Another, more substantive, question relating to Paul as a philosopher has been raised by those scholars who do find ancient philosophy in Paul: if one accepts that, is he then best understood as drawing substantively on Platonist motifs, or Stoic ones—or, indeed, both? Here it is helpful to bring in the figure of Philo of Alexandria, who was probably a little earlier than Paul (compare Runia 2017 and Lévy 2017). Philo was a Jew. That is his most basic identity and nothing in his ‘Hellenistic’ affiliations can change that. But Philo was also a philosopher of a Graeco-Roman type. The first thing to be noted is that Paul behaves much less explicitly as a philosopher than Philo. This has to do with Paul’s self-identification. While Philo clearly identifies himself as a Jew and also—though somewhat more implicitly—as a philosopher, Paul identified himself as an apostle and a Christ-believing Jew, but not as a philosopher. This feature of Paul’s stance is closely connected to his position as an ‘apocalypticist’, his ‘Messianism’. And this latter position extends the whole way to his understanding of the role of the small Messianic groups that he set up wherever he went. They, too, did not just ‘belong’ within the hegemonic, GraecoRoman, imperial culture and society. In this respect, Paul was widely different from Philo. Where Philo had only two identities to negotiate (as a Jew and as a participant in the hegemonic culture), Paul had three: that of a non-Christ-believing Jew, that of a non-Christ-believing participant in the hegemonic culture (a ‘Gentile’)—and that of a Christ-believing Jew. It was the latter that determined his relationship to the two others.
In short, in his own mind Paul was not a philosopher. He was a ‘called messenger (apostolos) of Christ’ or, as we might say, an ‘intellectual warrior for Christ’ (compare the war imagery all through 2 Cor 10:3–6). But that did not prevent him from also behaving as a philosopher in his actual argumentative practice. That is the final point to be made about taking Paul to behave as a philosopher: the exercise should be understood as a heuristic one (Engberg-Pedersen 2020). The primary aim should be to make best sense of Paul’s own ways of arguing over as long stretches as possible by drawing for elucidation on this or the other set of coherent philosophical ideas derived from the apostle’s Graeco-Roman philosophical context. If that can be persuasively done, then we may conclude that in spite of the fact that Paul did not see himself as a philosopher, he did behave as one.
Paul’s argument is intricate and complex (cf. Engberg-Pedersen 2000: 157–169; 2004). But an argument it is. It turns on a difference between living in relation to a set of ‘acttypes’ (erga) that are either forbidden or enjoined (by the law) and living with a coherent set of mental ‘attitudes’ (in fact, virtues) that are generated in Christ believers by the ‘spirit’ (pneuma). Whereas in the former situation there is no guarantee that one will always do what is enjoined and abstain from what is forbidden, in the latter situation there is such a guarantee: one only wills what one (also) must. That is how the Mosaic law is actually ‘fulfilled’ in Christ believers. And so, as Paul aims to say, if Christ faith is both necessary and sufficient for fulfilling the law, it would completely change the exclusive focus on Christ for non-Jews were they to let themselves be circumcised in order also to come to live under the law. The other noteworthy thing is that Paul is indeed arguing philosophically in the passage, as we have defined philosophy. There is universalizability insofar as Paul is speaking quite generally about living under the Mosaic law (or any law, cf. Gal 3:21) and living in Christ.
Romans 7.7-8.13:
1 Corinthians 15:35-57
Galatians 2.19-20, 6.14 & Philippians 3.4-11
