The Letters of Paul, Fifth Edition

Conversations in Context

Calvin J. Roetzel

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781611642957
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Estudios bíblicos

Calvin Roetzel's The Letters of Paul has long been established as the most effective textbook for introducing Paul and Paul's writings to undergraduate and seminary students. This new edition updates the text to include new scholarship developed after the fourth edition's release in 1998. The result is a wonderful basic textbook on Paul's letters.

1

Paul and His World

Most of us can empathize with Polycarp, who complained that neither he nor anyone like him was “able to follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul” (Letter to the Philippians 3.2). Many parts of the letters are “hard to understand” (2 Pet. 3:16). Nevertheless, more information about Paul and the world of his addressees should make comprehension less difficult. Ultimately, Paul’s letters are understandable only in the light of his genius and the gospel he preached. However, Paul’s religious and cultural context does help to illumine the writings. It may not explain them entirely, but it does shed light. In the discussion below we shall look at some of the ways Paul’s milieu, both Hellenistic and Jewish, influenced his message, and on the other side, how the Sitz im Leben, or real life setting, of his readers affected their response. This convenient division is made to aid discussion, even though, as we soon shall see, there was no unhellenized Judaism in the first century and no part of the Hellenistic world totally isolated from the Jewish experience. So what we separate for purposes of discussion was not in fact separated in the first century.

PAUL’S HELLENISTIC HABITAT

As the Acts of the Apostles suggests, Paul probably grew up in Tarsus, an important commercial, administrative, and cultural center on the southeast coast of Asia Minor (9:11; 21:39; 22:3). As the provincial capital of Cilicia, Tarsus rivaled Alexandria and Athens in importance. There it was that Paul learned his first language, Greek. There he became familiar with the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. There he was most likely taught to read, write, and imitate Greek literary and rhetorical forms. There he received his latinized Greek name, Paulos rather than the Hebrew, Shaul, which appears nowhere in his letters (but see Acts 13:9). There he acquired an understanding of Hellenistic culture—its anthropology, its political and religious institutions, its cosmology, its sports, and its ecumenical tendencies. There he became acquainted with Greco-Roman rhetoric and mastered the fine art of writing a Hellenistic letter. This rich, cosmopolitan tradition transmitted to Paul through his ancestral religion lingered to shape his messianist thinking in highly original ways. The nucleus of that Jewish tradition was found in the scriptures so important to Diaspora Jews—that is, Jews at home in the Greco-Roman world outside Palestine. An awareness of the role of the Septuagint in Paul’s religious outlook is crucial for understanding the letters.

The Septuagint as Paul’s Bible

Just as for Helen Keller the discovery and use of language was magical, so also Paul’s identity was profoundly influenced by the popular Greek of his day. Language, we know, is no mere passive mirror of the world or a mute tool to be discarded after world construction is done. Rather, language shapes our understanding of reality itself—our understanding of God, Christ, history, the church, and even our very own self. Just as children learn their colors through the promptings of parents, teachers, siblings, and friends, so also religious understanding came to Paul through the language of his native religion.

Much of the language shaping Paul’s identity and outlook came from the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that we call the Septuagint. Within a Jewish community steeped in that language, Paul gained his understanding of life and death, fate and freedom, sin and piety, isolation and reconciliation, and inclusion and exclusion.

As an important feature of Paul’s Diaspora Judaism, the Septuagint was the Bible not just of the elite scholars but of the common people. While retaining some of its Hebrew flavor, the Septuagint, composed in the ordinary Greek of the day,¹ was fully intelligible even to the illiterate person who heard it read or cited in synagogue settings. Not only was Paul a “Septuagint-Jew,” as Adolf Deissmann called him nearly a century ago, but the same was also the case for most synagogue Jews in Tarsus.²

Popular legends sprang up supporting its claim to authenticity. According to one fanciful tale, for instance, seventy-two Hebrew scribes from Jerusalem fluent in Greek translated the entire Torah, or first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in seventy-two days. Translated for the library of Pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284–247 BCE), the independent renditions of these scholars, according to later legend, agreed in every single detail.³ (Because of this combination of seventies, we call the book the Septuagint, or LXX, the Roman numeral for seventy.) In reality, the Septuagint was not translated in a little over two months from the Hebrew text but evolved slowly over more than two centuries, and its faithfulness to its Hebrew predecessor varies greatly from book to book.

Once available, however, the text was soon surrounded by a vast body of commentary written to interpret it for Jewish Diaspora communities. In his multivolume works, Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Jew, concerns himself almost exclusively with the interpretation of the Septuagint for his generation. The commentary in the romantic tale of Joseph’s marriage to the beautiful Egyptian woman Aseneth had special relevance for Diaspora Jews, who sometimes also fell in love with and married non-Jews.⁴ Aristobolus, writing in the second century BCE, attempted to explain anthropomorphic references to God in the Bible to make them more acceptable to the sophisticated, educated Jews of his day.⁵ These works, and others besides, all underscored the authority of the Septuagint as God’s preeminent vehicle of revelation.

More than a text generating interpretation, however, the Septuagint itself was an interpretation. From different periods, from many hands, and scribed in the vernacular Greek of the day, the Septuagint concerned itself with the preservation and interpretation of the “Old Testament” in a Greek appropriate to a new time that also remained true to the spirit of the Ur-text. Inevitably certain Greek ideas crept into the translation in at least three important areas.

First, the view of God in the Septuagint reflects a Hellenistic bias. Especially noteworthy is the disappearance of the personal names for God. The Septuagint may render the proper nouns Yahweh and Elohim with the generic theos (god). El Shaddai, a common Hebrew proper name yahweh sebaoth for God, is most often rendered in Greek with the abstract “Almighty” (pantokrafōr) or “All-Powerful.”

A trend toward abstraction surfaces in Exodus 3:1–4, Elohim’s ambiguous response to Moses’ clever attempt to worm the secret, powerful divine name from the divine agent. Using a play on words, Elohim slyly answers the impertinent Moses with “‘I AM WHO I AM. . . .’ Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” In order for the play on words to work, a knowledge of the Hebrew verb “to be,” from which the word Yahweh is formed, is required. Such a wordplay, however, is missing entirely from the Septuagint. The Septuagint has instead, “I am The Being. . . . say to the children, ‘The Being (ho ōn) has sent me.’” Consequently, Yahweh is depicted as the Self-Existent One, the Absolute, or the cosmic, divine being of the Greek philosophers.

A comparable level of abstraction is achieved when the Hebrew God Most High, or El Elyon, becomes “the supreme deity” in the Septuagint. Likewise, Adonai, whose name implies a cultic relationship between deity and worshiper, becomes “sovereign Lord” (kyrios) in the Septuagint.

The Hebrew word Elohim, which was used for the one revealed to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the one who gave the law to Moses, is known in Greek as “God” (theos) or, following the Hebrew plural form, “gods.” Thus for the Hebrew of Exodus 22:28, “You shall not revile Elohim,” the Greek has, “You shall not revile the gods.” This small change had major implications for the practice of a Hebrew religion that traditionally centered on the one God to the exclusion of all others. The literal rendering of the plural “gods” made the septuagintal commandment encourage tolerance of different forms of religious piety, that is, of the “gods.” While tolerance of all religious traditions was encouraged, subscription to them was still forbidden.

While Paul’s rigorous monotheism would have resisted the Greek spirit of tolerance embedded in the septuagintal translation of Exodus 22:28, he was decisively shaped by the ecumenical tendencies at the heart of Hellenism. Moreover, Paul’s churches in the Hellenistic orbit, more open to that spirit than he (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:7ff.), in some cases dictated the issues under consideration in the letters. In the tendency toward abstraction both Paul and his readers came under the influence of the Septuagint, and in one specific case, Paul’s understanding of the term “Lord” (kyrios) was informed by his Greek Bible.

Second, we see in the Septuagint an understanding of law that Paul shared. One of the most prominent features of postexilic Jewish religion (i.e., after 537 BCE) was the emphasis on Torah. The root of the word torah in its verbal form means “to direct” or “to instruct.” It may refer to a teacher’s instruction, Yahweh’s direction, prophetic appeal to the “word of Yahweh,” or the instruction derived from the rich and varied story of God’s dealing with Israel. In the Greek translation, the word torah almost always appears as the Greek nomos (law), a translation that lacks the nuances of both languages. Usually nomos refers to a code that governs community life or an individual’s or community’s conduct. In some cases, however, the Greek nomos can refer to a cosmic principle like gravity or even mortality. In this latter sense especially, the Septuagint departed from the Hebrew understanding of torah and drew near to the Greek understanding of “natural law.” While Paul was aware of the nuance torah carried, he used nomos in Romans 8:2 to refer to being “set free from the law of sin and death,” an echo of Genesis 3:1–3, which predicted that death would follow disobedience of the divine command, an obvious etiological legend about the genesis of death. Moreover, Paul nowhere equated, as this passage would seem to, torah with sin and death. Similarly in Romans 7:2 3, where Paul spoke of the “law of my mind,” and in 3:27, where he referred to the “law of works” as opposed to the “law of faith,” the most accurate translation for “law” would be “principle.”

Third, the perception of “faith” in the Septuagint is also significant for understanding Paul’s thought. The word for “faith” in Greek (pistis) translates the Hebrew noun ’emet, whose basic meaning is firmness, stability, or reliability. When the Hebrews wanted to speak of faith in someone or something deemed reliable, they always preferred a verb form. We see, therefore, that the Hebrews made precise distinctions between reliability (or faithfulness) and faith or belief in that which is reliable. The Septuagint made no such distinction, and the Greek word for “faith” (pistis) was ambiguous enough to allow for both meanings. While this point may seem trivial, it does have relevance for understanding Romans 1:17. In this pivotal passage, which Luther deemed the most important passage in the Bible, Paul quoted from a version of Habakkuk 2:4, but it is uncertain whether he cited the Greek or the Hebrew. The Hebrew of Habakkuk 2:4 is clear and can be translated, “the righteous live by their faith.” Perhaps following a slightly different manuscript, the Septuagint has, “the righteous shall live by my [i.e., God’s] faithfulness.” Paul rendered the passage without the pronoun “my” and took “faith” to refer to individual belief; thus the “one who is righteous will live by faith.” Did Paul use a variant of the word pistis to mean “belief in” God’s work in Christ or to refer to the importance of fidelity to God’s covenant or faithful obedience to God’s will? Or did he refer to God’s fidelity? Scholars have debated this issue without producing a consensus.⁶ In using the Greek text Paul may be purposely using a term that is sufficiently ambiguous to suggest multiple meanings. In any case, the point is that the passage is notoriously difficult at least in part because of the ambiguity of the language Paul used, and that ambiguity is only possible if Paul was using the Septuagint.

In this sample of passages we can see how the Hellenistic spirit influenced the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek and how Paul shared the outlook of the Septuagint at some points. While it is true that this intrusion of the Hellenistic spirit did not compromise the fundamental character of the Hebrew religion, it would be inaccurate to say that no change in viewpoint or shift of emphasis occurred. In the comparison below we observe some of those alterations.

Comparison of Translations
of Hebrew and Greek Texts
(* = author’s translation, italics= emphasis added)

Translation of Hebrew Texts	Translation of Septuagint*
Who has known the Spirit of the Lord . . . (Isa. 40:13)*	Who has comprehended the mind of the Lord . . . (cf. 1 Cor. 2:16)
He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa. 53:12)	[He] bore away the sins of many, and on account of their lawlessness was he handed over. (cf. Rom. 4:25)
The rabble among them had a strong craving. (Num. 11:4)	And the people who were among them had an eager desire . . . (cf. 1 Cor. 10:6)
The righteous shall live by their faith. (Hab. 2:4)	“The righteous shall live by my [i.e., God’s] faithfulness . . .” (cf. Rom. 1:17)
“By you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” (Gen. 12:3 RSV)	“In you shall all the peoples of the earth be blessed.” (cf. Gal. 3:8)
Moses went up to God. (Exod. 19:3)	Moses ascended to the mount of God
And they [Moses and the elders] saw the God of Israel. (Exod. 24:10)	And they saw the place on which the God Israel stood.
[Isaiah said to Ahaz,] “Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” (Isa. 7:14)	Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (cf. Gal. 4:4)
Elohim said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” (Exod. 3:14)	And the God spoke to Moses saying, “I am The Being.”
“You shall not make light of Elohim.” (Exod. 22:28)	“You shall not speak evil of the gods.”

While no comprehensive treatment of septuagintal tendencies and their theological significance is readily available, scholars recognize that certain septuagintal viewpoints influenced Paul’s religious outlook. Heard in the home, memorized in the school, read and discussed in the synagogue, the Septuagint was in Paul’s blood surely as much as the KJV was in the blood of Milton. Lodged in his soul, the language of the English Bible came to the fore in his discussion of the great issues of sin and justification, law and liberty, election and exclusion, life and death. The language of the Septuagint molded Paul’s understanding of faith, legitimated his mission to the Gentiles, and defined his eschatology. This relationship to the Septuagint was dynamic. Its language defined his world and then curved back onto it to illumine and inform Paul’s gospel as an apostle of Christ.

Paul’s Nonbiblical Hellenistic Language

While the Septuagint was central to Paul’s theology, much of his language and important religious expressions came from the wider Hellenistic culture. The word for “conscience” (syneidēsis), for example, commonly appeared in the writings of the Stoic philosophers but is missing entirely from Jewish scriptures. Even allowin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction: Contrary Impressions
• 1. Paul and His World
• 2. The Anatomy of the Letters
• 3. Traditions behind the Letters
• 4. The Letters as Conversations
• 5. Paul and His Myths
• 6. Interpreters of Paul in the New Testament
• 7. Currents and Crosscurrents
• Notes
• Suggested Additional Reading
• Index