To realize that Paul was actually Jewish now seems too obvious to mention, but at the time it changed everything. I walked out of class stunned with the realization that I didn’t really get Paul at all—not because I hadn’t tried, but because I hadn’t known his world.For more on the series, see here.I began asking different questions. Rather than, “How does Paul get this from the Old Testament?” I asked, “What kind of interpretive world made Paul’s reading possible?” I stopped assuming I understood what Paul and the other New Testament writers were about and started asking how and why they actually read Scripture the way they did.
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