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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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’.

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.

I concluded the last chapter by suggesting that Al-e Ahmad’s turn to a renewed reading of Islam in Gharbzadegi and On the Services and Treasons of Intellectuals might be interpreted as his preliminary steps towards a kind of liberation theology, the full contours of which he could not see for he was unaware of similar events in Latin America led by theologian like Gustavo Gutiérrez and others. These ground-breaking events were happening almost simultaneously with the publication of Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi. But his own mind being overly fixated on Europe, and his main interlocutors at Tehran University too Eurocentric even to be aware of such monumental developments, he never unpacked this crucial potential in his critical thinking. That aspect of Al-e Ahmad’s project thus remained dormant until the Islamist takeover of his legacy would take it in a direction that would legitimise their tyranny and discredit Al-e Ahmad. A major task of this book is to retrieve that moment in Al-e Ahmad’s thinking and push it in a direction he could not see or even anticipate. In this chapter I turn to his literary work.

When individuals tell awakening stories, they weigh in on cultural disputes over truth and meaning that emerged during various historical eras and evolved through time. This chapter sketches a cultural history of the awakening narrative formula, showing how awakening narratives proliferated over time with the rise of various discursive communities. It discusses several cases that span different contexts, belief systems, and historical periods -- from the Axial Age to the late modern era -- in order to show how awakening stories emerged in various historical eras to mark the prominent cultural and moral tensions of those eras. These cases variously express philosophical, religious, political, scientific, psychological, and sexual worldviews and span different levels of analysis. These include the story of Zarathustra, Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Buddhist story of Siddh?rtha Gautama, the Christian story of Paul the Apostle, the Western Enlightenment narrative, the Marxist account of false and class consciousness, and Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Finally, this chapter discusses the proliferation of awakening stories that accompanied the rise of identity politics and new social movements, including New Age movements, in the 1970’s and 80’s.

The final chapter, “The Spiritual Body,” brings into relief the previous chapters’ discussion of grace, thanksgiving, attention, and the “flesh,” by arguing that the Holy Sonnets were attempts to create an “extended” attention by turning the bodies of the poems into “spiritual bodies.” The “spiritual body,” the highest redemptive ideal in Christianity, is imitated in Donne’s devotional poems in that the poem is used as a machine by which one can pay attention to the very acts of attention and distraction within the poem. The chapter concludes by returning to “Death be not proud” and offering a reading of the poem as a figurative spiritual body.

This chapter offers a theory of sin, grounded in a new approach to existential thinking about time and presence. The chapter argues that, despite the intuitive association of sin with inauthenticity, Pauline and Protestant notions of sin had a profound influence on the idea of authentic temporality among existential thinkers. By adopting ascetic notions of conversion within a normative procedure for the philosophy of everyday life, sin became a model for defining authentic existence on the basis of rupture, dispossession, and difference, a model that had a profound effect on late twentieth-century critiques of essentialism.

This chapter considers the variety of Greek letter collections that the late antique reader would have inherited. These range from letters—real, spurious, or imagined—by orators, philosophers, military officials, and Christian leaders. The chapter also considers how letter collections were formed, how the ancient reader confronted questions of authenticity, and ancient discussions of the art of letter writing.