Cynics, Paul and the Pauline Churches

F. Gerald Downing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134694570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

F. Gerald Downing explores the teachings of Paul, arguing that the development of Paul's preaching and of the Pauline Church owed a great deal to the views of the vagabond Cynic philosophers, critics of the gods and of the ethos of civic society.
F. Gerald Downing examines the New Testament writings of Paul, explaining how he would have been seen, heard, perceived and understood by his culturally and ethnically diverse converts and disciples. He engages in a lucid Pauline commentary and offers some startling and ground-breaking views of Paul and his Word.
Cynics, Paul and the Pauline Churches is a unique and controversial book, particularly in its endorsement of the simple and ascetic life proffered in Paul's teachings in comparison with the greedy, consumerist and self-promoting nature of today's society.

1

A CYNIC PREPARATION FOR PAUL’S GOSPEL FOR JEW AND GREEK, SLAVE AND FREE, MALE AND FEMALE ¹

(i) How may Paul have been heard and his behaviour perceived?

How well Paul was in fact understood by the people he persuaded to join the Christian movement it is hard for us to assess with any certainty. But it is clear that he persuaded some, among them some of those to whom his surviving letters were addressed. The problems he decides he has to sort out in these letters would suggest that communication had not been completely successful, either in quantity or quality. Yet people had been persuaded to join the movement, and so to share in common activities, deploying common phrases as part of their active belonging.

Paul himself tells us that he is fully aware of the importance of using language that people will understand (1 Cor 14.6–12), even attempting to be ‘all things to all people’ (1 Cor 9.22); as well as being aware of the danger involved in all this, the danger of the sophist’s superficial persuasiveness (Gal 1.10; 2 Cor 5.11).² Paul’s success or failure, as said, is hard to gauge. Still harder to assess is the extent of his own actual awareness of the match or mismatch between his proclamation and others’ appropriation of it; though in noting that we need also to take account of the high standards of rapport between speaker and hearers expected in the culture of Paul’s day. It remains the case that it is worth trying to discern and assess the contents of Paul’s initial approaches to people in the Hellenistic towns he visited. These will have been gentiles in the main (Gal 2.9).³ Many if not all Paul’s gentile contacts seem to have been fully ‘pagan’ (1 Thess 1.9; Gal 4.8; 1 Cor 12.2), not ‘God-fearers’ in the sense indicated in Acts 16.14; 18.7, for instance: when first they encountered Paul they had not yet ‘turned from idols’. Some, admittedly, could have had some contact with Jewish ideas, but not as a group that had already ‘turned’.⁴ This study attempts to discern something of what Paul may have felt – and found – such ordinary Hellenistic townspeople would without too much difficulty understand.

For the investigation to go ahead we have to make the minimum preliminary assumption that Paul was fairly confident (even if unreflectively) that he could make sense to these Hellenised gentiles whom he addressed; and for that to be so, he must have felt reasonably at ease with some ranges of their existing vocabularies of ideas-in-words. We must also accept for the sake of the discussion the common conviction that in his letters Paul refers back to the practices and beliefs and specific verbal formulae⁵ shared in those earliest stages of forming congregations in Galatia, in Macedonia and in Achaea, some years before writing the letters preserved for us.

Obviously most scholarly attention is directed – entirely properly – towards attempts to discern what is being said and perhaps heard in the extant letters in their ‘Christian’ context around the time of writing and first listening, so far as that can be reconstructed.⁶ On the other hand, although detailed discussions of the likely intelligibility of the language of Paul’s supposed prior proclamation to as yet uncommitted gentiles may be on the shelves, they have so far escaped the present writer. Thus, while it is noted, for instance, that 1 Thessalonians 1.9–10 (‘You turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come’) may be a formulaic (even pre-Pauline) summary of early missionary success among gentiles; yet the ‘unabridged’, ‘full-length’ wording supposedly implied appears to be nowhere reconstructed. Assuming that what we have here is a summary, and that Paul would not have restricted himself to so terse a formulation, we are still not told how this or any other themes of his preaching might have been fleshed out in speeches or conversations in terms likely to have been comprehensible and also persuasive. Available studies seem only to sketch-in the early stages of Paul’s work with a very broad brush, and briefly.⁷

With no detailed lead available, at least to the present writer, we proceed to Paul’s inventio, his

, his combined quest for what to say and how to say it when first making contact with ‘idolatrous’ gentiles.⁸ What ‘preparation for his gospel’, what at all serviceable words and ideas-in-words may he have been able to discern and deploy? The most common inference (based primarily on Acts) is that Paul had to hand and used the topics, language and ethos of a long-established and relatively successful ‘Jewish Hellenistic mission’. Whether there was any such ‘Jewish Hellenistic mission’ cannot be debated here.⁹ But it is argued by a number of authors that from some of the Greek-speaking synagogues Paul would not only have found many of its ‘god-fearing’ converts responsive to his law-free messianic Judaism, while themselves still closely in touch with the wider gentile world; but here would have been available a ready-made and tested vocabulary of Hellenistic Jewish ideas-in-words for Paul’s own preaching.¹⁰ So it is often, but far too readily, concluded.

For the people Paul addresses in his letters do not seem to have been ‘acculturated’ to the thought-forms of even the most free-thinking Greek-speaking synagogues. Paul’s arguments in what is taken to be his earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, clearly presuppose little if any prior awareness of, let alone authority accorded to Jewish scriptures.¹¹ Although the Corinthian congregation may well at the time of writing have included Jewish Christians (1 Cor 1.24; 9.20), Paul addresses these, too, in general terms as converts from paganism (12.2).¹² Galatian Christians were, it seemed to Paul, now beginning to take Jewish tradition seriously, and so here he could – or must – now argue from a Jewish scriptural basis.¹³ But when he appeals to what first convinced them in their introduction to Christian commitment, there is no sign of their having been given much at all by way of biblical ‘texts’. We may note for example Galatians 3.1–5, where Paul reminds his hearers of factors in their early believing with no reference to scripture (none to fulfilled prophecy, for instance), and contrast that with Acts 13.¹⁴

The Paul of the letters certainly displays amply his own Jewish roots and also evinces some acquaintance with the ideals and attitudes instanced elsewhere in Hellenistic Jewish sources, and we shall revert to this later in the present study. But, as J. M. G. Barclay has recently argued with great thoroughness, even writing to established congregations Paul does not use much of this latter, Hellenistic Jewish material. Its apologetic aim may well have been simply to gain respect or at least tolerance, but what is actually urged is a total acceptance of the Jewish Torah and a full assimilation into the Jewish community. By contrast, ‘Paul’s tone is radically different from that total commitment to the law which we find in writers as diverse as Aristeas, Josephus, Philo and the author of 4 Maccabees.’¹⁵ Barclay finds no sign of Paul having built on any of the more positive elements of this diverse Hellenistic Judaism, nor even of his having to distinguish his approach from it. All Paul seems to use, and that very occasionally, is a restricted range of Jewish anti-pagan polemic.¹⁶

Another avenue of approach Paul is thought by some to have adopted would have been the practice, language and ethos of Graeco-Roman cults, civic or more private, and gnostic, if such there were around in Paul’s day. If we had more relevant and contemporary texts available, the case might of course be stronger.¹⁷ But as things stand it certainly seems worth exploring further, and asking whether any other encompassing field of contemporary discourse available to us may have been popular enough and at least apparently appropriate enough for Paul to have adopted it in some measure, both to sort out what he wanted to say, and to say it, when first trying to make contact.

The title of this study indicates that the complex to which further attention is being invited is that of popular Cynicism. A number of writers over the years have noted occasional apparent echoes of Cynic terms and topoi in Paul (R. Bultmann – though I would discount the ‘Cynic-Stoic diatribe’; H. Conzelmann, H. D. Betz, D. Georgi, V. C. Pfiztner, H. Funke, H. Koester, R. Hock, S. Vollenweider, M. Plunkett, M. Ebner, to mention but a few; but especially, of course, A. J. Malherbe).¹⁸ Malherbe in particular expresses himself convinced that ‘Paul himself was familiar with Cynic tradition.’¹⁹ In the present writer’s recent Cynics and Christian Origins, however, it was suggested that Cynic traces in Paul were interesting but scattered and occasional.²⁰ Further investigation now leads to the conclusion that for early Paul at least there is much more to be found.

Evidence is to be presented to substantiate the following five theses (which will be recalled at the end of each chapter): (a) That Paul would regularly have been heard and seen as some sort of Cynic. If that turns out to be at all persuasive, the exercise will have been worthwhile. Such a conclusion would be interesting enough an addition to our picture of Paul. The Cynic-sounding matter could then well provide some important indications of how Paul came to be understood (or, of course, misunderstood), and in what manner. But we shall then also argue further (b) that these similarities appear so often and in so many contexts that Paul cannot but have been aware of them. At the very least he must have been content with them, and found them no hindrance. That is the next step. However, these ‘Cynic-seeming’ elements in Paul are often so closely bound up with the rest of what he says and says he did, that we must further still consider that they are deliberate. Cynic discourse and praxis (c) may now seem to have been part of the total field of discourse and action available to Paul, and would have allowed him to articulate and enact important elements of the faith and life he was developing and attempting to share. Just how suggestive, how formative this or any other available field of discourse was for Paul is a further question that is very hard to answer with any certainty. But Paul does not seem to have been ‘cherry-picking’ adventitious quotes. The Cynic strands are understood and used as some Cynics themselves understood and used them, and are integral to what Paul is about.²¹

Since Samuel Sandmel invented the term, an investigation of this sort often attracts the charge of ‘paral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 A Cynic preparation for Paul’s Gospel for Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female
• 2 Scholarly perceptions of Cynics, and of Cynics and early Christians; and our sources
• 3 Why then the Law?
• 4 Already the Sceptre and the Kingdom
• 5 Troubles Invited, Troubles Withstood
• 6 Paul the Teacher and Pastor
• 7 One God, One Lord
• 8 Paul, an ‘anomalous’ Jew
• 9 Stoic and Epicurean Strands
• 10 Paul and other early Christians and their Traditions of Jesus; and Jesus
• 11 Conclusions
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Ancient Author Index
• Modern Modern Author Index
• Subject Index