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  • From: Loren Rosson <rossoiii AT yahoo.com>
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Reconceptualising Conversion
  • Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 12:15:11 -0700 (PDT)

List members --

Everyone should add the following book to their
reading list: Zeba Crook's _Reconceptualising
Conversion: Patronage, Loyalty, and Conversion in the
Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean_ (ISBN
3-11-018265-3), published last year. I'll review the
book's arguments here on C-P, because while not about
Paul per se, it uses Paul as a chief illustration of
the pattern of conversion found in the antique
Mediterranean.

Crook's premise is that the key to understanding
conversion in patron-client societies is
"benefaction", or what is gained, as opposed to
internal fulfillment or the resolution of a supposedly
conflicted self. With trademark Context-Group gusto,
he undercuts cross-cultural psychology which
mistakenly assumes that all people share the same
psychological structure underneath a veneer of
cultural difference. Crook emphasizes that the
cultural divide between collectivist and
individualistic societies yields fundamental
psychological differences, which have serious bearing
on the question of "conversion".

While the academic field has generally heeded Krister
Stendahl's pointer that Paul didn't have a bad
experience with Judaism and the Torah, they have not
heeded his more general claim -- that Paul was not
introspective at all. People in the ancient
Mediterranean converted or chose gods for the same
reason they chose patrons -- based on the benefits
they stood to gain. The "balance sheet" was what
mattered in ancient conversion: "what's in it for me".

Crook pinpoints five rhetorical conventions that occur
within the context of this "balance-sheet" psychology
(see pp 5-7). These apply whether the patron is human
or divine: (1) the unanticipated call of the patron,
who gives the client a benefaction; (2) the referral
to a philosophical teaching as a benefaction in
itself; (3) the honoring discourse of prayer, praise,
and proselytism -- the last of which was expected of
clients so as to publicize the generosity of the
patron in an attempt to increase the honor and
reputation of the patron and attract new clients (the
more clients the patron has, the more honor); (4)
patronal synkrisis, by which the client feels
compelled to compare his past with a better present,
to the credit of the patron; (5) the "grace" received
by the client ("benefaction" being a better
translation than "grace", since the latter is loaded
with post-Reformation overtones; rather than abstract
ideas of love and mercy, grace referred more often to
a concrete item of benefaction or patronage).

Each of these conventions accomplished the goals of
giving thanks to a patron (whether human or divine),
praising a patron, and securing future benefactions,
goals which were the imperative duties of any client.
In the ancient Mediterranean, a client's sole duty was
to increase the honor of a patron in exchange for
benefactions received. (pp 7-8)

Crook then demonstrates that Paul's own rhetoric of
conversion (in I Cor 9:1; 9:16-17; 15:8-10; Gal
1:11-17; Philip 3:4b-11) owes precisely to that of
patronage and benefaction, so it's all the more
surprising that introspection and other western
psychological models continue to play a role in
interpreting Paul's conversion. Christ appeared to
Paul and gave him a benefaction (though what this
benefaction was, Crook doesn't venture to say), just
like Isis appeared to Lucius on the beach and gave him
the key to his escape from his present shape, or as
Asclepius called Aristides to Pergamum to be healed (p
158). Crook shows that 2nd-Temple Judaism had co-opted
the language of patronage and benefaction for God
(evidenced in the Septuagint, Josephus and Philo). In
ancient Israel the model had been covenantal exchange
rather than patron-client, but by the time of
Hellenized Judaism, the patron-client model was firmly
in place (see pp 79-89).

Paul expresses his conversion in terms of a call or
commission, exactly the language of
patronage/benefaction. The traditional dichotomy
between "conversion" and "calling" is thus seen to be
false: "As a client of a divine patron, Paul can be
called and *thus* converted" (p 176). Paul was
invoking the Greco-Roman example of the call of the
divine patron-benefactor ("conversion") and the call
of the Hebrew prophets at the same time.

Recalling the five conventions of conversion mentioned
above --

(1) call of the patron (as a benefaction)
(2) the philosopher's teaching (as a benefaction)
(3) prayer, praise, proselytism (as an obligation, to
honor the benefactor)
(4) synkrisis (the comparison of the past with a
better present, to the credit of the benefactor)
(5) grace (= benefaction, favor)

Crook examines Paul's conversion passages and finds
the above conventions present as follows:

I Cor 9:1 (1),(3)
I Cor 9:16-17 (1),(3)
I Cor 15:8-10 (1),(3),(5)
Gal 1:11-17 (1),(3),(4),(5)
Philip 3:4b-11 (4)

Absent is (2), the convention of a philosopher's
teaching as a benefaction designed to bring
"salvation" (from slavery, ignorance, and/or
suffering, etc). But Crook finds (2) implied
elsewhere, as in Gal 5:16-23 and Rom 1:18-32 (loose
Stoic parallels), II Cor 10:3-6 (loose Cynic
parallels), I Thess 2:1-12 (indicating that Paul was
at least mistaken for an itinerant philosopher), and
the fact that Paul believed hardships were good for a
person in the long run (calling to mind the Stoic
sages). Crook is careful to emphasize that Paul was
not a card-carrying member of any popular philosophy,
but he did make use of philosophical terminology and
analogies unrelated to his Jewish heritage. (This puts
one in mind of David Seeley's The Noble Death, in
which Christ's death, particularly in Rom 6, can be
seen as vicarious in ways loosely paralleling the
deaths of the Greco-Roman philosophers.)

Of particular interest is the way missionary activity
must be understood in this context. Paul's evangelical
activity is nothing more than client-reciprocity,
reflecting his simple obligation to publicize Christ
in return for the benefaction Christ gave him. Crook
admits it's hard to understand how a mission to the
Gentiles, in particular, would have been derived (see
p 169), though I suspect Philip Esler's reconstruction
of early Christianity can easily supply the answer.
Namely, if Christians had already been allowing
Gentiles into the movement as equals (by sharing
equal-standing table-fellowship without being
circumcised), and if this is what had offended Paul
beyond measure so as to persecute the Christians, then
after being converted he would have wanted to
evangelize precisely those Gentiles who had so deeply
offended him. In any case, missionary activity was an
obligation, as Paul saw it -- "Woe to me if I do not
proclaim the gospel!" (I Cor 9:16) -- as all clients
were duty-bound to publicize on behalf of a
benefactor, in order to increase the benefactor's
honor.

Paul's synkrisis (the fourth convention) is the one
which most interests me in terms of relating Paul's
Christ-believing convictions to his native ones. Crook
points out that in order to credit benefactors,
clients almost always described their past as grim and
bleak in comparison to the present -- except in cases
where the patron doesn't change (as when, for
instance, slaves receive manumission). Paul didn’t
change gods, so he had to "raise the stakes", as it
were, by improving upon an already excellent past
(Philip 3:4b-6) which in comparison to the present is
actually worse than worthless (Philip 3:7-11). Crook
writes:

"If patronal synkrisis was meant to honor the patron
by attributing to him or her a tremendous improvement
in life by comparing the good one has received to the
ill one knew previously, then Paul's synkrisis in
Philippians does this all the more so... All that he
has lost from his past he now regards as 'shit'.
Herein lies the power of Paul's patronal synkrisis:
Paul's past was excellent; it was a source of pride
for him. Yet in comparison with Paul's awesome present
status, even something as excellent as that appears so
profoundly diminished as to call it ['shit']." (pp
181-182)

This seems to me a profoundly correct basis for
understanding the relationship between Paul's twin
sets of convictions (native and revealed) as well as
providing a springboard for making sense of Paul's
various contradictions elsewhere. Crook writes (much
later) that Paul, as a result of converting while
still following the same deity, had a tenacious
loyalty to the traditions of his forefathers, subject
to a strict loyalty to the Christ movement:

"[In Romans] Paul seems to be constantly making a
point, then back-tracking, working himself into a
corner, then fighting to get out. In each case, this
has to do with the value of the law...Paul is
struggling to express loyalty to God in a new way
(law-free salvation) without expressing disloyalty to
God for the previous gift of the law...How can Paul
argue that the law was a benefaction from God but that
the supersession of it was also a benefaction from the
same God? These are the issues of loyalty, which are
the result of a conversion that involved the same
divine patron, that Paul is struggling to work out."
(p 246)

I couldn't have said it better, and this improves upon
the way someone like E.P. Sanders has described
(essentially) the same phenomenon (see Paul, the Law,
and the Jewish People, especially ch 2, The Purpose of
the Law, and the last chapter on salvation history).
Sanders explained the anguished dilemmas of Rom 7 and
9-11 in terms of Paul's concern for God's sovereign
will and consistency. Crook has the better of it by
focusing more on Paul's concern for his own loyalty.
Sanders is right too, of course; it can hardly be
denied that Paul worried about the implied character
of God he was advancing. But overplaying this perhaps
makes too much a systematic theologian out of Paul.
Loyalty, as Crook underscores, was the concrete
concern which converts like Paul had to worry about in
an honor-shame context: how did Paul's actual behavior
and conduct square with professed loyalty to the
Jewish God?

To wrap up, Crook is plainly convincing that Paul's
conversion was anything but unique. On the contrary,
he followed the general pattern of conversion found
everywhere in the Mediterranean. Once again, the
balance sheet was the important factor -- "what's in
it for me", that is, not "vocation" or a sense of
inner fulfillment -- which led one to answer a divine
call of grace, which in turn resulted in an obligation
to honor the divine benefactor through prayer, praise,
proselytism, and synkrisis.

But here's my quibble: after emphasizing over and over
how important the "balance sheet" was in ancient
conversion, and providing numerous examples of
converts gaining something from the patron or deity
before reciprocating in turn with
prayer/praise/proselytizing/synkrisis, Crook refuses
to speculate on what Jesus gave to Paul. What exactly
*was* in it for Paul? Was it simply the privilege of
having a direct revelation of Israel's messianic
liberator? The promise of favored status which would
play out in the end (as the twelve are reported as
being promised in places like Mt 19:28/Lk 22:30)?
Perhaps Crook wants to leave this a mystery for others
to work on, but given that he devotes so much space to
Paul as his chief example, I felt a bit cheated here.

There's something else which demands comment. Crook
pulls a sly maneuver when relating patron-broker ideas
to the question of Jesus' divinity. He declares it all
but self-evident that Paul (and other NT writers) did
not portray Jesus as equal to God:

"Throughout Paul's letters and the New Testament,
Jesus is depicted solely as God's divine broker and
thus is the agent through whom salvation was now to be
attained. Since he was the deliverer of salvation,
such a grand benefaction in the eyes of Mediterranean
people, the honor that had to be directed at Jesus was
great, and because of this it became ever greater
throughout the centuries and people mistook the role
of the broker for that of the patron...The gratitude
that Paul had originally directed only at God was now
to be directed at God **and**, appropriately, at God's
broker Jesus. Both are honored and are the recipients
of Paul's words and actions of praise, gratitude and
loyalty. Significantly, however, in the letters of
Paul, Jesus the broker is always subordinate to God as
the divine patron. The confusion of the two for one is
a later theological development that, from the
perspective of patronage and benefaction, would have
appeared foreign to Paul. Paul is consistent on this:
Jesus *must* be honored -- as God's broker his
benefactions are utterly indispensable to Paul -- but
he is the broker and not therefore to be confused with
the divine patron. Indeed, such a confusion would have
been quite insulting to the patron." (pp 195-196)

But Paul is actually, infamously, inconsistent on this
point. Sometimes he subjects Jesus to God (I Cor 15)
and sometimes he equates the two (Philip 2). Crook's
claim becomes even more hazardous by bringing the
entire NT into view, since the NT as a whole
attributes more divine characteristics to Jesus than
the mere fact that he is owed "praise, gratitude, and
loyalty". The NT claims he is sovereign, exalted over
angelic powers, worshipped, and pre-existent. These
can only point to equality with God, not only by
Jewish standards, but by the conventions of
Greco-Roman patronage/benefaction. These attributes
are patronal, almost be definition, and they indicate
something much stronger than the "praise, gratitude,
and loyalty" which can be naturally given to brokers
as much as patrons. The issue cannot be settled here,
of course, but scholars (like Bauchkam, Witherington,
Esler, etc) are becoming increasingly convinced that
Paul (and most, if not all, NT authors) equated Jesus
with God. The broker *is* the patron in this case (and
Crook knows very well that brokers can be either
clients and/or patrons at the same time; see p 73).

Quibbles aside, this is a great book and mandatory
reading for everyone in the Pauline field. Thumbs up,
Zeba (if you're listening), for offering another
Context Group accomplishment which helps us understand
the ancients refreshingly on their own terms. I'm a
bit surprised the book hasn't received wider
attention, though maybe it’s still too early to have
caught on.

Loren Rosson III
Nashua NH
rossoiii AT yahoo.com



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