[Lyric] Beyond the Heroic Paul (Laura Nasrallah and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre)

In 1963, Krister Stendahl attempted to divert scholars from reading Paul as the quintessential Western individual and the Pauline letters as "documents of human consciousness." 1 Since then, Paul's communal orientation and social-political goals have come to be a focal point of interest and debate. These days, Paul is not an introspective conscience-the characterization with which Stendahl wrestled-but a cultural critic, a community organizer, a political philosopher, or a hybrid subject under empire. Yet these very characterizations show that an interest in Paul-the-individual persists. Paul frequently still functions as a paradigmatic human, so that explorations of his theology, politics, and even his subjectivity become the grounds for contemporary meditations on the same.

Let us juxtapose this interest in Paul's thought and actions with two stories that dramatically decenter him and thus begin to change the subject/s. ln his discussion of Paul and African American interpretation, Brian Blount recounts the report of Rev. J. Colcock Jones, a nineteenth-century Methodist missionary, to his missionary board: "I was preaching to a large congregation [of slaves] on the Epistle to Philemon: and when I insisted on fidelity and obedience as Christian virtues in servants, and upon the authority of Paul, condemned the practice of running away, one-half of my audience deliberately rose up and walked off with themselves." 2 In her chapter on postcolonial and feminist biblical interpretation, Kwok Pui-lan tells a similar story about an early-twentieth-century. Chinese woman who could barely read, yet who nonetheless "used a pin to cut from the Bible verses where Paul instructed women to be submissive and remain silent in the church."3

In both examples, the hearers of Paul's letters take center stage as hinkers and actors. They interpret Paul (and those who try to interpret Paul for them) for themselves, voting with their feet and hands. Some of the slaves in Rev. Jones's audience stayed to debate. They did not question what Paul really meant, but whether there was such an epistle in the Bible or whether what they had heard was in fact the gospel. 4 Kwok similarly reclaims the interpretive agency of the uneducated woman who edits Paul's text. She notes that remembering the Chinese woman's interpretation can "enliven the historical and moral imagination" of feminist postcolonial interpreters because it "demonstrates how oppressed women have turned the Bible, a product introduced by the colonial officials, missionaries, and educators, into a site of contestation and resistance for their own emancipation." 5

In this chapter, we will suggest that there is much to gain from reading the letters of Paul-in their writing, reception, and afterlives-as sites of debate, contestation, and resistance rather than as articulations of one individual's vision and heroic community-building efforts. 6 Such an approach takes seriously Paul's own writings, where he presents himself as one among many other apostles, teachers, and siblings who struggled together to puzzle out the meaning of being assemblies in Christ. Focusing on Paul alone often replicates his self-authorizing rhetoric and Acts' heroic depiction of him, rather than presenting him as one significant voice among many. 7 By shifting the lens from Paul alone to Paul among others, we gain a better understanding of differences of opinion and perspective, thereby opening debates and productive collaborations both ancient and contemporary, rather than limiting our understanding of the political vision and practices of the Christ assemblies to whatever Paul alone meant or means.

Our discussion proceeds in two stages. First, we explore how politically engaged Euro-American Pauline scholarship 8 has focused largely on Paul, whether as an anti-imperial hero, an imperial collaborator, or, now, something in between. 9 Despite the attention given to diverse voices in feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Paul's identity, politics, and voice remain the focus of both theological-philosophical engagement and historical reconstruction. Second, we demonstrate the potential of decentering Paul by exploring one theme from postcolonial biblical studies-the idea of travel-and by questioning the constructions of Paul as a heroic traveling missionary in 1 Thessalonians and Acts. At the end, we propose some fruitful areas of inquiry for a decolonizing feminist 10 approach to a politically and communally focused Pauline studies.


                                        The Heroic Political Paul


The persistence of a heroic Paul and the magnification of his voice as the voice of the Christ-assemblies with which he was associated result not only from a Western predilection for individualism but also from a process of identification spurred by Paul's rhetoric. From epistle to epistle, Paul offers himself as a model for imitation. 11 even as his self-presentation shifts from community to community-sometimes within a single letter. He is father and nurse (1 Cor 4:15; 1 Thess 2:7), apostle and slave (Gal 1:1; Rom 1:1), both under the law and outside the law (1 Cor 9:20-21). This Paul mediates self and other while negotiating his own particularity and his universal connection to others. Paul offers this rhetorically constructed in-between self as a model for, and an argument to, his inscribed audiences. In this larger context, the hos me injunctions in 1 Cor 7:29-31, where Paul talks about how to live "as if not" in a particular condition, and the self-wrestling ego speech in Rom 7:13-25, in which Paul seems tortured about his own actions, can be and have been read as simultaneously Paul and not Paul. That is, they have been read both as windows onto Paul's religious and/or ethnic subjectivity and as compelling expressions of human subjectivity in any place and age. 12

Several contemporary discussions about power, difference, religion, and politics have taken up this theme of Paul-as-subject. Despite their differences, we find that the books emerging from the Paul and Politics section of the Society of Biblical Literature and those of continental philosophers thinking about unity and diversity share a tendency to think with and about Paul in the context of contemporary politics. This interest is apparent also in certain scholars from the "New Perspective" on Paul. Such approaches are not necessarily problematic. As we will show, they use Paul to think about challenging contemporary issues such as diversity and inclusion. But by centering on Paul rather than situating Paul among those to whom he wrote, they-and we-miss an opportunity to engage with true diversity and the multiple struggles concomitant with it. Such works tend to emphasize one aspect of difference or to whitewash difficult and exclusionary passages in Paul's letters that function in churches today to condemn Judaism as a sin, 13 to deny women's leadership, and to exclude gays and lesbians from full participation in Christian community.

As is apparent from the title, Paul takes center stage in Pamela Eisenbaum's Paul Was Not a Christian: The Real Message of a Misunderstood Apostle. Building on the New Perspective on Paul, Eisenbaum explains how Paul's writings make more sense if one reads him as a Jew called to apostleship and not as a converted Christian. At the heart of her project is an effort to plumb Paul's logic of how, with the pressure of the end of time, individual salvation is not a key issue but rather the means by which both Jews and Gentiles alike can enter into God's redemption. Paul's particular struggles have contemporary resonance for Eisenbaum: "I have come to regard Paul as a Jew who wrestled with an issue with which many modern American Jews wrestle: how to reconcile living as aJew with living in and among the rest of the non-Jewish world.'' 14 Focusing on Paul's own relation to difference, Eisenbaum suggests that his writings can provide insights for contemporary engagement with religious difference and pluralism. 15

In a similar way, Daniel Boyarin's earlier book, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, takes seriously the New Perspective on Paul, resituating him as a first-century Jewish thinker. Boyarin also finds that Paul's rhetorical stance between particularity and universality helps him to think about the challenges of contemporary identity politics.
In his very extremity and marginality, Paul is in a sense paradigmatic of "the Jew." He represents the interface between Jew as a self-identical essence and Jew as a construction constantly remade. The very tension in his discourse, indeed in his life, between powerful self-identification as a Jew ... and an equally powerful, or even more powerful, identification of self as everyman is emblematic of Jewish selfhood. 16

For Boyarin, the Jewish dilemma of the self is one that is characteristic of both our time and Paul's. 17 The particularity of the figure of Paul thus connects the past and present, so that contemporary politics are engaged through a reading of the life and thought of Paul. Boyarin's Paul is complex but also politically heroic, as we see in much of the politically attuned Pauline scholarship of today. Conceding that "in the reception history of Paul, his texts have generally served what might be broadly called conservative cultural-political interests; they have been used as props in the fight against liberation of slaves and women as well as major supports for theological anti-Judaism," Boyarin argues, like many other recent scholars, that "Paul need not be read this way, indeed, ... his texts support, at least equally well, an alternative reading, one that makes him a passionate striver for human Jiberation and equality." 18 In a similar way, much of the recent empire-critical scholarship on Paul presents him as resisting or reversing imperial discourses and structures. 19 The four volumes emerging from the Paul and Politics section of the Society of Biblical Literature, for example, feature several explications of Paul's subversive efforts to overturn the logic and power relations of empire. 20 Many scholars have taken as the hermeneutical key to all of Paul's writings the pre-Pauline baptismal statement in Gal 3:28 ("there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female:') rather than Romans 13, in which Paul appears to urge quiescence to empire, or 1 Corinthians 11, where women's voices in prayer or prophecy are circumscribed by the act of veiling. 21 In this way Paul is read as a culturalpolitical visionary who is relevant.to those of us with a particular political bent-not perfect, but still savvy, a subtle revolutionary in the midst of a hierarchical empire. 22

Where New Testament scholars generally privilege Paul's historical particularity and sometimes draw larger analogies between Paul's writings and contemporary identity politics or struggles with/against American empire, European scholars like Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben approach the themes of Paul's thought as timeless philosophical categories. 23 Thus, Paul the solitary political subject moves beyond the fields of biblical studies and Christian theology to engage with continental philosophy and cultural criticism, where he becomes a heroic philosopher of universalism and love. 24 For Zizek, for example, Paul argues for a nation and culturetranscending agape, a love "that enjoins us to 'unplug' from the organic community into which we were born-or, as Paul puts it, for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. 25 While these conversations aim to energize new communal secular-political visions, they do so without the chorus of New Testament scholars who have worked to expose the Christian supersessionism and anti-Semitism of many interpretations of Paul. 26 Such a decontextualization allows secular authors to rehabilitate an authoritative (Christian) Paul as a loving Everyman who successfully and rightly supersedes his (Jewish) particularity.

In our opinion, these varied depictions of a political Paul and his politics, whether created by biblical scholars or European cultural critics and philosophers, fail to articulate adequately the fact that Paul was and continues to be one among many, part of a community that is diverse and multicentered. 27 Where political debate is theorized, it is most often framed as a dialogue either between the historical Paul and his (usually wrongheaded) epistolary audiences or between a political Paul and contemporary beliefs about religious exclusivism/ capitalism/ empire. 28 As Boyarin notes, "When Paul says, there is no Jew or Greek, no male and female in Christ, he is raising an issue with which we still struggle. Are the specificities of human identity, the differences, of value, or are they only an obstacle in the striving for justice?" 29 We could extend this discussion to the ancient ekklesia that first heard the letter or even to communities today by imagining that they might debate the issues raised in Paul's letters rather than simply accepting or rejecting Paul's words on the subject.

To some extent our critique-the belief that we should turn the scholarly focus from a reconstruction or use of Paul alone to consideration of Paul's letters as sites of contestation and debate-has already been enacted and heard. In each of the SBL's Paul and Politics sessions, a feminist scholar has disrupted or mitigated the focus on a heroic anti-imperial Paul by calling for serious consideration of the perspectives and contributions of his comrades and interlocutors in both the ancient ekklesiai and the history of interpretation. 30 Some of the hearers have acted on these constructive critiques. 31 For example, in The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire, Neil Elliott-a longtime champion of the anti-imperial Paul-engages some feminist interpretations of Paul and draws on the writings of Fredric Jameson and Antonio Gramsci to map both the context and the limitations of Paul's political discourse. Elliott concludes that Paul's hierarchical and messianic political solution is the only thinkable or utterable counterpoint to the extreme violence and claims to universal sovereignty that characterize imperial rule. His approach thus helps to trace the inscription of kyriarchal logic in Romans-that is, how Paul's vision of God's victory is a political counterpoint to Roman imperial systems of domination that simultaneously replicates aspects of imperial logic. However, Arrogance of Nations does not explore whether any nascent or alternative political responses to empire might have been present in Paul's communities or activated by diverse interpreters of Paul.

Elliottt's Judean political Paul disrupts impenal and capitalist Euro-American Christianity. 32 Paul's Gentile audience in Romans is loosely correlated with "modern, comfortable, more-or-less secularized first-world Christians who remain the primary consumers of Pauline scholarship." 33 With important prompting from Latin American liberation theologians and the struggles against poverty and injustice in Haiti, Elliott reads Paul's God-talk in Romans as giving voice to the human struggle for justice and freedom, what Fredric Jameson calls the "single vast unfinished plot" of history. 34

Elliott makes an important step forward by beginning his book with Haitian women and Latin American martyrs and theologians. Yet these figures do not play a role in the main part of the book, with the result that their multivocality is made univocal: within the ekklesiai of Christ, Paul alone becomes the voice of those struggling under empire. In the end, it seems the arrogant Gentiles and the political Paul are the worst and best sides of (white, liberal) U.S. Christianity. 35

How might these contemporary figures-the voices of Haitians, Latin Americans, others-be foregrounded in the project of historical reconstruction so that they add to our understanding of how the letter to the Romans might have been heard in the imperial metro pole? 36 Incorporating such voices does not mean that historians necessarily risk having less precision in their reconstructions of the ancient world; such voices rather "enliven our historical imaginations," as Kwok suggests, regarding the possible range of responses of those who first received Paul's letter. Such voices also disrupt a center-and-margins view of contemporary political discourse; they open up the possibility that the women in Haiti might have political visions that complicate, contest, reframe, or even discard Paul's vision (and thus Elliott's and our own). The meaning of Romans might then be varied and its possibilities and limitations more fully unfolded. 37 Such an approach takes Paul's letters as partial inscriptions of the political visions and debates of the Christ-assemblies rather than as a repository for Paul's thought alone.

The persistence of the Paul-centered habit in politically engaged Pauline studies is apparent even among postcolonial feminist and gender-critical scholars. Both Davina Lopez and Joseph Marchal, for example, situate their work in a complex nexus of empire-critical, postcolonial, feminist, and gender-critical interpretations of Paul. Each is clear about the need to confront the intertwined sexist, racist, and colonialist legacies of the Pauline tradition. Reading them side by side, however, does not produce a unified feminist or postcolonial view of Paul. Instead, two different portraits of Paul emerge: the rhetorical-textual Paul is either the organizer of the empire's subjugated nations or their imperial subjugator. Paul either undermines or wields dominant notions of masculinity.

In her preface, Lopez states, "this book seeks to re-imagine Paul's consciousness and communities as critically liberationist in orientatiop. and transformative in potential." 38 She situates her project as intervening in contemporary debates that draw on an authoritative figure of Paul in order to exclude and dehumanize society's marginalized. She asks:

Who can claim Paul as authoritative? ... With whom does Paul side? I re-imagine Paul as occupying a vulnerable, subversive social position of solidarity among others and as part of a useable past for historically dominated and marginalized peoples in the present. 39

The framework of Apostle to the Conquered is thus defined by an intentionally Paul centered approach that sees Paul's solidarity with the conquered and marginalized as part of "building a more just human and earth community." 40

Lopez's book does not explore the complexities of Paul's self-construction across his letters, 41 nor the possibility that the "nations" to which he wrote might not desire or uniformly appreciate his particular form of rescue and resurrection. In reality, they might have debated with him or even ignored him, as it appears some did in Galatians. In addition, this authoritative Paul functions importantly as a model for political conversion (or, more accurately, consciousness raising) in the U.S. context, that is, for those who need to recognize and repent of their complicity with imperial politics. If we ignore Paul's conversation partners and his shifting self-presentation in response to them, the diverse subjects in the Pauline assemblies become the recipients of Paul's mission rather than subjects with political agency and imagination.
Marchal's Paul is defined with similar sharpness. 42 In his view, however, Paul did not offer liberation to the communities to which he wrote, but rather a new form of colonialism. Marchal's intersectional analysis shows clearly that empire-critical work cannot sidestep the fundamental hierarchical structures of gender, sexuality, race, and nation that are embedded in imperial discourse on their way to an anti-imperial Paul. Throughout the book, Marchal applies to Paul's letter to the Philippians the four broad questions posed by Musa Dube in Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible for identifying the influence of imperial and/or colonial ideologies ([1] Does this text have a clear stance against the political imperialism of its time? [2] Does this text encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands, and if so, how does it justify itself? [3] How does this text construct difference: does it promote dialogue and liberating independence or condemnation of all that is foreign? [4] Does this text employ gender and divine representations to construct relationships of subordination and domination?). 43 He concludes that "both Paul's letters and Pauline interpretation are the results ofimperially gendered rhetorical activities." 44 Marchal thus locates the political-rhetorical Paul and his interpreters on an undifferentiated trajectory stretching from Roman to EuroAmerican Christian imperialism. Marchal writes in order to challenge the empirecritical scholarship discussed above, so that the scholarly production of the singularly anti-imperial Paul births its opposite: a singularly imperial Paul. This single-minded focus on Paul is not Marchal's intent; 45 the application of Dube's questions to Paul functions primarily to enact a feminist, postcolonial critique of the heroic political Paul. Thus, while it makes sense to begin with Dube's questions, developing them with a concern for multiple contexts and interpretations of imperial rhetoric might tell a different story (or complicate a single one). In short, we need to ask whether Paul's selfauthorizing rhetoric (and its reinscriptions) might be better understood in the context of debates within the ekklesiai of Christ and the history of interpretation rather than as a general will to imperial power.

Empire-critical approaches to Paul confront imperialist and capitalist Euro-American Christianity either by opposing it with Paul's obscured and now revealed anti-imperial gospel or by exposing the complicity of Paul's rhetoric with imperial ideologies. At the same time, they construct Western Christianity and U.S. politics as religious-political monoliths, obscuring the ways in which each has been and continues to be a complex site of oppression, liberation, and local contestation. As Schussler Fiorenza has argued, a Paul-centered approach accepts Paul's self-construction as founder and authoritative teacher, thus limiting our ability to imagine the diverse communities of women and men that supported, shaped, and even differed from Paul without thereby being imperialistic themselves. 46

We propose that an approach that is both feminist and decolonizing should interpret the letters of Paul as embedded in a contested, complex, and shifting context that includes both ancient empire and modern neocolonialism, thus allowing an engagement with the present to revise our approach to the past and vice versa. These epistles-produced, read, and debated by multiple voices and dialogical in their very nature, even if we lack half of the correspondence and all of the oral communications-inscribe a variety of communities that were engaged in negotiating, contesting, and colluding in the context of empire. An approach that decenters Paul requires that we interrogate Paul's arguments in light of their silenced or elided counter-arguments, interpreting Paul's self-construction as reacting to and against various other self-understandings. Such an approach also allows us to recognize the diversity of Pauls after Paul, as letters written under Paul's name and narratives that feature Paul the heroic Christian missionary add to the diversity and richness of our understanding of the contestation and debates that took place in early Christian communities.


                Disrupting the Heroic Traveling Missionary:
                1 Thessalonians and Acts as Test Cases


How can we begin to enact such a program of feminist and decolonizing interpretation? Following Marchal, let us consider one of Dube's programmatic questions for bringing postcolonial analnis to bear on biblical studies: "Does this text encourage travel to distant and inhabited lands, and how does it justify itself ?" 47 Putting this question to 1 Thessalonians produces some interesting observations for an ekklesia-focused interpretation. Ostensibly, the letter narrates the travels of Paul and his co-workers from Philippi (2:2) to Thessalonica (2:2-13) to Athens (3:1), while constructing Paul's imitative readers (1:6) as self-sufficient (2:9), heroic travelers who bravely face danger (2:2, 15; 3:7). The justification and the measure of Paul's success are sacralized: "We have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak not to please people but to please God" (2:4). Such a missionary needs no invitation. God wills his territorial presence, and his aggressive persistence (2:18) is coded as perseverance against sinfulness (2:14-16) and godlessness (1:9).

We need not search far to trace some possible effects of Paul's self-construction. 48 In a sermon entitled "The Qualities of a Great Missionary," the popular American evangelical preacher John MacArthur draws on the brief description of Paul's experience in Philippi in 1 Thessalonians 2:2 to claim Paul's missionary boldness as a "quality with no substitute" for both Paul and contemporary Christians: 49

Even after they had been beaten up and were treated shamefully, they were still bold. Paul could never be daunted, there just wasn't any way to stop him ... When you want to start something for God, you get organized first and then say, "Here I go, God. I'm doing this for you." But as soon as you take one step, Satan is there. Now you have a test. If you have boldness, you go right through to victory. Boldness is essential to victory because it is the quality that makes you go through the test when you' re being resisted... If you have the opportunity on your job to share Jesus Christ, and your supervisor says, "Shut up or you'll be fired," in your heart say, "Good," and then continue to declare Jesus Christ. If you are fired for sharing Christ, go to a new job and you will have some new territory for declaring Jesus Christ. And if your neighbor can't stand your testimony, she will move away and a new one will come. Boldness makes for greater opportunity, and it always did in the Book of Acts. They were bold and people got upset. They would be thrown out of places and they would go to new places ... Don't be ashamed. Boldness is basic because there will always be resistance. Boldness is the only capacity that says, "I will not succumb to the resistance." Now that doesn't mean that you should be a bull in a china closet, stomping all over people's necks and becoming terribly offensive. 50 But it does mean that nobody should be allowed to stop you in a ministry that you believe the Spirit of God has called you to. 51

This interpretation of Paul as a heroic missionary is not being used for authorizing a foreign missionary society. 52Yet the language of competing for territory-the job and the neighborhood-and the expectation of victory easily evoke that history and locate the daily struggles of the addressee-the emboldened "you" -within it.

Regardless of Paul's context or intent, the heroic Paul takes on a life of his own with the help of the book of Acts and contemporary interpreters who shape buld and territorially minded Christians through an identification with the figure of Paul. Many New Testament scholars could easily provide an effective and even convincing historical counterpoint to MacArthur's reading of Paul. For example, they could critique MacArthur's individualizing, religious, self-authorizing reading with a reading of Paul as "other" with a communal outlook and a countercultural politics. This process, however, would also replicate the tendency to cast Paul as a hero and to draw on his life and thinking to address contemporary social, political, and religious issues. 53

First Thessalonians' construction of Paul as a heroic, tramping traveler is, however, just that: a construction. Thus we might also think about the letter's image of Paul as a suffering and triumphant apostle in relation to the text's construction of the ancient ekklesia in Thessalonica, asking what such a construction attempts to produce or hide and how it might take on different force in different contexts 54The heroic apostolic traveler contrasts with the construction of the Thessalonians in the letter. It is Paul and his co-workers who faced trouble in Philippi, and Paul who is lonely in Athens but prevented by Satan from returning. The community members are not called to be imitators of Paul by actively traveling and preaching; rather, they imitate Paul and Jesus when they receive the word (1:7). Combined with Paul's advice to the community to live quietly and mind their own affairs, the narration of the traveling Paul rhetorically renders the Thessalonians passive, localizing them to smaller spheres of movement and influence and minimizing their suffering by smoothing their relations with the larger society. While Paul appears as the counter-cultural persecuted hero for the gospel, the community should "command the respect of outsiders" (4:11).

But perhaps the community was not so insular. The letter does not describe how the word about the Thessalonians had spread through the region. But by mentioning that they already love all the communities throughout Macedonia, the letter points to existing networks of information and economic exchange. Such connections were likely maintained not by traveling apostles or missionaries but through the travel of various ordinary men and women-slave messengers, poor artisans and agricultural laborers seeking work in the cities, and members of households connected by various informal and formal familial ties such as marriage, adoption, inheritance, and other factors. 55 As the rhetoric of the self-sufficient traveler draws on imperial discourses, so also these communal networks emerge from the realities of empire, including the system of Roman roads and the increase in mobility and urban populations that resulted from economic and social displacement. 56 If we privilege the apostolic traveler, we hear the prelude to ideologies of colonization and the centralization of leadership around a few heroic men. If we privilege a much wider range of travelers and social networks, we see structures of economic survival and diverse efforts to create distinctive communities in Christ in the context of an expanding empire. 57

Despite Paul's construction of apostolic independence and lonely suffering, he himself is fully a part of these networks of support. He has received financial support from the Philippians (Phil 4:16), and he must make the case that he supported himself while he was living among the Thessalonians (1 Thess 2:9). Paul's economic dependence is problematic for him because it can easily be spun as greedy and self-promoting (2:5). Moreover, in the context of hegemonic imperial constructions of masculinity, it also signals his weakness. Thus, in 1 Thessalonians Paul masks his economic need through claims to economic self-sufficiency and imagery that speaks of caretaking rather than dependence - "we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children" (2:7) and "like a father with his children" (2:11 ). In this gender-slipping self-presentation, we see an example of community leaders in colonized positions constructing their own relative weakness as power. But Paul's rhetoric also serves to infantilize the community and thus to subordinate any community leadership to his own. 58
Paul's status and authority with the community are evidently at stake. Although 1 Thessalonians is widely characterized as a letter of encouragement or consolation, it is Paul who sends Timothy to confirm that the community has not lost its regard for Paul in light of the afflictions he faced when among them (3:1-5). If anything, their message (sent through Timothy) was a message of encouragement to Paul. This reading of Paul among others restores Paul to sociality as a participant in networks of women and men who promote, resist, or ignore him while he is away. 59

Thus, the Pauline letters represent the creation of structures of interdependence and identity among competing but subordinated subjectivities in the context of empire. They also contribute to the construction of powerful configurations of outsiders and foreignness that drew new maps in the context of Western territorial expansion. 60 The "mission to the gentiles" in the Pauline letters is not the same as the nineteenth-century Western missionary movement. 61 If we fail to see these complex negotiations ofidentity in the particular context of the Roman Empire, then Paul-the-Jew becomes a colonizer of the Gentiles (despite their being the dominant culture) and our interpretations replicate the anti-Judaism that has long characterized triumphalist Christianity. 62 When this happens, we are effectively reading Paul's letters through Acts.

Despite more than a century of cautions about using Acts to read Paul, scholars continue to do this in an effort to make sense of the order and content of Paul's epistles. Frequently Acts 16-17, the account of Paul in Philippi and Thessalonike, is used to explain both 1 Thessalonians and Paul's stance toward the Roman Empire. We suggest that a decolonizing feminist analysis should take into account not only "the genuine Paul" but also his afterlife in pseudepigraphical letters and narrative representations. Investigation of the politics and rhetoric of Paul-after-Paul can sensitize us to what is occluded and revealed when we read Paul through these later lenses. Viewed in this framework, Acts is one of the earliest interpretations of the Pauline traditions, an interpretation that famously ignores the-weak and letter-writing Paul while weaving from various strands in Paul's own rhetorical self-construction a larger-than-life hero.

The issue of space and geography, introduced so powerfully in Acts 2, 63 recurs throughout the book as the narrative moves from Jerusalem to Rome with Paul collecting cities for the Christian Way. 64 Acts participates in a kind of urban and imperial network building that was common at the time as subjected Greek cities sought to find their place in the oikoumene ("inhabited world") of the Roman Empire. The Roman emperor Hadrian, for instance, sponsored and encouraged such coalitions of Greek city-states in the form of a Panhellenion, centered in Athens, that engaged in religious and judicial activities, maintaining that they had ancient ethnic ties to Athens, on the one hand, and current ties to Rome through politics and benefactions, on the other. 65

Luke uses a logic similar to that of the Panhellenion to craft a coalition of Christian cities from across the oikoumene, most of which were brought into this network by the mapping movement of Paul's body. In Paul's own letters we see a plurality of apostles; in other New Testament texts, including the beginning of Acts, we see a diversity of co-workers and theological ideas within earliest Christianity. Yet the narrative of Acts funnels the reader's focus ever narrower. This is similar to other stories of travel from this period, which reflect Rome's interest in geographical expansion and conquest, on the one hand, and the model of ancient Greek travelers, on the other. Men are cast in the mold of the Odysseus of old, bravely making their way through exotic regions with different customs, wealth, and dangers. Acts likewise narrows its focus from an initial interest in various apostolic (and other) travelers to center increasingly on Paul as a quintessential traveler. Philologically and ideologically, Luke effectively reduces the plural Christian ekklesiai or civic assemblies of Paul's letters (the plural appears only once in Acts) to a singular ekklesia (mentioned twenty-two times in Acts) and thus to one univocal church. Local networks of support and contested leadership are erased by the attention on Paul's dangerous, heroic, relentless move across much of the Roman oikoumene.

In the sections of Acts that are set in Philippi and Thessalonica, there seem to be tensions between Paul and the Roman Empire. In Philippi, Paul and his cohort are accused of being Jews (Ioudaioi) who are disturbing the city: "They advocate customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice" (16:20-21 RSV). Yet Paul the traveler, despite being accused of sedition against the empire, uses the standards of empire to trump the acts of empire: he asserts his Roman citizenship to humiliate local officials who have imprisoned and humiliated him. In Thessalonica, too, Paul's cohort is dragged into the street and accused: "These who have turned the world (oikoumene) upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them; and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus" (Acts 17:6-7). Yet Paul slips off safely even while under threat, though the threat involves Jewish violence toward Jewish followers of Christ, not Roman injustice or even judicial proceedings. When Paul and Silas are accused by Jews in Thessalonica, they slip away by night to Beroea, where high-status Greek women as well as men, along with Jews more noble than those in Thessalonica, accept their message (17:10-13).

In creating this heroic and unifying Paul, the writer of Acts seeks to distance the one true ekklesia and the one true Paul from contemporaneous Jews who might be seen as seditious toward the empire, especially after the events of 70 C.E. and in light of the upcoming Bar Kokhba revolts. 66 Luke crafts Paul in the image of contemporary elites who seamlessly combined Greek and Roman identities while appealing to both. As Lawrence Wills and Shelly Matthews have shown, the majority of Jews in Acts are portrayed as chaotic and moblike, while Roman justice is generally straightforward and fair. Paul is able to rehearse the narratives of ancient Judaism while remaining different from rabble-rousing contemporary Jews; he is embraced by Romans and by those of high status. In a similar way, Luke's Paul, unlike the Paul of Romans 16 and other Pauline texts, has no female traveling companions and meets no female co-apostles, troublesome authoritative women who might disturb the oikonomia of empire.

Luke is one of the earliest sources to frame the question that is still contested in Pauline scholarship: Was Paul a rebel against Rome and thus a postcolonial hero? For Luke, the answer is no. Nothing comes of the accusations of sedition against Rome. Luke carefully constructs a Way that has no place for sedition, and charges of resistance and rebellion eventually melt away. Paul and his cohort never agree that such accusations are true, and the canonical Acts suggests that the Roman authorities actually like Paul. As we know, the end of Acts leaves the reader hanging and Paul involved in what seems to be a pleasant house arrest.

Acts must therefore have been written in response to a lively conversation-argument, really-about the relationship of emerging Christian communities to Jewish communities and to the Roman Empire. In response, Luke chose to foreground not the communities that housed and supported Paul, but Paul himself. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul's rhetorical focus on his own brave body and its travels does not fully mask the possibility of resistance to that focus. Acts, building on Paul's rhetorical self-construction, goes beyond Paul's own letters, further limiting what we know about early communities in Christ. Once we see how Acts narrows its focus primarily to Paul, we are in a better position to recognize and oppose the genealogy of interest in Paul's heroic identity.


                                            Conclusions


Empire-critical, postcolonial, and feminist work in Pauline studies has too often become stuck in individualistic debate-replicating the historiographical model of great men who stood alone to change history-over whether Paul was a liberator or an oppressor of women, slaves, and Gentiles. Scholars disagree over whether his letters attest a creative and radical subversion of imperial discourse and structures or whether they appropriate imperial language and logic and thus collaborate with empire. Decolonizing feminist scholarship can and should interrogate and disrupt this legacy through various strategies.

One such strategy is to recenter attention on Paul's letters as sites of vision and debate. Such work begins with privileging the ancient communities to which Paul wrote-groups that struggled with, alongside, and sometimes against him-while simultaneously tracing the diverse communities that have interpreted Paul throughout history. Such an approach can imagine and articulate both the ancient "in Christ" assemblies and contemporary sites of interpretation as contested spaces more readily than an approach that begins with Paul himself.

Another strategy is to turn away from the question of whether the ancient Paul was a hero or a villain and instead to imagine him and his interpreters as fully engaged in the messier political subjectivities of the diverse communities to which he wrote and those that have subsequently interpreted him. Taking seriously the differences, the rifts, and the discontinuities between our own identities and those of our contemporaries (as well as the overlaps and the possibilities for solidarity) can facilitate our reconstruction of similar differences in antiquity. Conversely, a disciplined intimacy with ancient texts and contexts provides an ethical and intellectual pattern that can facilitate a similar attentiveness to the politics, conditions, and textures of situations and persons in the present. Feminists often speak of the importance of reading texts in community or in the "contact zone" where an awareness of our differing perspectives can both challenge and expand our readings. Focusing on the diversity within and around the Pauline assemblies both then and now can provide a site for such engagement.

A third strategy is to trace the effects of different reconstructions of Paul. A story of Paul the ancient hero (masked as an authoritative, historical account) can weave into community life Paul's justifications of his subordination of women or his apparent disregard for transforming the master-slave ideology of the ancient world. Similarly, a story of Paul the collaborator (masked as the only historically viable reading) can also silence the survival, movement, vision, vitality, and open dissent and debate that occurred in the Pauline ekklesiai, as well as the struggles that various men and women, ancient and modern-including Paul-have faced as unwelcome or imprisoned travelers.

When we examine Paul's letters alongside his afterlife in the Acts of the Apostles (as well as other texts such as the Acts of Thecla), we enact a decolonizing feminist historiography that interrogates not only the Pauline correspondence and its earliest interpretation but also the legacy of the Pauline tradition as a "base text" for Western imperialism and diverse patriarchies. We do not seek to exonerate or free Paul's letters from Acts and its legacy of imperial collusion. Instead, we assume a history of resistance and rereading of Paul through time and in different contexts. Stories of resistant Georgia slaves and uneducated Chinese women are fully a part of this history and can be used to imagine a similar agency and voice for the members of Paul's audiences and for early Christians in the time of Acts. This sort of feminist and decolonizing historiography recognizes the complex and diverse strategies of resistance, adaptation, and transformation that characterize individual and corporate negotiations of subjectivity and survival in the context of empire. It also takes up the dual task of articulating an ethics of interpretation, 67 on the one hand, and working for liberating interdependence and justice, on the other, even if it is difficult to determine precisely what those might be in a given context.

Engaging the Pauline letters as rhetorical instruments that construct both Paul and his audience in various ways might leave us less certain about what Paul the individual thought or accomplished. But it will give us more clarity about how a particular construction of Paul serves to authorize, valorize, or erase particular agendas and voices. More importantly, if we place the assemblies at the center and hear Paul's letters as one voice among many, we can imaginatively reconstruct and reclaim a richer history of interpretation of Paul, a history populated with subjects struggling in different ways within the varied contexts of empire.


FOOT NOTES :


1 Krister Stendahl, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963): 199-215.

2 Cited in Brian K. Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 121.

3 Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 77. See also the reaction of Gordon Zerbe's Filipino students to Paul in "The Politics of Paul: His Supposed Social Conservatism and the Impact of Postcolonial Readings," Conrad Grebel Review21(2003):82-103.

4 Blount, Whisper, 121.

5 Ibid., 77-78.

6 See also Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 69-109; and earlier, the essays of Schussler Fiorenza ("Paul and the Politics of Interpretation"), Cynthia Briggs Kittredge ("Corinthian Women Prophets and Paul's Argumentation in l Corinthians"), and Antoinette Clark Wire ("Response: The Politics of the Assembly in Corinth" and "Response: Paul and Those Outside Power") in Paul and Politics: Ekklesia, Israel Imperium, Interpretation. Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2000). While Paul remains the primacy dialogue partner, there is some opening toward a dialogical and communal engagement with the Pauline traditions in Yung Suk Kim, Christ's Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor, Paul in Critical Contexts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), and earlier, Charles H. Cosgrove, Herold Weiss, and Khiok-Khng Yeo, Crosscultural Paul: Journeys to Others, Journeys to Ourselves (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005 ).

7 Our review of a range of politically engaged Pauline scholarship suggests that Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's original assessment of Paul-centered scholarly discourse remains true today: "A full paradigm shift from an individualistic Euro-American malestream framework of interpretation to a fully political and communal paradigm of Pauline studies has not yet been accomplished. The reason for this, I suggest, is the hegemonic politics of interpretation. The rhetoric of Pauline interpreters continues not only to identify themselves with Paul but also to see Paul as identical with 'his' communities, postulating that Paul was the powerful creator and unquestioned leader of the communities of whom he writes" ("Paul and the Politics of Interpretation," 44). See also eadem, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999 ), 180-88; and Power of the Word, 83-89. In an early essay, Randall C. Bailey questioned this process of identification among AfricanAmericans ("The Danger of ignoring One's Own Cultural Bias in Interpreting the Text," in The Bible andPostcolonialism, ed. R. S. Sugircharajah [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998], 79).

8 By this we mean scholars who frame their work as informed by and somehow interested in contemporary politics, in contrast to those who have ethical-political concerns but do not foreground them. Insofar a's this scholarship articulates political and cultural valences of what has traditionally been read as (purely) religious discourse, it can make an important contribution to the already politically forthright feminist and postcolonial conversations. Richard Horsley and Neil Elliott have been influential in framing a trajectory of Pauline scholarship that articulates the political rather than religious context and meaning of Paul's letters (now called an "empire-critical" approach).

9 See Robert C. Tannehill, "Paul as Liberator or Oppressor: How Should We Evaluate Diverse Views of First Corinthians?" in The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Conflict of Interpretation, ed. Charles H. Cosgrove, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 411 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 122-37. For a discussion of his "he was both" answer, see Schussler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 92-94. Zerbe also sees Paul as both reinscribing and challenging empire ("Politics of Paul," 97). For Paul as a fully postcolonial hybrid subject, see Robert Paul Seesengood, Competing Identities: The Athlete and the Gladiator in Early Christianity, Library of New Testament Studies 346, Playing the Texts 12 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006).

10 We use "decolonizing" rather than "postcolonial" here to indicate the ongoing nature of the struggle within and against empire and to signal complex connections of this approach to a range of liberationist projects. For discussion, see Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000), 111-24; Schussler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 111-29; and Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2000).

11 See Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power, Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991); Joseph A. Marchal, The Politics of Heaven: Women, Gender, and Empire in the Study of Paul, Paul in Critical Contexts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 59-90.

12 For two very different examples of using Romans 7 to think about subjectivity in a postcolonial/imperial context, see L. Ann Jervis, "Reading Romans 7 in Conversation with Post-Colonial Theory: Paul's Struggle Toward a Christian Identity of Hybridity," Theoforum 35 (2004): 173-93 (reprinted in this volume); and more briefly, Nestor Miguez, Jeorg Rieger, and Jung Mo Sung, Beyond the Spirit of Empire: Theology and Politics in a New Key, Reclaiming Liberation Theology (London: SCM, 2009), 137, 139, 161-62.

13 See the first anecdote in Pamela Eisenbaum's Paul Was Not a Christian: The Real Message of a Misunderstood Apostle (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

14 Ibid., 3.

15 Ibid., 4.

16 Daniel Boyarin,A Radical few: Paul and the Politics o/Identity, Contraversions 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3. For an extended treatment of the politics of difference, see 228-60.

17 Ibid., 9. In a similar way, much recent empire-critical scholarship on Paul's letters regards Roman and American imperialism as comparable contexts that both Paul and contemporary people must navigate. This view of interactivity between the past and the present is valuable and productive, but it also poses challenges both for writing history that takes seriously the otherness of the past and for interpreting the distinctiveness of the present situation.

18 Boyarin,Radical Jew, 9.

19 Elliott locates Boyarin within New Perspective scholarship that is still driven by a religious reading of Paul's categories and interests ("Paul and the Politics of Empire: Problems and Prospects," in Horsley, Paul and Politics, 20, 33-34). In reality, however, Boyarin's Paul is political insofar as cultural-ethnic-religious-gendered discourses are also political. Equating "political readings" with readings that are attentive to the Roman empire seems a narrow and monolithic understanding of politics-see the response of Simon Price in Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2004), 182-83. A primary and not insignificant difference between the two is that Boyarin's politics are informed by feminist and cultural criticism while Elliott's are shaped by Marxism.

20 See the three volumes edited by Horsley: Paul and Politics; Paul and the Roman Imperial Order; and Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1997), especially the articles by Elliott, Robert Jewett, Horsley, N. T. Wright, Sze-kar Wan, Abraham Smith, Rollin A. Ramsaran, Efrain Agosto, Erik M. Heen, and Allen Dwight Callahan. Horsley has long been an important advocate for a (re)politicized reading of the New Testament that takes seriously the socioeconomic structures of the Judean temple-state and the Roman Empire. While Horsley rightly .criticizes the Lutheran-theological Paul as homo religiosus and the "hero of justification by faith," Horsley's Paul frequently looks like homo politicus, the hero of anti-imperialism.

21 For a critique of Paul-centered readings of Gal 3:28 (that is, reading it as Paul's theology and not that of the ekklesia), see Schussler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 165-69.

22 Working from an exploration of Paul's ethnically based vision of human unity, Sze-kar Wan calls Paul's vision "subtly anti-imperial." Although he does not explore the topic further, Wan does open a small space for subjects to speak back to this construction of Paul: "Rather than eschew universal claims, a move postcolonial readers would have liked him to make, he unabashedly constructs a metanarrative based on his own ethnicity, an eschatological universalism" ("Collection for the Saints as Anticolonial Act: Implications of Paul's Ethnic Reconstruction," in Horsley, Paul and Politics, 209-10). It is this Jewish universalism that Boyarin critiques, thus opening a dialogue with Paul's politics rather than reclaiming them. However, Boyarin does not imagine that Paul's audience similarly engaged, resisted, or revised Paul's political vision.

23 See Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For (London: Verso, 2000); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

24 For example, for Zizek, Christianity becomes a religion of love that insists on conversion; Judaism becomes the sign of constant particularity, while Christianity stands for a passage into universality "that achieves Redemption by coming to terms with its traumatic Origins, by ritualistically enacting the founding Crime and the Sacrifice that erases its traces, by bringing about reconciliation in the medium of the Word" (Fragile Absolute, 99).

25 Ibid., 120. See also Badiou, Saint Paul, 9, 14.

26 These philosophers have done their work with little or no regard for Pauline scholarship. For a reading of Paul's political philosophy that presupposes the work of the New Perspective on Paul, see Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On justice, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). There is much to recommend in this reading, but Jennings, too, focuses almost exclusively on Paul's thought, thus rendering Paul's political discourse timeless and without rhetorical context or dialogical contestation.

27 Allen Dwight Callahan suggests that 1 Corinthians represents Paul's directions "in emancipatory theory and practice," a "project inherently political because manumission, morality, and mutualismare by definition communal practices, collective concerned action" ("Paul, Ekklesia, and Emancipation in Corinth: A Coda on Liberation Theology; in Horsley, Paul and Politics, 223). Like Yung Suk Kim (Christ's Body in Corinth), Callahan roots Paul's politics in his identification with those who suffer at the bottom of Roman imperial structures. For both, Paul leads the way in theorizing beyond liberation theology toward a truly emancipatory politics. See also the work of Davina Lopez discussed below.

28 Abraham Smith counters popular North American apocalypticism with an anti-imperial reading of 1 and 2 Thessalonians. He disrupts dichotomous and monolithic constructions of Paul by noting that Brazilian apocalypticism differs from North American versions and by discussing the way in which Paul's sexual othering in 1 Thess 4:3 reinscribes imperial ideologies ("The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians; in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah, Bible and Postcolonialism 13 [London and New York: T & T Clark, 2007], 308, 315-16).

29 Boyarin, Radical Jew, 3.

30 See the articles by Schussler Fiorenza, Wire, Kittredge, and Briggs in Horsley, Paul and Politics, and the article by Jennifer Wright Knust in Horsley, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order ("Paul and the Politics of Virtue and Vice"). See also Marchal, Politics of Heaven, ch. 1. As Kittredge notes, "Those who seek to interpret Paul in an imperial context have thus far restricted themselves to emphasizing Paul's radical stance and underplaying the ways in which Paul's language replicates and reinscribes imperial power relations. In doing so, they continue to operate within the traditional paradigm in which Paul's position, now 'correctly' interpreted within his imperial context, is the only important one and other voices must be subordinated to his. The strength of this paradigm testifies to the effectiveness of Paul's rhetoric as it has been amplified throughout the history of interpretation" ("Corinthian Women Prophets," 108-9).

31 While he does not discuss sexual othering in his article in Horsley, Paul and the Roman Imperial Order, Abraham Smith does incorporate the work of Knust into his postcolonial commentary article on 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

32 Elliott is explicit about this interest: "No legitimate reading of Romans in our contemporary situation can remain oblivious to the effects of empire today" (The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire, Paul in Critical Contexts [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008], 9). See also Brad R. Braxton, "Paul and Racial Reconciliation: A Postcolonial Approach to 2 Corinthians 3: 12-18," in Scripture and Traditions: Essays on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Carl R. Holladay, ed. Patrick Gray and Gail R. O'Day, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 129 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 413.

33 Elliott, Arrogance of Nations, 8.

34 Ibid.,3.

35 Although Elliott notes his interest in letting "first-century Judeans, Paul above all, speak for themselves" (Arrogance of Nations, 16), it is clear throughout his book that he also identifies with Paul's anti-imperial critique and gives it voice precisely to engage the contemporary U.S. context (p. 9).

36 See Peter Oakes (Reading Romans in Pompeii: Paul's Letter at Ground Level [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009]), who brings together archaeological remains from Pompeii's insulae with Paul's letter to the Romans to imagine how four "Christians," all of low status but at various levels, might have interpreted the letter. Oakes largely upholds Paul's authority throughout his analysis; while the responses vary, none of the persons whom Oakes invenrs in his project of historical reconstruction questions Paul's letter, even the slave woman who struggles with her ongoing requirement of sexual slavery, which is in tension with Paul's injunctions regarding purity (see especially p. 143).

37 A sustained consideration of the diverse perspectives of Haitian women and Latin American theologians would also take our eyes off the problem of whether we are the ones prophetically challenging Paul or the status-obsessed Gentiles. In Arrogance of Nations, all of the Judeans in Rome are "weak" and all the Gentiles are status-conscious (p. 158). As with Marxist analysis, these kinds of dichotomies can romanticize the oppressed and leave the category of the oppressor equally undifferentiated.

38 Davina C. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul's Mission, Paul in Critical Contexts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), xi, xiii.

39 Ibid., xii.

40 Ibid., 3. Wire notes that Paul's vision of liberation for Gentiles (including women and slaves) is more apparent in Galatians than in 1 Corinthians, suggesting that Paul's politics, like his theology, should be seen as contextual, rhetorical, and intersubjective ("Response: Paul and Those Outside Power: 226).

41 For example, Lopez argues that Paul recognized his top-down hegemonic stance as he sought to ravage or destroy the ekklesia and that he was transformed after his travels to Arabia. During that time, he became vulnerable and even pursued a "life of penetrated, defeated masculinity" (Apostle to the Conquered, 138). Certainly in Galatians and elsewhere Paul presents his body as homologous to Christ's abused body. But is it possible, as some feminist scholars have argued, that Paul's assertion of his homology between his body and Christ's might be an authorizing move and thus another assertion of power, even if cast in a key different from that of the imperial masculinity depicted in statuary such as the Prima Porta Augustus? If we decenter Paul and assume that his subjectivity is embedded in his multiple relationships, should we not ask about the variety of modes of employing gender and one's own gender mutability for the purposes of persuasion? Paul's assertion of maternal status in relation to the Galatians would then need to be placed alongside his image of himself as a nurse in 1 Thessalonians and his self-depiction as a father with a punishing rod in 1 Corinthians.

42 He, too, locates his writing in the context of the American empire, but he is less explicit than Lopez about producing a view of Paul that is useful in public debates and more concerned with crafting an analysis that will further nuance politically-attuned Pauline scholarship. See Marchal, Politics of Heaven, vii-viii.

43 Ibid., 44.

44 Ibid., 111.

45 Ibid., 11.

46 Although Kim (Christ's Body in Corinth) claims to agree with Wire that the women in Corinth are claiming voice and agency in the ekklesia, his reconstruction of Paul's opponents in Corinth as imperially minded elites with oppressive views renders the women's voices silent in 1 Corinthians, which is figured primarily as a dialogue between Paul (as he identifies with the oppressed) and his oppressive and triumphalist opponents.

47 Marchal applies this question to Paul alone, concluding that he positions "himself as a provincial governor or colonial administrator for the divine imperator" (Politics of Heaven, 51 ). However, if we consider the social and economic status of both Paul and the communities to which he writes, might Paul's travels look more like the circumambulations of a migrant worker than the visits of a Roman imperial governor? Might they look that way to some contemporary communities, too?

48 For the notion of tracing the effective history of Paul's rhetoric, see Smith, "First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians," 307-9.

49 MacArthur is the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Idaho. He has a regular radio program (Grace to You), appeared frequently on Larry King Live, and in 2006 was named one of the twenty-five most influential preachers in America by Christianity Today (see http://www.christianitytoday.com/anniversary/features/top25preachers.html ).

50 This self-conscious caveat both recognizes the history of violence in Christian missions and dismisses it as avoidable through benevolent moderation.

51 John MacArthur, "The Qualities of a Great Missionary-Part 1; http://www.biblebb.com/files/mac/sgl747.htm (accessed May 29, 2010).

52 To our knowledge, not much work has been done to trace the place of Pauline literature in the history of European missionary expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (though see the article by Robert Seesengood in the present volume). For some brief references, see R. S. Sugirtharajah, "A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation," in The Postcolonial Bible, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah, Bible and Postcolonialism 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998). 91-117, especially 96-98.

53 Smith begins to get beyond this problem with his treatment of the Pauline assemblies as alternative communities of resistance. These are not, however, sites of struggle and debate around the challenges of empire so much as the result of Paul's work in the Greek cities ("The First and Second Letters to the Thessalonians," 311-13).

54 For an extended example of interrogating Paul's rhetorical construct of a community, see Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul's Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990).

55 See Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, ed., Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). For theorizing intersectional analysis in a context of highly increased population mobility, see Avtar Brah, "Diaspora, Border, and Transnational Identities," in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, ed., Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 613-34.

56 For a contemporary exploration of the importance of identifying the material (often military-driven) technologies of empire and their use as sites of resistance to empire, see Jenna Tiirsman, "Planetary Subjects after the Death of Empire," in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera, Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).

57 See John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson, eds., Voluntary Associations in the GraecoRoman World (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Richard S. Ascough, Paul's Macedonian Associations: The Social Context of Philippians and 1 Thessalonians, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/161 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

58 For a discussion of the Thessalonian ekklesia as a voluntary association and the economic and gendered imagery in 1 Thessalonians, see Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, "'Gazing Upon the Invisible': Archaeology, Historiography, and the Elusive Women of 1 Thessalonians," in From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonike: Studies in Religion and Archaeology, ed. Laura Nasrallah, Charalambos Bakirtzis, and Steven J. Friesen, Harvard Theological Studies 64 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

59 In his sermon on 1 Thess 2:l-6 ("Leading the Charge: Fail-Proof Spiritual Leadership"), MacArthur replicates Paul's politics of othering and thus constructs his own audience as standing in need of the preacher's (and Paul's) guidance: "Somehow and in some way not known to us, the church in Thessalonica was being told lies about Paul. Someone was attacking his integrity and someone or some group was attacking his sincerity. They were doing evetything they could to be hostile toward the church and one way to tear up the church was to destroy its confidence in the one that God used to found it, namely Paul. This group may have included the Jews who were so utterly hostile to the gospel, it may also have included pagan Gentiles who would be hostile to it as well." The audience is thus identified with a community that faces hostile religious Others bent on disrupting the proper relations between the assembly and its leader and founder.

60 Marchal (Politics of Heaven, 119) warns that a reconstruction of a political Paul who opposes the Roman imperial cult can become an anti-pagan missionary Paul who is thus available to support the missionary ambitions of European empires against Africa and the Americas.

61 See Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered. Dube's first question asks about "distant and inhabited lands," while her third question asks, "How does this text construct difference: does it promote dialogue and liberating interdependence or condemnation of all that is foreign?" In the case of 1 Thessalonians, Paul, Timothy, and Silvanus travel to inhabited cities, but the cities are not figured as distant nor foreign. The construction of difference is cast not geographically or in terms of foreignness but in terms of allegiances-the Thessalonians are to be different from Gentiles who are "not of God" (4:5). In this, they are like Jews who are "in Christ." Gentiles who are "not of God" are painted with the usual sexual slanders ( 4:5). In the same way, the outsider Jews in faraway Judea are murderous and have killed the Lord and abused Paul (both insider Jews).

62 See Elliott, Arrogance of Nations. See also the roundtable discussion between Amy-Jill Levine and third-world feminists in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 20, no. 1 (Spring 2004).

63 See, among others, Stefan Weinstock, "The Geographical Catalogue in Acts II, 9-11," Journal of Roman Studies 38, no. 1-2 (1948): 43-46; Gary Gilbert, "The List of Nations in Acts 2: Roman Propaganda and Lukan Response," journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 3 (2002): 497-529; Allen Brent, The Imperial Cult and the Development of Church Order: Concepts and Images of Authority in Paganism and Early Christianity before the Age of Cyprian, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 45 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 101-23.

64 Loveday Alexander, "Mapping Early Christianity: Acts and the Shape of Early Church History," Interpretation 57, no. 2 (2003): 163-75; and eadem, "'In Journeyings Often': Voyaging in the Acts of the Apostles and in Greek Romance," in Luke's Literary Achievement: Collected Essays, ed. C. M. Tuckett, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 116 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 17-49; James M. Scott, "Luke's Geographical Horizon," in The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, vol. 2, The Book of Acts in Its Graeco-Roman Setting, ed. David W. J. Gill and Conrad Gempf (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 483-544; Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke, trans. Geoffrey Buswell (1961; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). On the eclipsing of Jerusalem, see Richard I. Pervo, "My Happy Home: The Role of Jerusalem in Acts 1-7," Forum n.s. 3.1 (2000): 31-55, especially 38.

65 For a fuller analysis of Acts and the Panhellenion, see Laura S. Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 3. On the Panhellenion, see A. S. Spawforth and Susan Walker, "The World of the Panhellenion, I. Athens and Eleusis," Journal of Roman Studies 75 ( 1985): 88-104; eidem, "The World of the Panhellenion, II. Three Dorian Cities," journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 88-105; Ilaria Romeo, "The Panhellenion and Ethnic Identity in Hadrianic Greece," Classical Philology 97, no. 1 (2002): 21-40; Christopher P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Andent World, Revealing Antiquity 12 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

66 Shelly Matthews, "The Need for the Stoning of Stephen," in Violence in the New Testament, ed. Shelly Matthews and E. Leigh Gibson (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 124-39; see also Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Lawrence Wills, "The Depiction of the Jews in Acts," Journal of Biblical Literature 110 (1991): 631-54; Richard I. Pervo, "Meet Right-and Our Bounden Duty," Forum n.s. 4.1 (2001): 57-60.

67 Schussler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 196-98.