What Saint Paul Originally Said

Larry Hurtado, professor emeritus of New Testament at the
University of Edinburgh, has been blogging his reflections on N. T. Wright’s
new two-volume work Paul and the Faithfulness of God. In response to
Wright’s claim that Paul views Jesus as the God of Israel’s returning—in the
flesh and in person, so to speak—to his people, Hurtado
writes:

I really don’t see evidence in Paul’s letters of an explicit
emphasis that Jesus is the “return of YHWH” embodied and in person. To be
sure, there are statements in some OT passages and subsequently in other Jewish
texts that YHWH promised to renew Israel and come to Israel in eschatological
redemption. But my question is what evidence there is in Paul’s letters
that this specific idea and these specific texts were particularly cited and
central.

So Hurtado isn’t convinced that Wright is correct in his
reading of Paul’s Christology. In response, Hurtado offers an alternative
reading of Paul:

To be sure, Paul appears to have been a pretty intelligent
and articulate fellow, and was perhaps particularly skilled in scriptural study
and interpretation (from his Pharisee background). But, so far as I can
see, the only claims that Paul makes about any distinctiveness or
originality concern (1) his conviction that he was specially called by God to
conduct a mission to gentiles, and (2) his view of the terms on which gentiles
were to be received as full co-religionists with Jewish believers
(baptism/faith in Jesus without taking on Jewish observance of Torah). So,
was Paul really the creative figure that Wright seems to posit in developing
the “high christology” that we see reflected (really presumed) in Paul’s
letters? Or, instead, do we have in his letters essentially the sort
of claims about Jesus and the sort of devotion to him that Paul acceded
to subsequent to the “revelation of his [God’s] Son” (Gal. 1:15) that
changed him from persecutor to proponent of Jesus? Indeed, as I’ve
proposed, was it these claims and devotional actions that (at least in part)
provoked the zealous Pharisee, Saul, to feel obliged to “destroy” (his term)
the young Jesus movement? (Something certainly got up his nose!)

Hurtado, in other words, wants to see Paul as borrowing and
adapting, here and there, the Christology he learned from others. Paul’s real
“originality” as a theologian lies elsewhere, in his development of a novel
view of the Jewish law in relation to his Gentile converts.

But can Christology and the law-free mission to the Gentiles
(as J. Louis Martyn has dubbed it) really be kept apart in that way? I don’t
think so. Certainly Hurtado is right that Paul isn’t singlehandedly responsible
for whatever “high Christology” is found in the New Testament. But he’s wrong,
I think, when he implies that Paul thought about the Jewish law and Gentile inclusion
without grounding his thinking at every turn in a particular construal of the
identity of Christ and the meaning of Christ’s history for the world.

If you read the opening of the letter to the Galatians, you
might think Paul is simply citing a traditional early Christian formula without
much modification. The “Lord Jesus Christ,” he writes, is the one “who gave
himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the
will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:4). It could be that this is so much
prolegomena, inserted to demonstrate Paul’s alignment with his forebears in the
faith, before he moves on to contributing his own distinctive call for the
Galatians not to accept circumcision. But that overlooks how Paul’s later
arguments against circumcision draw on the apocalyptic, invasive Christology
that he adumbrates with this opening.

It is precisely because of the particular shape of the
Christ-event as Paul understands it—as a gift (1:6, 15) given without regard
for its recipients’ worth, status, honor, or cultural capital, whether Jewish
or pagan (1:14-15; 6:15), delivering them from enslavement to cosmic powers
(4:1-7)—that Paul deems circumcision unnecessary and, in the Galatians’ case,
at least, positively forbidden (5:4). It is precisely because of his Christology—one
that sees the Christ-event arising from no prior conditions and plotted against
no prior coordinates (2:20; 6:14)—that Paul develops his peculiar understanding
of Gentiles’ freedom from the requirement of becoming Jewish proselytes. Trying
to tweeze apart Christology and the Gentile mission, as if Paul only marginally
reworked the former and maximally developed the latter, misses their
fundamental interconnectedness.

Paul and the Jewish Christian missionaries he opposed in his
letter to the Galatians shared some basic convictions: that Jesus was God’s
Messiah, that he had been sent and authorized by God, and raised and exalted as
Lord by God too. In that sense,
Paul’s Christology was unoriginal. But when he came to delineate his
differences with his opponents—that Gentile Christians need not adopt
circumcision, Jewish food law observance, and the keeping of Jewish festivals
and holy days—Paul traced those differences back to his own, unusual (by his opponents’
standards) version of what God had achieved in sending Christ. There is
something about the coming of Christ, Paul argued, that has severed the root of
all previous allegiances, relativizing every other human commitment. And
it’s that Christological commitment that energized the Gentile mission.

This is why many recent critics of the so-called “New
Perspective” on Paul—I have in mind names like Francis Watson and John Barclay at Durham in
the UK, Martinus de Boer at VU University Amsterdam, Susan Grove Eastman at
Duke Divinity School, and even the French philosopher Alain Badiou, who, despite his
atheism, finds Pauline theology to be a powder keg of possibility for addressing
matters of the day—have faulted other scholars like Krister Stendahl and James
D. G. Dunn for presenting a relatively de-theologized Paul. Did Paul’s
convictions about the Gentile mission arise from some ancient seed of modern,
Western egalitarianism and social justice? Reading Stendahl and Dunn, you might
be tempted to think so. But a body of newer work on the apostle—including,
perhaps, as Hurtado notes, Wright’s own new books (which I haven’t had the
chance to finish reading yet)—reveals that Paul may, after all, look less like
a liberal Westerner than the New Perspective has taught us to think and more
like a Christ-haunted figure whose radical social practices arose directly from
his pioneering, innovative thinking about the identity and achievement of Jesus
Christ. In short, there was a creative, peculiar Christology in Paul,
and it is part of Paul’s greatness as a missionary and a letter-writer to have
articulated it.