Acknowledgements Abbreviations Chapter 1: The Novelistic Self Chapter 2: The Rustle of Paul Chapter 3: The Myth of Paul Chapter 4: The Disease of Paul Chapter 5: The Death of Paul Postscript: Writer Paul Bibliography Index
Examines Paul's self-understanding and references to himself in his letters in light of the work and theories of Roland Barthes.
Scott S. Elliott is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Leadership at Adrian College (Michigan, USA). He is the author of Reconfiguring Mark's Jesus: Narrative Criticism After Poststructuralism (2011) and co-editor of Bible and Theory: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Stephen D. Moore (2020).
[The Rustle of Paul] provides extensive sophisticated, detailed,
and creative engagements with Barthes’s writings and other relevant
works related to self-narration ... Readers seeking inspiration (or
frustration) by poststructuralist critiques of conventional Pauline
scholarship will certainly find a treasure trove of ideas on which
to ruminate.
*Review of Biblical Literature*
[T]here is much that is useful and of interest, especially for
Pauline scholars who are desiring novel approaches to important
(and foundational) biblical texts.
*Barthes Studies*
A dazzling achievement. Just how much has remained unthought and
unsaid about Paul and his letters, even (or especially) in Pauline
scholarship, is what Scott Elliott unearths in this singular study.
Elliott is currently our most incisive biblical-scholarly
(re)thinker of the tangled relationships between the factual and
the fictional, the historical and the autobiographical, and the
unutterable and the sayable—all relationships around which Paul’s
letters pivot, as Elliott shows.
*Stephen D. Moore, Edmund S. Janes Professor of New Testament
Studies, The Theological School, Drew University, USA*
Scott S. Elliott’s The Rustle of Paul offers something rare in the
crowded landscape of Pauline scholarship today: a genuinely fresh
encounter with the elusive figure of Paul. Reading the Pauline
epistles alongside literary theorist Roland Barthes, Elliott’s
results are both revelatory and revolutionary. Just as Barthes
struggled to liberate language from the strictures of supposedly
stable structures and the false imposition of authorial intent,
Elliott seeks to free Paul from the modern impulse to pin him down
by figuring him out. At once bold and suggestive, the rustle of
Elliott’s own writing has restored for me the pleasures of the
Pauline text.
*Michal Beth Dinkler, Yale Divinity School, USA*
Most read Pauline letters in search of Paul, an Author and/or
system of ideas, and then deploy that Author to construct early
Christianity or make disciples. Foregoing such myth-making, Scott
S. Elliot focuses, with Roland Barthes, on “writing” itself in
Paul’s autobiographical fragments. He privileges the fragmented,
fictional “I” of Rom. 7 over that of Phil. 3 and sees this writerly
“I” as relational, weak, and vulnerable to systems (see 1 Cor. 9;
12). Throughout Elliott searches for that which temporarily baffles
meaning (the Neutral). This challenging, incisive text will lead
readers to ponder anew both the Greek NT and Barthes’
Mythologies.
*Richard Walsh, Methodist University, USA*
In this remarkable book, Scott S. Elliott suggests a different way
of looking at important texts, by reading Paul in a manner proposed
by both Roland Barthes and Barthes’ contemporary, Susan Sontag —
not by looking past or through the text (for Oedipal meanings,
structured class relations, the expression of some well-defined
self or experience, etc.), but at the work itself. In this
approach, the point is less about interpretation than it is about
pleasure, but what Elliott has done so well is to show us that to
take pleasure in the texts of Paul, to look at them and not past
them, is no disservice to Paul or to us. In the spirit of Barthes’
‘pleasure of the text’ (and Sontag’s ‘erotics of art’), Elliott
demonstrates that remaining open to the ‘rustle of Paul’ requires
extraordinary care and sensuous attunement to language.
*Matthew Waggoner, Albertus Magnus College, USA*
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