ABRAHAM AS A SPIRITUAL ANCESTOR IN ROMANS 4 IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ROMAN APPROPRIATION OF ANCESTORS: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF PAUL’S USE OF ABRAHAM FOR SHONA CHRISTIANS IN POSTCOLONIAL ZIMBABWE. by ISRAEL KAMUDZANDU Bachelor of EDUCATION, 1990 University of Zimbabwe Harare, Africa Master of Divinity, 1996 Africa University Mutare, Africa Master of Arts in Theological Studies, 2002 United Theological Seminary Dayton, Ohio, USA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Brite Divinity School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Biblical Interpretation Fort Worth, TX May 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS APPRECIATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................. ii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE SUMMARY OF THE DISSERTATION AGENDA..................... 15 CHAPTER TWO THE ANCESTOR IN GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE: THE CASE OF AENEAS ....................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER THREE ABRAHAM IN HELLENISTIC-JEWISH CONTEXT.......... 141 CHAPTER FOUR THE SHONA ANCESTRAL COSMOLOGY .......................... 246 CHAPTER FIVE ANCESTRY AND DESCENDANCY IN ROMANS 4.............. 307 CONCLUSION......................................................................................................... 357 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 370 i APPRECIATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am thankful to God who rescued and guided my steps from the jungles, battle zones, dust roads, villages, and cities of Zimbabwe. I am grateful to my late mother, Esinath Kamudzandu, for her encouragement, prayers, and support during painful years of war and controlled education. I deeply appreciate the spirit of my late father that kept me focused in difficult times and challenges during my school years. To my wife, Rutendo, and daughters Zvikomborero and Tendai, I offer my heartfelt gratitude for their love, support, patience, and advice throughout my graduate education and writing of this dissertation. My sincere gratitude to my late father-in- law, Enoch Chiunda, and mother-in-law, Beatrice Chiunda, for their continued support and prayers when we made a transition to the United States of America. I am grateful to a number of colleagues and friends who have offered both encouragement and financial support at various stages of my education and stay in the United States. These people include my mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jaime Potter-Miller, John and Carol Parsons, Joan Negley, Rev Warren Jones, Rev. Henry Brooks, June Johnson, Melba Davis, Royce Victor, Dr. Thomas Boomershine, and Amelia Cooper. Thanks are especially due to Dr. Carolyn Osiek and Dr. David Balch, who not only taught me at Brite Divinity School, but also graciously provided a substantial financial grant to enable me write my language and complete my comprehensive examinations. ii In addition, I am indebted to Dr. David Balch for his patience, encouragement, and valuable suggestions throughout the writing of this dissertation. I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Larry Welborn who graciously gave of his time and depth of insight in reading and correcting the entire manuscript in draft form. My entire dissertation committee was a real blessing, I could not have asked for a more helpful academic team to assist me in bringing this work to completion. I deeply appreciate the work of my proofreader and editor, Martha Bernard, who diligently read and corrected every sentence and paragraph of this work. I also want to express appreciation to the library personnel at Texas Christian University, Wright State University, University of Dayton, Cincinnati University, and United Theological Seminary for their invaluable assistance. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the unflagging love and desire of my father, Rev. Elijah Kamudzandu, who went to be with the Lord before I even started elementary education. I also acknowledge the prayers and love of my mother, Prophetess Esinath Kamudzandu, who also went to be with the Lord before I completed my graduate work. Although I cannot physically see them, I feel their saintly presence in my life and education. Through the years, these two have been models of what it means to authentically live out the gospel in a cross-cultural manner. I humbly and lovingly dedicate this dissertation to my parents—my ancestors who are in heaven. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT The main focus of this dissertation is on the interpretation of Abraham as a spiritual ancestor in the context of the Roman appropriation of ancestors and the implications of perspective for Shona Christians in postcolonial Zimbabwe. In constructing Abraham as a spiritual ancestor, Paul not only builds upon an apologetic tradition in Hellenistic Judaism, but also interacts with an ideological trend in early Roman imperialism, which sought a basis for reconciliation between Greeks and Romans in the tradition of Aeneas as a common cultural ancestor. Thus, Paul’s portrayal of Abraham as an ancestor of Jews and Greeks is an analogous ideological construction to that which was familiar to his Roman audience shaped by the propaganda of the Augustan Age (26 B.C.E. – 68 C.E.). By asserting that Abraham the Jew, rather than Aeneas the Roman, is the ancestor of the people of faith ( fides), Paul constructs a liberating counter–ideology, the effect of which is to subvert the basis of Roman power. Unlike Aeneas, Abraham is an ancestor for all God’s people and can be claimed by the Shona people of Zimbabwe on the basis of faith. Abraham is a model for all Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and through him all faith religions are able to establish a unique relationship with God. Drawing upon the Greco-Roman appropriation of Aeneas as a figure of reconciliation between cultures, Paul does something creative within the Abraham iv tradition. He makes Abraham the spiritual ancestor of “all” those whose lives are characterized by pistis/fides, regardless of whether they are Jews or Greeks. The paradigm for Paul’s attempt to use “Abraham our forefather” as an ideological construct enabling the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles is found in the literature of Greek and Roman writers of the first–century B.C.E., namely Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Virgil, who made Aeneas a vehicle for the reconciliation of Greeks and Romans. Paul was interacting with the intellectual work of Greek and Roman writers, such as Dionysius and Virgil who, in the decades before Paul, had sought a means for reconciling Greeks and Romans in the figure of Aeneas as a source of identity. The dissertation concludes that the construction of Abraham as a spiritual ancestor allows Shona people to claim Abraham as a spiritual ancestor on the basis of faith, and thus reincarnating the gospel in the continent of Africa where ancestor veneration is regarded as a spiritual practice. Abraham is an ideal figure through whom the nations of the world can see each other as sisters and brothers. v INTRODUCTION The impetus for writing this dissertation arises out of my own journey of faith and service as a pastor in the United Methodist Church. I am a Shona from Zimbabwe whose academic training has been provided in large part by North American professors. As an African pastor from a Third-World country, I have lived with an exegesis handed down from the West, yet grappled with the desire to communicate the gospel within the context of the Shona culture of Zimbabwe. My first contact with New Testament language was through E. P. Sanders who came to Africa University in the summer of 1994. His teaching was thought provoking and engaging, but still something was missing. His foreign culture dislocated him from the Shona students. My second experience with New Testament language came when I studied under Larry Wellborn, a professor at United Theological Seminary in the United States. He was a terrific North American professor whose teaching was prophetic and engaging. However, I continued to grapple with the desire to contextualize the gospel to my own cultural setting. My third encounter with Western theological world views came when I was accepted at Brite Divinity School in Texas in the spring of 2002. My mentor and academic advisor, David L. Balch, intrigued me with his interest in Greco-Roman 1 studies (specifically, in Christian house churches and the archaeology of Pompeii). 1 It was in his seminars that I came to realize that if the gospel was to be meaningful to Zimbabweans, it would have to be presented within their unique cultural context. Thus, my cross-cultural hermeneutic began to take shape. I owe a debt of gratitude to the above-mentioned professors, because they equipped me with the necessary theological and exegetical tools to pursue this thesis. They taught the New Testament in the language and categories that were familiar to them, but in the process challenged me to rise above North American models so as to build new exegetical blocks that are relevant to Zimbabweans. My professors’ questions and answers were, to a large extent, not connecting with my own experience. Thus, I began to pose my own cultural, anthropological, and political questions: Is it possible to be both an African and a Christian? What does the New Testament say about being colonized, about suffering, and oppression? What theological