Paul and the Gift

By John M. G. Barclay

A fresh scholarly reading of grace in Paul's theology

In this book esteemed Pauline scholar John Barclay presents a strikingly fresh reading of grace in Paul's theology, studying it in view of ancient notions of "gift" and shining new light on Paul's relationship to Second Temple Judaism.

Paul and the Gift centers on divine gift-giving, which for Paul, Barclay says, is focused and fulfilled in the gift of Christ. He offers a new appraisal of Paul's theology of the Christ-event as gift as it comes to expression in Galatians and Romans, and he presents a nuanced and detailed discussion of the history of reception of Paul. This exegetically responsible, theologically informed, hermeneutically useful book shows that a respectful, though not uncritical, reading of Paul contains resources that remain important for Christians today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781467443753

John M. G. Barclay

 John M. G. Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University, England. His previous book Paul and the Gift was awarded Book of the Year by Jesus Creed in 2015. He was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2020.

Book preview

Paul and the Gift

John M. G. Barclay

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN / CAMBRIDGE, U.K.

© 2015 John M. G. Barclay

All rights reserved

Published 2015 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barclay, John M. G.

Paul and the gift / John M.G. Barclay.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6889-3 (cloth: alk. paper); 978-1-4674-4375-3 (ePub); 978-1-4674-4335-7 (Kindle)

1. Bible. Epistles of Paul — Theology.

2. Grace (Theology) — Biblical teaching. I. Title.

BS2655.G65B37 2015

227′.06 — dc23

2015018062

www.eerdmans.com

For John Riches

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Prologue

I. The Multiple Meanings of Gift and Grace

1. The Anthropology and History of the Gift

1.1. The Gift in Anthropological Perspective

1.1.1. Mauss and the Gift

1.1.2. The Anthropology of Gift Post-Mauss

1.2. Gift and Reciprocity in the Greco-Roman World

1.2.1. Greek Reciprocity and the Limits of the Gift

1.2.2. Civic Euergetism

1.2.3. Roman Patronage

1.2.4. Were the Jews Different?

1.2.5. Stoic Solutions to the Problems of the Gift

1.3. The Emergence of the Western Pure Gift

1.3.1. Persisting Modes of Gift Exchange

1.3.2. Modern Social and Ideological Transformations

1.3.3. The Modern Notion of the Pure Gift

1.4. Conclusions

2. The Perfections of Gift/Grace

2.1. Perfecting a Concept

2.2. Six Perfections of Grace

2.3. Grace as a Polyvalent Symbol

3. Interpreting Paul on Grace: Shifting Patterns of Perfection

3.1. Marcion

3.2. Augustine

3.2.1. Early Works on Romans

3.2.2. Further Wrestling with Romans 9: Ad Simplicianum

3.2.3. The Pelagian Controversy

3.2.4. Against the Massillians

3.3. Luther

3.3.1. The Context

3.3.2. Not by Works of the Law

3.3.3. But by Faith in Jesus Christ

3.3.4. The Lutheran Perfections of Grace

3.4. Calvin

3.4.1. Grace in Creation, Providence, and History

3.4.2. Grace in Justification

3.4.3. Grace in Sanctification

3.4.4. Calvin’s Perfections of Grace

3.5. From Barth to Martyn

3.5.1. Karl Barth

3.5.2. Rudolf Bultmann

3.5.3. Ernst Käsemann

3.5.4. J. Louis Martyn

3.6. Sanders and the New Perspective on Paul

3.6.1. E. P. Sanders

3.6.2. The New Perspective on Paul

3.7. Recent Discussions of Paul and Grace

3.7.1. After the New Perspective

3.7.2. Alain Badiou

3.7.3. New Research on Grace and Benefaction in the Roman World

4. Summary and Conclusions to Part I

II. Divine Gift in Second Temple Judaism

5. The Wisdom of Solomon

5.1. Death and the Question of Justice (1:1–6:11)

5.2. Wisdom, the Ultimate Gift (6:12–10:21)

5.3. Divine Equity in the Exodus Events (10:15–19:22)

5.4. The Correlation of Mercy and Justice (11:21–12:22)

6. Philo of Alexandria

6.1. Ground Rules in the Interpretation of Divine Gift

6.2. God as the Sole and Singular Cause of Abundant Good

6.3. The Fitting Gift

6.4. Israel and the Reward of the Wise and Virtuous

6.5. Philo’s Perfections of Grace

7. The Qumran Hodayot (1QHa)

7.1. Introduction

7.2. The Worthlessness of the Human

7.3. The Goodness of God

7.4. Predetermination and the Design of the Cosmos

7.5. Conclusions

8. Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum

8.1. Covenant Promises That Cannot Fail

8.2. Why Israel Is Special

8.3. The Mercy of God

9. 4 Ezra

9.1. The Desolation of Zion and the World to Come (Episode 1): 3.1–5.20

9.2. Election and Future Judgment (Episode 2): 5.21–6.35

9.3. Mercy and Justice in a Two-Age Framework (Episode 3): 6.36–9.25

9.4. Breakthrough to a Bifocal Vision (Episode 4): 9.26–10.59

9.5. The Messianic Future (Episodes 5 and 6): 11.1–13.58

9.6. Ezra as Agent of Revelation (Episode 7): 14.1-50

9.7. Conclusions

10. The Diverse Dynamics of Grace in Second Temple Judaism

10.1. Summary

10.2. Diversity and Debate

10.3. Beyond Covenantal Nomism

10.4. Placing Paul in the Mix

III. Galatians: The Christ-Gift and the Recalibration of Worth

11. Configuring Galatians

11.1. Gift in Galatians

11.2. The Conflict in Galatia

11.3. Pauline Polarities

11.4. Four Readings of Galatians

11.4.1. Luther

11.4.2. Dunn

11.4.3. Martyn

11.4.4. Kahl

12. The Christ-Gift and the Recalibration of Norms (Galatians 1–2)

12.1. Greeting in Grace (1:1-5)

12.2. The Good News and the Disjunction of Divine from Human Norms (1:6-12)

12.3. Paul’s Call as the Drama of an Incongruous Gift (1:13-24)

12.4. Jerusalem and the Relativization of Previous Cultural Capital (2:1-10)

12.5. The Antioch Incident and the Suspension of the Torah as Norm (2:11-21)

12.5.1. The Antioch Incident

12.5.2. The Logic of 2:15-21

12.5.3. Galatians 2:15-16

12.5.4. Galatians 2:17-21

13. The Christ-Gift, the Law, and the Promise (Galatians 3:1–5:12, with 6:11-18)

13.1. The Christ-Gift and the Refusal of Pre-constituted Systems of Worth

13.1.1. Galatians 3:1-5

13.1.2. Galatians 5:2-6

13.1.3. Galatians 6:11-16

13.1.4. Galatians 3:26-28

13.1.5. Galatians 4:12-20

13.2. The Christ-event and the Story of the Law

13.2.1. The Distinction between Torah and Promise

13.2.2. The Incapacity of the Torah to Create Worth

13.3. The Christ-event as the Fulfillment of the Promise

13.3.1. Divine Promise and Human History: Narrative Trajectory and Radical Caesura

13.3.2. The Christological Re-reading of Scripture

13.3.3. A Unique Place for Israel?

13.4. Conclusions

14. The New Community as the Expression of the Gift (Galatians 5:13–6:10)

14.1. Freedom for the Spirit’s Regime of Love

14.1.1. Flesh and Spirit

14.1.2. Freedom for Slavery

14.1.3. Love and the Law of Christ

14.2. From Rivalry to Reciprocal Support

14.2.1. The Competitive Quest for Honor

14.2.2. Paul’s Counter-Strategy

14.3. Social Practice as the Realization of the Gift

14.4. Conclusions to Part III

IV. Romans: Israel, the Gentiles, and God’s Creative Gift

15. The Creative Gift and Its Fitting Result (Romans 1:1–5:11)

15.1. Gift and Mercy in Romans

15.2. From Galatians to Romans

15.3. The Occasion of Romans

15.4. The Framework of the Good News (1:1-7; 15:7-13)

15.5. Human Sin and the Creative Power of God (1:16–3:20)

15.6. The Christ-Gift (3:21-26; 5:1-11)

15.7. The Abrahamic Family Trait

15.8. Conclusions

16. New Life in Dying Bodies: Grace and the Construction of a Christian Habitus (Romans 5:12–8:39; 12:1–15:13)

16.1. Under the Reign of Grace (Romans 5–6)

16.2. Newness of Life: An Eccentric Existence in Christ

16.3. The Body and the Construction of a Christian Habitus

16.4. A Community Constructed by Unconditioned Welcome (Romans 12:1–15:13)

16.5. Conclusions

17. Israel, Christ, and the Creative Mercy of God (Romans 9–11)

17.1. The Crisis of Israel

17.2. The Creation of Israel by the Incongruity of Grace (Romans 9:6-29)

17.3. God’s Incongruous Act in Christ (Romans 9:30–10:21)

17.4. The Momentum of Mercy and the Salvation of Israel (Romans 11:1-36)

17.5. Conclusions

18. Conclusions

18.1. Grace as Gift

18.2. Distinct Perfections of Grace

18.3. Paul among Jewish Theologians of Grace

18.4. Paul’s Theology of Grace in Its Original Social Context

18.5. New Contexts and New Meanings of Grace

Appendix: The Lexicon of Gift: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and English

Bibliography

Index of Authors

Index of Subjects

Index of Ancient Sources

Preface

This book has been at least ten years in the making, the last four devoted to writing. Since I have learned a lot about gifts, I am acutely aware of the thanks I owe to the many people who have encouraged, clarified, and supported this project in numerous ways. My Durham colleagues — especially Francis Watson, Lutz Doering, Jane Heath, Dorothee Bertschmann, Stephen Barton, Bill Telford, Walter Moberly, and Robert Hayward — have each given encouragement and support, and the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University generously urged me not to rush a book that took longer than expected. Several doctoral students at Durham have been to varying degrees co-workers in this exploration, and have given friendship, advice, and research support, including Gary Griffith, Debbie Watson, Dean Pinter, Ben Blackwell, Kyle Wells, John Goodrich, Susan Mathew, Wesley Hill, Jeanette Hagen, and David Briones. Three others — Matthew Scott, Jonathan Linebaugh, and Orrey McFarland — have made particularly significant contributions, both to me personally and to the analysis of texts and ideas: I could not count the times we have chewed over this project, in person and by email, both during their doctoral research and afterwards, and their input has always been of immense value. The research foundations were laid during a period of leave in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2009-10, and I remain ever grateful for the hospitality of Paul Trebilco and of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago, where I also had the privilege of offering the De Carle Lectures in 2010. Since then I have been fortunate to receive feedback and constructive criticism on many elements of this book in lectures, seminars, and conference papers in Melbourne, Sydney, Vancouver, Chicago, Singapore, Copenhagen, Berne, Heidelberg, Groningen, and several universities in the UK. Highlights have included the Hooker Lectures at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), the annual lecture for the International Centre for Biblical Interpretation (University of Gloucestershire), the inaugural lecture at the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible (St. Mary’s University, London), the Nils Dahl Lecture (Oslo University), and the Ethel Wood Lecture (King’s College, London). In each case, the audience has been kind enough to pose challenging questions and to point me in fruitful directions, only some of which I have so far been able to pursue. As this project grew, I realized that there are dimensions of gift-giving in Paul that I would not be able to cover in this book, at the human level of gift-reciprocity. I hope to return to these in a subsequent volume.

I record my gratitude to the British Academy, who funded a year of research leave (2010-11, on the BARDA scheme), without which this project would not have got beyond its initial stage. Many friends around the world have offered wisdom and support along this lengthy journey, among whom I am especially grateful to Susan Eastman, Beverly Gaventa, Barry Matlock, Stephen Chester, Lou Martyn, Stephen Westerholm, Troels Engberg-Pedersen (who suggested my title), and Tom Wright (whose Paul and the Faithfulness of God appeared too late for interaction here). Diana, my wife, has put up with my preoccupation with this book well beyond what was reasonable, and for this, as for so much else, I offer my deep and heartfelt thanks.

Michael Thomson and his colleagues at Eerdmans have waited patiently for a long-delayed book, and I am very grateful for their commitment to this project from the start. At the final stages I have been extremely fortunate to have Orrey McFarland as editor of my manuscript. He has saved me from many errors (all that remain are, of course, my responsibility), while his extensive knowledge of the subject has made him a superb dialogue partner over many years. His editorial labor on the text and the bibliography has been immense, and I am greatly indebted to him for his care and attention to detail. Finally, Tavis Bohlinger was enormously helpful in the labor of proofreading and indexing, for which I am hugely grateful.

I dedicate this book to John Riches, who for nearly two decades was my colleague in New Testament at Glasgow University and, more than that, became a mentor and friend, one who inspired me to explore the history of reception of Paul and to tease out what it was that made Paul’s letters so fertile for the Christian tradition.

EASTER 2015

Abbreviations

Abbreviations of primary and secondary sources follow the SBL Handbook of Style, with the addition of the following:

CO Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863-1900)

DK Die Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels and W. Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951-52)

LW Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. J. Pelikan and H. L. Lehmann (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-1986)

WA Dr. Martin Luthers Werke, 69 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883-1993)

Prologue

Paul is famous for speaking of Christ with the language of gift. Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift (2 Cor 9:15), he exclaims, referring to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The giver of the gift can equally be figured as Christ himself, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age (Gal 1:4). A rich variety of gift-terms pepper Paul’s discourse; among them χάρις — a common Greek word for gift or favor — is traditionally translated (via the Latin gratia) as grace. You know the grace (χάρις) of our Lord Jesus Christ, Paul reminds the Corinthians (2 Cor 8:9); I do not reject the grace of God (Gal 2:21). Paul’s converts have experienced being called in grace (Gal 1:6), and so has he himself (Gal 1:15; cf. 1 Cor 15:9-10). Under the influence of Paul, the language of gift and grace has become central to the Christian theological tradition. Radical readings of this Pauline motif — by Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth, to name some of the most famous — have caused significant shifts in the history of Christian theology. Within Christian piety, the language of grace has become embedded in prayers and hymns, as a means of recognizing God’s gratuitous initiative toward inadequate or worthless human recipients. Many individual believers connect most deeply with Paul’s theology in their personal celebration of amazing grace.

Paul is also well known as an apostle to the Gentiles, the missionary theologian who preached the good news to Gentiles in the cities of the Roman world and developed a controversial policy whereby Gentile converts were not required to adopt Jewish customs such as male circumcision or kosher food-laws. Scholars now commonly note that Paul’s theology — including his theology of justification and his famous antithesis between faith in Christ and works of the law — is best understood as articulated in and for this Gentile mission. The creation of new communities of Jews and Gentiles in Christ was central to Paul’s purpose and to his understanding of history, since he identified here the fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham and a sign of hope for Israel.

Do these two aspects of Paul — his theology of grace and his establishment of churches that bridged the division between Jews and non-Jews — belong together? Does his theology of grace accompany his social practice in the formation of innovative communities? Is Paul’s theology, in its original context, as much about social as individual transformation, and does the gift of God in Christ ground the creation of communities capable of challenging taken-for-granted norms?

In the Christian tradition, Paul’s theology of grace has often been interpreted as the antithesis of Judaism, as if by Paul’s day Judaism had corrupted its biblical theology of grace with a soteriology of works-righteousness and reward. Paul’s language, laden with nuances derived from internal Christian disputes, has been conscripted to differentiate Christianity from Judaism on these terms, and to diminish the latter. On this reading, Paul was the premier theologian of grace who resisted the legalism of late Judaism, a works-based religion that amounted to auto-salvation. In recent decades this negative image of Judaism has been challenged with a counter-image, presenting Judaism as a religion of grace. Students of Judaism have traced grace everywhere in Second Temple literature, as the foundation of Israel’s covenant relationship with God and the frame within which the Torah was observed. Thus, for many, Paul says nothing remarkable about grace, and if his theology departs in any respect from his Jewish tradition, this has little if anything to do with grace.

But if grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism — in the celebration of divine beneficence, goodness, and mercy — is it everywhere the same? Are Jewish configurations of this topic uniform, or is the map of Jewish theology over-simplified if labelled a religion of grace? Might there be various construals of divine mercy and goodness, and of their relationship to justice? Is there evidence for diversity, even debate, regarding the generosity of God, its expressions, its beneficiaries, and its patterns of distribution? If so, where should Paul be placed within this Jewish diversity?

More fundamentally, what do we mean by grace? In the Christian tradition, the nature of grace has been the subject of intense controversy and polemical redefinition; the term comes to us already over-determined by particular connotations. It is the strategy of this book to place the relevant terms and concepts, both those of Paul and those of his fellow Jews, within the category of gift. This is not to say that all the vocabulary we take into our purview is best translated as gift: in some cases, even for χάρις, that is manifestly not the case. It is rather to claim that the conceptual field we are studying, with its varied terminology, is best captured by the anthropological category of gift. This category is broad, but covers a sphere of voluntary, personal relations that are characterized by goodwill in the giving of some benefit or favor and that elicit some form of reciprocal return that is both voluntary and necessary for the continuation of the relationship. Hence, our study is confined to no single term (and certainly not to χάρις); its focus is on concepts, not words. Among other things, by approaching this topic through the category of gift we hope to gain some analytical distance from the specific theological meanings of grace, even where we continue to use that term.

Ever since Mauss’s anthropological classic Essai sur le Don, the notion of gift as a form of reciprocity that is basic to society has fascinated anthropologists and historians, who have used this category to analyze social structures and their changes over time.¹ The deployment of the concept by Derrida has occasioned a flurry of philosophical treatments of this topic, ranging from phenomenology to economics, while theologians have embraced gift as a framework for exploring a large range of theological topics.² Concepts of gift have been used to chart intellectual and social trends over the centuries down to the present peculiarities of Western, postmodern capitalism.³ It is important to be conscious of this history, not least so as to free ourselves from modern assumptions regarding the free gift, but the focus of attention here will be the historical meanings of gift at the time of Paul and his Jewish contemporaries. A number of recent books have made valuable contributions to this enterprise, placing Paul’s theology and practice of grace in the context of gifts and benefactions in the Greco-Roman world.⁴ A contextual approach such as this seems the most promising addition to the long history of the scholarly study of grace in Paul and his contemporaries.⁵

An anthropological approach reveals how complex and multi-faceted is the business of gift-giving and helps to separate facets of grace that are traditionally run together. Studies of grace have directed their attention sometimes to the character of the giver, sometimes to the nature of the gift, and sometimes to the relationship between the giver and the recipient. Is God gracious in being purely generous, to the exclusion of judgment or wrath? Is grace a power, a decision, a gift, or some combination of these three? Is it to be found in creation, or in historical events, or in divine predestination before all time? Is grace free in its abundance, or in its application to worthy and unworthy alike, or in not requiring a return? The more we probe, the greater the complexity of the topic.

The book before you is large, but even so has limits. The title, Paul and the Gift, has a double nuance. It gestures toward Mauss and thus toward the framing of our discussion within the anthropology of gift. But it indicates also that our primary focus will be on divine gift-giving, which for Paul is focused and fulfilled in the gift of Christ (the gift). There are many aspects of gift-giving on the human level that are significant for Paul but not investigated here: the formation of community through reciprocity, the Jerusalem collection, the gifts of the Spirit, and the mutuality of gift and need in the body of Christ. All of these were intended to be part of this project, but will have to wait for a subsequent book. What lies before you is a reconsideration of grace within the anthropology and history of gift, a study of Jewish construals of divine beneficence in the Second Temple period, and, within that context, a new appraisal of Paul’s theology of the Christ-event as gift, as it comes to expression in Galatians and Romans.

The first part of this book sets the foundation for the rest, and those inclined to skim through other parts of the volume are encouraged to read at least chapters 1 and 2. The first chapter frames our topic in the anthropology of gift and in the historical realities of gift-reciprocity in the Greco-Roman (including the Jewish) world. Chapter 2 then provides some crucial analytical tools, introducing the notion of a perfection (the drawing out of a concept to an end-of-the-line extreme) and suggesting six ways in which gift-giving has been perfected, particularly with reference to God. (Ideally, of course, there should have been seven.) The long chapter 3 is also foundational. It charts a number of points in the history of reception of Paul that continue to shape our understanding of the topic of grace. It is crucial to attempt to understand these figures, not least at a time when dismissive and poorly informed comments on Augustine and Luther have gained currency in New Testament scholarship.⁶ Disaggregating the six perfections of grace proves to be helpful in understanding the history of reception of Paul, explaining why interpreters who equally emphasize grace interpret it in different and even contradictory ways.

The second part of this volume, on divine gift in Second Temple Judaism, provides an alternative to a central thesis of Sanders’s famous Paul and Palestinian Judaism.⁷ It selects five Jewish texts in which divine beneficence is a central theme and analyzes their theologies in depth. What emerges is not uniformity but diversity, of a type very different from Sanders’s image of covenantal nomism, a diversity again made visible by disaggregating the differing perfections of grace. Readers primarily interested in Paul may want to go first to the concluding chapter of this part (chapter 10), but I hope that they will be sufficiently intrigued to read at least some of these studies of Jewish texts that are important in their own right. I also hope that scholars of Second Temple Judaism will find here readings that further the scholarly analysis of some fascinating texts.

Part III (chapters 11-14) offers a reading of Galatians from the perspective of Paul’s theology of grace. Of course, not every part of this letter can be discussed in detail, but I offer an integrated reading of its theological logic in a fashion that goes beyond both the Augustinian-Reformation tradition of interpretation and the new perspective on Paul. In comparison with my earlier work on Galatians,⁸ I here advance a fuller and perhaps more convincing interpretation of a letter that through the work of Martyn, Dunn, and others has become a storm-center of Pauline scholarship.

The final part of the book (chapters 15-17) consists of a reading of Romans, necessarily also selective but intended to establish the coherence of a letter that is often reduced to its parts; it deliberately climaxes in a discussion of Romans 9–11, which the majority of scholars now consider central to the letter, but many have judged to be self-contradictory. A number of similarities and differences between Romans and Galatians appear in this reading. Readers are encouraged to read the whole of this part as a single entity, even if their primary interest is in one or another segment of the letter.

The conclusions draw the threads of this volume together by identifying its key contributions in a number of areas. Readers who wish to know where this lengthy journey is heading are welcome to start there and to work backwards into the meat of the book. Alternatively, its theses can be summarized in shortened form as follows:

1. Grace is a multi-faceted concept best approached through the category of gift. It is susceptible to perfection (conceptual extension) in a number of different ways, which do not constitute a unified package. Some who discuss this theme will maximize the superabundance, the priority, or the efficacy of grace, and others its incongruity with the worth of the recipients (as gift to the unworthy). Others again will urge the singularity of grace (that God is nothing but gracious), and some that God’s gifts are given with no strings attached. These are not better or worse interpretations of grace, just different, and it is perfectly possible to speak of grace without defining it, for instance, as gift to the unworthy. These perfections have been variously deployed in the history of reception of Paul, though some are better supported than others by the Pauline texts themselves. Much in Jewish interpretations of grace, and in the history of interpretation of Paul, can be clarified by distinguishing between these six perfections.

2. Grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism but not everywhere the same. Instead of uniformity, a careful examination of the texts indicates diversity in their representations of divine beneficence; they differ, for instance, on whether God’s mercy is properly applied without regard to worth. Paul stands in the midst of this diversity. His theology of grace does not stand in antithesis to Judaism, but neither is there a common Jewish view with which it wholly coincides.

3. Paul’s theology of grace characteristically perfects the incongruity of the Christ-gift, given without regard to worth. This theology is articulated within and for Paul’s Gentile mission, and grounds the formation of innovative communities that crossed ethnic and other boundaries. This incongruous gift bypasses and thus subverts pre-constituted systems of worth. It disregards previous forms of symbolic capital and thus enables the creation of new communities whose norms are reset by the Christ-gift itself. Grace took its meaning in and from Paul’s experience and social practice: the nature of the gift was embodied and clarified in novel social experiments. In the subsequent interpretation of Paul, within an established Christian tradition, this motif has played a number of other roles, but has generally shifted from undermining the believers’ previous criteria of worth to undercutting their self-reliance in attaining to Christian norms or their understanding of this effort as necessary for salvation.

I hope that the reading of Paul offered here will prove to be historically plausible, exegetically responsible, theologically informed, and (as had better be declared up front) hermeneutically useful. No one reads from nowhere, and this reading of the evidence, like every other, has its own context and interests. It springs from the conviction that a respectful, though not uncritical, reading of Paul contains resources that are theologically important today, though in ways that stretch beyond the usual interpretative frameworks. Paul has the capacity to think about communities and their social identities, and the ability to reset their norms around the Christ-event by a theology of grace that suspends other criteria of worth; such tools may prove valuable for churches that are required to rethink their identity and social location in a pluralist or secularizing context. By a strange paradox, Paul may be most significant today when he is most carefully re-situated in his own original context.

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1. M. Mauss, Essai sur le Don: Forme et Raison de l’Échange dans les Sociétés Archaïques, in Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 145-279 (first published in 1925). Translated into English as M. Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Hall (London: Routledge, 1990). Famous historical studies of the gift include N. Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For detail on the anthropology and history of gift, see chapter 1, below.

2. J. Derrida, Given Time, vol. 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Cf. J.-L. Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. J. L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); K. Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). The theology of Milbank has recently been centered on this theme; see, e.g., J. Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003).

3. A recent overview, broad but well informed, is provided by P. J. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).

4. E.g., S. Joubert, Paul as Benefactor: Reciprocity, Strategy, and Theological Reflection in Paul’s Collection (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); J. R. Harrison, Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). See further below, 3.7.3.

5. Classics in this field include G. P. Wetter, Charis: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des ältesten Christentums (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913); J. Moffatt, Grace in the New Testament (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931); and J. Wobbe, Der Charis-Gedanke bei Paulus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1932). More recent treatments include D. Zeller, Charis bei Philon und Paulus (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1990), and B. Eastman, The Significance of Grace in the Letters of Paul (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

6. My intent is similar to that of S. Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The Lutheran Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), though my focus is primarily on the topic of grace.

7. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977).

8. J. M. G. Barclay, Obeying the Truth: A Study of Paul’s Ethics in Galatians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988).

Part I

The Multiple Meanings of Gift and Grace

Chapter 1

The Anthropology and History of the Gift

Gift is neither a single phenomenon nor a stable category. A great variety of objects, acts, and relationships have been regarded as gifts in different cultures and at different times. Likewise, in many cultures, the definition of gift (in distinction from other forms of exchange) has altered over time. If Paul and his contemporaries spoke about divine and human benevolence using the language of gift, we need to be sure that we know what is implied in the evocation of such terms, and what is not. A modern Western dictionary tells us that gift means something handed over gratuitously, for nothing.¹ But even the slightest knowledge of antiquity would inform us that gifts were given with strong expectations of return — indeed, precisely in order to elicit a return and thus to create or enhance social solidarity. Those of us brought up in the modern West are likely to be surprised (even shocked) by the gift practices of non-Western cultures today. We should expect a similar or even greater surprise when we encounter ancient practices and opinions.

In this chapter I hope to achieve three ends: first, to use the rich discussion of the gift in the field of anthropology in order to raise appropriate questions about the operation of gifts in contexts outside and before modern Western culture (1.1); second, to outline the role of gifts or benefactions in the Greco-Roman world contemporary to Paul (1.2); and third, to trace what has happened to notions of gift in Western modernity, in order to alert us to unconscious assumptions liable to distort our reading of first-century practices and texts (1.3). (When in a subsequent chapter [3] we examine significant moments in the interpretation of Paul on grace, it may prove possible to identify correlations between shifts in the reception of Pauline theology and changes in conceptions of the gift.) By pursuing these three ends, we begin to interrogate what is meant by gift and grace and to lay both conceptual and historical foundations for the investigations to follow in the rest of this book.

1.1. The Gift in Anthropological Perspective

1.1.1. Mauss and the Gift

Marcel Mauss’s famous Essai sur le Don (1925) is justly regarded as the seminal treatment of our topic, spawning a vast array of anthropological research and academic debate in subsequent decades.² In this uneven but immensely suggestive essay, Mauss harvested the research of ethnographers working at various points around the Pacific Rim (on the western seaboard of America and Canada; in Melanesia; and in the Polynesian islands, including the Maori population of Aotearoa/New Zealand), supplementing this with his own encyclopedic knowledge of ancient languages and texts in the Indo-European tradition. Reconfiguring the sociological tradition of Durkheim (his uncle), Mauss took care to use detailed and historically specific ethnographic evidence, but constructed from it a synthetic hypothesis about a core characteristic of archaic societies, which he called le régime du don or le système des dons échangés.³ His analysis was innovative in interpreting society as a totality, in all its interconnected and correlative parts; it was also powerful in suggesting how, in archaic societies, the gift-system was basic to, and the glue between, all the realms which modernity has distinguished — economics, law, kinship, religion, aesthetics, ritual, and politics.⁴ Although the essay title speaks of le Don, the term Mauss preferred was the old-fashioned French prestations (with a meaning something like obligatory community services): the gift being discussed is not confined to objects (or people) passed from one hand to another, but includes a large range of favors and services, symbolic and material, performed by one party for another. Mauss’s thesis is that in such societies the exchange of such prestations constitutes a unifying social choreography under different forms and for reasons different from those with which we are familiar.⁵

Mauss identified three key elements in l’institution de la prestation totale: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to return.⁶ Each of these interdependent moves carries the force of social necessity, since they constitute the most important bonds of society (and of relations between humans and gods). Families and groups (tribes) are tied together internally and externally by the offering and receiving of gifts — an unwillingness to receive is a sign of hostility or mistrust. Since things are never completely detached from those carrying out the exchange, the mutual ties and alliance that they establish are comparatively indissoluble.⁷ Such bonds may be the chief source of cohesion in a gift-centered culture, although their very significance is also often the occasion for rivalry and competition. Mauss was fascinated by the extremes of agonistic gift-giving in the potlatch, the enormous disposal (even destruction) of wealth that had been reported (and perhaps misunderstood) by ethnographers among the First Nations of the North American western seaboard.⁸ As he rightly noted, generosity in such contexts is a form of power — a display of wealth that challenges the honor of others by requiring them to reciprocate with an even greater return. He noted how in many contexts gift-giving operates as a substitute for war — soothing or sublimating hostility with gifts that constitute either challenge or riposte.⁹ In such a system, how and to whom one gives matters greatly. A gift given inappropriately or received in the wrong spirit can create resentment, even hostility (as Mauss noted, the word Gift in German can mean poison).¹⁰ And, given the importance of the tie created by gifts, the choice of recipient is strategic. Commenting on the kula gifts circulated around the Trobriand Islands, Mauss notes: They seek out the best possible partner in the opposing tribe. The affair is a serious matter, for the association one attempts to create establishes a kind of clan link between the partners.¹¹ If there is a danger in omitting (and therefore offending) powerful people from the circle of recipients of one’s gift,¹² there is also a danger in including unfitting recipients, who would be unable to make a return, or from whom one would not wish to receive it.¹³

Mauss’s essay specifically sets out to explain the obligation to return a gift. Whence comes the pressure (real even if not enforceable in law) for the gift to be reciprocated to an equal if not greater value?¹⁴ Why is it that a gift is received with a burden attached?¹⁵ His answer is that the thing or service given is not detachable from the person who gives it, and that the tie with the donor can only be acknowledged by a counter-gift. In this connection, he famously (and controversially) made appeal to a report from a Maori informant, who spoke of the hau of the gift that had to return to the giver.¹⁶ Taking this to refer to the spirit inhabiting the gift, Mauss concluded that

one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from someone is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, his soul…. The thing given is not inactive. Invested with life, often possessing individuality, it seeks to return to what Hertz called its place of origin or to produce, on behalf of the clan and the native soil from which it sprang, an equivalent to replace it.¹⁷

Elsewhere, Mauss speaks of the social forces obliging a return — the loss of honor that would result from failure to reciprocate¹⁸ or the general need to maintain a profitable alliance with the donor.¹⁹ But he is generally concerned to emphasize the fact that the gifts themselves were not simply objects, that is, the passive, depersonalized things that are passed from one person to another; rather, they had a personality and an inherent power.²⁰ The very distinction between property and persons, which is basic to Western legal systems at least since Roman times, is, he insists, absent from the archaic societies he is analyzing:²¹ the gifts not only belong to people, they are invested with the personality of the donor.

Mauss thus observed that his analysis requires a mixing, or scrambling, of the categories and values that have become associated with gifts and their opposites in modern, Western culture. At the beginning of the essay, he speaks of gifts that are apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested, as if they were part of a polite fiction and social deceit.²² But by the end, he suggests that, more fundamentally, our polarized categories need to be reassessed:

These concepts of law and economics that it pleases us to contrast: liberty and obligation; liberality, generosity, and luxury, as against savings, interest, and utility — it would be good to put them into the melting pot once more…. This [Trobriand] notion is neither that of the free, purely gratuitous rendering of total services [prestation] nor that of production and exchange purely interested in what is useful. It is a sort of hybrid which flourished.²³

In this connection, Mauss criticizes the representation of the Trobriand gift-system offered by Malinowski (his chief informant on the kula exchange). Malinowski had distinguished between various kinds of gifts, placing at one end of the spectrum what he considered free or pure gifts — gifts given willingly and free of any counter-gift — which he found operative between husbands and wives, and fathers and children.²⁴ As Mauss insists, this moral gradation of gifts is inapplicable and loaded with inappropriate assumptions: if, as Malinowski himself reported, husbands’ gifts to wives are regarded in their culture as a kind of salary for sexual services rendered, then that is what they were, an obligatory counter-gift that is not at all free or pure in a modern sense.²⁵ In effect, Mauss insists that gifts can be both voluntary and obliged, both disinterested and self-interested, both free and compulsory: if we find this confusing or nonsensical, the problem may lie with the categories that we have invented.

The boldness and fertility of Mauss’s essay includes his suggestion that the economy of gift-exchange that he identified in archaic societies also lies at the root of Indo-European society, and can be traced in shadowy outline in the early texts and customs of Indian, German, and Roman cultures.²⁶ He thus suggests not an absolute contrast between different cultures of gift, but a trajectory, by which Western culture has evolved out of a common total system of gift into the differentiated domains and practices of today. In this regard, he suggests that it is precisely the Romans and Greeks, who, perhaps following upon the Semites of the north and west, invented the distinction between personal and property law, separated sale from gift and exchange, isolated the moral obligation and contract, and in particular, conceived the difference that exists between rites, laws, and interests.²⁷ He does not altogether bemoan this great revolution, but he notes the way it has led to a conceptual distinction between free gifts and obligatory exchange (in sales or contracts), as also between disinterested generosity and utilitarian or interested procedures of quid pro quo. The final chapter of the essay celebrates co-operative gift-relations as against the cold and calculating ethos of utilitarian individualism, contributing to political debates of the 1920s by showing that alternative systems of social relation have left traces even in twentieth-century Europe, and can be created anew.²⁸ In this way, Mauss indicated that the analysis of gift-relations could play a crucial role in revealing the structural relations operative within any society; he thus placed gift at the centre of subsequent anthropological analysis and debate.

There is much in Mauss’s essay that is (as he acknowledged) incomplete and ambiguous, but also (and partly for that reason) much that has proved fertile for future thought and research. It would be a mistake to use Mauss’s analysis of archaic societies as a kind of model, applicable to every relation of gift: as we have seen, he was acutely aware of cultural developments that have changed the role and even the understanding of gifts over time.²⁹ But his work generates fruitful questions for the analysis of gift-relations, their functions within society, their relation to other domains (if their reach is not comprehensive), and the values and power-dynamics with which they are loaded. By highlighting the role of gifts in the creation of social solidarity, and the patterns of obligation which they represent and induce, Mauss alerts us to aspects of gifts/benefactions in antiquity that will be important to explore. He simultaneously draws attention to the cultural relativity of modern assumptions about gifts, which are liable to distort our perspective on the past.

1.1.2. The Anthropology of Gift Post-Mauss

The iconic status of Mauss’s Essai sur le Don ensured that, in the extensive subsequent debates, it was both co-opted and criticized in the service of various agendas.³⁰ This fate was evident already in the way Lévi-Strauss presented Mauss as the forerunner of a structuralist analysis of culture: he took Mauss’s three movements of gift (giving, receiving, and returning) to constitute a single structure of exchange, a system of reciprocal relations lying deep in the universal, but unconscious structures of the human mind.³¹ Lévi-Strauss criticized the role Mauss had given to the Maori notion of hau (the spirit in the gift): such native mystification was not necessary to explain the obligation to return the gift, which was built into the very structure of gift-reciprocity.³² However, Mauss’s question about the obligation to return has continued to haunt debates about the gift for many decades. His interpretation of the Maori hau has been strongly disputed, and his appeal to the notion of a non-material presence of the giver in the gift has proved distasteful to those who would banish such ideas as the naïve objectification of social forces.³³

Everyone is agreed that recipients of gifts are under a strong (though non-legal) obligation to make some return for a gift — even if only in gratitude. Is this in order to preserve honor, or out of ambition for some further gift (i.e., out of the self-interest of the recipient)? Does it represent the power of the donor, in some sense present in the gift, laying on the recipient the requirement to return?³⁴ It seems impossible to decide absolutely between these forms of explanation, and it may be best to conclude more generally that the return of the gift represents the desire to reproduce social relations: each party to the gift-relation is in some sense produced by the exchange between them, and social relations can only be maintained or reproduced in the continual motion of exchange.³⁵ In this sense, the counter-gift is rarely the end of the relationship, replacing an inequality with a stable equilibrium: it is liable to constitute, rather, a form of giving-again, adding to the gift-relationship a continuing forward momentum.

Since Mauss, the analysis of such exchange relations has been further refined, as research has probed more deeply into a variety of traditional societies. Weiner brought to the fore the gender-dimension of gifts, and the vital but often unnoticed role of women in gift-relations, though her analysis of male exploitation was challenged by Strathern, who questioned her use of Western notions of identity and ownership.³⁶ The importance of honor or prestige has also been emphasized by a variety of researchers: if material gifts are returned in the form of honor, such symbolic capital should not be downplayed as an insubstantial return, since the power that is entailed by the possession of honor may be precisely the purpose of the gift-giving. The power-dynamics of gift-giving, already recognized by Mauss, have indeed drawn much attention. Sahlins, for instance, noted the importance of the time delay between the gift and the return, and of the imprecision in the value of the gift: both keep the obligations of the recipient open-ended, and cement the power of the original donor.³⁷ Gift-giving is thus by no means always an innocent or even a friendly enterprise, but is easily manipulated by those in a position of power: as Sahlins cynically remarks, everywhere in the world the indigenous category for exploitation is ‘reciprocity.’ ³⁸

As Mauss had noted, there are some forms of exchange which are not gift: he learned from Malinowski, for instance, that even in the Trobriand Islands there are forms of trade (gimwali) that are very different from the personalized and enduring relationships formed by kula-gifts.³⁹ Even gift exchange can take extremely diverse forms, and gifts can vary greatly in their value, in the personality they bear, their productivity, and the time gap between gift and return. In this connection, Sahlins helpfully charted the correlation between different kinds of exchange and the different types of people with whom that exchange is carried out. For immediate kin, or those in a closest relationship, he mapped forms of generalized (or indefinite) reciprocity, where the counter is not stipulated by time, quantity, or quality: the expectation of reciprocity is indefinite.⁴⁰ At a midpoint, there is balanced reciprocity or transactions which stipulate returns of commensurate worth or utility within a finite and narrow period:⁴¹ such, he suggests, are liable to occur between individuals or groups on friendly but less intimate terms. At the unsociable extreme he places negative reciprocity, where, in a contest of opposed interests, each looks to maximize utility at the other’s expense.⁴² The mapping is necessarily simplified, drawing from a wide range of ethnographic material, but the essential point is valid: different forms of exchange reflect, and create, different degrees of social proximity and thus different kinds of social relation. Not every gift-relation is the same, and not everyone is a desirable partner. Even a lavish giver is not indiscriminate: gifts are carefully placed, or refused, according to prior and desired relations, and even in societies strongly determined by gift-relations there are limits to gift-distribution where the ties which gifts produce would be unprofitable or unfit.⁴³

Gift-research also shows that not everything is exchangeable; some things simply cannot be given away. Mauss had noticed that even in the potlatch, some family possessions are sacra and therefore cannot be given, and this notion of inalienable goods has been the subject of much further research.⁴⁴ One might distinguish here between different kinds of inalienability. There are some possessions that simply cannot be alienated (given away) at all, without loss of individual or group identity. There are others that are in one sense given, but in another sense still belong to the giver: a sister remains a sibling even when a family gives her in marriage, and a group may retain a strong attachment to, and interest in, property or possessions even after they are given away. Other gifts again are given on the expectation that they, or something closely equivalent, will be returned: like a ball on an elastic string, they remain ever liable to be retracted into the hands of the original giver. The relationship between objects that can and that cannot be given may vary greatly in traditional cultures, but inalienable goods serve to remind us of the strong investment of the giver in the gift.

As we saw, Mauss’s interpretation of gift-giving advocated a conceptual scrambling of contemporary polarities between exchanges that are free or obliged, pure or interested. But it is striking how often these modern moral polarities have crept back into the anthropology of gift. Sahlins persisted in regarding certain types of gift (at the generalized end of his spectrum) as pure and altruistic, labeling contrasting forms of exchange selfish or interested.⁴⁵ In the preface to the second edition of his work (2004), he recognized that there is something wrong with assessing economic life as a contest between self-satisfaction and social constraint: too much here suggests the thoroughly bourgeois standpoint of how individuals go about acquiring and disposing of the material means of their personal existence.⁴⁶ But the main text of his work is still beset with antithesis between sacrifice in favor of another and self-interested gain, or between obligations and altruistic assistance, as if the categories were unproblematic.⁴⁷ The same categories dominate the analyses of Weiner,⁴⁸ and reappear in a subtle form in the famous analysis of Kabyle gift-giving by Bourdieu. Acutely sensitized to the power-dynamics of gift-giving, Bourdieu argued that there is a deliberate ambiguity, a double reality, in the exchange of gift. The official reality is of generosity, with the delayed return imagined as an independent act of disinterested giving; but the objective reality is of power, domination, and the law of self-interest, cloaked by relations of gift. In his view, it is important to regard both aspects as socially real, and not merely to discount one in favor of the other. But he concludes that the objective reality requires for its working a careful, even conscious policy of self-deception. When domination cannot take place overtly, it must be disguised under the veil of enchanted relationships, the official model of which is presented by relations between kinsmen; in order to be socially recognized it must get itself misrecognized.⁴⁹ Thus, the whole society pays itself in the false coin of its dream;⁵⁰ everyone plays their part in the fiction. It is hard to avoid the impression that Bourdieu’s Marxian analysis requires the subtle reimposition of exactly those polarities (between interested and disinterested, obligated and free) that Mauss suggested were liable to skew our perception of gifts. If, as Mauss insists, gifts in traditional societies exhibit both things at once (and not just one at one level, and one at another), it is important precisely not to play off against one another characteristics that are not contradictory in their cultural context.

One further trend in the anthropology of gift should also be noted here. If traditional gift-societies still preserve a place for ordinary trade, that space has grown greatly in importance where the Western market for commodities has penetrated cultures traditionally built around gift.⁵¹ In the analysis of this phenomenon, there has arisen a tendency to essentialize a distinction between a Western commodity-economy and a traditional gift-economy, the one characterized by the alienation of goods, in a cold and calculated exchange, the other by the personal relations in which people and property are closely interlinked.⁵² There is value in this distinction if it can be used to question our assumptions about exchange; but there is a danger of making gift in every sense the opposite of commodity and thus forgetting that in traditional or archaic societies gifts too are exchanged and carry heavy loads of obligation. What has happened to gifts in the modern West is a subject we will explore below (1.3), but for now we must note the danger of retrojecting a modern conceptualization of the polarity commodity vs. gift onto the relations between gifts and commodities in a pre-modern context.

The anthropology of traditional gift-giving offers no simple model of gift-relations, and is not straightforwardly transferable to the world of Paul and his contemporaries, who are the main subject of this book. It cannot be used to essentialize the gift, or to provide a defined and clearly delimited concept. But it does generate some valuable angles of perception, raising salient questions and sensitivities that alert us to possibilities we might miss (or misconstrue) from a modern perspective. Thus, for our further study we should note:

1. It may be helpful to work with a broad definition of gifts, including favors, benefactions, and services of many kinds. Such services may include important forms of symbolic capital such as prestige or honor, which may be precisely the kind of return that more material gifts expect, especially in asymmetrical relationships. Gifts and counter-gifts may be presumed to function as important media of power.

2. It is important to map the role and the significance of gifts within the larger social matrix of relations: how significant are they beside other modes of transaction and forms of exchange? What spheres of social life are affected by gift relations (or kept separate from them)? And how do gifts relate to trade and commodity exchange?

3. It is equally important to map what kinds of relationship are created, cemented, and reproduced by gift-relations, and by what kinds of gift.⁵³ For instance, one should trace, where possible, the correlation between the depth of gift-relations and the intimacy or importance of the connection thus formed. It is important also to observe where gift-giving does not take place, and where discrimination is exercised in the distribution of the gift.

4. We should assume, unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, that gifts carry expectations of a return. The strength and nature of the obligation to return is worth observing closely, as is also the sense in which the gifts themselves are (or are not) alienated from the giver. Some form of reciprocity is likely to be present, since gifts have generally functioned to create social bonds, which can only be recognized and reproduced through return.⁵⁴ But the form this takes, and the weight of obligation entailed, may vary greatly from case to case.

5. We should beware the use of value labels such as free and pure in relation to gifts, lest they carry the connotations of modern ideologies of gift, and lest they imply polarities that are not applicable to other cultures and contexts. Thus, we should be open to the possibility that gifts could be, at the same time, both voluntary and obliged, both disinterested and interested, both generous and constrained by the social connections they represent. In any case, as Panoff notes, productive research will not be aided by the elaboration of formal typologies based on moral evaluation.⁵⁵ At the same time, ancient sources themselves may weigh the value of gifts by emotive or moral terminology in ways that signify their symbolic significance relative to other forms of exchange.

As Mauss indicated, the nature of gifts and their relation to other forms of exchange have developed significantly over time.⁵⁶ In order to position our research more precisely, it is therefore necessary to outline the role of gifts or benefactions in the context of the Greco-Roman world contemporary to Paul (1.2) before noting the changes that have taken place in Western culture since that time (1.3). Such changes have inevitably affected the way in which interpreters of Paul (including ourselves) have heard what he has to say about gifts and grace.

1.2. Gift and Reciprocity in the Greco-Roman World

The hybrid adjective Greco-Roman in the title of this section gestures to the complexity of the Mediterranean world in the first century, where the overlay of Roman political power onto Greek traditions created a complex and socially layered interaction of cultural traditions, changing over time and varying from East to West. It will be well to begin by surveying the assumptions of Greek gift-reciprocity and some of its institutional forms, before introducing distinctively Roman systems of patronage and outlining the problematics surrounding gifts or benefactions in the early Roman Empire.⁵⁷

1.2.1. Greek Reciprocity and the Limits of the Gift

It is widely recognized that one of the fundamental principles of Greek social relations, both among humans and in the relationship between humans and gods, was the expectation of reciprocity in gifts, favors and good turns.⁵⁸ Hesiod’s advice on this matter seems well tuned to the everyday lives of farmers:

Invite your friend, but not your enemy,

to dine; especially be cordial to

your neighbour, for if trouble comes at home,

a neighbour’s there, at hand…. Measure carefully

when you must borrow from your neighbour, then,

pay back the same, or more, if possible,

and you will have a friend in time of need.

Shun evil profit, for dishonest gain

is just the same as failure. Love your friends,

visit those who visit you, and give

to him who gives, but not, if he does not.

We give to a generous person (δώτης), but no-one gives

to someone who is stingy (ἀδώτης)….

The man who gives ungrudgingly is glad

at heart, rejoicing in his gift, but if

a man forgets his shame and takes something,

however small, his heart grows stiff and cold. (Works and Days 342-59)⁵⁹

In its commonsense ordinariness, this advice shows acute awareness of the vulnerability of everyday existence: taking care in reciprocal relations not only makes life pleasant; it makes it more secure. It is important to be generous, and glad-heartedly so, but also discriminating and cautious: to give to the stingy, to those who cannot or will not give back, would be as useless as sowing seeds in the sea (Ps.-Phocylides 152). A reputation for grasping is dangerous: when you are the recipient of the gift, it is crucial to give a well-measured return, if possible with sufficient increment to place your friend under obligation (for when you need his aid). Such ordinary reciprocal favor excludes exact calculation, but requires a rough awareness of who is under obligation to whom. Nonetheless, these are gifts — the exchange of services not a trade in goods — and it is crucial that they are suffused with the warm sentiments of friendship.

While every social situation has its specific nuance, these norms of reciprocity could be illustrated a thousand times over from Greek sources of many different kinds. Never specified in legislation (they were too deeply embedded, too obvious, and too incalculable for legal purposes), such norms are the stuff of popular maxims and high literature, the everyday etiquette of social communication as well as the formulaic language of civic proclamation. As everyone knows, one hand washes another (the Greek equivalent of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours); give something and get something (Epicharmus, DK 30). Plenty of popular maxims encourage people to favor a friend while being sure to return a favor.⁶⁰ The rules of gift-reciprocity — the willing exchange of valued items or services, the obligation to return in some form and at some time — are fundamental also to the dynamics of Greek literature, from Homeric epic to tragedy, comedy, and novel: as Sophocles pithily puts it, one favor always begets another (χάρις χάριν γάρ ἐστιν ἡ τικτουσ’ ἀεί, Ajax 522). The semantic field for gifts and counter-gifts embraces a broad array of terms, but prominent are nouns from the δωρ-root (δῶρον, δωρεά, etc.), with their associated verbs (δίδωμι and its counterpart, ἀποδίδωμι), interwoven with nouns and verbs from the χαρ-stem.⁶¹ These latter (among nouns, most commonly χάρις and its plural, χάριτες) typically convey the ethos of the gift as voluntary benevolence, but are also used often for specific acts of beneficence, favor expressed in a particular object or action.⁶² As Sophocles’ line makes clear, the fact that the same term could be used for a favor given and a favor returned made the reciprocity of gift-giving all the more obvious: when χάρις is returned, it is