The State of Pauline Studies: Paul and the Messiah

I am in my late fifties. It is interesting to locate myself among those scholars I observed when I was in my late twenties. I would read articles and books they had written and wonder where they were now. Some hadn't seemed to have written much for a while, and I wondered if they were still alive. Some sat in the back of the room at SBL while the young people presented. Some didn't bother going to SBL anymore.

I still buy the books. Some of my purchases these last months have of course included James McGrath's two books on John the Baptist (started). I bought the landmark New Testament in Color. You'll find Vanhoozer's Mere Christian Hermeneutics on my shelf as well as Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology among several others outside of biblical studies.

One I may persist through is The State of Pauline Studies. I'm grateful to Nijay Gupta and Scot McKnight for doing these volumes. They help me know how out of touch I may or may not be. It doesn't matter much to the church. In the current hyper-populism of America, expertise is a sign of evilness.

I've made it through the first chapter, whoop-tee-do. It's by one of the youngin's, Josh Jipp, on "Paul and the Messiah." I didn't feel too out of date. Here is a very brief run down.

1. Christos as a Title
Jipp sets out well the transition in consensus that has happened over the last hundred years from a generation that largely saw Christ as almost a proper name to a growing new consensus that it does indeed invoke a sense of the title Messiah. He presents the sharpest pivot taking place in the 2012 work of Matthew Novenson, Christ Among the Messiahs. Novenson argued that Christos would have been recognized as an honorific -- thus having a clear content without having to spell it out.

I should also note references throughout this chapter to Jipp's own work, chiefly Christ is King (2015) and The Messianic Theology of the New Testament (2020).

2. Messianic Exegesis
I'm not sure if this section had much of a debate point. Jipp catalogs various works of recent years that have explored one or another way in which Paul read the Old Testament with Jesus glasses on. This seems to be beyond question. He starts the section going back to Don Juel's classic on Messianic Exegesis. 

A key resource for me here was an old chapter by Richard Hays in a Festscrift titled, "Christ Prays the Psalms." Since Hays is now an old guy, Jipp cites instead another youngin', Matthew Bates, in his The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation (2012). While I'm on the subject, another key recent work in the footnotes is Bates' Salvation by Allegiance Alone (2017).

3. Romans 1:3-4
Here Jipp pits an older reading of these two verses as a "two-step," "exaltation Christology" with adoptionist overtones with more recent readings that see Jesus' human messianic identity in full concert with his divine messianic identity. The trend of the last twenty-five years has clearly been toward a reading of Paul that is closer to the later creeds than the earlier Dunn generation that saw a longer development of Christology in the first century. At the moment, Hurtado and Bauckham have won the day among the younger generation of scholars.

4. Royal Christology
This section explores some suggested overtones for Jesus' kingship. Is it primarily Jewish messianism (Horbury)? To what extent does Paul present Jesus in contrast to Caesar (Wright)? Jipp himself sees some influence of ancient royal ideology.

I do think that there are overtones of Christ as a king in contrast to Caesar. I've generally thought however that Paul was careful not to be too explicit about these overtones for obvious reasons. But I do indeed see Paul's royal Christology as the very center of his Christology.