Paul and His Recent Interpreters

Top Highlights

“This was the picture that dominated German scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: (a) a focus on ‘religion’ as the primary category; (b) a sharp distinction between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’, with Paul as the pioneer of ‘gentile Christianity’; (c) the centrality to Paul of ‘justification’, in Baur’s sense of a new spiritual experience. Sanders, Martyn and Meeks do not often refer to Baur, but his picture is the one they are ultimately rejecting.” (Pages 15–16)

“There are Beker’s two main themes in a nutshell. First, Paul’s central and coherent theme was ‘the triumph of God’, that is, the divine victory over the powers of evil. This victory, won on the cross, resulted in the new creation which, launched in the resurrection, is to be completed in the final triumph, which is yet to come. Second, Beker proposed that in Paul we find a rich mixture of this coherent overall theme and of the varied expressions called forth by the ‘contingent’ situations to which his letters were addressed.” (Pages 135–136)

“The ‘apocalyptic triumph’ in which God wins the victory over the forces of evil, highlighting the ‘cosmic’ dimensions of Paul’s gospel rather than focusing on the ‘individual’ meaning, has become, in many circles, the new orthodoxy.” (Page 136)

“A vital part of this task, one which would prove fateful a century after Baur’s day in social and political life (ironically!) as well as in theology and exegesis, was his insistence that it was essential to break Christianity off from its Jewish roots.” (Page 13)

“First, Dunn accepts a good deal of Sanders’s case about Judaism, but insists that Sanders has still not read Paul in the right way.” (Page 90)