Logos has been giving away a free book each month for the last couple of years. This month they are offering a free copy of A. T. Robertson, Paul, the Interpreter of Christ for the Logos Library. This 154 page book is fully formatted for the Logos Library with real page numbers. All the features of Logos are available and the book will appear in the user’s library on both the desktop version of Logos and the iOS Logos app.
If we stop studying Paul, we shall miss much of Christ. A. T. Robertson, Paul, the Interpreter of Christ, p. 6.
A. T. Robertson (1863-1934) is perhaps best known his massive A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in Light of Historical Research. His Word Pictures in the New Testament was a standard work for pastors for many years. He taught at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville until he died in 1934. Paul, the Interpreter of Christ was published in 1921 and is a companion to his life of Paul (Epochs in the Life of Paul, 1914). He tries to show that Paul did know Jesus, but interpreted him in a way that was distinct from Peter: “It was not a new Christ that Paul had to preach, but he had a more just perspective of the world-mission of Christ than any of the apostles had yet grasped (p.21-22)”
This book deals with some of the problems relating the message of Jesus and Paul. This is a topic which continues to be discussed in contemporary scholarship. David Wenham’s Did Paul Get Jesus Right (Kregel, 2010) and the essays in Todd Still, Jesus and Paul Reconnected (Eerdmans, 2007) indicate that there is a great deal of interest in showing that Paul was an accurate interpreter of Jesus, while Pamela Eisenbaum’s Paul was not A Christian (Harper, 2009) separates Paul from Jesus (or at least the later interpretations of Jesus).
Since the book is long past copyright, it appears in a variety of formats at the Internet Archive, and I did notice someone trying to sell it for $2.99 in the Kindle store. Most of the time these are books I already owned because they were part of some collection I had purchased in the past. For some reason, this one is new to me. In fact, I enjoyed reading the book as I teach Pauline Lit this semester!
The offer expires at the end of October 2013, so head on over to Logos and get this free book for your Logos library.
Thanks for this “heads-up”, Phillip. I remember using Robertson’s “Word Pictures” a number of times in seminar days.
Your ref’s to the 2 Paul works led me to look at them, particularly Wenham’s. I found that neither Kregel nor Amazon have any reviews, tho it’s about 3 yrs. old. Do you happen to know of reviews of it?
That leads me to a 2nd q.: Might you consider, if you’ve not already done such, a post on the overall state of Paul scholarship, from the full range of scholarship?
I know there is a fair amt. of discussion about the “new perspective” on Paul… I think mainly among Evangelicals and relatively conserv. scholars. What I’ve seen there has not satisfied my curiosity re. what real interaction there has been, and of what nature, between not just differing “conservatives”, but in the broader field of biblical studies (and/or X’n origins). In other words, is there much interaction, either on blogs or via SBL/AAR meetings, papers; within certain schools, etc., that is more than just “in house” by either conservatives or liberals?
I have not seen a review of Wenham, although I have read the book. My quick-review is that he works very hard to show Paul is an accurate interpreter of Jesus, unlike quite a few Jewish scholars who might say that Paul mis-read Jesus and created a Church that was different than the vision / teaching of Jesus. I think that is the view of a few of the “emergent” writers as well, Paul is not very well-liked by them.
The second question is much larger, and probably needs a good answer (maybe over Christmas Break when I have some time to ponder!) I think that the New Perspective has made a more or less permanent mark on Pauline studies, even if everyone works hard to show how they are not lock-step with Sanders, etc. No one can really write a “Theology of Paul” without treating the contribution of the NPP, even the writer disagrees. At the very least, Davies/Sanders and then Dunn/Wright have driven even conservative evangelicals back to the sources in order to read Paul in the light of a proper understanding of Second Temple Judaism.
The more conservative Pauline scholars also tend to be the young, angry Calvinist types. For them, the NPP is a disaster and rigorously dismiss it!
Thanks… that begins a good answer, and I will be eager to hear more detail if/when you write it. The one thing I’ll follow with, if it DOES have a fairly easy answer, is this: “Is there a fairly clear, agreed upon beginning point for the NPP, perhaps with one key work?” (And maybe it would take a fairly specific definition, which you may have already given, for the NPP, to answer that.)
One clear statement of the NPP? The watershed is E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Fortress, 1979). Obviously there are all sorts of influences on him for that book (including Stendahl and W. D. Davies, Sanders mentor). Probably more influential was an essay by Dunn in which he coined the NPP, and another by Wright. I think that Wright’s little “What Saint Paul Really Meant” from Eerdmans is a good a statement as any, in about 120 easy-to digest pages.
Of course everyone is waiting for Wright’s new book on Paul to drop this fall.