Paul and the Gift: A Mirror for Our Protestant Faces

Abstract

Paul and the Gift:A Mirror for Our Protestant Faces Matthew J. Thomas John Barclay's Paul and the Gift is a monumental work, one that will represent a landmark for later generations of scholars who tell the story of how the Apostle's theology has been understood.1 In a book replete with valuable Pauline analysis and insights, there are three points in particular that have left an enduring impression on me, the first two of which I believe are major achievements. First, Barclay shows that while E. P. Sanders is right that grace is everywhere in Second Temple Jewish sources, it is not everywhere in the same way; as Barclay's study makes eminently clear, it is essential to understand how grace functions in different sources, not simply to note that it is present. Second, Barclay demonstrates that contrary to modern notions, ancient conceptions of gift do not imply noncircularity, and to project this onto Paul is anachronistic; the difference between wage and gift is not circular versus noncircular, but that gift implies (and creates!) relationship with the giver. The third point is a curiosity, and it is the one that I wish to reflect on here. No doubt the first two points will be rightly recalled by posterity as more significant, but it is the third that has recurred to me most often in the months since finishing Paul and the Gift. Imagine an academic volume of Church history, one that tells the story of Christian thought by examining key figures in the faith. Say that in [End Page 229] covering the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history, this volume engages precisely two figures, and that these two figures are Marcion and Augustine, those most commonly identified by later claimants as proto-Protestants. Imagine that this history then devoted the vast majority of its space to covering the five hundred years since the Reformation, featuring nine key players and a host of minor ones, and that apart from the occasional atheist, all of these were Protestants as well. Within the field of ecclesiastical history, to label such a volume as a Christian history at all would be impossible; it might be a confessional or denominational work of some sort, but with such a scope no one could regard it as actually representative of Christian thought. But if one does quite the same thing in the field of biblical studies, hardly anyone blinks an eye—for in its lengthy historical survey of Christian interpretation on Pauline grace, this is precisely the framework that Barclay's volume adopts. Modern academic biblical studies operates under an assumption of confessional neutrality, in which our judgments are thought to be characterized by a disinterested fairness to all sides. And Barclay himself is well-attuned to how this is often an illusion, with our standard evaluative standpoints actually reflecting smuggled-in theological assumptions. For example, in responding to common objections that Second Temple Jews diluted grace by including "recompense," Barclay astutely notes that such critiques take for granted a particular understanding of grace: "What is not considered is whether grace and recompense may be a perfectly normal combination in antiquity (gift to the worthy, gift as reward). As we have seen, this is not a self-contradiction; it simply entails that grace is not perfected as an incongruous gift, as espoused by Augustine and in the Protestant tradition" (169; italics original; see also 211). Barclay similarly defends Philo against his scholarly detractors by shedding light on the Protestant framework that underlies their judgments: If we rid ourselves of the assumption that divine grace is, by definition, given to the unworthy, an assumption that (for ideological reasons) makes one perfection of grace its defining characteristic, it is perfectly possible to hail Philo as a profound theologian of grace, even though he does not perfect its incongruity. As we have seen, there are good reasons why Philo finds God to give to the 'worthy,' reasons that have nothing to do with 'synergism,' 'legalism,' 'works-righteousness,' or other such categories. (238; italics original) [End Page 230] Likewise, Barclay pinpoints the confessional paradigm that leads to scholarly critiques of 4 Ezra's conception of grace according...