The Letters of Paul, Sixth Edition

Conversations in Context

Calvin J. Roetzel

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780664239992
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645491
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

This is the sixth edition of the classic textbook that has been introducing Paul and his writing to seminary and undergraduate students for over forty years. Roetzel provides a comprehensive look at Paul in light of recent scholarship and theological understandings of Paul. This new edition includes four brand-new sections on the following: the chronology of Paul's letters; Paul's concept of "law" in the context of messianic expectation; the religious and political contexts in which Paul's letters were written; and Jewish understandings of Gentiles and Paul's mission to include them among the elect of God. This long-established textbook is the ideal choice for any student of Paul.

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Paul and His Hellenistic World

Most might agree with second-century Polycarp, that neither he nor anyone like him was “able to follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul” (Letter to the Philippians 3.2). Parts of the letters are “hard to understand” (2 Pet. 3:16), and at times we might side with the great Pauline scholar Ernst Käsemann, who once complained that no one understood Paul except the heretic Marcion, and even he misunderstood him. Nevertheless, information about Paul and his world, now available, makes attempts to understand the apostle less daunting, though still difficult. While Paul’s letters are understandable only in light of his genius and gospel, understanding their contexts will offer clues to their purpose. In the discussion below we shall examine the milieu of both Paul and his readers for hints of the dynamic of the letters, the refinement of Paul’s theologizing and fiery rhetoric that helped shape the Jesus movement.

As Acts suggests, Paul probably grew up in Tarsus, an important commercial, intellectual, administrative, and cultural center on the southeast coast of Asia Minor, modern Turkey (Acts 9:11; 21:39; 22:3). As the Roman provincial capital of Cilicia, Tarsus rivaled Alexandria, Corinth, and Athens in importance. There Paul would have learned his first language. There he would have studied the Septuagint (LXX), the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek translation. There he would have learned to read, to write, and to imitate Greek literary and rhetorical forms. There he would have received his Latinized Greek name Paulos (Paul), rather than the Hebrew Shaul (Saul, Acts 13:9). There he would have been introduced to a vibrant Hellenistic culture—its anthropology, its political and religious institutions, its cosmology, its sports, and its universalism. There he doubtless would have had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends and playmates. And that rich, multifaceted experience would have lingered to influence his messianist thinking and his worldly experience. Some sense of the interplay of these multiple factors is fundamental for a serious and discerning reading of the letters.

SELECTED WAYS LANGUAGE CREATED A WORLD

The great philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein has taught us that a whole mythology is embedded in our language. Similarly the blind, deaf, and speechless Helen Keller once wrote that the power of language to create and affirm identity is magical. Language, we now know, is no mere passive mirror of the world or a mute tool, to be discarded after world construction is complete. Rather, language shapes one’s worldview, one’s sense of self, and one’s understanding of ultimate reality, history, community, family; and it identifies such mundane things as color, smells, and sacramental meaning. Paul also gained his understanding of life, death, fate, freedom, sin, piety, and community through his native language. Within his Diaspora community Paul became what Adolf Deissmann almost a century ago called a “Septuagint-Jew.”1 But before turning to consider his Greek Scriptures, let us first survey the Hellenistic world bequeathed to him.

While the Septuagint was central to Paul’s theology, much of his language and important religious expressions came from the wider Hellenistic culture. The Greek word for “conscience” (syneidēsis), for example, commonly appeared in the writings of the Stoic philosophers but is missing entirely from Jewish Scriptures. Even allowing that the thing may exist when the word does not, “conscience,” as used by Paul, resembled its Hellenistic parent even when sharing a family likeness with its Jewish genealogy. The apostle appropriated the word to defend himself against charges of insincerity (1 Cor. 4:2), and he asked the Corinthians to acknowledge the truth of his apostolic claim (2 Cor. 5:11). In the first reference Paul allowed that conscience was culturally conditioned, and thus partially flawed, for he argued there that even though no charge was brought against him by his conscience, he was not, therefore, necessarily innocent. For he recognized that he would ultimately have to stand before the divine tribunal (“I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me,” 1 Cor. 4:4). Elsewhere, however, he spoke of the important function of the conscience for the Gentile unbeliever (Rom. 2:15) as well as the “weak” (l Cor. 8:7, 10, 12). So Paul’s understanding embraced both concepts—conscience that served as an inner critical voice that he recognized as culturally shaped, and conscience as an awareness of the ultimate accountability to the one God. The two stand in tension in Paul’s thought, even though both play important roles.

Elsewhere Paul drew on the tradition of the Hellenistic church that predated him. But even if Paul borrowed these traditions, they were no less his own, for in adopting and using the traditions of others Paul shared the views expressed, even if he did not author them. In the closing admonition of his letter to the Philippians, for example, he cited a tradition packed with language from his Hellenistic milieu. There he wrote, “Whatever is true (alēthē) is honorable (semna), whatever is just (dikaia), whatever is pure (hagna), whatever is pleasing (prosphilē), whatever is commendable (euphēma), if there is any excellence (arētē), and if there is anything worthy of praise (epainos), think about these things” (Phil. 4:8). A survey reveals ways this passage mirrored a world quite apart from that of the Hebrew parent. For example, alēthēs, the “true, truthful, or honest,” and semnos, that which is “august, sacred, or worthy of honor,” are hardly intelligible apart from their Hellenistic origin. Anything judged more important—for example, the majesty of the king’s throne, gorgeous dress, eloquent speech, beautiful music, or graceful motion—shared that same world. Hagnos, much used in Hellenistic circles to refer to the sanctuary, and prosphilēs, that is, the “lovely, pleasing, or agreeable,” likewise are of Hellenistic parentage. Euphēmos, what is “auspicious, praiseworthy, attractive, or appealing,” and arētē, a prominent word in Greek philosophy and literature, referred to excellence of achievement or mastery of a field; it may even signify valor. Also special merit, honor, good fortune, success, and fame likewise had a Hellenistic genealogy. Epainos, “recognition, approval, or praise,” similarly shared the Hellenistic world of the words above.

The alert reader will recognize the nonbiblical character of other materials in the Pauline epistles. Scholars recognize, for instance, that the virtue and vice lists that interlarded Hellenistic writings shared the world of Paul’s letters. Galatians 5:19–23, for example, lists “works of the flesh”—“fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these”—to admonish readers to produce the “fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”2 Such lists came to Paul from his Hellenized Judaism, and more than an emphasis on works of the law were the focus of his native faith framed by the Hellenistic world. Except for “love,” his list of virtues contains nothing that would have appeared as strange or unusual in conventional Greek ethical writings. The eschatological tone of those lists came from Paul. The very use to which Paul put these lists demonstrates how fully he inhabited his Hellenistic Jewish world.

Paul also made copious use of metaphors from his Greek milieu. While not literally true, the metaphor aimed to provoke thought and to engage the hearer as an imaginative partner in conversation. If one should say, “Sam Jackson is a horse,” or “Stephanie Grant is a gazelle,” the hearer would know those expressions are not to be taken literally, but at some level they are true.

So also Paul’s letters use metaphors from sports, politics, nature, and religion to provoke thought. In 1 Corinthians 9:24–27, for example, Paul used a boxing metaphor to describe his discipline of the body to make it serve his mission. While boxers try to defeat opponents in a slugfest, Paul pummeled his body to bring it into submission to Christ (see also Phil. 3:12–15). This statement offered believers an optic through which they might view their world afresh. Similarly, when Paul bestowed citizenship in heaven’s colony (politeuma) on Philippian converts (Phil. 3:20), he invited them to ponder the fateful difference between this world and another. Likewise, he admonished fractious Corinthians to ponder their place in the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 12:27). With sharp irony Paul invited them to reflect on a conversation between the ear and the eye. How silly for the ear to say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body” (12:16). Designed to puncture inflated pretensions, these metaphors aimed to move believers from a self-absorbed, individualistic, puffed-up spirituality into a concern for the welfare of the whole church. Similarly, his metaphorical statement that among the Thessalonians he was “gentle . . . like a nurse” (1 Thess. 2:7) aimed to assure a cell of converts of his tender care for them.3 While all of these metaphors spring from a Greek context, they depend on the familiarity of converts with their place in the “new creation” and on their ability to translate those images into their religious experience. Note how elsewhere also Paul used metaphor to advance his mission, to educate his churches, and to instruct his converts in the gospel’s imperative.

Paul’s play with metaphor often signaled a crucial turn or a struggle with a seemingly insolvable problem. In Romans 9:30–33 and 11:11, for example, he sketched a scenario in which Israel, while running a race, comically (or tragically) tripped on a rock placed on the track by God, only to be beaten to the finish by Gentiles who were not even competing. After its introduction in 9:30–33, this farcical construction ferments for more than a chapter before resurfacing in 11:11. There Paul asks, “Have they [i.e., the Israelites] stumbled so as to fall?”4 Then he snorted, “No, no, absolutely not!”

In an aha moment, the racing metaphor provoked new thought even in the apostle himself. Paul opined that this race was unlike other races in which winners require losers; this race, he argued, was to have only winners. Jews who ran the Torah race and Gentiles who did not would both be victorious. When we come to discuss Romans 9–11 and Paul’s response to the question, “Now in turning to the Gentiles, has God reneged on promises made to Israel?” we shall see how this metaphor worked to advance thought about a difficult question.

Mixed with the language drawn from his Hellenistic environment were also metaphorical expressions that were unmistakably Jewish in origin. For example, Paul called the church “God’s temple” (l Cor. 3:16–17) and thus used a powerful religious symbol to bolster the identity of Christ people. He also referred to Philippian believers as “the circumcision” (Phil. 3:3),5 and he invited the Romans to present their bodies as a “living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). All such metaphors bore the unmistakable fingerprints of a vital Jewish legacy. Inasmuch as Paul’s background contained a dynamic blend of Jewish and Hellenistic elements, it is no surprise to find a mix of those elements in nonmetaphorical language as well. That complex mix may account in part for Paul’s success in preaching a Jewish gospel to a Hellenistic audience. Sensitivity to the interplay of Hellenistic and Jewish language worlds will offer the curious reader clues to the dynamic of the exchanges between Paul and his churches.

METHODS OF ARGUMENTATION

Rudolf Bultmann once noted how Paul used a form of Hellenistic philosophical argumentation, the diatribe, to respond to those contesting his gospel.6 Used as a tool of Stoic and Cynic argumentation from the third century BCE onward, the diatribe enjoyed broad popular use in Jewish circles as well. The diatribe was an argument form that placed sharp questions on the lips of hypothetical objectors as an entry to blunt responses. In reading Roma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Images
• Preface to the Sixth Edition
• Introduction: Contrary Impressions
• 1. Paul and His Hellenistic World
• 2. Paul and His Jewish World
• 3. The Anatomy of the Letters
• 4. Traditions behind the Letters
• 5. The Letters as Conversations
• 6. Paul and His Myths
• 7. New Testament Interpreters of Paul
• 8. Currents and Crosscurrents
• Suggested Additional Reading
• Index