This exciting new interpretation of Pauls Letter to the Romans approaches Pauls most famous letter from one of the newest scholarly positions within Pauline Studies: The Radical New Perspective on Paul (also known as Paul within Judaism). As a point of departure, the author takes Pauls self-designation in 11:13 as apostle to the gentiles as so determining for Pauls mission that the audience of the letter is perceived to be exclusively gentile. The study finds confirmation of this reading-strategy in the letters construction of the interlocutor from chapter 2 onwards. Even in 2:17, where Paul describes the interlocutor as someone who calls himself a Jew, it requests to perceive this person as a gentile who presents himself as a Jew and not an ethnic Jew. If the interlocutor is perceived in this way throughout the letter, the dialogue between Paul and the interlocutor can be perceived as a continuous, unified and developing dialogue. In this way, this interpretation of Romans sketches out a position against a more disparate and fragmentary interpretation of Romans.

The Studia Philonica Annual is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of Hellenistic Judaism, particularly the writings and thought of the Hellenistic-Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria (circa 15 BCE to circa 50 CE).

A wide-ranging study of the interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans throughout history, from Origen to Karl Barth. In anticipation of his Illuminations commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Stephen Westerholm offers this extensive survey of the reception history of Romans. After two initial chapters discussing the letter’s textual history and its first readers in Rome (a discussion carried out in dialogue with the Paul-within-Judaism stream of scholarship), Westerholm provides a thorough overview of over thirty of the most influential, noteworthy, and representative interpretations of Romans from nearly two thousand years of history. Interpreters surveyed include Origen, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Locke, Cotton Mather, John Wesley, and Karl Barth. Bearing in mind that Paul did not write for scholars, Westerholm includes in his study interpreters like Philipp Jakob Spener and Richard Baxter who addressed more popular audiences, as well as an appendix on a remarkable series of 372 sermons on Romans by beloved British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. A further aim of the book is to illustrate the impact of this New Testament letter on Christian thought, supporting Westerholm’s claim that “the history of the interpretation of Romans is, in important areas and to a remarkable extent, the history of Christian theology.”

Israel and the Nations: Paul's Gospel in the Context of Jewish Expectation provides various perspectives of leading contemporary scholars concerning Paul’s message, particularly his expressed expectation of the end-time redemption of Israel and its relation to the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations, in the context of Jewish eschatological expectation. The contributors engage the increasingly contentious enigmas relating to Paul’s Jewishness: had his perception of living in a new era in Christ and anticipating an imminent final consummation moved him beyond the bounds of what his contemporaries would have considered Judaism, or did Paul continue to think and act “within Judaism”?

This volume brings together contributions from the ongoing conversation among New Testament scholars from the Nordic Countries, namely Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The aim is to challenge the New Testament texts and their interpretations but also to be challenged by these texts and interpretation, i.e., how to read, interpret and contextualize the impact of these texts, and how to conceptualize the power and authority attributed to them. As neighbours in peripheral Europe, partly sharing language and history, scholars of this region also aim to participatie in the broader international discourse. The fact that their common academic language is English begs the question whether many of the current essays could have been written in different settings, since they do not explicitly reflect on contextual issues. Or is this the case? What characterizes that part of the world are social democracies with relatively high standards of living, a strong protestant past but an increasing multicultural population, public welfare systems, and gender equality. Public universities still have money and can prioritize mobility and internationalisation; accordingly, although few people live in the Nordic countries relatively many biblical scholars have roots there.

Pamela Eisenbaum, an expert on early Christianity, reveals the true nature of the historical Paul in Paul Was Not a Christian. She explores the idea of Paul not as the founder of a new Christian religion, but as a devout Jew who believed Jesus was the Christ who would unite Jews and Gentiles and fulfill God’s universal plan for humanity. Eisenbaum’s work in Paul Was Not a Christian will have a profound impact on the way many Christians approach evangelism and how to better follow Jesus’s—and Paul’s—teachings on how to live faithfully today.