ebook img

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul PDF

254 Pages·1989·27.384 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

... , . r \ ~. .' '. > y • ", ~:' ..... '-j,Iot:+! . t . ,'l" . '. " ~ .. ~ r .... ,. . - '. . . ,... -" \ ECHOES OF SCRIPTURE IN THE LETTERS OF RICHARD B. HAYS YALE UNIVERSITY ·PRESS NEW HA VEN & LONDON ECHOES OF SCRIPTURE IN THE LETTERS OF PAUL Copyright © 1989 by Richard B. Hays. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying pe~mitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Excerpt from "Ash Wednesday" in Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher. Permission to reprint outside the U.S. granted by Faber and Faber Limited, Publishers. "The Nineteenth Century and After" reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from The Poems of w. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Permission to reprint outside the U.S. granted by A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Palatino Roman types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States ofA merica by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N. Y. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hays, Richard B. Echoes of scripture in the letters of Paul/Richard B. Hays. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-300-04471-2 (alk. paper) Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul-Relation to the Old Testament. 1. 2. Bible. O.T.-Quotations in the New Testalnent. 3. Bible. N.T. , Epistles of Paul-Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title. BS2655·R32H39 1989 227' .066-dC19 89-30110 CIP The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 This book is dedicated to George Hobson, ao<po~ aQXL'tEx'tWV, and to the memory of John Harold Gibbs (1940 - 1982), whose life was a true reading of the gospel. Contents Preface IX The Puzzle of Pauline Hermeneutics CHAPTER ONE 1 Paul as Reader and Misreader of Scripture Critical Approaches to Pauline Hermeneutics In tertextual Echo in Phil. 1: 19 Hermeneutical Reflections and Constraints Intertextual Echo in ROlnans CHAPTER TWO 34 Righteousness and Wrath Prefigured The Law and the Prophets as Witnesses of God's Righteousness Sheep to Be Slaughtered Has the Word of God Fallen? uThe Righteousness from Faith Says" Children of Promise 84 CHAPTER THREE Ecclesiocen tric Hermeneutics Israel in the Wilderness The Israel/Church Typology Scripture Prefigures the Blessing of Gentiles A Letter from Christ CHAPTER FOUR 122 New Covenant Hermeneutics? Cor. 3:1-4:6-A Reading 2 The Text Transfigured "The Word Is Near You": Hermeneutics in CHAPTER FIVE the Eschatological Community 154 Paul's Readings of Scripture Paul's Letters as Hermeneutical Model Notes 193 Indexes 231 Preface Around the time I was finishing the manuscript of this book, I happened on George Steiner's review of The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.1 In his learned and provocative essay,2 Steiner castigates the contributors to the Literary Guide for avoiding what he calls the thorny and ugly theological issues raised by the relationship between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian interpretation of them: The all too precise prefiguration of Christ's role and agony in the Psalms, in Deutero-Isaiah, is only glancingly referred to. This, in turn, makes it hardly possible for the modern reader to apprehend the bitter, wholly consequent hatred of the Jew expressed in Romans-a hatred incomparably phrased, metaphorized by Paul, and one cannot but feel, bearing its death fruit in our century. It is just because the Psalms and the literature of prophecy in the Old Testament foretell Jesus so graphically that the rejection of Jesus by the Jews of his own day strikes Paul as a specifically suicidal blasphemy, as an act of self negation which sets mankind on the treadmill of its imprisonment in history. This passing reference to the apostle Paul cries out for response. If so erudite a literary critic as Steiner labors under such distressing misap prehensions about Paul and his argument in Romans, the need for the reading of Paul offered in the following pages is perhaps greater than I realized when I began to write. me "Hatred of the Jew"? As Paul would say, genoito (by no means)! In this book I seek to show, among other things, that Paul the Jew remained passionately driven, to the end of his life, by the desire to demonstrate that God had not abandoned Israel. Furthermore, the predictive christo- IX x PREFACE logical interpretation of the Psalms and the prophets, which appears so graphically obvious to Steiner, plays only a minor role in Paul's exposi tion of Israel's Scriptures. In short, although Steiner's remarks might be applied, with some justice, to the evangelists Matthew and John, they badly misrepresent Paul. If indeed we must reckon with "death fruit" of the Christian tradition in our century, that fruit grows from soil made fertile by Christian theology's perverse incomprehension of Paul's vision for eschatological reconciliation, a vision that seeks-in Romans above all-to embrace Jews and Gentiles alike within the scope of God's un fathomable mercy. If we are to arrive at a properly nuanced estimate of Paul's theological stance toward his own people and their sacred texts, we must engage him on his own terms, by following his readings of the texts in which he heard the word of God. My investigation is thus animated by the question, How did Paul interpret Israel's Scriptures? In order to keep that question in proper historical perspective, the reader should bear in mind a few important facts. First, Paul's letters are the earliest writings in the New Testament. Although this fact is somewhat obscured by the conventional arrange ment of the New Testament canon, these letters were all sent as pastoral communications to particular churches long before the earliest of the canonical Gospels had been composed. Consequently, the termgospeZ in this book is normally used in the sense that Paul himself used it, as a reference to the content of early Christian preaching, not as a reference to specific narrative texts. Following this first fact is a logically related second: because Paul wrote in a time when there was no New Testanlent, no body of generally acknowledged authoritative Christian writings, his Scripture was the body of writings that constituted Israel's sacred text, which Christians later came to call the Old Testament. Paul himself never referred to these writings that way: the Scripture that he had known as a Pharisee re mained Scripture for him after his call to proclaim the gospel of the crucified Messiah, and he did not anticipate its supplementation by a New Testament. Consequently, when I use the term Scripture in this book, I normally use it in the sense that Paul himself used it, as a reference to the Bible of the Jewish people (in Christian parlance, the Old Testa ment), not inclusive of any Christian writings. It would be misleading, however, to refer to this Scripture as the "Hebrew Bible," because the original Hebrew language of the biblical writings was not a concern of Paul. His citations characteristically follow PREFACE Xl the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible dating from the second or third century which was in common use in B.C.E., Hellenistic synagogues during Paul's lifetime. Rarely do Paul's quota tions agree with the Masoretic Hebrew text (MT) against the LXX; even the few cases of apparent agreement with the Hebrew can be explained as evidence of variant LXX text forms that have been subjected to "hebraiz ing revisions," a tendency well attested elsewhere by the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. (A technical discussion of the biblical text employed by Paul can be found in the comprehensive study of Dietrich-Alex Koch, Die Schrift als Zeuge des Evangeliums: Unter suchungen zur Verwendung und zum Verstiindnis der Schrift bei Paulus.)3 It appears that Paul, whose missionary activity concentrated on predomi nantly Gentile congregations in Asia Minor and Greece, normally read and cited Scripture in Greek, which was the common language of the eastern empire in his time. Quotations from the LXX in this book follow the Greek text of Alfred Rahlfs, Septuaginta.4 Translations of passages from the LXX are my own. Likewise, except where otherwise indicated, translations of the New Testament passages cited are my own, though I have generally not de parted far from the Revised Standard Version (RSV) unless there was particular reason to do so. Italics in scriptural passages are mine unless otherwise indicated. Abbreviations in the footnotes follow the system set forth in the Journal of Biblical Literature 107 (1988): 588-96. Abbreviations for journals are italicized; abbreviations for titles of monograph series are set in roman type. In this book I pursue questions that differ markedly from the normal range of issues posed by historical criticism of the Pauline letters. I ap proach the task of interpretation not by reconstructing the historical situa tion in the churches to which Paul wrote, not by framing hypothetical accounts of the opponents against whom Paul was arguing, but by read ing the letters as literary texts shaped by complex intertextual relations with Scripture. Such an approach does not in principle preclude or invali date other approaches that seek to describe the social world of the Pauline communities or the historical circumstances surrounding the production of the letters; indeed, a fully rounded understanding of these texts is impossible without such historical inquiry. To the trained eye, my debt to historical-critical scholarship is evident on every page. Nonetheless, I employ, for heuristic purposes, a set of analytical instruments different from those traditionally employed by Pauline scholars. I do this in part because I find the phenomena of intertextual echo intrinsically interesting XlI PREFACE and in part because I believe that the literary critic's "hearing aid" can disclose important elements of Paul's thought that have been left unex plored by other critical methods. The results of my reading sometimes pose a challenge to current historical hypotheses. For example, if the structure and logic of Paul's elaborate contrast in Corinthians 3 between Moses' ministry and his 2 own can be explained through an understanding of the poetic function of dissimile, then it becomes unnecessary to postulate a pre-Pauline source for Paul's midrash on Exodus 34 in order to account for the internal tensions of the passage. My literary reading does not disprove the histor ical reconstructions of earlier commentators, but it does highlight the fact that these reconstructions are conjectural attempts to explain certain gaps or disjunctions within the text that might be patient of other explanations. I would insist, nonetheless, that my treatment of Paul in these pages is not ahistorical. Attention to intertextuality, as I have defined it here, compels respect f<?r diachronic concerns. The readings of Paul that I offer place him firmly within his historical context, as a first-century Jewish Christian seeking to come to terms hermeneutically with his Jewish heritage. This construal of Paullnakes sense historically; indeed, I hope that it contributes to a more exact appreciation of Paul's place on the spectrum of emergent Jewish and Christian communities in the middle of the first century. Furthermore, the intertextual approach to Paul may prove theo logically fruitful. Questions about the relation between Judaism and Christianity, the authority of Scripture, the role of the church as an in terpretive community, and the freedoms and constraints operative with in that community are brought into sharp focus by the questions that I ask here of Paul's letters. If this book contributes to stimulating discussion of these problems, I will have achieved one of my purposes. The aim of this study, then, is to undertake a reading of sefected passages in Paul's letters, attending carefully to the scriptural echoes that sound there. This is neither a comprehensive study of Paul's use of Scrip ture nor an essay on literary theory as such; it is rather an attempt to probe the complex significations created by a representative sampling of Paul's intertextual reflections. Chapter charts an approach to interpreting the 1 echoes of Scripture in Paul and contrasts this approach to previous stud ies of Paul's use of the Old Testament. Chapter concentrates on the effects of intertextual echo in Romans, 2 the letter in the Pauline corpus that bears the greatest concentration of Old Testament quotations. Romans centers on the problem of God's faithfulness to Israel: if uncircumcised Gentiles are now received into the

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.