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.

This chapter advances a thesis about how to make progress on “the problem of sacrifice.” What is the problem of sacrifice? Emerging from a long history of learned discussion, the problem of sacrifice centers on the notion that sacrifice in its many refractions carries some deep and perhaps universal power. The problem for the researcher comes in attempting to evaluate and to explain this notion. Paradigmatically, the question would take the following form: How does the seemingly straightforward and even mundane act of killing an animal in a religious context exhibit this power? Even though grain and plant offerings were much more common than animal offerings, and one did not kill the cakes or grain, the question has typically focused on animals, and thus often death. Thinkers have proposed many explanations for its power. Is it a deep meaning, a symbol, a psychological transformation, a power of social cohesion and social transformation or one of many other proposals?

Any critical interrogation of this “problem” must involve noticing that that the idea seems to have arisen in the ancient Mediterranean. This discussion will find its examples there, especially with the abundant Greek examples. Central facts must include that sacrifice was the focus of the Judean temple and that Christians came eventually to describe Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, and in the Medieval West also the Mass. But sacrificial practices were ubiquitous across the Mediterranean and West Asia. And there was mutual recognition. Judeans, for instance, readily identified what Romans, Syrians, Lydians, Romans and Libyans did with plants and animals in relation to gods as in the same category as what they did in their Judean temple. Romans and the others also recognized the Jews as sacrificers.

When the study of religion as part of the study of other cultures developed, missionaries and anthropologists found that numerous cultures around the globe had sacrificial practices, offerings to gods and ancestors. Some of these Europeans saw the ubiquity of the practices as the proof of an original true monotheistic religion recorded in the Bible that had degenerated into polytheism. Others interpreted the ubiquity as the sign that a kernel of an innate religiosity implanted by God in human nature had survived. How did the sacrificial practices relate to the kernel of truth?

This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

The entwinement of Attica and Boiotia brought with it challenges and opportunities. This geographical entanglement will be analysed to understand how the geological situation influenced neighbourly relations. The entwinement ensured considerations of proximity were always at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds. It also created a distinct relationship between the Athenians and Boiotians. Scholarship previously focused on border disputes as the governing mode of interaction in the borderlands, yet the lived experience was different, as this investigation shows. Analysis of the Mazi and Skourt plains, and the adjacent lands of Plataia and Oropos, demonstrates that these contested lands were not the cause of hostilities, but often a consequence of a pre-existing war; that is, territorial disputes were the result rather than the cause of enmity. Boiotia’s maritime connectivity through its harbours provided another strategic consideration for the Athenians, whose interest in the region was partially predicated on the function of these harbours as strategic hubs in the Corinthian Gulf. Finally, Boiotia’s role as a buffer is investigated and how that influenced neighbourly relations. The security it provided Athens meant that the latter consistently aimed to obtain Boiotia as a shield for its hinterland, whether through force or willingly.