All the glory of Adam: liturgical anthropology in the Dead Sea scrolls [review] / by Crispin H.T. Fletcher-Louis (original) (raw)

2004, Andrews University Seminary Studies (AUSS)

simply borrow the commonplaces, but fashioned new constructs out of them to bring about para* shifts in the t. of the audience. For example, Paul took the o& emancipation motif of the Sinai tradition and dramatically transformed it into a theme of enslavement Also, he transformed the concept of atonement from a process initiated by humans through sacrifices and repentance into a process initiated by God through the sacrifice of his Son. The Hellenistic topes of reconciliation underwent similar changes at the hands of Paul, &om being an appeal made by the offendmg party for a settlement and rapprochement to a grace settlement proffered by the offended party, which in this case was God. Accordmg to Fitzgerald, Paul was the &st Jewish (Christian) person to bring together the ideas of atonement and reconciliation in a manner similar to Dionysus and Plato. In his introductory essay ("Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide"), Engberg-Pedersen reveals and discusses the overall aim of the book, which is to put "a new program" of research (4) on the table for Pauline scholarship with the intention of replacing, for good, the misguided dualism of Hellenism and Judaism. As one makes one's way through the book, it becomes clear that, indeed, looking at Paul and Second Temple Judaism as subsets of Hellenism is not only a refreshing and fruitful interpretive approach, but an approach that is here to stay for quite a while. Nevertheless, the description given to the approach of the present work as a "new program" needs to be reconsidered, as it could give the false impression that the iditor intends with these essays to put together a new Scb~k capable of bringing the entire Pauline scholarship on board, a feat that is no longer possible in our day. Finally, one wonders whether lookmg at the NT through an outsider's perspective is necessarily a more accurate way of loo+ at history, unless, of course, one insists that history is an outsider's perspective, period. An urgent question is whether the insider's view of Paul, which, in my opinion, may be ultimately responsible for the dualism of Jewish particularism and Christian universalism (the nascent form of which has been pointed out in Barclay' s essay), has any place in the current interpretive climate. If Paul, for example, formulated his gospel as a new interpretive possibility in the setting of the Jewish and Christian selfunderstandmg that presupposed, rightly or wrongly, the dualism of Hellenism and Judaism, one wonders whether it is possible to understand Paul without referring to that dualism. In other words, one wonders whether the view of Paul offered in this volume, one which sees him primarily from an outsider's perspective, is not just as one-sided in the opposite direction as was the older view it seeks to replace.