The Problem of Motive in the Ethics of Paul

Abstract

THERE is nothing clearer in the letters of Paul than the fact of his intense interest in the problems of human conduct as those problems concerned the life of his Christian communities in the great urban centers of his missionary activity. He usually closes his letters with admonitions designed to produce a more ideal morality. Although problems of conduct were a major concern of Paul, they have never commanded like attention in Paul's interpreters. The treatment of the ethics of Paul occupies relatively little space compared with that devoted to the theology and to the doctrinal interests. There are comparatively few books on the ethics of Paul, although his letters have given rise to a vast and varied literature since the beginning of the historical criticism of the New Testament. Before 900oo there was in English one chapter in one biography devoted to Paul's ethics. Two massive twovolume biographies had appeared before 900oo. The outstanding life of Paul in English, that of Conybeare and Howson, for all its 1576 pages, carries not one citation of ethics in all its ample index. Nor does the important work of F. C. Baur, the wellknown Tiibingen scholar, differ in this respect. He is interested in source-criticism and other problems, but not in ethics. It was Orello Cone's Paul the Man, Missionary and Teacher that in 1898 devoted a chapter to Paul's ethics. Since that time handbooks and special works on Pauline theology have carried a chapter or a section on the ethics. Heinrich Weinel and Johannes Weiss among German, and Percy Gardner and William Morgan among English, scholars have given brief consideration to this subject. Some of the well-known recent books are uncon-