Preliminary considerations

Over the past two or three decades the question of whether Paul refers to the faith of Jesus Christ has received considerable attention. It constituted the subject matter for the presidential address delivered to the 43rd General Meeting of the Society for New Testament Studies in 1988 and it seems that the question still remains largely unresolved. The debate, which can be traced back with certainty to the previous century, revolves around a number of genitival constructions exhibiting a form of Christ's name qualifying the substantive πίστις:

The crucial issue is whether one or more of these constructions refers, either exclusively or in conjunction with another party, to the faith of Jesus Christ. Each of these occurrences will be discussed in detail below, but we shall start by introducing the theological issues central to the debate and surveying the pertinent grammatical data. Before doing this, however, it is worth noting that the burden of proof can no longer be thought to rest with those claiming the apostle had Christ's own faith in view.