The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

While thelocus classicusfor early Christian arguments concerning resurrection of the flesh is Paul's first Corinthian letter, the statement in 15.50 that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ complicates early Christian understandings of resurrection and its form. Such explicit denial of fleshly inheritance and resurrection within Paul's writings leads to widely conflicting interpretations of this Corinthian passage. Consequently, early Christian writers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Augustine engaged other New Testament texts such as John 11 in order to subvert the claim of 1 Cor 15.50 and develop their argument for fleshly resurrection.

Reviewed by: Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference by Andrew S. Jacobs Joshua Ezra Burns Andrew S. Jacobs Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 Pp. 320. $75.00. In this study Jacobs mines the early Christian literary tradition for reflections on the circumcision of Jesus. Noted in passing in Luke 2.21, this foremost sign of Jesus’ Judaism naturally concerned interpreters trained on Paul’s famous refutation of its necessity. Their efforts to reconcile those facts yielded a variegated discourse of cultural difference highlighting Jesus’ otherness amidst his Jewish surroundings, and, by extension, the Christians’ evolving sense of otherness in Roman society. If Jesus was to overcome his Judaism and his materiality, his submission to circumcision would seem to signify his mastery of those qualities en route to his transcendence. That argument, Jacobs shows, resonated with Christian thinkers aiming to manage the internal and external differences which defined the Church as it took on the features of the hegemonic “impossible orthodoxy” (91) of the post-Nicene age. The book presents a series of case studies variously plotted by context and form. An introduction establishes Jacobs’s theoretical framework against the backdrop of a fluid Roman discourse on cultural imperialism. Chapter one proceeds with an account on the social stigma of Jewish circumcision in the Roman world, a fact likely informing the attitudes toward that rite expressed by Paul, Luke, and other apostolic authors. Chapter two addresses efforts by Justin and Origen, among others, to factor Jesus’ circumcision into an orthodox theological argument at once internalizing and negating Christianity’s Jewish roots. In their accounts, Jesus’ submission to the archaic Jewish rite was an early mark of his self-sacrifice, a motif revisited by later patristic authors and revisited throughout Jacobs’s study. Chapter three addresses a concurrent exegetical development citing Jesus’ circumcision as a defense against alleged Christian heretics seeking to de-Judaize Christianity, a strategy used by Tertullian against the Marcionites and by Augustine against the Manicheans, as well as by Jerome against Jovinian against the [End Page 641] latter’s effort to dematerialize Christ. Chapter four examines the use of a corresponding heresiological argument by Epiphanius. Revisiting the territory of his previous book Remains of the Jews, Jacobs here focuses on the Ebionites, whom Epiphanius alleges to have cited Jesus’ circumcision in order to justify their own adherence to the Jewish law. In casting the Ebionites as Christian heretics, he argues, Epiphanius at once laid claim to their Judaism and dispossessed it, exemplifying the paradoxical nature of his orthodoxy and its contrarian logic of Jesus’ Jewishness. Chapter five offers further, sporadic exegetical insights gleaned from commentaries on Luke by Origen, Ephrem, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Proclus of Constantinople, and Philoxenus. Finally, chapter six deals with ritual invention of the Feast of the Circumcision. Though conveniently coinciding with the first day of the Julian calendar year and the established feast of Basil of Caesarea, the supposed date of Jesus’ submission to the Jewish law is the subject of two pseudonymous Byzantine-era homilies conflating the Savior’s circumcision of the flesh with Paul’s circumcision of the heart. The public celebration of Christianity’s management of its Jewish past, Jacobs therefore argues, served to extend its triumphalist rhetoric into a Roman cultural sphere now likewise subject to the totalizing discourse of the church. As Jacobs acknowledges, the varied exegetical evidences he surveys exhibit no univocal or linear development in thought by which one might measure the cumulative effect of those evidences on early Christian culture (14). In his conclusion, however, Jacobs offers a metanarrative describing the efforts of early Christians to “pass” as typical Romans by forgoing the physical mark of circumcision, which kept Jews from achieving that effect. In accomplishing this effect, their theologians invented a Christian Jesus who merely pretended to be Jewish for the sake of advancing his salvific mission. But with the rise of Docetism, the pretense became more nuanced. Now Jesus had also to pass for a human being, occupying a gendered male body in order to fulfill the Jewish law and, later, to perform his ultimate act of...

Reviewed by: The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity Elizabeth DePalma Digeser Birgir A. Pearson. The Emergence of the Christian Religion: Essays on Early Christianity. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997. Pp. xiv + 241. $19.00. Why should Christianity be studied comparatively, as “one of the religions of the world”? Pearson’s essays tackle this question. He begins (chapter 1) by describing how Religion departments often isolate Christian studies from the comparative study of other religions. Pearson argues instead that a richer, more accurate understanding of early Christianity (including its theology) results from an empathetic, historically-oriented analysis, one sensitive to Christianity’s diversity and its relationship to other Mediterranean religions. In the succeeding essays (most published originally elsewhere), he demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach in studies that spotlight a series of issues in early Christian history from the search for the historical Jesus to the secularization of the Late Antique church. For example, in chapter 2, Pearson examines the historical foundations of the Jesus Seminar. Although the Seminar set out to answer a historical question, Pearson’s philological and comparative analysis reveals anachronisms that undercut the Seminar’s interpretation of Jesus. The following chapters show Pearson applying his historical and comparative methodology in his own research. Chapter 3 looks at the structure, content, and historical context of 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16 to argue that this passage is an interpolation. In chapter 4, Pearson’s philological analysis of 2 Peter reveals the pagan background of its author. Taken together, chapters 3 and 4 show how the earliest Christians reached beyond and became estranged from their original Jewish communities. Chapters 5 through 8 explore Gnosticism, a topic for which Pearson is especially well-known. In chapter 5, Pearson compares the Apocalypse of Peter with 2 Peter to argue that Gnostic Christians drew on mainstream texts to help them assert their legitimacy. Chapters 6 and 7 explore Gnosticism’s origins. Pearson’s study of two apocalypses (John and Adam) supports his claim that Christian Gnosticism grew out of an originally Jewish form. In chapter 8, Pearson assesses how the larger Christian community viewed Gnosticism, as he contrasts the informed criticism of Christians such as Irenaeus and Hippolytus with the surprisingly ignorant attacks of the first Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea. Chapters 5 through 8 thus testify not only to the diversity of Christianity in the second and third centuries, but also to the efforts of later Christians to gloss over this variegated landscape, a topic that Pearson develops further in chapter 9. Finally, chapter 10 uses philology to understand Christianity in its social setting as a religion that emphasized philanthropia. Pearson looks at philanthropia in Greek, Roman, and Jewish contexts and then compares these practices with those in Christianity. Pearson, like Rodney Stark, sees Christian philanthropy as one key to the ultimate “success” of the new faith. The book ends with an epilogue reviewing the methodology of the previous chapters. As a plea for the historical and comparative study of Christianity, Pearson’s book will be most welcome to scholars in Religion departments interested in [End Page 306] adopting such an approach. Ancient historians, on the other hand, may find that Pearson’s first chapter simply states what they have long taken for granted. The book might also have been made more accessible to non-specialists if Pearson had defined specialized terminology (e.g., “trajectory,” “form criticism,” “hapax legomenon,” and “halakah”) the first time he used it and if he had transliterated more of the Greek. These, however, are minor criticisms. The Emergence of the Christian Religion will be useful to anyone interested in the historiography of early Christianity. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser St. Norbert College, DePere, WI Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Book Review| October 01 2004 The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, Richard A. Horsley Neil Asher Silberman. Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (2004) 123 (3): 564–568. https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte; The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 2004; 123 (3): 564–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings by Jennifer Otto Todd Berzon Jennifer Otto Philo of Alexandria and the Construction of Jewishness in Early Christian Writings Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Pp. 256. $84.50. Jennifer Otto's detailed yet eminently readable monograph sees in Philo of Alexandria a hermeneutic of collective identity for three early Christian writers, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea. Philo's own identity, as a Jewish biblical interpreter and Platonic thinker, afforded these authors the conceptual space in which to elaborate the contours of Christianness vis-a-vis a proximate Jewishness (the author generally avoids the terms Christianity and Judaism because, she says, they anachronistically connote the category of religion). Otto further contends that Philo was harnessed by Christians not simply to elaborate the differences between Jewishness and Christianness, but also "to establish Christianity as a virtuous way of life, parallel to the pursuits of the philosophical schools" (2). Otto's book thus concerns itself with the circumstances in which early Christians invoked Philo as an interpreter who could link facets of Christianness, Jewishness, and (pagan) philosophy and yet simultaneously differentiate them. The Introduction situates Philo's Christian reception in relation to a number of highly contentious issues in the study of early Christian representations of Jewishness. Otto conceptualizes Philo as a lens for revisiting questions about the parting of the ways, the differences in Christian usages of the terms Ioudaioi, Hebraioi, and Israel, the relationship between ancient notions of ethnicity and way of life, and the idea of Christianity as a philosophy. Otto's survey of the relevant scholarly literature is helpful and clear, though the various sub-sections of the Introduction have a disjunctive flow. It is only in the ensuing chapters that the relationship between these questions becomes slightly clearer. In Chapter One, Otto elaborates how Clement likely came to possess Philonic texts. Her aim is to rebut the dominant scholarly theories which argue that Clement's source must have been either a Jewish teacher in Alexandria or a school tradition with Jewish roots. But if, as Otto insists, the Alexandrian Jewish community was virtually decimated after the Trajanic revolt of 115–117, Clement would have needed an alternative source. Otto thus proposes that Clement came into contact with Philo's works through the vibrant (non-Jewish) philosophical networks in Alexandria. Because the philosophical schools of Alexandria were open to consulting outside works, Philo's writings were almost certainly part of the city's broader philosophical exchanges. While Otto is correct that the consensus theory about Clement's acquisition of Philo (via some sort of connection to Jews) necessitates a fair amount of speculation, her alternative suggestion is no less speculative. There is simply no direct evidence to support her claim, and it is not clear how it materially affects her analysis in subsequent chapters. Chapters Two, Three, and Four examine how Clement, Origen, and Eusebius describe Philo's exegetical skills and ethnic identity. Chapter Two investigates Clement's four overt references to Philo. In two of those cases, Clement calls Philo "the Pythagorean" even where he is also called an expert interpreter of the [End Page 342] Mosaic law and/or historian of the Jewish people. Why, Otto asks, would Clement describe Philo this way? Her answer is that the ascription "Pythagorean" worked to present Philo as a barbarian sage who blended the wisdom of Hebraism and Hellenism. Philo's exegetical skills "can thus be wielded by Clement both against Christians who protest the validity of Greek education and against philosophers who denigrate the teachings of the ekkelsia as a novelty" (89). Chapter Three focuses on Origen, who drew upon Philo's biblical allegorizing to bolster Christian efforts to uncover the veiled intent of scripture. For that reason, Origen often (and anonymously) refers to Philo as a predecessor, literally as "one of those who came before us." But in calling Philo his predecessor, Origen is not rendering him into a proto-Christian; rather, in Otto's estimation, the term "signals Origen's awareness of Philo as an interpreter of old who . . . correctly perceived the hermeneutical depths of the narratives recorded in Israel...

Reviewed by: The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts by Ronald Charles Mary Ann Beavis ronald charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World; London: Routledge, 2020). Pp. xvii + 272. $124. This book sets out to examine a wide range of early Jewish and Christian texts in which enslaved figures are represented and, according to Charles, rendered silent, by their authors, “who had no intrinsic interest in slaves . . . used, abused, and silenced their enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions” (p. 1) The Jewish texts considered all belong to the so-called Pseudepigrapha: Sibylline Oracles, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Job, Letter of Aristeas, Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Wisdom writings that include Ahiqar, 3 Maccabees, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sentences of the Syriac Menander. The early Christian writings are both canonical and extra-canonical: 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, the Gospels, Acts, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acta Perpetuae, Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and the Acts of Andrew. C. approaches these texts through the lenses of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing [End Page 330] the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), and Subaltern studies, to “uncover small tales constructed around slaves, or better, to consider how particular narratives could be understood differently if the reader pays attention to enslaved persons in their characterizations in the texts” (p. 12). Not surprisingly in a project that covers so much ground, the results are uneven. In my reading, several “small tales” stand out: the slave woman in the Testament of Job who gives her own loaf of bread to Satan, disguised as a stranger, when Job snubs him (7:5). Admittedly, the woman is rebuked for her kind act, but by Satan, hardly a reliable character. C. pays special attention to the slave characters—an unnamed slave girl and Malchus, the male slave of the high priest named in John 18:10—who figure in the scene of the denial of Peter (Mark 14:66–68; Matt 26:69–71; Luke 22:56; John 18:15–26), meticulously detailing the unique features of each narrative. C. highlights both the devalued figure of Rhoda (Acts 12:1–16) and the unnamed fortune-teller of Acts 16:16–18, characters often neglected by interpreters. Although all act/speak truthfully (and, in the case of the slave woman in Testament of Job, righteously), their words are dismissed, like the true words of the women disciples in Luke 24:11. Similarly, the slave Felicitas is sidelined by the freeborn Perpetua in the Passion, and both women are silenced in the Acts. In the Acts of Andrew, the body of the slave woman Euclia is used, abused, and discarded to preserve the chastity of her Christian mistress Maximilla: “The body of the elite woman is protected, while the body of the slave is exploited” (p. 196). Several of C.’s interpretive moves are less compelling. Some of the references to slaves in the pseudepigraphal writings he includes are slight or nonexplicit, as with the figure of Hermon in 3 Maccabees 5, who “is not explicitly called one [a slave] in the text” (p. 47). The observation that “he is an administrative person, who is in danger of being killed because of the king’s caprice” (p. 47), suffices to explain his vulnerability. C. adopts the traditional, but highly contested, hypothesis that Onesimus (Phlm 10) was a runaway slave, although why a fugitive slave would seek refuge by visiting a Roman prisoner is not explained. C. assumes that Epaphroditus (Phil 2:19, 25; 4:18) was a freedman (and thus outside the scope of the study), although he could just as likely have been enslaved or freeborn. To be sure, Eusebius’s construction of Blandina as a Christ figure whose death has cosmic significance (p. 182) subordinates her to a “highly theologized salvation history” (p. 183), but this is no different from his portrayal of other martyrs, enslaved or free. Charles’s study features a conclusion that thoroughly summarizes his analysis, chapter by chapter, seemingly in response to the critiques of...

Book Review| April 01 2000 Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, Bernadette J. Brooten. Elizabeth A. Castelli Elizabeth A. Castelli Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (2000) 119 (1): 127–129. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267982 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Elizabeth A. Castelli; Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 2000; 119 (1): 127–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3267982 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The life story of David Flusser (1917 Vienna – 2000 Jerusalem) extends from interwar Czechoslovakia, where he grew up and studied, to the broad research and teaching activities of an erudite professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was a leading authority on Second Temple Judaism as well as early Christian writings. His contribution to the Jewish-Christian dialogue lies above all in his deep understanding of early Christianity, which he approached with great interest, openness and friendliness. For him, both Jesus and the apostle Paul are inspirational personalities who can only be properly understood in the context of the Jewish tradition of the time. The presented article focuses on how Flusser perceives their relationship to Jewish law (Torah) and how he sees Jewish attitudes to Jesus’ crucifixion.

The study of early Christianity overlaps with closely related fields of study such as New Testament canonical literature, Historical Jesus studies, and early Christian history (or church history/patristics). This survey will concentrate on the broader conceptualization of the formation of the religio-historical phenomenon named Christianity, the religio-historical contexts that formed the matrix for the emergence of Christianity, Christianity as the taxonomizer for a number of cultural practices or as a subset of the broader Greco-Roman Mediterranean culture including its cultural production, and the history of scholarship on early Christianity. Broadly speaking, early Christianity as a historical phenomenon is framed by two “events,” namely, at the one end, the career of Jesus of Nazareth and the subsequent formation of Jesus- or Christ-groups in the 1st century ce, and at the other end, in the 4th century ce, the Constantinian revolution which signaled the Christianization of the Roman Empire (or which goes by the shorthand of “Nicaea”—after the Council called in 325 ce). These are not hard and fast boundaries as there are good reasons to include subsequent developments beyond the Council of Chalcedon, into the 6th century ce, in the purview. Beyond that, the study of early Christianity also encompasses the newly emerged field of “Christian origins,” by which is specifically referred to the interdisciplinary, non-theological theorizing of the origins of Christianity. All in all, this bibliographic overview assumes, in line with new directions in scholarship on early Christianity, that the study of early Christianity is best approached from the perspective of the newly defined study field of early Christian studies. The difference between early Christian studies and disciplines such as early church history and patristics is constituted by the fact that early Christian studies is informed by theories of history and of religion and is practiced as a kind of cultural studies.

The 27th of April 1994 marks for South Africa the end of apartheid and the transition to a constitutional democracy. For Bernard Lategan there was no further need to read Galatians in challenging the legacy of apartheid. His interest in Pauls letter though, has not dwindled. Nevertheless, he still uses Galatians as his example, when he draws on the history of early Christianity. Future historians, writing on the New Testament Society of South Africa (NTSSA) and their ethics of interpretation during the age of apartheid will gratefully draw on the positive example of Lategan and Galatians. Bernard Lategan contribution to the discussion on hermeneutics undoubtedly had a remarkable impact on theological development in South Africa.Keywords: apartheid State; Bernard Lategan; constitutional democracy; early Christianity; Galatians; NTSSA

ABOVE, WE CONSIDERED TEXTS FROM THE FIRST AND EARLY SECOND century ce as part of our evidence for pre-Rabbinic Judaism, without distinguishing between authors who did and did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. This reflects the character of our evidence. References to the fallen angels in Second Temple Judaism and the NT literature follow the same basic pattern: early Enochic traditions about the Watchers' sexual sins and their punishment were widespread, but even texts that were clearly dependent on the Book of the Watchers consistently omitted reference to their transmission of corrupting teachings to humankind. The only exceptions that we found were two texts closely aligned with the Book of the Watchers : Jubilees and the Similitudes . By contrast, the relevant Christian sources all followed the majority of Jewish sources in their exegesis of Gen 6:1–4 and their use of this apocalypse. This finding fits well with what we know about the Jewish origins of the Jesus Movement and early Christianity. In the century after the death of Jesus, this messianic movement became gradually displaced from its original Galilean and Jerusalemite contexts, but the beliefs and practices of the earliest Christians (whether ethnic Jews or Gentile converts) continued to be shaped by the diverse forms of Judaism that flourished both in Israel and in the Diaspora. In the NT and early Patristic literature, we can discern the first traces of a long process by which some Christians forged systems of belief and practice that distinguished them first from other Jewish groups and progressively from “Judaism” more broadly.

Muted Voices of the New Testament: Readings in the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews

Reviewed by: Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse by Callie Callon Colleen M. Conway Callie Callon Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse London: T&T Clark, 2019. Pp. 173. $114.00. What might a man's hair or gait convey about his Christian moral character? Quite a bit, if early Christian writers such as Tertullian or Clement of Alexandria are to be believed. In Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse, Callie Callon shows how early Christian writers shared the same "physiognomic consciousness" as their non-Christian contemporaries. Both Christian and non-Christian writers assumed that a person's physical characteristics, when read with skill, revealed the truth about his (or less often her) moral character. Given the work that has already been done on physiognomic texts in the ancient world, this is not an especially groundbreaking conclusion. Nor does Callon present it as such. But she is right in her observation that the use of physiognomic ideas in early Christian rhetoric has been underexamined. For this reason, the book is a valuable contribution in at least two ways. As Callon argues, attending to the function of physiognomic details offers a more nuanced understanding of early Christian rhetoric. And because physiognomic ideas were so closely linked to constructions of gender, the book is also a significant addition to gender critical studies of the early church. [End Page 677] Callon begins with an overview of the widespread use of ancient physiognomy across multiple genres, all of which was put to similar purpose, namely, "to help persuade an audience to either support or disdain the individual being portrayed" (21). Nevertheless, the meanings of physiognomic references were variable both in their application and interpretation. Here Callon also highlights a tension inherent to physiognomic thought. On the one hand, ancient authors refer to physical traits as though they are inherently natural indicators that reveal a man's true character, despite efforts he may make to conceal it. On the other hand, the fact that authors regularly offered instructions on how to walk, talk, or otherwise manipulate the body to achieve a desired physiognomic outcome, suggests that such traits were not natural as much as learned. While Callon suggests several ways by which this and other tensions might be resolved, more to the point is her claim that such logical inconsistencies did not threaten the legitimacy of the physiognomic enterprise in all of its variations. The rest of the book traces the different ways that references to the body functioned in early Christian rhetoric. Perhaps most obviously, a rhetorical focus on bodily defects added to the arsenal of ways writers could denigrate theological opponents. Meanwhile, highlighting positive physical features was useful for supporting claims of Christian moral superiority. As an example, Callon suggests that when the author of the apocryphal Acts of Peter contrasts Simon Magus's "shrill" or "weak and useless" voice with Peter's "strong" and "great" one, he is likely using physiognomic indicators to showcase Simon's effeminacy (47–49). Chapter Two details this and other examples of the use of physiognomy against so-called heretics. Chapter Three shows how writers drew on physiognomy to describe (and construct?) the ideal Christian, thereby solidifying group identity. Here Callon shows us Clement of Alexandria pronouncing on a range of physiognomic topics, including the proper grooming of hair, the necessity of avoiding the effeminate "mincing gait," not to mention tips for how to avoid sweating too much. Notable in this chapter is a section that discusses the somewhat distinctive admonitions to Christian ascetics. Both male and female should be aware of appearances, but in this case, pale faces and unkempt bodies reveal the truth of the ascetic's character and devotion. Chapter Four extends and confirms the work of Stephanie Cobb (Dying to Be Men: Gender in Early Christian Martyr Texts [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008]). Here Callon explores how physical descriptions of martyrs such as Polycarp, the Martyrs of Lyon, and Prudentius affirm their masculinity, while descriptions of their torturers were often rhetorically effeminizing. As Callon puts it, "The tortured Christian can 'win' physiognomically via bodily...

Reviewed by: Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church Jerry L. Sumney Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church. By James W. Aageson. [Library of Pauline Studies.] (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers. 2008. Pp. xvi, 235. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-598-56041-1.) James Aageson's engaging book examines the ways various groups within the early Church developed and utilized differing images of Paul. Rejecting the notion that only Gnostics and others on the fringe of the developing Church accepted Paul as an authority, he shows how various early Christian writers used both their image of Paul and Paul's letters as sources for their theological positions. Aageson's method is to compare the patterns and structures of the [End Page 761] thought and theology of individual writings, rather than identifying features of the tradition and comparing each text to that synthetic structure. Using this method, Aageson concludes that 2 Timothy was either written by someone other than the author of 1Timothy and Titus or that the situation it addressed was so different that it required a significant reorientation of thought. He also finds diverse patterns of thought in the manners in which Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen develop their images of Paul and use Pauline texts. Aageson's analysis of how the Acts of Paul constructs and uses its image of Paul undermines the notion that this work simply opposes the line of tradition the Pastorals represent by showing that in some ways, it stands close to the image of Paul in 2 Timothy, while in others, it opposes the outlook of 1Timothy and Titus. Aageson demonstrates clearly that the church fathers did not belong to a monolithic tradition of developing orthodoxy that demanded conformity; rather, they drew on a range of developing trends, trends that sometimes stood in tension with one another. Christians such as those who wrote the Acts of Paul drew on some of the same trajectories, even as they interpreted them differently and used their image of Paul to advocate alternative views. Still, most recognized Paul as an authority and by the third century drew on his writings as authoritative. The complexity Aageson uncovers shows that no simple model of conflict or separate trajectories sufficiently accounts for what we find in early Christian writings. Neither can models that assume movement from orthodoxy to heresy, or the reverse, explain the differences and commonalities in the theological structures and thought of these works. Aageson suggests a "multiplex"approach that recognizes commonality and tension within a shared tradition that contains competing elements and makes competing uses of common materials. Readers will disagree with some specifics of Aageson's interpretation of individual texts, but such disagreements do not undermine his comparisons or his method of comparison. One might also ask for a larger and more diverse comparative base, but the series in which the book appears limits its length, as well as its explicit exchange with the scholarly literature on the works it does treat. These quibbles do not, however, significantly weaken Aageson's convincing case for acknowledging the complexity of the development of the Church's theology, ecclesiology, and ethic through the third century and the resultant need to move beyond the oppositional models that many still use to interpret the theological differences present in the early Church. [End Page 762] Jerry L. Sumney Lexington Theological Seminary Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press