>Allen Dwight Callahan has written an excellent essay on Paul the Apostle. His essay appears in Religion and Ethics and it is a review of the book The Real Paul (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) written by John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.
In his essay, Callahan also discusses other recent books on Paul. He also discusses Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement of a special jubilee year dedicated to Paul to celebrate the 2,000th anniversary of his birth.
The following is an excerpt from the essay:
Benedict emphasized in his vespers announcement of the Pauline year that it would have an important ecumenical dimension, explaining that “the Apostle of the Gentiles, who dedicated himself to the spreading of the good news to all peoples, spent himself for the unity and harmony of all Christians.” In that spirit John Dominic Crossan, an Irish Catholic biblical scholar and former Roman Catholic priest, and Marcus Borg, a Protestant biblical scholar and Episcopal canon theologian, teamed up to coauthor The First Paul (Harper Collins, 2009).
Borg, as the Protestant principal of the duo, writes, “As I look back on my experience of growing up Lutheran, it is clear that I was taught to see Jesus, God, and the Christian gospel through a Pauline lens as mediated by Luther.” Crossan recalls his days as a young priest in 1959 “when I first stood in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and looked at the statues of St. Peter … and St. Paul.” Together Borg and Crossan claim to cut through the hagiographical accretions to get to the original Paul, the first Paul, and say “our common hope is that we can get Paul out of the Reformation world and back into the Roman world.”
For Borg and Crossan there is more than one Paul in the New Testament and no less than three Pauls. The first is “the radical Paul,” author of the seven genuine letters that go under his name: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. Then there is “the conservative Paul” of 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians (“the disputed letters”) and “the reactionary Paul” of the Pastoral Epistles.
Some recent commentators do not mark differences between the Paul of the seven undisputed letters, the Paul of Ephesians and Colossians, the Paul of the Pastoral Epistles, and the Paul of Acts, differences explained with characteristic clarity and elegance by Garry Wills in his What Paul Meant (Viking, 2006). Yet among some entries to the ample bibliography of the Pauline Year, there is still some slippage. Raymond Collins’s The Power of Images in Paul (Liturgical Press, 2008), as its table of contents makes clear, treats the Magnificent Seven as authentic, devoting a chapter to each. The first chapter opens with a quotation from Titus 1:1-3, which Collins describes without further comment as having been written “toward the end of the first century, CE” by “an anonymous author.” But Collins freely refers to Acts to document that Paul was born in Tarsus and was a disciple of Gamaliel and a devotee of the Jerusalem Temple. Stephen Finlan, in The Apostle Paul and the Pauline Tradition (Liturgical Press, 2008), makes much of the importance of distinguishing the different sources of Pauline tradition and the theological difference that makes, without explicitly endorsing the judgment that the authentic Paul is the Paul of the seven letters.
Borg and Crossan, for their part, avidly endorse the persona of the seven-letter corpus as the real Paul, an anti-imperialist advocate of radical equality in imitation of his Lord Jesus Christ: “In Paul, the mystical experience of Jesus Christ as Lord led to resistance to the imperial vision and advocacy of a different vision of the way the world can be.”
But the best that has been thought and said about Paul’s purportedly anti-imperialist project has already been thought and said in a number of scholarly treatments in the last decade. The seminal collection of essays edited by Richard Horsley, Paul and Empire (Trinity Press, 1997), comes most readily to mind. Horsley and company first raised the question and set the scholarly agenda for answering it. The First Paul, subtitled “Reclaiming the Radical Visionary behind the Church’s Conservative Icon,” promises more of the same, if not better. But it is neither, and for one simple reason: the radical Paul of Borg and Crossan is not really very radical at all. This becomes painfully clear, among several other instances that could be adduced, in their contorted exegesis of Roman 13:1-7, Paul’s infamous exhortation to obey ruling authorities—read the Roman imperial regime—because they are “ordained of God,” who has given them the sword to enforce law and order.
Borg and Crossan explain that Paul feared his Roman audience would resort to “violent tax revolt” against Rome: “Paul is most afraid not that Christians will be killed but that they will kill, not that Rome will use violence against Christians but that Christians will use violence against Rome.” This danger of violent revolt whips Paul into a “rhetorical panic’ and causes him to “make some very unwise and unqualified statements with which to ward off that possibility”—the possibility that church folk in Rome would use their marginalized, persecuted faces to scuff the brass knuckles of Roman state terror. The hermeneutic here would be hilarious if Paul’s “statements” in this toxic text were not so “unwise and unqualified.” With radicals like this, who needs reactionaries?
The authors also identify a fourth Paul, the globetrotting hero of the second half of the book of Acts. The several and in some cases irreconcilable differences between Paul’s representation in Acts and his self-representation in his letters are treated at some length by Borg and Crossan in their third chapter, “The Life of a Long-Distance Apostle.” These differences have led some scholars to conclude that Paul’s letters and theology were either unknown to or ignored by the writer of Acts, who has woven a text about Paul’s career using threads of legend along with the whole cloth of his own imagination. Yet Borg and Crossan write, “Our primary source will be the seven genuine letters, supplemented when appropriate by Acts.” This begs the question, of course, of how Borg and Crossan know when it’s appropriate—a question they don’t answer in their book. This unresolved methodological issue must leave us in doubt about any conclusions they draw from harmonizing the first Paul and the fourth.
To read the essay in its entirety, visit the web page for Religion and Ethics.
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Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary
Tags: Allen Dwight Callahan, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Paul, The Real Paul
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Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament 
>I recently read NT Wright's book Paul: In Fresh Perspective, which really laid out a convincing, coherent vision of Paul. The key, I think, is how Wright describes Paul as Roman citizen and a practicing Jew in Tarsus, straddling three worlds: Jewish, Hellenistic and Rome itself. And his writings speak to all three worlds simultaneously, with different things echoing with different audiences, some picking things up that others would not. What seems like a jerky, "rhetorical panic" to some, is in fact Paul's carefully constructed argument straddling the three.
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