A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (The Library of New Testament Studies)

Love L. Sechrest

ISBN 10: 056768962X / ISBN 13: 9780567689627

Published by T&T Clark, 2019

About this Item

Seller Inventory # V9780567689627

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (The Library of New Testament Studies)
• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 056768962X
• ISBN 13: 9780567689627
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Sechrest describes Pauline Christianity as a nascent ancient racial group, drawing on a Jewish understanding of race in Second Temple Judaism.

With analysis of nearly five thousand Jewish and non-Jewish passages about identity from around the turn of the era, the models presented describe ancient Greek and Jewish ethnic and racial identity. Further, these models become resources for examining the racial character of Paul's self-identity and the continuities and discontinuities between the three races in his social world: Jews, Gentiles, and Christians.

Using historical and literary methods of exegesis for passages in the Pauline corpus, Sechrest describes Paul as someone who was born a Jew, but who later saw himself as a member of a different race. Analyzing Christian identity in Galatians in terms of membership criteria, membership indicia, and inter-group dynamics, a final section of the book con­trasts the portrait of Paul that emerges from this study with those in Daniel Boyarin's A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity and Brad Braxton's No Longer Slaves: Galatians and African American Experience. This section engages all three of these descriptions of community and identity, and illuminates the problems and opportunities contained in a modern appropriation of a racial construction of Christian identity.

About the Authors

Love Sechrest, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA, USA

Chris Keith is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Norway. He is the author of The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John and the Literacy of Jesus, a winner of the 2010 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and Jesus' Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee. He is also the co-editor of Jesus among Friends and Enemies: A Historical and Literary Introduction to Jesus in the Gospels, and was recently named a 2012 Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar.