theological reflection on the results of this practice. Instead, in a reductive move, theygive priority to the Hebrew version as, e.g., when we read that ‘the Greek and Latinversions of the Song of Songs diverge significantly from the Hebrew, and the variantsoften suggest interpretations that would not be supported by the Masoretic Text’(p. xvi). True enough: but it is decidedly odd to think that support from theMasoreticversion would be needed, helpful or even relevant when fully half of the Christianauthors cited in the volume died at least two centuries before the Masoretes evenbegan the centuries-long process of fixing and pointing Hebrew Scripture. Giving thissort of priority to the Hebrew text is at odds with the explicit (and correct) assertionthat the ‘Jewish Greek Bible [i.e., the Septuagint] (or translations based on it) was thebible of the early church’ (p. xv). The contrast between practical deference to theHebrew text on the one hand, and recognition that the Hebrew text was not itselfformative for the early and medieval Christian commentators on the other, points upa fundamental question about this series: how can these historical commentatorsspeak meaningfully to the modern church (or rather churches) if, from the word go,we moderns feel squeamish about the Christian versions of Scripture when theydiverge from the later Jewish version?That question may strike the reader of Norris’s fine compilation as straining at a

gnat whilst swallowing a camel. Norris and Wilken clearly expect the reader to copesuccessfully with allegorical exegesis and other techniques of interpretation that donot stir tremendous enthusiasm these days. Indeed, the very relevance of the seriesdepends upon readers being able to relate in some way to such foreign approaches toScripture. For example, in his introductory remarks, Wilken calls attention to the factthat ancient and early medieval Christian interpretation operated on a Christocentrichermeneutic; he secures his point with a passage from Hugh of St Victor: ‘All ofDivine Scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ, because all of DivineScripture speaks of Christ, and all of Divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ’ (p. xii). Theability to accept in all seriousness such a claim is crucial to the mission of this series,and Norris and Wilken do much to explain why such a foreign approach to Scriptureis worthy of being taken seriously. I wonder, though, if it is possible to treatChristological exegesis as anything other than a pious exercise in devotion when thereis real uncertainty about the adequacy of the very texts that the commentators used.

University of Durham A. M. C. Casiday

From Hope to Despair in Thessalonica: Situating 1 and 2 Thessalonians (SNTS 126). ByColin R Nicholl. Pp. xx, 315, Cambridge UP, 2004, $80.00.

Theological Hermeneutics and 1 Thessalonians (SNTS 133). By Angus Paddison. Pp. xvi,230, Cambridge UP 2005, d48.

Reading Romans through the Centuries: From the Early Church to Karl Barth. Edited byJeffrey P Greenman and Timothy Larsen. Pp. 223, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids,Michigan, 2005. $24.99.

Social-Science Commentary of the Letters of Paul. By Bruce J Malina and John J Pilch.Pp. x, 417, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2006, $27.00.

Re-Examining Paul’s Letters: The History of the Pauline Correspondence. By Bo Reickeand edited by David P Moessner and Ingalisa Reicke. Pp. xii, 164, Trinity PressInternational, 2001. Paperback $20.

A Feminist Companion to Paul. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine. Pp. xi, 227, T&T Clark,London, 2004, d25.

Colin Nicholl focuses, predictably enough, on the eschatology of Paul’s two earliestletters and, because of apparent differences between the two, considers whether Paul

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really did write the second. To do this he identifies the likely character of thecommunity in Thessalonica and the context – social, historical and theological – forthe correspondence. His method is to consider each of a range of solutions suggestedin recent study to the various problems found in the text and he refutes them, so far ashe can, one by one until he is left with the most plausible hypothesis for a context thatmakes sense of Paul’s letters. The hypothesis he adopts allows him to preserve theauthenticity of the second letter.Nicholl’s treatment of 1 Thessalonians concentrates on the eschatological sections

in chapters 4 and 5 where their hope for salvation at the ‘day of the Lord’ has beenundermined by the death of members of the community. More than that, maybe thedeath of some believers has indicated God’s disfavour and presages the damnation ofthe whole community! That the dead might have missed out on salvation suggests thatthis young community had not been very well instructed in Paul’s gospel. So Paul tellsthem that ‘we who are alive . . . shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. Thedead will rise first, then we who are alive . . .’. So Paul wrote to strengthen their hope.By the time his letter had arrived the situation had moved on to a second crisis.

Evidently someone with authority had told the Thessalonians that the day of the Lordhad been and gone and they had missed it. Nicholl thinks this suggestion might havecome in a forged letter with Paul’s name attached (2 Thess 2.2); hence Paul’sstatement at the end of his second letter that he authenticates his own letters byclosing them in his own hand. (This suggests that Paul fired off a lot more letters thanhave survived.) The first letter did not by this stage meet the crisis of belief inThessalonica and a second letter was needed and had to be written quickly, maybeonly weeks after the first.An important move here is the chapter that argues, against the majority opinion,

that the refusal by some in Thessalonica to work had nothing to do witheschatological belief but was the act of feckless semi-believers sponging off thewealthy in the community. So these letters respond to two stages of a single crisis: ‘inthe first stage the Thessalonians were asking a question concerning the timing of theDay of the Lord (1 Thess 5.1), and in the second stage they had succumbed to whatappears to be a particular answer to that question, the pronouncement that the Dayhad come (2 Thess 2.2)’ [p. 16]. The second letter is an appendix to the first and there isno reason to suppose the second is pseudonymous.This is an enlightening argument. The book closes with a lengthy appendix

reprinted from the JTS arguing that the mysterious ‘restrainer’ of 2 Thess 2.7 isMichael the Archangel. Would the Christians in Thessalonica have understood thisobscure reference? Nicholl suggests that they knew their Old Testament prophecieswell enough (p. 248), however this does not fit at all well with the argument in themain body of the book where he explains their crisis of belief (‘FromHope to Despair’as the title says) by calling them ‘a young, insecure Gentile community still coming toterms with Jewish-Christian eschatological concepts’ (p. 143). So, perhaps, theThessalonians didn’t after all understand Paul’s reference to the restrainer and theman of lawlessness.Angus Paddison might well disapprove of Nicholl’s book which is firmly bound

into historical-critical method and recovering the original context of the letter todiscover what it might have meant for those Thessalonian believers. Paddison wantsto read 1 Thessalonians theologically and he precedes his exposition with a justifiedbut perhaps overstated criticism of historical method. His criticism, however, is not ofhistorical method but of historicism. His objection to historicism is that it restricts themeaning and significance of a text to its original context and he identifies KristerStendhal as a prime exponent of this together with James Dunn, though Dunn’srecent attempt to bring the faith of the author(s) of scripture and the faith of theoriginal readers into play suggests that there might not be such a gulf between him andAngus Paddison.

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By reducing the meaning of a text to what it meant for the original readers and towhat it might mean for us today if we find ourselves in an analogous situation,historicist interpretation tend to miss the point of the text. Biblical texts are scripture,they are a revelation of God through Christ and, Paddison asserts, are a well ofinexhaustible meaning for later generations of believers. To exemplify this he gives asummary of two pre-modern interpretations of 1 Thessalonians, by Thomas Aquinasand Jean Calvin, who would certainly be ignored by those who think no decent NewTestament interpretation was done before the Enlightenment. For all theirlimitations, Thomas and Calvin both focus on the subject matter of the letter, whichis primarily Christology and eschatology, and interpret what Paul had to say aboutthese theological themes through other things that Paul wrote in Calvin’s case, andthrough the whole of Christian scripture in Thomas’s case.Paddison’s theological exposition of Paul’s letter is less than 40 pages long; the rest

is a hermeneutical prolegomenon but is something that all ‘historicist’ (in Paddisonand Barr’s sense) critics should allow themselves to be challenged by. (I might addthat both Nicholl’s and Paddison’s monographs have the tiresome schematisation andrepetition that is commonplace in doctoral dissertations that have been prepared forpublication.) Paddison likens scripture to an icon that draws a sympathetic believerinto the mystery of God. The theological subject matter can speak to a reader in anyage and new meaning can always emerge in new situations. The author draws onwriters from a wide range of Church traditions (Barth, Rahner and especiallyOrthodox writers) and frommany of the Fathers. It is admirably eclectic and the bookis important, not so much for it says about 1 Thessalonians, as the pathway it opensfor theological interpretations of the New Testament.Those who are drawn to Paddison’s theological approach might well want to follow

it by Reading Romans through the Centuries in which the editors, Jeffrey Greenmanand Timothy Larsen have collected a series of conference papers on the commentariesor published lectures on Romans by a variety of authors from Ambrosiaster, JohnChrysostom, Augustine, Luther, Tyndale and a few others. As with Angus Paddisonwe have accounts of Thomas Aquinas and Calvin, but this time on Romans. All theexpositors are North American apart from John Webster, now at Aberdeen, with thefinal chapter on Karl Barth. This chapter can profitably be read with Paddison’shermeneutical discussion because Webster does not recount what Barth said aboutthe text of Romans but is concerned to argue that Barth’s is a commentary – atheological commentary – on Romans and not some sort of sideways dogmatics, andin doing so he sets out what Barth thought biblical interpretation should be about: anunderstanding of the matter (Sache) of the text.Advocates of a theological interpretation of scripture will be less pleased with the

reductionism of BruceMalina and John Pilch’s social-scientific commentary on Paul’sletters. Theirs is not a theological but, you might say, a ‘socialist’ interpretation, in thenon-political sense that the meaning of the text is reduced to the analysis of its originalsocial context. The introduction tells us that ‘To focus on Paul’s ‘‘theology’’ [what dothe inverted commas signify?] rather than on the social interrelationship between thechange agent and his clients is to miss the thrust of his letters’. Note that the ‘changeagent’ above is Paul. In the current jargon Paul is no longer an apostle of the Churchbut a ‘Jesus group change agent’. Nor does it inspire confidence to read that ‘the letterto the Romans is really about travel arrangements’.The texts that the authors use to represent Paul are reduced to the undisputed seven

so, without discussion, out go the Pastoral Letters and Ephesians as you might expect,but also Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. Some of these seven are seen as compositedocuments incorporating other smaller missives. Some aspects of the description ofthe social environment are also surprising. For example, Ioudaioi, usually translatedas ‘Jews’, is here said to indicate Judeans who live in or near Jerusalem, while theHellenes are not ‘Gentiles’ but Israelites who speak Greek, who have adopted Hellenic

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customs and values, who are then civilised, but who live in the Diaspora among non-Israelites, i.e. pagans. Apparently Paul had nothing to say to Gentiles and little aboutGentiles in his letters: ‘Paul’s ethnocentrism precludes social systemic concern for‘‘Gentiles’’ ’. But apply this to the first two chapters of Romans and what follows,reading Ioudaioi as uncultured Aramaic speaking Jews who live in the homeland, andHellenes as cultured Greek-speaking Jews in the Diaspora. It doesn’t work. ‘Whatadvantage has the Judean Jew [over the Diaspora Jew]? Much in every way . . . theJudeans are entrusted with the oracles of God’ (Romans 3.1f.); and the Diaspora Jewsare not? In fact Paul explicitly refers to Gentiles (ta ethne) in a number of places inRomans, e.g. 1.5–6; 1.13 and 15.15–16, and in other places explains his own people,the Israelites, to non-Jewish Christians readers, 9.3–4; 10.1–2 and 11.23, 28 & 32.From the analysis of Paul’s letters in this book you would never guess that there wereany baptised Gentiles at that time, nor how any ever came into the Church at all.Malina and Pilch have produced a seriously skewed and unreliable reading of Paul.

Consider a passage as rich as Romans 6.1–10 and their single page of anodyne notes.Or their comments near the end on ‘resurrection’, largely in terms of burial andmourning rituals in Israel, which are vapid compared with some recent theologicaldiscussion of what resurrection meant for the early Christians. I also disliked theirrepeated description of Israel’s God being ‘in the sky’ which reminded me of RichardDawkin’s slurs on Christianity. And their insistence that Paul was a henotheist, not amonotheist, and so much else. This is a bad book.Bo Reicke accepts all thirteen of the Pauline letters as being by the man himself.

Reicke died in 1987 and was working on the central part of this book shortly beforewith a view to publication . He doesn’t have a theological agenda that requires him toascribe apostolic authorship to the thirteen canonical letters and he applies rigoroushistorical argument to the evidence in these letters and Acts to construct a plausiblehistorical context and sequence into which they all fit, using the names, places andcircumstances mentioned in those documents. Reicke realises that Paul could usedifferent styles for different circumstances (‘all things to all people’) and suggests thata later generation of Christians would not have been impressed by the fakery of usingthe names of those now dead. He certainly makes a most plausible scenario thatbegins with 2 Thessalonians in the summer of AD 52 followed by 1 Thessalonians afew months later, with 1 Timothy in the middle of the Corinthian correspondence inAD 56, Titus in 58 just after Romans, and 2 Timothy written from captivity inCaesarea in 60. He claims Colossians and Ephesians come from AD 59 (Colossae wasdestroyed by an earthquake in 61) and Philippians was written during house arrest inRome in 61 or 62.The problem here is that Reicke seems to take little account of the very different

vocabulary and grammar of the Pastoral Letters compared with the definitelyauthentic letters, as set out by Harrison as long ago as 1921, nor the difficulty ofascribing Colossians and Ephesians to the same hand because of the differentmeaning given in each of these letters to the same words (e.g. mysterion, oikonomia).Nor would everyone by any means agree with Reicke that the issues dealt with in thePastorals fit easily into the development of the Church in the 50s. The development ofbishops and deacons is more likely to come from the latter part of the first century inthe period before St Ignatius of Antioch; paradoxically it is usually evangelicals whodefend the Pauline authorship of these letters and who then have to accept that theChurch had an episcopacy comfortably before the death of Paul.Reicke’s argument is likely to prove tedious for the general reader; the

concentration on times, places, names, associations and contexts will be moreappealing to those who are doing detailed scholarship on the authorship of Paul’sletters. This section is preceded and concluded by a reprint of five articles germane tothe central issue of Judeo-Christianity and the Jewish establishment of the first century,and the historical background of the apostolic council and the events that came after.

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One characteristic of everything that has been reviewed so far is that it is all by men,with the sole exception of the chapter on Augustine’s reading of Romans which is byPamela Bright of Concordia University, Montreal. The Feminist Companion to Pauledited by Amy-Jill Levine redresses the balance, though two of the chapters are bymen (Daniel Boyarin and Richard Hays) which shows you don’t have to be a womanto discuss gender issues. It is a largely North American collection with contributionsfrom Basel (Luzia Sutter Rehmann) and from Kassel (Luise Schottroff). Theintroduction forces the contributions into an iconoclastic mould but many are in factmoderate in tone. A view emerges, first voiced by Boyarin, that Paul may have had anidealistic view of gender, identified with life in the spirit, in which sexual differenceswould disappear and human life would revert to something like that of ‘the primalandrogyne’ of Genesis 1.27 and that this ideal might be anticipated in the celibate life.But this is an eschatological view and for most of us the practical way is marriage andsex. This life ‘in the flesh’ is lower but not wrong. This line is broadly followed byHaysand Margaret McDonald and the chief source is 1 Corinthians 7. Boyarin thinks thatin practical terms Paul is not substantially different from views in Rabbinic Judaism,and Galatians 3.28 (‘neither male not female’) does not propose a feminist politicalagenda.A couple of chapters are scarcely about feminist issues: SaraWinter looks at slavery

in Philemon adopting the ‘new’ interpretation that Onesimus is not a run-away slavebut a fellow-worker with Paul for whom manumission from slavery is requested asthat status is not compatible with being a Christian ‘brother’. She then tenuouslyconnects Paul’s rejection of slavery with his views on women, a connection which is astenuous as Faith Kirkham Hawkins’ after her discussion of food offered to idols in1 Cor 8. Beverly Roberts Gaventa sketches a project – no more than that – onmaternal language in Paul; Luzia Rehmann looks at the appropriation of birthlanguage in Romans 8.18.25 and thinks Paul demeans women by doing so. DianaSwancutt looks at Paul’s condemnation of some sexual behaviour in Romans1.18–2.16 in a fresh way by seeing his criticism directed against a hypothetical andstereotyped Stoic teacher, the like of which might have been attractive to Gentileconverts in Rome. Kathleen Corley gives an account of inheritance rights in theancient world to judge whether uioyesia in Romans 8 & 9 should be translated‘adoption as sons’ or ‘adoption as children’ and decides that the latter, useful as itmight be in community worship, does not adequately convey what Paul had to say ina first century context.When Luise Schottroff writes early in the last chapter that ‘As a concept, ‘‘law-free

Gentile Christianity’’ is anti-Jewish, misogynist, and dominating’, you know that youare in for a bumpy ride. The style is fairly belligerent as she points away from atraditional Lutheran interpretation of Paul (a move already firmly established inBritain and North America since E. P. Sanders’ celebrated book), for she sees herselfas a Gentile Christian woman who wants to live under the Torah, as a type of Jewishproselyte. But in the end the chapter is rather disappointing as she adopts anaggressive prise de position rather than develops an argument as she closes what is avery mixed and not entirely satisfactory collection.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Christology and Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark (SNTS 135). By Suzanne WattsHenderson. Pp. xv, 287, Cambridge University Press, 2006, $90.00.

The SNTS monograph series generally attracts a number of re-worked doctoraldissertations. This item in the series is no exception, SuzanneWatts Henderson havingcompleted a dissertation – on the Markan disciples, significantly – under Joel Marcus

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