It was certainly fun to write, if nothing else.

Good timing! I've been working on it furiously since Tuesday. Pretty happy with how my response turned out.

I don't have time to keep doing this. It's Thanksgiving, so I'm signing off. I would encouage you to actually read these scholars rather than assume a guy who's never done work in this field has an accurate take.

PWJ is a group of historians trying to do better descriptive historical work. Everything else you (and Adam) are projecting onto PWJ is either a misreading or just a complete hallucination.

I'm not going to get bogged down in questions of exceptionality, because we don't actually disagree there.

Sorry, but you're misreading me—or just willfully misrepresenting PWJ as someone who doesn't understand the field. It has, as I've said repeatedly, no investment in trying to adjudicate contemporary theological claims. You're still interpreting everything through the lens of Kotsko. He's wrong.

The point of PWJ is that there is no monolithic “Judaism” in the 1st century. Paul was “normal” in the sense that it was normal for Jewish thinkers to debate heatedly over what proper fidelity to the ancestral traditions means and looks like.

You seem to think that by claiming Emanuel as PWJ that everyone in PWJ agrees with their claims. There’s lots of disagreement within PWJ—a point that Adam misses.

I simply deny that it’s trivial to claim Paul is a fully Jewish thinker of his time. That wasn’t accepted by NPP.

…from the Jewish communities of this time. That’s all that PWJ wishes to propose as a school. You can certainly quibble with individual scholars. No one is saying that every single PWJ scholar is 100% right. But as long as we see Paul as a Jewish thinker of his day, we’re within PWJ. End of story.

Seems like you’re not disputing my point that Emanuel is PWJ. But I think you’re nitpicking over a publishing blurb. The point is to refute the notion, common in older scholarship, that Paul or Jesus was somehow exceptional, unique, which was a rhetorical effort of distancing the Christ movement…

Indeed. That’s been a hobby horse of mine for a while.

It certainly cuts against NPP harder than much that’s out there. The hierarchical part of the argument is very good.

The problem here is with Adam’s take on PWJ, which is informed by a misreading of a single PWJ scholar. There’s been a lot of correction of Adam’s view by PWJ scholars on other sites.

Emanuel’s position is squarely within PWJ. That’s clear in this line: “Finally, none of these beliefs made Paul exceptional in his Judaism. It made him average in his Judaism.”

Happy Thanksgiving to you all as well!

Makes for a great stocking stuffer! 😉
www.cambridge.org/us/universit...

Haha thanks! Inside baseball talk for sure.