Corpus-Paul

["Tim Gallant" <tim AT rabbisaul.com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark D. Nanos" <nanosmd AT comcast.net>
To: "Corpus Paul" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Corpus-Paul] Did Paul break the Law?


<snip>
I have tried to raise the problem of context, of language usage, and by Paul
in particular, that is, within the canon of texts scholars today attribute
to Paul. (The exchange with Dieter Mitternacht is an example of a discussion
of the context of the language in question.) Appeal to the Christian canon
is useful if one wants to answer the question what Christians thought fit
within the circle of truth in the third or fourth century, but I want to
know what Paul might have thought he was communicating, and what his
audiences might have thought he meant (whether I believe that Paul speaks
for God in the texts we have [and believe to have been written by
secretaries for him, although none of his original manuscripts are available
and thus scribes were at least involved over the course of hundreds of years
of copying] is irrelevant to that question. However, whatever one's canon,
the reason that citing versus and supposing the plain meaning to the one
citing is the plain meaning to others, besides being naïve and arrogant,
fails to account for the fact that there are tensions between statements in
each of these canons, sometimes what seem to be and may be downright
contradictions, and these make it clear that there is a need for
interpretation. The question is not that there is language one can mount for
a point, but what did that language mean in its own context(s), which is not
self-evident, as should be clear to anyone who has visited a library or
bookstore: there is more than one interpretation for everything.
<snip>
What would you lose by recognizing there might be some who
do not agree with Paul's proposition because of Christ-faith of this altered
role for defining who are the righteous ones, but who remain "also" but not
"only" the righteous ones? After all, it is this proposition of "also" for
which Paul struggled, in the opposite direction. Is it not making the same
category mistake (according to Paul, that is being made by some Jews) from
the non-Jewish side when you insist on "only" and find no place for "also"?
<snip>
In conclusion, it seems to me, this "also" but not "only" concern (by not
excluding the one when the other gets control of interpretation) is a
fitting way to approach each other especially on this day, which in America,
is set aside to honor the memory of Martin Luther King. Did he mean to argue
that America was to offer equal opportunity for "only" the minority people
who were not experiencing it, or for that freedom for them "also"?

Dr Nanos, your post was very long, and I certainly do not have time to 
interact with everything you have written here. There is a great deal I 
agree with, and those who have taken the time to look at my work elsewhere 
will know that I have a great deal of sympathy for reading Paul as someone 
who is not discarding Torah, but for (for lack of a better term) re-reading 
it. (To get a basic handle, one could compare my position on Paul and the 
law with N. T. Wright's, although I disagree with him in spots, and think 
that he somewhat overplays the ethnological hand.) Torah as Scripture 
remains fully authoritative. And even Torah considered more narrowly as the 
administration known as the Mosaic covenant is not merely discarded, but 
eschatologized in Christ and the Spirit.

Drawing that out here, however, is not my purpose. My present aim is simply 
to note what I see as a fundamental inconsistency in your post. You begin by 
complaining that others are presupposing a canon which you do not 
presuppose, and observing that Paul must be read on his own terms rather 
than through the lens of either 16th century Reformation debates or 3rd-4th 
century concerns of Christian orthodoxy versus heretics. And since this is 
purely an exegetical list, I have a great deal of sympathy for that, 
although I also suggest that no reading of a text is done in a vacuum.

And it is precisely here where I see your post as fundamentally 
inconsistent. You repudiate a later confessional Christian presupposition as 
a proper way to interpret Paul, but it appears to me that what it comes down 
to in the end is a sort relativistic postmodern reading of Paul that you 
wish to advocate. Insisting that it is legitimate to read Paul as saying 
that Gentiles can be saved through Christ without the law, in addition to 
Jews being saved through the covenant without Christ is, it seems to me, a 
peculiar way of reading a first-century Jewish text, not least when Paul 
uses exclusive language all over the place.

My point here is not that you must agree with Paul's exclusive vision 
regarding Jesus of Nazareth. I am aware that you are not a Christian. But 
let's not cast Paul either as a postmodernist, nor as a 1st century pagan 
who thought that all sorts of religions were legitimate. He simply was not, 
and he makes this explicitly clear. We have numerous strands of evidence 
that he thought that salvation for Jews was through Christ alone. For 
instance:

1) Paul's great sorrow and continual anguish for his kinsmen, which was such 
that he was upon the verge of asking to become anathema for their sakes (Rom 
9.1-3), is incomprehensible apart from this presupposition.

2) Paul says that Jesus is Yahweh Himself, not only directly (Rom 9.5), but 
by re-visioning OT texts which refer to Yahweh. Earlier I mentioned one of 
the most emphatic monotheistic passages of all, Isaiah 45, which Paul 
applies to Jesus in Philippians 2. Another is Romans 10.13, which is a 
quotation of Joel 2. I know you are enough of a biblical scholar to be aware 
of these. If, however, Jesus is Yahweh, it will not do to say that for Paul 
failure to believe in Jesus is irrelevant as long as one is Jewish. That is 
tantamount to saying that Jews will be saved apart from believing and 
obeying Yahweh.

3) Nor is this merely a logical deduction. In Romans 10.1, Paul says that 
his heart's desire is that Israel would be *saved*; thus when he cites Joel 
later in the chapter, he is referring to the *way* they will be saved: 
through calling upon the name of the risen Lord.

I have selected only a very small sampling of the evidence, because I do not 
want to belabour the point here. And I am well aware that it is not pleasant 
for a Jew to be told Paul's message, that his salvation is only to be found 
through Jesus. But if the issue is Pauline exegesis, I think it is only fair 
that we not denude Paul of what he actually says. Disagree with him if you 
will, but please do not say that he simply sweepingly presupposes the 
salvation of his people apart from Christ. To his own anguish, he does no 
such thing. Either Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and Israel must submit to 
Him as God's saving righteousness (Romans 10.3), or He is nothing.

Someone else has asked, what would Gentiles care about a Jewish Messiah? 
Well, they could only care if the task of the Jewish Messiah involved a 
vision for the world. But for all that, He is not a Gentile Messiah, but a 
Jewish one, and Paul's mission message presupposes that his word is the 
gospel for the Jew *first,* and then for the Greek. If this is not the good 
news for Israel, it is not the good news for the Gentiles either.

As I said, you may not like that message. But it's Paul's message. Please 
let us not, in the name of Paul, say his message was something else.

And now I must say one more thing. Respect for the other does not 
necessarily entail assuming that everyone is equally right and every opinion 
equally valid. I for one am appalled by much of what has occurred in the 
past two thousand years with reference to Christians and Jews. I am 
appalled, and these horrors most emphatically occurred precisely because the 
Church failed radically to listen to Paul. No one who has grasped Romans 
9-11 could have done what many in the Church did in the name of Christ 
during that time. To blame Paul's soteriological exclusivism for those 
horrors is as wrong-headed as appropriating Paul's ethnological inclusivism 
as a mandate for relativism or postmodernism. The Church's shameful history 
with regard to the Jews is not a cause to pretend that truth is relative. 
That history was a betrayal of Paul, and more importantly, of Christ. The 
solution for Christians now is not to betray Christ in a different direction 
by denying His Lordship, but by imitating His pattern of suffering love, 
just as we were always called to do.

Sincerely,

tim


Tim Gallant
Pastor, Conrad Christian Reformed Church

http://www.timgallant.org
tim | gallant site group