Search Results

This chapter explores the development of an occlusionistic model of Jewish Christianity, and its relationship to the rise of critical New Testament scholarship, in the works of English Deist Thomas Morgan and German theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur. Morgan and Baur did not abandon John Toland's humanistic retelling of Christian myth so much as simply reconfigure the role of Jewish Christianity within it. The apostles no longer stood alongside Jesus as examples of an authoritative incarnation of transcendent Christianity in Jewish cultural forms. Now they represented the first occlusion of transcendent Christianity by those Jewish forms. The normative authority traditionally ascribed to the apostles and their purported writings, accordingly, was effectively reduced to the singular apostle Paul and his letters. The commingling of the latter with the former in the New Testament was explained in terms of a pervasive and multifaceted miscoloration of transcendent Christianity by its first, Jewish receptacle during the apostolic and postapostolic eras. Thus, Morgan and, more consequentially, Baur both called for a systematic and thoroughly critical study of the New Testament itself, precisely to distill from all its Jewish trappings the true, transcendent Christianity they assumed it concealed.

This chapter shows how Ferdinand Christian Baur's more traditionally minded critics, in an effort to turn back his assault on apostolic and canonical authority, combined the disparate models of John Toland and Baur into new and more complex taxonomies of Jewish Christianity. This resulted in the notorious problems of definition and terminology that have plagued the category ever since. Underlying the varying details of these new accounts of Jewish Christianity was a common counternarrative that restored the integrity and authority traditionally accorded to the apostolic and canonical spheres by revising Baur's theory at two critical junctures. First, the apostles, while superficially similar to Paul's “Judaizing” opponents in outward practice, were said to have been aligned with Paul, not with those opponents, in essential religious principle. Second, the “Judaizers” were said to have quickly become a nonfactor in the development of the early Catholic Church and thus to have had virtually no meaningful influence on the New Testament.

This chapter explores in detail some of the Byzantine icons found in Wadi al-Natrun, arguing for their Egyptian origin. Six large Deesis portraits of unknown provenance are preserved in the Coptic monasteries in the Wadi al-Natrun. Five, which are of serial nature, formed a part of a majestic Great Deesis set of 11 icons. The investigation in technical art history reconstructs the set and traces the origin of the Wadi al-Natrun icons painted in Byzantine style on locally made sycamore panels to Coptic patronage in Cairo. It specifically addresses the thirteenth-century Interceding St. John the Baptist from a Trimorphon Set and the five palaiologan serial portraits from the Great Deesis, namely Archangel Gabriel, St. Mark the Evangelist, St. Matthew, Apostle Paul, and St. John the Theologian. It then considers the reconstruction of the Great Deesis set from which the Wadi al-Natrun portraits originated. Moreover, the Church of St. Mercurios Abu Seifein in the Monastery of St. Mercurios, Old Cairo is explored.

This chapter focuses primarily on the New Testament, the charter document for Christian views of conversion. It examines the vocabulary of conversion and the multitudinous ways that Scripture depicts conversion. At a basic level, conversion in the New Testament is a personal response of faith to God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ: theologically, affirming certain beliefs about Jesus; ethically, conforming in behavior to Jesus; and sociologically, joining a community of followers of Jesus. Following a discussion of the vocabulary of conversion in the Old and New Testaments, the chapter discusses conversion in the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles (emphasizing the contrast to the pagan world and discussing household conversions), the Johannine writings, and the conversion of Paul. It concludes with comments about the relationship between baptism and conversion.

This introductory chapter traces the history of homosexuality in mainline Protestantism. Appearing for the first time in the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible in 1946, in Apostle Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, the term “homosexual” was added by liberal Protestant Bible scholars who believed that homosexuality was a vice that had been opposed since Sodom. Two enigmatic Greek nouns, referenced in the older King James Version (KJV) as “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” now appeared as a single, streamlined “homosexual.” Some Bible readers, however, opposed this textual change and noted that before the addition, the topic of same-sex relationships was absent in Protestant literature. The chapter argues that the Bible's specifically same-sex meaning was an invention of the twentieth century. It also discusses how this liberal Protestant legacy shaped all sides of the oppositional politics over gay rights.

This chapter introduces readers to the inclusion of the concept of travel in Paul the Apostle's writings and his form of life. The first section is about a declaration of a new age during 17 bc and Paul's letter to Christ-believing communities within the Roman Empire, which includes a prophecy about the emergence of divine heralds. It then goes on to consider travel and its pervasiveness as a theme for social change, the many definitions of travel, and even the common features Paul and the Emperor Augustus functioned within. Postcritical readings of Paul, social-historical and philosophical-theological approaches, and Paul's letters are also discussed.

This chapter describes the significance of the Apostle Paul's traumas within Christianity as a whole. The writings of Paul left a model of Christian suffering to millennia of Christians who followed him. The chapter also shows that a right relationship with God is created by faith rather than law. Judaism is not bothered with the deep contradictions of Paul surrounding righteousness, works, and the law. Comparison between Paul and Hosea is also presented.

Chapter 7 concludes that all of the Pauline traditions of the second century deployed selected pieces of an earlier layer of the Pauline tradition while forgetting others. Appeals to particular combinations of texts and stories from this earlier layer, along with the elevation of some pieces above others, were the means of producing Pauline image traditions. These images were not constructed out of thin air, but were part of the developing social memory of early Christianity. They each exhibit a unique mixture of continuity with and change from the past. Consequently, ancient discourses on the “real” Paul, like their modern counterparts, are problematic. The book ends with considerations for practicing Pauline Studies with a more rigorous sociology of knowledge.

In this chapter, Tilling argues that an account of Paul’s understanding of freedom can be brought into fruitful dialogue with other contributions in this volume, and with ‘freedom’ in the Eroica and in modernity more generally. An outline of Pauline scholarship sets the stage for Tilling’s constructive proposal, which claims that Paul’s core theological axioms situate the Apostle’s ‘freedom’ language in such a way that takes us beyond contemporary New Testament debates. It does this by deploying musical analogies, presenting a more coherent account than before of both Paul’s language as well as the interpreter’s task of describing Paul’s theology. The upshot, which presents freedom in Paul as a corollary of divine love, facilitates critical interaction with modernity’s freedom.

This chapter starts by looking at 1 Thessalonians from the New Testament of the Bible. Historians believe that Paul the Apostle wrote this letter from Corinth. The book consists of two main parts, the first part contains chapters 1–3, which deal with the circumstance and general purpose of the letter and the second part contains chapters 4–5, which provide answers to specific questions. Another effective and powerful letter from Paul the Apostle is Galatians, which is the first of the New Testament books to include a rich and detailed rhetorical analysis. This chapter explores the final and longer epistle “Epistle to the Romans”, which is the sixth book of New Testament.

This chapter provides a detailed look at Heidegger’s 1920–1921 course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in which the writings of the apostle Paul play a crucial role. Setting this course in its philosophical context, it argues not only that Heidegger turned to Paul’s earliest writings in search of a novel understanding of temporality, but that the eschatological model of temporality Heidegger equated with Christian religiosity revolves curiously around the Pauline “katechon”-an obscure figured identified in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians as “holding back” the Second Coming of Christ. In demonstrating that Heidegger’s Paul lays the blame for the delay in Christ’s return squarely upon the Christian believer, this chapter contends that Heidegger’s initial readings of Christian theological sources, and his focus on eschatology, generates an extreme version of personal guilt that ultimately haunts his subsequent attempts to describe selfhood and human existence philosophically in terms of being-guilty.

This concluding chapter reviews the main points made in this book about Paul the Apostle, starting with his belief that he was required to show his ability to resolve the differences with his communities and cooperate with envoys that belonged to another network. It presents Paul's trip to Rome as a focal point in his evangelical career, his representation as the Wandering Signifier, and the concept of apostolic proclamation. The chapter ends with a brief look at an analysis of the logic of Paul's rhetoric, the juxtaposition of travel and death, and the influence his wandering form of life can give more resources for theological and interventionist thought.

By far the majority of Agamben’s books (about 23) make reference to Paul’s letters, often at key points in discussions of concepts that he finds important for his own work as a thinker of the political. This reliance upon Paul in the context of political philosophy goes back to Spinoza (and we should recall that Agamben has held the Baruch Spinoza chair at the European Graduate School). In his Theological-Political Treatise of 1670 Spinoza identified Paul as the most philosophical of the biblical writers and made use of Paul’s thought to advance a view of the constitution of a liberal or secular republic. Agamben also makes significant use of Paul, but this time as the major thinker of a messianic politics, a thinking with which Agamben identifies his own work. While in his reading of Paul Agamben occasionally refers to modern theologians such as Barth and Moltmann, as well as modern biblical scholars, the most important intellectual context within which he reads Paul is provided, on the one hand, by Carl Schmitt with his reflections on political theology and, on the other, by Walter Benjamin, especially the latter’s theses ‘On the Concept of History’.

The writings of Paul form a major part of the New Testament. This includes not only the so-called undisputed letters of Paul but also other letters attributed to him in antiquity that might have been written by later disciples of Paul citing him as author to evoke his apostolic authority. This chapter describes what we know of Paul’s life, beginning with his strong Jewish identity as well as his roots in the Greco-Roman world. Paul himself cites his inaugural visionary experience of the Risen Jesus as a decisive turning point in his life, leading him ultimately to be an ardent proclaimer of the gospel to the Gentile world. Paul’s letters to various early Christian communities in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world served as extensions of his missionary efforts. Although fashioned in a different literary form than the gospel narratives, Paul’s letters also portray Jesus’s identity as both rooted in Judaism and exhibiting a unique transcendent character and purpose. Paul’s Christology focuses intensely on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. The so-called deutero-Pauline Letters extend Paul’s theological vision; in the case of Colossians and Ephesians, situating the redemptive and reconciling role of Christ within the cosmos, and, in the case of the Pastoral Letters, bringing Paul’s exhortations about the life of the Christian community to some of the developing challenges of the late first-century church.

Greek literature from ancient Judaism reflects many of the same strategies and assumptions surrounding food and proper formation found in Greek paideia and Roman family values. Indeed, certain Jewish authors (including the author of 2 Maccabees, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul) worked with the prominent notion that food carries an essence in order to think through the very characteristics of their “Jewishness.” In so doing, they devised similar gastronomic regimes out of milk and solid food. Yet something was also different in how food functioned in this literature as the material basis of a deeper religious bond. The three sets of Jewish texts examined in this chapter indicate how the idioms, values, and embodied politics of Roman rule could be repurposed within a specific provincial culture. And they do so in such a way that emphasizes their own scriptural and philosophical commitments.

This chapter argues that there is a crucial difference in the ways Jesus and the Apostle Paul defined the practice of interpersonal forgiveness, which theologians have largely ignored or downplayed. Jesus and Paul present different models of what forgiveness means, what power it possesses, and its place in the dynamics of salvation. Paul rewrites what Jesus says is most important about interpersonal forgiveness and its relationship to divine forgiveness in a way that undermines what Jesus insisted on in emphasizing the role forgiveness should play in human interactions. That Biblical debate, in the moment that arguably constitutes the origins of the concept of interpersonal forgiveness, reveals how contemporary philosophy conceives of forgiveness when it debates its possibility and its function.