There are, thankfully, two new reviews available online of the
complete book of N.T.
Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God.
One is by Simon
Gathercole and the other by Larry
Hurtado, both eminent scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity.
They are both generous scholars because even though they have major misgivings of
Wright’s work, by my reading of their reviews, they have finally kind things to
say about what Wright has accomplished in this major work. Hurtado ends his review, for instance, by
saying,
Hurtado is, to my mind, far too kind about the length of
this book, about which I will have something to say shortly. Gathercole ends
his recent review by stating,
And Gathercole is far too kind
about the hard work this book is, and I will get to that in a bit too.
All of these scholars have far
greater reputations than I – I am laughing as I type this since it goes without
saying – and this generosity of academic spirit might be only one of the reasons
they have such deserved reputations; the fact that they have already read the
whole book and reviewed it is another sign that their reputations are more than
deserved, for this whole book by N. T. Wright is far too much. I say this even
though I acknowledge that Wright is clearly a virtuoso who knows the ancient
world and Paul in particular in an intimate and thorough manner that I could
only hope to do.
This is only the beginning of a
sixteen part review because I have not even read a half of the book right now
and I want to toss it aside. If I waited until I read the whole book before I
reviewed it, I would have to put aside all of my other academic and writing
projects and my teaching for a year to get it done within a year, or read it
over a few years and then by the time I was ready to review it, I would have to
start reading it again since I had already forgotten what the book was about. My solution is to offer a review and to give
my impressions chapter by chapter. It is entirely possible that by the time I
finish this review, Wright will have published many other books.
The length of this book is not an
insignificant matter. It raises practical and scholarly concerns. I used Wright’s
Justification
for a recent graduate seminar on The Epistles of Paul and it was useful,
helpful and enjoyable (and great fun knowing that we were only a long stone’s throw
from John Piper’s church and seminary in Minneapolis). Most graduate students remember courses on
Paul and often we were all assigned a book to review, one a week, by various
scholars, such as Raisanen, or Sanders, or Westerholm, etc. I could never use this book in a graduate
seminar on Paul. We would wind up studying N.T. Wright and not Paul. We could
use no other secondary literature and Paul’s letters would be relegated to
footnotes. I say all of this even though I have a genuine fondness for his
thought and find myself in agreement with most of it. But if it could not be
used for a graduate seminar, how much less could it be trotted out in my
undergraduate courses on Paul? It cannot be used, it seems to me, in any
classroom setting unless the course is actually on the work of N.T. Wright.
The book itself is too long partly
because, as one can see immediately in the first chapter, the tone is too
paternalistic, like a chatty uncle speaking down to his dim-witted nephews and
nieces. Listen to his description of slavery: “It {slavery} was how things got
done. It was the electricity of the ancient world; try imagining your home or town
without the ability to plug things in and switch them on, and you will realize
how unthinkable it was to them that there should be no slaves” (32). Really?
There was slavery in the ancient world? No one ever questioned slavery? To whom
is this being written? Fellow colleagues for the most part, as the book could scarcely
be used in the classroom and I cannot imagine even interested readers outside
of the academy investing the time to read it all. Is this how you should speak
to Gathercole and Hurtado?
The bit on “Philemon as Allegory,”
comprising pages 68-74, tells of the reconciliation between history and
theology. It grows out of his earlier discussion on history, theology and
critical realism and it is a discussion for which I have a great deal of
sympathy for his position, which is to say: I agree with him. Wright begs “indulgence”
and “pardon" for this section (68) in which Philemon and Onesimus stand for history and theology, but I cringed as I read it and it should
simply be cut and a footnote added to Ben F. Meyer’s Critical
Realism and the New Testament or Reality
and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship, both of which handle the
question on the relationship of history and theology with depth and deal with
critical realism more fully.
Much of this is simply editing, or
lack of editing. Editing is not the enemy. You must kill
your darlings and if you cannot do it, your editor must. The style is often
rather unctuous, too, and it wears you down after a while and turns you off of
the serious content. For example, “How very convenient. And how very untrue. If
we take that route, a supposed ‘Pauline soteriology’ will swell to a distended
size and, like an oversized airline traveler, end up sitting not only in its
own seat but in those on either side as well” (31). Well, okay, on its own, one
of these groaners is fine, but after ten of them, especially when the chapter goes
on and on, it is not unfair to desire some editing.
On the other hand because Wright
wants to cover everything in the world that pertains to Paul and the study of
Paul, the book is too short on many occasions to cover the material well and
the hard-won findings of generations of scholars is presented as if he had just
stumbled upon them. A couple of examples must suffice. At the beginning of
chapter two, he writes, “gone are the days when scholars could cheerfully
assign this or that material or idea to ‘Judaism’ or ‘Hellenism,’ as though
they could ever be separated in a world which Alexander the Great had
transformed three centuries earlier” (76). Yes, but this reality was something
scholars such as Saul
Lieberman, Arnaldo
Momigliano and Elias
Bickerman (cited once, but not in this context) had established decades ago
and scholars who were still engaging in such assignation were simply wrong. One
sometimes gets the impression in this book that now that Wright says it is so, it
has been established. The other example is in a footnote (117 on page 50) in
which Helmut
Koester is commended for his attempt at a geographical account of early Christianity
but which Wright finds “significantly flawed through several of the controlling
assumptions.” We are never told, though,
in the footnote or the text what the controlling assumptions are and which of
the controlling assumptions are flawed.
The chapter itself presents the
letter to Philemon as a control or entrée for Wright’s study of Paul’s world
and letters, which is a nice choice, but I wonder if the real control is Paul’s
letter to the Romans, itself divided like these books into sixteen chapters. My
operating suspicion, not even hypothesis yet, is that the sixteen chapters in
Wright’s work equate to the sixteen chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It
is chapters 9-11 in Wright’s work, and their titles which have overtones of the
content in Romans 9-11, which have put this in my mind. If that is the case,
then in Wright’s first chapter we have had a long Salutation and introduction to
Paul’s Gospel, just as in Romans.
Sometime in the future, I will return with my
review of chapter two. It is, though, hard work to go through this book, given the length (Gathercole says the book, over 1,600 pages, is
"roughly 800,000 words, or 25 times the length of the 13-letter Pauline
corpus"), the depth of scholarship, and the regular citing of his earlier work in the footnotes for detail on particular issues discussed in the text. Though I have read much of Wright's work, I cannot remember his previous discussions in earlier books simply by page number and so this task requires re-reading as much of Wright's instead of Paul's corpus.
To
summarise a book of over 1500 pages - roughly 800,000 words, or 25
times the length of the 13-letter Pauline corpus and probably longer
than the Bible - See more at:
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god-a-review.php#sthash.eh39awnj.dpuf
To
summarise a book of over 1500 pages - roughly 800,000 words, or 25
times the length of the 13-letter Pauline corpus and probably longer
than the Bible - See more at:
http://www.reformation21.org/articles/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god-a-review.php#sthash.eh39awnj.dpuf
John W. Martens
I invite you to follow me on Twitter @Biblejunkies
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