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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Constructing Paul, (Dis)Placing Ephesians The Pauline Book and the Dilemma of Ephesians Benjamin J. Petroelje Doctor of Philosophy New Testament and Christian Origins The University of Edinburgh 2018 For Amy, Norah, Rose, and Teddy With Love Declaration I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. __________________________________ Benjamin J. Petroelje - iii - Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................................... v Lay Summary ........................................................................................................................................ viii Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................................ x Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................. xi Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1 PART 1: Reading Paul and Ephesians in Modern Criticism Chapter One: Dismembering Paul ..................................................................................................... 16 Chapter Two: Displacing Ephesians .................................................................................................. 61 PART 2: Reading Paul and Ephesians in Late Antiquity Chapter Three: Assembling Paul ....................................................................................................... 112 Chapter Four: Placing Ephesians ..................................................................................................... 162 PART 3: Reading Ephesians among the Paulines Chapter Five: Imaging Paul in Ephesians ....................................................................................... 211 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 262 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 267 - iv - Abstract The problem of how to situate Ephesians vis-à-vis Paul and Paulinism—one with a long and venerable history in Pauline scholarship, although now largely taken for granted—is better characterised as the problem of how to read Ephesians vis-à-vis the corpus Paulinum. Any study of Paul, working in historical mode, has to reckon with the nature of the evidence: to study Paul is to be a student, firstly, of a letter collection. Any judgment about Ephesians, then, is, in the end, born from a judgment about how to read a letter col- lection. This thesis, therefore, comprises three parts. Part 1 recounts the rise of a distinc- tively modern way of (not) reading Paul's letter collection, which privileges discrete let- ters, chronologically arranged, as the raw data for narrating Pauline biography and early Christianity (chapter one), and the effect that this reading strategy has on Ephesians, which is now displaced—one strand of the welter of the Pauline legacy (chapter two). To- gether, chapters one and two make the negative argument that the consensus on Eph- esians, more than a scientific reconstruction of history, is a hermeneutical construct of modern criticism. Part 2 turns to Paul's late-ancient tradents to ask the same two questions: how do these readers read Paul's letter collection (chapter three), and how does this impact how they read Ephesians (chapter four)? Chapter three finds that late-antique Paulinists privi- lege, at one and the same time, both the collectivity/arrangement of the corpus and frag- mentary ways of reading it that derive from the practices of late-ancient grammar. The priority of the collection, together with reading strategies that negotiate rather than dis- - v - place difference, serves to place Ephesians consistently near the centre of late-ancient portraits of Paul—so the argument of chapter four. A different way of reading a letter col- lection generates a different way of reading Ephesians vis-à-vis Paul. This is the cumula- tive argument of Part 2. Part 3, then, picks up one of the most pervasive contemporary judgements about Ephesians—its developed image of Paul (chapter five) as inscribed in 3.1-13—in order to ask a simple question: if one does not begin with assumptions about authenticity and chronology, how do this text read vis-à-vis relevant co-texts within Paul's letter collection? Contemporary rhetoric aside, chapter five argues that Ephesians holds together various tensions in the collection's image of Paul that surface not just between so-called disputed and undisputed letters, but between the undisputed letters themselves. Rather than de- veloped, a less hermeneutically loaded designation of the difference would be to call Eph 3.1-13 a generalised account of what we find ad hoc in the other letters. But this does not allow one to make claims about historical distance. At least with respect to its image of Paul, then, I argue that Ephesians is a source for Paul, whether Paul wrote it or not. This relatively simple argument has three rather significant implications: [1] scholars of early Christianity lose a key text frequently used to situate Ephesians in the middle of developmental trajectories of Pauline reception; [2] scholars of Paul may not buttress one-sided accounts of Paul by appeal to the 'divergent' or 'developed' account of the same in Ephesians—that is, they must deal with the data of Ephesians, or provide an account of why they do not; and [3] scholars of Ephesians, not least of 3.1-13, will need to - vi - learn to speak of Paul, and not just the Pauline legacy, again. - vii - Lay Summary Among the literary deposit of early Christianity, one of the most prominent of those re- mains is a series of letters written by the apostle Paul, one of the movement's foremost leaders. The letters come down to us in later manuscripts which contain, variably, ten, thirteen, and fourteen letters attributed to Paul. Modern scholarship on Paul widely agrees that Paul himself wrote seven of those letters, attributing the rest to Paul's later fol- lowers writing in his name. This thesis investigates one of the letters typically not ascribed to Paul, the letter to the Ephesians (although it lacks an address in the earliest manu- scripts), and asks how we should read it relative to Paul and the other letters, given its presence in the letter collection from the very beginning. In Part 1, I look at shifts in how modern scholars read letter collections—shifts that go back, in the study of Paul, to the late 1700s—that privilege reordering the collec- tion chronologically in order to tell the story of Paul's life, and illuminate the period of earliest Christianity (chapter one). It is this way of reading, I find, that is ultimately re- sponsible for the judgment that Paul did not write Ephesians, and for the ubiquitous judg- ments that Ephesians represents a later development of, or away from, the Paul of the au- thentic letters (chapter two). In Part 2, I turn to a group of earlier readers of Paul's letter collection in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, asking what they privilege in reading a letter collection, and how this impacts how they read Ephesians. While these readers can recognise the chronology of the letters, they are far more interested in the (non-chronological) arrangement of the - viii - collection itself, which they not infrequently call a 'book'. They are interested, that is, in what the letters offer together, as a collection (chapter three). The impact of this on how they read Ephesians is varied, but given how general this letter is, it tends to function cen- trally in these readers' accounts of Paul (chapter four). A different way of reading a letter collection leads to a very different judgment about Ephesians. In Part 3, I turn to the text of Ephesians itself, to interpret a passage (3.1-13) in which Paul, the purported author, outlines his role and message in the early Jesus move- ment. In modern ways of reading, this is typically taken to represent a later, idealised (and developed) image of Paul that does not fit the self-image of Paul himself. Given the fragili- ty of this way of reading Ephesians (so, Part 1), I read this passage alongside the other let-
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