2024.09.06 | Matthew T. Sharp. Divination and Philosophy in the Letters of Paul. Edinburgh Studies in Religion in Antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
Review by Joshua W. Jipp, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
This revised doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Edinburgh, takes as its starting point the question: “if Paul claims to convey the words and will of a deity, how does he believe he has received such knowledge?” (p. 1). While there is an abundance of studies devoted to aspects of this question (e.g., Paul and healing, Paul and prophecy, Paul and religious experience, Paul and signs and wonders, Paul and glossolalia), “Pauline scholarship has so far lacked an adequate analytical category through which to account for all of these methods of divine communication in Paul’s historical context” (p. 2). Sharp proposes, then, to engage in a careful examination of Paul’s letters through the ancient category of “divination” – that is, “the reception and interpretation of knowledge that is believed to have a divine, or superhuman, source” (p. 2). Paul does not use this category himself, but the scholarly use of divination to make sense of Paul’s religious knowledge, Sharp proposes, will enable scholars “to bring together a collection of related practices and ideas in Paul’s letters that existing scholarly categories usually keep apart” (p. 25).
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Biblical and Early Christian Studies 