The opening question in Gal 4:21: “you who want to be under the Law, do you not hear the law,” is a call to adopt the right interpretative practice in order to relate rightly to the Mosaic Law (see 2.2). What follows from this question is crucial for capturing Paul's hermeneutical strategy, since Paul goes on to model the hermeneutic he wants his readers to adopt (cf. 4:12).633 Paul's explicit statement about his own practice being
allegorical (4:24) provides the entry point for analysing his hermeneutic here.
Boyarin has argued that Paul's allegorical mode of reading Scripture is indicative of his theological programme (see 1.1.5). Boyarin's Paul has a Hellenistic vision that is predicated on the flesh-spirit duality, where the body is particular but spirit universal.634
Similarly, Boyarin claims that Paul's hermeneutic is dualistic, and thus allegorical; language is composed of outer material signs (signifiers) and inner spiritual
significations.635 Although Boyarin’s construction of Paul’s hermeneutic would apply
better to Philo than to Paul, I begin my discussion on Paul's allegoresis from his claims. Boyarin understands Paul's allegorical interpretation as a movement away from the level of the text (signifier) to a reality beyond it (signified). This is in sharp contrast with his understanding of the Rabbinic mode of interpretation (midrash). The contrast Boyarin sets up between these two modes of interpretation is a helpful analytical tool
633 Cf. Watson: “he is inviting them to participate with him in a responsible interpretation of this [Genesis] text” (PHF, 190).
634 Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 7. 635 Ibid.
for approaching the nature of Paul's allegorical practice. Boyarin claims that Rabbinic midrash is intertextual rather than allegorical.636 In other words, midrash is an
intertextual reading that makes meaning on the level of texts rather than using the text(s) as a pointer to meaning on another level:
what characterizes midrash is an understanding of interpretation not as the translating of a text to a higher or deeper level of signification, or, to use a different metaphor, the pairing of a signifier with a signified, but rather, as the laying bare of an intertextual connection between two signifiers which mutually read each other.637
Boyarin connects the Rabbinic preference for intertextuality over allegory to the status of the Torah as the ultimate reference point: “[f]or the Rabbis of the midrash, the highest reality, other than God Himself, of course, is the Torah – that is, a text, not an abstract idea.”638 However, a more nuanced understanding of the concept of the Torah in
Rabbinic interpretation actually opens the idea of intertextuality in ways that resemble Paul's allegorical practice.
Bruns asserts that midrash is engaged in contemporising the Torah: “[t]he sense of Torah is the sense in which it applies to the life and conduct of those who live under its power;” and “[t]he text is always contemporary with its readers or listeners, that is, always oriented towards the time and circumstances of the interpreter.”639 This results in
the extension of the concept of the Torah to include the interpretative community and its traditions:
[t]he word Torah, and therefore its power and authority, extends itself to include not only the original books of Moses but also the Mishnah, the Talmuds and Aggadot as well. In other words, the Torah is constituted as an open canon. To be sure, the letters of the original scriptures are fixed, but they are not dead. Openness here has to be construed as the openness of what is written; that is, its applicability to the time of its interpretation, its need for actualization.640
The openness in the “canon” of the Torah extends the intertextual field of Rabbinic interpretation to encompass not only the text of Scripture (Books of Moses, the Prophets and Writings), but also the Rabbinic dialogue – “the traditions of the fathers.” This is an important qualifier to Boyarin's insistence that midrash does not move beyond the text. The intertextual practice of midrash moves beyond the field of Scripture, since the
636 Daniel Boyarin, “The Song of Songs: Lock or Key? Intertextuality, Allegory and Midrash,” in
The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina M. Schwartz (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1990), 226. 637 Ibid., 223.
638 Boyarin, “The Song of Songs: Lock or Key?,” 226.
639 Gerald L. Bruns, “The Hermeneutics of Midrash,” in The Book and the Text, 191.
640 Ibid., 201. Not everyone agrees with this view, see e.g. Gary G. Porton, “Rabbinic Midrash,” in A
Rabbinic dialogue participates in some sense in the authority of the Torah. Bruns explains this in terms of the unity of the written and oral Torah:
[Rabbinic interpretations] are modes of participation in the dialogue with Torah, such that the words of the wise as they engage the Torah cannot be isolated from the words of Torah itself. Hence the rabbinic tradition – which perhaps extends all the way back to the Pharisees and beyond them to the priestly Ezra – concerning the unity of the written and oral Torah. The meaning and authority of the word Torah extends itself to include not only the original Pentateuch, followed by the Prophets and Writings, but also the Mishnah, the Talmudic commentaries on the Mishnah, and the whole tradition of midrash.641
These two moves in the Rabbinic interpretative practice (midrash) – the extension of the intertextual field and its predication on the contemporising drive – provide a point of comparison to analyse Paul's allegorical practice in Gal 4:21-5:1.
I argue that Paul's allegorical practice is essentially intertextual, but, as with the Rabbis, so also is Paul's intertextual interpretative field extended, and similarly
predicated on the need to contemporise. As we observe what Paul does after his initial question in Gal 4:21, we get a sense of how Paul extends the intertextual field. To counter the Galatians' desire to come “under the Law (no/moß),” Paul asks the Galatians to listen to what the “law” (no/moß) really says – to interpret it right (4:21).642 What
follows this question reveals how Paul extends the sphere of the “law.” For Paul, the second mention of “law” here is not simply a reference to the Torah, but a reference to the “intertextual field,” or “revelatory field,” in which he constructs meaning – the right understanding of the Law. Initially, it includes not only the books of Moses (Torah), but also the prophetic revelation in Isaiah (Isa 54:1 quoted in Gal 4:27).643 But even that is
not its limit. The totality of revelation that comprises the “law”644 is ultimately centred
641 Gerald L. Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,” in The
Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (London: Fontana, 1989), 632.
642 Many commentators note Paul's play with a double sense of no/moß here, and read it so that the first instance refers to the Mosaic legislation/commands of Scripture and the second either to the Pentateuch (e.g. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Exeter: Paternoster, 1982), 215; Moo, Galatians, 297; Rohde, an die Galater, 192–193), or to Scripture as a whole (e.g. de Boer, Galatians, 291; Longenecker, Galatians, 206–207; Vouga, An die Galater, 115). Martyn goes further in recognising that this is the first positive reference to the Law that reflects “Paul's conviction that with the advent of Christ the Law is revealed to be a complex entity (cf. Rom 3:21) having the voice with which it pronounces a curse (3:10), but having also the gospel voice with which it speaks God's promise (3:8, 11; 4:27; cf. 5:14; 6:2 ...)” (Galatians, 433). This is a good observation, but not a sufficient analysis of what follows. I suggest that the full sense of Paul's second use of no/moß here becomes clear only as we follow what he actually does. For discussion on the complexity in Paul's use of the term “no/moß,” see the two essays by Heikki Räisänen, “The ‘Law’ of Faith and the Spirit;” and “Paul’s Word-Play on ‘νόµος’: A Linguistic Study,” in Jesus, Paul and Torah: Collected Essays (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).
643 The extension of the Torah to include also prophetic revelation can already be perceived in the book of Isaiah (e.g. Isa 2 and 58).
on the reality of Christ that is signalled in the concluding exhortation of the passage (5:1) and eventually in reference to the “law” of Christ (6:2 no/moß touv Cristouv; cf. 1 Cor 9:21).645 Thus, Paul's allegoresis is intertextual, in which the intertextual revelatory
field (“no/moß”) is extended beyond the Scripture to include the revelatory experience of Christ.
When Paul expounds his allegorical other sense of Scripture (see 5.3 for discussion on 4:24 [a‚tina¿ e˙stin aÓllhgorou/mena]), he derives it from the extended revelatory field that he has come to embrace. In other words, Paul does not read the Abraham narrative only together with the Isaianic vision of restoration (4:27), but also in light of the generative activity of God in Christ (5:1) and the Spirit (4:29). Hence, Paul's hermeneutic has a dialogical dynamic between Scripture and experience (Paul's experience of the risen Jesus [1:1, 11-16] and the Spirit in the Gentile mission [3:1-5]), in which he reads Scripture within the total revelation of God that has at its gravitational centre the Christ-event. Paul believes that Scripture and the revelation of Christ belong to the same revelatory field. With this premise, he reads Scripture in light of Christ and interprets the Christ-event in light of Scripture.646 Both forms of revelation function as
signifiers that participate in the same divine reality.647
With this understanding of Paul's allegoresis, it is possible to argue that the resultant system (theology) in it is not heterogenous; it does not originate from or move God's revelation to God's people” (Paul Was Not a Christian, 168).
645 The expression “law of Christ” has generated multiple views for its meaning. For discussions on the wide range of possibilities (that are not mutually exclusive) and evaluation of them, see Barclay,
Obeying, 126–135; and de Boer, Galatians, 378–381. In his recent work, Barclay helpfully narrows the
options for understanding the relationship between the “law of Christ” and the Torah in terms of 1) the “law of Christ” is “an allusion to the Torah, reconfigured in Christ,” or 2) it represents a “Pauline wordplay, akin to his insistence in 1 Corinthians 9:20-21 that he is neither ‘under the law’ (uJpo\ no/mon) nor lawless in relation to God (a‡nomoß qeouv), but ‘lawfully beholden to Christ’ (e¶nnomoß Cristouv)” (Paul and the Gift, 431). I see value in both views. The first rightly recognises the hermeneutical impact of the Christ-event that maintains some level of continuity with the Torah (fulfilment) in the new reality brought about by the Christ-event. The second view rightly emphasises the centrality of Christ in Paul's theology and ethics. Additionally, Dunn argues that the “law of Christ” also refers to the influence of Jesus's own teaching and example concerning the Torah: “Paul drew his attitude to the law from Jesus. … And it was no doubt this teaching and that example which Paul had in mind when he spoke of the 'law of Christ (Gal 6.2).” (Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011], 114.) This is
historically plausible (Paul being aware of the Jesus tradition; cf. 1 Cor 11; 15), and complements my focus on the influence of the Christ-event reconfiguring Paul's understanding of the Law. It is also possible that the concept of the “law of Christ” has some roots in the matrix of Isaiah where it is the servant who becomes the law for the restored people (Isa 42:4), who are taught by God the new way of life in the “Jerusalem above” (Isa 2:3; 54:13).
646 Cf. Watson, PHF, 15–16.
647 Cf. Childs: “Scripture is a divine vehicle bearing testimony to theological reality. Its truth is thus not tied to its linguistic form, but it can be extended to embrace a fuller divine reality only partially manifested in the original form.” (The Church's Guide for Reading Paul: The Canonical Shaping of the
to alien terrain, as is the case arguably with Philo’s Hellenistic vision and Greek
philosophy. Instead, Paul's system is homogenous, because it emerges out of the matrix of divine revelation in Scripture and in Christ – both belong to the same world of thought. The difference from Rabbinic midrash is that Paul displaces Mosaic revelation from the centre of gravity by the revelation of Christ, and, rather than extending the intertextual field to include the “traditions of the fathers” (i.e. oral Torah and Rabbinic dialogue), it includes the experience of Christ and the Spirit to give a promise-fulfilment shape to the intertextual field of the “no/moß” (see Figure 2.). Furthermore, as I will demonstrate in 5.3-5 and ch. 6, Paul’s allegoresis is more ikonic than Philo’s, because the allegorical meaning is facilitated to a greater measure by the meaning potential in the Abraham narrative itself, especially as it is read within the enlarged intertextual field. Hence, convictions concerning the nature of the Christ-event ultimately determine whether Paul’s resultant system is homogenous or heterogenous with Israel’s scriptures.
Figure 2. The “intertextual fields” in Rabbinic midrash and Paul's allegoresis
Rabbinic midrash – the intertextual field Paul's allegoresis – the intertextual field
The extension of Paul's intertextual interpretative field stems from the necessity to contemporise. But unlike the open-endedness of the Rabbinic contemporising, or Philo’s universal contemporising, Paul operates more in the mode of Pesher that is associated with the Qumran community,648 in which “the text is related to one moment
only, a moment thought of as occurring near the end of time.”649 Paul's emphasis on the
648 For discussion on the different Jewish interpretive practices in the first century, see Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids / Vancouver: Eerdmans / Regent College Publishing, 1999 [first edition was published in 1975 by Eerdmans]), 6–35.
649 Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory” 634. Longenecker: “Qumran distinguishes itself from rabbinic interpretation, for while in the talmudic literature there is a contemporizing treatment of Holy Writ that seeks to make God's Word relevant to the present circumstances and ongoing situations, among the Dead
revelatory experience of Christ (aÓpoka/luyiß ΔIhsouv Cristouv) (1:11-16) is an
indication of his understanding of his place in time for hearing the Scripture. The cross and resurrection of Jesus form the nexus for the tension between the “present evil age” (1:4) and the “new creation” (6:14-15). The Christ-event has taken place, for Paul, at the “fullness of time” (4:4),650 and it occasions a turn in time that gives a new angle for
interpreting Scripture. Paul hears the Scripture now in the context of the in-breaking of the new creation that on one level (anthropology/cosmology) results in a sharp break between the new age and the present evil age (apocalyptic emphasis), but on an other level (divine action/purpose)651 retains a sense of continuity: the new is understood as a
fulfilment of the promises given in the old age (covenantal emphasis).652 Both the
Abrahamic promise of blessing to all nations (Gen 12:3; 22:18) and the Isaianic promise of restoration (Isa 54:1), envisaged as new creation (e.g. Isa 43; 54:11-12; 65), are now being realised in Christ and the Spirit (Gal 3:8, 14, 29; 4:4-7, 29; 5:1; 6:14-15). The alignment of Scripture and the experience of Christ and the Spirit is predicated on this perceived promise-fulfilment matrix.653 Since both the promise and its fulfilment are
configured as part of the same divine action, they are also part of the same divine revelatory field. The perception that the Christ-event participates in the same divine revelation that Paul attributes to Scripture is evidenced in the way Paul conflates time; the revelation of the gospel of Christ was already foreseen by Scripture (proiœdouvsa de« hJ grafh/), and pre-proclaimed (proeuhggeli÷sato) in the promise to Abraham (3:8). Time is not understood simply as linear historical progression; the past, present, and future can be conflated within the same divine reality, as the future gospel of Christ was already present in the past promise to Abraham.
Sea covenanters the biblical texts were looked on from the perspective of imminent apocalyptic fulfilment” (Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, 25).
650 Dunn understand the “fullness of time” with a covenantal emphasis as an “eschatological climax” (Galatians, 214), whereas Martyn takes it with an apocalyptic emphasis as indicating a “stepping on the scene” or a “punctiliar liberation” (Galatians, 389). These categories can be confusing, since both continuity and discontinuity are present in Paul on different levels (see discussion below).
651 I like Wischmeyer's preference for using the concept die Geschichte Gottes mit der Menschheit rather than Heilsgeschichte (“Wie kommt Abraham in den Galaterbrief?,” 135), because it captures better Paul's emphasis on divine action in the continuity of his purposes.
652 This is the essence of apocalyptic for Wright, who combines both the apocalyptic and the covenantal emphases in referring to the “apocalyptic nature of Paul's covenantal theology” (“Gospel and Theology in Galatians [1994],” 91). I agree with Wright that it is essential to understand that the coming of the new does not come out of the blue or to destroy everything old, but, as in Isaiah, the new creation is the fulfilment of God's covenantal promise (Ibid.).
653 Dawson's critique of Boyarin highlights that Boyarin misses Paul's insistence that the divine action in Christ accounts for the fulfilment of the divine promise in Scripture: “[w]hile ‘promise’ might describe the pledge of an agent to perform a future action, in Boyarin's reading it becomes a term used to denote the abstract meaning of a textual signifier” (John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and
Now that I have argued that Paul's allegorical mode is essentially intertextual, I further substantiate this claim by analysing how the intertexts lend themselves to Paul's allegorical application. I first consolidate the sense of the prefigurative potential in the Abraham narrative that emerged during my analysis in chapter three, and note the significance in Isaiah's re-appropriation of the pattern of the Abrahamic promise in its theological programme (5.3). This leads me to a discussion on how best to understand the hermeneutical role of the Isaianic vision of restoration in Paul's allegoresis (5.4-5).