5. The Anticipation of Jesus in the Story of Israel
5
The Anticipation of Jesus in the Story of Israel
Paul’s understanding of the person of Christ has its deepest roots in Jewish messianism, based on the Davidic kingship. Thus an examination of the Apostle’s recognition of Jesus as born of the “seed of David” will be our starting point, since as Israel’s first great king, David became the singular person in their history who was understood to be God’s “son” par excellence. Equally significant is that David’s monarchical descendants were sometimes celebrated as those who would “forever” sit on his throne. These two matters will be taken up in chapters 6 and 7. But in the present chapter we must first situate Paul’s understanding of Christ within the broader story of Israel.
In order to examine the christological significance of Jesus as the Son of God, we can take our lead from Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome. Romans is the least impassioned of the preserved letters, as it was written mostly to people Paul would not have known personally and thus served as an introduction of the Apostle to those living in the capital of the Roman Empire. It is also one of the two letters (along with Ephesians) where the overarching passion of Paul’s own apostolic calling—namely, to see Jew and gentile together as one eschatological people of God—is argued at length. In Romans Paul spells out quite plainly the earthly origins of Jesus as fundamental to his being the Jewish Messiah. At the climax of Paul’s retelling of the biblical story and recounting of all the Jewish privileges, Paul states his anguish over Jewish rejection of their own Christos, or Messiah (Rom. 9:5), which scholars agree in this instance is used exclusively as a title for Jesus himself.
So central is this concern on the part of the Apostle that it comes as the first thing in this letter to the believers in Rome, a very large number of whom Paul would not have known personally, despite the long series of greetings at the end (Rom. 16:3–15). Paul begins his careful presentation of his entire understanding of the Christian gospel with a somewhat elaborate salutation in which Jesus is introduced as God’s “Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ, our Lord” (1:3–4). It is not surprising, therefore, that in contrast to the rest of Paul’s preserved letters, in Romans the primary christological motif is of Jesus as the Son of God.
Paul’s “Son of God” language is not invented whole cloth but is woven together from language that was already a part of Israel’s story. Below we examine how Paul regularly places Christ within that story. We begin where Paul does: with his own encounter with the crucified Jesus as the exalted Lord of a psalm that he and most of his contemporaries considered to be messianic (Ps. 110:1). Indeed, Paul’s encounter accounts in large part for his own radically altered understanding of the Messiah as not only exalted but also crucified.
The Ultimate Scandal: Jesus as the Crucified Messiah
Norwegian New Testament scholar Nils Dahl observes that scholars sometimes speak of Paul’s Christology without ever referring to the messiahship of Jesus, but he then rightly points out that “whether Jesus was the Messiah or not was crucial in the life of the onetime persecutor and later apostle.” Dahl’s assessment of Paul’s view of Christ is confirmed in several passages that are rather early in the Pauline collection.
The historical reality that the religious leaders of Jesus’s day tried to eliminate Jesus, at least in part because of a latent claim that he was the Messiah, lies at the heart of Paul’s understanding. What was intolerable for them was a Messiah who lived and taught in ways that ran roughshod over their own understanding and expectations. They were looking for more normal signs of power, power that would free them from the bondage of belonging to a pagan foreign power. What they got instead was power of a radically different kind, packaged in the form of gentleness and meekness—but still very real power indeed! From any merely human perspective it is no wonder these leaders wanted to do away with him: he was so totally off most people’s radar or expectations for who the Messiah would be!
To be sure, in the sometimes unfortunate history of the later church, there has been a deluge of attempts to re-create Christ back into our own fallen images. Why, we seem to wonder rather constantly, can’t God be just a bit more like us so that we can ultimately fall down and worship one who has been re-created in our own image? But that will not work now any more than it did then, because at the very heart of our story lies that ultimate theological oxymoron: a crucified Messiah! And so it was for Paul, in ever so many ways. So we begin where Paul began, with what he called from a merely human perspective, “the foolishness of God.”
1 CORINTHIANS 1:22–25
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
1 CORINTHIANS 15:3
Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
Toward the end of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul takes up the issue of the future bodily resurrection of believers, an idea that was especially repulsive to these believers, who were apparently looking for something a bit more “spiritual.” At the outset Paul reminds them of what has been “passed on” to them, that the One who was raised bodily from the dead is the same “Christ” who had “died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3). In so doing, Paul appears to be citing the basic elements of an early creedal formula that was held in common by the earliest community of believers. But, interestingly, this formula comes at the very end of the letter, where Paul finally confronts those who were denying a future bodily resurrection of believers. Therefore, and even if not by Paul’s design, this passage serves as an inclusio with—and must be understood in light of—the first item addressed in the letter (1:13–2:5). At the outset, with considerable irony and passion, Paul reminds these believers of “the foolishness of God” (1:25), reflected first in the message of a “Christ crucified” (1:18–25); then in the Corinthian believers themselves, of whom not many were “wise by human standards,” “influential,” or “of noble birth” (1:26–31); and finally in God’s calling Paul, who came not “with eloquence or human wisdom,” to be an apostle (2:1–5). It is therefore little wonder that there was some considerable tension between Paul and the Corinthians: Greek wisdom was much more to their liking than any emphasis on Christ as the crucified one, the ultimate shame for any Roman citizen in such an important city as Corinth.
Paul’s argument makes sense contextually only if, when he writes “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23), he means a crucified Messiah. This in particular was the ultimate “stumbling block,” or scandal, for the Jews. At the same time it would have been such utter folly to the Greeks that one can only wonder why Paul would so vehemently press this point with the Corinthians as the first thing in his letter. Why not simply let Christ be a proper name and put the emphasis on his death “for us”? But no, Paul says, we preach a crucified Messiah, knowing full well how both Jews and Greeks will respond: “scandal” to the one and “foolishness” to the other (v. 23). Why does Paul do this? Because, he maintains, in God’s own infinite wisdom and power, every imaginable human pretension—that we should consider ourselves as able either to find out God or to match wits with God—has been undercut.
One will simply never understand Paul, nor the depth of his commitment and devotion to Christ, without starting where he starts: with the crucified Messiah. This is why Dahl’s observation noted above rings so true, and it leads us to seek for Paul’s own reasons for such a proclamation, especially when he knew full well how people on both sides of the ethnic “wall of separation” would instinctively resist it as either “scandal” or “foolishness.” Answering this question leads us back to the Apostle’s own story, which finds expression on several occasions, but especially so at two crucial moments in his letters: first, in an impassioned defense of his own apostleship to the Galatians and, second, in a letter to the Philippians that has all the markings of a letter of friendship with one of his truly beloved communities of faith.
GALATIANS 1:15–16
But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being.
PHILIPPIANS 3:4–6
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.
Early on in the argument of Paul’s letter to the believers in Galatia, while demonstrating that his version of the gospel was without human origins of any kind—and was therefore not dependent on those in Jerusalem who were apostles before him—Paul points to the radical nature of his own conversion. He begins by asserting that he had advanced far beyond others in Judaism in two ways: (1) as a persecutor of the perceived enemy, the Christ-followers, and (2) as an avid student of Torah (Gal. 1:13–14). Although the second of these is perhaps more important in the long run, he mentions being a persecutor of the church first in this instance very likely because this is what had most clearly distanced him from the early believing community. For the Apostle, his zeal in persecuting Christ-followers both demonstrated his independence from his readers and put him on the other side of any of those who had followed Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Indeed, there was absolutely nothing in Paul’s personal history that would ever have led him to become a follower of Christ, and yet he had become one—and passionately so! Incidentally, the later narrative by Luke in Acts 9:1–2 agrees with Paul’s self-assessment at this point.
The sentence that follows this preconversion autobiographical moment begins in an especially significant way: “But when God, who . . . called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being” (Gal. 1:15–16). The prepositional phrase Paul uses here, noted in italics above, has had an unfortunate history in the English versions, having occasionally been rendered as to me (e.g., NRSV, ESV). But this is a case where translators make Paul say what they want him to have said, since it plays havoc with a Greek preposition that simply cannot in any way be stretched to carry that meaning.
To the contrary, in telling his own story at this early moment in the letter, the Apostle puts forth the thoroughly radical nature of his own conversion from a Christ hater to a Christ devotee. He deliberately sets himself forward as Exhibit A of the gospel of grace that includes both Jew and gentile. God chose to reveal his Son in Saul of Tarsus, meaning that Paul served personally as a thoroughly unlikely candidate to exhibit God’s redeeming love and grace.
To be sure, this moment has appeared to many as little more than a passing moment in his letter to the Galatian believers. But that it was not just an incidental moment, struck on the hot iron of controversy, is confirmed by Paul’s stress on the same two points in his much later retelling of his story. In writing to the believers in Philippi, in what is known technically as a “letter of friendship,” Paul again sets forth his unquestioned Jewish credentials (Phil. 3:4–6). In this case he does so, first, in terms of what had been given to him at birth (circumcised, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Israelite of Israelites) and, second, in terms of his own achievements within Judaism (a zealous Pharisee who had both persecuted the church and been a faultless adherent of the law). The order in which the two realities are affirmed would seem to reflect his own self-understanding of the significance of his former posture toward Christ and his followers. He had tried to eliminate the early communities of believers precisely because they were worshiping one whom he could only believe that God had rejected by having him crucified by the Roman Empire.
In both of these retellings of what is essential to his pre-Christian story, Paul places his violence against the church before his loyal adherence to the law. Most likely this is the result of his own controversies within the Jewish community, where he was wont to remind fellow Jews that he had once been where they are. So again he juxtaposes his past as both a persecutor of the church and a faithful adherent of the law with the surpassing worth of knowing Christ as Lord, putting all of these former privileges into the category of zēmia (Phil. 3:7), a Greek word that has to do with something basically worthless, something to be thrown away, which the KJV translators properly rendered as “dung.”
Thus the common denominator of Paul’s pre-Christian life was that he was an avid follower of Torah and an equally avid persecutor of those who dared proclaim that the crucified Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, which was the ultimate scandal for a law-abiding man like Saul of Tarsus. The God he served with passion could not possibly have been involved in such foolishness, which is why Paul considered his own encounter with the risen Christ to be of the same kind as all those that had preceded him, even though it was untimely.
GALATIANS 3:13
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole” [Deut. 21:23].
We learn the reason for Saul of Tarsus’s hatred for followers of Jesus in Paul’s letter to the believers in Galatia, where the Apostle associates Christ’s death by crucifixion with the curse of Deuteronomy: “Cursed [by God] is anyone who is hung on a pole” (Gal. 3:13). Since Jesus had been “hung on a pole” by the Romans, this had served for Saul as sure evidence that the one and only God had “cursed” Jesus, and he whom God had cursed could not possibly be honored as the Jewish Messiah. This in particular accounts for Saul’s considerable passion to eliminate what he perceived as an absolute heresy. The God of Israel could not possibly have done something so utterly foolish—so absolutely contrary to what would have happened had God consulted us for wisdom!
Thus it was no mere bit of cleverness, but words spoken out of personal experience, that had led Paul earlier to argue with the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:21–24, discussed above) that what from any merely human perspective is the ultimate oxymoron—a crucified Messiah—must be recognized as God’s power and wisdom at work in the world. As we discussed above, the historical event that was viewed as sheer folly by those who spoke Greek (namely, the gentile world) was at the same time an utter scandal to the everyday Jew—and all the more so to a passionately religious one like Saul of Tarsus.
That this scandal lies at the heart of Paul’s pre-Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth helps to explain the self-description of Paul in a much later letter as formerly “a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man” (1 Tim. 1:13). Such a prior commitment to violent opposition explains the radical nature of Saul’s conversion in the Damascus road experience, which he relates in terms of seeing the Lord (1 Cor. 9:1). Here is an undoubted case where the effect (Paul’s utter and total devotion to Christ as Lord) must be commensurate with the cause (being confronted by the crucified one as the risen one). His personal encounter with the risen Jesus radicalized Paul (cf. 1 Cor. 15:8). It also explains his immediate departure to Arabia (Gal. 1:17), very likely as a compulsion to go to historic Mount Sinai, the place where God had given the law to Moses, to sort out what had happened to him on the road to Damascus.
Thus Paul emerged from his Damascus road experience as a passionate follower of God’s true Messiah, Jesus, crucified and raised from the dead. What Paul eventually came to realize, as the argument in his letter to the Galatians indicates (Gal. 3:10–14), is that the hanging of Christ on a cross did indeed involve God’s curse, just not on Christ as such. Rather, the whole human race in their sin and rebellion against the eternal God came under God’s curse, and in effect humanity was hung on the cross through the one perfect sacrifice so that all could be raised to eternal life. True wisdom indeed!
God’s paradoxical wisdom lies at the very heart of the Christ narrative: that the eternal One should so love his created ones that he would go to such lengths to redeem them and by his Spirit to re-create them in the divine image. This is why any theology of redemption that does not include behavior as the necessary result of the essential Christian story falls far short of the Apostle himself. In Paul’s view, to be sure, we are not saved by good works, but we are indeed saved for good works, in the sense of doing what is good for one and all. Any theology that falls short of this does not in any way reflect Paul’s own passions.
For Paul, humankind’s “No” to Christ was in fact God’s “No” to our fallenness and rebellion, whereby we were offered grace and eternal glory. And by raising Christ from the dead, God said “Yes” to the Son and thus to humankind through the Son. The result, Paul argues, was that what was for any good Jew the ultimate oxymoron—a crucified Messiah—turns out to be the ultimate expression of God’s own wisdom and power over against every form of human machination. Only the eternal God in his infinite wisdom could be so wise as to be so “foolish” from our merely human perspective.
The theme of a crucified Messiah is a sure instance where the often cited scholarly criterion of “frequency of mention” is quite unrelated to theological significance. That Paul does not refer more often either to his own conversion or to Christ as a crucified Messiah has little or no bearing at all on the importance of this event for Paul’s subsequent theological understanding. Rather, what emerges with a kind of frequency that is theologically compelling is the sheer volume of Paul’s references to the risen Lord, Jesus, as (the) “Christ.”
Even if one grants that by the time of Paul’s letters the title “Christ” had moved very close to a name in its own right, the messianic origins of this “name” could hardly have been fully abandoned by this point. In Paul’s case this is evidenced by the considerable frequency of every imaginable combination of names and titles in the corpus, including the Pastoral letters, except the combination “the Lord Christ,” which appears only twice (Rom. 16:18; Col. 3:24). That the combination occurs at all indicates that the title had become something of a name; yet its infrequency in comparison with all the other combinations would lead one to think that Paul had himself come to this slowly. Thus in time the truly human Jesus, the crucified Messiah, came to be understood as the Lord.
Since “Christ,” this title-turned-name, derives directly out of Paul’s understanding of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, we can trace this understanding by way of Paul’s relationship to the basic narrative of his deeply held commitment to historic Judaism. Whatever else is true of Paul’s Christology, he was convinced that the crucified and now risen Christ is the culmination of the basic Jewish story, as a passage in his letter to the believers in Rome bears eloquent testimony.
ROMANS 9:1–5
I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised. Amen.
Paul’s cry over his people in Romans 9 is not the rant of a madman but the expression of the deep conviction of one whom Christ had “arrested” on the road to Damascus. And Paul, who seems to have been a passionate individual by nature, redirects all his passion to the One who had now become his “Lord”—namely, the historic Jesus of Nazareth, whom Paul was convinced was none other than the Jewish Messiah. Nothing else can explain how this passionate Christ hater had become such an equally passionate Christ lover. Indeed, so convinced is Paul of Christ’s lordship that this passage provides the one certain place where Paul’s otherwise consistent usage breaks down and he uses the name “God” specifically to refer to the “Messiah,” or Christ (v. 5). While Paul’s new understanding of the Jewish Messiah is indeed radical, he returns to Scripture to help him make sense of it. And in so doing he interprets Christ with the basic narrative of Judaism.
Christ and the Basic Narrative of Judaism
Paul cites or echoes the Old Testament in over two hundred instances and in a variety of ways throughout the thirteen letters. Since the Apostle tended to cite the Old Testament primarily in argumentation, the majority of these references are understandably in Paul’s more argumentative letters: the two letters to the believers in Corinth, the one to the believers in Rome, and the one to believers in the province of Galatia. But the letters that are often regarded as having no citations (e.g., 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Philippians) are full of equally important echoes of the Old Testament in such crucial ways and with such frequency that one must assume that Paul expected his readers, or hearers, for the most part to have been able to pick up these echoes.
When one turns to look at Paul’s use of the Old Testament in general, what stands out is that his primary interest lies with the central features of Israel’s essential story:
It is not surprising, therefore, that even though Paul cites passages from all over the Greek Old Testament, the considerable majority (over 70 percent) of his citations come from Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalter.
What is most striking is the role that Christ plays in the story, as the story itself has now been adjusted to incorporate Christ as crucified, raised, and exalted. Indeed, for the Apostle his Lord, Jesus Christ, now plays a major role in all six of the primary facets of the story. Chapter 6 focuses on the fifth and sixth items: the Davidic kingship and the eschatological consummation. But first we conclude this chapter with a brief overview of the role Christ plays in the first four elements of the story, which at the same time serves to heighten the effect of the whole picture—that Christ, who is first of all the messianic Son of God, is at the same time the eternal Son of God.
Creation
1 CORINTHIANS 8:6
Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
COLOSSIANS 1:15–16
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.
The role of Christ in creation is writ large in two major christological texts in the corpus: 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15–16. In one of the strange bypaths of New Testament scholarship, some have tried to see Paul in these two moments as echoing personified Wisdom’s alleged role in creation. But as we saw in chapter 2, careful examination of these two otherwise unrelated moments in Paul’s letters reveals that Paul is not equating Christ with Lady Wisdom. Rather, in each case what is either implied (1 Corinthians) or explicit (Colossians) is that Jesus as the Son of God is the divine agent of creation. By identifying God as Father in the Corinthians passage and specifically identifying Christ as the Father’s beloved Son in Colossians, Paul places creation firmly in the context of Jesus as the messianic and eternal Son of God.
Paul’s use of prepositions in the striking moment in his letter to the Corinthians is revealing: “from” and “for” the Father; “through” and “through” the Son, who in this case is identified as “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Similarly, in writing later to the Colossian believers Paul urges that everything that exists came through the agency of the beloved (eternal) Son, who is expressly identified as the sphere (in him), the agent (though him), and goal (for him) of the whole created order. It is difficult to imagine a stronger affirmation of Christ’s identity as the eternal Son than this one—even though doing so was not Paul’s goal. So, once again, the thoroughly presuppositional nature of what Paul says and his readers understood here reveals a Christology of the highest order.
Abraham
GALATIANS 3:16, 29
The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one Person, who is Christ. . . . If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
ROMANS 8:32
He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
Basic to the way the Jewish Bible presented God’s dealings with his people was the role of Abraham as progenitor of God’s elect people. This fundamental affirmation plays a major role on two occasions where Paul refers to the story: Galatians 3 and Romans 8. As in creation, Christ plays the crucial role in the (now eschatological) retelling of the story of redemption. Thus in Paul’s rather strong letter to the believers in Galatia, Christ is identified as the true “seed” of Abraham (Gal. 3:16) so that all who “belong to Christ” are to be understood now as having become Abraham’s true “heirs” (v. 29).
In the argument of Paul’s later letter to the believers in Rome, the role of Christ with regard to Abraham is spelled out in a slightly different way that in the end comes to the same conclusion. Abraham again is the ancestor of all people who believe, Jews and gentiles alike. But in this case, Abraham offers the key to much of the story: (1) he is the exemplary man of faith in that (2) he trusted God before circumcision and is thus the father of gentiles who believe (Rom. 4:9–11); at the same time (3) he received circumcision as an expression of his faith and is thus also the father of the Jews, now especially of those who have similar faith (v. 12); and (4) he serves as the primary example of faith through the birth of Isaac, whom he received as one raised from the dead, which in turn leads to our faith in the One who was truly raised from the dead (vv. 18–25).
Echoing the narrative of Isaac—specifically Genesis 22:16—later in his letter (Rom. 8:32), Paul has Christ step into the role of the promised Son. Just as God blessed Abraham because he did not spare his beloved son, so now God is portrayed as stepping into Abraham’s role as the one who “did not spare his own Son.” What is striking in this kind of echo of an Old Testament passage is the ease with which Paul does this; most likely he assumes that at least some of his readers will hear the echo and thereby see the relationship of the two narratives.
Thus each mention in Paul’s letters of Abraham and his role in the basic biblical story is explicitly tied to Christ. With Christ’s coming, the promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed has found its fulfillment.
The Exodus
COLOSSIANS 1:12–16
. . . giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people [traditionally “saints”] in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.
The exodus as part of the biblical story comes through in many ways in Paul’s letters, primarily in the passages dealing with salvation, which are too many to note here individually. Indeed, every metaphor for salvation in Christ except “reconciliation,” which is also the least metaphorical term, comes directly from the Pentateuch, especially the theme of “redemption.” One passage in particular, Colossians 1:12–16, echoes much of the story of the exodus, including gaining the inherited land, while at the same time alluding to the other major moments in Israel’s story, which we have italicized above. Below we lay out the many allusions in this passage:
And all of these themes are found in just one, very long, typically Pauline sentence! In Paul’s letters, Christ is regularly seen as the way the new covenant fulfillment of the story takes place, and thus he is understood as in continuity with the first expression of the story. Indeed, in a series of warnings to the Corinthian believers, drawn from Israel’s own history, Paul expressly understood Christ to have been present with Israel in that first expression of the story: “they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ,” and “we should not test Christ, as some of them did” (1 Cor. 10:4, 9).
The Giving of the Law
ROMANS 10:4
Christ is the culmination [= goal] of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.
The giving of the law is perhaps the most widely recognized element of Israel’s history that Paul argues has been fulfilled with the coming of Christ. Nonetheless, this emphasis occurs in Paul in only four instances, all of which have in common the threat of gentile believers’ capitulating to Torah observance (Romans; Galatians; Philippians 3; Colossians 2). In Romans 10:4, Paul makes this connection so directly that it requires no further commentary.
Conclusion
We conclude our abbreviated review of Paul’s use of Israel’s narrative by emphasizing once again the primary concern—to note that Paul simply asserts that Christ was both present at key places in the original unfolding of the biblical story and is the central feature of its current unfolding in human history. As we’ll see in chapter 6, Christ plays the major role in the crucial fifth and sixth elements of the story, which serve as the key matters in Paul’s Christology. We thus turn to an examination of the related themes of Jesus as (1) the Jewish Messiah who at the same time is (2) the eternal Son of God.
. Nils A. Dahl, Jesus the Christ: The Historical Origins of Christological Doctrine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 15.
. Note that throughout his letters Paul relied on a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that came eventually to be known as the Septuagint (LXX), the Bible that was used in all of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities. This was the Bible he would have grown up with in Tarsus and the Bible used by his Greek-speaking churches. This explains why Paul’s citations of the Old Testament often differ (at times considerably so) from many English versions since our versions have all been translated directly from the Hebrew Bible. This means that in modern English Bibles Paul’s “citations” are two languages removed from the original: they are an English translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible! Thus the content is usually the same, but the way it is said is understandably sometimes a bit different.
. To be sure, some contemporary readers might be skeptical that Paul’s original recipients would have heard these echoes. Since our overloaded culture has multiplied forms of verbal experiences, the idea that people might remember any of them by rote seems altogether unlikely. But this author knows from experience—as any parent who reads to their children will—that even today children are capable of rote memorization. Indeed, once when reading from a familiar children’s book to our four children, I slightly changed the story for the fun of it and was immediately reprimanded, “Daddy, that’s not how that story goes!”