Roland Deines

Paul and the Miraculous

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Twelftree's new book is a welcome contribution to the growing momentum in the quest for the historical Paul. His focus on the miraculous locates Paul even closer to his Galilean master, and the often-assumed divide between Jesus and Paul is bridged from a rather unexpected angle. The book serves as a healthy reminder that 'transempirical realities' are an indispensable part of the experiential basis and theological fabric of the earliest followers of Jesus. It also shows how expectations and experiences of the miraculous formed a shared religious language across the Jewish and pagan contexts of early Christianity. That the miracle traditions are regularly ignored or downplayed has more to do with the potential embarrassment they might cause to the portrait of Paul as an intellectual master theologian than with pure exegesis. Twelftree succeeds in reminding us that 'the full range of the miraculous' did not disappear with Jesus but continued in an even more widely 'democratized' form as one of the results of the ministry of Paul.”