PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

For Saul the Pharisee, coming to Jesus as the Christ forced a major re-evaluation of what he
had formerly assumed and held dear. Roland Deines’ comment illustrates the nature of this re-
evaluation:
The pharisaic yearning for the commandments concerning the areas of holiness and
purity (which cannot be separated) inevitably led to conflict with Jesus of Nazareth,
who announced, in Messianic freedom and authority, a new Torah – or at least a
totally changed Torah-understanding: purity and holiness are no longer ritually
conveyable or representable, but rather are Jesus’ gift to those who believe in his
coming. 105
My contention, then, is that Paul’s ethics might be seen fruitfully as a “christologisation” of
Paul’s Pharisaic tradition of Jewish ethics – a “christologisation” that is especially seen in the
concept of embodiment: Christ died and rose in his “body of flesh”, bringing to fulfilment the
ritual and ethical demands of the Torah; and believers are those who are “in Christ”, benefiting
from and identifying with Christ’s bodily death and resurrection. Believers are called, then, to
an ethical identification with Christ that is both corporeal (putting away sexual immorality,
greed, and impurity of bodies, and rather offering one’s body to God) and corporate (putting
off social vices/autonomy, and rather pursuing edifying love within the body of Christ).
It is in fact striking how often the Pauline literature refers both to the achievement of Christ
and the identity of the believer in “bodily” terms. An example from each of the first seven
letters of the canonical Pauline Corpus will suffice to demonstrate:
Romans 7:4: So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of
Christ.
105 Deines, “Pharisäer,” 1464; translated from the original German.
249