Teacher of the Nations

Devin L. White

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110538175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This study examines educational motifs in 1 Corinthians 1-4 in order to answer a question fundamental to the interpretation of 1 Corinthians: Do the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians contain a Pauline apology or a Pauline censure? The author argues that Paul characterizes the Corinthian community as an ancient school, a characterization Paul exploits both to defend himself as a good teacher and to censure the Corinthians as poor students.

1Introduction: Early Christian Reception of Paul and the Interpretation of 1 Cor 1–4

1.1Teacher of the Nations?

Roughly thirty-five years after Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, Clement of Rome sent his own letter to the still-fractious Corinthians (c. 90 CE). In this letter he reminded his audience of the example of the apostle who founded their community. Paul, he wrote, “taught righteousness throughout the whole world” (δικαιοσύνην διδάξας ὅλον τὸν κόσμον), by making himself an “example” (ὑπογραμμός) for his audience to imitate (1 Clem 5:5–7). Clement’s description of Paul as a moral exemplar appears reminiscent of the instances in Paul’s corpus in which he exhorts his audience to imitate him (e.g., 1 Cor 4:16, 11:1). But a ὑπογραμμός was not just any example. More specifically, it was a writing exercise common in the early stages of Greek and Roman education.

The literate members of Clement’s audience would have known the ὑπογραμμός from painful experience. Teachers would inscribe practice sentences on wax tablets or papyri, and their students, in the midst of a years-long quest to improve their penmanship, would copy them repeatedly and meticulously.1 When Clement likens Paul to the ὑπογραμμός, then, he presents him not as a generic example but as an example whose proper social location was the classroom. Like Paul’s modern biographers, Clement and other early Christians thought of Paul as a great apostle, perhaps the greatest apostle.2 Yet Clement’s missive indicates another trajectory in the early Christian reception of Paul’s apostolic legacy, one which valorized Paul as a teacher and associated him with the life and practice of ancient schools.

Clement was not the only second century author to correlate Paul with ancient education. According to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla’s contemporaries find Paul’s teaching unnerving.3 The Epistula Apostolorum likewise recounts a prophecy of the resurrected Jesus—essentially a rewriting of Acts 9:10 –16—informing the other disciples about Paul’s impending apostolic call and his mission to preach the gospel and teach the nations.4 Other early descriptions of Paul veered away from narrative toward the encomiastic. Polycarp summarized Paul’s work in glowing terms:

For neither I nor anyone like me can keep pace with the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul. When he was with you in the presence of the people of that time, he accurately and reliably taught the word concerning the truth (ἐδίδαξεν ἀκριβῶς καὶ βεβαίως τὸν περὶ ἀληθείας λόγον). And when he was absent he wrote you letters; if you study them carefully, you will be able to build yourselves up in all the faith that has been given to you.5

For Polycarp, Paul’s greatness lay primarily in his teaching. When he exhorts his audience to study Paul’s writings, Polycarp himself sounds like an ancient schoolmaster urging his pupils to find in Homer examples of virtuous living. Polycarp’s Paul was nothing less than the teacher, the author, and the contents of a new Christian curriculum.

This trend in the Christian reception of Paul continued unabated into the third and fourth centuries.6 For Tertullian, Paul was “teacher” (magister),7 or “teacher of the nations” (doctor nationum).8 Athanasius remembers him as “Paul, our teacher.”9 Jerome, in his translation of Origen’s homilies on Ezekiel, alludes to (and agrees with) Didymus the Blind’s assertion that Origen was the second-greatest teacher of the church “after the Apostle.”10 Ambrose reflects on Paul as a student would his grammarian, asking “What better expounder of the scriptures do we indeed look for than that teacher of the gentiles, that chosen vessel?”11 Paul was Chrysostom’s favorite apostle, and “teacher of the world” (διδάσκαλος τῆς οἰκουμένης) was Chrysostom’s favorite epithet for Paul.12 Epiphanius calls Paul Jesus’s student (μαθητής) and claims that Christ himself appointed Paul to be a teacher of the nations (ὁ διδάσκαλος κατασταθεὶς τῶν ἐθνῶν ὑπὸ Χριστοῦ Παῦλος).13 Examples from the rest of late antiquity abound.14

What sources could have inspired such a consistent trend in early Christian cultural memory?15 The simplest answer is that the earliest Christians were describing Paul as a teacher even before Clement of Rome. When Luke describes the Pauline mission in Acts, he commonly uses vocabulary drawn from the semantic field of teaching and learning.16 In Antioch Paul and Barnabas “taught and proclaimed the word of God” (Acts 15:35); Paul stayed in Corinth for “a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them” (18:11). It is no surprise that in Ephesus Paul moves his students (τοὺς μαθητάς) from the synagogue to “the school of Tyrannus” (τῇ σχολῇ Τυράννου) (19:9). For Luke, Paul’s teaching was sufficiently similar to the “secular” education available in an urban center like Ephesus to warrant the occupation of an established school.17

The disputed Pauline epistles also portray Paul as a teacher. Colossians 1:28 recounts how Paul went about “warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom (διδάσκοντες πάντα ἄνθρωπον ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ), so that we may present everyone mature (τέλειον) in Christ.”18 Both 1 and 2 Timothy begin with claims that Paul was an “apostle of Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 1:1; 2 Tim 1:1), but each also claims that Paul “was appointed a herald and an apostle … a teacher of the Gentiles (διδάσκαλος ἐθνῶν) in faith and truth” (1 Tim 2:7) or that he “was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher (διδάσκαλος)” (2 Tim 1:11). Commentators tend to be skeptical about the historical accuracy of these descriptions.19 Modern wariness aside, the author of 1 Timothy is keen to keep Christian teaching (ἡ διδασκαλία) in good repute (6:1; cf. Titus 2:10). Timothy is unlike the teachers whom Paul opposes in 1–2 Timothy—those “who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim 3:7). Unlike false teachers, Timothy has received Paul’s teaching (σὺ δὲ παρηκολούθησάς μου τῇ διδασκαλίᾳ [2 Tim 3:10; cf. 3:14]). Moreover, Paul enjoins Timothy to

continue in what you have learned and firmly believed (ἐν οἷς ἔμαθες καὶ ἐπιστώθης), knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (πρὸς διδασκαλίαν, πρὸς ἐλεγμόν, πρὸς ἐπανόρθωσιν, πρὸς παιδείαν τὴν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ), so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:14–17)

Paul here places Christian teaching, some of which he provided to Timothy himself, alongside education in Jewish texts, the curricular bedrock of Second Temple Jewish education.20

Even this brief survey demonstrates that one common “image” (Bild) structuring early Christian memory of Paul was the notion that, in addition to being an apostle or evangelist, he was earliest Christianity’s teacher.21 This appellation, so commonly applied to Paul by his ancient readers, ought to lead modern interpreters to ask themselves a straightforward question: Did an epithet like “teacher of the nations,” simply strike later readers of 1 Timothy as a catchy biblical sobriquet, or might it be helpful to bear the title διδάσκαλος in mind when interpreting the undisputed Pauline epistles?

1.2Argument

To answer this question, the present study will investigate 1 Cor 1–4. Early Christians like Clement who remembered Paul as a teacher have observed a feature of Paul’s letters that contemporary scholars are currently rediscovering: the presence of educational language, imagery, and logic in his corpus.22 Though references to ancient education, overt and subtle, dot Paul’s surviving letters, awareness of educational discourse is particularly vital for answering two longstanding and interrelated questions about 1 Cor 1–4: (1) what is Paul arguing and (2) how is he arguing it? This study suggests that Paul, in 1 Cor 1–4, creatively adapts ancient Greek, Roman, and Second Temple Jewish educational practices and institutional features in order to portray the Corinthian community as an ancient school. As a familiar institution, the school provided Paul with an established script of behavioral norms by which he could defend himself (explaining that he has acted as a good teacher) and rebuke the Corinthians (depicting them as immature and unruly students). In fact, Paul used this scholastic model to cast the Corinthians’ factionalism as a symptom of an inherently academic disease. They have failed to learn rightly Paul’s most basic message, the λόγος of the cross.

1.3Methodology: Exegesis and Reception

In order to demonstrate this thesis, the following pages provide an exegetical study of 1 Cor 1–4, with special attention given to Paul’s reception of Greco-Roman and Jewish educational traditions. As an exegetical study, this dissertation focuses on the text of 1 Corinthians, leaving important but ancillary issues such as historical causes of the Corinthian crises to the side. Close attention to the text is called for because, to date, only a few of the correspondences between 1 Corinthians and ancient educational traditions have been identified. Like Clement’s telling suggestion that Paul made himself a ὑπογραμμός, many of Paul’s nods to ancient education rely not on teaching and learning vocabulary obvious to contemporary readers (διδάσκειν, παιδεία, etc.), but rather on imagery and commonplaces that come into focus when we familiarize ourselves with Greek, Roman, and Jewish education.23 Moreover, several previously identified educational motifs have been misinterpreted and require a fresh reading.

In addition to being a work of exegesis, the following study is devoted to analyzing Paul’s reception of established educational traditions and institutions.24 To paraphrase Frances Young, the terms “reception” and “appropriation” refer to processes by which i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Early Christian Reception of Paul and the Interpretation of 1 Cor 1–4
• 2 Greek, Roman, and Jewish Educational Institutions: An Overview
• 3 Ancient Education in 1 Cor 3:1–4:21
• 4 Ancient Education in 1 Cor 1:10–2:16
• 5 Good Teachers, Bad Students, and the Argument of 1 Cor 1:10–4:21
• 6 Conclusion: Contributions and Directions for Future Research
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Authors
• Index of References