Paul thru Mediterranean Eyes–a Review Part Eight

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 11:07 pm by Ben Witherington

Paul thru Mediterranean Eyes–a Review Part Eight 2015-03-13T23:07:25-04:00 Ben Witherington

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The treatment of 1 Cor. 12 is somewhat more helpful. I like Bailey’s coining of the term ‘energizings’ for the translation of 12.6 (p. 326). Bailey is right that in 2.6-16 and here in 1 Cor. 12 we have implicit references to the Trinity— the Spirit gives the gifts, the Lord assigns the tasks, and the Father energizes the activity (p. 334). On p. 335 we have an odd discussion about the Holy Spirit. Bailey argues that while the term pneuma is not feminine, “NT writers were often thinking in Hebrew as they wrote in Greek. Thinking of the Spirit in feminine terms thus has a serious Biblical foundation.” However, the Hebrew word for spirit is Ruach…. And in any case it is not used in reference to the third person of the Trinity in texts like Gen. 1—it simply refers to God’s presence, his spirit. There is in any case a difference between names and imagery. There is certainly both male and female imagery predicated of Yahweh in the OT, who is neither male nor female, but rather spirit in nature. The issue of naming is a different matter (see the discussion in my The Shadow of the Almighty). Bailey is however right to stress that Paul when he refers to spiritual gifts is not talking about natural talents, abilities, inclinations, secular callings or the like. He is talking about gifts like prophecy only obtained from the Spirit of God post-conversion.

“Prophecy is at least preaching at its best. Many have experienced it to be more; it cannot be less.” P. 337. Prophecy, it must be said, can certainly involve exhortation but it always involves revelation, a late word from God. It is not exposition of a pre-existing text of Scripture, which is typically what we call preaching.

In the parable of the body, Bailey brings into the discussion the issue of clean and unclean pp. 341-42. This might have been appropriate in a Jewish setting but Greco-Roman attitudes about feet and shoes were different than modern Middle Eastern attitudes about feet being unclean, and shoes likewise. Paul rather makes the distinction between more and less presentable, more and less vulnerable body parts. Paul may have started the analogy with the foot to begin with the lowliest part of the body, the part servants cleaned, for a reason, but he does not say so. The issue is not cleanliness here, but the importance of all the parts to the whole. The body of Christ as a metaphor may have rung some bells for the Gentiles since the Emperor sometimes spoke of the Empire as his Body. Implicitly then Christ would be contrasted with the Emperor, except for the fact that Christ is not called the head of the body here. Indeed, the head seems to be seen here as just another member of the body.

In an astounding leap of logic, Bailey, pp. 344-45 concludes that the reference to the genitals in 12.22-24 is brought up because they represent the need for the body to reproduce— i.e. they are brought up because of evangelism!! But Paul says nothing of this. He brings them into the picture as the weak and most vulnerable members of the body who need to be treated with greater honor and respect. Paul is not talking about outsiders here at all, but rather insiders, as the previous discussion in 8-10 about strong and weak who are already members of the body makes clear.

The good point is made on p. 348 that since charismata is in the plural it does not refer to the gift of administration or steering or helping, but rather to actual deeds of such kinds. In other words it is referring to functions praxis, not abilities one may occasionally exercise. As Bailey suggests, they are gifts to others when they are given, not merely when they are obtained.

The theme of love crops up all along the way in 1 Corinthians (1.10-16;2.9;3.3;4.14;8.1,11-12;10.24,28-29;,32-34; 12.26) but here it gets full treatment. As Bailey notes (p. 349), the noun agape only shows up in the LXX in Song of Solomon. Remarkably, he translates 12.31—“I will give directions for a journey over a mountain pass”. Interesting as this is, it ignores the rhetorical signal in the text. The proper translation is ‘I will display a more excellent (or in an hyperbolic) way (manner)’ to exercise one’s gifts. The very display is a technical rhetorical term used to refer to the rhetorical of praise and blame, epideictic rhetoric, and that is what we have in this chapter. Love is not treated in this chapter as a gift (pace Bailey), not even as the supreme gift much less one gift among many. It is treated as the manner or way to exercise all gifts, to do all deeds. It is shown as the way freedom and responsibility are to be exercised. While Bailey is right that one must see 12.31 and 14.1 as hinge verses, they are talking about two things— gifts, and love. Not love as a gift, but love as a manner to exercise gifts. And Paul warns, rightly he will ‘display’ in a still more hyperbolic way on love.

Bailey is however right that when we compare 12.31a with 14.1 we learn that Paul can use both ‘grace gifts’ and the term ‘spiritual gifts’ to refer to these things he is talking about. Bailey thinks that Paul sees faith, hope, and love as gifts, but these are not listed in the gift lists in 1 Cor. 12 and 14. The reference to faith in the former list clearly enough refers to a special gift of miracle working faith, not basic salvific faith which every believer has. Paul is indeed saying in this hymn like passage that the spiritual gifts are aids here and now and will pass away later, but faith, hope and love will abide. They are more important, more fundamental, and they have to do with basic salvation itself—faith is required, hope is generated by the indwelling Spirit, and love is the engine that drives the train enables the proper response to God and neighbor, norms the gifts. It is the primary fruit of the Spirit, not a spiritual gift in the sense Paul is discussing here. The fruit should norm the gifts (see Wesley). On p. 361 Bailey argues that the gift of tongues has to do with human languages, not angelic ones. This is problematic in light of what Paul goes on to say, namely that tongues in any worship venue, regardless of who is or isn’t present, always requires interpretation and explanation to either insiders or outsiders. It is more probable that Paul say glossolalia as an angelic prayer language humans could share in, through a gift from God, which enhanced their prayer life and their intimacy with God, and presumably as well, gave them a sense of praising God like and with the angels in heavenly worship. ‘To speak in the tongues of angels’ does not mean to speak to angels, but rather like them.

On pp. 363-65 Bailey presents a helpful argument for the reading ‘to boast’ rather than ‘to burn’ for 13.3 and he is likely right. He plausibly conjectures that the ‘burn’ reading came from later scribes who knew about the Christian martyrdoms by fire. Pp. 371-85 are some of the most helpful and powerful pages of the whole book. Unlike earlier chapters where Bailey was interacting with older sources, if with any, here his discussion has a freshness because he interacts with more recent and helpful sources— Richard Hays, Miroslav Volf, Elie Wiesel, Hannah Haddad on the evils of war. He is commenting on the verse ‘love keeps no record of wrong doing’ and he holds up the phrase of Volf—‘remembering well’, that is redeeming the past. Not merely remembering but not allowing past suffering or difficulties to dominate one’s thoughts or determine one’s present course of actions, or lead to retaliation. On

p. 379 Bailey suggests the proper translation is ‘love never falls’ rather than ‘love never fails’. He points to the Peshitto and various eastern translations. The question is whether this makes the best sense of what follows, about prophecy and tongues failing, disappearing, passing away. The contrast suggests one thing enduring and the other failing or passing away, hence the rendering ‘does not fail’. On pp. 380-81 Bailey suggests that when Paul talks about ‘when I was a child’ he is referring to when he was a new Christian. Were that the case, we would have expected different language here language about immaturity, not language about being a child. There are some some effective discussions about the bronze industry in Corinth, and how Paul alludes to it (‘sounding bronze’; the dim mirror—often bronze). What this suggests is that this chapter was composed quite specifically for application to the Corinthians, for Corinth’s bronze industry was the most famous in the Empire.

Bailey effectively points out that in a multi-lingual situation like Corinth, Paul is effective in comparing speaking in tongues to hearing people speaking foreign languages one doesn’t know. In both cases the issue is the lack of intelligibility without an interpreter (p. 393). In his discussion of the outsider who comes into the congregation and hears glossolalia, Bailey (p. 295) opts for the translation ‘inquirer’ but this is surely not correct. The word mean ‘uninitiated’ or even ‘untrained and unlearned’ a term used of Peter in Acts in fact, as he was assessed by the Sanhedrin. It is the word from which we get the term ‘idiot’ though that is not the meaning of this term here. This person is unlikely to be a catechumen as Paul goes on to say he needs to be convicted, convinced and converted by the prophecy and fall on his knees and worship the true God (but cf. Bailey p. 398).

The quoting of Isaiah 28 is stressed by Bailey and here he has a case that Paul has been thinking about this text at several junctures as he wrote 1 Cor. Here, it bubbles to the surface of the text, and informs his discussion about tongues and prophecy. On pp. 400-01 Bailey suggests that Paul is contrasting his reception in the synagogue with what is happening in Christian worship, or put another way he is reminding the audience that the synagogue response to Paul’s preaching was largely negative, and like that of the Jews in Isaiah 28. In other words, the text is not so much applied to the Corinthian church, as serves as a contrast to the rejection of the prophetic word in the synagogue. On pp. 402-03 Bailey follows Chrysostom and suggests that tongues is a sign for unbelievers because it astonishes them and maybe they are startled into considering God might be present. The term sign however would seem to be the key here, and it is used in the negative way Jesus sometimes used the term. Here tongues makes clear to the unbeliever that he is an outsider, whereas prophecy gives him the opportunity to become an insider. Since evangelism is the heart of the matter…. Paul wants only intelligible speech in worship.

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Paul thru Mediterranean Eyes-- A Review Part Seven

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