Paul and the Gift

John Barclay's Paul and the Gift (2015) has been hailed as one of the most groundbreaking works in Pauline scholarship in the last twenty years. Barclay argues that modern scholars have misread Paul and his contemporaries within Second Temple Judaism as though their definition of ‘grace' and ‘gift' were the same as “the modern (Western) ideal of the ‘pure' gift, which is supposedly given without strings attached” (562).

Barclay helpfully provides six different axes along which a gift might be ‘perfected' (that is, drawn out to an extreme for the sake of definition). He distinguishes six possible perfections of the gift: its superabundance, its singularity (the giver is nothing but gracious), its priority, its incongruity, its efficacy, and its non-circularity (69). Barclay demonstrates that the final perfection is entirely modern: gifts in the ancient world always obliged the receiver to reciprocate. Although Paul speaks of the first five perfections of the gift, the one he most emphasizes (in contradistinction to most of Second Temple Judaism) is the incongruity of grace with the worthiness of the recipient. The second half of Barclay's book explores Paul's concept of the gift in Galatians and Romans. Barclay notes in conclusion,

The reading of Paul offered in this book may be interpreted either as a re-contextualization of the Augustinian/Lutheran tradition, returning the dynamic of the incongruity of grace to its original mission environment where it accompanied the formation of new communities, or as a reconfiguration of the ‘new perspective,' placing its best historical and exegetical insights within the frame of Paul's theology of grace (573).