He was wrong about all this, as we now know but Paul did not know this, and scholars who purport to do historical work should not evade Paul’s miscalculation. So when it comes to apocalyptic, a word that has considerable currency in Pauline studies, Fredriksen uses it to mean what it actually meant in the ancient world: Paul truly thought the end was imminent, that the Messiah was going to return in his lifetime, and that he and many of his readers/hearers were going to experience it. What evidence does Fredriksen bring to her construction of the apostle Paul? Her career-long research on the world of Late Antiquity. All these portraits are based upon a new configuration of the surviving evidence, set into a particular, chosen, framework. Pauline interpretation is fundamentally an artistic exercise in conjuring up and depicting a dead man from his ghostly images in the ancient text, as projected on a background composed from a selection of existing sources. Margaret Mitchell has put this fact beautifully: All reconstructions of Paul, from the longest Pauline Theology to the briefest of articles, imaginatively construct a Paul, no matter how self-aware their various writers are of this process. The Pagans’ Apostle imaginatively constructs a Paul from his few letters. How, then, should we read Paul? Fredriksen puts it this way: “As historians, we conjure that innocence as a disciplined act of imagination, through appeals to our ancient evidence” (xii). He could not foresee that his individual letters would be collected and canonized, read by people the world over for two thousand years. ![]() Paul simply did not know how it all would turn out. ![]() Beyond Sanders, though, The Pagans’ Apostle emphasizes the intended Gentile audience of Paul’s letters and situates Paul’s thinking within the larger Greco-Roman world (Jewish and non-Jewish) which was populated by numerous ethnic gods.įredriksen begins The Pagans’ Apostle by reminding modern historians that “Paul lived his life-as we all must live our lives-innocent of the future” (xii). It also rejects the anti-ethnocentric Paul that co-opted Sanders’s many insights and threatened to lead the study of Paul into another dead end. This is a book, then, that rejects the anti-legalistic Paul of the pre-Sanders era, which continues in many circles today. Like Sanders’s work, this is a book about a Jewish Paul, not a Paul who stands against Judaism. ![]() In the words of the greatest father of all time, Mike Brady (in 1995 film The Brady Bunch Movie), “I couldn’t have put it better myself, Jan. These two pictures frame this forum more powerfully than anything I could write. But it is no mere homage, for a closer examination of both books reveals that The Pagans’ Apostle isn’t a dead ringer for Paul and Palestinian Judaism. It serves, therefore, as Fredriksen’s homage to what remains for many of us the most important work written on the apostle Paul. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, published just over forty years ago. ![]() The cover evokes an earlier book on the apostle Paul, E. One glance at the cover of Paula Fredriksen’s Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle signals to its readers something important about what they are going to find within its pages.
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