E. P. [= Ed Parish] Sanders, PAUL. "Past Masters" Series; Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. 133 + index (135-138). <0.0> coding keys, each ended by : = title of modern book = emphasis = Greek word(s) = Latin word(s)
<0.1> This has been an extremely difficult review to write. The reasons are manifold. My hope was to discover a suitable brief orientation (first assignment) volume for my Paul course at the University of Pennsylvania, and thus my main criteria for evaluation in the first instance were dictated by that context. I was also very interested in how a brief introduction written by such a recognized research scholar as Ed Sanders might look, and how his particular scholarly perspectives might or might not manifest themselves. My first reading of the book proved frustrating regarding its potential value for my course, and introduced aspects of S's outlook for which I was not really prepared. In a second reading, I found myself overemphasizing the issues that seemed most problematic, thus losing perspective as a reviewer and losing balance in the review. A third reading of the book brought greater clarity, both with regard to what S seemed to be doing and with regard to how to construct what I intend to be a fair and useful review of the work. Hopefully, what follows will succeed in making all this evident! <0.2> In one sense, we are really dealing with two books on Paul between this one set of covers. One of the books comes very close to meeting my introductory textbook needs -- it introduces Paul in his world in a fairly clearly stated manner, although for my tastes, it fails to exploit as fully as desirable the basic (and to most of us, relatively radical) eschatological perspectives that it describes or mentions and from which Paul operates. The "other book," which unfortunately (for my purposes) colors the entire finished product, is an extended apologetic for seeing Paul as basically a "moralist" with regard to his instructions on conduct of those who follow Jesus Christ. This apologetic is conducted in opposition to perceived misconstructions by "Luther" and his followers, and is contained especially in the lengthy chapters on "righteousness" in Galatians and Romans, and to a lesser extent in the chapters on "law" and "behavior." It seems to me that my students -- and most readers in general -- will be quickly misled into a grossly distorted overall understanding of Paul because of the ways in which the "righteousness" issue is presented in S's book, and the effect that this focus has on the overall structure and balance of the book. Here, then, is the review opening that I had formulated more than a year ago, before deciding to add the prefatory comments just presented. <1.1> Good news, bad/ambivalent news. On the one hand, here is a brief and readable and inexpensive introductory book on Paul by a well-known scholar of early Christianity in a well-known series by a major publisher. It engagingly jumps right into the middle of the project ("1. Paul's Mission" = pp.1-7) and exposes the reader to Paul the person who finds himself in strange and conflicted circumstances, functioning somewhere between the worlds of Judaism and non-Judaism as an advocate of Jesus "Messiah" who is of great significance for "gentiles" in what Paul considered to be the last times. From there, S moves on to a biographical sketch for Paul (11 pages), to Paul's strategy and message (7 pages), to his expectations regarding "the return of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead" (8 pages) and his "theological presuppositions: monotheism and providence" (10 pages), before moving on to "the major disputes in which Paul engaged" (p.34) -- organized around the themes of righteousness, "Christology," law and behavior, and finally, the fate of Israel and the world. <2.1> On the down side, however, the promise implied in the opening chapter is not fulfilled in any clear and balanced way. All the elements are there, as has become apparent to me after multiple readings of key sections. But one shouldn't have to explore an introductory book so carefully to get the crucial points! S seems preoccupied with problems relating to ethical and behavioral issues, with separate chapters on righteousness in Galatians and Romans (23 pages) and the longest chapters in the book, on "the law" (17 pages) and "behaviour" (16 pages) -- thus comprising nearly half the book using this artificial gauge of counting pages! Paul's eschatological orientation that provides the context for understanding these issues is not exactly lost in this treatment, but it clearly takes a presentational back seat and casts a relatively short shadow on the explicit presentation, to the detriment of achieving a clear introductory appreciation of Paul and his thought. <2.2> I am not being patronizing to say that, relative to the alternatives, this is in many ways a very good introductory/orientation book, better than most similarly sized treatments in English by widely respected scholars (S's book runs to about 44K words of text): e.g. Adolf Deissmann, Paul ([1912\1], 1927\2 [Harper, 1957]; about 55K text plus notes & appendices); Wilfred Knox, St. Paul (Peter Davies Ltd., 1932; about 28K words); Arthur Darby Nock, St. Paul (Harper, 1938; about 52K words); Martin Dibelius and Werner Georg Kuemmel, Paul (Longmans/Westminster, 1953; about 49K words) -- I would put Bornkamm, Paul (Harper 1971; more than 90K words plus appendices), in a more advanced category, and yet more advanced would be works such as Schoeps, Paul (Westminster 1961), J. C. Beker, Paul the Apostle (Fortress 1980 1984\2), and J. Becker, Paul (Westminster/Knox 1993). S's Paul is "Apostle to the Gentiles in the Messianic Era" (3). The "last days" are at hand (4), and "God would not long delay" (5). Although "Paul's theology contained the potential for social revolution, ...there was not time to remake society" (12). Paul "expected to be alive when the Lord returned ... [and] foresaw neither the centuries which lay ahead nor the role in shaping subsequent history which some of his letters would play" (17). "Paul expected most people then living to be still alive when the Lord returned..., the event which would end this present age" (21-22; see also 26). "One of Paul's most striking views is that those in Christ had already begun the process of transformation which would culminate at the return of the Lord" (69). "The 'completion' of Paul's own work (as he thought of it) meant that the Lord would soon return" (118). "The revelatory moment, through which Paul read history, was his own commission to be apostle to the Gentiles. ...Held as a fixed conclusion, it forced him to readjust everything else he thought" (99). Of the small sized books, only Dibelius-Kuemmel is as clearly on-target with regard to this central feature of Pauline activity. <2.3> If S had built carefully and consistently and explicitly on this framework throughout his treatment, this would probably be a mostly ecstatic review. He does fill out the picture rather neatly on occasion: "Paul inherited from Judaism two principal theological views: there is one God; God controls the world. ...He believed in one God; he thought that there were other powers in the universe besides God; he thought that God was exercising a grand plan in history; and he thought that individuals could decide to be with him or against him" (34). S knows and mentions such Pauline building blocks as the sin/flesh antinomy, or death/life, body of Christ, etc., but he never really tries to put this all together in a concentrated presentation of Paul's eschatological perspectives, or of their relationship to the other items of discussion. Too often he either forgets the framework, or assumes that the (assumed novice) reader will remember it, and its various implications, in dealing with the particular points of discussion in the book. This did not happen for me, and I doubt that it will happen for many others. In the end, S's Paul will not be the strange and insistent apostle of the last times, urging his readers to live in accord with their eschatological responsibilities and conditions. He will be much more a timeless teacher of ethical responsibility for Christians in their complex worlds. <3.1> Thus, in my estimation, the book as a whole is a significantly (indeed, for my purposes, fatally) flawed treatment. Are these perceived flaws relatively superficial, perhaps due to the assignment of writing a brief and largely popular treatment? Some are (e.g. the failure to discuss source problems within the canonical Pauline corpus, or extracanonical materials pertaining to Paul), but the ones that concern me most seem to be due to other factors that strangely constrain S's ability (or perhaps his willingness) to communicate an understanding of Paul on Paul's own terms. Strange, because there are also strong indications that S knows better. <3.2> Sanders' Paul as presented in this book is at heart a moralist, anticipating battles with certain "Lutheran" (p.48) perspectives and similar modern villians. In the two longest chapters, on "The Law" and on "Behaviour" (84-116), and elsewhere in this slim volume, S inveighs against interpretations of Paul in which "righteousness" is basically a forensic/legal term, representing a status "imputed" to the believer rather than an actual state of activity. It is not until p. 99, at the end of the treatment of Paul's view of law, that the basic picture of how Paul's thought was shaped is given explicit description:
The revelatory moment, through which Paul read history, was his own commission to be apostle to the Gentiles when God revealed his Son to him (Gal. 1:16). The only conclusion that Paul could draw from this revelation was that God intended to save the world, Jew and Gentile alike, by faith in Christ. Since this was so, the law had not been given for 'life' or 'righteousness'. If righteousness were by the law, Christ had died for no reason, in vain (as he explicitly says, Gal. 2:21). But Christ evidently had not died in vain: he, Paul, had seen him (1 Cor. 9:1). Therefore, the law had never been intended to bring righteousness (Gal. 3:21). This is a theological, in fact dogmatic view. Held as a fixed conclusion, it forced him to readjust everything else he thought.
<3.3> Prior to this, to be sure, many things are said that relate to S's understanding of Paul's perspective -- comments about how Paul is not systematic, is not approaching things as a trained philosopher or theologian might, does not always express clearly the reasons for a particular position, is gearing his comments to a particular situation or problem, is goverened by his exchatological perspectives, and the like. But the reader -- or at least this reader -- does not understand the force of these statements until other things have distracted from arriving at an appropriate picture of Paul as he probably appeared in his own times. And the main distraction is S's early preoccupation with the question of the meaning of "righteousness" terminology in Paul vis a vis a perceived "Lutheran" understanding of those issues. The result is that S develops a picture of what he thinks Paul could not have meant, at the expense of creating a broader context for understanding what Paul probably did mean. <3.4> To put it another way, while S sees (correctly, it seems to me) that "the most important parts of Paul's thought [are] those which depict actual change by participation in a new creation" (74), S does not develop with any degree of detail how Paul depicts or understands this "actual change by participation" (e.g. the "body of Christ" imagery, or suffering with Christ, or even "law of Christ," or Christ in me), but contents himself with the misleading argument that somehow this "actual change" is more "real" than are interpretations that use terms like "fictional" or "legal" regarding Paul's concept of "righteousness." And the clear implication of S's discussion of these issues in this book (although not necessarily an accurate reflection of S's nuanced view) is that "actual change" means individual moral achievement in Paul's view, as over against the "Luther" view of "imputed" (fictional) righteousness. The point is so central in S's book, and the arguments so intricate, that attention to S's choice of arguments and wording is desirable at this point, to illustrate how important he has made these matters.
There are three problems, one of which plagues only English- speakers and one of which plagues only people in modern times...: English is deficient in its ability to translate the key terms...; Paul himself sometimes uses the language of 'righteousness' in a peculiar way; Martin Luther...made Paul's statements central to his own quite different theology. (44)
<3.5> The first problem is that English (alone?!) has difficulty rendering the Greek dikaio- terms, and shifts between French derived "justification" terminology and Anglo-Saxon derived "righteousness" terms; S prefers the latter equivalence, but the verbal form "to rightwise" is no longer available in living English. A similar problem is identified with regard to pist- words, where the French derived "faith" terminology is preferable (for S) to the Anglo-Saxon "belief" words (45-46). S understandably points to Galatians 3.6-7 to illustrate his point, and provides a consistent translation: "Thus Abraham 'had faith in God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness'. So you see that it is men of faith who are sons of Abraham. And the scripture, forseeing that God would righteous the Gentiles by faith...." <3.6> Secondly, "even if we were not plagued by these curious and unusual defects in English, Paul would still be hard to understand," since "the principal and normal meaning of the terms for 'righteousness' both in Greek and in English," and "not infrequently ... in Paul's letters," is "judicial," but Paul also "presses the meaning of the verb... 'to righteous' beyond this, its normal frame of reference." Thus for Paul,
the passive verb 'to be righteoused'... almost always means to be changed, to be transferred from one realm to another: from sin to obedience, from death to life, from being under the law to being under grace.... This is why 'righteousness' by faith is slightly misleading as a summary of Paul's position. The noun 'righteousness' implies a status, while Paul's verb has more the connotation of something which happens to a person. This is seldom legal aquittal.... The passive of dikaioun does not easily bear this meaning -- changed, transferred, incorporated into another person -- but Paul forced it to do so. (47-48)
<3.7> Thirdly,
Luther saw the world and the Christian life quite differently. ... He suffered from guilt. Paul, however, did not have a guilty conscience.... Luther, plagued by guilt, read Paul's passages on 'righteousness by faith' as meaning that God reckoned a Christian to be righteous even though he or she was a sinner. Luther understood 'righteousness' to be judicial, a declaration of innocence, but also fictional, ascribed to Christians 'by mere imputation', since God was merciful. (48-49) ... Luther's emphasis on fictional, imputed righteousness, though it has often been shown to be an incorrect interpretation of Paul, has been influential because it corresponds to the sense of sinfulness which many people feel.... Luther sought and found relief from guilt. But Luther's problems were not Paul's, and we misunderstand him if we see him through Luther's eyes. (49)
<3.8> But surely it can also be said that in many ways, our problems were not Paul's either, and attempting to see Paul through his own eyes would seem to be the appropriate solution to the problem with Luther's intrepretation -- and S's (and Kraft's!). S's attempted correction, however, does not in my mind operate on that level. Surely there is a "fictional" or "formal" (or substitute terms like "forensic" or "mystical," if you like; the point is that it is not "real" or "moral" in the usual senses of those words) thrust to Paul's use of "righteousness" terminology in the passages S discusses. S knows this: commenting on Gal 3.28 he states "when they were 'righteoused' they were made one person with Christ,... or, as Paul put it in another letter, they had become part of a 'new creation.'" Really? Yes, but in what sense of "really"? Or with reference to Rom 8.9-17 and Gal 5.16-24, S comments: "'You...are not in the Flesh, you are in the Spirit'; and those in the Spirit, he thought, did not do the sinful deeds 'of the Flesh'." Is that Paul's position, that there has been a "real" ("moral"?) change? I thought Paul was exhorting those who were "of the spirit" not to do the deeds "of the flesh," since the flesh no longer had the (inevitable?) right to force such actions! Surely this concept of "righteousness" is as close to Luther's "judicial" and "fictional" interpretation as it is to S's moralistic overreaction. <3.9> But S knows how to go about adjudicating such hermeneutical squabbles: "To come to grips with the substance of Paul's thought we must first grasp the context of his discussions of being 'righteoused by faith'.... [At least in Gal 2-4 and Rom 3-4,] the subject-matter is not 'how can the individual be righteous in God's sight?', but rather, 'on what grounds can Gentiles participate in the people of God in the last days?'" (49-50). Yes, please, what is the eschatological context in which Paul's language is to be understood? How do such conceptual polarizations as flesh/spirit, law/grace, death/life, curse/bless, sin/righteousness relate to "Gentiles in the messianic age" (55)? <3.10> Sanders tells the reader almost nothing of that context in any direct and coherent discussion (although a second and third reading of his treatment makes it clear that he has this context in mind throughout!), but he does return to the anti-Luther issues in the treatment of "righteousness by faith" in Romans:
In the discussion in Romans 3-4 the verb 'reckon' (logizomai [Gen 15.6])... comes into prominence.... This does not mean, however, that Paul thinks of righteousness as being fictitiously imputed to those who have faith, while they remain sinners in fact. In sharing Christ's death Christians have died to the old order. They no longer live in sin.... Paul picked up 'reckon' from Genesis, and then he repeated it, with no thought of a fictional, 'merely imputed' righteousness. (67)
<3.11> One of S's methodological operating principles is that it is when Paul leaves the Greek biblical terminology (Paul knew it by heart) and introduces non-biblical language, that is where the real Paul appears most clearly. <3.12> But does S really intend to suggest that Paul is speaking moralistically in this language? Yes, if I have read the following summary paragraph correctly (68):
Behaviour: Christians should live morally blameless lives. The idea of fictional, imputed righteousness had not occurred to him, but had it done so he would have raged against it. We shall consider moral perfectionism in Chapter 10.
<3.13> Sanders explains this interpretation, which we might call "eschatological realism," more fully in what follows.
We can best see this [that by transformation Paul did not mean merely moral redirection] by focusing directly on ethics and noting the degree to which Paul thought that correct behaviour was the inevitable consequence of becoming one person with Christ: a member of Christ's body lived accordingly, naturally producing the 'fruit of the Spirit'. (71) ... He thought that his converts were dead to sin, alive to God, that conduct flowed naturally from people, and that it varied according to who they really were. Those who were under sin naturally committed sins...; those who were in Christ produced 'the fruit of the Spirit' (Gal. 5.22). (72) ... This 'realistic' view of human transformation and of behaviour as the natural product of each sort of person may be contrasted with the psychological explanation of how Paul's ethics related to his basic proclamation of salvation" (72). "Paul's ethical admonitions are not connected to the 'doctrine' of righteousness by faith, but principally to two other conceptions: being a member of the body of Christ and being in the Spirit. (72) ... The deeper levels of Paul's thought are not found in the judicial categories, but in those which express the participation of the faithful in Christ or in the Spirit, a participation which produces a real change. (74)
This is shown by Paul's abandonment of the scriptural language (e.g. reckon, being righteoused) as he moves more centrally into his own thought. The language that is most important to Paul's thought is that which depicts "actual change by participation in a new creation, rather than ... judicial or legal" language (74). <3.14> It would be surprising if S were to reject completely any sense of forensic "fiction" and "imputation" in Paul's view of "righteousness," and he does not do so as the following excerpts show:
If it be granted that, in Paul's view, membership in the body of Christ changed believers in some real sense, rather than just changing their perception of God and the world, we may still ask whether God's opinion of them also changed. The answer is yes. ... God 'righteoused' the person of faith as well as 'reckoned' the person to be righteous. ... The person was transferred to another sphere, called variously 'the body of Christ', the Spirit, and the like. In this transfer a real change was effected, the first step towards the glorified body which would be attained at the return of the Lord. As a result of this change the new person found that good deeds flowed out naturally and that everything which the law had required was 'fulfilled' in his or her life. (73)
<3.15> It is not difficult to agree with statements such as "Paul's ethics are organically related not to legal innocence, being declared to be righteous, but to participation in another being or power" (75); what is hard is trying to understand why S so resolutely refuses to recognize this as just as much a "fiction" as anything Luther claimed. It is, to be sure, an eschatological fiction -- the expected but not yet fulfilled is already in effect in advance -- but nonetheless not a "reality" in any individual ethical sense! For Paul, Jesus' part in this scenario is indeed "reality," and imparts its reality to those who participate in its reality -- and who thus, without being fulfilled as righteous are (by this eschatological fiction) considered already to have attained the "righteousness of Jesus" who now indwells them.
Another way of putting all this is to say that 'righteoused by faith' means 'being transferred from the group which will be destroyed to that which will be saved'. This transfer involves a change in the person, so that Christ lives in and through the believer. The deeper meaning of Paul's difficult passive verb, 'be righteoused', is that one dies with Christ and becomes a new person. (76)
Of course. But not REALLY!
Although Paul knew and employed forensic or judicial ideas (sin is transgression; God aquits those who have faith in Christ; his death wipes the slate clean), the heart of his thought lies in another set of ideas: participation in Christ and a change of one's state from being under Sin to living in the Spirit. The death and resurrection enable the person who has faith in Christ to make this change, by sharing the transfer which was first made by him. (80) ... While they waited for the return of the Lord, Paul's converts were to behave uprightly, maintaining moral perfection. (opening words to ch. 10, "Behaviour") ... The moral perfection which he required of his converts, he first required of himself. This came all the easier because he expected the end to come soon. (101) ... Paul also thought, however, that good deeds should flow naturally from life in Christ. ...The fruit, then, was not really theirs, but Christ's; and they were a part of Christ. The theory of participation in Christ helps explain Paul's perfectionism and gives it a theoretical basis: Christians should bear such fruit and only such fruit. He did not, however, regard effort in doing good as being in any way opposed to membership in the body of Christ. (102-3)
<3.16> With reference to Paul's use of ethical lists in his teaching,
the vice lists are traditional Jewish homiletical material: they emphasize the two cardinal Gentile errors as seen by Jews: idolatry and sexual transgression. ...When he is passing on this traditional material, especially when he does so in lists, he seems inflexible and unsympathetic. ... Whole masses of people are thus consigned to perdition in sweeping terms. Only when circumstances forced him to leave his traditional lists do we meet his characteristic virtuosity, and we also find a good deal more sympathy. One of his converts was actually living in an incestuous relationship, perhaps justifying his doing so on the grounds of Paul's own preaching of the new creation. Here we find fresh thinking. Paul does not follow the traditional practice of roundly condemning transgressors to destruction, but proposes that the man's soul would be saved. ...When forced to think, he was a creative theologian: but on ethical issues he was seldom forced to think, and simply sought to impose Jewish behaviour on his Gentile converts. (115-16)
<4.0> This review has gone on perhaps too long already. Much more could be said about S's little book, positively and negatively. I append a few quotations and observations on some other interesting features: <4.1> On getting at the real Paul, especially amid the flood of scriptural prooftexts, S argues that what Paul adds to the scriptural language is most likely to be important to him -- "His own language tells us more about how he thought than does the language of his proof texts" (75, top). Similarly, S is often suspicious on general psychological grounds about Paul's expressed argumentation -- "The distinction between ... his arguments on behalf of a position and his actual reasons for holding it is one that few students or scholars make.... People often put forward arguments in favour of a postion which they reached in a different way" (52). "The difficult parts of the interpreter's task are to explain his complex arguments and to relate his arguments in favour of a position to the actual reason for which he held it" (56). I have little quarrel with such observations, except to wonder how the interpreter can keep the inevitable subjectivity under reasonable historical control. S provides little guidance on that difficult issue, and as I have tried to show, sometimes sets a bad example himself. <4.2> Regarding Paul's ability to leave unharmonious ideas juxtaposed: "But he was instead an apostle, an ad hoc theologian, a proclaimer, a charismatic who saw visions and spoke in tongues -- and a religious genius. Let us not put him entirely into the strait-jacket of logical arrangement" (127). True enough, it seems to me. But let us not either put him into some moralistic straightjacket! <4.3> Regarding the vexed issue of "Judaism" (or "Judaisms") in Paul's time, S seems to me to know more, or perhaps sometimes less, than the evidence warrants. This manifests itself especially in the behavior chapter (ch. 10): for example, in discussing the "two great issues on which Jews and Gentiles disagreed" regarding "standards of behaviour," namely, "idolatry and some aspects of sexual behaviour," S affirms that Paul's vice lists "all show the influence of the Diaspora synagogue" (105). Regarding Paul's treatment of prostitution in 1 Cor 6, "we here come to a point which reveals the existence of views about sex in Diaspora Judaism which were stricter than would be expected on the basis of the Bible and most Palestinian material." Here Paul "was Jewish and followed strict Diaspora practice" (109). While evidence from Josephus and rabbinic literature suggests that "common Judaism" did not consider the practice of prostitution to be "completely wrong," "in the Diaspora, and perhaps also in Palestine, there was a more rigorous view" (109). S concludes that the prohibition of prostitution in Diaspora Judaism was "a step which was not required in Palestine, where the problem of Gentile sexual ethics did not press so heavily" (110). <4.4> Similarly, Paul's teaching on "desire and marriage" in 1 Thess 4 is "thoroughly Jewish," or at least "probably Jewish" (114), but it is a Judaism shaped by Platonic and Stoic views mediated in "a strict and partially ascetic stream of Diaspora Judaism" (115). This all sounds more than a bit strained, given the paucity of sources on which to base such a judgment. And given even Saunders' hesitating admission that maybe things were not so neatly distinguishable between diaspora and Palestinian Judaism, we are perhaps justified in asking, in accord with S's own hermeneutical observations, what the REAL reason for this identification of Paul with "ascetic" diaspora perspectives might be? (Perhaps those more intimate with current squabbles in Pauline studies could answer better than I could.) It would be equally easy to use Paul as evidence for the presence of such attitudes right there at home in the Palestine of his "hellenistic," if not always hellenized, world. Indeed, in the entire chapter, which on the whole is an interesting and timely treatment of these ethical and social issues, S explicitly mentions the Qumran evidence only once, and that as an afterthought to the discussion of "remarriage as adultery" (109). He obviously prefers to have Paul reflecting a diaspora Jewish synagogue homiletic background, and not to find such "ascetic" Judaism strongly entrenched in Palestine. This sort of quasi- geographical, quasi-linguistic, distinction seems to me extremely problematic and misleading both with reference to the contours of Judaism in Paul's time, and to the question of Paul's own Jewish orientation -- what WAS being taught in the Palestinian Greek synagogual homilies, or even their Semitic counterparts? <5.1> Finally, I would quarrel mildly with S on the rather minimal guidance he provides for relatively novice readers to explore the issues further in modern literature and discussions. Granted that this small book may not have been intended primarily as an introductory text book, it seems strange to me that the concluding "Notes on Sources" (129-130) and "Further Reading" (131-133) should be of such uneven referential value (not to mention the perpetuation of such unhelpful and/or misleading simplifications as "the Septuagint" or "the OT" with reference to the Jewish scriptural anthologies in Greek and Semitic forms). Readers are given no guidance concerning the "pseudepigraphical" sources, beyond a bibliographical reference to Charlesworth's two volume collection, although the paragraph on "rabbinic literature" does give some useful orientation to the latter corpus. While much valuable and relevant modern literature is mentioned, there are no direct guidelines for exploring further the situation with regard to Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, for example, or the impact of Paul on Christianity prior to Luther (something like Wayne Meeks' anthology on The Writings of St. Paul [Norton 1970] could have helped here). I was mildly disappointed not to see mention of Joseph Fitzmyer's valuable compact work on Pauline Theology (Prentice Hall 1967), and shocked that a book with its opening pages and final chapter ("The Salvation of Israel and of the World") so clearly indebted to the work of Johannes Munck never makes mention of that epochal (or do we now say "paradigm shifting"?) work, available in English as Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (John Knox Press, 1959). <5.2> As an addendum to the bibliographical issues, and not intended as a criticism of S as such, let me air a pet peeve: why do we continue to perpetuate -- or let some of our publishers perpetuate -- the absurd practice of listing only places of publication for literature cited, as though that is of any help to anyone today? I can probably make a good guess how to get further information on a book listed as "New Haven, Conn.," but what am I supposed to do with "Philadelphia, Pa.," or even worse, "New York" or "London"? The convention of listing such geographical locations presumably developed at a time when it made some sense -- the location was enough to identify the publisher. But this has not been the case, especially in metropolitan centers, for a rather long time now. If editors and publishers insist on streamlined bibliographical information, the choice should be the name of publisher, not the place of publication! Indeed, the latter is mostly redundant anymore. We as authors can have some influence in the conventions under which we operate. Here is one area that might be worth attacking. <00.1> In a book that attempts to deal with a general and controversial topic such as Paul, most reviewers will have various quarrels with various details. Much more could be said at that level about S's book, but I will refrain. I apologize for the length of time it has taken to put my reactions into this form, and I regret that the results, as an evaluation, will sound so negative. It is not on the small points that this book fails to provide what I had hoped to find as an introduction to Paul for a secular university audience. Nor is it a problem of the author's skills as a scholar and a writer, both of which are positively attested in this small volume. My problem is that the Paul who emerges from S's presentation, on the sort of quick reading for which I would want students to use the book, is not likely to stand out as the itinerant Jewish missionary bringing an end of the world message to the Greco-Roman audiences of his day that both S and I know him to have been. That Paul is strongly present in the background of this book. But the Paul in the foreground seems to me to be someone else, doing other things. //end//