Within that impressive array, though, two clear positions emerge as polar oppo-sites of one another and I shall deal with each in turn. The first could be termed the ‘halakhic’ proto-rabbinic Paul advocated in this case by Ze’ev Safrai and Peter Tomson.32 Their lengthy article deals with understanding the Jewish background to a financial collection that Paul was requesting of his Corinthian community
30 Reimund Bieringer et al., eds., Second Corinthians in the Perspective of Late Second Temple Judaism, CRINT 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
31 Joshua Schwartz, “Methodological Remarks on ‘Jewish’ Identity: Jews, Jewish Christians and Prolegomena on Pauline Judaism,” in Second Corinthians in the Perspective of Late Second Tem-ple Judaism, 36–58, here p. 56 (emphasis his).
32 Ze’ev Safrai and Peter J. Tomson, “Paul’s ‘Collection for the Saints’ (2 Cor 8-9) and Financial Support of Leaders in Early Christianity and Judaism,” in Second Corinthians in the Perspective of Late Second Temple Judaism, 132–220.
in support of whom he terms ‘the saints’ (the community of Jesus followers in Jerusalem). This investigation leads in turn to understanding the antecedents to a salaried leadership in early Christianity and early rabbinic Judaism. The details of their analysis need not detain us here, but I shall summarize some salient fea-tures of their methodology.
First of all, Safrai and Tomson situate Paul’s collection within a matrix of early Christian and Jewish literature, that is to say, Paul’s letter (in this case the section of 2 Cor 8-9) is analyzed alongside literature from the New Testament, the apostolic fathers, Jewish apocalyptic sources (like Daniel and Enoch), and early rabbinic sources (Tannaic and Amoraic literature). That is to say, positively, that Paul is read comparatively to contemporaneous literature existing at the time, without maintaining an anachronistic confessional divide between them. Such a comparative exercise makes it possible for Safrai and Tomson to conclude that
“[t]he debate regarding payment for spiritual leaders appears in both traditions, although the Jewish material is far greater because of the sheer quantity of sourc-es.”33
Second, because Paul is placed along this chronological continuum of early Christian and Jewish literature, his request for a collection for the ‘saints’ can be seen to be exceptional to Paul and his communities since no similar case could be found among Jewish communities.34 At the same time, to the larger question of a salaried leadership, where Paul had assumed the right to financial support elsewhere in the Corinthian letters (1 Cor 9:4-10), Paul can be seen to build upon existing Jewish tradition that would anticipate later developments in rabbinic Judaism by at least a century and a half.35 That being said, Paul’s model of financial support for spiritual leaders was never adopted in the same way by the Tannaim (the earliest rabbis of the Common Era); in fact, they opposed an institutionalized and professional leadership on ideological grounds, and only in the Amoraic period (from the 3rd century CE onwards) was there a gradual shift towards a salaried leadership.
Third, there is a marked absence of material from the Graeco-Roman world.
Safrai and Tomson argue that “the Graeco-Roman world was not familiar with the phenomenon of holy men, certainly not as a social group. Nor was the system of
33 Ibid., 215.
34 Ibid., 216: “Our main subject is Paul’s collection for the ‘saints’. We found no institution in the Jewish community, and as mentioned, in earliest Christianity it also remained exceptional because it did not accord with the general policy on supoort for teachers.”
35 Ibid., 215: “Through the doing of Paul, however, the early Church attained within a genera-tion or two what took the Jewish community all five generagenera-tions of the Tannaic period, and even then only partially in the Land of Israel.”
paying salaries or giving donations to leaders familiar. As we have observed, the elite fulfilled the task of leading and administering society voluntarily, though they often used these positions to enrich themselves. Nor was the Roman world familiar with personal payments to priests. Needless to say, support for a group of leaders living in a distant and supposedly holy province was not common in the Roman world. In short, Paul did not borrow the model for the system he estab-lished from the Roman world.”36 As such, although Paul was unique in develop-ing this system of financial support for spiritual leaders, he is nonetheless seen to be more in line with Jewish traditions and ethos which predate him and which he in turn also anticipates of the later rabbis after him. In this sense Paul is ‘pro-to-rabbinic’ and almost attuned, avant la lettre, to later halakhic discussions on receiving a salary for teaching Torah.37
Safrai and Tomson are not alone in seeing both the uniqueness of Paul’s con-tributions and his indebtedness to – almost aptitude for – what would become established rabbinic principles. Daniel Schwartz, examining another issue in Paul’s letter to the Romans (the question of food laws and ritual impurity in Rom 14), similarly compares Paul’s writings to other Jewish writings. Quite naturally, towards the end of his argument, Schwartz turns to Pharisaic proto-rabbinic liter-ature since it too deals with questions of food laws and ritual impurity. Schwartz’s concluding contention is that Paul’s stance in Rom 14 “reflects what was common for Diaspora and Pharisaic-rabbinic Jews”.38 The ‘halakhic’ proto-rabbinic Paul represents, therefore, the ‘legal’ pole of the spectrum that the Jewish Paul spans between law and love.
36 Ibid., 178–179.
37 Ibid., 217: “A minority opinion in this [Tannaitic] literature, however, allows for support being given to wandering Tora scholars. We get the impression that this was the loophole utilized by Paul.” I should caution that the lack of Graeco-Roman material on the issue of holy men and sal-aried leadership may not actually be the case but simply be because Safrai and Tomson’s primary focus was on early Jewish and Christian sources.
38 Daniel R. Schwartz, “‘Someone who Considers Something to Be Impure – For Him it Is Im-pure’ (Rom 14:14): Good Manners or Law?,” in Paul’s Jewish Matrix, 293–309, here p. 309. I chose this example because Schwartz’s paper was given in the same year (2009) as Safrai and Tomson’s paper, yet delivered at another, although thematically related, conference examining Paul’s let-ters within a larger Jewish matrix and context.