Loading…

Paul, a New Covenant Jew: Rethinking Pauline Theology is unavailable, but you can change that!

After the landmark work of E. P. Sanders, the task of rightly accounting for Paul’s relationship to Judaism has dominated the last forty years of Pauline scholarship. Pitre, Barber, and Kincaid argue that Paul is best viewed as a new covenant Jew, a designation that allows the apostle to be fully Jewish, yet in a manner centered on the person and work of Jesus the Messiah. This new covenant...

Either way, Paul’s language evokes Israel’s sacrificial cult (cf. NRSV: “sacrifice of atonement”). Whatever associations the language conjures up, one cannot ignore the fact that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Israel’s scriptures—which dominates Paul’s thinking—primarily uses hilastērion in reference to the ark of the covenant, the “mercy seat,” the object at the center of the Day of Atonement liturgy:72 You shall put the mercy seat [LXX to hilastērion] on the top of the ark; and in the
Page 150
Buy this book at Logos.com