As a sequel to the hugely successful Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, this book brings together fourteen internationally acclaimed scholars in antiquities studies and experts on Paul and Luke. The contributors provoke new approaches to the troubled relation of the Lukan Paul by re-configuring the figure and impact of Paul upon nascent Christianity, with the two leading questions as a driving force. First, 'Who is "Israel" and the "church" for Luke and Luke's Paul' and secondly 'Who is Jesus of Nazareth and who is Paul in relation to both?' The contributors provide challenging new perspectives on approaches to the figure of Paul in recent scholarship as well as in the scholarship of previous generations, 're-figuring' Paul by examining both how he is portrayed in Acts, and how the Pauline figure of Acts may be envisioned within Paul's own writings. Paul and the Heritage of Israel thus accomplishes what no other single volume has done: combining both the 'Paul of Paul' and the 'Paul of Luke' in one seminal volume.
Seventeen leading international scholars collaborate in forming an emerging new consensus at the dawn of the millenium that Luke is the interpreter of Israel.
This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of ancient Israel—from the creation account to setting the stage for the New Testament era. This edition has been thoroughly revised, but maintains its focus on Old Testament texts as well as ancient Near Eastern literary and archeological sources to highlight the important modern controversies surrounding this part of Scripture. The work provides an up-to-date, conservative, evangelical position on matters relating to ancient Israel’s history and is illustrated with over 600 figures, charts, and maps.
"Westerholm is admirably concerned to focus our attention on Paul's theology, specifically on the theological issues that arose for the Apostle in his valiant attempt to assess the role of the law after the advent of Christ. Beginning with an unusually mature account of the debate that is currently raging over Paul's understanding of the law, Westerholm has provided an analysis of his own that will certainly claim the attention of all student's of Paul the theologian." - J. Louis Martyn "This is the most clearly written and understandable treatment of the debate over the law in Pauline thought that I have seen." - Robert Jewett "Westerholm has produced an illuminating, engaging, and refreshing book. He sets forth the views of major interpreters of Paul with clarity and candor, engages them, and then makes proposals of his own, which are both well considered and instructive. The book is both interesting and informative, a reader's delight." - Arland J. Hultgren
In the dominant interpretation of the Antioch incident Paul is viewed as separating from Peter and Jewish Christianity to lead his own independent mission which was eventually to triumph in the creation of a church with a gentile identity. Paul's gentile mission, however, represented only one strand of the Christ movement but has been universalized to signify the whole. The consequence of this view of Paul is that the earliest diversity in which he operated and which he affirmed has been anachronistically diminished almost to the point of obliteration. There is little recognition of the Jewish form of Christianity and that Paul by and large related positively to it as evidenced in Romans 14-15. Here Paul acknowledges Jewish identity as an abiding reality rather than as a temporary and weak form of faith in Christ. This book argues that diversity in Christ was fundamental to Paul and that particularly in his ethical guidance this received recognition. Paul's relation to Judaism is best understood not as a reaction to his former faith but as a transformation resulting from his vision of Christ. In this the past is not obliterated but transformed and thus continuity is maintained so that the identity of Christianity is neither that of a new religion nor of a Jesus cult. In Christ the past is reconfigured and thus the diversity of humanity continues within the church, which can celebrate the richness of differing identities under the Lordship of Christ.
In recent years, a growing number of New Testament scholars have questioned traditional portrayals of the Apostle Paul as a leader of a new religious movement that set faith in Christ in opposition to the Jewish tradition. Instead, they have stressed the need to interpret Paul from within the Judaism of his day, regarding him as a faithful Jew who cherished deeply his Jewish identity and saw observance of the Mosaic law or Torah among Jewish believers in Christ as a good thing. While the present work argues strongly in favor of this latter interpretation of Paul, it also seeks to delve deeper into his thought in order to explore at length the points of continuity and convergence between Paul and the Judaism(s) of his day as well as the beliefs that distinguished him from his fellow Jews who did not share his faith in Christ. Chief among these beliefs was the conviction that the identity and will of God were now to be defined primarily on the basis of his relation to Jesus his Son, through whom he had intended from the start to accomplish his purposes for Israel and the world. Yet rather than bringing Paul to reject his Jewish heritage, this conviction led him to redefine and resignify around Christ his understanding of Judaism and the way of life prescribed in the Torah, thereby filling them with new meaning, though he also continued to value and uphold them for the same reasons he had previously. According to Paul, the purpose for which God had sent his Son and delivered him up to death was not that he might atone for sins or make it possible for God to forgive sins, as later Christian thought came to affirm, but rather that through him he might establish a new community in which Jews and non-Jews would be brought to live together as one in fellowship and solidarity. While Paul expected his fellow Jews to continue to live as Jews and members of Israel within this community, which he called the ekklēsia, his conviction that those non-Jews who lived faithfully as part of the same community yet did not submit fully to the Mosaic law were equally acceptable and righteous in God’s sight led him to oppose all attempts to impose on them the observance of that law. Such attempts implied that the members of the community who observed the law were to be regarded as more righteous or as superior in some way to those who did not and thus threatened to destroy the very fabric of the communities that Paul had worked so hard to establish. Rather than running contrary to Jewish thought, Paul’s teaching that it was a life of faith rather than the observance of works of the law per se that led people to be accepted as righteous by God would have been regarded by most Jews as being fully in accordance with traditional Jewish belief. What they would have found novel was Paul’s claim that faith in the God of Israel was now to be equated with faith in Jesus as his Son or “Christ-faith” and that through such a faith non-Jews who did not observe the law could come to be as fully acceptable to God as those Jews who did. Paul’s redefinition of God and Judaism around Jesus as God’s Son would have led many of his fellow Jews to conclude that he was proclaiming a God who was distinct from the God in whom the people of Israel had believed from time immemorial, since that God was never thought to have such a Son and much less to have intended to exalt him to his right side as Lord of all after handing him over to death on a cross. From the perspective of Paul and his fellow believers in Christ, however, the God of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ were one and the same.
Over the years Romans 9–11 has been investigated from a variety of approaches, with one of the most prominent being an intertextual reading. However, most discussions of intertextual studies on this section of Romans fail to adequately address Paul’s discourse patterns and that of his Jewish contemporaries with regard to God, Israel, and the Gentiles. Adapting Lemke’s linguistic intertextual thematic theory, this study uses a methodological control to analyze the discourse patterns in Romans 9–11. Through this analysis the author demonstrates the divergence of Paul’s viewpoints on several typical Jewish issues, which suggests that his discontinuities from his Jewish contemporaries are obvious and sometimes radical. It is apparent that Romans 9–11 not only provides a self-presentation of Paul as a Mosaic prophet figure, but overall it appears as a prophetic discourse, reinforcing the notion that Paul’s message comes from divine authority.
The Salvation of Israel investigates Christianity's eschatological Jew: the role and characteristics of the Jews at the end of days in the Christian imagination. It explores the depth of Christian ambivalence regarding these Jews, from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Jeremy Cohen contends that few aspects of a religion shed as much light on the character and the self-understanding of its adherents as its expectations for the end of time. Moreover, eschatological beliefs express and mold an outlook toward nonbelievers, situating them in an overall scheme of human history and conditioning interaction with them as that history unfolds. Cohen's close readings of biblical commentary, theological texts, and Christian iconography reveal the dual role of the Jews of the last days. For rejecting belief and salvation in Jesus Christ, they have been linked to the false messiah—the Antichrist, the agent of Satan and the exemplary embodiment of evil. Yet from its inception, Christianity has also hinged its hopes for the second coming on the enlightenment and repentance of the Jews; for then, as Paul prophesized, "all Israel will be saved." In its vast historical scope, from the ancient Mediterranean world of early Christianity to seventeenth-century England and New England, The Salvation of Israel offers a nuanced and insightful assessment of Christian attitudes toward Jews, rife with inconsistency and complexity, thus contributing significantly to our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations.
David Moessner proposes a new understanding of the relation of Luke’s second volume to his Gospel to open up a whole new reading of Luke’s foundational contribution to the New Testament. For postmodern readers who find Acts a ‘generic outlier,’ dangling tenuously somewhere between the ‘mainland’ of the evangelists and the ‘Peloponnese’ of Paul—diffused and confused and shunted to the backwaters of the New Testament by these signature corpora—Moessner plunges his readers into the hermeneutical atmosphere of Greek narrative poetics and elaboration of multi-volume works to inhale the rhetorical swells that animate Luke’s first readers in their engagement of his narrative. In this collection of twelve of his essays, re-contextualized and re-organized into five major topical movements, Moessner showcases multiple Hellenistic texts and rhetorical tropes to spotlight the various signals Luke provides his readers of the multiple ways his Acts will follow "all that Jesus began to do and to teach" (Acts 1:1) and, consequently, bring coherence to this dominant block of the New Testament that has long been split apart. By collapsing the world of Jesus into the words and deeds of his followers, Luke re-configures the significance of Israel’s "Christ" and the "Reign" of Israel’s God for all peoples and places to create a new account of ‘Gospel Acts,’ discrete and distinctively different than the "narrative" of the "many" (Luke 1:1). Luke the Historian of Israel’s Legacy combines what no analysis of the Lukan writings has previously accomplished, integrating seamlessly two ‘generically-estranged’ volumes into one new whole from the intent of the one composer. For Luke is the Hellenistic historian and simultaneously ‘biblical’ theologian who arranges the one "plan of God" read from the script of the Jewish scriptures—parts and whole, severally and together—as the saving ‘script’ for the whole world through Israel’s suffering and raised up "Christ," Jesus of Nazareth. In the introductions to each major theme of the essays, this noted scholar of the Lukan writings offers an epitome of the main features of Luke’s theological ‘thought,’ and, in a final Conclusions chapter, weaves together a comprehensive synthesis of this new reading of the whole.
