Remembering Paul

Who was Paul of Tarsus? Radical visionary of a new age? Gender-liberating progressive? Great defender of orthodoxy? In Remembering Paul, Benjamin L. White offers a critique of early Christian claims about the "e;real"e; Paul in the second century C.E.--a period in which apostolic memory was highly contested--and sets these ancient contests alongside their modern counterpart: attempts to rescue the "e;historical"e; Paul from his "e;canonical"e; entrapments. White charts the rise and fall of various narratives about Paul and argues that Christians of the second century had no access to the "e;real"e; Paul. Through the selection, combination, and interpretation of pieces of a diverse earlier layer of the Pauline tradition, Christians defended images of the Apostle that were important for forming collective identity.