Euangelion
Christoph, your first book was Hidden Criticism? about the alleged counter-imperial ethos of the New Testament. Your latest volume is Paulus als Erzahler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe (English: Paul as Story-Teller: A Narratological Perspective on Paul’s Letters). What brought you to this topic?
In some sense, I wanted to do something quite similar in both cases, namely to scrutinize very influential approaches to Pauline exegesis on a fundamental level. (Note the question marks in both titles). Moreover, both paradigms are of course based to a large degree on the work of N. T. Wright, who has been an inspirational figure for my research in several respects and on whose “Paul and the Faithfulness of God” we had prepared, together with J. Thomas Hewitt, a collection of essays, evaluating his proposal from several angles. There’s one important difference though. In Hidden Criticism? I aimed at offering an assessment of the general plausibility of the hypothesis that Paul used the subtext of his letters for criticism against the Roman Empire and I discussed important methodological aspects. However, I intentionally did not make judgements on the explanatory potential of the hypothesis for individual passages – and thus on the overall probability of such a subtext in specific verses. For that, I offered an exemplary treatment of 2. Cor 2:14 in my second monograph, Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). In my present book, by contrast, I am doing all these things together: I try to lay a solid theoretical foundation, attempt to sketch a reliable method, and apply it to a ton of texts from every letter in the Pauline corpus.
I remember there being a lot on Paul and narrative back in the 90s and 00s, I think particularly of Bruce Longenecker’s Narrative Dynamics in Paul, Ben Witherington’s work on Paul’s theology, and few other studies about narratives in Paul’s letters like Romans by scholars such as Katherine Grieb and Sylvia Keesmatt and on Philemon by Norman Petersen. Did the discussion on Paul and narrative die with a whimper? Where are we at now on Paul and narrative?
First, I don’t really think the influence of the “narrative approach” has receded over the last decade. There is still a dozen or so new theses published every year that have a “narrative” in the subtitle and claim to build on the work by Hays and Wright. But you are right that the heyday of the methodological discussion is over. It seems like the senior scholars have made up their mind and junior scholars mainly work within set paths the direction of which has already been determined. And that’s actually quite unfortunate because I believe that the discussion you are referring to did not yield any conclusive results that we could just mechanically build upon. To the contrary, it is my impression that a lot of that debate had narrowed down on intertextuality – fizzling out over endless discussions about which of Hays’s criteria for echoes (and associated stories) were valid and which weren’t. That misses the point, in my opinion. Not only because Hays’s criteria seem to me to be irredeemably inadequate for what they are meant for, intertextuality should only be a small part of the issue. The issue should not even be methodology in general. A good method leads you to your goal reliably. But you first need a theoretical basis that specifies said goal. And we’ve never had a solid narratological discussion about what actually constitutes narrative, how it relates to the fact that Paul wrote letters (“not gospels!” as many are quick to add), and what it might even mean for a story to be “implicit” – a narrative substructure or worldview story. I am very confident that if we transform the largely pre-theoretical “narrative approach” into a “narratological approach,” i.e. into a perspective that takes into account the current research on narrativity, there’s an immense potential for Pauline exegesis. My book aims at making that case and offering a sketch of how such a paradigm might look like.
You say that Paul has a “multitude of explicit stories.” What are those stories and why do they matter for understanding Paul?
First a word on explicit stories in general. When it comes to narratives and Paul, our field is pretty much divided into two camps. There are those who insist that it does not make much sense to speak of “stories” in relation to the apostle’s writings, given that he never actually tells anything explicitly. After all, he is writing letters,not gospels, and he is interested mostly in making arguments for his theological ideas. The other group of scholars (following Richard B. Hays and N. T. Wright in particular) admits that Paul does not produce explicit narratives to any notable extent, but still insists on the value of the category, claiming that implicit stories are of the uttermost importance for understanding the apostle’s writings. Now, I argue that a careful theoretical, methodological, and empirical analysis confirms indeed the heuristic value of the concept of implicit narratives. However, while I agree with the narrative approach with regard to what they affirm, I also disagree strongly with what both its supporters and its critics deny: Paul tells a lot of explicit stories in his letters.
Second, I think there is a prima facie case to be made for taking into account these stories if we want to talk about narratives in relation to Paul. After all, why shouldn’t we? Hays and Wright both try to explain why they favor implicit stories, but at this specific point their reasoning is very weak, containing even a couple of category mistakes. It seems to me that they were so annoyed by people telling them that narrativity was of no importance in relation to Paul because, after all, he never tells a story except in Gal 1-2 (a point that, for example, Francis Watson made), they just admitted that in order to avoid an additional fight and be able to move on what they are interested in most. But even if we don’t want to give preference to explicit stories over implicit stories, it just isn’t clear to me why we should ignore them altogether.
Third, I think a very strong case can be made for why the narrative approach should actually begin with explicit stories. It’s simply what narratologists usually deal with. We’ve got excellent conceptual tools to deal with stories in this usual sense. And if in analyzing them, using even a rather strict definition for explicit narratives, we perhaps find something that points us towards implicit stories – all the better! An approach to stories in Paul that aims at proving some implicit structures from the beginning is unlikely to convince anyone. If, by contrast, even the most conservative approach constantly makes us want to use narrative terms and concepts in relations to phenomena in the text that are “almost narratives,” we’ve found a very good empirical reason for reconsidering this rather strange category of “implicit stories” or “narratives in non-narrative texts.” And – spoiler alarm – that’s exactly what happened to me during the research for that book.
Does Paul have a “grand story” like still-in-exile, new exodus, apocalyptic combat myth, or something like that?
Well, I do believe that there is a ton of implicit stories in Paul’s letters. By that I mean that there are passages that do not fulfill my rather strict definition of what constitutes a narrative but that nevertheless make us assume that Paul could have told a story about the events that appear in the text. For example, if he exhorts his readers to perform certain actions, he can’t – yet! – tell the story of how they did it. But in some passages it is very clear (cf. e.g. Phil 2:16!) that Paul imagines himself telling this “success story” in the future. So he clearly simulates an act of narration in the process of writing some passages, even though these mental narratives – I call them “proto-narratives” (following German narratologists Köppe and Kindt) – come to expression on the surface level of the text fragmentarily. Now, I hope that I’ve put enough evidence together that my readers will become convinced that proto-narratives are real and that they are actually of immense importance in interpreting Paul. (For example, I believe that the German commentary literature on the disputed letters in that corpus discovers a lot of incoherence mainly because they are analyzing the text only with reference to its potential Vorlage but do not take seriously the narrative world that the text itself demands us to imagine.) And – yet another spoiler – I think Hays’s category of narrative substructures is indeed a very useful concept with respect to Paul. I am just not sure how frequently it occurs – and that’s actually quite important for our exegetical judgements. Because (see here for details) if narrative substructures occur in, let’s say, half of all verses, it’s fine if the hypothesis explains the evidence – Paul’s strange formulations – only slightly better than the alternative. If, however, narrative substructures are actually quite rare, then it’s not enough for it to be the “better explanation” of the text – it needs to be way better! I think that for some passages I’ve demonstrated that this is the case. But a lot of research still needs to be done. And then there is the grand story that you mention. It took me quite some time to explicate Wright’s proposal in narratological terms, which was necessary to evaluate it against the backdrop of my research. As I interpret his view it’s basically equivalent to postulating that all the many proto-narratives (and explicit narratives) that we find in Paul’s letter can actually be combined into a unified whole. In other words, we are encouraged to believe that at some point Paul mentally simulated the narration of such a big story that in his letters finds expression only fragmentarily. That’s a big claim and there are many important distinctions to be kept in mind. We can not, in any case, simply assume that just because we can combine certain proto-narratives, they’ve also been a unity in Paul’s mind at some point. I think Wright has put forward a very bold proposal and it remains to be seen how much of his reconstruction of Paul’s guiding proto-narrative can be confirmed through careful exegetical work.
If Paul told one story to a Greek in Ephesus and another story to a Jew in Antioch, what would it be?
Oh, that’s a big question – that I would like to answer by just commenting on a very important aspect that is included in it. We’ve got only Paul’s letters but we can be sure that in his personal interaction he also told stories (and described situations and argued for certain ideas). What I found very interesting in my analysis is that time and again we can see how Paul’s explicit stories presuppose prior acts of narration – mostly from his time with the communities. (Something we find just as well in the disputed letters, by the way. Again, whether you believe that’s a hallmark of authenticity or not, it at least is reason to really take seriously the narrative world created by these texts if we want to understand them.) What we can see is that Paul doesn’t usually tell stories because he wants to inform his readers that certain events happened in the past. And that’s quite untypical indeed for narratives because their prototypical function is to inform – and it seems to me that part of the reason why many people think that Paul did not tell a lot of stories is because the narratives that he included in his letters don’t inform but rather aim at changing the evaluation of situations that the addresses already know about. Often, these evaluating narratives support arguments, which in turn have the function of affecting behavior. (Sometimes the story itself is supposed to do that job.)
To sum up: The pragmatics of Paul’s stories is a really fascinating aspect of his narration – and something that might be overlooked if you mainly perceive of the individual stories as fragments of a large implicit narrative and your main goal is to synthesize it somehow on the basis of these fragments. Thus, while I think the focus on explicit narratives naturally leads to implicit narratives and at least some of the concepts – and results – by Hays and Wright, I also think they are a very worthy object of study in themselves.
When can we expect an English translation of your book?
There won’t be a typical translation. It’s just too big. But I have written two blog posts aimed at readers who only know a little German and still want to profit from it. Here (https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-read-my-40797524) I tell you which passages you should concentrate on, depending on your main interests. And here (https://www.patreon.com/posts/learn-or-improve-40659496) I explain how with the help of a wonderful app – LingQ – (the only one you will ever need again to learn/acquire your modern languages) you can read my book pretty easily – and automatically drastically improve your theological German in so doing! Beyond that, I’ve signed contracts with Eerdmans to produce one book that focuses on the debate surrounding Hays/Wright and another one that will offer an introduction to the text grammar section of Heinrich von Siebenthal’s new Ancient Greek Grammar, something that also constitutes a big part of the German book because I try to explicate the narratological category of narrativity in more linguistic terms. I can’t tell yet when I will be able to finish these manuscripts, but you can certainly accelerate their production by supporting me on Patreon, by helping me to take on less side jobs.
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