Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective

This is the revised and expanded edition of Watson’s Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach (SNTSMS 56, 1986), itself a revision of his doctoral thesis for Oxford in 1984. It seems to have three different but overlapping objectives. The most obvious is the revision and expansion of the original thesis. The original thesis is still there: that Paul sought to create and maintain Christian communities sharply distinct and separate from the Jewish community/synagogue (51–54). The basic structure is the same: chapter 1 on “Paul, the Reformation and Modern Scholarship”; chapter 2 on “The Origins of Paul’s View of the Law”; chapter 3 on “The Galatian Crisis”; chapter 4 on “Philippi, Corinth and the Jewish Christian Mission (formerly “The Judaizers”); chapter 5 on “Rome in Pauline Perspective’ (formerly “The Situation in Rome”), and then no less than four further chapters on Romans itself, where the regular “The Social Function of…” the sections of Romans in sequence has been replaced by more sharply defined titles: “The Social Function of Romans 2”; “Pauline Antithesis and Its Social Correlate (Romans 3)”; “The Law and Christian Identity (Romans 4–8)”; and “Election: Reimagining the Scriptural Witness (Romans 9–11).” Where the body of the first edition ran to 231 pages, the revised edition runs to 369 pages. [Full Review]