444 - Heirs of Paul: Paul's Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today

Heirs of Paul: Paul's Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today
By J. Christiaan Beker
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1991. 146 pp. $11.00.

This text surveys the deutero-Pauline literature in the interest of learning about the earliest churches' reception of Paul's message. Beker encourages readers to resist conventional assumptions about the deutero-Pauline letters as a fall from the purity of Paul's own doctrine, and he draws out the positive value of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastoral Epistles, and the portrait of Paul in Acts as witnesses to Paul. He deploys both comparative and traditionhistorical strategies for reconstructing the ways Paul's gospel was adapted to the particular situations of the deutero-Pauline texts, and suggests what the contemporary church can learn from the ways various communities appropriated Paul.

This book provides a welcome impetus to reassess the theological status of Paul's early interpreters. Indeed, Beker might well have extended his survey to incorporate James, another important response to Pauline teaching. While readers will disagree with some of Beker's interpretive conclusions, they will profit from reckoning with his approach.

A. K M. Adam
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ.