Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity

Adela Yarbro Collins. Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

Yarbro Collins’s goal in Paul Transformed is to capture the multiple images of Paul that early Christ-confessors created from reading the apostle’s letters. In the process, she examines five areas of Paul’s theology, which Yarbro Collins derives from his so-called undisputed letters,[1] and tracks the various interpretations of these theological tenets in Christian writings from the first to the fourth centuries CE (and sometimes beyond). The work consists of an introduction, five chapters, which serve as Yarbro Collins’s test cases, a conclusion, endnotes, a bibliography, and indices of ancient and modern sources as well as subjects she discusses.

In the “Introduction,” Yarbro Collins lays out her goal of tracing the varied and sometimes contradictory ways in which Paul was read by later interpreters. The introduction also provides a concise discussion of the modern scholarly conversations surrounding the history of interpretation and reception history, positioning her work within them. The first chapter, “The Transformation of Paul’s Apocalyptic Ideas,” introduces Paul’s Jewish apocalypticism, highlighting the imminence of Jesus’s Second Coming, “ambiguous statements” concerning how this event will occur. She also examines the apostle’s journey to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12 and the ways in which numerous ancient readers of Paul transformed them. She contends that some later interpreters of Paul shifted this future focus to the present,[2] while others allegorized aspects of it, reading the Second Coming as a template for Christian ethical development,[3] and that a few so-called Gnostic Christians used 2 Corinthians 12 to address the fate of disembodied souls after death.[4]

In the second chapter, “The Resurrection Body: The Reception of 1 Corinthians 15,” Yarbro Collins examines the “spiritual body” Paul says resurrected Christ-confessors will receive at Christ’s Second Coming and how ancient interpreters of the apostle understood it. She proposes that Paul believed the “spiritual body” is an embodied existence that, while not consisting of flesh and blood (1 Corinthians 15:50), is made up of “an airy or fiery substance” (p. 36). Some later interpreters understood Paul’s “spiritual body” to be embodied but interpreted the apostle’s words in such a way to include flesh in that body.[5] Other so-called Gnostic readers of Paul interpreted the “spiritual body” to mean the soul alone.[6] A few Christians also held a somewhat mediating position: that the body in question does not consist of human flesh but of an ethereal material.[7]

The third chapter, “Marriage and Celibacy: The Reception of 1 Corinthians 7,” examines Paul’s understanding of marriage and how later interpreters received it. The apostle’s belief in the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming affected his view of the subject. Because this event would happen soon, Christ-confessors should avoid marriage, which would be a distraction from God’s work in the world through Christ. If they were unable to remain celibate, then Paul allowed marriage (1 Corinthians 7). Some later Christians interpreted Paul as commanding singleness and continence.[8] Others believed the apostle allowed marriage.[9] And still other Christians took Paul as teaching marriage for the sake of procreation.[10]

In the fourth chapter, “The Role of Women in the Church: The Reception of Paul’s Instructions and Practices regarding Women,” which is also the longest and most complex in the book, Yarbro Collins takes up female leadership in churches associated with Paul and how later Christ-confessors interpreted Paul’s views on the subject. She posits that the apostle’s letters are contradictory on the role of women. On the one hand, Paul praises female leadership of Junia the apostle (Romans 16:6–7) and Phoebe the deacon (Romans 16:1–2) and notes that women teach and prophesy (1 Corinthians 11:2–16; 12:28). On the other hand, he insists that women cover their heads (1 Corinthians 11:5–9) and disallows them to speak in Christian assemblies (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).[11] These two views on the role of women in the church are echoed in later interpreters of Paul with some Christ-confessors advocating for female leadership, while others attempted to silence women.

The fifth chapter, “Paul’s Transformation from Suffering Apostle to Saint and Martyr,” follows the transformation of the biographic material that the apostle provides about himself as a persecuted, suffering apostle to the venerated martyr after his death. According to Yarbro Collins, for Paul, his weakness—and not miracles—was the venue through which God displayed his power. However, later Christians venerated the apostle’s supposed tomb in Rome and his corpse became a supposed source of miraculous healing. Finally, in the “Conclusion” of Paul Transformed, Yarbro Collins summarizes the preceding chapters.

Paul Transformed is thought-provoking and demonstrates the breadth and scope of Yarbro Collins’s scholarship, from Jewish apocalypticism to fourth-century Christian architecture in Rome. While many scholars will question her interpretation of Paul’s letters as riddled with irreconcilable inconsistencies, she has done a masterful job highlighting passages in the apostle’s letters that make a systematic presentation of his theology difficult and the varied and contradictory ways that later readers of the apostle interpreted him.[12] The individuals who will benefit most from this work are scholars and advanced graduate students. Those uninitiated into the mysteries of Pauline and nascent Christian scholarship will find this book difficult mainly because of its density and brevity. It is only 132 pages of text and yet Paul Transformed attempts to trace Paul’s thought from the apostle to numerous, later, and varied readers of him. To accomplish this goal, Yarbro Collins abbreviates not only her own exegeses of Paul’s letters but also discussions of interpreters of the apostle with whom she interacts. In sum, scholars who focus on the reception of Paul will find Paul Transformed to be a lively conversation partner.

[1] That is, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

[2] These interpreters are the authors of three canonical letters of Paul that Yarbro Collins (and many scholars) does not consider to be by Paul, but by his later disciples: Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus). 

[3] These ancient Christian readers of Paul are the second century Christian Irenaeus and the second-third century Christian Origen. 

[4] These readers of the apostle are the authors of the Coptic Gnostic Apocalypse of Paul and the Apocalypse of Paul.

[5] These readers are Irenaeus, Pseudo-Justin (or the author of works that some scholars believe have been falsely attributed to the second century Christian Justin Martyr), the second-third century Christian Tertullian, and the fourth-fifth century Christian Augustine of Hippo.

[6] These so-called Gnostic interpreters are the authors of Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip.

[7] This individual is Origen.

[8] These are the author of the Acts of Paul and Thelca and the second century Christians Marcion and Tatian.

[9] These individuals are the second century Christian Basilides, his son Isidore, Origen, the author of 1 Timothy, and Tertullian.

[10] An example of this is the second-third century Christian Clement of Alexandria.

[11] Some scholars have determined that this passage is a later interpolation and thus is not part of Paul’s original (what we call his first) letter to the Corinthians. See Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary on the New Testament, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 780–92. If this is the case, then Paul is not as inconsistent about the role of women as Yarbro Collins alleges. 

[12] For those scholars who believe Paul to be a coherent thinker, the passages that she underscores are not impossible to interpret coherently, as many of the apostle’s readers throughout history have shown. 

D. Clint Burnett is a visiting scholar at Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA) who focuses on using ancient material culture and inscriptions in particular to reconstruct nascent Christianity in the cities in which Paul the apostle established it. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which (March 2024) focuses on the relationship between imperial cults and early Christianity in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth and offers a much-needed corrective to the scholarly contention that the nascent Christian message was anti-Roman.