The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought

Benjamin E. Reynolds, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Benjamin E. Reynolds, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Benjamin Reynolds

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781451492668
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506423425
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Here an international team of scholars draws out the implications of the newest scholarship on the nature of apocalypticism for the variety of New Testament writings. Each entry presses the boundaries regarding the nature of apocalypticism in application to a particular New Testament author, revealing early Christianity, its Christology, cosmology, and eschatology as expressions of tendencies in Second Temple Judaism.

II

Paul and the Pauline Letters

6

Paul as an Apocalyptist

Christopher Rowland

When Ed Sanders’s epoch-making book on Paul came out in 1977,^[1] I recall being struck by a passing reference to ecstatic mysticism and thinking that there was a dimension of Pauline thought which was relegated to relative insignificance. Indeed, I gave a response to Ed’s book when it was discussed at the New Testament seminar in the early 1980s. It was an issue that mattered to me, particularly at that time, as I had devoted the previous decade trying to explore the implications of apocalyptic/mysticism for the New Testament. Perhaps I was over optimistic in hoping that this doyen of the relationship of ancient Judaism to the New Testament might have seen what I had seen. Sanders knew Scholem’s work as well as I did, but it was as refracted through Ephraim Urbach’s view of the rabbinic material that counted.^[2] That meant that the Scholem line on the importance of the mystical, in the sense of an experiential dimension, in ancient Judaism was downplayed. A theologically orientated view of Paul, which plays down the apocalyptic dimension and stresses continuity with Jewish traditions, omits something crucial from the understanding of the Pauline corpus. Reading Paul in the light of “normal mysticism,” or Urbach’s entirely plausible construal of the rabbinic traditions about the merkabah, or, for that matter, Peter Schäfer’s,^[3] reduces the significance of the “apocalyptic Paul” who subordinated human traditions and convention to “the apocalypse of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:16) and lived with the consequences for himself and those whom he influenced by his testimony. It is not that Paul is far removed from the rabbis. In many ways, his writing resembles their sentiments with regard to the management of the ecstatic and revelatory very closely. But that similarity was born in a situation where the ecstatic, the revelatory, the disruptive threatened to wreak havoc and something else was needed which would bring some kind of order to what seemed like an apocalyptic chaos, the divisiveness of whose power politics, rightly or wrongly, had alarmed Paul in Corinth. In the case of the rabbis, it was immersion in the tradition; that was true to some extent in Paul’s case too (cf. 1 Cor 14:33–34) but there was also appeal to the authority of one who had seen the Lord (1 Cor 9:1) and carried in his body Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:10; cf. Gal 2:20) to demand submission to his words.

“The apocalyptic Paul” is now a popular construal, but in a way different from what I then understood—and still understand. J. C. Beker and J. Louis Martyn, inspired by Ernst Käsemann, have trodden in Schweitzer’s footsteps, as did Sanders to some extent in following Schweitzer in his advocacy of “participationist eschatology,” in arguing for an “apocalyptic” Paul.^[4] But apocalyptic in this context meant the cataclysmic disruptive eschatology, which Käsemann believed was typical of apocalyptic. When “apocalyptic” and “eschatological” are merged and have similar meanings, both lose their heuristic value for understanding the intellectual history of early Christianity, and Paul’s thought, in particular.

On the margins of Pauline scholarship, there have been dissenting voices, many of which have, in recent years, been linked with the religious experience seminar at the Society of Biblical Literature. The late Alan Segal, in particular—and in a parallel but more overtly history of religions mode, John Ashton—argued for locating Paul in mystical and apocalyptic traditions.^[5] As far as I am concerned, apocalyptic as eschatology, and apocalyptic as mysticism are not an either/or, as the eschatological Paul is every bit as crucial as the apocalyptic/mystical Paul. But, in nuce, I find it as impossible to understand Paul’s activity without his belief in the breaking in of a new age as I do to understand that conviction without recourse to the life-changing vision which brought it about. As Martyn has pointed out, the epistemology of “the turn of the ages” is crucial for understanding.^[6] That epistemology is intimately linked with the “apocalyptic.” Apocalyptic epistemology—in the sense of the ways in which claim to visionary experience has consequences for the way in which one lives—may confirm prejudices or overturn them, for visions offer a mode of knowing which can either complement received wisdom or turn it on its head, and Gershom Scholem suggested that “the most radical of revolutionary mystics are those who not only reinterpret and transform a religious authority, but aspire to establish a new authority based on their own experience.” According to Scholem, Paul is “the most outstanding example known to us of a revolutionary Jewish mystic.”^[7]

This chapter is about the importance of the apocalyptic element in understanding the writings and life of Paul. The consideration begins with a short survey of the change in the understanding of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” in writing over the last forty years before moving to consideration of “apocalypse” in Pauline texts. Particular consideration will be given to 1 Corinthians where the clash between the apocalyptic and community cohesion is particularly sharp and Paul’s own apocalyptic authority comes into conflict with others who could make similar claims to be “taught by God” (cf. 1 Thess 4:9; John 6:45). The chapter concludes with a hermeneutical perspective informed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion of different types of mysticism and its possible implications for the study of Jewish apocalyptic in the thought of Paul the Apostle. This is not an exercise which seeks to explain the totality of Paul’s thought by reference to apocalyptic but more an attempt to show that without attention to the “apocalyptic” in addition to the eschatological, we shall not understand what Paul writes, whether in terms of his positive assertions about the importance of the apocalypse of Jesus Christ for his own authority or the effects of apocalypse on the nascent Christian communities which had come together as a result of his activity as one who believed himself called by God to be the apostle to the gentiles. The Paul of the extant letters does not come across as an interpreter of apocalyptic or prophetic oracles with a divinely given wisdom so much as a figure whose authority in this phase of his life owes everything to an apocalyptic conviction. Such a claim seems to have puzzled his contemporaries (Acts 26:24) and inspired their claims and continued to inspire individuals down the centuries—for example, Mani.^[8]

The focus of this discussion is on Galatians and 1 Corinthians, but letters attributed to Paul, such as Colossians and Ephesians should be taken into account in any discussion of “the apocalyptic Paul.” The apocalyptic background of the cosmology of Ephesians was recognized long ago, and apocalyptic issues pervade the Letter to the Colossians with concern for the activities of the angels and the emulating of them (Col 2:16–18; cf. 2:21).^[9] We know from the apocalypses and later Jewish mystical material that strict preparation was a necessary prerequisite for the receipt of visions. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, just as the angels in heaven have their allotted place in the heavenly liturgy (4Q405 23 i; cf. 2 Enoch 20:3–21:1), so the earthly community is given a position corresponding to God’s everlasting purpose (1QS 2:22–26; 5:23–24; 6:8–10). It is possible that the problem addressed had two components: the ritual preparations and the visions themselves and an unhealthy concentration on other, lesser, heavenly beings, rather than Christ. In the light of this, the remarkable words in Colossians 1:15–20 and 2:9 become comprehensible. Passages such as Justin, Dialogue 114, where Christ is identified with the human figure on the throne of glory, suggest that Christ as the image of the invisible God is the concrete expression of God, the divine kabod (cf. John 12:42; and 1:18; cf. 2 Cor 4:6; 1 Cor 15:49). He took the form of a slave who had put on a heavenly, glorious body (Phil 2:6; cf. 3:21).^[10]

Apocalyptic as Revelation and the New Testament

In 1976, Michael Stone published a landmark contribution to the deb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Jesus and the Gospels
• Paul and the Pauline Letters
• Hebrews, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation
• Contributors
• Index of Subjects and Key Terms
• Index of Modern Authors