![\"righto\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2015\/08\/righto.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nTom reserves his most strident critique of the apocalyptic approach to Paul for Lou Martyn\u2019s Galatians commentary and the impact it has had on Pauline interpretation. So Chapter Eight of the book is an analysis of the work of Lou Martyn and his disciples e.g. M. de Boer, B. Gaventa. The basic analysis of the apocalyptic school involves the assumption that God in Christ breaks into the world bringing new creation and overthrowing not just one religion but the whole concept of religion. There is a radical opposition between grace and religion. The Union School has not really engaged with the new perspective discussion, although they accept the Hays proposal about pistis Christou. Much is made of the two ages language in the discussions of Martyn and his disciples and the language is taken to signal a rupture in the flow of salvation history or covenantal progression. <\/p>\n
One of the things Wright keeps points out is that the two age schema is not<\/em> distinctive to apocalyptic literature, nor should it be seen as a defining signaling device that indicates apocalyptic literature or thinking. He puts it this way\u2026.<\/p>\n \u201cA two age scheme is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for giving a text, \u201cBut the \u2018two ages\u2019 scheme, a belief in angels (including So, it would appear that DeBoer and Martyn arrive at the notion of apocalyptic as something which has transpired in the death of Jesus, not in the future as Kasemann thought. They see Paul as largely concerned with responsibility for evil and rescue from evil, which of course is a form of soteriology, a cosmic sort. Tom\u2019s big concern is that the apocalyptic Paul advocates are ignoring the narrative about Israel and covenant reaching climax motif in Paul. Further Tom argues that the texts De Boer is relying on to set up his apocalyptic paradigms do not neatly fall into categories of cosmic responsibility for sin and death on the one hand or individual responsibility for sin and death. His point is that Jewish texts would often say both in the same text. So the distinction between cosmic and human responsibility for evil is artificially imposed by De Boer. See Test. of 12 Pat. 67-69. That Adam shows up in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch does not mean that this literature rejects cosmic responsibility for evil. <\/p>\n Tom\u2019s big point is that\u2026 Tom adds \u201cIn Martyn\u2019s hands, the polemic between Paul and \u2018the Teachers\u2019, seen through the lens of de Boer\u2019s \u2018two types of apocalyptic eschatology\u2019, has turned into the familiar neo-orthodox In the notes Tom quotes Martyn as follows\u2026. Thus e.g. Martyn 1997a, 87, 151, 155, 164 (\u201cJudaism was now revealed to be a religion, as distinguished from God\u2019s apocalyptic and new-creative act in Christ\u2019; \u2018the whole of the letter shows . . . that the advent of Christ is the end of religion\u2019); 382f., 474, 478 (the Teachers are \u2018nothing more than men who place their trust in religion rather than in the God of the crucified Christ\u2019 (italics original)). At 417 n. 82 Martyn suggests that \u2018the promissory voice\u2019 of the Law had an \u2018original, nonreligious, Abrahamic form\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom calls Martyn and De Boer\u2019s approach a highly sophisticated version of the old Lutheran perspective on Paul, ala Kasemann. The basic complaint about Martyn\u2019s describing of the Teacher\u2019s theology (in Galatians) is that it involves the perils of mirror-reading, which often leads to skewed readings of texts. <\/p>\n Tom stresses that retelling the story of Israel is at the heart of Jewish apocalyptic, and that Paul is doing that in Gal 4. My take on that is: 1) notice how different Revelation is in comparison to the earlier Jewish apocalypses on this very score. It is not about a retelling of Israel tale; 2) Paul is selective in the portions of the earlier story he is retelling in Galatians and Romans\u2014 he sticks with the patriarchs. He avoids Moses and the exodus. The slavery to sin he speaks of conjures up Adam, not the exodus and Moses\u2019 story. The language of bondage is not exodus specific or a cipher for exodus stories. The slavery of this present evil age began with Adam, and it was nor alleviated by Moses and the exodus. L. Goppelt is right\u2014 apocalyptic interprets history as a series of events heading for a specific end or telos. <\/p>\n Tom stresses that the periodization of history is one of the things that most characterizes apocalyptic (see Gal. 4.4\u2014 when the time had fully come\u2026). This is not because of a belief in an easy maturation or evolution of human history. In other words, apocalyptic doesn\u2019t mean an absolute break with the past, though it is referring to God\u2019s managing of all history and to divine incursions along the way. <\/p>\n We will let Tom have the last word here\u2014\u2013 \u201cIt Tom reserves his most strident critique of the apocalyptic approach to Paul for Lou Martyn\u2019s Galatians commentary and the impact it has had on Pauline interpretation. So Chapter Eight of the book is an analysis of the work of Lou Martyn and his disciples e.g. M. de Boer, B. Gaventa. The basic analysis of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nor the ideas expressed in it, that label. The two-age scheme is simply a widespread
\nfeature of Jewish thought throughout the second-Temple period and
\non into the high rabbinic period. We may assume that Saul of Tarsus, as a
\nzealous Pharisee, took it for granted, and we may take it as read that this of
\nitself is not sufficient to affix the label \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 around his neck\u201d. (p. 158). <\/p>\n
\nevil ones), a sense of cosmic drama as well as the local and personal challenges
\nfaced by individuals and groups \u2013 all this is to be found as far back as
\nearly biblical texts and as far forward as medieval and modern Jewish writings.
\nAnd once we have said this we have insisted that the entire history-of-religions
\ndiscussion of Paul must be moved from the narrow screen of something labelled \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 on to the much larger screen which has the multiform, complex, swirling history, culture, thought and writing of
\nancient Israel as its backdrop and the equally multiform life of early Judaism
\nas its foreground. That is where Paul belongs. To notice that he, like many
\nother early Christians, thought in terms of the \u2018present age\u2019 and the \u2018age to
\ncome\u2019, and to deduce from this that he is therefore to be seen within a rather
\nnarrow subset of \u2018Judaism\u2019 called \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 (and within that, as we shall
\nsee, a narrower one again) is entirely unwarranted.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u201cthe books which might properly be called \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 \u2013 whether we confine
\nthis, as I think we should, to a genre of that name, or whether we launch
\nout into the stormy waters and apply the label to a type of theology or
\nworldview \u2013 are never simply about (a) the human plight and (b) the divine
\nsolution. They are, again and again, about Israel\u2019s plight \u2013 a subset of the human plight, to be sure, but specific, historical, and urgent \u2013 and the divine covenantal solution.28 The question is, What is Israel\u2019s God up to, in the world and with his people? These writers were always striving for what might be called a theopolitical vision: their question was not \u2018how do people
\nget saved\u2019 so much as What is going to happen to Israel? These books, as a
\nresult, are again and again preoccupied with the strange dark story of Israel
\nfrom earliest days to the present time\u201d. (pp. 162-63).<\/p>\n
\npolemic of \u2018revelation\u2019 against \u2018religion\u2019. This can be, and now often is, cast
\nin terms of the \u2018vertical\u2019 against the \u2018horizontal\u2019: the divine initiative breaking
\ninto the world, over against any human project, system or effort\u2026. At this point Martyn seems to me to have stepped back from the history-of-religions analysis on which his work was
\nsupposedly based, and to have taken his stand instead on the familiar but
\ndangerous territory in which Judaism was a \u2018religion\u2019 while (Pauline) Christianity
\nwas a \u2018revelation\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n
\ndoes seem a serious weakness, in a commentary on Galatians, that one cannot
\neasily understand how the Paul of this \u2018Galatians\u2019 could transmute into
\nthe Paul of Romans. Of course, all kinds of developmental schemes have
\nbeen offered. Beker, as we saw, envisaged a mixture of \u2018coherence and contingency\u2019.
\nHu\u0308bner and others have postulated significant development, not
\nleast perhaps from a negative view of the Jewish law to a positive one. But,
\nstarting where Martyn starts, the only way of holding the two letters in any
\nkind of relationship to one another would be either to shrink Romans
\nbeyond the bounds of credibility, until it became simply a fuller version of
\n(this) \u2018Galatians\u2019, or to postulate some massive rethinking in between the
\ntwo, such that one would then be forced to choose between two radically
\ndifferent visions of God, Israel, the gospel and the world. Romans, after all,
\nhas a strong and thematic narrative core, and the narrative in question is the
\nclassic Israelite and Jewish story of Adam, Abraham, and Abraham\u2019s family.
\nIn particular, the clearly positive view of the law in Romans, insisted upon
\neven when the law is doing devastating things,91 stands in sharp contrast to
\nMartyn\u2019s reading of Galatians. And Paul\u2019s positive view of Israel does the
\nsame. Martyn\u2019s Paul, faced with the question of Romans 3.1 (\u2018what advantage
\nhas the Jew\u2019), ought to have responded \u2018none at all\u2019. With that, we
\nwould be back with the shallow reductionism of C. H. Dodd.\u201d (p. 184).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"