He is surely right when he says that this Christology has been imported into Paul; there is no textualsupport for it and Fee argues his case in a lengthy appendix. He also reins in the extent of Paul’s AdamChristology as you find it in some authors (Dunn again, and Wright). Yet he adopts more than aminimalist approach that looks only at the explicit Adam texts in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15,particularly by looking at ‘image’ texts, where Adam loses the divine image that the human race once hadand which Christ sets out to restore. However, he makes surprisingly little of 2 Corinthians 4.6.There is far more detail in the book than can even be hinted at in a review. The book has been much

need and the treatment of its theme is nothing less than magisterial. Even if the reader finds something toquibble at – and this would not be surprising in a work of 600 pages of main text – he or she is likely to beswept along by its presentation. How will the book change the scene? No longer will any serious scholarbe able to suggest that Paul has a low, non-incarnational Christology, in which there is no pre-existentChrist involved in creation and later effective in redemption and the process of restoring the divine imageto mankind. I also think we will have seen the last of a Wisdom interpretation of Paul’s Christology, andmaybe a diminution in presentations of Paul’s Adam Christology. This is a book that must be on the shelfof every serious student of Paul, for it is not likely to be superseded for some time.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission. By Davina C. Lopez. Pp. xix, 248, Fortress Press,Minneapolis, 2008, d16.99.

This is an extraordinary book; certainly out of the ordinary. Davina Lopez rejects the so-called idealistexegesis of traditional scholarship to bring the reader down to the social-political and non-idealist earth,ruled in Paul’s time by the Roman empire, and to incorporate insights from feminist, queer, black andpostcolonial interpretative methods. The author would not object to this being called a Lesbianunderstanding of Paul but her intention is that this should be ‘liberationist’.The author calls the book a gender-critical re-imagining of Paul. This involves using iconography and

archaeology to help understand the New Testament, something not quite as innovative as she claims, andusing gender representations from Roman images to, as it were, re-genderise Paul’s language and, indeed,Paul himself. Reimagining Paul in practice involves presenting the reader with a fresh image of Paul butwhich, alas, is presented by way of assertion rather than an analysis of evidence to support an argument.This is re-imagining, then, rather than re-interpreting.At the centre of this, Lopez asks us to imagine that when Paul spoke of the ethne/nations/gentiles he

was not predominantly using the Jewish sense of non-Jews but the Roman sense of conquered non-Roman nations which, of course, included the Jews. In Roman iconography these defeated nations werefrequently represented as women being assaulted (or ‘penetrated’ to useMs Lopez’s oft repeated word) bya divine, armed, Roman male figure who usually represented an emperor. Where one of these nations isrepresented as a defeated, male warrior, illustrated here by a single figure from the breastplate of a statueof Augustus, we are told he has been made effeminate by his stance. In fact this particular stance looksordinary enough to me and his large curly beard makes him look fairly butch. However, the first realproblem comes when the author asks us to imagine that Paul often or sometimes used ‘nations’ in theRoman sense so that Paul, when he finally appears two thirds of the way through the main text, canbecome ‘the apostle to the defeated nations’, including the Jews, rather than our traditional apostle to thegentiles. (And Peter was the apostle to whom? The Romans presumably. He did after all achieve a certainstatus in Rome.) The evidence, however, does not support this imagining. Sticking to Galatians, which isthe only text of Paul’s that Lopez spends any space discussing, and even then only a few passages, the keyverses are 2.7–15 where ethne/nations occurs six times. The reader will see that the nations are clearly andexplicitly identified as the akrobustia/foreskin/uncircumcised and contrasted with the circumcised/Jews. Itis quite right, then, to here translate ‘ta ethne’ consistently as ‘gentiles’ as the NRSV does. It is contrary tothe sense of the letter to translate it as ‘defeated nations’. And there follows after 2.15 the beginning ofPaul’s discussion of righteousness, faith/faithfulness and the law/Torah. The context is Jewish; there isnothing specifically Roman here. Would we not anyway expect Paul’s language to have been influencedby the Jewish scriptures rather than what we later find in Pliny and Tacitus? The Greek Bible that Paulread consistently uses ta ethne to refer to nations other than Israel. Consider the 56 such uses in Psalms, abook that Paul cited often, particularly in Romans.Evidence, however, is not Davina Lopez’s strongpoint. Originality and imagination is. Paul has become

the apostle to the nations conquered by Rome who have been rendered semiotically female in Romanideology. The good news he brings them is unashamedly political, that the nations should free themselvesfrom world-wide slavery. Squabbling among themselves only makes Rome’s task of pacifying the nations

148 BOOK REVIEWS

easier; they should achieve solidarity by rejecting Rome’s ideology of power and masculine aggression.Femaleness becomes the image of suffering, subordination and defeat (being penetrated, as we are told)and as the author wants to redeem Paul from the slander of misogyny and being domineering, she –semiotically – turns him into a woman, one who suffers, as he certainly did. By p.142 she begins referringto Paul as s/he and ‘her’self, she calls him ‘the defeated woman, the laboring mother’ and eventually atp.154 the change is complete when Lopez writes that ‘Mother Paul voices her (sic) allegorical call tofreedom . . .’ etc.Turning Paul into a theological transsexual seems to be based on just one verse in Galatians at 4.19

where he uses the metaphor of suffering birth pains on behalf of his readers, and on his reference to thetwo women in the allegory of 4.21–5.1. The allegory is given a strongly political interpretation: ‘Paulmanipulates the Hagar/Sarah mother entanglement from Genesis to further his unnatural genealogicaljustification of alternative power alignments among the defeated’. And similarly with the much misused3.28 which is not about ‘solidarity among the defeated’ but, as the context shows, is about baptism. Paul’sdiscussion there is about circumcision, the sign of the old covenant, which was only for Jewish, free men(actually they circumcised their slaves too), which he contrasts with baptism, the sign of the new covenant,which is for all races, all ranks of society and both genders.The language of this book is opaque throughout. At times it smacks of academic obscurantism – it is a

doctoral thesis, of course. There are many diagrams which do not aid clarity of meaning. There is littleengagement with what Paul actually wrote and more assertion than argument. There is a huge amount ofrepetition of the main ideas and one admires the ingenuity of the author in managing to say the samethings in so many different ways. But the result is that the reader has to wade through many paragraphs ofthick language in which nothing new is being said. In that sense the book at 173 pages (plus many endnotes) is too long. While the author gets top marks for originality, ingenuity and boldness, she gets thelowest marks for lucidity and argumentation. Paul is a difficult author to deal with at the best of timesand, while this is a harsh review, understanding him is too important for cavalier treatments like this topass uncriticised.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Romans: A Commentary. By Robert Jewett. Pp. lxx, 1140, Minneapolis, Fortress, 2007, $90.00.

This book, the most recently released volume in the prestigious Hermeneia commentary series, containsthe fruit of twenty-six years of research and learning by a distinguished Pauline scholar. Following theseries format, Professor Jewett – after a lengthy introduction – offers for each pericope a literaltranslation, extensive text-critical notes, and ample analysis. The details given in the text-critical notes areparticularly helpful, as Jewett offers explanations for textual variants, many of which reveal varioustheological tendenzen in the early transmission of Romans.Jewett places his interpretation within the context of the ‘Romans debate’ of the last thirty years: Is

Romans best understood as a theological treatise or as a situational letter (i.e., as primarily addressing thesituation in the churches at Rome)? Jewett contends that neither alternative is satisfactory – the former,because it takes insufficient account of Rom 12–16; the latter, because it contradicts Paul’s principle ofnoninterference as articulated in 15:20. Instead, Jewett proposes that Romans is properly understood as‘ambassadorial letter’ in which Paul, as one called to be an apostle, sought support for his proposedmissionary endeavor to bring the gospel to the ‘barbarians’ in Spain.Methodologically, Jewett employs what he calls a ‘sociohistorical and rhetorical approach.’ In the

introduction he posits the critical sociohistorical background for understanding the letter. In terms of thesituation in Rome, Jewett homes in on the tensions and struggles between Jewish Christians and theGentile majority (caused in large part by Claudius’s expulsion of Jewish Christian leaders from Rome in49 C.E. and their subsequent return after Nero became emperor). Such tensions and struggles revealed,among other things, that the Roman Christians themselves were caught up in the cultural mores ofcompetition for superiority. Jewett also insists that the cultural situation of Spain be taken into account.Indeed, this insistence is an important contribution to the study of Romans. Prominent features of thecultural situation of Spain include the lack of Jewish population (which would undercut Paul’s normalstrategy of beginning his mission work in the synagogue) and language barriers.Jewett’s rhetorical approach is evident at both the macro and micro levels of the text of Romans. At the

macro level he proposes the following five-part rhetorical structure: 1:1–12 is the exordium; 1:13–15 thenarratio; 1:16–17 the propositio or thesis statement; 1:18–15:13 the probatio or ‘proof,’ which is furthersubdivided into four major sections; and 15:14–16:23 the peroratio. Of particular note is his insistence that15:14ff forms the rhetorical climax and highpoint of the letter and that chap. 16 provides critical data forreconstructing some of the Christian assemblies in Rome. At the micro level Jewett expertly explains

BOOK REVIEWS 149