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  • From: "Doug Chaplin" <fatherdoug AT anglicans.org.uk>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Gal 2:17
  • Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 22:13:29 +0100


Jeff Krantz said
> I would be happy to see other listers' opinions of Stowers' work.
For what it's worth, here's a brief summary of my own views, but I too would
be interested in knowing what others think.
While Stowers' rereading is a fascinating and detailed one, it ultimately
fails to convince me. His interpretation seems ultimately to demand that
Paul espoused two ways of salvation, one through imitating the faithfulness
of Abraham for Jews, and one imitating the faithfulness of Christ for
Gentiles.So he can comment "When a Jew is born into the community of Israel,
or a gentile baptized into Christ, the blessings of the lineages that they
receive have nothing to do with their merit"(p225), which seems to entirely
fail to take into account the baptism of Jews (such as Paul) into Christ. In
the end (as with the way he criticises commentators such as Dunn for
affirming the presence of a Jewish Christian minority instead of what he
sees as an overwhelming Gentile community (pp23-24) he seems to me to make
the evidence fit the theory.

I might be wrong and have missed some of his nuances, and I did find much of
this book especially the material on the opening three chapters of Romans,
extremely stimulating and helpful for my own reading of the letter. But
overall, Paul seems to me to be trying to hold Jews and Gentiles within one
soteriological and (an essential part of the argument) one ecclesiological
framework.

Doug Chaplin
fatherdoug AT anglicans.org.uk









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