Scripture, Cultures, and Criticism: Interpretive Steps and Critical Issues Raised by Robert Jewett

By Kathy Ehrensperger

This collection of nineteen representative essays is a Festschrift written by former colleagues and students in honor of Prof. Dr. Robert Jewett (1933-2020) and his legacy. Our hope is that future generations of Bible readers will find this textbook on biblical interpretation helpful for navigating through the strong winds of exegetical, theological, and hermeneutical methods. Jewett's expansive research interests have inspired each author in this tribute volume, each of whom has witnessed to the ways that helmsman Jewett has navigated through the often-choppy ocean waters of biblical interpretation--as well as the complex, changing world of religion, sacred texts, films and popular culture, psychology and sociology, politics and Pauline studies.


Contributors

Kathy Ehrensperger
Brigitte Kahl
Aliou C. Niang
Aida Besancon Spencer
Lallene Rector
T. Christopher Hoklotubbe
Najeeb T. Haddad
Robert K. Johnston
Frank Hughes
Goh Menghun
Hii Kong-hock
Lim Kar Yong
Keith Burton
Sheila McGinn
Douglas Campbell
Ellen Jewett
William S. Campbell
Troy W. Martin
Zakali Shohe
Christopher Deacy
A. Andrew Das
Frederick Mawusi Amevenku

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Aug 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666797831

Book preview

Part I

Scripture, Paul, and Ancient Cultures

1

Beyond the Acts-Based Approach to Pauline Biography

Douglas A. Campbell

Abstract

The interpretation of Paul’s letters in the modern era takes place historically, in conversation with their original circumstances, which presupposes a detailed biography of Paul’s life. But most interpreters presuppose a biography based on a literal reading of Acts that treats the life of Paul told there as correct in every detail and in the correct sequence. Paul’s letters are then inserted into this framework. Robert Jewett demonstrated that this approach generates insuperable difficulties in terms of dating and compression and must be abandoned for a biography that begins with the letters, evaluating the Acts data in light of the events and sequences attested there—an approach pioneered originally by John Knox and then furthered by works like Jewett’s own important analysis. ¹

Overview

Most modern interpreters of Paul generate their readings of his letters in conversation with their original contexts, which presupposes a reconstruction of the apostle’s biography that tells us where he was and what he was doing when he wrote them, not to mention who he was writing to and why. Crafting the right biography of Paul can be a complex matter, however. But, as a handful of scholars such as Robert Jewett have repeatedly pointed out, this task is usually undertaken by way of shortcut, that is, by relying on a reading of the book of Acts in fairly literal terms. (The episodes concerning Paul’s life are assumed to be true and the sequence in which the book of Acts recounts them.) The letters are simply inserted into Acts’ story of Paul as they seem to fit. This story of Paul will probably be familiar to most readers since any Bibles with maps in the back usually reproduce this outline directly, along with most NT introductions. But is this straightforward, Acts-based approach to Paul’s life reliable?

Unfortunately, as scholars like Robert Jewett have shown, when we place all our interpretative weight on this framework, and on its key date that locks it in place, we find that they give way. In order to appreciate these difficulties, however, we must first trace out the basic outline of Paul’s apostolic career as Acts, read in a strictly linear fashion, describes it.

Outline

In brief: Acts begins its account of the early church in Jerusalem, and Paul begins his story there too. But his story really starts in earnest after his dramatic call en route to Damascus, which in view of its importance is described by Acts three times.² Paul’s mission is then orchestrated in Acts by a series of missionary journeys; he circles out through unevangelized provinces and cities in the northeastern Roman Empire, planting churches and then back to Jerusalem, before being arrested there on his fifth visit. However, his first visit to Jerusalem takes place very quickly after his call. So the missionary journeys only become a prominent feature after his second visit to Jerusalem. Three journeys then take place before his final fifth visit (so before visits three, four, and five). This final visit introduces a long narrative of imprisonments and trials, which transport Paul, in the most ironic of circumstances, to Rome, where the story ends with the apostle anticipating a fatal trial before the emperor. Here is the outline:

•Call on the road to Damascus

•JV1 (first visit to Jerusalem)

•(Ministry in Syrian Antioch)

•JV2

•First missionary journey to Cyprus, Galatia, and Pamphylia

•JV3

•Second missionary journey to Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia

•JV4

•Third missionary journey to Asia

•JV5: arrest in Jerusalem

•Long series of imprisonments and trials, including a journey to Rome and final detention there

Until the modern period, a strictly sequential use of this story as a biographical framework for Paul actually posed insuperable difficulties largely because of the data found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, although pre-Renaissance interpreters were not usually especially interested in strict, if not critical, historical reconstruction. So the following challenges were not always noted.

In ancient Greek, the word Galatians basically means Gauls or Celts (3:1). Moreover, in the eponymous letter’s opening arguments, Paul supplies an unusually detailed account of his relationship with Jerusalem, including specific time intervals between two visits there. After his call, Paul visited Jerusalem in the third year, and then again, on a visit that clearly included an important consultation, in the fourteenth year. Ancient interpreters referred the letter’s Gallic recipients to the ethnic group known to inhabit a region in what is today central Turkey, a migration of Gauls having taken place there centuries earlier. They knew further that, as Acts describes things, Paul could only have traveled through this area at the beginning of his second missionary journey when he traveled from Syria to Europe (see bullet seven above). However, by this point in the Acts narrative, Paul has already visited Jerusalem three times, while his letter only speaks, very clearly, of two (see bullets 2, 4, and 6). So Acts simply has to be mistaken, at least in strictly sequential historical terms. Hence, in a distant anticipation of much modern scholarly work on the Gospels, ancient authors concluded that the narrative of Acts was not in a strict sequence and may even have included episodic doublets, and they proceeded to work biographically in a more haphazard manner (which many of them were already doing anyway).

Vindication?

This problem was potentially resolved in the modern period, however, by the work of W. Ramsay who, in the late 1800s, discovered that a Roman province called Galatia had been formed in 25 bce. The kingdom of Galatia was bequeathed posthumously by its ruler, King Amyntas, to the Roman emperor, Augustus. But Augustus also incorporated a series of colonies lying to the south of the ethnic kingdom into his new province, including some of the very cities Acts describes Paul visiting during his first missionary journey. And, at this moment, it becomes plausible to suggest that Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written earlier in his career, after the first missionary journey, when only two visits to Jerusalem had been made according to Acts. Galatians 2:1–10 then provides an insider’s account of the visit mentioned vestigially in Acts 11:27–30 and does not describe the conference of Acts 15:1–29. A straightforward coordination between Galatians and Acts now becomes possible.

But this still leaves the challenge posed by the long time intervals Paul enumerates in Galatians between his first two visits to Jerusalem—the issue that Robert Jewett aptly names the problem of compression, which we will discuss further momentarily.³ His missionary journeys do not begin in Acts until after his second Jerusalem visit, so is it really plausible to suppose that he remained in Damascus after his call—an interval Acts describes as many days (9:23)—for up to three years, and then stayed for up to fourteen years working only in Tarsus and Syrian Antioch before beginning the far-flung missionary journeys that so characterized his subsequent career? A strict harmonization between Acts and the letters entails this biography.

Two key pieces of evidence arguably come to Acts’ support here in relation to the story it tells about Paul’s mission in Corinth.

Acts notes a series of distinctive events during Paul’s mission in that important Achaian commercial center (18:1b–18a). Among other things, on arriving, Paul meets Prisca and Aquila, who have just been forced to leave Rome because of some executive decree by the emperor Claudius (18:2–3). And, at some point during the mission, Paul is tried in front of a governor called Gallio (who famously refuses to take part in a case that he adjudges to be nothing more than a nasty squabble within the Jewish community; see 18:12–17). Acts states, in addition, that Paul worked in Corinth for eighteen months (18:11). Arguably, two key external markers now allow scholars to pinpoint these events, thereby ultimately vindicating Acts’ testimony impressively.

The first key marker derives from the discovery in 1905 of an inscription at Delphi that mentions L. Annaeus Gallio. In its final reconstructed form, achieved in 1967, nine coordinated fragments determine that Gallio was the governor of Achaia at a time when Claudius was acclaimed as imperator for the twenty-sixth time, which probably denotes a date in 51 ce.⁴ Governorships were exercised from July 1, normally for one year, so it follows that Paul could have been tried by Gallio anywhere from July 1, 51 ce through the early months of 52. (Gallio left his appointment early, taking a sea voyage to address an illness as attested in a letter written by his brother, Seneca [Ep. 104.1].) This inscription vindicates the veracity of the Gallio episode in Acts directly, and also creates a tight chronological window for Paul’s mission in Corinth; his time there must overlap with a period extending just from mid-51 to early 52 ce.

Complementing this marker is data from various ancient historians attesting to an action by the emperor Claudius against the Jews living in Rome. Acts states that Paul met Aquila and Priscilla on his first arrival in Corinth because an imperial edict promulgated by Claudius had forced the couple to leave Rome (18:2), thereby dating Paul’s Corinthian mission to this event. And a Claudian action against the Jews in Rome is also attested by Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Orosius.

Suetonius and Orosius speak of an expulsion of the Jews from Rome, although both sources are cryptic and a little garbled. Most importantly, Orosius states that this took place during Claudius’s ninth year. Since this year basically equates to 49 ce, and Acts speaks of a mission by Paul in Corinth lasting eighteen months (18:11), we are clearly in—or almost in—the same chronological window as the governorship before Gallio attested from mid-51 ce, Orosius supplying the second all-important marker for this coordination.

The coordination is tight, but it works if Paul arrives at the very end of Claudius’s ninth regnal year, in early January 50 ce. An eighteen-month-long ministry as detailed by Acts then takes him through—just—to the arrival of Gallio by July 1, 51 ce. If Paul’s trial was undertaken immediately, then this evidence does fit together. Indeed, it can be claimed that this is an unusually impressive set of chronological correlations for a set of ancient sources, and it has been enough to convince many scholars that Acts is telling it like it is. In particular, this happy conjunction arguably validates Acts’ episodic and sequential veracity. The long-time intervals that Galatians specifies between Paul’s first and second visits to Jerusalem can be accommodated after the founding events for the Jesus movement, along with the additional events that have to fit into this period.

We are on reasonably safe ground supposing that the Easter events took place in 30 ce, plus or minus three years. We must allow time for the early church to grow to the point that Paul persecutes it just prior to his dramatic call. We must then add around sixteen years for the Galatian intervals. After these have elapsed—perhaps in mid-48 ce—Paul must undertake his first missionary journey through Cyprus, Pamphylia, and Galatia (Acts 13–14), his third visit to Jerusalem, and then undertake his second missionary journey as far as Corinth. This is a lot of time and activity, so the fit before an arrival in Corinth in early 50 ce is quite tight, but it is doable with a little bit of biographical nip and tuck as necessary.

Career

The broader trajectory of Paul’s life can now be filled in around this key cluster of data points. His missionary journey to what is now Europe must have begun mid-way through Claudius’s reign, in the late 40s ce, after the long pause detailed by Galatians in and around Syrian Antioch through the late 30s and early 40s. But after his journeys began, they proceeded apace. Calculating forward from a Corinthian mission in 50–51 ce, scholars suppose that on his third missionary journey, which began shortly thereafter, following his fourth Jerusalem visit, Paul spent two years and some months in Ephesus evangelizing Asia, presumably from late 51 ce through early 54 ce, after which he began his final fateful journey to Jerusalem. This was conspicuously circuitous, passing through Macedonia and Achaia and back again, Paul leaving Corinth for the last time only in the spring of 55 ce.⁵ Nero has meanwhile become emperor after the death of Claudius in October 54 ce.

Paul’s missionary journeys ended when he circled back to Jerusalem on this fifth visit, was arrested there, and was incarcerated in Caesarea. He languished under the governorship of Felix from mid-55 through late 56 ce, since Acts speaks of a two-year detention. The newly-arrived and vastly more competent governor Festus then tried Paul who, fearing the outcome of the case, appealed famously to the emperor. Paul’s voyage to Rome and sojourn on Malta consequently fall through the winter of 56–57 ce, and his incarceration in Rome, also for two years, would have lasted until at least mid-58 ce and possibly into early 59 ce.

With this framework in place, we can turn to the letters and ask where they best belong.

Placing the Letters

Some of Paul’s letters must now fit into a certain location in this schema, while other locations tempt interpreters to place them there.

Galatians, as we have already seen, is the earliest letter extant from Paul and must be placed after Jerusalem visit #2 and the first missionary journey but before Jerusalem visit #3. This seems to be roughly two full years earlier than Paul’s arrival in Corinth, so this framework suggests its composition in 47 ce.

Romans fits much later in the sequence, in the spring of 55 ce, during Paul’s final stay in Corinth as he anticipates what will turn out to be his final visit to Jerusalem. It follows that he wrote 1 and 2 Corinthians in the previous year, 54 ce, since these three letters are mutually involved with the collection of a great sum of money for the Jerusalem congregation.

First Thessalonians seems to reflect an early stage in that congregation’s development and so to belong to Paul’s first journey through the area, around 49 ce, although Acts creates a conundrum here. The letter implies that it was written from Athens (3:1). Paul is clearly sending Timothy back and forth to the fledgling congregation while he waits with Silas in Athens for news (1:1; 3:2–6). However, Acts takes pains to place Paul in Athens alone, only sending Silas and Timothy on from Thessalonica and Berea to link up with him after he has moved on from Athens to Corinth (17:13–15; 18:5). This data has led to some explanatory ingenuity if the letter is located, as Acts now necessitates, in Corinth.

If 2 Thessalonians is deemed authentic, it should be placed in this period as well. Strictly speaking, it is only second because it is shorter in length. It could therefore easily have been written before 1 Thessalonians. However, most Acts-based interpreters seem to prefer its placement in second position, after that letter, if they accept that it is genuine.

Setting aside the Pastorals for the time being, Paul’s four remaining letters were written from prison, and long incarcerations are now evident in Caesarea and Rome. Unsurprisingly, scholars are often tempted to fill these with some letter writing.

In particular, Paul speaks in Philippians 1:13 of the gospel spreading through the praetōrion, which could be read as a reference to the emperor’s Praetorian Guard, stationed in the main in Rome. And in 4:22, he sends greetings especially from those of Caesar’s Household, which refers either, literally, to members of the emperor’s close family or, more plausibly (as suggested by Lightfoot) to members of the vast imperial bureaucracy, which was also centered in, although by no means limited to, Rome. Classicists tend to refer to this sprawling patronage network as Caesar’s Household. Hence this data almost begs interpreters to place Philippians during Paul’s imprisonment in Rome, the center of imperial power, not to mention the scene of many a toga-clad Hollywood epic that biblical scholars probably watched in their youth. A two-year incarceration overcomes the travel challenges this scenario faces.⁶ (Unfortunately, both of the key interpretative judgments underlying this location will ultimately prove inaccurate.)

Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon clearly belong together, if they are authentic, although no data point specifically toward Rome. Hence, scholars can take their pick of locations because Paul himself attests to frequent trials—which imply imprisonments—well before Acts places him in a detention (2 Cor 11:25). Scholars nevertheless usually place these letters in Rome, or less frequently in Caesarea, although some suggest an imprisonment during Paul’s long ministry in Ephesus. Second Corinthians 1:8–9 attests to some terrible trial during this mission, even using a fragment of judicial language to describe it: we ourselves bore within ourselves the sentence of death . . . (v. 9).⁷ Nevertheless, all three options for these imprisonments are clearly suggested by the Acts-based approach.

Table

1

.

1

: An Acts-Based Biography of Paul’s Life and Letters

* denotes widely-argued pseudonymity

Problems with the Usual Approach

Despite the dominance of the Acts-based approach within modern Pauline interpretation, however, we need to face the unpleasant fact that the framework contains serious problems, and few scholars have grasped and articulated these better than Robert Jewett.

One such problem, which he was well aware of, is the fragility of its key chronological cluster. Although the Gallio datum is firm, the assertion that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome at some point in 49 ce, allowing Paul to meet the migrating Prisca and Aquila during his first mission in Corinth, eighteen months before his trial in 51 ce, as Acts says, is implausible. (It would follow that Acts is conflating events from separate visits, which is not uncommon in ancient biographies and biographical histories that tend to group events by topic.)

The Acts-based biography rests largely on the attestation of Orosius, who was a notoriously bad historian and wrote long after the critical event in question. (His Historiae Adversus Paganos was written ca. 416 ce.) His incompetence is evident in the key datum that the Acts-based biography relies on:

Josephus reports, In his ninth year the Jews were expelled by Claudius from the city. But Suetonius, who speaks as follows, influences me more: Claudius expelled from Rome the Jews constantly rioting at the instigation of Christ. (Historiae Adversus Paganos

7

.

6

.

15

–

16

)

No such quotation can be found in Josephus, whose works are extant, calling Orosius’s chronological claim immediately into question. That a Claudian expulsion of the Jews from Rome even took place rests now on the witness of Suetonius, who is Orosius’s only obvious source. (The all-important second infinitive in Acts 18:2 itself is ambiguous; the verb could denote purpose or result.)

Suetonius was much closer to the events in question (his work, The Twelve Caesars, was written in 121 ce), but his information is both compact and garbled: "Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [the emperor Claudius] expelled them from Rome" (Claudius, 25.4). That a messianic agitator was directly causing problems at Rome during the reign of Claudius is clearly false, while other doubts about the accuracy of this statement can be raised. Hence, it is significant that Dio Cassius, writing his massive Roman History through the early 200s, deliberately nuances this scenario:

As for the Jews, who had again increased so greatly that by reason of their multitude it would have been hard without raising a tumult to bar them from the city [of Rome], he [Claudius] did not drive them out, but ordered them, while continuing their traditional mode of life, not to hold meetings. (Roman History

60

.

6

.

6

)

Dio states here that the Jews were not expelled by Claudius, although many of the pious, forbidden from praying or learning Torah in their synagogues, would have left following the withdrawal of their right to associate, perhaps creating the impression of an expulsion. Two further observations suggest that Dio’s account is more plausible than Suetonius’s (that is, apart from the considerable superiority of Dio as a historian over Suetonius in general terms).

First, Dio is well aware of an earlier expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Tiberius and knows that the later Claudian action was both different and milder. The earlier expulsion undoubtedly took place and was so traumatic that other ancient historians besides Suetonius and Dio note it. Tacitus and Josephus provide details, and it even left an imprint on Tertullian.⁸ But these other historians are all silent concerning any later expulsion by Claudius, suggesting that the rather sensational Suetonius could be confusing a softer Claudian judgment with the earlier Tiberian action—and he is, after all, describing it in just one sentence. He is not supplying legal or political nuance as Dio is. It is doubtful that a full-fledged Claudian expulsion ever took place.

Second, Dio provides a plausible account of what Claudius did do to the Jews in Rome, joining hands again with data from other ancient historians in a way that Suetonius and Orosius do not, although connecting here especially with Philo.⁹

The Jews experienced a terrible crisis during the reign of Gaius, first in relation to emperor worship in general, the tensions being especially acute in Alexandria, and then with his particular plan to install an enormous cult statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem. Gaius’s assassination halted this incendiary policy, but Claudius still had to address the lingering disruptions, and his firm admonitions to the citizens in Alexandria are extant. The data in Dio suggests that he took an even firmer step in Rome itself, withdrawing the Jews’ right to associate. This was a standard Roman response to perceived urban disorder, although it was much less aggressive—and much more enforceable—than an expulsion. Moreover, Dio places this Claudian action right where it should be, after the assassination of Gaius and the new emperor’s accession, in 41 ce. (No such crisis necessitating the far more dramatic step of a Jewish expulsion is evident in 49 ce.¹⁰)

The data in Dio opens up another, more plausible date and rationale for the arrival of Prisca and Aquila in Corinth, in 41 ce, and basically torpedoes the Acts-based biography—although the alternative date fits neatly into an epistolary approach, thereby vindicating Acts’ episodic reliability. There was a Claudian action against the Jews in Rome, and Prisca and Aquila did arrive in Corinth because of it. But it was their pious response to the withdrawal of their right to associate and the resulting abrogation of synagogue worship that led to their decision to leave the city in 41 ce, as Claudius sought to calm the Jewish tumult still eddying at Rome after the horrors of the reign of