St. Paul (1 of 7)

A couple years ago, I went looking for secondary sources on the bible. I tried Jewish, Christian and secular commentaries but found them all thoroughly unilluminating. Sometime later, a woman (with whom I subsequently made plans to conduct a certain ritual under a canopy), gave me a book by one Gabriel Josipovici called The Book of God. The first thing this book did was show me that I had been looking for the wrong sort of help from secondary sources; the second thing it did was teach me to read better; the third was to lay out a web of thoughts about biblical narrative, its treatment of character, its relation to other kinds of narrative, and the implications of all this for our relationship to our lives and ourselves.

Anything I now say about the bible is grounded in Josipovici’s ideas. What follows, especially the point regarding Paul’s subjectivity, owes a great deal to him.

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The vividness and distinctiveness of the language of the King James Bible, which I imagine must have left its mark on all subsequent translations, exerts a powerful unifying force.*  The various books of the bible may vary in content, authorship, and genre, but they are all unmistakably biblical sounding. Because the bible is such an opaque document, because we are so often hard-pressed to make sense of what is being said, style rises to the surface. For modern, secular people, encountering this text largely in disconnected fragments—a line quoted here or there, taken from disparate books—our sense of the bible is primarily our sense of a certain linguistic style. As we all know, that linguistic style is not in fact native to the text.

[* Since writing this crumb, I've read parts of Tyndale's bible and discovered that the King James follows it very closely, so it seems the KJ is not the originator of the linguistic style I'm describing. - 7/2/2023]

Beneath this unity of prose style, one finds a radical divide— in mentality, in content, in narrative form— between the Old and New Testaments. The bridge between them is the Gospels. The Gospels still retain much of the narrative style of the Old Testament: its sparseness, its tendency to leave things unsaid, its emphasis on action and speech, its shortage of internality. But the story of the Jesus's life feels very different form the stories of the OT. The nature of God, the relationship between God and his creations, the conception of human history—all have undergone a transformation when we turn the final page of the OT and find ourselves in the opening chapter of Matthew.

With the epistles of Saint Paul (the great early organizer of Christian churches whose letters make up 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament), we enter a new realm entirely. Gone is the sparseness and opacity that forced us to surmise, to guess, to interpret, that left us, sometimes, utterly at a loss. Paul wants to make his meaning crystal clear. He has none of Jesus’s penchant for ambiguous parables nor the OT’s penchant for reporting bizarre events without explanation. Paul has a message of burning import, and he wishes to tell it. Here at last we have a first-person narrator of the kind we moderns are familiar with: a narrator who tells us what he thinks and feels, who reports his emotions, who speaks of his own hopes and faults. Paul exhorts from a point of view that we can recognize as personal in a modern sense.

The OT narrators are very different. They report what was said and done, but they never tell us how they felt. We do not know whether Daniel was afraid in the lion’s den. Indeed, the narrative does not stay with Daniel amongst the lions but follows the King who has imprisoned him there to his royal chambers and, with the King, discovers Daniel alive the next morning. Even in Jonah, the angstiest of the prophets, we never hear directly about Jonah’s emotions. In the belly of the whale, it is only in the words of Jonah's prayer that we learn anything of his feelings. When I think of Jonah's story, I think of how he feared to take up the burden of prophecy, how, like Moses, he doubted his ability, but when I turn to the text, I discover that I have inferred these emotions; in the text there is only action:

Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.
(Jonah 1:1-3, KJV)

The books of the Old Testament prophets move with strange fluidity between first and third person. The book of Daniel, for example, is entirely third person for the first six chapters. In chapter 7, we get first person, but only in quotation: “Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold…” (Daniel 7:2). His vision goes on and on, the first person persisting. We seem to be in an extended quotation (the bible does not use quotation marks), but gradually we become unsure. Chapter 8 begins “In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel…” (8:1). The third person has vanished—and it will not reappear. Daniel’s speech has become the book.

When we do find the first person in the prophets, it is sometimes unclear whether the “I” refers to the prophet or to God, whose words he is repeating. It seems to slip back and forth without anything to mark the change. There is something strangely unfixed about the identities of these writers. As characters in their own stories, they are clear, but as narrators, as speakers, they blur and dissolve into a perspective beyond the individual. They do not emerge as individual subjects, as speakers, as personal narrators.

Paul is the first such narrator in the bible.

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