All this points to the classic passage in 2 Corinthians 5 and 6, where Paul explains the nature of his apostolic ministry. He understands this ministry, as in Galatians, in terms of the “servant” passage in Isa. 49:8, quoted here at 6:2. When he says “the right time is now! The day of salvation is here!,” he is interpreting Isaiah: this has been the sudden fulfillment of divine promise. This is the context within which we should understand the statement of new epistemology in 5:16–17: “From this moment on, we don’t regard anybody from a merely human point of view. Even if we once regarded the Messiah that way, we don’t do so any longer. Thus if anyone is in the Messiah, there is a new creation! Old things have gone, and look—everything has become new!” One could, of course, take this out of context, as an irruptive invasion of epistemological reflection, without any prior promise. But the wider passage forbids this. The new creation, and with it, the new mode of knowing, have come about—Paul says it four times—through the Messiah’s death, which has reconciled people to God by dealing with their sins (5:14, 18, 19, 21). Exactly as in the compressed formula of Gal. 1:4, the Messiah’s sin-bearing death brings about new creation. Paul holds together what later traditions divide.
The new creation in 2 Corinthians 5 is, for Paul, directly dependent upon the new covenant expounded in 2 Corinthians 3. Some suppose that Paul only discussed Moses and the Exodus because his opponents had done so first. But the use of related themes elsewhere makes this unlikely. It is better to see the transformation in chapter 3, where the Spirit renews the covenant, as supplying the theological energy for chapter 5, since here (5:5), as in 1:22, the Spirit is the “first installment and guarantee” of what is to come. The new creation, already launched in the Messiah, will be complete when all appear before the Messiah’s judgment seat (5:10). This produces the scandalous message and ministry which remain opaque to the wider world, but which Paul believes to be the appropriate vehicle for (what we might call) the apocalyptic gospel of new creation.
If, then, by “apocalyptic,” we mean the unveiling of things previously hidden, for Paul the gospel was indeed “apocalyptic.” As we said, he did not express it in the apocalyptic genre; 2 Corinthians 12 hints that he could have gone that route, but chose not to. His message remains that of the crucified and risen Messiah. And that message makes sense, not because of a dualistic “invasion” of creation, but because of the sudden, shocking fulfillment of ancient covenantal promises.
All of which leads to Romans. It is ironic that, in Douglas Campbell’s now famous treatment, Romans 1–4 is relativized in the light, supposedly, of the “apocalyptic” message of chapters 5–8.[29] But it is in Rom. 1:16–2:16 that we find one of the most obviously “apocalyptic” passages in the whole letter. And the central thing revealed there is the righteousness of God, the covenant plan promised ages ago, discussed with such anguish in a genuine “apocalypse” by Paul’s near-contemporary 4 Ezra. For Paul the “apocalypse,” the decisive divine revelation, had taken place in the gospel events, both in themselves and in their apostolic proclamation, and would be completed in the final denouement (2:16). The one God had unveiled his age-old purposes in a sudden fulfillment, which was only visible as such in retrospect. The gospel was, in this sense, “apocalyptic,” not because it represented an invasion without prior warning, but because it was the ultimate revelation to which earlier writings (Torah, Psalms, Prophets) had all looked forward. For Paul the identity and achievement of Jesus was the revelation in action of Israel’s returning God. The form and function of Second Temple Jewish apocalypses reflected the belief that God had promised to return in judgment and mercy, but had delayed. The form and function of Paul’s letters, and supremely Romans, reflect the belief that God had indeed returned to judge and to save, but in a way hitherto unsuspected, and that this work would be fulfilled in the events yet to come (8:18–25; 13:11–12).
At the heart of Romans, as with Galatians, there lies the new Exodus-narrative: the slaves are set free by coming through the water (chapter 6), the law does its strange God-intended work of allowing sin to grow to its full height (chapter 7), so that Sin (with a capital S) is condemned in the flesh of the Messiah, whereupon the Spirit leads the people through the wilderness to their inheritance—which is, of course, the renewed creation. This is the larger narrative matrix which holds together “apocalyptic” and other elements such as “covenant” and atonement. New Exodus leads directly to new creation. The cross, at its heart, is for Paul both penal in force and cosmic in scope: “There is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus,” because “God sent his son . . . and, right there in the flesh, he condemned sin.” This is solidly forensic language within a larger apocalyptic and “cosmic” setting: no power in earth or heaven can undermine God’s Messiah-shaped love (8:31–39), because this “love” is the covenant love spoken of in passages such as Deuteronomy 7 or Jeremiah 31, through which sins have been dealt with. This entire sequence, again, is an expansion of Gal. 1:4. In Rom. 8:31–39, themes rush together which both theology and exegesis have held apart: the victory of God over the powers, the forensic dealing with sin, the new creation which follows when death itself is defeated. This is the ultimate horizon of Paul’s thought. If it deserves the name “apocalyptic,” despite not belonging to the literary genre, such a label does not rule out, but rather insists upon, (a) the covenantal context of ancient scriptural promises, and (b) the dealing with human sin, which has prevented humans taking their intended place within the created order. Of course, there is more to be said; much more. But no less.
Conclusion
I have barely scratched the surface of a vital and fascinating topic. Let me, in conclusion, name two related issues.
First, if we are serious about the “apocalyptic Paul,” there is no excuse for not bringing 2 Thessalonians and even Ephesians in from the cold. Ephesians is explicit about the divine plan hidden for ages but now revealed, and about ongoing warfare with the “powers.”[30] Second Thessalonians, of course, clearly draws on some of the normal apocalyptic tropes. One of the main reasons for its demotion in early scholarship was the anxiety about allowing “Paul” to be quite so explicitly “apocalyptic”: now that that has changed, why not welcome it on board?
The final point, again very briefly, concerns the Temple. For the devout Second Temple Jew, heaven and earth met in the Temple. That was where one might expect, as with Isaiah, the sudden revelation of things previously hidden. If Paul really had an “apocalyptic” strand in his theology, as I have argued he did (albeit reworked through the inaugurated eschatology of the crucified and risen Messiah and the gift of the Spirit), one might expect his frequent Temple-language to reflect this line of thought. In fact, it does: the Spirit who indwells God’s people means that, corporately and personally, they are seen in terms of the Temple.[31]
It is, therefore, no surprise that for Paul the sudden fulfillment of divine promise which has come about through the gospel of Jesus has generated a community which discovers new knowledge, a new mode of knowledge. The renewal of the covenant leads directly to the renewal of creation, by the shocking, yet promise-fulfilling, route of cross and resurrection. That is Paul’s apocalyptic gospel. It belongs historically on the map of Second Temple Jewish thought, reconceived around Jesus and the Spirit. It belongs theologically as an integrated whole, not to be split up into different component strands. If we find ourselves wanting to pry apart what Paul held together, that is our problem. We should not suppose it was his as well.
I am reminded of the lines which T. S. Eliot puts into the mouth of Thomas à Becket as he realizes his assassins have arrived at last:
However certain our expectation
The moment foreseen may be unexpected
When it arrives. It comes when we are
Engrossed with matters of other urgency.[32]
* * *
See, e.g., my Paul and the Faithfulness of God (London: SPCK, 2013) [=PFG], chapter 2. ↵
See J. P. Davies, Paul
Among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the ‘Apocalyptic Paul’ in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature, LNTS 562 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016). ↵
C. Rowland, The Open Heaven (SPCK, 1982); C. Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2009). On all this see further Part II of N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters (London: SPCK, 2015). ↵
See George B. Caird, Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980). Cf. the defense of this point in PFG 163–75. ↵
N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), chapter 10. ↵
Among possible exceptions we might include 1 Enoch 42. ↵
This point was already made by J. C. Beker: e.g., his Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 137. See too W. Meeks, The First Urban Christians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 179–80. ↵
See the account of basic Jewish belief in e.g., E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 bce–66 ce (London: SCM, 1992), 247–51. ↵
M. C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988), 84–88, 182–83; Cf. M. C. de Boer, “Paul and Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament, eds. Joel Marcus, Marion L. Soards, and J. Louis Martyn (Sheffield: JSOT, 1989), 180–81; M. C. de Boer, Galatians: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 31–35, 79–82. In his Hermeneia commentary on 1 Enoch, George Nickelsburg also makes use of similar categories, but insists they are not antithetical (1 Enoch 1 [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002], 41). A similar point to mine is made by Meeks, First Urban Christians, 172: debates about “apocalyptic” have unfortunately focused on “the abstractions represented by the terms anthropology versus cosmology, both of which the discussants use in peculiar senses” (italics original). ↵
G. Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (London: Macmillan, 1967). ↵
De Boer, Defeat of Death, 85. ↵
See my article “A New Perspective on Käsemann? Apocalyptic, Covenant, and the Righteousness of God,” in Studies in the Pauline Epistles: Essays in Honor of Douglas J. Moo, eds. M. S. Harmon and J. E. Smith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 243–58. ↵
See Wright, Interpreters, Part II. ↵
On the “Jesus Seminar” see my Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), 29–35. ↵
For this whole subject, see PFG 1473–84. ↵
On the debate between Käsemann and Stendahl, see N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul (London: SPCK, 2013), chapter 1. ↵
See the discussion of G. van Kooten, O. Wischmeyer, and N. T. Wright, “How Greek was Paul’s Eschatology?,” NTS 61, no. 2 (2015): 239–53. ↵
I have in my possession a letter from Käsemann in which he says that, for him, “apocalyptic” simply means “Naherwartung.” ↵
J. L. Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 33a (New York: Doubleday, 1997); J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997). ↵
See, e.g., de Boer, Defeat of Death, 85; de Boer, Galatians, 32. ↵
E.g., the dichotomous analyses of Gal. 1:4 offered de Boer himself (Galatians, 30) and by Martyn (Galatians, 90). ↵
D. A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). See the discussion in Wright, Interpreters, chapter 9. ↵
See Aulén, Christus Victor. ↵
This was readily admitted by Douglas Campbell in a recent panel discussion at Duke University, and again, at the SBL session at which the present collection of essays were first presented. ↵
See PFG, chapter 12. See now C. Heilig, Hidden Criticism? The Methodology and Plausibility of the Search for a Counter-Imperial Subtext in Paul, WUNT 2/392 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). ↵
A. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). ↵
Quotations from the NT are taken from my own translation, N. T. Wright, The Kingdom New Testament (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011). ↵
For this, and what follows, see esp. PFG chapter 14. ↵
Campbell, Deliverance. I say “supposedly” because, though Campbell bases his argument on the “apocalyptic” theology he claims to find in chapters 5–8, he nowhere in this book expounds those chapters or that theology. In his contribution (113–43) to M. Bird, ed., Four Views on the Apostle Paul (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), Campbell promises a detailed engagement with Rom. 5–8, but fails to provide it, as one of his responders in that volume points out (L. T. Johnson, at 149–52). ↵
Meeks, First Urban Christians, 90 and 107, stresses the cosmic vision of both Ephesians and Colossians. It is not clear (as in his further comment at 184) that this goes beyond what is both stated and implied in e.g., Rom. 8:18–39, 1 Cor. 10:20; 15:26; or indeed, Gal. 4:1–11. ↵
See, e.g., 1 Cor. 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor. 6:16; and, in the light of these, Rom. 8:9–11; Col. 2:9–10. ↵
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, Part II, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1969), 266. ↵
7
Some Reflections on Apocalyptic Thought and Time in Literature from the Second Temple Period
Loren T. Stuckenbruck
Introduction and the Question
The term “apocalyptic” has been widely used in biblical scholarship, especially since World War II. Since its antecedent was “eschatology,” the term has frequently been associated with notions of time, especially in relation to the ultimate conclusion of things at the end of history from a faith perspective. The simple equation of “apocalyptic” with “eschatology,” however, has rightly been questioned, primarily on two fronts.
First, as Martin de Boer has emphasized since the appearance in 1988 of his monograph on The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5,[1] the term not only relates to time, but also to cosmology; hence, there may be the need to distinguish “apocalyptic eschatology” from “apocalyptic cosmology,” although these dimensions frequently overlap in Second Temple Jewish literature and cannot be held so clearly apart. Second, since Christopher Rowland’s influential work, originally published in 1982 and entitled The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Early Judaism and Christianity,[2] the term “wisdom” has come into play as a way to describe a “revealed” knowledge conveyed in texts conventionally designated as apocalyptic.
While both strains have had some impact on the interpretation of the New Testament and will continue to weigh in on reconstructions of “the historical Jesus” or of Pauline theology, the ultimate focus of scholars on the distinctive character of emerging Christian thought during the first century ce has sometimes short-circuited what can be said about apocalyptic thought, based on a remarkably diverse selection of Jewish literature composed in different areas of the eastern Levant over some 400 years between the third century bce and the early part of the second century ce. What follows below can hardly provide a survey of the literature. Nevertheless, I hope to draw attention to some aspects thereof that, for a variety of reasons, have either been marginally noted or altogether overlooked.
Broadly, there is wide agreement that “apocalyptic” thought during the Second Temple period relates to the end of history or to the structure of the created order or both. This understanding, when put in such terms, goes back to the much quoted definition of “apocalypse” as a literary genre initially offered by John J. Collins in 1979[3]:
. . . revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendental reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves anothe
r, supernatural world.
While the German Apokalyptik had multiple connotations that would carry over into a vague English use of “apocalyptic” as a noun, it became necessary to introduce distinctions. “Apocalypse” would denote a literary genre that became the focus of Collins’s definition, and “apocalypticism” could be understood as a socially rooted ideology. “Apocalyptic,” then, would be used as an adjective (with the German equivalent “apokalyptisch”) that refers to a worldview. These expressions have proved useful. While in relation to Second Temple Jewish tradition, “apocalypticism” draws attention to the ideologies that, in some Jewish groups, gave rise to the composition of apocalypses, the adjective “apocalyptic” not only serves as a label for the worldview of such groups and their literature, but also more broadly for such a worldview whenever and where it was held.
Thus, the presence of “apocalyptic” ideas is not limited to a certain kind of literature, nor can it be reduced to a well-defined sociological profile.[4] For example, among Second Temple writings, many compositions preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls can arguably be designated “apocalyptic” in worldview, without technically being apocalypses themselves,[5] even if their relation to a broader social movement cannot be clearly ascertained. However, the greater degree of fluidity surrounding the use of the adjective has sometimes led to such casual application that its real connection to particular Second Temple writings can for the most part only be discerned on a profound level.[6] While such broad notions of the adjective “apocalyptic” have their place and can even be theologically constructive, a usage that is unhinged from a Jewish literary-historical context is at risk of engaging with an imprecise or even arbitrary range of ideas. Although one commonly speaks of modifications of Jewish apocalyptic thought in Paul, such adaptations have become so significant in characterizing the distinguishing emphases of the apostle that one wonders whether one is, in effect, dealing with two understandings of “apocalyptic” thought (in Judaism and Christianity, respectively), rather than one that allows adequate room for continuity.
Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination Page 17
