Remembering Paul
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A01=Benjamin L. White
Author_Benjamin L. White
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
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Product details
- ISBN 9780199370276
- Weight: 692g
- Dimensions: 236 x 163mm
- Publication Date: 02 Oct 2014
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the real Paul in the second century C.E.a period in which apostolic memory was highly contestedand sets these ancient contests alongside their modern counterpart: attempts to rescue the historical Paul from his canonical entrapments.
Examining numerous early Christian sources, White argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the real Paul. Rather, they possessed mediations of Paul as a personaidealized images transmitted in the context of communal memories of the Apostle. Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were important for forming collective identity. As products of memory, images of Paul exhibit unique mixtures of continuity with and change from the past.
Ancient discourses on the real Paul, thus, like their modern counterparts, are problematic. Through a host of exclusionary practices, the real Paul, whose authoritative persona carries authority as the first window into Christianity, was and continues to be invoked as a wedge to gain traction for the conservation of ideology.
Bejamin L. White is Assistant Professor of Religion at Clemson University where he specializes in ancient and modern interpretations of the New Testament, the reconstruction of Christian origins, and the development of early Christianities. He received a Ph.D. in Ancient Mediterranean Religions from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
