In 2001, Troels Engberg-Pedersen published an edited volume in which he sought to move the study of Paul past the “Judaism/Hellenism Divide.”1 The underlying conviction of that collection of essays was that scholars must not pit Judaism against Hellenism in the study of Paul; rather, one must draw upon a wide range of Greco-Roman sources, Jewish and non-Jewish, in order to appreciate fully Paul’s thought and writings. Any attempt to distinguish between what is Jewish and what is Greek in Paul’s thought tears apart the very fabric of his mind.2 To what degree Joshua Jipp consciously feels himself indebted to this conviction, I do not know, but Christ Is King is a book that admirably situates Paul’s Christology within the Jewish and non-Jewish political ideologies of the wider Mediterranean world. When it comes to the question of Paul and empire, then, Christ Is King should be one of the first places scholars turn, for it convincingly shows the manifold ways in which Paul is indebted both to Roman imperial ideology and to Mediterranean rulership discourses.

The importance of this broader argument notwithstanding, I would like to focus on Jipp’s fourth chapter, “King and Kingdom: Sharing in the Rule of Christ the King.” Here he makes a compelling case that Paul not only portrays Christ as king, using various facets of the political ideologies of his day, but also envisages believers participating in Christ’s rule themselves. Thus Paul can speak of believers ruling (basileuō) with Christ (1 Cor 4:8; Rom 5:17), judging the kosmos and angels (1 Cor 6:2–3), and trampling Satan under their feet (Rom 16:20). This claim that Christ followers would co-rule with Christ springs out of Paul’s conviction that believers have received Christ’s pneuma and are now, in some way, identified with him. They will be divinely transformed so as to share Christ’s image (eikōn, Rom 8:29). The language of Christ’s eikōn evokes all sorts of Mediterranean literature regarding royalty: most famously, the priestly creation account’s portrayal of humanity as God’s royal image (eikōn, Gen 1:26–28 LXX), as well as Seneca’s claim that Nero passes on his likeness to all in the empire (Clem. 2.2.1).3

Similarly, Paul’s understanding of the way in which Christ’s pneuma holds the body together (e.g., 1 Cor 12) fits within a larger political ideology that equates the Roman emperor with the soul of the empire. As Jipp notes (205), Paul’s contemporary, Seneca, calls Nero the spiritus of the empire, which serves as the emperor’s body (Clem. 1.4.1). According to Stoic thought, the emperor is to the empire as the supreme god, who is pneuma, is to the kosmos, and as the soul is to the body. God, the emperor, and the soul enliven and organize, respectively, the kosmos, the empire, and the body (e.g., Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 7.139; Alexander of Aphrodisias, Mixtures 223.25; 224.14; Plutarch, Against the Stoics 1085C–D). Conversely, the kosmos, the empire, and the body participate, again respectively, in the life of god, the emperor, and the soul. This is precisely the shape of Paul’s thinking with regard to Christ and those who trust in him. Christ lives in believers and organizes them into a cohesive body, just as pneuma knits together fleshly bodies. He does this because he is Israel’s Messiah and this is how numerous people in the Greco-Roman world, Jews and non-Jews, thought of rulers.4 Simply put, Paul’s thought here is indebted to Jewish and non-Jewish Greco-Roman thought in a way that makes it impossible to untangle the two.

Jipp’s fourth chapter, therefore, makes an important contribution to larger discussions of Paul’s participatory language. Already in 1930 Albert Schweitzer challenged traditional readings of Paul that placed justification by faith at the center of Paul’s thought.5 Instead, Schweitzer contended that Paul’s en Christō (“in Christ”) language pointed to mysticism, or union with Christ, as the center of Paul’s thought. Like Schweitzer, Jipp argues that many of the en Christō statements Paul makes are both instrumental and locative or participatory: “Believers, then, are not only the recipients of God’s actions by means of the Messiah, but they are also said to share with the Messiah in his identity and his rule” (199).6 They have become the messianic body, if not quite the Messiah himself (cf. Gal 2:20).

In Paul and Palestinian Judaism, E. P. Sanders reasserted this same thesis, characterizing the core of Paul’s thought as “participationist eschatology.”7 Yet Sanders did not provide an account of what such language signifies for Paul. As Richard Hays puts it: “What in the world does such language actually mean? To what experiences or realities does it refer? If it is not simply speculative fantasy, how is it to be understood?”8 Recently, in a volume dedicated to Sanders, both Hays and Stanley Stowers have taken up this question, coming to rather different answers.9 For his part, Hays suggests four complementary models for understanding this participatory language: familial, political/military, ecclesial, and narratival. Nonetheless, he argues that the latter two categories, ecclesial and narrative participation, are “epistemologically primary.”10 Jipp’s work provides a textured account of the way in which Paul’s participatory thought is actually rooted in the wider political discourses (Hays’s second model) of the Greco-Roman world. This political understanding of participation is, I would insist, epistemologically primary.

But I would maintain that the familial sense of participation is just as epistemologically primary as the political. Here I turn to the aforementioned essay of Stowers, which builds upon the work of Caroline Johnson Hodge and focuses on the familial understanding of Paul’s participatory language.11 According to Johnson Hodge and Stowers, Paul’s participatory language relates to Paul’s belief that Christ’s stuff, his pneuma (understood in the Stoic sense as a type of matter), creates a real and material connection between Christ and believers. As they show, Paul believes that gentiles become sons and seed of Abraham through the reception of Christ’s pneuma. This pneuma, then, interpenetrates gentiles and not only forges a connection to Christ, but also creates a genealogical connection or lineage to Abraham, since Christ is Abraham’s seed (Gal 3:16).

For Paul, this familial link to Abraham relates closely to Jipp’s work on the political participation in the Messiah. Scholars have long puzzled over Paul’s claim that Christ is the seed (sperma) of Abraham (Gal 3:16), but I have elsewhere argued that Paul makes this claim because he has connected two similarly worded passages (admittedly, more similar in the MT than in the LXX): 2 Sam 7:12 and Gen 15:3–5.12 The first text contains God’s promise to establish the kingdom of David’s sperma, who is described as coming out of his loins (cf. Ps 131:11 LXX). Some later Jews, including Paul presumably, interpreted this oracle as a promise of the Messiah (e.g., 4QFlorilegium; Psalm of Solomon 17; Heb 1:5). Paul associates this reference to seed that comes out of David’s loins with God’s similar promise that he would give Abraham seed (sperma), which would also come out of Abraham (LXX) or even out of Abraham’s loins (MT). In other words, Paul identifies David’s seed, the Messiah, with Abraham’s seed. (Compare the way in which Matthew likewise links the Son of David to the Son of Abraham; Matt 1:1.) Since Jesus is the Christ, the seed of David (Rom 1:3; cf. 2 Tim 2:8), he must also be Abraham’s promised seed.

To Paul’s mind, then, there is a close connection between Abrahamic descent and Davidic descent. Paul explicitly argues that his readers in Galatia and Rome are sons and seed of Abraham (Rom 4:11–13; Gal 3:7, 26–29) because he needs to convince his gentile readers that they are, via Christ’s pneuma and apart from circumcision, heirs of God’s promises to Abraham. But, and here I admit that I am extrapolating beyond Paul’s letters, I think that Paul would say the same thing about his readers becoming Davidic sons and seed. In order to inherit the kingdom promised to David’s seed, people must become Davidic seed. And one obtains the status of Davidic seed by being interpenetrated by the pneuma of Christ, the seed of David. When Paul looks at Gen 17:5, then, he may well believe that the royal seed of Abraham refers to the messianic seed, Christ, as well as to all those who are in Christ and share his stuff (pneuma).

Thanks to Jipp’s work, what we see better in Paul is the belief that, via Christ’s pneuma, believers gain a lineal connection to both Abraham and David. Participation is both familial (descent from Abraham and David through Christ, the seed of Abraham and David) and political inasmuch as Christ followers, by becoming seed of David, inherit the kingdom God promised to David’s seed and now rule with David’s seed, Christ. It is, to address Hays’s remaining two categories, also ecclesial,13 in the sense that Paul thinks that believers participate communally in Christ’s body, again, via his pneuma. And, to be sure, Paul’s readers are called, so to speak, to read themselves into Paul’s story of Christ Jesus who reigns with his followers. But such a narratival participation is secondary, not primary, to Paul’s conviction that his readers have been genealogically (one might even say biologically) connected to Christ, the seed of Abraham and the seed of David. This genealogical connection is fundamental to all other models of participation. They are to live as seed of Abraham and seed of David precisely because Israel’s God has made them into Abrahamic and Davidic seed via the pneuma.

What is remarkable to my mind is the way in which Paul’s thinking reflects how deeply committed he remains to matters of genealogy and descent. Gentiles must become sons and seed of Abraham to inherit the promises God made to him. Likewise, his readers must become Davidic seed in order to rule with Christ. As seed of David, those in Christ are now genealogically qualified to rule. Sirach makes explicit the genealogical assumptions common to Judaism (and the broader Greco-Roman world) that Paul shared:

Just as a covenant was established with David,

son of Jesse of the tribe of Judah,

that the inheritance of the king [is] only from son to son,

so the inheritance of Aaron [is] also for his seed alone. (45:25)14

This succinct statement encapsulates the importance of genealogical descent in early Jewish thinking. Just as the priesthood is a genealogical inheritance, so too is kingship. Those who rule must be sons and seed of David. When Paul talks about Christ followers reigning or inheriting the kingdom he assumes that they do so by virtue of having been infused with the pneuma of the Davidic ruler, and thereby having become pneumatic seed of David. The entirety of Jipp’s Christ Is King serves to further our understanding of the centrality of messianism to Paul’s thinking. Here I have focused on Jipp’s fourth chapter in order to draw out some of the implications of Jipp’s work which emphasize the genealogical substructure of Paul’s thought because I am excited by the critical and welcome contribution his book makes to larger debates about the nature of Paul’s participationist eschatology.

I have been curious about the topic of the Davidic Messiahship of Jesus in Paul’s letters and theology for a long time.1 I had grown discontent with the conventional assumption by scholars of every perspective, traditional and new and even the radical perspective, that Christos meant little more than Jesus’ surname. To me this didn’t jive with Paul’s explicit references to David and Davidic Messianism evidenced in Romans (1:3 [“seed of David”]; 15:12 [“root of Jesse”—Isa 11:10]) and 2 Tim 2:8 (“Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, seed of David according to my gospel”). Although the latter example of course is considered by many to be post-Pauline, both texts give an initial indication that Davidic messianism may be more fundamental to Paul’s Christology than has been admitted.

Possible corroborating evidence for the significance of Davidic messianism in Paul may come from Luke’s biography of him in Acts. According to Luke, when Paul preached in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch, he briefly narrated Israel’s story in Jewish Scripture focusing on the subject Israel’s kingship. The sermon is likely paradigmatic, intended to show the kind of sermon Paul was remembered to have preached when addressing synagogue audiences comprised of both Jews and God-fearing Greeks (13:16). In converse fashion, it is equally likely that this is the function of Acts 17 and Paul’s sermon in Athens to exclusively Greeks (17:22–“men of Athens”). The brief narrative selectively culminated with the appointment of David and skipped directly to the story of Savior Jesus, David’s descendent (Acts 13:21–23). It is reasonable to think that this represents a genuine remembrance of Paul’s preaching, albeit in the voice of Luke. Paul is remembered to have preached Davidicly focused sermons when in a synagogue.2

When Matthew Novenson’s book Christ Among the Messiahs appeared in 2012, I was enthusiastic. Novenson’s book, the published version of his Princeton doctoral dissertation, all but demolished that modern scholarly assumption about Paul’s use of Christos. Novenson effectively demonstrated that Paul’s use of the term Christos retained its messianic import as a linguistic category. Of course, the exact significance of the term is debated, but the implication of Novenson’s argument is that for Paul the term continued to carry messianic freight.

Joshua Jipp’s book Christ Is King explicitly builds on Novenson’s work and seeks to move the discussion forward in new directions (4–7). Jipp is interested in unearthing the linguistic resources Paul employed in creating his “Christ discourse,” his Christology. He writes, “I am interested in the conceptual and lexical sources for Paul’s christological language” (29). Jipp seeks to identify the sources of Paul’s Christ language which, according to Jipp, Paul reinterpreted and reworked in his letters for his purposes. Jipp wants to “demonstrate that Paul’s linguistic and conceptual resources for these Pauline texts are notions of the good king” (41). What’s more, Jipp believes that Paul constructs an ideal king Jesus to stabilize and secure the identity of his ecclesia.

He agrees with Novenson that Israel’s Scriptures are a significant and primary source for Paul’s Christ language. But Jipp wishes to expand the linguistic field by showing that Paul also drew heavily on the resources of ancient kingship discourse of the ideal or good king. Jipp claims, “Paul’s Christ-discourse is heavily indebted to his own creative reflection upon ancient royal ideology, as activated through the fate of Jesus and the early Christians’ continued experience of him” (9). Jipp claims further that “Paul used, reworked, and applied ancient conceptions of the good king—both Greco-Roman and Jewish—to Christ in order to structure reality or the symbolic universe of his congregations” (9).

I am in sympathy with most of Christ Is King. The works of both Novenson and Jipp present significant resources for rethinking Paul’s Christology in terms of Jewish messianism; something nearly unthinkable just a decade ago. The scales have finally tipped in favor of N. T. Wright who has been making a point about the significance of messianism in Paul for decades with only a few making common cause.3

Christ Is King is a significant contribution. I agree fully with the central assertion of the book that kingship is a fundamental category for Paul, one that has been largely ignored by scholars. What is more, I agree that the concept of kingship has the potential for untangling the thorniest Pauline conundrums: Paul and the law, justification and righteousness language, Paul’s so-called “Christological monothesism,” participation language and the life of the ecclesia to name a few of the issues.

In each of these cases, ancient kingship ideology may be the framework within which questions of Paul’s theology and practice finally will be coherently explained. The first chapter of Christ Is King presents the case for the wide and pervasive purchase of kingship discourse in Paul’s Jewish and Greco-Roman world. The subsequent four chapters attempt to illustrate the explanatory power of kingship discourse for Paul’s christological language under four topics: King and Law (ch. 2) King and Praise (ch. 3), King and Kingdom (ch. 4) and King and Justice (ch. 5).

In this response to Christ Is King, I will raise three interrelated questions; I’ll call them “points of curiosity.” These are topics that I found myself wrestling over with Jipp as I was reading him. These are not questions about which I have definitive answers. Reading Christ Is King has invited deeper curiosity in me over questions such as these. No doubt my future work on Davidic Christology will be sharpened by Jipp’s book.

So to my questions.

1. How much of a free and independent agent should we envisage Paul to be, standing as it were above his own cultural heritage to borrow, rework, and adapt at will content from Jewish and Greco-Roman kingship ideology?

Jipp seems to imagine Paul as quite independent and as a free agent who has the capacity to choose linguistic elements from Jewish and Greco-Roman sources of royal ideology to create his own in accordance with his conviction about Jesus. In this sense Paul comes across as a man of modernity. Beholden and constrained by little except perhaps his “presupposition” about Jesus, Paul can take elements from diverse sources which suit his pragmatic goals. So, Paul comes off as a pragmatist whose primary interest in selection is the creation of a new social imaginary for his new social entity, the churches.

Jipp repeats many times the refrain that Paul is “reworking” or “reordering” or “remapping” or “inventing a new royal ideology of Christ the King.” On one occasion, he writes: “I understand Paul’s ‘Christ the king’ construct to provide evidence that he has assimilated the ideals of the good king as a means of remapping, reordering, and stabilizing the world for the early Christian communities” (16). In another place: “I will focus on his reworking and fashioning of this discourse” (17). Or again: “The following four chapters will exemplify some of the most important ways in which Paul created a new royal ideology that could remap the symbolic universe and the social existence of his churches” (42).

Jipp’s presentation of Paul’s creative deployment of ancient kingship discourse is well illustrated in this sentence:

My basic argument, then, is that Paul used, reworked, and applied ancient conceptions of the good king—both Greco-Roman and Jewish—to Christ in order to structure reality or the symbolic universe of his congregations. (9, emphasis mine)

Another example I find of this comes in Jipp’s statement about the significance of the Septuagint for Paul’s Christ-language. He writes,

Except in those instances where Paul quotes or alludes to the Greek Old Testament, my argument is that Paul adopts and adapts the cultural scripts, generic conventions, and topoi popularly associated with the good king. . . . In other words, given Paul’s ethnic and religious background within ancient Judaism, his explicit citations of the Greek Old Testament, and the historical-religious derivation of Paul’s churches, I generally emphasize and give pride of place to the Greek Old Testament as providing the sources for Paul’s language. (9–10)

Let me pose my concern as a question: Can we really believe that Paul would have been able to stand far enough outside his “ethnic and religious background” (and foreground!), that he would have been able to freely select source material available to him for conceiving of Jesus as a king and then independently and intentionally choose and manipulate these ideas toward a new end? Is it conceivable that Paul created a “new royal ideology” from Greco-Roman and Jewish sources? Aren’t we giving him too much agency here? Did an ancient Jewish eschatological thinker have that kind of autonomy of thought that Jipp presupposes? As a man of his time and place and station, would not it more likely be that Paul was conceiving of Jesus as the Lord Messiah because his own social imaginary was shaped by particular ideas and practices much of which were under his consciousness? Was he shaping social imaginary or reflecting one?

I don’t doubt that Paul and other early Jewish believers in Jesus adapted, revised and intensified their messianic expectations in view of the unique circumstances and results related to “this Jesus” (Acts 2:36). But I agree with William Horbury that these adaptations, if we call them that, are best explained as a development of Jewish messianism.4 Jipp seems to tip his hat to Horbury, but then appears to retract his affirmation immediately. Jipp presents Paul as standing outside of Jewish messianism it seems to me. I say this because Jipp states that he “front-grounds how Paul “reinterpreted and reworked notions of kingship discourse’; presumably those very notions within Jewish messianism” (7, emphasis his).

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what Jipp means to say; and, indeed, I wonder if the confusion is more rhetorical than real because it seems that what he ends up presenting in the book is a Christ the King within a Jewish messianism shaped uniquely of course by the story and experience of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet Jipp’s language of invention and the like causes me to wonder if he sees Paul in the ways similar to recent apocalyptic interpreters (e.g., J. L. Marytn and his followers) in which Jesus Christ is over and against all other previous forms of religion and culture, even Jewish ones. Thus, there is an ultimate eschatological discontinuity at work. A sentence like this one bends in that direction:

Paul’s creative invention of this new royal ideology helps to establish the internal stability of the church and is the invisible web that helps sustain the existence of Paul’s churches in the midst of competing religious alternatives in the ancient Mediterranean world. (276, emphasis mine)

This leads me to my next question.

2. To what ethnic group was Paul’s Christ the King social imaginary project aimed? Jews or Gentiles or both? Did Paul differentiate between the ethnicity and the cultural heritage of the Jews and that of the non-Jews?

Consider this passage from Jipp:

I suggest that the evidence we will see is strong enough to hazard that Paul was attempting to rework the symbolic universe or social imaginary of his churches in order to reorder the allegiances and practices around the reign of Christ the King. One of Paul’s agendas, in other words was to create a new royal ideology, out of the conceptual and linguistic resources at this disposal, and thereby to proclaim the rule of Christ over Paul’s churches. Paul, in other words, legitimates the people around Christ the king by upstaging every other royal competitor as he adapts and reworks aspects of ancient kingship discourse to portray the total sovereignty and power of the Messiah. . . . This new Pauline royal ideology plays a crucial role in . . . “the establishment and legitimation of a new people of God.” (11–12)

Notice here again Paul’s pragmatism and independence envisaged by Jipp. Paul is creating “a new royal ideology” from the “conceptual and linguistic resources at his disposal.” What I really want to call attention to, however, is the end to which this construction project was aimed: “Paul’s churches.” This “new Pauline royal ideology” was intended to establish a “new people of God.” So what would this mean for the “old” people? What would this mean for those like Barnabas, a Jew how who presumably awaited a Davidic messiah? Does Christ the King represent a new symbolic universe for them?

If Jipp is arguing here a more ethnically differentiated point, that because Paul was pastoring “ex-pagan pagans,” to use a phrase from Paula Fredriksen, he sought to radically enculturate—dare I say Judaize?!—them as non-Jews into a Jesus-oriented Jewish messianism, I would be complete in support.5 This would explain the need for Paul to creatively adapt Jewish tradition and halakhah to his churches since he would be in the unprecedented position of bringing Gentiles into the “obedience of faith” (Rom 1:5; 15:18; 16:26). What is more, if Jipp proves correct that Paul selects topoi of the good king from sources outside of the treasure trove already a part of Jewish messianism, this would perhaps make sense given he is addressing Gentile audiences who are immersed in the Roman imperial ideology.6

But Jipp seems not to be making that point given the double use of the adjective “new” in the above quotation. The last paragraph of Christ Is King confirms that Jipp conceives of a fundamental discontinuity in Paul’s thinking.

Paul’s reworking of the linguistic and conceptual resources of ancient kingship discourse functions to create a new royal ideology that reorients Paul’s churches to Christ as the singular supreme ruler whose rule establishes and stabilizes Paul’s churches. This new Pauline ideological construct of “Christ the king” has resulted in a new worldview, a new locus of absolute power that subsumes all other alternative possibilities for Paul’s churches. (281, emphasis mine)

I do think there are indications in Paul’s letters that the Jewish social imaginary too needed adaptation given the unique profile and story of Jesus the Messiah. But Paul differentiates between Jewish and non-Jewish in this regard. Consider for example Rom 15:9–12. Here Paul distinguishes between Christ’s unique self-giving service to the Jews, on the one side, and the Gentiles, on the other. Galatians too seems to suggest something similar at several points. Explicitly, in Gal 3:13–14 Paul differentiates between Jew and Gentile in the application of the work of Christ’s self-giving. The Jew, on the one hand, is redeemed from the curse of the law so that, on the other, the “blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles.” There are also of course those statements in Romans about the value of Jewish ethnicity (e.g., 3:1–2; 9:3–5).

Thus, it seems unlikely that Paul thought a Jewish believer in Jesus needed the same kind of radical reorientation that a non-Jewish pagan convert would need. Furthermore, while Paul asserts that the appearance of the Messiah meant nothing short of the inauguration of the new creation, this was still in keeping with Jewish messianic expectations. In this sense, it was not a “new worldview,” at least for the Jew expecting a new world order to come through the agency of the Messiah.

3. Was Paul’s messianism Davidic, and, if so, what difference does that make?

A final question I raise in response to Jipp’s work is his view of the influence of especially Davidic messianism on Paul. If Rom 1:3–4 has anything near the significance Jipp affords it in defining Paul’s gospel, more reflection is needed on the function of Davidic messianism on Paul’s Christology. Jipp eloquently writes,

The δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ that has been revealed in the gospel has as its content God’s resurrection of his royal [Davidic] son from the dead and the enthronement of this son to a position of powerful lordship over the nations. . . . God’s righteousness is revealed in the rescue of God’s righteous Davidic son, and this makes perfect sense of Paul’s situation the revelation of God’s righteousness (Rom 1:17) within the gospel of his resurrected and enthroned Davidic Son (1:3–4). (249, 251)

Yet, Jipp does not devote the kind of attention to the possibility of a particular Davidic kingship discourse in Paul as one would have hoped or expected. Obviously the first question is whether one can even speak of a coherent Davidic messianism in early Judaism. Although this “older view” has become unfashionable today, I am inclined, with William Horbury, to keep the possibility open given its presence in Christianity and later Judaism.7

I was surprised at how little attention was paid to a text like Psalms of Solomon in Jipp’s overall discussion, a mere ten references according to the index (370). It seems to me that Psalms of Solomon is significant and unparalleled comparative material for a discussion Paul’s conception of Christ is King for a few reasons.

First, Psalms of Solomon is a late Second Temple Jewish document which predates Jesus’ career and the apostolic documents by nearly a century and already exhibited the employment of Greek and Roman kingship ideology within a Jewish messianism. For this reason, Horbury makes significant use of Psalms of Solomon in his Jewish Messianism and the Cult of Christ, referring to it some forty-five times (211–12).

Second, Psalms of Solomon 17 represents one of the few traces we have of a thoroughgoing Davidic messianism in early Jewish literature outside the New Testament.

And third, each of the four topics Jipp covered in the book (chs. 2–5) could be fruitfully compared with material in Psalms of Solomon 17: (1) King as the living law (Pss. Sol. 17:32); (2) Royal Encomia (Pss. Sol. 17:30); (3) Sharing in the rule of Christ especially the sharing of kingship with God and the representative role of the king (Pss. Sol. 17); and (4) God’s righteousness and the righteousness of the king (Pss. Sol. 17:26, 32).

Unfortunately, Psalms of Solomon has been erroneously disregarded by many modern New Testament scholars having been deemed inappropriate comparative material for the New Testament Christology because of misunderstandings of its type of messianism.8 So, I ask: what would a Davidic Messiah mean for a Pauline Christology? Both the recent work of Novenson and Jipp now make a question like this possible.

*

I am in significant agreement with most of what Joshua Jipp is doing in this essential monograph, Christ Is King. I receive it as a very welcome addition to the discussion of Messiah in Paul alongside Matthew Novenson’s recent work. On nearly every page, there are a whole number of exegetical and biblical theological points, both small and large, I could raise with him. However, in this brief response essay, I’ve focused on three interrelated points of curiosity that his work raised as I read it. I look forward to listening to Josh’s response to these curiosities and hope to continue to sharpen my own thinking by means of his. In truth, I believe we are far closer in our respective outlooks on Christ as king in Paul than we are apart.

Joshua Jipp’s book is an ambitious project that in many ways disrupts current conversations in Pauline studies by proposing a new center of Paul’s thought, which is also the title of his book: Christ Is King. In four substantive chapters in his book, Jipp argues that Christ as the “Ideal King” is the living embodiment of the law, (43–76) receives praise and encomiums fitting only of a king, (77–138), is God’s representative to the people who enables people to participate in his rule, (139–210) and establishes his righteousness through a “just rule” over his subjects and the entire cosmos.) (211–72). Jipp’s argument is elegant, compelling, and takes seriously the religious and political discourses of various Hellenistic sources, the Roman empire, and ancient Judaism. There is much to commend in this book, and I want to affirm at the outset that I think Jipp’s project is largely successful in demonstrating that the category of “kingship” is central to Paul’s Christology. Since I think Jipp is largely successful in demonstrating that kingship is a central category for Paul, I want to use the space below to probe a bit more into exactly what Paul might mean by Christ as the “Ideal King.”

To make his argument, Jipp employs the historical-critical method, drawing comparisons from a wide array of sources on ancient kinship discourse (e.g., Ps 89, 2 Sam 7:14, the Res gestae divi Augusti, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and many others). Jipp’s purpose in gathering this data and setting it alongside the Pauline text is to show the prevalence of kingship language in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources, and then to argue that a close reading of Paul shows that the “linguistic and conceptual resources for these Pauline texts are notions of the good king” (41). At the outset of the project he hints at moving beyond the historical-critical method since one of his stated goals is to show that “Paul strategically reworks and applies these royal scripts to Christ such that this king now stabilizes their assemblies and is the focal point for their symbolic world” (13). Since Jipp made such a statement, I expected that his chapters might explore how Paul’s kingship discourse moves beyond what I would term “lexical and conceptual borrowing” to being generative in its own right. In other words, I expected that Jipp might also treat the theology of Paul’s texts, especially where that theology shows a “reworking” of the categories of kingship, and I was disappointed that this reordering of their symbolic universe is not given a good deal of attention in the main chapters of Jipp’s study. It is here where I have to wonder if the historical-critical method leaves his conclusions a bit short of where other forms of analysis might have taken him, and I’ll say more about this a bit later in my response.

Since Jipp sets out to demonstrate that Paul’s overarching christological framework is that Jesus is the “Ideal King,” I want to spend a bit of time probing the notion of what “ideal” might mean in Paul’s thought, especially in relation to the chapter on the Christ-hymns. Of the Colossian hymn, Jipp argues that Christ is depicted as “God’s elected royal (Davidic) viceregent, who . . . creates, sustains and rules over creation, and . . . rules over his people and establishes peace between them and God by reconciling the entire cosmos to God” (100). Taking the “prose hymn” phrase by phrase, Jipp shows how each of the phrases parallels other ancient kingship discourse on the ideal king. However, when he comes to the final line of the hymn “through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20), Jipp concludes, “What cannot be paralleled in any ancient kingship document is the means whereby Christ enacted this pacification” (127). Since Jipp has identified that part of this hymn is unparalleled, I had hoped that he might have more to say about how a statement like this one “reworked the symbolic universe” of ancient kingship discourses. What might this reworking say about who Christ is as Paul’s “Ideal King?”

Likewise, Jipp’s treatment of the Philippian hymn focuses largely on the first line of the hymn, “being in the very form of God did not think equality with God something to be used to his own advantage” (Phil 2:6), and argues that “true divine rule and power is revealed, then, in the Messiah’s refusal to exploit equality with God” (132), and further, “while the preexistent Christ already shared in God’s status, his obedience to God and willing humiliation on the cross—the greatest of all benefactions to humanity—is the act that legitimates his rule, grants him universal authority, and qualifies him to receive divine worship” (134). Jipp does briefly mention Christ’s humility and sacrificial death here, but there is only a glancing countenance of the form Christ assumes. In my mind however, that the “Ideal King” in Philippians 2 is a shamed and humiliated slave who was executed on a cross deserves more attention, since it is a shocking departure from the other examples of kingship discourse that Jipp engages.

Although I appreciate and find helpful Jipp’s illumination of the concept of kingship in these hymns, what is most noticeably absent for me are the notions of Christ as “humiliated,” “cursed,” or the one who “became sin.” In short, what is missing in Jipp’s construal of Paul’s Christology is a robust notion of the divine exchange that I see as central in texts like 2 Cor 5:21, Gal 3:13, and Rom 8:3–4. In these texts Jesus is decidedly not the “righteous sufferer,” but rather the “cursed one,” who “became sin,” or who came “in the likeness of sinful flesh.” Likewise, the logic of each of these texts is that of exchange. In Galatians Christ becomes the “cursed one” so that he might redeem “us” from the curse of the Law. In 2 Cor 5:21 Jesus, who knew no sin “became sin” so that those who are “in him” “might become the righteousness of God.” In Rom 8:3–4 Jesus came in the “likeness of sinful flesh for sin” and in doing so he condemned “sin in the flesh,” yet the righteous requirement of the law is not met “in him,” but rather “in us” (Rom 8:4). In these texts, Christ is portrayed not as “innocent victim,” or “righteous sufferer,” but as the embodiment of “sin” who takes the wrath of God upon himself. If he is only the righteous sufferer, as Jipp seems to claim in his chapter on righteousness,1. why should his death vindicate all of humanity? In my view, these texts speak to Christ’s dual vocation as the “righteous one” who is simultaneously the one “cursed by God.” One might also point to Christ as the “hilasterion” in Romans 3 who is not Jipp’s “righteous sufferer,” but rather is the sacrifice outlined in Leviticus 16 who bears the sin of the people and delivers them from God’s wrath. The “realness” of Christ’s assumption of our sin is imperative for the diversion of God’s wrath in Galatians, Romans, and 2 Corinthians. If Christ does not really trade places with us; if Christ does not really become “the sinner,” then what hope have we of deliverance from sin? So I must ask here, does this notion of Christ becoming “sin” or becoming “a curse” fit within the framework of Pauline kingship as Jipp has outlined it? Perhaps this is where he might spend a bit more time examining Paul’s reworking of Jesus as the “cursed king” or the “humiliated king” or the “sacrificed king.”

I found his fourth chapter, “Sharing in the Rule of Christ,” novel, and in many ways compelling, as much of my own research has been focused on the adoption metaphor in Romans 8. In this chapter, Jipp’s desire is to show that Paul’s intention was to persuade his churches that they themselves participate in the reign and rule of Christ by creating “a discourse that makes the closest possible connection between king and subjects” (140). He does so by demonstrating that Paul’s argument is dependent upon “Israelite royal ideology,” which according to Jipp sets forth a Davidic king who shares both in God’s divine kingship and also represents the people of Israel (187). Thus Paul, drawing on this “Israelite royal ideology,” and incorporating other themes prevalent in royal discourse such as “election,” “sonship,” “firstborn,” and “image” indicates not only that Christ is a sovereign ruler, but that his subjects participate in this rule. One minor point I want to make is that it might have strengthened Jipp’s argument in his chapter if he had connected the “adoption” of believers to “adoption” in Roman discourse, since the adoptions of Roman emperors were broadcast widely through inscriptions and coins.2 However, my primary concern with this chapter stems from largely the same questions I raised above, which is that Jipp’s picture of sharing in the kingship is just a bit too triumphant for me, and doesn’t quite address what it might mean to share in the kingship of the “Ideal King” who for Paul is also the “Humiliated King” and the “Cursed King.” Jipp mentions that Christians “share in the sufferings (8:17–18) and creational bondage (8:20–23), that mark Adam’s dominion” (195), but he quickly moves to the resurrected Messiah who has lordship over suffering (197). In my view, Jipp’s brief treatment of this material risks minimizing the severity of the suffering in this passage, and also risks smoothing over the centrality of suffering to Christ’s own kingship, and by extension, what it means for Paul’s audience to share in that kingship. In Romans 8, Paul’s audience members are called “sons” and will be glorified with Christ if they also share in his sufferings (8:17).3 Elsewhere in Romans Paul encourages the believers to glory in their sufferings (Rom 5:3), which is connected to their justification in Christ through whom they have peace with God. In short, suffering is central to what it means for Paul’s audience to share in the kingship of Christ. In his treatment of Christ as the embodiment of the royal law, Jipp rightly connects justification and peace with Christ’s kingship, (80–81) but I think he would do well to connect suffering to Christ’s kingship in a more meaningful way in his exegesis of Romans, Philippians, and indeed many other Pauline passages could be added here (e.g., 2 Cor 1–2; Gal 3:4; 1 Thess 3).

In sum, I would reiterate that I think Jipp’s study is an important contribution to Pauline scholarship, and I appreciate the depth of his comparative analysis between Paul’s letters and other ancient sources. I think that Jipp has definitively shown that Paul’s Christology must necessarily be understood in terms of kinship, and yet I wonder how Paul’s exposition of “kingship” alters and subverts the category. My final observation of this project is that, since at its outset, Jipp indicated that he wanted to show how Paul reworked the topoi of ancient kingship discourses to reframe kingship for his own audiences, I have to wonder if another form of analysis might have given him useful tools to better articulate this reworking. In large part, my own research has focused on how metaphors work to create meaning and identity for their audiences, and while I concur with Jipp that “kingship” as a background is important to Paul, I think more attention could be paid to how Paul is blending the kingship metaphors with other images and texts to create his own figuration of kingship. For Paul, it is the “suffering king” who is the “ideal king.” In his letters, Paul fuses the “righteous one” of Habakkuk with the “suffering servant” of Isaiah, and overlays both with the language of sacrifice drawn from Leviticus 16. The result is a complex and compound figuration of Christ’s kingship, which is unique and without parallel in the kingship discourses Jipp includes in his analysis. It is with this complex and compound figuration of Christ’s kingship that his followers must come to terms.

Joshua Jipp is not the first to tackle the royal ideology of Pauline letters. Though Ephesians may not be authored by Paul, it is universally thought to be influenced by Paulinism and relatively early. Julien Smith’s dissertation at Baylor produced the 2011 WUNT entry Christ the Ideal King: Cultural Context, Rhetorical Strategy, and the Power of Divine Monarchy in Ephesians. Jipp uses the categories in Smith’s book to look both at letters agreed to be written by Paul and the overlapping letters of Ephesians and Colossians. By showing a common thread of royal ideology across these Pauline letters, Jipp claims to demonstrate a means by which early Christian theology could have developed the Christology of the gospels so quickly (with its Jesus who is not only aware of his own divine identity but the cosmic schema of time and his “Hour” in it). As Jipp has it, Greek audiences would have been well-acquainted with divine kingship tropes and would have easily applied them to Jesus.1

It would seem as though the point of a forum of reviews to which the author might respond is to give the author space to elaborate on points the editors at Fortress would not allow him. Accordingly, I will focus my remarks on Paul’s own conception of his apostleship and the inheritance in which his communities share.

In exegeting Romans, Jipp argues that it “seems likely that Paul views his apostolic task as securing the inheritance of God’s Son through his apostolic ministry.” Romans envisions the resurrected and enthroned Lord above all nations, and Paul anticipates being the executor of the inheritance of God’s Christ (Rom 1:4–6). This point could be extended and connected to other letters. Paul’s humble administrative function occurs elsewhere in Paul, as has been discussed by Aletti, myself, and others.2

Likewise, Jipp’s point about Christ as a living law could be developed further. Jipp notes this is a summary of Leviticus both in Paul and in the Gospels.3 As a living law, his messianic mission brings believers into obedience to the Torah. Paul’s placement of himself as a mere functionary to the body of Christ is consonant with his implosion of the Roman political theory that the emperor breathed life into the hierarchical body politic he ruled. While Christ is still the head of the body, each believer becomes a child and heir of God and one with the body.

In anticipation of righteousness-language in Romans, Jipp quotes a section of Plutarch on Numa at length. Numa, as those who have taken a class with Hans Dieter Betz will know, was a founder figure on par with Paul. Numa was Rome’s second king, following in the wake of the ascent to heaven of Romulus and his wife to join the council of the gods.4 According to Plutarch, Numa’s righteousness changed the physical and emotional character of the Roman people:

Not only was the Roman people softened and charmed by the righteousness and mildness of their king, but also the cities round about, as if some cooling breeze or salubrious wind were wafted upon them from Rome, began to experience a change of temper, and all of them were filled with longing desire to have good government, to be at peace, to till the earth, to rear their children in quiet, and to worship the gods . . . honor and justice flowed into every heart from Numa’s wisdom. (Num. 20.1–4)

Thus, Numa is not only an example of a good king, but his reign produces somatic effects within his people. Where once they were hard and warlike, the Romans let their muscles relax and their political discussions demonstrate complexity. They display, to borrow from Christian terminology, “the fruits of the Spirit.”

Jipp, who has done the work of providing a succinct rendering of Numa, does not fully connect this with Paul’s royal imagery. There is, of course, no direct borrowing from texts on Numa and those on Christ. However, one may assume that this cultural milieu of kingship and bodies means therefore that it is not surprising that Paul sees Christ working changes in the believer’s bodies. Jipp notes that it is not just the Roman audience of Paul who is exhorted to view itself in terms of being the heirs of God. The Colossians also share “in numerous aspects of Christ’s rule.” (143) The idea that Paul pictures believers as children and heirs of God rather than mere subjects in the body politic is undoubtedly true.

Jipp then wonders how Paul emancipates believers from what can be a body image that reifies the status quo. In Romans, Paul contrasts the reign of Adam and sin with that of Christ and salvation. Believers are freed from the enslavement to sin, permitting them to participate fully in the body of Christ. Paul simply oversees their inheritance.

However, neglected in Jipp’s fine argument is 1 Corinthians 4, where Paul chastises the Corinthians for their adherence to their “many pedagogues” but neglect of “one father.” Paul reminds the Corinthians of his founder status.5 The apostle ranks himself as the last of all apostles, as “one untimely born.” He does not attempt to placate the unruly Corinthians by placing himself as a middle figure in the emperor’s arena. Rather, Paul finds himself squarely in the arena and fears being disqualified. I do not think that the crowns of 1 Corinthians need participate in the royal imagery as I have argued that the crowns evoke different imagery in Paul. While Christ is indeed depicted regally in Paul’s letters, the heavenly politeuma (Phil 3:20) is one which allows Paul and the community to potentially envision themselves outside of the constraints of Hellenistic or Roman kingship and within a semi-autonomous—and potentially democratic—polity.

In sum, though I agree with much of Jipp’s argument on the image of Christ as king and applaud this contribution to Pauline scholarship, I think that there are indeed moments when Paul does not need to be referring to a kingdom. Paul’s politeuma is not a kingdom, and this is precisely the image’s genius.6 Paul may extricate his communities from Rome’s grip without directly confronting the power of Rome itself. I also think that it should be noted Paul’s denigration of his own power is highly paradoxical. While he presents himself as the last of all, in the arena, and living in the bowels of Christ, he also portrays himself as a father and authority figure.