It is finished! Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind (Part 1)

Pre-Print Graphic. The WUNT2 monograph

is forthcoming in June 2020

After 15+ years of off-and-on research time, trying to find gaps in a hectic teaching schedule, two sabbaticals, and every summer and winter break spent writing, and many nights of solitude typing away and increasing my caffeine tolerance, finally I can announce: "It is finished!" (John 19:30). By God's grace, I submitted the manuscript Moral Transformation in Greco-Roman Philosophy of Mind to Mohr Siebeck back in September 2019. With some back and forth with an excellent editorial and production team (thanks Tobias Stäbler and Jana Trispel!), my work with the corrections/editions plus indices is done. The book is in production and will likely be in print this coming April 2020. Many thanks to Megan Herrold, my research assistant, who help me edit the entire manuscript + indices. Words cannot express how much I owe to my doctoral supervisor Dr. Judy Gundry and second Doktorvater Dr. Seyoon Kim for their support and encouragement in seeing this book through to the end.
     The book's primary audience is for other scholars and doctoral students doing research on the moral traditions of early Christianity's Greco-Roman environment. It attempts to map the moral universe of the ancient Mediterranean world during the late Republic to early imperial period of Rome from which both Diaspora Judaism and early Christianity emerge. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (2017) calls this era "the Transitional Period" during which Stoicism and Platonism dominated the moral and intellectual environment of the Roman Empire. The intellectual culture during this era shifted from the traceable influence of Stoicism (i.e., the Middle Stoa and Neostoicism) in the 1st century B.C.E. towards the documented dominance of Middle or Imperial Platonism by the end of the 2nd century C.E. 
      This monograph contributes to the synoptic picture of Greco-Roman antiquity by defining the moral transformation systems of the Platonists and Stoics so that the historian can have a starting point for what constitutes Platonist doctrines and what constitutes Stoic ones, including the latter’s Neostoic innovations. In my study of Middle Platonism, I analyzed mainly the works of Plato, Plutarch, Alcinous, and Galen and for Stoicism, Zeno, Chrysippus, Musonius Rufus, Seneca, and Epictetus.
     Here I develop systemic models for a given philosophical school's teaching on emotional control, ethical action and habit, character formation, and the role of communities and the divine. These models demonstrate that the internal logic and interconnectedness between seemingly disparate moral topoi (or topics of ethical concern) which were shared between the major philosophical schools of this era find their coherence as distinct systems of moral transformation. This is the primary thesis that the monograph defends.
    Secondly, the book also functions as a type of handbook which gives a "big picture" of Platonism and Stoicism as systems of philosophy. The teachings of every philosopher are read in their contingent, historical particularity and for how they cohere with the overall tenets of a given philosophical school. This project thus develops independent models of contingency and coherence for each Greco-Roman philosophy of mind. The method has been applied by J. Christiaan Becker to Pauline theology (1980), and I have modified it for ancient philosophy of mind. Though, as Abraham Malherbe has argued, every philosopher should be examined independently in their own right (i.e., lex Maherbe), because every philosopher of a particular school (i.e., Stoicism and Platonism) is united in one's fidelity to the teachings of the founder (i.e., Zeno/Cleanthes/Chrysippus and Plato, respectively), we can also talk about 'systems' of a school based on the interpretation of the founder's texts and a coherence between different members of a given sect based on their fidelity to the founder.
    The relevance of the book for New Testament studies lies in its foundational role for a further research on how the Apostle Paul engaged, appropriated, and modified the moral traditions of his day to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ to Gentile audiences in terms which the latter could understand. If the moral traditions of the Greco-Roman world were dominated by Stoicism and Platonism, or rather, by the interactions between these two intellectual movements (i.e., the thesis of Troels Engberg-Pedersen and other contributors to From Stoicism to Platonism), then a systemic study of Stoicism and Platonism is needed in order to situate the moral exhortations of Paul to his Gentile churches within their Greco-Roman cultural environment. At heart, Paul was a missionary. He would know how to engage and modify the moral traditions of his day to explain better to his Gentile recipients the major tenets and distinctions of the gospel he preached. 
    In sum, a short epitome of the book's major contributions to both classical studies and New Testament research are listed as follows: 

1. The book argues and defends the thesis that moral transformation is one important and effective way to find internal coherence and interconnectedness between disparate moral topoi, a project that Johan Thom (2003) has called "mapping the moral universe" of Greco-Roman antiquity. 
2. It constructs models for the moral transformation systems of Stoicism and Platonism and therefore enables scholars to contextualize any study of specific moral topos from the broader perspective of an entire school of thought
3. The models differentiate for the reader areas of continuity and innovation between orthodox or early Stoicism and their latter Greco-Roman Neostoic heirs; the same has been done for distinguishing Plato's teachings and Middle Platonism
4. The types of interactions between Stoicism and Platonism have been mapped and organized in a way to help the interpreter detect Greco-Roman allusions in the New Testament and sets up possibilities for how the NT author engages, appropriates, and modifies the moral traditions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The concluding chapters argue for 6 interaction types between rival sects: eclecticism, refutation, competitive appropriation, irenic appropriation, concession, and common ethical usage. Paul and his Diaspora Jewish contemporaries may not have employed all of these interactions types in their engagement with Greco-Roman moral traditions but this taxonomy of interactions lays out the possible ways they have may have engaged and modified a common encyclopedia of knowledge intrinsic to their cultural environment. 

Below are screen shots of the Table of Contents. I plan on giving separate expanded blog posts for each of the major contributions described above. Stay tuned for further posts. MJL

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

      ** Postscript: Originally I had hoped to publish the book way back in 2015/16. In fact, some book sellers like Amazon or Book Depository surprisingly list the monograph as having been published already. This is incorrect. The book's publication date is officially 2020. Nothing was released in 2015/16.

Intertextuality in the New Testament Section SBL Denver 2018

Invited Plenary Speakers for the Intertextuality in the New Testament Section
Theme: Ancient Exegetical Methods in
Greco-Roman Discourse and the New Testament
SBL Denver 2018

It's been quite some time since I revisited my blog but I have not forgotten about it. But I did need the timely break to get a sense on how to manage my time as the chair of the biblical field at North Park Theological Seminary.
    In this post, I'm excited to announce the opening plenary session of the Intertextuality in the New Testament Section at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Denver this November 2018. The theme of the session is Ancient Exegetical Methods in Greco-Roman Discourse and the New Testament. Much ink has been spilt on how the New Testament authors quote, cite, echo, and allude to Old Testament and Jewish texts in their writings, but little has been done on the way they quote, echo, allude or recontextualize Greco-Roman sources. The three main presenters who are giving papers on various intertexts between Greco-Roman discourse and the New Testament are all experts in their respective fields and have masterfully engaged with a wide range of rhetorical, religious, political and philosophical material by Greek and Roman authors. The speakers and their papers titles are listed below. 
     I especially want to highlight that the respondent to each of the papers is Peter Oakes. Anyone having read his 2005 journal article in JSNT entitled "Remapping the Universe," where he outlined four possible ways the New Testament texts allude, echo, appropriate or compete with Roman imperial texts/theology would know that there are few who could comment on not only the specific content of the papers but on the broader issue of how to map out a method for detecting Greco-Roman textual and conceptual allusions in the New Testament. It's sure to be a fantastic session. I hope all attending SBL and reading this post will come to the session on Saturday morning Nov 17, 2018. Best! MJL



Intertextuality in the New Testament
11/17/2018
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Room TBD - Hotel TBD

Theme: Ancient Exegetical Methods in Greco-Roman Discourse and the New Testament
Each paper will be 25-30min long. Peter Oakes will be responding after each paper for 10min. There is a general discussion at the end of the session

Max Lee, North Park Theological Seminary, Presiding

Bruce Longenecker, Baylor University
Intertextuality in Pompeian Plaster: Can Vesuvian Artifacts Inform Our Expectations about Intertextual Expertise among Sub-Elite Jesus-Followers? (30 min)

Peter Oakes, University of Manchester, Respondent (10 min)

Judith M. Gundry, Yale Divinity School
Roman Household Religion and the Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:14 (30 min)

Peter Oakes, University of Manchester, Respondent (10 min)

Paul Trebilco, University of Otago
Echoes in Ephesus: ‘From the beginning’ in the Johannine Letters and in Ephesian Foundation Myths (30 min)

Peter Oakes, University of Manchester, Respondent (10 min)

Discussion (30 min)

Business Meeting (0 min)

Competitive Acculturation, Part 2: Alcinous and the Stoics on Good Emotions

[Warning! going turbo nerd again:] Remember that in a previous post (long ago, in a time far far away...[here]) I cited Thiessen’s definition of competitive syncretism as: “Rivals in the marketplace in part resemble one another ... They have to 'imitate' one another in order to outdo one another in the imitation” (A Theory of Primitive Religion; p. 49). In this earlier post, I used Thiessen’s definition as a template and but jettisoned the problematic term ‘syncretism’ to give the category competitive acculturation. Here in this post, I would like to give an example of competitive acculturation from ancient philosophical discourse (a long overdue post).

   Here is a quotation from the Middle Platonist Alcinous in his handbook on Platonism entitled the Didaskalikos. Here he pokes fun at his rivals, the Stoics, on what constitutes the basis for human flourishing (εὐδαιμονία):

• Contemplation (θεωρία), then, is the activity of the mind when it intelligizes the intelligibles, but practice (πράξις) is the activity of the rational soul which happens through the body. The soul which contemplates the divine and the thoughts of the divine is said to be in a good state (εὐπαθεῖν), and this state of the soul is called ‘wisdom’ (φρόνησις), and this, one may say, is none other than assimilation to the divine. – Alcinous, Didask. 2.2 (= Whittaker 153.2–9; Eng. trans. follows Dillon, Alcinous, p. 4)

The key word that is the hinge text for competitive acculturation is εὐπαθεῖν. In the thematic context of  the passage: when are human beings at their best? (you can call it “living according to virtue” like the Stoics, or call it “assimiliation to the divine” as the Middle Platonists do), the Stoics and Platonists had contrasting views on the τέλος or end/goal of life. The Stoics believed if we extirpated harmful emotions completely, and are ruled only by rational good emotions called the εὐπάθειαι, then we can live life according to virtue and be fully human.

   According to the Stoics, the sage could experience some “good emotions” or “good affective states” called εὐπάθειαι – i.e., joy (χαρά), willfulness (βούλησις), and caution (εὐλάβεια) – which stood as the positive counterparts to the harmful the passions of the soul which threaten to derail human life and character, namely, pleasure, lust, fear and grief. That is, joy stood as the positive counterpart to pleasure, willfulness to lust/desire, and caution to fear, with no apparent equivalent εὐπάθος corresponding to grief (see Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.116; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. 4.12-14; note: Cicero translates εὐπάθειαι as constantiae or "stable states").

Roman copy (1st cent. AD) of a Hellenistic original (200 BC)
Head of Chrysippus, 2nd successor of the Stoa
Photo taken by Max Lee © 2010 British Museum

   So here is the punchline: in philosophical discourse, the Stoics own the language of the εὐπάθειαι. It would be impossible for the philosophically informed reader to miss the allusion then of Alcinous to the Stoic doctrine of the good emotions with his use of the word εὐπαθεῖν especially in the context of the discourse: what does it mean to flourish as a human being.

   Alcinous effectively says the Stoics are wrong. Good emotions are inadequate. We do not reach our potential until we participate and commune with the divine through the process of contemplation (θεωρία = how the mind sees the transcendent world and models its life after what it sees). Ethical practice (πράξις) is important but secondary to the contemplative life which provides a paradigm for moral living. If we see what beauty, goodness, and justice is in the transcendent Forms of Beauty, Goodness, and Justice, then we can shape our souls and govern society according to the beauty, goodness and justice we see.

   So the example or case for competitive acculturation works if one can demonstrate that:

1. a particular group (philosophical, political or religious) owns the terminology or language like the Stoics did for the terms εὐπάθειαι / εὐπάθος
2. a rival group uses the same language in a literary context that evokes the discourse of their competing interlocutors (in this case, what is the τέλος or end/goal of life? what is human flourishing?)
3. the rival group offers an alternative solution or thesis in contradistinction to the solution offered by the other group (Alcinous posits theoria as the key to human flourishing not the good emotions of the Stoics)
4. often times there is a double entendre or word play: “the good state” (εὐπαθεῖν) of a human being is not the Stoic good emotions (εὐπάθειαι) and extirpation of the passions but the Platonic mind’s assimilation to the divine. 

The question, then, is with Paul’s use of such charged words as εὐαγγέλιον (gospel), εἰρήνη (peace), κύριος (Lord), σωτήρ (Savior), κτλ., did Paul consciously pit his gospel against the good news of the imperial cult? Did the imperial cult own this language? or do these terms find wider currency elsewhere? Going beyond whether Paul had an anti-imperial gospel or not, do current claims to find any Greco-Roman allusion in Paul which are competitive meet all or some of the above conditions distilled from Alcinous’ interaction with his Stoic rivals?

   We are still, in the end, just scratching the surface of how methodologically do we approach the problem and detection of Greco-Roman allusions in Paul, but I thought this example would give us some food for thought to move forward on the issue.

First Category: Competitive Acculturation

I did not expect such a gap between posts, but once I finished grading, there was Christmas, a family getaway, and now I'm frantically preparing for a travel course to Greece this January 3-11... only 2 days away.

But I did want to follow up on the first category of Greco-Roman allusions in Paul's letters.

When I was doing my post-doctoral studies at Durham University in England back in 2010, my patron and supervisor, Prof. John Barclay, suggested reading what Gerd Theissen had to say about "competitive syncretism" among religions. He pulled off the shelf of his office a copy of Theissen's A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (1999) and read to me this excerpt:

"Rivals in the marketplace in part resemble one another when they are struggling to meet the same needs. The same is true of religions in a pluralistic situation. They have to 'imitate' one another in order to outdo one another in the imitation. And the imitation comes about by shaping their own tradition as the counterpart of others. I call such an indirect way of reciprocal influence 'competitive syncreticism.' " (p. 49)

Theissen then goes on to apply this category to the use of the term kyrios in Christian and imperial cult discourse and definitely thinks that Paul articulates his gospel in antithesis to the claims of lordship by Caesar in the cult.

He says: "In my view, the outdoing of power by a competitive contrast and the demonization of devalued 'rivals' can best be observed in the relationship between belief in Christ and the emperor cult." (p. 50)

'Syncretism' is loaded-word, however, and too nebulous and slippery a term to be of much use. There is also the conceptual baggage of an older Religionsgeschichtliche Schule or comparative religions approach that is associated with the language of syncreticism from which I would prefer to disengage my work.

In Barclay's Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora (1996), he provides more technically precise definitions and terms for the processes of assimilation, acculturation, and accomodation, against which he judges the level of adaptation by various Jews in the Diaspora contemporary with Paul such as Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and others. Without going into too much detail, Barclay's use of sociological categories to describe acculturation as "the linguistic, educational, and ideological aspects of a given cultural matrix" (p. 92) is a much more preferable term to describe competitive traditions than "syncretism."

I myself am not completely convinced, however, that Theissen's example of Paul's counter-imperial gospel is indeed the best instantiation of this category. I wrote to this effect in my review of Seyoon Kim's book Christ and Caesar for the Horizons in Biblical Theology 33 (2011), 90-92. I think what would be interesting is to look at some of the examples in ancient philosophy where competitive acculturation takes place between Stoics and Academics who use philosophical terms indicative of their rival schools to argue that their philosophy outdoes the other at their own epistemological game.

But I think blogging on an example of competitive acculturation in ancient philosophical discourse will have to wait until I come back from my trip to Greece.

Defining a Critical Method for Detecting Greco-Roman Allusions

So much work has been done on OT echoes in the NT, and several monographs have attempted to refine Richard Hays' 7 criteria for recognizing an echo (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 29-32; cf. Leroy Huizenga, The New Isaac, 61ff; Christopher Beetham, Echoes of Scripture in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians, ch. 2). But so little has been done in defining a critical methodology for detecting Greco-Roman allusions in Paul's letter corpus. I'm going to start blogging on this soon. I'm going to first define different categories for Greco-Roman allusions. The challenge right now is to develop the right terms or technical categories for defining the types of allusions Paul and other New Testament writers make in reference to Greco-Roman literature or even general encyclopedic knowledge that was shared between the author and his/her readers.

First up is what I would like to call "competitive acculturation," i.e., when Paul uses a word or phrase (e.g., εὐαγγέλιον) that has a technical use in the discourse of a particular political, social, or religious group (e.g., the imperial cult) in order to say that Christianity outdoes and out-competes the group in its own game (e.g., who is really the author of good news? Christ or Caesar).

However, right now, I am neck deep in grading final exams and final papers at North Park. I have a stack of exegesis papers to go through. Duty before pleasure, so I'm going to have to post on this later. MJL