Abstract

Paul was a controversial figure among his contemporaries when he preached the gospel of the crucified Christ to the Greco-Roman world as a diaspora Jew. He made truth claims that created disputes within his own religious communities as well as among his enemies and the outsiders. His extant letters are the products of such controversies, but his once-contested claims are now considered to be non-negotiable truths by many modern Christian groups. Then an epistemological question needs to be asked: how does Paul acquire the knowledge that he claims to be authentically true; or what is the ground of his truth claim? ;Paul's answer to the question may be designated "pneumatic epistemology," by which he believes that a person can come to the understanding of divine truth only when s/he has the Spirit, through whom God reveals needed knowledge to $\pi\nu\epsilon\upsilon\mu\alpha\tau\iota\kappa\rm o\acute\iota$ . Paul's pneumatic epistemology is most explicitly stated in 1 Cor 2:6-16 and implicitly suggested in other passages, such as Rom 8:14-16, 26-27; 15:18-19; 1 Cor 2:1-5; 7:40; 12:3, 8-9a; 2 Cor 3:12-4:6; Gal 4:6; 1 Thess 1:5-6 and so on. The idea is basically related to the conviction of the believer in terms of $\pi\acute\iota\sigma\tau\iota\varsigma$ through which one perceptually accepts the message of the gospel. Paul extends and applies the concept of pneumatic epistemology to the authenticating of his own truth claims and inspired rhetoric . ;Paul's letter-writing act, along with his efforts to instill the needed knowledge in the mind of the addressee , constitutes an epistemological process of truth formation. Paul utilizes resources, such as the sayings of Jesus, Scripture and early church traditions, in order to formulate authentic knowledge for his readers. Even though Paul considers these resources as authentic constants for truth formation, the manner in which Paul draws arguments from them betrays his apostolic freedom of hermeneutic in the Spirit . An inductive examination of his knowledge formation in ethical instructions and doctrinal traditions shows that the controlling factor in this process is his conviction in the gospel of Christ and that such conviction is promoted by the current dynamic of the Spirit . As such, the concept of pneumatic epistemology is intimated in Paul's appropriation of apostolic authority as he interprets pastoral situations and makes authentic truth claims for the situations. ;Pneumatic epistemology in 1 Cor 2:6-16 is an expression of Paul's belief in God as the ultimate source and the fundamental revealer of truth in the light of his Christian experience of the Spirit. The concept is formulated in the process of Paul's counter argument against the Corinthian rhetorical wisdom, in which Paul sees a reliance on human effort in bringing about $\pi\acute\iota\sigma\tau\iota\varsigma,$ that is, a knowledge-conviction in the gospel of "Christ crucified." Paul ascribes the $\pi\acute\iota\sigma\tau\iota\varsigma$-engendering power to the Spirit that Paul and his community experience in charismatic phenomena. Pneumatic epistemology finds its parallels in such Jewish literature as Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Philo and the Dead Sea Scrolls, while it is in tension with some epistemological presuppositions of the Greco-Roman rhetoric in a cultural-ideological dimension