Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

254 Pages·1989·27.384 MB·English

by  Richard B. Hays

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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