Steward of God's Mysteries: Paul and Early Church Tradition

By Jerry L. Sumney and Patrick T. Gray

One view that perennially springs up among biblical scholars is that Paul was the inventor of Christianity, or that Paul introduced the idea of a divine Christ to a church that earlier had simply followed the ethical teaching of a human Jesus. In this book Jerry Sumney responds to that claim by examining how, in reality, Paul drew on what the church already believed and confessed about Jesus.

As he explores how Paul's theology relates to that of the broader early church, Sumney identifies where in the Christian tradition distinctive theological claims about Christ, his death, the nature of salvation, and eschatology first seem to appear. Without diminishing significant differences, Sumney describes what common traditions and beliefs various branches of the early church shared and compares them to Paul's thought. Sumney interacts directly with arguments made by those who claim Paul as the inventor of Christianity and approaches the questions raised by that claim in a fresh way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467448987

Jerry L. Sumney

Jerry L. Sumney is Professor of Biblical Studies at Lexington Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky.

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Steward of God’s Mysteries

Paul and Early Church Tradition

Jerry L. Sumney

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

© 2017 Jerry L. Sumney

All rights reserved

Published 2017

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-8028-7361-3

eISBN 978-1-4674-4900-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sumney, Jerry L., author.

Title: Steward of God’s mysteries : Paul and early church tradition / Jerry L. Sumney.

Description: Grand Rapids : Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014595 | ISBN 9780802873613 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Paul, the Apostle, Saint—Theology. | Bible. Epistles of Paul—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS2651 .S86 2017 | DDC 227/.06—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014595

For Tim Stevens,

long-suffering college roommate

and lifelong friend

Contents

Foreword: Paul’s Place in Christian Tradition, by Patrick Gray

Preface

Abbreviations

1.Thinking about Paul’s Place in the Early Church

2.Christ Died for Us: The Meaning of the Death of Jesus

3.Jesus Is Lord: The Identity of Jesus

4.For Our Sins: Understandings of Salvation

5.The Coming of the Lord: Envisioning the Kingdom

6.In Remembrance of Me: The Lord’s Supper

7.I Handed On to You . . . What I Received

Bibliography

Index of Authors

Index of Subjects

Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Texts

Foreword: Paul’s Place in Christian Tradition

Death, Paul tells his Corinthian correspondents, is the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Cor 15:26). At the time of his own death, Paul’s enemies had only just begun their work. Few contemporary scholars know more about Paul’s enemies than Jerry Sumney. In Identifying Paul’s Opponents: The Question of Method in 2 Corinthians (1990) and Servants of Satan, False Brothers, and Other Opponents of Paul (1999), he calls attention to the importance of correctly identifying the adversaries against whom Paul is writing in order to understand his letters. Since the time of F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School in the 1830s, an emphasis on conflict has been central to a dominant approach to the study of Paul and of early Christianity more broadly. Even scholars who question key components of this model find it hard to break free from it. In these works and in subsequent essays, Sumney has shown that opposition to Paul during his lifetime was not simply a function of tensions between Jewish and Gentile factions within the early Christian movement and, furthermore, that a focus on the specific situation behind individual letters is a more reliable way of understanding opposition to Paul than is reliance on tenuous reconstructions cobbled together from multiple sources.

Perhaps one should therefore qualify this assessment of Sumney’s research by saying that few scholars know more about what can and cannot be known about Paul’s enemies. What we know about this opposition comes almost exclusively from Paul’s own letters, especially 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Philippians. His ostensible opponents in these letters may not necessarily think of themselves as such, which may also be true of the ignorant and unstable who twist Paul’s words to their own destruction (2 Pet 3:16). Acts, too, reflects traditions that are negative in their assessment of the apostle, though these perspectives are not those of its author. Those who took issue with Pauline teachings or pastoral practices in his own day have left behind nothing in writing. To be sure, the Letter of James is often taken as a polemic against the notion that faith without works might merit salvation, whether the author’s target is Paul or exaggerated or misunderstood versions of Pauline teaching. The Letter of Jude has likewise been read as making an allusion to Paul and implying that an excessive emphasis upon grace encourages a libertine attitude to morality. Still others see Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount that he has not come to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them as covert criticism of putative Pauline antinomianism. Some go even further, claiming that when Matthew has Jesus conclude that whoever breaks one of the least of the commandments will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven (5:19), he is taking a dig at Paul’s self-identification as the least of the apostles (1 Cor 15:9). Such conjecture can be quite clever, but as often as not too clever by half.

In this volume, Sumney turns his attention to the modern heirs of Paul’s ancient enemies. Pitting Paul against Jesus is one of the oldest attested forms of criticism. It appears as early as the second century with the Ebionites and can be found in a wide range of contexts ever since. Pagans from late antiquity, medieval Jews and Muslims, British Deists, Enlightenment rationalists, philosophers, feminists, poets, playwrights—these and many other observers have charged Paul with unwittingly grafting alien elements on the faith of Jesus or betraying him outright. Sumney continually circles back to three popular iterations of this basic argument—Hyam Maccoby’s Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1987), Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became a Christian (2008), and James D. Tabor’s Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (2012)—though he might have selected many other examples from the last several decades. And these are only examples of book-length critiques written by scholars. The list of luminaries who have compared Paul unfavorably with Jesus in other forms reads like a veritable who’s who of the last two centuries: Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, H. G. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Martin Buber, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, and Carl Jung, to name only a few.

Adjudicating the question of Paul’s fidelity to Jesus and the faith of his earliest followers requires more than simple comparison of the primary account of the apostle’s teaching in his letters with the secondary accounts of Jesus’s teachings found in the Gospels. It is not that any such comparison is a self-evidently misguided task. Rather, subjectivity and confirmation bias inevitably affect the process in such a way that Paul’s supporters and detractors each find only what they seek. Instead, Sumney proposes to compare Paul’s teachings with those of the early church from which, in his own telling, he received the faith.

But in the same way that we are dependent on Paul for information about Paul’s enemies, we have few other sources from which to reconstruct the chain of tradition linking Paul to the early church and thus to the earliest followers of the one he calls Lord. Only in rare instances does he document his sources. Painstaking analysis of the extant forms of this tradition embedded in the letters is required in order to bring some control to the process. In the pages that follow, Sumney does much of the methodological and exegetical heavy lifting that is too often taken for granted. He lays out the criteria he uses in isolating preexisting creedal, confessional, liturgical, hymnic, and other kinds of tradition, enabling the reader to understand the basis on which comparative data might be generated. In so doing, he also makes possible some informed judgments about Paul’s originality or creative fidelity with respect to Jesus and the primitive church in such areas as Christology, soteriology, eschatology, and the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

It is much easier to make facile claims about Paul founding Christianity, by accident or by design, or inventing this or that aspect of Christian theology than it is to engage in close, critical, dispassionate analysis of the primary texts. The devil is in the details. Sumney will have succeeded if his examination of these details makes it more difficult to invoke pat answers that do little to illuminate the origins of Christianity and Paul’s role in it.

PATRICK GRAY

Preface

This book got its start in an invitation to contribute to the 2008 Theological Diversity in Early Christianity section of the Society of Biblical Literature. When I received that invitation to present a paper in their group, I had no idea that I would give so much attention to form-critical analysis of the Pauline letters. But it sparked my interest in examining the ways that Paul was dependent upon the traditions that the church formed before he was a member and outside his sphere of influence. I am grateful for the response to my initial foray into this work by Jennifer Knust at that session. I received good advice on other parts of the work at a session of the 2015 Society for New Testament Study meeting and from Carl Holladay’s response and the comments of others, especially Greg Sterling, to a presentation of parts of it at the 2016 Christian Scholars Conference. I am grateful for all the responses at those meetings and from the faculty colloquy of Lexington Theological Seminary. I am particularly grateful for the conversations about this work that I had with O. Wesley Allen. The thoughts of all of these parties have improved this work in significant ways. Of course, the faults that remain are of my own making.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Maryann Wellman, who was so helpful in combing through and organizing research materials for this project.

Parts of chapters 1 and 2 were published previously in ‘Christ Died for Us’: Interpretations of Jesus’ Death as a Central Element of the Identity of the Early Church, in Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation: Essays in Honour of William S. Campbell, edited by Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 147–72. This material is used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. I thank them for their gracious permission to use it.

Abbreviations

CHAPTER 1

Thinking about Paul’s Place in the Early Church

In this book we will search Paul’s letters for preformed traditions that he did not formulate. We will look for occasions when he uses such traditions as a means to persuade his churches to believe a particular doctrine or act in a particular way. We will observe what kinds of theological claims these traditions make and look for points of continuity and points of difference in relation to Paul’s theology. The point of this examination is to bring some light to a slice of the church’s history in its first few decades, particularly where Paul’s teachings stand in relation to those in the church before him and those in other branches of the church during his ministry. We will try to identify where some distinctive theological claims about Christ, his death, the nature of salvation, and eschatology first seem to appear. We will also examine the traditions about the Lord’s Supper to gain some insight into how they developed.

One view of Paul’s relationship to those in the church before him that is resurrected every twenty years or so claims that Paul is the inventor of Christianity or that Paul is the one who invented the divine Christ; before him, the church had simply followed the ethical teaching of a human Jesus. Among the more recent such works are those of Hyam Maccoby (The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, 1987), Barrie Wilson (How Jesus Became Christian, 2008), and James Tabor (Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, 2012). Modern versions of this thesis go back at least as far as Joseph Klausner (1943), and before him to Adolf Harnack and William Wrede. A similar view of Paul’s relationship to the earlier and non-Pauline branches of the church appears in scholars who see the Q community or others holding to the teaching of Jesus without the christological and soteriological beliefs of the later (post-Pauline) church.¹

It is interesting to note that when Wrede called Paul the second founder of Christianity, he meant it as a compliment.² He meant that Paul turned the church into a universal religion. What Wrede claimed as something good has become an accusation in those who now claim that Paul invented Christianity.³ The tales of how Paul single-handedly took over the church have become more elaborate in these recent claims. The tone and methods of these works are more those of conspiracy theory writings than those of careful history.

In this chapter we will review some aspects of these studies. We begin by looking at some assertions of those who contend that Paul invented Christianity. They identify a number of things about Paul and his teachings that they claim are shocking. We will then make some observations about the methods of historical research they employ. The brief glimpses at these studies will help clear the table before we begin to explore whether or how Paul is dependent on earlier church teaching. We will survey the diversity of views within the early church that Paul’s letters evidence. Finally in this chapter we will set out a method for identifying preformed material in Paul’s letters. This method will guide the work in the rest of the study to try to see what beliefs were held by those outside Paul’s influence.

Assertions That Paul Invented Christianity

The assertion that the religion of Paul was not the religion of Jesus is often claimed to be a radical and hidden idea.⁴ This claim is correct in many ways and not surprising. Jesus was never a Christian and was never a member of the church. The church does not begin until some followers of Jesus experience his resurrection and then have the experience of feeling that the risen Christ is in some way facilitating the presence of God in their midst. The church is composed of those who believe that God vindicated the message and ministry of Jesus through the resurrection. Even by the Gospel accounts, no one believed this before Jesus was crucified. The rest of this book will help one see what kinds of claims this experience led them to make about Jesus. Of course, in the earliest days all church members remained observant Jews. They saw no contradiction between making claims about what God had done in Christ and being faithful Jews.

There is now debate among Pauline scholars about how long the church continued to see itself as a group wholly within Judaism. Some contend that Paul’s churches, which had mostly gentile members, continued to be a subgroup within the local synagogues at least as long as Paul was alive. Even if many of those churches were separate from the local synagogues, as I think they were, Jewish members of those churches would have remained members of their synagogues. The list of troubles Paul says he endured in 2 Cor 11:21b–29 includes chastisements received from synagogue authorities. He continues to submit to the authority of synagogue officials even as he is a missionary of the church. So while Paul is a member of the church and Jesus never was, Paul maintains, at least in some ways, his observance of Judaism. So both Jesus and Paul were adherents of Judaism, but only Paul was a church member. Paul is, then, a member of a different religious movement than Jesus, even though both were observant Jews.

Some who claim that Paul invented Christianity say that he shifted the movement away from an emphasis on the teaching of Jesus to an emphasis on teaching about the Christ.⁵ There is here an important truth that, again, is not really shocking or new. The church from its beginning was not just about passing on the teachings of Jesus. It was a movement that made claims about who Jesus was and, as we will see, began calling him Messiah/Christ very early. Wilson also claims that it is unusual to say that Paul’s religion emerged from a different revelation than that of Jesus.⁶ Of course, since the risen Jesus was the speaker in the Acts accounts of Paul’s revelation, this is hardly surprising news. Indeed, it has to be true.

The claim that there was this shift from the teaching of Jesus to teachings about him, though, contains an internal fallacy; it presents readers with a false dilemma. The move to proclaiming things about Jesus’s identity does not need to signal that his teachings are being ignored. In places it is clear that Paul expects members of his churches to know stories of the life of Jesus and to know his teachings (e.g., 1 Cor 7:10). As we will see, for Jesus’s followers to have a reason to continue to think about his teachings, they had to formulate an understanding of his identity in the wake of his execution as an insurrectionist. So they had to begin proclaiming things about his identity that made him worth remembering, not just remember his teachings. Further, as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza points out, the Jesus traditions were formative for the urban non-Palestinian churches because the first people to take the message outside Palestine were Jews who went to other Jews and synagogue adherents. These missionaries led those who listened to adapt the Jesus tradition to their different cultural settings.⁷

Wilson makes what he also seems to see as a shocking revelation when he says that the New Testament is not a neutral collection of early Christian writings.⁸ This is also true and nearly self-evident. It is clearly a collection intended to help the church maintain its belief in Christ and to guide its behavior. The collection intends its readers to believe certain things about Jesus and to reject other claims. What Wilson and Maccoby want to claim beyond this is that the whole New Testament is the product of the Pauline branch of the church, which is dramatically different from the earlier, Palestinian church.⁹ Looking at traditions in Paul’s letters will help us evaluate whether the divide between the predominantly Jewish churches and those Paul founded is as wide as those who charge Paul with inventing Christianity contend.

Historical Methods

Beyond the sensationalizing of some assertions about the early church, there are also serious questions about the historical methods employed in some of these studies. A prime example is Maccoby’s view of Paul’s psychological motivation to invent Christianity. He notes that the Ebionites say that rather than being a Pharisee, Paul was a gentile who converted to Judaism to marry a priest’s daughter. When the marriage was refused, he turned against the law. Maccoby argues that the truth behind this story is that Paul was in love with Judaism itself. As a deputy of the high priest who persecuted believers in Christ, Paul converted to Judaism. But when his ambitions within Judaism were thwarted, he became involved with the Jesus movement and became the creator of a savior religion.¹⁰

To weave this tale, Maccoby relies on a fourth-century text, the Panarion of Epiphanius. In this work, Epiphanius describes and argues against various understandings of Christianity that he rejects. In his account of the teachings of the Ebionites, Epiphanius says they tell this story of the conversion of Paul and the failed marriage. Maccoby acknowledges that this is not historical, but then chooses elements of it he needs to create his version of Paul. So Maccoby’s view of Paul is based on a psychologizing of an admittedly nonfactual account of Paul’s life that appears in a polemical account of the group whose beliefs contain the story. This is hardly solid historical methodology.

Similarly, Tabor looks to Jerome, who wrote in the late fourth and early fifth century, to support his version of Paul’s biography. While Tabor acknowledges that Paul was Jewish and a Pharisee (and so not as much of a liar as Maccoby charges), he was not from Tarsus but from Gischala in Galilee. While this does not directly contradict what Paul says about himself, neither is it good evidence. Still, Tabor at least does not change what his source says to construct an otherwise unsupported biography of Paul.

Maccoby identifies the Ebionites as the authentic successors of the Jerusalem church.¹¹ It seems likely that the Ebionites were, indeed, a group that grew out of the Palestinian church. The Ebionites continued to be a Torah-observant church, as the Jerusalem church was. But calling them that church’s authentic successors is a value judgment, not a historical statement. Maccoby means that he likes what they taught better than he likes Paul. Maccoby says their beliefs were consistent with the Jerusalem church because they believed, among other things, that Jesus was just a human and that he intended to establish an earthly kingdom.¹² But these beliefs are not really what Epiphanius reports about the Ebionites. Epiphanius does say that some Ebionites believe Jesus was born a human, but he also says that others say he was an archangel (2.30.16.4–5; 2.30.14.4; see other options in 2.30.3.4; 2.30.17.6). Other Ebionites say he was not a human because when his family came to talk with him (Matt 12:46–50) Jesus said that his family members are those who do the will of God (2.30.14.5). Those who do think he was born a human seem to have an adoptionist Christology, though Epiphanius says they do not agree among themselves (2.30.3.4–6; 2.30.18.5–6). If Maccoby is right about what the Jerusalem church believed, the Ebionites did not remain faithful to it. Indeed, Ephiphanius says that the Ebionites even say that Jesus commanded his followers to reject the temple sacrifices (2.20.16.4–7). The Ebionites, then, do not reflect what Maccoby wants to find when we look at the full description in Epiphanius.

When Maccoby moves from constructing a story of Paul’s life, he describes Paul’s religion as a combination of Gnosticism, mystery religions, and Judaism.¹³ Scholars from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century often pointed to elements in those religions as the sources for the teachings of the early church. More recent scholarship acknowledges that there was no fully formed pre-Christian Gnosticism. This means it could not have been a source for Paul. Interpreters are also now more careful about saying that parallels indicate dependence. That is, similarities do not automatically show that one religion was dependent on the other.

Maccoby’s kind of construction of history is also evident in his means of supporting the idea that Paul was a gentile. He identifies Paul as the source of Christian anti-Semitism. This means that Paul had to be a gentile, he argues, because there were no self-hating Jews in the first century. Jewish self-hatred is the product of Christian anti-Semitism.¹⁴

The idea that Jews were not subjected to vehement anti-Semitism before Paul is historically unsustainable. As Pieter van der Horst notes, Most anti-Jewish material from Greek and Latin authors is pre-Christian.¹⁵ From a more academically oriented resource, Louis Feldman states that from 270 BCE on, the constant view of Jews among Greek and Roman authors is negative.¹⁶ In the first century, Josephus (Contra Apion 1.161) and Philo (In Flaccum 1–107 and Legatio ad Gaium 114–39) tell of the abuse of Jews by both riots and government programs.

One clear evidence that this anti-Semitism led some Jews to a desire not to be identified as Jewish is the operation to remove the evidence of circumcision called epispasm. The textual evidence for the practice as a means of trying to appear like a gentile comes from as early as stories of what led to the Maccabean Revolt (1 Macc 1:11–15) and continue through the Mishnah and into the era of the Talmud.¹⁷ There is, then, an abundance of evidence for both anti-Semitism and its effects on how Jews think of themselves before the influence of Paul.

Maccoby, Wilson, and Tabor all cite the Didache as evidence for a type of church that was not influenced by Paul. This document promises to be much more relevant to understanding Paul and the early church than a fourth-century polemical tract. This manual of church teaching and instruction seems to have been written in the late first or perhaps early second century. Interpreters are nearly unanimous in identifying it as a document produced by Jewish church members who remained Torah observant. It represents a branch of the church different from the Pauline churches. While Tabor draws on it for evidence of a number of beliefs, Maccoby and Wilson cite it primarily in discussions of the meaning and practices of the Lord’s Supper. They see great differences between its supper and that in the Pauline churches. Tabor contends that the Didache’s teaching goes back to Jesus and was then perpetuated by James.¹⁸ But there is no textual or historical evidence for these connections beyond the recognition that it does belong to a predominantly Jewish branch of the church. That does not provide any certainty that it comes from James and certainly none that it goes back to Jesus. Still, since this work does come from the early church, it provides significant evidence for the teaching and practices of some churches in that early time. Thus we will give attention to it throughout this study. We will note where there are commonalities and differences between it and what we find in