Paul: A Critical Life

433 Pages·1998·24.66 MB·English

by  Jerome Murphy-O'Connor

Paul
Jerome Murphy-O'Connor is Professor
of New Testament at the Ecole Biblique
et Archeologique Francaise, Jerusalem.
The Kachere Tree Body of Christ (Photo: MISSIO, Munich)
The Kachere Tree is propagated by birds who deposit the pits of its fruit on the branches
of other trees. Airborne roots float down and take root in the soil. As the Kachere tree
grows it incorporates and changes its host. Malawian sculptors from the Kun'goni Art
Centre in Mua saw this descent and transformation as a profound symbol of God's grace.
From a towering Kachere tree they created this 3m high figure in order to concretize
Paul's vision of the Body of Christ. The torso and limbs are made up of tiny carvings of
those who have been transformed through incorporation into the Christian community.
Together they are the fruit-bearing physical presence of Christ in the world.
Paul
A Critical Life
Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, OP
Oxford New York
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXPORD
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©Jerome Murphy-O'Connor OP, 1996
First published 1996
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Paul: a critical life /Jerome Murphy-O'Connor.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Paul, the Apostle, Saint. 2. Christian saints—Turkey—Tarsus-
Biography. 3. Apostles—Biography. I. Title.
BS2506.M855 1996 225.9'2—dc20 [B] 95-49173
ISBN 0-19-285342-2
3 5 79 10 864
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent
Preface
NOT the least of problems faced by the author of a biography of the Apostle,
Paul of Tarsus, is to find a title that will distinguish it from its many eminent
predecessors. My choice of Paul: A Critical Life was dictated by the poly valence
of the adjective, whose range of meanings may serve both to explain my pur-
pose and to highlight the specific contributions of this volume.
One sense of 'critical' is 'involving suspense as to the issue', but it can also
mean 'decisive, crucial'. Both are applicable to Paul, and to my own life in rela-
tion to his. The church of Antioch was responsible for the missionary outreach,
which demanded of pagan converts only faith in Jesus. It was in this spirit of
freedom that Paul laboured in Asia Minor and Greece. When Antioch later
changed its stance and aligned itself with Jerusalem, which insisted on observ-
ance of the Law, the status of its churches to the north and west came under
attack. The very nature of Gentile Christianity was put at risk. Paul was its
main defender. For five or six years in the middle of the first century AD he
invested every ounce of his energy, and every scintilla of his intelligence, in
devising a response which was ultimately to prevail. Even if his writings were
not part of the canon, the incalculable debt we owe him is adequate justification
for yet another attempt to understand how and why he achieved what he did.
On a more personal level, I wrote my doctoral dissertation at the University
of Fribourg, Switzerland, on Paul's understanding of the function of preaching,
and it was to prove crucial to my future career. Not only did it lead to my
nomination to the Ecole Biblique in 1965, which has been my academic home
ever since, but it stimulated a life-time interest in the Pauline writings. At first
my concern was with the exact interpretation of points of detail, with a view to
a better understanding of his theology, but almost insensibly my focus gradu-
ally shifted to the historical dimension of his life and work. The more conscious
I became of the way theological thought actually develops—by historically con-
ditioned insights rather than by logical deduction from a deposit of faith—the
more I wanted to encounter the personality behind the letters, and to determine
the factors which led him to think in a particular way. This book contains the
fruits of that quest, which are displayed with a certitude that all historians will
recognize as spurious. Only definiteness, however, can provoke the reactions
that in dialogue lead to progress. I make my own what J. A. T. Robinson said in
the conclusion to a much more challenging work, 'all the statements of this
book should be taken as questions' (1976: 357).
vi Preface
I try to be as 'critical' as possible in the sense of 'exercising careful judge-
ment', above all with respect to the use of material from the Acts of the
Apostles. The tradition of lives of Paul has been to accept the framework pro-
vided by Luke, and into it to integrate material from the letters. The appropri-
ateness of this approach, which subordinated the testimony of the individual
concerned to that of a tendentious theologian, was questioned by J. Knox, who,
in consequence, laid down the methodological principle, 'A fact only suggested
in the letters has a status which even the most unequivocal statement of Acts, if
not otherwise supported, cannot confer. We may, with proper caution, use Acts
to supplement the autobiographical data of the letters, but never to correct
them' (1950: 32). Recent lives of Paul (e.g. Fitzmyer, Baslez, Legasse) all pay
lip-service to this principle, but in practice they not only permit Luke to exer-
cise decisive control over the presentation of Paul's career, but fail to recognize
the problems of extracting historical data from the Acts of the Apostles. The
sporadic criticisms of Luke's portrait of Paul, which are scattered through
many commentaries on Acts, has been recently competently synthesized by J. C.
Lentz, Jr., in his Luke's Portrait of Paul (1993).
I may have gone to the other extreme in the way I use the letters as the princi-
pal source of Paul's biography, but the publications of three of my colleagues
have made it impossible for me to continue to read the Acts of the Apostles with
the naivety that characterized some of my earlier work. Advances in textual
criticism mean that it is no longer acceptable to move without comment or
justification from the Western text to the Alexandrian text and back again.
Moreover, in their present form both are corrupt. To date the only fully docu-
mented critical text is that provided by M.-E. Boismard and A. Lamouille in
their monumentalTexte Occidentaldes Actes desApotres (1984). A by-product of
their work is a heightened awareness of the complexity of the literary develop-
ment of the Acts of the Apostles.
They have attempted to determine its various stages in their Les Actes des
deuxApotres, i-iii (1990), whose implications for the history of the early church
are being worked out by Justin Taylor, SM. His first volume, Les Actes des deux
Apotres, v. Commentaire historique (Act 9. 1-18, 22), appeared in 1994. Only
those who have attempted to reconstruct history will recognize the inestimable
advantage of working beside a colleague who approaches the same situations
from a different perspective. The interaction enlightened me in ways that I
would not have thought possible, and his publications dispense me from dealing
with the data of Acts in greater detail. Our books should be considered comple-
mentary.
The decision to use the letters as the controlling source in the reconstruction
of Paul's life has had important consequences for the organization of the book.
The authenticity, integrity, and order of the letters had to be addressed more
thoroughly than in comparable biographies. A strictly chronological order
Preface vii
proved incapable of integrating such discussions, which often provided valu-
able insights into Paul's attitude at a given moment. Thus I deal with all his con-
tacts with a given church in the same chapter, even though events concerning
other churches may have intervened. A life, however, moves forward through
time. In order to keep this dimension in focus, I begin by establishing a general
chronological framework of Paul's career (Ch. 1), which subsequently is made
more precise for the crucial two years and three months that he spent in
Ephesus, whence he wrote half of his letters (Ch. 7).
This two-pronged approach has the advantage of throwing into relief the
essentially dialogical character of Paul's thought. Each community generated
questions to which he had no ready-made answers. His response in each case is
tailored to the particular situation, but rooted in a consistent core, which is his
vision of Christ. I have devoted particular attention to isolating the new ideas,
and the improved or modified formulations, that changing circumstances
forced him to develop. Only thus can one come to a proper appreciation of the
quality of his intellectual training and the extraordinary flexibility of his mind.
The bibliography reveals my indebtedness to the generations of Pauline
scholars on whose shoulders I stand Three deserve to be singled out—Ceslaus
Spicq, OP, of the University of Fribourg, Ernst Kasemann of the University of
Tubingen, and Charles Kingsley Barrett of the University of Durham—
because, in addition to the illumination of their writings, their friendship and
personal example as teachers and ministers have greatly influenced the way I
see the role of scholarship in the church.
I must also express my gratitude to Santiago Martinez Caro of Ankara,
Turkey, who surveyed Galatia for me, and to Anthony Ward. S.M., erstwhile
Librarian of the Ecole Biblique and now Chief Archivist of the Basilica of Saint
Peter in Rome, my colleague Justin Taylor, SM, and Terrence Prendergast, SJ,
whom the Catholic Biblical Association of America sent to the Ecole Biblique as
a visiting professor at just the opportune moment. The three last named read
the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. Those that remain are my
own.
J.M.-O'C.
1 September 1995
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Contents
List of Figures xii
Abbreviations xiii
1 The Chronological Framework i
The Evidence from the Pauline Letters i
The Evidence from the Acts of the Apostles 8
Developing a Chronology for Paul's Life 24
2 Growing Up in Tarsus 32
The City of Tarsus 33
The Family of Paul 35
Education 46
3 A Pharisee in Jerusalem 52
A Student in Jerusalem? 52
Pharisaic Studies 59
A Married Man 62
Persecutor of the Church 65
4 Conversion and its Consequences 71
Conversion 72
Arabia 81
Damascus 85
Jerusalem 90
The Missing Years 95
5 Learning with the Thessalonians 102
Contacts with Thessalonica 104
Thessalonica and its Christians 114
Maintenance differs from Mission 119
6 Meetings and Meals: Jerusalem and Antioch 130
The Jerusalem Conference 131
Why did James agree with Paul on Circumcision? 138
The Agreement 142
The Collection 144