Conclusion
And
so our study, as far as Paul and his doctrine of salvation is concerned, is
concluded. It has necessitated looking at his use of the Old Testament and
seeing how he stayed faithful to its thought patterns and expectations. We have
seen how he saw himself to be part of the Hebrew tradition of the prophets
declaring the will of Yahweh to his people, and going beyond that, to declare
the message of Abraham’s God to the gentiles. This was something that the
prophets did very rarely, and then normally under constraint. In this Paul was
extending the inevitable logic that if the Messiah’s coming was to bring the
nations into the blessings of the covenant, then, as he believed Jesus to be
the Messiah, it was essential that the gentiles should be evangelised to fulfil
the scriptures.
We
have seen that the assumptions that are made in any study effect the outcome of
the study. In this we have disagreed with those who have argued that Paul
Hellenised the Christian message, so transforming it into something very
different from what Jesus had proclaimed. On the evidence that has increasingly
won scholarly support, that the NT documents, and Paul’s letters no less than
others, are Jewish, we have constructed a picture of Paul that has disagreed
with the findings of some others who accept their Jewish character. First, We
have challenged the idea that many have embraced that Paul was a member of the
zealot movement before his conversion to Christ. The foundation of this
argument has been that Paul admits to his zeal and that he persecuted the
believers for proclaiming a law free gospel, i.e. that the gentiles were
accepted by God without circumcision and the need to follow the Jewish dietary
laws as well as Sabbath observance. I have pointed out that this was not the
reason for Paul’s behaviour for the simple reason that the gentile issue did
not arise until Peter had accepted the members of Cornelius’s household as
members of the covenant community and baptised them. Examination of the
evidence has led me to conclude that the persecution was not against the
Hellenists per se, but the church as a whole, and the reason for the
persecution was that they preached a crucified Messiah something no Jew could
countenance without being confronted with the resurrection.
Another
assumption was examined, namely the growing dependence on Intertestamental
Literature to be the key into the mind set of \Judaism and by implication of
the early church. We saw that while this literature is of considerable value in
helping us to identify the major common issues that were within Judaism, that
because of the complexity of NT Judaism, the texts were of very limited use for
interpreting the NT. The danger was shown of reading meaning into these texts
that could not possibly be proved because of knowing neither the theological
position of the stable they came from nor having enough samples to construct a
theology for the group. It was argued that it is much safer to recognise the
unquestionable influence of the OT on the NT and to also appreciate that the NT
church had been taught how to read these scriptures in the light of the Christ
event. Thus NT exegesis of the OT is