304 - The Unknown Paul: Essays on Luke-Acts and Early Christian History & Paul: Rabbi and Apostle

The Unknown Paul: Essays on Luke-Acts and Early Christian History
By Jacob Jervell
Minneapolis, Augsburg, 1984. 190 pp. $9.95.

Paul: Rabbi and Apostle.
By Pinchas Lapide and Peter Stuhlmacher
Minneapolis, Augsburg, 1984. 77 pp. $5.95.

Jacob Jervell, professor of New Testament at the University of Oslo, has become known as an original and provocative interpreter of the New Testament. This reputation is continued and enhanced in the present. volume of collected essays. Most of the essays share a common concern with the importance of Jewish Christiantiy, in the period of 70-100 A.D. and the: significance of that phenomenon for the correct interpretation of Paul and. Luke-Acts. Important for an accurate: understanding of Paul is the recogni-, tion that he was accepted by earliest Jewish Christianity and only as time went on was it necessary for the earlier permitted diversity increasingly to conform to the conservatism of Jewish Christianity, a movement characterized as "the mighty minority." A key factor in this shift is the jealousy aroused by Paul's highly successful Gentile mission. Furthermore, suggests Jervell, the Apostle's letters are not necessarily representative of his theology, since they are written to specific, often polemical, situations. Thus, to understand the historical Paul one must use Luke and Acts; they "place in the sun … elements lying in the shadow of Paul's letters." Further, Jervell argues anew that Luke-Acts is not a Gentile Christian, but a Jewish Christian document. This point is demonstrated by an exegesis of Luke 2:21, in which the circumcision of Jesus is certainly not "happenstance," but an indication of Jesus' legitimacy to speak and act in the name of God. This tendency of the Lucan writings is also evident in their emphasis on women, an emphasis not because they are women as such, but because they are daughters of Abrabam, devout Jews, and thus members of Israel in the end-time and so members of the church. Many of these insights will have to be taken very seriously, particularly the emphasis on the importance of Jewish Christianity in the late first century. But is it not precisely because of this tendency, so well represented in Luke-Acts, that one should not, uncritically use this source for completing the Pauline portrait?

Peter Stuhlmacher of Tubingen, while acknowledging that many Jews and Jewish Christians of the first century

305 - The Unknown Paul: Essays on Luke-Acts and Early Christian History & Paul: Rabbi and Apostle

viewed Paul as an apostate, suggests that both Acts and the letters repeatedly stress Paul's Jewish roots and his call as the apostle to the Gentiles for Israel's sake. In attempting to support this position, Stuhlmacher's uncritical dependence on Acts is lamentable; his exegesis of Romans in defense of the Jewish-Christian accusations against Paul is most persuasive. The presentation of Paul through the Jewish eyes of Pinchas Lapide, an Orthodox Jewish theologian in Frankfurt, is invaluable for its rich insights into Pauline thought. Paul was a Jew and missionary throughout his life who was called to proclaim and enact a twofold reconciliation: (1) to God, and (2) between Jews and Gentiles. Much of the confusion in current interpretations of Paul is that they absolutize, eternalize, and universalize Paul's occasional letters, thus failing to recognize his fallibility and imperfection and, further, that his life's task was "an unfinished symphony." Characteristic of Lapide's view, as well as that of Jervell, is that the interpreter must distinguish between Paul's attitude to the Gentiles who are "strangers to the covenants of promise" from that of the Jews. Only thus can I Cor 9:20-21 ("to the Jews I became as a Jew") be understood properly.

These two books are not only filled with keen insights for the continuing reappraisal of our understanding of Paul, but are rich in their contributions to the continuing Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Karl P. Donfried
Smith College
Northampton, Mass.