Book Notice: Benjamin White on Remembering Paul

Benjamin L. White

Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle
Oxford: OUP, 2014.
Available at Amazon.com

This book is a revised version of Benjamin White’s doctoral dissertation written at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Bart Ehrman. In a nutshell, White argues that there is no reconstruction of the “real Paul,” a type of “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” only the exploration of collective memories of Paul that produce meaningful pasts for the present. Note, White does not think that there is no realism or authenticity in portraits of Paul, only that all accounts of a “real Paul” are themselves theological and social constructs. The fact that scholarship has accepted a seven letter Pauline collection – itself based on the Hauptbriefe of Romans, Galatians, and 1-2 Corinthians, which condenses down really to Romans and Galatians – shows that the standard scholarly representation of Paul is skewed since it rejects the disputed letters and Pastorals as part of the Pauline collection.

The strength of the book is that it deconstructs and critiques the Pauline captivity narrative whereby Paul was ignored or rejected by the proto-orthodox church and embraced by the Marcionites and Gnostics in the second century, and it was only with the composition of Acts, the Pastorals, and Irenaeus that Paul was domesticated for proto-orthodox use. White provides a good critique of F.C. Baur’s objectivist historiography and provides a nice overview of scholarship about the reception of Paul in the second century. He shows very effectively that Paul’s legacy could be viewed through a number of theological lenses. For instance, he says:

In the Pastorals, Paul is heresy fighter and caretake of the household of God. He is inwardly focuses on the ekklesia. For Luke, Paul is a public speaker and missionary. His mission is to the world. For Ignatius, Paul is the great martyr. For 1 Clement, Paul is the writer to a fractious Corinthian congregation. He is the wise teacher for Polycarp. In the Acts of Paul and Thecla …. Paul is the challenger of traditional society.

He gives a thick description of the reception of Paul in 3 Corinthians and in Irenaeus. White concludes that discourses on Paul need to be historicized and all remembrances on Paul seen as part of collective memory or effective history. All in all, an interesting book about Pauline historiography and the reception of Paul in the second century.