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What if Martin Luther Had Read the Dead Sea Scrolls? HistoricalParticularity and Theological Interpretation in Pauline Theology:Galatians as a Test Case

Introduction

Michael F. BirdHighland Theological College/UHI Millennium InstituteEvangelical Theological Society, Boston, 21 November 2008

Imagine that in San Diego last year Martin Luther was seen wandering around the ETSbookstall and browsing all the various books on Paul, especially those that pit himself againstthe now commonly known ‘New Perspective on Paul’ (NPP).

We can only guess what hisresponse might be to reading

Paul: Fresh Perspectives

by N.T. Wright and

The Future of Justification

by John Piper.

Luther might be flattered by the portrait of himself on the coverof Piper’s book and feel a bit of

déjà vu

after reading Wright’s work. Hadn’t they settled thisall before? When Paul spoke of ‘works of the law’ he did not mean ‘Jewish ceremonies’ or‘boundary markers,’ but any human deeds that seek for merit before God. Justification wasnot to be confused with sanctification as the opponents of Paul and the Papists believed. The‘righteousness of God’ was an alien and imputed righteousness, not God’s ‘covenantfaithfulness’. Next imagine Martin Luther stumbling into the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit thatwas in San Diego that year and after excitedly perusing the displays he buys a Germantranslation of the scrolls in the Museum book store and then sits down at a bar with a frostyBudweiser and begins reading, ‘As for me, if I stumble, the mercies of God shall be myeternal salvation. If I stagger because of the sin of the flesh, my justification shall be by therighteousness of God which endures forever’ (1QH 11.11-12) and flicking over further hecomes across ‘Now, we have written to you some of the works of the Law, those which wedetermined would be beneficial for you and your people, because we have seen [that] youpossess insight and knowledge of the Law’ (4QMMT C 26-28). After devouring the entirevolume, with a mixture of confusion and curiosity, Luther goes up to the nearest person in thebar, who just so happens to Jacob Neusner, and asks him what does he make of these DeadSea Discoveries and what they mean for the Reformation. Neusner is not short on a reply; infact, they have a three hour long conversation which ends in a publishing agreement fortwenty volumes on Jews and Christians to be jointly written by the end of the month (Lutherand Neusner are both prolific authors after all).So would reading the Dead Sea Scrolls have led Luther to change his mind about Jewsand Judaism, make him rethink his understanding of Paul, Paul’s Jewish Christiansinterlocutors, and reassess his own view of Galatians? This is fantasy and fiction, but I haveoften wondered what would have been the effect if the magisterial Reformers had a moreinformed knowledge of the diversity of Judaism in antiquity, grappled with Jewishsectarianism as background to intra-Christian debates, and had shown more attention to theoccasional nature of the Pauline letters. It is my contention that Reformed theologicalinterpretation (i.e. that emerging from the Reformation) is improved not undermined bygreater attention being given to the historical particularity of Paul’s letters. Indeed, while theReformed theological framework needs some serious repair work, the whole edifice stands a

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Here I am obviously imitating the ‘Whimsical Introduction’ of Stephen Westerholm in

Perspectives Old and New On Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), xiii-xvi.

N.T. Wright,

Paul: Fresh Perspectives

(London: SPCK, 2005); John Piper,

The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright

(Wheaton, ILL: Crossway, 2007).

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better chance of surviving contact with history than its NPP counterpart. Therefore, in thispaper, I want to argue that a shift from historical particularity to the theological interpretationof Galatians yields much fruit for a broad and revised Reformed understanding of Paul.

Pounding Luther and Liberating Paul

What has been at stake in modern debates on Paul in the last twenty-five years has been thevalidity of the theological framework of the Lutheran/Reformed tradition and the biblicalfoundations that it claims to rest upon. One of the major pillars of revisionist readings of Paulhas been the ‘Total Travesty’ of the ‘Lutheran Perspective on Paul’.

Lutheran and Reformedinterpretation in general have not faired well in evaluation by NPP interpreters.

ThisReformation interpretation of Paul is frequently touted as being too individualistic, hamperedby western ideas of guilt, anthropological instead of christocentric, too influenced bymedieval debates on law and merit, and lacking an awareness of the historical contingency of Paul’s letters.

In fact, one of the most invective opprobrium’s one Pauline scholar can labelagainst the work of another Pauline scholar is ‘Lutheran’ which has come to mean things likepassé, uncritical, unhistorical, or not christocentric enough.

Others have come to Luther’s defence which has produced an industry of refutationsnot seen since Marcion came to Rome.

Carl Trueman delivered a fiery criticism of JamesDunn’s handling of Luther in a Tyndale Fellowship paper to which Dunn respondedexpressing that he had no intent of repudiating Luther (Trueman since has graciouslyconceded a misrepresentation of Dunn in personal correspondence).

The NPP has not made

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My thought here is taken largely from Francis Watson,

Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the NewPerspective

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 351-69 but drawn along a trajectory in the Reformed andBritish Evangelical Tradition.

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Francis Watson, ‘Not the New Perspective,’ An unpublished paper delivered at the British New TestamentConference, Manchester, September 2001. Cited 21/10/08. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/staff/watsonart.shtml

Cf. surveys of criticism in e.g. Westerholm,

Perspectives Old and New on Paul

, xiii-xix; idem, ‘The “NewPerspective” at Twenty-Five,’ in

Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2 – The Paradoxes of Paul

, eds.D.A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, Mark A. Seifrid (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), 1-17; Guy Prentiss Waters,

Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul

(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2004), 1-13.

Cf. Douglas Harink,

Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology Beyond Christendom and Modernity

(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), 25-65; Douglas A. Campbell,

The Quest for Paul’s Gospel: A Suggested Strategy

(London: T&T Clark, 2005), 34-36, 146-177; Mark Reasoner,

Romans in Full Circle: A History of Interpretation

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 5, 147.

Watson,

Beyond the New Perspective

, 25, n. 42.

See bibliography in Michael F. Bird,

The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective

(PBM; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 194-211. Notable studies include: Paul F. M. Zahl,‘E.P. Sanders' Paul Versus Luther's Paul: Justification by Faith in the Aftermath of the Scholarly Crisis,’

St. Luke's Journal of Theology

34 (1994): 33-40; Mark A. Seifrid, ‘Paul, Luther, and Justification in Gal 2:15-21,’

WTJ

65 (2003): 215-30; Donald Macleod, ‘The New Perspective: Paul, Luther and Judaism,’

SBET

22 (2004):4-31; Timothy George, ‘Modernizing Luther, Domesticating Paul: Another Perspective,’ in

Justification and Variegated Nomism, Volume 2 – The Paradoxes of Paul

, eds. D.A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, Mark A. Seifrid(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2004), 436-63; Robert G. Artinian, ‘Luther After Stendahl/Sanders Revolution: AResponsive Evaluation of Luther's View of First-Century Judaism in His 1535 Commentary on Galatians,’

TrinJ

27.1 (2006): 77-99.

Carl Trueman, ‘A Man More Sinned Against than Sinning? The Portrait of Martin Luther in ContemporaryNew Testament Scholarship: Some Casual Observations of a Mere Historian.’ Unpublished paper presented atTyndale Fellowship in Cambridge in 2000. http://www.crcchico.com/covenant/trueman.html. Cited 22 October2008. Cited 22 October 2008; James D. G. Dunn, ‘A Man More Sinned Against than Sinning? A Response toCarl Trueman,’ The Paul Page, 2004. http://www.thepaulpage.com/Response.html. Cited 22 October 2008;idem, ‘The New Perspective: whence, what, whither?’ in

The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays

(WUNT 185; Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2005), 19 (esp. n. 83).

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in roads in the Lutheran heartland of Germany.

In an interview in

Criswell Theological Review

Martin Hengel was asked if he was impressed by the NPP and he replied: ‘Not at all,because it is not really new. Pelagius, who lived 1600 years ago, held to similar views’. Whenasked why British scholars have been slower than their American counterparts to embrace theNPP, Hengel replied that ‘they have more common sense’.

Some have taken a more mediating view in reaffirming (elements of) the traditionalLutheran reading, while taking on board insights from the New Perspective. John Ziesler, forinstance, maintains that the NPP is exegetically justified, while the Lutheran interpretation isappropriate theologically if regarded as an exposition rather than exegesis.

Michael Bird hasattempted to identify a position beyond reformed and revisionist readings of Paul thatappreciates the social origins and social function of Paul’s teachings on ‘righteousness’ butdemonstrates how a nuanced reading of Paul retains the essential architecture of Reformedtheology.

Francis Watson, who arguably wrote one of the most polemical tirades againstLuther in the 1980’s,

has cautiously distanced himself from the NPP in the second editionof his volume on Paul where he intends on moving beyond the ‘polarity’ of the old and newperspectives divide.

Watson maintains that Luther’s interpretation of Paul’s critique of works is ‘allegorical’ and the Lutheran image of Paul is ‘deeply flawed’.

He points out thatsome anti-NPP critics or pro-Lutheran apologists routinely miss the horizontal or socialdimensions of Paul’s argument about justification and consequently lack ‘social realism’.

Yet Watson rejects the once unassailable assumptions of the NPP like the naïve essentialismof post-Sanders scholarship that Judaism was a religion of grace with a singular soteriologicalscheme. He also maintains that Paul advocated a sectarian separation between Christiancommunities and Judaism.

Even so, Watson states that one can embrace the historicalcritical sensitivity of F.C. Baur and the theological acumen of Martin Luther because: ‘Bothreadings see in Paul’s antitheses an opposition between two mutually exclusive principles,relating to divine and human agency in the one case, universality and exclusiveness in theother. And both readings need to be rather drastically relativized, since they reduce Paulineantithesis to a common denominator and fail to grasp the incommensurability of patterns of communal life oriented towards two distinct and irreducible particularities’.

We might dowell to also appreciate that James Dunn and N.T. Wright have both expressed that they haveno desire to abandon either Scripture or the Reformation. Dunn writes:

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See German discussion in Hans Hübner, 'Zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion über die Theologie des Paulus,'

JBTh

7 (1992): 399-413; Eduard Lohse, ‘Theologie der Rechtfertigung im kritischen Disput – zu einigen neuenPerspektiven in der Interpretation der Theologie des Apostels Paulus,’

Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen

249(1997): 66-81; Michael Bachmann and Johannes Woyke (eds.),

Lutherische und Neue Paulusperspektive: Beiträg zu einem Schlüsselproblem der gegenwärtigen exegetischen Diskussion

(WUNT 2.182; Tübingen:Mohr/Siebeck, 2005); A. J. M. Wedderburn, ‘Eine neuere Paulusperspektive?’ In

Biographie und Persönlichkeit des Paulus

, eds. E.-M. Becker and P. Pilhofer (WUNT 187; Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2005), 46-64.

R. Alan Streett, ‘An Interview with Martin Hengel,’

CTR

2.2 (2005): 14-15.

John Ziesler, ‘Justification by Faith in the Light of the “New Perspective” on Paul,’

Theology

94 (1991): 188-94.