Messiahs and their messengers

Paul's frequent self-designation apostolos christou Iesou is one of those phrases we take for granted by transliterating, "apostle of Christ Jesus." But christos, of course, means messiah, and apostolos is an old Greek political term meaning envoy or emissary. Paul styles himself an emissary for the messiah, which is in fact a kind of social type in the history of Judaism: the contemporary partisan of a messiah who interprets and propagandizes for him in literary form. Like Zechariah with Zerubbabel, Nicolaus of Damascus with Herod the Great, R. Akiba (according to legend) with Shimon bar Kosiba, and Nathan of Gaza with Sabbetai Zevi, Paul made his mark as a literary surrogate for a man whom he regarded as the messiah. This article examines the social role of the emissary for a messiah in the history of Judaism from antiquity to the early modern period

The Pauline epistles in Tertullian’s bible

The question of the fate of Paulinism in late antiquity, a point of controversy in early Christian studies especially since Adolf von Harnack, has benefited from fresh attention in recent research, even as, simultaneously, there is ever less agreement among New Testament scholars on the question of what Paulinism actually is. This state of affairs comes sharply into focus in Todd Still and David Wilhite's edited volumeTertullian and Paul, the first in a new series from T&amp;T Clark on the reception of Paul in the church fathers. Reading and assessingTertullian and Paulis a sometimes dizzying experience of intertextuality. The reader encounters, for example, Margaret MacDonald reading Elizabeth Clark reading Tertullian reading Paul. What is more, Paul himself is reading, for example, Second Isaiah, who is reading First Isaiah, who is reading parts of the Pentateuch, and so on. One thinks of Derrida's notion ofdifférance, in which any given text refers to other texts, which refer to still other texts, which refer to still other texts, and so on, ad infinitum.</jats:p