Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Nam, David

Titel

Narratives of Paul's Death in Early Pauline Tradition

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate that the narrative structure of a historical account gives significance to particular historical events in the narrative, using the death of Paul as a case study. The first narrative analyzed in this study is the Martyrdom of Paul, an early account of Paul’s death from a longer narrative features Paul as a central figure. I will also make the case that the Acts of the Apostles is another such narrative. The death of Paul is not explicitly narrated in Acts, but I argue that since significant narrative elements direct the reader to anticipate Paul’s death at the ending of Acts, his death is part of the reader’s experience of the narrative progression. The Martyrdom of Paul and Acts clearly show how one historical event can be placed in vastly different narratives. The other narratives I will include for comparison are 1 Clement and Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, early Christian works that include brief accounts of Paul’s death, and two modern scholarly biographies, Jürgen Becker’s Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles and Jerome Murphy-O’Connor’s Paul: A Critical Life. I will show through the analysis of each narrative tells Paul’s story in its own way and for its own rhetorical aims; in doing so, this set of narratives results in six distinct understandings of what makes Paul’s death significant as a historical event. In shifting from questions of historical factuality to questions of historical significance, the goal is not to ascertain what the death of Paul “really” means, or should mean, today. Instead the approach taken in this study will accentuate the interpretive choices facing readers of historical narratives of Paul’s death.