Readers who want to explore the issues Gager raises will be well advised to turn to his sources—and, of course, to Paul.
In this lucid overview of recent scholarship on the theology of the Apostle to the Gentiles, Princeton theologian Gager (The Origins of Anti-Semitism, 1983) challenges the received view of Paul as a convert from Judaism to Christianity who rejected the law of Moses and taught that God was replacing the people of Israel with a new Israel, the Christian church.
Gager sees the traditional view as resting on a failure to locate Paul within rather than against the Judaism of his time (a Judaism anachronistically caricatured by later Christian commentators), on an inability to identify the intended hearers of Paul's message and the rhetorical strategies he used to persuade them, and on a tendency to illegitimately universalize the particular polemical contexts in which Paul wrote. The result was a series of fundamental misunderstandings of Paul and his gospel. A chapter on “New Views of Paul” surveys challenges to the traditional view from scholars like Krister Stendahl and E.P. Sanders (who made important contributions to viewing Paul within the context of first-century Judaism), and Lloyd Gaston and Stanley Stowers (whose work on Paul, the Torah, and the letter to the Romans are fundamental to Gager’s argument). Gager concludes that the traditional wisdom about Paul is completely wrong: Paul’s mission was only to the Gentiles, and his polemic against the Jewish law was directed at those in the Jesus movement who demanded that Gentiles be circumcised. Paul believed that Jews remained the people of God, in Gager’s view, and although the calling of the Gentiles through Jesus was to play a role in the (imminent) salvation of Israel, belief in Jesus was not necessary for Jews. Gager puts these “new views” to work in detailed examinations of the letters to the Galatians and the Romans. Gager is attempting a very great deal in a very short space; as a result, assertions and quotations from other scholars (particularly Gaston and Stowers) sometimes take the place of arguments, and some serious exegetical difficulties (particularly in the discussion of Romans) are elided.
Readers who want to explore the issues Gager raises will be well advised to turn to his sources—and, of course, to Paul.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-513474-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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