Elliott - Paul the Jew under Roman Rule

The essays gathered here concern two areas that continue to occupy the best efforts of the apostle Paul’s interpreters today and, often enough, to set them at odds with one another. One is the effort to understand Paul’s relationship to his ancestral religion, where we can find some who understand Paul as a “convert” from Judaism to Christianity posed over against others who seek to understand the apostle “within Judaism,” without remainder. The second area seeks to set the apostle in the context of the early Principate and to understand him as engaging imperial claims; that is, as some would have it, to read him “politically.” Here, the range of interpretation involves not only questions of substance (for example, did Paul mean a blanket endorsement of governing authorities in Romans 13, or did he not?), but also self-critical questions of interpretation: however we read Romans 13, mustn’t we regard Paul as an irreducibly theological thinker, so that any attempt to understand him from a political point of view is inevitably an anachronistic projection of our own prejudices?

 

Both conversations have involved not just serious methodological reflection, but also a respectable measure of ad hominem argument and invective. We are told that the “within Judaism” crowd has been blinded to hard historical realities by their “misty-eyed” sentimentality regarding the horrors of the Shoah; conversely, we hear their opponents are merely dressing up their own presumptuous Protestantism in period costume when they claim to interpret Paul historically. Here, we read that “empire-critical” interpreters are disgruntled Leftists who take their frustrations out in essays on the apostle; there, that the conventional reading is but the projection of the Constantinian cooptation of Christianity as perpetuated through centuries of imperial-colonial privilege.

 

As the essays that follow reveal, I cannot present myself as floating calmly above the fray in either area of contestation. My purpose is more modest, but, I hope, significant nonetheless. I argue that these questions are so intertwined that they cannot be adequately grasped separately. Understanding Paul as a Jew requires understanding him as a Jew under Roman rule.

 

At the risk of self-indulgence, it may be helpful for me to give the reader of these essays a sense of where their author is coming from. I discovered E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism soon after its publication in 1977, while still an undergraduate. I recognized its significance because I had already been introduced to Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (1974), and had come to recognize how much was at stake in the investigation and exposure of anti-Judaism in the New Testament.

 

Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2024

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-6667-5267-0

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-6667-5268-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-6667-5269-4

 

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Bibliography