Second Corinthians And Paul S Gospel Of Human Mortality

"How does Paul's bodily mortality both collapse his apostolic authority in Corinth and yet confirm his gospel? Richard I. Deibert explores the vital relationship between Paul's experience of death and his theology of death."--Back cover.

While many books are written on Jesus’ death, a gap exists in writings about the theological significance of a believer’s death, particularly in imitation of Jesus’. Paul, as a first apostolic witness who talked frequently about his own death, serves as a foundational model for how believers perceive their own death. While many have commented about Paul’s stance on topics such as forensic righteousness and substitutionary atonement, less is written about Paul’s personal experience and anticipation of his own death and the merit he assigned to it. Paul and His Mortality: Imitating Christ in the Face of Death explores how Paul faced his death in light of a ministry philosophy of imitation: as he sought to imitate Christ in his life, so he would imitate Christ as he faced his death. In his writings, Paul acknowledged his vulnerability to passive death as a mortal, that at any moment he might die or come near death. He gave us some of the most mournful and vitriolic words about how death is God’s and our enemy. But he also spoke openly about choosing death: “My aim is to know him . . . to be like him in his death.” This study seeks to show that Paul embraced death as a follower and imitator of Christ because the benefits of a good death supersede attempts at self-preservation. For him, embracing death is gain because it is honorable, because it reflects ultimate obedience to God, and because it is the reasonable response for those who understand that only Jesus’ death provides atonement. Studying mortality is paradoxically a study of life. Peering at the prospect of life’s end energizes life in the present. This urgency focuses on living with mission in step with God, the Creator and Sustainer of life, who is rightly referred to as Life itself. By focusing on mortality, we focus on Paul’s theology of life in its practical aspects, in particular, living life qualitatively, aware of God’s kingdom and mission and our limited quantity of days.

V. George Shillington sees this letter as Paul's personal testimony about his ministry of reconciliation among the Corinthian Christians (chapters 1-9) and his ministry in defending the truth of the gospel (chapters 10-13). The thread that ties the two parts together is Paul's conviction on pastoral ministry under the banner of Christ. Paul insists that ministry is to be borne in affliction like that of Christ crucified. In raising the crucified Messiah out of the old creation, God has inaugurated a new creation, in which believers already participate. The only boast allowed is in the Lord, not in one's own achievements or elevated experiences.

Speculation around the health of Paul the Apostle has been present since soon after his death. Recently scholars have understood Paul to be disabled but have been wary of isolating precisely what his disabilities may have been or whether they are important for understanding his writings. This book is the first full-length study of Paul the Apostle and disability. Using insights from contemporary disability studies, Isaac Soon analyses features of Paul's body in his ancient Mediterranean context to understand the ways in which his body was disabled. Focusing on three such ancient disabilities—demonization, circumcision, and short stature—this book draws on a rich variety of ancient evidence, from textual sources and epigraphy, to ancient visual culture, to analyze ancient bodily ideals and the negative cultural effects such 'deviant' persons generated. The book also examines Paul's use of his own disabilities in his letters and shows how disability is not subsidiary to his thought but a central aspect of it. This book also provides scholars with a new method for uncovering previously unrecognized disabilities in the ancient world. Last of all, it critiques the latent ableism in much New Testament scholarship, which assumes that the figures of the early Jesus movement were able-bodied.

How did the Apostle Paul navigate the language differences in Corinth? In Contesting Languages: Heteroglossia and the Politics of Language in the Early Church, Ekaputra Tupamahu investigates Corinthian tongue-speech as a site of political struggle. Tupamahu demonstrates that conceptualizing speaking in tongues as ecstatic, unintelligible expressions is an interpretive invention of German romantic-nationalist scholarship. Instead, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of language, Tupamahu finds two forces of language at work in the New Testament: a centripetalizing force of monolingualism, which attempts to force heterogeneous languages into a singular linguistic form, and a countervailing centrifugal force that diverse languages unleash. The city of Corinth in the Roman period was a multilingual city-a sociolinguistic context that Tupamahu argues should be taken seriously when reading Paul's directives concerning Corinthians "speaking in tongues". Grounding his reading of the texts in the experiences of immigrants who speak minority languages, Tupamahu reads Paul's prohibition against the use of tongues in public gathering as a form of cultural domination. This book offers a competing social imagination, in which tongues as a heteroglossic phenomenon promises a radically hospitable space and a new socio-linguistic vision marked by unending difference.

The letters of the Apostle Paul are central witnesses to the Christian faith and to the earliest history of Christianity. And yet, when students, preachers, and others turn to Paul, they find many things “hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16) in these ancient writings. James Prothro’s new book aims to help readers see the Apostle’s faith and hope at work as he evangelized the nations. Steeped in up-to-date scholarship and a passion for the gospel Paul preached, Prothro draws readers into Paul’s life and letters in order to help them hear the Apostle’s voice. The book’s chapters offer introductions to Paul’s background, life, and legacy; an introduction to ancient letter writing; a guide to understanding Paul’s theology across the letters; a survey of the portrait of Paul in the Book of Acts; separate treatments of each letter’s background and purpose; treatments of key theological topics in each letter and a thorough outline of each letter showing its arguments and how they make sense. Prothro introduces complex matters with clarity, balance, and an inviting style. He not only offers answers but models how to ask questions, helping us reason through Paul’s letters as ancient documents and as Christian Scripture. This book will prove a valuable introduction for those who study, teach, and preach these biblical books.

In recent years, a growing number of New Testament scholars have questioned traditional portrayals of the Apostle Paul as a leader of a new religious movement that set faith in Christ in opposition to the Jewish tradition. Instead, they have stressed the need to interpret Paul from within the Judaism of his day, regarding him as a faithful Jew who cherished deeply his Jewish identity and saw observance of the Mosaic law or Torah among Jewish believers in Christ as a good thing. While the present work argues strongly in favor of this latter interpretation of Paul, it also seeks to delve deeper into his thought in order to explore at length the points of continuity and convergence between Paul and the Judaism(s) of his day as well as the beliefs that distinguished him from his fellow Jews who did not share his faith in Christ. Chief among these beliefs was the conviction that the identity and will of God were now to be defined primarily on the basis of his relation to Jesus his Son, through whom he had intended from the start to accomplish his purposes for Israel and the world. Yet rather than bringing Paul to reject his Jewish heritage, this conviction led him to redefine and resignify around Christ his understanding of Judaism and the way of life prescribed in the Torah, thereby filling them with new meaning, though he also continued to value and uphold them for the same reasons he had previously. According to Paul, the purpose for which God had sent his Son and delivered him up to death was not that he might atone for sins or make it possible for God to forgive sins, as later Christian thought came to affirm, but rather that through him he might establish a new community in which Jews and non-Jews would be brought to live together as one in fellowship and solidarity. While Paul expected his fellow Jews to continue to live as Jews and members of Israel within this community, which he called the ekklēsia, his conviction that those non-Jews who lived faithfully as part of the same community yet did not submit fully to the Mosaic law were equally acceptable and righteous in God’s sight led him to oppose all attempts to impose on them the observance of that law. Such attempts implied that the members of the community who observed the law were to be regarded as more righteous or as superior in some way to those who did not and thus threatened to destroy the very fabric of the communities that Paul had worked so hard to establish. Rather than running contrary to Jewish thought, Paul’s teaching that it was a life of faith rather than the observance of works of the law per se that led people to be accepted as righteous by God would have been regarded by most Jews as being fully in accordance with traditional Jewish belief. What they would have found novel was Paul’s claim that faith in the God of Israel was now to be equated with faith in Jesus as his Son or “Christ-faith” and that through such a faith non-Jews who did not observe the law could come to be as fully acceptable to God as those Jews who did. Paul’s redefinition of God and Judaism around Jesus as God’s Son would have led many of his fellow Jews to conclude that he was proclaiming a God who was distinct from the God in whom the people of Israel had believed from time immemorial, since that God was never thought to have such a Son and much less to have intended to exalt him to his right side as Lord of all after handing him over to death on a cross. From the perspective of Paul and his fellow believers in Christ, however, the God of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ were one and the same.