Gift Histories

Gift-Narratives ¹

Among the interwoven tales told by characters in the novel τὰ Αἰθιοπικά (An Ethiopian Story) by the author Heliodorus (‘gift of the sun’) is the following, recounted by Charikles, priest at Delphi, who had fled Greece to Egypt after the tragic death of his biological daughter on her wedding night. While shopping in a marketplace there he has a mysterious encounter with a stranger. ²

‘I have been watching you buying a number of the herbs and roots that grow in India, Ethiopia, and Egypt’, [the stranger] said. ‘If you were interested in buying such things unadulterated and with no suspicion of sharp dealing, I would be pleased to supply them for you.’

‘I am interested’, I [Charikles] said. ‘Show me your wares.’

‘I shall let you see them’, he replied, ‘but give me your word that you will not haggle over the price’. ³

‘You must make sure then’, I answered, ‘that the price you ask is not extortionate’.

‘He drew out a little pouch that he carried beneath his arm and opened it to reveal a prodigious display of precious stones: pearls the size of small nuts, perfectly spherical and glistening the purest white; emeralds and sapphires, the former as green as grass in springtime, their depths glowing with a luster as clear and soft as olive oil, the latter exactly the color of the sea in the shadow of a tall cliff, sparkling on the surface and a deep violet beneath. In short, all these gems, with their blend of many scintillating hues, were a sight to gladden the eye. But one glance was enough.’

‘My friend’, I said, ‘it is time you started looking for another customer. All that I am and possess would hardly be enough to pay for just one of the stones you have shown me’ [ὡς ἔγωγε καὶ ἡ κατ’ ἐμὲ περιουσία σχολῇ γ’ ἂν καὶ ἑνὸς εἴη τῶν ὁρωμένων ἰσοστάσιος ⁴ ].

‘But even if you are unable to buy them’, he said, ‘you are perfectly capable of taking them as a gift’ [δῶρόν γε λαμβάνειν οὐκ ἀδύνατος].

‘Of course I could afford them ⁵ if they were given to me as a gift’, I answered. ‘But for some reason you are making fun of me’ [Ἐγὼ μὲν οὐκ ἀνίκανος, ἔϕην, δῶρόν γε λαμβάνων σὺ δὲ οὐκ οἶδ’ ὅ τι βουλόμενος παίζεις ἡμᾶς].

‘This is no joke’, he replied. ‘I am very much in earnest. In the name of the god in whose temple we stand, I swear that I shall give you all these jewels, on condition that, in addition to what you see, you will agree to accept another gift much more precious than these.’ [Οὐ παίζω, εἶπεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ σϕόδρα σπουδάζω καὶ ἐπόμνυμί γε τὸν ἱδρυμένον ἐνθάδε θεὸν ἅπαντα δώσειν εἰ πρὸς τούτοις καὶ ἕτερον δῶρον ὑποδέξασθαι βουληθείης πολὺ τούτων ἐριτιμότερον].

At this I burst into laughter, and when he asked why, I replied, ‘Because it is absurd for you to promise to give me a gift of such great value and then to offer me payment for accepting it far in excess of the value of the gift itself!’ [Ἐγέλων πρὸς ταῦτα, τοῦ δὲ τὴν αἰτίαν πυνθανομένου ὅτι γελοῖον, ἔϕην εἰ τηλικαῦτα δῶρα καθυπισχνούμενος προσέτι καὶ μισθὸν ἐπαγγέλλῃ πολὺ τῶν δώρων αὐτῶν ὑπερϕέροντα].

‘Trust me’ [πίστευε], he said. ‘But now you too must swear an oath, to put my gift to the best possible use and to follow my instructions to the letter’ [ἀλλ’ ἐπόμνυε καὶ αὐτὸς ἦ μὴν ἄριστα χρήσεσθαι τῷ δώρῳ καὶ ὡς ἂν αὐτὸς ὑϕηγήσωμαι].

I was thoroughly bewildered, but the thought of such riches led me to take his oath, exactly as he prescribed. That done, he took me to his house and showed me a little girl, lovely beyond telling, sublimely beautiful … He began to speak as follows.

‘The child you see before you, my friend, was, for a reason which you will learn shortly, exposed by her mother in her swaddling clothes, and her fate entrusted to the uncertainties of fortune. I chanced upon her and took her up, for once a soul had taken human form it would have been a sin for me to pass it by in its hour of peril … Besides, even at so tender an age, there was something special, something godlike about the light in the baby’s eyes [καὶ θεῖον τῶν ὀϕθαλμῶν ἐξέλαμπεν], so piercing and yet so enchanting was the gaze she turned on me as I examined her. Beside her had been laid the necklace of gemstones that I showed you just now.

The dialogue ends (for now) with the stranger’s parting words: ‘I commit this child to your care and that of the gods who willed it thus. I do this on conditions that you are under oath to me to honor [i.e., to marry her to a freeborn husband and use the jewels for her dowry] [σοὶ δὲ καὶ θεοῖς τοῖς οὕτως ἐπιτρέψασιν ἐγχειρίζω τὴν κόρην ἐπὶ συνθήκαις ταῖς ἐνωμότοις ἡμῖν γενομέναις] … I feel sure that you will honor our compact to the letter: I have your oath, and throughout your long stay here I have kept you under scrutiny and found your character to be that of a true Greek. For the moment I have been able to tell you this story only in abbreviated form [λέγειν ἐπιτετμημένως] …’

After promising to meet Charikles again the next day the stranger left him. Charikles told his own listener, Kalasiris: ‘I did as he said; I took the child from him and, covering her face with a veil, conveyed her to my lodgings, where for that day I tended her with much love, and in my heart I felt deep gratitude to the gods [πολλὴν τοῖς θεοῖς ὁμολογῶν χάριν]. From that day forward I thought of her, and spoke of her, as my own daughter [αὐτόθεν τε ἐμαυτοῦ θυγατέρα καὶ ἐνόμιζον καὶ ὠνόμαζον].’

Later in the novel we shall learn from the Pythian prophetess in an oracle that the name of this wonder-child is Χαρίκλεα, ‘one who starts in grace and ends in glory’. ⁶

Thesis: Essential Contents and Contribution

John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift mounts an ambitious and significant effort to give an account of Paul’s theology as a ‘theology of the gift’ that, while situated within and among Second Temple Jewish texts that talk abundantly about gift, grace or mercy (treated as a single Begriffskomplex), has as its particular distinction an emphasis on incongruity (which for Barclay means the gift is given ‘without regard to the worth of the recipient’). The argument has several moves, incorporating anthropological study of the gift (from Marcel Mauss forward), a proposal for six ‘perfections’ of grace or gift (superabundance, singularity, priority, incongruity, efficacy, non-circularity) offered as an analytical tool whereby he examines some trajectories of the history of reception of Paul (with a focus on Galatians and Romans) from antiquity to today, as well as treatments of grace/gift/mercy in five Second Temple Jewish authors or text corpora (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, 1QH^a Hodayot, Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, 4 Ezra), and his own exegetical readings of two Pauline letters, Galatians and Romans. The thesis of the book is that while ‘Grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism’ it is ‘not everywhere the same …’

Paul stands in the midst of this diversity. His theology of grace does not stand in antithesis to Judaism, but neither is there a common Jewish view with which it wholly coincides. Paul’s theology of grace characteristically perfects the incongruity of the Christ-gift, given without regard to worth. This theology is articulated within and for Paul’s Gentile mission and grounds the formation of innovative communities that crossed ethnic and other boundaries (Barclay 2015: 6, combining points 2 and 3 from the summation).

Professor Barclay has written a major book; all who wish to engage the question of Paul’s theology in years to come will have to grapple with it. It is clearly and economically written (even as it is a quite lengthy tome) and filled with judicious, trenchant arguments and observations, small and large. The study is accessible and straightforward in approach and results. It is a book to be dealt with, both on its critical apparatus and call for revision of prior scholarship, and on its own proposals and readings of the Pauline and other Second Temple Jewish texts. It is a very ambitious undertaking reflecting years of intelligent and patient study of the issues, the texts and the history of research. Professor Barclay (henceforth, JB, for economy) engages with an impressive and daunting range of materials, characterized by a most commendable sense of seeking to be fair, ⁷ to read these figures or texts on their own terms, to avoid some forms of scholarly and ecclesiastical polemics. The book is a stellar example of scholarly civility. It mounts a significant, even formidable proposal for a singular integrating focus to Paul’s theology. In many ways the style and demeanor of the book are what in ancient literary criticism and rhetoric would be called χαρίεις, gracious, elegant, kind, courteous, with good intention. ⁸ But it is also a critical book, sharp in its own way, and with an argument that is at times for this reader too insistent on its discriminations and dichotomies, too tidy, and with (I worry) some potentially deleterious consequences, which I think JB also sees, as he refers to how Paul’s thought, on his reckoning, is ‘shocking’ and ‘theologically dangerous’. So, we must attend to both aspects in assessing the argument and its impact.

A Reading Old or New?

Barclay’s reading is unmistakably a deeply Lutheran one, an alchemy of Luther’s insistence on the utter depravity and undeservedness of the individual with the sociological, ecclesiological emphasis of some more recent ‘new perspective on Paul’ (NPP) readings (from Stendahl’s ‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience in the West’ [1976], Sanders 1977, Dunn 2007, and others), but clearly more indebted to the Lutheran tradition for its laser beam focus on incongruity. The argument is characterized by JB as offering the reader a choice (p. 573).

[T]he reading of Paul offered in this book may be interpreted either as a recontextualization of the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition, returning the dynamic of the incongruity of grace to its original mission environment where it accompanied the formation of new communities, or as a reconfiguration of the ‘new perspective’, placing its best historical and exegetical insights within the frame of Paul’s theology of grace.

But even on its own terms the book does not seem to propound an even balance between these options, because the Augustinian-Lutheran paradigm, to use the typology of the book, has priority (it was, after all, there to begin with), superabundance, singularity and efficacy, into which what is useful in the NPP – its focus on Paul’s theology of the Gentile mission and social formation of his Gentile congregations – has been absorbed.

This is reflected not only in the conclusion, but in the very structure and fabric of the book, especially given the figures chosen (and those not chosen) for the Forschungsbericht: Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bultmann, Käsemann, Martyn, and then back to Sanders and the NPP as a stumbling block to the Augustinian-Lutheran trajectory that stumbles less, for Barclay, when one recalibrates the different ‘perfections’ of grace and one insists on Paul’s uniqueness. It is also reflected in the choice of only Galatians and Romans as the Pauline letters interpreted. But if the goal is to understand Paul’s letters or his theology, of course there have been other readers of Paul outside this tradition and this set of questions. Pelagius does not get much attention on his own terms (none of his own works is cited), nor does John Chrysostom or any other eastern father (who, famously, with a different emphasis leaning more to the Corinthian correspondence and to sanctification, do not parse the pie of Pauline theologoumena on grace and free will quite the same way as the Augustinian tradition). ⁹ But JB does not present his argument as a repetition or reinscription of older theological debates, but as a new way forward through a taxonomic history of religions investigation of Second Temple Judaism.

‘Taxonomy’ – Method, Contents and Execution

JB’s study proceeds from what I take to be an unassailably correct assumption: it is not enough to study ‘grace’ with a simple ‘grace present, grace absent’ pair of options, but instead one must look at grace under what sorts of definition (or roles). This approach does indeed lead to many trenchant insights and some sustainable critiques and a more fine-grained comparison with the sources about grace, which it is valuable to read through with Professor Barclay as guide. (I did often wonder, however, if these sources were all talking about the same thing when using vocabulary of gift/grace/mercy, but that is a different point that I shall leave to other reviewers to assess.) As it is designed to do, this approach is especially ‘smart-bombed’ (if you will) when dealing with E.P. Sanders and the NPP. ¹⁰ This tight fit raises questions about the directionality of the design and application of the methodological template and the degree to which it can offer ‘some analytical distance’ (pp. 3, 562). In his search for such analytical distance JB relies on not one of the usual suspects in debates on Paul and grace, but the literary critic Kenneth Burke and his conception of ‘perfections’.

Yet the language of ‘perfecting’ that JB adopts from Burke, though it does not derive from Christian theological disputes, may nonetheless be inherently problematic for this set of questions because it is itself already theologically implicated in some of the key issues involved in the history of reception and debate about χάρις/gratia. ¹¹ This raises the question whether one can fully get ‘analytical distance’ on the question of Paul and grace by applying to Second Temple Jewish sources and reapplying to Paul ‘perfections’, many of which have distinguished and hotly contested pedigrees in the history of Christian thought on grace, ¹² given that incongruity, for instance, or priority (as a synonym for prevenience), or efficacy (mapping onto efficient and sufficient grace, perhaps), are theological termini technici of especially Protestant-Catholic but also intra-Protestant (i.e., Arminian) and intra-Catholic (Jansenist) contests about grace.

A second potential difficulty inherited from Burke’s formulation of the ‘perfection’ of a concept is that there may be, often is, and certainly for scholarly analysis should be (in my view), a considerable difference between ‘perfection’ ‘for definitional clarity’, on the one hand, and ‘for rhetorical or ideological advantage’, ¹³ on the other. This points to a problem of rhetoric and reality: are these ‘perfections’ of grace, for the various thinkers analyzed (ancient and later), instances of rhetorical extreme ¹⁴ meant to persuade to certain behaviors (generosity, abstemiousness, virtue, humility), and dissuade from others, or, differently, to create a compelling story, or as part of the articulation a higher (or purer?) search to understand and explain the realities of human exchange and/or human and divine ones? When do such rhetorical extremes become definitions, ontologies or singular commitments? And is the former (i.e., rhetorical extremes) the place to find the latter (definitions)? Unavoidable here is the relation between rhetoric and theology. One aspect of this is that the treatment of the five test cases, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, Hodayot, LAB and 4 Ezra, does not address directly enough the issue of generic difference, and, in line with it, rhetorical forms and expectations, such as the self-abnegation of the speaker in the Hodayot (is this really unexpected in hymns of thanksgiving?), or the dialogical nature of 4 Ezra between Ezra and Uriel that still, according to this approach, must issue forth in some ‘perfections’. Too often I had the sense here that ‘theology’ of grace is conceived as a well-defined something that is in, prior, underneath, behind these texts, at times even inside these persons as equivalent to their religious experience, and a singular and immutable thing, with ‘rhetoric’ as a mere vehicle of its coordinated expression, rather than that the rhetoric is integral to the very way of doing theology, the way of construing what theology is, as a more dialogical mode of navigating ideals and realities. ¹⁵

Third, moving from method to the material, is it empirically the case that the ancient sources are uniformly characterized by the pull to ‘perfections’ or ‘extremes’? Given the tensions that are inherent in biblical covenantal traditions (in the Torah and prophets, as read in MT, LXX, Targumim shared by Second Temple Jewish authors) between the unconditionality of divine gift and election and the conditionality of the blessing and curse on those who have received the divine תוצמ, it seems counterintuitive to try to push all Second Temple Jewish writers to choose one or the other or be ‘perfected’ in one or another extreme. The same is true, I think, of the Stoic paradoxes on gift-giving or philosophical reflection on the relationship between divine benisons and human action and virtue (for instance, in the famous Euthyphro’s dilemma), ¹⁶ with Philo or Seneca or others. Here, with an alternative method one could read some of the sources differently in terms of emphasis than JB. For example, one might reasonably have expected more attention to free will in Philo than is given on this account, ¹⁷ or push a bit harder on the last sentence of Seneca’s de beneficiis: hoc est magni animi perdere et dare (‘it is characteristic of a great soul to lose and yet give’) against the blanket statement, ‘Seneca never idealizes the one-way, unreciprocated gift’ (p. 50). ¹⁸ The larger question this raises is why ‘perfect’ or push to the extreme what the ancient thinkers most often did not consistently do, given that we so often can see them articulating, arguing and playing in the middle, and, above all, parlaying the tensions between them depending upon the genre, the context and the rhetorical, philosophical and theological purpose?

This concern about the workability of ‘perfections’ as a taxonomic structure is not just my own insight foisted onto the book, because it is there, too, in Professor Barclay’s beautifully lucid, careful and forthright analyses – perhaps most especially on the dialogues between Uriel and Ezra in 4 Ezra. Indeed, where I am closest to JB – and appreciatively so – is where he says in the conclusion to the comparative study that ‘there is reason to think that the congruity or incongruity of grace was one of several related issues that were debated among Second Temple Jews’ (p. 315). I would agree completely, and say this is true of all six of the ‘perfections’ he has identified. But if we are capturing a debate (and here I think E.P. Sanders has understood this so well), do we do so best by looking for extreme positions assigned to or offered by given writers in given literary genres at particular moments and with focused intentions?

There is an interesting moment on p. 75 where JB says ‘it is not necessary to perfect either human or divine gift-giving … the normal discourse of gift does not contain any perfecting momentum’ (italics added). Then why do so? Why are the Second Temple writers surveyed, including Paul, not ‘normal’, or, if normal, why not trace how they are normal in granting the push and pull of these extremes? One is left to wonder whether the ‘perfecting momentum’ comes from Second Temple authors, or from the non-normal gravitational pull of the history of Pauline interpretation, especially in the Augustinian-Lutheran line. Where is this ancient ‘normal discourse’ on the gift to be found? Maybe in An Ethiopian Story?

A Counter-Proposal – Tensions not Perfections

The novelistic episode from Heliodorus’s An Ethiopian Story with which I began ¹⁹ dramatizes some of these dynamics and paradoxes of the gift as they are explored in ancient prose narrative texts. As you can see there in a single composition, the gift is both like and unlike a commercial transaction (not completely distinct but not the same); the gift is free (‘that’s a price I can pay’, says Charikles, who can indeed imagine with delight a gift that is free!) and the gift exacts a recompense; the gift is undeservedly granted to a shocked passer-by, and, as we learn only later, not completely so (since the stranger had scoped out the character of the beneficiary and found him to be properly ‘Greek’); the gift is linked with an obligation (an inherent condition, we might say, since Charikles immediately assumes he cannot even afford this ‘gift’), and yet that is not in itself sufficiently binding, such that an additional oath is required to spell out the obligation; the gift is both from humans and from the gods; the gift is familiar and it is exotic; the future of the gift is in the hands of human choices and it is in the will of the gods; the gift is given once and for all, and yet the young girl Chariklea changes hands and owners with dizzying speed throughout the story; the gift is given in its fullness even in its infancy and yet (as just a few paragraphs later we find out) it evolves and deepens as the young woman matures and her character is molded by choice and fate; the gift both (re)constitutes and reveals relationships (in this case, of paternity); the gift changes identities (the childless man becomes a father in an instant) and cannot do so (since he cannot fulfill the father’s role since the daughter has chosen a life of virginity, and the biological father, dear reader – spoiler alert! – lives).

And above all, the story has a very long way to go from the episode I cited, during which time the reader, though she knows some of the history of this gift and its entanglements, is continually unsure what the future of the gift and the promises and relations constituted by it will be, even as, though reading the narrative in its progression, her view of the past is constantly revised by new revelations and retrospections. While there are sequels and climaxes in this portion I cited from book 2, fully eight more books are needed to realize the dénouement, for the providential narrative as it unfolds will revolve around human choices that are negotiated, regretted, refashioned and brought to a satisfying resolution. Only then will Chariklea (united with her biological father Hydaspes) and her beloved Theagenes enact a sacred marriage that ‘produced a perfect harmony of diametric opposites’ through their own priestly offering of a sacrifice. This is in place of their being killed as the sacrifice, since, after all, they are ‘god’s gifts’ [οἱ παρ’ αὐτῶν δωρηθέντες]. ²⁰ Chariklea realized in that concluding moment that ‘the prophecy that the gods had given long ago was fulfilled in actions’ ²¹ [τοῖς ἔργοις βεβαιούμενον τὸ πάλαι παρὰ τῶν θεῶν προαγορευθὲν ηὕρισκεν]. What makes this story work, what makes it compelling, are the very tensions and ambiguities about the gift that fashion the suspense, the expectation, the drama.

A reason attention to narrative is so important in analyzing gift-dynamics is that, when it comes to priority or reciprocity or conditionality, for example, the same actions of giving and receiving may be perceived and may be narrated in multiple and changing ways, even as one who is a giver in one instance may be the recipient in another, a gift may change hands and change meanings, a gift may be itself a price, or a condition of yet another gift. A dynamic form is needed to capture this. Often this is a source of poignant dramatic tension, reversals of fortune and controlled surprise. Would we even think to ask here about the extremes of incongruity or priority of the gift-recipient, since we already know how complexly this human and divine tale is crisscrossed, especially in light of the divine oracles that (we later learn) have prefigured the action? Here ‘incongruity’ is a matter of negotiation, and it is rhetorical, surely not definitional.

So, I would ask, how would the study of Paul and Second Temple Jewish authors on the gift be different if one were not to search for a taxonomy of extremes or ‘perfections’ (for either rhetorical or definitional purposes) but instead to identify a series of tensions along a spectrum of ideals that are constantly being negotiated in a variety of ways and relations across a dynamic temporal field in cultural forms in the ancient Mediterranean, both Jewish and majority culture and their admixtures, and in the letters of the Greek-speaking Jewish preacher Paul? Hence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Superabundance of gifts (creation as apex)	Tiny, focused individual gifts (surprising by their smallness or appropriateness to a moment)
Emphasis on divine as merciful	Emphasis on divine as judge
Temporal priority of giving emphasized	Giving as response to something that came before emphasized
Incongruity	Conditionality (or contingency, or worthiness 22 )
Efficacy	Cooperation or coordination (or synergy)
Non-circularity	Forms of circulation (paying ‘back’; paying ‘forward’)

The above rearticulate JB’s six ‘perfections’ as poles or a spectrum. One could add among other possible tensions.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Gift as entailing obligation	Gift as (ostensibly) ‘free’
Gift as unique to sender	Gift as unique to recipient
Natural bestowals (given complete)	Nurtured gains (requiring developments [gifts that need batteries])
Gifts that last	Gifts that are temporary (or fading, etc.)
Gifts that are sought	Gifts that are found
Gifts recognized immediately	Hidden/unnoticed gifts
Gift of great price	Gift of small price
Gifts that are non-material	Gifts that are material
Gifts that by nature cannot be possessed	Gifts that in theory can be possessed
Gifts that change sender	Gifts that change recipient

All of this would need to be mapped in 3-D, both in terms of the perspectives of the giver and the receiver, on the one hand, the gift itself and its own complicated history, and in terms of the pasts, presents and futures in which they interact. It is not a flat map with only compass points (‘extremes’) but a complex topographical terrain between and among these exalted claims and perspectives about the gift.

My reason for proposing this as a framework for comparison with Paul is, of course, that the gift he conveyed, the εὐαγγέλιον, is itself a narrative, and it is a narrative that involves a telling and retelling and reconceptualizing of a complex history of divine gifts and human responses. Introduced to the God of Israel as their own god (surprise!) who has had them in mind all along (surprise!) and whose beneficences are for them (surprise!), these Gentile Christ-believers have inherited a history of this god as a gift-giver. Paul has to work out in his arguments the narrative tensions this involves, as well as the practical implications of them for the present, because we do not know how it will work out, do not know whose perception about gift and responsibility is primary, which time zone is in view, what hands the gift may be in next, etc., etc. And Paul wrote letters that treat the ‘gift history’ in medias res.

The Gift in the Argument of the Letter to the Galatians

In grounding his thesis about Paul and the gift in the corpus Paulinum, Professor Barclay presents an initial reading of Galatians and then shows how some of the gaps or just ‘hints’ within it are developed and deepened and addressed in Romans. I find JB’s reading of Galatians more problematic than that of Romans, though in Romans, too, I find the insistence on ‘incongruous grace’ as the resolution to all or most exegetical quandaries, inconsistencies or paradoxes, at times too clean and too insistent against the problems in the texts, where, as suggested above, I see Paul navigating between poles more than pressing singularities. But I would like to focus here on the reading of Galatians, both due to space limitations and, because the argument of the full book is presented as a developmental one, it only makes logical sense to start with the earlier.

In my view, Paul in his argument in Galatians, for all its use of antitheses because it is an argument of ἀποτροπή (dissuasion), is also in some key ways working to navigate and negotiate between these extremes of gift history and dynamics of both continuity and discontinuity more than JB’s reading for ‘perfections’ allows. Although the language of χάρις and related terms is, I agree, found throughout the letter (as are other key terms like πίστις, etc.), I do not see ‘incongruity’ (as unworthiness) as an operative or central theme in this letter. Exegetically, incongruity of grace in the case of Paul himself is grounded first in JB’s reading of Gal. 1.15-16 as an absolute antithesis to Gal. 1.13-14 (with the ὅτε δέ carrying a lot of weight). Paul’s calling by God’s grace was (because this is what χάρις already means on JB’s account) completely without regard for Paul’s training in and zealousness for his ancestral traditions ‘when I was ἐν τῷ ’Ιουδαϊσμῷ’. I would read this as much more tensive, as Paul is both seeking to establish himself as the Torah-expert par excellence who will sacrifice all in the quest for truth, and also as one who is a paradigm of the surprising then-and-now topsy-turvy change the gospel represents, all in service of his argumentative purpose: to deny that his gospel to the Gentiles who are already justified by their πίστις and the gift of the spirit relies upon his own ingenuity, and instead to ground it in God’s purposes and plan. JB’s reading here, like Augustine’s own (famously), ²³ seems to me too much of a retrojection onto Gal. 1.13-17 of 1 Tim. 1.12-17 and Acts that is not indicated in the then-and-now topos in the first movement of Paul’s Galatians, of the persecutor turned apostle that is meant to emphasize the divine surprise and the external proofs for Paul’s legitimacy.

But nowhere in the letter does Paul say outright, ‘you did not and do not deserve this gift, oh undeserving Galatians’, ‘nor did I or do I deserve to be an apostle’. ²⁴ Indeed, I am not sure that is Paul’s question or his focus. Instead, what Paul declares is ‘I was sent to you by God (and I am genuinely and legitimately an apostle!) and you accepted me and the gospel in/with me (and you are already genuinely and legitimately children of Abraham without taking on circumcision or other works of the Torah)’. Both ‘callings’ were ‘incongruous’ in the rhetorical sense of ‘surprising’, ‘disharmonious with expectation’, and they involve reversals, but the reasons they were chosen and the ground of preparatory or proleptic worthiness or unworthiness is left to the divine will, the proclaimed goodness in the good news/εὐαγγέλιον and its mystery. I do not see ontological definitional anthropological incongruity explicated by Paul here, nor in that postulate ‘the primary root of the creativity of the letter’, as does JB (p. 446).

Paul’s εὐαγγέλιον, for which he fights vigorously in Galatians, was an episodic narrative with the death and resurrection of Christ at its center that could be expanded like an accordion to incorporate other events, or contracted via forms of shorthand (epithet, synecdoche, metonymy) to the most compacted formulation. ²⁵ When Paul articulates the εὐαγγέλιον tradition in 1 Cor. 15.3-4, it is absolutely fundamental that twice he says κατὰ τὰς γραϕάς. Paul’s story about the Christ-gift, therefore, is not solely discontinuous, inconceivable, out of history, but it is also pre-planned, pre-articulated – where? – in the scriptures of Israel, and these include in a significant way the νόμος Μωϋσέως in which Paul was so commendably steeped as a young man. Hence, when JB reads Galatians as though Paul is saying that the Torah represented an old, even ‘dead currency, because the Christ-gift has rendered it no longer of value’ ²⁶ (p. 383), or that it is something κατὰ ἄνθρωπον, or a system of merely human cultural value or ‘symbolic capital’ that has expired or never really had value, I cannot see that consistently in the text of Galatians. And I cannot reconcile it either with the logic of Paul’s situationally specific argument that appeals to that very Torah throughout, and seeks to grapple with the Torah as part of the giving-history of the partners in this new gift exchange with the Gentiles. Even as Paul seeks – radically, indeed! – to emphasize Abraham over Moses (who is not named), still νόμος ἐδόθη in 3.21 is, I think, clearly a divine passive – God gave the Law. Paul assumes this. And a key part of the question before Paul and the Galatians is how to accept one gift from the God of Israel in light of his other good gifts, including the Torah, some of the component benisons of which – including the promise of the Messiah and the love command – are aggressively retained (contrast Barclay p. 332 n. 5 and p. 403). Even a mediating term like παιδαγωγός (3.24-25), which Paul uses to navigate between dispensations, is read by JB as accenting only the negative side: ‘From the perspective of the Christ-event, Paul sees the Torah as temporary and past’ (p. 403). But that is in relation to a very specific question: What will justify the Galatian Gentile πιστοί? ²⁷ To this concrete question Paul’s answer is πίστις ’Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ and not ἔργα νόμου (2.16). He does not say that the ἔργα νόμου were a bad gift; they are just not the gift on which he wishes his Gentile converts to depend for their salvation.

JB’s reading strategy heightens into extremes some of the tensions in the argument while minimizing others as ‘paradoxes’ or ‘ambiguities’. ²⁸ But on his reading, Paul is not paradoxical or tensive but unequivocally negative about the Law, seen as disjunctive from Christ: ‘The Christ-gift was not a Torah event: it was not enacted, distributed, or experienced within the criteria of value established by the Torah’ (p. 390). Admittedly, in Galatians Paul says some radical things about the Torah (and he is deliberately slippery about whether it refers to the ‘Mosaic books’, ‘the Law’ in aggregate or ‘some specific laws’ [ἔργα νόμου] like circumcision or calendrical observances) in his dissuasive effort to keep his converts from ‘being compelled’ (ἀναγκάζεσθαι) to circumcision (2.14; 6.12). But does he break entirely its system of values or its role in ‘the story of the promise’?

This is for me the most ‘shocking’ part of JB’s reading. How can the Torah not be ‘integral to the story of the promise’ (p. 404) when it is γραϕή (= νόμος/הרות) that pre-preached the gospel in the promise to Abraham (3.8, προευαγγελίζεσθαι)? Can one say that Paul has ‘removed the Torah from the trajectory of the promise’ (p. 407) in light of Paul’s outright denial that the law is against the divine promises in 3.21a: ὁ οὖν νόμος κατὰ τῶν ἐπαγγελιῶν [τοῦ θεοῦ]; μὴ γένοιτο? ²⁹ JB argues that Gal. 3–4 is a historical trajectory that ‘represents the history of the promise of God, not the continuity or development of the history of humanity’ (p. 412). Here I fear that JB divides what Paul the gospel narrator seeks to unite – the divine plan and human history combined in the calling of Israel, which, after all, is the combination that the mysterious εὐαγγέλιον represents: ‘From the perspective of the divine plan, the Christ-event is the fulfillment of an ancient promise; from the perspective of human affairs, including the history of Israel, it is a reversal, a disjunction, and an impossibility’ ³⁰ (p. 421). But a ‘gift history’ such as Paul is recounting cannot separate the giver and recipient into two separate stories – they intersect and are intertwined precisely at the Christ-gift.

JB’s reading resists the tensiveness in Paul’s Galatians about the gift-narrative and raises it to a level of abstraction beyond its immediate concern. Even in Paul’s explicitly approving citation of the Law in Gal. 5.14, Barclay denies any ‘contradiction’, and instead finds only ‘hints at a conviction, clearer in Romans, that there are echoes of the good news even in the Torah’ (p. 431). Why does this ‘hint’ not shine more brightly in JB’s interpretation of the argument in the letter to the Galatians? One reason is the way JB reads apart from the ἀκολουθία, or logical progression of the argument. Treating 3.1–5.12 and 6.11-18 together – and leaving 5.13–6.10 for later consideration ³¹ – allows JB to turn 5.7 and 6.15, on the irrelevance of circumcision or non-circumcision, into postulates upon which the whole previous argument was founded, when, in my view, they are ex post facto ἀδιάϕορα implications of the previously laid out argument about the means of justification that comes to a crescendo at 5.2-6. But these statements in turn depend upon this key narrative moment and what the Galatians will do next, since the gift-history is being carried out into the future (and this particular version of the gift-history is not concerned with the meaning of Torah for its original recipients, the children of Abraham κατὰ σάρκα). Furthermore, this approach to reading the letter out of sequence also allows JB at first pass to skip entirely over the positive citation of the νόμος/Torah (Lev. 19.18) at Gal. 5.14 in favor of the ‘extremes’ that entail that ‘[Paul] subverts any form of symbolic capital that operates independently of Christ’ (p. 393). This also makes it much easier to deny outright that the Christ-gift in Galatians has ‘any strings attached’, ethical or otherwise. ³²

Conclusions and Implications: One Ancient, One Modern

Despite all the work of contextual history in this book, from a history of religions and history of culture point of view, JB’s Paul winds up looking very much a solitary man. As compared with ancient Mediterranean culture, both Jewish and majority, Paul alone conceptualized and ‘perfected’ the concept of the incongruous gift. Further, Paul (virtually alone?) contested that culture’s pervasive ‘habits of intra-communal rivalry’ (pp. 432-39). ³³ Here JB does not grant the degree to which that same culture also produced severe critiques of its own agonistic tendencies, as are found, for instance, in the ὁμόνοια rhetoric that Paul adopts somewhat here and more directly in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, nor the degree to which, for all the rhetoric of newness, Paul’s ethical vision is deeply rooted in the Torah and in conventional Hellenistic morality (as in the vice and virtue codes). Setting out to set Paul in relation to his contemporaries, JB has found and emphasized mostly and significantly Paul’s exceptionalism. Or, am I reading JB’s reading more ‘extreme’ and ‘perfected’ than it is intended? If one reads Paul’s Christ-gift articulations alongside Heliodorus’s narrative of surprises, would one not see it in a less one-sided way than with the pressures of Burkean ‘perfections’?

JB presents Paul’s theology as ‘shocking’ (pp. 407, 409, etc.) in Galatians by rejecting the power and authority of Torah, both past and present, and presenting the story of Israel as discontinuous with that of the Christ-event (p. 412). His conclusion to the whole book highlights Paul’s theology of the Christ-gift as entailing ‘a shocking devaluation of Jewish symbolic capital’ (p. 566). JB states at the outset of the book that his proposal should be judged not only for historical plausibility, exegetical responsibility and theological grounding, but also its hermeneutical usefulness for the present (p. 7; cf. p. 350: ‘whether the reading thus produced is coherent and productive in our own contemporary context, and capable of replicating, at least in part, the explosive power of this letter [Galatians]’). In the conclusion, he seeks to coordinate Paul’s missionary theology with the ‘new missional context’ of today ‘even (in fact, especially) in a pluralist or secularizing context’ (p. 573) and sees in Paul’s theology of incongruous grace in Christ a force for ‘innovative, counter-cultural communities of faith’. A hallmark of this is that ‘Paul provides resources for the dissolution of pre-formed assumptions and for the construction of boundary-erasing communities’ (ibid.). But the reading of Romans in the previous chapter has not, I fear, been integrated into this celebration of boundary effacement and its possible implications for Jewish–Christian relations:

Paul dares to offer a reading of these texts that would have shocked many of his contemporary Jews, but that matches the incongruity of grace in Christ … To state the matter dialectically: the incongruity of grace is the hallmark of the Christ-event because it is characteristic of God’s dealings with Israel; conversely, the incongruous pattern of God’s dealings with Israel is Christologically determined … Thus, the Christ-event is not simply a stage in Israel’s history, even its final stage; it is the moment that gives meaning to the whole (pp. 560-61).

In Galatians, the claim is made that ‘we have offered a reading that requires no denigration of Judaism, while clarifying how Paul’s allegiance to the truth of the good news necessarily questions the ultimate authority of the Torah’ (p. 445) and an outright worry about the concern I am addressing here: ‘I would repudiate those readings of Galatians that have resulted in the demonization of Jews and Judaism’ (p. 445). Does JB not expect his own proposal also to ‘shock’?

An exegetical reading does not have to ask to be judged by its theological generativity for the present; ³⁴ nor should a historical argument be judged on that criterion if what one seeks is a better understanding of the historical-epistolary Paul. But if one sets oneself the former task, as JB has, it seems not only fair but essential to ask how this reading helps contemporary Christians or churches to understand and live in relation to their Jewish friends, family members, neighbors (which was, as we all know, a major impetus for Stendahl and Sanders and a source of their concern about the Augustinian-Lutheran reading as they characterized it). If one chooses to take up this charge of theological accountability for the present, following the fiftieth anniversary of the papal encyclical Nostra aetate in October 2015, it seems necessary to ask how this reading of Paul’s theology of incongruous grace and of Galatians and in particular of Rom. 9–11 might be taken to imply that Jews have been subsumed into the Christian theological narrative and that that is what is most powerful about the gospel message – that in obliterating all boundaries and in relegating Torah to an obsolete system of human value, Paul (on this reading) effectively renders Judaism naught in light of the Christ-event (what Nostra aetate denies). Or is what JB finds life-giving for (some) contemporary Christian communities knowingly recognized to have an associated cost – a return to forms of Christian supersessionism or a kinder, gentler, but no less troublesome and ultimate ‘subsumptionism’? How would this reading help or hinder Christian understanding of the role of the people Israel and faithful Jews past and present in the divine plan, and address not only the internal needs of embattled Christian churches, but their engagement with their neighbors in a multi-religious world?

Let me be clear – in this book is a lot of careful attention to get it right, to think inside the shoes of others, to be fair and gracious – as I stated earlier in my response, and I truly and respectfully mean. I hope I have done the same in assessing the arguments and proposal, both historical and theological. Professor Barclay is one of my most cherished dialogue partners in Pauline studies for many years now, and I am quite sure that he has thought hard about these questions, and I look forward to further conversation (already begun at the SBL panel) about these key questions. What is the price of this incongruous grace, and what are the hermeneutical modes and perhaps challenges of its contemporary incorporation, both for Pauline studies and for Christian and Jewish communities?