28 Stuckenbruck, 1 Enoch, 518.
4. The Imagination of the Apostle and the Flow of 1 Corinthians
Paul’s Rhetoric
I contend that this reception of Jesus is evident in the creative theology and rhetoric of Paul, the self-confessed “Hebrew of Hebrews”.
In seeking to be attentive to the arrangement of Paul’s communication it is necessary to move beyond the examination of genre (or form, or rhetorical convention), to consider broader issues of flexible mental imagery and cultural conceptualisation. Additionally, it is necessary to move beyond the practical assumption of a monolithic Greco-Roman rhetorical culture, to emphasise, within the complexity of Paul’s identity and literary manner, the significant influence of his kerygma “in accordance with the Scriptures”. Just as it would be naïve to think that early Christianity, Judaism and Hellenism are completely separable, it would also be naïve to think that the interpretative and communicative motifs of Judaism – or of the Messianic sect to which Paul was converted – were effectively dissolved in the conventions of Greco-Roman oratory.42
42 There is a parallel in the communicative strategies of Australian Aboriginal cultures: Ian
G. Malcolm’s research (my father, Emeritus Professor at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia) has concerned the ways in which Australian Aboriginal users of English frequently use the language in distinctive (and sometimes culturally subversive) ways. Discourse is often distorted and misunderstood if it is interpreted using the imagery and communication-patterns of non-Aboriginal Australian English. It is essential, he argues, that Aboriginal English discourse be understood on its own terms. See, for example, Ian G. Malcolm and Farzad Sharifian, “Aspects of Aboriginal English Oral Discourse: An Application of Cultural Schema Theory,” DisS 4/2 (2002): 169-181; and Ian G. Malcolm and Susan Kaldor, “Aboriginal English: An Overview,” in Language in
Australia (ed. Suzanne Romaine; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 67-84.
Paul identifies himself to the Corinthians as an “apostle of Jesus Christ” (1:1) who has been called to “proclaim the gospel” (1:17) to them; and it would be unhelpfully
restrictive to seek to understand Paul’s discourse without reference to the shared imagery and communicative motifs of this utterly self-conscious sub-cultural identification. Thus, while it need not be denied that Paul met “expectations for ‘cultural literacy’ of a Greek- speaking Diaspora Jew in the first century”43, this should not result in the conclusion that the rhetorical resources available to him were limited to those that were generic across the Greco-Roman world.
Paul’s Biography
I suggest that for Paul himself, the Damascus Road experience involved unexpectedly coming to view Jesus as the one in whom Israel and the world’s hope of reversal lay.44
Paul had been zealously pursuing the cleansing of Israel;45 but he now came to view his actions as presumptuous,46 having been blind to what God was doing in the death, resurrection, and deferred manifestation of Jesus.47
Australia. In a resource for Australian school teachers, Diana Eades writes, “To people not trained in linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis, it might appear that Aboriginal English is simply an uneducated variety of English. However, this would be an erroneous assumption, for while there are a number of features (particularly grammatical features) which AE shares with other non-standard varieties of English, there are many others which are distinctively Aboriginal. These features testify to the fact that Aboriginal ways of using language and communicating have survived and remained strong – despite the extinction of traditional languages all over the continent”. Diana Eades, “Aboriginal English,” Primary English Teachers’ Association, Pen 93 (1993): 2. Cited 23rd July 2010. Online: http://www.elit.edu.au/mediaLibrary/documents/pens/PEN093.pdf. For legal applications see, for example, Diana Eades, Aboriginal English and the Law:
Communicating with Aboriginal English Speaking Clients: A Handbook for Legal Practitioners (Brisbane: Queensland Law Society, 1992).
43 Margaret M. Mitchell, “Pauline Accommodation and ‘Condescension’ (συγκατάβασις):
1 Cor 9:19-23 and the History of Influence” in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 197- 214; 199.
44
Ciampa and Rosner rightly note, “For Paul, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were the decisive events in the history of Israel and even the world”. Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (PNTC; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, Forthcoming) 10.
45
Numerous scholars have connected Paul’s actions with the “zeal” that characterised the tradition of Phinehas and the Maccabeans. Richard Bell comments: “The pre-Christian
Thus Paul’s formative experience of Jesus, as one whose resurrected Lordship had been startlingly hidden by the outrageous shame of his crucifixion, renegotiated the reversal motif by applying it prototypically to the death, resurrection, and awaited manifestation of Jesus, the “hidden” Christ. Belonging to God’s people now had to mean belonging to this Christ.
Terrance Callan argues:
Paul, as Haacker argues, most probably saw his persecution of Christians in this tradition stemming from Phineas…. It would therefore seem likely that Paul belonged to the radical end of the Pharisaic spectrum”. Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 306. G. Walter Hansen comments: “In Galatians Paul describes his life ‘in Judaism’ as having been characterized by an extremely zealous devotion to the Jewish traditions (1:14). His zeal was a mark of the Jews of his time who fought to maintain the purity of the Jewish way of life from pervasive Hellenistic influences”. G. Walter Hansen, “Paul’s Conversion and His Ethic of Freedom in Galatians,” in The Road
From Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry
(ed. Richard N. Longenecker; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 213-237; 216. Martin Hengel argues that such “zeal” had become pervasive in the Judaism of the era: “[Z]eal for God’s cause, that is, for the law and the Sanctuary, was a phenomenon that had characterized the whole of Palestinian Judaism in general from the time of the Maccabees and in particular the groups of Essenes and Pharisees who had emerged from the Hasidim. Even early Christianity had been at least to some extent influenced by its Jewish
inheritance. This ‘zeal’ was based on a consciousness of Israel’s election and separateness and it was therefore experienced in a completely positive way. It was not until the catastrophes of 70 and 135 A.D. that the rabbinate, influenced by those events, began to develop a more critical attitude towards certain aspects of this zeal”. Hengel, The Zealots, 224.
46
By this I mean that Paul came to perceive that in zealously pursuing the purity of Israel, he had been effectively pursuing a manifest “reversal” that had in fact already been initiated by God in a hidden way, in Christ. Hengel similarly characterises the approach of the Zealots as an attempt to anticipate and generate divine reversal: “the attempt to achieve by every possible means the ‘purity of Israel’ was at the same time an attempt to prepare the way for the eschatological coming of God”. Hengel, The Zealots, 228.
47 As Hengel and Roland Deines note, Paul later emphasises that he had mis-perceived
Jesus: “The assertion of [Jesus’] former followers that God had raised him from the dead, had exalted him to himself ‘in power’ (Rom.1.3f.) to the right hand of God and appointed him Messiah, Son of God and coming judge of the world, had to be opposed with all resolution. Like many responsible and learned men in Jerusalem, Sha’ul too will have shared this view – and in so doing have completely misjudged the crucified Messiah of Israel, as he himself later confesses, ‘in a fleshly way’”. Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, The Pre-Christian Paul (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1991), 64.
[D]ying and rising with Christ as part of the body of Christ is central both to Paul’s understanding of Jesus as Savior and to his understanding of Christian life.48
S.A. Cummins succinctly summarises this “corporate Christology” in Paul:
For the apostle Paul, an integral aim and outworking of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ is the incorporation of the whole of humanity into Messiah Jesus and his Spirit, and thereby into the divine life that is eternal communion with the triune God. The historical and theological dimensions of such a claim involve at least two key interrelated aspects of Paul’s Christology: namely, that Jesus’ messianic identity and destiny encompass an Israel-specific life and death transposed into his exaltation as universal living Lord, and that this pattern and path are replicated in the lives of all those who are incorporated into him as the messianic and Spirit-empowered eschatological people of God.49
In reacting to perceived presumptuous/autonomous spirituality in Corinth, then, Paul was able to interpret and respond to the situation by means of the reversal motif that had, beginning at the Damascus Road, become focused in his kerygma of the Christ.50 Those who were engaging in boastful, presumptuous status games were effectively blinded by the shame of the crucified Christ, preferring to play the role of the boastful ruler. They
48 Terrence Callan, Dying and Rising with Christ: The Theology of Paul the Apostle (New
York: Paulist Press, 2006), 8.
49 S.A. Cummins, “Divine Life and Corporate Christology: God, Messiah Jesus, and the
Covenant Community in Paul” in The Messiah in the Old and New Testaments (ed. Stanley E. Porter; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 190-209; 190. Cummins’ summary unfortunately lacks recognition of the hiddenness of Christ’s exaltation. Callan rightly gives some attention to this theme: “Thus Christians have died but not yet risen with Christ; or their death and resurrection with Christ has not yet been revealed; or their life is an ongoing death and resurrection with Christ. All of this is so because salvation has not yet fully arrived”. Callan, Dying and Rising with Christ, 128.
50 Hengel and Deines make a similar connection: “When Paul explicitly stresses around
twenty years later that the crucified Christ – here one could almost speak of the crucified Messiah – is a stumbling block to the Jews (I Cor.1.23), he is describing not only his present experience of mission but the personal offence which he had taken to the message of the crucified Messiah as a Pharisaic scribe on the basis of his understanding of the Torah, when he still knew Christ ‘after the flesh’”. Hengel and Deines, Pre-Christian
must therefore be reminded of the necessity of sharing in Christ’s death – and hiddenness – before sharing publicly the manifestation of Christ’s resurrected glory. The main body of 1 Corinthians ends up exhibiting what might be called kerygmatic rhetoric, moving from a corrective summons to identify with the cross in chapters 1–4 through to a corrective summons to await the fullness of resurrection in chapter 15:
1 Corinthians 1–4: Divisive boasting is set against inhabitation of Christ’s cross 1 Corinthians 5–14: The cross applied
1 Corinthians 15: Disregard for the dead is set against the expected manifest inhabitation of Christ’s resurrection51
I will examine this in more detail after briefly considering Paul’s other letters.
Paul’s Other Letters
As 1 Corinthians is the only New Testament letter to come from Paul and Sosthenes as co- senders, it should not be surprising if it has distinctive features. However, what I have described as kerygmatic rhetoric may be seen to arise flexibly to some degree in other letters of Paul.
2 Corinthians
Paul’s subsequent (canonical) letter to the Corinthians begins by summing up his apostolic ministry as one of death in hope of resurrection. Indeed, God is defined there as the one “who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9). Paul Barnett opines that Paul has drawn on a
51 I use the terminology of “inhabitation” here, even though such imagery is seldom
explicit in 1 Corinthians itself (although see 10:16). Such terminology is an attempt to capture the letter’s insistence on human indebtedness to God-in-Christ for status (1:2), present calling (1:5-7), and future hope (1:8). The Corinthians are summoned not only to emulate Christ as a great example, but to recognise that their very life and identity comes from union with him (1:30); and they are thus to subject their conceptions of their own status, life, and conduct to an acknowledgement of his (crucified and exalted) identity.
Jewish conception of God, which has become crystallised in his own gospel of the resurrected Christ:
[I]t may be no coincidence that, as he adapted the First Synagogue Benediction in his epistolary benediction, he now alludes to the Second Benediction,52 whose subject is resurrection. Paul’s own piety has been shaped by the synagogue, which he is unashamed to betray. Yet, the experience of the Risen One has permanently altered the structure of his thought.53
This fits well with the argument of this dissertation. The “structure of [Paul’s] thought” has been shaped by his encounter with the Christ who has died and risen; and the kerygma about this Christ, informed by the Jewish imagery of reversal, suggests motifs and patterns for historical interpretation and discourse.
Romans
Similarly, in what is largely agreed to be his next (canonical) letter, Paul’s conception of the identification of believers with the death-and-resurrection of the Christ plays an essential role. Moo suggests that this conception has become for Paul “an unbreakable ‘law of the kingdom’”. Moo expands:
For the glory of the kingdom of God is attained only through participation in Christ, and belonging to Christ cannot but bring our participation in the sufferings of Christ.54
52 Ralph P. Martin quotes this Benediction as “Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever, thou
makest the dead to live”. Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians (WBC; Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1985), 15.
53 Paul Barnett, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT; Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1997), 87.
54
Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996), 506; emphasis mine.
Philippians
This “law of the kingdom” perhaps provides structure to Paul’s letter to the Philippians, with one example after another of its embodiment:
1:12-26: Paul is shown to “suffer” and to expect “deliverance”
1:27-30: Philippians are urged to “suffer” as they live in accordance with the “gospel of Christ”
2:1-11: Jesus is presented as the paradigm of one who willingly accepts “death on a cross” before being “exalted”
2:12-18: Paul is depicted as being “poured out” as a libation in the hope that he might boast “on the day of Christ”
2:19-24: Timothy is presented briefly as an exemplar of one who is not self-interested but rather serves Christ “in the work of the gospel”
2:25-30: Epaphroditus is commended for his willingness to come “close to death” for the sake of Christ
3:1-16: Paul is shown to have suffered the “loss of all things” in order to “share in Christ’s sufferings”, and one day “the resurrection of the dead”
3:17-4:1: Philippians are urged to become “imitators” of Paul rather than enemies of “the cross of Christ”
It would seem possible that here, the identification of believers with the death and resurrection of Christ – Moo’s Pauline “law of the kingdom” – has combined with the Greco-Roman moralistic commonplace of Exemplary Argumentation to produce a particular expression of kerygmatic rhetoric.
Rollin A. Ramsaran comments on the converging conclusions of a variety of approaches to the study of the arrangement of Philippians:
It is generally recognized that Philippians 1:27-30 marks an important imperatival exhortation (epistolary; oral/aural) or functions as the letter’s propositio or propositional statement (rhetorical). Most hold that Paul’s use of
πολιτεύεσθε in 1:27 and πολίτευμα in 3:20 forms a ring device around 1:27-
3:21, and Paul’s argumentation within the smaller sections is built on key examples (Christ, Timothy, Epaphroditus, Paul).55
Ramsaran identifies the assertion “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” as a key maxim of the letter, and notes:
A careful and attentive reading of 1:12-4:1 identifies the theme of life and death as central to the series of examples contained therein.56
It may well be that the converging conclusions of a variety of interpretative approaches could be further illuminated by considering the conceptual imagery of the kerygma as a rhetorical resource.
Colossians
Colossians, similarly, whether a product of Paul or a Pauline heir, appears to exhibit what I am calling kerygmatic rhetoric, allowing the motif of death and resurrection with/in Christ to give overall shape to the main body of the letter:
1:1-2:5: Christ in you; you in Christ 2:6-4:1: Walking in Christ
• Sharing Christ’s death
• Sharing Christ’s resurrection
55 Rollin A. Ramsaran, “Living and Dying, Living is Dying (Philippians 1:21): Paul’s
Maxim and Exemplary Argumentation in Philippians,” in Rhetorical Argumentation in
Biblical Texts (ed. Anders Eriksson et al.; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International,
2002), 325-338; 325-326.
4:2-18: Service of Christ in the world and the church
Indeed, James D.G. Dunn, in summing up the theme of the letter, points out:
Paul insists that the other teaching [i.e. the “Colossian heresy”] has failed to understand the gospel of the cross properly (Col. 2:8-15).57
The utilisation of the motif of death and resurrection in Colossians is different to its utilisation in 1 Corinthians. In Colossians (as in Romans 6), death and resurrection are both to be claimed in the present; while in 1 Corinthians (as in Philippians), death is to be claimed in the present, and resurrection to be awaited as a future destination. The application of the renegotiated motif clearly retains flexibility.
A full examination of these letters, however, is unnecessary here. My purpose is simply to point out that the idea of a kerygmatic rhetoric in 1 Corinthians would not be greatly divergent to what is found in the rest of the Pauline Corpus. On the contrary, other parts of the corpus may be examined fruitfully in such a light.
1 Corinthians: From Boastful Rulers to Hopeful Sufferers
I contend, then, that 1 Corinthians may be heard as expressing the fundamentality of identification with Christ in his death and resurrection, in order to move the Corinthian church from presumptuous autonomy to dependence on God in Christ.
Paul’s letter confronts the Corinthians with a choice: Will they align themselves with those who boastfully scorn the meek – the “rulers of this age” who “crucified the Lord of glory” – or will they become imitators of Christ’s apostles who “have been condemned to death” and “die every day”? Will they assume the role of the boaster who awaits
condemnation, or the sufferer who awaits vindication?
57
James D.G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon: A Commentary on
I seek to demonstrate in the rest of this dissertation that this is a defensible and attentive reading of the letter. Here, I provide an overview of such a reading:
Chapters 1–4
The choice is set up in the opening four chapters of the letter. Paul raises the problem of squabbling divisions over leadership in the church, divisions that he sees as expressive of a human-confident orientation, rather than a God-dependent orientation. So he calls the Corinthians to choose whether they desire to be aligned with rulers who are honourably wise in this age (who will be condemned), or apostles of the cross (who will be vindicated):
For the word of the cross, to those who are being destroyed, is foolishness; but to
us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy
the wisdom of the wise, and I will reject the understanding of those with understanding”. (1:18-19)
Paul attempts to persuade the Corinthians not to see themselves as the mighty rulers, but as the poor “nothings”, and he uses the familiar terminology of the God who brings reversal:
For consider the situation of your calling, brothers and sisters: not many of you