The Promises of God

The Background of Paul’s Exclusive Use of 'epangelia' for the Divine Pledge

Kevin P. Conway

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9783110375077
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110410273
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This study is the first to investigate why Paul makes exclusive use of 'epangelia' for the divine pledge when referring to the Abrahamic covenant, a usage of the term never found in the OT-LXX. After examining Jewish writings and Greek literature of the classical and Hellenistic periods, this study demonstrates that Paul is rather unique in his exclusive use of the 'epangelia' word group for the divine pledge and for using the term predominantly in reference to the Abrahamic promises. This exclusive usage is further deemed unexpected in that the 'horkos' and 'omnymi' lexemes are by far the terms most commonly associated with God's promises to Abraham in the OT, the literature with which Paul was most familiar. The study then moves to explain why Paul has chosen this path of discontinuity, where it is argued that Paul's exclusive choice of 'epangelia' for the divine promise is driven by its conceptual and linguistic correspondence with the 'euangelion', one of the terms Paul adopted from the early church that forms the core of his ministry. This conceptual word study of the divine promise will benefit Pauline scholars interested in Paul's use of the OT as well as his association of the 'euangelion' and 'epangelia' word groups.

1 Introduction and Method

1.1 Introduction

This word [ἐπαγγελία] has no preliminary
history in the OT. This is the more striking
because on the basis of Paul’s teaching we tend
to consider the OT from the standpoint of
promise.¹

The paradox contained in this quotation is even more puzzling when one considers that the vast majority of occurrences of the divine ἐπαγγελία in the NT—and, for our purposes, specifically in the undisputed Pauline Writings—are references to such in the OT. Thus, the major question this dissertation attempts to answer is, “Why does Paul use a pledge term for the OT divine promises that the LXX itself rarely, if ever, uses?” In fact, most English translations of the OT translate a variety of words from the Masoretic and LXX texts as “promise/to promise,” but the vast majority of these words could more literally be translated as “word,” “to say,” or “to do.”² This study will argue that not only is Paul’s exclusive use of ἐπαγγελία for the divine pledge without precedent in Greek literature, but that it was an intentional rhetorical choice, which served his communicative purpose better than any other word group in the Greek language of his milieu. Paul, as the argument goes, employs this term because of its close conceptual and linguistic correspondence with εὐαγγέλιον. The conceptual side of the coin concerns the promises of the Abrahamic covenant being closely associated with the gospel, while the linguistic side of the coin considers the assonance created by both terms sharing the -αγγελ stem.

(and its verbal cognates) is a favorite term in the Pauline Corpus, as it is used thirty-three times.³ However, a word search for ἐπαγγελία language in the so-called canonical books of the LXX⁴ reveals that it occurs only five times in four verses, and most scholars see none of those instances as having anything to do with God making a pledge toward his people. Building upon the position expounded in the opening quote of this chapter, Moltmann concludes, “Linguistically speaking it [NT use of ἐπαγγελία] appears to have no previous history in the Old Testament, although it is actually only in the Old Testament traditions that a previous history exists.”⁵ Johnson agrees: “Given the importance of the language of ‘promise’ in the NT, it is remarkable how little a role it plays in the LXX.”⁶ Christoph Barth reasons that though the Hebrew Bible accords an important place to God’s promises, “strangely, it has no specific word for ‘promise.’ God says: I shall give, I shall bless, you will become, you will receive. His declaration of what is going to happen, strengthened at times by his oath, is his promise. The word ‘promise’ comes in only tentatively and occasionally with the Greek translation.”⁷ Westermann stresses that ἐπαγγελία is a NT, and not an OT, conception.⁸ Cranfield sees the earliest use of ἐπαγγελία with reference to God’s promises as being found in the Psalms of Solomon rather than the LXX books with MT counterparts.⁹ Prümm argues that the use of ἐπαγγελία in the NT cannot be fully understood except through its use in the NT when he writes, “Der Terminus Epangelia gehört zu den Begriffsworten, die erst mit der Ablösung des Alten Testamentes durch das Neue zu ihrer vollen Bedeutung gelangen sollten, als man lernte, den gottgesetzten Sinn und Zweck des Alten Testamentes im Lichte der messianischen Erfüllung zu betrachten.”¹⁰ Jewett goes so far as to incorrectly write, “Although Paul consistently employs this term [ἐπαγγελία] in reference to God’s ‘promises granted to the patriarchs’…, the OT does not employ this term at all.”¹¹ Similarly, Sass states that before Paul there were no theological lexemes for the promise of God.¹² It would appear that the consensus among scholars has been that the use of ἐπαγγελία language in the OT has had little or no effect on Paul’s use and understanding of the term. Thus, the issue of why Paul uses the term, ἐπαγγελία, for the divine pledge—when it is rarely used, if at all, for such in the OT-LXX—does not even show up on the radar of scholars as a vexata quaestio since no solutions are offered when the question does, indeed, emerge.

Since the OT-LXX provides little or no background information for Paul’s use of ἐπαγγελία, it is necessary to examine the term’s usage over a broader array of literature. Following the introductory chapter, where synonymous Greek terms for the divine pledge are introduced, Part One of this study explores, in mostly chronological order, Greek literature written by both non-Jews and Jews. The first part of the assessment investigates different authors’ usage of pledge terms for the divine promise in order to demonstrate that Paul is unique in his exclusive ...

Table of contents

• Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Citations
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction and Method
• Part One: Paul’s Uniqueness in His Exclusive Use of ἐπαγγελία for the Divine Promise
• Part Two: Paul’s Reasons for Exclusively Using for the Divine Promise
• Bibliography
• Index of Scriptures and Other Ancient Writings
• Index of Ancient Authors
• Index of Greek and Hebrew Words
• Subject Index