Searching Paul: Conversations with the Jewish Apostle to the Nations. Collected Essays

Description

Firmly rooted in his ancestral Jewish traditions, Paul interacted with, and was involved in vivid communication primarily with non-Jews, who through Christ were associated with the one God of Israel. In the highly diverse cultural, linguistic, social, and political world of the Roman Empire, Paul's activities are seen as those of a cultural translator embedded in his own social and symbolic world and simultaneously conversant with the diverse, mainly Greek and Roman world, of the non-Jewish nations. In this role he negotiates the Jewish message of the Christ event into the particular everyday life of his addressees. Informed by socio-historical research, cultural studies, and gender studies Kathy Ehrensperger explores in her collection of essays aspects of this process based on the hermeneutical presupposition that the Pauline texts are rooted in the social particularities of everyday life of the people involved in the Christ-movement, and that his theologizing has to be understood from within this context. Cover Titel Preface Table of Contents I. Introduction 1. Searching Paul II. Gender and Traditions 2. Paul and the Authority of Scripture: A Feminist Perception 3. The Question(s) of Gender: Relocating Paul in Relation to Judaism 4. Paul, Emasculated Apostle or Manly Man? Gendered Aspects of Cultural Translation 5. At the Table: Common Ground Between Paul and the Historical Jesus 6. The Pauline Ἐκκλησίαι and Images of Community in Enoch Traditions III. Among Greeks and Romans 7. Speaking Greek under Rome: Paul, the Power of Language and the Language of Power 8. Between Polis, Oikos, and Ekklesia: The Challenge of Negotiating the Spirit World (1 Cor 12:1–11) 9. Embodying the Ways in Christ: Paul’s Teaching of the Nations 10. The Absence of ἐυσέβεια in Paul: Peculiarities of Cultural Translation IV. The Language of Belonging 11. Paul, His People, and Racial Terminology 12. Narratives of Belonging: The Role of Paul’s Genealogical Reasoning 13. What’s in a Name? Ideologies of Volk, Rasse, and Reich in German New Testament Interpretation Past and Present V. Romans 14. Reading Romans “in the Face of the Other”: Levinas, the Jewish Philosopher, Meets Paul, the Jewish Apostle 15. “Called to be Saints”: The Identity Shaping Dimension of Paul’s Priestly Discourse in Romans 16. The “Mysterion” in Romans 11:25–36: No Mystery But a Space for Reconciliation 17. The Ministry to Jerusalem (Rom 15:31): Paul’s Hopes and Fears 18. The New Perspective on Paul and Beyond VI. Early Reception 19. Striving for Office and the Exercise of Power in the “House of God”: Reading 1 Tim 3:1–16 in Light of 1 Cor 4:1 20. Διδάσκαλος ἐθνῶν: Pauline Trajectories According to 1 Timothy Bibliography Acknowledgements Ancient Sources Index Modern Authors Index