An und für sich

I’ve finally made my way through Paul’s undisputed letters in Greek and am now aiming to read all the epistles this summer (having already read 1-3 John, James, 2 Peter, and Jude — the latter two because of the recent discussion of sodomy). This has been an excellent exercise for shoring up my Greek skills, but the main intellectual result has been to soften or nuance some of my views on Paul. First of all, I realize that I went into this project believing that I would find some clear overarching “Pauline system,” but that ran aground in Galatians — there’s something about having to work through a text in agonizing detail that makes it very difficult to breeze over things, which I was predisposed to do whenever I came across the clear contradictions in Galatians.

The solution, it seems, is to recognize change and development in Paul’s thought, which seems a sensible enough position in retrospect but which was apparently unavailable to me initially because of an unreflected-upon “scriptural authority” that Paul the man, if not all the letters under the name of Paul, still had for me. Once it is permissible to assume that Paul’s position is evoluving, though, I wonder how much the question of authorship matters.

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Yesterday vividly illustrated the dangers of diving into Paul after having gone through a Greek textbook by oneself — some readers have been put off by the seeming self-centeredness of the whole “we blog for our own benefit” thing, but in the Greek translation posts, I’m making up for my lack of formal classroom instruction in Greek.

I promised more on Galatians 2, and here’s something that doesn’t seem to require me to delve too deeply into the Greek text. Before the long monologue, Paul reports that he asked Peter the following: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” The question I have is what “living like a Gentile” means in this context.

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A prominent, yet underemphasized theme in the synoptic gospels is Jesus’ empowerment of the disciples to be like him in power and teaching — for instance, in the sending of the twelve and the seventy on their preaching mission. In contrast to later interpretations that see Jesus’ role as irreducibly unique and irreplaceable, the synoptics seem to indicate that Jesus’ goal is to make sure that the disciples can be equal to their teacher.

This theme is further expanded in Luke and particularly in Acts, where Peter, John, and Paul are able to reproduce even the most powerful miracles of Jesus and in some cases even outdo him, in a relationship reminiscent of that between Elijah and Elisha. (A sidenote: the only major one that isn’t reproduced is the feeding of the 5000, but perhaps the establishment of the communistic community in Jerusalem, where everyone has enough to eat as a result of freely sharing, is a kind of institutionalization of that miracle.)

The parallels drawn between Jesus and Paul are the strongest of all. Both raise the ire of the Jewish leaders, who then appeal to the Roman rulers to get rid of the offender. In both cases, the Roman rulers hem and haw and pass the buck, unable to find any fault. Paul’s process is much more drawn out than Jesus’, in part because his status as a Roman allows him to appeal to the emperor, an emperor who is never explicitly named and never appears. In Jesus’ case, the buck stopped with Pilate, who eventually gave in and killed Jesus. In Paul’s case, the buck stops with the emperor, who tradition tells us eventually did kill him (and Peter as well, for good measure).

In this light, perhaps the seemingly abrupt ending of Acts is, or can be read as, a literary device. After reading Luke, we know how a story like this ends and there’s no need to belabor that — but in the meantime, Paul is free to teach the gospel even in the very center of the empire.