Review of “Luke’s Social Location of Paul:  Cultural Anthropology and the Status of Paul in Acts” by Jerome H. Neyrey, University of Notre Dame 

Who was Paul?  From what I’ve been reading lately it would appear that this is a complicated question.  Scholars suggest the answer to the question is very different depending on where you get your answers.  If you go to the New Testament letters authored by Paul I am led to believe that you would get one answer and if you go to the Book of Acts written by Luke it seems that you would get a different answer.  Personally, I do not see contradictions between these two sources.  The picture of Paul is simply made more complete by combining what we are told in Acts with what we are told in the Pauline epistles.  Jerome H. Neyrey of the University of Notre Dame asserts his opinion on this matter in his paper, “Luke’s Social Location of Paul:  Cultural Anthropology and the Status of Paul in Acts”.  Here is what he says,

It is our hypothesis that Luke has positioned Paul in the retainer level of the social strata common in ancient cities.  As such, Luke portrays him in the employ of upper-strata elites; he states that Paul was educated to perform as a citizen at home in both the public courts and the halls of political power.  Luke consciously presents him as an urbane person, at home in the great cities of the empire, the client of the elites, and a very honorable person.  This sort of information simply cannot be gleaned from Paul’s letters and would appear to be at variance with the presentation of himself in those documents.  But such seems to be the Lukan rhetorical aim in his presentation of Paul’s social location.[1]

Neyrey thoroughly addresses the social status that Luke gives to Paul in the Book of Acts.  It is worthy of our time and attention to consider the suggestions of this paper regarding how Luke describes Paul.  However, Neyrey devotes none of his attention to building upon the argument that “this sort of information simply cannot be gleaned from Paul’s letters”.  In fact, Neyrey only contributes five lines in his conclusion to support this opinion.  I will, therefore, only address what I have learned from Neyrey about Paul from the singular source of Acts.  We will leave the picture gained from the letters of Paul for another review.

What Neyrey presents well is the picture that we are given by Luke of Paul in the Book of Acts.  Paul is first portrayed as a member of the retainer class.  The paper introduces a social stratification model by Gerhard Lenski that is very helpful.  Using Lenski’s model, Neyrey places Paul near the top of the social classes just below rulers and the governing class.  Paul is considered, here, to be a type of personal retainer responsible for mediating relationships between the governing elites and the common people.  In order to support this argument, Neyrey reminds the reader of Paul’s early role as ambassador for the Jerusalem Pharisees as well as his extensive education under Gamaliel (22:3).  Not only does Paul go forth bearing letters of authorization, but he also acts as a “bailiff” during the time when he was responsible for persecuting the Christians.[2]  We are asked to consider how comfortable Paul is among the elites as depicted by Luke.  Paul interacts with two Judean governors, discourses with a client king, dialogues with both Stoics and Epicureans in Athens, and he is entertained as a personal guest of Publius, “the chief man of the island”, after the shipwreck in Acts 28:8-9 just to mention a few of the relationships sited within the paper that substantiate the claim, “Paul is a very honorable person of relatively high social status, who associates with the elites of his world and is trained to perform suitably at that level of society”.[3]

The second point that Neyrey makes about Paul’s social status has to do with the city Paul is said to be from as well as the cities within which he resides throughout the course of events in Acts.  Neyrey begins by analyzing Paul’s birthplace of Tarsus and we are reminded that Luke includes the comment that Tarsus was, “no mean city” (21:39).  There is a strong case made that one’s prestige and standing were greatly determined by the city of one’s birth.  Building from this place of origin we are introduced to the importance of other cities where Paul spent time such as Antioch, Ephesus, and Corinth.  I do not dispute any of the details Neyrey presents convincing his audience that all of these cities were admirable, honorable, and important during this period of history.  However, based merely upon the association Paul had to these additional places it seems that an equal argument could be made that Paul was also a peasant given some of the sad, unremarkable, and forgotten towns that he must have stayed in as he traveled across so much of the continent.  Neyrey spends much of his time in this section describing these other three cities and concludes with, “we can discern how Luke portrays Paul as traveling to and residing in provincial capitals . . . Thus Paul is presented as a citizen of the world.”[4]  Well, why not a citizen of the islands?  I seem to recall in Acts that he visited and resided on a number of islands as well.

Finally, the paper discusses a third critical point, the Roman citizenship of Paul.  This appears to be the strongest of the three arguments.  Luke does make issue of Paul’s Roman citizenship (16:37; 22:27-28).  Roman citizenship, we are told, “was particularly rare among the population of the eastern Mediterranean in this period, and so, as F.F. Bruce remarked, ‘…the few Roman citizens, whether Greek or Jews by birth, would constitute a social elite.’”[5]  Not only does Paul carry the mark of Roman citizenship but Luke draws particular attention to Paul’s “appeal to Caesar” where Paul wields his citizenship in the face of opposition.  The work of John Lentz is brought to bear here.  We are informed of the following:

(a) Only a very small fraction of cases ever came before the emperor; (b) the various laws concerning trials favored those of high social status; (c) Paul’s appeal to Caesar is not a legal protest against the abusive authority of a local magistrate, which is the normal rationale for a change of jurisdiction; and (d) numerous historical examples of change of jurisdiction all involve persons of high rank and status.  Thus Lentz concludes that an appeal to Caesar or to higher legal authority was common for persons of “high social status and reputation, or personal ties to the emperor.”

I find this information from John Lentz to be very compelling and if I did not agree with Neyrey’s claim regarding the social status of Paul as presented by Luke up to this point, I would now be convinced.   

It is clear to me, primarily based on Neyrey’s first and third arguments pertaining to Paul’s social interaction and Roman citizenship, that Luke does portray Paul as a member of the retainer class and a man of considerable honor.  The evidence based upon the work of Gerhard Lenski and John Lentz is especially convincing.  If Neyrey’s opinions regarding the differences between the rhetorical strategy in the presentation of Paul given in the Pauline epistles and the work of Luke in Acts had been posed as questions instead of assertions, I would be more intrigued as a reader to explore the issue further.  However, as it stands, Neyrey inserts his opinion with respect to this matter in the midst of his analysis of the identity of Paul in Acts alone leading me to believe that his paper is not yet complete.  We need to see the same sort of analysis for the letters before these opinions can really be considered.  The question, “Who is Paul” is not answered here in full, but Neyrey does provide a very interesting introduction to the subject based on his investigation of Acts.

Blessings to you ~ Steadman

[1] Jerome H. Neyrey, “Luke’s Social Location of Paul:  Cultural Anthropology and the Status of Paul in Acts.”  http://www.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/location.html , 1.
[2] Ibid, 5.
[3] Ibid. 8.
[4] Ibid, 10.
[5] Ibid, 11.

For several years now I have been going to http://www.bible.com in order to check Scripture references or do a quick copy and paste for the purpose of sharing a particular quotation from the Bible.  My favorite translation has been the ESV since it was published and distributed several years ago.  The only problem has been that, in order to cut and paste verses of Scripture, you had to use a proprietary software that was a bit tedious.  I was pleased to discover just this week that the folks at Good News and Crossway had launched the online version of the ESV in the last couple of months. 

You can find the online ESV at:  http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/browse/ 

Here is what Good News and Crossway have to say about the English Standard Version.

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Blessings to you ~ Steadman

Our quick and solitary prayer needs to turn in to lengthy ceaseless prayer like that of the widow in Luke 18… ask and keep on asking having the faith that at any moment God may act where He may not have acted before. Do we pray for the good stuff or simply the daily needs that come to mind? We need to pray that our prayers would be enriched and more effective… we need to pray for joy, for power, for wisdom, for discernment, for opportunity, and for God to use our suffering. “Prayer is an encounter of wills – till one will or the other give way. It is not a spiritual exercise merely, but in its maturity it is a cause acting on the course of God’s world . . . ‘Thy will be done’ is no utterance of mere resignation; though it has mostly come to mean this in a Christianity which tends to canonize the weak instead of strengthening them. As prayer it was a piece of active co-operation with God’s will. It was a positive part of it. It is one thing to submit to a stronger will, it is another to be one with it. We submit because we cannot resist it; but when we are one with it we cannot succumb.” Forsythe, pp. 97-98 “[A condition of continuous prayer] means the constant bent and drift of the soul . . . All the current of its being set towards Him. It means being ‘in Christ,’ being in such a moving, returning Christ – reposing in this godward, and not merely godlike, life. The note of prayer becomes the habit of the heart, the tone and tension of its new nature; in such a way that when we are released from the grasp of our occupations the soul rebounds to its true bend, quest, and even pressure upon God. It is the soul’s habitual appetite and habitual food.” Forsyth, pp. 68-69 “To cultivate the ceaseless spirit of prayer, use more frequent acts of prayer. To learn to pray with freedom, force yourself to pray. The great liberty begins in necessity. Do not say, ‘I cannot pray. I am not in the spirit.’ Pray till you are in the spirit.” Forsythe, p. 71 Blessings to you ~ Steadman

We can often become convinced that the success of the gospel, the success of the church, the success of our ministry to others has primarily to do with our personal abilities, strengths, talents, and timing when the truth is that the battle belongs to the Lord – He already has victory and he will use us despite our weaknesses, personal failures, insufficiencies, and lack of time management or poor timing in general. “No man is established in faith (and thus renewed in life) who has not descended into that utter helplessness in which only God can render help. No man is a Christian—which means, simply, to be a real human being – who has not thus asked in faith for faith.” Stringfellow, p. 51 “Do not worry about who is for you or who is against you; rather see that God is with you in all that you do. If you have a clear conscience God will defend you, and whomever God chooses to help no man’s malice can harm. If you suffer in calm silence you will, without doubt, experience God’s help, and since He alone knows the hour and the manner of your deliverance, place yourself in His hands. Truly, God desires to help you and to rescue you from your troubles. Many a time it is to our benefit if others know our defects and even reproach us because of them for they thus help us remain humble.” Kempis, pp. 49-50 We can be discouraged in our evangelistic efforts when we fail to see the fruit of our efforts. “Christians are not called upon to assault other human beings, in these or similar ways, in the name of saving them. Besides, no Christian ever converted any other person. Authentic conversion is a work of Christ, not of Christians or of the church, as the Bible abundantly testifies. Faith cannot be coerced. It is a matter of grace in much the same fashion as the love of one person for another is a gift. Faith is not something so cheap that it may be purchased by any effort, not something rewarded for any merit, not something gained for the seeking, however earnest, but a thing, on the contrary, that is ridiculed by pietism, thwarted by religion, and opposed guilefully by death. It is God’s grace that establishes a man in faith, that is, reconciles a man within himself and with the whole of creation.” Stringfellow, p. 53 Our timing is not God’s timing – we want closure to come quickly and our timeframes are often short when, instead, we need to think eternally or at the very least pressing ahead with perseverance in order to see what God will do over the long haul of our ministry rather than wanting to see a plan completed in a matter of weeks or months. “We do not simply spread our thought out before God, but we offer it to Him, turn it on Him, bring it to bear on Him, press it on Him. This is our great and first sacrifice, and it becomes pressure on God. We can offer God nothing so great and effective as our obedient acceptance of the mind and purpose and work of Christ. It is not easy. It is harder than any idealism. But then it is very mighty. And it is a power that grows by exercise.” Forsyth, p. 15 “All our peace in this wretched world comes from our humble endurance of suffering and not from living a life without it. He who best knows how to suffer enjoys the greatest peace, and such a man is victor over himself, master of the world, friend of Christ, and heir of heaven.” Kempis, p. 51 Have a blessed day ~ Steadman