Spirit and Covenant Renewal: A Theologoumenon of Paul's Opponents in 2 Corinthians (Critical Essay‪)‬

The reconstruction of the position of the missionary rivals whose legitimacy Paul attempts to undermine in 2 Corinthians has proven to be a difficult task. Since the time of Ferdinand Christian Baur, scholars have proposed various, often conflicting reconstructions. In 1990, Jerry L. Sumney proposed some salutary methodological guidelines for this project and offered his own minimalist reconstruction. (1) The material that Sumney used in his reconstruction of the position of Paul's missionary rivals was gleaned solely from the text of 2 Corinthians. There remain, however, substantial comparative data from early Jewish and Christian texts that have not yet been examined in connection with this problem. These comparative data, I argue, suggest an alternative to Sumney's view of the role played by the spirit in the preaching of Paul's missionary rivals in 2 Corinthians. To contextualize this argument, let us briefly examine Jerry Sumney's methodological dicta, the reasons that he had for proposing them, and the minimalist sketch of Paul's Corinthian missionary opponents that he proposed. Sumney's delineation of a methodology for establishing the characteristics of the preaching of Paul's missionary opponents in 2 Corinthians was formulated in response to what he perceived as an undue variety in the types of characteristics that previous scholars had imputed to those missionaries. In the interest of time, I mention only three of the more influential theories here. (2) In the late 1800s, Baur saw Paul's missionary rivals in 2 Corinthians as representatives of a single, unified movement that opposed Paul's law-free mission: that of Petrine Christianity. (3) In 1964, Dieter Georgi proposed a novel solution to the problem of Paul's opposition in Corinth. (4) Georgi argued that Paul's missionary rivals presented themselves as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Greco-Roman divine men such as Apollonius of Tyana, who possessed superhuman traits including preternatural wisdom and the ability to work miracles. C. K. Barrett presented Paul's rivals as Christian Jews who received their authority from the Jerusalem church, although they misrepresented the principals James and Cephas there by "adopting ... the ecstatic accompaniments of pagan religion" such as visionary experience and glossolalia. (5)