PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

sexual) virtue and the avoidance of idolatry directly affect corporate mutuality and peace. He
concludes:
Philo, On the Virtues 47
Therefore, Moses says in the Exhortations, “If you should pursue righteousness and
godliness and the other virtues, you will live a life free of war and in uniform peace”.
It may be, then, that these broad contours of ethical discussion in the period around the time of
Paul are reflected in Paul’s own ordering of ethical sections.
A “Christologisation” 103 of Inherited Ethics
I view the source materials discussed above as illustrative of a broad conceptual pattern of
ethical argumentation that began in Judaism of the Hellenistic era, in which the themes of the
Torah were summarised or expressed in a culturally relevant (and culturally influenced) way,
often involving a flow from fundamental vices of sexual immorality, greed, and impurity, to
secondary vices of violent or exploitative social interaction, or involving a movement from the
personal to the corporate. But this by no means exhaustively explains the ethics of Paul the
apostle of Jesus Christ. It could never be said that a modification of the Torah is at the centre
of Paul’s ethics. 104 Rather, Christ himself is at the centre of Paul’s ethics:
Philippians 1:21
For to me, living is Christ.
103 I use the term “christologisation” rather than “Christianisation” simply to emphasise the
fact that Paul’s adaptation is not a direct transfer of ethical assumptions from a “Jewish” to a
“Christian” sphere; but a transference mediated by fulfilment in the person of Jesus the
Messiah.
104 Furnish rightly notes, “Paul never seeks to assemble, codify, or interpret in a legalistic way
the statutes or wisdom of the Old Testament. It is not a ‘source’ for his ethical teaching in this
sense”. Furnish, Theology and Ethics, 34.
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