Delivering the Word

Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition

William John Lyons, Isabella Sandwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781845538927
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317543985
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Biblical texts have been used consistently in sermons throughout Christian history. Preachers have transformed the texts into an aural experience, using them to evangelize, educate, edify, exhort, or even terrify, their audiences. Sermons have enabled Scripture to be communicated to people from a wide range of social backgrounds. 'Delivering the Word' examines the power of preaching and its reception across two millennia of homilies: from St Paul, Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine and Hildegard of Bingen to Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Chris Brain. In its exploration of the impact of the sermon on the interpretation of Scripture, 'Delivering the Word' will be of interest to students of biblical and religious studies.

“A DARING SYNAGOGUE SERMON?” PAUL’S PREACHING IN 2 COR. 3:7–18

Sean F. Winter^a

1. Introduction

It is highly unlikely that the New Testament preserves intact any example of early Christian preaching in a form that closely resembles its original oral delivery. The best known example, the so-called “sermon on the mount”, is a literary composition which draws together previously isolated aspects of Jesus’ teaching and arranges them into a more or less coherent whole.¹ The examples of early Christian preaching preserved for us in the Acts of the Apostles owe much of their content and mode of expression to Luke, the author of that work. Whatever traces of a primitive apostolic kerygma or of the actual preaching of Peter may have been preserved, they have been transmitted and thus transformed in the process leading up to their incorporation into Luke’s narrative. The numerous references to Paul’s preaching in Acts clearly fall into the same category.²

The case of Paul’s preaching is further complicated by the observation that Luke’s reports of his sermons suffer from a distinct “lack of fit” when we compare them with Paul’s authentic letters. In short, it is unlikely that we hear the authentic voice of Paul the preacher in the sermons attributed to him in Acts.³

So if we wish to consider how a particular example of the earliest Christian preaching might be understood as an “instance” of biblical reception (“biblical” here referring of course to those texts that were viewed as authoritative by the first generations of Christ-believers: mainly those of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) we have several possible directions for further enquiry in the absence of the sermons themselves. First, we might seek to discern within the New Testament texts the likely shape or pattern of early Christian preaching. This may lead us to explore the possible kerygmatic heart of early proclamation, the kernel of apostolic preaching (Dodd, 1936; Stanton, 1974). This might include consideration of the common interpretative and exegetical strategies used by the first generation of preachers in the emerging Jesus movement and study of the biblical texts they found most conducive for performance as they brought their message into the homes of Galilean villages, the synagogues of the Diaspora and the agorae of the Empire.⁴ Second, we might focus our attention on the considerable amount of data that the New Testament affords of what is usually termed “biblical intertextuality”: the quotation of, allusion to, and evocation of Israel’s scriptures with a view to locating the audience of early Christian texts within Israel’s story (Beale and Carson, 2007). Third, given the fact that early Christian documents all to some degree draw on pre-existing traditional materials, we might ask whether or not our extant texts do in fact preserve an early Christian sermon, in part or in whole. The best known suggestion of this phenomenon in relation to Paul focuses on Rom. 1:18–2:29. E. P. Sanders famously suggested that the apparently non-Pauline aspects of this passage are best explained by reading it as a synagogue sermon aimed at Jews and thereby possessing no distinctive Christian/Pauline content (Sanders, 1983:123–32). Sanders appealed to the “sermon” hypothesis as a way of explaining apparent discrepancies between the material in Romans 1–2 (in terms of the arguments and rhetorical tropes there employed) and things that Paul says elsewhere in Romans. The “sermon” that Sanders detects in Romans is therefore not a sermon of the post-conversion Paul, or at least it is not a sermon that Paul would or could have given in his apostolic preaching.⁵ For our purposes, therefore, Sanders’ hypothesis offers little scope for further reflection.

Yet the concern of the current volume to study biblical reception through an investigation not of preaching as a general phenomenon but of the sermon as an artefact provides some impetus for an additional tentative exploration of one further place in Paul’s letters where an earlier Pauline sermon, based on an antecedent Old Testament text, may be preserved.

2. A Daring Synagogue Sermon?

The example I have therefore chosen to consider is 2 Cor. 3:7–18 which reads as follows:

2 Cor. 3:7 Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, 8 how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? 9 For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! 10 Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; 11 for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory! 12 Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, 13 not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. 14 But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. 15 Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds; 16 but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.⁶

The text is striking for a number of reasons and New Testament scholars have long enquired after its meaning and function within the argument of 2 Corinthians. In particular the scholarly debates have tried to do justice to what we might term its “double character”. As a textual unit, these verses betray evidence of their pre-history as well as evidence of their close integration into the epistolary context. The history of scholarship on 2 Corinthians 3 can be read as a series of successive attempts to explain and resolve this double character, usually through an attempt to emphasize one aspect to the exclusion of the other.⁷ In what follows, I hope to show that the text’s double character can be explained and further illuminated by appeal to the “sermon” hypothesis.

As early as 1962 C. F. D. Moule pondered: “[m]ight not II Cor. iii. 4ff have been constructed out of the substance of a daring synagogue sermon?” (Moule, 1981: 70, n. 1).⁸ A number of commentators recognize that such a view is possible, but are reluctant to commit to it (Thrall, 1994: 238; Harris, 2005: 278). Others affirm the homiletic features of the text but do not consider these sufficient to warrant a conclusion to the effect that Paul is making use of a pre-existing sermon (Hays, 1989:132). In at least one instance, Moule’s view has been picked up and developed as a concrete and convincing explanation for some of the complex features of the passage (Martin, 1986: 59). To be sure, almost every verse of our chosen section is replete with exegetical difficulties. Yet, I suggest that the hypothesis that Paul here utilizes the substance of a sermon that was delivered in the synagogue serves to explain some of these difficulties and proves an instructive example of the way in which an early Christian preacher interpreted a biblical text within a homiletical framework. In the following discussion it will be necessary to narrow the focus. Taking Moule’s suggestion as a working hypothesis we can use it as a way of exploring the following questions:

1. What can we say about the exegetical techniques that Paul brings to bear on the biblical text that forms the basis of his sermon?

2. How is the biblical text rendered in the light of (a) Paul’s core theological convictions and (b) a plausible reconstruction of the contextual circumstances that elicited the sermonic response?

3. How does Paul’s inclusion of this “sermonic” material contribute to his wider rhetorical purposes in the letter we know as 2 Corinthians?

The discussion will proceed in four steps. The first is to identify the textual unit itself and the reasons for suspecting that it warrants the attribution “sermon” or “homily”. I will then briefly describe the Old Testament text that forms the basis for Paul’s exposition and go on to identify some of the exegetical strategies that Paul employs in relation to it. I will conclude by sketching an outline of two “performances” of this text, arguing that the incorporation of what began as a sermon used by Paul in his synagogue preaching into its current epistolary location serves to extend the sermon’s homiletical purpose beyond that of its original composition and setting.⁹ The capacity for this “daring synagogue sermon” to undergo a new, epistolary reception is rooted, I suggest, in the inherent ambiguities of the narrative of Moses’ descent from Sinai. These ambiguities are exploited by Paul in his exegetical and interpretative work as the initial text is deployed by him in two quite different sets of circumstances and thus to two different kinds of persuasive end.

3. Identifying the Sermon

The first step is to clarify further the boundaries, genre and provenance of the “sermon” under scrutiny. There are two sets of data to consider relating to the double character of the text identified above. The first supports the idea that 2 Cor. 3:7–18 is a pre-existing unit that Paul has inserted (no doubt with some modifications) into his argument. It is clear that the section shifts the argumentation away from the apologetic and polemical concerns of 2 Cor. 3:1–6 and 4:1–6, where Paul explicitly defends his ministry among the Corinthians in the face of criticisms. In 3:7–18 the audience’s attention is re-directed so that, in the words of one classic discussion of the problem, “Christianity and Judaism, not Paulinism and Christian Judaism are the main adversaries” (Windisch, 1924: 112).¹⁰ The comparison is between dispensations in salvation history, rather than missionary movements in Corinth, and the text moves away from the situation in the Corinthian church and its relationship with Paul, themes that dominate the surrounding material (Thrall, 1994:238). The sense that 3:7–18 should therefore be understood as a digression is reinforced by two further observations. First, there is a marked contrast in the use of the verb forms and pronouns. In 3:1–6 and 4:1–6 Paul repeatedly refers to himself and probably his co-workers using first person plural forms although this use of the plural is not rigidly exclusive but sets these “ministers of the new covenant” (3:6) as an example for the Corinthians themselves. It is noticeable, however that in 3:7–18 the language is largely in the third person, with the exception of the climactic “Since, then, we have such a hope” in 3:12 and “all of us … are being transformed”. Second, the surrounding sections of 3:1–6 and 4:1–6 are clearly connected by a significant number of words, many of which are entirely absent from 3:7–18 (Lambrecht, 1994: 261–62). Together, these observations offer formal support in favour of the view that our text is a literary insertion of material that Paul has used in other contexts (Lietzmann, 1969: 242; Schröter, 1998).

However, this perspective on 2 Cor. 3:7–18 has recently been challenged by those who point to other evidence supporting the view that these verses are fully integrated into their context. Linda Belleville plausibly suggests that these verses should be understood as a clear continuation of Paul’s defence that begins in 2:14–3:6 and continues in 4:1–6. For her, the point of the overall argument is that Paul’s “competence as a minister lies in the competence of the ministry that he represents” (Belleville, 1991:144–45). Belleville shows how a number of the key emphases of Paul’s wider argument in 2 Cor. 2–4 are continued through 3:7–18.¹¹

The double character of this section – its capacity to be read both as a digression from and as integral to the surrounding argument – requires some kind of explanation. Those who emphasize its connection to the wider epistolary context do not successfully undermine earlier argume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Preacher, People, Place, Performance
• 1. “A Daring Synagogue Sermon?” Paul’s Preaching in 2 Cor. 3:7–18
• 2. Origen as Preacher and Teacher: A Comparison of Exegetical Methods in His Writings on Genesis and the Song of Songs
• 3. The Typology of Listening: The Transformation of Scripture in Early Christian Preaching
• 4. A Milky Text Suitable for Children: The Significance of John Chrysostom’s Preaching on Gen. 1:1 for Fourth-century Audiences
• 5. Hildegard of Bingen’s Exegesis of Jesus’ Miracles and the Twelfth-century Study of Science
• 6. Johannes Brenz and His Written Sermons in the Spirit of Luther
• 7. Stoned in the Pulpit: The Provocative Preaching of Hanserd Knollys
• 8. “The Excellency of Jesus Christ”: Affective Doctrine in the Sermons of Jonathan Edwards
• 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Preaching and Reflection
• 10. “Patriotism and Sacrifice”: The Preaching of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (“Woodbine Willie”), 1914–1918
• 11. “Give the Winds a Mighty Voice!”: Aimee Semple McPherson and Her Radio Audience
• 12. Preaching at the Nine O’clock Service: A Study of Shifting Meaning in a Published Sermon
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Modern Authors Index