A Worthy Cornelius and Divine Grace: Complicating John Barclay's Paul and the Gift

Abstract

In Paul and the Gift, John Barclay compares Paul's view of grace to a number of other ancient Jewish writers' conceptions of grace/gift. He concludes that Paul's view of grace differs from some, but not all, other ancient Jews because he stresses the incongruity of the worth of the gift in relation to the (un)worthiness of the recipient of that divine gift. The conclusion to which one might come is that, following Paul's lead, a Christian definition of grace must stress that people can never merit God's gift, while at least some Jews thought that people need to merit God's gift, thus returning us to an essentially pre-Sanders period of Pauline scholarship. But what if one compared Paul to another Messiah follower such as Luke? I argue that Luke depicts Cornelius, the first and paradigmatic gentile adherent to the Way, as a person whose piety and charity occasion and merit God's sending of the pneuma.