Paul and His Letters : Thinking with Josephus

In this book, F. B. A. Asiedu presents a new framework for interpreting the life of Paul, his letters, his self-understanding as a Christian Jew, and his uniqueness among his contemporaries and in Jewish history. He does this by reading Paul’s letters in relation to certain themes in Josephus’s life.

Paul the apostle and the historian Flavius Josephus spent considerable parts of their careers away from Jerusalem. They cultivated Roman audiences under very different circumstances: Paul, with his Letter to the Romans; and Josephus, with the writings he produced in Rome after the Jewish War. Curiously, Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem coincided with Josephus’s entry into public life, a period about which Josephus is deliberately silent. In this book, F. B. A. Asiedu selects themes from Josephus’s life to explore Paul’s letters and his biography that contribute to his uniqueness in Jewish history. He highlights, for example, the need to read Romans 9–11 as aporetic discourse to appreciate Paul as an existential thinker. Asiedu considers, among other things, the authenticity of Paul’s letters and offers an alternative to the prevailing scholarly consensus. He maintains, as well, that the Pauline collection in the New Testament first took shape in Corinth in the house of Gaius, where Paul composed Romans. Asiedu also suggests that the traditional view that Luke the Physician wrote the Acts of the Apostles is probably a mistake. He argues that Titus the Greek, the co-worker and friend of Barnabas and Paul, was the most likely person to have authored Acts.