Sunday, January 26, 2025

Pauline Studies 4: Paul and the Spirit

Just to put a pulse through it, I am now beyond Kris Song's chapter on "Paul and the Spirit" in Gupta, Heim, and McKnight's The State of Pauline Studies. Previous posts:

I don't have much to say about this chapter 4. I did find interesting the discussion of various backgrounds that have been proposed for Paul's sense of the Holy Spirit. Stoicism is sometimes suggested. I could see it being one filter in Paul's paradigm of the person. I will also say that Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body was one of those studies that just completely exposed my unexamined assumptions about ancient psychology. One of the more transformative studies I've read even if extreme perhaps at some points.

I've long been struck by Paul's use of the phrase "Spirit of holiness" in Romans 1:4. It seems to reveal an earlier layer of Christian tradition and it's not lost on me that it is an expression we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, my suggestion is that Paul's understanding of the Spirit starts with a very Jewish foundation. Then quite possibly it is filtered a smidge through some Hellenistic dynamics.


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