On p. 1095 Tom begins his discussion of two important topics when it comes to eschatology— ethics and ethnics, as he puts it, the latter having to do with the future of Israel. I think he is right that Paul is the first Jewish Christian to have to think through what these categories would look like between the time when Messiah first came and his return. Jesus, for example, says nothing about how Gentiles would fit into the people of God after his Ascension but before the parousia (and Tom is right that this is a good reason NOT to conclude that the Gospels simply reflect the later life and issues of the Christian church in the last third of the first century A.D.).

I am with Tom on the contention that theology necessarily implies ethics, for example, a commitment to one God, implies avoiding the worship of idols, an ethical matter. Tom repeats approvingly, on p. 1097 Schnelle’s dictum that when God accepts a person, they are accepted unconditionally, but not without consequences. The problem with this dictum is that there is always an implied condition— namely that one continue in the faith, working out one’s salvation that God has been working in. Of course this requires ongoing grace of God, so that no one could ever say it was accomplished on the sole basis of human effort much less work’s righteousness, but real faith not only implies works, necessitates works, it enables it, or as I like to put it ‘faith works’. I am in full agree with Tom that all that Paul says about ethics is directed toward and in relationship to the whole believing community. Modern individualistic ethics and a call for individual moral athletes is not part of Paul’s purpose or emphasis. Most of Paul’s imperatives are indeed plural, or as Tom puts, ethics is a team sport! Tom refers us to Richard Hays’ fine Moral Vision of the NT which insists rightly on a tight integration of Paul’s theology and ethics. Just so. Paul is not throwing out an ethical grab bag of ideas at the end of his otherwise theological letters.

In answer to why God didn’t simply bring about the resurrection of believers and the new creation immediately after the resurrection of Jesus Tom’s view of Paul’s answer (p. 1098) is interesting— “Paul’s answer was deeply humanizing: the one God did it this way in order to enable the humans who would share in the running of his new creation to develop the character they would need for that ultimate task.”

Again, Tom is absolutely right to reject the old Schweitzerian formula, still touted today by his latter day disciples (e.g. Allison, Ehrman etc.) that the ethics of the NT reflects and depends upon a wrong-headed belief in an imminent parousia that never came imminently. “For Paul what mattered was primarily something that had happened, namely the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit…when I speak of eschatological ethics I refer not to an ethic determined by a sense that the world was about to end but to a sense of human vocation shaped equally by what had recently happened and what would one day happen.” (p. 1098). This is exactly right. 1 Cor. 7.29-31 does not say ‘the time is short’ it says ‘the time has been shortened’ by the eschatological events which were already in play, such that the schema of this world with its institutions was ALREADY passing away. The usual distinctions between the indicative (theology) and the imperative (ethics) are seen as inadequate but they do respond in a Jewish context to the relationship between election and keeping Torah as a response. The problem in using this schema for analyzing Paul is that there is still theology in terms of parousia to come as well as work to be done. There is, for example, a tight inner weaving of theology and ethics in Romans, for example. Instead of indicative and imperative Schnelle suggests transformation and participation as nearer the mark. Tom is right that Paul’s ethic is deeply grounded in Scripture, but oddly he fails to mention how deeply indebted it is also to the Jesus tradition, especially in Romans 12ff. It has some connections with Greco-Roman ethics as well, but not to the degree of debt of these two other sources of material. In order to hold theology and ethics together, Tom wants to talk about “the eschatological and behavioral aspect of the redefined election…rooted in Paul’s revised monotheism”. (p. 1100). The new creation has been launched but not yet fully consummated and so the ethics reflect both this already and this not yet.

Christians then are to live knowing what time it is— namely the period of the overlap of the ages. The age to come has already dawned and Christians are to live with that awareness that they have been rescued out of this present evil age. They are not to let this world squeeze them into its mold. Rather they are to live out of a (partially) transformed or renewed mind.

On pp. 1102-03 Tom wants to insist that in one sense resurrection has already happened to the believer, and so when he is asked to calculate himself dead to sin and alive to God, this latter is not just about considering the fact that one day he will be resurrected. Tom says, if resurrection in some sense has not already in part happened to the believer, then all these exhortations to a radical change in behavior are asking for the impossible. While I take his point on this, what is not the case is that Paul associates that ‘being made alive’ with water baptism. No, water baptism is the emblem of the burial of the old self. The being made alive happens in and through the Spirit, and that is not conveyed by, in, or with the water. One needs to keep steadily in view that baptism is like circumcision the sign of the covenant, and as such the sign of the cutting off, not the grafting in. So with circumcision it is a sign of the oath curse— ‘if you do not keep the covenant, I will cut you and your descendants off’ and what better symbol of this than an act applied to the organ of generation? Similarly, Paul says we have been buried in baptism, not raised in baptism, and the rising to newness of life is surely a reference (as a future tense verb) to the future resurrection, which present transformation by the Spirit is only a down payment, a foretaste. Comparisons with Col.3 can be overdrawn. There Paul does refer to present transformation as a sort of ‘being raised to life with the Messiah’ but this should not be read back into Romans 6. What is true about both Col. 3 (see p. 1103) and Rom. 6 is that Paul is convinced the believer has ‘stripped off the old nature, complete with its patterns of behavior, and ‘you have put on the new, which is being renewed in the image of the creator’. It is that internal being renewed that Paul affirms as already happening in the believer, though not to his physical body. True as well it is Jesus’ resurrection that has brought about this change, along with the sending of the Spirit to his people. Tom points to Col. 2.11-12 as the basis for his sort of reading of Col. 3 as once again about baptism, but in fact what Col. 2.11-12 says is that they were raised through their faith, not by means of baptism. Probably what Paul is saying there is we were buried with Christ (in him), and were raised with Him’ not ‘in baptism’ but ‘in Him’. When he wants to talk about what actually happens in us, he says the raising with him happens through faith (which is certainly not the same thing as baptism– see my commentary on Colossians pp. 156-57).

On p. 1104 Tom goes on to stress that believers are ‘in Christ’ and that this is the basis for the call to imitate Christ, not in some superficial mimicking, but by living self-sacrificial lives ala Phil. 2.4-11. They are to have the same mindset as Christ, and this should lead to following his pattern of behavior. Tom is right as well that one of the goals of the ethics enunciated is to unify the body of Christ— sin divides the body, the fruit of the Spirit, and Christ like behavior unifies it. On p. 1106 Tom is right to stress that the kingdom for Paul is present and future, and more particularly the Messiah’s kingdom is now, and it will be turned over to the Father later (1 Cor.15). The current nature of the Kingdom is seen in a saying like Rom.14.17. Christ’s res. is the crucial factor determining the believers status and goal, but it is the Spirit which enables the believer to turn that status into behavior. There is a crucial point at the bottom of this page” “when Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit, in contradistinction to the ‘works of the flesh’ he is not talking of things that happen automatically… Part of the mystery of the Spirit’s work… is that that work does not cancel out human moral effort, including thought, will, decision and action. Rather it makes them all possible. It opens up a new kind of freedom and offers help, encouragement, and companionship”.

It needs to be kept steadily in view that Tom’s view of the new covenant is that it is the renewed old covenant. And therefore, the law that Paul talks about as the Law of Christ, is not a new law, but rather the messianically redefined old one. The problem of course with this is among other things the Sermon on the Mount, which not only intensifies some of the OT commandments, but offers some that are at odds with OT commandments, for example the prohibition of divorce, of murder, of oaths, and we could go on about no more food laws and no more sabbath keeping either. The renewed covenant model of what is going on in Paul’s discussion of the Law simply does not have a broad enough explanatory power to do justice to all of Christ’s or Paul’s ethic, frankly.

Of course it is true that there is overlap between ethics in the new covenant and the old one on many particular imperatives. This is hardly a surprise since God’s character and what he expects of the character of his people has not really changed just because Christ has come. And yes, it is also true that the real intention and heart of the old covenant— loving God and neighbor, can be said to be fulfilled in Christ and in the new covenant. But if it is fulfilled, then a covenant is over and done with, just as when a contract is fulfilled and completed.

So when Tom endorses E.P. Sanders statement that what happens with Paul and the law is that he simply denies the parts of the law which separate Jew and Gentile and he affirms the parts and insists on keeping the bits which keep the church from idolatry and immorality, thus preserving both the unity of the new people of God and its purity (see p. 1108 n. 272), this frankly does not conjure with the full radicality of Paul’s ethics and covenant theology.

At no point in the Mosaic covenant are we told that God’s people should be committed to no oaths, no divorce, no violence, no food laws, no circumcisions, or even the love of enemies. These new things reflect a new covenant, not merely a renewal of the old one, and new covenants have new commandments, however much they may also adopt old ones and make them part of the new covenant. The Law of the Spirit of life, is not the same as the Law of sin and death merely renewed or redefined in Christ and the Spirit (see Romans 8.1ff).

New creatures in Christ are new in the sense that Adam was a new creature on earth. They are not merely newly redefined Jews or new members of a highjacked Israel (thought to = the church). Ethnic Israel still has a purpose and a promise in God’s plan of things in the future according to Rom. 11, and the new people of God, Jew and Gentile in Christ, have become the new humanity, not merely the true Israel. Non-Christian Israel will one day be incorporated into the new people of God when Christ returns. Paul does not use the term Israel to refer to non-Jews or the church writ large, though clearly Paul does think that true ethnic Jews like himself are followers of the Messiah, and someday that will be true of ‘all Israel’ (whatever sized group that signifies).

The discussion which begins on p. 634 on how exactly Paul reformed and reaffirmed Jewish monotheism is interesting in various ways. Tom begins by discussing texts such as the cause celebre Rom.8.18-30. His translation of key phrases is interesting (on which see his earlier Romans commentary). Instead of the word predestined, he prefers ‘marked out in advance to be shaped according to the model of the image of the Son’. He also prefers the translation ‘called according to his purpose’ even though the word ‘his’ is nowhere in any Greek manuscript, and as Chrysostom says, the word itself can mean choice. Then one has to ask— Whose chose, God’s or the responders? This is indeed a viable question here because the ‘ous’ in vs. 29a has as its antecedent ‘those who love God’. In other words, the text reads ‘for those who love God, whom God foreknew, he also destined or marked out in advance. The discussion then is about the destiny of believers, not about how persons came to be believers in the first place. Their destiny is to be conformed to the image of the Son. And again, Paul is referring to a group of people— ‘those who love God, who were called according to choice/purpose’. Those folks whom God foreknew would love him (making clear that God’s choice was not mere fiat, or arbitrary but on the basis of God’s clear advance knowledge of how these people would respond). None of this is really dealt with at this juncture in the book, but we may hope for more later. Tom is certainly right here that we have a clear affirmation that the God who created it all is also the God who is in the process of recreating it all. This is an expression of creational monotheism, now reconfigured to include the Son and conformity to the Son’s image (p. 636).

But there are more implications to an affirmation of creational monotheism: “This positive view of creation also explains the passages where Paul indicates that, even among pagans, there is a moral sense which will recognize the good behavior of the Messiah’s people, and from which, in turn one can even learn by example. It is this too which enables Paul exactly in line with at least one regular second Temple viewpoint, to affirm the goodness and God-givenness of governments and authorities…even while reserving the right both to remind them of their God-given duty and to hold them to account in relation to it” (p. 639).

p. 640 finds Tom affirming an interesting connection— no idols also means there is only one true ‘image’ of God that has ever been on earth since the Fall, that is Jesus the Messiah, himself the truly human one. Those who are in the Messiah are to be renewed according to that image. What Tom does not say, but could have done is that this fits nicely with Paul’s contention that Christ is the last Adam, remembering that the first one was also created in the image of God.

On p. 644 Tom turns more specifically to the discussion of Jesus and monotheism. He is not happy with either the traditional liberal notion that high christology is late and therefore tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, nor is he simply happy with the attempts ala Hengel and company to demonstrate high Christology was thoroughly Jewish and early. He rejects the analysis of modernity saying “At the same time Romanticism constantly implyied that the ‘primitive’ form of any movement was the genuine,inspired article, the original vision which would fade over time as people moved from charisma to committees, from adoration to administration, from spontaneous and subversive spirituality to stable structures and a salaried sacerdotalism.” (p. 646). Nice turns of phrase, and there are many such in these volumes.

I found ironic Wright’s pronouncement on p. 647 that the work of Hengel, Bauckham, Hurtado makes it “almost inconceivable that one would go back to the old days of Bousset and Bultmann (or even Dunn, Casey, and Vermes).” (p. 647). Obviously, he was not aware that Bart Ehrman was about to launch yet another salvo based on such assumptions with a title something like How Jesus became the divine Son of God, or the like. Nonetheless, Tom is right that the idea that high Christology must be late has been so widely rejected that even Jewish scholars like Daniel Boyarin “have swung round in the opposite direction, arguing that most if not all of the elements of early Christology, not least the divinity of the expected Messiah, were in fact present within pre-Christian Judaism itself” (p. 648— see e.g. the recent flap over the Gabriel Stone). Wright’s judgment is that Boyarin has claimed much more than the early Jewish texts will support.

More importantly Wright is correct about noticing what Paul does NOT have to argue for— “”early Christians, already by the time of Paul, had articulated a belief in the ‘divinity’ of Jesus far more powerfully and indeed poetically than anyone had previously imagined. Paul can in fact assume his (very ‘high’) view of Jesus as a given. He never says, even to Corinth ‘How then can some of you be saying that Jesus was simply a wonderful human being and nothing more?’ Nor does christology seem to be a point of contention between him and (say) the church of Jerusalem. Despite regular assumptions and assertions, there is no historical evidence for an ‘early Jewish Christianity which (like the later Ebionites) denied identification between Jesus and Israel’s God.” (p. 648). Tom thus concludes that Paul’s view of Jesus couldn’t all have come from that revelatory moment on Damascus Road.

Thus the question remains, what pushed Jesus’ earliest followers after Easter in the direction of a high Christology. Tom is not satisfied with the older view that Jesus himself made such a thing possible and clear by the use of Son of Man language, thereby some kind of equality with Israel’s God, and that the early church saw the resurrection as the confirmation of Jesus’ claim. Tom oddly says about this view “I regard such a view as hopelessly short-circuited though not entirely misleading and mistaken” (p. 649). He does not explain what he means by short-circuited.

Tom is more impressed with the proposal of Larry Hurtado that “it was the sense and experience of the personal presence of the exalted Jesus, in the way that one might expect to experience the presence of the living God, that led Jesus’s earliest disciples first to worship him (without any sense of compromising monotheism) then to re-read Israel’s Scriptures in such a way as to discover him in passages which were about the one God”… In other words it was “‘early Christian experience’ of the risen lord in their midst that compelled them to the first stirrings of what would later becoming trinitarian and incarnational theology.” (p. 650). Wright things Hurtado is basically correct in his presentation and analysis of the phenomena and he sees it as completely ruling out the Bousset hypothesis (namely that when Christianity full engaged with the pagan world it absorbed pagan notions about deities and lords and applied them to Christ). In addition, Wright points to the recent work of Chris Tilling which demonstrates that Paul’s descriptions of the relationship between the early Christians and Jesus match the scriptural descriptions of the relationship between Israel and the one God (C. Tilling, Paul’s Divine Christology, Mohr, 2012). For example Paul’s passages about Christ being married to his believers (2 Cor. 11.2;Rom. 7.4-6, never mind Ephes. 5) relate directly to the OT theme of Israel being Yahweh’s bride.

But even beyond a basic agreement with Hurtado, Wright finds the proposals of Richard Bauckham even more important. The major point is that you can’t get to divine worship of Jesus as divine, from what is said in early Judaism about exalted angels or mediators. For example, notice the fierce rejection of the worship of an angel in Revelation coupled with the clear worship of God and the lamb. “Bauckham’s main proposal is that the NT, Paul included offered a christology of divine identity in which Jesus is included in the unique identity of this one God” (p. 651). So Bauckham stresses that identity concerns who God is, to be distinguished from ‘nature’ which concerns what God is. Thus he distinguishes what is going on in the NT from later debates about Jesus’ divine and human natures. (Bauckham notes however there is one exception to the rejection of the worship of intermediary figures— namely what is said about the Son of Man in the parables of Enoch).

Thus Bauckham concludes “the highest possible Christology– the inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity–was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the NT writings were written, since it occurs in all of them” (p. 652– quoted approvingly by Wright). Bauckham stresses there are three key aspects to Jewish monotheism– God is the sole creator, he will at last establish his kingdom, and he and he alone is to be worshipped. He then proceeds (in ‘God Crucified’) to demonstrate that in the NT Christ is portrayed as the agent of creation, the one through whom all things are reconciled and kingdom comes, and he is to be worshipped.

Tom’s own proposal is to build on Bauckham, but to add another component to eschatological monotheism, namely that the God who abandoned the Temple when it became corrupt, had also promised to return to Jerusalem and his Temple after the exile, come back to be king once more in Zion and set his people free from bondage. We will continue this discussion in the next blog post on this book.

Here below is a helpful post by Larry Hurtado. He does not mention what I would consider the best Intro to getting into the Fathers, namely my former GCTS classmate Rod Whitacre’s Patristic Greek Reader published in 2007 by Baker, but otherwise this is a helpful summary. I should also add, that new unpublished works by Lightfoot, including essays on the Apostolic Fathers, will soon be forthcoming from yours truly and Todd Still under the title The Lightfoot Legacy. Stay tuned.
—-

The term “The Apostolic Fathers” designates a body of early Christian writings that, next to the NT, include some of the earliest most important and fascinating texts from ancient Christian circles. Most recent editions include fifteen texts, plus fragments ascribed to Papias cited in other early texts. Although of considerable historical significance, these writings (which largely are dated to the late first and early/mid second centuries CE) have been overlooked far too much, even in scholarly circles, and certainly among the wider public. But there are signs of a renewed interest, and these comprise a number of recent publications that offer help in becoming acquainted with these early texts.

The texts include “1 Clement” (a letter from the Roman church to the Corinthian church typically dated in the 90s CE), “2 Clement” (and early Christian homily-type text), letters of Ignatius of Antioch (early 2nd century), the “Martyrdom of Polycarp” (traditionally regarded our earliest extant martyrdom-account), the “Didache” (a fascinating text that may include traditions/portions from the first century CE), the “Epistle of Barnabas”, “The Shepherd of Hermas” (a complex texts purporting to reflect visionary experiences of a Hermas of Rome), the “Epistle of Diognetus” (an early apologetic work). These texts show early Christians working out how to live as a small and vulnerable sect in the larger Roman world.

There are now two recent hand-editions of the texts: The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library, ed. Bart D. Ehrman (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, Third edition, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). Both give Greek text and English translation on facing pages, with brief introductions, and some concise textual notes, plus select bibliographies. Scholars and serious students will want to consult both, but if you have to choose a purchase, for my money, the Holmes edition is preferable. (In price, and in being a handy one-volume format, aside from other features.)

The texts were all written in “Koine” Greek, much of the vocabulary shared with the NT. To assist those who come to these texts via NT Greek, there is now a very helpful tool: A Reader’s Lexicon of the Apostolic Fathers, eds. Daniel B. Wallace, Brittany Burnette & Terri Darby Moore (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2013). For each text, this reader’s lexicon gives definitions of all words occurring fewer than thirty times in the Greek NT, or not in the Greek NT, laid out chapter-by-chapter (and, where appropriate, verse-by-verse). Those who have begun to read in the Greek NT will find this a very useful help in reading the Apostolic Fathers, without having to look up unfamiliar words in a full Greek lexicon. (Of course, the standard reference lexicon for the Greek NT, the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lexicon, includes all vocabulary in the Greek NT and the Apostolic Fathers, but it’s a good bit more cumbersome to have to refer to it frequently simply in the effort to read a text.)

There are also a couple of recent simple introductions to these texts: Clayton N. Jefford et al., Reading the Apostolic Fathers: An Introduction (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), and more recently Paul Foster (ed.), The Writings of the Apostolic Fathers (London: T&T Clark, 2007). Each of these works addresses the contents and all critical questions about the texts individually, as well as helpful bibliographies for further reading/research.

Still unsurpassed, however, for all serious scholarly on these texts is the five-volume work by J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers (London: Macmillan, 1889-1890). I have a 1981 reprint edition produced by Hendrickson, but I can’t tell whether it’s now in print by anyone. This work is simply amazing in depth of analysis, and remains essential in advanced research on early Christianity.

But for anyone simply interested in seeing how early Christianity developed, especially in that crucial second century CE, “The Apostolic Fathers” make for fascinating reading, and these welcome recent publications are designed to promote and facilitate this.

While many of us have been appalled by the recent attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt and the terroristic acts against churches in Pakistan, what many fail to realize, including apparently the author of the recent book on early Christian martyrdom reviewed previously on this blog, is that these actions are part of a much larger pattern of such persecution and murder. Here is a quote from a recent important article on this subject (see the link below),

“According to the Pew Forum, between 2006 and 2010 Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of 139 nations, which is almost three-quarters of all the countries on earth. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the centre calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.”

This deserves a WOW and makes a nonsense of people who would want to claim that Christians either: 1) have a martyr complex going all the way back to the early church, or 2) they are making it up, or 3) its been continually exaggerated. What is in fact the case is it has been enormously UNDER REPORTED. See now the article link below….

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9041841/the-war-on-christians/

I have one small story to relate. A few years ago I did a lecture tour in Australia and then went on to lecture at an apologetics conference in Indonesia. There are lots of Christians in Indonesia and even more Muslims, and there has often been trouble including persecution and murder of Christians.

When I was there, I was told clearly enough that I was not to leave my hotel without multiple personal escorts. And there was armed security not only downstairs in the hotel but in other floors as well. Clearly there had been trouble before, and shortly after I left, there was more of these horrors. I was asked to give a public lecture about things like the Da Vinci Code and its distorted pictures of early Christianity, as well as to deal with some of the problems with Bart Ehrman’s analyses of the NT (whose books are regularly being used by Muslims to critique Christians and even in Egyptto justify vilifying them. I have had a letter from Christians in Egypt telling me true stories about such things in Aswan and Cairo).

Now fortunately, I have been spared the sort of persecution many I have met have faced, endured, and some have died from. So if you ask me why I get upset with attempts to minimize the sufferings of Christians and their martyrdoms in the various ages of Christian history, it is precisely because this is a historical distortion of the truth, and in worst case scenarios it is like those who try to deny or minimize the truth about the Holocaust in WWII.

People of course would like believe such horrors seldom if ever happen. They would like to believe that all people are basically good at heart. The Bible tells a different tale when it comes to the persecution of God’s people whether Jewish or Christian, and so does history, even modern history, even contemporary history. Think on these things.

Here is another review of Aslan’s recent Jesus book, which appeared in the London review of books, saying basically what Hurtado said– namely that the book focuses too much on the Zealot issue, rehashing old arguments, and leaves out some major clues to Jesus’ identity and ministry— namely the parables. See what you think….

The snake slunk off
Diarmaid MacCulloch

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
Westbourne, 296 pp, £17.99, August, ISBN 978 1 908906 27 4

Academics, chief among them theologians, are deeply envious of Reza Aslan’s stroke of luck in encountering a particularly stupid Fox News reporter during his round of publicity interviews for this book. Apparently having got no further than the publisher’s blurb in wrestling with the work, she asked Aslan why he as a Muslim had written a study of the life of the founder of Christianity. He replied rather testily that he was a scholar of religions, with four degrees, who just happened to be a Muslim. She asked much the same question again; he replied in much the same fashion, and again, and again, and mercifully never quite lost his temper. His interlocutor also appeared to believe that he ‘had never disclosed’ that he was a Muslim in media appearances, and that exhausted the ideas on her prompt-card. To expect that she might be at all aware of Jesus’ presence in the Quran would have assumed too high a level of sophistication. Aslan won hands down. Altogether it was the sort of TV that you end up watching from between your fingers – and naturally the clip went viral, to the huge benefit of Aslan’s bank balance. A bestseller was born.

Will the book disappoint the many who will have bought it after enjoying the Fox encounter? Probably not, and they will learn a good deal, though they would have learned much the same and more from the many masterly works on Jesus and Judaism by Geza Vermes, or from Martin Goodman’s thrillingly epic overview of the same period, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations. Aslan writes clearly and sensibly, though he is overfond of snappy two-word punchlines as narrative punctuation, and his publisher has forced him to dispense with reference numbers in the text, which might have guided the curious more speedily through his very meaty footnotes. That’s a pity, because he has read the right things and drawn the right sorts of conclusion from them, so his audience will gain a pretty good notion of the state of modern biblical scholarship on the origins of Christianity. Aslan says what all scholars not in thrall to blinkered religious conservatism say: when reading the New Testament, we have to fight through several filters of authorship to get any idea of how these sacred texts relate to a life lived in first-century Palestine. All the works included in the New Testament canon were written in a language different from Jesus’ native tongue, and even the earliest among them were written by someone who never met him in his earthly life; the latest may postdate his death on the cross by about a century. They are coloured by preoccupations which were not those of Jesus himself, and they fuelled the development of a church which became radically different from anything Jesus or the first generation of his followers could have envisaged.

Is there much that is original or distinctive in the treatment here? The book’s title suggests that we are in for a pretty radical new view of Jesus as a militant intent on revolution, but the text itself reveals Aslan using ‘zealot’ in two different ways. The first usage is set in Jesus’ own time, and has a rather broad sense, to describe a general frame of mind which could be described as ‘zealous’. Such zealots might calibrate their zeal on any point of a wide spectrum. So the word might at one extreme simply indicate a strict adherence to Jewish law as embodied in the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy (to which Greek-speaking Jews gave the collective title Pentateuch), or to the wider concept of Jewish law comprehended in the term ‘Torah’. These people would be what contemporaries called Pharisees, and despite the sneering connotations the word has acquired in Christian discourse thanks to its use in the Gospels, it is commonplace among New Testament scholars to see Jesus’ outlook as nearer to that of the Pharisees than to any other of the varied Jewish identities of his time. The other extreme in this first variety of zealotry extended as far as revolutionary fury at the Roman occupation of the Promised Land. Such zealots in Jesus’ age might indeed long to re-enact the Hasmoneans’ successful military expulsion of foreign power a century and a half before the birth of Jesus.

Aslan then rightly makes a distinction between this extremely broad and broadly based band of sentiment, which did exist during Jesus’ lifetime, and the much more clearly bounded grouping of Zealots, undeniably militant, coalescing three decades after his crucifixion, when in 66 CE hatred of Roman rule erupted into full-scale national rebellion. Jesus was not a zealot like that, because such zealotry lay in the future. Given this necessary qualification, does Aslan make his case for Jesus being on the militant end of the earlier zealous frame of mind? One piece of evidence worth considering is Jesus’ interesting reply, variously recounted in three Gospel writers (Matthew, Mark and Luke), to a group of hostile questioners (Aslan, with an excessively broad brush, reduces them to ‘the Temple authorities’). They ask Jesus if it is lawful to pay tribute to the Roman emperor, Caesar. His response, they hope, will commit him one way or another on the propriety of Jewish acquiescence in Roman rule, and that will bring trouble on him from either Romans or those who hate the Romans. Jesus turns the discussion with two questions, first asking for a coin, and then for a description of its design: the emperor’s portrait and titles. His conclusion is to make a distinction: ‘Give back to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar, and give back to God the property that belongs to God.’ For Aslan, this is a statement of a thoroughgoing ‘Zealot’ position, for it rests on the Jewish conviction that God’s property is the land of Israel, which he has given his people. Logically that would imply that Rome and its armies had no place within God’s property. Certainly the incident is placed in the Gospels not long before Jesus’ arrest, trial and death. This was undoubtedly Roman retribution for Jesus’ supposed sedition, even though the Gospel writers, terrified of being tarred with the same revolutionary brush, did their narrative best to shift the blame for Jesus’ death away from the Romans to an artificial caricature of the Jewish people, both leadership and bloodthirsty mob. The proof that the Romans regarded Jesus as a political revolutionary comes from what might seem a rather technical detail, whose authenticity is nevertheless strongly suggested by its presence in all four Gospels: on his cross was affixed a label or titulus styling him ‘King of the Jews’, not in sarcasm but as a bureaucratic explanation of his punishment. Aslan’s Jesus is revolutionary not merely in his answer about tribute, but in many other respects – among them, his violent ‘cleansing’ of traders from the outer court of the Jerusalem Temple, for which there was no good precedent.

The trouble is that this line of argument doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, nor does it do full justice to the range of jigsaw pieces which seem to reach back to Jesus’ lifetime, once his Gospel portraits have been sifted to separate out later ideological spin. Naturally we are inclined to ask what was ‘new’ or ‘original’ in what Jesus said, but that question may be misguided and distort what was important in his teaching. Aslan is well aware that in the turbulent atmosphere of first-century Palestine there were a good many wandering teachers like Jesus; like him, they healed people and worked miracles. Among the contemporaries of Jesus was the engaging Hanina ben Dosa. On one occasion Hanina was bitten by a poisonous snake but simply went on praying, and it was the snake that slunk off and died. ‘Woe to the man bitten by a snake, but woe to the snake which has bitten ben Dosa!’ his astonished disciples cried. Jesus, the evangelists Mark and Luke record, had likewise been given authority to tread on serpents. It may have been precisely the ideas and modes of behaviour which Jesus shared with his contemporaries and predecessors that were most significant at the time; they first won a hearing thanks to their familiarity to the local audience. One of Jesus’ central commands is a commonplace of ancient philosophy, indeed a conclusion at which most world religions eventually arrive: what has come to be known as the Golden Rule, ‘whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.’ Not much revolution there, and also another sign of that even-handed wit which is one way of interpreting Jesus’ quip about Caesar’s coin.

Above all, in his concentration on his Jesus as Zealot theme, Aslan says virtually nothing about one of the most memorable aspects of Jesus’ teaching: his parables. It is always difficult to catch irony and humour across a gap of centuries; but they are very audible in these miniature stories which illuminate aspects of his message; zealots don’t usually have much sense of humour. There is nothing like the parables in the writings of Jewish spiritual teachers before Jesus used them: interestingly, parables only emerge as a literary form in later Judaism after Jesus’ death. Was this form of his teaching so successful that it impressed even Jews who did not become his followers? Because the parables are stories, they have woven themselves into general memory more than any other aspects of Jesus’ message: the Good Samaritan; the Wise and the Foolish Virgins; the bad and good use of talents – a word which has itself been enriched thanks to the parable of the talents, whose original reference was simply to coins called talents, and not to gifts of personality.

There is a wonderfully quirky, counter-intuitive character to the things that happen in Jesus’ parables. Certainly, they are full of a sense that things are going to change very soon. Jesus did have an arresting vision of a kingdom, which he generally called the Kingdom of God – maybe a worldly kingdom, maybe not. It would have been a polity that radically changed many of the rules one would expect not just in first-century Judaism but in most sane societies. ‘The last shall be first, and the first last’ (Matthew 20.16); ‘let the dead bury their dead’ (Matthew 8.22), a shockingly transgressive command which the later Christian Church has steadfastly ignored. When Jesus created a new prayer for his followers, the ‘Lord’s Prayer’, its first petition addressed to the Father-God was ‘Thy kingdom come.’ There is no question but that Jesus assumed this to be an event in the near future, both cosmic and historically concrete: that idea has been a constant problem for the many generations of Christians thereafter, who have had to live with the fact that it proved not to be. Nor did such a kingdom come for the Zealots whom the Romans destroyed, together with the Temple in Jerusalem, between 66 and 70 CE, as they brutally ended three decades of growing unrest and violence in the Holy Land. Both Christianity and Judaism are radical reconstructions of the religion which, bereft of the Temple, was so traumatically disrupted in those years. Christianity created most of its sacred literature after 70 CE, while Judaism similarly produced voluminous new commentary on its existing sacred books, themselves codified from radical variants of the venerable texts in much the same period as the New Testament was being finalised. Both resulting religions would have seemed strange to the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

If anything, Aslan’s treatment of New Testament texts is conservative by the standards of the modern academy. There is a methodological temptation in analysing the New Testament hall of mirrors to mistrust the text until it suits one’s argument to trust it; so Aslan is inclined to cite that extremely slippery narrative known as the Acts of the Apostles when it will back up what he wants to say. Nor does he question the ancient and still too little challenged assumption that Acts was written by the same man who created the gospel attributed to Luke. Rather surprisingly, he is prepared to accept the traditional biblical explanation of the peculiar pseudonymity of most of the books and letters in the New Testament: he tells us that there was a literary genre in the ancient world in which people would honour an admired personality by writing new literary works in their name. Bart Ehrman’s recent gritty study Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics has provided plenty of reasons to suppose that this is a piece of modern Christian wishful thinking, designed to avoid the embarrassment of recognising that people in the ancient world knew perfectly well what a forgery was, and that they didn’t hold with it.[*] Aslan’s last chapter has a distressing trail of howlers on the Council of Nicaea of 325 CE and its aftermath. It forms too hasty and scrappy a conclusion to an argument which in its controlling narrative of a first-generation struggle for the future of a newly institutionalised Christianity, between James of Jerusalem and Paul of Tarsus, would not have been unfamiliar to those great bookends of 19th-century early church scholarship, Ferdinand Christian Baur and Adolf von Harnack. Still, there’s no harm in going down that road again, since the complexity and multi-layered nature of the New Testament repeatedly seems to come as a surprise to the faithful sitting in the pews – partly because most clergy feel that it’s more than their job’s worth to let the faithful know about it.

Here is the lecture I gave May 2nd at Castle College on the Bible and the Media…

RELIGION AND THE MEDIA IN THE POST-MODERN WORLD

PROLEGOMENA

I have spent a great deal of my time as a professor of Biblical Studies working with the media— ABC, NBC, CBS, the BBC, the Discovery and History Channels and so on. There are really two different sorts of dealings with the media that people who teach religion or theology are likely to have in this day and age— questions from the press about recent archaeological discoveries or developments in the Lands of the Bible, and secondly Christmas and Easter or even other sorts of specials commissioned by some major network as a program or series of programs. For an example of the latter, take the BBC series I did called the Story of Jesus, which aired here and in the U.S. a couple of Easter seasons ago. Usually what happens is that the print media news division gives tips to the program division about who to interview and who speaks well on camera and then you get a phone call. Print media interviews are of a more urgent nature (‘can I speak to you today…’) because of something suddenly being newsworthy, whereas TV programs gestate over a longer period of time. Now a days, much is created in a sound studio with the help of CG, but there are still series, such as the Story of Jesus, or the show I did for CBS called The Mystery of Christmas, where you go and film in Israel or elsewhere on location.

None of this might seem very important to you in the classroom, except as the occasional film clip to be used to illustrate your teaching about religion or the Bible, except that unfortunately in a post-modern, and increasingly post-Western, post-Christian era, even in large parts of the West itself, there is rampant Biblical illiteracy even among the well educated, and that includes the media. In this sort of situation, perception is reality and image is crucial. In other words, one of the reasons you find yourself having to justify the teaching of religion and theology in what I would call public schools and public universities is to a very large degree because you have an image problem, generated in part by that very ignorance of religion and theology in our culture. It is assumed that religion or theology has only to do with antiquity or out-moded non-scientific ways of thinking, and in any case is not essential to the curriculum in the U.K. in an increasingly scientific age. This prompts the need for justification of such classes and course of study, increasingly so since in the case of schools in the U.K. public tax dollars go to supporting these classes or course on religion or theology and indeed various of these educational institutions are declared charitable ventures.
This of course is different from public schools or universities in America which are not charitable organizations at all, and are simply supported by public tax dollars. Furthermore, there is the difference that in the American setting religion or theology is basically not taught in public schools, or it is mentioned in passing in a history class perhaps. There are not separate classes or course of studies in such things before one gets to colleges. Even in colleges, increasingly even in major universities in America where the Bible has been taught and is still in some instances taught, it is taught as part of a department of world religions, or even in some cases taught as one part of a course on world religions. There are no departments of theology or the Bible in modern secular American universities. You may find that very odd since America on any accounting is a far more church and synagogue attending place than the U.K. but then the separation of church and state as a founding principle of America set in motion a different religious history than yours, where you still have a monarch who technically though not really is ‘the defender of the faith’. In other words, the relationship between politics and religion in this country is not the same as in the U.S. I have said all this as a backdrop to talking to you about what Jo McKenzie in fact wanted me to talk about— namely the benefits of having courses and curriculums of religion and theology in what I call public schools and universities. But how does one defend such things without becoming overly defensive? Especially if one is dealing with the media, since they love the soundbytes or the dramatic emotive pictures, one has to be very careful what one says and how one says it— image may not be everything, but it is all the religiously illiterate who watch the news have when evaluating what you do. In a post-modern situation perception is all too often assumed to be reality, most especially when it comes to religion and theology.

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
If the task were given to me to provide a rationale or justification for the continued teaching of religion, the Bible, theology in your schools at whatever level, I think I would first approach the matter by talking about history, and where Western civilization, including its art, architecture, literature, customs etc. come from. For example, I have not noticed recently an anti-Shakespeare or an anti-Milton, or an anti-Chaucer society growing up in your midst, or a campaign against teaching such things in your schools, but frankly you can’t fully understand Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer etc. etc. at all unless you know things like the BCP, the Geneva Bible, theology. Western culture whether we are talking about literature, art, architecture and so on, is deeply indebted to the Bible, Christianity, theology, and the religions of the Bible, particularly Christianity and Judaism. Most citizens of the U.K. still love to visit their cathedrals, love to come to concerts in such venues, love a good deal of the literature they were required to read in their school years, and so a little enlightenment or reminder that most of that English culture and religion is deeply indebted to the Bible, theology, religion would not go amiss. I must tell you a story.
I was in London watching Alec McGowen’s one man dramatic presentation verbatim of the Gospel of Mark (the authorized version of course) several years ago. At intermission is was fun to walk around in the lobby and listen to the comments. One person said “It began rather abruptly. Where were the birth narratives then?” Another said, “Where’s the Sermon on the Mount. I missed that bit. Will it be in the second half of the show?” Well, to give them credit at least these folks knew there were birth narratives and the Sermon on the Mount, but Biblical and theological illiteracy are an increasing problem, especially as less and less of those sorts of topics are taught. Your task is not just to educate your students in your classes, you need to educate the general public about the value of your subject matters, and that requires dealing with the print and television media. Furthermore, you need to be a good will ambassador for the subjects you are teaching, wherever and whenever you have an opportunity to do so, putting your best foot forward, as it were. One of the things you could do as a group, is figure out who amongst you is the best on camera or in an interview, and regularly recommend that person or persons to the media when there are requests and interviews and television shows on offer. I would stress that your public, as in the U.S., is more likely to listen to teachers than clergy on such subjects, because of course there is a natural suspicion about what the clergy will say about the Bible, theology, religion, since they have a vested interest in it.
I found it amusing recently when there was a review of Bart Ehrman’s Intro to the NT for Oxford, compared to my new Intro to the NT also for Oxford, and the former was called an ‘historical approach’ whereas the latter was called a ‘theological approach’, even though Bart didn’t bracket out theology, and my volume had more history in it in various ways than his did. I use this as an illustration to say that you need to emphasize that when it comes to an historical religion like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, you can’t put theology in one box and history neatly in another. These subjects are intertwined.
The second thing I would do, after pointing out how much all of Western civilization owes to theology, the Bible, religion, is that I might spend some time explaining how that is even true of the English language all by itself. Without question, the so-called King James or Authorized Bible has had more influence on English diction, turns of phrase etc. than any other single source in the course of English history. There are of course wonderful books written on this subject alone, but it is true to say, yea verily, that our English, and especially English English (as opposed to Aussie or American English) is still deeply indebted to the translation of the Bible into English in the 16th and 17th centuries. My primary degree in college was in English literature. I did a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets for example at some length. I discovered that there were about 50 or more clear quotations or allusions or echoes from the Prayer Book or the Bible in those sonnets, never mind from his plays. The same sort of demonstration can be done for Milton, Donne, Herbert, and I could go on. Or if one wants to give examples of the on going positive impact of the Bible and religion on English authors, you could point people to Susan Hill’s very interesting murder mystery series starring a woman named Cat Deerborn, who is both a doctor and a Christian. Most of these novels have a religious sub-plot in them. Having read all seven of these novels in the series, I don’t think she is finished talking about such subjects yet, not least since she herself is now involved in ministry in a cathedral.

DIGGING DEEPER
But supposing we are looking for an even deeper rationale as to why teaching theology or religion is vital in schools in the U.K. Suppose we want to probe deeper and be able to explain more what the benefit to society is of such teaching. Here I would turn to the issue of anthropology— What does it mean to be truly human and humane? What is the essence of human nature, when set apart from other sentient beings that roam the earth? Let me tell you about a recent archaeological discovery near Urfa in southeastern Turkey.
The usual sociological or anthropological party line about the relationship of religion to the origins of civilization goes like this—- first human beings were hunter gatherers, then there was the beginnings of agriculture and with that the beginnings of village life. It was only after village life began that religion appeared on the scene as, the opiate of the masses, or the tranquilizer of the frazzled, or however you want to metaphorically express that notion. It turns out that this analysis of the origins of civilization is entirely wrong. At Gobeckli Tepe there is a high place with remarkable stone circles (not unlike those seen at Avebury or Stonehenge) and the site dates to 8,000-10,000 B.C. That is it predates the evidence for human writing by several thousand years, and the pyramids by several thousands of years as well.

Let us suppose then, on the basis of this and other evidence, that human beings were religious from the start. Let us suppose that the fact that we find evidence of burial rituals with a religious diminish all over the world and cross culturally as well, tells us something about our inherently religious nature. Let us suppose that in the end the Bible was right by suggesting we are ‘homo religiosis’ inherently religious beings. If this is true, then of course there is a powerful rationale for teaching religion and theology in public schools. If we want to pretend to understand human beings and human nature, then we need to understand religion and its place throughout human history, all the way back to its origins in places like Gobeckli Tepe.
If in fact it is true that human beings are indeed bearers of the image of God, inherently religious by nature, one can also make the case that this is the true basis for saying that all human beings are creatures of sacred worth, and this in itself creates a rationale against war, abusive behavior, and the general devaluing of human life that we see every day when we watch the news.
Besides the various arguments, historical, linguistic, literary, sociological on how religion, and most specifically Biblical religion, has helped build Western society, to which we have now added the anthropological argument mentioned above about human beings being fundamentally religious by nature, there is also of course the ethical argument. Religion, theology tends to promote and provide a sanction for more ethical behavior. If you believe human beings are of sacred worth, if you believe human civilization requires civil behavior to not merely survive but to thrive, then the implementation of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is bound to promote the civilizing of human society. This becomes especially urgent as Western society becomes ever more radically individualistic and narcissistic in its ways. If you are a historian of religion, you know that ethics without some sort of theological sanction, such as the belief that there is a God who holds people accountable for their behavior, usually proves to be an ineffective if not entirely useless ethic. If you have ever served on a committee for a hospital where medical ethics are the issue, and hospital praxis is the outcome, you will know what I mean by this. Pragmatism and cost-effectiveness are the sanctions that actually guide the ethical policies of so many hospitals, rather than actual ethics grounded in things like the sacred worth of human life. This comes to light especially when discussions about the quality of a life always trumps discussions of quantity of life. But of course you must have a life before you can talk about the quality of that life.

IN SUM
There are plenty of good rationales, and good arguments that can be presented about the benefit of teaching theology and religion in public educational institutions at any and all levels of education including post-graduate education. These rationales are varied, involving history, language, literature, art, architecture, anthropology, ethics, the study and understanding of human psychology and human nature, and I could go on. But what is crucial beyond the arguments is the presentation of the case, whether being made to the general public, or to the assessors of education and its degree programs at the college or post-graduate level. What I would stress is that however we might favor substance over form, in a multi-media age presentation and appearances matter, both the way we speak, how we appear. We have to bear in mind as well to whom we are speaking.

In a Biblically and theologically illiterate culture, we should not expect the media to know technical terms and phrases, but they have a nose for defensiveness so your presentation needs to be positive in nature. In short, if you want to win some, you need to be winsome.

The article by Andreas Dettwiler (translated by Eric Gilchrest and Nicholas Zola, the former of which is one of my own former students) has much the same orientation as the article by Sterling, reviewed in the previous post in this particular series. That is, it involves a comparison of the supposedly deutero-Pauline Colossians and Ephesians to the portrait of Paul in Acts. Like so many who take this view of the pseudonymous character of those Pauline letters, the author talks about a Pauline school, something for which we have no historical evidence or basis whatsoever. Dettwiler however wants to emphasis that authority stressed in these documents.

Thus, for example Dettwiler points out that in Colossians and Ephesians Paul is presented as an uncontested authority figure, in contrast to the earlier Paulines. This contrast forgets that: 1) Colossians is written to a congregation Paul did not found and had not gotten embroiled in controversy with, and 2) Ephesians is a circular document not an ad hoc particularistic one. This does not allow the confident conclusion “Therefore, the Paul of Colossians, and even more noticeably the Paul of Ephesians, seems to have been a figure detached from any historical contigency or individuality.” (p. 249).

With those sorts of presuppositions, Dettwiler then is somewhat surprised that the image of Paul conveyed in these documents doesn’t amount to guilding the lily, or turning Paul into a hero. He is also somewhat surprised that in the case of Ephesians the writer “does not seem to have made any effort to create a strong and convincing ‘pseudepigraphical situation’.” And then he endorses the conclusion that “we are dealing here with a pseudepigraphy that lacks real pseudepigraphical elements.” (p. 251), in contrast to some efforts in that direction in Colossians. Of course these puzzles disappear if these are Pauline documents, and the later one is a circular letter. Sometimes scholarly presuppositions create more problems than they solve. Of course all of this is brought into question by Ehrman’s now very detailed demonstration that there was no literary convention in antiquity of pseudepigraphy that made it an ethically unobjectionable practice.

I agree with Dettwiler however that Luke does not present Paul as a largely polemical figure. It is untrue to say that Paul is not presented as a controversial figure, at least in the context of Jerusalem. To the contrary, Paul is constantly embroiled in controversy in Acts when he goes to Jerusalem, and finally it leads to his incarceration. What is interesting about this is that Luke is fair enough to show that the controversy was with both non-Christian Jews, and Christian ones (see Acts 15). Note as well, that not even the Christian ones come to his defense when he is under house arrest in Caesarea Maritima. Not even Luke presents us with an uncontroversial, non-polemical Paul. Dettwiler explains the lack of calling Paul an apostle in Acts as a result of Luke being in a community where the term was limited to the 12. This hardly explains what we find in Acts 14. Is Paul then presented as a figure of uncontested authority in Acts and Ephesians? No, in the former case, and the matter is not an issue in Ephesians.

Dettwiler then turns to the dialogical nature of ancient friendly letters, as outlined by Cicero and Seneca. Here he is on more solid footing. He quote Stan Stowers approvingly when he says that letters convey a fictive presence of the author to the recipient when the author is absent (earlier scholars called this the apostolic parousia–see p.255). Dettwiler however makes a good point when he stresses that the mention of Paul being in chains underscores the forced absence of the apostle, and gives more pathos to these Pauline letters especially underlining his suffering on their behalf. I also agree with Dettwiler that Luke, while alluding to the demise of the person of Paul, stresses the ongoing endurance of the Word, boldly proclaimed in the capital city– Rome (p. 256). But then Luke is writing salvation not a biography of Paul.

Dettwiler goes on to emphasis the ‘musterion’ dimension of both Colossians and Ephesians, with Paul being the special emissary who unveils the mystery of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles into God’s people without their becoming practicing Jews. Dettwiler admits that this seems to be stressing that Paul has a very high authority, indeed a unique one to unveil this form of the Gospel and so reach the Gentiles for Christ. It is going too far however to speak of a quasi-soteriological status for Paul (p. 258). Yet Paul is the paradigmatic presenter of the Good News for the Gentiles, and both Colossians and Ephesians allude to this, but so does Acts in a different narratival way.

Dettwiler is however on to something in stressing that in Acts it is Paul the founder of communities that is stressed whereas in the letters it is Paul the developer and nurturer of communities, hence Luke does not mention the letters. Put another way Luke is focusing on evangelism, Paul in his letters on discipleship. (see p. 260). This should have led to the conclusion that it’s not a big deal that Luke chooses not to mention the letters. It’s outside the scope of what he is trying to unveil in Acts— the spread of the Word across the Mediterranean to more and more people groups. Dettwiler concludes his essay (pp. 262-63) by rightly stressing that more reflection should be given to the relationship of Paul as paradigmatic presenter of the Gospel, and Paul as a unique and distinctive proclaimer of the Good News to the Gentiles. Here I would just suggest that as 1 Cor. 3 says, there is a difference between the historical role the man played as church planter, which was often unique, and the message or Word that he planted, which was shared by Apollos and others.