Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle

by Benjamin L. White

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul , Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the "real" Paul in the second century C.E.--a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested--and sets these ancient contests alongside their modern attempts to rescue the "historical" Paul from his "canonical" entrapments. White charts the rise and fall of various narratives about Paul and argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the "real" Paul. Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were important for forming collective identity.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Griffin Duffey]

Dr. White with that historiographical heat.

[Nick Meyer]

3.5 stars. Ignore the bloated blurbs, from reviews, on the back cover. Thankfully, the author is less grandiose in his self presentation, which is not always the case for those who perceive themselves as pushing the boundaries or reorienting a discipline. In this case that is done through the belated application of Social Memory Theory to the study of Paul and his reception, over against positivistic historiography which seeks to tell things "as they actually happened" with its firm distinction between subject (historian) and object (history). There is thus a heavy dose of theory, which could all be boiled down to a few relatively straightforward yet important observations: the present is always implicated in constructions of the past; humans are social creatures; memory is a form of traditionig and tradition is not fixed but responsive to pressures from within and without, etc. When these insights are presented in their more extreme forms however (e.g. there are no constraints on memory or tradtion, the past is pure construction, there's no real Paul), it's hard not to feel that the whole just collapses in on itself. I'm not sure White, though aware of it, entirely avoids that trap. He quite helpfully 1) exposes the ideological basis, as well as some of the flawed methodology, which has mediated the construction of a "real Paul" from a limited selection of the Pauline writings in the NT canon, and then 2) adds to the overturning of the narrative of the "Pauline captivity" to "the heretics" in the second century until such time as the Pastorals and Acts supposedly made available to the Proto Orthodox a Paul which they could claim as their own. These are most welcome contributions. But I note, back to the theoretical bit, just how much this whole project in narrating a history of scholarship engages in a form of historiography that tells things "as they actually happened" (obviously, *more or less*) and that despite rhetoric to the contrary White also has an understanding of Paul, namely, as complex and ambiguous (Protean!), which functions implicitly in place of the "real Paul" built off the supposedly authentic letters. Well, I'm no philosopher, but one suspects there are better alternatives for accounting for subjectivity than postmodernism, which so readily becomes self-defeating in just these sorts of ways. All that said, I look forward to reading White's latest monograph dedicated exclusively to the question of the methodologies used to divide up the Pauline letters of the Canon.