Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

by Ben C Blackwell

  “The fullness of time”: Galatians 4:4

  Thus, we come to a passage that lies, for many, at the heart of the question of Paul’s eschatology in Galatians, 3:15–4:7, and to one verse in particular, 4:4, dubbed by Martyn “the theological center of the entire letter.”[56] Here it is, with its following context:

  ὅτε δὲ ἦλθεν τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου, ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον, ἵνα τοὺς ὑπὸ νόμον ἐξαγοράσῃ, ἵνα τὴν υἱοθεσίαν ἀπολάβωμεν.

  But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.

  The phrase τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου, translated by the NRSV as “the fullness of time,” arguably invokes a redemptive-historical metaphor that is potentially at odds with the “two age” scheme of 1:4 and 6:15. Martyn and de Boer are aware of this tension in their own discussions of the verse. Martyn, for example, asks whether the phrase τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου indicates “a point that lies at the end of a line” and whether “after rejecting the Teachers’ view of redemptive history . . . Paul finally embraces in 4.4 his own way of affirming that view.”[57] Martyn emphatically rejects this option, concluding that “throughout this passage, Paul does not think of a gradual maturation, but rather of a punctiliar liberation, enacted by God in his own sovereign time.”[58] This is an interpretation reflected clearly in his rendering of τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου as “at a time selected by [God].”[59] Thus, Martyn employs a dichotomy, central to his approach to apocalyptic, between a “gradual maturation” and a “punctiliar liberation.” It is questionable, however, whether the notion of a “gradual maturation” is something that accurately describes salvation history, and whether these extremes are really the only two options.

  For de Boer, 4:4 is also “the central theological announcement of the letter.”[60] He offers a similar discussion, rejecting any smooth redemptive-historical readings of τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου, arguing that

  it would be wrong, however, to conclude that God’s action is somehow dependent on time, on the course of human history. That approach would lead to a futile endeavor to study the history of the Greco-Roman period, or of Israel, around the time of Jesus in order to establish the marks of that fullness.[61]

  His conclusion is that τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου “signifies a clean break with the past and may be regarded as an apocalyptic assertion on Paul’s part: it announces the end of ‘the present evil age’ (1:4) and the beginning of the ‘new creation’ (6:15).”[62]

  The same problematic dichotomy which drives Martyn’s critique of salvation history can be seen here. For de Boer, the two-ages scheme is the controlling eschatological metaphor to the exclusion of any redemptive-historical themes. It is significant that it is precisely here that de Boer makes his comment, noted earlier, that the “periodization of history in certain strands of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic eschatology” is “an optional feature.”[63] The above discussion of 4 Ezra has attempted to demonstrate that this stance is problematic, and that, while the two ages motif is important, it is a theme woven together with other eschatological themes, among them a focus on redemptive history. There is no need to dismiss this as an “optional feature” or to treat it as alien to Pauline apocalyptic. Rather, Paul’s use of τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου “bespeaks a conviction about God’s control of history that is at home in Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic thought.”[64] There is thus no reason to avoid, on the basis of Paul’s apocalyptic theology, the redemptive-historical translation of the phrase as “the fullness of time.” Indeed, there is every reason why we should expect an “apocalyptic Paul” to weave the two eschatological themes together.

  The way in which the two ages doctrine is employed by de Boer to exclude redemptive history, resulting in the interpretation of τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου as “a clean break with the past,” thus appears rather more like an exercise in Sachkritik than an interpretation informed by the complex eschatological patterns of the apocalyptic literature. Martyn’s approach is more nuanced, since he rightly rules out such a “clean break” interpretation, observing that “the picture . . . is not so simple.”[65] But his solution, employing the motif of “invasion” and interpreting τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου as “a time selected by God” has much the same result. For both de Boer and Martyn, Paul’s use of that phrase is a problem to be solved, and their solutions demonstrate that a dualistic two-ages scheme is being employed as an apocalyptic sine qua non over against any redemptive-historical framework, caricatured as “gradual maturation.”

  What our earlier analysis of 4 Ezra suggests, however, is that there is, in these interpretations, a false antithesis between the “punctiliar” and the “linear,” between the two ages and redemptive history, that does not do justice to the way in which the multiple eschatological metaphors interrelate in the apocalypses. As Wright has argued concerning Galatians 4:4, “we cannot, then, invoke something called ‘apocalyptic’ to rule out the idea of a continuous flow of history, looking back to Abraham and trusting in the promises God made to him, and eventually reaching a point of ‘fullness.’ . . . The radical newness of this moment does not constitute a denial of all that has gone before.”[66] Martyn’s approach to Galatians 4:4 constitutes an interpretation which “unravel[s] the controlling metaphor of the chapter.”[67] There is a real danger here of taking the two-ages scheme, absolutizing it and applying it to Paul univocally, and thus failing to account for the complex but coherent character of the apostle’s use of multiple eschatological metaphors.

  The Two Ages and Salvation History

  in Paul’s Apocalyptic Imagination

  Thirty years ago, Richard Hays issued a warning against one-dimensional approaches to Paul’s language in Galatians:

  Perhaps Paul’s language is less univocal and more “poetic” than the Western theological tradition has usually supposed. In the quest for clarity and accuracy, NT exegetes have tended to strive for the single right interpretation of Paul’s theological expressions. . . . I am not proposing that NT exegesis should abandon the quest for clarity in interpreting Paul. I am advocating only that the presupposition of univocity be discarded. The texts and symbols which grasp and move us most profoundly are almost always polyvalent.[68]

  To be sure, it is not always clear how the apocalypses hold together themes which modern minds find incompatible—this requires careful attention to the complex metaphorical logic.[69] Hays has more recently repeated his call for this sort of attention to poetics, and now particularly, in evaluating the nature of Paul’s apocalyptic imagination:

  to understand “apocalyptic” in Paul, we must attend to the gospel’s imaginative remaking of the world. To interpret the apocalyptic rhetoric and theology of Galatians we must reflect on the poetics of the letter, the way in which Paul deploys language and imagery to reshape the symbolic world in which his readers live and move.[70]

  In Galatians, the complex, polyvalent, but coherent interweaving of the eschatological themes of two ages (1:4) and redemptive history (4:4) is just such a poetic endeavor, and one which is attested, mutatis mutandis, elsewhere in the apocalyptic literature, as the present discussion of 4 Ezra has exemplified. Evaluating Paul as a thinker in the apocalyptic mode should not be oversimplified into the presence of one feature, such as the two ages, but requires attention to this complex eschatology. In Galatians, Paul asks the apocalyptic question “what time is it?”[71] and answers in the apocalyptic mode. But in exploring his answer, we must resist a false dichotomy between the “linear” and the “punctiliar,” between the equally apocalyptic eschatological doctrines of the two ages and salvation history.

 
* * *

  K. Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus Gerd Mohn, 1970), translated by Margaret Kohl and published as The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (London: SCM, 1972). This rather bloodless English title loses the polemic of the original German. ↵

  See, e.g., the discussion in R. E. Sturm, “Defining the Word ‘apocalyptic’: A Problem in Biblical Criticism,” in Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honour of J. Louis Martyn (Sheffield: Sheffield University, 1989), 17–48, at 17. T. F. Glasson considered it “a useless word which no one can define and which produces nothing but confusion and acres of verbiage” (“What Is Apocalyptic?,” NTS 27, no. 1 [1980]: 98–105, at 99). ↵

  J. J. Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Collins’s definition of the apocalyptic genre is for many, though not all, the basis for discussion: “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world” (J. J. Collins, “Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14, no. 1 [1979]: 1–20, at 9). For Rowland, see The Open Heaven (London: SPCK, 1982); C. Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Among recent studies from the Enoch Seminar see, e.g., M. Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First Century Israel: Reading Second Baruch in Context (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck: 2011); M. Henze and Boccaccini, eds., Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch: Reconstruction After the Fall (Leiden: Brill, 2013); K. M. Hogan, Theologies in Conflict in 4 Ezra: Wisdom Debate and Apocalyptic Solution (Leiden: Brill, 2008); and L. Stuckenbruck, 1 Enoch 91–108 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007). For Stuckenbruck’s work on Paul, see L. Stuckenbruck, “Overlapping Ages at Qumran and ‘Apocalyptic’ in Pauline Theology,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pauline Literature, ed. Jean-Sébastien Rey (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 309–26; “Posturing ‘Apocalyptic’ in Pauline Theology: How Much Contrast with Jewish Tradition?,” in The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 240–56. ↵

  N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters (London: SPCK, 2015), 138. ↵

  J. L. Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, ABC 33a (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 98. Martyn died in June 2015, as this volume was in preparation, and New Testament scholarship, particularly on the subject of apocalyptic, lost one of its most important and stimulating voices. ↵

  M. C. de Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5, JSNTSup 22 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1988), 19, cf. 181–82. ↵

  M. C. de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, eds. John J. Collins and Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 2000), 345–83, at 353. ↵

  R. B. Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul: Paul’s Interpreters and the Rhetoric of Criticism, JSNTSup 127 (Sheffield: Sheffield University, 1996), 261. ↵

  Ibid., 291–92. ↵

  B. R. Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 83, directing Matlock to de Boer, Defeat of Death, 39–91. Whether or not one finds de Boer’s treatment of the texts satisfactory, he is at least attempting to anchor his definition of “apocalyptic” in those texts, despite Matlock’s protestations. ↵

  Matlock, Unveiling the Apocalyptic Paul, 292. Cf. Gaventa’s statement that, apocalyptic means “not simply that Paul’s metaphors of maternity have some parallels in apocalyptic literature or that they come to Paul from the sphere of apocalyptic thought” (Our Mother Saint Paul, 79). What I understand Gaventa to be saying is that “apocalyptic” is not simply this historical connection, but it is as at least this. ↵

  The position of Douglas Campbell seems to be something of an outlier. While acknowledging that, for some interpreters “[apocalyptic] denotes certain positions within the more diverse, Jewish apocalyptic corpus and worldview,” he prefers to use the word “at an introductory level of discussion when broad loyalties and orientations are being sketched in relation to different basic approaches to Paul” which, for Campbell, means “that an approach to Paul is being pursued that ultimately aligns with the concerns and readings of—in this context in particular—Lou Martyn” (D. A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009], 191). That Martyn himself, as we have just seen, insisted on a connection with the apocalyptic texts seems to go unnoticed in Campbell’s summary (189–90). ↵

  A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. 106–11. ↵

  Ibid., 106. ↵

  Ibid. ↵

  Ibid., 111. Fowler’s framework has been used to good effect by Eibert Tigchelaar, cf. esp. Prophets of Old and the Day of the End: Zechariah, the Book of Watchers, and Apocalyptic (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 5–8. ↵

  R. B. Hays, “Apocalyptic Poiesis in Galatians,” in Galatians and Christian Theology, eds. M. W. Elliott et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 200–219, at 203. ↵

  P. Vielhauer, “Apocalypses and Related Literature: Introduction,” in New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 581–607, at 588–89. ↵

  Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 432–33. ↵

  D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (London: SCM, 1964), 266. ↵

  Martyn, Galatians, 97–98. ↵

  de Boer, Defeat of Death, 7. Cf. Also his discussion in de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 347–49. See also his contribution to the present volume. ↵

  Rowland, Open Heaven, 26. ↵

  Rowland and Morray-Jones, Mystery of God, 15. Another example is N. T. Wright, who has made this point repeatedly: see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 254; 299–300; idem. Paul and the Faithfulness of God (London: SPCK, 2013), 1059–60; idem. Interpreters, 157–58. (cf. esp. the list of references at 158n12.) ↵

  I have argued this more fully in chapter 3 of 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). ↵

  Vielhauer, “Apocalypses and Related Literature: Introduction,” 588; cf. e.g., de Boer, “Paul and Apocalyptic Eschatology,” 348. ↵

  Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 222. I will return to this point below. ↵

  Stuckenbruck, “Overlapping Ages,” 312. See also idem, “Posturing ‘Apocalyptic’ in Pauline Theology: How Much Contrast with Jewish Tradition?” Cf. J. J. Collins, “Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death,” CBQ 36, no. 1 (1974): 21–43, and Stuckenbruck’s contribution to the present volume. ↵

  M. C. de Boer, Galatians: A Commentary, NTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 261n389. ↵

  Stuckenbruck, “Overlapping Ages,” 322. ↵

  M. E. Stone, Fourth Ezra, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 93. ↵

  4 Ezra 7:45–50. Translations of 4 Ezra are those of Metzger in J. H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. I. Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2009), 525–59, though I will also refer to the more recent work of Stone, M. E. and Henze, M., 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch: Translations, Introductions, and Notes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013). ↵

  B. W. Longenecker, Eschatology and the Covenant: A Comparison of 4 Ezra and Romans 1–11, JSNTSup 57 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1991), 81n3. ↵