Opening Paul's Letters

A Reader's Guide to Genre and Interpretation

Patrick Gray

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801039225
• eBook ISBN: 9781441236289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

It is sometimes easy to forget that the books of the Bible are not really "books" at all but individual documents composed in a wide array of literary genres. This clear, concise, and accessible text on the Pauline Letters orients beginning students to the genre in which Paul writes. The book compares and contrasts Paul's letters with ancient and modern letters, revealing the distinctive conventions, forms, and purposes of Paul's Epistles. It focuses on the literary genre of the letter in ancient Greece and Rome, providing an overview of subjects, strategies, and concerns of immediate relevance for readers who wish to understand Paul in his ancient context. Discussion questions and sidebars are included.

1

Paul’s Cultural Contexts

Viewing a picture is not entirely unlike interpreting one of the letters Paul is frequently depicted writing in paintings from the Renaissance to the present. A picture, so the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. Consider this picture: A man with brown skin in evident distress pounds on one side of a window. On the other side sits a figure with horns, a tail, and cloven hooves, calmly whistling as he peruses an album cover bearing the title “New Age Music’s Greatest Hits,” the turntable in front of him apparently broadcasting the music through the large speakers on the other side of the glass. Below the picture appears the caption “Charlie Parker’s private hell.”

Gary Larson published this comic strip as part of his popular Far Side series in 1990. It is supposed to be funny. And funny it is, provided that one is familiar with the general cultural context and catches the specific allusions it contains. What knowledge is needed to get the joke? Larson assumes that his readers will know who Charlie Parker is—that he was a legendary jazz saxophonist—what “new age” signifies, what the devil looks like, what records are, and that hell is supposed to be unpleasant. All this information, and much more, is encoded in this one panel. Another approach to interpreting this comic strip is to ask what it reveals about Larson and his late twentieth-century milieu. For starters, it is apparent that new age music is widely despised—at least by those who know and love the music of Charlie Parker—since Larson can make fun of it and count on a laugh. Accordingly, new age music fits perfectly with a depiction of hell, but only if the devil specifically tailors the punishment to the individual, a notion familiar to most people, whether or not they have read Dante. Further information may be gleaned from other details: Turntables are still in use. The image of the devil is instantly recognizable. Other features raise as many questions as they answer: Does Larson believe in hell? Does he think that his audience believes in hell? Most Americans tell pollsters they do, but is their willingness to joke about something so grave as eternal torment an indicator that belief in hell is wide but not very deep?

If a single picture with a four-word caption implies, evokes, relates to, suggests, presupposes, and hints at so many different social, cultural, historical, and religious concerns, how much more so do larger and more complex artifacts like Paul’s letters to the Romans or the Philippians? To read and understand Paul’s letters, it is absolutely necessary to know something about the wider world in which he lived and wrote. The death of Jesus, according to Paul, marks a decisive intervention into human history by the God of Israel. “Christ crucified,” however, is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). That Christianity spread as quickly as it did is surprising given that its central message struck a discordant note with every conceivable demographic—the categories “Jew” and “gentile,” after all, cover all of humanity. Christianity begins with the execution of a Jewish teacher, but it is also important to remember that he was killed by Roman authorities and that the earliest writings of the fledgling sect survive only in Greek. From the outset, then, the Christian movement cut across ordinary ethnic, cultural, social, and linguistic boundaries.

Sometimes the encounter between the Jews who were Jesus’s first followers and the Greco-Roman world is quite explicit, as when Paul reminds the centurion about to flog him that he has certain legal rights as a Roman citizen (Acts 22:25–29), or when he urges the Roman Christians to obey the emperor and pay their taxes (Rom. 13:1–7). Elsewhere in his letters the influence of Greek and Roman culture is less conspicuous but no less profound. Attempting to articulate the new faith, Paul and his readers are engaged in the process of creating a distinctively Christian identity. But it was not creation ex nihilo. Although novel claims about Jesus function as a common denominator, Christian identity is formed from preexisting elements in the cultural contexts of those who had converted, Jew and gentile alike.

It would be impossible to provide anything like a comprehensive overview of the world Paul inhabited in an entire book, much less in a single chapter. This chapter will survey a small selection of concepts, images, and motifs from the Greco-Roman milieu in which Christianity emerged and will illustrate their significance for understanding Paul’s letters. Additional resources may be found in the bibliography at the end of the chapter.

Paul among Greeks and Romans

By virtue of his living at the same time and in the same culture as his neighbors who do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, Paul takes for granted any number of the same things about the way the world operates. Although the real world as experienced by real people is not easily organized into separate compartments, for the sake of convenience it is helpful to observe Paul’s background under a handful of distinct headings.

Judaism and Hellenism

Paul was a Jew. To appreciate this aspect of Paul’s background, an acquaintance with the Hebrew Bible is essential, but it is only a beginning. Just as there is much more to understanding English history than kings and queens and the Magna Carta, understanding Judaism in the first century involves much more than reading its officially sanctioned Scriptures. Jewish life and thought continued to thrive during the so-called intertestamental period between the time of Nehemiah and the last of the biblical prophets (ca. 400 BCE) and the birth of Jesus. Even though they were never a part of anyone’s canon of Scripture, writings such as Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 1–2 Enoch, Apocalypse of Abraham, and Ascension of Isaiah attest to the rich diversity of Jewish literature in the centuries preceding Paul’s appearance on the scene.[12]

Key Events Shaping Paul’s World

586 BCE	The Babylonians destroy the temple in Jerusalem, sending most of the Jews into exile.
538 BCE	After the Persians defeat the Babylonians, Cyrus the Great issues a proclamation permitting the exiled Judeans to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple.
333 BCE	Alexander the Great conquers the Persians and establishes Greek-Macedonian rule over Palestine.
167–164 BCE	The Maccabees in Jerusalem stage a revolt against the Seleucid Greeks in response to the program of forced hellenization conducted by Antiochus IV.
63 BCE	Under Pompey, Rome begins its occupation of Palestine.
31 BCE	Octavian (later Augustus Caesar) defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Four years later, he assumes the powers of an emperor, and Rome officially becomes an empire.
70 CE	Rome destroys the Second Temple in putting down the Jewish revolt that had begun a few years earlier.

Jewish diversity in the first century was not limited to the literary sphere. Judaism was every bit as diverse when it came to politics and theology. Institutions and ideas such as land, covenant, law, and temple were recognized by Jews of all stripes, albeit with differing emphases and interpretations of their meaning. First-century Palestine was home to four main sects of Judaism. These sects were somewhat analogous to Christian denominations today, though the majority of Jews were not official members of any sect. Pharisaic Judaism placed special emphasis on the interpretation and adaptation of Mosaic law to all areas of life. The Sadducees were closely associated with activities at the temple in Jerusalem—the high priest was typically drawn from their ranks—and were seen by many Jews as overly friendly with the Roman overlords. The Essenes, who comprised an austere community based in the desert at Qumran near the Dead Sea, viewed all other groups as having deviated from the authentic faith of Israel. The Zealots aimed at throwing off the Roman yoke by military means. Within this field of play, Paul plants his flag with the Pharisees (Phil. 3:5; cf. Acts 23:6; 26:5), which probably explains his preoccupation with the role of the law in Romans, Galatians, and other letters. Of these four groups, only the Pharisees survived the Jewish revolt that ended with the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. The survival of so many of Paul’s letters, relative to other early Christian writers, may be due to the relevance they had late in the first century when the Pharisees were the primary rivals opposing the Christians in their claim to represent fidelity to Torah.

Conditions were different in the Diaspora, a term used for the Jewish community located outside the land of Israel. Sizable populations of Jews across the Mediterranean, in cities like Paul’s hometown of Tarsus, had put down roots centuries before the birth of Christianity. After the Babylonian destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 BCE, most Jews went into exile and their descendants never returned to the land. Jews in the Diaspora still outnumbered those in Palestine in the first century. Even in cities with large Jewish populations such as Rome and Alexandria, Jews were a minority everywhere in the Diaspora. Jews commanded the respect of their gentile neighbors for their strict moral code and the antiquity of their customs. At the same time, they were frequently the object of ridicule and prejudice on account of what many non-Jews saw as cultural insularity, bizarre dietary restrictions, loyalty to foreign interests, and the barbaric practice of circumcising male infants.[13] Little wonder that the message of justification apart from “works of the law” appealed to many gentiles, especially those like Titus who, according to Gal. 2:3, “was not compelled to be circumcised.” (From Acts 16:3, it appears that Timothy was not so lucky.)

Always cognizant of their calling to be “a peculiar people” (Deut. 14:2 KJV) wherever they called home, for Diaspora Jews like Paul the temptation to assimilate was nevertheless ever present. Engagement with gentile culture was unavoidable, beginning in the fourth century BCE, when Alexander the Great established Greek military control over much of the region and Greek became the common language of the Mediterranean basin. This fusion between Greek cultures and the peoples conquered by Alexander is called Hellenism. Without a male heir to succeed him at his death in 323 BCE, Alexander divided his empire between three of his top generals, leaving Palestine and Judea caught at a crossroads, with political and cultural traffic flowing in multiple directions.

After generations of life outside the homeland, for many Jews the decision was not whether to assimilate to Hellenistic culture, but in what way and to what extent. Ben Sira’s grandson translated his wisdom writings into Greek and in his preface acknowledged that “what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language” and that even the Law and the Prophets “differ not a little when read in the original.” His book was subsequently included in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint. Other Jewish writers did not have the same qualms. Ezekiel the Tragedian presented the story of the exodus in the form of a Greek drama. Philo of Alexandria synthesized Israelite religion with Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic philosophy. Josephus related a story about Aristotle meeting a Jew who “not only spoke Greek, but had the soul of a Greek” (Against Apion 1.179–81). While Paul did not go so far as Theodotus, who retold Gen. 34 in dactylic hexameter after the fashion of Homer, he felt no need to defend his use of the Septuagint when quoting the Jewish scriptures.

Paul conducted most of his ministry in the Diaspora but also had regular contact with Jerusalem and the Jewish Christian groups residing there. Jerusalem was not exempt from Hellenistic influence, nor were those who sought actively to escape it. The case of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (167–164 BCE) provides a poignant illustration. Although the Maccabees succeeded in driving the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Paul’s Cultural Contexts
• 2. Letter Genres
• 3. How Paul Writes
• 4. Paul’s Audiences
• 5. How Paul Reads the Old Testament
• 6. Pseudonymity
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: Dating Paul’s Letters
• Appendix 2: Defining Authorship
• General Index
• Scripture and Ancient Sources Index
• Notes
• Back Cover