Chapter 11 The Love Commandment in the Authentic Pauline Letters and Ephesians 5:2: An Intertextual Study in the Development of Agape Ethics in the Pauline Corpus
In: “To Recover What Has Been Lost”: Essays on Eschatology, Intertextuality, and Reception History in Honor of Dale C. Allison Jr.Search for other papers by Matthias Konradt in
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Abstract
This essay analyses the development of agape ethics in Pauline tradition as it is evidenced by the authentic Pauline letters and the deutero-Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians. While the emphasis on agape appears as practically a universal signum of early Christian ethics, it is characteristic of Paul’s letters that agape does not just occur as the core of the instructional material Paul handed down to his congregations. Rather, the ethical argumentations in Pauline letters give evidence of Paul’s strong ability to apply agape as the guiding principle of Christian social behavior to concrete ethical issues among his addressees and, thereby, to deepen the understanding of agape christologically by referring to the “pro-existence” of Christ as a model of love. But in Paul’s letters, the christological rationale did not yet transform the general paraklesis. In the process of the christological expansion and transformation of the agape concept in the Pauline tradition, it is not until Eph 5:2 that we find a concise, christologically founded admonition to agape as part of the general paraklesis.