William S. Campbell’s Romans, Part One

William S. Campbell’s Romans, Part One April 26, 2023

There is now a new series of commentaries that uses the methodology called Social Identity Theory or SIT for short.   This particular theory has been developing for some decades now and is especially helpful in getting late Western persons through their heads that ancient culture was a different animal than our modern or post-modern Western cultures.  In particular, this way of analyzing New Testament things makes clear that group identity was primary and individual identity entirely secondary in antiquity.  In other words, identity was viewed in almost an entirely opposite way than we view it today, with all our ’emphasis on the individual’ or ‘I gotta be me’ or even ‘looking out for number one’  which is to say this theory provides a thoroughgoing critique of modern narcissism and self centered ways of viewing the world.  It’s become so bad that we actually have people running around talking about ‘my truth’, only truth is not individualistic, and is not generated by a particular individual. Actual truth makes claims on all sorts of individuals.  So, in short, this lens through which one can look at the NT in fresh ways, does a better job of comporting with the actual nature of ancient cultures than our modern individualistic readings of the NT.

I will not soon forget the day that I began to read the Greek NT, and discovered that one of my favorite verses ‘workout your salvation with fear and trembling’ did not mean what I thought it meant, namely the individual’s responsibility to work our what God had worked into my inner being, my heart.  I discovered that the ‘you’ in that sentence is plural, and it is an appeal to the community— ‘ya’ll work out ya’lls salvation, which God has worked into your community to will and to do.’ Mind blowing.  You mean salvation could be a group project?    Then after that I discovered that the persons in the Gospels didn’t have last names— which of course is the way modern persons demarcate one person from another, or one family from another.   Christ is not Jesus’ last name, nor is Magdalene Mary’s last name.  The cellphone log must have been confusing in Jesus’ day– which John and which Simon am I supposed to call?

I say all this to make clear that it is good to have a commentary series that decenters and disorients some of the mistaken ways modern people read the Bible.     This SIT series is such a series.   So far there are three volumes in the series, one on Luke, one on 2 Corinthians, and now Bill Campbell’s landmark volume on Romans. Just when you thought there couldn’t be anything fresh or new that could be added to the thousands of treatments of Romans, this volume comes along and wakes up the neighborhood.  I have been fortunate enough to mentor two doctoral students who used this method to do a fresh take on Luke and then most recently one on 1 Peter, and the results are promising as well as interesting.

One warning about this series—– it is very expensive, but then sometimes knowledge doesn’t come cheap, even in the internet age.    This particular volume of 480 pages is $130 on Amazon.   Ouch.   This means only libraries and those with a good incomes can likely afford this volume.  Certainly not my starving students, or some pastors and lay people.   Nevertheless, this book is important and I’m going to do a series of unpacking posts about it, and then Bill and I will be having a dialogue about his magnum opus in May.   Stay tuned.   Let me say at the outset that Bill is something of a pioneer in this sub-field of NT studies.  Before there was a group of mostly Jewish scholars called ‘the Paul within Judaism’ group (and actually they are somewhat diverse in their views— see especially the work of Mark Nanos, Paula Fredriksen, and to some extent Matthew Novenson. See the review I did of his recent Paul book on this blog back near the beginning of this year).

I found Bill’s book so stimulating, I took some 30 single-spaced pages of notes while reading it.   Which is not to say I agreed with a fair bit of his major theses in the book, but that’s o.k.— it’s good to have your long held assumptions challenged, and sometimes even ruled out.  In the next post I will talk about ways in which Bill and I are in agreement about Romans and this method of interpretation.


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