Corpus-Paul

["Runar M. Thorsteinsson" <Runar.Thorsteinsson AT teol.lu.se>]

Loren, Bob et al.,

since I have recently devoted a whole book on this very question (Paul's
Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient
Epistolography [ConBNT 40; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2003]), please
allow me to offer few comments and suggestions.

Loren, you wrote in response to Bob:

Rom 1:16-3:20 says that
> all will be judged, either by the law or apart from
> the law (2:7-16). I'm still not sure why you avoid
> using "law". It's what Paul has in mind, whether Torah
> for Judeans or some kind of Noahide equivalent for
> non-Judeans ("the law written on their hearts"). The
> Greek will be judged for the crimes of Sodom
> (1:19-2:6), no less than the Judean will be judged for
> adultery and robbing temples. Laugh. Rhetoric can be
> preposterous, but that doesn't stop people like Paul
> from using it when it serves an effective purpose.

I wonder what "effective purpose" it would have served for Paul to charge
Jews with "robbing temples". After all, this was not something which Jews
could be or normally were in the habit of doing. "Laugh", you say, pointing
out the potential irony here. I suspect that laughter may indeed have been
the actual effect, a laughter caused by Paul's ridiculous rhetoric, i.e. IF
his charge would have been understood by his first century audience to be a
charge against Jews (or any Jew).
Unlike us, however, who are more or less influenced by a post-70 CE view of
"the typical, Pharisaic Jew", this audience would probably not have made
such a connection at all, but recalled that NON-JEWS were regularly accused
by Jews like Paul of robbing the temple in Jerusalem (e.g. 1Macc, 2Macc,
4Macc, 1Esd, Josephus).

In other words, charging Jews with "robbing temples" would probably have
sounded ridiculous to Paul's audience, while alluding to a well-known and
well-recorded crime committed by non-Jews against the Jewish nation would at
least have had some reasonable ground.

> Where Paul puts the screws to one group he must do
> likewise to the other. He needs to take Judeans down
> as much as the pagans -- his elaboration in 3:1-20
> offers more credibility than the naked 2:17-24 -- if
> he hopes to keep unity in his church and stop the two
> groups from competing with each other. We need to
> think in terms of the text's function more than how it
> can pass for credible or appealing theology.

Again, I wonder: If, as many scholars suggest, (one of) Paul's main
purpose(s) with his letter was to settle tensions between a "Jewish
Christian" minority and a "gentile Christian" majority, and to ensure that
the latter (the "strong") accept and welcome the former (the "weak"), why on
earth would he want to "take Judeans down as much as the pagans"?

I myself see no such purpose with Paul's letter and no such audience.
Alternatively, then, if Paul (as I read it) is addressing people of
non-Jewish origin, what purpose would it have served for such an audience or
for Paul himself to "take Judeans down as much as the pagans"?

Such a purpose would also seem to be quite at odds with what Paul says only
few lines later about the value of being a Jew (3.1-2), and with what he
still later in this very letter says about Jewish privileges (9.4-5), not to
mention his definite disapproval of gentile arrogance towards Jews in
chapter 11 (to take but few examples).

I think that we have been on the wrong track for centuries when identifying
(or not bothering to identify) Paul's interlocutor in Romans 2.

A number of features in Paul's text suggest that the (imaginary) person
addressed in Romans 2, including vv. 17-29, is not a Jew at all but a person
of gentile origin (who wants to become a proselyte and thus call himself a
"Ioudaios").

Yours,

Runar

-- 
Runar M. Thorsteinsson, Ph.D.

Centre for Theology and Religious Studies
Lund University, Sweden

http://www.teol.lu.se/nt/forskning/thorsteinsson.html