St. Paul among the Philosophers

3 Historical Integrity, Interpretive Freedom: The Philosopher’s Paul and the Problem of Anachronism

61 In 1583, Matteo Ricci entered China. Trained in philology, philosophy, and rhetoric by Jesuits in Rome, gifted at languages, Ricci was uniquely suited to his mission: to bring the heathen Chinese into the Church. Once he finally held in his hands the religious literature of this foreign culture, however, he made a surprising discovery. Ricci saw (though the Chinese had not) that the ancient scriptures of Buddhism and Taoism revealed the clear imprint of the Christian Trinity. I thought of Matteo Ricci as I made my way through Professor Badiou’s essay on Paul and universalism. Postmodern Paris is no less far from Paul’s Mediterranean than Renaissance Rome was from Ming dynasty China. And Badiou’ssenseofdiscoveryandrecognitionwhenreadingthePaulineepistles, which he communicates with excitement and conviction in his book, echoes what I imagine would have been Matteo’s experience of Taoist Trinitarianism .Suchrecognitionopensinterpretivepossibilitiesandclosesculturalgaps. And indeed, in the title of his opening chapter, Badiou proclaims the erasure precisely of this gap between Paris and Philippi, between the present and the past. “Paul,” states that chapter’s title, is “our contemporary.” Such a position is a hard sell to historians. (We are “the heathen” in my analogy.) It is true that, like philosophers, historians look for meaning in texts (as also in other kinds of data). And it is true that, like philosophers, historians through their interpretations of those data seek to generate meaning , to render the evidence intelligible. But the frame of reference for historical interpretation is not and cannot be the present. To do history requires acknowledging difference between us and the objects of our inquiry. Historical interpretation proceeds by acceding Three Historical Integrity, Interpretive Freedom: The Philosopher’s Paul and the Problem of Anachronism Paula Fredriksen 62 · Paula Fredriksen to the priority of the ancient context. Our frame of reference is the past. In our particular instance, this morning, for example, my question is not, What does Paul mean? that is, to us. Rather, I ask, What did Paul mean? that is, to his first-century contemporaries—sympathizers, admirers, opponents, enemies. They,notwe,weretheaudienceofhismessage.Hewasobligedtobeintelligible not to us but to them. This intelligibility can be alarmingly elusive. Consistency does not rank among Paul’s strong suits. In fairness, this impression may be due to the nature of our evidence. We have only seven authentic letters composed, it seems, fifteen to twenty years after Paul joined this new messianic movement . They are real letters addressed to particular communities, occasioned by specific incidents: our grasp of their context is often conjectural. The texts of these letters have certainly altered over time. Thanks to generations of copyists, we no longer have the letters as they left Paul’s mouth. And the literary integrity of individual letters is uncertain. Scholars have argued that our present versions of Philippians, 2 Corinthians, and Romans represent various epistles edited together. All this means that, in terms of Paul’s “thought,” coherence often has to be distilled or imposed. The deutero-Pauline letters, also preserved in the New Testament collection , make this same point from a different direction: 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus came from other Christians in the generation following Paul’s who saw themselves as standing in a tradition that he had established. They accordingly authorized their own statements by writing in his name. The positions taken by this second group of authors vary significantly among themselves and differ markedly from some of Paul’s. That Paul was so widely interpreted by those who stood so close to him should caution us about the difficulties of construing his thought. Put succinctly, often Paul shoots from the lip. How, then, shall we define and identify Paul’s ideas on universalism? And how shall we understand them? In light of the messiness of the primary evidence, I propose that we approach this question obliquely. Before turning to Paul himself, let’s see what happened to him once he strayed among the philosophers—not modern ones but ancient ones. I will begin this investigation not with Paul, then, but with two of his greatest ancient interpreters. Each of these later readers of Paul expended great effort to render Paul a coherent universalist, and they worked philosophically no less than exegetically in order to do this. These two later readers disagreed sharply with each other, even though they constructed their respective positions by appeal to precisely the same passages in Paul. Historical Integrity...