ple. Still, the ratio of ten to one puts the stress on the multitude of Gentiles
who join in the pilgrimage to Zion.
In my opinion, then, this notion of representative universalism simply
begs the question. It accentuates the disjunction between the elaborate
way in which Paul speaks of his mission and the much more modest scale
of the reality, without really explaining it. All it does is describe how Paul
himself negotiates the tension between vision and performance, without
providing us with a coherent explanation of the Pauline reality itself.
Similar conclusions are to be drawn, I believe, with respect to the sec-
ond element discussed above, namely, the various suggestions about Paul’s
selection of territories in which to work. We will consider first the situation
in the east, before turning to a consideration of Paul’s plans to go on to Rome
and Spain. As we have seen, two justifications have been put forward for
Paul’s declaration that his work in the east was completed. The more com-
mon one builds on Paul’s stated principle of working only in untouched ter-
ritory; his statement that there is no more room for him in the east is then
understood to mean that other Gentile missionaries are at work in the ter-
ritories between “Jerusalem and Illyricum” untouched by Paul. The other
is Riesner’s argument that Isaiah 66:19 provided Paul with his itinerary.
Riesner’s hypothesis is quite unlikely, and so needs to be treated only
briefly (see J.M. Scott 1995, 145–46). First, as Riesner himself recognizes,
the list of names in Isaiah 66:19 is variously interpreted in Jewish tradition,
and cannot be correlated with any certainty with Paul’s itinerary. To take
one particularly telling example, Put is usually associated with Libya in
Africa, not Cilicia (the LXX renders Put as Libya; see Jer. 46:9 [LXX 26:9];
Ezek. 27:10; 30:5; 38:5; Nah. 3:9; also Josephus, A.J.1.132). Further, in Isa-
iah 66:19, those who are going out to these nations to proclaim God’s glory
are Gentiles—this is implied by Isaiah 66:19 (cf. Isa. 45:20, where the same
word “survivors” (palitim) refers to the nations [see Westermann 1969,
425]; in the LXX, it is made explicit: ex autôn sesômenous)—and their goal is
to bring the scattered Israelites back to Jerusalem as an offering to the
Lord. It is difficult to see how Paul could find grounds in this text for his
mission as a Jewish apostle to the Gentiles, especially if one also wants to
find in this text the background for Paul’s language about the “offering of
the Gentiles” (Rom. 15:16; see Riesner 1994, 218–21; also Aus 1979, 236–41,
though Aus’s statement that Paul reverses the usual meaning of the text
simply underlines the difficulty without removing it). A significant men-
tal strain is required to take a project in which a Jew (Paul) brings an offer-
ing of Gentiles, and then to understand it as Paul’s conscious attempt to
realize a prophetic text in which Gentiles bring Jews. Finally, the fact that
“The Field God Has Assigned” 123