Paul: Apostle to the Nations, An Introduction

Introduction: Why Study Paul?

3 Introduction Why Study Paul? Positive and Negative Evaluations of Paul Think of a well-known but controversial public figure from the present or the past: Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lady Gaga, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan. Each person has passionate supporters—and equally ardent opponents. Paul, an early Christ-believing missionary, apostle (or “messenger,”see chapter 3), theologian, and author, has elicited the same kind of sharply opposed reactions. Over the centuries, he has been appreciated as the most important apostle and vilified as virtually the Antichrist. For Christian thinkers like Augustine (354–430) and Martin Luther (1483– 1546),Paul and his thought are at the very heart of the Christian theological enterprise . Thus, Luther wrote that Paul’s letter to believers in Rome “is in truth the most important document in the New Testament, the gospel in its purest expression . . . . It is the soul’s daily bread, and can never be read too often, or studied too much. . . . It is a brilliant light, almost enough to illumine the whole Bible.”1 John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism, at a crucial point in his development felt his “heart strangely warmed” when he heard Luther’s words about Paul read.Throughout his career,Wesley repeatedly returned to Romans in his sermons and writings. In the twentieth century, Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) acknowledged the importance of Paul for ongoing Christian witness.For such thinkers,Paul’s radical analysis of human nature and sin,coupled with his profound emphasis on God’s unmerited love given to humanity in the 4 | Paul: Apostle to the Nations cross of Jesus, provided clear answers to questions about the meaning of life in general and the God-human relationship in particular. For others,however,the view of Paul has been quite different.In his own lifetime , Paul not only was opposed by Judeans who did not believe in Jesus—which might seem natural—but also was fiercely opposed by other Christ-believing missionaries (see the chapters on Galatians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Philippians).After his death,some ancient Judean-Christ-believing communities denounced him as the “enemy”or the “messenger of Satan,”apparently because he relaxed the requirements of the Law of Moses (see chapter 13 on “The Apostate Paul”). In the nineteenth century, many scholars saw Paul as the corruptor of the simple ethical system of Jesus. For Paul de Lagarde, for instance, Paul was the one who burdened Christianity with Israel’s Bible.2 Even thinkers with no claims to being biblical scholars have had their opinions about Paul. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of Paul as the “dys-evangelist,” that is, the negative evangelist, the proclaimer of bad news. The playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1913 a section on “The Monstrous Imposition upon Jesus” as part of his preface to Androcles and the Lion.The “monstrous imposition” is Paul’s theology.3 For opponents of slavery in the American South, Paul seemed a fickle resource: in tandem with ringing endorsements of freedom and equality (Gal A Note on Terms Israel’s Bible instead of Old Testament The term Old Testament is frequently used to designate the portion of the Christian Bible that includes the documents from Genesis to Malachi (in the Protestant Bible). Paul, of course, did not have the Christian Bible, and the documents that were available to him were not known as the “Old Testament,” since there was as yet no“NewTestament.”Generally, he used the Greek translation of Israel’s authoritative scriptures, but he also had knowledge of the Hebrew. It is therefore misleading to refer to Paul’s use of the Old Testament, the Greek Old Testament (over against the Hebrew Bible), or the Hebrew Bible (over against the Greek translation). For those reasons, this study will use the terms Israel’s Scriptures, Israel’s Bible, Judean Scriptures, and Judean Bible to refer to this body of writings. Paul ordinarily called them simply hai graphai,“the writings”or“the scriptures,”or hē graphē,“the writing”or“the scripture.” Judean instead of Jew For many years, English-speaking people have translated the Greek word Ioudaios as Jew. Recently, scholars have questioned that decision, arguing that the term Jew ought not to be used to translate first-century documents like the New Testament. Philip Esler is an articulate representative of that approach.4 His basic argument is that ancient Greeks named ethnic groups in relationship to the territory in which they...