Pauline Autobiography: What I’ve Been Studying for the Last Year, Part 2

In the previous post I introduced my MA project on Pauline autobiography. What follows is a (very) brief outline of that project and some of the major questions that emerged.

I first looked at the nature and function of Pauline self-references. Some of the major questions to emerge here concern the occasion of these texts and Paul’s motivation for referring to himself. Is he forced to write autobiographically because his character is under attack and/or does he willingly offer-up his own experience? If the latter, what is his aim in doing so? These questions have implications for the relationship between experience and theology in Paul.

I next honed in on one issue in Paul’s self-references which seemed particularly prominent, his persecution of Christ-believers. Here I mapped out the different modes in which Paul’s motivation for persecuting Christ-believers has been understood (cf. this). Paul cites his own zeal for the law as motivating his persecution of Christ-believers. But is this simply the product of the retrospective self or merely a rhetorical ploy? Or perhaps both? I concluded there is no necessary contradiction between the emphases of the four kinds of explanations and that it seems historically plausible that Paul’s zeal for the law was a motivating factor in his persecution of Christ-believers. This, again, becomes theologically significant.

Finally, I looked into the manner in which Paul’s biography and autobiography has been related to his thinking on righteousness. Here a major fault line runs between those who detect a Pauline critique of the role which Jewish tradition attributed to human agency in securing life or righteousness before God and those who think that no such critique is to be found.

In the former scheme, the revelation at Damascus is a defining theological moment in the life of Paul for the judgment it rendered on the success of his attempt to meet the law’s conditional offer of life and the grace and salvation it freely and simultaneously bestowed on him.

In the latter, the revelation is typically regarded as more significant for the way it signalled to Paul a dispensational change from law to faith and their differing requirements for righteousness (Sanders). Alternatively its significance may be seen in the judgment it rendered on his zeal to protect Israel’s national boundaries, that is, her covenant status = “righteousness” (Dunn; cf. Wright) and the ensuing realization that Israel’s destiny had been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah (Wright).

In either case, it must be explained why Paul’s language of righteousness by faith rather than works emerges relatively late in his career. (This gets rather complex.)

To keep this post from becoming over-long, I’ll finish this series in a separate post, where I’ll summarize how I would like to develop this research.