Leadership Succession in the World of the Pauline Circle

 

Perry Leon Stepp

Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited, 2006-06-30 - 227 pages

Since New Testament times, the discussion of leadership succession in the church has always been polemical. But what the New Testament, especially in the Pastoral Epistles, means in speaking of succession deserves a more sober investigation in the light of the literary tradition about succession in the ancient Mediterranean world. How is succession actually depicted in Graeco-Roman texts and in Jewish and early Christian texts of that world? This book undertakes, for the first time, a thoroughgoing analysis of the evidence, deftly laying out the data from a wide range of Greek and Roman writers. The question then becomes how the early readers of the New Testament, conditioned by prior knowledge of such epistolary and other literary conventions, would have interpreted Paul's relationship with his delegates like Timothy and Titus, and how they would have conceived the ministry portrayed in the Pastorals as passing from a leader to a successor. Stepp's study has important implications both for our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and for our conceptions of ordination and ministry in the New Testament.

 

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The Pauline Epistles

 

John Muddiman, John Barton

Oxford University Press, 2010-04-22 - 292 pages

 

The Oxford Bible Commentary is a Bible study and reference work for 21st century students and readers that can be read with any modern translation of the Bible. It offers verse-by-verse explanation of every book of the Bible by the world's leading biblical scholars. From its inception, OBC has been designed as a completely non-denominational commentary, carefully written and edited to provide the best scholarship in a readable style for readers from all different faith backgrounds. It uses the traditional historical-critical method to search for the original meaning of the texts, but also brings in new perspectives and insights - literary, sociological, and cultural - to bring out the expanding meanings of these ancient writings and stimulate new discussion and further enquiry. Newly issued in a series of part volumes, the OBC is now available in an affordable and portable format for the commentaries to the Pauline Epistles. Includes a general introduction to using the Commentary, in addition to an introduction to study of the New Testament, and to the Pauline Corpus in particular.

 

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Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries: From Paul to Valentinus

Peter Lampe

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006-06-30 - 528 pages

 Investigating the rise and shape of the earliest churches in Rome, Lampe integrates history, archaeology, theology, and social analysis. He also takes a close look at inscriptional evidence to complement the reading of the great literary texts: from Paul's letter to the Romans to the writings of Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Montanus, and Valentinus. Lampe deals with the shape of leadership and the followers of Christ in relation to the Judeans living in Rome.

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Second Corinthians

Ernest Best

Westminster John Knox Press, 1987 - 142 pages

 This commentary, a part of the Interpretation series, explores the book of Second Corinthians.Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

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Romans

 

Paul J. Achtemeier

Westminster John Knox Press, 1985 - 244 pages

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'And The Two Shall Become One Flesh': A Study of Traditions in Ephesians 5: 21-33

J. Paul Sampley

Cambridge University Press, 2004-12-02 - 188 pages

In this detailed exegesis of Ephesians 5: 21-33 Dr Sampley not only elucidates the meaning of this difficult and historically important passage, but he also discusses and describes the background and sources of the Epistle. In particular he traces the history of the traditions incorporated in it and demonstrates convincingly that the writer of Ephesians drew heavily on certain passages in Genesis and Leviticus. Ephesians can be seen as a mosaic of traditions ingeniously arranged and employed to express the new message of the early church. This book should be of interest to all Old and New Testament scholars.

 

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Ephesians 

Martin Kitchen

Taylor & Francis, 1994-10-18 - 147 pages

This study approaches the Epistle of the Ephesians in a radically different way from traditional commentaries. Rather than analyzing each individual verse, Martin Kitchen examines the complete text within the framework of contemporary Biblical criticism. He acknowledges the debt which Biblical studies owes to historical method, while also recognizing the need to view the epistle against the background of recent literary approaches to New Testament texts. The book shows why most commentators now think that Ephesians was not the work of Paul himself and suggests a context in which the epistle might have been written. Covering recent developments in New Testament theology,Ephesians discusses the early history of the church and the hermeneutical questions concerning the significance of religious texts which date from a past age.

 

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Reading Ephesians: Exploring Social Entrepreneurship in the Text

Minna Shkul

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010-02-10 - 279 pages

 

Minna Shkul examines how Ephesians engages in social entrepreneurship - the deliberate shaping of emerging Christian Identity through provision of ideological and social paradigms for the fledgling Christian community. Shkul uses social entrepreneurship as an umbrella for a variety of social processes reflected in the text. This eclectic theoretical framework and deutero-Pauline reading position has two key aims. The first is to offer a theoretically informed social-scientific reading which demonstrates the extensive socio-ideological shaping within the text, and displays the writer's negotiation of different group processes throughout the letter. The second is to examine emerging Christian identity in the text, testing its ideological and social contours and its reforms upon Jewish traditions. Crucially this is done without the theological presupposition that something was wrong with the Judaism practised at the time, but rather by focusing upon the divine 'legitimating' of the Christian group and its culture.
These readings of Ephesians examine how the writer engages in a self-enhancing discourse that reinforces basic components of communality. These include the construction of a positive in-group identity and the provision of ideological and social legitimating for the community. Shkul also discusses the textual reflection of communal relations in other groups in Greco-Roman antiquity. She examines how Christ-followers are positioned in a Jewish symbolic universe, which is forced to make room for Christ and his non-Israelite followers. Finally, she explores the attitude toward non-Israelites within Ephesians, and their need for re-socialization.

 

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Jews, Gentiles, and Ethnic Reconciliation: Paul's Jewish Identity and Ephesians

Tet-Lim N. Yee

Cambridge University Press, 2005-03-10 - 302 pages

Much scholarship has focused on Paul's insistence on Gentile membership of the people of God equally with Jews. Dr Yee's study of Ephesians 2 reveals how the distinctively Jewish world view of the author of Ephesians underlies this key text. He explores how the Ephesians' author provides a resolution to one of the thorniest issues regarding two ethnic groups in the earliest period of Christianity: can Jew and Gentile, the two estranged human groups, be one (people of God) and if so, how? Setting Ephesians 2 as fully as possible into its historical context, he describes some of the relevant Jewish features and demonstrates them, revealing many explosive but hidden issues. This book provides an important contribution to the continuing reassessment of Christian and Jewish self-understanding in regard to each other during the critical period of the latter decades of the first century CE.

 

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Paul and the Crucified Christ in Antioch: Maccabean Martyrdom and Galatians 1 And 2 

Stephen Anthony Cummins

Cambridge University Press, 2001-11-15 - 287 pages

The so-called 'Antioch Incident' - the confrontation between the apostles Peter and Paul in Galatians 2.11-21 - continues to be a source of controversy in both scholarly and popular estimations of the emergence of the early Church and the development of Pauline theology. Paul and the Crucified Christ in Antioch offers an interesting interpretation of Paul's account of and response to this event, creatively combining historical reconstruction, detailed exegesis, and theological reflection. S. A. Cummins argues that the nature and significance of the central issue at stake in Antioch - whether the Torah or Jesus Christ determines who are the people of God - gains great clarity and force when viewed in relation to a Maccabean martyr model of Judaism as now christologically reconfigured and redeployed in the life and ministry of the apostle Paul.

 

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Paul and his Theology

 

Stanley E. Porter

Brill, 2006 - 454 pages

This volume consists of fifteen essays by an international group of scholars on a variety of topics in Pauline theology. These include his gentile mission, the concepts of faith, grace, and the law, reconciliation, the temple, eschatology, miracles, gender, and Paul's trinitarian tendencies.

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Soma in Biblical Theology: With Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology

Robert H. Gundry

Cambridge University Press, 2005-08-22 - 280 pages

This addition to the well-known series of theological monographs deals with the use of the Greek work traditionally translated 'body' but recently as 'person', especially in certain parts of the writings of Paul. Theologians have argued that the translation as 'person' defines man as an indivisible whole and as a complex of relationships rather than an organization of substances. Against the trends of modern biblical theology, Dr Gundry seeks to show that soma always refers to the individual physical body and that it should be defined in substantive categories. Consequently, the theological importance of the body as individual physical substance is insured for life in this world and in the next. Neither antagonism between body and spirit nor the possible independence of full personhood from physical existence characterizes biblical anthropology.

 

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The Genius of Paul: A Study in History

Samuel Sandmel

Fortress Press, 1979-09-01 - 236 pages

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An End to Enmity: Paul and the "Wrongdoer" of Second Corinthians

L. L. Welborn

De Gruyter, 2011-10-15 - 570 pages

This book casts light upon the shadowy figure of the wrongdoer in Second Corinthians, disclosing the type of offence that was committed and the relationship of the wrongdoer to Paul and to the Corinthians. Drawing upon the social and rhetorical conventions that governed friendship, enmity and reconciliation in the Greco-Roman world, the book offers an hypothesis regarding the identity of the wrongdoer and reconstructs the history of Paul's relationship with an influential convert to Christianity at Corinth.

 

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1 Corinthians

 

Richard A. Horsley

Abingdon Press, 1998 - 240 pages

This commentary highlights both the socio-political context of 1 Corinthians and the clash of significantly different religious viewpoints represented by Paul and the congregation he had founded in Corinth. In particular, Richard Horsley shows that this letter provides a window through which one may view the tension between the Corinthians' interest in cultivating individual spirituality and the apostle's concern for building up a social-religious community devoted to the common advantage, for the flourishing both of personal dignity and a humanizing solidarity.

 

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Pauline Studies: Essays Presented to Professor F.F. Bruce on His 70th Birthday

 

Frederick Fyvie Bruce, Donald Alfred Hagner, Murray J. Harris

Paternoster Press, 1980 - 293 pages

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Echoes of Scripture in the letter of Paul to the Colossians

 

Christopher A. Beetham

BRILL, 2008 - 342 pages

 

While the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament has captured the attention of biblical scholars over the years, no study has been devoted to the presence of Scripture in Colossians, largely because there are no explicit quotations in Colossians. With the introduction of literary intertextuality into the discipline, however, scholars have begun to devote more attention to the NT authors' less explicit references to Scripture, often labelled as 'allusions' and/or 'echoes.' Scholars, however, continue to debate what constitutes an allusion or echo, or how one validates a given proposal as such. This study proposes new definitions of these terms and offers a methodology on how to detect and validate them, using Colossians as a test case.

 

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Romans and the Apologetic Tradition: The Purpose, Genre and Audience of Paul's Letter

Anthony J. Guerra

Cambridge University Press, 2005-02-17 - 216 pages

Of all the letters in the Pauline corpus, the Letter to the Romans has attracted the greatest degree of scholarly attention. Yet surprisingly scant consideration has been given to the question of its literary genre. Taking up the comparatively brief suggestions of previous scholars, Dr Guerra argues that the Letter belongs to the protreptic genre - the class of writing in antiquity which urges the adoption of a particular way of life (or a deeper commitment to it), setting out its advantages, replying to objections, and demonstrating its superiority. Working through each chapter of the Letter in turn, he indicates how Paul provides a critique of non-Christian ways of life (both Jewish and Gentile) and affirms the superiority of the Christian Gospel. It becomes apparent that the Pauline apologetics of Romans stand between the hellenistic Jewish tradition and the later Greek Christian apologists, and may have influenced the latter.

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A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5-11 in Recent Interpretation & in the Setting of Early Christian Worship

 

Ralph P. Martin

InterVarsity Press, 1997-11-01 - 372 pages

 

Philippians 2:5-11, long cherished and mined for its riches, has shaped the very language and architecture of orthodox Christian confession of Christ. Whether in contemporary worship or devotional reading, all Christians have found this Pauline passage speaking with memorable and evocative power.Yet few scriptural texts have generated as much interpretive comment and controversy. Close inspection of its lines raises important questions of the meaning of terms, the principal affirmations regarding Christ's nature and work, the function of these verses within the argument of Philippians and the possibility that the poetry of verses 6-11 reveals the shape of an early Christian hymn. And if these verses constitute a hymn, what does it disclose of its original setting and the nature of early Christian worship?Ralph Martin's study of this passage was originally published in 1967 under the titleCarmen Christiand then reissued in 1983 with a new preface. For thirty years it has been widely and uncontestedly recognized as the indispensable work for any serious interpretation of Philippians 2:5-11. Now reissued asA Hymn of Christ,this classic work includes a new preface that brings readers abreast of critical issues in the interpretation of this text since 1983. Once again a foundational volume on Pauline theology is made available to students of Scripture.

 

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Philippians: From People to Letter 

Peter Oakes

Cambridge University Press, 2007-04-30 -248 pages

A case-study in modelling the social make-up of an early Christian community, including estimated figures for the various social groups in the model. A case-study in how such modelling can make an impact on the exegesis of a text. The result is a proposal for reading Philippians as a call for unity under economic suffering. In particular, the story of Christ in Philippians 2.6-11 is read as a reinforcement of this call in the specifically Roman context of Philippi. The book begins with a discussion of archaeological and literary evidence about the development of the Roman colony of Philippi. It also includes discussion of the likely effects of suffering among various social groups in the church, exploration of Paul's and Christ's roles as models for the Philippians, and comparison of Paul's language about Christ with Imperial ideology.

 

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