In a volume, Secrecy in Religions, Kees Bolle, as editor responsible for the introduction and author of the lead essay, excoriates scholars for attempting to explain mystery that he counts as the essence of religion. He writes as if secrecy and mystery are sui generis givens and neglects the role of human agency in producing secrecy. The concepts of secrecy and of concealment differ from the concept of the unknown in that the former entails the idea of agency and mind. They are activities involving intentionality. I am one of those who believe that religion is most usefully treated in the academy as the study of human practices that involve imagining interaction with certain classes of agents, that is, gods, ancestors, saints, spirits, the world as mind and many other types of non-obvious beings. Most study of secrecy in religion has treated esoteric traditions, mysticism and social formations that feature secret knowledge. Instead, I want to think about the way that various kinds of practices involve different modes of imagining the secrets of and about these non-obvious agents.

I begin with a central characteristic of conceiving these agents across cultures that ensures a large role for secrecy in religion. Normally humans do not have full and direct access to gods, ancestors and so on, but recognize their activity in traces that the gods have left. A trace could be a strike of lightening, an illness, a bountiful crop, a healing, a heightened mood, a possessed individual, divine embodiments in plants, animals or natural features, or a deposit of divine words that needs an interpreter. One usually sees not the god but the results of divine activity as in Ps 77:19; “The rumble of your thunder was in the whirlwind; your lightening flashed light at the world; the earth trembled and shook. Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were not seen.” Traces are partial, mysterious and require interpretation such as the writer of the Psalm and other authors are eager to supply. Most of all, traces often raise the question of divine intentions. Thus, religion has involved enormous investment in human interpretive practices.

Paul of the New Testament letters was not a philosopher, but more than a century of scholarship has shown that he nevertheless knew and used philosophical terms and concepts. The letters possess a philosophical element, but how to construe both the philosophical affinities of those features and the degree of coherence among them remains a matter of debate. Troels Engberg-Pedersen has made a brilliant case for a substantial and coherent Stoic element. Others, including myself, have argued for significant Platonic features also and an appropriation that is more piecemeal and adapted to Paul's particular interests. The bulk of scholarship on Paul and philosophy has focused on moral psychology, ethics and educational-psychagogic elements in the letters. Very recent work has meanwhile taken up features that we can rightly think of as involving physics and ontology.

Paul ranks by broad scholarly agreement as a thinker centrally informed by Judean apocalyptic beliefs and he interprets Jesus Christ according to these beliefs. My own thesis about the genesis and sense of the major physical ideas in Paul's thought is as follows. Sometime in the 30s ce Paul came into contact with people who organized themselves around the belief that the executed Judean teacher, Jesus, had returned to life and had become a god serving the Judean high god. His resurrection was the beginning of a crisis in history that would eventuate in a resurrection of the righteous dead. Paul came to accept these beliefs and claimed that he had a vision in which Christ commanded him to teach about this scenario to non-Jews. After so many centuries of Christian culture in the West, this may not seem a striking idea, but the very notion of a “salvation” movement of Judeans for non-Judeans based on ideas about a Jew who became a god should be odd for the critical historian and in need of explanation. I would argue that central to this puzzle is Paul's conviction that when God brought Jesus Christ back to life he had been remade of a particular substance, a very special kind or quality of πνϵύμα (hereafter pneuma).

Albert Schweitzer made the classic case for the idea that participation in Christ is the central or most basic or most important element in Paul's thought. But it is due to Ed Sanders’ incisive critical reassessment of Schweitzer's position in Paul and Palestinian Judaism that the centrality of participation has been widely accepted in New Testament scholarship. Among other things, Schweitzer and Sanders showed decisively that in forming arguments for moral advice, Paul draws these arguments from facts about participation in Christ and not justification by the believer's faith. If there has been wide acceptance of the centrality of participation, the agreement has ended on how to characterize the phenomenon indicated in Paul's discourse. From incomprehensible mystery to a form of corporate personality, the proposals have varied greatly and failed to win wide assent. As argued in Chapter Six, I understand participation as assimilation to Christ by way of God's pneuma. Here I want to focus on one aspect that features Gentile paternity.

Schweitzer's answer was clearer than most. He proposed a historical explanation of sorts for the origins of the idea and a broad cultural context. The context was a rather uniform Jewish eschatology, or as New Testament scholars might say today, apocalypticism, that he posited. Jews, including Paul, held to a series of strict and logically interrelated doctrines about their own age, past ages and the world to come. Paul created the idea of participation in Christ as a solution to the dilemma caused by his belief that the Messiah had come and been raised from the dead well ahead of the end time and its general resurrection. Paul had to make the elect mystically share in the death and resurrection of the Messiah already in this natural age. He writes:

The way the concept of “communities” and “community” is deployed in scholarship hinders historical work on early Christianity, especially if early Christianity is to be treated as a normal human social phenomenon studied in the non-sectarian university. In contemporary English, “community” has a number of senses connected to uses developed in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and North America. One sense of the word is territorial or features place as in “rural communities” and “flooding affected many households in the community.” A neighborhood in this sense can be called a community even if its inhabitants have almost no social interaction with one another. We also speak of a “linguistic community,” although there may be enormous cultural and political differences among those speakers. The range of meanings that has been important for scholarship on ancient Christianity, however, has a different history not only in Christian thought, but also in European and American social and political thought. This is the idea of community as a deep social and mental coherence, a commonality in mind and practice. Although Enlightenment traditions sometimes approached the idea, as in the French Revolution's fraternity in “liberty, equality and fraternity,” it has been the anti-Enlightenment and Romantic traditions that have featured community in this sense. Most famously, the sense was central to Fascism, National Socialism, many other twentieth century pre-World War Two conservative movements, and both Christian and non-Christian forms of communitarianism. A now much criticized, but influential, sociological approach to the concept is found in the work of Ferdinand Tönnies with his dualism between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), the former supposedly based upon the essential will (Wesenwille) of the participant. The idea of an essential and totalizing identity and commitment is very much like the idea of early Christian conversion. Factors within Christian traditions, together with broader European culture, have contributed to the pervasive appeal of communities and community, which have made the study of early Christian history oddly different from other ancient histories. The uses of the concepts in the study of early Christianity are far from descriptive and analytical.

In this chapter I want to try and answer the question of whether Paul's moral teachings were meant to be fitting for ordinary humans. This may seem a strange question, but perhaps less so when we remember that the concept of the sage loomed as central to Hellenistic ethical thought. And, according to Seneca, the sage was an ideal human (Ep. 42.1; also, Alexander, De Fato 196.24–197.3) as rare as the Phoenix that appears only once in 500 years, so hardly an ordinary human. Stoics did not even consider as sages the extraordinary founders of Stoicism: Zeno and Chrysippus. The concept of the sage affected moral thought widely well into the Roman Empire and the later Christian idea of the saint.

But I take my start on Paul's moral thought from another characteristic of ancient philosophy and ancient thought more broadly. Unlike the principled rejections of the metaphysical and the ontological that arose in the wake of Kant's self-proclaimed “Copernican Revolution” and which in the middle third of the last century characterized modern philosophy, the ancients held that rigorous moral thinking must be based on some conception of the way the world is, including what it consists of and how it works. Platonists had a cosmos made up of something like thought, the noetic, and its relative absence, matter. Epicureans had a world of colliding and sometimes compounding atoms and Stoics a world composed of pneuma in various degrees of tension creating a scala naturae, a hierarchy of being. This physics in each case plays an indispensable role in how the system brings about achievement of the ethical goal. In some forms of Platonism, by proper use of the mind one acquires a noetic existence and the abilities to exercise that noetic power. In Epicureanism, recognition of the non-teleological nature of a world of colliding atoms allows an untroubled life shared with others. In Stoicism, being in harmony with the divine pneumatic nature of the world allows one to live according to its providential order and unfolding.

This assumption that the question “how should we live and act?” only makes sense on the basis of understanding how the world is, coheres with ancient Mediterranean folk and West Asian scribal traditions.

In a volume celebrating the scholarship of Ed Sanders, Shaye Cohen considered the evidence of Greek and Roman writings for Sanders's notion of “common Judaism.” There he makes a point important for my effort here: These writers mention things distinctive to Jews, but have almost nothing to say about what was common across the Mediterranean. Thus, for instance, they say nothing about Jewish hymns and prayers. But what exactly is the price to pay for characterizing Jewish religion by difference only?

Ed Sanders's idea of common Judaism has been a hit, albeit with a number of dissenters. The idea beautifully expresses intuitions underlying conceptions of Jewish and Christian origins that have been and still are normative for many. In my estimation, there is clearly something right about common Judaism. There were, for instance, social mechanisms that allowed for ethnic-religious self-identification and identification by others. But the idea contradicts much of the scholarship about social groups that has become dominant in the social sciences, parts of the humanities and the mind sciences in the last several decades. The academy is in the midst of a major revolution in thinking about social groups. I will briefly discuss why the common belief/practice model that “common Judaism” assumes cannot adequately deal with the dynamics of ancient Mediterranean religion.

Psychology and other fields have shown dramatically that we know far less than we think we know. With unrealistic confidence individuals hold fragmentary outlines of knowledge and what is known varies greatly across individuals in a population. This overconfidence has in many ways served our species well. The unfounded confidence has made us bold about acting and going forward even when we really do not know. The mentally efficient fragments and outlines often pay off because they allow us just enough information to discover where to go for types of expertise or to technologies of knowledge for answers. Brains/minds with intrinsic limits can not survive unless they are efficient and adapted to the resources of their social environment. The key resource of social environments comes in that many people in any culture are experts in some small corner of knowledge.

The time is right for reassessing what Paul's letters have to say about sin. Modern scholarly treatments of the topic usually assume that Paul had a unified and coherent doctrine of sin that somehow lay behind all of the many things that he says about sin, including the rich and varied metaphorical language. I will call this the “invisible meta-narrative.” This habit arises at least partly as a holdover from ancient and medieval Christian thinkers who constructed unifying narratives by synthesizing from all parts of scripture in light of their assumptions about human moral psychology, cosmology, physics, and Christian tradition. I will argue that Paul employed a number of distinct discourses about sin among which he made certain connections, but without condensing these into one theology of fallen human nature as Augustine did. These discourses, known to have been prevalent in Paul's time account for letters’ language about sin. Further, I will argue that the eclipse of the discourse about moral psychology in modern scholarship has led to distortions in understanding Paul's thought about sin.

A number of new assumptions and perspectives that are an outgrowth of scholarship in the last forty years motivate my conviction about a need for reassessing Paul on sin. I will list some of these that I consider most important.

• 1. The persuasive critique of the binary opposition between Jewish and Hellenistic (or Jewish and Persian, Babylonian, “Canaanite,” and so on) that rendered anything Jewish or “of the Old Testament” sui generis, unique and therefore incomparable, has enabled research into the complex cultural mix of which Paul was heir. Many of the numerous studies claiming to show “the origins of Paul's theology” regarding sin and other matters “in the Old Testament” and in Judaism are ways of reading contemporary theological convictions into Paul's letters.

• 2. Now a substantial amount of historical work has been done on the various discourses that may have contributed to Paul's thinking about sin. Discourses do not respect boundaries that writers and authorities claim for or seek to impose upon particular populations (such as the thought of Syrians, Greeks, Judeans, Romans, Christians). Such discourses above all circulated among networks of literate experts, and the networks crossed ethnic boundaries.

I do not think that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was a Stoic, but I do think that the writer freely adapted elements of Stoic thought in creating his picture of Jesus the moral teacher. I arrived at my conclusions by asking what is distinctive about Matthew's depiction of Jesus as a teacher of ethics. This holds especially for the so-called Sermon on the Mount, but recent scholarship has shown that Stoicism was also a component of the gospel's thought more generally.

Recognizing the importance of Stoic thought for Matthew should entail a revolution in our scholarly thinking. We have all been captured by the narrative world created by the writer that both informed and coincided with our romantic and theological stereotypes of what was genuinely Jewish, an imagined “Palestinian Judaism.” But Matthew was not written in archaizing Hebrew or in Aramaic and discovered in some Judean cave. It was written in Greek and directed toward that cosmopolitan world eager for exotic foreign wisdom. We should have long ago guessed the imaginative construction at play from the fact that Matthew makes its Markan source more Jewish in its exoticizing and ethnicizing way. Now current scholarship has rightly shifted the cultural locations of the gospels from the ghetto of our imaginations to the known vigorous cultural landscapes of the early Roman empire.

It will be helpful to review what are taken as basic facts in gospel studies and studies of the earliest traditions about Jesus. In the earliest sources, the only sources that precede and are not definitively shaped by the Roman destruction of the Judean temple in Jerusalem, one cannot even determine that Jesus was a teacher of ethics. If Paul knew that Jesus was such a teacher, he does not appeal to the teachings or the idea that Jesus was a teacher, even though the teachings from the later Matthew and Luke would be very relevant and overlap with his own teachings. In the Gospel of John, Jesus teaches, but those teachings are about himself (such as “I am the light of the world” in 8:12) and there are no teachings that might be considered broadly moral teachings beyond the saying that his disciples should love one another (John 15:12).

I beg the pardon of my readers for indulging in some autobiographical reflection. I justify the endeavor because I am often asked how I came to the approaches that I use and why they have made sense to me. Hopefully, this narrative of a few salient episodes can serve as an orientation to the chapters here that originally spanned many years of my career and varied interests. Looking back, and I realize the ever-present risks of corrupt and selective memory, the questions that have animated me already started taking form in graduate school so that I must credit professors, fellow students and the stirrings of the field at the time for the options available and directions taken. I cannot claim originality.

It was an exciting time when several developments were beginning to shake up the staid areas of New Testament Studies and Patristics. For one, as Abe Malherbe explained to us, some generations of brilliant continental scholarship by individuals steeped in a knowledge of the Greek and Latin texts and cultures had been made to all but disappear with the rise of dialectical theology and the Biblical theology movement from the late 1920s through the 1950s and beyond. The pure Old Testament/Jewish origins of Christianity had only later been corrupted when enveloped by Hellenism. But worse than the ideology was the loss of scholars who had a deep knowledge of the ancient world. As I struggled through my studies at Yale, issue after issue vindicating Malherbe's judgment came to light, even though it was a place that strongly emphasized the “Jewish background” of the New Testament, and Malherbe did not disagree. The Dead Sea Scrolls were much at the center of attention with Nils Dahl and Wayne Meeks among those who taught us that literature. In slightly different ways, all three of our professors taught us to resist the ideologically driven oppositions between Judaism and Hellenism. The message was only reinforced by the young Carl Holladay who taught us the importance of Hellenistic Judaism.

Historians agree upon the great importance of so-called “voluntary associations” such as synodoi, koina, eranistai, hetaireiai, collegia, sodalicia and corpora in the Hellenistic age and Roman Empire. The ubiquity of religious practices in such groups forms another area of agreement, although an older scholarship often characterized such activities as mere pretexts for drinking, eating and good cheer. How to construe the category of associations with its many varieties of social formation has proven more difficult. The work of John Kloppenborg, alongside his colleagues and students, has marked an advance on this problem of the category and other issues. Here the criterion of social networks has been a methodological aid to finding a broadly convincing fivefold typology based on relations of the household, of ethnicity or geography, of neighborhoods, of occupations and of “cults.” As this and earlier scholarship has shown, there can be little doubt that many synagogues and Christian groups were seen as and understood themselves as associations.

Although the wide agreement on the importance of religion in associations prevails, one finds remarkably little discussion of their religious activities, associated goals or beliefs, especially within some account of how ancient Mediterranean religion worked. An enormous amount of research meanwhile exists regarding their organization, sense of fellow belonging, legal status, relation to the polis/civic and imperial order, occupational forms, patronage by the well-to-do, and practices of honoring members and benefactors. If one rejects the ideas that all religion in antiquity was adherence to the official public norms of cities, ethnicities or “the Church” or that one cannot detect differing modes or types of religiosity, then the alternative compels the historian to imagine a complex and dynamic map of interactive practices, institutions and sites of religiosity. This theory stands in opposition to the once dominant “polis religion” theory, and the similar “common Judaism” theory. In this chapter, I aim to address the question of where the religiosities of associations lie on such a map. The tools for this endeavor come primarily from my theory of religion as a social kind with eventually four dominant sub-types in the ancient Mediterranean religion.

In this chapter, I discuss traditional conceptions of the social formations that scholars imagine as having been in Rome and that present themselves as explanatory for understanding Paul's letter. I then outline an alternative scenario. I undertake this project as an experiment in what I take to be the best critical practices of the historian who works in the study of religion. Of course, “best practices of the historian” and “the study of religion” are rightly debated activities.

Among several possible critical issues one could raise about scholarship that tries to argue for social formations in Rome that would partly explain Paul's letter, I want to focus here upon the issue of parsimony. Many people are familiar with the Rube Goldberg cartoons depicting extremely complex sets of gadgets, levers, pulleys on a contraption designed to perform some simple task. These drawings are amusing because a good mousetrap does not need eighty working parts. Given the varied constraints of different fields of knowledge – and the application of the principle of simplicity does vary by field – among relatively plausible contenders, the more economical explanation is generally to be preferred. This is one of the bedrock principles of knowledge both in the academy and more generally. The historian wants to explain particular relatively-known outcomes in terms of antecedent processes (types of causes including human activities). The parsimony here is not reduction to some totalizing theory such as psychoanalytic, crude forms of Marxist ideology, or a Foucauldian idea that “all language, culture and practice is politically loaded,” but preferring that which most fully explains the antecedent processes with the greatest economy, the fewest assumptions. This is in no way to deny the great complexity and multiple causes in history. Romantic historiography such as R. J. Collingwood's revels in the irreducible complexity of the historical and the intuitive understanding of the historical interpreter, but even these historians rather inconsistently use the principle of parsimony in their actual historical work. In the case before us, the relatively known to be explained is Paul's letter to the Romans. I will argue that numerous scholarly accounts, taken as explanations, resemble Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Jonathan Z. Smith's comparison of the Corinthians, as known from Paul's letters and the Atbalmin of Papua New Guinea, provides a remarkable opportunity for scholars of early Christianity. The study of the New Testament has understandably been dominated by the internal perspectives of Christian theology. This means that approaches to Paul's letters continually reinscribe a notion of incomparable uniqueness and irresistible relevance. Privileged meta-narratives ensure that the ways scholars imagine Paul and the Corinthians elide many of the human social and cognitive processes that students of a contemporary culture or a scholar in a department of history would assume as requirements for construing the people in question as human. Smith's bold comparison breaks through these constraints and creates an opening for imagining Paul and the Corinthians in ways that are quite normal in the humanities and the social sciences.

I want to take advantage of the opening created by Smith's article to raise some questions about certain social and cognitive processes that traditional approaches usually hide. In a more comprehensive study, I would theoretically develop the concepts of doxai, interests, recognition, and attraction that I believe need to be added to Smith's concepts of incorporation and resistance. I understand all of these as attendant to the processes of ongoing mythic formations that Smith's paper allows us to imagine for the Atbalmin, and for Paul and the Corinthians. For the purposes of this chapter, I will stipulate the following. A “doxa” is a body of taken-for-granted beliefs, practical skills, assumptions and understandings that the researcher through historical investigation imagines that the people in question brought to a social situation. Interests are the most basic and important projects and ends that motivated the people in question. “Most basic” should be a matter of debate and corrigible for scholars. “Recognition” meanwhile is the process of someone taking someone else or another group to be someone of a certain type or identity that to various degrees makes sense to them, and that often entails to some degree of legitimacy or social capital. “Attraction” is the process of recognizing some sort of mutuality of interests that can be the basis for individuals or groups engaging in common practices or entertaining the possibility.