Reinventing Paul

ISBN: 9780195150858 出版年：2011 页码：209 Gager, John G Oxford University Press

Few figures in Western history have been the subject of greater intrigue and controversy than Saint Paul. An active persecutor of the early Jesus-movement, Paul suddenly emerged as a fervent follower of the risen Jesus and came to be installed at the very heart of the Christian scriptures. Although Paul's character has remained elusive, there has been general agreement on at least these points: Paul was a convert from Judaism to Christianity; he repudiated the law of Moses, not just for the Gentiles but for the Jews as well; and he believed that the Jews had been rejected by God as a disobedient people. In this important new book, John Gager overturns this entrenched understaning of Paul, the source of Christian anti-Semitism throughout the centuries. Gager argues that Paul was not the father of Christian anti-Judaism, that he neither repudiated Jewish law nor expected Jews to seek salvation through Jesus Christ, and that he did not believe that God had rejected Israel. Offering a new interpretation of this seminal figure of the Christian faith, Gager's provocative and accessibly-written book should appeal to the many readers who have shown an inexhaustible interest in competing interpretations of "the historical Jesus" in recent years.