3:1; Col. 1:6), and celebrated those who were the “first fruits” of a new area
(1 Cor. 16:15; Rom. 16:5), Paul nowhere gives us cause to believe that the
reason he feels free to move on to a new province, once one or two churches
have been established in a given region, is his expectation that these
churches would become centres of evangelization for the province as a
whole.
Arland J. Hultgren (1985, 135–36) speaks of Paul’s churches as “first
fruits” of a larger Gentile offering. But this is not in accordance with Paul’s
usage of the term. Paul never uses it with respect to the church in a given
area, but only regarding initial converts. In other words, the “full harvest”
implied in the metaphor is the church itself in the present, rather than
any potential conversion of a larger proportion of the region in the future.
The only possible counter-example is 2 Thessalonians 2:13. Here, though,
for reasons clearly articulated by Ernest Best (1972, 312–13), the reading ap’
archês(“God chose you from the beginning for salvation”) is to be pre-
ferred.
If Paul’s statement about his work in the east being completed cannot
be accounted for in the preceding terms, what about the idea of represen-
tative universalism (Munck 1959, 278)? Does Paul really believe that his
apostolic commission to proclaim Christ “among all the Gentiles” (Rom. 1:5;
also Gal. 1:16) has been fully discharged in any given Roman province,
once a few small congregations have been planted in this “nation”? This
might appear to be the implication of Paul’s statement in Romans 15. But
it is not easy to see how it could be corroborated. The universal scope of the
gospel is a common Pauline theme; in 2 Corinthians 5:14, for example, it
is the conviction that “one has died for all” that drives Paul on (see also
Rom. 3:22–24; 5:18; 10:11–15; 11:32; 1 Cor. 9:19–23; Phil. 2:10–11; Col.
1:28). While he can speak of the believers as having been chosen by God
(e.g., 1 Thess. 1:4; 1 Cor. 1:27; Rom. 8:28–30), and so is fully prepared to
accept the fact that not all will respond (cf. 2 Cor. 2:15–16), he gives us no
reason to believe that, in his doctrine of election, the chosen are limited from
the outset to a few cities (Philippi but not Dyrrhachium, Corinth but not
Olympia, Ephesus but not Sardis). Further, despite the attempt by Aus
(1979, 257) to find a background for this idea in Jeremiah 3:14 (“one from
a city and two from a family”), it is difficult to see anything in Jewish tra-
ditions about the Gentiles which might have shaped Paul’s thinking in
this way. Jeremiah 3:14 has to do with a remnant from Israel; Old Testa-
ment passages looking ahead to the ultimate salvation of Gentiles, includ-
ing those cited by Paul (see especially Rom. 15:9–12), tend to be more
universal in tone and scope. Zechariah 8:23 might provide a counter-exam-
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