Over the last few decades there has been a renewed interest in St Paul by continental philosophers, many of them from Lacanian traditions. This has arisen independent of the revolutionary developments in Pauline theology over the same period. This thesis bridges the gap between them, as a Lacanian study of Paul that is faithfully Lacanian and faithfully Pauline. Lacan’s thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language, and some of the accompanying structures he discovered, are found in Paul’s theology. Finding Lacan in Paul poses new solutions to many of the dilemmas facing both Lacanian readings of Paul and Pauline scholarship itself. A more faithfully Lacanian (and less Hegelian) version of Slavoj Žižek’s Paul loses none of his political usefulness, without requiring atheism. The Pauline ‘event’ as Alain Badiou describes it is described again through Lacan, in a way that fits better with Pauline scholarship, allowing equal importance to both the death and resurrection of Christ. Refusing to sacrifice an authentically Lacanian understanding of ‘alienation’ forces a more nuanced reading of Paul than some other similar attempts; but it also reframes what some Paul scholars mean when they claim that in Christ the believer undergoes an ontological transformation. Inserting a Lacanian Paul into the modern philosophical discourse reveals a Paul who can be politically meaningful beyond his relation to ‘Empire.’ Interwoven in this is a reading of Paul opposed to Stoicism, revealed by qualifying Stoic ethics as obsessional neurotic in structure. This reading of Paul against Stoicism helps to demonstrate Paul’s relation to the ‘master signifiers’ of his time, which also helps to clarify what happened in Pauline Christian ‘conversions,’ and provides another way to theorise about what Paul might mean for today. This thesis demonstrates that Lacan’s concepts are helpful to Pauline scholarship, and that they are not irreconcilable with the historical critical method, in the hope that many more Lacanian Pauls might emerge in the future.

While various central themes have been suggested for Galatians, including justification by faith alone, the need for Gentiles to follow the Mosaic law (via the New Perspective on Paul), or sonship, none of them truly binds the letter together or is satisfactorily represented in all six chapters. The search within existent scholarship for a comprehensive thread has led to the discovery of the New Exodus theme. The New Exodus has enjoyed considerable attention in recent years and shows great promise for the construction of a consistent biblical theology. Yet the New Exodus in Galatians has not been explored with any depth. The premise of this thesis is that the New Exodus undergirds Paul’s theology as he writes his letter to the Galatians, and to recognize this will result in a clearer and more coherent reading of the letter. In particular, it highlights the way in which Paul views the salvific work of Jesus as fundamental to the life of the people of God as was the first exodus of Israel. A threefold approach is adopted. The study indentifies New Exodus motifs found in the OT prophets that are also located in Galatians to confirm the presence of the pattern there. It also recognizes apocalyptic antitheses that mark the inauguration of the New Exodus and examines the letter for evidence of these. And finally, the method uses an intertextual hermeneutic, which exposes Paul’s reliance on a wider use of the OT than is seen at the surface, and in particular, a reliance on Isaiah. The analysis presented here focuses on Galatians 1–4, while providing pointers for applying the results to remaining two chapters of the letter.

This thesis contributes to the discussion about the theological vision and logic in Paul's letter to the Galatians, in which he opposes the “Judaizing” of the Gentiles by means of their circumcision and the observance of the Mosaic Law, and calls for full alignment with the reality that the Christ-event had inaugurated. Thus, the discussion is also about discontinuity and continuity between Paul's message and Israel's scriptures, and with the hermeneutic in, and the shape of, Paul's retelling of Israel's story. After reviewing six perspectives on the reading of Galatians, I position my approach in relation to N. T. Wright and John Barclay. With Wright, I focus on Paul’s appropriation of Israel's scriptures and story, giving special attention to the hermeneutic involved in it. In search for the logic in Paul's resistance to Gentile circumcision, I develop Barclay's emphasis on the centrality of incongruous grace with reference to Paul's scriptural matrix. The vantage point for my reading of the letter is the strategically important passage of 4:21-5:1 that draws together the preceding argument, and moves it to a new phase. Also, in 4:21-5:1, Paul invites the Galatians to adopt his interpretative practice, which opens up Paul's hermeneutic for analysis. I demonstrate that Paul's allegoresis in 4:21-5:1 is intertextual; Paul reads the Abraham narrative together with Isaiah in light of the revelation of Christ and the experience of the Spirit. Following Paul's signals in Gal 4:21-5:1 that point to his scriptural matrix, I analyse the theological potential in the narrative of the birth of Abraham's two sons and in Isaiah's vision of restoration. I claim that Paul's theological vision draws from the Abrahamic promise of blessing to all the nations and from its re-appropriation in Isaiah in terms of the Gentiles' inclusion in the regenerated people of God. Paul also makes a correlation between the pattern in Isaac's birth and the alienation-restoration paradigm in Isa 54:1 that is formative for his logic of incongruent grace that recognises the dependence of both the Jew and Gentile on the promissory act of God in Christ and the Spirit for inclusion in the restored people of God – the re-created humanity.

This study is an investigation of the function of emotion in the social formation of the believers in the Pauline churches. In his letters, Paul speaks often of his own emotions, and also promotes certain emotions while banishing others; all this surely indicates that emotion has an important role to play within the believing community. However, in New Testament studies, the study of emotion is still at an embryonic stage. This thesis, which represents the first thesis-length treatment of emotion in the Pauline letter corpus, attempts to take the discussion forward. It argues that for Paul, emotions are integral to the proper formation and stabilizing of Christian identity and community, because they encode structures of belief and influence patterns of sociality. Chapter 1 reviews the nascent scholarship on emotion in Paul’s letters and the wider New Testament, and also surveys the state of play of emotions research in the sciences and social sciences. In chapter 2, we examine emotion in Stoicism, the dominant philosophical influence of the day, focusing particularly on joy and grief—the two emotions that we take up and investigate exegetically in chapters 3 and 4, which concern, respectively, joy in Philippians, and grief in 1 Thessalonians. Finally, in chapter 5, we enlist the sociological notion of the “emotional regime” to explore how authorized emotions are constructed and reinforced in the Pauline communities. I conclude by offering an account of emotion in Paul, contrasting it with Stoic thinking. Taking its cue from current emotions research, which highlights the cognitive and social dimensions of emotion, this thesis proposes that as Paul sees it, right patterns of feeling stem from, and indeed embody, right patterns of belief, and that the social display of sanctioned emotions upbuilds the communal life of the believers. Furthermore, such right emotions, by squaring felt experience with held beliefs, and demarcating social boundaries between Christians and others, have powerful integrating and differentiating functions that profoundly influence identity and belonging. These conclusions have potentially far-reaching implications for our overall understanding of the social formation of the early believers, not least in terms of how a hitherto neglected aspect of that socialization—Paul’s emphasis on the affective dimensions of personal and communal life—is brought into active conversation with the theological realities that were believed to shape all of human existence and the practices that undergirded and sustained these beliefs.

The Epistle to the Hebrews presents God in dialogue. It opens with God speaking through the prophets and the Son in Hebrews 1.1, and then presents words previously attested in Scripture as the speech of God throughout the epistle. By means of prosopological exegesis, an ancient reading strategy with its roots in classical Greco-Roman training, the author interprets these texts by giving them new participants and settings, which produces readings that support his theological program. They do not appear at random, but instead are found in a distinct pattern throughout Hebrews. In the first two sections of Hebrews (1.1–4.16; 4.11–10.25), the Father speaks first, primarily to the Son; then the Son responds to the Father; and finally, the Spirit speaks to the community. The first chapter of this thesis introduces prosopological exegesis and then discusses the speech of the Father, Son, and Spirit, in chapters 2, 3, and 4 respectively. These chapters discuss the author’s use of Scripture, including his utilization of certain ambiguities within Greek traditions of Scripture, and by extension its text-form and the impact of considering these texts as “speech.” The fifth chapter discusses the implications of these readings for understandings of the structure of Hebrews in addition to divine and human speech in Hebrews 10.19–13.25. This third section of Hebrews exhibits variations from the patterns above, but may help to draw together the author’s three speaking characters. What emerges from this study is a clearer picture of the speaking God in Hebrews. The regular and regulated use of speech throughout the epistle moves the argument forward and is essential to the author’s portrayal of God, since it is not just the author’s words, but God’s as well, that disclose the theological core of this book.

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This study examines 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, a passage that has caused scholarly puzzlement. The content of Paul's argument has been generally understood to emphasise discontinuity between the present human body and the body of the resurrection. However, Paul's use of the seed motif then seems to contradict ancient understandings of seeds; the purpose of his cosmological descriptions becomes opaque; and, at some points, elements of his argument appear redundant. This study answers Troels Engberg-Pedersen's call for a 'cosmological', rather than a 'cognitive', understanding of Paul's language, and brings together both causal and functional analyses of Paul's argument. By recognising both the philosophical background to Paul's motifs and his use of Old Testament intertexts, a new understanding of the passage is achieved. Furthermore, an examination of religious practices in Corinth provides the basis for proposing a reconstruction of the situation addressed by Paul. The study demonstrates that, in seeking a 'cosmological' reading, a fresh interpretation becomes possible; an interpretation that resolves some of the puzzles attending existing readings. Paul's seed material in vv.36-38 can be seen to accord with ancient understandings of seeds, and to emphasise continuity rather than discontinuity. An intertextual analysis of vv.39-41 identifies Psalm 8 as the hitherto undetected intertext which structures Paul's thought. Paul's argument portrays continuity between the present and eschatological ages, with Paul constructing a model of correspondence that emphasises a renewed cosmos as the context for the resurrection. A further model of correspondence in v.45 then allows Paul to write of the agency of Christ in the resurrection, and also the character of raised humanity (vv.47-49).

The subject of “glory”, used to translate the Greek term δόξα, has been relatively neglected in Pauline scholarship. Due to the wide semantic range of δόξα, the few studies on glory in Paul’s epistles have focused on certain aspects of it, such as its association with honour, effulgence or immortality. Although the association of glory with power has been noted by classical and biblical scholars, it has not been explored in detail within the Pauline corpus, particularly Romans where the connection is immediately evident in Romans 1:18-21 and 6:4. This study attempts to address this lacuna by exploring the relationship between glory and power in Romans by: (1) focusing on the concept of glory through paying attention to δόξα and other terms that are closely related to it, in particular honour and shame language, and (2) examining it from both Jewish and Graeco-Roman backgrounds since both traditions were probably influential on Paul’s Roman audience. Our exploration of the correlations of glory with power in the Graeco-Roman and Jewish traditions demonstrates the centrality of glory/honour in the ancient Mediterranean world, with glory/honour often denoting or connoting power. Glory is often a function of power, and power a function of glory/honour, such that the two mutually reinforce each other. This provides insights into the ways in which they could have shaped Paul’s understanding of their relationship. Our journey of glory through Romans traces the variegated connections between glory and power, under the categories of divine, human, eschatological and communal glory/power, and across a wide range of Pauline theological themes, providing fresh insights into Paul’s theology of glory and his arguments in Romans.