This past week I received a question from a reader about the book of Philemon.  The last time that happened ... well, actually, I think it has happened only once before in the history of the blog!   And now that vibrant and widespread interest has been raised, it is a good time to address  it again!  Seriously, it involves an unusually intriguing question.  What was Paul's view of slavery? Philemon provides an unexpected answer, at least as I read it.  This is the shortest of Paul’s letters (it’s a one-pager) where he is writing to his convert Philemon, a rich slave owner, asking him to receive back into his good graces his run-away slave Onesimus. So what was *that* all about?  Here is the question and my response.   QUESTION: From your writing about Greco Roman notions of dominance as status, it seems that the simple manumission of a slave was not a de facto improvement in status, because a man with no wealth, power, or influence was about as low on the ladder as [...]

I’ve been discussing how Paul understands the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for salvation, and have done so by laying out as concisely as I could his two principal “models” of how salvation worked, the judicial and the participationist model. In this post I’ll make some brief concluding comments about the two models, in particular in relation to one another, again from my textbook on the New Testament. ****************************** Comparison and Contrast of the Two Models Let me emphasize that the two models of salvation we have been looking at are ways of understanding something. They are not the thing itself. Paul's gospel is not "justification by faith" or "union with Christ." These are ways of reflecting on or thinking about his gospel. His gospel is God's act of salvation in Christ; the models are ways of conceptualizing how it worked. The way it worked differed according to which model Paul had in mind. In both of them, the problem is "sin." But in one, sin is an act of disobedience that a person [...]

I started explaining that Paul has different ways that he conceptualizes the act of salvation – how the death and resurrection of Christ restores a person to a right relationship with God. The judicial model that I laid out can be found in several of Paul’s letters, especially Romans and Galatians. But he has other ways of understanding how salvation works, other models involving Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other BIG one can be called the Participationist model. Here is what I say about it in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** The Participationist Model. Most of us today have no trouble understanding how a judicial process can be seen as analogous to the act of salvation. The participationist model, however, is much harder to get our minds around. This is partly because it involves a way of thinking that is no longer prevalent in our culture. Under this second model the human problem is still called "sin," "sin" is still thought to lead to "death," and Christ's death and resurrection still work to [...]

I am currently in the middle of a thread discussing the significance of Paul to the history of early Christianity.  So far I have been trying to argue that Paul is of utmost importance to the New Testament itself, but that it is very difficult to know how much of what we think of as Pauline theology (the doctrine of the atonement, for example) was *distinctive* of Paul (I doubt if he came up with the idea himself) and that there are some prominent features of Paul’s thought – e.g., the importance of Jesus’ resurrection – that he must have inherited from Christians before him. One of my ultimate points is going to be that whatever one thinks about Paul’s originality, it is clear that the gospel that he proclaimed looked very different from what Jesus himself taught.  To get to that point, I have to deal a bit more with what it is that Paul proclaimed. Nowhere does Paul lay out his gospel message more clearly than in the book of Romans.  The reason [...]

I was recently recording the monthly Q&A that I do with Gold members of the blog (if you're not a Gold member, this is one of the perks of moving to that level: every month Gold members ask me questions -- in writing -- and I record a 50-55 minute audio Q&A answering them; since the Gold members get audio versions of the posts, as well as written, this is an add-on they get every month.  Think about joining!).  In this Q&A I received a lot of really interesting questions, but one was very important for understanding the life and ministry of Paul.  And now I see that it was closely related to a question I received on the blog years ago, which is exactly what I was going to post on today anyway!  Here's the original blog question and response.   QUESTION What do you make of Paul’s statement that he didn’t get the good news (= the resurrection and thus the triumph over death) from other humans but from the ‘risen Christ’ himself? [...]

I’d like to say a bit more about Paul in relationship to the beginning of Christianity. Yesterday I argued that Paul could not have invented the idea of the resurrection. I should point out that Paul himself – who was always proud of the “revelation” of the truth given to him and his part in disseminating it (see Galatians 1-2) – admits in 1 Cor. 15:3-5 that he “received” from others the view that Christ died for sins and rose from the dead, before appearing “first” to Cephas and then others. I should stress, this language of “receiving” and “passing on” has long been understood as a standard way of indicating how tradition was transmitted from one person to another. Paul did not “receive” this information from his visionary encounter with Jesus (Jesus didn’t tell him: first I appeared to Cephas then to… and then to… and then finally to you!). Paul received this core of the Gospel message from those who were Christians before him. People today often think of Paul as the second-founder [...]

I have been discussing at some length the rise of Jewish apocalyptic ways of thinking. I decided to do so not only because it's so interesting and important on its own terms (which it is, at least for me) but also because I wanted to talk about the apostle Paul's understanding of salvation (how do you get it?) and I realized that I couldn't do that without talking about apocalypticism. My reason for talking about Paul's view of salvation was because I wanted to ask if he had the same as Jesus. A rather important issue and actually controversial. But I realized I couldn't discuss either without discussing Jewish apocalyptic thought. Hence the thread. You don't need to have read all the preceding posts to make sense of this one and the ones to come; but if you end up wondering more about some of the things I talk about, the posts are there in case you want to check them out. I have not dealt with the theological views of Paul and Jesus in [...]