Paul against the Nations

In these essays, some of them never published before, Neil Elliott presents an understanding of Romans at odds with the traditional Protestant understanding (a treatise on justification by faith) or the "New Perspective" (Paul''s argument with Jewish "ethnocentrism"). The letter that emerges here is an urgent response to a historical situation: Paul engages what would quickly become the supersessionist norm in gentile Christianity, shaped by the Roman construal of subject peoples. Gathered here for the first time, these studies rely on rhetorical criticism, broad attention to Roman imperial ideology, and postcolonial criticism to argue for a strikingly new perspective on Romans.