Cosmopolitan Paul

Karin Neutel’s A Cosmopolitan Ideal is a detailed contextual study of Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. “Contextual” here means that Neutel examines the use of these and similar contrasts in Greco-Roman and Jewish texts of the first century, on the assumption that Paul was intervening in an ongoing debate about the ideal organization of society.

Neutel discovers that the male-female and master-slave binaries are common in discussions of hierarchical family and social order. Aristotle said that barbarians were beneath the Greeks in part because they didn’t properly dichotomize – they failed to distinguish slaves and women (32-3). Families and societies depended on these differences, and on the hierarchies they imply. Similar groups of oppositions are found in prayers of thanksgiving, like that of Rabbi Judah in the Tosefta: “Blessed [is God] who has not made me a gentile. Blessed [is God] who has not made me a boor. Blessed [is God] who has not made me a woman” (40). 

On the other hand, there is a strain of both Greco-Roman and Jewish thought that imagined a very different order for society. One of the key elements of these utopian visions was the elimination of slavery. For Jewish utopians, the inclusion of Gentiles is an important feature of the ideal order. She places Paul in this latter group: “Like the sources on ideal communities, Paul’s letters are focused on promoting harmony and preventing conflict, and emphasize the importance of reciprocal relationships. The same concern for unity, egalitarian relationships and the same emphasis on brother and mutuality that are evident in Philo and Josephus, and in a way also in Plato, can be seen in Paul” (69).

Paul doesn’t fit neatly into either of the contemporary academic schemes that have been used to explain him. He’s not proposing an “egalitarian” vision. Neutel argues that “no more male and female” doesn’t have to do with gender equality but with the elimination of marriage in the new eschatological economy that has dawned in Christ (ch. 4; 240-1). But Paul is not simply talking about “inclusion” either. Instead, Paul is offering what might be called a realized utopianism: The community that mystics had dreamed of has now come into historical expression in Jesus: “We already experience an ideal community, an ideal way of life, and we are part of the new creation that will soon see this ideal realized in full” (236).

Neutel perpetuates the common but false claim that Paul expected the world to end within his lifetime. That, and her avoidance of Ephesians 6 and other paraenetic texts in Paul, leads to a distorted view of Paul’s understanding of marriage in the new creation. Since Paul addressed both parents and children, he presumably expected churches to have both. 

Putting Paul in context highlights what Paul does not mention: “One aspect that features in many depictions of utopian groups, one that is fundamental . . . to Plato’s Republic, as well as for the Essenes in the descriptions of Philo and Josephus, is the absence of property. Sharing all goods equally ‘like brothers’ is seen as the basis for community” (236). Neutel claims that Paul believes that property belongs to the world rather than to the new creation, and that wealth ought not create division in the church. Otherwise, “property does not seem to play a role in his thought on an ideal community” (236). 

That is an overstatement. Paul says quite a lot about inheritance; koinonia in the Spirit involves the sharing of gifts and “social capital,” and Paul sees his effort to collect money for famine relief as a way of forging communion among brothers. Still, in first century context it is striking that Paul doesn’t call for the elimination of property. “Utopian” as his vision of the church may be, Paul retains the category of “his own.”