Paul in Critical Contexts Series (8 vols.)

Elliott offers a fresh and surprising reinterpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans in the context of Roman imperial ideology, bringing to the text the latest insights from classical studies, rhetorical criticism, postcolonial criticism, and people’s history.

By setting the letter alongside Roman texts (Cicero, Virgil, the Res Gestae of Augustus, Seneca, poets from the age of Nero, as well as later historians and satirists), Elliott provides a dramatic new reading of the letter as Paul’s confrontation with the arrogance of empire—and with an emerging Christianity already tempted by the seductive ideology of imperial power. The Arrogance of Nations explores such topics as:

• Empire and the obedience of faith
• Justice and the arrogance of nations
• Mercy and the prerogatives of power
• Piety and the scandal of an irreligious race
• Virtue and the fortunes of peoples
• Paul and the horizon of the possible

Although the term “postcolonial” is contested today, not least by scholars who identify themselves as postcolonial interpreters, on any account it involves vital questions about ideology and identity, empire, ethnicity, gender, hybridity, political struggle, and all the overlapping tensions and ambiguities occasioned by the colonial situation. In recent years, postcolonial explorations in biblical studies and theology have intertwined and collided with feminist, liberationist, Marxist, and more traditional historical-critical perspectives. No part of the Bible has received more attention—or been the site of more controversy—than the interpretation of the Apostle Paul, his letters, and the communities in which he moved.

How did Roman imperial culture shape the environment in which Paul carried out his apostolate? How do the multiple legacies of modern colonialism and contemporary empire shape, illuminate, or obscure our readings of Paul’s letters? In The Colonized Apostle, Christopher D. Stanley has gathered many of the foremost voices in postcolonial and empire-critical scholarship on Paul to provide a state–of–the–art guide to these questions.

This volume includes essays introducing postcolonial criticism and applying its insights both to Paul’s context in the Roman world and to the reevaluation of contemporary interpretation.

Contributors:

• Susan Abraham
• Jennifer Bird
• Neil Elliott
• L. Ann Jervis
• Melanie Johnson–DeBaufre
• Brigitte Kahl
• Jae Won Lee
• Tat–Siong Benny Liew
• Davina C. Lopez
• Joseph A. Marchal
• Stephen D. Moore
• Laura S. Nasrallah
• Jeremy A. Punt
• Robert P. Seesengood
• Christopher D. Stanley
• Gordon M. Zerbe

Philemon is the shortest letter in the Pauline collection, yet—because it has to do with a slave separated from his master—it has played an inordinate role in the toxic brew of slavery and racism in the United States. In Onesimus Our Brother, leading African American biblical scholars tease out the often unconscious assumptions about religion, race, and culture that permeate contemporary interpretation of the New Testament and of Paul in particular. The editors argue that Philemon is as important a letter from an African American perspective as Romans or Galatians have proven to be in Eurocentric interpretation. The essays gathered here continue to trouble scholarly waters, interacting with the legacies of Hegel, Freud, Habermas, Ricoeur, and James C. Scott, as well as the historical experience of African American communities.

Contributors:

• Allen Dwight Callahan
• Matthew V. Johnson Sr.
• James A. Noel
• James W. Perkinson
• Mitzi J. Smith
• Margaret B. Wilkerson
• Demetrius K. Williams

Although the political interpretation of Paul is still considered something of a novelty in North America and Europe, it is well established in Latin America and among theologians of liberation. In The Practice of Hope, Néstor O. Míguez brings the insights of historical-critical study and political analysis together with incisive theological reflection. Taking on European philosophical interpretations of Paul, the “North Atlantic consensus” regarding social stratification in the Pauline churches, and the distortions of “rapture” theology, Míguez situates Paul’s mission in the political context of Roman Thessalonica and reads his first letter in engagement with Latin American realities. The result is a surprising rediscovery of Paul as an organic intellectual for whom hope is always a socially concrete reality.

Davina C. Lopez here combines attention to Roman visual and literary representations of conquered nations with a gender-critical "re-imagination" of Paul’s apostleship. The result is a new and more critical perspective on the systematic violence of the Roman Empire, and a renewed understanding of "Paul’s politics of the new creation."

Brigitte Kahl brings to this insightful reading of Galatians a deep knowledge of the classical world and especially of Roman imperial ideology. The first wave of scholarship on the Roman imperial context of Paul’s letters raised important questions that only thorough treatments of individual letters can answer. Kahl sets the letter to the Galatians in the context of Roman perceptions of vanquished peoples as represented in the Great Altar at Pergamum. Beginning with a perceptive discussion of the Great Altar, Kahl describes imperial representations of Roman power as well as the characteristics officially imputed to conquered peoples, including the "savage" Galatians (Gauls).

In this provocative study, Joseph A. Marchal argues that biblical interpretation, but most especially Pauline studies, must engage the full range of critical challenges brought by feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and Roman imperial studies. A feminist, postcolonial analysis requires negotiating the gaps, overlaps, and tensions between these three "strands" by adopting an explicitly multi-axial focus and an interdisciplinary methodology. Using Philippians as a test case, the analysis covers issues of both ancient and contemporary import: from imitation and authority to travel and contact. As a result, Marchal provides strikingly new perspectives on Paul’s letters and fresh challenges to the paradigms of Pauline interpretation.

Yung Suk Kim takes up the language of "body" that infuses 1 Corinthians, Paul’s most complicated letter, and the letter that provides us the most information, and poses the sharpest questions, about social realities in the early church. Kim argues against the view that in speaking of the church as Christ’s body Paul seeks to emphasize unity and the social boundary. Against the conventional rhetoric of the "body politic" in Greco-Roman philosophy, Kim argues that Paul seeks rather to nourish the vitality of a diverse community and to criticize the ideology of a powerful in-group in Corinth, a message of particular importance for contemporary global Christianity.