‘Almost all the problems of philosophy’, claims Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘pose the same form of question …: how can something originate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic …?’Footnote 1 According to a growing tide of interpreters, the apostle Paul retrieved a theological answer to this philosophical question from the depths of apocalyptic Judaism. For these scholars, Paul's apocalyptic thought surfaces when he declares that God disjunctively creates something out of its opposite (creatio e contrario): new creation out of old creation, blessing out of curse, freedom out of slavery, life out of death.Footnote 2 In classifying creatio e contrario as apocalyptic, they theologically coordinate the Pauline corpus with the texts commonly recognised as apocalypsesFootnote 3 – but this coordination must be assessed via direct comparison between the two bodies of literature.Footnote 4 Does Paul's account of such drastic, cataclysmic, e contrario reversals in the divine–human drama stem from and bear similarity to the Jewish apocalypses?
To propose a methodological criterion, in order to categorise creatio e contrario as apocalyptic, one must demonstrate its analogic and genetic connection to the Jewish apocalypses, that it is both common to and derived from this literature.Footnote 5 Commencing an investigation on these terms, I will compare the Enochic Apocalypse of Weeks (hereafter Apocalypse) with Paul's letter to the Galatians.Footnote 6 The structure of this article is twofold. I first analyse three major topics in the Apocalypse – revelation, salvation, and eschatology – and then compare these with parallel topics in Galatians. Within this structure my thesis is deconstructive and then reconstructive: creatio e contrario is absent from and theologically foreign to the Apocalypse; by contrast this motif is pervasive in Galatians, not because Paul retrieves it from apocalyptic Judaism but because for him the economy of salvation is shaped by the disjunctive, e contrario event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Creatio e contrario is therefore neither analogically nor genetically related to the apocalypses, and thus the term ‘apocalyptic’ not only inappropriately classifies this motif but also obscures its origin and contour; here Paul's theology is irreducibly christomorphic, not apocalyptic.Footnote 7
1. Enhancing the Righteous: The Apocalypse of Weeks
‘More will be given to the one who has’ (Matt 13.12). Has what? If we could allow the author of the Apocalypse to answer, he might say that ‘more will be given to the one who has righteousness’. In the Apocalypse the divine–human relation in its past, present and future follows a consistent pattern: God enhances the antecedently righteous. This pattern comes to expression in Apocalypse in three sections: (1) the portrayal of Enoch as the recipient and revealer of divine knowledge (1 Enoch 93.1–3), (2) the revelation of wisdom to the author's community (93.8–10; 91.11–13), and (3) the arrival of the ‘new heaven’ (91.13–16).Footnote 8
1.1 Enoch, the Righteous Revealer of Divine Knowledge (1 Enoch 93.1–3)
Texts, if they are to be trusted, need trustworthy origins. This is what the author of the Apocalypse assumes when he portrays the ancient figure of Enoch as its original writer in order to establish the content of this text as divine revelation.Footnote 9 So the Apocalypse begins:
After this Enoch took up his discourse, saying, ‘Concerning the sons of righteousness, and concerning the chosen of eternity, and concerning the plant of truth, these things I say to you, and I make known to you, my sons, I myself, Enoch. The vision of heaven was shown to me, and from the words of the watchers and holy ones I have learned everything, and in the heavenly tablets I read everything and I understood.’ (1 Enoch 93.1–2)Footnote 10
Enoch advocates for the divine origin of his words by indicating three means of mediation: the ‘heavenly tablets’, which signify the divine ordination of Enoch's prophecy,Footnote 11 the ‘watchers and holy ones’, who mediate between God and creation,Footnote 12 and the ‘vision of heaven’, which indicates the divine source of his revelation.Footnote 13 When Enoch speaks the revelatory formula ‘I make known to you’ (93.2) his readers should thus recognise the ‘heavenly etiology’ of his prophecy.Footnote 14 These words have come from God.Footnote 15
In addition to indicating the means by which God gives Enoch this heavenly knowledge, the author indicates why: Enoch received revelation because he was righteous. In the Ethiopic text, Enoch was ‘born (in) the seventh (part) in the first week, until when justice and righteousness lasted’ (93.3), and, more pointedly, in the Coptic and the Aramaic texts Enoch asserts that righteousness remained ‘until me’.Footnote 16 After Enoch, another era of righteousness does not appear until the seventh week (91.12).Footnote 17 This is not merely stylistic flourish; the characterisation of Enoch as righteous integrally establishes and supports the author's authority-conferring strategy.Footnote 18 As Lars Hartman explains,
[s]uch an access to divine secrets cannot be accorded to anyone without qualifications, and so Enoch is explicitly called ‘righteous’, and probably this righteousness, in the eyes of our author as in those of other Jews, made Enoch capable of a unique closeness to the Holy One in heaven. When a man of such qualities stands behind a blessing of this kind, the truth and trustworthiness of the oracle are ascertained in two ways …: on the one hand, he is trustworthy as a stalwart witness to the divine secrets which God has revealed to him; on the other, the ‘blessing’ of such a powerful personality is so loaded that it, so to speak, shapes the future.Footnote 19
Revelation comes as a fitting gift for the righteous.Footnote 20 This is the fundamental parameter within which the author supports the authority of the Apocalypse and the implicit logical premise which surfaces in the descriptions of Enoch in 93.1–3. Insofar as Enoch's prior righteousness is etiologically linked to God's revelation, the more Enoch is righteous, the more the Apocalypse is likely to have a divine origin. If Enoch was unrighteous, then, his unfit status would fatally undermine the theological bedrock of the author's authority-conferring strategy. An unrighteous mediator of revelation, if not to our author a terminological contradiction, would cast serious doubt on his fittingness and therefore plausibility to receive revelation. Enoch's experience of revelation cannot drastically or disjunctively reverse his status before God because the text's internal theological structure demands a correspondence between Enoch's prior righteousness and his reception of revelation.
1.2 The Righteous Saved by Revelation (1 Enoch 93.8–10; 91.11–13)
‘Knowledge is power’, so goes the proverb; but in the Apocalypse knowledge moreover constitutes eschatological power. Expressing the etiological link between righteousness and revelation shown in 1 Enoch 93.1–3, 93.8–10 and 91.11–13 describe how those who are righteous receive divine revelation which empowers them to enact their eschatological military victory over the unrighteous.
The author recounts the demise of Israel as they become ‘blind’ and their hearts ‘stray from wisdom’, resulting in exile and the destruction of the temple (93.8). To continue this tragedy, ‘in the seventh week, a wicked generation will arise, and its deeds will be many, and all its deeds will be wicked’ (93.9).Footnote 21 But here God decisively intervenes: Enoch predicts that ‘the chosen righteous ones will be chosen from the eternal plant of righteousness’.Footnote 22 Yet who are ‘the chosen righteous’ and what is the ‘plant of righteousness’? E. P. Sanders suggests that
[i]n the ‘Apocalypse of Weeks’ (93.1–10; 91.12–17), the ‘children of righteousness’ are apparently the same as ‘the elect’ and ‘the plant of uprightness [righteousness]’ (93.1). The seventh ‘week’ is that of ‘an apostate generation’, which will be succeeded, in the eighth week, by the election of ‘the elect righteous of the eternal plant of righteousness’ (93.9f). It thus appears that in this section, as in others, the righteous and the elect are identical, and are the opposite of the apostates (or, as elsewhere, foreign oppressors).Footnote 23
Sanders’ intent to unearth covenantal nomism here forces him to collapse ‘the chosen righteous’ (ḫeruyān ṣādeqān) into ‘the plant of righteousness’ (takla ṣedq). Two elements in the text, however, indicate that these labels refer to distinct groups. First, the phrase ‘a wicked generation’ (tewled ‘elut) – Moses’ label for later Israel in Deut 32.5, 20 – suggests that a portion, if not the majority, of Israel will turn away in the seventh week (93.9). The author here distinguishes not between Israel and the Gentiles, but between faithful Israel and unfaithful Israel. Second, and more crucially, Enoch states that ‘the chosen righteous’ are chosen from (’em/מן) ‘the eternal plant of righteousness’. Sander's uses R. H. Charles's misleading and ambiguous translation, ‘the elect righteous of the eternal plant of uprightness’, but both the Ethiopic and Aramaic texts use a passive transitive verb (yetḫarrāyu/י]תבחרון]) with an ablative preposition (’em/מן, denoting source) and thus distinguish between Israel (the main body, the eternal plant of righteousness) and the chosen righteous (a sub-group of that body).Footnote 24 In other words, ‘the chosen righteous ones’ do not constitute all of Israel.Footnote 25 As Loren Stuckenbruck recognises, ‘while Israel is and remains God's special people, the fact that they descend from Abraham has not provided any guarantee that they would not be punished for their sins. Election must be confirmed through a further event of choosing.’Footnote 26
But this begs a perennial question. What is the relationship here between election and righteousness? Sanders assumes that, if the group is identified as both ‘chosen’ and ‘righteous’, election precedes and determines righteousness. So he asserts that ‘we still find that salvation depends on election and that what is necessary to maintain the elect state – to be righteous – is to maintain loyalty and obedience to God and his covenant’.Footnote 27 Yet the variant Ethiopic traditions of 93.10 may suggest a different relationship between righteousness and election. Instead of ḫaraya (‘to choose’), seven manuscripts use a form of of ‘asaya (‘to reward’): ‘the chosen righteous from the eternal plant of righteousness will be rewarded’ (yet‘assayu ḫeruyān ṣādeqān ’em-takla ṣedq).Footnote 28 As Stuckenbruck puts it, in 93.10 ‘[e]lection … depend[s] on the righteousness of the individuals or people at any given time.’Footnote 29 If Stuckenbruck is correct, then in the Apocalypse it is not the chosen qua the chosen who are righteous; it is the righteous qua the righteous who are chosen.Footnote 30
The righteous are thus set on the path to eschatological salvation. In contrast to the rest of Israel who ‘fell away from wisdom’ in the sixth week (93.8), God endows the righteous with ‘sevenfold instruction with respect to the whole of his creation’ (93.10), or, as in the Aramaic text, ‘sevenfold wisdom and knowledge’ (שבעה פ[עמי]ן חכמה ומדע).Footnote 31 Wisdom here functions teleologically to empower the righteous to purge evil from the cosmos by obliterating the wicked and consequently enacting their salvation:Footnote 32
… the roots of oppression shall be cut off, and sinners shall be destroyed by the sword; from every place the blasphemers will be cut off, and those who plan oppression and those who commit blasphemy will be destroyed by the knife. And after this there shall be another, an eighth week, which is (of) righteousness, and to it shall be given a sword, so that judgement and righteousness will be executed on those who oppress, and sinners will be delivered into their hands. At its end, they shall obtain possessions through their righteousness … (91.11–13)Footnote 33
The Aramaic text clarifies that the elect judge sinners through their God-given military skill: ‘a sword will be given to all the righteous ones in order to exact a righteous judgement (למעבד דין קשוט) from all the wicked ones’.Footnote 34 As fitting recipients of this empowering revelation, then, the righteous strike down the wicked and thus enact their eschatological vindication and salvation.Footnote 35
Thus, the implicit theological premise in 93.1–3 – that revelation corresponds to righteousness – comes to expression in the Apocalypse’s soteriology in 93.8–10 and 91.11–13. Just as God gave revelation to Enoch because of his prior righteousness, so also God gives soteriological wisdom to those already righteous. Though 93.8–10 and 91.11–13 may describe drastic changes within the world order (e.g. the vindication of the righteous and the condemnation of the unrighteous), as regards the divine–human drama God's revelation does not disjunctively transform the identity of the righteous. What is apocalypsed to them does not, for example, enact an e contrario movement from unrighteousness to righteousness or from demonic slavery to liberation; instead, this revelation confirms their identity: the righteous remain righteous, the unrighteous remain unrighteous.Footnote 36 This theological correlation between revelation and soteriology in the Apocalypse leads us to consider one final element: the eschatological arrival of the new heaven.
1.3 The Arrival of the New Heaven, in the Absence of Sin (1 Enoch 91.13–16)
In the Apocalypse Enoch predicts that world history will gradually develop into a restored state that provides the preconditions for the smooth transition into the ‘new heaven’:
… the Temple of the Great King shall be built in glory forever. And after this, in the ninth week, the righteous judgement will be revealed to all the world, and all the works of the wicked will depart from the whole earth. And the world will be written down for destruction, and all people will look to the path of uprightness. And after this, in the tenth week, the seventh part in it, there will be eternal judgement. And it will be executed against the watchers of the eternal heaven, a great (judgement) that will be decreed in the midst of the angels. (1 Enoch 91.13–15)Footnote 37
This gradual restoration anticipates and prepares for the eschatological refashioning of heaven itself: ‘And the first heaven will pass away in it, and a new heaven will appear, and all the powers of the heavens will shine forever with sevenfold (brightness)’ (91.16).Footnote 38 Here the ‘new heaven’ replaces the old heaven after the reconstruction of the temple, the vindication of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked (both human and angelic) and a universal turn to obedience.Footnote 39 This follows the same pattern expressed elsewhere in the Apocalypse: just as God provided revelation to the antecedently righteous – both Enoch and the chosen righteous – here the new heaven (and only a ‘new heaven’, not a ‘new earth’) appears within a cosmos already purged from sin. God has thus enhanced the antecedently righteous on a cosmological/eschatological scale. Because the new heaven arrives once the world is restored, it does not irrupt out of a wicked age, create a historical disjunction, or invade a demonic sphere. There is no disjunctive eschatology in the Apocalypse and no eschatological or cosmological event of creatio e contrario.Footnote 40 Only after being restored from within, the cosmos gradually develops into and climaxes in the arrival of the ‘new heaven’. Thus, a strict dualistic separation between ‘this age’ and ‘the age to come’ is not necessarily present in or characteristic of apocalypses. As Crispin Fletcher-Louis recognises, ‘[t]here is no intrinsic connection between an apocalypse and so-called “apocalyptic eschatology”.’Footnote 41
In the Apocalypse God consistently enhances the antecedently righteous, and thus the divine–human drama contains no instances of creatio e contrario. Enoch receives revelation for his righteousness, the righteous obtain salvific wisdom as a fitting gift, and the new heaven appears within a world already restored. Revelation, salvation and eschatology are not characterised by disjunction: there is no disruptive apocalypse given to Enoch, no salvific invasion that liberates the community from the demonic captivity, and no cataclysmic end to an evil age immediately replaced by a new age. Creatio e contrario is not only absent from but also radically foreign to the theology of the Apocalypse. But this is not the case for Paul in his letter to the Galatians.
2. Raising the Dead: Disjunction in Galatians
Like the Apocalypse, Paul speaks of divine revelation (Gal 1.11–16), the salvation of a community (3.10–14), and ‘new creation’ (6.14–15). This topical similarity, however, only unveils the fundamental disparity between these authors. In contrast to the Apocalypse, in which God consistently enhances the righteous, in Galatians disjunctive events of creatio e contrario are pervasive in the divine economy: revelation brings new life out of Paul's dead self, redemption creates blessing out of curse, and the new creation irrupts within and out of the present evil age. While contrasting Paul with the Apocalypse, this section will show that the e contrario shape of revelation, redemption and eschatology in Galatians derives from Paul's theological application of the significance and centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As such this, motif is not apocalyptic but christomorphic.
2.1 Paul's Biography of Resurrection (Gal 1.11–16)
Γνωρίζω … ὑμῖν, ἀδελφοί (Gal 1.11). Though Paul's introduction to his mediation of divine revelation bears striking similarity to Enoch's ‘I make known to you, my sons’ (1 Enoch 93.2), Paul's authority-conferring strategy fundamentally differs from and even inverts the strategy of the Apocalypse: instead of signifying that he was worthy or fit to receive revelation, Paul exploits his prior unrighteousness to prove that he has received divine revelation.
Galatians opens with an axiomatic binary antithesis between divine and human origination: Paul's apostleship is ‘not from man … but through Jesus Christ and God’ (1.1). His gospel derives from no human source (1.12). According to Paul's deductive reasoning, since no human generated his gospel, God himself must have revealed it. Paul here argues by way of negation: since there are two and only two potential sources of this revelation, he substantiates the divine, revelatory source of his gospel by stating (1.11–12), and then supporting (1.13–16), that no human produced his message.Footnote 42
Paul's story begins with his life ἐν τῷ Ἰουδαϊσμῷ, but, notwithstanding his identification as Ἰουδαῖος later (2.15), he no longer identifies with or bears allegiance to such a movement.Footnote 43 Two clauses in apposition to his ‘former conduct’ (ἀναστροφή ποτε) elucidate his past life. First, by pointing out that he persecuted the assembly of God, he identifies the negative worth that he had possessed in relation to God; second, by referring to his zealous character, he signifies the positive worth that he accrued before his peers.Footnote 44 But these elements of his former life, including both his merits and demerits, his righteousness and unrighteousness, are only dramatically identified to point out, rather ironically, their complete irrelevance: God set him apart from birth, and thus nothing in Paul's prior life either occasioned or inhibited God's revelation to him.Footnote 45 To expand on a phrase from Karl Barth, the conversion of Paul speaks not only a great ‘yet’ and ‘nevertheless’ to his unrighteousness, but also a ‘regardless’ to the positive social value he obtained amongst his kinsmen.Footnote 46 Accordingly, Paul, considering his past life to be a functional state of non-existence without worth or proper direction, states that God ‘called me by his grace’, signifying the creative power of God which miraculously calls his new life into being. God's interruptive intervention does not provide Paul with some sort of enhancement, empowerment or even new information per se. The revelation of Jesus Christ occasions his entire deconstruction and reconstruction (2.19–20); Paul is called into existence ex nihilo.Footnote 47
This conversion transforms the entirety of his existence, not least his actions and even his physical body, into a crucimorphic pattern (cf. 6.17).Footnote 48 Paul is ‘co-crucified’ with the messiah, who then indwells and enables his actions: ‘It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (2.20). By saying that the son of God was revealed ‘in’ him, Paul interprets his own conversion and calling as the moment when he becomes a re-presentation and continuation of God's eschatological revelation of Jesus Christ to the world.Footnote 49 Paul himself becomes an apocalypse.
For Paul his conversion account provides sufficient evidence to prove that his gospel did not come from man. The e contrario transition from his former life as a persecutor to an apocalypse of the crucified messiah precludes the possibility that any human, either himself or his peers, caused this transformation.Footnote 50 God is the only option. Whereas the Apocalypse establishes the ‘heavenly etiology’ of the text by highlighting Enoch's righteousness, Paul supports the divine origin of his gospel by exploiting his unrighteousness to prove that no human could have produced this revelation which has now newly constituted him as righteous (2.16). Both arguments function within certain presupposed theological parameters: the author of the Apocalypse takes for granted that revelation and righteousness must correspond; Paul presupposes a christologically conditioned creator–creature distinction (1.1). Logically speaking, whereas the Apocalypse makes an inductive argument, Paul makes a deductive argument: Enoch's righteousness establishes the divine origin of his message; Paul's unrighteousness necessitates it.Footnote 51
Paul's configuration of his conversion does not simply stem from his reflection on experience per se. Instead, he interprets his conversion through the history of the crucified and risen Christ and so expresses God's call in the christomorphic imagery of death and resurrection: ‘Through the Torah I died to the Torah in order that I might live to God’ (2.19). In light of this death-to-life imagery, we should call Paul's story not just a ‘biography of reversal’ but a biography of resurrection: God's call brought him to life out of death.Footnote 52 Paul's account of his e contrario reconstitution is therefore not determined by some prior theory about how revelation must work but rather retrospectively derived from his theological application of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, Paul configures his disjunctive experience of revelation in explicitly christomorphic terms.
2.2 Salvation by Blessing out of Curse (Gal 3.10–14)
Paul describes a rather pessimistic situation in Gal 3.10: ‘those from works of the Torah’ fail to obey the Torah and thereby incur the curse. The Torah, though against neither the blessing nor the promise, nevertheless contains an internal weakness and inability to effect the realisation of the eschatological blessing of Abraham. The Torah promised blessing but has only brought curse.
A number of elements in Galatians 3 demonstrate that Paul at least associates the content of this curse with death.Footnote 53 Blessing, justification and life are tightly connected so as to be virtually interchangeable. Paul declares that ‘nobody is justified in the Torah’ (3.11) and the blessing comes by faith (3.14) because ‘the righteous by faith will live’ (3.11). Furthermore, he interprets the Torah's inability to bring blessing as an inability to ‘make alive’ (ζῳοποιῆσαι, 3.21). To invert this, the curse, lack of justification and death are correlated, most prominently when Paul coordinates Jesus’ death with his assimilation into the curse (3.13). Thus, the terms ‘blessing’ and ‘curse’ describe and accentuate what Paul calls ‘life’ and ‘death’.
Gal 3.10–11 drives home the absolute certainty and universal scope of the Torah's death-curse.Footnote 54 With quantitative terms Paul emphasises that ‘as many who are from works of Torah are accursed … accursed are all who do not remain in all of the things written in the book … nobody is justified in the Torah’. But Paul has also referred to a group that has received the blessing along with Abraham (3.6), and thus at first glance in 3.6–11 Paul appears simply to apply the blessing and curse to two distinct communities. On the one hand, there are those of faith who, by virtue of their participation with Jesus through the Spirit, are children of Abraham and receive his blessing. On the other hand, all of ‘those from works of the Torah’ are cursed because they for one reason or another fail to obey the Torah. A cursory reading of 3.6–11 would not indicate any movement between the two groups: one is cursed, the other is blessed. If, however, those from works of the Torah are to be justified, blessed and made alive, what is needed is a disjunctive movement from curse into blessing. What is needed is a way to bring life out of death.Footnote 55
And indeed Paul discovers just that. Those under the curse of the Torah are ‘redeemed’ by ‘Christ becoming a curse for us’ (3.13). Christ's assimilation to those under the curse of death results in both their disjunctive movement out of the sphere of curse and into the sphere of blessing: ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse … so that the blessing of Abraham might come in Christ Jesus (3.13–14). To borrow a phrase from Barth, God ‘does not allow his history to be his and our ours’: he does not will for Israel's death to be hers alone, her curse hers alone, or her humanity hers alone.Footnote 56 For Paul, God in Jesus Christ willingly participates in Israel's fallen humanity, her curse and her death, in order that he might, by the re-creative power of the resurrection, bring Abraham's blessing out of the curse to all humanity, both Jew and Gentile alike.
Blessing out of curse means life out of death, and so this e contrario movement in Gal 3.10–14 theologically parallels the announcement of Christ's death and resurrection (1.1). Paul therefore also configures redemption christomorphically: God creates the blessing of life out of the curse of death through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In light of this christomorphically configured soteriology, Paul describes salvation as a gift distributed not to the worthy, the elite or the antecedently righteous but to the unworthy insofar as they are, prior to this event, under the curse for disobedience. In other words, the mismatch between the crucifixion and the resurrection entails a corresponding mismatch between divine gift and human recipient: the christomorphic shape of salvation entails that, to use John Barclay's vocabulary, God's grace is given as an incongruous gift.Footnote 57 Because God's nature is to bring life out of death, he has mercy on none except sinners.Footnote 58
Whereas in the Apocalypse God enhances the antecedently righteous with wisdom which empowers them to actualise their own military victory over the wicked, in Galatians God delivers the unrighteous into a state of blessing through the disjunctive, christomorphic, e contrario event of making the dead come to life. This christomorphic pattern also shapes Paul's understanding of the relationship between the ‘present evil age’ and the ‘new creation’.
2.3 The Birth of the New Creation, out of the Present Evil Age (Gal 1.4; 6.14–15)
At the outset of Galatians Paul announces that Jesus ‘snatched us from the present evil age’ (1.4). The resurrection of Jesus Christ (1.1) transfers Paul's community (‘us’) out of this age and into a different realm of existence. Paul further elaborates on this in 6.14–15:
May it never be for me to boast – except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but new creation.
This is cosmological deconstruction. The triple crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Paul and the world tears Paul away from the old age which is now in a state of objective, permanent dissolution.Footnote 59 The erasure of the old antinomy of circumcision/uncircumcision directly follows the crucifixion of the world, the nullification of the ‘present evil age’.Footnote 60 Because the old world is crucified, its systems of value and standards of evaluation are non-existent and utterly irrelevant: ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of value’. It is not that Paul prefers uncircumcision over circumcision, or vice versa, but rather he evaluates both forms of male status as irrelevant in view of the norm-shattering cosmological deconstruction of Christ's crucifixion. What does count, what is ‘something’ (τί), is ‘the new creation’, the creative action of God in the resurrection of Jesus, which generates a new aeon out of the evil age. Such profound newness arrives in the Christ-event that it drastically restructures all indexes of quality established prior to or against what must now be regarded as the singular criterion of worth in the new creation: the self-gift of Jesus Christ (2.20).
The Apocalypse described a gradual and eventual eschatological development in which the new heaven arrives after the judgement of sinners, the rebuilding of the temple and a universal turn to obedience. For Paul, however, as an event of creatio e contrario, the new creation irrupts from within and out of the present evil age when the death of Jesus permanently judges the old age and his resurrection produces the new creation on the other side of death. Paul's configuration of his eschatology as a type of cosmological death and resurrection is purely christomorphic: the disjunction between the present evil age and the new creation derives from the disjunction between the crucified and risen Christ.Footnote 61 Thus, the drastic separation between the present evil age and the new creation is not a predetermined tenet of Jewish apocalypticism but stems from Paul's creative eschatological application of his Christology.
3. Disjunction as Christomorphic, Not Apocalyptic
Paul opens his letter with a decisive assertion of the divine identity: God is the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead (Gal 1.1). God is thus known through the history of Jesus Christ as a fundamentally christocentric reality, or, in other words, Jesus Christ constitutes both the formal and material principles, the source and content, of Paul's theology. Paul rethinks the identity of God and his interaction with humanity through the disjunctive, e contrario history of Christ crucified and risen. God manifests as ‘the one who raised him from the dead’ (1.1) when he brings Paul's new life out of his dead self (1.11–16), the blessing of life out of the curse of death (3.10–14), and the new creation out of the present evil age (1.4; 6.14–15). Paul configures these elements of the divine economy according to a disjunctive, e contrario pattern precisely because the paradigmatic action of the divine identity is the e contrario enactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This contrasts starkly with the Apocalypse of Weeks. In the Apocalypse, God gives revelation to Enoch on account of his prior righteousness, enacts salvation for only the righteous and brings in the new heaven after a universal turn to obedience. Instances of creatio e contrario are absent from the Apocalypse because the narrative consistently follows a theological pattern of divine relationality in which God enhances the antecedently righteous. This is to suggest neither that creatio e contrario is nowhere in the Jewish apocalypses nor that the Apocalypse is somehow representative of all the apocalypses or apocalypticism; rather, as this investigation has shown, this motif is just not common to all the apocalypses and therefore should not be classified as a uniquely apocalyptic theme. Attempts to pinpoint the origin of the Pauline creatio e contrario somewhere in the Jewish apocalypses will ultimately fail to reveal how the theological pattern of this motif demonstrates Paul's thoroughgoing application of his Christology to his theology.
Paul's explicit christomorphic shaping of creatio e contrario is neither analogous to common aspects of the Jewish apocalypses nor directly retrieved from them. Disjunctive aspects of Paul's letters commonly described as apocalyptic are more appropriately identified as christomorphic since they are not derived from the apocalypses but shaped by the kerygmatic history of Jesus Christ. Put simply, Paul's theology here is not apocalyptic; it is christomorphic. For Paul, then, the problem of Nietzsche's philosophers – ‘[H]ow can something originate in its opposite…?’ – is not answered by apocalypticism. The answer is Jesus Christ.
