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'Son of Abraham'-Christian Reception of a Jewish Concept -

EunGeol Lyu 1

1호서대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

The aim of this essay is to explore the process how the Jewish concept 'son of Abraham' underwent a so-called 'Christianization' in the primi- tive Christianity. The terminology 'sons of Abraham' denotes originally Jews and conveys an ethnic meaning; but it came to refer to Christians as well: 'those who believe in Christ become children of Abraham.' Our concern is to answer the following questions: To whom does this Christian reception go back? What were the issues which are respon- sible for this theological variation? A careful survey of New Testament literature leads us to assume that the origin of the Christian understanding could hardly be traced back to any New Testament writers other than Paul, although we cannot definitely confirm this hypothesis by means of 'Traditionsgeschichte'. We need now to turn to Paul's letters, in order to establish our exegetical view on this matter. It is often maintained that Abraham's sonship provides Paul with a major soteriological concept, which can be deduced mainly from the reading of Rom 4, but we should still ask whether Gal 3 also offers the same line of thought. To facilitate our task, it is advisable to assume what Paul had preached to his Christians, before he wrote to them. We call it 'protokerygma' which converted e. g. Galatians to the Christian belief. The protokerygma is presupposed in the letter, but is not directly accessible to us. If we examine carefully whether Paul used the model of Abraham in the protokerygma, we can answer rather in the negative: the sonship of Abraham was an argument of the opponents and Paul tried to take advantage of the Abraham motif as a counter-example for the justification through faith. This is why Paul contrasts the sonship of Abraham with that of God, which played an important role in the protokerygma. He reluctantly accepts the title 'children of Abraham', in so far as it can be combined with faith (cf. Gal 3:7, 29). To do this, Paul interprets the blessing of Abraham in fact as the justification of Gentiles. The negative view on the sonship of Abraham undergoes a significant change, when Paul proposes Abraham as the forefather of both believing Jews and Gentiles. It was out of the question if Jews are sons of Abraham in the Galatian debate, but Paul needs to state in Romans more precisely how they can be affiliated to Abraham in the Pauline sense (cf. Rom 4:16), whom the apostle once acknowledged as forefa- ther of Gentile Christians. In short, we can draw our conclusion that it is highly plausible that the Christian reception of Abraham's sonship goes back to Paul's Jewish opponents but it was theologically established by him.

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