Knowing and Being Known: Pauline Epistemology and Ethics

The battle over evaluative concepts in BT is a battle of epistemologies. BT consultants know the original languages and the theology of their translation organization, while translators know the target culture and the theology of participating churches. These two parties clash in exegesis and making translation decisions on that exegesis. Traditional BT has looked to accuracy, naturalness, and clarity as guidelines. Since 2013, some have offered alternative evaluative guides by using paradigms of hospitality and alterity, along with strategies such as orality and multi-modality. Reactions to such alternative evaluative guides are varied. Negative reactions against Muslim idiom translations (Ibrahim-Greenham. Islam and the Bible. B&H Academic, 2023) oppose contextualization in principle. Others have incorporated parts of alternative suggestions into a traditional BT framework, such as ETEN’s Innovation Lab (Floor. “Increasing Communication Bandwidth”. Forthcoming), namely with an emphasis on multi-modality.

This paper takes a step back and examines how epistemological and thus theological claims are established. Following Chris Tilling’s work on 1 Corinthians 8, it is demonstrated that knowledge claims for Paul are based in God’s relation to humanity. Since this Pauline epistemology is necessarily relational, epistemology cannot rightly be separated from ethics. Rather than applying ethical values to epistemological conflicts, Pauline epistemology is inherently ethical because there is no epistemology apart from relationships. Theological knowledge is bound to sets of relations for Paul, and these sets of relations dictate the ethics for theological discourse.