The Imitation of Paul in the Greco-Roman World
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE IMITATION OF PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Adam C. Koontz May 2020 Examining Committee Members: Vasiliki Limberis, Advisory Chair, Department of Religion Jeremy Schipper, Department of Religion Khalid Blankinship, Department of Religion Jane DeRose Evans, Department of Art History ABSTRACT The interpretation of Paul’s command to imitate him in the New Testament has been widely and variously understood. This work uses close attention to the Hellenistic Jewish context of imitation in Paul’s world and the Latin and Greek epigraphic evidence to demonstrate that imitation was a practical strategy to unite the farflung churches of the early Christian movement. It did not establish Paul as a powerful figure over every church but was limited to those churches personally acquainted with Paul that could know how to conduct themselves by observing Paul’s example. ii UXORI CARISSIMAE iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii CHAPTER 1. INTERPRETING PAULINE IMITATION ...................................................................1 2. IMITATION BEFORE THE PAULINE CORPUS .....................................................34 3. IMITATION IN THE PAULINE CORPUS ................................................................75 4. IMITATION AND POWER ......................................................................................111 5. IMITATION IN PRACTICE .....................................................................................139 6. IMITATION ON MISSION ......................................................................................160 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................180 iv CHAPTER 1 INTERPRETING PAULINE IMITATION The variety of Pauls produced by New Testament scholarship is nearly endless. The emporium of apostolic portraits is crowded with Newly Perspectival Pauls, Lutheran Pauls, Mystical Pauls, Social-Scientific Pauls, and more recently Pauls-Within-Judaism, even against the historical Paul’s own explicit rejection of Judaism as a self-descriptor (Gal. 1:13-14). The fragmentation of Pauline studies according to the multitude of paradigms leaves the image of the historical Paul broken. When Ronald Hock took up the first book-length treatment of Paul’s occupation,1 in which the apostle was likely engaged most days he was not traveling, Hock argued with passion about the neglect of basic historical and social realities in Paul’s life. The imitation of Paul, a theme in the Pauline homologoumena and the Deutero-Paulines, has suffered a fate similar to Paul’s daily work: what was important to the man who lived in the first-century Roman East is relatively unimportant to the scholars who study him, consigning these signal elements of his life and self-image to hard-to-find dissertation reprints and brief mentions in commentaries.2 An image’s restoration cannot be accomplished in one day as layers of soot and grime accumulated over years are removed from a work of art. Yet small steps toward 1 Ronald F. Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Ministry: Tentmaking and Apostleship (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980). 2 A rare instance of placing imitation in the center of Paul’s work is Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 41-48, a book little cited in NT circles but connecting Paul’s understanding of the image of God in Christ to the entirety of his missionary efforts and writing. restoration can be made, and this book is one. We will examine the group of words Paul uses and their attendant practices, which together constitute Pauline imitation. Summarizing those words and practices as “Pauline imitation” is not altogether new in New Testament scholarship, but it is a subject rarely seen in the light of its own importance within Paul’s larger project of the establishment of churches throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. To focus on Pauline imitation is to see Paul first of all as someone trying to accomplish the establishment and endurance of human organizations, which he understood to be individual “churches” within an entity extended in space and time called “the body of Christ.” That historical Paul concerned with the provision of finances, the transmission of certain practices, and most of all the handing-over of a way of life distinct from ways of life available outside his churches is neither particularly a Newly Perspectival Paul, a Lutheran Paul, a Mystical Paul, a Social-Scientific Paul, nor a Paul-Within-Judaism. We will not here attempt to introduce a new or renovate an old paradigm for understanding Paul. His historical sayings and doings are not available for endless malleability, and much that he did say (and presumably do) concerning imitation is not stricte dictu “theological” in the same sense that his discussion of the law in Galatians or the relationship between Jew and Gentile in Romans 9-11. The study of Paul’s tactics and doings in his enormous project of founding and maintaining churches does not have the same susceptibility to theological castle-building that some other Pauline themes do. 2 The imitation of Paul has thus been relatively neglected.3 In the precritical era of biblical studies, it was conflated with the textually separate notion from the gospels of “following” Jesus and with the theological and mystical tradition of the imitation of Christ. In the critical era it has also been neglected, perhaps because it was a practice rather than a specifically theological datum. Where Paul’s theological contributions to early Christianity have been elevated above the the historical Jesus, as in Rudolf Bultmann’s magisterial Theology of the New Testament, Pauline imitation has received short shrift because it is 1) an historical given similar to the Jerusalem collection that is therefore not subject to theological reinterpretation and could be dismissed as mere Historie and 2) a claimed link between the historical Paul and the historical Jesus whom Paul claimed he was imitating, thereby presuming a connection between Paul and a man whom Paul asserted had once died and was now alive again. The former reason has been the cause of theological disinterest down to the present, and the latter makes Pauline imitation an unappetizing prospect for the critical scholar.4 In the past century, there have been a handful of studies of Pauline imitation as an historical phenomenon not immediately collapsible into the following or imitation of Jesus. 3 A recent encyclopedia on ethics in the Bible devotes its article on “imitation” to “mimesis criticism” and its application to biblical texts, D. R. MacDonald, “Imitation,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics, ed. R. Brawley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1:407-410. 4 Bultmann’s discussion of the “fellowship of suffering” in 1 and 2 Cor. is explicitly not about an historical relationship between Paul the follower and Jesus the master but between the Christ of faith and Paul the terminological gnostic, Theology of the New Testament, Vol. 1, trans. K. Grobel (New York: Scribners, 1954), 351. 3 Wilhelm Michaelis’ work in The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, first published in German in 1936,5 remains a lodestone for the discussion of Pauline imitation. This reveals both the quality of Michaelis’ writing and the paucity of resources on the subject. Michaelis’ method, like that of every article in TDNT, is to do an historical word-study of words grouped around a common verb or noun, in this case, μιμέομαι. Michaelis traced the origin of the semantic group surrounding imitation to the dance and theater of ancient Greece but found its greatest employment prior to Paul in the cosmological thought of Plato and Philo. Michaelis did not differentiate between degrees of imitation within the work of any ancient writer. In Paul as in Plato imitation was for Michaelis a matter of obedience. The Christian is obedient to Paul, as the world is obedient to the patterning of the Platonic demiurge. Michaelis made small mention of Aristotle and the aesthetic discussion of imitation, which may have impoverished his understanding of degrees within imitation, but his major methodological shortcoming was the word-study method itself. This presumes that a word retains its basic purpose through varying times and varying usages, as a hammer passed down through generations might. That method limits the range of meaning any later writer may desire to assign to a term. Thus Michaelis linked Paul’s usage more tightly to Plato’s than, as we will see, was appropriate to Paul’s purposes in commanding imitation and the extent of his likely depth of acquaintance with Platonism. 5 Wilhelm Michaelis, “μιμέομαι, μιμητής, συμμιμητής,” TWNT, ed. G. Kittel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), 4:661-678. 4 D. M. Stanley’s seminal 1959 article on Pauline imitation6 connected the exhortation to imitation tightly to the personal credibility and authority of Paul. Paul’s assertion of fatherhood in several letters (1 Thess. 2:11, 1 Cor. 4:15, 2 Cor. 6:13, Gal. 4:19) is the marker of his personal connection to the command to imitate,