1. In Chapter 7 below, there will be a detailed analysis of this passage. [BACK]

2. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school who understood the Bible and indeed the philosophy of language as he did. On this see Winston 1988. [BACK]

3. See Chadwick. The notion that Paul has a background in Hellenistic Judaism has been advanced fairly often. It has generally had a pejorative tinge to it, as if only Palestinian Judaism was “authentic,” and terms like “lax” or, surprisingly enough, “coldly legal,” are used to describe Paul's alleged Hellenistic environment. Recently, this idea has been rightly discarded on the grounds that there is no sharp dividing line between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism. If we abandon the ex post facto judgments of history, moreover, there is no reason to accept the previous notions of margin and center in the description of late-antique Jewish groups, no reason why Philo should be considered less authentic than Rabban Gamaliel. The question of cultural differences between Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Jews can be reapproached on different non-judgmental territory. In that light, I find the similarities between Paul and Philo, who could have had no contact with each other whatsoever, very exciting evidence for first-century Greek-speaking Jews. [BACK]

4. I have limited the scope of this claim to allow for other types of allegory, including such phenomena as Joseph's interpretations of Pharaoh's dreams, as well as an untheorized allegorical tradition in reading Homer. When I use the term allegory, therefore, this is to be understood as shorthand for allegoresis of the type we know from Philo and on. [BACK]

5. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of this point with regard to 1 Corinthians 15. [BACK]

6. Note how this approach solves exegetical problems resulting from apparent contradictions between Romans 11 and, e.g., Romans 9. See Watson (1986, 168). Cf. also Davies (1965, 143–44). [BACK]

7. Frederic Jameson has articulated this point well:

A criticism which asks the question “What does it mean?” constitutes something like an allegorical operation in which a text is systematically rewritten in terms of some fundamental master code or “ultimately determining instance.” On this view, then, all “interpretation” in the narrower sense demands the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its particular master code or “transcendental signified”: the discredit into which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself.

It is going to be very tricky to distinguish the allegorical mode of relating to a master code from the midrashic, but that is just what I am going to have to do my best to accomplish below. [BACK]

8. David Dawson has recently brilliantly articulated the relation between the “literal” and the allegorical in the following terms:

Allegorical interpretation thus seems almost inevitably to challenge prior, nonallegorical readings. Naturally, those for whom that prior reading is meaningful and authoritative in its own right will resist the allegorical challenge, especially when challenge turns into outright replacement. But should a community of such “literalists” subsequently come to embrace the allegorical meaning as the obvious, expected meaning, that allegorical meaning would have become, in effect, the new “literal sense.” (Dawson 1992, 8)

Such a diachronic relationship cannot by definition exist between a midrashic and a literal/allegorical reading because of the way that midrash resists, inherently, the status of “obvious, expected meaning.” The politics of this kind of resistance, resistance to allegory and not through allegory, is one of the major themes of this book and will be most fully developed in the final chapter. [BACK]

9. Indeed, much of her book from page 93 on is devoted to arguing this thesis. However, even she agrees that “over the last two and a half millennia…Plato has stood securely, heir to Parmenides' kouros, as the founder of ‘idealist’ philosophy, asserting the existence of a world beyond the senses, one comprehensible only to the intellect, one that unifies by abstracting from particulars of the world that we experience with our senses ” (92, emphasis added). It is, of course, the Plato of this tradition that interests me here and not the “true” Plato. [BACK]

10. My next book will be devoted entirely to this theme, in which, however, I will read it as a positive, utopian moment in Jewish masculine subjectivity and not as an anti-Semitic canard. Garber has, in fact, shown the way toward such a reappropriation (227). [BACK]

11. The longing for univocity runs even deeper than this in Hesiod, on which see Saxonhouse (1992, 23–24). On the other hand, I do not want to show here a fear of diversity in characterizing Greek culture, for Saxonhouse is very careful not to homogenize the Greeks on this issue. See, for instance, her description of the difference between Heraclitus, who celebrates sexual difference as productive, and Parmenides, for whom childbirth and intercourse are “hateful mingling” (Saxonhouse, 38):

Among the differences that morals introduce with their naming of discrete objects are those that appear to separate the sexes and that lead to the “hateful mingling” of opposites mentioned above. In the world of “what is,” there can be no mingling because there are no opposites, and nor is there the “hateful birth” that results from the hateful mingling of the sexes. There is no generation at all. By transforming sexual intercourse (here we cannot forget Aphrodite) and childbirth into what is hateful Parmenides underscores the radical nature of his poem. Rather than attack war, death, and disease, he attacks the traditional pleasures (and the results) of sexuality. No Helen waits for her Paris to be lifted from the bloodshed of war and brought back to her chambers. The pleasures of sex entail hated opposites rather than the unified whole of “what is.” Such pleasures seduce men's senses, make them delight in opposites, when in fact they should dismiss opposites as false divisions of a beautiful whole. (Saxonhouse, 44)

In this book I am arguing that such themes and affects deeply inform the culture of Hellenistic Judaism with Philo and Paul, each in his own distinct way, representative figures. I think that in Paul already—as very explicitly in only slightly later figures that follow him—this Greek revulsion from sexuality, childbirth, and gender (which is a product of them) comes to one possible resolution. See Chapter 7 below for further discussion particularly with regards to Romans 7. [BACK]

12. This is, of course, only a partial list. Below briefly, and in my next book extensively, I will discuss the transformation of meaning which the signifier/signified opposition undergoes in Lacan. [BACK]

13. Recently, Pierre Vidal-Naquet has remarked on the “series of events that were completely unforseeable.…In the second and third centuries A.D., the Mediterranean world began to turn Christian. Particularly for the intellectuals who sought to come to terms with the change, this meant replacing their mythology and history, from the War of the Giants down to the Trojan War, with the mythology and history of the Hebrews and the Jews, from Adam to the birth of Christ” (Vidal-Naquet 1992, 304). What Vidal-Naquet does not take into sufficient consideration, in my opinion, is how much the way was prepared for this “replacement” by the allegorizing platonization of Judaism by Paul and Philo and their successors. We have not so much a replacement but a syncretization, whereby the Jewish stories are made to carry Hellenic cultural values. [BACK]

14. I am thus in near total disagreement with the interpretation of Philo on gender produced by Giulia Sissa, who writes, “A biologist, who, out of curiosity, looked into De opificio mundi would probably see the text as a mythological commentary on mythology [sic; should this be “biology”?]. He [sic] might notice that masculine and feminine are symmetrical and appear simultaneously. The notion that Adam came first and that Eve was later created from one of his ribs is not Philo's; for him male and female are both essential aspects of the concept of human being” (Sissa 1992, 54). Sissa ignores entirely the fact that Philo claims that there were two creations of two “races,” genoi, of humanity. [BACK]

15. Philo contradicts himself on this point in several places. I am not interested here in sorting out Philo's different interpretations and their sources, which has already been very well done in Tobin (1983). My interest here is rather in how the reading given here enters into a certain politics of the gendered body. For further discussion of this passage in Philo and his followers, see Tobin (108–19) and J. Cohen (1989, 74–76 and 228). [BACK]

16. Note the platonic disdain for poetry. Philo's attitude toward “myth” is virtually identical to that of his near contemporary, the Hellenistic interpreter of Homer, Heraclitus, for which see Dawson (1992, 39). [BACK]

17. For a precise delineation of the modality of this synergistic process by which allegorical interpretation transforms culture through a transformational combination of two discourses, see Dawson, who writes:

That is, precisely through an allegorical reading, other, formerly nonscriptural meanings may become “textualized” by being associated with the preallegorical, literal reading. For example, the preallegorical, literal reading of Exodus might concern the escape of Hebrews from Egypt. If I draw on Platonic theories of the soul's origin and destiny in order to read this biblical story allegorically as an account of the soul's ascent from bodily distraction to mental purity, I may do so because I want to reinterpret Plato's account by placing it within a scriptural framework. But in so doing, I may in fact subtly alter the meaning that Plato's account has on its own terms by making the once-eternal soul now directly created by God. When functioning in this way, allegorical readings can subvert previously nonscriptural meanings (i.e., meaning that prior to the allegorical reading would not have been associated with scripture); the allegorical reading can enable the preallegorical or “literal” reading to critique or revise those nonscriptural meanings. (1992, 11)

19. See Chapter 9. [BACK]

20. Upon presenting this material orally to the community of Pauline scholars at venues such as the Society of Biblical Literature, I was several times confronted by claims that it is ridiculous to make this text central to an interpretation of Paul, since it is so “transparently” marginal to his writing. I cannot imagine on what grounds one can determine centrality or marginality in this fashion. The fact that it is a citation of liturgy surely does not militate against its authority for Paul! Even Hamerton-Kelly's move (discussed below in Chapter 9) of reading all of Paul through the lens of 1 Thessalonians 2:14 cannot be disproven but only deplored. Certainly the fact that Paul cites the “no Jew or Greek” formula at a crucial point in an explicit defense of his gospel argues for its validity in his thought, however we will interpret it, as do his repeated citations of versions of it in other places. Most of Chapter 8 below will be devoted to sorting out the differences between the citation in Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12:13. For a recent discussion of this passage, see Campbell (1992, 106–10). [BACK]

21. Cp. Betz, especially, “If Paul means his words in this sense, ἐν ὑμῖν would have to be rendered as ‘within you’: Christ ‘takes shape’ in the Christians like a fetus and is born in the hearts of the believers; simultaneously they are reborn as ‘children.’ But ἐν ὑμῖν can also refer to the creation of the Christian community as a living organism, the ‘body of Christ’ ” (1979, 234–35). [BACK]

22. Indeed, this is his major focus, for when he repeats this formula in Corinthians, he notoriously drops the clause about “male and female.” In Chapter 8, I treat this issue in Pauline interpretation more fully. [BACK]

23. See now the brilliant interpretation of Galatians 3:15–20 in Wright (1992a, 164–67). [BACK]

24. Note how early and how deeply rooted in Greek culture are the associations of spirit/mind with the universal and of physical/sensual with difference. As Saxonhouse writes, “The attack on senses [in Heraclitus!], though, is not simply because they are unreliable, but because they separate men from one another as the mind does not.…Knowledge is thus unified in the logos and the logos in its turn unifies humans. This unity, though, can come only from the soul and not from the senses” (Saxonhouse 1992, 31–32). Saxonhouse argues, in fact, that in Plato these notions are somewhat problematized. [BACK]

25. According to H. A. Wolfson (1968, 369) Philo allowed for the possibility of uncircumcised “spiritual” proselytes. On the other hand, there is a very striking report of Suetonius that Augustus remarked: “Not even a Jew, my dear Tiberius, observes the Sabbath fast as faithfully as I did today” (cited in Gager 1983, 75). [BACK]

26. “The real member of the Old Israel is he who has appropriated to himself the history of his people: he has himself been in bondage in Egypt, has himself been delivered therefore. We may also add that he has himself received the Torah” (Davies 1965, 104). [BACK]

27. The circumcision of the Egyptians appears in a very early (late-first-century) polemic against “The Jews,” The Epistle of Barnabas (9:6), where the author writes, “But you will say, ‘But surely the people were circumcised as a seal.’ But every Syrian and Arab and all the idol-worshipping priests are circumcised; does this mean that they, too, belong to their covenant? Why, even the Egyptians practice circumcision!” (Lightfoot and Harmer 1989, 174). What was a defense in Philo's apology for Judaism vis-à-vis “pagans” becomes an attack in this apology for Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism. [BACK]

28. There are, of course, other ways of interpreting this Pauline complex of ideas. Cp. Meeks (1983, 183–85), who interprets this differently, but see there 187–88. This interpretation, however, makes a great deal of sense to me. In baptism, the Christian is translated in this life from a physical existence to a spiritual one. In the ecstasy of the baptismal experience, this is both an experiential fact and an ontological one. Thus Paul explains in Galatians, “For through the Law I died to the Law, in order that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and what I now live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me” (2:19–20). This is an account not of a moral transformation but of a thorough ontological and spiritual one. It thus follows that there are more possibilities than future resurrection versus righteous life in the present for interpreting such passages as Romans 8:10–11 (pace Gundry 1976, 44). The third alternative is a life in the here and now, which is only apparently in the flesh but in reality “Christ living in the person.” This form of life is a type or even an anticipation of the resurrection, as is strongly implied by the Galatians passage. (See also Gundry 1976, 46, 57ff.) [BACK]

29. The term platonistic—as opposed to platonic—will be used to identify ideas belonging to the middle- or neo-platonist traditions but which are not necessarily platonic in origin. [BACK]

30. It is not clear to me precisely what is the source of the profound resistance to any imputation of platonism in Paul in contemporary Pauline scholarship. One very important source of insight into this question is surely Smith (1990, esp. 1–36), where the history of seeing “platonism” and “philonism” as a contamination of the pure waters of early Christianity is documented extensively. Given such a set of prejudices, and particularly the notion that Catholicism is the misbegotten child of this illicit union, one can begin to understand the allergy that Protestant scholarship has for attributing dualism to Paul. Further, those schools of interpretation which have treated Paul as Hellenist in the past have been implicated in anti-Semitic attempts to de-Judaize him (or anti-Paulinic attempts to implicate him in anti-Semitism), further explaining why scholars who wish to rehabilitate Paul historically have emphasized the “purity” of his Jewish cultural connections. But of course, and this is just the point, precisely that pure Jewish cultural world that Paul grew up in was thoroughly Hellenized and platonized—and this is not to be seen as contamination. [BACK]

31. Cp. Smith (1990, 83). I do not, of course, suggest that the “absolutely new” is therefore necessarily superior to that from which it was constituted. I do, however, suggest that Smith is somewhat unfair to Aune here who, while revealing an apologetic tendency in his unfortunate choice of “transcending” to refer to the relation of Christianity to Jewish and Hellenistic traditions, does not claim Christianity as sui generis in some theological sense but as a unique development of given historical traditions. This strikes me as quite different from the polemic purposes of the earlier scholarly apologetics for Christianity which Smith is attacking. [BACK]

32. Note how similar and yet how different this is from Bultmann's famous claim that for Paul theology is anthropology (Bultmann 1951, 191). [BACK]

33. Note that in later Christian iconography, according to Leo Steinberg, representations of Christ's genitalia and of his circumcision represent the human aspect of his Incarnation (Steinberg 1983). See also Davidson (1992, 102–10). [BACK]

34. See the elegant exposition in Martyn (1967, 270–71). [BACK]

35. I am struck by how infrequently Romans 9:5 is cited in connection with 2 Corinthians 5:16. Even in Fraser's compendium of the possible options for interpreting this verse, it seems not to have been mentioned even once (Fraser 1970–71, 301–03). [BACK]

36. I discuss this passage in detail in the next chapter. [BACK]

37. Note how this interpretation clarifies a point at issue between Pauline scholars, namely, the question of the “historical Jesus” in Paul's thought. Some hold that the human, living Jesus held no importance whatsoever for Paul, while “W. L. Knox however rightly regarded Paul as valuing the historical Jesus, for this marked the difference of Christianity from the mystery religions. Yet he regarded II Cor. v. 16 as somehow setting aside the historical Jesus. Therefore he could describe the verse as ‘an incautious outburst,’ in spite of which ‘Jesus as the risen Lord of the Church, remained the concrete figure of the Gospels’” (Fraser 1970–71, 297). [BACK]

38. Contrast the reductive views of Francis Watson, for whom any such antitheses, whether in Paul or Qumran (or presumably the Pythagoreans), serve only to “express the ineradicable distinction between the sect (in which salvation is to be found) and the parent religious community (where there is only condemnation).” Watson entirely begs the question of why salvation is to be found only in the sect (Watson 1986, 46). Is it not possible that these very antinomies and antitheses are what led to the creation of the “sect”? [BACK]

39. These are not, strictly speaking, binary oppositions for Paul, but rather bi-polar oppositions on a continuum. There is not an absolute opposition of spirit and flesh in Paul, but entities can be more and less spiritual or carnal. Thus the resurrection body can be a spiritualized body. The analogical structure holds up, but with great subtlety and polyvalence, a polyvalence which enabled ultimately the multifarious directions that successors to Paul could take, from gnostic rejection of the material to the wallowing in it of medieval resurrection theory. [BACK]

40. See next chapter for detail. [BACK]

41. “This rigorously ecclesiocentric allegory is not an anomaly but a heightened expression of themes that repeatedly surface when Paul turns to interpreting Scripture” (Hays 1989, 111). [BACK]

42. Allegory here is not in the slightest “related to the exemplum and the metaphor” and is therefore not “among the figurae per immutationem ” (pace Betz 1979, 239–40). That refers to the construction of an allegorical device in rhetoric, while here Paul is interpreting the Bible in allegorical fashion in order to finally hammer down and home his point that following the coming of Christ the promise to Abraham has been fulfilled. Far from being a weak and merely persuasive device, this allegory is the climax of his whole argument and thus of the letter. [BACK]

43. Cp. the following account of Plato on kinship:

They [i.e., the Homeric representation of the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus] invoke kinship and conjugality, in other words, only to displace them, to reduce them to mere images of friendship. This dialectic will ultimately prove to have had pregnant implications for the later history of the representation of the relations between family and community, between oikos and polis, in Greek culture: in Plato's Republic, for example, the utopian effort to unite all the citizens of the just city in the bonds of fraternal love effectively does away with the social significance of real brothers and sisters, of both kinship and conjugality, altogether. (Halperin 1990, 85–86)

It seems hardly stretching the point to see Paul's thinking as within this ethos. [BACK]

44. It should be noted that in the biblical text, it is not stated that Abraham “knew Sarah his wife” after the “annunciation.” There may have even been, then, a tradition that the conception of Isaac was entirely by means of the promise. The birth of Isaac would be, then, an even more exact type of Jesus' birth. This would also explain Paul's application of Isaiah 54:1, in which Hagar is called “she who has a husband,” to whom Sarah is contrasted. The point would be that Hagar had sex with a man in order to conceive, but Sarah did not! Indeed, given that the verse in Isaiah explicitly refers to Jerusalem as the barren one, and contrasts her with another city who is figured as “her who has a husband,” it is neither surprising nor startling that these two cities are read as the two Jerusalems, nor that they are mapped onto Sarah and Hagar respectively (Hays 1989, 118–19). See also Philo, On the Cherubim, 40–52 for the virgin births of the patriarchs' wives, whereby God begets their children! Such notions were abandoned very quickly, it seems, in the post-Christian environment. [BACK]

45. See also Martyn (1985, 418–20). I am quite unconvinced by Martyn's interpretation that Paul's discourse is intended to discredit such oppositions. [BACK]

46. Parenthetically, I would like to remark that I think Hays underestimates Paul when he avers that the statement that Ishmael persecuted Isaac was “shaped significantly by the empirical situation of the church in his own time. The fact is that Torah advocates are persecuting those who carry out the Law-free mission to the Gentiles; consequently, given the way Paul has set up the allegory, the text must be read in a way that portrays Ishmael as the persecutor” (1989, 118). I think, rather, given the evidence of to be sure later rabbinic readings to which Hays refers, Paul must have already known of a tradition which reads קהצמ as some form of persecution or harassment of Isaac by Ishmael. [BACK]

47. See Dawson (1992, 15–17 and esp. 256–57n.56), and cp. Hays (1989, 115–17) and Sang (1991, 7). [BACK]

48. Cp., for instance, Sallust, for whom, “despite the apparent vicissitudes of the mother of the gods and Attis this myth in fact tells of eternal and unchanging realities ” (cited in Wedderburn 1987, 127–28). [BACK]

49. Months after I wrote the above sentence, Timothy Hampton's important paper appeared, which includes the following sentence: “To speak of the other is to make metaphors” (1993, 66). It is altogether quite astonishing how many themes of the present work are approached in that paper from quite a different direction. [BACK]

50. By a hermeneutic error I mean two things, which are only partly related to each other but converge nevertheless in my claim. On the one hand, I am making a fairly conventional interpretative claim to the effect that a theme that is never mentioned in a major text of a given corpus cannot be identified as the motivating moment of the entire corpus taken as a whole. In other words, unless we are prepared to separate Paul out into separate parts—as some critics are perfectly prepared to do, on, e.g., chronological or situational terms—the expectation of the Parousia, as important as it is, cannot be seen as the central, motivating force of Paul's work. On the other hand, I am claiming that this is a hermeneutic error in the other sense of hermeneutics, as that which makes a text useable to us. For those of us not living in the end-time, in the sense of in the immediate expectation of that end, a Paul who is fully or largely explained as thinking only in that context will become simply irrelevant. Of course I also see Paul as apocalyptic in the sense that the Christ-event has resulted for him in a fundamental change in the structure of history. It is the content of that change that reveals—Apocalypsis—Paul to us. I come back to this point in Chapter 7 in my discussion of Paul on sexuality. [BACK]

51. See also the very helpful remarks of Gerard Caspary (1979, 17–18 and 51–60) on the relationship between the Old Testament and the New in Paul and Origen and also Robbins 1991. [BACK]

52. On the last, see Caspary (1979, 60–62). It seems to me even more the case that food rules and the observance of Sabbaths and festivals would not in themselves have prevented gentiles from converting were it not for their symbolic, theological significance to the effect that one had to be Jewish in order to be Christian. Thus arguing that Paul abandoned circumcision in order to make it easier for gentiles to convert begs more questions than it answers, pace Watson (1986, 28). I find Watson's account reductive; for example, he contrasts a theological motivation for Paul's abandonment of circumcision, kashruth, and Sabbaths with a purely utilitarian one, “to make it easier for Gentiles to become Christians” (34–38): “Paul's theological discussions about the law are therefore attempts to justify this essentially non-theological decision” (36). It is not even clear to me what this claim could mean. If Paul held that keeping the Law was important for being saved, then what was he accomplishing by winning souls for Christ who would not be saved anyway? On the other hand, if he did not consider the Law important for being saved, what could be more theological than that? 1 Corinthians 9:19–21 does not prove what Watson claims it proves, since it could easily be interpreted that keeping the Law is adiaphora for Paul—i.e., totally indifferent theologically—and then he makes the sociological decision to adapt himself to whatever community he preaches to. On the other hand, I find salutary Watson's clear understanding that not keeping the commandments was not a liberalization of Jewish practice but a break with it, a break with precisely that which made being Jewish Jewish. [BACK]