Читать книгу Paul Among the Gentiles: A "Radical" Reading of Romans - Jacob P. B. Mortensen - Страница 11

Lloyd Gaston is a predecessor of the radical new perspective on hermeneutical and theological grounds, rather than on historical ones. In his book, Paul and the Torah (1987), he opens his introduction presenting his novel take on Paul’s letters. First, he explains that his writing is part of (but not only) a ‘theology after Auschwitz’.1 According to Gaston, the insights from the Holocaust must result in a complete reversal of Christian theology, but not in a revision of the biblical texts. For one thing, this means that New Testament scholarship should expose underlying anti-Semitic currents, but it also means that New Testament scholarship may acquire new perspectives on Paul by being in contact with modern, post-Holocaust Judaism. By way of a ‘hermeneutic of experimentation’,2 Gaston invites scholars to address traditional problems of interpreting Paul from an entirely different angle than the usual one. Thus, instead of perceiving Paul as having assailed the foundations of Judaism, Gaston finds in Paul various statements concerning God’s continual election of, and love for Israel. He explains about the beginning of his project on Paul, that he ‘expected to find anti-Judaism particularly in Paul’.3 However, by way of his ‘hermeneutic of experimentation’, he realized that the Christian church did not replace Israel as God’s chosen people. To the contrary, Paul often identifies an ongoing covenant relationship between God and Israel: ‘Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law’ (Rom 3:31). Paul makes a similar statement elsewhere: ‘I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!’ (Rom 11:1).

There are two access points to Gaston’s ‘opposite’ conclusions. The first concerns his positioning of Paul within Second Temple Judaism. In this regard, Gaston continues the work of E.P. Sanders. He writes: ‘… I shall assume that Paul understood ’covenantal nomism” very well indeed and that he is to be interpreted within the context of early Judaism …’4 However, the other approach to Gaston’s conclusions about Paul concerns Paul’s audience. The reason that Paul did not write in an anti-Semitic vein was because he did not write about Judaism for Jews; he wrote about Judaism for Gentiles. Because Paul really understood the concepts of covenant and commandment from within Judaism he could present Judaism in a different way to outsiders of Judaism. When summarizing the conclusions of his book, Gaston provides six headings, four of which concern Gentiles. Hence, four of the conclusions of Gaston’s work may be summarized as ‘Gentiles as Addressees’, ‘The Gentile Predicament’, ‘Gentiles and the Law’, ‘Israel and the Gentiles’.