Book Review
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In Search of Paul - How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's KingdomMost compelling thought:Paul never invented his signature phrasology but swiped it from Roman Imperial theology. Buy this book for: The advanced Paul enthusiast. In Search of Paul is an academic masterpiece. Its reader is expected to be familiar with the works of Paul, and eager for insights in its original applications. |
John Dominic Crossan
John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, DePaul University, Chicago. Most of his work focuses on the historical Jesus.
Jonathan L. ReedJonathan L. Reed is Professor of Religion at the University of La Verne in La Verne, California. He is a leading authority on the archaeology of early Christianity, and has been involved in several major excavations in Israel.
A brief review of:
In Search of Paul
Paul is the author of half the books of the New Testament and by far the most influential Christian theologian of all time. His great strength lies in his unequaled adaptability: to the Jews he sounds like a covenantal scholar, to the Greeks like a seasoned philosopher, and Romans hear the gospel told in all the common phrases of their Imperial theology.Everywhere Paul goes, he blends with the local culture and bursts its shells from the inside out. To understand Paul, therefore, the reader should be thoroughly informed about the arenas in which Paul's theology unfolds.
In Search of Paul offers a fascinating survey of the world of the famous apostle and his audience, and so enthusiastically that the reader can almost taste the dust on the streets of Rome or hear the rioters shout in the great theater at Ephesus. Crossan and Reed are fabulous guides on our journey into the world of temples and towns crammed with little shops and taverns with altars and an empire that produces its own gods.
Much of Christian theology, that now sounds so familiar to us, is in fact an adaptation of Roman Imperial theology with which everyone in the Roman realm was intimately involved. Paul did not simply forward the idea that Jesus is the Son Of God, he took the already existing titles of emperor Augustus, "Son of God, God and God of God [] Lord, Redeemer, and Savior of the World", and boldly applied it to Jesus Christ.
"Christians must have understood, then, that to proclaim Jesus as Son of God was deliberately denying Caesar his highest title and that to announce Jesus as Lord and Savior was calculated treason."
"It was a cosmic clash of gods, lords, and saviors, a global struggle not just between future possibilities, but between present actualities, a debate in which exactly the same words had absolutely different meanings."
Crossan and Reed argue convincingly that Paul's target audience consisted of the so-called God-lovers; gentiles that existed on the periphery of the Jewish communities, those people who were sincerely touched by the God of the Jews, but reluctant to follow in every law and bylaw. The great difference between the Jewish religion and Roman state religion was the difference between the one single 'aniconic' divinity of Israel and the obese pantheon of Rome and Rome's casual casting of divine titles left and right.
In Search of Paul is a trip through a torrent of insight, and sheds broad beams of light on Scriptures. The only little shadow hides in its opulent literary style. The excess of truly baffling triple-bridges, mirrored modifiers and alacritous alliterations, which tends to convolute the text and distract from the topic, may get on one's nerves after a while. On the other hand, such a display of juggling skills certainly argues a mastery of the material at hand.
John Dominic Crossan
