Introduction

1 The Familiar Paul?1

To many, Paul is a familiar figure. Too familiar, perhaps. For as David Horrell laments, “[t]here is already a small mountain of books about Paul” and “even those whose research specialism is Paul despair of reading all that is being published about him.”2 I find this despair to be quite real. Indeed, even aside from a host of other entirely legitimate frustrations that might contribute to a level of jadedness when it comes to the study of Paul, the sheer glut of work on him is alone daunting, and can easily lead one to confess, alongside Cavan Concannon, that “studying Paul is no longer fun.”3 Be that as it may, interest in Paul persists. And to be sure, there are many reasons for this, not the least of which relate to a prestige ascribed to him in both Christian history and theology. To a certain extent, this prestige is connected rather obviously to Paul’s dominant presence in the New Testament, as both an author and integral character in Acts. For it is in Acts, of course, where we are told of Paul’s famous “road to Damascus” conversion (Acts 9:13-19)—Paul transitions from being an early persecutor of Christianity to becoming one of its most zealous advocates. Further, insofar as his message and apostolic com- mission are said to be of divine origin—a “mission from God,” as Elwood Blues would put it—Paul’s immense significance to Christianity is almost impossi- ble to overstate.4 Indeed, one could well argue that Paul is relevant not only to Christianity, but also, more generally, to any who would take seriously the concept of divine revelation.

1 I recognize that on its face, the notion of a “familiar Paul” stands in stark contrast to some, such as Jacob Jervell, who present Paul as unfamiliar, or unknown. See Jacob Jervell, The Unknown Paul: Essays on Luke-Acts and Early Christian History (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984). Nonetheless, for reasons that will become clear shortly, the use of the word “familiar” is entirely deliberate. 2 David G. Horrell, An Introduction to the Study of Paul, 3rd edition (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2015), xiii. 3 Cavan Concannon, “Paul is Dead. Long Live Paulinism!: Imagining a Future for Pauline Stud- ies,” Ancient Jew Review, 1 November 2016, http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2016/ 11/1/paul-is-dead-long-live-paulinism-imagining-a-future-for-pauline-studies. While it is not obvious to me that Concannon’s title is an intentional allusion to the 1960s urban leg- end involving Paul McCartney, I would like to think that it is indeed a deliberately playful nod. 4 See Acts 9:3-4; Acts 22:6-21; Acts 26:12-18; and Gal 1:12.

Yet even on top of all of this, Paul enjoys an entrenched sort of literary em- inence, one that is continually reinscribed, deliberately or not, in each and every study of him (including this one). In fact, one routinely sees flagrant signs of Pauline veneration in scholarship, ranging from descriptions of him as a “gifted exegete”5 or “genius,”6 to even “one of the greatest religious leaders of all time.”7 However, while some vague and unceasing sense of esteem is, for some writers at least, one factor that justifies and fuels a sustained preoccu- pation with Paul, there is another that is both ubiquitous among scholars and also quite embarrassing: despite the small mountain of books on the subject, there seemingly remains a persistent failure on the part of scholars to generate a cogent and compelling understanding of Paul’s thought. As Ernst Käsemann remarks, “the real Paul… [is] for the most part unintelligible to posterity.”8 Paul, in other words, proves relentlessly incomprehensible. But lest contemporary readers of Paul despair too much over this state of affairs, it is worth adding some small measure of consolation: this failure, or the inability to “get Paul right,”9 as Benjamin White puts it, goes back at least to Polycarp of Smyrna (ca. 69-155 CE), who remarked, “neither am I, nor is any other like unto me, able to follow the wisdom of the blessed and glorious

5 Jacob Jervell, “Paul in the Acts of the Apostles: Tradition, History, Theology,” in The Unknown Paul: Essays on Luke-Acts and Early Christian History (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984), 76. 6 See, for example, Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, 2nd edition, trans. William E. Wilson (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 79 (“Paul must be classed with the few people regarding whom that much misused phrase ‘religious genius’ can rightly and fittingly be used”); Calvin J. Roetzel, The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context, 5th edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 19 (“Ultimately, Paul’s letters are understandable only in the light of his genius and the gospel he preached”); and Horrell, An Introduction to the Study of Paul, 1 (“Paul is a man of enormous influence, a religious genius whose capacity for creative thought and original writing has made him a mountain on the landscape of Christian history”). It is worth noting, however, that the “genius” des- ignation takes on an entirely different connotation in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, who actually views the concept as an inaccurate and ultimately inadequate descriptor of Paul. See Søren Kierkegaard, “The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle,” in Without Au- thority, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 7 E.P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), xix. 8 Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W.J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 249. 9 Benjamin L. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests Over the Image of the Apostle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15.