Paul Wasn’t Writing About You: A Conversation with Dr. Beverly Gaventa

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have the privilege of having Dr. Beverly Gaventa on with us. Dr. Gaventa, thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Thank you for having me, Pastor.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. Let's jump right into this. We're going to talk Paul, we're going to talk New Testament today, but specifically gearing toward Paul's letters. A lot of Christians read Paul's letters as if they're being written directly to them, like "Dear Johnny in Long Island, New York." But I know you've spent 40 plus years studying Paul, and you say we got it backwards. So what are we missing?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Well, we tend to miss the historical context. These are actual letters written to, in the case of Romans, where I spent a lot of my time, groups, not individuals. I think it's wonderful that we have the sense that they speak to us. That's why we keep reading them. But we need to remember that, in a sense, and this is a thing a lot of people have said, we're listening in on somebody else's telephone conversation. We're reading somebody else's email. In this case that's a good thing, but we always need to keep in mind that we're in half of a conversation and we don't know what the other half is.

Johnny Ova: It's funny, because people are often surprised when I ask the question: do you believe that when Paul was writing the letter to the Romans, he knew, "Hey, I'm writing the Bible right now. God is using me to write the Bible"? Or did he just think he was writing a letter?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: I think that's absolutely correct. I will say two things about that. One, Paul had scripture. He had what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, although he was probably reading it already in Greek translation. He certainly quotes it in Greek translations. He had a set of scriptures that had informed and shaped and guided Israel, and he was drawing off of them. And when he wrote, I do think Paul had this sense of being guided by God, of being directed by God. So writing a letter wouldn't fall outside that purview. But you're absolutely right. He didn't get up in the morning and think, "I've got to finish this chapter of the Bible today, it's due next week."

Johnny Ova: Now, you studied under Dr. J. Louis Martyn and Dr. Raymond Brown, two giants who really changed how scholars read the New Testament. How did sitting underneath those men reshape what you thought about Paul and the New Testament?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: That's a great question. My work with Ray Brown was mostly on the Gospel of John and on the Gospels in general. He did not do a lot of work on Paul, although I think Ray's passion for the tiny detail of scripture was formative for me. Lou Martyn, for one thing, was just an extraordinary teacher. He cultivated the best in his students. He really listened and followed you in a way that I tried to emulate and I'm sure I didn't succeed at.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Lou was the one, I think, who helped so many of us see the larger horizon, as I call it, of Paul's letters. Paul is not just concerned with individuals, although he is. For Paul the gospel is about God's intrusion in a whole world that has gone wrong, a world that is controlled by larger than human figures, which Paul refers to as Sin and Death. That's not just sin in the small sense of the thing I did wrong today or the thing I didn't do today, but the pressures on all of us to live in a world that has values that are distorted and corrupt, and that lead us to do, individually and collectively, things that are terribly, terribly wrong.

Johnny Ova: Great points on Paul in general and who he was writing to, what the concerns in his heart were. And I know you're known for reading Paul apocalyptically. That word is very scary to people. They think end times, rapture, Left Behind. But that's not what you mean at all. Break it down for us.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: No, no. Some people say, well, if you had better sense, you would just stop using the word and find something else. But I tend to be a little stubborn. You're right, we use "apocalyptic" for what Christians often talk about as end times. Or these days we hear it as the equivalent of a disaster. "This is an apocalyptic moment," by which we mean it was a total disaster of some sort. COVID could be an apocalypse of sorts. But technically, the word in Greek means a revelation. It's an uncovering. The Greek verb could mean something like: I have on a hat, I take off my hat, and I have "apocalypsed" my head. I have revealed it.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: But theologically what it means is something more like God has revealed something. And it's more than just revealing something that was already there, like my head. God has revealed something by doing something. In the case of Paul's understanding of the gospel, God has sent Jesus, God's own incarnate being, into the world, not just to help me understand my life better or to be my buddy, but to reveal this world as it is and to rescue it.

Johnny Ova: I was talking to a member of my church yesterday about this. We read the scriptures and we can get so caught up in the language. We read words like "apocalyptic" or "heaven and earth," and we reference them the way we know them to be. What we often forget is, let's go back 2,000 plus years and put ourselves in the middle of ancient Rome or ancient Israel. The words meant different things.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Absolutely. And we know this in our own lives. If I had said to you 15 years ago, "We're going to have a Zoom chat," you would have said, "What are you talking about?" If I had used the word Zoom, you would have thought I meant to go too fast, or to look closely at something. It would never have occurred to you that we were talking about an online conversation. Language changes all the time. Anybody who's been around a middle school kid knows that. What works today doesn't work tomorrow. Sometimes we read ancient texts and we think they're using language the way we know it, and often there's a huge gap. We have to investigate. We have to look at other ancient texts and deduce what that term might have meant.

Johnny Ova: I can see where the church fathers were coming from too, because it's always portrayed as a negative that in the early church we didn't have a Bible we could read for ourselves. Obviously I love the fact that I can read my Bible for myself. That's not what I'm saying. But you can also see the concern. You give the Bible to everybody, and they're reading it through a lens, not understanding the full picture, and coming to conclusions that are very dangerous.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Right. And we get caught on that, because people like me are inclined to say to students or to lay people, "You need help with this." There's truth to that. We all need help with it. On the other hand, I am sometimes just amazed to see how people who have had little of what you and I would call formal education often come to truly wise readings. So you don't want to discount that. One of the things I find really important in recent scholarship is the way we've learned about how women, often women of color, were reading scripture in ways that were very liberative for them, some of which overlap beautifully with things we have learned as scholars that we think we invented. We think we found this thing, but our predecessors who had very few tools came to some of the same conclusions.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: I'll give you an example, and I'm going to be embarrassed because I can't remember the name right offhand. There is an 18th century African American woman who points out in some of her speeches that when people read the word "deacon" in scripture of men, they think they're leaders. When they find it attributed to Phoebe in Paul's letter, they think she's a servant. So we translate it differently. And she saw this with, so far as I know, very little of that kind of formal education. She just had a good eye.

Johnny Ova: Really good point. All right, let's go into Romans a little bit. I know this may get uncomfortable for some, but most of us were taught that Romans is basically how to get saved. You walk the Romans Road, pray the prayer, done. Boom, finished. But you say that reading shrinks the gospel down to nothing. What's actually happening in Romans?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Okay, that's a big question for a podcast. First of all, as I think I've already said, I don't want to diminish the importance of Romans or any of the letters for individuals. They're important to me. But I have two sorts of problems with this notion of the road to salvation, because it sounds very American. I've got my trip planned, I've got my GPS set, I get on this road, I go to the first place and the second place, and then I get saved. That is the polar opposite of the way Paul presents the gospel. It's not that I'm on my road somewhere. It's the opposite. I think I'm already where I'm supposed to be, and lo and behold, I find out I'm not. That's part of this apocalyptic that does involve the individual. My life is upturned. So that's one level.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: A second level you could think about in terms of Romans 1:16, which so many people point to, talking about God's intervention to save Jew and Greek alike. So it's not just the individual. It's whole peoples. God acts for Israel and God acts for Gentiles, non-Israel. These are whole people groups, which encompass the whole world. But then even beyond that second level, there is the whole of creation. By the time we get to Romans 8, Paul is talking about creation itself groaning, waiting to be redeemed. So as the letter talks about what God is doing, the power of God for salvation, it's the salvation of me, it's the salvation of our people groups, our ethnic groups, and it's the salvation of the whole created order, all of which has gone badly astray, as Paul sees it.

Johnny Ova: You give me a lot to think about, Dr. Gaventa, because it's the zoom out and the zoom in: the people group, the focus of the letter, the why. I know you've also described the gospel as God's invasion of the cosmos. That's violent language. That's war language. Why does Paul see it that way? What has God invaded?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: It is. That's language Lou Martyn used, and in my more recent writing I've tried to back away from it, because I do think it is susceptible of misunderstanding. I use the word "intrusion," which I think gets at the same thing without the violence. I have backed away from the notion that this is an image of power. It is an image of God's power, but God's power doesn't look like armies. It looks like a crucified Messiah. It looks like being weak with the weak. So it upends our definitions of power, and it upends our definitions of strength.

Johnny Ova: So it's more like changing the word "invade," because when you think invade, you think power and strength. Intrusion is a good word, because he's stepping in or stepping through, but not in a violent, forceful way.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Right. There's a sense in which I think for Paul God does have to confront. God does powerfully act. But it's not acting powerfully to destroy humanity. It's acting powerfully to destroy those forces that keep humanity in a form of captivity.

Johnny Ova: It's similar with the word authority in general. Some people think of God's authority like, "I have authority over this whole region, what I say goes, you bow down to me." But really God's authority reflects the sovereignty of God. He doesn't need to force, yet his will is done anyway, because he works with the meek and the lowly, the broken, the hurting, the lost. He didn't pick Rome. He picked Israel. He picked the Jewish people.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Right. The way I would put it is that God's authority is used from the bottom up. That is to say, on behalf of people, not over against them. It is under and with, not over against, not to harm.

Johnny Ova: Paul talks about powers, principalities, and Sin with a capital S, almost like it's a character in a story. A lot of modern readers just skip right over stuff like that. Who or what are these powers Paul keeps warning about?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Well, he doesn't feel the need to explain that, because I think he assumes people understand. Think about the Gospels and all the talk of the devil and demons and so forth. He lived in a world where people knew there were powers other than human. He doesn't give us a philosophical account of them. He doesn't give us an ontology of them. He assumes they are there. I think our best analogy is something like what we talk about as corporate sin, those things that make it impossible for us, in some cases, to do what we would do.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: The example I've been happiest with over the years is the child soldier, who is taken into a web of activity that usually he did not choose and would not choose, but is shaped by it in such a way that you can't just say to him, "Okay, you're free now, stop." You have to be with him, you have to reshape, you have to liberate. Now, I realize this is language that can be corrupted. It's language that can be manipulated. But I think it's true to the text, and I also think it's an important way into thinking about how the gospel speaks in and acts in our world.

Johnny Ova: I've also heard teachings that relate the principalities, powers and rulers of darkness to physical governing bodies. The wickedness in high places would be like the Pharisees in the religious system, or the wicked governors ruling the land. Any thoughts on that interpretation?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: I tend to stay away from that, especially when it comes to the Pharisees, who are simply a group of Jews, some of whom will have been corrupt, no doubt, because humans tend to be, and many of whom will not have been. When Paul talks about principalities and powers, I don't think he identifies them with specific individuals or specific governing bodies. I do think they may be at work in them. When he says in 1 Corinthians 2 that the rulers of this age put Jesus to death, I think he really means the actual superhuman powers acting in their agents in Rome. But he doesn't identify the two, and that's important.

Johnny Ova: Makes sense. So back to salvation. We spoke about Paul writing not only about individual salvation but about groups of people. What does that do with the way we've been reading passages like Romans 3, Romans 5, Romans 8? Are we getting those texts wrong if we're only looking at them through an individual lens?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: You're talking specifically about the way he talks about the death of Jesus. Yes, I think we are, because we tend to think of it so much in terms of "Jesus died for me," and that's not the way Paul talks about it. Just before 3:21, the law speaks to close every human mouth, Jew and Gentile alike. So it's all of humanity. And when you get to chapter 5, he does that really complicated contrast between Christ and Adam. Adam acted in a way that brought sin into the whole human population. Nobody was exempt. When you then say Christ's act also involves the whole human population, that means Christ's redemption is for all. It doesn't mean everybody sees it or recognizes it, but it does mean that the whole of humanity is caught up in this event.

Johnny Ova: It's almost like it started through the lens of the Jewish people, and then we get to the new covenant and it's no longer Jew and Gentile, we're all one. He builds that umbrella: all one under the blood, male, female. Jesus Christ levels the playing field.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: It's really interesting. I think in Romans in particular, Jews are still Jews. They haven't stopped being Jews. Gentiles are still Gentiles. They haven't stopped being Gentiles. What they are together is, in Romans 12, the body of Christ. So there's difference in the body, as you would expect, but they are all together in this new thing.

Johnny Ova: The New Testament writers weren't writing in isolation. We already established that nobody was saying, "I'm writing the Bible today, I've got to be done by three o'clock." But you've argued that they're in conversation with each other, sometimes even in tension with each other. Can you give us an example? Where do we see this dialogue happening?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: When I use that language, I don't mean that Paul is actually writing to correct Mark or something like that. I don't think there's much evidence of that. Some people have thought James has a conversation going with Paul. What I mean is that we make a mistake if we assume everybody is saying the same thing at all times. The New Testament, and scripture as a whole, contains an immense diversity of points of view. Paul seems to be much more wary of the law. He is somewhat critical, at least of sin's use of the law. The law can be holy, just and good, but still sin has used it. Matthew has "not a jot or a tittle of the law shall pass away." It's really hard to make those say the same thing, and I think we need to be comfortable with that.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: In part, to me, it's because the church needs to hear different voices at different times. I always think we're in a time that needs to hear Paul. But ours is a time when we desperately need to hear the warnings of James about our treatment of the poor, and what it means to treat the poor and the dispossessed with disdain. We need to be mindful of that and act on it in a way that sometimes maybe we don't.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Gaventa, you're leading me right into the meat and potatoes here. You mentioned Phoebe before, and I want to get back to her. She's a footnote in a lot of sermons, but you make the claim that she was the first interpreter of Romans, a woman. Explain what you mean and why that changes a lot of things.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: For a lot of people that's kind of radical. I think it's pretty obvious. One of the things that happens when people read Romans, to be honest, is that by the time you get to chapter 16 you're worn out. You get a bunch of names and you think, "Well, I'm done here." But we're not done. Paul commends Phoebe as what clearly is the carrier of the letter. He says she is a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, the port city of Corinth. So she's not simply Paul's courier. She is a person who has some kind of role. I wouldn't say a leadership role in a defined sense. We don't have that at this period. But she's a recognized person in this congregation.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: And he says she's been a benefactor. She has helped. I don't think that means necessarily that she's a member of the elite. There were very few people in the elite. But she was probably someone with a little more than the average resource. It looks as if she's going to Rome, maybe on her own business, and it's interesting that he doesn't feel the need to mention a man going with her as her protector or partner or anything of the sort. He commends her and asks them to help her in her business, whatever the pragma is, which he doesn't specify. My understanding is that she's going to take this letter. That means he trusts her. This letter is clearly of massive importance to him. He's about to go to Jerusalem. He's worried about what's going to happen in Jerusalem. He then wants to go to Spain. This is a pivotal moment, and he wouldn't send somebody to Rome with this letter unless he trusted them. I think that has to mean she is entrusted with the letter, not just in a physical sense, but with the importance of it.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Most scholars would agree with what I just said. Some would disagree with what I'm about to say. I think there's reason to believe she's the one who reads the letter. We have these small groups of believers in certain parts of Rome. This is a small operation. We don't have the First Christian Church of Rome sitting on the corner. We have groups gathered in homes, in tabernae, places where people go to eat. We don't know exactly where they are, but they are small gatherings. I think Paul entrusts her to go from one to the other to the other to read this letter. Now, not a lot of people could read, so maybe she couldn't. But there are women who could read. We have evidence of that, and she may have been one of them.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: If she read the letter, then think of it: the first voice with which people hear this letter is that of a woman. When you read something, you interpret it. When you hear scripture read in church, it's being interpreted already, whether you know it or not, by which words are emphasized and which are not. But even if she doesn't read the letter, she's the one with it. So when the thing is read and people want to discuss it, because they surely would, who's there to represent Paul? The only name we have is Phoebe. So I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the first interpreter of this letter is a woman.

Johnny Ova: Makes sense. To help our audience gain a little more understanding, what would the role of a deacon in the first century have been? Are we clear on what they actually did?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: No. A deacon, at its most general, means somebody who is an envoy from one person or one group to another, so it can be used in a huge number of ways. What I would say is that neither in that case nor in any other do we have a definition. We don't even have one for apostle. Luke gives us a definition of apostle, but it clearly isn't the definition Paul uses, because for Luke an apostle must have been somebody who was with Jesus, which wouldn't include Paul himself.

Johnny Ova: Right. And interestingly, Paul uses maternal imagery a lot in his writings, calling himself a mother in labor, a nursing mother. When you point this out, it shocks some people. Why did Paul describe himself this way, and what have we lost by ignoring it? You also see things like birth pangs, and that maternal relation to God as well.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: When I first started noticing this, it was almost in reaction to something I ran across that talked about how Paul always features himself as a father. And I thought, well, not really. There are these places where he uses this interesting language of the nursing mother. In the ancient world, the nursing mother was somebody who was breastfeeding. You didn't have a bottle, except in extreme circumstances, when you would jerry-rig something to feed a baby. And he uses language, as you say, of being in labor. He doesn't mean working like the guys putting new roofs on the row of houses behind us. He means somebody who is actually in the physical labor of birth.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: There's a debate about this. There are scholars who find it not important, and there are some who find it a little offensive, as if Paul is taking over maternal language that is not rightfully his. I see it as further evidence, not that he got up in the morning and said, "I'm a feminist today," but that in a number of places he uses language that attributes what the world would see as weakness, as vulnerability, even to the apostle. The apostle is not the heavy, the strong man. The apostle is the one who is sent on behalf of the weakness of Jesus, the weakness of the God who takes on human form as a baby.

Johnny Ova: Romans 9 to 11 has been used to justify some horrific things throughout history, from supersessionism to anti-Jewish violence. How does your apocalyptic reading rescue these chapters from that legacy?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: I'm really glad you asked that. It's a very complicated question. We would have to work through all three chapters. My quick summary is that for Paul, when he uses the word Israel, he means everybody who would be called a Jew, the physical descendants of Abraham. But for Paul, the important thing is that God created this people. God called Abraham, God made a child for Abraham where there was no child, and God has sustained and corrected the Jewish people ever since. When he confronts the issue of many of his fellow Jews not believing in Jesus, what Paul sees is a division in Israel in his present, created by God for God's own purposes. There's a group he calls the remnant, just as there's been a remnant in Israel over time. These are the people he identifies with, who understand Jesus as Messiah. And then there's the rest, the hardened, whom God has hardened. Any time you look at Romans, one of the things you need to notice is what God is doing, because it's so relentlessly driven by God's action.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: So what he finally says is, "I will tell you a mystery." This is a revelation: all Israel will be saved. Some people try to get around that by saying he really means the church. I don't see that at all. That's not the language. He never calls the church Israel. Others say it's only those Jews who believe. Again, Paul doesn't talk about everybody believing. He says all Israel will be saved, and I think that is his expectation, because God made promises to Israel. If God didn't keep those promises to Israel, then God can't be relied on to keep promises to anybody else. It's God who is being questioned here. For Paul, the promises to Israel are without change.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: So when Christians have acted in hateful ways and worse toward Jews, first of all, that violates the whole sense of creation. God created human beings. To mistreat a human being is to mistreat God's creation, period. God came in Jesus as a human being. To mistreat human flesh is to mistreat what God took on. But Israel in particular is God's beloved, and for Christians to act against Israel is really just unthinkable.

Johnny Ova: We could probably spend another hour on that. I've got loads of questions. But I appreciate your insight. I have just a few more questions, because of your new Romans commentary. I know it took a while to write, and I see scholars online calling it a landmark work. After sitting with this letter your entire career, what did you finally see that you hadn't seen before?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: There are so many, and 24 hours from now I would probably think of something else. But the thing that struck me that I really hadn't expected was the emphasis in this letter on what I would generally call worship, and along with that, our use of language. What is the human problem when Paul gets into 1:18 and the second half of Romans 1? I think the human problem, as Paul sees it, is the unwillingness to worship, to allow God to be God. They did not recognize God as God. Classically, it's what Israel would call idolatry: we make other things into gods.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: When you get into the first half of chapter 3, which you asked me about earlier, there's that long passage in which he quotes a ton of texts, many of them psalms, about people refusing to honor God. Then later in the letter, one of the things that happens is the opening of the human mouth again to praise God. In chapter 8, we call God Father. At the end of chapter 15, at what people think of as the climax of the letter, there's this doxology of Jew and Gentile coming together to glorify God. There are numerous doxologies and benedictions in the letter. One of the things I hadn't noticed before is the use of "amen," where Paul will say something and then say, "Glory be to God, amen." Amen, as you know, is worship language. It's not a word you throw into a letter, at least it wasn't. If you look in the Old Testament, it's always used in connection with Israel's worship of God. So we get all these pieces that have to do with worship, and I had not expected that at all.

Johnny Ova: Wow, what insight. I never even put those two together.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: We think about Romans up here, what I think and what I believe. Or sometimes, if we get caught up in chapter 12 and following, about what I do. But for Paul these things are integrated, and I think the integrating factor is the worship of God.

Johnny Ova: Amen. All right, last question, and I throw these softballs up all the time. If there's one thing you want listeners to walk away with today, one truth that could transform how they engage with the New Testament, what is it?

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: I would say always look for what God is doing. I mean that not just in a personal reading or appropriation way, although I'm happy with that, but literally: as you look, what is attributed to God? What is attributed to Jesus? What is attributed to the Spirit? Because as Americans we're especially inclined to look and see what we're supposed to do, what we're supposed to be. That's fine, but that's not where the story starts. It's always about what God is up to and only secondarily about how we respond. And if we don't get that order straight, then we're not going to get the response straight either.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Gaventa, I can't thank you enough. I really enjoyed our conversation today. So much wisdom and knowledge. I truly appreciate your time. Have a great rest of your day.

Dr. Beverly Gaventa: Thank you, Pastor. You too.