a brief comment from Sam Williams

I am reading Sam Williams's classic essay, "The 'Righteousness of God' in Romans" (JBL 99.2 [1980]: 241–90) as I write on the vexed and vexing passage, Rom. 3.21–26. His discussion of the purpose and occasion of Romans in contemporary (in 1980) scholarship is still valuable, especially the tension that he manages without resolving between Romans as an occasional letter, on the one hand, and as a general expression of Paul's gospel, on the other.

But this comment, in which Williams notes Paul's mediating position between both ta ethnē (the nations/gentiles) and the Jews, seemed especially helpful:

In view of these concerns on Paul's part, we cannot avoid the impression that he is defending the conversion of the nations/Gentiles as a crucial part of God's eschatological plan at the same time that he is defending the Law and the specialness of the Jews. (248)

I think much of the Romans scholarship with which I am familiar has too readily read Paul as attacking rather than defending "the Jews" or, worse, Judaism, and fail to miss how often Paul comes to Israel's defense, especially in Romans. I have explanations for why texts like Rom. 2.25–29; 3.9–20; and others have been misread as anti-Judaic (or even anti-Semitic) rhetoric; I might put some of those explanations online at a future date. But for now the important thing to note is that this is a misreading, a failure to understand how Paul defends both the nations/gentiles as the objects of God's grace and Israel as the recipients of God's covenant.

identifying Paul (again)

I'm currently reading through Tim Gombis's introductory volume, Paul: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark International, 2010). Of course, as I mentioned in a previous post, I read Rodrigo Morales's published doctoral dissertation, The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), last week. So all things Paul have been on my mind these last few days.

Gombis's discussion of Paul is introductory and pitched at beginning ("perplexed") students, so of course there is lots of room to nitpick and complain about lack of nuance or precision. But the goal of the book isn't to provide nuance or precision; it's to speak in broad strokes and get people into the discussion. Details can come later.

So I hope it's clear that I'm not nitpicking here (or at least I don't think I am). And I should also disclose that I know Gombis personally, and I've found him to be one of the nicer, more congenial younger biblical scholars. I think he and I think a lot alike. But as Gombis briefly introduces Paul's letter to the Galatian communities, he attributes the problem Paul confronts to a "very conservative Jewish Christian faction . . . seeking to make certain that the Christian communities that sprang up in Asia Minor were thoroughly Jewish" (25). A little later, Gombis explains that Paul bristles against the claim that gentile converts "must adopt a Jewish way of life." I'm not sure what to make of Gombis's use of the term Jewish; even (or perhaps especially!) in an introductory volume such as this I think a little more nuance is necessary.

The problem comes down to this: If Paul sets out to correct the claims of the "agitators" (see Gal. 5.10) that gentiles "must adopt a Jewish way of life" (25), what should we think Paul set up as an alternative to that Jewish lifestyle? Should the converts remain gentiles? If so, we need to explain the continued negative references to gentiles in Paul's letters (e.g., Eph. 2.11–12; Gombis accepts Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters attributed to Paul). Should the converts become Christians? If so, we need to explain how Paul never uses the word Christian in any of his letters.

Since neither of these terms—gentile or Christian—will work for Paul, the question remains: What should we think Paul set up as an alternative to the Jewish lifestyle the "agitators" were advocating to Paul's gentile converts in Galatia? I think the only answer that will work, historically or theologically, is, Paul proposes a differently Jewish lifestyle to the universal Torah-obedience advocated by his opponents. If I learned anything from Morales (which I wouldn't expect Gombis to cite even if they weren't both published in 2010), Paul understands his vocation as "apostle to the nations/gentiles" in terms of bringing the blessing of Abraham to bear upon the nations of the Roman Empire, and this precisely because God has poured out his Spirit upon his people Israel and brought an end to their experiences of the covenantal curses (exile and, especially, death).

In other words, and to sum up Morales's point and wrap up this post, the problem Paul has with Torah in Galatians isn't that it's Jewish. The problem is that Israel has failed to keep the terms of the covenant and has brought upon itself the covenantal curses—exile and death (see Deut. 27–30)—rather than the covenantal blessings. But God has not abandoned his people or his promises to them; instead, Israel's messiah, Jesus, overcame the covenantal curses brought on by Israel's failure to observe Torah. (Notice the problem isn't Torah itself but the people's failure to keep Torah.) Now the gentile Galatian believers have a choice to make. Do they take on a Jewish lifestyle defined by Torah? Or do they take on a Jewish lifestyle defined by the blessing of Abraham, now unleashed on God's people in the aftermath of God's Spirit poured out on Israel and a new heart given them? This latter might be what we mean when we refer to a "Christian lifestyle," but we need to recognize (and teach others to recognize) that in all likelihood, for Paul, this was simply a better way to be Jewish.

a Pauline transformation of Jewish eschatology?

I have been reading the published version of Rodrigo Morales's PhD dissertation (Duke, 2007), The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians (WUNT 2/282; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), which I'm reviewing for IBR. This is an excellent little book (only two hundred pages) that is very clearly and logically structured, cogently and carefully argued, and concisely written. As a brief introduction, Morales proceeds in three basic steps:

• First, he briefly establishes the Status Quaestionis of the role of the Spirit of God in Paul and, especially, his letter to the Galatians. At a pivotal point in the letter Paul asks, "Was it by works of the Law that you received the Spirit? Or was it by hearing of faith?" While the answer is clear (Paul simply could not be proposing that the Galatians received the Spirit via Torah-observance!), the significance of the Spirit for Pauline thought and rhetoric is not. Morales argues that the connection between the outpouring of God's Spirit and the restoration of Israel provides the key to understanding Paul's argument in Galatians.
• Second, he surveys the intersection of God's gift of his Spirit and the promise of Israel's restoration among the prophetic Hebrew biblical writings (specifically, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Joel) in Chapter 2 and among Second Temple Jewish texts in Chapter 3. His aim is not to identify how Paul reads either biblical or extracanonical texts but rather to assess how Paul takes up and employs themes and concepts current among (roughly) contemporaneous expressions of Jewish thought. Key among these themes are, among others, new creation and new exodus imagery, the heart and its need for renewal, and the sonship of God's people.
• Third, Morales turns to Galatians 3–4 (Chapter 4) and Galatians 5–6 (Chapter 5) to bring the material from previous chapters to bear on the exegetical discussion. I am currently at the beginning of Chapter 4, so I cannot say very much at all about Morales's hermeneutic or exegetical work. But his handling of the texts in Chapters 2–3 has been responsible and cautious, and so I don't anticipate problems here.

Except . . .

Morales makes a comment almost in passing (it's even in a footnote) regarding the shift in late-Second Temple Judaism from metaphorical understandings of "resurrection" (and of "death," too) toward literal interpretations. He says, "The key transformation that Paul brought about was the idea that one figure would be raised in the middle of history, and that others would somehow participate both anticipatorily and ultimately in that eschatological life" (79, n. 5; my emphasis). I have some problems with the phrase "middle of history," because I'm not sure that helpfully frames Paul's rhetoric. Would Paul affirm the present as "the middle of history"? Or would he see in Christ's resurrection the dawning of the new age and the fading of the old? But given the complexities of the dynamics of what are commonly referred to in Christian theology as the "now-and-not-yet" (complexities which Morales recognizes), we likely won't solve that problem here.

But I have bigger problems with the idea that this was, somehow, a "key transformation" for which Paul was responsible. I'm not at all opposed to the idea that individuals affect, sometimes dramatically, how and what their cultures think. And clearly Paul is one of those individuals. But after reading Jerry Sumney's essay, "'Christ died for us': Interpretation of Jesus' Death as a Central Element of the Identity of the Earliest Church," pp. 147–72 in Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identify Formation (FS William Campbell; Edited by K. Ehrensperger and J. B. Tucker; LNTS 428; London: T&T Clark International, 2010), I'm a bit more suspicious of the image of Paul-the-theological-revolutionary than I previously was.

Certainly Paul takes this idea—viz., that the future resurrection was inaugurated and even is proleptically exprienced in Christ's resurrection—and advances it considerably. But here's the question Sumney has taught me to ask: Is it really likely that the pre-Pauline church had not already developed some idea of the inaugurating/proleptic/"middle of history" resurrection of Jesus? How would the earliest Christians, whom Paul the Pharisee (who almost certainly accepted the notion of bodily resurrection in the age to come even before his experience on the Damascus road) saw fit to persecute, have connected their eschatological ideas of resurrection with the experiences of Jesus as raised "according to the Scriptures" (see 1 Cor. 15.3–5)? Is it not more likely that this was one of the ideas Paul found incomprehensible, and so he sought to stamp them out from Israel? Can't we understand the failure of the disciples to understand Jesus' so-called "Passion predictions" in Mark's Gospel (almost certainly later than Paul's letters) as suggesting that this very point caused problems for Jesus' followers prior to their experiences of Easter?

Of course, I'm only raising questions; I have very little to offer by way of answers. In many areas Paul was almost certainly theologically avant-garde. But in some areas—perhaps in many areas—Paul inherited ideas from those around him, whether Jewish, Greek, or even early (or proto-)Christian influences. In the balance of things, do we really want to think that Jesus' earliest followers had to wait for Paul to come around before they began wrestling with the connection between pre-Christ[ian] eschatological ideas about resurrection and the Easter Event? I find this very unlikely.

Still, to end on a positive note, Morales's book is very easy to read. Even if you find it difficult, the thesis he's pursuing (and the evidence he considers) is well worth the effort it takes to access his argument.

New JSP imminent

According to their website, the current issue of The Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha is still the December 2010 issue. However, I have it on good authority that the next issue (20/3 [March 2011]) will be issued very soon. When it's released I'll put up a link and a list of its contents. But for now, as a teaser, let me suggest that this issue will feature a very helpful discussion of the literal vs. metaphorical intentions of the therapeutic language in 4Q521. That text, famously found among the cache of texts from Cave 4 near the Dead Sea and originally published in 1992, contains striking thematic and traditional similarities to Jesus' response to John the Baptist's disciples, recorded in Matt. 11.2–6||Luke 7.18–23.

James Tabor, who published an essay with Michael Wise on this fragmentary text in the early 1990s, has posted a translation and discussion on his website. All of this is very interesting!!

Taylor-made Bultmann

One of my perennial interests concerns the way we have distinguished Judaism from Christianity and the various ways this distinction has affected our historical, exegetical, and theological work. A lot of work in the post-World War II era has gone to expose and/or correct the anti-Judaic tenor of a lot of Christian scholarship, but even here the fundamental disjunction between Judaism and Christianity as separate things is frequently detectable.

Rudolf Bultmann, famously, attributed the creation and transmission of many of the miracle-stories in the gospels to "Hellenistic circles," by which I understand him to mean Greek (= gentile) Christian communities. The transposition of the Jesus tradition from Palestinian (= Jewish?) to Hellenistic circles is, for Bultmann, a major source of the distortion evident between Jesus and the gospels. Here, then, is an excerpt from British NT scholar Vincent Taylor explaining how Bultmann would have considered a parable to have escaped relatively unscathed the distorting effects of Hellenization:

For the parables he [viz., Bultmann] lays down the principle that the best criterion of genuineness is the presence of an opposition to Jewish morality and piety or of the eschatological attitude which characterized the preaching of Jesus, always providing that no specifically Christian details are present (G.S.T. 222). (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933], 28)

What is a Ioudaios?

BDAG, the standard Greek-English lexicon for NT and early Christian scholarship, gives the following two extended definitions for Ἰουδαῖος, αία, αῖον:

• pert. to being Judean (Jewish), with focus on adherence to Mosaic tradition, Judean;


• one who is Judean (Jewish), with focus on adherence to Mosaic tradition, a Judean

The question of how to translate Ἰουδαῖος is a tricky one. Does it primarily delimit a set of religious and/or idealogical persuasions, and so mean Jew/Jewish? Or is it rather a geographical and/or ethnic marker, and so mean Judean? BDAG's extended definitions of Ἰουδαῖος recognize the difficulty inasmuch as give "Jewish" in parentheses, but in its glosses BDAG clearly prefers Judean to Jew (which it doesn't offer). This is, in my impression, in line with the current standard position among scholars of Second Temple Judaism, Christian origins, and the New Testament.

Even so, the preference for a geographical/ethnic referent cannot quite shake the religious/idealogical connotations. After the second definition, given above, BDAG offers the following:

Since Jerusalem sets the standard for fidelity to Israel's tradition, and since Jerusalem is located in Judea, Ἰ. frequently suggests conformity to Israel's ancestral belief and practice. in turn, the geographical name provided outsiders with a term that applied to all, including followers of Jesus, who practiced customs variously associated with Judea (note the Roman perception Ac 18:15 ['Judeans' at Corinth]; 23:28).

In his book Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Daniel Boyarin argues that "Judaism," as a religion, didn't exist before it was invented by early Christian heresiologists (beginning with Justin Martyr) as a foil against which "Christianity" could be defined. In other words, "Christianity" ≠ "Judaism," but before there was a "Christianity" there was no "Judaism." In yet other words, whereas today we think of "Jew" [Ἰουδαῖος] as a belonging to the same class as words like "Christian," "Muslim," "Buddhist," "Hindu," etc. (all of these are examples of religious adherents), before the rise of Christianity "Jew" [Ἰουδαῖος] belonged to a different class, other examples of which include "Roman," "Greek," "Persian," "Egyptian," "Asian," "Syrian," etc.

There's a lot of insight here, but we still need to exercise an inordinate amount of caution. Whereas geographical/ethnic markers today don't necessarily connote religious identity (what do "Europeans" or "Asians" or "Africans" think about God/god/the transcendent?), they clearly did in the ancient world. Being "Roman" or "Egyptian" meant something about your religious beliefs in addition to your national/ethnic identity; if you were "Roman" ethnically but not religiously, that was something to comment on (cp. the complaint against Paul and Silas in Acts 16.20–21). For example, note the description of Dositheus in 3 Maccabees 1.3:

But Ptolemy was taken out of harm's way by Dositheus, called the son of Drimylus, a Judean by race [τὸ γένος Ἰουδαῖος] who later changed his customs [μεταβαλὼν τὰ νόμιμα] and became estranged from his ancestral beliefs [τῶν πατρίων δογμάτων ἀπηλλοτριωμένος].

Surely it's significant, given the questions we've been asking about Ἰουδαῖος for over two decades, that Dositheus's status as a Ἰουδαῖος required qualification (it was "by race" only) because he wasn't a Ἰουδαῖος as the term was normally understood. He may have been a Judean, but he was no longer a Jew.

an interesting dilemma

Philip Sellew's article, "Achilles or Christ? Porphyry and Didymus in Debate over Allegorical Interpretation" (HTR 82 [1989]: 79–100) provides an interesting discussion of Porphyry (the third-century CE neo-Platonist student of Plotinus, who wrote a number of important works, including Against the Christians) and his criticism of the application of allegorical interpretation to biblical texts. I found this comment particularly interesting:

It was clear to Porphyry from his extensive firsthand knowledge that there was much of value in the Jewish scriptures, especially in some of the prophetic writings, and that they in some sense proclaimed the One High God that he too reverenced. But Porphyry was also strongly repelled by much of the Bible, particularly by its anthropomorphic images of God, its frequent anti-universalistic or even ethnocentric tendencies, and by such occasional episodes as Lot impregnating his own daughters in Genesis 19. Porphyry could not understand why the Christians did not simply reject the Jewish writings as no longer being religiously appropriate. (Sellew, "Achilles or Christ," 92; my emphasis)

I am fascinated by this dilemma. Why didn't the Christians, especially in the third and fourth centuries CE, simply cut loose of the Hebrew Bible and its traditions and pursue a more thoroughgoing New Testament theology? Why were Marcion and his followers the only ones to reject the Old Testament tout court?

I'm not advocating this move for contemporary Christianity; indeed, I find it worrisome that so much of contemporary Christianity seems to be following Marcion's lead, at least practically if not in so many words. My question (in the previous paragraph) really is, Why? I know what the Christians said: that the Bible was God's inspired word, that Moses and the prophets proclaimed Christ beforehand, etc. And these answers are themselves rooted in the general treatment of the Hebrew Bible in NT texts. But given the polemical and rhetorical energy the Church and its writers expended in its first four centuries repudiating the Jews and their reading of those texts, why did the Christians view the Jews' Bible as God's witness to the gospel's advent? Though I'm no church historian, from my NT scholar's point-of-view this seems a question too rarely raised.

Jerome and "our Judaizers"

I just finished reading Michael Graves's brief but very interesting article, "'Judaizing' Christian Interpretations of the Prophets As Seen by Saint Jerome," Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007): 142–56. Graves asks what, specifically, Jerome objects to as "Judaizing" given his own striking (for the early fifth century CE) views vis-à-vis Hebrew texts (vs. the LXX), rabbinic exegetical traditions, and spiritual vs. literal interpretations.

Citing Vaccari,¹ Graves identifies two aspects of Jerome's interpretive practice. First, Jerome draws upon three rather distinct perspectives in his hermeneutical discussions, (i) the historical or literal interpretive tradition associated with Antioch, (ii) the Jewish interpretive tradition, "as mediated primarily through personal Jewish teachers" (144), and (iii) the Christian mystical interpretive tradition associated with Alexandria. Second, Jerome's interest in Hebraic interpretations was closely associated with his appreciation for the texts' literal or historical interpretation.

Graves then provides examples of Jerome's interpretative practice, especially of Hebrew prophetic texts, that illustrate how these two factors relate as part of that practice. Here's the first of those examples:

A brief and clear-cut example of the spiritual and literal meanings given side by side may be found in Jerome's Commentary on Jeremiah 4:11–12, where Jerome says this about the ventus urens, the "scorching wind" which, as Jerome reads the verse, is coming in judgment: "iuxta historiam, understand the 'scorching wind' as Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed everything, but iuxta tropologiam understand the 'scorching wind' as the Adversarial Power, who, coming from the desert and the wasteland, where there is no shelter of God, tries to destroy His church." Here, Jerome gives both the "historical" and the "tropological" meanings one right after the other. As is evident, Jerome accepts both meanings as valid. (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 146–47)

Given Jerome's willingness to accept a "historical," "Hebraic" interpretation of prophetic texts (which focus on Israel and her history), how should we understand Jerome's polemical references to "Judaizing" interpretations (which, presumably, Jerome himself may have been accused of propagating)? According to Graves, Jerome accepted Hebraic interpretations only insofar as they referred to past events. Two things distinguished Jerome's interpretations from those he found unacceptable. First, Jerome insisted that every passage held some spiritual significance and was fulfilled spiritually, whether in reference to (one of the two advents of) Christ or to the church. Second, "literal" or "historical" interpretations applied to the past and not to the future.

Thus, it is not the literal meaning per se that Jerome regards as "Judaizing"; Jerome is comfortable with "literal" interpretations, provided that they assign the fulfillment of prophecy either to Israel's past history or directly to Christ. It is certainly not the futuristic aspect of the interpretations to which Jerome objects, since all prophetic texts have some contemporary or future application to Christ and the church. The problem, from Jerome's perspective, is that the "Judaizers" look for future, literal fulfillments that are not directly Christological. The particular combination of these two elements, literal and futuristic, is what Jerome does not accept. (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 151)

I'm certainly no scholar when it comes to Jerome and/or fourth- and fifth-century Christian history, but Graves's discussion is both clear and (as far as I am able to tell) insightful. How fascinating to watch elements within the Church, four centuries after Jesus, engaging "the continuing struggle . . . to determine how they relate to the promises made to 'Israel' in the Old Testament, and how the interpretation of prophetic literature intersects with Christian theology and Christian identity" (Graves, "Saint Jerome," 156).

---

¹ A. Vaccari, "I fattori della esegesi geronimiana," Bib 1 (1920): 457–80.

more on placing NT texts

As I continue to read Ruth A. Clement and Daniel R. Schwartz's edited volume, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), I find more information relevant to the point I made in my previous post, "placing NT texts." Hermann Licthenberger, in his essay, Last night I finished Serge Ruzer's essay, "Demonology in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament" (267–80), cites Lawrence Shiffman's programmatic announcement, at the beginning of Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: "This book aims to correct a fundamental misreading of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For some forty-five years, the scholars publishing and interpreting the scrolls have focused almost single-mindedly on the scrolls' significance for our understanding of early Christianity. This is the first book ever written to explain their significance in understanding the history of Judaism" (xiii; Lichtenberger 2009: 268). Schiffman is right, of course, to place the DSS in the history of Judaism. My point (and, I think, Ruzer's and Kister's) is that the NT itself is also a part of that history!

So I was happy to read Lichtenberger's appreciative appropriation of Schiffman's reclamation of the DSS:

But in my opinion we have to go one step further. Since early Christianity in the Land of Israel was, in its beginnings, nothing other than a Jewish group, we have not only to interrelate the New Testament and early Christianity to other Jewish groups of the time—and there were more than the three or four we know from Josephus—but we have also to ask whether and how the New Testament and early Christianity contribute to our understanding of early Judaism in general, and of the Qumran-Essene community in particular. This is not to be understood as another New Testament-centered approach to Jewish texts and Judaism, but as an integration of the New Testament and early Christianity into their Jewish contexts. Or in other words: we read the New Testament as a Jewish text and as a source for our understanding of Judaism. (269; my emphases)

I hope this signals the development—at whatever stage of maturity—in the future of NT scholarship.

placing NT texts

I'm coming to the end of Ruth A. Clement and Daniel R. Schwartz's edited volume, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). Last night I finished Serge Ruzer's essay, "Exegetical Patterns Common to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, and Their Implications" (231–51), which aims at the common exegetical assumptions underlying the diverse halakhic rulings on divorce in the Damascus Document and the New Testament. (Perhaps I should mention here that my review of Ruzer's Mapping the New Testament: Early Christian Writings as a Witness for Jewish Biblical Exegesis [Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series 13; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007] appeared in the Stone-Campbell Journal 12/1 [2009]: 141–2.) I find Ruzer's reading of ancient texts—especially NT texts—unconvincing and even problematic. Even so, his theoretical approach strikes me as dead-on; more people, I think, should think of the NT texts the way Ruzer does. Here's an extended quote from the conclusion to Ruzer's essay:

It is clear that if the Qumran community and the nascent Jesus movement are perceived as merely two among a number of Second Temple Jewish groups, a comparative study of the respective corpora—if not necessarily pointing to a direct development of New Testament traditions from earlier Qumran ones—may contribute to a better understanding of the Jewish setting of the former. Our discussion of exegetical parallels corroborates this basic position. I suggested a complementing direction, which can also be fruitful: we should more intensively introduce evidence from the New Testament into the discussion of texts from Qumran. Thus in this case, investigation of Paul's epistles has turned out to be useful for elucidating the meaning of the Damascus Document's marital halakhah, while the combined evidence of the epistles and the Gospels may be helpful in clarifying the nature of CD's eschatological stance and/or identity of the opponents against whom the CD exegesis polemicizes. (250)

In other words, we should not simply adduce Jewish data into our efforts to contextualize and understand NT passages and texts, but we should also adduce NT data to contextualize and understand Second Temple Jewish phenomena. A one-way movement pays lip service to the "Jewishness" of the New Testament; the two-way movement Ruzer pursues rightly takes the NT's participation in Hellenistic Palestinian and Diaspora Jewish social, cultural, and political processes seriously. In this regard, it may also be appropriate to reproduce Menahem Kister's concluding remarks to his own essay in the same volume:

Usually, and for good reasons, we seek to understand the Jewish background of the New Testament. It is not rare, however, that a passage in the Gospels supplies us with valuable evidence for the Jewish background of the Jewish texts that have come down to us. ("Divorce, Reproof, and Other Sayings in the Synoptic Gospels: Jesus Traditions in the Context of 'Qumranic' and Other Texts," 229)

how the ancients used language

I need some help. I'm reading Ruth A. Clements and Daniel R. Schwartz's edited volume, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 84; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), which has been a fascinating collection of essays to this point (I'm about two-thirds of the way through). I'm currently reading Menahem Kister's essay, "Divorce, Reproof, and Other Sayings in the Synoptic Gospels: Jesus Traditions in the Context of 'Qumranic' and Other Texts" (195–229). I'm extremely sympathetic to Kister's reading program, which situations NT traditions (here the sayings of Jesus) within overtly Jewish frames of reference.

But I am once again flummoxed at the implicit model of language and communication that enables conceptions such as the following:

Moreover, the expected Greek rendering of יסוד הבריאה is ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως, an expression in which the word ἀρχὴ would mean "principle." It seems that this expression was changed in Mark to ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως, "from the beginning of creation" (10:6), and in Matthew further revised to ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς (19:4, 8). If this expression indeed underlies both CD and the sayings tradition, there must be a close genetic link between them. If this is the case, we have here a striking case in which the originality of the wording in one Gospel may be established over against that of another through comparison with the Qumranic parallel. (Kister 2009: 202; my emphasis)

Anyone familiar with redaction-critical analyses of the synoptics will recognize immediately the familiar notion of language revised in later gospels from earlier ones. So Matthew's "from the beginning" is a modification of Mark's "from the beginning of creation" rather than an autonomous instance of language that relates to the sociolinguistic phenomena of Hellenistic Greek in general. Kister takes that thinking to a new level, if I understand him rightly, by applying redaction-critical analytical tools to texts that don't exhibit a literary relationship. In other words, the comparison of Mark and Matthew at least rests on the theory that Matthew knew and copied from Mark; but what theory legitimates Kister's claim that Mark changes language from another (Hebrew) text?

The larger problem, however, stems from our theory of language and communication, if it can be said that we have one at all. As historians of antiquity, we can only work with and analyze the remains of language that was inscribed some place, whether on papyrus or parchment, on a monumental stele or statue, or even the plethora of graffiti that survives from the ancient world. It seems to me, however, that redaction criticism in general, and especially analyses such as Kister's, implicitly assume that written language was all there was. This sounds ridiculous, of course; who could imagine a silent world where people communicated solely in writing?! But this is precisely the conception of language that appears to underlie anlyses of language from text to text. Otherwise, how can Kister (or anyone else) suppose that Mark has changed "the principle of creation" to "the beginning of creation"? Why is either phrase the cause or the effect of the other?

Werner Kelber has for over two decades been arguing against just these very analytical assumptions when he refers to the "equiprimordial"-ness of variant sayings. Kelber's neologism is, perhaps, unfortunate for two reasons. First, it's just plain weird, though it seems Kelber delights in weird language (or in weirdly using language). But second—and more substantively—the concept of equiprimordiality is an exaggeration of an otherwise very insightful point. That is, Kelber argues that tradition, in oral performance, enjoys a certain autonomy vis-à-vis previous and subsequent performances of the tradition. That is, if in one performance Jesus is reported to say, "Blessed are the poor . . . Blessed are the hungry," and in another performance he is made to say, "Blessed are those who mourn . . . Blessed are the meek," the two instances are both equally ("equi-") original instances of the tradition ("-primordial"). One is not "more original" than the other. This variability in the tradition goes back as far as Jesus himself, who on different occasions may have given various renditions of the Beatitudes (cp. Matthew and Luke), and who may have sometimes correlated his Beatitudes with parallel woes (Luke) or not (Matthew).

Kelber perhaps goes too far when he insists that traditions in oral performance are equally "original" or "primordial." Tradition could certainly develop as well as devolve; it could be applied to new contexts, integrated with other traditions, or cast in new frames of reference. These would not be equi-primordial. But we should recognize the fairly obvious point that the traditions we analyze transcended and existed well beyond the texts we work with. As a result, any analysis of one text solely—or even primarily—in terms of another text runs the risk of neglecting the ways that nontextual factors contextualized both the production and the reception of our texts. In other words, in a world where people could (and presumably did) say ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως as well as ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως, and many other things besides, no one was likely to perceive one phrase in terms of (or as a change from) the other.

Matthew and the parting of the ways

Anders Runesson's essay, "From Where? To What? Common Judaism, Pharisees, and the Changing Socioreligious Location of the Matthean Community" (Common Judaism: Explorations in Second-Temple Judaism, edited by Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008], 97–113), is as awkward as its title. I think I'm sympathetic to his overall thesis, but it isn't easy to tell.

But his final paragraph uses a familiar phrase in a peculiar way:

In conclusion, the Gospel of Matthew provides us with early evidence of an inner-Jewish parting of the ways, very different in character from the process that much later would lead to the establishment of "Christianity" as a religion independent of "Judaism." Indeed, the use of the Gospel of Matthew by non-Jewish Christ-believers as a resource in that later process of identity formation is a fascinating and hermeneutically complex problem that deserves further study. (113)

My question: How helpful is it to refer to "an inner-Jewish parting of the ways"? The point is clear enough: the Matthean community (if we can still speak of a "Matthean community") split from a[nother] Jewish group rather than from Judaism itself. But the metaphor parting of the ways has been used historically to refer to the differentiation and dis-identification of Jewish ways of being from their Christian counterparts, and vice versa. If Matthew presents evidence of and for continued Jewish identities for those who found their traditions in its telling of Jesus' story, shouldn't we jettison parting of the ways language tout court?

Paul and the Temple

As I mentioned previously, I'm reviewing Ruth A. Clements and Daniel R. Schwartz's book, Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity. Eyal Regev's essay, "Temple and Righteousness in Qumran and Early Christianity: Tracing the Social Difference between the Two Movements" (63–87), is the first treatment I've come across that places Paul's appeal to Jerusalem's Temple in proper perspective (though, judging from his footnotes, I just haven't been looking in the right places). That is, Regev doesn't assume that finding "Christian" analogs to the Temple ipso facto degrades the Temple as the locus of God's presence on earth. Instead, Regev proposes a four-fold typology of references to the Temple that recognizes participation, analogy, criticism, and rejection; "Only the last-named category really justifies the commonly held view that the early Christians substituted new alternatives for the Temple" (66). When it comes to Paul, specifically, Regev writes:

It seems that Temple, sacrifice, and priest are characterized in these analogies in an extremely favorable light; it would be a disgrace to draw an analogy between the most sublime Christian beliefs and an irrelevant Jewish cultic practice. . . . I suggest that since Paul used the imagery of the Temple and sacrifices as a model for sacredness and closeness to God, he had some appreciation for the Jewish cult" (68, 69).

This, I think, is a much more helpful approach to Temple imagery in Paul than, for example, that taken by James Dunn (see my related criticism here).

bound in the first century CE

In my essay, "Reading and Hearing in Ancient Contexts" (JSNT 32/2 [2009]: 151–78), I criticize one NT scholar for portraying the author of Hebrews as a writer who exists outside the constraints of his time and culture and who labors to present his point in such a way that his audience—who are so constrained—can understand what he's trying to teach them.

Davis portrays the author of Hebrews as a cultural monstrosity who wishes to communicate complex (literate?) ideas but finds himself constrained by the inability of his audience to follow ‘analytic’, ‘objectively distanced’ or ‘abstract’ discourse. Davis’s author, among other things, seems to grasp the truth he conveys in ways unconstrained by cultural or historical forces, and the task before him as he writes is to express that truth in terms that are accessible within the cultural limitations affecting his hapless readers. Though Davis rightly insists that processes of composing as well as receiving written traditions are at least somewhat culturally specific, his analysis never acknowledges that both the author and auditors of Hebrews were constrained by similar such patterns of information perception, organization, and presentation. Some authors and some oral performers were undoubtedly more effective at navigating cultural scripts when presenting written or oral information than were others, but to varying degrees they all navigated those scripts as insiders, hardly aware, if at all, that they or their audiences were constrained by any supposed ‘oral mindset’. (153–4)

Davis, of course, is just one manifestation of a common problem among NT scholars rather than a particularly inept expression of NT scholarship. As another example, notice Robert Stein's description of Jesus. Whereas my criticism of Davis concerns his conception of "orality" (as opposed to "literate" patterns of information processing and presentation), here I question Stein's implicit conception of Jesus' relation to Judaism. In Mark 1.40–45 Jesus cleanses a leper and tells him to present himself to the priest and offer the sacrifices prescribed by Moses.

Within the present story this command provides the proof of the leper's healing, even as "serving" demonstrated the healing of Simon's mother-in-law in 1:31. In the original setting of the incident and in light of 2:15–17, 18–22, 23–28; 3:1–6; 7:1–23, Jesus appears to be less concerned with demonstrating that he keeps the law than in helping the healed leper reenter society. (Stein 2008: 107–8)

Notice that "demonstrating that [Jesus] keeps the law" is an issue in our own cultural context and not necessarily an issue in Jesus'. Rather, the problem in first-century Galilee concerned how one should keep Torah, not whether one should do so. All the passages Stein cites (Mark 2.15–3.6; 7.1–23) don't present Jesus as non-Torah observant; in these passages Jesus engages in debates about the proper observation of the Mosaic covenant rather than the value of observing Torah. Notice, however, that these ways of talking about the text (Davis's and Stein's) both assume that "the good guy" (whether the author of Hebrews or Jesus himself) is more like us (literate, or unburdened by petty legalism, respectively) but forced to deal with people who aren't like us (oral, or obsessed with the Law, respectively). If only Jesus and the NT authors had had the foresight to wait until the twenty-first century to do their thing, they wouldn't have had to deal with those sad, backward people who couldn't read or were scrupulous about the Law's commands. Pity.

[Clarification: I don't think Mark is trying say that Jesus was a Torah-observant Jew; neither do I think Mark is trying to avoid the implication that Jesus kept the Mosaic Law. Rather, the Torah was the most conspicuous feature of the cultural world Jesus inhabited, and the issues he engaged concerned how to live in light of Torah rather than whether or not to do so. Jesus never had to "demonstrat[e] that he keeps the law," and so Stein has missed the point of the text.]

placing Jesus' baptism in (literary) context

In her comments on Mark 1.9–11, Adela Yarbro Collins appeals to biographies of Greek poets to provide a literary parallel to Mark's account of Jesus' baptism and the declaration of Jesus as God's well-pleasing son. Here's a rather extended passage from Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 147:

Ancient biographies of poets contain similar accounts near the beginning of the narrative about their main subjects. In the popular biography of Aesop, he is portrayed as a slave, extraordinarily ugly, and unable to speak because of a severe speech impediment. This low status is somewhat mollified by divine power. near the beginning of the narrative, Aesop assists a priestess of Isis. As a reward Isis grants him the power of speech, and the nine Muses bestow upon him the power to devise stories and the ability to conceive and elaborate tales, as well as other gifts of excellent speech. A story was told about the archaic lyric poet Archilochus involving an extraordinary experience which revealed that he would be a poet. When he was leading a cow to market at night while the moon was shining, he met a crowd of women who offered to buy his cow. When he had agreed and they had promised to give him a good price, both the women and the cow disappeared, and before his feet he saw a lyre. He was overcome and realized that they were the Muses. Like Archilochus, the Jesus of Mark has an experience near the beginning of the narrative that transforms him and prepares him for his life's work. Archilochus experienced an epiphany or vision of the Muses, who enabled him to be a poet; Jesus sees the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove and hears the divine voice address him as beloved son. The allusions to scripture in the words of the divine voice suggest that Jesus is being appointed as messiah or prophet or to an eschatological role that combines both offices. As Aesop was given gifts of wise speech by Isis and the Muses, Jesus is endowed with the divine Spirit on this occasion, the power that enables him to teach with authority, to heal, and to cast out demons.

It pains me to criticize Collins here, especially because (i) I'm really impressed with her commentary so far, and (ii) I think she's exactly right that we need to contextualize Mark in its larger traditional world. But the stories of Greek poets hardly provide the appropriate traditional world for understanding Mark. Notice the phrase, about halfway through the quote, "Like Archilochus, the Jesus of Mark has an experience near the beginning of the narrative that transforms him and prepares him for his life's work." Like Archilochus?! None of the story Collins has relayed sounds remotely like Mark's account of Jesus, which suggests that very little—if any—of Mark's story of Jesus is "like Archilochus."

The differences simply too great to draw any meaningful parallels between Archilochus and Aesop, on the one hand, and Jesus of Nazareth. Aesop is awarded for assisting a priestess of Isis; Jesus comes to John in the Judean wilderness, which is world's away from the Temple hierarchy in Jerusalem. Archilochus encounters the Muses without knowing it; nothing in Mark 1 suggests Jesus encounters either God or one of his agents unawares. The stories of Aesop and Archilochus simply belong to a completely different world from the stories of Jesus, and only the fact that both are ancient from our point of view hides that fact. It would be just as appropriate to draw links between Mark 1 and stories of John Henry or Emiliano Zapata.

Why does any of this matter? I can think of two reasons. First, notice that these parallels actually affect Collins's interpretation of Mark 1.9–11. She reads the divine voice in 1.11 (and its allusions to Hebrew biblical traditions) as a suggestion that "Jesus is being appointed as messiah or prophet or to an eschatological role that combines both offices." But I don't see any such implication in the text. For one thing, the voice's declaration that Jesus is God's son is not very prominent in the rest of Mark's gospel. Mark uses phrase υἱὸς θεοῦ only at 1.1 (if we accept the textual variant); at 3.11 and 5.7 demons acknowledge Jesus as υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ; at 15.39 a centurion calls the recently deceased Jesus υἱὸς θεοῦ. In Mark 9.7 the heavenly voice again declares Jesus God's "beloved son." Perhaps Mark 13.32 is also relevant. If Mark 1.9–11 narrates when Jesus is appointed to the status of God's son, I would expect the rest of the narrative to have more to do with Jesus as God's son. I think Collins would have done better to read this passage as the account of Jesus being declared (not appointed) the son of God (= royal messianic figure). The rest of the gospel makes good sense as the account of Jesus as the chosen king of God's people; notice that as early as 1.14–15 Jesus is announcing the nearness of God's (= his) kingdom.

Second, and even more importantly, Collins's appeal to biographies of Greek poets actually facilitates the trend among NT scholars to read early Christian literature outside of (and even in opposition to) the Jewish cultural context in which the texts were written and apprehended. The parallels between Jesus and Israel's patriarchs, monarchs, prophets, etc. are much more compelling than any similarities with Aesop and/or Archilochus. Perhaps we could make the case that stories of the Greek pantheon and biographies of poets and heroes help us understand the context in which Mark was (later) read and understood. But at this point I am utterly unconvinced that these stories provide any purchase on how the earliest memories of Jesus (say, the first century at least) were expressed, understood, and passed on.

how early Christians related to Israelite tradition

Over the last five years or so I have been growing increasingly aware of and frustrated by the tendency among NT critics to describe early Christians—especially the evangelists—in terms that imply they related to the sacred traditions of Second Temple Judaism as outsiders. Though these descriptions only imply and insinuate a view of the early Christians vis-à-vis their traditions, those implications and insinuations have dramatic consequences for our views of the evangelists as authors, the texts they left behind, and the larger issues of Christian origins we try to get at when we approach the gospels.

Sometimes this tendency almost casts the evangelists' relationship with sacred tradition in a light similar to a heart surgeon's relationship with the organs occupying the open ribcage on the table before her. The evangelists "worked with," "manipulated," "redacted," "revived," "created," "transformed," etc. their traditions, whether their Jesus traditions or sacred Israelite traditions. This view is directly related to the outdated view of the evangelists dominant among the form critics who explicitly and conscientiously cast the evangelists in the role of the Brothers Grimm, collectors of other peoples' traditions and stringers of pearls. For well over fifty years biblical scholarship has been aware of the inadequacies of this conception of the evangelists with respect to the Jesus tradition, but we have nevertheless continued to talk about them in similar terms with respect to Israelite tradition.

Notice, for example, Robert Stein's description of Mark's original audience: "It is also apparent Mark’s readers were familiar with various OT characters and possessed considerable knowledge of the Jewish religion” (Mark [BECNT; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008], 10; my emphasis). I can’t help but think that Stein has rather understated the point. Mark and his readers—the movement of Jesus’ followers who proclaimed him as Israel’s messiah to Jews throughout the Roman empire and, in time, to gentiles—were not “familiar with” Hebrew biblical traditions. Rather, they lived in a world defined and appraised by those traditions. By way of analogy, I am (vaguely) familiar with things Kanye West has written and/or said, but I live in a world defined by the writings and sayings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Even putting the two men next to each other seems a bit ridiculous, and I think the same can be said of Stein’s (and most NT critics’) comments about Israelite tradition in Mark.

Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman evinces a similar conception of the evangelists and the early Christians, especially in his rather strong distinction between ancient Judaism and early Christianity. In his description of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls—4Q521, also known as the Messianic Apocalypse—Schiffman rightly emphasizes this text's Jewish provenance. However, he also draws too stark a distinction between Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity, and that too-stark distinction gives rise to the following:

This text, therefore, has no connection to Christianity at all, except that it indicates the presence of the messianic idea in Judaism before Christianity emerged. It is understandable that those Jews who started the early Jesus movement brought with them the teachings of Judaism that they had learned. This beautiful poem [viz., 4Q521] sums up these beliefs, calling on human beings to observe God's Torah in order to bring about the eternal redemption. (Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls [New York and London: Doubleday, 1995], 350; my emphasis)

"Brought with them"? "That they had learned"?! I can't help but think that we have (wrongly) imagined the evangelists along the lines of representatives of the British Museum who acquire cultural property from distant and exotic lands and cultures and cross borders with said property, relocating these objects in altogether foreign contexts. But the evangelists weren't Britons digging in the sands of Egypt or the ruins of Assyria. They were Jews (as Schiffman acknowledges) who lived and moved and had their being in the stories of Moses, David, Isaiah, Elijah and Elisha . . . the story, in other words, of YHWH, which they saw also in the story of Jesus.

Jews, Christians, and everything in between

I've begun playing with phrases that might help me get at my problem with the way Jews and Christians (and the relation between them) have been conceived in biblical scholarship (broadly understood). A particularly interesting example of this conception, in a mildly polemical context, comes from Lawrence Schiffman's recontextualization of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity [New York and London: Doubleday, 1994]). The very first paragraph of the Preface reads,

This book aims to correct a fundamental misreading of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For some forty-five years, the scholars publishing and interpreting the scrolls have focused almost singlemindedly on the scrolls' significance for our understanding of early Christianity. This is the first work ever written to explain their significance in understanding the history of Judaism. (xiii)

I'm not interested in assessing the truth of Schiffman's claim (although I don't really doubt him here). Instead, I can't help but feel that Schiffman conceives the shift from "early Christianity" to "the history of Judaism" as a change of categories rather than as a broadening of categories. In my way of thinking, understanding the DSS and their significance for ancient Judaism is a larger question—not a different question—than the DSS and Christian origins.

Why does this matter? Well, consider Schiffman's description of "the messianic idea," by which he means the Jewish messianic idea. Again, I can't help but feel that Schiffman is excluding, or at least neglecting, Christian messianic ideas.

The messianic idea has been central tot he development of postbiblical Judaism in all its various forms. Generally speaking, the concept envisions the eventual coming of a redeemer, a descendant of David, who will bring about major changes in the world, leading to world peace, prosperity, and the end of evil and misfortune. Essential to the messianic idea in Judaism is the expectation that when the time comes, the ancient glories of the Davidic kingdom will be reestablished in the Land of Israel. Unquestionably this-worldly, Jewish messianism expresses its ideas in concrete terms. it looks forward to the messianic era, when the spiritual level of humanity will rise, resulting in and from the ingathering of Israel and the universal recognition of Israel's God. Of course, that definition is a sweeping generalization. in reality, the messianic idea in Judaism has a complex history, further complicated by the simultaneous existence, even within the same strain of Judaism, of various views of messianism. Within this history, we can distinguish certain patterns or trends of messianic thought. (317)

Despite a couple ideas in that paragraph that I think don't befit traditional Christian messianic ideas (though in the history of Christian ideas we could probably find an analogy to all of Schiffman's elements of the messianic idea), very much of this description describes Christianity very well. Some even, represent an important shift in perspective that helps us appreciate anew numbingly familiar aspects of Christianity (e.g., if Christianity identifies Jesus as Israel's messiah, how, if at all, does he bring "world peace, prosperity, and the end of evil and misfortune"? Or do we think these are things about which Jesus couldn't be bothered?).

Inasmuch as Schiffman has transferred his focus from Christianity to Judaism, I think his focus is still too narrow (though he would probably say his focus is what he wanted it to be). I think our understanding of Christianity and Schiffman's understanding of Judaism would only be enhanced if we broadened the interpretive field that gives our questions meaning rather than moving from one field to another.

Was Paul a Jew?

The Tablet has an essay entitled, "Was Paul a Jew?" which picks up the discussion of Pamela Eisenbaum's new book, Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperOne, 2009). I'm sympathetic to Eisenbaum's larger program (which I've encountered in Gabriella Gelardini's edited volume on Hebrews [see my comments here]), though I think there are problems with some of her details. Nonetheless, Stanley Stowers's blurb is about as positive as I could ever hope to receive; Stowers says:

Eisenbaum shows the implausibility of the common interpretation of Paul that pits a Christian essence against a superficial or rejected Jewish hull. The book's great accomplishment is to show us a historically plausible picture of a fully Jewish Paul who was also fully committed to Christ.

So I'm interested. Even so, the Tablet's essay, linked above, reveals more about the ways of thinking about Paul (and other Western symbols) in popular media than it does about the historical Paul and those who knew and/or remembered him in the first century or so of Christian history. Here's a blurb which illustrates both the nuance that I hope to see more of in our own reflection of Paul and the over-simplification that persists on seeing Christianity and Judaism as separable (or worse, separate!) "things":

If all this is true, it follows that when Paul condemns Jews, he is aiming his barbs at my meddling fellow Jewish missionaries of Christ, not the Jews, a people I harshly reject. And when he speaks of Judaism having been superseded, he means Judaism as a lifestyle to be aspired to by pagans, not Judaism as practiced by Jews. (In Acts, Jews do persecute Paul for preaching the gospel. But Acts doesn’t count as a source for Paul, since the man who probably wrote it, Luke, came along nearly half a century after him, by which point the Jesus movement was busily suppressing its Jewish roots.) (original italics)

[HT: Bible and Interpretation]

"The Gospel versus Judaism"?

First an explanatory comment: In my view the function of scholarship is debate and agonizing movement [in the sense of ἀγωνίζομαι (agōnizomai; "I struggle, fight; I make effort")] toward greater understanding. So my engagement with Michael Holmes's treatment of the Apostolic Fathers is appreciative rather than adversarial, critical rather than combative.

Okay. Holmes (2007: 243) introduces his translation of Ign. Phld. 8.2–9.2 under the subheading "The Gospel versus Judaism." Given my exposure to Ignatius thus far (my reactions are available in these posts), I expected certain things. I was surprised, then, that I didn't encounter what I expected. Holmes, of course, is the expert and I the neophyte newly come to Ignatius' epistles, so I may be am ignorant of the scholarly discussions on which this label may be based. In other words, I speak here (as sometimes elsewhere) from ignorance.

Ignatius begins with a very interesting (if typical) exhortation to "do nothing in a spirit of contentiousness." I say "interesting" because this particular exhortation (which is fairly typical of Ignatius) is based [ἐπεί (epei; "because, since")] on Ignatius' experience of "some who say, 'If I do not find it in the archives, I do not believe it in the gospel'" (Ign. Phld. 8.2). When Ignatius responded, "It is written," these apparently contentious people (snidely?) retort, "That is precisely the question" [πρόκειται (prokeitai; lit: "it is put [before us]," in the sense of "that is the issue at hand and under consideration")]. Ignatius then responds (to the Philadelphians, not the contentious people), "But for me, the 'archives' are Jesus Christ, the unalterable archives are his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that comes through him" (Phld. 8.2).

Holmes's interpretation, including his translation (which I've reproduced here), clearly understands "the archives" [τὰ ἀρχεῖα (ta archeia)] as a reference to Hebrew biblical texts (the Law and the Prophets, understood generally). I think this is right. What is more, Ignatius, then, privileges the gospel story ("Jesus Christ . . . his cross and death and his resurrection and the faith that comes through him") to the Bible. Then, in To the Philadelphians 9 Ignatius goes on to talk about the priests and the high priest, about the patriarchs "and the prophets and the apostles and the church" (9.1). Then, as he did in 8.2, Ignatius privileges the gospel over these things:

ἐξαίρετον δέ τι ἔχει τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ σωτῆρος, κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τὸ πάθος αὐτοῦ, καὶ τὴν ἀνάστασιν. οἱ γὰρ ἀγαπητοὶ προφῆται κατήγγειλαν εἰς αὐτόν· τὸ δὲ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπάρτισμά ἐστιν ἀφθαρσίας. πάντα ὁμοῦ καλά ἐστιν, ἐὰν ἐν ἀγάπῃ πιστεύητε.

But the gospel possesses something distinctive, namely, the coming of the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, his suffering, and the resurrection. For the beloved prophets preached in anticipation of him, but the gospel is the imperishable finished work. All these things together are good, if you believe with love. (Ign. Phld. 9.2; Holmes 2007: 244, 245)

My guess is that Ignatius' "the gospel has something different," along with his submission of the Bible to "Jesus Christ," provides a substantial portion of the reason Holmes subheads this section "The Gospel versus Judaism." Here I have two comments. First, that peculiar term, Ἰουδαϊσμός, which I've discussed here (and follow the links back), doesn't occur in this passage. So "The Gospel versus Judaism" is clearly an interpretive mood not (necessarily) warranted by the text.

Second, in the movement from 9.1 (priests, highpriest, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, church) to 9.2 ("the gospel possesses something distinctive"), I can't help but notice that Ignatius privileges the gospel not over Judaism (= not-Christianity) but over the entire history of God's revelation to his people, including the apostles and the church. All these former (Jewish and Christian) figures are simply a means by which to "enter in" to something [εἰσέρχονται (eiserchontai; 9.1)]. Immediately previously Ignatius made reference to the highpriest, who "has been entrusted" [πεπίστευμαι (2x)] with the Holy of Holies [τὰ ἅγια τῶν ἁγίων] and with the secret things of God [τὰ κρυπτὰ τοῦ θεοῦ]. God's "secret things" presumably refers to the things available only to him, and the Holy of Holies is that sacred space reserved for his presence alone, except for that one time a year (Yom Kippur) when the highpriest entered God's exclusive space to atone for himself and the people. So, equally presumably, when Ignatius refers to "entering in" to something, he means "entering in" to God's presence as his [acceptable] people.

Oddly, this is a remarkably Judaic way of viewing the gospel, one that, I would argue, is not "versus" Judaism and which characterizes other writers who make much more extensive use of Hebrew biblical traditions than does Ignatius. In fact, I would hesitate to attribute this understanding to Ignatius at all, except that (you'll recall) Ignatius lumps "the apostles and the church" along with the priests, highpriest, patriarchs, and the prophets (see Phld. 9.1). Perhaps, then, we should take a cautiously broader view of "the archives," mentioned in 8.2, than simply as the Law and the Prophets. That is, Ignatius is saying that all of the writings (perhaps including Paul's epistles [and any other Christian texts Ignatius both knows and considers authoritative]) are subject to the gospel story (8.2; 9.2). And in making this point, Ignatius is able to simultaneously (i) subsume the apostles and the church along with Jewish heroes to the gospel, and (ii) frame all of this in terms of Israel's historic access to YHWH, a framing much more characteristic of the (Jewish) NT authors and others, such as the didachist and the author of 1 Clement.

So Ignatius finishes 9.2 with πάντα ὁμοῦ καλά ἐστιν, ἐὰν ἐν ἀγάπῃ πιστεύητε, "All these things together are good, if you believe with love." Perhaps we should take Ignatius literally here: Not "the gospel is good, unlike Judaism," but all these things—from the priest to the patriarchs to the apostles and the church—are good, but under one condition. "If you believe with love."

Christianity from the circumcision

I have commented on the word Ἰουδαϊσμός [Ioudaïsmos; "Judaism"] twice before, once in a response to Richard Horsley's claim that Judaism is "a largely European Christian scholarly construct" (Jesus in Context, 110) and once in a response to Ign. Magn. 8–10, which Michael Holmes subtitled (in his English translation), "Judaism and Christianity." So I found it interesting to run into this relatively rare word (in Greek biblical literature only five uses in the Maccabean texts and twice in Galatians) once again in Ign. Phld. 6.1:

Ἐὰν δέ τις Ἰουδαϊσμὸν ἑρμηνεύῃ ὑμῖν, μὴ ἀκούετε αὐτοῦ. ἄμεινον γάρ ἐστιν παρὰ ἀνδρὸς περιτομὴν ἔχοντος Χριστιανισμὸν ἀκούειν ἢ παρὰ ἀκροβύστου Ἰουδαϊσμὸν. ἐὰν δὲ ἀμφότεροι περὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μὴ λαλῶσιν, οὗτοι ἐμοἰ στῆλαί εἰσιν καὶ τάφοι νεκρῶν, ἐφ᾽ οἷς γέγραπται μόνον ὀνόματα ἀνθρώπων.

But if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him. For it is better to hear about Christianity from a man who is circumcised than about Judaism from one who is not. But if either of them fails to speak about Jesus Christ, I look on them as tombstones and graves of the dead, upon which only the names of people are inscribed. (Holmes 2007: 240, 241)

I've encountered this passage before, which is a bit odd since I've never read any of the Apostolic Fathers (other than the Didache); perhaps Boyarin addressed Ign. Phld. 6.1 in Border Lines. But I think a few observations are possible here, especially on the strength of the discussion in my post, "Judaism and Christianity (Ign. Magn. 8–10)."

First, Ignatius appears to imagine the "anyone" [τις] who expounds Judaism as being a gentile. This, perhaps, isn't a necessary inference from the comparative statement, but it does seem to me that Ignatius exhorts the Philadelphians to shun a particular content (Ἰουδαϊσμός) rather than a certain ethnicity (Ἰουδαῖος). In other words, Ignatius isn't saying, "If a Jew speaks to you . . ."

Second, Ignatius' identification of the two hypothetical speakers in terms of "circumcision" [περιτομήν] and "uncircumcision" [ἀκρόβυστος] may simply be a result of Pauline influence (see Romans 2). But given my immediately preceding point as well as the emphasis on action rather than belief for the word Ἰουδαϊσμός, the "circumcision/uncircumcision" language likely continues the focus on behavior. Ignatius isn't telling the Philadelphians to avoid Judaism (as we understand the term, i.e. as a particular religious perspective) but rather those who espouse those set of practices that distinguish Jews from gentiles.

Third, Ignatius seems to be less critical of Jews who observe peculiarly Jewish practices than gentiles (= gentile Christians, I presume) who do so. For the circumcised Jew who proclaims Χριστιανισμόν ["Christianity"] is better [ἄμεινον] than the [circumcised?] gentile who proclaims Ἰουδαϊσμόν ["Judaism"]. In fact, the "uncircumcised man" [ἀκρόβυστος] who proclaims Judaism must have been circumcised if his proclamation of Judaism is to make any sense at all; the language of ἀκροβυστία must surely be metaphorical (even ironic) here.

Fourth, both speakers come under Ignatius' censure if they fail to speak of Jesus Christ. This raises the question, which Ignatius doesn't address, whether the bishop would have found acceptable a gentile proclaiming Judaic practices as long as he gave sufficient attention to proclaiming Jesus. In other words, was Ignatius' problem less about the idea of circumcision/Jewish distinctive culture and more with a phenomenological (or experiential) complaint that gentiles who found Jewish observances meaningful for their faith spent too much time expounding those observances rather than the message of/about Jesus?

Fifth [which, strictly speaking, is a question rather than an observation], how does the reference to "the names of men" (or "human [as opposed to "divine"?] names"; μόνον ὀνόματα ἀνθρώπων) relate to Ignatius' point? Is this simply an aspect of his metaphor of these speakers who neglect Jesus Christ as "tombstones and graves," or is this another way of speaking of his view of Ἰουδαϊσμός apart from the preaching of Jesus Christ? Is this, in other words, similar to the polemic in the Pastoral Epistles against [Jewish] genealogies (see 1 Tim 1.4; Tit 3.9)?