Framing Paul: An epistolary biography
Douglas A. Campbell
Eerdmans £25.99
(978-0-8028-7151-0)
Church Times Bookshop £23.40
FOR centuries, the religious history of Christianity's early
days was derived from the Acts of the Apostles. From the later
chapters, this supplied the account of St Paul's missionary
journeys and the framework for his life. Essentially, Acts provided
the primary source for Paul's biography, and his attributed letters
were very much a secondary source, to be fitted into the
chronological life with no shortage of controversy.
The majority of Pauline scholars continued "to work with either
an Acts-based chronology that had serious problems, or with a
muddled approach that switched between Acts-based and epistolary
systems, essentially opportunistically and hence
unjustifiably".
It was an American professor, John Knox, who, in two articles of
1939, and more fully in the modestly entitled Chapters in a
Life of Paul (1950), revolutionised the distinction between
the two kinds of source material. Paul's letters are the primary
and internal source (revealing the thought, character, and
religious experience of the Apostle), while Acts provides a
secondary and external source of biographical data (assembled at a
later date from historical accounts that may well be
fragmentary).
Within this radically different perspective, it is interesting
to compare the more recent studies Paul: A critical life
(1996) by Jerome Murphy O'Connor, and Apostle Paul: His life
and theology (2005) by Udo Schnelle. Douglas Campbell is
critical of Schnelle for his dependence on a doctrinal criterion of
justification by faith. For an example of datable evidence from
Paul himself, look at the Aretas incident in 2 Corinthians
11.32-33, which can be linked to a specific escape in 36/37 CE.
While Campbell builds on Knox's work, the keyword in his
magisterial study is "framing". This is no casual term, but a
technical reference to literary context, as in the thought of
Jacques Derrida. What we see is controlled by the way we look, and
so we need to be explicit about presuppositions and bias. Context
is examined in a highly inclusive way that learns from modern
methodologies while remaining aware of the dangers of
anachronism.
Campbell pays a special attention to the context of imprisonment
and its conditioning of thought, as applied to five of the 13
canonical letters of Paul. In a major synthesis of his work on
Pauline chronology over decades, he sets out his framework on the
evidence of the letters alone, ten of which are judged authentic.
Romans and the Corinthian correspondence provide the backbone,
augmented by Philippians and Galatians.
He then discusses in considerable detail the respective
locations of the Thessalonian correspondence (at the start of
the sequence); Philemon, Colossians, and "Ephesians"/Laodiceans
(belonging as a cluster to incarceration in mid-50 CE in Apamea);
and Titus with 1 and 2 Timothy (fairly decisively labelled as
pseudepigraphic).
There is still plenty of scope for the reader to dissent from
details in the supporting arguments, while appreciating the skill
and dedication of this synthesis.
I myself was surprised to see the revival of a thesis by Edgar
Goodspeed which dated the Pauline letter collection as providing a
model for the letters to the seven churches collected in chapters 2
and 3 of Revelation.
Dr John Court is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in New
Testament Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury.