Exegetical Amnesia“ and Πίστις Χριστοῦ. The „Faith of Christ“ in 19th Century Pauline Scholarship

Schliesser, Benjamin (2015). Exegetical Amnesia“ and Πίστις Χριστοῦ. The „Faith of Christ“ in 19th Century Pauline Scholarship. The Journal of Theological Studies, 66(1), pp. 61-89. Oxford Academic 10.1093/jts/flv008

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Contemporary scholarship holds, almost unanimously, that Johannes Haußleiter was the first to suggest that Paul’s expression πίστις Χριστοῦ should be interpreted as the ‘faith(fulness) of Christ’. His article of 1891 is said to have initiated the ongoing debate, now more current than ever. Such an assessment of the controversy’s origins, however, cannot be maintained. Beginning already in the 1820s a surprisingly rich and nuanced discussion of the ambivalent Pauline phrase can be seen. Then, a number of scholars from rather different theological camps already considered and favoured the subjective genitive. The present study seeks to recover the semantic, grammatical, syntactical, and theological aspects put forward in this past (and ‘lost’) exegetical literature. Such retrospection, while not weighing the pros and cons for the subjective or the objective interpretation, helps put into perspective the arguments and responses in the present debate. Then and now, scholars’ contextualization of their readings is in keeping with their respective diverse theological and philosophical frames of reference.

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