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No extant text gives so vivid a glimpse into the experience of an
ancient prisoner as Paul's letter to the Philippians. As a letter
from prison, however, it is not what one would expect. For although
it is true that Paul, like some other ancient prisoners, speaks in
Philippians of his yearning for death, what he expresses most
conspicuously is contentment and even joy. Setting aside pious
banalities that contrast true joy with happiness, and leaving
behind too heroic depictions that take their cue from Acts, Abject
Joy offers a reading of Paul's letter as both a means and an
artifact of his provisional attempt to make do. By outlining the
uses of punitive custody in the administration of Rome's eastern
provinces and describing the prison's complex place in the social
and moral imagination of the Greek and Roman world, Ryan
Schellenberg provides a richly drawn account of Paul's nonelite
social context, where bodies and their affects were shaped by acute
contingency and habitual susceptibility to violent subjugation.
Informed by recent work in the history of emotions, and with
comparison to modern prison writing and ethnography provoking new
questions and insights, Schellenberg describes Paul's letter as an
affective technology, wielded at once on Paul himself and on his
addressees, that works to strengthen his grasp on the very joy he
names. Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do by Ryan
S. Schellenberg is a social history of prison in the Greek and
Roman world that takes Paul's letter to the Philippians as its
focal instance-or, to put it the other way around, a study of
Paul's letter to the Philippians that takes the reality of prison
as its starting point. Examining ancient perceptions of
confinement, and placing this ancient evidence in dialogue with
modern prison writing and ethnography, it describes Paul's urgent
and unexpectedly joyful letter as a witness to the perplexing art
of survival under constraint.
The T&T Clark Handbook to the Historical Paul gathers leading
voices on various aspects of Paul's biography into a thorough
reconsideration of him as a historical figure. The contributors
show how recent trends in Pauline scholarship have invited new
questions about a variety of topics, including his social location,
his mode of subsistence, his cultural formation, his place within
Judaism, his religious experience and practice, and his affinities
with other religious actors of the Roman world. Through careful
attention to biographical detail, social context, and historical
method, it seeks to describe him as a contextually plausible social
actor. The volume is structured in three parts. Part One introduces
sources, methods, and historiographical approaches, surveying the
foundational texts for Paul and the early Pauline tradition. Part
Two examines key biographical questions pertaining to Paul's bodily
comportment, the material aspects of his career, and his religious
activities. Part Three reconstructs the biographical portraits of
Paul that emerge from the letters associated with him, presenting a
series of "micro-biographies" pieced together by leading Pauline
scholars.
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