Divination and Philosophy in the Letters of Paul by Matthew Sharp. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2022. Hardback. 264 pp. $94.91.
For any given word in the New Testament, there may be cultural background that modern readers must recover in order to understand it. But backgrounds can differ in kind, not merely degree. The word πραιτώριον in Acts 23:35 is a specimen of one kind: to understand this word, we need to know something about Greco-Roman military and political history. When we do, we discover that it is a Latin word (praetorium) for the official residence of a governor or king. And there, the matter is pretty well settled. Such research helps us transcend our own blinkered modern assumptions and “think our way into” first-century questions and the answers that the NT gives to them.
Not all background, however, is that simple. Especially in the case of abstract concepts, we should not assume that terminology is taken over by the NT authors from the Greco-Roman world without any difference. Of this kind is the term ἀνάστασις, used by Paul in Acts 17 to denote the “resurrection” of Jesus. It piques the interest of his Stoic hearers (“We will hear you again about this”), most likely because they thought it sounded similar to their doctrine of “eternal return” or cyclical history, by which the world is consumed in an ecpyrosis and begins again every thirty thousand years.[1] But of course, this is not at all what Paul has in mind by the term. Unlike πραιτώριον, the word ἀνάστασις carries with it distinctive and contested beliefs about anthropology, eschatology, cosmology, and theology. And while the idea of “resurrection” might bear surface-level similarity to Stoic ideas about cyclical history and “eternal return,” the reality is that the term is not really common ground. Christianity and Stoicism are, in C. Kavin Rowe’s words, “incommensurable forms of life.”[2] They urge not agreement, but conversion.
It is not easy to walk the tightrope between illuminating background and false syncretism. We see some of both in a recent new book by Matthew Sharp, Divination and Philosophy in the Letters of Paul. Sharp contends that “Paul’s various means of communication with the divine are best situated within the context of ancient divination” (2). He sets this in contrast to approaches to Paul that have assumed a theological framework and focused on “revelation” and “prophecy,” thereby “excluding the full range of available evidence for how people of the Graeco-roman world solicited information from the divine world.” The phenomenon of divination is an aspect of the first-century world (both Greco-Roman and Hebrew) that poses considerable challenges to modern readers. We tend to value discursive and scientific knowledge, viewing other modes of knowing with skepticism. Sharp provides the reader with a crash course in ancient divination: dreams, apparitions, omens, lots, and signs. Sources from Homer to Cicero are thoroughly cited and quoted. In my judgment, Sharp does not provide quite as many comparanda as Jennifer Eyl’s Signs, Wonders, & Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul, but he gives enough new citations that anyone who wants to place Paul’s practices within their ancient context will need to consult both books.
“The phenomenon of divination is an aspect of the first-century world (both Greco-Roman and Hebrew) that poses considerable challenges to modern readers. We tend to value discursive and scientific knowledge, viewing other modes of knowing with skepticism.”
What benefit can we derive from this information? Sharp occasionally provides impressive corrections to received English translations by adducing comparable ancient passages. In discussing Galatians 1:16-17 (“when God was pleased to reveal his Son to me…I did not immediately consult with anyone”), Sharp points out that Paul’s word προσανεθέμην “implies the consultation of a specialist regarding the interpretation of divinatory phenomena” and cites precedents from Chrysippus and Diodorus Siculus. This is valuable work which specifies the sense of Paul’s words: he means that he did not require assistance from a vision-interpreter, but understood his vision of Jesus on his own. Sharp gives similarly helpful comparanda to clarify the meaning of several other words: χρημαστισμός/χρηματίζω in Rom. 11:2-6 and the στεναγμοῖς ἀλαλήτοις of Rom. 8:26. Occasionally, Sharp’s data is lifted verbatim from Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, as when he cites three instances of the word στεναγμός from Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato, in the same sequence as they occur in LSJ, without attribution (98). But more often, he displays a knowledge that extends beyond lexicons to documentary sources, such as the technical instructions in Papyri Graecae Magicae. These parts are philologically grounded historical-grammatical exegesis at its best.
Sharp has made a methodological decision not to posit a qualitative distinction between divination authorized by Israel’s God and divination done in the service of the false gods of Greco-Roman religion. This amounts to a deliberate choice of an etic description of Paul’s religious practices, and Sharp admits as much:
“Paul does not describe his activities with the usual Greek words for divination, and one does not need to look too far to find a likely reason for this. In the LXX, words such as μάντις and μαντεύομαι are generally restricted to the illegitimate practices of the Gentile nations…We should be careful, however, not to confuse a taxonomic and linguistic preference with an eschewal of divination altogether.” (4)
This is a surprising admission. We should hesitate before rejecting the biblical authors’ own (emic) explanation of their choice of terms for divinatory activities in favor of an etic one. I suspect that if one were to ask the apostle Paul, “Do you engage in divination (μαντεύει)?”, he would reply with his characteristic μὴ γένοιτο! Despite this concession of deliberately different terminology, Sharp believes that he can find evidence of similar concepts and practices, e.g. that the interpretation of dreams or signs works the same way in Paul as it does in Greco-Roman religion. But too often, it is clear that there is a distinction, and that Sharp has elided it.
For instance, Sharp casts doubt on one of the main distinctions drawn between pagan divination and biblical practices: “A frequent assumption has also been that while ancient Jews and Christians enjoyed the direct divine revelation of prophecy, ‘pagan’ religions had to make do with indirect and artificial means of divination.” (15) It is true that ancient Jews and Christians did not always use different methods from those of the pagans.[3] But are there not times when this distinction is historically accurate because the gods of Greco-Roman polytheism were not gods, and their deliverances by divination had to be ginned up by mountebanks using their techne? So-called “Delphic ambiguity” is a documented trick of ancient oracles, and it is alive and well in the studied vagueness of modern horoscopes and fortune cookies. Then there is the matter of astrology. Augustine delivers scathing criticism of the Pythagorean philosopher and astrologer Nigidius (CD V.3). Sharp, though he cites the City of God as a source that mentions Nigidius (28-29), does not interact with Augustine’s arguments.
Sharp differs from Jennifer Eyl by including more discussion of philosophy, since his main sources are Cicero’s De Divinatione and Plutarch. How does Sharp use ancient philosophical sources? Too often, he uses them to supply conceptual definitions that are then read onto the Bible. For instance, he cites explanations of dream-visions and heavenly apparitions, which occur not only in the Bible but also in Greco-Roman literature, and attempts to use them in exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:10: “These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” Where we might think that Paul is making an analogical argument from human thought to divine thought, Sharp goes in a different direction: “Paul is identifying the physics through which such a visionary experience is possible.”
“We should hesitate before rejecting the biblical authors’ own (emic) explanation of their choice of terms for divinatory activities in favor of an etic one.”
In what sense is the Spirit the “physics” that enables divination? Sharp claims that Paul’s concept of pneuma in the Church, which “forms believers into Christ’s body”, should be understood along Stoic lines, similar to the pneuma that unites the various bodies of the cosmos together and also differentiates them from each other through different degrees of tension (e.g. low-tension pneuma produces solid objects, while higher tensions produce animate, sentient, and even rational beings). Sharp consistently refers to pneuma as impersonal substance, not an agent with intentions, even to the extent of eschewing use of “the Holy Spirit” in favor of the impersonal “holy pneuma,”[4] an anarthrous mass-noun that sounds more like “holy water” than like a person of the Trinity. When speaking of the pneuma of the resurrected Christ, which he concedes “is a personally identifiable title,” Sharp nonetheless claims that “by indwelling believers and forming them into a structured and unified body it operates more like the cosmic pneuma of Stoicism on a restricted scale.” (50) Drawing on Plutarch’s Def. orac. 432e, where “the soul receives pneuma into the body, from which it forms a κρᾶσις with the soul and enables the recept of divine knowledge,” Sharp follows Matthew Thiessen in suggesting that in Paul’s thinking, reception of pneuma happens when the pneuma forms a “blending” or complete mixture with the human soul, and that this mixture enables the manifestations of pneuma-empowered activities like prophecy and glossolalia in believers. The implications of such “total mixture” for theology proper are deeply unorthodox, whether applied to Christ’s two natures (the heresy of Eutychianism) or to the Holy Spirit and believers. Again, Sharp claims that when Paul uses the term pneuma in connection with his visions of Jesus or his being caught up to the third heaven, “Paul is identifying the physics through which such a visionary experience is possible.” (77)
I am not persuaded that the activities of the Spirit can be accurately described as “physics.” This choice of words seems rather to flow from Sharp’s agreement with the Danish scholar Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s thesis that pneuma in Paul is a material substance, and that resurrection bodies, including that of Jesus himself, are made of it. So when the apostle Paul was speaking or writing letters to the churches, we are to think he believed that pneuma was being passed to them in some material manner?
In discussing the appearance of the resurrected Christ to Paul, Sharp says that Paul “does not seem to have simply seen a resuscitated human body as his subsequent discussion suggests Jesus’s resurrected body is pneumatic (1 Cor 15:42-49) and not composed of flesh and blood (1 Cor 15:50).” (44) This idea has been heavily criticized by John M.G. Barclay[5] and N.T. Wright.[6] The latter points out that Engberg Pedersen is quite mistaken to take the “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) of 1 Cor. 15 to mean “a body made of spirit.” It is a philological error, for “made of X” is simply not what the Greek adjectival suffix –ikos means, and the lexicography on the adjective pneumatikon bears this out.[7] Unfortunately, we find Sharp identifying God’s glory with a material substance:
“The term τὴν δόξαν κυρίου, “the glory of the Lord,” (3:18) or τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ, “the glory of God,” (4:6) can be taken to refer to the kabod-YHWH of biblical prophetic visions. This glory represents the substance of Yahweh’s body, and Paul’s claim that they have all beheld this with unveiled face is thus a striking claim” (44)
This physical language about “substance” and “body” goes well beyond what Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah relate about the visual manifestations of YHWH. Indeed, the prophets are very careful not to assert that they know the substance of God, instead hedging and qualifying their descriptions of Him with as many hesitant words like “appearance” and “likeness” as they can (Ezek. 1:26-28). Sharp’s language of “physics” and “substance” fits better with Stoicism, where the divine pneuma is the material substance of the Stoic god, which permeates and fills the cosmos.[8] Similarly, Sharp refers to the utterance “abba, ho pater” (Rom. 8:16) as an “ecstatic cry” that results from total mixture of the pneuma of believers and the pneuma that they have received from Jesus (55), but he does not consider why the utterance is a bilingual one in Aramaic and Greek. I would submit that the Holy Spirit has enabled this bilingual cry, not as a specimen of ecstatic speech, but as the natural result of the union of Jew and Gentile in the one body of Christ.
Confessional and orthodox Christians will have difficulty accepting Sharp’s thesis. His persistent eschewal of the definite and personal title “the Holy Spirit” in favor of the material and impersonal “holy pneuma” falls afoul of both Scripture and the Creeds, which depict the Spirit as a paraclete, refer to Him with masculine personal pronouns (auton, John 16:7, N.B. not the neuter auto) and by the title “the Lord and giver of life”; credit Him with personal agency, and attribute to Him actions such as convicting the world, guiding the disciples, hearing truth from the Father, speaking it to the Church, declaring what belongs to Jesus, and glorifying Jesus and the Father (16:13-15). In Paul’s letters, the Spirit “helps us,” “intercedes for us” (Rom. 8:26), “bears witness” (8:16), is called “the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18); He can be “grieved” (Eph. 4:30); and He makes predictions about the future (1 Tim. 4:1). Sharp, however, consistently treats “holy pneuma” as a material substance by which Paul does things, not as a divine Person who does things Himself.
In sum, this book is valuable for its detailed discussion of the various modes and techniques of divination in the ancient Greco-Roman world, and for its perceptive discovery of a few passages where Paul’s use of the same technical language should illuminate our exegesis. I would class these benefits as “background” in the same sense as the meaning of πραιτώριον. But I was unpersuaded by Sharp’s attempts to read Paul’s letters and identify Stoic and other ancient Greek philosophical concepts at work. Rather, the errors into which he falls by this sort of Stoicizing eisegesis should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks we can adopt the intellectual artifacts of unbelieving Greco-Roman paganism without carefully pruning away the roots by which these ideas are deeply connected to narratives and conceptual models that are contrary to the Christian faith.
Rev. Dr. Matthew Colvin (PhD Cornell University) is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church and is a Visiting Fellow at Davenant Hall. He is the author of The Lost Supper (Fortress, 2019). He lives on Vancouver Island.
[1] See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.14, Alexander, On Aristotle’s Prior Analytics 180-181, and the other texts cited in Long & Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers vol. 1, §52.
[2] C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. “The Christian and Stoic stories are the requisite sense-makers of the particular terms within them so much so that adequate translation of words such as God from one tradition into the other requires the retelling of the story in which the words originally received their meaning….Because the stories are incommensurable and incompatible, the retelling of one story in the terms of the other is simply impossible—they are traditions in conflict.” (237)
[3] Dru Johnson’s recent Biblical Philosophy distinguishes Babylonian fortune-telling via formulas that interpret the “textualized” and pre-encoded world of omens, from Hebrew prophecy and divination, which is dependent upon God as the source of knowledge. I suspect Sharp would dispute this tidy division.
[4] So Sharp speaks of “wisdom transmitted by holy pneuma” (1) and translates 1 Cor. 12:3 as “no one is able to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by holy pneuma.” (102 n.23)
[5] John M.G. Barclay, “Stoic Physics and the Christ-event: A Review
of Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit” in JSNT 33, no. 4 (2014).
[6] N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1402.
[7] Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 1401: “Aristotle, speaking of wombs that are ‘swollen with air’, uses the phrase hysterai pneumatikai, and nobody supposes that he thought the wombs were made of something called pneuma. Galen quotes the third-century BC writer Erasistratus who uses pneumatikē to refer to the left ventricle of the heart, the one that conveys the pneuma, not one that is composed of it. Similarly, the first-century BC writer Vitruvius speaks of a machine that is ‘moved by wind’, a pneumatikon organon, and we do not imagine that he took the machines to be made of wind.”
[8] Barclay’s verdict on Engberg-Pedersen’s Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit could be equally well applied to Sharp’s work: “I regard Paul’s theology as fundamentally incompatible with Stoicism, and that not because he is more ‘Jewish’ or ‘apocalyptic’ than he is ‘Graeco-Roman’ or ‘philosophical’ (it is a huge service to the discipline to dispel those antitheses), but because his theology is configured around a narrative that is shaped, in both thought and life, around a distinctive event with its own resulting logics.” (Barclay, supra n.5, 413)