Description: In his letter to the Galatians, Paul sets out an astute vision of what God has done in Christ against the backdrop of a world out-of-joint, a world engulfed in identity-distorting domination systems. Theologically profound and prophetically challenging, Galatians showcases God's initiative to empower liberation from those systems and their relational toxicity. For Paul, the union of Christ with his followers fosters flourishing forms of relational life that testify to the sovereign power of God over all competing forces. In The Theology of Galatians, respected New Testament scholar Bruce Longenecker cuts through the complexity of a notoriously opaque text, disentangling and interpreting Paul's discourse to reveal its multifaceted cosmology, its comprehensive coherence, and its penetrating analysis humanity and the divine. Offering a new interpretation of Galatians, his volume synthesizes the best of four main interpretative alternatives, finding new solutions to scholarly gridlock.
Brief description: Bruce Longenecker is the Melton Chair of Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of In Stone and Story: Early Christianity in the Roman World (2020), co-editor (with David Wilhite) of The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity (2023), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Paul (2020) and Greco-Roman Associations, Deities, and Early Christianity (2022).
Review Quotes: 'Bruce Longenecker's fine reading of Galatians has the signal and nearly unique merit of staying close to Paul's message without a hint of the anti-Judaism that haunts so many (if not most) readings of Galatians. I applaud a genuine step forward.' Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Culture, University of California, Berkeley