Paul and Social Memory

Chapter 25 Paul and Social Memory Rafael Rodríguez Since the publication of the first edition of Paul in the Greco-Roman World in 2003, biblical scholarship has turned to memory studies—and particularly social and/or collective memory studies—to investigate the texts at the heart of our disciplines. Historical Jesus and Gospels scholarship (my specialty) has seen an explosion of studies employing social memory studies.1 Pauline studies, however, has not taken significant notice of social memory. Besides essays scattered across multiple journals and edited volumes, I am aware of only one book-length study of Paul and social memory: Benjamin White’s Remembering Paul.2 White focuses his attention on the memory of Paul (that is, Paul as a remembered—or traditioned—figure) in the latesecond century CE. The present essay, in contrast, highlights the function of memory in Paul’s letters. See Chris Keith, “Social Memory Theory and the Gospels Research: The First Decade (Part One),” Early Christianity 6, no. 3 (forthcoming); idem, “Social Memory Theory and the Gospels Research: The First Decade (Part Two),” Early Christianity 6, no. 4 (forthcoming). For critiques of the rise of memory studies in Jesus research, see Alexander J. M. Wedderburn, Jesus and the Historians, WUNT 269 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 13–32, as well as the chapter titled “Memory” (pp. 189–223). See also Birger Gerhardsson, “The Secret of the Transmission of the Unwritten Jesus Tradition,” NTS 51 (2005): 1–18; and Paul Foster, “Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Research,” JSHJ 10 (2012): 193–202. 2 Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); see also Georgia Masters Keightley, “The Church’s Memory of Jesus: A Social Science Analysis of 1 Thessalonians,” BTB 17 (1987): 149–56; eadem, “Christian Collective Memory and Paul’s Knowledge of Jesus,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, SemeiaSt 52 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 129–50; Philip F. Esler, “Paul’s Contestation of Israel’s (Ethnic) Memory of Abraham in Galatians 3,” BTB 36 (2006): 23–34; Stephen C. Barton, “Memory and Remembrance in Paul,” in Memory in the Bible and Antiquity: The Fifth Durham-Tübingen Research Symposium, ed. Stephen C. Barton, Loren T. Stuckenbruck, and Benjamin G. Wold, WUNT 212 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 321–39; Dennis C. Duling, “Social Memory and Commemoration of the Death of ‘the Lord’: Paul’s Response to the Lord’s Supper Factions at Corinth,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz, ed. Tom Thatcher, SemeiaSt 78 (Atlanta: SBL, 2014), 289–310. See also Peter-Ben Smit, “St. Thecla: Remembering Paul and Being Remembered Through Paul,” VC 68 (2014): 551–63 (my thanks to Ben White for bringing Smit’s article to my attention). 1 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 347 Part I. Social Memory Theory French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) is frequently described as the “pioneer” or “founder”—even as the “godfather”—of social memory theory,3 though Schwartz and Schuman explain that Halbwachs’s discussions of les cadres sociaux de la mémoire and la mémoire collective “did not cause the great current of collective memory research beginning in the 1980s; they were swept into it.”4 Halbwachs noted that individuals remember within the social frameworks (les cadres sociaux) of the groups to which they belonged. Ricoeur helpfully summarizes Halbwachs: “The text basically says: to remember, we need others. It adds: not only is the type of memory we possess not derivable in any fashion from experience in the first person singular, in fact the order of derivation is the other way around.”5 Halbwachs is emphatic at this point: “No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.”6 Despite the common-sensical suspicion that “groups and cultures do not remember and recall, individuals do,”7 Halbwachs (a student of Durkheim) insisted that individuals never remember qua individuals but rather always in relation to others. Halbwachs presses this thesis to the extreme and makes the individual derivative of her social context and relations: “if we examine a little more closely how we recollect things, we will surely realize that the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us.”8 The reader could be excused for suspecting that individuals are more prone to remember others’ memories on their behalf than to recall their own memories (whatever we might think this latter term refers to).9 In his introduction to the related discussion of social identity, Barry Schwartz and Howard Schuman (“History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945–2001,” ASR 70 [2005]: 183) describe Halbwachs’s work as “pioneering” and explain, “Maurice Halbwachs founded the field of collective memory.” Michael Thate (Remembrance of Things Past? Albert Schweitzer, the Anxiety of Influence, and the Untidy Jesus of Markan Memory, WUNT 2/351 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013], 190) calls him “the ‘godfather’ of modern critical memory theory,” citing Gabriel Moshenska, “Working with Memory in the Archaeology of Modern Conflict,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20 (2010): 34. 4 Schwartz and Schuman, “History, Commemoration, and Belief,” 183–84; see also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 120. For a biographical discussion and a survey of Halbwachs’s work, see Lewis Coser’s Introduction, in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–34. 5 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 120. 6 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 43. 7 Samuel Byrskog, Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History, WUNT 123 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 255; original in italics. See also Jeffrey K. Olick, “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 151–61. 8 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 38. 9 See also Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 122. 3 348 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD Richard Jenkins draws attention to and criticizes “the assumption that individual identity and collective identity are qualitatively, if not utterly, different.”10 Jenkins calls the distinction of the individual-personal from the social-cultural “neither stupid nor necessarily problematic,” but he goes on to note that, more than simply being distinguished from one another, one is often “assumed to be more important—if not actually more ‘real’—than the other. The greater is also often assumed, even if only in the last instance, to determine the lesser.”11 Samuel Byrskog’s objection, quoted above, that “groups and cultures do not remember and recall, individuals do,” reifies the individual as a concrete entity and privileges her over the more abstract group or society.12 Halbwachs, on the other hand, reifies society and privileges social frameworks over the more precarious individual. To remedy the excesses of both positions, Jenkins likens rather than differentiates individual and collective dynamics of identity: [T]he individually unique and the collectively shared can be understood as similar (if not exactly the same) in important respects; that each is routinely related to—or, better perhaps, entangled with—the other; that the processes by which they are produced, reproduced and changed are analogous; and that both are intrinsically social. The theorisation of social identity must include each in equal measure.13 If the social order does not exist without individuals populating that order, neither do individual selves exist apart from the social order that animates and contextualizes their interactions. The individual and the collective are mutually constitutive.14 The Obdurate Past: Memory as a Cultural System Though Halbwachs has been taken up across the Humanities, no one has done more to critique and extend his work from within the Durkeimian tradition than Barry Schwartz.15 Schwartz’s critique of Halbwachs has focused on the latter’s “presentism,” Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, Key Ideas (London: Routledge, 1996), 14. Jenkins, Social Identity, 15. 12 Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006]) commits the same error despite repeated references to memory’s “intersubjectivity.” 13 Jenkins, Social Identity, 19–20. 14 See Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 333–48; see also my discussion of “collective and individual influences on memory,” in Rafael Rodríguez, Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text, European Studies on Christian Origins, LNTS 407 (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 42–47. For the significance of collective in “collective memory,” see Barry Schwartz, “Reexamining Conflict and Collective Memory— The Nanking Massacre,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 529. 15 Schwartz’s most significant work focuses on Abraham Lincoln (see Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000]; idem, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009]). Schwartz has also addressed SBL Annual Meetings in 2003, 2010, and 2015 and contributed two essays to Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher’s introduction of social memory theory to NT scholarship: see Barry Schwartz, “Christian Origins: Historical Truth and Social Memory,” in Kirk and Thatcher, eds., Memory, Tradition, and Text, 43–56, and, in the same volume, “Jesus in First-Century Memory—A Response,” 249–61. See also the collection of essays that apply Schwartz’s work on memory 10 11 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 349 that is, his programmatic collapsing of the past into the problems and interests of the present. For example, “Halbwachs’s accounts of the Christian memory of Jesus are stunning because they violate common sense, making the past a hallucination pressed to the service of individual faith and social solidarity. But violations of common sense, although refreshing and stimulating, are often wrong.”16 Schwartz warns of presentist (or constructionist) distortions endemic among social memory theorists: “These distortions result from a cynical ‘constructionist’ project rooted in the valuable idea of memory being assembled from parts, but fixated on the circular assumption that constructed products are not what they seem precisely because they are constructed.”17 The past, Schwartz insists, is not reducible to a screen against which present concerns can be projected and magnified. But he goes further; he insists that the past does more than provide (real?) raw materials for constructing present concerns and making them meaningful. “[T]he reality of events is a primary determinant of what we remember.”18 We cannot overestimate the importance of this conviction for Schwartz’s work. The past is more than a playground in which the present plays its games; the past is constitutive of the very present that seeks to know something about the past. Schwartz adapts Clifford Geertz’s semiotic analysis of culture and applies it to “memory as a cultural system.”19 Memory, like culture, “is public”; moreover, memory “is public because meaning is.”20 Schwartz matches the past to the present as a double model: the past is a model of as well as a model for the present. This matching Schwartz calls “keying,” which “transforms memory into a cultural system because it matches publicly accessible (i.e., symbolic) models of the past…to the experiences of the present… Keying is communicative movement—talk, writing, image- and musicmaking—that connects otherwise separate realms of history.”21 Keying provides the mechanism by which the past constitutes the very present that turns back on itself to understand what has come before (and to extrapolate what might lie ahead): The past is matched to the present as a model of society and a model for society. As a model of society, collective memory reflects past events in terms of the needs, interests, fears, and aspirations of the present. As a model for society, collective memory performs two functions: it embodies a template that organizes and animates behavior and a frame within which people locate and find meaning for their present experience. Collective memory affects social reality by reflecting, shaping, and framing it.22 (Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz, ed. Tom Thatcher, SemeiaSt 78 [Atlanta: SBL, 2014]). 16 Barry Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Memory and History,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, 19. 17 Schwartz, “Christian Origins,” 43–44. He continues: “No assumption, in my view, has done more to undermine the foundation of social memory scholarship or hinder its application to biblical studies.” 18 Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke,” 20. The original reads, “Whether the reality of events is a primary determinant of what we remember or mere building material for what present situations require makes a difference.” Schwartz prefers the former. 19 See Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 908–27; idem, Forge of National Memory, 17–20. 20 Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 10, 12. 21 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 226; see also idem, Post-Heroic Era, 61. 22 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 18; italics in the original. 350 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD The constituting force of keying acts objectively (that is, externally, from the outside) on social actors whose actions produce, embrace, transmit, endorse, or challenge images of the past. Actors are indeed responsible for shifting images of the past; “history, sacred and secular alike, is malleable and constantly reinterpreted.”23 Even shifting images, however, maintain a continuity with previous images that allows a group to maintain its sense of connectedness with the past: “these variations would not be noticeable if not superimposed upon a stable essence that makes events and individuals recognizable across generations.”24 This stable essence is fundamentally related to the reality of the past and is not subject to the constructive work of memory’s ideological dynamics: “interpretation is more often forced upon the observer of an event by its inherent quality than imposed by the observer’s worldview and interests. Put another way, reality counts more than bias in the remembering of most events most of the time.”25 In none of this does Schwartz suggest that knowledge of the past as past is ever straightforward or simply a matter of recalling “what actually happened.” Rather, in a research environment that prizes exposing “the sins of memory,”26 Schwartz sets out to identify (and correct!) the “excessive, sometimes pathological and often paralyzing cynicism” of memory research.27 Over a quarter-century ago, Michael Schudson stressed the obvious point that “[t]here are features of our pasts that become part of the givens of our lives, whether they are convenient or not.”28 Like scars on our skin, “inconvenient features” of the past are not reducible to ideological interests in the present; they require discursive management, whether to be explained or to be explained away. Schudson drew attention to the way that the inherited past (Schudson would say “available past”) limited the rhetorical and ideological options available to those wrestling to make sense of the past:29 “Given that people can choose only from the available past and that the available past is limited, are individuals free to choose as they wish? Far from it. There are a variety of ways in which the freedom to choose is constrained.”30 Schudson discussed this “variety of ways” under four headings: trauma, vicarious Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke,” 20. Ibid. 25 Ibid., 20–21; italics in the original. 26 Dale Allison (Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010], 2), refers to memory’s “many sins”; note also the title of Daniel Schacter’s book, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Mariner, 2002). 27 Schwartz, “Where There’s Smoke,” 22; see also idem, Forge of National Memory, 25; citing Michael Schudson, “The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present,” Communication 11 [1989]: 113): “Political structures shape our understanding of the past, observes Michael Schudson; ‘[b]ut this is half the truth, at best, and a particularly cynical half-truth, at that.’” 28 Schudson, “Present in the Past,” 108. 29 Barry Schwartz echoes Schudson’s model, anchoring both the past’s reconstruction and its retention in the remembering present, in his essay, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington,” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 234. Nachman Ben-Yehuda (Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995]) endorses Schwartz’s model in his discussion of “mythmaking in Israel.” 30 Schudson, “Present in the Past,” 109. 23 24 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 351 trauma, channel, and commitment.31 In each of these, “[t]he past becomes part of us; and shapes us, it influences our consciousness, whether we like it or not.”32 Moreover, the past does not simply “become part of us” as a series of discrete events. Patterns of behavior, or habits, become engrained within individual as well as social norms of conduct, so that the way we act in the present is, often, dependent upon how we have acted in the past. Again, Schudson: “There are some facets of the past we cannot ignore because we do not have enough energy to escape their inertial pull.”33 Alternatively, and relatedly, individuals and groups develop emotional and/or moral attachments to the past: “There are some facets of the past we cannot ignore or forget without feeling the loss of some part of ourselves… A person comes to have a commitment in him or her self—in what is called identity or character or, with a more social aspect emphasized, reputation.”34 Actors in the present, in other words, while always free to alter behavior and/or reconfigure their image of the past, experience established patterns of behavior and/or images of the past as in various ways parts of their identity in the present. Changes to such patterns or images, therefore, become rather more momentous than simply following the whims of new ideological interests; “commitments and loyalties become a part of the person’s or organization’s identity. Abandoning these commitments would be transforming the self.”35 The weight of the past upon the present, however, is not rooted solely in psychological or social factors. The very same political dynamics that attend to every act of remembering the past (see the next sub-section) also constrain the extent to which ideological forces are able to upend and replace established images of the past. “Different reconstructions clash. Control over the past is disputed and the past becomes contested terrain.”36 Individuals and groups competing to propose and sanction images of the past have to convince their audiences of the veracity of their proposals. In other words, while anyone can produce any image of the past they might wish, historians have also to account for how images are received (or, alternatively, rejected). We cannot subscribe to what Schwartz calls “a supply-side theory that attends to the production of images but ignores their reception.”37 While anyone can propose a revisionist image of the past, getting the wider public to embrace that revisionist image is another matter entirely.38 The interpretation of history is pathdependent: “each human event is a step in a sequence, a node in a branching tree of See ibid., 109–12. Ibid., 110. 33 Ibid., 111. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 112; my emphasis. 36 Ibid. 37 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 255; Schwartz continues: “Reception, however, is always problematic.” 38 See Howard Schuman, Barry Schwartz, and Hannah d’Arcy, “Elite Revisionists and Popular Beliefs: Christopher Columbus, Hero or Villain?,” Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (2005): 2–29, who first describe traditional and revisionist images of Christopher Columbus and then measure the popular distribution of those images according to national surveys of Americans as well as school history textbooks and mass media (newspapers, television, etc.) in the late 1990s. 31 32 352 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD events that permits only so many next steps and thereby precludes untold numbers of others.”39 Radical breaks and unexpected events within the “sequence” or “branching tree” of history may be possible; radical breaks and unexpected events are not, however, the norm, and even when they occur they are not usually completely radical or unexpected.40 The Malleable Past: The Politics of Memory Schwartz regularly differentiates “the politics of memory,” as an analytical perspective, from “memory as a cultural system” (see the previous sub-section).41 The former, which Schwartz identifies as dominant among the literature, “sees the past as a social construction shaped by the concerns and needs of the present.”42 The politics of memory highlights the dynamics, distribution, and interactions of power structures in its analyses of images and commemorations of the past. In a culture “where the minorities and the powerless enjoy more dignity and rights than ever before,” the politics of memory offers utile theoretical concepts and bears compelling explanatory force for the shifting images of the past.43 Precisely because of its theoretical utility and explanatory power, however, Schwartz offers qualifications to the politics of memory, stressing that this approach “leads to an atemporal concept of collective memory, one that makes the past precarious, its contents hostage to the political conditions of the present.”44 Such atemporalism “produces little understanding of collective memory as such—only of its causes and consequences. How the past is symbolized and how it functions as a mediator of meaning are questions that go to the heart of collective memory, but they have been skirted.”45 Schwartz turns to memory as a cultural system (discussed above) in order to raise questions directly of remembrance of the past rather than to focus merely on shifting images of the past through time. (The present essay intentionally discusses “memory as a cultural system” before “the politics of memory” in order to counter—in whatever small way—the institutional bias toward the latter.) Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct The Past (New York: Basic, 1993), 2. 40 For a re-appraisal of the “radical” and/or “unexpected” nature of Paul’s purported “break” with Judaism, see the essays in Mark D. Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, eds., Paul within Judaism: Restoring the FirstCentury Context to the Apostle (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). 41 See the sub-section, “Two Theories of Collective Memory” (Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 13–20), which itself forms part of a chapter titled, “Two Faces of Collective Memory.” This differentiation was already programmatic for Schwartz’s work in 1991 (see idem, “Social Change and Collective Memory”; Ben-Yehuda, Masada Myth, 271–306). 42 Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory,” 221. Alan Kirk (“Social and Cultural Memory,” in Kirk and Thatcher, eds., Memory, Tradition, and Text, 13) notes, “the radical constructionist approach at times seems less argued for than it is taken as an axiomatic point of departure.” 43 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 14. 44 Ibid., 16. 45 Ibid., 17. Similarly, see Rafael Rodríguez, “‘According to the Scriptures’: Suffering and the Psalms in the Speeches in Acts,” in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, 241–62. 39 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 353 The politics of memory shifts attention away from questions about what actually happened and focuses instead on the contestation over the right and authority to represent the past and to determine the lessons to be drawn from it. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone draw attention to the “emphasis on memory as process,” which emphasis highlights memory’s “motivation and meaning.”46 Schwartz acknowledges, “[s]erving political interest is one of commemoration’s functions… Considering the commemoration of Lincoln as a symbol of political order makes the ups and downs of his reputation easier to understand.”47 Establishing and promoting images of the past requires capital investments, both cultural and financial; “reputational entrepreneurs” who speak for historical events and figures often—but not always—represent “official” or “hegemonic” social forces.48 Schwartz distinguishes entrepreneurial efforts that serve narrow self-interests from those that serve wider social concerns: Reputational entrepreneurs sometimes make this connection [between national identity and national memory] with a view to promoting and protecting their own interests; sometimes, with a view to promoting and protecting the interests of society at large. The consequence differs. An audience manipulated into associating its interests with a particular conception of the past will withdraw its commitment as soon as the manipulation ends; but if entrepreneurs and their audience share the same values, then reputational enterprise will sustain rather than create collective memory.49 Analytical emphases on social conflict and the interaction of political interests too frequently assume opposition as the fundamental social condition, “dismissing the possibility of image-makers embracing the same values and goals as their audience and invoking shared symbols to articulate rather than manipulate its sentiment.”50 This assumption finds programmatic force, for example, in Hodgkin and Radstone’s approach to memory “as a tool with which to contest ‘official’ versions of the past” and their emphasis on “the question around the many ways in which conflict and contest can emerge.”51 Memory studies have not only simplified concepts of power and conflict; they often conflate a variety of processes under the often ill-defined concept of memory. Jeffrey Olick largely agrees “that collective memory over-totalizes a variety of retrospective products, practices, and processes,” and he responds by configuring collective memory “as a sensitizing rather than operational concept” that “raises useful questions.”52 Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, “Introduction: Contested Pasts,” in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative (London: Routledge, 2003), 4. Similarly, see Erik Meyer, “Memory and Politics,” in Erll, Nünning, and Young, eds., A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, 176. 47 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 294–95. 48 Schwartz (Forge of National Memory) regularly refers to “reputational entrepreneurs”; the term comes from Gary Alan Fine, Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and idem, Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America (New York: Routledge, 2011). 49 Schwartz, Forge of National Memory, 295. 50 Ibid., 255. 51 Hodgkin and Radstone, “Introduction,” 5. 52 Olick, “From Collective Memory,” 152. 46 354 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD Olick offers three principles to assist in acknowledging the political dynamics of memory practices without reducing memory or the past to ideological constructions in the present.53 First, we can no longer refer to “the collective memory of an entire society” or claim to describe an entire epochal or cultural perception of the past as a monolith. “Collective memory is a highly complex process, involving numerous different people, practices, materials, and themes.” Second, we must view memory as “a fluid negotiation between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past.” When we speak of memory, we are referring to neither “the authentic residue of the past” nor “an entirely malleable construction in the present.” Third—and this will echo the first two principles—“memory is a process and not a thing, a faculty rather than a place.”54 As process, memory refers to the representation and commemoration of the past in interactions between individuals and groups, and our analyses must account for memory-as-interaction. Conflict, however, is not the only mode of social interaction, and the politics of memory, as Schwartz reminded us earlier, will need to differentiate whether official images of the past express wider or narrower ideological interests. Meyer, following Halbwachs, might be correct that “remembrance of the past is impossible without current interests,”55 but we should also recognize that current interests are themselves constituted by and perceived with reference to established images of the past. With these qualifications in mind, we ought nevertheless to recognize that different groups remember the past differently, and they compete for the privilege of defining the past’s images and lessons. The past offers very powerful resources for defining identity in the present and orientation toward the future. Alan Kirk rightly notes, “[t]he past is appropriated to legitimize particular sociopolitical goals and ideologies and to mobilize action in accord with these goals.”56 The politics of memory becomes especially visible in the selection, arrangement, and interpretation of historical events and figures. The obvious fact is that history—in the sense of the raw, uninterpreted flow of events—comprises more information (events, figures, etc.) than any historical narrative can include. To speak of the past necessarily means to narrate some things and to omit others, to mention some figures and to ignore others. The decisions— conscious or otherwise—about what and whom to include and exclude are inherently ideological, as evidenced both in traditional American history textbooks that emphasize the role of social elites (especially white males) and their contemporary counterparts that intentionally feature contributions of ethnic and religious minorities and women. Historical narratives and images only ever present a partial reality; they cannot present reality in toto. The “truth,” therefore, of every historical narrative is only partial truth, and an alternative selection of facts and narrative emplotments could conceivably Ibid., 158–59; the rest of this paragraph quotes p. 159. In 2004, Jeffrey Olick addressed the Social Scientific Criticism of the New Testament section at the SBL Annual Meeting. His paper, later published as “Products, Processes, and Practices: A Non-Reificatory Approach to Collective Memory,” BTB 36 (2006): 5–14, similarly argued for “a ‘practice’ approach to collective memory.” 55 Meyer, “Memory and Politics,” 177. 56 Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 12. 53 54 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 355 legitimize different sociopolitical goals and ideologies and mobilize different action toward those goals.57 Selection and emplotment, however, are not the only means of bending the past to the will of the present. Nachman Ben-Yehuda identifies three empirical patterns of distorting history for present interests: (i) the omission of inconvenient facts, (ii) the exaggeration or manipulation of useful details, and (iii) the wholesale invention/ fabrication of details.58 In general terms, these discontinuities cohere with Schwartz’s synthetic model of collective memory: “As each generation modifies the beliefs presented by previous generations, there remains an assemblage of old beliefs coexisting with the new, including old beliefs about the past itself.”59 The past is reconstructed in the present, yes; but the past is also retained in the present because the remembering present is itself constituted by the past it seeks to remember. We have only begun to scratch the surface of social memory studies; we have not even mentioned a number of central issues in the study of memory that could richly inform Pauline studies, including, among others, commemorative rituals, tradition, communicative media, and social structures. Our focus on the dialectical, mutually constitutive relationship between past and present has, I think, introduced the foundational issue in social memory studies, which scholars can then work out in other areas. Part II. The Ethnic Past in the Present of Paul’s Gentile Communities The entanglement of past and present in Paul presents especially complicated challenges. While we could turn to a number of difficult issues in the Pauline corpus (the interpretation/use of Scripture, the interpretation/use of Jesus tradition, Paul and Judaism/Torah, and so on), we will examine Paul’s approach to the conversion of Gentiles, the transformation of their ethnic identity from former (ποτέ, pote) Gentiles to descendants (σπέρμα, sperma) of Abraham. Already, we find ourselves at a disadvantage when we go looking for Paul’s approach to conversion. As historians and commentators, we have inherited a strong tradition of dichotomizing Paul and his Jewish identity. Even when we have recognized that Paul was and remained a Jew, we often continue to dichotomize Paul’s Gentile communities and Jewish identity. Paul emphatically denies that his Gentile readers should “become Jews,” especially by submitting to circumcision, and he positively bristles at any suggestion to the contrary. In this vein, references to Paul’s “law-free gospel,” which are common enough in the literature, implicitly at least suggest that Paul summons his Gentile audiences around the eastern Mediterranean (and in Rome) with a message that stands at fundamental Ben-Yehuda, Masada Myth, 276. Ben-Yehuda briefly discusses the issue of “historical sequencing” (viz. the emplotment of history as narrative) on pp. 277–79. 58 See ibid., 299–301. 59 Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory,” 234. 57 356 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD odds with the laws, customs, and/or traditions of the Jewish people. Love Sechrest has recently engaged a survey of race and ethnicity—primarily as evidenced in the use of the Greek words for “nation” (ἔθνος, ethnos) and “race/kind” (γένος, genos)—in Jewish and non-Jewish authors in the first centuries BCE and CE, arguing that Paul no longer thinks of ethnic Jews who follow Jesus as still being “Jews.”60 If Jewish followers of Jesus no longer count, in Paul’s mind, as Jews, Paul’s Gentile converts certainly do not. Joshua Garroway, on the other hand, has recently argued, “GentileChristians of the first century should in fact be considered Jews, at least to some extent.”61 This last caveat, of course, gets tricky quickly. Social memory theory provides a useful set of resources to help illumine the ethnic dynamics of Paul’s message.62 In his discussion of identity in Romans,63 Christopher Zoccali concludes: “the community of righteous ones necessarily consists of both Jews qua Jews and gentiles qua gentiles, who thereby share Abraham as father and exemplar of group identity.”64 He calls this identity (i.e. “descendants of Abraham”) a “superordinate group” identity, which Paul defines in terms of Abraham’s πίστις, pistis, his “faithful response to God’s promise and the fulfilment of this promise found in the multi-ethnic Christ community.”65 As a superordinate identity, descent from Abraham “promote[s] a ‘common ingroup identity’…while simultaneously maintaining the salience of subgroup identities.”66 The “subgroup identities” in question, of course, are “Jew” and “Gentile.” Paul maintains a basic ethnic distinction between Jews and non-Jews even as he grafts the latter into Abraham’s family tree, fusing them into one.67 See Love L. Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race, LNTS 410 (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 150–51. 61 Joshua D. Garroway, Paul’s Gentile-Jews: Neither Jew Nor Gentile, But Both (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1. 62 Pace Orrey McFarland (“Whose Abraham, Which Promise? Genesis 15.6 in Philo’s De Virtutibus and Romans 4,” JSNT 35 [2012]: 108), who thinks Paul sees Abraham “as the first of a non-ethnically determined group” (my emphasis). Caroline Johnson Hodge (If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]) has shown how Paul’s discourse creates rather than erases ethnic ties. 63 The processes of social memory and social identity, as subsets within the larger problem of the sociology of knowledge, are mutually entangled and can be brought to bear on one another (see, e.g., our earlier references to Richard Jenkins’s work on social identity). For the application of social memory and identity theories to a biblical text, see Coleman A. Baker, Identity, Memory, and Narrative in Early Christianity: Peter, Paul, and Recategorization in the Book of Acts (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011). 64 Christopher Zoccali, “Children of Abraham, the Restoration of Israel and the Eschatological Pilgrimage of the Nations: What Does It Mean for ‘In Christ’ Identity?,” in T&T Clark Handbook to Social Identity in the New Testament, ed. J. Brian Tucker and Coleman A. Baker (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 270; my emphasis. 65 Zoccali, “Children of Abraham,” 270–71. 66 Ibid., 258; citing Philip F. Esler, Conflict and Identity in Romans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 143–44. 67 Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 109–13, nicely expresses both the similarities (= fusion) and the differences (= distinction) between the circumcision of ethnic Jewish Christ-followers and the “circumcision” of Paul’s “Gentile-Jews.” 60 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 357 Zoccali, unfortunately, does not raise the question how Paul grafts non-Jews into Abraham’s family, apart from the general and undefined principle of pistis and, somehow, being ἐκ πίστεως Ἀβραάμ, ek pisteōs Abraam (Rom 4:16). Being ek pisteōs Abraam had at one point meant “full Torah submission in the era beginning with ‘Moses’,” but such significance has now become obsolete and “requires first and foremost acceptance of [Christ], his death and resurrection.”68 Joshua Jipp defines Abraham’s pistis in terms of Isaac’s conception and birth: “according to Paul’s reading of Genesis, Abraham did not receive Isaac through circumcision or anything else which could be characterized as κατὰ σάρκα (4.1). Isaac’s birth was a result, rather, of divine promise and Abraham’s faithful response to the promise.”69 This identification, however, makes problematic Jipp’s earlier claim that “Paul’s audience is…identified not simply as those who imitate, but as those who participate in their representative founder’s own faithfulness.”70 I am not sure what it would mean for Paul’s audience to “participate in” Isaac’s conception and/or birth, unless Jipp means that Abraham’s procreative act led, ultimately, to the messiah kata sarka (Rom 9:5) and, through him, to the life Paul’s converts receive “in Christ.” The relationship between Abraham, pistis, and Paul’s Gentile readers in Rome still requires some explanation.71 Stanley Stowers points in a helpful direction: “[Romans] asks how families of people establish a kinship with God and with one another. Jews inherit a status as God’s children (literally ‘sons’) from generation to generation; other peoples do not.”72 Ethnic Jews, in other words, inherit descent from Abraham κατὰ σάρκα, kata sarka (see Rom 4:1),73 by virtue of their birth, putatively, from an unbroken line of Abraham’s physical descendants.74 Gentiles, individuals to whom this putative ancestry is by definition off-limits, must be reckoned “sons” via another route.75 This Zoccali, “Children of Abraham,” 269. Joshua W. Jipp, “Rereading the Story of Abraham, Isaac, and ‘Us’ in Romans 4,” JSNT 32 (2009): 238. 70 Ibid., 233. 71 I follow those who have noted that Romans as a text “explicitly addresses itself only to gentiles and nowhere explicitly encodes a Jewish audience”; see Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 21–33 (p. 30 quoted); see also Runar M. Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography, ConBNT 40 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003), 87–122; A. Andrew Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); idem, “The Gentile-Encoded Audience of Romans: The Church Outside the Synagogue,” in Reading Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. Jerry L. Sumney, RBS 73 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 29–46. 72 Stowers, Rereading of Romans, 227. 73 Robert Jewett (Romans, Hermeneia [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007], 308) wrongly reads kata sarka negatively. See Rom 1:3; 9:3, 5 (Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 110–11, helpfully discusses these verses and others like them). 74 Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25: “[I]t must be the myth of shared descent which ranks paramount among the features that distinguish ethnic from other social groups, and, more often than not, it is proof of descent that will act as a defining criterion of ethnicity.” 75 I am not sure why Edward Adams (“Abraham’s Faith and Gentile Disobedience: Textual Links Between Romans 1 and 4,” JSNT 65 [1997]: 62) thinks that, “by adding the words κατὰ σάρκα” in Rom 4:1, Paul “signals at the outset that this level of understanding of Abraham is going to be increasingly put into the shade as the argument proceeds.” If, as Adams has just claimed, 4:1 carefully introduces Abraham as “the 68 69 358 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD is the fundamental problem with which Paul must wrestle, especially if, as Joshua Garroway argues, Paul’s Gentile readers, qua Gentiles, nevertheless “became Jews.” “In virtually one breath…Paul describes his charges in both Jewish and Gentile terms. Somehow or another, it seems, they are Gentiles and Jews.”76 The “other route” to Abrahamic descent, according to the many (most?) Jews, involved observing practices enjoined in Torah, especially circumcision.77 Judaism in the Hasmonean era began to reconfigure what it meant to be a Ioudaios, to privilege ideas of politeia (“citizenship” or “way of life”) over ideas of genealogical descent.78 Judaism, to use Matthew Thiessen’s word, became a “choice,” and in this conception circumcision came to hold “conversionistic significance.”79 Not all Jews, however, accepted that Gentiles could “choose” to become Jews and, by undergoing circumcision, be made into sons of Abraham. “Even in the Second Temple period, many Jews continued to define Jewishness in genealogical terms, refusing to view circumcision as a ritual remedy for the deficits of a Gentile identity.”80 Paul of Tarsus, for example, clearly did not accept that Gentiles should be circumcised. Those Gentiles who did undergo circumcision found themselves obligated to observe the whole Torah (Gal 5:3), a position that Paul strictly and starkly differentiates from any benefit to being “in Christ” (see Gal 5:2). Paul, however, did not therefore agree with the author of Jubilees that “conversion was impossible,”81 that “anyone who is born whose own flesh is not circumcised on the eighth day is not from the sons of the covenant which the L made for 82 Abraham since (he is) from the children of destruction” (Jub. 15:26). Instead, despite agreeing that Torah-observance by Gentiles was a non-starter, Paul goes on to identify a different “other route,” one he calls “the promise” (ἡ ἐπαγγελία, hē epangelia; see swears to provide for the aged Abraham “a great nation” of Rom 4:13–21).83 Y descendants (Gen 12:2 LXX). When YHWH promises to make Abraham’s “reward” exceedingly great (Gen 15:1 LXX), Abraham understands this reward as the provision of children and questions the Lord precisely on the basis that he continues childless (Gen 15:2 LXX).84 YHWH responds to Abraham’s challenge by explicitly affirming that “one who will come forth from you” would be his heir and that, through Abraham’s direct issue, his descendants would be innumerable, as the stars in the Jewish patriarch” (italics in the original), the addition of κατὰ σάρκα hardly signals a gradual diminution of the “fleshly” “level of understanding.” 76 Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 3; emphasis in the original. 77 See, e.g., Jdt 14:10; Philo, QE 2.2; Josephus, J.W. 2.454; Ant. 20.43–45; see also Acts 15:1–5. 78 Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, HCS 31 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 125–29. 79 Matthew Thiessen, Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5. 80 Ibid., 143. 81 Ibid., 85. 82 See O. S. Wintermute’s translation in OTP, 2:35–142. For a discussion of Jub. 15:25–34, see Thiessen, Contesting Conversion, 73–78. 83 See Jipp, “Rereading,” 233–34; Jewett, Romans, 325. 84 “And Abram said, ‘Since you have not given me an heir, my male house-slave will be my heir’” (Gen 15:3 LXX). PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 359 heavens. “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness” (Gen 15:6 LXX). God repeats and seals this promise in Gen 17, vowing to multiply Abraham greatly (Gen 17:2 LXX). “And I—behold, my covenant shall be with you, and you shall be the father of a host of nations. And no longer shall your name be called ‘Abram,’ but your name shall be ‘Abraham,’ because I have set you to be the father of many nations” (Gen 17:4–5 LXX).85 YHWH seals this promise with the sign of circumcision on the eighth day (Gen 17:12 LXX). In fact, references to Abraham’s descendants (σπέρμα, sperma) are more tightly clustered in Gen 17 than in any previous chapter; in other words, Gen 17 is the climax of God’s oath to Abraham for prodigious progeny and emphatically enjoins the observance of the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision on that progeny. Jipp rightly recognizes that this close association between the Abrahamic sperma and the sign of circumcision presents problems for Paul’s reading of the Abraham story.86 Jipp’s reading of Rom 4, however, suffers two flaws. First, despite rightly highlighting Stowers’s work on diatribe, Jipp has thoroughly cast Rom 4 in terms of Paul’s polemical response to “multiple charges” against his gospel by the rhetorical interlocutor.87 Stowers, however, locates the origins of the diatribe in the philosophical school; “censure is not an aspect of real inquiry, but an attempt to expose specific errors in thought and behavior so that the student can be led to another doctrine of life.”88 Diatribe is a pedagogical tool with which a teacher instructs a student rather than a polemical tool with which a disputant debates an opponent. Paul, therefore, is not defending his gospel against the interlocutor’s charges but rather instructing the interlocutor (and, indirectly, his encoded readers, whom the interlocutor represents89). Second, Jipp rightly recognizes the surprise of Paul’s direct quotation of Gen 17:5 in Rom 4:17, but he cannot explain either why Paul should cite the very passage that links the Abrahamic promise with the “eternal covenant” of circumcision (Gen 17:13) or even why Paul should want to disassociate circumcision from the Abrahamic promise in the first place.90 Given Gen 17’s repeated injunctions for Abraham’s sperma to circumcise their sons on the eighth day as an eternal covenant,91 Paul’s N. T. Wright (“Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4,” JSNT 35 [2013]: 207–41) argues Paul has all of Gen 15 in view. Paul, however, has more than Gen 15 in mind; see his quotations of Gen 17:5 (Rom 4:17) and Ps 32:1–2 (Rom 4:6–8). Wright goes on to identify “echoes” of Gen 18 and 22 in Rom 4:13. See also Mark Forman, “The Politics of Promise: Echoes of Isaiah 54 in Romans 4.19–21,” JSNT 31 (2009): 301–24. 86 Jipp, “Rereading,” 234. 87 Ibid., 218; see also pp. 225, 226, as well as Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 256–57. 88 Stanley K. Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans, SBLDS 57 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 77; see Rafael Rodríguez, If You Call Yourself a Jew: Reappraising Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 36–37. 89 See Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor, 140–45. 90 Jipp implies that Paul cited Gen 17:5 because his opponents stressed the association of the promise for sperma with circumcision: Paul had to answer for this association and provide an alternate explanation for the promise’s fulfillment (see Jipp, “Rereading,” 234–35). As we have seen, however, the rhetoric of diatribe does not counter charges but rather instructs pupils. 91 See Gen 17:7, 13; see also 17:8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 19, 21. 85 360 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD disjunction of circumcision and the promise of progeny becomes inexplicable.92 All we can hope to explain is how—but not why—Paul disjoins them. Jipp has helpfully demonstrated that Paul uncouples the prospect of becoming a descendant of Abraham from circumcision. The question remains: Why does a Jew like Paul categorically reject the “eternal covenant” of circumcision for his readers? Paul’s encoded readers provide the key: writing to Gentiles in Rome, Paul rejects any notion that his Gentile readers must be circumcised in order to become descendants of Abraham.93 Garroway goes so far as to suggest that, for Paul, “faith makes observing the righteous decrees of the Law possible for Gentiles and enables Gentiles to be reckoned as though they are circumcised, whether or not they really are!”94 Paul is not addressing the question how Abraham became the father of Isaac (and, from Isaac, Israel and the Jews); that question runs directly through Gen 17 and the covenantal seal of circumcision. We should not be surprised to find, when we look more closely, that Paul does not actually undermine circumcision as the seal of the Abrahamic covenant and the sign of Isaac’s (and through him, Israel’s) chosen status as the “child of promise” (see Gen 17:19, 24–26; 21:4 LXX); Paul, under the “inertial pull” of the past,95 continued to identify eighth-day circumcision as the sign of Abraham’s descendants through the line of Isaac. Instead, in the immediately preceding paragraph to his discussion of the Abrahamic promise (Rom 4:13–21), Paul focuses his interlocutor’s attention narrowly on the status of Abraham’s prepuce when he received the blessing from God. Paul asks his interlocutor: “This blessing, then, was it upon his [= Abraham’s] circumcision or even upon his foreskin? For we say, ‘His faith was reckoned to Abraham unto righteousness’ (Gen 15:6). How, then, was it reckoned? While he was circumcised? Or while he retained his foreskin?” (Rom 4:9–10a). The interlocutor answers, “Not while he was circumcised; rather, while he retained his foreskin” (Rom 4:10b). Paul then proceeds to explain the virtue of circumcision: circumcision is the seal of the righteousness that had already been reckoned to Abraham.96 Paul’s conclusion is not that Abraham’s children do not need to be circumcised; after all, circumcision is an “eternal covenant” to be observed “throughout their generations,”97 and Paul himself emphasizes Abraham’s circumcision in the latter’s paternity over at least the circumcised Jews who follow in Abraham’s faithfulness (Rom 4:12).98 Paul’s conclusion, rather, is that not all Abraham’s children need be physically circumcised, that Gentiles who are not able to observe the law of circumcision (because they are older than eight Thomas Schreiner (Romans, BECNT [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998], 210) too comfortably dismisses circumcision as “dispensable” (see also pp. 224–26) something one (including Paul) could not say on any serious reading of Gen 17. 93 See n. 71, above. 94 Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 107; my emphasis; see also idem, “The Circumcision of Christ: Romans 15.7–13,” JSNT 34 (2012): 303–22. 95 Schudson, “Present in the Past,” 111. 96 Jewett, Romans, 318–19. 97 See n. 91, above. 98 See Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 108–9. 92 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 361 days)99 nevertheless can claim Abrahamic descent, if they “believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (4:24), just as Abraham had believed could restore life to his lifeless body and Sarah’s lifeless womb (4:19). Indeed, if Garroway is right, Paul thinks his readers’ Abrahamic faith becomes, in effect, the removal of their foreskin!100 In other words, in Rom 4 Paul instructs his interlocutor how God transforms Gentiles into Abraham’s descendants, a transformation that Paul likens to resurrection from the dead, whether Abraham’s (and Sarah’s; see Rom 4:19–21) or Jesus’ (Rom 4:24–25). The emphasis on how is intentional. Commentators often discuss Rom 4 as if Paul were arguing, against the weight of Jewish tradition, that Gentiles could become children of Abraham.101 The point in Rom 4, however, is not that but rather how God transforms Gentiles into descendants for Abraham. This point holds particular relevance for a non-Jewish interlocutor who, like the Gentile king Izates, desired to become a Jew and identified circumcision as the conversionistic rite par excellence to effect that change.102 Runar Thorsteinsson has argued that this, in fact, is exactly how Paul introduces his interlocutor in Rom 2.103 Joshua Garroway goes so far as to argue, and not without merit, “Paul declares that ‘the circumcision’ of Abraham actually includes those Gentiles who have emulated the faith Abraham exhibited prior to his circumcision. In other words, Paul is suggesting that uncircumcised Gentiles are in fact circumcised!”104 If we use Shaye Cohen’s criteria for conversion to Judaism (practice of Jewish customs, exclusive devotion to the Jewish God, and integration into the Jewish community) as a reference point, we see that, in fact, Paul conforms exactly to this traditional pattern of conversion. The point bears repeating: Whatever innovations Paul introduces into his Jewish heritage and, specifically, the available patterns of conversion he inherited from that heritage, he also stands squarely within his tradition and continues to think in its categories.105 Despite the popularity of images of Paul as a radical innovator vis-à-vis his native Judaism and its view of Gentiles, Paul shows evidence of the “obduracy of the past” (see above) in his indebtedness to established symbolic frameworks that foster traditional meanings even in the face of new experiences. First, regarding practice of Jewish customs, Paul expects his Gentile readers to follow the example of Abraham’s pistis, his “faithfulness” (Rom 4:16), which clearly has moral and volitional significance and does not refer merely to a cognitive or See Thiessen, Contesting Conversion. See Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 106–9. 101 Examples are ubiquitous among the commentaries; see, for example, Moo, Romans, 256: “Paul shows that the ‘reckoning’ of Abraham’s faith for righteousness took place before he was circumcised, thereby enabling him to become the ‘father’ of both Jewish and Gentile believers” (my emphasis). 102 See Josephus, Ant. 20.34–48. 103 See Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor. 104 Garroway, Gentile-Jews, 83–84; italics in the original. 105 The phrase “available patterns of conversion” recalls Michael Schudson’s phrase, “available past” and the ways the available past constrains reconfigurations of the past in the present (Schudson, “Present in the Past,” 109, cited above). 99 100 362 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD mental trait.106 Romans refers on more than one occasion to Gentiles who “do Torah” (2:14), “keep Torah’s just requirements” (2:26), and even, by loving their neighbor, “have fulfilled Torah” (13:8, 10; see Gal 5:14). Even though Paul adamantly rejects that Gentiles must be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses,107 he just as clearly reorients his Gentile readers’ ethic “in Christ” toward Torah.108 Second, regarding exclusive devotion to the Jewish God, Paul clearly, explicitly, and repeatedly enjoins not just monotheism but worship specifically of the God revealed in Torah (see Rom 1:2–3; 3:21; 9:4–5; 10:4, 6–12, and passim). Third, regarding integration into the Jewish community, Paul clearly, explicitly, and repeatedly enjoins the unity of the body of Christ even as he maintains differences among its members. Paul’s use of inclusive language, specifically the first-person plural pronouns in Rom 4:23–25, unites ethnic Jews and “Gentile-Jews” in one body and actualizes the reality of Paul’s earlier portrayal of Abraham as “the father of us all” (Rom 4:16). Whatever discussion might be necessary regarding our classification of the ekklēsia as a “Jewish community,” Paul clearly expects that Gentile converts will be fully integrated into the ekklēsia as full (and not as second-class) members. Despite the similarities we have noted between Paul’s and other Jews’ handling of the conversion and integration of non-Jews into the Jewish community, obvious differences remain. The most glaring difference, of course, is Paul’s stance on the circumcision of non-Jews. Paul opposed the circumcision of Gentiles as a conversionist ritual. We should not imagine, however, Paul was the only Jew to reject that Gentiles should be circumcised and could thereby become Jews. Matthew Thiessen has adduced a number of voices from the Second Temple era that, like Paul, reject the idea that Gentiles should or even could submit to circumcision and become Jews.109 Paul agrees with the former view (Gentiles should not submit to circumcision); he disagrees with the latter (that Gentiles could not become Jews [= descendants of Abraham]). Even here, however, where Paul’s views are thought to be the most radical—even the allegorical exegete, Philo, did not spiritualize away circumcision as a physical rite—we find Paul taking social and ideological stances that make sense within broader discursive patterns among Hellenistic- and Roman-era Jews. This brings us to our final observation. Many—perhaps even most—Jews in the late Second Temple era identified circumcision as at least part of the process whereby non-Jews could become Jews. A circumcised Gentile may not have been reckoned a Jew automatically, but a Gentile who wanted to become a Jew would certainly Stowers, Rereading of Romans, 228; Zoccali, “Children of Abraham,” 262–63, 269. See Luke’s portrayal of Paul in Acts 15:1–5, which reflects well the Paul of Galatians even if historians struggle to reconcile the events of Paul’s [auto]biography in these two texts. 108 See Brian Rosner’s helpful discussion of Torah-ethics under the rubric of wisdom (“re-appropriation of the Law as wisdom”), in Paul and the Law: Keeping the Commandments of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013). 109 Space prevents us from discussing Thiessen’s examples, which include the translator of Genesis LXX and the author of Jubilees; see Thiessen, Contesting Conversion; idem, “Paul’s So-Called Jew and Lawless Lawkeeping,” in The So-Called Jew in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, ed. Rafael Rodríguez and Matthew Thiessen (Minneapolis: Fortress, forthcoming). 106 107 PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 363 encounter at some point the expectation that he be circumcised.110 Paul’s insistence that non-Jews not be circumcised leaves open the question: How ought Gentiles who convert to Paul’s form of Judaism—upon which history would look back and say, “This is Christianity”—experience Judaism’s heritage, what Josephus calls “the ancestral customs of the Jews” (Ant. 20.41)? We can only suggest an answer: Paul expects his Gentile converts to shed their non-Jewish past and to identify with Israel’s history and story. Schwartz’s double model of “keying” appears nicely suggestive, according to which Abraham becomes a mirror reflecting Paul’s Gentile converts back to them (= Abraham as model of Paul’s Gentile converts), a template giving shape to their present experiences and animating behavior in response to those experiences, and a frame contextualizing those experiences, within which they find meaning (= Abraham as model for Paul’s Gentile converts). Being “in Christ,” which Paul describes as being “a new creation” (2 Cor 5:17), involves a radical discontinuity with his Gentile converts’ past.111 To effect this discontinuity, Paul maps the narrative stretching from Abraham to Jesus onto his Gentile converts so that they are now constituted by a new (hi)story, a new past, a new frame. Social memory research, which highlights “the present in the past [and] the past in the present,”112 is especially well disposed to exploring the dynamics of this narratival reconfiguration and, as a necessary consequence, the transformation of Paul’s converts’ identity in the present. These are sociological questions as much as they are theological questions, and exploring them in social terms will shed additional light on the Pauline communities of Gentile followers of Jesus throughout the Roman Empire. Paying attention to Paul’s and his readers’ (and his opponents’!) “fluid negotiation between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past” can help us locate Paul and his followers as they carved out socially meaningful spaces for themselves in the complex flux of the Greco-Roman world.113 Part III. Other Relevant “Pauline” Texts The peculiar focus of the present essay (vis-à-vis the other essays in these volumes) means this section will look a little different. Social memory is not a topic to be See, again, Acts 15.1–5, as well as Josephus, Ant. 20.43–46. Michele Murray (Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries CE [Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004]) argues that Gentiles who had judaized exerted pressure upon other Gentiles to do the same. 111 Recall our earlier admission: “Certainly radical breaks and unexpected events within the ‘sequence’ or ‘branching tree’ of history are possible. The point, however, is that radical breaks and unexpected events are not the norm, and even when they occur they are not usually completely radical or unexpected.” This statement could be productively unpacked with respect to Paul, his Gentile converts, and the relation of both to diaspora Judaism. 112 See Schudson, “Present in the Past.” 113 Olick, “From Collective Memory,” 159. 110 364 PAUL IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD studied in (or through) Paul’s letters; neither is it a method to be applied to them. Social memory is a theoretical perspective that puts us at a new angle relative to the Pauline tradition to see Paul and images of Paul from a different point of view. In this sense, all of Paul’s letters—both the undisputed Hauptbriefe and the deutero-Pauline letters—as well as Luke’s portrayal of Paul are ripe for analysis from perspectives informed by social memory research. On the basis of our discussion thus far, I imagine a close reading of Paul’s allegorical reading of Sarah and Hagar in Gal 4:21–31 would pay nice dividends. On the other hand, reading Philippians, which never explicitly refers to scriptural texts or narratives, with an eye out for how Paul maps Israel’s history onto his Gentile readers might produce radically different results. Even so, as Paul exhorts his Philippian readers to a politeia centered on Christ and his example (Phil 1:27—2:11), readers with ears to hear may pick up a number of significant echoes of Scripture. Another “Pauline” text is relevant here: Eph 2:11–22. Texts outside the Pauline corpus also offer some promise, including Luke’s portrayal of Paul’s ministry in synagogues across the Roman Empire (see, inter alia, Acts 13:13–52; 18:1–11), especially in comparison with Paul’s ministry among Gentiles (e.g. Acts 14:8–18; 17:18–34). Similarly, 1 Peter is often described as having Pauline overtones and, like most (all?) of Paul’s letters, is written to a Gentile audience; this letter also maps an Israelite history onto its readers, describing them as “chosen sojourners in the diaspora” (1 Pet 1:1) and incorporating them, like Eph 2, into the imagery of the temple at Zion (1 Pet 2:1–10). All of these texts (and certainly others) have some potential for helping us place Paul and other early followers of Jesus within the broader discourse about conversion in the GrecoRoman world. Part IV. For Further Reading Esler, Philip F. “Paul’s Contestation of Israel’s (Ethnic) Memory of Abraham in Galatians 3.” BTB 36 (2006): 23–34. Fine, Gary Alan. Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ———Sticky Reputations: The Politics of Collective Memory in Midcentury America. New York: Routledge, 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Keightley, Georgia Masters. “Christian Collective Memory and Paul’s Knowledge of Jesus.” Pages 129–50 in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. Edited by Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher. SemeiaSt 52. Atlanta: SBL, 2005. ———“The Church’s Memory of Jesus: A Social Science Analysis of 1 Thessalonians.” BTB 17 (1987): 149–56. Kirk, Alan, and Tom Thatcher, eds. Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. SemeiaSt 52. Atlanta: SBL, 2005. PAUL AND SOCIAL MEMORY 365 Olick, Jeffrey K. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 333–48. ———“From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” Pages 151–61 in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Edited by Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. ———“Products, Processes, and Practices: A Non-Reificatory Approach to Collective Memory.” BTB 36 (2006): 5–14. Rodríguez, Rafael. Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text. European Studies on Christian Origins, LNTS 407. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. Schudson, Michael. “The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present.” Communication 11 (1989): 105–13. Schwartz, Barry. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late TwentiethCentury America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———“Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington.” American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 221–36. Thatcher, Tom, ed. Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: A Conversation with Barry Schwartz. SemeiaSt 78. Atlanta: SBL, 2014. White, Benjamin L. 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