Michael Goulder,
St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions.
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Professor
Goulder can always be relied upon to provide new exegetical insights
as well as to polish up old ones which have lain forgotten and
undervalued in the antique shop and curio stores of the history of
research, and St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions
is no exception to this happy rule. Goulder's enterprise this time is
to rehabilitate the grand synthesis of F.C. Baur according to which
the evolution of early Christianity were primarily to be traced along
the trajectory of Jewish nomistic Christianity (James and Peter)
versus Hellenistic law-free Christianity (Paulinism). We are by now
used to the liturgical repetition by scholars that Baur was brilliant
but wrong, like Lysenko or Velikofsky, and that nonetheless his ideas
still form the substructure of modern New Testament scholarship. And
those who chant thusly go on to urge the final exorcism of Baur's
influence in favor of what amounts to repristinated apologetics for
Eusebianism, sometimes via a sophisticated end run around the issues,
employing narrative criticism, sociology, or whatever, as if these
perspectives obviated the need for historical criticism. In such a
climate of a famine of criticism of the word of the Lord, it is
refreshing to see a scholar of Goulder standing up for the
much-maligned Baur.
One of
the most oft-heard criticisms of Baur is also the most insubstantial,
that his whole hypothesis was a mere function of his personal
Hegelianism, as if he had imposed an alien framework onto the
evidence. The fact that apologists still hurl this cavil on Baur's
grave actually attests the strength of Baur's reconstruction since it
implies they cannot come to grips with the exegetical meat of the
thing. Whether Baur was a Hegelian or a Flat-Earther hardly matters.
Who can deny that religions, especially in formative stages, are
racked by sectarian infighting as new saving truths are distilling in
the volcanic forge of enthusiasm? And, more to the point, who can deny
that the pages of the New Testament teem with controversial references
to the Jewish Law, rival conceptions of Christ, of the evangelistic
mission, etc? Baur did not make these up. And if anyone wants to move
beyond Baur, one had best be able to give sufficient weight to the
same data that occupied him and not just harmonize it, which is to
say, to ignore it.
Goulder here attempts to go beyond Baur but on the path his
predecessor marked out. He still sees the continental divide in early
Christianity as running between Petrine Torah Christianity and Pauline
Gentile Christianity. On the one hand, Goulder does attempt to take
into account two genuine weaknesses in Baur's original thesis. Whereas
conservative apologists like Ward Gasque think Baur complicated things
simple, rending the supposedly seamless garment of the Church, post-Baur
critics have seen Baur as oversimplifying the situation. The Eusebian
apologetic paradigm envisions the early church as analogous to the old
Soviet Union: a monolithic one-party system with a few marginal
dissidents and revisionists relegated to the theological Gulag. Baur,
followed by Goulder, seems to break this monopoly, but not by much.
Their early church is like the American two-party system: it provides
a superficial appearance of diversity, and yet what about all those
minority parties whose names one sees every election day on the
ballot, that one has never heard a single election poster or
commercial for?
In
short, in the wake of Walter Bauer, James M. Robinson and Helmut
Koester, Burton M. Mack (and even the early James D.G. Dunn), F.C.
Baur seems to have underestimated the amount of diversity. As already
anticipated, Goulder sticks with Baur on this one, but he does attempt
nonetheless to take into account the whole range of theological
fossils littering the pages of the New Testament. This he does by
sketching out a more extensive picture of the two movements, Petrine
and Pauline. He distributes between the two of them various
theologoumena that other scholars distribute more widely among divers
theological parties. For instance, Goulder's Petrines are Torah
legalists, adoptionists (sort of; see below), charismatics, gnostics,
itinerants, and triumphalistic proponents of realized eschatology. His
Paulines, by contrast, are anti-Torah, at least proto-incarnationists,
uneasy about visions and revelations, anti-gnostic, church organizers,
and longers for the kingdom of God. This is another version of the
"single front" theories of the Pauline opponents.
Many
of us are ill-inclined to ascribe such a diverse repertoire to
hypothesized early Christian factions. We would sooner see Paul facing
Gnostics here, Judaizers there, Colossian syncretists here,
Pentecostal fanatics there. Each sect ought to have its own specialty.
But perhaps this is simply another case of the "methodological
docetism" of which social-scientific critics rightly accuse historical
critics. He implicitly equate an idea with a group. Another idea? All
right, another group to have espoused it. But these theological
constructs work best as ideal types; the reality of human beings
organized into schismatic factions may have been a good deal messier.
For example, look at Bryan Wilson's seven types of sectarian movements
and ask where this or that particular group known to you fits in.
Quite often they will straddle our heuristic fences. And of course
Wilson is the first to admit this, stressing that an ideal type is not
a box into which the phenomena must neatly fit, but rather numbers
along a yardstick against which the unique distinctives of particular
sects may be measured. We ought to keep this in mind as we read
Goulder.
Like
Walter Schmithals, Goulder envisions single movements each with
several distinctive emphases and in this way tends to simplify the
picture of Christian origins, even while taking a wide range of
evidence into account. But then we may have merely pushed the question
of theological diversity back a step: how to account for the wide
range of doctrinal and ritual concerns within the Petrine movement?
Often diverse, complex movements got that way by an interior history
of syncretic evolution that is just as complex as the one Goulder
postulates for early Christianity as a whole. We can find even today a
Jewish, Toracentric, charismatic, gnostic missionary movement with a
non-incarnational messiah: the faction of Lubavitcher Hasidism
accepting the late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson as Messiah-elect. It may
surprise us to see such elements coexisting in what might seem a
theological mulligan stew. But the history of the movement accounts
for that. The Hasids began as a mystical, charismatic revival of
kabbalistic piety strongly opposed to and by rabbinic Judaism, but in
time, shades of Hegel!, the two reconciled their differences, and the
Hasidim became champions, as everyone knows, of halakhic
fastidiousness second to none.
The
idea od a Petrine Christianity which combined gnosticism, a
Christology of Jesus as the temporary host for the Christ
angel/spirit, and legalist piety is a viable hypothesis that would
certainly comport with the fact that Ebionites and Nag Hammadi
Gnostics both claimed Peter and James as special figureheads for their
movements. But Goulder's book suffers, from my perspective, by ruling
out the possibility of a diachronic view. Goulder eschews all
hypotheses of Markan priority and of Q. He takes an astonishingly
conservative position on the authorship of most New Testament books,
ascribing Luke-Acts to Dr. Luke, Paul's friend and physician, Mark's
gospel to John Mark who used to hear Peter preach in his mother's
house in Jerusalem. (John, Matthew, and 1 Peter, however, are not
apostolic for Goulder.) Paul wrote Ephesians, though not the
Pastorals. Romans 1:3-4 and Philippians 2:6-11 are treated as
originally Pauline, not quoted tradition. Even 2 Corinthians is
unitary.
The
result of this approach is to place full-blown Paulinism and Petrinism
already within the lifetime of Paul and Peter, with minor
modifications afterward by Paulinists such as the Fourth Evangelist
and the Writer to the Hebrews. All of Petrinism is already there for
Paul to write against before Nero gave him too close a shave. No
diachronic perspective would even make sense in this case. Goulder
flattens out the text to make it an obliging gameboard and analyzes
the whole thing synchronically. I am reminded of young-earth
Creationism which has to explain away the layers of sedimentation
visible in the Grand Canyon to the silt deposited in a little over a
month by Noah's Flood. Goulder's Petrine and Pauline Christianities
seem to have emerged as rivals from the womb like Jacob grabbing
Esau's heel.
Interestingly, Goulder does once repair to a hypothetical earlier
stratum of an extant document as an "epicycle" to make the paradigm
fit the evidence. Mark, as seen from his severe treatment of the
Twelve and the Heirs of Jesus as well as his abolition of kosher laws,
is understandably counted as a Pauline. But since Goulder wants to
ascribe an incarnational Christology to the Paulines, he relegates the
"possessionist" Christology to the Petrines. But Goulder admits that
Mark begins with the entrance of the Holy Spirit into Jesus and ends
with the Spirit forsaking him on the cross, just as Cerinthus thought.
Goulder's demonstration is quite convincing at both points. But then
that would seem to make Mark a mugwump, his mug on the Pauline side of
the fence, his wump on the Petrine! This may not be that much of a
problem if we remember the business of ideal types being measuring
rods, not boxes. Goulder has two ways of accounting for such hybrids,
depending on where they occur. When Luke does it, Goulder follows Baur
and makes Luke a harmonist. But when Mark does it, Goulder says he had
grown up hearing the Petrine version but converted later to the
Pauline. Nonetheless, the marks of his earlier allegiance remained. He
built his gospel on the model of a traditional Petrine presentation.
But
perhaps a better way to make sense of the "neither ichthus nor foul"
character of Mark would be to recognize Paulinism and Petrinism
themselves as ideal types rather than as historical incarnations of
theology. Perhaps after all there were more factions involved, with a
family of Christian Judaisms on the one hand and Gentile Christianites
on the other. The former included Ebionites, Nazoreans, Elchasites,
maybe even Cerinthians. The latter included Christian God-fearers,
Mystery-Religion syncretists, Gnostics, etc. And perhaps other whole
families as well.
Goulder's treatment of the issue of docetism is a good case in point.
Goulder tends to combine what we usually think of as three
Christologies: docetism (Christ was a phantom with no true flesh, or
at least was invulnerable to suffering), adoptionism (Jesus was a
righteous man raised to divine honors), and separationism (the man
Jesus as the channeler for the Christ spirit between his baptism and
his crucifixion). Again, the lines dividing them are not always so
clear in actual cases. Where do you place the Shepherd of Hermas or
Valentinus? But Goulder collapses all three into separationism.
Docetism meant only that the Christ spirit seemed to suffer because
bystanders could not see that the Christ spirit fled the human Jesus
on the cross. The idea wasn't that the man up on the cross wasn't
really suffering (cf. the fragmentary Gospel of Peter) much less that
the crucified form was a trick of the light or a case of mistaken
identity (cf. the Koran). It is true that particular crucifixion
stories might be read naturally the way Goulder suggests (e.g., the
Nag Hammadi Gospel of Peter; the Acts of John). But some of the
ancients did seem to believe in docetism and adoptionism as
traditionally defined. And Goulder seems to grant adoptionism a
separate status as a kind of evolutionary step toward full-fledged
Pauline incarnationism, but when it is reported of the Ebionites, he
tacitly collapses it into separationism, so as to increase the divide
between Petrinism and Paulinism. I take it as another case of
conflating early Christian theologies in the interests of
over-simplifications.
Among
the many fascinating individual exegeses peppering this book is
Goulder's suggestion that the Son of Man designation for Jesus in the
gospels originated in Paulinist exegesis of Psalm 8 as a title for
Jesus denoting his true incarnation: it was not the Christ spirit that
saves, but rather the human being Jesus Christ, a true son of man.
From here, Goulder thinks, the title made its way into gospel usage
and was anachronistically ascribed to Jesus. He entertains several
other Son of Man theories, passing them by, and one of these is that
in all authentic Son of Man sayings Jesus meant simply to speak of the
fate or the prerogatives of human beings generally, and that the
common Hebrew/Aramaic/Biblical idiom "son of man" was later grossly
misunderstood by Gentile evangelists. Why is this theory to be
rejected? Because, Goulder says, Mark knew Aramaic. But how do we know
this? Because he preserves Aramaic healing incantations like "Talitha
Cumi" and "Ephphatha" which were passed down in the
tradition in case readers/hearers wanted to use them? Or because we
have already decided Mark must have been John Mark of Jerusalem. If he
was, how to explain his confusion over Jewish washing customs,
Pharisaic traditions, etc.?
Thomas Kuhn's thinking on paradigm revolutions has made it impossible
to deceive ourselves any longer that in our historical reconstructions
we are really penetrating the picture-plane of the documents before
us. They form a surface beneath which we cannot dig, not until someone
invents a time machine. To this extent I agree with Bruce Chilton: a
text is not a tel. All we can do is lay out the evidence as if we were
rolling out the dough on the kitchen counter and use the cookie
cutters of our paradigms to shape it into new designs. And, though
Kuhn resisted the implication, it may be that personal aesthetic
preferences determine our choice of paradigmatic cookie cutters.
Goulder seems to prefer to work with large entities that may be
manipulated, again, on a flat surface, like a shell game, nothing
going above or below anything else. That is, he is partial to texts as
we now read them, not hypothesized Ur-versions or hypothetical source
documents, not with textual interpolations. And what is true in his
treatment of texts is equally true of his view of early Christian
factions: he organizes the data according to "big names" prominent in
the New Testament, Peter and Paul, and uses as few as possible,
eschewing the prospect of innumerable sects led by as many unnamed
individuals. He wants to connect all the dots with as few lines as
possible. His solution is certainly a viable one, but whether we
embrace it may be in the final analysis a matter of whether we share
his predilections.