel. 102 103

Cf. Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 184.

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The variety of apocalyptic texts also includes the fact that they present a wide variety of images of restitution or salvation, with or without a Messianic agent, and if there is a Messianic figure, he can be imagined human or superhuman (cf. Melchizedek in 11QMelch, or some images in the Psalter of the LXX), royal, prophetic, or priestly, or in specific combinations. Any idea of “the” Messianic expectation (as if there were one particular idea, image, or even prophetic perspective) should be definitely abandoned in view of the Qumran library. The diversity further includes the ideas of salvation as such: Some texts imagine that the righteous shall live to the age of a thousand years on the renewed earth, whereas others portray heavenly abodes. Some are focused on the sanctuary in Jerusalem, while others are unrelated to the temple or speculate about a “new” or heavenly temple. And there is also variety in view of the cosmos: While many texts envisage a renewed or restored world, others also use the image of a total disappearance or destruction of the present world and its replacement by a “new heaven and earth” (cf. Rev 21:1, 2 Pet 3:13, but also 4 Ezra 7), and it would also be misleading to exclude the concept of a destruction of the present world and of a totally new creation as impossible for first-century Jews. Such a view could grow from the insight into the radical depth of corruption in the world, resulting in a sequence of several judgments (as also in the Apocalypse of Weeks) or in a thoroughgoing destruction. A few Jewish texts (such as the Sibylline Oracles) could even adopt the Stoic idea of an ἐκπύρωσις (which is, then, also adopted in the Apocalypse of Peter and in 2 Pet 3:7, 10). If some exegetes use the military imagery of a divine “invasion” into the cosmos, this is rather anachronistic. In antiquity, the world was not considered a closed space of “immanence,” strictly separated from the realm of “transcendence,” since God the creator and ruler of the universe was always thought to be able to intervene in his creation. Even if evil powers were thought to rule the world or a portion of it (cf. the Treatise on the Two Spirits from Qumran; 1QS III, 13–IV, 26), such an authority was always thought to be given only for a certain time or space and subject to God’s permission. In the final visitation or in various acts of judgment God was considered to make an end to the evil powers. But an eschatological purification (1QS IV, 23–26) or even battle (1QM) was not considered an “invasion” of God into a realm that was not originally and legitimately his own.104 On the other hand, the strict presupposition of a “space-time continuum” is likewise a modern concept that should not be used to limit the creative and judicial power of God.

104 Possibly the idea of the intervention of God in the seventh period to decide the battle for Michael and his lot in 1QM I, 13–15 comes close to such a view, possibly based on a Zoroastric pattern.

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We can see that the concepts of apocalyptic applied by Käsemann, Martyn, and de Boer are inappropriate in view of the variety of the Jewish apocalyptic texts. But on the other hand, Wright seems to underestimate the variety of apocalyptic concepts as well. Not all of these texts share the Deuteronomistic pattern developed from the end of Deuteronomy and from Dan 9. Not all of them mention, or positively refer to the Sinai covenant, the election of Israel or the Fathers, or the creation. The early Enochic tradition, e.g., is unrelated to many of those elements, and the texts representing the views of the Qumran community use the Hebrew term ‫“ =( ברית‬covenant”) in a manner that excludes all other Israelites from election or “salvation,” thus emphatically denying the value of their national election. These examples should caution against any inappropriately simplifying view – or rather: ideology – of “covenantal Judaism.”

4. Paul the Apocalyptic Theologian and Salvation History 4.1 Paul the Apocalyptic Theologian From the Pauline texts it should be clear that Paul was deeply rooted in contemporary apocalyptic thought. There are thoroughly apocalyptic traditions he adopted from the early Jesus movement (e.g., 1 Thess 4:16–17), apocalyptic views such as the hope for a final resurrection of the dead are part of the Pharisaic position Paul had held before his encounter with Christ, and his earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, is strongly shaped by the expectation of the parousia of Christ (cf. 1 Thess 1:10; 2:19; 3:13; 4:16–17; 5:23). The themes of parousia (cf. Phil 3:20–21), the bodily resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15) or the universal, cosmic dimension of salvation (Rom 8:18–23) are repeated in the later authentic epistles, and there is no indication that apocalyptic eschatology was replaced by a more Hellenistic type of thought, although Paul can also use Hellenistic images to express his Christian hope (cf. 2 Cor 5:1– 10; Phil 1:23). Apocalyptic views were not only vivid in contemporary Palestinian Judaism (where Paul probably had studied Pharisaic learning) but also in the diaspora, in Greek language (cf. 2 Maccabees, 2 Enoch, the Apocalypse of Moses, the sayings of Pseudo-Phocylides, etc.). Apocalyptic thought was the framework in which various kinds of messianism could develop. Apocalyptic ideas and expectations were in the background of the teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus, and from here the entire early Jesus movement can be considered a Jewish apocalyptic and messianic sect, albeit with a universalistic perspective (which soon caused conflicts with other Jews).

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The apocalyptic influence on Paul’s language and thought is evident from a large number of terms and concepts in his letters:105 the scenario of 1 Thess 4:16–17 and the coming of Christ with all his saints (i.e., a host of angels) of 1 Thess 3:13 have already been mentioned, but much more frequently Paul mentions the “day of the Lord” or “of Christ” (1 Cor 1:8–9; 5:5; 2 Cor 1:14; Phil 1:6, 10; 2:16, 1 Thess 5:2) coming suddenly like a thief (1 Thess 5:2), the day of wrath and the revelation of judgment (Rom 2:5) related to the fire of testing or judgment (1 Cor 3:13). Of course, he expected the return of Christ during his lifetime (1 Thess 4:17; 1 Cor 15:52–53) in accordance with an understanding of time that is inspired by apocalyptic thought: Time approaches its end (cf. Rom 13:11–12), and the shape of this world vanishes (1 Cor 7:31); the present is the end-time (1 Cor 10:11), the time of the birthpangs (Rom 8:18–23) of salvation – as Paul describes using a widespread apocalyptic image. Paul also uses the pattern of the two ages (although it is used in its complete form for the first time in 4 Ezra). He knows that this aeon is evil (Gal 1:4; cf. Rom 12:2; 1 Cor 5:10), dominated by “rulers” (1 Cor 2:6) or even Satan (2 Cor 4:4), and it is contrasted with the incorruptible, the coming kingdom of God (1 Cor 15:50). Of course, Paul shares the hope for the resurrection of the dead, and the view that the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection (1 Cor 15:20, 23) is – as Käsemann has correctly seen – a sign of apocalyptic thought. The resurrection of the dead (as the resurrection of Jesus) is clearly conceptualized in a bodily manner,106 and it is obvious that Paul’s Greek audience in Corinth and Thessalonica had difficulty grasping that. The various ideas of judgment (which cannot be harmonized to form a coherent scheme) also point to widespread apocalyptic traditions. Paul further hopes for the removal of evil, or the evil one: Satan (cf. Rom 16:20; 1 Cor 5:5; 7:5; 2 Cor 2:11; 11:14; 12:7). He is aware of the idea of Satan as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14) and possibly knows the tradition of the fall of a primordial angel. The syntagma of the “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15) is also taken from the apocalyptic tradition (Isa 65:17) and is also used in Palestinian-Jewish texts (Jub. 4:26; 50:5; 11Q19 XXXIX, 9–10). Even the idea of a multi-layered heavenly realm is not unknown to Paul, as he shows in the account of his heavenly journey (2 Cor 12:2). Here we also have a hint at ecstatic and visionary religious experiences, which were obviously shared by Paul. Finally (and quite importantly for N. T. Wright’s interpretation), the use of the term µυστήριον in the sense of a hidden divine plan of history and eschatology (Rom 11:25; 1 Cor 15:51) 105 Cf. Jörg Frey, “Die religiöse Prägung,” in Paulus Handbuch, ed. Friedrich W. Horn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 59–63. 106 Cf. fundamentally Martin Hengel, “Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem Grabe,” in Studien zur Christologie, vol. 4 of Kleine Schriften, WUNT 201 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 386–450.

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which is considered to be revealed at present and proclaimed by Paul himself (1 Cor 2:1, 7; 4:1) points back to Jewish apocalyptic texts (e.g., Daniel) and also to the apocalyptic type of wisdom now accessible in texts from the Qumran library (Instruction = 1Q26; 4Q415–418, 418a, 423; Book of Mysteries = 1Q27; 4Q299–301) that point to a ‫“( רז נהיה‬mystery of being/becoming”) as a hidden order of being and history that encompasses the creation and the expected end. Paul’s usage of “flesh” suggests that he was influenced by terminological developments in that tradition of wisdom.107 In view of all those traditions adopted in Paul’s letters, it is quite obvious that the apostle (and probably already the Pharisee) was intensely influenced by the concepts of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic, and although some of the ideas are rephrased in the light of the Christ event and related to the present state of the believers (as, e.g., the “new creation”), others are still considered future (as, e.g., the parousia of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the defeat of Satan, or the vanishing of the present state of the world). Paul is undeniably an apocalyptic theologian, and only a stubbornly liberal or Bultmannian ideology could deny this in the interest of shaping the real Paul according to its own ideas. 4.2 Apocalyptic and Salvation History in Paul The question is how these apocalyptic elements are related to the covenantal traditions of Israel or to salvation history. Does apocalyptic (as a view of radical discontinuity) rule out a salvation-historical perspective or a view that positively relates the Christ event to some of the fundamental data of Israel’s history? Or does the covenantal perspective (or the presupposition of salvation-historical continuity) rule out any possibility of real “newness,” as everything can only happen as it is established in God’s plan or prophesied from old? In view of the deficiencies of the characterizations of “apocalyptic” (in Käsemann’s works and the “apocalyptic school” as well as in Wright’s view), both questions can be answered in the negative. It is true that apocalyptic texts can only phrase their hope for a new saving intervention of God by an (explicit or implicit) reference to the power of the creator and heavenly king, to former experiences confirming the trust in him or at least in his power to defend his creational order against all violators and enemies. But it should likewise be considered that, in an awareness of covenant and election, a situa107

On those texts cf. Jörg Frey, “Flesh and Spirit in the Palestinian Jewish Sapiential Tradition and in the Qumran Texts: An Inquiry into the Background of Pauline Usage,” in The Wisdom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought: Studies in Wisdom at Qumran and its Relationship to Sapiential Thought in the Ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Judaism and the New Testament, ed. Charlotte Hempel, Armin Lange, and Hermann Lichtenberger, BETL 159 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 367–404.

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tion of suffering from foreign enemies or even wicked Israelites, or the perception of injustice and corruption in the world could become so severe that the hope for a mere restoration could appear insufficient and a much more radical, unprecedented intervention was imagined. This means that apocalyptic and salvation history, or a “covenantal” perspective, are not contradictory.108 Neither does the apocalyptic viewpoint in Paul rule out a positive relation to certain elements of the biblical tradition, nor does trust in the faithfulness of God and the belief that this faithfulness has been revealed in Jesus rule out the view that the Christ event was a new intervention of God or that Christ’s parousia might bring about an unprecedented completion, or even an “end,” of the world. With regard to Paul, Wright is correct in interpreting the fullness of time in Gal 4:4 as a sign of continuity with the salvation history of Israel (cf. PFG 876), whereas the idea of a total discontinuity as advocated by Martyn109 or the understanding of the sending of the Son as an “invasion” from a certain place “outside” appears to presuppose an anachronistic concept and a “closed” world of immanence. But is it also correct to limit the possible range of apocalyptic hopes by the presupposition that all contemporary Jews shared a common worldview? Can the “covenant” or the related worldview be an overarching category to determine what Paul might have thought and what we can rule out for him? Such an argument is neither historical nor exegetical but ideological and thus to be rejected. It implies a switch from description to prescription in a methodologically problematic manner, and it is based on the generalizations of the quest for a “common Judaism,” which is mistaken in view of the varieties and complexities of Second Temple Judaism (or even “Judaisms”) and in view of the fragmentary evidence we have (from Eretz Israel and even more from the Diaspora where the majority of first-century Jews lived). Paul certainly does defend his gospel from the Scriptures, from the prophecies of Isaiah and from the promises to Abraham (which were particularly useful in his universalistic perspective). We may cautiously ask why Paul so rarely mentions the term διαθήκη. He knew it from the tradition of the Eucharistic words (1 Cor 11:23–25, where it draws on Jer 31:31–34, probably according to the LXX), but apart from that tradition he uses it only in polemical contexts where he feels urged to argue against the soteriological function of the law (2 Cor 3–4 and Gal 4). Should we conclude from here that the theme of the Sinai-covenant (perhaps in connection with circumcision and the Law) was introduced to the discussion by his opponents, or at least that Paul was so cautious and relatively silent about the covenant because the motif could easily work as an argument for his opponents who insisted on the circumci108 109

Cf. also PFG 781. Cf. Martyn, Galatians, 388.

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sion of Gentile believers and their integration into the covenant by such an act? In contrast with the motif of the Sinai covenant, the motif of Abraham could be much better used in Paul’s argument in Galatians.110 But the question is whether the positive relation to some fundamental events of Israel’s salvation history can rule out that the cross was a fundamental skandalon for “covenantal” Jews (including the young Paul himself). We have to consider that the interpretation of the death of Jesus “according to the Scriptures” was only possible in retrospect, due to an intense search for meaning and, of course, the revelatory work of the Spirit. Only in view of the Easter events could Jesus’s followers struggle for an understanding of that bewildering incident. The view that everything happened in accordance with the primordial divine plan, his prescience or even predestination, was a view that even Paul had only arrived at after disturbing experiences in his mission (cf. Rom 11:25–26), and that is – probably in a later time – phrased more fully in the retrospect of Eph 1:3–14.111 A synthesis of Pauline theology that takes such a retrospective viewpoint (from a deuteron-pauline epistle or also from Rom 11) may overlook some of the disturbing experiences Paul had to face – his wrestling for the adequate understanding of the cross, the gospel, and the “mystery” of salvation – and the concept of Wright’s synthesis may lead him to prefer such a retrospective or bird’s-eye view. From such a perspective, the “great narrative” may swallow everything, and some of the details of life along the way to the final retrospective may be overlooked. What is the theological value of apocalyptic? Church and theology have often considered apocalyptic (and in particular the book of Revelation) a dangerous element, questioning worldly rulers and the well-established church and inspiring critics and also too often “sectarians.” From apocalyptic thought the “no!” (not only the Barthian one) has unfolded its force, and indeed the coming kingdom (and the coming judgment) is the fundamental question mark to worldly rule and contemporary theology. Neutralizing apocalyptic is therefore a dangerous way of weakening the Christian message, perhaps as dangerous as making apocalyptic the center of everything. Paul himself shows the path: He did not put all the weight on the apocalyptic scenario he adopted in 1 Thess 4:16–17. He kept the expectation of the parousia, the resurrection, the transfiguration, but the focus was ultimately on the comforting hope for the final communion with Christ, “to be with the Lord forever.” This is neither “de-apocalypticizing” nor “apocalypticizing,” but a pastoral and theological perspective taken in view of the addressees with their probable Gentile background. 110

In contrast with Martyn and others, I do not think that the motif of Abraham (who was a central figure also for Diaspora Jews) was only introduced by Paul’s opponents. 111 Cf. PFG 728–33. It is clear that Eph 1 was a fundamental proof text for Calvin’s view of divine predestination.

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5. Apocalyptic as a Stumbling Stone and the Constraints of Construction N. T. Wright claims that his approach is strictly historical and that “his” Paul is the “true,” historical Paul. On the other hand, he also claims to bring a number of interlocking themes into a coherent whole (PFG 612). Thus, his approach is at the same time strongly systematic, reducing diversities of the texts and also integrating apocalyptic into the plot or “great narrative” presupposed for Paul. Rather than being inductive or exegetical, his method is deductive,112 deriving conclusions from an overall pattern – the “storied worldview” into which everything is integrated, including apocalyptic. This is a significant characteristic of Wright’s style of thought. And while such a method of interpretation is far from being illegitimate, it raises questions of whether the results still match the texts and historical details. We must ask whether the amount of constructive fantasy in this synthesis is aptly considered and whether the construction also necessarily causes some constraints. If the texts are taken seriously, the apostle was more apocalyptic than Wright’s overall system allows. He was Jewish, but contemporary Judaism was much more variegated than Wright’s harmonizing covenantal system – actually a salvation-historical reading through the lens of Deuteronomistic thought – may suggest. It is true that Paul’s Jewish worldview was thoroughly transformed by Jesus and the Spirit, that Paul was convinced that the eschatological period of salvation (including salvation for the Gentiles) had begun, and that he was part of that eschatological enterprise. But the hope for completion, the expectation of judgment, resurrection, and the final encounter with Jesus, should not be marginalized or neutralized. Moreover, the real-life Paul had much more open questions than Wright suggests in his synthetic retrospective. Especially Rom 9–11 is part of an intellectual wrestling of the apostle with God and Scripture in view of his own missionary experiences. Whereas Wright’s system presupposes (as from a bird’s-eye view, or even in the divine plan) that everything was clear from creation to covenant and from covenant to final deliverance, foreseen or even predestined,113 the “real” Paul did not have such a perfect plan, neither as a 112

Wright prefers to elaborate on concepts than following texts in their exegetical detail. When discussing particular texts, especially in Part III, he most often focusses on Romans which is indeed the key text for his systematic approach, in part also Galatians (esp. Gal 3–4), whereas 1 Thessalonians, 1–2 Corinthians, or Philippians are less represented. Obviously the texts addressed to a Gentile Christian audience are given less weight. 113 Certainly, Wright would not subscribe to a Calvinistic view of predestination, but actually his presupposition of a complete Divine plan of salvation, including the cross as well as the final completion comes close to such a view which can be phrased in retrospect but is somewhat remote from the questions of Paul and his contemporaries.

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Pharisee nor as an apostle of Christ. Shaken and turned upside down in his views through his encounter with Christ, he searched the Scriptures and found the gospel and also the new view of the Jewish law exegetically confirmed. He was even troubled by difficult missionary experiences and arrived at solutions by a special “revelation” (Rom 11:25–27). Likewise, many Jews in the Second Temple period and also Jesus followers wrestled to cope with the experiences of life, of foreign rulers and injustice within Israel, of evil and unbelief, with a strong sense of the tension between the traditions of election and covenant and the experience of life. Apocalyptic thought is basically a reaction to that experience of tension, related to the faithfulness of God or to the belief that God still reigns, but longing for a new act of deliverance – a purified, renewed, or even “freshly” created world, proportional to the insight into the depth of corruption of the present world. In my view, it is historically and theologically more appropriate to follow those efforts and to reconstruct the variegated concepts of maintaining and revitalizing hope in order to cope with the oddities of life and the experience of evil. In such a perspective there is no need to deny the hope for a new intervention of God whose faithfulness is not obvious but always an object of faith. There is no need to neutralize mythological elements of thought such as the idea of an end of the world, although such elements might have functioned already within the present world, inspiring persistence and even resistance (as “utopias” often work). There is also no need to deny that Paul did actually draw on such concepts and personally reckoned with the return of Christ during his lifetime. If the biblical texts are not read with a fundamentalist ideology in terms of a true and inerrant representation of past or coming “history,” there is no need to “tame” or eliminate such elements which have been considered problematic or even erroneous in modern theology. N. T. Wright’s system, however, follows other rules. Due to his gesture of explaining the world of Paul’s mind (and the world in general) from a bird’seye perspective,114 he presupposes a clarity from the beginning to the end. Everything happens as foreseen in the Divine plan, foretold in Scripture and “freshly” revealed and reworked in light of the Christ event. But this impressive synthesis is rather a “myth of redemption” created by a systematic mind at the expense of losing edgy details and – in some ways – also the real life of the real Paul. Apocalyptic is such an edgy element, especially for critical modern views, so that scholars from Baur to Bultmann have been united in 114 It is at least a systematic perspective largely inspired from Romans (rather than from the other authentic letters of Paul), and in parts even from Ephesians read as an authentic letter, although this shows strong signs of a retrospection on Paul. More than Rom 9–11, Eph 1:3–14, one of the core testimonies of Calvin’s theory, can inspire such a “bird’s-eye view.”

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the “agonized attempt” to save not only Jesus but also Paul and John from apocalyptic, and Wright has joined that party due to his apologetic, and especially systematic, interests. Why the emotional polemics against all those “would-be” apocalypticists and the furious attacks against the “apocalyptic” reading of Paul? The polemic points to a perceived danger. And indeed apocalyptic, if understood as a factor of discontinuity, is a decisive danger for a concept so strongly based on the idea of covenantal continuity. For Wright’s sophisticated synthesis of everything in and around Paul, with everything so well-integrated into the divine master-plan of salvation-history or the all-embracing covenant, apocalyptic indeed might be the rock that finally breaks the impressive image (cf. Dan 2:34). In Wright’s work apocalyptic ideas are tamed, put in a safe place within the covenantal order to prevent them from endangering the great synthesis of Pauline, or rather Wrightian, thought. But is it appropriate to neutralize aspects that might question the appealing construct? Systematicians have always done so, while exegetes have often uttered protest in the name of the details of language, history, or even “reality.” Hermeneutics may infer that any reconstruction is in fact construction, and this may justify a certain degree of construction as long as it does not claim to explain the real world of the real Paul, or even the real theology of the real divine mind. N. T. Wright’s claims are far from being humble as his polemic against numerous other views – biased Lutherans, stubborn “Old Perspective” interpreters, and especially apocalypticists – show. But if that system is too all-embracing and too clear-cut, the self-conscious author runs the risk – to adapt a phrase from Albert Schweitzer115 – that the real Paul will leave the world so nicely designed for him and return into his own world.116

Bibliography Albertz, Rainer. Vom Exil bis zu den Makkabäern. Vol. 2 of Religionsgeschichte Israel in alttestamentlicher Zeit. GAT/NTD Ergänzungsreihe 8.2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. Barclay, John M. G. Review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God, by N. T. Wright. SJT 68 (2015): 235–43. 115

Cf. the famous passage in the closure of Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. William Montgomery (London: Black, 2010), 399: “The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. … But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own.” 116 The author is research associate of the department of Theology, North-West University, Campus Potchefstroom, South-Africa.

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Boer, Martinus C. de. Galatians: A Commentary. NTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011. –. N. T. Wright’s Great Story and Its Relationship to Paul’s Gospel, Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters 4 (2014): 49–57. –. “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology.” Pages 169–90 in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn. Edited by Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards. JSNTSup 24. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989. –. The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5. JSNTSup 22. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988. Bultmann, Rudolf. “Analyse des ersten Johannesbriefes.” Pages 105–23 in Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments. Edited by Erich Dinkler. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967. Caird, G. B. A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. New York: Harper & Row, 1966). –. The Language and Imagery of the Bible. London: Duckworth, 1980. Campbell, Douglas A. The Deliverance of God. An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Christophersen, Alf. Friedrich Lücke (1791–1855). 2 vols. Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann 94. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999. Collins, Adela Yarbro. Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Collins, John J. “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre.” Pages 1–20 in Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre. Edited by John J. Collins. Semeia 14. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979. –. The Apocalyptic Imagination. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. –. “The Origin of Evil in Apocalyptic Literature and in the Qumran Community.” Pages 287–300 in Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic Roman Judaism. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 54. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Frey, Jörg. “Apocalyptic Dualism.” Pages 271–94 in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature. Edited by John J. Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. –. “Das apokalyptische Millennium.” Pages 10–72 in Millennium: Informationen zum christlichen Mythos der Jahrtausendwende. Kaiser Traktate 171. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1999. –. Der Judasbrief und der zweite Petrusbrief. THKNT 15.2. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015. –. “Die Apokalyptik als Herausforderung der neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft: Zum Problem: Jesus und die Apokalyptik.” Pages 23–94 in Apokalyptik als Herausforderung neutestamentlicher Theologie. Edited by Michael Becker and Markus Öhler. WUNT II 214. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. –. “Die Bildersprache der Johannesapokalypse.” ZTK 98 (2001): 161–85. –. Die johanneische Eschatologie, Volume I: Ihre Probleme im Spiegel der Forschung seit Reimarus. WUNT 96. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997. –. “Die religiöse Prägung.” Pages 59–63 in Paulus Handbuch. Edited by Friedrich W. Horn. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. –. “Eschatology in the New Testament: An Introduction.” Pages 3–32 in Eschatology in the New Testament and Some Related Documents. Edited by Jan G. van der Watt. WUNT II 315. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. –. “Flesh and Spirit in the Palestinian Jewish Sapiential Tradition and in the Qumran Texts: An Inquiry into the Background of Pauline Usage.” Pages 367–404 in The Wis-

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dom Texts from Qumran and the Development of Sapiential Thought: Studies in Wisdom at Qumran and its Relationship to Sapiential Thought in the Ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Judaism and the New Testament. Edited by Charlotte Hempel, Armin Lange, and Hermann Lichtenberger. BETL 159. Leuven: Peeters, 2002. –. “Johannine Christology and Eschatology.” Pages 101–32 in Beyond Bultmann: Reckoning a New Testament Theology. Edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Mikeal C. Parsons. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014. –. “Paulinische Perspektiven zur Kreuzestheologie.” Pages 53–97 in Kreuzestheologie: Kontrovers und erhellend. Edited by Klaus Grünwaldt and Udo Hahn. Hannover: VELKD, 2007. –. “The New Jerusalem Text in Its Historical and Traditio-Historical Context.” Pages 800– 16 in The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years After Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 20–25, 1997. Edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2000. –. “Was erwartet die Johannesapokalypse? Zur Eschatologie des letzten Buchs der Bibel.” Pages 473–552 in Die Johannesapokalypse: Kontexte – Konzepte – Rezeption. Edited by Jörg Frey, James A. Kelhoffer, and Franz Tóth. WUNT 287. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. –. “Zur Bedeutung der Qumrantexte für das Verständnis der Apokalyptik im Frühjudentum und im Urchristentum.” Pages 11–62 in Apokalyptik und Qumran. Edited by Jörg Frey and Michael Becker. Einblicke 6. Paderborn: Bonifatius, 2007. Götte, Monika. “Von den Wächtern zu Adam.” Ph.D. diss., University of Zurich, forthcoming. Hengel, Martin, “Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem Grabe.” Pages 386–450 in Studien zur Christologie. Vol. 4 of Kleine Schriften. WUNT 201. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. –. Der Sohn Gottes: Die Entstehung der Christologie und die jüdisch-hellenistische Religionsgeschichte. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975. –. Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine in the Early Hellenistic Period. Translated by John Bowden. 2 vols. London: SCM, 1974. –. Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr. 3rd ed. WUNT 10. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988. –. The Son of God: The Origins of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion. Translated by John Bowden. London: SCM, 1976. Käsemann, Ernst. “Die Anfänge christlicher Theologie.” Pages 82–104 in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen II. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964. –. Jesu letzter Wille nach Johannes 17. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1966. –. “On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic.” Pages 108–37 in New Testament Questions of Today. Translated by W. J. Montague. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969. –. “The Beginning of Christian Theology.” Pages 82–107 in New Testament Questions of Today. Translated by W. J. Montague. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969. –. “Zum Problem des historischen Jesus.” Pages 187–214 in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen I. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960. –. “Zum Thema der urchristlichen Apokalyptik.” Pages 105–31 in Exegetische Versuche und Besinnugen II. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964. Koch, Klaus, “Einleitung zur Apokalyptik.” Pages 109–34 in Von der Wende der Zeiten: Beiträge zur apokalyptischen Literatur. Edited by Uwe Glessmer und Martin Krause.

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Vol. 3 of Gesammelte Aufsätze. Edited by Klaus Koch. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1996. –. Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik: Eine Streitschrift über ein vernachlässigtes Gebiet der Bibelwissenschaft und die schädlichen Auswirkungen auf Theologie und Philosophie. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1970. –. The Rediscovering of Apocalyptic. SBT 22. London: SCM, 1972. Koziel, Bernd Elmar. Apokalyptische Eschatologie als Zentrum der Botschaft Jesu und der frühen Christen? Ein Diskurs zwischen Exegese, Kulturphilosophie und Systematischer Theologie über die bleibende Bedeutung einer neuzeitlichen Denklinie. Bamberger Theologische Studien 33. New York: Lang, 2007. Lange, Armin and Ulrike Mittmann-Richert. “Annotated List of the Texts from the Judaean Desert Classified by Content and Genre.” Pages 115–64 in The Texts from the Judaean Desert: Indices and an Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series. Edited by Emanuel Tov. DJD 39. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Lücke, Friedrich. Versuch einer vollständigen Einleitung in die Offenbarung Johannis und in die gesammte apokalyptische Litteratur. Vol. 4.1 of Commentar über die Schriften des Evangelisten Johannes. Bonn: Weber, 1832. Martyn, J. Louis. “A Personal Word About Ernst Käsemann.” Pages xiii–xv in Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn. Edited by Joshua B. Davis and Douglas Harink. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012. –. “Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.” NTS 31 (1985): 410–24. –. Galatians AB 33A. New York: Doubleday, 1997. –. Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul. Nashville: Abingdon, 1997. Müller, Gerhard, Horst Balz und Gerhard Krause, eds. Theologische Realenzyklopädie. 36 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–2004. Nickelsburg, George W. E., “Social Aspects of Palestinian Jewish Apocalypticism.” Pages 641–54 in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979. Edited by David Hellholm. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1979. Portier-Young, Anathea. Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. –. “Jewish Apocalyptic Literature as Resistance Literature.” Pages 145–62 in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature. Edited by John J. Collins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Schmidt, Johann Michael. Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran. 2nd ed., Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1976. Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Translated by William Montgomery. London: Black, 2010. Stuckenbruck, Loren T. “The Origins of Evil in Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition.” Pages 87– 118 in The Fall of the Angels. Edited by Christoph Auffahrt and Loren T. Stuckenbruck. Themes in Biblical Narrative 6. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Vielhauer, Philipp. “Apocalyptic in Early Christianity.” Pages 608–42 in Writings Relating to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects. Revised ed. Vol. 2 of New Testament Apocrypha. Edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Translated by R. McL Wilson. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964. –. “Apokalyptik des Urchristentums.” Pages 428–54 in Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes. Vol. 2 of Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung. Edited

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by Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963. –. “Einleitung.” Pages 407–28 in Apostolisches, Apokalypsen und Verwandtes. Vol. 2 of Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung. Edited by Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963. –. “Introduction to ‘Apocalypses and Related Subjects.’” Pages 581–607 in Writings Relating to the Apostles; Apocalypses and Related Subjects. Revised ed. Vol. 2 of New Testament Apocrypha. Edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Translated by R. McL. Wilson. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964. Wright, N. T. “A New Tübingen School? Ernst Käsemann and his Commentary on Romans.” Pages 52–76 in Pauline Perspectives. Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates. London: SPCK, 2015. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003. –. What Saint Paul Really Said. Oxford: Lion Books, 1997. Zager, Werner. Begriff und Wertung der Apokalyptik in der neutestamentlichen Forschung. Europäische Hochschulschriften: Theologie 358. New York: Lang, 1989.

Individual Eschatology Richard H. Bell In my discussion of individual eschatology, I focus on two issues: first, Paul’s view of the final judgement and its relation to justification by faith, and second, the nature of post-mortem life. Although I will be critical of Wright’s views concerning the former, for the latter I am in many respects in sympathy with his views, and I will make suggestions as to how his conclusions can be given a more secure philosophical basis so as to make the idea of a resurrection life more credible. This issue of credibility is becoming increasingly important in the “Western world” since many have essentially given up on any idea of immortality,1 and we are faced with ever increasing materialist views of the human person. Perhaps this is the place to suggest that New Testament scholars who have an apologetic motive in their work and a concern for a world which desperately needs the gospel – and Wright can certainly be placed in this category – may need to recover a sense of proportion in addressing these major concerns rather than attacking opponents over relatively minor issues in what are sometimes bad-tempered exchanges. My concern therefore in this contribution is to find common ground wherever possible and to suggest alternative (and what I consider more convincing) ways of coming to similar conclusions.2

1. Justification and Judgement according to Works When God justifies the sinner, he declares that person to be “not guilty.” Wright understands this in terms of Austin’s “speech acts” (PFG 945–46). In his William James Lectures (1955), Austin started with a distinction between 1

Oliver Sacks, professor of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, reflecting with gratitude on his life in the knowledge that he has little time to live, speaks for many Westerners who have given up any hope of immortality in emphasizing that we have only this one life. He closes thus: “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure” (Oliver Sacks, “My Own Life,” The New York Times [19 February 2015]: A25). 2 I will be referring to a number of works of Wright in order to gain a fuller picture of his position (especially in regard to individual eschatology).

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constative utterances (e.g. descriptions), which may be said to be either true or false, and performative utterances (e.g. commands, promises), which may be said to be either successful or unsuccessful. However, in Lecture 8 he realized that one cannot make this simple distinction3 and develops another classification where he speaks of three types of speech act: the “locutionary” (the performance of saying something); the “illocutionary” (the performance in saying something); the “perlocutionary” (the effect of saying something).4 For a variety of reasons, such an analysis cannot be satisfactorily applied to justification. The main problem is that the effects of human speech acts cannot be remotely compared to the ontological change that occurs in the justification of the sinner.5 Further, in Paul’s view of justification a clear distinction needs to be made between what the gospel achieves and what the proclamation achieves.6 The gospel as the “word” which issues from God achieves an ontological transformation in the person who receives this word such that he is a new creation (2 Cor 5:17) and finds his life hid with Christ in God (Col 3:3). To do justice to such a transformation, I find it more appropriate to employ the idea of “language event” (Sprachereignis),7 whereby the “hearer” is drawn out of himself and into the “word” which addresses him.8 3 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 94. 4 Austin, Words, 98–101. Austin speaks of three acts; Christoph Landmesser, Wahrheit als Grundbegriff neutestamentlicher Wissenschaft, WUNT 113 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 17, rightly prefers to speak of three aspects of a single speech-act. One should also add that the so-called perlocutionary act is actually an effect (Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Wirkendes Wort. Handeln durch Sprechen in der christlichen Verkündigung,” in Magie: Katastrophenreligion und Kritik des Glaubens, ed. Hans-Günther Heimbrock and Heinz Streib [Kampen: Kok, 1994], 131). 5 For Austin, Words, 5, human speech acts include utterances such as “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”; “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother.” Even the more serious promises such as “I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife” (Words, 5) or a pronouncement “Not guilty” are qualitatively different to the verdict given in justification by faith. 6 See Dalferth, “Wirkendes Wort,” 139: “Die Wirkweise der Verkündigung kann (muß aber nicht) konventionell geregelt sein: Sie muß das Evangelium verkündigen, aber sie muß das so tun, daß dessen Wirkung (Glaube) sich von ihrer Wirkung (Hören und Verstehen) klar unterscheidet. Der Glaube aber und damit die Wirkkraft des Wortes Gottes verdanken sich keiner Konvention oder sozialen Normierung, sondern der freien Selbstvergegenwärtigung Gottes in seinem Geist ubi et quando visum est deo in his qui audiunt evangelium” (quoting from the Augsburg Confession, Article V). This assumes, rightly, that for Paul the gospel is not to be equated with the proclamation and not even with the apostolic preaching. See Otfried Hofius, “Wort Gottes und Glaube bei Paulus,” in Paulusstudien, WUNT 51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1989), 150–51. 7 See Ernst Fuchs, “Das Sprachereignis in der Verkündigung Jesu, in der Theologie des Paulus und im Ostergeschehen,” in Zum hermeneutischen Problem in der Theologie; Die existentiale Interpretation, Gesammelte Aufsätze I, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,

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If the word which achieves such a transformation of the human person is the “gospel,” a transcendent word which comes from God, then it would appear that justification is about how one becomes a Christian. However, the view put forward by Wright is that ‘justification’ is not ‘how someone becomes a Christian’, but ‘how someone who becomes a Christian through believing the gospel and being baptized can be sure they will receive the verdict “righteous” on the last day’. (PFG 949)

Justification is therefore all about “the creation of a new status” and having “a new standing in the community” (PFG 945). Wright has been remarkably consistent on this over the years, writing in a much earlier work that justification “is not how someone becomes a Christian, but simply the declaration that someone is a Christian.”9 I wonder though whether the texts are actually saying this? When Paul speaks of “being justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is through Jesus Christ” (Rom 3:25), is he simply saying this justification is a declaration of a new status and new standing in the community? Does not the context suggest that we are dealing here with a radical ontological change in the person who encounters, and is transformed by, God’s saving righteousness?10 I therefore suggest that the verdict “not guilty” makes the sinner not guilty; it does not establish what is, but rather creates what was not already there.11 It is a creative rather than an analytical verdict and hence is truly a “language event.” 1965), 281–305. Fuchs was insistent, against his teacher Bultmann, that one should speak of Sprachereignis rather than Sprechereignis. Such a language event does not simply generate images within a field of images but rather creates this field of images (Ingolf U. Dalferth, Religiöse Rede von Gott, BEvT 87 [München: Kaiser, 1981], 226–27), and affects the Sein not just the Seiende (Ernst Fuchs, “Was ist ein Sprachereignis? Ein Brief,” Zur Frage nach dem historischen Jesus, 2nd ed. [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965], 425). 8 See Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt: Zur Begründung der Theologie des Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1986), 13: “Im Sprachereignis geschieht mehr als nur Kommunikation von Bewußtsein zu Bewußtsein. Im Sprachereignis wird vielmehr das Sein eines Sachverhaltes zur Sprache gebracht, daß es das Sein des Menschen anspricht und dieser durch das ihn anredende Wort aus sich herausgerufen und in dem ihn anredenden Wort zu sich selber gebracht beziehungsweise von sich selber entfernt wird. Im Sprachereignis geschieht also dies, daß der Mensch ins Wort versammelt wird und dort, extra se, bei einem anderen zu sich selbst kommt.” 9 N. T. Wright, “Justification: The Biblical Basis and its Relevance for Contemporary Evangelicalism,” in The Great Acquittal: Justification by Faith and Current Christian Thought, ed. Gavin Reid (London: Collins, 1980), 14. 10 Richard H. Bell, “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul,” JTS 53 (2002): 16–22. 11 Cf. Otfried Hofius, “‘Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen’ als Thema biblischer Theologie,” in Paulusstudien, WUNT 51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989), 130, quotes the word-play of H. Stoevesandt: the verdict “stellt nicht fest, was ist, sondern stellt her, was zuvor nicht war.”

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One of the main problems in Paul’s theology is how to relate this fundamental “language event” of justification by faith to questions of the final judgement. There are, of course, various texts which point to an assurance that the verdict of “not guilty” which the Christian receives now will correspond to the verdict on the last day (Rom 8:31–39; cf. PFG 902–8). Although I disagree with Wright on the nature of the declaration of “not guilty,” at least we can agree that “it truly anticipates the verdict which will be issued on the final day” (PFG 948) and that “‘justification’ is the heart of what later generations would rightly see as Christian assurance” (PFG 948–49). However, this sense of assurance seems to be undermined by Wright’s understanding of judgement according to works. For if there is a judgement according to works for Christians which could issue in either acquittal or condemnation, then such assurance is essentially destroyed. There are, of course, serious warnings which Paul issues, especially in the Corinthian correspondence, which could imply a judgement according to works. In 1 Cor 6:9–10 Paul lists “the unrighteous” (ἄδικοι) who cannot inherit12 the kingdom of God: “Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers.” No doubt Paul is referring to “habitual actions”13 rather than isolated acts. Further, Paul clearly has in mind ontological categories in view of 1 Cor 6:11 (“you were justified”) and this text, together with Gal 5:19–21, can be understood as cohering with a view of “perseverance of the saints.”14 But what is one to make of those texts which explicitly speak of a “judgement according to works”? Wright considers that such texts, 2 Cor 5:10; Rom 14:10–12; Rom 2:12–16; 25–29, all concern a judgement according to works which could issue in condemnation (PFG 1086–92). They are all concerned with “a Jewish-style notion of a coming day of judgment” (PFG 1089). However, 2 Cor 5:10 and Rom 14:10–12 do not fall into this category. Rather, they refer to the “reward” or lack of “reward” Christians will receive and fall into the category of texts such as 1 Cor 3:1315 and are not concerned with acquittal and condemnation as Wright seems to suggest. In 2 Cor 5:10 judgement is

12 Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000), 439, rightly argues that οὐ κληρονοµήσουσιν in v. 9 should be understood as “cannot inherit” “in the logical sense of cannot (not its causal sense).” 13 Thiselton, First Corinthians, 439. 14 See Judith Gundry-Volf, Paul and Perseverance: Staying in and Falling away, WUNT II 37 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990), 133–41 (on 1 Cor 6:9–11) and 141–54 (on Gal 5:19–21). 15 See 1 Cor 3:8, 14 for the use of µισθός. 1 Cor 4:5 is also concerned with the reward although the word is not there employed. Relating 4:5 back to 3:8, 14, David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 129, rightly comments that in 1 Cor 4:5 “Paul specifies what the reward is”: it is “praise from God.”

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exclusively for Christians. This is clearly indicated by “all of us”16 and the judgement “is concerned with the assessment of works, not the determination of destiny.”17 If the reference is to Christians, “φαῦλος πράσσειν must involve displeasing Christ (cf. 5:9) and therefore the forfeiture of his commendation, but not the passing of a sentence of condemnation.”18 I would be extremely surprised if Paul meant something different in Rom 14:10, which bears many parallels to 2 Cor 5:10,19 and am therefore doubtful that these texts deal with “a Jewish style notion of a coming day of judgment” (PFG 1089). But if there is such a judgement in Paul, it is to be found in Rom 2:6–16, 29. Whereas 2 Cor 5:10 deals with the reward Christians receive, here we certainly are dealing with two possible outcomes of salvation and condemnation.20 I therefore strongly contest that these texts in Rom 2 are comparable to 2 Cor 5:10, 1 Cor 4:5, and Rom 14:10–12 as Wright suggests (PFG 1089–90). How then does the Jewish style of judgement according to works of Rom 2 relate to Paul’s justification by faith? The texts in Rom 2 which speak of this judgement according to works have to be seen in the context of Rom 1:18– 3:20 where Paul’s aim is to establish that there can be no justification by works of law (3:20). The pious Jews and pious Gentiles of Rom 2:12–13 therefore do not exist. If this point sounds perverse, I simply direct the reader to the catena of Rom 3:10–18, where Paul makes precisely this point. Here Paul is reversing what he earlier wrote as can be seen by comparing Rom 2:6–7 (“seek for glory and honour”) with Rom 3:11b (“no one seeks for God”).21 Wright stresses the role of “story” in Paul’s theology and in Rom 1:18–3:20 we have a “history of damnation” (Verdammnisgeschichte).22 But in any good story there is a turning point, and this is exactly what we find in Rom 3.23 16

Margaret E. Thrall, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Vol. I, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 394. 17 See Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 408–09. 18 Harris, Second Corinthians, 409n250. 19 Rom 14:10 speaks of all appearing before “the judgment seat of God” whereas 2 Cor 5:10 has “the judgment seat of Christ.” As Douglas Moo comments, “the shift of terminology does not imply that Paul conceives of two separate ‘judgment seats’ but that he views God and Christ as so closely related that he can shift almost unconsciously from one to the other” (Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT [Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996], 847n105). The most significant difference between 2 Cor 5:10 and Rom 14:10 is the context. 20 Harris, Second Corinthians, 406, rightly contrasts Rom 2:6–10 with 2 Cor 5:10. 21 Hence the title of Richard H. Bell, No One Seeks for God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 1:18–3:20, WUNT 106 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). 22 Bell, No One Seeks for God, 90, 239. 23 The realization that “no one seeks for God” leads to the radical conclusion of Rom 3:20 and to the good news of Rom 3:21–31. Similar turning points and again a reversal can

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Therefore, if Paul is to be believed, the day of judgement will be an uncomfortable day for Christians. Their work and ministry will be tested, and some of it will be tested with fire (1 Cor 3:13); but even if the work is burned, the Christian will escape, although “as through fire” (1 Cor 3:15).24 But for Christians there will be no “Jewish-style” day of the judgement; and if judgement is according to works in this sense, then no one will stand. But what does one say about those who do not believe in Christ? Most of the material in Paul’s letters assumes a “double exit” (cf. PFG 1131). Wright and I agree that Rom 11:32 cannot be taken to support universal salvation;25 however, a case can be made that Rom 5:18–19 does support a universal salvation, all having participated in Adam and all in Christ.26 A universalist case can also be made on the basis of other texts (2 Cor 5:19; Phil 2:11). Paul, I maintain, holds to both a double exit and occasionally a universal salvation on the day of judgement.27 But whether I am right or wrong, it seems clear that Paul held to the view that there is a post-mortem existence

be found in Romans 11. This accounts for the seeming “contradiction” between Rom 9:27 and Rom 11:26. See Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11, WUNT II 63 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 139–40. 24 As N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007), 179, 324n4, points out, Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 218–33, has argued on the basis of 1 Cor 3 that Jesus Christ is the fire of judgment which transforms us and conforms us to his resurrected body; this occurs instantaneously in the moment of the final judgment itself. 25 See Bell, Provoked to Jealousy, 151–53, where I argue that the context of Rom 11:32 and the use of τοὺς πάντας suggests Paul has two groups in mind, i.e. Jews and Gentiles (cf. PFG 1253). 26 See Richard H. Bell, “Rom 5.18–19 and Universal Salvation,” NTS 48 (2002): 417– 32. Therefore the “all” of Rom 5:18–19 is not to be put in the same category as the “all” of Rom 11:32 (see Bell, “Universal Salvation,” 427 and Bell, Provoked to Jealousy, 151–53). By contrast PFG 1131 appears to understand the “all” in both texts as referring to two groups. 27 Such inconsistency need be no major problem and a rationale can be given: in those texts where Paul has a mythological participation in Christ he can move into a universalism (as in Rom 5:18–19; 2 Cor 5:19). The same can be said for an encounter with Christ at the parousia. So Rom 11:26 speaks of a universal salvation for Jews (I argue for this in Bell, Provoked to Jealousy, 136–40), but this is possible because “all Israel” will receive the gospel directly from the coming Christ (Bell, Provoked to Jealousy, 140–45). Paul can also envisage a universal salvation for Jews and Gentiles in Phil 2:10–11: here all will come to a confession of faith in Christ and thereby be saved (Bell, “Universal Salvation,” 429–30n84). However, when he is dealing with how to get the gospel message to people in the context of his world mission, he cannot have such a universal salvation (Bell, “Universal Salvation,” 430–31). So we see that in Rom 11:25, this speaks of the “full number of the Gentiles” being saved, possibly achieved after Paul had taken the gospel to Spain (Bell, Provoked to Jealousy, 131).

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and that all will appear before God and Christ at the last day. This is one reason why the Protestant traditions have held to the idea of a “soul,”28 and this brings me now to the second topic, the nature of human post-mortem existence.

2. Human Post-mortem Existence One of Wright’s recurring themes is that the Christian gospel is not about escaping from earth and “going to heaven when you die.”29 Further, he understands Paul to speak of “life after ‘life after death’”30 and that the world to come is bodily and that the whole creation will be renewed (PFG 1490–91). I can endorse many of Wright’s conclusions, although, as will be clear shortly, I approach the issues from a very different perspective. And I hope that my argument may make Paul’s vision of the “afterlife” seem more credible and “reasonable.” I start with Paul’s description of the resurrection appearances in 1 Cor 15:5–8.31 It is a particularly good place to start since, for Paul, Christ’s resurrection is the basis for all Christian hope in the general resurrection. It also happens to be a text Christians can discuss with non-Christians.32 The key to understanding the nature of the resurrection appearances is the use of “appear” (ὤφθη). The verb is used in relation to all the appearances of Jesus (to Cephas and the Twelve, v. 5; to over 500 brethren, v. 6; to James and all the 28 Luther held that in view of Matt 22:32 (God is God of the living), God addresses, either in grace or in wrath, human beings who are “alive” even though they may have died; this is the key reason why he holds to immortality (Paul Althaus, Die Theologie Martin Luthers, 6th ed. [Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1983], 344). Hence, his idea of immortality is relational rather than substantial (Matthias Heesch, “Unsterblichkeit II,” TRE 34:389). The soul, of course, was important in both Catholic (see, e.g., Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul, the Soul, Brief Histories of Philosophy [Oxford: Blackwell, 2011], 30–64) and Orthodox theology (see, e.g., Kallistos Ware, “The Soul in Greek Christianity,” in From Soul to Self, ed. M. James C. Crabbe [London: Routledge, 1999], 49–69). It also had an important place in Reformed theology (George S. Hendry, The Westminster Confession for Today: A Contemporary Interpretation [London: SCM, 1960], 243–48), a particularly interesting advocate being Herman Dooyeweerd (see, e.g., Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols., trans. David H. Freeman, William Young, and H. de Jongste [Amsterdam: Paris, 1953–58]). 29 N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003), 368, 355; PFG 1484–85. 30 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 31. 31 Discussed in Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 322–29. 32 I have held many discussions on this passage in Open Days at the University of Nottingham and found this to be an ideal New Testament text for discussing questions of transcendence in a “neutral” (i.e., “secular”) context.

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apostles, v. 7; to Paul, v. 8). In the LXX the verb is used 85 times “of which a little over half refer either to YHWH, or YHWH’s glory or an angel of YHWH, appearing to people”; the other 39 instances use the verb “in a straightforward, non-visionary sense.”33 A number of factors speak in favour of the former for elucidating the “appearances” in 1 Cor 15:5–8,34 the appearance of the angel of the Lord before Moses being particularly instructive (Exod 3:2): “There the angel of the LORD appeared (ὤφθη) to him in a flame of fire out of the bush.” The Greek aorist passive ὤφθη renders the niphal form of ‫ראה‬. If this is a valid parallel, then ὤφθη in 1 Cor 15:5–8 is to be understood as “let oneself be seen”; the risen Jesus therefore revealed himself to chosen individuals and groups.35 Therefore these appearances were not simple “objective” appearances such that any onlooker would see Jesus; neither are they “subjective” visions as in 2 Cor 12:1–4.36 I think the best way to understand this “perception” is to go back to that great tradition stretching roughly from Descartes to Kant which grappled with the question of how we perceive things in the world and how “objects” are given to us.37 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is widely considered the finest piece of philosophical writing since Plato and Aristotle. Most know this work from the second edition (1788); however, Kant’s disciple Arthur Schopenhauer came to prefer the first edition (1781) and felt that Kant’s “commitment to idealism, and his crushing of rationalist metaphysics obtained their clearest, boldest, and most powerful expression in it.”38 Schopenhauer developed Kant’s idealism in what could be considered a more consistent way (even though Kant was easi-

33 34

48:3.

Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 323. Taking the book of Genesis alone, see Gen 12:7; 17:1; 18:1; 22:14; 26:2, 24; 35:9;

35 Acts 9:7; 22:9, although contradicting each other, nevertheless suggest that Christ revealed himself only to Paul, and that he was the only one to be converted on the Damascus Road. 36 In 2 Cor 12:1 Paul writes of visions (ὀπτασία) and revelations (ἀποκαλύψεις). It is the case that Paul uses ἀποκαλύψαι in Gal 1:16 for his Damascus Road experience. Further, Paul in Acts 26:19 speaks of his “heavenly vision” (οὐράνιος ὀπτασία), but this reflects the Lukan use of the verb (Luke 1:22; 24:23). Nevertheless, 2 Cor 12:1–10 seems to be a different experience to that in 1 Cor 15:8 or in 9:1 (where Paul uses ὁράω, actively in 9:1, passively in 15:8). 37 A striking advocate of Kant is the 2014 Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine, John O’Keefe. He first postulated “place cells” in 1971 and, with Lynn Nadel, defended Kantian views on space in John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 5–61, 79–80. 38 David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 423–24. Schopenhauer discovered the first edition (1781) in 1826 but had already developed Kant’s idealism in a more radical form in the previous decade.

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ly the finer Philosopher),39 and I think this “transcendental idealism” offers a more successful way forward than “critical realism” for making sense of the resurrection appearances and indeed the whole resurrection life.40 For the resurrection appearances of 1 Cor 15:5–8 (being neither simple “objective” appearances nor “subjective” visions), one can consider Schopenhauer’s understanding of “subject” and “object”: there is always a certain correlation between the two and the nature of this correlation can change. We usually experience the world “according to the principle of sufficient reason” where the normal rules for space, time, and causation apply. But in certain instances, for example in the aesthetic experience, the nature of this correlation changes: there is a change in the subject and a simultaneous change in the object.41 The change in the correlation is related to how the “thing-in-itself” manifests itself in the world of phenomena. Schopenhauer leaves many questions unanswered, one of which is why this correlation should change. But applying his ideas of subject and object, I suggest that in the resurrection appearances there was a special subject-object correlation, the subject requiring faith in order to experience the resurrected Christ. The resurrected Christ was a special manifestation of the “soul” of Christ,42 this “soul” being that supra-temporal, supra-spatial aspect of the “human Christ,” which could be likened to some extent to the Kantian “thing-in-itself”;43 such a “soul” pro39

On the differences between the idealisms of Kant and Schopenhauer, see Dale Jacquette, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 11–39. 40 The “Christian Origins and the Question of God” volumes work with a “critical realism,” and Immanuel Kant is usually referred to in a negative light throughout, perhaps owing to the fact that many of the thinkers with whom Wright disagrees stand in the tradition of Kant (see, e.g., Bultmann and his neo-Kantianism). However, used critically, Kant, together with his disciple Arthur Schopenhauer, can open up the New Testament in ways critical realism cannot. If there is a problematic figure for Christians in German idealism, I suggest this is Hegel; it was precisely because he did away with Kant’s fundamental phenomenal/noumenal distinction that problems entered nineteenth-century theology. One key example here is the rejection of immortality (Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 265–67), a view further developed by Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, trans. James A. Massey [London: University of California Press, 1980). 41 See Richard H. Bell, Deliver Us from Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology, WUNT 216 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 152–58. 42 Cf. the idea of Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, I-II, repr., trans. Aslaug Møller (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1946), 170–76, that in the Old Testament the body is seen as a manifestation of the soul. 43 For my understanding of such a “soul,” see Richard H. Bell, “The Corrupt Mind and the Renewed Mind: Some Qualifications on the Grandeur of Reason from Pauline, Kantian and Schopenhauerian Perspectives,” in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, ed. Peter M. Candler Jr. and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM, 2010), 197–217.

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vides continuity between the body of the earthly Jesus and the resurrected Christ. For the resurrection life, transcendental idealism can also offer a way forward. Paul’s argument in 1 Cor 15:12–24 is that Christ’s resurrection is an anticipation of the general resurrection. He argues that “all” will be made alive (v. 22),44 Christ as “first fruits” and then, at his coming, “those who belong to Christ.”45 Just as Christ’s soul was manifest in his resurrection body, so it is for the human being, the “soul” being related to the “thing-initself” of the noumenal world. Just as our soul is now manifest as our present physical body in the phenomenal world, so it will be manifest in a different way in the new phenomenal world of the resurrection life. Debates about the resurrection are often troubled by the fact that our physical body is constantly changing;46 and some prefer to speak of the human being as a waterfall or river.47 My suggestion is that continuity is provided through the soul, which transcends both space and time and is related to every single stage of both the earthly body (from foetus to baby, teenage years, middle age, old age) and resurrection body.48 The soul is therefore the key to the continuity of the human person from the beginnings of human life on earth right through to the resurrection body. Whereas I am offering an element of continuity between the earthly and heavenly bodies, some emphasize the discontinuity and see any continuity in the creative power of God.49 The problem with such approaches is that they 44

The “all” of 1 Cor 15:22 refers to Christians and Rom 5:18 has to be seen as a further development (Bell, “Universal Salvation,” 428). 45 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 337 compares this to 1 Thess 4:14–18. 46 Advances in calculating the turnover of cells has been aided by nuclear tests which have changed the atmospheric concentrations of carbon-14. On this turnover, see K. L. Spalding et al., “Retrospective birth dating of cells in humans,” Cell 122 (2005): 133–43; K. L. Spalding et al., “Dynamics of fat cell turnover in humans,” Nature 453 (2008): 783– 87; Olaf Bergmann et al., “Evidence for cardiomyocyte renewal in humans,” Science 324 (2009): 98–102. The turnover of cells can be a matter of days (e.g., platelets, 10 days) to years (8 years for fat cells). However, occipital cells are as old as the individual. I thank Jack Bell for these details. 47 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 519 refers to Origen’s view that “the body is like a river; the actual matter does not remain the same from one day to the next,” the thing that does stay the same being “the eidos, a combination of Platonic form and Stoic seminal reason.” Wright adds that the apparent lack of continuity between the present body and the resurrection body in Origen’s thought led to his being attacked by Methodius (third century) and the Second Council of Constantinople (sixth century). 48 Relating the “soul” to the “thing-in-itself” is not entirely straightforward. One problem is that the “thing,” the human body, is constantly changing. The “soul” therefore has to be conceived as the sum total “things-in-themselves.” 49 See, e.g., Wolfgang Schrage, Der erste Brief an die Korinther (1Kor 15,1–16,24), EKKNT 7.4 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2001), 300: “Das Kontinuum bei der vorausgesetzten personalen Identität und der unabdingbar somatischen Existenzweise

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do not make sense of 1 Cor 15:35–44a, which speaks of the body being “sown” and “raised,” thereby indicating an element of continuity.50 Wright, I find, gives a balanced view of Paul’s argument in holding to both the continuity and discontinuity,51 the sense of continuity being seen in Paul’s illustrations in 1 Cor 15:36–38.52 The discontinuity is emphasized in 1 Cor 15:44a: it is sown a physical body (σῶµα ψυχικόν); it is raised a spiritual body (σῶµα πνευµατικόν).53 In view of the way Paul continues his argument in 1 Cor 15:45–49 (the first man coming from earth, the second from heaven), Wright argues Paul’s point is not that “the new humanity will exist in a place called ‘heaven’” but rather that “it will originate there, where Jesus himself currently is in his own risen and life-giving body” and that “it will transform the life of those who are presently located on earth and earthly in character.”54 In many respects I can concur with this although I would want to qualify his statement that this may “run in the opposite direction … to all kinds of Platonism ancient and modern.”55 This is because there are some sophisticated types of Platonism which could cohere with Wright’s views. I agree that “heaven and earth … are the twin partners in the creation,”56 and I also agree that Paul does not have any Platonic view that the soul has to escape an evil body. But there are elements of Plato which can be adopted in trying to make sense of Paul’s view of the future life, made even more powerful if combined with Kant!57 A combination of these two philosophers, who occupy an intellectual stratosteckt nicht in dem im Sinne einer sich unverändert durchhaltenden ontologischen Struktur verstandenen σῶµα, sondern allein in Gottes Schöpfertreue als eschatologischer Neuschöpfer.” I should add that in my own Christian anthropology I also stress God’s creative activity in that through his Holy Spirit he is the integrating principle of the human person holding together the “soul” in the depth of the world, the “subject” on the boundary of the world, and the sphere of what Kant calls “practical Reason” (Bell, “Corrupt Mind,” 214– 15). Such a view of the human person coheres in many respects with Origen’s understanding of the resurrection (cf. Christoph Heilig, “Resurrection and the Foundation of Christian Behaviour: Paul and Origen in Dialogue,” Colloq 46 [2014]: 193–206). 50 Robert H. Gundry, SŌMA in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology, SNTSMS 29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 176. 51 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 344. 52 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 341. 53 Wright correctly argues that the “spiritual body” is not a body made of spirit but a body animated by spirit (PFG 1400). See also PFG 1401: “Greek adjectives ending in – ikos tend to refer to ethical or functional meanings. If you want adjectives that refer to the stuff of which something is made, they tend to be the ones that end in –inos.” See the helpful summary of the arguments in Thiselton, First Corinthians, 1276–81. 54 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 355. 55 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 355. 56 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 355. 57 Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy was a creative combination of Plato and Kant; Wright seems to have a negative view of both philosophers.

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sphere, may offer insight into the reality of the risen Christ. A clue to the resurrection life could be that there is a new manifestation of the “thing-initself.” It is a world of transformed subjects and correspondingly transformed objects, and such an understanding of the subject-object correlation can explain why in Rom 8:18–25 it is not simply that the creation is transformed with humans but that the transformation of humans is the means by which creation is transformed (a point made in PFG 1491).58 But such a philosophical framework, like any other, is going to have its drawbacks, and this is seen, for example, in discussions of the “soul” and “ontological dualism,” and it is to these themes that I now turn.

3. The Soul and Ontological Dualism The issue of the “soul” is discussed in PFG but usually in relation to Plato, and there seems to be little positive evaluation of it. However, elsewhere Wright accepts (perhaps reluctantly) that the language of “soul” can be used and that he sees “no problem with the word in principle.”59 However, I believe a more robust use of “soul” is called for. Not only can the idea be discerned in many Old Testament texts,60 but Platonic thought on the soul had been adopted and adapted by many strands of Judaism.61 Presented by this tradition, I would be surprised had Paul not assumed a “soul” especially in view of his Pharisaic background.62 Now it is the case that the “soul” is absent in the intermediate state in 1 Thess 4:13–15, where Paul speaks of those who have fallen asleep.63 Further one could make the point that Paul rarely 58 Very briefly a Schopenhauerian explanation is that if “the world is my representation (Vorstellung)” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, trans. E. F. J. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 3) and there is a correspondence between subject and object, then if the subject is transformed so is the object. One of the clearest illustrations of this is the Good Friday Music of Wagner’s Parsifal, which “sings” of the new creation and which follows on directly from Kundry’s re-birth at her baptism. See Richard H. Bell, Wagner’s Parsifal: An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey, Veritas 10 (Eugene OR: Cascade, 2013), 252–53. 59 N. T. Wright, New Heavens, New Earth: The Biblical Picture of Christian Hope (Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999), 23. 60 See, e.g., James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (London: SCM, 1992), 36–47; Pedersen, Israel, 97–259. 61 See, e.g., Günther Stemberger, “Seele III: Judentum,” TRE 30:740–42. 62 Josephus, B.J. 2.163, explains that the Pharisees consider every soul to be “imperishable.” 63 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 216. Note, however, that 1 Thessalonians “shows little interest in anthropological problems” (Hans D. Betz, “The Concept of the ‘Inner Human Being’ (ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος) in the Anthropology of Paul,” NTS 46 [2000]: 325– 26).

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uses ψυχή, it being used thirteen times in the Pauline corpus and taking on a variety of meanings. However, in most of these texts the term is not used in the sense of “soul” I am now discussing.64 “Word studies” and “arguments from silence” can be hazardous and especially so in the case of anthropological terms. Paul, like the majority of Jews and Greeks of his time,65 most likely assumed some kind of “soul,” and if he did so in 1 Cor 15, then, as I suggested above, this would provide the crucial element in relating the σῶµα ψυχικόν to the σῶµα πνευµατικόν. The idea of the “immortality of the soul” is not in competition with the resurrection of the body but complements it and makes sense of it.66 Although Wright accepts some form of “immortality” in Paul, he rejects an ontological dualism,67 setting against this an eschatological dualism. However, an ontological dualism rightly understood can only aid an understanding not only of Paul but also of other New Testament witnesses; also such a dualism helps both theologically and pastorally. What then is the basis for holding to an ontological dualism?68 The first is Paul’s discussion in 2 Cor 4:16–18, where he contrasts the “inner nature” (ὁ 64

The term can mean “life” or relating to a living being (1 Cor 14:7; 15:45; Rom 11:3; 16:4; Phil 2:30; 2 Cor 1:23), “will” (Phil 1:27; Col 3:23; Eph 6:6), or “person” (Rom 2:9; 13:1; 2 Cor 12:15) (see David W. Stacey, The Pauline View of Man: In Relation to Its Judaic and Hellenistic Background [London: Macmillan, 1956], 122–24). In 1 Thess 5:23 the term may mean “soul,” but many commentators rightly argue that it would be inappropriate to establish a Pauline anthropology on the basis of this isolated verse (e.g. Leon Morris, The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians, 2nd ed., NICNT [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991], 182; Traugott Holtz, Der erste Brief an die Thessalonicher, 3rd ed., EKKNT 13 [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1998], 264). 65 Most strands of Greek thought in Paul’s time held to some idea of the soul. See Christopher J. Rowe, “Soul,” OCD 1428; Jan Stenger, “Soul, theory of the,” BNP 13:671–75; Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind; Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 1–87. 66 See Barr, Immortality, 94–116, who argues against Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? (London: Epworth, 1958) and Krister Stendahl, “Immortality Is Too Much and Too Little,” in Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 193–202. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 92, values Barr’s work on Gen 3, although he points out that distinctions need to be made on four possible types of “immortality.” 67 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 365–66. 68 Note that Thomas Schmeller, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther (2Kor 1,1–7,4), EKKNT 8.1 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2010), 276, holds to a Dualität (“duality”) rather than to a Dualismus (“dualism”). He compares this to the position of David E. Aune, “Anthropological Duality in the Eschatology of 2 Cor 4:16–5:10,” in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 220, who rejects the terms “dualistic” and “dualism” “because they are often understood to connote opposition or conflict.” Likewise, N. T. Wright, “Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All – Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Com-

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ἔσω ἄνθρωπος) and the “outer nature” (v. 16), and asserts that things seen are temporary whereas things unseen are eternal (v. 18). The dualism Paul is dealing with here can be legitimately called an ontological dualism, but it is not one of substances as in Plato69 but rather an earthly/heavenly ontological dualism.70 Second Corinthians 4:16b points to the eternal aspect of the present human person (the inner human being). As Aune comments: It must be made clear that while ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος is not described as the soul or mind in typical Greek conceptual categories, it is certainly described as that part of the Christian person which survives physical death and lives on in a superior and transformed state of existence in heaven.71

Behm suggests that it is the “new creation” of 2 Cor 5:17, for which I could give some qualified support. He relates the “inner person” to the “Christ coming into being in Christians” (Gal 2:20; 4:19), the “new creation” of 2 Cor 5:17 “who experiences daily renewal in virtue of the divine gift of the ἀρραβὼν τοῦ πνεύµατος” (2 Cor 5:5). He adds that the inner person corresponds to the καρδία of the LXX.72 This supports my contention that the realm in which this renewal takes place and the realm in which we are “in Christ” is precisely in what Christians have called the “soul.” Such an ontological dualism does not have to contradict an eschatological dualism, and the dichotomy Wright sets up between the two is unnecessary.73 Wright argues that an ontological dualism is “questioned” in 2 Cor 4:18b and “disproved entirely” in 5:1–5.74 However, the things which are unseen (4:18b) relate to the “inner person” of v. 16, a present but hidden reality. Again the best English word to describe what Paul is referring to is the “soul”; it is this which is being renewed “day by day.”75 As far as 2 Cor 5:1–5 is concerned, Wright plex Contexts,” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 459, prefers to speak of duality rather than dualism. I employ the term dualism for Paul not because of any “opposition or conflict” but because of the contrast he makes between the inner and outer person (2 Cor 4:16). 69 I agree with Wright that the dualism of 2 Cor 4:16–18 does not come “straight from Plato” (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 366). 70 Cf. John Calvin, The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemo,. repr., ed. David W. Torrance and T. F. Torrance, trans. Thomas A. Smail, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 10 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 63: “Here he speaks of two men and we are to think of two kinds of life, an earthly and a heavenly.” 71 Aune, “Duality,” 221. Although I support his sentiment, I suggest that “part” should be replaced by “aspect.” 72 Johannes Behm, “ἔσω,” TDNT 2:699. 73 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 364–69. 74 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 366. 75 Perhaps Wright and I are not too far apart on this. Although he criticizes various understandings of the “inner person” of 2 Cor 4:16, which point towards an ontological dualism (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 365, 368), in a discussion of ψυχή in

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again wishes to argue for an eschatological dualism, pointing to the contrast “between the present corruptible body and the future incorruptible one.”76 But again, such an eschatological dualism does not have to be in competition with an ontological one. In fact, the way Paul weaves the two together shows what an innovative, profound, and subtle theologian he truly is. The “inner person” which is being daily renewed (4:16) does have a relation to the resurrection body77 of which Paul speaks in 2 Cor 5:1; here he writes that “if the earthly dwelling of our tabernacle (ἡ ἐπίγειος ἡµῶν οἰκία τοῦ σκήνους)78 is destroyed, then we will have (ἔχοµεν) a building from God (οἰκοδοµὴ ἐκ θεοῦ),79 a house (οἰκία) made without hands, eternal in the heavens.” Many commentators rightly equate this heavenly eternal house with the resurrection body of 1 Cor 15:44.80 But since this is given at the parousia,81 Paul has to reckon with what may happen if someone dies before this time. In this intermediate state,82 when one is waiting for the resurrection body, one is going to be “naked” (5:3). Such “nakedness,” as Wright himself points out, was used in the hellenistic world to refer to the “soul when divested of the body.”83 But whereas the nakedness of the soul was “not dreaded but longed for”84 outside the Jewish and Christian field, Paul views it as undesirable but nevertheless conceivable.85

1 Pet 1:9 he relates this “soul” to the “inner human” of 2 Cor 4:16, “which carries the promise that is to be worked out in the entire human person” (Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 466). 76 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 366. 77 Stacey, Man, 211: “The inward man is the real self that passes from the body of flesh to the body of resurrection.” 78 The genitive is best understood as one of apposition (Schmeller, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther, 288n686). 79 I follow C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 2nd ed., BNTC (London: Black, 1979), 151, in understanding ἔχοµεν as “we have it in hope” and taking ἐκ θεοῦ with οἰκοδοµή. 80 E.g. Thrall, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 367 (cf. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 368). For an opposing view see Aune, “Duality,” 224, who argues that in 2 Cor 5 “Paul does not refer to the post-mortem heavenly state of existence with the term σῶµα, because he reserves that term for the resurrection body and in 2 Cor 4:16–5:10 he is not dealing with that subject.” 81 I disagree with Thrall, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 399, when she argues that the transformation into the spiritual body begins after death and “is not postponed until the Parousia as in 1 Cor 15.52.” 82 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 370 seems to accept an intermediate state in 2 Cor 5:1–5. 83 Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 367. 84 Barrett, Second Corinthians, 153. 85 Barrett, Second Corinthians, 155, rightly argues that, according to 1 Cor 15:35–57, bodilessness, although undesirable and not lasting forever, was not unthinkable.

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This intermediate state of bodiless existence surely points to an ontological dualism. However, I do not think Paul’s anthropology here radically differs from that in 1 Cor 15; with Wright I can agree that there is no “radical change of philosophical perspective,”86 but unlike Wright I maintain that in both letters there is both an ontological and an eschatological dualism. I take Wright’s point that any development in Paul’s eschatology between the two letters has often been overplayed. Nevertheless there seems to be a more explicit “Platonism” in the second letter. This is seen in a number of ways: first, in the contrast between the inner and outer person in 2 Cor 4:16, something which had a Platonic origin87 and which had evolved and mutated over many years88 and which Paul had fashioned for his own purposes;89 secondly, the idea of a disembodied life after death (2 Cor 5:2–3). As well as this support for an ontological dualism, there is another reason for holding to it, namely the relation of the human being to Christ, particularly participation in Christ. PFG includes a fair amount of discussion about “participation” and “incorporation,” seeing Jesus as the incorporative messiah (e.g. PFG 825–35) but, to my knowledge, does not go on to consider the ontological implications and it is to this that I now turn.

4. Participation One of my central contentions is that participating in Christ (being crucified with Christ, buried with him, and raised with him) is not simply a “figure of speech” or a “story” for Paul; it is rather to be understood “ontologically.” We are not just dealing with a “story” which functions like a scientific hypothesis;90 rather we are dealing with a myth which has the power to include the hearer in its reality and through which the hearer can be embedded in the 86

Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 368. Plato, Resp. 588A–589B. 88 Cf. Christoph Markschies, “Innerer Mensch,” RAC 18:280 (266–312); Betz, “Inner Human Being.” 89 I have always been skeptical about how much pagan Greek literature Paul read (see, e.g., Bell, No One Seeks for God, 62–82), but such ideas would certainly come to him via hellenized Judaism, the Hellenistic synagogue, his encounter with Greeks in his mission, with church members (especially in Corinth), and his fellow workers. 90 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992), 37, appeals to the critical realism of I. G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (London: SCM, 1966), and substitutes scientific hypotheses with “stories.” On the use of critical realism in the Science-Theology debate, see Andreas Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” Theology and Science 7 (2009): 85–106; concerning Wright’s own critical realism, Losch sees a problem in “its use to connect science and theology epistemologically through the parallelization of their methods” (see below, 110). 87

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reality of Christ.91 The crucial question then is how are we related to Christ, and how do we participate in Christ? To relate this simply on the level of “narrative” I find theologically inadequate; the Pauline texts cry out for an ontological explanation because Paul stresses the ontological transformation of the person in Christ (e.g. 2 Cor 5:14–21). My suggestion is that the Christian is related to Christ through the “soul.” But such a soul is not primarily a cognitive entity;92 rather, it is the essence of the human person. One key to understanding Christ’s sacrificial death is Lev 17:11, which can be translated thus: “The soul (‫ )נפשׁ‬of the flesh [of the bodily animal being] is in the blood. I [God] give it to you on/for the altar to atone for your souls (‫ ;)נפשׁתיכם‬for the blood atones through the soul (‫)נפשׁ‬.”93 The crucial thing the victim and the Israelite share is the “soul” and even if one objects to translating ‫ נפשׁ‬as “soul” and uses “life” instead, such “life” is heavily loaded and points not just to biological life but to the very existence of both the sacrificial victim and the Israelite. Applying this to Christ’s atoning work, I suggest that it is via such a “soul” that the human being participates in Christ.94 By employing such a dualism of body/soul, of an earthly/heavenly (phenomenal/noumenal) existence, one can do justice to Paul’s remarkable idea that we have been crucified with Christ (Rom 6:6; Gal 2:20; cf. 2 Cor 5:14), buried with Christ (Rom 6:4), and raised with Christ (2 Cor 5:15b); and by appreciating the

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A concern I have with Wright’s discussion of myth is that he does not sufficiently distinguish myth from other types of stories, and myth is understood simply in terms of “world view.” So myth can be understood as “story as an element within a worldview” (PFG 456). Further, “the gospels are ‘myth’ in the sense that they are foundational stories for the early Christian worldview. They contain ‘mythological’ language which we can learn, as historians, to decode in the light of other ‘apocalyptic’ writings of the time” (Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 426). This approach sounds remarkably “Cartesian.” I do have sympathy for some of Wright’s questions about Bultmann’s program of de-mythologizing (PFG 457–58), but one of Bultmann’s insights was the way in which myth can achieve an existential displacement. Although I am not in total agreement, this has been admirably analyzed by Eberhard Jüngel, “Die Wahrheit des Mythos und die Notwendigkeit der Entmythologisierung,” in Indikative der Gnade – Imperative der Freiheit: Theologische Erörterungen IV (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 1–23. 92 Ideas of a cognitive soul can be found in Plato, but the cognitive was just one aspect of the soul (Resp. 440E–441A; 588A–589B). The other aspects or parts are the “appetitive” and “spirited” (Goetz and Taliaferro, Soul, 15–16). As discussion of the soul develops over the centuries, it tends to take on an increasingly cognitive role. This is seen especially in Descartes, where the soul essentially is equated with “mind” (res cogitans). See Bell, Evil, 193–94. In Bell, “Corrupt Mind,” 214–15, I suggest how the “soul” is to be related to the cognitive aspects of the human person. 93 Bell, Evil, 194n25, a translation based on that Hartmut Gese, “Die Sühne,” in Zur biblischen Theologie, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989), 98. 94 Bell, Evil, 190–211.

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unique character of myth one can also do justice to the existential displacement of the human person who finds himself in Christ (2 Cor 5:17).95

5. Conclusion I started my response to Wright’s work on individual eschatology by discussing the “language event” whereby the gospel achieves an ontological change in the hearer who receives this life changing word, and I ended by considering Christ’s sacrificial death, which encompasses the death of the human person.96 These two elements, the reconciling word of the gospel and Christ’s reconciling act, I consider to be the key to individual eschatology. And although in the atonement Paul places the emphasis on the death of Christ, he does also relate the atonement to the resurrection of Christ (1 Cor 15:17) in which he believes Christians already participate (2 Cor 5:15, 17; Rom 6:4) and which will become a final reality on the last day. As I indicated at the beginning, Christian theologians have a challenge in communicating ideas of an “after-life” to a sceptical western civilisation. In view of the above discussion, one idea which may prove to be useful is the “soul,” which has enjoyed a long and distinguished tradition and of which, I suggest, theologians should speak with greater confidence. Terry Waite was captured by Islamic Jihad in 1987 and spent nearly five years in solitary confinement. In an interview with Sheridan Voysey, he spoke of how when you are out on a limb, when you are at the extremities, somehow you try and get to the real heart of the matter, try and cut through the nonsense and get to the real essence of belief and being.97

Then he says: I could say this in the face of my captors: you have the power to break my body, and you have tried; you have the power to bend my mind, and you have tried; but my soul is not yours to possess. There was that essential belief that my soul lay in the hands of God and couldn’t be taken by others.98

Terry Waite has put his finger on how the New Testament understands the soul. It is not primarily a cognitive entity (our minds can be bent), and neither is it something which propels the body or is a “form” of the body as in Aris-

95

Cf. Jüngel, “Die Wahrheit des Mythos,” 55. Christ’s death is therefore what can be termed an inclusive place-taking (Bell, “Sacrifice,” 9n44). 97 Sheridan Voysey, Open House Volume 1: Sheridan Voysey in Conversation (Sydney: Strand Publishing, 2008), Kindle edition, “Terry Waite.” 98 Voysey, Open House Volume 1, “Terry Waite.” 96

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totle.99 Rather, the soul is the essential person, which transcends space and time. Wright may well be right that to insist that we ‘possess’ an ‘immortal part’ (call it ‘soul’ or whatever) which cannot be touched by death might look suspiciously like the ontological equivalent to worksrighteousness in its old-fashioned sense: something we possess which enables us to establish a claim on God, in this case a claim to ‘survive’.100

But I do not have in mind such a “soul.” The soul is not something we “possess”; how can that be if it is manifest in the body? Neither is there any question of making a claim upon God. He is after all the only one who is fully acquainted with the human soul101 and has the unique capacity to destroy it: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28). This is precisely why the soul of the human person does lie “in the hands of God” and no one else has the power to take it.

Bibliography Althaus, Paul. Die Theologie Martin Luthers. 6th ed. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 1983. Aune, David E. “Anthropological Duality in the Eschatology of 2 Cor 4:16–5:10.” Pages 215–39 in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide. Edited by Troels EngbergPedersen. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Balz, Horst, and Gerhard Schneider. Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990–1993. Barr, James. The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality. London: SCM, 1992. Barrett, C. K. A Commentary on The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 2nd ed. BNTC. London: Black, 1979. Bell, Richard H. Deliver Us from Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology. WUNT 216. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. –. No One Seeks for God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 1:18–3:20. WUNT 106. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998. –. Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9–11. WUNT II 63. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. –. “Rom 5.18–19 and Universal Salvation.” NTS 48 (2002): 417–32. –. “Sacrifice and Christology in Paul.” JTS 53 (2002): 1–27. –. “The Corrupt Mind and the Renewed Mind: Some Qualifications on the Grandeur of Reason from Pauline, Kantian and Schopenhauerian Perspectives.” Pages 197–217 in

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Goetz and Taliaferro, Soul, 19–29. Wright, “Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body,” 472–73. 101 Who else but God could be fully acquainted with things as they are “in themselves”? On the “thing-in-itself” as the real seen from God’s perspective, see Merold Westphal, “In Defense of the Thing in Itself,” Kant-Studien 59 (1968): 118–31. 100

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The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism. Edited by Peter M. Candler Jr. and Conor Cunningham. London: SCM, 2010. –. Wagner’s Parsifal: An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey. Veritas 10. Eugene OR: Cascade, 2013. Bergmann, Olaf, et al. “Evidence for cardiomyocyte renewal in humans.” Science 324 (2009): 98–102. Betz, Hans D. “The Concept of the ‘Inner Human Being’ (ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος) in the Anthropology of Paul.” NTS 46 (2000): 315–41. Calvin, John. The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon. Repr. Edited by David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by Thomas A. Smail. Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 10. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. Cancik, Hubert, ed. Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. 22 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2002–2011. Cartwright, David E. Schopenhauer: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cullmann, Oscar. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? London: Epworth, 1958. Dalferth, Ingolf U. Religiöse Rede von Gott. BEvT 87. München: Kaiser, 1981. –. “Wirkendes Wort. Handeln durch Sprechen in der christlichen Verkündigung.” Pages 105–43 in Magie: Katastrophenreligion und Kritik des Glaubens. Edited by HansGünther Heimbrock and Heinz Streib. Kampen: Kok, 1994. Dooyeweerd, Herman. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. 4 vols. Translated by David H. Freeman, William Young, and H. de Jongste. Amsterdam: Paris, 1953–58. Feuerbach, Ludwig. Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Translated by James A. Massey. London: University of California Press, 1980. Fuchs, Ernst. “Das Sprachereignis in der Verkündigung Jesu, in der Theologie des Paulus und im Ostergeschehen.” Pages 281–305 in Zum hermeneutischen Problem in der Theologie: Die existentiale Interpretation, Gesammelte Aufsätze I. 2nd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965. –. “Was ist ein Sprachereignis? Ein Brief.” Pages 424–30 in Zur Frage nach dem historischen Jesus. 2nd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965. Garland, David E. 1 Corinthians. BECNT. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003. Gese, Hartmut. “Die Sühne.” Pages 85–106 in Zur biblischen Theologie. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989. Goetz, Stewart, and Charles Taliaferro. A Brief History of the Soul. Brief Histories of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. Gundry, Robert H. SŌMA in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology. SNTSMS 29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Gundry-Volf, Judith. Paul and Perseverance: Staying in and Falling away. WUNT II 37. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990. Harris, Murray J. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Heilig, Christoph. “Resurrection and the Foundation of Christian Behaviour: Paul and Origen in Dialogue.” Colloq 46 (2014): 193–206. Hendry, George S. The Westminster Confession for Today: A Contemporary Interpretation. London: SCM, 1960. Hofius, Otfried. “‘Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen’ als Thema biblischer Theologie.” Pages 121–47 in Paulusstudien. WUNT 51. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989.

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–. “Wort Gottes und Glaube bei Paulus.” Pages 148–74 in Paulusstudien. WUNT 51. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1989. Holtz, Traugott. Der erste Brief an die Thessalonicher. 3rd ed. EKKNT 13. NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 1998. Houlgate, Stephen. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Jacquette, Dale. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Chesham: Acumen, 2005. Jüngel, Eberhard. Gott als Geheimnis der Welt: Zur Begründung der Theologie des Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus. 5th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986. –. “Die Wahrheit des Mythos und die Notwendigkeit der Entmythologisierung.” Pages 1– 23 in Indikative der Gnade - Imperative der Freiheit: Theologische Erörterungen IV. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000. Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976. Klauser Theodor, et al. Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1950–. Müller, Gerhard, Horst Balz und Gerhard Krause, eds. Theologische Realenzyklopädie. 36 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977–2004. Landmesser, Christoph. Wahrheit als Grundbegriff neutestamentlicher Wissenschaft. WUNT 113. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Losch, Andreas. “On the Origins of Critical Realism.” Theology and Science 7 (2009): 85– 106. MacDonald, Paul S. History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind, and Spirit from Homer to Hume. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Moo, Douglas J. The Epistle to the Romans. NICNT. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996. Morris, Leon. The First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians. 2nd ed. NICNT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. O’Keefe, John and Lynn Nadel. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. Pedersen, Johannes. Israel: Its Life and Culture, I-II. Translated by Aslaug Møller. Repr. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1946. Ratzinger, JosEph Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life. Translated by Michael Waldstein. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988. Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sacks, Oliver. “My Own Life.” The New York Times (19 February 2015): A25. Schmeller, Thomas. Der zweite Brief an die Korinther (2Kor 1,1–7,4). EKKNT 8.1. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2010. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Volume I. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Schrage, Wolfgang. Der erste Brief an die Korinther (1Kor 15,1–16,24). EKKNT 7.4. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2001. Spalding, Kirsty L., et al. “Retrospective birth dating of cells in humans.” Cell 122 (2005): 133–43. Spalding, Kirsty L., et al. “Dynamics of fat cell turnover in humans.” Nature 453 (2008): 783–87. Stacey, David W. The Pauline View of Man: In Relation to Its Judaic and Hellenistic Background. London: Macmillan, 1956.

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Stendahl, Krister. “Immortality Is Too Much and Too Little.” Pages 193–202 in Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Thiselton, Anthony C. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NIGTC. Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000. Voysey, Sheridan. Open House Volume 1: Sheridan Voysey in Conversation. Sydney: Strand Publishing, 2008. Kindle edition. Ware, Kallistos. “The Soul in Greek Christianity.” Pages 49–69 in From Soul to Self. Edited by M. James C. Crabbe. London: Routledge, 1999. Westphal, Merold. “In Defense of the Thing in Itself.” Kant-Studien 59 (1968): 118–41. Wright, N. T. “Justification: The Biblical Basis and its Relevance for Contemporary Evangelicalism.” Pages 13–37 in The Great Acquittal: Justification by Faith and Current Christian Thought. Edited by Gavin Reid. London: Collins, 1980. –. New Heavens, New Earth: The Biblical Picture of Christian Hope. Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999. –. “Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All – Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Complex Contexts.” Pages 455–73 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Surprised by Hope. London: SPCK, 2007. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992 –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003.

The Faithfulness of God and Its Effects on Faithful Living A Critical Analysis of Tom Wright’s Faithfulness to Paul’s Ethics Volker Rabens The title of N. T. Wright’s opus magnum revolves around an ethical quality. Wright attributes the virtue of faithfulness to God. More specifically, he looks at how Paul uses the term δικαιοσύνη with regard to God’s salvific engagement with the world. He argues that when a first-century writer in a Jewish context refers to God’s δικαιοσύνη: He is speaking … of the attribute of covenant faithfulness. Not just the divine mercy …; not just the divine ‘salvation’ …; not even his ‘steadfast love’, though that would be closer. The divine covenant faithfulness brings all these and more together. (PFG 804)1

Wright thus interprets the ethical virtue of δικαιοσύνη, which is primarily about right behavior in relation to others (PFG 796), firmly within the context of God’s covenant with Israel. He agrees that δικαιοσύνη is a relational concept but warns that substituting “relation” for “covenant” would mean taking a large step away from its historical moorings (PFG 436). Rather, one needs to add to its broad ethical and “relational” sense the overtones of the law court, give it the extra dimensions of the divine covenant with Israel, and set it within a worldview-narrative that looks ahead to a final judgment in which the creator will set all things right at last (PFG 801). Wright thus presents “covenantal faithfulness” as an overarching term for the story of God’s virtuous interaction with his world and his people. This chapter investigates Tom Wright’s portrayal of Paul’s ethics. As faithfulness is such a central theme for Wright, we will pay particular attention to the effects on human faithfulness that he attributes to God’s faithfulness. Does Wright see a relation between God’s covenant faithfulness and human virtue at all? And if yes, how is this spelled out in terms of the ethical values that Paul propounds and in the way in which ethical living is enabled? Broadly speaking, Wright affirms that there is a close link between divine and human action, between “theology” and “ethics” in Paul. Having set out 1

Cf. PFG 529–30. All italics in quotations from PFG are those of N. T. Wright.

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his primary theological proposals, Paul did not simply shovel in a miscellany of Hellenistic paraenesis to give his churches something to be going on with (PFG 1099). Nor would “ethics” ever be for Paul simply a matter of discerning the nature either of the world or of humans and trying to live in accordance with it, though it would always involve that as well. Rather, for Paul ethics always entails “a direct address, a command, from the One God who is not part of the cosmos, nor yet detached from it, but remains in sovereign and dynamic relation with it” (PFG 1360; cf. 1371–72). In this sense, Paul’s ethics differs from ancient philosophical traditions where ethics was frequently based on physics.2 His understanding of ethics is rooted in Jewish creational monotheism, and he affirms the goodness of creation (hence the strong emphasis on classic Jewish sexual ethics). At the same time, Paul insists that the death and resurrection of the Messiah have dealt with the sin, corruption, and death that were distorting and destroying the old creation (PFG 1508). Paul’s eschatological ethics is thus founded on his interpretation of God’s salvific intervention through Jesus (primarily in the past but also by that expected for the future).3 Wright thinks that the word “ethics” is “of course” a problem. Unfortunately, he does not expand on what he thinks is obvious. He just refers to (a somewhat outdated summary of) “the philosophical debates of the last few centuries, which have often been framed in ways that meet Paul only at a tangent.”4 Neglecting some of the more recent interactions between current ethical discourses and New Testament ethics,5 what Wright seems to have in mind is the Protestant heritage of being afraid of smuggling in “works” to build up again a life of proud (or perhaps anxious) moralism. Wright is right to reject this as anachronistic. He explains that what Paul regarded as the

2

PFG 1096n222; however, see also PFG 1097n229. PFG 1098. Cf. the discussion in Volker Rabens, “‘Schon jetzt’ und ‘noch mehr’: Gegenwart und Zukunft des Heils bei Paulus und in seinen Gemeinden,” Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 28 (2013): 103–128. 4 PFG 1096, referencing in n222 Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (London: SPCK, 1977), 274. 5 See the literature discussed in, inter alia, Ruben Zimmermann, “Ethics in the New Testament and Language: Basic Explorations and Eph 5:21–33 as Test Case,” in Moral Language in the New Testament: The Interrelatedness of Language and Ethics in Early Christian Writings, ed. Ruben Zimmermann, Jan G. van der Watt, and Susanne Luther, Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 2, WUNT II 296 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 19–50; Ruben Zimmermann, “Pluralistische Ethikbegründung und Normenanalyse im Horizont einer ‘impliziten Ethik’ frühchristlicher Schriften,” in Ethische Normen des frühen Christentums: Gut – Leben – Leib – Tugend, ed. Friedrich W. Horn, Ulrich Volp, and Ruben Zimmermann, Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 4, WUNT 313 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 3–28. 3

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signs of renewed human life (which were key elements of the symbolic praxis within his worldview) are not just ‘ethics’ in the sense often supposed in western thought, to be placed low down on a scale of priority, way below ‘theology’. Nor are they ‘good works’, to be regarded with suspicion on the basis of ‘justification by faith alone’. They are part of the worldview which Paul believes must characterize the Messiah’s people. (PFG 438; cf. 1096)

There is hence no need to resort to Wright’s alternative terminology to “ethics,” namely “behaviour” and “action” (PFG 1096). If one employs the term “ethics” in its everyday sense, it is certainly possible to speak of the “ethics” of Paul. The apostle is clearly concerned for the practical conduct of Christbelievers. Although he does not present a systematic exposition of ethics, he explicitly reflects on questions regarding “the enabling and grounds, criteria and content of the early Christian way of acting and living.”6 His answers are inseparably related to the central themes of his preaching and teaching. We can hence agree with another of Wright’s circumscriptions of ethics as worldview-praxis (PFG 401, 442, 448, etc.), as this represents the ethical side of Paul’s intertwined theology-and-ethics a lot better than the more narrowly focused terms “behaviour” and “action.” As we look more closely at how, according to Wright, worldview and praxis interact in the Corpus Paulinum, we will start with Wright’s analysis of the human predicament in Paul’s theology: Why do people not live a morally good life? Second, we will investigate how people can change for the better. Third, we will explore Wright’s version of Paul’s ethical vision. In the concluding part we will then return to our above exposition of Wright’s concept of God’s covenant faithfulness and review its effects on virtuous life in the human sphere.

1. What Wright Thinks is Wrong Ethics is concerned with what is morally right and good. Discerning the right and good implies the awareness that there is also wrong and bad. Wright points out that virtually all worldviews have some notion that something is seriously wrong with the world, and indeed with human beings, often including one’s own self. This is especially true of monotheists of the Second Temple Jewish variety who saw that a) the world is God’s creation, and yet there is evil in it; b) humans are in God’s image, and yet they rebel; and c) Israel is called to be God’s covenant people, and yet they are trodden down by the 6 Wolfgang Schrage, Ethik des Neuen Testaments, GNT/NTD Ergänzungsreihe 4, 5th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 9. Pace PFG 1030, ethics also encompasses character formation.

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nations.7 This description of the human plight, seen from a Second Temple Jewish perspective which Saul of Tarsus would have endorsed, regularly focused on the destructive character of idolatry. Israel did not want to be drawn into the idolatry of the nations. They wanted to avoid this sin lest they would be back in a new slavery – in a new Egypt (PFG 744). Paul the apostle retained this perspective, but his radical rethinking of creational and covenantal monotheism in light of the Messiah and the Spirit contained within itself both an intensification of the problem and an equally radical solution (PFG 746–47). Because the Messiah was and is the crucified Jesus, the “problem of evil” goes much deeper than Paul had previously imagined. The problem is still sin – sin as the deadly disease within all human hearts but (now) also as a cosmic power which holds all humans captive (PFG 753). Wright thus identifies two aspects of the human plight, one cosmological and one anthropological. The cosmological side of S/sin seems to be a new aspect introduced by Paul. Wright does not provide many details on how Paul reached this new insight, but he indicates what Paul formerly held in its place: Both ‘Sin’ with a capital S and ‘the powers’, variously described, and also Death itself, have replaced, in Paul’s mind, the wicked, idolatrous pagans as seen from within his preChristian Pharisaism. ‘Sin’ and ‘Death’ are now ‘the enemy’, to be defeated in the final battle; indeed, they have already been defeated on the cross, and will be defeated fully and finally at the parousia. This both/and position will … enable us to avoid the unfortunate either/or into which certain parts of Pauline studies have recently fallen. (PFG 756)

Wright thus intends to present a balanced approach to Paul’s view of the human plight – an approach that has the strength of being able to accommodate salvation-historical and apocalyptic interpretations of Paul. This dual perspective should be appreciated. At the same time, it seems that Wright’s emphasis on the “powers” is not consistently followed through, as we will see below, especially when we look at his notion of “flesh.”8 How did Paul arrive at this change of perspective? Countering Sanders, Wright maintains that Paul was not confronted with a “solution” for which he felt compelled to cobble together a somewhat random “plight.” Like all other Jews, Paul already had a “plight.” But God had now offered a “solution” 7

By way of solution, these problems were addressed “(a) by varied use of the ancient narratives of Genesis and Exodus; (b) by cultic monotheism (especially the sacrificial system; cf. PFG 744); and (c) by eschatological monotheism (the hope and promise that one day YHWH would return, would unveil his covenant faithfulness in rescuing his people and renewing all things, and would set up his sovereign rule over the whole world)” (PFG 746). 8 Also with regard to the solution, Wright rightly attempts to provide a balanced both/and approach that allows for juridical as well as participative categories (PFG 1373). In practice, however, he seems to place more weight on the former (cf., e.g., PFG 958–61; see also n16 below).

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which, at first sight, did not seem to address the “plight” at all. Paul therefore rethought the “plight” around Jesus and the Spirit. According to Wright, [Paul] was asking himself (scrolling through his well-remembered scriptures as he did so): what does this ‘solution’ (the resurrection of the crucified Jesus) have to say to these ‘problems’? Paul was like a man who, on the way to collect a prescribed medication, studies the doctor’s note and concludes from the recommended remedy that his illness must be far more serious than he had supposed. (PFG 752; cf. 751)

Wright’s interpretation of Paul’s reinterpretation of the plight in the light of the solution is well illustrated by his graphic on PFG 750: (a) original ‘plight’ (c) reimagined ‘plight’

(b) solution

Wright’s reconstruction of Paul’s change of mind (µετάνοια) is comprehensible and logical. However, in light of the little explicit evidence that Paul’s letters provide on this issue, Wright’s confidence in his psychological reconstruction is slightly surprising. It is regrettable that in his discussion of “plight and solution,” Wright does not interact with Paul’s own account of his change of perspective that he lays out in Phil 3.9 There Paul indicates very 9

Wright is aware that Phil 3 is one of the major texts used in support of Sanders’s “solution to plight” approach (PFG 748; cf. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” in Paul amoung Jews and Gentiles and other Essays, by Krister Stendahl [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976], 78–96) but looks at Phil 3 only later on in PFG 984–92. Instead, Wright uses mainly Rom 1:18–2:16 in support of his model (PFG 764–71). However, while Rom 1:18–2:16 is an important (though debated) text on the problem of evil, it does not provide any clues on what questions Paul was asking himself prior to and in the aftermath of his encounter with Christ. Rather, Paul starts Rom 1 upfront with a statement of the “solution”: his gospel – which speaks of the saving intervention of God and hence of divine compassion (vv. 16–17). Campbell even thinks that what follows from v. 18 onwards is not Paul describing the plight, but the “bad” justification theory of Paul’s interlocutor in Rom 1–3 (προσωποποιία; cf. the diatribal character of 3:1–9, 27–31, etc.). It is a vision of the future wrath of God – of God as retributively just. According to Campbell, Paul does not think that this is the essential nature of the God of Jesus Christ. Paul contrasts his interlocutor’s programmatic theological claim quite deliberately with the initial disclosure of his own position. “Paul is stating here compactly that fundamentally different conceptions of God are at stake in these two gospels. Moreover, it is immediately apparent that the Teacher’s conception has no significant input from Christology. The stylistic parallel therefore denotes a deliberate contrast between two quite different theological programs” (Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul [Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009], 543; see the thorough critique by Robin Griffith-Jones, “Beyond Reasonable Hope of Recognition? Prosōpopoeia in Romans 1:18–3:8,” in Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul: Reflections on the Work of Douglas A. Campbell, ed. Chris Tilling [Eugene: Cascade, 2014], 161–74, and Campbell’s reply in the same volume; see already E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People [London: SCM, 1983], 129).

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clearly what he saw as the “problem” and what not: “as to zeal, [I was] a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (3:6). It was not Paul who had a problem, but those whom he was persecuting. He was zealous for God, but they had been led astray. It is likely that Saul of Tarsus interpreted the devotion to Jesus of those he persecuted in light of the Torah’s ban on idolatry. This would partly agree with Wright’s delineation of the Jewish version of the “plight.” Paul himself, however, was fine. He does not characterize his identity as that of a desperate sinner unable to keep the law. He had kept the entire law (κατὰ δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐν νόµῳ γενόµενος ἄµεµπτος; cf. Gal 5:3; 1:12–14), not just those parts that were Jewish identity markers (cf. Phil 3:5).10 And this moral performance has not changed since his encounter with Christ (Gal 3:9; 2:5; 1 Thess 2:10; 3:13; Rom 8:4; etc.). The new thing is his personal alignment with Christ. It is this new relationship that sets everything into a different light (including his persecution of the church: 1 Cor 15:9; cf. 1 Tim 1:13–16; but that is not his point in Phil 3:2– 16). Christ has made him his own (Phil 3:12). The problem of the past was simply that he did not have this intimate relationship to Christ, for knowing “Christ Jesus my Lord” surpasses everything (Phil 3:8). Looking at Paul’s short autobiographical reflection, we can thus say that Paul’s “conversion” was not a move from plight to solution. Wright would probably not disagree with this statement as an interpretation of Phil 3 (and Acts 9). However, his overall interpretation of Paul’s µετάνοια is clearly “plight → solution → reinterpreted plight” (PFG 750, etc.). Here Wright seems to place too great a focus on his reconstruction of what may have been Paul’s previous understanding of the human plight (as well as his alteration of it). Wright’s contextual reconstruction can help us understand better where Paul was probably coming from, but it needs to be stressed that this is our reconstruction whereas Paul remains more or less silent on these issues. The apostle rather emphasizes the intrusive nature of the revelation of Jesus Christ (e.g., Gal 1:11–16). The fact that Paul’s theological reasoning thus worked backwards – i.e., reimagining the plight in the light of Christ and the Spirit (to use Wright’s formulation for steps [b] and [c] of his diagram) – does not mean that he could not communicate his theology “forward.” In the light of his new, positive relationship to Christ through the Spirit, Paul identifies human existence without this relationship to be determined by other, negative relationships. In Rom 7–8, Paul starts off by describing this negative state of affairs from the

10

Cf. Markus Bockmuehl, The Epistle to the Philippians, BNTC (London: Black, 1997), 202–3. Wright notes that Paul’s point was not the claim to a lifetime of sinless perfection, but rather a status kept “without blame” by the usual Jewish method of repentance and sacrifice (PFG 989).

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perspective of Adam (and Eve) (Rom 7:7–25).11 By means of προσωποποιία, Paul introduces an “I” that in an introspective analysis of his moral dilemma attributes this inability to do good to his own flesh and to the indwelling S/sin. In Rom 8:1–17 Paul looks back at this existence from the perspective of life in the Spirit. He continues with the notion of S/sin as a power (which is personified in Rom 7:7–25; cf. 8:2–3, 10). However, in contrast to the figure-in-speech of 7:7–25 who further attributes the ethical plight to the internal inabilities of the human flesh (vv. 18, 25), Paul sees the problem in the human slavery to the external force field of the Flesh. This state of affairs is summarized both in Rom 7:5–6 (ὅτε γὰρ ἦµεν ἐν τῇ σαρκί), which foreshadow 7:7–8:17,12 as well as in 8:9a: ὑµεῖς δὲ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἐν σαρκὶ ἀλλὰ ἐν πνεύµατι (cf. 8:4–8, 12–13). Wright repeatedly says that Paul reimagined the plight in the light of (Christ and) the Spirit. If the Spirit is thus the solution,13 what is the plight in Paul’s theology-and-ethics? Surely one would think of Paul’s Spirit–Flesh antithesis that he unfolds in Rom 7–8 and elsewhere (Gal 3:3; 5:16–25; 1 Cor 3:1–3; 6:16; 9:11; etc.). However, Wright does not give any weight to the role of “Flesh” in his discussion of the human plight (in fact, “flesh” only has two entries in the PFG index). Moreover, when he does mention “flesh” elsewhere, it is clear that Wright is committed to the anthropological perspective of the figure-in-speech of Rom 7 (vv. 18, 25). He translates σάρξ as “human flesh”14 and explains that it refers to “flawed human beings” who are “incapable of responding appropriately” to the Law (PFG 725). Likewise, he translates the central designation for the human plight – i.e., existence ἐν σαρκὶ – as being “people of flesh” (Rom 8:9 “You’re not people of flesh; you’re people of the spirit”; PFG 716, 719). However, this translation is incapable of appropriately transporting the impact of Paul’s formulation. As with Paul’s ἐν Χριστῷ and ἐν πνεύµατι language, Paul is speaking of relationships or realms of influence in which people exist and by which they are determined. The plight is slavery to the negative force of σάρξ, and the solution is the loving relationship to God and the family of faith established by the transferral into 11

Cf. Stanley K. Stowers, “Romans 7.7–25 as a Speech-in-Character (προσωποποιία),” in Paul in his Hellenistic Context: Studies in the New Testament and its World, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 180–202; Hermann Lichtenberger, Das Ich Adams und das Ich der Menschheit: Studien zum Menschenbild in Römer 7, WUNT 164 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); Stefan Krauter, “Eva in Röm 7,” ZNW 99 (2007): 1– 17; et al. 12 Cf. Michael Wolter, Der Brief an die Römer: Röm 1–8, EKKNT 6.1 (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 2014), 417. 13 On Christ as the solution, see our discussion of Phil 3 above, and Rabens, “Schon jetzt,” 105–19, for a broader perspective. 14 Rom 8:3 “For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh [ἠσθένει διὰ τῆς σαρκός]) was incapable of doing” (PFG 659, 719, 895, etc.).

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the realm where the Spirit is the primary influence and power in their lives (cf. the contrast of slavery/fear and sonship in Rom 8:15–16; Gal 4:1–9).15 So, is Wright’s thinking on what is wrong, wrong? No, it is not wrong, but it puts the emphasis in the wrong place. In the theological biography of Paul the apostle, the focus is on the solution as a starting point, not on the plight. And in Paul’s retrospective description of the plight, the emphasis is on human enslavement to the external powers of Sin,16 Death, Flesh, Satan, τὰ στοιχεῖα, “rulers and authorities,” etc. – not on internal incapacities.17 Wright is to be commended for attempting to achieve a balance between the “cosmological” (enslavement under dark powers, PFG 480, 896) and anthropological (“human inability and guilt”) aspects of the human plight (PFG 753, 756, 771, 927). However, what his actual presentation of the problem of evil amounts to is this: “All humans, Jews included, were hard-hearted, in need of renewal in the innermost human depths” (PFG 750; cf. 759, 770, 1122).

2. From Wrong to (W)Right: How Change is Possible Wright thinks that a crucial dilemma of humankind is the desperate need for renewal in the innermost human depths. Without such a renewal, people will continue to incur guilt. According to Wright, however, Messiah-people must be ‘blameless’. They must be different from the world around, not by the ‘works’ which separated ethnic Jews from the rest of the world but by the change of heart, mind and life to which Torah pointed and which, through the Messiah and the spirit, the one God has now produced. Messiah-people are already in the New Age. Their baptism, justification and spirit-indwelt sanctification give them the platform on which to base this lifestyle. (PFG 1111)

Wright here defines the aim of ethical life as blamelessness. We will turn to the aims of religious-ethical life according to Paul in greater detail in the context of our discussion of Wright’s concept of Paul’s moral vision in the next section. In the present section we will focus on the question of how people can base a pure lifestyle on the “platform” of baptism, justification, and 15 Cf. Volker Rabens, The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for Religious-Ethical Life, 2nd ed., WUNT II 283, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 171–73, 209–37, and the literature mentioned there. 16 In line with his emphasis on the forensic and legal aspects of the “solution” (PFG 799, 933, 935, etc.), Wright subordinates the “cosmic power” aspect of Sin to an (anthropological) focus on human immorality and idolatry (PFG 843n200). Sin therefore “charges” and produces guilt (PFG 752, 777, 888, 947, 969, etc.). However, almost none of this language is dominant in Paul (consider, for example, how infrequently Paul speaks of “forgiveness” and “guilt”). 17 Cf., most recently, Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr, “Jakobus und Paulus über das Innere des Menschen und den Ursprung seiner ethischen Entscheidungen,” NTS 62 (2016): 1–30.

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sanctification. We will start by looking at divine and human agency in the process of change, and then turn to two different modi of transformation: cognitive behavior modification and relational transformation. 2.1 Divine and Human Agency Wright is clear that moral change does not happen automatically but needs human effort and hard work. Human labor, however, is part of the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal 5:22–23) which includes self-control (ἐγκράτεια). The energy for ethical action thus comes “from elsewhere” (PFG 1106–7, 1117). The power source is the Spirit. Wright devotes a large part of his chapter “The People of God, Freshly Reworked” (ch. 10) to an in-depth treatment of “Election Reworked around the Spirit” (PFG 912–1038) because he thinks that the place of the Spirit in the reshaping of the people of God – though fundamental for Paul – is often underestimated and misunderstood (PFG 952). If we want to understand Wright’s notion of divine agency in moral transformation, we hence need to look at the role that he attributes to the divine Spirit. Wright defines the Spirit as the phenomenon of people finding themselves given new energy, a new sense of direction, and above all a strong sense of the personal presence of Jesus experienced in the way one might expect to experience the presence of the One God himself.18 This relational emphasis is to be appreciated. However, when Wright spells out what the work of the Spirit means in practice, he tends to narrow this broad spectrum to the cognitive realm. Wright’s first stage of the work of the Spirit concerns the proclamation of the gospel and the spirit-inspired reaction of confessing Jesus as Lord (PFG 952–53, 956, 959). While it could be argued that the initiatory work of the Spirit in the context of coming to faith has more dimensions than proclamation and confession,19 what concerns us here is Wright’s second stage of the work of the Spirit. Wright explains that the activity of the Spirit during the first phase is different in character from all “subsequent development”:

18 Wright maintains that Paul seems to have chosen to continue using the potentially confusing word (πνεῦµα) because of its biblical roots, believing that what he and the other followers of Jesus were experiencing was the inauguration of the promised new covenant (PFG 1370). On this issue of interpretation, see the discussion in Volker Rabens, “Power from In Between: The Relational Experience of the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in Paul’s Churches,” in The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Turner, ed. I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 138–50. 19 See, e.g., the exposition in Volker Rabens, “1 Thessalonians,” in A Biblical Theology of the Holy Spirit, ed. Trevor J. Burke and Keith Warrington (London: SPCK, 2014), 199– 201.

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Everything that comes later, the hard moral work of producing ‘the fruit of the spirit’, the putting to death of the deeds of the body and so forth – all that has a very different character from this initial … gospel-driven confession that the crucified and risen Jesus is lord. (PFG 954–55).

What is the character of this subsequent work of the Spirit? Wright stresses the continuity of the sovereignty of the Spirit (PFG 954, 960). However, he does not explicate what is different about the work of the Spirit during this second stage. It rather seems that what is new is Wright’s stronger emphasis on the human involvement in the course of the “subsequent development.” The first step of human cooperation with the Spirit was a mere “helpless trust” and confession of the lordship of Christ (PFG 954). Now, however, believers have to put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit (Rom 8:13; cf. PFG 955, 957) and engage in “the hard moral work of producing ‘the fruit of the spirit’” (PFG 954). Wright’s unfortunate formulation that it is the believers who produce the “fruit of the Spirit” (despite Paul’s insistence that the fruit is that of the Spirit, καρπὸς τοῦ πνεύµατός, Gal 5:22)20 moves us on to looking at Wright’s view on human agency in the course of ethical life. How can people base a pure lifestyle on the “platform” of baptism, justification, and sanctification? Wright’s answer places the two moments of the moral life side by side: The new status must be the basis for new behaviour, which is to be achieved by implementing the death-and-life of the Messiah, and which can be spoken of in terms both of a new human nature and of ‘putting on the Messiah’ like a suit of clothes. (PFG 1103, referring to Rom 6:12–13; Col 3:1–11)

Wright understands the new life both as new status and as a new nature. The relation of the two to one another as well as their relation to human behavior is usually left open by Wright (as it is in Paul, as he would probably argue). Practically speaking, Wright often seems to appeal to a new mindset that results in a strong will-power: “Those who have died and been raised with him have a new identity; patterns of behaviour which belong with the old life must simply be killed off.”21 Wright is thus not afraid to attribute an important role to human effort. He shakes off potential accusations of “synergism,” for “Paul himself uses the very word in a positive sense in 2 Cor 6.1 (‘as we work together [with God]’, synergountes)” (PFG 956). While this word alone certainly cannot prove 20

Wright’s rendering would only make sense if he not only reads σάρξ (cf. section 1 above) but also πνεῦµα in Gal 5:19–24 as anthropological. However, this would fly in the face of Paul’s usage of πνεῦµα in Gal 5:5–6:8. 21 PFG 1103. In the same context, we also catch a glimpse of a more relational version of transformation which Wright could have unfolded in greater detail: “Paul believed that in baptism one entered a new reality, a new family, a new version of the human race, in which all sorts of things were possible that previously had not been” (PFG 1103).

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Wright right, his general point seems to provide an accurate reflection of this aspect of Paul’s theology-and-ethics: The gospel brings about a confluence between the divine and the human life (PFG 956). There is a to-and-fro implied here [i.e., in Col 3:1–11] between what is already true at one level (‘you have stripped off the old human nature’)22 and what must become true by sheer, new-creational moral effort (‘you must kill off … ’). (PFG 1103)

The tension between “is” and “ought” that Wright describes here has traditionally been called that of “indicative and imperative.” However, supporting some recent criticism of this terminology,23 Wright wants to discard it and speak instead about παράκλησις, encouragement,24 in the context of the eschatological tension (PFG 1099). As I have discussed in detail in a recent volume co-edited by Wright, a number of points of the critique of the “indicative and imperative” terminology are justified, particularly if one uses this as the only approach to Pauline ethics. However, with some refinement and embedding in the broader picture of Pauline ethics (which also includes the aspect of “worldview” singled out by Wright), it is not necessary to dispense with this terminology altogether.25 Looking at Wright’s approach to Paul’s ethics, we observe that he places a (too) strong emphasis on the “imperative.” The escape from the old, Adamic humanity “must become true by sheer, new-creational moral effort.” In a somewhat Bultmannian fashion, Wright explains that individuals always have to “make real for themselves” that which their membership in the Christian community indicates (PFG 423).26 “Making real” could suggest a reductionist reading of Paul in which the spiritual reality of the apostle’s audience is primarily constituted by what people achieve (or don’t achieve) – in a similar manner as ἀπεκδυσάµενοι τὸν παλαιὸν ἄνθρωπον σὺν ταῖς πράξεσιν αὐτου (Col 3:21) according to Wright is only “true at one level” and has to be made “re22 Once again, Wright’s translation reveals his focus on the (individual) human nature. See our discussion in section 1, and on Col 3:9 see Marianne Meye Thompson, A Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, Two Horizons New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 77–78. 23 Particularly Ruben Zimmermann, “Jenseits von Indikativ und Imperativ: Zur ‘impliziten Ethik’ des Paulus am Beispiel des 1. Korinterbriefs,” TLZ 132 (2007): 260–84. 24 Following Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 556. 25 Volker Rabens, “‘Indicative and Imperative’ as the Substructure of Paul’s Theologyand-Ethics in Galatians? A Discussion of Divine and Human Agency in Paul,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott, et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 285–305. Cf. PFG 447. 26 Cf. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1952), 336. See already Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 2nd ed. (London: Black, 1953), 168, 301, and the critical examination of Schweitzer’s and Bultmann’s positions in Rabens, Spirit, 269–82.

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ally”(?) “true by sheer, new-creational moral effort” (PFG 1103). Alternatively, Wright may have used this formulation as a reference to cognitive realization (“making real to themselves,” cf. PFG 18n51 for both renderings), thus pointing to his preferred method of ethical transformation, namely the renewal of the mind. He exhibits this emphasis very clearly when he says (also on PFG 423) that “Paul appeals for a genuine, thought-out faith on the basis of baptism: now you are baptized, figure out what it means!” It is this cognitive aspect of human agency in moral transformation to which we now turn. 2.2 Cognitive Behavior Modification Paul’s ethics is not just made up of lists of bad behaviors to avoid. Rather, the apostle regularly sets forth what a positive lifestyle looks like (cf. section 3 below: “Paul’s Ethical Aims and Aspirations”). Wright is right to point out that in Paul’s letters such expositions are usually not simply followed by single commands like “don’t do this; do that!” According to Wright, Paul rather explains to his readers that there are two things which enable them to escape from the slavery of negative lifestyles: First, remember who you are in the Messiah, where you are in the eschatological narrative: already released from slavery and ‘sanctified’ by the spirit, declared to be ‘in the right’ on the basis of faith, promised the ‘inheritance’. Second, work it out. Think it through. At the centre of Paul’s vision of a renewed humanity is the renewed mind. (PFG 1114)

The underlying presupposition of these two steps towards improved ethical living is that our behavior is determined by our thinking (thinking → behaving). While Wright admits that it can also work the other way round (behaving → thinking) (PFG 27), his dominant position is that right thinking effects right behavior (e.g. PFG 1104, 1114, 1122). An unfit mind is at the core of the human problem.27 The last element in the chain is feelings. Emotions tend to get neglected or played down by Wright (see below). When he speaks about love, for instance, Wright first makes clear that this is not about feelings but about something you do. He then explains that Paul “no doubt … hoped that feelings of mutual affection would follow, as they often do, but the practice must lead the way” (PFG 429). Although Wright seldom approaches religious-ethical life “holistically” (if that would encompass at least

27

PFG 1122. In accordance with his emphasis on the anthropological side of the human plight, Wright stresses God’s giving of a new heart (which he predominantly understands as cognitive transformation) as the central part of the solution (building on Deut 30:6 and its echoes in Qumran literature; PFG 759, etc.). However, as we will see below, this is only one of many aspects of ethical renewal in Paul, and together with the giving of the Spirit promised in Ezek 36–37 and related early Jewish traditions, it is placed within the context of renewed relationships (cf. Rabens, Spirit, chs. 4–6).

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these three components), when he does so his system of how humans work is this: thinking → behaving → feeling. Wright’s model of ethical transformation calls to mind the psychological approach to behavior change called Cognitive Behavior Modification (CMB). CMB comprehends modified thinking (e.g., replacing dysfunctional self-talk with constructive thoughts) as the basis for a change in behavior and feelings.28 I am not suggesting that Wright applies CBM in the technical sense to Pauline ethics. However, he does share the fundamental presupposition that a cognitive reconstruction is at the heart of all ethical transformation. A key verse on which Wright calls for support for his theory is Rom 12:2. He comprehends “the renewing of your minds” to be about “learning to think straight” (PFG 1123). While focusing on the cognitive aspects of moral transformation sits well with this passage,29 one nonetheless needs to be careful not to build an entire framework on this basis and project this on other contexts which do not evidence this notion. For example, Wright thinks that a legitimate summary of Paul’s praise of Abraham’s faith and trust in God (Rom 4:19–21) would convey that “Abraham had learnt to think straight about the creator God; that he had grasped the truth; and that his mind, rather than being ‘unfit’, was doing its proper job.”30 Unfortunately, this summary

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See, e.g., Raymond G. Miltenberger, Behavior Modification: Principles and Procedures, 6th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015), 509–24. 29 Wright places a lot of weight on “working out what God’s will is” (12:2c). He even thinks that “‘working out’, dokimazein, lies at the heart of Paul’s vision of Christian freedom: it is not only freedom from the deadly constraints of sin and death, but also freedom for the multiple and varied styles of service to which one may be called” (PFG 1123). 30 PFG 1122. “Learning to think straight” also includes adjusting one’s worldview. Wright has helpfully integrated the notion of narrative in this context, when he paraphrases Paul as saying “remember … where you are in the eschatological narrative” (PFG 1114). Narratives shape moral seeing, feeling, imagining and acting (cf. Brent D. Laytham, “Narrative Ethics, Contemporary,” Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics 538). On the whole, however, Wright’s concept of worldview transformation is dominated by cognitive and behavioral categories: basic beliefs, consequent beliefs, aims, actions, words, etc. (PFG 29, 64). A more encompassing model has been developed by Hiebert, who draws on the work of other cultural anthropologists (Opler, Shils, Parsons, etc.) to include the affective dimension in his concept of worldview (next to the categories of cognitive and moral). He provides a graph that demonstrates the formative force of experiences. Beliefs and feelings are here placed side by side (Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008], 26):

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distorts the broader relational nature of faith and trust (πίστις) by focusing exclusively on its cognitive aspect. Somewhat surprisingly, towards the end of PFG, buried in the middle of an extensive engagement with modern approaches to Paul from the perspective of ancient philosophy, one reads that Wright criticizes Engberg-Pedersen for constantly speaking of cognitive awareness, of knowledge, as the center of what Paul thinks is important, whereas Paul himself explicitly deconstructs that notion by saying that (a) what matters is God’s knowledge of us, not ours of him, and (b) knowledge will puff you up, but love builds you up. (PFG 1403–4)

The up-building nature of love is a welcome perspective that seems to be under-developed in PFG. How does it integrate with Wright’s vision of moral transformation? 2.3 Relational Transformation The heart of Wright’s model of ethical transformation is cognitive behavior change. The renewed mind helps believers on the way to living the holy life that they are called to. It helps them build up a loving community. However, does love also have a place in empowering moral transformation? At least

Cf. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 63: “My concern is that worldview-talk … retains a picture of the human person that situates the center of gravity of human identity in the cognitive regions of the mind rather than the affective regions of the gut/heart/body … The result is a narrow, reductionistic understanding of the human person that fails to appreciate the primarily affective, noncognitive way that we negotiate being-in-the-world.” See PFG 28n80 for a short reply.

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two peak statements in Wright’s opus magnum suggest such a role of love. First, in the context of his exposition of 2 Cor 5:14, Wright points out that “The Messiah is both the model and the means of love” (PFG 431). Christ is both – through his example and through the effects of his self-giving to death (which is an expression of God’s covenant faithfulness: PFG 529). Second, when he speaks about Paul’s encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, Wright adds a further dimension: What happened to Paul contained at its core a personal meeting involving a real ‘seeing’ of the risen Jesus; a cognitive awareness that the resurrection had declared Jesus to be Israel’s Messiah …; and a personal transformation such as love regularly effects, in which the heart itself was … enabled at last to love the One God with a spirit-given love. (PFG 1426; cf. 1111n284, 1489)

Wright is to be commended for including in his account of Paul’s encounter with Christ the transforming effect of love. The experience of love is the basis for being able to love others.31 This critical exegetical and psychological insight should be a key element of any discussion of moral transformation in Paul. In Wright’s exposition of Paul’s moral vision, the virtue of love does play an important role (PFG 1111, 1356, 1371, etc.). However, in the context of moral transformation Wright hardly attributes any importance to the experience of love. All three of the elements mentioned in the quotation above (personal encounter, cognitive awareness, and personal transformation through love) would integrate well in the category of relational transformation and empowering (which I have developed in previous publications).32 For Wright, however, the cognitive aspect is the key concept. This can be easily demonstrated by his exegesis of Phil 2:1–5. He says with regard to v. 5: It is a matter of the ‘mind of the Messiah’ which they already possess …, and of them allowing this shared and transformed ‘mind’ to work out into actual patterns of thought and then behaviour (as in 2.1–4). (PFG 1104; cf. 1121)

31 Cf. Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love, Library of Constructive Theology (Digswell Place: Nisbet, 1968), 120: “The discovery that we are loved does have a causally efficacious power which creates through that experience the transformation of the self. This is one of the most important themes in the psychoanalytic doctrine of love …. The attitudes and responses which the self finds in others are powerful factors in moving the self. Being loved creates a new person. We can make the general statement that inter-personal relations constitute a field of force in which action in any part of the field alters the structure of the field and all the elements within it.” Cf. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible, STI (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), 116: “we must speak of personal (trans)formation in relational terms. Our autobiographical selves are formed within a nest of relationships, a community” (cf. 120–21). 32 See esp. Rabens, Spirit, ch. 4.

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However, the priority of the mind in Phil 2:1–5 is less obvious than Wright thinks. For one thing, v. 2 mentions “having the same attitude” (Gesinnung, τὸ αὐτὸ φρονῆτε) and “one mind” (ἓν φρονοῦντες) in the same breath (without any hierarchy implied) as “having the same love” (τὴν αὐτὴν ἀγάπην ἔχοντες) and “being in full accord” (σύµψυχοι). What is more, Paul’s “chronology” in Phil 2:1–5 does not start with the renewed mind. Rather, Paul starts in v. 1 with other experiences and qualities which shall be complemented by further virtues (vv. 2–5), of which τὸ αὐτὸ φρονῆτε is just one. Verse 1 demonstrates that the apostle comprehended intimate and loving relationships to be empowering: “If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy.” The fact that he describes love as providing incentive encouragement and comfort (παραµύθιον) shows that Paul feels strengthened by the love he experiences in the relationships with Christ and fellow believers (cf. 1 Cor 8:1–3: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. … But anyone who loves God is known by him”; 2 Cor 1:3–5: we can console because we have been consoled by God; 1 Thess 3:12–13). If Paul wants to imply any causality at all, it is these experiences and qualities in v. 1 that form the basis for the ethical attitudes that he calls for in vv. 2–5. That Paul understands believers to be empowered by divine love can also be seen in other key passages. For instance, in Rom 8:35, 38–39 Paul praises the intimacy of Christ’s love. No one and nothing can separate “us” from it. Paul says this in the face of persecution. On the basis of this love, the church is able to persevere in adverse situations: “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (8:37;33 cf. 5:5;34 15:30: “I appeal to you … by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God …”; 2 Cor 2:14; 4:6–8; 5:14).35 Moreover, Paul also knows the empowering im33

Christ is here presented as the loving one. There is hence no need to discuss whether it is Christ or love that transforms. Cf. James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1–8, WBC 38A (Texas: Word, 1988), 512. 34 In agreement with my thesis above, with the majority of interpreters, and with the context of this passage (Rom 5:8: ἑαυτοῦ ἀγάπην εἰς ἡµᾶς ὁ θεός), I interpret the Spirit to convey God’s love to us (as a starting point for our love of him and others). Wright, however, reads ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ θεοῦ ἐκκέχυται ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡµῶν διὰ πνεύµατος ἁγίου (Rom 5:5) as the pouring of God’s love for himself. “It is not clear … what sense it would make to see God’s love for his people located in their hearts” (PFG 722). However, it is not surprising that God’s love meets people at the center of their being. Moreover, aspects or character traits of God are frequently “poured” in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish literature (see references and discussion in Rabens, Spirit, 40–54; cf. Wright’s own metaphor of God’s “outflowing love”: PFG 1371). Apart from that, on Wright’s reasoning, τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ πνεύµατος in Rom 15:30 would have to refer to love towards the Spirit – a notion that neither fits neither the context nor Paul’s pneumatology elsewhere. 35 Negatively speaking, the influence of relationships on people’s lives can also be seen, for instance, from the adverse effects of the dislocated relationship to God (and others) in

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pact of loving relationships on an interpersonal level. For example, Paul says in Rom 1:12 that he longs to meet up with the Romans “so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.” Paul thus trusts that he and his fellow believers are strengthened through meaningful encounters with others in the faith community (cf. 2 Cor 2:2–4; 3:2–3; Phlm 20).36 The realization that the experience of love and fellowship is a lifetransforming event is certified by modern psychological research37 and has a broad foundation in biblical literature.38 Wright, however, remains particularly suspicious of the aspect of emotions that is involved in this mode of transformation. We have already seen that in the context of his discussion of the Christian κοινωνία (“partnership/fellowship”), Wright stresses that love is something you do. Feelings will hopefully follow, “but the practice must lead the way” (PFG 429). Likewise, he explains that “when Paul tells the Thessalonians to love one another more and more, he is most likely referring not to emotional feelings but to practical financial help” (PFG 1118). This either/or (rather than both/and) approach to the different aspects of love and relationships, as well as his preference for the cognitive realm comes more critically to the fore when Wright outlines the work of the Spirit in the context of salvation. He emphasizes the declarative nature of adoption as God’s children. Although he laments that some scholars remove participationist aspects from the panorama of salvation and favor juridical categories (PFG 476), his own stress on the character of adoption as declaration has not really escaped such a limited perspective either (PFG 958–59). It reduces Paul’s multidimension-

Rom 1–3. Wright typically tends to reduce the problem described in Rom 1:20–28 to an “unfit” mind (PFG 1122). 36 The impact of interpersonal relationships can be observed further from the way in which Paul suggests that religious-ethical life can be shaped, namely, by looking at the apostle’s example and imitating him. See 1 Cor 4:16; 11:1; Phil 3:17; 1 Thess 1:6; 2:14; etc. 37 See, e.g., Robert A. Hinde, Towards Understanding Relationships, EMSP 18 (London: Academic Press, 1979), 4, 14, 273, 326; John Bowlby, A Secure Base: ParentChild Attachment and Healthy Human Development (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 119– 36; Hugh LaFollette, Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 89–90, 197–99, 207–209; Ludwig Stecher, Die Wirkung sozialer Beziehungen: Empirische Ergebnisse zur Bedeutung sozialen Kapitals für die Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen (München: Juventa, 2001), 249–50; Phillip R. Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, “Attachment Theory, Individual Psychodynamics, and Relationship Functioning,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, ed. Anita L. Vangelisti and Daniel Perlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 251–71. 38 Cf. the overviews in Reinhold Boschki, “Beziehung” als Leitbegriff der Religionspädagogik: Grundlegung einer dialogisch-kreativen Religionsdidaktik, Zeitzeichen 13 (Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 2003), 239–60; Rabens, Spirit, 133–37.

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al usage of υἱοθεσία to its declarative and cognitive aspect at the outset of Christian life. However, in Paul the individual as well as communal experiences of being (a) child(ren) of God are much broader. In Rom 8 the apostle explains that the Christians in Rome were pulled out of slavery and fear and were moved into the family of God through the Spirit of the Son (8:9, 15). In this way, the work of the Spirit of “sonship and daughtership” 39 not only marks the initiation into (“adoption”) and the finalization of Christian life (“glorifying” and “revealing,” 8:17–27), but determines all of Christian spirituality in the present. The new identity as children of God has, on the one hand, a cognitive dimension in the sense of a new self-understanding (as emphasized by Wright). On the other hand, however, it is shaped by the continual experience of the Spirit-wrought outcry “Abba! Father!”40 And “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16). These Spirit-induced experiences also include emotions. This is conveyed through the notion of “crying” (κράζοµεν) and through the contrast with fear (8:15). The relational experiences described here are thus characterized by love and intimacy (cf. Rom 5:5; Eph 3:14–19; see already Hos 11:1, 3–4; Isa 49:15– 16; Jub. 1:23–25; Jos. Asen. 12:8, 15; 1QHa XVII, 35–36; Philo, Sobr. 55– 56).41 This is significant because it indicates that Paul’s answer to the question of this section (“how is change possible?”) is not CBM but transformation through intimate relationships shaped by the Spirit. This comes evidently to the fore when we see how Paul in Rom 8 and elsewhere42 builds his ethical imperatives on the empowering and transforming nature of intimate relationships – to God and fellow believers. The apostle grounds his implicit request in 8:13 to put to death through the Spirit the “deeds of the body” (πνεύµατι τὰς πράξεις τοῦ σώµατος θανατοῦτε) in the experiential reality of the Spirit leading (8:14), freeing from fear, enabling to cry “Abba” (8:15), and bearing witness to one’s being a child of God. This line of reasoning is indicated by Paul’s employment of the causative conjunction “because” (γάρ) at the beginning of both vv. 14 and 15. Paul can describe the Spirit in v. 13 as an instrument (πνεύµατι) for fighting temptations, because the Spirit’s relational work unfolded in the following verses enable (and require) such ethical behavior. Thus, we can conclude that the quality and character of the Spirit39

In 8:15–16 Paul moves explicitly from υἱοθεσία (v. 15) to τέκνα θεοῦ, thus including women. 40 Cf. Gal 4:6, where it is the Spirit himself who “calls” (κρᾶζον). 41 On this early Jewish context, see Rabens, Spirit, 163–67, 216–28; and Volker Rabens, “Pneuma and the Beholding of God: Reading Paul in the Context of Philonic Mystical Traditions,” in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Jörg Frey and John R. Levison, Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 293–329. 42 Cf. Rabens, Spirit, ch. 6.

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wrought experiences of love and fellowship function as empowerment as well as criteria for living as children of God (cf. 2 Cor 3:18). In sum, the “platform” on which Wright bases moral life is established by God through Christ and the Spirit as well as by human effort. Divine agency has changed things “at one level” at conversion-initiation, but believers have to make this real for themselves through the renewal of their minds. However, Wright’s model somewhat diverges from Paul’s own description of the new state of affairs. The narratives of Rom 6 and 8 (etc.) do not present a state that would still need to be actualized in some way. Rather, Paul’s communities truly participate in the life of Christ and the Spirit. By the relational dynamics ἐν Χριστῷ/ἐν πνεύµατι they are transformed and empowered to live in accordance with these new realities. I have argued that this cognitive “mechanism” of change presents only one of several aspects of moral transformation in Paul and puts too little trust in the empowering dynamics of Spirit-shaped intimate relationships evidenced in Paul’s letters. Moreover, while Wright gives a detailed explanation of what “thinking straight” may entail (including a change in worldview), his instructions on ethical action through a (renewed) human will boil down to a mere “get your act together!” PFG sporadically mentions further aspects of what I have called “relational transformation” such as the transformative power of love. However, as these are not given adequate space in Wright’s treatment, I have filled in some of the missing pieces in my brief discussion above.

3. Paul’s Ethical Aims and Aspirations “Messiah-people must be ‘blameless’” (PFG 1111). At the outset of section 2 above we have seen that Wright puts forward that Paul expects moral perfection from his converts. Wright is aware, however, that Paul’s ethical aims are broader than that. In this section we will look at Wright’s version of Paul’s moral vision and briefly engage with his key points of reconciliation, virtues, and fulfilment of the Torah. We should note at the outset that Wright understands all of Paul’s ethical aims and aspirations to be embedded in an eschatological framework that places moral transformation in the “gap” between Christ’s resurrection and that of believers. God’s purpose for this gap is, according to Wright, “to enable the humans who would share in the running of his new creation to develop the character they would need for that ultimate task” of perfection (PFG 1098; cf. 1048, 1113). Following an established line of scholarship, Wright argues that Paul’s aims and intentions can be summarized with the word reconciliation

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(καταλλαγή).43 For Paul, reconciliation encompasses “politics,” “religion,” and “philosophy” (PFG 1488; cf. 1510). While Paul was a messenger of this reconciliation, Wright notes that there is surprisingly little evidence that he wanted his communities to be energetically outgoing in their own propagation of the faith. For the moment it seemed enough that they should be united (Jew and Gentile, etc.) and holy (PFG 1492–95). In this way Paul’s communities present the ultimate symbol of Paul’s worldview – an alternative world (µικροκόσµος) in which the Jewish Messiah-message brought to birth a quasiempire rivaling Caesar’s and a quasi-cult to give it expression, thus providing a fresh and previously unimagined coherence of gospel, politics, and religion.44 The church can be the ultimate symbol of Paul’s worldview that embodies reconciliation because it leads a life of virtue. Broadly speaking, Wright says that the center of Paul’s ethics is a kind of Christian transformation of the ancient traditions of virtue, of characterdevelopment. This, indeed, is the point at which his ethical teaching is at the same time closest to, and most interestingly distinguished from, that of the world around. (PFG 1115)

Wright feels justified to call Paul’s moral vision a “virtue ethic,” and for evidence he refers to his popular book Virtue Reborn.45 As useful as such a much more accessible study on character transformation based on numerous biblical books as well as contemporary questions may be, dependence on a work of this nature will leave many strands of critical scholarship on Paul somewhat disappointed.46 Nonetheless, Wright’s general point still stands, namely that at many points Christ-followers are called to walk the path of genuine humanness that others have sketched before – and perhaps to do so more effectively.47 Paul has reworked ancient philosophical traditions on 43

PFG 12, 1487–89. See the literature cited in Eckhard Schnabel’s chapter on mission in this volume. In PFG 1492 Wright has a similar statement, but somewhat surprisingly the focus is here on the new temple: “Paul’s aims and intentions could be summed up as the vocation to build and maintain the new Temple” (cf. PFG 1517). 44 PFG 1507; cf. 1492, 1505, 1514. On “Paul and empire” see the chapter of Seyoon Kim in this volume. 45 N. T. Wright, Virtue Reborn (London: SPCK, 2010). Published in the USA as N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2011). 46 While the majority of the Scripture references in Wright, After You Believe, chs. 5–6, on which he usually draws in PFG (e.g. 1115n305, cf. 1106, 1120, etc.), are taken from the thirteen-letter Corpus Paulinum, these chapters also build on non-Pauline literature such as 1 John, Hebrews, and Acts. 47 PFG 1377, 1374–75. See the critical discussion of attempts to comprehend the moral vision of the NT as virtue ethic in Friedrich W. Horn, “Tugendlehre im Neuen Testament? Eine Problemanzeige,” in Ethische Normen des frühen Christentums: Gut – Leben – Leib – Tugend, ed. Friedrich W. Horn, Ulrich Volp, and Ruben Zimmermann, Kontexte und

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virtue into a Christian key. At the top of his list of virtues he regularly places ἀγάπη, the “love” which he has seen revealed in the Messiah. He adds three other virtues which, like ἀγάπη itself, were more or less unknown in the world of “paganism”: patience, chastity, and humility (PFG 1374–75, cf. 1116n307). We have already observed this emphasis on love in the last section. Wright points out that love “was there in the ancient scriptures, but it emerges in a new way as a result of the work of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit” (PFG 1119). Exercising love is also a way of fulfilling the Torah. Wright affirms that “again and again Paul speaks of the work of the spirit as enabling people to fulfil Torah in a way previously impossible” (PFG 1037). Wright’s general point is to be welcomed. However, his assertion that Paul says this “again and again” seems slightly exaggerated.48 Wright continues that this leads to the transformation not only of the heart but of the entire life. Paul even thought about a fuller range of ethical behaviour as a new form of Torah-keeping. The spirit produces agapē, and this agapē is the fulfilling of Torah – though we note with interest that certain aspects which would have maintained Jew/Gentile separation, such as the sabbath, are never mentioned in this connection. (PFG 1037, referencing Rom 13:8–10; Gal 5:14)

Wright is right to draw attention to the fact that Paul does not exhort his Gentile readers to conform to the Jewish identity markers (cf. PFG 1048, 1109– 10, 1125), although he wants them to maintain a thoroughly Jewish ethics. However, when Wright continues with more sophistication that Paul “wants them to do this without becoming ethnically Jewish, without circumcision, the food taboos and the sabbath” (PFG 1108), his notion of “ethnic” Judaism seems slightly muddled. Neither early Judaism nor Paul limit grace to race or biological kinship. The issue is rather that Paul speaks against the necessity of Gentile observation of circumcision, food, and Sabbath laws. Nevertheless, we can agree with Wright’s more general statement that “Paul’s ‘ethic’ is … both a redefined and intensified version of the Jewish way of life” (PFG 447), as long as one keeps in mind that this intensification is based on the Spirit-enabled love of God and neighbor mentioned above. Wright reasons that “Paul’s practical aim was the creation and maintenance of particular kinds of communities” (PFG 1476). Wright has managed well to describe Paul’s overarching ethical vision as that of reconciliation, virtuous living and keeping (a redefined version of) the law. However, when Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 4, WUNT 313 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 417–31. Wright has been careful to avoid many of the pitfalls pointed out by Horn as he does not primarily focus on the individual’s happiness, but on the ethos of Paul’s assemblies. 48 Of the references that he lists, Rom 2:26–27 has this point only implicitly, and 3:31 does not mention the Spirit; the most fitting text is 8:3–4.

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it comes to the practical aims of Paul’s morality, Wright’s lengthy volume falls short. Wright aptly identifies two areas in which Paul calls for differentiation from Gentile practices: angry speech and behavior on the one hand, and sexual malpractice on the other need to be avoided (PFG 1117). However, when it comes to spelling out what this (and other issues such as worship, valuing spiritual gifts, eating food offered to idols, etc.)49 means in praxis, Wright’s highflying study fails to touch ground.

4. Faithfulness: God, Human Beings, and Tom Wright It is not surprising that “A Critical Analysis of Tom Wright’s Faithfulness to Paul’s Ethics” contains some points of criticism. However, throughout this review essay I have also tried to shed some light on the positive achievements of Wright’s weighty volumes on Paul. One of these regards Wright’s awareness of the need in Pauline studies to strike a balance between the various approaches to the theology-and-ethics of the apostle. Whether it is promising to achieve this via a single, integrating concept as Wright has attempted to do with the notion of “covenant faithfulness,” will remain debatable.50 Wright certainly manages to bring the many approaches to Paul (such as salvationhistorical, apocalyptic, anthropological, theological, Old and New Perspectives) into play in his study. One of the consequences of Wright’s particular way of trying to reach his goal of providing several “both-and interpretations” is that one finds different statements suitable to each of these approaches scattered throughout the two volumes. As a reader, one almost feels like being presented with the same breadth of divergent statements as one finds them in the letters of Paul himself – only that they are here presented not in the form of seven to thirteen (shorter) letters, but in that of two heavy volumes at the length of the entire bible. This has partly to do with the fact that Wright integrates his exposition of Paul with broader philosophical and forschungsgeschichtliche questions. For example, he endeavors to uncover Paul’s meta-perspective by looking at early Jewish worldviews and at Paul’s redefinition of it. This approach is helpful (although it somewhat neglects the issues of practical ethics). However, it is not surprising that such an endeavor is tainted by one’s own worldview, and Wright appears to be no exception. In our discussion of Wright’s analysis of the human plight we have discovered that he has a tendency to localize “the problem” in the human interi49 On which, see, e.g., Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 116–38. 50 See, e.g., the critique of this point in Martinus C. de Boer, “N. T. Wright’s Great Story and Its Relationship to Paul’s Gospel,” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 (2014): 51, 55.

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or (“an unfit mind”) rather than in exterior forces such as the Flesh. Correspondingly, Wright sees the solution in the cognitive renewal of the mind (and not so much in the transforming and empowering transferal by the Spirit into loving relationships to the divine and the community of faith). Wright does not totally discredit the relational and participative dimensions of ethical transformation that I have unfolded above. For example, in his exposition of 2 Cor 5:13–14, Wright explains that Paul is basically saying that the apostles are being overmastered by a love which makes [them] act in a different way, seeing everything in a new light, claiming that a new world has been born, claiming even to be embodying the divine covenant faithfulness. (PFG 1489; cf. 529, 796)

This is one of the very few places where Wright hints at the transforming power of love and even connects this to the covenant faithfulness of God. However, generally speaking, Wright hardly provides any insights on how God’s love and covenant faithfulness may effect human faithful living, even though the ethical quality of “faithfulness” is at the heart of his study. It seems, then, that faithfulness mainly plays a role in Wright’s soteriology but not so much in his ethics.51 Also in the example given above, Wright does not continue on the theme of love, but enlarges on the topic of cognitive change by explaining that Paul in 2 Cor 5:13–14 whips off his worldview-spectacles and describes the lenses. This is how I look at the world; this is how the things I do make sense within that worldview … This is one of Paul’s central statements, if not the central statement, of his aims and intentions. (PFG 1489)

Paul’s aim is that far more people come to know the reconciliation achieved by the Messiah (cf. section 3 above), and this means being confronted by the truth and changing one’s worldview (cf. PFG 1519). A key question of our investigation of Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God has concerned the relationship of the covenant faithfulness of God to human faithfulness (i.e., ethical life). While Wright’s treatment remains largely silent on this matter and instead appeals to “thinking straight” and to hard work when it comes to ethical life, there is a great body of evidence both in early Judaism and in Paul indicating that the human covenant partner can hardly fail to be transformed by a living relationship with the faithful and

51 These two areas should not be torn apart, as Wright would agree. However, when one looks at the weight of the evidence in PFG, this is the picture that emerges. This has partly to do with the fact that Wright’s starting point is a particular word, δικαιοσύνη, and not the vibrant relational dynamics of transformation that come to the fore upon a broader look at the Pauline corpus.

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loving God.52 In Paul, these dynamics are animated by the Spirit. One of the central passages on divine and human agency in Paul’s ethics (Gal 5:25, which is not discussed by Wright), could hence be paraphrased like this: Because we experience the transforming and empowering dynamic of the Spirit in our lives – by the Spirit’s creation of filial intimacy with God and the family of faith – we can and should orientate our lives toward precisely those values that are manifested among us through the expressions of life that the Spirit inspires.53

Integrating this experience of love and faithfulness into our picture of Paul’s moral vision will neither open the door to moral passivity nor to individualistic piety – two issues that Wright rightly warns of (e.g. PFG 796). On the contrary, it brings into focus the neglected link between divine and human faithfulness that any exposition of Paul’s theology-and-ethics that wants to be faithful to the apostle needs to appreciate.54

Bibliography Bockmuehl, Markus. The Epistle to the Philippians. BNTC. London: Black, 1997. Boer, Martinus C. de. “N. T. Wright’s Great Story and Its Relationship to Paul’s Gospel.” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4 (2014): 49–57. Boschki, Reinhold. “Beziehung” als Leitbegriff der Religionspädagogik: Grundlegung einer dialogisch-kreativen Religionsdidaktik. Zeitzeichen 13. Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 2003. Bowlby, John. A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Bultmann, Rudolf. Theology of the New Testament. Vol. 1. London: SCM, 1952. Burridge, Richard A. Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Campbell, Douglas A. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Dunn, James D. G. Romans 1–8. WBC 38A. Texas: Word, 1988. –. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Edinburgh: T&. Clark, 1998. Green, Joel B. Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible. STI. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008. Green, Joel B., ed. Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011. Griffith-Jones, Robin. “Beyond Reasonable Hope of Recognition? Prosōpopoeia in Romans 1:18–3:8.” Pages 161–74 in Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul:

52

Cf. James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 344, and the literature mentioned in section 2 above. 53 Cf. Rabens, “Indicative and Imperative,” 302–3. 54 The author is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in New Testament Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany), and Extraordinary Associate Professor at the Faculty of Theology at North-West University (South Africa).

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Reflections on the Work of Douglas A. Campbell. Edited by Chris Tilling. Eugene: Cascade, 2014. Hiebert, Paul G. Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. Hinde, Robert A. Towards Understanding Relationships. European Monographs in Social Psychology 18. London: Academic Press, 1979. Horn, Friedrich W. “Tugendlehre im Neuen Testament? Eine Problemanzeige.” Pages 417–31 in Ethische Normen des frühen Christentums: Gut – Leben – Leib – Tugend. Edited by Friedrich W. Horn, Ulrich Volp, and Ruben Zimmermann. Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 4, WUNT 313. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. Krauter, Stefan. “Eva in Röm 7.” ZNW 99 (2007): 1–17. LaFollette, Hugh. Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Lichtenberger, Hermann. Das Ich Adams und das Ich der Menschheit: Studien zum Menschenbild in Römer 7. WUNT 164. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Miltenberger, Raymond G. Behavior Modification: Principles and Procedures. 6th ed. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015. Niebuhr, Karl-Wilhelm. “Jakobus und Paulus über das Innere des Menschen und den Ursprung seiner ethischen Entscheidungen.” NTS 62 (2016): 1–30. Rabens, Volker. “Power from In Between: The Relational Experience of the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in Paul’s Churches.” Pages 138–55 in The Spirit and Christ in the New Testament and Christian Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Turner. Edited by I. Howard Marshall, Volker Rabens, and Cornelis Bennema. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. –. The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul: Transformation and Empowering for ReligiousEthical Life. 2nd ed. WUNT II 283. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. –. “‘Schon jetzt’ und ‘noch mehr’: Gegenwart und Zukunft des Heils bei Paulus und in seinen Gemeinden.” Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 28 (2013): 103–28. –. “1 Thessalonians.” Pages 198–212 in A Biblical Theology of the Holy Spirit. Edited by Trevor J. Burke and Keith Warrington. London: SPCK, 2014. –. “‘Indicative and Imperative’ as the Substructure of Paul’s Theology-and-Ethics in Galatians? A Discussion of Divine and Human Agency in Paul.” Pages 285–305 in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter. Edited by Mark W. Elliott, Scott J. Hafemann, N. T. Wright, and John Frederick. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014. –. “Pneuma and the Beholding of God: Reading Paul in the Context of Philonic Mystical Traditions.” Pages 293–329 in The Holy Spirit, Inspiration, and the Cultures of Antiquity: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Jörg Frey and John R. Levison. Ekstasis: Religious Experience from Antiquity to the Middle Ages 5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. Ridderbos, Herman. Paul: An Outline of His Theology. London: SPCK, 1977. Sanders, E. P. Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People. London: SCM, 1983. Schnelle, Udo. Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology. Translated by M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. Schrage, Wolfgang. Ethik des Neuen Testaments. 5th ed. GNT/NTD Ergänzungsreihe 4. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989. Schweitzer, Albert. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. 2nd ed. London: Black, 1953.

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Shaver, Phillip R., and Mario Mikulincer. “Attachment Theory, Individual Psychodynamics, and Relationship Functioning.” Pages 251–71 in The Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships. Edited by Anita L. Vangelisti and Daniel Perlman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Cultural Liturgies 1. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. Stecher, Ludwig. Die Wirkung sozialer Beziehungen: Empirische Ergebnisse zur Bedeutung sozialen Kapitals für die Entwicklung von Kindern und Jugendlichen. München: Juventa, 2001. Stendahl, Krister. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” Pages 78–96 in Paul amoung Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. Stowers, Stanley K. “Romans 7.7–25 as a Speech-in-Character (προσωποποιία).” Pages 180–202 in Paul in his Hellenistic Context: Studies in the New Testament and its World. Edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994. Thompson, Marianne Meye. A Commentary on Colossians and Philemon. Two Horizons New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Williams, Daniel Day. The Spirit and the Forms of Love. Library of Constructive Theology. Digswell Place: Nisbet, 1968. Wolter, Michael. Der Brief an die Römer: Röm 1–8. EKKNT 6.1. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2014. Wright, N. T. After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. New York: HarperOne, 2011. Zimmermann, Ruben. “Jenseits von Indikativ und Imperativ: Zur ‘impliziten Ethik’ des Paulus am Beispiel des 1. Korinterbriefs.” TLZ 132 (2007): 260–84. –. “Ethics in the New Testament and Language: Basic Explorations and Eph 5:21–33 as Test Case.” Pages 19–50 in Moral Language in the New Testament: The Interrelatedness of Language and Ethics in Early Christian Writings. Edited by Ruben Zimmermann, Jan G. van der Watt, and Susanne Luther. Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 2, WUNT II 296. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. –. “Pluralistische Ethikbegründung und Normenanalyse im Horizont einer ‘impliziten Ethik’ frühchristlicher Schriften.” Pages 3–28 in Ethische Normen des frühen Christentums: Gut – Leben – Leib – Tugend. Edited by Friedrich W. Horn, Ulrich Volp, and Ruben Zimmermann. Kontexte und Normen neutestamentlicher Ethik/Contexts and Norms of New Testament Ethics 4, WUNT 313. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.

Part V Implications

Ecclesiology as Ethnology The Church in N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God Andrew McGowan “So the plan of the library reproduces the map of the world?” “That’s probable. And the books are arranged according to the country of their origin, or the place where their authors were born, or … the place where they should have been 1 born.”

1. Introduction 1.1 The Library Reading N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is like moving through the Aedificium, the labyrinthine monastic library of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The knowledge on offer is remarkable, the path to it both linear and repetitive, and the very form opinionated. The meanings encountered are dependent not only on the parts but the arrangement of the whole, which invites inhabitation, exploration, and observation of how it all fits together. Full of insights into what Paul thought and how his world worked, PFG may also seem to correct or augment the evidence, and not merely to present or expound; if we are not always convinced of what Paul thought, we are left in no little doubt of what he might have, or should have. Although many exegetical moments are crucial to PFG, Wright interprets Paul by aggregating and arranging texts and traditions relative to one another, as much or more than dissecting and analyzing them individually. More than that, he links the volumes of the Pauline library to a wider literary and social context, reading the apostle with the literature of Second Temple Judaism in particular, then making new claims about the complex resulting whole. This project, then, is less about the microscopic examination of key words or phrases – granted that plenty of these get their attention in PFG – but the telescopic invocation of a great whole, presented to the reader as comprehensible through the relations between the parts, and between the parts and their context too. 1

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994).

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“The people of God” is the subject of the longest chapter in this very long work (ch. 10; PFG 774–1042), and that which could be seen as its “ecclesiological” center; yet ekklēsia and/or things related to it are repeatedly encountered throughout PFG, and there are issues properly regarded as having to do with Church that come up in quite different connections as well.2 A central piece of the literary edifice of PFG, “Church” – or better, ekklēsia – is also presented as central to Paul’s mission (PFG 546, 774). It is not so much about one or more key passages within or even beyond the Pauline canon, but a recurring subject or topic, encountered again and again as one turns corners, or pages. If PFG itself is an edifice, ekklēsia as Wright expounds it is not merely an institution or association, but a project and a people. To understand Church in PFG – and, as I think Wright helps demonstrate, in Paul – is to engage not merely an idea, but a worldview, a history, and a culture. 1.2 Defining Ekklēsia: Church and Symbol “Ecclesiology” is of course just as anachronistic or at least as oblique a topic relative to Paul as “sacramental theology”;3 that is, while Paul’s writings have necessarily been deeply influential for Christian thought on these subjects, his own questions and concerns are not particularly well expressed by the later constructions. The term ekklēsia (which Wright prefers, unless speaking of “the people of God” which he does often) of course brings us closer, if at least by de-centering the traditionally “ecclesial” sufficiently to see what Paul may have had in mind with this new entity. What sort of thing however is an ekklēsia? Or, if ekklēsia were an answer, what was the question? In a discussion that expresses his caution about “Church” language, Wright asks his own question that produces this answer: “What were the main symbols, and symbols-in-action, of Paul’s newly envisaged and constructed world?” His answer is that it “is the ekklēsia: its unity, holiness and witness” (PFG 385; italics original). Obviously Wright means something fairly specific by “symbol,” but “symbol” is often used to connote “image” as opposed to reality, sign rather than thing, the “merely” symbolic as opposed to what is more substantial.4 For that matter, ekklēsia does not really commend itself as a central “image” for Paul, for whom it is an important concept, but who uses other images 2 I have maintained Wright’s own use, the transliteration ekklēsia, throughout this essay; it involves a critical distance from the overtones of the English “church” but the transliteration suggests a sort of appropriation into English discourse that the Greek word would not. 3 See the essay by Edith M. Humphrey in this volume. 4 The use of “symbol” and of “worldview” are anticipated in N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992).

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(notably “body”) to elucidate it. So Wright has something more or something else in mind, it seems. At another point he says that this same “central symbol of the Christian worldview” is the unity in Christ spoken of in Gal 3:28 (PFG 11). So it is somehow the fact and character of the community that constitute a “symbol.” How Church or ekklēsia is primarily a “symbol” remains slightly obscure. The closest we get to an explanation of symbols per se in PFG comes in Wright’s related discussion of Torah, which he presents as the central Jewish symbol. What makes Torah a “symbol” for Wright is that it distinguishes Jews from others; it becomes more than a mere sign, not because symbols necessarily do this, but because of its specific character and content implying or demanding praxis (PFG 90–92). So symbols are markers of identity, above all else. The bad news is that this seems to confuse the fundamental with the distinctive, as a general way of approaching symbols; a symbol (in this context) would surely better be understood as what authentically characterized a community than what merely distinguished it from others. The point here, and the good news, is that Wright’s theory of Church as symbol, like that of Torah as symbol, relates closely to praxis and does not peter out at being a mere “sign”; yet this is not because of what symbols are but because of what Torah and Church are, respectively. Being “the central symbol of Paul’s worldview” means that “worldview” must be considered, too; it suggests that Wright’s emphasis on “Church” is not (or not only) a theological commitment to Christian community as such but the consequence of another complex and repeated thread in PFG, the claim that Paul’s thought needs to be understood in terms of story, symbol, praxis, and questions (PFG 26 etc.), which constitute “worldview.” So “worldview” is not merely the background against which Paul does his work, nor is it merely ideas; it is what Paul constructs, inhabits, lives, and proclaims. While Wright has chosen the language of symbol to describe ekklēsia, it is part of that world of lived praxis rather than merely of signs; in another theoretical framework, ekklēsia could have been described as a habitus.5 1.3 Constructing Ekklēsia: Church, Canon, and Context The way Wright handles the Pauline literature is central to what he says about ekklēsia, and the consequences play themselves out through the work. Wright places in his labyrinthine library not just the undisputed letters, but Ephesians as well as Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and (with a bit of hesitation about Titus) the Pastorals to boot (PFG 61). Reclaiming the Pastorals seems of little consequence as Wright goes along; more important among his judgment calls 5

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

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in this maximalist construction is what the cosmic and universal scope of Ephesians and Colossians bring. In ecclesiological terms, this includes the somewhat different (and “higher”; see PFG 57) picture of “Church” as a single and universal whole, correlated with savior and cosmos, and not merely the “churches” more likely to form in the reader’s mind from, say, Romans or the Corinthian letters. Yet Wright’s particular treatment of the undisputed letters is also important to his Church idea. Emphasizing the threads between as well as within letters, Wright presents a Pauline corpus which is just that – not only an accumulation of individual parts, however composed, but a whole with structures and meanings to be found in the connections within, between, and even beyond the individual letters. The Corinthian correspondence in particular is important in PFG, as Wright includes more significant material about the form and content of Christian life in community than many commentators have done constructing their “Pauls.” This makes some of his other claims about ideas like covenant, practice, and community stronger in themselves simply because it accounts for more of Paul’s writings and concerns than is sometimes the case. The “ecclesiological” faults of PFG, and its strengths, are as likely to be found in the shape of this whole as in the treatment of the parts. Wright’s maximalism does not, however, stop at the Pauline literature itself. His library is not assembled merely in terms of canonical or personal notions of authorship but employs materials from context as well as text. The first half of PFG in particular involves substantial treatments of what often passes for “background,” but which here is something rather more – that interesting idea of “worldview.” Wright, referring to this project as a sort of “thick description,” interprets Paul and his world very much in terms of each other. While giving significant attention to Roman and Greek philosophy, politics, and religion (terms Wright does not use uncritically – see further below), it is Judaism that claims his particular attention and plays a unique part in the big idea of PFG, and hence in his idea of Church too. There is much to profit from in these discussions, although they leave behind a sense that the categories of “Greek,” “Roman,” and in particular “Jewish” have been employed in ways that deserved more critical reflection. In much of the detail, Wright is impressive, but at the end this reader wanted a deeper acknowledgement of the messiness of ancient cultural interaction and in particular of how GrecoRoman much Judaism could be. Ekklēsia is not a construct drawn purely from direct Pauline musings about it but a form of human life in community strongly related to the “worldviews” of these wider communities and traditions; it is a social and historical phenomenon, and especially a political one, and not merely the outgrowth of events in the personal and spiritual sphere. It is, in effect, a

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“third race (PFG 1144–45). Wright’s ekklēsia-logy involves what could at different points in PFG variously be called ethnogenesis (Who are these people?), or political theology (What are these people seeking?), or ethnography (How does this people act?). Wright is not asking so much what the Church is as who God’s people are, what they are for, and how they live; his quest is for an ethnology of the ekklēsia. These three remain to elucidate his quest: identity, purpose, and character.

2. Identity 2.1 The Body of the Messiah The importance of the “people of God” concept in PFG is grounded in that of divine election and of its purpose, which will be considered further in the next section. But the issue of identity arises as a first question for ecclesiology, because the question of why there is an ekklēsia at all does not begin in any conception simply with the calling of Church but with that of Israel – unless in fact it is even more ancient and fundamental than that. To ask who the people of God are in Paul is to raise the difficult question of the relation between Israel and the Church, and between Jews and Gentiles. Throughout PFG Wright presents Paul’s thought and practice as on the one hand profoundly and traditionally Jewish and on the other hand radically different – the term “freshly” used in the chapter headings of Part III (PFG 619, 774, 1043) is how he conveys this sense of continuity and change. This means Wright argues for a very strong sense of continuity between narratives of call in the Pentateuch, and with Abraham in particular (PFG 784–85), while also pointing back to an Adamic need that gives rise to this Abrahamic election (on which see further below). Israel is of course the resulting people of God, but this is the premise of Paul’s thought, rather than its end. In PFG Paul’s “reworking” of the people of God concept actually involves a disjuncture in two steps, rather than one. It is not simply that (as some early Christian writers might have put it) a mantle of choice and blessing falls from a failed departing Israel to a waiting successor Church; it is actually Jesus as Messiah who is the key to the shift in elected identity. Jesus as Messiah certainly replaces Temple in Wright’s sense of Paul (PFG 355–58) and apparently “revises” Torah too (PFG 361). This is because Jesus’s Messianic identity and Paul’s incorporative ecclesiology – where and how we are used to thinking of Christians as participating for Paul in Jesus as a “body” – are mutually explanatory (PFG 825–26). In rough parallel to Wright’s use of ekklēsia to de-center traditional “ecclesial” language, the expected Pauline “body of Christ” phrase barely appears in PFG – Wright’s rhetoric claims and asserts his view about the cen-

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trality of Messianic identity as the always-present meaning of Χριστός. The “Messiah’s body” (PFG 18 etc.) is the concept that allows a transition from historical Israel to nascent Church; those who are incorporated into ekklēsia participate in the election of Israel because Jesus himself fulfills Israel’s vocation. So the result of what Paul “reworked, redefined, recategorized” (PFG 364) or “rethought, reworked and revised” (PFG 365) is that “Israel” remains absolutely central to the purposes of God, but that what “Israel” now properly means is not the ethnic community marked by physical descent from Abraham or by Torah observance etc., but as the community which participates covenantally in the Messiah Jesus. That community is also characterized by a particular form of life and a symbol-system, of which more will be said below. So what Wright says of Paul’s view of the land (as yet another key symbol of Judaism “rethought” etc.) seems to work as a way of describing the whole ekklēsia-project: God’s promise and call is “fulfilled in the Messiah on the one hand and implemented through his own mission on the other” (PFG 367, italics original). 2.2 Israel and the Ekklēsia Wright does not then start with the idea that Israel is replaced by the Church, but rather that Israel’s vocation is fulfilled in the Messiah and transformed accordingly. Wright also emphasizes that Jews can certainly be part of the new (or “reworked”) divinely called community (PFG 806–10, 1206). But of course this does not avoid the potential problem of a “replacement theology,” as Wright terms it, or reveal the fate of historical Israel itself. Wright certainly seeks to distance himself from “hard” supersessionism (like that of the letter of Barnabas [PFG 807n106]) and what he calls “sweeping” supersessionism (like that of twentieth-century theology, wherein Judaism itself is really not the point but stands for “religion” per se, on which see further below). His own view of the relation between ekklēsia and Israel he compares to a “Jewish supersessionism” like the position reflected at Qumran (PFG 809), and which he quickly suggests is not then worthy of the name “supersessionism” because it is concerned with fulfillment rather than replacement (and because it is still Jewish). If PFG is mostly about Paul, it is also about Wright’s own place in modern discourse about Paul; and this is one of the issues in PFG where Wright takes up cudgels both for attack and defense, since the place of Israel has been an area of controversy in the reception of his earlier work but also one of the defining issues in the “New Perspective.” Although Wright is in many respects seen as a “New Perspective” scholar, the argument here mostly takes place to his left with (mostly implied) interlocutors who object that his understanding of Paul is supersessionist.

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If we can agree that the point for this study is, or should be, what Paul seems to have believed and taught, then is Wright correct about the place of historical Israel after Messiah and ekklēsia? The material in Rom 9–11 that for most, including Wright, is the crucial evidence but not the whole can indeed be used piece by piece to support the view that for Paul the ekklēsia is a “reworked” (etc.) entity that now claims the historic vocation of Israel. However, many scholars would also say that in Rom 11 in particular (see vv. 25–27) Paul either qualifies or mitigates this picture to leave a sense that there is a future for the “old” Israel beyond the inclusion of a few faithful or lucky exceptions who caught the lifeboats and boarded the new salvific vessel.6 As Krister Stendahl put it, Paul celebrates the mystery of God telling the Roman Christians that “the salvation of Israel is assured and hence none of their business.”7 So the general force of Rom 9–11 notwithstanding, Wright – hardly uniquely of course among scholars of whatever stripe – might be sacrificing the reality of Paul’s own inner conflict on the altar of a coherent grand narrative, more “Pauline” than Paul. Despite frank reflection on the issues underlying such controversies (PFG 1128–33), Wright does not completely deal with the questions his critics have raised or might raise, either methodologically speaking or simply in terms of what Paul says. Each of these deserves at least brief comment. The experience of history itself – history not as a distant past freshly represented by the insightful scholar, but as the intervening stream of events and circumstances inhabited by all readers – suggests that thinking about the past actually does change because of cultural and social shifts to which we are subject however much we try (also) to place such thought in the service of honesty and objective inquiry. NT studies across the twentieth century have shifted greatly in thinking about Jews and Judaism, and not merely because there are suddenly better and brighter scholars who know more about the first century or, Qumran notwithstanding, because we have a completely different picture of ancient Judaism. Interpretation is in fact always political and theological. Social location does matter, and Wright says as much when pointing to some characteristics of North American scholarship (PFG 1130, 1132) without ever being quite as clear how a British social location apparently exempts one from such concerns.8 So yes, there really are inescapable questions of ethics in NT interpre-

6

Larry W. Hurtado, “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God,” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65. 7 Krister Stendahl, “Qumran and Supersessionism – and the Road Not Taken,” PSB 19 (1998): 141. 8 Apparently there are those who might be “sneakily falsifying the historical evidence to fit our predilections” (PFG 1133) which is a rather unworthy summary of the complexity of how presuppositions and commitments contribute to the outcomes of scholarship. Phy-

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tation, and anti-Semitism is among them just as honesty is. This remains true however sympathetic we may be to the repeated insistence in PFG that historical evidence must have the first and final word and that we cannot simply take up convenient or attractive positions if they do not fit. Like most contemporary interpreters, Wright wants to take Judaism seriously at least as an ancient community and tradition. Yet there remains the question of whether what Saul first knew as “Israel” has any theological meaning or significance for Paul, or for theological reflection grounded in Paul’s writings, other than being subject to the benign results of principles derived from scripture with which to ground social ethics and cultural awareness. One does not have to be a born-again Zionist to wonder whether Paul’s loose-hanging threads leave dangling the question of whether Judaism may actually have “ecclesiological” significance for Christians, so to speak – whether, that is to say, there is still something to be said about the historical Israel in considering the people of God whose mission and purpose Wright so passionately expounds. The problem here is, then, two-fold. First, the desire to let history have the last word does not solve the problem of dealing either with scholarly presuppositions or with the implications of their conclusions; but Wright is correct not to want to fix his thought-experiment merely to suit a particular political outcome. The second problem, however, is that he actually has done something like this, more in a theological than a political vein, in the very act of assuming that (e.g.) Rom 9–11 can be fixed neatly into the complex edifice of a consistent picture of Paul and his thought. This – whether it is based on the old romantic fantasy of Paul the inspired spiritual genius or, as seems more likely here, a sort of evangelical commitment to making the Pauline corpus (and the whole of scripture) into a single coherent system without invoking any other authority or context such as Church (!) or tradition – is another form of allowing presuppositions to determine outcomes regardless of the awkward reality of history and texts.

3. Purpose 3.1 Reworking the People of God We have seen that ekklēsia is for Wright a “refreshed” version of a traditional idea regarding God’s people and hence a new version of Israel. This complex claim involves an interpretation not just of the Pauline literature, but of the whole biblical narrative in which the key is not (of course) ecclesiology as sicians do also have their own welfare to consider. See also the essay of Oda Wischmeyer in this volume.

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such, but election. Election itself is presented by Wright as far more than an arbitrary (if gracious) act of choice by God that bestows benefits upon the people of God, Israel or ekklēsia; election is for a salvific purpose that has universal scope.9 It is therefore as fundamental to ask for Wright, and for Wright’s Paul, what this people is for as to ask who they are. Wright believes, then – and believes that Paul believes – that the election of Israel is not merely the arbitrary exercise of grace or otherwise an end in itself, but that Israel was called to be God’s people for wider reasons from the outset. Israel is called to be different in order to make a difference (PFG 775). So too, then, is the new ekklēsia. As he starts to construct the case in the central section of his labyrinth (“The People of God, Freshly Reworked,” PFG 774–1042), Wright sets out an awkward sort of mise en place (PFG 777–83), listing and discussing seven ideas or topics variously referred to as “emphases,” as a “category,” as “elements,” and finally as “positions.” As Wright enumerates them (justification, anthropology, “being in Christ,” “salvation history,” “apocalyptic,” “transformation,” covenant), it gradually appears that these are on the one hand issues relevant to the task, but on the other hand perspectives through which other scholars have approached related questions. The final category of “covenant” is in fact being offered as a “unifying perspective” (PFG 781) that Wright himself will seek to use going forward. This is more a question of elaborating the maze than hinting at the path through it, since the seven “do not stand in exact parallel,” indeed, and “are not seven different answers to exactly the same question” (PFG 783). What is hinted at is a sort of grand Aufhebung of other issues and positions not just about ekklēsia or election, but for the whole Pauline project of PFG. That unifying theme of covenant is tied closely in PFG to the classic Pauline themes of justification and/or righteousness; Wright accepts the forensic character of those ideas but argues that they belong not so much to notions of (e.g.) criminal acquittal, but to vindication by a righteous judge in settings like civil suits where redress for wrong is sought between parties. The “covenant faithfulness” shown by God as righteous vindicator draws together for Wright the Hebrew prophets’ proclamation of God’s justice and mercy and the Pauline proclamation of a righteousness obtainable in Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promises (PFG 795–804). We have already noted that Wright moves from his establishment of a claim about a salvific vocation for Israel to articulating the place of the Messiah in it and then to the resultant community. Election and justification are thus very much Christologically, or at least messianically, articulated for Wright; the importance of this move and the difficulty of Paul’s “messian-

9

See the fuller discussion in this volume by Sigurd Grindheim.

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ism” must be left to other essayists in this collection.10 This emphasis does however help indicate what Wright means: an “ecclesiological Messiah,” as it were, undergirds a “messianic ecclesiology.” All this depends on a particular reading of Israel’s own history and vocation. Paul’s theology of Israel’s vocation is for Wright characterized less by a Mosaic exceptionalism than an Abrahamic universalism. Although the Exodus plays a central part in some of how Wright reads Paul (and, for instance, in baptism – see further below), the interpretation of Pentateuchal narrative Wright presents to argue for Israel’s salvific purpose emphasizes Adam’s failure and Abraham’s call as parallel events. Not only is Israel’s calling intended to be salvific for all nations of the earth, Wright sees it (especially as fulfilled in Jesus) as having even cosmic significance. This basic idea is then interpreted Christologically and ecclesiologically, in historical and logical sequence. 3.2 Bible, Judaism, and Paul Does this convince, however? How this claimed Pauline scheme relates either to Second Temple Judaism or to the Hebrew Bible itself are other questions, or ought to be, but PFG moves freely between them all and tends to claim them for one another. So although Wright begins by suggesting that Second Temple Judaism is responsible for offering Paul this narrative, as Wright himself tells the story it is clear he regards it as inherent in the OT text, not simply as a later synthesis. There are then three contestable issues rather than one: What does Paul really mean? What did Second Temple Judaism (or strands of it?) teach or understand? And what did or does the Old Testament say? A certain coherence of Pentateuchal narrative purpose and even of salvific theme has of course been acknowledged in other ancient and modern readings alike.11 Why indeed deny the presence of that strand of universal salvation and cosmic renewal found in the extraordinary visions of the later Isaiah(s), for instance. But Wright regards this particular narrative of Israelite worldsalvation as “woven tightly … into the fabric of Genesis and Exodus” (PFG 811). This will not convince all readers, and frankly should not. It suggests a blurring of historical and theological agendas wherein the rhetoric of history is used to provide a bulwark for a position that could better have been defended theologically, as one reading among others.

10 If it is not hard to accept that Paul saw Jesus as Messiah, the centrality rather than the mere fact of it is where Wright may seem vulnerable to some; see PFG 817n127–28. 11 Wright refers a number of times to Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

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How Second Temple Jews – not a homogenous group in any case – heard or read or understood these texts is another question. It is possible, but not quite compelling, to imagine the views Wright describes as a real possibility in the ferment of the Judaism from which Saul emerged. The idea of a salvific vocation for Israel does not sound like something Paul would have rejected, but it may not account equally well for all aspects of what Paul actually says about Israel or salvation. Wright’s construction of Paul’s own Judaism, as far as we construct it, will not convince every reader by any means. His account of Pharisaism, in particular, is too dependent on choices made against the broad scholarly grain but that otherwise suit the labyrinthine big picture.12 Again we have an impressive theological reading of Paul, or rather of the Pauline corpus or tradition, richly historically informed indeed but then presented as though mainly or simply grounded in historical research. The author is perhaps too modest with regard to offering a theological vision that includes Paul as well as Pentateuch, but to which neither of them might always point in themselves. 3.3 Ecclesiology as Soteriology? In its earlier iterations, this part of Wright’s scheme is where attack on his work from the right has been most voluble, more because of the lack of fit with a version of Reformed theology than because of scholarly issues about Paul’s writings and their ancient context. The criticism exemplified in John Piper's The Future of Justification, which responded to the earlier exposition of Paul in What Saint Paul Really Said,13 is to the effect that Wright subsumes justification or salvation itself into ecclesiology. Although he tries to distance himself from this idea in PFG (xvi), Wright in fact had used language quite like this in What Saint Paul Really Said14 but by way of seeking to expound his sense of what “justification” language actually meant in the first century, rather than as a systematic claim. The irony of this is that Wright himself wants Paul to show a systematic or consistent approach to issues when it is more plausible to suggest that situational and rhetorical specifics can lead him, too, to express views that are in fact not completely consistent. That intra-evangelical theological debate is not our primary interest here, but the point of Wright’s claim in both books is really that Paul himself is 12

Thus also Chris Tilling, who cites a forthcoming response from Steve Mason, yet to appear in print when this essay was submitted, in SJT. Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay,” Anvil 31 (2015): 56. 13 John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007); N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion Books, 1997). 14 Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 119.

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focused on participation in the people of God before he comes to the mechanics of individual salvation. At the risk of buying back into those arguments, this need not mean that either Wright or Paul is uninterested in that second question, but rather that they approach one through the other. If there is an individual whose faith is foremost in Paul as PFG presents him, it is Jesus; and of course the very title of PFG is a confident declaration of Wright’s position on that vexed question of the interpretation of Rom 3:2 in particular and of the phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ (see PFG 836–51). It would be better to ask what Wright sees as the connection between ecclesiology and soteriology; and the answer to that is something like this: a) God called Israel to salvation (and to be a means of salvation for others), but now b) Jesus as crucified Messiah personifies Israel’s call, and c) men and women are called into a covenantal participation in him. This seems less like the absorption of soteriology into ecclesiology than the reverse. 3.4 Israel’s Failure? Such a view of salvation as ecclesial – or better, a view of ekklēsia as inheriting a salvific purpose – involves the assertion that for Paul, Israel’s own salvific mission is a failure and had been recognized as such even before Paul was persuaded that Jesus was the Messiah. As Larry Hurtado and others have noted, however, Paul’s criticism of Israel actually seems focused on its response to Jesus.15 So this idea of an already nationally-disillusioned Saul who helps with a particular interpretation (but may not really appear so clearly in the text once challenged) seems reminiscent of the introspective Paul whose reality was questioned by Krister Stendahl a half-century ago.16 And this claim does add some weight to the complaints already noted about supersessionism – why attribute a dubious sense of Paul’s own condemnation of Israel’s salvific vocation on so little evidence? Here again the construction of narrative about Second Temple Judaism external to the Pauline literature is important to the argument and a vulnerability of Wright’s scheme. If the weight placed on an idiosyncratic view of Pharisaism was already too great regarding supersession, Wright falls into the familiar trap of treating Jewish texts and traditions of whatever period as fair game for interpreting the Judaism of Paul – as though supersession meant an end to Jewish theology as well as to Israel’s salvific mission. To claim Genesis Rabbah in support of his interpretations (e.g. PFG 794) is odd.17 15

Hurtado, “Review,” 363. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215. 17 There are numerous places in this and other works where Wright seems to be nodding towards the language of the powerful but later Jewish notion of ‫תיקון ע ולם‬, the restoration of the world; see for instance PFG 775. 16

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All this does not mean that a version of Wright’s conception of Israel and Church, or even its central claims, could not be affirmed; the Church is a rethought version of Israel and is not merely an entity for its own sake but has a vocation in salvation. In this affirmation, however, it is easier to join in Wright’s “radically rethought” mantra than his “very Jewish” one. Of course this conception, like Paul’s work in general, has profound points of contact with elements of Second Temple Judaism; but it may also be a more original construction for Paul himself than Wright seems to believe.

4. Character 4.1 Religion18 The third element of Wright’s portrait of Paul’s Church could be the most persuasive, and also the most important, but in its previous iterations may not have attracted the same level of critical attention. This could be because in articulating a sense of ekklēsia with a distinct form of practice, Wright is treading ground not so well-worn in classic or even recent theological and scholarly debate about Paul and is opening up areas for new and richer conversation. Through the first part of PFG Wright had engaged impressively with Greek and Roman as well as Jewish worldviews, including not only aspects of philosophy and politics, but also the difficult set of issues and practices that are typically labeled as “religion.” The discussions of these traditions (and indeed their conceptualization as “three worlds” or “roads” [PFG 75 passim] in particular) are not beyond criticism, but overall they function as a rich and helpful contextualization of Paul’s world and “worldview.” In ch. 13 Wright turns to the question of Paul and religion,19 which provides the substance of an answer to our third “ecclesiological” question about the character and practice of the people of God. If ekklēsia is identified and its purpose understood, what characterizes its life as a particular community? While acknowledging the problematic character even of using religion as a category with which to approach belief and practice in the ancient world, Wright argues that we cannot avoid the importance of “religious” practices (prayer, divination, sacrifice) in thinking about what sort of entity this new ekklēsia was for Paul and for the communities connected with him. So while acknowledging the problem of “religion,” Wright suggests that despite the

18

For a helpful discussion, see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 19 See the contribution of James C. Hanges to this volume, which focuses on the contextual issue of “religion(s).”

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discomfort of some “there are several elements of early Christian practice which at least overlap with this entire world of ancient ‘religion’” (PFG 251). But what is “religion” here? Wright’s “worldview” discussion in the first parts of PFG had made use of a Ciceronian schema of religio – ritual, augury, and scripture (PFG 271 etc.) which now reappears as a way of shaping or testing how and when the Christian project has to do with “religion” in some ancient sense. Wright is correct to claim that “the post-Enlightenment category of ‘religion’ includes things which first-century religio did not, and vice versa” (PFG 1325). But etymology does not quite mean that religio is the only or best place to have started in the ancient world, conceptually speaking. Res divinae could have competed for instance, and if semantic connections were of real use, then there would be the even more problematic-sounding cultus and superstitio. Wright engages with attempts by E. P. Sanders, John Ashton, and Gerd Theissen to sort out the relation between nascent Church and “religion.” He acknowledges all as having made contributions, but none does quite enough or quite right.20 Wright criticizes Sanders for defining religion in terms that include “all sorts of things which in the ancient world would have been seen as part of ‘philosophy’ or even ‘theology’” (PFG 1322). However these are certainly a part of any discourse about “religious” subjects, as in the case of Cicero; so granted we agree on the inadequacy of the terms, Wright here risks joining in the general modern misconception that matters which are today called “religious” were quite distinct or separate not only from what we might now call “philosophy,” but also from things now thought of as (e.g.) political and economic. This seems not to be his intention, however, in that he suggests the Christians were in fact “a new kind of polis” (PFG 1332). Wright points tellingly to Sanders’s omission of any substantial treatment of baptism and “Lord’s Supper”21 and proposes an account that includes ritual practice as well as purely inner or “spiritual” activities or dispositions. Although Wright’s instincts on the importance of Christian ritual are sound, it is a shame that there is little sign of engagement with existing scholarship on liturgical history – not a rarity among NT scholars if that makes the lack any better.22 He presents the “religious” aspects of the emergent ekklēsia under 20

E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Gerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM, 1999). 21 Granted the use of this term in 1 Cor 11, probably not a widespread expression; see Andrew B. McGowan, “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper’: Paul’s Eucharistic Terminology and Its Ancient Reception,” CBQ 77 (2015): 503–21. 22 PFG 427n264 suggests Wright had consulted the following on the Eucharist: Paul F. Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins (London: SPCK, 2004); Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress

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five headings: baptism, “sacrifice,” the breaking of bread, prayer, and discernment. 4.2 Sacrifice The second of these (PFG 1339–44) may be the most important in that Wright tries to claim some sense of “sacrifice” as a significant category for Paul, pointing for instance to the way the meal of 1 Cor 10 is compared to Jewish and Greek sacrificial banquets. He does properly push readers likely to have balked at the idea of any concrete (as opposed to “spiritual”) Christian “sacrifice” at all. Yet to take the most obvious case – Eucharist – which he certainly indicates was religio by ancient standards (see PFG 1344–48), Wright falls back on claims of “metaphor” (PFG 1343–44). Rather than offering the expected “very Jewish” account of cultic practice, wherein Lev 2 and its grain offering is as much a literal “sacrifice” as any meat offering,23 Wright works with the general assumption that sacrifice and animal sacrifice are equivalents – more defensible perhaps for Greek or Roman practice than for Jewish. The deep connection between the meals of collegia and cultic practice could also have led the ancient onlooker or participant to think this was cultus too and not just religio.24 Wright’s particular version of problematizing “religion” and of interpreting its relevance to the emergent ekklēsia does place him again between commentators and critics both to the left and to the right. To the left, he criticizes those whose desire to see Christianity as a phenomenon quite comprehensible relative to other ancient Greco-Roman belief and practice leads them to underplay the distinctiveness of the new movement (PFG 247n8). On the right, Wright is not at all sympathetic to the very common view, which of course has its own left and right wing versions, of a Christianity that completely transcends or rejects “religion” – whatever that is. Most versions of Press, 2003); John Koenig, The Feast of the World’s Redemption: Eucharistic Origins and Christian Mission (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); but the discussion does not show particular engagement with any of these. Works in German such as Peter Wick, Die urchristlichen Gottesdienste: Entstehung und Entwicklung im Rahmen der frühjüdischen Tempel-, Synagogen-, und Hausfrömmigkeit, 2nd ed., BWA(N)T 150 (Stuttgart: Kohl-hammer, 2003); and Matthias Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern, Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 13 (Tübingen: Francke, 1996) would have been interesting to consider also. 23 Andrew B. McGowan, “Eucharist And Sacrifice: Cultic Tradition And Transformation In Early Christian Ritual Meals,” in Mahl und Religiöse Identität im frühen Christentum, ed. Matthias Klinghardt and Hal Taussig, Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 56 (Tübingen: Francke, 2012), 191–206. 24 Markus Öhler, “Cultic Meals in Associations and the Early Christian Eucharist,” Early Christianity 5 (2014): 475–502.

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this view engage in forms of dismissive circularity, defining “religion” in terms that obviously should be rejected and then unsurprisingly presenting Christianity as something different from it. Wright presents a view that by this point is unsurprising, namely that the use of “religion” is justified “albeit in a sense redefined, as everything else was for Paul, around Jesus himself” (PFG 1331). This seems again to blur the modern and the ancient categories, but the underlying point can be affirmed. Christianity as Paul presented and advocated it was in significant respects a new sort of social construction (hence the difficulty that many contemporaries had in placing it within existing categories of proper religio etc.), but it also drew deeply (and not merely via metaphor) on existing forms of religious practice – Greek, Roman, and Jewish – and had resultant success in offering forms of belief and practice in some ways familiar and in others fresh.

5. Conclusions N. T. Wright has produced an edifice whose impact on the landscape of Pauline studies will be lasting. The place of Church or ekklēsia in it is hard to exaggerate; it is a large part of the structure but also a design principle, a building material. It is not possible to understand Wright’s Paul without coming to grips with this persistent and profound element. 5.1 Ekklēsia and Ecclesiology We have here mostly avoided the questions framed by systematic and sacramental theology as anachronistic, but we have also avoided them because there is more to be gained by those interested in those questions by suspending them for a while in the hermeneutical process while historical inquiry does its own work and offers the results for consideration. It is worth returning to them now, albeit briefly, in considering the implications of Wright’s exposition of Paul. “Church” is an interesting and difficult subject both for New Testament scholars and for theologians, given that it may also be the air they breathe – or an institution they reject. And among those who live within some version of its walls, “ecclesiology” is of course one of the points of fundamental difference between the Catholic and Reformed sides of Western Christianity. Wright, an Anglican bishop of evangelical leanings as well as a critical scholar of ancient Christianity, could be seen as either remarkably wellplaced or as hopelessly compromised in regard to such conversations. In fact the elements of his scheme that support or undermine either side of this tradi-

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tional divide are reassuringly discontinuous with commitments that might be seen as self-serving on Wright’s own part. Wright’s strong account of the Church for Paul as a community distinguished by a set of social practices cuts somewhat across, for instance, the line between institutional and “invisibilist” ecclesiologies. As a people whose life is at least partly comparable to πόλις or ἔθνος, ekklēsia is not readily understood as defined by an invisible bond of theological concurrence or a common experience of personal religious experience; nor does it sound as though the Paul of PFG would have stopped at the expectation of a “pure Gospel” being preached to recognize it, but he would have expected an ἔθνος, a way of life, which included characteristic ritual practice. Here the Paul of PFG offers support to a catholic ecclesiology, generally at least. While he does emphasize baptism and eucharist in a way that might be expected from a tradition foregrounding them as “ordained of Christ,” Wright does not offer – on Paul’s behalf or otherwise – a sort of hierarchical view that might envisage the community of God’s people as constituted by its leadership or their continuity with predecessors. If this is no ecclesiology for revivalists, it offers little comfort to bishops – at least not to those who are not also New Testament scholars. It may nevertheless appear a rather Anglican (says this writer, of the same ecclesial sub-family) or Aristotelian thing to seek the mean between two extremes, in this regard as others; but what is striking here is that the Paul of PFG seems to point less to a high-Church Protestantism as to a reformed catholicism. 5.2 Out of the Labyrinth The limitations of what Wright offers regarding ekklēsia are unsurprisingly those of PFG as a whole. Sometimes the edifice is the Pauline canon, sometimes PFG itself; sometimes the guide seems to be Paul and sometimes N. T. Wright. Such alternations or elisions are, like the edifice of PFG, problematic as well as powerful. Although not exactly self-deprecating, Wright is less willing perhaps to acknowledge his own architectural genius as much as defer to Paul’s own, but we should not complain merely because this is a particular reading of Paul. If there is a real difficulty here, it is Wright’s own tendency to elision of his authoritative and authorial voice and Paul’s (as manifest in the chatty paraphrased translations that speak unmistakably with the same modern author’s voice as the main text). Let us not, however, fail to acknowledge the importance of this achievement relative to Pauline “ecclesiology” (or ethnology) and elsewhere. Wright’s claims about the salvific vocation of the ekklēsia for Paul and its roots in Jewish scripture and tradition will continue to resonate and influence even as they are tested and debated. If his historical claims about the relation between Paul’s conception of the people of God and Second Temple Judaism

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will be contested, his remains a strong and plausible reading of Paul’s own understanding of who the Church was and what the Church was for. Perhaps even more important though, as scholarship proceeds from hereon, is Wright’s picture of what the Church is like; his insistence that ekklēsia and its distinctive forms of practice – even while somewhat occluded under talk of worldview and symbol – are not a mere appendix to the real stuff of Paul but belong in the center, in the fabric, in the heart of the apostle’s thought.25

Bibliography Ashton, John. The Religion of Paul the Apostle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bradshaw, Paul F. Eucharistic Origins. London: SPCK, 2004. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994. Hurtado, Larry W. “Review of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.” Theology 117 (2014): 361–65. Klinghardt, Matthias. Gemeinschaftsmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern. Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 13. Tübingen: Francke, 1996. Koenig, John. The Feast of the World’s Redemption: Eucharistic Origins and Christian Mission. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000. Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. McGowan, Andrew B. “Eucharist And Sacrifice: Cultic Tradition And Transformation In Early Christian Ritual Meals.” Pages 191–206 in Mahl und religiöse Identität im frühen Christentum. Edited by Matthias Klinghardt and Hal Taussig. Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 56. Tübingen: Francke, 2012. –. “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper’: Paul’s Eucharistic Terminology and Its Ancient Reception.” CBC 77 (2015): 503–21. Nongbri, Brent. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Öhler, Markus. “Cultic Meals in Associations and the Early Christian Eucharist.” Early Christianity 5 (2014): 475–502. Piper, John. The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Smith, Dennis E. From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003. Stendahl, Krister. “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215. –. “Qumran and Supersessionism – and the Road Not Taken.” PSB 19 (1998): 134–42. 25

say.

My thanks to Felicity Harley McGowan for careful reading and comments on this es-

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Theissen, Gerd. A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion. London: SCM, 1999. Tilling, Chris. “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay.” Anvil 31 (2015): 45– 69. Wick, Peter. Die urchristlichen Gottesdienste: Entstehung und Entwicklung im Rahmen der frühjüdischen Tempel-, Synagogen-, und Hausfrömmigkeit. 2nd ed. BWA(N)T 150. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003. Wright, N. T. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God as Postmodern Scholarship James G. Crossley and Katie Edwards This essay will not focus on the rights and wrongs of N. T. Wright’s historical analysis in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, though it will inevitably touch on such issues. Instead, PFG will be used as a primary source for understanding the social history of biblical scholarship. One of the main advantages of using Wright’s work as a primary source in such a manner is that, for all of his seemingly idiosyncratic views, he is one of the great synthesizers of our age. To read Wright’s grand sweep of the history of Christian origins is to get an indication of the ideological issues at work among the most prominent in mainstream New Testament scholarship – in this case the strong emphasis on the “Jewishness” of Paul and Jesus, the significance of eschatology (however construed by Wright), and, of course, the New Perspective on Paul. And in PFG we have the culmination of an academic career’s worth of Pauline study. Indeed, the span of Wright’s career since the 1970s broadly corresponds to what we conventionally label “postmodernity.” Wright has long been critiquing postmodernity and postmodernism; in this essay we instead locate the work of Wright as a significant example of an influential strand of postmodern New Testament scholarship and attend to the range of cultural interests this reveals. It should be stated at the outset that this is not about looking for Wright’s face at the bottom of the well. That individualized view of the social history of scholarship is difficult to maintain, not least given the well-known complexities surrounding authorial intention. Instead, we will be looking at broader cultural issues revealed in PFG, focusing more on the rhetoric of PFG and the often unconscious issues at play.

1. The Postmodern Scholar, Multiculturalism, and the Construction of “Jewishness” First, some brief comments relating to the term “postmodernity” are required. Postmodernity, at least as it will be used in this essay, refers to the (dying?) era over the past forty years or so which has become, as Terry Eagleton famously put it, “suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single

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frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation.” In its place, so the argument goes, is an emphasis on, or emergence of, diversity, instability of meaning, multiple voices, instant image, fluid identities, eclecticism, playfulness, and the blurring of high and low culture.1 “Postmodernism” in this respect might be deemed the label for the accompanying forms of contemporary culture. But is not Wright, with all his heavy stress on overarching, grand, guiding narratives for understanding Paul and Christian origins, the very antithesis of what is popularly understood as “postmodern”? Yes and no. We will return to how Wright’s Paul functions partly as a reaction and challenge to the fragmentation of the so-called “postmodern condition,” but we might label Wright – like any of us, from Stephen Moore to Catrin Williams – as a “postmodern scholar” in the simple sense that he is a scholar active in the era of postmodernity. Wright’s penchant for grand narratives does not disqualify him in this sense. The point is that grand narratives do not necessarily dominate in the way they once did, not that they are nonexistent. Wright too should be regarded as one among many postmodern voice, or one proponent of a grand narrative in a marketplace of grand narratives. Yet even this apparent lack of a cultural grand narrative requires qualification because of the accompanying economic conditions which likewise emerged over the past forty years.2 Fredric Jameson famously called postmodernism the cultural logic of so-called “late capitalism.”3 David Harvey similarly saw the postmodern condition as part of the crisis of accumulation that began in the late 1960s and as a part of the results of the economic shift from Fordism-Keynesianism to neoliberal capitalism, with its distinctive emphasis on the private sector over the public sector and a strong rhetoric of individualism.4 The era of postmodern capitalism is also tied in with contemporary forms of multiculturalism and discourses of liberal inclusiveness in relation to the Other(s). For instance, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, multicultur1

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), vii. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998). 3 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review (1984): 53–92; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Duke University Press, 1991). On “late capitalism,” see Jameson, Postmodernism, xviii–xxii. 4 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010). On neoliberalism more generally see also, e.g., Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard J. A. Walpen, and Gisela Neunhoffer, eds., Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique (London: Routledge, 2007); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 2

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al inclusiveness may superficially appear to embrace the Other(s), but it is a limited inclusiveness most suited to liberal western multiculturalism with an acceptance of the palatable Other without any problematic otherness.5 We might recall the common debates about what “true Islam” is or discourses on welcoming immigrants of the right sort in relation to “national values.” The era of postmodern capitalism has served Wright well and has provided the context to help make him one of the most prominent scholars over the past forty years, at least in Anglo-American scholarship. His particular scholar-image is as well-known as any today; indeed, his particular image among historical Jesus scholars was considered instantly recognizable by Mark Allen Powell: “Even those who have never read any of Wright’s volumes may know him as the scholar who spells god with a lowercase g.”6 Wright’s books sell extremely well, and it is not inconceivable that SPCK would still make a profit even if they dropped every other author. The contexts of neoliberalism and postmodernity also help us further understand the prominence of the content of his work. In the context of historical Jesus studies, William Arnal has shown why there have been such heated debates over Jesus’s “Jewishness” (which no contemporary scholar denies) since the 1970s in relation to “the postmodern condition.”7 For Arnal, the emergence of “Jesus the Jew” with a strict scholarly definition of a culturally stable, and essentialist notion of, “Judaism,” partly functions as a response to socio-economic instability and fractured cultural identities, alongside the shifts in the geographical center of scholarship from Germany to North America in particular.8 Wright has 5 Among various publications see, e.g., Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review (1997): 28–51; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002); Slavoj Žižek, “Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face,” Guardian (3 October, 2010), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2010/oct/03/immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe; Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2011). For broader discussions of “race,” multiculturalism, and neoliberalism with more detailed analysis see, e.g., David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed Books, 2011). 6 Mark Allan Powell, The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ (Oxford: Lion, 1998), 142. 7 William Arnal, The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity, Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction (London: Equinox, 2005). 8 By “essentialism” we mean the assumption that a given or defined phenomenon (e.g., “Judaism,” “Christianity,” “religion”) have a distinct collection of unchanging features which make them what they are. By “essentializing” we mean tendencies in the direction of “essentialism.” Critique of “essentialist” and “essentializing” discourses is one of the most prominent features of postmodern continental philosophy and associated especially

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been prominent in this sort of essentialist presentation of “Jewishness” and Jewish identity and has a significant North American audience (whether hostile or favorable). Of course, what Arnal says about Jesus studies also applies to Pauline studies. Even a cursory look at PFG shows strong essentializing tendencies in relation to its construction of Judaism and “Jewishness” that will be familiar to anyone who as read Wright’s previous work. Indeed, New Testament scholarship has had a long history of constructing a rigid Jewish identity in essentialist terms.9 PFG continues this and is as explicit as any example we have come across. As Chris Tilling has also noted, the phrase “essentially Jewish” is ubiquitous in PFG.10 Among numerous examples, we might mention, “this essentially Jewish narrative” (PFG 1279), “Paul’s essentially Jewish … exposition” (PFG 1303), “an essentially Jewish message” (PFG 1437), and, in a most telling image, “the same essentially Jewish olive tree” (PFG 1449, italics original). Likewise, not only does this apply to Paul’s message, but also to “the life of his communities” which “remained essentially Jewish” (PFG 1438; cf. PFG 385). This essentialist reading of Jewish identity is, of course, with Jacques Derrida. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 278–94 (279): “Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure – although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science – is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions. The transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning – that is, a history, period – whose origin may always be revealed or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full presence which is out of play.” 9 James G. Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century, BibleWorld (London: Equinox, 2008), 143–94. 10 Chris Tilling, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay (Part 1),” Anvil 31 (2015), 45–56 (48n10).

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continued in its application in PFG. When taking about “the Jewish objection to the entire Roman view of the gods” (an “essentially Jewish view,” of course, PFG 370), Wright states that this was not simply about monotheism (though that was of course the basis of the standard critique of idolatry), nor even about election (their belief that they, rather than the Romans or anybody else, were the chosen people of the one true God). (PFG 370)

Instead, it “was about eschatology” and “their belief that the one God had determined on a divine justice that would be done, and would be seen to be done, in a way that Roman imperial justice somehow never quite managed” (PFG 370). Again, this leaves little room for maneuver in the construction of Jewish identity in the ancient world, or indeed ancient perceptions about Jewish identities. What if some Jews were more accommodating to, or indifferent about, Roman views about gods? What if some Jews foregrounded “monotheism” or “election” instead of “eschatology”? If pushed, Wright may well concede that these points were possibilities but the rhetoric shows his strict essentialist formulations: Judaism is x, y, and z and not a, b, and c. Wright does try to qualify this rigid view of identity when he compares debates about the imperial cult with understandings of Judaism: Still, as with the protests of the 1980s that there was ‘no such thing as first-century Judaism’, only Judaisms, plural, so we ought not to be too blown over by an Aristotelian critique of that Platonic abstraction, ‘imperial cult’. As long as we recognize that there was no single uniform reality that corresponded to that phrase, and as long as we remain alive to the multiple meanings which our diverse evidence throws up, we can, at least for present purposes, think in terms of a single complex phenomenon. (PFG 313–14)

However, we will see that when others do provide alternative formulations of Jewish identity, Wright rejects them in some of the strongest possible terms, only enhancing the idea that Wright’s construction of identity can reasonably be understood as hard essentialism. This construction also involves an essentialist Jewish-pagan binary, which Wright has inherited from his primary sources and their long reception history. In his preface, Wright points out that his use of “pagan” is a “convenient shorthand” (PFG xxi), but whatever we make of the realities of historical reconstruction and analysis, the label still functions as a category typically in stark opposition to Judaism throughout PFG. Not only does Wright claim that “what Paul thought he was doing was offering an essentially Jewish message to the pagan world” (PFG 200, italics original), but he also construes a range of different philosophical traditions as representing “paganism,” and these traditions are not to be understood as sources of concepts in Paul or in Jewish writings, irrespective of overlaps in language. When discussing Wisdom of Solomon, Wright argues that it raises issues that “would of course have been anathema not only to Epicureans, but also to Stoics, Platonists and more or less everyone else across the spectrum of paganism.” Wisdom of Solomon

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might use the language of such “pagan” philosophy, but Wright instead sees this as evidence for an essentialist Jewish identity. According to Wright, Wisdom of Solomon “has made [‘pagan’ philosophy] serve, decisively, an essentially Jewish vision of reality” (PFG 241). We might add that another function of this discourse is to construct an orthodox path through history and thus protect the Christian message from being tainted by anything deemed idolatrous. This might incorporate a degree of what Luke Timothy Johnson called the “Hengel sidestep” where any possible influence of Greco-Roman culture on the New Testament is systematically filtered through Hellenistic Judaism, which, presumably, renders it non-toxic for Christianity.11

Wright does accept a little “pagan” window dressing in Paul, though, perhaps because he more firmly locates the apostle in his definition of “Judaism” than Hengel did. It is striking that this essentialist approach to Jewish identity continues in Wright’s construction of more recent (and thus timeless?) Jewish identity in PFG. He briefly turns to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin who “in the extreme conditions of the mid-century crisis, understood the urgency of present action … Something has to be done, and done now.” Quoting Arendt, Wright adds that what is needed is a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities. (PFG 1474)12

Similarly, Wright adds that Benjamin “offers a reminder that the ancient Jewish vision, in which the Messiah and the redemption of history have played such an important role” brings “the challenge to action in the world itself” (PFG 1474). Wright summaries: “One does not have to fill in too many gaps to see that this is essentially a Jewish vision: a world at one, with human authorities necessary but firmly under limitation” (PFG 1474). This again works with a fixed view of Jewish identity across the ages (note once 11 Luke Timothy Johnson, review of Richard H. Bell, No one seeks for God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 1:18–3:20, RBL (1999), http://www.bookreviews. org/pdf/382_408.pdf. On the construction of an orthodox path through history, compare also the following comments by Wright where there are heretical historical paths the historian best avoids: “two of the greatest poems in scripture, perhaps in all the world, are the psalms we call 19 and 119, the latter celebrating Torah from every possible angle, the former balancing it with the power and glory of the sun itself. That is what Torah is like. Not to recognize that is to take a large step towards Marcion, or indeed towards the gnosticism that would scorn the created order as well” (PFG 1016–17). 12 Quoting the preface to Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: New Edition with Added Prefaces, 3 vols., 4th Eng. ed., (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1968).

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again the use of “essentially”), which has been established by the interpreter, Wright. It might be granted that Arendt and Benjamin (and indeed others in the Frankfurt School) were influenced by their Jewish backgrounds. But we might also factor in their Marxist backgrounds or wonder if such a vision might be known in Christianity, nineteenth-century nationalism, the developing Labour movement of the early twentieth century, complex combinations of all the above, or indeed something developed specifically in light of “the extreme conditions of the mid-century crisis.” And what do we do with those identifying and identified as Jews but who do not think of “a world at one, with human authorities necessary but firmly under limitation” (PFG 1474)? Would not at least some of the well-established Jewish anarchists in the East End of London prior to World War I have had difficulties with the idea of necessary “human authorities,” no matter how limited their power? Wright does not go into detail about what we do with alternative Jewish visions, but their very existence again reveals the extent of the static and essentializing nature of Wright’s “Jewishness.” Indeed, even the construction of paganism remains when Wright discusses problematic modern identity. The “horrible anti-semitism of Nazi ideology” was “of course essentially pagan, though sometimes borrowing some clothes designed to look ‘Christian’” (PFG 805). We might question the validity of such essentialism in academic analysis (as Wright does, PFG 248). What does it mean to say Nazism was “essentially pagan” (whatever that seemingly enormous category might contain) while anything seemingly “Christian” is only donning “clothes designed to look” so? This is not, of course, to say that Nazism was essentially Christian or the like, but clearly there were Nazis who did identify as Christian and who borrowed from earlier figures who also identified as Christian. Is it the role of the historian to distance “pure Christianity” from any unfortunate “impure” manifestations, not unlike popular discourse of ISIS not being “true Islam”? We would say this is not the historian’s task, but the point here is to show just how firmly essentialist Wright’s binaries are and how they are arguably the clearest example of what Arnal saw as a reaction against fragmented postmodern identities.

2. New Perspectives on “Jewishness” Wright is, of course, one of the most important representatives of one of the most high-profile developments in New Testament scholarship of the postmodern era: the New Perspective on Paul. Gaining momentum at more or less the same time as the scholarly rhetoric of Jesus the Jew, the “New Perspec-

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tive” was, so the story goes, heralded by James Dunn,13 though in 1978 Wright was already showing influences of E. P. Sanders’s groundbreaking work of 1977 and was already using the phrase “new perspective.”14 While not the first to make the challenge, Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism meant that scholarship, and Pauline scholarship in particular, was no longer going to be able to repeat uncritically, at least not without serious criticism in response, Lutheran-influenced analysis of Paul and early Judaism and the continual negative stereotypes about Judaism as a cold, harsh legalist religion of works-righteousness in contrast to the loving religion of grace advocated by Paul and, in the long run, (orthodox) Christianity. Sanders’s famous “covenantal nomism” – namely, the idea that “common Judaism” typically combined ideas of graceful election and the maintenance of the covenantal relationship through observance of the commandments (“getting in” and “staying in”) – became the central feature of the diverse approaches brought under the heading of the New Perspective on Paul. However, while “Jewishness” continued to be constructed as a strict form of identity, there is another distinctive feature of contemporary New Testament scholarship which has also affected the New Perspective: difference from that which came before, often couched in language of “transcending” this fixed construction of Jewish identity which is now “redundant,” even though the language of “Jewishness” remains.15 As Wright previously put it about his construction of Jesus: “[this is] a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism.”16 For all the criticisms of the Old Perspective on Paul for its negative portrayal of Judaism,17 a soft supersessionism has hardly been absent from the rhetoric of New Perspective publications, including PFG and other work of Wright, even if the rhetoric has become more positive. Indeed, Paul’s letters (with their apparent critique of the Law) make it easier for contemporary scholars to justify a “Jewish Paul” distanced from any potentially unpalatable Jewish beliefs. Paul, after all, raises some slightly different problems from Jesus. Whereas Jesus in the Synoptic tradition is not so obviously presented as re13

James D. G. Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983), 95–122. 14 N. T. Wright, “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” TynBul 29 (1978), 61– 88. 15 Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror, 143–94; James G. Crossley, “A ‘Very Jewish’ Jesus: Perpetuating the Myth of Superiority,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 11 (2013), 109–29. 16 N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996), 93 17 Such rhetoric is still present in PGF. For instance: “The deeper aim of Bultmann’s analysis can be seen, with hindsight, to be a radical deJudaizing, not only of the gospels (where his ‘demythologizing’ is best known) but of Paul as well” (PFG 458).

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jecting his Jewish tradition, Paul does at least imply that some aspects of Jewish Law and identity are problematic or possibly irrelevant to at least some degree (see, e.g., Gal 2:17–21; 3:10–13; 4:21–26; 6:15; Rom 14:1–8; 1 Cor 7:19). From a perspective concerning popular Jewish debates, the problem was casually summarized by Jacob Taubes, himself in negotiation with his own Jewish traditions: Now it happens that the Jewish study of Paul is in a very sad state. There is a literary corpus about Jesus, a nice guy, about the rabbi in Galilee, and about the Sermon on the Mount; it’s all in the Talmud and so on … This apologetic literature proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and there is a consensus in Liberal Judaism (not in Orthodox Judaism, which hasn’t moved an inch), that is, a sort of pride in this son of Israel. But when it comes to Paul, that’s a borderline that’s hard to cross.18

Taubes, more keen to “rescue” Paul for Judaism, saw Paul as part of a long Jewish tradition where the Law is overthrown in light of the new radical moment. But what is crucial for our purposes involves where the emphasis is placed in the construction of Jewish identity. By making things like circumcision and Torah central to a strict construction of Jewish identity, Wright can have Paul be different in order to “rescue” Paul for Christianity while Taubes has to make this difference from Torah practice another established Jewish tradition in order to “rescue” Paul for Judaism. Both work with the same data, both make similar arguments, but it is where the emphasis is put on their fixed notions of identity that allows each writer to construct their respective “Pauls” in relation to Judaism. In other words, how a scholar constructs Jewish identity can tell us a lot about the ideological underpinnings of a given scholar’s work and the assumptions of their categorizations. So, while Wright’s Paul is “essentially” or, in what functions as a near-synonymous category in Wright’s rhetoric, “thoroughly” Jewish, his Paul still transcends this strict construction of Jewish identity. Paul’s essential Jewishness presents “a new dramatic variation” (PFG 1438) about which “he thought through and transformed his existing Jewish worldview and theology” (PFG 611). Indeed, Wright see as “the main thesis of the book” the idea that Paul created a theology which was “a radical mutation in the core beliefs of his Jewish world” and where “markers (circumcision, the food laws, and so on) had been set aside as inappropriate for the new messianic day, for the new messianic people” (PFG xvi; cf. PFG 538–39). While a Christian tradition of superiority over Judaism obviously has an ongoing influence, it is also part of those discourses about contemporary multiculturalism where the palatable bits of the Other are embraced and where problematic otherness is pushed away. Put another way, “essential” 18

Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5.

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Judaism becomes acceptable for certain scholarly constructions of Paul’s identity, but the difficult and strange aspects of Jewish identity (e.g., circumcision, much of the Law) are put to one side. However, there is another important development which also helps explain this positive rhetoric towards Judaism while simultaneously presenting Paul in ways that go beyond what is assumed to be a previously “essential” Judaism. Part of Arnal’s argument was that the scholarly emphasis on strict Jewish identity involved a reaction against the dominance of pre-1970s German scholarship and a desire for Christian scholars to show that Christianity is not antisemitic at its core in order to distance Christianity from complicity in the Holocaust.19 This argument was nuanced further by Crossley. The rhetoric of Jesus’s “Jewishness” was part of post-1967 cultural shift including the first widespread interest in the Holocaust and a hugely favorable attitude towards Israel in AngloAmerican political, educational, and popular culture after the Six Day War. Yet this philo-Semitism nevertheless perpetuated attitudes of cultural and religious superiority in relation to Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and all as part of a general shift of the center of biblical scholarship from Germany to North America.20 In terms of PFG, we might note not only the use of the philo-Jewish rhetoric to proclaim transformation of a “Judaism” constructed by Wright, but also the loaded language he uses to disagree with his opponents and remove any potential complicity in the Holocaust on the part of an assumed “true” Christianity. On a number of occasions Wright turns to Nazi Germany as a point of bleak contrast. For instance, Wright argues that the Nazis could not tolerate two histories and so Jewish history had to be erased “in order that the fresh Nazi story of Germany could stand on its own new feet” (PFG 1479). But in the accompanying footnote Wright manages to associate such overtly antiSemitic views with the contemporary “apocalyptic” readings of Paul associated with, among others, the late J. Louis Martyn: “The parallel between this and the proposals of today’s neo-‘apocalyptic’ interpreters of Paul is, or should be, a matter of concern” (PFG 1479n8). Unsurprisingly, then, for Wright’s logic, this “apocalyptic” approach to Paul is “something quite different,” an “essentially non-Jewish ‘revelation’” (PFG 611–12). One function of this, of course, is to promote the moral purity of Wright’s work in the face of the not infrequent allegations of supersessionism while putting other rival supersessionist readings in their place with a culturally-loaded insinuation.21 19

Arnal, Symbolic Jesus, 39–72. Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror, 143–94. 21 Cf. PFG 806: “This carries, so it seems, none of the old propensity of the ‘hard supersessionism’ to say that Jewish persons are not welcome within the new way. It is just that being Jewish, and adhering to the Jewish hope that God would fulfil his long-awaited promises to Abraham, appears to be exactly the wrong kind of thing. It is what, according to Martyn, Paul’s opponents in Galatia had been teaching. And Paul insisted that any such 20

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Indeed, there are moments when vast swathes of European thought are tainted with fascism for Wright. In his discussion of Heidegger and the Nazis, Wright makes a plea for twenty-first-century New Testament scholarship to bring the long overdue liberation of exegesis and theology, and actually of early Christian history itself, from the dark gravitational pull of the whole post-Enlightenment European philosophical and political matrix, of which Heidegger was and is a central symbol. (PFG 1477)

Quite how a figure like Noam Chomsky, who identifies as a child of the Enlightenment but is not naïve about its dark side,22 and a whole host of antifascist, libertarian post-Enlightenment thinkers fit into this somewhat problematic generalization of the past few centuries is beyond us, but it does show the potential scope of Wright’s tainting of opposition views with the darkest of European legacies in order to protect his essentialist readings. Another function of this sort of rhetoric is, of course, to show that Wright’s fixed construction of Jewish identity is the one we should deem accurate, and this is why we might be skeptical about Wright’s claim to be alert to multiple meanings, diverse evidence, and complexity in this regard. Theoretically, could not a Jewish identity be constructed as something radically different to its past? Who gets to decide? This sort of allegation is, of course, not new for Wright. As he claimed of his opponents (who are far better understood in terms of North American “culture wars”) whose Jesus did not adhere closely to Wright’s construction of Judaism: Have the New Questers, and the advocates of the Cynic Jesus, come to terms with the problematic analogy between themselves and those German scholars who, in the 1920s and 1930s, reduced almost to nil the specific Jewishness of Jesus and his message?23

What Wright’s rigid notion of Jewish identity does is effectively claim that a Jew could not have very much in common with Cynic philosophy, despite (say) Matt 10:5–15. thing – any continuity with Abraham, let alone Moses – had been swept away in the ‘apocalypse’ of Jesus and his death. The new reality thus ‘supersedes’ the old. Attempts by Martyn and his followers to resist this conclusion from their teaching simply fail.” 22 Cf. Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power (New York: Vintage, 2003), 232, 261: “we’ve become a much freer society than we were in absolutist times. And intellectuals have often played a role in that, breaking down ideological barriers … for instance during the Enlightenment. That often took a lot of courage and quite a struggle, and it goes on until today … typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people committed to what I would call Enlightenment values – values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice.” 23 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 79n233, quoted and discussed in John S. Kloppenborg, “As One Unknown, without a Name? Co-opting the Apocalyptic Jesus,” Apocalypticism, Anti-Semitism and the Historical Jesus: Subtexts in Criticism, ed. John S. Kloppenborg with John W. Marshall, LNTS 275 (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 1–23 (19–21).

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Wright, and the New Perspective on Paul more generally, therefore attempt to present difference from Judaism without bringing in the triumphalism and negativity associated with the Old Perspective on Paul – even if it means tainting alternative scholarship with allegations of similarities to fascism. Instead of the overt rhetoric of Christian superiority, such New Perspective approaches use the language of Jewish “boundary markers” and Jewish nationalism to show how Paul rejects these categories when they impact upon the early church. Yet, as with Jesus the Jew, the superiority myth is perpetuated implicitly and with a liberalizing, credible overlay in positive language. There can be few better examples of using liberal rhetoric while maintaining cultural and religious superiority than Dunn’s suggestion that one of the five points of the New Perspective on Paul is that justification, in stark contrast to the pre-New Perspective period, can now help combat “nationalism and racialism.”24 The unmentioned implications of this for the scholarly construction of Judaism seem somewhat negative to say the least (presumably Judaism is less able to combat “nationalism and racialism” according to this logic). Wright is more subtle in that he goes out of his way to look at how Jewish thinking was in opposition to some of the toxic debates of the twentieth century, though perhaps Wright is less forgiving of such thinking which lacked God (PFG 1474). Yet, as we saw, Judaism is still transformed and mutated, with certain markers set aside. In this respect, it is perhaps worth noting what might happen to those scholarly positions which attempt to construct too high a degree of Otherness, namely those views which seem to allow Jewish identity (at least as constructed by scholarship) to flourish relatively untouched. The problematic fuller embrace of Otherness may be why Simon Gathercole has to explain his decision not to discuss such scholarship in his own (non-New Perspective) work on Paul: “L. Gaston and S. K. Stowers have not been particularly influential with their theological conclusions because they have been so radical.”25 Wright, with some more detail, is also dismissive “of those who want to claim that Paul remained a ‘Torah observant’ Jew” (PFG 1427). Again, this is not to dispute the historical accuracy of Wright’s claims but rather to understand what does and does not get stressed in scholarship. And, if we play Wright’s game, then why should Wright’s Paul be allowed to sweep such seemingly important practices off the table and remain “thoroughly Jewish”? Again, such language helps us understand the cultural assumptions of the Pauline interpreter. Another key aspect of this liberal turn, so to speak, is the “secularization” of the language which has become a hallmark of evangelical New Testament 24

James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays, WUNT 185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 15. 25 Simon J. Gathercole, Where is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1–5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 18.

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scholarship. As part of his extensive analysis of evangelical biblical scholarship as a primary source, Stephen Young argued that self-representation as academics and the “insider” language of the academic have become significant protective strategies.26 To reapply Young, where terms such as imputed righteousness, justification by faith, righteousness of God, salvation, and so on were standard in the Old Perspective era, we now have a new academic vocabulary with terms familiar to readers of Wright, such as “nationalism,” “boundary markers,” “common Judaism,” “story, symbol and praxis,” “a web of social and religious commitments,” “ethnicity,” and so on, as Michael Bird has pointed out.27 Much of this language is, of course, integral to PFG (e.g., PFG 28, 31, 42). Indeed, Wright shows some sensitivity about issues relating to the so-called “secular” historian and the theologian (PFG 72–74). He argues with a typical flourish: For a start, Paul will reassure both sides that they are full partners in his work. As we shall see when we examine his worldview, the symbols, praxis and stories which contribute to it are none of them simply about ‘ideas’ and ‘beliefs’. They are about the creator God, his world and his people – and this world and these people are creatures of space, time and matter, open by definition to historical enquiry, living life in public without shame, modelling a way of life which is precisely in and for the world, affirming the goodness of the creator’s universe and of human beings within it. Yes, says Paul to the suspicious slavemaster History: I am your partner! You and I belong together! (PFG 72)

Francis Watson may have had his tongue firmly in cheek when he claimed that the New Perspective emphasizes “presuppositionless exegesis” in the sense that proponents are seemingly freed from prior theological commitments, but there has obviously been a tendency to downplay, to some degree, an overtly Protestant (and specifically Lutheran) background in the language of New Perspective, even if some have tried to rectify this,28 and even if the story of Israel culminating in Jesus still has a Reformed feel. However, as Watson recognizes, one of the functions of this academic language is to give credibility or legitimacy to the New Perspective and partly discredit the “too theological” (or perhaps “wrongly theological”?) Old Perspective. Another function of such secularizing language is, therefore, to perpetuate a theological agenda. Indeed, as with historical Jesus studies, Sanders, who has openly portrayed himself as not interested in theology but in history and religious

26 Stephen L. Young, “Protective Strategies and the Prestige of the ‘Academic’: A Religious Studies and Practice Theory Redescription of Evangelical Inerrantist Scholarship,” BibInt 23 (2015): 1–35. 27 Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective, Paternoster Biblical Monographs (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006), 105. 28 Francis B. Watson, “Not the New Perspective” (paper presented at the British New Testament Conference, Manchester, September 2001).

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studies,29 becomes the touchstone, the figure used in his scholarly reception to present an argument as especially credible. But even Sanders himself and his influential reading of Judaism can be seen as perpetuating (presumably unconsciously in the case of Sanders) a Christian theological agenda. While covenantal nomism is not perpetuating a specifically Lutheran model, it certainly is a model influenced by Christian systematic theology which imposes on Judaism ideas of grace and works, neither of which seem to have been systematized in early Judaism.30

3. The Dictatorship of God? Intimately tied in with postmodernism and global capitalism, though perhaps not always comfortably, has been the emergence of postcolonial theories.31 In this respect we want to look at a final area where Wright has been particularly prominent and continues the debate in PFG: Paul and Empire. As Wright is aware, this trend in scholarship can be seen partly as a reaction to recent American imperialism as well as to the rise of postcolonial theory, though it is hardly without precedent (PFG 312). Wright has continued to present Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as an alternative to Caesar, and what we think is happening in Wright’s rhetoric is a case where we can turn the theory on the interpreter (as well as on Paul).32 In this instance we can look at postcolonial 29

E. P. Sanders, “Comparing Judaism and Christianity: An Academic Autobiography,” in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E. Udoh with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series 16 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2008), ch. 2. 30 See further Philip S. Alexander, “Torah and Salvation in Tannaitic Judaism,” Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume I: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, WUNT II 140 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 261–301. 31 For discussion of such connections in relation to biblical studies see Stephen D. Moore, Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament, Bible in the Modern World 12 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2006), 78–86. 32 Paul and Caesar is a major area of discussion in current Pauline studies, and we are aware that we are only scratching the surface of the complex issues. It is not clear that there was an overtly “anti-Empire” message in Paul that would necessarily have been picked up by all hearers or readers, and if there was, how it would have been understood. Would there have been indifference to the Empire in the knowledge that it would soon end? Would the interpretation have involved outright hostility to the Empire? Or would there be varying shades in-between? Indeed, there may well have been a range of reactions among Paul’s audiences. What should be clear enough, however, is that Paul is making imperial claims about the role of the rulership of Christ and God, both in the present and future. For discussion of the complexities of Paul’s view of Caesar and the Empire see now

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mimicry where the language of the colonizing power is replicated albeit in a new form (as indeed Paul himself may well have done, if indeed we can separate Paul and Wright at this point – Wright does seem to endorse Paul’s logic throughout33). For example, Wright’s Paul “noticed the ‘gods many and lords many’” but would upstage them “with the one God, one lord of his revised monotheism” (PFG 382). Imperial rhetoric was confronted “at point after point”: Jesus is ‘son of God’; he is ‘lord of the world’; he is ‘saviour’; the worldwide revelation of his rule is ‘good news’, because through it ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ are brought to birth at last. He is the one who ‘rises to rule the nations’. (PFG 382)

Wright’s Paul worked with the fact of a new community … which transcended the boundaries of class, ethnic origin, location and (not least) gender, by all of which the pagan world in general, and the imperial world in particular, set so much store. (PFG 383)

Indeed, rather than Caesar coming from Rome to rescue a beleaguered colony, Jesus will come from heaven to transform the world … He is the sōtēr, the saviour; he is the kyrios, the lord; he is Christos, the Messiah, the Jewish king destined to be lord of the whole world. (PFG 1293)

Phil 2:6–11 is about (among other things), “Paul declaring that Jesus is to receive the homage from every creature in heaven, on earth and under the earth,” a “universal sovereignty,” and the text is described by Wright as a “powerful statement.” Even more strikingly for our purposes, Phil 2:6–11 is described as “a narrative of imperial legitimation” (PFG 1294). Is this not replacement of Empire with Empire, both by Paul and Wright? In fact, we can see this functioning as Wright’s challenge to postmodernity, looking to the hope of the era of the imperial Christ, not unlike the lowly-butto-be-elevated Christ of Phil 2:6–11 eventually becoming the god of Rome. Wright might like to distance Paul from Marx and Marxism (e.g., PFG 1276, 1297, 1306, 1319), and indeed the whole of post-Enlightenment thought, but Christoph Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT II 392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). 33 Cf., e.g., PFG 318: “To say that a particular police force is riddled with corruption, racism or collusion with organized crime is not to say, ‘therefore we should not have a police force’. To say that the present imperial system encourages and sustains wickedness or folly of various sorts is not to say, ‘therefore we should have no human authorities’ … The answer to corrupt authorities is not anarchy. Paul, once again as a good creational monotheist, would not suggest such a thing; that is what is underneath his strong affirmations, so shocking to some liberal democrats, never mind some Anabaptists, in Romans 13.1–7. That is why the poem of Colossians 1.15–20 is so important. Creational monotheism entails a strong statement about the God-givenness of human structures, even while at the same time also indicating that the one God will hold office-holders to account.”

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he does claim that Walter Benjamin’s “own frustrated denunciation of various types of mid-twentieth-century Marxism itself constituted a form precisely of inner-Jewish debate” (PFG 1478). Indeed, he adds, Marx “offered a secularized, Hegelian version of the Jewish story of liberation” (PFG 1478). This “secularized” difference is important for Wright’s reading of “apocalyptic”: “If we bring that picture forward nineteen centuries or so, but take God out of it, we find Karl Marx” (PFG 1478). This connection between Wright’s Jewish “apocalyptic” tradition, Marx, and Wright’s Paul is significant because it leaves Wright’s Paul open to the same prophetic critique the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (and others after him) leveled at Marxism: it will only end up ferociously replicating the power it will replace.34 Does this not also apply to the logic of the narrative of power Wright, Wright’s Paul, and indeed the “historical Paul,” are presenting – the new dictatorship of God to overthrow the present age? Wright argues that “some people in the 1930s did indeed advocate a ‘salvation history’ which was really the totalitarian wolf dressed up in biblical sheep’s clothing” (PFG 1508). But does a Wrightian/Pauline theocracy really escape this charge?35

34

E.g. Mikhail Bakunin, Selected Works (New York: Knopf, 1972), 283–84: “The reasoning of Marx ends in absolute contradiction. Taking into account only the economic question, he insists that only the most advanced countries … are most capable of making social revolution … This revolution will expropriate either by peaceful, gradual or violent means, the present property owners and capitalists. To appropriate all the landed property and capital, and to carry out its extensive economic and political programs, the revolutionary State will have to be very powerful and highly centralized. The State will administer and direct the cultivation of the land, by means of salaried officials commanding armies of rural workers organized and disciplined for that purpose. At the same time, on the ruins of existing banks, it will establish a single state bank which will finance all labour and national commerce … For the proletariat this will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks: a regime, where regimented workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to the beat of a drum; where the shrewd and educated will be granted government privileges … There will be slavery within this state, and abroad there will be war without truce, at least until the ‘inferior’ races, Latin and Slav, tired of bourgeois civilisation, no longer resign themselves to the subjection of the State, which will be even more despotic than the former State, although it calls itself a Peoples’ State.” 35 For full discussion of this logic and these issues, including a hermeneutic of suspicion leveled at imperialistic claims of “peace,” see James G. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Biblical Refigurations (London: Oxford University Press, 2015). This might be contrasted with, for instance, Reinhard Feldmeier, Macht – Dienst – Demut: Ein neutestamentlicher Beitrag zur Ethik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012).

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4. Concluding Remarks PFG is an important book, no doubt in many respects. But for our purposes its size, vision, and intellectual scope make it a near-perfect primary source for analyzing the ideological trends present in postmodern New Testament scholarship. To repeat, this is not to challenge the historical reconstruction presented by Wright – others in this volume will do that – nor is it necessarily to claim that Wright consciously “intended” to use Paul in the ways outlined here, although there may be some convergence between Wright’s intentions and our analysis. What Wright particularly shows us is how postmodern Pauline scholarship remains obsessed with “Jewishness” and constructing a fixed notion of Jewish identity upon which Paul’s theology can be established. This, as we have seen, is partly a reaction to trends at work in postmodern capitalism and liberal multiculturalism. The harshness associated with the Old Perspective may be gone, but the myth of superiority over the construction of Judaism remains, albeit in softened language. What is striking about Wright’s epic project is that there is another function: to imply that Paul’s challenge to cultural norms is a challenge for our postmodern, postEnlightenment contexts. But, it seems to us, this has dangers of its own as Wright’s Pauline vision looks like nothing less than a new Empire in the form of theocracy. Wright provides a forceful challenge to failed ideologies of the twentieth century, but it is far from clear that his alternative avoids totalitarianism in the making.

Bibliography Alexander, Philip S. “Torah and Salvation in Tannaitic Judaism.” Pages 261–301 in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume I: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism. Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. WUNT II 140. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001. Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism: New Edition with Added Prefaces. 4th Eng. ed. 3 vols. Orlando: Harvest Books, 1968. Arnal, William. The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity. Religion in Culture: Studies in Social Contest and Construction. London: Equinox, 2005. Bakunin, Mikhail. Selected Works. New York: Knopf, 1972. Bird, Michael F. The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006. Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power. New York: Vintage, 2003. Crossley, James G. “A ‘Very Jewish’ Jesus: Perpetuating the Myth of Superiority.” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 11 (2013): 109–29. –. Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Biblical Refigurations. London: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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–. Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century. BibleWorld. London: Equinox, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Pages 278–94 in Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. Dunn, James D. G. “The New Perspective on Paul.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 65 (1983): 95–122. –. The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays. WUNT 185. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Feldmeier, Reinhard. Macht – Dienst – Demut: Ein neutestamentlicher Beitrag zur Ethik. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012. Gathercole, Simon J. Where is Boasting? Early Jewish Soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1–5. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Goldberg, David Theo. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. –. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. –. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books, 2010. –. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Heilig, Christoph. Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul. WUNT II 392. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review (1984): 53–92. –. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnson, Luke Timothy. Review of No One Seeks for God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 1:18–3:20, by Richard H. Bell. RBL (1999), http://www.book reviews.org/pdf/382_408.pdf. Kloppenborg, John S. “As One Unknown, without a Name? Co-opting the Apocalyptic Jesus.” Pages 1–23 in Apocalypticism, Anti-Semitism and the Historical Jesus: Subtexts in Criticism. LNTS 275. Edited by John S. Kloppenborg with John W. Marshall. London: T&T Clark, 2005. Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. London: Zed Books, 2011. Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe, eds. The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Moore, Stephen D. Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament. Bible in the Modern World 12. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2006. Plehwe, Dieter, Bernhard J. A. Walpen, and Gisela Neunhoffer, eds. Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique. London: Routledge, 2007. Powell, Mark Allan. The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ. Oxford: Lion, 1998. Sanders, E. P. “Comparing Judaism and Christianity: An Academic Autobiography.” Pages 11–41 in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders. Edited by Fabian E. Udoh with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 16. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2008.

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Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Tilling, Chris. “Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review Essay (Part 1).” Anvil 31 (2015): 45–56. Watson, Francis B. “Not the New Perspective.” Paper presented at the British New Testament Conference. Manchester, September 2001. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith.” TynBul 29 (1978): 61–88. Young, Stephen L. “Protective Strategies and the Prestige of the ‘Academic’: A Religious Studies and Practice Theory Redescription of Evangelical Inerrantist Scholarship.” BibInt 23 (2015): 1–35. Žižek, Slavoj. “Liberal Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face.” The Guardian (3 October 2010), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/ 03/immigration-policy-roma-rightwing-europe. –. Living in the End Times. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2011. –. “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” New Left Review (1997): 28–51. –. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

The Spirit and God’s Return to Indwell a People A Systematic Theologian’s Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul’s Pneumatology Frank D. Macchia 1. Introduction: Rediscovering the Importance of the Spirit Many of us working in the area of systematic theology have complained for some time that pneumatology has tended to function as the “Cinderella” of theology, to use a term coined by G. J. Sirks.1 Though times have changed since Sirks used this term of the Spirit, much work is still needed to grant the Spirit the wide-ranging role appropriate to various theological loci. Ever since James Dunn’s classic, Baptism in the Holy Spirit,2 and Gordon Fee’s equally important God’s Empowering Presence,3 it was clear to me at least that part of the problem involved in relegating the Holy Spirit to Cinderella status was the lack of attention to the central role of the Spirit in the New Testament, especially in Paul. Dunn argued that Paul regarded the Spirit to be the “nerve center” of the Christian life among the people of God, and Fee hammered home the point that in the pages of Paul’s letters the Spirit is at work in all dimensions of life among the people of God and not just the “cortex of the brain.”4 Both of them highlighted the strong emphasis in Paul on the diversity, depth, and breadth of the charismatic work of the Spirit. So also in the area of systematic theology, Jürgen Moltmann wrote of a contemporary shift of emphasis in pneumatology from “revelation” to “new creation,” granting the Spirit a much more expansive and multidimensional role in one’s

1

G. J. Sirks, “The Cinderella of Theology: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” HTR 1 (1957): 77–89. 2 James D. G. Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament on the Gift of the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977). 3 Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2009). 4 Dunn, Baptism in the Holy Spirit, 97; Fee, God’s Empowering Presence, 129.

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understanding of the divine purposes for creation.5 More recent pneumatologies have expanded on this principle.6 In N. T. Wright’s monumental Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Paul emerges as a theologian of the Spirit as well. This statement is perhaps more revolutionary than might be apparent at first glance. As most are prone to ask, is not Paul the great theologian of Christ, atonement, and justification? Wright does not exclude those towering Pauline doctrines, but he also brings to his volumes a breath-taking exposition of the significance of the Spirit for Paul. This emphasis on the Spirit is due in part to Wright’s over-arching attention to ecclesiology or the people of God in Pauline thought. This appreciation for the large role for ecclesiology in Paul provides a fertile context for greater attention to the role of the Spirit in Paul’s letters than is sometimes recognized. If the great power of the Protestant Reformation is the ability to bracket the tradition and get back to the text to hear with fresh ears something of “catholic” significance that had been neglected by the church, Wright opens up Paul to us in a way that is truly Protestant, and, therefore, truly ecumenical. Using monotheism, election, and eschatology as his theological framework, Wright masterfully reveals both the rich complexity and theological coherence of Paul’s pneumatology in the context of God’s promise to indwell a people and to renew creation in the process. His overarching framework for interpreting Paul is fundamentally covenantal but also richly soteriological. In fact, I was taken with the attention he pays to the broad theological area of sanctification in Paul. Indeed, the sharp focus of Wright’s treatment of Paul’s pneumatology is God’s promise to personally return to tabernacle among us or to indwell the temple and renew Israel, indeed, to indwell and renew all of creation. Wright shows that in Paul “the spirit constitutes the tabernacling presence of Israel’s God” so that the witness of the law to life may be fulfilled and lived (PFG 657). Everything is meant to become the sacred temple of God’s dwelling. According to Wright, Paul’s pneumatology arises from Paul’s recognition of the coming of the Spirit as the fulfillment of God’s personal return. In fulfillment of the Exodus, the people of God indwelled by the Spirit of the Son are delivered from slavery to sonship in order to become the place where God tabernacles and to realize the law’s witness to life. In fulfillment of the Exile, God’s Spirit returns to dwell within God’s holy temple (as it turns out) in and through the Messiah and his people. Paul emerges from the pages of Wright’s masterful work as a profoundly Jewish thinker and, as such, a theologian of 5

Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 7. 6 See, e. g., Eugene Rogers, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

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the Spirit, of the divine indwelling. From a systematic theological viewpoint, this stress on the divine indwelling is significant. Following Wright’s lead in his reading of Paul, what would happen if one were to view the purpose of creation and of the Messianic mission as caught up in God’s desire to indwell a people, indeed, all of creation by the Spirit of the living God? How might that do away with the Cinderella status of the Holy Spirit? We will have occasion to probe this question as we discuss Wright’s insights into Paul’s pneumatology. Along the way, we will take a look at what Wright has to say about the Spirit in Paul’s letters in relation to several theological loci, including God’s life as triune.

2. Breathing Room for the Spirit: Beyond Anthropocentrism Wright’s emphasis on ecclesiology and the divine return and indwelling opens up breathing room for pneumatology to be given its due in Paul’s theology. When I was a graduate student, pneumatology was emerging out from a restrictive preoccupation with anthropocentric and epistemological concerns, having to do with categories of revelation, cognition, enlightened consciousness, authentic existence and the like. Wright’s presentation of Paul’s Jewish theology of the Spirit bursts that modernist constriction of pneumatology wide open. Wright has shown us that such an anthropocentric, individualistic, and implicitly dualistic theological framework might be in some sense Greek or European, but it is not typical of ancient Jewish theology or of Paul. Paul was concerned instead with God’s return to the temple to reign and to indwell, to renew Israel and the entire creation. Paul saw the Spirit as fulfilling this expectation. Indeed, the ancient dualistic separation of the Spirit from the material world and the subsequent confinement of all things spiritual to the question of gnosis came as a result of a departure from this fundamentally Jewish expectation. I might add here that were it not for the fact that the church fathers continued to anchor pneumatology in the incarnate Christ and typically highlighted self-sacrificial charity as the highest virtue of the spiritual life, pneumatology would have practically disappeared from much of our embodied lives and the material realm in which we live and have our being. Pneumatology nearly disappears within a dualistic framework, because the unique economy of the Spirit is in part to turn matter into a “sacrament” of God’s holy presence, to turn God’s people into the temple of the divine indwelling. So, the fact that God has returned and is returning to make all of creation God’s dwelling place takes pneumatology out of its anthropocentric and epistemological confines and opens it up to larger ecclesiological, historical, eschatological

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and cosmic dimensions. Breathing room is opened up for appreciating the concrete reach and expanse of Pauline pneumatology.7 According to Wright, the deity of the Son and the Spirit in Paul is not simply established according to certain proof texts, such as the reference to Jesus as “Lord” (Phil 2:11), or to the Spirit as the Spirit of God (and of Christ) (Rom 8:9). It is also discernible from the framework of Jewish expectations concerning God’s personal return to reign and to indwell. All that Paul says about the Son and the Spirit recalls the tabernacling God of the Exodus or the God who will return to the temple. It is clear that Paul identified this returning God with the coming of the Son and the Spirit. The returning God of Jewish expectation is transformed for Paul into the Son-sending and Spiritgranting Father, all three sharing in some mysterious way the one divine identity (PFG 719). In highlighting Paul’s “revised monotheism” in the context of the returning God of Israel, Wright shows us that Paul’s pneumatology was more centrally theological than anthropological. As a result, Wright provides the groundwork for an understanding of Paul as a Trinitarian theologian of the Spirit. As we will see, this Trinitarian theology does not arise from a Hellenization of Christian dogma as Adolf von Harnack said of the doctrine of the Trinity long ago. Paul’s Trinitarian theology of the Spirit is thoroughly Jewish.

3. The Spirit as Integral to an Early High Christology This idea that the Son and the Spirit share a divine “identity” with the Father in Paul is a point that Wright has in common with the early high Christology school of Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado.8 It is important to note, however, that Wright revises Hurtado’s thesis by stressing the objective source in the tradition for identifying Jesus as the Lord who facilitates the return of God to indwell a people. Wright does not merely locate Paul’s identification of Jesus (and the Spirit) with God in his (and the community’s) 7

The effort to capture the expanse of pneumatology has also been important to my own work as a systematician. See, Frank D. Macchia, Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006). I began my monograph on justification and the Spirit with the words penned by Jürgen Moltmann: “all the works of God end in the presence of the Spirit.” Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 96. See Frank D. Macchia, Justified in the Spirit: Redemption, Creation, and the Triune God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 3. 8 See Richard J. Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of the Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); and Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

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experience of Jesus as the risen Lord. Rooted in the identification of the Son and the Spirit with the Jewish expectation concerning God’s personal return to reign over and to indwell creation, Paul’s conclusion concerning the divine identity of Jesus and the Spirit has a deeper source theologically than a shared experience (as important as that is). Paul identified Jesus and the Spirit with God because he saw the return of God promised by the Old Testament and expected within Judaism as fulfilled by the coming of Christ and the Spirit (PFG 653). There is an objective source in the history of Jewish tradition for identifying the Son and the Spirit with God. Wright also resists the idea that there was a binitarianism in Paul that excluded the deity of the Spirit. Wright notes instead that later church fathers quarreled over the deity of the Spirit because they lost touch with this ancient Jewish understanding of God’s promised return. He implies correctly that the assumption of a binitarianism in Paul is anachronistic. It reads a later lack of recognition concerning the divine identity of the Spirit back into Paul (PFG 709). A binitarianism did come to exist in the second century and beyond as the church struggled with the divine identity of the Spirit, but only because of a departure from Paul’s Jewish identification of the Spirit with God’s return to indwell the temple of God’s people. If Paul recognized in the gift of the Spirit the God who has promised to tabernacle among us (which Paul most certainly did), Paul would have assumed that the Spirit shares in the divine identity. There is, of course, no question that the church beyond the first century had indeed fallen prey to confusion concerning the Spirit. The concentration during the centuries leading up to Nicea was on the status of the Son. Amphilochius of Iconium thus noted in the fourth century, “It was quite necessary for the fathers then to expound more amply about the glory of the OnlyBegotten since they had to cut off the Arian heresy.”9 Consequently, the original Nicene Creed of 325 CE merely mentioned at the end of the Creed, “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” The First Council of Constantinople in 381 added to the Creed the belief in the Spirit as the “Lord and Giver of life” who with the Son is to be “worshipped and glorified.” Yet, at the same time that this significant addition to the Creed was penned, the level of ambiguity and uncertainty concerning the identity of the Holy Spirit remained. Notice this remarkable statement by Gregory of Nazianzus written in 380 CE: Of the wise men among ourselves, some have conceived of him (the Holy Spirit) as an activity, some as a creature, some as God; and some have been uncertain which to call him.10 9

Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 211. 10 Quoted in Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 213.

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In the light of Wright’s exposition of Paul’s pneumatology, the church’s struggle with the deity of the Spirit reveals how far it had drifted from its Jewish and Pauline roots. Incidentally, Wright does not deny the inclusion of intermediary exalted beings in the theology of Second Temple Judaism that sometimes receive near divine attributions, but he notes that these would not have competed in any way with the monotheism that Paul practiced as a Pharisee and later as someone devoted to Jesus as Lord. Rather than starting with these intermediary beings and then asking how Jesus or the Spirit as one of them might have been elevated to the place of divine identity, Wright starts with Paul’s understanding of God and then asks what it is about God and what God has promised that would have led Paul to view Jesus and the Spirit as internal to the divine identity or as the fulfillment of the promised divine return. This is an enormously helpful methodological move that is faithful to Paul’s theocentric vision.

4. Substance, Person, and Mediation Wright recognizes also the limitations of the language of “substances” and “persons” to describe Paul’s revised monotheism (PFG 721). Special challenges arise when the church moves from identifying and glorifying Christ and the Spirit as God to probing the metaphysical status of the Son and the Spirit. In classical theism (the view of God prior to the modern era), God’s “relation” to the world was typically viewed as one-sided rather than mutual. God tended to function as acting unilaterally on the world but immune to being acted upon by the world or affected in any way as a result. In fact, even God acting in the world became problematic because of the metaphysical oppositions that were assumed to exist between God and the material realm. This assumption of opposition was essentially Greek. The third-century philosopher, Plotinus, for example, contrasted temporal and changeable worldly substance with the supreme spiritual substance of the divine life, which is unchanging, unaffected, and impassible. Earlier, Aristotle thought of God in a similar way. Following such influences, the classical understanding of God seemed to represent the very opposite of creaturely life. The divine-world relation was defined by a series of oppositions. If material life is temporal, God is timeless. If material life is changing, God is immutable or unchanging. If material life is moved, affected, and vulnerable to suffering, God is immovable and impassible. As Jürgen Moltmann noted, the picture of God influenced by Greek metaphysics is “defined by certain characteristics of the

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finite cosmos, and these are marked by negation.”11 The assumption seemed to be that God could only be free and transcendent if this freedom is from us, as far from us as the mind could possibly imagine, even farther. What happens to the Spirit in Christian theology when the concern shifts historically from Paul’s temple theology to metaphysical theology, namely, the concern over the metaphysical status of the Son and the Spirit in relation to the Father? The metaphysical concern would indeed fundamentally call into question the idea that God directly incarnates and indwells the creation, thus undermining Paul’s temple theology. The difficulty had to do with the effort to conceive of God in ways that kept the divine life free from the vicissitudes of nature and history. God was “one unutterable, divine, good, simple, uncomposed, unique being that transcends the universe.”12 How can this utterly transcendent, simple, immutable, impassible God create, incarnate, indwell, and bear up under the sin, suffering, and death of the created realm? The chief threat in identifying the Son and the Spirit with God was either compromising God’s uniqueness within the entanglements of sin, change, corruption, and suffering, or fracturing the divine life between the one who must remain transcendent and the one who can enter fully into the condition of this mutable, corruptible realm. Either option was inconceivable. Viewed from the lens of Wright’s presentation of Jewish expectations concerning God’s return to reign and to indwell, the Jewish understanding of God posed a serious theological challenge for those who had entered the world of Greek metaphysics. How can a God who fundamentally contradicts the created realm at every point return to indwell it? To implicitly bridge the Jewish and the Greek conceptions of God, the fathers of the church focused attention on the mediatorial role of the Son and the Spirit in between the transcendent life of the Father and the dangerously mutable and corruptible creation. The Trinitarian debates of the early centuries thus had to do with the precise nature of this mediatorial status of the Son and the Spirit. Is it internal to the essence of the Father, so that God genuinely mediates Godself in coming to us? At Nicea, this was the argument of Alexander of Alexandria (and his successor, Athanasius) and the modalist, Marcellus of Ancyra. Or, is the mediatorial role of the Son with the Spirit external to the essence of the Father, participating in the Father and in creation in order to bridge them but as another, subordinate, οὐσία or essence? This was the option of Eusebius of Caesarea radicalized by Arius.13 11

11.

12

Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (New York: Harper & Row, 1981),

Eusebius of Caesarea, Eccl. theol. 2.14.6. This history is nicely described for us by Joseph T. Lienhard, Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth Century Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), as well as Lewis Ayres, Nicea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). I am de13

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It is important to point out that all of the above factions at Nicea sought to preserve the oneness of God. One faction includes the Son and the Spirit in that unity, the other does not (or at least wishes to significantly qualify it). The main question had to do with whether God is self-mediating, or, in Wright’s terms, whether or not God really returns. In light of Wright’s presentation of Paul, we could ask, is it really God who returns, or only one who participates fully in the divine life and represents it? Nicea tilts in the direction of the former. Wright’s use of a shared divine “identity” between Father, Son, and Spirit could indeed be viewed as implicitly at the heart of the Nicene Creed and the subsequent development of Trinitarian theology. The use of ὁµοούσιας at Nicea (that the Son is of “one nature” with the Father) had as its major purpose the preservation of the unity of divine “being” between the Father and the Son and, at least by implication, the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit are to be viewed as internal to the one God. God mediates Godself in the world. By implication, God really does return, as Messiah and as Spirit. This entire discussion helps us to understand Brevard Child’s remark that the “church's struggle with the Trinity was not a battle against the Old Testament, but rather a battle for the Old Testament.”14 So, the substantialist language of “being” had basically to do with this issue of shared divine identity and the preservation of a genuine self-mediation, a genuine return of God. But, what about the language of “persons?” Most interestingly, in the decades following Nicea, Athanasius joined the modalist Marcellus in common cause against the subordinationist Eusebians. Many theologians of the East sympathetic with the Eusebians felt for some time that Nicea did not provide a strong enough prophylactic against the likes of Marcellus, and Athanasius’s relationship to Marcellus only seemed to confirm the suspicion. Though not a modalist, Athanasius in the years directly following Nicea, favored analogies of the relationship between the Father and the Son that sounded Marcellan: rays from light, river from a pool (images picked up by others as well). The language of eternal generation was used to describe an unbroken river of divine self-giving. He even spoke of the Logos as representing the Father’s attributes, such as wisdom or knowledge. The Logos was understood as so vital to the Father’s essence for Athanasius that the Father is not the Father without him. Athanasius could even say that there was a sense in which the Son shares in the Father’s quality of being unoriginate. From the late 330s onward, Athanasius began to develop a more correlative vision of the life of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. I agree with Wright’s emphasis on the fact that the Spirit is God’s personal return as the one God pendent in part on Lienhard and Ayres for the remainder of my discussion of Marcellus and Athanasius. 14 Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 376.

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of Israel (PFG 719). Indeed, for Paul the Spirit is the “personal, powerful manifestation of the one God of Jewish monotheism” (PFG 719). Wright shares in common with Karl Barth the classic idea that God is fully Godself in each of the divine persons.15 But the question of the personhood of the Spirit was mainly raised historically in the context of the inter-relationality between Father, Son, and Spirit. “Being” language preserved the shared divine identity, but it was the language of “persons” that would preserve their inter-relationships.16 Applied to Pauline pneumatology, it would be in light of Paul’s willingness to speak of the Spirit as searching out the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:10) or interceding to God for us (Rom 8:15–16, 26) that the language of the Spirit and the Father as “persons” mainly comes to dominate post-Nicene Trinitarian theology. The Spirit is indeed “the personal, powerful manifestation of the one God of Jewish monotheism” as Wright maintains (PFG 719), but the Spirit also relates personally to that God, as God, on our behalf. Identity language in describing Father, Son, and Spirit works well if one is describing Paul’s Trinitarian pneumatology as a linear reality (the Father sends the Son and, through the Son, the Spirit). Less than adequate is the use of identity language to capture the inter-relationality of Father, Son, and Spirit and, hence, the full richness of the personhood of the Spirit. If one tends not to prefer the language of divine “persons,” one still has to find a way of capturing this inter-relationality. Wright attempts to do this at least implicitly by speaking of the Son as God’s “second self” (PFG 660) (and I assume the Spirit would be the third). In light of the Spirit’s implicit personhood in Paul, perhaps writing of the Spirit using the upper case is to be preferred. I agree with Barth that “person” language can lead to tritheistic implications if used to imply the modernist reference to an autonomous ego or personality (the term “self” is vulnerable to the same danger).17 I’m not sure whether Barth’s Seinsweise (mode of being) in three-fold repetition is adequate, however, given its unintended modalistic implications. Of course, such language, whether “being,” “persons,” or “selves” reflects a post-canonical stage in Trinitarian theology. Our struggle to justify the use of any of these terms is indeed challenging. Words used of God, whether they be Jewish or Greek, are broken symbols: useful, but ultimately inadequate. As Wright knows, this is a very Jewish insight.

15 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 350. 16 See Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 10–14. 17 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 351.

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5. The Spirit and the Gifted People of God As indicated in 2 Cor 3, the people of God for Wright come together as people of the Messiah, of the word and the Spirit, to be in him the living temple of God, the place of God’s dwelling. They embody the word of Christ and reflect to one another the glory of the Lord that comes from the Spirit. Wright shows us that pneumatology in Paul not only brings God near to us but also us near to God, and to one another. The pneumatology of the divine return leaves no possibility of keeping God at arm’s length from creation. No possibility of separating the forensic from incorporative, participative, and transformative dimensions of the Spirit from each other, no possibility of separating grace from the challenge and delight of fulfilling the Shema in the Spirit of Christ. Paul indeed prays that Christ and the Spirit dwell in us so that we could know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge “together with all the Lord’s people” (Eph 3:18). Due to Wright’s massive volumes on Paul, I will never read passages like this quite the same way again. Paul does not speak of the precise contributions of the people of God to the common building up of the congregation in generic terms but rather with richly diverse specificity. The people of God are all uniquely charismatically endowed, a point that Wright does not explore sufficiently in my view. The church should pulsate with ever increasing gifts of helps and edification toward this end. Essential to the church’s kerygmatic and sacramental life, therefore, is the church’s charismatic structure. What is this “charismatic structure” precisely? Hans Küng popularized the notion of the “charismatic structure of the church” in his classic, The Church, where he made it the overall context in which the church’s gifts of oversight are to be discussed.18 He noted that juridical thinking is mistrustful of movements of the free Spirit of God for fear of a non-regimented enthusiasm. The tendency has been to “sacramentalize or make uniform the charism, and hence the workings of the Spirit.”19 The result is a clericalism in which the notion of charism is overwhelmingly discussed in the context of ordained ministry. Neglected are the richness, variety, and exuberance of spiritual gifts as pictured in such texts as 1 Cor 12–14 and exercised throughout the lives of “ordinary” Christians. Küng wished to reverse the historic trend toward clericalism. Rather than subsume charism under church office, Küng thus wished to do the opposite, namely, subsume office beneath charism.20 Since charisms are universally exercised by all as everyone in the church is called and commissioned to 18 Hans Küng, The Church (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967). This concept is developed by Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), esp. 231. 19 Hans Küng, The Church, 184. 20 Hans Küng, The Church, 187.

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serve as bearers of the Spirit, the charisms are not peripheral but are rather essential and central elements of the church. Küng concludes that the charismatic structure of the church “includes but goes far beyond the hierarchical structure of the church.”21 Küng does not deny the unique role played by those who exercise the charism of oversight, but he places both gifts of oversight and other giftings within an overarching concept of the church as a fellowship of faith in which all members (including ordained clergy) as bearers of the Spirit are gifted to bless one another. For Küng, “the church must be seen first as a fellowship of faith and only in this light can ecclesiastical office be properly understood.”22 The Pentecostal and Charismatic churches that are becoming so visible globally and are arguably changing the face of Christendom in the world have traditionally stressed this implicitly Pauline notion of the charismatic structure of the church as essential to the strength of the church’s fellowship and witness. The practical result of elevating the church’s charismatic structure to prominence is the strong admonition that the people of God not fall short of any gift while waiting for the Lord’s return (1 Cor 1:9). Everyone has a gift and a call to serve others with their gift(s). Everyone is to be involved so that the church can “build itself up in love” (Eph 4:16). Tied to this admonition is a vision of the church as an interactive fellowship, filled with the Spirit in order to “speak to one another with Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” (Eph 5:18–19). In the church we “submit to one another out of reverence to Christ” (Eph 5:21) as we speak the truth in love to one another (Eph 4:15). In the process, the charismatic structure of the church is dynamic, interactive and developing. John Koenig rightly stated that the church is to be a “giftevoking” fellowship.23 As such a fellowship, the church encourages relationships that edify and build up, relationships that are grace filled and directed. Through its charismatic structure, the church expands the capacity of its members to receive grace from God via proclamation and sacrament and enhances the church’s ability to show forth relational signs of grace in an increasingly graceless world. As Fee noted, the diversity of the charisms shows us that God edifies us in ways deeper and more expansive than the cortex or the brain! Speaking in tongues cries out from the depths of one’s soul with groaning too deep for words (Rom 8:26). Gifted insights and discernment draw from both acquired wisdom and intuitive perception. Prophetic discernment and announcement can penetrate deeply into someone’s sense of self or into the soul of a nation. Varying gifts function to involve all of the people of God in ways that in21

Hans Küng, The Church, 188, italics his. Hans Küng, The Church, 363. 23 John Koenig, Charismata: God’s Gifts for God’s People, Biblical Perspectives on Current Issues (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 123. 22

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clude the educated and uneducated, rich and poor, in a way that makes them all important to the life and welfare of the church. Much of what Wright says about the church corresponds with the thrust of this sentiment. I would have enjoyed seeing his brilliant mind at work opening up with greater depth than he does the role of the charisms in all of this.

6. The People of God: The Spirit and the Law The returning and indwelling God as Father, Son, and Spirit means that the purpose of the return and the indwelling is incorporative. It has to do with the inclusion and sharing of life and love in the Messiah and in the Spirit, in the covenant renewed by the Son and the Spirit, in other words, in the embrace of the triune God. For Wright, Paul’s assumption concerning the return of the Spirit is profoundly covenantal because it is profoundly Jewish. So Wright begins with election and reworks it christologically and pneumatologically. The promise given to Abraham and through Moses had to do with covenant identity and blessings, the promise of life in the Spirit, and of God’s return to indwell God’s holy temple and to make all things new. But the fulfillment would come at a high price, one that Israel (in fact no human community) could possibly pay, even with the aid of God’s holy law. Wright shows that the breadth and depth of this fulfillment would only be revealed for Paul in the death and resurrection of the Messiah and the gift of the Spirit given through this event. The fact that Christ had to die and rise again and then impart the Spirit to fulfill God’s covenant renewal, God’s return to the temple to reign and to indwell, implies that the problem with Israel’s unfulfilled mission runs deep, involving captivity to sin and death. It thus reaches all the way back to Adam and involves the entire human race (PFG 748–49). This problem of sin and death was laid squarely at the doorstep of Israel and explains Israel’s colossal failure to solve it (PFG 747). It is a problem that is global, cosmic, and eschatological in scope, and so the fulfillment must be this as well. But how can Israel bring about such a staggering fulfillment? The Jews could not solve it by obeying the law. The attempt to do so only brought the problem of sin more prominently to the surface. Moreover, the attempt to use the law of Moses to solve the problem of Adam excludes the Gentiles. A solution is needed that fits the problem in all of its depth and breadth and that opens the blessings of covenant renewal to the whole world. “Torah’s aim to give life is fulfilled in the resurrection” (PFG 1037), is Paul’s message according to Wright. The Messiah steps into Israel’s shoes and condemns sin in his flesh so that through resurrection he could release to the world the Spirit of new life and of radical love for God and neighbor witnessed to in the Torah. The Messiah and the Spirit enact and reveal God’s

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covenant faithfulness to humanity, opening the door to true Torah observance. The Spirit of new life will finally write the law on hearts (2 Cor 3) (PFG 1037). The Messiah, who not only fulfilled God’s promise to return to the temple but himself became that temple, that place of divine indwelling, now makes us through the Spirit that holy temple of God in him (PFG 727). This is the beginning of the new creation that will one day turn all of creation into God’s dwelling place. This radically expansive christological and pneumatological solution to the problem of sin and death means that the Messiah cannot simply be added to the older Jewish attempt to solve the human problem by keeping the law, which was the error of the Judaizers. The Messiah does not just come to inspire or complete that misguided solution. Wright shows us that, for Paul, the way of fulfillment through Israel and the law has been blocked once and for all in the actual way that the Messiah and the Spirit came to solve it. The law could not accomplish any of this, nor make good on the promise of life because of human weakness (PFG 871). The law is unable to effect change “not through any inherent weakness in itself” but because we cannot in the flesh respond to it appropriately (PFG 725). When Wright states that the weakness is in us and not the law I think he means that the law accomplishes what it was given to accomplish, though in and through the Messiah rather than primarily in us, due in part, to our weakness. But, viewed more broadly, all that is creaturely is weak, including the law, when compared to the divine strength and is thus unable to do anything except in and through the divine strength given to us in the Messiah and the Spirit. Paul thus writes that if the law could impart life, then righteousness would have come by the law (Gal 3:21). The law cannot impart life because of our fallenness, but also because only God can impart life. So Wright’s insistence that the law is weak because of us needs to be qualified. The law is weak too. Wright concludes in a similar vein from 2 Cor 3 that the law of Moses is impotent in and of itself to effect any change without the work of the Spirit. The letter in and of itself does not have the power to change anyone without the Spirit (PFG 982). The law is thus only fulfilled in the Messiah’s death and resurrection (PFG 759). The way of the Messiah and the Spirit has opened up a new path for grasping the law’s witness to life. But this new path also involves a new way of keeping the law: in the Messiah, in the Spirit, and in the renewed covenant (the Messianic and pneumatological way of doing it). Wright says provocatively, “there is a new kind of ‘doing Torah’ available through the Messiah and the spirit, and all who do Torah in this way will be saved” (PFG 704). As John Wesley noted in line with this view of the law, we love God and act

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accordingly “for life as well as from life.”24 There is no cheap grace here, only the grace of the cross and the resurrection that transforms people in the way of God’s love. Jan Lochman was fond of calling the law of God a “second gospel” and added the idea that the commandments are “signposts to freedom.”25 The commandments are given to Moses as part of the gift of freedom granted in the Exodus (Exod 20). The preface to the law is election and Exodus (“I am the Lord your God who delivered you from Egypt,” Exod 20:1). The commandments follow as part of this gift of new covenant blessing. The Messiah’s death and resurrection and the impartation of the Spirit open up the possibility to us of following the Shema through the Spirit in a way that corresponds with Christ.

7. Justification in the Spirit: Covenantal or Salvific? What does the return of the Spirit to indwell God’s people have to do with justification by faith? Justification in Paul for Wright is indeed pneumatologically complex. He writes that the Holy Spirit in Paul’s theology is, in fact, the usually forgotten element in justification, and I am convinced that only as we come at the doctrine from this angle … can we gain the full Pauline picture. (PFG 914)

Since I have written an entire monograph making precisely this point, I can only but affirm it enthusiastically.26 It is important to note from the start, however, that the role of the Spirit granted by Paul in justification is not located for Wright in the area of salvation. According to Wright, the entire debate over justification in history has wrongly made the battle with Pelagius over how one gets saved the theological context for understanding justification. For Wright, justification is not the solution to Luther’s question over how one finds acceptance from God in the midst of the challenges of penance, the monastic rule, or other contexts of obedience to God. Wright insists, “‘justification’ and ‘salvation’ are emphatically not the same thing, and to confuse them is to make careful exegesis, not to mention theology, ultimately impossible” (PFG 927). This is an overstatement to be sure, but Wright does grab our attention with it! Justification for Wright does not have to do with how one gets saved, and certainly not with deliverance or redemption, or character formation. Wright agrees with many within the Protestant tradition that justification is “a declaration, not a description. It does not denote or 24

Emphasis his; John Wesley, “Minutes of Several Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and Others, from the Year 1744 to the year 1789,” in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1979), 8:337. 25 Jan Lochman, Signposts to Freedom: The Ten Commandments and Christian Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1982). 26 See Frank D. Macchia, Justified in the Spirit.

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describe a character; it confers a status” (PFG 946). However, the declaration in Paul for Wright is not of our saving relationship with God; it is rather of right status in the covenant of the Messiah and the Spirit, a vindicated covenant membership. Our vindicated covenant membership is “based” on God’s saving work and our present life in the Messiah but does not in itself have to do with such salvific realities for Wright. God’s act in righteousness or covenantal fidelity in Christ’s death and resurrection is “the means by which he will put all things right, like a judge finally settling a case” (PFG 935). This righteousness is not something Christ possessed and can “impute” to us; rather, God’s covenant faithfulness enacted in death and resurrection is reckoned to us for our freedom in living out the law of God. What gets applied to us in justification is the vindication of the risen Messiah as God’s Son, a status that we enjoy as members of the renewed covenant (this, I suppose, comes the closest in Wright’s reading of Paul to an “imputation” doctrine). According to Wright, justification in the Spirit for Paul is God’s forensic declaration of membership “status” in the covenant promised originally to Abraham, fulfilled by the Messiah in resurrection, and spoken to us today by the Spirit (PFG 930–31). In Wright’s reading of Galatians, justification is not about salvation but rather who is shown to have a place in the covenant of Abraham, a place at the table of fellowship. In his reading of Romans, Wright brings justification into integral connection with participatory and transformative soteriological realities. But he still wants to keep justification itself a declared vindication of covenant status. Is not justification for Wright still transformative? In declaring this new covenant status in Christ and by the Spirit, Wright still concludes that God creates a new context or situation for life (PFG 945–46). God makes it happen by declaring it. The walls are broken down between Jew and Gentile (as well as male and female, bond and free) in the community of the Messiah, the community of the Spirit (Gal 3:28). Everyone has equal standing in the Messiah because of what Christ did in dying and rising again and because of what the Spirit did in incorporating us into Christ and opening up the renewed covenant to everyone. Justification vindicates in Wright’s reading of Paul not only a “status” or a “membership” but also a sharing of life, a new mode of covenant existence or life that is liberating and just. This sounds transformational to me, and not only in its effects but also by its very nature. Right standing in Wright’s reading of Paul turns out to be equal access, equal access to the communion of life. As declarative, justification or right covenant status in Paul is also implicitly “incorporative” for Wright since it is spoken to us “in the Messiah,” which means that justification for Wright also implies the work of the Holy Spirit in giving rise to faith in Christ (PFG 940, 956). The declaration of right covenant status is spoken to faith, which is “the first sign of the spirit’s work

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through the gospel” by which we abandon ourselves to Christ, confessing that he is indeed raised from the dead (PFG 955). Wright even concludes from Rom 8 and Gal 4 that adoption by the Spirit into Christ’s sonship “is simply a way of exploring the meaning of ‘justification’ rather than a separate category” (PFG 950). But Wright correctly distinguishes this work of the Spirit in faith and adoption from the rise of spiritual fruit that comes as a consequence (PFG 955, 958). Faith is indeed for Wright’s reading of Paul the chief badge of the covenant status declared to us. In faith we are part of the covenant people, one of whom the covenant God declares, in advance of the final declaration which will consist in resurrection itself, that this person is dikaios, part of Abraham’s sin-forgiven covenant family. (PFG 931)

Wright notes that in the end also vindicated will be the entire life of following the leading of the Spirit: “the life in question will have been the life of spirit-led obedience, adoption, suffering, prayer, and ultimately glory … This is not something other than ‘Paul’s doctrine of justification.’” (PFG 941, emphasis mine). The vindication of one’s life corresponds to the ultimate vindication of resurrection. The final covenantal declaration of resurrection “will be part of the renewal of all things,” and will consist “of the gift of life” (PFG 936). Given all that Wright says about the Spirit and justification, a case can indeed be made that all of his protestations aside, justification does really have both forensic and transformational elements for him. Given his idea that justification involves filiation, and given his kingdom theology of redemption, I can also detect soteriological elements in Wright’s theology of justification. If the declaration of vindication actually creates the new context of right status (rather than merely describing what is in fact already present), it essentially and effectively overturns the condemnation and oppression of community hierarchies and declares a just and liberating equal access to communal life. In striving to erect a firm wall between justification and salvation, Wright in my view “doth protest too much.” I deeply appreciate the covenantal dimension to justification exposed by Wright in Paul and the overarching emphasis on our incorporation into the temple of God’s dwelling. But I still am not convinced that justification in Paul is restricted to a declaration or vindication of covenant status and life. Calvin has helped many of us to see in Paul that the obedience of the Son towards his heavenly Father not only enacted God’s covenant faithfulness towards us and fulfilled Israel’s covenant obligation to solve the problem of Adam, but also in doing these brought to fulfillment the requirements of our covenant faithfulness to God on our behalf. Our justification as sons and daughters in him thus not only involves a covenant status or standing but also a pardoning for sin in communion with God. In my reading of Paul, justification is thus both declarative and transformative,

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involving a just sharing of life with God and in God with one another. Paul thus makes it a requirement that that which justifies brings life, which is why the law cannot justify (Gal 3:21). The faith by which we are justified is thus comparable for Paul to a dying and rising again in which Christ in us is taken hold of (Gal 2:20) or the Spirit in us is received (Gal 3:5). The justified are those who have been born anew by the Spirit, which is what grants them their status as sons and daughters rather than as slaves (Gal 4). Michael Gorman is right: “there is no justification without transformation.”27 There is no justification that is not both salvific and covenantal.

8. The Significance of Galatians 3:21 for Justification in the Spirit Interestingly, Gal 3:21 has played an important role in the history of the debate over justification, a point that is generally neglected. In this text, Paul notes that “if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law” (Gal 3:21b). Augustine took this verse to mean that only by gaining the Spirit of life can we know God’s righteous favor in the Son, which is why the law cannot justify. Augustine hammered Pelagius with the truth that we are bound by the curse of sin and death and cannot be raised up to God’s righteous favor through the law. Augustine’s favorite analogy for helping his readers understand the integral relationship between justification and the new life of the Spirit in Gal 3:21 was the Shunammite woman’s request that Elijah pray to bring her dead son back to life in 2 Kgs 4. One might recall from this text that Elijah had his servant place the lifeless staff upon the dead child to raise him up, but nothing happened. Only when Elijah himself lay upon the child to impart breath did the child come back to life. Augustine saw the lifeless staff that Elijah’s servant laid upon the dead boy as the law. Just as the wooden staff in the hands of a mere servant, a representative of Elijah, could not raise the boy back to life, so also the law in the hands of Moses cannot raise up the sinner as recipient of divine favor in the face of the curse of sin and death. According to Augustine, it took Elijah himself as a figure of Christ to lie down over the boy and to impart new life mouth to mouth by imparting the divine Spirit. Justification for Augustine can only be attained in the Spirit.28 Augustine was at that point firmly within the boundaries of Gal 3:21 in my view. In reasoning further, however, Augustine arguably went too far in expanding justification so as to involve our spiritual progress. He thus took

51.

27

Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009),

28

Augustine, C. du. ep. Pelag. 4.11. See also Grat. Chr. 1.9.

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justification into the terrain that we in the West have grown accustomed to calling “sanctification.” Thus, after shoving Pelagius out of the front door, many Protestants understandably think that Augustine had opened the back door to let him back in! As a result, the Augustinian heritage ended up making pneumatology the controversial issue when it comes to justification. Luther’s revolution is often described as shifting justification from the subjective realm of pneumatology (penance, conversion, attainment of virtues) to the objective realm of Christ’s death and resurrection. Justification is based on a righteousness extra nos (apart from us, won by Christ) and not a righteousness in nobis (in us, attained by us). A close reading of Luther, especially earlier in his career as a Reformer, however, will show this depiction to be a stereotype that is essentially onesided. Luther would have wholeheartedly agreed with Augustine’s use of Gal 3:21 against Pelagius: Justification comes to us for Luther both in Christ and in the life-giving Spirit. In denying that justification is in any way dependent on spiritual progress, Luther did not mean to exclude the gift of the Spirit in granting grace to us and in giving rise to faith. Note what Luther says of justification and the Spirit in his 1519 commentary on Gal 3:21: Now is not the fact that faith is reckoned as righteousness a receiving of the Spirit? So either Paul proves nothing or the reception of the Spirit and the fact that faith is reckoned as righteousness will be the same thing. And this is true; it is introduced in order that the divine imputation may not be regarded as amounting to nothing outside of God as some think that the apostle’s word ‘grace’ means a favorable disposition rather than a gift. For when God is favorable and when he imputes, the Spirit is really received, both the gift and the grace.29

Imputation grants us the new life of the Spirit? This is a view of imputation we are not accustomed to hearing from the lips of Luther! In the above quote, Luther views the Father’s reckoning of righteousness to the believer and the gift of the Spirit as the “same thing.” But notice his reason. The identification of God’s reckoning of righteousness to us in faith with the gift of the Spirit is not only due to the fact that faith is enabled by the Spirit. It is not even due only to the fact that God declares us just through the power of the Spirit. It is more basically due for Luther to the fact that grace itself is not just a “divine disposition” but is also a divine gift, the gift of God’s own gracious selfgiving to us in Christ and in the Spirit. In other words, for Luther there is no grace outside the Son and no grace outside the presence of the Spirit of life. The grace by which the Father justifies us in the Son is not static for the early Luther but is a dynamic presence, the presence of God’s gracious embrace of sinners and a presence in which they now participate by faith. Justification is

29

Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1519,” in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), 27:252.

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both inherently christological and pneumatological for Luther, both forensic and transformative. More recent Luther scholarship has stressed that this assumption never leaves Luther. David Steinmetz has even stated: “Luther had … stressed that justification is the transforming work of the Spirit.”30 So also, Tuomo Mannermaa, of the Finnish interpretation of Luther, has recently attempted to make the case that justification for Luther involved the gift of the Spirit of life, causing justification as a forensic reality to also have a participative dynamic in which the believer by faith through grace alone participates in the very life of the Son.31 Of course, I can quote Calvin even more prolifically on all of these points, especially in bringing in the covenantal dimension. But I focus on Luther here to show that Calvin is not the only ally in connecting Wright with the Reformation heritage. Appropriately, Wolfhart Pannenberg has criticized the Protestant tradition for an overly forensic understanding of justification that ends up excluding incorporation into Christ through baptism and the gift of the Spirit. He appeals to Luther as a corrective.32 Incidentally, it was theoretically possible for the participants at the Council of Trent to place Luther under what was then called uncreated grace. This is the source of justification: the divine acceptance in the gift of the Spirit. But the responses to Luther at Trent implied that they would not have regarded Luther’s pneumatological doctrine of justification as proceeding far enough. They wanted to stretch the reality of justification over a larger pneumatological terrain so as to involve the justice of moral progress. So, the battle over justification in Luther’s revolution was arguably a battle over the third article of the Creed, the article of the Holy Spirit. Luther rejected works or spiritual progress as essential to justification, but he did not exclude from justification the life transforming gift of the Spirit and the participation that this affords faith in the very life of the Son. There is in fact an entire galaxy of notable Protestant theologians that have involved regeneration in justification by grace through faith. Philip Melanchthon,33 John Wesley (in a few places34), Paul Tillich,35 Emil Brunner,36 Eberhard Jüngel,37 and Jürgen Molt-

30

David Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),

127.

31

Tuomo Mannermaa, Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005). See also Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004). 32 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991–1998), 3:215ff. 33 Philip Melanchthon, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, § 117–18, 72. 34 For example, Wesley wrote, “I believe that justification is the same thing as to be born of God,” (“The Principles of a Methodist,” The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. [Baker Books, 1979], 8:369).

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mann38 are but a small number of examples. Does this mean that justification is dependent on moral progress or character formation? Not necessarily. I have found especially enlightening how Paul Tillich involves the gift of new life in the Spirit in justification without making justification dependent on spiritual or moral progress. He does this by showing how in the community of the Spirit we surrender our ambiguous faith, goodness, and spiritual progress to God in order to be taken hold of by “unambiguous life.”39 The sharing of life granted us in Christ and in the Spirit is pure gift for Tillich, the justification of life in the midst of death. Wright’s reading of Paul’s message about justification in Romans overlaps with this pneumatological understanding, and I do believe it fits better how Wright construes both the basis and eschatological fulfillment of the doctrine. Justification in the transforming Spirit best fits Wright’s understanding of Paul’s larger temple theology. But here I speak as a systematician, looking for coherence of vision. Everything depends for Wright as an exegete and biblical theologian on how one is to appropriately read Paul. Here is where I suspect the debate will continue, and so it should. Wright will continue to be a brilliant and challenging voice in the discussion. Concerning justification, I have learned much from him.

9. Conclusion In inviting us to read Paul with him, Wright has helped us to recognize truths about the Spirit that are of relevance ecumenically to the witness of the churches today. If the Messiah returns and the Spirit returns, God returns to the temple but does it in a way that involves us, indeed, all of creation. This single idea if brought to one’s reading of Paul opens up his writings in a new light. It ties together various dimensions of the Spirit’s work and challenges the church to appreciate the broader horizons of the Kingdom of God in the world. For if Paul’s locates the church within God’s broader agenda to indwell all things, to inaugurate a new humanity and to make all things new, then the church cannot remain satisfied with its self-preoccupation and tired complacency. The people of God are to fulfill the Shema and embody the 35

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 3:222–26. 36 Emil Brunner even places justification under the subtitle of “Regeneration” in his Dogmatics, trans. Olive Wyon, David Cairns, and T. H. L. Parker, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 3:269–75. 37 Eberhard Jüngel said of justification: “To put it briefly, we are talking about the raising of Jesus Christ from the dead and about our participation in his life and resurrection” (Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006], 4). 38 Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 143, 148. 39 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:222.

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word of God, the very word of Christ through the Spirit. The church is to strive to be a just and compassionate community in order to bear witness in its embodied life to the way of Jesus Christ in the world. The church is to find in the world a place marked by God for the divine indwelling, and they are to pray, yearn, and work to be both the instrument and sign of a new world coming.

Bibliography Ayres, Lewis. Nicea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Barth, Karl Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975. Bauckham, Richard J. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of the Divine Identity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Brunner, Emil. Dogmatics. Translated by Olive Wyon, David Cairns, and T. H. L. Parker. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949–1962. Childs, Brevard. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992. Dunn, James D. G. Baptism in the Holy Spirit: A Re-examination of the New Testament on the Gift of the Spirit. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977. Fee, Gordon D. God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. Gorman, Michael J. Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Hurtado, Larry. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Jüngel, Eberhard. Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004. Koenig, John. Charismata: God’s Gifts for God’s People. Biblical Perspectives on Current Issues. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978. Küng, Hans. The Church. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967. Lienhard, Joseph T. Contra Marcellum: Marcellus of Ancyra and Fourth Century Theology. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999. Lochman, Jan. Signposts to Freedom: The Ten Commandments and Christian Ethics. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1982. Luther, Martin. “Lectures on Galatians 1519.” Vol. 27 of Luther’s Works. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan. St. Louis: Concordia, 1963. Macchia, Frank D. Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006. –. Justified in the Spirit: Redemption, Creation, and the Triune God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Mannermaa, Tuomo. Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005.

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Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. –. The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001. –. The Trinity and the Kingdom. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Pannenberg. Wolfhart. Systematic Theology. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991–1998. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Rogers, Eugene. After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources outside the Modern West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Steinmetz, David. Reformers in the Wings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951– 1963. Repr., 1976. Volf, Miroslav. After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Sirks, G. J. “The Cinderella of Theology: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit.” HTR 1 (1957): 77–89. Wesley, John. “Minutes of Several Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and Others, from the Year 1744 to the year 1789.” Pages 275–89 in vol. 8 of The Works of John Wesley. Edited by Thomas Jackson. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1979. –. “The Principles of a Methodist.” Pages 359–74 in vol. 8 of The Works of John Wesley. Edited by Thomas Jackson. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1979.

Barth, Wright, and Theology Sven Ensminger The topic of this chapter is, broadly speaking, an engagement with some of the theological ramifications of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Admittedly, this is certainly broad enough to have something to say, while simultaneously this requires an early setting of boundaries so as not to get lost in a maze. In this chapter, thus, I am examining N. T. Wright’s engagement with the thought of early twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth and the way Barth’s thought challenges Wright’s enterprise. While it would be tempting to make general comments about Wright’s position on systematic theology in much broader terms, this narrower focus will provide a helpful guideline for examining some aspects of Wright’s position. The sheer magnitude of the writings of both of these thinkers will furthermore require close attention to some aspects of theology, rather than broad, sweeping statements. In particular, I will focus on the concepts of revelation, religion, and Christology.1

1. Introductory Comments There is an inherent difficulty – beyond the already raised issue of the magnitude of writing by the two scholars in question – when comparing Barth and Wright on a subject. This is due to the fact that the generational gap between them has led, on the one hand, to Barth’s inability to engage with Wright’s writings, while, on the other hand, Wright having the opportunity to have Barth’s writings directly at his fingertips and being able to engage with the entirety of Barth’s opus. Additionally, something should be said here on the topic of why I have chosen Barth as an interlocutor. Admittedly, personal preference plays into this for the simple reason that I have spent most of my young academic career studying his work. However, engaging Barth and Wright is not unfair or even unwise if one considers that at the center of the conversation is the Apostle 1

I am grateful to the Theology Research Seminar at St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford, whose members gave me valuable feedback on an early draft of this chapter. Particular thanks to Dr. Mary Marshall, who has given insights into the work of a theologian from the perspective of a New Testament scholar.

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Paul. Particularly helpful in this regard is Barth’s commentary on the Letter to the Romans,2 a work written in awareness of biblical critical method, historical scholarship, and of the way these relate to theology. This work, together with regular reference to Barth’s Church Dogmatics as well as some of his other works, will be the main sources on which I will be drawing in what follows. By way of introduction, then, Wright makes a central comment about all that follows and about his understanding of his own project at a fairly early stage in Paul and the Faithfulness of God: It will not do, in other words, for a particular interpretation of a particular text, whether of Aristotle, Paul, or anybody else, to be either affirmed or ruled out because that is what we want, or do not want, such a person to have said. Like most contemporary exegetes, I wish Paul could have said something much clearer about the dehumanizing practice of slavery and the need to work towards its abolition. But I cannot, as a historian, collude with the easy-going claim that that must have been what in fact he did say in this letter. (PFG 54)

It should not be taken lightheartedly here that theology is not featured in this list. Therefore, the problem from the perspective of systematic theology could be summarized as follows: On the one hand, the real core of the project as a whole is considered to be the section on theology (see below), while simultaneously, theology is put on par with worldview and history, i.e. “a set of questions about Paul (history, theology, exegesis and ‘application’, each with considerable subdivisions)” (PFG 63). The issue is not helped by a further introductory comment on the theological themes of Paul’s writings a few pages earlier: Once we glimpse the summit ridge on which Paul stands, with its three emerging theological peaks of monotheism, election and eschatology, freshly understood in the light of the Messiah and the Spirit, it will be comparatively easy to see these false either-or distinctions for what they are. (PFG 47)

Certainly, in a work such as Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Wright cannot be faulted for concentrating only on Paul. However, a theological focus constrained by categories such as monotheism, election, and eschatology, while undoubtedly important, misses a rather long list of divine attributes which would result in a very different, and arguably much more interesting picture of Paul – as well as his later reception in the Church. Critics of this avenue of inquiry might accuse me here of approaching this from a point of view which stresses some theological categories over historical ones. This is true, as my main purpose here is to react against the following statement from the preface to PFG:

2

For references to this work, see Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns from the 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

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The real climax of the book is Part III (chapters 9–11), where I have offered a fresh account of Paul’s theology, using as controlling categories the three main theological themes within the Jewish world both of his day and of our own, and proposing that his entire theology is best understood in terms of his reworking of those themes in the light of the Messiah and the spirit. (PFG xv)

Everything that follows is a reaction to this with two broad underlying objections. On the one hand, I desire to challenge these categories (monotheism, election, and eschatology). Put differently, while much of the subsequent argument is loosely written in response to these features, I would call into question to what extent they qualify as “controlling” categories. First, why are these chosen as categories over others (grace, χάρις, would be but one interesting theme which is prominent in all of the Pauline epistles)? 3 Second, to what extent is any categorization of Paul’s ideas for the purpose of “systematizing” his thought helpful at all? On the other hand, I want to raise the broader question of how much of the theological argument in PFG is written in awareness of the theological scholarship at hand, and Barth serves here as my case in point.4 To illustrate this, I want to consider some of the remarks that Barth makes on these topics: first, the question of the understanding of Scripture within the broader framework of revelation; second, the question of religion; and third, some thoughts on Christological implications, especially in light of Wright’s call for attention to the “Jewishness” of Jesus Christ. This engagement will form the main part of my argument.

2. Engaging Barth and Wright 2.1 Revelation This leads me, first of all, to the way revelation is understood in PFG. The question of revelation in the history of Christian thought, “refers both to the act of God’s self-disclosure to humanity and to the knowledge of God which results from such divine action.”5 As Hart has argued:

3

Grace is interestingly also not a theme to be found in the topical index. There are different ways of approaching this, certainly, from the theological perspective as done here, but the concern stretches beyond that. 4 Other examples in point could be, e.g., the Church Fathers, Martin Luther, or contemporary Roman Catholic theologians. 5 John B. Webster, “Revelation, concept of,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought 557.

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The question of revelation in Christian theology is finally no less than the question of theology’s own ultimate source and norm, of the conditions for the possibility of theology itself as a human activity.6

There are different directions in which this could be taken, but for the context here it leads to no smaller question than that of how to understand Scripture. Again, Barth poses here an interesting challenge to Wright. Even in the preface to the first edition of the commentary on Romans, Barth makes the conscious decision to take into account Biblical scholarship and the historical background, yet subordinates them to revelation, or, more precisely in this case, to inspiration. He argues, the historical-critical method of Biblical investigation has its rightful place: it is concerned with the preparation of the intelligence – and this can never be superfluous. But, were I driven to choose between it and the venerable doctrine of Inspiration, I should without hesitation adopt the latter, which has a broader, deeper, more important justification. The doctrine of Inspiration is concerned with the labour of apprehending, without which no technical equipment, however complete, is of any use whatever.7

This is a statement in need for further reflection. For Barth, the emphasis on revelation is inseparably linked with an emphasis on divine agency. Put differently, the author of revelation, in short the subject of revelation, is always God. There is no human possibility of knowing God without the help of the divine. Anyone who claims to have come to knowledge of God without divine intervention has not come into contact with God at all. In all things, it is God, who upholds us, who places himself in our path, who becomes our limit, who demands the keeping of his commands, who demands that we let ourselves be disturbed in our acts, that we learn to consider that we are human and not God.8

It is apparent that the point of revelation, “is not to grasp, but to be grasped.”9 It has to be distinguished from Scripture, as in Scripture the human author speaks together with God, whereas in revelation it is solely God who is the initiator of revelation and subject.10 The written and spoken testimony throughout history has always to be understood as a pointer to God as the subject of revelation. This means that the initial, first step originates from God. Yet, it is to be accepted with a second step, a reception of God, other-

6 Trevor Hart, “Revelation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John B. Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37. 7 Barth, Romans, 1. 8 Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, Vol. I, ed. Hannelore Reiffen, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 197, my emphasis. 9 Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 196. 10 Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 57.

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wise the testimonies remain mere human accounts and are not revelation. Barth argues, they [the Jews addressed by Jesus in John 5:31–47] are not deceived when believing that they possess eternal life in the Law and Prophets … Everything depends also here on whether the testimony is accepted. Otherwise the Bible is only a pile of old paper and all Biblicism utter senselessness … ‘You can admire John the Baptist, see my works, remember the old revelations, pursue theology – but you do not love God; you are indifferent to the Subject of all these testimonies.’11

In revelation, God is supremely subject.12 Secondly, God also remains the object of revelation. This needs an immediate qualification: the statement should not be mistaken as an attempt at an argument for the manipulability of God, the possibility for human beings to tame and control God through denying or receiving the act of revelation. Instead, it is the logical step of the Deus dixit, a necessary consequence of God’s being the subject of revelation: “God in his revelation, God as speaking subject, is a possible object of human speech which at once becomes a necessary object.”13 While this might seem contradictory in itself as well as contrary to the first point just made, the resolution of this tension is offered in the Trinitarian understanding of revelation. Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, the Word of God, without any further qualification. In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Barth writes on John 5:37–38: “Where it is known what revelation (Offenbarung) is, there has to be an awareness of the revealer (Offenbarer), of the one who is simultaneously its object and its subject who has appeared amongst people.”14 God does not reveal something – God reveals Himself. The same thought is subsequently taken up in the Church Dogmatics, where Barth introduces his second chapter on the revelation of God with the sentence: “God Himself in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired distinction is Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness.”15 God is, thus, 11

Barth, Erklärung des Johannes-Evangeliums (Kapitel 1–8) – Vorlesung Wintersemester 1925/1926, wiederholt in Bonn, Sommersemester 1933, ed. Walther Fürst (Zürich: TVZ, 1976), 294, 295, 296. The internal quote is Barth paraphrasing what Jesus would have said to the Jews. See also the broader context of this quote, 287–97. 12 One might note here that Barth here accords a somewhat secondary importance to Scripture in relation to God. The accusation from the previous quote is that the medium of revelation (here: Scripture) is given higher importance than the actual revelation. 13 Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 57. 14 Barth, Johannes-Evangelium, 294. (“Where there is knowledge of what revelation is, there has to be a sense for the revealer, for the one who is in it simultaneously its object and the subject that was revealed to humankind.”). 15 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 295. See also Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I: Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes, 1 (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1932), 311. Subsequent references to Church Dogmatics

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the object of revelation, but only because God is also its subject. It seems therefore no surprise that Barth decides against the choice between Biblical scholarship and history, arguing that “my whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavor to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit.”16 Barth continues, thus: “The understanding of history is an uninterrupted conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of to-morrow. And it is a conversation always conducted honestly and with discernment.”17 Consequently, the question geared towards Wright seems to be as follows: At what stage does God enter as an agent in the historical and biblical critical endeavor? In an even more exaggerated way: Without the faithfulness of God, where would Paul be (and would he even be Paul)? While this might sound glib, it sounds appropriate when examining Wright’s understanding of Scripture. A few chapters into the first volume of PFG, this is addressed in the following way: The final Jewish symbol to be examined here, as an element which Paul reworked and revised, is scripture itself – which surrounds, and gives body and colour to, everything else. Scripture was central to the world of the Jews. As that world became more complex through the time in Babylon and all that followed, so, increasingly, scripture – not just Torah, the Five Books, providing the key symbolic elements of the worldview, but also the Prophets and the Writings, particularly the Psalms – shaped and formed the people both resident in the Land, worshipping in the Temple itself and spread in dispersion across the world. (PFG 373)

Yet does this not lead to a position that reads Scripture for its own sake? Is there not a more central concern which breathes throughout all pages of Scripture – which is far more than a topic, but a person? This only increases in severity if one examines the way Wright continues the quote: I have already described how, though scripture was of course put to many different kinds of use by the many varieties of Jewish life in this period, one central strand of these uses was to see scripture as the great, controlling story through which Israel understood its own existence: to see it, indeed, as a story in search of an ending, an ending whose shape and content would not be in doubt (the fulfilment of the promises, the coming of the Messiah and so forth) but whose conditions, and hence whose timing, were open not just to doubt but to centuries of agonized searching and questioning. What was required – and the precise shaping and content of this requirement varied widely according to the different strands of Jewish life and the way they told the common story – was something new, some-

will, whenever appropriate, give the cross-reference to the original text in German, Kirchliche Dogmatik. Where changes to the English text were needed, this will be marked with a ‘rev.’ note. 16 Barth, Romans, 1. 17 Barth, Romans, 1.

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thing which would enable a new generation to become in truth the people through and for whom the story had reached its long-awaited destination. (PFG 373)

One way that Barth responds to this understanding of Scripture is the introduction of the terminology of the “Word of God.” It is understood as having a threefold character: it is the proclaimed, the written, and the revealed Word of God.18 Afterwards, Barth moves in ch. 2 of the Church Dogmatics to the question of “The Revelation of God.” Again, Barth understands revelation in a Trinitarian fashion: “the revelation attested in Holy Scripture is the revelation of the God who, as the Lord, is the Father from whom it proceeds, the Son who fulfils it objectively (for us), and the Holy Spirit who fulfils it subjectively (in us).”19 Jesus Christ is thereby the “objective reality of revelation” – i.e., the way Jesus Christ has been revealed in Scripture20 as well as “objective possibility of revelation”; i.e., the way this reality has the possibility to become revelation to man.21 Barth is thus more interested in the Subject behind the pages of Scripture rather than the way the pages of Scripture are received. Furthermore, for Barth, the Holy Spirit is of importance with regards to the subjective reality and possibility of revelation. God, through the work of the Holy Spirit, is the one to make revelation possible. The Trinitarian dimension of revelation can therefore be summed up: It is Christ, the Word of God, brought to the hearing of man by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who is man’s possibility of being the recipient of divine revelation. Therefore this receiving, this revealedness of God for us, is really itself revelation. In no less a sense than

18

Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 88–124; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 1, 89–128. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 1; Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I: Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes, 2, (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1938), 1. For the interconnected relationship between revelation and the Trinity, see the section below on Christology, as well as Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 295–347; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 1, 311–67. For the relationship between the Trinity and the doctrine of revelation, see Barth’s outline in Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 311–14; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 1, 328–31, particularly: “We are not saying, then, that revelation is the basis of the Trinity, as though God were the triune God only in His revelation and only for the sake of His revelation. What we are saying is that revelation is the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the Trinity has no other basis apart from this. We arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity by no other way than that of an analysis of the concept of revelation.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 312; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 1, 329). 20 See Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 15; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 16–17. On the notion of how God in Jesus Christ remains the “subject” of revelation, see the first and second point above and Johannes-Evangelium, particularly 111–15. 21 “How far has the reality Jesus Christ the power (potestas, virtus, δύναµις) to be the reality of revelation?” (Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 27; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 30). 19

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the incarnation of the Word in Christ, it is the divine act of lordship, the mystery and the miracle of the existence of God among us, the triumph of free grace.22

To summarize further: Our own freedom and possibility to be encountered (Widerfahrnis) by revelation must be completely talked out of us; talked out of us so that that this being encountered (Widerfahrnis) may be possible. To become free for God, we must be convicted (überführt) of the fact that we are not free already. Room must be made for the miracle of the knowledge of the Word of God.23

The activity of the Holy Spirit is once more an illustration of the first point made: in revelation, God is supremely subject. Consequently, revelation is God’s sovereign act in freedom. For the revelatory event, there are no anthropological Anknüpfungspunkte (points of contact);24 the human being is only free for revelation as determined by the freedom of God. The topic to which I return again and again is thus one of domesticating God to the extent that God becomes manageable – not only for Paul, but also for us as readers of Paul. The problem is epitomized in the way religion is understood, which is the second section to which we turn now. 2.2 Religion Secondly, then, a few comments are needed on the topic of religion. Wright speaks to this matter as follows in the opening comments of ch. 13, reflecting on a seminar he attended in Germany in the 1970s: The opening paper, given by Antonius Gunneweg, a senior Old Testament scholar from the Bonn faculty, was entitled ‘Religion oder Offenbarung: Zum hermeneutischen Problem des Alten Testaments’, i.e. ‘Religion or Revelation? Concerning the Hermeneutical Problem of the Old Testament’. The question was posed in terms of the standard protestant assumption, strengthened through the theology of Karl Barth: ‘religion’ was something humans did to try to gain favour with God, whereas ‘revelation’ was what happened when God, as an act of free grace, chose to unveil his love or his purposes to humans. Seen from this point of view, Christianity was not a ‘religion’ at all, since it was about divine grace rather than human effort, and the question was whether the Old Testament shared this character, or whether it had to be seen as the Jewish version of the human effort to please God, or even to know him. (PFG 1320)

It would have been of interest to know from where Wright takes this statement, which is a gross misunderstanding of Barth on religion,25 but Wright leaves this topic to speak of a first-century understanding of religion: 22

Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 249; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 272. Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 258 rev.; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 281. 24 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 263–65; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 287–89. 25 For the subsequent argument, also see Sven Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology 28 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), especially ch. 2. 23

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I intend, in other words, to investigate here the relation of Paul to first-century ‘religion’, as discussed in that earlier chapter, rather than to ‘religion’ as that term has been understood since at least the eighteenth century. (PFG 1321)

What I want to argue here is that Barth’s take on religion, instead of being easily dismissed, is relevant for exactly this issue.26 First and foremost, this has to do, again, with a translation error, now superseded, which translates the German term Aufhebung as “abolition.”27 Second, however, it is also questionable to what extent Wright can distance himself completely from the understanding of religion “since at least the eighteenth century.” The “religion” that Wright has in mind is circumscribed in the New Testament by using, “terms like eusebia, ‘piety’ or ‘godliness’; thrēskeia, ‘worship’, or the practices associated with it; or latreia, the ‘service’ that one might offer to the gods as to one’s social superiors” (PFG 249). If this is true, this can also be formulated differently as follows: Are not at any rate the elements and problems in the basic outlook of all religions the same as those of Christian doctrine: the world’s beginning and end, the origin and nature of man, moral and religious law, sin and redemption? And even in its supreme and finest forms, although it may be at the highest level, is not Christian “piety” on the same scale as all other forms of piety?28

This is how Barth defines “religion” – certainly, without the presupposed “heavy baggage” of a post-Enlightenment theologian! Far from seeing religion as merely antithetical to revelation, Barth sees the revelation of Jesus Christ as the person in whom, “God has reconciled to Himself godless man [together with his] religion.”29 Religion for Barth is unbelief. First, Barth returns to his argument of revelation as a necessary precondition for religion. Without revelation human beings are unable to recognize God; it is a process of God’s “coming to us,” meeting people in their attempt to know God for themselves as “religious”

26

A host of problems originates also from reading Barth here through the interpretation of others, most notably John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). While Wright discusses Ashton at length and ultimately rejects his overall argument, Ashton might serve Wright’s purpose because of his use of the category of “apocalyptic.” Yet, this does not mean that Ashton is correct in his conclusion about Barth, nor that the points made in Ashton can replace the engagement with Barth. 27 See Ensminger, Karl Barth’s Theology, 51, and the literature cited there, most notably the reference to Garrett Green’s new translation of that paragraph of Barth’s Church Dogmatics in which he calls this mistranslation “an egregious error” and “the most important reason” for a retranslation. (Karl Barth, On Religion – The Revelation of God and the Sublimation of Religion, trans. and introd. by Garrett Green, [London: Bloomsbury, 2006], viii). 28 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 282. 29 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 299, rev.; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 326.

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beings.30 In this sense, religion is an attempt at self-justification. Once more, we are close here to one of the core characteristics of the doctrine of revelation with which we started: God’s revelation occurs in perfect freedom. Thus, religion is the attempt to take from God what can only be given: grace. Returning to the motif of Aufhebung, Barth establishes the relationship between religion and revelation once more: Revelation does not link up with [the] human religion which is already present and practised. It contradicts it, just as religion previously contradicted revelation. It displaces it (hebt sie auf), just as religion previously displaced (aufhob) revelation; just as faith cannot link up with a mistaken faith, but must contradict and displace (aufheben) it as unbelief, as an act of contradiction.31

Second, religion is the human being’s attempt to make for herself an image of God. It is the endeavor to tame and to try to “anticipate God, to foist a human product into the place of His Word, to make our own images of the One who is known only where He gives Himself to be known.”32 Barth’s reference to idolatry is remarkable: religion is just another step in the long history that Barth traces throughout the body of Old and New Testament Scripture.33 It provides the opportunity to introduce the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as the deciding factor: “it is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and this revelation only, through which this characterization of religion as idolatry and self-justification and thus its exposure as unbelief is undertaken.”34 Again, we need to pause here and clarify: what is Barth saying? First, it has to be noted that it is the revelation of God that qualifies religion as unbelief. Again, we have to remember here the differentiation between divine and human judgment. There is (Barth is clear on this) also a human judgment on religion – “an observation which we can more or less clearly verify from the history and phenomenology of every religion that the religious man does not at all face up to his theoretico-practical aims”35 – yet this will not function as proof that religion is unbelief. A realization that religion is in fact unbelief, a true “crisis” of religion will, however, only be possible in the event of being encountered by revelation. Barth points to mysticism and atheism, both of which have provided this challenge in part throughout history. Yet, they will ultimately be just as incapable of challeng30

See Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 301; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 329. Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 303; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 331. 32 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 308; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 336–37. 33 See Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 303–07; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 330–35. 34 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 314, rev.; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 343. A faulty English translation might have contributed here to a misinterpretation. The English implies that the revelation in Jesus Christ allows us to call religion unbelief – and this goes against the distinction between human and divine judgment. The “subject” of this exposure of religion as unbelief is the revelation of God – not us. 35 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 314; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 343. 31

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ing,36 or, to use Barth’s phrase, to contribute to the Aufhebung of religion: “But the Aufhebung which is a genuine and dangerous attack on religion is to be found in another book, beside which the books of mysticism and atheism can only be described as completely harmless.”37 This is the revelation of Jesus Christ in whom “God has reconciled to Himself godless man [together with his] religion.”38 This leads to the second point in this context: It is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that Barth sees as the sole driving force behind the proof of religion being unbelief. Importantly, Barth puts the emphasis here on revelation rather than Jesus Christ.39 Here, we can now return to the points made previously regarding revelation and apply this in the context of religion: God remains sovereign in the act of revelation, yet there exists a vast array of means of revelation. God’s revelation serves, thus, as the Aufhebung of religion as such by proving that religion in and of itself is insufficient. It is a divine judgment of religion that does not – indeed, must not – carry with it a corresponding human judgment to the same extent. One can further delineate from this discussion that Barth’s doctrine of revelation emphatically stresses the divine initiative of this revelation; without God, there would not be a revelatory event. Barth’s doctrine of revelation – namely, God being Subject and Object of revelation – emphatically stresses the divine initiative. The problem for Wright therefore seems to be one that reduces religion to its historical and social dimension. Barth’s point, however, is that religion has to be understood within the framework of theology. Barth’s conceptualization does not negate the historical and social dimensions of religion. However, Barth’s starting point is “that God is present. Our basic task is so to order the concepts revelation and religion that the connexion between the two can again be seen as identical with that event between God and man in which God is God, i.e., the Lord and Master of man, who Himself judges and alone justifies and sanctifies, and man is the man of God, i.e., man as he is adopted and received by God in His severity and goodness.”40 Certainly, religion can be examined in scientific ways, be it sociologically, historically, or something else. However, to come to theological conclusions in light of these reflections will always turn God, who is the ultimate Subject of theology, into a manageable category. For Barth, this means that

36

Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 315–25; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 343–56. Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 325; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 356. 38 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 299, rev.; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 326. 39 This is not done in Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 314, but follows the emphasis according to the German original in Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 343. 40 Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 297; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 323. 37

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the problem of religion in theology is not the question how the reality, religion, which has already been defined (and usually untheologically), can now be brought into an orderly and plausible relationship with the theological concepts, revelation, faith, etc. On the contrary, the question is uninterruptedly theological: What is this thing which from the standpoint of revelation and faith is revealed in the actuality of human life as religion?41

Some possible answers to that question will be addressed in the conclusion after some brief reflections on the question of Christology, to which we turn now. 2.3 Christology With the preceding reflections on revelation and religion, I have tried to raise some points for a theological discussion between the claims made by Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God through engagement with the thought of the theologian Karl Barth. By way of introduction, I have done so by touching upon questions raised in the area of revelation (and more specifically, the understanding of Scripture), and secondly, the area of religion. The question that has underpinned all of these is: to what extent can God be bracketed out of theological reflection about a key figure of the Christian church such as Paul in order to consider him as a historical figure with his socio-political concerns and background? While these “human” concerns are not in and of themselves unimportant, if they are the sole point of emphasis, the result is something that resembles theology yet does not have God at its center. Who is this God? It is the triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As we move towards a conclusion, a cross-reference to one of Wright’s earlier works might be helpful. Wright considers it appropriate to start volumes such as his Jesus and the Victory of God with a single quote from Barth, which he then rejects, not to return to him beyond the first chapter.42 The quote in Jesus and the Victory of God is as follows (ellipses in original): “Jesus Christ in fact is … historically so difficult to get information about … .”43 Without the redaction, the sentence reads in its entirety: Jesus Christ in fact is also the Rabbi of Nazareth, historically so difficult to get information about, and when it is got, one whose activity is so easily a little commonplace alongside more than one other founder of a religion and even alongside many later representatives of His own ‘religion.’44 41

Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 2, 296; Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 2, 323. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996). 43 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 3. 44 Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God: Church Dogmatics Vol I.1, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 188. For the more common translation by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, see Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 165. 42

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The original text reads as follows: Jesus Christus ist in der Tat auch der historisch schwer zu ermittelnde, und wenn ermittelt, neben mehr als einem anderen Religionsstifter und sogar neben manchen späteren Vertretern seiner eigenen „Religion“ leicht ein wenig banal wirkende Rabbi von Nazareth.45

Without wanting to cause a tempest in a teapot about inaccuracies in Barth translations, for this context it is of importance that Barth would happily examine the historical figure of Jesus Christ. Yet the person of Jesus Christ is far more than this. Barth himself argues this a few lines below the quote just cited from Church Dogmatics: We do not have the Word of God otherwise than in the mystery of its secularity. This means, however, that we have it in a form which as such is not the Word of God and which as such does not even give evidence that it is the form of the Word of God. In other words the self-presentation of God in His Word is not direct, nor is it indirect in the way in which a man's face seen in a mirror can be called an indirect self-presentation of this man.46

Ivor Davidson speaks to this when he argues: Wherever its roots may be located historically (and they are certainly premodern), such an apologetic strategy spawned Christological methods in which Jesus became a symbol or cipher for truths which could be arrived at elsewhere, in ‘core’ religious experience, generic structures of rationality, ethical idealism, empirical science, and so on. The specificity of the human Jesus is reduced to a point of irrelevance, for it is not so much the particular narrative identity of the Jesus of the Christian gospels that matters, but the anthropological, ethical and intellectual convictions of the interpretative process to which his name is annexed.47

In this sense, the person of Jesus Christ needs to be examined within his historical context, yet not by way of sacrificing who Jesus Christ also is – Son of God, Word of God. This is summarized succinctly by Barth at a later stage, himself at times accused of over-emphasizing the divine character of Jesus, when he argued retrospectively that “it is precisely God’s deity which, rightly understood, includes his humanity.”48

45

Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I, 1, 171. Barth, Church Dogmatics I, 1, 188. This leads Barth to an examination of veiling/unveiling as a description of the dialectical process of revelation, which would lead too far in this context here. 47 Ivor J. Davidson, “Theologizing the Human Jesus: An Ancient (and Modern) Approach to Christology Reassessed,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3 (2001): 129–53, (quoting 131). 48 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, trans. Thomas Wiesner and John N. Thomas (Atlanta: John Knox, 1960), 46. 46

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3. Some Conclusions Over the previous paragraphs, I have raised the question of Wright’s engagement with the thought of theologian Karl Barth as it is available to us today. I have found this engagement wanting, as Barth is read either in passing or through the scholarship of others. Further research will need to be done on other key figures of church history and how they are treated within Wright’s larger project, yet this is a task for another time. Finally, by way of outlook, I want to raise a question for further reflection, namely: what is the relationship between biblical studies and theology? I have offered in this chapter some thoughts that come from the theological perspective, and I do this unashamedly. Can one do theology without biblical studies? Not at all. As Barth himself has argued again and again, Scripture as the written Word of God cannot, indeed must not, be left behind when engaging in a theological argument. Can one undertake biblical studies without theology? The answer is less clear. However, as I have shown in these reflections, biblical studies without a strong sense of the theological underpinnings of all of the Scriptural texts will always run the risk of being little more than historical, sociological studies of literature. These are certainly not without their merit. Yet to build a theological argument on these is a path that, from a theological point of view, needs to be treaded carefully. We are called as theologians to speak of God. However, we are human beings and are unable as such to speak of God. Yet, we are called to know both – our calling and our inability to do so – and give precisely with that the glory to God. That is our challenge. Everything else is mere child’s play.49

Bibliography Ashton, John. The Religion of Paul the Apostle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975. –. Church Dogmatics: Volume I, Part 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956. –. The Doctrine of the Word of God: Church Dogmatics Vol I.1. Translated by G. T. Thomson. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936. –. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hopkins from the 6th ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.

49

Barth, “Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie,” in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922–1925, ed. Holger Finze (Zürich: TVZ, 1990), 144–75 (151).

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–. The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, Vol. I. Edited by Hannelore Reiffen. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. –. The Humanity of God. Translated by Thomas Wieser and John N. Thomas. Atlanta: John Knox, 1960. –. Erklärung des Johannes-Evangeliums (Kapitel 1–8) – Vorlesung Wintersemester 1925/1926, wiederholt in Bonn, Sommersemester 1933 (GA II.9). Edited by Walther Fürst. Zürich: TVZ, 1976. –. Kirchliche Dogmatik I: Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes, 1. Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1932. –. Kirchliche Dogmatik I: Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes, 2. Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1938. –. On Religion – The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion. Translated and introduced by Garrett Green. London: T&T Clark, 2006. –. “Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie.” Pages 144–75 in Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten 1922–1925. Edited by Holger Finze. Zürich: TVZ, 1990. Davidson, Ivor J. “Theologizing the Human Jesus: An Ancient (and Modern) Approach to Christology Reassessed.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3 (2001): 129– 53. Ensminger, Sven. Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Christian Theology of Religions. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology 28. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hart, Trevor. “Revelation.” Pages 37–56 in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. Edited by John B. Webster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McGrath, Alister E., ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996.

Bishop Wright Sacramentality and the Role of the Sacraments Edith M. Humphrey N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God is a sustained exploration of the letters that shows how the apostle moved from his particular Jewish worldview to a nuanced theology that deeply informed the emerging Christian community, with theology defined us “prayerful reflection on God, God’s ways, God’s work, God’s purpose, and ultimately God’s faithfulness” (PFG 403). Further, it argues that the concept of a renewed and unified people of God is Paul’s characteristic contribution to Christian thought, something related to the first purpose, since “theology is the lifeblood of the ἐκκλησία, which is itself the central worldview-symbol” (PFG 404). This robust double volume explores St. Paul’s letters through the four inter-related elements of questions, stories, praxis, and symbols, with attention to worship and culture; because of its scope and focus, we might expect that sacramentality and the sacraments per se would not be neglected. My teacher, mentor, and friend (hereafter, “Wright”) does not disappoint! From Wright’s initial premise that the Jewish faithful believed themselves to be “actually in heaven” (PFG 97) while in the Temple “where heaven and earth meet” (PFG 96), through to the final vision, where the ἐκκλησία is conceived as “a microcosm” of the cosmos (PFG 1492) gathered up in Christ, we are confronted with what could be dubbed a sacramental imagination: here the material world is presented as theophoric, at least in a limited sense. There lurks in Wright’s treatment of the sacraments an appreciation of the apostle’s understanding that the spiritual world may be communicated by the material. Heaven and earth are not conceived as hermetically sealed against one another; the mysteries of God may be, at least partially, “discerned in considering the things he has made” (Rom 1:20). Though he does not address this head-on, Wright’s overall representation of Paul’s worldview thus seems friendly to the insight of Fr. Alexander Schmemann that “[a] sacrament is primarily a revelation of the genuine nature of creation …, a revelation of the sacramentality of creation itself.”1 1

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2010), 33. For more on this understanding of creation as sacramental or iconic, consider:

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Besides this premise of sacramentality, the work also treats the two most prominent sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist. Wright describes these as recognizable elements of praxis that expressed κοινωνία with God (PFG 251) in a first century religio (PFG 202), as actions enmeshed with the stories of Israel and Messiah (PFG 395, 419–20), as activities that answer to the questions of life (PFG 543), and as symbols indicating the identity of the new community (PFG 361–68, 417). The sacraments therefore find their natural place throughout Parts I and II, where Wright considers Paul’s world and mindset, and again more extensively in Part IV, where Paul is set in the context of history. However, in Part III, where Wright’s theology is examined, the sacraments are less evident, with a cluster of references subsumed under “the people of God, freshly reworked” and a few more found in the construction of an inaugurated eschatology (“the future for the world, freshly imagined”). We are presented with a puzzle: the bishop is not hostile to the classical Christian idea that God can be mediated to us through material means, since he underscores the good creation. However, the shape of his discussion implies that these sacraments are more expressive of the church and its identity than of “the one God of Israel, freshly revealed.” One is left with the impression that the sacraments belong to the realms of ritual, symbol, and ecclesial identity, rather than to the realm of theology proper (i.e. “prayerful reflection on God”). The volume, then, depends upon a view of reality that is sacramental (though the author might not use this term) even while the sacraments in themselves are not naturally described as partaking of this cosmic sacramentality. The purpose of this paper is appreciatively to collect and trace Wright’s expositions of the pertinent passages within his major arguments, while also suggesting possible reasons for this disconnect between a sacramental worldview and his description of the sacraments themselves in Paul’s thought. We will begin by considering Wright’s overall approach (i.e. underlying questions and worldview), move on to notice his representation of Pauline thought about God in relation to creation, and finally reflect upon his emphasis upon the historical rather than cosmic dimension. the whole of For the Life of the World; ch. 6 of Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s, 2003); ch. 7 (treating Congar and de Lubac) of Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Chryssavgis, “A New Heavens and a New Earth: Orthodox Christian Insights from Theology, Spirituality and the Sacraments,” in Towards an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 152–62; and Kallistos Ware, “Through Creation to the Creator,” in Towards an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 86–105.

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1. Approach: Reconciliation, Questions, and the Load-bearing Symbol Wright begins his book with a lively use of metaphor that promises, like the metaphors conceived by the apostle himself, to “generate further offspring” that can be set off “scampering around in celebration” (PFG 1341, 1344). Creatively, our friend plays the Philemon-Onesimus story in two directions, referring first to History as the runaway, who must be reconciled to the slavemaster Theology, but then recognizing that the tables have been turned in our day, so that Theology becomes the suspect and humble partner who must be brought to History. In our post-modern age, he hopes to assure “both sides [theology and history] that they are full partners” in a full-bodied reading of Paul’s letters (PFG 72). Theology and History belong together, along with the literary dimension.2 Like Calliope (or the Holy Spirit in Christian theology), the literary muse calls attention away from herself to the other two players in Wright’s volume but nonetheless makes a full impact by means of Wright’s imaginative discourse. How will theology and history come to understand their partnership – along with literary study? Wright explains that this happens through the adoption of a conceptual framework that puts emphasis upon foundational questions, stories, praxis, and symbols. When we examine the questions designed to give rise to this worldview, we are struck with a certain anthropocentrism: “who are we?” “where are we?” (even, with the first person implicitly attached to his three other questions, “what’s wrong?” “what’s the solution?” and “what time is it?” [for us?]) We are grateful to Wright for transforming the questions from their original singular form (i.e. “who am I?”3) to the plural first person more suited to the first century (and to Christian thought). It is also helpful that he directs the three final questions beyond the human situation into the realm of the cosmos. The first two questions set the tone, however. Though Wright is well aware of God’s initiating actions, which he celebrates, the form of these foundational questions leads us to assume that story, praxis, and symbols primarily concern the community, the “we” who is doing the asking. 2

For the three interconnected elements of New Testament study (literary study, history, and theology) spelled out explicitly, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London, SPCK: 1992), 11–14. 3 Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984) 35, used the singular first person in framing the first four questions. Wright, on adopting their schema, aptly transformed these, as he explains in Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 123n6. Since The New Testament and the People of God, he has added the final question concerning time, on which see the final section of this paper.

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From the get-go, then, the emphasis falls upon the social dimension, and eventually upon the ἐκκλησία, which is described by Wright as “the loadbearing symbol, generating its own necessary and organically appropriate praxis in worship, prayer, scripture reading and (what came to be called) the sacraments” (PFG 565). Surely Wright’s book runs the gamut, describing not only Pauline thought on human community and its creativity, but also on the world as a whole (including a few forays into the unseen cosmos), its history and promised future, and the mystery of who God is. Still, the interest in the human “we” predominates – a subjectivity (albeit corporate) that may not be entirely suited to one who types himself as a critical realist. The anthropocentricism is suited to questions concerning the origins of the Christian community; it is less helpful in grasping the enormity of this sacramental universe, which God declared “very good.” It may be even more diminishing of the sacraments themselves, which, according to the family story commended to us by the Holy Spirit, were not generated by those called out by God, but given to them (and so to us) as His transforming presence in and among us. (So the gospel: “How can he give us his body to eat?” “Out of his heart shall flow springs of living water!” So St. Paul: “For I received from the ΚΎΡΙΟΣ.”; “All of us … were baptized into his death.”) Even within the constraints of Wright’s argument, which fastens upon the Church in the world, there are places where a more explicit acknowledgment of the sacraments would have been useful. For example, as he moves to the final section of Part II, noting the “five signposts to the apostolic mindset,” he comes back to the crucial question “who are we?” and answers this as follows: “We are the Messiah’s people; we are indwelt by the spirit [sic] of God, the spirit [sic] of the Messiah” (PFG 543).4 What would happen to the bishop’s description of Paul’s thought if he were to fill out some of this dis4

Wright has, in PFG, largely abandoned his eccentric transcription of “god” with the lower case (see Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, xiv–xiv, for his initial rationale and PFG xi–xii for his new practice, where he offers an explanation for exclusive Pauline theology that I would think applies equally to every book of the Old and New Testaments). However, he has now adopted, without explanation, the same odd miniscule habit almost always when he refers to “spirit” – even when this use is clearly meant in the context to signify the one Holy Spirit. His rendering of πνεῦµα in the discussion of Stoicism is rightly lower case (PFG 214), as are examples where it is arguable that the apostle is referring to the human spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. It seems very odd, however, to constantly encounter “spirit” in reference to the divine πνεῦµα, the spirit of the Messiah, and so on (exceptional examples of the upper case are seen on PFG 356, 711, 717, etc. but without explanation). The general use of the lower case conflicts, it would seem, with his insistence that we speak of the Spirit as “who” rather than “what” (e.g., his translation of Rom 8:11), and perhaps complicates a full acceptance of the Spirit as unique, divine, and personal despite his plea for incipient Trinitarianism in ch. 9. Moreover, the Spirit is seen as primarily inhabiting the ἐκκλησία without reference to the cosmos as a whole. We will consider the possible implications of these details in the next section.

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cussion concerning signposts by adding the following markers?: “We are those who were washed; we are those who have in Baptism died in Christ; we are those who by the cup and bread share in God’s life.” While these themes of sharing in death and transformation are expounded in the next few pages of Wright’s exposition, this is not done with reference to the sacraments. Why this lacuna, this discrete treatment? The answer seems to be that, for all of our friend’s insistence that the main narrative of the Scriptures is the story of God and creation – rather than narrowly that of humanity and God – his major concern is to show Paul’s concentration upon ecclesiology. Baptism and Eucharist thus remain symbols whose major purpose is to signal that “the family to which [Paul] belonged had been utterly transformed” (PFG 368). In all this, Wright is leading us to one conclusion: “The community of baptized believers, rooted by that baptism and by that faith … became for Paul not only the central locus but also the key visible symbol of the transformed worldview” (PFG 368). The renewed community of Christ takes pride of place in his analysis. Alongside his emphasis upon the church, its identity, and its activity, Wright does gives formal precedence to the One who alone is holy. A holy God corresponds to a holy people. (Strictly speaking, in theological terms, this should be put the other way around, but in terms of Wright’s emphasis, this sequence is not misleading.) Let us then turn to consider his analysis of the apostle’s theology, taken in the narrow sense as prayerful talk about God, as it illuminates his view of the sacraments in Paul’s letters.

2. Theology: Creator, the Desacralized Creation, the Once-for-all Sacrifice, and Κοινωνία When one speaks of Tom Wright and Pauline theology, most who are “in the know” think immediately about his argument concerning δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. His controversial exposition of the letters with regards to this dominating theme of the Reformation is linked clearly to his corrective highlighting of the one true God, over against a fixation upon soteriology in Paul’s letters. A key plank in Wright’s argument concerning the Pauline teaching on justification is his conviction – now shared by many – that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ should be understood in terms of the subjective genitive, that is, as God’s very own righteousness. This plea, further explained as an apostolic concentration upon God’s faithful acts (rather than as an abstract idea of God’s character, as imputed or imparted righteousness, or as a template for salvation) is coherent with the first-century Jewish celebration of the one holy God. This eccentric monotheism, positing a God separate from his creation, which earned Christians the label “atheists,” comes directly from the worldview of a chastened

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Israel, who, according to the prophets, suffered exile because they had not fastened upon YHWH alone. When the apostle speaks into the Gentile milieu, then, he does so as a Messianic Jew intent on desacralizing the pagan worldview, which frequently had an animistic instinct. Such desacralization is consonant with an aniconic approach to the true God, commonly associated with Second Temple Judaism (despite the synagogue at Dura Europos), and is evident in Rom 1’s critique of pagans who made images, confusing elements of creation with the God of creation. In this regard, Wright comments that there is “almost no material culture” left to us of Paul’s life, though he admits that the claim to have the bones and fetters of the apostle might not be entirely frivolous (PFG 353). On the other hand, he concedes that “absence of evidence … is not evidence of absence” (PFG 382). In the case of relics and icons, the temptation to read an iconoclastic sensibility back into the apostolic age proves as irresistible to scholars as an earlier catholic tendency to create that first century after a medieval image. As our author memorably puts it: “scholarship wobbles from one thing to another” (PFG 311). Wright himself is much taken with the “pregnant reflection” (PFG 353n4) of C. Kavin Rowe,5 who deals with the puzzle of missing iconography in the first-century world by suggesting that it took some centuries for Christians to move away from Jewish scruples concerning such representations.6 Indeed, the dynamic of desacralization and the filling of a desacralized space is treated in Rowe, as is the difficulty of making negative declarations based on lack of evidence, which Rowe derives from Finney.7 The difficulty with even cogent explanations such as that offered by Rowe is that, as Wright notes, “life close up is always more complex than a distant vision suggests” (PFG 314). What if, from the beginning, the earliest Christians were disparate in their understanding of images, or even held ideas together in tension, the one aniconic and the other more iconic, much as Israel retained the priestly understanding of God’s residence in the Temple alongside the prophetic assertion of God’s uncontainability? What if in Paul’s day,

5 C. Kavin Rowe, “New Testament Iconography? Situating Paul in the Absence of Material Evidence” in Picturing the NT: Studies in Ancient Visual Images, ed. Annette Weissenrieder, Friederike Wendt, and Petra von Gemünden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 289–312. 6 I am myself very cautious about declaring that we can be certain about a state of affairs from silence and at any rate want to give full consideration to the suggestions of Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). He argues that the earliest Christians were not, like many of their Jewish counterparts, aniconic by ideology, but that they were simply too poor, lacking the material and capital, to produce images. 7 For Finney, see n6.

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praxis was not the only form of symbol used by Messianic Jews,8 and what if certain actions and material objects were not considered “symbols” in our abstract sense, but believed to partake of the reality that they signified? What if there were a reason other than sheer human respect that the bones of the apostle were kept in a holy place of worship (cf. Rev 6:9)? What if it be too simple to say that these early Christians believed that “God is not, and cannot properly be manifested in any kind of object within the world of space, time and matter” (PFG 377)? There is, after all, that astonishing “exception” (PFG 377), Jesus the God-Man, in whom Christians live, as the apostle put it. What, then, if knowing that God “had a human face” (PFG 378) in Jesus the Christ meant that matter itself no longer was exceptionally inhabitable by God, but now decisively taken up into God? This state of affairs would be seen as beginning with the embodied Son and now taking place by extension with those who follow him as well as in those material things consecrated by us to his use. Surely it is the case that the Messianic Jewish faith, like all forms of Judaism, eschewed the animism of many pagan religions – and so it would prophetically “desacralize” these places in the imagination of the worshippers. Moreover, it would claim (and the apostle did claim) that any hostile or oppressing powers interconnected with earthly realities were now rendered powerless by the One who was himself the εἰκών of the Father. God had, in Christ, reclaimed his own! But what if Paul’s logic and apologetic did not always follow a strict sequence of desacralization and resacralization? (Though there is warrant for this way of telling the story, as in Jesus’s parable of the house swept clean). What if the symbolic transformation of the pagan world, with its idols, social festivals, and sacred/political meals, might be expressed not only in terms of iconoclasm but in terms of fulfillment, just as Christ was the fulfillment and end of Torah, depending on what one was looking at? Looking sideways (or slightly forward) from Paul’s letters to the strange events in Acts, we note that Luke is not troubled at the idea of shadows and handkerchiefs of the apostles healing the crowds, though he is concerned about magic (cf. Acts 5:15; 19:12). Wright points out that some moderns are flummoxed by the Christian teaching of the Supper as “a physical event with supposed spiritual consequences” (PFG 421) – what, then, shall we do with the physical consequences of the sacrament (1 Cor 11:30) remarked upon by the apostle? All this is to notice that the narrative told by Wright to thicken the Pauline understanding of the ἐκκλησία falls by default into a Protestant view, try as 8

Following Rowe, Wright opines that Paul’s system was, “it seems,” aniconic, “but in Paul’s day praxis was symbol, and symbol praxis” (PFG 353). The implication, in the context of his discussion, is that there were no religious symbols other than praxis for Paul and his contemporaries.

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the bishop might to decry the “anti-sacramental reading [found] in much Protestantism” (PFG 425), a reading that fears a devolution into “human work” and “magic” (PFG 251). Accordingly, he describes early Christians as “using the language of temple, sacrifice, oracle and priesthood” while all the while they “offered no animal sacrifices … [,] had no sacred precincts or cult functionaries … [, and] did not make pilgrimages … in search of divine advice” (PFG 202). This is surely right in what it affirms but, I think, overconfident in what it denies. After all, they had a sacred Temple, did they not? – the physical body of Christ (now glorified but not dematerialized), and the concrete Body of Christ gathered around the apostles. This is not metaphorical language for an abstract idea, but a move from one material object made with hands to a shrine made by God himself: a living body, and then, living bodies joined together. Further, did they really have no cult functionaries, eschew pilgrimage, and offer no actual sacrifice? Paul calls himself “a father in Christ” in no uncertain terms. Even while in conflict with the circumcision party and aware of the foibles of Peter, he seeks out the apostles in Jerusalem, the nucleus of the Church, to make sure that he had not been running in vain (Gal 2:2). In correcting the Corinthians, he does not abrogate the office of apostle by replacing it with an egalitarian schema, but reaffirms it, claiming that he is an exceptionally appointed apostle, who like the others, has “seen” the Lord (1 Cor 9:1). Moreover, running through his letters are references to his concerted effort to collect funds for the poor of Jerusalem – a clear indication of his indebtedness to the community! Perhaps Jerusalem would not remain the “holy city” for Christians in the sense that it had been for the Jewish groups; but in the early second century, we have reports of those who sought out the Apostles who had been with Jesus because these were considered as embodied oracles, whose voice was even more authoritative than written words.9 Here is the problem: it is clear that the symbols of Temple and sacrifice were reconfigured as a result of Jesus, and that Paul is instrumental in showing how this works. However, St. Paul exhibits both an aniconic way of approaching the living God (cf. Rom 1:21–23) and an iconic imagination (cf. Rom 1:20, and Col 1, which Wright accepts as Pauline).10 Rowe, upon whom Wright relies, actually demonstrates this tension, and then opines that it took time for the Church to work carefully into its later iconic position.11 As Rowe points out, “in the person of Jesus Christ and his christologically shaped 9

So Papias, by way of Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.3–4 I believe it possible to see this impulse at work in the undisputed letters as well as, e.g., 1 Cor 8:6 and the reformulated Shema, coupled with Temple language used for the Church. Colossians does the integrating work for us, however, and so provides a more economic move for the historian of early Christian thought. 11 Rowe, “New Testament Iconography?,” 303–5, also 309–12. 10

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community, the God of Israel does in fact have an image.”12 So far, so good. This is, in some ways, similar to Wright’s declaration that the development of Trinitarian theology was not something foreign to the NT, but it is found in nuce there and especially in Paul’s letters (1 Cor 8:6; 2 Cor 3:18b). However, there is a misstep, it seems, in the argument, at least as Rowe construes it. Despite Rowe’s clear statement about Christ and the ἐκκλησία being the image of God, in fact what Rowe actually means is a little different – it is “the unity” of the Church, the concept shown forth by the community, that he has in mind: “Revelation … is no longer bound up with material images. Rather, to know God is to see his image in the pattern of community that is the life of Jesus Christ.”13 So much is beneficial in Rowe’s analysis, incorporated by Wright. But in the end we are moved from a physical Temple to a concept of community, rather than to the sacramental notion that the Church actually is the Body of Christ because it is in the One who superseded the Temple. There are several places where Wright himself speaks in concrete rather conceptual terms of the Church, though frequently the abstraction of “unity” dominates. As a result, he rightly puts forward the renewed people of God as showing forth God’s image – but there is little sense of the Church as a mystery. Similarly, there is no glimmering of the sacraments as actually involving sacrifice, except in metaphorical terms. The completely proper emphasis upon the One Holy God and his distinctness from creation unwittingly crowds out the mystery of the Church as truly the body of Christ, as a liturgical creature who adds her own sacrifice of flesh-and-blood (whether living or slaughtered) to that of her High Priest. In Wright’s account, the language used of the priestly office of Christians offering themselves, or of the apostle bringing in the sacrifice of the Gentiles, must be understood as wholly symbolic – despite the historical record that such activity indeed often involved actual martyrdom. In the end, we are enjoined even to consider these graphic words as hyperbole: “I am to be poured out upon the sacrifice and offering of your faith” (Phil 2:17, cf. PFG 1341–42). In Wright’s hands, this is a symbol of the Church’s united offering rather than an expression of St. Paul’s sacrificial imitatio Christi. This aniconic emphasis upon the one true God is interconnected with a stress upon Christ alone and his hapax sacrifice. Wright begins promisingly by pointing out the connection that the apostle draws for the Corinthians of the Lord’s Supper with Passover: “it grows directly out of the Jewish passover” (PFG 395).14 The selection of details in this sixth chapter, however, is 12

Rowe, “New Testament Iconography?,” 309. Rowe, “New Testament Iconography?,” 309, my italics. 14 Some have not agreed with Wright (or me) concerning a straight line between Jesus’s atoning death, interpreted in the Passover context, to the Lord’s Supper of the New 13

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telling: Wright does not direct us to the blood of the Passover lamb, nor to the “new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11:25), but to the political implications of that typology. Helpfully, we are told that in using Passover imagery, Paul is “bringing that long tradition to a climax, and thereby confronting, as Passover-meals always did, the power of paganism”; around the table, “the stress is on unity” (PFG 395). However, we need also to remember that at the first Passover, the people requested Pharaoh’s liberation so that they might “hold a feast” with YHWH (Exod 5:1) and there “serve” or “give sacrifice” to him (Exod 8:25; 9:1). The lamb was slain, the doorposts marked, and the meal itself was a hurried affair, though it involved all of Israel, from every station of enslaved life. One might be tempted to place the table higher than the altar in the apostle’s configuration of the new rite: this is a mistake. Though the apostle calls attention to a meal, both in Jesus’s institution and in the Corinthian context, he begins by speaking of the “handing-over” of the Lord himself, emphasizes the “blood” and “broken body” in the recital of the institution, and insists that the eating and drinking are themselves a proclamation of the Lord’s death (1 Cor 11:23–26). Again, in the description of the meal, the body and blood are detailed, not merely common cup and bread (1 Cor 11:27). Altar and table merge, as is to be expected in the ancient world and in a letter where the apostle equates the demon’s cup with blasphemous sacrifice. Is it truly the case that “Christians did not have their own version (as did the Jews) of the most central ‘religious’ activity, namely animal sacrifice” (PFG 1352)? Jesus, after all, was an animate creature, as we are! Indeed, early Christians used the language of flesh and blood so unapologetically that in the early years they were slandered for clandestine and indecent offerings. Perhaps it should be said that they did not offer less than animal sacrifice, but a good deal more – for there was present, with every Supper, the blood and the body of Christ. At the same time, Christians, aware of Ps 50 [49]:7–15, Hos 6:6, Amos 5:21–25, and Mic 6:6–11, incorporated the prophetic disclaimer that God does not need sacrifice! Such texts surely informed their understanding that God does not demand propitiation in the manner of the pagan gods; God himself was the provider of the sacrifice (cf. Rom 3:25)! But when Paul stresses the body and blood, the consequences of (even physical) judgment, and the real “sharing in” the life of the divinity, whether that of YHWH or a would-be demonic “god,” it is clear that “meal” (especially as Testament, and finally to the Eucharist as it developed in the Church. Kereszty, e.g., appeals instead to the ‫( תודה‬thanksgiving sacrifice) and the ‫( ברכה‬blessing) of the synagogue meetings (Roch A. Kereszty, Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eucharistic Theology from a Historical, Biblical and Systematic Perspective [Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2004], 11). It may well be that these have also informed the early understanding of the Lord’s Supper, but Wright is surely on firm ground in pointing out the Pauline foundations of the rite as a “Passover-with-a-difference.”

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construed in the twenty-first century context) misses the mark. Cultic meals are always bound up with sacrifice. As Wright signals through his heading for ch. 13, for Paul there was “a different sacrifice” – different from those offered in the Temple, and markedly different from those offered in the pagan cults. Properly speaking, only Jesus is “the paschal lamb” (1 Cor 5:7), around whose death “everything else … has been reframed” (PFG 1347). Nevertheless, the apostle “is not shy” (PFG 1339) about using the language of sacrifice for human participation in the cult and for service in the world as well. (Thus, Wright calls attention to θυσίᾳ and λειτουργίᾳ in Phil 2:17 – as I have done – along with other sacrificially tinged passages.) As prolific and energetic as such symbolic bunnies are, however, the terms of sacrifice remain metaphors in Wright’s reading, figures of speech “too good to pass up” (PFG 1342).15 The metaphorical nature of the terminology is clearly articulated in Wright’s balanced analysis of Pauline Baptism and Eucharist in ch. 13, where he shows the connection of these rites with the general concept of worship (which functioned to express the unity of the worshippers), while also demonstrating links, as well as distinctions, with Old Testament sacrifice (with its many injunctions to holiness) (PFG 1344). With great care, Wright also acknowledges the rhetorical slant by which we, in our context, are apt to straightjacket Paul because of that constraint given to us by the Reformation’s insistence against human effort and upon “a single, unrepeatable event” (PFG 1340). In his treatment of the pertinent passages, Wright’s argument enfolds both Baptism and Eucharist under the theme of unity in the Church. Tantalizingly, he notes that St. Paul says rather more than seems “necessary” for “the grounding of his point” (PFG 1346, cf. 1347) – that point being, says Wright, that both the Lord’s Supper and Baptism emphasize the human κοινωνία forged by Christ, which ought not to be broken. Wright is, of course, not contesting that these acts also express κοινωνία with “the lord” (PFG 1347: but why the lower case since he has already identified the Lord with YHWH?). Nevertheless, in this chapter, that humandivine concourse seems overshadowed by the real matter at hand: “If the eucharist is a real sharing in the lord and his death, then anything which fragments the unity of the lord’s single “body” is a crime against the lord himself” (PFG 1347, my emphasis). The conditional clause gives way to the main clause, which fastens upon the church. Baptism, likewise, has been described already (and will continue to be discussed in ch. 13) as “an encoded narrative” for the new exodus, a rite that “does … what justification says” 15

On PFG 1344, Wright speaks about Paul’s way of sending “lively metaphors scampering around” in celebration. It would seem that the adjective “lively” describes the metaphors’ potential to engender more images, as well as to their vigorous agency in the Pauline arguments.

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(PFG 962). That is, it marks out the people of God in the present time, showing who they are in advance of the final judgment.16 In a similar way, justification, as defined by Wright, is interconnected with the Lord’s Supper for the latter is the outward sign showing that “all who are in Christ belong at the same table.”17 The sacraments are handled most thoroughly within the context of ecclesiology. As such, they are connected with the Lord Jesus but are also rites distinct from his own, peculiar identity as the ἱλαστήριον (“atoning place/sacrifice”) and separate from his actual person, the One who is the source of living water. In the end, they express the power of sacrifice and death-conquering-death only in a derivative way despite Paul’s bald statements that “we were buried by baptism” (Rom 6:6) and that unworthy communication profanes Christ’s “body and blood” 1 Cor 11:27).18 Wright’s desire to avoid the Protestant-Catholic impasse is not solved by his contextualization of these passages. Thus the question remains: what is the tertium quid if Paul was himself “blithely innocent” of such debates (PFG 1340)? In thinking through the skirmishes and wars waged both in Pauline studies and beyond, we need to make some distinctions as well as some connections. First, as Wright insists, we should not confuse sacrifice or sacrament with pagan notions of theurgy and magic; on the other hand, it is essential to remember the gravity of the altar/table, which the apostle reminds us is perilous if approached in the wrong way (1 Cor 11:21–22, 29–30). Wright is perspicacious in that he sees the danger of psychologizing Paul’s thought so that we think only in terms of his subjective religious experience as does, for example, J. Ashton, who makes an analogy between what he perceives to be the apostle’s mysticism and shamanism.19 Read from such a perspective, the

16

It does seem odd that Wright puts the emphasis here upon Baptism as a rite by which one “gets in” (PFG 1336) when the very word exodus speaks first of a way out – out of Egypt, out of sin, by means of death. To jump immediately to the Promised Land, and to the positive constitutive implications of this rite as “a Christian innovation” (framed by the apostle as he reinterprets the Exodus) may be to mute the sacrificial themes of the slain lamb, the blood on the doorposts, the drowning of some in the Sea, the “dying in Christ.” As Wright would be quick to agree, it is not simply a “leaving behind” (PFG 1337) but a death and a sacrifice that is involved – deeply by the Lord, and by means of solidarity for his followers, some of whom actually have the marks of Christ, suffering and death, upon their bodies. But his emphasis lies elsewhere: “a rite … having the effect of binding together a particular community and shaping its communal life” (PFG 1338). 17 Wright’s earliest statement to this effect is found in N. T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 122. It becomes programmatic in PFG. 18 The explanation that sin against the Church is sin against Jesus seems hardly equal to the graphic and particular nature of the apostle’s word choice. 19 John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Wright himself does not treat Ashton in terms of the sacraments, but his comments

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sacraments become an aid to ineffable private experience, in contradiction to Paul’s teaching. Even more to the point is Wright’s subtle critique of Theissen’s semiotic approach, which details the sacraments as “ritual sign language” alongside narrative and prescriptive sign language.20 Though Wright is in agreement with Theissen that these symbolic elements “contributed towards forming a community” (PFG 1330), he faults him for not recognizing the countercultural impact of Paul’s religion as it came into a collision course with political and cultural movements of its day (PFG 1333). The gravitas of the Exodus story, in which the power of the true God was expressed, informs Baptism (PFG 1333–38), which is also associated with the cross of Christ. Wright’s critique of Theissen and Ashton demonstrates that he does not view St. Paul’s sacraments as a casual, “Kum by Ya” moment, that is, as community activities devoid of awe-struck participation. On the other hand, in his discussion we move rather quickly to the communal and political implications of the sacraments without lingering over the wonder that such liturgical activity “‘binds’ the baptized to the One God” (PFG 1334). The Pauline texts on Baptism and Eucharist stress the sacrificial implications of Jesus’s death but also link sacrifice with a sacramental view of God’s actions in the world that takes into consideration the entire story of salvation. In this too, Wright’s insistence on the whole Biblical narrative is salutary, though he does not demonstrate particularly its corrective influence upon misconstruals of Pauline sacramentality. Here we might apply his emphasis upon the Scriptural narrative to our topic. Some of the current theological debates concerning the connection of atonement with sacrament in the NT are predicated on too narrow a view of the sacrament, which fastens exclusively upon the death of Jesus (though this nadir – or apex – of the God-Man’s sacrificial offering should never be dismissed!). Careful attention to how Paul’s letters knit these themes together will prevent three common dangers enumerated by A. M. Ramsey: that we think of Jesus’s sacrifice only in terms of his death; that we separate the action of the Son from that of the Father; and that we consider the priest’s eucharistic action as separate from the offering of the rest of the Church.21 To this we might add the restrictive view of Jesus’s death as a mere legal transaction without reference to his assumption of humanity and its healing effect. Paul has in view not only sin, but also a second enemy – death! In this dynamic, Baptism is not simply a washing, but a

are instructive in helping us think through how Ashton’s approach would distort the meaning of these mysterious rites as explained by the apostle. 20 Gerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM, 1999) is treated by Wright on PFG 1328–30. 21 Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (New York: Longmans, 1936), 117.

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dying and rising in Christ; the cup and bread go beyond a memorial and are understood as “medicine of immortality,” anticipating the resurrection life to come.22 Due to his emphasis on Paul’s specific ecclesiological contributions, Wright subsumes what might have been a theology of Pauline sacramentality under the topic of the church. What happens when we shift the emphasis off Baptism and Eucharist as markers of the new community and put the presence of God in the center of the picture?23 In this case, we are led to see these rites not as instructive or constructive symbols, but as quintessential expressions of worship and as places where God meets his own. The problem with Ashton’s analysis goes beyond psychologization and individualization: it is blindness to the wonder that the Lord delights to work in our material world. Similarly, Theissen’s semiotic cathedral is exposed as a brittle construct that makes no demands upon the one appreciating it. Where is the ineluctable power of the One who condescends to wrestle with Israel, and who meets with his own in the creatures of water, oil, bread, and wine? The power of these rites to speak against the status quo, which Wright stresses, is not central, but serendipitous. “Holy things are for the holy,”24 even while this act also proclaims the Lord to those who will join the community. The power of sacraments to constitute the new community as a witness to the world is there 22

Here, of course, we venture beyond the apostle’s discussion of Eucharist to themes found more clearly in later tradition. Nonetheless, 1 Cor 11 speaks of participating unworthily in the rite as conveying physical illness: is it a far reach to assume that the apostle himself, and the Corinthians, assumed that the opposite would be the case if all things were in order? When they come together in this way, it is to be “for better” (1 Cor 11:17). 23 An example of where this might have been done is Wright’s intriguing chiastic ordering of 1 Cor 12 (PFG 426), where he takes the chiasm to show that Baptism “defines the community of the baptized as the Messiah’s people” (Wright’s own emphasis). In fact, the center of the chiasm, if it holds, is not a view of Baptism per se, but the statement οὕτως καὶ ὁ Χριστός [ἕν], “So also the Christ is one” (12b). Surrounding this statement of the divine unity of the Messiah, which is consonant with the oneness of God (Deut 6:4, cf. 1 Cor 8:6), is a statement about the natural oneness of the body (12a) and the one Spirit who by Baptism constitutes the spiritual Body, that is, the Church. Clearly, Wright is correct that the apostle’s main concern in this passage is to speak about the unity of the Church, hearkening back to his discussion of its divisions in 1 Cor 1. But the premise of that unity, the foundational statement, is the oneness of God, the oneness of Christ, the oneness of the Spirit. It would seem, then, that Baptism into the one LORD does not define the Church after the fact, but establishes her, as members enter into the unity of God. To return to the beginning of 1 Corinthians, it is the spiritual person within the body of Christ who understands spiritual things, including how the diversity of gifts makes for one-ness (1 Cor 2:14). The Messiah’s oneness is the foundation, with Baptism into Messiah actually constituting the Church, rather than simply marking it out. 24 This is the exclamation made by the priest during the solemn moment of the elevation in the Eastern Divine Liturgy. To this, the people respond, “One is holy; One is Lord Jesus Christ! To the glory of God the Father, Amen!”

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because, in the first place, they are the locale where Heaven and Earth, Christ and his people, the Spirit and the created world, meet. Primarily, they are the place of communion between the creature and the holy Creator. (“All were made to drink of one Spirit,” 1 Cor 12:13b.) In continually speaking about Baptism and Eucharist as our communion with Christ, the Anointed One, Wright perhaps unwittingly stifles our astonishment that we are called to fellowship with God. This is unfortunate since he has spoken about the Messiah as the LORD,25 about the memorial supper as “also celebrating a presence and a present reality” (PFG 251n24), and of the special quality of the “holy meals of messianic fellowship” (PFG 360). Moreover, as a conclusion to ch. 13, we are reminded that Eucharist functions … as a rite in which the founding myth was rehearsed … as a rite in which the worshippers share the life of the divinity being worshipped … as a rite dependent upon a prior sacrifice … as a rite which should bind the community together. (PFG 1347–48)

All the elements are here: worship, sharing in God, sacrifice, and human κοινωνία. However, it is the last element that dominates the chapter, and that is communicated through his placement of this larger discussion within an understanding of “Religion” (PFG 1320–52) and within historical currents (Part IV) rather than in his section on theology proper. “Messiah-faithfulness and baptism” and table-fellowship with the Messiah, the LORD, should give way to wonder concerning the incomprehensible death and inexpressible life of God. A singing of Wesley is in order: “’Tis mercy all! Th’immortal dies!” Now that we have considered Wright’s overall approach and his construal of the sacraments in relation to Pauline monotheism, we will go on to place the discussion within his understanding of the Pauline historical axis. What time is it?

3. The Hegemony of History, Metaphorical Eschatology, and the Time It Is Just as our compelling interlocutor is well-known for his reconstrual of δικαιοσύνη, so he is both celebrated and vilified for his emphasis upon history and for his Cairdian explanation of eschatological language as metaphorically signifying political events.26 Indeed, his question “what time is it?” was not 25 I use capitals here used in deference to the apostle’s reformulation of the Shema in 1 Cor 8:6. This seems more reflective of Paul’s meaning than a lower-case “lord.” 26 There is, indeed, an entire essay in this volume by Jörg Frey devoted to Wright’s treatment of “apocalyptic.” Here we will only consider the elements of space and identity as they relate to a sacramental world view.

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among the original worldview questions proposed by Walsh and Middleton27 but was necessarily added as he noted the prominence of salvation history in the Christian corpus: “Since writing NTPG I have realized that ‘what time is it?’ needs adding to the four questions I started with …. Without it, the structure collapses into the timelessness which characterizes some non-JudaeoChristian worldviews.”28 This explanation was written prior to the advent of those whom Wright dubs apocalyptic “covenant-dividers,” and who have now arrived with gusto among Paul’s interpreters. Yet even in his discussion of Jesus, Wright was combatting a lack of attention to the questions of history found in some critics of the “quest for the historical Jesus.” If the nature of the four gospels is such as to foreground historicity – not to mention the strange notice in the creed concerning “Pontius Pilate”! – then the occasional nature of St. Paul’s letters requires more attention to time. Wright’s polemic is apparent in the earliest chapters of his book, where the continuity of the covenant is established through his interpretation of 4 Ezra, and in his exploration of the Deuteronomic scheme. His addition to Sanders’s original critique of Protestant eisegesis is welcome: we need to be reminded that an affirmation of radical discontinuity does violence to Paul’s view that Christ is the fulfillment of Torah. “History,” Wright puckishly comments, “within this [‘apocalyptic’] frame of thought, is there only to be broken” (PFG 141). The thought of God “invading” the cosmos “without reference to the covenant” is as pernicious as a reading which offers “the solution of a non-narrative world” to the individual alone (PFG 141). The medicine is strong, but necessary. Perhaps, however, one cannot live on medicine alone. For it seems that the “spatial” element of apocalyptic (for want of a better term)29 suffers at the elevation of the historical. We see this in Wright’s otherwise remarkable reading of 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Daniel when we give attention to what is omitted. Following on from his exposition of the sequential dimension of Deut 32 (inspired by Josephus), Wright tackles 4 Ezra, the Jewish apocalypse that matches our own Christian Apocalypse both in temporal provenance and 27

See n3. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2 (London: SPCK, 1996), 443n1. 29 Since John J. Collins, ed., Apocalyptic: The Morphiology of a Genre, Semeia 14 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), scholars have acknowledged in the genre apocalypse two axes, the “spatial” (or vertical) as well as the “temporal” (or horizontal), by which the questions “what?” and “when?” are answered. Attention to such apocalypses as 1 Enoch, which stress the spatial dimension, has allowed us to move beyond equating apocalyptic with eschatological and to see this spatial dimension even within apocalypses that are more oriented towards the historical. In Edith M. Humphrey, The Ladies and the Cities, JSPSup 17 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), I argue that to these two axes may be added a third, “the axis of identity,” which corresponds to the question “who?” 28

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in the key historical question that is being asked: given human suffering, is God faithful? Wright, however, frames the question in wholly temporal terms: “The natural question which remains, as to when God will finally sort the whole thing out, is eventually answered within the book as it now stands by the vision of the eagle and the lion” (PFG 132). He realizes that fastening upon this aspect of “what time is it?” may not do justice to the entire book of 4 Ezra, but it is “enough to notice” the theme of fulfillment in these visions because it suits Wright’s “present purpose” (PFG 132). It is, of course, absolutely fair to highlight the anonymous author’s grasp of the historical continuum, which he sets forth in some parts of his apocalypse. 4 Ezra, like Revelation, is “an historical apocalypse.” Yet there is another element in this apocalypse upon which the solution to the major question turns. Wright does not notice this because his gaze is upon the historical continuum. I refer to the cyclical and persistent nature of the problem of evil, which is broken in the center of the apocalypse not by a vision of the lion, but by the suffering of Lady Zion, who in her very suffering is shown to be a city being built up (4 Ezra 10:27, following the Latin text). Simultaneously, Ezra, the spokesman for the faithful, cries out in lament and so is also ineffably transformed from a plaintiff into a prophet. The question is not simply, “what time is it? (i.e., are we there yet?)” but “who are we?” and “who is this God whom we worship?” The answer comes to us in the mode of Job: “We are the people of a mysterious God who works through suffering.” Moreover, the final chapters of 4 Ezra yield the picture of a people not merely defined by open covenantal books that assure them of God’s continued care in history, but also informed by books for the wise that contain “the spring of understanding, the fount of wisdom, and the river of knowledge” (14:47). These undisclosed mysteries correspond to the mysteries that Ezra sees but does not recount as he travels through transformed and enlarged Zion at the turning point of the apocalypse (10:55–57). These are not primarily temporal mysteries, but mysteries having to do with the transformed space and the transformed identity of God’s people – spatial and ontological, rather than historical in aspect. Of such mysteries in 4 Ezra, Wright has nothing to say. Even 2 Baruch, a more thoroughly historical apocalypse, offers glimpses into the spatial dimensions. For example, there is Moses’s reception of celestial and terrestrial mysteries at 2 Bar. 59:4–11, which Wright acknowledges (PFG 132n229). However, he does not note the wonder that in the earth itself God has secured away treasures of the Temple (6:1–9), treasures that serve as liturgical symbols for the benefit of his people. Nor does he make much of those ineffable details concerning the worshipping angels and the inscrutable Living One that are embedded in the extensive prayer of Baruch, (22:4–13). Wright’s use of these books to bolster the covenantal continuum is fair. Missing, however, are the aspects of spatial mystery and identity which peek through in 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and Daniel (cf. the fourth figure in the furnace,

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the present battle between Michael and the enemy), but are front and center in 1 Enoch’s heavenly journeys (seemingly unimportant to Wright).30 It is, of course, unfair to fault a book for selecting those things that are central to its thesis. It would have been helpful, however, if Wright had uncovered the apocalyptic perspective of those first two questions, “who?” and “where?”, with respect to the cosmic and mysterious dimensions and not simply with attention to the social and cultural ones. To recognize in the apocalypses the looming presence of things and beings mysterious, and to see these as having explanatory power for the apostle’s letters would perhaps have led Wright to read differently those tantalizing passages where St. Paul mentions mystery (e.g. 1 Cor 2:6) and personal illumination (2 Cor 12), or where spirits, glory, and the angels are present in the gatherings of the Church (1 Cor 5:4; 2 Cor 3:17–18; 4:6; 1 Cor 11:10). When we construe apocalyptic language as sheer metaphor for earthly and political realities we miss other dimensions that may well enrich our understanding of Pauline sacramentality. Caird’s lessons on mythological and eschatological language are surely worth heeding, and Wright is a shrewd ambassador for this view. However, Caird’s approach is limited in that in that it may leash metaphors that have polyvalent potential: what if the “alternative symbolic universe [intended] to reshape … imagination and structure … worldview” (PFG 175) includes a cosmic dimension? What if we are not only like Elisha’s servant at Dothan, requiring to see the presence of God in historical circumstances (1 Kgs 6:17), but also blind to the preferred, chosen places of the LORD in our world, in our worship, and in the material elements that we offer to Him? Wright says a good deal about filling up the void of a desacralized world by reference to the Anointed One and his followers (PFG 387) – but how does the immanence of the Holy Spirit, “who fills all things,” figure in this new situation? The emphasis upon the spirit (sic) as ἀρραβών in a historical continuum, and as expressed almost wholly in ecclesiology, prevents us from exploring this fully. Since Wright gives permission, let us without apology turn to Ephesians as consonant with Paul’s theology. Can we hear, in the protracted, thankful ‫ ברכה‬of Eph 1 an echo of the eucharistic liturgy, which has embedded within it an allusion to baptismal sealing (ἐσφραγίσθητε) by the divine Anointer, rather than simply a “marking out” (Eph 1:11, Col 2:11– 12; cf. PFG 729)? The One who descended also ascended so that he might fill all things for there is “one body” and “one Spirit” by whom we worship (Eph 5:15–20). More striking is the role given to us to inform the normally unseen Powers (Eph 3:10) about something they cannot understand – that Christ has filled all things, and that he is now by the Spirit at work in human bodies 30 Thus, he stresses the Animal Apocalypse (by far, in my view, the most pedestrian passage of 1 Enoch, with its steno symbolism) and chapters 2 and 7 of Daniel, cf. PFG 122, 119.

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brought together in the Body, in this world, in death and in resurrection. Even what appears to be the oldest political partnership, marriage, now takes on the aspect of a µυστήριον (Eph 5:32). Ordinary things are being made to partake of the higher reality that they symbolize; better, they are being taken up into Christ, whose plan is for the fullness of time, but who also is working on the vertical or spatial plane to “unite all things in heaven and in earth” (Eph 1:9). It is surprising that Wright does not balk at the suggestion of Theissen that the ‘rites’ in question are independent of space and time, giving a means by which ordinary space and time can be structured and hence by which humans can experience them as a different sort of time. (PFG 1329, my italics)

The statement seems at once too spiritualistic and too pedestrian. After all, Wright has firmly connected Baptism (via Horrell) to “the central story of the Christian myth” (PFG 428) and described it as “an encoded narrative” (PFG 419). Further, he has described the sacraments as the way in which “the worldview of Paul c[a]me into practical and physical expression” (PFG 417). Would it not be better, then, to see the nature of these rites as timeful rather than timeless, or “independent of time?”31 Just as Christ discloses “a depth of heaven-and-earth relation” only previously glimpsed, and since “the new creation is here … glimpsed in praise and intercession,” might we not also see the apostle affording Baptism and Eucharist the same role (PFG 1518)? Here, in the mysteries given to God’s people, we see the true meaning of creation. No longer can any creature “separate us from the love of God,” but because Christ has hallowed this present world, Creation has become in the present time the helper by which we are washed, by which we walk with God, feed on him, are healed by him – even see him! Indeed, she hopes to come into her own glory in due time (Rom 8:21), and there is a foretaste of this every time we offer the fruit of this world to the Creator who will renew all things. As St. Basil puts it in his Liturgy, We pray and beseech You … that by the pleasure of your goodness your Holy Spirit may descend upon us and upon these gifts lying here before You, and bless and sanctify them, and reveal this bread to be the precious Body of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, and that which is in this chalice to be the precious Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, poured forth for the life of the world.

That which is a “matter of mindset, the deepest habit of the heart” is not an act of cognition alone but involves the material world and our bodies (PFG 31

This way of conceiving time is congruent with Wright’s own explanation in his popular book N. T. Wright, The Meal Jesus Gave Us (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999). On p. 47 he explains: “at every celebration of the Jesus-meal … God’s past catches up with us again, and God’s future comes to meet us once more” (his italics). Precisely! I want, however, to understand this explicitly in terms of the dynamics of the Incarnation, by which God has assumed the material and the temporal world and so is transfiguring it: this divine activity is seen now especially when the Church gathers for worship.

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1518). Let us remember Schmemann’s insight: “A sacrament is primarily a revelation of the genuine nature of creation … a sacrament is primarily a revelation of the sacramentality of creation itself.”32 We return, at the end, to St. Paul’s exposition of things created good and gone wrong in the Garden (Rom 1:19–32) and newly created in the Second Adam (Rom 5). The first couple was given all they needed to flourish in God’s good creation, and in that context they walked with God. Refusal to give thanks and to worship aright led to the misuse of that material world – idolatry, disordered lust, and all kinds of conduct arising from not only the mind but also the body, a deadly condition in a dying world. The death and resurrection of the Second Adam, in the body, allowed for our reception of the life-giving Spirit; by his light we no longer see the world κατὰ σάρκα but as “an epiphany of God, a means of his revelation, presence and power.”33 We have only a few letters from the hands of St. Paul and only a few places in the NT that treat the sacraments. They are enough to remind us of the use to which God has put his humble creation – water to cleanse and in which we are killed and raised anew in Christ; bread and wine by which we share in Jesus’s sacrifice, are made one, and taste in anticipation the banquet to come; and as St. Paul’s complement reminds us, oil by which we are healed (Jas 5:14). Here, then, is the tertium quid through the Catholic-Protestant impasse. It is to follow Wright in his first treatment of the sacraments (Part II), “fram[ing] them … within a short study of the symbolic praxis of prayer and scripture,” which thus “emphasize[s] … all the more how much these two stand out” (PFG 417). They are remarkable not simply as expressive of our new humanity, but as actual overtures of God, who speaks with us in prayer, joins together worshippers, times and places, and transforms us. It is to recognize that a renewed worldview κατὰ πνεῦµα is primarily given to us that we might see God, though of course the lens affects how we see the created order as well. It is to see the sacraments neither as discrete symbols with cognitive and testimonial value, nor as magical human acts, but as God-given places, actions, and objects where the Holy Spirit takes up the creation and uses it for intimacy with us. The sacraments, Paul suggests, are not merely signs by which we are “marked out” in a particular way (PFG 427), nor merely rites by which we express our unity, nor even primarily means by which we proclaim what Christ has done in history – though they do accomplish these things. They are the “traditioned” (1 Cor 11:23) and active means of our transformation, personally and together, so that we might be truly with the One whom we worship. Here the “who are we?” “where are we?” and “what time is it?” meet around the One who has filled time (all χρόνος and 32 33

Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 33. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 120.

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each καιρός) and also space. Some respondents to this reading of Paul and this analysis of Wright’s work (perhaps even my dear friend!) may comment “wryly that this is just what one might expect from an [Orthodox]” (PFG 417). I remain convinced that St. Paul would agree with Alexander Schmemann: “We need water and oil, bread and wine, in order to be in communion with God and to know him.”34 By means of these lowly creatures, “exalted manna” (PFG 1516) collected “from the middle of everywhere,” we come “to know the place for the first time.”35 Here, material metaphorical vehicles are united with their Tenor, so there is something “concentrated and gathered … something understood” (PFG 1519): the Lord with us, in our prayers, and in our bodies, in our moments, the middle point between heaven and earth.

Bibliography Ashton, John. The Religion of Paul the Apostle. London: Yale University Press, 2000. Boersma, Hans. Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chryssavgis, John. “A New Heavens and a New Earth: Orthodox Christian Insights from Theology, Spirituality and the Sacraments.” Pages 152–62 in Towards an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation. Edited by John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013 Collins, John J., ed. Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre. Semeia 14. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979. Finney, Paul Corby. The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Humphrey, Edith M. The Ladies and the Cities: Transformation and Apocalyptic Identity in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and the Shepherd of Hermas. JSPSup 17. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995. –. “Sacrifice and Sacrament: Sacramental Implications of the Death of Christ.” Pages 68– 82 in Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering, eds. Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Kereszty, Roch. A. Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eucharistic Theology from a Historical, Biblical and Systematic Perspective. Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2004. Ramsay, Michael. The Gospel and the Catholic Church. New York: Longmans, 1936. Rowe, C. Kavin. “New Testament Iconography? Situating Paul in the Absence of Material Evidence.” Pages 289–312 in Annette Weissenrieder, Friederike Wendt, and Petra von Gemünden, eds. Picturing the New Testament: Studies in Ancient Visual Images. WUNT II 193. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2010. –. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2003. Theissen, Gerd. A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion. London: SCM, 1999.

34 35

Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 120. This is the title of PFG ch. 15 (see PFG 1408).

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Walsh, Brian J., and J. Richard Middleton. The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press 1984. Ware, Kallistos “Through Creation to the Creator.” Pages 86–105 in Towards an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation. Edited by John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. The Meal Jesus Gave Us. Louisville; Westminster John Knox, 2002. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Evangelism and the Mission of the Church Eckhard J. Schnabel Tom Wright recognizes the critical importance of mission and evangelism for New Testament theology and for the church. He recognizes that his Paul and the Faithfulness of God provides neither a presentation nor an analysis of Paul’s actual missionary work; thus he promises that the final volume in the series in which PFG appeared, “Christian Origins and the Question of God,” “will deal more directly, in summary of the whole, with the question of early Christian missiology” (PFG 1483). This essay explores what we can learn from Paul, and from Wright, about mission and evangelism.

1. Paul’s Missionary Work Paul’s missionary work in space and time is both the context and the catalyst of the Apostle’s letters; it forms the content of the second half of the book of Acts. In Wright’s PFG, we do not learn much about Paul’s travels, his evangelistic preaching before Jewish and Gentile audiences, and his efforts in establishing local congregations of believers in Jesus. Wright speaks of Paul’s “endless travels” (PFG 1354) and of the fact that “he travelled restlessly” (PFG 1487). Paul’s travels always ended, of course, whenever he arrived in the city that he deemed should be the next location for preaching the gospel. And Paul surely rested, at least during the long sea voyages (if there was no storm!). Part IV entitled “Paul in History” (PFG 1269–1519) rarely uses the material in Acts 13–20. Most of what Wright says in the 250 pages of these five chapters could have been integrated into Part III, which treats Paul’s theology. In Wright’s presentation, mission and evangelism seem to be largely ideas. He does say that Paul “was not just a spectator” (PFG 1489), but what Paul actually did, besides “doing theology,” is not explored. Wright gives us scattered glimpses of what a fuller presentation would have to include. Wright describes Paul’s ministry as focused on the message that God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah who is the new temple where heaven and earth meet, reconciled through his sacrifice. Paul’s vocation was to announce that this had happened, to ‘name the Messiah’ after the manner of a herald proclaiming a new sovereign … and so to extend this temple-shaped mission into the rest of the world. (PFG 1493)

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This statement could lead to an exploration of the meaning of the verb “announce” (κηρύσσω)1 and other verbs used to describe Paul’s preaching, teaching, counseling, exhorting, and traveling. The reference to “the rest of the world” would warrant a description of the geographical scope of Paul’s missionary work. We can explore the manner of his preaching before Jewish audiences and before Gentile audiences. We can explore the range of people he was able to establish contact with – from Roman governors and city magistrates to Jews and godfearers in synagogues to prison wardens and slave girls. The following sections give brief examples of the material that can and should be analyzed. 1.1 Paul’s Missionary Preaching upon Arrival in a New City Paul’s discussion in 1 Cor 1:18–25 is relevant not only for underscoring the centrality of Jesus as Israel’s crucified Messiah (PFG 522), but for understanding Paul’s evangelistic preaching and aspects of his missionary procedures. Paul engages his critics in the church in Corinth concerning the values of contemporary rhetoric, which they were using to evaluate past and present teachers in the church.2 Paul speaks very deliberately of the “entrance” (εἴσοδος) into a city and to the people in a given city before whom he proclaims the gospel (1 Cor 2:1; 1 Thess 1:9).3 Paul reflected on the factors and the conditions that came into play during the process of establishing first contacts with Jewish and Gentile listeners. It appears that Paul’s behavior as an “orator” surprised educated Gentiles both at the point of initial contact and afterwards. Paul reminds the Christians in Corinth of the events that took place when he first visited the city (1 Cor 2:1). Paul’s forceful remarks in 1 Cor 1:18–2:5 can most appropriately be understood against the background of Greek-Roman orators. In the eyes of the pagan citizens of a city, Paul was an orator who was looking for an audience. Compared with the conventions of the contemporary orators, however, Paul’s conduct was unconventional. Paul asserts that his behavior was deliberate:

1

The comments in PFG 1503n72 are rather brief. Cf. Duane Litfin, St. Paul’s Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1–4 and GrecoRoman Rhetoric, SNTSMS 79 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bruce W. Winter, Philo and Paul among the Sophists, SNTSMS 96 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147–65; Bruce W. Winter, After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 31–43; Eckhard J. Schnabel, Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther, 3rd ed., Historisch-Theologische Auslegung (Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 2014), 110–59. 3 1 Thess 1:9 refers to εἴσοδος, defined by BDAG as an “act of arriving at a destination” and as an “act of finding acceptance” (BADG s.v. εἴσοδος 2–3); in 1 Cor 2:1 Paul reminds the Corinthian believers of the time “when I came to you“ (ἐλθὼν πρὸς ὑµᾶς). Cf. 1 Cor 16:8–9; 2 Cor 2:12; Gal 4:14; and Col 4:3. 2

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When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith (πίστις) might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. (1 Cor 2:1–5 NRSV)

Paul uses the terms ἀπόδειξις, δύναµις, πείθω, and πίστις (1 Cor 2:4–5), which are central rhetorical terms. “Power” (δύναµις) is used by Isocrates and Aristotle in their definition of rhetoric: rhetoric is the “power” to detect the means of persuasion, rhetoric is the “power of speaking” (δύναµις τοῦ λέγειν). The verb πείθω (Lat. persuadere) is often used in definitions of rhetoric. Quintilian defines rhetoric as vis persuadendi.4 The central section of a speech, after the preparatory exordium and narratio, was the argumentatio (also called probatio, in Greek πίστις), which presented the evidence for the position that was presented by the orator.5 When Paul writes in 1 Cor 2:1, “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom,” he emphasizes the fact that when he preaches the gospel before Jewish and pagan audiences, he intentionally dispenses with the traditional contemporary conventions of rhetoric. He has no interest in being the center of attention by receiving praise from others. He does not want to gain prestige, he does not compete with rival orators, he does not have any financial interests. And, more importantly, he knows that the character of the gospel of Jesus Christ makes it impossible to rely on the strategies of traditional rhetoric as described by Aristotle, Cicero, or Quintilian. The message of a crucified Messiah is a “stumbling block” for Jewish listeners and “nonsense” for pagan listeners (1 Cor 1:23). Paul knows that the message of the cross cannot be adapted to the theological, rhetorical or aesthetic expectations of his audiences. He knows that he cannot convince his contemporaries of the truth of the gospel with traditional rhetoric or rational arguments. He had good “inartificial proofs”: the eyewitness testimony of people who had seen Jesus to be alive after his resurrection 4

Quintilian, Inst. 7.3.6: quid sit rhetorice, uis persuadendi an bene dicendi scientia. For details see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, 3rd ed. (München: Steiner, 1990), 190 (§ 348). See specifically Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 190–236 (§§ 348–430); Walter F. Veit, “Argumentatio,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 1:904–10; Manfred Kraus and Hans-Dieter Spengler, “Indiz,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 4:333–39; Josef Klein, “Beweis,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 1:1533–40; Manfred Kraus, “Enthymem,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 2:1197–1210; Wolfgang Gast, “Causa,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 2:140–42; Josef Klein, “Beispiel,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 1:1432–1413; L. Calboli Montefusco, “Auctoritas,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 1:1177–82; Walter F. Veit, “Induktion/Deduktion,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 4:351–62. 5

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(1 Cor 15:5–8). But the event that these witnesses could testify to would remind Greek and Roman listeners of mythological tales, prompting doubt about the relevance of this particular πίστις or argumentum. Moreover, the conviction that Jesus’s death on the cross represents the ultimate and universal rescue operation of the one true God who had created the world could not be proven with an appeal to eyewitnesses of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus from the dead. In the repertoire of material proofs, Paul would not have been able to find signa or argumenta with which to corroborate the salvific significance of Jesus’s death on the cross. As regards exempla, he could have referred to people who had the courage to die for their convictions, the classical example being Socrates. But such examples do not demonstrate that the death of a man hailed by his followers as the Jewish messiah brings salvation, forgiveness of sin, and adoption into God’s family to all people who believe in him. Neither would Paul have been able to appeal to the auctoritas of a generally acknowledged proposition (ἔνδοξα)6 or a generally recognized wisdom saying. Paul did have personal credibility (ἦθος) as a Roman citizen and a Torah scholar who had travelled internationally, but the shamefulness of the crucifixion of Jesus could not be overcome by such credentials. And the passions (πάθος) which Paul, speaking about a crucified savior, could have aroused would have consisted in sympathy at best, revulsion at worst. If one follows Aristotle and defines the comedy as “an imitation of base men … characterized not by every kind of vice but specifically by ‘the ridiculous’ (τὸ γελοῖον), some error or ugliness that is painless and has no harmful effects,” or if one follows Cicero and understands “the ridiculous” (ridiculum) as “a certain ugliness or defectiveness,”7 then the message of a crucified Jew who is presented as the savior of mankind must have made a comical (κωµικός, lat. comicus) and ridiculous impression upon the listeners. It was impossible, in the first century, to speak in a rhetorically alluring manner about a man who had been executed on a cross.8 The reality of cruci6

Peter Ptassek, “Endoxa,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 2:1134: “In rhetoric, every persuasive strategy has to start with such fundamental notions which are already generally shared by people and which are thus plausible and compelling if it wants to successfully convince people of something which would remain debatable or implausible without explanation, proof, or example.” 7 Aristotle, Poet. 1449a; Cicero, De or. 2.58.236; cf. Markus Winkler, “Komik, das Komische,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 4:1167. 8 Cf. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), on the shame connected with crucifixion. See the discussion of Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, “Die Kreuzesstrafe während der frühen Kaiserzeit: Ihre Wirklichkeit und Wertung in der Umwelt des Urchristentums,” ANRW 25.1:648–793; John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, WUNT 327 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 418–23; David W. Chapman and Eckhard J. Schnabel, The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus: Texts and Commentary, WUNT 344 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), Part 3: Crucifixion.

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fixion was too gruesome, and needed too much explanation, for rhetorical competence and argumentative brilliance to be of any help. When Paul taught new converts, he described Jesus as the “new Adam,”9 as the “savior of mankind,”10 as the “Son of God,”11 and as the “firstborn of the dead.”12 These are terms and categories that could be packaged as attractive religious content when introducing the message about Jesus to Jewish and pagan audiences. Paul asserts, however, that he never dispensed with preaching Jesus the crucified Savior in his missionary proclamation (1 Cor 2:2). Paul relies for conversions of men and women not on the powers of rhetorical strategies and techniques, but on the power of God. The “proof” (ἀπόδειξις) for the validity of the gospel of Jesus Christ is not to be found through the application of logical inference or deduction. The “proof” for the truth of the gospel is to be found in the power of the Holy Spirit (emphasized in PFG 917, without discussion of the rhetorical context of 1 Cor 1–2). When Paul proclaims the gospel (ὁ λόγος µου καὶ τὸ κήρυγµά µου; 1 Cor 2:4), he speaks “not with plausible words of wisdom” (οὐκ ἐν πειθοῖς σοφίας λόγοις). Rather, he relies “on the demonstration of the Spirit and of power (ἐν ἀποδείξει πνεύµατος καὶ δυνάµεως)” (1 Cor 2:4). The preaching of the gospel is a demonstration effected by the Spirit and by “power,” i.e., by God himself. The powerful Spirit of God “proves” the truth of the proclamation of God’s redemptive revelation in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.13 This “proof” consists in the fact that Jews and pagans living in Corinth are being persuaded to accept the message of Jesus the crucified and risen Messiah. The supernatural proof for the validity of Paul’s missionary proclamation is the conversion of Jews and 9

Cf. Otfried Hofius, “Die Adam-Christus-Antithese und das Gesetz: Erwägungen zu Röm 5,12–21,” in Paul and the Mosaic Law: The Third Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September 1994), ed. James D. G. Dunn, WUNT 89 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 165–206. 10 Cf. David W. J. Gill, “A Saviour for the Cities of Crete: The Roman Background to the Epistle to Titus,” in The New Testament in its First Century Setting: Essays on Context and Background in Honour of B. W. Winter on His 65th Birthday, P. J. Williams et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 220–30. 11 Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 101–08. 12 Cf. Otfried Hofius, “‘Erstgeborener vor aller Schöpfung’ – ‘Erstgeborener aus den Toten’: Erwägungen zu Struktur und Aussage des Christushymnus Kol 1,15–20,” in Auferstehung – Resurrection: The Fourth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium: Resurrection, Transfiguration, and Exaltation in Old Testament, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Tübingen, 1990), ed. Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger, WUNT 135 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 185–203. 13 Cf. Florian Voss, Das Wort vom Kreuz und die menschliche Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zur Soteriologie des 1. Korintherbriefes, FRLANT 199 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 131; Hans-Christian Kammler, Kreuz und Weisheit: Eine exegetische Untersuchung zu 1 Kor 1,10–3,4, WUNT 159 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 171.

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pagans to faith in Jesus, the crucified Messiah and Lord. Paul reaffirms in 1 Cor 2:5 why he renounces traditional rhetorical methods: “so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God (ἵνα ἡ πίστις ὑµῶν µὴ ᾖ ἐν σοφίᾳ ἀνθρώπων ἀλλ’ ἐν δυνάµει θεοῦ).” Wright surely would not disagree with any of this. However, his focus on Paul’s engagement with Israel’s story, back story, plot, and sub-plot moves the realities of Paul’s world and work to a theological plane in which specific missionary experience with its goals and challenges is strangely muted. The truth of Paul’s theology was inextricably rooted in the truth of the good news of a crucified Messiah, a truth that did not fit the hermeneutical framework of either Jews or polytheists. Missionaries certainly tell stories, but they also encounter specific people with diverse cultural background living in specific cities and belong to various social classes. An exploration of the historical, cultural, religious, and social realities in which Paul preached, taught, and wrote is as important as an exploration of the theological traditions with which he worked. 1.2 Geographical Strategies Paul’s geographical movements, including his plan to initiate missionary work in Spain, are explained by Wright in terms of an effort to establish messianic communities in the very places where Caesar’s power was strongest … in the places where another kyrios, another world ruler, another basileus, was being named and was being worshipped as the one and only sovereign. (PFG 1502–3)14

This is another suggestion that seeks to explain the geographical scope of Paul’s missionary work. Wright rejects, correctly I think, the view that Paul wanted to carry out the missionary “program” of Isa 66:18–20 that reaches the “end of the earth” (cf. Isa 49:6) via Tarshish, Put, Lud, Meshech, Tubal, Javan, and the distant coastlands. To suggest that Paul wanted to visit places “where Caesar’s power was strongest” does not explain Paul’s actual travels hinted at in his letters and explicitly mentioned in the book of Acts. 1) Paul does not focus exclusively on “the Roman world,” as is demonstrated by his missionary work in Arabia/Nabatea (cf. Gal 1:17; 2 Cor 11:32), which was not a Roman province in

14

Wright refers to John L. White, The Apostle of God: Paul and the Promise of Abraham (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 130–32; John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom: A New Vision of Paul’s Words and World (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 354–56; Ksenija Magda, Paul’s Territoriality and Mission Strategy: Searching for the Geographical Awareness Paradigm behind Romans, WUNT II 266 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 52– 53.

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the first century.15 2) Small towns such as Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, and Beroea were not renowned for a particularly strong zeal for the emperor cult.16 3) The imperial cult has been documented for nearly 200 cities in Asia Minor, attested by altars, temples, imperial priests, or inscriptions. During the time between 35 BC and AD 60, about fifty-two imperial temples and shrines were built.17 In the New Testament, twenty-four of these cities in which the imperial cult plays an important role are mentioned: Adramyttium, Alexandria Troas, Pisidian Antioch, Assos, Chios, Colossae, Cos, Derbe, Ephesus, Hierapolis, Iconium, Laodicea, Miletus, Mitylene, Patara, Pergamon, Perge, Philadelphia, Rhodes, Samos, Sardis, Smyrna, Tarsus, and Thyatira. In some of these cities Paul engaged in missionary work, but there were many more in which Paul evidently did not preach the gospel, which means that Wright’s suggestion does not explain what he deems “the otherwise strange suggestion that Paul had ‘no room’ for further work in the east” (PFG 1503), unless we assume that in every city in the East for which the emperor cult is attested, other missionaries were already preaching the gospel – in cities such as Aezani, Ancyra, Anazarbus, Bargylia, Cotenna, Daldis, Eumeneia, Halicarnassus, Ilium, Limyra, Mylasa, Nicomedia, Oenoanda, Patara, Sagalassus, Selge, Teos, and Xanthos, to name only a few places in Asia Minor in which Caesar was “being named” and in which Paul, as far as we know, did not initiate missionary work. Before going to Spain, Paul could have found plenty of missionary opportunities in cities and towns in Syria, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Galatia, Pamphylia, Asia, Pontus-Bithynia, Macedonia, Achaia, Illyrium, Italy, and Gaul. 4) The imperial cult, while focused on the emperor, included female members of the imperial family, a fact that should not be forgotten in discussions of the significance of the imperial cult for Paul. Thus, the explanation of Paul’s plan to preach the gospel in Spain in terms of an attempt to reach the “ends of the earth” (Isa 49:6; Acts 1:8; cf. Strabo, Geogr. 3.1.8) remains the more plausible option, without prejudicing the discussion concerning the imminence of Jesus’s parousia in Paul’s theology. Wright’s suggestion gives Caesar too much credit for Paul’s movements. Paul was less concerned about the emperor than about “all people” and “all Gentiles” (1 Cor 9:22; Rom 1:5; 15:11) who needed to hear the gospel, turn away from whatever Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or local (αὐτόχθων) deity people worshiped to serve the living and true God and believe in Jesus who rescues from the coming wrath (1 Thess 1:1–10). 15

On Paul’s mission in Arabia/Nabatea cf. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 2 vols. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 1032–45; cf. Jerome MurphyO’Connor, “Paul in Arabia,” CBQ 55 (1993): 732–37. 16 Cf. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 1111–13, 1121, 1168 for information on these cities. 17 Cf. Simon R. F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 249–74.

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1.3 Establishing Local Congregations Wright asserts, importantly, that Paul saw his vocation in terms of “bringing into being ‘places’ – humans, one by one and collectively – in which heaven and earth would come together and be, yes, reconciled” (PFG 1493). This emphasis should lead to a thorough exploration of the establishment of new communities of believers in Jesus, not only from the perspective of Scripture’s triple story and its fulfillment in Jesus, but from religious, social, ethnic, organizational, and liturgical perspectives. We get some of this: the churches that Paul started were indeed to be a kind of philosophical school, teaching and modelling a new worldview, inculcating a new understanding, a new way of thinking. They were to train people not only to practise the virtues everyone already acknowledged but also to develop some new ones … They were indeed, despite their lack of priests, sacrifices and temples, to be a new kind of ‘religion’: to read and study their sacred texts and to weave them into the beginnings of a liturgical praxis … These communities were indeed, despite their powerlessness or actually because of it, on the way to becoming a new kind of polis, a social and cultural community cutting across normal boundaries and barriers, obedient to a different kyrios, modelling a new way of being human and a new kind of power. (PFG 1491–92)

This is a significant description of the churches that Paul wanted to establish and nurture. The general description would benefit greatly from a detailed elaboration from Paul’s letters and from Luke’s description of the churches Paul founded. There are other details that would warrant more discussion. I agree with Wright that “Paul did not think the parousia would necessarily happen at once, and he certainly was not trying to provoke or hasten it by his missionary work,” and that “Paul’s gospel was a Jewish message for the nonJewish world … he believed the God of Israel to be the God of the whole world and Israel’s Messiah to be the world’s true lord” (PFG 1497, 1498). Wright explores this in the context of his repeated discussion of, and references to, Scripture’s triple story of God and the world, God and humankind, and God and Israel. It can and should also be explored in terms of Paul’s ethics, which are, largely, the ethics of Israel’s Scriptures, seen in his critique of a hedonistic lifestyle (1 Cor 5–6). There is much more that can be developed further. Note, for example, the statement, The ‘gospel’ is not mere information: it is summons. Something has happened which requires action. Better, someone is now named, acclaimed, exalted as the world’s true κύριος, and one cannot name and acclaim him as such without summoning all people everywhere to submit to his rule (PFG 524).

The phrase “summoning all people everywhere to submit to his rule,” if applied to the history of the early church and to Paul’s ministry, means, specifically, evangelism, missionary work, church planting. The planting and sustaining of churches is briefly addressed (PFG 549–550), while evangelism and missionary work is missing in the summary description of the ἐκκλησία:

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“generating its own necessary and organically appropriate praxis in worship, prayer, scripture reading and (what came to be called) the sacraments” (PFG 565). 1.4 The Missions of Paul and Peter What we know about Peter and Paul from the book of Acts suggests that Peter and Paul never agreed on a division of labor along ethnic lines, which later broke down (pace Wright, PFG 1497–99).18 An interpretation of Gal 2:7–9 in terms of a “Jewish mission” and a “Gentile mission” which excludes Paul from preaching in synagogues and bars Peter from preaching the gospel before Gentiles is not warranted.19 Paul’s description of his missionary flexibility in 1 Cor 9:19–20 demonstrates that he preaches among Jews with the same intensity as he preaches to Gentiles, long before he wrote Rom 11. Furthermore, Luke has Paul preaching in the synagogues of Damascus right after his conversion and throughout his missionary career, while he has Peter preaching before Gentiles in Caesarea (Acts 10) and asserting at the Apostles Council that God had chosen him so that the Gentiles might hear the Gospel (Acts 15:7). A division of the areas of missionary responsibility along geographical lines would have been impractical, especially for Paul since Jewish communities existed in all larger cities of the eastern Mediterranean region. If “preaching the gospel to the circumcised” limited Peter to Judea and Galilee, the question arises as to where Peter would actually have been active, since he evidently had left Jerusalem, and probably Judea as well, in AD 41. The following factors are important. 1) Galatians 2:1–10 does not describe a “division” or “separation” but a κοινωνία, a “close association involving 18

Thus many interpreters, e.g. Hans D. Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 100; J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, AB 33A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 202, 211–16; Gerd Lüdemann, Studien zur Chronologie, vol. 1 of Paulus der Heidenapostel, FRLANT 123 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), 96; Wolfgang Reinbold, Propaganda und Mission im ältesten Christentum: Eine Untersuchung zu den Modalitäten der Ausbreitung der frühen Kirche, FRLANT 188, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 168–72. Similarly, for those who speak of Jewish and Gentile “spheres” or “regions” which Peter and Paul divided up, cf. Theodor Zahn, Der Brief des Paulus an die Galater, 3rd ed. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 9 (Leipzig: Scholl, 1922; repr. with an introduction by Martin Hengel, Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1990), 107; Heinrich Schlier, Der Brief an die Galater, 2nd ed., KEK 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 79–80; Thomas R. Schreiner, Galatians, Zondervan Eexegetical Commentary on the New Testament 9 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 128; Lucien Legrand, “Gal 2.9 and the Missionary Strategy of the Early Church,” in Bible, Hermeneutics, Mission: A Contribution to the Contextual Study of Holy Scripture, Missio 10 (Uppsala: Swedish Institute for Missionary Research, 1995), 21–83, esp. 36–63. 19 For arguments see Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 992–99.

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mutual interests and sharing.”20 The subject of the consultation was not the question of whether there should two separate branches of missionary work, nor of whether Paul should “join” Jerusalem or whether Peter should “join” the missionary work of Paul. Josef Hainz comments that “the fellowship that was confirmed by a handshake is specifically defined in terms of being established on the mutual recognition of the different expressions of the one gospel and in terms of being realized in the collection that had been agreed upon.”21 2) Galatians 2:8 suggests that the issue was not geographical or ethnic areas of missionary work but the effectiveness of the work of Peter among Jews and the work of Paul among Gentiles, which in both cases is completely dependent upon God. The work of the two apostles may have been distinct in terms of larger numbers of Jews being converted to faith in Jesus in Peter’s ministry, and larger numbers of Gentiles in Paul’s ministry. 3) Paul’s concerns at the consultation of AD 44, expressed in Gal 2:2, were focused on the recognition of his missionary work and churches that he had established as having validity equal to the missionary work of Peter and of the other apostles. 4) Galatians 2:6–10 indicates that the Jerusalem apostles committed themselves not to interfere with the missionary work of Paul and Barnabas and not to make any demands, with the exception that they should remember the poor believers in the Judean churches. The fact that Paul’s visits to Jerusalem became much more frequent might indicate that Paul took their request seriously. This shows again that the issue was not the division of spheres of missionary influence but the recognition of the independent mission of Paul who had worked for eleven years without direct contact with the Jerusalem apostles and who was in the process of planning missionary outreach with Barnabas to Cyprus and to Galatia.

2. Conversion Wright repeatedly emphasizes that the concept of “getting in” was not a category for Roman religion, nor was it a category “that first-century Jews were much bothered about;” rather, the idea of “getting in” was a Christian innovation (PFG 1336). Wright’s discussion of conversion seems to depend on his extensive interaction with Troels Engberg-Pedersen who argues that for Paul and the Stoics, “conversion” is an “all or nothing” moment in which one

20

BDAG s.v. κοινωνία. Josef Hainz, Koinonia: “Kirche” als Gemeinschaft bei Paulus, Biblische Untersuchungen 16 (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), 134; cf. Zahn, Galater, 102; Legrand, “Missionary Strategy,” 59–61. 21

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leaves the old life behind for ever.22 Wright emphasizes that when Paul acknowledged Jesus as Israel’s Messiah on the road to Damascus, he has not stopped believing in the one God whose ‘grace’ is proclaimed right across Israel’s scriptures … He has always invoked the one God in personal prayer, and he continues to do so; he has not (that is) been ‘converted’ in some modern sense, from having belief in or awareness of a supreme deity to having such a thing for the first time. (PFG 1425, 1426)23

The last sentence raises the point of definition. Wright’s threefold definition of “conversion” (PFG 1418–19) is idiosyncratic: Conversion describes the moment when 1) the adherent of one religion abandons it and adopts another religion; 2) an atheist or agnostic enters a community of faith; or 3) a nominal adherent of a religion or community of faith moves from formal membership and outward ritual observance to a living inner reality. As Wright bases his discussion of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus on this tripartite definition, it is obvious why he does not want to use the term “conversion” to describe what happened to Paul, focusing instead on the term “call” as referring not only to missionary vocation but, in the context of Rom 8:29, to the effect of the gospel on Paul’s life. Wright points to Gal 1:15–17 where Paul states that God “called me by his grace” and without further analysis goes on to assert, “There is nothing about repentance and faith; nothing about finding his heart strangely warmed; nothing about replacing ‘works’ with ‘faith’” (PFG 1421). Wright seems quite comfortable in abandoning the term “conversion” in a description of Paul’s experience. At the same time he points to the concepts of dying and rising with the Messiah in Rom 6:2–11 and to the stark contrast between his present and his former life in Phil 3 for the statement that this “does indeed look for all the world like the kind of change we might want to call ‘conversion’” (PFG 1423).24 There are several problems here. 1) While the first definition was indeed rare in antiquity, where Greeks and Romans simply added new deities (or civic officials) to the range of beings they worshipped (with the exception of non-Jews joining the Jewish religion becoming proselytes), the definition does fit Greeks and Romans who became believers in Jesus. It is thus a definition that is certainly not relevant for Paul himself, but surely for the ἔθνη that he led to faith in Jesus. 2) Wright claims that the second definition – the conversion of the atheist or agnostic – is the sort of definition people assume 22 Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 8–9, 38, 70–71; cf. Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); see PFG 1383–1406. 23 Wright discusses Paul’s conversion in PFG 1417–26; for “call” as a preferable term see 1420–22. 24 Wright follows, with some modification, Krister Stendahl, “Call Rather than Conversion,” in Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 7–23.

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for Paul; he does not, however, document this claim. Obviously, before Paul accepted faith in Jesus, he was neither an atheist nor agnostic. Wright’s second definition is relevant for many people living in post-Christian Europe, especially, but neither for the ancient world nor for the majority of people in the 21st century; nor is it the standard definition of conversion for missionaries. 3) While Paul does not refer to repentance and faith in his description in Gal 1:15–17, this is surely implied: he persecuted and tried to destroy the church (Gal 1:13–14) because he regarded as blasphemy the proclamation of a crucified Messiah whose death atones sins (cf. Gal 3:10, quoting Deut 27:26), but in Damascus he turned away (repented) from his rejection of Jesus and of his persecution activities and turned to faith in Jesus as Israel’s crucified and risen Messiah and joined the community of believers (Acts 9:19). In his speech before Festus and Agrippa, as reported by Luke, Paul describes the task that the risen Lord gave him in these terms: “to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18). Paul goes on to say, “So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and then to the Gentiles, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and demonstrate their repentance by their deeds” (Acts 26:19–20 NRSV). Before Paul could preach repentance to Jews and Gentiles, he had to repent himself before he could lead others to faith in Jesus, he had to come to faith in Jesus Messiah himself. 4) A better definition of conversion is that of Richard Longenecker: “a radical change of thought, outlook, commitments, and practices, which involves either an overt or a subconscious break with one’s past identity.”25 Considering Paul’s description of the event on the road to Damascus and Luke’s descriptions of the event, as well as Paul’s re-evaluation and partial but thoroughgoing transformation of traditional Jewish beliefs in the areas of theology, anthropology, salvation history, Messiah thought, Law, soteriology, and eschatology,26 the term “conversion” indeed captures what happened to Paul (although it should be emphasized, pace Longenecker’s definition, that Paul did not “break” with his Jewish identity in the sense that he stopped being a Jew). J. D. G. Dunn acknowledges,

25 Richard N. Longenecker, ed., The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), xiii, used by Peter T. O’Brien, “Was Paul Converted?” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume II: The Paradoxes of Paul, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, WUNT II 181 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 361–91, 362; Wright does not interact with Longenecker’s study, nor with O’Brien’s essay. 26 Cf. Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel, 2nd ed., WUNT II 4 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), a study that is still relevant.

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It is hard to see what Paul’s conversion (from persecutor to apostle) could have meant had it not at least included a radical ‘change of mind’ on his part with regard to the first Christian claims regarding Jesus.27

In other discussions, Wright uses the term conversion without quotation marks. He castigates the modernist assumption that conversion is undesirable, thus making evangelism among Jews politically incorrect, despite Romans 11.11–24, and leaving ‘messianic Jews’ high and dry as an embarrassment to both ‘sides’. (PFG 1414)

One would wish for an analysis of Paul’s missionary work among Jews, both from geographical, exegetical, rhetorical, and theological perspectives. The discussion of 1 Cor 9:19–23 (PFG 1435–43) focuses nearly exclusively on the phrase “like a Jew to the Jews” and misses both the focus of the passage in the context of 1 Cor 8–10 (one can have certain rights, but one does not have to insist on using these rights) and the “missionary rule” that Paul formulates. I have explored elsewhere the following emphases of this passage:28 1) The basic rule of missionary existence requires the missionary to take the listener seriously. 2) Paul makes himself dependent upon his listeners, he becomes their “slave.” 3) Paul does not exclude anybody from his preaching: He preaches to Jews and Gentiles and to the weak. The “weak” are not, as Wright argues, “Christians who still harbour scruples on certain issues, and whose consciences must be respected” (PFG 1442),29 but the “simple” people in Corinth, people without Roman citizenship, people without power and influence. They are the freedmen and the foreigners and the slaves who are dependent upon a patron, an employer, or an owner.30 4) Paul’s missionary

27

James D. G. Dunn, “Paul’s Conversion: A Light to Twentieth Century Disputes [1997],” in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays, WUNT 185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 347–65, here 352; he goes on to emphasize that Paul understood his conversion “more or less from the first as conversion from a Judaism anxious to preserve its distinctiveness from Gentile corruption, as conversion from a zealous determination to defend Israel’s Torah defined boundaries, and as conversion to fulfill Israel’s eschatological mission to the nations” (364). The focus on Jewish boundary markers is too narrow for an explanation of what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. 28 Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 953–60. 29 Thus also Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, The First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1914), 192; Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, IBC (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 155; Samuel Vollenweider, Freiheit als neue Schöpfung: Eine Untersuchung zur Eleutheria bei Paulus und in seiner Umwelt, FRLANT 147 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 213, and others. 30 For arguments see Schnabel, Korinther, 507–508. Thus also Christian Wolff, Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther, 2nd ed., THKNT 7 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2000), 204; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 706; David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians, BECNT (Grand

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accommodation formulates no limitations in advance: He becomes “all things” to all people. 5) Paul seeks to win “more” people, which perhaps means that he would win fewer people if he behaved differently – for example if he always displayed the full scope of his freedom. 6) Paul emphasizes that the goal of his missionary work is to “win” people (1 Cor 9:19, 20a, 20b, 21, 22), i.e. to “rescue” them. 7) The normative center of Paul’s accommodation to his varied audiences is the gospel, not pragmatic effectiveness: “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings” (1 Cor 9:23). There are indeed boundaries for missionary accommodation: sin as defined by the word of God remains sin. Paul does not argue for cultural relativism but for cultural relevance.

3. Explicating the Gospel Paul uses the term εὐαγγέλιον as a summary term for his activity as an apostle as well as for the content of his proclamation. That Paul uses εὐαγγέλιον as the ninth word in his Letter to the Romans (Rom 1:1), immediately after a reference to Jesus and to his calling as an apostle, signals that the gospel was an integral and indispensable part of his mindset. Wright discusses “The Mindset of the Apostle” in Part II (PFG 351–569). It takes him nearly 170 of the 219 pages of this section to comment on the meaning and content of εὐαγγέλιον for Paul, discussing narrative, plots and sub-plots, God and creation, the vocation and failure and rescue and reinstatement of human beings, and the role of Torah in the story of Israel. Paul gets to the gospel quickly, decisively, and concisely, offering a basic definition in Rom 1:2–4 and an expanded definition in Rom 1:16–17.31 The term εὐαγγέλιον refers to “news,”32 to “something fresh happening” (PFG Rapids: Baker, 2003), 434; cf. Wolfgang Schrage, Der erste Brief an die Korinther, 4 vols., EKKNT 7 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1991–2001), 2:346. 31 Cf. Robert M. Calhoun, Paul’s Definitions of the Gospel in Romans 1, WUNT II 316 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), whose work may have appeared too late to be seen by Wright. See 9–84 on the characteristics and function of a definition according to Greek and Roman authors. One characteristic is conciseness, something that Wright does not strive for, as he develops the meaning of key terms such as “gospel” through references to the stories and their plots and sub-plots of both Israel and the Greeks and Romans. Wright (PFG 523–24) comments on Rom 1:1–6 only briefly, with the focus on Jesus’s messianic identity. 32 Cf. John P. Dickson, “Gospel as News: εὐαγγελ- from Aristophanes to the Apostle Paul,” NTS 51 (2005): 212–30, with reference to Lycurgus, Leocrates 1.18; Pausanias, Descr. 4.19.5; Plutarch, Pomp. 41.3; Sert. 11.4; Mor. 184A, 266B, 347D; Philostratus, Vit. Apoll. 1.28.37; 8.27.2; Vit. soph. 1.508.14; 2.572.12; Chariton, Chaer. 6.5.5; 17.7.1; Philo, Legat. 18, 99, 231; Opif. 34, 115; Mos. 2.186; Josephus, B.J. 1.607; 2.420; 3.143; 4.618, 656; A.J. 2.45; 5.24; 7.50; 11.65; 18.229.

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517). Instead of beginning with 1 Cor 15:3–8, Wright might have started his discussion with Rom 1:1, 2–4, 16–17 where Paul emphasizes the following: 1) God is the One who has caused the good news, who initiated the events that are so significant that they need to be made known as news, and who authorized the proclamation that Paul publicizes (εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ in 1:1 as genitivus auctoris and/or genitivus subjectivus). 2) The news consists in the fact that the promises of Israel’s prophets, as recorded in the holy Scriptures, have been fulfilled (ὃ προεπηγγείλατο) in Jesus, the Son of God (1:2–3a). 3) Jesus, the Son of God, was born (τοῦ γενοµένου); he was a member of the Davidic dynasty (ἐκ σπέρµατος Δαυίδ); and he lived as a human being (κατὰ σάρκα; 1:3b).33 4) Jesus was proclaimed by God as Son of God (τοῦ ὁρισθέντος υἱοῦ θεοῦ), he participates in God’s power (ἐν δυνάµει), and he participates in God’s Spirit and thus in God’s divine identity (κατὰ πνεῦµα ἁγιωσύνης; 1:4a).34 5) The date and the foundation of Jesus’s status as divine and powerful Son of God is Jesus’s resurrection from the dead (ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν; 1:4b).35 6) Jesus is thus both Messiah and Lord (Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡµῶν; 1:4c). 7) The function and effect of the gospel, hinted at in 1:4 with the terms holiness (ἁγιωσύνη), power (δύναµις), and resurrection (ἀνάστασις), and explicated in 1:16 in terms of consisting in the salvation (εἰς σωτηρίαν) of all human beings who believe (παντὶ τῷ πιστεύοντι) in Jesus, Messiah and Son of God, irrespective of ethnic identity (Ἰουδαίῳ τε πρῶτον καὶ Ἕλληνι; 1:16). 8) The gospel saves human beings because God who is the eschatological judge exercises his power to justify and declare righteous those who believe in Jesus (1:17). When Wright comments on Rom 1:1–6, he explains Paul’s understanding of “the gospel” as denoting

33 The reference in vv. 3–4 to Jesus’s birth (γενοµένου) and Jesus’s proclamation as powerful Son of God in connection with his resurrection from the dead (ὁρισθέντος … ἐξ ἀναστάσεως νεκρῶν) describe, as synecdoche, Jesus’s entire life, concisely focused on two fundamental events. On synedoche as supporting conciseness in definitions cf. Calhoun, Definitions, 76–79. 34 Cf. Thomas Söding, “Davidssohn und Gottessohn: Zur paulinischen Christologie von Röm 1,3f,” in Religionsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments: Festschrift für Klaus Berger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Axel von Dobbeler, Kurt Erlemann, and Roman Heiligenthal (Tübingen: Francke, 2000), 325–56, 341, and C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans, 2 vols., ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975–79), 1:64. Romano Penna, Lettera ai Romani, Scritti delle origini cristiane 6 (Bologna: Dehoniane, 2010), 20, speaks of an implicit (discretamente) trinitarian structure of the Easter event. 35 Cf. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, AB 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 235; Simon Légasse, L’épître de Paul aux Romains, LD 10 (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 58; Klaus Haacker, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer, 4th ed., THKNT 6 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2012), 28.

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a message which, in fulfillment of the scriptural prophecies and in implicit confrontation with the newer imperial realities, declared the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom in and through the life, messianic achievement and supremely the death and resurrection of Jesus. (PFG 915–16)

Had Wright recognized that 1:16–17 is a second definition of the gospel after 1:2–4, in the same context of the prooemium, he would have to revise his assertion that Paul’s gospel summaries do not mention justification (PFG 915n386).36 If Wright was less polemical over against his (evangelical reformed) critics, he would not have stated, somewhat contradictorily, that this gospel message far transcended the individualistic message of ‘how to be saved’ which the word ‘gospel’ has come to denote in much contemporary western Christian expression (PFG 916)

only to continue in the next sentence, “It remained intensely personal in its radical application” (PFG 916). In commenting on Rom 1:16, Wright insists, “‘The gospel’ is not itself ‘how to be saved’ or ‘how to be justified’” (PFG 916). If one recognizes that Rom 1:16 is part of a second definition of εὐαγγέλιον, that the phrase εἰς σωτηρίαν is the first particularity (τὸ ἴδιον)37 of the function of the gospel,38 and that the definition of the gospel in Rom 1:16–17 immediately leads Paul to explain the wrath of God against human beings who suppress the truth by the wickedness and engage in perverted, sinful behavior (Rom 1:18–32), Wright’s insistence on separating the gospel from individual salvation remains an exegetical curiosity, especially given the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes that “the cross stands at the heart of Paul’s worldview, as of his theology” (PFG 521, explained in 879–911). The explication of the εὐαγγέλιον in 1 Cor 15:3–8 focuses on Jesus’s death and resurrection. In his comments about this passage (PFG 518–21), Wright focuses on Jesus’s messianic identity, on the phrase “for our sins” (ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁµαρτιῶν ἡµῶν), and on the phrase “in accordance with the Bible” (κατὰ τὰς γραφάς). He emphasizes, importantly: Something has happened, which can be spoken of in one breath (verse 3) as accomplished through the Messiah’s death and in almost the next (verse 17) as effected or at least validated through his resurrection … And the thing that has happened is that a condition or state which could not otherwise be broken, a state of ‘being in sin’, has been dealt with, so that ‘you’ or ‘we’ are no longer ’in (y)our sins’. (PFG 519) 36 Wright refers, approvingly, to Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective, Paternoster Biblical Monographs (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 69, who comments on Rom 1:3–4 (not 1:1–6), 1 Cor 15:3–8, and 2 Tim 2:8 as “the most concise summaries of the gospel in the New Testament.” Note that Bird, in the same paragraph, mentions Rom 1:16–17 and Gal 3:8, and comments, “Thus, the gospel and justification are conceptually welded together.” 37 Cf. Aristotle, Top. 1.5 (101b39–102a40). 38 Calhoun, Definitions, 150.

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These formulations can be stated, more succinctly, as follows: Jesus the Messiah’s death on the cross dealt with sin, making possible the forgiveness of the sins of sinners who believe, a fact that is validated through Jesus’s resurrection. Jesus’s death, highlighted by Paul’s reference to Jesus’s burial (1 Cor 15:4), would seem to warrant more comment, especially in a discussion that emphasizes story, back story, plot, and sub-plot. The interest in the biblical narrative threatens to overshadow the explanation of the reality and the significance of Jesus’s death, as Wright explains how Scripture’s triple story of God and the world, God and humankind, and God and Israel, each of which faced a great problem, is resolved. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus has accomplished Israel’s need of being rescued; as Israel-in-person, Jesus brought rescue and restoration to the human race; as the truly human one, Jesus has defeated the creator’s enemies and re-established God’s rule over the cosmos. Jesus’s death on the cross brought about the divine judgment on evil, and thus solved the problem of the world, of human beings, and of Israel. This is why, as Wright argues, “the cross stands at the heart” of Paul’s worldview (PFG 521). Some may be less certain about Wright’s consistent distinction between the world and humans. Note that Paul can use the term κτίσις for the sum total of everything created (Col 1:23; cf. Rom 1:25; 8:19–22) and for created individuals (2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15). He uses κόσµος for the sum total of everything here and now, for the world, the universe (Rom 1:20; Eph 1:4; Tit 1:15), and also for humankind (Rom 3:6, 19). Note the assertion in Rom 4:13, “for the promise that he would inherit the world (τὸ κληρονόµον αὐτὸν εἶναι κόσµου) did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith” (Rom 4:13 NRSV). He uses τὰ πάντα for the universe (Rom 11:36; 1 Cor 8:6) and for humanity (Gal 3:22). What Wright says about Jesus’s messianic identity and about the centrality of Jesus’s death on the cross as the event in which God solved the problem of the world, of human beings, and of Israel, is fundamentally important as an explication of the central message of the good news. At the same time, while it is true that the term “gospel” implies a narrative, the “back story” of Scripture’s triple story of God and the world, humankind, and Israel should not take center stage (to stay with the metaphor of the “play”). This is not what Wright claims, but it is an impression that one might get from the rhetoric in the chapter and the attention devoted to the triple “back story.” When Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the “story” of Jesus, they devote thirty percent of their narrative to the events of Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection.

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4. Defining Evangelism In PFG ch. 16, which treats Paul’s aims and achievements, Tom Wright asserts, Just as the principal and ultimate goal of all historical work on J. S. Bach ought to be a more sensitive and intelligent performance of his music, so the principal and ultimate goal of all historical work on the New Testament ought to be a more sensitive and intelligent practice of Christian mission and discipleship. (PFG 1483–84)

I fully agree, both with regard to Bach and with regard to Paul, although the content of the 3,371 pages written up to this point in the four volumes of Christian Origins and the Question of God render this statement somewhat a surprise. The claim that there is no agreement in sight on the meanings of words like “mission” and “evangelism” is technically correct, but vastly exaggerated. He writes, “Both words are labels which different groups stick on different activities which for whatever reason they believe they ought to undertake. The meanings shift with the activities” (PFG 1484). It has been fashionable for some time to accept the disdain of secular anthropologists and agnostic pluralists for missionaries. Wright appears to join them when he polemicizes against “soul-saving” and against “collecting inhabitants for this future ‘heaven’” (PFG 1485).39 Wright can speak movingly about ἀγάπη,40 but there is not much ἀγάπη in the way he speaks about real, existing missionaries. While he censures “the sneering negativity of contemporary western antiecclesiasticalism” particularly “in the world of academic biblical studies” (PFG 1414), he repeats caricatures of missionaries drawn up by mostly Western liberal academics, people who would not want to be caught dead or alive with a missionary. In light of what Wright might call “the sneering negativity of contemporary western anti-missions bias,” he might want to revisit his own critique of missionaries. Anti-missionary critics do not seem to be aware of the fact that most missionaries today are not “cultural imperialists” from the West but committed, couragous Christians from the global south, from Korea and Brasil, from Nigeria and China. When Wright refers to “the normal modern western meanings of words like ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’” (PFG 1484), he needs to clarify whether “modern” refers to the missionary movement of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, and whether “western” includes the missionary work, for example, of Korean, Brasilian, Nigerian, and Chinese churches, whose evangelism and mission is virtually undistin39 Such polemic is repeatedly found: “Paul did not seem himself as simply snatching souls out of the world’s wreck in order to populate a Platonic heaven. For Paul, then, ‘evangelism’ was not just about soul-rescuing and ‘mission’ was not just about the wider advancement of Christian understanding” (PFG 1490, 1493). 40 PFG 391, 401, 430, 1116, 1120, 1361, 1382, 1404.

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guishable from the evangelism and mission of western churches.41 Apart from Wright’s willingness to hold up for ridicule missionaries of the past and present, his grand critique of wrong understandings of “mission” and “evangelism” may suggest that he sees himself as the savior from the morass of problematic definitions and problematic praxis. Defining “mission” is indeed difficult, so much so that Scott Moreau does not provide a definition in his entry “Mission and Missions” in the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, but traces developments in the discussion about the meaning of “mission.”42 David Bosch writes that “ultimately, mission remains undefinable,” and then goes on to describe “mission” as the missio Dei, God’s self-revelation as the One who loves the world, God’s involvement in and with the world, the nature and activity of God, which embraces both the church and the world, and in which the church is privileged to participate,

while “missions” “refer to particular forms, related to specific times, places, or needs, of participation in the missio Dei.”43 According to Thomas Ohm, mission is the first step of the confrontation of non-Christians with the gospel; the significant elements of “mission” are establishing contact, attempt at understanding, representation of Christ and of what it means to be a Christian, ministry of the word (proclamation, preaching, teaching, sermons, catechesis, witness), ministry of grace, of moral life, of social realities, and charity.44 When we study the New Testament, definitions of mission and evangelism are best derived from the specific activity of the early Christian missionaries, rather than from later developments and assorted critiques. As regards the early church, we have a wealth of information about Paul as a missionary, particularly if we include the Book of Acts as a reliable account of Paul’s missionary work.45 I define the term “mission” (or missions) as the activity of a community of faith that distinguishes itself from its environment both in 41

One wonders what Ludwig Rütti would say about these developments, fifty years after his assertion that the missionary enterprise is so polluted by its origins and association with Western colonialism that it is irredeemable; cf. Ludwig Rütti, Zur Theologie der Mission: Kritische Analysen und neue Orientierungen (München: Kaiser, 1972). 42 A. Scott Moreau, “Mission and Missions,” Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions 636–38. 43 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission, American Society of Missiology Series 16 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991; repr., 1999), 9, 10. 44 Thomas Ohm, “Mission,” LTK2 7:453–54, 453. 45 For an overview, cf. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Paul the Missionary: Realities, Strategies, and Methods (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008); Eckhard J. Schnabel, “Paul the Missionary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies, ed. R. Barry Matlock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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terms of religious belief (theology) and in terms of social behavior (ethics), that is convinced of the truth claims of its faith, and that actively works to win other people for the contents of faith and the way of life of whose truth and necessity the members of that community are convinced. This definition of “mission” involves a threefold reality: 1) People communicate to people of different faiths a new interpretation of reality, i.e. a different, new view of God, of mankind, and of salvation. 2) People communicate a new way of life that replaces, at least partially, the former way of life. 3) People integrate those whom they win over to their faith and their way of life into their community. This definition implies geographical movement, at least movement from the places where Christians live to their neighbors, then to other cities (such as Damascus, Antioch, both cities belonging to Syria, the larger entity to which the Roman prefect of Judea was responsible), and to cities in other provinces. As far as the ancient world is concerned, this definition always implies the oral communication of convictions. The communication of beliefs and behavior happens through active, expansive proclamation (the centrifugal dimension of mission) or through winsome, attractive presence (the centripetal dimension of mission).46 This understanding of mission does not include attempts by the church and its representatives to change unjust structures and practices of society, a concern that is often part of modern definitions of mission. Changing society was not an option for Christians in the first century who were a minority within a minority – Jewish Christians and also Gentile Christians were regarded by Roman authorities and, probably, by the pagan populations in the cities in which Paul proclaimed the gospel, as part of the Jewish community, which, in the Roman Empire, represented a minority of the people living in Rome and its provinces. The notion that missionaries should work towards establishing a more just government, that women should be treated equally to men, that slavery should be abolished, as well as a host of other important and worthy causes, was not on Paul’s agenda, although it would have been on his eschatological horizon for the new creation in the new heavens and the new earth. Wright’s critique is at times absolute and across-the-board. He claims that “the whole picture of ‘what Paul was doing’ has in my view been radically pulled out of shape by the two main drivers of modern western Christianity” (PFG 1484). He goes on to single out, first, the middle ages and the Reformation “in which Christian sights were firmly fixed on ‘going to heaven’” (PFG 1484), understood in an essentially Platonic spiritual sense, with the effect of turning Paul into a “soul-winner” (PFG 1485). The second pernicious influence was the Enlightenment which separated God and the world and combined a Platonist eschatology with an Epicurean polity where God is absent (PFG 1485). It is not clear whether Wright links the second factor 46

Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 11.

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with the missionary movement of the western churches. The first factor is largely a strawman. Many medieval theologians were certainly Platonists, but there were also apocalyptically motivated thinkers and activists who spoke of, and wanted to bring about, a new world order.47 Lutz von Padberg has traced the effects and changes that the work of the missionaries of the 7th and 8th centuries had for society: social welfare, increased legal protections, a new approach to slavery (albeit inconsistently), economic innovations and technical innovations in agriculture, protection of life, a new view of women, marriage and family and children, and organization of educational institutions.48 The charge that in the middle ages missionaries went about collecting inhabitants for a future heaven (PFG 1485) is a gross simplification and distortion of what actually happened. Paul’s aims and intentions can be summarized with the word “reconciliation” (καταλλαγή). This is not a new proposal, as Wright concedes (PFG 1487),49 nor is his important observation that Paul was not just a spectator. He was called to do and say things through which new creation was happening already: each personal ‘new creation’, through Messiah-faith and baptism, was another signpost to the larger ‘new creation’ of which the Psalms and the prophets had spoken . He was in the business . of transforming humans as wholes, to be both signs of that larger new creation and workers in its cause. (PFG 1489)50

Wright’s caveat that Paul was neither “a glorified social worker” nor “a global politician” (PFG 1490), is important, not only rhetorically in order to avoid being accused of moving away from the gospel, but substantially revelant because neither Paul, nor other missionaries, nor any bishops and their churches, were ever able to abolish all social ills and institute a just global 47 See the contributions in Jan A. Aertsen and Martin Pickavé, eds., Ende und Vollendung: Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 29 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001). 48 Lutz E. von Padberg, Mission und Christianisierung: Formen und Folgen bei Angelsachsen und Franken im 7. und 8. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 267–349. 49 Wright mentions Ralph P. Martin, Reconciliation: A Study of Paul’s Theology (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981); Peter Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992–1999), 2:320–321; I. Howard Marshall, Aspects of the Atonement: Cross and Resurrection in the Reconciling of God and Humanity (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007). He does not mention relevant German literature: Otfried Hofius, “Sühne und Versöhnung. Zum paulinischen Verständnis des Kreuzestodes Jesu,” in Paulusstudien 1, 2nd ed., WUNT 51 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 33–49; Peter Stuhlmacher, Reconciliation, Law & Righteousness: Essays in Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); Robert Vorholt, Der Dienst der Versöhnung. Studien zur Apostolatstheologie bei Paulus, WMANT 118 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2008); Jens Adam, Paulus und die Versöhnung aller: Eine Studie zum paulinischen Heilsuniversalismus (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2009). 50 The second omission in the quotation is another polemical aside: “[Paul was in the business], not of rescuing souls from corrupting bodies and a doomed world.”

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political order. Paul indeed aimed “to generate and sustain communities which would not only point to, but actually be an advance part of, the coming renewed world” (PFG 1490), without believing that “the world has started on a smooth and steady upward path to utopia, or that the church itself is now launched into a triumphant development” (PFG 1491).51

Bibliography Adam, Jens. Paulus und die Versöhnung aller: Eine Studie zum paulinischen Heilsuniversalismus. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2009. Aertsen, Jan A., and Martin Pickavé, eds. Ende und Vollendung: Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 29. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001. Betz, Hans D. Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979. Bird, Michael F. The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007. Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991. Repr., 1999. Calhoun, Robert M. Paul’s Definitions of the Gospel in Romans 1. WUNT II 316. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Chapman, David W., and Eckhard J. Schnabel. The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus: Texts and Commentary. WUNT 344. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Cook, John G. Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World. WUNT 327. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Cranfield, C. E. B. The Epistle to the Romans. 2 vols. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975– 79. Crossan, John Dominic, and Jonathan L. Reed. In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom: A New Vision of Paul’s Words and World. San Francisco: Harper, 2004. Dickson, John P. “Gospel as News: εὐαγγελ- from Aristophanes to the Apostle Paul.” NTS 51 (2005): 212–30. Dunn, James D. G. “Paul’s Conversion: A Light to Twentieth Century Disputes.” Pages 347–65 in The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays. WUNT 185. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. –. Paul and the Stoics. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Romans. AB 33. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Garland, David E. 1 Corinthians. BECNT. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003. Gill, David W. J. “A Saviour for the Cities of Crete: The Roman Background to the Epistle to Titus.” Pages 220–30 in The New Testament in its First Century Setting: Essays on Context and Background in Honour of B. W. Winter on His 65th Birthday. Edited by P.

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Wright is afraid that the term reconciliation “will collapse back into one of the shrunken versions of Paul’s task” (PFG 1487).

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J. Williams, Andrew D. Clarke, Peter M. Head, and David Instone-Brewer. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Haacker, Klaus. Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer. 4th ed. THKNT 6. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2012. Hainz, Josef. Koinonia: “Kirche” als Gemeinschaft bei Paulus. Biblische Untersuchungen 16. Regensburg: Pustet, 1982. Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. IBC. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997. Hengel, Martin. Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. Translated by John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. Höfer, Josef and Karl Rahner, eds. Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. 10 vols. 2nd ed. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1957–1968. Hofius, Otfried. “Die Adam-Christus-Antithese und das Gesetz: Erwägungen zu Röm 5,12–21.” Pages 165–206 in Paul and the Mosaic Law: The Third Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium on Earliest Christianity and Judaism (Durham, September 1994). Edited by James D. G. Dunn. WUNT 89. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1996. –. “‘Erstgeborener vor aller Schöpfung’ – ‘Erstgeborener aus den Toten’: Erwägungen zu Struktur und Aussage des Christushymnus Kol 1,15–20.” Pages 185–203 in Auferstehung – Resurrection: The Fourth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium: Resurrection, Transfiguration, and Exaltation in Old Testament, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Tübingen, 1999). Edited by Friedrich Avemarie and Hermann Lichtenberger. WUNT 135. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001. –. “Sühne und Versöhnung: Zum paulinischen Verständnis des Kreuzestodes Jesu.” Pages 33–49 in Paulusstudien 1. 2nd ed. WUNT 51. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Kammler, Hans-Christian. Kreuz und Weisheit: Eine exegetische Untersuchung zu 1 Kor 1,10–3,4. WUNT 159. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. Kim, Seyoon. The Origin of Paul’s Gospel. 2nd ed. WUNT II 4. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984. Kuhn, Heinz-Wolfgang. “Die Kreuzesstrafe während der frühen Kaiserzeit: Ihre Wirklichkeit und Wertung in der Umwelt des Urchristentums.” ANRW 25.1:648–793. Part 2, Principat, 25.1. Edited by Wolfgang Haase. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik: Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. 3rd ed. München: Steiner, 1990. Legrand, Lucien. “Gal 2.9 and the Missionary Strategy of the Early Church.” Pages 21–83 in Bible, Hermeneutics, Mission: A Contribution to the Contextual Study of Holy Scripture. Missio 10. Uppsala: Swedish Institute for Missionary Research, 1995. Légasse, Simon. L’épître de Paul aux Romains. LD 10. Paris: Cerf, 2002. Litfin, Duane. St. Paul’s Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1–4 and Greco-Roman Rhetoric. SNTSMS 79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Longenecker, Richard N., ed. The Road from Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Lüdemann, Gerd. Studien zur Chronologie. Vol. 1 of Paulus der Heidenapostel. FRLANT 123. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980. Magda, Ksenija. Paul’s Territoriality and Mission Strategy: Searching for the Geographical Awareness Paradigm behind Romans. WUNT II 266. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Marshall, I. Howard. Aspects of the Atonement: Cross and Resurrection in the Reconciling of God and Humanity. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007.

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Martin, Ralph P. Reconciliation: A Study of Paul’s Theology. Atlanta: John Knox, 1981. Martyn, J. Louis. Galatians. AB 33A. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Moreau, A. Scott, ed. Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions. Baker Reference Library. Grand Rapids: Baker Book, 2000. Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. “Paul in Arabia.” CBQ 55 (1993): 732–37. O’Brien, Peter T. “Was Paul Converted?” Pages 361–91 in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume II: The Paradoxes of Paul. Edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid. WUNT II 181. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Padberg, Lutz E. von. Mission und Christianisierung: Formen und Folgen bei Angelsachsen und Franken im 7. und 8. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995. Penna, Romano. Lettera ai Romani. Scritti delle origini cristiane 6. Bologna: Dehoniane, 2010. Price, Simon R. F. Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1984. Reinbold, Wolfgang. Propaganda und Mission im ältesten Christentum: Eine Untersuchung zu den Modalitäten der Ausbreitung der frühen Kirche. FRLANT 188. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Robertson, Archibald, and Alfred Plummer. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians. ICC. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1914. Rütti, Ludwig. Zur Theologie der Mission: Kritische Analysen und neue Orientierungen. München: Kaiser, 1972. Schlier, Heinrich. Der Brief an die Galater. 2nd ed. KEK 7. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989. Schnabel, Eckhard J. Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther. 3rd ed. HistorischTheologische Auslegung. Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 2014. –. Early Christian Mission. 2 vols. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004. –. “Paul the Missionary.” In The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies. Edited by R. Barry Matlock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. –. Paul the Missionary: Realities, Strategies, and Methods. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008. Schrage, Wolfgang. Der erste Brief an die Korinther. 4 vols. EKKNT 7. NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener, 1991–2001. Schreiner, Thomas R. Galatians. Zondervan Eexegetical Commentary on the New Testament 9. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010. Söding, Thomas. “Davidssohn und Gottessohn: Zur paulinischen Christologie von Röm 1,3f.” Pages 325–56 in Religionsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments: Festschrift für Klaus Berger zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Axel von Dobbeler, Kurt Erlemann, and Roman Heiligenthal. Tübingen: Francke, 2000. Stendahl, Krister. “Call Rather than Conversion.” Pages 7–23 in Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976. Stuhlmacher, Peter. Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments. 2 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992–1999. –. Reconciliation, Law & Righteousness: Essays in Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Thiselton, Anthony C. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. Ueding, Gert, ed. Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. 11 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992–2014.

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Vollenweider, Samuel. Freiheit als neue Schöpfung: Eine Untersuchung zur Eleutheria bei Paulus und in seiner Umwelt. FRLANT 147. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989. Vorholt, Robert. Der Dienst der Versöhnung: Studien zur Apostolatstheologie bei Paulus. WMANT 118. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2008. Voss, Florian. Das Wort vom Kreuz und die menschliche Vernunft: Eine Untersuchung zur Soteriologie des 1. Korintherbriefes. FRLANT 199. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. White, John L. The Apostle of God: Paul and the Promise of Abraham. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999. Winter, Bruce W. After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. –. Philo and Paul among the Sophists. SNTSMS 96. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Wolff, Christian. Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther. 2nd ed. THKNT 7. Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2000. Zahn, Theodor. Der Brief des Paulus an die Galater. 3rd ed. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament 9. Leipzig: Scholl, 1922. Repr. with an introduction by Martin Hengel, Wuppertal: Brockhaus, 1990.

Part VI Epilogue

The Challenge of Dialogue A Partial and Preliminary Response N. T. Wright It is a matter of astonishment to me that my large book on Paul should, within two years of its appearing, have generated a further substantial volume of discussion. I am enormously grateful to the editors for their initiative and hard work, and to the contributors, all of them busy in their own fields, for taking the time to engage with my project and in many cases coming up with shrewd and important angles of vision which I need to ponder carefully in the coming days. I am aware that in several cases the critiques included, by strong implication, the message that if only I had read their particular books or articles I might have seen things differently. It’s a fair point, but it merely illustrates the current problem: There is so much published today that one cannot keep up with more than a fraction of it, and one has to choose conversation partners without knowing what one might be missing. I want to thank especially the senior scholars such as James Charlesworth, Oda Wischmeyer, and especially Peter Stuhlmacher for the time and trouble they have taken to engage with my work. They represent living links with earlier stages of scholarship and even where I still disagree with them my main sense is of gratitude for serious scholarly engagement. There has been no time, since these essays landed on my desk, to think properly through the issues they raise, and there is no possibility here of responding in detail to all the contributors and the dozens – perhaps even thousands – of interesting points they make. The pressure to do so has in any case been partially alleviated by the appearance of three other works. There is the issue of Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters which carried some early reviews and my initial response.1 There is the small book The Paul Debate, in which I have tried to take into account the key points of many published reviews and to summarize, and in some cases clarify, the main questions at issue.2 And there is the somewhat larger history of research, Paul and his Recent Interpreters, which was originally intended to be part of Paul and the Faithfulness of God itself but which escaped from the parent volume 1 2

Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4.1 (2013). N. T. Wright, The Paul Debate (London: SPCK, 2013).

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and developed a life of its own.3 There, especially perhaps in the section on “apocalyptic,” I have said many things which would be pertinent for the present book – I think particularly of the exciting and combative essay here by Jörg Frey – and which therefore do not need repeating at length, though Frey’s essay here needs further careful discussion which I shall attempt to provide. Even when all these are added to the present response, of course, there is no way I can do justice in any detail to what has been said. All I can do is to give an indication of some lines of investigation I would like to pursue further, and an attempt to clarify things which seem to have remained opaque to some.

1. Introduction First, some apologies and explanations. Several contributors complained that key terms were not to be found in the index. I take responsibility for that, the excuse being that the index had to be completed at breakneck speed because of a late acceleration in production schedules. However, in some cases I think what some complainers were wanting was a treatment of Paul according to the traditional topics made famous by Bultmann and others. PFG was not designed to be another treatment of subjects in that fashion. As Joel White sees clearly in his helpful analysis here (and see the summary by Torsten Jantsch), I was intending deliberately to break the mold and to propose a different way of approaching the whole subject. I was trying to conduct a thought-experiment, saying in effect, “supposing Paul really was used to thinking in a Jewish mode; and supposing his mature reflection as the Messiah’s apostle to the Gentiles meant that he was revising that thinking around Messiah and spirit, but leaving its basic structure intact – what might that look like? And would such an analysis help us address some of the longstanding puzzles we have encountered as we have tried to impose other schemes on his thought?” I was attempting, in particular, to show the inner coherence between elements of Paul’s thought which are routinely played off against one another – despite the attempts of some contributors to this volume to suggest otherwise. That was the project on which I was engaged, despite some bizarre attempts at alternative summaries, and despite the somewhat schoolmasterish tone of James Dunn, saying “here we expect something with the structure of classic studies on the subject,”4 and complaining that he did not find the standard topics lined up in the way he had hoped. My whole

3 N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (London: SPCK, 2015). 4 353. Throughout, lone page numbers are internal citations to the present volume.

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point was that the classic studies have radically distorted the subject-matter and that it was time for a fresh look. This was why, in particular, I developed the worldview model which has been consistently applied throughout the larger project, “Christian Origins and the Question of God,” starting with The New Testament and the People of God.5 This was an attempt at a “thick” description – at least, thicker than most studies of Pauline theology were attempting – of the things Paul either took for granted himself or expected his churches to take for granted. I still believe it makes sense, in any culture, to enquire about symbols, praxis, stories, and key questions, so as to make sure we are not merely constructing an abstract set of ideas, detached from real life. That makes it all the more ironic that some have persisted in worrying as to whether the category of “worldview” is itself over-cognitive; I take the point made by Volker Rabens (citing Jamie Smith), but I have persisted with the word “worldview” as a heuristic term for what I then try to analyze. Of course, if one sees no point in such things – particularly, for instance, in any kind of narrative analysis – then Part II of my book, and the equivalent parts of my other books, will remain opaque (“somewhat occluded,” according to Andrew McGowan6). One would hope at least that readers would be prepared to live within the thought experiment, even if only after the manner of theatre-goers suspending disbelief for an hour or two. I should perhaps have explained even more than I did what I meant by “symbol,” because if Andrew McGowan didn’t quite understand it then others may not have done either. I meant it in the sense in which a flag, or a key building, or even a song (a national anthem?) might be a potent symbol: a concrete (or, in the case of a song, an audible) object or event around which all kinds of layers of meaning, memory, and hope might cluster within a culture. The Jerusalem Temple is an obvious Second Temple example, as would be the annual Passover celebration. My point in ch. 6 of PFG was that, for Paul, it seems as though the church itself, as a community living as “family” across traditional cultural lines, was already the key symbol of his worldview, the concrete sign of what the gospel was all about. The underlying point, though, is one where I stand more or less on the same ground as Clifford Geertz and other such writers.7 It is possible to analyze any society in terms of its cultural symbols, controlling implicit narratives, and so on. This kind of analysis is not a mere structuralist fantasy. It can become a way of understanding “what is going on” behind, for instance, what are presented as “doc-

5

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 1 (London: SPCK, 1992). 6 600 7 See Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 227–28, 243–54.

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trinal” disputes. It is a way of trying to pay attention to the whole human context, not just to one part of it. This in turn explains, I hope, why Parts III and IV of PFG are separate. In my early planning I had seen them integrated, so that within each of chs. 9, 10, and 11, I was going to conclude by showing how Paul’s revised monotheism, election, and eschatology impacted on the philosophical, religious, and political worlds I had sketched earlier. But, as several have pointed out, those three chapters are already long, and such a procedure would have made them impossibly so.8 It was with a sigh of relief that I realized at one point that not only would the material be better handled in a separate section, but that this would give to the whole book the somewhat chiastic form it now possesses. Dunn also expressed disappointment that I did not draw more obviously on the “new perspective,” which surprised me. Stuhlmacher criticizes me as though I am taking a post-Dunn position in relation to the “boundary markers” interpretation of “works of the law”; my entire treatment of Paul’s Jewish world in ch. 2, and my entire rethinking of how Paul related to that world both in his worldview and mindset on the one hand and his theology on the other grew straight out of the initial impetus of the “new perspective,” even though as I have shown elsewhere I think the study of the Jewish sources, to which that “new perspective” proposal committed us, pushes us considerably further than either Ed Sanders or Dunn himself have been prepared to go.9 That is why the central categories I proposed (to the perplexity of some) were “monotheism, election, and eschatology”; and that is what I meant by referring to Paul as an “essentially Jewish” figure. (I do not plead guilty to James Crossley’s charge of “essentializing,” which I realize is one of the cardinal postmodern sins. What I meant was that, over against the long tradition of seeing Paul as having abandoned his Jewish heritage and thought-forms and invented a scheme out of non-Jewish materials, I regard Paul as recognizably Jewish in the structure of his thinking. Treating the occurrence of a word like 8

Thus Eckhard Schnabel’s point, that the last five chapters of PFG could have been integrated into Part III, reflects the way I was thinking, but ignores the practicalities involved. I regret that I appear to have upset Schnabel in various ways; but his comments about my analysis of Paul’s intricate multi-layered narrative world appear to show that he has not attempted to come to terms with the problem: that Paul was capable of compressing many strands into a short summary such as Rom 1:1–7, and that a reader in a different culture, coming with expectations shaped by recent traditions, might simply ignore crucial elements unless they are laid out carefully. 9 On the “new perspective,” see Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, ch. 3; on Dunn especially, 89–98. As for Dunn’s complaint that there seems no discussion of atonement theology, he seems to have overlooked (as does Schnabel) both the substantial and detailed exposition at PFG 879–912 and the fact that that extended treatment occurs, deliberately, at the structural center of PFG ch. 10, and hence at the very center of my whole exposition of “Paul’s theology.” I was inviting my readers to see things differently, not merely to adjust some nuts and bolts on previous treatments.

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“essentially” as evidence of something called “essentializing” is itself an example of a word/concept fallacy; perhaps even of “essentializing” itself.) In particular, there is virtually no recognition at any point in these essays (except for the editors’ Introduction, and then in Oda Wischmeyer’s stimulating piece and Joel White’s comments) that the book was not simply laying out the elements of Paul’s thought, but was instead arguing a specific case, namely that Paul invented something we might with long hindsight call “Christian theology.” I meant this, not so much in terms of the subject-matter (James Charlesworth rightly points out that other early Christians had already begun to think through such things, though I persist in seeing Paul as the first rigorous and comprehensive Christian thinker for whom we have actual evidence10) but in terms of the task and vocation, laid upon every person and community “in the Messiah,” of learning to think in the new way demanded and enabled by gospel and spirit, to be (in other words) “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”11 Mention of the “spirit” leads to a comment about capitalization or lack thereof. My primary reason for using the lower case for “spirit,” to which some of the contributors (notably James Dunn and Edith Humphrey) objected, was that the capitalization trick we play in English (though not of course in German, where all nouns have capitals) was not an option either for Paul or for his oral audience, or indeed within the first centuries of transmission. When Paul’s audience heard or read πνεῦµα, they heard it as a word with which they were already familiar in many other contexts. The same would be true for words like κύριος, which I have treated in the same way. Terms like “spirit” and “lord,” both in a text read out loud and in a text in undifferentiated block capitals, had to make their way in the wider world of philosophical and religious ideas without the benefit of a semantic halo. We fool ourselves if we imagine otherwise. Of course, in today’s Christian discourse, and in languages that can decorate words in that fashion, we can be as “helpful” as we like in drawing out and highlighting the meanings we now believe to be present. But this book was an attempt to think historically into Paul’s world, and part of that task is always to be careful about attributing to him or his hearers verbal and similar distinctions which we may want to make but which they did not, or not in the same ways.

10 See too the Heiligs’s point that one should not jump from the Jewish context straight to Paul without taking into account the wider early Christian worldview. This is of course right and proper in theory (and that was why I wrote Part IV of The New Testament and the People of God), but difficult in practice since Paul himself is by some way our earliest and clearest source. 11 Rom 12:2 (English translations of the NT are taken from N. T. Wright, The New Testament for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2011) (in the US, N. T. Wright, The Kingdom New Testament [San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011]).

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Other terms, too, have caused some to stumble. I have used the phrase “fresh perspectives,” not as a synonym for the so-called “new perspective,” nor yet as a broad-brush term for a post-“new perspective” proposal I might have been advancing, but as a way of drawing attention to the “political” readings of Paul which nobody much was discussing until the early 1990s and which then suddenly became all the rage.12 I was surprised to be taken to task by Schnabel for describing Paul’s travels as “endless” and “restless”; of course, taken literally, Paul did stop travelling, and did rest, at this or that port of call, but I had not imagined that anyone would insist on such wooden literalism, or would fail to recognize these as a valid reflection of what Paul recounts in, for instance, 2 Cor 11:21–33. More seriously, I have used the word “Christian,” despite the currently received wisdom according to which it is anachronistic until the late first century at least, because the constant repetition of complex periphrases (“Jesus-believing” and so on) became wearisome; and also because, after all, Acts 11:26 does say that the term came into use in Antioch in the late 40s.13 That reflects a further question, raised by Eve-Marie Becker in particular: why did I not engage more with Acts? This is a classic case of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” As all Pauline scholars know, the methodological decision in the guild for many years has been to try as best we can to construct our portrait of Paul and his thought first and foremost upon the letters. To do anything else would have shut down the debate with a large section of readers, and I wanted to open that debate up, not foreclose it. Of course, the portrait of Paul in Acts (coupled with the tantalizing reference in 2 Pet 3:15–16) are our earliest sources for Paul outside his letters (unless we date both of them so late that Ignatius counts as earlier), so that a fuller historical account would want to deal with them. But they all raise questions which would require much more than a few lines of introduction, and though several of the contributors to this volume clearly wanted more detail on many points, many others, and many reviewers, have already told me it was too long as it was. I do indeed think that the more historical research we do on Acts the more Luke turns out to have been a serious historian rather than a theologically or politically driven fantasist, and that his portrait of Paul (as opposed to some portrayals of his portrait of Paul!) must therefore be taken very seriously. But (to say it again) to make that case, in a book already too long for some, was beyond possibility; and

12

This was, I grant, obscured by the decision of the American publisher to call their edition of my book whose British title is Paul: Fresh Perspectives (London: SPCK, 2005) Paul in Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005). 13 See too PFG xxi and xxiv–xxv on modern meanings of “Judaism.” Stuhlmacher (362) cites the verse as if it counted as evidence that “Christ” was already a proper name; but this is surely unnecessary. There is no reason why the word χριστιανοί could not be meant, and heard, as “messiah-people.”

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so, if I was not to beg the question, I had to restrict myself mainly to the letters. Mention of serious history leads to another rather important point. This may be a question of different terminology between different academic subcultures, but if so it deserves to be brought out into the open. Benjamin Schliesser suggests that I am indulging in a “psychoanalytical effort,” and using “psychologizing assumptions,” in my attempts to contextualize Rudolf Bultmann.14 What I am doing, however, is not what (in English discourse at least) we mean by “psychology.” What I was trying to do (with what success, others must judge) was actually history, which is not simply about “what happened” but “why did the actors do what they did?” This is the sort of question historians regularly ask: in Paul and his Recent Interpreters I give the example of a whole chapter in Margaret MacMillan’s recent book on the origins of the First World War, exploring the “hopes, fears, ideas and unspoken assumptions” of European leaders.15 MacMillan has not psychoanalyzed any of those leaders. They did not come and lie on a couch where she could interrogate them about their anxieties, their dreams, and their buried childhood memories. They remain unavailable for comment. But, like other historians, she has tracked the network of surrounding circumstances, social and cultural symbols, controlling narratives referred to obliquely but significantly, and so on. This is not psychology, but history. Of course, one might get it wrong, but if so the mistake is a mistake in a historical hypothesis, not a psychological one. Correspondence with Schliesser himself indicates that there is perhaps a subtle shift along a spectrum, and that in Germany the word “psychologizing” is used for this more general attempt to understand motivation. I would myself retain words beginning with “psych” for the sort of things one might discern in psychiatry or psychotherapy. The same point needs to be made in connection with the very interesting discussion by Volker Rabens about “plight and solution” in Paul. I have argued quite carefully that we can, as historians not psychologists, conclude for all sorts of reasons that any Pharisee in the first century, certainly any “extremely zealous” one, would have been aware of “a problem” in terms of the present state of things, with pagans in charge, Israel unredeemed, and most Jews insufficiently observant of Torah. This is not “psychology.” When Rabens says “It was not Paul who had a problem, but those whom he was persecuting,”16 this simply misses the point: the reason Paul was taking the trouble to persecute them was that he believed that their existence, beliefs, 14

On Bultmann see now Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 38–45. Margaret MacMillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War, (London: Profile Books, 2013), ch. 9; see Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 237–38. 16 560. 15

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and way of life was a blasphemous insult to Israel’s God and his law. It is true that in the discussion at PFG 737–72 I worked primarily with Rom 1:18– 2:16 rather than other relevant texts such as Phil 3:2–6, but I have discussed those elsewhere, and it is the Romans passage that has so often been cited in terms of “what Paul thought was wrong with the world.” By the same token, it is always fascinating when writers probe my own hidden motivations or lines of thought. Crossley and Edwards say that they are going to do this, speaking of “the often unconscious issues at play,”17 but apart from the misplaced charge of “essentializing” (see above) and of maintaining a “superiority myth” (which misses my frequently reiterated point, that for Paul what mattered was not comparing types of religion but the question of whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s divinely appointed Messiah), I seem to have escaped quite lightly. However, Andrew McGowan’s gently phrased rebuke (“physicians do also have their own welfare to consider,”18) was in fact misplaced: Τhe clause he takes as a rebuke to others was actually intended as an ongoing warning to myself, following from my comment that perhaps Paul himself “will one day put me straight” (PFG 1133). I was glad, though, that McGowan concluded that the key elements of my picture of Paul are “reassuringly discontinuous” with commitments that might be seen as self-serving on my part,19 and that “the Paul of PFG seems to point less to a high-Church Protestantism as to a reformed catholicism.”20 I am not sure where McGowan imagines I currently sit on any of these very modern sliding scales, but I do see what he means and am grateful that he has clearly seen what I was getting at. Another related question was raised, fascinatingly (to me at any rate) by the hypothesis of Andreas Losch, that I first read Ian Barbour on “critical realism” and then later amalgamated it with the exposition of Lonergan I found in Ben Meyer. Losch is quite right to draw attention to the different nuances in various statements of “critical realism,” and to suggest that I really ought to make my position clearer in relation to these subtle variations. I have often thought that if I were to produce a second edition of The New Testament and the People of God, that is one matter to which I would give eager attention, and I am grateful to be prodded in that direction (though I have no idea when I may get the time for such further methodological exploration). However, Losch is straightforwardly wrong in his hypothesis about the way I came to the view I express in The New Testament and the People of God, Part II. I reached it much earlier, when I read Ben Meyer᾽s remarkable book The

17

603. 589n7. 19 599. 20 599. 18

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Aims of Jesus in the late 1970s.21 Because Meyer later published detailed studies on method, I referred to those rather than to his earlier proposals; but I had been pondering and trying to use his “critical realism” throughout the 1980s, and certainly before I read Barbour. I do not feel particularly impenitent about my failure to set out my version of “critical realism” in a more, well, critical fashion; there would indeed be a place for such an exposition, but I did at least try to sketch a way forward epistemologically while a good many New Testament scholars never discuss the question at all, but proceed (or so it seems to me) as though one could take such things for granted. This normally means that they proceed with something which passes for induction but which is in fact – like most inductive work – undertaken within a larger implicit framework (see below). I am glad, however, that from a philosophical perspective Losch has identified helpful elements in my version of critical realism. He has made explicit various aspects of my work in such a way as to provide at least oblique confirmation of the path I have taken. This leads to the question of abduction itself, and I am delighted that Theresa and Christoph Heilig have drawn attention to this in their very helpful essay. Few biblical scholars have received much philosophical training. Many of them are moving away from an earlier conservatism (of whatever kind), and are particularly allergic to anything that smacks of “deduction,” the process by which a tradition of interpretation is assumed and the meaning of a particular text is “deduced” from it. An obvious example: an older “orthodox” reading of Rom 1:3–4 assumed that the main thing one might want to say about Jesus was that he was fully human and fully divine, so that the passage was read as affirming these two points, with Paul’s specific and quite nuanced notes of Messiahship, resurrection, and world sovereignty played down or ignored. More subtly, one might consider those myriad interpretations of Galatians which assume that Paul is talking, throughout the letter, about what you have to believe in order to have your sins forgiven and go to heaven. He is not: rescue from sin, and final salvation, are presupposed; they are not the topic under discussion. As Barth already pointed out, the Reformers were always in danger of reading their own urgent issues back into Paul’s most urgent letter.22 The essay by the Heiligs alerts us to the fact that everybody in fact does come to their textual study with some kind of framework. The question is whether one allows the data to challenge, subvert, or even contradict it. The process of abduction, of “inference to the best explanation,” is going on all the time.

21

Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 48 (London: SCM, 1979). 22 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV, 1, 622–23, quoted and discussed in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 86–87.

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To speak in this context, therefore, of me or anyone else having an idée fixe is likely to be mere smokescreen. If, after forty years of studying Paul, I have come by slow and winding steps (including frequent retracing of steps when I ended up in a cul-de-sac) to the belief that the entire complex history of Israel, as told and retold in the Bible and Second Temple literature and as understood variously within those varied texts, was present to Paul’s mind as part of the larger world within which what he wrote made the sense he wanted it to make, it will not do simply to accuse me of reading that story into his letters. Of course, in presenting my findings as I now see them, I am bound to summarize. The genre of much New Testament scholarship insists that one first sketches one’s current complete view of the historical, cultural, and/or philosophical world within which one is now going to interpret the text. One does not normally explain the complex steps of hypothesis, testing, second hypothesis, further testing, and so on which has preceded it. This ought to be understood. Certainly when biblical scholars accuse one another of “deduction” – the great bugbear we all fear, lest after all we turn out to be dogmaticians in disguise! – they ought to reflect both that “abduction,” rather than deduction, is what has been going on, and that their own supposedly “historically neutral” or “inductive” essays are just as likely to involve some major assumptions and idées fixes which are all the more powerful for being out of sight. Having said all that, I should add that, despite the Heiligs’ attempt to persuade me otherwise, I am still somewhat wary of Bayes’s theorem as a tool in historical research. It may be that I have been, so to say, inoculated against Bayesian methods by seeing them applied in other areas where they seem to me dangerously fanciful and subjective. When dealing with Paul, our textual base is so small that deciding what might or might not be likely is always going to be risky and potentially circular. However, I certainly take the main point, which is that anything that helps with assessing the “background plausibility” on the one hand, and the “explanatory potential” on the other, of any given proposal is to be welcomed. It is quite possible that I have sometimes overemphasized one rather than the other. Part I of PFG was designed to set up the terms for the “background plausibility”; Part IV was designed to explore at least the beginnings of the “explanatory potential,” though of course ideally the latter would require a complete set of detailed commentaries. The ultimate “explanatory potential” is found in the exegesis, where what one is looking for is not a conclusion in which we say, “Well, Paul was a bit imprecise here; what he really meant to say was …,” but rather for one in which we say, “Actually, if we come at things from this perspective, we will see that he has said exactly, if no doubt densely, what he meant.” At this point, naturally, readers will differ, so that (for instance) where I find a clear and helpful echo of scripture, or an obvious and exegetically fruitful resonance with one element of ancient Jewish narrative, others may neither see these things nor find them necessary to achieve what they

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regard as a satisfactory reading. An obvious example might be the echoes of the Exodus story in Gal 4:1–7. This is all part of the larger hermeneutical spirals on which we are all engaged. To the extent, then, that some version of Bayes’s theorem enables us to formulate these two possibilities (background plausibility and explanatory potential) it might be welcomed. And certainly it is important in New Testament studies constantly to examine our methodological presuppositions. I have tried to do that with as much rigor as I could; more, I think, than some; but I know very well that much more could yet be undertaken. In writing PFG I faced, of course, the challenge of choosing conversation partners, and the danger of doing so within too narrowly restricted a group, particularly a language group. Of course, there are hardly any scholars who succeed in taking account of all the major contributors from all the major languages, let alone from continents other than Europe and (north) America. Any volume that did try to include a worldwide survey of current writing would itself be a challenge to read. But the limitation is to be regretted for all that. I have said a little more about this in Paul and his Recent Interpreters. More pressing, I am accused by some – mostly on the basis of quotations from one or two earlier reviews – of being uncharitable or even caricaturing. I apologize for any and all offence, even for my deliberate borrowing at one point of Martin Luther’s splendid polemical style (which was far more vivid than anything I have dared to attempt) to tease some of his own followers. Cross-cultural teasing is always risky. And the charge of caricaturing, though always to be taken seriously, has sometimes been used as a way of getting off the hook; though, having myself been caricatured (most obviously in the present volume by the remarkable rant from Gregory Tatum, accusing me of Nominalism, Modernism, and ultimately immorality), I recognize that there is a place for raising the question. Risky, too, is the adopting of any style other than the relentless and depressing pseudo-“scientific” style which apes a laboratory report, pretending to an inductive “objectivity” but in fact often achieving little more than unreadability. Since I was asking my readers to take on board quite a long argument (a necessarily long argument, as I still think, and the essays in this volume have made me think that at various points it was still not long enough), I was determined that they would not find the going too tedious. In particular – thinking of Oda Wischmeyer’s fascinating remarks – I should explain, since no reviewer has even commented on this, that I have come to regard exegesis as a branch of history, history as requiring disciplined imagination, and disciplined imagination as being well served by (among other things) poetry. The New Testament itself, after all, is written with a fair amount of intertextual echo and allusion, and more than a little poetry. One might suggest that, just as a piano concerto is better played on a piano than on a tin whistle, so an allusive and poetical text may ultimately be better

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served by at least some allusive and poetical exegesis. The poetry in PFG – both the poems by Micheal O’Siadhail which structure the book and lend it several running metaphors, and those to which I allude (including for instance T. S. Eliot in ch. 6, Shakespeare in ch. 7, and George Herbert in the closing pages), and those embedded within the writing itself – is not intended as mere decoration around the edge of the argument, but as a way of trying to penetrate to its core. I quite see that some might have preferred it otherwise. I have written plenty of technical articles for those who want that mode of presentation, not least the collection in Pauline Perspectives. This includes some pieces that offer solid answers to some of the questions which contributors have raised; notably, for instance, a substantial exegesis of 4QMMT which does what James Charlesworth said he missed in PFG itself.23 All this leads to a welcoming of the very interesting essay of James Hanges. He stresses the importance of “thick description,” and regrets – as I do – that my own treatment of Greco-Roman “religion” was not “thicker.” This is parallel to Andrew McGowan’s point, that real life is more messy than any schemes allow: I heartily agree, of course, but we still have to summarize, otherwise we are in the position of only being allowed to draw a map which is of the same size as the landscape it wants to portray. My plea in mitigation is that the great majority of New Testament scholars (including myself in earlier writings) never get much beyond arm-waving generalizations about ancient “religion,” and I was particularly eager to stress the radical difference between what people in Paul’s day would have understood by “religion” and what that word conveys in today’s western world. I strongly agree with Hanges’s point about the blurred lines “between Paul the political actor and Paul the resister and Paul the assimilator, how he can be both and more simultaneously,” “constantly negotiating his identity within the matrices of anisodynamic power relationships.”24 My only additional comment there is that in today’s world people tend to import implicit late-modern standards into the historical discourse, praising or blaming Paul for doing, or not doing, what they like to think they might have done, or not done, in his place; and that the “postcolonial” stance which Hanges invokes here, despite its intentions, can be used in the same way. Hanges is wrong, however, to suggest that I focus on Roman religiones as “the critical hermeneutical key to Paul”; I am not sure how he received that impression, since the layered account in PFG chs. 2, 3, 4, and 5 was designed precisely to avoid the sort of oversimplification he fears, and my account of Paul as a whole, not least in Parts III and IV, seem to me free of any such proposal. I drew attention to Paul’s Roman con23

See N. T. Wright, “4QMMT and Paul: Justification, “Works” and Eschatology (2006),” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 332– 55. 24 272.

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text, in (I hope) a fairly nuanced way, and certainly not highlighting imperial cult as a main focus (the imperial world as a whole is the larger reality, within which “cult” plays this or that role in different settings), because this still seems to me a vital and non-reducible element within the larger context we loosely refer to as “Paul’s world.” I had no intention of implying that the Roman religiones had rendered Greek cult impotent: far from it. When I tried to distinguish ancient “religion” from “philosophy” or “theology,” I meant simply that the ancient religions themselves did not invite or generate philosophical or theological discussions; the passage in question (PFG 246–57) will I think speak for itself here. More interesting, perhaps, is Hanges’s challenging of my assertion that the ancient Greek world had no equivalent of Israel’s scriptures. I take his point, that there was “a vast body of oral traditions” of various sorts which might “fulfill for the Greeks a function similar to the function of scripture for Jews”; but I question his further suggestion that this was “the formation of a common narrative of human and divine interaction that defined their identity in the world.” As I have argued in various places, what we lack in the ancient non-Jewish world (with the important exception of the narratives of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy) was a single narrative in search of an ending, such as many Second Temple Jews saw in their scriptures. The vast accumulation of leges sacrae did not offer such a thing. Hanges’s way of saying something similar approaches to my point: “The Jewish scriptures were produced by a profundity of disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance arguably deeper yet certainly more creatively productive than other national identity-building narratives known from the ancient Mediterranean world.”25 In my (perhaps simplified) language, many Jews of Paul’s day read their ancient scriptures, which to be sure were from another angle “a disparate and multiform group of texts,” as a single story encapsulating not only identity but hope. However keenly some non-Jews studied their various texts, I do not think we would expect to find people saying, as Josephus says about first-century Jews, that they were driven to revolt by an oracle in their scriptures declaring that at that time a world ruler would arise from their nation.26 One final introductory comment, since it raises wider issues of some importance. I was, I confess, both disappointed and puzzled by the essay of Sven Ensminger. It seems to have escaped from a different project altogether. He does of course raise the question of whether PFG was written “in awareness of the theological scholarship at hand,” with Barth as the case in point.27 The answer is that it was and it wasn’t; it is barely possible to keep up in one’s own field, let alone in everyone else’s too. But my problem here is that 25

260. See PFG 116–17, citing Josephus, B.J. 6.312–15. 27 647. 26

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the repeated insistence of Barth and many of his followers on the primary importance of the Bible, and of exegesis, seems to me belied by their actual practice – though, from my reading of Barth, I do observe that the more he went on the more he seemed to take historical exegesis seriously, and I would like to engage with him more. But Ensminger seems not to have troubled, in objecting to my privileging of the categories of monotheism, election, and eschatology, to have noticed (though I made it quite clear) why, quite late in my career, I have found myself drawn to those, rather than to the “normal” topics of western theology, vital in their subordinate way though they of course are. To repeat, my point was that after many generations when exegetes had reached explicitly for non-Jewish categories to explain Paul’s thought, I decided to start where Jewish writings (such as Solomon Schechter’s Aspects of Rabbinic Theology) were pointing, with what seemed to be the fundamental structures: one God, one people of God, one future for God’s world.28 Here Torsten Jantsch, both in his critique of me and in his own published work, has grasped the point: Against a long tradition of neglecting the topic of “God” in the New Testament, I have firmly joined the minority who have tried to make this topic central. I decided to see what would happen if one supposed that Paul had started there, with monotheism and its correlates in Jewish thought, and had reflected anew on all three in the light of the crucified and risen Messiah and the fresh gift of the spirit. And I argued that, once one approaches things in this light, many features of Paul’s writings which are unclear or puzzling on other accounts come clear. That is the ultimate intended force of my overall argument. As with any proposed paradigm shift, the point is to clarify and explain elements found puzzling or unwieldy in earlier approaches. I persist in thinking that this offers a substantial proposal which I would hope systematic theologians would take seriously, and I was encouraged not least by the way in which Frank Macchia and Andrew McGowan did just that – just as I persist in hoping that my proposals in ch. 9 about the origins and early meanings of Christology and pneumatology might likewise attract the attention of the theologians. Ensminger accuses me of a “gross misunderstanding” of Barth on religion,29 and yet declares on the next page that “religion for Barth is unbelief” and a form of idolatry, which was precisely my point. He seems to be suggesting that I have “bracketed out” God himself in my understanding of Paul; I would say that I have deliberately, and in a way most other New Testament scholars have not normally done, made God central. Of course, if Ensminger means that I ought to be speaking of the divine inspiration which 28 Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology: Major Concepts of the Talmud (Peabody, MA: Henrickson, 1998) 29 652.

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enabled Paul to think and say what he did, that is quite another matter. Paul’s first hearers did not assume that a priori. He is right to raise the question of the relationship between biblical studies and theology; but I do not think that his veiled suggestion that exegetes such as myself have collapsed Paul into “little more than historical, sociological studies of literature” will cut much ice with most of my readers.30 Some, indeed, will accuse me of the opposite problem, of reading theological ideas back into texts where they do not belong. I fear that some systematicians may be eager to do exactly that. This discussion points back of course to larger questions of Christology (the Word of God known in human flesh). That stunning first-century paradox, leading in classic theology to the very heart of the Christian faith, is reflected in the paradox of why biblical scholars do what they do, expressed in a famous line attributed to the great English scholar Sir Edwin Hoskyns, “Bury yourself in a dictionary and come up in the presence of God.” Of course, it is possible to do the former with no intention of the latter, as many “secular” biblical scholars would insist. But it is equally possible to imagine that one can achieve the latter without recourse to the former. If there is a danger of humanistic reductionism among historical exegetes – which of course there has been – it would be fair to say that there is also a danger, among theologians, of a kind of Docetism in which the human words of scripture are only allowed to say what later tradition says they should have said. I too would like to address the relationship between our disciplines, and I had hoped that this book might help in that task. But clearly there is still a long way to go. All these introductory points lead to a series of major topics which have been raised by the essayists, upon which I need to comment briefly. I offer renewed apologies that detailed engagement is clearly ruled out both by space – one could write several hundred pages of discussion! – and by the very short time available. I hope these reflections will be taken as pointers to more substantial work that I or others might some day undertake.

2. The Holy Spirit First, there is the question of the holy spirit. James Dunn accuses me of marginalizing this topic, but I think he is more than answered by the essays of Jack Levison, Volker Rabens, and Frank Macchia. I was especially pleased by Macchia’s highlighting what he calls my “breathtaking exposition of the significance of the Spirit,” giving “breathing room for pneumatology,”31 resulting in a fresh approach to later Trinitarian discussions. That was indeed 30 31

658. 624–25.

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my intention. I could indeed have said more about the “gifts of the spirit,” as Macchia wanted me to, and actually I suspect that this was part at least of what Dunn was hoping for as well. (I have a hunch that he was thinking of a fuller treatment of “experience,” which correlates with some of the points Rabens makes.) But things run deeper than simply the number of pages devoted to the topic, or an endorsement (or indeed critique!) of “charismatic” interpretations. More important I reckon is my proposal (which is I think quite new, and which I fear not all my critics have noticed) that Paul ascribes to the spirit certain activities which, in the Exodus narrative he is echoing, are activities of the glorious divine presence, the pillar of cloud and fire. This gives to Paul’s pneumatology a height – to use that phrase – which no subsequent Patristic interpretations could trump. All that is important. I am delighted with Jack Levison’s proposal that I should add other texts such as Isa 63 and Hag 2 to my collection, associating the spirit more directly with the Exodus. But far more important even than these points, in my view, is the framing of the discussion of justification, in ch. 10 of PFG, under the overall heading of “election reworked around the spirit,” following the earlier part of the chapter on “Israel’s Messiah as the focus of election.” The point of that architectonic move, one of the most fundamental structural points in Part III as a whole, was that for Paul everything that one might want to say about the gospel and its effects, including justification as a central theme but going much wider (see below), had to do with the work of the spirit through whom the unique achievement of the Messiah was then implemented. The heart of the gospel, I have argued both in structure and in detail, is the divine self-gift in the person of Israel’s Messiah, the “son of God” in all senses (see below); and that gospel, “God’s good news concerning his son,” has the powerful effect it does because the spirit puts it to work, transforming hearts and minds, lives and communities. It is ironic that, by thus elevating the role of the spirit in Paul’s thought, both to an ontological height and to a major structural role, I have, it seems, made it invisible to some readers. For me – as for Paul! – it was and is foundational. Nor is this foundational role of the spirit confined to the redefinition of election (PFG ch. 10). It is equally vital in PFG chs. 9 and 11 as well. For Paul, the preaching of the gospel and its effects are incomprehensible without the work of the spirit; and – as I argued at length – so is justification. That, indeed, is why the spirit stands at the head of the present (otherwise somewhat arbitrary) list of topics, not least before “justification,” to which I now turn.

3. Justification, Participation, and Transformation All this makes it the more puzzling that some, notably Gregory Tatum, have accused me of expounding a version of justification from which both “partic-

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ipation” and “transformation” have been excluded. Tatum even thinks that this was why I wrote the whole book, to counter Sanders’s proposed “participationist eschatology”: “Wright wrote PFG to provide a new foundation for forensic justification (understood as a change in legal status and nothing more) in terms of a grand covenantal narrative,” he writes.32 I do not think that many readers of PFG will interpret the book this way,33 not least because I was at pains at several points to explain what I was doing in general, which was much wider than expounding any theory of justification, and in particular to integrate justification itself within “participation,” which – here I totally agree with Sanders and of course Schweitzer – is quite explicitly the larger category within which “justification” takes place, as in Rom 3:24, Gal 2:17, and Phil 3:9. Indeed, those who do want to see justification in terms of legal status and nothing more – the position Tatum seems to think I have adopted – have fulminated against me for the last decade or so for not agreeing with them, a point which seems to have passed Tatum by. The same framework I mentioned a moment ago, that of PFG ch. 10 in which the Messiah’s faithfulness is the fundamental move and the spirit’s implementation follows, ought to make it abundantly clear that for me “justification” is precisely something that occurs “in the Messiah.” To say it again only slightly differently, the “forensic” theme, which is only found in Romans, not (or not explicitly) in Galatians or Philippians, is to be seen as nesting within the “participatory” theme, as in Schweitzer’s famous account though worked out differently. And, yes, I interpret Paul’s “participatory” language (“in the Messiah,” and so forth) in terms of the most obvious Jewish category of the time, namely that of “covenant” in the sense I have given that word. Tatum seems to think this stands over against a Sanders-style “participation”; for me, it is the hidden clue that explains (as Sanders admits is otherwise difficult) what that very participation means. What is more, I repeatedly stress that the work of the spirit through the gospel does result in real and actual transformation, and that this is correlated with but not identical to “justification.” Once again Jack Levison reads me exactly right, quoting from a vital passage in PFG 957–59. The whole point, for me, of Paul’s emphasis on πίστις as the “vital sign” of the gospel’s work is that this reflects, and reembodies, the πίστις Χριστοῦ, the initial and initiating “faithfulness of the Messiah,” the Messiah “in whom” justification takes place. Tatum’s supposed critique seems in fact to be pure “deduction,” as above. He assumes (for reasons I cannot fathom) that I am directly opposing Sanders’s stress on the centrality of “participation,” whereas I have done my best 32

326. See, e.g., Macchia at 632: as he sees, I allow “no possibility of separating the forensic from incorporative, participative, and transformative dimensions of the Spirit from each other.” 33

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strongly to affirm it, and to argue for a construal of that notion in terms of a substantially “covenantal” understanding which grows straight out of Sanders’s own “covenantal” reading of Paul’s Jewish context, albeit in a way which Sanders himself never explored. Actually, the notion of “covenant” itself still seems to be opaque to some, and my stress on it has picked up some (to me) strange comments. To say, as does Stuhlmacher, that I “merely” see the “juridical” and “participatory” aspects of redemption as “united in ‘covenantal thinking,’” and that I would have done better to go with H. Gese and B. Janowski, seems to me to miss the whole point of the covenant, about which there is nothing “mere,” but rather is the rich God/Israel relationship, sustained in the ancient sacrificial cult which points finally to the cross.34 Similarly, Stuhlmacher’s proposals about 2 Cor 5:21 seem to me to lack exegetical coherence; contrast PFG 881– 84, which he does not attempt to refute. It is not that I “want” the sentence to refer to Paul and the other apostles, as he suggests; the whole passage from 2 Cor 5:11 through to 6:13 – in fact, from 2:14 onwards! – has been about Paul’s apostolic ministry, and the train of thought in 2 Cor 6:1–2, which Stuhlmacher says makes an apostolic reference improbable, actually strongly supports it, since Isa 49, which Paul there quotes, is one of his favorite passages in relation to his own ministry. As for the divine righteousness, on which Stuhlmacher did his own important early work under Ernst Käsemann, I was encouraged by his discussion,35 and would simply refer to a recent article in which I have tried to explore some of Käsemann’s later essays on this subject.36 If Tatum wanted to find someone holding out for a non-participatory account of justification, he might look at Jantsch’s essay. Jantsch cites the recent work of C. L. Irons against a “covenantal” reading of “righteousness” language in Israel’s scriptures,37 but I will not be the only reader to find Irons deeply unconvincing, and Jantsch’s attempt to expound biblical δικαιοσύνη texts without reference to the covenant does not help either.38 The idea that a “covenantal” interpretation is somehow a lesser thing than participation, justification, and transformation put together is a strange notion which cer34

364. 368–69. 36 N. T. Wright, “A New Perspective on Käsemann? Apocalyptic, Covenant, and the Righteousness of God,” in Studies in the Pauline Epistles: Essays in Honor of Douglas J. Moo, ed. M. S. Harmon and J. E. Smith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 243–58. 37 474n47. 38 He suggests that I shift the focus of Rom 4 from “theocentric” to “covenantal,” missing the whole point that Paul is arguing, there and in Gal 3, precisely for the divine faithfulness to – the covenant! Nor is one encouraged by Jantsch’s strange suggestion (474) that, apart from Rom 3:5, “lexemes of the semantic domain δίκαιος” etc. “cannot be found in Rom 1:18–3:20”: one wonders what happened to the crucial 2:13. 35

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tainly does not arise either from Paul or from the ancient Hebrew texts on which he draws. Tatum then, assuming as I say that I take a standard older protestant position on a non-transformative “forensic justification,” “deduces” all sorts of things about my philosophical leanings and theological positions which a more careful reading of the text would have shown to be absurd. This is all the more a shame in that there is an important discussion to be had (as, for instance, between me and Michael Gorman) as to whether, since Paul in the same passage (e.g., Gal 2:11–21) can talk about personal transformation and about justification, these are two ways of saying the same thing or, as I still think, two things which have to be said which belong closely together but which cannot be collapsed into terms of one another. At this point I might also cite the subtle but actually clear relationship between Rom 1:3–4, where Paul states his gospel itself, and 1:16–17, where he says what the effect of this gospel is – in other words, that it is God’s power for salvation, since in it God’s righteousness is revealed. Nothing is to be gained, and all clarity lost, I think, by suggesting, as many commentators have done, echoed now by Schnabel, that 1:16–17 is a further statement of the gospel in itself rather than in its effects. On this I have written much more in various places, not least my commentaries. As to the way in which the “transformation” wrought by gospel and spirit works its way out in terms both of the individual moral life (where Rabens is right to push me to say more about non-cognitive aspects) and the sacramental life (where Edith Humphrey is right to push me to say more about the ways in which the sacraments, as it were, borrow from God’s future world even within the present one) – well, I am very happy to take all this on board, though I remain impenitent at not having made the book any longer than it already is. In all this I am not sure why Stuhlmacher supposes I oppose the idea of making justification “absolute,” or of integrating it into the “ordo salutis.”39 It seems to me that in Galatians, Philippians, and especially Romans justification is indeed a fixed point for Paul, and it can indeed be expressed within a larger narrative which one might call a revised “ordo salutis.” It is just that I do not think that when Paul uses the language of δικαιόω and its cognates he is referring to exactly the same thing that many of his interpreters have supposed. There is much more to be said here, of course, not least in relation to how the metaphor of the law court, employed rather obviously by Paul in Romans, actually works. Stuhlmacher is right to point out that in the great law court scene in Rom 8:31–39 there is not only the judge (God), the defendant (humans), and the prosecutors (the powers), but also Christ acting as intercessor. But in the earlier scene in Rom 3, where the emphasis is on present justification rather than the future verdict of Rom 8, there are only the three normal 39

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parties. In any case, the point of insisting on the law court setting is not primarily to discuss the number of participants, but to emphasize – at this point, in good old-fashioned protestant style, one might have thought – that “justification” consists of the declaration of a verdict, a declaration which results in a new situation through the divine “speech-act.” (I am not sure that McGowan has fully grasped how, in my view, all this works; his summary, though much closer to my view than many others, suggests that I see the law court as a civil suit rather than a criminal trial, whereas my point, in insisting on the ancient biblical context, is that all criminal trials in that context did in fact have the form of what for us is a civil suit, the plaintiff against the defendant.) Once more, all this is contextualized by “participation in the Messiah”: It is the Messiah’s faithful obedience to death which constitutes the ultimate saving act; and, once more, it issues in, because “faith” is the first sign of, that radical transformation by the spirit which enables Paul to say that “the one who began a good work in you will thoroughly complete it” (Phil 1:6). But, to say it yet again, what Paul means specifically by “justification,” though closely correlated with all of this, is not the same thing. Discussions of justification, then, continue to be perplexing, and even where contributors do not get things so obviously muddled as Tatum there are still plenty of problems. Seyoon Kim persists in the old caricature of my exegesis of Romans and Galatians, according to which I see Paul affirming “only that God has faithfully fulfilled through the Messiah Jesus his promises to Abraham so that Jews and Gentiles are united under the rule of the Messiah Jesus,” so that again I “interpret the gospel of justification in the body of Romans only in terms of making Jews and Gentiles members of Abraham’s family.”40 Kim gives a reference for this, namely PFG 925–1042; but anyone who reads those pages will find that the repeated “only” is – to say the least! – unwarranted. He says I miss the fact that Paul’s gospel of justification has an apocalyptic framework of God’s kingdom overcoming the kingdom of Satan.41 Kim here refers to his own recent and forthcoming work, but his summary, that justification “means making a real righteous person by the creative divine word of declaration – a person who is in right relationship with God, one who has been forgiven of sins committed under Satan’s kingship, and restored to God’s kingdom” does not encourage me to think that he has understood either my own position or how Paul’s actual language of justification works in its contexts in Rom 3, Gal 3, or Phil 3. As in some other discussions, I do not disagree with the overall theological point Kim wants to make, but I do not think this is what Paul means by “justification.” In the Bible, a “right relationship with God” might usually be taken to mean an appropriate covenantal relationship; and the point about Gentiles coming in 40 41

303, emphasis added. Stuhlmacher makes a similar point.

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to the family of Abraham (and Jews being reaffirmed as members of that family) is that, while the Gentiles are “sinners” (Gal 2:15) in need of forgiveness, and the Jews, according to Paul at least, are also “under sin” (Rom 3:10–20), God’s purpose was always to deal with the problem of sin by fulfilling the covenant so that “all nations” might be blessed “in Abraham” (see below). When the emphasis falls particularly, as it does in Galatians, on the admission of uncircumcised “Gentile sinners” into full membership of God’s people, the point should be clear: “Forgiveness of sins” and “admission of believing Gentiles” amounts to the same thing – which is not to collapse salvation into ecclesiology, but to insist that ecclesiology at this point must be shaped by soteriology. At this point I might have liked to engage with Richard Bell, but though his essay is fascinating, it stands at some distance from my own work. Bell, like some other contributors, takes the view that the “righteous Gentiles” of Rom 2 do not exist, on the grounds that the larger argument from Rom 1:18 to 3:20 concludes that all are sinful. This, like attempted rebuttals of my reading of Rom 2:17–29, seems to me to miss the point. I know as well as anyone that this is where the overall argument is going. But as often Paul is quite capable of including, within a larger framework, elements which express different points, and I think that is what is going on both in Rom 2:1–16 and 2:17–29, to say nothing of the dense 3:1–9. Of course, there is much more to be said about those difficult passages, not least about Paul’s apparently puzzling use of scripture there. Steve Moyise is right to push me on this, and though I have written about Rom 2:17–29 at more length elsewhere I suspect that Moyise will not be satisfied with that account either (see below).42

4. Paul and the Story of Israel All this brings me, inevitably, to the question of Paul’s retrievals of Israel’s narrative. This requires a preliminary note about “narrative” itself. It is true, as Joel White has pointed out, that narrative analyses of the kind I learned from Richard Hays’s early work were originally employed in the service of a dehistoricizing structuralism, which obviously goes directly against some major theological points for which I have argued throughout my work: I understand the basic stories which ancient Jews and early Christians told as having, or at least intending to have, very specific historical referent. But I have continued to find this method of analysis helpful, to put otherwise implicit stories as it were under the microscope and see what in fact is going on. 42 See N. T. Wright, “Romans 2.17–3.9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans? (2012),” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 489– 509.

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The point is not then to retreat into the thinner air of a general point about narrative structure but to return to the text having clarified something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. I am sorry if that is not always the effect this exercise has on my readers. White is correct, too, to point to Norman Petersen’s work, and I made that foundational in the earlier account of narrative in The New Testament and the People of God. That said, I find White’s account of my investigation of ancient Jewish storylines and Paul’s retelling of them to be helpful, and his comparison of Deut 32 with Rom 9–11 is telling. In this connection, I have sometimes in the past been accused of cobbling together a few proof-texts from ancient Jewish writings to “construct” such a thing, but in view of PFG ch. 2, especially 108–77, I think this charge absurd. Many Jews in the Second Temple period “retrieved” Israel’s narrative, which was already being told in various ways within scripture itself (note “in various ways”; I have been careful not to treat Jewish texts and traditions all alike, despite McGowan’s suggestion otherwise). We can see how they did this, what patterns emerged, and what uses this retelling was put to. This is not a matter of proof-texting, or of a later supposedly “Christian” construction (as has been darkly hinted), but rather an attempt to pay attention to the biblical and postbiblical Jewish texts in their own contexts and with their own meanings. When we find early Christian writers engaging in similar retellings themselves, drawing the same kind of Jewish storytelling forward to the shocking conclusion of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah (as for instance in Acts 7 or 13, in Heb 11, or in Matt 1, to look only at some of the more obvious cases), we should have no hesitation in placing them within that larger world, however unwelcome their proposals may be to some. When we find Paul doing similar things, writing about Abraham, Moses, and the Messiah in Gal 3, or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Pharaoh and the Exodus, the monarchy, and the prophets and the exile … and then the Messiah, in Rom 9:6–10:4, we should not sweep this away. White suggests that I privilege the hypothetical chiastic structure of Rom 9–11 over the narrative of 9:6–10:21, which surprised me greatly since that narrative has been at the center of my understanding of those chapters for many years. My whole point, indeed, which I think is set out in my commentary, is that Paul tells the story of Israel from Abraham to Deut 30 – like Josephus, seeing the Pentateuch not simply as the “back story” of Israel but, in a measure and prophetically, as the “whole story” – in such a way that the coming of the Messiah precipitates the renewal of the covenant in Rom 10:5–13, which in turn generates the Gentile mission, again as prophesied in Isaiah and Deuteronomy. This then generates the unexpected question (unexpected, since no Jew before Paul seems to have envisaged the possibility that the Messiah might come but that most Jews of the time would reject him) of Rom 11, as I have described it at PFG 1195–96. (There is of course a more detailed argument to be made about the relation of Abraham in Rom 4 to Adam in Rom 5,

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and of both to the echoes of the Exodus in Rom 6–8, but there is no space for that here.43) When White asks me to explain more fully “where the [Jewish story] ends and the [narrative behind Paul’s theology] is picked up,”44 I am somewhat puzzled: For Paul, I have argued, the Jewish story (with all its twists and turns, with Ps 106 sitting beside Ps 105 and preventing it becoming triumphalistic) reaches its strange, unexpected, dark-and-light climax in the Messiah and his death and resurrection. In all of this, once more, I am consciously standing (in terms of the history of our discipline) on the side of Stendahl and Sanders, appealing for a “Jewish” reading of Paul over against the fragmented “non-Jewish” readings that were almost universal until recently and are still common. Of course, neither Stendahl nor Sanders saw the narratives and their purpose in the way that I and others have done. Of course, as well – to my frustration – my attempt to portray this Jewish Paul has earned me the ironic opprobrium that comes from people hearing a “messianic” reading of Israel’s narrative in terms of an “anti-Israel” reading. Even Andrew McGowan suggests that in my reading there is “an end to Jewish theology as well as to Israel’s salvific mission,”45 whereas my whole point – and, I think, Paul’s! – is that for Paul Jewish theology has reached its fulfilment, not its abolition, in Israel’s Messiah, and that Israel’s Messiah and all that he brings, not least the gift of his spirit, is indeed the way by which Israel’s salvific mission is now to be accomplished worldwide. Nor is it the case that I think Paul had already been convinced of a “failure” on the part of Israel prior to his call/conversion (see below), though it is not easy to be sure how, as a zealous Jew, he would have read the texts that he cites in, for instance, Rom 2:24. Once again I insist, as of first importance, that we are talking about scripturally-based messianic eschatology, or eschatological messianism, not about comparative religion. Paul is not saying “Christianity is better than Judaism,” though of course many of Paul’s later readers have wanted to say that, and of course many of their contemporary detractors have been eager to accuse people like me of saying it. He is saying “Jesus is Israel’s Messiah.” As anyone living through the competing messianic claims of the Roman-Jewish war would know, and as anyone in the bar-Kochba period would also know, no Jew could say “Here is the Messiah” and then say also “But if you disagree, and if you would prefer to wait for some other candidate, that’s fine as well.” A “messianic” claim is bound to be controversial, not least because it is exclusive: It is claiming that here, rather than anywhere else, Israel’s God is at last acting decisively as he 43 See, for instance, N. T. Wright, “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3–8 (1999),” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 160–68. 44 186. 45 594.

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had always promised. Controversial, yes, but anti-Jewish? Only in the minds of fevered polemicists. Was Akiba anti-Jewish for hailing bar-Kochba as Messiah? Some of his colleagues thought he was wrong, and dangerously so; but anti-Jewish? Of course not. Even to think in terms of a Messiah is to affirm that Israel is the people of the one creator God and that the Israelshaped divine purposes are reaching their goal at last. This is the place to express my gratitude to J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew Novenson for their very helpful essay on Messiahship and incorporation. I am very open to being persuaded that Paul’s incorporative language was developed not least on analogy with language used about Abraham’s seed; that Ps 72:17 transfers to the coming king the incorporative language used in relation to Abraham’s seed in Gen 12 and elsewhere; and that Dan 7 may yet be part of an explanatory grid for Paul’s “incorporative” understanding of the Messiah. The surprise expressed by the authors at my non-use of Dan 7 would have been mirrored by the surprise expressed by many others had I used it, since the allusion to Dan 7:27 at 1 Cor 15:24 (“all rule and authority”) has not been widely noted (Stuhlmacher says that Paul never quotes Daniel46). But the points are well taken, and strengthen my view that Paul’s vital and central “incorporative” language is best understood from within the proposal to treat Χριστός as more than a proper name (as Novenson has pointed out elsewhere, it is not exactly a “title,” but rather an “honorific”).47 I do indeed believe, as the authors expected I would, that their proposals will go very well with the multi-layered worldview analysis I have offered, about which I am of course impenitent. The whole point about Israel’s Messiah is that he is the one who will bring Israel’s narrative to its God-ordained τέλος; that is what Paul believed, that is what he said, and that is demonstrably the framework within which his rethinking of much besides took place. All this, despite the fears of Aquila Lee, can and does integrate in Paul’s thought with the “high Christology” for which I have argued at length in PFG ch. 9. Lee seems to be afraid that allowing Χριστός to mean “Messiah” will somehow take away from this conclusion and fails to see the force of my argument about the Messiah’s faithfulness (as in Rom 3:22) being the vehicle of the divine faithfulness. Paul likewise holds together, what so many have forced apart, the notions both of “representation” (which I have argued is rooted in the way he understands Jesus’s Messiahship as representing Israel) and “substitute.”48 For me, as for Paul in, e.g., Rom 8:1–4, the two are inextricably united; or rather, perhaps we should say, Paul’s train of thought actually shows no sign of holding together two normally incompatible things, but rather expresses, as a 46

363. Matthew V. Novenson, Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 48 See, e.g., 363. 47

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single complex whole, things which later tradition has forced artificially apart. If we see two different things awkwardly combined, that may be our problem. The idea of the incorporative Messiah might, it is true, have received fuller exposition. I could have devoted (as McGowan wanted me to) more space to the idea of the “body of Christ” – though there are nine index references to “Messiah, body of,” which carry some at least of what needs to be said. I persist in thinking that in both 1 Cor 12 and Rom 12 Paul’s use of “body” is a function not only of his fertile metaphorical imagination, not only of a potential analogy with Stoic language about a human community, but also of his belief that in the Messiah a new humanity had come into being. The image of the “body” is not simply a random metaphor. It is a kind of metonymy; I think, a deliberate metonymy.

5. The Purpose of Election? So what, then, were the original purposes of election? Joel White sees clearly that the view I have taken has a lot in common with traditional reformed theology, and I have been surprised at the number who have not grasped the basic point I was making. I had thought that the argument had been sufficiently clear in PFG, but for some reason one or two earlier reviewers ignored most of the evidence I laid out step by step and fastened on my quotation from Gen. Rab. 14:6, which came on PFG 794 after eleven pages of biblical and Second Temple passages; so that the idea that I was simply basing a theory on a late (and possibly anti-Christian) rabbinic passage is simply wrong. This applies particularly to Stuhlmacher, who implies that my whole view of Paul’s retrieval of the divine purpose in the Abrahamic covenant depends on this much later text.49 Nothing in my argument depends on the idea that Paul might have known an early version of this saying. I am assuming, rather, that Paul knew the traditions of reading Gen 1–12 that we see reflected in the many texts I cite in those earlier eleven pages. The point is brought out clearly by Jon Levenson and others, quoted in the discussion in PFG 783–94. In Genesis itself, and in its retrieval in Paul’s period (I cited, e.g., Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra) and not merely some centuries later, the call of Abraham was understood as having been designed to reverse the prob49

See, e.g., Stuhlmacher at 360–61 and in his summary. I have sometimes, in previous presentations, quoted Gen. Rab. 14:6 at the start of a discussion, just to sharpen up the point, but this was never intended to indicate that I was invoking such a late passage as my primary evidence. See too, e.g., N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 21–26, and White’s fair comment at 181n38.

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lem of Adam and its effects. Of course, this is sometimes expressed simply in terms of Israel (or the righteous/elect within Israel, as in Qumran) being in some sense the “true Adam,” sharing “all the glory of Adam,” and so on, so that any “reversal” would then involve Israel alone, not the Gentiles.50 But there are plenty of signs, starting with “all the families of the earth” in Gen 12:3, that what God does for Abraham is intended to have worldwide effects or repercussions. This is obviously the case in Isa 49:6, one of Paul’s favorite passages. It is the likely meaning of Exod 19:6. One might also cite many Psalms, such as for instance, 67; 72:8–11; and not least 47:8–9. What, I wanted to ask Stuhlmacher and others, might a Second Temple Jew think when singing or praying that “the princes of the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham”? When we then meet Gal 3, whose triumphant conclusion is that “if you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham’s family” (3:29), it seems obvious to me that Paul is drawing on this whole larger biblical construct, and that the idea of Abraham’s “seed” being the means of blessing for the world, so far from being a late rabbinic proposal, was already thoroughly familiar. Paul was not inventing it, even though of course he gave it the radical new twist which he believed was required by the fact that Israel’s Messiah had been crucified and raised from the dead. This then seems to me to point to the most natural reading of Rom 2:19– 20, down the same line (again, Aquila Lee unfortunately misses this point). Paul can hardly be supposing that the idea of “the Jew” being “a guide to the blind, a light to people in darkness, a teacher of the foolish, an instructor for children” was something he, as a Jesus-follower, had just invented. Nor can this list be reduced (as Jewett in his commentary reduces it) to the boast of “the bigot” who imagines himself morally superior: The emphasis of these two verses is on the supposed transformative effect on the rest of the world of what “the Jew” possesses in Torah. (Nor could this sequence be reduced to the idea of a strict Jew teaching the lax or lapsed within Israel, as the wider context makes clear.) It is this little sequence, as I have argued elsewhere, that best explains the otherwise strange idea that “the Jews were entrusted with God’s oracles” (Rom 3:2). And it is this entire line of thought, as again I have argued elsewhere, that looks on to the faithfulness of Israel’s representative Messiah in Rom 3:22. The Messiah accomplishes, alone, the vocation of Israel, thereby demonstrating simultaneously – such is the brilliance of Paul’s argument at this point – the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s God and the

50 On the meaning of “glory” in these contexts, see White, misunderstanding what I mean in the narrative analysis: The point is that as in Ps 8 the “glory” of human beings is designed to be their sovereignty over “all things.” This is part of the answer to Stuhlmacher and Kim, who would have liked me to say more about the Messiah’s people sharing in his βασιλεία, a point I would now link closely to Rom 5:17 as well as 1 Cor 6:1–3.

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answering covenant faithfulness of Israel-in-person. Presupposing some such scheme makes excellent sense of the line of thought in Romans. Various critics have remained unconvinced by my detailed discussion of this passage.51 Some (e.g., Jantsch) think to avoid the point by repeating that Rom 1:18–3:20 as a whole has to do simply with proving all humans sinful; this is indeed the overall conclusion, but this cannot be allowed to squelch the specific and vital sub-arguments within the section. Among more subtle critics here I find Andrew McGowan, who suggests, as some others have done, that I came to the texts with some choices already “made against the broad scholarly grain.”52 He hints that this was, for me, a matter of deduction rather than abduction: My work, he says, is “presented as though mainly or simply grounded in historical research,” with the implication of the “as though” being “but of course we readers can see that the conclusions were in view all along.” He makes the same point a page earlier: “the rhetoric of history is used to provide a bulwark for a position that could better have been defended theologically, as one reading among others.”53 I can understand why some suspicious critics might think this was what I was doing, but the facts are otherwise. Historical research, my own as much as anybody else’s, always proceeds in fits and starts, through a rich mixture of potential hypotheses, multiple readings of texts ancient and modern, modification of hypotheses, and so on. That is the procedure I have used ever since I first sat down to study the Second Temple Jewish world over forty years ago. I came very slowly, by some very circuitous routes, to the positions I now hold; but in presenting them to a fresh audience I do not – nobody would – describe those routes, with their many false trails, blind alleys, and months of puzzlement. One does one’s best to present them as a coherent whole, through the exposition (as in PFG ch. 2 in particular) of particular texts in their different contexts. It would be ironic if such presentation – the normal stuff of “history” – were to be mistaken for “deduction.” So, for instance, when McGowan quotes a passage from PFG 811 and declares that readers ought to find it unconvincing. This is at least partly because he has himself been selective, truncating the quotation. My point was not that the idea of Abraham’s family setting right the problem of Adam was simply “woven tightly into the fabric of Genesis and Exodus” (the line McGowan quoted), but also (the next clause in my text) “into several strands of Jewish thought in Paul’s period and on to the rabbis beyond.” Likewise, I remain unconvinced by the attempted refutations like, for instance, that of Sigurd Grindheim. He suggests that God chose Israel as his bride simply to love her, not to accomplish anything through her; but then he 51

See Wright, “Romans 2.17–3.9: A Hidden Clue.” 593. 53 592. 52

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more or less undermines his own point by suggesting that this love, in its effects, was meant to demonstrate God’s character to the nations. That is exactly Paul’s point, leading to the problem which he highlights, drawing on Isaiah and Ezekiel, when he says that Israel’s faithlessness has nullified that demonstration. Once more, pointing out that Rom 1:18–3:20 is all about proving both Jews and Gentiles guilty of sin does not mean that a sub-section within that longer passage cannot have a different, though supporting, slant. The ancillary question raised by Steven Moyise, of Paul’s reading of Isa 52:5 in Rom 2:24, is important. Has Paul taken a verse originally about Israel’s plight and turned it into a statement of Israel’s fault? The answer, it seems to me – without going into too much detail because of the present context – is that Paul is here citing a verse specifically about Israel being in exile, which, as every reader of Isa 40–55 knows, has happened because of Israel’s sins. He is thinking of the (strongly implicit) narrative of the divine purpose for Israel, which had seemed to be thwarted by Israel’s failure to be the light to the Gentiles, and by the Gentiles’ ruling over them and mocking their covenant God. And this, of course, makes the sense it makes within the larger biblical notion of “extended exile” (see below). Not to presuppose something like this does not mean one comes with an open mind; it merely means that one is assuming a different train of thought, often enough a scheme of soteriology in which Abraham is a mere distant back marker, an earlier example of “justification by faith.” Since in Rom 4 and Gal 3 Paul quotes and discusses, and argues forward from, the covenant-making chapter Gen 15 (as well as Gen 12 and other related passages), it makes sense to ask how he was reading that chapter; and then the implicit narrative comes into its own. Stuhlmacher’s assertion that “Paul never speaks expressis verbis of the Abrahamic covenant” is arguably contradicted by Gal 3:15.54 When read in context, where Paul is expounding Gen 15, this seems clearly to be referring to the Abrahamic covenant, however much various traditions have tried to avoid the point. In any case, what is more important is the way Paul expounds and applies Gen 15 as a whole. Abraham is indeed “a type and a witness of the faith that God justifies the ungodly,” but for Paul he is much more than that. I would not say, as Stuhlmacher suggests that I think, that Abraham has “a salvific function” in Paul’s theology,55 or that the call of Abraham was “the decisive redemptive act.”56 But I would say that the covenant made with Abraham in Gen 15 was seen by Paul as pointing directly forward to the salvific event itself, the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah as in Rom 4:24–25. Of course (answering Jantsch) God remains the subject throughout, as always in Romans: But what Paul is saying about God in Rom 54

362. 362. 56 360. 55

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4 is focused on the fact that, exactly as stated in 3:21–31, God has been faithful to his covenant promises, through the Messiah’s faithful death, with the result that all who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead are thereby marked out as the true worldwide family promised to Abraham in Gen 15.57 I do not expect hereby to have convinced all of my critics, but I would ask them to critique what I have actually said.

6. Extended Exile As for the “extended exile” itself: I was intrigued by Steve Moyise’s suggestion that I had given this a “brief” treatment, since (after so much puzzlement following my earlier attempts) I decided to set out the evidence in detail (PFG 139–62, replete with both primary and secondary sources). I think the message is getting home in some circles; even James Dunn, who had earlier resisted the entire idea, now seems to be prepared to admit that this way of thinking did have some currency, merely suggesting that he doesn’t see it in Paul. Peter Stuhlmacher still expresses doubt, but his reasons indicate to me that he has not grasped the point I was making. The idea is not a “modern construct” at all, but one which demonstrably belongs among ancient Jewish communities who were reading Dan 9. I have been heartened by the strong support I have received from experts in Judaica, such as Professor Philip Alexander, who at the British New Testament Conference in Edinburgh in September 2015 expressed the opinion that the theme of extended exile was so ubiquitous in Second Temple Jewish thought that it would be very surprising if it did not appear in the New Testament as well. There is now an entire new volume, being edited at the same time as the present one, which will discuss the issue from a wide variety of angles.58 We may compare the very supportive remarks of James Charlesworth, in his not uncritical review, stressing the way ancient Israel told and retold its own story, and insisting that “salvation history” and “apocalypse” are mutually supporting categories rather than being mutually exclusive. I still think the main problem here is 57 This, by the way, is why I am sticking to the interpretation of Rom 4:1 I have offered in PFG and in my commentaries, despite, e.g., Stuhlmacher 371. Hays and I already pointed out the proposal of Zahn to similar effect; what I have tried to do is to show, especially in relation to Rom 4:16–17, that this reading makes better sense of Rom 4 as a whole than the normal somewhat elliptical rendering, thus answering Stuhlmacher’s suggestion that this “hardly fits with further analysis.” Of course, this reading goes with my reading of Rom 1–4 as a whole, and would hardly make such good sense if combined with a “normal” reading of Rom 1–3, which is no doubt why the proposal continues to be not so much rejected as misunderstood. 58 James M. Scott, ed., Exile: A Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, forthcoming).

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that many New Testament interpreters find it difficult if not impossible to see the events concerning Jesus as in any way a completion, a fulfilment, of a long narrative, however troubled and tortuous that narrative may have been (in other words, it was never, as in some caricatures, simply a steady march up to the light, or a matter of “progressive revelation”). Thus the proposal about “extended exile” is heard simply as a kind of metaphor, one of the many which James Dunn wants me to celebrate, rather than a way of getting inside the narratival worldview of a great many Jews of the period. Dunn’s plea for multiple metaphors may, indeed, amount to this: no more narratives, please! But once we start thinking of Paul within his Jewish world, the narratives are omnipresent; they are the very fuel of hope; and the exegesis resonates with them at point after point. As always (in any text-reading, not only in biblical studies) the force of the argument for a particular “way in” is the sense it makes of the text itself; and different people will hold different opinions on what counts as a good sense. Here we meet, as well, the question of “plight and solution,” one of the key topics raised so sharply by Ed Sanders in Paul and Palestinian Judaism.59 Volker Rabens is correct to note that for Paul the “flesh” – the σάρξ, a word for which we still do not have a suitable English equivalent – is a major part of the “problem,” but he is in my view too keen to stress the Sanders-like “solution to plight” sequence, and, as I said earlier, fails to see that for a zealous Pharisee like Saul of Tarsus there was indeed a “plight,” namely the present parlous and “unredeemed” state of Israel. I hope it is clear that saying this about Saul of Tarsus has nothing to do with a Christian back-projection that there was “something wrong with Israel.” The point is that Jewish texts of the period attest, again and again, to the strong sense that all was not well; that the not-wellness had to do with the extension of the Danielic “exilic” state predicted in Deuteronomy; and that what was required was some kind of redemption, some kind of covenant renewal, again as promised in Daniel, Deuteronomy, and of course the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and so on. If then (a Pharisee might think) the God of Israel were at last to do what he had always promised, which might include sending Israel’s Messiah, such a moment, and such a figure, would be all about rescuing Israel from that plight. My argument has been that for Saul of Tarsus, coming to recognize that the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and that he had been crucified and raised from the dead, led him quickly to a radicalization of his previous understanding of the “plight,” so that his mature thinking about the “plight” did indeed reflect the “solution” he believed Israel’s God had unveiled; but this revised “plight” was none the less a revision, albeit a radical one, of the original vision, in which the “powers” – including Sin and 59

E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).

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Death – had now loomed larger than, though they were still also operating through, the pagan enemies who had been the “problem” since at least the time of the Babylonian captivity itself.

7. The Return of YHWH to Zion? All this leads naturally to the question of the story of Israel’s God himself, and the relation in Paul’s mind between this God, on the one hand, and Jesus on the other. I sense a slow convergence here between Larry Hurtado and myself. I hope I am not over-optimistic; but Hurtado seems to me to concede that Second Temple sources, drawing on several passages of exilic and postexilic scripture, do indeed look for a fresh “return” of the glorious presence, for a fulfilment of (say) Ezek 43 in a way which few Second Temple Jews would suppose had already happened. I set out the evidence in PFG 104–7, referring also to the fuller statement in Jesus and the Victory of God, 615–24, and no response or review I have seen has made me think this evidence – biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic – is irrelevant or misleading.60 Among my respondents, some have drawn attention to the way in which the second Temple was still the focus of prayer, sacrifice, and worship, including for followers of Jesus. Some have drawn attention to the saying recorded by Matt 23:21, speaking of “the one who lives in [the Temple].” All this is taken to imply that Second Temple Jews did indeed believe that their God had “returned,” despite any statements to this effect in the writings of the time, and in the teeth of statements to the effect that he had not. This question deserves further reflection. The question of “sacred space” is seldom if ever a matter of “all or nothing” (as Stuhlmacher implies, and as I have often heard stated in discussions). When, today, devout Jews (and sometimes their friends) gather at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; when they write prayers, fold them up, and push them into cracks in that wall; clearly they believe that somehow their covenant God is specially present in that place, specially receptive there to their prayers. But it would be strange to conclude from that that they did not wish for something more, or that they believed the prophecy of Ezek 43, or indeed Isa 52 or Mal 3, had already been fulfilled. So when my interlocutors draw my attention to well-known texts which indicate that the second Temple remained the center of sacred space, I do not suppose these to be knock-down disproofs of my proposal.61 On the contrary, this is 60 N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 2, (London: SPCK, 1996). 61 I do notice, however, that there is a quite strongly attested variant at Matt 23:21, in which the present κατοικοῦντι is replaced by the aorist κατοικήσαντι. One assumes (the point is not discussed in the recent major commentaries, nor is this variant noted in the

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just what one would expect. As Hadrian realized, the only way to stop Jews from gathering to worship on the desolate Temple mount was to ban them from the city altogether. Anyway, my point is that just as Mark, by quoting Isa 40 and Mal 3, and just as John, framing Jesus in terms of the λόγος “tabernacling” in the midst, indicate that he is to be seen as Israel’s long-awaited returning divinity in human form, so there are plenty of Pauline passages which can, and I think should, be taken in the same way.62 What Hurtado has now pressed me on, and what I think needs more work, certainly from me, is the possibility that in at least some pre-Christian Jewish texts there were hints that Israel’s Messiah might be thought of as in some sense embodying the returning divinity. It is certainly true that Paul can also pick up pre-Christian Jewish themes about the divine “return” when he looks forward to the return of Jesus, as I have emphasized in various places. But I have made the case, with plenty of exegetical examples, that he also used this same theme to speak of what is sometimes called the “first coming,” in such a way as to insist that Jesus was himself the living embodiment of Israel’s God. Certainly I have repeatedly stressed that Paul himself was making this move. I stress this point against Aquila Lee, who suggests that I neglect “the category of Jesus with respect to God’s person” and that I have overemphasized “Jesus’s Messiahship with respect to God’s people rather than God’s person.”63 This does seem rather to ignore pages 644–709 of PFG. I have argued in detail that Paul’s use of the language of “sonship” resonated both with traditional “messianic” categories, as in Ps 2 and 2 Sam 7, and with the belief that Jesus is the one who, uniquely, was “sent from the father,” as in Rom 8:3–4 and Gal 4:4–7. What I am still not clear about is whether any pre-Christian descriptions of Israel’s Messiah can be demonstrated to anticipate this fusion of messianic designation and return-of-YHWH description. If one could be clear that the “one like a son of man” in Dan 7 was being read messianically by Jews of Jesus’s day (as it seems to have been by Josephus, a generation later, and by 4 Ezra a generation after that); and if one could be clear that when this strange figure comes to sit on a throne beside the “ancient of days” this would be taken in terms of divine honors (with what conceptual understanding we can hardly imagine); then this would of course provide an answer, though the “ifs” are too strong, granted the controversies that have surrounded these topics, for any absolute certainty. What we can be sure of is that Paul used the phrase “son of God” both in order to retrieve and UBS edition) that this is a later post-destruction alteration, though since Matthew as a whole is normally taken to be post-destruction there may be more to be said; but it shows at least an awareness of the problem. 62 On the four gospels’ retrieval of this and similar themes, see the forthcoming work by Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, forthcoming). 63 388, 390.

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re-apply messianic passages such as Ps 2 and 2 Sam 7 and in order to express the belief that the man Jesus had been sent from the one true God, and was the very embodiment of the love of God (Rom 5:6–11; 8:3–4; 8:31–39). Through it all (one might have thought that systematic theologians would enjoy this point) it seems to me that the first followers of Jesus, as we see them reflected in the pages of Paul, were not so much telling the story of Jesus and inching their way up to say that this was the story of Israel’s God. They seem to have been convinced that what had just happened was the longawaited new Exodus, an event which could only be the personal action of Israel’s God. But in order to tell the story of what this God had done they found themselves compelled to tell the story of Jesus.64 Jantsch cites James McGrath and James Dunn in an attempt to ward off my arguments for a Pauline incarnational theology, but simply asking whether this putative “identification of Jesus and God” is “functional” or “ontological” is hardly the point.65 Relatively modern categories like these are called into question precisely by the kind of investigation undertaken by Hurtado and Bauckham, in their different ways, and I hope by my own work. The point is that Paul believed the great long-awaited drama of the new Exodus had taken place, and that the God who had said, at the first Exodus, that he had heard the cry of his people and had come down to help them (Exod 3:8) had done precisely that in and as the person of the human being Jesus. “Function” here actually depends on “ontology”: it makes no sense to say that the death of Jesus reveals the love of the one true God (Rom 5:8) if – to put it crudely – Jesus was not in some sense the living and dying embodiment of the one God. But both “function” and “ontology” depend on the deeper and more historically warranted categories we find in the fresh messianic retellings of the story of Israel among the first followers of Jesus.

8. “Apocalyptic” All this brings us, by a circuitous route, back to the toxic question of “apocalyptic.” I refer to my recent discussions in Paul and his Recent Interpreters Part II, and in The Paul Debate ch. 3, where some of the issues are addressed more fully. I was glad that James Charlesworth supported my contention that 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch give us an indication of how Daniel was being read towards the end of the first century. But I do not think that reading Daniel and related texts (and most Jewish and Christian “apocalyptic” texts are related to Daniel in one way or another) as supplying the theological depth to the 64 This receives a striking, almost formulaic, expression in Luke 8:39; but it is, I think, implicit all over the place. 65 481.

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confusing and frightening swirl of (what we call) socio-political events means that I am “reducing” something called “apocalyptic thought.”66 Nor, in particular, do I plead guilty to the charge which Jörg Frey repeats over a dozen times, that I have “neutralized” apocalyptic. Frey’s critique is important not least because of his own stature as one of the most learned current scholars in this field, and at the risk of pulling this response somewhat out of shape I choose to answer him in more detail than some others. I agree that “apocalyptic” is sometimes “neutralized” in contemporary scholarship, but I do not think that I am the one doing it. Here there is a vital distinction, which is clouded in the early pages of Frey’s response and only gradually comes to the fore. He opens by asking me, “What is wrong with reading Paul in terms of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic?”67 To this I respond, “Nothing at all!” That is what I have been trying to do for many years, and what ch. 2 of PFG was designed to facilitate. What I have objected to in my recent work on Paul is a quite new meaning of the word “apocalyptic,” which has grown out of, but also away from, earlier uses, particularly that of Ernst Käsemann. And I have objected to it precisely because the meaning the word now has, in one particular and influential American school of thought, associated with the late J. L. Martyn in particular, has very little to do with actual Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic. That is the whole point. If we can clarify this, we can then home in on the real debate between Frey (with many others in the wings) and myself. When faced with the proposals of this recent American school, Frey agrees with me: they are without historical warrant. This point is worth illustrating in detail in Frey’s own words: “A cosmic dimension is characteristic, but it is also clear for any Jewish (and early Christian) apocalypse that the Lord of the universe is the creator, the God of Israel.”68 Just so: and Israel’s God has made promises to his people, promises which he will keep. The military imagery of a divine “invasion” … is rather anachronistic …; an eschatological purification … was not considered an “invasion” of God into a realm that was not originally and legitimately his own.69

Yes: and this is exactly the criticism of one of Martyn’s favorite themes that I have myself stressed. Paul was intensely influenced by the concepts of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic, and although some of the ideas are rephrased in the light of the Christ event and related to the present state of the believers … others are still considered future.70

66

Charlesworth at 217. 489–90. 68 518. 69 519. 70 522. 67

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I couldn’t have put it better myself. “Apocalyptic and salvation history, or a ‘covenantal’ perspective, are not contradictory.”71 Precisely, and when I have been driven to polemic against the recent American “apocalyptic” readings, it is because the idea that these things are contradictory and in fact mutually exclusive has been so fiercely insisted upon, despite the lack of historical grounding for such an idea. The fullness of time in Gal 4:4 [is] a sign of continuity with the salvation history of Israel … whereas the idea of a total discontinuity as advocated by Martyn or the understanding of the sending of the Son as an “invasion” from a certain place “outside” appears to presuppose an anachronistic concept and a “closed” world of immanence.72

My point precisely.73 Lest anyone should suppose that Frey’s essay can be quoted as a way of saying that I have misunderstood what “apocalyptic” is all about, I want to make it clear that he has here simply and firmly endorsed the substance of my critique. As I have demonstrated in Paul and His Recent Interpreters chs. 8 and 9, the school of thought represented by J. L. Martyn has effectively taken over the word “apocalyptic,” at least in America; but not in the sense(s) one might understand in terms of Second Temple Jewish thought. They are the ones who have not been “reading Paul in terms of Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic.” The only one of that school to have attempted any such thing, M. C. de Boer, has so far failed (as I have argued elsewhere) to make a convincing case. Nor, in fact, are they reading “apocalyptic” either in terms of “the end of the world” (its older meaning in some German writing: see below) or in terms of Käsemann’s work in which it referred to the imminent parousia but also highlighted the political significance of Paul’s gospel over against a Bultmannian existentialist interpretation. Rather, “apocalyptic” has become for them a slogan, detached from both its ancient and its modern historical contexts and retooled for a different purpose. As used by Martyn himself and his many followers, “apocalyptic” has now become a polemical symbol in two modern theological battles: that between supposedly “cosmic” and supposedly “forensic” readings of Paul (in parallel with, though not usually referring to, Gustav Aulén’s famous book Christus Victor),74 and that between “apocalyptic” and “salvation history.” It has become the watchword of a repristinated stand-off between “religion” (as represented by Paul’s opponents in Galatia) and “revelation” (as represented by Paul himself). It has 71

523. 523. 73 Frey also rightly rejects the view that “the motif of Abraham (who was a central figure also for Diaspora Jews) was only introduced by Paul’s opponents” (524n110). 74 Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (New York: Macmillan, 1969). See also Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 162, 195. 72

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become detached not only from the older “end-of-the-world” connotations, but also from the political implications stressed by many recent writers, implications which can hardly be avoided in Daniel, Revelation, 1 Enoch (at least the Animal Apocalypse), 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.75 The distortions all this has introduced, and the fierce polemic from Martyn’s followers against any who disagree, may provide at least part of the answer to Frey’s question about my own counter-polemic.76 What I have tried to argue against, both for the relevant Second Temple texts and for Paul’s use of the relevant motifs, is any idea that evidence of “apocalyptic” thought is evidence for the absence of “forensic” or “covenantal” – or, in a carefully defined sense, salvationhistorical – ideas. Instead, I have tried to show, from the texts and not as an a priori, that these all go together in ways which much modern thought has found difficult to sustain. By the end of his essay, as I have already indicated, Frey has made it clear that he takes the same position, though he seems not to realize that he is thus echoing my own arguments. But once we have got this out of the way – essentially a distraction from the true historical task – the real questions open up before us, and this is where there is still real disagreement between Frey and myself. Here it may help to distinguish no fewer than six meanings of “apocalyptic” – first, the meaning proposed by Martyn and his colleagues, and then five proposals for what “apocalyptic language” in the Second Temple period might actually be intending to do. Frey appears to assume that the second is the natural historical usage, and that anything else is a watering down, a “neutralization.” I disagree. Here are the six: First, there is Apocalyptic(M), the view of J. L. Martyn and his followers noted above (and discussed at far more length elsewhere). Second, there is Apocalyptic(End): “end-of-the-world” apocalyptic. This is commonly credited to Albert Schweitzer, though I think he was more subtle than that: But for many today, where we find “apocalyptic” language we are to assume that its authors, and first readers, took it to refer to the actual end of the space-time world. This is of course a literalistic reading: When the text

75 E.g., A. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). See too now J. P. Davies, Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (London: T&T Clark, forthcoming). 76 To point out the socio-cultural contexts invoked by some who today speak of “apocalyptic” is not in itself polemical. As I explain in more detail in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, ch. 8, it is important as a matter of history to see the way in which the central themes of, e.g., Martyn’s commentary on Galatians reflect and re-embody the polemics against “religion” (with “Judaism” as its parade example) current in some earlier German writing, in the nineteenth century and onwards, even as late as Käsemann. This is a matter of historical record, not of “vilification.”

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says “the stars will fall from heaven,” it means that the stars will fall from heaven. Third, there is Apocalyptic(Par): the belief that in the reported sayings of Jesus and his first followers the language of apocalyptic still referred to the end of the world, but with a particular focus: This would be the parousia, the “second coming,” and it would occur within a generation. For Ernst Käsemann, this was the primary meaning of “apocalyptic”: the “imminent expectation” of the return of Jesus and of the end of all things. Fourth – the position Käsemann was resisting – we have Bultmann’s reading, which we may label Apocalyptic(Ex): an “existential” reading. For Bultmann, Jesus borrowed the language of Apocalyptic(End), but he did so in order to refer to Apocalyptic(Ex), the challenge that comes to each individual to decide for God and the gospel. Part of Käsemann’s protest against Bultmann was that this really did “neutralize” the sharp edges of Apocalyptic(Par): Instead of a cosmic battle, one merely had an interior personal struggle. Of course, for Bultmann many in the early church, failing to realize that this had been Jesus’s meaning, developed the same language but went back to Apocalyptic(End) or (Par): His program of demythologization was designed, it seems, to enable today’s interpreter a) to recover some kind of original dominical intention and b) to relativize, and escape the apparent problems of, the early church’s remythologization of Jesus’s message. Fifth, the further element of Käsemann’s view was Apocalyptic(Pow): the belief that the language of apocalyptic was used to denote the cosmic struggle in which dangerous and deadly non-human powers waged war against the just purposes of God. For Käsemann, this battle would reach its height at the parousia, and in the meantime the followers of Jesus would find themselves caught up in it. For Martyn and others, it came to its head on the cross, which raises other questions about Apocalyptic(M) which we cannot pursue here. The sixth way of understanding “apocalyptic,” the one for which I have argued, may be labelled Apocalyptic(TheoPol). This is – the label is merely heuristic – a theo-political reading of “apocalyptic” language, in which a writer uses the language of “end-of-the-world” events (the stars falling from heaven, and so on) in order to denote major and devastating socio-political events (the fall of Babylon and other equally earth-shattering events – notice that we readily use the same kind of metaphorical language) and to connote the belief that these events are not random, but are freighted with theological significance; in other words, that the writer is interpreting major events in terms of the purposes of the creator God. Such writing is not merely interpretative, looking back to events in the distant past or on to events in the future, and speculating about their meaning. It can function as political critique (“see, these great empires are just monsters, and the creator God will overthrow them”) and encouragement for the faithful (“look behind the veil, at what is here “revealed,” and you will have courage to be patient and resist”).

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What is more, by employing an elaborate metaphor-system borrowed from the language of the world’s creation, this language has the capacity, precisely in its metaphorical resonances, to evoke the belief it intends to convey: that the events denoted by the language (the great climaxes and catastrophes of this-worldly existence) are to be seen as shot through with divine presence and purpose, in ways too dark and complex for ordinary flat prose. The point of all this is as follows. Jörg Frey has, quite naturally, wanted to engage me because I adhere, for the most part, to some form of the sixth interpretation, while he adheres, it seems, to some form of the second and third. He seems to think that the sixth reading can be attacked in the same way as the (Bultmannian) fourth. This we must discuss. But this has little or nothing to do with the view we both reject, the first view, offered by Martyn and his followers, and that is the view which I was strongly resisting in PFG. Yes, I also argue against Apocalyptic(End), in PFG 163–75. This was a secondary issue in terms of my overall thesis; whereas, if Martyn’s view were correct, my entire argument about the structure of Paul’s thought would be mistaken, attributing to Paul (as Martyn says here and there) views held by his Galatian opponents, involving the covenant, God’s purpose in history, forensic justification, and so on. Frey seems to be reacting against my rejection of Apocalyptic(M) in order to gain further traction against my rejection of Apocalyptic(End). But since Frey agrees with my rejection of Apocalyptic(M), we ought to keep these questions utterly separate. That would be the way towards the real discussion we ought to be having. First, then, the apparent links of the fourth meaning (Bultmann’s existentializing demythologization) and the sixth (the veiled interpretation of sociopolitical events). A very strong case can be made, from scriptural precedent to books from the post-70 period, for the sixth interpretation. When Isa 13 spoke of the sun and moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven, the referent was the fall of Babylon. When Jer 4 spoke of the earth returning to being “waste and void,” he had to live for many years with the possibility of being a false prophet – not because the world had not ended, but because Jerusalem had not fallen.77 It will not do to label such readings as “modernization.” Reading “apocalyptic” as coded theo-political critique (thoroughly compatible, be it noted, with both “covenant” and “salvation history”) is not in fact “demythologizing” after the manner of Bultmann. However, at this point I believe Bultmann was right in what he denied (that Jesus and his first followers were referring to the actual end of the world) and wrong in what he affirmed (that they were talking about an existential experience, to be explained perhaps with reference to pre-Christian gnostic beliefs reshaped around Jesus). The first of these points needs further nuance. When Frey asks, remarkably enough, “Can we really assume that 77

I spell all this out in more detail in PFG 163–75.

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biblical authors were sensitive to the fact that they were using images or dramatizing language, that did not mean what it said?”78 I want to answer “Yes, of course,” with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel as the obvious witnesses; and I want to warn against “modernizing” Paul – the very thing of which he then accuses me. I want to insist, as a matter of history, that the (sixth) reading of “apocalyptic” does indeed assume that the biblical and post-biblical authors knew how to use poetic language and imagery. The rather obvious coded “history” in 1 Enoch, or the various events described in lurid “apocalyptic” detail in 4 Ezra, make the point in the post-biblical period. Nor will it do, in particular, to suggest that such “this-worldly” interpretations – which are none the less not merely “this-worldly,” because the whole point is that the creator God is working within and through the “this-worldly” events! – are “neutralizations” or “trivializations” of “apocalyptic,” as though the only thing which would count as a “real” interpretation might be one which ignored these vital dimensions of Second Temple language and their roots in Israel’s scriptures.79 To repeat, one might just as well say that any account which ignores these dimensions is itself the real “modernization,” depending as it does on an implicit split (between divine reality and thisworldly reality) well known to the generations after Lessing but less well known – indeed, more or less unknown – to first-century Jews. If one wants examples of “neutralizing” the language of apocalyptic, one might find them in the refusal to grasp its regular political referent, rendering apocalyptic incapable of speaking into the real power-struggles of the world whether ancient or modern.80 Nor can one sweep this interpretation away, as Frey attempts to do, by suggesting that it goes with “too Marxist a view of religion,” or that it is “too much in line with the old negative view of apocalyptic as a utopian hope developed from disappointment.”81 I have never taken either of those lines. To suggest, as Frey does, that a political reading is unlikely because the writings in question “do not originate in lower-class or totally uneducated circles 78

494. Here one might mention with gratitude the explanation of Edith Humphrey that the “spatial” element in apocalyptic – the language of an overlap between heaven and earth – is vital as a way of insisting that the two spheres of the good creation are not after all separated by a great gulf; but that this does not mean “the end of the world,” but rather its transformation. 80 Frey, 493, says that I am “taming” apocalyptic with a presupposed covenantal worldview “and thus neutralizing its critical potential.” The boot is on the other foot: as long as we can claim that first-century writers, unaware of poetical imagery, were simply saying that the world was going to end, we can neutralize the critical social and political potential which the language originally possessed and can still exercise. At this point Joel White, too, seems to me less than clear about what is going on. 81 496. 79

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but point to a considerable amount of knowledge” represents a remarkably shrunken view of political options in the early Jewish and Christian worlds.82 Here one should bring in as well Seyoon Kim’s rejection of my attempted (and, I hope, nuanced) analysis of the way in which Paul’s theology impacted the imperial rhetoric of his day. As in his earlier work, Kim resolutely holds apart what I am convinced the whole Bible (not just Paul) sees as a single, if multi-layered, whole. All this brings us to another major misunderstanding. It seems that Frey, supposing me to be demythologizing “apocalyptic,” supposes also that I am wanting to downplay the widespread early Christian conviction that Jesus the Messiah would return from heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth. Paul did believe, as it seems all the early Christians believed, that one day the Messiah would return from heaven to transform the present creation and raise his people from the dead. That is quite clear in short passages like Phil 3:20– 21 and much longer ones like Rom 8:18–30 and 1 Cor 15:20–28. If that is what one means by “apocalyptic” then I am all for it – (though, ironically, J. L. Martyn’s flagship commentary on Galatians has almost nothing to say about it, since for him the “apocalyptic” event, the crucifixion of the Messiah, has already occurred). I am genuinely puzzled, then, when Frey suggests that in my reading of Paul the “second coming,” with all that is stated and implied in these passages, “loses its weight in the light of the ‘already.’”83 Thus, when he says that, “wisely enough” (!), I do not “blatantly deny that there will be a ‘royal arrival’ of the Messiah,”84 I reply: Of course not, because it’s obvious, and has always been a vital element in my own theological understanding. At this point Frey’s attempt to attack the sixth view as though it were simply a variation on the (Bultmannian) fourth comes to grief, since the sixth view does not entail a “realized eschatology”; I shall return to this presently. This eschatological vision, in which Paul envisages the Messiah returning to redeem the entire creation, rescuing it from its bondage to decay, and raising his people from the dead, has been for many years central to my work, not only on Paul but on many other areas. And, yes, of course, Paul believes that this could happen at any time, and hence that one must be ready here and now – though in Philippians and 2 Corinthians at least he recognizes that he may die before the event. If I did not deal with all this as fully in PFG as perhaps I might have done, that was simply because, with a 700-page book on the resurrection already completed, and with a middle-level treatment also availa-

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ble,85 I did not wish to be accused (any more than was bound to happen anyway!) of going over old ground yet again. Problems have arisen, however, when this clear belief has been allied to the explicit dating of “within a generation.” This belongs, not to Paul, but to the Synoptic tradition, in passages like Mark 9:1 and 13:30–31.86 I have elsewhere argued that these are not referring to “the end of the world,” but – rather obviously in the case of Mark 13, and certainly in Luke’s reworking of that chapter in Luke 21! – to the imminent fall of Jerusalem.87 That, obviously, is not an argument we can pursue at this point, but it is important to note that one cannot simply transport the theme of “within a generation” from the Synoptics into Paul and hope to gain exegetical clarity. And, to answer another suggestion from Frey, this has nothing to do with either “modernizing,” “neutralizing,” or “taming” something called “apocalyptic,” or, still worse, “safeguarding Wright’s construction.”88 The charge of safeguarding constructions can rebound: If anyone’s constructions are being safeguarded in this debate, they are not mine. When I question the (essentially modernizing) shibboleth that first-century Jews and Christians expected the world to come to an end, this is not because I “assume” it but because, in line with other scholars like Ed Sanders and John Collins, I have argued it on the basis of a historical reading of the relevant texts.89 Frey’s summary, that “Paul expected … a radical change of the world, the resurrection of the dead, and the transformation of the living, the change from corruptibility to incorruptibility,” is I think exactly right.90 I have argued for many years, in many places, that “Paul hoped for such a change.” What appears to have happened is that Frey, seeing my polemic against what I regard as an unhistorical use of the idea of “apocalyptic” on the part of Martyn and his followers, and noting also (though it is a totally different point) that I reject Apocalyptic(End), has supposed that my polemic against Martyn is polemic against (rather than for!) first-century 85 N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God 3 (London: SPCK, 2003); N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007). 86 One ought not to allow passages like Rom 13:11–12 or 1 Cor 7:29–31 to act as a wedge through which one reading of these synoptic passages would make its way into Paul. On these, see PFG 562, 1098, 1303–4, with other references there. 87 See, e.g., Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, ch. 8. Frey suggests that Mark 9:1 refers to the parousia, though of course that word does not occur there. That may be how Matthew read it (see Matt 16:28), but that remains controversial, and certainly Luke (9:27) thinks otherwise. One cannot simply harmonize these synoptic texts, insist that they refer to the end of the world, and then force Paul to agree with the result. At Matt 28:18 it looks as though Matthew, with the reference to Dan 7:14, is indicating that the vindication of the Son of Man spoken of in his 24:30 and 26:64 either has now come to pass or at least is now coming to pass. 88 493. 89 See the earlier discussion in The New Testament and the People of God, ch. 10. 90 495.

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historical readings, and has reacted on the assumption that I was offering a kind of blanket demythologization, a dismissal of all sorts of other things that the word sometimes refers to. This was never the case. More specifically, as I suggested a moment ago, Frey also appears to align my views with the idea of a “realized eschatology” in which future references are flattened out into present ones. This again is a mistake. Frey misreads a crucial passage in PFG 706, where I discuss 1 Thess 3:13 and Phil 2:9–11 and propose that for Paul “this eschatological vision … has already become a reality in Jesus the Messiah.” The “eschatological vision” to which I was there referring was not the “second coming” or the ultimate renewal of creation, but the biblical vision of the coming of Israel’s God in person to judge and to save. I was there summing up my Christological argument that for Paul the identity of Jesus is bound up with this eschatological expectation of Israel’s returning God. In the same paragraph I made it clear that “Paul still looked forward” to the still-future event of Jesus’s own return. My basic point there was about Christology, not eschatology. The eschatology, I have argued throughout, has been precisely inaugurated but not yet completed – a relatively uncontroversial theme in the Pauline studies of the last two or three generations, though the Christological twist I have given it is I think new. I have little disagreement with Frey’s substantial comments about the origins of the modern “apocalyptic” interpretation, and certainly not with his full and helpful exposition of ancient Jewish “apocalyptic” writings, on which of course he is an authority. But he still seems to imagine that when I oppose (for instance) the unhistorical division between “apocalyptic” and “salvation history,” or between “apocalyptic” and “covenant,” I am arguing for a “non-apocalyptic” Paul, so that he can then express surprise when I say that, in a first-century historical sense, Paul’s message is “thoroughly apocalyptic.”91 The only sense in which I see Paul as “non-apocalyptic” is in the sense of “apocalyptic” now extremely common in those circles where Martyn’s influence is most powerful: where, in other words, “apocalyptic” has been made to mean something radically different from anything we can see in the first century, so that (for instance) it is set in sharp opposition to “forensic” ideas, to “salvation history,” to “religion,” and also to “covenant.” As Frey himself argues, as we saw above, in genuine ancient Jewish “apocalyptic” all these are thoroughly compatible. It is therefore the more disappointing to find Frey continuing to suggest that I propose that “all contemporary Jews shared a common worldview.” I was careful to distinguish as many early Jewish viewpoints as I reasonably could in The New Testament and the People of God Part III, in The Resurrection and the Son of God chs. 3 and 4, and in PFG ch. 2. Nor do I simply elevate something called “the covenant” into an “overarching category” in order 91

511.

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then to use it in a way “neither historical nor exegetical but ideological.”92 On the contrary. I argue in considerable detail – more historical and exegetical detail, I think, than most current Pauline scholars in discussing these matters – for a particular construal. Here Frey falls into the trap I mentioned earlier, of mistaking “abduction” for “deduction,” and in particular of mistaking “hypotheses” for “constructive fantasy.” Faced with the earlier German “agonized attempt” to save Jesus and the early church from apocalyptic (an echo of Klaus Koch’s famous phrase),93 I have certainly not “joined that party.” To suggest not only that I have done so but that I have done so because of apologetic and systematic interests seems to me not only dismissive but actually to miss the methodological point.94 To say it one more time: I have spent my adult life modifying, scrapping, reshaping, breaking, and remaking all kinds of hypothesis about how the Jewish world of Paul’s day worked, and about how Paul both fitted into it and, because of the gospel of the crucified and risen Messiah, reworked it. I am not sure what “apologetic and systematic” interests Frey has in mind, but anyone who knows the negative reaction to my work from various different angles will conclude that, if I was trying to make friends, I seem to have failed. Before signing off on Apocalyptic, a couple of quick final words about its first-century setting. First, we should beware of essentializing something we call “apocalyptic,” turning it into an “ism” (“apocalypticism”) and making those who wrote or read it into a specific party (“apocalyptists”). If anything is a modern construct, this is: “isms” were invented for the most part in the nineteenth century, and “apocalypticism” is a classic example.95 It grew, particularly, out of the nineteenth-century liberal embrace of supposed “prophetic” religion and dislike for the supposed dark dualism of books like Daniel and Revelation. It flourished in an atmosphere where many scholars in the field had given up believing that Jesus had actually been raised from the dead, so that any early Christian sense of excitement at a new world dawning was pushed forwards from something which had just happened to something that would soon happen (the parousia). It took root particularly in the splitlevel post-Enlightenment world in which “religion” and “politics” were held to be polar opposites, so that the thought of a “religious” book sustaining a deep political critique was a contradiction in terms, and “apocalyptic” writing 92

523. Klaus Koch, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (London: SCM 1972 [1970]), discussed in Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, 136–48. 94 499n32; 527. 95 On the invention of “isms” in the nineteenth century see esp. Dale B. Martin, “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Towards a Social History of the Question,” in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 29–61, and Wayne A. Meeks, “Judaism, Hellenism and the Birth of Christianity,” in the same volulme, 17–27. 93

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was seen (on the analogy of some modern European and American movements) as a dualistic rejection of the present world and all its wicked ways. All of this makes a lot of sense in relation to Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and very little relation to the Middle East in the first century. Indeed, when Josephus lists the groups and parties within the Jewish world of his day he does not mention “apocalyptists.” There is a great deal to be said for a true demythologization: the modern myth of such a movement can be translated back into the fact of a powerful literary form, designed to hold heaven and earth together and evoke mighty moments of the past (creation, Exodus, and so on) in order to point on to mighty divine deliverance in the future. So: yes, ancient prophets and Second Temple writers (including early followers of Jesus) could and did use complex metaphors to refer to actual thisworldly events and to invest them with their theological significance. The idea that they were somehow “primitive” and so wedded to a “literalistic” use of language is naïve. And yes: writers and readers in the first century understood this well, as we can see with Josephus’s treatment, or 4 Ezra’s reinterpretation, of Daniel. There is much more to be said about this whole subject. I have said some of it in Paul and his Recent Interpreters Part II. I hope this is sufficient to have cleared up where the real disagreements between myself and Jörg Frey actually lie. Whether we can resolve those disagreements is another question, which it would be exciting to address. So much (as Herodotus might have said) about Apocalyptic.

9. Paul and the Philosophers Of all the criticisms offered by colleagues in this volume, the ones which I most readily concede, and on which I am eager to do more work, are those of Gregory Sterling. I am very grateful for his wise and balanced appraisal of my discussion of Paul’s philosophical context and of how we might envisage him fitting into it. I recognize Sterling’s point that one ought really to distinguish more clearly between professional philosophy, attached to and expounding the views of specific schools, and the more popular philosophy of the day. It does seem to me that Paul’s addressees would much more naturally fit into the latter camp, though, granted, one should distinguish the “camps” more carefully; and even among the professionals an eclectic approach was common (one thinks of Seneca’s cheerful quotations from Epicurean sources). And I fully acknowledge that there is a large gap in my treatment, both of Paul and of the Wisdom of Solomon, namely, the contribution of and engagement with Middle Platonism. I should – in particular – have discussed Philo, and the possible parallels (not, presumably, influences either way) between Philo’s thought and Paul’s, and what we might learn from such

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phenomena. Mea culpa (even granted the book was already long enough). I was also selective, too selective it seems, in my choice of conversation partners; certainly I had not intended deliberately to bypass that great Yale luminary Abraham Malherbe, from whom I have learnt much. What seems to have happened is that, starting with Cicero’s De natura deorum, I have fallen too easily into the tripartite pattern of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and the older, more skeptical, “Academic” position; and, reflecting an ongoing tendency within the discipline (as well as my own ongoing fascination with Seneca and Epictetus), I have tended to see some kind of Stoicism as the most obvious default mode among Paul’s contemporaries. It is in any case difficult to get a purchase, historically speaking, on a Middle Platonism that can be securely anchored in Paul’s own day. Plutarch, easily our fullest source, is a bit too late. Though he may be representative of ideas already circulating, the earlier sources (Antiochus of Ascalon or Eudorus of Alexandria) are not so easy to pin down. However, the argument could of course run the other way: When we see Paul using language and thought-forms which we know from later sources to be current within Middle-Platonic thinking, we ought to be prepared to recognize some kind of flow, or at least engagement, of ideas. I have in mind especially the very stimulating work of George van Kooten, which I had not studied before completing PFG.96 The case he has made needs to be tested at point after point, and even if some elements are controversial it opens up a whole new dimension in which one might explore what for me is Paul’s controlling statement of apostolic method: “we take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah” (2 Cor 10:5). Certainly, if in my wider work I have seen the insinuation of Platonic thought into the church as part of the problem rather than the solution, I ought all the more to be prepared to watch Paul grappling with it, if that was indeed the case. Here, as with all such studies, one is by no means necessarily looking straightforwardly for “derivation”; nor indeed simply, as in an earlier antithesis, for “confrontation.” In the course of expounding a line of thought which, as I argued throughout PFG, was derived in outline and in theological substance from his Jewish heritage rethought around Messiah and spirit, Paul was quite capable of using terminology and thought-patterns which appear to emerge not, or not straightforwardly, from Jewish roots, but from the wider philosophical climate of the time. And yes, that may have included aspects of Middle Platonism (though to go all the way towards Richard Bell’s thoroughly Platonizing proposals seems to me to move away from history and into the realm of dogma – a dogma which would I think pull Paul out of shape altogether). It may also have included elements of what became Neopythagorean96

George H. van Kooten, Paul’s Anthropology in Context, WUNT 232 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

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ism, though the actual evidence for that – and its putative merging with Middle Platonism, in thinkers such as Eudorus – is likewise thin and dependent on later sources. What effect might all this have had, if I had been able to factor it into PFG chs. 3 and 14, and indeed elsewhere? Sterling suggests two points in particular. First, there is the “prepositional metaphysics” in which one might describe the relation between God and the world, as Marcus Aurelius did, by saying “all things are from you, all things are in you, and all things are for you.”97 Sterling sets out other similar metaphysical statements and suggests that some of the key Christological texts such as 1 Cor 8:6 or Col 1:15–20 were decisively influenced by this way of speaking. As he sees, this brings him to substantially the same conclusion as mine, but with a different dimension added. I would still argue that these two texts grow directly out of early Christian reflection on some foundational Jewish texts such as the Shema (for 1 Cor 8:6) and Gen 1 and Prov 8 (for Col 1:15–20). But it seems to me perfectly possible, and historically likely, that Paul either picked up earlier Jewish ideas which had already been expressed in contemporary philosophical language or chose on his own behalf to use that language. (The other option, of course, is that in either case he might have been quoting a formulation from pre-Pauline reflection, which itself might have been a fresh borrowing from the philosophical context or an adaptation of an earlier Jewish borrowing. One suspects that, as in one’s own day, the commerce of ideas and their various expressions may have been harder to track at the time than it appears with the advantage, and the heavy selectivity, of long hindsight.) The point would remain that the anchoring not only of the formulae but also of the larger context in each case within a strong statement of Christologically reframed creational monotheism might be seen as an example of missionary theology in action, expressing early Christian belief in Jesus in terms which resonated with aspects of the surrounding intellectual culture while at the same time challenging that culture through the Jewish, and now revisedJewish, claim that Israel’s God was the world’s creator and had decisively revealed himself in and as Jesus the Messiah, the Lord. Sterling’s second point has to do with the λόγος and the “image.” Philo is explicit in his exegesis of Gen 1: When God created humans, God did so “in the image of God’s Image, the Logos.”98 Sterling does not develop this very far, but it is highly suggestive, not least in considering “image” texts such as Rom 8:29; 2 Cor 3:18; 4:4; Col 3:10, in addition once more to Col 1:15. There is much food for thought, and for further research, at these points. Those of us who have tried to locate Paul historically within, but also in crea-

97 98

Marcus Aurelius 4.23, cited by Sterling at 246. 248.

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tive engagement with, the complex worlds of his day will always have to get up early in the morning to stay abreast of possibilities.

10. Economics and Mission Consideration of Paul’s wider world leads me to a double reflection which none of the contributors has offered but which has been on my mind ever since PFG was published. First, I wish there had been space (and that I had had the skill) to sketch, alongside Paul’s Jewish, philosophical, religious, and political worlds his economic world. Bruce Longenecker and others have significantly advanced our understanding of the early church’s use of money, especially in relation to caring for the poor.99 Second, it would have been good to tie together these different angles of vision, showing how in the world of “the first urban Christians” the philosophical, the religious, the political, and the economic were all bound together within mutually reinforcing thought-forms, narratives, symbols, and patterns of life. The kind of “thick description” called for in the social sciences ought to be our aim here, not least since Paul’s hearers will have taken so many things for granted, in their own world, which we inevitably have to reconstruct with care and difficulty.100 If I am anywhere near right in my proposals for how Paul’s missionary strategy impacted on his world, we ought to be thinking in terms of his entire vision of “being in the Messiah,” of being part of the advance guard of the coming new creation, as challenging the surrounding world on every front. That was the burden of my song in the final chapter of PFG, and I still think that my attempt to sketch that first-century missionary challenge in parallel and contrast to the position of Walter Benjamin in the middle of the twentieth century has something to commend it which has not yet been discussed.101 I can understand, in retrospect, some at least of the reasons why Eckhard Schnabel seemed to be quite cross with some of what I said in that discussion. I was not at all casting aspersions on the wonderful work of so many in 99

See Bruce W. Longenecker, Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty and the GrecoRoman World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 100 On the task of sociological description of Paul’s communities see Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, chs. 10 and 11. 101 One “loose end” which it would be good to explore, but not here, is Stuhlmacher’s surprising suggestion that Paul’s mission remained focused on Jerusalem. This seems to me quite wrong. What matters is the “Jerusalem above” (Gal 4:26); and, though Paul does not join up the dots at this point, I take it that he would integrate this, as does Rev 21–22, with the final renewal of the whole creation as in Rom 8:18–26 or Phil 3:20–21. God’s promise to Abraham, Paul insists (Rom 4:13), was that he would inherit the world – a notion which seems to come from putting together the promises of Genesis with the messianic promises of Ps 2.

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the modern missionary movements, of which I am an enthusiastic supporter. But I know, however, that in the world of theology and biblical studies the word “missionary” is often associated with an older caricature. I was anxious, in locating Paul and his vocation historically, to make it clear that the older caricature was irrelevant. Sadly, there are still some places where the caricature seems to be the norm; where, that is, the only aim of “mission” seems to be to rescue souls for a post-mortem “heaven,” not at all to anticipate in the present the coming of “heaven’s rule” on earth as in heaven. Paul, it seems to me – and this was the burden of my song throughout Part IV, but especially in the final chapter – had a holistic and many-sided vision of mission, in which the founding of communities living a different kind of human life to anything previously imagined was central (back to the question of the church as symbol, as in PFG ch. 6). Schnabel quotes a line from PFG 1485 as though it was a description of all contemporary missionary work, alluding also to other passages; with respect, I would invite him to re-read the whole section, starting at 1484, and see that I was warding off misunderstandings which the long tradition of western Christianity has made all too common. This was not at all an “anti-missions bias” or “anti-missionary criticism,” and it was most certainly not a willingness “to hold up for ridicule missionaries of the past and present.” I am well aware that throughout Christian history there have been holistic missionary efforts aimed at transforming society as well as “rescuing souls for heaven.” But a lifetime of experience in the western church – and the responses that I have had to my book Surprised by Hope bear this out strongly – has convinced me that the caricature I was sketching (in order to make it clear that Paul was very different) still has a good deal of currency. It is a pity that Schnabel has allowed his irritation with all this to color his reading of the rest of my text, so that, while agreeing that the “back story” of the gospel is important, he contrasts my work, in which I spell out that back story in detail (because it is so often ignored, and a subtly different “back story” substituted), with that of the canonical evangelists, who “devote thirty percent of their narrative to the events of Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection.”102 Indeed they do; but they make it clear, in their different ways, that the story they tell means what it means precisely because of the “back story” to which they constantly allude.103 When, therefore, Schnabel suggests that “Jesus’s death … would seem to warrant more comment,”104 I would invite him to re-read PFG 815–911; and to reflect, also, on the ways in which the message and meaning of that death percolate into one aspect after another of the missionary impact of the gospel which I trace, in PFG Part IV, 102

699. Here again the forthcoming book Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels is of great importance. 104 699. 103

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through the worlds of politics, “religion,” and philosophy, and also in the difficult and controversial Jewish world of Paul’s day. Nor do I deny or downplay, though Schnabel seems to think I do, the idea that in some sense Paul was “converted” on the road to Damascus. This has of course been a minor storm center ever since Krister Stendahl famously proposed that we should see that incident not as a “conversion” – as though Paul abandoned one “religion” called “Judaism” and embraced another – but rather as a “call” from the one God he had always worshipped and who had now revealed himself by fulfilling his ancient purposes in a shocking, dramatic and totally unexpected way. I tried to do some brief justice to that discussion, not least to the rehabilitation of “conversion” by the late Jewish scholar Alan Segal, in PFG 1417–26, though of course there is much more to say than could be compressed into those nine pages. I would draw attention particularly to what I say at PFG 1423, that for Paul, what happened to him, to which he refers as his “call” in Gal 1:15, clearly included “the sense … of a fresh and transformative divine work in which the person concerned is not merely redirected but revolutionized.” Nor was this transformation gradual: “it came about, for Paul, through something he describes in the vivid terms of death and resurrection.” I should be sorry to suppose that anyone might imagine that I either downplay or discount this reality.105

11. A Sacramental Universe and a Transformed Humanity? The question of the gospel’s impact on the present space-time world is approached in quite a different way by Edith Humphrey in a characteristically trenchant and engaging piece. She is quite right that the vision of Paul I have described is, in the sense she uses the word, “sacramental,” and she is also right to question why, then, I did not integrate the sacraments into my discussion of the three major themes in PFG Part III. Point taken. I allowed the earlier treatment in Part II to stand as an indication, but I should perhaps (for completeness’s sake, though at the risk no doubt of more complaints about length) have worked the theme through in PFG chs. 9, 10, and 11. That would have been an exciting task, and I broadly agree with Humphrey’s account of how one might go about it. Paul’s brief but indicative references to baptism are suffused with a narrative weight in which the “new exodus” is accomplished, Israel’s God is revealed in a whole new way, his people are 105 I should be sorry, too, if readers were to go on assuming that when Paul went to “Arabia” (Gal 1:17) he was doing missionary work (688–89). I have argued in N. T. Wright, “Paul, Arabia and Elijah (Galatians 1.17) (1996),” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 152–59 (cp. PFG 1422–23) for a much more likely construal of the whole episode.

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defined as the “rescued-by-the-messiah” people, and the new creation, emerging from the water under the power of the brooding spirit, is inaugurated. His equally brief but if anything still more evocative and new-exodus-laden references to the eucharist (all in two chapters of 1 Corinthians – think what conclusions critics would have drawn had those chapters been lost!) have no hesitation in presenting it as the true feeding on the living Messiah. Again, this dovetails easily into consideration of Paul’s reworked monotheism (feeding on the Messiah in the way a pagan might imagine feeding upon a divinity!), election (“we are one body, because we all share the one loaf,” 1 Cor 10:17), and eschatology (“you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes,” 1 Cor 11:26). And it is not difficult, again joining up dots which Paul himself leaves in the realm of implication, to suppose that with the vision of new creation in Rom 8 Paul would say that, since one day God will be “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), the sacraments are advance signs of that filling, that suffusing with the divine presence, power and love of the creation which will yet remain other than the creator. That, it seems to me, is pointing to the heart of the Trinitarian mystery itself. But to take such a line of thought further we would need to take several steps backwards – again, the “back story” is all-important! – and examine more closely the ancient Jewish temple-theology to which Paul fell heir and which, like everything else, he rethought dramatically around Messiah and spirit. The original tabernacle, and then the Jerusalem Temple, were the “microcosmos,” the advance sign of God’s intention to fill the whole world with his glory. For Paul, Jesus himself and then, by the spirit, the church, have taken on that role.106 And, to be sure, any account of the sacraments, even on the basis of the scanty Pauline references, would ultimately have to be located within that picture. If one were to do that, it might indeed be possible to give a further account of the church and its physical participation in the divine life, for which Humphrey is pressing. It is rather charming to be accused of collapsing by default into a Protestant view; this is not an accusation I often meet, though I understand the point my (now) Orthodox friend is making. When she speaks of my view as being merely metaphorical, or “wholly symbolic,”107 I suspect that even she would want to say that metaphors and symbols are seldom “mere,” and that they often convey the reality which they portray.108 Certain106 In her important note 4 on 664, Humphrey has missed a link in my argument, which is supplied in N. T. Wright, “‘Christ in You, the Hope of Glory’ (Colossians 1.27): Eschatology in St Paul (2008)” in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 379–91. 107 669; see too “sheer metaphor,” 678. 108 I confess, however, that I was originally puzzled by the “symbolic bunnies” at 671, and supposed that perhaps they were part of an arcane Orthodox custom I had not previously encountered. Rather to my disappointment, Edith Humphrey has assured me in

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ly in my view of “apocalyptic” (see above) the whole point is that one of the functions of this particular language-system is to express the ancient Jewish and early Christian belief that in certain ways and at certain times heaven and earth really are brought into lively and dangerous commerce with one another. This is not to “leash metaphors that have polyvalent potential,”109 but to rescue them from the stultifying literalism where their power has been neutralized for most of the past century at least. I can see that my statement at PFG 1329 has given rise to the misunderstanding Humphrey expresses, speaking of Theissen’s view that the early Christian rites are “independent of space and time.”110 What I meant was that the rites are not tied to a onedimensional space/time place and moment (here and now), but are precisely open to the larger purposes of the creator God. I am wary of accepting too readily Schmemann’s sweeping statement about the “sacramental universe,”111 much as I prefer Schmemann’s emphasis in general to the implicit dualism of much western thought. My wariness comes not least from my experience in ministry (the title of Humphrey’s article seems to be a tease: is she perhaps saying “you as a bishop ought to know better than this?”) in which I know how easily a high sacramental theology can tip over into abuse. The kind of language Schmemann uses is often borrowed to express a kind of easygoing pantheism or panentheism, which is certainly not what Schmemann or Humphrey intend but which is certainly what some in today’s church easily lurch towards. What Paul teaches, I think, picking up from those wonderful statements in Isaiah, Habakkuk, and elsewhere about the earth being filled with the divine knowledge and glory, is what one might call an eschatological the-en-panism: At the last, the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. God will be all in all. To speak of “the sacramentality of creation itself” can easily turn into an over-realized eschatology. Creation in the present time, as I have written elsewhere, is like a chalice: beautiful in itself, yes, but far more beautiful because we know what it is designed to be filled with. If one genuflects at the eucharist, one is not adoring the chalice, but its contents. Schmemann and Humphrey, of course, do not need this warning. But some do. When you go to a symphony concert, you do not go to admire the workmanship of the violins. They are indeed beautiful to look at, but that is not the point. They are designed to hum, throb, sing, and whisper of a truth far beyond themselves. The transformative character of the gospel is also stressed, in relation to the character and behavior of the believer, by Volker Rabens. His essay recorrespondence that she was merely (?) fleshing out the metaphor about metaphors on PFG 1344. 109 678. 110 679. 111 Quoted at 680.

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minds me of just how much I left unsaid when I took the difficult decision to locate my discussion of ethics not within PFG ch. 10, where it might in a sense have belonged (as part of the whole discussion of the people of God, and particularly in relation to justification) but in ch. 11, on the grounds that for Paul the new character of the believer was precisely part of the new creation which would be completed at the parousia (as for instance in Phil 1:6 and 3:20–21). I quite see that my treatment of this subject was incomplete, especially insofar as I have clearly given the impression that in my reading of Paul the “transformation” he envisaged was largely cognitive. That was not my intention. However, the main theme of PFG as a whole was Paul’s invention of “Christian theology” as a task for the whole church, a task which would focus on the “transformed mind” of Rom 12:1–2, the “mature thinking” of 1 Cor 14:20, the “mind of the Messiah” in 1 Cor 2:16 and Phil 2:5. This is hardly a minor theme. I could and no doubt should have made it clearer that this transformation in thinking is not, itself, a purely cognitive thing, but goes with the transformation of the entire person through the multilayered work of the spirit. And I would like to stress, in case there might be any doubt, that in drawing on my earlier more popular-level work on the New Testament’s retrieval and transformation of older virtue theory (I stress “transformation” here too: there is a reason why the real title of that book is Virtue Reborn112), it wasn’t just that I put less stress on “happiness” than the Aristotelian tradition would have done,113 but that I proposed that in the New Testament it had been replaced, as the τέλος of “renewed-human” behavior, by the rehumanizing notion of the “royal priesthood.” And though the moral effort of inhabiting that vocation does indeed involve a major cognitive shift, closely related to the entire theme of living by “the Messiah’s mind,” it obviously also involves every other aspect of the personality as well. That needs to be drawn out further and I am grateful to Rabens for pressing me to do so. (See too the note on “love” at the conclusion of this response.)

12. Jesus is Lord Two final notes, about the “lordship” of Jesus in Paul and in the possible retrievals of Paul we might attempt today. 112

N. T. Wright, Virtue Reborn (London: SPCK, 2010); published in the US as N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010). The American title, After You Believe, came about because the publisher suggested that Americans do not normally buy books with the word “Virtue” in the title. In the UK the American title is opaque, and has been taken to mean “now that you have given up believing.” Such are the linguistic echoes of our present cultural confusions. 113 Rabens, 574n47.

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First, Seyoon Kim takes me to task because I never explain what it means for Paul to think of living under the kingly rule of Jesus. He is right that I have not used that line of thought as the royal road, so to speak, to an understanding of Christian behaviour and of the impact of that behaviour on the world. But I am not as clear as Kim seems to be (the point is echoed by Stuhlmacher as well) that this idea of living under the βασιλεία of the Messiah is in fact a major integrating theme which can straightforwardly draw together Paul’s belief about why the community is to live as it ought and how this can in fact come about. To be sure, if we could ask Paul whether the new life of discipleship was to be understood in terms of living under the authority, the “lordship,” of the risen and ascended Jesus, and in the power of the spirit, he would undoubtedly agree. There are many passages which point in this direction, such as Rom 14:8–12. And far be it from me to say anything against finding “the kingdom of God” anywhere in Paul or his contemporaries – though I suspect that I understand that notion rather differently from Kim. But there are two points in particular which need to be raised. 1) I do not think that these passages can be linked as closely as he supposes with Paul’s doctrine of justification. All Paul’s themes link up ultimately, of course. But Kim seems to be proposing a tighter logic here than the texts allow. 2) I do not think that to stress that those “in the Messiah” live under the royal rule of Jesus undermines in any way the argument I have made about Paul’s proclamation of Jesus as lord subtly challenging the claims being made at the same time for the lordship of Caesar. On the contrary. As in Phil 2:12–18, it is precisely as members of the community shine like lights in the world that they are revealing their loyalty to Jesus as Lord and demonstrating to the watching world that this “lordship” is of a different order to that of Caesar, and results in a different kind of community. In this connection, I do not think that Kim has really thought through the reading of Rom 13:1–7 which I offered. He cites Polycarp (Mart. Pol. 10:2) as though it proves his point but without noticing that I cite it too as helping my own case (PFG 1274n11). It would have been interesting to have as an interlocutor at this point someone like Richard Horsley, who I suspect would have chided me for not going nearly far enough in terms of Paul’s critique of Caesar’s empire. Not (of course) that I was trying merely to offer a via media in terms of today’s political left/right options. What I was trying to do was precisely to shift that rather sterile debate on to the more nuanced and multi-layered territory of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman perceptions of society, empire, and lordship. That task remains important, not least (in my view) because of the quite new discussions recently opening up with political philosophers from very different traditions.114 114

On which see Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, ch. 12 – a small start but I hope pointing in the right direction.

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Second, James Crossley and Katie Edwards have quite properly raised the question one is used to hearing within postmodernity. If, after all, Christianity is not about a private religious option, but involves claims about a single creator God, and about Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful lord, does this not launch upon a weary world a new kind of imperialism, which, by implication, will be just as bad if not worse as all that went before? It is interesting to observe how, in contemporary moral and political discourse, the word “monotheism” itself – which used to be hailed as a kind of cultural high point! – has become deeply suspect. If, in other words, we renounce – as I have tried to renounce – the split-level modern world in which religion and politics are divided by a broad and ugly ditch, we seem to be faced with only two options: either the postmodern critique, in which suspicion reigns supreme and collapses into cynicism, or some new kind of “empire,” which the postmodernist, of course, will suspect of being a covert power-grab, however much the pill is sugared with soothing or encouraging theology. Another alternative, I suppose, is that new moralisms will emerge from within the postmodern world, enabling the good postmodernist to look down from a great moral height on those who still commit what are now deemed to be crimes against humanity, such as our old friend “essentializing.” With the older Christian moralisms, there was always the chance of repentance and forgiveness, but in postmodernity, it seems, there are only villains and victims, and the savvy critic who can discern which is which and pronounce sentence. The charge of imperialism is not as new as the postmodern label might indicate. It bears comparison with some of the things some reformers were saying about the Papacy in the sixteenth century, and certainly with some of the language about the church one finds in the great revolutions, in France in the late eighteenth century and Russia in the early twentieth. Nor will it do simply to respond to the charge pragmatically by pointing out that revolutions conceived in this way have quickly given birth to new forms of tyranny. A better response might be to recall that at the very moment when Paul was announcing the lordship of Jesus over everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth he was languishing in prison awaiting a possible death sentence; and that he, like many other early Christians, seems to have seen that situation not as an unfortunate accident but as part of the point, part of the means by which the lordship of the crucified Jesus was bound to make its way in the present world. The rulers of the present age did not understand who Jesus was; if they had done so, they would not have crucified him (1 Cor 2:8). That claim comes within an extended passage (1 Cor 1:18–2:16) in which Paul articulates the upside-down vision (or, he might have said, the right-way-up vision) of a world in which the crucified Messiah is the true lord.

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This is exactly cognate with the remarkable claim in Mark 10:35–45: Over against the power-games being played by some of Jesus’s closest followers, what is unveiled in the gospel is precisely a different kind of power. The rulers of the pagan nations, says Jesus, “lord it over their subjects.” But, he says, “that’s not how it’s going to be with you. Anyone who wants to be great among you must become your servant …” because “the son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’” (Mark 10:42–45). It is of course open to anyone to point out sardonically that the church, at least in its outward leadership, has sometimes appeared slow on the uptake when it comes to this challenge. All too often the church has simply enacted a “religious” version of the world’s regular power games. This theme is already beyond cliché, as it is (sadly) beyond caricature. Nor is this new: Origen’s remarks about bishops indicate that it was already a problem within the first two centuries of the new movement. That is why, at a different but important level, the only real answer one might make to Crossley and Edwards would be to show them communities where this different kind of power is at work. Crossley and I both come from the north-east of England, and I was privileged to serve the church in part of that region for seven years. My mind goes to one of the roughest council estates in the area, where the only person trusted both by the community and by the local council was the church worker who lived, by herself, at the heart of the troubled area, available to all, wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove. I think of the unsung heroes and heroines who organize furniture exchanges to help homeless people, or furniture repair shops where people suffering from multiple disabilities are trained to fix broken chairs and tables rather than sitting slumped in front of a television all day; of the theology professor waiting outside the prison door for someone to be released in order to take them for a cup of tea and to help with immediate needs; of the small church community that took over a redundant bank in an area hit by high unemployment after the closure of the coal mines and used it as a center to bring literacy, financial advice, job skills, childcare. and above all hope to the town. These are small signs. But they are the kind of small signs the church has always been good at. Jesus told stories about the kingdom making its way by small signs. In the early centuries, after all, it was the church that led the way in providing education and medicine to those who could not afford them. I think of how, in the early church, one of the few things the Roman authorities knew about bishops were that they were always banging on about the needs of the poor. The modernist and the postmodernist will of course recite their litany of the church’s appalling disgraces: crusades, inquisitions, and much more. There is a good reason why the church prays, several times a day, “forgive us our trespasses.” But we must not forget that other litany: Francis of Assissi, Óscar Romero, Janani Luwum, Mother Theresa, and a great host of others from the first century to the twenty-first.

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There is a different way to be human. There is a different way of power. This is what – leading with my chin, perhaps, in today’s climate! – I have sometimes called “cruciform theocracy.” This is what the four gospels are all about. And I think it is what Paul was not only talking about but living out, and expecting his hearers to live out as well. This is not the place to expand the point further. But it is part at least – perhaps the part that really matters – of the answer to the postmodern question. The church does indeed have a “big story”; but it is a love-story, not a power-story. Or rather, it is the story of the power of love. It is this story by which Paul lived, and by which he taught his churches to live. I discovered as I was writing Part IV of PFG that, without me consciously planning it that way, chs. 12, 13, and 14 all homed in from their various angles on the notion of “love,” whether in politics, religion, or epistemology. Rabens suggests that the theme of love is under-developed in PFG, but though that is undoubtedly true (the book had to stop somewhere) the fact that it emerges as a running theme at those points does perhaps warrant further reflection. Here at least the index to PFG would provide a good starting point.115 The suggestion that I am “suspicious of the aspect of the emotions that is involved in this mode of transformation” is partly true,116 because as a pastor – not to mention as a practicing Christian – I know only too well how often the emotions, if unchecked by wise reflection, can lead people and whole communities astray. Equally, as a pastor and a human being, I am well aware that squashing emotions out of sight can be just as damaging. All this, I think, is precisely why Paul insists on learning to think straight and to do so as part of a real community: the injunction of Phil 2:5 comes in the context of 2:1–4. I would hope, in fact, that anyone who reads the last two pages of PFG would realize that the focus on love, and on the utter and complete human transformation it involves, is not just a tail-piece, stuck on as a pastoral afterthought, but is a serious attempt to sum up the argument of the entire book. In the Bible, after all, the divine love, and the answering human love, is a way of speaking about the “covenant,” which I have argued remains an excellent summary. It has many advantages in terms of the deep structural questions that have puzzled Paul’s interpreters, questions to which the whole book was offering fresh solutions: How, for instance, does the argument about the divine δικαιοσύνη in Rom 1–4 fit together with the argument about the divine 115

The suggestion (570n34) that my reading of “the love of God” in Rom 5:5 as our love for God would lead to a reading of 15:30 in terms of our love for the spirit is puzzling: My argument was not based on the linguistic form, which is notoriously ambiguous, but on the context, in this case of the way in which Rom 5:5 anticipates 8:28. God’s own love is of course a major theme of Rom 5:6–11 and 8:31–39. 116 571.

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ἀγάπη in Rom 5–8? Paul clearly thinks they fit together, because his conclusion (8:31–39) combines the two. Once you suppose that at the heart of the multiple meanings of δικαιοσύνη, and at the heart of the meaning Paul intends with ἀγάπη, he discerns the powerful covenant faithfulness of Israel’s creator God, it all comes together. That is why PFG ends the way it does. It would be good to suppose that one result of the present volume would be to focus future discussion on the large-scale arguments I was advancing, not so much for their own sake but in order to ponder more deeply the reality, in Paul’s experience and theology, of the freshly revealed faithfulness of the one God.

Bibliography Aulén, Gustav. Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement. Translated by A. G. Herbert. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics Volume IV, Part 1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975. Davies, J. P. Paul Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature. London: T&T Clark, forthcoming. Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, forthcoming. Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 4.1 (2013). Koch, Klaus. The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic. London: SCM 1972 [1970]. Kooten, George H. van. Paul’s Anthropology in Context. WUNT 232. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. Longenecker, Bruce W. Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty and the Greco-Roman World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. MacMillan, Margaret. The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books, 2013. Martin, Dale B. “Paul and the Judaism/Hellenism Dichotomy: Towards a Social History of the Question.” Pages 29–61 in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide. Edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011. Meeks, Wayne A. “Judaism, Hellenism and the Birth of Christianity.” Pages 17–27 in Paul beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide. Edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011. Meyer, Ben F. The Aims of Jesus. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 48. London: SCM, 1979. Novenson, Matthew V. Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Portier-Young, A. Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Schechter, Solomon. Aspects of Rabbinic Theology: Major Concepts of the Talmud. Peabody, MA: Henrickson, 1998.

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Scott, James M., ed. Exile: A Conversation with N. T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, forthcoming. Wright, N. T. “4QMMT and Paul: Justification, “Works” and Eschatology (2006).” Pages 332–55 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. “A New Perspective on Käsemann? Apocalyptic, Covenant, and the Righteousness of God.” Pages 243–58 in Studies in the Pauline Epistles: Essays in Honor of Douglas J. Moo. Edited by M. S. Harmon and J. E. Smith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014. –. “‘Christ in You, the Hope of Glory’ (Colossians 1.27): Eschatology in St Paul (2008).” Pages 379–91 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 2. London: SPCK, 1996. –. “New Exodus, New Inheritance: The Narrative Substructure of Romans 3–8 (1999).” Pages 160–68 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates. London: SPCK, 2015. –. “Paul, Arabia and Elijah (Galatians 1.17) (1996).” Pages 152–59 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Paul: Fresh Perspectives. London: SPCK, 2005. Published in the US as Paul in Fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005. –. “Romans 2.17–3.9: A Hidden Clue to the Meaning of Romans? (2012).” Pages 489–509 in Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul 1978–2013. London: SPCK, 2013. –. Surprised by Hope. London: SPCK, 2007. –. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. –. The New Testament and the People of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 1. London: SPCK, 1992. –. The New Testament for Everyone. London: SPCK, 2011. Published in the US as The Kingdom New Testament. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. –. The Paul Debate. London: SPCK, 2013. –. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God 3. London: SPCK, 2003. –. Virtue Reborn. London: SPCK, 2010. Published in the US as After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010.

Indices

Index of Ancient Sources

1. Old Testament Genesis book 1 1–12 1:1–5 1:5 1:8 1:10 1:27 1:28 3 6:1–4 12 12:2 12:2–3 12:3 12:7 15 15:5 15:5–6 15:6 17:1 17:2 17:6 18:1 18:18 18:18–19 22:12 22:14 22:15–18 22:16 22:18 26:2 26:3–4

176, 515, 558n7, 592, 735 94, 756 735 247 478 478 478 242–43 192 545n66 515, 515n96 362, 734, 738 192 302 736 540n34 49n149, 477n61, 738–39 192 348 174–76, 324n23, 475, 477 540n34 192 192 540n34 382 302 479 540n34 192 479 302, 382, 403 540n34 192

26:24 28:4 35:9 35:11 47:27 48:3 49:10 Exodus book 1:7 3:2 3:8 4:22 5:1 8:25 9:1 13:21–22 14:19 14:25 19:4–5 19:5–6 19:6 20 20:1 21 23:19 23:20–23 23:21 23:22 25:22 29:1 29:38–42 29:43 32:34 33:2

540n34 403 540n34 192 192 540n34 405n36

176, 515, 558n7, 592 192 540 743 335, 371 670 670 670 458 455, 457 335 334n10 333, 335 736 636 636 82n24 343 455 455 455n32 367 342 360 343 455 455

Index of Ancient Sources

772 (Exodus cont.) 33:9–10 33:14 33:14–15 33:15 34:26 40 40:34–35

458 455 455 455 343 443 343

Leviticus book 1:3 2 2:14 4:21 4:24 5:12 9:23 17:11 18:5 19:2

176 342 597 343 367 367 367 343 549 41, 169, 177 336

Numbers 6:14 12:5 14:10 14:14 20:16 28:3–8

342 458 343 458 455n30 360

Deuteronomy book

1:33 4:37–38 4:6 6:4 6:4–5 7:7–11 14:1–2 15 21:23 27–30 27:4 27:26 28:9–10

30

91n40, 166, 176, 178, 185, 221, 336, 520, 732, 740 458 455n31 336 168, 674n23 476 334 336 82n24 169, 169n9, 169n10 90, 166n5, 168, 182, 185, 194 227 168–69, 169n10, 694 336

32:26–43 32:35 32:39 32:43 33:28–29

124, 167, 169–70, 177–79, 732 193 170 566n27 170 169 170 169 169 169 170 170 369 360, 676, 732 200 199–201 200 200 200 335 200 200, 200n58, 201n60, 482 200, 200n59 300 478 200, 471n37 174, 178

Judges 5:11

475n49

1 Samuel 2:6 4:22 12:7

478 343 475n49

30:1–5 30:1–10 30:6 30:11 30:11–14 30:11–20 30:12 30:12–14 30:14 30:15 30:16 31:21–22 32 32:1–3 32:1–43 32:4–9 32:10–14 32:15–18 32:18 32:19–25 32:21

2 Samuel book 7 7:10–14 7:12 7:12–14 19:43 20:1 22:50 23

399, 401 405n35, 405n36, 742–43 403n28 404, 405n36 298 381, 399 381, 399 471n37 384n35

Index of Ancient Sources 1 Kings 6:17 8:11 12:16

678 343 382

2 Kings 4 5:7 19:15 19:19

639 478 476n53 476n53

1 Chronicles

221

2 Chronicles book 5:14

221 343

Ezra 9

166n5

Nehemiah 9

166n5

Psalms book 2 2:7 7:8–9 8 8:5 14:7 17:50 LXX 19 24 30:2 LXX 31:1–2 LXX 32:1–2 35:11 LXX 39:11 LXX 47:8–9 49:1 LXX 49:2 LXX 50:7–15 60:8–9 61:8 LXX 64:6 LXX 67 70:15 LXX

91n40, 740 283, 742–43, 757n101 298, 389 427 736n50 198 174, 178 471n37 608n11 435 475n49 477 174–75 475n50 475n49 736 478 369 670 335 471n39 471n39 736 475n49

773

72:8–11 72:17 72:28 LXX 77:7 LXX 78 78:52–53 82:1 85:10 LXX 95:7 97:2 LXX 98:2 105 106 110 110:1 114:5 LXX 116:1 LXX 119 136:22 143:2 146:4 LXX

736 405, 734 471n39 471n39 166n5 335 427 476n53 335 475n49 369 166n5, 733 166n5, 733 283, 408–9 298, 389, 435, 499 475n50 471n37 608n11 335 174, 366 478

Proverbs 8

756

Isaiah book 1:2–3 2:2–3 2:3 2:5 5:1–2 5:4 5:7 9:2 10:17 11:10 11:11–16 13 14:1–2 19:19–25 24–27 24:1–6 26:20 27:9 31:1–3 37:10

336, 513, 732, 738, 740, 749, 761 335 192 174, 178 336 335 335 335 336 336 174, 192, 298, 471, 471n37 194 748 192 192 508 198 430 483 335 476n53

774 (Isaiah cont.) 37:16 40 40–55

40:10 41:8–10 41:20 42 42:1–4 42:6 42:16 42:18–20 43:6 43:8 43:10 43:12 44:1–2 44:8 44:21 45:4 45:7 45:8 45:14–17 45:22–23 45:23 46:13 48:20–21 49 49:1–6 49:3 49:5–6 49:6 49:15– 16 50:8 51:4 51:5 52 52:3 52:4–5 52:5

52:7 52:11 53 53:6

Index of Ancient Sources

476n53 742 166n5, 168, 337n16, 432, 454, 738 426 335 337 384 336n15 330, 336 336 337 335 337 335, 337 337 335 337 335 335 336 475n49 432 432–33 167 475n49 335 384, 728 336n15 336 194 330, 336, 688–89, 736 572 479 336 336 172, 741 172 172, 172n16 124, 172–73, 173n18, 178–79, 738 427 443 366–67 367

53:9 53:10–11 56–66 56:1 56:1–8 56:6–7 57:19 58:8 59 59:15–20 59:15–21 59:20 59:20–21 59:21 60:1 60:1–3 60:15–17 60:19 60:20 63

63:1–6 63:7 63:7– 8 63:7–14 63:10 63:11 63:11–14 63:14 63:17 65:1–2 65:17 65:17–25 66:12–16 66:18–20 66:18–21 66:22 Jeremiah book 3:19 4 29:4–7 30:10 31 31:9

367 368 454 475n49 454, 457 192 365 336 174 426 417 124, 178–79, 482 369, 483 174 336 192 426 336 336 455–56, 456n33, 456n35, 457–48, 461, 726 426 454 454 13, 442, 454–56, 459, 461 455 455, 457 454 455 194 482 430, 521 454 417, 426 688 192 430

193, 221, 282–84, 446, 740, 749 335 748 282 335 446 335

Index of Ancient Sources (Jeremiah cont.) 31:20 31:31–34 31:33 46:27–28 50–51 51:20

335 523 482 335 282 335

Lamentations

221

9:18 9:22–27 11 12 12:1–3

363, 406–7, 408n48, 409, 409n55, 491–92, 496, 507, 678n30, 734, 742 283 408 406, 407n42, 751n87 406–7, 407n42, 408, 734 166n5, 497, 520, 739 366 194 514 514 427

Hosea 6:1–3 6:6 11:1 11:3–4

417 670 335, 572 572

Joel 2:32

435

Amos 5:21–25

670

Micah 1:2–7 4:1–2 6:5 6:6–11

417 192 475n49 670

Habakkuk book 2:4

761 93, 176–77, 470

Zephaniah 3:9–10

192

7:1–8 7:9 7:14 7:27

Ezekiel book 8:4 16 16:6 16:15 16:35–63 20:32 28:25 34 34:11–16 34:11–22 34:23–24 36 36–37 36:20–23 36:26–27 37 43 43 48:30–35 Daniel book

1–6 2 2:34 2:46–47 3:17–18 7

446, 513n94, 738, 740, 749 343 335 335 335 335 336 335 426 426 426 426 173, 177, 446 566n27 172, 173 172 443 443, 741 741 194

91n40, 166, 185, 193, 282–83, 492, 495–96, 512–14, 516, 522, 676–77, 734, 743, 746, 749, 753–54 282 496, 678n30 527 91n42 476n54 12, 214n18, 220, 277–78, 281–85, 287–89, 291, 297, 299, 302, 305–6,

775

9

Haggai book 2 2:4–9

457 458, 461, 726 13, 442, 457–59, 461

Index of Ancient Sources

776 (Haggai cont.) 2:5

457

14:5 14:9 14:16

430 476n54 192

Zechariah book 2:11 8:20–23 14

513 192 192 417

Malachi book 2:10 3

94 475 741–42

2. Deuterocanonical Books Judith

91n40, 166n6

Wisdom of Solomon book 196, 242n42, 754 2:23 242 6:1–5 282 7:22–24 243n45 7:25–8:1 243n46 8:19 243 9:15 243 16:13 478 Sirach book 11:14 36:10–13 48:10

91n40, 166n6 478 194 194

Baruch 3

170, 221

1 Maccabees

91n40, 166n6, 223n42

2 Maccabees book 1:24 7:14 7:37

91n40, 520 476n53 471n39 476n53

Prayer of Manasseh

228

3 Maccabees

91n40, 166n6

2 Esdras 9:8–9 19:6

478 478

4 Maccabees

91n40

3. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Apocalypse of Abraham book 490, 492, 512, 513n94 8:1–5 477n60

Apocalypse of Zephaniah

513n94

Coptic Apocalypse of Elijah 512

Aristobulus book 132 139

219 476n53 476n53

Apocalypse of Moses

Assumption of Moses

512, 513n94

520

Index of Ancient Sources 2 Baruch book

6:1–9 21:4 22:4–13 35–40 48:8 48:39 59:4–11 78:1–7

91n40, 166n6, 211n10, 217, 221, 411, 490, 492, 496, 508–9, 512, 516, 676–77, 743, 746 677 478n63 677 220 478n63 417n3 677 194

3 Baruch

512

De Jona (Pseudo-Philo)

221

De Sampsone (Pseudo-Philo) 1 Enoch book

1–36 1:2–9 6–11 6–12 37–71 45:1 45:3 46:3–6 46:4 48 48:2–3 48:4 48:5 51:3 55:3–4 55:4 61:8 62 62:1–3

221

215, 227, 408, 512– 13, 516, 676n29, 678, 678n30, 735, 746, 749 508–9, 512n86, 514–15 417n3 509 515 224, 224n46, 407, 427, 429, 435n55 408n51 408n51, 427 408n51 428 224 428, 435n55 428 428 408n51 224 408n51, 427 224, 408n51, 427 224 408n51

62:3 62:5 62:7 62:9 62:13 69:26–29 69:27 69:29 72–82 85–90

777

90:15–17 91:7 91:11–17 93:1–10 100:4 102:1–3

224, 427 224 428 428 428 428 408n51 408n51 514 91n40, 166n6, 218, 221, 494, 514, 517, 678n30, 746 417n3 417n3 494, 514, 519 494, 514, 519 417n3 417n3

2 Enoch book 32:1

512, 513n94, 520 417n3

Ezekiel the Tragedian 68–76 214 4 Ezra book

7 10:27 10:55–57 11–12 13 13:39–47 14:47

91n40, 166n6, 210, 217, 221, 397, 411– 12, 496, 508–9, 513. 516, 521, 676– 77, 735, 742–43, 746, 749, 754 519 677 677 220 407 194 677

History of the Rechabites

221

Joseph and Aseneth 8:10 478n63 12:1 478n63 12:8 572 12:15 572

Index of Ancient Sources

778 (Joseph and Aseneth cont.) 20:7 478n63 Jubilees book 1:23–25 1:28 4:26 6:13 11:15–17 50:5 50:11

221, 513, 515, 735 572 417n3 521 360 477n60 521 360

Liber antiquitatum biblicarum (Pseudo-Philo) book 219, 221 19:12–13 417n3

17:4 17:7 17:21 17:26–31 17:34–35 17:46

426 426 426 194 426 426

Orphica 25–29

214

Sibylline Oracles book 3:11 4:30

213, 495, 519 476n52 476n52

Testament of Benjamin 9:2 194

Life of Adam and Eve 13:5 476n53

Testament of Joseph 8:5 476n53

Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah 512

Testament of Judah 22:2 417n3

Prayer of Jacob

Testament of Levi 8:11

219

Pseudo-Phocylides book 520 54 476n52

417n3

Testament of Naphtali 5:8 194

Psalms of Solomon book 91n40, 211, 215, 412 17 426 17:1 426

Testament of Abraham A 13:4 417n3 Testament of Moses 10:3–10 417n3

4. Dead Sea Scrolls CD

91n40, 412

XIV, 13–15 XVII, 35–36

1QapGen ar

166n6

1QpHab

171, 177n25

1QM document

1QHa document XII, 31–33

213–14, 225, 228 213

I, 13–15 II, 2–3 III, 12–13

225–26 572

509n70, 513n94, 516, 519 519n104 195 195

Index of Ancient Sources (1QM cont.) XIII, 10 XVII, 6–8 1QS document

427n29 427

I, 21–III, 12 III, 6–9 III, 13–IV, 26 IV, 23–26 V, 5–6 VIII, 5–6 VIII, 7, 9 IX, 3–6

213, 459–60 459–60 460 460 519 519 459 459 459 459

1Q26

513n94, 522

1Q27

513n94, 522

1Q28b V, 17–23 V, 20 V, 23 V, 25–24

426 426 427 427

1Q32

516

2Q24

516

4Q174

459n39

4Q243–45 4Q246

516 409n55, 513, 513n94

4Q252 V, 5–6

405n36

779

4Q299–301

513n94, 522

4Q385

513n94

4Q394

166n6, 213, 213n17, 221, 223– 24, 459n37

4Q400–7/Mas 1k

513n94

4Q415–18

513n94, 522

4Q423

513n94, 522

4Q491c

212n13, 214, 224, 435n55

4Q521

478n63, 513n94

4Q529

513n94

4Q543–48

513n94, 516

4Q552–55

516

5Q15

516

11Q13 document II, 10–25 II, 13–14

427, 519 427 427

11Q17

513n94

11Q18

512, 513n94, 516

11Q19 XXXIX, 9–10

521

5. Ancient Jewish Writers Josephus Antiquitates judaicae book 221 1.154ff. 477n60 2.45 696n32 5.24 696n32

7.50 11.65 18.63.1–64.6 18.63.4 18.229 8.335

696n32 696n32 262n23 263n23 696n32 476n52

Index of Ancient Sources

780 8.337 20.200.4

476n52 263n23

Bellum judaicum 1.607 2.163 2.420 3.143 4.618 4.656 6.289–90 6.312–15

696n32 544n62 696n32 696n32 696n32 696n32 219 723n26

Contra Apionem 2.37

261n19

Philo De Abrahamo 69–72

477n60

De agricultura 14–16

239n27

De cherubim 83 124–27

476n52 246n63

Quod Deus sit immutabilis 57 247n66 De ebrietate 202

239n26

De fuga et inventione 12 247n66 63 241n34 82 241n34 95 247n66 Quis rerum divinarum 231 248n72 Legum allegoriae 1.57 2.1–2 2.51 3.82 3.96 3.105

239n26 476n52 476n52 476n52 248n72 476n52

Legatio ad Gaium book 18 99 140–61 231

279n6 696n32 696n32 283 696n32

De vita Mosis 2.186

696n32

De mutatione nominum 74–76 239n27 De opificio mundi 24 247n69, 247n70 25 243n48, 247n71, 248n72 34 696n32 115 696n32 171 476n52 Questiones et solutiones in Genesin 1.58 246n63 2.62 248n72 De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 8 247n66 De sobreitate 55–56

572

De somniis 2 2.45

147n137 247n66

De specialibus legibus 1.30 476n52 1.52 476n52 1.65 476n52 1.67 476n52 1.81 248n72 1.336 239n26 2.253 215, 501 3.29 476n52 3.83 248n72 3.207 248n72 4.159 476n52

Index of Ancient Sources De virtutibus

212–216

781 477n60

4. New Testament Matthew book 1 5:14–16 10:5–15 10:28 16:28 19:28 22:32 23:21 24:30 25:31 25:31–46 26:64 28:18 Mark book 1 1:1–3 5:19–20 8:38 9:1 10:35–45 10:42–45 13 13:24–27 13:30–31 14:36 14:62 Luke book 1 1:22 7:19 8:39 9:27 10:29–37 11:2–4

94, 699, 742n61 732 305 220, 613 551 751n87 195, 224 539n28 741, 741n61 751n87 430n42 224 408n53, 751n87 751n87

96, 468, 699 94 418n6 418n6 224, 431 501n35, 751, 751n87 765 765 751 431 751 371 408n53

94, 152–53, 156– 58, 699 94 540n36 430n42 743n64 751n87 226 372

18:11–12 19:44 21 21:36 22:30 22:69 24:23 John book 1 1:1–18 1:3 1:10 4:25 5:27 5:31–47 5:37–38 Acts book

1:8 2 2:32–36 2:35 3:12 5:15 6:11–14 7 7:46 9 9:19 9:19–25 9:29 9:7 10 10–11

366 418n6 751 224 195 408n53 540n36

502n36, 504, 505n49, 699, 742 94 428 246 246 92n46 224 649 649

144–45, 152, 152n5, 153–59, 159n13, 159n16, 160–61, 387, 408, 667, 688, 701, 716 689 159 422 433n52, 434 226 667 366 159, 732 408n53 159, 560 694 369n22 369n22 540n35 159, 691 145

Index of Ancient Sources

782 (Acts cont.) 11:26 13 13–20 13:6–12 13:45 14:1–7 14:3 14:8–10 14:19–20 15:7 15:12 16:16–19 16:25–34 17 17:1–9 17:11–12 17:31 17:32 19:12 20:7–12 20:19 22 22:9 25:12 26:7 26:18 26:19 26:19–20 26:24 26:28 28:3–6 28:7–9 Romans letter

1 1–15

1–3 261n18, 362, 369n22, 716 732 683 160 369n22 369n22 160 160 160 691 160 160 160 159 295 359 433n52 296 160, 667 160 160 159 540n35 84n28 195 694 540n36 694 296 261n18 160 160

1–4

1–6 1:1 1:1–6 1:1–7 1:2 1:2–3 1:2–4 1:3 1:3–4

1:3–6 1:4 1:5 1:6 1:7 1:8–10 1:8–15 1:9 1:9–10 1:11–15 1:12 1:13–15 1:14–17 1:16 1:16–17

32–34, 47, 59, 177, 184n14, 201, 278, 294n33, 297–98, 303, 312–13, 314n6, 320n16, 331, 397, 465n10, 466–67, 469, 471– 72, 480, 484, 500, 503, 525n112, 526n114, 586, 637, 642, 648, 729, 738 559n9, 666 157

1:17 1:18 1:18–32 1:18–2:16 1:18–2:29 (Romans cont.)

559n9, 571n35, 739n57 320, 320n16, 322, 322n19, 466, 739n57, 766 698n36 469, 696–97 230, 302, 696n31, 697 469, 714n8 469 697 389, 696–98 405n35, 697 278, 286, 302–3, 303n43, 306, 372, 390n57, 405n36, 434, 469–70, 484n87, 697n33, 698n36, 719, 729 291, 298, 303–4 697 469, 689 469 325, 469, 484n83 469 469 470 470 470 571 485n88 305 321, 364, 369, 471, 697–98 176, 298, 303, 303n43, 450, 469– 72, 474, 485, 559n9, 696–98, 698n36, 729 176, 177n24, 357, 470, 474, 697 472, 472n41, 474, 559n9 300, 322n19, 477, 484n86, 485, 698 559n9, 718 322, 322n19

Index of Ancient Sources (Romans cont.) 1:18–3:20

1:18–4:25 1:19–23 1:19–32 1:20 1:20–28 1:21–23 1:23 1:24–31 1:25 1:32 2

2–3 2:1 2:1–5 2:1–6 2:1–11 2:1–16 2:1–29 2:1–3:20 2:2 2:3 2:4 2:5 2:5–11 2:5–13 2:6–7 2:6–16 2:7 2:9 2:11–16 2:12 2:12–13 2:12–16 2:12–29 2:13 2:14–15 2:16 2:17 2:17–20 2:17–23

14, 249, 304, 471– 75, 479n65, 484n82, 537, 728n38, 731, 737– 38 471n40 472 472, 680 661, 668, 699 571n35 668 198 472 699 472, 472n41 249, 322n18, 385n37, 452, 537, 731 319–20, 384, 473 473n45, 474 322 14 224, 369 320n16, 322, 322n19, 472, 731 472 473 323, 474, 474n48 473n45 324n23 521 321 321 537 323, 537 453n29 545n64 472 473n45, 474 321, 323–24, 537 248, 536 473 325, 728n38 14 473n45, 474 384, 472n42 384 349

2:17–24 2:17–29 2:17–3:8 2:19 2:19–20 2:24 2:25–29 2:26–27 2:26–29 2:28–29 2:29 3 3–4 3:1–2 3:1–3 3:1–8 3:1–9 3:1–31 3:2 3:3 3:3–6 3:3–8 3:5 3:6 3:7 3:7–8 3:8 3:9 3:9–20 3:10–18 3:10–20 3:11 3:19 3:19–20 3:19–26 3:20 3:21 3:21–26 3:21–31

3:21–5:11

783 172, 331n5 322n19, 472n42, 473, 731 473 330 736 124, 177, 179, 733, 738 172, 248, 323, 536 575n48 169 249n74 14, 537 44n123, 322n19, 452, 537, 729–30 474, 484 320, 322n19, 330 473n44 385n37, 466, 466n19, 473 559n9, 731 322n19 322n19, 594, 736 331, 384, 473 322n19 322n19 314n6, 474, 728n38 473n45, 474, 699 474 322n19 320n16, 474 320, 322n19 370, 473 537 731 537 699 320, 473 320 174, 537, 537n23 472, 474, 476 168, 320, 475 369, 466, 466n19, 473–76, 479n65, 484n82, 485n89, 537n23, 739 474

784 (Romans cont.) 3:22

3:22–24 3:23 3:24 3:25

3:25–26 3:26 3:27 3:27–31 3:27–4:5 3:28 3:29–30 3:30 3:31 4

4:1 4:1–25 4:1–5:11 4:3 4:4 4:5 4:5–6 4:6 4:7–8 4:8 4:9–12 4:10–12 4:11 4:13 4:13–21

Index of Ancient Sources

44n123, 320, 322n19, 383, 734, 736 475 479 320, 323, 367, 371, 484n83, 727 323, 363–64, 367, 475, 475n51, 535, 670 366 177n24, 321, 367, 474–75 320, 322n19, 323– 24, 475 320, 322n19, 559n9 324n23 366, 370, 475 475–76, 484 177n24, 475 476, 575n48 10, 49n149, 201, 313, 317, 319, 322n19, 326, 361– 62, 466, 466n19, 467, 475, 476n58, 476, 485n89, 315– 16, 348–49, 728n38, 732, 738, 739n57, 371, 371n25, 477n60, 477n61, 478 371, 371n25, 739n57 322n19 475 174, 324n23 484n83 476, 479, 480n70 475 174, 477 477 175 477 316 318 699, 757n101 316

4:13–22 4:13–25 4:16 4:16–17 4:17 4:17–22 4:17–25 4:19–21 4:23–25 4:24–25 4:25 5 5–8 5:1 5:1–11 5:2 5:3–5 5:5

5:6 5:6–7 5:6–11 5:8 5:8–10 5:9 5:12 5:12–21 5:17 5:18 5:18–19 5:19 5:20 6 6–8 6:1–2 6:1–11 6:1–14 6:2–11 6:4 6:6 6:7 6:11 6:11–22 6:12–13

466 474, 477 177n24 739n57 321, 362, 478, 484n86 478 478 567 478 738 363, 366–67 92, 508, 732 292n30, 320n16, 322, 322n19, 767 177n24, 298 299, 478, 480, 484n84 364 290 447–48, 570, 570n34, 572, 766n115 480 480 743, 766n115 480, 570n34, 743 448 480 198, 370 362 736n50 542n44 538, 538n26, 538n27 47 332 303n43, 453, 573 138n108, 733 320n16 325 47 693 549, 550 549, 672 47 402n25, 465 305 564

Index of Ancient Sources (Romans cont.) 6:12–23 6:16 6:18 6:19 6:20 6:22 7 7–8 7:5–6 7:6 7:7–25 7:7–8:17 7:14–20 7:18 7:24 7:25 8

8:1 8:1–4 8:1–11 8:1–17 8:2 8:2–3 8:3 8:3–4 8:4 8:4–8 8:5–11 8:6 8:9 8:10 8:11 8:12–13 8:12–17 8:13 8:14 8:15 8:15–16 8:15–17 8:16 8:17–27 8:17–30 8:18–23 8:18–25

448 299 47 325 47 47 174, 297, 371 560–61 561 249n74 332, 561 561 42n113 561 355 561 352, 355, 444, 452, 484, 572–73, 638, 729, 760 402n25 196, 303n43, 354, 355, 431, 734 453 168, 561 324, 372 369, 372, 561 363, 363, 561n14 575n48, 742–43 305, 560 561 448 299 354, 445, 561, 572, 626 561 664n4 561 423, 448 452, 564, 572 572 371, 572, 572n39 562, 572n39, 631 341 572 572 478 520–21 372n26, 446, 544

8:18–26 8:18–30 8:18–39 8:19 8:19–21 8:19–22 8:20 8:21 8:23 8:26 8:26–27 8:27–28 8:28 8:28–30 8:29 8:30 8:31 8:31–32 8:31–34 8:31–38 8:31–39

8:32

8:33 8:33–34 8:34 8:35 8:35–37 8:37 8:38 8:38–39 8:39 9 9–11

9–13

785 757n101 750 290 198 298 699 198 198, 679 323 372, 631, 633 448 448 168, 766n115 446 296, 479, 693, 756 343, 479 479 372 479–80 480 278, 280, 303n43, 448, 478–79, 484n84, 536, 729, 743, 766n115, 767 175, 303n43, 363, 366, 479, 479n67, 479n68 479 370, 479 303n43, 368, 372, 408n53, 479 570 480 283, 480, 570 408n53 370, 480, 570 85 466, 466n19, 480 169, 174, 199–201, 201n60, 318, 318n13, 320n16, 322n19, 339n20, 339, 353, 355, 369, 385, 466–67, 473n44, 480, 480n72, 481–82, 498, 525, 526n114, 589, 590, 732 217

786 (Romans cont.) 9:1–5 9:1–29 9:1–11:10 9:3 9:4 9:4–5 9:4–6 9:5 9:5 9:5 9:6 9:6–13 9:6–29 9:6–30 9:6–10:4 9:6–10:21 9:9 9:10–29 9:11–13 9:12 9:12–13 9:14–21 9:14–29 9:15 9:15–16 9:18 9:19–21 9:20–23 9:22–29 9:23 9:25 9:27 9:30 9:30–33 9:30–10:3 9:30–10:4 9:30–10:13 9:30–10:21 9:31 9:32 10 10:1

Index of Ancient Sources

169, 390n57 200 318n13 260 317, 317n12, 318, 362 372 484n80 45n129, 386n40, 480–81 45n129 480, 481 339, 372 481 169 482 732 732 474 477 484n79 366, 369 339 481 484n79 482 484n83 484n83 481 484n86 481 324n23, 484n83 339 538n23 177n24, 481n77, 484n81 169, 369, 481n77, 485n89 473 200 481 473 481n77 177n24, 366, 385, 481n77 173n18, 178, 323, 452 481n77

10:1–3 10:1–4 10:1–13 10:1–16 10:2 10:3–6 10:4 10:5 10:5–13 10:5–21 10:6 10:6–8 10:8 10:9 10:9–10 10:9–13 10:10 10:12–13 10:14–17 10:18–21 10:19 10:19–21 11

11:1 11:1–2 11:1–5 11:1–10 11:1–32 11:3 11:5 11:6 11:7 11:11 11:11–16 11:11–24 11:11–32 11:11–36 11:12 11:14 11:15 11:16 11:16–24

369 169 323, 481n77 324 481 481n77 176 41 169, 732 200 169, 176–77, 177n24, 481n77 169, 177–78 481n77 295n34, 364 370 422, 435 481n77 484n81 169 169, 482, 485n89 199, 201n60, 369, 369n22 201n60, 484n79 318n13, 332, 480, 524, 538n23, 589, 691, 732 216n27, 226, 482 474 484n80 200, 318n13, 484n79 169 545n64 484n83 366, 369, 484n83 385 43, 318n13, 369n22, 385, 483 200, 318n13, 484n79, 484n81 482, 695 200, 332 318n13 324n23, 339 369, 369n22 332, 339 482 320n16, 482

Index of Ancient Sources (Romans cont.) 11:17 11:17–24 11:17–32 11:25 11:25–26 11:25–27 11:25–31 11:25–32 11:25–36 11:26

11:26–27 11:27 11:28 11:29 11:30–32 11:31 11:31–32 11:32 11:33 11:33–36 11:36 12 12–15 12–15 12:1–2 12:2 12:9 12:14–13:7 12:19 13:1 13:1–4 13:1–7

13:3–4 13:8–10 13:11–12

385 200, 484n85 483 200, 332–33, 385, 483, 521, 538n27 291, 318n13, 339, 524 47n147, 355, 484n79, 526, 589 369, 372 369, 484n85, 484n81 466, 466n19 124, 179, 318, 332– 33, 483, 538n23, 538n27 483 174 482 318, 319n13, 372, 482–83, 484n80 484n82, 484n83 484n83 483 370, 538, 538n25, 538n26 324n23 169, 465, 481 484, 484n86, 699 735 299 320n16 298, 302, 448, 762 28, 521, 567, 567n29, 715n11 299 284 299–300 545n64 291 10, 280, 282–84, 284n19, 285–86, 289–90, 299–300, 301n41, 302, 306, 617n33, 763 283 575 217, 521, 751n86

13:11–14 14–15 14:1–8 14:1–15:6 14:1–15:13 14:8–12 14:10 14:10–12 14:17 14:17–19 14:23 15 15:3 15:5–12 15:6 15:7–8 15:7–12 15:7–13 15:8 15:8–13 15:9 15:9–13 15:10 15:11 15:12 15:13 15:14–21 15:18 15:19 15:30 16 16:4 16:20 16:23 16:25–26 16:26 1 Corinthians letter

1 1–2

787 284, 299–300 305, 318 611 471 320n16 763 370, 537, 537n19 536–37 325 299 177n24 319, 680 390n57 465 471 471 298, 303–4, 386n40, 390n57 466, 466n19, 470, 485n90 372, 471, 484n80 318 390n57, 471, 484n83 470–71 200 689 173, 302, 471 471 485n88 291, 321 161, 369 570, 570n34, 766n115 320n16 545n64 302, 521 301 291 304

34, 294n33, 297, 302, 460, 465n10, 467, 507, 510, 525n112, 586, 674n23, 760 674n23 280, 687

788

Index of Ancient Sources

(1 Corinthians cont.) 1:2 305n46, 325 1:5 401n22 1:8–9 521 1:9 633 1:17 321 1:17–2:16 466n14 1:18 296 1:18–25 507, 684 1:18–2:16 764 1:18–3:23 467 1:21 338 1:23 390n57, 685 1:26–31 338 1:28 321, 344 1:29 338 1:30 325, 367, 371 1:31 338 2:1 522, 684, 684n3, 685 2:1–5 685 2:2 687 2:4 687 2:4–5 685 2:5 688 2:6 521, 678 2:6–8 290, 297 2:7 522 2:8 764 2:10 631 2:14 674n23 2:16 762 2:18 321 3 538n24 3:1–3 561 3:3 314n6 3:8 370, 536n15 3:13 521, 536, 538 3:14 370, 536n15 3:15 324n23, 370, 538 3:16–17 442, 458 3:23 465, 481 4:1 522 4:4 370 4:5 536n15, 537 4:8–13 339 4:16 571n36 5–6 690 5–7 341, 341n22

5:2 5:4 5:5 5:7 5:9–13 5:10 5:11 6:1 6:1–3 6:2 6:2–3 6:9 6:9–10 6:9–11 6:11 6:16 6:18–20 6:19 6:19–20 7 7:5 7:13 7:17–24 7:19 7:29–31 7:31 8–10 8:1–3 8:4–6 8:5 8:5–6 8:6

9:1 9:8 9:11 9:17 9:19 9:19–20 9:19–23 9:20 9:21 9:22

341 678 341, 370, 521 341, 671 370 341, 521 341 290, 291, 300 736n50 370 372n26 536m12 370, 536 325 305n46, 325, 536 561 442 460 325 318 521 495 305, 321 325, 611 290, 291, 751n86 521 297, 301, 305, 353, 431, 695 570 428 290, 297 45, 295n34, 297 88, 245, 246, 246n64, 247n67, 362, 372, 429, 435, 465, 469, 476, 481, 668n10, 669, 674n23, 675n25, 699, 756 540n36, 668 314n6 561 370 696 691 87, 356, 695 696 325, 696 689, 696

Index of Ancient Sources (1 Corinthians cont.) 9:23 696 10 597 10:1–11 314 10:5–11 315n8 10:11 521 10:16 314 10:16–22 315n9, 317n12 10:17 760 10:18 317 10:21 435 10:21–22 315n8 11 596n21, 674n22 11:1 571n36 11:3 465, 481 11:10 678 11:17 674n22 11:17–34 305 11:20 435 11:20–22 143 11:21–22 672 11:23 229, 680 11:23–25 523 11:23–26 314, 366, 670 11:25 670, 314 11:26 760 11:27 670, 672 11:27–30 315n8, 315n9 11:29–30 672 11:30 667 12 674n23, 735 12–14 632 12:3 295n34, 422 12:4–11 423 12:8 50 12:9–11 161 12:12 674n23 12:13 305, 356, 675 12:28 161 13 97, 122, 124, 223 13:2 50 13:9 112 13:12 111n69 14:7 545n64 14:14 460 14:18 161 14:20 762 14:25 91n42

15 15:3 15:3–5 15:3–8 15:4 15:5 15:5–8 15:6 15:7 15:8 15:9 15:12–24 15:17 15:20 15:20–28

15:21–22 15:22 15:22–23 15:22–28 15:23 15:23–24 15:23–28 15:24 15:24–25 15:24–26 15:24–28 15:25 15:25–26 15:26 15:27 15:28 15:35 15:35–44 15:35–57 15:36–38 15:40–42 15:44 15:45 15:45–49 15:49 15:50

789 92, 157, 297, 508, 520, 545, 548 698 363, 366 697, 698, 698n36 699 539 539, 540, 541, 686 539 540 540, 540n36 560 542 698 521 278, 283, 284, 285, 286, 292n30, 297, 302, 303n43, 306, 390n57, 409, 510, 750 362 402n25, 542, 542n44 408 372 370, 521 368 368, 371, 386n40, 481 734 408 297 369, 389n52, 499, 500 499 368 297, 499 434 94, 465, 760 296 543 547n85 543 324n23 14, 296, 543, 547 352, 545n64 543 296 521

Index of Ancient Sources

790 (1 Corinthians cont.) 15:50–57 303n43 15:50–58 372 15:51 521 15:51–52 500 15:51–53 296 15:51–57 278, 297 15:52 547n81 15:52–53 521 15:52–54 499 15:54 499 15:54–56 292n30 15:54–57 297 16:8–9 684n3 16:17 500 16:22 435 2 Corinthians letter

1:3–5 1:8–10 1:14 1:19 1:20 1:21–22 1:23 2:2–4 2:11 2:12 2:14 2:14–4:6 3

3–4 3:2–3 3:4–6 3:6 3:8–9 3:12–4:4 3:12–4:6 3:15–18 3:17–18 3:18 4:1–12 4:3–6

294n33, 446, 465n10, 467, 525n112, 586, 750 570 295, 301 521 401n22 401n22 390n57 545n64 571 521 684n3 283, 297, 306, 570, 728 467 315, 443, 446, 447n21, 452, 452n26, 632, 635 431, 523 571 315 249n74, 355 47 423 385 445 355, 678 296, 573, 669, 756 466n14 354

4:4 4:6 4:6–8 4:13 4:16

4:16–18 4:16–5:10 4:18 5 5:1 5:1–5 5:1–10 5:3 5:5 5:9 5:10 5:11–6:13 5:13–14 5:14 5:14–21 5:15 5:16–17 5:17 5:18–21 5:19 5:2–3 5:21

6:1 6:1–2 6:3–10 6:10 6:14 6:14–7:1 7:6–7 7:14 8:9 10:3–5 10:5 10:10 11:2 11:4 11:14

296, 521, 756 678 570 50 546, 546n68, 546n75, 547, 547n75, 548 545, 546n69 547n80 546 547n80 547 546, 547n82 520 547 546 537 14, 370, 386n40, 536, 537, 537n19, 728 577 549, 569, 570 549 549, 550 390n57 280, 321, 367, 521, 534, 546, 550, 699 299 363, 429, 538, 538n27 548 47n146, 201n61, 366, 367, 401n22, 728 564 367, 728 286 324n23 299, 341 341, 442, 443 500 370 324n23 286 755 500 341 341 521

Index of Ancient Sources (2 Corinthians cont.) 11:21–33 716 11:21–12:10 466n14 11:23 295, 301 11:24 366 11:27 143n121 11:32 688 12 217, 678 12:1 540n36 12:1–4 540 12:1–10 540n36 12:2 521 12:4 372 12:7 521 12:8 367 12:11–12 161 12:15 545n64 13:4 401n22

2:15–16 2:15–21 2:15–3:14 2:15–4:11 2:16

Galatians letter

3:1–5 3:1–14 3:1–4:11 3:2 3:2–5 3:3 3:5 3:6 3:7 3:8

1–2 1:3–4 1:4 1:11 1:11–16 1:12–14 1:12–17 1:13–14 1:15 1:15–17 1:16 1:17 2 2:1–10 2:2 2:5 2:6–10 2:7–9 2:8 2:11–21 2:12 2:14 2:15

32, 34, 59, 184n14, 213n17, 312–13, 314n6, 354, 465n10, 468, 503, 510–11, 525n112, 637, 746n76, 750 157 303n43 280, 400, 511, 521 314n6 560 560 286 694 759 209, 693–94 400, 540n36 688, 759n105 143, 350 691 369, 668, 692 560 369, 692 691 692 142, 366, 729 145 145 731

2:17 2:17–21 2:19–21 2:20 2:21 3

3–4

3:9 3:10 3:10–13 3:10–14 3:11 3:12 3:13 3:13–14 3:14 3:14–16 3:14–19 3:15 3:15–18 3:16

3:18

791 319 144 354 353 59, 177n24, 350, 363, 366 727 611 325 546, 549, 639 325 10, 62, 62n221, 197, 223, 313, 315– 17, 319, 326, 352, 361–62, 371, 402, 404, 728n38, 730, 732, 736, 738 92, 96, 389, 525n112 316, 355 213 353 325, 366 50 561 161, 423n19, 639 324n23 177n24 177n24, 382, 698n36 177n24, 560 169, 317, 694 611 168, 178 176, 177n24 41, 176–77, 177n24 317 197 382, 401n22, 402– 3, 403n28, 404 402 409 738 314, 314n6 175, 382–83, 390, 390n57, 403, 403n29, 404, 407n45 317

792 (Galatians cont.) 3:19 3:19–29 3:21 3:21–4:7 3:22 3:24 3:28 3:29 3:30 4 4:1–7 4:1–9 4:1–11 4:4 4:4–5 4:4–7 4:5–6 4:6 4:14 4:19 4:21 4:21–26 4:21–31 4:21–5:1 4:24 4:24–25 4:25 4:26 5:3 5:5 5:5–6:8 5:14 5:16 5:16–17 5:16–25 5:19–21 5:19–24 5:22 5:22–23 5:22–26 5:25 6:2 6:10 6:14–15 6:15

Index of Ancient Sources

405n36 316 325, 635, 639–40 446 177n24, 699 177n24 305, 585, 637 736 476 523, 638–39 721 562 196, 431 94, 96n62, 511, 523, 745 92, 217 742 341 354, 572n40 684n3 546 96 611 313, 314 510 219 317 368 757n101 366, 560 177n24 564n20 575 423, 452 510 561 536 564n20 50, 299, 564 305, 563 423 578 372 284 280 321, 367, 521, 611, 699

Ephesians letter

1 1:3–10 1:3–14 1:4 1:5 1:6 1:7 1:9 1:10 1:11 1:14 1:20–22 1:21 2:4–10 2:6 2:8–9 2:11–22 2:19–22 3:4–6 3:9 3:10 3:14–19 3:18 4:3 4:5 4:15 4:16 4:21 5:5 5:15–20 5:18–19 5:21 5:32 6:6 6:8 6:10–17 6:10–20 6:12 6:14 6:15

31–32, 32n52, 137– 38, 154–55, 341, 341n23, 342, 444, 526n114, 585–86 524n111, 678 342 524, 526n114 342, 699 341 342 371 679 342 678 371 408n53 372 370 366 366 299, 305, 343, 365 444, 442, 449 343 343 342, 678 572 632 299 295n34 633 633 401n22 304n45, 370 678 633 633 679 545n64 370 286 298, 305 286 299 299

Index of Ancient Sources Philippians letter

1–2 1:6 1:10 1:11 1:12–13 1:12–14 1:13 1:19–26 1:23 1:27 1:27–30 2 2–3 2:1 2:1–4 2:1–5 2:2 2:2–5 2:3 2:5 2:5–11 2:6 2:6–8 2:6–11

2:8 2:9 2:9–11 2:10 2:10–11 2:11 2:12 2:12–18 2:13 2:15 2:15–16 2:16 2:17 2:30

3 87, 278, 293–94, 297–98, 339, 465n10, 525n112, 750 157 452n28, 521, 730, 762 433n52, 521 305 301 296 295 290, 295 520 284, 296, 339, 545n64 280, 290, 305 159, 230, 432–33 282, 302 570 569, 766 569, 570 570 570 159 569, 762, 766 339 435 428, 433 63, 278, 293–96, 303n43, 306, 362, 422, 431–33, 617 363 432 293, 363, 422, 432– 34, 501, 752 432 168, 481, 538n27 63, 295n34, 465, 538, 626 293, 500 763 294 290, 287 305 521 669, 671 545n64

3:1 3:1–17 3:2 3:2–6 3:2–11 3:2–16 3:3 3:3–7 3:4 3:4–16 3:5 3:6 3:7–8 3:7–11 3:8 3:9 3:10–11 3:12 3:17 3:18–21 3:20 3:20–21

4:2–9 4:19 4:20 4:22 Colossians letter

1 1:12 1:13–14 1:13–15 1:14 1:15 1:15–17 1:15–20 1:19

793 294, 302, 319, 559– 60, 559n9, 561n13, 693, 730 294 295 340–41 718 340, 453 560 249n74 30n45 340 294 560 325, 366, 560 340 370 560 401n22, 402n25, 727 325 560 571n36 294–95 63 278, 293–96, 303n43, 495, 500, 520, 750, 757n101, 762 299 324n23 368 84n28, 295–96, 301

31, 137, 137n104, 138–39, 154–55, 230, 341n23, 585– 86 230, 431, 668 372 303n43, 304n44 389n52 371 296, 756 282 245–46, 278, 362, 617n33, 756 429

Index of Ancient Sources

794 (Colossians cont.) 1:20 1:23 1:24 2 2:8–15 2:11–12 2:14–15 2:15 3:1–4 3:1–11 3:3 3:5 3:9 3:10 3:11 3:21 3:23 3:24 4:18 4:3 1 Thessalonians letter

1:1–10 1:4–6 1:6 1:9 1:10 2:2 2:10 2:13 2:14 2:16 2:19 3:12–13 3:13

4 4–5 4:7–8 4:13–15 4:13–18 4:13–5:11

429 699 372 282 303n43 678 278 283, 306 372, 422 564–65 534 452 452, 565n22 296, 756 305 565 545n64 370 31n49 684n3

278, 297–98, 467, 495n22, 520, 525n112, 544n63 689 339 571n36 684, 684n3 292, 303n43, 483, 495n22, 500, 520 295, 301 560 321 571n36 472n41 520 292, 303n43, 570 430, 431n45, 495, 500–1, 520–21, 560, 752 217 291, 293, 301 325 544 291–92, 430 278, 291–92, 296, 299

4:14 4:14–18 4:15 4:15–16 4:16–17 4:17 5 5:1–11 5:2 5:3 5:8 5:8–11 5:9 5:9–10 5:13 5:15 5:23 2 Thessalonians letter

434 542n45 434 500 499, 510, 520–21, 524 521 291 280, 284, 292, 434 521 290–91, 300, 306 286 291 434 292, 303n43, 370 500 284 500, 520, 545n64

1:6–8 2 2:1–12 2:3–4 2:3–10 2:8 2:9–10 2:13–14

31–32, 137–38, 154–55, 278, 290, 297–98, 341, 341n23, 585 430 291 278, 289, 291 289 288 289, 430 289 343

1 Timothy letter 1:13–16 2:1–2 2:2 2:5 6:15

32, 137–38, 155 560 301 279n6 426n24 279n6

2 Timothy letter 2:8

31, 137, 155 698n36

Titus letter 1:15

32, 137–38, 155, 585 699

Index of Ancient Sources (Titus cont.) 3:1 Philemon letter

279n6, 301

6 17 20

82, 82n24, 83, 165, 181, 305, 663 398, 398n12 141 571

Hebrews letter 1:2 1:3–4 4:15 8:6 9:15 10:37 11 12:2 12:24

368 246 434 367 426n24 426n24 430 732 363 426n24

James letter 1:1 2 2:14–26 5:14

468 195 96 366 680

1 Peter 1:9 1:21 2:13–17 2:22 4:16

547n75 422, 433n52 279n6, 301 367, 408n53, 433n52 261n18

2 Peter letter 2:4–13 3:1–10 3:5–13 3:7 3:10 3:10–13

199 500n34 199 494 519 519 430

795

3:13 3:15–16

372, 519 716

1 John

510n77

Revelation book

1:13–17 4–5 5 7 7:12 11 11:17–18 12 12:1–18 12:10–12 13 14 14:8 15:3–4 16:5–7 17 19–20 19–21 19:11–12 19:11–16 19:11–20:15 20 20–21 20:1–6 20:4 20:11 21 21–22 21:1 21:2 21:9–22:5

94, 147, 277, 287– 89, 291, 305–6, 368, 407, 491–92, 492n13, 494, 494n19, 495–96, 512–13, 516, 517n100, 524, 676– 77, 746, 753 494 289 288 288 368 288 368 288–89 494 368 288, 494 288 368 368 368 288, 494 288 495 368 431 297 500 368 499 370 494 494 757n101 372, 494, 519 368 368

Index of Ancient Sources

796

5. Rabbinic Works Amidah

228, 478n63

b. Ḥagigah 13a 14a

214n18 214

b. Sanhedrin 38b 110b

408n52 195

Fragmentary Targum Gen 49:10 405n36

Genesis Rabbah book 14:6 39:8

361, 594 360–61, 735, 735n49 477n60

Jalqut Shimon I §766

361n4

Targum Neofiti Gen 49:10

405n36

6. Apostolic Fathers, New Testament Apocrypha, and New Testament Pseudepigrapha Barnabas

588

10.1 10.2

301n41 301n41, 763

1 Clement 61

279n6

Apocalypse of Peter

495, 512, 519

Martyrdom of Polycarp 8.2 301n41 9.2–3 301n41

Apostolic Constitutions and Canons 8.12.7 478n63

7. Later Christian Writings Augustine Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum ad Bonifatium 4.11 639n28 Contra Julianum 4.3.25

248n72

De gratia Christi, et de peccato originali 1.9 639n28 Eusebius of Caesarea De ecclesiastica theologia 2.14.6 629n12

Justin Martyr Apologia i 46.2

235n1

Apologia ii 8.1 10.1–8 13.2–5

235n1 235n1 235n1

Tertullian Apologeticum 30–34

279n6

Index of Ancient Sources

797

8. Greco-Roman Literature Aelius Aristrides Orationes 45.14

246n61

Aëtius Placita I prooem. 2

239n23

Alcinous Didaskalikos 154, 10–160, 40 161, 1–179, 34 179, 35–189, 11 181, 19–182, 14

239n28 239n28 239n28 241n34

Aristotle Analytica posteriora 1.34 118n11 2.11 245n56 Analytica priora 2.25 118 Athēnaiōn politeia 39.2 264n31 Metaphysica 1.3.1 5.2.1–3

245n56 245n56

Physica 2.3 2.7

245n56 245n56

Poetica 1449a

686n7

Topica 1.5

698n37

Arius Didymus 5b3 6a

241n33 241n33

Chariton De Chaerea et Callirhoe 6.5.5 696n32 17.7.1 696n32 Cicero Academicae quaestiones 1.19 239n22 De finibus 1.29–30

241n36

De legibus dialogue 1.6.18 2.37

238 238n16 269n56

De natura deorum 755 De oratore 2.58.236

686n7

Cleanthes Hymn to Zeus

245

Diogenes Laertius Lives 3.56 7.39 7.39–40 7.40 7.87–89 10.127–32

239n22 239n23 239n25 239n23 241n33 241n36

Herodotos Historiae 6.105.1

262n20

Iamblichus De vita pythagorica 86 241n35 137 241n35 Livy Ab urbe condita 39.8–19

269n56

Index of Ancient Sources

798 Lycurgus Leocrates 1.18 Marcus Aurelius Meditations 4.23

266B 347D

696n32 696n32

Pompeius 41.3

696n32

Sertorius 11.4

696n32

696n32

246n60, 756n97

Pausanias Graeciae descriptio 4.19.5 696n32 8.54.6 262n20 Philostratus Vita Apollonii 1.28.37 8.27.2

696n32 696n32

Vita sophistarum 1.508.14 2.572.12

696n32 696n32

Plato Phaedo 81C

243n43

Phaedrus 247B

243n43

Respublica 440E-441A 588A–589B

549n92 548n87, 549n92

Theaetetus dialogue 167B

241 241n34

Timaeus 29E

243n47

De Stoicorum repugnantiis 1035A 239n23 1035B 244n51 De Superstitione 169b

241n35

Pythagoras The Golden Verses 46 241n35 Quintilian Institutio oratorio 7.3.6 685n4 Seneca Epistulae morales 65 65.2 65.7–10 89.9–17

245 245n58, 246n59 246n62 239n24

Sextus Empiricus Adversus mathimaticos 7.16 239n23 7.22 239n23 7.22–23 239n25 Simplicius In Physica 181.7–30

242n38

Pliny the Younger Epistulae 10.96.8 262n23 10.96.9 262n23 9.24 81

Stobaeus Anthology 2.75.11–76.8 2.77.16–27

241n33 241n33

Plutarch Moralia 184A

Strabo Geographica 3.1.8

689

696n32

Index of Ancient Sources (Geographica cont.) 10.30.42 264n29

12.5.3

799 264n29

9. Non-Literary Sources Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) 1.196 269n56

Lois sacrées de l’Asie Mineure (LSAM) 9.22 264n31

Die Inschriften von Ephesos (I.Eph) 1a.10.12–15 264n31

Samaritan papyri

Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno anteriores (IG 22) 659 264n31 1146, 6–7 264n31 Inscriptiones graecae Aeginae, Pityonesi, Cecryphaliae, Argolidis (IG IV) 203, 8–11 268n53

224

Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (SEG) 26.1382 264n29 29.1205.9–11 264n29 30.714 264n29 30.1508 264n29 30.1843 264n29 37.1168 264n29 Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (SIG) 3.985 263 3.985, 1–6a 263 3.985, 14 264

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God Preface preface i vii xi–xii xiii xv xvi

83, 106, 117–18, 607, 646 22, 89, 152 76, 184 664 118 35, 151, 647 31, 66, 208, 593, 611

xviii xix xxi xxii xxiv–xxv xxvi

33, 84, 105–7, 117– 18, 121, 127, 139 35, 66 66, 209, 215, 607, 716 92 716 8

Part I Chapter 1 chapter 3ff. 3–74 4 6 7 7–8 8 9 12 13 15 18 20 21 22 23 24 24–30 24–36 25

35 153–54 117 84 75 84 159 159 66 574 141, 165 82, 181 566, 588 81 66, 81 62, 90, 159 151 81 255 393 140, 142–43, 151, 255

25–26 26 26–27 27 28 29 30 30–31 31 32–33 33 34 35 36–37 37 40 42 44 45 46 47 48

144 82–83, 585 393 82, 566 35, 568, 615 115, 144, 255, 567 184 184 615 151 82 122, 153, 159 81 184 37, 46, 66, 144 217 615 53 35, 53, 61, 133, 151 35, 61–62, 151, 186, 393 646 115, 151

802 (Chapter 1 cont.) 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56ff. 56–61 56–63 57 57–61 59 60 61 62 62–63 63 64 64–68 66–67 67 68ff. 71 72 72–74 Chapter 2 chapter

75 75–196 76 77 79 81 82–84 83 84 85 86 86–87 86–89 87 89 90

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

107 151 33 151 109, 115 134, 152, 646 35, 152 154 341 136, 158 137, 586 138 154 138 32, 138, 154–55, 585 144, 152, 155–56 153, 155 144, 155–56, 646 567 184 412 112 153 25, 456 615, 663 615

35, 143, 188, 236, 714, 722, 732, 737, 744, 752 595 91 159 186, 208 55, 215 159, 215, 223 223 215 213 212 159, 209 159 350 159 159, 210 215

90–92 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 101 104–7 108–11 108–77 108–79 109 110 111 113 114 114–39 114–63 115 116 116–17 117 118 119 122 127 128–35 130–31 132 135 135–36 136 138 139 139–62 139–63 140 140–41 141 142–46 156 158 162 163 163–64 163–75 165

585 213–14 143 145, 159 209–10 214–15 661 661 214 741 218 732 141 185, 231 187 218 65, 218, 221 66, 91–92, 192, 349 410 350 221 91 91, 723 91, 121 221 678 678 215 496 372 677 166, 191, 410 497 166, 191 410 91 739 185, 193, 360 193 44, 349 25, 676 194 159 194 167, 194, 350 65 372 198, 748 501

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 2 cont.) 166 167 167–68 168 171 172 173 174 175 176 176–77 179 181 183 185 186 193–95 Chapter 3 chapter 197–245 198 200 201 202 204 205 206 207–11 209–28 211–13 213 213–29 214 229–30 230–32 232–37 233 237–38

241 242 246 246–57 246–78

167, 497 497 25 230 220 159, 219 167, 218 494 496, 678 167 167 88 360 212 224, 350 55 350

Chapter 4 chapter

247 248 248–52 249 249–50 250 251 252 252–53 253 254 263 265 271

35, 143, 236, 351, 722, 756 236 239 607 208 662, 668 240 43, 159 132 240 441 240 159 240 664 240 240 240 143 240

Chapter 5 chapter

608 159 255, 259, 263 723 255, 356

35, 154, 236, 255, 255n2, 350–51, 356, 722 258, 597 258, 609 256 653 256 257, 263 256, 263, 596, 662, 668, 675 260, 262, 271 257 256, 263 256–57, 262 213 143 596

280 284–311 288 305 311 311–43 312 313–14 314 318 331 340

35, 146n132, 236, 351, 722 143, 159 351 143 143 666 351 351, 616 607 666 617 132 607

351–569 353 354

144, 696 666–67 214

Part II Chapter 6 chapter 351

35, 140, 722, 758 351

803

804 (Chapter 6 cont.) 355–58 356 358 360 361 361–68 363 364 365 367 368 370 371 373 375 376 377 378 380–81 382 383 384–450 385 387 391 393 393–94 395 397 401 402 403 404 404–11 406 407 411–37 415 416 417 418 419 419–20 419–27 421 423 425 426

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

587 159, 350, 664 132, 143 675 55, 587 662 55, 65 159, 588 588 588 665 499 499 650–51 66 159 667 667 236 617, 666 55, 617 302 35, 584, 606 678 700 88 87 662, 669, 670 61 557, 700 503 661 661 351 55 169 352 66 159 662, 679–81 42 159 662 352 667 566 668 674

427 427–29 428 429 430 431 431–37 438–50 432 436 438 442 443 444 447 448 450 453 455 Chapter 7 chapter

456 456ff. 456–537 457 457–58 457–537 458 459 460 461 463 463–64 466 467 468 474 475 475–76 476 480 481 484 485 487 493

680 352 679 159–60, 566, 571 700 159, 569 352 352 55 159, 555 557 557 30 350 29, 565, 575 557 132 61 35

35, 140, 186, 188, 220, 352, 393–94, 722 549 157 352 25, 26 25, 549 186 25, 29, 610 25, 30 44, 64, 352, 502 498 218, 395 190 121 395 220 37, 186 44–45, 122 186 197, 571 186, 499, 562 499 186 62, 186, 393 44, 188, 197 188

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 7 cont.) 495 495ff. 496 496–99 498 499 500 502 503 504 505–16 507 510 511 512 514 517 517–37 518 518–21 519 520 521 522

193 360 187 384 52 42, 65 43 80, 90 65 65 394 187 371 52 65 30 697 393–94 411 698 698 197 65, 394–95, 698–99 684

523–24 524 527 529 529–30 530 531 533 533–34 534 536

696 690 168, 385 569, 577 555 49 52, 394 43 394 42 90, 395

Chapter 8 538–39 542–46 543 546 549 549–50 555–61 558 562 564 565

35, 140, 611 43 662, 664 584 408 690 353 367 751 65 664, 691

625 626 627 633 634 638 638–41 639 641 644–56 644–709 644–727 645–737 647 648 649 650 650–53 651–52

213–14, 229 48 66, 214 214, 417, 426 441 372 486 368 476 418 742 353 423 25, 46, 424 212, 418 26 419 419 46

Part III Introduction to Part III 609 61, 86 609–1266 353 610 35, 88 610–18 329 611 65, 87–88, 393, 611 611–12 612 612 393, 502, 525 612–13 393 617 61 Chapter 9 chapter

619 619–773 622–23

35, 171, 175, 353, 388, 647, 664n4, 714, 724, 726, 734, 759 587 441 213

805

806 (Chapter 9 cont.) 653 653–54 654 654–55 655 655–56 656 656–88 656–89 657 659 659–61 660 661 661–70 661–77 664 670 679–80 680–89 681–83 683 684 686 688 690 690–709 691 692 693 697 698 702 704 706 707–9 709 709–28 710 711 712 713 714 715 716 717

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

419–20, 425–26, 627 420 388, 420 419, 423 420 420 196, 426 196 431 624 138, 561 354 631 196, 481 353 245 132 132 354 432 433 354, 433 481 42 168 420–21, 423, 481 420 421 421 171–78 175 481 66 635 431, 501, 752 46, 481 627 354, 424 449 442, 449, 459, 664 442–43, 456, 458 461 443 443–44 444, 449, 454, 456– 57, 561 664

718 719 720 721 722 724 725 726 727 728–33 729 730 734 735 737–72 739 740 744 746 746–47 747 748–49 750 751 752 753 755 756 759 760 760–61 761–62 764 764–71 767 768 770 771 772 773 Chapter 10 chapter

774 774–1042

444 561, 626, 631 444 444, 456, 628 168, 447, 448, 570 367 561, 635 445 424, 447, 635 524 678 342 57 62, 445 354, 718 472 472 558 558 558 634 634 560, 562 559 52, 559, 562 558, 562 38 558, 562 442, 562, 566, 635 66 53, 66 281 329 559 472 473 53, 473, 562 65, 562 52, 365 66

35, 171, 175, 178, 313, 353–54, 388, 393, 395, 563, 584, 647, 714, 714n9, 726–27, 759, 762 354, 584, 587 441, 584, 591

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 10 cont.) 775 591, 594 776 360 777 37, 319–20, 325, 562 777–83 311n2, 591 778 26 779 28, 30 780 317 781 217, 523, 591 781–82 313 782 313 783 591 783–86 193 783–94 735 784 330, 360 784–85 587 794 594, 735 795 368 795–804 474, 591 796 555, 577–78 797–98 370 799 562 801 224, 555 803 199 804 555 804–15 193 805 334, 609 805–10 332 806 612 806–10 588 807 368, 588 809 588 811 360, 384–85, 592, 737 812 173 814 52, 172–73 815 197 815–911 302, 758 815–1042 92 816 376, 410 817 92, 362, 592 817–18 386 820 174 824 362, 375, 378–79, 386 825 197, 218, 396 825–26 587 825–35 388, 393–94, 548

826 826–27 827 827–28 828 828–30 829 830 832 835 836 836–39 836–40 836–51 838 839 839–40 840 841 842 843 846 847 847–48 848 848–50 849 849–51 850 854 854–56 856 860 860–73 860–79 862 862–70 863–67 864 865 867 868 869 870 871 874 876 878

807

381 399 381, 399, 402, 406 400 171, 381, 383 381 382 381, 399 55, 401 365, 381, 388 44, 48, 331 383 473 594 384, 473, 486 43, 52, 65, 201, 332, 383, 473 65 52, 56, 332 363, 368 65, 368 562 363, 367 332, 349 315 316, 475 476 371, 478 477 477 159 319 331 28, 389 318 353 316 317 317 315–16 37, 317 332 314 175 329 62, 635 316 523 329

808

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

(Chapter 10 cont.) 879 879–911 879–912 881 881–84 882 883 887 887–88 888 890 894 895 896 897 899 900 901 902–5 902–8 903 904 905 907 908–11 909–10 910 912 912–1032 912–1038 912–1042 913 914 915 915–16 916 917 918 920 924 925 925ff. 925–1032 925–1042 927 928 929

473 698 714 48 367, 728 25 201 364 470 562 486 30, 371 65, 368, 561 25, 562 363 66, 485 486 355 479 536 480 175 42, 178 479 486 365 65, 473 52, 445 353 441, 563 302 364 636 698 698 303, 470, 698 450–51, 470, 687 450 450 209, 228 41 365 354 303, 730 43, 65, 364, 562, 636 49 55

930–31 931 933 935 936 936–37 939 940 941 945 945–46 946 947 948 948–49 949 950 950–52 952 952–53 952–60 954 954–55 955 956 957 957–59 958 958–59 958–61 959 960 962 965 966 966–71 966–76 967 967–76 969 971–72 980–84 982 983 984–92 989 990

459, 637 55, 317, 332, 638 178, 562 562, 637 638 322–23 473 637 372, 638 50, 58, 535 533, 637 50, 321, 637 312, 562 536 536 535 312, 638 354 49, 55, 563 563 354 51, 325, 452, 564 564 564, 638 325, 439–40, 445, 563–65, 637 49, 450, 564 727 28, 48, 323, 450– 51, 638 323, 571 558 450, 563 564 42, 372, 446, 672 25, 61, 371 37, 55 145 353 201, 363 354 562 355 355 446, 452, 635 446 559 560 354

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 10 cont.) 991 995 996 998 999 1000 1000–3 1002–7 1003 1004 1007 1011 1012–13 1013 1015 1016 1016–17 1017 1020 1023 1024 1025 1026–27 1027 1028 1028–32 1029 1030 1031 1033 1034 1036 1037 1039 1041 Chapter 11 chapter

1043 1045 1046 1048 1049 1061–62 1063

25, 49, 55, 332 174 474, 476 168, 331 168 55 349 476 371 477 441 61 372 448 330, 371 25, 42 608 65 453 355, 446 368, 446–47 479 321 66, 341, 372 451 441 452–53 452, 557 312, 324, 364 62 55 62 447, 452–53, 575, 634–35 62, 354 372

35, 171, 353, 355, 647, 714, 726, 759, 762 490, 587 66 22 573, 575 65 66 368, 501

1063–65 1064–65 1065 1066 1071 1074–78 1082 1083 1084 1084–85 1086–92 1087 1089 1089–90 1089–95 1090 1091 1093 1094 1095–1128 1096 1096–97 1097 1098 1098–1100 1099 1103 1104 1106 1106–7 1108 1109 1109–10 1110 1111 1113 1114 1115 1116 1117 1118 1118–20 1119 1120 1121 1122 1123

809

408 132 132 159 355, 482, 486 355 500 500 42, 499 501 536 473 536–37 537 355 408 372 35 66 304 49, 556–57 372 556 25, 501, 556, 573, 751 29 556, 565 564–66 566, 569 304, 574 563 575 30, 31, 43 575 372 498, 562, 569, 573 573 304, 566–67 574 159, 575, 700 563, 576 571 97 159–60, 209, 223, 575 574, 700 569 562, 566–67, 571 567

810

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

(Chapter 11 cont.) 1125 1128–33 1130 1131 1132 1132–33 1133 1139 1140 1144–45 1145–46 1146 1148 1149 1153 1156–1258 1157 1157–58 1158 1164 1166 1167 1169 1173 1175 1178 1182 1183 1185 1188 1190

575 589 589 538 589 355 589, 718 314 42 587 226 144, 226, 230 132 132 159 199, 353, 480 480 480 159 159 486 170 365 170 484 331 65, 329 332 159 481 332

1191 1192 1194 1195 1195–96 1195–1257 1197–1211 1200 1203 1206 1207–8 1208 1209 1210 1212–13 1213 1215 1219–21 1235 1244 1246 1249 1250 1251 1252 1253 1255 1256–57 1258 1261 1262 1263

332 332 482 329 732 316, 318 332 132 161 588 332 330 61 369 484 482 482 484 499 48, 333 483 174 483 174, 483 132 538 132, 369 481 66, 333, 485 25 317 66

1276 1277 1277–78 1279 1279–81 1280 1280–81 1280–83 1281 1282 1283 1284

617 147 302 606 284 283–85 278 278 302 278, 286 278, 282–83 132, 146

Part IV Introduction to Part IV 1269 85, 683 Chapter 12 chapter 1271 1271–1319 1273 1274 1274–75 1275

35, 84, 145, 236, 355–56, 766 84, 159 145, 302 282, 286–87 763 146, 282–83 282–83, 290

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 12 cont.) 1284–85 1285–88 1286 1287 1287–88 1288 1289 1289–90 1290 1290–91 1291 1291–92 1292–93 1293 1294 1294–95 1295 1295–97 1296 1297 1298 1299 1299–1301 1300–1 1301 1302–3 1303 1303–4 1306 1306–7 1307 1308 1309 1309–12 1311 1312–14 1313 1313–14 1314 1314–17 1314–19 1315 1315–16 1316–17 1317

297 281 283 281–82, 297 286 282, 286–87, 297 278 278 30 289 281, 501 291 293 293–95, 408, 617 293, 617 293 294 294 294 294, 617 283–84, 286 281, 283, 285, 302, 356 298 303 298 299 159, 161, 299, 606 299–300, 751 66, 283–85, 617 63, 286–87 282, 287, 295, 302, 372 282, 285 146 146 277, 281–82, 285, 287, 292, 297 147 132 301 147 294 147 147–48, 294–95 147 147 147, 288

1317–18 1318 1319 Chapter 13 chapter

1320 1320–52 1320–53 1321 1321–22 1321–24 1322 1324–27 1325 1327–30 1328–30 1329 1330 1331 1332 1333 1333–38 1334 1336 1337 1338 1339 1339–44 1340 1341 1341–42 1342 1343–44 1344 1344–48 1345 1346 1347 1347–48 1350 1352 Chapter 14 chapter 1354

811

147, 287 281–82 286, 617

35, 75n7, 236, 255n2, 356, 595, 652, 671, 675, 766 75, 652 675 255, 257, 356 159, 161, 653 257 356 596 356 596 356 673 679, 761 673 598 596 673 673 673 672, 692 672 672 671 597 671–72 663 669 671 597 663, 671, 761 597 317 671 671 675 159 670

35, 236, 250, 356, 756, 766 683

812

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God

(Chapter 14 cont.) 1355–56 1356 1357 1359–83 1360 1361 1362 1362–67 1365 1370 1371 1371–72 1373 1374–75 1376 1377 1378 1379 1379–81 1382 1383 1383–1406 1386–1406 1388 1400 1401 1402–3 1403–4 1404 Chapter 15 chapter 1408 1408–17 1409 1411 1413 1414 1417–26 1418–19 1418–26 1419 1420 1420–22 1421 1422 1422–23

31, 66 236, 244, 569 64 356 244, 556 700 26 245 244 563 248, 569–70 556 558 574–75 244 248, 574 236 244 248 64–66, 236, 700 244 693 230 115 543 543 230 568 700

35, 93, 236, 356, 681n35 64, 208–9, 356, 681 228, 356 212 159, 209, 482 212 216, 695, 700 356, 693, 759 693 209 159, 209 43 693 693 43 759

1423 1425 1426 1427 1431 1434–43 1434–49 1435 1435–43 1437 1438 1440 1441 1442 1443 1449 1449–72 1453 1454 1456 1456–71 1459 1464 1465 1466–71 1470 1471 1472

209, 693, 759 693 569, 693 614 159 356 87 145 695 606 606, 611 145, 159, 208, 229 159 695 159 606 93, 175 176 176 176 356 93, 177 66, 177 177 470 52, 176, 470 177 219

Chapter 16 chapter 1473–84 1474 1476 1476–77 1477 1479 1481 1481–82 1483 1483–84 1484 1484–85 1484–1504 1485 1487 1487–89 1488 1489

35, 357, 700 357 608–9, 614, 618 575 502 106, 490, 503, 613 612 502 368 683 700 700, 702, 758 372, 539 357 700, 702–3, 758 683, 703–4 574 574 569, 577, 683, 703

Index of References to Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Chapter 16 cont.) 1490 1490–91 1491 1491–92 1492 1492–95 1493 1494 1495 1497 1497–99 1498 1502–3

700, 703–4 539 544, 704 690 574, 661 574 683, 690, 700 372, 470–71 159 690 691 159, 690 688

1503 1504 1505 1507 1508 1510 1514 1515–16 1516 1516–19 1517 1518 1519

813

684, 689 159 574 574 556, 618 574 574 89 84, 681 79 83, 574 85, 679–80 85, 577, 681, 683



Index of Names Adam, J., 703 Adams, E., 197, 198, 262, 417, 430 Aertsen, J. A., 703 Albertz, R., 517 Albrektson, B., 333 Albricht, M. von, 242 Albright, W. F., 27 Alesse, F., 238, 242 Alexander, P. S., 616, 739 Alkier, S., 54, 161 Allison, D. C., 219, 262 Althaus, P., 539 Anderson, D. R., 119, 125, 126 Anderson, P., 604 Arendt, H., 222, 608–9 Arnal, W., 605–6, 609, 612 Arnaoutoglou, I., 261 Arnim, I. von, 237–39, 241, 245 Ascough, R. S., 262 Ashton, J., 356, 596, 653, 672 Athanassiasdi, P., 245 Auffahrt, C., 509 Aulén, G., 745 Aune, D. E., 434, 545–47 Austin, J. L., 533–34 Avemarie, F., 687 Aviam, M., 215–16 Ayres, L., 629–30 Bailey, D. P., 363 Bakhos, J., 242 Bakunin, M., 618 Balch, D. L., 268 Barbour, I. G., 102–13, 548, 718–19 Barclay, J. M. G., 4–5, 22–23, 32, 38, 43, 59, 145–48, 182–84, 191, 210, 214, 279–81, 287–88, 293–94, 298, 301, 400, 489, 502 Barclay, W., 21 Barr, J., 544–45 Barrett, C. K., 296, 547

Barth, K., 29, 439, 502, 524, 631, 645– 58, 719, 723–24 Barth, M., 342 Bassler, J., 472 Batovici, D., 280 Bauckham, R. J., 46, 145, 388, 419, 429–30, 432, 436, 626, 743 Baum, A. D., 193 Baur, F. C., 155, 411, 526 Bayes, T., 127, 720–21 Beale, G. K., 195, 431 Becker, E.-M., 8, 31, 37, 77, 92–93, 136, 142, 144, 152, 157, 160–61, 716 Becker, J., 41 Becker, M., 504, 512 Beckwith, R. T., 194 Beek, B. van de, 112 Behm, J., 546 Beker, J. C., 222, 510 Bell, J., 542 Bell, R. H., 14, 35, 50, 110, 364, 367, 369, 535, 537–38, 541–44, 548–50, 608, 731, 755 Benages, N. C., 91 Bennema, C., 51, 563 Bergmann, O., 542 Berkley, T. W., 173 Best, E., 343 Betz, H. D., 87, 260, 544, 548, 691 Bhabha, H., 270, 272 Bhaskar, R., 110–11 Bickerman, E. J., 261 Biddle, M. E., 468 Binder, D. D., 215 Bird, M. F., 18, 42, 74, 304, 338, 418, 615, 698, 715 Bird, N. L., 18 Blass, F., 395 Blenkinsopp, J., 336 Boccaccini, G., 217, 427 Bock, D. L., 215

816

Index of Names

Bockmuehl, M., 6, 21–22, 38, 66, 74, 136, 142, 144, 378, 560, 711 Boer, M. C. de, 21, 38, 489, 502–3, 508–11, 520, 576, 711, 745 Boersma, H., 662 Bonazzi, M., 242 Bookidis, N., 265–68 Borght, E. van der, 112 Boring, M. E., 22, 79, 236, 379, 565 Bornkamm, G., 77 Bosch, D. J., 337, 701 Boschki, R., 571 Botta, A. F., 82 Bourdieu, P., 585 Bousset, W., 29, 46, 73, 75, 77, 98, 409, 506 Bouttier, M., 396 Bowden, J., 506, 686 Bowlby, J., 571 Boyarin, D., 22–23, 89, 152, 404, 406, 408 Bradshaw, P. F., 596 Brawley, R. L., 22, 79 Breytenbach, C., 240, 424, 429 Bromiley, G. W., 631, 641, 648–49, 651, 656 Broneer, O., 268 Brulé, P., 260 Brunner, E., 641, 642 Bryan, C., 286 Bryan, S., 194 Buber, M., 111 Büchsel, F., 439 Buitendag, J., 112 Bultmann, R., 7, 14, 22–31, 40, 46, 50– 51, 54, 64, 66, 73–74, 76–79, 86, 89, 93, 95, 97, 151–52, 162, 183, 221, 361–62, 368, 464–65, 492–93, 497– 98, 501–2, 504–6, 508–11, 515, 522, 526, 535, 541, 549, 565, 610, 712, 717, 745, 747–48, 750 Burford, A., 265 Burks, A. W., 117 Burridge, R. A., 576 Byassee, J., 21 Byrne, B., 172 Caird, G. B., 198, 231, 312, 491–93, 675

Cairns, D. E., 642 Calboli Montefusco, L., 685 Calhoun, R. M., 696–98 Calvin, J., 524–26, 546, 638, 641 Cameron, R., 375 Campbell, C. R., 396 Campbell, D. A., 171, 311, 503, 559 Candler, P. M. Jr., 541 Canterbury, A. of, 97 Capes, D. B., 435–36 Carmignac, J., 225 Carson, D. A., 193, 369, 616, 694 Cartwright, D. E., 540 Casey, M., 193, 408 Chancey, M., 396, 616 Chapman, D. W., 686 Charles, R., 210 Charles, R. H., 220 Charlesworth, J. H., 9, 43, 91, 144, 207–8, 210–11, 213–20, 222–24, 226–27, 229–30, 434, 711, 715, 722, 739, 743–44 Chester, A., 375, 378, 386–87, 436 Childs, B., 630 Chilton, B., 145 Chomsky, N., 613 Christiansen, E. J., 334 Christophersen, A., 512 Chryssavgis, J., 662 Churchill, W., 76 Clarke, A. D., 687 Clausen, H. N., 154 Cohick, L. H., 295 Collier, A., 110 Collins, A. Y., 400, 517 Collins, J. J., 218, 400, 407–9, 427, 435, 490–91, 495, 509, 513, 515–16, 518, 676, 751 Congar, Y., 439, 662 Conzelmann, H., 77 Cook, J. G., 686 Coppins, W., 7, 73–74 Coser, L. A., 273 Cosgrove, C. H., 385 Cox, R., 247, 248 Crabbe, M. J. C., 539 Cranfield, C. E. B., 40, 248, 331, 697 Crawford, R., 263 Cremer, H., 475

Index of Names Crossan, J. D., 262, 688 Crossley, J. G., 15, 37, 410, 606, 610, 612, 618, 714, 718, 764–65 Crüsemann, F., 475 Cullmann, O., 545 Cunningham, C., 541 Curtius, E., 257 Dahl, N. A., 375–80, 387, 402–5, 464, 466 Dalferth, I. U., 534–35 Das, A. A., 468 Davidson, I. J., 657 Davies, J. P., 746 Davies, W. D., 440 Davila, J. R., 429 Davis, J. B., 503 Dawid, P., 128 Day, M., 116 De Luca, G., 265 Dean, O. C. Jr., 41 Debrunner, A., 395 Deines, R., 116, 183 Deissmann, G. A., 29, 67, 74, 77, 277, 396, 410 Delling, G., 480 Derrida, J., 606 Descartes, R., 312, 540, 549 Dickson, J. P., 696 Dillon, J. M., 237, 240–42 Dinkler, E., 29, 77, 510 Dobbeler, A. von, 697 Dodd, C. H., 408 Donaldson, T., 192 Dooyeweerd, H., 539 Douven, I., 119, 121, 128, 136 Dow, S., 257 Drew-Beaer, T., 264 Droge, A. J., 262 Dumbrell, W. J., 192 Dunn, J. D. G., 5, 7, 11, 22, 31–36, 38– 46, 52, 74, 78, 110, 138, 140, 145, 171, 181, 188, 193, 213, 222–23, 236, 331, 347–50, 365, 375, 378, 384, 387–88, 400, 440, 451, 481, 570, 578, 610, 614, 623, 687, 694– 95, 712, 714–15, 725–26, 739–40, 743 Dunne, J. A., 280

817

Dupré, L., 312 Durham, J. I., 336 Eagleton, T., 603–4 Eck, W., 223 Eco, U., 583 Edsall, B., 432 Edwards, K., 15, 37, 718, 764–65 Ehrensperger, K., 229 Eisele, C., 125 Eliot, T. S., 722 Elliott, M. W., 565 Elliott, N., 286 Elmer, I. J., 91–92, 157, 408 Elwell, W. A., 3 Engberg-Pedersen, T., 230, 242, 249, 396, 440, 545, 561, 568, 692–93, 753 Enroth, A-M., 385 Ensminger, S., 16, 29, 652–53, 723–24 Erlemann, K., 468, 697 Eshlemann, K., 154 Evans, C. A., 145, 161, 166, 193, 408, 434 Fantin, J. D., 295 Fee, G. D., 49–50, 388–89, 432, 623, 633 Feldman, L. H., 221 Feldmeier, R., 159, 468, 618 Ferguson, E., 268 Ferguson, W. S., 257, 261 Feuerbach, L., 541 Finney, C., 666 Finze, H., 658 Fisher, A., 17 Fitzmyer, J. A., 697 Flebbe, J., 466–67, 471, 477, 481 Flint, P. W., 408 Flórez, J. A., 119 Flüchter, S., 112 Flusser, D., 216, 223 Foerster, W., 299 Foltz, B. V., 662 Fortna, R. T., 319 Francis of Assissi, 765 Frede, M., 245 Frederick, J., 565 Fredriksen, P., 22, 378, 400

818

Index of Names

Freeman, D. H., 539 Frei, N., 158 Frerichs, E. S., 273 Frey, J., 13, 17, 23, 35, 38, 53–54, 56, 138, 227, 424, 429, 436, 445, 449, 452, 459, 493–95, 497–501, 504–5, 507, 509, 512–13, 521–22, 572, 675, 712, 744–46, 748–54 Friesen, S. J., 265, 269 Fuchs, E., 534–35 Funk, R. W., 28, 395 Fürst, W., 649 Gadamer, H.-G., 77 García Martínez, F., 459 Garland, D. E., 536, 695 Gärtner, B., 459 Gast, W., 685 Gaston, L., 375 Gathercole, S. J., 39, 54, 58, 614 Gaventa, B. R., 21, 29, 38, 319, 711 Gebhard, E. R., 268–270 Geertz, C., 81–82, 144, 255, 271, 713 Geest, P. van, 112 Gemünden, P. von, 666 Gese, H., 364, 549, 728 Gibson, J. J., 145 Gigante, M., 237 Gill, D. W. J., 260, 687 Glad, C. E., 238 Gladd, B. L., 195 Glucker, J., 241 Goethe, J. W. von, 84 Goetz, S., 539, 549, 551 Goldberg, D. T., 605 Goldingay, J. E., 336 Goldstein, J. A., 218 Görgemanns, H., 242 Gorman, M. J., 21–22, 50, 639, 711, 729 Götte, M., 509 Grahame, K., 98 Granskou, D., 208 Gräßer, E., 464 Green, G., 653 Green, J. B., 216, 569 Green, N., 261 Greenberg, M., 334 Greimas, A. J., 188–89

Gribetz, S. K., 361 Griffith-Jones, R., 559 Grindheim, S., 10, 35, 333, 339, 480, 591, 737 Grobel, K., 24 Grossberg, D., 361 Grünwaldt, K., 507 Gundry, R. H., 543 Gundry-Volf, J., 536 Gunkel, H., 439 Gupta, N., 21, 711 Gurtner, D. M., 195 Guttenberger, G., 468 Haacker, K., 480, 697 Habets, C. J., 239 Haenchen, E., 156, 160 Hafemann, S. J., 365, 565 Hagner, D. A., 365 Hahn, F., 480 Hahn, U., 507 Hahne, H. A., 198 Hainz, J., 692 Hammann, K., 24, 27 Handel, G. F., 76 Hanges, J. C., 9, 36, 259, 262, 264, 271–72, 722–23 Hannah, D. D., 427 Harink, D., 503 Harland, P., 261, 262 Harley-McGowan, F., 600 Harmon, M. S., 728 Harnack, A. von, 77 Harris, M. J., 537 Hartman, J. J., 3 Hartshorne, C., 117 Harvey, D., 604 Hatch, E., 262 Häusser, D., 193 Hawthorne, J., 269 Hay, D. M., 408, 471 Hays, R. B., 3, 21, 23–24, 44, 55, 76, 134, 141, 147, 165, 169, 171, 173, 175, 182, 184, 187–89, 195–96, 199, 201, 220, 287–88, 311, 371, 403–4, 695, 731, 739, 742, 758 Head, P. M., 687 Heesch, M., 539 Hegel, G. W. F., 541, 618

Index of Names Heidegger, M., 79 Heilig, C., 7, 17, 31, 40, 73, 134, 139, 141, 145–48, 196, 268, 272, 282, 292, 543, 617, 715, 719–21 Heilig, T., 7, 18, 31, 139, 715, 719, 720–21 Heiligenthal, R., 697 Heimbrock, H.-G., 534 Heine, H., 95 Heininger, B., 161 Heither, T., 361 Hellholm, D., 260, 517 Hempel, C., 417, 522 Hempel, J., 398 Henderson, I. H., 217 Hendry, G. S., 539 Hengel, M., 46, 74, 78, 92, 183, 304, 375, 377, 378, 408, 506, 521, 608, 686, 691 Hennecke, E., 507 Hepding, H., 264 Herbert, A. G., 745 Herbert, G., 85, 722 Herrmann, W., 26 Herzog, R., 265 Heschel, S., 396, 616 Hewitt, A. L. C., 18 Hewitt, J. T., 12, 18, 57, 85, 408, 715, 734 Hiebert, P. G., 567 Himmelfarb, M., 361 Hinde, R. A., 571 Hirsch-Luipold, R., 242 Hofius, O., 360, 371, 478, 534–35, 687, 703 Hollander, D., 611 Holleman, J., 408 Holtz, T., 480, 545 Hooke, S. H., 399 Hooker, M. D., 59, 168, 184, 220, 377 Horbury, W., 195, 408 Horn, F. W., 79, 160, 521, 556, 574–75 Horrell, D. G., 261–62 Horsley, R. A., 63, 246, 286, 763 Horst, P. van der, 249 Hoskyns, E. C., 29, 646, 725 Humphrey, E. M., 16, 37, 584, 676, 715, 729, 749, 759–61

819

Hurtado, L. W., 5, 12, 22, 32, 38, 43, 45–46, 124, 378, 388, 419, 421–22, 425, 427, 429, 432–34, 449, 463, 468, 481, 589, 594, 626, 687, 741– 43 Idinopulos, T. A., 258 Instone-Brewer, D., 687 Inwood, B., 238 Irons, C. L., 474, 728 Jacquette, D., 541 Jakobsen, D. V., 160 Jameson, F., 604 Janowski, B., 364, 728 Jantsch, T., 13, 52, 463, 466–68, 472, 476, 478, 712, 724, 728, 737–38, 743 Jewett, R., 318, 322, 331, 736 Joel, B., 194 Johns, L. L., 216 Johnson, A. R., 399 Johnson, C. E., 312 Johnson, E. A., 439 Johnson, E. E., 471 Johnson, L. T., 608 Jonge, M. de, 378 Jongste, H. de, 539 Judge, E. A., 256, 262 Juel, D., 377, 403–6 Jüngel, E., 50, 535, 549–50, 641–42 Jurgens, B. A., 216 Kaminsky, J. S., 334, 336–37, 398 Kammler, H.-C., 687 Kant, I., 540, 541, 543 Kärkkäinen, V.-M., 641 Käsemann, E., 3, 77, 183, 303, 362, 368–69, 476, 480, 502–11, 520–22, 728, 744–47 Kaufmann, H., 95 Keck, L., 39 Keesmaat, S. C., 443, 456 Kelhoffer, J. A., 494 Kereszty, R. A., 670 Kierspel, L., 11, 359 Kim, S., 10, 63, 138, 266, 281, 286, 299–301, 304, 574, 694, 730, 736, 750, 763

820

Index of Names

Klauck, H.-J., 161 Klausner, J., 411 Klein, G., 27, 504 Klein, J., 685 Kline, M. G., 192 Klinghardt, M., 597 Kloppenborg, J. S., 261–62, 613 Klumbies, P.-G., 30, 58, 73, 465 Klutz, T. E., 261 Knight, H., 651 Koch, K., 493, 499, 512, 753 Koenig, J., 597, 633 Koester, H., 268–69, 505 Kooi, C. van der, 29 Kooten, G. van, 755 Köstenberger, A. J., 337 Koziel, B. E., 506 Kramer, W., 375, 377–78, 387 Kraus, M., 685 Krauter, S., 561 Kreitzer, L. J., 417, 430 Kreuzer, S., 477 Kugel, J. L., 221 Kugler, R. A., 427 Kuhn, H.-W., 686 Küng, H., 632, 633 LaFollette, H., 571 Lambrecht, J., 477 Lanci, J. R., 459 Landmesser, C., 23, 27, 534 Lange, A., 516, 522 Lausberg, H., 685 Laytham, B. D., 567 Lee, A. H. I., 11, 52, 93, 389, 734, 736, 742 Légasse, S., 697 Legrand, L., 691 Lentin, A., 605 Leonard, P., 272 Levenson, J. D., 403, 592, 735 Levine, A.-J., 262 Levison, J. R., 12, 49, 445, 447, 452, 459–60, 572, 725–27 Lewis, C. S., 21 Lewis, G. S., 429 Lichtenberger, H., 522, 561, 687 Lienhard, J. T., 629–30 Liesen, J., 91

Lieu, J. M., 417 Lim, T. H., 427 Lincicum, D., 171 Lincoln, A. T., 471 Lindemann, A., 30, 58, 73, 465 Lipton, P., 122–24, 130, 134 Litfin, D., 684 Loader, J. A., 90 Lochman, J., 636 Lohse, E., 478, 479 Lonergan, B. J. F., 102–5, 109–10 Long, A. A., 238–40 Longenecker, B. W., 23, 44, 182, 184, 188–89, 197, 395, 497, 757 Longenecker, R. N., 378, 694 Losch, A., 7, 33, 101–5, 109–13, 117, 548, 718–19 Lovejoy, A. O., 105 Lubac, H. de, 662 Lücke, F., 503, 512 Lüdemann, G., 691 Lummis, E., 411 Luther, M., 79, 329, 365, 502, 504, 511, 527, 539, 610, 615–16, 636, 640–41, 647, 721 Luther, S., 556 Luwum, J., 765 Luz, U., 66 Lyotard, J.-F., 183 Macchia, F. D., 16, 49, 451, 626, 636, 724–27 MacDonald, P. S., 545 Machalek, R., 263 MacMillan, M., 717 Magda, K., 688 Malcolm, M. R., 432 Malherbe, A. J., 238, 250, 343, 755 Malina, B. J., 117 MaMillan, M., 717 Mannermaa, T., 641 Marcus, J., 418, 503 Marguerat, D., 152 Markschies, C., 548 Marshall, I. H., 51, 290, 703 Marshall, J. W., 613 Marshall, M., 645 Martin, D. B., 396, 753 Martin, M. W., 432

Index of Names Martin, R. P., 703 Martin-Achard, R., 337 Martyn, J. L., 502–3, 508, 510–11, 520, 523–24, 612–13, 691, 744–48, 750– 52 Marx, K., 617–18, 749 Mason, S., 593 Massey, J. A., 541 Maston, J., 74, 304 Matera, F. J., 468 Matlock, R. B., 189, 395, 401, 701 Mazar, A., 221 Mazzarelli, C., 237 McConville, J. G., 200 McDonald, L. M., 212, 216 McDonough, S., 198 McDowell, D., 188 McGowan, A. B., 15, 37, 596–97, 713, 718, 722, 724, 730, 732–33, 735, 737 McGrath, A., 111 McGrath, J., 481, 743 McKelvey, R. J., 459 McKnight, S., 295 McLean, B. H., 262 Medina, M., 216 Meeks, W. A., 73, 82, 268, 753 Meier, J. P., 195 Melanchthon, P., 79, 641 Mendels, D., 216 Merleau-Ponty, M., 219, 222 Mette, H. J., 237 Meyer, B. F., 33, 101–2, 104–5, 109– 11, 718–19 Middleton, J. R., 663, 676 Mikulincer, M., 571 Milchhoefer, A., 257 Millar, F., 410 Miller, C., 146, 268 Miller, M. P., 375 Miltenberger, R. G., 567 Mirowski, P., 604 Mitchell, S., 245 Mittmann-Richert, U., 516 Modica, J. B., 295 Møller, A., 541 Moltmann, J., 27, 439, 623–24, 626, 628–29, 631, 642 Mommsen, C. M. T., 76

821

Montague, W. J., 505–6 Montgomery, W., 397, 527 Moo, D. J., 193, 378, 385, 537 Moore, S. D., 604, 616 Moreau, A. S., 701 Morris, L., 545 Mother Theresa, 765 Moule, C. F. D., 231 Moxnes, H., 464–67, 477, 480 Moyise, S., 8, 44, 92, 122–24, 166, 177, 731, 738–39 Müller, M., 154 Murphy, N. C., 110 Murphy-O’Connor, J., 689 Myers, S. E., 247 Nadel, L., 540 Naour, C., 264 Nash, B. A., 432 Neill, S., 25 Neugebauer, F., 396 Neunhoffer, G., 604 Neusner, J., 273 Newman, C. C., 3, 193, 219, 421–22, 429, 436 Neyrey, J. H., 117, 468 Nickelsburg, G. W. E., 407, 427, 517 Niebuhr, K.-W., 562 Nielson, I., 261 Nilsson, M. P., 265 Nongbri, B., 263, 595 Notley, R. S., 223 Novenson, M. V., 11–12, 57, 211, 280, 376, 379–80, 382–84, 387, 389–90, 400–1, 405–6, 408, 411, 734 Nuffelen, P. van, 245 O’Brien, P. T., 193, 337, 369, 616, 694 O’Keefe, J., 540 O’Siadhail, M., 722 Obbink, D., 237 Oberman, H. A., 312 Ochs, C., 116 Oegema, G. S., 208, 217, 412 Ogden, S. M., 77 Öhler, M., 504, 597 Ohm, T., 701 Oikonomides, A. N., 257 Olsson, B., 215

822

Index of Names

Opler, M., 567 Owen, P. L., 427 Paavola, S., 120, 126–27, 133 Padberg, L. E. von, 703 Paget, J. C., 378 Panitz-Cohen, N., 221 Pannenberg, W., 439, 641 Parker, T. H. L., 642 Parsons, M. C., 23, 497 Parsons, T., 567 Paschke, B., 183 Patte, D., 188 Payne, D., 336 Peacocke, A. R., 102 Pedersen, J., 541 Peirce, C. S., 8, 117–22, 125–28, 130– 32, 134, 136–37, 147, 149 Pelikan, J., 627, 640 Penna, R., 697 Pennington, J., 198 Perlman, D., 571 Perrin, N[icholas], 3, 21 Perrin, N[orman], 505 Petersen, N. R., 190–91, 194, 196, 732 Pfitzner, V. C., 288 Phillips, J., 272 Philonenko, M., 408 Pickavé, M., 703 Pilhofer, P., 77, 93, 142, 161 Piper, J., 593 Pitre, B., 166, 195 Pitts, A. W., 17, 40, 145 Plehwe, D., 604 Plümacher, E., 160 Plummer, A., 695 Plutynski, A., 118, 121, 125–28, 130– 32 Pokorný, P., 216, 229 Polanyi, M., 111, 222 Polkinghorne, J. C., 103–4, 111–12 Pomykala, K. E., 93 Ponterotto, J. G., 271 Popkes, E. E., 227 Porter, J. R., 398 Porter, S. E., 40, 145, 160–61, 166, 170, 301, 398 Portier-Young, A., 495, 513, 746 Potter, R. B., 272

Powell, M. A., 605 Price, S. R. F., 689 Ptassek, P., 686 Rabens, V., 14, 49, 51–52, 325, 452, 556, 561–63, 565–66, 569–72, 578, 713, 717, 725–26, 729, 740, 761–62, 766 Radice, R., 250 Radl, W., 431 Rahner, K., 439 Räisänen, H., 324, 385, 394 Raja, R., 261 Ramsay, M., 673 Ratzinger, J., 538 Reed, J. L., 688 Reemts, C., 361 Rehfeld, E., 193 Reid, G., 535 Reiffen, H., 648 Reimarus, H. S., 493 Reinbold, W., 691 Reitzenstein, R., 264, 409–10 Rhea, B., 216, 229 Richard, E., 380 Richardson, N., 430, 464, 467 Richardson, P., 208 Ridderbos, H., 181, 556 Robertson, A., 695 Robertson, R. G., 214 Robinson, H. W., 398 Roche, W., 128, 130 Rogers, E., 624 Rogerson, J. W., 398 Romero, Ó., 765 Rosner, B. S., 341 Rowe, C. J., 545 Rowe, C. K., 666–69 Rowley, H. H., 333 Runesson, A., 215 Runia, D. T., 240, 250 Rüpke, J., 261 Rütti, L., 701 Ryle, G., 271 Sachs, J. R., 439 Sacks, O., 533 Sæbø, M., 333, 403

Index of Names Sanders, E. P., 34, 39, 44, 51, 59, 77– 78, 195, 227, 244, 257, 311, 313, 316, 319, 321–22, 324–25, 348–50, 354, 356, 364–65, 395–96, 515, 558–59, 596, 610, 615–16, 714, 727–28, 733, 740, 751 Sanders, J. A., 166 Sartre, J.-P., 219 Scarpat, G., 245 Schäfer, P., 361 Schart, A., 90 Schechter, S., 724 Schiffman, L. H., 221, 513 Schlatter, A., 29, 33, 50, 365 Schleifer, R., 188 Schlier, H., 691 Schliesser, B., 6, 23, 49–50, 53–54, 56, 136, 717 Schmeller, T., 545, 547 Schmemann, A., 661–62, 680–81, 761 Schmidt, J. M., 504, 512 Schnabel, E. J., 17, 34, 574, 684, 686, 689, 691, 695, 701–2, 714, 716, 729, 757–59 Schneemelcher, W., 507 Schnelle, U., 7, 22, 31–37, 51–52, 57– 64, 79, 83, 161, 181, 236, 379, 565 Schnutenhaus, F., 426 Schofield, M., 242 Schopenhauer, A., 540–41, 543–44 Schowalter, D. N., 265, 269 Schrage, W., 542, 557, 696 Schreiber, S., 146, 161, 475 Schreiner, T. R., 7, 21–22, 31, 33–36, 46–51, 53, 385, 691, 711 Schrenk, G., 299 Schröter, J., 160, 429, 436 Schubert, P., 272 Schürer, E., 410–11 Schweitzer, A., 42, 66, 312, 396–97, 399–401, 405, 409–12, 491, 527, 565, 727, 746 Schwöbel, C., 90 Scott, J. M., 193, 739 Searle-Chatterjee, M., 261 Sedley, D. M., 238–41 Seebass, H., 336 Segal, A. F., 209, 212, 214, 216, 424, 436, 759

823

Segovia, C. A., 217 Seifrid, M. A., 48, 193, 369, 616, 694 Seitz, C. R., 336 Sellars, R. W., 105 Semler, J. S., 14, 501 Shakespeare, W., 76 Shanks, H., 208 Shaver, P. R., 571 Shils, E., 567 Sim, D. C., 91–92, 157, 408 Sirks, G. J., 623 Smith, C., 222 Smith, D., 439 Smith, D. E., 596 Smith, J. E., 728 Smith, J. K. A., 568, 713 Smith, J. P., 337 Smith, J. Z., 258, 260, 273 Smith, L. P., 28 Smith, M. F., 237 Smith, W. C., 263 Soards, M. L., 503 Sober, E., 119, 121, 128–30 Söding, T., 161, 697 Sohn, S.-T., 334, 337 Sölle, D., 27 Soulen, R. N., 189 Spalding, K. L., 542 Sparn, W., 77 Spengler, H.-D., 685 Spieckermann, H., 468 Stacey, D. W., 545, 547 Städele, A., 238 Standhartinger, A., 23, 27 Stanley, C. D., 166, 170–71, 176 Starling, D. I., 21, 711 Stavrianopoulou, E., 260 Stecher, L., 571 Steck, O. H., 193 Steely, J. E., 264 Stegemann, W., 56 Steinmetz, D., 641 Stemberger, G., 544 Stendahl, K., 3, 43, 63, 78, 183, 209, 545, 559, 589, 594, 693, 733, 759 Stenger, J., 545 Sterling, G. E., 9, 38, 242, 245, 247, 754, 756 Stettler, H., 372

824

Index of Names

Still, T. D., 262 Stinespring, W. F., 411 Stone, M., 216 Stowers, S. K., 331, 396, 400, 561, 614 Strachan, L. R. M., 29, 277 Strauss, D. F., 493 Strawbridge, J. R., 432 Strecker, C., 43 Streib, H., 534 Stuckenbruck, L. T., 509 Stuhlmacher, P., 11, 39, 44, 50, 138, 183, 192–93, 365–66, 703, 711, 714, 716, 728–30, 734–36, 738–39, 741, 757, 763 Stummer, F., 398 Sturgeon, M. C., 269 Sweet, J. P. M., 59 Swete, H. B., 440 Swinburne, R., 128–29 Talbott, W., 129 Taliaferro, C., 539, 549, 551 Talmon, S., 225 Tatum, G., 10, 51, 61, 396, 616, 721, 726–30 Taubes, J., 611 Taussig, H., 597 Theissen, G., 356, 596, 673, 761 Thesleff, H., 238 Thielman, F., 342 Thiselton, A. C., 440, 536, 543, 695 Thom, J. C., 238, 240, 245 Thomas, J. N., 657 Thompson, M. M., 565 Thomson, G. T., 651, 656 Thrall, M. E., 537, 547 Thüsing, W., 465, 470 Tigchelaar, E. J. C., 459 Tillich, P., 641–42 Tilling, C., 5, 22, 38, 53, 57, 418–19, 436, 559, 593, 606 Titley, G., 605 Toit, D. S. du, 30, 58, 73 Tolstaja, K., 29 Torrance, A. J., 74 Torrance, D. W., 546 Torrance, T. F., 111, 546, 631, 649, 651 Tóth, F., 494 Tov, E., 513, 516

Tucker, A., 115–16 Turner, M. M. B., 440 Twelftree, G. H., 161 Udoh, F. E., 396, 616 Ustinova, Y., 261 VanderKam, J. C., 427, 513 Vangelisti, A. L., 571 VanGemeren, W., 192 Veit, W. F., 685 Velie, A., 188 Vermes, G., 410 Vielhauer, P., 507 Volf, M., 632 Vollenweider, S., 695 Volp, U., 556, 574 Volz, P., 398 Vorholt, R., 703 Voss, F., 687 Voysey, S., 550 Vriezen, T. C., 333 Wagner, J. R., 171, 175, 311 Wagner, R., 544 Waite, T., 550 Waldstein, M., 538 Walker, D. D., 380 Walpen, B. J. A., 604 Walsh, B. J., 663, 676 Walter, N., 480 Ware, K., 539, 662 Watson, F. B., 31, 38, 73, 93, 171, 175– 77, 182, 199, 356, 615 Watt, J. G. van der, 498, 556 Watts, P., 116 Wax, M. L., 263 Weaver, J. D., 3 Webb, R. L., 6, 417, 426–28 Webster, J. B., 647–48 Wedderburn, A. J. M., 382–83, 395, 398–99, 402, 404 Weima, J. A. D., 291 Weinreich, O., 264 Weisberg, J., 129–30 Weiß, A., 475 Weiß, J., 77 Weiss, P., 117 Weiss, Z., 211

Index of Names Weissenrieder, A., 666 Welker, M., 422 Wellhausen, J., 503 Wendt, F., 666 Wenger, S., 468 Wesley, J., 635–36, 641 Westerholm, S., 40, 160 Westfall, C. L., 301 Westphal, M., 551 White, B. L., 220 White, J. L., 688 White, J. R., 8, 193, 195, 198–99, 291– 92, 395, 712, 715, 731–33, 735–36, 749 Whiteley, D. E. H., 230 Whitmarsh, T., 272 Wick, P., 597 Wiesner, T., 657 Wilcox, M., 404–5 Wilk, F., 91, 175, 408 Williams, C., 604 Williams, D. D., 569 Williams, P. J., 687 Williams, S. K., 331 Willitts, J., 387, 405 Wilson, B. C., 258 Wilson, R. McL., 507 Wilson, S. G., 208, 261–62, 377 Windisch, H., 367 Winkler, M., 686 Winter, B. W., 684 Wire, A. C., 464–66 Wischmeyer, O., 7, 23, 30, 37, 73, 78– 79, 90–93, 116, 140, 157, 161, 408, 590, 711, 715, 721 Wischmeyer, W., 88, 90 Wolff, C., 695

825

Wolter, M., 7, 22, 24, 29, 31–37, 51, 53–59, 63, 79, 161, 474, 479, 561 Wrede, W., 42, 77, 411 Wright, C. J. H., 334, 337 Wright, N. T. (includes only pages where works other than PFG are referenced), 3–5, 18, 21, 24–26, 28, 32–33, 39, 42, 48–49, 52, 58, 63–64, 66, 74, 80, 94–97, 102–3, 105–8, 116, 118, 120, 122, 126, 131–36, 138–40, 144, 166, 181, 183–84, 186–90, 192–93, 196, 207–8, 242, 246–47, 303, 329, 331, 347–48, 350, 359–60, 363–67, 370, 375, 378, 381, 383, 389–90, 394, 397–99, 404, 407, 418, 422, 476–77, 485, 489–92, 495, 499, 503, 505, 507–8, 510–11, 513, 518, 535, 538–40, 542–49, 551, 565, 574, 584, 593, 610, 613, 656, 663– 64, 672, 676, 679, 711–17, 719, 722, 728, 731, 733, 735, 737, 739, 741, 745–46, 751, 753, 757, 759–60, 762–63 Wyon, O., 642 Young, S. L., 615 Young, W., 539 Zager, W., 504 Zahn, T., 371, 691–92, 739 Zalta, E. N., 119, 129 Zeller, D., 57 Zetterholm, M., 76, 375, 378, 387 Ziebritzki, H., 17 Ziegenaus, O., 265 Zimmermann, C., 468 Zimmermann, R., 556, 565, 574 Žižek, S., 604–5



Index of Subjects N.B. The list of subjects is selective. In many cases, the reader will be aided best by the other indices, which are exhaustive. abduction (see also “deduction” and “induction”) 8, 115–49, 719–20, 737, 753 Abraham, Abrahamic covenant 10–13, 92, 95–96, 168, 174–75, 185–87, 191–93, 197, 199, 201, 218, 220, 229, 302–3, 307, 312–18, 322n19, 323, 326, 348–49, 360–73, 381–85, 390, 394, 396n6, 401–6, 463, 467, 473–78, 482–83, 486, 523–24, 567, 587, 592, 634, 637–38, 699, 730, 731–39, 745n73, 757n101 Acts (as historical source) 8, 47, 91, 91n43, 144–45, 151–62, 540n35, 540n36, 574n46, 683, 688, 691, 701, 716 Adam 30n44, 51, 65, 92, 94, 187, 192, 197, 220, 225, 314n7, 330–32, 360, 360n4, 361, 370–71, 373, 383, 394, 402, 407, 486, 508–9, 538, 561, 565, 587, 592, 634, 638, 680, 732, 736– 37 allusions (see “echoes, allusions” and “NT use of the OT”) American scholarship (see “North American scholarship”) Anglicanism 429, 598 Anglophone scholarship (see also “British scholarship” and “North American scholarship”) 5, 7, 24, 32, 38, 54, 103, 605 angels 62n222, 426n27, 427, 427n29, 491, 495, 500–1, 508, 514, 521, 677–78, anti-Semitism (see also “Nazis/ Holocaust”) 76n10, 208–9, 590, 609, 612

anti-imperialism (see “empire, imperialism”) apocalyptic, apocalyptic interpretation 4, 13–14, 32, 37–38, 61, 80, 85, 97, 138, 154, 199, 217–21, 230n54, 259–60, 277–307, 311n2, 368, 409n55, 410, 435n55, 485, 489–527, 549n91, 558, 576, 591, 612, 618, 653n26, 676–81, 703, 712, 730, 743–54, 761 atonement 353, 363–64, 367, 550, 624, 673 authenticity (of Pauline material) 31– 32, 46, 136–139, 141n115, 144, 153–55, 341n23, 398n11, 520, 526n114, 586 baptism (see also “sacraments”) 60, 316, 321n17, 370, 435, 441, 451, 453, 562, 564, 566, 592, 596, 599, 641, 661–81, 759 British scholarship (see also “Anglophone scholarship”) 76, 103, 492, 589, 605 Caesar (see “empire, imperialism”) church fathers 625, 627, 647n4, 726 christology 4, 11–12, 16, 38, 42, 45–46, 45n12952, 46n131, 46n133, 52n169, 56–57, 64–65, 88, 151, 171, 212, 224, 228, 247, 279, 281, 287, 315, 326, 330, 354, 361–64, 368, 376, 388–90, 393–412, 417–36, 448–49, 456, 465, 479, 481, 551, 559n9, 591–92, 626–28, 634–35, 641, 645, 647, 656–57, 668, 724–25, 734, 752, 756

828

Index of Subjects

χριστός (as honorific or title) (see “messiah, messiahship”) circumcision 42, 220–21, 313–19, 322n19, 323, 326, 340, 348–50, 366, 371, 400, 476, 523, 575, 611, 668 conversion 17, 41, 59, 86, 110, 209, 216n27, 284, 351, 356, 397, 451, 477, 483, 540n35, 560, 573, 640, 687, 691–95, 733, 759 covenant, covenantal interpretation (see also “salvation history, salvationhistorical interpretation” and “Abraham, Abrahamic covenant”) 4–6, 9–11, 13, 16, 37, 41, 48–49, 49n149, 52, 61, 85, 90, 167–70, 177, 185–86, 197, 226–28, 311–26, 329– 36, 348–49, 360–65, 368–69, 373, 383–85, 446–47, 460, 470, 473n44, 474, 476, 482–83, 485–86, 490, 492–93, 496–98, 500, 502, 510, 512, 515, 518, 520, 522–27, 555, 591, 594, 610, 624, 634–39, 641, 676–77, 727–40, 745–46, 749n80, 752, 766 covenantal nomism 227n50, 315, 349, 610, 616 covenant faithfulness (see also “δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ”) 48, 85, 368, 474, 555, 557–58, 569, 576–77, 635, 637–38, 736–37, 767 creation (see also “new creation”) 16, 44, 60, 95, 185, 187, 189, 192–93, 197–99, 218, 245–50, 298, 302, 352, 360n4, 367–68, 394, 419n10, 432, 435, 445, 465, 492, 494–95, 493, 514, 519–22, 525, 539, 543–44, 556, 617n33, 624–25, 627, 629, 632, 642, 661–62, 665–66, 679–80, 749n79, 750, 761 critical realism 7, 101–13, 117, 351, 541n40, 548n90, 718–19 crucifixion 52, 63, 66, 81, 85, 87, 144, 191n33, 212, 220, 230, 281n16, 285–86, 288, 297, 340, 351, 373, 393, 397, 402, 421, 434–35, 445, 548–49, 558–59, 564, 594, 684–88, 694, 736, 740, 750, 764, 766 Cynic philosophy 238, 240, 613

Damascus road (see also “conversion”) 17, 39, 59, 86, 281n16, 283–85, 318, 359, 366, 540n35, 569, 691, 693–94, 695n27, 759 David, Davidic king/covenant 174, 191, 211, 214n18, 229, 298, 304, 375–76, 381–83, 384n35, 386, 389, 399, 404–5, 405n36, 408, 410n60, 426, 469, 697 death (see “eschatology,” “resurrection,”) deduction (see also “abduction” and “induction”) 118–20, 125–26, 281, 525, 687, 719–20, 727, 737, 753 demons 297, 315, 514, 670 δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ 176, 367–68, 472–75, 486, 615, 665 ecclesiology 15, 34, 57, 58n196, 151, 353, 583–600, 624–25, 661–81, 731 echoes, allusions (see also “NT use of the OT”) 8, 91, 134, 141, 147, 165n1, 168, 173n18, 178, 196, 199n57, 287, 293–94, 566n27, 721, 733, 742n62, economics 15, 77, 82n24, 263n26, 596, 604–5, 618n24, 703, 757–59 ἐκκλησία (see “ecclesiology”) election 9–11, 13, 52–53, 88, 171, 178, 199–200, 225–26, 228, 329–44, 365, 372, 376, 388, 393–401, 441, 444– 47, 447n21, 476–77, 479, 486, 517, 520, 522, 526, 587–88, 590–92, 607, 610, 624, 634–36, 646–47, 714, 724, 726, 735–39, 760 emotion 57, 77, 97, 479, 489, 527, 566, 571–72, 766 empire, imperialism 4, 7, 9–10, 38, 60, 63–64, 76, 83–84, 145–47, 148n140, 196n49, 208, 255–56, 255n3, 266– 68, 271–72, 277–307, 351, 574, 607, 616–19, 689, 723, 747, 750, 763–64 Epicurean philosophy 237, 240–41, 607, 702, 755 eschatology (see also “judgment,” “parousia,” and “resurrection”) 9– 10, 12–14, 26–27, 35n69, 40, 60, 63, 66, 88, 171, 210–11, 214, 217–21, 224–25, 228, 231, 249, 266, 268,

Index of Subjects (eschatology cont.) 278, 283–86, 289–91, 299–300, 304, 306, 311n2, 312n3, 314n7, 315–16, 318–19, 325–26, 355, 365, 373, 397, 399– 400, 417–36, 443–44, 449, 456–58, 456n34, 472, 479–80, 483, 485–86, 489–527, 533–51, 558n7, 573, 603, 607, 624–26, 646–47, 662, 675–81, 694, 697, 702, 714, 724, 727, 733, 750, 752, 760–61 essentializing, essentialist readings 605–9, 613, 714–15, 718, 753, 764 ethics 9, 14–15, 29n36, 57, 97, 159–60, 237n9, 239, 239n25, 239n28, 248, 277, 304, 352–53, 452, 555–78, 589–90, 690, 702, 762 ethnicity 15, 30, 54, 78, 87, 200, 210, 214, 229, 259, 312n4, 332, 385, 387, 562, 575, 583–600, 615, 617, 690– 92, 697 evangelical scholarship 36, 46, 48, 590, 593, 598, 614–15, 698, evangelism (see also mission) 17, 216n27, 683–704 exile, return from exile 8, 11, 44–45, 45n125, 48n145, 65, 90, 121–22, 124n36, 166, 170, 178–79, 185–86, 191, 193–96, 201–2, 317, 350, 355– 56, 360, 417n4, 458, 497, 624, 666, 732, 738–41 existentialism, existentialist interpretation 24–25, 27, 30, 56, 58, 74, 76n10, 78–79, 89, 98, 368, 465, 492–93, 497, 505, 511, 549n91, 550, 745, 747 exodus, new exodus (event) 90, 138n108, 165, 168, 191, 196, 323, 355, 364n10, 367, 443–47, 454–57, 461, 624, 626, 636, 671, 672n16, 673, 721, 726, 732–33, 743, 754, 759–60 faith, faithfulness (see “πίστις” and “πίστις χριστοῦ”) flood 199, 361n4, 494 food laws 55, 143, 331n5, 366 575, 611 forgiveness 213, 221, 303, 316, 323, 342, 360, 364, 367, 450, 477, 484,

829

562n16, 686, 694, 699, 719, 730–31, 764–65 Fresh Perspective on Paul (see also “New Perspective on Paul”) 23, 41, 65, 303n42, 716 fruit of the Spirit 305, 563–64 German scholarship 5, 7, 23–32, 36–37, 53–64, 73–98, 116n8, 137n103, 183n10, 183n11, 597n22, 605, 612– 13, 703n49, 717, 746n76, 753 gnosticism 25n21, 287, 361, 492–93, 504n45, 505n49, 510n77, 748 grace 28, 41, 182, 191n33, 213, 221, 320n16, 322–24, 325n26, 334, 337– 39, 342–44, 348–49, 356, 362, 364, 369–70, 439–40, 467, 473, 475, 484, 535, 539n28, 575, 591, 610, 616, 632–33, 636, 640–41, 647, 652, 654, 693, 701 Hagar (see “Sarah and Hagar”) Heilsgeschichte (see “salvation history, salvation-historical interpretation”) hermeneutics 7, 15, 25, 27, 31–32, 37– 39, 44–45, 58–61, 73–98, 101n3, 108–12, 153–55, 158, 171, 181n3, 187, 202, 228, 256, 263–271, 272n68, 465, 492–93, 497, 499–500, 502, 504, 527, 598, 652, 721–22 historical Jesus 3, 26–27, 211, 220, 229, 505, 505n48, 505n52, 513n94, 527n115, 605, 615, 676 historical method, historiography (see also “abduction,” “deduction,” “induction”, and “critical realism”) 8, 115–49, 151–62 History of Religion (school) (see “Religionsgeschichte”) holiness 298, 316–17, 326, 336, 341, 459–60, 584, 671, 697 Holocaust (see “Nazis/Holocaust”) Holy Spirit (see “pneumatology”) idolatry 198, 279, 283, 286, 290, 297, 301, 305, 315, 322, 344, 400, 476– 77, 485, 558, 560, 562n16, 576, 607–8, 654, 667, 680, 724 imperial cult (see “empire, imperialism) imperialism (see “empire, imperialism”)

830

Index of Subjects

incarnation 428–29, 652, 679n31, 743 “in Christ” language (see “incorporation, incorporative messiahship” and “participationism, participation”) incorporation, incorporative messiahship, (see also “participationism, participation”) 12, 50, 175, 200, 218, 333, 378n14, 381–83, 388, 393–412, 453, 471, 548, 587–88, 632, 634, 637–38, 641, 727n33, 734–35 induction (see also “abduction” and “deduction”) 47, 118–21, 125–26, 132n82, 525, 719, 720–21 inference to the best explanation (see “abduction”) intertextuality (see “echoes, allusions” and “NT use of the OT”) Isaac 175, 191–92, 403n28, 404n31, 481, 732 Jacob 191–92, 314, 318, 330, 339 judgment 10, 14, 51, 172, 174, 218, 224, 224n46, 282, 298, 303, 303n43, 306, 321, 323–24, 326, 337–38, 364, 366, 368–70, 410n60, 417–18, 423, 426–28, 430, 432–33, 459, 472, 495, 500, 514, 518–19, 521, 524–25, 533, 536–37, (judgment cont.) 538n24, 555, 654–55, 654n34, 670, 672, 699 justification 4–5, 10–11, 14, 28–30, 34, 37, 39, 41–42, 42n115, 47–50, 55, 57–60, 62, 76n10, 79, 112, 137n105, 142, 183n10, 193, 201, 212, 277, 298, 301–7, 311n2, 311n3, 312, 319–26, 331, 349–54, 359–73, 439– 40, 446, 450–53, 459n37, 466–67, 473–80, 484, 505n47, 533–37, 557, 559n9, 562, 564, 591, 593, 614–16, 624, 636–43, 654–55, 665, 671–72, 697–98, 726–30, 738, 748, 762–63 kingdom of God 16, 66, 76, 85, 287, 302–4, 418, 499, 506, 518, 521, 536, 642, 763 κοινωνία (see also “unity”) 314, 315n9, 317–19, 321n17, 325–26, 571, 662, 665–75, 691–92 kosher (see “food laws”)

Kyrios 292, 293, 421, 422, 432, 433, 434, 617, 688, 690 law (see “works of the law”) legalism 10, 348, 349, 507, 610 Lord’s Supper, Eucharist (see also “sacraments”) 143, 314, 317n12, 352, 367, 435, 596–97, 599, 661–81, 760–61 Lord’s Prayer 293, 758, 765 (see also “prayer”) Lutheran theology 25n20, 30, 42, 57, 64, 76, 78–79, 88, 97, 221, 329, 365n15, 502, 504n46, 511, 511n85, 527, 539n28, 610, 615–16, 636, 640–41, 721 messiah, messiahship (see also “incorporation, incorporative messiahship”) 11, 92, 92n47, 93, 211, 263n23, 302, 352, 362, 375–90, 393–412, 588, 734 meta-narrative (see “narrative”) mission, missionary work (Pauline and modern; for Israel’s mission see “Israel”) 16–17, 34, 47, 56, 59, 64n233, 65, 151, 153, 161, 271–72, 291, 330, 336, 351, 357, 369, 411, 524, 538n27, 548n89, 574n43, 584, 588, 590, 683–704, 732, 757–59 modernism, modernity 311–12, 321, 325, 625, 631, 695, 721, 765 monotheism 9, 11, 35, 45–46, 57, 66, 88, 124, 213–15, 224–25, 228, 235, 245n53, 249, 353–54, 362, 388–89, 420, 440–42, 447–49, 449n22, 454– 56, 463n1, 481, 485–86, 556, 558, 558n7, 607, 617, 626–31, 646–47, 665–75, 714, 724, 756, 760, 764 Moses, Mosaic covenant/law 169–70, 193–94, 199–200, 213–14, 237, 247, 312–18, 314n7, 329n1, 332, 343, 446, 452, 454–55, 455n30, 482, 515, 540, 592, 613n21, 634–36, 639, 677, 732 music 61, 76, 142, 166–67, 194, 255, 544n58, 700, 761 narrative (see also “salvation history, salvation-historical interpretation”) 7–8, 10–11, 13, 16, 181–202

Index of Subjects Nazis/Holocaust (see also “antiSemitism”) 26n22, 27n29, 77, 216– 17n27, 502, 504n46, 506, 508n62, 609, 612–13 new covenant 10, 314–18, 325–26, 563n18, 636–37 new creation (see also “creation”) 280, 321, 494, 519, 521–22, 534, 544n58, 546, 565–66, 573, 623, 635, 679, 702–3, 757, 760 New Perspective on Paul 11, 30, 32, 39–43, 48, 54–57, 74, 78–79, 138– 39, 145, 186n18, 303n42, 347–57, 365, 511n85, 588, 603, 609–16, 714, 714n9, 716 North American scholarship (see also “Anglophone scholarship) 103, 505n52, 589, 605–6, 612–13, 721 NT use of the OT (see also “echoes, allusions”) 8, 90, 141, 165–79, 371, 731 Old Perspective on Paul 64–65, 353, 527, 610, 614–15, 619 Orthodox (churches, theology) 539n28, 661n1, 681, 760, 760n108 parousia (see also “second coming”) 12, 37, 42n113, 60, 198–99, 278, 289, 291–92, 295–300, 324n20, 369, 386, 397n9, 430–34, 483, 493, 495, 498–99, 501, 506, 515n95, 520, 522–24, 538n27, 547, 558, 689–90, 745, 747, 750, 751n87, 752–53, 762 participation (see also “incorporation, incorporative messiahship”) 10–12, 14, 36, 58, 60–62, 296, 311, 312n3, 315–16, 320–21, 324n20, 324n23, 325–26, 344, 354, 363–64, 367, 370–72, 393–412, 468, 538, 548–50, 558n8, 571, 573, 577, 587–88, 594, 632, 637, 640–41, 642n37, 674, 726–31, 760 patriarchs (see also “Abraham,” “Isaac,” and “Jacob”) 191–92, 218, 298, 348, 426n27, 473n44, 474, 476, 482–84 patristics (see “church fathers”) Pauline theology 5, 7, 21–66, 83, 86, 88, 94, 136, 155, 157, 181–82, 280,

831

390, 395, 439–40, 447, 453, 456n35, 507, 524, 664n4, 665, 713 persecution 338, 360, 372, 517, 560, 570, 694 Pharisees, Pharisaism 40–41, 65, 86, 90–92, 95, 167, 185–86, 194, 209, 212–20, 223n42, 226–28, 283–85, 340, 350, 359, 366, 400, 452, 485, 497, 501, 520, 522, 526, 544, 544n62, 558, 593–94, 628, 717, 740 philosophy (see “Cynic philosophy,” “Epicurean philosophy,” “Platonic philosophy,” and “Stoic philosophy,” “historical method, historiography,” “existentialism,” and “critical-realism”) πίστις (see also “justification”) 55–57, 65, 177, 277, 315–16, 324–25, 332, 363, 367, 481n77, 568, 638, 685–86, 727 πίστις χριστοῦ 4, 48n147, 55–56, 65, 201, 316, 321, 325–26, 331, 354, 362–63, 367, 383–85, 594, 727 Platonic philosophy 9, 87n33, 97, 110n60, 235, 237–47, 251, 540, 542n47, 543–44, 546, 546n69, 548, 549n92, 607, 700n39, 702–3, 754– 56 plight and solution 14, 34, 51–53, 354, 394, 558–62, 566n27, 576, 717, 738, 740 pneumatology 12, 13, 16, 151, 315, 326, 396n6, 423–24, 439–61, 563n18, 570, 623–43, 664n4, 724–26 poetry 219, 721–22 politics, political readings (see also “apocalyptic, apocalyptic interpretation”) 5, 9, 56, 63–64, 66, 74, 83, 106, 138, 142, 147n136, 198, 211, 217, 256, 263n26, 271–72, 277–307, 351, 355–56, 386–87, 493–96, 499, 501, 508, 516–18, 574, 586–90, 595–96, 608, 670, 673, 675, 678–79, 704, 714, 716, 722, 745–50, 753, 757, 759, 763–64, 766 postcolonialism 271–72, 616, 701n41, 722

832

Index of Subjects

postmodernism, postmodernity 15–16, 37, 45, 75, 106n32, 182, 183n9, 197, 603–19, 714, 764–66 prayer 85–86, 89, 213, 256, 372, 388, 419n11, 423, 448, 460, 595, 597, 638, 661–65, 680–81, 691, 693, 741 preaching 17, 25n20, 35, 37, 63, 91n43, 96, 159n14, 170, 207, 277, 288–89, 296n36, 299, 301, 305–7, 337n16, 452, 482, 557, 599, 683–95, 701, 726 priest(s), priesthood Protestantism (see also “Reformation”) 28, 32, 38, 48–49, 95, 155, 181, 213n3, 322, 539, 556, 599, 615, 624, 636, 640–41, 652, 667–68, 672, 676, 680, 718, 729–30, 760 psychology, psychologizing 25, 27, 29, 559, 567, 569, 571, 672, 674, 717 rabbis, rabbinics 11, 167, 175, 192n38, 227, 361–62, 361n5, 365, 373, 509, 735–37, 741 Reformation 17, 28, 258, 312n3, 359, 365, 624, 641, 665, 671, 702 Reformed theology 192, 197, 502, 524n11, 525n113, 526n114, 539n28, 593, 598–99, 615, 638, 641, 698, 718, 735 religion (general) 595–98, 645, 647, 652–57, 693, 722, 724, 753, 764, 766 religion (Greco-Roman) 9, 143, 236, 255–73, 351, 356, 586, 595–98, 667, 692, 722–23, 759 Religionsgeschichte 29, 31, 36, 74, 77, 86, 351, 377, 395n5, 409 repentance 316, 460, 560n10, 693–94, 764 resurrection 3, 10, 13, 60, 110n60, 220, 292, 296, 306, 324n20, 363, 368, 370, 382–83, 389, 396n6, 397, 397n9, 400–1, 405n36, 409, 421–23, 430, 441, 449, 452–53, 469, 479, 493, 495, 499–500, 505–6, 514, 520–25, 533–51, 559, 569, (resurrection cont.) 573, 634, 637– 38, 642n37, 674, 685–86, 697, 719, 750–51

righteousness of God (see “δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ”) Roman Catholicism 38, 95, 258, 311n1, 325n26, 539n28, 598, 647, 666, 672, 680, 718 Roman Empire (see “empire, imperialism”) sabbath 42, 55, 320n16, 331n5, 353, 366, 575 sacraments 16, 17, 584, 598, 625, 632, 633, 661–81, 691, 729, 759–62 sacrifice 15, 168, 256, 260, 264n31, 267, 268n49, 269–70, 288, 314, 315n9, 316–17, 317n12, 342, 362– 64, 366, 369, 373, 459–60, 549, 558n7, 560n10, 595–98, 665–75, 680, 683, 690, 728, 741 salvation history, salvation-historical interpretation 14, 25, 37, 47, 183, 183n10, 220–21, 226, 385n37, 387n45, 494, 496, 502, 511, 520–24, 558, 591, 618, 676, 739, 745, 748, 752 sanctification 47, 321n17, 325–26, 338, 343, 372, 562–66, 624, 640, 655, 694 Sarah and Hagar 313–14, 510 satan (see also “demons”) 280–93, 303– 6, 368, 521–22, 562, 694, 730 second coming (see also “parousia”) Second Temple Judaism (as context) Shema 13, 168, 213, 225, 246n64, 362, 372, 441, 447, 448, 452, 453, 475, 476, 632, 636, 642, 668n10, 675n25, 756 Shekina 12, 13, 317, 441, 443–46, 449, 455–58, 461 sin (see “wrath,” “judgment,” “forgiveness,” “justification,”) slavery 82n24, 168, 334, 444, 558, 561– 62, 566, 572, 618n34, 624, 646, 702–3 sociology solution and plight (see “plight and solution”) Sonderweg 483, 484n78

Index of Subjects son of man 12, 220, 224, 363, 406–8, 409n55, 427–28, 491, 507, 518, 742, 751n87, 765 soul 14, 110n60, 242–43, 539–551 soteriology 15, 38, 53–58, 58n196, 60, 88, 186, 248, 279, 281, 313–14, 321, 354, 369, 381n24, 523, 577, 593– 594, 624, 637–38, 665, 694, 731, 738 spirit (see “pneumatology”) spiritual gifts 161, 460, 576, 632–34 Stoic philosophy 4, 9, 38, 97, 159, 235– 46, 249–50, 351, 396n6, 519, 542n47, 607, 692, 735, 755 suffering 34, 47, 53, 55, 124, 168, 172, 221, 225, 284, 290, 300, 332–33, 339–41, 352, 372, 473, 478, 506, 523, 628–29, 638, 672n16, 677, 765 supersessionism 9, 15, 228–29, 332, 356, 588, 594, 610, 612 tabernacle 229, 343, 446, 547, 624, 627, 760 temple (Jerusalem), temple theology 13, 16, 185, 191, 214–15, 218–19, 227– 29, 289, 317, 342–43, 360, 363–64, 366–67, 372, 376, 388, 410n60, 418, 427, 441–45, 447, 449, 454, 457–61, 471,512n86, 515, 519, 574, 587, 624–29, 632–35, 638, 642, 650, 661, 666–71, 677, 683, 713, 741–42, 760 theology (Paul’s invention of) 5, 6n18, 66, 83, 184, 393, 715, theology (systematic, dogmatic) 16, 85, 222, 527, 616, 623–43, 645–58, 724–25, 743, 753 tongues 451, 460, 633 torah (see “works of the law”) transformation 13, 15, 25, 28–29, 37, 47–51, 54, 56, 58, 60–61, 311n2, 315, 319, 321, 323–25, 325n26, 326, 423, 441, 446, 449–52, 495, 499– 500, 534–35, 544, 547n81, 549, 563, 564n21, 566–577, 591, 637–41, 665, 680, 726–31, 736, 751, 759–762, 766 trial of Paul 290, 295

833

trinity, trinitarianism 424, 449n22, 626, 629–31, 649, 651, 664n4, 669, 697n34, 725, 760 unity 5, 89, 301–5, 307, 312, 318–19, 320n16, 324, 331, 343, 372, 460, 574, 584–85, 669–71, 674n23, 680– 81, 730 wisdom 9, 21, 64–65, 170, 196, 235–36, 244, 247, 250–51, 280, 297, 301, 338, (wisdom cont.) 342–43, 354, 484, 506–7, 513n94, 514, 518, 522, 630, 633, 650, 677, 685–88, 716 wrath 10, 51, 292, 306, 322–23, 332, 366, 434, 472–73, 479n65, 480, 485, 495, 521, 539n28, 559n9, 689, 698 works of the law 14, 30, 43, 55, 212–13, 223, 349, 354, 356–57, 366, 370, 475, 714 World War (I and II) (see also “Nazis/Holocaust”) 27, 77, 609, 717 worldview 4–5, 12–13, 31, 35, 53, 55, 61–62, 64–66, 80–83, 86–91, 96–97, 107, 115, 122, 140–45, 149, 151, 154, 157, 165–67, 181, 184–86, 195, 218, 229, 231, 278, 280–81, 297, 352, 359, 393–95, 406–12, 490–93, 496–98, 501, 513–15, 518, 523, 525, 549n91, 555, 557, 565, 567n30, 573–77, 584–86, 595–96, 600, 611, 615, 646, 650, 661–66, 676–80, 690, 698–99, 713–14, 715n10, 734, 740, 749n80, 752 worship 6, 11, 45, 46n103, 81n23, 225– 26, 256, 267, 269, 288–89, 318– 19n11, 320n16, 337n19, 340, 344, 388, 406, 419, 423, 429, 435, 448, 470, 472, 477, 485, 576, 627, 650, 653, 661, 664, 667, 671, 674–75, 677–78, 679n31, 680, 688–89, 691, 693, 741–42, 759 YHWH’s return to Zion 12, 171, 228, 388, 417–36, 442–44, 456, 458, 461, 481, 558n7, 741–43