Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context. By J. Albert Harrill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 208 pp. $25.99 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Paul Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context . By J. Albert Harrill . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012. xv + 208 pp. $25.99 paper.Book Reviews and NotesThat Saint Paul . . . . He's one who makes all trouble. Anyone who wants to understand that trouble would do well to take up this book, and anyone charged with teaching course on troublesome apostle will find it made for this purpose. That author chooses this line from Hemingway for an epigraph tells us that he, too, wants to stir up bit of creative trouble, in classroom and in academic discourse about Paul. The book is an admirably succinct introduction to current state of Pauline scholarship but wants also to offer an important correction. The book, identified as a historical biography with full awareness of ambiguity of both adjective and noun, is divided into two roughly equal parts: the and the legend.Those address in turn two pivotal insights that emerged in twentieth-century scholarship on Paul. First, to understand life one must know social and cultural context within which that life was lived and by which surviving evidence for it was shaped. Second, to discern significance of life one must explore ways its story was retold and appropriated or resisted by succeeding generations of interested parties.In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship, cultural context of nascent was defined by supposed antithesis between Judaism and Hellenism. Only slowly did we come to realize, by turn of this century, that there were many different ways in which Jewish communities adapted to complex culture of Greco-Roman world, appropriating some elements, resisting others, in order to maintain but reshape their own identities. And little sect and emerging trans-ethnic cult that would become Christianity must be understood--not against that background, but--as indigenous in that dynamic culture. Harrill is fully in accord with that shift of consensus, but he wants to correct it in one important respect: Paul was not only Jew and Greek, he was also Roman . That is subject of chapter 3, which is effectively book's center, and will likely provoke most surprise and resistance. New Testament scholars tend to dismiss notion that Paul might be in any way pro-Roman, as they tend to doubt assertion of book of Acts that he was born Roman citizen. The recent influence of post-colonialist theory has strengthened this tendency; Paul is now commonly seen as deliberately anti -Roman. Harrill will have none of this, dismissing it as wishful thinking (91-94).The key term for Harrill's understanding of Paul's romanitas is Latin auctoritas , which he translates clout or influence. …