Romans: Is that you speaking Paul?

Recent scholars on Romans has identified several instances of Speech-In-Character, where the a character other than Paul is speaking. I agree with Witherington's assessment that this is because Paul was writing to a church over which he had no direct authority, and therefore needed to be a bit indirect in his arguments.

It is fairly universally accepted that Romans 7 contains a lengthy monologue by a character who is not Paul who speaks of their struggles with sin and the law. It has also long been noted that Paul often asks rhetorical questions in Romans. Scholars seem to widely agree now that these are mostly not rhetorical questions, but rather indicate a dialogue between two characters.

To give an idea of how endemic this is in Romans:
Romans 1:18-2:16 is sometimes regarded as a dialogue between a gentile moral preacher and Paul. Much of Romans 2:17-4:25 is generally accepted to be a dialogue between Paul and a Jewish teacher of the Law. Romans 7 contains a long monologue by a non-Paul character. Most ancient commentators thought most of Romans 9 was a Jew who was not Paul speaking.

In some places in Romans there is some substantial level of difficulty involved in identifying who the characters are and which one is asking the questions and which one is giving the answers. eg Stowers argues that in Rom 3:1-8 Paul is the one asking questions and the teacher is giving answers. Campbell thinks most of 1:18-2:16 is a Jewish preacher speaking. I think the strength of the parallels between 1:18-32 and the Jewish work Wisdom of Solomon mean that it's the Jewish teacher there, but contrary to Campbell I think the voice changes to Paul in 2:1.

To the original intended audience it would have been clear what was going on because Phoebe whom Paul sent with the letter would have read and presented it in such a way as to make it clear (changing voice, expression, body movements) as she read / presented / acted out the letter. Whereas we do not have that luxury.

Of course this creates substantial difficulties for us in trying to understand the letter. It certainly makes difficulties if we try to "get theology" out of the letter by grabbing a sentence and setting it up as Truth, since it might be in the mouth of one of Paul's opponents.

Romans 7 and the "I"

Romans 7 is remarkable for being a passage on which biblical scholars had an almost unanimous change of view in a relatively short time.

Romans 7 contains a lengthy and passionate explanation about a person's struggles with Sin, Flesh, Spirit and Law. One of the more famous lines reads "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." This passage has often spoken powerfully to people as the see their own life struggles reflected in it.

From the time of the Reformation until 50 years ago, biblical scholarship was deeply divided over one question regarding Romans 7: Is Paul in this passage speaking of his pre-conversion life as a Pharisee or his post-conversion life as a Christian? In other words, should we expect such struggles with sin to exemplify the Christian life, or ought the Christian life be characterized by freedom from sin? The fact that the passage was about Paul was universally accepted - after all, it uses the word "I" constantly, and how could Paul write with such emotion if he was not writing about himself?

Yet now there is pretty much unanimity amongst scholars that the passage is not about Paul. Paul is definitely not the "I" speaking in the passage. Paul is using a standard ancient Greek rhetorical device of speech-in-character and it is that character who is talking. The previous question about whether the struggle with sin describes the Christian or pre-Christian life seems to have also been definitively answered: The character is speaking of their pre-Christian life and their struggles with sin, and looking for Christ to free them from the power of sin and save them from that struggle. It is notable that all the early Greek Christian commentaries on Romans held both these views.

The new question that has scholars engaged is the question of: Who is the character? The main candidates seem to be:

• Adam himself and his experiences with the command to not eat the fruit.
  
• A gentile who decided to start following the Jewish Law.
• Humanity/Israel personified. ie the passage is the story of salvation history from Adam to Christ like in Rom 5, with humanity/Israel itself as the speaker.

Scholars are divided on these three and no one has yet to produce a compelling argument for one over the others. I have no idea myself which of these three is most likely (I haven't studied the passage too carefully).

On few issues in scholarship is there much level of agreement, so it is quite surprising that there is so much agreement on the subject of Paul not being the "I" in Romans 7 and that there has been a universal change of tune within so short a time-frame. But it also raises a rather important question: If the one passage where we were sure was Paul speaking is in fact not Paul at all, then what about all the other passages where we thought Paul was speaking? More on that later...

Dikaio-, not so forensic

The Dikaio- words [dikaiosune (righteousness), dikaios (righteous), dikaioo (justify, set/do/make/become right), dikaiosis (justification, process of setting/making/becoming righteous), dikaioma (righteous acts)] are fairly important in biblical exegesis and theology.

Sometimes people talk about how the Dikaio- word group can be used in a "forensic" sense (ie legal, law-court language). Certainly this word group was sometimes used in law courts in the ancient world. There's nothing wrong with observing that. But, I was reminded with a shock recently while browsing the internet that some people actually think that the Greek word group itself has to do with law-courts and takes its meaning from a law-court setting and paradigm. In other words, they think that wherever we see a sentence containing a word from this group we ought to start thinking about a law-court setting. As these people read the bible wherever they see a Dikaio- word a law-court pops up in their minds.

The main trouble with this notion of the Dikaio- group as an "intrinsically forensic" word is that it is just utter crap. The vast majority of the uses of the word in both classical literature and the bible have nothing to do with law-courts. The Dikaio- word group is about morality. So it comes in useful sometimes in law-court discussions because law-courts generally try to discriminate the those who have done right from those who have done wrong and then do something about it.

In English, for example, we can talk about "guilty" and "innocent" people. Law courts use these moral terms precisely because they are interested in investigating the pre-existing moral status of individuals and subsequently announcing their findings. People do not become guilty of their crimes just because the court announces them guilty - rather they were already guilty or innocent prior to being tried and it is the court's job to search out and ascertain the truth. It is utter nonsense to talk of a judge making a person morally innocent by declaring them innocent. If the court gives the wrong verdict, the we would say "the judge got it wrong". In other words, the moral meaning of these English words is the primary one and the law-court usage is secondary and contingent on that moral meaning.

It is the same in Greek. "Dikaiosune" refers to morality / righteousness / virtue / goodness, and the "dikaios" are the good/virtuous/moral/righteous people, and so forth for the rest of the Dikaio- group. While such language can be useful in legal discussions, it is getting the cart before the horse to think that such language makes it a legal discussion. Use of such language makes it a discussion of morality and ethics. Moral language can be used in a judicial context of course, but the use of morality-related language doesn't make the context a judicial one. I shudder to think the sort of havoc screwing up the meaning of such a basic, central, and simple word makes to their exegesis and theology. But sadly, the linguistic nonsense of Dikaio- as intrinsically forensic terminology seems to propagate itself precisely because people like the theology it results it - ie the claim seems to be made for theological reasons rather than due to actual evidence for the view.

Pointless historical speculation: As far as I can tell, know or guess, the idea that Dikaio- is intrinsically forensic is a hangover from when the Latin Vulgate crossbreed with the origins of the modern judicial system half a millennia ago. The coincidence that the then-millennium-old Vulgate's Latin terminology happened to match with the then-current Latin judicial terminology was at the time projected back onto the underlying Greek.

Abstract atonement theory vs actual history

The fundamental question sitting in the background throughout Brondos' book is "how does Paul's view of atonement compare to the historical facts of Jesus' life and death?"

Jesus was a person, who lived at a particular time in history and did various things during his life. He gathered disciples, taught, healed, got into conflicts over the Law, the Temple and money. He got plotted against and killed by the authorities. Then God raised him from the dead. That's the story recorded in the gospels. That's the story his followers passed on to each other, its a story of Jesus' life and death and resurrection that purports to a historical account of something that really happened.

Now, if we heard this story as told to us by an early follower of Jesus, or read the gospels that recorded this story, the very first thing we would not say upon hearing the facts of the story is "so Satan's power over humanity is now broken" or "So thorough becoming human Jesus united humanity with God" or "so in dying Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world?". None of these ideas flow naturally out of the story. If you'd just heard the story of Jesus' life you wouldn't, from that story, deduce these ideas.

A view that was quite popular among scholars about a hundred years ago was the viewpoint that most of Jesus' immediate followers simply repeated the bare facts about his life, teachings, death and resurrection. It was believed they taught the historical story about Jesus, and then Paul came along and he wasn't interested in the historical Jesus as a real-person at all. To Paul (according to these scholars) Jesus was the Cosmic Redeemer, and Paul invented an abstract system of atonement in which Jesus' death is an event of cosmic atonement which is dissimilar from any other human deaths in history and which changes the very nature of reality itself. This was thought to have made Pauline Christianity far more attractive to the gentiles who were into religions that said this sort of thing. So it was thought Paul had invented these ideas basically out of whole cloth as he religiousifed
Christianity and brought it to the gentiles. In this way a huge chasm exists between the real Jesus of history which most of Jesus' immediate followers understood Jesus as and the non-historical cosmic Jesus of faith that Paul holds to.

Brondos is concerned about views such as this, where the views ascribed to Paul are either explicitly or implicitly divorced from the facts of Jesus' life and death. ie. where the "theory of atonement" is not obvious upon hearing a simple account of Jesus' ministry, where it involves hidden cosmic transactions that one has to be told about separately. Brondos sees numerous problems with this. He doesn't buy the idea that Paul is disinterested in the historical Jesus, and points to recent scholarship that has found numerous references to the life and teachings of Jesus throughout Paul's letters. He points out that in Romans, Paul is writing to a church he has never been to and yet uses Paul's normal atonement language with the assumption its recipients would understand it fine, indicating that Paul expected people who had heard the simple historical story about the life of Jesus would understand his atonement language and understand him to be saying essentially the same thing as what they already believed.

Brondos argues that a hypothesis that sees Paul's language situated in essentially the same narrative as the gospels actually does make sense of what Paul says. If one takes the view that Paul sees the atonement not as a single event of cosmic redemption accomplished once for all in a single act, but as an ongoing story, then one finds that this coheres very well with things Paul says. In a lengthy analysis of Paul's atonement language, Brondos concludes that Paul's story is the same story as the four gospels. Paul is not meaning to affirm a mysterious cosmic atoning event of a non-historical Christ, but rather to affirm the gospel stories of a historical Jesus whose life, death and resurrection form a unique part in the continuing global story of God's redemption.

The righteousness of God

The phrase dikaiosune theou (the righteousness of God) is quite an important phrase in Paul's letters and always a fun one to argue over the meaning of.

It is my view that what Paul means by the phrase is roughly "what God (as opposed to anyone else) considers righteousness to consist of" or, to say it another way, "godly righteousness" or, to say it another way again, "righteousness according to God". I was pleased to see Brondos in Paul on the Cross concurs with me - thumbs up to him. He takes it to mean:

"the righteous way of life commanded by God and in accordance with his will." (pg 85)

The other two main popular views are of course:

1. The Reformation view and Catholic view that it refers to "righteousness from God" either imputed or imparted.
   
2. The Kasemann-Wright view that it refers to something like "God's transformative power working in the world to put it to rights"
   

This is one of those cases where the evidence is pretty scanty and it's mostly a case of "any of them could be right, which do I like best?". Which view any given person holds is therefore probably a helpful indicator of the rest of their theology.

NT Wright in his book What Saint Paul Really Said gives a helpful table on the subject on pg 101:

In that table, my view and Brondos' is B2, while the traditional Protestant & Catholic views are B1 and the Kasemann-Wright view is A1&A2.

Brondos' Paul on the Cross

I am reading David A. Brondos' Paul on the Cross: Reconstructing the Apostle's Story of Redemption at the moment and finding it enjoyable. It's well-written, he's clearly well-read, and his logical arguments are pretty sound (few things causes me more mental anguish than poor logic). It's also all about the topics I enjoy studying - models of atonement, the life of Jesus, Paul's theology - so I'm particularly appreciating that.

I offer for viewer comment a rather controversial passage I've just encountered on page 78 of the book:

Futhermore, in accordance with Jewish belief, Paul consistently teaches that the final judgment will be according to one's works or deeds. [...] Nowhere does Paul affirm that the basis upon which people will be judged is whether they had faith or not. Nor is it Paul's teaching that the final judgment will be made on the basis of works merely because "works are indispensable as the demonstration of the true nature of faith."