Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the real Paul in the second century C.E.–a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested–and sets these ancient contests alongside their modern counterpart: attempts to rescue the historical Paul from his canonical entrapments. White charts the rise and fall of various narratives about Paul and argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the real Paul. Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were important for forming collective identity.