Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide - Book Review

Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide. Edited by Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. x and 355 pages. Paper. $34.95.

This superb collection of essays is based on a 1997 conference in Copenhagen dealing with the implications of the ostensible dichotomy between Judaism and Hellenism as they pertain to the interpretation of Paul's letters. In his introduction to the volume, Engberg-Pedersen lays out the methodological assumptions shared by the authors and briefly summarizes their respective contributions to the debate. The first three essays by Wayne Meeks, Dale Martin, and Philip Alexander provide a probing analysis of the use of the terms "Judaism" and "Hellenism." Although they address different aspects of how the terms have been used historically, each demonstrates that these are ideological constructs that are not very useful in describing the complexities of living as a Jew in the Greco-Roman world. The other essays deal with particular themes or texts in the Pauline corpus, especially the Corinthian correspondence, in terms of the religious and social milieu in which Paul worked.

The contributions in this volume are bound together by a methodological premise that emphasizes convergence between the ideas reflected in Paul's letters and their social and religious context rather than distinctiveness. In an essay that takes its cue from Alexander's call for a paradigm that favors similarity and emphasizes the ways Judaism translated into Hellenism and vice versa, Stan Stowers argues that from an emic or indigenous perspective the Pauline communities looked more like philosophical schools than either synagogues or voluntary associations. He provides a judicious description of the role and practices of religion, philosophy, and associations in antiquity and suggests that the Pauline assemblies most resemble the philosophical schools, because even in the Diaspora the liturgy of the synagogue served to orient Judeans everywhere toward the temple. Loveday Alexander adopts Nock's persona of a "cultural tourist." She construes the question a little differently and examines it from the perspectiv e of patterns of authority among the philosophical schools. She takes her cue from Sedley's claim that the identity of philosophical movements was predicated on the authority of a founder figure. On this model Moses is a founder of a school, and, as with all philosophical movements, it was the authority of the foundational texts associated with the figurehead that formed and preserved the group's identity. According to her, Paul's citation of Scripture in a letter like I Corinthians indicates that "Moses" still functions as a prime source of authority for Paul and his readers, so in this respect both the synagogue and the Pauline assemblies share structural similarities with philosophical movements.

The other articles in the volume deal with the false dichotomy between Judaism and Hellenism in terms of particular interpretive issues in Paul's Corinthian correspondence. In his second contribution Meeks describes the household groups organized by Paul in Corinth as "artificial aliens" by virtue of their conversion to the God of Israel and baptism into Messiah Jesus, and maintains that the form of their community was modeled primarily on the Jewish immigrant associations of the Diasporacities. John Barclay compares Josephus' discussion of the Jewish constitution, which emphasizes matching theory and practice, with the polity reflected in 1 Corinthians, and suggests that Paul tends toward less cultural specificity in practice because his communities are culturally diverse. In an excellent treatment of Paul's cosmology, Henrik Tronier shows the correspondence between philosophical idealism and apocalypticism in 1 Corinthians 15. Margaret Mitchell appeals to the early church fathers to interpret the language o f "condescension" in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23. David Aune explicates the anthropological duality evident in the eschatology of 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:10 by drawing on comparable notions of the relation between body and soul in Greco-Roman cosmology. In the final essay, John Fitzgerald argues that Paul's language of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians belongs to the friendship topos.

This is an exceptionally fine compendium of essays that redefines the extent to which Paul and the Judaism to which he belonged were shaped by and embedded in the cultural milieu of the Greco-Roman world.

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