RBL 12/2016

John M.G. Barclay

Paul and the Gift

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015. Pp. 672. Hardcover.

$70.00. ISBN 9780802868893.

Matthew V. Novenson
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland

The idea of , gift or grace, which for centuries lay at the center of interpretation
of the letters of the apostle Paul, has in recent years receded from scholarly discussion.
This trend may be due in part to E. P. Sanderss 1977 rediscovery of grace, hidden in plain
sight, throughout Jewish literature from the early Roman period. Since Paul does not,
after all, have a monopoly on grace, interpreters turned their attention to other features of
his thought. It also surely has to do with an increasing interest among New Testament
scholars in questions other than those handed down by the history of Christian doctrine.
Both of these developments are salutary, but of course we still owe an account of Pauls
own conspicuous use of the language of gifts and graces. Enter John Barclay, who here
pioneers a refreshingly historical approach to this most theologically fraught of topics
and, along the way, also defends the likes of Augustine and Luther against some of the
criticisms lately leveled at them. Paul and the Gift is, in Barclays words, a reconsideration
of grace within the anthropology and history of gift, a study of Jewish construals of
divine beneficence in the Second Temple period, and, within that context, a new appraisal
of Pauls theology of the Christ-event as gift, as it comes to expression in Galatians and
Romans (4).

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The book falls into four parts. Part 1, The Multiple Meanings of Gift and Grace, does
the theoretical work on which the balance of the book rests. Chapter 1 explicates grace in
terms of the cross-cultural phenomenon of gift exchange, taking Marcel Mausss Essai
sur le don as a point of reference. Barclay then shows how in antiquity gift reciprocity
was a ubiquitous social fact, much commented on by popular philosophers, and how the
modern notion of a pure gift (as, e.g., in Jacques Derrida, Given Time, vol. 1: Counterfeit
Money) is as arbitrary as it is novel. The brevity of chapter 2 belies its importance, as it
generates Barclays key heuristic categories: the multiple possible perfections of the
concept of gift. Invoking literary theorist Kenneth Burkes account of the perfecting of
concepts, Barclay argues that the concept of gift is commonly perfected, that is, drawn out
to a logical endpoint, in a number of quite different ways. Barclay identifies six ways in
which a gift is most giftish: (1) superabundancewhen it is largest; (2) singularity
when the giver is characterized by generosity and nothing else; (3) prioritywhen it
comes first in the cycle of reciprocity; (4) incongruitywhen it is given without regard to
the worthiness of the recipient; (5) efficacywhen it fully achieves its intended purpose;
and (6) noncircularitywhen no reciprocation follows. All these perfections are possible
and, in fact, quite common, but they usually go unrecognized. Armed with these
conceptual distinctions, Barclay is able to slice through the overgrown, centuries-long
debates about grace in Paul. Thus in chapter 3 he expounds Marcion, Augustine, Martin
Luther, John Calvin, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Ksemann, J. Louis Martyn,
E. P. Sanders, Alain Badiou, and others on Paul, explaining each interpreters account of
Paul as a more or less (usually less) conscious perfecting of one or more aspects of the
notion of gift.

Part 2, Divine Gift in Second Temple Judaism, shows by means of five well-chosen
examples that ancient Jewish writers, like their non-Jewish counterparts (e.g., Seneca, De
Beneficiis), thought long, hard, and carefully about how the gods give gifts. Under this
heading Barclay devotes one chapter each to Wisdom of Solomon, Philo of Alexandria,
the Qumran Hodayot, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, and 4 Ezra. Using the rubric of the
multiple possible perfections of gift, he argues that Wisdom perfects the superabundance
of divine grace, Philo its superabundance and priority, the Hodayot its incongruity and
priority, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum its incongruity and superabundance, and 4 Ezra
(differently) its incongruity and superabundance. The lesson here is that manyeven
mostancient Jewish texts think grace, but think it differently. As Barclay argues
throughout: grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, but not everywhere the same
(e.g., 319). This conclusion makes [Sanderss] characterization [of Judaism] as a religion
of grace of limited use: the label refutes outdated caricatures of a grace-less religion, but
has little analytical power (320). With his own, more analytically powerful account in
place, Barclay turns to Paul.

This review was published by RBL 2016 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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Parts 3 and 4, roughly half of the book, offer Barclays reading of Paul. Part 3, Galatians:
The Christ-Gift and the Recalibration of Worth, treats Galatians in four chapters:
prolegomena, Gal 12, Gal 35, and Gal 56. Barclays principal claims are that the
theology of Galatians drives toward the formation of innovative communities, that the
letter emphasizes the incongruity of grace enacted in the Christ-event and experienced
in the Spirit, that one must grasp both the contextual specificity of the letter, in disputes
about circumcision and Torah in the Gentile mission, and [also] the breadth of the canvas
on which Paul depicts these issues, that communal practice is integral to the expression
of the good news, and that, while Galatians entails no denigration of Judaism,
nevertheless Pauls allegiance to the truth of the good news necessarily questions the
ultimate authority of the Torah (44345). Part 4, Romans: Israel, the Gentiles, and
Gods Creative Gift, treats Romans in three chapters: Rom 15, Rom 58 and 1215, and
Rom 911. Here Barclay is particularly concerned to account for the relevant differences
in Pauls grace discourse in Romans vis--vis Galatians. About Romans, he concludes,
[Pauls] achievement here is to integrate the scriptural witness to Israels call with the
good news concerning Christ, and with the strange success of the Gentile mission. A
single frame of explanation unites them all: incongruous grace (561). Throughout parts 3
and 4 the ingenious readings of difficult texts are myriad. In Gal 2, contra Luther, Dunn,
and Martyn, Not by works of the law means, quite concretely, not by the practice of
the Torah (375). The natural-born gentile who does the law in Rom 2 is an empirical
product of Pauls mission, in which he has found sinful Gentiles miraculously endowed
with a moral consciousness (468). And so on. Barclay has effectively given us a fine, 150-
page commentary on Galatians and another on Romans.

Paul and the Gift is a brilliant book. It is not just a big, important bookan opus from a
senior scholar with which anyone working in the field is obliged to interactalthough it
certainly is that. If we set aside the eminence of the author and the considerable
prepublication buzz, the book stands on its own as a model of surefooted use of theory,
devastating criticism of previous interpretation, thorough command of relevant classical
and Jewish sources, and critical but empathetic exegesis. Such a book deserves not only
our praise but also our robust critical engagement. Here I can only make only some brief,
suggestive comments under the latter heading.

First, especially in his reading of Galatians Barclay uses the Christ-event as a kind of
cipher, meaning just the unique, unrepeatable, and unconditioned event (400) in which
God invaded history (echoing Martyn). But this usage masks the fact that ,
messiah or Christlike , which Barclay rightly glosses with Torahis a
venerable old biblical and Jewish term, every bit as ethnically specific as Abraham, Moses,
Sinai, Jerusalem, and the rest. To acknowledge this linguistic fact does not remotely entail
any notion of a narrative line, human saga of progress, or human-level line of

This review was published by RBL 2016 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
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progression, theological schemas about which Barclay expresses familiar Barthian
anxieties. In my opinion, interpretation of Paul continues to suffer under a clunky and
quite unnecessary dichotomy between Heilsgeschichte and apocalyptic. Barclay makes
some real conceptual advances on this debate (see 41114), but he neither manages nor
indeed wants to escape it altogether. This is a shame, since the debate has a way of
plowing under numerous features of Pauls thought, not least his Christology. After all, it
was not only the rival teachers in Galatia who identified Jesus as the messiah (see 400).

Second, Barclays sensible choice of giftan economic conceptas a way of getting at

Pauls gospel sometimes swallows up other, different Pauline concepts in the course of
exegesis. In particular, I note Barclays habit of glossing the important word group
(uprightness, justice) with worth, value, capital, and related terms. For instance,
on Gal 2:1516: To consider the works of the Law the criterion of worth (i.e.,
righteousness) is to assume the validity of a symbolic capital that has been shown to
count for nothing before God (383). Strikingly, in this very context Barclay rightly
criticizes N. T. Wright for transmut[ing] the language of righteousness into quite other
terms [viz. covenant membership] (377 n. 70). But Barclay does more or less the same
thing, persistently transposing rightness language into value language, as if in the
relevant places Paul had written rather than . Granted, the one concept is
related to the other, and Paul uses both, but the one is not identical with the other.
Replacing talk of righteousness with talk of symbolic capital has a powerful (unintended?)
demythologizing effect, obscuring what was for Paul the real and imminent prospect of a
final judgment. There is so much more that one might say by way of engaging with this
exciting book, but space constrains me. To raise criticisms like these is to take Barclays
study as a point of departure from which to think about Paul, which we should, and I
expect will, now do.

This review was published by RBL 2016 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a
subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.