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Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle is unavailable, but you can change that!

For centuries the apostle Paul has been invoked to justify oppression—whether on behalf of slavery, to enforce unquestioned obedience to the state, to silence women, or to legitimate anti-Semitism. To interpret Paul is thus to set foot on a terrible battleground between spiritual forces. But as Neil Elliott argues, the struggle to liberate human beings from the power of Death requires “Liberating...

How, precisely, do the personal depths of Paul’s “conversion experience and the accompanying mystical phenomena” relate to Paul’s “sober assessment of his apostolic task”?4 The answer is to be found in the mystical traditions of Jewish apocalypticism, which in Beker’s words provided “the indispensable filter, context and grammar by which [Paul] appropriated and interpreted the Christ event.”5 This does not mean that Paul’s visionary experience was somehow prior to and separable from the symbolic
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