Paul in Current Anglophone Scholarship

Introduction

Paul has always been tricky. So many images of him have flashed across the scholarly screen that it is sometimes hard to imagine them all referring to the same person. Hard, too, for a seasoned scholar, never mind a research student or a busy parish minister, to get a handle on what has been happening. What follows is an attempted bird’s-eye view; but this bird is conscious of flying mostly over the limited fields of Anglophone scholarship. There is plenty of writing about Paul in the rest of the world which doesn’t fit these categories and from which, in the fullness of time, we might all learn. ¹

A partial excuse for Anglophone concentration is the new dominance, in biblical studies as a whole, of North America. In the 1970s Germany still led the way. We might disagree, but it was Bultmann, Jeremias, Käsemann, and the rest we were disagreeing with. Sadly, just as older German scholars seldom cited non-Germans, the Anglophone world has often reciprocated. The sheer volume of publications, not to mention the internet, makes it hard to address this unhealthy situation. ²

A further crucial element, again American, is the implicit claim to scholarly high ground from the supposedly ‘objective’ research in ‘departments of religion’, as opposed to the supposedly ‘subjective’ or faith-driven study in seminaries. Postmodernity should have washed away these suppositions: neutrality is impossible. But once the centre of scholarship migrated to a country whose church/state split was carved in stone, the myth of ‘objectivity’ was bound to loom large.

The revolution in Pauline studies symbolized by Ed Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977 was a symptom of this double phenomenon: the turn from Germany to America and from theology (particularly Lutheran theology) to the secular study of ‘religion’. The earlier protest of Stendahl (1976: 78–96 [1963]), and the debate with Käsemann (1971: ch. 3) that followed, could still be regarded as a clash between a Swedish Lutheran and a German one. ³ But with Sanders all that was gone. Luther himself, and his twentieth-century followers, were now the problem. Despite the older appeal to the ‘historical-critical method’, history itself, particularly the study of first-century Judaism, would undermine the learned German constructions. Thus, whereas one of the major features of earlier German scholarship had been the attempt to rescue Paul from Judaism (anything too Jewish, or ‘covenantal’, in his writings was seen as a pre-Pauline formula or a mere response to opponents), ⁴ a major recent feature has been the enthusiastic attempt to place Paul once again in his Jewish world. This reflects a further contemporary element: a horrified reaction to the Holocaust, and to anything reminiscent of the ideologies that led to it. Nobody wants to be anti-Jewish, still less anti-Semitic. This has generated its own distorting and moralizing rhetoric. ⁵

Sanders embodied two major features of current Pauline studies: historical analysis as opposed to a pseudo-history ‘projected’ by theology, and a reassessment of Paul’s place within second-temple Judaism. In the latter task, Sanders looked back to his own teacher, W. D. Davies, and beyond that to Albert Schweitzer. ⁶ Like Davies, Sanders lined Paul up alongside the Rabbis (though, unlike Davies, his aim was comparison, not hypothetical derivation). ⁷ Like Schweitzer, Sanders privileged ‘participationist’ theology over against ‘juristic’ (though, unlike Schweitzer, he played down Paul’s apocalyptic framework). This polarization, often (in my view) misunderstood and misstated, still haunts the field. But already the task is set: where do we place Paul historically, and how do we understand the inner coherence (or lack thereof) in his theology? History and theology then interact not only with exegesis (how do we understand this verse, this chapter, this letter?) but also with questions of contemporary relevance: what might Paul say to us today (or, perhaps, how should we distance ourselves from him)? I deal here mainly with questions of history and theology, despite the plethora of commentaries on the one hand (including those that, importantly but controversially, analyse the text according to the canons of ancient rhetoric) and the constant question of ‘relevance’ on the other. ⁸

Like a tornado flattening one house but leaving its neighbours intact, the recent shift has wiped out some earlier hypotheses, but not all. Nobody now, I think, imagines Gnosticism to have been important for Paul, whether as an influence to follow or a danger to oppose. Käsemann tacitly rejected that Bultmannian presupposition, though his substitution of ‘apocalyptic’ has not been altogether helpful, as we shall see. But other features of F. C. Baur’s liberal Protestant paradigm remain largely unchallenged in Germany and mainstream America, despite the collapse of Baur’s paradigm and presuppositions. Ephesians and Colossians were regarded as secondary because of their high Christology and ecclesiology; 2 Thessalonians, because of its high-octane apocalyptic. Galatians was seen as late, and addressed to north Galatia (against the historical, archaeological and topological evidence), because it thereby anchored Baur’s hypothetical Paul/Peter split. Few seem to have noticed that Ephesians fits well with the ‘new perspective’; that if Paul was an ‘apocalyptic’ thinker 2 Thessalonians ought to be central; and that a ‘new perspective’ reading of Galatians fits well with the historically plausible early date and South Galatian destination. ⁹ The pseudo-historical grin on the liberal protestant Cheshire Cat remains, long after the Cat itself has vanished. ¹⁰

1. The New Perspective and Beyond

Much has been written about the so-called ‘new perspective’, a phrase James Dunn picked up and made his own. ¹¹ The movement was disparate from the start. Sanders, Dunn and the present writer, often cited as representatives, always disagreed on basic points. In terms of historical theology, the ‘new perspective’ contained elements of a Reformed protest (Judaism and the Law as positive and God-given) against a Lutheran theology (Judaism as the wrong sort of religion, the Law as negative). Had Reformed scholars like Herman Ridderbos been listened to, the protest might never have been necessary.

The ‘new perspective’, inevitably, oversimplified. Realising that the earlier protests of G. F. Moore and others had been cited but sidelined, Sanders determined on a frontal assault against the ruling paradigm. In doing so, he flattened Judaism and Paul into religious systems concerned with ‘getting in and staying in’; this may have been important in, say, Qumran, but not in, say, the Enoch literature, Josephus or the Wisdom of Solomon. Furthermore, Sanders assumed a basically Protestant value-laden analysis of ‘grace and works’, classifying Judaism with the former rather than the latter. It isn’t just that this analysis can be challenged as it stands. ¹² The problem is that, despite his own critique of reformational analyses, Sanders still assumed such a position on the underlying issue. ¹³ And Sanders himself, with characteristic frankness, admitted that though he saw ‘participation’ as Paul’s fundamental category, he did not have an explanation for how that notion ‘worked’. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, the basic elements of the ‘new perspective’ – an alternative reading of second-temple Judaism as ‘covenantal nomism’, an analysis of Paul in terms of ‘solution’ preceding ‘plight’ and of ‘participation’ trumping ‘justification’, and a more positive evaluation of Paul’s stance vis-a-vis Judaism – have been key subsequent reference points.

The most obvious reaction to the first claim, with implications for the others, has been the attempt to undermine the ‘new perspective’ in its own terms. Two large volumes have tackled this head on, accusing Sanders and his followers of errors both historical (‘Judaism really was a religion of “works-righteousness” in the traditional sense’) and theological and pastoral (‘the “new perspective” undermines justification by faith and leads to an uncertain and relativised gospel’). The jury is still out on this, and as myself one of those in the dock all I had better say here is that some of the prosecution witnesses need to read their own favourite texts a bit more closely, and to realise that quoting Luther, though no doubt entertaining to the home crowd, carries little weight when discussing what Paul meant sixteen centuries earlier. ¹⁵ A different sort of attack has come from some Jewish scholars who disagree with Sanders’s account of the Pharisees themselves (it is widely agreed, with only minor dissent, that we should believe Paul’s claim to have been a strict Pharisee.) ¹⁶ No doubt, since study of many of the Jewish texts involved is still in comparative infancy, we should expect a good deal more nuancing of the first ‘new perspective’ claim. In any case, what is at stake is not primarily how we characterize first-century Judaism but how Paul himself saw it. Of coruse, we need then to ask if he was right; but let us first be clear what he meant in (for instance) Romans 10.2: ‘I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God; but it is not based on knowledge.’

To the second question, ‘plight and solution’, there has been a variety of answers. Sanders claimed, following Stendahl, that Saul the Pharisee did not have a ‘bad conscience’ needing to find forgiveness. ¹⁷ He therefore had no ‘plight’ requiring a ‘solution’; so his own train of thought must have proceeded in the other direction, accounting for some scatty statements about sin and the law. ¹⁸ This, however, seems too hasty. Not only can it be attacked in its own terms. ¹⁹ It seems clear, whether from Qumran, Josephus, 4 Ezra or anywhere else, that, however zealous and holy a first-century Jew might be, there was still a ‘problem’: not Martin Luther’s personal problem, but the national problem of Jews under Roman rule, with scripture unfulfilled. Israel was unredeemed; Israel’s God had not returned in glory and power. ²⁰ This is the kind of quarry that Sanders’s net of ‘getting in and staying in’ was not designed to catch. A further weakness: Sanders assumed not only a sixteenth-century view of ‘grace’, but also an eighteenth-century view of ‘religion’. First-century Judaism embraced land, family, politics, and above all Torah and Temple, not because it was ‘works-righteousness’ but because of the God of the Bible, whose ‘righteousness’ meant, among other things, his faithfulness to covenant and promise. ²¹

The third question, Sanders’s Schweitzer-like subsuming of justification under participation, we shall postpone. The final question, Paul’s relationship to Judaism, remains central and controversial. There has been a flurry of Jewish writing on Paul, offering several further ‘perspectives’. Daniel Boyarin’s learned, profound but quirky portrayal comes to mind, as do the innovative works by Mark Nanos. ²² A predictable spectrum emerges, from Jewish writers who want to reclaim Paul and suggest that he was never really a ‘Christian’ in any meaningful sense ²³ through to those who, like Schoeps in an earlier generation, declare that Paul knew little about Palestinian Judaism, and was a renegade, hating his ancestral religion and perhaps himself as well. ²⁴ Meanwhile, both Christian and secular attempts to locate Paul within Judaism have reflected other concerns: not only the rejection of Holocaust-laden ideology, but also a relativistic or universalistic impulse. ²⁵ This joins up with another, prevalent in American fundamentalism: the idea that Romans 11, linked to the ‘rapture’ in 1 Thessalonians 4, predicts end-time Jewish conversion. Thus American left and American right assume, without adequate exegetical grounding, that Paul believed in an ultimate Jewish salvation. This then plays back into Paul’s critique of Israel in Galatians and Romans as well as Philippians 3 and 2 Corinthians 3. Exegesis has reflected these concerns rather than reframing them.

Three major developments within the broad ‘new perspective’ now emerge. First, I still regard Dunn’s proposal about ‘works of the law’ as correct: Paul is concerned, not with a proto-Pelagian attempt to save oneself by ethical energy, but with the Jewish attempt to define God’s people in terms of traditional boundary-markers. Qumran offers a parallel (one of the very few non-Pauline instances of the phrase ‘works of law’) in which a similar point is made to define one Jewish group over against others. ²⁶ To caricature this, as is sometimes done, in terms of minor issues of table manners (the food laws) or going easy on awkward entry requirements (circumcision) simply misses the point. ²⁷ If the big, gnawing first-century Jewish question was, ‘When and how will our God keep his word and liberate and vindicate us, and who will be his true people when he does so?’ (the question of ‘God’s righteousness’, as in 4 Ezra), then the question of loyalty to the symbols which marked out the Jew from the pagan becomes all-important. It does not seem to me that Dunn’s (and my) critics have begun to take this point seriously. ²⁸

The second major development came with Richard Hays’s groundbreaking Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. For Sanders, Paul simply invoked scripture as proof-text. To expound ‘justification by faith’, he searched his memory for texts combining ‘righteousness’ and ‘faith; finding Genesis 15 and Habakkuk 2, he dropped them into the argument. ²⁹ (Sanders was at least taking seriously Paul’s deep scriptural knowledge; many, still, suppose that Paul only quoted scripture under constraint, looking up passages in a written text. ³⁰ ) Hays, by contrast, demonstrated that Paul regularly quotes scripture with the entire passage in mind. This remains a leading edge in the field. ³¹ Others, however, claim that Paul could not have intended detailed reference to texts unknown to most hearers, and that he quoted scripture simply for rhetorical effect. ³²

Hays was also partly responsible for the third new wave within the ‘new perspective’: the turn to narrative. Even when texts such as Paul’s do not appear to be telling a story, we can detect an implicit narrative: the story both of Israel (especially the Exodus) and of Jesus himself (focussed on his saving death and resurrection). ³³ There is, however, a tension here not resolved even by Hays himself: was Paul’s retrieval of the scriptural narrative a matter of typology, setting ancient and recent events in parallel? Or was Paul appealing to a single continuous narrative, running from Abraham, and even Adam, through the exile and the long, dark years that followed, eventually arriving at the place ‘when the fullness of time arrived’ (Gal. 4.4)?

Within this, a particular storm centre has been Hays’ proposal that Paul saw Jesus’ death in terms of Jesus’ own ‘faith’ or ‘faithfulness’. The key phrase pistis Christou has usually been translated ‘faith in Christ’, but it can also mean, and according to Hays and others does mean, ‘[the] faith of Christ’ or ‘[the] faithfulness of Christ’. ³⁴ Nobody doubts that Paul could and did speak in terms of believers putting their faith in Christ, or in ‘the God who raised Jesus from the dead’. The question is whether this particular phrase, in its contexts, refers to that human faith, or to the ‘faithfulness’ of Jesus himself to God’s saving plan (in parallel with the ‘obedience’ mentioned in Romans 5 and Philippians 2). Here paths diverge. Many of us now read Paul as saying that Jesus, as Messiah, took upon himself the faithful obedience which Israel should have offered but did not. (This, in relation to Romans 2.17—3.31, is what convinced me.) Dunn, in company with most ‘old perspective’ readers, still insists that Paul is referring to the believer’s own faith. What counts, in the last analysis, is the coherent sense any proposal can make of Paul’s actual arguments. ³⁵

Two further post-new-perspective works come from different angles. Francis Watson has bravely revised his earlier work Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles so that, avoiding the polarizations of his original stance (theology or sociology) it incorporates many new insights and angles of vision. ³⁶ Michael Gorman has developed an analysis in which, looking towards Eastern Orthodoxy, he focusses not simply on the participation of the believer in the life of Christ, but on the transformation of the believer by the life of Christ within. This has undoubtedly been a neglected theme in much western thought. Whether it is sufficient to carry the weight Gorman places on it – including a revised doctrine of justification – remains to be seen. ³⁷ These scholars are typical of many who have refused to remain content with the dichotomy of ‘old perspective’ and ‘new perspective’, and have pushed towards fresh historical, theological and exegetical understanding.

2. Re-Enter Apocalyptic

In parallel to the ‘new perspective’ is a quite different approach to Paul, recently taken root in America. In a remarkable commentary on Galatians, dedicated to his teacher Käsemann, J. L. Martyn re-reads Paul in terms of what he calls ‘apocalyptic’. ³⁸

I say ‘what he calls’ because, though Martyn’s debt to Käsemann is obvious, he does not follow the Tübingen master in the meaning of this central, though slippery, term. For Käsemann, ‘apocalyptic’ meant simply the imminent expectation of the Parousia and, with it, the end of the world. This opened up, for Käsemann, a cosmic vision of God and the world, as opposed to Bultmann’s individual, ‘anthropological’, focus. (This goes with their respective analyses of dikaiosynē theou: for Bultmann, this is the righteousness which God credits to the believer’s account, but for Käsemann it is God’s own saving power.) Käsemann was here following the early Barth, who looms large over the current North American theological scene. Like Barth, Käsemann had opposed the Third Reich, whose theory of immanent historical development sustained the Nazi ideology. Barth’s famous ‘No!’ echoes loudly in Martyn’s reading of Paul.

Martyn, however, locates the ‘apocalyptic’ moment, not at the Parousia, but at the death of Jesus. That was where God ‘invaded’ history: everything before, all other features of the world including particularly its ‘religion’, are at best irrelevant and at worst demonic. Paul’s protest against the Galatians ‘teachers’ was thus that of Barth against bourgeois Kulturprotestantismus: the teachers were offering a salvation history, a narrative which one might join, but Paul was announcing God’s invasion of the world.

Martyn was extending and modifying the work of J. Christiaan Beker. ³⁹ Beker, sticking closer to Käsemann, did not see Galatians (which doesn’t mention the Parousia) as fitting the scheme. Both Beker and Martyn seem to have been protesting against comfortable American religiosity, expressed not least in widespread evangelicalism and fundamentalism. If God’s victory over the world, either past (in the cross) or future (in the Parousia) demolishes and remakes the world, then the self-obsessed, soul-searching fussiness of standard ‘saved-and-lost’ teaching can be put aside. Thus, instead of ‘justification’ as traditionally conceived, we have ‘rectification’, the putting-right of all things, humans included. As with Barth, this raises the question of universalism, the regular western reaction to traditional hell-fire teaching. But what exactly is going on when we transplant an early twentieth-century German protest against bourgeois liberalism to an early twenty-first century American protest against bourgeois conservative evangelicalism – and use the combination to read a first- century text?

A similar ‘apocalyptic’ protest has now come from Douglas Campbell, in one of the largest, and most tendentious, books on Paul ever written. ⁴⁰ Campbell’s breathtaking construction combines Martyn’s ‘apocalyptic’ reading with Sanders’s privileging of ‘participation’ theology over ‘justification’, and proposes a victory not only over the world but over ‘justification theology’ itself, requiring him to dismiss large sections of Romans 1—4 as a ‘speech in character’ which Paul puts into an opponent’s mouth. It is, of course, easy to solve a jigsaw if you sweep half the pieces off the table. But Campbell’s strong points, particularly his insights on ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘participation’, will need to be taken seriously in any alternative reconstruction.

There are several sharp questions to be addressed to this whole ‘apocalyptic’ paradigm. How come it is so different from what the leading analysts of first-century Jewish apocalyptic describe? Where else do we find evidence of the split between two types of ‘apocalyptic’ theology which Martyn, following his former student Martinus de Boer, predicates as characterising Paul and his opponents? ⁴¹ Does not Jewish apocalyptic regularly tell the story of Israel, reaching a climax – the very thing Martyn will not allow to Paul? Is not apocalyptic deeply covenantal – again, rejected by Martyn? To what extent is Martyn’s view simply a new version of (Käsemann’s version of) the old perspective? Why do neither Martyn nor de Boer, despite their location near the heart of contemporary American scholarship, wrestle more directly with the ‘new perspective’? (This is one version of a worrying trend: multiple different movements of scholarship make it very difficult to engage with more than one part of the field at a time, and conversations develop in different self-contained groups.) The closest Martyn gets to the ‘new perspective’ is his agreement with Sanders that Paul’s thought moved from solution to plight. But he says this, not from a fresh reading of Pharisaism, but from his Barthian a priori. Everything must now be known, and can only be known, through the fresh revelation in Christ. ⁴²

Despite Martyn’s enthusiastic following, especially in North America, ⁴³ I find his position deeply flawed. By attributing to Paul’s opponents views which were in fact central to Paul himself – the centrality of the promises to Abraham and their fulfilment in the Messiah – he makes it impossible to hear what Paul is actually saying. What is more, by seeing Paul as sweeping away all previous ‘religion’, particularly the Jewish-Christian teachers and their scripturally based theology, Martyn cannot escape the charge levelled by Sanders against the more common forms of the ‘old perspective’. He has rendered Paul radically unJewish, even anti-Jewish. Scholars too readily toss around the word ‘supersessionism’, but if it belongs anywhere it is right here.

Two other features of first-century ‘apocalyptic’ call for comment here. Take, first, any Jewish apocalyptic text that (implicitly at least) tells the long story of God’s people. If, at the point of fulfillment, we find a key figure executing God’s purposes, we should expect that figure to be Israel’s Messiah. When we find such a figure in Paul, and when Paul calls him Christos, we can no longer collude with the old belief that this was simply a proper name. Jesus’ Messiahship has been a sleeping element in Pauline studies so long that many scholars seem not to know what to do with it if it was proved. But proved it can be, and major revolutions must follow. ⁴⁴

The second feature is that Jewish apocalyptic is essentially political. Some ‘apocalyptic’ texts are concerned mainly to explore heaven itself (at which point ‘apocalyptic’ shades off into what we now call ‘mysticism’), but the great texts (Daniel, Revelation, the Enoch literature, 4 Ezra, the Sibylline Oracles, and so on) are describing, and often intending to affect, the actual political situation of Israel, caught among the empires of the world. Fourth Ezra, reinterpreting Daniel 7 after the devastating events of AD 66–70, sees the Lion of Judah confronting and overthrowing the Eagle of Rome. If we invoke ‘apocalyptic’, we must expect to arrive in the world of first-century politics. Martyn and his followers, by and large, do not make this connection, while those who write about Paul and politics often steer clear of ‘apocalyptic’. It is time to put genre and context back together again. ⁴⁵

3. Paul and Politics

As recently as twenty years ago, scholars (including the present writer) could write about Paul with little thought for the political realities of the day. In Romans 13, Paul appeared comfortable with the political status quo, and that was the end of it. Part of the turn away from a dehistoricized theology (including the Lutheran ‘two kingdoms’ theory) and back to a many-sided historical reality has been the upsurge of interest in Paul’s implicit, and sometimes explicit, political stance. To be sure, this new turn has its own context. Many Americans appear pleased with their neo-imperialism, and look to Rome as a model, ⁴⁶ but others, horrified by the same thing, look to Paul for a critique of Rome and hence of right-wing America. Others again, seeing this reaction, dismiss the whole thing as a fad. What counts, as ever, is history. And first-century history is full of Roman imperial symbols, from coins to temples, from the Ara Pacis to the Arch of Trajan, both expressing an imperial ideology under which the Jews, like many others, had suffered so much. ⁴⁷

Once we line up central motifs in Paul’s theology against imperial ideology and propaganda, it is astonishing that this theme was neglected so long. The word ‘gospel’ itself, rare (though important) in Israel’s scriptures, announced the Emperor’s accession or other celebrations. The word ‘Lord’, Paul’s central acclamation for Jesus (echoing, in many passages, the Septuagintal kyrios), was a central Caesar-title, as of course was ‘son of God’. These points, made a century ago by Deissmann and others, were held at bay by the dominance, not of ‘theology’ as is sometimes said (a good ‘theology’ ought to include a full, critical account of all creation, politics included), but by a particular kind of post-Enlightenment ‘theology’. Anyway, it was against this that Richard Horsley launched his protest in the 1990s, followed by others including Neil Elliot and the present writer. ⁴⁸

Among the products of this new wave we find a controversial account of Galatians. ⁴⁹ Supposing the real trouble in Galatia was that the (ex-pagan) Christians were, explicitly or implicitly, claiming the Jewish exemption under Roman law, hoping to escape without penalty for no longer worshipping local deities, Caesar included. Suppose, then, that the civic authorities put pressure on the local Jews, and they on the Jewish Christians, to bring these Gentile Christians into line by having them circumcised. Does that explain the text? This proposal remains highly controversial. But it is not easy, except by putting on Lutheran blinkers once more (or suggesting that Paul rose above such concerns), to see where it goes wrong.

Though Horsley and others have written as though this way of reading Paul was ‘political’ or ‘historical’ as opposed to ‘theological’, the counter-imperial reading of Paul requires a full and high Christology. This has been challenged over the years, most recently and memorably by James Dunn (1996 [1980]); but the counter-arguments are strong (e.g. Hurtado), and it may be that these different aspects of Paul will join up and produce a combined theo-political portrait which will commend itself in actual exegesis. Think of Romans 1.1–17 being read in a city where the ‘good news’ of the all-powerful ‘son of God’, his claim of allegiance upon all the world, and his gift to his people of ‘justice’ and ‘salvation’, all pointed to Caesar. Had Paul wanted to avoid confrontation, he could hardly have made a bigger blunder.

One of the key tasks facing any proposal about ‘Paul and politics’ will be to locate the discussion, not within a retrojected version of modern western politics, but within Paul’s own world. It would be silly, having spotted the danger of retrojecting Luther’s question into the first century, to do the same with today’s questions about empire. This, in my view, is where one needs a further integration of normally separate topics. Where does Paul belong on the map of ancient philosophical schools, especially the then dominant Stoicism?

4. Paul and the Philosophers

I have often recommended graduate students to read straight through Epictetus. When I first did it myself, I kept thinking that he and Paul must lived in the same street. The tone of voice, especially in the ‘diatribe’ sections with an imaginary interlocutor, comes over very similarly. This surface impression has challenged interpreters to wonder, with some previous generations, whether Paul has anything in common with the Stoics. Here, too, there has been a major project in recent years, spearheaded by the Danish scholar Troels Engberg-Pedersen. ⁵⁰

Of course, Paul’s subject-matter is very different from that of the Stoics. Or is it? Granted, Paul quotes Israel’s scriptures, focusses attention on Jesus the Messiah and his death and resurrection, and insists upon a holiness of life which looks much more like (a version of) Jewish Torah-obedience than a Stoic ‘natural law’. And yet. Supposing these are simply the surface noise from Paul’s ethnic background and particular circumstances. Could it be that, even so, he has developed a programme for how people should change their lives which reflects the shape and anthropological agendas of the ruling philosophy of the day? Like all proposals, this one needs testing against actual exegesis, and my judgment is that ultimately it fails that test. But, on the way, it has pointed out many features of Paul’s thought which mean something subtly different, granted a Stoic resonance, than they do in post-Enlightenment western thought.

Consider, for example, the notion of ‘spirit’ (pneuma). In the modern West, not least since Hegel, this word is directly contrasted with ‘matter’, so that, notoriously, a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15 is thought of as a ‘non-material body’. ⁵¹ But for the Stoic pneuma was a substantial reality: a different kind of ‘physicality’, but a bodily substance none the less. ⁵² The idea of the community itself as a ‘body’, with its coherent, though different, parts, was familiar in Stoicism. And what about those passages – Philippians 4 comes to mind – in which Paul seems to use the Stoic themes of ‘virtue’ and of autarkeia, self-sufficiency? Is he simply parodying, saying in effect ‘anything the Stoics can do, we can do better’? Or is he acknowledging the legitimacy, within his robust creational monotheism, of the aspiration and moral struggle he sees in the best non-Jewish thinkers of the day?

There is a danger, with questions like these, that the discipline will be pulled back into the old Jewish-or-Gentile history-of-religions analysis – despite the opposition of some. ⁵³ But that is the problem with historical analyses, of whichever sort, that fail to pay sufficient attention to the thoroughly double-edged theology which Paul actually articulates: a Jewish message for the pagan world, one which ‘takes every thought captive to obey the Messiah’, ⁵⁴ claiming the high ground in a world created ‘through’ the Jewish Messiah himself. ⁵⁵ More work remains to be done here, not only to pursue the questions from the newer ‘Stoic hypotheses’, but to see how they might cohere with other accounts of Paul.

In particular, to return to the previous topic, how does the implicit political critique some find in Paul cohere with the Stoic account of how a polis ought to work? If Paul thinks of Jesus as the true monarch not only of Israel but also of the world, is he borrowing from ancient political theory to articulate this theme, or is he undermining the rhetoric of politics and empire with a different account, based on Jesus as the crucified Messiah? How does his view sit within the ancient Jewish critique of pagan empire, from Isaiah 40—55 through to Daniel, and all the way to 4 Ezra and beyond? Has Paul produced a layered account, with some elements more loadbearing and others built on at a surface level, or can we perceive a deeper integration still? These questions emerge from today’s different movements in Pauline scholarship, from post-new-perspective writing to ‘apocalyptic’, ‘political’ and ‘philosophical’. Is any integration possible?

Some brave contemporary philosophers are now trying to re-read Paul within the context of their own modern or postmodern questionings. ⁵⁶ This should be good news: when the Greeks asked to see Jesus, it was a sign that the great moment was dawning. ⁵⁷ There are, however, puzzles: if one starts, as these philosophers do, with the assumption that Jesus was not raised from the dead, and indeed that there is no ‘god’ in the first place, will they ever understand Paul himself, rather than just hearing the echo of their own voices rebound from his texts? Those who have been quickest to engage with these new voices seem little concerned with actual exegesis. But flashes of insight emerge in unexpected places, as with Agamben’s insistence that Paul really did regard Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, or Taubes’s exploration of political themes. And for those who look to Paul for a contemporary Christian apologetic, there will be much to learn. If serious thinkers are bringing their questions to the text, how might students of the text help them towards better answers?

5. Paul and ‘Social History’

One of the most important books on Paul written in the last fifty years is Wayne Meeks’s The First Urban Christians. Meeks’s patient, unfussy analysis and his deadpan style – the very antithesis of Sanders’s combative approach – could fool the reader into thinking that he was just puttering about, rearranging the historical furniture without adding much to the overall picture. This would be a serious mistake. Like Sanders, Meeks was determined to ask the historical questions, though in his case they concerned the communities which Paul founded and maintained, and then, by reflex, the message with which Paul founded them and the teaching with which he tried to maintain them. In Meeks’s hands, the young urban churches appear in three dimensions, with all the puzzles and possibilities of their corporate (and quite Jewish-like) life in a pagan environment. And, though characteristically Meeks does not make a fuss over it, the theology which emerges is not a sociologically reduced ‘bare minimum’, but a sociologically grounded maximum: Paul’s own variant on the central Jewish doctrine of monotheism. One God, one Lord: Meeks rightly (in my view) goes for 1 Corinthians 8.6 as a tell-tale symptom of what it was that held Paul’s communities together.

Meeks’s approach has been followed, and his thesis advanced, by younger scholars who have filled out his paradigm. The so-called ‘context group’ at the Society of Biblical Literature has worked on this for years. One of the most important works has been David Horrell’s Solidarity and Difference, a sophisticated and many-sided account of Paul in terms of his attempts both to hold his communities together as a single family and to allow for differences of practice in key areas. Ground-breaking work has also been done by Peter Oakes, whose modelling of actual communities, at Philippi and at Rome (via the excavations at Pompeii), allow us to enquire how the texts might be heard by real human beings in multi-faceted real-life situations, not simply by comfortable but anachronistic nineteenth-century pietists. ⁵⁸ John Barclay, having written a detailed study of Jewish life in the wider Mediterranean world, has recently produced a further volume placing Paul himself in that context (reviewed on p. 408 of this issue). ⁵⁹ The wealth of contemporary historical, not least archaeological, work now available for the entire Greco-Roman world creates a setting in which such study ought to flourish for many years to come – not as an alternative to the traditional questions about placing Paul historically and analysing him theologically, but precisely as its proper and necessary context. There will be surprises, and fresh illumination, to be had at every turn. ⁶⁰

6. The Theological Task

And for all this, theology is never spent. As Meeks saw so clearly, whether we set Paul in the market-place or in the tentmaker’s shop, his picture of God, recentred upon Jesus and active through the Spirit, remains central – demonstrably central in relation to his practical agendas for his churches, arguably central in relation to the other major theological themes which clamour for their position in an implicit hierarchy (‘Christology’? ‘justification’? ‘being in Christ’? ‘salvation history’? ‘reconciliation’?). ⁶¹ Do we have to prioritize? Is there a way of articulating Paul’s core beliefs which does not depend on arranging these and other themes in a tight structure, but will allow each to play its contributory part in a larger whole than scholarship has yet imagined? Can such a theology be laid out in such a way as to make coherent sense of the contingent letters themselves? – always the acid test, as we can see when theological agendas force exegetes to declare this or that verse or theme to be an interpolation, or at least the quotation of a viewpoint Paul himself did not share. ⁶² Can such a theology explain Paul’s complex relationship to the Judaism of his birth, to the philosophical climate of the day, and also to the political challenges faced by his churches in a world where ‘son of God’ and ‘Lord’ straightforwardly and unambiguously denoted Caesar?

I believe this can in principle be done. Of course, the contemporary mantra is that ‘Paul was not a systematic theologian’. Insofar as this reminds us to follow the line of thought of each letter in its own terms, and not imagine that Paul was writing successive editions of something like Calvin’s Institutes, this is obviously right. However, the mantra has often been invoked against coherence of any sort, as scholars react against the sterile frameworks of the Sunday School or the Systematics department. It may, however, simply mean that we want Paul to be ‘inconsistent’ so that we need no longer take him seriously. Beker’s famous proposal of ‘coherence and contingency’ goes some way towards alleviating this, but not (in my view) far enough. What, after all, counts as ‘coherence’? The challenge to let Paul state his own terms, and reorganise familiar concepts around them, is well known and still central. There are, I suggest, ways forward here which will sit well within the contextual history of the first century, ways in which the apparently varied emphases of the ‘new perspective’, the turn to ‘apocalyptic’, and the political and philosophical strands, can be tied together in an unforced and exegetically fruitful manner. It is time for Paul’s own watchword of dikaiosynē theou to come back into its own, in its second-Temple Jewish sense of ‘the faithfulness of God’.