Review

Reviewed Work(s): A Rereading of Romans. Justice, Jews, and Gentiles by Stanley K.

Stowers
Review by: John M. G. Barclay
Source: The Journal of Theological Studies, NEW SERIES, Vol. 46, No. 2 (OCTOBER 1995),
pp. 646-651
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 646 REVIEWS

{History{History of Educati
1956), xiv). As Robin Lan
(Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1986), 305), the Greek
educated reader of that world would have been impressed, not so
much by the familiarity of Luke's imitatio, as by the alien and
'impossibly barbarous' style of the literary model he chose.
So a detailed comparison between Luke-Acts and Pseudo-Philo
enables us to see that many of the narrative tactics by which Luke
transforms 'story' into 'history' can be paralleled exactly in the
LAB (p. 146). Yet, once the point is made, it does become neces
sary to look out again to the wider literary environment. Thus
Reinmuth notes that there are significant differences in narrative
texture between Luke's work and the LAB: 'Luke's narrative style
is overall more richly decorated, more detailed and more pictur
esque than that of Pseudo-Philo' (p. 143). It is natural here to
invoke the techniques of 'hellenistic narrative', specifically those
of the Greek novel (p. 143 with notes 1, 2): but an equally detailed
comparison with the Greek novel would, I suspect, highlight by
contrast the economy and spareness of Luke's narrative. Part of
the problem is that we need to be clear that we are comparing
like with like: Reinmuth's detailed linguistic analysis operates
chiefly at the level of 'discourse', whereas many of the novelistic
parallels noted by other critics operate at the level of 'story' or
motif. Another may be simply that we tend to work with a series
of one-to-one comparative analyses of Luke's work, and still await
an overall study (monumental in conception!) which would allow
us to take a longer view on his literary affinities. We can of course
simply learn to compromise by saying that Luke falls somewhere
between the the 'biblical' narrative of LAB and the 'hellenistic'
narrative of the novels: but it would be more illuminating, as well
as more precise, if we were in a position to show exactly how (for
example) Luke handles a romantic story-line with the narrative
techniques of the Bible—or should that be a biblical storyline
with the narrative techniques of romance? We are not yet in that
position: but as a step towards that ultimate goal, Reinmuth's
study must be seen as a significant contribution.
Loveday Alexander

A A A Rereading of Romans. Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. B

Stanley K. Stowers. Pp. χ+ 383. New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 1994· ISBN
0300053576. £25.
This is a bold book which maintains that Romans has been
consistently misread in the Christian tradition, and which attempts

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 REVIEWS 647

to recover its original me

own time could have read it' (p. 1). It is not clear how one is
meant to assess the complete range of possible first-century read
ings, but Stowers is convinced that he can exclude from that range
the notions of universal human sinfulness and salvation through
Christ for both Jews and Gentiles which Romans is usually under
stood to depict. In a running polemic against Augustine and post
Augustinian readings ('the ghost of Augustine lives on', p. 278),
he insists that Romans supports neither a Western individua
list line of interpretation nor any serious critique of Judaism. He
also claims that his 'rereading' saves Paul from inconsistency
and restores to the letter a coherence unnoticed by previous
interpreters.
The core elements in this rereading appear to be as follows, (a)
The letter throughout constructs its audience as Gentile and gives
no hint, either at 7: 1 or in chapters 14-15, that Jewish believers
are in view. (The Jews named in chapter 16 are strangely left out
of account, although that chapter is otherwise mined for informa
tion about the social status of the addressees). (b) At key points
in the letter Paul employs the figure of προσωποποιία (speech
in-character), by which he puts sentiments into another's mouth.
Stowers finds this not only in 7: 7-25 (which he takes to represent
the frustrations of a Gentile trying to keep the Jewish law), but
also in 2: 1 ff. (the boast of a Gentile) and in 2: 17 ff. (the claims
of a Jewish teacher of Gentiles—though this passage is addressed
to to such a figure, rather than spoken by him, and thus not strictly
speech-in-character). Supplementing his earlier work on diatribe,
Stowers finds Paul to continue in dialogue with such a teacher all
the way from 2: 17 to 4: 21, with passages of intense interchange
at 3: 1-8 and 3: 27-4: 2. (c) The conversation with this Jewish
teacher concerns not the adequacy of Judaism as such but the
Jewish concern to teach Gentiles 'the works of the law', which
they are neither able to keep (being generally sinful) nor should
be expected to observe, since God's new act of righteousness
through 'the faithfulness of Christ' has been designed specifically
for them.
The novelty of this thesis is continually underlined by polemical
reference to 'conventional' or 'traditional' readings and by blanket
statements that 'exegetes have failed to notice' what is here
unearthed. The frequency of such claims is bound to irk readers
aware of the current diversity in interpretations of Romans, some
of which would not appreciate being labelled 'traditional'. In fact,
Stowers' own reading is heavily dependent on that outlined by
K. Stendahl, whose famous essay on 'Paul and the Introspective

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 648 REVIEWS

Conscience of the West' (1963) laid the foundations of Stowers'

approach: rejection of Augustinian (and subsequent Western)
readings of Paul; emphasis on the ethnic rather than the individual
aspects of Paul's soteriology; and the notion that Paul conceived
of salvation for Jews and Gentiles along two different paths. The
second element Stowers shares with the subsequent 'new perspect
ive' on Paul, and the third with Gaston (with whom he has only
minor disagreements). It is in his radical rejection of all post
Augustinian (or even post-70 ad) readings of Paul that Stowers
will be judged to have pushed Stendahl's thesis to new limits.
Stowers brings to Romans a wide knowledge of Graeco-Roman
literature, with which he is able to illuminate several aspects of
the letter. He skilfully demonstrates the points of comparison
between Romans 7 and the famous dilemma of Euripides' Medea,
notes parallels between Romans 1 and common narratives of
human decline, and sheds some fresh light on Romans 9-11 by
examining its pervasive athletic metaphors. His exegesis of
Romans 1 is also enlivened by a lengthy exposition of 'the quest
for self-mastery' in the ancient world, and its social and political
implications in the early Principate. In this connection Stowers
suggests that Romans is to be interpreted as Paul's offer of an
alternative moral strategy by which 'Christ becomes an enabler
of the restored and disciplined self' (p. 42). By the end of the
book, however, this rather individualistic theme has been down
played: 'adaptability to the needs of others rather than mastery of
emotion and desire becomes the paradigm for the ethic' (p. 258).
This and several other changes of focus give this large and ambi
tious book a rather uneven character.
Stowers' exegetical energy is mainly devoted to Romans 1-4,
whose discussion occupies more than twice as much space as is
given to the whole of the rest of the letter. His concern to show
that these chapters do not establish a scheme of universal sin
fulness and common salvation for Jew and Gentile in Christ is
advanced by three strategic moves. In the first place, he insists
that 1: 18-32 is about gentile sin and conveys no universal themes
from Genesis 1-3. Secondly, after reading 2: 1-16 as directed
solely against gentile boasting, he sees Paul turn in 2: 17 ff. to a
very particular kind of Jew, a teacher of Gentiles whose attempts
to lead Gentiles into the way of the law are shown to be hypocrit
ical on the basis of his own sinfulness. Thirdly, maximizing the
import of the references to righteous law-keeping in Romans 2,
Stowers attempts to neutralize the famous statements in Romans
3 which indict 'all' of sin. 3: 9 is taken to be merely hyperbolic
(or perhaps to mean 'Jews and Gentiles as a whole'), and its hint

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 REVIEWS 649

of sin as a dominating po
a piece of apocalyptic pes
unexplained. Most strikin
refer only to Gentiles ('or
pentant Jews', p. 190), so
any need for salvation thro
the claims of 3: 19 (the la
mouth be stopped) and 3:
by works of the law) unambiguously indict both Jews and
Gentiles. Fitting Romans 2 and Romans 3 into the sort of coher
ence which Stowers requires is, of course, an awkward task. But
the confidence with which he charts his new course through such
difficult waters only makes his eventual shipwreck all the more
disappointing.
Like some other recent rebels against the Augustinian-Lutheran
tradition, Stowers is unwilling to find in Romans 4: 1-6 any
generalizing analysis of human relations to God: 'The reader
grossly distorts any reading possible in Paul's time by construing
the issue as a religion of a [sic] grace versus a religion of good
works' (pp. 242-43). For Stowers, 4: 4-6 indicates that Abraham
is justified 'on the basis of his trusting loyalty, not his past records
of righteous deeds' (p. 242), but it is important that this 'loyalty'
or or 'faithfulness' is precisely his 'faithful action'. The reader is
hard pressed to detect a reference to Abraham's 'faithful action'
in Romans 4, but Stowers comes to our aid by finding it, between
the lines, in the night when 'Abraham and Sarah had sexual
intercourse because of God's promise' (p. 228)! Never before, to
my knowledge, has Paul been found to have accorded such theolo
gical significance to the moment when 'Abraham in faithfulness
planted his seed' (p. 229).
Stowers' ubiquitous interpretation of πίστις as 'faithfulness'
and his commitment to the subjective interpretation of πίστις
Ίησοΰ leads him further than most in finding references to Jesus'
faithfulness even when the noun appears on its own and in juxta
position to verbs expressing the faith of believers (e.g. 1: 16-17;
9■ 9■ 32—33; 10: 9-10). On this basis, and to rid the passage of any
sacrificial overtones (which would call the Jerusalem temple into
question), Stowers presents an unusual reading of 3: 21—26: for
him it depicts a decision of Jesus who, though conscious of his
messiahship, in an act of faithfulness postponed the time of mes
sianic reckoning by going to his death (pp. 214-23). This is pre
sented only as an hypothesis, but its implausibility will strengthen
the usual reading that Paul understood Jesus' death as in some
sense dealing with the sin of all humanity.

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 650 REVIEWS

It is here, in rejecting th
the presuppositions of St
cious of later doctrinal 's
misuse of Paul to justify Christian anti-Semitism, Stowers
assumes that to find any thoroughgoing critique of Judaism in
Romans would be to have Paul deny 'the validity of Judaism as a
religion' (p. 294). Hence his insistence that 2: 17 ff. is directed
only against a Jewish missionary to Gentiles. Hence also his read
ing of 'all' in 3: 22—23 as all Gentiles, of the '1' in Romans 7 as α
Gentile Gentile struggling to keep the law, and of Romans 9—10 as Paul's
polemic against Jews who think that Gentiles need to keep the
works of the law to be justified. In truth Stowers' position is not
easy to assess, since he takes Paul's caricature of the Jewish teacher
to be 'a way of saying that Jews have enough problems of their
own' and sometimes admits that, in Paul's view, Jews, like
Gentiles, 'must finally rely on God's mercy, not on their own
works' (pp. 151—52). But he leaves 'the Jewish condition' (p. 152)
significantly undefined, while making clear that Jews do not need
to believe in Christ, or trust in Christ's faithfulness as benefiting
themselves. Unfortunately the text is against him at almost every
turn (e.g. 1: 16-17; 3: 21-26, 30; 5: 12-21; 9: 30-10: 13). Worse,
Stowers has Paul agonize over the fate of Israel in Romans 9-10
as a rhetorical snare with which to entice his Gentile readers into
the pride he excoriates in Romans 11 (p. 299). Alternatively, the
ground of his anguish over the apparent failure of God's word (9:
6) is the fact that (immoral) Jewish teachers are trying to teach
the law to Gentiles and so put God's world to rights 'through
their own plans and efforts' rather than by leaving the Gentiles
to be saved through Christ (p. 305). It is curious that a reading
so concerned to find what was plausible to Paul's contemporaries
should fail to enter the debate whether Judaism was typically such
a 'missionary' religion and thus whether this strange critique of
Judaism would ring remotely true to social reality.
Although Stowers' concern for plausible contemporary readings
has opened up helpful insights on a number of passages, his thesis
is ultimately governed by a theological agenda. His presupposi
tions rise to the surface in sentences like the following: '[T]he
minute one begins to imagine the books of Moses concretely and
to think about how these writings functioned among Jews in Paul's
time, the idea of Paul saying that the law, with its divinely ordained
institutions, cannot make Jews acceptable to God becomes absurd'
(p. 190). One can only reply that some of us have thought for
many thousands of minutes about how these writings functioned
among Jews in Paul's time and have spent equal time contemplat

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 REVIEWS 651

ing Paul's letters, which d

question the adequacy of
that may seem to some. W
Jew, loyal as he claimed
Jewish contemporaries an
(2 Cor. 11: 24). Stowers seems unwilling to recognize Jewish
hostility as one of the ways in which readers in Paul's own time
could have read his letters.

John Μ.
M. G. Barclay

The The The Gifts of God and the Authentication of a Christian. An

ExegeticalExegetical Study of 1 Corinthians 8—11:1. By Paul
Douglas Gardner. Pp. xii + 217. Lanham: University
Press of America, 1994. ISBN 0819195197. $30.50.
This book, originally a Cambridge doctoral dissertation, proceeds
through three difficult chapters of 1 Corinthians by way of verse
by-verse exegesis. Each of the three main chapters of the book
deals with one chapter of text. The title of the book may surprise
some readers, who might not naturally associate such a phrase
with Paul's concerns in 1 Cor. 8: 1—11: 1. In fact the words are
well chosen and give significant insight into the hypothesis which
Gardner develops. He argues that γνώσις in 8: 1-7 refers to a
particular gift of the spirit (mentioned in 12: 8) which the 'strong'
at Corinth regarded as 'authenticating' their standing as members
of the community of God's people. They self-consciously exer
cised the εξουσία which this gift conveyed; their eating είδωλο
θυτα was a deliberate demonstration of their gift and hence of
their status before God. Paul attacks both their use of this 'gift'
and the content of their γνώσις, insisting that love, αγάπη, was
what showed a person to be 'known by God'. This love demon
strated itself, not through exercising its rightful εξουσία but
through concern for others, in building up the church.
Gardner offers a coherent reading of these three chapters of 1
Corinthians and views them as a connected and integrated argu
ment. His work therefore adds further weight to the growing
consensus that the chapters should not be divided up and assigned
to different letters, as was suggested by Schmithals and Hering,
among others. Gardner is also able to link his understanding of
these chapters with other parts of the epistle, adding weight to
his interpretation. His hypothesis, moreover, offers interesting
explanations for some of the more puzzling phrases in the text.
For example, Paul's concern that a weak Christian οίκοδομηθή

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