Corpus-Paul

[Shawn J Kelley <skelley AT daemen.edu>]

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