2009 Conference: Short Papers

In what is considered to be a climactic point in Romans, 12.1-2, Paul makes a firm appeal to the Roman in view of 'the mercies of God'. It is the conclusion of many scholars that either Paul is using oiktirmos to refer to the argument of Romans 9-11 or, perhaps, to summarize chapters 1-11 as a whole. Though the term is undoubtedly acting to refer back to Paul's argument in the preceding material, there is a pattern of the usage of oiktirmos (and its cognates) in the LXX that has not been introduced into the scholarly discussion. We will examine the patterned uses of an oiktirmos motif in the LXX with a view towards how and why it appears as well as what other concepts are frequently and naturally correlated. Then we will demonstrate how suitable this particular term was for summarizing the message of Romans (and Paul's gospel) as the foundation for the command par excellence that follows in the rest of 12.1-2. In particular we will observe how oiktirmos appears in the discussion of God's covenant faithfulness with a view towards eschatology, revelation, guidance, and deliverance.

Out of the ten clear references to Satan in the (undisputed) Pauline letters, all but three are to be found in Paul's letters to the Corinthians. The concentration of references to the chief malevolent figure of Judaism in 1-2 Corinthians has led some (e.g., Johnson, 1999) to suggest that Paul is here employing mere rhetoric ("Satan talk") to assert his authority among the Corinthian congregation. However, understood in light of references to "Satan" figures in the Hebrew Scriptures and Second Temple texts, and within the context of Paul's concern for the Corinthian church (e.g., 2 Cor 12:14-21; cf. 11:28), it is far more likely that Paul is warning of real activity by Satan in order that the church would not be outwitted by Satan (2 Cor 2:11) and that his work there would not be in vain (2 Cor 11:3). Accordingly, this paper seeks (1) to demonstrate that this cluster of references to Satan denotes Paul's genuine concern of Satan's presence at Corinth, and (2) to argue that characterizing such references as mere "Satan talk" offers an inadequate explanation since it fails to take seriously Paul's concern for the Corinthian church as well as the place of Satan within the theology and worldview of early Christians such as Paul.

Romans 7.7-25 is considered by many scholars to be a key text for our understanding of Paul's teaching on the law, human ability and sin. Yet, Paul's teaching here has remained ambiguous. In this paper, I propose that Paul depicts the human agent and the teaching on the law against the backdrop of the two-ways tradition. This tradition, coming through Deuteronomy 30.15-20 and Sirach 15.14-17, claims that life comes through law observance and that the human is completely competent to keep the Torah. Similarly, Paul claims that the law is 'unto life' (Rom 7.10), and the speaker in several ways indicates that he thinks he can keep the law. Paul, however, subjects this view to severe criticism with the introduction of another agent: Sin, a power that invades the human realm and, taking up resident within the human, turns the human's intent to obey into the doing of evil. Rather than Romans 7.7-25 being Paul's great defence of the law, this passage is actually a critique of a particular view on the relationship between law observance and life.

The relationship between the interpretation of the Old Testament in the New and early Jewish bible exegesis has long been a matter of debate in NT scholarship. Following the publication in the second half of the twentieth century of some significant studies comparing the exegetical techniques of various NT authors with Qumranic or rabbinic hermeneutics (e.g. those by Ellis, Fitzmyer, and, more recently, Lim), this subject is now commonly addressed in major NT commentaries. It is the argument of this paper that the Jewish context of the use of scripture in the NT should indeed be taken seriously, but that a closer engagement with current research in the field of Jewish Studies is necessary. The work of one of the leading rabbinic scholars of modern times, Arnold Goldberg, does not appear to have impacted widely on NT scholarship to date, for example. The paper therefore introduces the highly sophisticated methods developed by Goldberg and his students, particularly Alexander Samely, for analysing the interpretation of biblical texts in midrash and targum, and for identifying the underlying axioms about the nature of scripture held by these early Jewish interpreters. The potential significance of their approach for NT study is illustrated by applying it to two passages from writings particularly characterised by dense citation and interpretation of the OT, Hebrews and 1 Peter. This analysis of the NT texts seeks to offer a very precise explanation of the exegetical techniques employed in them, and a new vocabulary for facilitating a comparison of NT interpretation with other forms of Jewish and Christian exegesis.

It is commonly assumed that when Paul cites scripture, the cited material and its traditional context logically structure the target text. Debate concerning the capacities of Paul's audiences to grasp exegetical processes within his written text has led to a discussion of the difference between explicit 'citation' and tacit 'allusion'. I argue that Paul has two distinct modes of reference to traditional literature: logical and rhetorical. The argument of I Corinthians 15 exemplifies this disjunction between logic and rhetoric, demonstrating that Paul's own exegetical process need not register in his explicit rhetorical strategy.

These observations impact on the common supposition outlined above. To assume that the traditional literature, to which Paul refers, always logically structures his own writing is to conflate Paul's logic with his rhetoric. This runs the risk of anachronistically locating his writing within a closed canonical continuum of thought. Such a conclusion is foreign to historical criticism because it frames Paul's own writing and the ancestral scripture, to which he refers, within an abstracted intertextual object divorced from its own communicative context. Distinguishing Paul's logic from his rhetoric relieves debate surrounding 'citation' and 'allusion' of traditional literature because it acknowledges the independence of exegetical process from a rhetorical strategy adopted for particular purposes.