Interpreting Paul

Essays on the Apostle and His Letters

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310098690
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Draws together the most important articles on Paul and his letters by distinguished scholar and author N. T. Wright.

Interpreting Paul puts into one volume Wright's most important articles on the Apostle over the last six years. It collects the essays—written for a wide variety of publications—that further his detailed reflections on Paul since the publication of his magisterial Paul and the Faithfulness of God, including such diverse investigations as:

• How and Why Paul Invented 'Christian Theology'
• How Greek was Paul's Eschatology?
• Paul and Missional Hermeneutics
• The Challenge of Fraternity in Paul

Interpreting Paul displays Wright's engaging prose, his courage to go where few have gone, and his joy to bridge the work of the academy and the church.

Here is a rich feast for any serious student of the Bible, especially of the New Testament. Detailed, incisive, and exquisitely nuanced exegesis, this collection will reward you with a clearer, deeper, and more informed appreciation of Paul and the relevance of his teaching to Christian life and thought today.

Many of the included studies have never been published or were made available only in hard-to-find larger volumes and journals.

1

A New Perspective on Käsemann? Apocalyptic, Covenant, and the Righteousness of God

When I was asked to write an essay in honour of Douglas Moo, I knew right away that I had better return to a theme he and I had often discussed: the meaning of dikaiosynē theou in Romans, and its controversial translation in the New International Version (NIV), with which Doug had been associated. I wanted to make the case once more for the meaning of ‘covenant faithfulness’, which seemed to be ruled out entirely in the various recensions of the NIV. But a reading of the late essays of Ernst Käsemann gave me a fresh angle: he was regularly cited by those who preferred a supposedly ‘apocalyptic’ reading of Paul to a ‘covenantal’ reading, but he increasingly gave space to ‘covenantal’ understandings of the crucial passages in a way that had not been flagged up in the recent debates. This essay thus not only returns to a well-known question in the exegesis, theology and translation of Romans, but anticipates and in a measure undergirds the argument about the new American ‘apocalyptic’ school which I would go on to make in my Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Wright 2015) Part II.

[243] When I wrote my commentary on Romans, the demands of the series made it impossible to debate with more than a handful of scholars. Since I possess over a hundred commentaries on Romans, this became a challenge: whom to select? Some old friends, notably Cranfield and Käsemann, chose themselves. For the rest, I decided on two Roman Catholic and two protestant commentators, with an Anglican to stand, as it were, in between them. And one of my Protestants was Douglas Moo.¹

It goes without saying that Doug Moo and I have not always agreed. But his patient attention to the text, especially when it does not seem to agree with our church traditions, is a shining example of what exegesis means. That, I believe, is the ideal in which he and I are bound in ties of fellowship transcending verbal disputes. But disputes over words – and one word in particular – were forced on me by another demand of the commentary series. [244] Contributors were asked to comment on the Greek text, but with two English versions printed at the head of each section. One was the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV); the other one was the NIV.

When the NIV appeared [in 1978], I embraced it eagerly. It was like a teenage romance: we were made for each other. The promise to translate rather than paraphrase, to inject no extra words or phrases, to do for today what the King James Version had done for its day – that was what I’d been looking for. I bought several copies and gave them to the students in my confirmation class. Then, not long afterwards, I began to lecture from it – or rather, from the Greek text, but with the NIV open beside it. On page after page I felt let down. My new friend was breaking all those early promises. What’s more, the prose often seemed limp and soggy. Within months the romance was over. I wondered what I had found so attractive. Many churches on both sides of the Atlantic, however, have made the NIV their Bible of choice. How has this happened? More to the point, what are they missing?

I continued to use the NIV text for lectures, since most of the students had it in front of them – though I found myself constantly correcting it in the light of the Greek. Then, for the Romans commentary, I worked through it again, inch by inch, and commented on it with a heavy heart. Not long after that work was published, word reached me that a major revision was under way. Several scholars I knew and respected were working on it, including the colleague we are honouring in this volume [Studies in the Pauline Epistles; see fuller details in the acknowledgments section]. Surely this time they would sort it out? I wrote to the committee, expressing my concern over some passages in particular. Back came the reply: yes, they had taken this on board and were attending to it. Perhaps the romance would blossom again?

Then the second disappointment: in the key passages about which I was most concerned, the change was only cosmetic. The further revision of 2011 made no difference to the points I had raised. I have not had the heart to ask Doug Moo, or indeed any of the others, what went wrong.² But since the question at the heart of my anxiety is raised again, in contemporary debate, for quite other reasons, it seems appropriate to give it a fresh airing in this context. I suspect, from his commentary, that Doug himself was one of those who resisted my plea. If so, I hope this article will at least serve to raise the question once more from new angles.³ [245]

The question with which I am concerned is the meaning, and hence the translation, of the phrase dikaiosynē theou, in Romans 1.17; 3.21–22; and 10.3. (The controversial 2 Corinthians 5.21, and the similar but significantly different Philippians 3.9, will not concern us here.⁴) It has seemed clear to me for many years that when Paul speaks of ‘the righteousness of God’ he means it in its ancient biblical sense.⁵ That involves two things in particular. First, these phrases speak of God’s own ‘righteousness’, not a status or character that is somehow conveyed or transferred to humans. Second, this ‘righteousness’, though it involves a ‘forensic’ element in God’s judging the world justly, is focused more specifically on God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Israel. This is what Paul sees as now fulfilled in Israel’s Messiah, the crucified and risen Jesus.⁶

If we allow this, Romans and Galatians gain a radical new coherence: Paul’s exposition of Genesis 15, the chapter where God made a covenant with Abraham, does not merely illustrate or provide ‘scriptural proof’ for the point he is arguing, but rather undergirds it. Paul’s whole point is that God has fulfilled, in the Messiah and the spirit, the covenant promises he made to Abraham all those years ago. If we disallow this theme, all sorts of things in the overall argument of Romans and Galatians, and in Paul’s theology as a whole, begin to fall apart.

I have made this case extensively elsewhere, and do not intend to repeat the arguments.⁷ Here I focus instead on that question of translation. Granted that dikaiosynē theou and similar phrases in the LXX regularly refer, not indeed to a blind or punitive ‘justice’ (the old mediaeval iustitia distributiva, or even ‘retributive’ justice, against which Luther naturally reacted), but to the divine faithfulness that issues in God’s acts of rescue and mercy for Israel, and granted that Paul draws freely on books like the Psalms or Isaiah where that theme is regularly sounded, might it not be better to allow that meaning [246] pride of place, or at least to be clearly heard, in the key statements of the theme of Romans? After all, when Paul sums up the letter as a whole, he says, ‘The Messiah became a servant of the circumcised people in order to demonstrate the truthfulness of God – that is, to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, and to bring the nations to praise God for his mercy.’⁸ This has so many resonances with the argument of Romans 3 and 4 in particular that it would be wise to pay attention to it as a guide to what Paul is saying there, though of course the detailed exegesis must have the last word. Even if this meaning is thought to be secondary, one might suppose that a translation ought to leave the possibility open.

That is why I found the original NIV (1978 edition) so unhelpful at Romans 1.17 and 3.21. Here is 1.17:

For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last . . .

There is no ambiguity there, no chance for the reader to hear the echoes of Isaiah or the Psalms. The phrase dikaiosynē theou is taken to refer, straightforwardly, to the righteous status that the believer has as a result of faith, with the genitive ‘of God’ being read as a genitive of origin, in which the ‘from God’ indicates that this status is somehow given, bestowed, imputed or whatever by God.⁹ (Let me say at once that Paul does indeed think that the believer has a status of dikaiosynē, and that this is the result of God’s ‘reckoning’. This is what he refers to in Philippians 3.9 as a dikaiosynē ek theou, a righteous status from God. But this is not the natural meaning of dikaiosynē theou itself.)

However, this is repeated in the old NIV of 3.21–22:

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. (NIV 1984)

Again, there is no chance for the biblical overtones to be heard. Nor is there any chance that the meaning of these key verses will relate to the larger context of the passage, in which 3.5 has referred unambiguously and pregnantly to God’s own righteousness; in which 3.25–26 will insist that this is what the [247] entire paragraph has been about (‘[God] did it to demonstrate his justice’, repeated); and in which chapter 4 as a whole will expound the way in which God has been faithful to the Abrahamic covenant.

It is then no surprise that 10.3 goes the same way:

Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. (NIV 1984)

This again ignores the context, in which the question of the divine justice has been on the table since 9.6, being raised explicitly in 9.14. What the unbelieving Israelites ‘did not know’ was precisely how the divine covenant plan had been at work throughout their history, leading to the covenant renewal spoken of in Deuteronomy 30, which Paul proceeds to expound, as the centre of the entire section, in 10.6–10. This, again, I have expounded elsewhere.¹⁰

At first glance, Today’s New English Version (TNIV, a revision of the NIV that appeared in 2004) appeared to have taken the point by translating dikaiosynē theou in 1.17 and 3.21 as ‘the righteousness of God’, thus leaving open the possibility of hearing the phrase with its normal biblical meaning, and thus opening the way both to the climax of the initial statement of the argument in 3.25–26 and to the exposition of the Abrahamic covenant in chapter 4. But in both cases the following clause snatches away what had seemed to be offered. Here is the TNIV of 1.17:

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed – a righteousness that is by faith from first to last . . .

Here ‘a righteousness’ clearly refers back to ‘the righteousness of God’, and insists that it must refer to the believer’s status. Here, similarly, is 3.21–22, where ‘this righteousness’ provides the anchoring interpretation for ‘the righteousness of God’:

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. (TNIV)

At least 10.3 has changed for the better:

Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. (TNIV)

And that is where the NIV stands in its most recent version of 2011. [248]

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 A New Perspective On Käsemann? Apocalyptic, Covenant, and the Righteousness of God
• 2 Justifi Cation By (Covenantal) Faith to the (Covenantal) Doers: Romans 2 Within the Argument of the Letter
• 3 How and Why Paul Invented‘Christian Theology’
• 4 How Greek Was Paul’s Eschatology?
• 5 Paul’s Western Missionary Project: Jerusalem, Rome, Spain In Historical and Theological Perspectives
• 6 The Glory Returns: Spirit, Temple and Eschatology In Paul and John
• 7 Historical Paul and‘Systematic Theology’: To Start a Discussion
• 8 Paul and Missional Hermeneutics
• 9 God Put Jesus Forth: Reflections On Romans 3.24–26
• 10 A Poem Doubled: Pauline Reflections On Theology and Poetry
• 11 The Challenge of Fraternity In Paul
• 12 Learning from Paul Together: How New Insights Into Paul’s Teaching Can Help Move Us Forward In Mission
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors