SITUATING THE APOSTLE PAUL IN HIS DAY AND ENGAGING HIS LEGACY IN OUR OWN

Neil Elliott

After Jesus of Nazareth, the apostle Paul is the most significant figure in the New Testament. The letters he wrote, other letters attributed to him, and the portion of the Acts of the Apostles dedicated to him together account for about a third of its pages. In Christian churches that read the Bible according to lectionary cycles, Paul’s is the single voice more often heard than any other, as his epistles are read in all three years of a cycle. Throughout Christian history, Paul has been revered as one of the chief witnesses of the risen Christ (1 Cor. 15:3–8) and as his “apostle to the nations” (Rom. 1:1–5, 13; 11:13; 15:16–18; Gal. 2:8). (The Greek word apostolos means one “sent,” as on a mission; the translation “nations” will be discussed below.)

It is customary in modern scholarship (and in this commentary) to distinguish the letters whose authenticity has only rarely been questioned from other letters that appear under his name but are regarded by many scholars as pseudepigrapha—“falsely attributed” writings by others, after Paul’s death, who traded on his name to win acceptance for their ideas. The genuine (or “unquestioned”) letters are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. (This is their order of appearance in our New Testament, based originally on decreasing length; one reconstruction of their probable chronological order is indicated in the timeline below.) The disputed letters include Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles (see the discussions in the introductions to those letters). The genuine letters are premiere sources for understanding the beginnings of Christianity, but they are nonetheless puzzling and paradoxical sources, for reasons to be discussed below. The New Testament collection, however, makes no distinction between “genuine” and pseudepigraphic letters, presenting all alike as “Pauline Epistles” and as Scripture. As a consequence, not only are letters widely regarded as pseudepigrapha routinely read, especially in churches, as if they were from Paul himself, but also ambiguous passages in the unquestioned letters are frequently understood as if Paul “must have” meant the same thing that the disputed letters say.

A Basic Chronology of Paul’s Life and Career (after Taylor, 35–40)

33Crucifixion of Jesus

34Paul’s “conversion” (or better, call)

35–38Missionary activity in Arabia (including escape from Damascus and from the ethnarch Aretas IV)

38First visit to Jerusalem

38–48Missionary activity in Syria and Cilicia

48Second visit to Jerusalem (the “Apostolic Council”)

48–52Missionary activity in Asia Minor (Galatia), northern Greece (Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beroea), and Achaia (including Corinth)

50–56Writing of 1 Thessalonians

51–52Hearing before Gallio

52–55Missionary activity centered in Ephesus; writing of Galatians, 1 Corinthians, portions of 2 Corinthians, Philemon, perhaps Philippians

55–57Final missionary activity in Greece (Macedonia and Achaia); writing of other portions of 2 Corinthians and, from Corinth, Romans

57–59Journey to Jerusalem with offering; arrest and imprisonment

59–60Journey to Rome as prisoner

60–62Imprisonment in Rome; perhaps writing of Philippians and Philemon

c. 62Execution under Nero

Although Paul has been revered down the centuries, he was also opposed from the beginning, and today he is held by many men and women in suspicion, within the churches as much as outside them. Paul has been reviled—and not only in the modern age!—as a religious huckster who betrayed the teaching of Jesus, concocted a mythology of heavenly redemption through his death, and, in his enthusiasm for that religion, imposed on his converts a harsh doctrine of subordination to gender and social hierarchies (famously, Kazantzakis, 473–77). His detractors have regarded him as a spiritual charlatan at worst, a deeply flawed personality at best, and have regarded his letters as a toxic residue still leaching into contemporary culture with harmful consequences. Even in churches where his figure elicits deep devotion, Paul also evokes wariness, even antipathy, among men and women who have suffered real injuries under the invocation of his name.

To the historian of Christian origins, and of the relationship between early Christianity and Judaism in particular, Paul’s letters are indispensable. But because the information they provide is partial and far less than the historian would like in producing a convincing picture, we are compelled to fill in the blanks with educated but nonetheless imaginative reconstructions. Not surprisingly, historians draw different conclusions, due to the different weights they give to various aspects of the evidence and to their assumptions about the scope and significance of their subject—assumptions shaped as much by their own social locations as by the scientific aura of historiography.

Paul’s letters also present considerable challenges to readers seeking spiritual inspiration or theological clarity. They may be surprised how uninterested Paul actually appears to have been in elaborating metaphors or themes that have subsequently proven important for Christian doctrine. The obvious explanation is that Paul wrote his letters for others, far removed from us in historical circumstance and cultural presuppositions, and simply did not explain what he presumed his readers would understand. But because Paul himself repeatedly declares that Scripture (by which he meant Israel’s Scripture) was “written for our sake” and that it provides examples “for us” (1 Cor. 9:8; 10:1–11), and a later Pauline letter declares that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16), the rehearsal of such phrases has encouraged many modern readers to expect that his words (which, after all, are “Scripture” for many in our day) should be completely transparent and self-explanatory to the spiritually discerning. These readers will often be disappointed. Christian clergy—who are often familiar with the critical issues involved—would do well not only to mention these issues in their preaching and teaching but also to cultivate an awareness in their communities that reading Paul’s letters is a complicated affair.

Beyond the confines of Christian churches as well as within them, statements from Paul’s letters have come to be woven into the fabric of social roles and expectations in contemporary life—in the public sphere and domestic spaces alike. Modern readers may well find ourselves chafing against those statements. Much of the contemporary interest in Paul—in scholarly circles as well as beyond them—is driven by concerns to address the sometimes ambivalent, sometimes acutely painful legacy of his remarks, most often by seeking to set them into one or another historical context in Paul’s life or the life of one or another assembly. None of these efforts have yet won universal acceptance, however, for reasons that cannot be attributed solely to the agendas—or the obstinacy—of the apostle’s various interpreters. Paul’s letters themselves present a confounding array of puzzles and problems. Even if a particular reconstruction of the past should prove convincing, its significance for the present would remain a conundrum, for Paul’s letters are accorded very different levels of authority in different churches, let alone in a putatively secular society.

This essay will not attempt to resolve these interpretive questions or to set out a definitive portrait of Paul. To the contrary, one of its themes will be the remarkable variety of alternative interpretations on offer today. The task will instead be to identify some of the most important questions raised in the encounter with Paul and to discuss the sorts of decisions readers must make in the attempt to answer them. We will proceed in an order corresponding to the sequence in commentary entries in this volume. First, we will explore aspects of Paul’s letters and of his apostolic work in their ancient context. Next, we will consider some of the varied ways Paul has been remembered, and appropriated, through history. And last, we will turn to questions of Paul’s legacy and the interpreter’s responsibility today.