Contours Of Pauline Theology - Tom Holland

This study of the pervasive influence of the Passover on Pauline
thinking and the corporate significance of the NT texts was first
published in 2004. Dr Tom Holland of the Wales Evangelical School

of Theology has not been backward in wanting to draw attention to
his work. There is a website devoted to it, with an online version of
the book (appallingly badly proof-read, and presenting the work in an
earlier form from its modified published version), and a collection of
many reviews of the book. The book itself is also available, hardback,
at an astonishingly inexpensive price for a work of academic
scholarship, and I obtained a copy, new, through Amazon for £10.47.

Contours provides a paradigm for reading Paul in particular, and the
NT texts generally, based on the Egyptian Passover and the New Exodus
vision of the 8th century prophets. Tom Holland has done his
groundwork, and provides detailed and panoramic reference to studies
which have preceded his, whilst pointing out that none of these take
the implications and significance of their readings as far as he
himself is prepared to propose.

In the process, Holland throws out some major challenges to
contemporary scholarship, especially the various New Perspective
schools or writers. Amongst these, he challenges the vogue for using
inter-testamental writings as a way of interpreting the New Testament,
based on a model which has Second Temple Judaism as its background.
Holland argues that the complexity of the writings, and the difficulty
in establishing contexts and schools of thought which provide
consistent readings of the writings, make definitive observations and
statements about their underpinning of New Testament thought very
problematic. He argues for a more thorough-going use by the NT writers
and early church of the OT as the background which shaped their
thinking and theology, and this in a unique way without parallel in the
inter-testamental literature.

However, Holland lines up with NP scholarship in agreeing that Paul’s
theology is essentially Semitic, rooted in the Old Testament, and not
Hellenistic. His conclusions, based on extensive study, diverge from NP
scholarship, however - albeit not totally, but at key points.

In particular, Holland disagrees with Dunn and Wright that Paul’s
opposition to the early church arose from his belonging to the Jewish
Zealot faction, directed against Hellenists, who supposedly were in the
vanguard of encouraging uncircumcised gentiles into the covenant people
of God. Holland argues that Paul’s chief contention with the early
church was its preaching of a crucified messiah.

Holland also disagrees with Wright’s view that justification was
essentially a declaration identifying who belonged to the covenant
people of God. By pursuing the New Exodus provenance of the word,
Holland argues that while it does have primarily a covenant rather than
forensic significance, the word itself implies the creation of the new
covenant, rather than its identification. Holland argues that the
Reformers were not wrong in seeing justification as the means of entry
to the covenant, but that they failed to emphasise the historical basis
of the covenant as being deeply shaped by the Passover paradigm.

Dr Holland pursues in detail a widespread, profound and pervasive use
of language in Paul’s writings which firmly anchors his redemptive
theology in the narrative historical soteriology of Israel. A key to
unlocking this observation is the recognition that the Old Testament,
especially the eschatological vision of Ezekiel, and extra-biblical
writings, saw an atonement as well as a redemptive significance in the
Passover, and that in Ezekiel the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement
merged with the observation of the Passover in the eschatological
temple. Hence in Holland’s detailed exploration of Romans 3, the
hitherto problematic hilasterion (trans. propitiation, or sin offering,
whilst actually referring to the mercy seat which covered the ark of
the covenant in the temple), finds a natural home and explanation.

On the issue of hilasterion, Holland also refutes contemporary
scholarship’s resort to 4 Maccabees 17:22, where it is used to imply a
martyrdom theology, this being taken up and subsequently applied to
Christ’s own death. Holland points out the limitations of this as a way
of interpreting the death of Christ, and provides a way of interpreting
the word in its Romans context which resolves the difficulties which it
had previously posed.

Thus far has been some observation on details of Dr Holland’s thesis.
But not content with detail, which he provides in abundance, his work
throws up challenges to various threads of the NP school which require
an answer. He also provides a major paradigm for understanding the
theology of Paul, and the gospels. The paradigm is significant, because
it builds on the work of NP thinkers, and accepts a basic premise, that
the narrative history of the people of God is central to understanding
the significance of Christ and his death on the cross, and that much
that has subsequently been reshaped into ontological categories for
interpreting scripture can now be restored to a more convincing home,
providing greater integrity, and actually a simpler unifying way of
understanding things. This, Holland asserts, was the theology which
Paul inherited from his Judaistic background, but which had already
been formed by the early church. Paul introduced nothing new.

An example of how this approach works out can be seen in Holland’s
exposition of the ‘hymn’ in Colossians 1:15-20. The current consensus
sees a Wisdom provenance for the language of the hymn - connecting
Proverbs 8 with Genesis 1 in particular. Dr Holland takes the key
introductory word prototokos - firstborn, and demonstrates its
relationship with the Passover, and why this word, rather than its
associate in OT writings, redeemer, was extensively used in the NT. The
prototokos performed the function of Redeemer in OT thought, whilst
also connoting substitutionary sacrifice and atonement. (‘Redeemer’ did
not imply the latter, and ‘redemption’ was not the sole prerogative of
the firstborn - hence, Holland argues, its non-use in describing Jesus
in the NT). The hymn ends with a further cultic reference in the blood
of Jesus. Holland offers the intervening links to locate it entirely to
a New Exodus context.

The other major theme of the book is the exploration of the corporate
dimension of Paul’s thinking. Again, there is nothing new in the
attempt to move from a highly individualised reading of the letters to
the more authentic corporate setting in which they would originally
have been read. But Holland takes this much further than many, bearing
in mind the corporate significance of the Passover and New Exodus
settings which he is using to interpret Paul. So he takes words and
phrases such as ‘body of sin’, or ‘the old man’, and ‘the new man’ to
be consistently corporate. Going further, he suggests that references
to baptism in Romans 6 are not technically related to the meaning of an
individual’s water baptism, but have a consistent relationship to the
people of God as a whole, based on the Passover paradigm of baptism
into Moses, and the corporate passage through the Red Sea. This makes
sense, in Holland’s view, of the otherwise uncertain meaning of baptism
in, for instance, 1 Corinthians 12:13 (with its distinct Passover
references).

Of particular interest, in relation to Dr Holland’s pursuit of the
corporate significance of Paul’s thinking within the New Exodus
framework, is the light he sheds on the otherwise puzzling 1
Corinthians 6:15ff "Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and
make them members of a prostitute? Never" etc. Holland argues, using
historical research which suggests that Aphrodite worship did not
entail temple prostitution in the Roman period at Corinth, that the
prostitute or harlot here is not an individual example, but a demonic
corporate entity - akin to the harlot of Revelation. The believer may
be free to eat meat which has been sacrificed in pagan temple
ceremonies, but is not free to engage in the feasts which accompany the
ceremonies themselves - as the letter goes on to elucidate, making
reference, of course, to the first Exodus.

Dr Holland is not the first to explore the New Exodus as a way of
understanding Paul or the NT generally, and he enumerates many others
who have done some sort of work on the subject. He is probably the
first to pursue the New Exodus to an extent in which it is shown to
shape the thinking of Paul on a broad scale, and to suggest that this
is what underpinned the theology of the NT writers, in relating the
messiah Jesus to the OT narrative. In so doing, he throws up
considerable challenges to contemporary biblical studies, in relation
to Paul in particular, although, as already suggested, not exclusively
to Paul. Dr Holland’s style is sometimes rather whimsical, occasionally
overdoing assertions of what he has proved, rather than letting the
arguments speak for themselves. I occasionally found it helpful to read
the words to myself with a Welsh accent. Somehow the Celtic voice
seemed to help interpret the script, in the strange interior world of
my head.

This is one of the most stimulating works of academic scholarship I
have read. I wonder how well it will transfer into the realm of popular
thinking and theology in the church at large - in ways that the NP
paradigm(s) seem not to have been able to do.