Abstract
Benjamin White’s new study of Paul is sure to provoke considerable interest, given that he seeks to bring a new approach to bear on the investigation of one of the most significant figures in Christian history. Paul has been revered for centuries as the apostle par excellence, and credited as the person who more than any other ensured that the gospel of Jesus would be preached to the whole gentile world. The correct understanding of his writings and thought has, however, always been hotly contested, whether by ‘orthodox’ and ‘heretical’ groups within the early church, or by Catholics and Protestants in the Reformation period. White argues here that it is time to move beyond all such attempts to identify the ‘real’ Paul, and focus instead on exploring how and why a particular image of Paul is constructed in any given early Christian text.
The main argument of this volume, then, is that there is no one Paul, whose life and teaching can be accurately and correctly reconstructed, but rather that we are dealing with a multi-faceted reception and presentation of him. A range of images emerge from the literature of the second century, which draw on and re-shape combinations of earlier texts and memories, and reflect the needs and contexts of developing Christian communities. This understanding of the transmission of Pauline traditions leads White to critique in particular the account of the ‘real’ Paul which became dominant in 19th-century German New Testament scholarship, following the work of F.C. Baur, and which remains popular today. In this essentially Lutheran reading of Paul, his theology is seen as centring on justification by faith, an idea which reaches its fullest expression in Romans and Galatians. Other texts which do not appear to expound this doctrine (e.g. the Pastoral Epistles) are consequently dismissed as late or as not authentically Pauline. According to this narrative, Paul’s letters were distorted or even ignored by the proto-orthodox stream of early Christian tradition as attested by writers like Justin Martyr, because his teaching was only fully understood and embraced by Marcion and the ‘gnostics.’
This critique of long-standing scholarly assumptions about Paul’s theology and the authorship of the Pauline letters, and of the ideologically evaluative language and bias characteristic of many earlier commentators, is very timely, and is one of the strongest aspects of White’s study. He shows how interpreters across the centuries have employed similar tactics in their efforts to make Paul’s thought fit with their own beliefs and practices. In the second century as in the 19th, for instance, views attributed to Paul by some texts, such as allowing women to teach in the Acts of Paul and Thecla (contra 1 Cor 14.34–35), were marginalized by proto-‘orthodox’ groups and labelled as misinterpretations, interpolations, or as not genuinely written by Paul (see e.g. Tertullian, de Baptismo 17.5). Wright also includes a full discussion of more recent studies of the reception of Paul in early Christianity which also offer a challenge to the previous scholarly consensus, such as those by Lindemann, Dassmann, Aageson and Marguerat. His conclusion is that the search for the historical Paul is as misplaced as the quest for the historical Jesus, and should be similarly abandoned. The historian’s task is reformulated instead as the search to explain how and why some Pauline traditions were foregrounded and others forgotten in the early church.
To this task, White seeks to bring new methodological insights, especially the concept of social memory, which is increasingly being applied to studies of the Jesus tradition in the Gospels (as in the work of, for example, Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher). He emphasizes that no second-century writer had access to the ‘real’ Paul, so they were all engaged in constructing an image of him which would serve to transmit his significance to their various audiences and help to create a coherent and stable identity for their emerging Christian communities. To illustrate this approach, White devotes two chapters to examining the treatment of Paul in two texts dated to this period and produced in Asia Minor, 3 Corinthians and Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses. He argues that both of these writings present Paul as a defender of sound teaching, who stands in continuity with the other apostles, and affirms theological positions which the authors considered correct, such as the resurrection of the body and the unity between the God of Israel and the God of Jesus. To do so they draw selectively on earlier layers of Pauline tradition, particularly the Pastoral Epistles, sometimes modifying these to suit their overall purpose, which White suggests was ‘to memorialize a certain image of Paul as a heresy-fighter’ (p. 157).
White sets out very clearly the gap which his study aims to fill, and his evaluation of previous Pauline scholarship is very informative and critical. His explanation of the need for a new approach to the study of the reception of Paul in early Christianity is persuasive, but I must admit to a certain disappointment in the results of his application of it. I did not find that his discussion of 3 Corinthians and the Adversus Haereses yielded any significant fresh insights into the texts or their contexts, and I would like to have seen both a more detailed analysis of these writings and a fuller consideration of a wider range of second-century literature. This may reflect the volume’s origins as a doctoral dissertation, in which White had to expend considerable time in defending his methodology and explaining his interpretation of terms like ‘tradition’ and ‘memory.’ He has, however, certainly demonstrated the potential value of further studies of this kind, focusing both on Paul, and on the reception of other significant figures in the early church.