Studying Paul's Letters

Contemporary Perspectives and Methods

Joseph A. Marchal

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800698188
• eBook ISBN: 9781451411737
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

1

HISTORICAL APPROACHES

Which Past? Whose Past?

MELANIE JOHNSON-DEBAUFRE

The present changes our past. How is that possible? How can new developments today change the past? The answer is simple and you may have already guessed it. What happened in the past is only available to us through history, through the stories, charts, images, and objects that describe and represent the past.

Imagine telling about your day today in one story. Which moments will you tell about and which will you skip over? How do you decide what is worth telling about your day? Which objects that you used or touched should be associated with you and with this day? In the future, your story of this day might be changed because of things that happen. If you become a leading historian, someone might find this book filled with your marginal notes and argue that your love of history began when you read a book about Paul. What if society in the future is concerned about different realities than you are concerned about now? Your version of the day’s story probably does not mention that people picked up your garbage on the curb today. But if in the future your city is overrun by waste or a sanitation workers’ strike, your town might implicate you in its history of wasteful self-destruction or in its habit of paying low wages to essential but unskilled labor. With these kinds of changes, your future self might no longer recognize your own story, or you may now remember your past differently.

This chapter explores changes in the discipline of biblical studies that have altered the history we tell about the letters of Paul. Because the story of the past is constantly being rewritten in new times and from different perspectives, you too can enter the critical discussion about the history of Pauline communities and why it might matter to tell it differently.

THE BROAD CONTEXT

For much of the twentieth century, virtually the sole approach to the academic study of the Bible in Europe and the U.S. was historical criticism, which privileges interpreting biblical texts “in their historical contexts, in light of the literary and cultural conventions of their time.”1 This approach emerged in the European Enlightenment largely among Protestant theologian-scholars seeking religious and intellectual freedom from church authorities. It was thus part of a shifting approach to knowledge: “where medieval culture had celebrated belief as a virtue and regarded doubt as a sin, the modern critical mentality regards doubt as a necessary step in the testing of knowledge.”2 This introduced a separation between the history in the text and the history of and around the text. For example, historical-critical scholars began to distinguish among a scholarly history of the figure of Jesus, the story of Jesus in the Gospels, and the history of the writing of the Gospels. Phenomena like Jesus’ miracles began to be doubted as historical because they violate the laws of nature and reason. Although biblical critics in this period still largely viewed the book of Acts as presenting the history of Paul’s travels, there was significant effort to prove that it is historical, a project that presupposes that Acts might not be historical. Influential studies of Paul that explained his life and thought in terms of the religion and culture of the first century also emerged with this approach.

Although some people still find it unsettling, asking historical questions has become the standard scholarly approach to the Bible. Most of the reference works in the field, from dictionaries and commentaries to introductory textbooks and websites, have been produced with the historical-critical toolbox, which contains such tools as textual, source, form, and redaction criticisms, archaeology, epigraphy, and historically-focused versions of literary and sociological analysis.

However, in the past forty years, the landscape of biblical interpretation has begun to change. With the rise of diverse social movements claiming rights and recognition for groups of people traditionally excluded from the power structures of society, white women and various minority men and women in Europe and the U.S. began to enter the academy. On a global scale, nationalist and liberationist movements redrew the global map. From the 1970s on, the presence of and attention to diverse perspectives have multiplied, and new methods that take seriously the way knowledge and meaning is always produced in cultural contexts have proliferated in the field of biblical studies. Many of these approaches are represented in this volume.

Both the history of western colonialism and the social movements of the twentieth century have had an impact on Western thinking regarding the modernist approach to knowledge and authority. The broadest term one might use to describe the shift is postmodernism.3 Generally speaking, a postmodern way of thinking questions a modern privileging of traditional order, scientific rationality, and scholarly objectivity. A postmodern worldview highlights the way that knowledge—and even reality itself—is much more varied and contested than in a modernist view. The diversification of voices and shifting ideas about the nature of language and the politics of scholarship has produced an exciting intellectual context in biblical studies characterized by multiplicity and possibility. The next section introduces three basic principles that reflect these changes and that reorient how we might approach history in relation to the letters of Paul.

THREE BASIC PRINCIPLES
FOR A CRITICAL PRACTICE OF HISTORY

Language Shapes Reality

One of the most far-reaching ways to generate new historical questions is to remind ourselves constantly that language does not describe or reflect reality, it creates and shapes reality. From a traditional historian’s point of view, Paul’s letters are evidence of what happened in Corinth or Philippi or Galatia. But words do not refer to external realities in any simple way; rather, they participate in constituting that reality. Taking this distinction seriously is commonly called history after the linguistic turn, because it recognizes that our understanding of the past is always mediated by and as texts, both ancient and modern. Even material remains from the past must be interpreted as and by texts.

Consider a simple example of this principle: when Paul exclaims “O foolish Galatians!” (Gal. 3:1a), it is hardly a straightforward fact that the Galatians are fools. We should ask: How and why did Paul try to shape how the Galatians saw themselves? Do we know that any of them understood themselves as fools? How does Paul’s language shape how we understand them? You would be surprised how many interpreters of Galatians subtly assume that Paul is right and the letter’s audience is religiously or intellectually deficient. They do not see that they are taking Paul’s evaluations at face value. Many descriptions of the situation Paul addressed in the Galatian community replicate his negative evaluation of his audience. Paul is speaking rhetorically, that is, he is seeking to persuade his audience (see the “Rhetorical Approaches” chapter). Classifying his language within the types of ancient rhetoric helps our understanding, but it does not give us access to how the Galatians understood themselves, nor does it expose that Paul is making a power play that may or may not have succeeded.4

The one-sided nature of Paul’s letters presents a challenge to historians because texts can only succeed in producing reality if the readers grant authority to the text. Readers consent to or resist the text and thus participate in its production of meaning. Indeed, texts need readers to internalize and reproduce their ideas in order to have meaning and an impact on the world. This insight has been invaluable to feminist biblical scholars who take a posture of suspicion toward the biblical texts and their interpretations because their construction of reality is male-centered and promotes hierarchical structures of power and privilege based on categories like gender, race, and class. For example, when Paul says, “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3), in what sense do these words describe an ancient reality? Can we be sure that this is how everyone saw humans and the divine? If so, why does Paul say “I want you to understand”? Some historians might use 1 Corinthians 11:3 to demonstrate that the ancient Pauline communities were hierarchical with regard to gender. Others might use the same text to propose that the ancient Corinthian community was so fervently engaging issues that touched on women’s status that Paul (re)asserted a gendered hierarchy in response.

What You See Depends on Where You Stand

Disrupting an easy relationship between language and reality leads quickly to issues of perspective and authority. Just as the text is not automatically a description of the way things are, so the historian is not an objective describer of the past. He or she is always located. Even the concept of scientific objectivity emerged in a particular context. As discussed above, getting critical distance from the text and appealing to a scientific approach to knowledge freed biblical scholarship to pursue its questions independent of church approval. However, the impulses toward rooting authority in reason and the pursuit of objective Truth emerged at the same time as modern Western racism and colonialism, which often vilified or romanticized the “Other”—that is, the non-white, non-Christian, non-Western—as irrational, inferior, and uncivilized (and thus in need of civilizing). This claim to objectivity thus also served to authorize Western imperialism and racism, presenting Western ways of knowing and being as if they were and should be universal (see, for instance, the “African American Approaches” and “Postcolonial Approaches” chapters).

Reminding ourselves that what we see depends on where we stand interrupts any illusions of objectivity and raises the question of alternative and multiple ways of thinking. There are many handbooks, dictionaries, and textbooks that describe the history of the Pauline communities in impartial tones and as a set of relatively stable facts. It is quite easy to forget that these resources present the composite results of a series of scholarly arguments, interpretive decisions, and even unseen prejudices and assumptions. How often do we examine how these resources tell history and from what perspective?

For example, it is very common for New Testament scholarship to miss its Christian bias. The pro-Christian perspective of histories of the first century is often (but not always) quite apparent to non-Christians. Some members of minority groups and people from postcolonial contexts likewise have seen the way the Mediterranean past has been claimed as the history of white and western peoples.5 Recognizing that all history writing is selective and perspectival raises political and ethical questions that can be asked by anyone: Whose history has been told? Who has benefitted from this telling of the past? How has this telling been blind and/or harmful? How does your own context shape your view of Christian beginnings? These are questions you can ask in your study of both the letters and the history of interpretation of Paul.

History Is an Interpretation of the Past, Not the Past Itself

If you were to write a history of the Pauline communities, you would need to make some basic decisions. What materials will you use? Will you use all thirteen letters attributed to Paul? Or, will you accept the arguments of previous scholars and use only the seven letters understood to be “authentic” Pauline letters? How will you use the book of Acts? For other literature of the period, will you look at mostly Jewish sources—since Paul was Jewish—or at Greek and Roman literature since Paul wrote in Greek and presents himself as an apostle to the many peoples (Gentiles) of the Roman Empire? What about archaeological remains and other material artifacts? Which scholarly histories will you consult? According to what criteria will you select them?

Thinking about these basic questions reminds us that the past is lost to us except through some texts and material remains and the decisions we make about them. Whatever we say we know about the past is always a narration or a text of the past and not the past itself. If all our histories are particular interpretations of the past, then alternative narrations are always possible; not only ones that might arguably aim to be more accurate than the alternatives but also ones that might be as accurate but might narrate history from a different point of view or with a different goal. Taking a critical approach to history means examining the interests and assumptions of the histories that we have received from previous generations. It draws our attention not only to a history’s content but also its infrastructures, such as its large-scale models, terminology and categories, periodization, selection of relevant events and texts, choice of analogies, and theories of cause and effect.

One model of history that has been very influential in modernist historical criticism is the privileging of origins as the place to find the true essence of Christianity. The modern roots of this model are in the Reformation. Martin Luther championed (his interpretation of) the Pauline churches as the place where true Christianity emerged as a religion of freedom and faith defined over and against laws and works. From this view, the Judaism that came before Paul is often characterized as anemic and legalistic, and the Roman Catholic Christianity that came after is seen as both legalistic and also as polluted with pagan ideas, such as that the divine needs demonstrations of piety. Many historical narratives of the Pauline churches still replicate the notion that an ideal Pauline Christianity fixed and replaced Judaism and/or eventually decli...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Figures
• Introduction: Asking the Right Questions? Perspective and Approach Joseph A. Marchal
• 1. Historical Approaches: Which Past? Whose Past? Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre

• 2. Rhetorical Approaches: Introducing the Art of Persuasion in Paul and Pauline Studies Todd Penner and Davina C. Lopez
• 3. Spatial Perspectives: Space and Archaeology in Roman Philippi Laura S. Nasrallah

• 4. Economic Approaches: Scarce Resources and Interpretive Opportunities Peter S. Oakes

• 5. Visual Perspectives: Imag(in)ing the Big Pauline Picture Davina C. Lopez

• 6. Feminist Approaches: Rethinking History and Resisting Ideologies Cynthia Briggs Kittredge

• 7. Jewish Perspectives: A Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles Pamela Eisenbaum

• 8. African American Approaches: Rehumanizing the Reader against Racism and Reading through Experience Demetrius K. Williams

• 9. Asian American Perspectives: Ambivalence of the Model Minority and Perpetual Foreigner Sze-kar Wan

• 10. Postcolonial Approaches: Negotiating Empires, Then and Now Jeremy Punt

• 11. Queer Approaches: Improper Relations with Pauline Letters Joseph A. Marchal
• Glossary Prepared by Kelsi Morrison-Atkins