"A Variable and Many-sorted Man": John Chrysostom's Treatment of Pauline Inconsistency

Contemporary Pauline Scholarship is preoccupied, in several different arenas, with the question of Paul's consistency or lack of it. This essay identifies precursors to the positions taken in these modern debates in the writings of John Chrysostom, Paul's most prolific commentator and avid admirer from the patristic period. Though in many places Chrysostom sets himself the task to construct rhetorically appropriate forensic proofs to substantiate his categorical denial that Paul was "variable," in one of his homilies in praise of Paul we find the exact opposite—not only admission that Paul was "a variable and many-sorted man," but celebration of that fact. This article examines how Chrysostom could be so apparently inconsistent on the question of Pauline inconsistency, and inquires as to the relationship between the contours of this debate in biblical scholarship in the fourth and the late twentieth centuries.

Oh variable and contradictory utterance! Oh word taken captive by its own sword! Oh strange archery whose arrows return and strike the archer himself!¹

The Longstanding Question of Pauline Inconsistency

With these three powerful images—ancient equivalents of the modern idiom to "shoot oneself in the foot"—a third-century Greek philosopher, possibly Porphyry, denigrated Paul, the self-styled apostle to the Gentiles, as an impossibly contradictory speaker, thinker, and personality. This early critic of Paul has had compatriots throughout church history, both within and from outside the church. Charges of Pauline inconsistency extend back to the Corinthian detractor who said "his letters are weighty and harsh, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech is contemptible" (II Cor 10.10), and forward to the Finnish New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen, who in 1983 made the summary judgment that because Paul was impossibly inconsistent in his treatment of the Law,² "it is a fundamental mistake of much Pauline exegesis in this century to have portrayed Paul as the 'prince of thinkers' and the Christian 'theologian par excellence.'"³

The impression of Paul as variable can also to a large degree be laid at the apostle's own door, for he famously described himself to the same Corinthian church as "all things to all people" (I Cor 9:22), immediately following his description of himself as "a Christian Proteus":⁴

I became to the Jews as a Jew, so that I might gain Jews; to those under the Law as though under the Law (though not myself under the Law), so that I might gain those under the Law; to those outside the Law as though outside the Law (though not being outside the Law of God, but rather in the Law of Christ), so that I might gain those outside the Law; I became weak to the weak, so that I might gain the weak.

(I Cor 9.20–21)

This statement, taken literally, is a precise description of the chameleon, the ever-changeable, fluctuating personality, a well-known and frequently derided ancient caricature.⁵ Thus in an often-cited article Henry Chadwick asked the question many preferred to avoid: "Was the apostle, then, a mere weathercock?"⁶ Chadwick's own answer was negative; he defended Paul of the charge by praising the apostle's "astonishing elasticity of mind."⁷ Räisänen's blunt assessment has occasioned more recent, impassioned defenses of Paul against the charge of being variable, vacillating, inconsistent. C. E. B. Cranfield's is one of the most memorable: "Was Paul really quite as inconsistent, confused and incompetent, quite as careless and unreflective, as this? As I read Räisänen's book, I could not help thinking that for him Paul just cannot do right. It seemed to be a case of 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.'"⁸

Recent New Testament scholarship has been preoccupied with this question of Paul's consistency, not only in regard to his theology of the Law and other concepts, but also his practice and teachings on the social order,⁹ most conspicuously in regard to slaves¹⁰ and women.¹¹ Even if [End Page...