ANCIENT JEW REVIEW:
Paul is Dead. Long Live Paulinism! : Imagining a Future for Pauline Studies (Cavan Concannon).
The editors of Ancient Jew Review have asked me to think about the future of Pauline studies. To pronounce the future of a field is a weighty task. To conjure the future is beyond me. What I can do is gesture towards a future, a future in which I think I could have fun studying Paul again. The future that I conjure is not a neutral one. I am a partisan in the battles over Pauline studies. My prescriptions stem from my own roots in feminist biblical criticism, though I also invoke here other pathways toward solidarities that might yet be cobbled together.
When I think of what it would take to make Pauline studies fun, I am drawn to one simple idea: we have to kill Paul. ...
That seems a bit harsh, but the rest of the essay clarifies. For example:
What might it mean to kill the presumption of Paul’s authority over moral and ethical matters and reject our collective moratorium on ethical criticism of the Pauline archive?
Also:
If we stop caring about whether Paul might undergird our ethical, political, or theological projects, I think we should also stop pretending that our historical procedures can get us back to the historical Paul.
As someone who has a mild interest in Paul and Pauline studies, but is not a specialist, I found this essay very interesting.
