Reckoning with the hermeneutical struggle to make sense of Paul as both a historical figure and a canonical muse.Matthew Novenson has become a leading advocate for the continuing relevance of historic
Reckoning with the hermeneutical struggle to make sense of Paul as both a historical figure and a canonical muse.
Matthew Novenson has become a leading advocate for the continuing relevance of historical-critical readings of Paul even as some New Testament scholars have turned to purely theological or political approaches. In this collection of a decade’s worth of essays, Novenson puts contextual understandings of Paul’s letters into conversation with their Christian reception history. After a new, programmatic introductory essay that frames the other eleven essays, Novenson explores topics including:
- the relation between theology and historical criticism
- the place of Jews and gentiles in Paul’s gospel
- Paul’s relation to Judaism
- the relevance of messianism to Paul’s Christology
- Paul’s eschatology in relation to ancient Jewish eschatologies
- the aptness of monotheism as a category for understanding antiquity
- the reception of Paul by diverse early Christian writers
- the peculiar place of Protestantism in the modern study of Paul
- the debate over the recent Paul-within-Judaism movement
- anti-Judaism in modern New Testament scholarship
- disputes over Romans and Galatians
- the meta-question of what it would mean to get Paul right or wrong
Engaging with numerous schools of thought in Pauline studies—Augustinian, Lutheran, New Perspective, apocalyptic, Paul-within-Judaism, religious studies, and more—while also rising above partisan disputes between schools, Novenson illuminates the ancient Mediterranean context of Paul’s letters, their complicated afterlives in the history of interpretation, and the hermeneutical struggle to make sense of it all.
Journal for the Study of the New Testament Booklist
“This is a constructive project of Pauline interpretation, but it also develops an important metacritical challenge concerning the ways in which interpreters have engaged in ‘hermeneutical ventriloquism’ (p. 3), making the apostle speak for them.”
Religious Studies Review
“These studies have already made important contributions to the discussion of Paul and his letters. Scholars and students will benefit from having them gathered in one location.”
“Matthew Novenson has emerged as a leading Pauline scholar, and this fine collection of his essays indicates why. Through careful analysis of the sources, he insists on placing Paul honestly in the historical past, in all its strangeness from our point of view. But he has also thought deeply and clearly about the hermeneutical responsibility we undertake if we wish to activate Paul’s voice today. Lively, provocative, and self-aware, these essays are a rich resource for all who study Paul.”
— John M. G. Barclay
Durham University
“This fine collection of essays takes up a number of important issues in Pauline studies and displays at every turn Matthew Novenson’s remarkable capacity for astute questions and gracious engagement with the work of others. The results are insightful and instructive. This is must-reading for Pauline specialists.”
— Beverly Roberts Gaventa
Princeton Theological Seminary
“In this very interesting book, Novenson pursues his primary interest in the original historical situations of the Pauline letters and their meaning in those contexts. At the same time, he studies other, later readings to clarify the differences between them and what the apostle was up to. This is a fascinating and original approach, and its fruits are worth considering seriously.”
— Adela Yarbro Collins
Yale Divinity School
“These brilliant essays—with historical knowledge and theological awareness, with clarity and wit—advance our understanding both of Paul’s historical context and of how our own contexts influence our readings.”
— Amy-Jill Levine
Vanderbilt University
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Matthew V. Novenson is senior lecturer in New Testament and Christian origins at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins. He is the author of Christ among the Messiahs: Christ Language in Paul and Messiah Language in Ancient Judaism and The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users and editor of Monotheism and Christology in Greco-Roman Antiquity.
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Table of Contents
1. Our Apostles, Ourselves
2. Romans 1–2 between Theology and Historical Criticism
3. Ioudaios, Pharisee, Zealot
4. Did Paul Abandon Either Judaism or Monotheism?
5. Romans and Galatians
6. The Self-Styled Jew of Romans 2 and the Actual Jews of Romans 9–11
7. The Messiah ben Abraham in Galatians
8. “God Is Witness”: A Classical Rhetorical Idiom in Its Pauline Usage
9. What Eschatological Pilgrimage of the Gentiles?
10. Whither the Paul within Judaism Schule?
11. The Pauline Epistles in Tertullian’s Bible
12. Anti-Judaism and Philo-Judaism in Pauline Studies, Then and Now
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