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Reading 2 Corinthians 3:4-18: an Exercise in Exegesis Vilson Scholz Concordia Seminary, St

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Reading 2 Corinthians 3:4-18: an Exercise in Exegesis Vilson Scholz Concordia Seminary, St Concordia Seminary - Saint Louis Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary Doctor of Theology Dissertation Concordia Seminary Scholarship 5-1-1993 Reading 2 Corinthians 3:4-18: An Exercise in Exegesis Vilson Scholz Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.csl.edu/thd Part of the Biblical Studies Commons Recommended Citation Scholz, Vilson, "Reading 2 Corinthians 3:4-18: An Exercise in Exegesis" (1993). Doctor of Theology Dissertation. 16. http://scholar.csl.edu/thd/16 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Concordia Seminary Scholarship at Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctor of Theology Dissertation by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a special word of thanks to the people who made this project possible, namely, The Committee Responsible for International Scholarship Programs (CRISP) of The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, in particular to Mr. Kenneth Reiner, for support and service; and the Administration of Seminario Concordia, Brazil, for granting me a leave of absence. I would also like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Dr. James W. Voelz; to my readers, Dr. J. A. 0. Preus III and Dr. Robert Rosin; and to Dr. Wayne E. Schmidt, Director of Graduate Studies, for making much easier things that at first appeared to be so complicated. This dissertation is dedicated to my family, and to the Brazilian colleagues and their families who lived on the campus of Concordia Seminary from 1990-1992. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. READING FOR THE SENSE OF THE TEXT 16 Section One: 2 Cor. 3:4-6 18 Section Two: 2 Cor. 3:7-11 38 Section Three: 2 Cor. 3:12-18 57 3. EXPLAINING SOME CONCEPTS OF 2 CORINTHIANS 3 IN THE LIGHT OF THE NARROW CONTEXT AND OF THE PAULINE CORPUS 100 Atceiccrvice ecz-voitcrup // Atcxvccovice 7rvieiip.ce•tos 101 Kcet-vi-k StcsOirpcTi // laccA.cetaz 109 1-pap.p.ce // rIvervµa 127 K.ItheA.-up.p.ce 'Levet // K.45e7vottp.ce neptcetpetitoet 146 4. PROBING THE RHETORICAL DIMENSION OF 2 CORINTHIANS 3 157 Speech-act Theory 158 Rhetorical Criticism 162 Is 2 Corinthians 3 Aimed at Paul's Opponents 171 Rhetorical Analysis and 2 Corinthians • 176 The Rhetoric of 2 Corinthians 3 181 The Force of the Text in New Contexts • 191 5. CONCLUSION 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 204 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Paul's letters have a reading history of almost two millennia. It is a history of readings and misreadings, of grasping the general drift of the texts and of being puzzled when it comes down to the details. Readers have felt this ever since the New Testament era. Already in the first century Saint Peter writes that some things in Paul's letters are "hard to understand" (2 Pet. 3:16). Of the whole Pauline corpus, the Second Letter to the Corinthians has proved to be one of the most impenetrable. Paul and Timothy assured their first readers that they were writing to them only what they, the Christians at Corinth, could read and understand (2 Cor. 1:13). Yet, this does not mean that all readers, particularly late-comers, have read it with ease and complete understanding. One contemporary reader of 2 Corinthians, for instance, feels that its argumentation is frequently obscure . , its contents unfamiliar, its construction apparently haphazard, and its Sitz im Leben foggy." In Second Corinthians, one of the most baffling 1 Carol Kern Stockhausen, Moses' Veil and the Glory of the New Covenant: The Exegetical Substructure of II Cor. 3 1-4 6 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989), 2. 1 2 portions is chapter three.2 It is one of the most intensely studied portions of the Pauline corpus, as the flood of publications indicates.3 Many readers have come to one basic conclusion: it is a text that is not easily read. Here are some of the reactions: It [2 Cor. 3:1-4:6] is indeed one of the most fruitful and challenging parts of Paul's literary legacy. While there is here no lack of carity, there are many obscure passages in 3:7-18.' Many who try to grasp the nuances of Paul's argument may feel at times that they have a veil over their minds. It [2 Corinthiaps 3] is a passage fraught with exegetical perplexities. We now approach what could be called the Mount Everest of Pauline texts as far as difficulty is concerned - or should we rather call it the sphinx among texts, since its difficulty lies in its enigmatic quality rather than in its complexity?7 How should the reader approach a text as complex as 2 Corinthians 3? What method should he apply? In trying to 2"2 Corinthians 3" will be used throughout this paper as a convenient shorthand for "2 Cor. 3:4-18." 3 In the last two decades, more than 25 essays on 2 Corinthians 3 or parts thereof were published in scholarly journals. See Bibliography. 4 Stockhausen, 177. 5 Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, trans. Frank Clarke (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1959), 58. 6 David E. Garland, "The Sufficiency of Paul, Minister of the New Covenant," Criswell Theological Review 4 (1989): 21. 7 A. T. Hanson, "The Midrash is 2 Cor 3: A Reconsideration," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 9 (1980): 19. 3 find an answer to these questions, it is necessary to consider both the options that are available and some of the pitfalls that may be encountered along the way. No matter what method the interpreter of 2 Corinthians 3 is going to select, it will stress either one or a combination of four elements: the text itself, the author of the text, the referent of the text, or the reader of the text.8 In any case, the text is presupposed, so that it may be described as the center around which the other elements, namely, the author, the reader, and the referent revolve. This can be diagrammed as follows: REFERENTS TEXT AUTHOR(S) READER Based on this diagram, the interpreter of 2 8John Barton, "Classifying Biblical Criticism," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29 (1984): 23. Barton takes his clue from Abrams [The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953], who proposes that there are four basic coordinates which must be allowed for in any comprehensive critical theory: the work, the artist, the universe, and the audience. Ibid., 20. 4 Corinthians 3 could set out to discover what Paul really intended to say. Many interpreters would argue that this is the only viable option, namely, that the author's intention determines the meaning of the text and that the interpreter's task is to attempt to retrieve this intention.9 Yet, though it is fair to say that Paul's intention stands behind the text of Second Corinthians 3, otherwise the text would not have been written, it is also true that nobody can claim access to the apostle's mind apart from the text." No modern interpreter of Paul's 9M. Davies, in a review on Brevard S. Childs [The Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986), 161-62], refers to "the old Cartesian notion" that the author, as an individual who thinks without words, intends a meaning expressed through the medium of words, and that the author's intention therefore determines the meaning of the text. He indicates that this notion has been abandoned by most literary critics and philosophers because of its obvious difficulties, although many New Testament critics, and Childs, too, assume it unselfconsciously. In the field of Biblical hermeneutics, as Patrick R. Keifert explains in "Mind Reader and Maestro: Models for Understanding Biblical Interpreters" [In A Guide to Contemporary Hermeneutics: Major Trends in Biblical Interpretation, ed. Donald K. McKim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 224, note 16], the search for the author's intention springs from the Romantic hermeneutical tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey and its insistence that genuine understanding of a text involves and aims at what Paul Ricoeur refers to as "a 'congenial' coincidence with the 'genius' of the author." 10 James W. Voelz explains that "it is of no use appealing to the 'intention' of the author, for apart from a special interview with him, the author's intention is detectable only in the text." James W. Voelz, "Biblical Hermeneutics: Where Are We Now? Where Are We Going?" in Light for Our World: Essays Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, ed. John W. Klotz (St. Louis: Concordia Seminary, 1989), 246. 5 letters has access either to the sender or to the original receivers. All that is left is the text. The interpreter may well argue that his 'metatext,' either a commentary or a translation, is most certainly what Paul meant. Yet, this does not change the fact that it is just his interpretation of Paul's text. As Peter Cotterell and Max Turner have it, it is "actually only a hypothesis -- our hypothesis -- about the discourse meaning." 14 Another option is to focus on the reference of the text, on its depiction of events or ideas. The interpreter could attempt to look through 2 Corinthians 3 at the circumstances behind the text, that is, at the empirical situation at Corinth that prompted the apostle to write the text. Many interpreters of the historical school insist that this is how a text should be read. The text in this case is taken as a window into reality or history, and the interpreter is "mainly interested in the relationship between the text and the external factors surrounding its origin."12 The interpreter ends up being an historian, and 11Peter Cotterell and Max Turner, Linguistics & Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1989), 70.
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