DIVIn a significant reevaluation of Paul’s place in the early Christian story, Timothy Luckritz Marquis explores the theme of travel in the apostle’s correspondence and shows how Paul was a product of the material forces of his day./div

Looking at Paul’s writing through a feminist lens, this volume asks questions focused around science and philosophy. Antoinette Clark Wire specifically explores the reality of all bodies and beings in the ecosystem, not excluding whatever these beings produce, including the speed of light, the webs of spiders, and the culture of humans, so the broadest focus includes the specific. This focus could be too broad for Paul’s letters, blind as he seems to be about where food comes from, why families nurture children, or how water sustains life. Yet Wire shows the reader how he grapples again and again with the limits of his body and the threat of death and finds in Jesus’s dying and rising a way out of fear toward what he calls ‘a new creation.’

Paul and the Gentile Problem provides a new explanation for the apostle Paul's statements about the Jewish law in his letters to the Romans and Galatians. Paul's arguments against circumcision and the law in Romans 2 and his reading of Genesis 15-21 in Galatians 4:21-31 belong within a stream of Jewish thinking which rejected the possibility that gentiles could undergo circumcision and adopt the Jewish law, thereby becoming Jews. Paul opposes this solution to the gentile problem because he thinks it misunderstands how essentially hopeless the gentile situation remains outside of Christ. The second part of the book moves from Paul's arguments against a gospel that requires gentiles to undergo circumcision and adoption of the Jewish law to his own positive account, based on his reading of the Abraham Narrative, of the way in which Israel's God relates to gentiles. Having received the Spirit (pneuma) of Christ, gentiles are incorporated into Christ, who is the singular seed of Abraham, and, therefore, become materially related to Abraham. But this solution raises a question: Why is it so important for Paul that gentiles become seed of Abraham? The argument of this book is that Paul believes that God had made certain promises to Abraham that only those who are his seed could enjoy and that these promises can be summarized as being empowered to live a moral life, inheriting the cosmos, and having the hope of an indestructible life.

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.

In this monograph, Alex W. Muir shows how Paul and Seneca were significant contributors to an ancient philosophical and rhetorical tradition of consolation. Each writer's consolatory career is surveyed in turn through close readings of key primary texts: chiefly Seneca's three literary consolations and 'Epistles'; and Paul's letters, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Corinthians, and Philippians. A final comparative dialogue highlights the pair's adaptations and innovations within this tradition.

Nineteen biblical scholars and theologians in this volume explore the notions of union and participation within Pauline theology, teasing out the complex web of meaning conveyed through Paul's theological vision of being "in Christ." With essays that investigate Pauline theology and exegesis, ex-amine highlights from reception history, and offer deep theological reflection, this exemplary multidisciplinary collection charts new ground in the scholarly understanding of Paul's thought and its theological implications.

The complete guide to debunking right-wing misinterpretations of the Bible—from economics and immigration to gender and sexuality. Jesus loves borders, guns, unborn babies, and economic prosperity and hates homosexuality, taxes, welfare, and universal healthcare—or so say many Republican politicians, pundits, and preachers. Through outrageous misreadings of the New Testament gospels that started almost a century ago, conservative influencers have conjured a version of Jesus that speaks to their fears, desires, and resentments. In Republican Jesus, Tony Keddie explains not only where this right-wing Christ came from and what he stands for but also why this version of Jesus is a fraud. By restoring Republicans’ cherry-picked gospel texts to their original literary and historical contexts, Keddie dismantles the biblical basis for Republican positions on hot-button issues like Big Government, taxation, abortion, immigration, and climate change. At the same time, he introduces readers to an ancient Jesus whose life experiences and ethics were totally unlike those of modern Americans, conservatives and liberals alike.

"This handbook brings together work by leading scholars of the archaeology of early Christianity in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. The 34 essays to this volume ground the history, culture, and society of the first seven centuries of Christianity in the latest currents of archaeological method, theory, and research."--

A comprehensive case for a fresh literary approach to the New Testament For at least a half century, scholars have been adopting literary approaches to the New Testament inspired by certain branches of literary criticism and theory. In this important and illuminating work, Michal Beth Dinkler uses contemporary literary theory to enhance our understanding and interpretation of the New Testament texts. Dinkler provides an integrated approach to the relation between literary theory and biblical interpretation, employing a wide range of practical theories and methods. This indispensable work engages foundational concepts and figures, the historical contexts of various theoretical approaches, and ongoing literary scholarship into the twenty-first century. In Literary Theory and the New Testament, Dinkler assesses previous literary treatments of the New Testament and calls for a new phase of nuanced thinking about New Testament texts as both ancient and literary.

Paul and Seneca Among the Condemned: The Use of Spectacle in the Early Empire relocates the comparison of these two figures from the philosopher’s lecture hall to the amphitheaters of Rome and Corinth. The book explores the sites and images of spectacle that littered the landscapes of the ancient world. By examining archaeological remains alongside the letters of Paul and Seneca, James R. Unwin recreates their exhibitions of spectacle imagery. What we discover in viewing these provocative scenes from the grim world of the arena are suggestive responses to sovereign power and state terror. Their responses open up space for us to think through the reproduction of new arenas in our present world.