Abstract
T. S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi1 is spoken by one of the wise kings from the East who visited the infant Jesus. This king, or magus, recalls his journey many years afterwards, but he is not quite sure about the significance of what he has seen. And so he tells his story yet again, as if by rehearsing the details he will discover some larger, relieving insight that eludes him. He recalls the events carefully and deliberately:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
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Notes
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1936) pp. 107–8.
See Calvin J. Roetzel, The Letters of Paul. Conversations in Context (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 2nd edn 1982) pp. 6ff.
On various traditional elements in the Pauline letters, see Roetzel, The Letters, pp. 41ff.; Beda Rigaux, zz The Letters of St. Paul. Modern Studies, ed. and trans. Stephen Yonick (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1968) pp. 115ff.
On the Cynic-Stoic diatribe, a form of argument which answers questions uttered by imagined objectors, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, ‘Pauline Theology’, ed. Raymond E. Brown et al., The Jerome Biblical Commentary, 2 vols (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968) II, 803.
On the epistolary form (salutation, thanksgiving, body, paranesis or ethical exhortation, conclusion), see Roetzel, The Letters, pp. 29ff., and William Doty, Letters in Primitive Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973).
See Norman Perrin and Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament: an Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 2nd edn 1982) p. 197: ‘the centre is “the Christ event”, that is, Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. For Paul, the cross-resurrection opens up the whole meaning of the divine plan and purpose’. It is surprising how little of Jesus’ life is recorded in Paul. There is dispute about which letters are genuine. The list offered by Perrin (p. 128) is as follows: 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, Galatians, and Romans.
See Rudolf Schnackenburg, New Testament Theology Today, trans. David Askew (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1963) pp. 88–9: it is important ‘to arrive at a proper understanding of his expectation of an imminent Parousia (and we cannot reasonably deny that he does expect this)’. Still, ‘it is just as important not to reduce Paul’s real “eschatological” attitude to what he says in I Thess. 5.1–11’.
See also Hubert Richards, St. Paul and His Epistles. A New Introduction (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979) p. 36: ‘he saw the end coming as the climax of a struggle which had already reached its final stages. … No one in his senses would deny that if Paul were writing to Salonika today he would need to express himself rather differently. … When he wrote to the Corinthians only five or six years later, he had already changed his tune and assumed that both he and they would already be dead’.
Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), presents Paul as an eschatological mystic who expected an imminent messianic kingdom.
For an assessment of the weakness in Schweitzer’s influential argument, see W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism. Some Elements in Pauline Theology (London: SPCK, 1948) pp. 288ff. Davies argues that the ascription to the apostle of belief in a temporary messianic kingdom is erroneous, and Paul’s eschatology ‘was determined not by any traditional scheme but by that significance which Paul had been led to give Jesus’.
See Hans Joachim Schoeps, Paul: the Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History, trans. Harold Knight (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961) passim;
Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951) pp. 46–50; 80ff.; 91ff.;
E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963) esp. pp. 143ff. Sanders warns against over-simple readings of Paul’s treatment of the law. ’I have come to the conclusion that there is no single unity which adequately accounts for every statement about the law’ (147). In particular, Paulis uninterested in the interior attitude with which the law is approached (146), and his treatment of the law is unsystematic.
See also W. D. Davies, Jewish and Pauline Studies (London: SPCK, 1984) p. 108: ‘There is no one Pauline attitude to the Law’, yet Paul’s teaching on agape ‘achieved an immense and penetrating simplification’ of the relationship between law and religion (120).
See George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), The Bodley Head Shaw, vol. IV, pp. 546ff., ‘Preface on the Prospectus of Christianity’. Shaw thinks that Paul’s views on sin and sex make him ‘the eternal enemy of Woman’.
Robin Scroggs, ‘Paul: Chauvinist or Liberationist?’, The Christian Century 89 (1972) pp. 307–9; ‘Paul and the Eschatological Woman’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (1972) pp. 283–303; ‘Paul and the Eschatological Woman: Revisited’, Journal of the Academy of Religion 42 (1974) pp. 532–7, makes a case for Paul’s liberalism.
For a counterstatement, see Elaine Pagels, ‘Paul and Women: a Response to Recent Discussion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974) pp. 538–49.
Daniel Patte, Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), offers a structuralist reading of Paul’s epistles similar to mine at this point, and based on the semiotic theories of A. J. Greimas. Patte emphasises the exploratory nature of faith, and the development of clusters of conviction. He maintains that Paul emphasises the importance of avoiding absolute claims for human knowledge and authority (see pp. 311, 322 for applications of this view to the Corinthian letters). It is consistent with the modern developments in literary theory which I have outlined in chapter 1, that semiotics should be the ground on which a New Testament scholar’s approach to Paul is of special relevance to a literary critic.
See also Wayne A. Meeks, ‘The Christian Proteus’ in The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (New York: Norton, 1972) p. 435: ‘Paul has become the foe of all authoritative systems’, and p. 442: ‘Perhaps, indeed, Paul’s chief value in the ethical realm lies precisely in showing up the dangers of systems.’
Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, trans. Lionel Strachan (New York: Harper, 1923) p. 234.
For these opinions, see W. Marxsen, Introduction to the New Testament: an Approach to its Problems, trans. G. Buswell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968) p. 24;
Norman Perrin, The New Testament: an Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974) p. 97;
Bo Reicke, The Anchor Bible: the Epistles of James, Peter and Jude (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964) pp. xxx–xxxiii;
Ralph P. Martin, ‘Approaches to New Testament Exegesis’ in New Testament Interpretation, ed. I. Howard Marshall (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1977) p. 232;
William G. Doty, ‘The Classification of Epistolary Literature’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31 (1969) p. 198.
Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: Norton, 1971) p. 272.
Many of these problems in turn need to be reconstructed by us. See for instance G. Lüdemann, Paulus, der Heidenapostel, 2 vols (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982);
W. Schmithals, Gnosticism in Corinth, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971); Jewett, Paul’s Anthropological Terms, pp. 26ff.;
John Coolidge Hurd, Jr, The Origin of I Corinthians (London: SPCK, 1965).
Friedrich Nietzsche has given the central expression to this idea. See The Antichrist. An Attempted Criticism of Christianity, trans. Anthony M. Ludovizi, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London: J. N. Foulis, 1909–11) XVI, 178ff. See also Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (London: Collins, 1973). This book presents Jesus as a simple, pious peasant who would have been repelled by the theological claims made in his name.
For an account of interpretations of this episode, see Hans Conzelmann, I Corinthians: a Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975) pp. 258ff.
The various discussions of Paul’s mysticism are closely connected to what is meant by being ‘in’ Christ. See J. B. Nielson, in zz Christ. The Significance of the Phrase In Christ in the Writings of St. Paul (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1960);
E. Schweizer, ‘Dying and Rising with Christ’, New Testament Studies 14 (1967–68) pp. 1–14;
Alfred Wikenhauser, Pauline Mysticism. Christ in the Mystical Teaching of St. Paul, trans. Joseph Cunningham (London: Nelson, 1960) esp. pp. 21ff., ‘In Christ’, and 50ff., ‘The Meaning of the Phrase “In Christ”’;
Adolf Deissmann, Paul: a Study in Social and Religious History, trans. William E. Wilson (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926) pp. 135ff.;
Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (New York: Henry Holt, 1931).
The main contrast is between direct and indirect knowledge, though the figure of the mirror has occasioned much debate. See Norbert Hugède, La métaphore du miroir dans les Epîtres de saint Paul aux Corinthiens (Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1957); Hans Conzelmann, I Corinthians, pp. 226ff.;
James Moffatt, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938) p. 201, points out that there were some semi-transparent windows at this time, but the allusion is to a metal mirror, which the Corinthians made of polished bronze. Mirrors were also used in divination.
The phenomenon itself is not described, but can be associated, for instance, with the inspired babblings of the medium interpreted by the priests at Delphi. Yet, as Conzelmann points out, I Corinthians, p. 234: ‘Unlike the Greek theory, Paul’s opinion is not that what is said in tongues is unintelligible to the speaker himself. But like the Greeks, he is of the opinion that it can be translated into human language.’ See also Frank W. Beare, ‘Speaking with Tongues: a Critical Survey of the New Testament Evidence’, Journal of Biblical Literature 83 (1964) pp. 229–46;
Ralph P. Martin, The Spirit and the Congregation: Studies in I Corinthians 12–15 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1984), examines Paul’s attitude in detail. According to Martin, the ruling axiom is that worship should build up the entire congregation, and ‘exclusive personalism’ is seen as dangerous.
Se also M. E. Thrall, I and II Corinthians (Cambridge University Press, 1965) p. 99, on Paul’s suspicion of glossalalia even in private.
See Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905) p. 340: ‘“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up”. Not “I knew (AV.) such a person fourteen years ago.” St. Paul knows him intimately at the time of writing, but not until v. 7 does he show that he is speaking of himself.’
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© 1989 Patrick Grant
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Grant, P. (1989). Paul to the Corinthians: ‘As deceivers yet true’. In: Reading the New Testament. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09310-6_6
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