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  • From: Shawn J Kelley <skelley AT daemen.edu>
  • To: Corpus-Paul <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Daniel Patte's "Paul's Faith"
  • Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 19:44:06 -0400

I'm presenting a paper at the upcoming SBL on some of the ways that Heidegger's influence continues to be felt even in the work of people who are not explicitly following him. It's part of an ongoing methodological attempt to come to terms with Heidegger's Nazism. In any event, one of the books that I'm looking at is Daniel Patte's "Paul's Faith and the Power of the Gospel" (Fortress Press 1983). I'm fairly critical of it, mostly as an example of a particular methodology (in this case structuralism) that could have but did not really confront Heideggerian philosophy and that is surprisingly indebted to parable scholarship. In other words, I'm really interested in structuralism (and what went wrong with structuralism) rather than as an example of Pauline scholarship- which is not my area of expertise.

But now that I'm doing this research I am curious as to how the book has been received among Paul scholars. Hence this missive. Have any of you worked closely with it recently? Did it make much impact when it came out 20 years ago? Does it have much impact today? Or did it fall by the wayside in the wake of more recent and more innovative examples of post-Sanders Pauline scholarship? I see it as a text that really wants to, but is not quite able to, escape the antiJewish heritage of modern scholarship. Does anyone else see it that way? I am pretty much assuming that structuralism has fallen out of fashion, assuming that it ever was in fashion. But this book seems to be the closest structuralism ever came to making an impact on the discipline and I'm wondering how well or how poorly it has stood the test of time.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Shawn Kelley
Associate Professor of Religion
Daemen College
Amherst, NY





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