Luke Drake: Reading Paul, Rehabilitating Paul: Judaism and the Law in the Euthalian Apparatus

The Euthalian apparatus comprises a set of Late Antique paratextual materials that accompanied and epitomized the Pauline letters, Acts, and the Catholic letters. Hundreds of Greek manuscripts—as well as various Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, Gothic, and Latin witnesses—contain components of the apparatus, attesting to the influence of this ancient material on the reading practices of Late Ancient and medieval Christian readers. Early studies (Zacagni, Wettstein, Harris, Ehrhard, Von Soden, etc.) of the apparatus centered on questions of authorship and the authenticity of its respective components (prologues, bioi, kephalaia, etc.). More recent studies (Dahl, Hellholm, Blomkvist, Scherbenske) have established the function of ancient rhetorical theory within the apparatus, as well as the apparatus’ relationship to the corresponding New Testament literature (Blomkvist). Very little work, however, has been done on many of the theological propensities of the apparatus. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the apparatus (and the many manuscripts that carry it) articulates Jewish-Christian difference—with a specific emphasis on its representation of the Jewishness and “conversion” of Paul—and situate these positions alongside those of contemporaneous early Christian exegetes (assuming a 4th-5th c. CE date of composition).