The Historical Paul

Call For Papers: The Historical Paul section welcomes proposals for the following two sessions: 1) The "Book History and Biblical Literatures" and "Historical Paul" sections invite papers on the materiality of and social processes entailed in letter writing for a joint session on Material Philology and Ancient Epistolography. Possible considerations include the authors and recipients or intermediaries (e.g., scribes, companions, co-workers) of letters; the copying and collecting of letters, as well as interventions that often occurred in these stages of transmission (editing, interpolation); the statuses of letters as textual objects, which might range from mundane communication to pedagogical resources to “religious” artifacts in their own right; and the various afterlives of letters and letter collections, among other possibilities. While our collaboration seeks in part to set the stage for a future discussion of material philology and the letters of Paul—the Historical Paul section will hold a session on interpolations in the Pauline corpus and their biographical implications in 2022—we are here open to a range of topics and ancient evidence that speak to broader context. 2) An open call for papers addressing our objective of providing a contextually plausible account of the historical figure Paul. Especially welcome are proposals that explore the biographical entailments of Paul’s vocabulary, usage, and style. (A third session, Epistolary Affects, co-sponsored with the Bible and Emotion unit, consists of papers deferred from 2020.)

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