In Mein Kampf, Hitler presented his Damascus Road experience, and in doing so he put himself on a par with the real founder of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus. Both narratives include a period of temporary blindness, a highly symbolic theme in the Christian tradition. Both stories contain a conversation with some divine entity. In Paul’s case, God speaks to him from the outside in the form of a vision. In Hitler’s case, God, in the form of Hitler’s own conscience, thunders his commands from the inside. In Mein Kampf, it is not explicitly said that this was a vision per se, but newspaper reports from 1923 stated exactly that. It is very likely that these reports were based on interviews with Hitler himself or someone close to him and therefore represented the view that Hitler wished to give of himself. This obviously served as a propaganda tool as well. Both in the case of Paul and in the case of Hitler, these voices are said to have urged them to let go of the past and present, and instead focus their energy on the future.

This chapter evaluates the landscape of Pauline studies, demonstrating the need for reevaluation of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between Israel, the Jews, and the non-Jewish individuals receiving the spirit through Paul’s ministry. Contrary to many modern readings, Paul’s gospel is not systematically opposed to “legalism” or “ethnocentrism,” and his treatment of (former) gentiles as descendants not only of Abraham but of Israel begs explanation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the composition and interpretive capacity of the recipients of Paul’s letters and a discussion of key terms in the Pauline letters.

This chapter summarizes Paul’s gospel of divine self-sacrifice, giving special attention to the character of the righteous God responsible for his gospel. It identifies how divine righteousness figures in a solution to the human predicament of the corrosive powers of sin and death by offering a remedy in reparative self-sacrifice. The needed reparative sacrifice begins with divine self-sacrifice that includes the sacrifice of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, but it does not end there. It calls for human reciprocity in self-sacrifice to God, as voluntary sharing in the life-giving obedience of Jesus Christ to God. The chapter identifies how God agitates in human history to attract the cooperation of humans in such reparative self-sacrifice. This divine effort is at the center of God’s righteous love for humans, regardless of their national, ethnic, or religious background. Paul focused his calling from God on the good news that God has intervened in human history, climactically in Jesus Christ, to attract humans to cooperation with this good news.

The concept of Israel is central to the development of Judaism and Christianity, but the boundaries of Israel and Israelite identity were the source of significant conflict throughout the Second Temple period. This chapter argues that mapping the concept of Israel in the Second Temple period requires a recursive process that first examines the biblical constructions of Israel and then evaluates how later participants appropriated, performed, and developed thaose traditions. This introduction then outlines how this work aims to accomplish these tasks and concludes with a discussion of the equally difficult term Ioudaios (Jew/Judaean) and its relation to the concept of Israel.

Discussions of the post-exilic period have too frequently assumed that after the Assyrian campaigns of the eighth century, "Israel" was effectively redefined, as those from the kingdom of Judah were all that remained, with the result that "Israelite" and "Jew" became synonymous in this period. This chapter argues that the presence of a competing "Israel" in the region of Samaria and Shechem made this impossible, as the group that eventually came to be known (to outsiders) as Samaritans claimed to be Israelites descended from the northern tribes of Joseph. Neither Jews nor Samaritans, however, regarded Samaritans as Jews, further highlighting the continued distinction between these terms and providing compelling evidence of the persistence of non-Jewish Israelites throughout the Second Temple period and beyond. The chapter concludes with an examination of the ethnonym "Hebrew," arguing that this term, which could apply to Samaritans and Jews alike, served as a linguistic marker in the Second Temple period and therefore overlaps with both "Jew" and "Israelite" but is synonymous with neither.

This chapter introduces introduce the critical issues in the study of Paul and his letters, including the problems to be solved in historical reconstructions of his ministry, the standard approaches to determining the authorship of the letters, his place within the Judaism of his time, and the so-called “New Perspective” on Paul.

Here we convey the variety and complexity of late-antique Greek and Latin correspondences, tracing their antecedents from Classical times, their indebtedness to the apostle Paul, and subsequently to the post-apostolic writers. In the course of this overview we consider the considerable influence which Adolf Deissmann wielded in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and subsequently, on the question of what exactly a letter is. Now we are more cautious about writing and speaking about ‘letters’ and the ‘letter-genre’. Our next step in this chapter was to attempt a taxonomy of the more than 9,000 literary letters from Christian Late Antiquity, beginning with the category of dissenting voices.

Dunn identifies two foundational types ofmotivating experiences in earliest Christianity: postmortem appearances of Jesus and the first disciples’ Pentecost experiences. He regards the experiences of the apostle Paul as particularly illustrative of early Christianity, featuring the liberating power of the Spirit and of being “in Christ,” experiencing the Spirit of God as the Spirit of Jesus, and the shared experience of believers as members of the body of Christ.

This essay introduces the study of Paul and his letters to a non-specialist audience, overviewing the main issues that require negotiation and consideration whenever Paul’s letters are studied, including sections entitled: Why did Paul write letters? What letters did Paul write? Did other people contribute to Paul’s letters? To what extent is Paul’s discourse stable? How much do we know about Paul’s life? and To what extent can we make use of Acts?