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  • From: "Mark D. Nanos" <nanos AT gvi.net>
  • To: corpus-paul
  • Subject: Re: Paul and the Law
  • Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 4:55:49


Dear Bob,

Sorry to be so late; I have just altered this message composed Friday am
when found myself unable to use web or e-mail. Now web access is enabled
only, but at least I can post through C-P. Delighted to see my work
mentioned; thank you Jeffrey. I also had added Donaldson to this list,
though not Westerholm. Will return to this point in discussion, but first
some suggestions.

Peter Tomson, Paul and the Jewish Law, Fortress or Van Gorcum.

Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah, Univ. of British Columbia Press.

Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul, Orbis or Sheffield.

Hendrikus Boers, The Justification of the Gentiles, Hendrickson.

Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew, U. of Cal. Press.

W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 1948 (try Sigler Press for
reprint).

William Campbell, Paul's Gospel in an Intercultural Context, (Lang).

E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, Fortress.

Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, Fortress.

Alan Segal, Paul the Convert, Yale.

Terence Donaldson, Paul and the Gentiles, Fortress.

There are many "articles" on the subject, and I would recommend looking
also for the topic of works of law in titles (a new one is Kent Yinger,
Paul, Judaism, and Judgment according to Deeds, Cambridge).

Like Jim Hester, I too responded to your question with a bit of a sigh. In
my case it was in part because of the direction implied by your list of
choices, a direction that has changed little on the understanding of Paul's
view of Law since Aquinas and Luther, although with Sanders and Dunn there
are changes on the views of the Law imagined for Jewish people; other than
Paul, that is. May I elaborate a bit?

The writers on your selection list, if you will allow a Wittgenstein
metaphor, will in many ways differ only about how the rocks on the surface
are arranged. All of them are dealing with the same riverbed (at least with
respect to the prior assumption about Paul's beliefs and behavior according
to the Law, that is), although some will have a better understanding of
first century Judaisms since Sander's work; corrections were offered
earlier by others who went largely unheard. (Why this happened might be an
interesting entree to the topic of interpretive constraints!).

You will thus be confined to a certain way of posing the questions and of
conceiving the answers set by a way of seeing the world as imagined for
Paul, and as the possibilities for Paul were conceived in later times and
by people of different convictions. Of course the Reformation (i.e., e.g.,
Luther's) categories for conceiving reality are very important for the
authors you list, but there are many other determining factors to be
considered to analyze the interpretive framework, which limit the
possibilities for the conclusions of any interpreter. As noted, the
interpretation of Jews and Judaism imagined for Paul was largely set by
Aquinas. (The differences between Augustine and Aquinas are nicely set out
in Jeremy Cohen's new book, The Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew
in Medieval Christianity, U. of Cal. Press. The implications for the topic
of Paul and the Law are many).

Your task includes at least reaching decisions on two main categories: 1)
framing the portrait of Jewish Law for Paul's contemporaries, and 2) the
portrait of Paul against which the first will be measured to ascertain his
view. Then you will work out Paul and the Law in Phil. or some other
text(s) within the constraints of these decisions.

On the first point the Reformation assumptions are being reconsidered
(Sanders, Dunn, Raisanen), although not by all of the later works on your
list (Hubner, Schreiner, Thielman) or Westerholm (and you will need to
consider works specifically on the topic of first century Judaisms not
concerned with Paul per se, if at all). But on the second none are really,
in my view, starting over on Paul.

The problem for any of these interpreters is that they cannot make sense of
the "later" (e.g., Reformation) Paul with whom they are left unless they
make the Judaism portrayed more like "later" (e.g., Reformation) categories
than the evidence for Judaisms suggests (for some of them at least, such as
Sanders, Dunn, Raisanen). So you have a problem of how to fit (or find
inscrutable) this relatively traditional view of Paul on new maps of
Judaisms of his own time (Sanders, Dunn, Raisanen), or exposing the
inconsistencies of these newer views to corroborate their more traditional
Reformation understanding of reality in terms of both Judaism and Paul
(e.g., Schreiner and Thielman, Westerholm). Oversimplified, but maybe
helpful for framing where some of the issues are within the existing (two)
paradigms for Law, and existing one paradigm for Paul (Paulinism).

The above suggestions to add to your list are in different ways less happy
with the riverbed, or at least the stones that they are moving around
(either for understanding Jewish Law or Paul or both), and in some cases
they are not shaped by the Reformation lenses in terms of their own
convictions of reality (and some are Jewish for example). (Is the paucity
of Catholic scholars writing on this topic under these kinds of titles
telling?). I would also recommend that an article by John Gager on Paul
that appeared in Bible Today in the past year or so would help you sort out
the issues and some of the players, again within the constraints of the
current paradigms (add my work to the Jewish authors, although it will mess
with his nicely drawn categories).

I think that something new could be done within the existing way of setting
up the problem--although slightly modified--that would be profitable. But a
real breakthrough might come with breaking away from the constraints of the
same rocks on the anachronistic riverbed that was carved by those long ago
who were hostile to and largely unfamiliar with Jewish people and religious
life (like Law) in their own Medieval or Reformation time, and not engaged
in the historical critical task with respect to reading Paul in his
(Jewish, Greek or Roman) context.

What if you ignored all but the study of first-century people and cultures
concentrating on Jewish, Roman and Greek (which is of course a broader
topic than this), as well as the study of methodologies (like sociology,
historiography, anthropology, rhetoric, etc.), and the reading of Paul's
texts in Greek. Then, after formulating some questions and hypotheses,
compared the views of those on these lists. This might allow you to escape
some of the constraints of the existing approaches, although of course you
have to some degree already been shaped by them directly and indirectly
(obviously none of us are completely free agents).

Hope this is helpful. You will live with a dissertation very closely for
what may seem like an eternity; make sure you are really interested in the
question posed!

Regards,
Mark Nanos
Kansas City





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