Scot McKnight on the Apocalyptic Paul

Last updated on: October 9, 2016 at 11:07 pm by Michael F. Bird

Scot McKnight on the Apocalyptic Paul 2016-10-09T23:07:45-04:00 Michael F. Bird

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Scot McKnight chimes on in the “apocalyptic Paul” view at his Kingdom Roots podcast, which is a great introduction to what all the fuss is about.

Scot suggests that Richard Hays might belong somewhat to the apocalyptic Paul view. In some ways, yes, because Hays sees Paul’s hermeneutic as robustly christological, he does lean that way at times, and he says: “God’s ‘apocalyptic’ act in Christ does not simply shatter and sweep away creation and covenant; rather, it hermeneutically reconfigures creation and covenant, under the guidance of the Spirit, in light of the cross and resurrection.”

However, Hays also writes: “[T]he Abraham story is for Paul taken up into the Christ story, and the Christ story is understood, with the hindsight of narrative logic, as the fit sequel to the Abraham story.” For Paul, then, anyone who listens to the law will see that it supports his proclamation, not that of his adversaries. For within the law itself is a single narrative that moves from the promise given to Abraham to the promised one, Christ. To quote Hays again: “Paul saw scripture not just as a repository of proof texts about Jesus as the Messiah, but as a story – a story focused on God’s promise to bless and redeem all nations.” Interesting too is what Hays wrote in a RBL review of Lou Martyn’s Galatians commentary: “Can Martyn really maintain at the end of the day that Galatians, as he reads it, does not lead inevitably to an anti-Jewish, supersessionist Christian theology? … He impressively shows that the polemic of the letter is targeted not against Jews but against rival Jewish Christian evangelists, and he argues that Galatians ‘is not an anti-Judaic text.’ … Nonetheless, the letter’s slanderous statements about the Law and its radical negation (on Martyn’s reading) of the election of Israel seemingly leave no room for the continuing existence of a Law-observant Jewish people.”

See Richard B. Hays, “Apocalyptic Poiēsis in Galatians: Paternity, Passion, and Participation,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, eds. M.W. Elliott, S.J. Hafemann, N.T. Wright, and J. Frederick (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014).

I think I have read nearly everything on the apocalyptic Paul that I can find and I’ve condensed by research in a 20, 000 word chapter in my forthcoming An Anomalous Jew: Paul among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, which should be out in early November.

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