Читать книгу Paul Among the Gentiles: A "Radical" Reading of Romans - Jacob P. B. Mortensen - Страница 9

To my knowledge, only two scholars have tried to explain the development from the new perspective to the radical new perspective. The first scholar is John Gager, with his book, Reinventing Paul (2000), the second is Magnus Zetterholm, with his book, Approaches to Paul (2009). Both scholars describe themselves as belonging to the newest development in Pauline studies. Gager presents himself as part of the ‘New Views of Paul’, as differentiated from ‘The Traditional View of Paul’ (Gager 2000, v). When Gager wrote his book, the new perspective was still thriving, and many scholars connected to the impetus from this kind of research. In the years following the publication of his book, the radical perspective materialized more and more, and scholars began to distance themselves more specifically from the new perspective and, instead, to speak of a radical new perspective. So even if Gager fits best within the radical perspective, he ‘merely’ presents himself as a scholar holding the ‘New Views of Paul’.

Gager and Zetterholm stage the history of research on Paul in the same way: They present the research on Paul as moving from a ‘traditional’ view to a ‘New Perspective’, or even ‘Beyond the New Perspective’. Gager labels the ‘old’ view from which he distances himself ‘The Traditional View’. He organizes his study thematically, under headings such as, ‘Paul Converted from Judaism to Christianity’, ‘Paul Preached against the Law and Israel’, and ‘Generalizing and Universalizing’. Hence, Gager mentions few scholars, and he describes the ‘traditional’ view (i.e. all scholarship before his own) in broader terms, as though they all agreed on the points he presents. Zetterholm sets about his task slightly differently. He reviews the actual work of many different scholars and their specific books under three headings: ‘The Formation of the Standard View of Paul’, ‘Toward a New Perspective on Paul’, and ‘Beyond the New Perspective’. So the ways in which Gager and Zetterholm planned their presentations are similar: From something ‘old’, ‘traditional’, or ‘standard’, to something ‘new’ or ‘beyond the new’. But Gager approached this task from a thematic perspective, whereas Zetterholm approached it from the perspective of individual scholars.

The one thing lacking in both Gager’s and Zetterholm’s presentations is a critical view of their own radical positions or perspectives. This may be too much to ask of a scholar deeply involved in developing a new position. However, some sort of critical evaluation still needs to be presented. The only one of which I am aware is Terence L. Donaldson’s, in a book edited by Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm, Paul within Judaism (2015).1 There is another critique, by Alexander Wedderburn, but this is more a critique of the new, rather than the radical new, perspective. However, I present some of the objections raised by Donaldson and Wedderburn, after a presentation of the ‘radicals’, and I also present some critical remarks of my own.