Currents in the Interpretation of Paul: Collected Essays
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
The apostle Paul has long been championed, or criticized, as a Christian thinker, as a brilliant theological genius, or an enthusiastic convert who spun arguments to justify his new allegiances. In these essays, Neil Elliott engages some of the most provocative currents in contemporary scholarship, including Paul and the nature of violence; the presumptions of religious, cultural, or national innocence in particular interpretations of the apostle; the recent enthusiasm for Paul in some streams of Marxist thought; competing construals of economic realities in Paul’s day (and our own); and questions surrounding Paul’s legacy today.
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- Engages some of the most provocative currents in contemporary scholarship.
- Studies Paul and the nature of violence.
- Explores questions surrounding Paul’s legacy today.
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Reading Paul in Interesting Times
- 1 Paul and the Lethality of the Law
- 2 Paul and the Spiral of Violence
- 3 Strategies of Resistance and Hidden Transcripts in the Pauline Communities
- 4 An American “Myth of Innocence” and Contemporary Pauline Studies
- 5 Marxism and the Postcolonial Study of Paul
- 6 Diagnosing an Allergic Reaction: The Avoidance of Marx in Pauline Scholarship
- 7 Ideological Closure in the Christ-Event: A Marxist Response to Alain Badiou’s Paul
- 8 The Philosophers’ Paul and the Churches
- 9 Economic Realities in the New Testament World
- 10 Socioeconomic Stratification and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17–34)
- 11 Ephesians as the Quintessence of Pauline Deracination
- Bibliography
- Ancient Document Index
- Author Index
These essays continue Neil Elliott’s usual wide-ranging and comprehensively critical analysis and discussion of Paul’s gospel in the controlling political-economic context of the ancient Roman Empire. Again and again Elliott offers insights into the implications of Paul’s counter-imperial letters for struggles against the empire of global capitalism and its neoliberal ideology by secular Marxist philosophers as well as by theologians and churches. This collection of articles exposes the problems with standard misunderstandings of Paul and provides additional indications that Elliott is this generation’s most profound and challenging interpreter of Paul.
—Richard A. Horsley, professor of liberal arts and the study of religion, University of Massachusetts Boston
Neil Elliott’s collection of essays and lectures, composed over the past thirty years, consistently confronts readers with startling and provocative questions, exposing the ideological assumptions that constrain contemporary interpretations of Paul’s epistles. Based upon deep knowledge of the socioeconomic realities of the Greco-Roman world, Elliott deploys Postcolonial and Marxist strategies of reading to disclose previously occluded dimensions of Paul’s thought.
—L. L. Welborn, professor of New Testament, Fordham University
In his most recent collection of essays, Neil Elliott offers highly valuable insights from a wide range of scholarly approaches to Pauline studies from Marxist and Postcolonial readings to the Paul within Judaism perspective. The essays are beautifully tied together by the idea that our interpretation of Paul has much to do with how we understand our own history and responsibilities today, making it intensely relevant to a broad audience, not only one interested in Paul.
—Karin Hedner Zetterholm, associate professor of Jewish studies, Lund University