Christoph, your first book was Hidden Criticism?<\/em> about the alleged counter-imperial ethos of the New Testament. Your latest volume is Paulus als Erzahler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe<\/em><\/a> (English: Paul as Story-Teller: A Narratological Perspective on Paul\u2019s Letters<\/em>). What brought you to this topic?<\/strong><\/p>\n In some sense, I wanted to do something quite similar in both cases, namely to scrutinize very influential approaches to Pauline exegesis on a fundamental level. (Note the question marks in both titles). Moreover, both paradigms are of course based to a large degree on the work of N. T. Wright, who has been an inspirational figure for my research in several respects and on whose \u201cPaul and the Faithfulness of God\u201d we had prepared, together with J. Thomas Hewitt, a collection of essays, evaluating his proposal from several angles. There\u2019s one important difference though. In Hidden Criticism?<\/em> I aimed at offering an assessment of the general plausibility of the hypothesis that Paul used the subtext of his letters for criticism against the Roman Empire and I discussed important methodological aspects. However, I intentionally did not make judgements on the explanatory potential of the hypothesis for individual passages \u2013 and thus on the overall probability of such a subtext in specific verses. For that, I offered an exemplary treatment of 2. Cor 2:14 in my second monograph, Paul\u2019s Triumph<\/em> (Peeters, 2017). In my present book, by contrast, I am doing all these things together: I try to lay a solid theoretical foundation, attempt to sketch a reliable method, and apply it to a ton of texts from every letter in the Pauline corpus.<\/p>\n I remember there being a lot on Paul and narrative back in the 90s and 00s, I think particularly of Bruce Longenecker\u2019s Narrative Dynamics in Paul, Ben Witherington\u2019s work on Paul\u2019s theology, and few other studies about narratives in Paul\u2019s letters like Romans by scholars such as Katherine Grieb and Sylvia Keesmatt and on Philemon by Norman Petersen. Did the discussion on Paul and narrative die with a whimper? Where are we at now on Paul and narrative?<\/strong><\/p>\n First, I don\u2019t really think the influence of the \u201cnarrative approach\u201d has receded over the last decade. There is still a dozen or so new theses published every year that have a \u201cnarrative\u201d in the subtitle and claim to build on the work by Hays and Wright. But you are right that the heyday of the methodological discussion is over. It seems like the senior scholars have made up their mind and junior scholars mainly work within set paths the direction of which has already been determined. And that\u2019s actually quite unfortunate because I believe that the discussion you are referring to did not yield any conclusive results that we could just mechanically build upon. To the contrary, it is my impression that a lot of that debate had narrowed down on intertextuality \u2013 fizzling out over endless discussions about which of Hays\u2019s criteria for echoes (and associated stories) were valid and which weren\u2019t. That misses the point, in my opinion. Not only because Hays\u2019s criteria seem to me to be irredeemably inadequate for what they are meant for,\u00a0 intertextuality should only be a small part of the issue. The issue should not even be methodology in general. A good method leads you to your goal reliably. But you first need a theoretical basis that specifies said goal. And we\u2019ve never had a solid narratological discussion about what actually constitutes narrative, how it relates to the fact that Paul wrote letters (\u201cnot gospels!\u201d as many are quick to add), and what it might even mean for a story to be \u201cimplicit\u201d \u2013 a narrative substructure or worldview story. I am very confident that if we transform the largely pre-theoretical \u201cnarrative approach\u201d into a \u201cnarratological approach,\u201d i.e. into a perspective that takes into account the current research on narrativity, there\u2019s an immense potential for Pauline exegesis. My book aims at making that case and offering a sketch of how such a paradigm might look like.<\/p>\n You say that Paul has a \u201cmultitude of explicit stories.\u201d What are those stories and why do they matter for understanding Paul?<\/strong><\/p>\n First a word on explicit stories in general. When it comes to narratives and Paul, our field is pretty much divided into two camps. There are those who insist that it does not make much sense to speak of \u201cstories\u201d in relation to the apostle\u2019s writings, given that he\u00a0never actually tells anything explicitly<\/em>. After all, he is writing letters,not gospels, and he is interested mostly in making arguments for his theological ideas. The other group of scholars (following Richard B. Hays and N. T. Wright in particular) admits that Paul does not produce explicit narratives to any notable extent, but still insists on the value of the category, claiming that\u00a0implicit stories<\/em>\u00a0are of the uttermost importance for understanding the apostle\u2019s writings. Now, I argue that a careful theoretical, methodological, and empirical analysis confirms indeed the heuristic value of the concept of implicit narratives.<\/em>\u00a0However, while I agree with the narrative approach with regard to what they affirm, I also disagree strongly with what both its supporters and its critics deny: Paul tells a lot\u00a0of explicit stories\u00a0<\/em>in his letters.<\/p>\n Second, I think there is a prima facie case to be made for taking into account these stories if we want to talk about narratives in relation to Paul. After all, why shouldn\u2019t we? Hays and Wright both try to explain why they favor implicit stories, but at this specific point their reasoning is very weak, containing even a couple of category mistakes. It seems to me that they were so annoyed by people telling them that narrativity was of no importance in relation to Paul because, after all, he never tells a story except in Gal 1-2 (a point that, for example, Francis Watson made), they just admitted that in order to avoid an additional fight and be able to move on what they are interested in most. But even if we don\u2019t want to give preference to explicit stories over implicit stories, it just isn\u2019t clear to me why we should ignore them altogether.<\/p>\n Third, I think a very strong case can be made for why the narrative approach should actually begin<\/em> with explicit stories. It\u2019s simply what narratologists usually deal with. We\u2019ve got excellent conceptual tools to deal with stories in this usual sense. And if in analyzing them, using even a rather strict definition for explicit narratives, we perhaps find something that points us towards implicit stories \u2013 all the better! An approach to stories in Paul that aims at proving some implicit structures from the beginning is unlikely to convince anyone. If, by contrast, even the most conservative approach constantly makes us want to use narrative terms and concepts in relations to phenomena in the text that are \u201calmost narratives,\u201d we\u2019ve found a very good empirical reason for reconsidering this rather strange category of \u201cimplicit stories\u201d or \u201cnarratives in non-narrative texts.\u201d And \u2013 spoiler alarm \u2013 that\u2019s exactly what happened to me during the research for that book.<\/p>\n Does Paul have a \u201cgrand story\u201d like still-in-exile, new exodus, apocalyptic combat myth, or something like that?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I do believe that there is a ton of implicit stories in Paul\u2019s letters. By that I mean that there are passages that do not fulfill my rather strict definition of what constitutes a narrative but that nevertheless make us assume that Paul could <\/em>have told a story about the events that appear in the text. For example, if he exhorts his readers to perform certain actions, he can\u2019t \u2013 yet! \u2013 tell the story of how they did it. But in some passages it is very clear (cf. e.g. Phil 2:16!) that Paul imagines himself telling this \u201csuccess story\u201d in the future. So he clearly simulates <\/em>an act of narration in the process of writing some passages, even though these mental narratives \u2013 I call them \u201cproto-narratives\u201d (following German narratologists K\u00f6ppe and Kindt) \u2013 come to expression on the surface level of the text fragmentarily. Now, I hope that I\u2019ve put enough evidence together that my readers will become convinced that proto-narratives are real and that they are actually of immense importance in interpreting Paul. (For example, I believe that the German commentary literature on the disputed letters in that corpus discovers a lot of incoherence mainly because they are analyzing the text only with reference to its potential Vorlage but do not take seriously the narrative world that the text itself demands us to imagine.) And \u2013 yet another spoiler \u2013 I think Hays\u2019s category of narrative substructures is indeed a very useful concept with respect to Paul. I am just not sure how frequently it occurs \u2013 and that\u2019s actually quite important for our exegetical judgements. Because (see here<\/a> for details) if narrative substructures occur in, let\u2019s say, half of all verses, it\u2019s fine if the hypothesis explains the evidence \u2013 Paul\u2019s strange formulations \u2013 only slightly better than the alternative. If, however, narrative substructures are actually quite rare, then it\u2019s not enough for it to be the \u201cbetter explanation\u201d of the text \u2013 it needs to be way better! I think that for some passages I\u2019ve demonstrated that this is the case. But a lot of research still needs to be done. And then there is the grand story that you mention. It took me quite some time to explicate Wright\u2019s proposal in narratological terms, which was necessary to evaluate it against the backdrop of my research. As I interpret his view it\u2019s basically equivalent to postulating that all the many proto-narratives (and explicit narratives) that we find in Paul\u2019s letter can actually be combined into a unified whole. In other words, we are encouraged to believe that at some point Paul mentally simulated the narration of such a big story that in his letters finds expression only fragmentarily. That\u2019s a big claim and there are many important distinctions to be kept in mind. We can not, in any case, simply assume that just because we can combine certain proto-narratives, they\u2019ve also been a unity in Paul\u2019s mind at some point. I think Wright has put forward a very bold proposal and it remains to be seen how much of his reconstruction of Paul\u2019s guiding proto-narrative can be confirmed through careful exegetical work.<\/p>\n If Paul told one story to a Greek in Ephesus and another story to a Jew in Antioch, what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, that\u2019s a big question \u2013 that I would like to answer by just commenting on a very important aspect that is included in it. We\u2019ve got only Paul\u2019s letters but we can be sure that in his personal interaction he also told stories (and described situations and argued for certain ideas). What I found very interesting in my analysis is that time and again we can see how Paul\u2019s explicit stories presuppose prior acts of narration \u2013 mostly from his time with the communities. (Something we find just as well in the disputed letters, by the way. Again, whether you believe that\u2019s a hallmark of authenticity or not, it at least is reason to really take seriously the narrative world created by these texts if we want to understand them.) What we can see is that Paul doesn\u2019t usually tell stories because he wants to inform his readers that certain events happened in the past. And that\u2019s quite untypical indeed for narratives because their prototypical function is to inform \u2013 and it seems to me that part of the reason why many people think that Paul did not tell a lot of stories is because the narratives that he included in his letters don\u2019t inform but rather aim at changing the evaluation of situations that the addresses already know about. Often, these evaluating narratives support arguments, which in turn have the function of affecting behavior. (Sometimes the story itself is supposed to do that job.)<\/p>\n To sum up: The pragmatics of Paul\u2019s stories is a really fascinating aspect of his narration \u2013 and something that might be overlooked if you mainly perceive of the individual stories as fragments of a large implicit narrative and your main goal is to synthesize it somehow on the basis of these fragments. Thus, while I think the focus on explicit narratives naturally leads to implicit narratives and at least some of the concepts \u2013 and results \u2013 by Hays and Wright, I also think they are a very worthy object of study in themselves.<\/p>\n When can we expect an English translation of your book?<\/strong><\/p>\n There won\u2019t be a typical translation. It\u2019s just too big. But I have written two blog posts aimed at readers who only know a little German and still want to profit from it. Here (https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/how-to-read-my-40797524<\/a>) I tell you which passages you should concentrate on, depending on your main interests. And here (https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/posts\/learn-or-improve-40659496<\/a>) I explain how with the help of a wonderful app \u2013 LingQ \u2013 (the only one you will ever need again to learn\/acquire your modern languages) you can read my book pretty easily \u2013 and automatically drastically improve your theological German in so doing! Beyond that, I\u2019ve signed contracts with Eerdmans to produce one book that focuses on the debate surrounding Hays\/Wright and another one that will offer an introduction to the text grammar section of Heinrich von Siebenthal\u2019s new Ancient Greek Grammar<\/em>, something that also constitutes a big part of the German book because I try to explicate the narratological category of narrativity in more linguistic terms. I can\u2019t tell yet when I will be able to finish these manuscripts, but you can certainly accelerate their production by supporting me on Patreon<\/a>, by helping me to take on less side jobs.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christoph, your first book was Hidden Criticism? about the alleged counter-imperial ethos of the New Testament. Your latest volume is Paulus als Erzahler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe (English: Paul as Story-Teller: A Narratological Perspective on Paul\u2019s Letters). What brought you to this topic? In some sense, I wanted to do something quite similar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":16381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n