From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 15 1998 - 06:24:54 EDT
At 4:12 PM -0700 7/14/98, Edgar Foster wrote:
>Dear B-Greekers,
>
>While reading Galatians, I came across a word I hadn't researched in
>quite some time--PAIDAGWGOS (Gal. 3:24, 25). There is a voluminous
>amount of information on this subject, and many divergent opinions. My
>question is: does the word PAIDAGWGOS in Gal. 3:24, 25 carry a
>negative, harsh connotation? What do you think?
The text: Gal 3:23-25. PRO TOU DE ELQEIN THN PISTIN hUPO NOMON EFROUROUMEQA
SUGKLEIOMENOI EIS THN MELLOUSAN PISTIN APOKALUFQHNAI. hWSTE hO NOMOS
PAIDAGWGOS hHMWN GEGONEN EIS CRISTON, hINA EK PISTEWS DIKAIWQWMEN: ELQOUSHS
DE THS PISTEWS OUKETI hUPO PAODAGWGPM ESMEN.
I think it is ambivalent: like the Torah itself, for which it is a figure,
the PAIDAGWGOS plays an essential, but nevertheless temporally limited role
in the process of maturation of believing humanity. As the PAIDAGWGOS plays
a vital role in assisting the growing young man in a Greek household,
through kindly urging and admonition to practice right behavior before he
can properly understand WHY it is right behavior and do what is right of
his own initiative, so also the Torah, says Paul in Galatians, has been an
assistant in the moral education of humanity prior to the Christ-event,
after which it is possible to walk righteously without the assistance of
the Torah--i.e. possible to do what is right without obeying the Torah
itself now that one is growing in the ability to obey the will of God
directly.
Nevertheless, as is the case with some of Paul's other images chosen to
illustrate an argument about faith and right action, this image gets a bit
tricky when considered fundamentally and solely in a context of general
human Heilsgeschichte. It seems to me that Paul means to be talking about a
function performed by the Torah before the Christ-event and suggesting that
the Torah no longer has a role to play, or that humanity no longer needs
something equivalent to a PAIDAGWGOS now that it can live under a New
Covenant of grace rather than law. I think that the focus of Paul's
argument really rests upon an adult such as himself who has grown up under
the Torah (or under what, in Rom 1 & 2, he speaks of as a Gentile
equivalent of the Torah), who now, as one who is righteous by faith, can
direct his obedience to God directly without the mediation of a written
legal code.
BUT, Paul's argument here seems to me to beg (or overlook) the question of
whether the Torah should continue to play a role in humanity or in the
Christian community AFTER the Christ-event. Perhaps humanity has passed a
turning point toward the sort of adulthood of which Paul speaks when using
this image, but: (a) empirically, the historical evidence hardly suggests a
massive improvement in human behavior--or even the behavior of humans as
Christian believers, in the 2000 odd years of the Christian era, and (b)
Christian faith-communities seem to have more difficulty taking Paul's
doctrine of Christian freedom in Galatians seriously than any other aspect
of Paul's teaching: even if it is not the Torah as a whole, the Decalogue
and a fair amount of the moral strictures set down in the books of Moses
continue to play a pretty important role in the moral education of children
of believers--so that it would appear the Torah continues to play the role
of a PAIDAGWGOS within believing communities, at least so far as growing
children are concerned, and perhaps for adults too.
Quite honestly, I don't think it is a very easy matter to "divide rightly"
this word of Pauline scripture. Much as he seems to be saying that the role
of the Torah as a PAIDAGWGOS is a thing of a now bygone era, nevertheless
our--humanity's--need for PADAGWGOI hardly seems to be much diminished from
the need of the humanity of that era Paul claimed was bygone.
It's an interesting question. At any rate, I certainly don't think that,
when Paul uses the image of the PAIDAGWGOS, he has in mind anything harsh.
In this connection, some might find it instructive to read in translation
Horace's Satire 1.4, his autobiographical account of his own education and
his gratitude toward his own freedman father who functioned as the boy
Horace's own PAIDAGWGOS, thus enabling the adult Horace to become when of
the most successful of history's social climbers (who never lost a sense of
his origins).
Another passage that Gal 3:24-5 always makes me think of is the opening
chapters of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he argues that a
discussion of moral principles can be meaningful only to a person who has
already received a good moral upbringing, reasoning that one cannot
understand WHY a given sort of behavior is right unless one has already
learned THAT it is right.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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