The Promise of a Critical Historical Imagination

Such widely divergent interpretations, or appropriations, of a text can leave many a reader perplexed: “but what did Paul really mean?” Were the busybodies rebuked in 2 Thessalonians the indolent recipients of some imaginary Roman antecedent of the modern welfare state, or were they people of means who could pursue lives of leisure, presuming that their social inferiors would attend to their needs? (The latter attitude is in fact well documented among the Roman aristocracy.) Was the Letter to Philemon most like the genre of the amicus (“friend”) letter, which we know from a number of Roman examples, in which a social peer would appeal to an angry slaveholder to extend leniency to a slave who had disobeyed or run away, then had a change of heart? Or was it simply a request to “borrow” a slave’s services for a time; or a carefully leveraged appeal to a master to fulfill an otherwise unspecified “duty” by granting a slave his freedom?

On these and many other points of interpretation, the promise of historical criticism is to describe a range of possible meanings that may be drawn, through inference, from the available data and, on occasion, to identify some as more or less probable (or even to rule some out as impossible). The temptation posed by historical criticism, however, is to exaggerate that promise: to imagine that once the right methods and instruments have been deployed, a single “right” interpretation, what the text really meant, can be determined. As the diversity of current interpretations of Paul shows, things rarely work out that way.

One reason is simply the limits of our evidence (and thus of the inferences we can draw from it). Another is that “we” contemporary readers do not agree on what should be done with whatever results might be achieved, because “we” actually encompass a variety of different subjectivities and purposes. Some of us presume the authority of Paul’s voice because it is scriptural; we want to use historical-critical method to fix the single, authoritative meaning of his words. Others of us want to qualify or mitigate the consequences of one or another pronouncement in Paul’s letters and use historical-critical method to circumscribe Paul as a man of his own age, rather than a transcendent voice of revelation, binding on all generations.

And many of us are frankly inconsistent about just when or how historical considerations should matter. For example, Paul is often cited most vociferously today by individuals who insist that some of his words, at least, enjoy timeless and universal authority. In the still-roiling debates over equal protection under law and marriage equality for same-sex couples, a few select passages (Rom. 1:24–27; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; 1 Tim. 1:8–11) are regularly invoked by some Christians to argue that God considers homosexuality, and even homosexual persons, an “abomination” (though that specific language is drawn from Leviticus, not Paul). My purpose here is not to adjudicate the issue but to point out that such appeals to Paul are necessarily selective: that is, most of these same Christians would presumably not argue analogously that the comments on slavery discussed above had an eternal validity, binding on twenty-first-century American society, any more than the other “abominations” mentioned in Leviticus might. Such appeals also necessarily avoid historical investigation. “Homosexuality” is a modern conception; we know, from abundant and intersecting data, that people in the ancient world did not recognize what we call “sexual orientation,” and so Paul simply could not have commented on it (Nissinen). This has not stopped the appearance of some recent Bible translations, however, where Paul’s Greek is rendered—quite improbably—with interpretive paraphrases like “active and passive partners in homosexual relations.” Whatever Paul did mean to comment on in these passages (and this remains a matter of debate among scholars: see for example Boswell; Scroggs; Martin, 37–64; Countryman; Ruden) is clearly abusive and outrageous. But this means that equating Paul’s target with contemporary same-sex couples who seek a church’s recognition of their love seems both exegetically dubious and morally gratuitous. Regrettably, with regard to this unfinished debate, it seems that setting the Pauline Letters in their historical context is the last thing some readers wish to do!

Some of us have used the historical-critical identification of Pauline pseudepigrapha to disqualify certain letters, or verses in them, as tendentious adaptations of Paul’s own voice, which in contrast is more liberative than has usually been perceived (e.g., Elliott 1994; 2008; Lopez; Zerbe 2011; 2012). Others point out that the attempt to isolate the “genuine” voice of Paul only reinforces the problematic and too-prevalent assumption of “the ‘masculine’ hegemonic voice inscribed in kyriarchal Pauline or other ancient source-texts” (Schüssler Fiorenza 1999, 187), and the problematic aura of Paul himself as a “heroic” figure (Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah). It is worth notice that the plea to “decenter” Paul is based, in part, on a historical-critical argument that contextualizes Paul precisely as one voice among many on a crowded and complex Roman landscape (Wire). Resistance to “kyriarchal” aspects of Paul’s legacy involves recognizing the actual character of Paul’s own appeals for obedience, submission, and imitation as rhetoric—patterns that were reinscribed in successive generations (Schüssler Fiorenza 1987; Castelli; Kittredge; Marchal).

Historical criticism, then, is neither a panacea that will reliably deliver us from the tyranny of an oppressive text or an obsolete means of holding on nostalgically to the same text—though it can be used for either purpose. The important consideration is what the interpreter’s purposes are, for these will determine just how one or another method of biblical study will be used. The twin virtues of responsible interpretation are honesty with regard to the data (or lack of it) on a specific question, and accountability with regard to the purposes toward which we invoke it. In this light, the scientific mystique that the historical criticism of Scripture has long enjoyed has the effect of obscuring, or effacing altogether, the actual role of the interpreter. More recent challenges to classical historical criticism, whether they have gone under the names “postmodern,” “postcritical,” “contextual,” “deconstructive,” or “minority” or “minoritized” interpretation, have sought to pull back the curtain to reveal the interpreter’s identity, standpoint, and intentions.

Such challenges are still mounted as exceptions to the status quo. Attention to the social location of the interpreter is most pronounced when members of a marginalized group seek to identify the power relations inscribed in the dominant discourse of biblical scholarship. Greg Carey has observed that in the history of biblical studies in the United States, a “commonsense” interpretation that privileged the biblical text as floating above ambiguity coincided with the culture of white privilege. Thus, he observes, it remains the case today that “ ‘minority’ criticism is performed almost exclusively by minorities,” while the analysis of white interpreters is also performed, “well, almost exclusively by minorities” (Carey, 7).

Nor is race the only modality in which questions of power relations are usually effaced by the scholarly mainstream. For example, in his slender 2005 book on Paul, N. T. Wright discusses the state of Pauline interpretation by identifying the social location of various alternative viewpoints. Narrative criticism precipitated, as naturally as dew, in “the postliberal and canonical air of New Haven”; secular Copenhagen gave rise, unsurprisingly, to readings of Paul “which owe little to traditional Jewish or Christian ideas and much to first-century pagan philosophy”; and political interpretation distilled, almost inevitably, from the context of “below-the-tracks university” life in Blue-State Massachusetts, where deep suspicion of American empire was presumably at home. Similarly, suspicion of the authenticity of Colossians and Ephesians derived from “a particular kind of German existentialist Lutheranism.” But if those specific contexts produced the readings that Wright considers eccentric, social location has nothing to do, so far as he admits, with his own theological approach, except insofar as he speaks from “[his] own acquaintance with Paul.” Wright attributes the same innocence to “the vast majority of Christians in the world today” who “read Paul with blissful ignorance” of those other, peripheral, situationally contingent “movements and counter-movements” (16–18).

Such comments would not deserve our attention if they were unusual. The point is that representations of interpretive innocence remain prevalent in biblical scholarship, and not surprisingly. Scholarship on the Bible is often sponsored by churches and church-affiliated educational institutions and continues to be shaped in large part by the interests of Christian ministry. Such sites are likely the context in which many readers will encounter this volume, and are assuredly the context in which many of its contributors work. But just here, many of the critical considerations discussed above run up against the prevalent routines of Christian theology. The habits that may be observed in many a Christian pulpit on a Sunday morning emphasize the unique saturation of the biblical texts with unitary and authoritative sacred meaning. Although some preachers may invite admiration for their virtuosic skill in extracting that meaning homiletically, it is just as important for a preacher to insist that the meaning he or she finds in the text is not their invention. The powerful ethos of “commonsense” interpretation requires that the preacher has only discovered the meaning that was somehow, supernaturally packed into the biblical text. Admitting that my own life experience helps to determine what I hear or see in the text suggests more than just that you may hear or see something different. The preceding discussion also shows that, historically, relations of unequal privilege and power have also determined the possibilities for which truths prevail as “common sense” in a particular society, at a particular time.

In contrast, the interpretation to which feminist, postcolonial, African American, and an array of other important voices call all of us will require habits of candid self-awareness. Alongside historical questions about the apostle Paul and lexical, exegetical, and rhetorical-critical questions about the range of possible meanings of his words, we will need to ask what is at stake for our engagement with the apostle and his legacy. In what ways do different parties “use Paul to think with”? What are the consequences of different claims, and why do the people raising those claims seek out the aegis of Paul’s authority for them? Are there more direct and honest ways to think through interpreting Paul as a matter of public responsibility?

These questions have their true force only when they are joined with questions about the actual power relationships in our society, the nature of our participation in those relationships, and—to adopt the interpretive principle of the theology of liberation—the effect of those relationships on the poor. This mode of interpretation remains peripheral and contested in scholarship, and is practiced more or less sporadically in different faith communities, but it is avowed in the preparation of this volume and the structure of its various entries, including the entries on Paul’s letters that follow. By attending to each letter as a text in an ancient historical context, these entries challenge the “commonsense” assumption that we can read the ancient texts with the directness of their contemporaries. By attending to the various ways one or another text has been heard, or contested, through history, and to the contours of contemporary debate as well, these entries are intended to erode the confidence that any part of the Bible simply “means one thing.” But the loss of false confidence can be the occasion for new discovery and, when shared with others, new opportunity for mutual understanding.