PAUL AND THE RHETORIC OF REVERSAL: KERYGMATIC ...

Thus Paul’s formative experience of Jesus, as one whose resurrected Lordship had been
startlingly hidden by the outrageous shame of his crucifixion, renegotiated the reversal
motif by applying it prototypically to the death, resurrection, and awaited manifestation of
Jesus, the “hidden” Christ. Belonging to God’s people now had to mean belonging to this
Christ.
Terrance Callan argues:
Paul, as Haacker argues, most probably saw his persecution of Christians in this tradition
stemming from Phineas…. It would therefore seem likely that Paul belonged to the
radical end of the Pharisaic spectrum”. Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 306. G. Walter Hansen comments: “In Galatians Paul describes his
life ‘in Judaism’ as having been characterized by an extremely zealous devotion to the
Jewish traditions (1:14). His zeal was a mark of the Jews of his time who fought to
maintain the purity of the Jewish way of life from pervasive Hellenistic influences”. G.
Walter Hansen, “Paul’s Conversion and His Ethic of Freedom in Galatians,” in The Road
From Damascus: The Impact of Paul’s Conversion on His Life, Thought, and Ministry
(ed. Richard N. Longenecker; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 213-237; 216.
Martin Hengel argues that such “zeal” had become pervasive in the Judaism of the era:
“[Z]eal for God’s cause, that is, for the law and the Sanctuary, was a phenomenon that had
characterized the whole of Palestinian Judaism in general from the time of the Maccabees
and in particular the groups of Essenes and Pharisees who had emerged from the Hasidim.
Even early Christianity had been at least to some extent influenced by its Jewish
inheritance. This ‘zeal’ was based on a consciousness of Israel’s election and separateness
and it was therefore experienced in a completely positive way. It was not until the
catastrophes of 70 and 135 A.D. that the rabbinate, influenced by those events, began to
develop a more critical attitude towards certain aspects of this zeal”. Hengel, The Zealots,
224.
46 By this I mean that Paul came to perceive that in zealously pursuing the purity of Israel,
he had been effectively pursuing a manifest “reversal” that had in fact already been
initiated by God in a hidden way, in Christ. Hengel similarly characterises the approach
of the Zealots as an attempt to anticipate and generate divine reversal: “the attempt to
achieve by every possible means the ‘purity of Israel’ was at the same time an attempt to
prepare the way for the eschatological coming of God”. Hengel, The Zealots, 228.
47 As Hengel and Roland Deines note, Paul later emphasises that he had mis-perceived
Jesus: “The assertion of [Jesus’] former followers that God had raised him from the dead,
had exalted him to himself ‘in power’ (Rom.1.3f.) to the right hand of God and appointed
him Messiah, Son of God and coming judge of the world, had to be opposed with all
resolution. Like many responsible and learned men in Jerusalem, Sha’ul too will have
shared this view – and in so doing have completely misjudged the crucified Messiah of
Israel, as he himself later confesses, ‘in a fleshly way’”. Martin Hengel and Roland
Deines, The Pre-Christian Paul (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1991), 64.
46