by John G. Gager ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2000
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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