Abstract
To live in exile, as Socrates insists throughout Plato's Crito, would be a fate worse than death. The tremendous pain of exile, as witnessed in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish texts, is one of the key insights brought to bear in this fine study of the apostle Paul's communal disciplinary practices, by Adam G. White, senior lecturer at Alphacrucis College in Sydney, Australia. Directed primarily towards biblical scholars, the argument of Paul, Community, and Discipline falls into two parts. In the first part, White offers a concise historical overview of the practice of expulsion in the Greco-Roman world: from its origins in the Greek practice of ostracism as a means of eliminating political rivals and de-escalating violent conflict; through its development in the Roman Republic as a voluntary means of avoiding capital punishment; to its widespread use in the Roman Empire as punishment for treason. Throughout the process of Hellenization, as the concept of citizenship became more diffuse, expulsion played out on smaller stages as well: in families, philosophical schools, voluntary associations, and synagogues. To be removed from membership rolls or excluded from communal meals was to experience the shameful erasure from public memory, a form of social death.
In the second part of the book, White applies this historical survey of disciplinary practices (which, as he amply demonstrates, extend far beyond the practice of expulsion) to better understand the ways in which Paul addressed disorderly behavior in the communities he founded. First, he establishes that, while Christian communities bore resemblance to certain aspects of philosophical schools, households, and synagogues, they an most helpfully be compared to Greco-Roman voluntary associations. Through careful analysis of Paul's disciplinary practices in the Corinthian and Thessalonian correspondences, White adduces four disciplinary principles that were also common to associations: when the unwanted behavior results from immaturity, warnings must be issued, which if ignored are liable to result in expulsion; conflict must be resolved internally rather than through the law courts; in the case of a severe threat to the wellbeing of a community, offenders may be expelled without warning; and in agreement with Deuteronomic statute, any accusation must be confirmed by witnesses. In applying these principles, Paul endeavors always to preserve the identity and wellbeing of the community.
Having established these four principles on the basis of Paul's letters in which expulsion is (more or less) explicit, White goes on to examine three instances in which Paul may implicitly be urging expulsion. To do so he takes what he regards as a “slight detour” (4) from historical-critical methodology to cull insights from Social Identity Theory. According to this theory, people gather together in groups to “establish a positive sense of value,” which is maintained by preserving the boundary between in-group and out-group behavior (198). When highly esteemed members (“prototypes”) within tightknit (“high entitativity”) groups behave in ways that contradict group norms, they threaten group identity and become the target of derogation, often at the hands of other prototypes. This harsh derogation is known as the “black sheep effect,” and is intended to preserve the wellbeing of the social group. In three instances (Galatians, Rom 16:17-18, and Phil 3:1-19), White argues that Paul is urging the community to spot the black sheep in their midst and to expel them. In Galatians, for example, Judaizers threaten the community's wellbeing by insisting that full membership in the group requires circumcision (and, by extension, observance of Torah) in addition to faithful allegiance to Jesus. Paul perceives the threat posed by these self-proclaimed prototypes so severe that he urges the community to expel them without warning, consistent with the principles that White has elucidated above.
In the penultimate chapter, White briefly discusses the ways in which Paul's disciplinary practices are carried forward in the Pastoral Epistles, which seek to re-establish Pauline teaching and authority in the midst of ongoing threats to communal identity. The conclusion effectively summarizes the argument and suggests in the last two sentences that more work in this vein remains to be done on other NT communities. The argument of this book, in the perception of this reviewer, is clearly organized, amply researched, elegantly written, and in the end persuasive in its central claims. My one minor critique is that White might be more explicit about the ways in which his study builds upon, extends, or departs from the previous studies mentioned in the introduction by Forkman (1972) and Hein (1973).