"God is witness" a classical rhetorical idiom in its pauline usage

AbstractFive times in the undisputed letters Paul invokes God as guarantor of the truth of a claim with a form of the phrase “God is witness.” Interpreters have long identified these sayings as self-imprecatory oaths after a pattern attested in the Hebrew Bible. In this article, I argue that the Pauline phrase “God is witness” is not a self-imprecatory oath at all, but rather a figure of speech with roots in the rhetoric of classical Greece and a long tradition in postclassical pagan, Jewish, and Christian literature. In this figure of speech, God is not testifying against Paul in case Paul should default on a promise; rather God is testifying for Paul that Paul’s character can be trusted. </jats:sec

Messiahs and their messengers

Paul's frequent self-designation apostolos christou Iesou is one of those phrases we take for granted by transliterating, "apostle of Christ Jesus." But christos, of course, means messiah, and apostolos is an old Greek political term meaning envoy or emissary. Paul styles himself an emissary for the messiah, which is in fact a kind of social type in the history of Judaism: the contemporary partisan of a messiah who interprets and propagandizes for him in literary form. Like Zechariah with Zerubbabel, Nicolaus of Damascus with Herod the Great, R. Akiba (according to legend) with Shimon bar Kosiba, and Nathan of Gaza with Sabbetai Zevi, Paul made his mark as a literary surrogate for a man whom he regarded as the messiah. This article examines the social role of the emissary for a messiah in the history of Judaism from antiquity to the early modern period