This book shows how in the Corinthian letters Paul was fashioning the principles that later authors would use to interpret scripture. This engagingly written demonstration of the hermeneutical impact of Paul's correspondence on early Christian exegetes also illustrates a new way to think about the history of reception of biblical texts.
The apostle Paul was the inaugurator of early Christian literary culture, not only through the writing of his own letters (ca. 50-62 CE) - which were to become surprisingly influential once collected and published after his death - but also through the successful propagation of a religious logic of mediated epiphanies of Christ, on the one hand, and of "synecdochical hermeneutics" of the gospel narrative about Christ, on the other. He set the precedent that the Christ-believing movements were to be rooted in texts and textual interpretation. Already in his own letters, Paul began a process of ongoing articulation and reinterpretation of the gospel narrative and the various means by which it could be replicated in each new generation and locale. This process was to continue through the letters written in his name, the Acts of the Apostles, and apostolic imitators and expositors in the centuries to come. These 15 essays by Margaret M. Mitchell are accompanied by an introduction that lays out thirteen propositions for the development of early Christian literary culture from its inception in the astounding claims of Paul, the self-styled "apostolic envoy of Jesus Christ crucified," up through Constantine.
This work casts new light on the genre, function, and composition of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Margaret Mitchell thoroughly documents her argument that First Corinthians was a single letter, not a combination of fragments, whose aim was to persuade the Corinthian Christian community to become unified.
A multi-faceted commentary that breathes fresh insight into Paul's letter In Second Corinthians, Paul responds to reports of the Corinthian congregation questioning his competency as a divinely sent messenger. Through apologetic demegoria and the use of graphic imagery related to triumphal processions, siege warfare, and emissary travels and negotiation, Paul defends his constancy, persona, and speaking abilities as he extends the offer of clemency and reconciliation to his auditors. Oropeza combines rhetorical pictures (rhetography) with interpretative layers (literary features, intertextuality, socio-cultural, ideological, and sacred textures) to arrive at the rhetorical impact of Paul's message for ancient Mediterranean discourse. Features: A visual, sensory, and imaginative interpretation of the scripture A comprehensive commentary An avant-garde approach to biblical interpretation
A signature volume in the NIV-based New American Commentary series, New Testament professor Mark Taylor offers his exposition of the popular book of 1 Corinthians to give readers a deeper understanding of its content and context.
At the heart of Paul’s Corinthian correspondence is a historical puzzle. How did the relative calm of 1 Corinthians deteriorate into the chaos of 2 Corinthians, and what role did the so-called Jewish “super-apostles” play in that conflict? This book proposes a new solution: it was Paul, not his rivals, who shot the first volley in the Corinthian conflict. Paul’s claims of unique authority—for instance, as the architect atop whose foundation all others must build (1 Cor 3:10) and the Corinthians’ father while others are mere pedagogues (4:15)—would relegate other leaders to lesser positions. His contention that accepting financial support put an obstacle before the gospel (9:12) would jeopardize the livelihood of apostles who relied on such support. Finally, Paul’s claim that he becomes “lawless to the lawless” (9:21) or that “circumcision is nothing” (7:19) could throw into question Paul’s own Jewishness (cf. 2 Cor 11:22). By reading the Corinthian correspondence against the grain—imagining how Paul’s letter might have backfired for an audience who did not yet take him as scripture—this book explores how misunderstandings and misinterpretations can fracture church communities and cause a ripple effect of conflict and accusation.
This volume presents a detailed case for the plausible literary dependence of the Gospel of Mark on select letters of the apostle Paul. The book argues that Mark and Paul share a gospel narrative that tells the story of the life, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus Christ "in accordance with the scriptures," and it suggests that Mark presumed Paul and his mission to be constitutive episodes of that story. It contends that Mark self-consciously sought to anticipate the person, teachings, and mission of Paul by constructing narrative precursors concordant with the eventual teachings of the itinerant apostle–a process Ferguson labels Mark’s ‘etiological hermeneutic.’ The book focuses in particular on the various (re)presentations of Christ’s death that Paul believed occurred within his communities—Christ's death performed in ritual, prefigured in scripture, and embodied within Paul’s person—and it argues that these are all seeded within and anticipated by Mark’s narrative. Through careful argument and detailed analysis, A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing debate about the dependence of Mark on Paul. It is key reading for any scholar engaged in that debate, and the insights it provides will be of interest to anyone studying the Synoptic Gospels or the epistles of Paul more generally.
The T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul gathers leading voices on various aspects of Paul's biography into a thorough reconsideration of him as a historical figure. The contributors show how recent trends in Pauline scholarship have invited new questions about a variety of topics, including his social location, his mode of subsistence, his cultural formation, his place within Judaism, his religious experience and practice, and his affinities with other religious actors of the Roman world. Through careful attention to biographical detail, social context, and historical method, it seeks to describe him as a contextually plausible social actor. The volume is structured in three parts. Part One introduces sources, methods, and historiographical approaches, surveying the foundational texts for Paul and the early Pauline tradition. Part Two examines key biographical questions pertaining to Paul's bodily comportment, the material aspects of his career, and his religious activities. Part Three reconstructs the biographical portraits of Paul that emerge from the letters associated with him, presenting a series of “micro-biographies” pieced together by leading Pauline scholars.
Paul the apostle is usually imagined as a man of prestige and power – comfortably conversing with philosophers, seeking an audience with the emperor, and composing compelling letters for Christians throughout the Mediterranean. Yet this portrait of a safe and conventional figure at the origins of Christianity airbrushes out many strange things about him. This volume repositions Paul as a man at the periphery of power. Recovering an Undomesticated Apostle explores the ways that Paul has been “domesticated” in both popular and scholarly imagination. By isolating selected crises of the apostle’s life and legacy and examining the social and material dimensions of his world, these essays collectively chip away at the received image of his strength and status. The result is a series of glimpses of Paul that frame the apostle as surprisingly marginal and weak within Roman society. Published in honour of New Testament scholar Leif E. Vaage, Recovering an Undomesticated Apostle presents Paul as a man operating from a position of desperation, making virtue out of necessity as he attempted to claw his way up in the dog-eat-dog world of the ancient Mediterranean.
This book argues for the integrity of the Pauline Corpus as a complex, composite text. Martin Wright critiques the prevailing tendency to divide the Corpus in two, separating the undoubtedly authentic letters from those of disputed authorship. Instead, he advocates for a renewed canonical hermeneutic in which the Corpus as a whole communicates Paul's legacy, and the authorship of individual letters is less important, stressing that that current preoccupations with authorship have a distorting effect on exegesis, and need to be reconsidered. Wright uses Ephesians as a focal text to illustrate the exegetical potential of this approach. He critically investigates the history of the prevailing hermeneutics of pseudonymity, with particular attention to the theological and confessional partiality with which it is often inflected. And constructively, he proposes a new hermeneutical model in which the Pauline Corpus is read as a continuous interpretative dialogue, leaving the question of authorship to one side. In two substantial exegetical studies, Wright offers new readings of passages from Ephesians and other Pauline letters, amplifying the proposed approach and illustrating its value.
