Krister Stendahl takes a fruitful area ripe for discussion and quickly loses sight of his topic in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. With credentials that allowed him to fill the roles of Dean of the Harvard Divinity School and (Lutheran) Bishop of Stockholm, Sweden, the reader would expect to find a much more scholarly examination than Stendahl has given.
Despite a back cover note which depicts the work as a "sharp challenge to traditional ways of understanding Paul . . . by a distinguished interpreter of the New Testament," Stendahl's thesis is neither sharp nor challenging. Rather, it is simply one preacher's viewpoint supported only by scripture. Instead of filling a void in academic theology which has yet to be fully explored, the author merely recites familiar hypotheses which others before him have done time and again.
Now the time has come for me to recognize that whatever insights I may have they are perhaps most useful to others if I share them more or less in the impressionistic form of lecture style. . . . (I)t allows your colleagues and critics to see what you think when you cannot balance every statement . . . with footnotes or by the guarded precision of noncommitment" (v).
This, precisely, is the foundational flaw of the work. It removes the text from the academic sphere and relegates it to the dreary realm of Christian apologetics. Instead of forceful argumentation, it is just another dogmatic examination of Paul which just as suddenly departs from the Pauline corpus of the New Testament and ends up in the Gospels, which have, in essence, nothing to do with Paul.
Indeed, the stagnant picture of Paul which Stendahl paints is offensive to anyone who recognizes that Paul does more to explain Judaism and Christianity to Jews and Gentiles than the church has largely managed not to do in nearly two thousand years. His characterization of Paul as an epileptic (first seen at page 42) is fundame
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