“New Testament Backgrounds”: How They Work to Clarify Our Understanding of the Texts

In my first post here at Triablogue, I discussed the “oral character” of some of the New Testament documents, and especially with regard to a comment that R.T. France had made about a much-disputed passage, Matthew 16:18. In his commentary, France had posited a hypothetical oral presentation between Jesus and Peter, with France suggesting that if Jesus was pointing to Peter’s “faith” or “confession” in that passage, then “Jesus chose his words badly”:

A second escape route [to suggest that Peter himself was not “the Rock” of that passage], beloved especially by those who wish to refute the claims of the Roman Catholic Church based on the primacy of Peter as the first pope, is to assert that the foundation rock is not Peter himself, but the faith in Jesus as Messiah which he has just declared. If that was what Jesus intended, he has chosen his words badly, as the wordplay points decisively toward Peter, to whom personally he has just given the name, as the rock, and there is nothing in his statement to suggest otherwise. Even more bizarre is the supposition that Jesus, having declared Simon to be Petros, then pointed instead to himself when he said the words “this rock” (“The Gospel of Matthew,” R.T. France, Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, U.K.: William B.Eerdmans Publishing Company, ©2007, pg 622).

While France may be correct to suggest that Jesus “did not point to himself” when he uttered that phrase, given the rhetorical character of the ancient world, it is highly likely that Matthew had some form of oral delivery system in mind, complete with hand gestures, when he penned his Gospel. And within the context of that oral delivery system, the awkward construction of that verse (“you are Peter, and on this rock …”) can be seen in a new light.

Robert Jewett, in his 2007 Commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans (a part of the Hermeneia commentary series, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), building on the work of other scholars, has assembled a fantastic overview of “the cultural situation in first century Rome”, (from which I’ve taken much of my previous House Church series). I’d like to continue with this “cultural situation” in ancient Rome for a number of reasons.

The first of which is that, as in the example above, it helps to shed new light on the New Testament Scriptures. (And in fact, such “cultural background” is helpful for understanding all the Scriptures. I really benefitted from this series by John Currid in that regard.)

But “backgrounds” are important for many reasons.

In 1977, E.P. Sanders published a work, “Paul and Palestinian Judaism” (©1977, London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Fortress Press) which, as many of you know, blindsided the world of Protestant New Testament scholarship and sent it reeling for a time. Sanders’s work was a study in the “background” of Second Temple Judaism, especially the Tannaitic literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sanders’s work was extremely difficult to respond to, precisely because not many others had studied these “backgrounds” in quite the detail that he had done. Fortunately, D.A. Carson, Peter O’Brien and Mark Seifrid were able to “out-background Sanders,” and they also “out-Pauled” him in their two volume work on Justification and Variegated Nomism. Carson puts this into perspective:

This means that the place to begin is with the literature of Second Temple Judaism, and the questions to be asked have to do with whether or not “covenantal nomism” serves us well as a label for an overarching pattern of religion. The scholars who have contributed the chapters of this book are not in perfect agreement on this point. The disagreement may spring in part from legitimate scholarly independence, but it springs even more (as the following chapters show) from the variations within the literature: the literature of Second Temple Judaism reflects patterns of belief and religion too diverse to subsume under one label. The results are messy. But if they are allowed to stand, they may in turn prepare us for a more flexible approach to Paul. It is not that the new perspective has not taught us anything helpful or enduring. Rather, the straitjacket imposed on the apostle Paul by appealing to a highly unified vision of what the first-century “pattern of religion” was really like will begin to find itself unbuckled… (5).

In Volume 1 of this work, more than a dozen authors consider a far broader range of literature than Sanders himself assessed. And the results of this study helped to put “the New Perspective” into perspective. While Sanders had forced New Testament scholars to consider a far broader range of literature, the “backgrounds” of the New Testament, he himself had spoken too boldly about his own conclusions. Carson summarizes:

There is strong agreement that covenantal nomism is at best a reductionistic category. … But covenantal nomism is not only reductionistic, it is misleading, and this for two reasons. First, deploying this one neat formula across literature so diverse engenders an assumption that there is more uniformity in the literature than there is. In Philo, for instance, there is no real notion of being “saved” in any of the traditional senses. In Sanders’s usage, the “getting in” of covenantal nomism is bound up with how the community becomes the people of God. Philo is really not interested in this (though he does hold that Israel has a special relationship with God): his focus is on the individual’s pilgrimage toward God. Compare the “getting in” and “staying in” here, with whatever they mean in the Tannaitic literature, in Josephus, in the apocalypses: Sanders’s formula is rather difficult to falsify precisely because it is so plastic that it hides more than it reveals, and engenders false assumptions that lose the flavor, emphases, priorities, and frames of reference, of these diverse literary corpora.

Secondly, and more importantly, Sanders has erected the structure of covenantal nomism as his alternative to merit theology. At one level, of course, he has a point. Earlier analyses of the literature of Second Temple Judaism often found merit everywhere, and Sanders, as we have seen, is right to warn against a simple arithmetical tit-for-tat notion of payback. Even where some of the apocalypses use the language of weighing deeds in the balance and the like, it is possible to understand the relevant passages as reflecting a holistic assessment of an entire life and its direction. Nevertheless, covenantal nomism as a category is not really an alternative to merit theology, and therefore it is no real response to it. Over against merit theology stands grace (whether the word itself is used or not). By putting over against merit theology not grace but covenant theology, Sanders has managed to have a structure that preserves grace in the “getting in” while preserving works (and frequently some form or other of merit theology) in the “staying in”. In other words, it is as if Sanders is saying, “See, we don’t have merit theology here; we have covenantal nomism” – but the covenantal nomism he constructs is so flexible that it includes and baptizes a great deal of merit theology. …

Examination of Sanders’s covenantal nomism leads one to the conclusion that the New Testament documents, not lest Paul, must not be read against this reconstructed background – or, at least, must not be read exclusively against this background. It is too doctrinaire, too unsupported by the sources themselves, too reductionistic, too monopolistic The danger is that of the “parallelomania” about which Sandmel warned us, by which texts are domesticated as they are held hostage to the ostensible background called forth by appealing to certain other antecedent texts. One of the hopes of the editors of this pair of volumes is that the breaking up of fallow ground attempted in this first volume will lead to fresh exegesis of crucial Pauline texts in the next (543-548).

And so on it goes – new material is discovered and considered and incorporated into the historical-critical exegesis of a text.

My intention here is not to begin a discussion on the New Perspectives on Paul. I’ve not read nearly enough to speak confidently about it. But I do trust that Evangelical and Reformed scholars have treated the topic adequately, and I trust the work they’ve done.

But my intention rather is to highlight the process of how some of the background information – provided through historical studies in ancient literature and archaeology can help to shed light on things we’ve been reading all of our lives.

Ancient Rome is one of these topics where studies in secular history and literature and archaeology of the period are shedding new light on very old topics, and where some of the seemingly intractable dilemmas of the last 500 years and more (i.e., the history of the early papacy) are being forced to give way, in a decidedly Protestant direction, in the new light of the additional evidences that are being uncovered.

And it’s in this direction that I hope to move in the coming weeks.