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INTRODUCTION TO PAUL'S LETTERS
TRADITIONS AND UNITS IN PAUL’S LETTERS
The Canon (accepted list of authentic and authoritative writings)
Peter Richardson
1. A few obvious propositions about Paul and his letters:
2. Form criticism of Paul's letters.
close (peace, prayer, greeting, kiss, autograph, benediction)
paraenesis (ethical instruction, advice)
thanksgiving
travel plans (writing, relations, plans, divine will, benefits)
body
other discrete forms such as disclosure formulae
3. Letters in the ancient world
deliberative (advising--assembly or council)
epideictic (praise or blame--celebrations, weddings, funerals)
official (archival, formal communications; see Trajan/Pliny)
literary (for reading and publication, e.g., Cicero)
family letters
hortatory letters (advice, admonition, rebuke, consolation)
recommending or mediating letters
accusing, apologetic or accounting letters.
[For further information see David Aune, The NT in its Literary Environment (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987); Stanley Stowers, Letter-Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadephia: Westminster, 1986).]
Peter Richardson
1. Pre-Pauline Christian traditions (examples in brackets)
2. Other traditions
3. Scripture
4. Paul's own preaching
5. Other units
Peter Richardson
(see Aune, pp. 183-91)
1 Salutation
2 Thanksgiving
3 Body
relationship to recipients
plans for a visit
divine approval for a visit
benefits
4 Paraenesis or Advice section: occasionally signalled by a reference to having heard of problems (e.g., 1 Cor. 5:1) or turning seriatim to problems (e.g., 1 Cor. 7:1, 25; 8:1 etc.). Other formulae may also be used: reminders, urgings and the like. The advice section often is signalled only by a change in style or tone.
5 Closing
Peter Richardson
1. Paul is, and remains, a proud--and to some extent observant—Jew; he continues to be devoted to the Temple and the synagogue; he participates in appropriate observances, at least some of the time.
2. After Damascus his basic conviction is that the risen Jesus is the expected Messiah of Israel.
3. For Paul there is a priority in being a Jew. Israel is the centre of God's attention and will be saved, yet not many Jews accept the Christian message.
4. Paul, however, is called to a mission to non-Jews. This creates an explosive situation as Christianity spreads beyond the boundaries of Judaism, for he is insistent that Gentiles share in God's goodness without circumcision or participation in Israel's national religion.
5. To resolve the contradictions inherent in this position he constructs a theory that God's willingness to accept non-Jews will make Israel jealous and provoke a believing response on the part of Israel.
6. Despite these differences between Jew and Gentile and in God's dealings with each, in Christ the distinction between Jew and Gentile is erased.
7. Yet in some places (Antioch, Galatia, Rome, at least) there is considerable tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians.
8. The Jerusalem collection attempts to cement the relationship between Gentile and Jewish Christians, and to provoke the right response from Judean Jews. Instead it exacerbates the situation and emphasizes the tensions.
9. As time goes on Jews accept the message in decreasing numbers. This is partly a result of Paul's attention to Gentile mission, partly a result of a more restrained strategy relative to Jewish-Christian missionary activity, and partly a result of internal differences within early Christianity.
10. Paul wishes to keep the two sides of early Christian mission balanced, but this becomes more a theoretical than a practical balance since his activity focuses on Gentiles.
11. The Jerusalem leaders and Paul are at very serious odds. In the next generation Paul is treated either as subordinate to them (e.g., Acts), or as totally unconnected with them (e.g., Acts of Paul and Thecla), or as an opponent (the Pseudo-Clementine literature).
12. The anti-Judaic developments of the following generations are due, in some part, to emphasizing only the critical side of Paul's views and ignoring the other, more constructive and positive, side.
Peter Richardson
1 Paul was essentially a city person. He liked big cities, and used them as bases from which to move out to smaller cities and towns.
2 When he said to the Romans that he had preached "all the way from Jerusalem to Illyricum," he meant that he had preached in major cities between those two points; he spent relatively little time in the countryside.
3 Paul had a strong preference for Roman cities--either Roman foundations or re-foundations--because he was most at home there. He seems to have avoided cities that had strong and continuing non-Roman cultural roots. He did not go, for example to the regions of Cappadocia, north Galatia (?), Pontus, Phrygia, Mysia, Bithynia; nor did he go to Pergamum or Priene, strongly Hellenistic Greek. But he went to Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth—all Roman colonies or re-foundations—and to Ephesus, a strongly Roman city.
4 Virtually all his cities had Jewish communities; where he was successful, the Jewish community was relatively strong. These Jewish religious communities were not limited to Jews only, but included proselytes and God-fearers, among whom were some converts.
5 He and his associates moved relatively quickly. They used sea travel when they could and as much as possible avoided slow overland routes. Most of the main cities were around the perimeter of the Aegean or Mediterranean Seas, for old geo-political reasons. Since most trade moved by ship, the harbour cities were great trading cities and entrepots.
6 These features fit with the fact that Paul, as an artisan who worked with his hands, was at home in this cosmopolitan and commercial world.
7 As an artisan--who needed only a small bag of tools--he found it relatively simple to ply his trade. He and many philosophers taught their philosophy and ethics in workshops, in the agora or on the streets of town.
8 Itinerant philosophers had several potential means of support: work; sell services to a patron; beg (i.e., accept handouts); live with a wealthy patron. Paul seems at different times--sometimes at the same time--to have done all these, and thereby created difficulties for himself.
9 We know relatively little about his oral message, since all we have are letters he wrote later; it seems he spoke primarily about the death and resurrection of Jesus, but not much about Jesus' own teaching or his birth and childhood; some of his initial teaching dealt with how to live. He made it a point not to preach on someone else's turf, though other missionaries did not observe the same practice, for some built on his foundations (1 Cor. 3).
10 Despite the Jerusalem agreement dividing the mission field between uncircumcised (Paul) and circumcised (Peter), Paul seems to have had frequent and perhaps even intense contacts with the synagogues in the cities in which he worked. Some converts were Jews or proselytes and this caused considerable concern to some of the Jerusalem apostles; it is likely that they and Paul interpreted the Jerusalem agreement differently.
11 Many of the issues that troubled his fledgling Christian communities arose from questions of Jewish observance in gentile Christian missions: circumcision, food laws, observance of torah, ritual questions, morality, and the like. On one interpretation, however, Paul's congregations should, according to the Jerusalem agreement, have had only Gentiles.
12 Equally pressing were the questions prompted by the Greco-Roman customs: eating food offered to idols, eating in a pagan temple, joining in dinner parties where libations were offered to pagan gods, loose sexual morality, too much emphasis on wisdom, perhaps offering incense to the Emperor, and the like.
13 Paul usually identified a "patron" from among the wealthier and more "elite" converts, in whose house the church would meet. These "house churches" reflected the pattern that had developed within Judaism and other religious groups such as Mithraism, in which a patron would host the religious community, might make small renovations to adapt his house for meetings, would later perhaps bequeath his house to the community, at which point major renovations might be made to the house to accommodate a wider range of activities. Only later would a purpose-built structure be commissioned.
14 As the church grew, other house churches would hive off, so that large cities (Ephesus, Rome, etc.) would have several congregations (Romans 16). He often established some local leadership (Philemon?). He urged standard Roman household rules on congregations (see Col., "husbands, wives, fathers, sons, masters, slaves"; cf. later Ephesians, 1-2 Timothy, Titus).
15 Patrons had considerable responsibility and authority--even power. Tensions and rivalries arose sometimes as a result. Might the groups that said proudly "I am of Paul, I am of Cephas, I am of Apollos," have represented different house churches (1 Cor. 1)?
16 Even in Paul's regions, he was selective. We don't hear of Athens' Christian community, nor of any in Illyricum. Paul seems to have avoided some cities (Pergamum, Smyrna, Sardis, Laodicea, Hierapolis, Magnesia) for reasons that are never hinted at, though all of these soon would have Christian communities. Were other competing cults too strong? Had another Christian been there? Was the Imperial cult too strong? Were they too unRoman?
17 Paul kept moving inexorably westwards, trying to cover as much ground as possible. While he may not have got to Spain, it was still an important aspect of his strategy
18 Paul's strategies included: (1) planting churches in large cities with local leaders (probably upper class); (2) modeling churches on synagogues but with substantial differences in practice; (3) using younger subordinates for frequent contact; (4) writing to maintain contact; (5) fighting for the interests of his converts. In the long run Pauline Christianity won over Jerusalem Christianity, in part because it was led locally and had a body of literature.
19 While Paul lost lots of battles, in the end he won the war; western Christianity is largely Pauline because he focused on gentile mission, in whose interest he sacrificed important Jewish principles, despite his contention that "all Israel will be saved."
Peter Richardson
1. Paul was a formerly torah-observant Pharisee wrestling, over a period of time (c. 33-58 CE), with the implications of conversion to messianic belief. The process, the questions, the debates (intra muros), the difficulties and "persecution" (exrtra muros) show how difficult were the issues. Paul is the one writer of the period to allow direct insight into these difficulties.
2. To understand Paul, he must be put in the context of other separatist or party movements at the same time. In a general sense the issues are the same: who is Israel and what does it mean to be a part of Israel? But Christians such as Paul raised a number of new variants of the question, partly because of Christianity's determination to be a missionary religion and partly because Christians believed in a Messiah who was executed and raised from the dead. The former raises questions of Gentile converts' practice and behaviour (circumcision, purity regulations, food observances); the latter raises questions about redemption, atonement, faith and new practices, independent of requirements of the law.
3. What was Paul's view of his mandate? His major role was speaking to Gentiles; it is very likely, however, that he also worked with Jews, despite the agreement of Galatians 2. He apparently saw the agreement (or chose to interpret it) geographically: his role lay in the farther regions beyond what had been evangelized to date (Judea, Samaria, Syria, Cilicia). Peter (Cephas) saw the agreement ethnologically: his role was to go to all Jews everywhere. In Peter’s view, Paul was not to work with Jews; the agreement's references to Syria and Cilicia were merely exemplary. The conflict between Paul and Jerusalem over Jew/Gentile matters was partly a result of the different interpretations of he agreement.
4. As Sanders claims, Paul saw himself in direct contact with his own people. He never cut himself off from the synagogue or Temple, or from inclusion in Israel. Though his behaviour altered, his view of inclusion did not.
5. Paul's view of torah was at best ambivalent. On the one hand, he maintained that torah was good and right and essential to the people of God. On the other, he saw law as opposed to faith, as unnecessary once faith in Messiah Jesus was possible for all. So torah was a parenthesis between Abraham and Jesus. The main problem with torah, in this view, is that it divided Gentiles from Jews in the widened people of God. The main benefit of torah was that this was the way God had always guided his people. On some occasions (e.g. Romans) Paul approved torah; on others (e.g. Galatians) he argued against torah; and on still others (e.g. 1 Corinthians), especially when talking about missionary activity, he wanted it both ways.
6. Paul (against Sanders) converted Jews, and his churches included both Gentiles and Jews. Some Jews were closer to other leaders in the Christian Community, perhaps obligated to them (e.g., Cephas, Apollos, James, Barnabas, etc.).
7. This leads to a larger question. Was the radical position of Paul on matters of practice and belief responsible--by the very challenges it posed--for the development of other identifiable positions in early Christianity? Was the inability to plaster over the cracks in early Christianity to be traced to Paul. Perhaps so.
8. Paul was in a minority position during his lifetime, though the NT gives a different (and somewhat false) impression of his dominance. Reading between the lines of Paul's letters and of other early Christian material (e.g. Acts) it is clear that there was a lot of opposition to Paul and his ideas. What contributed to his posthumous domination of Christianity? His letters and their collection; the church's later attractiveness to the Gentiles; the coherence between these two; the loss of the Temple cult; the destruction of Jerusalem as a religious centre; the abandonment of Jerusalem by Christian leaders in 68-69 CE; the shift in Roman attitudes to Judaism following the revolts; the accelerating separation from the side of Judaism; the opportunity and/or need to find a focus for gentile Christianity as a parallel development alongside rabbinic Judaism.
9. Ultimately Christianity looked back on Paul (as Luke already does in Acts) as the key figure in the first generation, one who took an outward looking road anticipating the role Christianity would play in the Greco-Roman world. His was a prophetic kind of role, in this view, stressing "justification by faith," "newness," a "law-free" form of Christianity where the emphasis was on the world-wide implications of faith in Jesus. It is ironic that the church at the same time actively promoted the notions that Paul fought against: abandonment of Judaism, legalism, formal requirements, institutionalism, hierarchy.
10. Another view of Paul also developed--though ultimately this was a dead-end--that saw him as an irritant in the history of the church, as the opponent of Peter and James, the one who led towards a law-free and overly convoluted (2 Peter 3:14-18) form of Christianity.
11. Whichever view one takes to be more accurate historically, there can be little doubt that Paul pushed the early church a substantial distance towards the defining of itself as an identifiable sect within Judaism. This process of definition as a sectarian group--with its own initiation rites, membership, sense of separate identity--led ultimately to Christianity as a new religion. The movement towards a new religion had not yet taken place in Paul's day; his theological encouragement led, however, to that as an inevitable consequence.