The Narrative Approach to Paul
A Paradigm without Foundation
For decades, scholars have debated whether the category of narratives is relevant or not when it comes to understanding the letters of the Apostle Paul. In my new book, Paul the Storyteller: A Narratological Approach, I tackle this controversy head-on. At the moment, the scholarly world is currently divided into two camps:
Those who say it makes little sense to talk about "narratives" in Paul's letters because he rarely tells explicit stories. After all, they argue, Paul wrote letters to make theological arguments, not to tell tales. If he had wanted to tell a story, he would have written a gospel, so they say!
Those who acknowledge Paul's apparent lack of explicit storytelling but insist that implicit stories are crucial for understanding his writings. These narratives are said to underlie Paul's arguments as kinds of "narrative substructures" – or even his entire letter corpus as a kind of "worldview narrative."
What's fascinating is that despite the heated nature of this debate and its enormous implications for how we interpret Paul's letters, until now there hasn't been detailed research addressing this conflict directly. In my book I question the consensus that Paul rarely tells actual stories and suggest, by contrast, that we first need to analyze cases of clear-cut narration if we ever want to be able to venture into the more speculative terrain of supposedly implicit stories.
The Rejection of Explicit Narratives in the Narrative Approach
To get there, we first need to see, however, why the so-called "narrative approach to Paul" so quickly, and preemptively, gave up on the idea that Paul might actually be a real storyteller. Richard B. Hays, in his groundbreaking work The Faith of Jesus Christ, dismisses explicit stories as mere illustrations that could easily be replaced:
"We all know that people sometimes tell stories in order to illustrate ideas: the preacher or lecturer, in order to make a point, uses an anecdote that ornaments or emphasizes the intended message. In this case, the story belongs not to the 'substructure' of the discourse, but to its 'superstructure'; it could be replaced by a different illustrative story without materially altering the 'meaning' of the discourse" (p. 27).
N.T. Wright, responding to Francis Watson's criticism that Paul simply wasn't a storyteller (except in Galatians 1-2), advances a different argument in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, which has the same general effect of downplaying the relevance of actual stories:
"To point out Paul's lack of actual stories [...] looks, at least to begin with, like a sort of category mistake: as though one were to declare that the singer could not be singing a song because she was not singing the word 'a song.' [...] Thus it is no objection to observe that Paul never says 'Once upon a time,' and hardly ever lays out his material in an explicit narrative sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end" (p. 463).
Problems with This Stance
Hays's dismissal of explicit stories seems quite arbitrary. Why should we assume that explicit stories are merely replaceable illustrations while implicit ones are foundational? After all, the same could be said about Paul's arguments - different arguments could lead to the same conclusion. The distinction appears to serve more of a rhetorical purpose than reflect a genuine theoretical insight.
Wright's argument even contains a significant logical flaw. Note that in his analogy about singing two entirely different issues are conflated. Of course we don't need someone to explicitly state "I am singing a song" - that would be merely a metalinguistic comment about the action. But we do need certain musical qualities to be present (rhythm, melody, etc.) to recognize something as singing! Similarly, while we don't need Paul to explicitly announce "here comes a story," we do need some identifiable narrative features to justify calling his texts stories. It should go without saying that, of course, these features do not have to be specific genre markers like "once upon a time." We also don't require rhythmic patterns typical for country songs to be present in oral products that we would classify as "songs" in general!
Moving Forward: A New Theoretical Foundation
This brings us to the heart of the problem: The entire debate about stories in Paul's letters has been proceeding without a clear definition of what actually constitutes a story.
Surprisingly, scholars who have followed Hays and Wright have likewise never really devoted much attention to this crucial question. Rather, they immediately moved on to focus on discussing what these supposed stories are about (Israel? Jesus's faithfulness?) and where exactly they are located in relation to the text (behind it? under it?).
However, as long as we ignore the more fundamental question of what actually makes something a story, it is difficult to identify it in the first place – and seems impossible to make such more specific claims about the nature. No surprise, hence, that the critics of the narrative approach remain unconvinced by the plethora of works that build on Hays's and Wright's foundational works!
In my next post, I'll begin laying out a proper theoretical foundation by addressing fundamental questions like:
What exactly makes something a story?
What are the minimal requirements for narrative?
How can we identify narrative features in ancient texts?
What narratological tools can help us describe how authors like Paul craft their stories?
By building this theoretical foundation first, we'll be better equipped to examine both explicit and implicit narratives in Paul's letters - and you might be surprised by how many stories we actually find.
This is the first in a series exploring themes from my new book Paul the Storyteller: A Narratological Approach. Here is the description from Eerdmans.
Next week: "What Makes a Story a Story? Essential Tools from Narratology"