Israel’s Scriptures in Paul’s narrative theology

In sundry times and divers manners the apostle Paul has been examined as a reader, and perhaps a misreader, of Israel’s Scriptures. Many have concentrated on the explicit quotations, analysing intensively the exact text-forms which Paul uses and the precise formulae with which these are introduced. Many, now, have studied allusion and echo, and have replayed the great concerto in which Paul plays the solo part with all the instruments of the scriptural orchestra providing the harmony and counterpoint. ¹ Some have proposed, as a warning note, that much of this is mere rhetorical fireworks, a power-play to trick the unlearned. ² And so on. A great deal of other fine work has been done in this whole area. ³

But we still lack one thing. Forgetting what lies behind, we should strain forward for what lies ahead: a renewed awareness not only of allusion and echo, not only of rhetoric and verbal trickery, but also of narrative: a single narrative, the narrative many second-Temple Jews carried in their heads and their praying hearts. This narrative looked back to Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets not merely as random examples, not merely as establishing patterns to be imitated at some indefinite future date (I am reminded of Mark Twain’s suggestion that history never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes), but which told a single story that was, they believed, reaching its decisive moment at that time.

That phrase – ‘at that time’ – is crucial. Josephus speaks of a scriptural oracle which drove the Jews to revolt in the first century, because it said that at that time a world ruler would arise from Judaea. ⁴ The only passage which fits this mention of a chronology of fulfilment is Daniel, whose famous 490 years (Dan. 9.24) were being calculated and recalculated throughout our period. Josephus elsewhere says that only Daniel not only foretold the future but also gave a precise time-reference. ⁵ When Paul speaks of the time having fully come (Gal. 4.4), there is every indication that he is thinking of this long historical story which, in true ‘apocalyptic’ style, had had such an unexpected and cataclysmic conclusion.

The idea of a long story finally reaching its destination has nothing to do with the kind of ‘salvation-history’ in which a smooth crescendo finally reaches full strength. It is much more like what we find in the genuine ‘apocalyptic’ of Daniel itself and many similar second-Temple books: terrible times for Israel, until in a dramatic reversal Israel’s God acts to condemn the wicked pagans and to vindicate and exalt his people. Here is the paradox of apocalyptic, ignored by many who claim that word today in favour of non-narratival novelty: God acts suddenly and surprisingly, as he always said he would, and as the actual though unanticipated climax of Israel’s (and the world’s) history.

The apparent near-absence of Daniel from Paul’s extant writings is interesting, though not for present purposes. Nevertheless, Paul would I think urge us, not so much in Daniel’s presence but much more in his absence, to work out our own scriptural hermeneutic with fear and trembling, since for him the same narrative was at work, not as a mere backward glance, a rhetorically motivated proof-text, but as a living story which, having reached its climax, was continuing forward in a new but still scripturally energized mode.

Paul does, after all, make clear and definite use of the other great passage which, in the second-Temple period, constituted a narrative of prophecy yet to be fulfilled: the closing chapters of Deuteronomy. Here too Josephus is revealing. These chapters, he says, contain a prediction of future events, in accordance with which all has come and is coming to pass. ⁶ We can back this up from Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon and even Philo, who says of Deuteronomy 33 that it contains prophecies, some of which have come to pass while others are still looked for in the future. ⁷ The two classic passages here are Baruch 3 and 4QMMT section C, where Deuteronomy 30 is invoked in what we might be so bold to say is its natural sense, the prediction of the restoration of Israel after the disaster of rebellion and the curse of exile – a restoration which the authors of Baruch and MMT believed was happening, at last, in their own day.

Plenty of evidence thus points us to the phenomenon which we could in any case have deduced from works like Pseudo-Philo, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ben-Sirach, and indeed Acts and Hebrews. The overall narrative of Israel was well known, and could be told in various ways, with different selected highlights, but always as a story in search of an ending, an ending sketched in many prophecies including the explicitly historical schemes of Daniel and Deuteronomy.

This narrative might well contain within it other, less narrativally located, patterns, types, allusions and echoes. The paradigmatic Exodus story appears frequently like a theme in a symphony, echoing back and forth within the larger and still single musical line. To use a more mundane example, the overall narrative is like the track in the snow made by a single wheel whose every revolution is both another retelling of its own particular circular story and also the means by which the larger story of its journey moves forward towards its goal. This is not, then, a matter simply of returning to the place where one started and knowing it for the first time. It is rather, in terms of present discussions of Paul and Scripture, a matter of taking the road less travelled by, and its making all the difference.

Three key principles. First, as I have heard Ed Sanders say: Paul didn’t need to lug around scriptural scrolls, or look up passages to quote. He kept his Bible in the best place: in his heart and mind. He knew the Scriptures from childhood and could, and did, quote them freely. To expend energy studying his introductory formulae or precise wording, as many have done, is therefore to miss the point. The question ought to be: what world of thought is he evoking? Which parts of the great narrative is he opening up?

Second, he often refers to Scripture, or to its great themes, in passages where there are no specific quotations. (We might compare Revelation, which has no actual biblical quotations but is soaked in Scripture from start to finish.) When Paul speaks of Abraham or Sarah, he is referring to Scripture. When he tells a story with Abraham at the start, Moses in the middle, and the Messiah at the end, he is referring to Scripture, even if he never quotes its actual words. His explicit quotations, and implicit allusions, are not freestanding. They are the tips of a much larger iceberg, the massive but often submerged scriptural narrative which Paul believed came to the surface dramatically with Jesus and thereby caused havoc to the Titanics, both Jewish and pagan, of the day.

Third, it is beside the point to try to assess the reader-competence of Paul’s audience. Even if we could be sure how familiar or unfamiliar Paul’s hearers were with Israel’s Scriptures, a major feature of early church life was precisely teaching. And the content of that teaching was, to my mind obviously, Israel’s Scriptures. New Christians, from whatever background, needed to know the Scriptures in order to understand the significance of the Jesus they were meeting in preaching and prayer, in service and sacrament. ⁸ In any case, it’s a poor writer who does not put into the text considerably more than the first audience, or even the hundred and first, will pick up straight away. Think of Shakespeare; or J. S. Bach; or T. S. Eliot. Reducing Paul’s compositional options to the limits of hypothetical reader-incompetence is an example of that left-brain rationalism, allied to a hermeneutic of suspicion, from which biblical studies has suffered for too long.

So, briefly, to the text; and, first, Romans 4. When Paul quotes Genesis 15.6 (‘Abraham believed God, and it was calculated in his favour, putting him in the right’) in verse 3 this is not a mere proof-text plucked out of context. ⁹ The whole of Genesis 15 is present to his mind throughout Romans 4. And the point of Genesis 15 is that this is where God establishes the covenant with Abraham, the covenant through which, as in Genesis 12.1, God will bless all the nations after the disaster of Babel. This is, for Paul, the beginning of the long story of God’s purposes which comes to its goal in the Messiah: what God promised to Abraham, he has fulfilled in the Messiah Jesus. Abraham in Romans 4 is thus not merely a telling example of someone who was justified by faith. He is the start of the story of the covenant, the covenant to which God has been faithful, so that the unveiling of God’s ‘righteousness’ in the gospel is precisely the revelation of how God has done, however shockingly and surprisingly, what he always promised. About these things we cannot now speak in detail.

But one crucial point in Romans 4 has been missed. In verse 4, Paul declares that to one who works, their ‘reward’ (misthos) is not calculated on the basis of generosity but on the basis of what they are owed. Ah, declare the anxious opponents of the ‘new perspective on Paul’: here is the sign that Paul is really thinking about, and opposing, a kind of proto-Pelagianism. ¹⁰ Not so. He is reading Genesis 15; and in 15.1 God says to Abraham, ‘Don’t be afraid; your reward (misthos) will be very great.’ What is this reward? The context makes it clear: the ‘reward’ is the massive, uncountable, worldwide family. The promise which Abraham believed, as Paul indicates in 4.18, was not ‘I will justify you even though you are ungodly’ but ‘I will give you a great family’. The ungodly state is presupposed with Babel; the promise speaks of the family in which Babel is reversed. Abraham thus ‘believes in the God who justifies the ungodly’, not in the sense that he is believing in his own ‘justification without works’, but in the sense that he is believing that God will justify the Gentiles. Get the story right, and the scriptural quotations will make sense.

That, I suggest, is how we should read Paul’s use of Psalm 32 as well (Rom. 4.7–8). David is pronouncing a blessing on anyone out there, Gentiles as well as Jews, whose sin is covered. I am a bit suspicious of the familiar claim that Paul is here imitating the Rabbinic technique of lining up two texts with the same catchword, as commentators often say. Rather, he is hinting at the classic narrative: Abraham, David, Messiah (compare Matt. 1). This ties Romans 4 tightly together as an exposition of the founding of the covenant in which Jew and Gentile come together as forgiven sinners through faith in the God who raised Jesus. ‘Have we found Abraham to be our ancestor in a human, fleshly sense?’ he asks in verse 1. No: we have found him to be the father of all, the entire single ‘seed’ (v. 16). This in turn plays back into fresh possible readings of Romans 2 and 3, for which there is no space here. ¹¹

Turning away from Romans for a minute, we find in 1 Corinthians 15 one of the few Pauline hints of Daniel. Paul believes that in Jesus and his messianic resurrection the apocalyptic promise of God’s kingdom has been realized. Daniel 2.44, in the Theodotion version, repeats the verb anastesein: God will ‘raise up’ a kingdom through which all other kingdoms will be overthrown. This fits in with the Adam-Christ theme of 1 Corinthians 15.21 and thereafter, and opens the way for Paul’s characteristic citations of Psalms 110 and 8, combining prophecies about the Messiah’s victory and the sovereignty of the ‘son of man’, ultimately under the rule of God himself. Daniel, as Josephus says, was read in the first century as a prophecy of a coming world ruler. Josephus said it was Vespasian; Paul says it’s Jesus.

The other passage cited by Josephus as offering long-range prophecies being fulfilled in the first century is the closing section of Deuteronomy. That takes us back to Romans, and particularly to chapter 10. This point seems obvious, yet such is the present state of reader-incompetence that it must be spelled out again.

First, Romans 9.6—10.21 constitutes a retelling of the story of Israel, in close and obvious parallel with other second-Temple retellings. This isn’t a matter of the actual quotations, which have their own point. It is that if a biblically literate second-Temple Jew tells a story which moves from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Moses and Pharaoh to the prophets and the exile, and then speaks of a telos (an end or goal) which involves the Christos, and then invokes Deuteronomy 30 which involves covenant renewal, it ought to be a no-brainer to say: this is Israel’s story, retold from yet another angle, but still ending up with the Messiah. And the particular angle from which it is here being told is the angle of God’s covenant faithfulness, his ‘justice’. The question of God’s dikaiosyne is raised again and again, in 9.6, 14, 19 and then decisively in 10.3. This is the story of how Israel’s God was all along faithful to his covenant justice, even though that narrative of faithfulness was also the story of how Israel got it wrong, misunderstood, disobeyed and ended up as a remnant, failing to ‘attain to the Torah’ (9.31). But, for Paul, the narrative has found its goal, its telos. As the Psalms of Solomon and many other texts would insist, when the Messiah comes he will sort out the mess once for all. That is how the story works.

What, then, will God do next? Deuteronomy 30 provides the answer, and was seen in Paul’s day as providing the answer. After the covenant curse of exile comes the covenant renewal in which Torah will be ‘near you, on your lips and in your heart’. In Baruch, the Torah of Deuteronomy 30 is translated into ‘wisdom’. In 4QMMT, it is the specific selection of commandments, the miqsath ma’ase hattorah, which will mark out the people who, fulfilling Deuteronomy 30 in the present, will be declared tzaddikim, ‘righteous’, in the future. For Paul, since ‘the goal of the law is the Messiah’, it is Christos who, in his resurrection and lordship, is ‘on your lips and in your heart’. So far from this being (as many have imagined) an odd, awkward midrash which makes an obscure text dance on its hind legs to an unfamiliar Pauline tune, it is, I suggest, exactly the right text at the right moment in the narrative of Romans 9 and 10. Paul has, in a measure, retold the Pentateuchal story, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, via Exodus and with a hint of Leviticus. The quotation from Joel 2.32 (3.5 lxx) in verse 13 rounds off the point, indicating that he is indeed thinking of the ultimate, eschatological renewal of the covenant.

Through all this, my general point is sustained: the explicit quotations nest within the larger biblical narrative which Paul is retelling. We have to learn to read the quotations in the light not only of their own original larger context but also of the still larger context which is the implicit narrative presupposed by many second-Temple Jews; and then of the Pauline context, which is never simply an exposition of ‘doctrine’ or ‘ethics’, supported by detached proof-texts, but always, rather, a fresh telling of Israel’s story in the light of its shocking messianic fulfilment and the covenant renewal brought about by the Spirit.

Finally, in that light, a note about Israel’s Scriptures in Paul’s own theological self-understanding. It has often been pointed out that he draws on Isaiah’s picture of the Servant, especially the second ‘song’ of chapter 49, where the Servant wonders (49.4) if he has run in vain or laboured in vain. ¹² But I draw attention in particular to 2 Corinthians 6.2, where Paul quotes Isaiah 49.8, still in reference to his own ministry, right after expressing once more the challenge about receiving God’s grace eis kenon, ‘in vain’. ‘I have heard you,’ says the prophet, ‘at an acceptable time, and I helped you on a day of salvation.’ This is all part of the covenant ministry of the Servant, and of the apostle; the very next line reads ‘I gave you as a covenant to the nations’, eis diatheken ethnon, echoing 42.6. This is picked up in the next Servant Song, at 51.5–8, where God’s dikaiosyne and his soteria are set in regular parallel. All this firmly underscores the proposal which I and others have made about 2 Corinthians 5.21: that Paul there speaks, not of a soteriology in which a ‘righteous status’ is imputed or transferred to God’s people, but of the work of the apostle, in which God has given him as a covenant to the people. That is why he writes genometha, ‘become’: ‘so that in him we might become, embody, God’s faithfulness to the covenant’. Understand the story, and the use of Scripture comes up in three dimensions.

What more shall we say? Time would fail me to tell of Genesis 1; 2; and 3; of Exodus 34; of Psalms 18; 69 and the rest, and the rich and dense way Paul employs them. I have offered here, of course, only a sketch, but perhaps enough to indicate a paradigm which is not usually prominent in discussions of Paul and his Bible. There are a thousand shades of usage, from direct quotation to echo and allusion, from hints half guessed to gifts half understood. But at the heart of it all – not as an occasional added extra but as the living force within the whole thing – there lies Paul’s fresh reading of Israel’s Scriptures as the unfinished narrative of creation and covenant which, attaining its telos in the Messiah, now reaches out, still as Israel’s story, to embrace the whole world, as Israel’s story always aimed to do. The types and patterns fit within this larger framework. The playful allegories and poetic reworkings give it further, sometimes paradoxical, embodiment. But the story remains the story.

Paul is not interested in atomized proof-texts, because his theology does not consist of detached doctrines. For him, ‘theology’ – the new discipline which I believe he invented as the necessary support for the single family created by the gospel – was always about discerning and living out the vocation of Israel, in obedience to Israel’s one God, at the new moment when the covenant promises in Genesis, Daniel and Deuteronomy had been fulfilled. Paul’s theology, at its heart, consists of a freshly worked allegiance to Israel’s God, a fresh understanding of the people of God, and a fresh grasping of Israel’s hope, each of these freshly understood in terms of Jesus and the Spirit. And, at each level and stage of that complex but tightly integrated whole, we find Israel’s Scriptures, neither as proof-texts, nor as detached illustrative echoes, nor as rhetorical flourishes or gestures, but as the great narrative which had now arrived at its intended destination. Not the intense moment, isolated with no before and after, as many today are eagerly suggesting; rather, a lifetime burning in every moment. The purpose, no doubt, is beyond the end they figured, and is altered in fulfilment. Scripture, for Paul, is the unknown, remembered gate through which we pass to discover that which was the beginning.