Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 36:1 (NA 1985)
Article: 1 Corinthians 15:8 : Paul The Last Apostle
Author: Peter R. Jones

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TynBul 36:1 (1985) p. 3

1 Corinthians 15:8 : Paul The Last Apostle

Peter R. Jones

I.

As a subject, ‘Paul the last apostle’ has all the marks of a scholarly old chestnut. Oddly it turns out to be, if one may change the metaphor, a virtual academic orphan which to my knowledge no one has adopted for serious and sustained analysis. It is also a subject that reserves many fascinating surprises both with regard to Paul’s apostolic self-consciousness, as one might expect, but also for the general orientation of his thought. For the central term (ἔσχατος) of the key passage, 1 Corinthians 15:8, is capable of summing up the major point of contention in the modern Pauline debate between Käsemann, the spokesman for the primacy of justification by faith, and Stendahl, the proponent of salvation history. For while neither scholar discusses 1 Corinthians 15:81 , their respective positions are reflected in the two possible senses of ἔσχατος which scholars of these two schools propose: (1) ‘least’, ‘of no worth’, which every justified sinner must confess concerning himself, and (2) ‘last’, a final chronological event or act of God in the process of redemptive history.2

The almost total absence of scholarly comment on the ἔσχατος of 1 Corinthians 15:8 is all the more surprising since Paul has never lacked serious interpreters concerned to show his crucial eschatological place in salvation history.3 His role in relation to the Gentiles is a case in

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point. In 1939 G. Sass declared that ‘there are many apostles of Christ but only one eschatological apostle to the peoples’.4 Some fifteen years later J. Munck expressed the same opinion. ‘It is above all on the shoulders of Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, that the task is laid of bringing about the fulness of the Gentiles.’5 In his later study Christ and Israel, Munck persuasively defends this opinion, noting that in Romans 9–11 Paul is dealing with peoples, not individuals. The sudden introduction of his own person indicates the uniqueness of the role he believes he is playing in the events of salvation history.6 An...

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