Review of Marchal (ed.), The People Beside Paul

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | The People Beside Paul: The Philippian Assembly and History from Below (Jennifer Quigley).

Joseph A. Marchal, editor. The People beside Paul: The Philippian Assembly and History from Below. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015

From history and religious studies to journalism and political science, numerous fields have struggled to better understand and describe the lives of ordinary people. New Testament and Early Christian studies continue to make strides in the study of ordinary people living under Roman rule, the people who would have comprised the earliest assemblies of Christ followers. Joseph A. Marchal’s edited volume The People beside Paul: The Philippian Assembly and History from Below represents a significant addition to this trend, offering a glimpse into current scholarly conversations about the people in Philippi who corresponded with Paul. How does an orientation towards “a people’s history,” following Howard Zinn, help scholars ask new questions about the context and content of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, a brief but important text in the Pauline corpus? Eight scholars take up this task to describe “the variety and specificity that would characterize communities composed of such people” from the “underside of the Roman imperial world” (p. 15-16). ...