March 22, 2011
Introduction
What Paul Really Said…
The most essential question for followers of Jesus to ask about Paul is: what is the relationship between Paul and Jesus? If Paul is found to be incompatible with following Jesus, or his theology was thought to be different from that of Jesus, then Christians ought to dismiss him altogether and brand him a heretic. If, however, the opposite is true, that Paul really was a disciple and a follower of the Way of Jesus, then we must re-approach his writings carefully and seriously. This task raises the challenge of determining, as the titles of works by N.T. Wright and John Bristow suggest, what Paul really said.
The problem for many people in the twenty-first century—scholars, clergy, and lay people alike—is that certain Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts as they have traditionally been interpreted, seem to be ethically amiss on the particular issues of gender relations and slavery.One can easily conclude that Paul has strayed from the ethical stance of Jesus toward women and liberation, citing certain Deutero-Pauline texts that seem to baptize the very status quo Jesus had prophetically and emphatically denounced.
At this point it would be convenient to dispense with all but the undisputed Pauline corpus and move on, but this cannot be done easily. For one thing, issues of authorship aside, all of this material is nevertheless canonized as holy scripture. Typically, those who have tried to remove texts from the canon wound up being themselves removed from the church—in any case, it is counterproductive. Furthermore, as Murphy-O’Connor demonstrates, even the issue of authorship itself cannot easily be shrugged off; the early acceptance of the authenticity of Pauline authorship cannot be explained away without at least “a very solid link with Pauline circles.”
In short, the problem is twofold: on the one hand, we must address the ethical charge that certain Pauline (in the wider sense of the term) texts should be questioned because of their position on slavery and gender equality; but on the other hand, we cannot easily ignore or dispense with these texts altogether because they are canonical. The function of taking the canon seriously extends far beyond merely satisfying continuity with an established tradition; it is for the well-being of the ecumenical community that we avoid reinforcing the very sectarianism that has been endemic to Christian history. As I will demonstrate, no greater violence could be done to Paul than to deal with his writings in a way that destroys rather than builds Christian community. In fact, if we could identify one reason above all others that Paul wrote at all, it would be the purpose of building and preserving communities. What is needed, then, is a more nuanced approach that seeks to understand the Pauline corpus in its original context—to acknowledge as Crossan and Borg put it, that we essentially are “reading someone else’s mail.”
In What Paul Really Said About Women, Bristow attempts to take on the task of setting Paul’s words about gender issues in their proper context. Through his detailed analysis of historical practices and attitudes toward women in Greek, Roman, and Jewish life, paired with his grammatical and etymological expertise in koine Greek, the original language of Paul’s writing, Bristow is able to cast Paul’s most controversial words about women in a new light. Yet as a pastor primarily addressing other pastors and laypeople, his historical critique is consequentially more sensitive and nuanced in its handling of traditional beliefs and interpretations. In this method of contextual analysis, he is able to respect the original text and confirm its authority as scripture while at the same time he addresses important ethical challenges by debunking and dismissing false interpretations of the texts rather than the texts themselves.
This is merely one example that beautifully illustrates how sending Paul’s mail back to its proper context enables us to understand Paul’s real message. By understanding the communities to and about whom Paul wrote, we are enabled to discover how Paul addresses our own communities as members of the same Body and Spirit.
Jesus and Paul
The Ladies’ Men?
What Bristow’s analysis brings to light is the essential continuity of the roles played by both Jesus and Paul to empower and embrace the women in their communities, even as their particular attitudes and responses varied according to the specific situations and cultural contexts in which each operated. While evidence abounds from the Gospels and Acts that Jesus’ movement was very inclusive of women during both his earthly ministry and at Pentecost, the evidence that Paul held a similar stance is buried under centuries of poor translation and interpretation.
Bristow thoroughly demonstrates how passages such as Ephesians 5, as well as undisputed Pauline passages such as 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, have been translated and interpreted in ways that reinforce patriarchalism and the oppression of women, concealing Paul’s original meaning and intent.
The greatest source of this interpretive error is the reinterpretation of Paul’s writings by subsequent generations of Christians in light of Hellenistic and specifically Aristotelean categories and values which has made Paul’s words endorse the exact opposite of the values he lived and stood for. When Thomas Aquinas, the great champion of Aristotelean Christianity, was canonized by the Roman church, the revolutionary egalitarian Paul was finally eclipsed by the conservative, patriarchal Paul. Passages like Ephesians 5 and 1 Timothy 2 have drowned out the liberating voice of Paul found in other places. We can, however, be released from this hermeneutical snare of mistranslations and catchwords when we remember a phrase from one of Paul’s undisputed letters which epitomizes what Paul really did say about women and slaves: “There is no longer slave or free…male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:28-29). These words reveal who Paul really was, and who he believed Jesus to be. In these words lies the ultimate significance of Paul’s message and its implications for the community of the Church.
How They Role…
What emerges from the attempt to understand Jesus and Paul from the perspective of gender equality is that to really understand what they have in common we must understand the roles they played within their own context. Thus, the real question about their relationship has much less to do with the content of their teachings than the unique role that each felt he was playing in the context of Jewish salvation history. It turns out that the most obvious commonality between Jesus and Paul, though often overlooked is also one of the most significant: they were first century Jews.
Within this contextual framework, N.T. Wright poignantly argues, the thesis that Jesus and Paul are fundamentally at odds—because the former proclaimed the Kingdom of God whereas the latter proclaimed the Lordship of Jesus Christ—is essentially untenable. By thoroughly examining the distinctive elements in the social-historical contexts of both men, Wright finds tremendous continuity between the roles that Jesus and Paul played within Jewish monotheism. The shift in emphasis to the roles of Jesus and Paul reveals, Wright contends, that within the context of his Jewish religious-historical consciousness, Paul would have been utterly incomprehensible if he had said and done the same things as Jesus.
Instead, Paul’s message, as understood through the hermeneutical lens of his divine calling by the one God of Israel, occupies its own proper place in Jewish salvation history. For Paul, the climax in the narrative of Jewish salvation history had already been reached at the death and resurrection of the Messiah; with the Messianic age ushered in, there was a complete paradigm shift—the world had been quite literally turned on its head. Politically it meant that Christ and not Caesar was Lord.
In the words of Jesus, blessings and curses have been reversed (Mt. 5, Lk. 6). Paul, too, interprets the reversal of the curse, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal 3:13). The analogy that Wright is led to draw of the relationship between the two is that of the relationship of a composer to his conductor.
The weakness of this analogy, however, is that there seems to be a slight confusion of roles. For, unlike a composer who diligently transcribes his musical revelation into detailed notation for the conductor to read and perform, Jesus never wrote a single word; Jesus himself was the performer. On the other hand, the copious writings of Paul in correspondence with early churches and other epistles penned in his name make up nearly half of the New Testament. Even literature composed by early Christians about Jesus’ words and deeds—the Gospels and presumably the sayings collections from which these drew—comprises a minority of Christian scripture by comparison to the works and tradition of Paul. Thus, it seems that a more proper analogy may be made that Jesus was the virtuoso, the musician and performer. The Gospel writers, then, were the compilers of the original score, and Paul was the transcriber, sometimes even the transposer of the score into a new key to catch the Gentile ear, and always the recruiter of new players into the community of transformed performers. Though there is nothing wrong with Wright’s analogy, this alternative construction seems to get us closer to his own well-articulated point that Paul’s role was “to call into being, by proclaiming Jesus as Lord, the worldwide community in which ethnic divisions would be abolished and a new family created as a sign…that new creation had been launched.”
Thus, the roles of Paul and Jesus are united in the shared narrative framework of salvation history which Jesus had brought to its climax, and to which Paul’s words and works stood as a testimony to all nations. The reality of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and initiated is what Paul invited others to participate in as “heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). Neither Jesus nor Paul, then, ought to be understood primarily as founders or teachers of a new religion; instead they both fulfilled their specific calls to action on behalf of Israel’s God whose saving action was manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In light of this understanding of Jesus’ and Paul’s unique roles and their Jewish context, we can finally take up the discussion of Paul’s words about Jesus (christology), and the implications of this teaching for Paul’s work in forming and fostering Christian community.
Paul’s Communal Christology
Jesus is Lord
We have seen that what Jesus did was what mattered to Paul and that it was the catalyst for what Paul ultimately did and said. Jesus inaugurated the Kingdom of God in his life, death, and resurrection and thus, Paul proclaimed, Jesus alone is the Lord to whom all things are subject (1 Cor. 15:27-28) and in whom the fulness of God’s glory is revealed (Phil. 2:9-11; 2 Cor. 4:6). These bold statements constitute a very high christology along the very same theological premises for which Paul had once zealously attacked the Jesus movement (Phil. 3:6; Gal. 1:13-14). It is even likely that Paul was mocking his own anti-Christian arguments when he cites the application of Deuteronomy to imply Jesus was cursed by God in his death on the cross (Gal. 3:13).
This begs the question: what sparked Paul’s radical paradigm shift from zealous persecutor of the church to zealous founder of church communities? Paul alludes to a profound experience of the risen Christ which he interpreted as a divine revelation that turned his entire interpretive framework upside down (1 Cor. 15:8; Gal. 1:12-16). It was not a conversion, in the sense of an exchange of one religious identity for another; it was a revelation of what Paul felt to be the true way of understanding and living as a Jew. In light of this revelation, Paul speaks of his vocational change, using language reminiscent of God’s call to the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, as a unique call from God to share the euangelion, the good news of this revelation with the Gentiles (Rom. 1:5; 15:17-19). As a Pharisee, Paul had previously held that the Torah alone was the norm, which meant that he was not able to accept the claim of Jesus as Lord. Thus, argues Luke Timothy Johnson, “It was the experience of Jesus as the powerfully risen Lord that put Paul in a state of cognitive dissonance.”
This is the point at which the discussion surfaces about Paul’s tension between affirming the truth and validity of the Law in some statements while taking a markedly antinomian stance in others. This debate, however, misses the point of what this christology really meant for Paul: the Lordship of Christ represents a the true way of being human in community. It is significant to note that Paul does not ever outline a fully systematic and comprehensive christology; what can be called Paul’s christology is in reality a constellation of fragments distilled from Paul’s writing (and thus, divorced from their context) and compiled by scholars to evaluate systematically.
Paul’s christology is really not understood at all if his statements are removed from their immediate context which always revolves around the building and nurturing of Christian community. When Paul affirms Jesus as Lord, he is simultaneously speaking about the redemption-community which is the sign, or in Paul’s words, the ‘firstfruits’ of the new creation inaugurated by Christ (Rom. 8:23). In short, because Jesus is the true Lord of all creation, the church is the community of redemption in which creation is beginning to be subjected to its rightful ruler.
The Real Son of God
The statement of authority in Paul’s proclamation reaches its peak when Paul gives Jesus the title Son of God. While the use of the titles Lord and Son of God certainly do imply that Paul believed Jesus to be divine, it should be recognized that they are at least as important as declarations of who is not the divine lord and son of God. When Paul proclaimed Jesus as Lord, it meant that Christ, not Caesar, is the true Son of God. At this point, sharply divided along lines of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ scholarship, most interpreters have fallen into two equally narrow camps: on the left side, it is recognized that Paul hailed Jesus of Nazareth over Caesar, so it is concluded that Paul was essentially making a radical political statement to denounce the empire’s false claims of ultimacy; on the right, this dimension is either denied or ignored and Paul is seen as simply the source of the true religious doctrine, essentially stating a system of beliefs one must hold to obtain salvation. Such a lack of integration of Pauline insights has led to the tired dichotomy between preaching the gospel and social action that essentially misses the point: for Paul these were inseparable.
While the christological language of Paul’s gospel certainly resonated deeply within Jewish religious tradition, the very same language is oozing with radical political criticism. This is easily overlooked until we recognize that Paul lived in an empire whose lord was venerated as a son of God, and which proclaimed itself the ultimate source of freedom, justice, peace and salvation for the whole earth—indeed, even labeling these proud proclamations as euangelion, the gospel, the good news.
We cannot ignore that this was the political landscape “within which Paul went about declaring the ‘gospel‘ according to which Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by Roman soldiers…was the world’s true Lord, claiming universal allegiance.” It is thus no accident that among the locations where Paul worked most arduously to proclaim this counter-imperial gospel were the most thoroughly Roman cities in the Greek world—namely Philippi and Corinth—and the capital of Rome itself!
This contextual analysis makes clear the extent to which certain Pauline passages that have been made to endorse a status-quo of slavery (Philemon and Eph. 5) or reinforce subservience to political domination (Rom. 13) have been misunderstood. On the contrary, these statements are simply instances in which the radical Paul was attempting to prevent Christians from succumbing too easily to any political ideology or movement “that merely reshuffles the political cards into a different order.”
No political change can be revolutionary enough for the community whose citizenship belongs to an entirely new and transformed creation! Paul was far beyond a radical ideology, or party affiliation—what he championed was a radically new existence. This new way of being human, along with the hope for a new creation under a new authority was for Paul the real gospel, the real good news, and the salvation offered by this gospel is to be found exclusively in the community it inaugurates.
Paul’s Christological Community
A New Way to be Human
For Paul, Christ’s death and resurrection is the climax of God’s mission of salvation and reconciliation because Jesus was the revelation of a new way of being human as a sign of the dawn of a whole new creation. We have seen how Paul’s christology is developed in the context of its implications for the community he felt God was calling him to bring together and nurture. This call was aimed at the incorporation of Jews and Gentiles, males and females, slaves and free men and women into the salvation-community of the Church, which Paul literally refers to as Christ’s body (Gal. 3:28).
Indeed, one might be led to ask, along with Johnson, whether Paul understood the church to be the real bodily presence of the resurrected Jesus. It is unfathomable that any thorough reading of Paul could lead to an individualistic and systematic soteriology. On the contrary, Johnson notes, “It can be argued that for him soteriology is ecclesiology; all of his language about salvation has a communal rather than an individual referent.” Johnson goes on to demonstrate that the real reason circumcision became such an important theme in Paul’s writing was not for antinomian or anti-Jewish polemical concerns, but because if some in the community were circumcised it would mark an obvious division between the Jewish males and the Gentiles and women of the community.
Perhaps the most revealing of the many metaphors Paul uses to depict the church community is that of the family. In this family, God is the Father (Rom. 1:7) and Jesus Christ is the Son (1:4), but he is the firstborn of many children (8:29). Here it is crucial to note that Paul deliberately refers to the community members to whom he writes as adelphoi—brothers and sisters. In this family it is adoption in Christ, and not ancestral blood that constitutes legitimate membership. It is the community in which the Holy Spirit dwells (Rom. 8:9-11), the very Body of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 12:22; Rom. 12:4-5). The many gifts given to the family’s individual members are to be used solely for the ‘building up’ of the whole community (1 Cor. 14:26) into the true temple, the oikos in which God dwells and reconciles all of creation anew.
Conclusion
In the end, it turns out that what Paul really did—that is, what he felt uniquely called by the one God of Israel to do—holds the key to truly understanding what Paul really said. The question of what Paul really said is less a question of which epistles are genuine and which ones are pseudonymous—it is a matter of grappling with the true essence of Paul’s life and work. What all of this points to is that Paul was, in his own words, one of God’s oikonomoi, or household managers (1 Cor. 4:1-2).
He encountered the risen Jesus, the firstborn of a new family of reconciliation and he responded to God’s personal call to welcome all of humanity into this family to which it truly belongs. In all things, he put the needs of the community ahead of his own personal desires, even when it led to being ‘afflicted in every way,’ ‘perplexed,’ and ‘persecuted,’ because even in the midst of these struggles he was “not crushed…not driven to despair…not forsaken” (2 Cor. 4:8-9). Why endure all of this hardship? Because for Paul, the community was truly the end in itself, the embodied result of God’s reconciliation. This is what enabled him to affirm with the whole church that “we do not lose heart,” no matter what “slight momentary affliction” we may endure (4:16-17).
Bibliography
Borg, Marcus J., and John Dominic Crossan. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon. New York: Harper, 2010.
Bristow, John Temple. What Paul Really Said About Women: An Apostle’s Liberating Views on Equality in Marriage, Leadership, and Love. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.
Dunn, James D. G. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 1-15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hurtado, L. W. “Paul’s Christology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 185-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Paul’s Ecclesiology.” In The Cambridge Companion to St Paul, edited by James D. G. Dunn, 199-211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Levine, Amy-Jill, and Marianne Blickenstaff, eds. A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003.
Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Winter, Sara. “Philemon and the Patriarchal Paul.” In A Feminist Companion to Paul, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff, 122-136. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004.
Wright, N. T.. Paul: In fresh Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.
_____ What Saint Paul really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997.
Heretical Rhetoric 