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for most contemporary historians, we hear Paul’s authentic voice only in seven of the letters bearing his name: 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians and Romans.
Most importantly, he gave to the early Christian movement a clear Jewish (i.e. scriptural) rationale for its spread into the non-Jewish world, and for its mission among non-Jews on terms that integrated them as full members of God’s people (‘children of Abraham’) without requiring them to live like Jews.
As the historian has to remind the theologian, Paul was a situational thinker: he was undoubtedly engaged in doing theology, but he was more a practical than a systematic theologian.
Paul could not understand the life, death and resurrection of Jesus without seeing there the agency of God; but neither could he now understand God except in the light of what had happened in Christ.
But Paul’s own experience and the experience of his Gentile converts was that God paid no regard to human systems of social, moral or ethnic worth, and this alarmingly unexpected behaviour by God, demonstrated in Christ, shaped all Paul’s convictions about history.
The members of Paul’s churches were predominantly non-Jewish, and the more they were disowned or opposed by local Jews the more anomalous they looked on the social landscape of the Roman world. To abstain, without good reason, from normal religious activity was deeply offensive and even dangerous. It broke social solidarity and threatened the delicate relationship between the community and the gods, by which the safety of the community was maintained.
Other schools of thought in second-century Christianity were also enamoured of Paul, whose theology (combined with the Gospel of John) they took to validate a ‘spiritualized’ understanding of salvation, as the enlightenment and liberation of the true self from its bodily imprisonment in a faulty, material universe.
Whether Paul’s voice in this choir is subordinate to that of the Gospels (as is common in the Catholic tradition), or whether he stands out as the soloist with whom others are expected to harmonize (as is typical in the Protestant tradition), is a significant variable underlying different receptions of Paul down to this day.
The pastoral dimensions of his letters – his moral and practical instructions on such matters as sexual morality, church community and life in the Spirit – are of a range and depth to provide endless resources for preachers and church-builders throughout the centuries. But Paul’s biggest imprint has been in the scope with which he portrays the narrative of salvation, and the depth with which he interprets its meaning at both personal and social levels. In this domain, he was the original and perhaps the most fertile Christian theologian of all time, and his legacy has been immense.
By and large, the Western Christian tradition has gravitated towards Paul’s cultic and legal metaphors, as refracted through Augustine. In the Eastern tradition, under the influence of John Chrysostom and the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, from the fourth century), metaphors of ‘transformation’ and ‘renewal’ have been dominant, with the believer drawn upwards towards participation in God through the Spirit.
Thus, the history of interpretation of these letters is not best understood as a centuries-long search for the one, original meaning, for which historical experts search as the ultimate ‘holy grail’. Rather, interpreters in each generation and in every new context have entered into deep conversations with these texts, exploring diverse possibilities of meanings which will never be singular, final or fixed.
Although some of the extremes to which he was led were highly controversial both in his lifetime and thereafter, he shaped the Western reading of Paul to such an extent that all medieval and Reformation interpretations of Paul constitute developments of the Augustinian tradition, even when they differ from him in significant ways.
Even so, how these historical disputes are framed intellectually is a matter of acute sensitivity. Was Paul attacking a form of ‘nationalistic privilege’ and ‘ethnocentrism’ – or does that way of putting it adopt a distinctively (and dangerously) modern preference for universal sameness over the particularities of difference? Was Paul criticizing only the Gentile adoption of Jewish laws, while leaving his Jewish heritage and his fellow Jews unaffected by the Christ event – or does that way of reading Paul (the ‘radical new perspective’) clash with the evidence of the letters, overcorrecting a
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And such paradoxes are not simply wordplay. They represent Paul’s ability to scramble the accepted meanings of terms, to invert the normal hierarchies of value, and to view reality from an unusual angle such that new structures of meaning emerge.
Here again, Paul’s theology shows its capacity to scramble our taken-for-granted assumptions about sexuality and gender, though it does so from an angle that fits neither conservative ‘family values’ nor the liberal desire for sexual freedom and individual autonomy.
Such examples illustrate a basic rule of hermeneutics: texts do not simply ‘speak’ (as in the frequently voiced claim, ‘the Bible says . . .’). Rather, texts (even biblical texts) are given voice and influence by human interpreters, who inevitably select, prioritize and construe them according to their own social locations and their cultural or political agendas.
