An Appreciative Response

Abstract

blameless Pharisee, not a perfect one, if Pharisee he was. In her blowing away a great deal of the dusty accretions of post-Pauline pro-Pauline Christian exegesis, which made Paul a model Christian and no kind of Jew, Fredriksen, in her essay for The Pharisees, continues the lifeproject represented by a stack of books and a thumb-drive of other scholarly papers. She succeeds here in uncovering the essentials of the Pauline text. In her reasking the question “What made Paul a Pharisee?,” she has walked back along a familiar path, to discover wrong turnings and right, and it has been a pleasure to walk along with her. Her essay is only one of the gems of this magnificent collection.