Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith
Overview
In recent years, scholars from both Christian and Jewish backgrounds have tried to rethink the relationship between earliest Christianity and its Jewish milieu. Paul has emerged as a central figure in this debate. The present book contributes to this scholarly discussion by seeing Paul and his Jewish contemporaries as, above all, readers of scripture. However different the conclusions they draw, they all endeavor to make sense of the same normative scriptural texts — in the belief that, as they interpret the scriptural texts, the texts will themselves interpret and illuminate the world of contemporary experience. In that sense, Paul and his contemporaries are standing on common ground. Far from relativizing their differences, however, it is this common ground that makes such differences possible.
This book seeks to show how three distinct bodies of literature in fact constitute a single intertextual field. It is therefore necessary to dismantle artificial scholarly boundaries between the Pauline letters, other extant Jewish writings of the period, and the scriptural texts themselves. The method adopted is to set a Pauline and a non-Pauline reading of a scriptural text alongside one another, to compare the ways in which the different readings seek to realize the semantic potential of the scriptural text, and to construct communal identity on that basis. Contrary to the view that these early readers merely impose their own pre-existing viewpoints on the scriptural texts, it becomes clear that they are profoundly engaged in fundamental hermeneutical issues.
Top Highlights
“This book is a comparative study in the early reception of Jewish scripture, with a primary Pauline focus. The aim is to explore the relationships between three bodies of literature: the Pauline letters, the scriptural texts to which they appeal, and the non-Christian Jewish literature of the Second Temple period which appeals to the same scriptural texts.” (Page 2)
“The implication here is that Paul’s disagreement with Judaism derives from a christological conviction that is self-grounded and self-sufficient, and that the pervasive appeal to scripture is merely a secondary consequence of that primary conviction. In this account, the relationship between christology and scripture is a unilateral one: christology determines how scripture is read, but christology itself is not itself determined by the reading of scripture. In the last resort, that would mean that scripture is dispensable for Paul. His christology stands or falls on its own account, irrespective of whether it issues in plausible readings of scripture.” (Page 16)
“In Paul, scripture is not overwhelmed by the light of an autonomous Christ-event needing no scriptural mediation. It is scripture that shapes the contours of the Christ-event, and to discern how it does so is to uncover the true meaning of scripture itself. Pauline theology is thus intertextual theology: explicit scriptural citations are simply the visible manifestations of an intertextuality that is ubiquitous and fundamental to Pauline discourse.” (Page 17)
“As we shall see, Paul cites individual texts not in an ad hoc manner but on the basis of a radical construal of the narrative shape of the Pentateuch as a whole, highlighting and exploiting tensions between Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Many of the apparent contradictions within Paul’s ‘view of the law’ in fact originate within the pentateuchal texts themselves, at least as Paul reads them.” (Page 3)
- Title: Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith
- Author: Francis Watson
- Publisher: T&T Clark
- Publication Date: 2001
- Pages: 584