Rather than a book, we find here a series of sermons that the author would have liked to preach, clearly placing Paul within the Jewish world the apostle did not deny. The author considers that Paul's Jesus Messiah message was constructed on mutual understanding between Jews and Gentiles within the realm of the same God, contradicting the Lutheran interpretation of the apostle to the Gentiles where Judaism is banned.
Stendahl is right, but the Pauline situation is more complicated than opposing or reconciling synagogue Jews, Christian-Jews and Gentile Christians facing a "pagan" world.
We can go a step further in understanding Paul and pinpointing his not always undisclosed interlocutors. The Jewish messianic community in Antioch, with which Paul was familiar, was also divided between an avant-garde that supported Jesus as messiah against those who denied such expectations. Within the Jewish communities, Paul had two lots of contradictors: the Essene traditionalists in the line of James and Peter who were his most important source of frustration. And only after, the normative synagogue abiding Jews more familiar with Elijah as the messiah to come. The Essene split that produced the gospels, written contra the traditionalists, better positions Paul's thoughts and struggles and sets his proselytizing closer to the political-religious situation in his days. Paul's mission starts exactly where the gospels ended: crucifixion, resurrection and the imminent second coming. Paul was exporting the rules and constitution of a new religious party devoted to a messiah-mediated survival cult and had to invent and adapt his arguments to various publics and situations, promising and contradicting himself as any newly joining party leader would after experiencing a radical change of opinion. Paul was building an audience with a tempting prime product -eternal life - just as today convinced ecologists are fencing against conservative establishments with the promise of saving the world.
With these reserves in mind, Stendahl's book is well worth reading because it was one of the first significant efforts to understand a Paul retaining his indelible Judean context and within which Paul's uniqueness belongs to the richness of diversity characteristic of the nascent church.
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2011
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- EEDUARDOReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2015
Is a good book to understand the difficult position of Paul
