The Making of Christian Morality

Reading Paul in Ancient and Modern Contexts

David G. Horrell

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780802876072
• eBook ISBN:
  9781467452618
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In this volume David Horrell focuses on themes of community, ethics, and ecology in Paul, moving from the concrete social circumstances in which the earliest Christian communities gathered to the appropriation of Paul's writings in relation to modern ethical challenges. Often questioning established consensus positions, Horrell opens up new perspectives and engages with ongoing debates both in Pauline studies and in contemporary ethics.

After covering historical questions about the setting of the Paul-ine communities, The Making of Christian Morality analyzes Paul-ine ethics through a detailed study of particular passages. In the third and final section Horrell brings Pauline thought to bear on contemporary issues and challenges, using the environmen­tal crisis as a case study to demonstrate how Paul's ethics can be appropriated fruitfully in a world so different from Paul's own.

Part I

Early Christian Assemblies in Sociohistorical Context

Chapter 1

The Letters for All (Local) Christians

Were There “Pauline Churches”?

Introduction

Richard Bauckham’s provocative and by now well-known essay, “For Whom Were the Gospels Written?,” sets out to challenge the widely held view that the gospels were shaped by, and written for, specific and different local communities: Markan, Matthean, Lukan, and Johannine, respectively.¹ Instead, Bauckham argues, “the Gospels were written for general circulation around the churches and so envisaged a very general Christian audience.”² Bauckham does not deny that “the community in which a Gospel was written is likely to have influenced the writing of the Gospel,”³ though he stresses that many of the issues addressed would have been faced not only by one specific Christian community, but by many of the churches of the time.⁴ Moreover, the evangelists most likely traveled, or were in other ways made aware of the translocal dimensions of the Christian movement.⁵ Thus the “historical context” of the gospels is “not the evangelist’s community. It is the early Christian movement in the late first century.”⁶

One of the points Bauckham makes is that the gospels have been interpreted as if they were letters, and that this is a crucial hermeneutical error. Letters, of course, were sent to specific communities to address their particular needs and problems.⁷ Nevertheless, and without intending to signal uncritical acceptance of Bauckham’s case,⁸ Bauckham’s arguments prompt me to raise some comparable questions about the so-called Pauline communities, which we know primarily through the Pauline letters. Just as Bauckham forcefully questions the validity of the concepts “Markan community,” “Matthean community,” and so on—arguing that they “should disappear from the terminology of Gospels scholarship”⁹—so we might ask how valid are the terms “Pauline community,” “Pauline church,” paulinische Gemeinde, and other equivalents, which appear in abundance in the scholarly literature.¹⁰ Just as Bauckham suggests is the case with the concepts of “Markan” or “Matthean” communities, and so on, so perhaps the term “Pauline church” has become part of our standard vocabulary without serious and critical reflection on precisely what we intend that term to mean.¹¹ The issue here, it should be stressed, is not whether the Pauline letters were written for specific local or for wider Christian audiences—the two alternatives that Bauckham considers in the case of the gospels and upon which Margaret Mitchell focuses in her critique¹²—but rather whether the local communities to which the letters were undoubtedly sent can in any sense be meaningfully labeled “Pauline.” In other words, the issue is not one of geographical localization but of theological or ideological distinctiveness.¹³

First I should make clear that I do not intend to dispute two rather indisputable data: that Paul was the founder of a number of early Christian communities, and that he wrote letters to specific Christian communities. Insofar as the term “Pauline community” is used as implicit shorthand in relation to either of these basic facts—to denote a church that Paul founded or the view of the church depicted and promoted in the Pauline letters—it has a certain historical legitimacy. But it is the further connotations that deliberately or unconsciously expand this denotation that may prove more problematic. Indeed, even with regard to the two “facts” mentioned above, some caution may be in order.

On the first point, we may suspect Paul of a certain amount of rhetorical exaggeration when he insists on his singular role as founder of any particular church. Take the Corinthian church as an example. When Paul is seeking to defuse Corinthian factionalism and dismantle party allegiances, he insists that he (alone) “planted” (ἐγὼ ἐφύτευσα, 1 Cor 3:6), laid a foundation “like a skilled master builder” (1 Cor 3:10, NRSV), and, indeed, gave them birth (ἐγὼ ὑµᾶς ἐγέννησα, 1 Cor 4:15). Yet elsewhere it becomes apparent that the founding mission at Corinth was not conducted by Paul alone but by Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy (2 Cor 1:19)—also the coauthors of 1 Thessalonians (1 Thess 1:1). Moreover, there is the distinct possibility that there were Christians in Corinth prior to Paul’s arrival there: Prisca and Aquila, according to Acts (18:2), had come to Corinth having been expelled from Rome by Claudius, and provided Paul’s first point of contact and hospitality. Acts does not record that they were already Christians on arriving in Corinth, but neither is there any mention of their conversion there; and the fact that Paul makes their household his base suggests their Christian sympathies.¹⁴ Such factors complicate the picture of Paul as the sole founder of known Christian communities. And, of course, there are other churches to which Paul writes or refers, such as those in Antioch or in Rome, which he certainly did not found.

On the second point, it is worth noting that Paul sometimes addresses his letters to a broad geographical area (e.g., 2 Cor 1:1), or urges that a letter be widely read (1 Thess 5:27; cf. Col 4:16),¹⁵ or, indeed, gives an indication that his letter is addressed to all Christians everywhere (1 Cor 1:2)—so the later circulation of Pauline letters as documents of universal Christian importance only picks up a claim already expressed within the letters themselves. Furthermore, as we shall see, insofar as the historical realities are concerned, Paul’s letters themselves do not even depict the churches to which he writes as “Pauline” communities, in the sense of being theologically and ideologically distinct communities, with “little contact”¹⁶ with other competing factions. So even the idea that the term “Pauline community” might validly describe the church as depicted in Paul’s letters is not entirely secure. We might perhaps want to suggest that the term “Pauline community” could be used in a sense analogous to the use of “ideal” or “implied” reader—to refer to the “ideal” or “implied” church as it is constructed and envisaged by the author of the letters, Paul. Such a church would, by definition, be a “Pauline” church, since it would dance to the tune of Paul’s instructions and accept his authority without question. Yet the historical churches, even as Paul allows us to glimpse them in his letters, never conformed neatly to such Pauline ideals, whatever the apostle might have wished.

Although these observations, then, are important qualifications of data all-too-easily assumed at face value, it is the question about whether there were Pauline communities that I particularly want to address. It was Ferdinand Christian Baur, of course, who famously placed onto the agenda of NT studies the thesis that early Christianity was riven by a twofold division between Petrine, law-observant, Jewish Christianity and Pauline, non-law-observant, gentile, “universal” Christianity.¹⁷ Although widely criticized, this basic thesis still has its contemporary proponents.¹⁸ The particular question that concerns us here is not whether Baur was right or wrong, but whether the divisions and arguments that undoubtedly existed in some forms in the early Christian movement were embodied in distinct communities. David Sim, in his response to Bauckham’s thesis, presumes that this was the case. Given the very strong disagreement over questions of law observance, we should speak, Sim insists, not of the Christian movement, but “of very different Christian movements.”¹⁹ Taking the Pauline epistles as evidence, Sim argues that “our sources strongly suggest that the rival Christian factions had little contact with one another.”²⁰ Different churches were aligned with different early Christian factions and those with one theological perspective on the law would not have recognized those of a different perspective as belonging to the same movement.²¹ Thus, according to Sim, each gospel writer would have written for their own community—not necessarily “a single church,” but perhaps “a cluster of churches linked by geographical proximity and a shared theological perspective”²²—so while “Mark wrote for a Christian community that did not observe the Torah. . . . Matthew wrote for one that did.”²³

But does the evidence from the Pauline letters—the most important source for the earliest period—support Sim’s conclusions? Let us briefly survey that evidence, moving through the letters in what may approximate to their chronological order, though nothing in particular hangs on this choice of order.

The Evidence of Paul’s Letters

First Thessalonians, probably Paul’s earliest letter, might certainly be taken as evidence that the church at Thessalonica was, at this time at least, a “Pauline” community, so long as we qualify that by insisting that it is Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy who founded the church there and now write to its members. There is no explicit indication of any anti-Pauline opposition in, or known to, the church, nor any mention of other leading Christian figures. Second Thessalonians, though probably inauthentic, does reveal that a certain version of Paul’s gospel now has to be defended against alternatives; but this text, if a later and pseudonymous attempt to correct misreadings of Paulinism, may not be particularly revealing of conditions specifically in Thessalonica. Nonetheless, given the early date of 1 Thessalonians, its silence on any non-Pauline influences in the community should not be overinterpreted as indicating that the churches of Thessalonica continued to be exclusively “Pauline.” Indeed, the inclusion of Silvanus in the team of those who founded this church, and that at Corinth, is in itself a significant qualification of the idea that these churches were “Pauline” as opposed to “early Christian”: Silvanus/Silas first appears in Jerusalem, helping to bear a letter from there to Antioch, after which he joins Paul’s missionary team (Acts 15:22–40). John Elliott goes too far in claiming Silvanus as a chief representative of a Petrine circle (cf. 1 Pet 5:12), but neither should he be seen as an exclusively Pauline collaborator.²⁴

Galatians may or may not be early, but the information it yields does not depend on its chronological placement. The letter gives a certain window onto Christian communities in two different locations: in Antioch and in Galatia. Without needing to resolve the many complex questions about the incident at Antioch, we may make some basic observations. First, the table fellowship includes both gentile Christians and Jewish Christians, and, more specifically, includes Paul and Barnabas on the one hand, associated especially with the gentile mission, and also Peter on ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by John M. G. Barclay
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Figures
• Introduction
• I: Early Christian Assemblies in Sociohistorical Context
• II: Pauline Ethics in Historical Context
• III: Pauline Ethics in Modern Contexts
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Biblical References