About this Book

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a theoretical and methodological examination of the legacy of the Apostle Paul in which he explores the way Paul was remembered in the century after his death, as well as the discursive practices that accompanied claims about the "real" Paul in a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested. Examining myriad sources both ancient and modern, White charts the rise and fall of various narratives about Paul--such as the "Pauline Captivity" narrative - and argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the "real" Paul. Rather, he shows, they possessed mediations of Paul as a persona - idealized images transmitted in the context of communal memories of "the Apostle." Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were particularly constitutive of their collective cultures. In this book White traces how Pauline traditions (written and oral) developed and made their way into early Christian rhetoric about the "real" Paul.