Introduction

Countless studies have sought to correlate the apostle Paul's handling of Scripture with the methods of his Jewish contemporaries. In addition to the summary treatments that accompany most investigations of Paul's use of the “Old Testament,” a variety of monographs have compared Paul's mode of interpretation with those of Philo, the rabbinic literature, and the Qumran community. Similar investigations have been carried out for every book of the New Testament where biblical quotations can be identified. Additional studies have examined the interpretational techniques of the Jewish materials themselves. After so much scholarly effort, one would expect to find a wealth of data on the way early Jewish writers handled the wording of their quotations. In reality, very few researchers have concerned themselves with this problem. Several explanations can be posited for this comparative neglect: the complex and uncertain text-history of the biblical materials themselves; the difficulty of fixing an individual author's biblical Vorlage; the loss of original language versions of many of the works in question; a notable lack of comparative studies on other documents; and especially the higher visibility and relative accessibility of an author's exegetical techniques as compared to the way he handled the wording of Scripture. Comparing hermeneutical models is certainly a more promising enterprise than entering into a labyrinthine discussion of the relationship between a series of quotations and their presumed biblical Vorlage. In the long run, however, there is no escaping the close analysis that is required to render an adequate portrait of an author's approach to the biblical text.

The importance of methodology

Surely the most vexing problem that confronts any attempt to analyze the citation technique of the apostle Paul concerns how one can know where Paul has adapted the wording of the biblical text and where he has simply reproduced the wording of a non-“standard” Vorlage. It comes therefore as something of a surprise to discover how little attention has been paid to this key question in the standard examinations of Paul's use of Scripture. In fact, a careful review of available studies turns up not one significant discussion of the thorny methodological issues raised by this perennial crux. For the most part investigators have been content to compare the wording of the Pauline text with the standard editions of the Greek and Hebrew Bibles (the more astute include references to the critical apparatus) and then to offer a few perfunctory remarks as to why this or that reading should or should not be attributed to the apostle Paul. Questions such as what constitutes reliable criteria for adjudicating such matters have been largely ignored. As a result, one finds almost no guidance in the literature on such vital subjects as: how to distinguish between intentional adaptations and other forms of textual variation, such as arise from memory quotation or the use of a different Vorlage; what types of modifications Paul typically introduces into the wording of his citations; how Paul's handling of the biblical text compares with the approaches of his contemporaries; and similar matters.

The last two chapters have produced a massive amount of data on the way Paul handled the text of Scripture in his explicit biblical citations. In accordance with the procedures outlined in chapter 2,only the most secure evidence (A and B ratings) will be used in constructing a portrait of Paul's normal citation technique. In view of the generally conservative method applied throughout the present study, the following conclusions can be affirmed with a reasonable degree of confidence:

(1) Counting the individual verses that make up the so-called “combined citations” (Rom 3.10–18, 9.25–6, 1 Cor 15.54–5, 2 Cor 6.16–18), the present study has examined eighty-three explicit quotations at seventy-four different sites within the assured letters of Paul. Of this number, seventy-six could be identified by the presence of an explicit introductory formula, three by the appearance of specific interpretive comments in the surrounding verses, and four by grammatical incongruities with the new Pauline context.1 Of the seventy-six verses marked by formal introductions, fifty-eight (76 percent) quote individual biblical texts, five (7 percent) conflate verses from more than one passage, and thirteen (17 percent) appear in one or another of Paul's “combined citations.”

(2) It has become common to use the term “introductory formulae” to describe the various phrases that Paul and other New Testament writers use to identify their explicit quotations. In Paul's case, however, such terminology can be rather misleading, since Paul is by no means “formulaic” in the way he incorporates biblical materials into his own compositions.