repudiation of Eberhard Jungel’s objections to the Declaration which are based on a typically Lutheran(though evidently not typical of all Lutherans) theology of opposites: gospel not law, grace not works, etc.For Jungel (not one of the contributors here) ‘the doctrine of justification is the one and only criterion forall theological statements’. Joseph Fitzmyer implies that Jungel and others like him do not read the wholeof Paul. In his worthy but well balanced survey of justification in Paul, Fitzmyer shows that justification isonly one way in which Paul talks about salvation and only really in two of his letters in which he isresponding to a particular form of opposition. Fitzmyer suggests a decahedron of effects of the Christ-event, as he calls it: justification, salvation, reconciliation, expiation, redemption, freedom, sanctification,transformation, new creation and glorification. Margaret Mitchell smooths this out by identifying themnot as ten different effects but as ‘different metaphorical means . . . for expressing the same, salvificreality’. So, then, not a decahedron of salvific effects but ‘different templates or transparencies that can beoverlaid in viewing what is for Paul the singly central Christ-event’. Either way, Richard DeMaris agreesfrom a Lutheran perspective that, in the light of recent Pauline scholarship, we have to decentrejustification without underestimating its integral importance. He thinks we need a new language andsuggests that of God as a ‘benefactor’ as an alternative to God as one who justifies or makes righteous.Much recent work on Romans, particularly the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’, coming from

Protestant exegetes, has seriously questioned Luther’s and subsequent Lutheran readings of Paul. JohnReumann here tries to re-establish something like a Lutheran understanding by setting aside Romans andGalatians to focus on Philippians, and specifically Philippians 3.2–11. Margaret Mitchell does a lot toundermine this position methodologically and at the same time quite correctly warns of the danger ofrequiring a consensus of New Testament scholars as a precondition of ecumenical advance. Especially, Iwould add, in the ever more complex and confusing world of Pauline scholarship.There are also chapters on how Paul was interpreted in the early Church, specifically by Origen,

Chrysostom and Augustine, by David Rylaarsdam, and on the interpretation of Paul in the middle agesand Reformation by Randall Zachman, but these are make-weights. What is helpful is a lengthy finalchapter by the editor on ‘Recent Readings of Paul Relating to Justification by Faith’. For those readersstill on the fringe of understanding recent shifts in Pauline studies, this would be a good place to start.These shifts have been provoked by a realisation that Luther got Paul wrong. This is something of abombshell for Protestant theology which says a lot for the resilience of those who are trying to deal withthe after-shock. Within Protestant exegesis there is a dispute between Lutheran and Calvinist readings ofPaul, which is not easy to get your head round if you do not come from those traditions. It is a disputeabout the status of the law, the value of human actions, and the centrality within theology of justificationby faith, among other things. But Catholic scholars need to latch onto this because it would be short-sighted to formally agree with Lutherans in such a way that it cut them adrift in this debate fromCalvinists (who would include N. T. Wright) who are the ones who might have a lot to teach us aboutPaul at the present time.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church. By James W Aageson. Pp. xv, 235, Hendrickson, Peabody,Massachusetts, 2008, d12.99.

What to do with the Pastoral Epistles? The predominant approach is to first ask who wrote them –probably not Paul; then to date then – AD 80–100; then to comment on the text but with the effect ofmaking them somewhat marginal in the NT canon and, within the tradition of Protestant exegesis(particularly post-Harnack), to consign them to a post-Apostolic ‘Catholic’ development. Aageson’spurpose is rather different. He is interested in what they tell us about a Pauline tradition that emergedafter Paul and continued into the following centuries. He asks ‘What happened to Paul after Paul?’Aageson’s method is descriptive and comparative. He prefers to leave open the questions of the

authorship, date, location and context of the Pastoral Epistles in order to compare literary andtheological patterns among the three letters themselves and with a range of other ‘Pauline’ documents. Henotes that 1Timothy and Titus are concerned, among other things, with behaviour in ‘the household ofGod’, with ministerial order and with holding to the (unspecified) truth of faith. 2 Timothy is concernedwith suffering in the Christian life in a way paralleled most strongly in Philippians. Aageson inclines to theview that 2 Timothy was written by someone other than the author of 1 Timothy and Titus, so not all thePastorals were written by Paul. Aageson lines up the three Pastoral letters against those undisputed lettersof Paul with which they have most often been thought to have a connection: 1 Timothy with 1Corinthians, 2 Timothy with Philippians, and Titus with Galatians. In each case he finds the connectionsare tenuous or non-existent. So probably none of them were written by Paul; there were probably three

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authors: Paul and two others. In answer to the question, What happened to Paul after Paul? The firstanswer is: the Pastoral Epistles, but under two forms: 1 Timothy/Titus and 2 Timothy.The next comparison is with Acts where Paul is not presented as a writer of letters and a thinker but as

an orator and witness. Luke here also moves out from 1 Timothy’s concern with life within the householdof God towards life for the Christian inside the Empire. Then the patterns within the Pastorals arecompared with Deutero-Pauline letters, where Aageson finds that in ‘theological and structural terms,Colossians and Ephesians resemble more closely the undisputed Pauline letters than they do thePastorals’. And so the comparisons continue to the Apostolic Fathers – Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement ofAlexandria – and the Pastoral Epistles to see how the Pauline tradition developed in new contexts and tosee how the image of Paul himself changed. Then to their positive use at the end of the second-century byIrenaeus and Tertullian, and their comparative neglect by Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Two thingsemerge here. First, it is not true to say that Paul was ignored by orthodox writers in the second-centuryand only used and misused by Gnostics like Marcion. And second, the Pastoral Epistles, with their appealto hold to the true faith, were cited more by authority figures like Irenaeus, while Paul’s own letters weremore used by those who wanted to interpret scripture, to use philosophy and to present arguments. Sobishops used the Pastorals and teachers used Paul himself.Aageson also thinks that the Pastorals demonstrate an early move towards a Pauline scripture, a

Pauline canon, which developed further in the following decades, even to showing itself in The Acts ofPaul and Thecla. When he considers patterns that have been proposed for the development of doctrine inthe early Church – whether truth preceding error, or error preceding the formulation of orthodoxy(Walter Bauer); whether there were both fixed and flexible elements of tradition, or a diversity oftrajectories from the beginning (James Robinson and Helmut Koester) – James Aageson reckons that hisexamination of Paul and the Pastoral Letters demands ‘a more complex and variegated approach toChristian origins . . . we need to adopt what might be called a multiplex or multilayered approach to thedevelopment of early Christianity in general and Paul’s legacy in particular’. This book, then, is in nosense a conventional account of the Pastoral Epistles; it is much more interesting than that.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians. Volume 1. A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Titus, 1-2 Timothyand 1-3 John. By Ben Witherington III. Pp. 623, Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic & Nottingham:Apollos, 2006, d21.99.

This is the first of a projected three volume project which will cover Hebrews, the Pastorals, and theGeneral Epistles. Six of those eleven NT books get Witherington’s customary full and fair treatment here.The rationale offered for the series seems mainly to be that it will allow W to finish his ‘long-term projectof exegeting the entire New Testament’ (p. 12), though some of the other volumes he has written are atpresent still forthcoming. Given that even Calvin never wrote a commentary on Revelation this is anextraordinary achievement, and certainly at this level nobody springs to mind in the intervening 400 yearswho has achieved anything comparable. All praise to W that the commentaries never let up in theirserious two-pronged attention to social and theological factors. Whether his judgement that these sixdocuments deserve attention together because they are written to congregations in the same‘socioreligious milieu and even the same regional context’ is justified, it probably matters little in theend compared to the value of the treatment herein.There is a general introduction, presumably to the series rather than this one book, though this is not

clear. Two issues are raised. Firstly W discusses the ‘old chestnut’ of epistolary pseudepigrapha’. Hisbracing survey shows up the increasingly evident faultlines in the old view that pseudepigrapha in thecanon was a harmless literary convention. This view has attained such widespread status in NTscholarship that it is doubtful that the brief 15-page analysis will shift it, though W is abreast of thecurrent discussion and faithfully reports that the tide is turning. The concept of harmless conventionseems increasingly unlikely. Deliberate deception is not of course ruled out, but the personal details thatsuffuse the pastorals must have been added in with intent to deceive. The burden of proof, at least, hasshifted, as W concludes. In the wake of the work of Luke Timothy Johnson and works like the editedvolume The Canon Debate (eds. Sanders & MacDonald, Hendrickson, 2002, not noted herein), thisjudgements seems correct. (With regard to the two main subdivisions of the commentary that follow, Wargues that the ‘pastorals’ are Pauline with the possible help of Luke as amanuensis, and that theJohannine epistles are by the Beloved Disciple, who was also the source of the material for the FourthGospel, which was however edited by a different John, possibly John of Patmos.) The secondintroductory issue discussed is a brief defence of the suitability of rhetorical categories in analysing

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