https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233543586_Paul’s_Reversal_of_Jews_Calling_Gentiles_’Dogs’_Philippians_32_1600_Years_of_an_Ideological_Tale_Wagging_an_Exegetical_DogThe commentary tradition on Philippians 3:2 (and on Matt. 15 and Mark 7 too) has been claiming at least since Chrysostom that Jews commonly called Gentiles dogs, thereby legitimating a pattern of calling Jews dogs. Contemporary commentaries indicate no awareness of the harmful legacy or the continued implications of the polemic to which it contributes…

Another, more substantive, question relating to Paul as a philosopher has been raised by those scholars who do find ancient philosophy in Paul: if one accepts that, is he then best understood as drawing substantively on Platonist motifs, or Stoic ones—or, indeed, both? Here it is helpful to bring in the figure of Philo of…

Ancient ideas about ‘the End’, and theories about an afterlife, are inevitably varied (Adams 2007). Many are pessimistic, envisioning a catastrophic destruction of the cosmos, as in the Stoic ‘conflagration’ (ekpyrōsis) (Salles 2009). For Paul, the beginning of the eschaton has begun (1 Cor 10:6), but in a penultimate sense. ‘The Christ-event is the turning…

First: some words about these -ology words. ‘Cosmology’, from the Greek word for ‘world’ (kosmos), refers to ideas about the composition, demography, and operation of the universe. Every reader of these words has a cosmology. In this most basic sense, one’s cosmology emerges intuitively through experience and the tutelage of culture and tradition. But in…

The effort to turn Gentiles to the god of Israel, Munck urged, originated uniquely within Christianity, and even then only because it was linked there, from the beginning, to the over-arching faith of these earliest Christians as Jews in the biblical promises of (Jewish) Israel’s redemption (1959: 264–271). The apostles’ conviction that they stood at…

It should also be emphasized that Even though it creates the perception that it is something “immaterial” for us moderns living in the Cartesian Dualist paradigm because it is translated as soul, pneuma (πνεῦμα) was a very material thing for the people of that period. The most “refined” form of matter, but still matter. Although…

Paul was not against the Law, the Torah, or Judaism in any way. What he was against was the Gentiles adopting Jewish customs. Because for Paul the problem of the Gentiles is too deep for the law to solve. “Paul did not reject circumcision or the Law, but rejected their application to the gentiles.” “Just…

Paul thought that the end of the age was near so he tells people to not marry and to minimize all their dealings with society. “apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology” -Ernst Käsemann “The early community around Jesus, both before and after his crucifixion, awaited the approaching End. This belief bound them together…

Paula Fredriksen, on the nature of Paul’s persecution of followers of Jesus. https://academic.oup.com/jts/article-abstract/42/2/532/1703659?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false What did Paul mean when he said, “I persecuted the church” (Philippians 3:6) ? And why did he “persecute”? No, oppressing does not mean “killing”. Paul uses this word to mean “to impose disciplinary punishment.” So why was he subjecting Christians to…

Paul does not have much to say about his supposed conversion. Krister Stendahl’s argumnet better captures Paul’s Damascus experience. Christianity did not exist as a separate and distinct religion. Paul barely makes mention of his conversion.