This volume brings together an international group of scholars on Mark and Paul, respectively, who reopen the question whether Paul was a direct influence on Mark. On the basis of the latest methods in New Testament scholarship, the battle over Yes and No to this question of literary and theological influence is waged within these pages. In the end, no agreement is reached, but the basic issues stand out with much greater clarity than before. How may one relate two rather different literary genres, the apostolic letter and the narrative gospel? How may the theologies of two such different types of writing be compared? Are there sufficient indications that Paul lies directly behind Mark for us to conclude that through Paul himself and Mark the New Testament as a whole reflects specifically Pauline ideas? What would the literary and theological consequences of either assuming or denying a direct influence be for our reconstruction of 1st century Christianity? And what would the consequences be for either understanding Mark or Paul as literary authors and theologians? How far should we give Paul an exalted a position in the literary creativity of the first Christians? Addressing these questions are scholars who have already written seminally on the issue or have marked positions on it, like Joel Marcus, Margaret Mitchell, Gerd Theissen and Oda Wischmeyer, together with a group of up-coming and senior Danish scholars from Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities who have collaborated on the issue for some years. The present volume leads the discussion further that has been taken up in: "Paul and Mark" (ed. by O. Wischmeyer, D. Sim, and I. Elmer), BZNW 191, 2013.

An up-to-date discussion of early Christian paraenesis in its Graeco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish contexts in the light of one hundred years of scholarship, issuing from a research project by Nordic and international scholars. The concept of paraenesis is basic to New Testament scholarship but hardly anywhere else. How is that to be explained? The concept is also, notoriously, without any agreed-upon definition and it is even contested. Can it at all be salvaged? This volume reassesses the scholarly discussion of paraenesis - both the concept and the phenomenon - since Paul Wendland and Martin Dibelius and argues for a number of ways in which it may continue to be fruitful.

Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul challenges the traditional reading of Paul. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that the usual, mainly cognitive and metaphorical, ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, such as 'being in Christ', 'having God's pneuma (spirit), Christ's pneuma, and Christ himself in one', must be supplemented by a literal understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology.
Engberg-Pedersen shows that Paul's cosmology, not least his understanding of the pneuma, was a materialist, bodily one: the pneuma was a physical element that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into 'pneumatic bodies'. This literal understanding of the future events is then traced back to the Pauline present as Engberg-Pedersen considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of a range of central themes like his own conversion, his mission, the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way the apostle took the pneuma to inform his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end.
In developing this picture of Paul's world view, an explicitly philosophically oriented form of interpretation ('philosophical exegesis') is employed, in which the interpreter applies categories of interpretation that make sense philosophically, whether in an ancient or a modern context. For this enterprise Engberg-Pedersen draws in particular on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology - as opposed to the Platonic, immaterialist and dualistic categories that underlie traditional readings of Paul - and on modern ideas on 'religious experience', 'self', 'body' and 'practice' derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. In this way Paul is shown to have spelled out philosophically his Jewish, 'apocalyptic' world view, which remains a central feature of his thought.
The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier 'ethical' reading of Paul in his prize-winning book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).

From Stoicism to Platonism describes the change in philosophy from around 100 BCE, when monistic Stoicism was the strongest dogmatic school in philosophy, to around 100 CE, when dualistic Platonism began to gain the upper hand - with huge consequences for all later Western philosophy and for Christianity. It is distinguished by querying traditional categories like 'eclecticism' and 'harmonization' as means of describing the period. Instead, it highlights different strategies of 'appropriation' of one school's doctrines by philosophers from the other school, with all philosophers being highly conscious of their own identity. The book also sets out to break down the traditional boundaries between, on the one hand, the study of Greco-Roman philosophy in the period and, on the other hand, that of contemporary Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian writings with a philosophical profile. In these ways, the book opens up an immensely fruitful period in the history of philosophy.

From Stoicism to Platonism describes the change in philosophy from around 100 BCE, when monistic Stoicism was the strongest dogmatic school in philosophy, to around 100 CE, when dualistic Platonism began to gain the upper hand - with huge consequences for all later Western philosophy and for Christianity. It is distinguished by querying traditional categories like 'eclecticism' and 'harmonization' as means of describing the period. Instead, it highlights different strategies of 'appropriation' of one school's doctrines by philosophers from the other school, with all philosophers being highly conscious of their own identity. The book also sets out to break down the traditional boundaries between, on the one hand, the study of Greco-Roman philosophy in the period and, on the other hand, that of contemporary Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian writings with a philosophical profile. In these ways, the book opens up an immensely fruitful period in the history of philosophy.

John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel offers a Stoic reading of the Fourth Gospel, especially its cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. It works through the gospel in narrative sequence providing a 'philosophical narrative reading'. In each section of the gospel Troels Engberg-Pedersen raises discusses philosophical questions. He compares John with Paul (in philosophy) and Mark (in narrative) to offer a new reading of the transmitted text of the Fourth Gospel. Of these two profiles, the narrative one is strongly influenced by the literary critical paradigm. Moreover, by attending carefully to a number of narratological features, one may come to see that the transmitted text in fact hangs together much more coherently than scholarship has been willing to see. The other profile is specifically philosophical. Scholarship has been well aware that the Fourth Gospel has what one might call a philosophical dimension. Engberg-Pedersen shows that throughout the Gospel contemporary Stoicism, works better to illuminate the text. This pertains to the basic cosmology (and cosmogony) that is reflected in the text, to the epistemology that underlies a central theme in it regarding different types of belief in Jesus, to the ethics that is introduced fairly late in the text when Jesus describes how the disciples should live once he has himself gone away from them, and more.

Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul challenges the traditional reading of Paul. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that the usual, mainly cognitive and metaphorical, ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, such as 'being in Christ', 'having God's pneuma (spirit), Christ's pneuma, and Christ himself in one', must be supplemented by a literal understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology. Engberg-Pedersen shows that Paul's cosmology, not least his understanding of the pneuma, was a materialist, bodily one: the pneuma was a physical element that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into 'pneumatic bodies'. This literal understanding of the future events is then traced back to the Pauline present as Engberg-Pedersen considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of a range of central themes like his own conversion, his mission, the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way the apostle took the pneuma to inform his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end. In developing this picture of Paul's world view, an explicitly philosophically oriented form of interpretation ('philosophical exegesis') is employed, in which the interpreter applies categories of interpretation that make sense philosophically, whether in an ancient or a modern context. For this enterprise Engberg-Pedersen draws in particular on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology - as opposed to the Platonic, immaterialist and dualistic categories that underlie traditional readings of Paul - and on modern ideas on 'religious experience', 'self', 'body' and 'practice' derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. In this way Paul is shown to have spelled out philosophically his Jewish, 'apocalyptic' world view, which remains a central feature of his thought. The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier 'ethical' reading of Paul in his prize-winning book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).

John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel offers a Stoic reading of the Fourth Gospel, especially its cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. It works through the gospel in narrative sequence providing a 'philosophical narrative reading'. In each section of the gospel Troels Engberg-Pedersen raises discusses philosophical questions. He compares John with Paul (in philosophy) and Mark (in narrative) to offer a new reading of the transmitted text of the Fourth Gospel. Of these two profiles, the narrative one is strongly influenced by the literary critical paradigm. Moreover, by attending carefully to a number of narratological features, one may come to see that the transmitted text in fact hangs together much more coherently than scholarship has been willing to see. The other profile is specifically philosophical. Scholarship has been well aware that the Fourth Gospel has what one might call a philosophical dimension. Engberg-Pedersen shows that throughout the Gospel contemporary Stoicism, works better to illuminate the text. This pertains to the basic cosmology (and cosmogony) that is reflected in the text, to the epistemology that underlies a central theme in it regarding different types of belief in Jesus, to the ethics that is introduced fairly late in the text when Jesus describes how the disciples should live once he has himself gone away from them, and more.

This book seeks to do for the study of Paul and Stoicism what E. P. Sanders did for Paul and Judaism. Instead of making a brick-by-brick analysis, Troels Engberg Pedersen provides the first comprehensive building-to-building comparison of how the two religious/philosophical systems functioned. The book moves through the major letters of Paul (e.g., Philippians, Galatians, and Romans), carefully documenting Paul's indebtedness to Stoic thought.

This volume brings together an international group of scholars on Mark and Paul, respectively, who reopen the question whether Paul was a direct influence on Mark. On the basis of the latest methods in New Testament scholarship, the battle over Yes and No to this question of literary and theological influence is waged within these pages. In the end, no agreement is reached, but the basic issues stand out with much greater clarity than before. How may one relate two rather different literary genres, the apostolic letter and the narrative gospel? How may the theologies of two such different types of writing be compared? Are there sufficient indications that Paul lies directly behind Mark for us to conclude that through Paul himself and Mark the New Testament as a whole reflects specifically Pauline ideas? What would the literary and theological consequences of either assuming or denying a direct influence be for our reconstruction of 1st century Christianity? And what would the consequences be for either understanding Mark or Paul as literary authors and theologians? How far should we give Paul an exalted a position in the literary creativity of the first Christians? Addressing these questions are scholars who have already written seminally on the issue or have marked positions on it, like Joel Marcus, Margaret Mitchell, Gerd Theissen and Oda Wischmeyer, together with a group of up-coming and senior Danish scholars from Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities who have collaborated on the issue for some years. The present volume leads the discussion further that has been taken up in: "Paul and Mark" (ed. by O. Wischmeyer, D. Sim, and I. Elmer), BZNW 191, 2013.

This volume address a fundamental issue of debate in New Testament studies, but does away with the traditional strategy of playing Judaism and Hellenism off against eachother as a context to understand Paul. This aim is reached in two ways: first in essays that display the ideological underpinnings of a Jewish and Hellenistic Paul in scholarly interpretations of him; and secondly, in case studies that illuminate issues from the Corinthian correspondence by drawing freely on Jewish and Greco-Roman contextual material.

Dr Engberg-Pedersen shows how a range of problems encountered in twentieth-century interpretation may be overcome by reading the epistles in the light of ancient Stoic ethics.
He discusses literary, conceptual and theological issues: for example, the unity of the letters; the relationship in the Pauline letters
between theology and ethics; the logical character and shape of Pauline exhortation; the meaning of righteousness from faith; Paul's
handling of the Jewish law.
The author illuminates the whole world of the Stoics, and argues that scholars must move beyond the traditional Judaism/Hellenism divide to reach a comprehensive and accurate reading of Paul's letters.