Coda

24. Paul’s Messianic Mission (15:14–33)

In this concluding section of Paul’s argument, he will return to where he began in the preface to the letter, explaining the rationale for his desire to come to Rome (14–24) and why he is not coming immediately (25–32). This conclusion, together with the introduction, gives further clarity regarding what may fairly be termed Paul’s “political agenda” or “messianic politics.”

At the beginning of this letter Paul had written: For I long to see you that I may offer some spirited gift to you. In the meantime he has provided something of a down payment on this spirited gift through his treatment of the messianic justice of which he had claimed he was not ashamed. While aware of his own responsibility as an apostle and his own gifts as an interpreter of the glad proclamation, he had maintained that his coming was in no way an imposition of apostolic authority but that his purpose was that we may be mutually encouraged through one another’s faithfulness, both yours and mine. He seeks, that is, a relationship of mutual encouragement, the sort of relationship he has been emphasizing in the concluding sections of his argument about the new sociality he sees coming into being in the messianic now-time. Now at the end he emphasizes this mutuality: I myself have been persuaded about you, comrades, that you yourselves are full of goodness, having been filled with all knowledge [gnosis] and so are able to instruct one another. In this way he suggests that they, too, have important knowledge, that he is not presuming that they have nothing to offer, either to him or to one another. But on some points I have been bold as a reminder to you through the favor given me from God. In a way he is claiming that he has been simply reminding them of what they presumably already know, although his way of explaining these things may be somewhat different from what may have been familiar to them.

The ground of his boldness in this regard was earlier rooted in his apostolic responsibility, but here he substitutes “liturgical” language to much the same end, explaining that the favor or gift that has been granted him enables him to be a leitourgon of messiah Joshua to the nations. The leitourgon is not a professional priest but a citizen who plays a role in the public dedication of a project that benefits the public good. What he dedicates or offers up (sacrifices) is the glad-making proclamation of God, which he had at the beginning specified as a proclamation concerning Joshua messiah. His work then is lifting up—as in a sacrificial offering—of this proclamation to the end that the offering of the gentiles may be acceptable, made holy by holy spirit. Here Paul uses cultic language to express a public and even political responsibility—his work among the nations—just as he had used similar language to speak of all offering up their bodies as a living sacrifice or a rational worship. What seems evident is that Paul makes use of familiar pagan cultic language to give expression to his mission as well as to the form of just life that he supposes characterizes the life of the messianic sociality. This is not a giant leap, since the pagan cultus was itself a sort of civil religion deeply embedded in the public and political life of the polis. In any case, the goal is that these messianic groups for which he has a certain responsibility should be in conformity with the aim of God in history that, as we have seen, has to do with the beginnings of the actualization of messianic justice.

In messiah Joshua therefore I have pride in the things of God, although I will not speak of anything but what messiah worked through me for the adherence of the nations, by word and deed, by power of signs and wonders, by the power of holy spirit. Paul exults in the way his service to the messianic event has been effective thus far among the nations due to the way he has been used by the messiah and empowered by spirit. At the beginning he had spoken of his work as a delegate or apostle to bring about the adherence of faithfulness . . . among all the nations. He now exults over or takes a certain pride in the efficacy of his work to this point. The “signs and wonders” likely refer to the extraordinary ways in which he has thus far escaped peril (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:11–13:11; he uses similar language about signs and wonders in 2 Corinthians 13:12) and to the ways in which persons in a variety of towns and cities have responded affirmatively to his message and been formed into new messianic vanguards.

Certainly it is to this formation of cells of messianic loyalists that he immediately refers: So that from Jerusalem around to Illyricum I have filled up the good news of the messiah. The trajectory described by Paul is a sort of semicircle beginning in Jerusalem and going through Syria into Turkey and Greece, and then into what was once Yugoslavia, thereby bringing him close to what is now Italy. He has thus traversed the eastern half of the Roman Empire, filling it with the proclamation concerning the messiah. Indeed, he will say that he now has no longer any space for work in these regions. Obviously, it is not Paul’s task to “Christianize” the empire. This can scarcely be said to have already been accomplished. What, then, can it mean that he has run out of room? We may suppose that at this time there may be messianic cells of at most a few dozen folk in perhaps fewer than a score of towns and cities in the eastern half of the empire. What can it mean that he is basically done here? How does this count as fulfilling the messianic mission?

Here it is important to recall the synecdochal logic with which Paul has been operating. A part not only stands for but also entails the whole of which it is a part. The first fruits—to use a cultic reference—entail the entire harvest. This is particularly true of the messianic “vanguard” that Paul has been establishing in places like Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Galatia, and Ephesus. Insofar as these messianic cells are sufficiently well established in manifesting the new just sociality in the midst of the towns and cities of this half of the empire, it is time for Paul to move on. Here we might recall Stanislas Breton’s observation that Paul seems condemned to a “perpetual transit” (52).

In an analogy offered by Frederick Engels at the beginning of On the History of Early Christianity, Paul is like the early leaders of the social democrats who launch cells of workers among the proletarian masses of the cities and towns of Europe and leave the rest to them—and to history’s inevitable triumph. Now, of course, what Paul is doing is somewhat different. His is an explicitly messianic movement that supposes that God’s purpose of a truly just social order has been inaugurated in the messianic event of Joshua’s mission, execution, and resurrection. I recall Steve Biko in South Africa saying that it is not a matter of organizing a movement to bring about liberation but of preparing people for the liberation that is coming. Something like that is going on here it seems. If there are communities of generous welcome that exhibit a new sort of justice outside the law within the empire, then this is enough to demonstrate that the days of that empire are truly numbered.

Paul is not alone in this mission. Thus, he is eagerly striving to announce the good news not where the name of the messiah is already heard, so that I don’t build on a foundation that belongs to another, but as it is written: They shall see who have never been told of Him, and they shall understand who have never heard of Him (Isaiah 52:15). Paul’s point is that his is the work of going into so-far-untouched territory to launch new cells. He has no ambition either to correct or improve, still less to administer, the work that others are already doing. He goes only where no one else has gone before in the messianic mission of announcing God’s proclamation concerning the messiah.

Of course, as we have seen here and know from the other letters, he is not interested simply in giving people the right ideas but in enabling them to become mini-societies of messianic justice. He has no particular interest in cult or even the fine points of doctrine but in forms of social life that reflect the coming justice of God.

It is this work that has been completed in the eastern half of the empire. But for this to be truly and effectively a counterimperial movement, it is necessary to move on to the western half, the part that is not Greek but “barbarian,” as he had said at the beginning. Now he makes this a bit more explicit: Since I have long yearned for so many years to visit you, I hope in traveling on to Spain to see you and be sent on by you if it may be possible and to be refreshed by you. Paul hopes to find in Rome a sort of blessing and encouragement to move into the next urgent phase of his mission. His way of phrasing this seems designed to prevent the Romans from supposing that he is coming to exercise any sort of authority over them. He is, rather, seeking partnership with them on his way onward. This letter seeks to suggest why they might indeed welcome this traveling delegate and approve of and perhaps even facilitate in some way (perhaps through the provision of translators or places of hospitality along the way) his mission.

On reading this, one might suppose that Paul is immediately coming to Rome. He has spoken of a long-deferred deep desire to see the Romans, and he clearly has an urgent mission if he is to go on to Spain in the short time that he may believe remains before the consummation of the messianic reign (the time has grown short, he has said). He has now finished his work in the east that has previously prevented him from moving on. But there is one more thing to do first, something that for Paul trumps even the urgency of his eschatological mission.

But now I am going to Jerusalem to serve the saints. Wherever Paul is writing this letter from, he is headed not toward but away from Rome. What motivates this strange deviation or detour? Why turning away again from the “saints” of Rome to those of Jerusalem? Macedonia and Achaia [Greece] thought it good to make some contribution for the poor of the saints in Jerusalem. Of this collection we read considerably more in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9. Reading those chapters makes it quite clear that for Paul it was an extraordinarily important thing.

In spite of the importance Paul attaches to this collection of support destined for Jerusalem, it is not obvious what precisely was entailed thereby. We know that Paul has had his troubles with the “saints” in Jerusalem. He gives some account of this in writing to the cells in the region of Galatia. But there Paul also maintained that the only condition set for the mission to the gentiles by those in Jerusalem was that those entrusted with this mission, especially Paul, not forget the poor. Paul has here just referred to the poor who pertain to or are the concern of the saints in Jerusalem. Briefly, I suppose that the following is at stake here. The community in Jerusalem was characterized, according to Acts, by a Pentecostal communism. All gave all so that it might be distributed to (all) the poor. This is a policy that we read of twice in Acts, in chapters 2 and 4, the first two times that we are told of the community receiving holy spirit. Keeping the poor in mind is something utterly crucial to this community, so crucial that it becomes, according to Paul, the condition for agreeing to the mission to the gentiles. In this way, the gentile or pagan communities would dramatically reflect the will of the God of Israel that the welfare of the poor be the measure of the justice of the whole society. It is this consistent theme of the law and the prophets that comes to be dramatically enacted in Jerusalem. If pagan communities imitate this polity, then they will give clear and unmistakable evidence of loyalty to the messiah of Israel.

Paul may have invented, or stumbled upon, or improvised, a way to “up the ante” on this expectation. Not only would pagan communities imitate this polity or politics but they would actually contribute to the ability of the saints in Jerusalem to serve the poor of Jerusalem, thereby strengthening the witness of the Jerusalem community in Jerusalem itself. Since Jerusalem was the site of both the execution and resurrection of the messiah, this would indeed be a dramatic sign of the truth of the gospel of God concerning that messiah and evidence of the coming reign of messianic justice. Instead, therefore, of paying the temple tax expected from all Judeans in diaspora to support the temple in Jerusalem, the pagan devotees of the messiah of Israel would be contributing to the building of justice that begins with attention to the weak, the humiliated, the impoverished—in Jerusalem itself.

Paul explains about the cells in Macedonia and Achaia: They were happy to do it and are indebted to them, for if the nations have come to share their spirited things, then they should also be of service to them in fleshly things. We recall that the gospel is for the Judeans first and then the Greeks. This sharing from the Judeans to the pagans in the messianic proclamation now redounds to the Judeans in the form of concrete material assistance, what Paul does not hesitate to call fleshly things: things, that is, that serve or minister to the weakness of the human, the necessities of life. In this way, the historical progression he had sketched in the movement of the glad proclamation from the Judeans to the gentiles—in part through the rejection of the proclamation by (some of) the Judeans and then culminating in the salvation of all Israel—is now enacted in a partial, preliminary, yet extraordinarily concrete way in the collection destined for the poor of the saints in Jerusalem.

It is on this fleshly service that Paul places extraordinary priority, for he must do this before he can continue on his urgent business in and beyond Rome. When therefore I will have completed this and sealed to them this fruit, I will be on my way through you to Spain. The “fruit” here is the first fruits of the mission to the gentiles or pagans, the material evidence of growing solidarity in mission among all who belong to the messiah. It is this, then, that will complete his work in the eastern half of the empire and permit him to move on to complete what remains of his mission: And I know that when I come I will come to you in the fullness of messianic blessing. Paul will then have good reason to know that his mission is indeed the sign of the messianic blessing in which both Israel and the nations will rejoice.

But this final task is not without its very real dangers. I beg you comrades, through our leader Joshua messiah and through the love of the spirit, to strive together with me in prayer to God for my sake, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea and that my service to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints so that in joy I may come to you through the will of God and find rest with you. The danger from those who do not (yet) adhere to the good news is not imaginary. After all, Paul was himself one who persecuted the early community. He may have been one who regarded the gospel concerning a rejected and executed messiah to be blasphemy, deserving of death. Thus, he knows all too well the danger that may arise from the zealous defenders of a certain law and order, a certain tradition, even a certain patriotism. He then begs the Romans to be in solidarity with him in yearning for his deliverance from this real and present danger. In this way they already become his partners in his mission.

We do not know to what extent Paul’s contribution for the poor of the saints of Jerusalem produced the desired result. It seems likely that it did. But we are informed by Acts that Paul was less fortunate with respect to escaping the ire of the Judeans generally. The result was Paul’s imprisonment, which may have greatly delayed his journey to Rome, but in what Paul must surely have recognized as another surprising bit of improvisation on the part of divine agency, it was precisely that opposition and imprisonment that eventually ensured his arrival in Rome—under military guard. It would only confirm his assurance that God improvises in and through history to advance the messianic promise.

The God of peace be with you all.

Ultimately, peace is the goal of Paul’s messianic politics—not, as we have seen, the peace of pacification but the peace of diversity rejoicing in harmony. There is indeed no other politics that is worth striving for or to which it makes sense to seek to be faithful.

25. Traces of the New Sociality (16:1–27)

The material that we encounter in Romans 16 has been a source of considerable controversy. Some Pauline scholars have regarded the entire chapter as a fragment (perhaps somewhat altered) of another letter of Paul’s that came to be attached to the letter to the Romans after losing its original context. The body of the letter of Romans suggests that Paul is a stranger to the group or groups of messiah followers in Rome, while this material suggests Paul’s deep acquaintance with groups there and with groups who are heading for the destination of the letter. Thus, many have suggested that this might actually be a letter of greeting from Paul to another community where he might plausibly have known many people because of his prior residence there: Ephesus, for example (as Käsemann suggests).

However, a rather plausible case can be made that the letter to those in Rome had been occasioned by the end of the expulsion of Judeans, including Judean “Christians,” from Rome, which permits not only the arrival of Paul in Rome but also the return of Judean messiah followers to Rome. Accordingly, the letter would be commending these and their associates, who had in the meantime become friends or associates of Paul and who would precede Paul in coming to Rome. Thus, Paul’s emphasis on the relation of Judeans and pagans would come to a head in (and perhaps have been motivated by) the desired mutual welcome of returning Judean messianists to Roman messianic communities that had in the meantime become largely pagan in membership. This is an argument that Jewett ably puts forward.

Disputes of this sort admit only of more or less plausible reconstructions. In this case, the difficulty is increased on account of the appearance of passages that seem quite puzzling from the standpoint of the letter as a whole. For example, the doxology of Romans 16:25–27 seems to have in view not the togetherness of Judeans and gentiles that Paul has argued for in the letter (and that the offering to Jerusalem makes concrete) but a divine plan aimed exclusively at the gentiles. Thus, Jewett is able to label this whole doxology as supersessionist in character (997–1002). In addition, much of the terminology (though not all) seems to be borrowed from phrases more familiar from late first-century documents, including post-Pauline documents like 1 Timothy and Ephesians. Similar puzzlement attaches to the warnings in Romans 16:17–20a, which in spirit seem to flatly contradict the irenic position of Paul’s desire that those of different opinions “welcome one another” (in addition to language about crushing Satan under your feet, which may have echoes of the deutero-Pauline 2 Thessalonians).

In this concluding section, I will not attempt to adjudicate these scholarly disputes but will deal with two issues germane to the themes of my reading of the argument of Romans as a whole. One concerns what it might mean for the perspective I have offered that the texts of Paul are subject to significant alteration in the decades after their writing and, indeed, in the decades after Paul’s death. The other consideration concerns what can be gleaned from the names in the lengthy greetings that constitute the bulk of this chapter concerning the sort of sociality and thus polity or politics that Paul’s mission is bringing into being. It will turn out that these are in fact related questions.

What is to be made of an apparent grab bag of names of persons who are to be received or welcomed or to whom the writer sends greetings? In most cases we have no other knowledge of the persons named than what the writer suggests about them in the names and designations provided in this letter. However, considerable attention to the provenance of names as well as reflection on the wording that Paul uses in connection with them actually yields a rather helpful outline of Paul’s friends and associates and thus of the character of the new sociality that Paul has been laboring to foster.

This material opens with the commendation of a certain Phoebe and includes the names of several other women who appear as Paul’s associates and as persons of some distinction among the messianic cells in the empire. Phoebe is designated as a sort of “patroness” (not, as some suppose, simply a “helper”). That is, she appears to have the means to give some material support to messianists who are associated with her. We next encounter Prisca (or Priscilla) and Aquila, who we are told have a “house” in which a messianic cell meets. We are not told whether they are husband and wife, brother and sister, or related in some other way. In Acts 18, we are informed that they are husband and wife who had left Rome and engaged in the same trade as Paul (tentmakers). They have placed themselves in harm’s way in order to rescue Paul from some great danger, most likely in Corinth or in Ephesus. It is notable that the woman (Prisca) is mentioned first, in contrast to the way in which Acts makes Aquila the lead character. Next, after Paul’s beloved Epaenetus, we have Mary or Miriam, who is distinguished by her labors among the recipients of this greeting. This is followed by Junia and Andronicus, who are not designated as persons whom the apostles honor but as apostles themselves. There has been a long-standing attempt to disguise Junia’s female identity and her apostolic role because of the supposition that a woman could not be an apostle.

Already at this point, we see that women were regarded as very important collaborators and leaders in the messianic mission. In addition, we have the women companions Tryphaena and Tryphosa, who as laborers in the lord are designated as leaders in messianic groups. Further, there is the mother of Rufus, who is also called the writer’s (adoptive) mother. Among the five leaders of what may be a distinct cell in 16:15, two are women (Julia and the sister of Nereus). Overall, the impression given here is of leadership in the messianic communities or cells that appears to place male and female on a completely equal footing.

This gender equality in leadership of messianic communities is not destined to last much beyond Paul. Indeed, in the light of this and other indications in the Pauline correspondence we can guess that the prohibition of women speaking in the assembly in 1 Corinthians 14:33b–36 is an interpolation designed to claim Paul’s authority for an anti-Pauline innovation. This will in turn mean that the gender of important apostles like Junia will be changed by both copyists and translators until the latter part of the twentieth century, when Christianity begins to free itself from its denial of gender equality.

Yet a further trace of the messianic sociality Paul envisions relates to the way in which we find names of Judeans and Greek gentiles intermingled among the leaders that are named here. Jewett (953) offers a useful table for organizing the names as Greek, Judean, and Latin, with possible ethnic identities attached. The majority of the names (nineteen) are of Greek origin, although two of these may suggest Jewish identity (Andronikos and Herodion). Eight are of Latin derivation, although Jewett suspects Jewish identity among four of these (Aquila, Junia, Rufus, and his mother). The difficulty has to do with ways in which slaves (and former slaves or freedmen) take names from the household of their owners, thus making identification imprecise.

Whatever the difficulties in assigning ethnicity on the basis of names, what does emerge from this list of greetings and commendations is a remarkable coming together of Judean and gentile adherents to the messiah. Moreover, if we were to accept the disjunction of Greek and barbarian that Paul employs early in the letter to those in Rome, then the non-Greek but Latin names of some of these persons might indicate the presence among the gentiles of persons of “barbarian” origin (to which we might add Persis, whose name suggests Persian or Parthian origin).

The new sociality that Paul and his companions and collaborators are fostering, therefore, is one that cuts across preexisting cultural, linguistic, and even religious identities (as we have seen in Romans) to constitute a sociality based not on such identities but on a shared commitment to the messianic project and mission. This does not mean that these preexisting cultural identities are abolished, but they are rendered “inoperative” or nondeterminative, as Agamben has suggested (Time), or that those who are called into the messianic project are “uncoupled” (Žižek, Fragile Absolute 123–130) from those identities that might separate them or set them against one another.

We may notice two entire “congregations” or cells that appear to be constituted by slaves: those belonging to Narcissus and those belonging to Aristobulus. The Greek only indicates that they are of or belong to the aforementioned men, who are referred to neither as leaders nor as belonging to cell groups. Translators have often inserted the supposition that those who are greeted are family members of the aforementioned worthies, but there is no indication that they are members of the family or even that they are of the household. Rather, the natural supposition is that those of Narcissus are among his slaves; the same would be true of those of, or belonging to, Aristobulus. We thus have two cell groups formed among (some of) the slaves of slave-owning persons of some power who themselves have no relation to the messianic movement.

In addition, we are told of two other groups: the “brothers” (or comrades) who are led collectively by Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobus, and Hermas; and the “saints” led collectively by Philologus, Julia, Nereus, his sister, and Olympas. We have here first an indication of a sort of collective or shared leadership that Jewett thinks would be characteristic of what he calls “tenement churches” (as distinguished from the “house churches” that might be formed in the homes or apartments of more prosperous members of the community). All the names listed here indicate probable slave background according to Jewett, suggesting either that they are slaves or freed persons of low status.

Other names that seem to suggest slave or former slave status include Herodion, Ampliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, and Trypania. There are others of whom slave status is not indicated by their names or other epithets, including Phoebe, Rufus and his mother, and Prisca. At the very least, we learn that messianic cells were often formed among the lowest groups of society and that some were groups composed entirely of slaves belonging to particular masters, whereas others may have included slaves and freed persons with collective leadership. More prosperous persons, either of free descent or manumitted from slavery, also formed communities or cells. What this set of greetings envisions is that both within and among these groups there should prevail an unreserved welcome and an intimate fellowship. In this way they give dramatic testimony to the coming of a new messianic justice, already taking shape now in the slums and apartments of the cities of Rome.

On account of something like a cult of personality that has grown up around the name of Paul, it is important to notice the way in which Paul’s labors are never solitary. He works among companions and insists upon the bonds of affection and collaboration that unite him with others. Here, for example, several persons are called Paul’s beloved: Epaenetus, Ampliatus, Stachys, and Persis (the one female in this number!).

One way a strong sense of collaboration is emphasized is Paul’s identification of persons as “coworkers”—for example, Prisca, Aquila, and Urbanus. This is one of Paul’s frequent uses of this term that also appears in Philemon, Philippians, and other letters. In addition, Paul identifies persons as fellow militants (usually translated as fellow soldiers), as fellow prisoners, and so on. In general, Paul supposes that all are or may be fellow laborers, companions in the messianic project. Badiou suggests that this emphasis of being coworkers is an important marker of the egalitarian character of Paul’s mission: “Where the figure of the master breaks down come those of the worker and equality conjoined. All equality is that of belonging together to a work” (Saint Paul 60). Hence, one of the characteristic features of Paul’s diction is the use, and perhaps invention, of so many compound terms in Greek prefaced with syn- (co-).

While some have supposed that the standard form of organization of early cells was the house church (or perhaps better, apartment church), with the owner or renter offering support for common meals and perhaps having some leadership in those cells (here, for example, Phoebe or the “house” of Prisca and Aquila), other forms of organization are identified by Jewett as “tenement churches,” with a more communal style and collective leadership (here those who are slaves of Aristobulus and Narcissus as well as the two collectives with five leaders identified in verses 14 and 15).

It appears that Paul does not insist on any particular “polity” concerning the difference between house churches or tenement churches. Rather, he seems to be nonchalant about how these groups are formed so long as they embody among themselves the love that is his aim and demonstrate this same love, generosity, and hospitality in the relations between these groups.

Whether one agrees with those like Jewett, who place these leaders and cell groups in Rome, or with those like Käsemann, who incline toward locating those who are to be greeted in Ephesus, it is possible to glimpse (as through a glass darkly) something of the astonishing character of the messianic sociality that Paul and his associates have fostered. Groups may be led by women or men or both together; they may be inaugurated by men or women or both together. Roles played out in these communities depend not on gender but on the particular gifts of those who launch and lead such messianic cells.

Moreover, groups that are predominantly of pagan origin and composition and groups that are primarily of Judean origin are yoked together, overcoming ethnic and religious divisions. Some groups are constituted wholly or primarily of slaves, others of mixed slave and freed persons, and others led by free patrons who may enjoy full citizenship. Thus, there is a great diversity of class, gender, and ethnic “location,” even if primarily associated with the urban underclass.

All of these are to greet one another with the “holy kiss,” a greeting generally reserved for intimate members of the same family. Thus, there is to be a remarkable intimacy among members of the same cell and between members of different cells, composed of different sorts of people, united in messianic hope and in the project of living out already in the now-time a form of life in dramatic contrast to the old social order out of which they have been called.

We have noticed in this range of names the tendency in later copyists of the text (as well as translators) to reduce the range of Paul’s astonishingly inclusive polity. The countercultural inclusion of women among the most prominent members and leaders of communities came to be covered over as emergent Christianity assimilated itself to safer patriarchal norms of imperial (and later) social order. Less marked, perhaps, but also noticeable has been the reduction in the togetherness of persons of different ethnic and cultural origin and of class location. The radically egalitarian sociality onto which these greetings provide a window appears to have been compromised quite early.

The very fact of this set of compromises, however, testifies to the radical political significance of the Pauline messianic project. The compromises themselves seek to make this project more politically palatable within the social order that was inadvertent host to these vanguard cells of a new sort of humanity, a new sort of politics.

Now we can see a similar process at work in the “interpolations” that were signaled earlier. These interpolations need to be seen within the wider framework of a general tendency to modify and perhaps deradicalize Paul’s letters. Moreover, we have the widely recognized phenomenon of passing off other documents as from Paul that appear to have a completely different character from those letters now agreed to be genuinely Pauline. These texts (deutero-Pauline and Pastoral) are certainly not without value in their own right, but they also show an unmistakable tendency to reduce the Pauline inclusivity in decisive ways.

We may also note the struggle over Paul that occurs in the light of history in the case of Marcion. It is generally agreed that Marcion sought to create a gentile Christianity in Rome that severed its tie to the root of Judean texts, society, and practices. In this attempt, he adopted and revised the Pauline letters. Galatians he may have found acceptable, but Romans (and he was in Rome) provided certain challenges. Among the changes made by Marcion is the elimination of chapters 15 and 16. The Judeans named in chapter 16 are thereby erased from Marcion’s history of Christian beginnings. The concluding doxology that emphasizes the gentile mission to the exclusion of Israel seems to have been composed under Marcionite influence. The doxology sees the “mystery” of God as the inclusion of the gentiles as opposed to the letter that understands the inclusion of the gentiles as a detour on the way to inclusion of all of Israel.

The translators’ erasure of slave communities by making Aristobulus and Narcissus into “fathers” whose families are Christian (rather than as slave owners, some of whose slaves form messianic cell groups among themselves without permission or patronage) also serves to mitigate or erase the radical character of messianic sociality, of the messianic politics of Paul.

What can we learn from this? One thing is that the letters themselves were a kind of political dynamite that had to be handled with care. Moreover, “Paul” becomes the name of a receding authority figure whose ideas must be adapted and whose name must be appropriated by those who sought to maintain the relevance of Pauline views in many respects, without the dangers that would be associated with the messianic project.

Here let us take up Derrida’s astute reflections on autoimmunity to clarify this political reality. In his reflections on the “democracy to come,” which serves for Derrida as a way of orienting a decidedly political hope, an orientation toward the call and claim of justice, he is led to wonder about the ways in which democracy may undermine itself from within in the unceasing quest to transform any actually existing democracy toward greater inclusivity or in the attempt to maintain or preserve itself (Rogues 36). One side of this problem would be the question of whether a democratic ethos must welcome or give place to antidemocratic views and movements. The point is that this is fundamentally an insoluble double bind. If democracy in the name of democracy silences opinions that in some fundamental way oppose democracy, then it has already attacked its own democratic values. But if it does not constrain antidemocratic movements, then it may very well find itself overwhelmed by them and again lose itself.

In the Pauline case, if Paul’s egalitarian experiment were to grow unabated, then outside forces would surely seek to destroy it—with likely success. If the movement compromises with those forces, it may survive but will have lost what was most distinctive about itself. Or again if, in the name of the messianic project, alternative views about how to actualize that project under existing imperial conditions had been silenced, then what of the principle of welcome one another . . . but not for disputes about opinions? Paul insists in this letter on the mutual welcoming of those with fundamentally different opinions. To say, for example, that only the “strong” (let’s say feminists) are right and others must not be allowed to express their views or to gain influence would undermine the democratic project from within. If, on the other hand, those antidemocratic views are not only expressed but for a variety of reasons gain influence or even control, then once again the messianic project is fatally compromised. And of course, it is not an equal struggle, since those who prefer a more autocratic or narrower sociality have no compunctions about excluding those of a different view. Thus, the struggle is always unequal, and democratic or inclusive views always succumb precisely on account of their democratic ethos.

But wait. If this were all there is to be said about the matter, then the struggle would be without hope—indeed, it would be impossible to see how the struggle might be waged in the first place, let alone continued. What awakens the desire for this new sociality? In our case, it may be these compromised texts themselves. The insertions and redactions that serve to render Paul’s texts more palatable, and perhaps less explosive, in later or different contexts also preserve the texts, together with the explosive potential they still bear. The writing of letters in Paul’s name that answer to a different, less egalitarian, ecclesial context does so at the price of claiming and maintaining the authority of these more subversive texts. The very attempt to claim Paul’s authority for these compromises still underlines and perhaps even increases Paul’s authority, and thus the capacity of his less authoritarian and more socially (as well as theologically) radical voice to still be overheard. That is, the attempt to preserve or construct authority for these less radical positions runs the risk of allowing the messianic politics a chance to break out again. The antidemocratic impulse has its own autoimmune crisis, or as Derrida notes, “We now know that repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and in its political sense—whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy—ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (“Autoimmunity” 99).

The very attempts to protect the messianic project fatally compromise it. But even as thus compromised, and indeed sometimes perverted into its very opposite, it still sparks here and there that hope that continues the struggle against all forms of domination and division. These texts have never been rendered completely harmless to the existing social order. Their explosive potentiality still awakens a hearing, an aspiration, a loyalty to the call and claim of messianic justice. Those who have contained the texts have preserved them. That which seeks to render them harmless has not erased them or completely silenced them. So they still may be read, their audacious claims may still be deciphered, and they may still awaken hope and an unflinching fidelity—and the struggle begins again.

One of the many names of this struggle is that of democracy. In writing of the meaning of democracy, Derrida notes that there have hardly ever been any philosophical friends of democracy and points to Nietzsche, whose contempt for democracy is as strong as (and perhaps fueled by) his animosity toward Paul, especially the “Pauline perversion that turns weakness into force” (a reference to 1 Corinthians 1–3). Derrida continues: “More than any other form of democracy, more than social democracy, or popular democracy, a Christian democracy should be welcoming to the enemies of democracy; it should turn them the other cheek, offer hospitality, grant freedom of expression and the right to vote to antidemocrats, something in conformity with a certain hyperbolic essence, an essence more autoimmune than ever, of democracy itself, if ‘itself’ there ever is, if ever there is a democracy and thus a Christian democracy worthy of this name” (Rogues 41). Thus, the Pauline messianic project can even be identified as “democracy itself,” a democracy that, of course, has never existed but always remains a democracy to come—or, as Paul had called it, “divine justice.”