Paul, His Letters, and Acts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Paul, His Letters, and Acts John A. Egger Thomas E. Phillips . Paul, His Letters, and Acts. Library of Pauline Studies. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009. Pp. xi + 243. Paper, US$24.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-001-5. With Paul, His Letters, and Acts, Thomas E. Phillips does not offer us just another book on Paul. Instead, he offers us a disciplined reflection on how we can have so many books on Paul that differ from each other on significant points. Phillips traces much of this diversity to the degree that scholars are willing to draw upon biographical information about Paul from Acts in order to supplement what can be found in Paul’s undisputed letters. In chapter 1, he draws our attention to two recent examples: Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Bibliography (New York: Doubleday, 2004) and John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004). Both, according to Phillips, offer plausible portraits of Paul that are faithful to the sources, yet depict very different Pauls. The gap between these two plausible Pauls is characteristic of contemporary Pauline scholarship, which ranges on a spectrum “from a complete or [End Page 114] nearly complete dismissal of the traditions in Acts to an eagerness to supplement, or even correct, the traditions in Paul’s letters on the basis of traditions in Acts” (46). Recognizing that this basic duality cannot be escaped, Phillips offers a different approach to thinking about the relationship between Paul’s letters and Acts, one where the distinct Paul of Acts is brought into dialogue with the distinct Paul of the letters so that comparisons can be made between the two of them. Phillips thus structures his approach by isolating the two Pauls from each other. Treating the undisputed letters and Acts as two independent data sets makes disciplined and meaningful comparison between them possible. In chapter 2, after describing the traditional approaches of Pauline scholarship as they developed in the nineteenth century, from Baur and the Tübingen school through to Knox and Vielhauer a century later, Phillips puts forward what he describes as a modest methodological proposal of his own that operates on four guiding principles: independent inquiry into Acts and the letters, intentional separation of Paul’s life and thought, conscious focus on lesser data sets, and disciplined comparison moving from the lesser data sets to the greater (in most cases, this means moving from the letters of Paul to Acts) (47). As Phillips notes, this approach does not produce a comprehensive picture of Paul; rather, it highlights the points of convergence and divergence between the two portraits. In the rest of the book, Phillips puts this approach to the test by examining the chronology of Paul’s life (chapter 3), then his social location within the Greco-Roman world (chapter 4), and finally his location in the narrower world of the early Christianity—both his interactions with other participants in the so-called Jerusalem Conference (chapter 5), and more generally with other figures in his churches (chapter 6). Not surprisingly, Phillips discovers in each case a high degree of convergence in some areas and a high degree of divergence (if not incompatibility) in others. His critical insight arising from these comparisons is that everything hangs on how you reconcile the events described in Galatians 2 and Acts 15 (the apostolic conference in Jerusalem). If both texts are describing the same event, then the divergence between the two Pauls is very great. Acts can then be understood as an attempt to rehabilitate Paul for the post-Pauline churches later on in the first or early second century. If the two texts are describing different events, then the possibility is opened up for a reconciliation between Paul and the other Apostles, and you end up with a Paul who looks much more like the Paul of Acts. Paul, His Letters, and Acts offers nothing new on Paul. What it does offer is a critical reflection on the discrepancy between the Paul of the undisputed letters and the Paul of Acts. This will be of...