Paul

A Beginner's Guide

Morna D. Hooker

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741734
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Invaluable for anyone seeking a deeper insight into Christianity and its most controversial figure. The Apostle Paul has shaped the course of Christian ethics for centuries and is widely regarded as the most influential theologian in the Christian tradition. In this authoritative introduction, Morna D. Hooker offers a female perspective on a figure usually portrayed as a conservative misogynist. Looking behind the epistles to reconstruct the real man and his beliefs, she places the scriptures in their original context and suggests a consistent and coherent Pauline theology. Original and thought-provoking, this concise study is essential reading for all who seek to learn more about the most controversial figure in Christianity.

1

How important was Paul?

Two figures dominate the pages of the New Testament. The first is Jesus, the second, Paul. Although Paul himself would undoubtedly have protested that even to link his name with that of Jesus in this way was improper – since he was the ‘slave of Christ’, whose mission was to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord – it is nevertheless true that Paul’s influence on the development of what came to be known as ‘Christianity’ was immense. Thirteen of the twenty-seven documents that make up the New Testament claim to be written by him, and the larger part of the Acts of the Apostles is devoted to relating the story of Paul’s missionary endeavours. Paul is the central figure in the New Testament between the middle of Acts and the end of Philemon.

Why was Paul so important? It is, in fact, worth reframing that question and asking whether he was as important in his own lifetime as we suppose. Or was his later influence due rather to the devotion of some of those who were close to him, and who carefully preserved his letters – perhaps even wrote, in his name, letters for the churches of the next generation, saying what they believed would have been his message for their particular situations? And since Paul is so clearly Luke’s¹ ‘missionary hero’, the impression we gain from Acts – that the spread of the Christian gospel throughout the Mediterranean world was due almost entirely to Paul and his fellow-workers – may be a distorted one. What role did other Christians play in the spread of the gospel? How important a figure was Paul in the councils of the Church of his day? To many of his fellow-Christians, he seems to have been – to borrow Paul’s own phrase – something of ‘a thorn in the flesh’.² To the outside world, he was totally insignificant – except on those occasions when he was a nuisance to the authorities. And though he undoubtedly planted the Christian gospel in various strategic cities in the Roman world, the communities he formed were small, and largely ignored or abused by those around them.

Paul’s legacy

Paul’s legacy to later generations, however, was undoubtedly enormous, and he influenced the Church for all time. He is important, first, because his insistence that membership of God’s people had been thrown open to Gentiles, and that the gospel must therefore be taken to them without demanding that they should become Jews in order to receive it, meant that what had begun as a Jewish sect became, within a few generations, a largely gentile movement; although Paul was not alone in taking up this position, he seems to have understood the issues involved more clearly than anyone else, and he certainly threw himself into the gentile mission without reserve. He is important, secondly, because the profound insights expressed in his epistles have fed and shaped Christian theology, spirituality and ethics ever since.

Paul’s conviction that the gospel was intended for the Gentiles was not unique to him, and he was not alone in preaching to them. According to Galatians 2:6–12, it is true, the leaders of the Jerusalem Church had recognized that Paul was called by God to be the apostle to the uncircumcised – though some Jewish Christians clearly disapproved (v. 12). But if Luke is to be believed, then even before Paul began his missionary work, there were moves in this direction. Luke tells us how Philip, one of the Greek-speaking members of the early Christian community, had preached the gospel to Samaritans and to an Ethiopian eunuch – someone who was not only not Jewish, but who (as a eunuch) was debarred from becoming a proselyte³ – and had baptized them; his work in Samaria had been endorsed by Peter and John (Acts 8). Luke records, too, a tradition that Peter had been persuaded by a vision to visit Cornelius, a Gentile, and to preach the gospel to him; then, when the Holy Spirit descended on Cornelius, Peter realized that Gentiles might be baptized (Acts 10:1–11:18). When Paul himself began his mission work it was in Antioch (Acts 11:25–6), a city where the gospel had already been preached, not only to Jews but to Gentiles also (Acts 11:19–20).⁴

How reliable are these traditions? Scholars differ in the value they place upon them, but it seems reasonable to suppose that they reflect a development that was already taking place before Paul became a Christian. Paul may have been the apostle to the Gentiles par excellence, but he himself is aware that others were working in the same field (Rom. 1:13; 15:20). Indeed, the news that Christian Jews were mixing with Gentiles and worshipping with them may well have been one of the factors that led the pre-Christian Paul to persecute the Christian community with such vehemence.

Paul’s second legacy is in his writings. But to what extent was the interpretation of the gospel expressed in Paul’s epistles his own interpretation, and to what extent did he share it with other early Christians? In what ways did his beliefs overlap with theirs?

One of the reasons that it is so difficult to answer these questions is that Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents to have come down to us. The accounts of Jesus’ own teaching, the Gospels, were almost certainly written after Paul’s death, and have been shaped by the needs and beliefs of those who passed on the tradition and wrote the Gospels. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells us something of the early years of the Church, but there were no written records of what was said and done, and he is dependent on oral traditions. These were formative years, when men and women, reeling from recent events and trying to understand their significance, had not yet formulated their faith. We cannot assume that Luke’s account of what the apostles said represents the way they expressed their beliefs at the time. Writing, as he does, with the benefit of hindsight, he is likely to assume that they understood then what in fact they came to grasp only later.⁵

Pre-Pauline tradition

In the absence of reliable accounts of what Christians before Paul had believed, scholars have turned to Paul’s own letters in an attempt to discover ‘pre-Pauline’ tradition. Neat summaries of faith found in his writings are, they suggest, credal statements that were used in the early Christian communities, and which Paul has adopted and incorporated into his letters. There must, to be sure, have been ways of expressing Christian belief that would quickly become recognizable summaries: ‘Jesus is Lord’ is an obvious one – quoted both in Romans 10:9 and 1 Corinthians 12:3. Paul himself refers to ‘the tradition’ that he received, in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff, and this tradition consists of a summary statement of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and appearances to various witnesses. Each of these summaries is quoted because it is relevant to the subject under discussion; the one quoted in 1 Corinthians is clearly adapted by Paul, who has added a reference to an appearance of the risen Christ to himself to the list of names included in the tradition.

Are there other such summaries of the gospel elsewhere? There are indeed – but are they Paul’s own summaries, or did he ‘inherit’ them from other Christians? In favour of the latter, it is suggested, is the fact that these summaries are often ‘rhythmic’ in structure and sometimes employ ‘unPauline vocabulary’. Unfortunately, in order to uncover the ‘rhythmic structure’, it is often necessary to delete certain phrases as ‘Pauline additions’! In Romans 1:3–4, for example, we find this summary of the gospel concerning God’s Son,

who was descended from David according to the flesh

and was declared to be Son of God [with power] according to

the Spirit [of holiness by resurrection from the dead].⁶

If such credal summaries were indeed in circulation, we can understand why Paul might quote this couplet at the beginning of a letter written to a Christian community which does not know him, in order to establish that they share a common faith. If that was his intention, however, it would surely have served his purpose better if he had quoted the summary without any additions of his own! In fact, the whole passage may well have been written by Paul himself, since it is particularly appropriate as an introduction to the Epistle to the Romans, where Paul is going to discuss what is involved in life lived ‘according to the flesh’ and ‘according to the Spirit’ and the way in which, through Christ, Christians can move from one sphere to the other.

If the ‘rhythmic structure’ of these passages is not always obvious, neither is the ‘unPauline’ character of the vocabulary. The language of the summary in Romans 4:25, for example, which refers to Christians’ belief in God,

who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead –

who was handed over to death for our trespasses

and was raised for our ‘justification’,

sounds remarkably Pauline, though it is often assumed to be a traditional formula that he inherited. This time, the rhythmic structure is plain, and there are no ‘additions’ in need of excision. Are we to conclude that Paul’s understanding of the gospel agreed exactly with that of those who were responsible for formulating this particular summary? Or that he wrote the summary himself?

At other times, the vocabulary is unfamiliar. Romans 3:24–5, thought by many to be pre-Pauline, speaks of Jesus as the one ‘whom – God put forward as a hilastērion’ – a Greek word whose meaning is disputed and which occurs nowhere else in Paul.⁷ But do we have enough authentic Pauline material to be able to say which words were and which were not part of his vocabulary? The answer is clearly ‘no’. On the whole, it seems probable that Paul himself was responsible for using this striking image. It is certainly appropriate in the context in which he uses it.⁸

Perhaps the most notable example of so-called ‘pre-Pauline tradition’ is to be found in Philippians 2:6–10. Once again, its ‘rhythmic structure’ and confessional character – the passage, like so many others, is introduced with the word ‘who’ – distinguish this section from its context. The use of parallelism and dramatic ‘punchlines’ make this a powerful summary of the gospel:

Who, being in the form of God,

Did not consider as something-to-be-exploited

Equality with God,

But made himself nothing,

Taking the form of a slave!

Having been born in human likeness,

and being found in human appearance,

he humbled himself,

becoming obedient to death,

even death on a cross!

Therefore God has highly exalted him,

and given to him the name

that is above all names,

that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bow,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord

to the glory of God the Father!

Was this passage written by Paul himself? It is possible. It is also possible that he was making use of a ‘spiritual song’⁹ composed by someone else. What is clear is that – as we shall see later¹⁰ – he uses this passage in the course of his argument in a typically ‘Pauline’ way.

The search for ‘pre-Pauline tradition’ in Paul’s own letters takes us nowhere. There had probably been little time for anything but the briefest of summaries to develop before Paul’s own conversion. If there are any quotations in his letters, they are on the whole too brief, and too close to Paul’s own beliefs, to enable us to distinguish anything distinctive about his own theology. Moreover, it should be obvious that Paul would not ‘borrow’ any confessions of faith unless he agreed with them. What he clearly inherited, and what was certainly being preached before Paul, is summed up in the tradition he cites in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 – the conviction that Jesus died and had been raised from the dead – and in the confession that he had therefore been made Lord.¹¹

If pre-Pauline summaries of Christian belief are difficult to discover in the letters, so too are traditions about Jesus’ own teaching, of which we might have expected frequent echoes. Paradoxically, the clearest parallel between a reference to what Jesus did and said in Paul and the tradition preserved in the Synoptic Gospels occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:23–6 – the account of the Last Supper – which Paul insists he received ‘from the Lord’. Perhaps these words should be understood to mean that the tradition originated with the Lord, rather than as a claim to direct revelation; however, Paul is not necessarily denying that the tradition was passed on by those present at the Last Supper. Elsewhere Paul appeals to commands given by the Lord, not himself: these include the prohibition of divorce¹² and the instruction to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Map
• Preface
• 1 How important was Paul?
• 2 What do we know about Paul?
• 3 A bundle of letters
• 4 Paul’s inheritance
• 5 The new element
• 6 Who was this Jesus?
• 7 Christ: the ‘end’ of the law
• 8 ‘The gospel concerning God’s son’
• 9 ‘Christ died ... and was raised’
• 10 Life ‘in Christ’
• 11 ‘Lives worthy of the gospel’
• 12 ‘Then comes the end’
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of citations