Paul the Change Agent: The Context Aims and Implications of an Apostolic Innovator: 2 (Glossahouse Dissertation)

This project like many works that fall within the genre of dissertation begins with the conviction that many of the analyses of Paul as a change agent that have been offered by my predecessors and contemporaries are found wanting. That however is only half of the story. To be sure many interpreters have made great strides in their exegesis and commentary on Paul and his letters. Thus in this study I will build on what is useful challenge what I see as questionable and fill in what I perceive to be a number of gaps concerning the claim that Paul was in fact a change agent. I intend to demonstrate in this work that a close analysis of Galatians 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians reveals that Paul was a change agent; indeed he was a change agent of a particular sort in a culture where there was often an enormous resistance to change and perhaps especially religious change.