I was thinking about popular authors Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, Reza Aslan, Robert M. Price, Karen Armstrong who are all popular scholars. Which brought me to the lesser known Dale B. Martin. Martin is not currently in Logos, but he easily could be if you would preorder either or both of these titles.
- Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity | Logos Bible Software
Early Christians frequently used metaphors about slavery, calling themselves slaves of God and Christ and referring to their leaders as slave representatives of Christ. Most biblical scholars have insisted that this language would have been distasteful to potential converts in the Greco-Roman world, and they have wondered why early Christians such as Paul used the image of slavery to portray salvation. In this book Dale B. Martin addresses the issue by examining the social history and rhetorical and theological conventions of the times.
The first half of the book draws on a variety of historical sources - inscriptions, novels, speeches, dream-handbooks, and agricultural manuals - to portray the complexity of slavery in the early Roman empire. Concentrating on middle-level, managerial slaves, Martin shows how slavery sometimes functioned as a means of upward social mobility and as a form of status-by-association for those slaves who were agents of members of the upper class. For this reason, say Martin, "slavery of Christ," brought the Christian convert a degree of symbolic status and lent the Christian leader a certain kind of derived authority.
The second half of the book traces the Greco-Roman use of political rhetoric that spoke about populist leaders as "enslaved" to their followers, especially to members of the lower class. This provides the context for Paul's claim, in 1 Corinthians 9, that he has enslaved himself to "all" - that is, to those very people he is supposed to lead as an apostle. Martin thus interprets this statement to mean that Paul identifies himself with the interests of persons with lower status in the Corinthian church, calling on those with higher status to imitate his self-debasement in order to further the interests of those below them on the social scale.
- The Corinthian Body | Logos Bible Software
In this intriguing discussion of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin contends that Paul’s various disagreements with the Corinthians were the result of a fundamental conflict over the ideological construction of the human body.
According to Martin, most Corinthian Christians and Paul himself saw the body as an entity that could be permeated by different pollutions. Other members of the Corinthian church, however, viewed the body as hierarchical—as a microcosm of the universe—and were not particularly concerned about body boundaries or pollution. These differing views of the human body (and also of the church as the body of Christ) led to differing opinions on a variety of subjects—including the role of rhetoric and philosophy in a hierarchical society, the eating of meat sacrificed to idols, prostitution, sexual desire and marriage, and the resurrection of the body. Martin explores these conflicts by drawing on ancient medical writings, modern anthropological approaches, and feminist and ideological methods of critical analysis. He shows how Paul’s understanding of the body prevailed among the less well-educated inhabitants of the Roman Empire, who occupied relatively low socioeconomic levels. The minority who espoused the ideas of hierarchy, on the other hand, were usually of higher social status and were better educated. And it was along these same class lines, Martin argues, that the Corinthian church itself was divided.
