Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith

by Francis Watson

In recent years, scholars from both Christian and Jewish backgrounds have tried to rethink the relationship between earliest Christianity and its Jewish milieu; and Paul has emerged as a central figure in this debate. The present book contributes to this scholarly discussion by seeing Paul and his Jewish contemporaries as, above all, readers of scripture. However different the conclusions they draw, they all endeavour to make sense of the same normative scriptural texts - in the belief that, as they interpret the scriptural texts, the texts will themselves interpret and illuminate the world of contemporary experience. In that sense, Paul and his contemporaries are standing on common ground. Far from relativizing their differences, however, it is this common ground that makes such differences possible. This book seeks to show how three distinct bodies of literature in fact constitute a single intertextual field. It is therefore necessary to dismantle artificial scholarly boundaries between the Pauline letters, other extant Jewish writings of the period, and the scriptural texts themselves. The method adopted is to set a Pauline and a non-Pauline reading of a scriptural text alongside one another, to compare the ways in which the different readings seek to realize the semantic potential of the scriptural text, and to construct communal identity on that basis. Contrary to the view that these early readers merely impose their own pre-existing viewpoints on the scriptural texts, it becomes clear that they are profoundly engaged in fundamental hermeneutical issues.

Genres: Biblical Studies, Theology

600 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2004

Reviews

[Timothy Crouch · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars — I could go up or down here. Perhaps not quite as riveting a read as his later _Gospel Writing_, and I do not much care for either the phenomenon of scholars writing “A Response to My Critics” for the second edition (you’ve got to the second edition, man! You are guaranteed your flowers!) or editors placing such material at the beginning of the book before one has read the main argument. (On the other hand, the two papers presented as appendices are a brilliant supplement to the main text: a kind of proof of concept of the paradigm’s viability outside the book’s primary territory.) But the main argument is a profoundly erudite work on Paul that simultaneously offers a major methodological contribution to Pauline studies and models the best kind of reading that the methodology invites. Its second best feature is the interaction with contemporary writers (Philo, Josephus, 4 Ezra, etc.) by which the Pauline hermeneutic is differentiated from the others, without the projection that plagues the mirror-readings of a Martyn or a Campbell. The best feature is its sheer plausibility. The Paul who emerges from Watson’s portrait is a master of Scripture indeed, but not (unlike Hays) a virtuoso whose dazzling feats of interpretation and reinterpretation are occasionally theologically irreconcilable and practically inimitable.