Paul and the Faithfulness of God

NT Wright, Tom Wright, N.T. Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780281055548
• eBook ISBN: 9780281067565
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

A masterly exposition of Paul's thought by one of his leading contemporary interpreters. The summation of a lifetime's study, this landmark book offers an unparalleled wealth of detailed insights into Paul's life, times and enduring impact. Destined to become the point of reference in Pauline studies for the next decade, and beyond.Wright carefully explores the whole context of Pauls thought and activityJewish, Greek and Roman, cultural, philosophical, religious, and imperialand shows how the apostles worldview and theology enabled him to engage with the many-sided complexities of first-century life that his churches were facing. Wright also provides close and illuminating readings of the letters and other primary sources, along with critical insights into the major twists and turns of exegetical and theological debate in the vast secondary literature. The result is a rounded and profoundly compelling account of the man who became the worlds first, and greatest, Christian theologian'Tom Wright's long-awaited full-length study of St Paul will not in any way disappoint the high expectations that surround it. From the very first sentence, it holds the attention, arguing a strong, persuasive, coherent and fresh case, supported by immense scholarship and comprehensive theological intelligence. It is a worthy successor to his earlier magisterial studies of the themes of the Kingdom and the Resurrection: lively, passionate and deeply constructive, laying out very plainly the ways in which the faith of the New Testament is focused on God's purpose to re-create, through the fact of Jesus crucified and risen, our entire understanding of authority and social identity.' Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

PART I

Paul and His World

Chapter One

Return of the Runaway?

1. A World of Difference

(i) Pliny and Paul

Roughly seventy years after the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a Roman senator, mindful of his own importance and seniority, wrote to a friend about a third man, a social inferior who had got himself in trouble:

You told me you had been angry with a freedman of yours, and now he’s come to see me! He threw himself at my feet and clung on to me as though I were you. He wept a lot, he asked for a lot, though he kept quiet about a lot too. To sum it up, he made me believe that he was genuinely sorry. I think he is a changed character, because he really does feel that he did wrong.

Yes, I know you are angry; and I know, too, that you have a right to be angry. But mercy earns most praise when anger is fully justified. Once you loved this fellow, and I hope you will love him again; for the moment, it’s enough if you let yourself be placated. You can always be angry again if he deserves it, and you’ll have all the more reason if you’ve been placated now. He’s young, he’s in tears, and you have a kind heart – make all that count. Don’t torture him, and don’t torture yourself either; anger is always torture for a soft heart like yours.

I am afraid it will look as though I’m putting pressure on you, not simply making a request, if I join my prayers to his. But I’m going to do it anyway, and all the more fully and thoroughly because I’ve given him a sharp and severe talking-to, and I’ve warned him clearly that I won’t make such a request again. (This was because he needed a good fright, and I said it to him rather than to you, because it’s just possible that I shall make another request, and receive it too – always supposing it’s an appropriate thing for me to ask and for you to grant.)

Yours sincerely …

The writer was Pliny: Pliny the Younger, nephew of the great naturalist whose death (at the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79) he memorably described in another letter.1 This younger Pliny was a barrister, a senator, a public official who held a priesthood and other civil service appointments. He was elected to the Consulship for the autumn of AD 100; the office was, by then, nowhere near as important as it had been under the Republic, but it was still the highest civic honour available. After further work in the courts, the Senate and the civil service, he was sent by the emperor Trajan as his personal representative to Bithynia and Pontus, in today’s northern Turkey. There, it seems, he died; but not before writing a couple of puzzled letters back home to his master on what to do about those strange people called ‘Christians’. That was where we met him in an earlier volume.2

The present letter is remarkable in several ways. We know nothing more about the friend in question, one Sabinianus, except that he granted the request and earned himself a further letter from the great man, congratulating him on ‘accepting my authority – or, if you like, indulging my prayers’, and urging him to be ready for further acts of mercy even if there is nobody to make the case.3 But we know enough to see what’s going on. The freedman (in other words, a slave whom Sabinianus has freed but who is still clearly dependent on him) has got himself into trouble. Knowing Pliny to be a friend of his master, he has gone to him for help.

There then ensues a nice little comedy of manners, worthy almost of Jane Austen though without the dry humour. All three dancers retain their places in the implicit social hierarchy, with each making the moves appropriate to those places.

Pliny is at the top of the social pile, giving lordly instructions and emphasizing the fact by saying he’s only making a request. Sabinianus is in the middle, obviously in command of the freedman but presumably a little in awe of the great Pliny, and eager to maintain friendship with such a man.4 The freedman, who remains unnamed, is no longer a slave, but is nevertheless socially near the bottom of the pile, at the mercy of those above him. Pliny does what a man in his position might be expected to do, dispensing the philosophical and even psychological wisdom of the day: ‘Mercy looks even better when you’ve a right to be angry, but being angry is such torture for a gentle-hearted chap like you!’ He makes it clear that the freedman deserves anger, and that he himself has given him a good, menacing talking-to. The appeal is based on the man’s genuine repentance; but, despite the protestations that this appears genuine, Pliny’s subsequent warning indicates that he suspects it may not last. In saying one thing to the unfortunate freedman and another to Sabinianus he shows himself again the lofty master of the situation, playing the two others like a pair of (albeit very different) musical instruments.

Sabinianus, for his part, complies with Pliny’s command/request, which involves no social change. He is subservient to Pliny, but his forgiveness, conditional as it is upon the man’s present penitence and future good behaviour, leaves him even more obviously superior to the freedman than before. ‘He has not demeaned himself by pardoning an inferior (his freedman), because his action represents his fitting submission to a superior (Pliny).’5

The freedman himself, tearful and apparently penitent, and now further frightened by Pliny’s warnings, is, we may suppose, deeply grateful to them both. He is determined, at least until further notice or provocation, to know his place and to play the part of a well-behaved social inferior.

In terms of the customs of the time, the unnamed freedman was quite lucky. He was at least free, not a slave, even though the net result of that change may not have been very significant in real terms (he was presumably technically at liberty to leave Sabinianus and seek his fortune elsewhere, but many ex-slaves remained without the means to do such a thing).6 His master could have made life very unpleasant for him. He would not have faced the extreme danger of the runaway slave, but punishments and deprivations of many kinds might have awaited his projected return. All the more reason for him to go back with his tail between his legs and learn to lie low.

We move from Pliny’s world of carefully calibrated social distinctions into a very different universe. Roughly half way in time between the resurrection of Jesus and Pliny’s letter, we have another letter whose surface similarities mask a deep, disturbing dissimilarity. Here is its central core:

I have considerable boldness in the Messiah to command you to do the right thing, but I prefer to appeal on the basis of love, seeing as I am Paul, an elder and now also a prisoner of the Messiah, Jesus. I appeal to you about my child, whose father I have become in my imprisonment: Onesimus! Once he was useless to you, but now he is useful to you and to me. I’m sending him to you – sending the one who is my very heart. Actually, I would have liked to keep him here beside me, so that he could work for me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the royal announcement, but I didn’t want to do anything without your approval, so that your good deed wouldn’t be done, as it were, under compulsion, but willingly.

Perhaps this is why he was separated from you for a while, so that you could have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, a beloved brother – especially to me, but how much more to you, but in human terms and in the lord.

So: if you count me as your partner, receive him as you would me. If he has wronged you or owes you anything, put it down on my account. I, Paul, will repay: I’m writing this with my own hand! (Not to mention the fact that you owe me your own very self …) Yes, brother, let me have some benefit from you in the lord! Refresh my heart in the Messiah.

I’m writing this fully confident of your obedience, and knowing that you will do more than I say. At the same time, get a guest room ready for me. I’m hoping, you see, that through your prayers I will be given to you as a gift …

Paul’s letter to Philemon, of which this extract forms verses 8–22, has some interesting similarities to that of Pliny to Sabinianus. The most obvious is the standard rhetorical ploy: Far be it from me to force your hand – I wouldn’t tell you what to do, now would I? No, no, of course not, think Sabinianus and Philemon with a wry smile; you merely put me in an impossible position! The frequent references to friendship, at various levels, is a standard theme right across the world of ancient letter-writing.7 Then again Paul, like Pliny, speaks simply of ‘obedience’. He is in fact (or so it seems) appealing, still more explicitly than Pliny, to his possession of a status which places him in a position to give orders, should he wish to do so (which of course, he insists, he doesn’t!). Here, however, is the first rather shocking dissimilarity: Paul is in prison, a fact he mentions not as though it decreases his social standing (which it naturally did) but as though it gives him a higher status rather than a lower one.

But the main impression, once we study the two letters side by side, is that they breathe a different air. They are a world apart. Indeed – and this is part of the point of beginning the present book at this somewhat unlikely spot – this letter, the shortest of all Paul’s writings that we possess, gives us a clear, sharp little window onto a phenomenon that demands a historical explanation, which in turn, as we shall see, demands a theological explication. It is stretching the point only a little to suggest that, if we had no other first-century evidence for the movement that came to be called Christianity, this letter ought to make us think: Something is going on here. Something is different. People don’t say this sort of thing. That isn’t how the world works. A new way of life is being attempted – by no means entirely discontinuous with what was there already, but looking at things in a new way, trying out a new path. There is, after all, a world of difference between saying, ‘Now, my good fellow, let me tell you what to do with your stupid freedman and then we’ll all be safely back in our proper positions’ and ‘Now, my brother and partner, let me tell you about my newborn child, and let me ask you to think of him, and yourself, and me, as partners and brothers.’ This new way of life, and the new patterns of thinking which sustain it, are what the present book is about. I choose to begin here, with this sharp little vignette, one snapshot from Paul’s copious album. Sometimes it is better to get your hands dirty at once rather than approach a topic with lofty generalizations.

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. Yes, yes, think many readers, this simply reveals Paul as a master of manipulation. The hermeneutic of suspicion casts its usual wet blanket over all possibilities other than the reinscribing of narratives of money, sex and particularly power, and it is power that people often see at work here.8 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 …

To this the only real answer is, How might we tell? and the answer is ‘through a more thorough study, not only of the history and theology, but of the entire worldview which here comes to the surface’. Such study must be both as broad as an entire worldview always is, and as deeply rooted as we can make it in an actual close reading of the text. And when we read this Pauline text closely, it compels us to focus on two features not sufficiently remarked upon: the actual request Paul makes, which is clear and sharp despite what people have often said, and the supporting argument he offers, which is likewise clear and sharp, and which opens up a window on the heart of Paul’s beliefs and aims, which are the central focus of this book.

(ii) The Runaway Slave?

Recent scholarship has gone round and round in circles in debating the question of what Paul was actually asking for. The letter to Philemon is sometimes hailed as a crystal-clear example of the ‘real Paul’, an out-an-out abolitionist, demanding of his convert Philemon that he give another convert, Onesimus, his freedom.9 But the implicit narrative of this letter is more complex than that. And implicit narratives – the ‘referential sequence’ which explains what was going on, as opposed to the ‘poetic sequence’ which consists of the flow of thought in the text itself – are vital if we are to understand any text, whether a poem of Catullus, a treatise of Plato, a novel of Jane Austen, or a letter of Paul.10 Once we come to grips with that, the real heart of the letter stands out – not simply the request itself, but also the way Paul makes it.11

But this is already to run somewhat ahead of the argument. Was Onesimus even a runaway slave? That, to be sure, has been the majority opinion, at least since Chrysostom. According to this view, Philemon was a householder (probably in Colosse) who had been converted under Paul’s ministry, probably in Ephesus. Paul had not been to Colosse himself, but many from that town would find their way the eighty miles or so down the Lycus valley to Ephesus, the great metropolis and seaport of the region. Onesimus, one of Philemon’s slaves, had run away, as slaves often did, perhaps helping himself to some money, again as runaway slaves often did. In this hypothetical narrative, Onesimus made his way to Paul in prison, presumably deliberately and seeking help. This is not as problematic as some have suggested, and is considerably more likely than his happening to run into Paul by some extraordinary coincidence, let alone his finding himself imprisoned by chance alongside him. Granted, he was taking a big risk by going to Paul. Remember Pliny. But he had already risked everything in running away in the first place.

Before looking at the other options, I should stress that I side with the majority of contemporary scholars, who think that the place where Paul was imprisoned at that stage was Ephesus. The fact that such an Ephesian imprisonment is mentioned neither in Acts nor by Paul himself in his letters is no bar to this very likely hypothesis. The matter is clinched, for me, by Paul’s proposal of a visit to Philemon in the near future (verse 22). From Ephesus, that would be easy and natural. When he was in prison in Caesarea he was planning to go to Rome, and a visit to Colosse would not be part of such a journey. When under house arrest in Rome, he was still hoping to go on to Spain.12 To place this letter in Ephesus, in the middle of Paul’s ministry (before his final visit to Corinth), is easy and natural, and would date it in the early or middle 50s.13

This already undercuts some of the objections to the ‘runaway slave’ hypothesis. We do not have to imagine Onesimus undertaking the long and complicated journey to Rome and then, by a wonderful coincidence, meeting up with the apostle through whom his master had been converted. People went to and fro up and down the Lycus valley all the time. Philemon might have had a town house in Ephesus. Onesimus might have grown up in Ephesus in the fi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Paul and His World
• 2 Like Birds Hovering Overhead: The Faithfulness of the God of Israel
• 3 Athene and Her Owl: The Wisdom of the Greeks
• 4 A Cock for Asclepius: ‘Religion’ and ‘Culture’ in Paul’s World
• 5 The Eagle has Landed: Rome and the Challenge of Empire
• Part II The Mindset of the Apostle
• 7 The Plot, the Plan and the Storied Worldview
• 8 Five Signposts to the Apostolic Mindset
• Part III Paul’s Theology
• 9 The One God of Israel, Freshly Revealed
• 10 The People of God, Freshly Reworked
• 11 God’s Future for the World, Freshly Imagined
• Part IV Paul in History
• 13 A Different Sacrifice: Paul and ‘Religion’
• 14 The Foolishness of God: Paul among the Philosophers
• 15 To Know the Place for the First Time: Paul and his Jewish Context
• 16 Signs of the New Creation: Paul’s Aims and Achievements
• Full Bibliography of works referred to in Parts I–IV
• A Primary Sources
• B Secondary Literature
• Search items for ancient sources
• Search names for modern authors
• Search items for selected topics