Voices and Views on Paul

Exploring Scholarly Trends

Ben Witherington III, Jason A. Myers

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830873449
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover AwardIn the field of Pauline studies, much has changed over the last twenty years. Since Ben Witherington III first published his influential book The Paul Quest, monumental works have appeared from scholars such as James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, E. P. Sanders, and John Barclay. The New Perspective is no longer new, and the flurry of publications continues across a range of specialized studies. Those interested in exploring trends and issues related to Paul may find themselves in need of a map.With Voices and Views on Paul, Ben Witherington and Jason Myers have teamed up to provide a reliable guide to the major terrain of Pauline scholarship. Through a distinctive combination of survey and evaluation, they explain and analyze the thought of recent major Pauline interpreters and track developments over the past two decades. They conclude with an assessment of how these studies have advanced our understanding of Paul and where further work is needed.Voices and Views on Paul offers a helpful service to students, pastors, and anyone seeking to keep up with this dynamic field as scholars continue to wrestle with Paul and his work.

When John wrote, “Behold, I am making all things New!”

(Rev 21:5), one wonders whether this applies to Pauline theology.

ANONYMOUS

Since the initial publication of The Paul Quest in 1998, Pauline scholars have continued churning out book after book on the apostle Paul. There has been an explosion of resources from a variety of fields in the guild. While the first Paul quest book was concerned with issues relating to Paul’s identity and thought, little space could be devoted to the history of interpretation of Paul, which has shaped how we know what we know. One of the larger developments in Pauline scholarship in the last thirty years is the so-called new perspective on Paul; at this time of writing, however, even this phrase is out of touch in many ways with the current state of Pauline studies.

First, the new perspective is no longer new. The phrase was coined by James Dunn in 1983 and is now thirty-seven years old. Second, the term perspective is a bit misleading, as there is no singular view on Paul within the new perspective on Paul. The term perspectives may be a bit more appropriate, as it represents a variety of persons and issues, some of whom seldom agree with one another. These perspectives will be unpacked in due course. Third, we now have new terms, such as “beyond the new perspective,” that build on, extend, and truly go beyond the new perspective on Paul. For these reasons and more, a book such as this is needed in order to keep pace with the flurry of publications on Paul over the past twenty years since the initial publication of The Paul Quest. However, in order to know where Pauline studies is headed, one must have an appropriate knowledge of where Pauline studies has come from.1 Hence this retrospective is in order.

WHERE TO BEGIN?

Any work on Paul has to pick a starting point, this work being no exception. The Pauline volcano had been bubbling up for some time before the eruption that was the new perspective on Paul. Although it might seem obvious to start a retrospect on the new perspective on Paul with E. P. Sanders or James Dunn, this would be a mistake and set off the conversation within the wrong context and on the wrong track. In order to understand the context of Sanders, Dunn, Wright, and others, we must take a step back and investigate some of the forerunners who led the way to those scholars’ seminal works. For the purposes of the current project we will begin with Krister Stendahl.2

THE GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF THE NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PAUL: KRISTER STENDAHL

The work of Krister Stendahl marked a noted shift in Pauline studies.3 In 1963 he published “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” which anticipated much of later Pauline studies emphases by almost twenty years.4 However, even here, Stendahl’s work had its own predecessors.5 His influential work was first given as a lecture in 1960, published in Swedish in 1961, and then in English two years later. One of the primary features of Stendahl’s work is his emphasis on the uniqueness of Paul’s historical context and the differences between his time and ours. Stendahl argues that one of the most basic issues of Paul had gone unnoticed, and this issue shaped Paul’s thought to a greater extent than any other.

According to Stendahl, the missing link in Pauline studies was the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. At the heart of Stendahl’s concern is that Paul’s letters have been homogenized to reveal an abstract theological outline rather than attention being devoted to the particular issues that Paul addressed. It is to this primary issue of Paul being an apostle to the Gentiles, in a specific historical situation, that Stendahl directs his entire attention. Stendahl raises the important correction that Paul’s teaching had been detached from his mission and task, to be the apostle to the Gentiles. One can see how this sort of emphasis could even lead to some of the later Jewish perspectives on Paul that have insisted that not only is Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, but that what he says about circumcision, Sabbath, and other boundary issues are strictly applicable only to Gentile followers of Jesus. In other words, Paul is not addressing the issues of “Jew and Gentile united in Christ.” He is addressing Gentile Christians only.6

One of the first pillars Stendahl attempts to demolish in a typical reading of Paul deals with the man himself. Here Stendahl picks up the typical interpretation of Paul’s Damascus road experience as involving a conversion (Acts 9:1-9; 22:4-16; 26:9-16; Gal 1:11-17). Stendahl highlights the continuity both before and after this event to argue that rather than a conversion of Paul, what we have is a new call for Paul. Paul receives a new assignment from God: a move from persecutor to proclaimer. Stendahl draws attention to the allusions from the Old Testament in Paul’s experience, specifically to Jeremiah and Isaiah, that appear in these accounts. Stendahl surmises that what we have in these accounts is a prophetic call of Paul, like that of Jeremiah or Isaiah.

Stendahl’s approach is certainly helpful for understanding Paul. One feature of his nuanced and attentive reading of Paul is our language in describing “how Paul met Jesus.” He argues that the term conversion has too much baggage in the modern context to do justice to the experience of Paul and is perhaps too strong of a term to describe Paul’s change. Certainly, it is not the same as someone changing from a polytheistic religion to Christianity. The change for Paul is not necessarily in his conception of Yahweh but in his understanding of Jesus as Messiah. To this degree, Stendahl rightly draws attention to the problems with the word conversion when used of Paul’s Damascus road experience. The issue is the new thing Paul embraces, not the old thing he leaves behind, because he does not leave behind his faith in the God of the Old Testament.

Paul’s experience as a call rather than a conversion has several corollaries in terms of understanding Paul’s message. First, what is specifically revealed to Paul is not the doctrine of justification but that Gentiles can enter the people of God without becoming Jewish. In this regard, Stendahl also anticipated by many decades the recent attempts by Jewish New Testament scholars to reclaim Paul as an observant Jew simply focused on bringing Gentiles to biblical faith.7 On Stendahl’s view, what accompanied Paul’s new vocation was a new understanding of the law. Paul’s call radically shaped his understanding of the law in the program and outworking of God in salvation history. The theological payoff for this, according to Stendahl, is that the epicenter of Paul’s thought about God, salvation, and the law springs from his new vocation as apostle to the Gentiles.

A second corollary of Stendahl’s emphasis on call rather than conversion is directed specifically against the Lutheran reading of Paul that views him as a conflicted individual before his “conversion.” Stendahl rightly stresses that we have no evidence from the New Testament that Paul ever experienced a situation similar to Martin Luther. There were no pangs of conscience, no inner turmoil or despair. Rather, the New Testament evidence from Acts and Paul’s letters points in the opposite direction. Paul had no issues with following the law, something he did remarkably well according to Philippians 3, calling himself “as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.”

It is a fruitful exercise for the student of Paul to entertain a thought experiment concerning what changed, theologically speaking, for Paul pre- and post-Damascus. The obvious answer is that his understanding of Jesus took a 180-degree turn. Paul went from understanding Jesus as a false messiah bent on leading the nation astray to being the savior of Israel. There is perhaps no word better than conversion to speak of how Paul changed his mind on Jesus. However, after his messianic revolution, one can wonder whether much else changed. He certainly didn’t stop being a monotheist, and his canon of Scripture seemed to stay the same as well. One might argue that his interpretation of that Scripture changed, but not the texts themselves. Likewise, his focus on the moral and ethical impetus of the Hebrew Scriptures is present both before and after Damascus. Again, one ought to take time to think through, rather than just assume, that everything changed for Paul. This is perhaps the greatest pedagogical help that Stendahl provided.

While there is much that can and should be commended about Stendahl’s emphasis on call rather than conversion, there is criticism that needs to be raised. The Paul we meet in both Acts and his letters is Paul the persecutor, one who oversaw the murder of fellow Jews who in his mind had apostatized by following Jesus as Messiah and had now put the whole nation at risk. What Stendahl’s argument assumes, although not explicitly, is that Paul’s call to persecute apostates was acceptable and Paul merely had a transfer between theological departments. This, however, raises the precise issue that Paul had radically misunderstood his calling by God; indeed, the Damascus experience is when Paul realizes that his call had been radically pointed in the wrong direction. Perhaps we can begin to speak of a conversion of Paul’s call? Might this adjudicate the two different approaches? It would seem that this notion stresses the appropriate point of Stendahl’s argument, in that it eliminates the theological baggage of conversion in the soteriological sense. However, it gives due weight to the radicalness in Paul’s change of thought concerning the person of Jesus and the people of God.

Likewise, when we encounter Paul’s story in Luke’s narrative, he has placed it right in the middle of a triple conversion narrative: the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40), Saul/Paul (Acts 9), and Cornelius (Acts 10). Paul’s story is preceded by the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch and followed by the conversion of Cornelius and his household. Now, we should separate how Luke has presented Paul’s account versus Paul’s own description, but it is worth noting at least how one first-century representative—Luke—understood the event.

Stendahl’s work came to exercise a profound influence on numerous people associated with the new perspective on Paul, as will be seen below. A proper understanding of Stendahl’s work reveals a profound shaping of the subsequent conversation. If nothing else, his arguments provided some of the first cracks in the traditional perspective on Paul as an advocate of grace rather than law, justification by faith rather than works-righteousness. In other words, his arguments showed that Paul was not Luther’s predecessor.

(RE)VIEWING JUDAISM: E. P. SANDERS

Our next figure is E. P. Sanders, who typically leads the list in a discussion of the origin(s) of the new perspective on Paul. His epochal work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, challenged many common assumptions in New Testament scholarship and secondarily in Pauline studies. His book is a massive attempt to offer a critical rereading of the relevant primary Jewish (including later rabbinical) sources to construct an historical portrait of first-century Judaism as a backdrop for the study of the historical Jesus and Paul. However, as seen above, Sanders’s work has its predecessors, and thus his contribution to the discussion did not appear out of nowhere. Contrary to the popular opinion of those most critical of the new perspective on Paul, his attempt was not the first attempt to reevaluate either first-century Judaism or Paul. This endeavor, in part, had already been put on the map by Albert Schweitzer, furthered to a large degree by W. D. Davies almost twenty years prior, and echoed in theory by Stendahl ten years before Sanders’s own work.8 There was also the extensive work of Martin Hengel, who came to very different conclusions from Sanders on these seminal issues.9 S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 - Retrospective: The New Perspective on Paul
• 2 The Sanders Revolution
• 3 Climbing the Wright Mountain
• 4 Dunn, with Paul and the Boundary Markers
• 5 The New Apocalyptic Paul
• 6 Other Voices, Other Views: Barclay and Chester
• 7 Conclusions: An Appalling Amount of Paul?
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Voices and Views on Paul
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright