John Barclay – The Unconditioned Gift

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gift, John Barclay, Paul

John Barclay, in the spacious surrounds of his office in the Burns Building, Dunedin's equivalent of the stunning Pruitt-Igoe Building

Professor John Barclay, currently residing in Dunedin, features in a one-page article today in Otago’s leading newspaper, The Otago Daily Times.

The article highlights some of John Barclay’s recent work on The Gift in the letters of Paul – a subject on which he presented earlier this week, in his fine De Carle Open Lecture series. Here’s an excerpt:

“”Paul has some radical notions about gift which arise out of the nature of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which make him break the mould of the ways in which people thought about and practised gift-giving in the ancient world,” he said. Gift-giving has become peripheral in modern Western society, and we consider the best gifts are unilateral, but for most other cultures past and present, a web of reciprocal gift-giving bound societies together. Over the past century, anthropologists and philosophers have studied how gift exchange operates in various societies, including Pacific and Maori societies, he said. “I’m trying to bring together that study and studies of Roman society and put Paul in that mix and ask what is Paul doing that is different; how does he think about the death and resurrection of Christ, and how does that challenge ancient notions of gift?” In societies where people tied themselves to others by giving and receiving gifts they had to be careful to whom they gave gifts. You gave to people according to their social status, who would enhance your reputation. There was no point in giving to insignificant people who were too poor or too worthless to tie oneself to in a gift relationship. The male, the free, the powerful and the rational were favoured over the female, slaves, the weak, poor or uneducated, he said. “So you have a set of interlocking hierarchies which determine how gifts are given. If this is so among humans, it’s all the more applicable to how God or the gods give.” Most religions had notions of sacrifice, which is giving to God or gods, and in doing so developing a gift relationship with them like that between a client and patron. People understood God or the gods maintained the proper order of the universe by giving gifts to fitting recipients with the right social, moral or intellectual qualities, he said. “Now one of the ways in which Paul’s thinking is very intriguing is that he interprets the life and death and resurrection of Jesus as a divine gift, but what is radical about it is that this is a gift given without preconditions, given in a way that flouts normal criteria of what is reasonable and sensible. “The sorts of values that are embedded in the way people give gifts in antiquity are deeply challenged by the way God’s gift is given to the unfitting, the undeserving, without regard to ethnicity, birth or lineage, without regard to moral status or achievement, without regard to gender, without regard to social status.””

Full article here: “The Unconditional Gift” (which should, rather, be entitled “The Unconditioned Gift”, to agree with JB’s understanding of Paul’s conception of the Christ-gift as a gift without precondition but with obligations).

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John Barclay gives Open Lectures this month

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gift, John Barclay, Paul

John Barclay

Professor John Barclay, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University (United Kingdom), famed New Testament scholar, and occasional Dunedin resident, will give (if you will pardon the pun) two lectures in the De Carle Open Lecture series, on Tuesday 30 March and Wednesday 31 March:

1. Paul and the Subversive Power of the Unconditional Gift
Tuesday 30 March, 5:10pm
Archway 1 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago

Working from the anthropology of gift, and the practice of gifts in Paul’s first-century context, a critical question emerges concerning who is qualified or worthy to receive the gift; answers on the gift’s proper distribution reveal foundational social norms. Paul’s mission to non-Jews broke Jewish ethnic and legal norms, and was the social corollary of his conviction that a divine gift (of Christ) had been given and distributed without qualificatory conditions. This conviction represents a highly unsettling perception of the world, at odds with the normal categories of hierarchy, quality and significance, and capable of creating irregular, socially creative communities. Paul emerges as one of the most subversive thinkers of the ancient world.

2. Paul, Reciprocity and the Modern Myth of the Pure Gift
Wednesday 31 March, 5:10pm
Archway 1 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago

The modern ideology of the pure, unilateral and utterly disinterested gift is the product of social and economic developments in Western history, strengthened by Protestant polemics and modern individualism. In Paul’s context, as in most traditional societies, gifts create obligations, are bilateral in exchange, and are a key mechanism for social integration. Paul’s ideology of gift-reciprocity in a community bound together by gift and need indicates that he is not a modern – and all the better for that! Special features of Paul’s notion of community-construction will be explored, with suggestions concerning their relevance to contemporary social and economic problematics.

All Welcome
And it’s free!

Derrida receives a crap Christmas present and contemplates his obligation to give one back.

Paul writing Jibberish

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jibberish, Paul

One Jack Kilmon has a complaint about the way TV Bible-documentaries portray Paul writing his letters:

“Many of these documentaries, like “After Jesus,” flash back to and anchor themselves on a guy dressed in ancient garb with a reed in his hand, writing on papyrus to represent the Gospels or the Pauline epistles as the narrator discusses some historical event mentioned in those texts between discussions from some of the finest and most brilliant scholars and authors today… Now I can forgive the Medieval artists who depict the evangelists or Paul writing a text of scribbling or jibberish but in every one of these documentaries, not just one but all of them, the director does close-ups of the papyrus and the scribe dipping his reed and writing…what? Jibberish! Scribbles!”

So… the TV documentaries are portraying Paul as though he was writing jibberish? This might be just too obvious to even say, but: at least they are getting something right!

For complete historical accuracy, they then need to portray hordes of scholars across the span of the subsequent two millennia asserting that they have made perfect sense of Paul’s jibberish.