Corpus-Paul

["Jeff Krantz @ optonline.net" <jkrantz AT optonline.net>]

I regret that it's taken me so long to finish Mark's most recent book, The
Irony of Galatians, but having done so I was even more troubled by the
academy's apparent reluctance to engage his work.

I can see that "Irony" hasn't really been out long enough to have impacted
the study of many, but "Romans" has been out for ages, and the insights
present in that book, whether agreed with or not, are so compelling that
it's disturbing to see so little reaction to it.

I wonder if the listers have any insight into this phenomenon.  I'm sure
that Nanos is too modest to ask the same question, so I'm asking, for
myself.  The image of Paul as a Torah-observant Jew who, believing in
Christ, finds no inherent contradiction between that and his Jewish
identity, while seeing any Gentile movement toward claiming a Jewish
identity as a negation of the very gospel he preaches, solves so many of the
inconsistencies inherent in most models of Paul, and yet this model seems
slow to catch on. (Parts of this, of course, have surfaced in other works,
but the larger construction seems to be Nanos' work.  Perhaps you can
correct me on this.)

Posts like a recent one on the list concerning the "false brothers" suggest
that these books aren't even being read, even as they're commented upon.  I
sincerely hope that constructive comment on and engagement with Nanos' work
will help us both incorporate and refine these initial movements toward a
"Paul" who is fully integrated, one whose influence on the early church
makes sense.

Yours,

Jeff Krantz

Rector, Church of the Advent, Westbury, NY
Instructor, George Mercer School of Theology
http://www.preachingpeace.org