Paul and his Recent Interpreters by N.T. Wright– Part Nine

Last updated on: September 10, 2015 at 1:43 am by Ben Witherington

Paul and his Recent Interpreters by N.T. Wright– Part Nine 2015-08-04T14:08:40-04:00 Ben Witherington

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

In a candid moment, Tom reveals that Wayne Meek’s First Urban Christians provided something of a template for what he was trying to do in a major part of his Paul and the Faithfulness of God. He says this on pp. 260-61….
“One or two reviewers of my Paul and the Faithfulness of God have expressed surprise at the significant number of times I refer to Meeks’s book. There was a good reason. I envisaged Part II
of my book as corresponding, in a sense, to chapters 2—5 of The First Urban Christians, trying to map the worldview, not least the symbols, narratives and praxis, which Paul was inculcating. I envisaged Part III as corresponding to Meeks’s chapter 6, showing particularly how the ‘patterns of belief’ we find in Paul’s letters sustained the kind of community, and the
kind of worldview, we had discerned earlier on. Sharp eyes might have picked up that I began Part III with Paul’s reworked monotheism, just as Meeks did in his sixth chapter. Again, there was good reason. Looking back on the last generation of Anglophone Pauline scholarship, there remain
three great landmarks, Sanders, Martyn and Meeks; and the one I value most is Meeks.

“He saw with increasing clarity that when people had spoken of ‘historical’,
or ‘historical-critical’, study of the New Testament, they had often meant
the history of early Christian ideas as discerned on a hypothetical map of
religious history, a map moreover which was divided into two continents,
‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’, with a significant ocean between them. This was
not ‘history’ in the sense that most historians understood it – the history,
that is, of actual communities, with their characteristic ways of life, their
social and cultural mores and morals, their challenges and hopes. Meeks
determined to plunge into that denser world…. Meeks determined early on, and has continued to insist on this point, that social history is not a matter of discovering large abstractions and
imposing them on the material. He has thus, notoriously, been persona non
grata with the ‘Context Group’.”

On p. 262, Tom quotes with approval Meek’s own judgment on the Context Group, and particularly on the quest to find one sociological key that unlocks the mysteries of early Christians. Meeks responds “There is no such key. Not the patron-client relation, not the honor-shame society, not status inconsistency, routinization of charisma, the dyadic personality, rational choice in a premarket economy, or group-grid dynamics. The constructs represented by some or even all of these metonyms and others like them may indeed help us to look from a new angle at some of the evidence at hand, or to discover evidence that we didn’t know was there. They remain, nevertheless, abstractions that can never substitute for deep and longterm immersion in the scattered and enigmatic traces left by the people of the first century. . . Putting the story together is finally more art than science – and the scientists I know are quick to acknowledge that there is much art in their science.” (QUOTED FROM THE 2ND EDITION OF FIRST URBAN 2002, p. xii).

Some of the things Wright agrees with Meeks about, and derives from his study of Meeks has to do with the unique features of the early Christian movement. For example, consider the following analysis by Tom….
“The ‘household’ was basic; the ‘voluntary association’ was common.
Both show considerable parallels with the Christian groups; both also
reveal considerable divergencies, of which the translocal character of the
group was again an obvious one. Likewise, the Christian groups saw themselves
as ‘exclusive and totalistic in a way that no club nor even any pagan
cultic association was’. Pauline converts underwent an ‘extraordinarily thoroughgoing
resocialization’, for which ‘the only convincing parallel in antiquity
was conversion to Judaism’. If, however, the Christian groups were in
one sense ‘exclusive’, they were in another sense ‘much more inclusive in
terms of social stratification and other social categories’ than the clubs or
associations would have been. Nobody else in Paul’s world was attempting
to found new communities in which social status counted for nothing. The
parallel with conversion to Judaism is significant in another way: the word
ekklēsia, though it has non-Jewish echoes as well, seems to have been used
by the Christians in such a way as to evoke the Septuagint translation of
qehal YHWH, the ‘assembly of the Lord’. This points again to the parallels
with the Jewish communities, which were simultaneously closed cultic communities
and members of a larger transnational entity…. But the culture of the early Christian groups we
glimpse in Paul’s letters was characterized, in a way that no other groups
were, by three things in particular: a set of beliefs, a new moral world, and
certain specific rituals. (We recall, once again, the way that ‘worldview’
functions: it holds together symbol, narrative, ethos, ritual and so on.)” (p. 266).

On p. 273 Tom asks himself why at points he finds Meek’s analysis insufficient or weak. He says this— “Why then do I find it less than fully convincing? Because though Meeks does indeed note the christological and eschatological interpretation of scripture, I do not think he gives sufficient
weight to the theme which, as I have argued elsewhere, drills down below
this. Scripture, for Paul, is not merely a miscellaneous, ahistorical source of
guidance. It is the earlier, and in some ways determinative, stage of the narrative
in which Paul believes that he and his communities are still living.
This narrative has indeed been broken in the Messiah’s crucifixion; but it
continues in its new cross-shaped form, and when Paul appeals (for
instance) to the exodus story in 1 Corinthians 10.1–13 he does so not simply
to pick out an example from long ago but in order to stress that the erstwhile
pagan converts in Corinth are part of the same, single family that was
once rescued from Egypt.”

This is where I personally find Wright least convincing. The example in 1 Cor. 10 has nothing to do with the Corinthians being told they belong to that story. It is about telling them that since we are talking about the same God, that same sort of behavior will produce the same sort of judgment. There is a big difference between using the OT as typology or moral example as Paul does here and suggesting a continuing family story. The Corinthians were never part of the Mosaic story or covenant. They were grafted into the patriarchal story and the Abrahamic covenant now fulfilled in Christ and in the new covenant.

Much of the rest of this chapter involves summarizing some of Meek’s key points, and making some minor corrections along the way. Here is how he sums up the analysis of Meeks contributions…

“What then has Wayne Meeks done for Pauline interpretation? Two
things in particular, I think. First, he has shifted the focus decisively from
‘history of religion’ to history, period – with a particular emphasis on social
history, but on that as falling within the larger ‘thick description’ of the
ancient Mediterranean world, and the particular cities in which Paul
founded churches. The question of ‘religion’ is included within that, but
Meeks, both in his 1983 work and in his important 2001 article, has stoutly
challenged the ideological construct which had taken ‘religion’ as its overall
subject and ‘Judaism and Hellenism’ as its particular binary opposition. The
fact that many works continue to be written as if this revolution had not
happened indicates well enough that the discipline still has much to learn
from him. At the same time, he has insisted, against continuing opposition,
that Paul’s communities did indeed have some decidedly distinctive features,
and that some of those features have their closest analogies with features
of the Diaspora Jewish communities. Once we get away from a false
religionsgeschichtliche opposition between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’, the real
distinctives can stand out.

“Second, Meeks has placed the study of belief, in this case the beliefs which
Paul sought to inculcate in his communities, within the study of what I have
called ‘worldview’, the large clump which includes symbol, myth, ritual and
so on. He has demonstrated that, though one may indeed observe close correlations,
this is not reductionist in either direction, unless of course the
interpreter forces it to be so. He has repeatedly stressed Paul’s urgent plea
for the unity and holiness of the church, and indicated that the main correlate
of this is a Jewish-style monotheism reworked around Jesus as the Messiah.
Likewise, in line with Schweitzer and Wrede, and in parallel with the
so-called new perspective (though without apparently noticing any of this),
he has insisted that Paul’s language about justification is closely correlated
with the social reality of his Jew-plus-gentile communities, but he makes
this point without lapsing into the sort of reductionism some have observed
in Francis Watson’s 1986 monograph or in the ‘Context Group’. He has
likewise demonstrated that some key elements of Paul’s theology mean what
they mean within a missionary impulse which was seeking, not to snatch
people out of the world, but to generate a community which saw itself as the
vanguard of an entire new creation.” (pp. 282-83).

Uncategorized

Previous Post

September 9, 2015

Paul and his Recent Interpreters by N.T. Wright--- Part Eight

Next Post

September 11, 2015 Paul and his Recent Interpreters by N.T. Wright-- Part Eleven

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz