Paul après Paul: une histoire de réception

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of the reception of Paul: how does the construction of the image of Paul in the Deuteropauline letters (Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians), the Pastoral letters, the Acts of the Apostles and the apocryphal Acts of Paul relate together? The difficult question of the relationship between Paul in his letters and Paul in Acts is treated first. A typology of the reception of Paul is proposed following three poles: documentary (his letters), biographical (his life) and doctoral (his permanent authority for the Church). The conception that Paul's letters were the only regulation for the memory of Paul in the first century isdenied. This three poles typology is applied to some topics of the Pauline tradition: the status of the apostle, the suffering of the apostle, and his teaching. It is possible to observe finally how the writings which honor the memory of the apostle have interpreted these topics by working out a feature present in the writings of the apostle.

What Justification? Pauline Reception and the Interpretation of Phld. 8.2

“…The trajectories along which these reception-historical studies have traced Paul's influence have been well documented in recent years and need not be rehearsed in full. From the ground-breaking works of Ernst Dassmann (1979), Andreas Lindemann (1979), Donald Penny (1979), andDavid Rensberger (1981), to the increasingly nuanced distinctions between the receptions of Paul's person, letters, and teaching (Marguerat 2008), and into recent explorations of how the Apostle was transformed or remembered (White 2014;Yarbro Collins 2022), the field of reception history has developed quickly and with growing complexity when it comes to Paul. 1 In his programmatic chapter on the reception of Paul in the second century, Lindemann (2018) rightly highlights that various receptions of Paul are evident across a wide geographical swath of the second-century Christian world.…”