This latest addition to the Fortress Social-Science Commentaries on New Testament writings illuminates the values, perceptions, and social codes of the Mediterranean culture that shaped Paul and his interactions - both harmonious and conflicted - with others, Malina and Pilch add new dimensions to our understanding of the apostle as a social change agent, his coworkers as innovators, and his gospel as an assertion of the honor of the God of Israel.
The Social-Science Commentary series pioneers an alternative commentary genre, providing in this volume the text of the deutero-Pauline letters and cultural notes on them. The Social-Science Commentary on the Deutero-Pauline Letters provides essential "reading scenarios" on specific cultural phenomena in these letters, including forgery, normative conflict, paideia (training), and Household Codes. This volume highlights the transformation of the memory of Paul in early Christianity as reflecting the concerns and interest of communities after Paul's death.
While most Christians might accurately identify Timothy as an associate of the apostle Paul, they probably conjure up images of Timothy and his relationship with Paul in twenty-first-century terms. In Timothy: Pauls Closest Associate, Bruce J. Malina ventures off the path of modern biography toward a more likely description of Timothy, providing readers with fresh and plausible insights that lead to a greater appreciation not only for Timothy but, more important, for the gospel of God that Paul enjoined on him to proclaim: the Godof Israel raised Jesus from the dead, making him Lord and Messiah.
"In this volume Thomas E. Phillips examines the portrayals of Paul in recent biblical scholarship in the light of two major New Testament portraits. Believing the apostolic conference at Jerusalem to be a watershed event, Phillips draws conclusions that help contemporary readers get a more accurate picture of Paul." --Book Jacket.
The authors build on their earlier social-scientific works and enhance the highly successful commentary model they developed in their social-scientific commentaries. This volume is a thoroughly revised edition of this popular commentary. They include an introduction that lays the foundation for their interpretation, followed by an examination of each unit in the Synoptics, employing methodologies of cultural anthropology, macro-sociology, and social psychology.
We can have a sense that when we try to do right by one another, we aren't merely striving against ourselves. The feeling is that we are struggling against something--someone-else. As if there's a force-a person- that wishes us ill. In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul describes just such a person: Sin, a cosmic tyrant who constrains our moral freedom, confuses our moral judgment, and condemns us to slavery and to death. Commentators have long argued about whether Paul literally means to say Sin is a person or is simply indulging in literary personification, but regardless of Paul's intentions, for modern readers it would seem clear enough: there is no such thing as a cosmic tyrant. Surely it is more reasonable to suppose "Sin" is merely a colorful way of describing individual misdeeds or, at most, a way of evoking the intractability of our social ills. In The Emergence of Sin, Matthew Croasmun suggests we take another look. The vision of Sin he offers is at once scientific and theological, social and individual, corporeal and mythological. He argues both that the cosmic power Sin is nothing more than an emergent feature of a vast human network of transgression and that this power is nevertheless real, personal, and one whom we had better be ready to resist. Ultimately, what is on offer here is an account of the world re-mythologized at the hands of chemists, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, and entomologists. In this world, Paul's text is not a relic of a forgotten mythical past, but a field manual for modern living.
Through a social-scientific approach, this study pays attention to four main aspects relative to Apollos: his collectivistic nature as a person of the first-century Mediterranean; his relationship to Corinth and its emerging conflicts; his roots in the city of Alexandria and its contributions to his personality and identity; and, finally, his relationship to Paul and his social network. With this book, readers will see the highly educated person of Apollos and the entire New Testament through new lenses.
The letters of Paul to the newly founded Christian community at Thessalonica hold a special place within the Christian tradition as possibly the earliest extant Christian writings. They are also of special interest not only for their theological value but for their sociological context. Among the communities established by Paul, the church at Thessalonica appears to have been the only one to have suffered serious external oppression. These two important epistles, then, speak uniquely to contemporary Christians living in a society often ideologically, if not politically, opposed to Christian faith. In this innovative commentary Charles A. Wanamaker incorporates what may be called a social science approach to the study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, taking into full account the social context that gave rise to Paul s correspondence. While Wanamaker in no way ignores traditional historical-critical, linguistic, literary, and theological approaches to writing a commentary -- in fact, at several points he makes a significant contribution to the questions raised by traditional exegesis -- at the same time he goes beyond previous commentaries on the Thessalonian correspondence by taking seriously the social dimensions both of Christianity at Thessalonica and of the texts of 1 and 2 Thessalonians themselves. In blending traditional exegetical methods with this newer approach, Wanamaker seeks to understand Pauline Christianity at Thessalonica as a socio-religious movement in the first-century Greco-Roman world and attempts to grasp the social character and functions of Paul s letters within this context. A significant and original addition to the literature on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, this commentary will be valuable to scholars, pastors, and students alike.
